Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, Bad Luck and Trouble, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow, 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, The Affair, A Wanted Man, and Never Go Back are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Delacorte Press eBook Edition

Persuader copyright © 2003 by Lee Child

The Enemy copyright © 2004 by Lee Child

One Shot copyright © 2005 by Lee Child

The Hard Way copyright © 2006 by Lee Child

Bad Luck and Trouble copyright © 2007 by Lee Child

Nothing to Lose copyright © 2008 by Lee Child

Gone Tomorrow copyright © 2009 by Lee Child

61 Hours copyright © 2010 by Lee Child

Worth Dying For copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

The Affair copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

A Wanted Man copyright © 2012 by Lee Child

Never Go Back copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

Second Son copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

Deep Down copyright © 2012 by Lee Child

High Heat copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

Excerpt from Personal copyright © 2014 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2011, 2012, and 2013.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Personal by Lee Child. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-8075-7

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Persuader

The Enemy

One Shot

The Hard Way

Bad Luck and Trouble

Nothing to Lose

Gone Tomorrow

61 Hours

Worth Dying For

The Affair

A Wanted Man

Never Go Back

Excerpt from Personal

PERSUADER

A Delacorte Book / May 2003

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2003 by Lee Child

Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

Persuader : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838 P4 2003

813′.54—dc21

2002034965

eISBN: 978-0-440-33386-9

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Persuader

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. He moved like he knew his fate in advance. He pushed the door against the resistance of a stiff hinge and swiveled slowly on the worn vinyl seat and planted both feet flat on the road. Then he grasped the door frame with both hands and heaved himself up and out. He stood in the cold clear air for a second and then turned and pushed the door shut again behind him. Held still for a second longer. Then he stepped forward and leaned against the side of the hood up near the headlight.

The car was a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice. It was black and had no police markings. But it had three radio antennas and plain chrome hubs. Most cops you talk to swear the Caprice is the best police vehicle ever built. This guy looked like he agreed with them. He looked like a veteran plain-clothes detective with the whole of the motor pool at his disposal. Like he drove the ancient Chevy because he wanted to. Like he wasn’t interested in the new Fords. I could see that kind of stubborn old-timer personality in the way he held himself. He was wide and bulky in a plain dark suit made from some kind of heavy wool. He was tall but stooped. An old man. He turned his head and looked north and south along the road and then craned his thick neck to glance back over his shoulder at the college gate. He was thirty yards away from me.

The college gate itself was purely a ceremonial thing. Two tall brick pillars just rose up from a long expanse of tended lawn behind the sidewalk. Connecting the pillars was a high double gate made from iron bars bent and folded and twisted into fancy shapes. It was shiny black. It looked like it had just been repainted. It was probably repainted after every winter. It had no security function. Anybody who wanted to avoid it could drive straight across the lawn. It was wide open, anyway. There was a driveway behind it with little knee-high iron posts set eight feet back on either side. They had latches. Each half of the gate was latched into one of them. Wide open. The driveway led on down to a huddle of mellow brick buildings about a hundred yards away. The buildings had steep mossy roofs and were overhung by trees. The driveway was lined with trees. The sidewalk was lined with trees. There were trees everywhere. Their leaves were just about coming in. They were tiny and curled and bright green. Six months from now they would be big and red and golden and photographers would be swarming all over the place taking pictures of them for the college brochure.

Twenty yards beyond the cop and his car and the gate was a pickup truck parked on the other side of the road. It was tight against the curb. It was facing toward me, fifty yards away. It looked a little out of place. It was faded red and had a big bull bar on the front. The bar was dull black and looked like it had been bent and straightened a couple of times. There were two men in the cab. They were young, tall, clean-cut, fair-haired. They were just sitting there, completely still, gazing forward, looking at nothing in particular. They weren’t looking at the cop. They weren’t looking at me.

I was set up to the south. I had an anonymous brown panel van parked outside a music store. The store was the kind of place you find near a college gate. It had used CDs in racks out on the sidewalk and posters in the windows behind them advertising bands people have never heard of. I had the van’s rear doors open. There were boxes stacked inside. I had a sheaf of paperwork in my hands. I was wearing a coat, because it was a cold April morning. I was wearing gloves, because the boxes in the van had loose staples where they had been torn open. I was wearing a gun, because I often do. It was wedged in my pants, at the back, under the coat. It was a Colt Anaconda, which is a huge stainless steel revolver chambered for the .44 Magnum cartridge. It was thirteen and a half inches long and weighed almost four pounds. Not my first choice of weapon. It was hard and heavy and cold and I was aware of it all the time.

I paused in the middle of the sidewalk and looked up from my papers and heard the distant pickup’s engine start. It stayed where it was, just idling. White exhaust pooled around its rear wheels. The air was cold. It was early and the street was deserted. I stepped behind my van and glanced down the side of the music store toward the college buildings. Saw a black Lincoln Town Car waiting outside one of them. There were two guys standing next to it. I was a hundred yards away but neither one of them looked like a limo driver. Limo drivers don’t come in pairs and they don’t look young and heavy and they don’t act tense and wary. These guys looked exactly like bodyguards.

The building the Lincoln was waiting outside of looked like some kind of a small dormitory. It had Greek letters over a big wooden door. I watched and the big wooden door opened up and a young thin guy stepped out. He looked like a student. He had long messy hair and was dressed like a homeless person but carried a bag that looked like shiny expensive leather. One of the bodyguards stood point while the other held the car door and the young thin guy tossed his bag onto the back seat and slid right in after it. He pulled the door shut behind himself. I heard it slam, faint and muffled from a hundred yards away. The bodyguards glanced around for a second and then got in the front together and a short moment later the car moved away. Thirty yards behind it a college security vehicle snuffled slowly in the same direction, not like it was intending to make up a convoy but like it just happened to be there anyway. There were two rent-a-cops in it. They were slumped down low in their seats and they looked aimless and bored.

I took my gloves off and tossed them into the back of my van. Stepped out into the road where my view was better. I saw the Lincoln come up the driveway at a moderate speed. It was black and shiny and immaculate. It had plenty of chrome on it. Plenty of wax. The college cops were way behind it. It paused at the ceremonial gate and turned left and came south toward the black police Caprice. Toward me.

What happened next occupied eight seconds, but it felt like the blink of an eye.

The faded red pickup moved off the curb twenty yards back. It accelerated hard. It caught up with the Lincoln and pulled out and passed it exactly level with the cop’s Caprice. It came within a foot of the cop’s knees. Then it accelerated again and pulled a little ways ahead and its driver swung the wheel hard and the corner of the bull bar smashed square into the Lincoln’s front fender. The pickup driver kept the wheel turned and his foot hard down and forced the Lincoln off the road onto the shoulder. The grass tore up and the Lincoln slowed radically and then hit a tree head-on. There was the boom of metal caving and tearing and headlight glass shattering and there was a big cloud of steam and the tree’s tiny green leaves shook and quivered noisily in the still morning air.

Then the two guys in the pickup came out shooting. They had black machine pistols and were firing them at the Lincoln. The sound was deafening and I could see arcs of spent brass raining down on the blacktop. Then the guys were pulling at the Lincoln’s doors. Hauling them open. One of them leaned into the back and started dragging the thin kid out. The other was still firing his gun into the front. Then he reached into his pocket left-handed and came out with some kind of a grenade. Tossed it inside the Lincoln and slammed the doors and grabbed his buddy and the kid by the shoulders and turned them away and hauled them down into a crouch. There was a loud bright explosion inside the Lincoln. All six windows shattered. I was more than twenty yards away and felt every bit of the concussion. Pebbles of glass blew everywhere. They made rainbows in the sun. Then the guy who had tossed the grenade scrambled up and sprinted for the passenger side of the pickup and the other straight-armed the kid inside the cab and crowded right in after him. The doors slammed shut and I saw the kid trapped in there on the center seat. I saw terror in his face. It was white with shock and right through the dirty windshield I saw his mouth opening in a silent scream. I saw the driver working the gears and heard the engine roaring and the tires squealing and then the truck was coming directly at me.

It was a Toyota. I could see TOYOTA on the grille behind the bull bar. It rode high on its suspension and I could see a big black differential at the front. It was the size of a soccer ball. Four-wheel drive. Big fat tires. Dents and faded paint that hadn’t been washed since it left the factory. It was coming straight at me.

I had less than a second to decide.

I flipped the tail of my coat and pulled out the Colt. Aimed very carefully and fired once at the Toyota’s grille. The big gun flashed and roared and kicked in my hand. The huge .44 slug shattered the radiator. I fired again at the left front tire. Blew it out in a spectacular explosion of black rubber debris. Yards of blown tread whipped through the air. The truck slewed and stopped with the driver’s side facing me. Ten yards away. I ducked behind the back of my van and slammed the rear doors and came out on the sidewalk and fired again at the left rear tire. Same result. Rubber everywhere. The truck crashed down on its left-side rims at a steep angle. The driver opened his door and spilled out on the blacktop and scrambled up on one knee. He had his gun in the wrong hand. He juggled it across and I waited until I was fairly sure he was going to point it at me. Then I used my left hand to cradle my right forearm against the Colt’s four-pound weight and aimed carefully at center mass like I had been taught a long time ago and pulled the trigger. The guy’s chest seemed to explode in a huge cloud of blood. The skinny kid was rigid inside the cab. Just staring in shock and horror. But the second guy was out of the cab and scrambling around the front of the hood toward me. His gun was coming around at me. I swiveled left and paused a beat and cradled my forearm. Aimed at his chest. Fired. Same result. He went down on his back behind the fender in a cloud of red vapor.

Now the skinny kid was moving in the cab. I ran for him and pulled him out right over the first guy’s body. Ran him back to my van. He was limp with shock and confusion. I shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door on him and spun around and headed for the driver’s side. In the corner of my eye I saw a third guy coming right at me. Reaching into his jacket. Some tall heavy guy. Dark clothes. I braced my arm and fired and saw the big red explosion in his chest at exactly the same split second I realized it was the old cop from the Caprice and he had been reaching into his pocket for his badge. The badge was a gold shield in a worn leather holder and it flew up out of his hand and tumbled end over end and landed hard against the curb right in front of my van.

Time stood still.

I stared at the cop. He was on his back in the gutter. His whole chest was a mess of red. It was all over him. There was no welling or pumping. No sign of a heartbeat. There was a big ragged hole in his shirt. He was completely still. His head was turned and his cheek was hard against the blacktop. His arms were flung out and I could see pale veins in his hands. I was aware of the blackness of the road and the vivid green of the grass and the bright blue of the sky. I could hear the thrill of the breeze in the new leaves over the gunshots still roaring in my ears. I saw the skinny kid staring out through my van’s windshield at the downed cop and then staring at me. I saw the college security cruiser coming left out of the gate. It was moving slower than it should have been. Dozens of shots had been fired. Maybe they were worried about where their jurisdiction began and where it ended. Maybe they were just scared. I saw their pale pink faces behind their windshield. They were turned in my direction. Their car was doing maybe fifteen miles an hour. It was crawling straight at me. I glanced at the gold shield in the gutter. The metal was worn smooth by a lifetime of use. I glanced at my van. Stood completely still. One thing I learned a long time ago is that it’s easy enough to shoot a man. But there’s absolutely no way to unshoot one.

I heard the college car rolling slowly toward me. Heard its tires crushing grit on the blacktop. Everything else was silence. Then time restarted and a voice in my head screamed go go go and I ran for it. I scrambled into the van and threw the gun down on the middle seat and fired up the engine and pulled a U-turn so hard we came up on two wheels. The skinny kid was thrown all over the place. I got the wheel straight and stamped on the gas and took off south. I had a limited view in the mirror but I saw the college cops light up their roof bar and come right after me. The kid next to me was totally silent. His mouth was hanging open. He was concentrating on staying in his seat. I was concentrating on accelerating as hard as I could. Traffic was mercifully light. It was a sleepy New England town, early in the morning. I got the van wound up to about seventy miles an hour and tightened my hands on the wheel until my knuckles showed white and just stared at the road ahead, like I didn’t want to see what was behind me.

“How far back are they?” I asked the kid.

He didn’t respond. He was slack with shock and crunched up in the corner of his seat, as far away from me as he could get. He was staring at the roof. He had his right hand braced against the door. Pale skin, long fingers.

“How far back?” I asked again. The engine was roaring loud.

“You killed a cop,” he said. “That old guy was a cop, you know.”

“I know.”

“You shot him.”

“Accident,” I said. “How far back are the others?”

“He was showing you his badge.”

“How far back are the others?”

He stirred himself and turned around and ducked his head so he could line up the view out of the small rear windows.

“Hundred feet,” he said. He sounded vague and scared. “Real close. One of them is hanging out the window with a gun.”

Right on cue I heard the distant pop of a handgun over the roar of the engine and the whine of the tires. I picked up the Colt from the seat beside me. Dropped it again. It was empty. I had fired six times already. A radiator, two tires, two guys. And one cop.

“Glove compartment,” I said.

“You should stop,” the kid said. “Explain to them. You were helping me. It was a mistake.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out of the back windows.

“I shot a cop,” I said. I kept my voice completely neutral. “That’s all they know. That’s all they want to know. They aren’t going to care about how or why.”

The kid said nothing.

“Glove compartment,” I said again.

He turned again and fumbled the lid open. There was another Anaconda in there. Identical. Shiny stainless steel, fully loaded. I took it from the kid. Wound my window all the way down. Cold air rushed in like a gale. It carried the sound of a handgun firing right behind us, fast and steady.

“Shit,” I said.

The kid said nothing. The shots kept coming, loud and dull and percussive. How were they missing?

“Get down on the floor,” I said.

I slid sideways until my left shoulder was jammed hard against the door frame and craned my right arm all the way around until the new gun was out of the window and pointing backward. I fired once and the kid stared at me in horror and then slid forward and crouched down in the space between the front edge of his seat and the dash with his arms wrapped around his head. A second later the rear window ten feet behind where his head had been exploded.

“Shit,” I said again. Steered for the side of the road to improve my angle. Fired behind us again.

“I need you to watch,” I said. “Stay down as far as you can.”

The kid didn’t move.

“Get up,” I said. “Now. I need you to watch.”

He raised himself and twisted around until his head was just high enough to see out the back. I saw him register the shattered rear window. Saw him realize that his head had been right in line with it.

“I’m going to slow down a little,” I said. “Going to pull in so they’ll pull out to pass me.”

“Don’t do it,” the kid said. “You can still put this right.”

I ignored him. Dropped the speed to maybe fifty and pulled right and the college car instinctively drifted left to come up on my flank. I fired my last three chambers at it and its windshield shattered and it slewed all the way across the road like maybe the driver was hit or a tire had gone. It plowed nose-first into the opposite shoulder and smashed through a line of planted shrubs and then it was lost to sight. I dropped the empty gun on the seat beside me and wound the window up and accelerated hard. The kid said nothing. Just stared into the rear of the van. The broken window back there was making a weird moaning sound as the air sucked out through it.

“OK,” I said. I was out of breath. “Now we’re good to go.”

The kid turned to face me.

“Are you crazy?” he said.

“You know what happens to people who shoot cops?” I said back.

He had no reply to that. We drove on in silence for maybe thirty whole seconds, more than half a mile, blinking and panting and staring straight ahead through the windshield like we were mesmerized. The inside of the van stank of gunpowder.

“It was an accident,” I said. “I can’t bring him back. So get over it.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“No, who are you?” I asked back.

He went quiet. He was breathing hard. I checked the mirror. The road was completely empty behind us. Completely empty ahead of us. We were way out in open country. Maybe ten minutes from a highway cloverleaf.

“I’m a target,” he said. “For abduction.”

It was an odd word to use.

“They were trying to kidnap me,” he said.

“You think?”

He nodded. “It’s happened before.”

“Why?”

“Money,” the kid said. “Why else?”

“You rich?”

“My father is.”

“Who is he?”

“Just a guy.”

“But a rich guy,” I said.

“He’s a rug importer.”

“Rugs?” I said. “What, like carpets?”

“Oriental rugs.”

“You can get rich importing Oriental rugs?”

“Very,” the kid said.

“You got a name?”

“Richard,” he said. “Richard Beck.”

I checked the mirror again. The road was still empty behind. Still empty ahead. I slowed a little and steadied the van in the center of my lane and tried to drive on like a normal person.

“So who were those guys?” I asked.

Richard Beck shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“They knew where you were going to be. And when.”

“I was going home for my mother’s birthday. It’s tomorrow.”

“Who would know that?”

“I’m not sure. Anybody who knows my family. Anybody in the rug community, I guess. We’re well known.”

“There’s a community?” I said. “Rugs?”

“We all compete,” he said. “Same sources, same market. We all know each other.”

I said nothing. Just drove on, sixty miles an hour.

“You got a name?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

He nodded, like he understood. Smart boy.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’m going to let you out near the highway,” I said. “You can hitch a ride or call a cab and then you can forget all about me.”

He went very quiet.

“I can’t take you to the cops,” I said. “That’s just not possible. You understand that, right? I killed one. Maybe three. You saw me do it.”

He stayed quiet. Decision time. The highway was six minutes ahead.

“They’ll throw away the key,” I said. “I screwed up, it was an accident, but they aren’t going to listen. They never do. So don’t ask me to go anywhere near anybody. Not as a witness, not as nothing. I’m out of here like I don’t exist. We absolutely clear on that?”

He didn’t speak.

“And don’t give them a description,” I said. “Tell them you don’t remember me. Tell them you were in shock. Or I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.”

He didn’t answer.

“I’ll let you out somewhere,” I said. “Like you never saw me.”

He moved. Turned sideways on his seat and looked straight at me.

“Take me home,” he said. “All the way. We’ll give you money. Help you out. We’ll hide you, if you want. My folks will be grateful. I mean, I’m grateful. Believe me. You saved my ass. The cop thing, it was an accident, right? Just an accident. You got unlucky. It was a pressure situation. I can understand that. We’ll keep it quiet.”

“I don’t need your help,” I said. “I just need to get rid of you.”

“But I need to get home,” he said. “We’d be helping each other.”

The highway was four minutes ahead.

“Where’s home?” I asked.

“Abbot,” he said.

“Abbot what?”

“Abbot, Maine. On the coast. Between Kennebunkport and Portland.”

“We’re heading in the wrong direction.”

“You can turn north on the highway.”

“It’s got to be two hundred miles, minimum.”

“We’ll give you money. We’ll make it worth your while.”

“I could let you out near Boston,” I said. “Got to be a bus to Portland.”

He shook his head, violently, like a seizure.

“No way,” he said. “I can’t take the bus. I can’t be alone. Not now. I need protection. Those guys might still be out there.”

“Those guys are dead,” I said. “Like the damn cop.”

“They might have associates.”

It was another odd word to use. He looked small and thin and scared. There was a pulse jumping in his neck. He used both hands to pull his hair away from his head and turned toward the windshield to let me see his left ear. It wasn’t there. There was just a hard knob of scar tissue. It looked like a small piece of uncooked pasta. Like a raw tortellini floret.

“They cut it off and mailed it,” he said. “The first time.”

“When?”

“I was fifteen.”

“Your dad didn’t pay up?”

“Not quickly enough.”

I said nothing. Richard Beck just sat there, showing me his scar, shocked and scared and breathing like a machine.

“You OK?” I asked.

“Take me home,” he said. Like he was pleading. “I can’t be alone now.”

The highway was two minutes ahead.

“Please,” he said. “Help me.”

“Shit,” I said, for the third time.

“Please. We can help each other. You need to hide out.”

“We can’t keep this van,” I said. “We have to assume the description is on the air all over the state.”

He stared at me, full of hope. The highway was one minute ahead.

“We’ll have to find a car,” I said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. There are cars all over the place.”

There was a big sprawling out-of-town shopping mall nestled south and west of the highway interchange. I could already see it in the distance. There were giant tan buildings with no windows and bright neon signs. There were giant parking lots about half-filled with cars. I pulled in and drove once around the whole place. It was as big as a town. There were people everywhere. They made me nervous. I came around again and headed in past a line of trash containers to the rear of a big department store.

“Where are we going?” Richard asked.

“Staff parking,” I said. “Customers are in and out all day long. Unpredictable. But store people are in there for the duration. Safer.”

He looked at me like he didn’t understand. I headed for a line of eight cars parked head-on against a blank wall. There was an empty slot next to a dull-colored Nissan Maxima about three years old. It would do. It was a pretty anonymous vehicle. The lot was a backwater, quiet and private. I pulled beyond the empty slot and backed up into it. Put the van’s rear doors tight against the wall.

“Got to hide the busted window,” I said.

The kid said nothing. I put both empty Colts into my coat pockets and slid out. Tried the Maxima’s doors.

“Find me some wire,” I said. “Like heavy electrical cable or a coat hanger.”

“You’re going to steal this car?”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“Is that smart?”

“You’d think so if it was you who’d accidentally shot a cop.”

The kid looked blank for a second and then came to and scouted around. I emptied the Anacondas and tossed the twelve spent shell cases into a garbage container. The kid came back with a three-foot length of electrical wire from a trash pile. I stripped the insulation with my teeth and made a little hook in the end and shoved it past the rubber sealing strip around the Maxima’s window.

“You’re the lookout,” I said.

He stepped away and scanned the lot and I fed the wire down inside the car and jiggled it around and jiggled the door handle until it popped open. I tossed the wire back in the trash and bent down under the steering column and pulled off the plastic shroud. Sorted through the wires in there until I found the two I needed and touched them together. The starter motor whined and the engine turned over and caught and ran steadily. The kid looked suitably impressed.

“Misspent youth,” I said.

“Is this smart?” he asked again.

I nodded. “Smart as we can get. It won’t be missed until six tonight, maybe eight. Whenever the store closes. You’ll be home long before then.”

He paused with his hand on the passenger door and then kind of shook himself and ducked inside. I racked the driver’s seat back and adjusted the mirror and backed out of the slot. Took it easy through the mall lot. There was a cop car crawling around about a hundred yards away. I parked again in the first place I saw and sat there with the engine running until the cop moved away. Then I hustled for the exit and around the cloverleaf and two minutes later we were heading north on a wide smooth highway at a respectable sixty miles an hour. The car smelled strongly of perfume and there were two boxes of tissues in it. There was some kind of furry bear stuck on the rear window with clear plastic suckers where its paws should have been. There was a Little League glove on the back seat and I could hear an aluminum bat rattling around in the trunk.

“Mom’s taxi,” I said.

The kid didn’t answer.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s probably insured. Probably a solid citizen.”

“Don’t you feel bad?” he said. “About the cop?”

I glanced at him. He was thin and pale and crunched up again as far from me as he could get. His hand was resting against the door. His long fingers made him look a little like a musician. I think he wanted to like me, but I didn’t need him to.

“Shit happens,” I said. “No need to get all worked up about it.”

“What the hell kind of answer is that?”

“The only kind. It was minor collateral damage. Means nothing unless it comes back to bite us. Bottom line, we can’t change it, so we move on.”

He said nothing.

“Anyway, it was your dad’s fault,” I said.

“For being rich and having a son?”

“For hiring lousy bodyguards.”

He looked away. Said nothing.

“They were bodyguards, right?”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“So don’t you feel bad?” I asked. “About them?”

“A little,” he said. “I guess. I didn’t know them well.”

“They were useless,” I said.

“It happened so fast.”

“The bad guys were waiting right there,” I said. “A ratty old pickup like that just hanging around in a prissy little college town? What kind of bodyguards don’t notice a thing like that? They never heard of threat assessment?”

“You saying you noticed?”

“I noticed.”

“Not bad for a van driver.”

“I was in the army. I was a military cop. I understand bodyguarding. And I understand collateral damage.”

The kid nodded, uncertainly.

“You got a name yet?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said. “I need to understand your point of view. I could be in all kinds of trouble. At least one cop is dead and now I just stole a car.”

He went quiet again. I matched him, mile for mile. Gave him time to think. We were almost out of Massachusetts.

“My family appreciates loyalty,” he said. “You did their son a service. And you did them a service. Saved them some money, at least. They’ll show their gratitude. I’m sure the last thing they’ll do is rat you out.”

“You need to call them?”

He shook his head. “They’re expecting me. As long as I show up there’s no need to call them.”

“The cops will call them. They think you’re in big trouble.”

“They don’t have the number. Nobody does.”

“The college must have your address. They can find your number.”

He shook his head again. “The college doesn’t have the address. Nobody does. We’re very careful about stuff like that.”

I shrugged and kept quiet and drove another mile.

“So what about you?” I said. “You going to rat me out?”

I saw him touch his right ear. The one that was still there. It was clearly a completely subconscious gesture.

“You saved my ass,” he said. “I’m not going to rat you out.”

“OK,” I said. “My name is Reacher.”

We spent a few minutes cutting across a tiny corner of Vermont and then struck out north and east across New Hampshire. Settled in for the long, long drive. The adrenaline drained away and the kid got over his state of shock and we both ended up a little down and sleepy. I cracked the window to get some air in and some perfume out. It made the car noisy but it kept me awake. We talked a little. Richard Beck told me he was twenty years old. He was in his junior year. He was majoring in some kind of contemporary art expression thing that sounded a lot like finger painting to me. He wasn’t good at relationships. He was an only child. There was a lot of ambivalence about his family. They were clearly some kind of tight close-knit clan and half of him wanted out and the other half needed to be in. He was clearly very traumatized by the previous kidnap. It made me wonder whether something had been done to him, apart from the ear thing. Maybe something much worse.

I told him about the army. I laid it on pretty thick about my bodyguarding qualifications. I wanted him to feel he was in good hands, at least temporarily. I drove fast and steady. The Maxima had just been filled. We didn’t need to stop for gas. He didn’t want lunch. I stopped once to use a men’s room. Left the engine running so I wouldn’t have to fiddle with the ignition wires again. Came back to the car and found him inert inside it. We got back on the road and passed by Concord in New Hampshire and headed toward Portland in Maine. Time passed. He got more relaxed, the closer we got to home. But he got quieter, too. Ambivalence.

We crossed the state line and then about twenty miles short of Portland he squirmed around and checked the view out of the back very carefully and told me to take the next exit. We turned onto a narrow road heading due east toward the Atlantic. It passed under I-95 and then ran more than fifteen miles across granite headlands to the sea. It was the kind of landscape that would have looked great in summer. But it was still cold and raw. There were trees stunted by salt winds and exposed rock outcrops where gales and storm tides had scoured the dirt away. The road twisted and turned like it was trying to fight its way as far east as it could get. I glimpsed the ocean ahead. It was as gray as iron. The road pushed on past inlets to the left and right. I saw small beaches made of gritty sand. Then the road curved left and immediately right and rose up onto a headland shaped like the palm of a hand. The palm narrowed abruptly into a single finger jutting directly out to sea. It was a rock peninsula maybe a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. I could feel the wind buffeting the car. I drove out onto the peninsula and saw a line of bent and stunted evergreen trees that were trying to hide a high granite wall but weren’t quite tall enough or thick enough to succeed. The wall was maybe eight feet tall. It was topped with big coils of razor wire. It had security lights mounted at intervals. It ran laterally all the way across the hundred-yard width of the finger. It canted down suddenly at the ends and ran all the way into the sea, where its massive foundations were built on huge stone blocks. The blocks were mossy with seaweed. There was an iron gate set in the wall, dead-center. It was closed.

“This is it,” Richard Beck said. “This is where I live.”

The road led straight to the gate. Behind the gate it changed to a long straight driveway. At the end of the driveway was a gray stone house. I could see it there at the end of the finger, right out in the ocean. Right beside the gate was a one-story lodge. Same design and same stone as the house, but much smaller and lower. It shared its foundations with the wall. I slowed and stopped the car in front of the gate.

“Honk the horn,” Richard Beck said.

The Maxima had a little bugle shape on the airbag lid. I pressed on it with one finger and the horn beeped politely. I saw a surveillance camera on the gatepost tilt and pan. It was like a little glass eye looking at me. There was a long pause and the lodge door opened. A guy in a dark suit stepped out. Clearly the suit came from a big-and-tall store and was probably the largest size it had ever offered but even so it was very tight in the shoulders and short in the arms for its owner. He was way bigger than me, which put him firmly in the freak category. He was a giant. He walked up close to his side of the gate and stared out. He spent a long time looking at me and a short time looking at the kid. Then he unlocked the gate and pulled it open.

“Drive straight up to the house,” Richard told me. “Don’t stop here. I don’t like that guy very much.”

I drove through the gate. Didn’t stop. But I drove slow and looked around. The first thing you do going into a place is to look for your way out. The wall ran all the way into rough water on both sides. It was too high to jump and the razor wire along the top made it impossible to climb. There was a cleared area maybe thirty yards deep behind it. Like no-man’s-land. Or a minefield. The security lights were set to cover all of it. There was no way out except through the gate. The giant was closing it behind us. I could see him in the mirror.

It was a long drive up to the house. Gray ocean on three sides. The house was a big old pile. Maybe some sea captain’s place from way back when killing whales made people respectable fortunes. It was all stone, with intricate beadings and cornices and folds. All the north-facing surfaces were covered in gray lichen. The rest was spotted with green. It was three stories high. It had a dozen chimneys. The roofline was complex. There were gables all over the place with short gutters and dozens of fat iron pipes to drain the rainwater away. The front door was oak and was banded and studded with iron. The driveway widened into a carriage circle. I followed it around counterclockwise and stopped right in front of the door. The door opened and another guy in a dark suit stepped out. He was about my size, which made him a lot smaller than the guy in the lodge. But I didn’t like him any better. He had a stone face and blank eyes. He opened the Maxima’s passenger door like he had been expecting to see it, which I guessed he was, because the big guy in the lodge would have called ahead.

“Will you wait here?” Richard asked me.

He slipped out of the car and walked away into the gloom inside the house and the guy in the suit closed the oak door from the outside and took up station right in front of it. He wasn’t looking at me but I knew I was somewhere in his peripheral vision. I broke the wire connection under the steering column and turned the motor off and waited.

It was a reasonably long wait, probably close to forty minutes. Without the engine running the car grew cold. It rocked gently in the sea breeze eddying around the house. I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I was facing northeast and the air was whipped and clear. I could see the coastline curving in from the left. I could see a faint brown smudge in the air about twenty miles away. Probably pollution coming up out of Portland. The city itself was hidden behind a headland.

Then the oak door opened again and the guard stepped smartly aside and a woman came out. She was Richard Beck’s mother. No doubt about that. No doubt at all. She had the same slight build and the same pale face. The same long fingers. She was wearing jeans and a heavy fisherman’s sweater. She had windblown hair and was maybe fifty years old. She looked tired and strained. She stopped about six feet from the car, like she was giving me the opportunity to realize it would be more polite if I got out and met her halfway. So I opened the door and slid out. I was stiff and cramped. I stepped forward and she put out her hand. I took it. It was ice cold and full of bones and tendons.

“My son told me what happened,” she said. Her voice was low and sounded a little husky, like maybe she smoked a lot or had been crying hard. “I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that you helped him.”

“Is he OK?” I asked.

She made a face, like she wasn’t sure. “He’s lying down now.”

I nodded. Let go of her hand. It fell back to her side. There was a short awkward silence.

“I’m Elizabeth Beck,” she said.

“Jack Reacher,” I said.

“My son explained your predicament,” she said.

It was a nice neutral word. I said nothing in reply.

“My husband will be home tonight,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”

I nodded. There was another awkward pause. I waited.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked.

She turned and walked back into the hallway. I followed her. I passed through the door and it beeped. I looked again and saw that a metal detector had been installed tight against the inside jamb.

“Would you mind?” Elizabeth Beck asked. She made a sort of sheepish apologetic gesture toward me and then toward the big ugly guy in the suit. He stepped up and made ready to pat me down.

“Two guns,” I said. “Empty. In my coat pockets.”

He pulled them out with the kind of easy practiced moves that suggested he had patted plenty of people down before. He laid them on a side table and squatted and ran his hands up my legs, and then stood and went over my arms, my waist, my chest, my back. He was very thorough, and not very gentle.

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth Beck said.

The guy in the suit stood back and there was another awkward silence.

“Do you need anything?” Elizabeth Beck asked.

I could think of a lot of things I needed. But I just shook my head.

“I’m kind of tired,” I said. “Long day. I really need a nap.”

She smiled briefly, like she was pleased, like having her own personal cop-killer asleep somewhere would relieve her of a social pressure.

“Of course,” she said. “Duke will show you to a room.”

She looked at me for a second longer. Underneath the strain and the pallor she was a handsome woman. She had fine bones and good skin. Thirty years ago she must have been fighting them off with a stick. She turned away and disappeared into the depths of the house. I turned to the guy in the suit. I assumed he was Duke.

“When do I get the guns back?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Just pointed me to the staircase and followed me up. Pointed to the next staircase and we came out on the third floor. He led me to a door and pushed it open. I went in and found a plain square room paneled with oak. There was heavy old furniture in it. A bed, an armoire, a table, a chair. There was an Oriental carpet on the floor. It looked thin and threadbare. Maybe it was a priceless old item. Duke pushed past me and walked across it and showed me where the bathroom was. He was acting like a bellboy in a hotel. He pushed past me again and headed back to the door.

“Dinner’s at eight,” he said. Nothing more.

He stepped out and closed the door. I didn’t hear a sound but when I checked I found it was locked from the outside. There was no keyhole on the inside. I stepped to the window and looked out at the view. I was at the back of the house and all I could see was ocean. I was facing due east and there was nothing between me and Europe. I looked down. Fifty feet below were rocks with waves foaming all around them. The tide looked like it was coming in.

I stepped back to the door and put my ear against it and listened hard. Heard nothing. I scanned the ceiling and the cornices and the furniture, very carefully, inch by inch. Nothing there. No cameras. I didn’t care about microphones. I wasn’t going to make any noise. I sat on the bed and took my right shoe off. Flipped it over and used my fingernails to pull a pin out of the heel. Swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up and shook it. A small black plastic rectangle fell out on the bed and bounced once. It was a wireless e-mail device. Nothing fancy. It was just a commercial product, but it had been reprogrammed to send only to one address. It was about the size of a large pager. It had a small cramped keyboard with tiny keys. I switched the power on and typed a short message. Then I pressed send now.

The message said: I’m in.

CHAPTER 2

Truth is by that point I had been in for eleven whole days, since a damp shiny Saturday night in the city of Boston when I saw a dead man walk across a sidewalk and get into a car. It wasn’t a delusion. It wasn’t an uncanny resemblance. It wasn’t a double or a twin or a brother or a cousin. It was a man who had died a decade ago. There was no doubt about it. No trick of the light. He looked older by the appropriate number of years and was carrying the scars of the wounds that had killed him.

I was walking on Huntington Avenue with a mile to go to a bar I had heard about. It was late. Symphony Hall was just letting out. I was too stubborn to cross the street and avoid the crowd. I just threaded my way through it. There was a mass of well-dressed fragrant people, most of them old. There were double-parked cars and taxis at the curb. Their engines were running and their windshield wipers were thumping back and forth at irregular intervals. I saw the guy step out of the foyer doors on my left. He was wearing a heavy cashmere overcoat and carrying gloves and a scarf. He was bareheaded. He was about fifty. We almost collided. I stopped. He stopped. He looked right at me. We got into one of those crowded-sidewalk things where we both hesitated and then both started moving and then both stopped again. At first I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then there was a shadow in his face. Nothing definitive. I held back and he walked across in front of me and climbed into the rear seat of a black Cadillac DeVille waiting at the curb. I stood there and watched as the driver eased out into the traffic and pulled away. I heard the hiss of the tires on the wet pavement.

I got the plate number. I wasn’t panicking. I wasn’t questioning anything. I was ready to believe the evidence of my own eyes. Ten years of history was overturned in a second. The guy was alive. Which gave me a huge problem.

That was day one. I forgot all about the bar. I went straight back to my hotel and started calling half-forgotten numbers from my Military Police days. I needed somebody I knew and trusted, but I had been out for six years by then and it was late on a Saturday night so the odds were against me. In the end I settled for somebody who claimed he had heard of me, which might or might not have made a difference to the eventual outcome. He was a warrant officer named Powell.

“I need you to trace a civilian plate,” I told him. “Purely as a favor.”

He knew who I was, so he didn’t give me any grief about not being able to do it for me. I gave him the details. Told him I was pretty sure it was a private registration, not a livery car. He took my number and promised to call me back in the morning, which would be day two.

He didn’t call me back. He sold me out instead. I think in the circumstances anybody would have. Day two was a Sunday and I was up early. I had room service for breakfast and sat waiting for the call. I got a knock on the door instead. Just after ten o’clock. I put my eye to the peephole and saw two people standing close together so they would show up well in the lens. One man, one woman. Dark jackets. No overcoats. The man was carrying a briefcase. They both had some kind of official IDs held up high and tilted so they would catch the hallway light.

“Federal agents,” the man called, just loud enough for me to hear him through the door.

In a situation like that it doesn’t work to pretend you’re not in. I’d been the guys in the hallway often enough. One of them stays right there and the other goes down to get a manager with a passkey. So I just opened up and stood back to let them in.

They were wary for a moment. They relaxed as soon as they saw I wasn’t armed and didn’t look like a maniac. They handed over their IDs and shuffled around politely while I deciphered them. At the top they said: United States Department of Justice. At the bottom they said: Drug Enforcement Administration. In the middle were all kinds of seals and signatures and watermarks. There were photographs and typed names. The man was listed as Steven Eliot, one l like the old poet. April is the cruelest month. That was for damn sure. The photograph was a pretty good likeness. Steven Eliot looked somewhere between thirty and forty and was thickset and dark and a little bald and had a smile that looked friendly in the picture and even better in person. The woman was listed as Susan Duffy. Susan Duffy was a little younger than Steven Eliot. She was a little taller than him, too. She was pale and slender and attractive and had changed her hair since her photograph was taken.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Search the room. It’s a long time since I had anything worth hiding from you guys.”

I handed back their IDs and they put them away in their inside pockets and made sure they moved their jackets enough to let me see their weapons. They had them in neat shoulder rigs. I recognized the ribbed grip of a Glock 17 under Eliot’s armpit. Duffy had a 19, which is the same thing only a little smaller. It was snug against her right breast. She must have been left-handed.

“We don’t want to search the room,” she said.

“We want to talk about a license plate,” Eliot said.

“I don’t own a car,” I said.

We were all still standing in a neat little triangle just inside the door. Eliot still had the briefcase in his hand. I was trying to figure out who was the boss. Maybe neither one of them. Maybe they were equals. And fairly senior. They were well dressed but looked tired. Maybe they had worked most of the night and flown in from somewhere. From Washington D.C., maybe.

“Can we sit down?” Duffy asked.

“Sure,” I said. But a cheap hotel room made that awkward. There was only one chair. It was shoved under a small desk crammed between a wall and the cabinet that held the television set. Duffy pulled it out and turned it around so it faced the bed. I sat on the bed, up near the pillows. Eliot perched on the foot of the bed and laid his briefcase down on it. He was still giving me the friendly smile and I couldn’t find anything phony about it. Duffy looked great on the chair. The seat height was exactly right for her. Her skirt was short and she was wearing dark nylons that went light where her knees bent.

“You’re Reacher, right?” Eliot asked.

I took my eyes off Duffy’s legs and nodded. I felt I could count on them to know that much.

“This room is registered to somebody called Calhoun,” Eliot said. “Paid for with cash, one night only.”

“Habit,” I said.

“You leaving today?”

“I take it one day at a time.”

“Who’s Calhoun?”

“John Quincy Adams’s vice president,” I said. “It seemed appropriate for this location. I used up the presidents long ago. Now I’m doing vice presidents. Calhoun was unusual. He resigned to run for the Senate.”

“Did he get in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the phony name?”

“Habit,” I said again.

Susan Duffy was looking straight at me. Not like I was nuts. Like she was interested in me. She probably found it to be a valuable interrogation technique. Back when I interrogated people I did the same thing. Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.

“We spoke to a military cop called Powell,” she said. “You asked him to trace a plate.”

Her voice was low and warm and a little husky. I said nothing.

“We have traps and flags in the computers against that plate,” she said. “Soon as Powell’s inquiry hit the wires we knew all about it. We called him and asked him what his interest was. He told us the interest came from you.”

“Reluctantly, I hope,” I said.

She smiled. “He recovered fast enough to give us a phony phone number for you. So you needn’t worry about old unit loyalties.”

“But in the end he gave you the right number.”

“We threatened him,” she said.

“Then MPs have changed since my day,” I said.

“It’s important to us,” Eliot said. “He saw that.”

“So now you’re important to us,” Duffy said.

I looked away. I’ve been around the block more times than I care to count but the sound of her voice saying that still gave me a little thrill. I began to think maybe she was the boss. And a hell of an interrogator.

“A member of the public calls in a plate,” Eliot said. “Why would he do that? Maybe he got in a fender bender with the car the plate was on. Maybe it was a hit-and-run. But wouldn’t he go to the cops for that? And you just told us you don’t have a car anyway.”

“So maybe you saw somebody in the car,” Duffy said.

She let the rest of it hang. It was a neat Catch-22. If the person in the car was my friend, then I was probably her enemy. If the person in the car was my enemy, then she was ready to be my friend.

“You guys had breakfast?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“So have I,” I said.

“We know,” she said. “Room service, a short stack of pancakes with an egg on top, over easy. Plus a large pot of coffee, black. It was ordered for seven forty-five and delivered at seven forty-four and you paid cash and tipped the waiter three bucks.”

“Did I enjoy it?”

“You ate it.”

Eliot snapped the locks on his briefcase and lifted the lid. Pulled out a stack of paper secured with a rubber band. The paper looked new but the writing on it was blurred. Photocopies of faxes, probably made during the night.

“Your service record,” he said.

I could see photographs in his briefcase. Glossy black-and-white eight-by-tens. Some kind of a surveillance situation.

“You were a military cop for thirteen years,” Eliot said. “Fast-track promotion all the way from second lieutenant to major. Citations and medals. They liked you. You were good. Very good.”

“Thank you.”

“More than very good, actually. You were their special go-to guy on numerous occasions.”

“I guess I was.”

“But they let you go.”

“I was riffed,” I said.

“Riffed?” Duffy repeated.

“RIF, reduction in force. They love to make acronyms out of things. The Cold War ended, military spending got cut, the army got smaller. So they didn’t need so many special go-to guys.”

“The army still exists,” Eliot said. “They didn’t chop everybody.”

“No.”

“So why you in particular?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He didn’t challenge me.

“You can help us,” Duffy said. “Who did you see in the car?”

I didn’t answer.

“Were there drugs in the army?” Eliot asked.

I smiled.

“Armies love drugs,” I said. “They always have. Morphine, Benzedrine. The German Army invented Ecstasy. It was an appetite suppressant. CIA invented LSD, tested it on the U.S. Army. Armies march on their veins.”

“Recreational?”

“Average age of a recruit is eighteen. What do you think?”

“Was it a problem?”

“We didn’t make it much of a problem. Some grunt goes on furlough, smokes a couple of joints in his girlfriend’s bedroom, we didn’t care. We figured we’d rather see them with a couple of blunts than a couple of six-packs. Outside of our care we liked them docile rather than aggressive.”

Duffy glanced at Eliot and Eliot used his fingernails to scrape the photographs up out of his case. He handed them to me. There were four of them. All four were grainy and a little blurred. All four showed the same Cadillac DeVille I had seen the night before. I recognized it by the plate number. It was in some kind of a parking garage. There were two guys standing next to the trunk. In two of the pictures the trunk lid was down. In two of them it was up. The two guys were looking down at something inside the trunk. No way of telling what it was. One of the guys was a Hispanic gangbanger. The other was an older man in a suit. I didn’t know him.

Duffy must have been watching my face.

“Not the man you saw?” she said.

“I didn’t say I saw anybody.”

“The Hispanic guy is a major dealer,” Eliot said. “Actually he’s the major dealer for most of Los Angeles County. Not provable, of course, but we know all about him. His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. But he came all the way to Portland, Maine, to meet with this other guy.”

I touched one of the photographs. “This is Portland, Maine?”

Duffy nodded. “A parking garage, downtown. About nine weeks ago. I took the pictures myself.”

“So who’s this other guy?”

“We’re not exactly sure. We traced the Cadillac’s plate, obviously. It’s registered to a corporation called Bizarre Bazaar. Main office is in Portland, Maine. Far as we can tell it started out way back as some kind of hippy-dippy import-export trader with the Middle East. Now it specializes in importing Oriental rugs. Far as we can tell the owner is a guy called Zachary Beck. We’re assuming that’s him in the photographs.”

“Which makes him huge,” Eliot said. “If this guy from LA is prepared to fly all the way back east to meet with him, he’s got to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. And anybody a couple of rungs above this LA guy is in the stratosphere, believe me. So Zachary Beck’s a top boy, and he’s fooling with us. Rug importer, drug importer. He’s making jokes.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never saw him before.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Duffy said. She hitched forward on the chair. “It’s better for us if he isn’t the guy you saw. We already know about him. It’s better for us if you saw one of his associates. We can try to get to him that way.”

“You can’t get to him head-on?”

There was a short silence. Seemed to me there was some embarrassment in it.

“We’ve got problems,” Eliot said.

“Sounds like you’ve got probable cause against the LA player. And you’ve got photographs that put him side by side with this Beck guy.”

“The photographs are tainted,” Duffy said. “I made a mistake.”

More silence.

“The garage was private property,” she said. “It’s under an office building. I didn’t have a warrant. Fourth Amendment makes the pictures inadmissible.”

“Can’t you lie? Say you were outside the garage?”

“Physical layout makes that impossible. Defense counsel would figure it in a minute and the case would collapse.”

“We need to know who you saw,” Eliot said.

I didn’t answer.

“We really need to know,” Duffy said. She said it in the kind of soft voice that makes men want to jump tall buildings. But there was no artifice there. No pretense. She wasn’t aware of how good she was sounding. She really needed to know.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I need to put this right.”

“Everybody makes mistakes.”

“We sent an agent after Beck,” she said. “Undercover. A woman. She disappeared.”

Silence.

“When?” I asked.

“Seven weeks ago.”

“You looked for her?”

“We don’t know where to look. We don’t know where Beck goes. We don’t even know where he lives. He has no registered property. His house must be owned by some phantom corporation. It’s a needle in a haystack.”

“Haven’t you tailed him?”

“We’ve tried. He has bodyguards and drivers. They’re too good.”

“For the DEA?”

“For us. We’re on our own. The Justice Department disowned the operation when I screwed up.”

“Even though there’s an agent missing?”

“They don’t know there’s an agent missing. We put her in after they closed us down. She’s off the books.”

I stared at her.

“This whole thing is off the books,” she said.

“So how are you working it?”

“I’m a team leader. Nobody’s looking over my shoulder day to day. I’m pretending I’m working on something else. But I’m not. I’m working on this.”

“So nobody knows this woman is missing?”

“Just my team,” she said. “Seven of us. And now you.”

I said nothing.

“We came straight here,” she said. “We need a break. Why else would we fly up here on a Sunday?”

The room went quiet. I looked from her to Eliot and back to her. They needed me. I needed them. And I liked them. I liked them a lot. They were honest, likable people. They were like the best of the people I used to work with.

“I’ll trade,” I said. “Information for information. We’ll see how we get along. And then we’ll take it from there.”

“What do you need?”

I told her I needed ten-year-old hospital records from a place called Eureka in California. I told her what kind of a thing to look for. I told her I would stay in Boston until she got back to me. I told her not to put anything on paper. Then they left and that was it for day two. Nothing happened on day three. Or day four. I hung around. I find Boston acceptable for a couple of days. It’s what I call a forty-eight town. Anything more than forty-eight hours, and it starts to get tiresome. Of course, most places are like that for me. I’m a restless person. So by the start of day five I was going crazy. I was ready to assume they had forgotten all about me. I was ready to call it quits and get back on the road. I was thinking about Miami. It would be a lot warmer down there. But late in the morning the phone rang. It was her voice. It was nice to hear.

“We’re on our way up,” she said. “Meet you by that big statue of whoever it is on a horse, halfway around the Freedom Trail, three o’clock.”

It wasn’t a very precise rendezvous, but I knew what she meant. It was a place in the North End, near a church. It was springtime and too cold to want to go there without a purpose but I got there early anyway. I sat on a bench next to an old woman feeding house sparrows and rock doves with torn-up crusts of bread. She looked at me and moved to another bench. The birds swarmed around her feet, pecking at the grit. A watery sun was fighting rainclouds in the sky. It was Paul Revere on the horse.

Duffy and Eliot showed up right on time. They were wearing black raincoats all covered in little loops and buckles and belts. They might as well have worn signs around their necks saying Federal Agents from Washington D.C. They sat down, Duffy on my left and Eliot on my right. I leaned back and they leaned forward with their elbows on their knees.

“Paramedics fished a guy out of the Pacific surf,” Duffy said. “Ten years ago, just south of Eureka, California. White male, about forty. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest. Small-caliber, probably .22s. Then they figure he was thrown off a cliff into the ocean.”

“He was alive when they fished him out?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“Barely,” she said. “He had a bullet lodged near his heart and his skull was broken. Plus one arm and both legs and his pelvis, from the fall. And he was half-drowned. They operated on him for fifteen straight hours. He was in intensive care for a month and in the hospital recuperating for another six.”

“ID?”

“Nothing on him. He’s in the records as a John Doe.”

“Did they try to ID him?”

“No fingerprint match,” she said. “Nothing on any missing-persons lists. Nobody came to claim him.”

I nodded. Fingerprint computers tell you what they’re told to tell you.

“What then?” I asked.

“He recovered,” she said. “Six months had passed. They were trying to work out what to do with him when he suddenly discharged himself. They never saw him again.”

“Did he tell them anything about who he was?”

“They diagnosed amnesia, certainly about the trauma, because that’s almost inevitable. They figured he might be genuinely blank about the incident and the previous day or two. But they figured he must be able to remember things from before that, and they got the strong impression he was pretending not to. There’s a fairly extensive case file. Psychiatrists, everything. They interviewed him regularly. He was extremely resolute. Never said a word about himself.”

“What was his physical condition when he left?”

“Pretty fair. He had visible scars from the GSWs, that’s about all.”

“OK,” I said. I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky.

“Who was he?”

“Your guess?” I said.

“.22s to the head and chest?” Eliot said. “Dumped in the ocean? It was organized crime. An assassination. Some kind of hit man got to him.”

I said nothing. Looked up at the sky.

“Who was he?” Duffy said again.

I kept on looking up at the sky and dragged myself ten years backward through time, to a whole different world.

“You know anything about tanks?” I asked.

“Military tanks? Tracks and guns? Not really.”

“There’s nothing to them,” I said. “I mean, you like them to be able to move fast, you want some reliability, you don’t object to some fuel economy. But if I’ve got a tank and you’ve got a tank, what’s the only thing I really want to know?”

“What?”

“Can I shoot you before you can shoot me? That’s what I want to know. If we’re a mile apart, can my gun reach you? Or can your gun reach me?”

“So?”

“Of course, physics being physics, the likely answer is if I can hit you at a mile, then you can hit me at a mile. So it comes down to ammunition. If I stand off another two hundred yards so your shell bounces off me without hurting me, can I develop a shell that doesn’t bounce off you? That’s what tanks are all about. The guy in the ocean was an army intelligence officer who had been blackmailing an army weapons specialist.”

“Why was he in the ocean?”

“Did you watch the Gulf War on TV?” I asked.

“I did,” Eliot said.

“Forget about the smart bombs,” I said. “The real star of the show was the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. It scored about four hundred to zip against the Iraqis, who were using the best anybody ever had to give them. But having the war on TV meant that we’d shown our hand to the whole world, so we better get on with dreaming up some new stuff for the next time around. So we got on with it.”

“And?” Duffy asked.

“If you want a shell to fly farther and hit harder, you can stuff more propellant into it. Or make it lighter. Or both. Of course, if you’re stuffing more propellant into it, you’ve got to do something pretty radical elsewhere to make it lighter. Which is what they did. They took the explosive charge out of it. Which sounds weird, right? Like, what’s it going to do? Go clang and bounce off? But they changed the shape. They dreamed up this thing that looks like a giant lawn dart. Built-in fins and all. It’s cast from tungsten and depleted uranium. The densest metals you can find. It goes real fast and real far. They called it the long-rod penetrator.”

Duffy glanced at me with her eyelids low and smiled and blushed all at the same time. I smiled back.

“They changed the name,” I said. “Now it’s called the APFSDS. I told you they like initials. Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot. It’s powered by its own little rocket motor, basically. It hits the enemy tank with tremendous kinetic energy. The kinetic energy changes to heat energy, just like they teach you in high school physics. It melts its way through in a split second and sprays the inside of the enemy tank with a jet of molten metal, which kills the tankers and blows up anything explosive or flammable. It’s a very neat trick. And either way, you shoot, you score, because if the enemy armor is too thick or you’ve fired from too far away, the thing just sticks partway in like a dart and spalls, which means it fragments the inner layer of the armor and throws scabs of scalding metal around inside like a hand grenade. The enemy crew come apart like frogs in a blender. It was a brilliant new weapon.”

“What about the guy in the ocean?”

“He got the blueprints from the guy he was blackmailing,” I said. “Piece by piece, over a long period of time. We were watching him. We knew exactly what he was doing. He was aiming to sell them to Iraqi Intelligence. The Iraqis wanted to level the playing field for the next time around. The U.S. Army didn’t want that to happen.”

Eliot stared at me. “So they had the guy killed?”

I shook my head. “We sent a couple of MPs down to arrest him. Standard operating procedure, all legal and aboveboard, believe me. But it went wrong. He got away. He was going to disappear. The U.S. Army really didn’t want that to happen.”

“So then they had him killed?”

I looked up at the sky again. Didn’t answer.

“That wasn’t standard procedure,” Eliot said. “Was it?”

I said nothing.

“It was off the books,” he said. “Wasn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

“But he didn’t die,” Duffy said. “What was his name?”

“Quinn,” I said. “Turned out to be the single worst guy I ever met.”

“And you saw him in Beck’s car on Saturday?”

I nodded. “He was being chauffeured away from Symphony Hall.”

I gave them all the details I had. But as I talked we all knew the information was useless. It was inconceivable that Quinn would be using his previous identity. So all I had to offer was a physical description of a plain-looking white man about fifty years old with two .22 GSW scars on his forehead. Better than nothing, but it didn’t really get them anywhere.

“Why didn’t his prints match?” Eliot asked.

“He was erased,” I said. “Like he never existed.”

“Why didn’t he die?”

“Silenced .22,” I said. “Our standard issue weapon for covert close work. But not a very powerful weapon.”

“Is he still dangerous?”

“Not to the army,” I said. “He’s ancient history. This all was ten years ago. The APFSDS will be in the museum soon. So will the Abrams tank.”

“So why try to trace him?”

“Because depending on exactly what he remembers he could be dangerous to the guy who went to take him out.”

Eliot nodded. Said nothing.

“Did he look important?” Duffy asked. “On Saturday? In Beck’s car?”

“He looked wealthy,” I said. “Expensive cashmere overcoat, leather gloves, silk scarf. He looked like a guy who was accustomed to being chauffeured around. He just jumped right in, like he did it all the time.”

“Did he greet the driver?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to place him,” she said. “We need context. How did he act? He was using Beck’s car, but did he look entitled? Or like somebody was doing him a favor?”

“He looked entitled,” I said. “Like he uses it every day of the week.”

“So is he Beck’s equal?”

I shrugged. “He could be Beck’s boss.”

“Partner at best,” Eliot said. “Our LA guy wouldn’t travel to meet with an underling.”

“I don’t see Quinn as somebody’s partner,” I said.

“What was he like?”

“Normal,” I said. “For an intelligence officer. In most ways.”

“Except for the espionage,” Eliot said.

“Yes,” I said. “Except for that.”

“And whatever got him killed off the books.”

“That too.”

Duffy had gone quiet. She was thinking hard. I was pretty sure she was thinking of ways she could use me. And I didn’t mind at all.

“Will you stay in Boston?” she asked. “Where we can find you?”

I said I would, and they left, and that was the end of day five.

I found a scalper in a sports bar and spent most of days six and seven at Fenway Park watching the Red Sox struggling through an early-season homestand. The Friday game went seventeen innings and ended very late. So I slept most of day eight and then went back to Symphony Hall at night to watch the crowd. Maybe Quinn had season tickets to a concert series. But he didn’t show. I replayed in my mind the way he had glanced at me. It might have been just that rueful crowded-sidewalk thing. But it might have been more.

Susan Duffy called me again on the morning of day nine, Sunday. She sounded different. She sounded like a person who had done a lot more thinking. She sounded like a person with a plan.

“Hotel lobby at noon,” she said.

She showed up in a car. Alone. The car was a Taurus built down to a very plain specification. It was grimy inside. A government vehicle. She was wearing faded denim jeans with good shoes and a battered leather jacket. Her hair was newly washed and combed back from her forehead. I got in on the passenger side and she crossed six lanes of traffic and drove straight into the mouth of a tunnel that led to the Mass Pike.

“Zachary Beck has a son,” she said.

She took an underground curve fast and the tunnel ended and we came out into the weak midday April light, right behind Fenway.

“He’s a college junior,” she said. “Some small no-account liberal-arts place, not too far from here, as it happens. We talked to a classmate in exchange for burying a cannabis problem. The son is called Richard Beck. Not a popular person, a little strange. Seems very traumatized by something that happened about five years ago.”

“What kind of something?”

“He was kidnapped.”

I said nothing.

“You see?” Duffy said. “You know how often regular people get kidnapped these days?”

“No,” I said.

“Doesn’t happen,” she said. “It’s an extinct crime. So it must have been a turf war thing. It’s practically proof his dad’s a racketeer.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“OK, but it’s very persuasive. And it was never reported. FBI has no record of it. Whatever happened was handled privately. And not very well. The classmate says Richard Beck is missing an ear.”

“So?”

She didn’t answer. She just drove west. I stretched out on the passenger seat and watched her out of the corner of my eye. She looked good. She was long and lean and pretty, and she had life in her eyes. She was wearing no makeup. She was one of those women who absolutely didn’t need to. I was very happy to let her drive me around. But she wasn’t just driving me around. She was taking me somewhere. That was clear. She had come with a plan.

“I studied your whole service record,” she said. “In great detail. You’re an impressive guy.”

“Not really,” I said.

“And you’ve got big feet,” she said. “That’s good, too.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said.

“We’re very alike,” she said. “You and me. We have something in common. I want to get close to Zachary Beck to get my agent back. You want to get close to him to find Quinn.”

“Your agent is dead. Eight weeks now, it would be a miracle. You should face it.”

She said nothing.

“And I don’t care about Quinn.”

She glanced right and shook her head.

“You do,” she said. “You really do. I can see that from here. It’s eating you up. He’s unfinished business. And my guess is you’re the sort of guy who hates unfinished business.” Then she paused for a second. “And I’m proceeding on the assumption that my agent is still alive, unless and until you supply definitive proof to the contrary.”

“Me?” I said.

“I can’t use one of my people,” she said. “You understand that, right? This whole thing is illegal as far as the Justice Department is concerned. So whatever I do next has to stay off the books. And my guess is you’re the sort of guy who understands off-the-books operations. And is comfortable with them. Even prefers them, maybe.”

“So?”

“I need to get somebody inside Beck’s place. And I’ve decided it’s going to be you. You’re going to be my very own long-rod penetrator.”

“How?”

“Richard Beck is going to take you there.”

She came off the pike about forty miles west of Boston and turned north into the Massachusetts countryside. We passed through picture-perfect New England villages. Fire departments were out on the curbs polishing their trucks. Birds were singing. People were putting stuff on their lawns and pruning their bushes. There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air.

We stopped at a motel in the middle of nowhere. It was an immaculate place with quiet brick facings and blinding white trim. There were five cars in the lot. They were blocking access to the five end rooms. They were all government vehicles. Steven Eliot was waiting in the middle room with five men. They had hauled their desk chairs in from their own rooms. They were sitting in a neat semicircle. Duffy led me inside and nodded to Eliot. I figured it was a nod that meant: I told him, and he hasn’t said no. Yet. She moved to the window and turned so that she faced the room. The daylight was bright behind her. It made her hard to see. She cleared her throat. The room went quiet.

“OK, listen up, people,” she said. “One more time, this is off the books, this is not officially sanctioned, and this will be done on our own time and at our own risk. Anybody wants out, just leave now.”

Nobody moved. Nobody left. It was a smart tactic. It showed me she and Eliot had at least five guys who would follow them to hell and back.

“We have less than forty-eight hours,” she said. “Day after tomorrow Richard Beck heads home for his mother’s birthday. Our source says he does it every year. Cuts classes and all. His father sends a car with two pro bodyguards because the kid is terrified of a repeat abduction. We’re going to exploit that fear. We’re going to take down the bodyguards and kidnap him.”

She paused. Nobody spoke.

“Our aim is to get into Zachary Beck’s house,” she said. “We can assume the supposed kidnappers themselves wouldn’t exactly be welcome there. So what will happen is that Reacher will immediately rescue the kid from the supposed kidnappers. It will be a tight sequence, kidnap, rescue, like that. The kid comes over all grateful and Reacher is greeted like a hero around the family hearth.”

People sat quiet at first. Then they stirred. The plan was so full of holes it made a Swiss cheese look solid. I stared straight at Duffy. Then I found myself staring out the window. There were ways of plugging the holes. I felt my brain start to move. I wondered how many of the holes Duffy had already spotted. I wondered how many of the answers she had already gotten. I wondered how she knew I loved stuff like this.

“We have an audience of one,” she said. “All that matters is what Richard Beck thinks. The whole thing will be phony from beginning to end, but he’s got to be absolutely convinced it’s real.”

Eliot looked at me. “Weaknesses?”

“Two,” I said. “First, how do you take the bodyguards down without really hurting them? I assume you’re not that far off the books.”

“Speed, shock, surprise,” he said. “The kidnap team will have machine pistols with plenty of blank ammunition. Plus a stun grenade. Soon as the kid is out of the car, we toss a flashbang in. Lots of sound and fury. They’ll be dazed, nothing more. But the kid will assume they’re hamburger meat.”

“OK,” I said. “But second, this whole thing is like method acting, right? I’m some kind of a passerby, and coincidentally I’m the type of guy who can rescue him. Which makes me smart and capable. So why wouldn’t I just haul his ass around to the nearest cops? Or wait for the cops to come to us? Why wouldn’t I stick around and give evidence and make all kinds of witness statements? Why would I want to immediately drive him all the way home?”

Eliot turned to Duffy.

“He’ll be terrified,” she said. “He’ll want you to.”

“But why would I agree? It doesn’t matter what he wants. What matters is what is logical for me to do. Because we don’t have an audience of one. We have an audience of two. Richard Beck and Zachary Beck. Richard Beck there and then, and Zachary Beck later. He’ll be looking at it in retrospect. We’ve got to convince him just as much.”

“The kid might ask you not to go to the cops. Like last time.”

“But why would I listen to him? If I was Mr. Normal the cops would be the first thing on my mind. I’d want to do everything strictly by the book.”

“He would argue with you.”

“And I would ignore him. Why would a smart and capable adult listen to a crazy kid? It’s a hole. It’s too cooperative, too purposeful, too phony. Too direct. Zachary Beck would rumble it in a minute.”

“Maybe you get him in a car and you’re being chased.”

“I’d drive straight to a police station.”

“Shit,” Duffy said.

“It’s a plan,” I said. “But we need to get real.”

I looked out of the window again. It was bright out there. I saw a lot of green stuff. Trees, bushes, distant wooded hillsides dusted with new leaves. In the corner of my eye I saw Eliot and Duffy looking down at the floor of the room. Saw the five guys sitting still. They looked like a capable bunch. Two of them were a little younger than me, tall and fair. Two were about my age, plain and ordinary. One was a lot older, stooped and gray. I thought long and hard. Kidnap, rescue, Beck’s house. I need to be in Beck’s house. I really do. Because I need to find Quinn. Think about the long game. I looked at the whole thing from the kid’s point of view. Then I looked at it again, from his father’s point of view.

“It’s a plan,” I said again. “But it needs perfecting. So I need to be the sort of person who wouldn’t go to the cops.” Then I paused. “No, better still, right in front of Richard Beck’s eyes, I need to become the sort of person who can’t go to the cops.”

“How?” Duffy said.

I looked straight at her. “I’ll have to hurt somebody. By accident, in the confusion. Another passerby. Some innocent party. Some kind of ambiguous circumstance. Maybe I run somebody over. Some old lady walking her dog. Maybe I even kill her. I panic and I run.”

“Too difficult to stage,” she said. “And not really enough to make you run, anyway. I mean, accidents happen, in circumstances like these.”

I nodded. The room stayed quiet. I closed my eyes and thought some more and saw the beginnings of a sketchy scene take shape right there in my mind.

“OK,” I said. “How about this? I’ll kill a cop. By accident.”

Nobody spoke. I opened my eyes.

“It’s a grand slam,” I said. “You see that? It’s totally perfect. It puts Zachary Beck’s mind at rest about why I didn’t act normally and go to the cops. You don’t go to the cops if you’ve just killed one of their own, even if it’s an accident. He’ll understand that. And it’ll give me a reason to stay on at his house afterward. Which I’ll need to do. He’ll think I’m in hiding. He’ll be grateful about the rescue and he’s a criminal anyway so his conscience won’t get in his way.”

There were no objections. Just silence, and then a slow indefinable murmur of assessment, agreement, consent. I scoped it out, beginning to end. Think about the long game. I smiled.

“And it gets better,” I said. “He might even hire me. In fact I think he’ll be very tempted to hire me. Because we’re creating the illusion that his family’s suddenly under attack and he’ll be down by two bodyguards and he’ll know I’m better than they were anyway because they lost and I didn’t. And he’ll be happy to hire me because as long as he thinks I’m a cop-killer and he’s sheltering me he’ll think he owns me.”

Duffy smiled, too.

“So let’s go to work,” she said. “We’ve got less than forty-eight hours.”

The two younger guys were tagged as the kidnap team. We decided they would be driving a Toyota pickup from the DEA’s stock of impounded vehicles. They would be using confiscated Uzis filled with nine-millimeter blanks. They would have a stun grenade filched from the DEA SWAT stores. Then we started to rehearse my role as the rescuer. Like all good scam artists we decided I should stick as close to the truth as possible, so I would be an ex-military drifter, in the right place at the right time. I would be armed, which in the circumstances would be technically illegal in Massachusetts, but which would be in character and plausible.

“I need a big old-fashioned revolver,” I said. “I have to be carrying something appropriate for a citizen. And the whole thing has to be a big drama, beginning to end. The Toyota comes at me, I need to disable it. I need to shoot it up. So I need three real bullets and three blanks, in strict sequence. The three real bullets for the truck, the three blanks for the people.”

“We could load any gun like that,” Eliot said.

“But I’ll need to see the chambers,” I said. “Right before I fire. I won’t fire a mixed load without a visual check. I need to know I’m starting in the right place. So I need a revolver. A big one, not some small thing, so I can see clearly.”

He saw my point. Made a note. Then we nominated the old guy as the local cop. Duffy proposed he should just blunder into my field of fire.

“No,” I said. “It has to be the right kind of mistake. Not just a careless shot. Beck senior needs to be impressed with me in the right kind of way. I need to do it deliberately, but recklessly. Like I’m a madman, but a madman who can shoot.”

Duffy agreed and Eliot thought through a mental list of available vehicles and offered me an old panel van. Said I could be a delivery guy. Said it would give me a legitimate reason to be hanging out on the street. We made lists, on paper and in our heads. The two guys my age were sitting there without an assigned task, and they were unhappy about it.

“You’re backup cops,” I said. “Suppose the kid doesn’t even see me shoot the first one? He might have fainted or something. You need to chase us in a car, and I’ll take you out when I’m certain he’s watching.”

“Can’t have backup cops,” the old guy said. “I mean, what’s going on here? Suddenly the whole place is swarming with cops for no good reason?”

“College cops,” Duffy said. “You know, those rent-a-cop guys colleges have? They just happen to be there. I mean, where else would you find them?”

“Excellent,” I said. “They can start from right inside the campus. They can control the whole thing by radio from the rear.”

“How will you take them out?” Eliot asked me, like it was an issue.

I nodded. I saw the problem. I would have fired six shots by then.

“I can’t reload,” I said. “Not while I’m driving. Not with blanks. The kid might notice.”

“Can you ram them? Force them off the road?”

“Not in a crummy old van. I’ll have to have a second revolver. Preloaded, waiting inside the van. In the glove compartment, maybe.”

“You’re running around with two six-shooters?” the old guy said. “That’s a little odd, in Massachusetts.”

I nodded. “It’s a weak point. We’re going to have to risk a few.”

“So I should be in plain clothes,” the old guy said. “Like a detective. Shooting at a uniformed cop is beyond reckless. That would be a weak point, too.”

“OK,” I said. “Agreed. Excellent. You’re a detective, and you pull out your badge, and I think it’s a gun. That happens.”

“But how do we die?” the old guy asked. “We just clutch our stomachs and fall over, like an old Wild West show?”

“That’s not convincing,” Eliot said. “This whole thing has got to look exactly right. For Richard Beck’s sake.”

“We need Hollywood stuff,” Duffy said. “Kevlar vests and condoms filled with fake blood that explode off of a radio signal.”

“Can we get it?”

“From New York or Boston, maybe.”

“We’re tight for time.”

“Tell me about it,” Duffy said.

That was the end of day nine. Duffy wanted me to move into the motel and offered to have somebody drive me back to my Boston hotel for my luggage. I told her I didn’t have any luggage and she looked at me sideways but didn’t say anything. I took a room next to the old guy. Somebody drove out and got pizza. Everybody was running around and making phone calls. They left me alone. I lay on my bed and thought the whole thing through again, beginning to end, from my point of view. I made a list in my head of all the things we hadn’t considered. It was a long list. But there was one item bothering me above all. Not exactly on the list. Kind of parallel to it. I got off my bed and went to find Duffy. She was out in the lot, hurrying back to her room from her car.

“Zachary Beck isn’t the story here,” I told her. “He can’t be. If Quinn’s involved, then Quinn’s the boss. He wouldn’t play second fiddle. Unless Beck is a worse guy than Quinn, and I don’t even want to think about that.”

“Maybe Quinn changed,” she said. “He was shot twice in the head. Maybe that kind of rewired his brains. Diminished him, somehow.”

I said nothing. She hurried away. I went back to my room.

Day ten started with the arrival of the vehicles. The old guy got a seven-year-old Chevy Caprice to act as his police unmarked. It was the one with the Corvette motor in it, from the final model year before General Motors stopped making them. It looked just right. The pickup was a big thing painted faded red. It had a bull bar on the front. I saw the younger guys talking about how they would use it. My ride was a plain brown panel van. It was the most anonymous truck I had ever seen. It had no side windows and two small rear windows. I checked inside for a glove compartment. It had one.

“OK?” Eliot asked me.

I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.

“Perfect,” I said. “I want the revolvers to be big .44 Magnums. I want three heavy soft-nosed bullets and nine blanks. Make the blanks as loud as you can get.”

“OK,” he said. “Why soft-nose?”

“I’m worried about ricochets,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anybody by accident. Soft-nose slugs will deform and stick to what they hit. I’m going to fire one into the radiator and two at the tires. I want you to pump the tires way high so they’ll explode when I hit them. We’ve got to make it spectacular.”

Eliot hurried away and Duffy came up to me.

“You’ll need these,” she said. She had a coat and a pair of gloves for me. “You’ll look more realistic if you’re wearing them. It’ll be cold. And the coat will hide the gun.”

I took them from her and tried on the coat. It fit pretty well. She was clearly a good judge of sizes.

“The psychology will be tricky,” she said. “You’re going to have to be flexible. The kid might be catatonic. You might need to coax some reaction out of him. But ideally he’ll be awake and talking. In which case I think you need to show a little reluctance about getting yourself more and more involved. Ideally you need to let him talk you into driving him all the way home. But at the same time you need to be dominant. You need to keep events moving along so he doesn’t have time to dwell on exactly what he’s seeing.”

“OK,” I said. “In which case I’m going to change my ammunition requisition. I’m going to make the second bullet in the second gun a real one. I’ll tell him to get down on the floor and then I’ll blow out the window behind him. He’ll think it was the college cops shooting at us. Then I’ll tell him to get up again. It’ll increase his sense of danger and it’ll get him used to doing what I tell him and it’ll make him a little happier to watch the college cops get it in the neck. Because I don’t want him fighting me, trying to stop me. I might wreck the van and kill both of us.”

“In fact you need to bond with him,” she said. “He needs to speak well of you, later. Because I agree, getting hired on up there would hit the jackpot. It would give you access. So try to impress the kid. But keep it very subtle. You don’t need him to like you. You just need to make him think you’re a tough guy who knows what he’s doing.”

I went to find Eliot and then the two guys playing the college cops came to find me. We arranged that they would fire blanks at me first, then I would fire one blank at them, then I would shoot out the van’s rear window, and then I would fire another blank, and finally I would fire my last three blanks in a spaced group. On the final shot they would blow out their own windshield with a real bullet from one of their own guns and then they would go sliding off the road like they had lost a tire or been hit.

“Don’t get confused which load is which,” one of them said.

“You either,” I said back.

We had more pizza for lunch and then went out to cruise the target area. We parked a mile short and went over a couple of maps. Then we risked three separate passes in two cars right past the college gate. I would have preferred more time to study but we were worried about being conspicuous. We drove back to the motel in silence and regrouped in Eliot’s room.

“Looks OK,” I said. “Which way will they turn?”

“Maine is north of here,” Duffy said. “We can assume he lives somewhere near Portland.”

I nodded. “But I think they’ll go south. Look at the maps. You get to the highway faster that way. And standard security doctrine is to get on wide busy roads as soon as possible.”

“It’s a gamble.”

“They’ll go south,” I said.

“Anything else?” Eliot asked.

“I’d be nuts to stick with the van,” I said. “Old man Beck will figure if I was doing this for real I’d ditch it and steal a car.”

“Where?” Duffy asked.

“The map shows a mall next to the highway.”

“OK, we’ll stash one there.”

“Spare keys under the bumper?” Eliot asked.

Duffy shook her head. “Too phony. We need this whole thing to be absolutely convincing. He’ll have to steal it for real.”

“I don’t know how,” I said. “I’ve never stolen a car.”

The room went quiet.

“All I know is what I learned in the army,” I said. “Military vehicles are never locked. And they don’t have ignition keys. They start off a button.”

“OK,” Eliot said. “No problem is insuperable. We’ll leave it unlocked. But you’ll act like it is locked. You’ll pretend to jimmy the door. We’ll leave a load of wire and a bunch of coat hangers nearby. Maybe you could ask the kid to find something for you. Make him feel involved. It’ll help the illusion. Then you screw around with it and, hey, the door pops open. We’ll loosen the shroud on the steering column. We’ll strip the right wires and only the right wires. You find them and touch them together and you’re an instant bad guy.”

“Brilliant,” Duffy said.

Eliot smiled. “I do my best.”

“Let’s take a break,” Duffy said. “Start again after dinner.”

The final pieces fell into place after dinner. Two of the guys got back with the last of the equipment. They had a matched pair of Colt Anacondas for me. They were big brutal weapons. They looked expensive. I didn’t ask where they got them from. They came with a box of real .44 Magnums and a box of .44 blanks. The blanks came from a hardware store. They were designed for a heavy-duty nail gun. The sort of thing that punches nails straight into concrete. I opened each Anaconda cylinder and scratched an X against one of the chambers with the tip of a nail scissor. A Colt revolver’s cylinder steps around clockwise, which is different from a Smith & Wesson, which rotates counterclockwise. The X would represent the first chamber to be fired. I would line it up at the ten o’clock position where I could see it and it would step around and fall under the hammer with the first pull of the trigger.

Duffy brought me a pair of shoes. They were my size. The right one had a cavity carved into the heel. She gave me a wireless e-mail device that fit snugly into the space.

“That’s why I’m glad you’ve got big feet,” she said. “Made it easier to fit.”

“Is it reliable?”

“It better be. It’s new government issue. All departments are doing their concealed communications with it now.”

“Great,” I said. In my career more foul-ups had been caused by faulty technology than any other single cause.

“It’s the best we can do,” she said. “They’d find anything else. They’re bound to search you. And the theory is if they’re scanning for radio transmissions all they’ll hear is a brief burst of modem screech. They’ll probably think it’s static.”

They had three blood effects from a New York theatrical costumier. They were big and bulky. Each was a foot-wide square of Kevlar that was to be taped to the victim’s chest. They had rubber gore reservoirs and radio receivers and firing charges and batteries.

“Wear loose shirts, guys,” Eliot said.

The radio triggers were separate buttons I would have to tape to my right forearm. They were wired to batteries I would have to carry in my inside pocket. The buttons were big enough to feel through my coat and my jacket and my shirt, and I figured I would look OK supporting the Colt’s weight with my left hand. We rehearsed the sequence. First, the pickup driver. That button would be nearest my wrist. I would trigger it with my index finger. Second, the pickup passenger. That button would be in the middle. Middle finger. Third, the old guy playing the cop. That button would be nearest my elbow, ring finger.

“You’ll have to lose them afterward,” Eliot said. “They’ll search you for sure at Beck’s house. You’ll have to stop at a men’s room or something and get rid of them.”

We rehearsed endlessly in the motel lot. We laid out the road in miniature. By midnight we were as solid as we were ever going to get. We figured we would need all of eight seconds, beginning to end.

“You have the critical decision,” Duffy said to me. “It’s your call. If there’s anything wrong when the Toyota is coming at you, anything at all, then you abort and you watch it go on by. We’ll clean it up somehow. But you’ll be firing three live rounds in a public place and I don’t want any stray pedestrians getting hit, or cyclists, or joggers. You’ll have less than a second to decide.”

“Understood,” I said, although I really didn’t see any easy way of cleaning it up if it had already gotten that far. Then Eliot took a last couple of phone calls and confirmed they had a college security cruiser on loan and were putting a plausible old Nissan Maxima behind the mall’s flagship department store. The Maxima had been impounded from a small-time marijuana grower in New York State. They still had tough drug laws down there. They were putting phony Massachusetts plates on it and filling it with the kind of junk a department store sales lady might be expected to haul around with her.

“Bed now,” Duffy called. “Big day tomorrow.”

That was the end of day ten.

Duffy brought doughnuts and coffee to my room for breakfast on day eleven, early. Her and me, alone. We went through the whole thing, one last time. She showed me photographs of the agent she had inserted fifty-nine days ago. She was a blonde thirty-year-old who had gotten a clerk’s job with Bizarre Bazaar using the name Teresa Daniel. Teresa Daniel was petite and looked resourceful. I looked hard at the pictures and memorized her features, but it was another woman’s face I was seeing in my mind.

“I’m assuming she’s still alive,” Duffy said. “I have to.”

I said nothing.

“Try hard to get hired,” she said. “We checked your recent history, the same way Beck might. You come out pretty vague. Plenty missing that would worry me, but I don’t think it would worry him.”

I gave the photographs back to her.

“I’m a shoo-in,” I said. “The illusion reinforces itself. He’s left shorthanded and he’s under attack, all at the same time. But I’m not going to try too hard. In fact I’m going to come across a little reluctant. I think anything else would seem phony.”

“OK,” she said. “You’ve got seven objectives, of which numbers one, two, and three are, take a lot of care. We can assume these are extremely dangerous people.”

I nodded. “We can do more than assume it. If Quinn’s involved, we can absolutely guarantee it.”

“So act accordingly,” she said. “Gloves off, from the start.”

“Yes,” I said. I put my arm across my chest and started massaging my left shoulder with my right hand. Then I stopped myself, surprised. An army psychiatrist once told me that type of unconscious gesture represents feelings of vulnerability. It’s defensive. It’s about covering up and hiding. It’s the first step toward curling yourself into a ball on the floor. Duffy must have read the same books, because she picked up on it and looked straight at me.

“You’re scared of Quinn, aren’t you?” she said.

“I’m not scared of anybody,” I said. “But certainly I preferred it when he was dead.”

“We can cancel,” she said.

I shook my head. “I’d like the chance to find him, believe me.”

“What went wrong with the arrest?”

I shook my head again.

“I won’t talk about that,” I said.

She was quiet for a beat. But she didn’t push it. Just looked away and paused and looked back and started up with the briefing again. Quiet voice, efficient diction.

“Objective number four is find my agent,” she said. “And bring her back to me.”

I nodded.

“Five, bring me solid evidence I can use to nail Beck.”

“OK,” I said.

She paused again. Just a beat. “Six, find Quinn and do whatever you need to do with him. And then seven, get the hell out of there.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“We won’t tail you,” she said. “The kid might spot us. He’ll be pretty paranoid by then. And we won’t put a homing device on the Nissan, because they’d probably find it later. You’ll have to e-mail us your location, soon as you know it.”

“OK,” I said.

“Weaknesses?” she asked.

I forced my mind away from Quinn.

“Three weaknesses that I can see,” I said. “Two minor and one major. First minor one is that I’m going to blow the back window out of the van but the kid will have about ten minutes to realize the broken glass is in the wrong place and there isn’t a corresponding hole in the windshield.”

“So don’t do it.”

“I think I really need to. I think we need to keep the panic level high.”

“OK, we’ll put a bunch of boxes back there. You should have boxes anyway, if you’re a delivery man. They might obscure his view. If they don’t, just hope he doesn’t put two and two together inside ten minutes.”

I nodded. “And second, old man Beck is going to call the cops down here, sometime, somehow. Maybe the newspapers, too. He’s going to be looking for corroborating information.”

“We’ll give the cops a script to follow. And they’ll give the press something. They’ll play ball for as long as they need to. What’s the major weakness?”

“The bodyguards,” I said. “How long can you hold them? You can’t let them get near a phone, or they’ll call Beck. So you can’t formally arrest them. You can’t put them in the system. You’ll have to hold them incommunicado, completely illegally. How long can you keep that going?”

She shrugged. “Four or five days, tops. We can’t protect you any longer than that. So be real fast.”

“I plan to be,” I said. “How long will the battery last on my e-mail thing?”

“About five days,” she said. “You’ll be out by then. We can’t give you a charger. It would be too suspicious. But you can use a cell phone charger, if you can find one.”

“OK,” I said.

She just looked at me. There was nothing more to say. Then she moved close and kissed me on the cheek. It was sudden. Her lips were soft. They left a dusting of doughnut sugar on my skin.

“Good luck,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve missed anything.”

But we had missed a lot of things. They were glaring errors in our thinking and they all came back to haunt me.

CHAPTER 3

Duke the bodyguard came back to my room five minutes before seven in the evening, which was way too early for dinner. I heard his footsteps outside and a quiet click as the lock turned. I was sitting on the bed. The e-mail device was back in my shoe and my shoe was back on my foot.

“Get a nap, asshole?” he asked.

“Why am I locked up?” I asked back.

“Because you’re a cop-killer,” he said.

I looked away. Maybe he had been a cop himself, before he went private. Lots of ex-cops wind up in the security business, as consultants or private eyes or bodyguards. Certainly he had some kind of an agenda, which could be a problem for me. But it meant he was buying Richard Beck’s story without question, which was the upside. He looked at me for a second with nothing much in his face. Then he led me out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor and through dark passageways toward the side of the house that faced north. I could smell salt air and damp carpet. There were rugs everywhere. Some places they were laid two-deep on the floor. They glowed with muted colors. He stopped in front of a door and pushed it open and stepped back so I was channeled into a room. It was large and square and paneled with dark oak. Rugs all over the floor. There were small windows in deep recesses. Darkness and rock and gray ocean outside. There was an oak table. My two Colt Anacondas were lying on it, unloaded. Their cylinders were open. There was a man at the head of the table. He was sitting in an oak chair with arms and a tall back. He was the guy from Susan Duffy’s surveillance photographs.

In the flesh he was mostly unremarkable. Not big, not small. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. Gray hair, not thin, not thick, not short, not long. He was about fifty. He was wearing a gray suit made out of expensive cloth cut without any attempt at style. His shirt was white and his tie was no color at all, like gasoline. His hands and face were pale, like his natural habitat was underground parking garages at night, hawking samples of something from his Cadillac’s trunk.

“Sit down,” he said. His voice was quiet and strained, like it was all high up in his throat. I sat opposite him at the far end of the table.

“I’m Zachary Beck,” he said.

“Jack Reacher,” I said.

Duke closed the door gently and leaned his bulk against it from the inside. The room went quiet. I could hear the ocean. It wasn’t a rhythmic wave sound like you hear at the beach. It was a continuous random crashing and sucking of surf on the rocks. I could hear pools draining and gravel rattling and breakers coming in like explosions. I tried to count them. People say every seventh wave is a big one.

“So,” Beck said. He had a drink on the table in front of him. Some kind of amber liquid in a short heavy glass. Oily, like scotch or bourbon. He nodded to Duke. Duke picked up a second glass. It had been waiting there for me on a side table. It had the same oily amber liquid in it. He carried it awkwardly with his finger and thumb right down at the base. He walked across the room and bent a little to place it carefully in front of me. I smiled. I knew what it was for.

“So,” Beck said again.

I waited.

“My son explained your predicament,” he said. It was the same phrase his wife had used.

“The law of unintended consequences,” I said.

“It presents me with difficulties,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary businessman, trying to work out where my responsibilities lie.”

I waited.

“We’re grateful, naturally,” he said. “Please don’t misunderstand that.”

“But?”

“There are legal issues, aren’t there?” He said it with a little annoyance in his voice, like he was being victimized by complexities beyond his control.

“It’s not rocket science,” I said. “I need you to turn a blind eye. At least temporarily. Like one good turn deserves another. If your conscience can accommodate that kind of a thing.”

The room went quiet again. I listened to the ocean. I could hear a full spectrum of sounds out there. I could hear brittle seaweed dragging on granite and a drawn-out undertow sucking backward toward the east. Zachary Beck’s gaze was moving all over the place. He was looking at the table, then at the floor, then into space. His face was narrow. Not much of a jaw. His eyes were set fairly close together. His brow was lined with concentration. His lips were thin and his mouth was pursed. His head was moving a little. The whole thing was a reasonable facsimile of an ordinary businessman struggling with weighty issues.

“Was it a mistake?” he asked.

“The cop?” I said. “In retrospect, obviously. At the time, I was just trying to get the job done.”

He spent a little more time thinking, and then he nodded.

“OK,” he said. “In the circumstances, we might be willing to help you out. If we can. You did a great service for the family.”

“I need money,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m going to need to travel.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“Is that wise?”

“Not really. I’d prefer to wait here a couple of days until the initial panic is over. But I don’t want to push my luck with you.”

“How much money?”

“Five thousand dollars might do it.”

He said nothing to that. Just started up with the gazing thing again. This time, there was a little more focus in his eyes.

“I’ve got some questions for you,” he said. “Before you leave us. If you leave us. Two issues are paramount. First, who were they?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I have many rivals and enemies.”

“That would go this far?”

“I’m a rug importer,” he said. “I didn’t intend to be, but that’s the way things worked out. Possibly you think I just deal with department stores and interior decorators, but the reality is I deal with all kinds of unsavory characters in various foreign hellholes where enslaved children are forced to work eighteen-hour days until their fingers bleed. Their owners are all convinced I’m ripping them off and raping their cultures, and the truth is I probably am, although no more than they are. They aren’t fun companions. I need a certain toughness to prosper. And the point is, so do my competitors. This is a tough business all around. So between my suppliers and my competitors I can think of half a dozen separate people who would kidnap my son to get at me. After all, one of them did, five years ago, as I’m sure my son told you.”

I said nothing.

“I need to know who they were,” he said, like he really meant it. So I paused a beat and recounted the whole event for him, second by second, yard by yard, mile by mile. I described the two tall fair-haired DEA guys in the Toyota accurately and in great detail.

“They mean nothing to me,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Did you get the Toyota’s license plate?” he asked.

I thought back and told him the truth.

“I only saw the front,” I said. “There was no plate.”

“OK,” he said. “So they were from a state that doesn’t require a front license plate. That narrows it down a little, I guess.”

I said nothing. A long moment later he shook his head.

“Information is in very short supply,” he said. “An associate of mine contacted the police department down there, in a roundabout way. One town cop is dead, one college cop is dead, two unexplained strangers in a Lincoln Town Car are dead, and two unexplained strangers in a Toyota pickup truck are dead. The only surviving eyewitness is a second college cop, and he’s still unconscious after a car wreck nearly five miles away. So right now nobody knows what happened. Nobody knows why it happened. Nobody has made a connection to an attempted kidnap. All anybody knows is there was a bloodbath down there for no apparent reason. They’re speculating about gang warfare.”

“What happens when they run the Lincoln’s plate?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“It’s a corporate registration,” he said. “It doesn’t lead directly here.”

I nodded. “OK, but I want to be on the West Coast before that other college cop wakes up. He got a good look at me.”

“And I want to know who stepped out of line here.”

I glanced at the Anacondas on the table. They had been cleaned and lightly oiled. I was suddenly very glad I had ditched the spent shells. I picked up my glass. Wrapped my thumb and all four fingers around it and sniffed the contents. I had no idea what they were. I would have preferred a cup of coffee. I put the glass back on the table.

“Is Richard OK?” I asked.

“He’ll live,” Beck said. “I’d like to know who exactly is attacking me.”

“I told you what I saw,” I said. “They didn’t show me ID. They weren’t known to me personally. I just happened to be there. What’s your second paramount issue?”

There was another pause. The surf crashed and boomed outside the windows.

“I’m a cautious man,” Beck said. “And I don’t want to offend you.”

“But?”

“But I’m wondering who you are, exactly.”

“I’m the guy who saved your boy’s other ear,” I said.

Beck glanced at Duke, who stepped forward smartly and took my glass away. He used the same awkward pincer movement with his thumb and his index finger, right down at the base.

“And now you’ve got my fingerprints,” I said. “Nice and clear.”

Beck nodded again, like a guy making a judicious decision. He pointed at the guns, where they lay on the table.

“Nice weapons,” he said.

I said nothing back. He moved his hand and nudged one of them with his knuckles. Then he sent it sliding across the wood toward me. The heavy steel made a hollow reverberant sound on the oak.

“You want to tell me why there’s a mark scratched against one of the chambers?”

I listened to the ocean.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “They came to me like that.”

“You bought them used?”

“In Arizona,” I said.

“From a gun store?”

“From a gun show,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t like background checks,” I said.

“Didn’t you ask about the scratches?”

“I assumed they were reference marks,” I said. “I assumed some gun nut had tested them and marked the most accurate chamber. Or the least accurate.”

“Chambers differ?”

“Everything differs,” I said. “That’s the nature of manufacturing.”

“Even with eight-hundred-dollar revolvers?”

“Depends on how discriminating you want to be. You feel the need to measure down to the hundred-thousandths of an inch, then everything in the world is different.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me,” I said. “I point a gun at somebody, I don’t care which individual blood cell I’m targeting.”

He sat quiet for a moment. Then he went into his pocket and came out with a bullet. Shiny brass case, dull lead point. He stood it upright in front of him like a miniature artillery shell. Then he knocked it over and rolled it under his fingers on the table. Then he placed it carefully and flicked it with his fingertip so that it rolled all the way along to me. It came in a wide graceful curve. It made a slow droning sound on the wood. I let it roll off the end of the table and caught it in my hand. It was an unjacketed Remington .44 Magnum. Heavy, probably more than three hundred grains. It was a brutal thing. Probably cost the best part of a dollar. It was warm from his pocket.

“You ever played Russian roulette?” he asked.

“I need to get rid of the car I stole,” I said.

“We’ve already gotten rid of it,” he said.

“Where?”

“Where it won’t be found.”

He went quiet. I said nothing. Just looked at him, like I was thinking Is that the sort of thing an ordinary businessman does? As well as registering his limousines through shell corporations? And instantly recalling the retail on a Colt Anaconda? And trapping a guest’s prints on a whiskey tumbler?

“You ever played Russian roulette?” he asked again.

“No,” I said. “I never did.”

“I’m under attack,” he said. “And I just lost two guys. Time like this I need to be adding guys, not losing them.”

I waited, five seconds, ten. I made out like I was struggling with the concept.

“You asking to hire me?” I said. “I’m not sure I can stick around.”

“I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I’m deciding. You look like a useful guy. You could have that five thousand dollars to stay, not to go. Maybe.”

I said nothing.

“Hey, if I want you, I’ve got you,” he said. “There’s a dead cop down in Massachusetts and I’ve got your name and I’ve got your prints.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know who you are.”

“Get used to it,” I said. “How do you know who anybody is?”

“I find out. I test people. Suppose I asked you to kill another cop? As a gesture of good faith?”

“I’d say no. I’d repeat that the first one was an unfortunate accident I regret very much. And I’d start wondering about what kind of an ordinary businessman you really are.”

“My business is my business. It needn’t concern you.”

I said nothing.

“Play Russian roulette with me,” he said.

“What would that prove?”

“A federal agent wouldn’t do it.”

“Why are you worried about federal agents?”

“That needn’t concern you, either.”

“I’m not a federal agent,” I said.

“So prove it. Play Russian roulette with me. I mean, I’m already playing Russian roulette with you, in a manner of speaking, just letting you into my house without knowing exactly who you are.”

“I saved your son.”

“And I’m very grateful for that. Grateful enough that I’m still talking to you in a civilized manner. Grateful enough that I might yet offer you sanctuary and employment. Because I like a man who gets the job done.”

“I’m not looking for work,” I said. “I’m looking to hide out for maybe forty-eight hours and then move on.”

“We’d look after you. Nobody would ever find you. You’d be completely safe here. If you pass the test.”

“Russian roulette is the test?”

“The infallible test,” he said. “In my experience.”

I said nothing. The room was silent. He leaned forward in his chair.

“You’re either with me or against me,” he said. “Either way, you’re about to prove it. I sincerely hope you choose wisely.”

Duke moved against the door. The floor creaked under his feet. I listened to the ocean. Spray smashed upward and the wind whipped it and heavy foam drops arced lazily through the air and tapped against the window glass. The seventh wave came booming in, heavier than the others. I picked up the Anaconda in front of me. Duke pulled a gun out from under his jacket and pointed it at me in case I had something other than roulette on my mind. He had a Steyr SPP, which is most of a Steyr TMP submachine gun cut down into pistol form. It’s a rare piece from Austria and it was big and ugly in his hand. I looked away from it and concentrated on the Colt. I thumbed the bullet into a random chamber and closed the cylinder and spun it free. The ratchet purred in the silence.

“Play,” Beck said.

I spun the cylinder again and raised the revolver and touched the muzzle to my temple. The steel was cold. I looked Beck straight in the eye and held my breath and eased the trigger back. The cylinder turned and the hammer cocked. The action was smooth, like silk rubbing on silk. I pulled the trigger all the way. The hammer fell. There was a loud click. I felt the smack of the hammer pulse all the way through the steel to the side of my head. But I felt nothing else. I breathed out and lowered the gun and held it with the back of my hand resting on the table. Then I turned my hand over and pulled my finger out of the trigger guard.

“Your turn,” I said.

“I just wanted to see you do it,” he said.

I smiled.

“You want to see me do it again?” I said.

Beck said nothing. I picked up the gun again and spun the cylinder and let it slow and stop. Raised the muzzle to my head. The barrel was so long my elbow was forced up and out. I pulled the trigger, fast and decisive. There was a loud click in the silence. It was the sound of an eight-hundred-dollar piece of precision machinery working exactly the way it should. I lowered the gun and spun the cylinder a third time. Raised the gun. Pulled the trigger. Nothing. I did it a fourth time, fast. Nothing. I did it a fifth time, faster. Nothing.

“OK,” Beck said.

“Tell me about Oriental rugs,” I said.

“Nothing much to tell,” he said. “They go on the floor. People buy them. Sometimes for a lot of money.”

I smiled. Raised the gun again.

“Odds are six to one,” I said. I spun the cylinder a sixth time. The room went completely silent. I put the gun to my head. Pulled the trigger. I felt the smack of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. Nothing else.

“Enough,” Beck said.

I lowered the Colt and cracked the cylinder and dumped the bullet out on the table. Lined it up carefully and rolled it all the way back to him. It droned on the wood. He stopped it with the heel of his hand and sat there and said nothing for two or three minutes. He was looking at me like I was an animal in a zoo. Like maybe he wished there were some bars between him and me.

“Richard tells me you were a military cop,” he said.

“Thirteen years,” I said.

“Were you good?”

“Better than those bozos you sent to pick him up.”

“He speaks well of you.”

“So he should,” I said. “I saved his ass. At considerable cost to myself.”

“You going to be missed anywhere?”

“No.”

“Family?”

“Haven’t got any.”

“Job?”

“I can’t go back to it now,” I said. “Can I?”

He played with the bullet for a moment, rolling it under the pad of his index finger. Then he scooped it up into his palm.

“Who can I call?” he said.

“For what?”

He jiggled the bullet in his palm, like shaking dice.

“An employment recommendation,” he said. “You had a boss, right?”

Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.

“Self-employed,” I said.

He put the bullet back on the table.

“Licensed and insured?” he said.

I paused a beat.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Reasons,” I said.

“Got a registration for your truck?”

“I might have mislaid it.”

He rolled the bullet under his fingers. Gazed at me. I could see him thinking. He was running things through his head. Processing information. Trying to make it fit with his own preconceptions. I willed him onward. An armed tough guy with an old panel van that doesn’t belong to him. A car thief. A cop-killer. He smiled.

“Used records,” he said. “I’ve seen that store.”

I said nothing. Just looked him in the eye.

“Let me take a guess,” he said. “You were fencing stolen CDs.”

His type of guy. I shook my head.

“Bootlegs,” I said. “I’m not a thief. I’m ex-military, trying to scrape a living. And I believe in free expression.”

“Like hell,” he said. “You believe in making a buck.”

His type of guy.

“That too,” I said.

“Were you doing well?”

“Well enough.”

He scooped the bullet into his palm again and tossed it to Duke. Duke caught it one-handed and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

“Duke is my head of security,” Beck said. “You’ll work for him, effective immediately.”

I glanced at Duke, than back at Beck.

“Suppose I don’t want to work for him?” I said.

“You have no choice. There’s a dead cop down in Massachusetts, and we have your name and your prints. You’ll be on probation, until we get a feel for exactly what kind of a person you are. But look on the bright side. Think about five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of bootleg CDs.”

The difference between being an honored guest and a probationary employee was that I ate dinner in the kitchen with the other help. The giant from the gatehouse lodge didn’t show, but there was Duke and one other guy I took to be some kind of an all-purpose mechanic or handyman. There was a maid and a cook. The five of us sat around a plain deal table and had a meal just as good as the family was getting in the dining room. Maybe better, because maybe the cook had spat in theirs, and I doubted if she would spit in ours. I had spent enough time around grunts and NCOs to know how they do things.

There wasn’t much conversation. The cook was a sour woman of maybe sixty. The maid was timid. I got the impression she was fairly new. She was unsure about how to conduct herself. She was young and plain. She was wearing a cotton shift and a wool cardigan. She had clunky flat shoes on. The mechanic was a middle-aged guy, thin, gray, quiet. Duke was quiet too, because he was thinking. Beck had handed him a problem and he wasn’t sure how he should deal with it. Could he use me? Could he trust me? He wasn’t stupid. That was clear. He saw all the angles and he was prepared to spend a little time examining them. He was around my age. Maybe a little younger, maybe a little older. He had one of those hard ugly corn-fed faces that hides age well. He was about my size. I probably had heavier bones, he was probably a little bulkier. We probably weighed within a pound or two of each other. I sat next to him and ate my food and tried to time it right with the kind of questions a normal person would be expected to ask.

“So tell me about the rug business,” I said, with enough tone in my voice that he knew I was saying I assumed Beck was into something else entirely.

“Not now,” he said, like he meant not in front of the help. And then he looked at me in a way that had to mean anyway I’m not sure I want to be talking to a guy crazy enough to chance shooting himself in the head six straight times.

“The bullet was a fake, right?” I said.

“What?”

“No powder in it,” I said. “Probably just cotton wadding.”

“Why would it be a fake?”

“I could have shot him with it.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I wouldn’t, but he’s a cautious guy. He wouldn’t take the risk.”

“I was covering you.”

“I could have gotten you first. Used your gun on him.”

He stiffened a little, but he didn’t say anything. Competitive. I didn’t like him very much. Which was OK with me, because I guessed he was going to wind up as a casualty before too long.

“Hold this,” he said.

He took the bullet out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“Wait there,” he said.

He got up off his chair and walked out of the kitchen. I stood the bullet upright in front of me, just like Beck had. I finished up my meal. There was no dessert. No coffee. Duke came back with one of my Anacondas swinging from his trigger finger. He walked past me to the back door and nodded me over to join him. I picked the bullet up and clamped it in my palm. Followed him. The back door beeped as we passed through it. Another metal detector. It was neatly integrated into the frame. But there was no burglar alarm. Their security depended on the sea and the wall and the razor wire.

Beyond the back door was a cold damp porch, and then a rickety storm door into the yard, which was nothing more than the tip of the rocky finger. It was a hundred yards wide and semicircular in front of us. It was dark and the lights from the house picked up the grayness of the granite. The wind was blowing and I could see luminescence from the whitecaps out in the ocean. The surf crashed and eddied. There was a moon and low torn clouds moving fast. The horizon was immense and black. The air was cold. I twisted up and back and picked out my room’s window way above me.

“Bullet,” Duke said.

I turned back and passed it to him.

“Watch,” he said.

He loaded it into the Colt. Jerked his hand to snap the cylinder shut. Squinted in the moonlit grayness and clicked the cylinder around until the loaded chamber was at the ten o’clock position.

“Watch,” he said again.

He pointed the gun with his arm straight, aiming just below horizontal at the flat granite tables where they met the sea. He pulled the trigger. The cylinder turned and the hammer dropped and the gun kicked and flashed and roared. There was a simultaneous spark on the rocks and an unmistakable metallic whang of a ricochet. It feathered away to silence. The bullet probably skipped a hundred yards out into the Atlantic. Maybe it killed a fish.

“It wasn’t a fake,” he said. “I’m fast enough.”

“OK,” I said.

He opened the cylinder and shook the empty shell case out. It clinked on the rocks by his feet.

“You’re an asshole,” he said. “An asshole cop-killer.”

“Were you a cop?”

He nodded. “Once upon a time.”

“Is Duke your first name or your last?”

“Last.”

“Why does a rug importer need armed security?”

“Like he told you, it’s a rough business. There’s a lot of money in it.”

“You really want me here?”

He shrugged. “I might. If somebody’s sniffing around, we might need some cannon fodder. Better you than me.”

“I saved the kid.”

“So what? Get in line. We’ve all saved the kid, one time or another. Or Mrs. Beck, or Mr. Beck himself.”

“How many guys have you got?”

“Not enough,” he said. “Not if we’re under attack.”

“What is this, a war?”

He didn’t answer. Just walked past me toward the house. I turned my back on the restless ocean and followed him.

There was nothing doing in the kitchen. The mechanic had disappeared and the cook and the maid were stacking dishes into a machine large enough to do duty in a restaurant. The maid was all fingers and thumbs. She didn’t know what went where. I looked around for coffee. There still wasn’t any. Duke sat down again at the empty deal table. There was no activity. No urgency. I was aware of time slipping away. I didn’t trust Susan Duffy’s estimate of five days’ grace. Five days is a long time when you’re guarding two healthy individuals off the books. I would have been happier if she had said three days. I would have been more impressed by her sense of realism.

“Go to bed,” Duke said. “You’ll be on duty as of six-thirty in the morning.”

“Doing what?”

“Doing whatever I tell you.”

“Is my door going to be locked?”

“Count on it,” he said. “I’ll unlock it at six-fifteen. Be down here by six-thirty.”

I waited on my bed until I heard him come up after me and lock the door. Then I waited some more until I was sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I took my shoe off and checked for messages. The little device powered up and the tiny green screen was filled with a cheerful italic announcement: You’ve Got Mail! There was one item only. It was from Susan Duffy. It was a one-word question: Location? I hit reply and typed Abbot, Maine, coast, 20m S of Portland, lone house on long rock finger. That would have to do. I didn’t have a mailing address or exact GPS coordinates. But she should be able to pin it down if she spent some time with a large-scale map of the area. I hit send now.

Then I stared at the screen. I wasn’t entirely sure how e-mail worked. Was it instantaneous communication, like a phone call? Or would my reply wait somewhere in limbo before it got to her? I assumed she would be watching for it. I assumed she and Eliot would be spelling each other around the clock.

Ninety seconds later the screen announced You’ve Got Mail! again. I smiled. This might work. This time her message was longer. Only twenty-one words, but I had to scroll down the tiny screen to read it all. It said: We’ll work the maps, thanks. Prints show 2 bodyguards in our custody are ex-army. All under control here. You? Progress?

I hit reply and typed hired, probably. Then I thought for a second and pictured Quinn and Teresa Daniel in my mind and added otherwise no progress yet. Then I thought some more and typed re 2 bodyguards ask MP Powell quote 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, 10-36 unquote from me specifically. Then I hit send now. I watched the machine announce Your message has been sent and looked away at the darkness outside the window and hoped Powell’s generation still spoke the same language mine did. 10-29, 10-30, 10-24, and 10-36 were four standard Military Police radio codes that meant nothing much in themselves. 10-29 stood for weak signal. It was a procedural complaint about failing equipment. 10-30 meant I am requesting nonemergency assistance. 10-24 meant suspicious person. 10-36 meant please forward my messages. The 10-30 nonemergency call meant the whole string would attract no attention from anybody. It would be recorded and filed somewhere and ignored for the rest of history. But taken together the string was a kind of underground jargon. At least it used to be, way back when I was in uniform. The weak signal part meant keep this quiet and under the radar. The request for nonemergency assistance backed it up: keep this away from the hot files. Suspicious person was self-explanatory. Please forward my messages meant put me in the loop. So if Powell was on the ball he would understand the whole thing to mean check these guys out on the quiet and give me the skinny. And I hoped he was on the ball, because he owed me. He owed me big time. He had sold me out. My guess was he would be looking for ways to make it up to me.

I looked back at the tiny screen: You’ve Got Mail! It was Duffy, saying OK, be fast. I replied trying and switched off and nailed the device back into the heel of my shoe. Then I checked the window.

It was a standard two-part sliding thing. The bottom casement would slide upward in front of the top casement. There was no insect screen. The paint on the inside was thin and neat. The paint on the outside was thick and sloppy from where it had been continually redone to beat the climate. There was a brass catch. It was an ancient thing. There was no modern security. I slipped the catch and pushed the window up. It caught on the thick paint. But it moved. I got it open about five inches and cold sea air blew in on me. I bent down and looked for alarm pads. There weren’t any. I heaved it all the way up and examined the whole of the frame. There was no sign of any security system at all. It was understandable. The window was fifty feet up above the rocks and the ocean. And the house itself was unreachable because of the high wall and the water.

I leaned out the window and looked down. I could see where I had been standing when Duke fired the bullet. I stayed half-in and half-out of the window for about five minutes, leaning on my elbows, staring at the black ocean, smelling the salt air, and thinking about the bullet. I had pulled the trigger six times. It would have made a hell of a mess. My head would have exploded. The rugs would have been ruined and the oak paneling would have splintered. I yawned. The thinking and the sea air were making me sleepy. I ducked back inside and slammed the casement down and went to bed.

I was already up and showered and dressed when I heard Duke unlock the door at six-fifteen the next morning, day twelve, Wednesday, Elizabeth Beck’s birthday. I had already checked my e-mail. There were no messages. None at all. I wasn’t worried. I spent ten quiet minutes at the window. The dawn was right there in front of me and the sea was gray and oily and subdued. The tide was out. Rocks were exposed. Pools had formed here and there. I could see birds on the shore. They were black guillemots. Their spring feathers were coming in. Gray was changing to black. They had bright red feet. I could see cormorants and black-backed gulls wheeling in the distance. Herring gulls swooping low, searching for breakfast.

I waited until Duke’s footsteps had receded and went downstairs and walked into the kitchen and met the giant from the gatehouse face-to-face. He was standing at the sink, drinking water from a glass. He had probably just swallowed his steroid pills. He was a very big guy. I stand six feet five inches tall and I have to center myself quite carefully to walk through a standard thirty-inch doorway. This guy was at least six inches taller than me and probably ten inches wider across the shoulders. He probably outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Maybe by more. I got that core shudder I get when I’m next to a guy big enough to make me feel small. The world seems to tilt a little.

“Duke is in the gym,” the guy said.

“There’s a gym?” I said.

“Downstairs,” he said. His voice was light and high-pitched. He must have been gobbling steroids like candy for years. His eyes were dull and his skin was bad. He was somewhere in his middle thirties, greasy blond, dressed in a muscle shirt and sweatpants. His arms were bigger than my legs. He looked like a cartoon.

“We work out before breakfast,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

“You too.”

“I never work out,” I said.

“Duke’s expecting you. You work here, you work out.”

I glanced at my watch. Six twenty-five in the morning. Time ticking away.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Just looked at me like I was setting some kind of a trap for him. That’s another problem with steroids. Too many of them can rewire your head. And this guy’s head didn’t look like it had started from a very positive place to begin with. He looked mean and stupid. No better way to put it. And not a good combination. There was something in his face. I didn’t like him. I was oh-for-two, as far as liking my new colleagues went.

“It’s not a difficult question,” I said.

“Paulie,” he said.

I nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Paulie. I’m Reacher.”

“I know,” he said. “You were in the army.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t like officers.”

I nodded. They had checked. They knew what rank I had held. They had some kind of access.

“Why not?” I asked. “Did you fail the OCS exam?”

He didn’t answer.

“Let’s go find Duke,” I said.

He put his glass of water down and led me out to a back hallway and through a door to a set of wooden cellar stairs. There was a whole basement under the house. It must have been blasted out of solid rock. The walls were raw stone patched and smoothed with concrete. The air was a little damp and musty. There were naked lightbulbs hanging in wire cages close to the ceiling. There were numerous rooms. One was a good-sized space with white paint all over it. The floor was covered with white linoleum. There was a smell of old sweat. There was an exercise bicycle and a treadmill and a weights machine. There was a heavy bag hanging from a ceiling joist. There was a speed bag near it. Boxing gloves on a shelf. There were dumbbells stored in wall racks. There were free weights stacked loose on the floor next to a bench. Duke was standing right next to it. He was wearing his dark suit. He looked tired, like he had been up all night. He hadn’t showered. His hair was a mess and his suit was creased and wrinkled, especially low down on the back of the coat.

Paulie went straight into some kind of a complicated stretching routine. He was so muscle-bound that his legs and arms had limited articulation. He couldn’t touch his shoulders with his fingers. His biceps were too big. I looked at the weights machine. It had all kinds of handles and bars and grips. It had strong black cables that led through pulleys to a tall stack of lead plates. You would have to be able to lift about five hundred pounds to move them all.

“You working out?” I said to Duke.

“None of your business,” he replied.

“Me either,” I said.

Paulie turned his giant neck and glanced at me. Then he lay down on his back on the bench and shuffled around until his shoulders were positioned underneath a bar resting on a stand. The bar had a bunch of weights on either end. He grunted a bit and wrapped his hands around the bar and flicked his tongue in and out like he was preparing for a major effort. Then he pressed upward and lifted the bar off the stand. The bar bent and wobbled. There was so much weight on it that it curved way down at the ends, like old film of Russian weight-lifters at the Olympics. He grunted again and heaved it up until his arms were locked straight. He held it like that for a second and then crashed it back into the stand. He turned his head and looked straight at me, like I was supposed to be impressed. I was, and I wasn’t. It was a lot of weight, and he had a lot of muscle. But steroid muscle is dumb muscle. It looks real good, and if you want to pit it against dead weight it works just fine. But it’s slow and heavy and tires you out just carrying it around.

“Can you bench-press four hundred pounds?” he called. He was a little out of breath.

“Never tried,” I said.

“Want to try now?”

“No,” I said.

“Wimpy little guy like you, it could build you up.”

“I’m officer class,” I said. “I don’t need building up. I want some four-hundred-pound weight bench-pressed, I just find some big stupid ape and tell him to do it for me.”

He glowered at me. I ignored him and looked at the heavy bag. It was a standard piece of gym equipment. Not new. I pushed it with my palm and set it swinging gently on its chain. Duke was watching me. Then he was glancing at Paulie. He had picked up on some vibe I hadn’t. I pushed the bag again. We had used heavy bags extensively in hand-to-hand combat training. We would be wearing dress uniforms to simulate street clothes and we used the bags to learn how to kick. I once split a heavy bag with the edge of my heel, years ago. The sand dumped right out on the floor. I figured that would impress Paulie. But I wasn’t going to try it again. The e-mail thing was hidden in my heel and I didn’t want to damage it. I made an absurd mental note to tell Duffy she should have put it in the left shoe instead. But then, she was left-handed. Maybe she had thought she was doing the right thing all along.

“I don’t like you,” Paulie called. He was looking straight at me, so I assumed he was talking to me. His eyes were small. His skin glittered. He was a walking chemical imbalance. Exotic compounds were leaking from his pores.

“We should arm wrestle,” he said.

“What?”

“We should arm wrestle,” he said again. He came up right next to me, light and quiet on his feet. He towered over me. He practically blotted out the light. He smelled of sharp acrid sweat.

“I don’t want to arm wrestle,” I said. I saw Duke watching me. Then I glanced at Paulie’s hands. They were clenched into fists, but they weren’t huge. And steroids don’t do anything for a person’s hands, unless they exercise them, and most people don’t think to do that.

“Pussy,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Pussy,” he said again.

“What’s in it for the winner?” I asked.

“Satisfaction,” he said.

“OK.”

“OK what?”

“OK, let’s do it,” I said.

He seemed surprised, but he moved back to the weights bench fast enough. I took my jacket off and folded it over the exercise bicycle. Unbuttoned my right cuff and rolled my sleeve up to my shoulder. My arm looked very thin next to his. But my hand was a shade bigger. My fingers were longer. And what little muscle I had in comparison to him came from pure genetics, not out of some pharmacist’s bottle.

We knelt down facing each other across the bench and planted our elbows. His forearm was a little longer than mine, which was going to put a kink in his wrist, which was going to help me. We slapped our palms together and gripped. His hand felt cold and damp to me. Duke took up station at the head of the bench, like a referee.

“Go,” he said.

I cheated from the first moment. The aim of arm wrestling is to use the strength in your arm and shoulder to rotate your hand downward, taking your opponent’s hand with it, to the mat. I had no chance of doing that. Not against this guy. No chance at all. It was going to be all I could do to keep my own hand in place. So I didn’t even try to win. I just squeezed. A million years of evolution have given us an opposable thumb, which means it can work against the other four fingers like a pincer. I got his knuckles lined up and squeezed them mercilessly. And I have very strong hands. I concentrated on keeping my arm upright. Stared into his eyes and squeezed his hand until I felt his knuckles start to crush. Then I squeezed harder. And harder. He didn’t give up. He was immensely strong. He kept the pressure on. I was sweating and breathing hard, just trying not to lose. We held it like that for a whole minute, straining and quivering in the silence. I squeezed harder. I let the pain build up in his hand. Watched it register in his face. Then I squeezed harder still. That’s what gets them. They think it’s already gotten as bad as it’s going to get, and then it gets worse. And then worse still, like a ratchet. Worse and worse, like there’s an infinite universe of agony ahead of them, stepping up and up and up, remorselessly, like a machine. They start concentrating on their own distress. And then the decision starts flickering in their eyes. They know I’m cheating, but they realize they can’t do anything about it. They can’t look up helplessly and say he’s hurting me! It’s not fair! That makes them the pussy, not me. And they can’t face that. So they swallow it. They swallow it and they start worrying about whether it’s going to get any worse. And it is. For sure. There’s plenty more to come. There’s always more to come. I stared into Paulie’s eyes and squeezed harder. Sweat was making his skin slick, so my hand was moving easily over his, tighter and tighter. There were no friction burns to distract him. The pain was all right there in his knuckles.

“Enough,” Duke called. “It’s a tie.”

I didn’t loosen my grip. Paulie didn’t back off with the pressure. His arm was as solid as a tree.

“I said enough,” Duke called. “You assholes have got work to do.”

I raised my elbow up high so he couldn’t surprise me with a last-second effort. He looked away and dragged his arm off the bench. We let go of each other. His hand was marked vivid red and white. The ball of my thumb felt like it was on fire. He pushed himself off his knees and stood up and walked straight out of the room. I heard his heavy tread on the wooden staircase.

“That was real stupid,” Duke said. “You just made another enemy.”

I was out of breath. “What, I was supposed to lose?”

“It would have been better.”

“Not my way.”

“Then you’re stupid,” he said.

“You’re head of security,” I said. “You should tell him to act his age.”

“Not that easy.”

“So get rid of him.”

“That’s not easy either.”

I stood up slowly. Rolled my sleeve down and buttoned my cuff. Glanced at my watch. Nearly seven in the morning. Time ticking away.

“What am I doing today?” I asked.

“Driving a truck,” Duke said. “You can drive a truck, right?”

I nodded, because I couldn’t say no. I had been driving a truck when I rescued Richard Beck.

“I need to shower again,” I said. “And I need some clean clothes.”

“Tell the maid,” he said. He was tired. “What am I, your damn valet?”

He watched me for a second and headed for the stairs and left me all alone in the basement. I stood and stretched and panted and shook my hand loose from the wrist to ease the strain. Then I retrieved my jacket and went looking for Teresa Daniel. Theoretically she could be locked up somewhere down there. But I didn’t find her. The basement was a warren of spaces carved and blasted out of the rock. Most of them were self-explanatory. There was a furnace room filled with a roaring boiler and a bunch of pipes. There was a laundry room, with a big washing machine sitting high on a wooden table, so it would drain by gravity into a pipe that ran out through the wall at knee height. There were storage areas. There were two locked rooms. Their doors were solid. I listened hard but heard nothing from inside them. I knocked gently and got no response.

I headed back upstairs and met Richard Beck and his mother in the ground-floor hallway. Richard had washed his hair and parted it low on the right and swept it sideways so it hung down thickly on the left, to hide his missing ear. It looked like the thing old guys do to hide the fact they’re going bald on top. The ambivalence was still there in his face. He looked comfortable in the dark safety of his house, but I could see he also felt a little trapped. He looked pleased enough to see me. Not just because I had saved his ass, but maybe because I was a random representation of the outside world, too.

“Happy birthday, Mrs. Beck,” I said.

She smiled at me, like she was flattered that I’d remembered. She looked better than she had the day before. She was easily ten years older than me, but I might have paid her some attention if we’d met somewhere by chance, like a bar or a club or on a long train ride.

“You’ll be with us for a while,” she said. Then it seemed to dawn on her why I would be with them for a while. I was hiding out there because I had killed a cop. She looked confused and glanced away and moved on through the hallway. Richard went with her and looked back at me, once, over his shoulder. I found the kitchen again. Paulie wasn’t there. Zachary Beck was waiting for me instead.

“What weapons did they have?” he asked. “The guys in the Toyota?”

“They had Uzis,” I said. Stick to the truth, like all good scam artists. “And a grenade.”

“Which Uzis?”

“The Micros,” I said. “The little ones.”

“Magazines?”

“The short ones. Twenty rounds.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

I nodded.

“You an expert?”

“They were designed by an Israeli Army lieutenant,” I said. “His name was Uziel Gal. He was a tinkerer. He made all kinds of improvements to the old Czech models 23 and 25 until he had a whole new thing going. This was back in 1949. The original Uzi went into production in 1953. It’s franchised to Belgium and Germany. I’ve seen a few, here and there.”

“And you’re absolutely sure these were Micro versions with the short mags?”

“I’m sure.”

“OK,” he said, like it meant something to him. Then he walked out of the kitchen and disappeared. I stood there and thought about the urgency of his questions and the wrinkles in Duke’s suit. The combination worried me.

I found the maid and told her I needed clothes. She showed me a long shopping list and said she was on her way out to the grocery store. I told her I wasn’t asking her to go buy me clothes. I told her just to borrow them from somebody. She went red and bobbed her head and said nothing. Then the cook came back from somewhere and took pity on me and fried me some eggs and bacon. And made me some coffee, which put the whole day in a better light. I ate and drank and then I went up the two flights of stairs to my room. The maid had left some clothes in the corridor, neatly folded on the floor. There was a pair of black denim jeans and a black denim shirt. Black socks and white underwear. Every item was laundered and neatly pressed. I guessed they were Duke’s. Beck’s or Richard’s would have been too small and Paulie’s would look like I was wearing a tent. I scooped them up and carried them inside. Locked myself in my bathroom and took my shoe off and checked for e-mail. There was one message. It was from Susan Duffy. It said: Your location pinpointed by map. We will move up 25m S and W of you to motel near I-95. Response from Powell quote your eyes only, both DD after 5, 10-2, 10-28 unquote. Progress?

I smiled. Powell still talked the language. Both DD after 5 meant both guys had served five years and then been dishonorably discharged. Five years is way too long for the discharges to have been related to inherent ineptitude or training screw-ups. Those things would have been evident very early. The only way to get fired after five years is to be a bad person. And 10-2, 10-28 left no doubt about it. 10-28 was a standard radio-check response meaning loud and clear. 10-2 was a standard radio call for ambulance urgently needed. But read together as MPs’ covert slang ambulance urgently needed, loud and clear meant these guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it. Powell had been in the files, and he hadn’t liked what he had seen.

I found the icon for reply and typed no progress yet, stay tuned. Then I hit send now and put the unit back in my shoe. I didn’t spend long in the shower. Just rinsed the gymnasium sweat off and dressed in the borrowed clothes. I used my own shoes and jacket and the overcoat Susan Duffy had given me. I walked downstairs and found Zachary Beck and Duke standing together in the hallway. They both had coats on. Duke had car keys in his hand. He still hadn’t showered. He still looked tired, and he was scowling. Maybe he didn’t like me wearing his clothes. The front door was standing open and I saw the maid driving past in a dusty old Saab, off to do the household’s marketing. Maybe she was going to buy a birthday cake.

“Let’s go,” Beck said, like there was work to be done and not much time to do it in. They led me out through the front door. The metal detector beeped twice, once for each of them but not for me. Outside the air was cold and fresh. The sky was bright. Beck’s black Cadillac was waiting on the carriage circle. Duke held the rear door and Beck settled himself in the back. Duke got into the driver’s seat. I took the front passenger seat. It seemed appropriate. There was no conversation.

Duke started the engine and put the car in gear and accelerated down the driveway. I could see Paulie far ahead in the distance, opening the gate for the maid in the Saab. He was back in his suit. He stood and waited for us and we swept past him and headed west, away from the sea. I turned around and saw him closing the gate again.

We drove the fifteen miles inland and turned north on the highway toward Portland. I stared ahead through the windshield and wondered exactly where they were taking me. And what they were going to do with me when they got me there.

They took me right to the edge of the port facilities outside the city itself. I could see the tops of ships’ superstructures out on the water, and cranes all over the place. There were abandoned containers stacked in weedy lots. There were long low office buildings. There were trucks moving in and moving out. There were seagulls in the air everywhere. Duke drove through a gate into a small lot made of cracked concrete and patched blacktop. There was nothing in it except for a panel van standing all alone in the center. It was a medium-sized thing, made from a pickup frame with a big boxy body built onto it. The body was wider than the cab and wrapped up over it. It was the kind of thing you find in a rental line. Not the smallest they have to offer, not the largest. There was no writing on it. It was entirely plain, painted blue, with rust streaks here and there. It was old, and it had lived its life in the salt air.

“Keys are in the door pocket,” Duke said.

Beck leaned forward from the back seat and handed me a slip of paper. It had directions on it, to some place in New London, Connecticut.

“Drive the truck to this exact address,” he said. “It’s a parking lot pretty much the same as this one. There’ll be an identical truck already there. Keys in the door pocket. You leave this one, you bring the other one back here.”

“And don’t look inside either one,” Duke said.

“And drive slow,” Beck said. “Stay legal. Don’t attract attention.”

“Why?” I said. “What’s in them?”

“Rugs,” Beck said, from behind me. “I’m thinking of you, is all. You’re a wanted man. Better to keep a low profile. So take your time. Stop for coffee. Act normally.”

They said nothing more. I got out of the Cadillac. The air smelled of sea and oil and diesel exhaust and fish. The wind was blowing. There was indistinct industrial noise all around, and the shriek and caw of gulls. I walked over to the blue truck. Passed directly behind it and saw the roller door handle was secured by a little lead seal. I walked on and opened the driver’s door. Found the keys in the pocket. Climbed inside and started the engine. Belted myself in and got comfortable and put the thing in gear and drove out of the lot. I saw Beck and Duke in the Cadillac, watching me go, nothing in their faces. I paused at the first turn and made the left and struck out south.

CHAPTER 4

Time ticking away. That’s what I was conscious of. This was some kind of a trial or a test, and it was going to take me at least ten precious hours to complete it. Ten hours that I didn’t have to spare. And the truck was a pig to drive. It was old and balky and there was a constant roaring from the engine and a screaming whine from the transmission. The suspension was soft and worn out and the whole vehicle floated and wallowed. But the rearview mirrors were big solid rectangular things bolted to the doors and they gave me a pretty good view of anything more than ten yards behind me. I was on I-95, heading south, and it was quiet. I was pretty sure nobody was tailing me. Pretty sure, but not completely certain.

I slowed as much as I dared and squirmed around and put my left foot on the gas pedal and ducked down and pulled off my right shoe. Juggled it up into my lap and extracted the e-mail device one-handed. I held it tight against the rim of the steering wheel and drove and typed all at the same time: urgent meet me 1st I-95 rest area southbound S of Kennebunk exit now immediately bring soldering iron and lead solder Radio Shack or hardware store. Then I hit send now and dropped the thing on the seat beside me. Kicked my foot back into the shoe and got it back on the pedal and straightened up in the seat. Checked the mirrors again. Nothing there. So I did some math. Kennebunk to New London was a distance of maybe two hundred miles, maybe a little more. Four hours at fifty miles an hour. Two hours fifty minutes at seventy, and seventy was probably the best I was going to get out of that particular truck. So I would have a maximum margin of an hour and ten minutes to do whatever I decided I needed to.

I drove on. I kept it at a steady fifty in the right lane. Everybody passed me. Nobody stayed behind me. I had no tail. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. The alternative might be worse. I passed the Kennebunk exit after twenty-nine minutes. Saw a rest area sign a mile later. It promised food and gas and restrooms seven miles ahead. The seven miles took me eight and a half minutes. Then there was a shallow ramp that swooped right and rose up a slope through a thicket of trees. The view wasn’t good. The leaves were small and new but there were so many of them that I couldn’t see much. The rest area itself was invisible to me. I let the truck coast and crested the rise and drove down into a perfectly standard interstate facility. It was just a wide road with diagonal parking slots on both sides and a small huddle of low brick buildings on the right. Beyond the buildings was a gas station. There were maybe a dozen cars parked close to the bathrooms. One of them was Susan Duffy’s Taurus. It was last in line on the left. She was standing next to it with Eliot at her side.

I drove slowly past her and made a wait gesture with my hand and parked four slots beyond her. I switched off the engine and sat gratefully in the sudden silence for a moment. I put the e-mail device back in my heel and laced my shoe. Then I tried to look like a normal person. I stretched my arms and opened the door and slid out and stumped around for a moment like a guy easing his cramped legs and relishing the fresh forest air. I turned a couple of complete circles and scanned the whole area and then stood still and kept my eyes on the ramp. Nobody came up it. I could hear light traffic out on the highway. It was close by and fairly loud, but the way it was all behind the trees made me feel private and isolated. I counted off seventy-two seconds, which represents a mile at fifty miles an hour. Nobody came up the ramp. And nobody follows at a distance of more than a mile. So I ran straight over to where Duffy and Eliot were waiting for me. He was in casual clothes and looked a little uneasy in them. She was in worn jeans and the same battered leather jacket I had seen before. She looked spectacular in them. Neither of them wasted any time on greetings, which I guess I was happy about.

“Where are you headed?” Eliot asked.

“New London, Connecticut,” I said.

“What’s in the truck?”

“I don’t know.”

“No tail,” Duffy said, like a statement, not a question.

“Might be electronic,” I said.

“Where would it be?”

“In the back, if they’ve got any sense. Did you get the soldering iron?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It’s on its way. Why do we need it?”

“There’s a lead seal,” I said. “We need to be able to remake it.”

She glanced at the ramp, anxious. “Hard thing to get ahold of at short notice.”

“Let’s check the parts we can get to,” Eliot said. “While we’re waiting.”

We jogged back to the blue truck. I got down on the ground and took a look at the underside. It was all caked in ancient gray mud and streaked with leaking oil and fluid.

“It won’t be here,” I said. “They’d need a chisel to get close to the metal.”

Eliot found it inside the cab about fifteen seconds after he started looking. It was stuck to the foam on the bottom of the passenger’s seat with a little dot of hook-and-loop fastener. It was a tiny bare metal can a little bigger than a quarter and about half an inch thick. It trailed a thin eight-inch wire that was presumably the transmitting antenna. Eliot closed the whole thing into his fist and backed out of the cab fast and stared at the mouth of the ramp.

“What?” Duffy asked.

“This is weird,” he said. “Thing like this has a hearing-aid battery, nothing more. Low power, short range. Can’t be picked up beyond about two miles. So where’s the guy tracking it?”

The mouth of the ramp was empty. I had been the last guy up it. We stood there with our eyes watering in the cold wind, staring at nothing. Traffic hissed by behind the trees, but nothing came up the ramp.

“How long have you been here now?” Eliot asked.

“About four minutes,” I said. “Maybe five.”

“Makes no sense,” he said. “That puts the guy maybe four or five miles behind you. And he can’t hear this thing from four or five miles.”

“Maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe they trust me.”

“So why put this thing in there?”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s been in there for years. Maybe they forgot all about it.”

“Too many maybes,” he said.

Duffy spun right and stared at the trees.

“They could have stopped on the highway shoulder,” she said. “You know, exactly level with where we are now.”

Eliot and I spun to our right and stared, too. It made good sense. It was no kind of clever surveillance technique to pull into a rest stop and park right next to your target.

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

There was a narrow strip of neat grass and then an equally narrow area where the highway people had tamed the edge of the woods with planted shrubs and bark chips. Then there were just trees. The highway had mown them down to the east and the rest area had leveled them to the west but in between was a forty-foot thicket that could have been growing there since the dawn of time. It was hard work getting through it. There were vines and scratchy brambles and low branches. But it was April. Getting through in July or August might have been impossible.

We stopped just before the trees petered out into lower growth. Beyond that was the flat grassy highway shoulder. We eased forward as far as we dared and craned left and right. There was nobody parked there. The shoulder was clear as far as we could see in both directions. Traffic was very light. Whole five-second intervals went by with no vehicles in view at all. Eliot shrugged like he didn’t understand it and we turned around and forced our way back.

“Makes no sense,” he said again.

“They’re short of manpower,” I said.

“No, they’re on Route One,” Duffy said. “They must be. It runs parallel with I-95 the whole way down the coast. From Portland, way down south. It’s probably less than two miles away most of the time.”

We turned east again, like we could see through the trees and spot a car idling on the shoulder of a distant parallel road.

“It’s how I’d do it,” Duffy said.

I nodded. It was a very plausible scenario. There would be technical disadvantages. With up to two miles of lateral displacement any slight fore-aft discrepancy due to traffic would make the signal drift in and out of range. But then, all they wanted to know was my general direction.

“It’s possible,” I said.

“No, it’s likely,” Eliot said. “Duffy’s right. It’s pure common sense. They want to stay out of your mirrors as long as they can.”

“Either way, we have to assume they’re there. How far does Route One stay close to I-95?”

“Forever,” Duffy said. “Way farther than New London, Connecticut. They split around Boston, but they come back together.”

“OK,” I said. Checked my watch. “I’ve been here about nine minutes now. Long enough for the bathroom and a cup of coffee. Time to put the electronics back on the road.”

I told Eliot to put the transmitter in his pocket and drive Duffy’s Taurus south at a steady fifty miles an hour. I told him I would catch him in the truck somewhere before New London. I figured I would worry about how to get the transmitter back in the right place later. Eliot took off and I was left alone with Duffy. We watched her car disappear south and then swiveled around north and watched the incoming ramp. I had an hour and one minute and I needed the soldering iron. Time ticking away.

“How is it up there?” Duffy asked.

“A nightmare,” I said. I told her about the eight-foot granite wall and the razor wire and the gate and the metal detectors on the doors and the room with no inside keyhole. I told her about Paulie.

“Any sign of my agent?” she asked.

“I only just got there,” I said.

“She’s in that house,” she said. “I have to believe that.”

I said nothing.

“You need to make some progress,” she said. “Every hour you spend there puts you deeper in trouble. And her.”

“I know that,” I said.

“What’s Beck like?” she asked.

“Bent,” I said. I told her about the fingerprints on the glass and the way the Maxima had disappeared. Then I told her about the Russian roulette.

“You played?”

“Six times,” I said, and stared at the ramp.

She stared at me. “You’re crazy. Six to one, you should be dead.”

I smiled. “You ever played?”

“I wouldn’t. I don’t like those odds.”

“You’re like most people. Beck was the same. He thought the odds were six to one. But they’re nearer six hundred to one. Or six thousand. You put a single heavy bullet in a well-made well-maintained gun like that Anaconda and it would be a miracle if the cylinder came to rest with the bullet near the top. The momentum of the spin always carries it to the bottom. Precision mechanism, a little oil, gravity helps you out. I’m not an idiot. Russian roulette is a lot safer than people think. And it was worth the risk to get hired.”

She was quiet for a spell.

“You got a feeling?” she asked.

“He looks like a rug importer,” I said. “There are rugs all over the damn place.”

“But?”

“But he isn’t,” I said. “I’d bet my pension on it. I asked him about the rugs and he didn’t say much. Like he wasn’t very interested in them. Most people like to talk about their businesses. Most people, you can’t shut them up.”

“You get a pension?”

“No,” I said.

Right then a gray Taurus identical to Duffy’s except for the color burst up over the rise of the ramp. It slowed momentarily while the driver scanned around and then accelerated hard straight toward us. It was the old guy at the wheel, the one I had left in the gutter near the college gate. He slammed to a stop next to my blue truck and opened his door and heaved himself up and out in exactly the same way he had gotten out of the borrowed police Caprice. He had a big black-and-red Radio Shack bag in his hand. It was bulky with boxes. He held it up and smiled and stepped forward to shake my hand. He had a fresh shirt on, but his suit was the same. I could see blotches where he had tried to sponge the fake blood out. I could picture him, standing at his motel room sink, getting busy with the hand towel. He hadn’t been very successful. It looked like he had been careless with the ketchup at dinner.

“They got you running errands already?” he asked.

“I don’t know what they got me doing,” I said. “We got a lead seal problem.”

He nodded. “I figured. Shopping list like that, what else could it be?”

“You done one before?”

“I’m old-school,” he said. “We did ten a day, once upon a time, way back. Truck stops all over the place, we’d be in and out before the guy had even ordered his soup.”

He squatted down and emptied the Radio Shack bag on the blacktop. He had a soldering iron and a spool of dull solder. And an inverter that would power the iron from his car’s cigar lighter. That meant he had to keep his engine running, so he started it up and reversed a little way so that the cord would reach.

The seal was basically a drawn lead wire with large tags molded on each end. The tags had been crushed together with some kind of a heated device so they had fused together in a large embossed blob. The old guy left the fused ends strictly alone. It was clear he had done this before. He plugged the iron in and let it heat. He tested it by spitting on the end. When he was satisfied he dabbed the tip on the sleeve of his suit coat and then touched it to the wire where it was thin. The wire melted and parted. He eased the gap wider like opening a tiny handcuff and slipped the seal out of its channel. He ducked into his car and laid it on the dash. I grabbed the door lever and turned it.

“OK,” Duffy said. “So what have we got?”

We had rugs. The door rattled upward and daylight flooded the load area and we saw maybe two hundred rugs, all neatly rolled and tied with string and standing upright on their ends. They were all different sizes, with the taller rolls at the cab end and the shorter ones at the door end. They stepped down toward us like some kind of ancient basalt rock formation. They were rolled face-in, so all we saw were the back surfaces, coarse and dull. The string around them was rough sisal, old and yellowed. There was a strong smell of raw wool and a fainter smell of vegetable dye.

“We should check them,” Duffy said. There was disappointment in her voice.

“How long have we got?” the old guy asked.

I checked my watch.

“Forty minutes,” I said.

“Better just sample them,” he said.

We hauled a couple out from the front rank. They were rolled tight. No cardboard tubes. They were just rolled in on themselves and tied tight with the string. One of them had a fringe. It smelled old and musty. The knots in the string were old and flattened. We picked at them with our nails but we couldn’t get them undone.

“They must cut the string,” Duffy said. “We can’t do that.”

“No,” the old guy said. “We can’t.”

The string was coarse and looked foreign. I hadn’t seen string like that for a long time. It was made from some kind of a natural fiber. Jute, maybe, or hemp.

“So what do we do?” the old guy asked.

I pulled another rug out. Hefted it in my hands. It weighed about what a rug should weigh. I squeezed it. It gave slightly. I rested it end-down on the road and punched it in the middle. It yielded a little, exactly how a tightly-rolled rug would feel.

“They’re just rugs,” I said.

“Anything under them?” Duffy asked. “Maybe those tall ones in back aren’t tall at all. Maybe they’re resting on something else.”

We pulled rugs out one by one and laid them on the road in the order we would have to put them back in. We built ourselves a random zigzag channel through the load space. The tall ones were exactly what they appeared to be, tall rugs, rolled tight, tied with string, standing upright on their ends. There was nothing hidden. We climbed out of the truck and stood there in the cold surrounded by a crazy mess of rugs and looked at each other.

“It’s a dummy load,” Duffy said. “Beck figured you would find a way in.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Or else he just wanted you out of the way.”

“While he’s doing what?”

“Checking you out,” she said. “Making sure.”

I looked at my watch. “Time to reload. I’m already going to have to drive like a madman.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “Until we catch up with Eliot, I mean.”

I nodded. “I want you to. We need to talk.”

We put the rugs back inside, kicking and shoving them until they were neatly arranged in their original positions. Then I pulled the roller door down and the old guy got to work with the solder. He slipped the broken seal back through its channel and eased the parted ends close together. He heated the iron and bridged the gap with its tip and touched the free end of the solder roll to it. The gap filled with a large silvery blob. It was the wrong color and it was way too big. It made the wire look like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has just swallowed a rabbit.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

He used the tip of the iron like a tiny paintbrush and smoothed the blob thinner and thinner. He flicked the tip occasionally to get rid of the excess. He was very delicate. It took him three long minutes but at the end of them he had the whole thing looking pretty much like it had before he arrived. He let it cool a little and then blew hard on it. The new silvery color instantly turned to gray. It was as close to an invisible repair as I had ever seen. Certainly it was better than I could have done myself.

“OK,” I said. “Very good. But you’re going to have to do another one. I’m supposed to bring another truck back. We better take a look at that one, too. We’ll meet up in the first northbound rest area after Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“When?”

“Be there five hours from now.”

Duffy and I left him standing there and headed south as fast as I could get the old truck to move. It wouldn’t do much better than seventy. It was shaped like a brick and the wind resistance defeated any attempt to go faster. But seventy was OK. I had a few minutes in hand.

“Did you see his office?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “We need to check it out. In fact we need to check out his whole harbor operation.”

“We’re working on it,” she said. She had to talk loud. The engine noise and gearbox whine were twice as bad at seventy as they had been at fifty. “Fortunately Portland is not too much of a madhouse. It’s only the forty-fourth busiest port in the U.S. About fourteen million tons of imports a year. That’s about a quarter-million tons a week. Beck seems to get about ten of them, two or three containers.”

“Does Customs search his stuff?”

“As much as they search anybody’s. Their current hit rate is about two percent. If he gets a hundred and fifty containers a year maybe three of them will be looked at.”

“So how is he doing it?”

“He could be playing the odds by limiting the bad stuff to, say, one container in ten. That would bring the effective search rate down to zero-point-two percent. He could last years like that.”

“He’s already lasted years. He must be paying somebody off.”

She nodded beside me. Said nothing.

“Can you arrange extra scrutiny?” I asked.

“Not without probable cause,” she said. “Don’t forget, we’re way off the books here. We need some hard evidence. And the possibility of a payoff makes the whole thing a minefield, anyway. We might approach the wrong official.”

We drove on. The engine roared and the suspension swayed. We were passing everything we saw. Now I was watching the mirrors for cops, not tails. I was guessing that Duffy’s DEA papers would take care of any specific legal problems, but I didn’t want to lose the time it would take for her to have the conversation.

“How did Beck react?” she asked. “First impression?”

“He was puzzled,” I said. “And a little resentful. That was my first impression. You notice that Richard Beck wasn’t guarded at school?”

“Safe environment.”

“Not really. You could take a kid out of a college, easy as anything. No guards means no danger. I think the bodyguard thing for the trip home was just some kind of a sop to the fact that the kid is paranoid. I think it was purely an indulgence. I don’t think old man Beck can have thought it was really necessary, or he would have provided security at school as well. Or kept him out of school altogether.”

“So?”

“So I think there was some kind of a done deal somewhere in the past. As a result of the original kidnap, maybe. Something that guaranteed some kind of stability. Hence no bodyguards in the dorm. Hence Beck’s resentment, like somebody had suddenly broken an agreement.”

“You think?”

I nodded at the wheel. “He was surprised, and puzzled, and annoyed. His big question was who?”

“Obvious question.”

“But this was a how-dare-they kind of a question. There was attitude in it. Like somebody was out of line. It wasn’t just an inquiry. It was an expression of annoyance at somebody.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I described the truck. I described your guys.”

She smiled. “Safe enough.”

I shook my head. “He’s got a guy called Duke. First name unknown. Ex-cop. His head of security. I saw him this morning. He’d been up all night. He looked tired and he hadn’t showered. His suit coat was all creased, low down at the back.”

“So?”

“Means he was driving all night. I think he went down there to get a look at the Toyota. To check the rear license plate. Where did you stash it?”

“We let the state cops take it. To keep the plausibility going. We couldn’t take it back to the DEA garage. It’ll be in a compound somewhere.”

“Where will the plate lead?”

“Hartford, Connecticut,” she said. “We busted a small-time Ecstasy ring.”

“When?”

“Last week.”

I drove on. The highway was getting busier.

“Our first mistake,” I said. “Beck’s going to check it out. And then he’s going to be wondering why some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut are trying to snatch his son. And then he’s going to be wondering how some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut can be trying to snatch his son a week after they all got hauled off to jail.”

“Shit,” Duffy said.

“It gets worse,” I said. “I think Duke got a look at the Lincoln, too. It’s got a caved-in front and no window glass left, but it hasn’t got any bullet holes in it. And it doesn’t look like a real grenade went off inside. That Lincoln is living proof this whole thing was phony baloney.”

“No,” she said. “The Lincoln is hidden. It didn’t go with the Toyota.”

“Are you sure? Because the first thing Beck asked me this morning was chapter and verse about the Uzis. It was like he was asking me to damn myself right out of my own mouth. Two Uzi Micros, twenty-round mags, forty shots fired, and not a single mark on the car?”

“No,” she said again. “No way. The Lincoln is hidden.”

“Where?”

“It’s in Boston. It’s in our garage, but as far as any paperwork goes it’s in the county morgue building. It’s supposed to be a crime scene. The bodyguards are supposed to be plastered all over the inside. We aimed for plausibility. We thought this thing through.”

“Except for the Toyota’s plate.”

She looked deflated. “But the Lincoln is OK. It’s a hundred miles away from the Toyota. This guy Duke would have to drive all night.”

“I think he did drive all night. And why was Beck so uptight about the Uzis?”

She went still.

“We have to abort,” she said. “Because of the Toyota. Not because of the Lincoln. The Lincoln’s OK.”

I checked my watch. Checked the road ahead. The van roared on. We would be coming up on Eliot sometime soon. I calculated time and distance.

“We have to abort,” she said again.

“What about your agent?”

“Getting you killed won’t help her.”

I thought about Quinn.

“We’ll discuss it later,” I said. “Right now we stay in business.”

We passed Eliot after eight more minutes. His Taurus was sitting rock-steady in the inside lane, holding a modest fifty. I pulled ahead of him and matched his speed and he fell in behind. We skirted all the way around Boston and pulled into the first rest area we saw south of the city. The world was a lot busier down there. I sat still with Duffy at my side and watched the ramp for seventy-two seconds and saw four cars follow me in. None of their drivers paid me any attention. A couple of them had passengers. They all did normal rest-stop things like standing and yawning by their open doors and looking around and then heading over to the bathrooms and the fast food.

“Where’s the next truck?” Duffy asked.

“In a lot in New London,” I said.

“Keys?”

“In it.”

“So there will be people there, too. Nobody leaves a truck alone with the keys in it. They’ll be waiting for you. We don’t know what they’ve been told to do. We should consider termination.”

“I won’t walk into a trap,” I said. “Not my style. And the next truck might have something better in it.”

“OK,” she said. “We’ll check it in New Hampshire. If you get that far.”

“You could lend me your Glock.”

I saw her reach up and touch it under her arm. “How long for?”

“As long as I need it.”

“What happened to the Colts?”

“They took them.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t give up my service weapon.”

“You’re already way off the books.”

She paused.

“Shit,” she said. She took the Glock out of her holster and passed it to me. It was warm from the heat of her body. I held it in my palm and savored the feeling. She dug in her purse and came out with two spare magazines. I put them in one pocket and the gun in the other.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you in New Hampshire,” she said. “We’ll check the truck. And then we’ll decide.”

“OK,” I said, although I had already decided. Eliot walked over and took the transmitter out of his pocket. Duffy got out of his way and he stuck it back under her seat. Then they went off together, back to the government Taurus. I waited a plausible amount of time and got back on the road.

I found New London without any problem. It was a messy old place. I had never been there before. Never had a reason to go. It’s a Navy town. I think they build submarines there. Or somewhere nearby. Groton, maybe. The directions Beck had given me brought me off the highway early and threaded me through failing industrial areas. There was plenty of old brick, damp and smoke-stained and rotten. I pulled into the side of the road about a mile short of where I guessed the lot would be. Then I made a right and a left and tried to circle around it. I parked at a busted meter and checked Duffy’s gun. It was a Glock 19. It was maybe a year old. It was fully loaded. The spare magazines were full, too. I got out of the truck. I heard booming foghorns way out in the Sound. A ferry was heading in. The wind was scraping trash along the street. A hooker stepped out of a doorway and smiled at me. It’s a Navy town. She couldn’t smell an army MP the way her sisters could elsewhere.

I turned a corner and got a pretty good partial view of the lot I was headed for. The land sloped down toward the sea and I had some elevation. I could see the truck waiting for me. It was the twin of the one I was in. Same age, same type. Same color. It was sitting there all alone. It was in the exact center of the lot, which was just an empty square made of crushed brick and weeds. Some old building had been bulldozed two decades ago and nothing had been built to replace it.

I couldn’t see anybody waiting for me, although there were a thousand dirty windows within range and theoretically all of them could have been full of watchers. But I didn’t feel anything. Feeling is a lot worse than knowing, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got. I stood still until I got cold and then I walked back to the truck. Drove it around the block and into the lot. Parked it nose to nose with its twin. Pulled the key and dropped it in the door pocket. Glanced around one last time and got out. I put my hand in my pocket and closed it around Duffy’s gun. Listened hard. Nothing but grit blowing and the far-off sounds of a run-down city struggling through the day. I was OK, unless somebody was planning to drop me with a long-range rifle shot. And clutching a Glock 19 in my pocket wasn’t going to defend against that.

The new truck was cold and still. The door was unlocked and the key was right there in the pocket. I racked the seat and fixed the mirrors. Dropped the key on the floor like I was clumsy and checked under the seats. No transmitter. Just a few gum wrappers and dust bunnies. I started the engine. Backed away from the truck I had just gotten out of and swooped the new one around the lot and aimed it back toward the highway. I didn’t see anybody. Nobody came after me.

The new truck drove a little better than the old one had. It was a little quieter and a little faster. Maybe it had been around the clock only twice. It reeled in the miles, taking me back north. I stared ahead through the windshield and felt like I could see the lonely house on the rock finger getting bigger and bigger with every minute. It was drawing me in and repelling me simultaneously with equal force. So I just sat there immobile with one hand on the wheel and my eyelids locked open. Rhode Island was quiet. Nobody followed me through it. Massachusetts was mostly a long loop around Boston and then a sprint through the northeastern bump with the dumps like Lowell on my left and the cute places like Newburyport and Cape Ann and Gloucester far away on my right. No tail. Then came New Hampshire. I-95 sees about twenty miles of it with Portsmouth as the last stop. I passed it by and watched for rest area signs. I found one just inside the Maine state line. It told me that Duffy and Eliot and the old guy with the stained suit would be waiting for me eight miles ahead.

It wasn’t just Duffy and Eliot and the old guy. They had a DEA canine unit with them. I guess if you give government types enough time to think they’ll come up with something you don’t expect. I pulled into an area pretty much identical to the Kennebunk one and saw their two Tauruses parked on the end of the row next to a plain van with a spinning ventilator on the roof. I parked four slots away from them and went through the cautious routine of waiting and watching, but nobody pulled in after me. I didn’t worry about the highway shoulder. The trees made me invisible from the highway. There were trees everywhere. Maine has got a whole lot of trees, that was for damn sure.

I got out of the truck and the old guy pulled his car close and went straight into his thing with the soldering iron. Duffy pulled me out of his way by the elbow.

“I made some calls,” she said. She held up her Nokia like she was proving it to me. “Good news and bad news.”

“Good news first,” I said. “Cheer me up.”

“I think the Toyota thing might be OK.”

“Might be?”

“It’s complicated. We got Beck’s shipping schedule from U.S. Customs. All his stuff comes out of Odessa. It’s in the Ukraine, on the Black Sea.”

“I know where it is.”

“Plausible point of origin for rugs. They come north through Turkey from all over. But Odessa is a heroin port, from our point of view. Everything that doesn’t come here direct from Colombia feeds through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and across the Caspian and the Caucasus. So if Beck’s using Odessa it means he’s a heroin guy, and if he’s a heroin guy it means he doesn’t know any Ecstasy dealers from Adam. Not in Connecticut, not anywhere. There can’t be a relationship. No way. How could there be? It’s a completely different part of the business. So he’s starting from scratch as far as finding anything out goes. I mean, the Toyota plate will give him a name and an address, sure, but that information won’t mean anything to him. It’s going to be a few days before he can find out who they are and pick up their trail.”

“That’s the good news?”

“It’s good enough. Trust me, they’re in separate worlds. And a few days is all you’ve got anyway. We can’t hold those bodyguards forever.”

“What’s the bad news?”

She paused a beat. “It’s actually not impossible that someone could have gotten a peek at the Lincoln.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing specific. Just that security at the garage maybe wasn’t as good as it might have been.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can’t say for sure that something bad didn’t happen.”

We heard the truck’s roller door rattle upward. It banged against its stop and a second later we heard Eliot calling us urgently. We stepped over there expecting to find something good. We found another transmitter instead. It was the same tiny metal can with the same eight-inch filament antenna. It was glued to the inside of the sheetmetal, near the loading door, about head height.

“Great,” Duffy said.

The load space was packed with rugs, exactly the same as we had seen before. It could have been the same van. They were rolled tight and tied with rough string and stacked on their ends in descending order of height.

“Do we check them?” the old guy asked.

“No time,” I said. “If somebody’s on the other end of that transmitter they’ll figure I’m entitled to maybe ten minutes here, nothing more.”

“Put the dog in,” Duffy said.

A guy I hadn’t met opened up the rear of the DEA van and came out with a beagle on a leash. It was a little fat low-slung thing wearing a working-dog harness. It had long ears and an eager expression. I like dogs. Sometimes I think about getting one. It could keep me company. This one ignored me completely. It just let its handler lead it over to the blue truck and then it waited to be told what to do. The guy lifted it up into the load space and put it down on the staircase of rugs. He clicked his fingers and spoke some kind of a command and took the leash off. The dog scampered up and down and side to side. Its legs were short and it had a problem making it up and down between the different levels. But it covered every inch and then came back to where it had started and stood there with its eyes bright and its tail wagging and its mouth open in an absurd wet smile like it was saying so where’s the action?

“Nothing,” its handler said.

“Legit load,” Eliot said.

Duffy nodded. “But why is it coming back north? Nobody exports rugs back to Odessa. Why would they?”

“It was a test,” I said. “For me. They figured maybe I’d look, maybe I wouldn’t.”

“Fix the seal,” Duffy said.

The new guy hauled his beagle out and Eliot stretched up tall and pulled the door down. The old guy picked up his soldering iron and Duffy pulled me away again.

“Decision?” she said.

“What would you do?”

“Abort,” she said. “The Lincoln is the wild card. It could kill you.”

I looked over her shoulder and watched the old guy at work. He was already thinning the solder join.

“They bought the story,” I said. “Impossible not to. It was a great story.”

“They might have looked at the Lincoln.”

“I can’t see why they would have wanted to.”

The old guy was finishing up. He was bending down, ready to blow on the join, ready to turn the wire dull gray. Duffy put her hand on my arm.

“Why was Beck talking about the Uzis?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“All done,” the old guy called.

“Decision?” Duffy said.

I thought about Quinn. Thought about the way his gaze had traveled across my face, not fast, not slow. Thought about the .22 scars, like two extra eyes up there on the left of his forehead.

“I’m going back,” I said. “I think it’s safe enough. They’d have gone for me this morning if they had any doubts.”

Duffy said nothing. She didn’t argue. She just took her hand off my arm and let me go.

CHAPTER 5

She let me go, but she didn’t ask for her gun back. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe she wanted me to have it. I put it in the back of my waistband. It felt better there than the big Colt had. I hid the spare magazines in my socks. Then I hit the road and was back in the lot near the Portland docks exactly ten hours after I left it. There was nobody waiting there to meet me. No black Cadillac. I drove right in and parked. Dropped the key in the door pocket and slid out. I was tired and slightly deaf after five hundred highway miles.

It was six o’clock in the evening and the sun was way down behind the city on my left. The air was cold and dampness was blowing in from the sea. I buttoned my coat and stood still for a minute in case I was being watched. Then I wandered off. I tried to look aimless. But I headed generally north and took a good look at the buildings ahead of me. The lot was bordered by low offices. They looked like trailers without the wheels. They had been cheaply built and badly maintained. They had small untidy parking lots. The lots were full of mid-range cars. The whole place looked busy and down-to-earth. Real-world commerce happened there. That was clear. No fancy headquarters, no marble, no sculpture, just a bunch of ordinary people working hard for their money behind unwashed windows lined with broken venetian blinds.

Some of the offices were bumped-out additions built onto the sides of small warehouses. The warehouses were modern prefabricated metal structures. They had concrete loading platforms built up to waist height. They had narrow lots defined by thick concrete posts. The posts had every shade of automotive paint known to man scraped on them.

I found Beck’s black Cadillac after about five minutes. It was parked on a rectangle of cracked blacktop at an angle against the side of a warehouse, near an office door. The door looked like it belonged on a house in the suburbs. It was a colonial design made from hardwood. It had never been painted and it was gray and grainy from the salt air. It had a faded sign screwed to it: Bizarre Bazaar. The script was handpainted and looked like something from Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. Like it should have been promoting a concert at the Fillmore West, like Bizarre Bazaar was a one-hit wonder opening for Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.

I heard a car approaching and backed off behind the adjacent building and waited. It was a big car, coming slowly. I could hear fat soft tires dropping into wet potholes. It was a Lincoln Town Car, shiny black, identical to the one we had trashed outside the college gate. The two of them had probably come off the line together, nose to tail. It drove slowly past Beck’s Cadillac and rounded the corner and parked in back of the warehouse. A guy I hadn’t seen before got out of the driver’s seat. He stretched and yawned like maybe he had just driven five hundred highway miles, too. He was medium height and heavy with close-cropped black hair. Lean face, bad skin. He was scowling, like he was frustrated. He looked dangerous. But junior, somehow. Like he was low down on the totem pole. And like he might be all the more dangerous because of it. He leaned back into the car and came out again carrying a portable radio scanner. It had a long chrome antenna and a mesh-covered speaker that would whine and squawk whenever an appropriate transmitter was within a mile or two of it.

He walked around the corner and pushed in through the unpainted door. I stayed where I was. Reviewed the whole of the last ten hours in my head. As far as radio surveillance went I had stopped three times. Each stop had been short enough to be plausible. Visual surveillance would be a different matter entirely. But I was pretty sure there had been no black Lincoln in my line of sight at any point. I tended to agree with Duffy. The guy and his scanner had been on Route One.

I stood still for a minute. Then I came out into plain sight and walked to the door. Pushed it open. There was an immediate right-angle turn to the left. It led to a small open area filled with desks and file cabinets. There were no people in it. None of the desks was occupied. But they had been until very recently. That was clear. They were part of a working office. There were three of them and they were covered with the kind of stuff people leave behind at the end of the day. Half-finished paperwork, rinsed coffee cups, notes to themselves, souvenir mugs filled with pencils, packs of tissues. There were electric heaters on the walls and the air was very warm and it smelled faintly of perfume.

At the back of the open area was a closed door with low voices behind it. I recognized Beck’s, and Duke’s. They were talking with a third man, who I guessed was the guy with the tracking equipment. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Couldn’t make out the tone. There was some urgency there. Some debate. No raised voices, but they weren’t discussing the company picnic.

I looked at the stuff on the desks and the walls. There were two maps pinned up on boards. One showed the whole world. The Black Sea was more or less in the exact center. Odessa was nestling there to the left of the Crimean Peninsula. There was nothing marked on the paper but I could trace the route a little tramp steamer would take, through the Bosphorus, through the Aegean Sea, through the Mediterranean, out past Gibraltar, and then full steam across the Atlantic to Portland, Maine. A two-week voyage, probably. Maybe three. Most ships are pretty slow.

The other map showed the United States. Portland itself was obliterated by a worn and greasy stain. I guessed people had put their fingertips on it to span their hands and calculate time and distance. A small person’s hand fully extended might represent a day’s driving. In which case Portland wasn’t the best location for a distribution center. It was a long way from everywhere else.

The papers on the desks were incomprehensible to me. At best I could just about interpret details about dates and loads. I saw some prices listed. Some were high, some were low. Opposite the prices were codes for something. They could have been for rugs. They could have been for something else. But on the surface the whole place looked exactly like an innocent shipping office. I wondered if Teresa Daniel had worked in it.

I listened to the voices some more. Now I was hearing anger and worry. I backed out to the corridor. Took the Glock out of my waistband and put it in my pocket with my finger inside the trigger guard. A Glock doesn’t have a safety catch. It has a sort of trigger on the trigger. It’s a tiny bar that latches back as you squeeze. I put a little pressure on it. Felt it give. I wanted to be ready. I figured I would shoot Duke first. Then the guy with the radio. Then Beck. Beck was probably the slowest and you always leave the slowest for last.

I put my other hand in my pocket, too. A guy with one hand in his pocket looks armed and dangerous. A guy with both hands in his pockets looks relaxed and lazy. No threat. I took a breath and walked back into the room, noisily.

“Hello?” I called.

The back office door opened up fast. The three of them crowded together to look out. Beck, Duke, the new guy. No guns.

“How did you get in here?” Duke asked. He looked tired.

“Door was open,” I said.

“How did you know which door?” Beck asked.

I kept my hands in my pockets. I couldn’t say I had seen the painted sign, because it was Duffy who had told me the name of his operation, not him.

“Your car’s parked outside,” I said.

He nodded.

“OK,” he said.

He didn’t ask about my day. The new guy with the scanner must have described it already. Now he was just standing there, looking straight at me. He was younger than Beck. Younger than Duke. Younger than me. He was maybe thirty-five. He still looked dangerous. He had flat cheekbones and dull eyes. He was like a hundred bad guys I had busted in the army.

“Enjoy the drive?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“I saw you bring the scanner in,” I said. “I found the first bug. Under the seat.”

“Why did you look?” he asked.

“Habit,” I said. “Where was the second?”

“In the back,” he said. “You didn’t stop for lunch.”

“No money,” I said. “Nobody gave me any yet.”

The guy didn’t smile.

“Welcome to Maine,” he said. “Nobody gives you money here. You earn it.”

“OK,” I said.

“I’m Angel Doll,” he said, like he was expecting his name to impress me. But it didn’t.

“I’m Jack Reacher,” I said.

“The cop-killer,” he said, with something in his voice.

He looked at me for a long moment and then looked away. I couldn’t figure out where he fit in. Beck was the boss and Duke was his head of security but this junior guy seemed very relaxed about talking right over their heads.

“We’re in a meeting,” Beck said. “You can wait out by the car.”

He ushered the other two back inside the room and shut the door on me. That in itself told me there was nothing worth hunting for in the secretarial area. So I wandered outside and took a good look at the security system on my way. It was fairly rudimentary, but effective. There were contact pads on the door and all the windows. They were small rectangular things. They had wires the size and color of spaghetti tacked all along the baseboards. The wires came together in a metal box mounted on the wall next to a crowded notice board. The notice board was full of yellowed paper. There was all kinds of stuff about employee insurance and fire extinguishers and evacuation points. The alarm box had a keypad and two small lights. There was a red one labeled armed and a green one labeled unarmed. There were no separate zones. No motion sensors. It was crude perimeter defense only.

I didn’t wait by the car. I walked around a little, until I had gotten a feel for the place. The whole area was a warren of similar operations. There was a convoluted access road for trucks. I guessed it would operate as a one-way system. Containers would be hauled down from the piers to the north and unloaded into the warehouses. Then delivery trucks would be loaded in turn and take off south. Beck’s warehouse itself wasn’t very private. It was right in the middle of a row of five. But it didn’t have an outside loading dock. No waist-high platform. It had a roller door instead. It was temporarily blocked by Angel Doll’s Lincoln, but it was big enough to drive a truck through. Secrecy could be achieved.

There was no overall external security. It wasn’t like a naval dockyard. There was no wire fencing. No gate, no barriers, no guards in booths. It was just a big messy hundred-acre area full of random buildings and puddles and dark corners. I guessed there would be some kind of activity all around the clock. How much, I didn’t know. But probably enough to mask some clandestine comings and goings.

I was back at the Cadillac and leaning on the fender when the three of them came out. Beck and Duke came first and Doll hung back in the doorway. I still had my hands in my pockets. I was still ready to go for Duke first. But there was no overt aggression in the way anybody was moving. No wariness. Beck and Duke just walked over toward the car. They looked tired and preoccupied. Doll stayed where he was in the doorway, like he owned the place.

“Let’s go,” Beck said.

“No, wait,” Doll called. “I need to talk to Reacher first.”

Beck stopped walking. Didn’t turn around.

“Five minutes,” Doll said. “That’s all. Then I’ll lock up for you.”

Beck didn’t say anything. Neither did Duke. They looked irritated, but they weren’t going to object. I kept my hands in my pockets and walked back. Doll turned and led me through the secretarial pen and into the back office. Through another door and into a glass-walled cubicle inside the warehouse itself. I could see a forklift on the warehouse floor and steel racks loaded with rugs. The racks were easily twenty feet high and the rugs were all tightly rolled and tied with string. The cubicle had a personnel door to the outside and a metal desk with a computer on it. The desk chair was worn out. Dirty yellow foam showed through at every seam. Doll sat down on it and looked up at me and moved his mouth into the approximate shape of a smile. I stood sideways at the end of the desk and looked down on him.

“What?” I said.

“See this computer?” he said. “It’s got taps into every Department of Motor Vehicles in the country.”

“So?”

“So I can check license plates.”

I said nothing. He took a handgun out of his pocket. A neat move, fast and fluid. But then, it was a good pocket gun. It was a Soviet-era PSM, which is a small automatic pistol built as smooth and slim as possible, so it won’t snag on clothing. It uses weird Russian ammunition, which is hard to get. It has a safety catch at the rear of the slide. Doll’s was in the forward position. I couldn’t remember whether that represented safe or fire.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I want to confirm something with you,” he said. “Before I go public with it and move myself up a rung or two.”

There was silence.

“How would you do that?” I asked.

“By telling them an extra little thing they don’t know about yet,” he said. “Maybe I’ll even earn myself a nice big bonus. Like, maybe I’ll get the five grand they earmarked for you.”

I pressed the Glock’s trigger lock in my pocket. Glanced to my left. I could see all the way through to the back office window. Beck and Duke were standing by the Cadillac. They had their backs to me. They were forty feet away. Too close.

“I dumped the Maxima for you,” Doll said.

“Where?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. Then he smiled again.

“What?” I said again.

“You stole it, right? At random, from a shopping mall.”

“So?”

“It had Massachusetts plates,” he said. “They were phony. No such number has ever been issued.”

Mistakes, coming back to haunt me. I said nothing.

“So I checked the VIN,” he said. “The vehicle identification number. All cars have them. On a little metal plate, top of the dash.”

“I know,” I said.

“It came back as a Maxima,” he said. “So far, so good. But it was registered in New York. To a bad boy who was arrested five weeks ago. By the government.”

I said nothing.

“You want to explain all that?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Maybe they’ll let me waste you myself,” he said. “I might enjoy that.”

“You think?”

“I’ve wasted people before,” he said, like he had something to prove.

“How many?” I said.

“Enough.”

I glanced through the back office window. Let go of the Glock and took my hands out of my pockets, empty.

“The New York DMV list must be out-of-date,” I said. “It was an old car. Could have been sold out of state a year ago. You check the authentication code?”

“Where?”

“Top of the screen, on the right. It needs to have the right numbers in it to be up-to-date. I was a military cop. I’ve been in the New York DMV system more times than you have.”

“I hate MPs,” he said.

I watched his gun.

“I don’t care who you hate,” I said. “I’m just telling you I know how those systems work. And that I’ve made the same mistake. More than once.”

He was quiet for a beat.

“That’s bullshit,” he said.

Now I smiled.

“So go ahead,” I said. “Embarrass yourself. No skin off my nose.”

He sat still for a long moment. Then he swapped the gun from his right hand to his left and got busy with the mouse. He tried to keep one eye on me while he clicked and scrolled. I moved a little, like I was interested in the screen. The New York DMV search page came up. I moved a little more, around behind his shoulder. He entered what must have been the Maxima’s original plate number, apparently from memory. He hit search now. The screen redrew. I moved again, like I was all set to prove him wrong.

“Where?” he asked.

“Right there,” I said, and started to point at the monitor. But I was pointing with both hands and all ten fingers and they didn’t make it to the screen. My right hand stopped at his neck. My left took the gun out of his left. It dropped on the floor and sounded exactly like a pound of steel hitting a plywood board covered with linoleum. I kept my eyes on the office window. Beck and Duke still had their backs to me. I got both hands around Doll’s neck and squeezed. He thrashed around wildly. Fought back. I shifted my grip. The chair fell over under him. I squeezed harder. Watched the window. Beck and Duke were just standing there. Their backs to me. Their breath was misting in front of them. Doll started clawing at my wrists. I squeezed harder still. His tongue came out of his mouth. Then he did the smart thing and gave up on my wrists and reached up behind him and went for my eyes. I pulled my head back and hooked one hand under his jaw and put the other flat against the side of his head. Wrenched his jaw hard to the right and smashed his head downward to the left and broke his neck.

I stood the chair upright again and pushed it in neatly behind the desk. Picked up his gun and ejected the magazine. It was full. Eight bottle-necked 5.45 millimeter Soviet Pistol shells. They’re roughly the same size as a .22, and they’re slow, but they’re supposed to hit pretty hard. Soviet security forces were supposed to be happy enough with them. I checked the chamber. There was a round in it. I checked the action. It had been set to fire. I reassembled the whole thing and left it cocked and locked. Put it in my left-hand pocket.

Then I went through his clothes. He had all the usual stuff. A wallet, a cell phone, a money clip without much money in it, a big bunch of keys. I left it all there. Opened the rear personnel door to the outside and checked the view. Beck and Duke were now hidden from me by the corner of the building. I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. There was nobody else around. I walked over to Doll’s Lincoln and opened the driver’s door. Found the trunk release. The latch popped quietly and the lid rose an inch. I went back inside and dragged the body out by the collar. Opened the trunk all the way and heaved it inside. Latched the lid down gently and closed the driver’s door. Glanced at my watch. The five minutes were up. I would have to finish the garbage disposal later. I walked back through the glass cubicle, through the back office, through the secretarial pen, through the front door, and outside. Beck and Duke heard me and turned around. Beck looked cold and annoyed by the delay. I thought: so why stand still for it? Duke was shivering a little and his eyes were watering and he was yawning. He looked exactly like a guy who hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours. I thought: I see a triple benefit in that.

“I’ll drive,” I said. “If you want.”

He hesitated. Said nothing.

“You know I can drive,” I said. “You just had me driving all day. I did what you wanted. Doll told you all about it.”

He said nothing.

“Was it another test?” I asked.

“You found the bug,” he said.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“You might have acted different if you hadn’t found the bug.”

“Why would I? I just wanted to get back here, fast and safe. I was exposed, ten straight hours. It was no fun for me. I’ve got more to lose than you, whatever you’re into.”

He said nothing to that.

“Your call,” I said, like I didn’t care.

He hesitated a fraction more and then exhaled and handed me the keys. That was the first benefit. There’s something symbolic about handing over a set of keys. It’s about trust and inclusion. It moved me closer to the center of their circle. Made me less of an outsider. And it was a big bunch of keys. There were house keys and office keys as well as the car keys. Maybe a dozen keys in total. A lot of metal. A big symbol. Beck watched the whole transaction and made no comment about it. Just turned away and settled himself in the back of the car. Duke dumped himself in the passenger seat. I got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. Arranged my coat around me so that both of the guns in my pockets were resting in my lap. I was ready to pull them out and use them if a cell phone rang. It was a fifty-fifty chance that the next call these guys got would be because someone had found Doll’s body. Therefore the next call these guys got would also be their last. I was happy with odds of six hundred or six thousand to one, but fifty-fifty was a little too rich for me.

But no phones rang the whole way home. I drove smoothly and gently and found all the right roads. I turned east toward the Atlantic. It was already full dark out there. I came up on the palm-shaped promontory and drove out onto the rock finger and aimed straight for the house. The lights were blazing all along the top of the wall. The razor wire glittered. Paulie was waiting to open the gate. He glared at me as I drove past. I ignored him and hustled up the driveway and stopped on the carriage circle right next to the door. Beck got straight out. Duke shook himself awake and followed him.

“Where do I put the car?” I asked.

“In the garage, asshole,” he said. “Around the side.”

That was the second benefit. I was going to get five minutes alone.

I looped all the way around the carriage circle again and headed down the south side of the house. The garage block stood on its own inside a small walled courtyard. It had probably been a stable back when the house was built. It had granite cobblestones in front of it and a vented cupola on the roof to let the smell out. The horse stalls had been knocked together to make four garages. The hayloft had been converted into an apartment. I guessed the quiet mechanic lived up there.

The garage on the left-hand end had its door open and was standing empty. I drove the Cadillac inside and killed the motor. It was gloomy in there. There were shelves filled with the kind of junk that piles up in a garage. There were oil cans and buckets and old bottles of wax polish. There was an electric tire compressor and a pile of used rags. I put the keys in my pocket and slid out of the seat. Listened for the sound of a phone in the house. Nothing. I strolled over and checked the rags. Picked up a thing the size of a hand towel. It was dark with grime and dirt and oil. I used it to wipe an imaginary spot off the Cadillac’s front fender. Glanced around. Nobody there. I wrapped Doll’s PSM and Duffy’s Glock and her two spare magazines in the rag. Put the whole bundle under my coat. It might have been possible to get the guns into the house. Maybe. I could have gone in the back door and let the metal detector beep and looked puzzled for a second and then pulled out the big bunch of keys. I could have held them up like they explained everything. A classic piece of misdirection. It might have worked. Maybe. It would depend on their level of suspicion. But whatever, getting the guns out of the house again would have been very difficult. Assuming there were no panic phone calls anytime soon the chances were I would be leaving with Beck or Duke or both in the normal way and there was no guarantee I would have the keys again. So I had a choice. Take a chance, or play it safe? My decision was to play it safe and keep the firepower outside.

I walked out of the garage courtyard and wandered around toward the back of the house. Stopped at the corner of the courtyard wall. Stood still for a second and then turned ninety degrees and followed the wall out toward the rocks like I wanted to take a look at the ocean. It was still calm. There was a long oily swell coming in from the southeast. The water looked black and infinitely deep. I gazed at it for a moment and then ducked down and put the wrapped guns in a little dip tight against the wall. There were scrawny weeds growing there. Somebody would have to trip over them to find them.

I strolled back, hunched into my coat, trying to look like a reflective guy getting a couple of minutes’ peace. It was quiet. The shore birds were gone. It was too dark for them. They would be safe in their roosts. I turned around and headed for the back door. Went in through the porch and into the kitchen. The metal detector beeped. Duke and the mechanic guy and the cook all turned to look at me. I paused a beat and pulled out the keys. Held them up. They looked away. I walked in and dropped the keys on the table in front of Duke. He left them there.

The third benefit of Duke’s exhaustion unfolded steadily all the way through dinner. He could barely stay awake. He didn’t say a word. The kitchen was warm and steamy and we ate the kind of food that would put anybody to sleep. We had thick soup and steak and potatoes. There was a lot of it. The plates were piled high. The cook was working like a production line. There was a spare plate with a whole portion of everything just sitting untouched on a counter. Maybe somebody was in the habit of eating twice.

I ate fast and kept my ears open for the phone. I figured I could grab the car keys and be outside before the first ring finished. Inside the Cadillac before the second. Halfway down the drive before the third. I could smash through the gate. I could run Paulie over. But the phone didn’t ring. There was no sound in the house at all, except people chewing. There was no coffee. I was on the point of taking that personally. I like coffee. I drank water instead. It came from the faucet over the sink and tasted like chlorine. The maid came in from the family dining room before I finished my second glass. She walked over to where I was sitting, awkward in her unfashionable shoes. She was shy. She looked Irish, like she had just come all the way from Connemara to Boston and couldn’t find a job down there.

“Mr. Beck wants to see you,” she said.

It was only the second time I had heard her speak. She sounded a little Irish, too. Her cardigan was wrapped tight around her.

“Now?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said.

He was waiting for me in the square room with the oak dining table where I had played Russian roulette for him.

“The Toyota was from Hartford, Connecticut,” he said. “Angel Doll traced the plate this morning.”

“No front plates in Connecticut,” I said, because I had to say something.

“We know the owners,” he said.

There was silence. I stared straight at him. It took me a fraction of a second just to understand him.

“How do you know them?” I asked.

“We have a business relationship.”

“In the rug trade?”

“The nature of the relationship needn’t concern you.”

“Who are they?”

“That needn’t concern you either,” he said.

I said nothing.

“But there’s a problem,” he said. “The people you described aren’t the people who own the truck.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “You described them as tall and fair. The guys who own the truck are Spanish. Small and dark.”

“So who were the guys I saw?” I asked, because I had to ask something.

“Two possibilities,” he said. “One, maybe somebody stole their truck.”

“Or?”

“Two, maybe they expanded their personnel.”

“Either one is possible,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not the first. I called them. There was no answer. So I asked around. They’ve disappeared. No reason why they should disappear just because someone stole their truck.”

“So they expanded their roster.”

He nodded. “And decided to bite the hand that feeds them.”

I said nothing.

“Are you certain they used Uzis?” he asked.

“That’s what I saw,” I said.

“Not MP5Ks?”

“No,” I said. I looked away. No comparison. Not even close. The MP5K is a short Heckler & Koch submachine gun designed early in the 1970s. It has two big fat handles molded from expensive plastic. It looks very futuristic. Like a movie prop. Next to it an Uzi looks like something hammered together by a blind man in his basement.

“No question,” I said.

“No possibility the kidnap was random?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Million to one.”

He nodded again.

“So they’ve declared war,” he said. “And they’ve gone to ground. They’re hiding out somewhere.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I have no idea.”

There was silence. No sound from the sea. The swells came and went inaudibly.

“Are you going to try to find them?” I asked.

“You bet your ass,” Beck said.

Duke was waiting for me in the kitchen. He was angry and impatient. He wanted to take me upstairs and get me locked down for the night. I didn’t protest. A locked door with no inside keyhole is a very good alibi.

“Tomorrow, six-thirty,” he said. “Back on duty.”

I listened hard and heard the lock click and waited for his footsteps to recede. Then I got busy with my shoe. There was a message waiting. It was from Duffy: back OK? I hit reply and typed: Bring a car one mile short of the house. Leave it there with key on seat. Quiet approach, no lights.

I hit send. There was a short delay. I guessed she was using a laptop. She would be waiting in her motel room with it plugged in and switched on. It would go: Bing! You’ve Got Mail!

She came back with: Why? When?

I sent: Don’t ask. Midnight.

There was a long delay. Then she sent: OK.

I sent: Retrieve it six am, stealthy.

She replied: OK.

I sent: Beck knows the Toyota owners.

Ninety painful seconds later she came back with: How?

I sent: quote business relationship unquote.

She asked: Specifics?

I sent: Not given.

She replied with one simple word: Shit.

I waited. She sent nothing more. She was probably conferring with Eliot. I could picture them, talking fast, not looking at each other, trying to decide. I sent a question: How many did you arrest in Hartford? She came back with: All of them, i.e. three. I asked: Are they talking? She replied: Not talking at all. I asked: Lawyers? She came back with: No lawyers.

It was a very ponderous way to have a conversation. But it gave me plenty of time to think. Lawyers would have been fatal. Beck could have gotten to their lawyers, easily. Sooner or later it would have occurred to him to check if his buddies had been arrested.

I sent: Can you keep them incommunicado?

She sent: Yes, two or three days.

I sent: Do it.

There was a long pause. Then she came back with: What is Beck thinking?

I sent: That they’ve declared war and gone to ground.

She asked: What are you going to do?

I sent: Not sure.

She sent: Will leave car, advise use it to pull out.

I replied: Maybe.

There was another long pause. Then she sent: Turn unit off, save battery. I smiled to myself. Duffy was a very practical woman.

I lay fully dressed on the bed for three hours, listening for a phone. I didn’t hear one. I got up just before midnight and rolled the Oriental rug back and lay down on the floor with my head against the oak boards and listened. It’s the best way to pick up the small sounds inside a building. I could hear the heating system running. I could hear the wind around the house. It was moaning softly. The ocean itself was quiet. The house was still. It was a solid stone structure. No creaking, no cracking. No human activity. No talking, no movement. I guessed Duke was sleeping the sleep of the dead. That was the third benefit of his exhaustion. He was the only one I was worried about. He was the only professional.

I laced my shoes tight and took off my jacket. I was still dressed in the black denim the maid had supplied. I slid the window all the way up and sat on the sill, facing the room. I stared at the door. Twisted around and looked outside. There was a slim sliver of moon. Some starlight. A little wind. Ragged silver clouds. The air was cold and salty. The ocean was moving slow and steady.

I swung my legs out into the night and shuffled sideways. Then I rolled over onto my stomach and scrabbled with my toes until I found a fold in the stone carving where an accent line had been set into the facade. I got my feet set and held the sill with both hands and craned my body outward. Used one hand to pull the window down to within two inches of closed. Eased sideways and felt for a drainpipe running down from the roof gutter. I found one about a yard away. It was a fat cast-iron pipe maybe six inches in diameter. I got my right palm flat on it. It felt solid. But it felt distant. I’m not an agile person. Put me in the Olympics and I’d be a wrestler or a boxer or a weight-lifter. Not a gymnast.

I brought my right hand back and shuffled sideways with my toes until I was as far to the right as I could get. I jumped my left hand along the sill until it was tight in the corner of the window frame. Stretched out with my right. Got it hooked around the far side of the pipe. The iron was painted and it felt cold and a little slick with night dew. I put my thumb in front and my fingers behind. Tested my grip. Craned out a little more. I was spread-eagled on the wall. I equalized the pressure between my hands and pulled inward. Kicked my feet off the ledge and jumped them sideways, one each side of the pipe. Pulled inward again and let go of the sill and brought my left hand over to join my right. Now I had the pipe in both hands. My grip held. My feet were flat on the wall. My ass was sticking right out, fifty feet above the rocks. The wind caught my hair. It was cold.

A boxer, not a gymnast. I could hold on there all night. No problem with that. But I wasn’t certain how to move myself down. I tensed my arms and pulled myself in toward the wall. Slid my hands downward as I did so, six inches. Slid my feet down a matching distance. Let my weight fall backward. That seemed to work. I did it again. I bounced down, six inches at a time. Wiped each palm in turn to fight the dew. I was sweating, even though it was cold. My right hand hurt from my bout with Paulie. I was still forty-five feet above the ground. I inched downward. Got myself level with the second floor. It was slow progress, but it was safe. Except that I was putting two hundred and fifty pounds of shock into an old iron pipe every few seconds. The pipe was probably a hundred years old. And iron rusts and rots.

It moved a little. I felt it shudder and shake and shiver. And it was slippery. I had to lock my fingers behind it to make sure my grip would hold. My knuckles were scraping on the stone. I bounced down, six inches at a time. I developed a rhythm. I would pull close, then fall back and slide my hands down and try to cushion the shock by easing my arms out straight. I let my shoulders take the impact. Then I would be bent at the waist at a tighter angle than before so I would move my feet down six inches and start again. I made it down to the first-floor windows. The pipe felt stronger there. Maybe it was anchored in a concrete base. I bounced down, faster. Made it all the way to the ground. Felt the solid rock under my feet and breathed out in relief and stepped away from the wall. Wiped my hands on my pants and stood still and listened. It felt good to be out of the house. The air was like velvet. I heard nothing. There were no lights in the windows. I felt the sting of cold on my teeth and realized I was smiling. I glanced up at the hunter’s moon. Shook myself and walked quietly away to reclaim the guns.

They were still there in the rag in the dip behind the weed stalks. I left Doll’s PSM where it was. I preferred the Glock. I unwrapped it and checked it carefully, out of habit. Seventeen bullets in the gun, seventeen in each of the spare magazines. Fifty-one nine-millimeter Parabellums. If I fired one, I’d probably have to fire them all. By which time somebody would have won and somebody would have lost. I put the magazines in my pockets and the gun itself in my waistband and tracked all the way around the far side of the garage block for a preliminary distant look at the wall. It was still all lit up. The lights blazed harsh and blue and angry, like a stadium. The lodge was bathed in the glow. The razor wire glittered. The light was a solid bar, thirty yards deep, bright as day, with absolute darkness beyond. The gate stood closed and chained. The whole thing looked like the outer perimeter of a nineteenth-century prison. Or an asylum.

I gazed at it until I had figured out how to get past it and then I headed around inside the cobbled courtyard. The apartment above the garages was dark and quiet. The garage doors were all closed, but none of them had locks. They were big old-fashioned timber things. They had been installed way back before anybody had thought of stealing cars. Four sets of doors, four garages. The left-hand one held the Cadillac. I had already been in there. So I checked the others, slow and quiet. The second had yet another Lincoln Town Car in it, black, the same as Angel Doll’s, the same as the one the bodyguards had used. It was waxed and shiny and its doors were locked.

The third garage was completely empty. Nothing in it at all. It was clean and swept. I could see broom tracks in the dusty oil patches on the floor. There were a few carpet fibers here and there. Whoever had swept up had missed them. They were short and stiff. I couldn’t make out the color in the darkness. They looked gray. They looked like they had been pulled out of a rug’s burlap backing. They meant nothing to me. So I moved on.

I found what I wanted in the fourth garage. I opened the doors wide and let in just about enough moonlight to see by. The dusty old Saab the maid had used for her marketing was in there, parked head-in close to a workbench. There was a grimy window behind the bench. Gray moonlight on the ocean outside. The bench had a vise screwed to it and was covered in tools. The tools were old. Their handles were wood that had darkened with age and oil. I found a bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. The handle was bulbous, turned from oak. The spike was maybe two inches long. I put it into the vise, maybe a quarter-inch deep. Tightened the vise hard. Pulled on the handle and bent the spike into a neat right angle. Loosened the vise and checked my work and put it away in my shirt pocket.

Then I found a chisel. It was a woodworking item. It had a half-inch blade and a nice ash handle. It was probably seventy years old. I hunted around and found a carborundum whetstone and a rusty can of sharpening fluid. Dabbed some fluid on the stone and spread it with the tip of the chisel. Worked the steel back and forth until it showed bright. One of the many high schools I went to was an old-fashioned place in Guam where shop was graded by how well you did with the scut work, like sharpening tools. We all scored high. It was the kind of accomplishment we were interested in. That class had the best knives I ever saw. I turned the chisel over and did the other face. I got the edge square and true. It looked like high-grade Pittsburgh steel. I wiped it on my pants. Didn’t test the edge on my thumb. I didn’t particularly want to bleed. I knew it was razor sharp just by looking at it.

I came out into the courtyard and squatted down in the angle of the walls and loaded my pockets. I had the chisel if things needed to stay quiet, and I had the Glock if it was OK to go noisy. Then I scoped out my priorities. The house first, I decided. There was a strong possibility that I would never get another look at it.

The outer door to the kitchen porch was locked, but the mechanism was crude. It was a token three-lever affair. I put the bent spike of the bradawl in like a key and felt for the tumblers. They were big and obvious. It took me less than a minute to get inside. I stopped again and listened carefully. I didn’t want to walk in on the cook. Maybe she was up late, baking a special pie. Or maybe the Irish girl was in there doing something. But there was only silence. I crossed the porch and knelt down in front of the inner door. Same crude lock. Same short time. I backed off a foot and swung the door open. Smelled the kitchen smells. Listened again. The room was cold and deserted. I put the bradawl on the floor in front of me. Put the chisel next to it. Added the Glock and the spare magazines. I didn’t want to set the metal detector off. In the still of the night it would have sounded like a siren. I slid the bradawl along the floor, tight against the boards. Pushed it right through the doorway and into the kitchen. Did the same with the chisel. Kept it tight against the floor and rolled it all the way inside. Almost all commercial metal detectors have a dead zone right at the bottom. That’s because men’s dress shoes are made with a steel shank in the sole. It gives the shoe flexibility and strength. Metal detectors are designed to ignore shoes. It makes sense, because otherwise they would beep every time a guy with decent footwear passed through.

I slid the Glock through the dead zone and followed it with one magazine at a time. Pushed everything as far inside as I could reach. Then I stood up and walked through the door. Closed it quietly behind me. Picked up all my gear and reloaded my pockets. Debated taking my shoes off. It’s easier to creep around quietly in socks. But if it comes to it, shoes are great weapons. Kick somebody with your shoes on, and you disable them. With your shoes off, you break a toe. And they take time to put back on. If I had to get out fast, I didn’t want to be running around on the rocks barefoot. Or climbing the wall. I decided to keep them on and walk carefully. It was a solidly-built house. Worth the risk. I went to work.

First I searched the kitchen for a flashlight. Didn’t find one. Most houses on the end of a long power line spur have outages from time to time, so most people who live in them keep something handy. But the Becks didn’t seem to. The best I could find was a box of kitchen matches. I put three in my pocket and struck one on the box. Used the flickering light to look for the big bunch of keys I had left on the table. Those keys would have helped me a lot, but they weren’t there. Not on the table, not on some hook near the door, not anywhere. I wasn’t very surprised. It would have been too good to be true to find them.

I blew out the match and found my way in the dark to the head of the basement stairs. Crept all the way down and struck another match with my thumbnail at the bottom. Followed the tangle of wires on the ceiling back to the breaker box. There was a flashlight on a shelf right next to it. Classic dumb place to keep a flashlight. If a breaker pops the box is your destination, not your starting point.

The flashlight was a big black Maglite the length of a nightstick. Six D cells inside. We used to use them in the army. They were guaranteed unbreakable, but we found that depended on what you hit with them, and how hard. I lit it up and blew out the match. Spat on the burned stub and put it in my pocket. Used the flashlight to check the breaker box. It had a gray metal door with twenty circuit breakers inside. None of them was labeled gatehouse. It must have been separately supplied, which made sense. No point in running power all the way to the main house and then running some of it all the way back to the lodge. Better to give the lodge its own tap on the incoming power line. I wasn’t surprised, but I was vaguely disappointed. It would have been sweet to be able to turn the wall lights off. I shrugged and closed the box and turned around and went to look at the two locked doors I had found that morning.

They weren’t locked anymore. First thing you always do before attacking a lock is to check it’s not already open. Nothing makes you feel stupider than picking a lock that isn’t locked. These weren’t. Both doors opened easily with a turn of the handle.

The first room was completely empty. It was more or less a perfect cube, maybe eight feet on a side. I played the flashlight beam all over it. It had rock walls and a cement floor. No windows. It looked like a storeroom. It was immaculately clean and there was nothing in it. Nothing at all. No carpet fibers. Not even trash or dirt. It had been swept and vacuumed, probably earlier that day. It was a little dank and damp. Exactly how you would expect a stone cellar to feel. I could smell the distinctive dusty smell of a vacuum cleaner bag. And there was a trace of something else in the air. A faint, tantalizing odor right at the edge of imperceptibility. It was vaguely familiar. Rich, and papery. Something I should know. I stepped right inside the room and shut off the flashlight. Closed my eyes and stood in the absolute blackness and concentrated. The smell disappeared. It was like my movements had disturbed the air molecules and the one part in a billion I was interested in had diffused itself into the clammy background of underground granite. I tried hard, but I couldn’t get it. So I gave it up. It was like memory. To chase it meant to lose it. And I didn’t have time to waste.

I switched the flashlight back on and came out into the basement corridor and closed the door quietly behind me. Stood still and listened. I could hear the furnace. Nothing else. I tried the next room. It was empty, too. But only in the sense that it was currently unoccupied. It had stuff in it. It was a bedroom.

It was a little larger than the storeroom. It was maybe twelve-by-ten. The flashlight beam showed me rock walls, a cement floor, no windows. There was a thin mattress on the floor. It had wrinkled sheets and an old blanket strewn across it. No pillows. It was cold in the room. I could smell stale food, stale perfume, sleep, and sweat, and fear.

I searched the whole room carefully. It was dirty. But I found nothing of significance until I pulled the mattress aside. Under it, scratched into the cement of the floor, was a single word: justice. It was written all in spidery capital letters. They were uneven and chalky. But they were clear. And emphatic. And underneath the letters were numbers. Six of them, in three groups of two. Month, day, year. Yesterday’s date. The letters and the numbers were scratched deeper and wider than marks made with a pin or a nail or the tip of a scissor. I guessed they had been made with the tine of a fork. I put the mattress back in position and took a look at the door. It was solid oak. It was thick and heavy. It had no inside keyhole. Not a bedroom. A prison cell.

I stepped outside and closed the door and stood still again and listened hard. Nothing. I spent fifteen minutes on the rest of the basement and found nothing at all, not that I expected to. I wouldn’t have been left to run around there that morning if there was anything for a person to find. So I killed the flashlight and crept back up the stairs in the dark. Went back to the kitchen and searched it until I found a big black trash can liner. Then I wanted a towel. Best thing I could find was a worn linen square designed to dry dishes with. I folded both items neatly and jammed them in my pockets. Then I came back out into the hallway and went to look at the parts of the house I hadn’t seen before.

There were a lot to choose from. The whole place was a warren. I started at the front, where I had first come in the day before. The big oak door was closed tight. I gave it a wide berth, because I didn’t know how sensitive the metal detector was. Some of them beep when you’re a foot away. The floors were solid oak planks, covered in rugs. I stepped carefully, but I wasn’t too worried about noise. The rugs and the drapes and the paneling would soak up sound.

I scouted the whole of the ground floor. Only one place caught my attention. On the north side next to the room where I had spent the time with Beck was another locked door. It was opposite the family dining room, across a wide interior hallway. It was the only locked door on the ground floor. Therefore it was the only room that interested me. Its lock was a big brass item from back when things were manufactured with pride and aplomb. It had all kinds of fancy filigree edges where it was screwed into the wood. The screw heads themselves were rubbed smooth by a hundred and fifty years of polishing. It was probably original to the house. Some old artisan up in nineteenth-century Portland had probably fashioned it by hand, in between making boat chandlery. It took me about a second and a half to open.

The room was a den. Not an office, not a study, not a family room. I covered every inch with the flashlight beam. There was no television in there. No desk, no computer. It was just a room, simply furnished in an old-fashioned style. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled across the window. There was a big armchair padded with buttoned red leather. There was a glass-fronted collector’s cabinet. And rugs. They were three-deep on the floor. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o’clock. I had been on the loose for nearly an hour. I stepped into the room and closed the door quietly.

The collector’s cabinet was nearly six feet tall. It had two full-width drawers at the bottom and locked glass doors above them. Behind the glass were five Thompson submachine guns. They were the classic drum-magazine gangster weapons from the 1920s, the pieces you see in old grainy black-and-white photographs of Al Capone’s soldiers. They were displayed alternately facing left and right, resting on custom hardwood pegs that held them exactly level. They were all identical. And they all looked brand new. They looked like they had never been fired. Like they had never even been touched. The armchair was set to face the cabinet. There was nothing else of significance in the room. I sat down in the chair and got to wondering why anybody would want to spend time gazing at five old grease guns.

Then I heard footsteps. A light tread, upstairs, directly over my head. Three paces, four, five. Fast quiet steps. Not just deference to the time of night. A real attempt at concealment. I got up out of the chair. Stood still. Turned the flashlight off and put it in my left hand. Put the chisel in my right. I heard a door close softly. Then there was silence. I listened hard. Focused on every tiny sound. The background rush of the heating system built to a roar in my ears. My breathing was deafening. Nothing from above. Then the footsteps started again.

They were heading for the stairs. I locked myself inside the room. I knelt behind the door and tripped the tumblers, one, two, and listened to the creak of the staircase. It wasn’t Richard coming down. It wasn’t a twenty-year-old. There was a measured caution in the tread. Some kind of stiffness. Somebody getting slower and quieter as they approached the bottom. The sound disappeared altogether in the hallway. I pictured someone standing on the thick rugs, surrounded by the drapes and the paneling, looking around, listening hard. Maybe heading my way. I picked up the flashlight and the chisel again. The Glock was in my waistband. I had no doubt I could fight my way out of the house. No doubt at all. But approaching an alert Paulie over hundreds of yards of open ground and through the stadium lights would be difficult. And a firefight now would bury the mission forever. Quinn would disappear again.

There was no sound from the hallway. No sound at all. Just a crushing silence. Then I heard the front door open. I heard the rattle of a chain and a lock springing back and the click of a latch and the sucking sound of a copper insulating strip releasing its grip on the edge of the door. A second later the door closed again. I felt a tiny shudder in the structure of the house as the heavy oak hit the frame. No beep from the metal detector. Whoever had passed through it wasn’t carrying a weapon. Or even a set of car keys.

I waited. Duke was surely fast asleep. And he wasn’t the trusting type. I guessed he wouldn’t walk around at night without a gun. Neither would Beck. But either one of them might be smart enough just to stand there in the hallway and open and close the door to make me think they had gone out through it. When in fact they hadn’t. When in fact they were still standing right there, gun drawn, staring back into the gloom, waiting for me to show myself.

I sat down sideways in the red leather chair. Took the Glock out of my pants and aimed it left-handed at the door. Soon as they opened it wider than nine millimeters I would fire. Until then, I would wait. I was good at waiting. If they thought they were going to wait me out, they had picked the wrong guy.

But a whole hour later there was still absolute silence out in the hallway. No sound of any kind. No vibrations. There was nobody there. Certainly not Duke. He would have fallen asleep by then and hit the deck. Not Beck, either. He was an amateur. It takes tremendous skill to keep absolutely still and silent for a whole hour. So the door thing hadn’t been a trick. Somebody had gone out unarmed into the night.

I knelt down and used the bradawl on the tumblers again. Lay full-length on the floor and reached up and pulled the door open. A precaution. Anybody waiting for the door to open would have their eyes locked at head height. I would see them before they saw me. But there was nobody waiting. The hallway was empty. I stood upright and locked the door behind me. Walked silently down the basement stairs and put the flashlight back in its place. Felt my way back upstairs. Crept to the kitchen and slid all my hardware along the floor and out the door into the porch. Locked it behind me and crouched down and picked up all my stuff and checked the view out back. Saw nothing except an empty gray world of moonlit rocks and ocean.

I locked the porch door behind me and kept very close to the side of the house. Ducked through deep black shadows and made it back to the courtyard wall. Found the dip in the rock and wrapped the chisel and the bradawl in the rag and left them there. I couldn’t take them with me. They would tear the trash bag. I followed the courtyard wall onward toward the ocean. I aimed to get down on the rocks right behind the garage block, to the south, completely out of sight of the house.

I made it halfway there. Then I froze.

Elizabeth Beck was sitting on the rocks. She was wearing a white bathrobe over a white nightgown. She looked like a ghost, or an angel. She had her elbows on her knees and she was staring into the darkness in the east like a statue.

I kept completely still. I was thirty feet away from her. I was dressed all in black but if she glanced to her left I would show up against the horizon. And sudden movement would give me away. So I just stood there. The ocean swell lapped in and out, quiet and lazy. It was a peaceful sound. Hypnotic motion. She was staring at the water. She must have been cold. There was a slight breeze and I could see it in her hair.

I inched downward like I was trying to melt into the rock. Bent my knees and spread my fingers and eased myself down into a crouch. She moved. Just a quizzical turn of her head, like something had suddenly occurred to her. She looked right at me. Gave no sign of surprise. She stared directly at me for minute after minute. Her long fingers were laced together. Her pale face was lit by moonlight reflected off the lapping water. Her eyes were open, but clearly she wasn’t seeing anything. Or else I was low enough down against the sky that she thought I was a rock or a shadow.

She sat like that for maybe ten more minutes, staring in my direction. She started shivering in the cold. Then she moved her head again, decisively, and looked away from me at the sea to her right. She unlaced her fingers and moved her hands and smoothed her hair back. Turned her face up to the sky. She stood up slowly. She was barefoot. She shuddered, like she was cold, or sad. She held her arms out sideways like a tightrope walker and stepped toward me. The ground was hurting her feet. That was clear. She balanced herself with her arms and tested every step. She came within a yard of me. Went right on by and headed back to the house. I watched her go. The wind caught her robe. Her nightdress flattened against her body. She disappeared behind the courtyard wall. A long moment later I heard the front door open. There was a tiny pause and then a soft clump as it closed. I dropped flat to the ground and rolled onto my back. Stared up at the stars.

I lay like that as long as I dared and then got up and scrambled the final fifty feet to the edge of the sea. Shook out the trash bag and stripped off my clothes and packed them neatly into it. I wrapped the Glock inside my shirt with the spare magazines. Stuffed my socks into my shoes and packed them on top and followed them with the small linen towel. Then I tied the bag tight and held it by the neck. Slipped into the water, dragging it behind me.

The ocean was cold. I had figured it would be. I was on the coast of Maine in April. But this was cold. It was icy. It was jarring and numbing. It took my breath away. Inside a second I was chilled to the bone. Five yards offshore my teeth were chattering and I was going nowhere and the salt stung my eyes.

I kicked onward until I was ten yards out and I could see the wall. It glared with light. I couldn’t get through it. Couldn’t get over it. So I had to go around it. No choice. I reasoned with myself. I had to swim a quarter-mile. I was strong but not fast and I was towing a bag, so it would take me maybe ten minutes. Fifteen, at the absolute maximum. That was all. And nobody dies of exposure in fifteen minutes. Nobody. Not me, anyway. Not tonight.

I fought the cold and the swell and built a kind of sidestroke rhythm. I towed the bag with my left hand for ten leg-kicks. Then I changed to my right and kicked on. There was a slight current. The tide was coming in. It was helping me. But it was freezing me, too. It was coming in all the way from the Grand Banks. It was arctic. My skin was dead and slick. My breath was rasping. My heart was thumping. I started to worry about thermal shock. I thought back to books I had read about the Titanic. The people who didn’t make it into the lifeboats all died within an hour.

But I wasn’t going to be in the water for an hour. And there were no actual icebergs around. And my rhythm was working. I was about level with the wall. The light spill stopped well short of me. I was naked and pale from the winter but I felt invisible. I passed the wall. Halfway there. I kicked onward. Pounded away. Raised my wrist clear of the water and checked the time. I had been swimming for six minutes.

I swam for six more. Trod water and gasped for air and floated the bag ahead of me and looked back. I was well clear of the wall. I changed direction and headed for the shore. Came up through slick mossy rocks onto a gritty beach. Threw the bag up ahead of me and crawled out of the water on my knees. I stayed on all fours for a whole minute, panting and shivering. My teeth were chattering wildly. I untied the bag. Found the towel. Rubbed myself furiously. My arms were blue. My clothes snagged on my skin. I got my shoes on and stowed the Glock. Folded the bag and the towel and put them wet in my pocket. Then I ran, because I needed to get warm.

I ran for nearly ten minutes before I found the car. It was the old guy’s Taurus, gray in the moonlight. It was parked facing away from the house, all set to go, no delay. Duffy was a practical woman, that was for sure. I smiled again. The key was on the seat. I started the motor and eased away slowly. Kept the lights off and didn’t touch the brake until I was off the palm-shaped promontory and around the first curve on the road inland. Then I lit up the headlights and turned up the heater and hit the gas hard.

I was outside the Portland docks fifteen minutes later. I left the Taurus parked on a quiet street a mile short of Beck’s warehouse. Walked the rest of the way. This was the moment of truth. If Doll’s body had been found the place would be in an uproar and I would melt away and never be seen again. If it hadn’t, I would live to fight another day.

The walk took the best part of twenty minutes. I saw nobody. No cops, no ambulances, no police tape, no medical examiners. No unexplained men in Lincoln Town Cars. I circled Beck’s warehouse itself on a wide radius. I glimpsed it through gaps and alleys. The lights were all on in the office windows. But that was the way I had left it. Doll’s car was still there by the roller door. Exactly where I had left it.

I walked away from the building and came back toward it from a new angle, from the blind side where there was no window. I took the Glock out. Held it hidden low down by my leg. Doll’s car faced me. Beyond it on the left was the personnel door into the warehouse cubicle. Beyond that was the back office. I passed the car and the door and dropped to the floor and crawled under the window. Raised my head and looked inside. Nobody there. The secretarial area was empty, too. All quiet. I breathed out and put the gun away. Retraced my steps to Doll’s car. Opened the driver’s door and popped the trunk. He was still in there. He hadn’t gone anywhere. I took his keys out of his pocket. Closed the lid on him again and carried the keys in through the personnel door. Found the right key and locked it behind me.

I was willing to risk fifteen minutes. I spent five in the warehouse cubicle, five in the back office, and five in the secretarial area. I wiped everything I touched with the linen towel, so I wouldn’t leave any prints behind. I found no specific trace of Teresa Daniel. Or of Quinn. But then, there were no names named anywhere. Everything was coded, people and merchandise alike. I came away with only one solid fact. Bizarre Bazaar sold several tens of thousands of individual items every year, to several hundred individual customers, in transactions totaling several tens of millions of dollars. Nothing made clear what the items were or who the customers were. Prices were clustered around three levels: some around fifty bucks, some around a thousand bucks, and some much more than that. There were no shipping records at all. No FedEx, no UPS, no postal service. Clearly distribution was handled privately. But an insurance file I found told me that the corporation owned only two delivery trucks.

I walked back to the warehouse cubicle and shut the computer down. Retraced my steps to the entrance hallway and turned all the lights off as I went and left everything neat and tidy. I tested Doll’s keys in the front door and found the one that fit and clamped it in my palm. Turned back to the alarm box.

Doll was clearly trusted to lock up, which meant he knew how to set the alarm. I was sure Duke would do it himself, from time to time. And Beck, obviously. Probably one or two of the clerks as well. A whole bunch of people. One of them would have a lousy memory. I looked at the notice board next to the box. Flipped through the memos where they were pinned three-deep. Found a four-figure code written on the bottom of a two-year-old note from the city about new parking regulations. I entered it on the keypad. The red light started flashing and the box started beeping. I smiled. It never fails. Computer passwords, unlisted numbers, alarm codes, someone always writes them down.

I went out the front door and closed it behind me. The beeping stopped. I locked it and walked around the corner and slid into Doll’s Lincoln. Started it up and drove it away. I left it in a downtown parking garage. It could have been the same one that Susan Duffy had photographed. I wiped everything I had touched and locked it up and put the keys in my pocket. I thought about setting it on fire. It had gas in the tank and I still had two dry kitchen matches. Burning cars is fun. And it would increase the pressure on Beck. But in the end I just walked away. It was probably the right decision. It would take most of a day for anybody to grow aware of it parked there. Most of another day for them to decide to do something about it. Then another day for the cops to respond. They would trace the plate and come up against one of Beck’s shell corporations. So they would tow it away, pending further inquiry. They would bust open the trunk for sure, worried about terrorist bombs or because of the smell, but by then a whole bunch of other deadlines would have been reached and I would be long gone.

I walked back to the Taurus and drove it to within a mile of the house. Returned Duffy’s compliment by U-turning and leaving it facing the right way for her. Then I went through my previous routine in reverse. I stripped on the gritty beach and packed the garbage bag. Waded into the sea. I wasn’t keen to do it. It was just as cold. But the tide had turned. It was going my way. Even the ocean was cooperating. I swam the same twelve minutes. Looped right around the end of the wall and came ashore behind the garage block. I was shaking with cold and my teeth were chattering again. But I felt good. I dried myself as well as I could on the damp linen rag and dressed fast before I froze. Left the Glock and the spare magazines and Doll’s set of keys hidden with the PSM and the chisel and the bradawl. Folded the bag and the towel and wedged them under a rock a yard away. Then I headed for my drainpipe. I was still shivering.

The climb was easier going up than coming down. I walked my hands up the pipe and my feet up the wall. Got level with my window and grabbed the sill with my left hand. Jumped my feet across to the stone ledge. Brought my right hand over and pushed the window up. Hauled myself inside as quietly as I could.

The room was icy. The window had been open for hours. I closed it tight and stripped again. My clothes were damp. I laid them out on the radiator and headed for the bathroom. Took a long hot shower. Then I locked myself in there with my shoes. It was exactly six in the morning. They would be picking up the Taurus. Probably Eliot and the old guy would be doing it. Probably Duffy would have stayed back at base. I took the e-mail device out and sent: Duffy? Ninety seconds later she came back with: Here. You OK? I sent: Fine. Check these names anywhere you can, inc. with MP Powell—Angel Doll, poss. associate Paulie, both poss. ex-military.

She sent: Will do.

Then I sent the question that had been on my mind for five and a half hours: What is Teresa Daniel’s real name?

There was the usual ninety-second delay, and then she came back with: Teresa Justice.

CHAPTER 6

No point in going to bed, so I just stood at the window and watched the dawn. It was soon in full flow. The sun came up over the sea. The air was fresh and clear. I could see fifty miles. I watched an arctic tern coming in low from the north. It skimmed the rocks as it passed them. I guessed it was looking for a place to build a nest. The low sun behind it threw shadows as big as vultures. Then it gave up on the search for shelter and looped and wheeled and swooped away over the water and tumbled into the ocean. It came out a long moment later and silver droplets of freezing water trailed it back into the sky. It had nothing in its beak. But it flew on like it was happy enough. It was better adapted than me.

There wasn’t much to see after that. There were a few herring gulls far in the distance. I squinted against the glare and looked for signs of whales or dolphins and saw nothing. I watched mats of seaweed drift around on circular currents. At six-fifteen I heard Duke’s footsteps in the corridor and the click of my lock. He didn’t come in. He just tramped away again. I turned and faced the door and took a deep breath. Day thirteen, Thursday. Maybe that was better than day thirteen falling on a Friday. I wasn’t sure. Whatever, bring it on. I took another breath and walked out through the door and headed down the stairs.

Nothing was the same as the morning before. Duke was fresh and I was tired. Paulie wasn’t around. I went down to the basement gym and found nobody there. Duke didn’t stay for breakfast. He disappeared somewhere. Richard Beck came in to eat in the kitchen. There was just him and me at the table. The mechanic wasn’t there. The cook stayed busy at the stove. The Irish girl came in and out from the dining room. She was moving fast. There was a buzz in the air. Something was happening.

“Big shipment coming in,” Richard Beck said. “It’s always like this. Everybody gets excited about the money they’re going to make.”

“You heading back to school?” I asked him.

“Sunday,” he said. He didn’t seem worried about it. But I was. Sunday was three days away. My fifth full day there. The final deadline. Whatever was going to happen would have happened by then. The kid was going to be in the crossfire throughout.

“You OK with that?” I asked.

“With going back?”

I nodded. “After what happened.”

“We know who did it now,” he said. “Some assholes from Connecticut. It won’t happen again.”

“You can be that sure?”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “My dad handles stuff like this all the time. And if it’s not done by Sunday, then I’ll just stay here until it is.”

“Does your dad run this whole thing by himself? Or does he have a partner?”

“He runs it all by himself,” he said. His ambivalence was gone. He looked happy to be home, secure and comfortable, proud of his dad. His world had contracted to a barren half-acre of lonely granite, hemmed in by the restless sea and a high stone wall topped by razor wire.

“I don’t think you really killed that cop,” he said.

The kitchen went quiet. I stared at him.

“I think you just wounded him,” he said. “I’m hoping so, anyway. You know, maybe he’s recovering right now. In a hospital somewhere. That’s what I’m thinking. You should try to do the same. Think positive. It’s better that way. Then you can have the silver lining without the cloud.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“So just pretend,” he said. “Use the power of positive thinking. Say to yourself, I did a good thing and there was no downside.”

“Your dad called the local police,” I said. “I don’t think there was any room for doubt.”

“So just pretend,” he said again. “That’s what I do. Bad things didn’t happen unless you choose to recall them.”

He had stopped eating and his left hand was up at the left side of his head. He was smiling brightly, but his subconscious was recalling some bad things, right there and then. That was clear. It was recalling them big time.

“OK,” I said. “It was just a flesh wound.”

“In and out,” he said. “Clean as a whistle.”

I said nothing.

“Missed everything by a fraction,” he said. “It was a miracle.”

I nodded. It would have been some kind of a miracle. That was for damn sure. Shoot somebody in the chest with a soft-nose .44 Magnum and you blow a hole in them the size of Rhode Island. Death is generally instantaneous. The heart stops immediately, mostly because it isn’t there anymore. I figured the kid hadn’t seen anybody shot before. Then I thought, but maybe he has. And maybe he didn’t like it very much.

“Positive thinking,” he said. “That’s the key. Just assume he’s warm and comfortable somewhere, making a full recovery.”

“What’s in the shipment?” I asked.

“Fakes, probably,” he said. “From Pakistan. We get two-hundred-year-old Persians made there. People are such suckers.”

“Are they?”

He looked at me and nodded. “They see what they want to see.”

“Do they?”

“All the time.”

I looked away. There was no coffee. After a while you realize that caffeine is addictive. I was irritated. And tired.

“What are you doing today?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m just going to read,” he said. “Maybe stroll a little. Walk the shoreline, see what washed up in the night.”

“Things wash up?”

“Sometimes. You know, things fall off boats.”

I looked at him. Was he telling me something? I had heard of smugglers floating bales of marijuana ashore in isolated places. I guessed the same system would work for heroin. Was he telling me something? Or was he warning me? Did he know about my hidden bundle of hardware? And what was all that stuff about the shot cop? Psychobabble? Or was he playing games with me?

“But that’s mostly in the summer,” he said. “It’s too cold for boats right now. So I guess I’ll stay inside. Maybe I’ll paint.”

“You paint?”

“I’m an art student,” he said. “I told you that.”

I nodded. Stared at the back of the cook’s head, like I could induce her to make coffee by telepathy. Then Duke came in. He walked over to where I was sitting. Placed one hand on the back of my chair and the other flat on the table. Bent low, like he needed to have a confidential conversation.

“Your lucky day, asshole,” he said.

I said nothing.

“You’re driving Mrs. Beck,” he said. “She wants to go shopping.”

“Where?”

“Wherever,” he said.

“All day?”

“It better be.”

I nodded. Don’t trust the stranger on shipment day.

“Take the Cadillac,” he said. He dropped the keys on the table. “Make sure she doesn’t rush back.”

Or, don’t trust Mrs. Beck on shipment day.

“OK,” I said.

“You’ll find it very interesting,” he said. “Especially the first part. Gives me a hell of a kick, anyway, every single time.”

I had no idea what he meant, and I didn’t waste time speculating about it. I just stared at the empty coffee pot and Duke left and a moment later I heard the front door open and close. The metal detector beeped twice. Duke and Beck, guns and keys. Richard got up from the table and wandered out and I was left alone with the cook.

“Got any coffee?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

I sat there until I finally figured that a dutiful chauffeur should be ready and waiting, so I headed out through the back door. The metal detector beeped politely at the keys. The tide was all the way in and the air was cold and fresh. I could smell salt and seaweed. The swell was gone and I could hear waves breaking. I walked around to the garage block and started the Cadillac and backed it out. Drove it around to the carriage circle and waited there with the motor running to get the heater going. I could see tiny ships on the horizon heading in and out of Portland. They crawled along just beyond the line where the sky met the water, half-hidden, infinitely slow. I wondered if one of them was Beck’s, or whether it was in already, all tied up and set for unloading. I wondered whether a Customs officer was already walking right past it, eyes front, heading for the next ship in line, a wad of crisp new bills in his pocket.

Elizabeth Beck came out of the house ten minutes later. She was wearing a knee-length plaid skirt and a thin white sweater with a wool coat over it. Her legs were bare. No panty hose. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band. She looked cold. And defiant, and resigned, and apprehensive. Like a noblewoman walking to the guillotine. I guessed she was used to having Duke drive her. I guessed she was a little conflicted about riding with the cop-killer. I got out and made ready to open the rear door. She walked right past it.

“I’ll sit in front,” she said.

She settled herself in the passenger seat and I slid back in next to her.

“Where to?” I asked politely.

She stared out her window.

“We’ll talk about that when we’re through the gate,” she said.

The gate was closed and Paulie was standing dead-center in front of it. His shoulders and arms looked like he had basketballs stuffed inside his suit. The skin on his face was red with cold. He had been waiting there for us. I stopped the car six feet in front of him. He made no move toward the gate. I looked straight at him. He ignored me and tracked around to Elizabeth Beck’s window. Smiled at her and tapped on the glass with his knuckles and made a winding motion with his hand. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. Tried to ignore him. He tapped again. She turned to look at him. He raised his eyebrows. Made the winding motion again. She shuddered. It was enough of a definite physical spasm to rock the car on its springs. She stared hard at one of her fingernails and then placed it on the window button and pressed. The glass buzzed down. Paulie squatted with his right forearm on the door frame.

“Good morning,” he said.

He leaned in and touched her cheek with the back of his forefinger. Elizabeth Beck didn’t move. Just stared straight ahead. He tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear.

“I enjoyed our visit last night,” he said.

She shuddered again. Like she was deathly cold. He moved his hand. Dropped it to her breast. Cupped it. Squeezed it. She sat still for it. I used the button on my side. Her glass buzzed up. Then it stalled against Paulie’s giant arm and the safety feature kicked in and it came back down again. I opened my door and slid out. Rounded the hood. Paulie was still squatting down. He still had his hand inside the car. It had moved a little lower.

“Back off,” he said, looking at her, talking to me.

I felt like a lumberjack confronting a redwood tree without an ax or a chainsaw. Where do I start? I kicked him in the kidney. It was the kind of kick that would have sent a football out of the stadium and into the parking lot. It would have cracked a utility pole. It would have put most guys in the hospital all by itself. It would have killed some of them. It had about as much effect on Paulie as a polite tap on the shoulder. He didn’t even make a noise. He just put both hands on the door frame and slowly pushed himself upright. Turned around to face me.

“Relax, Major,” he said. “Just my way of saying good morning to the lady.”

Then he moved away from the car and looped right around me and unlocked the gate. I watched him. He was very calm. No sign of a reaction. It was like I hadn’t touched him at all. I stood still and let the adrenaline drain away. Then I looked at the car. At the trunk, and at the hood. To walk around the trunk would say I’m scared of you. So I walked around the hood instead. But I made sure to stay well out of his reach. I had no desire to give some surgeon six months’ work rebuilding the bones in my face. The closest I got to him was about five feet. He made no move on me. Just cranked the gate all the way open and stood there patiently waiting to close it again.

“We’ll talk about that kick later, OK?” he called.

I didn’t reply.

“And don’t get the wrong impression, Major,” he said. “She likes it.”

I got back in the car. Elizabeth Beck had closed her window. She was staring straight ahead, pale and silent and humiliated. I drove through the gate. Headed west. Watched Paulie in the mirror. He closed the gate and headed back inside the lodge. Disappeared from sight.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Elizabeth said quietly.

I said nothing.

“And thank you for your intervention,” she said. “But it will prove futile. And I’m afraid it will bring you a lot of trouble. He already hates you, you know. And he’s not very rational.”

I said nothing.

“It’s a control thing, of course,” she said. It was like she was explaining it to herself. It wasn’t like she was talking to me. “It’s a demonstration of power. That’s all it is. There’s no actual sex. He can’t do it. Too many steroids, I suppose. He just paws me.”

I said nothing.

“He makes me undress,” she said. “Makes me parade around for him. Paws me. There’s no sex. He’s impotent.”

I said nothing. Just drove slow, keeping the car steady and level through the coastal curves.

“It usually lasts about an hour,” she said.

“Have you told your husband?” I asked.

“What could he do?”

“Fire the guy.”

“Not possible,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because Paulie doesn’t work for my husband.”

I glanced at her. Recalled telling Duke: You should get rid of him. Duke had answered: That’s not easy.

“So who does he work for?” I said.

“Somebody else.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. It was like she couldn’t speak the name.

“It’s a control thing,” she said again. “I can’t object to what they do to me, just like my husband can’t object to what they do to him. Nobody can object. To anything, you see. That’s the point. You won’t be allowed to object to anything, either. Duke wouldn’t think to object, of course. He’s an animal.”

I said nothing.

“I just thank God I have a son,” she said. “Not a daughter.”

I said nothing.

“Last night was very bad,” she said. “I was hoping he would start leaving me alone. Now that I’m getting old.”

I glanced at her again. Couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It was my birthday yesterday,” she said. “That was Paulie’s present to me.”

I said nothing.

“I turned fifty,” she said. “I suppose you don’t want to think about a naked fifty-year-old, parading around.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“But I keep in shape,” she said. “I use the gym when the others aren’t around.”

I said nothing.

“He pages me,” she said. “I have to carry a pager at all times. It buzzed in the middle of the night. Last night. I had to go, right away. It’s much worse if I keep him waiting.”

I said nothing.

“I was on my way back when you saw me,” she said. “Out there on the rocks.”

I pulled onto the side of the road. Braked gently and stopped the car. Eased the gearshift into Park.

“I think you work for the government,” she said.

I shook my head.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m just a guy.”

“Then I’m disappointed.”

“I’m just a guy,” I said again.

She said nothing.

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” I said. “I’m in enough trouble already.”

“Yes,” she said. “They’d kill you.”

“Well, they’d try,” I said. Then I paused. “Have you told them what you think?”

“No,” she said.

“Well don’t. And you’re wrong anyway.”

She said nothing.

“There’d be a battle,” I said. “They’d come for me and I wouldn’t go quietly. People would get hurt. Richard, maybe.”

She stared at me. “Are you bargaining with me?”

I shook my head again.

“I’m warning you,” I said. “I’m a survivor.”

She smiled a bitter smile.

“You have absolutely no idea,” she said. “Whoever you are, you’re in way over your head. You should leave now.”

“I’m just a guy,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide from them.”

The wind rocked the car. I could see nothing but granite and trees. We were miles from the nearest human being.

“My husband is a criminal,” she said.

“I figured that,” I said.

“He’s a hard man,” she said. “He can be violent, and he’s always ruthless.”

“But he’s not his own boss,” I said.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t. He’s a hard man who literally quakes in front of the person who is his boss.”

I said nothing.

“There’s an expression,” she said. “People ask, why do bad things happen to good people? But in my husband’s case, bad things are happening to a bad person. Ironic, isn’t it? But they are bad things.”

“Who does Duke belong to?”

“My husband. But Duke’s as bad as Paulie, in his way. I wouldn’t care to choose between them. He was a corrupt cop, and a corrupt federal agent, and a killer. He’s been in prison.”

“Is he the only one?”

“On my husband’s payroll? Well, he had the two bodyguards. They were his. Or they were provided for him, anyway. But they were killed, of course. Outside Richard’s college. By the men from Connecticut. So yes, Duke’s the only one now. Apart from the mechanic, of course. But he’s just a technician.”

“How many has the other guy got?”

“I’m not sure. They seem to come and go.”

“What exactly are they importing?”

She looked away. “If you’re not a government man, then I guess you wouldn’t be interested.”

I followed her gaze toward the distant trees. Think, Reacher. This could be an elaborate con game designed to flush me out. They could all be in it together. His gate man’s hand on his wife’s breast would be a small price for Beck to pay for some crucial information. And I believed in elaborate con games. I had to. I was riding one myself.

“I’m not a government man,” I said.

“Then I’m disappointed,” she said again.

I put the car in Drive. Held my foot on the brake.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Do you think I care where the hell we go?”

“You want to get some coffee?”

“Coffee?” she said. “Sure. Go south. Let’s stay well away from Portland today.”

I made the turn south onto Route One, about a mile short of I-95. It was a pleasant old road, like roads used to be. We passed through a place called Old Orchard Beach. It had neat brick sidewalks and Victorian streetlights. There were signs pointing left to a beach. There were faded French flags. I guessed Quebec Canadians had vacationed there before cheap airfares to Florida and the Caribbean had changed their preferences.

“Why were you out last night?” Elizabeth Beck asked me.

I said nothing.

“You can’t deny it,” she said. “Did you think I hadn’t seen you?”

“You didn’t react,” I said.

“I was in Paulie mode,” she said. “I’ve trained myself not to react.”

I said nothing.

“Your room was locked,” she said.

“I climbed out the window,” I said. “I don’t like to be locked in.”

“What did you do then?”

“I took a stroll. Like I thought you were doing.”

“Then you climbed back in?”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“The wall is your big problem,” she said. “There are the lights and the razor wire, obviously, but there are sensors too, in the ground. Paulie would hear you from thirty yards away.”

“I was just getting some air,” I said.

“No sensors under the driveway,” she said. “They couldn’t make them work under the blacktop. But there’s a camera on the lodge. And there’s a motion alarm on the gate itself. Do you know what an NSV is?”

“Soviet tank-turret machine gun,” I said.

“Paulie’s got one,” she said. “He keeps it by the side door. He’s been told to use it if he hears the motion alarm.”

I breathed in, and then I breathed out. An NSV is more than five feet long and weighs more than fifty-five pounds. It uses cartridges four and a half inches long and a half-inch wide. It can fire twelve of them in a second. It has no safety mechanism. The combination of Paulie and an NSV would be nobody’s idea of fun.

“But I think you swam,” she said. “I can smell the sea on your shirt. Very faintly. You didn’t dry yourself properly when you got back.”

We passed a sign for a town called Saco. I coasted to the shoulder and stopped again. Cars and trucks whined past us.

“You were incredibly lucky,” she said. “There are some bad riptides off the point. Strong undertow. But I expect you went in behind the garages. In which case you missed them by about ten feet.”

“I don’t work for the government,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“Don’t you think you’re taking a hell of a chance?” I said. “Let’s say I wasn’t exactly what I appeared to be. Just for the sake of argument. Let’s say I was from a rival organization, for instance. Don’t you see the risk? You think you would make it back to the house alive? Saying what you’re saying?”

She looked away.

“Then I guess that will be the test,” she said. “If you’re a government man, you won’t kill me. If you’re not, you will.”

“I’m just a guy,” I said. “You could get me in trouble.”

“Let’s find coffee,” she said. “Saco is a nice town. All the big mill owners lived there, way back.”

We ended up on an island in the middle of the Saco River. There was an enormous brick building on it that had been a gigantic mill, way back in history. Now it was being gentrified into hundreds of offices and stores. We found a glass-and-chrome coffee shop called Café Café. A pun in French, I guessed. But the smell alone was worth the trip. I ignored the lattes and the flavored foamy stuff and ordered regular coffee, hot, black, large. Then I turned to Elizabeth Beck. She shook her head.

“You stay,” she said. “I’ve decided to go shopping. Alone. I’ll meet you back here in four hours.”

I said nothing.

“I don’t need your permission,” she said. “You’re just my driver.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

She gave me twenty bucks from her purse. I paid for the coffee and carried it to a table. She came with me and watched me sit down.

“Four hours,” she said. “Maybe a little more, but no less. In case there’s something you need to do.”

“I’ve got nothing to do,” I said. “I’m just your driver.”

She looked at me. Zipped her purse. The space around my table was tight. She twisted a little to get the strap of her purse square on her shoulder. Jackknifed slightly to avoid touching the table and spilling my coffee. There was a clunk, like plastic hitting the floor. I looked down. Something had fallen out from under her skirt. She stared at it and her face slowly turned a deep shade of red. She bent and picked the thing up and clutched it in her hand. Fumbled her way onto the chair opposite me like all the strength had gone out of her. Like she was utterly humiliated. She was holding a pager. It was a black plastic rectangle a little smaller than my own e-mail device. She stared at it. Her neck was bright red all the way down under her sweater. She spoke in a low rueful whisper.

“He makes me carry it there,” she said. “Inside my underpants. He likes it to have what he calls the appropriate effect when it buzzes. He checks that it’s there every time I go through the gate. Normally I take it out and put it in my bag afterward. But I didn’t want to do that, you know, this time, with you watching.”

I said nothing. She stood up. Blinked twice and took a breath and swallowed.

“Four hours,” she said. “In case there’s something you need to do.”

Then she walked away. I watched her go. She turned left outside the door and disappeared. An elaborate con game? It was possible that they could try to set me up with her story. Possible that she could carry a pager in her pants to back it up. Possible that she could contrive to shake it loose at exactly the right moment. All possible. But what wasn’t even remotely possible was that she could manufacture a deep red blush, right on cue. Nobody can do that. Not even the world’s finest actress at the peak of her powers could do that. So Elizabeth Beck was for real.

I didn’t abandon sensible precautions entirely. They were too deeply ingrained for that. I finished my coffee like an innocent person with all the time in the world. Then I strolled out to the mall’s internal sidewalks and turned random lefts and rights until I was sure I was alone. Then I went back to the coffee shop and bought another cup. Borrowed their restroom key and locked myself in. Sat on the lid of the john and took off my shoe. There was a message waiting from Duffy: Why interest in Teresa Daniel’s real name? I ignored it and sent: Where is your motel? Ninety seconds later she answered: What did you have for breakfast first day in Boston? I smiled. Duffy was a practical woman. She was worried my e-mail device had been compromised. She was asking a security question. I sent: Short stack with egg, coffee, three-dollar tip, I ate it. Any other answer than that and she would be running for her car. Ninety seconds later she came back with: West side of Route One 100 yards south of Kennebunk River. I figured that was about ten miles away. I sent: See you in 10 minutes.

It took me more like fifteen minutes by the time I had gotten back to the car and fought the traffic where Route One bottlenecked through Saco. I kept one eye on the mirror the whole way and saw nothing to worry about. I crossed the river and found a motel on my right. It was a cheerful bright gray place pretending to be a string of classic New England saltboxes. It was April and not very busy. I saw the Taurus I had been a passenger in out of Boston parked next to the end room. It was the only plain sedan I could see. I put the Cadillac thirty yards away behind a wooden shed hiding a big propane tank. No sense in leaving it visible to everybody passing by on Route One.

I walked back and knocked once and Susan Duffy opened the door fast and we hugged. We just went straight into it. It took me completely by surprise. I think it took her by surprise, too. We probably wouldn’t have done it if we had thought about it first. But I guess she was anxious and I was stressed and it just happened. And it felt real good. She was tall, but she was slight. My hand spanned almost the whole width of her back and I felt her ribs give a little. She smelled fresh and clean. No perfume. Just skin, not long out of the shower.

“What do you know about Teresa?” she asked.

“You alone?” I asked.

She nodded. “The others are in Portland. Customs says Beck’s got a boat coming in today.”

We let go of each other. Moved on into the room.

“What are they going to do?” I asked.

“Observation only,” she said. “Don’t worry. They’re good at it. Nobody will see them.”

It was a very generic motel room. One queen bed, a chair, a desk, a TV, a window, a through-the-wall air conditioner. The only things that distinguished it from a hundred thousand other motel rooms were a blue-and-gray color scheme and nautical prints on the wall. They gave it a definite New England coastal flavor.

“What do you know about Teresa?” she asked again.

I told her about the name carved into the basement room floor. And the date. Duffy stared at me. Then she closed her eyes.

“She’s alive,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Well, she was alive yesterday,” I said.

She opened her eyes. “You think she’s alive today?”

I nodded. “I think the odds are pretty good. They want her for something. Why keep her alive nine weeks and kill her now?”

Duffy said nothing.

“I think they just moved her,” I said. “That’s all. That’s my best guess. The door was locked in the morning, she was gone by the evening.”

“You think she’s been treated OK?”

I didn’t tell her what Paulie liked to do with Elizabeth Beck. She already had enough to worry about.

“I think she scratched her name with a fork,” I said. “And there was a spare plate of steak and potatoes lying around last night, like they took her out in such a hurry they forgot to tell the cook. So I think they were probably feeding her. I think she’s a prisoner, plain and simple.”

“Where would they have taken her?”

“I think Quinn’s got her,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it seems to me what we’re looking at here is one organization superimposed over another. Beck’s a bad guy for sure, but he’s been taken over by a worse guy.”

“Like a corporate thing?”

“Exactly,” I said. “Like a hostile takeover. Quinn’s put his staff into Beck’s operation. He’s riding it like a parasite.”

“But why would they move Teresa?”

“A precaution,” I said.

“Because of you? How worried are they?”

“A little,” I said. “I think they’re moving things and hiding things.”

“But they haven’t confronted you yet.”

I nodded. “They’re not really sure about me.”

“So why are they taking a risk with you?”

“Because I saved the boy.”

She nodded. Went quiet. She looked a little tired. I guessed maybe she hadn’t slept at all since I asked her for the car at midnight. She was wearing jeans and a man’s Oxford shirt. The shirt was pure white and neatly tucked in. The top two buttons were undone. She was wearing boat shoes over bare feet. The room heat was set on high. There was a laptop computer on the desk, next to the room phone. The phone was a console thing all covered in fast-dial buttons. I checked the number and memorized it. The laptop was plugged through a complex adapter into a data port built into the base of the phone. There was a screensaver playing on it. It showed the Justice Department shield drifting around. Every time it reached the edge of the screen it would bounce off in a new random direction like that ancient video tennis game. There was no sound with it.

“Have you seen Quinn yet?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Know where he operates out of?”

I shook my head again. “I haven’t really seen anything. Except their books are coded and they don’t have enough of a distribution fleet to be moving what they seem to move. Maybe their customers collect.”

“That would be insane,” she said. “They wouldn’t show their customers their base of operations. In fact we already know they don’t. Beck met with the LA dealer in a parking garage, remember.”

“So maybe they rendezvous somewhere neutral. For the actual sales. Somewhere close by, in the northeast.”

She nodded. “How did you see their books?”

“I was in their office last night. That’s why I wanted the car.”

She moved to the desk and sat down and tapped the laptop’s touch pad. The screensaver disappeared. My last e-mail was displayed under it: See you in 10 minutes. She went into the deleted items directory and clicked on a message from Powell, the MP who had sold me out.

“We traced those names for you,” she said. “Angel Doll did eight years in Leavenworth for sexual assault. Should have been life for rape and murder, but the prosecution screwed up. He was a communications technician. Raped a female lieutenant colonel, left her to bleed to death from the inside. He’s not a very nice guy.”

“He’s a very dead guy,” I said.

She just looked at me.

“He checked the Maxima’s plates,” I said. “Confronted me. Big error. He was the first casualty.”

“You killed him?”

I nodded. “Broke his neck.”

She said nothing.

“His choice,” I said. “He was about to compromise the mission.”

She was pale.

“You OK?” I said.

She looked away. “I wasn’t really expecting casualties.”

“There might be more. Get used to it.”

She looked back at me. Took a breath. Nodded.

“OK,” she said. Then she paused. “Sorry about the plates. That was a mistake.”

“Anything about Paulie?”

She scrolled down the screen. “Doll had a buddy in Leavenworth called Paul Masserella, a bodybuilder, serving eight for assault on an officer. His defense counsel pleaded it down on account of steroid rage. Tried to blame the army for not monitoring Masserella’s intake.”

“His intake is all over the place now.”

“You think he’s the same Paulie?”

“Must be. He told me he doesn’t like officers. I kicked him in the kidney. It would have killed you or Eliot. He didn’t even notice.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

“I hate to think.”

“You OK with going back?”

“Beck’s wife knows I’m phony.”

She stared at me. “How?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she just wants me to be. Maybe she’s trying to convince herself.”

“Is she broadcasting it?”

“Not yet. She saw me out of the house last night.”

“You can’t go back.”

“I’m not a quitter.”

“You’re not an idiot, either. It’s out of control now.”

I nodded. “But it’s my decision.”

She shook her head. “It’s our decision, jointly. You’re depending on our backup.”

“We need to get Teresa out of there. We really do, Duffy. It’s a hell of a situation for her to be in.”

“I could send SWAT teams for her. Now you’ve confirmed she’s alive.”

“We don’t know where she is right now.”

“She’s my responsibility.”

“And Quinn is mine.”

She said nothing.

“You can’t send SWAT teams,” I said. “You’re off the books. Asking for SWAT teams is the same thing as asking to be fired.”

“I’m prepared to get fired, if it comes to it.”

“It’s not just you,” I said. “Six other guys would get fired with you.”

She said nothing.

“And I’m going back anyway,” I said. “Because I want Quinn. With you or without you. So you might as well use me.”

“What did Quinn do to you?”

I said nothing. She was quiet for a long moment.

“Would Mrs. Beck talk to us?” she said.

“I don’t want to ask her,” I said. “Asking her is the same thing as confirming her suspicions. I can’t be sure exactly where that would lead.”

“What would you do if you went back?”

“Get promoted,” I said. “That’s the key. I need to move up into Duke’s job. Then I’ll be top boy on Beck’s side. Then I’ll get some kind of official liaison with Quinn’s side. That’s what I need. I’m working in the dark without it.”

“We need progress,” she said. “We need evidence.”

“I know,” I said.

“How will you get promoted?”

“Same way anybody gets promoted,” I said.

She didn’t reply to that. Just switched her e-mail program back to inbox and stood up and stepped away to the window to look at the view. I looked at her. The light behind her was coming right through her shirt. Her hair was swept back and a couple of inches of it was on her collar. It looked like a five-hundred-dollar style to me, but I guessed on a DEA salary she probably did it herself. Or got a girlfriend to do it for her. I could picture her in someone’s kitchen, on a chair set out in the middle of the floor, an old towel around her neck, interested in how she looked but not interested enough to spend big bucks in a city salon.

Her butt looked spectacular in the jeans. I could see the label on the back: Waist 24. Leg 32. That made her inseam five inches short of mine, which I was prepared to accept. But a waist a whole foot smaller than mine was ridiculous. I carry almost no body fat. All I’ve got in there are the necessary organs, tight and dense. She must have had miniature versions. I see a waist like that and all I want to do is span it with my hands and marvel at it. Maybe bury my head somewhere a little higher up. I couldn’t tell what that might feel like with her unless she turned around. But I suspected it might feel very nice indeed.

“How dangerous is it now?” she asked. “Realistic assessment?”

“Can’t tell,” I said. “Too many variables. Mrs. Beck is running on intuition, that’s all. Maybe a little wish-fulfillment with it. She’s got no hard evidence. In terms of hard evidence I think I’m holding up OK. So even if Mrs. Beck talks to somebody it all depends on whether they choose to take a woman’s intuition seriously or not.”

“She saw you out of the house. That’s hard evidence.”

“But of what? That I’m restless?”

“This guy Doll was killed while you weren’t locked up.”

“They’ll assume I didn’t get past the wall. And they won’t find Doll. No way. Not in time.”

“Why did they move Teresa?”

“Precaution.”

“It’s out of control now,” she said again.

I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see the gesture. “This kind of thing is always out of control. It’s to be expected. Nothing ever works like you predict it. All plans fall apart as soon as the first shot is fired.”

She went quiet. Turned around.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

I paused a beat. The light was still behind her. Very nice indeed.

“I’m going to take a nap,” I said.

“How long have you got?”

I checked my watch. “About three hours.”

“You tired?”

I nodded. “I was up all night, swimming, mostly.”

“You swam past the wall?” she said. “Maybe you are an idiot.”

“Are you tired too?” I asked.

“Very. I’ve been working hard for weeks.”

“So take a nap with me,” I said.

“Doesn’t feel right. Teresa’s in danger somewhere.”

“I can’t go yet anyway,” I said. “Not until Mrs. Beck is ready.”

She paused a beat. “There’s only one bed.”

“Not a huge problem. You’re thin. You won’t take up much room.”

“Wouldn’t be right,” she said.

“We don’t have to get in,” I said. “We could just lie on top.”

“Right next to each other?”

“Fully dressed,” I said. “I’ll even keep my shoes on.”

She said nothing.

“It’s not against the law,” I said.

“Maybe it is,” she said. “Some states have weird old statutes. Maine might be one of them.”

“I’ve got other Maine statutes to worry about.”

“Not right this minute.”

I smiled. Then I yawned. I sat on the bed and lay down on my back. Rolled over on my side and turned away from the middle and jammed my arms up under my head. Closed my eyes. I sensed her standing there, minute after minute. Then I felt her lie down next to me. She shuffled around a little. Then she went still. But she was tense. I could feel it. It was coming through the mattress springs, tiny high-frequency thrills of concern.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “I’m way too tired.”

But I wasn’t, really. The problem started when she moved slightly and touched my butt with hers. It was a very faint contact, but she might as well have plugged me into a power outlet. I opened my eyes and stared at the wall and tried to figure out whether she was asleep and had moved involuntarily or whether she had done it on purpose. I spent a couple of minutes thinking it through. But I guess mortal danger is an aphrodisiac because I found myself erring on the side of optimism. Then I wasn’t certain about the required response. What was the correct etiquette? I settled for moving an inch myself and firming up the connection. I figured that would put the ball back in her court. Now she could struggle with the interpretation.

Nothing happened for a whole minute. I was on the point of getting disappointed when she moved again. Now the connection was pretty damn solid. If I didn’t weigh two hundred and fifty pounds she might have slid me right across the shiny bedcover. I was fairly certain I could feel the rivets on her back pockets. My turn. I disguised it with a sort of sleepy sound and rolled over so we were stacked like spoons and my arm was accidentally touching her shoulder. Her hair was in my face. It was soft and smelled like summer. The cotton of her shirt was crisp. It plunged down to her waist and then the denim of her jeans swooped back up over her hips. I squinted down. She had taken her shoes off. I could see the soles of her feet. Ten little toes, all in a line.

She made a sleepy sound of her own. I was pretty sure it was fake. She nestled backward until she was jammed tight against me from top to bottom. I put my hand on her upper arm. Then I moved it down until it fell off her elbow and came to rest on her waist. The tip of my little finger was under the waistband of her jeans. She made another sound. Almost certainly a fake. I held my breath. Her butt was tight against my groin. My heart was thumping. My head was spinning. No way could I resist. No way at all. It was one of those insane hormone-driven moments when I would have risked eight years in Leavenworth for it. I slid my hand up and forward and cupped her breast. After that, things got completely out of control.

She was one of those women who is far more attractive naked than clothed. Not all women are, but she was. She had a body to die for. She had no tan, but her skin was not pale. It was as soft as silk, but it was not translucent. She was very slim, but I couldn’t see her bones. She was long, and she was lean. She was made for one of those bathing suits that swoop way up at the sides. She had small firm breasts, perfectly shaped. Her neck was long and slender. She had great ears and ankles and knees and shoulders. She had a little hollow at the base of her throat. It was very slightly damp.

She was strong, too. I must have outweighed her by a hundred and thirty pounds, but she had worn me out. She was young, I guess. She had maybe ten years on me. She had left me exhausted, which made her smile. She had a great smile.

“Remember my hotel room in Boston?” I said. “The way you sat on the chair? I wanted you right then.”

“I was just sitting on a chair. There wasn’t a way to it.”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

“Remember the Freedom Trail?” she said. “You told me about the long-rod penetrator? I wanted you right then.”

I smiled.

“It was part of a billion-dollar defense contract,” I said. “So I’m glad this particular citizen got something out of it.”

“If Eliot hadn’t been with me I’d have done it right there in the park.”

“There was a woman feeding the birds.”

“We could have gone behind a bush.”

“Paul Revere would have seen us,” I said.

“He rode all night,” she said.

“I’m not Paul Revere,” I said.

She smiled again. I felt it against my shoulder.

“All done, old guy?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that, exactly.”

“Danger is an aphrodisiac, isn’t it?” she said.

“I guess it is.”

“So you admit you’re in danger?”

“I’m in danger of having a heart attack.”

“You really shouldn’t go back,” she said.

“I’m in danger of not being able to.”

She sat up on the bed. Gravity had no effect on her perfection.

“I’m serious, Reacher,” she said.

I smiled up at her. “I’ll be OK. Two or three more days. I’ll find Teresa and I’ll find Quinn and then I’ll get out.”

“Only if I let you.”

I nodded.

“The two bodyguards,” I said.

She nodded in turn. “That’s why you need my end of the operation. You can forget all about the heroic stuff. With you or without you, my ass. We turn those guys loose and you’re a dead man, one phone call later.”

“Where are they now?”

“In the first motel, back in Massachusetts. Where we made the plans. The guys from the Toyota and the college car are sitting on them.”

“Hard, I hope.”

“Very.”

“That’s hours away,” I said.

“By road,” she said. “Not by telephone.”

“You want Teresa back.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m in charge.”

“You’re a control freak,” I said.

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, is all.”

“Nothing bad ever happens to me.”

She leaned down and traced her fingertips over the scars on my body. Chest, stomach, arms, shoulders, forehead. “You’ve taken a lot of damage for a guy nothing bad ever happens to.”

“I’m clumsy,” I said. “I fall over a lot.”

She stood up and walked to the bathroom, naked, graceful, completely unself-conscious.

“Hurry back,” I called.

But she didn’t hurry back. She was in the bathroom a long time and when she came out again she was wearing a robe. Her face had changed. She looked a little awkward. A little rueful.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It was unprofessional.”

She looked straight at me. I nodded. I guessed it was a little unprofessional.

“But it was fun,” I said.

“We shouldn’t have.”

“We’re grown-ups. We live in a free country.”

“It was just taking comfort. Because we’re both stressed and uptight.”

“Nothing really wrong with that.”

“It’s going to complicate things,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Not if we don’t let it,” I said. “Doesn’t mean we have to get married or anything. We don’t owe each other anything because of it.”

“I wish we hadn’t.”

“I’m glad we did. I think if a thing feels right, you should do it.”

“That’s your philosophy?”

I looked away.

“It’s the voice of experience,” I said. “I once said no when I wanted to say yes and I lived to regret it.”

She hugged the robe tight around her.

“It did feel good,” she said.

“For me too,” I said.

“But we should forget it now. It meant what it meant, nothing more, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

“And you should think hard about going back.”

“OK,” I said again.

I lay on the bed and thought about how it felt to say no when you really wanted to say yes. On balance saying yes had been better, and I had no regrets. Duffy was quiet. It was like we were just waiting for something to happen. I took a long hot shower and dressed in the bathroom. We were done talking by then. There was nothing left to say. We both knew I was going back. I liked the fact that she didn’t really try to stop me. I liked the fact that we were both focused, practical people. I was lacing my shoes when her laptop went ping, like a muffled high-pitched bell. Like a microwave when your food is ready. No artificial voice saying You’ve got mail. I came out of the bathroom and she sat down in front of the computer and clicked a button.

“Message from my office,” she said. “Records show eleven dubious ex-cops called Duke. I put the request in yesterday. How old is he?”

“Forty, maybe,” I said.

She scrolled through her list.

“Southern guy?” she asked. “Northern?”

“Not Southern,” I said.

“Choice of three,” she said.

“Mrs. Beck said he’d been a federal agent, too.”

She scrolled some more.

“John Chapman Duke,” she said. “He’s the only one who went federal afterward. Started in Minneapolis as a patrolman and then a detective. Subject of three investigations by Internal Affairs. Inconclusive. Then he joined us.”

“DEA?” I said. “Really?”

“No, I meant the federal government,” she said. “He went to the Treasury Department.”

“To do what?”

“Doesn’t say. But he was indicted within three years. Some kind of corruption. Plus suspicion of multiple homicides, no real hard evidence. But he went to prison for four years anyway.”

“Description?”

“White, about your size. The photo makes him look uglier, though.”

“That’s him,” I said.

She scrolled some more. Read the rest of the report.

“Take care,” she said. “He sounds like a piece of work.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. I thought about kissing her good-bye at the door. But I didn’t. I figured she wouldn’t want me to. I just ran over to the Cadillac.

I was back in the coffee shop and almost at the end of my second cup when Elizabeth Beck appeared. She had nothing to show for her shopping. No purchases, no gaudy bags. I guessed she hadn’t actually been inside any stores. She had hung around for four long hours to let the government guy do whatever he needed to. I raised my hand. She ignored me and headed straight for the counter. Bought herself a tall white coffee and carried it over to my table. I had decided what I was going to tell her.

“I don’t work for the government,” I said.

“Then I’m disappointed,” she said, for the third time.

“How could I?” I said. “I killed a cop, remember.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Government people don’t do stuff like that.”

“They might,” she said. “By accident.”

“But they wouldn’t run away afterward,” I said. “They would stick around and face the music.”

She went quiet and stayed quiet for a long time. Sipped her coffee slowly.

“I’ve been there maybe eight or ten times,” she said. “Where the college is, I mean. They run events for the students’ families, now and then. And I try to be there at the start and finish of every semester. One summer I even rented a little U-Haul and helped him move his stuff home.”

“So?”

“It’s a small school,” she said. “But even so, on the first day of the semester it gets very busy. Lots of parents, lots of students, SUVs, cars, vans, traffic everywhere. The family days are even worse. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen a town policeman there. Not once. Certainly not a detective in plain clothes.”

I looked out the window to the internal mall sidewalk.

“Just a coincidence, I suppose,” she said. “A random Tuesday morning in April, early in the day, nothing much going on, and there’s a detective waiting right by the gate, for no very obvious reason.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“That you were terribly unlucky,” she said. “I mean, what were the odds?”

“I don’t work for the government,” I said.

“You took a shower,” she said. “Washed your hair.”

“Did I?”

“I can see it and smell it. Cheap soap, cheap shampoo.”

“I went to a sauna.”

“You didn’t have any money. I gave you twenty dollars. You bought at least two cups of coffee. That would leave maybe fourteen dollars.”

“It was a cheap sauna.”

“It must have been,” she said.

“I’m just a guy,” I said.

“And I’m disappointed about it.”

“You sound like you want your husband to get busted.”

“I do.”

“He’d go to prison.”

“He already lives in a prison. And he deserves to. But he’d be freer in a real prison than where he is now. And he wouldn’t be there forever.”

“You could call somebody,” I said. “You don’t need to wait for them to come to you.”

She shook her head. “That would be suicide. For me and Richard.”

“Just like it would be if you talked about me like this in front of anybody else. Remember, I wouldn’t go quietly. People would get hurt. You and Richard, maybe.”

She smiled. “Bargaining with me again?”

“Warning you again,” I said. “Full disclosure.”

She nodded.

“I know how to keep my mouth shut,” she said, and then she proved it by not saying another word. We finished our coffee in silence and walked back to the car. We didn’t talk. I drove her home, north and east, completely unsure whether I was carrying a ticking time bomb with me or turning my back on the only inside help I would ever get.

Paulie was waiting behind the gate. He must have been watching from his window and then taken up position as soon as he saw the car in the distance. I slowed and stopped and he stared out at me. Then he stared at Elizabeth Beck.

“Give me the pager,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Just do it,” I said.

Paulie unlatched the chain and pushed the gate. Elizabeth unzipped her bag and handed me the pager. I let the car roll forward and buzzed my window down. Stopped level with where Paulie was waiting to shut the gate again.

“Check this out,” I called.

I tossed the pager overarm out in front of the car. It was a left-handed throw. It was weak and lacked finesse. But it got the job done. The little black plastic rectangle looped up in the air and landed dead-center on the driveway maybe twenty feet in front of the car. Paulie watched its trajectory and then froze when he realized what it was.

“Hey,” he said.

He went after it. I went after him. I stamped on the gas and the tires howled and the car jumped forward. I aimed the right-hand corner of the front bumper at the side of his left knee. I got very close. But he was incredibly quick. He scooped the pager off the blacktop and skipped back and I missed him by a foot. The car shot straight past him. I didn’t slow down. Just accelerated away and watched him in the mirror, standing in my wake, staring after me, blue tire smoke drifting all around him. I was severely disappointed. If I had to fight a guy who outweighed me by two hundred pounds I’d have been much happier if he was crippled first. Or at least if he wasn’t so damn fast.

I stopped on the carriage circle and let Elizabeth Beck out at the front door. Then I put the car away and was heading for the kitchen when Zachary Beck and John Chapman Duke came out looking for me. They were agitated and walking quickly. They were tense and upset. I thought they were going to give me a hard time about Paulie. But they weren’t.

“Angel Doll is missing,” Beck said.

I stood still. The wind was blowing in off the ocean. The lazy swell was gone and the waves were as big and noisy as they had been on the first evening. There was spray in the air.

“He spoke with you last thing,” Beck said. “Then he locked up and left and he hasn’t been seen since.”

“What did he want with you?” Duke asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know? You were in there five minutes.”

I nodded. “He took me back to the warehouse office.”

“And?”

“And nothing. He was all set to say something but his cell phone rang.”

“Who was it?”

I shrugged. “How would I know? Some kind of an urgent thing. He talked on the phone the whole five minutes. He was wasting my time and yours so I just gave it up and walked back out.”

“What was he saying on the phone?”

“I didn’t listen,” I said. “Didn’t seem polite.”

“Hear any names?” Beck asked.

I turned to him. Shook my head.

“No names,” I said. “But they knew each other. That was clear. Doll did a lot of listening, I guess. I think he was taking instructions about something.”

“About what?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Something urgent?”

“I guess so. He seemed to forget all about me. Certainly he didn’t try to stop me when I walked away.”

“That’s all you know?”

“I assumed it was some kind of a plan,” I said. “Instructions for the following day, maybe.”

“Today?”

I shrugged again. “I’m just guessing. It was a very one-sided conversation.”

“Terrific,” Duke said. “You’re a real big help, you know that?”

Beck looked out at the ocean. “So he took an urgent call on his cell and then he locked up and left. That’s all you can tell us?”

“I didn’t see him lock up,” I said. “And I didn’t see him leave. He was still on the phone when I came out.”

“Obviously he locked up,” Beck said. “And obviously he left. Everything was perfectly normal this morning.”

I said nothing. Beck turned through ninety degrees and faced east. The wind came off the sea and flattened his clothes against him. His trouser legs flapped like flags. He moved his feet, scuffing the soles of his shoes against the grit, like he was trying to get warm.

“We don’t need this now,” he said. “We really don’t need this. We’ve got a big weekend coming up.”

I said nothing. They turned around together and headed back to the house and left me there, alone.

I was tired, but I wasn’t going to get any rest. That was clear. There was bustle in the air and the routine I had seen on the previous two nights was all shot to hell. There was no food in the kitchen. No dinner. The cook wasn’t there. I heard people moving in the hallway. Duke came into the kitchen and walked straight past me and went out the back door. He was carrying a blue Nike sports bag. I followed him out and stood and watched from the corner of the house and saw him go into the second garage. Five minutes later he backed the black Lincoln out and drove off in it. He had changed the plates. When I had seen it in the middle of the night it had six-digit Maine plates on it. Now it was showing a seven-digit New York number. I went back inside and looked for coffee. I found the machine, but I couldn’t find any filter papers. I settled for a glass of water instead. I was halfway through drinking it when Beck came in. He was carrying a sports bag, too. The way it hung from its handles and the noise it made when it bumped against his leg told me it was full of heavy metal. Guns, probably, maybe two of them.

“Get the Cadillac,” he said. “Right now. Pick me up at the front.”

He took the keys out of his pocket and dropped them on the table in front of me. Then he crouched down and unzipped his bag and came out with two New York license plates and a screwdriver. Handed them to me.

“Put these on it first,” he said.

I saw guns in the bag. Two Heckler & Koch MP5Ks, short and fat and black with big bulbous molded handles. Futuristic, like movie props.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“We’re following Duke down to Hartford, Connecticut,” he said. “We’ve got some business there, remember?”

He zipped the bag and stood up and carried it back out into the hallway. I sat still for a second. Then I raised my glass of water and toasted the blank wall in front of me.

“Here’s to bloody wars and dread diseases,” I said to myself.

CHAPTER 7

I left the rest of the water in the kitchen and headed out toward the garage block. Dusk was gathering on the ocean horizon, a hundred miles away in the east. The wind was blowing hard and the waves were pounding. I stopped walking and turned a casual circle. Saw nobody else out and about. So I ducked out of sight down the side of the courtyard wall. Found my hidden bundle and laid the phony plates and the screwdriver on the rocks and unwrapped both guns. Duffy’s Glock went into my right-hand coat pocket. Doll’s PSM went into my left. I put the spare Glock mags in my socks. Stowed the rag and picked up the plates and the screwdriver and backtracked to the courtyard entrance.

The mechanic was busy in the third garage. The empty one. He had the doors wide open and was oiling the hinges. The space behind him was even cleaner than when I had seen it in the night. It was immaculate. The floor had been hosed. I could see it drying in patches. I nodded to the guy and he nodded back. I opened up the left-hand garage. Squatted down and unscrewed the Maine plate off the Cadillac’s trunk lid and replaced it with the New York number. Did the same at the front. Left the old plates and the screwdriver on the floor and got in and fired it up. Backed it out and headed around to the carriage circle. The mechanic watched me go.

Beck was waiting there for me. He opened the rear door himself and dropped his sports bag on the back seat. I heard the guns shifting inside. Then he closed the rear door again and slid in the front beside me.

“Go,” he said. “Use I-95 south as far as Boston.”

“We need gas,” I said.

“OK, first place you see,” he said.

Paulie was waiting at the gate. His face was all twisted up with anger. He was a problem that wouldn’t keep much longer. He glared in at me. Turned his head left and right and kept his eyes on me the whole time he was opening the gate. I ignored him and drove on through. I didn’t look back at him. Out of sight, out of mind was the way I wanted to play it, as far as he was concerned.

The coast road west was empty. We were on the highway twelve minutes after we left the house. I was getting used to the way the Cadillac drove. It was a nice car. Smooth, and quiet. But it was heavy on gas. That was for sure. The needle was getting seriously low. I could almost see it moving. The way I recalled it the first gas stop was the one south of Kennebunk. The place where I had met with Duffy and Eliot on the way down to New London. We reached it within fifteen minutes. It felt very familiar to me. I drove past the parking lot where we had broken into the van and headed down to the pumps. Beck said nothing. I got out and filled the tank. It took a long time. Eighteen gallons. I screwed the cap back on and Beck buzzed his window down and gave me a wad of cash.

“Always buy gas with cash,” he said. “Safer that way.”

I kept the change, which was a little over fifteen bucks. I figured I was entitled. I hadn’t been paid yet. I got back on the road and settled in for the trip. I was tired. Nothing worse than mile after mile of lonely highway when you’re tired. Beck was quiet beside me. At first I thought he was just morose. Or shy, or inhibited. Then I realized he was nervous. I guessed he wasn’t entirely comfortable heading into battle. I was. Especially because I knew for sure we weren’t going to find anybody to fight.

“How’s Richard?” I asked him.

“He’s fine,” he said. “He’s got inner strength. He’s a good son.”

“Is he?” I said, because I needed to say something. I needed him to talk to keep me awake.

“He’s very loyal. A father can’t ask for more.”

Then he went quiet again, and I fought to stay awake. Five miles, ten.

“Have you ever dealt with small-time dope dealers?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“There’s something unique about them,” he said.

He didn’t say anything more for twenty miles. Then he picked it up again like he had spent the entire time chasing an elusive thought.

“They’re completely dominated by fashion,” he said.

“Are they?” I said, like I was interested. I wasn’t, but I still needed him to talk.

“Of course lab drugs are fashion items anyway,” he said. “Really their customers are just as bad as they are. I can’t even keep track of the stuff they sell. Some different weird name every week.”

“What’s a lab drug?” I asked.

“A drug made in a lab,” he said. “You know, something manufactured, something chemical. Not the same as something that grows naturally in the ground.”

“Like marijuana.”

“Or heroin. Or cocaine. Those are natural products. Organic. They’re refined, obviously, but they aren’t created in a beaker.”

I said nothing. Just fought to keep my eyes open. The car was way too warm. You need cold air when you’re tired. I bit my bottom lip to stay awake.

“The fashion thing infects everything they do,” he said. “Every single thing. Shoes, for instance. These guys we’re looking for tonight, every time I’ve seen them they’ve had different shoes.”

“What, like sneakers?”

“Sure, like they play basketball for a living. One time they’ve got two-hundred-dollar Reeboks, brand new out of the box. Next time I see them, Reeboks are completely unacceptable and it’s got to be Nikes or something. Air-this, air-that. Or it’s suddenly Caterpillar boots, or Timberlands. Leather, then Gore-Tex, then leather again. Black, then that yellow color like a work boot. Always with the laces undone. Then it’s back to the running shoes again, only this time it’s Adidas, with the little stripes. Two, three hundred dollars a pop. For no reason. It’s insane.”

I said nothing. Just drove, with my eyelids locked open and my eyeballs stinging.

“You know why it is?” he said. “Because of the money. They’ve got so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Like jackets. Have you seen the jackets they wear? One week it’s got to be North Face, all shiny and puffy, full of goose feathers, doesn’t matter whether it’s winter or summer because these guys are only out at night. The next week, shiny is yesterday’s news. Maybe North Face is still OK, but now it’s got to be microfiber. Then it’s letter jackets, wool with leather sleeves. Two, three hundred dollars a pop. Each style lasts about a week.”

“Crazy,” I said, because I had to say something.

“It’s the money,” he said again. “They don’t know what to do with it, so they get into change for change’s sake. It infects everything. Guns, too, of course. Like these particular guys, they liked Heckler and Koch MP5Ks. Now they have Uzis, according to you. You see what I mean? With these guys, even their weapons are fashion items, the same as their sneakers, or their jackets. Or their actual product, which brings everything full circle. Their demands change all the time, in every arena. Cars, even. They like Japanese mostly, which is about fashions coming in from the West Coast, I guess. But one week it’s Toyotas, next week it’s Hondas. Then it’s Nissans. The Nissan Maxima was a big favorite, two, three years ago. Like the one you stole. Then it’s Lexuses. It’s a mania. Watches, too. They’re wearing Swatches, then they’re wearing Rolexes. They don’t see a difference. Complete madness. Of course, being in the market, speaking as a supplier, I’m not complaining. Market obsolescence is what we aim for, but it gets a little rapid at times. Gets hard to keep up.”

“So you’re in the market?”

“What’s your guess?” he said. “You thought I was an accountant?”

“I thought you were a rug importer.”

“I am,” he said. “I import a lot of rugs.”

“OK.”

“But that’s fundamentally a cover,” he said. Then he laughed. “You think you don’t have to take precautions these days, selling athletic shoes to people like that?”

He kept on laughing. There was a lot of nervous tension in there. I drove on. He calmed down. Looked through the side window, looked through the windshield. Started talking again, like it served his own purpose as much as it served mine.

“Do you ever wear sneakers?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Because I’m looking for somebody to explain it to me. There’s no rational difference between a Reebok and a Nike, is there?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I mean, they’re probably made in the same factory. Out in Vietnam somewhere. They’re probably the same shoe until they put the logo on.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I really wouldn’t know. I was never an athlete. Never wore that type of footwear.”

“Is there a difference between a Toyota and a Honda?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never had a POV.”

“What’s a POV?”

“A privately owned vehicle,” I said. “What the army would call a Toyota or a Honda. Or a Nissan or a Lexus.”

“So what do you know?”

“I know the difference between a Swatch and a Rolex.”

“OK, what’s the difference?”

“There isn’t one,” I said. “They both tell the time.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I know the difference between an Uzi and a Heckler and Koch.”

He turned on his seat. “Good. Great. Explain it to me. Why would these guys junk their Heckler and Kochs in favor of Uzis?”

The Cadillac hummed onward. I shrugged at the wheel. Fought a yawn. It was a nonsense question, of course. The Hartford guys hadn’t junked their MP5Ks in favor of Uzis. Not in reality. Eliot and Duffy hadn’t been aware of Hartford’s weapon du jour and they hadn’t been aware that Beck knew anything about Hartford, that’s all, so they had given their guys Uzis, probably because they were lying around closest to hand.

But theoretically it was a very good question. An Uzi is a fine, fine weapon. A little heavy, maybe. Not the world’s fastest cyclic rate, which might matter to some people. Not much rifling inside the barrel, which compromises accuracy a little bit. On the other hand, it’s very reliable, very simple, totally proven, and you can get a forty-round magazine for it. A fine weapon. But any Heckler & Koch MP5 derivative is a better weapon. They fire the same ammunition faster and harder. They’re very, very accurate. As accurate as a good rifle, in some hands. Very reliable. Flat-out better. A great 1970s design up against a great 1950s design. Doesn’t hold true in all fields, but with military ordnance, modern is better, every time.

“There’s no reason,” I said. “Makes no sense to me.”

“Exactly,” Beck said. “It’s about fashion. It’s an arbitrary whim. It’s a compulsion. Keeps everybody in business, but drives everybody nuts, too.”

His cell phone rang. He juggled it up out of his pocket and answered it by saying his name, short and sharp. And a little nervously. Beck. It sounded like a cough. He listened for a long time. Made his caller repeat an address and directions and then clicked off and put the phone back in his pocket.

“That was Duke,” he said. “He made some calls. Our boys aren’t anywhere in Hartford. But they’re supposed to have some country place a little ways south and east. Duke figures that’s where they’re holed up. So that’s where we’re going.”

“What are we going to do when we get there?”

“Nothing spectacular,” Beck said. “We don’t need to make a big deal out of it. Nothing neat, nothing fancy. Situation like this, I favor just mowing them down. An impression of inevitability, you know? But casual. Like you mess with me, then punishment is definitely swift and certain, but not like I’m in a sweat about it.”

“You lose customers that way.”

“I can replace them. I’ve got people lining up around the block. That’s the truly great thing about this business. Supply and demand is tilted way in favor of demand.”

“You going to do this yourself?”

He shook his head. “That’s what you and Duke are for.”

“Me? I thought I was just driving.”

“You already wasted two of them. Couple more shouldn’t bother you.”

I turned the heater down a click and worked on keeping my eyes open. Bloody wars, I said to myself.

We looped halfway around Boston and then he told me to strike out south and west on the Mass Pike and then I-84. We did sixty more miles, which took about an hour. He didn’t want me to drive too fast. He didn’t want to be conspicuous. Phony plates, a bag full of automatic weapons on the back seat, he didn’t want the Highway Patrol to get involved. I could see the sense in that. I drove like an automaton. I hadn’t slept in forty hours. But I wasn’t regretting passing up the chance of a nap in Duffy’s motel. I was very happy with the way I had spent my time there, even if she wasn’t.

“Next exit,” he said.

Right then I-84 was spearing straight through the city of Hartford. There was low cloud and the city lights made it orange. The exit led to a wide road that narrowed after a mile and headed south and east into open country. There was blackness ahead. There were a few closed country stores, bait and tackle, beer on ice, motorcycle parts, and then nothing at all except the dark shape of trees.

“Make the next right,” he said, eight minutes later.

I turned onto a smaller road. The surface was bad and there were random curves. Darkness everywhere. I had to concentrate. I wasn’t looking forward to driving back.

“Keep going,” he said.

We did eight or nine more miles. I had no idea where we were.

“OK,” he said. “Pretty soon we should see Duke waiting up ahead.”

A mile and a half later my headlight beams picked out Duke’s rear plate. He was parked on the shoulder. His car was canted over where the grade fell away into a ditch.

“Stop behind him.”

I pulled up nose-to-tail with the Lincoln and jammed the selector into Park. I wanted to go to sleep. Five minutes would have made a lot of difference to me. But Duke swung out of his seat as soon as he identified us and hurried around to Beck’s window. Beck buzzed the glass down and Duke squatted and leaned his face inside.

“Their place is about two miles ahead,” he said. “Long curved driveway on the left. Not much more than a dirt path. We can make it about halfway up in the cars, if we do it quiet and slow, no lights. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”

Beck said nothing. Just buzzed his window up again. Duke went back to his car. It bounced off the shoulder and straightened up. I followed him through the two miles. We killed our lights a hundred yards short of the driveway and made the turn. Took it slow. There was some moonlight. The Lincoln ahead of me lurched and rolled as it crawled over ruts. The Cadillac did the same thing, out of phase, up where the Lincoln was down, corkscrewing right where the Lincoln was twisting left. We slowed to a crawl. Used idle speed to inch us closer. Then Duke’s brake lights flared bright and he stopped dead. I stopped behind him. Beck twisted around in his seat and hauled the sports bag through the gap between us and unzipped it on his knee. Handed me one of the MP5Ks from it, with two spare thirty-round magazines.

“Get the job done,” he said.

“You waiting here?”

He nodded. I broke the gun down and checked it. Put it back together and jacked a round into the chamber and clicked the safety on. Then I put the spare mags in my pockets very carefully so they wouldn’t rattle against the Glock and the PSM. Eased myself out of the car. Stood and breathed the cold night air. It was a relief. It woke me up. I could smell a lake nearby, and trees, and leaf mold on the ground. I could hear a small waterfall in the distance, and the mufflers on the cars ticking gently as they cooled. There was a gentle breeze in the trees. Other than that there was nothing to hear. Just absolute silence.

Duke was waiting for me. I could see tension and impatience in the way he was holding himself. He had done this stuff before. That was clear. He looked exactly like a veteran cop before a major bust. Some degree of routine familiarity, mixed in with an acute awareness that no two situations are ever quite alike. He had his Steyr in his hand, with the long thirty-round magazine in it. It protruded way down out of the grip. Made the gun look bigger and uglier than ever.

“Let’s go, asshole,” he whispered.

I stayed five feet behind him and walked on the opposite side of the driveway, like an infantryman would. I had to be convincing, like I was worried about presenting a grouped target. I knew the place was going to be empty, but he didn’t.

We walked on around a bend and saw the house in front of us. There was a light burning in a window. On a security timer, probably. Duke slowed and stopped.

“See a door?” he whispered.

I peered into the gloom. Saw a small porch. Pointed at it.

“You wait at the entrance,” I whispered back. “I’ll check the lighted window.”

He was happy enough to agree to that. We made it to the porch. He stopped there and waited and I peeled off and looped around toward the window. Dropped to the ground and crawled the last ten feet in the dirt. Raised my head at the sill and peered inside. There was a low-wattage bulb burning in a table lamp with a yellow plastic shade. There were battered sofas and armchairs. Cold ash from an old fire in the hearth. Pine paneling on the walls. No people.

I crawled backward until the light spill let Duke see me and held two forked fingers below my eyes. Standard sniper-spotter visual code for I see. Then I held my hand palm out, all my fingers extended. I see five people. Then I went into a complicated series of gestures that might have indicated their disposition and their weaponry. I knew Duke wouldn’t understand them. I didn’t understand them either. As far as I knew they were entirely meaningless. I had never been a sniper-spotter. But the whole thing looked real good. It looked professional and clandestine and urgent.

I crawled back ten more feet and then stood up and walked quietly back to join him at the door.

“They’re out of it,” I whispered. “Drunk or stoned. We get a good jump, we’ll be home and dry.”

“Weapons?”

“Plenty, but nothing within reach.” I pointed at the porch. “Looks like there’s going to be a short hallway on the other side. Outer door, inner door, then the hallway. You take left, I’ll take right. We’ll wait there in the hallway. Take them down when they come out of the room to see what the noise is all about.”

“You giving the orders now?”

“I did the recon.”

“Just don’t screw up, asshole.”

“You either.”

“I never do,” he said.

“OK,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. “You get in my way, I’ll be more than happy to put you down with the rest of them, no hesitation.”

“We’re on the same side here.”

“Are we?” he said. “I think we’re about to find out.”

“Relax,” I said.

He paused. Tensed. Nodded in the dark. “I’ll hit the outer door, you hit the inner. Like leapfrog.”

“OK,” I said again. I turned away and smiled. Just like a veteran cop. If I hit the inner door, he would leapfrog through it first and I would go second, and the second guy is the guy who usually gets shot, given normal reaction times from the enemy.

“Safeties off,” I whispered.

I clicked the H&K to single-round fire and he clicked the catch on his Steyr to the right. I nodded and he nodded and kicked in the outer door. I was right there on his shoulder and slid past him and kicked in the inner door without breaking stride. He slid past me and jumped left and I followed him and went right. He was good enough. We made a pretty good team. We were crouched in perfect position even before the shattered doors had stopped swinging on their hinges. He was staring ahead at the entry to the room in front of us. He had the Steyr in a fixed two-handed grip, arms straight out, eyes wide open. He was breathing hard. Almost panting. Getting himself through a long moment of danger, the best way he could. I pulled Angel Doll’s PSM out of my pocket. Held it left-handed and snicked the safety off and scrambled across the floor and jammed it in his ear.

“Keep very quiet,” I said to him. “And make a choice. I’m going to ask you one question. Just one. If you lie, or if you refuse to answer, I’m going to shoot you in the head. You understand?”

He held perfectly still, five seconds, six, eight, ten. Stared desperately at the door in front of him.

“Don’t worry, asshole,” I said. “There’s nobody here. They were all arrested last week. By the government.”

He was motionless.

“You understand what I said before? About the question?”

He nodded, hesitantly, awkwardly, with the gun still jammed hard in his ear.

“You answer it, or I shoot you in the head. Got it?”

He nodded again.

“OK, here it comes,” I said. “You ready?”

He nodded, just once.

“Where is Teresa Daniel?” I asked.

There was a long pause. He turned half toward me. I tracked my hand around to keep the PSM’s muzzle in place. Realization dawned slowly in his eyes.

“In your dreams,” he said.

I shot him in the head. Just jerked the muzzle out of his ear and fired once left-handed into his right temple. The sound was shattering in the dark. Blood and brain and bone chips hit the far wall. The muzzle flash burned his hair. Then I fired a double-tap from the H&K right-handed into the ceiling and fired another from the PSM left-handed into the floor. Switched the H&K to automatic fire and stood up and emptied it point-blank into his body. Picked up his Steyr from where it had fallen and blasted the ceiling with it, again and again, fifteen fast shots, bam bam bam bam, half the magazine. The hallway was instantly full of bitter smoke and chips of wood and plaster were flying everywhere. I switched magazines on the H&K and sprayed the walls, all around. The noise was deafening. Spent shell cases were spitting out and bouncing around and raining down everywhere. The H&K clicked empty and I fired the rest of the PSM’s ammo into the hallway wall and kicked open the door to the lighted room and blew up the table lamp with the Steyr. I found a side table and tossed it through the window and used up the second spare magazine for the H&K by spraying the trees in the distance while I fired the Steyr left-handed into the floor until it clicked empty. Then I piled the Steyr and the H&K and the PSM together in my arms and ran for it with my head ringing like a bell. I had fired a hundred and twenty-eight rounds in about fifteen seconds. They had deafened me. They must have sounded like World War Three to Beck.

I ran straight down the driveway. I was coughing and trailing gunsmoke like a cloud. I headed for the cars. Beck had already scrambled across into the Cadillac’s driver’s seat. He saw me coming and opened his door an inch. Faster than using the window.

“Ambush,” I said. I was out of breath and I could hear my own voice loud inside my head. “There were at least eight of them.”

“Where’s Duke?”

“Dead. We got to go. Right now, Beck.”

He froze for a second. Then he moved.

“Take his car,” he said.

He already had the Cadillac rolling. He jammed his foot down and slammed his door and reversed down the driveway and out of sight. I jumped into the Lincoln. Fired it up. Stuck the selector in Reverse and got one elbow up on the back of the seat and stared through the rear window and hit the gas. We shot out backward onto the road one after the other and slewed around and took off again north, side by side like a stoplight drag race. We howled around the curves and fought the camber and stayed up around seventy miles an hour. Didn’t slow until we reached the turn that would take us back toward Hartford. Beck edged ahead of me and I fell in behind him and followed. He drove five fast miles and turned in at a closed package store and parked at the back of the lot. I parked ten feet from him and just lay back in the seat and let him come to me. I was too tired to get out. He ran around the Cadillac’s hood and pulled my door open.

“It was an ambush?” he said.

I nodded. “They were waiting for us. Eight of them. Maybe more. It was a massacre.”

He said nothing. There was nothing for him to say. I picked up Duke’s Steyr from the seat beside me and handed it over.

“I recovered it,” I said.

“Why?”

“I thought you might want me to. I thought it might be traceable.”

He nodded. “It isn’t. But that was good thinking.”

I gave him the H&K, too. He stepped back to the Cadillac and I watched him zip both pieces into his bag. Then he turned around. Clenched both hands and looked up at the black sky. Then at me.

“See any faces?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Too dark. But we hit one of them. He dropped this.”

I handed him the PSM. It was like punching him in the gut. He turned pale and put out a hand and steadied himself against the Lincoln’s roof.

“What?” I said.

He looked away. “I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

“You hit somebody and he dropped this?”

“I think Duke hit him.”

“You saw it happen?”

“Just shapes,” I said. “It was dark. Lots of muzzle flashes. Duke was firing and he hit a shape and this was on the floor when I came out.”

“This is Angel Doll’s gun.”

“Are you sure?”

“Million to one it isn’t. You know what it is?”

“Never saw one like it.”

“It’s a special KGB pistol,” he said. “From the old Soviet Union. Very rare in this country.”

Then he stepped away into the darkness of the lot. I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep. Even five seconds would have made a difference.

“Reacher,” he called. “What evidence did you leave?”

I opened my eyes.

“Duke’s body,” I said.

“That won’t lead anybody anywhere. Ballistics?”

I smiled in the dark. Imagined Hartford PD forensic scientists trying to make sense of the trajectories. Walls, floors, ceilings. They would conclude the hallway had been full of heavily-armed disco dancers.

“A lot of bullets and shell cases,” I said.

“Untraceable,” he said.

He moved deeper into the dark. I closed my eyes again. I had left no fingerprints. No part of me had touched any part of the house except for the soles of my shoes. And I hadn’t fired Duffy’s Glock. I had heard something about a central registry somewhere that stored data on rifling marks. Maybe her Glock was a part of it. But I hadn’t used it.

“Reacher,” Beck called. “Drive me home.”

I opened my eyes.

“What about this car?” I called back.

“Abandon it here.”

I yawned and forced myself to move and used the tail of my coat to wipe the wheel and all the controls I had touched. The unused Glock nearly fell out of my pocket. Beck didn’t notice. He was so preoccupied I could have taken it out and twirled it around my finger like the Sundance Kid and he wouldn’t have noticed. I wiped the door handle and then leaned in and pulled the keys and wiped them and tossed them into the scrub at the edge of the lot.

“Let’s go,” Beck said.

He was silent until we were thirty miles north and east of Hartford. Then he started talking. He had spent the time getting it all worked out in his mind.

“The phone call yesterday,” he said. “They were laying their plans. Doll was working with them all along.”

“From when?”

“From the start.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Duke went south and got the Toyota’s plate number for you. Then you gave it to Doll and told him to trace it. But why would Doll tell you the truth about the trace? If they were his buddies, he’d have dead-ended it, surely. Led you away from them. Left you in the dark.”

Beck smiled a superior smile.

“No,” he said. “They were setting up the ambush. That was the point of the phone call. It was good improvisation on their part. The kidnap gambit failed, so they switched tactics. They let Doll point us in the right direction. So that what happened tonight could happen.”

I nodded slowly, like I was deferring to his point of view. The best way to clinch a pending promotion is to let them think you’re just a little dumber than they are. It had worked for me before, three straight times, in the military.

“Did Doll actually know what you were planning for tonight?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We were all discussing it, yesterday. In detail. When you saw us talking, in the office.”

“So he set you up.”

“Yes,” he said again. “He locked up last night and then left Portland and drove all the way down to wait with them. Told them all who was coming, and when, and why.”

I said nothing. Just thought about Doll’s car. It was about a mile away from Beck’s office. I began to wish I had hidden it better.

“But there’s one big question,” Beck said. “Was it just Doll?”

“Or?”

He went quiet. Then he shrugged.

“Or any of the others that work with him,” he said.

The ones you don’t control, I thought. Quinn’s people.

“Or all of them together,” he said.

He started thinking again, another thirty, forty miles. He didn’t speak another word until we were back on I-95, heading north around Boston.

“Duke is dead,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Here it comes, I thought.

“I knew him a long time,” he said.

I said nothing.

“You’re going to have to take over,” he said. “I need somebody right now. Somebody I can trust. And you’ve done well for me so far.”

“Promotion?” I said.

“You’re qualified.”

“Head of security?”

“At least temporarily,” he said. “Permanently, if you’d like.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Just remember what I know,” he said. “I own you.”

I was quiet for a mile. “You going to pay me anytime soon?”

“You’ll get your five grand plus what Duke got on top.”

“I’ll need some background,” I said. “I can’t help you without it.”

He nodded.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Then he went quiet again. Next time I looked, he was fast asleep beside me. Some kind of a shock reaction. He thought his world was falling apart. I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men’s shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast bloody wars and dread diseases, because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that’s how it’s always been, in the military.

I made it back to the Maine coast purely on autopilot. I couldn’t recall a single mile of the drive. I was numb with exhaustion. Every part of me ached. Paulie was slow about opening the gate. I guess we got him out of bed. He made a big point about staring in at me. I dropped Beck at the front door and put the car in the garage. Stashed the Glock and the spare magazines just for safety’s sake and went in through the back door. The metal detector beeped at the car keys. I dropped them on the kitchen table. I was hungry, but I was too tired to eat. I climbed all the stairs and fell down on my bed and went to sleep, fully dressed, overcoat and shoes and all.

The weather woke me six hours later. Horizontal rain was battering my window. It sounded like gravel on the glass. I rolled off the bed and checked the view. The sky was iron gray and thick with cloud and the sea was raging. It was laced with angry foam a half-mile out. The waves were swamping the rocks. No birds. It was nine in the morning. Day fourteen, a Friday. I lay down on the bed again and stared at the ceiling and tracked back seventy-two hours to the morning of day eleven, when Duffy gave me her seven-point plan. One, two, and three, take a lot of care. I was doing OK under that heading. I was still alive, anyway. Four, find Teresa Daniel. No real progress there. Five, nail down some evidence against Beck. I didn’t have any. Not a thing. I hadn’t even seen him do anything wrong, except maybe operate a vehicle with phony license plates and carry a bag full of submachine guns that were probably illegal in all four states he’d been in. Six, find Quinn. No progress there, either. Seven, get the hell out. That item was going to have to wait. Then Duffy had kissed me on the cheek. Left doughnut sugar on my face.

I got up again and locked myself in my bathroom to check for e-mail. My bedroom door wasn’t locked anymore. I guessed Richard Beck wouldn’t presume to walk in on me. Or his mother. But his father might. He owned me. I was promoted, but I was still walking a tightrope. I sat on the floor and took my shoe off. Opened the heel and switched the machine on. You’ve Got Mail! It was a message from Duffy: Beck’s containers unloaded and trucked to warehouse. Not inspected by Customs. Total of five. Largest shipment for some time.

I hit reply and typed: Are you maintaining surveillance?

Ninety seconds later she answered: Yes.

I sent: I got promoted.

She sent: Exploit it.

I sent: I enjoyed yesterday.

She sent: Save your battery.

I smiled and switched the unit off and put it back in my heel. I needed a shower, but first I needed breakfast, and then I needed to find clean clothes. I unlocked the bathroom and walked through my room and downstairs to the kitchen. The cook was back in business. She was serving toast and tea to the Irish girl and dictating a long shopping list. The Saab keys were on the table. The Cadillac keys weren’t. I scratched around and ate everything I could find and then went looking for Beck. He wasn’t around. Neither was Elizabeth or Richard. I went back to the kitchen.

“Where’s the family?” I asked.

The maid looked up and said nothing. She had put a raincoat on, ready to go out shopping.

“Where’s Mr. Duke?” the cook asked.

“Indisposed,” I said. “I’m replacing him. Where are the Becks?”

“They went out.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked out at the weather. “Who drove?”

The cook looked down at the floor.

“Paulie,” she said.

“When?”

“An hour ago.”

“OK,” I said. I was still wearing my coat. I had put it on when I left Duffy’s motel and I hadn’t taken it off since. I went straight out the back door and into the gale. The rain was lashing and it tasted of salt. It was mixed with sea spray. The waves were hitting the rocks like bombs. White foam was bursting thirty feet in the air. I ducked my face into my collar and ran around to the garage block. Into the walled courtyard. It was sheltered in there. The first garage was empty. The doors were standing open. The Cadillac was gone. The mechanic was inside the third garage, doing something by himself. The maid ran into the courtyard. I watched her haul open the fourth garage’s doors. She was getting soaked. She went in and a moment later backed the old Saab out. It rocked in the wind. The rain turned the dust on it to a thin film of gray mud that ran down the sides like rivers. She drove away, off to market. I listened to the waves. Started worrying about how high they might be getting. So I hugged the courtyard wall and looped all the way around it to the seaward side. Found my little dip in the rocks. The weed stalks around it were wet and bedraggled. The dip was full of water. It was rainwater. Not seawater. It was safely above the tide. The waves hadn’t reached it. But rainwater was all it was full of. Apart from the water, it was completely empty. No bundle. No rag, no Glock. The spare magazines were gone, Doll’s keys were gone, the bradawl was gone, and the chisel was gone.

CHAPTER 8

I came around to the front of the house and faced west and stood in the lashing rain and stared at the high stone wall. Right at that moment I came as close as I ever got to bailing out. It would have been easy. The gate was wide open. I guessed the maid had left it that way. She had gotten out in the rain to open it and she hadn’t wanted to get out again to close it. Paulie wasn’t there to do it for her. He was out, driving the Cadillac. So the gate was open. And unguarded. The first time I had ever seen it that way. I could have slipped straight through it. But I didn’t. I stayed.

Time was part of the reason. Beyond the gate was at least twelve miles of empty road before the first significant turning. Twelve miles. And there were no cars to use. The Becks were out in the Cadillac and the maid was out in the Saab. We had abandoned the Lincoln in Connecticut. So I would be on foot. Three hours’ fast walk. I didn’t have three hours. Almost certainly the Cadillac would return within three hours. And there was nowhere to hide on the road. The shoulders were bare and rocky. It was an exposed situation. Beck would pass me head-on. I would be walking. He would be in a car. And he had a gun. And Paulie. I had nothing.

Therefore strategy was part of the reason, too. To be caught in the act of walking away would confirm whatever Beck might think he knew, assuming it was Beck who had discovered the stash. But if I stayed I had some kind of a chance. Staying would imply innocence. I could deflect suspicion onto Duke. I could say it must have been Duke’s stash. Beck might find that plausible. Maybe. Duke had enjoyed the freedom to go wherever he wanted, any time of night or day. I had been locked up and supervised the whole time. And Duke wasn’t around anymore to deny anything. But I would be right there in Beck’s face, talking loud and fast and persuasive. He might buy it.

Hope was part of the reason, too. Maybe it wasn’t Beck who had found the stash. Maybe it was Richard, walking the shoreline. His reaction would be unpredictable. I figured it at fifty-fifty whether he would approach me or his father first. Or maybe it was Elizabeth who had found it. She was familiar with the rocks out there. She knew them well. Knew their secrets. I guessed she had spent plenty of time on them, for one reason or another. And her reaction would favor me. Probably.

The rain was part of the reason for staying, too. It was cold and hard and relentless. I was too tired to road march three hours in the rain. I knew it was just weakness. But I couldn’t move my feet. I wanted to go back inside the house. I wanted to get warm and eat again and rest.

Fear of failure was part of the reason, too. If I walked away now I would never come back. I knew that. And I had invested two weeks. I had made good progress. People were depending on me. I had been beaten many times. But I had never just quit. Not once. Not ever. If I quit now, it would eat me up the rest of my days. Jack Reacher, quitter. Walked away when the going got tough.

I stood there with the rain driving against my back. Time, strategy, hope, the weather, fear of failure. All parts of the reason for staying. All right there on the list.

But top of the list was a woman.

Not Susan Duffy, not Teresa Daniel. A woman from long ago, from another life. She was called Dominique Kohl. I was a captain in the army when I met her. I was one year away from my final promotion to major. I got to my office early one morning and found the usual stack of paperwork on my desk. Most of it was junk. But among it was a copy of an order assigning an E-7 Sergeant First Class Kohl, D.E. to my unit. Back then we were in a phase where all written references to personnel had to be gender-neutral. The name Kohl sounded German to me and I pictured some big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. Big red hands, big red face, older than me, maybe thirty-five, with a whitewall haircut. Later in the morning the clerk buzzed through to say the guy was reporting for duty. I made him wait ten minutes just for the fun of it and then called him in. But the him was a her and she wasn’t big and ugly. She was wearing a skirt. She was about twenty-nine years old. She wasn’t tall, but she was too athletic to be called petite. And she was too pretty to be called athletic. It was like she had been exquisitely molded from the stuff they make the inside of tennis balls out of. There was an elasticity about her. A firmness and a softness, all at the same time. She looked sculpted, but she had no hard edges. She stood rigidly at attention in front of my desk and snapped a smart salute. I didn’t return it, which was rude of me. I just stared at her for five whole seconds.

“At ease, Sergeant,” I said.

She handed me her copy of her orders and her personnel file. We called them service jackets. They contained everything anybody needed to know. I left her standing easy in front of me while I read hers through, which was rude of me too, but there was no other option. I didn’t have a visitor’s chair. Back then the army didn’t provide them below the rank of full colonel. She stood completely still, hands clasped behind her back, staring at a point in the air exactly a foot above my head.

Her jacket was impressive. She had done a little of everything and succeeded at it all in spectacular fashion. Expert marksman, specialist in a number of skills, tremendous arrest record, excellent clear-up percentage. She was a good leader and had been promoted fast. She had killed two people, one with a firearm, one unarmed, both incidents rated righteous by the subsequent investigating panels. She was a rising star. That was clear. I realized that her transfer represented a substantial compliment to me, in some superior’s mind.

“Glad to have you aboard,” I said.

“Sir, thank you, sir,” she said, with her eyes fixed in space.

“I don’t do all that shit,” I said. “I’m not afraid I’m going to vaporize if you look at me and I don’t really like one sir in a sentence, let alone two, OK?”

“OK,” she said. She caught on fast. She never called me sir again, the whole rest of her life.

“Want to jump right in at the deep end?” I said.

She nodded. “Sure.”

I rattled open a drawer and slid a slim file out and passed it across to her. She didn’t look at it. Just held it one-handed down by her side and looked at me.

“Aberdeen, Maryland,” I said. “At the proving grounds. There’s a weapons designer acting weird. Confidential tip from a buddy who’s worried about espionage. But I think it’s more likely blackmail. Could be a long and sensitive investigation.”

“No problem,” she said.

She was the reason I didn’t walk out through the open and unguarded gate.

I went inside instead and took a long hot shower. Nobody likes to risk confrontation when they’re wet and naked, but I was way past caring. I guess I was feeling fatalistic. Whatever, bring it on. Then I wrapped up in a towel and went down a flight and found Duke’s room. Stole another set of his clothes. I dressed in them and put my own shoes and jacket and coat on. Went back to the kitchen to wait. It was warm in there. The way the sea was pounding and the rain was beating on the windows made it feel warmer still. It was like a sanctuary. The cook was in there, doing something with a chicken.

“Got coffee?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Caffeine,” she said.

I looked at the back of her head.

“Caffeine is the whole point of coffee,” I said. “Anyway, tea’s got caffeine, and I’ve seen you make that.”

“Tea has tannin,” she said.

“And caffeine,” I said.

“So drink tea instead,” she said.

I looked around the room. There was a wooden block standing vertically on a counter with black knife handles protruding at angles. There were bottles and glasses. I guessed under the sink there might be ammonia sprays. Maybe some chlorine bleach. Enough improvised weapons for a close-quarters fight. If Beck was even a little inhibited about shooting in a crowded room, I might be OK. I might be able to take him before he took me. All I would need was half a second.

“You want coffee?” the cook asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“All you have to do is ask.”

“I did ask.”

“No, you asked if there was any,” she said. “Not the same thing.”

“So will you make me some? Please?”

“What happened to Mr. Duke?”

I paused. Maybe she was planning on marrying him, like in old movies where the cook marries the butler and they retire and live happily ever after.

“He was killed,” I said.

“Last night?”

I nodded. “In an ambush.”

“Where?”

“In Connecticut.”

“OK,” she said. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

She set the machine going. I watched where she got everything from. The filter papers were stored in a cupboard next to the paper napkins. The coffee itself was in the freezer. The machine was old and slow. It made a loud ponderous gulping sound. Combined with the rain lashing on the windows and the waves pounding on the rocks it meant I didn’t hear the Cadillac come back. First I knew, the back door was thrown open and Elizabeth Beck burst in with Richard crowding after her and Beck himself bringing up the rear. They were moving with the kind of exhilarated breathless urgency people show after a short fast dash through heavy rain.

“Hello,” Elizabeth said to me.

I nodded. Said nothing.

“Coffee,” Richard said. “Great.”

“We went out for breakfast,” Elizabeth said. “Old Orchard Beach. There’s a little diner there we like.”

“Paulie figured we shouldn’t wake you,” Beck said. “He figured you looked pretty tired last night. So he offered to drive us instead.”

“OK,” I said. Thought: Did Paulie find my stash? Did he tell them yet?

“You want coffee?” Richard asked me. He was over by the machine, rattling cups in his hand.

“Black,” I said. “Thanks.”

He brought me a cup. Beck was peeling off his coat and shaking water off it onto the floor.

“Bring it through,” he called. “We need to talk.”

He headed out to the hallway and looked back like he expected me to follow him. I took my coffee with me. It was hot and steaming. I could toss it in his face if I had to. He led me toward the square paneled room we had used before. I was carrying my cup, which slowed me down a little. He got there well ahead of me. When I entered he was already all the way over by one of the windows with his back to me, looking out at the rain. When he turned around he had a gun in his hand. I just stood still. I was too far away to use the coffee. Maybe fourteen feet. It would have looped up and curled and dispersed in the air and probably missed him altogether.

The gun was a Beretta M9 Special Edition, which was a civilian Beretta 92FS all dressed up to look exactly like a standard military-issue M9. It used nine-millimeter Parabellum ammunition. It had a fifteen-round magazine and military dot-and-post sights. I remembered with bizarre clarity that the retail price had been $861. I had carried an M9 for thirteen years. I had fired many thousands of practice rounds with it and more than a few for real. Most of them had hit their targets, because it’s an accurate weapon. Most of the targets had been destroyed, because it’s a powerful weapon. It had served me well. I even remembered the original sales pitch from the ordnance people: It’s got manageable recoil and it’s easy to strip in the field. They had repeated it like a mantra. Over and over again. I guess there were contracts at stake. There was some controversy. Navy SEALs hated it. They claimed they’d had dozens blow up in their faces. They even made up a cadence song about it: No way are you a Navy Seal, until you eat some Italian steel. But the M9 always served me well. It was a fine weapon, in my opinion. Beck’s example looked like a brand-new gun. The finish was immaculate. Dewy with oil. There was luminescent paint on the sights. It glowed softly in the gloom.

I waited.

Beck just stood there, holding the gun. Then he moved. He slapped the barrel into his left palm and took his right hand away. Leaned over the oak table and held the thing out to me, butt-first, left-handed, politely, like he was a clerk in a store.

“Hope you like it,” he said. “I thought you might feel at home with it. Duke was into the exotics, like that Steyr he had. But I figured you’d be more comfortable with the Beretta, you know, given your background.”

I stepped forward. Put my coffee on the table. Took the gun from him. Ejected the magazine, checked the chamber, worked the action, looked down the barrel. It wasn’t spiked. It wasn’t a trick. It was a working piece. The Parabellums were real. It was brand new. It had never been fired. I slapped it back together and just held it for a moment. It was like shaking hands with an old friend. Then I cocked it and locked it and put it in my pocket.

“Thanks,” I said.

He put his hand in his own pocket and came out with two spare magazines.

“Take these,” he said.

He passed them across. I took them.

“I’ll get you more later,” he said.

“OK,” I said.

“You ever tried laser sights?”

I shook my head.

“There’s a company called Laser Devices,” he said. “They do a universal handgun sight that mounts under the barrel. Plus a little flashlight that clips under the sight. Very cool device.”

“Gives a little red spot?”

He nodded. Smiled. “Nobody likes to get lit up with that little red spot, that’s for sure.”

“Expensive?”

“Not really,” he said. “Couple hundred bucks.”

“How much weight does it add?”

“Four and a half ounces,” he said.

“All at the front?”

“It helps, actually,” he said. “Stops the muzzle kicking upward when you fire. It adds about thirteen percent of the weight of the gun. More with the flashlight, of course. Maybe forty, forty-five ounces total. Still way less than those Anacondas you were using. What were they, fifty-nine ounces?”

“Unloaded,” I said. “More with six shells in them. Am I ever going to get them back?”

“I put them away somewhere,” he said. “I’ll get them for you later.”

“Thanks,” I said again.

“You want to try the laser?”

“I’m happy without it,” I said.

He nodded again. “Your choice. But I want the best protection I can get.”

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“I’ve got to go out now,” he said. “Alone. I’ve got an appointment.”

“You don’t want me to drive you?”

“This sort of appointment, I have to do them alone. You stay here. We’ll talk later. Move into Duke’s room, OK? I like my security closer to where I sleep.”

I put the spare magazines in my other pocket.

“OK,” I said.

He walked past me into the hallway, back toward the kitchen.

It was the kind of mental somersault that can slow you down. Extreme tension, and then extreme puzzlement. I walked to the front of the house and watched from a hallway window. Saw the Cadillac sweep around the carriage circle in the rain and head for the gate. It paused in front of it and Paulie came out of the gatehouse. They must have dropped him there on their way back from breakfast. Beck must have driven the final length of the driveway himself. Or Richard, or Elizabeth. Paulie opened the gate. The Cadillac drove through it and away into the rain and the mist. Paulie closed the gate. He was wearing a slicker the size of a circus tent.

I shook myself and turned back and went to find Richard. He had the kind of guileless eyes that hide nothing. He was still in the kitchen, drinking his coffee.

“You walk the shoreline this morning?” I asked him.

I asked it innocently and amiably, like I was just making conversation. If he had anything to hide, I would know. He would go red, look away, stammer, shuffle his feet. But he did none of those things. He was completely relaxed. He looked straight at me.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “Seen the weather?”

I nodded.

“Pretty bad,” I said.

“I’m quitting college,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because of last night,” he said. “The ambush. Those Connecticut guys are still on the loose. Not safe to go back. I’m staying right here for a spell.”

“You OK with that?”

He nodded. “It was mostly a waste of time.”

I looked away. The law of unintended consequences. I had just short-circuited a kid’s education. Maybe ruined his life. But then, I was about to send his father to jail. Or waste him altogether. So I guessed a BA didn’t matter very much, compared to that.

I went to find Elizabeth Beck. She would be harder to read. I debated my approach and couldn’t come up with anything guaranteed to work. I found her in a parlor tucked into the northwest corner of the house. She was in an armchair. She had a book open on her lap. It was Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Paperback. I had seen the movie. I remembered Julie Christie, and the music. “Lara’s Theme.” Train journeys. And a lot of snow. Some girl had made me go.

“It’s not you,” she said.

“What’s not me?”

“You’re not the government spy.”

I breathed out. She wouldn’t say that if she’d found my stash.

“Exactly,” I said. “Your husband just gave me a gun.”

“You’re not smart enough to be a government spy.”

“Aren’t I?”

She shook her head. “Richard was desperate for a cup of coffee just now. When we came in.”

“So?”

“Do you think he would have been if we’d really been out for breakfast? He could have had all the coffee he wanted.”

“So where did you go?”

“We were called to a meeting.”

“With who?”

She just shook her head, like she couldn’t speak the name.

“Paulie didn’t offer to drive us,” she said. “He summoned us. Richard had to wait in the car.”

“But you went in?”

She nodded. “They’ve got a guy called Troy.”

“Silly name,” I said.

“But a very smart guy,” she said. “He’s young, and he’s very good with computers. I guess he’s what they call a hacker.”

“And?”

“He just got partial access to one of the government systems in Washington. He found out they put a federal agent in here. Undercover. At first they assumed it was you. Then they checked a little further and found out it was a woman and she’s actually been here for weeks.”

I stared at her, not understanding. Teresa Daniel was off the books. The government computers knew nothing about her. Then I remembered Duffy’s laptop, with the Justice Department logo as the screensaver. I remembered the modem wire, trailing across the desk, going through the complex adapter, going into the wall, hooking up with all the other computers in the world. Had Duffy been compiling private reports? For her own use? For postaction justification?

“I hate to think what they’re going to do,” Elizabeth said. “To a woman.”

She shuddered visibly and looked away. I made it as far as the hallway. Then I stopped dead. There were no cars. And twelve miles of road before I would even begin to get anywhere. Three hours’ fast walk. Two hours, running.

“Forget it,” Elizabeth called. “Nothing to do with you.”

I turned around and stared in at her.

“Forget it,” she said again. “They’ll be doing it right now. It’ll be all over soon.”

The second time I ever saw Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl was the third day she worked for me. She was wearing green battledress pants and a khaki T-shirt. It was very hot. I remember that. We were having some kind of a major heat wave. Her arms were tanned. She had the kind of skin that looks dusty in the heat. She wasn’t sweating. The T-shirt was great. She had her tapes on it, Kohl on the right and US Army on the left, both of them kicked up just a little by the curve of her breasts. She was carrying the file I had given her. It had gotten a little thicker, padded out with her notes.

“I’m going to need a partner,” she said to me. I felt a little guilty. Her third day, and I hadn’t even partnered her up. I wondered whether I’d given her a desk. Or a locker, or a room to sleep in.

“You met a guy called Frasconi yet?” I said.

“Tony? I met him yesterday. But he’s a lieutenant.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mind commissioned and noncommissioned working together. There’s no regulation against it. If there was, I’d ignore it anyway. You got a problem with it?”

She shook her head. “But maybe he does.”

“Frasconi? He won’t have a problem.”

“So will you tell him?”

“Sure,” I said. I made a note for myself, on a slip of blank paper, Frasconi, Kohl, partners. I underlined it twice, so I would remember. Then I pointed at the file she was carrying. “What have you got?”

“Good news and bad news,” she said. “Bad news is their system for signing out eyes-only paper is all shot to hell. Could be routine inefficiency, but more likely it’s been deliberately compromised to conceal stuff that shouldn’t be happening.”

“Who’s the guy in question?”

“A pointy-head called Gorowski. Uncle Sam recruited him right out of MIT. A nice guy, by all accounts. Supposed to be very smart.”

“Is he Russian?”

She shook her head. “Polish, from a million years ago. No hint of any ideology.”

“Was he a Red Sox fan up at MIT?”

“Why?”

“They’re all weird,” I said. “Check it.”

“It’s probably blackmail,” she said.

“So what’s the good news?”

She opened her file. “This thing they’re working on is a kind of small missile, basically.”

“Who are they working with?”

“Honeywell and the General Defense Corporation.”

“And?”

“This missile needs to be slim. So it’s going to be subcaliber. The tanks use hundred and twenty millimeter cannons, but the thing is going to be smaller than that.”

“By how much?”

“Nobody knows yet. But they’re working on the sabot design right now. The sabot is a kind of sleeve that surrounds the thing to make it up to the right diameter.”

“I know what a sabot is,” I said.

She ignored me. “It’s going to be a discarding sabot, which means it comes apart and falls away immediately after the thing leaves the gun muzzle. They’re trying to figure whether it has to be a metal sabot, or whether it could be plastic. Sabot means boot. From the French. It’s like the missile starts out wearing a little boot.”

“I know that,” I said. “I speak French. My mother was French.”

“Like sabotage,” she said. “From old French labor disputes. Originally it meant to smash new industrial equipment by kicking it.”

“With your boots,” I said.

She nodded. “Right.”

“So what’s the good news again?”

“The sabot design isn’t going to tell anybody anything,” she said. “Nothing important, anyway. It’s just a sabot. So we’ve got plenty of time.”

“OK,” I said. “But make it a priority. With Frasconi. You’ll like him.”

“You want to get a beer later?”

“Me?”

She looked right at me. “If all ranks can work together, they should be able to have a beer together, right?”

“OK,” I said.

Dominique Kohl looked nothing at all like the photographs I had seen of Teresa Daniel, but it was a blend of both their faces I saw in my head. I left Elizabeth Beck with her book and headed up to my original room. I felt more isolated up there. Safer. I locked myself in the bathroom and took my shoe off. Opened the heel and fired up the e-mail device. There was a message from Duffy waiting: No activity at warehouse. What are they doing?

I ignored it and hit new message and typed: We lost Teresa Daniel.

Four words, eighteen letters, three spaces. I stared at them for a long time. Put my finger on the send button. But I didn’t press it. I went to backspace instead and erased the message. It disappeared from right to left. The little cursor ate it up. I figured I would send it only when I had to. When I knew for sure.

I sent: Possibility your computer is penetrated.

There was a long delay. Much longer than the usual ninety seconds. I thought she wasn’t going to answer. I thought she must be ripping her wires out of the wall. But maybe she was just getting out of the shower or something because about four minutes later she came back with a simple: Why?

I sent: Talk of a hacker with partial access to government systems.

She sent: Mainframes or LANs?

I had no idea what she meant. I sent: Don’t know.

She asked: Details?

I sent: Just talk. Are you keeping a log on your laptop?

She sent: Hell no!

I sent: Anywhere?

She sent: Hell no!!

I sent: Eliot?

There was another four-minute delay. Then she came back with: Don’t think so.

I asked: Think or know?

She sent: Think.

I stared at the tiled wall in front of me. Breathed out. Eliot had killed Teresa Daniel. It was the only explanation. Then I breathed in. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he hadn’t. I sent: Are these e-mails vulnerable?

We had been e-mailing back and forth furiously for more than sixty hours. She had asked for news of her agent. I had asked for her agent’s real name. And I had asked in a way that definitely wasn’t gender-neutral. Maybe I had killed Teresa Daniel.

I held my breath until Duffy came back with: Our e-mail is encrypted. Technically might be visible as code but no way is it readable.

I breathed out and sent: Sure?

She sent: Totally.

I sent: Coded how?

She sent: NSA billion-dollar project.

That cheered me up, but only a little. Some of NSA’s billion-dollar projects are in the Washington Post before they’re even finished. And communications snafus screw more things up than any other reason in the world.

I sent: Check with Eliot immediately about computer logs.

She sent: Will do. Progress?

I typed: None.

Then I deleted it and sent: Soon. I thought it might make her feel better.

I went all the way down to the ground-floor hallway. The door to Elizabeth’s parlor was standing open. She was still in the armchair. Doctor Zhivago was facedown in her lap and she was staring out the window at the rain. I opened the front door and stepped outside. The metal detector squawked at the Beretta in my pocket. I closed the door behind me and headed straight across the carriage circle and down the driveway. The rain was hard on my back. It ran down my neck. But the wind helped me. It blew me west, straight toward the gatehouse. I felt light on my feet. Coming back again was going to be harder. I would be walking directly into the wind. Assuming I was still walking at all.

Paulie saw me coming. He must have spent his whole time crouched inside the tiny building, prowling from the front windows to the back windows, watching, like a restless animal in its lair. He came out, in his slicker. He had to duck his head and turn sideways to get through the door. He stood with his back against the wall of his house, where the eaves were low. But the eaves didn’t help him. The rain drove horizontally under them. I could hear it lashing against the slicker, hard and loud and brittle. It drove against his face and ran down it like torrents of sweat. He had no hat. His hair was plastered against his forehead. It was dark with water.

I had both hands in my pockets with my shoulders hunched forward and my face ducked into my collar. My right hand was tight around the Beretta. The safety was off. But I didn’t want to use it. Using it would require complicated explanations. And he would only be replaced. I didn’t want to have him replaced until I was ready to have him replaced. So I didn’t want to use the Beretta. But I was prepared to.

I stopped six feet from him. Out of his reach.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk,” he said.

“You want to arm wrestle instead?”

His eyes were pale blue and his pupils were tiny. I guessed his breakfast had been taken entirely in the form of capsules and powder.

“Talk about what?” he said.

“New situation,” I said.

He said nothing.

“What’s your MOS?” I asked.

MOS is an army acronym. The army loves acronyms. It stands for Military Occupational Specialty. And I used the present tense. What is, not what was. I wanted to put him right back there. Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they’re way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull. Old rituals like obeying an officer.

“Eleven bang bang,” he said, and smiled.

Not a great answer. Eleven bang bang was grunt slang for 11B, which meant 11-Bravo, Infantry, which meant Combat Arms. Next time I face a four-hundred-pound giant with veins full of meth and steroids I would prefer it if his MOS had been mechanical maintenance, or typewriting. Not combat arms. Especially a four-hundred-pound giant who doesn’t like officers and who had served eight years in Fort Leavenworth for beating up on one.

“Let’s go inside,” I said. “It’s wet out here.”

I said it with the kind of tone you develop when you get promoted past captain. It’s a reasonable tone, almost conversational. It’s not the sort of tone you use as a lieutenant. It’s a suggestion, but it’s an order, too. It’s heavy with inclusion. It says: Hey, we’re just a couple of guys here. We don’t need to let formalities like rank get in our way, do we?

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and slid sideways through his door. Ducked his chin to his chest so he could get through. Inside, the ceiling was about seven feet high. It felt low to me. His head was almost touching it. I kept my hands in my pockets. Water from his slicker was pooling on the floor.

The house stank with a sharp acrid animal smell. Like a mink. And it was filthy. There was a small living room that opened to a kitchen area. Beyond the kitchen was a short hallway with a bathroom off it and a bedroom at the end. That was all. It was smaller than a city apartment, but it was all dressed up to look like a miniature stand-alone house. There was mess everywhere. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Used plates and cups and articles of athletic clothing all over the living room. There was an old sofa opposite a new television set. The sofa had been crushed by his bulk. There were pill bottles on shelves, on tables, everywhere. Some of them were vitamins. But not many of them.

There was a machine gun in the room. The old Soviet NSV. It belonged on a tank turret. Paulie had it suspended from a chain in the middle of the room. It hung there like a macabre sculpture. Like the Alexander Calder thing they put in every new airport terminal. He could stand behind it and swing it through a complete circle. He could fire it through the front window or the back window, like they were gunports. Limited field of fire, but he could cover forty yards of the road to the west, and forty yards of the driveway to the east. It was fed by a belt that came up out of an open ammunition case placed on the floor. There were maybe twenty more cases stacked against the wall. The cases were dull olive, all covered with Cyrillic letters and red stars.

The gun was so big I had to back up against the wall to get around it. I saw two telephones. One was probably an outside line. The other was probably an internal phone that reached the house. There were alarm boxes on the wall. One would be for the sensors out in no-man’s-land. The other would be for the motion detector on the gate itself. There was a video monitor, showing a milky monochrome picture from the gatepost camera.

“You kicked me,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Then you tried to run me over,” he said.

“Warning shots,” I said.

“About what?”

“Duke’s gone,” I said.

He nodded. “I heard.”

“So it’s me now,” I said. “You’ve got the gate, I’ve got the house.”

He nodded again. Said nothing.

“I look after the Becks now,” I said. “I’m responsible for their security. Mr. Beck trusts me. He trusts me so much he gave me a weapon.”

I was giving him a stare the whole time I was talking. The kind of stare that feels like pressure between the eyes. This would be the moment when the meth and the steroids should kick in and make him grin like an idiot and say, Well he ain’t going to trust you anymore when I tell him what I found out there on the rocks, is he? When I tell him you already had a weapon. He would shuffle and grin and use a singsong voice. But he said nothing. Did nothing. Didn’t react at all, beyond a slight defocus in his eyes, like he was having trouble computing the implications.

“Understand?” I said.

“It used to be Duke and now it’s you,” he said neutrally.

It wasn’t him who had found my stash.

“I’m looking out for their welfare,” I said. “Including Mrs. Beck’s. That game is over now, OK?”

He said nothing. I was getting a sore neck from looking up into his eyes. My vertebrae are much more accustomed to looking downward at people.

“OK?” I said again.

“Or?”

“Or you and I will have to go around and around.”

“I’d like that.”

I shook my head.

“You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “Not one little bit. I’d take you apart, piece by piece.”

“You think?”

“You ever hit an MP?” I asked. “Back in the service?”

He didn’t answer. Just looked away and stayed quiet. He was probably remembering his arrest. He probably resisted a little, and needed to be subdued. So consequently he probably tripped down some stairs somewhere and suffered a fair amount of damage. Somewhere between the scene of the crime and the holding cell, probably. Purely by accident. That kind of thing happens, in certain circumstances. But then, the arresting officer probably sent six guys to pick him up. I would have sent eight.

“And then I’d fire you,” I said.

His eyes came back, slow and lazy.

“You can’t fire me,” he said. “I don’t work for you. Or Beck.”

“So who do you work for?”

“Somebody.”

“This somebody got a name?”

He shook his head.

“No dice,” he said.

I kept my hands in my pockets and eased my way around the machine gun. Headed for the door.

“We straight now?” I said.

He looked at me. Said nothing. But he was calm. His morning dosages must have been well balanced.

“Mrs. Beck is off-limits, right?” I said.

“While you’re here,” he said. “You won’t be here forever.”

I hope not, I thought. His telephone rang. The outside line, I guessed. I doubted if Elizabeth or Richard would be calling him from the house. The ring was loud in the silence. He picked it up and said his name. Then he just listened. I heard a trace of a voice in the earpiece, distant and indistinct with plastic peaks and resonances that obscured what was being said. The voice spoke for less than a minute. Then the call was over. He put the phone down and moved his hand quite delicately and used the flat of his palm to set the machine gun swinging gently on its chain. I realized it was a conscious imitation of the thing I had done with the heavy bag down in the gym on our first morning together. He grinned at me.

“I’m watching you,” he said. “I’ll always be watching you.”

I ignored him and opened the door and stepped outside. The rain hit me like a fire hose. I leaned forward and walked straight into it. Held my breath and had a very bad feeling in the small of my back until I was all the way through the forty-yard arc the back window could cover. Then I breathed out.

Not Beck, not Elizabeth, not Richard. Not Paulie.

No dice.

Dominique Kohl said no DICE to me the night we had our beer. Something unexpected had come up and I had to rain-check the first evening and then she rain-checked my makeup date, so it was about a week before we got together. Maybe eight days. Sergeants drinking with captains was difficult on-post back then because the clubs were rigorously separate, so we went out to a bar in town. It was the usual kind of place, long and low, eight pool tables, plenty of people, plenty of neon, plenty of jukebox noise, plenty of smoke. It was still very hot. The air conditioners were running flat out and getting nowhere. I was wearing fatigue pants and an old T-shirt, because I didn’t own any personal clothes. Kohl arrived wearing a dress. It was a simple A-line, no sleeves, knee-length, black, with little white dots on it. Very small dots. Not like big polka dots or anything. A very subtle pattern.

“How’s Frasconi working out?” I asked her.

“Tony?” she said. “He’s a nice guy.”

She didn’t say anything more about him. We ordered Rolling Rocks, which suited me because it was my favorite drink that summer. She had to lean very close to talk, because of the noise. I enjoyed the proximity. But I wasn’t fooling myself. It was the decibel level making her do it, nothing else. And I wasn’t going to try anything with her. No formal reason not to. There were rules back then, I guess, but there were no regulations yet. The notion of sexual harassment was slow coming to the army. But I was already aware of the potential unfairness. Not that there was any way I could help or hurt her career. Her jacket made it plain she was going to make master sergeant and then first sergeant like night follows day. It was only a matter of time. Then came the leap up to E-9 status, sergeant major. That was hers for the taking, too. After that, she would have a problem. After sergeant major came command sergeant major, and there’s only one of those in each regiment. After that came sergeant major of the army, and there’s only one of those, period. So she would rise and then stop, whatever I said about it.

“We have a tactical problem,” she said. “Or strategic, maybe.”

“Why?”

“The pointy-head, Gorowski? We don’t think it’s blackmail in the sense that he’s got some terrible secret or anything. Looks to us more like straightforward threats against his family. Coercion, rather than blackmail.”

“How can you tell?”

“His file is clean as a whistle. He’s been background-checked to hell and back. That’s why they do it. They’re trying to avoid the possibility of blackmail.”

“Was he a Red Sox fan?”

She shook her head. “Yankees. He’s from the Bronx. Went to the High School of Science there.”

“OK,” I said. “I like him already.”

“But the book says we should bust him right now.”

“What’s he doing?”

“We’ve seen him taking papers out of the lab.”

“Are they still doing the sabot?”

She nodded. “But they could publish the sabot design in Stars and Stripes and it wouldn’t tell anybody anything. So the situation isn’t critical yet.”

“What does he do with the papers?”

“He dead-drops them in Baltimore.”

“Have you seen who picks them up?”

She shook her head.

“No dice,” she said.

“What are you thinking about the pointy-head?”

“I don’t want to bust him. I think we should get whoever it is off his back and leave him be. He’s got two baby girls.”

“What does Frasconi think?”

“He agrees.”

“Does he?”

She smiled.

“Well, he will,” she said. “But the book says different.”

“Forget the book,” I said.

“Really?”

“Direct order from me,” I said. “I’ll put it in writing, if you want. Go with your instinct. Trace the chain the whole way to the other end. If we can, we’ll keep this Gorowski guy out of trouble. That’s my usual approach, with Yankees fans. But don’t let it get away from you.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“Wrap it up before they get done with the sabot,” I said. “Or we’ll have to think of another approach.”

“OK,” she said.

Then we talked about other things, and drank a couple more beers. After an hour there was something good on the jukebox and I asked her to dance. For the second time that night she told me No dice. I thought about that phrase later. Clearly it came from crapshooters’ jargon. It must have originally meant foul, like a call, like the dice hadn’t been properly rolled. No dice! Like a baseball umpire calling a grounder over the bag. Foul ball! Then much later it became just another negative, like no way, no how, no chance. But how far back in its etymology was she mining? Had she meant a plain no, or was she calling a foul? I wasn’t sure.

I was completely soaked when I got back to the house so I went upstairs and took possession of Duke’s room and toweled off and dressed in a fresh set of his clothes. The room was at the front of the house, more or less central. The window gave me a view west all the way along the driveway. The elevation meant I could see over the wall. I saw a Lincoln Town Car in the far distance. It was heading straight for us. It was black. It had its headlights on, because of the weather. Paulie came out in his slicker and opened the gate well ahead of time so it didn’t have to slow down. It came straight through, moving fast. The windshield was wet and smeared and the wipers were beating back and forth. Paulie had been expecting it. He had been alerted by the phone call. I watched it approach until it was lost to sight below me. Then I turned away.

Duke’s room was square and plain, like most of the rooms in the house. It had dark paneling and a big Oriental carpet. There was a television set and two telephones. External and internal, I guessed. The sheets were clean and there were no personal items anywhere, except for clothes in the closet. I guessed maybe early in the morning Beck had told the maid about the personnel change. I guessed he had told her to leave the clothes for me.

I went back to the window and about five minutes later I saw Beck coming back in the Cadillac. Paulie was ready for him, too. The big car barely had to slow. Paulie swung the gate shut after it. Then he chained it and locked it. The gate was a hundred yards from me, but I could make out what he was doing. The Cadillac disappeared from view beneath me and headed around to the garage block. I headed downstairs. I figured since Beck was back it might be time for lunch. I figured maybe Paulie had chained the gate because he was heading on down to join us.

But I was wrong.

I made it to the hallway and met Beck coming out of the kitchen. His coat was spotted with rain. He was looking for me. He had a sports bag in his hand. It was the same bag he had carried the guns to Connecticut in.

“Job to do,” he said. “Right now. You need to catch the tide.”

“Where?”

He moved away. Turned his head and called over his shoulder.

“The guy in the Lincoln will tell you,” he said.

I went through the kitchen and outside. The metal detector beeped at me. I walked back into the rain and headed for the garage block. But the Lincoln was parked right there at the corner of the house. It had been turned and backed up so its trunk faced the sea. There was a guy in the driver’s seat. He was sheltering from the rain, and he was impatient. He was tapping on the wheel with his thumbs. He saw me in the mirror and the trunk popped and he opened his door and slid out fast.

He looked like somebody had dragged him out of a trailer park and shoved him in a suit. He had a long graying goatee hiding a weak chin. He had a greasy pony tail held together by a pink rubber band. The band was speckled with glitter. It was the kind of thing you see on drugstore carousels, placed low down so little girls will choose them. He had old acne scars. He had prison tattoos on his neck. He was tall and very thin, like a regular person split lengthwise into two.

“You the new Duke?” he said to me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the new Duke.”

“I’m Harley,” he said.

I didn’t tell him my name.

“So let’s do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

He came around and raised the trunk lid all the way.

“Garbage disposal,” he said.

There was a military-issue body bag in the trunk. Heavy black rubber, zipped all along its length. I could see by the way it was folded into the space that it held a small person. A woman, probably.

“Who is it?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“The government bitch,” he said. “Took us long enough, but we got her in the end.”

He leaned in and grabbed his end of the bag. Clamped both corners in his hands. Waited for me. I just stood there, feeling the rain against my neck, listening to it snapping and popping against the rubber.

“Got to catch the tide,” he said. “It’s going to turn.”

I leaned down and took hold of the corners at my end. We glanced at each other to coordinate our efforts and heaved the bag up and out. It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward, and Harley was not strong. We carried it a few steps toward the shore.

“Put it down,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to see,” I said.

Harley just stood there.

“I don’t think you do,” he said.

“Put it down,” I said again.

He hesitated a second longer and then we squatted together and laid the bag on the rocks. The body settled inside with its back arched upward. I stayed squatted down and duck-walked around to the head. Found the zipper tag and pulled.

“Just look at the face,” Harley said. “That part’s not too bad.”

I looked. It was very bad. She had died in extreme agony. That was clear. Her face was blasted with pain. It was still twisted into the shape of her final ghastly scream.

But it wasn’t Teresa Daniel.

It was Beck’s maid.

CHAPTER 9

I inched the zipper down a little more until I saw the same mutilation I had seen ten years previously. Then I stopped. Turned my head into the rain and closed my eyes. The water on my face felt like tears.

“Let’s get on with it,” Harley said.

I opened my eyes. Stared at the waves. Pulled the zipper back up without looking anymore. Stood slowly and stepped around to the foot of the bag. Harley waited. Then we each grasped our corners and lifted. Carried the burden over the rocks. He led me south and east, way out to a place on the shore where two granite shelves met. There was a steep V-shaped cleft between them. It was half-full of moving water.

“Wait until after the next big wave,” Harley said.

It came booming in and we both ducked our heads away from the spray. The cleft filled to the top and the tide ran up over the rocks and almost reached our shoes. Then it pulled away again and the cleft emptied out. Gravel rattled and drained. The surface of the sea was laced with dull gray foam and pitted by the rain.

“OK, put it down,” Harley said. He was out of breath. “Hold your end.”

We laid the bag down so the head end was hanging out over the granite shelf and into the cleft. The zipper faced upward. The body was on its back. I held both corners at the foot. The rain plastered my hair to my head and ran into my eyes. It stung. Harley squatted and straddled the bag and humped the head end farther out into space. I went with him, inch by inch, small steps on the slippery rocks. The next wave came in and eddied under the bag. It floated it up a little. Harley used the temporary buoyancy to slide it a little farther into the sea. I moved with it. The wave receded. The cleft drained again. The bag drooped down. The rain thrashed against the stiff rubber. It battered our backs. It was deathly cold.

Harley used the next five waves to ease the bag out more and more until it was hanging right down into the cleft. I was left holding empty rubber. Gravity had jammed the body tight up against the top of the bag. Harley waited and looked out to sea and then ducked low and pulled the zipper all the way down. Scrambled back fast and took a corner from me. Held tight. The seventh wave came booming in. We were soaked with its spray. The cleft filled and the bag filled and then the big wave receded and sucked the body right out of the bag. It floated motionless for a split second and then the undertow caught it and took it away. It went straight down, into the depths. I saw long fair hair streaming in the water and pale skin flashing green and gray and then it was gone. The cleft foamed red as it drained.

“Hell of a riptide here,” Harley said.

I said nothing.

“The undertow takes them right out,” he said. “We never had one come back, anyways. It pulls them a mile or two, going down all the way. Then there’s sharks out there, I guess. They cruise the coast here. Plus all kinds of other creatures. You know, crabs, suckerfish, things like that.”

I said nothing.

“Never had one come back,” he said again.

I glanced at him and he smiled at me. His mouth was like a caved-in hole above the goatee. He had rotten yellow stumps for teeth. I glanced away again. The next wave came in. It was only a small one, but when it receded the cleft was washed clean. It was like nothing had happened. Like nothing had ever been there. Harley stood up awkwardly and zipped the empty bag. Pink water sluiced out of it and ran over the rocks. He started rolling it up. I glanced back at the house. Beck was standing in the kitchen doorway, alone, watching us.

We went back toward the house, soaked with rain and salt water. Beck ducked back into the kitchen. We followed him in. Harley hung around on the edge of the room, like he felt he shouldn’t be there.

“She was a federal agent?” I said.

“No question,” Beck said.

His sports bag was on the table, in the center, prominent, like a prosecution exhibit in a courtroom. He zipped it open and rummaged inside.

“Check this out,” he said.

He lifted a bundle onto the table. Something wrapped in a damp dirty oil-stained rag the size of a hand towel. He unfolded it and took out Duffy’s Glock 19.

“This all was hidden in the car we let her use,” he said.

“The Saab?” I said, because I had to say something.

He nodded. “In the well where the spare tire is. Under the trunk floor.” He laid the Glock on the table. Took the two spare magazines out of the rag and laid them next to the gun. Then he put the bent bradawl next to them, and the sharpened chisel. And Angel Doll’s keyring.

I couldn’t breathe.

“The bradawl is a lock pick, I guess,” Beck said.

“How does this prove she was federal?” I asked.

He picked up the Glock again and turned it around and pointed to the right-hand side of the slide.

“Serial number,” he said. “We checked with Glock in Austria. By computer. We have access to that kind of thing. This particular gun was sold to the United States government about a year ago. Part of a big order for the law enforcement agencies, 17s for the male agents and 19s for the women. So that’s how we know she was federal.”

I stared at the serial number. “Did she deny it?”

He nodded. “Of course she did. She said she just found it. Gave us a big song and dance. She blamed you, actually. Said it was your stuff. But then, they always deny it, don’t they? They’re trained to, I guess.”

I looked away. Stared through the window at the sea. Why had she picked it all up? Why hadn’t she just left it there? Was it some kind of a housekeeping instinct? She didn’t want it to get wet? Or what?

“You look upset,” Beck said.

And how did she even find it? Why would she even be looking?

“You look upset,” he said again.

I was beyond upset. She had died in agony. And I had done it to her. She probably thought she was doing me a favor. By keeping my stuff dry. By keeping it from rusting. She was just a dumb naive kid from Ireland, trying to help me out. And I had killed her, as surely as if I had stood there and butchered her myself.

“I’m responsible for security,” I said. “I should have suspected her.”

“You’re responsible only since last night,” Beck said. “So don’t beat yourself up over it. You haven’t even got your feet under the table yet. It was Duke who should have made her.”

“But I never would have suspected her,” I said. “I thought she was just the maid.”

“Hey, me too,” he said. “Duke, also.”

I looked away again. Stared at the sea. It was gray and heaving. I didn’t really understand. She found it. But why would she hide it so well?

“This is the clincher,” Beck said.

I looked back in time to see him lifting a pair of shoes out of the bag. They were big square clunky items, black, the shoes she had been wearing every single time I had seen her.

“Look at this,” he said.

He turned the right shoe over and pulled a pin out of the heel with his fingernails. Then he swiveled the heel rubber like a little door and turned the shoe the right way up. He shook it. A small black plastic rectangle clattered out on the table. It landed facedown. He turned it over.

It was a wireless e-mail device, exactly identical to my own.

He passed me the shoe. I took it. Stared at it, blankly. It was a woman’s size six. Made for a small foot. But it had a wide bulbous toe, and therefore a wide thick heel to balance it visually. Some kind of a clumsy fashion statement. The heel had a rectangular cavity carved out of it. Identical to mine. It had been done neatly. It had been done with patience. But not by a machine. It showed the same faint tool marks that mine did. I pictured some guy in a lab somewhere, a line of shoes on a bench in front of him, the smell of new leather, a small arc of woodcarving tools laid out in front of him, curls and slivers of rubber accumulating on the floor around him as he labored. Most government work is surprisingly low-tech. It’s not all exploding ballpoint pens and cameras built into watches. A trip to the mall to buy a commercial e-mail device and a pair of plain shoes is about as cutting-edge as most of it gets.

“What are you thinking?” Beck asked.

I was thinking about how I was feeling. I was on a roller-coaster. She was still dead, but I hadn’t killed her anymore. The government computers had killed her again. So I was relieved, personally. But I was more than a little angry, too. Like, what the hell was Duffy doing? What the hell was she playing at? It was an absolute rule of procedure that you never put two or more people undercover in the same location unless they’re aware of each other. That was absolutely basic. She had told me about Teresa Daniel. So why the hell hadn’t she told me about this other woman?

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“The battery is dead,” he said. He was holding the device in both hands. Using both thumbs on it, like a video game. “It doesn’t work, anyway.”

He passed it to me. I put the shoe down and took it from him. Pressed the familiar power button. But the screen stayed dead.

“How long was she here?” I asked.

“Eight weeks,” Beck said. “It’s hard for us to keep domestic staff. It’s lonely here. And there’s Paulie, you know. And Duke wasn’t a very hospitable guy, either.”

“I guess eight weeks would be a long time for a battery to last.”

“What would be their procedure now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was never federal.”

“In general,” he said. “You must have seen stuff like this.”

I shrugged.

“I guess they’d have expected it,” I said. “Communications are always the first things to get screwed up. She drops off the radar, they wouldn’t worry right away. They’d have no choice but to leave her in the field. I mean, they can’t contact her to order her home, can they? So I guess they would trust her to get the battery charged up again, as soon as she could.” I turned the unit on its edge and pointed to the little socket on the bottom. “Looks like it needs a cell phone charger, something like that.”

“Would they send people after her?”

“Eventually,” I said. “I guess.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

“We plan to deny she was ever here. Deny we ever saw her. There’s no evidence she was ever here.”

“You better clean her room real good,” I said. “There’ll be fingerprints and hair and DNA all over the place.”

“She was recommended to us,” he said. “We don’t advertise in the paper or anything. Some guys we know in Boston put her in touch.”

He glanced at me. I thought: Some guys in Boston begging for a plea bargain, helping the government any which way they could. I nodded.

“Tricky,” I said. “Because what does that say about them?”

He nodded back sourly. He agreed with me. He knew what I was saying. He picked up the big bunch of keys from where they were lying next to the chisel.

“I think these are Angel Doll’s,” he said.

I said nothing.

“So it’s a three-way nightmare,” he said. “We can tie Doll to the Hartford crew, and we can tie our Boston friends to the feds. Now we can tie Doll to the feds, too. Because he gave his keys to the undercover bitch. Which means the Hartford crew must be in bed with the feds as well. Doll’s dead, thanks to Duke, but I’ve still got Hartford, Boston, and the government on my back. I’m going to need you, Reacher.”

I glanced at Harley. He was looking out the window at the rain.

“Was it just Doll?” I asked.

Beck nodded. “I’ve been through all of that. I’m satisfied. It was just Doll. The rest are solid. They’re still with me. They were very apologetic about Doll.”

“OK,” I said.

There was silence for a long moment. Then Beck rewrapped my stash in its rag and dumped it back in his bag. He threw the dead e-mail device in after it and piled the maid’s shoes on top. They looked sad and empty and forlorn.

“I’ve learned one thing,” he said. “I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.”

I bet my life on it right there and then. I kept my own shoes on. I got back up to Duke’s room and checked his closet. There were four pairs in there. Nothing I would have picked out for myself in a store, but they looked reasonable and they were close to the right size. But I left them there. To show up so soon in different shoes would raise a red flag. And if I was going to ditch mine, I was going to ditch them properly. No point leaving them in my room for casual inspection. I would have to get them out of the house. And there was no easy way of doing that right then. Not after the scene in the kitchen. I couldn’t just walk downstairs with them in my hands. What was I supposed to say? What, these? Oh, they’re the shoes I was wearing when I arrived. I’m just going out to throw them in the ocean. Like I was suddenly bored with them? So I kept them on.

And I still needed them, anyway. I was tempted, but I wasn’t ready to cut Duffy out. Not just yet. I locked myself in Duke’s bathroom and took the e-mail device out. It was an eerie feeling. I hit power and the screen came up with a message: We need to meet. I hit reply and sent: You bet your ass we do. Then I turned the unit off and nailed it back into my heel and went down to the kitchen again.

“Go with Harley,” Beck told me. “You need to bring the Saab back.”

The cook wasn’t there. The counters were neat and clean. They had been scrubbed. The stove was cold. It felt like there should be a Closed sign hanging on the door.

“What about lunch?” I said.

“You hungry?”

I thought back to the way the sea had swelled the bag and claimed the body. Saw the hair under the water, fluid and infinitely fine. Saw the blood rinsing away, pink and diluted. I wasn’t hungry.

“Starving,” I said.

Beck smiled sheepishly. “You’re one cold son of a bitch, Reacher.”

“I’ve seen dead people before. I expect to see them again.”

He nodded. “The cook is off duty. Eat out, OK?”

“I don’t have any money.”

He put his hand in his pants pocket and came out with a wad of bills. Started to count them out and then just shrugged and gave it up and handed the whole lot to me. It must have been close to a thousand dollars.

“Walking-around money,” he said. “We’ll do the salary thing later.”

I put the cash in my pocket.

“Harley is waiting in the car,” he said.

I went outside and pulled my coat collar up. The wind was easing. The rain was reverting to vertical. The Lincoln was still there at the corner of the house. The trunk lid was closed. Harley was drumming his thumbs on the wheel. I slid into the passenger seat and buzzed it backward to get some legroom. He fired up the engine and set the wipers going and took off. We had to wait while Paulie unchained the gate. Harley fiddled with the heater and set it on high. Our clothes were wet and the windows were steaming up. Paulie was slow. Harley started drumming again.

“You two work for the same guy?” I asked him.

“Me and Paulie?” he said. “Sure.”

“Who is he?”

“Beck didn’t tell you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then I won’t either, I guess.”

“Hard for me to do my job without information,” I said.

“That’s your problem,” he said. “Not mine.”

He gave me his yellow gappy smile again. I figured if I hit him hard enough my fist would take out all the little stumps and end up somewhere in the back of his scrawny throat. But I didn’t hit him. Paulie got the chain loose and swung the gate back. Harley took off immediately and squeezed through with about an inch of clearance on each side. I settled back in my seat. Harley clicked the headlights on and accelerated hard and rooster tails of spray kicked up behind us. We drove west, because there was no choice for the first twelve miles. Then we turned north on Route One, away from where Elizabeth Beck had taken me, away from Old Orchard Beach and Saco, toward Portland. I had no view of anything because the weather was so dismal. I could barely see the tail lights on the traffic ahead of us. Harley didn’t speak. Just rocked back and forth in the driver’s seat and drummed his thumbs on the wheel and drove. He wasn’t a smooth driver. He was always either on the gas or the brake. We sped up, slowed down, sped up, slowed down. It was a long twenty miles.

Then the road swerved hard to the west and I saw I-295 close by on our left. There was a narrow tongue of gray seawater beyond it and beyond that was the Portland airport. There was a plane taking off in a huge cloud of spray. It roared low over our heads and swung south over the Atlantic. Then there was a strip mall on our left with a long narrow parking lot out front. The mall had the sort of stores you expect to find in a low-rent place trapped between two roads near an airport. The parking lot held maybe twenty cars in a line, all of them head-in and square-on to the curb. The old Saab was fifth from the left. Harley pulled the Lincoln in and stopped directly behind it. Drummed his thumbs on the wheel.

“All yours,” he said. “Key is in the door pocket.”

I got out in the rain and he drove off as soon as I shut my door. But he didn’t get back on Route One. At the end of the lot he made a left. Then an immediate right. I saw him ease the big car through an improvised exit made of lumpy poured concrete that led into the adjoining lot. I pulled my collar up again and watched as he drove slowly through it and then disappeared behind a set of brand-new buildings. They were long low sheds made of bright corrugated metal. Some kind of a business park. There was a network of narrow blacktop roads. They were wet and shiny with rain. They had high concrete curbs, smooth and new. I saw the Lincoln again, through a gap between buildings. It was moving slow and lazy, like it was looking to park somewhere. Then it slid behind another building and I didn’t see it again.

I turned around. The Saab was nose-in to a discount liquor store. Next to the liquor store on one side was a place that sold car stereos and on the other side was a place with a window full of fake crystal chandeliers. I doubted if the maid had been sent out to buy a new ceiling fixture. Or to get a CD player installed in the Saab. So she must have been sent to the liquor store. And then she must have found a whole bunch of people waiting there for her. Four of them, maybe five. At least. After the first moment of surprise she would have changed from a bewildered maid to a trained agent fighting for her life. They would have anticipated that. They would have come mob-handed. I looked up and down the sidewalk. Then I looked at the liquor store. It had a window full of boxes. There was no real view out. But I went in anyway.

The store was full of boxes but empty of people. It felt like it spent most of its time that way. It was cold and dusty. The clerk behind the counter was a gray guy of about fifty. Gray hair, gray shirt, gray skin. He looked like he hadn’t been outside in a decade. He had nothing I wanted to buy as an ice-breaker. So I just went right ahead and asked him my question.

“See that Saab out there?” I said.

He made a big show of lining up his view out front.

“I see it,” he said.

“You see what happened to the driver?”

“No,” he said.

People who say no right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying no, but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add sorry or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It’s human nature. They say Sorry, no, why, what happened? I put my hand in my pocket and peeled off a bill from Beck’s wad purely by feel. Took it out. It was a hundred. I folded it in half and held it up between my finger and my thumb.

“Now did you see?” I said.

He glanced to his left. My right. Toward the business park beyond his walls. Just a fast glance, furtive, out and back.

“No,” he said again.

“Black Town Car?” I said. “Drove off that way?”

“I didn’t see,” he said. “I was busy.”

I nodded. “You’re practically rushed off your feet in here. I can see that. It’s a miracle one man can handle the pressure.”

“I was in the back. On the phone, I guess.”

I kept the hundred up there in my hand for another long moment. I guessed a hundred tax-free dollars would represent a healthy slice of his week’s net take. But he looked away from it. That told me plenty, too.

“OK,” I said. I put the money back in my pocket and walked out.

I drove the Saab two hundred yards south on Route One and stopped at the first gas station I saw. Went in and bought a bottle of spring water and two candy bars. I paid four times more for the water than I would have for gasoline, if you calculated it by the gallon. Then I came out and sheltered near the door and peeled a candy bar and started eating it. Used the time to look around. No surveillance. So I stepped over to the pay phones and used my change to call Duffy. I had memorized her motel number. I crouched under the plastic bubble and tried to stay dry. She answered on the second ring.

“Drive north to Saco,” I said. “Right now. Meet me in the big brick mall on the river island in a coffee shop called Café Café. Last one there buys.”

I finished my candy bar as I drove south. The Saab rode hard and it was noisy compared to Beck’s Cadillac or Harley’s Lincoln. It was old and worn. The carpets were thin and loose. It had six figures on the clock. But it got the job done. It had decent tires and the wipers worked. It made it through the rain OK. And it had nice big mirrors. I watched them all the way. Nobody came after me. I got to the coffee shop first. Ordered a tall espresso to wash the taste of chocolate out of my mouth.

Duffy showed up six minutes later. She paused in the doorway and looked around and then headed over toward me and smiled. She was in fresh jeans and another cotton shirt, but it was blue, not white. Over that was her leather jacket and over that was a battered old raincoat that was way too big for her. Maybe it was the old guy’s. Maybe she had borrowed it from him. It wasn’t Eliot’s. That was clear. He was smaller than she was. She must have come north not expecting bad weather.

“Is this place safe?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“What?” she said.

“You’re buying,” I said. “You got here second. I’ll have another espresso. And you owe me for the first one.”

She looked at me blankly and then went to the counter and came back with an espresso for me and a cappuccino for herself. Her hair was a little wet. She had combed it with her fingers. She must have parked her car on the street and walked in through the rain and checked her reflection in a store window. She counted her change in silence and dealt me bills and coins equal to the price of my first cup. Coffee was another thing way more expensive than gasoline, up here in Maine. But I guessed it was the same everywhere.

“What’s up?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Reacher, what’s the matter?”

“You put another agent in eight weeks ago,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What?”

“What I said.”

“What agent?”

“She died this morning. She underwent a radical double mastectomy without the benefit of anesthetic.”

She stared at me. “Teresa?”

I shook my head.

“Not Teresa,” I said. “The other one.”

“What other one?”

“Don’t bullshit me,” I said.

“What other one?”

I stared at her. Hard. Then softer. There was something about the light in that coffee shop. Maybe it was the way it came off all the blond wood and the brushed metal and the glass and the chrome. It was like X-ray light. Like a truth serum. It had shown me Elizabeth Beck’s genuine uncontrollable blush. Now I was expecting it to show me the exact same thing from Duffy. I was expecting it to show me a deep red blush of shame and embarrassment, because I had found her out. But it showed me total surprise instead. It was right there in her face. She had gone very pale. She had gone stark white with shock. It was like the blood had drained right out of her. And nobody can do that on command, any more than they can blush.

“What other one?” she said again. “There was only Teresa. What? Are you telling me she’s dead?”

“Not Teresa,” I said again. “There was another one. Another woman. She got hired on as a kitchen maid.”

“No,” she said. “There’s only Teresa.”

I shook my head again. “I saw the body. It wasn’t Teresa.”

“A kitchen maid?”

“She had an e-mail thing in her shoe,” I said. “Exactly the same as mine. The heel was scooped out by the same guy. I recognized the handiwork.”

“That’s not possible,” she said.

I looked straight at her.

“I would have told you,” she said. “Of course I would have told you. And I wouldn’t have needed you if I had another agent in there. Don’t you see that?”

I looked away. Looked back. Now I was embarrassed.

“So who the hell was she?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Just started nudging her cup around and around on her saucer, prodding at the handle with her forefinger, turning it ten degrees at a time. The heavy foam and the chocolate dust stayed still while the cup rotated. She was thinking like crazy.

“Eight weeks ago?” she said.

I nodded.

“What alerted them?” she asked.

“They got into your computer,” I said. “This morning, or maybe last night.”

She looked up from her cup. “That’s what you were asking me about?”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“Teresa isn’t in the computer,” she said. “She’s off the books.”

“Did you check with Eliot?”

“I did better than check,” she said. “I searched the whole of his hard drive. And all of his files on the main server back in D.C. I’ve got total access everywhere. I looked for Teresa, Daniel, Justice, Beck, Maine, and undercover. And he didn’t write any of those words anywhere.”

I said nothing.

“How did it go down?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I guess at first the computer told them you had somebody in there, and then it told them it was a woman. No name, no details. So they looked for her. And I think it was partly my fault they found her.”

“How?”

“I had a stash,” I said. “Your Glock, and the ammo, and a few other things. She found them. She hid them in the car she was using.”

Duffy was quiet for a second.

“OK,” she said. “And you’re thinking they searched the car and your stuff made her look bad, right?”

“I guess so.”

“But maybe they searched her first and found the shoe.”

I looked away. “I sincerely hope so.”

“Don’t beat up on yourself. It’s not your fault. As soon as they got into the computer it was only a matter of time for the first one they looked at. They both fit the bill. I mean, how many women were there to choose from? Presumably just her and Teresa. They couldn’t miss.”

I nodded. There was Elizabeth, too. And there was the cook. But neither one of them would figure very high on a list of suspicious persons. Elizabeth was the guy’s wife. And the cook had probably been there twenty years.

“But who was she?” I said.

She played with her cup until it was back in its starting position. The unglazed rim on the bottom made a tiny grinding sound.

“It’s obvious, I’m afraid,” she said. “Think of the time line here. Count backward from today. Eleven weeks ago I screwed up with the surveillance photographs. Ten weeks ago they pulled me off the case. But because Beck is a big fish I couldn’t give it up and so nine weeks ago I put Teresa in without their knowledge. But also because Beck is a big fish, and without my knowledge, they must have reassigned the case to someone else and eight weeks ago that someone else put this maid person in, right on top of Teresa. Teresa didn’t know the maid was coming and the maid didn’t know Teresa was already there.”

“Why would she have nosed into my stuff?”

“I guess she wanted to control the situation. Standard procedure. As far as she was concerned, you weren’t anybody kosher. You were just a loose cannon. Some kind of troublemaker. You were a cop-killer, and you were hiding weapons. Maybe she thought you were from a rival operation. She was probably thinking of selling you out to Beck. It would have enhanced her credibility with him. And she needed you out of the way, because she didn’t need extra complications. If she didn’t sell you out to Beck, she would have turned you in to us, as a cop-killer. I’m surprised she didn’t already.”

“Her battery was dead.”

She nodded. “Eight weeks. I guess kitchen maids don’t have good access to cell phone chargers.”

“Beck said she was out of Boston.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “They probably farmed it out to the Boston field office. That would work, geographically. And it would explain why we didn’t pick up any kind of water-cooler whispers in D.C.”

“He said she was recommended by some friends of his.”

“Plea-bargainers, for sure. We use them all the time. They set each other up quite happily. No code of silence with these people.”

Then I remembered something else Beck had said.

“How was Teresa communicating?” I asked.

“She had an e-mail thing, like yours.”

“In her shoe?”

Duffy nodded. Said nothing. I heard Beck’s voice, loud in my head: I’m going to start searching people’s shoes, that’s for damn sure. You can bet your life on that.

“When did you last hear from her?”

“She fell off the air the second day.”

She went quiet.

“Where was she living?” I asked.

“In Portland. We put her in an apartment. She was an office clerk, not a kitchen maid.”

“You been to the apartment?”

She nodded. “Nobody’s seen her there since the second day.”

“You check her closet?”

“Why?”

“We need to know what shoes she was wearing when she was captured.”

Duffy went pale again.

“Shit,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “What shoes were left in her closet?”

“The wrong ones.”

“Would she think to ditch the e-mail thing?”

“Wouldn’t help her. She’d have to ditch the shoes, too. The hole in the heel would tell the story, wouldn’t it?”

“We need to find her,” I said.

“We sure do,” she said. Then she paused a beat. “She was very lucky today. They went looking for a woman, and they happened to look at the maid first. We can’t count on her staying that lucky much longer.”

I said nothing. Very lucky for Teresa, very unlucky for the maid. Every silver lining has a cloud. Duffy sipped her coffee. Grimaced slightly like the taste was off and put the cup back down again.

“But what gave her away?” she said. “In the first place? That’s what I want to know. I mean, she only lasted two days. And that was nine whole weeks before they broke into the computer.”

“What background story did you give her?”

“The usual, for this kind of work. Unmarried, unattached, no family, no roots. Like you, except you didn’t have to fake it.”

I nodded slowly. A good-looking thirty-year-old woman who would never be missed. A huge temptation for guys like Paulie or Angel Doll. Maybe irresistible. A fun thing to have around. And the rest of their crew might be even worse. Like Harley, for instance. He didn’t strike me as much of an advertisement for the benefits of civilization.

“Maybe nothing gave her away,” I said. “Maybe she just went missing, you know, like women do. Lots of women go missing. Young women especially. Single, unattached women. Happens all the time. Thousands a year.”

“But you found the room they were keeping her in.”

“All those missing women have to be somewhere. They’re only missing as far as the rest of us are concerned. They know where they are, and the men who took them know where they are.”

She looked at me. “You think it’s like that?”

“Could be.”

“Will she be OK?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

“Will they keep her alive?”

“I think they want to keep her alive. Because they don’t know she’s a federal agent. They think she’s just a woman.”

A fun thing to have around.

“Can you find her before they check her shoes?”

“They might never check them,” I said. “You know, if they’re seeing her in one particular light, as it were, it would be a leap to start seeing her as something else.”

She looked away. Went quiet.

“One particular light,” she repeated. “Why don’t we just say what we mean?”

“Because we don’t want to,” I said.

She stayed quiet. One minute. Two. Then she looked straight back at me. A brand-new thought.

“What about your shoes?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Same thing,” I said. “They’re getting used to me. It would be a leap to start seeing me as something else.”

“It’s still a big risk.”

I shrugged.

“Beck gave me a Beretta M9,” I said. “So I’ll wait and see. If he bends down to take a look I’ll shoot him through the middle of the forehead.”

“But he’s just a businessman, right? Basically? Would he really do bad stuff to Teresa without knowing she was a threat to his business?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Did he kill the maid?”

I shook my head. “Quinn did.”

“Were you a witness?”

“No.”

“So how do you know?”

I looked away.

“I recognized the handiwork,” I said.

The fourth time I ever saw Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl was a week after the night we spent in the bar. The weather was still hot. There was talk of a tropical storm blowing in from the direction of Bermuda. I had a million files on my desk. We had rapes, homicides, suicides, weapons thefts, assaults, and there had been a riot the night before because the refrigeration had broken down in the enlisted mess kitchens and the ice cream had turned to water. I had just gotten off the phone with a buddy at Fort Irwin in California who told me it was the same over there whenever the desert winds were blowing.

Kohl came in wearing shorts and a tank top shirt. She still wasn’t sweating. Her skin was still dusty. She was carrying her file, which was then about eight times as thick as when I had first given it to her.

“The sabot has got to be metal,” she said. “That’s their final conclusion.”

“Is it?” I said.

“They’d have preferred plastic, but I think that’s just showboating.”

“OK,” I said.

“I’m trying to tell you they’ve finished with the sabot design. They’re ready to move on with the important stuff now.”

“You still feel all warm and fuzzy about this Gorowski guy?”

She nodded. “It would be a tragedy to bust him. He’s a nice guy and an innocent victim. And the bottom line is he’s good at his job and useful to the army.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“It’s tricky,” she said. “I guess what I want to do is bring him on board and get him to feed phony stuff to whoever it is who’s got the hook in. That way we keep the investigation going without risking putting anything real out there.”

“But?”

“The real thing looks phony in itself. It’s a very weird device. It’s like a big lawn dart. It has no explosive in it.”

“So how does it work?”

“Kinetic energy, dense metals, depleted uranium, heat, all that kind of stuff. Were you a physics postgrad?”

“No.”

“Then you won’t understand it. But my feeling is if we screw with the designs the bad guy is going to know. It’ll put Gorowski at risk. Or his baby girls, or whatever.”

“So you want to let the real blueprints out there?”

“I think we have to.”

“Big risk,” I said.

“Your call,” she said. “That’s why you get the big bucks.”

“I’m a captain,” I said. “I’d be on food stamps if I ever got time to eat.”

“Decision?”

“Got a line on the bad guy yet?”

“No.”

“Feel confident you won’t let it get away?”

“Totally,” she said.

I smiled. Right then she looked like the most self-possessed human being I had ever seen. Shining eyes, serious expression, hair hooked behind her ears, short khaki shorts, tiny khaki shirt, socks and parachute boots, dark dusty skin everywhere.

“So go for it,” I said.

“I never dance,” she said.

“What?”

“It wasn’t just you,” she said. “In fact, I’d have liked to. I appreciated the invitation. But I never dance with anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Just a thing,” she said. “I feel self-conscious. I’m not very coordinated.”

“Neither am I.”

“Maybe we should practice in private,” she said.

“Separately?”

“One-on-one mentoring helps,” she said. “Like with alcoholism.”

Then she winked and walked out and left a very faint trace of her perfume behind her in the hot heavy air.

Duffy and I finished our coffee in silence. Mine tasted thin and cold and bitter. I had no stomach for it. My right shoe pinched. It wasn’t a perfect fit. And it was starting to feel like a ball and chain. It had felt ingenious at first. Smart, and cool, and clever. I remembered the first time I opened the heel, three days ago, soon after I first arrived at the house, soon after Duke locked the door to my room. I’m in. I had felt like a guy in a movie. Then I remembered the last time I opened it. Up in Duke’s bathroom, an hour and a half ago. I had fired up the unit and Duffy’s message had been waiting there for me: We need to meet.

“Why did you want to meet?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter now. I’m revising the mission. I’m scrapping all our objectives except getting Teresa back. Just find her and get her out of there, OK?”

“What about Beck?”

“We’re not going to get Beck. I screwed up again. This maid person was a legitimate agent and Teresa wasn’t. Nor were you. And the maid died, so they’re going to fire me for going off the books with Teresa and you, and they’re going to abandon the case against Beck because I compromised procedure so badly they could never make it stand up in court anymore. So just get Teresa the hell out and we’ll all go home.”

“OK,” I said.

“You’ll have to forget about Quinn,” she said. “Just let it go.”

I said nothing.

“We failed anyway,” she said. “You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all. It’s been a complete waste of time, beginning to end.”

I said nothing.

“Like my career,” she said.

“When are you going to tell the Justice Department?”

“About the maid?”

I nodded.

“Right away,” she said. “Immediately. I’ll have to. No choice. But I’ll search the files first and find out who put her in there. Because I’d prefer to break the news face-to-face, I guess, at my own level. It’ll give me a chance to apologize. Any other way all hell will break loose before I get the opportunity. All my access codes will be canceled and I’ll be handed a cardboard box and told to clear my desk within thirty minutes.”

“How long have you been there?”

“A long time. I thought I was going to be the first woman director.”

I said nothing.

“I would have told you,” she said. “I promise, if I’d had another agent in there I would have told you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

“It’s the stress,” she said. “Undercover is tough.”

I nodded. “It’s like a hall of mirrors up there. One damn thing after another. Everything feels unreal.”

We left our half-finished cups on the table and headed out, into the mall’s interior sidewalks, and then outside into the rain. We had parked near each other. She kissed me on the cheek. Then she got into her Taurus and headed south and I got into the Saab and headed north.

Paulie took his own sweet time about opening the gate for me. He made me wait a couple of minutes before he even came lumbering out of his house. He still had his slicker on. Then he stood and stared for a minute before he went near the latch. But I didn’t care. I was busy thinking. I was hearing Duffy’s voice in my head: I’m revising the mission. Most of my military career a guy named Leon Garber was either directly or indirectly my boss. He explained everything to himself by making up little phrases or sayings. He had one for every occasion. He used to say: Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad. He didn’t mean money in any literal sense. He meant manpower, resources, time, will, effort, energy. He used to contradict himself, too. Just as often he would say: Never ever get distracted from the exact job in hand. Of course, proverbs are like that generally. Too many cooks spoil the broth, many hands make light work, great minds think alike, fools never differ. But overall, after you canceled out a few layers of contradiction, Leon approved of revision. He approved of it big time. Mainly because revision was about thinking, and he figured thinking never hurt anybody. So I was thinking, and thinking hard, because I was aware that something was slowly and imperceptibly creeping up on me, just outside of my conscious grasp. Something connected to something Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

I heard the gate swing back. Looked up to see Paulie waiting for me to drive through. The rain was beating on his slicker. He still had no hat. I exacted some petty revenge by waiting a minute myself. Duffy’s revision suited me well enough. I didn’t care much about Beck. I really didn’t, either way. But I wanted Teresa. And I would get her. I wanted Quinn, too. And I would get him too, whatever Duffy said. The revision was only going to go so far.

I checked on Paulie again. He was still waiting. He was an idiot. He was out in the rain, I was in a car. I took my foot off the brake and rolled slowly through the gate. Then I accelerated hard and headed down to the house.

I put the Saab away in the slot I had once seen it in and walked out into the courtyard. The mechanic was still in the third garage. The empty one. I couldn’t see what he was doing. Maybe he was just sheltering from the rain. I ran back to the house. Beck heard the metal detector announce my arrival and came into the kitchen to meet me. He pointed at his sports bag. It was still there on the table, right in the center.

“Get rid of this shit,” he said. “Throw it in the ocean, OK?”

“OK,” I said. He went back out to the hallway and I picked up the bag and turned around. Headed outside again and slipped down the ocean side of the garage block wall. I put my bundle right back in its hidden dip. Waste not, want not. And I wanted to be able to return Duffy’s Glock to her. She was already in enough trouble without having to add the loss of her service piece to the list. Most agencies take that kind of a thing very seriously.

Then I walked on to the edge of the granite tables and swung the bag and hurled it far out to sea. It pinwheeled end over end in the air and the shoes and the e-mail unit were thrown clear. I saw the e-mail thing hit the water. It sank immediately. The left shoe hit toe-first and followed it. The bag parachuted a little and landed gently facedown and filled with water and turned over and slipped under. The right shoe floated for a moment, like a tiny black boat. It pitched and yawed and bobbed urgently like it was trying to escape to the east. It rode up over a peak and rode down on the far side of the crest. Then it started to list sideways. It floated maybe ten more seconds and then it filled with water and sank without a trace.

There was no activity in the house. The cook wasn’t around. Richard was in the family dining room eating a sandwich he must have made for himself and staring out at the rain. Elizabeth was still in her parlor, still working on Doctor Zhivago. By a process of elimination I figured Beck must be in his den, maybe sitting in his red leather chair and looking at his machine gun collection. There was quiet everywhere. I didn’t understand it. Duffy had said they had five containers in and Beck had said he had a big weekend coming up, but nobody was doing anything.

I went up to Duke’s room. I didn’t think of it as my room. I hoped I never would. I lay down on the bed and started thinking again. Tried to chase whatever it was hovering way in the back of my mind. It’s easy, Leon Garber would have said. Work the clues. Go through everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard. So I went through it. But I kept coming back to Dominique Kohl. The fifth time I ever saw her, she drove me to Aberdeen, Maryland, in an olive-green Chevrolet. I was having second thoughts about letting genuine blueprints out into the world. It was a big risk. Not usually something I would worry about, but I needed more progress than we were making. Kohl had identified the dead-drop site, and the drop technique, and where and when and how Gorowski was letting his contact know that the delivery had been made. But she still hadn’t seen the contact make the pickup. Still didn’t know who he was.

Aberdeen was a small place twenty-some miles north and east of Baltimore. Gorowski’s method was to drive down to the big city on a Sunday and make the drop in the Inner Harbor area. Back then the renovations were in full swing and it was a nice bright place to be but the public hadn’t caught on all the way yet and it stayed pretty empty most of the time. Gorowski had a POV. It was a two-year-old Mazda Miata, bright red. It was a plausible car, all things considered. Not new, but not cheap either, because it was a popular model back then and nobody could get a discount off sticker, so used values held up well. And it was a two-seater, which was no good for his baby girls. So he had to have another car, too. We knew his wife wasn’t rich. It might have worried me in someone else, but the guy was an engineer. It was a characteristic choice. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. Entirely plausible that he would hoard his spare dollars and spring for something with a sweet manual change and rear-wheel drive.

The Sunday we followed him he parked in a lot near one of the Baltimore marinas and went to sit on a bench. He was a squat hairy guy. Wide, but not tall. He had the Sunday newspaper with him. He spent some time gazing out at the sailboats. Then he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sky. The weather was still wonderful. He spent maybe five minutes just soaking up the sun like a lizard. Then he opened his eyes and opened his paper and started to read it.

“This is his fifth time,” Kohl whispered to me. “Third trip since they finished with the sabot stuff.”

“Standard procedure so far?” I asked.

“Identical,” she said.

He kept busy with the paper for about twenty minutes. I could tell he was actually reading it. He paid attention to all the sections, except for sports, which I thought was a little odd for a Yankees fan. But then, I guessed a Yankees fan wouldn’t like the Orioles stuffed down his throat all the time.

“Here we go,” Kohl whispered.

He glanced up and slipped a buff army envelope out of the newspaper. Snapped his left hand up and out to take a kink out of the section he was reading. And to distract, because at the exact same time his right hand dropped the envelope into the garbage can beside him at the end of the bench.

“Neat,” I said.

“You bet,” she said. “This boy is no dummy.”

I nodded. He was pretty good. He didn’t get up right away. He sat there for maybe ten more minutes, reading. Then he folded the paper slowly and carefully and stood up and walked to the edge of the water and looked out at the boats some more. Then he turned around and walked back toward his car, with the newspaper tucked up under his left arm.

“Now watch,” Kohl said.

I saw him take a nub of chalk out of his pants pocket with his right hand. He scuffed against an iron lamp post and left a tick of chalk on it. It was the fifth mark on the post. Five weeks, five marks. The first four were fading away with age, in sequence. I stared at them through my field glasses while he walked on into the parking lot and got into his roadster and drove slowly away. I turned back and focused on the garbage can.

“Now what happens?” I said.

“Absolutely nothing,” Kohl said. “I’ve done this twice before. Two whole Sundays. Nobody’s going to come. Not today, not tonight.”

“When is the trash emptied?”

“Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“Maybe the garbage man is a go-between.”

She shook her head. “I checked. The truck compacts everything into a solid mass as it’s loaded and then it goes straight into the incinerator.”

“So our secret blueprints are getting burned up in a municipal incinerator?”

“That’s safe enough.”

“Maybe one of these sailboat guys is sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

“Not unless the Invisible Man bought a sailboat.”

“So maybe there’s no guy,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing was set up way in advance and then the guy got arrested for something else. Or he got cold feet and left town. Or he got sick and died. Maybe it’s a defunct scheme.”

“You think?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Are you going to pull the plug?” she said.

“I have to. I might be an idiot, but I’m not completely stupid. This is way out of hand now.”

“Can I go to plan B?”

“Haul Gorowski in and threaten him with a firing squad. Then tell him if he plays ball and delivers phony plans we’ll be nice to him.”

“Tough to make them convincing.”

“Tell him to draw them himself,” I said. “It’s his ass on the line.”

“Or his children’s.”

“All part of being a parent,” I said. “It’ll concentrate his mind.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You want to go dancing?”

“Here?”

“We’re a long way from home. Nobody knows us.”

“OK,” I said.

Then we figured it was too early for dancing, so we had a couple of beers and waited for evening. The bar we were in was small and dark. There was wood and brick. It was a nice place. It had a jukebox. We spent a long time leaning on it, side by side, trying to choose our debut number. We debated it with intensity. It began to assume enormous significance. I tried to interpret her suggestions by analyzing the tempos. Were we going to be holding on to each other? That sort of dancing? Or was it going to be the usual sort of separate-but-equal leaping about? In the end we would have needed a United Nations resolution, so we just put our quarter in the machine and closed our eyes and hit buttons at random. We got “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. It was a great number. It always has been. She was actually a pretty good dancer. But I was terrible.

Afterward we were out of breath, so we sat down and ordered more beers. And I suddenly figured out what Gorowski had been up to.

“It’s not the envelope,” I said. “The envelope is empty. It’s the newspaper. The blueprints are in the newspaper. In the sports section. He should have checked the box scores. The envelope is a diversion, in case of surveillance. He’s been well rehearsed. He dumps the newspaper in another garbage can, later. After making his chalk mark. Probably on his way out of the lot.”

“Shit,” Kohl said. “I wasted five weeks.”

“And somebody got three real blueprints.”

“One of us,” she said. “Military, or CIA, or FBI. A professional, to be that cute.”

The newspaper, not the envelope. Ten years later I was lying on a bed in Maine thinking about Dominique Kohl dancing and a guy called Gorowski folding his newspaper, slowly and carefully, and staring out at a hundred sailboat masts on the water. The newspaper, not the envelope. It seemed to be still relevant, somehow. This, not that. Then I thought about the maid hiding my stash under the floor of the Saab’s trunk. She couldn’t have hidden anything else there, or Beck would have found it and added it to the prosecution exhibits on his kitchen table. But the Saab’s carpets were old and loose. If I was the sort of person who hid a gun under a spare tire I might hide papers under a car’s carpets. And I might be the sort of person who made notes and kept records.

I rolled off the bed and stepped to the window. The afternoon had already happened. Full dark was on its way. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over. I went downstairs, thinking about the Saab. Beck was walking through the hallway. He was in a hurry. Preoccupied. He went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Listened to it for a second and then held it out to me.

“The phones are all dead,” he said.

I put the receiver to my ear and listened. There was nothing there. No dial tone, no scratchy hiss from open circuits. Just dull inert silence, and the sound of blood rushing in my head. Like a seashell.

“Go try yours,” he said.

I went back upstairs to Duke’s room. The internal phone worked OK. Paulie answered on the third ring. I hung up on him. But the outside line was stone dead. I held the receiver like it would make a difference and Beck appeared in the doorway.

“I can speak to the gate,” I said.

He nodded.

“That’s a completely separate circuit,” he said. “We put it in ourselves. What about the outside line?”

“Dead,” I said.

“Weird,” he said.

I put the receiver down. Glanced at the window.

“Could be the weather,” I said.

“No,” he said. He held up his cell phone. It was a tiny silver Nokia. “This is out too.”

He handed it to me. There was a tiny screen on the front. A bar chart on the right showed that the battery was fully charged. But the signal meter was all the way down. No service was displayed, big and black and obvious. I handed it back.

“I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”

I locked myself in. Pulled off my shoe. Opened the heel. Pressed power. The screen came up: No service. I turned it off and nailed it back in. Flushed the toilet for form’s sake and sat there on the lid. I was no kind of a telecommunications expert. I knew phone lines came down, now and then. I knew cell phone technology was sometimes unreliable. But what were the chances that one location’s land lines would fail at the exact same time its nearest cell tower went down? Pretty small, I guessed. Pretty damn small. So it had to be a deliberate outage. But who had requested it? Not the phone company. They wouldn’t do disruptive maintenance at commuting time on a Friday. Early on a Sunday morning, maybe. And they wouldn’t have the land lines down at the same time as the cell towers, anyway. They would stagger the two jobs, surely.

So who had organized it? A heavy-duty government agency, maybe. Like the DEA, perhaps. Maybe the DEA was coming for the maid. Maybe its SWAT team was rolling up the harbor operation first and it didn’t want Beck to know before it was ready to come on out to the house.

But that was unlikely. The DEA would have more than one SWAT team available. It would go for simultaneous operations. And even if it didn’t, it would be the easiest thing in the world to close the road between the house and the first turning. They could seal it forever. There was a twelve-mile stretch of unlimited opportunity. Beck was a sitting duck, phones or no phones.

So who?

Maybe Duffy, off the books. Duffy’s status might just get her a major once-in-a-lifetime favor, one-on-one with a phone company manager. Especially a favor that was limited geographically. One minor land line spur. And one cell tower, probably somewhere out near I-95. It would give a thirty-mile dead spot for people to drive through, but she might have been able to swing it. Maybe. Especially if the favor was strictly limited in duration. Not open-ended. Four or five hours, say.

And why would Duffy suddenly be afraid of phones for four or five hours? Only one possible answer. She was afraid for me.

The bodyguards were loose.

CHAPTER 10

Time. Distance divided by speed adjusted for direction equals time. Either I had enough, or I had none at all. I didn’t know which it would be. The bodyguards had been held in the Massachusetts motel where we planned the original eight-second sting. Which was less than two hundred miles south. That much, I knew for sure. Those were facts. The rest was pure speculation. But I could put together some kind of a likely scenario. They had broken out of the motel and stolen a government Taurus. Then they had driven like hell for maybe an hour, breathless with panic. They had wanted to get well clear before they did another thing. They might have even gotten a little lost, way out there in the wilds. Then they had gotten their bearings and hit the highway. Accelerated north. Then they had calmed down, checked the view behind, slowed up, stayed legal, and started looking for a phone. But by then Duffy had already killed the lines. She had acted fast. So their first stop represented a waste of time. Ten minutes, maybe, to allow for slowing down, parking, calling the house, calling the cell, starting up again, rejoining the highway traffic. Then they would have done it all again a second time at the next rest area. They would have blamed the first failure on a random technical hitch. Another ten minutes. After that, either they would have seen the pattern, or they would have figured they were getting close enough just to press on regardless. Or both.

Beginning to end, a total of four hours, maybe. But when did those four hours start? I had no idea. That was clear. Obviously somewhere between four hours ago and, say, thirty minutes ago. So either I had enough time or no time at all.

I came out of the bathroom fast and checked the window. The rain had stopped. It was night outside. The lights along the wall were on. They were haloed with mist. Beyond them was absolute darkness. No headlights in the distance. I headed downstairs. Found Beck in the hallway. He was still prodding at his Nokia, trying to get it to work.

“I’m going out,” I said. “Up the road a little.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like this thing with the phones. Could be nothing, could be something.”

“Something like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody’s coming. You just got through telling me how many people you got on your back.”

“We’ve got a wall and a gate.”

“You got a boat?”

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“If they get as far as the gate, you’re going to need a boat. They could sit there and starve you out.”

He said nothing.

“I’ll take the Saab,” I said.

“Why?”

Because it’s lighter than the Cadillac.

“Because I want to leave the Cadillac for you,” I said. “It’s bigger.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Whatever I need to,” I said. “I’m your head of security now. Maybe nothing’s happening, but if it is, then I’m going to try to take care of it for you.”

“What do I do?”

“You keep a window open and listen,” I said. “At night with all this water around, you’ll hear me from a couple miles away if I’m shooting. If you do, put everybody in the Cadillac and get the hell out. Drive fast. Don’t stop. I’ll hold them off long enough for you to get past. Have you got someplace else to go?”

He nodded. Didn’t tell me where.

“So go there,” I said. “If I make it, I’ll get to the office. I’ll wait there, in the car. You can check there later.”

“OK,” he said.

“Now call Paulie on the internal phone and tell him to stand by to let me through the gate.”

“OK,” he said again.

I left him there in the hallway. Walked out into the night. I detoured around the courtyard wall and retrieved my bundle from its hole. Carried it back to the Saab and put it on the rear seat. Then I slid into the front and fired up the engine and backed out. Drove slow around the carriage circle and accelerated down the drive. The lights on the wall were bright in the distance. I could see Paulie at the gate. I slowed a little and timed it so I didn’t have to stop. I went straight through. Drove west, staring through the windshield, looking for headlight beams coming toward me.

I drove four miles, and then I saw a government Taurus. It was parked on the shoulder. Facing toward me. No lights. The old guy was sitting behind the wheel. I killed my lights and slowed and stopped window to window with him. Wound down my glass. He did the same. Aimed a flashlight and a gun at my face until he saw who I was. Then he put them both away.

“The bodyguards are out,” he said.

I nodded. “I figured. When?”

“Close to four hours ago.”

I glanced ahead, involuntarily. No time.

“We got two men down,” he said.

“Killed?”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“Did Duffy report it?”

“She can’t,” he said. “Not yet. We’re off the books. This whole situation isn’t even happening.”

“She’ll have to report it,” I said. “It’s two guys.”

“She will,” he said. “Later. After you deliver. Because the objectives are right back in place again. She needs Beck for justification, now more than ever.”

“How did it go down?”

He shrugged. “They bided their time. Two of them, four of us. Should have been easy. But our boys got sloppy, I guess. It’s tough, locking people down in a motel.”

“Which two got it?”

“The kids who were in the Toyota.”

I said nothing. It had lasted roughly eighty-four hours. Three and a half days. Actually a little better than I had expected, at the start.

“Where is Duffy now?” I asked.

“We’re all fanned out,” he said. “She’s up in Portland with Eliot.”

“She did good with the phones.”

He nodded. “Real good. She cares about you.”

“How long are they off?”

“Four hours. That’s all she could get. So they’ll be back on soon.”

“I think they’ll come straight here.”

“Me too,” he said. “That’s why I came straight here.”

“Close to four hours, they’ll be off the highway by now. So I guess the phones don’t matter anymore.”

“That’s how I figure it.”

“Got a plan?” I said.

“I was waiting for you. We figured you’d make the connection.”

“Did they get guns?”

“Two Glocks,” he said. “Full mags.”

Then he paused a beat. Looked away.

“Less four shots fired at the scene,” he said. “That’s how it was described to us. Four shots, two guys. They were all head shots.”

“Won’t be easy.”

“It never is,” he said.

“We need to find a place.”

I told him to leave his car where it was and get in with me. He came around and slid into the passenger seat. He was wearing the same raincoat Duffy had been wearing in the coffee shop. He had reclaimed it. We drove another mile, and then I started looking for a place. I found one where the road narrowed sharply and went into a long gentle curve. The blacktop was built up a little, like a shallow causeway. The shoulders were less than a foot wide and fell away fast into rocky ground. I stopped the car and then turned it sharply and backed it up and pulled forward again until it was square across the road. We got out and checked. It was a good roadblock. There was no room to get around it. But it was a very obvious roadblock, like I knew it would be. The two guys would come tearing around the curve and jam on the brakes and then start backing up and shooting.

“We need to roll it over,” I said. “Like a bad accident.”

I took my bundle out of the back seat. Put it down on the shoulder, just in case. Then I made the old guy put his coat down on the road. I emptied my pockets and put mine beyond his. I wanted to roll the Saab onto the coats. I needed to bring it back relatively undamaged. Then we stood shoulder to shoulder with our backs to the car and started rocking it. It’s easy enough to turn a car over. I’ve seen it done all over the world. You let the tires and the suspension help you. You rock it, and then you bounce it, and then you keep it going until it’s coming right up in the air, and then you time it just right and flip it all the way over. The old guy was strong. He did his part. We got it bouncing through about forty-five degrees and then we spun around together and hooked our hands under the sill and heaved it all the way onto its side. Then we kept the momentum going and tipped it right onto its roof.

The coats meant it slid around easily enough without scratching, so we positioned it just right. Then I opened the upside-down driver’s door and told the old guy to get in and play dead for the second time in three days. He threaded his way inside and lay down on his front, half-in and half-out, with his arms thrown up above his head. In the dark, he looked pretty convincing. In the harsh shadows of bright headlights he would look no worse. The coats weren’t visible, unless you really looked for them. I moved away and retrieved my bundle and climbed down the rocks beyond the shoulder and crouched low.

Then we waited.

It seemed like a long wait. Five minutes, six, seven. I collected rocks, three of them, each a little larger than my palm. I watched the horizon to the west. The sky was still full of low clouds and I figured headlight beams would reflect off them as they bounced and dipped. But the horizon stayed black. And quiet. I could hear nothing at all except the distant surf and the old guy breathing.

“They got to be coming,” he called.

“They’ll come,” I said.

We waited. The night stayed dark and quiet.

“What’s your name?” I called.

“Why?” he called back.

“I just want to know,” I said. “Doesn’t seem right that I’ve killed you twice and I don’t even know your name.”

“Terry Villanueva,” he called.

“Is that Spanish?”

“Sure is.”

“You don’t look Spanish.”

“I know,” he said. “My mom was Irish, my dad was Spanish. But my brother and I took after our mom. My brother changed his name to Newton. Like the old scientist, or the suburb. Because that’s what Villanueva means, new town. But I stuck with the Spanish. Out of respect for the old guy.”

“Where was this?”

“South Boston,” he said. “Wasn’t easy, years ago, a mixed marriage and all.”

We went quiet again. I watched and listened. Nothing. Villanueva shifted his position. He didn’t look comfortable.

“You’re a trooper, Terry,” I called.

“Old school,” he called back.

Then I heard a car.

And Villanueva’s cell phone rang.

The car was maybe a mile away. I could hear the faint feathery sound of a faraway V-6 motor revving fast. I could see the distant glow of headlights trapped between the road and the clouds. Villanueva’s phone was set to ring with an insane speeded-up version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D. He stopped playing dead and scrambled halfway up to knees and dragged it out of his pocket. Thumbed a button and killed the music and answered it. It was a tiny thing, lost in his hand. He held it to his ear. He listened for a second. I heard him say, “OK.” Then, “We’re doing it right now.” Then, “OK.” Then he said “OK” again and clicked the phone off and lay back down. His cheek was on the blacktop. The phone was half-in and half-out of his hand.

“Service was just restored,” he called to me.

And a new clock started ticking. I glanced to my right into the east. Beck would keep trying the lines. I guessed as soon as he got a dial tone he would come out to find me and tell me the panic was over. I glanced to my left into the west. I could hear the car, loud and clear. The headlight beams bounced and swung, bright in the darkness.

“Thirty seconds,” I called.

The sound got louder. I could hear the tires and the automatic gearbox and the engine all as separate noises. I ducked lower. Ten seconds, eight, five. The car raced around the corner and its lights whipped across my hunched back. Then I heard the thump of hydraulics and the squeal of brake rotors and the howl of locked rubber grinding on the blacktop and the car came to a complete stop, slightly off line, twenty feet from the Saab.

I looked up. It was a Taurus, plain blue paint, gray in the cloudy moonlight. A cone of white light ahead of it. Brake lights flaring red behind. Two guys in it. Their faces were lit by their lights bouncing back off the Saab. They held still for a second. Stared forward. They recognized the Saab. They must have seen it a hundred times. I saw the driver move. Heard him shove the gearshift forward into Park. The brake lights died. The engine idled. I could smell exhaust fumes and the heat from under the hood.

The two guys opened their doors in unison. Got out and stood up, behind the doors. They had the Glocks in their hands. They waited. They came out from behind the doors. Walked forward, slowly, with the guns held low. The headlight beams lit them brightly from the waist down. Their upper bodies were harder to see. But I could make out their features. Their shapes. They were the bodyguards. No doubt about it. They were young and heavy, tense and wary. They were dressed in dark suits, creased and crumpled and stained. They had no ties. Their shirts had turned from white to gray.

They squatted next to Villanueva. He was in their shadow. They moved a little and turned his face into the light. I knew they had seen him before. Just a brief glimpse as they passed him, outside the college gate, eighty-four hours ago. I didn’t expect them to remember him. And I don’t think they did. But they had been fooled once, and they didn’t want to get fooled again. They were very cautious. They didn’t start in with immediate first aid. They just squatted there and did nothing. Then the one nearest me stood up.

By then I was five feet from him. I had my right hand cupped around a rock. It was a little bigger than a softball. I swung my arm, wide and flat and fast, like I was going to slap him in the face. The momentum would have taken my arm off at the shoulder if I had missed. But I didn’t miss. The rock hit him square on the temple and he went straight down like a weight had fallen on him from above. The other guy was faster. He scrambled away and twisted to his feet. Villanueva flailed at his legs and missed them. The guy danced away and whipped around. His Glock came up toward me. All I wanted to do was stop him firing it so I hurled the rock straight at his head. He spun away again and took it square in the back of his neck, right where his cranium curved in to meet his spine. It was like a ferocious punch. It pitched him straight forward. He dropped the Glock and went down on his face like a tree and lay still.

I stood there and watched the darkness in the east. Saw nothing. No lights. Heard nothing, except the distant sea. Villanueva crawled out of the upside-down car on his hands and knees and crouched over the first guy.

“This one’s dead,” he said.

I checked, and he was. Hard to survive a ten-pound rock sideways into the temple. His skull was neatly caved in and his eyes were wide open and there was nothing much happening behind them. I checked the pulses in his neck and his wrist and went to look at the second guy. Crouched down over him. He was dead, too. His neck was broken, but good. I wasn’t very surprised. The rock weighed ten pounds and I had pitched it like Nolan Ryan.

“Two birds, one stone,” Villanueva said.

I said nothing.

“What?” he said. “You wanted to take them back into custody? After what they did to us? This was suicide by cop, plain and simple.”

I said nothing.

“You got a problem?” Villanueva said.

I wasn’t us. I wasn’t DEA, and I wasn’t a cop. But I thought about Powell’s private signal to me: My eyes only, 10-2, 10-28. These guys need to be dead, make no mistake about it. And I was prepared to take Powell’s word for it. That’s what unit loyalties are for. Villanueva had his, and I had mine.

“No problem,” I said.

I found the rock where it had come to rest and rolled it back to the shoulder. Then I got to my feet and walked away and leaned in and killed the Taurus’s lights. Waved Villanueva over toward me.

“We need to be real quick now,” I said. “Use your phone and get Duffy to bring Eliot down here. We need him to take this car back.”

Villanueva used a speed dial and started talking and I found the two Glocks on the road and stuffed them back into the dead guys’ pockets, one each. Then I stepped over to the Saab. Getting it the right way up again was going to be a whole lot harder than turning it over. For a second I worried that it was going to be impossible. The coats killed any friction against the road. If we shoved it, it was just going to slide on its roof. I closed the upside-down driver’s door and waited.

“They’re coming,” Villanueva called.

“Help me with this,” I called back.

We manhandled the Saab on the coats back toward the house as far as we could get it. It slid off Villanueva’s coat onto mine. Slid to the far edge of mine and then stopped dead when the metal caught against the road.

“It’s going to get scratched,” Villanueva said.

I nodded.

“It’s a risk,” I said. “Now get in their Taurus and bump it.”

He drove their Taurus forward until its front bumper touched the Saab. It connected just above the waistline, against the B-pillar between the doors. I signaled him for more gas and the Saab jerked sideways and the roof ground against the blacktop. I climbed up on the Taurus’s hood and pushed hard against the Saab’s sill. Villanueva kept the Taurus coming, slow and steady. The Saab jacked up on its side, forty degrees, fifty, sixty. I braced my feet against the base of the Taurus’s windshield and walked my hands down the Saab’s flank and then put them flat on its roof. Villanueva hit the gas and my spine compressed about an inch and the Saab rolled all the way over and landed on its wheels with a thump. It bounced once and Villanueva braked hard and I fell forward off the hood and banged my head on the Saab’s door. Ended up flat on the road under the Taurus’s front fender. Villanueva backed it away and stopped and hauled himself out.

“You OK?” he said.

I just lay there. My head hurt. I had hit it hard.

“How’s the car?” I said.

“Good news or bad news?”

“Good first,” I said.

“The side mirrors are OK,” he said. “They’ll spring back.”

“But?”

“Big gouges in the paint,” he said. “Small dent in the door. I think you did it with your head. The roof is a little caved-in, too.”

“I’ll say I hit a deer.”

“I’m not sure they have deer out here.”

“A bear, then,” I said. “Or whatever. A beached whale. A sea monster. A giant squid. A huge woolly mammoth recently released from a melting glacier.”

“You OK?” he said again.

“I’ll live,” I said.

I rolled over and got up on all fours. Pushed myself upright, slow and easy.

“Can you take the bodies?” he said. “Because we can’t.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to,” I said.

We opened the Saab’s rear hatch with difficulty. It was a little misaligned because the roof was a little distorted. We carried the dead guys one at a time and folded them into the load space. They almost filled it. I went back to the shoulder and retrieved my bundle and carried it over and put it in on top of them. There was a parcel shelf that would hide everything from view. It took both of us to close the hatch. We had to take a side each and lean down hard. Then we picked up our coats off the road and shook them out and put them on. They were damp and crushed and a little torn up in places.

“You OK?” he asked again.

“Get in the car,” I said.

We sprung the door mirrors back into place and climbed in together. I turned the key. It wouldn’t start. I tried again. No luck. In between the two tries I heard the fuel pump whining.

“Leave the ignition on for a moment,” Villanueva said. “The gasoline drained out of the engine. When it was upside down. Wait a moment, let it pump back in.”

I waited and it started on the third attempt. So I put it in gear and got it straight on the road and drove the mile back to where we had left the other Taurus. The one that Villanueva had arrived in. It was waiting right there for us on the shoulder, gray and ghostly in the moonlight.

“Now go back and wait for Duffy and Eliot,” I said. “Then I suggest you get the hell out of here. I’ll see you all later.”

He shook my hand.

“Old school,” he said.

“Ten-eighteen,” I said. 10-18 was MP radio code for assignment completed. But I guess he didn’t know that, because he just looked at me.

“Stay safe,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Voice mail,” he said.

“What about it?”

“When a cell phone is out of service you usually get routed to voice mail.”

“The whole tower was down.”

“But the cell network didn’t know that. Far as the machinery knew, Beck just had his individual phone switched off. So they’ll have gotten his voice mail. In a central server somewhere. They might have left him a message.”

“What would have been the point?”

Villanueva shrugged. “They might have told him they were on their way back. You know, maybe they expected him to check his messages right away. They might have left him the whole story. Or maybe they weren’t really thinking straight, and they figured it was like a regular answering machine, and they were saying, Hey, Mr. Beck, pick up, will you?”

I said nothing.

“They might have left their voices on there,” he said. “Today. That’s the bottom line.”

“OK,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Start shooting,” I said. “Shoes, voice mail, he’s one step away now.”

Villanueva shook his head.

“You can’t,” he said. “Duffy needs to bring him in. It’s the only way she can save her own ass now.”

I looked away. “Tell her I’ll do my best. But if it’s him or me, he goes down.”

Villanueva said nothing.

“What?” I said. “Now I’m a human sacrifice?”

“Just do your best,” he said. “Duffy’s a good kid.”

“I know she is,” I said.

He hauled himself out of the Saab, one hand on the door frame, the other on the seat back. He stepped across and got into his own car and drove away, slow and quiet, no lights. I saw him wave. I watched until he was lost to sight and then I backed up and turned and got the Saab straddling the middle of the road, facing west. I figured when Beck came out to find me he would think I was doing a good defensive job.

But either Beck wasn’t trying the phones very often or he wasn’t thinking very much about me because I sat there for ten minutes with no sign of him. I spent part of the time testing my earlier hypothesis that a person who hides a gun under the spare wheel might also hide notes under the carpets. The carpets were already loose and they hadn’t been helped by being turned upside down. But there was nothing at all under them, except for rust stains and a damp layer of acoustical padding that looked like it had been made out of old red and gray sweaters. No notes. Bad hypothesis. I put the carpets back in place as well as I could and kicked them around until they were reasonably flat.

Then I got out and checked the exterior damage. Nothing I could do about the scratches in the paint. They were bad, but not disastrous. Nothing I could do about the dent in the door either, unless I wanted to take it apart and press the panel out. The roof was a little caved in. I remembered it as having a definite dome shape. Now it was fairly flat. But I figured I could maybe do something about that from the inside. I climbed into the back seat and put both palms up flat on the headliner and pushed hard. I was rewarded by two sounds. One of them was the pop of sheet metal springing back into shape. The other was the crackle of paper.

It wasn’t a new car, so the headliner wasn’t the one-piece molded mouse-fur thing that everybody uses now. It was the old-fashioned cream vinyl thing with the side-to-side wire ribs that pleated it into three accordion sections. The edges were trapped under a black rubber gasket that ran all around the roof. The vinyl was a little puckered in the front corner, over the driver’s seat. The gasket looked a little loose there. I guessed a person could stress the vinyl by pushing up on it and then peel it out from under the gasket. Then tug on it until it pulled away all along its length. That would give sideways access into any one of the three pleated sections the person chose to use. Then it would take time and fingernails to get the vinyl back under the gasket. A little care would make the intrusion hard to see, in a car as worn as that one.

I leaned forward and checked the section that ran above the front seats. I stabbed the vinyl upward until I felt the underside of the roof, all the way across the width of the car. Nothing there. Nothing in the next section, either. But the section above the rear seats had paper hidden in it. I could even judge the size and weight. Legal-size paper, maybe eight or ten stacked sheets.

I got out of the back and slid into the driver’s seat and looked at the gasket. Put some tension into the vinyl and picked at the edge. I got a fingernail under the rubber and eased it down into a little mouth a half-inch long. Scraped my other hand sideways across the roof and the vinyl obediently pulled out from under the gasket and gave me enough of a hole to get my thumb into.

I worked my thumb backward and I had gotten about nine inches unzipped when I was suddenly lit up from behind. Bright light, harsh shadows. The road came in over my right shoulder so I glanced across at the passenger-door mirror. The glass was cracked. It was filled with multiple sets of bright headlights. I saw the etched warning: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. I twisted around in the seat and saw a single set of high beams sweeping urgently left and right through the curves. A quarter-mile back. Coming on fast. I dropped my window an inch and heard the distant hiss of fat tires and the growl of a quiet V-8 kicked down into second gear. The Cadillac, in a hurry. I stabbed the vinyl back into place. No time to secure it under the gasket. I just shoved it upward and hoped it would stay there.

The Cadillac came right up behind me and stopped hard. The headlights stayed on. I watched in the mirror and saw the door open and Beck step out. I put my hand in my pocket and clicked the Beretta to fire. Duffy or no Duffy, I wasn’t interested in a long discussion about voice mail. But Beck had nothing in his hands. No gun, no Nokia. He stepped forward and I slid out and met him level with the Saab’s rear bumper. I wanted to keep him away from the dents and the scratches. It put him about eighteen inches from the guys he had sent down to pick up his son.

“Phones are back on,” he said.

“The cell too?” I said.

He nodded.

“But look at this,” he said.

He took the little silver phone out of his pocket. I kept my hand around the Beretta, out of sight. It would blow a hole in my coat, but it would blow a bigger hole in his coat. He passed me the phone. I took it, left-handed. Held it low, in the spread of the Cadillac’s headlights. Looked at the screen. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Some cell phones I had seen signaled a voice mail message with a little pictogram of an envelope. Some used a little symbol made up of two small circles joined together by a bar at the bottom, like a reel-to-reel tape, which I thought was weird, because I guessed most cell phone users had never seen a reel-to-reel tape in their lives. And I was pretty sure that the cell phone companies didn’t record the messages themselves on reel-to-reel tape. I guessed they did it digitally, inert inside some kind of a solid-state circuit. But then, the signs at railroad crossings still show the sort of locomotive that Casey Jones would have been proud of.

“See that?” Beck said.

I saw nothing. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. Just the signal strength bar, and the battery bar, and the menu thing, and the names thing.

“What?” I said.

“The signal strength,” he said. “It’s only showing three out of five. Normally I get four.”

“Maybe the tower was down,” I said. “Maybe it powers up again slowly. Some kind of electrical reason.”

“You think?”

“There are microwaves involved,” I said. “It’s probably complicated. You should look again later. Maybe it’ll come back up.”

I handed the phone back to him, left-handed. He took it and put it away in his pocket, still fretting about it.

“All quiet here?” he said.

“As the grave,” I said.

“So it was nothing,” he said. “Not something.”

“I guess,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I appreciate your caution. Really.”

“Just doing my job,” I said.

“Let’s go get dinner,” he said.

He went back to the Cadillac and got in. I clicked the Beretta back to safe and slid into the Saab. He backed up and turned in the road and waited for me. I guessed he wanted to go in through the gate together, so Paulie would only have to open and close it once. We drove back in convoy, four short miles. The Saab rode badly and the headlights pointed way up at an angle and the steering felt light. There were four hundred pounds of weight in the trunk. And the corner of the headliner fell down when I hit the first bump in the road and flapped in my face the whole way back.

We put the cars in the garages and Beck waited for me in the courtyard. The tide was coming in. I could hear the waves behind the walls. They were dumping huge volumes of water on the rocks. I could feel its impact through the ground. It was a definite physical sensation. Not just sound. I joined Beck and we walked back together and used the front door. The metal detector beeped twice, once for him, once for me. He handed me a set of house keys. I accepted them, like a badge of office. Then he told me dinner would be served in thirty minutes and he invited me to eat it with the family.

I went up to Duke’s room and stood at the high window. Five miles to the west, I thought I saw red taillights moving away into the distance. Three pairs of lights. Villanueva and Eliot and Duffy, I hoped, in the government Tauruses. 10-18, assignment completed. But it was hard to be sure if they were real because of the glare from the lights on the wall. They might have been spots in my vision, from fatigue, or from the bang on the head.

I took a fast shower and stole another set of Duke’s clothes. Kept my own shoes and jacket on, left my ruined coat in the closet. I didn’t check for e-mail. Duffy had been too busy for messages. And at that point we were on the same page, anyway. There was nothing more she could tell me. Pretty soon I would be telling her something, just as soon as I got a chance to rip the headliner out of the Saab.

I wasted the balance of the thirty-minute lull and then walked downstairs. Found the family dining room. It was huge. There was a long rectangular table in it. It was oak, heavy, solid, not stylish. It would have seated twenty people. Beck was at the head. Elizabeth was all the way at the other end. Richard was alone on the far side. The place set for me put me directly opposite him, with my back to the door. I thought about asking him to swap with me. I don’t like sitting with my back to a door. But I decided against it and just sat down.

Paulie wasn’t there. Clearly he hadn’t been invited. The maid wasn’t there either, of course. The cook was having to do all the scut work, and she didn’t look very pleased about it. But she had done a good job with the food. We started with French onion soup. It was pretty authentic. My mother wouldn’t have approved, but there are always twenty million individual Frenchwomen who think they alone possess the perfect recipe.

“Tell us about your service career,” Beck said to me, like he wanted to make conversation. He wasn’t going to talk about business. That was clear. Not in front of the family. I guessed maybe Elizabeth knew more than was good for her, but Richard seemed fairly oblivious. Or maybe he was just blocking it out. What had he said? Bad things don’t happen unless you choose to recall them?

“Nothing much to tell,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. Bad things had happened, and I didn’t choose to recall them.

“There must be something,” Elizabeth said.

They were all three looking at me, so I shrugged and gave them a story about checking a Pentagon budget and seeing eight-thousand-dollar charges for maintenance tools called RTAFAs. I told them I was bored enough to be curious and had made a couple of calls and been told the acronym stood for rotational torque-adjustable fastener applicators. I told them I had tracked one down and found a three-dollar screwdriver. That had led to three-thousand-dollar hammers, thousand-dollar toilet seats, the whole nine yards. It’s a good story. It’s the sort of thing that suits any audience. Most people respond to the audacity and anti-government types get to seethe. But it isn’t true. It happened, I guess, but not to me. It was a different department entirely.

“Have you killed people?” Richard asked.

Four in the last three days, I thought.

“Don’t ask questions like that,” Elizabeth said.

“The soup is good,” Beck said. “Maybe not enough cheese.”

“Dad,” Richard said.

“What?”

“You need to think about your arteries. They’re going to get all clogged up.”

“They’re my arteries.”

“And you’re my dad.”

They glanced at each other. They both smiled shy smiles. Father and son, best buddies. Ambivalence. It was all set to be a long meal. Elizabeth changed the subject away from cholesterol. She started talking about the Portland Museum of Art instead. She said it had an I. M. Pei building and a collection of American and Impressionist masters. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to educate me or to tempt Richard to get out of the house and do something. I tuned her out. I wanted to get to the Saab. But I couldn’t, right then. So I tried to predict exactly what I would find there. Like a game. I heard Leon Garber in my head: Think about everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve heard. Work the clues. I hadn’t heard much. But I had seen a lot of things. I guessed they were all clues, of a sort. The dining table, for instance. The whole house, and everything in it. The cars. The Saab was a piece of junk. The Cadillac and the Lincolns were nice automobiles, but they weren’t Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The furniture was all old and dull and solid. Not cheap, but then, it didn’t represent current expenditure anyway. It was all paid for long ago. What had Eliot said in Boston? About the LA gangbanger? His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. Beck was supposed to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. But Beck didn’t live like an emperor. Why not? Because he was a cautious Yankee, unimpressed by consumer baubles?

“Look,” he said.

I surfaced and saw him holding his cell phone out to me. I took it from him and looked at the screen. The signal strength was back up to four bars.

“Microwaves,” I said. “Maybe they ramp up slowly.”

Then I looked again. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. No voice-mail messages. But it was a tiny phone and I have big thumbs and I accidentally touched the up-down arrow key underneath the screen. The display instantly changed to a list of names. His virtual phone book, I guessed. The screen was so small it could show only three contacts at a time. At the top was house. Then came gate. Third on the list was Xavier. I stared at it so hard the room went silent around me and blood roared in my ears.

“The soup was very good,” Richard said.

I handed the phone back to Beck. The cook reached across in front of me and took my bowl away.

The first time I ever heard the name Xavier was the sixth time I ever saw Dominique Kohl. It was seventeen days after we danced in the Baltimore bar. The weather had broken. The temperature had plummeted and the skies were gray and miserable. She was in full dress uniform. For a moment I thought I must have scheduled a performance review and forgotten all about it. But then, I had a company clerk to remind me about stuff like that, and he hadn’t mentioned anything.

“You’re going to hate this,” Kohl said.

“Why? You got promoted and you’re shipping out?”

She smiled at that. I realized it had come out as more of a personal compliment than I should have risked.

“I found the bad guy,” she said.

“How?”

“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said.

I looked at her. “Did we schedule a performance review?”

“No, but I think we should.”

“Why?”

“Because I found the bad guy. And I think performance reviews always go better just after a big break in a case.”

“You’re still working with Frasconi, right?”

“We’re partners,” she said, which wasn’t strictly an answer to the question.

“Is he helping?”

She made a face. “Permission to speak freely?”

I nodded.

“He’s a waste of good food,” she said.

I nodded again. That was my impression, too. Lieutenant Anthony Frasconi was solid, but he wasn’t the crispest shirt in the closet.

“He’s a nice man,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong.”

“But you’re doing all the work,” I said.

She nodded. She was holding the original file, the one that I had given her just after I found out she wasn’t a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. It was bulging with her notes.

“You helped, though,” she said. “You were right. The document in question is in the newspaper. Gorowski dumps the whole newspaper in a trash can at the parking lot exit. Same can, two Sundays in a row.”

“And?”

“And two Sundays in a row the same guy fishes it out again.”

I paused. It was a smart plan, except that the idea of fishing around in a garbage can gave it a certain vulnerability. A certain lack of plausibility. The garbage can thing is hard to do, unless you’re willing to go the whole way and dress up like a homeless person. And that’s hard to do in itself, if you want to be really convincing. Homeless people walk miles, spend all day, check every can along their route. To imitate their behavior plausibly takes infinite time and care.

“What kind of a guy?” I said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Who roots around in trash cans except street people, right?”

“So who does?”

“Imagine a typical Sunday,” she said. “A lazy day, you’re strolling, maybe the person you’re meeting is a little late, maybe the impulse to go out for a walk has turned out to be a little boring. But the sun is shining, and there’s a bench to sit on, and you know the Sunday papers are always fat and interesting. But you don’t happen to have one with you.”

“OK,” I said. “I’m imagining.”

“Have you noticed how a used newspaper kind of becomes community property? Seen what they do on a train, for instance? Or a subway? A guy reads his paper, leaves it on the seat when he gets out, another guy picks it up right away? He’d rather die than pick up half a candy bar, but he’ll pick up a used newspaper with no problem at all?”

“OK,” I said.

“Our guy is about forty,” she said. “Tall, maybe six-one, trim, maybe one-ninety, short black hair going gray, fairly upmarket. He wears good clothes, chinos, golf shirts, and he kind of saunters through the lot to the can.”

“Saunters?”

“It’s a word,” she said. “Like he’s strolling, lost in thought, not a care in the world. Like maybe he’s coming back from Sunday brunch. Then he notices the newspaper sitting in the top of the can, and he picks it up and checks the headlines for a moment, and he kind of tilts his head a little and he puts the paper under his arm like he’ll read some more of it later and he strolls on.”

“Saunters on,” I said.

“It’s incredibly natural,” she said. “I was right there watching it happen and I almost discounted it. It’s almost subliminal.”

I thought about it. She was right. She was a good student of human behavior. Which made her a good cop. If I ever did actually get around to a performance review, she was going to score off the charts.

“Something else you speculated about,” she said. “He saunters on out to the marina and gets on a boat.”

“He lives on it?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, it’s got bunks and all, but I think it’s a hobby boat.”

“How do you know it’s got bunks?”

“I’ve been aboard,” she said.

“When?”

“The second Sunday,” she said. “Don’t forget, all I’d seen up to that point was the business with the newspaper. I still hadn’t positively identified the document. But he went out on another boat with some other guys, so I checked it out.”

“How?”

“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said. “I wore a bikini.”

“Wearing a bikini is a skill?” I said. Then I looked away. In her case, it would be more like world-class performance art.

“It was still hot then,” she said. “I blended in with the other yacht bunnies. I strolled out, walked up his little gangplank. Nobody noticed. I picked the lock on the hatch and searched for an hour.”

I had to ask.

“How did you conceal lock picks in a bikini?” I said.

“I was wearing shoes,” she said.

“Did you find the blueprint?”

“I found all of them.”

“Did the boat have a name?”

She nodded. “I traced it. There’s a yacht registry for all that stuff.”

“So who’s the guy?”

“This is the part you’re going to hate,” she said. “He’s a senior Military Intelligence officer. A lieutenant colonel, a Middle East specialist. They just gave him a medal for something he did in the Gulf.”

“Shit,” I said. “But there might be an innocent explanation.”

“There might,” she said. “But I doubt it. I just met with Gorowski an hour ago.”

“OK,” I said. That explained the dress greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. “And?”

“And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two. The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won’t talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid’s absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn’t play ball. I don’t see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff.”

“No,” I said. “Nor do I. Who is the guy?”

“His name is Francis Xavier Quinn,” she said.

The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn’t really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new identity, ready made. An identity that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.

“Rare or well?” Beck asked me.

He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.

“Rare,” I said. “Thank you.”

He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife’s work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.

“Horseradish?” Elizabeth said.

I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn’t know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I’d heard, everything I’d seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper. Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven’t found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

“Have you read Pasternak?” Elizabeth asked me.

“What do you think of Edward Hopper?” Richard asked.

“You think the M16 should be replaced?” Beck said.

I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated. But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.

“I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies,” I said. “I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night.”

“Nighthawks,” Richard said.

I nodded. “I like the guy on the left, all alone.”

“Remember the name of the diner?”

“Phillies,” I said. “And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle.”

“Really?” Beck said.

“It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do,” I said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.”

“Hopper was a genius,” Richard said.

“Pasternak was a genius,” Elizabeth said. “Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn’t been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison.”

“I guess the M16 is an improved rifle,” Beck said.

“Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler,” Richard said. “He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett.”

“Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?” his mother said.

They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.

“He’s a real Pentagon insider,” she said to me, the seventh time we met. “Lives close by in Virginia. That’s why he keeps his boat up in Baltimore, I guess.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Forty,” she said.

“Have you seen his full record?”

She shook her head. “Most of it is classified.”

I nodded. Tried to put the chronology together. A forty-year-old would have been eligible for the last two years of the Vietnam draft, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. But a guy who wound up as an intel light colonel before the age of forty had almost certainly been a college graduate, maybe even a Ph.D., which would have gotten him a deferment. So he probably didn’t go to Indochina, which in the normal way of things would have slowed his promotion. No bloody wars, no dread diseases. But his promotion hadn’t been slow, because he was a light colonel before the age of forty.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kohl said. “How come he’s already two whole pay grades above you?”

“Actually I was thinking about you in a bikini.”

She shook her head. “No you weren’t.”

“He’s older than me.”

“He went up like a bottle rocket.”

“Maybe he’s smarter than me,” I said.

“Almost certainly,” she said. “But even so, he’s gone real far, real fast.”

I nodded.

“Great,” I said. “So now we’re messing with a big star from the intel community.”

“He’s got lots of contact with foreigners,” she said. “I’ve seen him with all kinds of people. Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians.”

“He’s supposed to,” I said. “He’s a Middle East specialist.”

“He comes from California,” she said. “His dad was a railroad worker. His mom stayed at home. They lived in a small house in the north of the state. He inherited it, and it’s his only asset. And we can assume he’s been on military pay since college.”

“OK,” I said.

“He’s a poor boy, Reacher,” she said. “So how come he rents a big house in MacLean, Virginia? How come he owns a yacht?”

“Is it a yacht?”

“It’s a big sailboat with bedrooms. That’s a yacht, right?”

“POV?”

“A brand-new Lexus.”

I said nothing.

“Why don’t his own people ask these kind of questions?” she said.

“They never do,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that? Something can be plain as day and it passes them by.”

“I really don’t understand how that happens,” she said.

I shrugged.

“They’re human,” I said. “We should cut them some slack. Preconceptions get in the way. They ask themselves how good he is, not how bad he is.”

She nodded. “Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper. Preconceptions.”

“But they should know better.”

“I guess.”

“Military Intelligence,” I said.

“The world’s biggest oxymoron,” she replied, in the familiar old ritual. “Like safe danger.”

“Like dry water,” I said.

“Did you enjoy it?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.

I didn’t answer. Preconceptions get in the way.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asked again.

I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.

“Sorry?” I said. Everything I had heard.

“Dinner,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”

I looked down. My plate was completely empty.

“It was fabulous,” I said. Everything I had seen.

“Really?”

“No question,” I said. You haven’t found anything useful.

“I’m glad,” she said.

“Forget Hopper and Pasternak,” I said. “And Raymond Chandler. Your cook is a genius.”

“You feeling OK?” Beck said. He had left half his meat on his plate.

“Terrific,” I said. Not a thing.

“You sure?”

I paused. No evidence at all.

“Yes, I really mean it,” I said.

And I really did mean it. Because I knew what was in the Saab. I knew for sure. No doubt about it. So I felt terrific. But I felt a little ashamed, too. Because I had been very, very slow. Painfully slow. Disgracefully slow. It had taken me eighty-six hours. More than three and a half days. I had been every bit as dumb as Quinn’s old unit. Something can be plain as day and it passes them by. I turned my head and looked straight at Beck like I was seeing him for the very first time.

CHAPTER 11

I knew, but I calmed down fast during dessert and coffee. And I gave up on feeling terrific. Gave up on feeling ashamed, too. Those emotions were crowded out. I started to feel a little concerned instead. Because I started to see the exact dimensions of the tactical problem. And they were huge. They were going to force a whole new definition of working alone and undercover.

Dinner ended and everybody scraped their chairs back and stood up. I stayed in the dining room. I left the Saab’s headliner undisturbed. I was in no hurry. I could get to it later. There was no point risking trouble to confirm something I already knew. I helped the cook clean up instead. It seemed polite. Maybe it was even expected. The Becks went off somewhere and I carried dishes through to the kitchen. The mechanic was in there, eating a bigger portion of beef than I had gotten. I looked at him and started to feel a little ashamed again. I hadn’t paid him any attention at all. Hadn’t thought much about him. I had never even asked myself what he was for. But now I knew.

I loaded the dishes into the machine. The cook did economical things with the leftovers and wiped off the counters and within about twenty minutes we had everything squared away. Then she told me she was headed for bed so I said good night to her and went out the back door and walked across the rocks. I wanted to look at the sea. Wanted to gauge the tide. I had no experience with the ocean. I knew the tides came in and out maybe twice a day. I didn’t know when or why. Something to do with the moon’s gravity, maybe. Possibly it turned the Atlantic into a giant bathtub sloshing east and west between Europe and America. Maybe when it was low tide in Portugal it was high tide in Maine, and vice versa. I had no idea. Right then the tide looked to be changing from high to low. From in to out. I watched the waves for five more minutes and then headed back to the kitchen. The mechanic had left. I used the bunch of keys Beck had given me to lock the inner door. I left the outer door open. Then I walked through the hallway and checked the front. I guessed I was supposed to do stuff like that now. It was locked and chained. The house was quiet. So I went upstairs to Duke’s room and started planning the endgame.

There was a message from Duffy waiting for me in my shoe. It said: You OK? I replied: Sincere thanks for the phones. You saved my ass.

She came back with: Mine too. Equal element of self-interest.

I didn’t reply to that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just sat there in the silence. She had won a minor postponement, but that was all. Her ass was toast, whatever happened next. Nothing I could do about that.

Then she sent: Have searched all files and cannot repeat cannot find authorization for 2nd agent.

I sent: I know.

She came back with just two characters: ??

I sent: We need to meet. I will either call or just show up. Stand by.

Then I shut down the power and nailed the device back into my heel and wondered briefly whether I would ever take it out again. I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight. Day fourteen, a Friday, was nearly over. Day fifteen, a Saturday, was about to begin. Two weeks to the day since I had barged through the crowd outside Symphony Hall in Boston, on my way to a bar I never reached.

I lay down on the bed, fully dressed. I figured the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours were going to be crucial, and I wanted to spend five of the first six of them fast asleep. In my experience tiredness causes more foul-ups than carelessness or stupidity put together. Probably because tiredness itself creates carelessness and stupidity. So I got comfortable and closed my eyes. Set the alarm in my head for two o’clock in the morning. It worked, like it always does. I woke up after a two-hour nap, feeling OK.

I rolled off the bed and crept downstairs. Went through the hallway and the kitchen and unlocked the back door. I left all my metal stuff on the table. I didn’t want the detector to make a noise. I stepped outside. It was very dark. There was no moon. No stars. The sea was loud. The air was cold. There was a breeze. It smelled of dampness. I walked around to the fourth garage and opened the doors. The Saab was still there, undisturbed. I eased the hatch open and pulled out my bundle. Carried it around and stowed it in its dip. Then I went back for the first bodyguard. He had been dead for several hours and the low temperature was bringing rigor on early. He was pretty stiff. I hauled him out and jacked him up on my shoulder. It was like carrying a two-hundred-pound tree trunk. His arms stuck out like branches.

I carried him to the V-shaped cleft that Harley had shown me. Laid him down next to it and started counting waves. Waited for the seventh. It rolled in and just before it got to me I nudged the body into the cleft. The water came in under it and pushed it right back up at me. It was like the guy was trying to grab me with his rigid arms and take me with him. Or like he wanted to kiss me good-bye. He floated there for a second quite lazily and then the wave receded and the cleft drained and he was gone.

It worked the same way for the second guy. The ocean took him away to join his buddy, and the maid. I squatted there for a moment, feeling the breeze on my face, listening to the tireless tide. Then I went back and closed up the Saab’s hatch and slid into the driver’s seat. Finished the job on the headliner and reached back and pulled out the maid’s notes. There were eight legal-size pages of them. I read them all in the dim glow from the dome light. They were full of specifics. They had plenty of fine detail. But in general they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I checked them twice and when I was finished I butted them into a neat stack and carried them back to the tip of the point. Sat down on a rock and folded each page into a paper boat. Somebody had showed me how, when I was a kid. Maybe it had been my dad. I couldn’t remember. Maybe it had been my brother. I launched the eight little boats on the receding tide one after the other and watched them sail and bob away into the pitch darkness in the east.

Then I went back and spent some time fixing the headliner. I got it looking pretty good. I closed up the garage. I figured I would be gone before anybody opened it up again and noticed the damage on the car. I headed back to the house. Reloaded my pockets and relocked the door and crept back upstairs. Stripped to my shorts and slid into bed. I wanted to get three more hours. So I reset the alarm in my head and hauled the sheet and the blanket up around me and pressed a dip into the pillow and closed my eyes again. Tried to sleep. But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t come. Dominique Kohl came instead. She came straight at me out of the darkness, like I knew she would.

The eighth time we met we had tactical problems to discuss. Taking down an intel officer was a can of worms. Obviously MPs deal exclusively with military people gone bad, so acting against one of our own was not a novelty. But the intel community was a case apart. Those guys were separate and secretive and they tried very hard to be accountable to nobody. They were tough to get at. Generally they closed ranks faster than the best drill squad you ever saw. So Kohl and I had a lot to talk about. I didn’t want to have the meeting in my office. There was no visitor’s chair. I didn’t want her standing up the whole time. So we went back to the bar in town. It seemed like an appropriate location. The whole thing was getting so heavy we were ready to feel a little paranoid about it. Going off-base seemed like a smart thing to do. And I liked the idea of discussing intel matters like a couple of regular spies, in a dark little booth at the back of a tavern. I think Kohl did, too. She showed up in civilian clothes. Not a dress, but jeans and a white T-shirt with a leather jacket over it. I was in fatigues. I didn’t have any civilian clothes. The weather was cold by then. I ordered coffee. She got tea. We wanted to keep our heads clear.

“I’m glad we used the real blueprints now,” she said.

I nodded.

“Good instinct,” I said. As far as evidence went we needed to slam-dunk the whole thing. For Quinn to be in possession of the real blueprints would go a long way. Anything less than that, he could start spinning stories about test procedures, war games, exercises, entrapment schemes of his own.

“It’s the Syrians,” she said. “And they’re paying in advance. On an installment plan.”

“How?”

“Briefcase exchange,” she said. “He meets with an attaché from the Syrian Embassy. They go to a café in Georgetown. They both carry those fancy aluminum briefcases, identical.”

“Halliburton,” I said.

She nodded. “They put them side by side under the table and he picks up the Syrian guy’s when he leaves.”

“He’s going to say the Syrian is a legit contact. He’s going to say the guy is passing him stuff.”

“So we say, OK, show us the stuff.”

“He’ll say he can’t, because it’s classified.”

Kohl said nothing. I smiled.

“He’ll give us a big song and dance,” I said. “He’ll put his hand on our shoulders and look into our eyes and say, Hey, trust me on this, folks, national security is involved.”

“Have you dealt with these guys before?”

“Once,” I said.

“Did you win?”

I nodded. “They’re generally full of shit. My brother was MI for a time. Now he works for Treasury. But he told me all about them. They think they’re smart, whereas they’re really the same as anybody else.”

“So what do we do?”

“We’ll have to recruit the Syrian.”

“Then we can’t bust him.”

“You wanted two-for-one?” I said. “Can’t have it. The Syrian is only doing his job. Can’t fault him for that. Quinn is the bad guy here.”

She was quiet for a moment, a little disappointed. Then she shrugged.

“OK,” she said. “But how do we do it? The Syrian will just walk away from us. He’s an embassy attaché. He’s got diplomatic immunity.”

I smiled again. “Diplomatic immunity is just a sheet of paper from the State Department. The way I did it before was I got hold of the guy and told him to hold a sheet of paper up in front of his gut. Then I pulled my pistol out and asked him if he figured the paper was going to stop a bullet. He said I would get into trouble. I told him however much trouble I got into wasn’t going to affect how slowly he bled to death.”

“And he saw it your way?”

I nodded. “Played ball like Mickey Mantle.”

She went quiet again. Then she asked me the first of two questions that much later I wished I had answered differently.

“Can we see each other socially?” she said.

It was a private booth in a dark bar. She was cute as hell, and she was sitting there right next to me. I was a young man back then, and I thought I had all the time in the world.

“You asking me on a date?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

I said nothing.

“We’ve come a long way, baby,” she said. Then she added, “Women, I mean,” just in case I wasn’t up-to-date with current cigarette advertising.

I said nothing.

“I know what I want,” she said.

I nodded. I believed her. And I believed in equality. I believed in it big time. Not long before that I had met a woman Air Force colonel who captained a B52 bomber and cruised the night skies with more explosive power aboard her single plane than all the bombs ever dropped in the whole of human history put together. I figured if she could be trusted with enough power to explode the planet, then Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl could be trusted to figure out who she wanted to date.

“So?” she said.

Questions I wished I had answered differently.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Unprofessional,” I said. “You shouldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll put an asterisk next to your career,” I said. “Because you’re a talented person who can’t get any higher than sergeant major without going to officer candidate school, so you’ll go there, and you’ll ace it, and you’ll be a lieutenant colonel within ten years, because you deserve it, but everybody will be saying that you got it because you dated your captain way back when.”

She said nothing. Just called the waitress over and ordered us two beers. The room was getting hotter as it got more crowded. I took my jacket off, she took her jacket off. I was wearing an olive-drab T-shirt that had gotten small and thin and faded from being washed a thousand times. Her T-shirt was a boutique item. It was scooped a little lower at the neck than most T-shirts, and the sleeves were cut away at an angle so they rode up on the small deltoid muscles at the top of her arms. The fabric was snow white against her skin. And it was slightly translucent. I could see that she was wearing nothing underneath it.

“Military life is full of sacrifices,” I said, more to myself than to her.

“I’ll get over it,” she said.

Then she asked me the second question I wish I had answered differently.

“Will you let me make the arrest?” she said.

Ten years later I woke up alone in Duke’s bed at six o’clock in the morning. His room was at the front of the house, so I had no view of the sea. I was looking west, at America. There was no morning sun. No long dawn shadows. Just dull gray light on the driveway, and the wall, and the granite landscape beyond. The wind was blowing in off the sea. I could see trees moving. I imagined black storm clouds behind me, way out over the Atlantic, moving fast toward the shore. I imagined sea birds fighting the turbulent air with their feathers whipped and ruffled by the gale. Day fifteen, starting out gray and cold and inhospitable, and likely to get worse.

I showered, but I didn’t shave. I dressed in more of Duke’s black denim and laced my shoes and carried my jacket and my coat over my arm. Walked quietly down to the kitchen. The cook had already made coffee. She gave me a cup and I took it and sat at the table. She lifted a loaf of bread out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. I figured I would need to evacuate her, at some point before things turned unpleasant. And Elizabeth, and Richard. The mechanic and Beck himself could stay to face the music.

I could hear the sea from the kitchen, loud and clear. The waves crashed in and the relentless undertow sucked back out. Pools filled and drained, the gravel rattled across the rocks. The wind moaned softly through the cracks in the outer porch door. I heard frantic cries from the gulls. I listened to them and sipped my coffee and waited.

Richard came down ten minutes after me. His hair was all over the place and I could see his missing ear. He took coffee and sat down across from me. His ambivalence was back. I could see him facing up to no more college and the rest of his life hidden away with his folks. I figured if his mother got away without an indictment they could start over somewhere else. Depending on how resilient he was, he could get back to school without missing much more than a week of the semester. If he wanted to. Unless it was an expensive school, which I guessed it was. They were going to have money problems. They were going to walk away with nothing more than they stood up in. If they walked away at all.

The cook went out to set the dining room up for breakfast. Richard watched her go and I watched him and saw his ear again and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“Five years ago,” I said. “The kidnap.”

He kept his composure. Just looked down at the table and then looked up at me and combed his hair over his scar with his fingers.

“Do you know what your dad is really into?” I asked.

He nodded. Said nothing.

“Not just rugs, right?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not just rugs.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“There are worse things,” he said.

“Want to tell me what happened five years ago?” I said.

He shook his head. Looked away.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“I knew a guy called Gorowski,” I said. “His two-year-old daughter was abducted. Just for a day. How long were you gone for?”

“Eight days,” he said.

“Gorowski fell right into line,” I said. “One day was enough for him.”

Richard said nothing.

“Your dad isn’t the boss here,” I said, like a statement.

Richard said nothing.

“He fell into line five years ago,” I said. “After you had been gone eight days. That’s the way I figure it.”

Richard was silent. I thought about Gorowski’s daughter. She was twelve years old now. She probably had the Internet and a CD player and a phone in her room. Posters on her walls. And a tiny dim ache in her mind about something that had happened way in the past. Like the itch you get from a long-healed bone.

“I don’t need details,” I said. “I just want you to say his name.”

“Whose name?”

“The guy who took you away for eight days.”

Richard just shook his head.

“I heard the name Xavier,” I said. “Someone mentioned it.”

Richard looked away and his left hand went straight to the side of his head, which was all the confirmation I needed.

“I was raped,” he said.

I listened to the sea, pounding on the rocks.

“By Xavier?”

He shook his head again.

“By Paulie,” he said. “He was just out of prison. He still had a taste for that kind of thing.”

I was quiet for a long moment.

“Does your father know?”

“No,” he said.

“Your mother?”

“No.”

I didn’t know what to say. Richard said nothing more. We sat there in silence. Then the cook came back and fired up the stove. She put fat in a skillet and started heating it. The smell made me sick to my stomach.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

Richard followed me outside to the rocks. The air was salty and fresh and bitter cold. The light was gray. The wind was strong. It was blowing straight in our faces. Richard’s hair strung way out behind him, almost horizontal. The spray was smashing twenty feet in the air and foamy drops of water were whipping toward us like bullets.

“Every silver lining has a cloud,” I said. I had to talk loud, just to be heard over the wind and the surf. “Maybe one day Xavier and Paulie will get what’s coming to them, but your dad will go to prison in the process.”

Richard nodded. There were tears in his eyes. Maybe they were from the cold wind. Maybe they weren’t.

“He deserves to,” he said.

Very loyal, his father had said. Best buddies.

“I was gone eight days,” Richard said. “One should have been enough. Like with the other guy you mentioned.”

“Gorowski?”

“Whoever. With the two-year-old girl. You think she was raped?”

“I sincerely hope not.”

“Me too.”

“Can you drive?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You might need to get out of here,” I said. “Soon. You and your mother and the cook. So you need to be ready. For if and when I tell you to go.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a guy paid to protect your father. From his so-called friends, as much as his enemies.”

“Paulie won’t let us through the gate.”

“He’ll be gone soon.”

He shook his head.

“Paulie will kill you,” he said. “You have no idea. You can’t deal with Paulie, whoever you are. Nobody can.”

“I dealt with those guys outside the college.”

He shook his head again. His hair streamed in the wind. It reminded me of the maid’s hair, under the water.

“That was phony,” he said. “My mom and I discussed it. It was a setup.”

I was quiet for a second. Did I trust him yet?

“No, it was for real,” I said. No, I didn’t trust him yet.

“It’s a small community,” he said. “They have about five cops. I never saw that guy before in my life.”

I said nothing.

“I never saw those college cops either,” he said. “And I was there nearly three full years.”

I said nothing. Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.

“So why did you quit school?” I said. “If it was a setup?”

He didn’t answer.

“And how come Duke and I were ambushed?”

He didn’t answer.

“So what was it?” I said. “A setup or for real?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You saw me shoot them all,” I said.

He said nothing. I looked away. The seventh wave came rolling in. It crested forty yards out and hit the rocks faster than a man can run. The ground shuddered and spray burst upward like a star shell.

“Did either of you discuss this with your father?” I said.

“I didn’t,” he said. “And I’m not going to. I don’t know about my mom.”

And I don’t know about you, I thought. Ambivalence works both ways. You blow hot, then you blow cold. The thought of his father in a prison cell might look pretty good to him right now. Later, it might look different. When push came to shove, this guy was capable of swinging either way.

“I saved your ass,” I said. “I don’t like it that you’re pretending I didn’t.”

“Whatever,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do anyway. This is going to be a busy weekend. You’ve got the shipment to deal with. And after that you’ll be one of them anyway.”

“So help me out,” I said.

“I won’t double-cross my dad,” he said.

Very loyal. Best buddies.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“So how can I help you?”

“Just tell him you want me here. Tell him you shouldn’t be alone right now. He listens to you, about stuff like that.”

He didn’t reply. Just walked away from me and headed back to the kitchen. He went straight through to the hallway. I guessed he was going to eat breakfast in the dining room. I stayed in the kitchen. The cook had set my place at the deal table. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat. Tiredness and hunger are bad enemies. I had slept, and now I was going to eat. I didn’t want to wind up weak and light-headed at the wrong moment. I had toast, and another cup of coffee. Then I got more into it and had eggs and bacon. I was on my third cup of coffee when Beck came in to find me. He was wearing Saturday clothes. Blue jeans and a red flannel shirt.

“We’re going to Portland,” he said. “To the warehouse. Right now.”

He went back out to the hallway. I guessed he would wait at the front. And I guessed Richard hadn’t talked to him. Either he hadn’t gotten a chance, or he hadn’t wanted to. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Checked my pockets to make sure the Beretta was safely stowed and the keys were there. Then I walked out and fetched the car. Drove it around to the front. Beck was waiting there for me. He had put a canvas jacket over his shirt. He looked like a regular Maine guy heading out to split logs or tap his maple trees for syrup. But he wasn’t.

Paulie was about ready with the gate so I had to slow but I didn’t have to stop. I glanced at him as I passed. I figured he would die today. Or tomorrow. Or I would. I left him behind and gunned the big car along the familiar road. After a mile I passed the spot where Villanueva had parked. Four miles after that I rounded the narrow curve where I had trapped the bodyguards. Beck didn’t speak. He had his knees apart with his hands held down between them. He was leaning forward in his seat. His head was down, but his eyes were up. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield. He was nervous.

“We never had our talk,” I said. “About the background information.”

“Later,” he said.

I passed Route One and used I-95 instead. Headed north for the city. The sky stayed gray. The wind was strong enough to push the car a little off line. I turned onto I-295 and passed by the airport. It was on my left, beyond the tongue of water. On my right was the back of the strip mall where the maid had been captured, and the back of the new business park where I figured she had died. I kept on going straight and threaded my way into the harbor area. I passed the lot where Beck parked his trucks. One minute later we arrived at his warehouse.

It was surrounded by vehicles. There were five of them parked head-in against the walls, like airplanes at a terminal. Like animals at a trough. Like suckerfish on a corpse. There were two black Lincoln Town Cars and two blue Chevy Suburbans and a gray Mercury Grand Marquis. One of the Lincolns was the car I had been in when Harley drove me out to pick up the Saab. After we put the maid into the sea. I looked for enough space to park the Cadillac.

“Just let me out here,” Beck said.

I eased to a stop. “And?”

“Head back to the house,” he said. “Take care of my family.”

I nodded. So maybe Richard had talked to him, after all. Maybe his ambivalence was swinging my way, just temporarily.

“OK,” I said. “Whatever you need. You want me to pick you up again later?”

He shook his head.

“I’m sure I’ll get a ride back,” he said.

He slid out and headed for the weathered gray door. I took my foot off the brake and looped around the warehouse and rolled back south.

I used Route One instead of I-295 and drove straight to the new business park. Pulled in and cruised through the network of brand-new roads. There were maybe three dozen identical metal buildings. They were very plain. It wasn’t the kind of place that depends on attracting casual passersby. Foot-traffic wasn’t important. There were no retail places. No gaudy come-ons. No big billboards. Just discreet unit numbers with business names printed small next to them. There were lock-and-key people, ceramic tile merchants, a couple of print shops. There was a beauty products wholesaler. Unit 26 was an electric wheelchair distributor. And next to it was Unit 27: Xavier eXport Company. The Xs were much larger than the other letters. There was a main office address on the sign that didn’t match the business park’s location. I figured it referred to someplace in downtown Portland. So I rolled north again and recrossed the river and did some city driving.

I came in on Route One with a park on my left. Made a right onto a street full of office buildings. They were the wrong buildings. It was the wrong street. So I quartered the business district for five long minutes until I spotted a street sign with the right name on it. Then I watched the numbers and pulled up on a fireplug outside a tower that had stainless steel letters stretched across the whole of the frontage, spelling out a name: Missionary House. There was a parking garage under it. I looked at the vehicle entrance and was pretty sure Susan Duffy had walked through it eleven weeks earlier, with a camera in her hand. Then I recalled a high school history lesson, somewhere hot, somewhere Spanish, a quarter-century in the past, some old guy telling us about a Spanish Jesuit called Francisco Javier. I could even remember his dates: 1506 to 1552. Francisco Javier, Spanish missionary. Francis Xavier, Missionary House. Back in Boston at the start Eliot had accused Beck of making jokes. He had been wrong. It was Quinn with the twisted sense of humor.

I moved off the fireplug and found Route One again and headed south on it. I drove fast but it took me thirty whole minutes to reach the Kennebunk River. There were three Ford Tauruses parked outside the motel, all plain and identical apart from color, and even then there wasn’t much variation between them. They were gray, gray blue, and blue. I put the Cadillac where I had put it before, behind the propane store. Walked back through the cold and knocked on Duffy’s door. I saw the peephole black out for a second and then she opened up. We didn’t hug. I saw Eliot and Villanueva in the room behind her.

“Why can’t I find the second agent?” she said.

“Where did you look?”

“Everywhere,” she said.

She was wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt. Different jeans, different shirt. She must have had a large supply. She was wearing boat shoes over bare feet. She looked good, but there was worry in her eyes.

“Can I come in?” I said.

She paused a second, preoccupied. Then she moved out of the way and I followed her inside. Villanueva was in the desk chair. He had it tilted backward. I hoped the legs were strong. He wasn’t a small guy. Eliot was on the end of the bed, like he had been in my room in Boston. Duffy had been sitting at the head of the bed. That was clear. The pillows were stacked vertically and the shape of her back was pressed into them.

“Where did you look?” I asked her again.

“The whole system,” she said. “The whole Justice Department, front to back, which means FBI as well as DEA. And she’s not there.”

“Conclusion?”

“She was off the books too.”

“Which begs a question,” Eliot said. “Like, what the hell is going on?”

Duffy sat down at the head of the bed again and I sat down next to her. There was no other place for me to go. She wrestled a pillow out from behind her and shoved it in behind me. It was warm from her body.

“Nothing much is going on,” I said. “Except all three of us started out two weeks ago just like the Keystone Cops.”

“How?” Eliot said.

I made a face. “I was obsessed with Quinn, you guys were obsessed with Teresa Daniel. We were all so obsessed we went right ahead and built a house of cards.”

“How?” he said again.

“My fault more than yours,” I said. “Think about it from the very beginning, eleven weeks ago.”

“Eleven weeks ago was nothing to do with you. You weren’t involved yet.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

He shrugged. Rehearsed it in his mind. “We got word from LA that a top boy just bought himself a first-class ticket to Portland, Maine.”

I nodded. “So you tracked him to his rendezvous with Beck. And took pictures of him doing what?”

“Checking samples,” Duffy said. “Doing a deal.”

“In a private parking garage,” I said. “And as an aside, if it was private enough to get you in trouble with the Fourth Amendment, maybe you should have wondered how Beck got himself in there.”

She said nothing.

“Then what?” I said.

“We looked at Beck,” Eliot said. “Concluded he was a major importer and a major distributor.”

“Which he most definitely is,” I said. “And you put Teresa in to nail him.”

“Off the books,” Eliot said.

“That’s a minor detail,” I said.

“So what went wrong?”

“It was a house of cards,” I said. “You made one tiny error of judgment at the outset. It invalidated everything that came after it.”

“What was it?”

“Something that I should have seen a hell of a lot earlier than I did.”

“What?”

“Just ask yourself why you can’t find a computer trail for the maid.”

“She was off the books. That’s the only explanation.”

I shook my head. “She was as legal as can be. She was all over the damn books. I found some notes she made. There’s no doubt about it.”

Duffy looked straight at me. “Reacher, what exactly is going on?”

“Beck has a mechanic,” I said. “Some kind of a technician. For what?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I never even asked myself,” I said. “I should have. I shouldn’t have needed to, actually, because I should have known before I even met the damn mechanic. But I was locked in a groove, just like you were.”

“What groove?”

“Beck knew the retail on a Colt Anaconda,” I said. “He knew how much it weighed. Duke had a Steyr SPP, which is a weird Austrian gun. Angel Doll had a PSM, which is a weird Russian gun. Paulie’s got an NSV, probably the only one inside the United States. Beck was obsessed with the fact that we attacked with Uzis, not H and Ks. He knew enough to spec out a Beretta 92FS so it looked just like a regular military M9.”

“So?”

“He’s not what we thought he was.”

“So what is he? You just agreed he’s definitely a major importer and distributor.”

“He is.”

“So?”

“You looked in the wrong computer,” I said. “The maid didn’t work for the Justice Department. She worked for Treasury.”

“Secret Service?”

I shook my head.

“ATF,” I said. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”

The room went quiet.

“Beck isn’t a drug dealer,” I said. “He’s a gunrunner.”

The room stayed quiet for a very long time. Duffy looked at Eliot. Eliot looked back at her. Then they both looked at Villanueva. Villanueva looked at me. Then he looked out the window. I waited for the tactical problem to dawn on them. But it didn’t. Not right away.

“So what was the LA guy doing?” Duffy said.

“Looking at samples,” I said. “In the Cadillac’s trunk. Exactly like you thought. But they were samples of the weapons Beck was dealing. He as good as told me. He said dope dealers were driven by fashion. They like new and fancy things. They change weapons all the time, always looking for the latest thing.”

“He told you?”

“I wasn’t really listening,” I said. “I was tired. And it was all mixed in with stuff about sneakers and cars and coats and watches.”

“Duke went to Treasury,” she said. “After he was a cop.”

I nodded. “Beck probably met him on the job. Probably bought him off.”

“Where does Quinn fit in?”

“I figure he was running a rival operation,” I said. “He probably always was, ever since he got out of the hospital in California. He had six months to make his plans. And guns are a much better fit with a guy like Quinn than narcotics. I figure at some point he identified Beck’s operation as a takeover target. Maybe he liked the way Beck was mining the dope dealer market. Or maybe he just liked the rug side of the business. It’s great cover. So he moved in. He kidnapped Richard five years ago, to get Beck’s signature on the dotted line.”

“Beck told you the Hartford guys were his customers,” Eliot said.

“They were,” I said. “But for their guns, not for their dope. That’s why he was puzzled about the Uzis. He’d probably just gotten through selling them a whole bunch of H and Ks, and now they’re using Uzis? He couldn’t understand it. He must have thought they had switched suppliers.”

“We were pretty dumb,” Villanueva said.

“I was dumber than you,” I said. “I was amazingly dumb. There was evidence all over the place. Beck isn’t rich enough to be a dope dealer. He makes good money, for sure, but he doesn’t make millions a week. He noticed the marks I scratched on the Colt cylinders. He knew the price and the weight of a laser sight to use on the Beretta he gave me. He put a couple of mint H&Ks in a bag when he needed to take care of some business down in Connecticut. Probably pulled them right out of stock. He’s got a private collection of Thompson grease guns.”

“What’s the mechanic for?”

“He gets the guns ready for sale,” I said. “That’s my guess. He tweaks them, adjusts them, checks them out. Some of Beck’s customers wouldn’t react well to substandard merchandise.”

“Not the ones we know,” Duffy said.

“Beck talked about the M16 at dinner,” I said. “He was conversing about an assault rifle, for God’s sake. And he wanted to hear my opinion about Uzis versus H&Ks, like he was really fascinated. I thought he was just a gun nerd, you know, but it was actually professional interest. He has computer access to the Glock factory in Deutsch-Wagram in Austria.”

Nobody spoke. I closed my eyes, then I opened them again.

“There was a smell in a basement room,” I said. “I should have recognized it. It was the smell of gun oil on cardboard. It’s what you get when you stack boxes of new weapons and leave them there for a week or so.”

Nobody spoke.

“And the prices in the Bizarre Bazaar books,” I said. “Low, medium, high. Low for ammunition, medium for handguns, high for long guns and exotics.”

Duffy was looking at the wall. She was thinking hard.

“OK,” Villanueva said. “I guess we were all a little dumb.”

Duffy looked at him. Then she stared at me. The tactical problem was finally dawning on her.

“We have no jurisdiction,” she said.

Nobody spoke.

“This is ATF business,” she said. “Not DEA.”

“It was an honest mistake,” Eliot said.

She shook her head. “I don’t mean then. I mean now. We can’t be in there. We have to butt out, right now, immediately.”

“I’m not butting out,” I said.

“You have to. Because we have to. We have to fold our tents and leave. And you can’t be in there on your own and unsupported.”

A whole new definition of alone and undercover.

“I’m staying,” I said.

I searched my soul for a whole year after it happened and concluded I wouldn’t have answered any differently even if she hadn’t been fragrant and naked under a thin T-shirt and sitting next to me in a bar when she asked the fateful question. Will you let me make the arrest? I would have said yes, whatever the circumstances. For sure. Even if she had been a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota standing at attention in my office, I would have said yes. She had done the work. She deserved the credit. I was vaguely interested in getting ahead back then, maybe a little less so than most people, but any structure that has a ranking system tempts you to try to climb it. So I was vaguely interested. But I wasn’t a guy who hijacked subordinates’ achievements in order to make myself look good. I never did that. If somebody performed well, did a good job, I was always happy to stand back and let them reap the rewards. It was a principle I adhered to throughout my career. I could always console myself by basking in their reflected glow. It was my company, after all. There was a certain amount of collective recognition. Sometimes.

But anyway, I really liked the idea of an MP noncom busting an intel light colonel. Because I knew a guy like Quinn would absolutely hate it. He would see it as the ultimate indignity. A guy who bought Lexuses and sailboats and wore golf shirts didn’t want to be taken down by a damn sergeant.

“Will you let me make the arrest?” she asked again.

“I want you to,” I said.

“It’s a purely legal issue,” Duffy said.

“Not to me,” I said.

“We have no authority.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“It’s suicide,” Eliot said.

“I survived so far.”

“Only because she cut the phones.”

“The phones are history,” I said. “The bodyguard problem resolved itself. So I don’t need backup anymore.”

“Everybody needs backup. You can’t go undercover without it.”

“ATF backup did the maid a whole lot of good,” I said.

“We lent you a car. We helped you every step of the way.”

“I don’t need cars anymore. Beck gave me my own set of keys. And a gun. And bullets. I’m his new right-hand man. He trusts me to protect his family.”

They said nothing.

“I’m an inch away from nailing Quinn,” I said. “I’m not butting out now.”

They said nothing.

“And I can get Teresa Daniel back,” I said.

“ATF can get Teresa Daniel back,” Eliot said. “We go to ATF now, we’re off the hook with our own people. The maid was theirs, not ours. No harm, no foul.”

“ATF isn’t up to speed,” I said. “Teresa will be caught in the crossfire.”

There was a long silence.

“Monday,” Villanueva said. “We’ll sit on it until Monday. We’ll have to tell ATF by Monday at the latest.”

“We should tell them right now,” Eliot said.

Villanueva nodded. “But we won’t. And if necessary I’ll make sure that we don’t. I say we give Reacher until Monday.”

Eliot said nothing more. He just looked away. Duffy laid her head back on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling.

“Shit,” she said.

“It’ll be over by Monday,” I said. “I’ll bring Teresa back to you here and then you can head home and make all the calls you want.”

She was quiet for a whole minute. Then she spoke.

“OK,” she said. “You can go back. And you should probably go back right now. You’ve been gone a long time. That’s suspicious in itself.”

“OK,” I said.

“But think first,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I’m not your responsibility,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Just answer the question. Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Now think again. Still sure?”

“Yes,” I said again.

“We’ll be here,” she said. “Call us if you need us.”

“OK,” I said.

“Still sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So go.”

She didn’t get up. None of them did. I just eased myself off the bed and walked out through the silent room. I was halfway back to the Cadillac when Terry Villanueva came out after me. He waved me to wait and walked across to me. He moved stiff and slow, like the old guy he was.

“Bring me in,” he said. “Any chance you get, I want to be there.”

I said nothing.

“I could help you out,” he said.

“You already did.”

“I need to do more. For the kid.”

“Duffy?”

He shook his head. “No, Teresa.”

“You got a connection?”

“I got a responsibility,” he said.

“How?”

“I was her mentor,” he said. “It worked out that way. You know how that is?”

I nodded. I knew exactly, totally, and completely how that was.

“Teresa worked for me for a spell,” he said. “I trained her. I broke her in, basically. Then she moved up. But ten weeks ago she came back to me and asked if I thought she should accept this mission. She had doubts.”

“But you said yes.”

He nodded. “Like a damn fool.”

“Could you really have stopped her?”

“Probably. She would have listened to me if I had made a case why she shouldn’t do it. She’d have made up her own mind, but she’d have listened.”

“I understand,” I said.

And I did, no question about it. I left him standing there in the motel lot and slid into the car and watched him watch me drive away.

I stayed on Route One all the way through Biddeford and Saco and Old Orchard Beach and then struck out east on the long lonely road out to the house. I checked my watch as I got close and figured I had been away two whole hours, of which only forty minutes were legitimate. Twenty minutes to the warehouse, twenty back. But I didn’t expect to have to explain myself to anybody. Beck would never know I hadn’t come straight home and the others would never know I had been supposed to. I figured I was right there in the endgame, freewheeling toward victory.

But I was wrong.

I knew it before Paulie got halfway through opening the gate. He came out of his house and stepped across to the latch. He was wearing his suit. No coat. He lifted the latch by butting it upward with his clenched fist. Everything was still normal. I had seen him open the gate a dozen times and he was doing nothing he hadn’t done before. He wrapped his fists around the bars. Pulled the gate. But before he got halfway through opening it he stopped it dead. He just made enough space to squeeze his giant frame through. Then he stepped out to meet me. He walked around toward my window and when he got six feet from the car he stopped and smiled and took two guns out of his pockets. It happened in less than a second. Two pockets, two hands, two guns. They were my Colt Anacondas. The steel looked dull in the gray light. I could see they were both loaded. There were bright snub-nose copper jackets winking at me from every chamber I could see. Remington .44 Magnums, without a doubt. Full metal jacket. Eighteen bucks for a box of twenty. Plus tax. Ninety-five cents each. Twelve of them. Eleven dollars and forty cents’ worth of precision ammunition, ready to go, five dollars and seventy cents in each hand. And he was holding those hands very steady. They were like rocks. The left was aimed a little ahead of the Cadillac’s front tire. The right was aimed directly at my head. His fingers were tight on the triggers. The muzzles weren’t moving at all. Not even a fraction. He was like a statue.

I did all the usual things. I ran all the numbers. The Cadillac was a big car with long doors but he had put himself just far enough away that I couldn’t jerk my door open and hit him with it. And the car was stationary. If I hit the gas he would fire both guns instantly. The bullet from the one in his right hand might well pass behind my head but the car’s front tire would roll straight into the path of the one from his left. Then I would hit the gates hard and lose momentum and with a blown front tire and maybe with damaged steering I would be a sitting duck. He would fire ten more times and even if I wasn’t killed outright I would be badly wounded and the car would be crippled. He could just step over and watch me bleed while he reloaded.

I could sneak it into reverse and howl away backward but reverse gear is pretty low on most cars and therefore I would be moving slowly. And I would be moving directly away from him in a perfectly straight line. No lateral displacement. None of the usual benefits of a moving target. And a Remington .44 Magnum leaves a gun barrel at more than eight hundred miles an hour. No easy way to outrun one.

I could try my Beretta. It would have to be a very fast snap shot through the window glass. But the window glass on a Cadillac is pretty thick. They make it that way to keep the interior quiet. Even if I got the gun out and fired before he did, it would be pure chance if I hit him. The glass would shatter for sure, but unless I took all the time I needed to make absolutely certain the trajectory was exactly perpendicular to the window the bullet would deflect. Perhaps radically. It could miss him altogether. And even if it hit him it would be pure chance if it hurt him. I remembered kicking him in the kidney. Unless I happened to hit him in the eye or straight through the heart he would think he had been stung by a bee.

I could buzz the window down. But it was very slow. And I could predict exactly what would happen. He would straighten his arm while the glass was moving and bring the right-hand Colt within three feet of my head. Even if I got the Beretta out real fast he would still have a hell of a jump on me. The odds were not good. Not good at all. Stay alive, Leon Garber used to say. Stay alive and see what the next minute brings.

Paulie dictated the next minute.

“Put it in Park,” he yelled.

I heard him clearly, even through the thick glass. I moved the gearshift into Park.

“Right hand where I can see it,” he yelled.

I put my right palm up against the window, fingers extended, just like when I signaled I see five people to Duke.

“Open the door with your left,” he yelled.

I scrabbled blindly with my left hand and pulled the door release. Pushed on the glass with my right. The door swung open. Cold air came in. I felt it around my knees.

“Both hands where I can see them,” he said. He spoke quieter, now the glass wasn’t between us. He brought the left-hand Colt around on me, now the car was out of gear. I looked at the twin muzzles. It was like sitting on the foredeck of a battleship looking up at a pair of naval guns. I put both hands where he could see them.

“Feet out of the car,” he said.

I swiveled on my butt, slowly on the leather. Got my feet out onto the blacktop. I felt like Terry Villanueva outside the college gate, early in the morning of day eleven.

“Stand up,” he said. “Step away from the car.”

I levered myself upright. Stepped away from the car. He pointed both guns directly at my chest. He was four feet away from me.

“Stand very still,” he said.

I stood very still.

“Richard,” he called.

Richard Beck came out of the gatehouse door. He was pale. I saw Elizabeth Beck behind him in the shadows. Her blouse was open at the front. She was clutching it tight around herself. Paulie grinned at me. A sudden, lunatic grin. But the guns didn’t waver. Not even a fraction. They stayed rock steady.

“You came back a little too soon,” he said. “I was about to make him have sex with his mother.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I got a call,” he said. “That’s what’s going on.”

I should have been back an hour and twenty minutes ago.

“Beck called you?”

“Not Beck,” he said. “My boss.”

“Xavier?” I said.

“Mr. Xavier,” he said.

He stared at me, like a challenge. The guns didn’t move.

“I went shopping,” I said. Stay alive. See what the next minute brings.

“I don’t care what you did.”

“I couldn’t find what I wanted. That’s why I’m late.”

“We expected you to be late.”

“Why?”

“We got new information.”

I said nothing to that.

“Walk backward,” he said. “Through the gate.”

He kept both guns four feet from my chest and walked forward while I walked backward through the gate. He matched me pace for pace. I stopped twenty feet inside, in the middle of the driveway. He stepped to one side and half-turned so he could cover me on his left and Richard and Elizabeth on his right.

“Richard,” he called. “Close the gate.”

He kept the left-hand Colt aimed at me and swung the right-hand Colt toward Richard. Richard saw it coming around at him and stepped up and grabbed the gate and pushed it shut. It clanged into place, loud and metallic.

“Chain it.”

Richard fumbled with the chain. I heard it ringing and rattling against the iron. I heard the Cadillac, idling quietly and obediently forty feet away on the wrong side of the gate. I heard the waves pounding on the shore behind me, slow and regular and distant. I saw Elizabeth Beck in the gatehouse doorway. She was ten feet away from the big machine gun hanging on its chain. It had no safety catch. But Paulie was in the blind spot. The back window couldn’t see him.

“Lock it,” Paulie called.

Richard snapped the padlock shut.

“Now you and your mom go stand behind Reacher.”

They met near the gatehouse door. Walked toward me. Passed right by me. They were both white and trembling. Richard’s hair was blowing. I saw his scar. Elizabeth had her arms crossed tight against her chest. I heard them both stop behind me. Heard their shoes on the blacktop as they shuffled around to face my back. Paulie stepped over to the center of the driveway. He was ten feet away. Both barrels were aimed at my chest, one to the left side, one to the right. Jacketed .44 Magnums would go straight through me and probably straight through Richard and Elizabeth, too. They might make it all the way to the house. Might break a couple of first-floor windows.

“Now Reacher holds his arms out by his sides,” Paulie called.

I held them out, away from my body, stiff and straight, angled down.

“Now Richard takes Reacher’s coat off,” Paulie called. “He pulls it down, from the collar.”

I felt Richard’s hands on my neck. They were cold. They grasped my collar and peeled the coat down. It slid off my shoulders and came down my arms. It pulled past one wrist, then past the other.

“Ball it up,” Paulie called.

I heard Richard balling it up.

“Bring it here,” Paulie called.

Richard came out from behind me carrying the balled coat. He got within five feet of Paulie and stopped.

“Throw it over the gate,” Paulie said. “Real far.”

Richard threw it over the gate. Real far. The arms flapped in the air and it sailed up and then down and I heard the dull padded thump of the Beretta in the pocket landing hard on the Cadillac’s hood.

“Same thing with the jacket,” Paulie said.

My jacket landed next to the coat on the Cadillac’s hood and slid down the shiny paint and ended up on the road in a crumpled heap. I was cold. The wind was blowing and my shirt was thin. I could hear Elizabeth breathing behind me, fast and shallow. Richard was just standing there, five feet from Paulie, waiting for his next instruction.

“Now you and your mom walk fifty paces,” Paulie said to him. “Back toward the house.”

Richard turned and walked back and passed by me again. I heard his mother get in step with him. Heard them walk away together. I turned my head and saw them stop about forty yards back and turn around and face front again. Paulie tracked backward toward the gate, one pace, two, three. He stopped five feet from it. His back was to it. He had me fifteen feet in front of him and I guessed he could see Richard and Elizabeth over my shoulder, maybe a hundred feet farther on in the distance. We were all in a perfect straight line on the driveway, Paulie near the gate and facing the house, Richard and Elizabeth halfway to the house and facing back at him, me in the middle, trying to stay alive to see what the next minute would bring, facing Paulie, looking him square in the eye.

He smiled.

“OK,” he said. “Now watch carefully.”

He stayed facing me the whole time. He maintained eye contact. He crouched down and placed both guns on the blacktop by his feet and then flipped them backward toward the base of the gate. I heard their steel frames scraping on the rough surface. Saw them come to rest a yard behind him. Saw his hands come back, empty. He stood up again and showed me his palms.

“No guns,” he said. “I’m going to beat you to death.”

CHAPTER 12

I could still hear the Cadillac. I could hear its lumpy V-8 whisper and the faint liquid burble from its tailpipes. I could hear drive belts turning slowly under the hood. I could hear the muffler ticking as it adjusted to a new temperature.

“Rules,” Paulie called. “You get past me, you get the guns.”

I said nothing.

“You get to them, you can use them,” he called.

I said nothing. He kept smiling.

“You understand?” he called.

I nodded. Watched his eyes.

“OK,” he said. “I won’t touch the guns unless you run away. You do that, I’ll pick them up and shoot you in the back. That’s fair, right? You got to stand and fight now.”

I said nothing.

“Like a man,” he called.

Still I said nothing. I was cold. No coat, no jacket.

“Like an officer and a gentleman,” he said.

I watched his eyes.

“We clear on the rules?” he said.

I said nothing. The wind was on my back.

“We clear on the rules?” he said again.

“Crystal,” I said.

“You going to run?” he said.

I said nothing.

“I think you will,” he said. “Because you’re a pussy.”

I didn’t react.

“Officer pussy,” he said. “Rear-echelon whore. Coward.”

I just stood there. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And I doubted he knew any words I hadn’t heard a hundred thousand times before. Military cops are never very popular. I tuned his voice out. Watched his eyes and his hands and his feet instead. Thought hard. I knew a lot about him. None of it was good. He was big and he was crazy and he was fast.

“Damn ATF spy,” he called.

Not exactly, I thought.

“Here I come,” he called.

He didn’t move. I didn’t, either. I just stood my ground. He was full of meth and steroids. His eyes were blazing.

“Coming to get you,” he sang.

He didn’t move. He was heavy. Heavy, and strong. Very strong. If he hit me, I would go down. And if I went down, I would never get up again. I watched him. He came up on the balls of his feet. Moved, fast. Feinted left, and stopped. I stood still. Held my ground. Watched him. Thought hard. He was heavier than nature intended, maybe by a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds. Maybe by more. So he was fast, but he wouldn’t be fast forever.

I took a breath.

“Elizabeth tells me you can’t get it up,” I said.

He stared in at me. I could still hear the Cadillac. I could still hear the waves. They were crashing in, way behind the house.

“Big guy,” I said. “But not big everywhere.”

No reaction.

“I bet my left-hand pinkie is bigger,” I said.

I held it out, halfway curled into my palm.

“And stiffer,” I said.

His face darkened. He seemed to swell up. He exploded at me. Just launched himself forward with his right arm scything around in a giant roundhouse strike. I sidestepped his body and ducked under his arm and bounced up again and spun around. He stopped short on stiff legs and whipped back toward me. We had changed places. Now I was nearer the guns than he was. He panicked and came at me again. Same move. His right arm swung. I sidestepped and ducked and we were back where we started. But he was breathing a little heavier than I was.

“You’re a big girl’s blouse,” I said.

It was a term of abuse I had picked up somewhere. England, maybe. I had no idea what it meant. But it worked real well, with a certain type of guy. It worked real well with Paulie. He came at me again, no hesitation. Same exact move. This time I crashed an elbow into his side as I spun under his arm. He bounced straight off of locked knees and came right back at me. I dodged away again and felt the breeze as his giant fist passed an inch above my head.

He stood there, panting. I was warming up nicely. I was beginning to feel I had some kind of a chance. He was a very poor fighter. Lots of very big guys are. Either their sheer size is so intimidating it stops fights from ever starting in the first place, or else it lets them win every one directly after their first punch lands. Either way, they don’t get much practice. They don’t develop much finesse. And they get out of shape. Weights machines and treadmills are no substitute for the kind of urgent, anxious, breathless tight-throat high-speed high-adrenaline fitness you need to fight on the street. I figured Paulie was a prime example. I figured he had weight-lifted himself right out of the frame.

I blew him a kiss.

He swarmed through the air at me. Came on like a pile driver. I dodged left and put an elbow in his face and he connected with his left hand and knocked me sideways like I weighed nothing at all. I went down on one knee and got back up just in time to arch around his next crazy lunge. His fist missed my gut by a quarter-inch and its wild momentum pulled him past me and downward a little which put the side of his head right in line for a left hook. I let it go with everything I had from my toes on up. My fist crashed into his ear and he staggered back and I followed up with a colossal right to his jaw. Then I danced back and took a breather and tried to see what damage I’d done.

No damage.

I had hit him four times and it was like I hadn’t hit him at all. The two elbows had been solid smashes and the two punches had been as hard as anything I had ever thrown in my life. There was blood on his upper lip from the second elbow, but there was absolutely nothing else wrong with him. Theoretically he should have been unconscious. Or in a coma. It was probably thirty years since I ever had to hit a guy more than four times. But he showed no pain. No concern. He wasn’t unconscious. He wasn’t in a coma. He was dancing around and smiling again. He was relaxed. Moving easy. Huge. Impregnable. There was no way to hurt him. I looked at him and knew for sure I had no chance at all. And he looked at me and knew exactly what I was thinking. He smiled wider. Got balanced on the balls of both feet and hunched his shoulders down low and held his hands out in front of him like claws. He stamped his feet, left, right, left, right. It was like he was pawing the ground. Like he was going to come and get me and tear me apart. The smile distorted into a terrible wide grin of pleasure.

He came straight at me and I dodged left. But he was ready for that maneuver and he landed a right hook in the center of my chest. It felt exactly like being hit by a four-hundred-pound weight-lifter moving at six miles an hour. My sternum seemed to crack and I thought my heart would stop from the shock. I came up off my feet and went down on my back. Then it was about choosing to live or choosing to die. I chose to live. Rolled over twice and pushed with my hands and levered myself upright. Jumped back and sideways and dodged a straight drive that would have killed me.

After that it was about staying alive and seeing what the next half-second would bring. My chest hurt badly and my mobility was below a hundred percent but I dodged whatever he threw for about a minute. He was fast, but he wasn’t talented. I got an elbow in his face. It cracked his nose. It should have punched it out the back of his head. But at least it started bleeding. He opened his mouth to breathe. I dodged and danced and waited. Caught a huge roundhouse punch on the left shoulder that nearly paralyzed my arm. Then he near-missed with a right and for a fraction of a split second his stance was wide open. His mouth was open because of the blood in his nose. I wound up and let go with a cigarette punch. It’s a bar fight trick I learned long ago. You offer your guy a cigarette and he takes it and lifts it to his lips and opens his mouth maybe three-quarters of an inch. Whereupon you time it just right and land a huge uppercut under his chin. It slams his mouth shut and breaks his jaw and busts his teeth and maybe he bites his tongue off. Thank you and good night. I didn’t need to offer Paulie a cigarette because his mouth was already hanging open. So I just let go with the uppercut. Gave it everything I had. It was a perfect blow. I was still thinking and still steady on my feet and although I was small compared with him I’m really a very big guy with a lot of training and experience. I landed the punch right where his jaw narrowed under his chin. Solid bone-to-bone contact. I came up on my toes and followed through a whole yard. It should have broken his neck as well as his jaw. His head should have come right off and rolled away in the dirt. But the blow did nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. Just rocked him back an inch. He shook his head once and hit me in the face. I saw it coming and did all the right things. I whipped my head back and opened my mouth wide so I wouldn’t lose teeth from both parts of my jaw. Because my head was moving backward I took some momentum out of the blow but it was still a tremendous impact. Like being hit by a train. Like a car wreck. My lights went out and I went down hard and lost track of where I was so the blacktop came up at me like a second huge punch in the back. Air thumped out of my lungs and I saw a spray of blood from my mouth. The back of my skull hit the driveway. The sky dimmed above me.

I tried to move but it was like a car that doesn’t start with the first turn of the key. Click … nothing. I lost half a second. My left arm was weak so I used my right. Got halfway off the floor. Folded my feet under me and heaved myself upright. I was dizzy. I was all over the place. But Paulie was just standing still and watching me. And smiling.

I realized he was going to take his time with me. I realized he was going to really enjoy himself.

I looked for the guns. They were still behind him. I couldn’t get to them. I had hit him six times and he was laughing at me. He had hit me three times and I was a mess. I was badly shaken up. I was going to die. I knew it with sudden clarity. I was going to die in Abbot, Maine, on a dull Saturday morning in late April. And half of me was saying Hey, we’ve all got to die. What does it matter exactly where or when? But the other half was blazing with the kind of fury and arrogance that has powered so much of my life: You going to let this particular guy take you down? I followed the silent argument intently and made my choice and spat blood and breathed hard and shaped up one last time. My mouth hurt. My head hurt. My shoulder hurt. My chest hurt. I was sick and dizzy. I spat again. Traced my teeth with my tongue. It made me feel like I was smiling. So look on the bright side. I had no fatal injuries. Yet. I hadn’t been shot. So I smiled for real and spat for the third time and said to myself OK, let’s die fighting.

Paulie was still smiling, too. He had blood on his face but other than that he looked completely normal. His tie was still neat. He still had his suit coat on. He still looked like he had basketballs stuffed up into the shoulders. He watched me shape up and he smiled wider and got down into the crouch again and did the claw-hands thing again and started pawing the ground again. I figured I could dodge one more time, maybe twice, maybe three times if I was really lucky, and then it would be all over. Dead, in Maine. On an April Saturday. I pictured Dominique Kohl in my mind and I said I tried, Dom, I really did. I faced front. I saw Paulie take a breath. Then I saw him move. He turned away. Walked ten feet. Turned back. Then he came straight at me, fast. I dodged away. His coat slapped at me as he went past. In the corner of my eye I saw Richard and Elizabeth, far in the distance, watching. Their mouths were open, like they were saying Those who are about to die, we salute you. Paulie switched direction fast and came toward me at a dead run.

But then he got fancy, and I saw I was going to win, after all.

He tried to kick me martial-arts style, which is about the stupidest thing you can do in a face-to-face street fight. As soon as you have one foot off the floor you’re off balance and you’re vulnerable. You’re just begging to lose. He came at me fast with his body turned sideways like some kung-fu idiot on the television. His foot was way up in the air and he led with it, heel first, with his giant shoe held parallel with the ground. If he had connected, he would have killed me, no question. But he didn’t connect. I rocked backward and caught his foot in both hands and just heaved it upward. Can I bench-press four hundred pounds? Well, let’s find out, asshole. I put every ounce of my strength into it and jerked him right off the ground and got his foot way up in the air and then I dropped him on his head. He sprawled in a stunned heap with his face turned toward me. The first rule of street fighting is when you get your guy on the ground you finish him, no hesitation, no pause, no inhibition, no gentlemanly conduct. You finish him. Paulie had ignored that rule. I didn’t. I kicked him as hard as I could in the face. Blood spurted and he rolled away from me and I stamped on his right hand with my heel and shattered all the carpals and metacarpals and phalanges that he had in there. Then I did it again, two hundred fifty pounds of dead weight stamping down on broken bones. Then I stamped again and bust his wrist. Then his forearm.

He was superhuman. He rolled away and pushed himself upright with his left hand. He got on his feet and stepped away. I danced in and he swung a huge left hook and I knocked it aside and landed a short left on his broken nose. He rocked back and I kneed him in the groin. His head snapped forward and I hit him with the cigarette punch again, right-handed. His head snapped back and I put my left elbow in his throat. Stamped on his instep, once, twice, and then stabbed my thumbs in his eyes. He wheeled away and I kicked his right knee from behind and his leg folded up and he went down again. I got my left foot on his left wrist. His right arm was completely useless. It was just flopping around. He was pinned, unless he could backhand two hundred fifty pounds vertically with his left arm alone. And he couldn’t. I guessed steroids only got you so far. So I stamped on his left hand with my right foot until I could see the shattered bones coming out through the skin. Then I spun and jumped and landed square on his solar plexus. Stepped off him and kicked him hard in the top of his head, once, twice, three times. Then again a fourth time, so hard my shoe fell apart and the e-mail device came out and skittered away across the blacktop. It landed exactly where Elizabeth Beck’s pager had landed when I had thrown it from the Cadillac. Paulie followed it with his eyes and stared at it. I kicked him in the head again.

He sat up. Just levered himself upright with the strength in his massive abs. Both arms hung uselessly by his sides. I grabbed his left wrist and turned his elbow inside out until the joint dislocated and then broke. He flapped his broken right wrist at me and slapped me with his bloody hand. I grabbed it in my left and squeezed the broken knuckles. Just stared into his eyes and crushed the shattered bones. He didn’t make a sound. I kept hold of his slimy hand and turned his right elbow inside out and fell on it with my knees and heard it break. Then I wiped my palms on his hair and walked away. Made it to the gate and picked up the Colts.

He stood up. It was a clumsy move. His arms were useless. He slid his feet in toward his butt and jerked his weight forward onto them and levered himself upright. His nose was crushed and pouring with blood. His eyes were red and angry.

“Walk,” I said. I was out of breath. “To the rocks.”

He stood there like a stunned ox. There was blood in my mouth. Loose teeth. I felt no satisfaction. None at all. I hadn’t beaten him. He had beaten himself. With the kung-fu nonsense. If he had come at me swinging, I would have been dead inside a minute, and we both knew it.

“Walk,” I said. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

His chin came up, like a question.

“You’re going in the water,” I said.

He just stood there. I didn’t want to shoot him. I didn’t want to have to move a four-hundred-pound carcass a hundred yards to the sea. He stood still and my mind started working on the problem. Maybe I could wrap the gate chain around his ankles. Did Cadillacs have tow hooks? I wasn’t sure.

“Walk,” I said again.

I saw Richard and Elizabeth coming toward me. They were looping around in a wide circle. They wanted to get behind me without coming too close to Paulie. It was like he was a mythic figure. Like he was capable of anything. I knew how they felt. He had two broken arms, but I was watching him like my life depended on it. Which it did. If he ran at me and knocked me over he could crush me to death with his knees. I began to doubt that the Colts would do anything to him. I imagined him swarming at me, and emptying twelve bullets into him and watching them hit without slowing him down at all.

“Walk,” I said.

He walked. He turned away and started up the driveway. I followed, ten paces behind. Richard and Elizabeth moved farther onto the grass. We passed them and they fell in behind me. At first I thought of telling them to stay where they were. But then I figured they had earned the right to watch, each in their own separate ways.

He followed the carriage circle around. He seemed to know where I wanted him. And he didn’t seem to care. He passed by the garage block and headed behind the house and out onto the rocks. I followed, ten paces back. I was limping, because the heel had come off my right shoe. The wind was in my face. The sea was loud around us. It was rough and raging. He walked all the way to the head of Harley’s cleft. He stopped there and stood still and then turned back to face me.

“I can’t swim,” he said. He slurred his words. I had broken some of his teeth, and hit him hard in the throat. The wind howled around him. It lifted his hair and added another inch to his height. Spray blew past him, right at me.

“No swimming involved,” I replied.

I shot him twelve times in the chest. All twelve bullets passed straight through him. Big chunks of flesh and muscle followed them out over the ocean. One guy, two guns, twelve loud explosions, eleven dollars and forty cents in ammunition. He went down backward into the water. Made a hell of a splash. The sea was rough, but the tide was wrong. It wasn’t pulling. He just settled in the roiling water and floated. The ocean turned pink around him. He floated, static. Then he started drifting. He drifted out, very slowly, bucking up and down violently on the swell. He floated for a whole minute. Then two. He drifted ten feet. Then twenty. He rolled over on his front with a loud sucking sound and pinwheeled slowly in the current. Then faster. He was trapped just underneath the surface of the water. His jacket was soaked and air was ballooned under it and leaking out of twelve separate bullet holes. The ocean was tossing him up and down like he weighed nothing at all. I put both empty guns on the rocks and squatted down and threw up into the ocean. Stayed down, breathing hard, watching him float. Watching him spin. Watching him drift away. Richard and Elizabeth kept themselves twenty feet from me. I cupped my hand and rinsed my face with cold salt water. Closed my eyes. Kept them closed for a long, long time. When I opened them again I looked out over the rough surface of the sea and saw that he wasn’t there anymore. He had finally gone under.

I stayed down. Breathed out. Checked my watch. It was only eleven o’clock. I watched the ocean for a spell. It rose and fell. Waves broke and spray showered me. I saw the Arctic tern again. It was back, looking for a place to nest. My mind was blank. Then I started thinking. Started scoping things out. Started assessing the changed circumstances. I thought for five whole minutes and eventually got around to feeling pretty optimistic. With Paulie gone so early I figured the endgame had just gotten a whole lot faster and easier.

I was wrong about that, too.

The first thing that went wrong was that Elizabeth Beck wouldn’t leave. I told her to take Richard and the Cadillac and get the hell out. But she wouldn’t go. She just stood there on the rocks with her hair streaming and her clothes flapping in the wind.

“This is my home,” she said.

“Pretty soon it’s going to be a war zone,” I said.

“I’m staying.”

“I can’t let you stay.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said. “Not without my husband.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. I just stood there, getting colder. Richard came up behind me and circled around and looked out at the sea, and then back at me.

“That was cool,” he said. “You beat him.”

“No, he beat himself,” I said.

There were noisy seagulls in the air. They were fighting the wind, circling a spot in the ocean maybe forty yards away. They were dipping down and pecking at the crests of the waves. They were eating floating fragments of Paulie. Richard was watching them with blank eyes.

“Talk to your mother,” I said to him. “You need to convince her to get away.”

“I’m not leaving,” Elizabeth said again.

“Me either,” Richard said. “This is where we live. We’re a family.”

They were in some kind of shock. I couldn’t argue with them. So I tried to put them to work instead. We walked up the driveway, slow and quiet. The wind tore at our clothes. I was limping, because of my shoe. I stopped where the bloodstains started and retrieved the e-mail device. It was broken. The plastic screen was cracked and it wouldn’t turn on. I dropped it in my pocket. Then I found the heel rubber and sat cross-legged on the ground and put it back in place. Walking was easier after that. We reached the gate and unchained it and opened it and I got my jacket and my coat back and put them on. I buttoned the coat and turned the collar up. Then I drove the Cadillac in through the gate and parked it near the gatehouse door. Richard chained the gate again. I went inside and opened the big Russian machine gun’s breech and freed the ammunition belt. Then I lifted the gun off its chain. Carried it outside into the wind and put it sideways across the Cadillac’s rear seat. I went back in and rolled the belt back into its box and took the chain off its ceiling hook and unscrewed the hook from the joist. Carried the box and the chain and the hook outside and put them in the Cadillac’s trunk.

“Can I help with anything?” Elizabeth asked.

“There are twenty more ammunition boxes,” I said. “I want them all.”

“I’m not going in there,” she said. “Never again.”

“Then I guess you can’t help with anything.”

I carried two boxes at a time, so it took me ten trips. I was still cold and I was aching all over. I could still taste blood in my mouth. I stacked the boxes in the trunk and all over the floor in back and in the front passenger footwell. Then I slid into the driver’s seat and tilted the mirror. My lips were split and my gums were rimed with blood. My front teeth at the top were loose. I was upset about that. They had always been misaligned and they had been a little chipped for years, but I got them when I was eight and I was used to them and they were the only ones I had.

“Are you OK?” Elizabeth asked.

I felt the back of my head. There was a tender spot where I had hit the driveway. There was a serious bruise on the side of my left shoulder. My chest hurt and breathing wasn’t entirely painless. But overall I was OK. I was in better shape than Paulie, which was all that mattered. I thumbed my teeth up into my gums and held them there.

“Never felt better,” I said.

“Your lip is all swollen.”

“I’ll live.”

“We should celebrate.”

I slid out of the car.

“We should talk about getting you out of here,” I said.

She said nothing to that. The phone inside the gatehouse started ringing. It had an old-fashioned bell in it, low and slow and relaxing. It sounded faint and far away, muffled by the noise of the wind and the sea. It rang once, then twice. I walked around the Cadillac’s hood and went inside and picked it up. Said Paulie’s name and waited a beat and heard a voice I hadn’t heard in ten years.

“Did he show up yet?” it said.

I paused.

“Ten minutes ago,” I said. I kept my hand halfway over the mouthpiece and made my voice high and light.

“Is he dead yet?”

“Five minutes ago,” I said.

“OK, stay ready. This is going to be a long day.”

You got that right, I thought. Then the phone clicked off and I put it down and stepped back outside.

“Who was it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Quinn,” I said.

The first time I heard Quinn’s voice was ten years previously on a cassette tape. Kohl had a telephone tap going. It was unauthorized, but back then military law was a lot more generous than civilian procedure. The cassette was a clear plastic thing that showed the little spools of tape inside. Kohl had a player the size of a shoe box with her and she clicked the cassette into it and pressed a button. My office filled with Quinn’s voice. He was talking to an offshore bank, making financial arrangements. He sounded relaxed. He spoke clearly and slowly with the neutral homogenized accent you get from a lifetime in the army. He read out account numbers and gave passwords and issued instructions concerning a total of half a million dollars. He wanted most of it moved to the Bahamas.

“He mails the cash,” Kohl said. “To Grand Cayman, first.”

“Is that safe?” I said.

She nodded. “Safe enough. The only risk would be postal workers stealing it. But the destination address is a PO box and he sends it book rate, and nobody steals books out of the mail. So he gets away with it.”

“Half a million dollars is a lot of money.”

“It’s a valuable weapon.”

“Is it? That valuable?”

“Don’t you think so?”

I shrugged. “Seems like a lot to me. For a lawn dart?”

She pointed at the tape player. Pointed at Quinn’s voice filling the air. “Well, that’s what they’re paying, obviously. I mean, how else did he get half a million dollars? He didn’t save it out of his salary, that’s for sure.”

“When will you make your move?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll have to. He’s got the final blueprint. Gorowski says it’s the key to the whole thing.”

“How will it go down?”

“Frasconi is dealing with the Syrian. He’s going to mark the cash, with a judge advocate watching. Then we’ll all observe the exchange. We’ll open the briefcase that Quinn gives to the Syrian, immediately, in front of the same judge. We’ll document the contents, which will be the key blueprint. Then we’ll go pick Quinn up. We’ll arrest him and impound the briefcase that the Syrian gave to him. The judge can watch us open it later. We’ll find the marked cash inside, and therefore we’ll have a witnessed and documented transaction, and therefore Quinn will go down, and he’ll stay down.”

“Watertight,” I said. “Good work.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Will Frasconi be OK?”

“He’ll have to be. I can’t deal with the Syrian myself. Those guys are weird with women. They can’t touch us, can’t look at us, sometimes they can’t even talk to us. So Frasconi will have to do it.”

“Want me to hold his hand?”

“His part is all offstage,” she said. “There’s nothing much he can screw up.”

“I think I’ll hold his hand anyway.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

“And he’ll go with you to make the arrest.”

She said nothing.

“I can’t send you one-on-one,” I said. “You know that.”

She nodded.

“But I’ll tell him you’re the lead investigator,” I said. “I’ll make sure he understands it’s your case.”

“OK,” she said.

She pressed the stop button on her tape player. Quinn’s voice died, halfway through a word. The word was going to be dollars, as in two hundred thousand. But it came out as doll. He sounded bright and happy and alert, like a guy at the top of his game, fully aware he was busy playing and winning. Kohl ejected the cassette. Slipped it into her pocket. Then she winked at me and walked out of my office.

“Who’s Quinn?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.

“Frank Xavier,” I said. “He used to be called Quinn. His full name is Francis Xavier Quinn.”

“You know him?”

“Why else would I be here?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a guy who knew Frank Xavier back when he was called Francis Xavier Quinn.”

“You work for the government.”

I shook my head. “This is strictly personal.”

“What will happen to my husband?”

“No idea,” I said. “And I don’t really care either way.”

I went back inside Paulie’s little house and locked the front door. Came out again and locked the back door behind me. Then I checked the chain on the gate. It was tight. I figured we could keep intruders out for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, which might be good enough. I put the padlock key in my pants pocket.

“Back to the big house now,” I said. “You’ll have to walk, I’m afraid.”

I drove the Cadillac down the driveway, with the ammunition boxes stacked behind and beside me. I saw Elizabeth and Richard in the mirror, hurrying side by side. They didn’t want to get out of town, but they weren’t too keen on being left alone. I stopped the car by the front door and backed it up ready to unload. I opened the trunk and took the ceiling hook and the chain and ran upstairs to Duke’s room. His window looked out along the whole length of the driveway. It would make an ideal gunport. I took the Beretta out of my coat pocket and snicked the safety off and fired it once into the ceiling. I saw Elizabeth and Richard fifty yards away stop dead and then start running toward the house. Maybe they thought I had shot the cook. Or myself. I stood on a chair and punched through the bullet hole and raked the plaster back until I found a wooden joist. Then I aimed carefully and fired again and drilled a neat nine-millimeter hole in the wood. I screwed the hook into it and slipped the chain onto it and tested it with my weight. It held.

I went back down and opened the Cadillac’s rear doors. Elizabeth and Richard arrived and I told them to carry the ammunition boxes. I carried the big machine gun. The metal detector on the front door squealed at it, loud and urgent. I carried it upstairs. Hung it on the chain and fed the end of the first belt into it. Swung the muzzle to the wall and opened the lower sash of the window. Swung the muzzle back and traversed it side to side and ranged it up and down. It covered the whole width of the distant wall and the whole length of the driveway down to the carriage circle. Richard stood and watched me.

“Keep stacking the boxes,” I said.

Then I stepped over to the nightstand and picked up the outside phone. Called Duffy at the motel.

“You still want to help?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then I need all three of you at the house,” I said. “Quick as you can.”

After that there was nothing more to be done until they arrived. I waited by the window and pressed my teeth into my gums with my thumb and watched the road. Watched Richard and Elizabeth struggling with the heavy boxes. Watched the sky. It was noon, but it was darkening. The weather was getting even worse. The wind was freshening. The North Atlantic coast, in late April. Unpredictable. Elizabeth Beck came in and stacked a box. Breathed hard. Stood still.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“No way of telling,” I said.

“What’s this gun for?”

“It’s a precaution.”

“Against what?”

“Quinn’s people,” I said. “We’ve got our backs to the sea. We might need to stop them on the driveway.”

“You’re going to shoot at them?”

“If necessary.”

“What about my husband?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“I’m going to shoot at him, too.”

She said nothing.

“He’s a criminal,” I said. “He can take his chances.”

“The laws that make him a criminal are unconstitutional.”

“You think?”

She nodded again. “The Second Amendment is clear.”

“Take it to the Supreme Court,” I said. “Don’t bother me with it.”

“People have the right to bear arms.”

“Drug dealers don’t,” I said. “I never saw an amendment that says it’s OK to fire automatic weapons in the middle of a crowded neighborhood. Using bullets that go through brick walls, one after the other. And through innocent bystanders, one after the other. Babies and children.”

She said nothing.

“You ever seen a bullet hit a baby?” I said. “It doesn’t slide right in, like a hypodermic needle. It crushes its way through, like a bludgeon. Crushing and tearing.”

She said nothing.

“Never tell a soldier that guns are fun,” I said.

“The law is clear,” she said.

“So join the NRA,” I said. “I’m happy right here in the real world.”

“He’s my husband.”

“You said he deserved to go to prison.”

“Yes,” she said. “But he doesn’t deserve to die.”

“You think?”

“He’s my husband,” she said again.

“How does he make the sales?” I asked.

“He uses I-95,” she said. “He cuts the centers out of the cheap rugs and rolls the guns in them. Like tubes, or cylinders. Drives them to Boston or New Haven. People meet him there.”

I nodded. Remembered the stray carpet fibers I had seen around.

“He’s my husband,” Elizabeth said.

I nodded again. “If he’s got the sense not to stand right next to Quinn he might be OK.”

“Promise me he’ll be OK. Then I’ll leave. With Richard.”

“I can’t promise,” I said.

“Then we’re staying.”

I said nothing.

“It was never a voluntary association, you know,” she said. “With Xavier, I mean. You really need to understand that.”

She moved to the window and gazed down at Richard. He was heaving the last ammunition case out of the Cadillac.

“There was coercion,” she said.

“Yes, I figured that out,” I said.

“He kidnapped my son.”

“I know,” I said.

Then she moved again and looked straight at me.

“What did he do to you?” she asked.

I saw Kohl twice more that day as she prepared her end of the mission. She was doing everything right. She was like a chess player. She never did anything without looking two moves ahead. She knew the judge advocate she asked to monitor the transaction would have to recuse himself from the subsequent court-martial, so she picked one she knew the prosecutors hated. It would be one less obstacle later. She had a photographer standing by to make a visual record. She had timed the drive out to Quinn’s Virginia house. The file I had given her at the start now filled two cardboard boxes. The second time I saw her she was carrying them. They were stacked one on top of the other and her biceps were straining against their weight.

“How is Gorowski holding up?” I asked her.

“Not good,” she said. “But he’ll be out of the woods tomorrow.”

“You’re going to be famous.”

“I hope not,” she said. “This should stay classified forever.”

“Famous in the classified world,” I said. “Plenty of people see that stuff.”

“So I guess I should ask for my performance review,” she said. “Day after tomorrow, maybe.”

“We should have dinner tonight,” I said. “We should go out. Like a celebration. Best place we can find. I’ll buy.”

“I thought you were on food stamps.”

“I’ve been saving up.”

“You’ve had plenty of opportunity. It’s been a long case.”

“Slow as molasses,” I said. “That’s your only problem, Kohl. You’re thorough, but you’re slow.”

She smiled again and hitched the boxes higher.

“You should have agreed to date me,” she said. “Then I could have shown you how slow can be better than fast.”

She carried the boxes away and I met her two hours later at a restaurant in town. It was an upmarket place so I had showered and put a clean uniform on. She showed up wearing a black dress. Not the same one as before. No dots on it. Just sheer black. It was very flattering, not that she needed the help. She looked about eighteen.

“Great,” I said. “They’re going to think you’re dining with your dad.”

“My uncle, maybe,” she said. “My dad’s younger brother.”

It was one of those meals where the food wasn’t important. I can remember everything else about the evening, but I can’t remember what I ordered. Steak, maybe. Or ravioli. Something. I know we ate. We talked a lot, about the kind of stuff we probably wouldn’t share with just anybody. I came very close to breaking down and asking her if she wanted to find a motel. But I didn’t. We had a glass of wine each and then switched to water. There was an unspoken agreement we needed to stay sharp for the next day. I paid the check and we left at midnight, separately. She was bright, even though it was late. She was full of life and energy and focus. She was bubbling with anticipation. Her eyes were shining. I stood on the street and watched her drive away.

“Someone’s coming,” Elizabeth Beck said, ten years later.

I glanced out the window and saw a gray Taurus far in the distance. The color blended with the rock and the weather and made it hard to see. It was maybe two miles away, coming around a curve in the road, moving fast. Villanueva’s car. I told Elizabeth to stay put and keep an eye on Richard and I went downstairs and out the back door. I retrieved Angel Doll’s keys from my hidden bundle. Put them in my jacket pocket. I took Duffy’s Glock and her spare magazines, too. I wanted her to get them back intact. It was important to me. She was already in enough trouble. I stashed them in my coat pocket with my Beretta and walked around to the front of the house and got in the Cadillac. Drove it up to the gate and slid out and waited out of sight. The Taurus stopped outside the gate and I saw Villanueva at the wheel with Duffy next to him and Eliot in the back. I stepped out of hiding and took the chain off the gate and swung it open. Villanueva eased through and stopped nose to nose with the Cadillac. Then three doors opened and they all climbed out into the cold and stared at me.

“What the hell happened to you?” Villanueva said.

I touched my mouth. It felt swollen and tender.

“Walked into a door,” I said.

Villanueva glanced at the gatehouse.

“Or a doorman,” he said. “Am I right?”

“You OK?” Duffy asked.

“I’m in better shape than the doorman,” I said.

“Why are we here?”

“Plan B,” I said. “We’re going to Portland, but if we don’t find what we need up there we’re going to have to come back here and wait. So two of you are coming out with me right now and the other one is staying here to hold the fort.” I turned around and pointed at the house. “The center second-floor window has got a big machine gun mounted in it to cover the approach. I need one of you in there manning it.”

Nobody volunteered. I looked straight at Villanueva. He was old enough to have been drafted, way back. He might have spent time around big machine guns.

“You do it, Terry,” I said.

“Not me,” he said. “I’m coming out with you to find Teresa.”

He said it like there was going to be no way to argue with him.

“OK, I’ll do it,” Eliot said.

“Thanks,” I said. “You ever seen a Vietnam movie? Seen the door gunner on a Huey? That’s you. If they come, they won’t try to get through the gate. They’ll go in the front window of the gatehouse and out the back door or the back window. So you be ready to hose them down as they come out.”

“What if it’s dark?”

“We’ll be back before dark.”

“OK. Who’s in the house?”

“Beck’s family. And the cook. They’re noncombatants, but they won’t leave.”

“What about Beck himself?”

“He’ll come back with the others. If he got away again in the confusion it wouldn’t break my heart. But if he got hit in the confusion it wouldn’t break my heart either.”

“OK.”

“They probably won’t show up,” I said. “They’re busy. This all is just a precaution.”

“OK,” he said again.

“You keep the Cadillac,” I said. “We’ll take the Taurus.”

Villanueva got back in the Ford and reversed it out through the gate again. I walked out with Duffy and closed the gate from the outside and chained it and locked it and tossed the padlock key over to Eliot.

“See you later,” I said.

He turned the Cadillac around and I watched him drive it down toward the house. Then I got in the Taurus with Duffy and Villanueva. She took the front seat. I took the back. I got her Glock and her spare magazines out of my pocket and passed them forward to her, like a little ceremony.

“Thanks for the loan,” I said.

She put the Glock in her shoulder holster and the magazines in her purse.

“You’re very welcome,” she said.

“Teresa first,” Villanueva said. “Quinn second. OK?”

“Agreed,” I said.

He K-turned on the road and took off west.

“So where do we look?” he said.

“Choice of three locations,” I said. “There’s the warehouse, there’s a city-center office, and there’s a business park near the airport. Can’t keep a prisoner in a city-center office building over the weekend. And the warehouse is too busy. They just had a big shipment. So my vote goes with the business park.”

“I-95 or Route One?”

“Route One,” I said.

We drove in silence, fifteen miles inland, and turned north on Route One toward Portland.

CHAPTER 13

It was early afternoon on a Saturday, so the business park was quiet. It was rinsed clean by rain and it looked fresh and new. The metal buildings glowed like dull pewter under the gray of the sky. We cruised through the network of streets at maybe twenty miles an hour. Saw nobody. Quinn’s building looked locked up tight. I turned my head as we drove by and studied the sign again: Xavier eXport Company. The words were professionally etched on thick stainless steel, but the oversized Xs looked like an amateur’s idea of graphic design.

“Why does it say export?” Duffy asked. “He’s importing stuff, surely.”

“How do we get in?” Villanueva asked.

“We break in,” I said. “Through the rear, I guess.”

The buildings were laid out back-to-back, with neat parking lots in front of each of them. Everything else in the park was either a road or new lawn bounded by neat poured-concrete curbs. There were no fences anywhere. The building directly behind Quinn’s was labeled Paul Keast & Chris Maden Professional Catering Services. It was closed up and deserted. I could see past it all the way to Quinn’s back door, which was a plain metal rectangle painted dull red.

“Nobody around,” Duffy said.

There was a window on Quinn’s back wall near the red door. It was made from pebbled glass. Probably a bathroom window. It had iron bars over it.

“Security system?” Villanueva said.

“On a new place like this?” I said. “Almost certainly.”

“Wired direct to the cops?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “That wouldn’t be smart, for a guy like Quinn. He doesn’t want the cops snooping around every time some kid busts his windows.”

“Private company?”

“That’s my guess. Or his own people.”

“So how do we do it?”

“We do it real fast. Get in and out before anybody reacts. We can risk five or ten minutes, probably.”

“One at the front and two at the back?”

“You got it,” I said. “You take the front.”

I told him to pop the trunk and then Duffy and I slid out of the car. The air was cold and damp and the wind was blowing. I took the tire iron out from under the spare wheel and closed the trunk lid and watched the car drive away. Duffy and I walked down the side of the catering place and across the dividing lawn to Quinn’s bathroom window. I put my ear against the cold metal siding and listened. Heard nothing. Then I looked at the window bars. They were made up from a shallow one-piece rectangular iron basket that was secured by eight machine screws, two on each of the four sides of the rectangle. The screws went through welded flanges the size of quarters. The screw heads themselves were the size of nickels. Duffy pulled the Glock out of her shoulder holster. I heard it scrape on the leather. I checked the Beretta in my coat pocket. Held the tire iron two-handed. Put my ear back on the siding. Heard Villanueva’s car pull up at the front of the building. I could hear the beat of the engine coming through the metal. I heard his door open and close. He left the engine running. I heard his feet on the front walkway.

“Stand by,” I said.

I felt Duffy move behind me. Heard Villanueva knocking loudly on the front door. I stabbed the tire iron end-on into the siding next to one of the screws. Made a shallow dent in the metal. Shoved the iron sideways into it and under the bars and hauled on it. The screw held. Clearly it went through the siding all the way into the steel framing. So I reseated the iron and jerked harder, once, twice. The screw head broke off and the bars moved a little.

I had to break six screw heads in total. Took me nearly thirty seconds. Villanueva was still knocking. Nobody was answering. When the sixth screw broke I grabbed the bars themselves and hauled them open ninety degrees like a door. The two remaining screws screeched in protest. I picked up the tire iron again and smashed the pebbled glass. Reached in with my hand and found the catch and pulled the window open. Took out the Beretta and went headfirst into the bathroom.

It was a small cubicle, maybe six-by-four. There was a toilet and a sink with a small frameless mirror. A trash can and a shelf with spare toilet rolls and paper towels on it. A bucket and a mop propped in a corner. Clean linoleum on the floor. A strong smell of disinfectant. I turned around and checked the window. There was a small alarm pad screwed to the sill. But the building was still quiet. No siren. A silent alarm. Now a phone would be ringing somewhere. Or an alert would be flashing on a computer screen.

I stepped out of the bathroom into a back hallway. Nobody there. It was dark. I faced front and backed away to the rear door. Fumbled behind me without looking and unlocked it. Pulled it open. Heard Duffy step inside.

She had probably done six weeks at Quantico during her basic training and she still remembered the moves. She held the Glock two-handed and slid past me and took up station by a door that was going to lead out of the hallway into the rest of the building. She leaned her shoulder on the jamb and crooked her elbows to pull the gun up out of my way. I stepped forward and kicked the door and went through it and dodged left and she spun after me and went to the right. We were in another hallway. It was narrow. It ran the whole length of the building, all the way to the front. There were rooms off it, left and right. Six rooms, three on either side. Six doors, all of them closed.

“Front,” I whispered. “Villanueva.”

We crabbed our way along, back-to-back, covering each door in turn. They stayed closed. We made it to the front door and I unlocked it and opened it up. Villanueva stepped through and closed it again behind him. He had a Glock 17 in his gnarled old hand. It looked right at home there.

“Alarm?” he whispered.

“Silent,” I whispered back.

“So let’s be quick.”

“Room by room,” I whispered.

It wasn’t a good feeling. We had made so much noise that nobody in the building could have any doubt we were there. And the fact that they hadn’t blundered out to confront us meant they were smart enough to sit tight with their hammers back and their sights trained chest-high at the inside of their doors. And the center hallway was only about three feet wide. It didn’t give us much room to maneuver. Not a good feeling. The doors were all hinged on the left, so I put Duffy on my left facing out to cover the doors opposite. I didn’t want us all facing the same way. I didn’t want to get shot in the back. Then I put Villanueva on my right. His job was to kick in the doors, one by one. I took the center. My job was to go in first, room by room.

We started with the front room on the left. Villanueva kicked the door, hard. The lock broke and the frame splintered and the door crashed open. I went straight in. The room was empty. It was a ten-by-ten square with a window and a desk and a wall of file cabinets. I came straight out and we all spun around and hit the room opposite, immediately. Duffy covered our backs and Villanueva kicked the door and I went in. It was empty, too. But it was a bonus. The partition wall between it and the next room had been removed. It was ten-by-twenty. It had two doors to the hallway. There were three desks in the room. There were computers and phones. There was a coat rack in the corner with a woman’s raincoat hanging on it.

We crossed the hallway to the fourth door. The third room. Villanueva kicked the door and I rolled around the jamb. Empty. Another ten-by-ten square. No window. A desk, with a big cork notice board behind it. Lists pinned to the cork. An Oriental carpet covering most of the linoleum.

Four down. Two to go. We chose the back room on the right. Villanueva hit the door. I went in. It was empty. Ten-by-ten, white paint, gray linoleum. Completely bare. Nothing in it at all. Except bloodstains. They had been cleaned up, but not well. There were brown swirls on the floor, where an overloaded mop had pushed them around. There was splatter on the walls. Some of it had been wiped. Some of it had been missed altogether. There were lacy trails up to waist height. The angles between the baseboards and the linoleum were rimed with brown and black.

“The maid,” I said.

Nobody replied. We stood still for a long silent moment. Then we backed out and turned around and hit the last door, hard. I went in, gun-first. And stopped dead.

It was a prison. And it was empty.

It was ten-by-ten. It had white walls and a low ceiling. No windows. Gray linoleum on the floor. A mattress on the linoleum. Wrinkled sheets on the mattress. Dozens of Chinese food cartons all over the place. Empty plastic bottles that had held spring water.

“She was here,” Duffy said.

I nodded. “Just like in the basement up at the house.”

I stepped all the way inside and lifted up the mattress. The word justice was smeared on the floor, big and obvious, painted with a finger. Underneath it was today’s date, six numbers, month, day, year, fading and then strengthening as she had reloaded her fingertip with something black and brown.

“She’s hoping we’ll track her,” Villanueva said. “Day by day, place by place. Smart kid.”

“Is that written in blood?” Duffy said.

I could smell stale food and stale breath, all through the room. I could smell fear and desperation. She had heard the maid die. Two thin doors wouldn’t have blocked much sound.

“Hoisin sauce,” I said. “I hope.”

“How long since they moved her?”

I looked inside the closest cartons. “Two hours, maybe.”

“Shit.”

“So let’s go,” Villanueva said. “Let’s go find her.”

“Five minutes,” Duffy said. “I need to get something I can give to ATF. To make this whole thing right.”

“We haven’t got five minutes,” Villanueva said.

“Two minutes,” I said. “Grab what you can and look at it later.”

We backed out of the cell. Nobody looked at the charnel house opposite. Duffy led us back to the room with the Oriental carpet. Smart choice, I thought. It was probably Quinn’s office. He was the kind of guy who would give himself a rug. She took a thick file marked Pending from a desk drawer and pulled all the lists off the cork board.

“Let’s go,” Villanueva said again.

We came out through the front door exactly four minutes after I had gone in through the bathroom window. It felt more like four hours. We piled into the gray Taurus and were back on Route One a minute after that.

“Stay north,” I said. “Head for the city center.”

We were quiet at first. Nobody looked at anybody. Nobody spoke. We were thinking about the maid. I was in the back and Duffy was in the front with Quinn’s paperwork spread over her knees. Traffic across the bridge was slow. There were shoppers heading into the city. The roadway was slick with rain and salt spray. Duffy shuffled papers, glancing at one after another. Then she broke the silence. It was a relief.

“This all is pretty cryptic,” she said. “We’ve got an XX and a BB.”

“Xavier Export Company and Bizarre Bazaar,” I said.

“BB is importing,” she said. “XX is exporting. But they’re obviously linked. They’re like two halves of the same operation.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want Quinn.”

“And Teresa,” Villanueva said.

“First-quarter spreadsheet,” Duffy said. “They’re on track to turn over twenty-two million dollars this year. That’s a lot of guns, I guess.”

“Quarter-million Saturday Night Specials,” I said. “Or four Abrams tanks.”

“Mossberg,” Duffy said. “You heard that name?”

“Why?” I said.

“XX just received a shipment from them.”

“O.F. Mossberg and Sons,” I said. “From New Haven, Connecticut. Shotgun manufacturer.”

“What’s a Persuader?”

“A shotgun,” I said. “The Mossberg M500 Persuader. It’s a paramilitary weapon.”

“XX is sending Persuaders someplace. Two hundred of them. Total invoice value sixty thousand dollars. Basically in exchange for something BB is receiving.”

“Import-export,” I said. “That’s how it works.”

“But the prices don’t add up,” she said. “BB’s incoming shipment is invoiced at seventy thousand. So XX is coming out ten thousand dollars ahead.”

“The magic of capitalism,” I said.

“No, wait, there’s another item. Now it balances. Two hundred Mossberg Persuaders plus a ten-thousand-dollar bonus item to make the values match.”

“What’s the bonus item?” I said.

“It doesn’t say. What would be worth ten grand?”

“I don’t care,” I said again.

She shuffled more paper.

“Keast and Maden,” she said. “Where did we see those names?”

“The building behind Quinn’s,” I said. “The caterers.”

“He hired them,” she said. “They’re delivering something today.”

“Where?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“What kind of something?”

“Doesn’t say. Eighteen items at fifty-five dollars each. Almost a thousand dollars’ worth of something.”

“Where to now?” Villanueva said.

We were off the bridge and looping north and west, with the park on our left.

“Make the second right,” I said.

We pulled straight into Missionary House’s underground garage. There was a rent-a-cop in a fancy uniform in a booth. He logged us in without paying a whole lot of attention. Then Villanueva showed him his DEA badge and told him to sit tight and keep quiet. Told him not to call anybody. Behind him the garage was quiet. There were maybe eighty spaces and fewer than a dozen cars in them. But one of them was the gray Grand Marquis I had seen outside Beck’s warehouse that morning.

“This is where I took the photographs,” Duffy said.

We drove to the back of the garage and parked in a corner. Got out and took the elevator up one floor to the lobby. There was some tired marble decor and a building directory. The Xavier Export Company shared the fourth floor with a law firm called Lewis, Strange & Greville. We were happy about that. It meant there would be an interior hallway up there. We wouldn’t be stepping straight out of the elevator into Quinn’s offices.

We got back in the elevator and pressed 4. Faced front. The doors closed and the motor whined. We stopped on four. We heard voices. The elevator bell pinged. The doors opened. The hallway was full of lawyers. There was a mahogany door on the left with a brass plate marked Lewis, Strange & Greville, Attorneys at Law. It was open and three people had come out through it and were standing around waiting for one of them to close it. Two men, one woman. They were in casual clothes. They were all carrying briefcases. They all looked happy. They all turned and looked at us. We stepped out of the elevator. They smiled and nodded at us, like you do with strangers in a small hallway. Or maybe they thought we had come to consult with them on a legal matter. Villanueva smiled back and nodded toward Xavier Export’s door. It’s not you we’re looking for. It’s them. The woman lawyer looked away and squeezed past us into the elevator. Her partners locked up their office and joined her. The elevator doors closed on them and we heard the car whining down.

“Witnesses,” Duffy whispered. “Shit.”

Villanueva pointed at Xavier Export’s door. “And there’s someone in there. Those lawyers didn’t seem surprised that we should be up here at this time on a Saturday. So they must know there’s someone in there. Maybe they thought we’ve got an appointment or something.”

I nodded. “One of the cars in the garage was at Beck’s warehouse this morning.”

“Quinn?” Duffy said.

“I sincerely hope so.”

“We agreed, Teresa first,” Villanueva said. “Then Quinn.”

“I’m changing the plan,” I said. “I’m not walking away. Not if he’s in there. Not if he’s a target of opportunity.”

“But we can’t go in anyway,” Duffy said. “We’ve been seen.”

“You can’t go in,” I said. “I can.”

“What, alone?”

“That’s the way I want it. Him and me.”

“We left a trail.”

“So roll it up. Go back to the garage and drive away. The guard will log you out. Then call this office five minutes later. Between the garage log and the phone log it’ll be on record that nothing happened while you were here.”

“But what about you? It’ll be on record that we left you in here.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think the garage guy paid that much attention. I don’t think he counted heads or anything. He just wrote down the plate number.”

She said nothing.

“I don’t care anyway,” I said. “I’m a hard person to find. And I plan to get harder.”

She looked at the law firm’s door. Then at Xavier Export’s. Then at the elevator. Then at me.

“OK,” she said. “We’ll leave you to it. I really don’t want to, but I really have to, you understand?”

“Completely,” I said.

“Teresa might be in there with him,” Villanueva whispered.

I nodded. “If she is, I’ll bring her to you. Meet me at the end of the street. Ten minutes after you make the phone call.”

They both hesitated and then Duffy put her finger on the elevator call button. We heard noises in the shaft as the machinery started.

“Take care,” she said.

The bell pinged and the doors opened. They stepped in. Villanueva glanced out at me and hit the button for the lobby and the doors closed on them like theater curtains and they were gone. I stepped away and leaned on the wall on the far side of Quinn’s door. It felt good to be alone. I put my hand around the Beretta’s grip in my pocket and waited. I imagined Duffy and Villanueva stepping out of the elevator and walking to their car. Driving it out of the garage. Getting noticed by the guard. Parking around the corner and calling information. Getting Quinn’s number. I turned and stared at the door. Imagined Quinn on the other side of it, at his desk, with a phone in front of him. I stared at the door like I could see him right through it.

The first time I ever saw him was on the actual day of the bust. Frasconi had done well with the Syrian. The guy was all squared away. Frasconi was very adequate in a situation like that. Give him time and a clear objective and he could deliver. The Syrian brought cash money with him from inside his embassy and we all sat down together in front of the judge advocate and counted it. There was fifty thousand dollars. We figured it was the final installment of many. We marked each bill separately. We even marked the briefcase. We put the judge advocate’s initials on it with clear nail varnish, near one of the hinges. The judge advocate wrote up an affidavit for the file and Frasconi held on to the Syrian, and Kohl and I moved into position ready for the surveillance itself. Her photographer was already standing by in a second-floor window in a building across the street from the café and twenty yards south. The judge advocate joined us ten minutes later. We were using a utility truck parked at the curb. It had portholes with one-way glass. Kohl had borrowed it from the FBI. She had drafted three grunts to complete the illusion. They were wearing power company overalls and actually digging up the street.

We waited. There was no conversation. There wasn’t much air in the truck. The weather was warm again. Frasconi released the Syrian after forty minutes. He came strolling into view from the north. He had been warned what would happen if he gave us away. Kohl had written the script and Frasconi had delivered it. They were threats we probably wouldn’t have carried out. But he didn’t know that. I guess they were plausible, based on what happened to people in Syria.

He sat down at a sidewalk table. He was ten feet from us. He put his briefcase on the floor, level with the side of the table. It was like a second guest. The waiter came and took his order. Came back after a minute with an espresso. The Syrian lit a cigarette. Smoked it halfway down and crushed it out in the ashtray.

“The Syrian is waiting,” Kohl said, quietly. She had a tape recorder running. Her idea was to have a real-time audio record as a backup. She was wearing her dress greens, ready for the arrest. She looked real good in them.

“Check,” the judge said. “The Syrian is waiting.”

The Syrian finished his coffee and waved to the waiter for another. He lit another cigarette.

“Does he always smoke so much?” I asked.

“Why?” Kohl said.

“Is he warning Quinn off?”

“No, he always smokes,” Kohl said.

“OK,” I said. “But they’re bound to have an abort sign.”

“He won’t use it. Frasconi really put a fright in him.”

We waited. The Syrian finished his second cigarette. He put his hands flat on the table. He drummed his fingers. He looked OK. He looked like a guy waiting for another guy who was maybe a little overdue. He lit another cigarette.

“I don’t like all this smoking,” I said.

“Relax, he’s always like this,” Kohl said.

“Makes him look nervous. Quinn could pick up on it.”

“It’s normal. He’s from the Middle East.”

We waited. I watched the crowd build up. It was close to lunch time.

“Now Quinn is approaching,” Kohl said.

“Check,” the judge replied. “Quinn is approaching now.”

I looked to the south. Saw a tidy-looking guy, neat and trim, maybe six feet one and a little under two hundred pounds. He looked a little younger than forty. He had black hair with a little gray in it in front of his ears. He was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and a dull red tie. He looked just like everybody else in D.C. He moved fast, but he made it look slow. He was neat in his movements. Clearly fit and athletic. Almost certainly a jogger. He was carrying a Halliburton briefcase. It was the exact twin of the Syrian’s. It flashed slightly gold in the sunlight.

The Syrian laid his cigarette in the ashtray and sketched a wave. He looked a little uneasy, but I guessed that was appropriate. Big-time espionage in the heart of your enemy’s capital is not a game. Quinn saw him and moved toward him. The Syrian stood up and they shook hands across the table. I smiled. They had a smart system going. It was a tableau so familiar in Georgetown that it was almost invisible. An American in a suit shaking hands with a foreigner across a table loaded with coffee cups and ashtrays. They both sat down. Quinn shuffled on his chair and got comfortable and placed his briefcase tight alongside the one that was already there. At a casual glance the two cases looked like one in a larger size.

“Briefcases are adjacent,” Kohl said, into the microphone.

“Check,” the judge said. “The briefcases are adjacent.”

The waiter came back with the Syrian’s second espresso. Quinn said something to the waiter and he left again. The Syrian said something to Quinn. Quinn smiled. It was a smile of pure control. Pure satisfaction. The Syrian said something else. He was playing his part. He thought he was saving his life. Quinn craned his neck and looked for the waiter. The Syrian picked up his cigarette again and turned his head the other way and blew smoke directly at us. Then he put the cigarette out in the ashtray. The waiter came back with Quinn’s drink. A large cup. Probably white coffee. The Syrian sipped his espresso. Quinn drank his coffee. They didn’t talk.

“They’re nervous,” Kohl said.

“Excited,” I said. “They’re nearly through. This is the last meeting. The end is in sight. For both of them. They just want to get it done.”

“Watch the briefcases,” Kohl said.

“Watching them,” the judge replied.

Quinn put his cup down on the saucer. Scraped his chair back. Reached forward with his right hand. Picked up the Syrian’s case.

“Quinn has the Syrian’s case,” the judge said.

Quinn stood up. Said one last thing and turned around and walked away. There was a spring in his step. We watched him until he was out of sight. The Syrian was left with the check. He paid it and walked away north, until Frasconi stepped out of a doorway and took his arm and led him right back toward us. Kohl opened up the truck’s rear door and Frasconi pushed the guy inside. We didn’t have much space, with five people in the truck.

“Open the case,” the judge said.

Up close the Syrian looked a lot more nervous than he had through the glass. He was sweating and he didn’t smell too good. He laid the case flat on the floor and squatted in front of it. Glanced at each of us in turn and clicked the catches and lifted the lid.

The case was empty.

I heard the phone ring inside the Xavier Export Company’s office. The door was thick and heavy and the sound was muffled and far away. But it was a phone, and it was ringing exactly five minutes after Duffy and Villanueva must have left the garage. It rang twice and was answered. I didn’t hear any conversation. I guessed Duffy would make up some kind of a wrong-number story. I guessed she would keep it going just long enough to look significant in a phone log. I gave it a minute. Nobody keeps a bogus call going longer than sixty seconds.

I took the Beretta out of my pocket and pulled open the door. Stepped inside into a wide-open reception area. There was dark wood and carpet. An office to the left, closed up. An office to the right, closed up. A reception desk in front of me. A person at the desk, in the act of hanging up a phone. Not Quinn. It was a woman. She was maybe thirty years old. She had fair hair. Blue eyes. In front of her was an acetate plaque in a wooden holder. It said: Emily Smith. Behind her was a coat rack. There was a raincoat on it. And a black cocktail dress sheathed in dry-cleaner’s plastic hanging on a wire hanger. I fumbled behind my back left-handed and locked the hallway door. Watched Emily Smith’s eyes. They were staring straight at me. They didn’t move. They didn’t turn left or right toward either office door. So she was probably alone. And they didn’t drop toward a purse or a desk drawer. So she was probably unarmed.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” she said.

“Am I?”

She nodded, vaguely, like she couldn’t process what she was seeing.

“You’re Reacher,” she said. “Paulie told us he took you out.”

I nodded. “OK, I’m a ghost. Don’t touch the phone.”

I stepped forward and looked at her desk. No weapons on it. The phone was a complicated multi-line console. It was all covered in buttons. I leaned down left-handed and ripped its cord out of its socket.

“Stand up,” I said.

She stood up. Just pushed her chair back and levered herself upright.

“Let’s check the other rooms,” I said.

“There’s nobody here,” she said. There was fear in her voice, so she was probably telling me the truth.

“Let’s check anyway,” I said.

She came out from behind her desk. She was a foot shorter than me. She was wearing a dark skirt and a dark shirt. Smart shoes, which I figured would go equally well later with her cocktail dress. I put the Beretta’s muzzle against her spine and bunched the back of her shirt collar in my left hand and moved her forward. She felt small and fragile. Her hair fell over my hand. It smelled clean. We checked the left-hand office first. She opened the door for me and I pushed her all the way inside and stepped sideways and moved out of the doorway. I didn’t want to get shot in the back from across the reception area.

It was just an office. A decent-sized space. Nobody in it. There was an Oriental carpet, and a desk. There was a bathroom. Just a small cubicle with a toilet and a sink. Nobody in it. So I spun her around and moved her all the way across the reception area and into the right-hand office. Same decor. Same type of carpet, same type of desk. It was unoccupied. Nobody in it. No bathroom. I kept tight hold of her collar and pushed her back to the center of the reception area. Stopped her right next to her desk.

“Nobody here,” I said.

“I told you,” she said.

“So where is everybody?”

She didn’t answer. And I felt her stiffen, like she was going to make a big point out of not answering.

“Specifically, where is Teresa Daniel?” I said.

No reply.

“Where’s Xavier?” I said.

No reply.

“How do you know my name?”

“Beck told Xavier. He asked his permission to employ you.”

“Xavier checked me out?”

“As far as he could.”

“And he gave Beck his OK?”

“Obviously.”

“So why did he set Paulie on me this morning?”

She stiffened again. “The situation changed.”

“This morning? Why?”

“He got new information.”

“What information?”

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Something about a car.”

The Saab? The maid’s missing notes?

“He made certain deductions,” Emily Smith said. “Now he knows all about you.”

“Figure of speech,” I said. “Nobody knows all about me.”

“He knows you were talking to ATF.”

“Like I said, nobody really knows anything.”

“He knows what you’ve been doing here.”

“Does he? Do you?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Where do you fit in?”

“I’m his operations manager.”

I wrapped her shirt collar tighter in my left fist and moved the Beretta’s muzzle and used it to itch my cheek where the bruising was tightening the skin. I thought about Angel Doll, and John Chapman Duke, and two bodyguards whose names I didn’t even know, and Paulie. I figured adding Emily Smith to the casualty list wasn’t going to cost me much, in a cosmic sense. I put the gun to her head. I heard a plane in the distance, leaving from the airport. It roared through the sky, less than a mile away. I figured I could just wait for the next one and pull the trigger. Nobody would hear a thing. And she probably deserved it.

Or, maybe she didn’t.

“Where is he?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“You know what he did ten years ago?”

Live or die, Emily. If she knew, she would say so. For sure. Out of pride, or inclusion, or self-importance. She wouldn’t be able to keep it in. And if she knew, she deserved to die. Because to know and to still work with the guy made it that way.

“No, he never told me,” she said. “I didn’t know him ten years ago.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

I believed her.

“You know what happened to Beck’s maid?” I said.

A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying no, but generally they stop and think about it first. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It’s human nature.

“Who?” she said. “No, what?”

I breathed out.

“OK,” I said.

I put the Beretta back in my pocket and let go of her collar and turned her around and trapped both her wrists together in my left hand. Picked up the electrical cord from the phone with my right. Then I straight-armed her into the left-hand office and all the way through to the bathroom. Shoved her inside.

“The lawyers next door have gone home,” I said. “There won’t be anybody in the building until Monday morning. So go ahead and shout and scream all you want, but nobody will hear you.”

She said nothing. I closed the door on her. Tied the phone cord tight around the knob. Opened the office door as wide as it would go and tied the other end of the cord to its handle. She could haul on the inside of the bathroom door all weekend long without getting anywhere. Nobody can break electrical wire by pulling on it lengthwise. I figured she’d give up after an hour and sit tight and drink water from the sink faucet and use the toilet and try to pass the time.

I sat down at her desk. I figured an operations manager should have some interesting paperwork. But she didn’t. The best thing I found was a copy of the Keast and Maden order. The caterers. 18 @ $55. Somebody had penciled a note on the bottom. A woman’s handwriting. Probably Emily Smith’s own. The note said: lamb, not pork! I swiveled her chair around and looked at the wrapped dress on the coat rack. Then I swiveled it back and checked my watch. My ten minutes were up.

I rode the elevator to the garage and left by a fire exit in the rear. The rent-a-cop didn’t see me. I walked around the block and came up on Duffy and Villanueva from behind. Their car was parked on the corner and they were together in the front, staring forward through the windshield. I guessed they were hoping to see two people walking down the street toward them. I opened the door and slid into the back seat and they spun around and looked disappointed. I shook my head.

“Neither of them,” I said.

“Somebody answered the phone,” Duffy said.

“A woman called Emily Smith,” I said. “His operations manager. She wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“What did you do with her?”

“Locked her in the bathroom. She’s out of the picture until Monday.”

“You should have sweated her,” Villanueva said. “You should have pulled her fingernails out.”

“Not my style,” I said. “But you can go right ahead, if you want. Feel free. She’s still up there. She’s not going anywhere.”

He just shook his head and sat still.

“So what now?” Duffy asked.

“So what now?” Kohl asked.

We were still inside the utility truck. Kohl, the judge advocate, and me. Frasconi had taken the Syrian away. Kohl and I were thinking hard and the judge was in the process of washing his hands of the whole thing.

“I was only here to observe,” he said. “I can’t give you legal advice. It wouldn’t be appropriate. And frankly I wouldn’t know what to tell you anyway.”

He glared at us and let himself out the rear door and just walked away. He didn’t look back. I guess that was the downside of picking out a royal pain in the ass for an observer. Unintended consequences.

“I mean, what happened?” Kohl said. “What exactly did we see?”

“Only two possibilities,” I said. “One, he was ripping the guy off, plain and simple. Classic confidence trick. You drip, drip, drip the unimportant stuff, and then you hold back on the final installment. Or two, he was working as a legitimate intelligence officer. On an official operation. Proving that Gorowski was leaky, proving that the Syrians were willing to pay big bucks for stuff.”

“He kidnapped Gorowski’s daughter,” she said. “No way was that officially sanctioned.”

“Worse things have happened,” I said.

“He was ripping them off.”

I nodded. “I agree with you. He was ripping them off.”

“So what can we do about it?”

“Nothing,” I said “Because if we go ahead and accuse him of scamming them for personal profit, he’ll just automatically say no, I wasn’t doing that, actually I was running a sting, and I invite you to try to prove otherwise. And then he’ll not very politely remind us to keep our big noses out of intelligence business.”

She said nothing.

“And you know what?” I said. “Even if he was ripping them off, I wouldn’t know what to charge him with. Does the Uniform Code stop you taking money from foreign idiots in exchange for briefcases full of fresh air?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

“But whatever, the Syrians will go ape,” she said. “I mean, won’t they? They paid him half a million bucks. They’ll have to react. Their pride is at stake. Even if he was legit, he took a hell of a big risk. Half a million big risks. They’ll be coming after him. And he can’t just disappear. He’ll have to stay on-post. He’ll be a sitting target.”

I paused a beat. Looked at her. “If he’s not going to disappear, why was he moving all his money?”

She said nothing. I looked at my watch. Thought: This, not that. Or, just perhaps, just for once, this and that.

“Half a million is too much money,” I said.

“For what?”

“For the Syrians to pay. It’s just not worth it. There’ll be a prototype soon. Then there’ll be a preproduction batch. There’ll be a hundred finished weapons down at the quartermaster level within a matter of months. They could buy one of those for ten thousand dollars, probably. Some bent corporal would sell them one. They could even steal one for free. Then they could just reverse-engineer it.”

“OK, so they’re dumb businessmen,” Kohl said. “But we heard Quinn on the tape. He put half a million in the bank.”

I looked at my watch again. “I know. That’s a definite fact.”

“So?”

“It’s still too much. The Syrians are no dumber than anybody else. Nobody would value a fancy lawn dart at half a million bucks.”

“But we know that’s what they paid. You just agreed it’s a definite fact.”

“No,” I said. “We know Quinn’s got half a million in the bank. That’s the fact. It doesn’t prove the Syrians paid him half a million. That part is speculation.”

“What?”

“Quinn’s a Middle East specialist. He’s a smart guy, and he’s a bad guy. I think you stopped looking too soon.”

“Looking at what?”

“At him. Where he goes, who he meets. How many dubious regimes are there in the Middle East? Four or five, minimum. Suppose he’s in bed with two or three of them at once? Or all of them? With each one thinking it’s the only one? Suppose he’s leveraging the same scam three or four times over? That would explain why he’s got half a million in the bank for something that isn’t worth half a million to any one individual.”

“And he’s ripping them all off?”

I checked my watch again.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he’s playing for real with one of them. Maybe that’s how it got started. Maybe he intended it to be for real all along, with one favored client. But he couldn’t get the kind of big money he wanted from them. So he decided to multiply the yield.”

“I should have watched more cafés,” she said. “I shouldn’t have stopped with the Syrian guy.”

“He’s probably got a fixed route,” I said. “Lots of separate meetings, one after another. Like a damn mail carrier.”

She checked her watch.

“OK,” she said. “So right now he’s taking the Syrian’s cash home.”

I nodded. “And then he’s heading out again right away to meet with the next guy. So you need to get Frasconi and get some more surveillance going. Find Quinn on his way back into town. Haul in anybody he swaps a briefcase with. Maybe you’ll just end up with a bunch of empty briefcases, but maybe one of them won’t be empty, in which case we’re back in business.”

She glanced around the inside of the truck. Glanced down at her tape recorder.

“Forget it,” I said. “No time for the clever stuff. It’ll have to be just you and Frasconi, out there on the street.”

“The warehouse,” I said. “We’re going to have to check it out.”

“We’ll need support,” Duffy said. “They’ll all be there.”

“I hope they are.”

“Too dangerous. There are only three of us.”

“Actually I think they’re all on their way to someplace else. It’s possible they’ve left already.”

“Where are they going?”

“Later,” I said. “Let’s take it one step at a time.”

Villanueva moved the Taurus off the curb.

“Wait,” I said. “Make the next right. Something else I want to check first.”

I directed him two blocks over and one up and we came to the parking garage where I had left Angel Doll in the trunk of his car. Villanueva waited on a hydrant and I slipped out. I walked down the vehicle entrance and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. Walked on until I came to the space I had used. There was a car in it. But it wasn’t Angel Doll’s black Lincoln. It was a metallic green Subaru Legacy. It was the Outback version, with the roof rails and the big tires. It had a Stars and Stripes sticker in the back window. A patriotic driver. But not quite patriotic enough to buy an American automobile.

I walked the two adjacent aisles, just to make sure, although I already was. Not the Saab, but the Lincoln. Not the maid’s missing notes, but Angel Doll’s missing heartbeat. Now he knows all about you. I nodded to myself in the dark. Nobody knows all about anybody. But I guessed now he knew more about me than I was totally comfortable with. I walked back the way I had come. Up the entrance ramp and out into the daylight. It was cloudy and gray and dim and shadowed by tall buildings but it felt like a searchlight beam had hit me. I slid back into the Taurus and closed the door quietly.

“OK?” Duffy asked.

I didn’t answer. She turned around in her seat and faced me.

“OK?” she said again.

“We need to get Eliot out of there,” I said.

“Why?”

“They found Angel Doll.”

“Who did?”

“Quinn’s people.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “It could have been the Portland PD. A suspicious vehicle, parked too long?”

I shook my head. “They’d have opened the trunk. So now they’d be treating the whole garage as a crime scene. They’d have it taped off. There’d be cops all over the place.”

She said nothing.

“It’s completely out of control now,” I said. “So call Eliot. On his cell. Order him out of there. Tell him to take the Becks and the cook with him. In the Cadillac. Tell him to arrest them all at gunpoint if necessary. Tell him to find a different motel and hide out.”

She dug in her purse for her Nokia. Hit a speed dial button. Waited. I timed it out in my head. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings. Duffy glanced at me, anxious. Then Eliot answered. Duffy breathed out and gave him the instructions, loud and clear and urgent. Then she clicked off.

“OK?” I said.

She nodded. “He sounded very relieved.”

I nodded back. He would be. No fun in crouching over the butt end of a machine gun, your back to the sea, staring out at the gray landscape, not knowing what’s coming at you, or when.

“So let’s go,” I said. “To the warehouse.”

Villanueva moved off the curb again. He knew the way. He had watched the warehouse twice, with Eliot. Two long days. He threaded southeast through the city and approached the port from the northwest. We all sat quiet. There was no conversation. I tried to assess the damage. It was total. A disaster. But it was also a liberation. It clarified everything. No more pretending. The scam had dissolved away to nothing. Now I was their enemy, plain and simple. And they were mine. It was a release.

Villanueva was a smart operator. He did everything right. He worked his way around the warehouse on a three-block radius. Covered all four sides. We were limited to brief glimpses down alleys and through gaps between buildings. Four passes, four glimpses. There were no cars there. The roller door was closed tight. No lights in the windows.

“Where are they all?” Duffy said. “This was supposed to be a big weekend.”

“It is,” I said. “I think it’s very big. And I think what they’re doing makes perfect sense.”

“What are they doing?”

“Later,” I said. “Let’s go take a look at the Persuaders. And let’s see what they’re getting in exchange.”

Villanueva parked two buildings north and east, outside a door marked Brian’s Fine Imported Taxidermy. He locked the Taurus and we walked south and west and then looped around to come up on Beck’s place from the blind side where there were no windows. The personnel door into the warehouse office was locked. I looked in through the back office window and saw nobody. Rounded the corner and looked in at the secretarial area. Nobody there. We arrived at the unpainted gray door and stopped. It was locked.

“How do we get in?” Villanueva asked.

“With these,” I said.

I pulled out Angel Doll’s keys and unlocked the door. Opened it. The burglar alarm started beeping. I stepped in and flipped through the papers on the notice board and found the code and entered it. The red light changed to green and the beeping stopped and the building went silent.

“They’re not here,” Duffy said. “We don’t have time to explore. We need to go find Teresa.”

I could already smell gun oil. It was floating right there on top of the smell of the raw wool from the rugs.

“Five minutes,” I said. “And then ATF will give you a medal.”

“They should give you a medal,” Kohl said.

She was calling me from a pay phone on the Georgetown University campus.

“Should they?”

“We’ve got him. We can stick a fork in him. The guy is totally done.”

“So who was it?”

“The Iraqis,” she said. “Can you believe that?”

“Makes sense, I guess,” I said. “They just got their asses kicked and they want to be ready for the next time.”

“Talk about audacious.”

“How did it go down?”

“The same as we saw before. But with Samsonites, not Halliburtons. We got empty cases from a Lebanese guy and an Iranian. Then we hit the motherlode with the Iraqi guy. The actual blueprint.”

“You sure?”

“Totally certain,” she said. “I called Gorowski and he authenticated it by the drafting number in the bottom corner.”

“Who witnessed the transfer?”

“Both of us. Me and Frasconi. Plus some students and faculty. They did it in a university coffee shop.”

“What faculty?”

“We got a law professor.”

“What did he see?”

“The whole thing. But he can’t swear to the actual transfer. They were real slick, like a shell game. The briefcases were identical. Is it enough?”

Questions I wish I had answered differently. It was possible Quinn could claim the Iraqi already had the blueprint, from sources unknown. Possible he could suggest the guy just liked to carry it around with him. Possible he could deny there was any exchange at all. But then I thought about the Syrian, and the Lebanese guy, and the Iranian. And all the money in Quinn’s bank. The rip-off victims would be smarting. They might be willing to testify in closed session. The State Department might be able to offer them some kind of a quid pro quo. And Quinn’s fingerprints would be on the briefcase in the Iraqi’s possession. He wouldn’t have worn gloves to the rendezvous. Too suspicious. Altogether I thought we had enough. We had a clear pattern, we had inexplicable dollars in Quinn’s bank account, we had a top-secret U.S. Army blueprint in an Iraqi agent’s possession, and we had two MPs and a law professor to say how it got there, and we had fingerprints on a briefcase handle.

“It’s plenty,” I said. “Go make the arrest.”

“Where do I go?” Duffy said.

“I’ll show you,” I said.

I moved past her through the open area. Into the back office. Through the door into the warehouse cubicle. Angel Doll’s computer was still there on the desk. His chair was still leaking its stuffing all over the place. I found the right switch and lit up the warehouse floor. I could see everything through the glass partition. The racks of carpets were still there. The forklift was still there. But in the middle of the floor were five head-high stacks of crates. They were piled into two groups. Farthest from the roller door were three piles of battered wooden boxes all stenciled with markings in unfamiliar foreign alphabets, mostly Cyrillic, overlaid with right-to-left scrawls in some kind of Arabic language. I guessed those were Bizarre Bazaar’s imports. Nearer the door were two piles of new crates printed in English: Mossberg Connecticut. Those would be the Xavier Export Company’s outgoing shipment. Import-export, barter at its purest. Fair exchange is no robbery, as Leon Garber might have said.

“It’s not huge, is it?” Duffy said. “I mean, five stacks of boxes? A hundred and forty thousand dollars? I thought it was supposed to be a big deal.”

“I think it is big,” I said. “In importance, maybe, rather than quantity.”

“Let’s take a look,” Villanueva said.

We moved out onto the warehouse floor. He and I lifted the top Mossberg crate down. It was heavy. My left arm was still a little weak. And the center of my chest still hurt. It made my smashed mouth feel like nothing at all.

Villanueva found a claw hammer on a table. Used it to pull the nails out of the crate’s lid. Then he lifted the lid off and laid it on the floor. The crate was full of foam peanuts. I plunged my hands in and came out with a long gun wrapped in waxed paper. I tore the paper off. It was an M500 Persuader. It was the Cruiser model. No shoulder stock. Just a pistol grip. 12-gauge, eighteen-and-a-half-inch barrel, three-inch chamber, six shot capacity, blued metal, black synthetic front grip, no sights. It was a nasty, brutal, close-up street weapon. I pumped the action, crunch crunch. It moved like silk on skin. I pulled the trigger. It clicked like a Nikon.

“See any ammunition?” I said.

“Here,” Villanueva called. He had a box of Brenneke Magnum slugs in his hand. Behind him was an open carton full of dozens of identical packages. I broke open two boxes and loaded six shells and jacked one into the chamber and loaded a seventh. Then I clicked the safety, because the Brennekes were not birdshot. They were one-ounce solid copper slugs that would leave the Persuader at nearly eleven hundred miles an hour. They would punch a hole in a cinder block wall big enough to crawl through. I put the weapon on the table and unwrapped another one. Loaded it and clicked the safety and laid it next to the first one. Caught Duffy looking right at me.

“It’s what they’re for,” I said. “An empty gun is no good to anybody.”

I put the empty Brenneke boxes back in the carton and closed the lid. Villanueva was looking at Bizarre Bazaar’s crates. He had paperwork in his hands.

“These look like carpets to you?” he said.

“Not a whole lot,” I said.

“U.S. Customs thinks they do. Guy called Taylor signed off on them as handwoven rugs from Libya.”

“That’ll help,” I said. “You can give this Taylor guy to ATF. They can check his bank accounts. Might make you more popular.”

“So what’s really in them?” Duffy said. “What do they make in Libya?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They grow dates.”

“This all is Russian stuff,” Villanueva said. “It’s been through Odessa twice. Imported to Libya, turned right around, and exported here. In exchange for two hundred Persuaders. Just because somebody wants to look tough on the streets of Tripoli.”

“And they make a lot of stuff in Russia,” Duffy said.

I nodded. “Let’s see what, exactly.”

There were nine crates in three stacks. I lifted the top crate off the nearest stack and Villanueva got busy with his claw hammer. He pulled the lid off and I saw a bunch of AK-74s nested in wood shavings. Standard Kalashnikov assault rifles, well used. Boring as hell, street value maybe two hundred bucks each, depending on where you were selling them. They weren’t fashion items. I couldn’t see any guys in North Face jackets trading in their beautiful matte-black H&Ks for them.

The second crate was smaller. It was full of wood shavings and AKSU-74 submachine guns. They’re AK-74 derivatives. Efficient, but clunky. They were used too, but well maintained. Not exciting. No better than a half-dozen Western equivalents. NATO hadn’t lain awake at night worrying about them.

The third crate was full of nine-millimeter Makarov pistols. Most of them were scratched and old. It’s a crude and lazy design, ripped off from the ancient Walther PP. The Soviet military was never much of a handgun culture. They thought using sidearms was right down there with throwing stones.

“This is all crap,” I said. “Best thing to do with this stuff would be melt it down and use it for boat anchors.”

We started on the second stack, and found something much more interesting in the very first crate. It was full of VAL Silent Sniper rifles. They were secret until 1994, when the Pentagon captured one. They’re all black, all metal, with a skeleton stock. They fire special heavy nine-millimeter subsonic rounds. Tests showed they penetrated any body armor you chose to wear at a range of five hundred yards. I remember a fair amount of consternation at the time. There were twelve of them. The next crate held another twelve. They were quality weapons. And they looked good. They would go really well with the North Face jackets. Especially the black ones with the silver linings.

“Are they expensive?” Villanueva asked.

I shrugged. “Hard to say. Depends on what a person is willing to pay, I guess. But an equivalent Vaime or SIG bought new in the U.S. could cost over five grand.”

“Then that’s the whole invoice value right there.”

I nodded. “They’re serious weapons. But not a lot of use in south-central LA. So their street value might be much less.”

“We should go,” Duffy said.

I stepped back to line up the view through the glass and out the back office window. It was mid-afternoon. Gloomy, but still light.

“Soon,” I said.

Villanueva opened the last crate in the second stack.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

I stepped over. Saw a nest of wood shavings. And a slim black tube with a short wooden section to act as a shoulder rest. A bulbous missile loaded ready in the muzzle. I had to look twice before I was sure.

“It’s an RPG-7,” I said. “It’s an anti-tank rocket launcher. An infantry weapon, shoulder-fired.”

“RPG means rocket propelled grenade,” he said.

“In English,” I said. “In Russian it means Reaktivniy Protivotankovyi Granatomet, rocket anti-tank grenade launcher. But it uses a missile, not a grenade.”

“Like the long-rod penetrator?” Duffy said.

“Sort of,” I said. “But it’s explosive.”

“It blows up tanks?”

“That’s the plan.”

“So who’s going to buy it from Beck?”

“I don’t know.”

“Drug dealers?”

“Conceivably. It would be very effective against a house. Or an armored limousine. If your rival bought a bulletproof BMW, you’d need one of these.”

“Or terrorists,” she said.

I nodded. “Or militia whackos.”

“This is very serious.”

“They’re hard to aim,” I said. “The missile is big and slow. Nine times out of ten even a slight crosswind will make you miss. But that’s no consolation to whoever else gets hit by mistake.”

Villanueva wrenched the next lid off.

“Another one,” he said. “The same.”

“We need to call ATF,” Duffy said. “FBI too, probably. Right now.”

“Soon,” I said.

Villanueva opened the last two crates. Nails squealed and wood split.

“More weird stuff,” he said.

I looked. Saw thick metal tubes painted bright yellow. Electronic modules bolted underneath. I looked away.

“Grails,” I said. “SA-7 Grails. Russian surface-to-air missiles.”

“Heat seekers?”

“You got it.”

“For shooting down planes?” Duffy said.

I nodded. “And really good against helicopters.”

“What kind of range?” Villanueva asked.

“Good up to nearly ten thousand feet,” I said.

“That could take down an airliner.”

I nodded.

“Near an airport,” I said. “Soon after takeoff. You could use it from a boat in the East River. Imagine hitting a plane coming out of La Guardia. Imagine it crashing in Manhattan. It would be September 11 all over again.”

Duffy stared at the yellow tubes.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“This is not about drug dealers anymore,” I said. “They’ve expanded their market. This is about terrorism. It has to be. This one shipment alone would equip a whole terrorist cell. They could do practically anything with it.”

“We need to know who’s lining up to buy it. And why they want it.”

Then I heard the sound of feet on the floor in the doorway. And the snick of a round seating itself in an automatic pistol’s chamber. And a voice.

“We don’t ask why they want it,” it said. “We never do. We just take their damn money.”

CHAPTER 14

It was Harley. His mouth was a ragged hole above his goatee. I could see his yellow teeth. He was holding a Para Ordnance P14 in his right hand. The P14 is a solid Canadian-made copy of the Colt 1911 and it was way too heavy for him. His wrists were thin and weak. He would have been better off with a Glock 19, like Duffy’s.

“Saw the lights were on,” he said. “Thought I’d come in and check.”

Then he looked straight at me.

“I guess Paulie screwed up,” he said. “And I guess you faked his voice when Mr. Xavier called you on the phone.”

I looked at his trigger finger. It was in position. I spent half a second mad at myself for letting him walk in unannounced. Then I moved on to working out how to take him down. Thought: Villanueva is going to yell at me if I take him down before we ask about Teresa.

“You going to introduce me around?” he said.

“This is Harley,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

“Who are these other people?” Harley asked me.

I said nothing.

“We’re federal agents,” Duffy said.

“So what are you all doing in here?” Harley asked.

He asked the question like he was genuinely interested. He was wearing a different suit. It was shiny black. He had a silver tie under it. He had showered and washed his hair. His pony tail was secured by a regular brown rubber band.

“We’re working in here,” Duffy said.

He nodded. “Reacher has seen what we do to government women. He’s seen it with his own eyes.”

“You should jump ship, Harley,” I said. “It’s all coming apart now.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“See, we don’t get that feeling from the computers. Your friend and mine in the body bag, she didn’t tell them nothing yet. They’re still waiting on her first report. Matter of fact, most days it seems like they’ve forgotten about her altogether.”

“We’ve nothing to do with computers.”

“Even better,” he said. “You’re freelance operators, nobody knows you’re here, and I got you all covered.”

“Paulie had me covered,” I said.

“With a gun?”

“With two.”

His eyes flicked down for a second. Then back up.

“I’m smarter than Paulie,” he said. “Put your hands on your heads.”

We put our hands on our heads.

“Reacher’s got a Beretta,” he said. “I know that for sure. I’m guessing there are two Glocks in the room as well. Most likely a 17 and a 19. I want to see them all on the floor, nice and slow, one at a time.”

Nobody moved. Harley shaded the P14 toward Duffy.

“The woman first,” he said. “Finger and thumb.”

Duffy slid her left hand under her jacket and dragged her Glock out, pinched between her finger and thumb. She dropped it on the floor. I moved my arm and started my hand toward my pocket.

“Wait,” Harley said. “You’re not a trustworthy character.”

He stepped forward and reached up and pressed the P14’s muzzle into my lower lip, right where Paulie had hit me. Then he reached down with his left hand and burrowed in my pocket. Came out with the Beretta. Dropped it next to Duffy’s Glock.

“You next,” he said to Villanueva. He kept the P14 where it was. It was cold and hard. I could feel the muzzle’s pressure on my loose teeth. Villanueva dropped his Glock on the floor. Harley raked all three guns behind him with his foot. Then he stepped backward.

“OK,” he said. “Now get over here by the wall.”

He wheeled us around until he was next to the crates and we were lined up against the back wall.

“There’s one more of us,” Villanueva said. “He isn’t here.”

Mistake, I thought. Harley just smiled.

“So call him,” he said. “Tell him to come on down.”

Villanueva said nothing. It felt like a dead end. Then it turned into a trap.

“Call him,” Harley said again. “Right now, or I’ll start shooting.”

Nobody moved.

“Call him, or the woman gets a bullet in the thigh.”

“She’s got the phone,” Villanueva said.

“In my purse,” Duffy said.

“And where’s your purse?”

“In the car.”

Good answer, I thought.

“Where’s the car?” Harley asked.

“Close by,” Duffy said.

“The Taurus next to the stuffed animal place?”

Duffy nodded. Harley hesitated.

“You can use the phone in the office,” he said. “Call the guy.”

“I don’t know his number,” Duffy said.

Harley just looked at her.

“It’s on my speed dial,” she said. “I don’t have it memorized.”

“Where’s Teresa Daniel?” I asked.

Harley just smiled. Asked and answered, I thought.

“Is she OK?” Villanueva said. “Because she better be.”

“She’s fine,” Harley said. “Mint condition.”

“You want me to go get the phone?” Duffy asked.

“We’ll all go,” Harley said. “After you put these crates back in order. You messed them up. You shouldn’t have done that.”

He stepped up next to Duffy and put the muzzle of his gun to her temple.

“I’ll wait right here,” he said. “And the woman can wait here with me. Like my own personal life insurance policy.”

Villanueva glanced at me. I shrugged. I figured we were nominated to do the quartermaster work. I stepped forward and picked up the hammer from the floor. Villanueva picked up the lid from the first Grail crate. Glanced at me again. I shook my head just enough for him to see. I would have loved to bury the hammer in Harley’s head. Or his mouth. I could have solved his dental problems permanently. But a hammer was no good against a guy with a gun to a hostage’s head. And anyway, I had a better idea. And it would depend on a show of compliance. So I just held the hammer and waited politely until Villanueva had the lid in place over the fat yellow missile tube. I butted it with the heel of my hand until the nails found their original holes. Then I hammered them in and stood back and waited again.

We did the second Grail crate the same way. Lifted it up and piled it back on top of the first one. Then we did the RPG-7s. Nailed down the lids and stacked them exactly like we had found them. Then we did the VAL Silent Snipers. Harley watched us carefully. But he was relaxing a little. We were compliant. Villanueva seemed to understand what we were aiming for. He had caught on fast. He found the lid for the Makarov crate. Paused with it halfway into position.

“People buy these things?” he said.

Perfect, I thought. His tone was conversational, and a little puzzled. And professionally interested, just like a real ATF guy might be.

“Why wouldn’t they buy them?” Harley said.

“Because they’re junk,” I said. “You ever tried one?”

Harley shook his head.

“Let me show you something,” I said. “OK?”

Harley kept the gun pressed hard against Duffy’s temple. “Show me what?”

I put my hand in the crate and came out with one of the pistols. Blew wood shavings off it and held it up. It was old and scratched. Well used.

“Very crude mechanism,” I said. “They simplified the original Walther design. Ruined it, really. Double-action, like the original, but the pull is a nightmare.”

I pointed the gun at the ceiling and put my finger on the trigger and used just my thumb on the back of the butt to exaggerate the effect. Pincered my hand and pulled the trigger. The mechanism grated like a balky stick shift in an old car and the gun twisted awkwardly in my grip.

“Piece of junk,” I said.

I did it again, listening to the bad sound and letting the gun twist and rock between my finger and thumb.

“Hopeless,” I said. “No chance of hitting anything unless it’s right next to you.”

I tossed the gun back into the crate. Villanueva slid the lid into position.

“You should be worried, Harley,” he said. “Your reputation won’t be worth shit if you put junk like this on the street.”

“Not my problem,” Harley said. “Not my reputation. I just work here.”

I hammered the nails back in, slowly, like I was tired. Then we started on the AKSU-74 crate. The old submachine guns. Then we did the AK-74s.

“You could sell these to the movies,” Villanueva said. “For historical dramas. That’s about all they’re good for.”

I hammered the nails into position and we stacked the crate with the others until we had all of Bizarre Bazaar’s imports back into a neat separate pile, just like we had found them. Harley was still watching us. He still had his gun at Duffy’s head. But his wrist was tired and his finger wasn’t hard on the trigger anymore. He had let it slide upward to the underside of the frame, where it was helping take the weight. Villanueva shoved the Mossberg crate across the floor toward me. Found the lid. We had only opened one.

“Nearly done,” I said.

Villanueva slid the lid into position.

“Wait up,” I said. “We left two of them on the table.”

I stepped across and picked up the first Persuader. Stared at it.

“See this?” I said to Harley. I pointed at the safety catch. “They shipped it with the safety on. Shouldn’t do that. It could damage the firing pin.”

I snicked the safety to fire and wrapped the gun in its waxed paper and burrowed it deep down into the foam peanuts. Stepped back for the second one.

“This one’s exactly the same,” I said.

“You guys are going out of business for sure,” Villanueva said. “Your quality control is all over the place.”

I set the safety to fire and stepped back toward the crate. Pivoted off my right foot like a second baseman lining up a double play and pulled the trigger and shot Harley through the gut. The Brenneke round sounded like a bomb going off and the giant slug cut Harley in half, literally. He was there, and then suddenly he wasn’t. He was in two large pieces on the floor and the warehouse was full of acrid smoke and the air was full of the hot stink of Harley’s blood and his digestive system and Duffy was screaming because the man she had been standing next to had just exploded. My ears were ringing. Duffy kept on screaming and danced away from the spreading pool at her feet. Villanueva caught her and held on tight and I racked the Persuader’s slide and watched the door in case there were any more surprises coming at us. But there weren’t. The warehouse structure stopped resonating and my hearing came back and then there was nothing except silence and Duffy’s fast loud breathing.

“I was standing right next to him,” she said.

“You aren’t standing right next to him now,” I said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Villanueva let go of her and stepped over and bent down and picked up our handguns from where Harley had kicked them. I took the second loaded Persuader out of the crate and unwrapped it again and clicked the safety on.

“I really like these,” I said.

“They seem to work,” Villanueva said.

I held both shotguns in one hand and put my Beretta in my pocket.

“Get the car, Terry,” I said. “Somebody’s probably calling the cops right now.”

He left by the front door and I looked at the sky through the window. There was plenty of cloud, but there was still plenty of daylight, too.

“What now?” Duffy said.

“Now we go somewhere and wait,” I said.

I waited more than an hour, sitting at my desk, looking at my telephone, expecting Kohl to call me. She had timed the drive out to MacLean at thirty-five minutes. Starting from the Georgetown University campus might have added five or ten, depending on traffic. Assessing the situation at Quinn’s house could have added another ten. Taking him down should have taken less than one. Cuffing him and putting him in the car should have taken another three. Fifty-nine minutes, beginning to end. But a whole hour passed and she didn’t call.

I started to worry after seventy minutes. Started to worry badly after eighty. Dead on ninety minutes I scared up a pool car and hit the road myself.

Terry Villanueva parked the Taurus on the patch of broken blacktop outside the office door and left the engine running.

“Let’s call Eliot,” I said. “Find out where he went. We’ll go wait with him.”

“What are we waiting for?” Duffy said.

“Dark,” I said.

She went out to the idling car and got her bag. Brought it back. Dug out her phone and hit the number. I timed it out in my head. One ring. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

“No answer,” Duffy said.

Then her face brightened. Then it fell again.

“Gone to voice mail,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where to?”

I looked at my watch. Looked out the window at the sky. Too early.

“The coast road,” I said.

We left the warehouse with the lights off and the doors locked. There was too much good stuff in it to leave it open and accessible. Villanueva drove. Duffy sat next to him in the front. I sat in the back with the Persuaders on the seat beside me. We threaded our way out of the harbor area. Past the lot where Beck parked his blue trucks. Onto the highway, past the airport, and south, away from the city.

We came off the highway and struck out east on the familiar coast road. There was no other traffic. The sky was low and gray and the wind off the sea was strong enough to set up a howling around the Taurus’s windshield pillars. There were drops of water in the air. Maybe they were raindrops. Maybe it was sea spray, lashed miles inland by the gale. It was still way too light. Too early.

“Try Eliot again,” I said.

Duffy took her phone out. Speed-dialed the number. Put the phone to her ear. I heard six faint rings and the whisper of the voice mail announcement. She shook her head. Clicked the phone off again.

“OK,” I said.

She twisted around in her seat.

“You sure they’re all out at the house?” she said.

“Did you notice Harley’s suit?” I said.

“Black,” she said. “Cheap.”

“It was as close as he could get to a tux. It was his idea of evening wear. And Emily Smith had a black cocktail dress ready in her office. She was going to change. She already had her smart shoes on. I think there’s going to be a banquet.”

“Keast and Maden,” Villanueva said. “The caterers.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Banquet food. Eighteen people at fifty-five dollars a head. Tonight. And Emily Smith made a note on the order. Lamb, not pork. Who eats lamb and not pork?”

“People who keep kosher.”

“And Arabs,” I said. “Libyans, maybe.”

“Their suppliers.”

“Exactly,” I said again. “I think they’re about to cement their commercial relationship. I think all the Russian stuff in the crates was some kind of a token shipment. It was a gesture. Same with the Persuaders. They’ve demonstrated to each other that both sides can deliver. Now they’re going to break bread together and go into business for real.”

“At the house?”

I nodded. “It’s an impressive location. Isolated, very dramatic. And it’s got a big dining table.”

He turned the windshield wipers on. The glass streaked and smeared. It was sea spray, whipping horizontally off the Atlantic. Full of salt.

“Something else,” I said.

“What?”

“I think Teresa Daniel is part of the deal,” I said.

“What?”

“I think they’re selling her along with the shotguns. A cute blond American girl. I think she’s the ten-thousand-dollar bonus item.”

Nobody spoke.

“Did you notice what Harley said about her? Mint condition.”

Nobody spoke.

“I think they’ve kept her fed and alive and untouched.” I thought: Paulie wouldn’t have bothered with Elizabeth Beck if Teresa had been available to him. With all due respect to Elizabeth.

Nobody spoke.

“They’re probably cleaning her up right now,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

“I think she’s headed for Tripoli,” I said. “Part of the deal. Like a sweetener.”

Villanueva accelerated hard. The wind howled louder around the windshield pillars and the door mirrors. Two minutes later we reached the spot where we had ambushed the bodyguards and he slowed again. We were five miles from the house. Theoretically we were already visible from the upper floor windows. We came to a stop in the center of the road and we all craned forward and stared into the east.

I used an olive-green Chevrolet and made it out to MacLean in twenty-nine minutes. Stopped in the center of the road two hundred yards shy of Quinn’s residence. It was in an established subdivision. The whole place was quiet and green and watered and was baking lazily in the sun. The houses were on acre lots and were half-hidden behind thick evergreen foundation plantings. Their driveways were jet black. I could hear birds singing and a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation. I could see fat dragonflies in the air.

I took my foot off the brake and crawled forward a hundred yards. Quinn’s house was sided with dark cedar boards. It had a stone walk and knee-high stone walls boxing in earth beds full of low spruces and rhododendrons. It had small windows and the way the eaves of the roof met the tops of the walls made it feel like the house was crouched down with its back to me.

Frasconi’s car was parked in the driveway. It was an olive-green Chevrolet identical to my own. It was empty. Its front bumper was tight against Quinn’s garage door. The garage was a long low triple. It was closed up. There was no sound anywhere, except the birds and the sprinkler and the hum of insects.

I parked behind Frasconi’s car. My tires sounded wet on the hot blacktop. I slid out and eased my Beretta out of its holster. Clicked the safety to fire and started up the stone walk. The front door was locked. The house was silent. I peered in through a hallway window. Saw nothing, except the kind of solid neutral furniture that goes into an expensive rental.

I walked around to the rear. There was a flagstone patio with a barbecue grill on it. A square teak table going gray in the weather and four chairs. An off-white canvas sun umbrella on a pole. A lawn, and plenty of low-maintenance evergreen bushes. A cedar fence stained the same dark color as the house siding closed off the neighbors’ view.

I tried the kitchen door. It was locked. I looked in the window. Saw nothing. I moved around the rear perimeter. Came to the next window and saw nothing. Moved to the next window and saw Frasconi lying on his back.

He was in the middle of the living room floor. There was a sofa and two armchairs all covered in durable mud-colored fabric. The floor was done in wall-to-wall carpet and it matched the olive of his uniform. He had been shot once through the forehead. Nine millimeter. Fatal. Even through the window I could see the single crusted hole and the dull ivory color of his skull under his skin. There was a lake of blood under his head. It had soaked into the carpet and was already drying and turning dark.

I didn’t want to go in on the first floor. If Quinn was still in there he would be waiting upstairs where he had the tactical advantage. So I dragged the patio table over to the back of the garage and used it to climb onto the roof. Used the roof to get me next to an upstairs window. Used my elbow to get me through the glass. Then I went feetfirst into a guest bedroom. It smelled musty and unused. I walked through it and came out in an upstairs hallway. Stood still and listened. Heard nothing. The house sounded completely empty. There was a deadness. A total absence of sound. No human vibrations.

But I could smell blood.

I crossed the upstairs hallway and found Dominique Kohl in the master bedroom. She was on her back on the bed. She was completely naked. Her clothes had been torn off. She had been hit in the face enough times to make her groggy and then she had been butchered. Her breasts had been removed with a large knife. I could see the knife. It had been thrust upward through the soft flesh under her chin and through the roof of her mouth and into her brain.

By that point in my life I had seen a lot of things. I had once woken up after a terrorist attack with part of another man’s jawbone buried in my gut. I had had to wipe his flesh out of my eyes before I could see well enough to crawl away. I had crawled twenty yards through severed legs and arms and butted my knees against severed heads with my hands pressed hard into my abdomen to stop my own intestines falling out. I had seen homicides and accidents and men machine-gunned in feuds and people reduced to pink paste in explosions and blackened twisted lumps in fires. But I had never seen anything as bad as Dominique Kohl’s butchered body. I threw up on the floor and then for the first time in more than twenty years I cried.

“So what now?” Villanueva said, ten years later.

“I’m going in alone,” I said.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Don’t argue,” I said. “Just get me a little closer. And drive real slow.”

It was a gray car on a gray day and slow-moving objects are less perceptible than fast-moving objects. He took his foot off the brake and touched the gas and got it rolling at about ten miles an hour. I checked the Beretta and its spare magazines. Forty-five rounds, less two fired into Duke’s ceiling. I checked the Persuaders. Fourteen rounds, less one fired through Harley’s gut. Total of fifty-six rounds, against less than eighteen people. I didn’t know who was on the guest list, but Emily Smith and Harley himself were going to be no-shows for sure.

“Stupid to do it alone,” Villanueva said.

“Stupid to do it together,” I said back. “The approach is going to be suicidal.”

He didn’t answer.

“Better that you guys stand by out here,” I said.

He made no reply to that. He wanted my back and he wanted Teresa but he was smart enough to see that walking toward a fortified and isolated house in the last of the daylight was going to be no kind of fun. He just kept the car rolling slowly. Then he took his foot off the gas and put the transmission in neutral and let it coast to a stop. He didn’t want to risk the flare of brake lights in the mist. We were maybe a quarter-mile short of the house.

“You guys wait here,” I said. “For the duration.”

Villanueva looked away.

“Give me one hour,” I said.

I waited until they both nodded.

“Then call ATF,” I said. “After an hour, if I’m not back.”

“Maybe we should do that now,” Duffy said.

“No,” I said. “I want the hour first.”

“ATF will get Quinn,” she said. “It’s not like they’re going to let him walk.”

I thought back to what I had seen and just shook my head.

I broke every regulation and ignored every procedure in the book. I walked away from a crime scene and failed to report it. I obstructed justice left and right. I left Kohl in the bedroom and Frasconi in the living room. Left their car on the driveway. Just drove myself back to the office and took a silenced Ruger Standard .22 from the company armory and went to find Kohl’s boxed-up files. My gut told me Quinn would make one stop before he headed for the Bahamas. He would have an emergency stash somewhere. Maybe phony ID, maybe a wad of cash, maybe a packed bag, maybe all three. He wouldn’t hide the stash on-post. Nor in his rented house. He was too professional for that. Too cautious. He would want it safe and far away. I was gambling it would be in the place he had inherited in northern California. From his parents, the railroad worker and the stay-at-home mom. So I needed that address.

Kohl’s handwriting was neat. The two cartons were filled with her notes. They were comprehensive. They were meticulous. They broke my heart. I found the California address in an eight-page bio she had prepared. It was a five-digit house number on a road that came under the Eureka post office. Probably a lonely place, far out of town. I went to my company clerk’s desk and signed a stack of travel warrants for myself. Put my service Beretta and the silenced Ruger in a canvas bag and drove to the airport. They gave me papers to sign before they let me carry loaded firearms inside the cabin. I wasn’t about to check them. I figured there was a good chance Quinn might take the same flight. I figured if I saw him at the gate or on the plane I would waste him right there and then.

But I didn’t see him. I got on a plane for Sacramento and walked the aisle after takeoff and scanned every face and he wasn’t there. So I sat tight for the duration of the flight. Just stared into space. The stewardesses stayed well away from me.

I rented a car at the Sacramento airport. Drove it north on I-5 and then northwest on Route 299. It was a designated scenic road. It wound through the mountains. I looked at nothing except the yellow line ahead of me. I had picked up three hours because of flying across three time zones but even so it was gathering dark when I hit the Eureka limit. I found Quinn’s road. It was a meandering strip that ran north-south high in the hills above U.S. 101. The highway was laid out far below me. I could see headlights streaming north. Taillights heading south. I guessed there was a rail line down there somewhere. Maybe a station or a depot nearby, convenient for Quinn’s old man back when he was working.

I found the house. Drove past it without slowing. It was a rough one-story cabin. It used an old milk churn instead of a mailbox post. The front yard had gone to seed a decade ago. I K-turned five hundred yards south of it and drove two hundred yards back toward it with my lights off. Parked behind an abandoned diner with a caved-in roof. Got out and climbed a hundred feet into the hills. Walked north three hundred yards and came on his place from the rear.

In the dusk I could see a narrow back porch and a scuffed area next to it where cars could be parked. Clearly it was the sort of place where you use the back door, not the front. There were no lights on inside. I could see dusty sun-faded drapes half-closed in the windows. The whole place looked empty and unused. I could see a couple of miles north and south and there were no cars on the road.

I came down the hill slowly on foot. Circled the house. Listened at every window. There was nobody inside. I figured Quinn would park in back and come in through the rear, so I broke in through the front. The door was thin and old and I just pushed hard on it until the inner jamb started to give and then I smacked it once above the lock with the heel of my hand. Wood splintered and the door swung open and I stepped inside and closed it again and wedged it shut with a chair. It would look OK from the outside.

It was musty inside and easily ten degrees colder than outside. It was dark and dim. I could hear a refrigerator running in the kitchen, so I knew there was electricity. The walls were covered in ancient wallpaper. It was faded and yellow. There were only four rooms. There was an eat-in kitchen, and a living room. There were two bedrooms. One was small and the other was smaller. I figured the smaller one had been Quinn’s, as a kid. There was a lone bathroom between the bedrooms. White fixtures, stained with rust.

Four rooms plus a bath is an easier search than most. I found what I was looking for almost immediately. I lifted a rag rug off of the living room floor and found a square hatch let into the boards. If it had been in the hallway I would have figured it for an inspection cover above the crawl space. But it was in the living room. I took a fork from the kitchen and levered it open. Under it was a shallow wooden tray built between the floor joists. On the tray was a shoe box wrapped in milky plastic sheeting. Inside the shoe box were three thousand dollars and two keys. I figured the keys were for safety-deposit boxes or left-luggage lockers. I took the cash and left the keys where they were. Then I put the hatch lid back and replaced the rug and chose a chair and sat down to wait with my Beretta in my pocket and the Ruger laid across my lap.

“Take care,” Duffy said.

I nodded. “Sure.”

Villanueva said nothing. I slid out of the Taurus with the Beretta in my pocket and the Persuaders held one in each hand. Crossed straight to the shoulder of the road and got as far down on the rocks as I could and started picking my way east. There was still daylight behind the clouds but I was dressed in black and I was carrying black guns and I wasn’t exactly on the road itself and I thought I might have a chance. The wind was blowing hard toward me and there was water in the air. I could see the ocean ahead. It was raging. The tide was on the way out. I could hear the distant waves pounding and the long suck of the undertow ripping through sand and gravel.

I came around a shallow curve and saw that the wall lights were on. They blazed blue-white against the dim sky. The contrast between the electric light and the late-afternoon darkness beyond it would mean they would see me less and less well the closer I got. So I climbed back onto the roadway and started to jog. I got as close as I dared and then slipped back down the rocks and hugged the shore. The ocean was right at my feet. I could smell salt and seaweed. The rocks were slippery. Waves pounded and spray burst up at me and the water swirled angrily.

I stood still. Took a breath. Realized I couldn’t swim around the wall. Not this time. It would be madness. The sea was way too rough. I would have no chance. No chance at all. I would be tossed around like a cork and smashed against the rocks and battered to death. Unless the undertow got me first and pulled me out and swallowed me into the depths and drowned me.

Can’t go around it, can’t go over it. Got to go through it.

I climbed up the rocks again and stepped into the bar of light as far from the gate as I could get. I was all the way over where the foundations canted down toward the water. Then I kept very close to the wall and walked along its length. I was bathed in light. But nobody east of the wall could see me because it was between me and the house and it was taller than me. And anybody west of me was a friend. All I had to worry about was tripping the sensors buried in the ground. I stepped as lightly as I could and hoped they hadn’t buried any this close in.

And I guess they hadn’t, because I made it to the gatehouse OK. I risked a glance inside through the gap in the drapes in the front window and saw the brightly-lit living room and Paulie’s replacement busy relaxing on the collapsed sofa. He was a guy I hadn’t seen before. He was about Duke’s age and size. Maybe approaching forty, maybe a little slighter than me. I spent some time figuring his exact height. That was going to be important. He was possibly two inches shorter than me. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and a denim jacket. Clearly he wasn’t going to the ball. He was Cinderella, tasked to watch the gate while the others partied. I hoped he was the only one. I hoped they were working a skeleton crew. But I wasn’t about to bet on it. Any kind of minimal caution would put a second guy on the front door of the house, and maybe a third up there in Duke’s window. Because they knew Paulie hadn’t gotten the job done. They knew I was still out there somewhere.

I couldn’t afford the noise involved in shooting the new guy. The waves were loud and the wind was howling but neither sound would mask the Beretta. And nothing on earth would mask a Persuader firing a Brenneke Magnum. So I retreated a couple of yards and put the Persuaders down on the ground and took my coat and my jacket off. Then I took my shirt off and wrapped it tight around my left fist. Put my bare back against the wall and sidestepped my way to the edge of the window. Used the nails on my right hand to tap softly on the bottom corner of the glass, where it was draped, on and off, faint little paradiddles like a mouse makes when he runs across above a ceiling. I did it four times and was about to try a fifth when I saw in the corner of my eye the light in the window suddenly go dim. That meant the new guy had gotten off his sofa and pressed his face up against the glass to try to see what kind of little creature was out there bothering him. So I concentrated on getting the height exactly right and spun one-eighty and threw a huge roundhouse left with my padded fist and bust the window first and the new guy’s nose a millisecond later. He went down in a heap below the inside sill and I reached in through the hole I had made and unlatched the casement and swung it open and climbed inside. The guy was sitting on his butt on the floor. He was bleeding from his nose and the glass cuts in his face. He was groggy. There was a handgun on the sofa. He was eight feet away from it. He was twelve feet from the phones. He shook his head to clear it and looked up at me.

“You’re Reacher,” he said. There was blood in his mouth.

“Correct,” I said back.

“You’ve got no chance,” he said.

“You think?”

He nodded. “We’ve got shoot-to-kill orders.”

“On me?”

He nodded again.

“Who has?”

“Everybody.”

“Xavier’s orders?”

He nodded again. Put the back of his hand up under his nose.

“People going to obey those orders?” I asked.

“For sure.”

“Are you?”

“I guess not.”

“Promise?”

“I guess so.”

“OK,” I said.

I paused for a moment and thought about asking him some more questions. He might be reluctant. But I figured I could slap him around some and get all the answers he had to give. But in the end I figured those answers didn’t matter very much. Made no practical difference to me if there were ten or twelve or fifteen hostiles in the house, or what they were armed with. Shoot to kill. Them or me. So I just stepped away and was trying to decide what to do with the guy when he made my mind up for me by reneging on his promise. He came up off the floor and made a dive for the handgun on the sofa. I caught him with a wild left in the throat. It was a solid punch, and a lucky one. But not for him. It crushed his larynx. He went down on the floor again and suffocated. It was reasonably quick. About a minute and a half. There was nothing I could do for him. I’m not a doctor.

I stood completely still for a minute. Then I put my shirt back on and climbed back out of the window and retrieved the shotguns and my jacket and my coat and climbed back in and crossed the room and looked out of the back window at the house.

“Shit,” I said, and looked away.

The Cadillac was parked on the carriage circle. Eliot hadn’t gotten away. Nor had Elizabeth, or Richard, or the cook. That put three noncombatants into the mix. And the presence of noncombatants makes any assault a hundred times harder. And this one was hard enough to begin with.

I looked again. Next to the Cadillac was a black Lincoln Town Car. Next to the Town Car were two dark blue Suburbans. There was no catering truck. Maybe it was around the side, next to the kitchen door. Maybe it was coming later. Or maybe it wasn’t coming at all. Maybe there was no banquet. Maybe I had screwed up completely and misinterpreted the whole situation.

I stared through the harsh lights on the wall into the gloom around the house. I couldn’t see a guard on the front door. But then, it was cold and wet and anybody with any sense would be inside the hallway looking out through the glass. I couldn’t see anybody in Duke’s window, either. But it was standing open, exactly the way I had left it. Presumably the NSV was still hanging there on its chain.

I looked at the vehicles again. The Town Car could have brought four people in. The Suburbans could have brought seven each. Eighteen people, maximum. Maybe fifteen or sixteen principals and two or three guards. Alternatively, maybe only three drivers came. Maybe I was completely wrong.

Only one way to find out.

And this was the hardest part. I had to get through the lights. I debated finding the switch and turning them off. But that would be an instant early warning to the people in the house. Five seconds after they went off they would be on the phone asking the gate guard what had happened. And the gate guard couldn’t answer, because the gate guard was dead. Whereupon I would have fifteen or more people swarming straight at me in the gloom. Easy enough to avoid most of them. But the trick would be to know who to avoid, and who to grab. Because I was pretty sure if I let Quinn get behind me tonight I would never see him again.

So I had to do it with the lights blazing. Two possibilities. One was to run straight toward the house. That would minimize the time I spent actually illuminated. But it would involve rapid motion, and rapid motion catches the eye. The other possibility would be to traverse the wall all the way to the ocean. Sixty yards, slowly. It would be agony. But it was probably the better option.

Because the lights were mounted on the wall, trained away from it. There would be a dark tunnel between the wall itself and the rear edge of the beams. It would be a slim triangle. I could crawl along it, right down at the base of the structure. Slowly. Through the NSV’s field of fire.

I eased the rear door open. There were no lights on the gatehouse itself. They started twenty feet to my right, where the gatehouse wall became the perimeter wall. I stepped halfway out and crouched down. Turned ninety degrees right and looked for my tunnel. It was there. It was less than three feet deep at ground level. It narrowed to nothing at head height. And it wasn’t very dark. There was scatter coming back off the ground and there were occasional misaligned beams and there was glow coming out of the rear of the lamps themselves. My tunnel was maybe halfway between pitch dark and brilliantly lit.

I shuffled forward on my knees and reached back and closed the door behind me. Put a Persuader in each hand and dropped to my stomach and pressed my right shoulder hard against the base of the wall. Then I waited. Just long enough for anybody who thought they’d seen the door move to lose interest. Then I started crawling. Slowly.

I got maybe ten feet. Then I stopped again. Fast. I heard a vehicle out on the road. Not a sedan. Something bigger than that. Maybe another Suburban. I reversed direction. Dug my toes in and crawled backward to the doorway. Knelt up and opened the door and slid inside the gatehouse and stood up. Put the Persuaders on a chair and took the Beretta out of my pocket. I could hear a big-inch V-8 idling on the other side of the gate.

Decisions. Whoever was out there was expecting the gate guard’s services. And a buck got ten whoever was out there would know I wasn’t the real gate guard. So I figured I would have to give up on the crawling. I figured I would have to go noisy. Shoot them, take their vehicle, make it down to the house real fast before the NSV gunner could draw a bead. Then take my chances in the ensuing chaos.

I stepped to the back door again. Clicked the Beretta’s safety off and took a breath. I had the initial advantage. I already knew exactly what I was going to do. Everybody else would have to react first. And that would take them a second too long.

Then I remembered the camera on the gatepost. The video monitor. I could see exactly what I was faced with. I could count heads. Forewarned is forearmed. I stepped across to check. The picture was gray and milky. It showed a white panel van. Writing on the side. Keast & Maden Catering. I breathed out. No reason why they should know the gate man. I put the Beretta back in my pocket. Stripped off my coat and jacket. Pulled the denim thing off the gate man’s body and slipped it on. It was tight, and there was blood on it. But it was reasonably convincing. I stepped out the door. Kept my back to the house and tried to make myself look two inches shorter. Walked to the gate. Butted the latch upward with my fist, the same way Paulie used to. Hauled it open. The white truck drove up level with me. The passenger buzzed his window down. He was wearing a tux. The guy at the wheel was in a tux. More noncombatants.

“Where to?” the passenger asked.

“Around the house to the right,” I said. “Kitchen door’s all the way at the back.”

The window went back up. The truck drove past me. I waved. Closed the gate again. Stepped back into the lodge and watched the truck from the window. It headed straight for the house and then swung right at the carriage circle. Its headlight beams washed over the Cadillac and the Town Car and the two Suburbans and I caught a flare from its brake lights and then it disappeared from view.

I waited two minutes. Willed it to get darker. Then I changed back into my own coat and jacket and retrieved the Persuaders from the chair. Eased the door open and crawled out and closed it behind me and dropped to my stomach. Pressed my shoulder to the base of the wall and started the slow crawl all over again. I kept my face turned away from the house. There was grit underneath me and I could feel small stones sharp against my elbows and my knees. But mostly I could feel a tingle in my back. It was facing a weapon that could fire twelve half-inch bullets every second. There was probably some tough guy right behind it with his hands resting lightly on the handles. I was hoping he would miss with the first burst. I figured he probably would. I figured he would fire the first burst way low or way high. Whereupon I would be up and running zigzags into the darkness before he lined up for a better try.

I inched forward. Ten yards. Fifteen. Twenty. I kept it really slow. Kept my face turned to the wall. Hoped I looked like a vague indistinct shadow in the penumbra. It was completely counterintuitive. I was fighting a powerful desire to jump up and run. My heart was pounding. I was sweating, even though it was cold. The wind was battering me. It was coming off the sea and hitting the wall and streaming down it like a tide and trying to roll me out to where the lights were brightest.

I kept going. Made it about halfway. About thirty yards covered, about thirty yards to go. My elbows were sore. I was keeping the Persuaders up off the ground and my arms were taking the toll. I stopped to rest. Just pressed myself into the dirt. Tried to look like a rock. I turned my head and risked a glance toward the house. It was quiet. I glanced ahead. Glanced behind. The point of no return. I crawled on. Had to force myself to keep the speed slow. The farther I got, the worse my back tingled. I was breathing hard. Getting close to panic. Adrenaline was boiling through me, screaming run, run. I gasped and panted and forced my arms and legs to stay coordinated. To stay slow. Then I got within ten yards of the end and started to believe I could make it. I stopped. Took a breath. And another. Started again. Then the ground tilted down and I followed it headfirst. I reached the water. Felt wet slime underneath me. Small rough waves came at me and spray hit me. I turned a ninety-degree left and paused. I was way on the edge of anybody’s field of view, but I had to get through thirty feet of bright light. I gave up on keeping it slow. I ducked my head and half-stood and just ran for it.

I spent maybe four seconds lit up brighter than I had ever been before. It felt like four lifetimes. I was blinded. Then I crashed back into darkness and crouched down and listened. Heard nothing except the wild sea. Saw nothing except purple spots in my eyes. I stumbled on another ten paces over the rocks and then stood still. Looked back. I was in. I smiled in the dark. Quinn, I’m coming to get you now.

CHAPTER 15

Ten years ago I waited eighteen hours for him. I never doubted he was coming. I just sat in his armchair with the Ruger on my lap and waited. I didn’t sleep. I barely even blinked. Just sat. All through the night. Through the dawn. All through the next morning. Midday came and went. I just sat and waited for him.

He came at two o’clock in the afternoon. I heard a car slowing on the road and stood up and kept well back from the window and watched as he turned in. He was in a rental, similar to mine. It was a red Pontiac. I saw him clearly through the windshield. He was neat and clean. His hair was combed. He was wearing a blue shirt with the collar open. He was smiling. The car swept past the side of the house and I heard it crunch to a stop on the dirt outside the kitchen. I stepped through to the hallway. Pressed myself against the wall next to the kitchen door.

I heard his key in the lock. Heard the door swing open. The hinges squealed in protest. He left it open. I heard his car idling outside. He hadn’t switched it off. He wasn’t planning on staying long. I heard his feet on the kitchen linoleum. A fast, light, confident tread. A man who thought he was playing and winning. He came through the door. I hit him in the side of the head with my elbow.

He went down on the floor on his back and I spanned my hand and pinned him by the throat. Laid the Ruger aside and patted him down. He was unarmed. I let go of his neck and his head came up and I smashed it back down with the heel of my hand under his chin. The back of his head hit the floor and his eyes rolled up in his head. I walked through the kitchen and closed the door. Stepped back and dragged him into the living room by the wrists. Dropped him on the floor and slapped him twice. Aimed the Ruger at the center of his face and waited for his eyes to open.

They opened and focused first on the gun and then on me. I was in uniform and all covered in badges of rank and unit designations so it didn’t take him long to work out who I was and why I was there.

“Wait,” he said.

“For what?”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Am I?”

“You’ve got it wrong.”

“Have I?”

He nodded. “They were on the take.”

“Who were?”

“Frasconi and Kohl.”

“Were they?”

He nodded again. “And then he tried to cheat her.”

“How?”

“Can I sit up?”

I shook my head. Kept the gun where it was.

“No,” I said.

“I was running a sting,” he said. “I was working with the State Department. Against hostile embassies. I was trawling.”

“What about Gorowski’s kid?”

He shook his head, impatiently. “Nothing happened with the damn kid, you idiot. Gorowski had a script to follow, that’s all. It was a setup. In case the hostiles checked on him. We play these things deep. There has to be a chain to follow, in case anyone is suspicious. We were doing proper dead drops and everything. In case we were being watched.”

“What about Frasconi and Kohl?”

“They were good. They picked up on me real early. Assumed I wasn’t legit. Which pleased me. Meant I was playing my part just right. Then they went bad. They came to me and said they’d slow the investigation if I paid them. They said they’d give me time to leave the country. They thought I wanted to do that. So I figured, hey, why not play along? Because who knows in advance what bad guys a trawl will find? And the more the merrier, right? So I played them out.”

I said nothing.

“The investigation was slow, wasn’t it?” he said. “You must have noticed that. Weeks and weeks. It was real slow.”

Slow as molasses.

“Then yesterday happened,” he said. “I got the Syrians and the Lebanese and the Iranians in the bag. Then the Iraqis, who were the big fish. So I figured it was time to put your guys in the bag too. They came over for their final payoff. It was a lot of money. But Frasconi wanted it all. He hit me over the head. I came around and found he had sliced Kohl up. He was a crazy man, believe me. I got to a gun in a drawer and shot him.”

“So why did you run?”

“Because I was freaked. I’m a Pentagon guy. I never saw blood before. And I didn’t know who else might be in it with your guys. There could have been more.”

Frasconi and Kohl.

“You’re very good,” he said to me. “You came right here.”

I nodded. Thought back to his eight-page bio, in Kohl’s tidy handwriting. Parents’ occupations, childhood home.

“Whose idea was it?” I said.

“Originally?” he said. “Frasconi’s, of course. He outranked her.”

“What was her name?”

I saw a flicker in his eyes.

“Kohl,” he said.

I nodded again. She had gone out to make the arrest in dress greens. A black acetate nameplate above her right breast. Kohl. Gender-neutral. Uniform, female enlisted, the nameplate is adjusted to individual figure differences and centered horizontally on the right side between one and two inches above the top button of the coat. He would have seen it as soon as she walked in the door.

“First name?”

He paused.

“Don’t recall,” he said.

“Frasconi’s first name?”

Uniform, male officer, the nameplate is centered on the right-side breast pocket flap equidistant between the seam and the button.

“I don’t recall.”

“Try,” I said.

“I can’t recall it,” he said. “It’s only a detail.”

“Three out of ten,” I said. “Call it an E.”

“What?”

“Your performance,” I said. “A failing grade.”

“What?”

“Your dad was a railroad worker,” I said. “Your mom was a homemaker. Your full name is Francis Xavier Quinn.”

“So?”

“Investigations are like that,” I said. “You plan to put somebody in the bag, you find out all about them first. You were playing those two for weeks and weeks and never found out their first names? Never looked at their service records? Never made any notes? Never filed any reports?”

He said nothing.

“And Frasconi never had an idea in his life,” I said. “Never even took a dump unless somebody told him to. Nobody connected to those two would ever say Frasconi and Kohl. They’d say Kohl and Frasconi. You were dirty all the way and you never saw my guys in your life before the exact minute they showed up at your house to arrest you. And you killed them both.”

He proved I was right by trying to fight me. I was ready for him. He started to scramble up. I knocked him back down, a lot harder than I really needed to. He was still unconscious when I put him in the trunk of his car. Still unconscious when I transferred him to the trunk of mine, behind the abandoned diner. I drove a little way south on U.S. 101 and took a right that led toward the Pacific. I stopped on a gravel turnout. There was a fabulous view. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was shining and the ocean was blue. The turnout had a knee-high metal barrier and then there was another half-yard of gravel and then there was a long vertical drop into the surf. Traffic was very light. Maybe a car every couple of minutes. The road was just an arbitrary loop off the highway.

I opened the trunk and then slammed it again just in case he was awake and planning to jump out at me. But he wasn’t. He was starved of air and barely conscious. I dragged him out and propped him up on rubbery legs and made him walk. Let him look at the ocean for a minute while I checked for potential witnesses. There were none. So I turned him around. Stepped away five paces.

“Her name was Dominique,” I said.

Then I shot him. Twice in the head, once in the chest. I expected him to go straight down on the gravel, whereupon I was planning to step in close and put a fourth up through his eye socket before throwing him into the ocean. But he didn’t go straight down on the gravel. He staggered backward and tripped on the rail and went over it and hit the last half-yard of America with his shoulder and rolled straight over the cliff. I grabbed the barrier with one hand and leaned over and looked down. Saw him hit the rocks. The surf closed over him. I didn’t see him again. I stayed there for a full minute. Thought: Two in the head, one in the heart, a hundred-twenty-foot fall into the ocean, no way to survive that.

I picked up my shell cases. “Ten-eighteen, Dom,” I said to myself, and walked back to my car.

Ten years later it was going dark very fast and I was picking my way over the rocks behind the garage block. The sea was heaving and thrashing on my right. The wind was in my face. I didn’t expect to see anybody out and about. Especially not at the sides or the back of the house. So I was moving fast, head up, alert, a Persuader in each hand. I’m coming to get you, Quinn.

When I cleared the rear of the garage block I could see the catering company’s truck parked at the back corner of the building. It was exactly where Harley had put the Lincoln to unload Beck’s maid from the trunk. The truck’s rear doors were open and the driver and the passenger were shuttling back and forth unpacking it. The metal detector on the kitchen door was beeping at every foil dish they carried. I was hungry. I could smell hot food on the wind. Both guys were in tuxedos. Their heads were ducked down because of the weather. They weren’t paying attention to anything except their jobs. But I gave them a wide berth anyway. I stayed all the way on the edge of the rocks and skirted around in a loop. Jumped over Harley’s cleft and kept on going.

When I was as far from the caterers as I could get I cut in and headed for the opposite back corner of the house. I felt real good. I felt silent and invisible. Like some kind of a primeval force, howling in from the sea. I stood still and worked out which would be the dining room windows. I found them. The lights were on in the room. I stepped in close and risked a look through the glass.

First person I saw was Quinn. He was standing up straight in a dark suit. He had a drink in his hand. His hair was pure gray. The scars on his forehead were small and pink and shiny. He was a little stooped. A little heavier than he had been. He was ten years older.

Next to him was Beck. He was in a dark suit, too. He had a drink. He was shoulder to shoulder with his boss. Together they were facing three Arab guys. The Arabs were short, with black oiled hair. They were in American clothes. Sharkskin suits, light grays and blues. They had drinks, too.

Behind them Richard and Elizabeth Beck were standing close together, talking. The whole thing was like a free-form cocktail party crammed around the edges of the giant dining table. The table was set with eighteen places. It was very formal. Each setting had three glasses and enough flatware to last a week. The cook was bustling about the room with a tray of drinks. I could see champagne flutes and whiskey tumblers. She was in a dark skirt and a white blouse. She was relegated to cocktail waitress. Maybe her expertise didn’t stretch to Middle Eastern cuisine.

I couldn’t see Teresa Daniel. Maybe they planned to make her jump out of a cake, later. The other occupants of the room were all men. Three of them. Quinn’s best boys, presumably. They were a random trio. A mixture. Hard faces, but probably no more dangerous than Angel Doll or Harley had been.

So, eighteen settings, but only ten diners. Eight absentees. Duke, Angel Doll, Harley, and Emily Smith made four of them. The guy they had sent to the gatehouse to replace Paulie was presumably the fifth. That left three unaccounted for. One on the front door, one in Duke’s window, and one with Teresa Daniel, probably.

I stayed on the outside, looking in. I had been to cocktail parties and formal dinners plenty of times. Depending on where you served they played a big part in base life. I figured these people would be in there four hours, minimum. They wouldn’t come out except for bathroom breaks. Quinn was talking. He was sharing eye contact scrupulously among the three Arabs. He was holding forth. Smiling, gesturing, laughing. He looked like a guy who was playing and winning. But he wasn’t. His plans had been disrupted. A banquet for eighteen had become dinner for ten, because I was still around.

I ducked under the window and crawled toward the kitchen. Stayed on my knees and slipped out of my coat and left the Persuaders wrapped in it where I could find them again. Then I stood up and walked straight into the kitchen. The metal detector beeped at the Beretta in my pocket. The catering guys were in there. They were doing something with aluminum foil. I nodded at them like I lived there and walked straight into the hallway. My feet were quiet on the thick rugs. I could hear the loud buzz of cocktail conversation from the dining room. I could see a guy at the front door. He had his back to me and he was staring out the window. He had his shoulder leaning on the edge of the window recess. His hair was haloed blue by the wall lights in the distance. I walked straight up behind him. Shoot to kill. Them or me. I paused for one second. Reached around and cupped my right hand under his chin. Put my left knuckles against the base of his neck. Jerked up and back with my right and down and forward with my left and snapped his neck at the fourth vertebra. He sagged back against me and I caught him under the arms and walked him into Elizabeth Beck’s parlor and dumped him on the sofa. Doctor Zhivago was still there on a side table.

One down.

I closed the parlor door on him and headed for the stairs. Went up, quick and quiet. Stopped outside Duke’s room. Eliot was sprawled just inside the doorway. Dead. He was on his back. His jacket was thrown open and his shirt was stiff with blood and full of holes. The rugs under him were crusty. I stepped over him and kept behind the door and glanced into the room. Saw why he had died. The NSV had jammed. He must have taken Duffy’s call and been on his way out of the room when he looked up and saw a convoy coming toward him on the road. He must have darted toward the big gun. Squeezed the trigger and felt it jam. It was a piece of junk. The mechanic had it field-stripped on the floor and was crouched over it trying to repair the belt feed mechanism. He was intent on his task. Didn’t see me coming. Didn’t hear me.

Shoot to kill. Them or me.

Two down.

I left him lying on top of the machine gun. The barrel stuck out from under him and looked like a third arm. I checked the view from the window. The wall lights were still blazing. I checked my watch. I was exactly thirty minutes into my hour.

I went back downstairs. Through the hallway. Like a ghost. To the basement door. The lights were on down there. I went down the stairs. Through the gymnasium. Past the washing machine. I pulled the Beretta out of my pocket. Clicked the safety. Held it out in front of me and turned the corner and walked straight toward the two rooms. One of them was empty and had its door standing open. The other was closed up and had a young thin guy sitting on a chair in front of it. He had the chair tilted back against it. He looked straight at me. His eyes went wide. His mouth came open. No sound came out. He didn’t seem like much of a threat. He was wearing a T-shirt with Dell on it. Maybe this was Troy, the computer geek.

“Keep quiet if you want to live,” I said.

He kept quiet.

“Are you Troy?”

He stayed quiet and nodded yes.

“OK, Troy,” I said.

I figured we were right underneath the dining room. I couldn’t risk firing a gun in a stone cellar right under everybody’s feet. So I put the Beretta back in my pocket and caught him around the neck and banged his head on the wall, twice, and put him to sleep. Maybe I cracked his skull, maybe I didn’t. I didn’t really care either way. His keyboard work had killed the maid.

Three down.

I found the key in his pocket. Used it in the lock and swung open the door and found Teresa Daniel sitting on her mattress. She turned and looked straight at me. She looked exactly like the photographs Duffy had shown me in my motel room early in the morning on day eleven. She looked in perfect health. Her hair was washed and brushed. She was wearing a virginal white dress. White panty hose and white shoes. Her skin was pale and her eyes were blue. She looked like a human sacrifice.

I paused a moment, unsure. I couldn’t predict her reaction. She must have figured out what they wanted from her. And she didn’t know me. As far as she knew, I was one of them, ready to lead her right to the altar. And she was a trained federal agent. If I asked her to come with me, she might start fighting. She might be storing it up, waiting for her chance. And I didn’t want things to get noisy. Not yet.

But then I looked again at her eyes. One pupil was enormous. The other was tiny. She was very still. Very quiet. Slack and dazed. She was all doped up. Maybe with some kind of a fancy substance. What was it? The date rape drug? Rohypnol? Rophynol? I couldn’t remember its name. Not my area of expertise. Eliot would have known. Duffy or Villanueva would still know. It made people passive and obedient and acquiescent. Made them lie back and take anything they were told to take.

“Teresa?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“You OK?” I whispered.

She nodded.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Can you walk?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Walk with me.”

She stood up. She was unsteady on her feet. Muscle weakness, I guessed. She had been caged for nine weeks.

“This way,” I said.

She didn’t move. She just stood there. I put out my hand. She reached out and took it. Her skin was warm and dry.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Don’t look at the man on the floor.”

I stopped her again just outside the door. Let her hand go and dragged Troy into the room and closed the door on him and locked it. Took Teresa’s hand again and walked away. She was very suggestible. Very obedient. She just fixed her gaze out in front of her and walked with me. We turned the corner and passed by the washing machine. We walked through the gymnasium. Her dress was silky and lacy. She was holding my hand like a date. I felt like I was going to the prom. We walked up the stairs, side by side. Reached the top.

“Wait here,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere without me, OK?”

“OK,” she whispered.

“Don’t make any noise at all, OK?”

“I won’t.”

I closed the door on her and left her on the top step, with her hand resting lightly on the rail and a bare lightbulb burning behind her. I checked the hallway carefully and headed back to the kitchen. The food guys were still busy in there.

“You guys called Keast and Maden?” I said.

The one nearer me nodded.

“Paul Keast,” he said.

“Chris Maden,” his partner said.

“I need to move your truck, Paul,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s in the way.”

The guy just looked at me. “You told me to put it there.”

“I didn’t tell you to leave it there.”

He shrugged and rooted around on a counter and came up with his keys.

“Whatever,” he said.

I took the keys and went outside and checked the back of the truck. It was fitted out with metal racks on either side. For trays of food. There was a narrow aisle running down the center. No windows. It would do. I left the rear doors open and slid into the driver’s seat and fired it up. Backed it out to the carriage circle and turned it around and reversed it back to the kitchen door. Now it was facing the right way. I killed the motor but left the keys in it. Went back inside the kitchen. The metal detector beeped.

“What are they eating?” I asked.

“Lamb kebabs,” Maden said. “With rice and couscous and humus. Stuffed grape leaves to start. Baklava for dessert. With coffee.”

“That’s Libyan?”

“It’s generic,” he said. “They eat it everywhere.”

“I used to get that for a dollar,” I said. “You’re charging fifty-five.”

“Where? In Portland?”

“In Beirut,” I said.

I stepped out and checked the hallway. All quiet. I opened the basement door. Teresa Daniel was waiting right there, like an automaton. I held out my hand.

“Let’s go,” I said.

She stepped out. I closed the door behind her. Walked her into the kitchen. Keast and Maden stared at her. I ignored them and walked her through. Out through the door. Over to the truck. She shivered in the cold. I helped her climb into the back.

“Wait there for me now,” I said. “Very quiet, OK?”

She nodded and said nothing.

“I’m going to close the doors on you,” I said.

She nodded again.

“I’ll get you out of there soon,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

I closed the doors on her and went back to the kitchen. Stood still and listened. I could hear talking from the dining room. It all sounded reasonably social.

“When do they eat?” I said.

“Twenty minutes,” Maden said. “When they’re through with the drinks. There was champagne included in the fifty-five dollars, you know.”

“OK,” I said. “Don’t take offense.”

I checked my watch. Forty-five minutes gone. Fifteen minutes to go.

Show time.

I went back outside into the cold. Slipped into the food truck and fired it up. Eased it forward, slowly around the corner of the house, slowly around the carriage circle, slowly down the driveway. Away from the house. Through the gate. Onto the road. I hit the gas. Took the curves fast. Jammed to a stop level with Villanueva’s Taurus. Jumped out. Villanueva and Duffy were instantly out to meet me.

“Teresa’s in the back,” I said. “She’s OK but she’s all doped up.”

Duffy pumped her fists and jumped on me and hugged me hard and Villanueva wrenched open the doors. Teresa fell into his arms. He lifted her down like a child. Then Duffy grabbed her away from him and he took a turn hugging me.

“You should take her to the hospital,” I said.

“We’ll take her to the motel,” Duffy said. “We’re still off the books.”

“You sure?”

“She’ll be OK,” Villanueva said. “Looks like they gave her roofies. Probably from their dope-dealer pals. But they don’t last long. They flush out fast.”

Duffy was hugging Teresa like a sister. Villanueva was still hugging me.

“Eliot’s dead,” I said.

That put a real damper on the mood.

“Call ATF from the motel,” I said. “If I don’t call you first.”

They just looked at me.

“I’m going back now,” I said.

I turned the truck around and headed back. I could see the house ahead of me. The windows were lit up yellow. The wall lights flared blue in the mist. The truck fought the wind. Plan B, I decided. Quinn was mine, but the others could be ATF’s headache.

I stopped on the far side of the carriage circle and reversed down the side of the house. Stopped outside the kitchen. Got out and walked around the back of the house and found my coat. Unwrapped the Persuaders. Put my coat on. I needed it. It was a cold night and I would be on the road again in about five minutes.

I stepped across to the dining room windows to check inside. They had closed the drapes. Makes sense, I thought. It was a wild blustery night. The dining room would look better with closed drapes. Cozier. Oriental rugs on the floor, wood paneling, silver on the linen tablecloth.

I picked up the Persuaders and walked back to the kitchen. The metal detector squealed. The food guys had ten plates with stuffed grape leaves all lined up on a counter. The leaves looked dark and oily and tough. I was hungry but I couldn’t have eaten one. The way my teeth were right then would have made it impossible. I figured I would be eating ice cream for a week, thanks to Paulie.

“Hold off with the food for five minutes, OK?” I said.

Keast and Maden stared at the shotguns.

“Your keys,” I said.

I dropped them next to the grape leaves. I didn’t need them anymore. I had the keys Beck had given me. I figured I would leave by the front door and use the Cadillac. Faster. More comfortable. I took a knife from the wooden block. Used it to put a slit in the inside of my right-hand coat pocket, just wide enough to allow a Persuader’s barrel down into the lining. I picked the gun I had killed Harley with and holstered it there. I held the other one two-handed. Took a breath. Stepped into the hallway. Keast and Maden watched me go. First thing I did was check the powder room. No point in getting all dramatic if Quinn wasn’t even in the dining room. But the powder room was empty. Nobody on bathroom break.

The dining room door was closed. I took another breath. Then another. Then I kicked it in and stepped inside and fired two Brennekes into the ceiling. They were like stun grenades. The twin explosions were colossal. Plaster and wood rained down. Dust and smoke filled the air. Everybody froze like statues. I leveled the gun at Quinn’s chest. Echoes died away.

“Remember me?” I said.

Elizabeth Beck screamed in the sudden silence.

I moved another step into the room and kept the muzzle on Quinn.

“Remember me?” I said again.

One second. Two. His mouth started moving.

“I saw you in Boston,” he said. “On the street. A Saturday night. Maybe two weeks ago.”

“Try again,” I said.

His face was completely blank. He didn’t remember me. They diagnosed amnesia, Duffy had said. Certainly about the trauma, because that’s almost inevitable. They figured he might be genuinely blank about the incident and the previous day or two.

“I’m Reacher,” I said. “I need you to remember me.”

He glanced helplessly at Beck.

“Her name was Dominique,” I said.

He turned back to me. Stared at me. Eyes wide. Now he knew who I was. His face changed. Blood drained out and fury swarmed in. And fear. The .22 scars went pure white. I thought about aiming right between them. It would be a difficult shot.

“You really thought I wouldn’t find you?” I said.

“Can we talk?” he said. Sounded like his mouth was dry.

“No,” I said. “You’ve already been talking ten extra years.”

“We’re all armed here,” Beck said. He sounded afraid. The three Arabs were staring at me. They had plaster dust stuck to the oil in their hair.

“So tell everybody to hold their fire,” I said. “No reason for more than one casualty here.”

People eased away from me. Dust settled on the table. A slab of falling ceiling had broken a glass. I moved with the crowd and turned and adjusted the geometry to herd the bad guys together at one end of the room. At the same time I tried to force Elizabeth and Richard and the cook together at the other. Where they would be safe, by the window. Pure body language. I turned my shoulder and inched forward and even though the table was between me and most of them they went where I wanted them. The little gathering parted obediently into two groups, eight and three.

“Everybody should step away from Mr. Xavier now,” I said.

Everybody did, except Beck. Beck stayed right at his shoulder. I stared at him. Then I realized Quinn had a grip on his arm. He was holding it tight just above the elbow. Pulling on it. Pulling on it hard. Looking for a human shield.

“These slugs are an inch wide,” I said to him. “As long as I can see an inch of you, that won’t work very well.”

He said nothing back. Just kept on pulling. Beck was resisting. There was fear in his eyes, too. It was a static little slow-motion contest. But I guessed Quinn was winning it. Inside ten seconds Beck’s left shoulder was overlapping Quinn’s right. Both of them were quivering with effort. Even though the Persuader had a pistol grip instead of a stock I raised it high to my shoulder and sighted carefully down the barrel.

“I can still see you,” I said.

“Don’t shoot,” Richard Beck said, behind me.

Something in his voice.

I glanced back at him. Just a brief turn of my head. Just a flash. There and back. He had a Beretta in his hand. It was identical to the one in my pocket. It was pointed at my head. The electric light was harsh on it. It was highlighted. Even though I had only looked for a fraction of a second I had seen the elegant engraving on the slide. Pietro Beretta. I had seen the dew of new oil. I had seen the little red dot that is revealed when the safety is pushed to fire.

“Put it away, Richard,” I said.

“Not while my father is there,” he said.

“Let go of him, Quinn,” I said.

“Don’t shoot, Reacher,” Richard said. “I’ll shoot you first.”

By then Quinn had Beck almost all the way in front of him.

“Don’t shoot,” Richard said again.

“Put it down, Richard,” I said.

“No.”

“Put it down.”

“No.”

I listened carefully to his voice. He wasn’t moving. He was standing still. I knew exactly where he was. I knew the angle I would have to turn through. I rehearsed it in my head. Turn. Fire. Pump. Turn. Fire. I could get them both within a second and a quarter. Too fast for Quinn to react. I took a breath.

Then I pictured Richard in my mind. The silly hair, the missing ear. The long fingers. I pictured the big Brenneke slug blasting through him, crushing, bludgeoning, the immense kinetic energy blowing him apart. I couldn’t do it.

“Put it away,” I said.

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“You’re helping them.”

“I’m helping my dad.”

“I won’t hit your dad.”

“I can’t take that risk. He’s my dad.”

“Elizabeth, tell him.”

“No,” she said. “He’s my husband.”

Stalemate.

Worse than stalemate. Because there was absolutely nothing I could do. I couldn’t fire on Richard. Because I wouldn’t let myself. Therefore I couldn’t fire on Quinn. And I couldn’t say I wasn’t going to fire on Quinn because then eight guys would immediately pull guns on me. I might get a few of them, but sooner or later one of them would get me. And I couldn’t separate Quinn from Beck. No way was Quinn going to let go of Beck and walk out of the room alone with me. Stalemate.

Plan C.

“Put it away, Richard,” I said.

Listen.

“No.”

He hadn’t moved. I rehearsed it again. Turn. Fire. I took a breath. Spun and fired. A foot to Richard’s right, at the window. The slug smashed through the drapes and caught the casement frame and blew it away. I ran three paces and went headfirst through the hole. Rolled twice wrapped in a torn velvet curtain and scrambled up on my feet and ran. Straight out on the rocks.

I turned back after twenty yards and stood still. The remaining curtain was billowing in the wind. It was flapping in and out of the hole. I could hear the fabric snapping and beating. Yellow light shone behind it. I could see backlit figures crowding together behind the shattered glass. Everything was moving. The curtain, the people. The light was fading and blazing as the curtain flapped in and out. Then shots started coming at me. Handguns were firing. First two, then four, then five. Then more. Rounds were buzzing through the air all around me. Hitting the rocks and sparking and ricocheting. Chips of stone flew everywhere. The shots sounded quiet. They sounded like dull insignificant pops. Their sound was lost in the howl of the wind and the crash of the waves. I dropped to my knees. Raised the Persuader. Then the shooting stopped. I held my fire. The curtain disappeared. Somebody had torn it down. Light flooded out at me. I saw Richard and Elizabeth forced to the front of the crowd at the window. Their arms were twisted up behind them. I saw Quinn’s face behind Richard’s shoulder. He was aiming a gun straight at me.

“Shoot me now,” he screamed.

His voice was nearly lost in the wind. I heard the seventh wave crash in behind me. Spray burst upward and the wind caught it and it hit me hard in the back of the head. I saw one of Quinn’s guys behind Elizabeth. Her face was twisted in pain. His right wrist was resting on her shoulder. His head was behind her head. He had a gun in his hand. I saw another gun butt come forward and knock shards of glass out of the frame. It raked it clean. Then Richard was jerked forward. His knee came up on the sill. Quinn pushed him all the way outside. Came out after him, still holding him close.

“Shoot me now,” he screamed again.

Behind him Elizabeth was lifted out through the window. There was a thick arm around her waist. Her legs kicked desperately. She was planted on the ground and pulled backward to cover the guy holding her. I could see her face, pale in the darkness. Twisted in pain. I shuffled backward. More people climbed out. They swarmed. They formed up together. They made a wedge. Richard and Elizabeth were held shoulder to shoulder at the front like a blunt point. The wedge started lurching toward me. It was uncoordinated. I could see five guns. I shuffled backward. The wedge kept coming. The guns started firing again.

They were aiming to miss. They were aiming to corral me. I moved backward. Counted rounds. Five guns, full mags, they had at least seventy-five shells between them. Maybe more. And they had fired maybe twenty. They were a long way from empty. And their fire was controlled. They weren’t just blasting away. They were aiming left and right of me, into the rocks, regular spaced shots every couple of seconds. Coming on like a machine. Like a tank armored with humans. I stood up. Moved backward. The wedge kept coming at me.

Richard was on the right and Elizabeth was on the left. I picked a guy behind Richard and to his right and aimed. The guy saw me do it and crowded in tight. The wedge jammed together. Now it was a narrow column. It kept on coming. I had no shot. I walked backward, step by step.

My left heel found the edge of Harley’s cleft.

Water boiled in and covered my shoe. I heard the waves. Gravel rattled and sucked. I moved my right foot level with my left. Balanced on the edge. I saw Quinn smiling at me. Just the gleam of his teeth in the dark.

“Say good night now,” he screamed.

Stay alive. See what the next minute brings.

The column grew arms. Six or seven of them, reaching out, turning forward with their guns. Aiming. They were waiting for a command. I heard the seventh wave crash in at my feet. It came up over my ankles and flooded ten feet in front of me. It paused there for a second and then it drained back, indifferent, like a metronome. I looked at Elizabeth and Richard. Looked at their faces. Took a deep breath. Thought: Them or me. I dropped the Persuader and threw myself backward into the water.

First was the shock of the cold, and then it was like falling off a building. Except it wasn’t a free fall. It was like landing in a freezing lubricated tube and being sucked down it at a steep and controlled angle. With acceleration. I was upside down. I was traveling head-first. I had landed on my back and for a split second I had felt nothing. Just the freezing water in my ears and my eyes and my nose. It stung my lip. I was about a foot under the surface. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was worried about floating back up. I would bob to the surface right in front of them. They would be crowding around the lip of the cleft with their guns aimed down at the water.

But then I felt my hair stand up. It was a gentle sensation. Like somebody was combing it upright and pulling on it. Then I felt a grip on my head. Like a strong man with big hands was clamping my face between his palms and pulling, very gently at first, and then a little harder. And harder. I felt it in my neck. It was like I was getting taller. Then I felt it in my chest and my shoulders. My arms were floating free and suddenly they were wrenched up above my head. Then I fell off the building. It was like a perfect swallow dive, on my back. I just arched downward. But I accelerated. Much faster than a free fall through the air. It was like I was being reeled in by a gigantic elastic cord.

I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know if my eyes were open or shut. The cold was so stunning and the pressure on my body was so uniform that I didn’t really feel anything, either. No physical force. It was completely fluid. It was like some kind of science fiction transportation. Like I was being beamed down. Like I was liquid. Like I had been elongated. Like I was suddenly thirty feet tall and an inch wide. There was blackness and coldness everywhere. I held my breath. All the tension went out of me and I leaned my head back to feel the water on my scalp. Pointed my toes. Arched my spine. Stretched my arms far up ahead of me. Opened my fingers to feel the water flow between them. It felt very peaceful. I was a bullet. I liked it.

Then I felt a panicked thump all through my chest and knew I was drowning. So I started to fight. I tumbled myself over and my coat came up around my head. I tore it off, spinning and somersaulting in the freezing tube. The coat whipped across my face and hurtled away. I slid out of my jacket. It disappeared. I suddenly felt the bitter cold. I was still going down fast. My ears were hissing. I was tumbling in slow motion. Whipping down and down faster than I had ever traveled and rolling and tumbling like I was mired in treacle.

How wide was the tube? I didn’t know. I kicked desperately and clawed at the water around me. It felt like quicksand. Don’t swim down. I kicked and fought and tried to find the edge. Bargained with myself. Concentrate. Find the edge. Make progress. Stay calm. Let it take you down fifty feet for every foot you move sideways. I stopped for a second and regrouped and started swimming properly. And hard. Like the tube was the flat surface of a pool and I was in a race. Like there was a girl and a drink and a chair on the patio for the winner.

How long had I been down? I didn’t know. Maybe fifteen seconds. I could hold my breath for maybe a minute. So relax. Swim hard. Find the edge. There had to be an edge. The whole ocean wasn’t moving like this. It couldn’t be, otherwise Portugal was going to be under water. And half of Spain. Pressure roared in my ears.

Which way was I facing? Didn’t matter. I just had to get out of the current. I swam onward. Felt the tide fighting me. It was incredibly powerful. It had been gentle before. Now it tore at me. Like it resented my decision to fight back. I clamped my teeth and kicked on. It was like crawling across a floor with a thousand tons of bricks on my back. My lungs swelled and burned. I trickled air out between my lips. Kicked on and on. Clawed the water ahead of me.

Thirty seconds. I was drowning. I knew it. I was weakening. My lungs were empty. My chest was crushed. I had a billion tons of water on top of me. I could feel my face twisting in pain. My ears were roaring. My stomach was knotted. My left shoulder was burning where Paulie had hit it. I heard Harley’s voice in my head: We never had one come back. I kicked on.

Forty seconds. I was making no progress. I was being hurled down into the depths. I was going to hit the seabed. I kicked on. Clawed at the tide. Fifty seconds. My ears were hissing. My head was bursting. My lips were clamped against my teeth. I was very angry. Quinn had made it out of the ocean. Why couldn’t I?

I kicked on desperately. A whole minute. My fingers were frozen and cramped. My eyes were scoured. More than a minute. I flailed and lashed. I battered my way through the water. Kicked and fought. Then I felt a change in the tide. I found the edge. It was like grabbing a telegraph pole from a speeding train. I punched through the skin of the tube and a new tide seized my hands and hit me in the head and turbulence battered me and I was suddenly cartwheeling head over feet and floating free in water that felt still and clear and freezing.

Now think. Which way is up? I used every ounce of self-control I had and stopped fighting. Just floated. Tried to gauge my direction. I went nowhere. My lungs were empty. My lips were clamped tight. I couldn’t breathe. I had neutral buoyancy. I wasn’t moving. I was dead in the water. In a cubic mile of black ocean. I opened my eyes. Stared all around me. Above me, below me, to the sides. I twisted and turned. Saw nothing. It was like outer space. Everything was pitch dark. No light at all. We never had one come back.

I felt slight pressure on my chest. Less on my back. I was hanging facedown in the water. Suspended. I was floating upward, very slowly, back-first. I concentrated hard. Fixed the sensation clearly in my mind. Fixed my position. Arched my spine. Scrabbled with my hands. Kicked my legs down. Stretched my arms toward the surface. Now go. Don’t breathe.

I kicked furiously. Scooped huge strokes with my arms. Clamped my lips. I had no air. I held my face up at an angle so that the first thing to break the surface would be my mouth. How far? It was black above me. There was nothing there. I was a mile down. I had no air. I was going to die. I opened my lips. Water flooded my mouth. I spat and swallowed. Kicked onward. I could see purple colors in my eyes. My head hummed. I felt feverish. Like I was burning. Then like I was freezing. Then like I was wrapped in thick feather quilts. They were soft. I could feel nothing at all.

I stopped kicking then, because I was pretty sure I had died. So I opened my mouth to breathe. Sucked in seawater. My chest spasmed and coughed it out. In and out, twice more. I was breathing pure water. I kicked once more. It was all I could manage. One last kick. I made it a big one. Then I just closed my eyes and floated and breathed the cold water.

I hit the surface half a second later. I felt the air on my face like a lover’s caress. I opened my mouth and my chest heaved and a high spout of water shot up and I gulped air even before it came back down on me. Then I fought like a madman to keep my face up in the cold sweet oxygen. Just kicked and panted and breathed, sucking and blowing and coughing and retching.

I spread my arms wide and let my legs float up and tilted my head back with my mouth wide open. Watched my chest rise and fall, rise and fall, fill and empty. It moved incredibly fast. I felt tired. And peaceful. And vague. I had no oxygen in my brain. I tossed around in the water for a full minute, just breathing. My vision cleared. I saw dull clouds above me. My head cleared. I breathed some more. In, out, in, out, with my lips pursed, blowing like a locomotive. My head starting aching. I trod water and looked for the horizon. Couldn’t find it. I was pitching and falling on fast urgent waves, up and down, up and down, maybe ten or fifteen feet at a time. I kicked a little and timed it so the next wave carried me up to its peak. Stared ahead. Saw nothing at all before I fell back into its trough.

I had no idea where I was. I turned ninety degrees and rode the next peak and looked again. To my right. Maybe there would be a boat out there somewhere. There wasn’t. There was nothing. I was alone in the middle of the Atlantic. Drifting. We never had one come back.

I turned one-eighty and rode a peak and looked to my left. Nothing there. I fell back into the trough and rode the next peak and looked behind me.

I was a hundred yards from shore.

I could see the big house. I could see lit windows. I could see the wall. I could see the blue haze of its lights. I hauled my shirt up on my shoulders. It was soaked and heavy. I took a breath. Rolled onto my front and started swimming.

One hundred yards. Any kind of a halfway decent Olympic competitor could swim a hundred yards in about forty-five seconds. And any kind of a halfway decent high school swimmer could do it in less than a minute. It took me nearly fifteen. The tide was going out. I felt like I was going backward. I felt like I was still drowning. But eventually I touched the shore and got my arms around a smooth rock that was coated with freezing slime and held on tight. The sea was still rough. Big waves thumped in on me and smashed my cheek against the granite, regular as clockwork. I didn’t care. I savored the impacts. Each and every one of them. I loved that rock.

I rested on it for a minute more and then crawled my way around behind the garage block, sloshing along half in and half out of the water, crouched low. Then I crawled out on my hands and knees. Rolled over on my back. Stared up at the sky. Now you had one come back, Harley.

The waves came in and reached my waist. I shuffled on my back until they reached only my knees. Rolled onto my front again. Lay with my face pressed down on the rock. I was cold. Chilled to the bone. My coat was gone. My jacket was gone. The Persuaders were gone. The Beretta was gone.

I stood up. Water sluiced off me. I staggered a couple of steps. Heard Leon Garber in my head: What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. He thought JFK had said it. I thought it was actually Friedrich Nietzsche, and he said destroy, not kill. What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger. I staggered two more steps and leaned up against the back of the courtyard wall and threw up about a gallon of salt water. That made me feel a little better. I jerked my arms around and kicked each leg in turn to try to get some circulation going and some water out of my clothes. Then I plastered my soaking hair back on my head and tried a couple of long slow breaths. I was worried about coughing. My throat was raw and aching from the cold and the salt.

Then I walked along the back wall and turned at the corner. Found my little dip and visited my hidden bundle one last time. I’m coming to get you, Quinn.

My watch was still working and it showed me my hour was long gone. Duffy would have called ATF twenty minutes ago. But their response would be slow. I doubted if they had a field office in Portland. Boston was probably the closest. Where the maid had been sent out from. So I still had enough time.

The food truck was gone. Evidently dinner had been canceled. But the other vehicles were still there. The Cadillac, the Town Car, the two Suburbans. Eight hostiles still in the house. Plus Elizabeth and the cook. I didn’t know which category to put Richard in.

I kept tight against the house wall and looked in every window. The cook was in the kitchen. She was cleaning up. Keast and Maden had left all their stuff there. I ducked under the sill and moved on. The dining room was a ruin. The wind blowing in through the shattered window had caught the linen tablecloth and thrown plates and glasses everywhere. There were dunes of plaster dust in the corners where the wind had piled them. There were two big holes in the ceiling. Probably in the ceiling of the room above, and the room above that, too. The Brennekes had probably made it all the way out through the roof, like moon shots.

The square room where I had played Russian roulette had the three Libyans and Quinn’s three guys in it. They were all sitting around the oak table, doing nothing. They looked blank and shocked. But they looked settled. They weren’t going anywhere. I ducked under the sill and moved on. Came all the way around to Elizabeth Beck’s parlor. She was in there. With Richard. Somebody had taken the dead guy out. She was on her sofa, talking fast. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but Richard was listening hard. I ducked under the sill and moved on.

Beck and Quinn were in Beck’s little room. Quinn was in the red armchair and Beck was standing in front of the cabinet with the machine gun display. Beck looked pale and grim and hostile and Quinn looked full of himself. He had a fat unlit cigar in his hand. He was rolling it between his fingers and thumb and lining up a silver cutter at the business end.

I made it back to the kitchen after completing a whole circle. Stepped inside. I didn’t make a sound. The metal detector stayed quiet. The cook didn’t hear me coming. I caught her from behind. Clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her over to a counter. I wasn’t taking any chances after what Richard had done to me. I found a linen towel in a drawer and used it as a gag. Found another to tie her wrists. Found another to tie her ankles. I left her sitting uncomfortably on the floor next to the sink. I found a fourth towel and put it in my pocket. Then I stepped out into the hallway.

It was quiet. I could hear Elizabeth Beck’s voice, faintly. Her parlor door was standing open. I couldn’t hear anything else. I went straight to the door of Beck’s den. Opened it. Stepped inside. Closed it again.

I was met by a haze of cigar smoke. Quinn had just lit up. I got the feeling he had been laughing about something. Now he was frozen with shock. Beck was the same. Pale, and frozen. They were just staring at me.

“I’m back,” I said.

Beck had his mouth open. I hit him with a cigarette punch. His mouth slammed shut and his head snapped back and his eyes rolled up and he went straight down on the three-deep rugs on the floor. It was a decent blow, but not my best. His son had saved his life after all. If I hadn’t been so tired from swimming, a better punch would have killed him.

Quinn came straight at me. Straight out of the chair. He dropped his cigar. Went for his pocket. I hit him in the stomach. Air punched out of him and he folded forward and dropped to his knees. I hit him in the head and pushed him down on his stomach. Knelt on his back, with my knees high up between his shoulder blades.

“No,” he said. He had no air. “Please.”

I put the flat of one hand on the back of his head. Took my chisel out of my shoe and slid it in behind his ear and up into his brain, slowly, inch by inch. He was dead before it was halfway in, but I kept it going until it was buried all the way to the hilt. I left it there. I wiped the handle with the towel from my pocket and then I spread the towel over his head and stood up, wearily.

“Ten-eighteen, Dom,” I said to myself.

I stepped on Quinn’s burning cigar. Took Beck’s car keys out of his pocket and slipped back into the hallway. Walked through the kitchen. The cook followed me with her eyes. I stumbled around to the front of the house. Slid into the Cadillac. Fired it up and took off west.

It took me thirty minutes to get to Duffy’s motel. She and Villanueva were together in his room with Teresa Justice. She wasn’t Teresa Daniel anymore. She wasn’t dressed like a doll anymore, either. They had her in a motel robe. She had showered. She was coming around fast. She looked weak and wan, but she looked like a person. Like a federal agent. She stared at me in horror. At first I thought she was confused about who I was. She had seen me in the cellar. Maybe she thought I was one of them.

But then I saw myself in the mirror on the closet door and I saw her problem. I was wet from head to toe. I was shaking and shivering. My skin was dead white. The cut on my lip had opened and turned blue on the edges. I had fresh bruises where the waves had butted me against the rock. I had seaweed in my hair and slime on my shirt.

“I fell in the sea,” I said.

Nobody spoke.

“I’ll take a shower,” I said. “In a minute. Did you call ATF?”

Duffy nodded. “They’re on their way. Portland PD has already secured the warehouse. They’re going to seal the coast road, too. You got out just in time.”

“Was I ever there?”

Villanueva shook his head. “You don’t exist. Certainly we never met you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Old school,” he said.

I felt better after the shower. Looked better, too. But I had no clothes. Villanueva lent me a set of his. They were a little short and wide. I used his old raincoat to hide them. I wrapped it tight around me, because I was still cold. We had pizza delivered. We were all starving. I was very thirsty, from the salt water. We ate and we drank. I couldn’t bite on the pizza crust. I just sucked the topping off. After an hour, Teresa Justice went to bed. She shook my hand. Said good night, very politely. She had no idea who I was.

“Roofies wipe out their short-term memory,” Villanueva told me.

Then we talked business. Duffy was very down. She was living a nightmare. She had lost three agents in an illegal operation. And getting Teresa out was no kind of upside. Because Teresa shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.

“So quit,” I said. “Join ATF instead. You just handed them a big result on a plate. You’ll be flavor of the month.”

“I’m going to retire,” Villanueva said. “I’m old enough and I’ve had enough.”

“I can’t retire,” Duffy said.

In the restaurant the night before the arrest, Dominique Kohl had asked me, “Why are you doing this?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Having dinner with you?”

“No, working as an MP. You could be anything. You could be Special Forces, Intelligence, Air Cavalry, Armored, anything you wanted.”

“So could you.”

“I know. And I know why I’m doing this. I want to know why you’re doing it.”

It was the first time anybody had ever asked me.

“Because I always wanted to be a cop,” I said. “But I was predestined for the military. Family background, no choice at all. So I became a military cop.”

“That’s not really an answer. Why did you want to be a cop in the first place?”

I shrugged. “It’s just the way I am. Cops put things right.”

“What things?”

“They look after people. They make sure the little guy is OK.”

“That’s it? The little guy?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “Not really. I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”

“You produce the right results for the wrong reasons, then.”

I nodded. “But I try to do the right thing. I think the reasons don’t really matter. Whatever, I like to see the right thing done.”

“Me too,” she said. “I try to do the right thing. Even though everybody hates us and nobody helps us and nobody thanks us afterward. I think doing the right thing is an end in itself. It has to be, really, doesn’t it?”

“Did you do the right thing?” I asked, ten years later.

Duffy nodded.

“Yes,” she said.

“No doubt at all?”

“No,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Totally.”

“So relax,” I said. “That’s the best you can ever hope for. Nobody helps and nobody says thanks afterward.”

She was quiet for a spell.

“Did you do the right thing?” she said.

“No question,” I said.

We left it at that. Duffy had put Teresa Justice in Eliot’s old room. That left Villanueva in his, and me in Duffy’s. She seemed a little awkward about what she had said before. About our lack of professionalism. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to reinforce it or trying to withdraw it.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “I’m way too tired.”

And this time, I proved I was. Not for lack of trying. We started. She made it clear she wanted to withdraw her earlier objection. Made it clear she agreed that saying yes was better than saying no. I was very happy about that, because I liked her a lot. So we started. We got naked and got in bed together and I remember kissing her so hard it made my mouth hurt. But that’s all I remember. I fell asleep. I slept the sleep of the dead. Eleven hours straight. They were all gone when I woke up. Gone to face whatever their futures held for them. I was alone in the room, with a bunch of memories. It was late morning. Sunlight was coming in through the shades. Motes of dust were dancing in the air. Villanueva’s spare outfit was gone from the back of the chair. There was a shopping bag there instead. It was full of cheap clothes. They looked like they would fit me very well. Susan Duffy was a good judge of sizes. There were two complete sets. One was for cold weather. One was for hot. She didn’t know where I was headed. So she had catered for both possibilities. She was a very practical woman. I figured I would miss her. For a time.

I dressed in the hot weather stuff. Left the cold weather stuff right there in the room. I figured I could drive Beck’s Cadillac out to I-95. To the Kennebunk rest area. I figured I could abandon it there. Figured I could catch a ride south without any problem. And I-95 goes to all kinds of places, all the way down to Miami.

FOR JANE

AND THE SHORE BIRDS

THE ENEMY

A Delacorte Press Book / June 2004

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2004 by Lee Child

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written

permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,

and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Child, Lee.

The enemy : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p.                  cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction.                  2. Generals—Crimes against—Fiction.                  3. Americans—France—Fiction.                  4. Military police—Fiction.                  5. Conspiracies—Fiction.                  6. France—Fiction.                  I. Title.

PS3553.H4838E54 2004

813'.54—dc22

2003065282

Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN: 978-0-440-33498-9

Cover design: Carlos Beltran. Cover art: Tom Hallman.

v3.0_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

The Enemy

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Dedication

one

As serious as a heart attack. Maybe those were Ken Kramer’s last words, like a final explosion of panic in his mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it. He was where he shouldn’t have been, with someone he shouldn’t have been with, carrying something he should have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right.

Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all. They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms mean nothing to us. You just drop dead is what they should say. Ken Kramer certainly did. He just dropped dead, and he took his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly killed me too.

I was alone in a borrowed office. There was a clock on the wall. It had no second hand. Just an hour hand, and a minute hand. It was electric. It didn’t tick. It was completely silent, like the room. I was watching the minute hand, intently. It wasn’t moving.

I waited.

It moved. It jumped ahead six degrees. Its motion was mechanical and damped and precise. It bounced once and quivered a little and came to rest.

A minute.

One down, one to go.

Sixty more seconds.

I kept on watching. The clock stayed still for a long, long time. Then the hand jumped again. Another six degrees, another minute, straight-up midnight, and 1989 was 1990.

I pushed my chair back and stood up behind the desk. The phone rang. I figured it was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. But it wasn’t. It was a civilian cop calling because he had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off-post.

“I need the Military Police duty officer,” he said.

I sat down again, behind the desk.

“You got him,” I said.

“We’ve got one of yours, dead.”

“One of mine?”

“A soldier,” he said.

“Where?”

“Motel, in town.”

“Dead how?” I asked.

“Heart attack, most likely,” the guy said.

I paused. Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the desk, from December 31st to January 1st.

“Nothing suspicious?” I said.

“Don’t see anything.”

“You seen heart attacks before?”

“Lots of them.”

“OK,” I said. “Call post headquarters.”

I gave him the number.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

“You don’t need to come out?” he said.

“No,” I said. I put the phone down. I didn’t need to go out. The army is a big institution, a little bigger than Detroit, a little smaller than Dallas, and just as unsentimental as either place. Current active strength is 930,000 men and women, and they are as representative of the general American population as you can get. Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000 population per year, and in the absence of sustained combat soldiers don’t die any faster or slower than regular people. On the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at large, but they smoke more and drink more and eat worse and stress harder and do all kinds of dangerous things in training. So their life expectancy comes out about average. Soldiers die at the same speed as everyone else. Do the math with the death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents, suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver failure, kidney failure. Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas. So I didn’t need to go out. I’m a cop, not a mortician.

The clock moved. The hand jumped and bounced and settled. Three minutes past midnight. The phone rang again. It was someone calling to wish me a happy new year. It was the sergeant in the office outside of mine.

“Happy New Year,” she said to me.

“You too,” I said. “You couldn’t stand up and put your head in the door?”

“You couldn’t put yours out the door?”

“I was on the phone.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Just some grunt didn’t make it to the new decade.”

“You want coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I put the phone down again. At that point I had been in more than six years, and army coffee was one of the things that made me happy to stay in. It was the best in the world, no question. So were the sergeants. This one was a mountain woman from north Georgia. I had known her two days. She lived off-post in a trailer park somewhere in the North Carolina Badlands. She had a baby son. She had told me all about him. I had heard nothing about a husband. She was all bone and sinew and she was as hard as woodpecker lips, but she liked me. I could tell, because she brought me coffee. They don’t like you, they don’t bring you coffee. They knife you in the back instead. My door opened and she came in, carrying two mugs, one for her and one for me.

“Happy New Year,” I said to her.

She put the coffee down on my desk, both mugs.

“Will it be?” she said.

“Don’t see why not,” I said.

“The Berlin Wall is halfway down. They showed it on the television. They were having a big party over there.”

“I’m glad someone was, somewhere.”

“Lots of people. Big crowds. All singing and dancing.”

“I didn’t see the news.”

“This all was six hours ago. The time difference.”

“They’re probably still at it.”

“They had sledgehammers.”

“They’re allowed. Their half is a free city. We spent forty-five years keeping it that way.”

“Pretty soon we won’t have an enemy anymore.”

I tried the coffee. Hot, black, the best in the world.

“We won,” I said. “Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?”

“Not if you depend on Uncle Sam’s paycheck.”

She was dressed like me in standard woodland camouflage battledress uniform. Her sleeves were neatly rolled. Her MP brassard was exactly horizontal. I figured she had it safety-pinned in back where nobody could see. Her boots were gleaming.

“You got any desert camos?” I asked her.

“Never been to the desert,” she said.

“They changed the pattern. They put big brown splotches on it. Five years’ research. Infantry guys are calling it chocolate chip. It’s not a good pattern. They’ll have to change it back. But it’ll take them another five years to figure that out.”

“So?”

“If it takes them five years to revise a camo pattern, your kid will be through college before they figure out force reduction. So don’t worry about it.”

“OK,” she said, not believing me. “You think he’s good for college?”

“I never met him.”

She said nothing.

“The army hates change,” I said. “And we’ll always have enemies.”

She said nothing. My phone rang again. She leaned forward and answered it for me. Listened for about eleven seconds and handed me the receiver.

“Colonel Garber, sir,” she said. “He’s in D.C.”

She took her mug and left the room. Colonel Garber was ultimately my boss, and although he was a pleasant human being it was unlikely he was calling eight minutes into New Year’s Day simply to be social. That wasn’t his style. Some brass does that stuff. They come over all cheery on the big holidays, like they’re really just one of the boys. But Leon Garber wouldn’t have dreamed of trying that, with anyone, and least of all with me. Even if he had known I was going to be there.

“Reacher here,” I said.

There was a long pause.

“I thought you were in Panama,” Leon Garber said.

“I got orders,” I said.

“From Panama to Fort Bird? Why?”

“Not my place to ask.”

“When was this?”

“Two days ago.”

“That’s a kick in the teeth,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Panama was probably more exciting.”

“It was OK,” I said.

“And they got you working duty officer on New Year’s Eve already?”

“I volunteered,” I said. “I’m trying to make people like me.”

“That’s a hopeless task,” he said.

“A sergeant just brought me coffee.”

There was another pause. “Someone just call you about a dead soldier in a motel?” he asked.

“Eight minutes ago,” I said. “I shuffled it off to headquarters.”

“And they shuffled it off to someone else and I just got pulled out of a party to hear all about it.”

“Why?”

“Because the dead soldier in question is a two-star general.”

The phone went quiet.

“I didn’t think to ask,” I said.

The phone stayed quiet.

“Generals are mortal,” I said. “Same as anyone else.”

No reply.

“There was nothing suspicious,” I said. “He croaked, is all. Heart attack. Probably had gout. I didn’t see a reason to get excited.”

“It’s a question of dignity,” Garber said. “We can’t leave a two-star lying around belly-up in public without reacting. We need a presence.”

“And that would be me?”

“I’d prefer someone else. But you’re probably the highest-ranking sober MP in the world tonight. So yes, it would be you.”

“It’ll take me an hour to get there.”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s dead. And they haven’t found a sober medical examiner yet.”

“OK,” I said.

“Be respectful,” Garber said.

“OK,” I said again.

“And be polite. Off-post, we’re in their hands. It’s a civilian jurisdiction.”

“I’m familiar with civilians. I met one, once.”

“But control the situation,” he said. “You know, if it needs controlling.”

“He probably died in bed,” I said. “Like people do.”

“Call me,” he said. “If you need to.”

“Was it a good party?”

“Excellent. My daughter is visiting.”

He clicked off and I called the civilian dispatcher back and got the name and the address of the motel. Then I left my coffee on my desk and told my sergeant what was up and headed back to my quarters to change. I figured a presence required Class A greens, not woodland-pattern BDUs.

I took a Humvee from the MP motor pool and was logged out through the main gate. I found the motel inside fifty minutes. It was thirty miles due north of Fort Bird through dark undistinguished North Carolina countryside that was equal parts strip malls and scrubby forest and what I figured were dormant sweet potato fields. It was all new to me. I had never served there before. The roads were very quiet. Everyone was still inside, partying. I hoped I would be back at Bird before they all came out and started driving home. Although I really liked the Humvee’s chances, head-on against a civilian ride.

The motel was part of a knot of low commercial structures clustered in the darkness near a big highway interchange. There was a truck stop as a centerpiece. It had a greasy spoon that was open on the holidays and a gas station big enough to take eighteen-wheelers. There was a no-name cinder-block lounge bar with lots of neon and no windows. It had an Exotic Dancers sign lit up in pink and a parking lot the size of a football field. There were diesel spills and rainbow puddles all over it. I could hear loud music coming out of the bar. There were cars parked three-deep all around it. The whole area was glowing sulfurous yellow from the streetlights. The night air was cold and full of fog. The motel itself was directly across the street from the gas station. It was a run-down swaybacked affair about twenty rooms long. It had a lot of peeling paint. It looked empty. There was an office at the left-hand end with a token vehicle porch and a buzzing Coke machine.

First question: Why would a two-star general use a place like this? I was pretty sure there wouldn’t have been a DoD inquiry if he had checked into a Holiday Inn.

There were two town police cruisers parked at careless angles outside the motel’s last-but-one room. There was a small plain sedan sandwiched between them. It was cold and misted over. It was a base-model Ford, red, four cylinder. It had skinny tires and plastic hubcaps. A rental, for sure. I put the Humvee next to the right-hand police cruiser and slid out into the chill. I heard the music from across the street, louder. The last-but-one room’s lights were off and its door was open. I figured the cops were trying to keep the interior temperature low. Trying to stop the old guy from getting too ripe. I was anxious to take a look at him. I was pretty sure I had never seen a dead general before.

Three cops stayed in their cars and one got out to meet me. He was wearing tan uniform pants and a short leather jacket zipped to his chin. No hat. The jacket had badges pinned to it that told me his name was Stockton and his rank was deputy chief. He was gray, about fifty. He was medium height and a little soft and heavy but the way he was reading the badges on my coat told me he was probably a veteran, like a lot of cops are.

“Major,” he said, as a greeting.

I nodded. A veteran, for sure. A major gets a little gold-colored oak leaf on the epaulette, one inch across, one on each side. This guy was looking upward and sideways at mine, which wasn’t the clearest angle of view. But he knew what they were. So he was familiar with rank designations. And I recognized his voice. He was the guy who had called me, at five seconds past midnight.

“I’m Rick Stockton,” he said. “Deputy Chief.”

He was calm. He had seen heart attacks before.

“I’m Jack Reacher. MP duty officer tonight.”

He recognized my voice in turn. Smiled.

“You decided to come out,” he said. “After all.”

“You didn’t tell me the DOA was a two-star.”

“Well, he is.”

“I’ve never seen a dead general,” I said.

“Not many people have,” he said, and the way he said it made me think he had been an enlisted man.

“Army?” I asked.

“Marine Corps,” he said. “First sergeant.”

“My old man was a Marine,” I said. I always make that point, talking to Marines. It gives me some kind of genetic legitimacy. Stops them from thinking of me as a pure army dogface. But I keep it vague. I don’t tell them my old man had made captain. Enlisted men and officers don’t automatically see eye to eye.

“Humvee,” Stockton said.

He was looking at my ride.

“You like it?” he asked.

I nodded. Humvee was everyone’s best attempt at saying HMMWV, which stands for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, which about says it all. Like the army generally, what you’re told is what you get.

“It works as advertised,” I said.

“Kind of wide,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to drive it in a city.”

“You’d have tanks in front of you,” I said. “They’d be clearing the way. I think that would be the basic plan.”

The music from the bar thudded on. Stockton said nothing.

“Let’s look at the dead guy,” I said to him.

He led the way inside. Flicked a switch that lit up the interior hallway. Then another that lit up the whole room. I saw a standard motel layout. A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the left and a bathroom on the right. Then a twelve-by-twenty rectangle with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet, and a queen bed the same depth as the bathroom. Low ceiling. A wide window at the far end, draped, with an integrated heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it. Most of the things in the room were tired and shabby and colored brown. The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable.

There was a dead man on the bed.

He was naked, facedown. He was white, maybe pushing sixty, quite tall. He was built like a fading pro athlete. Like a coach. He still had decent muscle, but he was growing love handles the way old guys do, however fit they are. He had pale hairless legs. He had old scars. He had wiry gray hair buzzed close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of his neck. He was a type. Any hundred people could have looked at him and all hundred would have said army officer, for sure.

“He was found like this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Stockton said.

Second question: How? A guy takes a room for the night, he expects privacy until the maid comes in the next morning, at the very least.

“How?” I said.

“How what?”

“How was he found? Did he call 911?”

“No.”

“So how?”

“You’ll see.”

I paused. I didn’t see anything yet.

“Did you roll him over?” I said.

“Yes. Then we rolled him back.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest.”

I stepped to the bed and slipped my left hand under the dead guy’s armpit and rolled him over. He was cold and a little stiff. Rigor was just setting in. I got him settled flat on his back and saw four things. First, his skin had a distinctive gray pallor. Second, shock and pain were frozen on his face. Third, he had grabbed his left arm with his right hand, up near the bicep. And fourth, he was wearing a condom. His blood pressure had collapsed long ago and his erection had disappeared and the condom was hanging off, mostly empty, like a translucent flap of pale skin. He had died before reaching orgasm. That was clear.

“Heart attack,” Stockton said, behind me.

I nodded. The gray skin was a good indicator. So was the evidence of shock and surprise and sudden pain in his upper left arm.

“Massive,” I said.

“But before or after penetration?” Stockton said, with a smile in his voice.

I looked at the pillow area. The bed was still completely made. The dead guy was on top of the counterpane and the counterpane was still tight over the pillows. But there was a head-shaped dent, and there were rucks where elbows and heels had scrabbled and pushed lower down.

“She was underneath him when it happened,” I said. “That’s for sure. She had to wrestle her way out.”

“Hell of a way for a man to go.”

“I can think of worse ways.”

Stockton just smiled at me.

“What?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“No sign of the woman?” I said.

“Hide nor hair,” he said. “She ran for it.”

“The desk guy see her?”

Stockton just smiled again.

I looked at him. Then I understood. A low-rent dive near a highway interchange with a truck stop and a strip bar, thirty miles north of a military base.

“She was a hooker,” I said. “That’s how he was found. The desk guy knew her. Saw her running out way too soon. Got curious as to why and came in here to check.”

Stockton nodded. “He called us right away. The lady in question was long gone by then, of course. And he’s denying she was ever here in the first place. He’s pretending this isn’t that kind of an establishment.”

“Your department had business here before?”

“Time to time,” he said. “It is that kind of an establishment, believe me.”

Control the situation, Garber had said.

“Heart attack, right?” I said. “Nothing more.”

“Probably,” Stockton said. “But we’ll need an autopsy to know for sure.”

The room was quiet. I could hear nothing except radio traffic from the cop cars outside, and music from the bar across the street. I turned back to the bed. Looked at the dead guy’s face. I didn’t know him. I looked at his hands. He had a West Point ring on his right and a wedding band on his left, wide, old, probably nine carat. His dog tags were hidden under his right arm, where he had reached across to grab his left bicep. I lifted the arm with difficulty and pulled the tags out. He had rubber silencers on them. I raised them until the chain went tight against his neck. His name was Kramer and he was a Catholic and his blood group was O.

“We could do the autopsy for you,” I said. “Up at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.”

“Out of state?”

“He’s a general.”

“You want to hush it up.”

I nodded. “Sure I do. Wouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” he said.

I let go of the dog tags and moved away from the bed and checked the nightstands and the built-in counter. Nothing there. There was no phone in the room. A place like this, I figured there would be a pay phone in the office. I moved past Stockton and checked the bathroom. There was a privately purchased black leather Dopp kit next to the sink, zipped closed. It had the initials KRK embossed on it. I opened it up and found a toothbrush and a razor and travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and shaving soap. Nothing else. No medications. No heart prescription. No pack of condoms.

I checked the closet. There was a Class A uniform in there, neatly squared away on three separate hangers, with the pants folded on the bar of the first and the coat next to it on the second and the shirt on a third. The tie was still inside the shirt collar. Centered above the hangers on the shelf was a field grade officer’s service cap. Gold braid all over it. On one side of the cap was a folded white undershirt and on the other side was a pair of folded white boxers.

There were two shoes side by side on the closet floor next to a faded green canvas suit carrier which was propped neatly against the back wall. The shoes were gleaming black and had socks rolled tight inside them. The suit carrier was a privately purchased item and had battered leather reinforcements at the stress points. It wasn’t very full.

“You’d get the results,” I said. “Our pathologist would give you a copy of the report with nothing added and nothing deleted. You see anything you’re not happy about, we could put the ball right back in your court, no questions asked.”

Stockton said nothing, but I wasn’t feeling any hostility coming off him. Some town cops are OK. A big base like Bird puts a lot of ripples into the surrounding civilian world. Therefore MPs spend a lot of time with their civilian counterparts, and sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes it isn’t. I had a feeling Stockton wasn’t going to be a huge problem. He was relaxed. Bottom line, he seemed a little lazy to me, and lazy people are always happy to pass their burdens on to someone else.

“How much?” I said.

“How much what?”

“How much would a whore cost here?”

“Twenty bucks would do it,” he said. “There’s nothing very exotic available in this neck of the woods.”

“And the room?”

“Fifteen, probably.”

I rolled the corpse back onto its front. Wasn’t easy. It weighed two hundred pounds, at least.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About Walter Reed doing the autopsy.”

There was silence for a moment. Stockton looked at the wall.

“That might be acceptable,” he said.

There was a knock at the open door. One of the cops from the cars.

“Medical examiner just called in,” he said. “He can’t get here for another two hours at least. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

I smiled. Acceptable was about to change to highly desirable. Two hours from now Stockton would need to be somewhere else. A whole bunch of parties would be breaking up and the roads would be mayhem. Two hours from now he would be begging me to haul the old guy away. I said nothing and the cop went back to wait in his car and Stockton moved all the way into the room and stood facing the draped window with his back to the corpse. I took the hanger with the uniform coat on it and lifted it out of the closet and hung it on the bathroom door frame where the hallway light fell on it.

Looking at a Class A coat is like reading a book or sitting next to a guy in a bar and hearing his whole life story. This one was the right size for the body on the bed and it had Kramer on the nameplate, which matched the dog tags. It had a Purple Heart ribbon with two bronze oak leaf clusters to denote a second and third award of the medal, which matched the scars. It had two silver stars on the epaulettes, which confirmed he was a major general. The branch insignia on the lapels denoted Armor and the shoulder patch was from XII Corps. Apart from that there were a bunch of unit awards and a whole salad bowl of medal ribbons dating way back through Vietnam and Korea, some of which he had probably earned the hard way, and some of which he probably hadn’t. Some of them were foreign awards, whose display was authorized but not compulsory. It was a very full coat, relatively old, well cared for, standard-issue, not privately tailored. Taken as a whole it told me he was professionally vain, but not personally vain.

I went through the pockets. They were all empty, except for a key to the rental car. It was attached to a keyring in the shape of a figure 1, which was made out of clear plastic and contained a slip of paper with Hertz printed in yellow at the top and a license-plate number written by hand in black ballpoint underneath.

There was no wallet. No loose change.

I put the coat back in the closet and checked the pants. Nothing in the pockets. I checked the shoes. Nothing in them except the socks. I checked the hat. Nothing hidden underneath it. I lifted the suit carrier out and opened it on the floor. It contained a battledress uniform and an M43 field cap. A change of socks and underwear and a pair of shined combat boots, plain black leather. There was an empty compartment that I figured was for the Dopp kit. Nothing else. Nothing at all. I closed it up and put it back. Squatted down and looked under the bed. Saw nothing.

“Anything we should worry about?” Stockton asked.

I stood up. Shook my head.

“No,” I lied.

“Then you can have him,” he said. “But I get a copy of the report.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

He walked out to his car and I headed for my Humvee. I called in a 10-5 ambulance requested and told my sergeant to have it accompanied by a squad of two who could list and pack all Kramer’s personal property and bring it back to my office. Then I sat there in the driver’s seat and waited until Stockton’s guys were all gone. I watched them accelerate away into the fog and then I went back inside the room and took the rental key from Kramer’s jacket. Came back out and used it to unlock the Ford.

There was nothing in it except the stink of upholstery cleaner and carbonless copies of the rental agreement. Kramer had picked the car up at one thirty-two that afternoon at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C. He had used a private American Express card and received a discount rate. The start-of-rental mileage was 13,215. Now the odometer was showing 13,513, which according to my arithmetic meant he had driven 298 miles, which was about right for a straight-line trip between there and here.

I put the paper in my pocket and relocked the car. Checked the trunk. It was completely empty.

I put the key in my pocket with the rental paper and headed across the street to the bar. The music got louder with every step I took. Ten yards away I could smell beer fumes and cigarette smoke from the ventilators. I threaded through parked vehicles and found the door. It was a stout wooden item and it was closed against the cold. I pulled it open and was hit in the face by a wall of sound and a blast of hot thick air. The place was heaving. I could see five hundred people and black-painted walls and purple spotlights and mirrorballs. I could see a pole dancer on a stage in back. She was on all fours and naked except for a white cowboy hat. She was crawling around, picking up dollar bills.

There was a big guy in a black T-shirt behind a register inside the door. His face was in deep shadow. The edge of a dim spotlight beam showed me he had a chest the size of an oil drum. The music was deafening and the crowd was packed shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. I backed out and let the door swing shut. Stood still for a moment in the cold air and then walked away and crossed the street and headed for the motel office.

It was a dismal place. It was lit with fluorescent tubes that gave the air a greenish cast and it was noisy from the Coke machine parked at its door. It had a pay phone on the wall and worn linoleum on the floor and a waist-high counter boxed in with the sort of fake wood paneling people use in their basements. The clerk sat on a high stool behind it. He was a white guy of about twenty with long unwashed hair and a weak chin.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“You take anything out of the dead guy’s room?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Tell me again.”

“I didn’t take anything.”

I nodded. I believed him.

“OK,” I said. “When did he check in?”

“I don’t know. I came on at ten. He was already here.”

I nodded again. Kramer was in the rental lot at Dulles at one thirty-two and he hadn’t driven enough miles to do much of anything except come straight here, in which case he was checking in around seven-thirty. Maybe eight-thirty, if he stopped for dinner somewhere. Maybe nine, if he was an exceptionally cautious driver.

“Did he use the pay phone at all?”

“It’s busted.”

“So how did he get hold of the hooker?”

“What hooker?”

“The hooker he was poking when he died.”

“No hookers here.”

“Did he go over and get her from the lounge bar?”

“He was way the hell down the row. I didn’t see what he did.”

“You got a driver’s license?”

The guy paused. “Why?”

“Simple question,” I said. “Either you do or you don’t.”

“I got a license,” he said.

“Show me,” I said.

I was bigger than his Coke machine and all covered in badges and ribbons and he did what he was told, like most skinny twenty-year-olds do when I use that tone. He eased his butt up off the stool and reached back and came out with a wallet from his hip pocket. Flipped it open. His DL was behind a milky plastic window. It had his photograph on it, and his name, and his address.

“OK,” I said. “Now I know where you live. I’ll be back later with some questions. If I don’t find you here I’ll come and find you at home.”

He said nothing to me. I turned away and pushed out through the door and went back to my Humvee to wait.

Forty minutes later a military meat wagon and another Humvee showed up. I told my guys to grab everything including the rental car but didn’t wait around to watch them do it. I headed back to base instead. I logged in and got back to my borrowed office and told my sergeant to get me Garber on the phone. I waited at my desk for the call to come through. It took less than two minutes.

“What’s the story?” he asked.

“His name was Kramer,” I said.

“I know that,” Garber said. “I spoke to the police dispatcher after I spoke to you. What happened to him?”

“Heart attack,” I said. “During consensual sex with a prostitute. In the kind of motel a fastidious cockroach would take pains to avoid.”

There was a long silence.

“Shit,” Garber said. “He was married.”

“Yes, I saw his wedding band. And his West Point ring.”

“Class of Fifty-two,” Garber said. “I checked.”

The phone went quiet.

“Shit,” he said again. “Why do smart people pull stupid stunts like this?”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

“We’ll need to be discreet,” Garber said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The cover-up is already started. The locals let me send him to Walter Reed.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” Then he paused. “From the beginning, OK?”

“He was wearing XII Corps patches,” I said. “Means he was based in Germany. He flew into Dulles yesterday. From Frankfurt, probably. Civilian flight, for sure, because he was wearing Class As, hoping for an upgrade. He would have worn BDUs on a military flight. He rented a cheap car and drove two hundred ninety-eight miles and checked into a fifteen-dollar motel room and picked up a twenty-dollar hooker.”

“I know about the flight,” Garber said. “I called XII Corps and spoke with his staff. I told them he was dead.”

“When?”

“After I got off the phone with the dispatcher.”

“You tell them how or where he was dead?”

“I said a probable heart attack, nothing more, no details, no location, which is starting to look like a very good decision now.”

“What about the flight?” I said.

“American Airlines, yesterday, Frankfurt to Dulles, arrived thirteen hundred hours, with an onward connection nine hundred hours today, Washington National to LAX. He was going to an Armored Branch conference at Fort Irwin. He was an Armored commander in Europe. An important one. Outside chance of making Vice-Chief of Staff in a couple of years. It’s Armored’s turn next, for Vice-Chief. Current guy is infantry, and they like to rotate. So he stood a chance. But it ain’t going to happen for him now, is it?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Being dead and all.”

Garber didn’t answer that.

“How long was he over here for?” I said.

“He was due back in Germany inside a week.”

“What’s his full name?”

“Kenneth Robert Kramer.”

“I bet you know his date of birth,” I said. “And where he was born.”

“So?”

“And his flight numbers and his seat assignments. And what the government paid for the tickets. And whether or not he requested a vegetarian meal. And what exact room Irwin VOQ was planning on putting him in.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is, why don’t I know all that stuff too?”

“Why would you?” Garber said. “I’ve been working the phones and you’ve been poking around in a motel.”

“You know what?” I said. “Every time I go anywhere I’ve got a wad of airplane tickets and travel warrants and reservations and if I’m flying in from overseas I’ve got a passport. And if I’m going to a conference I’ve got a briefcase full of all kinds of other crap to carry them in.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there were things missing from the motel room. Tickets, reservations, passport, itinerary. Collectively, the kind of things a person would carry in a briefcase.”

Garber didn’t respond.

“He had a suit carrier,” I said. “Green canvas, brown leather bindings. A buck gets ten he had a briefcase to match. His wife probably chose them both. Probably got them mail-order from L.L.Bean. Maybe for Christmas, ten years ago.”

“And the briefcase wasn’t there?”

“He probably kept his wallet in it too, when he was wearing Class As. As many medal ribbons as this guy had, it makes the inside pocket tight.”

“So?”

“I think the hooker saw where he put his wallet after he paid her. Then they got down to business, and he croaked, and she saw a little extra profit for herself. I think she stole his briefcase.”

Garber was quiet for a moment.

“Is this going to be a problem?” he asked.

“Depends what else was in the briefcase,” I said.

two

I put the phone down and saw a note my sergeant had left me: Your brother called. No message. I folded the note once and dropped it in the trash. Then I headed back to my quarters and got three hours’ sleep. Got up again fifty minutes before first light. I was back at the motel just as dawn was breaking. Morning didn’t make the neighborhood look any better. It was depressed and abandoned for miles around. And quiet. Nothing was stirring. Dawn on New Year’s Day is as close as any inhabited place gets to absolute stillness. The highway was deserted. There was no traffic. None at all.

The diner at the truck stop was open but empty. The motel office was empty. I walked down the row to the last-but-one room. Kramer’s room. The door was locked. I stood with my back to it and pretended I was a hooker whose client had just died. I had pushed his weight off me and dressed fast and grabbed his briefcase and I was running away with it. What would I do? I wasn’t interested in the briefcase itself. I wanted the cash in the wallet, and maybe the American Express card. So I would rifle through and grab the cash and the card and ditch the bag itself. But where would I do that?

Inside the room would have been best. But I hadn’t done it there, for some reason. Maybe I was panicking. Maybe I was shocked and spooked and just wanted to get the hell out, fast. So where else? I looked straight ahead at the lounge bar. That was probably where I was going. That was probably where I was based. But I wouldn’t carry the briefcase in there. My co-workers would notice, because I was already carrying a big purse. Hookers always carry big purses. They’ve got a lot of stuff to haul around. Condoms, massage oils, maybe a gun or a knife, maybe a credit card machine. That’s the easiest way to spot a hooker. Look for someone dressed like she’s going to a ball, carrying a bag like she’s going on vacation.

I looked to my left. Maybe I walked around behind the motel. It would be quiet back there. All the windows faced that way, but it was night and I could count on the drapes being closed. I turned left and left again and came out behind the bedrooms on a rectangle of scrubby weeds that ran the length of the building and was about twenty feet deep. I imagined walking fast and then stopping in deep shadow and going through the bag by feel. I imagined finding what I wanted and heaving the bag away into the darkness. I might have thrown it thirty feet.

I stood where she might have stood and scoped out a quarter circle. It gave me about a hundred and fifty square feet to check. The ground was stony and nearly frozen by overnight frost. I found plenty of stuff. I found trash and used needles and foil crack pipes and a Buick hubcap and a skateboard wheel. But I didn’t find a briefcase.

There was a wooden fence at the rear of the lot. It was about six feet tall. I jacked myself up on it and looked over. Saw another rectangle of weeds and stones. No briefcase. I got down off the fence and walked onward and came up on the motel office from the back. There was a window made of dirty pebbled glass that I guessed let into the staff bathroom. Underneath it were a dozen trashed air conditioners all stacked in a low pile. They were rusty. They hadn’t been moved in years. I walked on and came around the corner and turned left into a weedy gravel patch with a Dumpster on it. I opened the lid. It was three-quarters full of garbage. No briefcase.

I crossed the street and walked through the empty lot and looked at the lounge bar. It was silent and closed up tight. Its neon signs were all switched off and the little bent tubes looked cold and dead. It had its own Dumpster, close by in the lot, just sitting there like a parked vehicle. There was no briefcase in it.

I ducked inside the greasy spoon. It was still empty. I checked the floor around the tables and the banquettes in the booths. I looked on the floor behind the register. There was a cardboard box back there with a couple of forlorn umbrellas in it. But no briefcase. I checked the women’s bathroom. No women in it. No briefcase in it either.

I looked at my watch and walked back to the bar. I would need to ask some face-to-face questions there. But it wouldn’t be open for business for another eight hours at least. I turned around and looked across the street at the motel. There was still nobody in the office. So I headed back to my Humvee and got there in time to hear a 10-17 come in on the radio. Return to base. So I acknowledged and fired up the big diesel and drove all the way back to Bird. There was no traffic and I made it inside forty minutes. I saw Kramer’s rental parked in the motor pool lot. There was a new person at the desk outside my borrowed office. A corporal. The day shift. He was a small dark guy who looked like he was from Louisiana. French blood in there, certainly. I know French blood when I see it.

“Your brother called again,” the corporal said.

“Why?”

“No message.”

“What was the ten-seventeen for?”

“Colonel Garber requests a ten-nineteen.”

I smiled. You could live your whole life saying nothing but 10-this and 10-that. Sometimes I felt like I already had. A 10-19 was a contact by phone or radio. Less serious than a 10-16, which was a contact by secure landline. Colonel Garber requests a 10-19 meant Garber wants you to call him, was all. Some MP units get in the habit of speaking English, but clearly this one hadn’t yet.

I stepped into my office and saw Kramer’s suit carrier propped against the wall and a carton containing his shoes and underwear and hat sitting next to it. His uniform was still on three hangers. They were hung one in front of the other on my coatrack. I walked past them to my borrowed desk and dialed Garber’s number. Listened to the purr of the ring tone and wondered what my brother wanted. Wondered how he had tracked me down. I had been in Panama sixty hours ago. Before that I had been all over the place. So he had made a big effort to find me. So maybe it was important. I picked up a pencil and wrote Joe on a slip of paper. Then I underlined it, twice.

“Yes?” Leon Garber said in my ear.

“Reacher here,” I said. The clock on the wall showed a little after nine in the morning. Kramer’s onward connection to LAX was already in the air.

“It was a heart attack,” Garber said. “No question.”

“Walter Reed worked fast.”

“He was a general.”

“But a general with a bad heart.”

“Bad arteries, actually. Severe arteriosclerosis leading to fatal ventricular fibrillation. That’s what they’re telling us. And I believe them too. Probably kicked in around the time the whore took her bra off.”

“He wasn’t carrying any pills.”

“It was probably undiagnosed. It’s one of those things. You feel fine, then you feel dead. No way it could be faked, anyway. You could simulate fibrillation with an electric shock, I guess, but you can’t simulate forty years’ worth of crap in the arteries.”

“Were we worried about it being faked?”

“There could have been KGB interest,” Garber said. “Kramer and his tanks are the biggest single tactical problem the Red Army is facing.”

“Right now the Red Army is facing the other way.”

“Kind of early to say whether that’s permanent or not.”

I didn’t reply. The phone went quiet.

“I can’t let anyone else touch this with a stick,” Garber said. “Not just yet. Because of the circumstances. You understand that, right?”

“So?”

“So you’re going to have to do the widow thing,” Garber said.

“Me? Isn’t she in Germany?”

“She’s in Virginia. She’s home for the holidays. They have a house there.”

He gave me the address and I wrote it on the slip of paper, directly underneath where I had underlined Joe.

“Anyone with her?” I asked.

“They don’t have kids. So she’s probably alone.”

“OK,” I said.

“She doesn’t know yet,” Garber said. “Took me a while to track her down.”

“Want me to take a priest?”

“It isn’t a combat death. You could take a female partner, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might be a hugger.”

“OK.”

“Spare her the details, obviously. He was en route to Irwin, is all. Croaked in a layover hotel. We need to make that the official line. Nobody except you and me knows any different yet, and that’s the way we’re going to keep it. Except you can tell whoever you partner with, I guess. Mrs. Kramer might ask questions, and you’ll need to be on the same page. What about the local cops? Are they going to leak?”

“The guy I saw was an ex-Marine. He knows the score.”

“Semper Fi,” Garber said.

“I didn’t find the briefcase yet,” I said.

The phone went quiet again.

“Do the widow thing first,” Garber said. “Then keep on looking for it.”

I told the day-shift corporal to move Kramer’s effects to my quarters. I wanted to keep them safe and sound. The widow would ask for them, eventually. And things can disappear, on a big base like Bird, which can be embarrassing. Then I walked over to the O Club and looked for MPs eating late breakfasts or early lunches. They usually cluster well away from everybody else, because everybody else hates them. I found a group of four, two men and two women. They were all in woodland-pattern BDUs, standard on-post dress. One of the women was a captain. She had her right arm in a sling. She was having trouble eating. She would have trouble driving too. The other woman had a lieutenant’s bar on each lapel and Summer on her nametape. She looked to be about twenty-five years old and she was short and slender. She had skin the same color as the mahogany table she was eating off.

“Lieutenant Summer,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Happy New Year,” I said.

“Sir, you too.”

“You busy today?”

“Sir, general duties.”

“OK, out front in thirty minutes, Class As. I need you to hug a widow.”

I put my own Class As on again and called the motor pool for a sedan. I didn’t want to ride all the way to Virginia in a Humvee. Too noisy, too uncomfortable. A private brought me a new olive-green Chevrolet. I signed for it and drove it around to post headquarters and waited.

Lieutenant Summer came out halfway through the twenty-eighth minute of her allotted thirty. She paused a second and then walked toward the car. She looked good. She was very short, but she moved easily, like a willowy person. She looked like a six-foot catwalk model reduced in size to a tiny miniature. I got out of the car and left the driver’s door open. Met her on the sidewalk. She was wearing an expert sharpshooter badge with bars for rifle, small bore rifle, auto rifle, pistol, small bore pistol, machine gun, and submachine gun hanging on it. They made a little ladder about two inches long. Longer than mine. I only have rifle and pistol. She stopped dead in front of me and came to attention and fired off a perfect salute.

“Sir, Lieutenant Summer reports,” she said.

“Take it easy,” I said. “Informal mode of address, OK? Call me Reacher, or nothing. And no saluting. I don’t like it.”

She paused. Relaxed.

“OK,” she said.

I opened the passenger door and started to get in.

“I’m driving?” she asked.

“I was up most of the night.”

“Who died?”

“General Kramer,” I said. “Big tank guy in Europe.”

She paused again. “So why was he here? We’re all infantry.”

“Passing through,” I said.

She got in on the other side and racked the driver’s seat all the way forward. Adjusted the mirror. I pushed the passenger seat back and got as comfortable as I could.

“Where to?” she said.

“Green Valley, Virginia,” I said. “It’ll be about four hours, I guess.”

“That’s where the widow is?”

“Home for the holidays,” I said.

“And we’re breaking the news? Like, Happy New Year, ma’am, and by the way, your husband’s dead?”

I nodded. “Lucky us.” But I wasn’t really worried. Generals’ wives are as tough as they come. Either they’ve spent thirty years pushing their husbands up the greasy pole, or they’ve endured thirty years of fallout as their husbands have climbed it for themselves. Either way, there’s not much left that can get to them. They’re tougher than the generals, most of the time.

Summer took her cap off and tossed it onto the backseat. Her hair was very short. Almost shaved. She had a delicate skull and nice cheekbones. Smooth skin. I liked the way she looked. And she was a fast driver. That was for damn sure. She clipped her belt and took off north like she was training for NASCAR.

“Was it an accident?” she asked.

“Heart attack,” I said. “His arteries were bad.”

“Where? Our VOQ?”

I shook my head. “A crappy little motel in town. He died with a twenty-dollar hooker wedged somewhere underneath him.”

“We’re not telling the widow that part, right?”

“No, we’re not. We’re not telling anyone that part.”

“Why was he passing through?”

“He didn’t come to Bird itself. He was transiting D.C. Frankfurt to Dulles, then National to LAX twenty hours later. He was going out to Irwin for a conference.”

“OK,” she said, and then she went very quiet. We drove on. We got about level with the motel, but well to the west, heading straight for the highway.

“Permission to speak freely?” she said.

“Please,” I said.

“Is this a test?”

“Why would it be a test?”

“You’re from the 110th Special Unit, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“I have an application pending.”

“To the 110th?”

“Yes,” she said. “So, is this a covert assessment?”

“Of what?”

“Of me,” she said. “As a candidate.”

“I needed a woman partner. In case the widow is a hugger. I picked you out at random. The captain with the busted arm couldn’t have driven the car. And it would be kind of inefficient for us to wait until we had a dead general to conduct personnel assessments.”

“I guess,” she said. “But I’m wondering if you’re sitting there waiting for me to ask the obvious questions.”

“I’d expect any MP with a pulse to ask the obvious questions, whether or not they had a special unit transfer pending.”

“OK, I’m asking. General Kramer had a twenty-hour layover in the D.C. area and he wanted to get his rocks off and he didn’t mind paying for the privilege. So why did he drive all the way down here to do it? It’s what, three hundred miles?”

“Two hundred and ninety-eight,” I said.

“And then he’d have to drive all the way back.”

“Clearly.”

“So why?”

“You tell me,” I said. “Come up with something I haven’t thought of myself and I’ll recommend you for the transfer.”

“You can’t. You’re not my CO.”

“Maybe I am,” I said. “This week, anyway.”

“Why are you even here? Is something happening I should know about?”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I got orders. That’s all I know.”

“Are you really a major?”

“Last time I checked,” I said.

“I thought 110th investigators were usually warrant officers. Working plain clothes or undercover.”

“They usually are.”

“So why bring you here when they could send a warrant officer and have him dress up as a major?”

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe one day I’ll find out.”

“May I ask what your orders were?”

“Temporary detached duty as Fort Bird’s Provost Marshal’s executive officer.”

“The Provost Marshal isn’t on-post,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I found that out. He transferred out the same day I transferred in. Some temporary thing.”

“So you’re acting CO.”

“Like I said.”

“MP XO isn’t a special unit job,” she said.

“I can fake it,” I said. “I started out a regular MP, just like you.”

Summer said nothing. Just drove.

“Kramer,” I said. “Why did he contemplate a six-hundred-mile round-trip? That’s twelve hours’ driving time out of his twenty. Just to spend fifteen bucks on a room and twenty on a whore?”

“Why does it matter? A heart attack is a heart attack, right? I mean, was there any question about it?”

I shook my head. “Walter Reed already did the autopsy.”

“So it doesn’t really matter where or when it happened.”

“His briefcase is missing.”

“I see,” Summer said.

I saw her thinking. Her lower eyelids flicked upward a fraction.

“How do you know he had a briefcase?” she said.

“I don’t. But did you ever see a general go to a conference without one?”

“No,” she said. “You think the hooker ran off with it?”

I nodded. “That’s my working hypothesis right now.”

“So, find the hooker.”

“Who was she?”

Her eyelids moved again.

“Doesn’t make sense,” she said.

I nodded again. “Exactly.”

“Four possible reasons Kramer didn’t stay in the D.C. area. One, he might have been traveling with fellow officers and didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of them by having a hooker come to his room. They might have seen her in the corridor or heard her through the walls. So he invented an excuse and stayed in a different place. Two, even if he was traveling alone he might have been on a DoD travel voucher and he was paranoid about a desk clerk seeing the girl and calling The Washington Post. That happens. So he preferred to pay cash in some anonymous dive. Three, even if he wasn’t on a government ticket he might have been a well-known guest or a familiar face in a big-city hotel. So likewise he was looking for anonymity somewhere out of town. Or four, his sexual tastes ran beyond what you can get from the D.C. Yellow Pages, so he had to go where he knew for sure he could get what he wanted.”

“But?”

“Problems one, two, and three could be answered by going ten or fifteen miles, maybe less. Two hundred and ninety-eight is completely excessive. And whereas I’m prepared to believe there are tastes that can’t be satisfied in D.C., I don’t see how they’re more likely to be satisfied way out here in the North Carolina boonies, and anyway I would guess such a thing would cost a lot more than twenty bucks wherever you eventually found it.”

“So why did he take the six-hundred-mile detour?”

She didn’t answer. Just drove, and thought. I closed my eyes. Kept them closed for about thirty-five miles.

“He knew the girl,” Summer said.

I opened my eyes. “How?”

“Some men have favorites. Maybe he met her a long time ago. Fell for her, in a way. It can happen like that. It can almost be a love thing.”

“Where would he have met her?”

“Right there.”

“Bird is all infantry. He was Armored Branch.”

“Maybe they had joint exercises. You should check back.”

I said nothing. Armored and the infantry run joint exercises all the time. But they run them where the tanks are, not where the grunts are. Much easier to transport men across a continent than tanks.

“Or maybe he met her at Irwin,” Summer said. “In California. Maybe she worked Irwin, but had to leave California for some reason, but she liked working military bases, so she moved to Bird.”

“What kind of a hooker would like working military bases?”

“The kind that’s interested in money. Which is all of them, presumably. Military bases support their local economies in all kinds of ways.”

I said nothing.

“Or maybe she always worked Bird, but followed the infantry to Irwin when they did a joint exercise out there one time. Those things can last a month or two. No point in hanging around at home with no customers.”

“Best guess?” I said.

“They met in California,” she said. “Kramer will have spent years at Irwin, on and off. Then she moved to North Carolina, but he still liked her enough to make the detour whenever he was in D.C.”

“She doesn’t do anything special, not for twenty bucks.”

“Maybe he didn’t need anything special.”

“We could ask the widow.”

Summer smiled. “Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she made damn sure he did. Hookers are good at that. They like repeat customers best of all. It’s much safer for them if they already know the guy.”

I closed my eyes again.

“So?” Summer said. “Did I come up with something you didn’t think of?”

“No,” I said.

I fell asleep before we were out of the state and woke up again nearly four hours later when Summer took the Green Valley ramp too fast. My head rolled to the right and hit the window.

“Sorry,” she said. “You should check Kramer’s phone records. He must have called ahead, to make sure she was around. He wouldn’t have driven all that way on the off chance.”

“Where would he have called from?”

“Germany,” she said. “Before he left.”

“More likely he used a pay phone at Dulles. But we’ll check.”

“We?”

“You can partner with me.”

She said nothing.

“Like a test,” I said.

“Is this important?”

“Probably not. But it might be. Depends what the conference is about. Depends what paperwork he was taking to it. He might have had the whole ETO order of battle in his case. Or new tactics, assessment of shortcomings, all kinds of classified stuff.”

“The Red Army is going to fold.”

I nodded. “I’m more worried about red faces. Newspapers, or television. Some reporter finds classified stuff on a trash pile near a strip club, there’ll be major embarrassment all around.”

“Maybe the widow will know. He might have discussed it with her.”

“We can’t ask her,” I said. “As far as she’s concerned he died in his sleep with the blanket pulled up to his chin, and everything else was kosher. Any worries we’ve got at this point stay strictly between me, you, and Garber.”

“Garber?” she said.

“Me, you, and him,” I said.

I saw her smile. It was a trivial case, but working it with Garber was a definite stroke of luck, for a person with a 110th Special Unit transfer pending.

Green Valley was a picture-perfect colonial town and the Kramer house was a neat old place in an expensive part of it. It was a Victorian confection with fish-scale tiles on the roof and a bunch of turrets and porches all painted white, sitting on a couple of acres of emerald lawn. There were stately evergreen trees dotted about. They looked like someone had positioned them with care, which they probably had, a hundred years ago. We pulled up at the curb and waited, just looking. I don’t know what Summer was thinking about, but I was scanning the scene and filing it away under A for America. I have a Social Security number and the same blue and silver passport as everyone else but between my old man’s Stateside tours and my own I can only put together about five years’ worth of actual residence in the continental U.S. So I know a bunch of basic elementary-school facts like state capitals and how many grand slams Lou Gehrig hit and some basic high-school stuff like the constitutional amendments and the importance of Antietam, but I don’t know much about the price of milk or how to work a pay phone or how different places look and smell. So I soak it up when I can. And the Kramer house was worth soaking up. That was for sure. A watery sun was shining on it. There was a faint breeze and the smell of woodsmoke in the air and a kind of intense cold-afternoon quiet all around us. It was the kind of place you would have wanted your grandparents to live. You could have visited in the fall and raked leaves and drunk apple cider and then come back in the summer and loaded a ten-year-old station wagon with a canoe and headed for a lake somewhere. It reminded me of the places in the picture books they gave me in Manila and Guam and Seoul.

Until we got inside.

“Ready?” Summer said.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do the widow thing.”

She was quiet. I was sure she had done it before. I had too, more than once. It was never fun. She pulled off the curb and headed for the driveway entrance. Drove slowly toward the front door and eased to a stop ten feet from it. We opened our doors together and slid out into the chill and straightened our jackets. We left our hats in the car. That would be Mrs. Kramer’s first clue, if she happened to be watching. A pair of MPs at your door is never good news, and if they’re bareheaded, it’s worse news.

This particular door was painted a dull antique red and it had a glass storm screen in front of it. I rang the bell and we waited. And waited. I started to think nobody was home. I rang the bell again. The breeze was cold. It was stronger than it had looked.

“We should have called ahead,” Summer said.

“Can’t,” I said. “Can’t say, please be there four hours from now so we can deliver some very important news face-to-face. Too much of a preview, wouldn’t you say?”

“I came all this way and I’ve got nobody to hug.”

“Sounds like a country song. Then your truck breaks down and your dog dies.”

I tried the bell again. No response.

“We should look for a vehicle,” Summer said.

We found one in a closed two-car garage standing separate from the house. We could see it through the window. It was a Mercury Grand Marquis, metallic green, as long as an ocean liner. It was the perfect car for a general’s wife. Not new, not old, premium but not overpriced, suitable color, American as hell.

“Think this is hers?” Summer asked.

“Probably,” I said. “Chances are they had a Ford until he made lieutenant colonel. Then they moved up to a Mercury. They were probably waiting for the third star before they thought about a Lincoln.”

“Sad.”

“You think? Don’t forget where he was last night.”

“So where is she? You think she went out walking?”

We turned around and felt the breeze on our backs and heard a door bang at the rear of the house.

“She was out in the yard,” Summer said. “Gardening, maybe.”

“Nobody gardens on New Year’s Day,” I said. “Not in this hemisphere. There’s nothing growing.”

But we walked around to the front anyway and tried the bell again. Better to let her meet us formally, on her own terms. But she didn’t show. Then we heard the door again, at the back, banging aimlessly. Like the breeze had gotten hold of it.

“We should check that out,” Summer said.

I nodded. A banging door has a sound all its own. It suggests all kinds of things.

“Yes,” I said. “We probably should.”

We walked around to the rear of the house, side by side, into the wind. There was a flagstone path. It led us to a kitchen door. It opened inward, and it must have had a spring on the back to keep it closed. The spring must have been a little weak, because the gusting breeze was overpowering it from time to time and kicking the door open eight or nine inches. Then the gust would die away and the spring would reassert itself and the door would bang back into the frame. It did it three times as we watched. It was able to do it because the lock was smashed.

It had been a good lock, made of steel. But the steel had been stronger than the surrounding wood. Someone had used a wrecking bar. It had been jerked hard, maybe twice, and the lock had held but the wood had splintered. The door had opened up and the lock had just fallen out of the wreckage. It was right there on the flagstone path. The door had a crescent-shaped bite out of it. Splinters of wood had been blown here and there and piled by the wind.

“What now?” Summer said.

There was no security system. No intruder alarm. No pads, no wires. No automatic call to the nearest police precinct. No way of telling if the bad guys were long gone, or if they were still inside.

“What now?” Summer said again.

We were unarmed. No weapons, on a formal visit in Class A uniform.

“Go cover the front,” I said. “In case anyone comes out.”

She moved away without a word and I gave her a minute to get in position. Then I pushed the door with my elbow and stepped inside the kitchen. Closed the door behind me and leaned on it to keep it shut. Then I stood still and listened.

There was no sound. No sound at all.

The kitchen smelled faintly of cooked vegetables and stewed coffee. It was big. It was halfway between tidy and untidy. A well-used space. There was a door on the other side of the room. On my right. It was open. I could see a small triangle of polished oak floor. A hallway. I moved very slowly. Crept forward and to the right to line up my view. The door banged again behind me. I saw more of the hallway. I figured it ran straight to the front entrance. Off of it to the left was a closed door. Probably a dining room. Off of it to the right was a den or a study. Its door was open. I could see a desk and a chair and dark wood bookcases. I took a cautious step. Moved a little more.

I saw a dead woman on the hallway floor.

three

The dead woman had long gray hair. She was wearing an elaborate white flannel nightgown. She was on her side. Her feet were near the study door. Her arms and legs had sprawled in a way that made it look like she was running. There was a shotgun half underneath her. One side of her head was caved in. I could see blood and brains matted in her hair. More blood had pooled on the oak. It looked dark and sticky.

I stepped into the hallway and stopped an arm’s length from her. I squatted down and reached for her wrist. Her skin was very cold. There was no pulse.

I stayed down. Listened. Heard nothing. I leaned over and looked at her head. She had been hit with something hard and heavy. Just a single blow, but a serious one. The wound was in the shape of a trench. Nearly an inch wide, maybe four inches long. It had come from the left side, and above. She had been facing the back of the house. Facing the kitchen. I glanced around and dropped her wrist and stood up and stepped into the den. A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. I stood on it and imagined I was hearing quiet tense footsteps coming down the hallway, toward me. Imagined I was still holding the wrecking bar I had used to force the lock. Imagined swinging it when my target stepped into view, on her way past the open doorway.

I looked down. There was a stripe of blood and hair on the carpet. The wrecking bar had been wiped on it.

Nothing else in the room was disturbed. It was an impersonal space. It looked like it was there because they had heard a family house should have a study. Not because they actually needed one. The desk was not set up for working. There were photographs in silver frames all over it. But fewer than I would have expected, from a long marriage. There was one that showed the dead man from the motel and the dead woman from the hallway standing together with the Mount Rushmore faces blurry in the background. General and Mrs. Kramer, on vacation. He was much taller than she was. He looked strong and vigorous. She looked petite in comparison.

There was another framed photograph showing Kramer himself in uniform. The picture was a few years old. He was standing at the top of the steps, about to climb into a C-130 transport plane. It was a color photograph. His uniform was green, the airplane was brown. He was smiling and waving. Off to assume his one-star command, I guessed. There was a second picture, almost identical, a little newer. Kramer, at the top of a set of airplane steps, turning back, smiling and waving. Off to assume his two-star command, probably. In both pictures he was waving with his right hand. In both pictures his left held the same canvas suit carrier I had seen in the motel room closet. And above it, in both pictures, tucked up under his arm, was a matching canvas briefcase.

I stepped out to the hallway again. Listened hard. Heard nothing. I could have searched the house, but I didn’t need to. I was pretty sure there was nobody in it and I knew there was nothing I needed to find. So I took a last look at the Kramer widow. I could see the soles of her feet. She hadn’t been a widow for long. Maybe an hour, maybe three. I figured the blood on the floor was about twelve hours old. But it was impossible to be precise. That would have to wait until the doctors arrived.

I retreated through the kitchen and went back outside and walked around to find Summer. Sent her inside to take a look. It was quicker than a verbal explanation. She came out again four minutes later, looking calm and composed. Score one for Summer, I thought.

“You like coincidences?” she said.

I said nothing.

“We have to go to D.C.,” she said. “To Walter Reed. We have to make them double-check Kramer’s autopsy.”

I said nothing.

“This makes his death automatically suspicious. I mean, what are the chances? It’s one in forty or fifty thousand that an individual soldier will die on any given day, but to have his wife die on the same day? For her to be a homicide victim on the same day?”

“Wasn’t the same day,” I said. “Wasn’t even the same year.”

She nodded. “OK, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. But that just makes my point. It’s inconceivable that Walter Reed had a pathologist scheduled to work last night. So they had to drag one in, specially. And from where? From a party, probably.”

I smiled, briefly. “So you want us to go up there and say, hey, are you sure your doc could see straight last night? Sure he wasn’t too juiced up to spot the difference between a heart attack and a homicide?”

“We have to check,” she said. “I don’t like coincidences.”

“What do you think happened in there?”

“Intruder,” she said. “Mrs. Kramer was woken up by the noise at the door, got out of bed, grabbed a shotgun she kept near at hand, came downstairs, headed for the kitchen. She was a brave lady.”

I nodded. Generals’ wives, tough as they come.

“But she was slow,” Summer said. “The intruder was already all the way into the study and was able to get her from the side. With the crowbar he had used on the door. As she walked past. He was taller than she was, maybe by a foot, probably right-handed.”

I said nothing.

“So are we going to Walter Reed?”

“I think we have to,” I said. “We’ll go as soon as we’ve finished here.”

We called the Green Valley cops from a wall phone we found in the kitchen. Then we called Garber and gave him the news. He said he would meet us at the hospital. Then we waited. Summer watched the front of the house, and I watched the back. Nothing happened. The cops came within seven minutes. They made a tight little convoy, two marked cruisers, a detective’s car, an ambulance. They had lights and sirens going. We heard them a mile away. They howled into the driveway and then shut down. Summer and I stepped back in the sudden silence and they all swarmed past us. We had no role. A general’s wife is a civilian, and the house was inside a civilian jurisdiction. Normally I wouldn’t let such fine distinctions get in my way, but the place had already told me what I needed to know. So I was prepared to stand back and earn some Brownie points by doing it by the book. Brownie points might come in useful later.

A patrolman watched us for twenty long minutes while the other cops poked around inside. Then a detective in a suit came out to take our statements. We told him about Kramer’s heart attack, the widow trip, the banging door. His name was Clark and he had no problem with anything we had to say. His problem was the same as Summer’s. Both Kramers had died miles apart on the same night, which was a coincidence, and he didn’t like coincidences any better than Summer did. I started to feel sorry for Rick Stockton, the deputy chief down in North Carolina. His decision to let me haul Kramer’s body away was going to look bad, in this new light. It put half the puzzle in the military’s hands. It was going to set up a conflict.

We gave Clark a phone number where he could reach us at Bird, and then we got back in the car. I figured D.C. was another seventy miles. Another hour and ten. Maybe less, the way Summer drove. She took off and found the highway again and put her foot down until the Chevy was vibrating fit to bust.

“I saw the briefcase in the photographs,” she said. “Did you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Does it upset you to see dead people?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You?”

“It upsets me a little.”

I said nothing.

“You think it was a coincidence?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“So you think the postmortem missed something?”

“No,” I said again. “I think the postmortem was probably accurate.”

“So why are we driving all the way to D.C.?”

“Because I need to apologize to the pathologist. I dropped him in it by sending him Kramer’s body. Now he’s going to have wall-to-wall civilians bugging him for a month. That will piss him off big time.”

But the pathologist was a her, not a him, and she had such a sunny disposition that I doubted anything could piss her off for long. We met with her in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s reception area, four o’clock in the afternoon, New Year’s Day. It looked like any other hospital lobby. There were holiday decorations hanging from the ceilings. They already looked a little tired. Garber was already there. He was sitting on a plastic chair. He was a small man and didn’t seem uncomfortable. But he was quiet. He didn’t introduce himself to Summer. She stood next to him. I leaned on the wall. The doctor faced us with a sheaf of notes in her hand, like she was lecturing a small group of keen students. Her name badge read Sam McGowan, and she was young and dark, and brisk, and open.

“General Kramer died of natural causes,” she said. “Heart attack, last night, after eleven, before midnight. There’s no possibility of doubt. I’m happy to be audited if you want, but it would be a complete waste of time. His toxicology was absolutely clear. The evidence of ventricular fibrillation is indisputable and his arterial plaque was monumental. So forensically, your only tentative question might be whether by coincidence someone electrically stimulated fibrillation in a man almost certain to suffer it anyway within minutes or hours or days or weeks.”

“How would it be done?” Summer asked.

McGowan shrugged. “The skin would have to be wet over a large area. The guy would have to be in a bathtub, basically. Then, if you applied wall current to the water, you’d probably get fibrillation without burn marks. But the guy wasn’t in a bathtub, and there’s no evidence he ever had been.”

“What if his skin wasn’t wet?”

“Then I’d have seen burn injuries. And I didn’t, and I went over every inch of him with a magnifying glass. No burns, no hypodermic marks, no nothing.”

“What about shock, or surprise, or fear?”

The doctor shrugged again. “Possible, but we know what he was doing, don’t we? That kind of sudden sexual excitement is a classic trigger.”

Nobody spoke.

“Natural causes, folks,” McGowan said. “Just a big old heart attack. Every pathologist in the world could take a look at him and there would be one hundred percent agreement. I absolutely guarantee it.”

“OK,” Garber said. “Thanks, Doc.”

“I apologize,” I said. “You’re going to have to repeat all that to about two dozen civilian cops, every day for a couple of weeks.”

She smiled. “I’ll print up an official statement.”

Then she looked at each of us in turn in case we had more questions. We didn’t, so she smiled once more and swept away through a door. It sucked shut behind her and the ceiling decorations rustled and stilled and the reception area went quiet.

We didn’t speak for a moment.

“OK,” Garber said. “That’s it. No controversy with Kramer himself, and his wife is a civilian crime. It’s out of our hands.”

“Did you know Kramer?” I asked him.

Garber shook his head. “Only by reputation.”

“Which was?”

“Arrogant. He was Armored Branch. The Abrams tank is the best toy in the army. Those guys rule the world, and they know it.”

“Know anything about the wife?”

He made a face. “She spent way too much time at home in Virginia, is what I hear. She was rich, from an old Virginia family. I mean, she did her duty. She spent time on-post in Germany, only when you add it up, it really wasn’t a hell of a lot of time. Like now, XII Corps told me she was home for the holidays, which sounds OK, but actually she came home for Thanksgiving and wasn’t expected back until the spring. So the Kramers weren’t real close, by all accounts. No kids, no shared interests.”

“Which might explain the hooker,” I said. “If they lived separate lives.”

“I guess,” Garber said. “I get the feeling it was a marriage, you know, but it was more window dressing than anything real.”

“What was her name?” Summer asked.

Garber turned to look at her.

“Mrs. Kramer,” he said. “That’s all the name we need to know.”

Summer looked away.

“Who was Kramer traveling to Irwin with?” I asked.

“Two of his guys,” Garber said. “A one-star general and a colonel, Vassell and Coomer. They were a real triumvirate. Kramer, Vassell, and Coomer. The corporate face of Armor.”

He stood up and stretched.

“Start at midnight,” I said to him. “Tell me everything you did.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like coincidences. And neither do you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Everybody did something,” I said. “Except Kramer.”

Garber looked straight at me.

“I watched the ball drop,” he said. “Then I had another drink. I kissed my daughter. I kissed a whole bunch of people, as I recall. Then I sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

“And then?”

“My office got me on the phone. Told me they’d found out by circuitous means that we had a dead two-star down in North Carolina. Told me the Fort Bird MP duty officer had palmed it off. So I called there, and I got you.”

“And then?”

“You set out to do your thing and I called the town cops and got Kramer’s name. Looked him up and found he was a XII Corps guy. So I called Germany and reported the death, but I kept the details to myself. I told you this already.”

“And then?”

“Then nothing. I waited for your report.”

“OK,” I said.

“OK what?”

“OK, sir?”

“Bullshit,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

“The briefcase,” I said. “I still want to find it.”

“So keep looking for it,” he said. “Until I find Vassell and Coomer. They can tell us whether there was anything in it worth worrying about.”

“You can’t find them?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “They checked out of their hotel, but they didn’t fly to California. Nobody seems to know where the hell they are.”

Garber left to drive himself back to town and Summer and I climbed into the car and headed south again. It was cold, and it was getting dark. I offered to take the wheel, but Summer wouldn’t let me. Driving seemed to be her main hobby.

“Colonel Garber seemed tense,” she said. She sounded disappointed, like an actress who had failed an audition.

“He was feeling guilty,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he killed Mrs. Kramer.”

She just stared at me. She was doing about ninety, looking at me, sideways.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.

“How?”

“This was no coincidence.”

“That’s not what the doctor told us.”

“Kramer died of natural causes. That’s what the doctor told us. But something about that event led directly to Mrs. Kramer becoming a homicide victim. And Garber set all that in motion. By notifying XII Corps. He put the word out, and within about two hours the widow was dead too.”

“So what’s going on?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I said.

“And what about Vassell and Coomer?” she said. “They were a threesome. Kramer’s dead, his wife is dead, and the other two are missing.”

“You heard the man. It’s out of our hands.”

“You’re not going to do anything?”

“I’m going to look for a hooker.”

We set off on the most direct route we could find, straight back to the motel and the lounge bar. There was no real choice. First the Beltway, and then I-95. Traffic was light. It was still New Year’s Day. The world outside our windows looked dark and quiet, cold and sleepy. Lights were coming on everywhere. Summer drove as fast as she dared, which was plenty fast. What might have taken Kramer six hours was going to take us less than five. We stopped for gas early, and we bought stale sandwiches that had been made in the previous calendar year. We forced them down as we hustled south. Then I spent twenty minutes watching Summer. She had small neat hands. She had them resting lightly on the wheel. She didn’t blink much. Her lips were slightly parted and every minute or so she would run her tongue across her teeth.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“About what?”

“About anything,” I said. “Tell me the story of your life.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m tired,” I said. “To keep me awake.”

“Not very interesting.”

“Try me,” I said.

So she shrugged and started at the beginning, which was outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in the middle of the sixties. She had nothing bad to say about it, but she gave me the impression that she knew even then there were better ways to grow up than poor and black in Alabama at that time. She had brothers and sisters. She had always been small, but she was nimble, and she parlayed a talent for gymnastics and dancing and jumping rope into a way of getting noticed at school. She was good at the book work too, and had assembled a patchwork of minor scholarships and moved out of state to a college in Georgia. She had joined the ROTC and in her junior year the scholarships ran out and the military picked up the tab in exchange for five years’ future service. She was now halfway through it. She had aced MP school. She sounded comfortable. The military had been integrated for forty years and she said she found it to be the most color-blind place in America. But she was also a little frustrated about her own individual progress. I got the impression her application to the 110th was make-or-break for her. If she got it, she was in for life, like me. If she didn’t, she was out after five.

“Now tell me about your life,” she said.

“Mine?” I said. Mine was different in every way imaginable. Color, gender, geography, family circumstances. “I was born in Berlin. Back then, you stayed in the hospital seven days, so I was one week old when I went into the military. I grew up on every base we’ve got. I went to West Point. I’m still in the military. I always will be. That’s it, really.”

“You got family?”

I recalled the note from my sergeant: Your brother called. No message.

“A mother and a brother,” I said.

“Ever been married?”

“No. You?”

“No,” she said. “Seeing anyone?”

“Not right now.”

“Me either.”

We drove on, a mile, and another.

“Can you imagine a life outside the service?” she asked.

“Is there one?”

“I grew up out there. I might be going back.”

“You civilians are a mystery to me,” I said.

Summer parked outside Kramer’s room, I guessed for authenticity’s sake, a little less than five hours after we left Walter Reed. She seemed satisfied with her average speed. She shut the motor down and smiled.

“I’ll take the lounge bar,” I said. “You speak to the kid in the motel office. Do the good cop thing. Tell him the bad cop is right behind you.”

We slid out into the cold and the dark. The fog was back. The streetlights burned through it. I stretched and yawned and then straightened my coat and watched Summer head past the Coke machine. Her skin flared red as she stepped through its glow. I crossed the road and headed for the bar.

The lot was as full as it had been the night before. Cars and trucks were parked all around the building. The ventilators were working hard again. I could see smoke and smell beer in the air. I could hear music thumping away. The neon was bright.

I pulled the door and stepped into the noise. The crowd was wall-to-wall again. The same spotlights were burning. There was a different girl naked on the stage. There was the same barrel-chested guy half in shadow behind the register. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was looking at my lapels. Where Kramer had worn Armored’s crossed cavalry sabers with a charging tank over them, I had the Military Police’s crossed flintlock pistols, gold and shiny. Not the most popular sight, in a place like that.

“Cover charge,” the guy at the register said.

It was hard to hear him. The music was very loud.

“How much?” I said.

“Hundred dollars,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“OK, two hundred dollars.”

“Hilarious,” I said.

“I don’t like cops in here.”

“Can’t think why,” I said.

“Look at me.”

I looked at him. There was nothing much to see. The edge of a downlighter beam lit up a big stomach and a big chest and thick, short, tattooed forearms. And hands the size and shape of frozen chickens with heavy silver rings on most of the fingers. But the guy’s shoulders and his face were in deep shadow above them. Like he was half-hidden by a curtain. I was talking to a guy I couldn’t see.

“You’re not welcome here,” he said.

“I’ll get over it. I’m not an unduly sensitive person.”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “This is my place and I don’t want you in it.”

“I’ll be quick.”

“Leave now.”

“No.”

“Look at me.”

He leaned forward into the light. Slowly. The downlighter beam rode up his chest. Up his neck. Onto his face. It was an incredible face. It had started out ugly and it had gotten much worse. He had straight razor scars all over it. They crisscrossed it like a lattice. They were deep and white and old. His nose had been busted and badly reset and busted again and badly reset again, many times over. He had brows thick with scar tissue. Two small eyes were staring out at me from under them. He was maybe forty. Maybe five-ten, maybe three hundred pounds. He looked like a gladiator who had survived twenty years, deep inside the catacombs.

I smiled. “This thing with the face is supposed to impress me? With the dramatic lighting and all?”

“It should tell you something.”

“It tells me you lost a lot of fights. You want to lose another, that’s fine with me.”

He said nothing.

“Or I could put this place off-limits to every enlisted man at Bird. I could see what that does to your bar profits.”

He said nothing.

“But I don’t want to do that,” I said. “No reason to penalize my guys, just because you’re an asshole.”

He said nothing.

“So I guess I’ll ignore you.”

He sat back. The shadow slid back into place, like a curtain.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, from out of the darkness. “Somewhere, sometime. That’s for sure. That’s a promise. You can count on that.”

“Now I’m scared,” I said. I moved on and pressed into the crowd. I made it through a packed bottleneck and into the main part of the building. It was much bigger inside than it had looked. It was a big low square, full of noise and people. There were dozens of separate areas. Speakers everywhere. Loud music. Flashing lights. There were plenty of civilians in there. Plenty of military too. I could spot them by their haircuts, and their clothes. Off-duty soldiers always dress distinctively. They try to look like everybody else, and they fail. They’re always a little clean and out-of-date. They were all looking at me as I passed them by. They weren’t pleased to see me. I looked for a sergeant. Looked for a few lines around the eyes. I saw four likely candidates, six feet back from the edge of the main stage. Three of them saw me and turned away. The fourth saw me and paused for a second and then turned toward me. Like he knew he had been selected. He was a compact guy maybe five years older than me. Special Forces, probably. There were plenty of them at Bird, and he had the look. He was having a good time. That was clear. He had a smile on his face and a bottle in his hand. Cold beer, dewy with moisture. He raised it, like a toast, like an invitation to approach. So I went up close to him and spoke in his ear.

“Spread the word for me,” I said. “This is nothing official. Nothing to do with our guys. Something else entirely.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Lost property,” I said. “Nothing important. Everything’s cool.”

He said nothing.

“Special Forces?” I said.

He nodded. “Lost property?”

“No big deal,” I said. “Just something that went missing across the street.”

He thought about it and then he raised his bottle again and clinked it against where mine would have been if I had bought one. It was a clear display of acceptance. Like a mime, in all the noise. But even so a thin stream of men started up, shuffling toward the exit. Maybe twenty grunts left during my first two minutes in the room. MPs have that effect. No wonder the guy with the face didn’t want me in there.

A waitress came up to me. She was wearing a black T-shirt cut off about four inches below the neck and black shorts cut off about four inches below the waist and black shoes with very high heels. Nothing else. She stood there and looked at me until I ordered something. I asked for a Bud, and I paid about eight times its value. Took a couple of sips, and then went looking for whores.

They found me first. I guess they wanted me out of sight before I emptied the place completely. Before I reduced their customer base to zero. Two of them came straight at me. One was a platinum blonde. The other was a brunette. Both were wearing tiny tight sheath dresses that sparkled with all kinds of synthetic fibers. The blonde got in front of the brunette and headed her off. Came clattering straight toward me, awkward in absurd clear plastic heels. The brunette wheeled away and headed for the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to. He waved her off with what looked like an expression of genuine distaste. The blonde kept on track and came right up next to me and leaned on my arm. Stretched up tall until I could feel her breath in my ear.

“Happy New Year,” she said.

“You too,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you in here before,” she said, like I was the only thing missing from her life. Her accent wasn’t local. She wasn’t from the Carolinas. She wasn’t from California either. Georgia or Alabama, probably.

“You new in town?” she asked, loud, because of the music.

I smiled. I had been in more whorehouses than I cared to count. All MPs have. Every single one is the same, and every single one is different. They all have different protocols. But the Are you new in town? question was a standard opening gambit. It invited me to start the negotiations. It insulated her from a solicitation charge.

“What’s the deal here?” I asked her.

She smiled shyly, like she had never been asked such a thing before. Then she told me I could watch her onstage in exchange for dollar tips, or I could spend ten to get a private show in a back room. She explained the private show could involve touching, and to make sure I was paying attention she ran her hand up the inside of my thigh.

I could see how a guy could be tempted. She was cute. She looked to be about twenty. Except for her eyes. Her eyes looked like a fifty-year-old’s.

“What about something more?” I said. “Someplace else we could go?”

“We can talk about that during the private show.”

She took me by the hand and led me past their dressing room door and through a velvet curtain into a dim room behind the stage. It wasn’t small. It was maybe thirty feet by twenty. It had an upholstered bench running around the whole perimeter. It wasn’t especially private either. There were about six guys in there, each of them with a naked woman on his lap. The blonde girl led me to a space on the bench and sat me down. She waited until I came out with my wallet and paid her ten bucks. Then she draped herself over me and snuggled in tight. The way she sat made it impossible for me not to put my hand on her thigh. Her skin was warm and smooth.

“So where can we go?” I asked.

“You’re in a hurry,” she said. She moved around and eased the hem of her dress up over her hips. She wasn’t wearing anything under it.

“Where are you from?” I asked her.

“Atlanta,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Sin,” she said. “Spelled S, i, n.”

I was fairly certain that was a professional alias.

“What’s yours?” she said.

“Reacher,” I said. There was no point adopting an alias of my own. I was fresh from the widow visit, still in Class As, with my nameplate big and obvious on my right jacket pocket.

“That’s a nice name,” she said, automatically. I was fairly certain she said it to everybody. Quasimodo, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, that’s a nice name. She moved her hand. Started with the top button of my jacket and undid it all the way down. Smoothed her fingers inside across my chest, under my tie, on top of my shirt.

“There’s a motel across the street,” I said.

She nodded against my shoulder.

“I know there is,” she said.

“I’m looking for whoever went over there last night with a soldier.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

She pushed against my chest. “Are you here to have fun, or ask questions?”

“Questions,” I said.

She stopped moving. Said nothing.

“I’m looking for whoever went over to the motel last night with a soldier.”

“Get real,” she said. “We all go over to the motel with soldiers. There’s practically a groove worn in the pavement. Look carefully, and you can see it.”

“I’m looking for someone who came back a little sooner than normal, maybe.”

She said nothing.

“Maybe she was a little spooked.”

She said nothing.

“Maybe she met the guy there,” I said. “Maybe she got a call earlier in the day.”

She eased her butt up off my knee and pulled her dress down as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far. Then she traced her fingertips across my lapel badge.

“We don’t answer questions,” she said.

“Why not?”

I saw her glance at the velvet curtain. Like she was looking through it and all the way across the big square room to the register by the door.

“Him?” I said. “I’ll make sure he isn’t a problem.”

“He doesn’t like us to talk to cops.”

“It’s important,” I said. “The guy was an important soldier.”

“You all think you’re important.”

“Any of the girls here from California?”

“Five or six, maybe.”

“Any of them used to work Fort Irwin?”

“I don’t know.”

“So here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to the bar. I’m going to get another beer. I’m going to spend ten minutes drinking it. You bring me the girl who had the problem last night. Or you show me where I can find her. Tell her there’s no real problem. Tell her nobody will get in trouble. I think you’ll find she understands that.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll roust everybody out of here and I’ll burn the place to the ground. Then you can all find jobs somewhere else.”

She glanced at the velvet curtain again.

“Don’t worry about the fat guy,” I said. “Any pissing and moaning out of him, I’ll bust his nose again.”

She just sat still. Didn’t move at all.

“It’s important,” I said again. “We fix this now, nobody gets in trouble. We don’t, then someone winds up with a big problem.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Spread the word,” I said. “Ten minutes.”

I bumped her off my lap and watched her disappear through the curtain. Followed her a minute later and fought my way to the bar. I left my jacket hanging open. I thought it made me look off duty. I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s evening.

I spent twelve minutes drinking another overpriced domestic beer. I watched the waitresses and the hookers work the room. I saw the big guy with the face moving through the press of people, looking here, looking there, checking on things. I waited. My new blonde friend didn’t show. And I couldn’t see her anywhere. The place was very crowded. And it was dark. The music was thumping away. There were strobes and black lights and the whole scene was confusion. The ventilation fans were roaring but the air was hot and foul. I was tired and I was getting a headache. I slid off my stool and tried a circuit of the whole place. Couldn’t find the blonde anywhere. I went around again. Didn’t find her. The Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to before stopped me halfway through my third circuit.

“Looking for your girlfriend?” he said.

I nodded. He pointed at the dressing room door.

“I think you just caused her some trouble,” he said.

“What kind of trouble?”

He said nothing. Just held up his left palm and smacked his right fist into it.

“And you didn’t do anything?” I said.

He shrugged.

“You’re the cop,” he said. “Not me.”

The dressing room door was a plain plywood rectangle painted black. I didn’t knock. I figured the women who used the room weren’t shy. I just pulled it open and stepped inside. There were regular lightbulbs burning in there, and piles of clothes, and the stink of perfume. There were vanity tables with theater mirrors. There was an old sofa, red velvet. Sin was sitting on it, crying. She had a vivid red outline of a hand on her left cheek. Her right eye was swollen shut. I figured it for a double slap, first forehand, then backhand. Two heavy blows. She was pretty shaken. Her left shoe was off. I could see needle marks between her toes. Addicts in the skin trades often inject there. It rarely shows. Models, hookers, actresses.

I didn’t ask if she was OK. That would have been a stupid question. She was going to live, but she wasn’t going to work for a week. Not until the eye went black and then turned yellow enough to hide with makeup. I just stood there until she saw me, through the eye that was still open.

“Get out,” she said.

She looked away.

“Bastard,” she said.

“You find the girl yet?” I said.

She looked straight at me.

“There was no girl,” she said. “I asked all around. I asked everybody. And that’s what I heard back. Nobody had a problem last night. Nobody at all.”

I paused a beat. “Anyone not here who should be?”

“We’re all here. We’ve all got Christmas to pay for.”

I didn’t speak.

“You got me slapped for nothing,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Get out,” she said again, not looking at me.

“OK,” I said.

“Bastard,” she said.

I left her sitting there and forced my way back through the crowd around the stage. Through the crowd around the bar. Through the bottleneck entrance, to the doorway. The guy with the face was right there in the shadows again, behind the register. I guessed where his head was in the darkness and swung my open right hand and slapped him on the ear, hard enough to rock him sideways.

“You,” I said. “Outside.”

I didn’t wait for him. Just pushed my way out into the night. There was a bunched-up crowd of people in the lot. All military. The ones who had trickled out when I came in. They were standing around in the cold, leaning on cars, drinking beer from the long-neck bottles they had carried out with them. They weren’t going to be a problem. They would have to be very drunk indeed to mix it up with an MP. But they weren’t going to be any help either. I wasn’t one of them. I was on my own.

The door burst open behind me. The big guy came out. He had a couple of locals with him. Both looked like farmers. We all stepped into a pool of yellow light from a fixture on a pole. We all faced each other. Our breath turned to vapor in the air. Nobody spoke. No preamble was required. I guessed that parking lot had seen plenty of fights. I guessed this one would be no different from all the others. It would finish up just the same, with a winner and a loser.

I slipped out of my jacket and hung it on the nearest car’s door mirror. It was a ten-year-old Plymouth, good paint, good chrome. An enthusiast’s ride. I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to come out into the lot. He looked at me for a second and then stepped away into the shadows and stood with his men by the cars. I took my watch off and turned away and dropped it in my jacket pocket. Then I turned back. Studied my opponent. I wanted to mess him up bad. I wanted Sin to know I had stood up for her. But there was no percentage in going for his face. That was already messed up bad. I couldn’t make it much worse. And I wanted to put him out of action for a spell. I didn’t want him coming around and taking his frustration out on the girls, just because he couldn’t get back at me.

He was barrel-chested and overweight, so I figured I might not have to use my hands at all. Except on the farmers, maybe, if they piled in. Which I hoped wouldn’t happen. No need to start a big conflict. On the other hand, it was their call. Everybody has a choice in life. They could hang back, or they could choose up sides.

I was maybe seven inches taller than the guy with the face, but maybe seventy pounds lighter. And ten years younger. I watched him run the numbers. Watched him conclude that on balance he would be OK. I guessed he figured himself for a real junkyard dog. Figured me for an upstanding representative of Uncle Sam. Maybe the Class As made him think I was going to act like an officer and a gentleman. Somewhat proper, somewhat inhibited.

His mistake.

He came at me, swinging. Big chest, short arms, not much reach at all. I arched around the punch and let him skitter away. He came back at me. I swatted his hand away and tapped him in the face with my elbow. Not hard. I just wanted to stop his momentum and get him standing still right in front of me, just for a moment.

He put all his weight on his back foot and lined up a straight drive aimed for my face. It was going to be a big blow. It would have hurt me if it had landed. But before he let it go I stepped in and smashed my right heel into his right kneecap. The knee is a fragile joint. Ask any athlete. This guy had three hundred pounds bearing down on it and he got two hundred thirty driving straight through it. His patella shattered and his leg folded backward. Exactly like a regular knee joint, but in reverse. He went down forward and the top of his boot came up to meet the front of his thigh. He screamed, real loud. I stepped back and smiled. He shoots, he scores.

I stepped back in and looked at the guy’s knee, carefully. It was messed up, but good. Broken bone, ripped ligaments, torn cartilage. I thought about kicking it again, but I really didn’t need to. He was in line for a visit to the cane store, as soon as they let him out of the orthopedic ward. He was going to be choosing a lifetime supply. Wood, aluminum, short, long, his pick.

“I’ll come back and do the other one,” I said. “If anything happens that I don’t want to happen.”

I don’t think he heard me. He was writhing around in an oily puddle, panting and whimpering, trying to get his knee in a position where it would stop killing him. He was shit out of luck there. He was going to have to wait for surgery.

The farmers were busy choosing up sides. Both of them were pretty dumb. But one of them was dumber than the other. Slower. He was flexing his big red hands. I stepped in and headbutted him full in the face, to help with the decision-making process. He went down, head-to-toe with the big guy, and his pal beat a fast retreat behind the nearest pickup truck. I lifted my jacket off the Plymouth’s door mirror and shrugged back into it. Took my watch out of my pocket. Strapped it back on my wrist. The soldiers drank their beer and looked at me, nothing in their faces. They were neither pleased nor disappointed. They had invested nothing in the outcome. Whether it was me or the other guys on the ground was all the same to them.

I saw Lieutenant Summer on the fringe of the crowd. Threaded my way through cars and people toward her. She looked tense. She was breathing hard. I guessed she had been watching. I guessed she had been ready to jump in and help me out.

“What happened?” she said.

“The fat guy hit a woman who was asking questions for me. His pal didn’t run away fast enough.”

She glanced at them and then back at me. “What did the woman say?”

“She said nobody had a problem last night.”

“The kid in the motel still denies there was a hooker with Kramer. He’s pretty definite about it.”

I heard Sin say: You got me slapped for nothing. Bastard.

“So what made him go looking in the room?”

Summer made a face. “That was my big question, obviously.”

“Did he have an answer?”

“Not at first. Then he said it was because he heard a vehicle leaving in a hurry.”

“What vehicle?”

“He said it was a big engine, revving hard, taking off fast, like a panic situation.”

“Did he see it?”

Summer just shook her head.

“Makes no sense,” I said. “A vehicle implies a call girl, and I doubt if they have many call girls here. And why would Kramer need a call girl anyway, with all those other hookers right here in the bar?”

Summer was still shaking her head. “The kid says the vehicle had a very distinctive sound. Very loud. And diesel, not gasoline. He says he heard the exact same sound again a little later on.”

“When?”

“When you left in your Humvee.”

“What?”

Summer looked right at me. “He says he checked Kramer’s room because he heard a military vehicle peeling out of the lot in a panic.”

four

We went back across the road to the motel and made the kid tell the story all over again. He was surly and he wasn’t talkative, but he made a good witness. Unhelpful people often do. They’re not trying to please you. They’re not trying to impress you. They’re not making all kinds of stuff up, trying to tell you what you want to hear.

He said he was sitting in the office, alone, doing nothing, and at about eleven twenty-five in the evening he heard a vehicle door slam and then a big turbodiesel start up. He described sounds that must have been a gearbox slamming into reverse and a four-wheel-drive transfer case locking up. Then there was tire noise and engine noise and gravel noise and something very large and heavy sped away in a big hurry. He said he got off his stool and went outside to look. Didn’t see the vehicle.

“Why did you check the room?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I thought maybe it was on fire.”

“On fire?”

“People do stuff like that, in a place like this. They set the room on fire. And then hightail out. For kicks. Or something. I don’t know. It was unusual.”

“How did you know which room to check?”

He went very quiet at that point. Summer pressed him for an answer. Then I did. We did the good cop, bad cop thing. Eventually he admitted it was the only room rented for the whole night. All the others were renting by the hour, and were being serviced by foot traffic from across the street, not by vehicles. He said that was how he had been so sure there was never a hooker in Kramer’s room. It was his responsibility to check them in and out. He took the money and issued the keys. Kept track of the comings and the goings. So he always knew for sure who was where. It was a part of his function. A part he was supposed to keep very quiet about.

“I’ll lose my job now,” he said.

He got worried to the point of tears and Summer had to calm him down. Then he told us he had found Kramer’s body and called the cops and cleared all the hourly renters out for safety’s sake. Then Deputy Chief Stockton had shown up within about fifteen minutes. Then I had shown up, and when I left sometime later the kid recognized the same vehicle sounds he had heard before. Same engine noise, same drivetrain noises, same tire whine. He was convincing. He had already admitted that hookers used the place all the time, so he had no more reason to lie. And Humvees were still relatively new. Still relatively rare. And they made a distinctive noise. So I believed him. We left him there on his stool and stepped outside into the cold red glow of the Coke machine.

“No hooker,” Summer said. “A woman from the base instead.”

“A woman officer,” I said. “Maybe fairly senior. Someone with permanent access to her own Humvee. Nobody signs out a pool vehicle for an assignation like that. And she’s got his briefcase. She must have.”

“She’ll be easy to find. She’ll be in the gate log, time out, time in.”

“I might have even passed her on the road. If she left here at eleven twenty-five she wasn’t back at Bird before twelve-fifteen. I was leaving around then.”

“If she went straight back to the post.”

“Yes,” I said. “If.”

“Did you see another Humvee?”

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“Who do you think she is?”

I shrugged. “Like we figured about the phantom hooker. Someone he met somewhere. Irwin, probably, but it could have been anywhere.”

I stared across at the gas station. Watched cars go by on the road.

“Vassell and Coomer might know her,” Summer said. “You know, if it was a long-term thing between her and Kramer.”

“Yes, they might.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m sure I’ll find them if I need them.”

I didn’t find them. They found me. They were waiting for me in my borrowed office when we got back. Summer dropped me at my door and went to park the car. I walked past the outer desk. The night-shift sergeant was back. The mountain woman, with the baby son and the paycheck worries. She gestured at the inner door in a way that told me someone was in there. Someone that ranked a lot higher than either of us.

“Got coffee?” I said.

“The machine is on,” she said.

I took some with me. My coat was still unbuttoned. My hair was a mess. I looked exactly like a guy who had been brawling in a parking lot. I walked straight to the desk. Put my coffee down. There were two guys in upright visitor chairs against the wall, facing me. They were both in woodland BDUs. One had a Brigadier General’s star on his collar and the other had a colonel’s eagle. The general had Vassell on his nametape and the colonel had Coomer. Vassell was bald and Coomer wore eyeglasses and they were both pompous enough and old enough and short and soft and pink enough to look vaguely ridiculous in BDUs. They looked like Rotary Club members on their way to a fancy dress ball. First impression, I didn’t like them very much.

I sat down in my chair and saw two slips of paper stacked square in the center of the blotter. The first was a note that said: Your brother called again. Urgent. This time there was a phone number with it. It had a 202 area code. Washington D.C.

“Don’t you salute senior officers?” Vassell said, from his chair.

The second note said: Col. Garber called. Green Valley PD calculates Mrs. K died approx. 0200. I folded both notes separately and tucked them side by side under the base of my telephone. Adjusted them so I could see exactly half of each one. Looked up in time to see Vassell glaring at me. His naked scalp was going red.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”

“Don’t you salute senior officers when you enter a room?”

“If they’re in my chain of command,” I said. “You’re not.”

“I don’t consider that an answer,” he said.

“Look it up,” I said. “I’m with the 110th Special Unit. We’re separate. Structurally we’re parallel to the rest of the army. We have to be, if you think about it. We can’t police you if we’re in your chain of command ourselves.”

“I’m not here to be policed, son,” Vassell said.

“So why are you here? It’s kind of late for a social visit.”

“I’m here to ask some questions.”

“Ask away,” I said. “Then I’ll ask some of my own. And you know what the difference will be?”

He said nothing.

“I’ll be answering out of courtesy,” I said. “You’ll be answering because the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires you to.”

Vassell said nothing. Just glared at me. Then he glanced at Coomer. Coomer looked back at him, and then at me.

“We’re here about General Kramer,” he said. “We’re his senior staff.”

“I know who you are,” I said.

“Tell us about the general.”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“We’re aware of that. We’d like to know the circumstances.”

“He had a heart attack.”

“Where?”

“Inside his chest cavity.”

Vassell glowered.

“Where did he die?” Coomer said.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “It’s germane to an ongoing inquiry.”

“In what way?” Vassell said.

“In a confidential way.”

“It was around here somewhere,” he said. “That much is already common knowledge.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “What’s the conference at Irwin about?”

“What?”

“The conference at Irwin,” I said again. “Where you were all headed.”

“What about it?”

“I need to know the agenda.”

Vassell looked at Coomer and Coomer opened his mouth to start telling me something when my phone rang. It was my desk sergeant. She had Summer out there with her. She was unsure whether to send her in. I told her to go right ahead. So there was a tap on the door and Summer came in. I introduced her all around and she pulled a spare chair over to my desk and sat down, alongside me, facing them. Two against two. I pulled the second note out from under the telephone and passed it to her: Col. Garber called. Green Valley PD calculates Mrs. K died approx. 0200. She unfolded it and read it and refolded it and passed it back to me. I put it back under the phone. Then I asked Vassell and Coomer about the Irwin agenda again, and watched their attitudes change. They didn’t get any more helpful. It was more of a sideways move than an improvement. But because there was now a woman in the room they dialed down the overt hostility and replaced it with smug patronizing civility. They came from that kind of a background and that kind of a generation. They hated MPs and I was sure they hated women officers, but all of a sudden they felt they had to be polite.

“It was going to be purely routine,” Coomer said. “Just a regular powwow. Nothing of any great importance.”

“Which explains why you didn’t actually go,” I said.

“Naturally. It seemed much more appropriate to remain here. You know, under the circumstances.”

“How did you find out about Kramer?”

“XII Corps called us.”

“From Germany?”

“That’s where XII Corps is, son,” Vassell said.

“Where did you stay last night?”

“In a hotel,” Coomer said.

“Which one?”

“The Jefferson. In D.C.”

“Private or on a DoD ticket?”

“That hotel is authorized for senior officers.”

“Why didn’t General Kramer stay there?”

“Because he made alternative arrangements.”

“When?”

“When what?” Coomer said.

“When did he make these alternative arrangements?”

“Some days ago.”

“So it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Do you know what those arrangements were?”

“Obviously not,” Vassell said. “Or we wouldn’t be asking you where he died.”

“You didn’t think he was maybe visiting with his wife?”

“Was he?”

“No,” I said. “Why do you need to know where he died?”

There was a long pause. Their attitudes changed again. The smugness fell away and they replaced it with a kind of winsome frankness.

“We don’t really need to know,” Vassell said. He leaned forward and glanced at Summer like he wished she weren’t there. Like he wanted this new intimacy to be purely man-to-man with me. “And we have no specific information or direct knowledge at all, but we’re worried that General Kramer’s private arrangements could lead to the potential for embarrassment, in light of the circumstances.”

“How well did you know him?”

“On a professional level, very well indeed. On a personal level, about as well as anyone knows his brother officer. Which is to say, perhaps not well enough.”

“But you suspect in general terms what his arrangements might have been.”

“Yes,” he said. “We have our suspicions.”

“So it wasn’t a surprise to you that he didn’t bunk at the hotel.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

“And it wasn’t a surprise when I told you he wasn’t visiting with his wife.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“So you suspected roughly what he might be doing, but you didn’t know where.”

Vassell nodded his head. “Roughly.”

“Did you know with whom he might have been doing it?”

Vassell shook his head.

“We have no specific information,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m sure you know the army well enough to realize that if we discover a potential for embarrassment, we’ll cover it up.”

There was a long pause.

“Have all traces been removed?” Coomer asked. “From wherever it was?”

I nodded. “We took his stuff.”

“Good.”

“I need the Irwin conference agenda,” I said.

There was another pause.

“There wasn’t one,” Vassell said.

“I’m sure there was,” I said. “This is the army. It’s not the Actors Studio. We don’t do free improvisation sessions.”

There was a pause.

“There was nothing on paper,” Coomer said. “I told you, Major, it was no big deal.”

“How did you spend your day today?”

“Chasing rumors about the general.”

“How did you get down here from D.C.?”

“We have a car and a driver on loan from the Pentagon.”

“You checked out of the Jefferson?”

“Yes, we did.”

“So your bags are in the Pentagon car?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Where is the car?”

“Waiting outside your post headquarters.”

“It’s not my post headquarters,” I said. “I’m here on temporary detachment.”

I turned to Summer and told her to go fetch their briefcases from the car. They got all outraged, but they knew they couldn’t stop me doing it. Civilian notions about unreasonable search and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army post main gate. I watched their eyes while Summer was gone. They were annoyed, but they weren’t worried. So either they were telling the truth about the Irwin conference or they had already ditched the relevant paperwork. But I went through the motions anyway. Summer got back carrying two identical briefcases. They were exactly like the one Kramer had in his silver-framed photographs. Staffers kiss up in all kinds of ways.

I searched through them on my desk. I found passports, plane tickets, travel vouchers, and itineraries in both of them. But no agendas for Fort Irwin.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” I said.

“Happy now, son?” Vassell said.

“Kramer’s wife is dead too,” I said. “Did you know that?”

I watched them carefully, and I saw that they didn’t know. They stared at me and stared at each other and started to get pale and upset.

“How?” Vassell said.

“When?” Coomer said.

“Last night,” I said. “She was a homicide victim.”

“Where?”

“In her house. There was an intruder.”

“Do we know who it was?”

“No, we don’t. It’s not our case. It’s a civilian jurisdiction.”

“What was it? A burglary?”

“It maybe started out that way.”

They said nothing more. Summer and I walked them out to the sidewalk in front of post headquarters and watched them climb into their Pentagon car. It was a Mercury Grand Marquis, a couple of model years newer than Mrs. Kramer’s big old boat, and black rather than green. Their driver was a tall guy in BDUs. He had subdued-order badges on and I couldn’t make out his name or his rank in the dark. But he didn’t look like an enlisted man. He U-turned smoothly across the empty road and drove Vassell and Coomer away. We watched his taillights disappear north, through the main gate, and away into the darkness beyond.

“What do you think?” Summer said.

“I think they’re full of shit,” I said.

“Important shit or regular flag-rank shit?”

“They’re lying,” I said. “They’re uptight, they’re lying, and they’re stupid. Why am I worried about Kramer’s briefcase?”

“Sensitive paperwork,” she said. “Whatever he was carrying to California.”

I nodded. “They just defined it for me. It’s the conference agenda itself.”

“You’re sure there was one?”

“There’s always an agenda. And it’s always on paper. There’s a paper agenda for everything. You want to change the dog food in the K-9 kennels, you need forty-seven separate meetings with forty-seven separate paper agendas. So there was one for Irwin, that’s for damn sure. It was completely stupid to say there wasn’t. If they’ve got something to hide, they should have just said it’s too secret for me to see.”

“Maybe the conference really wasn’t important.”

“That’s bullshit too. It was very important.”

“Why?”

“Because a two-star general was going. And a one-star. And because it was New Year’s Eve, Summer. Who flies on New Year’s Eve and spends the night in a lousy stopover hotel? And this year in Germany was a big deal. The Wall is coming down. We won, after forty-five years. The parties must have been incredible. Who would miss them for something unimportant? To have gotten those three guys on a plane on New Year’s Eve, this Irwin thing had to be some kind of a very big deal.”

“They were upset about Mrs. Kramer. More than about Kramer himself.”

I nodded. “Maybe they liked her.”

“They must have liked Kramer too.”

“No, he’s just a tactical problem for them. It’s an unsentimental business, up there at their level. They hitched themselves to him, and now he’s dead, and they’re worrying about where that leaves them.”

“Ready for promotion, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if Kramer turns out to be an embarrassment, they could go down with him.”

“Then they should be reassured. You promised them a cover-up.”

There was something prim in her voice. Like she was suggesting I shouldn’t have promised them any such thing.

“We protect the army, Summer,” I said. “Like family. That’s what we’re for.” Then I paused. “But did you notice they didn’t shut up after that? They should have taken the hint. Cover-up requested, cover-up promised. Asked and answered, mission accomplished.”

“They wanted to know where his stuff was.”

“Yes,” I said. “They did. And you know what that means? It means they’re looking for Kramer’s briefcase too. Because of the agenda. Kramer’s copy is the only one still outside of their direct control. They came down here to check if I had it.”

Summer looked in the direction their car had gone. I could still smell its exhaust in the air. An acid tang from the catalyst.

“How do civilian medics work?” I asked her. “Suppose you’re my wife, and I go down with a heart attack? What do you do?”

“I call 911.”

“And then what happens?”

“The ambulance shows up. Takes you to the emergency room.”

“And let’s say I’m DOA when I get there. Where would you be?”

“I would have ridden to the hospital with you.”

“And where would my briefcase be?”

“At home,” she said. “Wherever you left it.” Then she paused. “What? You think someone went to Mrs. Kramer’s house last night looking for the briefcase?”

“It’s a plausible sequence,” I said. “Someone hears that he’s dead from a heart attack, assumes he was pronounced in the ambulance or the emergency room, assumes whoever he was with would have accompanied him, goes down there expecting to find an empty house with a briefcase in it.”

“But Kramer was never there.”

“It was a reasonable first try.”

“You think it was Vassell and Coomer?”

I said nothing.

“That’s crazy,” Summer said. “They don’t look the type.”

“Don’t let looks fool you. They’re Armored Branch. They’ve trained all their lives to roll right over anything that gets in their way. But I don’t think the timing works for them. Let’s say Garber called XII Corps in Germany at twelve-fifteen, earliest. Then let’s say XII Corps called the hotel back here in the States at twelve-thirty, earliest. Green Valley is seventy minutes from D.C. and Mrs. Kramer died at two o’clock. That would have given them a twenty-minute margin to react, maximum. They were just in from the airport, so they didn’t have a car with them, and it would have taken time to get hold of one. And they certainly didn’t have a crowbar with them. Nobody travels with a crowbar in their luggage, just in case. And I doubt if the Home Depot was open, after midnight on New Year’s Eve.”

“So someone else is out there looking?”

“We need to find that agenda,” I said. “We need to nail this thing down.”

I sent Summer away to do three things: first, list all female personnel at Fort Bird with access to their own Humvees, and second, list any of them who might have met Kramer at Fort Irwin in California, and third, contact the Jefferson Hotel in D.C. and get Vassell and Coomer’s exact check-in and checkout times, plus details on all their incoming and outgoing phone calls. I went back to my office and filed the note from Garber and spread the note from my brother on the blotter and dialed the number. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Joe,” I said.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“I got a call.”

“Who from?”

“Mom’s doctor,” he said.

“About what?”

“She’s dying.”

five

I hung up and called Garber’s office. He wasn’t in. So I left a message detailing my travel plans and saying I would be out for seventy-two hours. I didn’t give a reason. Then I hung up and sat at my desk, numb. Five minutes later Summer came in. She had a sheaf of motor-pool paper with her. I guess she planned on compiling her Humvee list there and then, right in front of me.

“I have to go to Paris,” I said.

“Paris, Texas?” she said. “Or Paris, Kentucky, or Paris, Tennessee?”

“Paris, France,” I said.

“Why?”

“My mother is sick.”

“Your mother lives in France?”

“Paris,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s French.”

“Is it serious?”

“Being French?”

“No, whatever she’s sick with.”

I shrugged. “I don’t really know. But I think so.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I need a car,” I said. “I need to get to Dulles, right now.”

“I’ll drive you,” she said. “I like driving.”

She left the paperwork on my desk and went to retrieve the Chevrolet we had used before. I went to my quarters and packed an army duffel with one of everything from my closet. Then I put on my long coat. It was cold, and I didn’t expect Europe was going to be any warmer. Not in early January. Summer brought the car to my door. She kept it at thirty until we were off-post. Then she lit it up like a rocket and headed north. She was quiet for a spell. She was thinking. Her eyelids were moving.

“We should tell the Green Valley cops,” she said. “If we think Mrs. Kramer was killed because of the briefcase.”

I shook my head. “Telling them won’t bring her back. And if she was killed because of the briefcase we’ll find whoever did it from our end.”

“What do you want me to do while you’re gone?”

“Work the lists,” I said. “Check the gate log. Find the woman, find the briefcase, put the agenda in a very safe place. Then check on who Vassell and Coomer called from the hotel. Maybe they sent an errand boy out into the night.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“But they didn’t know where Kramer was.”

“That’s why they tried the wrong place.”

“Who would they have sent?”

“Bound to be someone who has their interests close to his heart.”

“OK,” she said.

“And find out who was driving them just now.”

“OK,” she said.

We didn’t speak again, all the way to Dulles.

I met my brother Joe in the line at the Air France ticket desk. He had booked seats for both of us on the first morning flight. Now he was lining up to pay for them. I hadn’t seen him for almost three years. The last time we had been together was at our father’s funeral. Since then we had gone our separate ways.

“Good morning, little brother,” he said.

He was wearing an overcoat and a suit and a tie, and he looked pretty good in them. He was two years older than me, and he always had been, and he always would be. As a kid I used to study him and think, That’s how I’ll look when I grow up. Now I found myself doing it again. From a distance we could have been mistaken for each other. Standing side by side it was obvious that he was an inch taller and a little slighter than me. But mostly it was obvious that he was a little older than me. It looked like we had started out together, but he had seen the future first, and it had aged him, and worn him down.

“How are you, Joe?” I said.

“Can’t complain.”

“Busy?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

I nodded and said nothing. Truth is, I didn’t know exactly what he did for a living. He had probably told me. It wasn’t a national secret or anything. It was something to do with the Treasury Department. He had probably told me all the details and I probably hadn’t listened. Now it seemed too late to ask.

“You were in Panama,” he said. “Operation Just Cause, right?”

“Operation Just Because,” I said. “That’s what we called it.”

“Just because what?”

“Just because we could. Just because we all had to have something to do. Just because we’ve got a new Commander-in-Chief who wants to look tough.”

“Is it going well?”

“It’s like Notre Dame against the Tumble Tots. How else is it going to go?”

“You got Noriega yet?”

“Not yet.”

“So why did they post you back here?”

“We took twenty-seven thousand guys,” I said. “It wasn’t down to me personally.”

He smiled briefly and then got that narrow-eyed look I remembered from childhood. It meant he was figuring out some pedantic and convoluted line of reasoning. But we got to the head of the line before he had time to tell me about it. He took out his credit card and paid for the flights. Maybe he expected me to pay him back for mine, maybe he didn’t. He didn’t make it clear either way.

“Let’s get coffee now,” he said.

Joe was probably the only other human on the planet who liked coffee as much as I did. He started drinking it when he was six. I copied him immediately. I was four. Neither of us has stopped since. The Reacher brothers’ need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.

We found a place with a W-shaped counter snaking through it. It was three-quarters empty. It was harshly lit with fluorescent tubes and the vinyl on the stools was sticky. We sat side by side and rested our forearms on the counter in the universal pose of early-morning travelers everywhere. A guy in an apron put mugs in front of us without asking. Then he filled them with coffee from a flask. The coffee smelled fresh. The place was changing over from the all-night service to the breakfast menu. I could hear eggs frying.

“What happened in Panama?” Joe asked.

“To me?” I said. “Nothing.”

“What were your orders there?”

“Supervision.”

“Of what?”

“Of the process,” I said. “The Noriega thing is supposed to look judicial. He’s supposed to stand trial here in the States. So we’re supposed to grab him up with some kind of formality. Some way that will look acceptable when we get him in a courtroom.”

“You were going to read him his Miranda rights?”

“Not exactly. But it had to be better than some cowboy thing.”

“Did you screw up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who replaced you?”

“Some other guy.”

“Rank?”

“Same,” I said.

“A rising star?”

I sipped my coffee. Shook my head. “I never met him before. But he seemed like a bit of an asshole to me.”

Joe nodded and picked up his mug. Said nothing.

“What?” I said.

“Bird’s not a small post,” he said. “But it’s not real big either, right? What are you working on?”

“Right now? Some two-star died and I can’t find his briefcase.”

“Homicide?”

I shook my head. “Heart attack.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“After you got there?”

I said nothing.

“You sure you didn’t screw up?” Joe said.

“I don’t think so,” I said again.

“So why did they pull you out of Panama? One day you’re supervising the Noriega process, and the next day you’re in North Carolina with nothing to do? And you’d still have nothing to do if the general hadn’t died.”

“I got orders,” I said. “You know how it is. You have to assume they know what they’re doing.”

“Who signed the orders?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should find out. Find out who wanted you at Bird badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an asshole. And you should find out why.”

The guy in the apron refilled our mugs. Shoved plastic menus in front of us.

“Eggs,” Joe said. “Over well, bacon, toast.”

“Pancakes,” I said. “Egg on the top, bacon on the side, plenty of syrup.”

The guy took the menus back and went away and Joe turned around on his stool and sat back-to with his legs stretched way out into the aisle.

“What exactly did her doctor say?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Not very much. No details, no diagnosis. No real information. European doctors aren’t very good with bad news. They hedge around it all the time. Plus, there’s a privacy issue, obviously.”

“But we’re headed over there for a reason?”

He nodded. “He suggested we might want to come. And then he hinted that sooner might be better than later.”

“What is she saying?”

“That it’s all a lot of fuss about nothing. But that we’re always welcome to visit.”

We finished our breakfast and I paid for it. Then Joe gave me my ticket, like a transaction. I was sure he earned more than me, but probably not enough to make an airline ticket proportional to a plate of eggs and bacon with toast on the side. But I took the deal. We got off our stools and got our bearings and headed for the check-in counter.

“Take your coat off,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want the clerk to see your medal ribbons,” he said. “Military action going on overseas, we might get an upgrade.”

“It’s Air France,” I said. “France isn’t even a military member of NATO.”

“The check-in clerk will be American,” Joe said. “Try it.”

I shrugged out of my coat. Folded it over my arm and walked sideways so the left of my chest stuck out forward.

“OK now?” I said.

“Perfect,” he said, and smiled.

I smiled back. Left-to-right on the top row I wear the Silver Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit. Second row has the Soldier’s Medal, the Bronze Star, and my Purple Heart. The bottom two rows are the junk awards. I won all of the good stuff purely by accident and none of it means very much to me. Using it to get an upgrade out of an airline clerk is about what it’s good for. But Joe liked the top two rows. He served five years in Military Intelligence and didn’t get past the junk.

We made it to the head of the line and he put his passport and ticket on the counter along with a Treasury Department ID. Then he stepped behind my shoulder. I put my own passport and ticket down. He nudged me in the back. I turned a little sideways and looked at the clerk.

“Can you find us something with legroom?” I asked him.

He was a small man, middle-aged, tired. He looked up at us. Together we measured almost thirteen feet tall and weighed about four hundred fifty pounds. He studied the Treasury ID and looked at my uniform and pattered on his keyboard and came up with a forced smile.

“We’ll seat you gentlemen up front,” he said.

Joe nudged me in the back again and I knew he was smiling.

We were in the last row of the first-class cabin. We were talking, but we were avoiding the obvious subject. We talked about music, and then politics. We had another breakfast. We drank coffee. Air France makes pretty good coffee in first class.

“Who was the general?” Joe asked.

“Guy called Kramer,” I said. “An Armored commander in Europe.”

“Armored? So why was he at Bird?”

“He wasn’t on the post. He was at a motel thirty miles away. Rendezvous with a woman. We think she ran away with his briefcase.”

“Civilian?”

I shook my head. “We think she was an officer from Bird. He was supposed to be overnighting in D.C. on his way to California for a conference.”

“That’s a three-hundred-mile detour.”

“Two hundred and ninety-eight.”

“But you don’t know who she is.”

“She’s fairly senior. She drove her own Humvee out to the motel.”

“She has to be fairly senior. Kramer’s known her for a good spell, to make it worth driving a five-hundred-ninety-six-mile round-trip detour.”

I smiled. Anyone else would have said a six-hundred-mile detour. But not my brother. Like me he has no middle name. But it should be Pedantic. Joe Pedantic Reacher.

“Bird is still all infantry, right?” he said. “Some Rangers, some Delta, but mostly grunts, as I recall. So have you got many senior women?”

“There’s a Psy-Ops school now,” I said. “Half the instructors are women.”

“Rank?”

“Some captains, some majors, a couple of light colonels.”

“What was in the briefcase?”

“The agenda for the California conference,” I said. “Kramer’s staffers are pretending there isn’t one.”

“There’s always an agenda,” Joe said.

“I know.”

“Check the majors and the light colonels,” he said. “That would be my advice.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“And find out who wanted you at Bird,” he said. “And why. This Kramer thing wasn’t the reason. We know that for sure. Kramer was alive and well when your orders were cut.”

We read day-old copies of Le Matin and Le Monde. About halfway through the flight we started talking in French. We were pretty rusty, but we got by. Once learned, never forgotten. He asked me about girlfriends. I guess he figured it was an appropriate subject for discussion in the French language. I told him I had been seeing a girl in Korea but since then I had been moved to the Philippines and then Panama and now to North Carolina so I didn’t expect to see her again. I told him about Lieutenant Summer. He seemed interested in her. He told me he wasn’t seeing anyone.

Then he switched back to English and asked when I had last been in Germany.

“Six months ago,” I said.

“It’s the end of an era,” he said. “Germany will reunify. France will renew its nuclear testing because a reunified Germany will bring back bad memories. Then it will propose a common currency for the EC as a way of keeping the new Germany inside the tent. Ten years from now Poland will be in NATO and the USSR won’t exist anymore. There’ll be some rump nation. Maybe it will be in NATO too.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“So Kramer chose a good time to check out. Everything will be different in the future.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to do?”

“When?”

He turned in his seat and looked at me. “There’s going to be force reduction, Jack. You should face it. They’re not going to keep a million-man army going, not when the other guy has fallen apart.”

“He hasn’t fallen apart yet.”

“But he will. It’ll be over within a year. Gorbachev won’t last. There’ll be a coup. The old communists will make one last play, but it won’t stick. Then the reformers will be back forever. Yeltsin, probably. He’s OK. So in D.C. the temptation to save money will be irresistible. It’ll be like a hundred Christmases coming all at once. Never forget your Commander-in-Chief is primarily a politician.”

I thought back to the sergeant with the baby son.

“It’ll happen slowly,” I said.

Joe shook his head. “It’ll happen faster than you think.”

“We’ll always have enemies,” I said.

“No question,” he said. “But they’ll be different kinds of enemies. They won’t have ten thousand tanks lined up across the plains of Germany.”

I said nothing.

“You should find out why you’re at Bird,” Joe said. “Either nothing much is happening there, and therefore you’re on the way down, or something is happening there, and they want you around to deal with it, in which case you’re on the way up.”

I said nothing.

“You need to know either way,” he said. “Force reduction is coming, and you need to know if you’re up or down right now.”

“They’ll always need cops,” I said. “They bring it down to a two-man army, one of them better be an MP.”

“You should make a plan,” he said.

“I never make plans.”

“You need to.”

I traced my fingertips across the ribbons on my chest.

“They got me a seat in the front of the plane,” I said. “Maybe they’ll keep me in a job.”

“Maybe they will,” Joe said. “But even if they do, will it be a job you want? Everything’s going to get horribly second-rate.”

I noticed his shirt cuffs. They were clean and crisp and secured by discreet cuff links made from silver and black onyx. His tie was a plain somber item made from silk. He had shaved carefully. The bottom of his sideburn was cut exactly square. My brother was a man horrified by anything less than the best.

“A job’s a job,” I said. “I’m not choosy.”

We slept the rest of the way. We were woken by the pilot on the PA telling us we were about to start our descent into Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. Local time was eight o’clock in the evening. Nearly the whole of the second day of the new decade had disappeared like a mirage as we slid through one Atlantic time zone after another.

We changed some money and hiked over to the taxi line. It was a mile long, full of people and luggage. It was hardly moving. So we found a navette instead, which is what the French call an airport shuttle bus. We had to stand all the way through the dreary northern suburbs and into the center of Paris. We got out at the Place de l’Opéra at nine in the evening. Paris was dark and damp and cold and quiet. Cafés and restaurants had warm lights burning behind closed doors and fogged windows. The streets were wet and lined with small parked cars. The cars were all misted over with nighttime dew. We walked together south and west and crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde. Turned west again along the Quai d’Orsay. The river was dark and sluggish. Nothing was moving on it. The streets were empty. Nobody was out and about.

“Should we get flowers?” I asked.

“Too late,” Joe said. “Everything’s closed.”

We turned left at the Place de la Résistance and walked into the Avenue Rapp, side by side. We saw the Eiffel Tower on our right as we passed the mouth of the Rue de l’Université. It was lit up in gold. Our heels sounded like rifle shots on the silent sidewalk. We arrived at my mother’s building. It was a modest six-story stone apartment house trapped between two gaudier Belle Époque facades. Joe took his hand out of his pocket and unlocked the street door.

“You have a key?” I said.

He nodded. “I’ve always had a key.”

Inside the street door was a cobbled alley that led through to the center courtyard. The concierge’s room was on the left. Beyond it was a small alcove with a small, slow elevator. We rode it up to the fifth floor. Stepped out into a high, wide hallway. It was dimly lit. It had dark decorative tiles on the floor. The right-hand apartment had tall oak double doors with a discreet brass plaque engraved: M. & Mme. Girard. The left-hand doors were painted off-white and labeled: Mme. Reacher.

We knocked and waited.

six

We heard slow shuffling steps inside the apartment and a long moment later my mother opened the door.

“Bonsoir, Maman,” Joe said.

I just stared at her.

She was very thin and very gray and very stooped and she looked about a hundred years older than the last time I had seen her. She had a long heavy plaster cast on her left leg and she was leaning on an aluminum walker. Her hands were gripping it hard and I could see bones and veins and tendons standing out. She was trembling. Her skin looked translucent. Only her eyes were the same as I remembered them. They were blue and merry and filled with amusement.

“Joe,” she said. “And Reacher.”

She always called me by my last name. Nobody remembered why. Maybe I had started it, as a kid. Maybe she had continued it, the way families do.

“My boys,” she said. “Just look at the two of you.”

She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.

“What happened?” I said.

“Come inside,” she said. “Make yourselves at home.”

She turned the walker around with short clumsy movements and shuffled back through the hallway. She was panting and wheezing. I stepped in after her. Joe closed the door and followed me. The hallway was narrow and tall and was followed by a living room with wood floors and white sofas and white walls and framed mirrors. My mother made her way to a sofa and backed up to it slowly and dropped herself into it. She seemed to disappear in its depth.

“What happened?” I asked again.

She wouldn’t answer. She just waved the inquiry away with an impatient movement of her hand. Joe and I sat down, side by side.

“You’re going to have to tell us,” I said.

“We came all this way,” Joe said.

“I thought you were just visiting,” she said.

“No you didn’t,” I said.

She stared at a spot on the wall.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Well, it was just bad timing.”

“In what way?”

“I got unlucky,” she said.

“How?”

“I was hit by a car,” she said. “It broke my leg.”

“Where? When?”

“Two weeks ago,” she said. “Right outside my door, here on the Avenue. It was raining, I had an umbrella, it was shading my eyes, I stepped out, and the driver saw me and braked, but the pavé was wet and the car slid right into me, very slowly, like slow motion, but I was transfixed and I couldn’t move. I felt it hit my knee, very gently, like a kiss, but it snapped a bone. It hurt like hell.”

I saw in my mind the guy in the parking lot outside the nude bar near Bird, writhing around in an oily puddle.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Joe asked.

She didn’t answer.

“But it’ll mend, right?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s trivial.”

Joe just looked at me.

“What else?” I said.

She kept on looking at the wall. Did the dismissive thing with her hand again.

“What else?” Joe asked.

She looked at me, and then she looked at him.

“They gave me an X ray,” she said. “I’m an old woman, according to them. According to them, old women who break bones are at risk from pneumonia. Because we’re laid up and immobile and our lungs can fill and get infected.”

“And?”

She said nothing.

“Have you got pneumonia?” I said.

“No.”

“So what happened?”

“They found out. With the X ray.”

“Found what out?”

“That I have cancer.”

Nobody spoke for a long time.

“But you already knew,” I said.

She smiled at me, like she always did.

“Yes, darling,” she said. “I already knew.”

“For how long?”

“For a year,” she said.

Nobody spoke.

“What sort of cancer?” Joe said.

“Every sort there is, now.”

“Is it treatable?”

She shook her head.

“Was it treatable?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”

“What were the symptoms?”

“I had stomachaches. I had no appetite.”

“Then it spread?”

“Now I hurt all over. It’s in my bones. And this stupid leg doesn’t help.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate.

“What was to tell?” she said.

“Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”

She didn’t answer for a time.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Of what?” Joe said. “Life?”

She smiled. “No, Joe, I mean I’m tired. It’s late and I need to go to bed, is what I mean. We’ll talk some more tomorrow. I promise. Don’t let’s have a lot of fuss now.”

We let her go to bed. We had to. We had no choice. She was the most stubborn woman imaginable. We found stuff to eat in her kitchen. She had laid in provisions for us. That was clear. Her refrigerator was stocked with the kinds of things that wouldn’t interest a woman with no appetite. We ate pâté and cheese and made coffee and sat at her table to drink it. The Avenue Rapp was still and silent and deserted, five floors below her window.

“What do you think?” Joe asked me.

“I think she’s dying,” I said. “That’s why we came, after all.”

“Can we make her get treatment?”

“It’s too late. It would be a waste of time. And we can’t make her do anything. When could anyone make her do what she didn’t want to?”

“Why doesn’t she want to?”

“I don’t know.”

He just looked at me.

“She’s a fatalist,” I said.

“She’s only sixty years old.”

I nodded. She had been thirty when I was born, and forty-eight when I stopped living wherever we called home. I hadn’t noticed her age at all. At forty-eight she had looked younger than I did when I was twenty-eight. I had last seen her a year and a half ago. I had stopped by Paris for two days, en route from Germany to the Middle East. She had been fine. She had looked great. She was about two years into widowhood then, and like with a lot of people the two-year threshold had been like turning a corner. She had looked like a person with a lot of life left.

“Why didn’t she tell us?” Joe said.

“I don’t know.”

“I wish she had.”

“Shit happens,” I said.

Joe just nodded.

She had made up her guest room with clean fresh sheets and towels and she had put flowers in bone china vases on the nightstands. It was a small fragrant room full of two twin beds. I pictured her struggling around with her walker, fighting with duvets, folding corners, smoothing things out.

Joe and I didn’t talk. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up in the bathroom. Set the clock in my head for seven the next morning and got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling for an hour. Then I went to sleep.

I woke at exactly seven. Joe was already up. Maybe he hadn’t slept at all. Maybe he was accustomed to a more regular lifestyle than I was. Maybe the jet lag bothered him more. I showered and took fatigue pants and a T-shirt from my duffel and put them on. Found Joe in the kitchen. He had coffee going.

“Mom’s still asleep,” he said. “Medication, probably.”

“I’ll go get breakfast,” I said.

I put my coat on and walked a block to a pâtisserie I knew on the Rue St.-Dominique. I bought croissants and pain au chocolat and carried the waxed bag home. My mother was still in her room when I got back.

“She’s committing suicide,” Joe said. “We can’t let her.”

I said nothing.

“What?” he said. “If she picked up a gun and held it to her head, wouldn’t you stop her?”

I shrugged. “She already put the gun to her head. She pulled the trigger a year ago. We’re too late. She made sure we would be.”

“Why?”

“We have to wait for her to tell us.”

She told us during a conversation that lasted most of the day. It proceeded in bits and pieces. We started over breakfast. She came out of her room, all showered and dressed and looking about as good as a terminal cancer patient with a broken leg and an aluminum walker can. She made fresh coffee and put the croissants I had bought on good china and served us quite formally at the table. The way she took charge spooled us all backward in time. Joe and I shrank back to skinny kids and she bloomed into the matriarch she had once been. A military wife and mother has a pretty hard time, and some handle it, and some don’t. She always had. Wherever we had lived had been home. She had seen to that.

“I was born three hundred meters from here,” she said. “On the Avenue Bosquet. I could see Les Invalides and the École Militaire from my window. I was ten when the Germans came to Paris. I thought that was the end of the world. I was fifteen when they left. I thought that was the beginning of a new one.”

Joe and I said nothing.

“Every day since then has been a bonus,” she said. “I met your father, I had you boys, I traveled the world. I don’t think there’s a country I haven’t been to.”

We said nothing.

“I’m French,” she said. “You’re American. There’s a world of difference. An American gets sick, she’s outraged. How dare that happen to her? She must have the fault corrected immediately, at once. But French people understand that first you live, and then you die. It’s not an outrage. It’s something that’s been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen, don’t you see? If people didn’t die, the world would be an awfully crowded place by now.”

“It’s about when you die,” Joe said.

My mother nodded.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “You die when it’s your time.”

“That’s too passive.”

“No, it’s realistic, Joe. It’s about picking your battles. Sure, of course you cure the little things. If you’re in an accident, you get yourself patched up. But some battles can’t be won. Don’t think I didn’t consider this whole thing very carefully. I read books. I spoke to friends. The success rates after the symptoms have already shown themselves are very poor. Five-year survival, ten percent, twenty percent, who needs it? And that’s after truly horrible treatments.”

It’s about when you die. We spent the morning going back and forth on Joe’s central question. We talked it through, from one direction, then from another. But the conclusion was always the same. Some battles can’t be won. And it was a moot point, anyway. It was a discussion that should have happened twelve months ago. It was no longer appropriate.

Joe and I ate lunch. My mother didn’t. I waited for Joe to ask the next obvious question. It was just hanging there. Eventually, he got to it. Joe Reacher, thirty-two years of age, six feet six inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, a West Point graduate, some kind of a Treasury Department big shot, placed his palms flat on the table and looked into his mother’s eyes.

“Won’t you miss us, Mom?” he asked.

“Wrong question,” she said. “I’ll be dead. I won’t be missing anything. It’s you that will be missing me. Like you miss your father. Like I miss him. Like I miss my father, and my mother, and my grandparents. It’s a part of life, missing the dead.”

We said nothing.

“You’re really asking me a different question,” she said. “You’re asking, how can I abandon you? You’re asking, aren’t I concerned with your affairs anymore? Don’t I want to see what happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you?”

We said nothing.

“I understand,” she said. “Truly, I do. I asked myself the same questions. It’s like walking out of a movie. Being made to walk out of a movie that you’re really enjoying. That’s what worried me about it. I would never know how it turned out. I would never know what happened to you boys in the end, with your lives. I hated that part. But then I realized, obviously I’ll walk out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives forever. I’ll never know how it turns out for you. I’ll never know what happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the best of circumstances. I realized that. Then it didn’t seem to matter so much. It will always be an arbitrary date. It will always leave me wanting more.”

We sat quiet for a spell.

“How long?” Joe asked.

“Not long,” she said.

We said nothing.

“You don’t need me anymore,” she told us. “You’re all grown up. My job is done. That’s natural, and that’s good. That’s life. So let me go.”

By six in the evening we were all talked out. Nobody had spoken for an hour. Then my mother sat up straight in her chair.

“Let’s go out to dinner,” she said. “Let’s go to Polidor, on Rue Monsieur Le Prince.”

We called a cab and rode it to the Odéon. Then we walked. My mother wanted to. She was bundled up in a coat and she was hanging on our arms and moving slow and awkward, but I think she enjoyed the air. Rue Monsieur Le Prince cuts the corner between the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Boulevard St.-Michel, in the Sixième. It may be the most Parisian street in the whole of the city. Narrow, diverse, slightly seedy, flanked by tall plaster facades, bustling. Polidor is a famous old restaurant. It makes you feel all kinds of people have eaten there. Gourmets, spies, painters, fugitives, cops, robbers.

We all ordered the same three courses. Chèvre chaud, porc aux pruneaux, dames blanches. We ordered a fine red wine. But my mother ate nothing and drank nothing. She just watched us. There was pain showing in her face. Joe and I ate, self-consciously. She talked, exclusively about the past. But there was no sadness. She relived good times. She laughed. She rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe’s forehead and scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she always did. I rolled up my sleeve like I always did and showed her where he had stuck me with a chisel in revenge, and she scolded him equally. She talked about things we had made her in school. She talked about birthday parties we had thrown, on grim faraway bases in the heat, or the cold. She talked about our father, about meeting him in Korea, about marrying him in Holland, about his awkward manner, about the two bunches of flowers he had bought her in all their thirty-three years together, one when Joe was born, and one when I was.

“Why didn’t you tell us a year ago?” Joe asked.

“You know why,” she said.

“Because we would have argued,” I said.

She nodded.

“It was a decision that belonged to me,” she said.

We had coffee and Joe and I smoked cigarettes. Then the waiter brought the bill and we asked him to call a cab for us. We rode back to the Avenue Rapp in silence. We all went to bed without saying much.

I woke early on the fourth day of the new decade. Heard Joe in the kitchen, talking French. I went in there and found him with a woman. She was young and brisk. She had short neat hair and luminous eyes. She told me she was my mother’s private nurse, provided under the terms of an old insurance policy. She told me she normally came in seven days a week, but had missed the day before at my mother’s request. She told me my mother had wanted a day alone with her sons. I asked the girl how long each visit lasted. She said she stayed as long as she was needed. She told me the old insurance policy would cover up to twenty-four hours a day, as and when it became necessary, which she thought might be very soon.

The girl with the luminous eyes left and I went back to the bedroom and showered and packed my bag. Joe came in and watched me do it.

“You leaving?” he said.

“We both are. You know that.”

“We should stay.”

“We came. That’s what she wanted. Now she wants us to go.”

“You think?”

I nodded. “Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying good-bye. She wants to be left in peace now.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s what she wants. We owe it to her.”

I got breakfast items again in the Rue St.-Dominique and we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three of us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was acting like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a broken leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was how she wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed things to each other, politely. It was a civilized meal. Like we used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.

Then she revisited another old family ritual. She did something she had done ten thousand times before, all through our lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of our own. She struggled up out of her chair and stepped over and put her hands on Joe’s shoulders, from behind. Then she bent and kissed his cheek.

“What don’t you need to do?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer. He never did. Our silence was part of the ritual.

“You don’t need to solve all the world’s problems, Joe. Only some of them. There are enough to go around.”

She kissed his cheek again. Then she kept one hand on the back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved herself over behind me. I could hear her ragged breathing. She kissed my cheek. Then like she used to all those years before she put her hands on my shoulders. Measured them, side to side. She was a small woman, fascinated by the way her baby had grown into a giant.

“You’ve got the strength of two normal boys,” she said.

Then came my own personal question.

“What are you going to do with this strength?” she asked me.

I didn’t answer. I never did.

“You’re going to do the right thing,” she said.

Then she bent down and kissed me on the cheek again.

I thought: Was that the last time?

We left thirty minutes later. We hugged long and hard at the door and we told her we loved her, and she told us she loved us too and she always had. She stood there and we went down in the tiny elevator and set out on the long walk back to the Opéra to get the airport bus. Our eyes were full of tears and we didn’t talk at all. My medals meant nothing to the check-in girl at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. She sat us in the back of the plane. About halfway through the flight I picked up Le Monde and saw that Noriega had been found in Panama City. A week ago I had lived and breathed that mission. Now I barely remembered it. I put the paper down and tried to look ahead. Tried to remember where I was supposed to be going, and what I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I had no real recollection. No sense of what was going to happen. If I had, I would have stayed in Paris.

seven

Going west the time changes lengthened the day instead of shortening it. They paid us back the hours we had lost two days before. We landed at Dulles at two in the afternoon. I said good-bye to Joe and he found the cab line and headed into the city. I went looking for buses and was arrested before I found any.

Who guards the guards? Who arrests an MP? In my case it was a trio of warrant officers working directly for the Provost Marshal General’s office. There were two W3s and a W4. The W4 showed me his credentials and his orders and then the W3s showed me their Berettas and their handcuffs and the W4 gave me a choice: either behave myself or get knocked on my ass. I smiled, briefly. I approved of his performance. He carried himself well. I doubted if I would have done it any different, or any better.

“Are you armed, Major?” he said.

“No,” I said.

I would have been worried for the army if he had believed me. Some W4s would have. They would have been intimidated by the sensitivities involved. Arresting a superior officer from your own corps is tough duty. But this particular W4 did everything right. He heard me say No and nodded to his W3s and they moved in to pat me down about as fast as if I had said Yes, with a nuclear warhead. One of them did the body search and the other went through my duffel. They were both very thorough. Took them a good few minutes before they were satisfied.

“Do I need to put the cuffs on you?” the W4 asked.

I shook my head. “Where’s the car?”

He didn’t answer. The W3s formed up one on either side and slightly behind me. The W4 walked in front. We crossed the sidewalk and passed by the bay where the buses were waiting and headed for an official-vehicle-only lane. There was an olive green sedan parked there. This was their time of maximum danger. A determined man would be tensing up at that point, ready to make his break. They knew it, and they formed up a little tighter. They were a good team. Three against one, they reduced the odds to maybe fifty-fifty. But I let them put me in the car. Afterward, I wondered what would have happened if I had run for it. Sometimes, I found myself wishing that I had.

The car was a Chevrolet Caprice. It had been white before the army sprayed it green. I saw the original color inside the door frame. It had vinyl seats and manual windows. Civilian police specification. I slid across the rear bench and settled in the corner behind the front passenger seat. One of the W3s crammed in next to me and the other got behind the wheel. The W4 sat next to him up front. Nobody spoke.

We headed east toward the city on the main highway. I was probably five minutes behind Joe in his taxi. We turned south and east and drove through Tysons Corner. At that point I knew for sure where we were going. A couple of miles later we picked up signs to Rock Creek. Rock Creek was a small town twenty-some miles due north of Fort Belvoir and forty-some north and east of the Marine place at Quantico. It was as close as I got to a permanent duty station. It housed the 110th Special Unit headquarters. So I knew where we were headed. But I had no idea why.

One Hundred and Tenth headquarters was basically an office and supply facility. There were no cells. No secure holding facilities. They locked me up in an interview room. Just dumped my bag on the table and locked the door and left me there. It was a room I had locked guys in before. So I knew how it was done. One of the W3s would be on station in the corridor outside. Maybe both of them would be. So I just tilted the plain wooden chair back and put my feet on the table and waited.

I waited an hour. I was uncomfortable and hungry and dehydrated from the plane. I figured if they knew all of that they’d have kept me waiting two hours. Or more. As it was they came back after sixty minutes. The W4 led the way and gestured with his chin that I should stand up and follow him out the door. The W3s fell in behind me. They walked me up two flights of stairs. Led me left and right through plain gray passageways. At that point I knew for sure where we were going. We were going to Leon Garber’s office. But I didn’t know why.

They stopped me outside his door. It had reeded glass with CO painted on it in gold. I had been through it many times. But never while in custody. The W4 knocked and waited and opened the door and stepped back to let me walk inside. He closed the door behind me and stayed on the other side of it, out in the corridor with his guys.

Behind Garber’s desk was a man I had never seen before. He was a colonel. He was in BDUs. His tape said: Willard, U.S. Army. He had iron-gray hair parted in a schoolboy style. It needed a trim. He had steel-rimmed eyeglasses and the kind of gray pouchy face that must have looked old when he was twenty. He was short and relatively squat and the way his shoulders failed to fill his BDUs told me he spent no time at all in the gym. He had a problem sitting still. He was rocking to his left and plucking at his pants where they went tight over his right knee. Before I had been in the room ten seconds he had adjusted his position three times. Maybe he had hemorrhoids. Maybe he was nervous. He had soft hands. Ragged nails. No wedding band. Divorced, for sure. He looked the type. No wife would let him walk about with hair like that. And no wife could have stood all that rocking and twitching. Not for very long.

I should have come smartly to attention and saluted and announced: Sir, Major Reacher reports. That would have been the standard army etiquette. But I was damned if I was going to do that. I just took a long lazy look around and came to rest standing easy in front of the desk.

“I need explanations,” the guy called Willard said.

He moved in his chair again.

“Who are you?” I said.

“You can see who I am.”

“I can see you’re a colonel in the U.S. Army named Willard. But I can’t explain anything to you before I know whether or not you’re in my chain of command.”

“I am your chain of command, son. What does it say on my door?”

“Commanding officer,” I said.

“And where are we?”

“Rock Creek, Virginia,” I said.

“OK, asked and answered,” he said.

“You’re new,” I said. “We haven’t met.”

“I assumed this command forty-eight hours ago. And now we’ve met. And now I need explanations.”

“Of what?”

“You were UA, for a start,” he said.

“Unauthorized absence?” I said. “When?”

“The last seventy-two hours.”

“Incorrect,” I said.

“How so?”

“My absence was authorized by Colonel Garber.”

“It was not.”

“I called this office,” I said.

“When?”

“Before I left.”

“Did you receive his authorization?”

I paused. “I left a message. Are you saying he denied authorization?”

“He wasn’t here. He got orders for Korea some hours earlier.”

“Korea?”

“He got the MP command there.”

“That’s a Brigadier General’s job.”

“He’s acting. The promotion will no doubt be confirmed in the fall.”

I said nothing.

“Garber’s gone,” Willard said. “I’m here. The military merry-go-round continues. Get used to it.”

The room went quiet. Willard smiled at me. Not a pleasant smile. It was close to a sneer. The rug was out from under my feet, and he was watching me hit the ground.

“It was good of you to leave your travel plans,” he said. “It made today easier.”

“You think the arrest was appropriate for UA?”

“You don’t?”

“It was a simple miscommunication.”

“You left your assigned post without authorization, Major. Those are the facts. Just because you had a vague expectation that authorization might be granted doesn’t alter them. This is the army. We don’t act in advance of orders or permissions. We wait until they are properly received and confirmed. The alternative would be anarchy and chaos.”

I said nothing.

“Where did you go?”

I pictured my mother, leaning on her aluminum walker. I pictured my brother’s face as he watched me pack.

“I took a short vacation,” I said. “I went to the beach.”

“The arrest wasn’t for the UA,” Willard said. “It was because you wore Class As on the evening of New Year’s Day.”

“That’s an offense now?”

“You wore your nameplate.”

I said nothing.

“You put two civilians in the hospital. While wearing your nameplate.”

I stared at him. Thought hard. I didn’t believe the fat guy and the farmer had dropped a dime on me. Not possible. They were stupid, but they weren’t that stupid. They knew I knew where I could find them.

“Who says so?” I asked.

“You had a big audience in that parking lot.”

“One of ours?”

Willard nodded.

“Who?” I said.

“No need for you to know.”

I kept quiet.

“You got anything to say?” Willard asked me.

I thought: He won’t testify at the court-martial. That’s for damn sure. That’s what I’ve got to say.

“Nothing to say,” I said.

“What do you think I should do with you?”

I said nothing.

“What do you think I should do?”

You should figure out the difference between a hard-ass and a dumb-ass, pal. You should figure it out real quick.

“Your choice,” I said. “Your decision.”

He nodded. “I also have reports from General Vassell and Colonel Coomer.”

“Saying what?”

“Saying you acted in a disrespectful manner toward them.”

“Then those reports are incorrect.”

“Like the UA was incorrect?”

I said nothing.

“Stand at attention,” Willard said.

I looked at him. Counted One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Then I came to attention.

“That was slow,” he said.

“I’m not looking to win a drill competition,” I said.

“What was your interest in Vassell and Coomer?”

“An agenda for an Armored Branch conference is missing. I need to know if it contained classified information.”

“There was no agenda,” Willard said. “Vassell and Coomer have made that perfectly clear. To me, and to you. To ask is permissible. You have that right, technically. But to willfully disbelieve a senior officer’s direct answer is disrespectful. It’s close to harassment.”

“Sir, I do this stuff for a living. I believe there was an agenda.”

Now Willard said nothing.

“May I ask what was your previous command?” I said.

He shifted in his chair.

“Intelligence,” he said.

“Field agent?” I asked. “Or desk jockey?”

He didn’t answer. Desk jockey.

“Did you have conferences without agendas?” I asked.

He looked straight at me.

“Direct orders, Major,” he said. “One, terminate your interest in Vassell and Coomer. Forthwith, and immediately. Two, terminate your interest in General Kramer. We don’t want flags raised on that matter, not under the circumstances. Three, terminate Lieutenant Summer’s involvement in special unit affairs. Forthwith, and immediately. She’s a junior-grade MP and after reading her file as far as I’m concerned she always will be. Four, do not attempt to make further contact with the local civilians you injured. And five, do not attempt to identify the eyewitness against you in that matter.”

I said nothing.

“Do you understand your orders?” he said.

“I’d like them in writing,” I said.

“Verbal will do,” he said. “Do you understand your orders?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Dismissed.”

I counted One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Then I saluted and turned around. I made it all the way to the door before he fired his parting shot.

“They tell me you’re a big star, Reacher,” he said. “So right now you need to decide whether you keep on being a big star, or whether you let yourself become an arrogant smart-ass son of a bitch. And you need to remember that nobody likes arrogant smart-ass sons of bitches. And you need to remember we’re coming to a point where it’s going to matter whether people like you or not. It’s going to matter a lot.”

I said nothing.

“Do I make myself clear, Major?”

“Crystal,” I said.

I got my hand on the door handle.

“One last thing,” he said. “I’m going to sit on the brutality complaint. For as long as I possibly can. Out of respect for your record. You’re very lucky that it came up internally. But I want you to remember that it’s here, and it stays active.”

I left Rock Creek just before five in the afternoon. Caught a bus into Washington D.C., and another one south down I-95. Then I removed my lapel insignia and hitched the final thirty miles to Bird. It works a little faster that way. Most of the local traffic is enlisted men, or retired enlisted men, or their families, and most of them are suspicious of MPs. So experience had taught me things went better if you kept your badges in your pocket.

I got a ride and got out two hundred yards short of Bird’s main gate, a few minutes past eleven in the evening, January fourth, after a little more than six hours on the road. North Carolina was pitch dark and cold. Very cold, so I jogged the two hundred yards to heat myself up. I was out of breath when I got to the gate. I was logged in and I ran down to my office. It was warm inside. The night-watch sergeant with the baby son was on duty. She had coffee going. She gave me a cup and I walked into my office and found a note from Summer waiting for me on my desk. The note was clipped to a slim green file. The file had three lists in it. The women-with-Humvees list, the women-from-Irwin list, and the main gate log for New Year’s Eve. The first two lists were relatively short. The gate log was a riot. People had been in and out all night long, partying. But only one name was common to all three compilations: Lt/Col Andrea Norton. Summer had circled the name in all three locations. Her note said: Call me about Norton. Hope your mom was OK.

I found the old message slip with Joe’s telephone number on it and called him first.

“You holding up?” I asked him.

“We should have stayed,” he said.

“She gave the nurse one day off,” I said. “One day was what she wanted.”

“We should have stayed anyway.”

“She doesn’t want spectators,” I said.

Joe didn’t answer. The phone was hot and silent against my ear.

“I’ve got a question,” I said. “When you were at the Pentagon, did you know an asshole called Willard?”

He stayed quiet for a long moment, changing gears, searching his memory. He had been out of Intelligence for some time.

“Squat little man?” he said. “Couldn’t sit still? Always shuffling around on his chair, fussing with his pants? He was a desk guy. A major, I think.”

“He’s a full colonel now,” I said. “He just got assigned to the 110th. He’s my CO at Rock Creek.”

“MI to the 110th? That makes sense.”

“Makes no sense to me.”

“It’s the new theory,” Joe said. “They’re copying private-sector doctrine. They think know-nothings are good because they’re not invested in the status quo. They think they bring fresh perspectives.”

“Anything I should know about this guy?”

“You called him an asshole, so it sounds like you already know about him. He was smart, but he was an asshole, for sure. Vicious, petty, very corporate, good at office politics, exclusively interested in number one, excellent ass-kisser, always knew which way the wind was blowing.”

I said nothing.

“Hopeless with women,” Joe said. “I remember that.”

I said nothing.

“He’s a perfect example,” Joe said. “Like we discussed. He was on the Soviet desk. He monitored their tank production and fuel consumption, as I recall. I think he worked out some kind of an algorithm that told us what kind of training Soviet armor was doing based on how much fuel they were eating. He was hot for a year or so. But now I guess he’s seen the future. He got himself out while the getting was good. You should do the same. At least you should think about it. Like we discussed.”

I said nothing.

“Meanwhile, watch your step,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t want Willard for a boss.”

“I’ll be OK,” I said.

“We should have stayed in Paris,” he said, and hung up.

I found Summer in the O Club bar. She had a beer on the go and was leaning on the wall with a couple of W2s. She moved away from them when she saw me.

“Garber’s gone to Korea,” I said. “We got a new guy.”

“Who?”

“A colonel called Willard. From Intelligence.”

“So how is he qualified?”

“He isn’t qualified. He’s an asshole.”

“Doesn’t that piss you off?”

I shrugged. “He’s telling us to stay away from the Kramer thing.”

“Are we going to?”

“He’s telling me to stop talking to you. He says he’s going to turn down your application.”

She went very quiet. Looked away.

“Shit,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you wanted it.”

She looked back at me.

“Is he serious about the Kramer thing?” she asked.

I nodded. “He’s serious about everything. He had me arrested at the airport, to make all his various points.”

“Arrested?”

I nodded again. “Someone ratted me out for those guys in the parking lot.”

“Who?”

“One of the grunts in the audience.”

“One of ours? Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s cold.”

I nodded. “Never happened to me before.”

She went quiet again.

“How was your mom?” she said.

“She broke her leg,” I said. “No big deal.”

“They can get pneumonia.”

I nodded again. “She had the X ray. No pneumonia.”

Her lower eyelids moved upward.

“Can I ask the obvious question?” she said.

“Is there one?”

“Aggravated battery against civilians is a big deal. And apparently there’s a report and an eyewitness, good enough to get you arrested.”

“So?”

“So why are you still walking around?”

“Willard’s sitting on it.”

“But why would he, if he’s an asshole?”

“Out of respect for my record. That’s what he said.”

“Did you believe him?”

I shook my head.

“There must be something wrong with the complaint,” I said. “An asshole like Willard would use it if he could, that’s for sure. He doesn’t care about my record.”

“Can’t be something wrong with the complaint. A military witness is the best kind they can get. He’ll testify to whatever they tell him to. It’s like Willard would be writing the complaint himself.”

I said nothing.

“And why are you here at all?” she asked.

I heard Joe say: You should find out who wanted you at Bird badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an asshole.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “I don’t know anything. Tell me about Lieutenant Colonel Norton.”

“We’re off the case.”

“So just tell me for interest’s sake.”

“It isn’t her. She’s got an alibi. She was at a party in a bar off-post. All night long. About a hundred people were there with her.”

“Who is she?”

“Psy-Ops instructor. She’s a psychosexual Ph.D. who specializes in attacking an enemy’s internal emotional security concerning his feelings of masculinity.”

“She sounds like a fun lady.”

“She was invited to a party in a bar. Someone thinks she’s a fun lady.”

“Did you check who drove Vassell and Coomer down here?”

Summer nodded. “Our gate guys list him as a Major Marshall. I looked him up, and he’s a XII Corps staffer on temporary detached duty at the Pentagon. Some kind of a blue-eyed boy. He’s been over here since November.”

“Did you check phone calls out of the D.C. hotel?”

She nodded again.

“There weren’t any,” she said. “Vassell’s room took one incoming call at twelve twenty-eight in the morning. I’m assuming that was XII Corps calling from Germany. Neither of them made any outgoing calls.”

“None at all?”

“Not a one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally. It’s an electronic switchboard. Dial nine for an outside line, and the computer records it automatically. It has to, for the bill.”

Dead end.

“OK,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.”

“Really?”

“Orders are orders,” I said. “The alternative is anarchy and chaos.”

I went back to my office and called Rock Creek. I figured Willard would be long gone. He was the type of guy who keeps bankers’ hours his whole life. I got hold of a company clerk and asked him to find a copy of the original order moving me from Panama to Bird. It was five minutes before he came back on the line. I spent them reading Summer’s lists. They were full of names that meant nothing to me.

“I’ve got the order here now, sir,” the guy on the phone said.

“Who signed it?” I asked him.

“Colonel Garber, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said, and put the phone down. Then I sat for ten minutes wondering why people were lying to me. Then I forgot all about that question, because my phone rang again and a young MP private on routine base patrol told me we had a homicide victim in the woods. It sounded like a real bad one. My guy had to pause twice to throw up before he got to the end of his report.

eight

Most rural army posts are pretty big. Even if the built infrastructure is compact, there is often a huge acreage of spare land reserved around it. This was my first tour at Fort Bird, but I guessed it would be no exception. It would be like a small neat town surrounded by a county-sized horseshoe-shaped government-owned tract of poor sandy earth with low hills and shallow valleys and a thin covering of trees and scrub. Over the post’s long life the trees would have imitated the gray ashes of the Ardennes and the mighty firs of Central Europe and the swaying palms of the Middle East. Whole generations of infantry training theory would have come and gone there. There would be old trenches and foxholes and firing pits. There would be bermed rifle ranges and barbed-wire obstacles and isolated huts where psychiatrists would challenge masculine emotional security. There would be concrete bunkers and exact replicas of government offices where Special Forces would train to rescue hostages. There would be cross-country running routes where out-of-shape boot camp inductees would tire and stagger and where some of them would collapse and die. The whole thing would be ringed by miles of ancient rusty wire and claimed for the DoD forever by warning notices fixed to every third fence post.

I called a bunch of specialists and went out to the motor pool and found a Humvee that had a working flashlight in the clip on the dash. Then I fired it up and followed the private’s directions south and west of the inhabited areas until I was on a rough sandy track leading straight out into the hinterland. The darkness was absolute. I drove more than a mile and then I saw another Humvee’s headlights in the distance. The private’s vehicle was parked at a sharp angle about twenty feet off the road and its high beams were shining into the trees and casting long evil shadows deep into the woods. The private himself was leaning up against its hood. His head was bowed and he was looking down at the ground.

First question: How does a guy on motor patrol in the dark spot a corpse hidden way the hell out here, deep in the trees?

I parked next to him and took the flashlight out of the clip and slid out into the cold and immediately understood how. There was a trail of clothing starting in the center of the track. Right on the crown of the camber was a single boot. It was a standard-issue black leather combat boot, old, worn, not very well shined. West of it was a sock, a yard away. Then another boot, another sock, a BDU jacket, an olive drab undershirt. The clothes were all spaced out in a line, like a grotesque parody of the domestic fantasy where you get home and find abandoned lingerie items leading you up the stairs to the bedroom. Except that the jacket and the undershirt were stained dark with blood.

I checked the condition of the ground at the edge of the track. It was rock hard and frosted over. I wasn’t going to compromise the scene. I wasn’t going to blur any footprints, because there weren’t going to be any footprints. So I took a deep breath and followed the trail of clothes to its conclusion. When I got there I understood why my guy had thrown up twice. At his age I might have thrown up three times.

The corpse was facedown in the frozen leaf litter at the base of a tree. Naked. Medium height, compact. It was a white guy, but he was mostly covered in blood. There were bone-deep knife cuts all over his arms and shoulders. From behind I could see that his face looked beaten and swollen. His cheeks were protruding. His dog tags were missing. There was a slim leather belt cinched tight around his neck. It had a brass buckle and the long tail looped away from his head. There was some kind of thick pink-white liquid pooled on his back. He had a broken tree limb rammed up his ass. Below it the ground was black with blood. I guessed when we rolled him over we would find that his genitals had been removed.

I backtracked along the trail of clothes and made it to the road. Stepped over next to the MP private. He was still staring down at the ground.

“Where are we exactly?” I asked him.

“Sir?”

“No question we’re still on the base?”

He nodded. “We’re a mile inside the fence line. In every direction.”

“OK,” I said. Jurisdiction was clear. Army guy, army property. “We’ll wait here. Nobody gets access in there until I say so. Clear?”

“Sir,” he said.

“You’re doing a good job,” I said.

“You think?”

“You’re still on your feet,” I said.

I went back to my Humvee and radioed my sergeant. Told her what was up and where and asked her to find Lieutenant Summer and have her call me on the emergency channel. Then I waited. An ambulance arrived two minutes later. Then two Humvees showed up with the crime scene specialists I had called before leaving my office. Guys spilled out. I told them to stand by. There was no burning urgency.

Summer got on the radio within five minutes.

“Dead guy in the woods,” I told her. “I want you to find that Psy-Ops woman you were telling me about.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Norton?”

“I want you to bring her out here.”

“Willard said you can’t work with me.”

“He said I can’t involve you in special unit stuff. This is regular police business.”

“Why do you want Norton there?”

“I want to meet her.”

She clicked off and I got out of my truck. Joined the medics and the forensics people. We all stood around in the cold. We kept our engines running to keep the batteries charged and the heaters working. Clouds of diesel smoke drifted and pooled and formed horizontal strata, like smog. I told the crime scene people to start listing the clothing on the road. I told them not to touch it and not to leave the track.

We waited. There was no moon. No stars. No light and no sound beyond our headlights and our idling diesels. I thought about Leon Garber. Korea was one of the biggest branch offices the U.S. Army has to offer. Not the most glamorous, but probably the most active and certainly the most difficult. MP command out there was a feather in anyone’s cap. It meant he would probably retire with two stars, which was way more than he could have ever hoped for. If my brother was right and axes were getting ready to fall, then Leon had already come out on the right side of the cut. I was happy for him. For about ten minutes. Then I started looking at his situation from a different perspective. I worried at it for another ten minutes and got nowhere with it.

Summer showed up before I was finished thinking. She was driving a Humvee and she had a bareheaded blonde woman in BDUs about four feet away from her in the front passenger seat. She stopped the truck in the center of the track with her headlights full on us. She stayed in the vehicle and the blonde got out and scanned the crowd and stepped into the matrix of headlight beams and made straight for me. I saluted her out of courtesy and checked her nametape. It said: Norton. She had a light colonel’s oak leaves sewn on her lapels. She was a little older than me, but not much. She was tall and thin and had the kind of face that should have made her an actress or a model.

“How can I help you, Major?” she said. She sounded like she was from Boston and not very pleased about being dragged outside in the middle of the night.

“Something I need you to see,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe you’ll have a professional opinion.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re here in North Carolina. It would take me hours to get someone from somewhere else.”

“What kind of someone do you need?”

“Someone in your line of work.”

“I’m aware that I work in a classroom,” she said. “I don’t need constant reminders.”

“What?”

“It seems to be a popular sport here, reminding Andrea Norton that she’s just a bookish academic, while everybody else is out there busy with the real thing.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I’m new here. I just want first impressions from someone in your line of work, is all.”

“You’re not trying to make a point?”

“I’m trying to get some help.”

She made a face. “OK.”

I offered her my flashlight. “Follow the trail of clothes to the end. Please don’t touch anything. Just fix your first impressions in your mind. Then I’d like to talk to you about them.”

She said nothing. Just took my flashlight from me and set off. She was brightly backlit for the first twenty feet by the MP private’s headlights. His Humvee was still facing the woods. Her shadow danced ahead of her. Then she stepped beyond the range of the headlights’ illumination and I saw her flashlight beam move onward, bobbing and spearing through the darkness. Then I lost sight of it. All that was visible was a faint reflection from the underside of leafless branches, far in the distance, high in the air.

She was gone about ten minutes. Then I saw the flashlight beam sweeping back toward us. She came out of the woods, retracing her steps. She walked right up to me. She looked pale. She clicked the flashlight off and handed it back.

“My office,” she said. “In one hour.”

She got back in Summer’s Humvee and Summer backed up and turned and accelerated away into the dark.

“OK, guys, go to work,” I said. I sat in my truck and watched drifting smoke and flashlight beams quartering the ground and bright blue camera flashes freezing the motion all around me. I radioed my sergeant again and told her to get the base mortuary opened up. Told her to have a pathologist standing by, first thing in the morning. After thirty minutes the ambulance backed up onto the shoulder and my guys loaded a sheet-draped shape into it. They closed the doors and slapped on them and the truck took off. Clear plastic evidence bags were filled and labeled. Crime scene tape was wound between tree trunks. It was tied off in a rough rectangle maybe forty yards by fifty.

I left them to finish up by themselves and drove back through the dark to the main post buildings. Checked with a sentry and got directions to the Psy-Ops facility. It was a low brick structure with green doors and windows that might have housed the quartermaster offices way back when it was built. It was set at a distance from post headquarters, maybe halfway to where Special Forces bunked. There was darkness and silence all around it but there was a light burning in the central hallway and in one of the office windows. I parked my truck and went inside. Made it through gloomy tiled corridors and came to a door with a pebble-glass window set in its upper half. The glass had light behind it and Lt/Col. A. Norton stenciled on it. I knocked and went in. I saw a small neat office. It was clean and it smelled feminine. I didn’t salute again. I figured we were past that point.

Norton was behind a big oak army-issue desk and she had it covered with open textbooks. She had so many on the go that she had taken her telephone off the desk and put it down on the floor. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with handwritten notes on it. The pad was in a pool of light from her desk lamp and its color was reflected upward into her hair.

“Hello,” she said.

I sat down in her visitor’s chair.

“Who was he?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll get a visual ID. He was too badly beaten. We’ll have to use fingerprints. Or teeth. If he’s got any left in there.”

“Why did you want me to look at him?”

“I told you why. I wanted your opinion.”

“Why did you think I would have an opinion?”

“Seemed to me there were elements in there that you would understand.”

“I’m not a criminal profiler.”

“I don’t want you to be. I just want some input, fast. I want to know if I’m starting out in the right direction.”

She nodded. Swept her hair back off her face.

“The obvious conclusion is that he was a homosexual,” she said. “Possibly killed because of it. Or if not, then with full awareness of it on the part of his attackers.”

I nodded.

“There was genital amputation,” she said.

“You checked?”

“I moved him a little,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to.”

I looked at her. She hadn’t been wearing gloves. She was a tough lady. Maybe her classroom-bound reputation was undeserved.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“My guess is you’ll find his testicles and his penis in his mouth. I doubt if his cheeks would have swelled that much simply from a beating. It’s an obvious symbolic statement, from the point of view of a homophobic attacker. Removing the deviant organs, simulating oral sex.”

I nodded.

“Likewise the nudity and the missing dog tags,” she said. “Removing the army from the deviant is the same thing as removing the deviant from the army.”

I nodded.

“The foreign object insertion speaks for itself,” she said. “In the anus.”

I nodded.

“And then there’s the fluid on his back,” she said.

“Yogurt,” I said.

“Probably strawberry,” she said. “Or maybe raspberry. It’s the old joke. How does a gay man fake an orgasm?”

“He groans a bit,” I said. “And then he throws yogurt on his lover’s back.”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t smile. And she watched me, to see if I would.

“What about the cuts and the beating?” I said.

“Hate,” she said.

“And the belt around the neck?”

She shrugged. “It’s suggestive of an autoerotic technique. Partial asphyxiation creates heightened pleasure during orgasm.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said.

“OK what?”

“Those were your first impressions. Do you have an opinion based on them?”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You first.”

“I think it’s bogus.”

“Why?”

“Too much going on,” I said. “There were six things there. The nudity, the missing tags, the genitals, the tree branch, the yogurt, and the belt. Any two would have done it. Maybe three. It’s like they were trying to make a point, instead of just going ahead and making one. Maybe trying too hard.”

Norton said nothing.

“Too much,” I said again. “Like shooting someone, then strangling him, then stabbing him, then drowning him, then suffocating him, then beating him to death. It’s like they were decorating a damn Christmas tree with clues.”

She stayed quiet. She was watching me, deep inside her pool of light. Maybe assessing me.

“I have my doubts about the belt,” she said. “Autoeroticism isn’t exclusively homosexual. All men have the same orgasms physiologically, gay or not.”

“The whole thing was faked,” I said.

She nodded, finally.

“I agree with you,” she said. “You’re a smart guy.”

“For a cop?”

She didn’t smile. “But we know as officers that to permit homosexuals to serve is illegal. So we better be sure we’re not letting a defense of the army cloud our judgment.”

“It’s my job to protect the army,” I said.

“Exactly,” Norton said.

I shrugged. “But I’m not taking a position. I’m not saying this guy definitely wasn’t gay. Maybe he was. I really don’t care. And maybe his attackers knew, maybe they didn’t. I’m saying either way, that’s not why they killed him. They wanted it to look like the reason. But they weren’t really feeling it. They were feeling something else. So they larded on the clues, in a rather self-conscious way.”

Then I paused.

“In a rather academic way,” I said.

She stiffened.

“An academic way?” she said.

“Do you guys teach anything about this kind of stuff in class?”

“We don’t teach people how to kill,” she said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She nodded. “We talk about it. We have to. Cutting off your enemy’s dick is as basic as it gets. It’s happened all through history. Happened all through Vietnam. Afghan women have been doing it to captured Soviet soldiers for the last ten years. We talk about what it symbolizes, what it communicates, and the fear it creates. There are whole books about the fear of grotesque wounds. It’s always a message to the target population. We talk about violation with foreign objects. We talk about the deliberate display of violated bodies. The trail of abandoned clothing is a classic touch.”

“Do you talk about yogurt?”

She shook her head. “But that’s a very old joke.”

“And the asphyxiation thing?”

“Not on the Psy-Ops courses. But most of the people here can read magazines. Or they can watch porn on videotape.”

“Do you talk about questioning an enemy’s sexuality?”

“Of course we do. Impugning an enemy’s sexuality is the whole point of our course. His sexual orientation, his virility, his capability, his capacity. It’s a core tactic. It always has been, everywhere, throughout history. It’s designed to work both ways. It diminishes him, and it builds us up by comparison.”

I said nothing.

She looked right at me. “Are you asking me if I recognized the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods?”

“I guess I am,” I said.

“You didn’t really want my opinion, did you?” she asked. “That was all preamble. You already knew what you were seeing.”

I nodded. “I’m a smart guy, for a cop.”

“The answer is no,” she said. “I did not recognize the fruits of our lessons, out there in the woods. Not specifically.”

“But possibly?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Did you meet General Kramer when you were at Fort Irwin?” I asked.

“Once or twice,” she said. “Why?”

“When did you last see him?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Not recently?”

“No. Not recently. Why?”

“How did you meet him?”

“Professionally,” she said.

“You teach your stuff to Armored Branch?”

“Irwin isn’t exclusively Armored Branch. It’s the National Training Center too, don’t forget. People used to come to us there. Now we go to them.”

I said nothing.

“Does it surprise you we taught Armored people?”

I shrugged again. “A little, I guess. If I was riding around in a seventy-ton tank, I don’t suppose I’d feel a need for any more of a psychological edge.”

She still didn’t smile. “We taught them. As I recall General Kramer didn’t like it if the infantry was getting things his people weren’t. It was an intense rivalry.”

“Who do you teach now?”

“Delta Force,” she said. “Exclusively.”

“Thank you for your help,” I said.

“I didn’t recognize anything tonight that we would take responsibility for.”

“Not specifically.”

“It was psychologically generic,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“And I resent being asked.”

“OK,” I said again. “Good night, ma’am.”

I got up out of the chair and headed for the door.

“What was the real reason?” she asked. “If the display we saw was bogus?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not that smart.”

I stopped in my outer office and the sergeant with the baby son gave me coffee. Then I went into my inner office and found Summer waiting for me there. She had come to collect her lists, because the Kramer case was closed.

“Did you check the other women?” I asked her. “Apart from Norton?”

She nodded. “They all have alibis. It’s the best night of the year for alibis. Nobody spends New Year’s Eve alone.”

“I did,” I said.

She said nothing back. I butted the papers into a neat stack and put them back inside their folder and unclipped the note off the front. Hope your mom was OK. I dropped the note in my drawer and handed the file to her.

“What did Norton tell you?” she asked.

“She agreed with me that it was homicide dressed up to look like gay-bashing. I asked her if any of the symbols came from Psy-Ops classes and she didn’t really say yes or no. She said they were psychologically generic. She resented being asked.”

“So what now?”

I yawned. I was tired. “We’ll work it like we work any of them. We don’t even know who the victim is yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. On deck at seven, OK?”

“OK,” she said, and headed for my door, carrying her file.

“I called Rock Creek,” I said. “Asked a clerk to find their copy of the order bringing me here from Panama.”

“And?”

“He said it’s got Garber’s signature on it.”

“But?”

“That’s not possible. Garber got me on the phone on New Year’s Eve and was surprised I was here.”

“Why would a clerk lie?”

“I don’t think a clerk would. I think the signature is a forgery.”

“Is that conceivable?”

“It’s the only explanation. Garber couldn’t have forgotten he’d transferred me here forty-eight hours previously.”

“So what’s this all about?”

“I have no idea. Someone somewhere is playing chess. My brother told me I should find out who wants me here bad enough to pull me out of Panama and replace me with an asshole. So I tried to find out. And now I’m thinking maybe we should be asking the same question about Garber. Who wants him out of Rock Creek bad enough to replace him with an asshole?”

“But Korea has to be a genuine merit promotion, doesn’t it?”

“Garber deserves it, no question,” I said. “Except it’s too early. It’s a one-star job. DoD has to bring it to the Senate. That process happens in the fall, not in January. This was a panic move, spur of the moment.”

“But that would be pointless chess,” Summer said. “Why bring you in and pull him out? The two moves neutralize each other.”

“So maybe there are two people playing. Like a tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. Win one, lose one.”

“But the bad guy could have won both, easily. He could have discharged you. Or sent you to prison. He’s got the civilian complaint to work with.”

I said nothing.

“It doesn’t add up,” Summer said. “Whoever’s playing on your side is willing to let Garber go but is powerful enough to keep you here, even with the civilian complaint on the table. Powerful enough that Willard knew he couldn’t proceed against you, even though he probably wanted to. You know what that means?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She looked straight at me.

“It means you’re seen as more important than Garber,” she said. “Garber’s gone, and you’re still here.”

Then she looked away and went quiet.

“Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“You’re not more important than Garber,” she said. “You can’t be.”

I yawned again.

“No argument from me,” I said. “Not on that particular subject. This is not about a choice between me and Garber.”

She paused. Then she nodded.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t. This is about a choice between Fort Bird and Rock Creek. Fort Bird is seen as more important. What’s happening here on the post is seen as more sensitive than what’s happening at special unit headquarters.”

“Agreed,” I said. “But what the hell is happening here?”

nine

I took the first tentative step toward finding out at one minute past seven the next morning, in Fort Bird’s mortuary. I had slept for three hours and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules involved in military crime investigation. Mostly we depend on instinct and improvisation. But one of the few rules that exist is: You don’t eat before you walk into an army postmortem.

So I spent the breakfast hour with the crime scene report. It was a fairly thick file, but it had no useful information in it. It listed all the recovered uniform items and described them in minute detail. It described the corpse. It listed times and temperatures. All the thousands of words were backed by dozens of Polaroid photographs. But neither the words nor the pictures told me what I needed to know.

I put the file in my desk drawer and called the Provost Marshal’s office for any AWOL or UA reports. The dead guy might have been missed already, and we might have been able to pick up on his identity that way. But there were no reports. Nothing out of the ordinary. The post was humming along with all its ducks in a row.

I walked out into the morning cold.

The mortuary had been custom-built during the Eisenhower administration and it was still fit for its purpose. We weren’t looking for a high degree of sophistication. This wasn’t the civilian world. We knew last night’s victim hadn’t slipped on a banana skin. I didn’t much care which particular injury had been the fatal one. All I wanted to know was an approximate time of death, and who he was.

There was a tiled lobby inside the main doors with exits to the left, the center, and the right. If you went left, you found the offices. If you went right, you found cold storage. I went straight ahead, where knives cut and saws whined and water sluiced.

There were two dished metal tables set in the center of the room. They had bright lights above them and noisy drains below. They were surrounded by greengrocer scales hanging on chains ready to weigh excised organs, and by rolling steel carts with empty glass jars ready to receive them, and other carts with rows of knives and saws and shears and pliers lying ready for use on green canvas sheets. The whole place was glazed with white subway tiles and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of formaldehyde.

The right-hand table was clean and empty. The left-hand table was surrounded by people. There was a pathologist and an assistant and a clerk taking notes. Summer was there, standing back, observing. They were maybe halfway through the process. The tools were all in use. Some of the glass jars were filled. The drain was sucking loudly. I could see the corpse’s legs through the crowd. They had been washed. They looked blue-white under the lamps above them. All the smeared dirt and blood was gone.

I stood next to Summer and took a look. The dead guy was on his back. They had taken the top of his skull off. They had cut around the center of his forehead and peeled the skin of his face down. It was lying there inside out, like a blanket pulled down on a bed. It reached to his chin. His cheekbones and his eyeballs were exposed. The pathologist was dissecting his brain, looking for something. He had used the saw on his skull and popped the top off like a lid.

“What’s the story?” I asked him.

“We got fingerprints,” he said.

“I faxed them in,” Summer said. “We’ll know today.”

“Cause of death?”

“Blunt trauma,” the doctor said. “To the back of the head. Three heavy blows, with something like a tire iron, I should think. All this dramatic stuff is postmortem. Pure window dressing.”

“Any defensive injuries?”

“Not a thing,” the doctor said. “This was a surprise attack. Out of the blue. There was no fight, no struggle.”

“How many assailants?”

“I’m not a magician. The fatal blows were probably all delivered by the same individual. I can’t tell if there were others standing around and watching.”

“Best guess?”

“I’m a scientist, not a guesser.”

“One assailant only,” Summer said. “Just a feeling.”

I nodded.

“Time of death?” I asked.

“Hard to be sure,” the doctor said. “Nine or ten last night, probably. But don’t take that to the bank.”

I nodded again. Nine or ten would make sense. Well after dark, several hours before any reasonable expectation of discovery. Plenty of time for the bad guy to lure him out there, and then to be somewhere else when the alarms sounded.

“Was he killed at the scene?” I asked.

The pathologist nodded.

“Or very close to it,” he said. “No medical signs to suggest otherwise.”

“OK,” I said. I glanced around. The broken tree limb was lying on a cart. Next to it was a jar with a penis and two testicles in it.

“In his mouth?” I said.

The pathologist nodded again. Said nothing.

“What kind of a knife?”

“Probably a K-bar,” he said.

“Great,” I said. K-bars had been manufactured by the tens of millions for the last fifty years. They were as common as medals.

“The knife was used by a right-handed person,” the doctor said.

“And the tire iron?”

“Same.”

“OK,” I said.

“The fluid was yogurt,” the doctor said.

“Strawberry or raspberry?”

“I didn’t do a taste test.”

Next to the jars of organs was a short stack of four Polaroid photographs. They were all of the fatal wound site. The first one was as-discovered. The guy’s hair was relatively long and dirty and matted with blood and I couldn’t make out much detail. The second was with the blood and dirt rinsed away. The third was with the hair cut back with scissors. The fourth was with the hair completely shaved away, with a razor.

“How about a crowbar?” I asked.

“Possible,” the doctor said. “Maybe better than a tire iron. I took a plaster cast, anyway. You bring me the weapon, I’ll tell you yes or no.”

I stepped in a little and took a closer look. The corpse was very clean. It was gray and white and pink. It smelled faintly of soap, as well as blood and other rich organic odors. The groin was a mess. Like a butcher’s shop. The knife cuts on the arms and the shoulders were deep and obvious. I could see muscle and bone. The edges of the wounds were blue and cold. The blade had gone right through a tattoo on his left upper arm. An eagle was holding a scroll with Mother written on it. Overall, the guy was not a pleasant sight. But he was in better shape than I had feared he would be.

“I thought there would be more swelling and bruising,” I said.

The pathologist glanced at me.

“I told you,” he said. “All the drama was after he was dead. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, no circulation, therefore no swelling and no contusions. Not much bleeding either. It was just leaking out by gravity. If he’d been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river.”

He turned back to the table and finished up inside the guy’s brain pan and put the lid of bone back where it belonged. He tapped it twice to get a good seal and wiped the leaky join with a sponge. Then he pulled the guy’s face back into place. Poked and prodded and smoothed with his fingers and when he took his hands away I saw the Special Forces sergeant I had spoken to in the strip club, staring blindly upward into the bright lights above him.

I took a Humvee and drove past Andrea Norton’s Psy-Ops school to the Delta Force station. It was pretty much self-contained in what had been a prison back before the army collected all its miscreants together at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The old wire and the walls suited its current purpose. There was a giant WW2-era airplane hangar next to it. It looked like it had been dragged in from some closed base and bolted back together to house their racks of stores and their trucks and their up-armored Humvees and maybe even a couple of fast-response helicopters.

The sentry on the inner gate let me in and I went straight to the adjutant’s office. Seven-thirty in the morning, and it was already lit up and busy, which told me something. The adjutant was at his desk. He was a captain. In the upside-down world of Delta Force the sergeants are the stars, and the officers stay home and do the housework.

“You got anyone missing?” I asked him.

He looked away, which told me something more.

“I assume you know I do,” he said. “Otherwise why would you be here?”

“You got a name for me?”

“A name? I assumed you had arrested him for something.”

“This is not about an arrest,” I said.

“So what’s it about?”

“Does this guy get arrested a lot?”

“No. He’s a fine soldier.”

“What’s his name?”

The captain didn’t answer. Just leaned down and opened a drawer and pulled a file. Handed it to me. Like all the Delta files I had ever seen, it was heavily sanitized for public consumption. There were just two pages in it. The first was a name-rank-and-number ID sheet and a bare-bones career summary for a guy called Christopher Carbone. He was an unmarried sixteen-year veteran. He had served four years in an infantry division, four in an airborne division, four in a Ranger company, and four in Special Forces Detachment D. He was five years older than me. He was a sergeant first class. There were no theater details and no mention of awards or decorations.

The second sheet contained ten inky fingerprints and a color photograph of the man I had spoken to in the bar and just left on the mortuary slab.

“Where is he?” the captain asked. “What happened?”

“Someone killed him,” I said.

“What?”

“Homicide,” I said.

“When?”

“Last night. Nine or ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“Edge of the woods.”

“What woods?”

“Our woods. On-post.”

“Jesus Christ. Why?”

I put the file back together and slipped it under my arm.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “Yet.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said again. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Yet.”

“Jesus Christ,” the guy said, for the third time.

“Next of kin?” I asked.

The captain paused. Breathed out.

“I think he has a mother somewhere,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be making the call.”

He said nothing.

“Did Carbone have enemies here?” I asked.

“None that I knew about.”

“Any points of friction?”

“Like what?”

“Any lifestyle issues?”

He stared at me. “What are you saying?”

“Was he gay?”

“What? Of course not.”

I said nothing.

“You’re saying Carbone was a fag?” the captain whispered.

I pictured Carbone in my mind, lounging six feet from the strip club runway, six feet from whoever was crawling around at the time on her elbows and knees with her ass up in the air and her nipples brushing the stage, a long-neck bottle in his hand and a big smile on his face. It seemed like a weird way for a gay man to spend his leisure time. But then I pictured the detachment in his eyes and his embarrassed gesture as he waved the brunette hooker away.

“I don’t know what Carbone was,” I said.

“Then keep your damn mouth shut,” his captain said. “Sir.”

I took Carbone’s file with me back to the mortuary and collected Summer and took her to the O Club for breakfast. We sat on our own in a corner, far from everyone else. I ate eggs and bacon and toast. Summer ate oatmeal and fruit and glanced through the file. I drank coffee. Summer drank tea.

“The pathologist is calling it gay-bashing,” she said. “He thinks it’s obvious.”

“He’s wrong.”

“Carbone’s not married.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “Neither are you. Are you gay?”

“No.”

“There you go.”

“But misdirection has to be based on something real, right? I mean, if they knew he was a gambler, for instance, they might have crammed IOU slips in his mouth or thrown playing cards all around the place. Then we might have thought it was about gambling debts. You see what I mean? It just doesn’t work if it’s not based on anything. Something that can be disproved in five minutes looks stupid, not clever.”

“Your best guess?”

“Carbone was gay, and someone knew it, but it wasn’t the reason.”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t the reason,” I said. “Let’s say he was gay. He was in sixteen years. He survived most of the seventies and all of the eighties. So why would it happen now? Times are changing, getting better, he’s getting better at hiding it, going out to strip joints with his buddies. No reason for it to happen now, all of a sudden. It would have happened before. Four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or sixteen. Whenever he joined a new unit and new people got to know him.”

“So what was the reason?”

“No idea.”

“Whatever, it could be embarrassing. Just like Kramer and his motel.”

I nodded again. “Bird seems to be a very embarrassing place.”

“You think this is why you’re here? Carbone?”

“It’s possible. Depends on what he represents.”

I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.

“Is it true about Carbone?” one of them asked.

“He was killed,” I said. “Don’t know who, don’t know why.”

“When?”

“Last night, nine or ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“This is a closed post.”

I nodded. “The perp wasn’t a member of the general public.”

“We heard he was messed up good.”

“Pretty good.”

“When are you going to know who it was?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“You got leads?”

“Nothing specific.”

“When you know, are we going to know too?”

“You want to?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” the guy said.

I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the world’s most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone’s office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I’d have to do is drop a name.

“I need to ask you some cop questions,” I said. I asked them all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook their heads and answered every question in the negative.

“Anything else?” I asked. “Anything that put him at risk?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything,” I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.

“No,” they all said.

“Got any theories?” I asked.

“Look at the Rangers,” the young one said. “Find someone who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to prove.”

Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not plausible. Delta sergeants don’t go out in the woods with people they don’t know and get hit on the back of the head. They train long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If two Rangers had gone out there with him, we’d have found two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn’t have gone down easily.

So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere, his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I pictured a tire iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again. And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down. Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn’t get surprised very often.

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the asshole in Garber’s office, up in Rock Creek.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In my office,” I said. “How else would I be answering my phone?”

“Stay there,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there quietly and wait.”

“For what?”

“I’m on my way down.”

He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.

I stayed there. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn’t told me to die of thirst.

After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered my orders. Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.

“Help you, Sergeant?” I said.

“I think Carbone was gay,” the sergeant said.

“You think he was?”

“OK, he was.”

“Who else knew?”

“All of us.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I thought you should know, is all.”

“You think it has a bearing?”

He shook his head. “We were comfortable with it. And whoever killed him wasn’t one of us. It wasn’t anyone in the unit. That’s not possible. We don’t do stuff like that. Outside the unit, nobody knew. Therefore it wasn’t a factor.”

“So why tell me?”

“Because you’re bound to find out. I wanted you to be ready for it. I didn’t want it to be a surprise.”

“Because?”

“Then maybe you can keep it quiet. Since it’s not a factor.”

I said nothing.

“It would trash his memory,” the sergeant said. “And that’s wrong. He was a nice guy and a good soldier. Being gay shouldn’t be a crime.”

“I agree,” I said.

“The army needs to change.”

“The army hates change.”

“They say it damages unit cohesion,” he said. “They should have come and seen our squadron working. With Carbone right there in it.”

“I can’t keep it quiet,” I said. “Maybe I would if I could. But the way the crime scene looked, everyone’s going to get the message.”

“What? It was like a sex crime? You didn’t say that before.”

“I was trying to keep it quiet,” I said.

“But nobody knew. Not outside the unit.”

“Someone must have. Or else the perp is in your unit.”

“That’s not possible. No way, no how.”

“One thing or the other has got to be possible,” I said. “Was he seeing anyone on the outside?”

“No, never.”

“So he was celibate for sixteen years?”

The guy paused a beat.

“I guess I don’t really know,” he said.

“Someone knew,” I said. “But I don’t think it was a factor. I think someone just tried to make it look like it was. Maybe we can make that clear, at least.”

The sergeant shook his head. “It’ll be the only thing anyone remembers about him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m not gay,” he said.

“I don’t really care either way.”

“I’ve got a wife and a kid.”

He left me with that information and I went back to obeying Willard’s orders.

I spent the time thinking. There had been no weapon recovered at the scene. No significant forensics. No threads of clothing snagged on a bush, no footprints in the earth, none of his attacker’s skin under Carbone’s fingernails. All of that was easily explicable. The weapon had been taken away by the attacker, who had probably been wearing BDUs, which the Department of the Army specifies very carefully just so that they won’t fall apart and leave threads all over the place. Textile mills across the nation have stringent quality targets to meet, in terms of wear-and-tear standards for military twill and poplin. The earth was frozen hard, so footprints were impossible. North Carolina probably had a reliable frost window of about a month, and we were smack in the middle of it. And it had been a surprise attack. Carbone had been given no time to turn around and claw and kick at his assailant.

So there was no material information. But we had some advantages. We had a fixed pool of possible suspects. It was a closed base, and the army is pretty good at recording who was where, at all times. We could start with yards of printout paper and go through each name, on a simple binary basis, possible or not possible. Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn’t signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim’s head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.

So it would end up with motive, which is where it had started for me. What was the reason?

I sat for another hour. Didn’t go anywhere, didn’t do anything, didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me more coffee. I mentioned that she might call Lieutenant Summer for me and suggest she stop by.

Summer showed up within five minutes. I had a whole raft of things to tell her, but she had anticipated every one of them. She had ordered a list of all base personnel, plus a copy of the gate log so we could add and subtract names as appropriate. She had arranged for Carbone’s quarters to be sealed, pending a search. She had arranged an interview with his CO to develop a better picture of his personal and professional life.

“Excellent,” I said.

“What’s this thing with Willard?” she asked.

“A pissing contest, probably,” I said. “Important case like this, he wants to come down and direct things personally. To remind me I’m under a cloud.”

But I was wrong.

Willard finally showed after a total of exactly four hours. I heard his voice in the outer office. I was pretty sure my sergeant wasn’t offering him coffee. She had better instincts than that. My door opened and he came in. He didn’t look at me. Just closed the door behind him and turned around and sat down in my visitor’s chair. Immediately started up with the shuffling thing. He was going at it hard and plucking at the knees of his pants like they were burning his skin.

“Yesterday,” he said. “I want a complete record of your movements. I want to hear it from your own lips.”

“You’re down here to ask me questions?”

“Yes,” he said.

I shrugged.

“I was on a plane until two,” I said. “I was with you until five.”

“And then?”

“I got back here at eleven.”

“Six hours? I did it in four.”

“You drove, presumably. I took two buses and hitched a ride.”

“After that?”

“I spoke to my brother on the phone,” I said.

“I remember your brother,” Willard said. “I worked with him.”

I nodded. “He mentioned that.”

“And then what?”

“I spoke to Lieutenant Summer,” I said. “Socially.”

“And then?”

“Carbone’s body was discovered about midnight.”

He nodded and twitched and shuffled and looked uncomfortable.

“Did you keep your bus tickets?” he said.

“I doubt it,” I said.

He smiled. “Remember who gave you a ride to the post?”

“I doubt it. Why?”

“Because I might need to know. To prove I didn’t make a mistake.”

I said nothing.

“You made mistakes,” Willard said.

“Did I?”

He nodded. “I can’t decide whether you’re an idiot or whether you’re doing this on purpose.”

“Doing what?”

“Are you trying to embarrass the army?”

“What?”

“What’s the big picture here, Major?” he said.

“You tell me, Colonel.”

“The Cold War is ending. Therefore there are big changes coming. The status quo will not be an option. Therefore we’ve got every part of the military trying to stand tall and make the cut. And you know what?”

“What?”

“The army is always at the bottom of the pile. The Air Force has got all those glamorous airplanes. The Navy has got submarines and carriers. The Marines are always untouchable. And we’re stuck down there in the mud, literally. The bottom of the pile. The army is boring, Reacher. That’s the view in Washington.”

“So?”

“This Carbone guy was a shirtlifter. He was a damn fudgepacker, for Christ’s sake. An elite unit has got perverts in it? You think the army needs for people to know that? At a time like this? You should have written him up as a training accident.”

“That wouldn’t have been true.”

“Who cares?”

“He wasn’t killed because of his orientation.”

“Of course he was.”

“I do this stuff for a living,” I said. “And I say he wasn’t.”

He glared at me. Went quiet for a moment.

“OK,” he said. “We’ll come back to that. Who else but you saw the body?”

“My guys,” I said. “Plus a Psy-Ops light colonel I wanted an opinion from. Plus the pathologist.”

He nodded. “You deal with your guys. I’ll tell Psy-Ops and the doctor.”

“Tell them what?”

“That we’re writing it up as a training accident. They’ll understand. No harm, no foul. No investigation.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You think the army wants this to get around? Now? That Delta had an illegal soldier for four years? Are you nuts?”

“The sergeants want an investigation.”

“I’m pretty sure their CO won’t. Believe me. You can take that as gospel.”

“You’ll have to give me a direct order,” I said. “Words of one syllable.”

“Watch my lips,” Willard said. “Do not investigate the fag. Write a situation report indicating that he died in a training accident. A night maneuver, a run, an exercise, anything. He tripped and fell and hit his head. Case closed. That is a direct order.”

“I’ll need it in writing,” I said.

“Grow up,” he said.

We sat quiet for a moment or two, just glaring at each other across the desk. I sat still, and Willard rocked and plucked. I clenched my fist, out of his sight. I imagined smashing a straight right to the center of his chest. I figured I could stop his lousy heart with a single blow. I could write it up as a training accident. I could say he had been practicing getting in and out of his chair, and he had slipped and caught his sternum on the corner of the desk.

“What was the time of death?” he asked.

“Nine or ten last night,” I said.

“And you were off-post until eleven?”

“Asked and answered,” I said.

“Can you prove that?”

I thought of the gate guards in their booth. They had logged me in.

“Do I have to?” I said.

He went quiet again. Leaned to his left in the chair.

“Next item,” he said. “You claim the butt-bandit wasn’t killed because he was a butt-bandit. What’s your evidence?”

“The crime scene was overdone,” I said.

“To obscure the real motive?”

I nodded. “That’s my judgment.”

“What was the real motive?”

“I don’t know. That would have required an investigation.”

“Let’s speculate,” Willard said. “Let’s assume the hypothetical perpetrator would have benefited from the homicide. Tell me how.”

“The usual way,” I said. “By preventing some future action on Sergeant Carbone’s part. Or to cover up a crime that Sergeant Carbone was a party to or had knowledge of.”

“To silence him, in other words.”

“To dead-end something,” I said. “That would be my guess.”

“And you do this stuff for a living.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“How would you have located this person?”

“By conducting an investigation.”

Willard nodded. “And when you found this person, hypothetically, assuming you were able to, what would you have done?”

“I would have taken him into custody,” I said. Protective custody, I thought. I pictured Carbone’s squadron buddies in my mind, pacing anxiously, ready to lock and load.

“And your suspect pool would have been whoever was on-post at the time?”

I nodded. Lieutenant Summer was probably struggling with reams of printout paper even as we spoke.

“Verified via strength lists and gate logs,” I said.

“Facts,” Willard said. “I would have thought that facts would be extremely important to someone who does this stuff for a living. This post covers nearly a hundred thousand acres. It was last strung with perimeter wire in 1943. Those are facts. I discovered them with very little trouble, and you should have too. Doesn’t it occur to you that not everyone on the post has to come through the main gate? Doesn’t it occur to you that someone recorded as not being here could have slipped in through the wire?”

“Unlikely,” I said. “It would have given him a walk of well over two miles, in pitch dark, and we run random motor patrols all night.”

“The patrols might have missed a trained man.”

“Unlikely,” I said again. “And how would he have rendezvoused with Sergeant Carbone?”

“Prearranged location.”

“It wasn’t a location,” I said. “It was just a spot near the track.”

“Map reference, then.”

“Unlikely,” I said, for the third time.

“But possible?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“So a man could have met with the shirtlifter, then killed him, then gotten back out through the wire, and then walked around to the main gate, and then signed in?”

“Anything’s possible,” I said again.

“What kind of timescale are we looking at? Between killing him and signing in?”

“I don’t know. I would have to work out the distance he walked.”

“Maybe he ran.”

“Maybe he did.”

“In which case he would have been out of breath when he passed the gate.”

I said nothing.

“Best guess,” Willard said. “How much time?”

“An hour or two.”

He nodded. “So if the fairy was offed at nine or ten, the killer could have been logging in at eleven?”

“Possible,” I said.

“And the motive would have been to dead-end something.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“And you took six hours to complete a four-hour journey, thereby leaving a potential two-hour gap, which you explain with the vague claim that you took a slow route.”

I said nothing.

“And you just agreed that a two-hour window is generous in terms of getting the deed done. In particular the two hours between nine and eleven, which by chance are the same two hours that you can’t account for.”

I said nothing. Willard smiled.

“And you arrived at the gate out of breath,” he said. “I checked.”

I didn’t reply.

“But what would have been your motive?” he said. “I assume you didn’t know Carbone well. I assume you don’t move in the same social circles that he did. At least I sincerely hope you don’t.”

“You’re wasting your time,” I said. “And you’re making a big mistake. Because you really don’t want to make an enemy out of me.”

“Don’t I?”

“No,” I said. “You really don’t.”

“What do you need dead-ended?” he asked me.

I said nothing.

“Here’s an interesting fact,” Willard said. “Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone was the soldier who lodged the complaint against you.”

He proved it to me by unfolding a copy of the complaint from his pocket. He smoothed it out and passed it across my desk. There was a reference number at the top and then a date and a place and a time. The date was January second, the place was Fort Bird’s Provost Marshal’s office, and the time was 0845. Then came two paragraphs of sworn affidavit. I glanced through some of the stiff, formal sentences. I personally observed a serving Military Police Major named Reacher strike the first civilian with a kicking action against the right knee. Immediately subsequent to that Major Reacher struck the second civilian in the face with his forehead. To the best of my knowledge both attacks were unprovoked. I saw no element of self-defense. Then came a signature with Carbone’s name and number typed below it. I recognized the number from Carbone’s file. I looked up at the slow silent clock on the wall and pictured Carbone in my mind, slipping out of the bar door into the parking lot, looking at me for a second, and then merging with the knot of men leaning on cars and drinking beer from bottles. Then I looked down again and opened a drawer and slipped the sheet of paper inside.

“Delta Force looks after its own,” Willard said. “We all know that. I guess it’s part of their mystique. So what are they going to do now? One of their own is beaten to death after lodging a complaint against a smart-ass MP major, and the smart-ass MP major in question needs to save his career, and he can’t exactly account for his time on the night it went down?”

I said nothing.

“The Delta CO’s office gets its own copy,” Willard said. “Standard procedure with disciplinary complaints. Multiple copies all over the place. So the news will leak very soon. Then they’ll be asking questions. So what shall I tell them? I could tell them you’re definitely not a suspect. Or I could suggest you definitely are a suspect, but there’s some type of technicality in the way that means I can’t touch you. I could see how their sense of right and wrong deals with that kind of injustice.”

I said nothing.

“It’s the only complaint Carbone ever made,” he said. “In a sixteen-year career. I checked that too. And it stands to reason. A guy like that has to keep his head down. But Delta as a whole will see some significance in it. Carbone comes up over the parapet for the first time in his life, they’re going to think you boys had some previous history. They’ll think it was a grudge match. Won’t make them like you any better.”

I said nothing.

“So what should I do?” Willard said. “Should I go over there and drop some hints about awkward legal technicalities? Or shall we trade? I keep Delta off your back, and you start toeing the line?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t really think you killed him,” he said. “Not even you would go that far. But I wouldn’t have minded if you had. Fags in the army deserve to be killed. They’re here under false pretenses. You would have chosen the wrong reason, is all.”

“It’s an empty threat,” I said. “You never told me he lodged the complaint. You didn’t show it to me yesterday. You never gave me a name.”

“Their sergeants’ mess won’t buy that for a second. You’re a special unit investigator. You do this stuff for a living. Easy enough for you to weasel a name out of all the paperwork they think we do.”

I said nothing.

“Wake up, Major,” Willard said. “Get with the program. Garber’s gone. We’re going to do things my way now.”

“You’re making a mistake,” I said. “Making an enemy out of me.”

He shook his head. “I don’t agree. I’m not making a mistake. And I’m not making an enemy out of you. I’m bringing this unit into line, is all. You’ll thank me later. All of you. The world is changing. I can see the big picture.”

I said nothing.

“Help the army,” he said. “And help yourself at the same time.”

I said nothing.

“Do we have a deal?” he said.

I didn’t reply. He winked at me.

“I think we have a deal,” he said. “You’re not that dumb.”

He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door behind him. I sat there and watched the stiff vinyl cushion on my visitor’s chair regain its shape. It happened slowly, with quiet hissing sounds as air leaked back into it.

ten

The world is changing. I had always been a loner, but at that point I started to feel lonely. And I had always been a cynic, but at that point I began to feel hopelessly naive. Both of my families were disappearing out from under me, one because of simple relentless chronology, and the other because its reliable old values seemed suddenly to be evaporating. I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.

Summer came back three minutes later. I guessed she had been hiding around a corner, waiting for Willard to leave. She had folds of printer paper under her arm, and big news in her eyes.

“Vassell and Coomer were here again last night,” she said. “They’re listed on the gate log.”

“Sit down,” I said.

She paused, surprised, and then she sat where Willard had.

“I’m toxic,” I said. “You should walk away from me right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were right,” I said. “Fort Bird is a very embarrassing place. First Kramer, then Carbone. Willard is closing both cases down, to spare the army’s blushes.”

“He can’t close Carbone down.”

“Training accident,” I said. “Carbone tripped and fell and hit his head.”

“What?”

“Willard’s using it as a test for me. Am I with the program or not?”

“Are you?”

I didn’t answer.

“They’re illegal orders,” Summer said. “They have to be.”

“Are you prepared to challenge them?”

She didn’t reply. The only practical way to challenge illegal orders was to disobey them and then take your chances with the resulting general court-martial, which would inevitably become a mano a mano struggle with a guy way higher on the food chain, in front of a presiding judge who was well aware of the army’s preference that orders should never be questioned.

“So nothing ever happened,” I said. “Bring all your paperwork here and forget you ever heard of me or Kramer or Carbone.”

She said nothing.

“And speak to the guys who were there last night. Tell them to forget what they saw.”

She looked down at the floor.

“Then go back to the O Club and wait for your next assignment.”

She looked up at me.

“Are you serious?” she said.

“Totally,” I said. “I’m giving you a direct order.”

She stared at me. “You’re not the man I thought you were.”

I nodded.

“I agree,” I said. “I’m not.”

She walked out and I gave her a minute to get clear and then I picked up the folded paper she had left behind. There was a lot of it. I found the page I wanted, and I stared at it.

Because I don’t like coincidences.

Vassell and Coomer had entered Bird by the main gate at six forty-five in the evening of the night Carbone had died. They had left again at ten o’clock. Three and a quarter hours, right across Carbone’s time of death.

Or right across dinnertime.

I picked up the phone and called the O Club dining room. A mess sergeant told me the NCO in charge would call me back. Then I called my own sergeant and asked her to find out who was my opposite number at Fort Irwin, and to get him on the line. She came in four minutes later with a mug of coffee for me.

“He’s all tied up,” she said. “Could be half an hour. His name is Franz.”

“Can’t be,” I said. “Franz is in Panama. I talked to him there face-to-face.”

“Major Calvin Franz,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”

“Call them back,” I said. “Double-check.”

She left my coffee on my desk and went back out to her phone. Came in again after another four minutes and confirmed that her information had been correct.

“Major Calvin Franz,” she said again. “He’s been there since December twenty-ninth.”

I looked down at my calendar. January 5th.

“And you’ve been here since December twenty-ninth,” she said.

I looked straight at her.

“Call some more posts,” I said. “The big ones only. Start with Fort Benning, and work through the alphabet. Get me the names of their MP XOs, and find out how long they’ve been there.”

She nodded and went back out. The NCO from the dining room called me back. I asked him about Vassell and Coomer. He confirmed they had eaten dinner in the O Club. Vassell had gone with the halibut, and Coomer had opted for the steak.

“Did they eat on their own?” I asked.

“No, sir, they were with an assortment of senior officers,” the guy said.

“Was it a date?”

“No, sir, we had the impression it was impromptu. It was an odd collection of people. I think they all hooked up in the bar, over aperitifs. Certainly we had no reservation for the group.”

“How long were they there?”

“They were seated before seven-thirty, and they got up just before ten o’clock.”

“Nobody left and came back?”

“No, sir, they were under our eye throughout.”

“All the time?”

“We paid close attention to them, sir. It was a question of the general’s rank, really.”

I hung up. Then I called the main gate. Asked who had actually eyeballed Vassell and Coomer in and out. They gave me a sergeant’s name. I told them to find the guy and have him call me back.

I waited.

The guy from the gate was the first to get back to me. He confirmed he had been on duty all through the previous evening, and he confirmed he had personally witnessed Vassell and Coomer arrive at six forty-five and leave again at ten.

“Car?” I asked.

“Big black sedan, sir,” he said. “A Pentagon staff car.”

“Grand Marquis?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure, sir.”

“Was there a driver?”

“The colonel was driving,” the guy said. “Colonel Coomer, that is. General Vassell was in the front passenger seat.”

“Just the two of them in the car?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“That’s definite, sir. No question about it. At night we use flashlights. Black sedan, DoD plates, two officers in the front, proper IDs displayed, rear seat vacant.”

“OK, thanks,” I said, and hung up. The phone rang again immediately. It was Calvin Franz, in California.

“Reacher?” he said. “What the hell are you doing there?”

“I could ask you the exact same question.”

The phone went quiet for a beat.

“No idea what the hell I’m doing here,” he said. “Irwin’s all quiet. It usually is, they tell me. Weather’s nice, though.”

“Did you check your orders?”

“Sure,” he said. “Didn’t you? Panama’s the most fun I’ve had since Grenada, and now I’m staring at the sands of the Mojave? Seems to have been Garber’s personal brainwave. I thought I must have upset him. Now I’m not so sure what’s going on. Unlikely that we both upset him.”

“What exactly were your orders?” I said.

“Temporary XO for the Provost Marshal.”

“Is he there right now?”

“No, actually. He got a temporary detachment the same day I got in.”

“So you’re acting CO?”

“Looks that way,” he said.

“Me too.”

“What’s going on?”

“No idea,” I said. “If I ever find out, I’ll tell you. But first I need to ask you a question. I came across a bird colonel and a one-star over here, supposed to be heading out to you for an Armored conference on New Year’s Day. Vassell and Coomer. Did they ever show?”

“That conference was canceled,” Franz said. “We heard their two-star bought the farm somewhere. Guy called Kramer. They seemed to think there was no point going ahead without him. Either that, or they can’t think at all without him. Or they’re all too busy fighting over who’s going to get his command.”

“So Vassell and Coomer never came to California?”

“They never came to Irwin,” Franz said. “That’s for sure. Can’t speak for California. It’s a big state.”

“Who else was supposed to attend?”

“Armored’s inner circle. Some are based here. Some showed and went away again. Some never showed at all.”

“Did you hear anything about the agenda?”

“I wouldn’t expect to. Was it important?”

“I don’t know. Vassell and Coomer said there wasn’t one.”

“There’s always an agenda.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“I’ll keep my ears open.”

“Happy New Year,” I said. Then I put the phone down and sat quiet. Thought hard. Calvin Franz was one of the good guys. Actually, he was one of the best guys. Tough, fair, as competent as the day was long. Nothing ever knocked him off his stride. I had been happy enough to leave Panama, knowing that he was still there. But he wasn’t still there. I wasn’t there, and he wasn’t there. So who the hell was?

I finished my coffee and carried my mug outside and put it back next to the machine. My sergeant was on the phone. She had a page of scribbled notes in front of her. She held up a finger like she had big news. Then she went back to writing. I went back to my desk. She came in five minutes later with her scribbled page. Thirteen lines, three columns. The third column was made up of numbers. Dates, probably.

“I got as far as Fort Rucker,” she said. “Then I stopped. Because there’s a very obvious pattern developing.”

“Tell me,” I said.

She reeled off thirteen posts, alphabetically. Then she reeled off the names of their MP executive officers. I knew all thirteen names, including Franz’s and my own. Then she reeled off the dates they had been transferred in. Every date was exactly the same. Every date was December 29th. Eight days ago.

“Say the names again,” I told her.

She read them again. I nodded. Inside the arcane little world of military law enforcement, if you wanted to pick an all-star squad, and if you thought long and hard about it all through the night, those thirteen names were what you would have come up with. No doubt about it. They made up a major-league, heavy-duty baker’s dozen. There would have been about ten other obvious guys in the mix, but I had no doubt at all that a couple of them would be right there on posts farther along in the alphabet, and the other eight or so in significant places around the globe. And I had no doubt at all that all of them had been there just eight days. Our heavy hitters. I wouldn’t have wanted to say how high or how low I ranked among them individually, but collectively, down there at the field level, we were the army’s top cops, no question about it.

“Weird,” I said. And it was weird. To shuffle that many specific individuals around on the same day took some kind of will and planning, and to do it during Just Cause took some kind of an urgent motive. The room seemed to go quiet, like I was straining to hear the other shoe fall.

“I’m going over to the Delta station,” I said.

I drove myself in a Humvee because I didn’t want to walk. I didn’t know if the asshole Willard was off the post yet, and I didn’t want to cross his path again. The sentry let me into the old prison and I went straight to the adjutant’s office. He was still at his desk, looking a little more tired than when I had seen him in the early morning.

“It was a training accident,” I said.

He nodded. “So I heard.”

“What kind of training was he doing?” I asked.

“Night maneuvers,” the guy said.

“Alone?”

“Escape and evasion, then.”

“On-post?”

“OK, he was jogging. Burning off the holiday calories. Whatever.”

“I need this to sound kosher,” I said. “My name’s going to be on the report.”

The captain nodded. “Then forget the jogging. I don’t think Carbone was a runner. He was more of a gym rat. A lot of them are.”

“A lot of who are?”

He looked straight at me.

“Delta guys,” he said.

“Did he have a specialization?”

“They’re all generalists. They’re all good at everything.”

“Not radio, not medic?”

“They all do radio. And they’re all medics. It’s a safeguard. If they’re captured individually, they can claim to be the company medic. Might save them from a bullet. And they can demonstrate the expertise, if they’re tested.”

“Any medical training take place at night?”

The captain shook his head. “Not specifically.”

“Could he have been out testing comms gear?”

“He could have been out road testing a vehicle,” the captain said. “He was good with mechanical things. I guess as much as anyone he looked after the unit’s trucks. That was probably as close as he got to a specialization.”

“OK,” I said. “Maybe he blew a tire, and his truck fell off the jack and crushed his head?”

“Works for me,” the captain said.

“Uneven terrain, maybe a soft spot under the jack, the whole thing would be unstable.”

“Works for me,” the captain said again.

“I’ll say my guys towed the truck back.”

“OK.”

“What kind of truck was it?”

“Any kind you like.”

“Your CO around?” I said.

“He’s away. For the holidays.”

“Who is he?”

“You won’t know him.”

“Try me.”

“Colonel Brubaker,” the captain said.

“David Brubaker?” I said. “I know him.” Which was partially true. I knew him by reputation. He was a real hairy-assed Special Forces evangelist. According to him the rest of us could fold our tents and go home and the whole world could hide behind his handpicked units. Maybe some helicopter battalions could stay in harness, to ferry his people around. Maybe a single Pentagon office could stay open, to procure the weapons he wanted.

“When will he be back?” I said.

“Sometime tomorrow.”

“Did you call him?”

The captain shook his head. “He won’t want to be involved. And he won’t want to talk to you. But I’ll get him to reissue some operational safety procedures, as soon as we find out what kind of an accident it was.”

“Crushed by a truck,” I said. “That’s what it was. That should make him happy. Vehicular safety is a shorter section than weapons safety.”

“In what?”

“In the field manual.”

The captain smiled.

“Brubaker doesn’t use the field manual,” he said.

“I want to see Carbone’s billet,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I need to sanitize it. If I’m going to sign off on a truck accident, I don’t want any loose ends around.”

Carbone had bunked the same way as his unit as a whole, on his own in one of the old cells. It was a six-by-eight space made of painted concrete and it had its own sink and toilet. It had a standard army cot and a footlocker and a shelf on the wall as long as the bed. All in all, it was pretty good accommodations for a sergeant. There were plenty around the world who would have traded in the blink of an eye.

Summer had had police tape stuck across the doorway. I pulled it down and balled it up and put it in my pocket. Stepped inside the room.

Special Forces Detachment D is very different from the rest of the army in its approach to discipline and uniformity. Relationships between the ranks are very casual. Nobody even remembers how to salute. Tidiness is not prized. Uniform is not compulsory. If a guy feels comfortable in a previous-issue fatigue jacket that he’s had for years, he wears it. If he likes New Balance running shoes better than GI combat boots, he wears them. If the army buys four hundred thousand Beretta sidearms, but the Delta guy likes SIGs better, he uses a SIG.

So Carbone had no closet full of clean and pressed uniforms. There were no serried ranks of undershirts, crisp and laundered, folded ready for use. There were no gleaming boots under his bed. His clothing was all piled on the first three-quarters of the long shelf above his cot. There wasn’t much of it. It was all basically olive green, but apart from that it wasn’t stuff that a current quartermaster would recognize. There were some old pieces of the army’s original extended cold-weather clothing system. There were some faded pieces of standard BDUs. Nothing was marked with unit or regimental insignia. There was a green bandanna. There were some old green T-shirts, washed so many times they were nearly transparent. There was a neatly rolled ALICE harness next to the T-shirts. ALICE stands for All-Purpose Lightweight Carrying Equipment, which is what the army calls a nylon belt that you hang things from.

The final quarter of the shelf’s length held a collection of books, and a small color photograph in a brass frame. The photograph was of an older woman who looked a little like Carbone himself. His mother, without a doubt. I remembered his tattoo, sliced across by the K-bar. An eagle, holding a scroll with Mother on it. I remembered my mother, shooing us away into the tiny elevator after we had hugged her goodbye.

I moved on to Carbone’s books.

There were five paperbacks and one tall thin hardcover. I ran my finger along the paperbacks. I didn’t recognize any of the titles or any of the authors. They all had cracked spines and yellow-edged pages. They all seemed to be adventure stories involving prototype airplanes or lost submarines. The lone hardcover was a souvenir publication from a Rolling Stones concert tour. Judging by the style of the print on the spine it was about ten years old.

I lifted his mattress up off the cot springs and checked under it. Nothing there. I checked the toilet tank and under the sink. Nothing doing. I moved on to the footlocker. First thing I saw after opening it was a brown leather jacket folded across the top. Underneath the jacket were two white button-down shirts and two pairs of blue jeans. The cotton items were worn and soft and the jacket was neither cheap nor expensive. Together they made up a soldier’s typical Saturday-night outfit. Shit, shave, and shower, throw on the civilian duds, pile into someone’s car, hit a couple of bars, have some fun.

Underneath the jeans was a wallet. It was small, and made out of brown leather that almost matched the jacket. Like the clothes above it, it was set up for a typical Saturday night’s requirements. There were forty-three dollars in cash in it, sufficient for enough rounds of beers to get the fun started. There was a military ID card and a North Carolina driver’s license in it, in case the fun concluded inside an MP jeep or a civilian black-and-white. There was an unopened condom, in case the fun got serious.

There was a photograph of a girl, behind a plastic window. Maybe a sister, maybe a cousin, maybe a friend. Maybe nobody. Camouflage, for sure.

Underneath the wallet was a shoe box half-full of six-by-four prints. They were all amateur snapshots of groups of soldiers. Carbone himself was in some of them. Small groups of men were standing and posing, like chorus lines, arms around each other’s shoulders. Some shots were under a blazing sun and the men were shirtless, wearing beanie hats, squinting and smiling. Some were in jungles. Some were in wrecked and snowy streets. All showed the same tight camaraderie. Comrades in arms, off duty, still alive, and happy about it.

There was nothing else in Carbone’s six-by-eight cell. Nothing significant, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing explanatory. Nothing that revealed his history, his nature, his passions, or his interests. He had lived his life in secret, buttoned down, like his Saturday-night shirts.

I walked back to my Humvee. Turned a corner and came face-to-face with the young sergeant with the beard and the tan. He was in my way, and he wasn’t about to move.

“You made a fool out of me,” he said.

“Did I?”

“About Carbone. Letting me talk the way I did. Company clerk just showed us some interesting paperwork.”

“So?”

“So we’re thinking now.”

“Don’t tire yourself out,” I said.

“Think this is funny? You won’t think it’s funny if we find out it was you.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Says you.”

I nodded. “Says me. Now get out of my way.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll kick your ass.”

He stepped up close. “Think you could kick my ass?”

I didn’t move. “You’re wondering whether I kicked Carbone’s ass. And he was probably twice the soldier you are.”

“You won’t even see it coming,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Believe me,” he said.

I looked away. I believed him. If Delta put a hit on me, I wouldn’t see it coming. That was for sure. Weeks from now or months from now or years from now I would walk into a dark alley somewhere and a shadow would step out and a K-bar would slip between my ribs or my neck would snap with a loud crack that would echo off the bricks around me, and that would be the end of it.

“You’ve got a week,” the guy said.

“To do what?”

“To show us it wasn’t you.”

I said nothing.

“Your choice,” the guy said. “Show us, or make those seven days count. Make sure you cover all your lifetime ambitions. Don’t start a long book.”

eleven

I drove the Humvee back to my office. Left it parked right outside my door. The sergeant with the baby son had gone. The small dark corporal who I thought was from Louisiana was there in her place. The coffeepot was cold and empty. There were two message slips on my desk. The first was: Major Franz called. Please call him back. The second said: Detective Clark returned your call. I dialed Franz in California first.

“Reacher?” he said. “I asked about the Armored agenda.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t one. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.”

“But?”

“We both know that’s bullshit. There’s always an agenda.”

“So did you get anywhere?”

“Not really,” he said. “But I can prove an incoming secure fax from Germany late on December thirtieth, and I can prove significant Xeroxing activity on the thirty-first, in the afternoon. And then there was some shredding and burning on New Year’s Day, after the Kramer news broke. I spoke to the incinerator guy. One burn bag, full of paper shreds, maybe enough for about sixty sheets.”

“How secure is their secure fax line?”

“How secure do you want it to be?”

“Extremely secure. Because the only way I can make sense out of this is if the agenda was really secret. I mean, really secret. And if it was really secret, would they have put it on paper in the first place?”

“They’re XII Corps, Reacher. They’ve been living on the front line for forty years. All they’ve got is secrets.”

“How many people were scheduled to attend the conference?”

“I spoke to the mess. There were fifteen bag lunches booked.”

“Sixty pages, fifteen people, that’s a four-page agenda, then.”

“Looks that way. But they went up in smoke.”

“Not the original that was faxed from Germany,” I said.

“They’ll have burned that one over there.”

“No, my guess is Kramer was hand-carrying it when he died.”

“So where is it now?”

“Nobody knows. It got away.”

“Is it worth chasing?”

“Nobody knows,” I said again. “Except the guy who wrote it, and he’s dead. And Vassell and Coomer. They must have seen it. They probably helped with it.”

“Vassell and Coomer went back to Germany. This morning. First flight out of Dulles. The staffers here were talking about it.”

“You ever met this new guy Willard?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Try not to. He’s an asshole.”

“Thanks for the warning. What did we do to deserve him?”

“I have no idea,” I said. We hung up and I dialed the Virginia number and asked for Detective Clark. I got put on hold. Then I heard a click and a second’s worth of squad room sounds and a voice came on the line.

“Clark,” it said.

“Reacher,” I said. “U.S. Army, down at Fort Bird. Did you want me?”

“You wanted me, as I recall,” Clark said. “You wanted a progress report on Mrs. Kramer. But there isn’t any progress. We’re looking at a brick wall here. We’re looking for help, actually.”

“Nothing I can do. It’s your case.”

“I wish it wasn’t,” he said.

“What have you got?”

“Lots of nothing. The perp was in and out without maybe touching a thing. Gloves, obviously. There was a light frost on the ground. We’ve got some residual grit from the driveway and the path, but we’re not even close to a footprint.”

“Neighbors see anything?”

“Most of them were out, or drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. I’ve had people up and down the street canvassing, but nothing’s jumping out at me. There were some cars around, but there would be anyway, on New Year’s Eve, with folks heading back and forth to parties.”

“Any tire tracks on the driveway?”

“None that mean anything.”

I said nothing.

“The victim was killed with a crowbar,” Clark said. “Probably the same tool as was used on the door.”

“I figured that,” I said.

“After the attack the perp wiped it on the rug and then washed it clean in the kitchen sink. We found stuff in the pipe. No prints on the faucet. Gloves, again.”

I said nothing.

“Something else we haven’t got,” Clark said. “There’s nothing much to say your general ever really lived there.”

“Why?”

“We gave it the full-court press, forensically. We printed the whole place, we took hair and fiber from everywhere including the sink and shower traps, like I said. Everything belonged to the victim except a couple of stray prints. Bingo, we thought, but the database brought them back as the husband’s. And the ratio of hers to his suggests he was hardly there over the last five years or so. Is that usual?”

“He’ll have stayed on-post a lot,” I said. “But he should have been home for the holidays every year. The story here is that the marriage wasn’t so great.”

“People like that should just go ahead and get divorced,” Clark said. “I mean, that’s not a deal-breaker even for a general, right?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “Not anymore.”

Then he went quiet for a minute. He was thinking.

“How bad was the marriage?” he asked. “Bad enough that we should be looking at the husband for the doer?”

“The timing doesn’t work,” I said. “He was dead when it happened.”

“Was there money involved?”

“Nice house,” I said. “Probably hers.”

“So what about a paid hit, maybe set up way ahead of time?”

Now he was really clutching at straws.

“He’d have arranged it for when he was away in Germany.”

Clark said nothing to that.

“Who called you for this progress report?” I asked him.

“You did,” he said. “An hour ago.”

“I don’t recall doing that.”

“Not you personally,” he said. “Your people. It was the little black chick I met at the scene. Your lieutenant. I was too busy to talk. She gave me a number, but I left it somewhere. So I called back on the number you gave me originally. Did I do wrong?”

“No,” I said. “You did fine. Sorry we can’t help you.”

We hung up. I sat quiet for a moment and then I buzzed my corporal.

“Ask Lieutenant Summer to come see me,” I said.

Summer showed up inside ten minutes. She was in BDUs and between her face and her body language I could see she was feeling a little nervous of me and a little contemptuous of me all at the same time. I let her sit down and then I launched right into it.

“Detective Clark called back,” I said.

She said nothing.

“You disobeyed my direct order,” I said.

She said nothing.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why did you give me the order?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because you’re toeing Willard’s line.”

“He’s the CO,” I said. “It’s a good line to toe.”

“I don’t agree.”

“You’re in the army now, Summer. You don’t obey orders just because you agree with them.”

“We don’t cover things up just because we’re told to either.”

“We do,” I said. “We do that all the time. We always have.”

“Well, we shouldn’t.”

“Who made you Chief of Staff?”

“It’s unfair to Carbone and Mrs. Kramer,” she said. “They’re innocent victims.”

I paused. “Why did you start with Mrs. Kramer? You see her as more important than Carbone?”

Summer shook her head. “I didn’t start with Mrs. Kramer. I got to her second. I had already started on Carbone. I went through the personnel lists and the gate log and marked who was here at the time and who wasn’t.”

“You gave me that paperwork.”

“I copied it first.”

“You’re an idiot,” I said.

“Why? Because I’m not chicken?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“OK,” I said. “So next year you’ll be twenty-six. You’ll be a twenty-six-year-old black woman with a dishonorable discharge from the only career you’ve ever had. Meanwhile the civilian job market will be flooded because of force reduction and you’ll be competing with people with chests full of medals and pockets full of testimonials. So what are you going to do? Starve? Go work up at the strip club with Sin?”

She said nothing.

“You should have left it to me,” I said.

“You weren’t doing anything.”

“I’m glad you thought so,” I said. “That was the plan.”

“What?”

“I’m going to take Willard on,” I said. “It’s going to be him or me.”

She said nothing.

“I work for the army,” I said. “Not for Willard. I believe in the army. I don’t believe in Willard. I’m not going to let him trash everything.”

She said nothing.

“I told him not to make an enemy out of me. But he didn’t listen.”

“Big step,” she said.

“One that you already took,” I said.

“Why did you cut me out?”

“Because if I blow it I don’t want to take anyone down with me.”

“You were protecting me.”

I nodded.

“Well, don’t,” she said. “I can think for myself.”

I said nothing.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-nine,” I said.

“So next year you’ll be thirty. You’ll be a thirty-year-old white man with a dishonorable discharge from the only job you’ve ever had. And whereas I’m young enough to start over, you’re not. You’re institutionalized, you’ve got no social skills, you’ve never been in the civilian world, and you’re good for nothing. So maybe it should be you laying in the weeds, not me.”

I said nothing.

“You should have talked it over,” she said.

“It’s a personal choice,” I said.

“I already made my personal choice,” she said. “Seems like you know that now. Seems like Detective Clark accidentally ratted me out.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” I said. “One stray phone call and you could be out on the street. This is a high-stakes game.”

“And I’m right here in it with you, Reacher. So bring me up to speed.”

Five minutes later she knew what I knew. All questions, no answers.

“Garber’s signature was a forgery,” she said.

I nodded.

“So what about Carbone’s, on the complaint? Is that forged too?”

“Maybe,” I said. I took the copy that Willard had given me out of my desk drawer. Smoothed it out on the blotter and passed it across to her. She folded it neatly and put it in her inside pocket.

“I’ll get the writing checked,” she said. “Easier for me than you, now.”

“Nothing’s easy for either of us now,” I said. “You need to be very clear about that. So you need to be very clear about what you’re doing.”

“I’m clear,” she said. “Bring it on.”

I sat quiet for a minute. Just looked at her. She had a small smile on her face. She was plenty tough. But then, she had grown up poor in an Alabama shack with churches burning and exploding all around her. I guessed watching her back against Willard and a bunch of Delta vigilantes might represent progress, of a sort, in her life.

“Thank you,” I said. “For being on my side.”

“I’m not on your side,” she said. “You’re on mine.”

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was the Louisiana corporal, calling from his desk outside my door.

“North Carolina State Police on the line,” he said. “They want a duty officer. You want to take it?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I guess I better.”

There was a click and some dead air and another click. Then a dispatcher came on the line and told me a trooper in an I-95 patrol car had found an abandoned green canvas briefcase on the highway shoulder. He told me it had a wallet inside that identified the owner as a General Kenneth R. Kramer, U.S. Army. He told me he was calling Fort Bird because he figured it was the closest military installation to where the briefcase had been found. And he was calling to tell me where the briefcase was currently being held, in case I was interested in having someone sent out to pick it up.

twelve

Summer drove. We took the Humvee I had left at the curb. We didn’t want to take time to sign out a sedan. It cramped her style a little. Humvees are big slow trucks that are good for a lot of things, but covering paved roads fast isn’t one of them. She looked tiny behind the wheel. The vehicle was full of noise. The engine was thrashing and the tires were whining loud. It was four o’clock on a dull day and it was starting to go dark.

We drove north to Kramer’s motel and turned east through the cloverleaf and then north on I-95 itself. We covered fifteen miles and passed a rest area and started looking for the right State Police building. We found it twelve miles farther on. It was a long low one-story brick structure with a forest of tall radio masts bolted to its roof. It was maybe forty years old. The brick was dull tan. It was impossible to say whether it had started out yellow and then faded in the sun or whether it had started out white and gotten dirty from the traffic fumes. There were stainless-steel letters in an art deco style spelling out North Carolina State Police all along its length.

We pulled in and parked in front of a pair of glass doors. Summer shut the Humvee down and we sat for a second and then slid out. Crossed a narrow sidewalk and pulled the doors and stepped inside the facility. It was a typical police place, built for function and floored with linoleum, which was shined every night whether it needed it or not. The walls had many layers of slick paint directly over concrete blocks. The air was hot and smelled faintly of sweat and stewed coffee.

There was a desk guy behind a reception counter. We were in battledress uniform and our Humvee was visible behind us through the doors, so he made the connection fast enough. He didn’t ask for ID or inquire why we were there. He didn’t speculate as to why General Kramer hadn’t shown up himself. He just glanced at me and spent a little longer looking at Summer and then leaned down under his counter and came back up with the briefcase. It was in a clear plastic bag. Not an evidence bag. Just some kind of a shopping bag. It had a store’s name printed across it in red.

The briefcase itself matched Kramer’s suit carrier in every way. Same color, same design, same age, same level of wear and tear, no monogram. I opened it and looked inside. There was a wallet. There were plane tickets. There was a passport. There was a paper-clipped itinerary three sheets thick. There was a hardcover book.

There was no conference agenda.

I closed the case up again and laid it down on the counter. Butted it square with the edge. I was disappointed, but not surprised.

“Was it in the plastic bag when the trooper found it?” I asked.

The desk guy shook his head. He was looking at Summer, not me.

“I put it in the bag myself,” he said. “I wanted to keep it clean. I wasn’t sure how soon someone would get here.”

“Where exactly was it found?” I asked him.

He paused a beat and looked away from Summer and ran a thick fingertip down a desk ledger and across a line to a mile marker code. Then he turned around and used the same fingertip on a map. The map was a large-scale plan of North Carolina’s portion of I-95 and was long and narrow, like a ribbon five inches wide. It showed every mile of the highway from where it entered from South Carolina and exited again into Virginia. The guy’s finger hovered for a second and then came down, decisively.

“Here,” he said. “Northbound shoulder, a mile past the rest area, about eleven miles south of where we are right now.”

“Any way of knowing how long it had been there?”

“Not really,” he said. “We’re not out there specifically looking for trash on the shoulders. Stuff can be there a month.”

“So how was it found?”

“Routine traffic stop. The trooper just saw it there, walking from his car to the car he had stopped.”

“When was this exactly?”

“Today,” the guy said. “Start of the second watch. Not long after noon.”

“It wasn’t there a month,” I said.

“When did he lose it?”

“New Year’s Eve,” I said.

“Where?”

“It was stolen from where he was staying.”

“Where was he staying?”

“A motel about thirty miles south of here.”

“So the bad guys were coming back north.”

“I guess,” I said.

The guy looked at me like he was asking permission and then picked the case up with both hands and looked at it like he was a connoisseur and it was a rare piece. He turned it in the light and stared at it from every angle.

“January,” he said. “We’ve got a little night dew right now. And it’s cold enough that we’re worried about ice. So we’ve got salt down. Things age fast, this time of year on the highway shoulder. And this looks old and worn, but not very deteriorated. It’s got some grit on it, in the weave of the canvas. But not very much. It hasn’t been out there since New Year’s Eve, that much is for damn sure. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say. One night, not more.”

“Can you be certain?” Summer asked.

He shook his head. Put the case back on the counter.

“Just a guess,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’ll have to sign for it.”

I nodded. He reversed the desk ledger and pushed it toward me. I had Reacher in a subdued-pattern stencil above my right breast pocket, but I figured he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had spent most of his time looking at Summer’s pockets. So I scrawled K. Kramer on the appropriate line in the book and picked up the briefcase and turned away.

“Funny sort of burglary,” the desk guy said. “There’s an Amex card and money still in the wallet. We inventoried the contents.”

I didn’t reply. Just went out through the doors, back to the Humvee.

Summer waited for a gap in the traffic and then drove across all three lanes and bounced straight onto the soft grass median. She went down a slope and through a drainage ditch and straight up the other side. Paused and waited and turned left back onto the blacktop and headed south. That was the kind of thing a Humvee was good for.

“Try this,” she said. “Last night Vassell and Coomer leave Bird at ten o’clock with the briefcase. They head north for Dulles or D.C. They extract the agenda and throw the case out the car window.”

“They were in the bar and the dining room their whole time at Bird.”

“So one of their dinner companions passed it on. We should check who they ate with. Maybe one of the women on the Humvee list was there.”

“They were all alibied.”

“Only superficially. New Year’s Eve parties are pretty chaotic.”

I looked out the window. Afternoon was fading fast. Evening was coming on. The world looked dark and cold.

“Sixty miles,” I said. “The case was found sixty miles north of Bird. That’s an hour. They would have grabbed the agenda and ditched the case faster than that.”

Summer said nothing.

“And they would have stopped at the rest area to do it. They would have put the case in a garbage can. That would have been safer. Throwing a briefcase out of a car window is pretty conspicuous.”

“Maybe there really wasn’t an agenda.”

“It would be the first time in military history.”

“Then maybe it really wasn’t important.”

“They ordered bag lunches at Irwin. Two-stars, one-stars, and colonels were planning to work through their lunch hour. That might be the first time in military history too. That was an important conference, Summer, believe me.”

She said nothing.

“Do that U-turn thing again,” I said. “Across the median. Then go back north a little. I want to look at the rest area.”

The rest area was the same as on most American interstates I had seen. The northbound highway and the southbound highway eased apart to put a long fat bulge into the median. The buildings were shared by both sets of travelers. Therefore they had two fronts and no backs. They were built of brick and had dormant flower beds and leafless trees all around them. There were gas pumps. There were angled parking slots. Right then the place seemed to be halfway between quiet and busy. It was the end of the holidays. Families were struggling home, ready for school, ready for work. The parking slots were maybe one-third filled with cars. Their distribution was interesting. People had grabbed the first parking spot they saw rather than chancing something farther on, even though that might have put them ultimately a little closer to the food and the bathrooms. Maybe it was human nature. Some kind of insecurity.

There was a small semicircular plaza at the facility’s main entrance. I could see bright neon signs inside at the food stations. Outside, there were six trash cans all fairly close to the doors. There were plenty of people around, looking in, looking out.

“Too public,” Summer said. “This is going nowhere.”

I nodded again. “I’d forget it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Mrs. Kramer.”

“Carbone is more important. We should prioritize.”

“That feels like we’re giving up.”

We went north out of the rest area and Summer did her off-roading thing across the median again and turned south. I got as comfortable as it was possible to get in a military vehicle and settled in for the ride back. Darkness unspooled on my left. There was a vague sunset in the West, to my right. The road looked damp. Summer didn’t seem very worried about the possibility of ice.

I did nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I switched the dome light on and searched Kramer’s briefcase, thoroughly. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I wasn’t proved wrong. His passport was a standard item, seven years old. He looked a little better in the picture than he had dead in the motel, but not much. He had plenty of stamps in and out of Germany and Belgium. The future battlefield and NATO HQ, respectively. He hadn’t been anywhere else. He was a true specialist. For at least seven years he had concentrated exclusively on the world’s last great tank arena and its command structure.

The plane tickets were exactly what Garber had said they should be. Frankfurt to Dulles, and Washington National to Los Angeles, both round-trip. They were all coach class and government rate, booked three days before the first departure date.

The itinerary matched the details on the plane tickets exactly. There were seat assignments. It seemed like Kramer preferred the aisle. Maybe his age was affecting his bladder. There was a reservation for a single room in Fort Irwin’s Visiting Officers’ Quarters, which he had never reached.

His wallet contained thirty-seven American dollars and sixty-seven German marks, all in mixed small bills. The Amex card was the basic green item, due to expire in a year and a half. He had carried one since 1964, according to the Member Since rubric. I figured that was pretty early for an army officer. Back then most got by with cash and military scrip. Kramer must have been a sophisticated guy, financially.

There was a Virginia driver’s license. He had been using Green Valley as his permanent address, even though he avoided spending time there. There was a standard military ID card. There was a photograph of Mrs. Kramer, behind a plastic window. It showed a much younger version of the woman I had seen dead on her hallway floor. It was at least twenty years old. She had been pretty back then. She had long auburn hair that showed up a little orange from the way the photograph had faded with age.

There was nothing else in the wallet. No receipts, no restaurant checks, no Amex carbons, no phone numbers, no scraps of paper. I wasn’t surprised. Generals are often neat, organized people. They need fighting talent, but they need bureaucratic talent too. I guessed Kramer’s office and desk and quarters would be the same as his wallet. They would contain everything he needed and nothing he didn’t.

The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose. I wasn’t surprised by his choice of reading material. Some small part of him must have feared the closest he would ever get to truly cataclysmic action was reading about the hundreds of Tigers and Panthers and T-34s whirling and roaring through the choking summer dust all those years ago.

There was nothing else in the briefcase. Just a few furred paper shreds trapped in the seams. It looked like Kramer was the sort of guy who emptied his case and turned it upside down and shook it every time he packed for a trip. I put everything back inside and buckled the little straps and laid the case on the floor by my feet.

“Speak to the dining room guy,” I said. “When we get back. Find out who was at the table with Vassell and Coomer.”

“OK,” Summer said. She drove on.

We got back to Bird in time for dinner. We ate in the O Club bar with a bunch of fellow MPs. If Willard had spies among them, they would have seen nothing except a couple of tired people doing not very much of anything. But Summer slipped away between courses and came back with news in her eyes. I ate my dessert and drank my coffee slowly enough that nobody could think I had urgent business anywhere. Then I stood up and wandered out. Waited in the cold on the sidewalk. Summer came out five minutes later. I smiled. It felt like we were conducting a clandestine affair.

“Only one woman ate with Vassell and Coomer,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Colonel Andrea Norton.”

“The Psy-Ops person?”

“The very same.”

“She was at a party on New Year’s Eve?”

Summer made a face. “You know what those parties are like. A bar in town, hundreds of people, in and out all the time, noise, confusion, drinks, people disappearing two by two. She could have slipped away.”

“Where was the bar?”

“Thirty minutes from the motel.”

“Then she would have been gone an hour, absolute minimum.”

“That’s possible.”

“Was she in the bar at midnight? Holding hands and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Whoever was standing next to her should be able to say for sure.”

“People say she was there. But she could have made it back by then anyway. The kid said the Humvee left at eleven twenty-five. She’d have been back with five minutes to spare. It could have looked natural. You know, everybody comes out of the woodwork, ready for the ball to drop. The party kind of starts over.”

I said nothing.

“She would have taken the case to sanitize it. Maybe her phone number was in there, or her name or her picture. Or a diary. She didn’t want the scandal. But once she was through with it, she didn’t need the rest of the stuff anymore. She’d have been happy to hand it back when asked.”

“How would Vassell and Coomer know who to ask?”

“Hard to hide a long-standing affair in this fishbowl.”

“Not logical,” I said. “If people knew about Kramer and Norton, why would someone go to the house in Virginia?”

“OK, maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it was just there on the list of possibilities. Maybe way down the list. Maybe it was something that people thought was over.”

I nodded. “What can we get from her?”

“We can get confirmation that Vassell and Coomer arranged to take possession of the briefcase last night. That would prove they were looking for it, which puts them in the frame for Mrs. Kramer.”

“They made no calls from the hotel, and they didn’t have time to get down there themselves. So I don’t see how we can put them in the frame. What else can we get?”

“We can be certain about what happened to the agenda. We can know that Vassell and Coomer got it back. Then at least the army can relax because we’ll know for sure it isn’t going to wind up on some public trash pile for a journalist to find.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“And maybe Norton saw it,” Summer said. “Maybe she read it. Maybe she could tell us what all this fuss is about.”

“That’s tempting.”

“It sure is.”

“Can we just walk in and ask her?”

“You’re from the 110th. You can ask anyone anything.”

“I have to stay under Willard’s radar.”

“She doesn’t know he warned you off.”

“She does. He spoke to her after the Carbone thing.”

“I think we have to talk to her.”

“Difficult kind of a talk to have,” I said. “She’s likely to get offended.”

“Only if we do it wrong.”

“What are the chances of doing it right?”

“We might be able to manipulate the situation. There’ll be an embarrassment factor. She won’t want it broadcast.”

“We can’t push her to the point where she calls Willard.”

“You scared of him?”

“I’m scared of what he can do to us bureaucratically. Doesn’t help anyone if we both get transferred to Alaska.”

“Your call.”

I was quiet for a long moment. Thought back to Kramer’s hardcover book. This was like July thirteenth, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We found Andrea Norton in the O Club lounge and I asked her if she would spare us a minute in her office. I could see she was puzzled as to why. I told her it was a confidential matter. She stayed puzzled. Willard had told her that Carbone was a closed case, and she couldn’t see what else we would have to talk to her about. But she agreed. She told us she would meet us there in thirty minutes.

Summer and I spent the thirty minutes in my office with her list of who was on-post and who wasn’t at Carbone’s time of death. She had yards of computer paper neatly folded into a large concertina about an inch thick. There was a name, rank, and number printed on each line with pale dot-matrix ink. Almost every name had a check mark next to it.

“What are the marks?” I asked her. “Here or not here?”

“Here,” she said.

I nodded. I was afraid of that. I riffed through the concertina with my thumb.

“How many?” I asked.

“Nearly twelve hundred.”

I nodded again. There was nothing intrinsically difficult about boiling down twelve hundred names and finding one sole perpetrator. Police files everywhere are full of larger suspect pools. There had been cases in Korea where the entire U.S. military strength had been the suspect pool. But cases like that require unlimited manpower, big staffs, and endless resources. And they require everybody’s total cooperation. They can’t be handled behind a CO’s back, in secret, by two people acting alone.

“Impossible,” I said.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Summer said.

“We have to go at it a different way.”

“How?”

“What did he take to the scene?”

“Nothing.”

“Wrong,” I said. “He took himself.”

Summer shrugged. Dragged her fingers up the folded edges of her paper. The stack thickened and then thinned back down as the air sighed out from between the pages.

“Pick a name,” she said.

“He took a K-bar,” I said.

“Twelve hundred names, twelve hundred K-bars.”

“He took a tire iron or a crowbar.”

She nodded.

“And he took yogurt,” I said.

She said nothing.

“Four things,” I said. “Himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and yogurt. Where did the yogurt come from?”

“His refrigerator in his quarters,” Summer said. “Or one of the mess kitchens, or one of the mess buffets, or the commissary, or a supermarket or a deli or a grocery store somewhere off-post.”

I pictured a man breathing hard, walking fast, maybe sweating, a bloodstained knife and a crowbar clutched together in his right hand, an empty yogurt pot in his left, stumbling in the dark, nearing a destination, looking down, seeing the pot, hurling it into the undergrowth, putting the knife in his pocket, slipping the crowbar under his coat.

“We should look for the container,” I said.

Summer said nothing.

“He’ll have ditched it,” I said. “Not close to the scene, but not far from it either.”

“Will it help us?”

“It’ll have some kind of a product code on it. Maybe a best before date. Stuff like that. It might lead us to where it was bought.”

Then I paused.

“And it might have prints on it,” I said.

“He’ll have worn gloves.”

I shook my head. “I’ve seen people opening yogurt containers. But I’ve never seen anyone do it with gloves on. There’s a foil closure. With a tiny little tab to pull.”

“We’re on a hundred thousand acres here.”

I nodded. Square one. Normally a couple of phone calls would get me all the grunts on the post lined up a yard apart on their knees, crawling slowly across the terrain like a giant human comb, staring down at the ground and parting every blade of grass by hand. And then doing it again the next day, and the next, until one of them found what we were looking for. With manpower like the army has, you can find a needle in a haystack. You can find both halves of a broken needle. You can find the tiny chip of chrome that flaked off the break.

Summer looked at the clock on the wall.

“Our thirty minutes are up,” she said.

We used the Humvee to get over to Psy-Ops and parked in a slot that was probably reserved for someone else. It was nine o’clock. Summer killed the motor and we opened the doors and slipped out into the cold.

I took Kramer’s briefcase with me.

We walked through the old tiled corridors and came to Norton’s door. Her light was on. I knocked and we went in. Norton was behind her desk. All her textbooks were back on her shelves. There were no legal pads on view. No pens or pencils. Her desktop was clear. The pool of light from her lamp was a perfect circle on the empty wood.

She had three visitor’s chairs. She waved us toward them. Summer sat on the right. I sat on the left. I propped Kramer’s briefcase on the center chair, facing Norton, like a ghost at the feast. She didn’t look at it.

“How can I help you?” she said.

I made a point of adjusting the briefcase’s position so that it was completely upright on the chair.

“Tell us about the dinner party last night,” I said.

“What dinner party?”

“You ate with some Armored staffers who were visiting.”

She nodded.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “So?”

“They worked for General Kramer.”

She nodded again. “So I believe.”

“Tell us about the meal.”

“The food?”

“The atmosphere,” I said. “The conversation. The mood.”

“It was just dinner in the O Club,” she said.

“Someone gave Vassell and Coomer a briefcase.”

“Did they? What, like a present?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t remember that,” Norton said. “When?”

“During dinner,” I said. “Or as they were leaving.”

Nobody spoke.

“A briefcase?” Norton said.

“Was it you?” Summer asked.

Norton looked at her, blankly. She was either genuinely puzzled, or she was a superb actress. “Was it me what?”

“Who gave them the briefcase.”

“Why would I give them a briefcase? I hardly knew them.”

“How well did you know them?”

“I met them once or twice, years ago.”

“At Irwin?”

“I believe so.”

“Why did you eat with them?”

“I was in the bar. They asked me. It would have been rude to decline.”

“Did you know they were coming?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I had no idea. I was surprised they weren’t in Germany.”

“So you knew them well enough to know where they’re based.”

“Kramer was an Armored Branch commander in Europe. They were his staffers. I wouldn’t expect to find them based in Hawaii.”

Nobody spoke. I watched Norton’s eyes. She hadn’t looked at Kramer’s briefcase longer than about half a second. Just long enough to figure I was some guy who carried a briefcase, and then to forget all about it.

“What’s going on here?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Tell me.”

I pointed to the briefcase. “This is General Kramer’s. He lost it on New Year’s Eve and it showed up again today. We’re trying to figure out where it’s been.”

“Where did he lose it?”

Summer moved in her chair.

“In a motel,” she said. “During a sexual assignation with a woman from this post. The woman was driving a Humvee. Therefore we’re looking for women who knew Kramer, and who have permanent access to Humvees, and who were off-post on New Year’s Eve, and who were at dinner last night.”

“I was the only woman at dinner last night.”

Silence.

Summer nodded. “We know that. And we promise we can keep the whole thing quiet, but first we need you to confirm who you gave the briefcase to.”

The room stayed quiet. Norton looked at Summer like she had told a joke with a punch line she didn’t quite understand.

“You think I was sleeping with General Kramer?” she said.

Summer said nothing.

“Well, I wasn’t,” Norton said. “God forbid.”

Nobody spoke.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said. “I’m seriously conflicted. That’s a completely absurd accusation. I’m astonished you made it.”

Nobody spoke for a long time. Norton smiled, like the main component of her reaction was amusement. Not anger. She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.

“Is there something missing from the briefcase?” she asked me.

I didn’t answer.

“Help me out here,” she said. “Please. I’m trying to see the point of this extraordinary visit. Is there something missing from Kramer’s briefcase?”

“Vassell and Coomer say not.”

“But?”

“I don’t believe them.”

“You probably should. They’re senior officers.”

I said nothing.

“What does your new CO say?”

“He doesn’t want it pursued. He’s worried about embarrassment.”

“You should be guided by him.”

“I’m an investigator. I have to ask questions.”

“The army is a family,” she said. “We’re all on the same side.”

“Did Vassell or Coomer leave with this briefcase last night?” I said.

Norton closed her eyes again. At first I thought she was just exasperated, but then I realized she was picturing last night’s scene, at the O Club coat check.

“No,” she said. “Neither one of them left with that briefcase.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“I’m totally certain.”

“What was their mood during dinner?”

She opened her eyes.

“They were relaxed,” she said. “Like they were passing an empty evening.”

“Did they say why they were at Bird again?”

“General Kramer’s funeral was yesterday, at noon.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I believe Walter Reed released the body and the Pentagon handled the details.”

“Where was the funeral?”

“Arlington Cemetery,” she said. “Where else?”

“That’s three hundred miles away.”

“Approximately. As the crow flies.”

“So why did they come down here for dinner?”

“They didn’t tell me,” she said.

I said nothing.

“Anything else?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“A motel?” she said. “Do I look like the kind of woman who would agree to meet a man in a motel?”

I didn’t answer.

“Dismissed,” she said.

I stood up. Summer did the same. I took Kramer’s briefcase from the center chair and walked out of the room. Summer followed behind me.

“Did you believe her?” Summer asked me.

We were sitting in the Humvee outside the Psy-Ops building. The engine was idling and the heater was blowing hot stale air that smelled of diesel.

“Totally,” I said. “As soon as she didn’t look at the briefcase. She’d have gotten very flustered if she’d ever seen it before. And I certainly believed her about the motel. It would cost you a suite at the Ritz to get in her pants.”

“So what did we learn?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“No, we learned that Bird is a very attractive place, apparently. Vassell and Coomer keep coming all the way down here, for no very obvious reason.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“And that Norton thinks we’re a family.”

“Officers,” I said. “What do you expect?”

“You’re an officer. I’m an officer.”

I nodded.

“I was at West Point for four years,” I said. “I should know better. I should have changed my name and come back in as a private. Three promotions, I’d be an E-4 specialist by now. Maybe even an E-5 sergeant. I wish I was.”

“What now?”

I checked my watch. It was close to ten o’clock.

“Sleep,” I said. “First light, we go out looking for a yogurt container.”

thirteen

I had never eaten yogurt myself but I had seen some and my impression was that individual portions came in small pots about two inches wide, which meant you could fit about three hundred of them in a square yard. Which meant you could fit nearly a million and a half of them in an acre. Which meant you could hide a hundred-fifty billion of them inside Fort Bird’s perimeter wire. Which meant that looking for one would be like looking for a single anthrax spore in Yankee Stadium. I did the calculation while I showered and dressed in the predawn darkness.

Then I sat on my bed and waited for some light in the sky. No point in going out there and missing the 1-in-150-billion chance because it was too dark to see properly. But as I sat I started to figure we could narrow the odds by being intelligent about where exactly we looked. The guy with the yogurt obviously made it back from A to B. We knew where A was. A was where Carbone had been killed. And there was a limited choice of places for B. B was either a random hole in the perimeter wire or somewhere among the main post buildings. So if we were smart, we could cut the billions to millions, and find the thing in a hundred years instead of a thousand.

Unless it was already licked clean inside some starving raccoon’s den.

I met Summer in the MP motor pool. She was bright and full of energy but we didn’t talk. There was nothing to say, except that the task we had set for ourselves was impossible. And I guessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud. So we didn’t speak. We just picked a Humvee at random and headed out. I drove, for a change, the same three-minute journey I had driven thirty-some hours before.

According to the Humvee’s trip meter we traveled exactly a mile and a half and according to its compass we traveled south and west, and then we arrived at the crime scene. There were still tatters of MP tape on some of the trees. We parked ten yards off the track and got out. I climbed up on the hood and sat on the roof above the windshield. Gazed west and north, and then turned around and gazed east and south. The air was cold. There was a breeze. The landscape was brown and dead and immense. The dawn sun was weak and pale.

“Which way did he go?” I called.

“North and east,” Summer called back.

She sounded pretty sure about it.

“Why?” I called.

She climbed up on the hood and sat next to me.

“He had a vehicle,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because we didn’t find one left out here, and I doubt if they walked.”

“Why?”

“Because if they’d walked, it would have happened closer to where they started. This is at least a thirty-minute walk from anywhere. I don’t see the bad guy concealing a tire iron or a crowbar for thirty solid minutes, not walking side by side. Under a coat, it would make him move like a robot. Carbone would have twigged. So they drove. In the bad guy’s vehicle. He had the weapon under a jacket or something on the backseat. Maybe the knife and the yogurt too.”

“Where did they start?”

“Doesn’t matter. Only thing that matters to us now is where the bad guy went afterward. And if he was in a vehicle, he didn’t drive outward toward the wire. We can assume there are no vehicle-sized holes in it. Man-sized maybe, or deer-sized, but nothing big enough to drive a truck or a car through.”

“OK,” I said.

“So he headed back to the post. He can’t have gone anywhere else. Can’t just drive a vehicle into the middle of nowhere. He drove back along the track and parked his vehicle and went about his business.”

I nodded. Looked at the western horizon ahead of me. Turned and looked north and east, back along the track. Back toward the post. A mile and a half of track. I pictured the aerodynamics of an empty yogurt container. Lightweight plastic, cup-shaped, a torn foil closure flapping like an air brake. I pictured throwing one, hard. It would sail and stall in the air. It would travel ten feet, tops. A mile and a half of track, ten feet of shoulder, on the left, on the driver’s side. I felt millions shrink to thousands. Then I felt them expand all the way back up to billions.

“Good news and bad news,” I said. “I think you’re right, so you’ve cut the search area down by about ninety-nine percent. Maybe more. Which is good.”

“But?”

“If he was in a vehicle, did he throw it out at all?”

Summer was silent.

“He could have just dropped it on the floor,” I said. “Or chucked it in the back.”

“Not if it was a pool vehicle.”

“So maybe he put it in a sidewalk trash can later, after he parked. Or maybe he took it home with him.”

“Maybe. It’s a fifty-fifty situation.”

“Seventy-thirty at best,” I said.

“We should look anyway.”

I nodded. Braced the palms of my hands on the windshield’s header rail and vaulted down to the ground.

It was January, and the conditions were pretty good. February would have been better. In a temperate northern hemisphere climate, vegetation dies right back in February. It gets as thin and sparse as it ever will. But January was OK. The undergrowth was low and the ground was flat and brown. It was the color of dead bracken and leaf litter. There was no snow. The landscape was even and neutral and organic. It was a good background. I figured a container for a dairy product would be bright white. Or cream. Or maybe pink, for a strawberry or a raspberry flavor. Whatever, it would be a helpful color. It wouldn’t be black, for instance. Nobody puts a dairy product in a black container. So if it was there and we came close to it, we would find it.

We checked a ten-foot belt all around the perimeter of the crime scene. Found nothing. So we went back to the track and set off north and east along it. Summer walked five feet from the track’s left-hand edge. I walked five feet to her left. If we both scanned both ways we would cover a fifteen-foot strip, with two pairs of eyes on the crucial five-foot lane between us, which is exactly where the container should have landed, according to my aerodynamic theory.

We walked slow, maybe half-speed. I used short paces and settled into a rhythm of moving my head from one side to the other with every step. I felt pretty stupid doing it. I must have looked like a penguin. But it was an efficient method. I lapsed into a kind of autopilot mode and the ground blurred beneath me. I wasn’t seeing individual leaves and twigs and blades of grass. I was tuning out what should be there. I felt like something that shouldn’t be there would leap right out at me.

We walked for ten minutes and found nothing.

“Swap?” Summer said.

We changed places and moved on. We saw a million tons of forest debris, and nothing else. Army posts are kept scrupulously clean. The weekly litter patrol is a religion. Outside the wire we would have been tripping over all kinds of stuff. Inside, there was nothing. Nothing at all. We did another ten minutes, another three hundred yards, and then we paused and swapped positions again. Moving slow in the cold air was chilling me. I stared at the earth like a maniac. I felt we were close to our best chance. A mile and a half is 2,640 yards. I figured the first few hundred and the last few hundred were poor hunting grounds. At first the guy would have been feeling the pure urge to escape. Then close to the post buildings he knew he had to be ready and done and composed. So the middle stretch was where he would have sanitized. Anyone with any sense would have coasted to a stop, breathed in, breathed out, and thought things through. He would have buzzed his window down and felt the night air on his face. I slowed down and looked harder, left and right, left and right. Saw nothing.

“Did he have blood on him?” I said.

“A little, maybe,” Summer said, on my right.

I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.

“On his gloves,” she said. “Maybe on his shoes.”

“Less than he might have expected,” I said. “Unless he was a doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was going to drive the next day.”

“So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.”

I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.

We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing. Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper, no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred yards in front of us.

“I want to backtrack,” I said. “I want to do the middle part again.”

“OK,” she said. “About-face.”

She turned and we switched positions. We decided we would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed her eyes were good for detail.

We walked back, slow and steady.

Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I put my hands in my pockets.

Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a 2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was a hair better than two-point-four acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out of a hundred thousand. Odds of forty thousand to one, approximately. Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery ticket. But not much better.

We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We saw nothing.

Then I saw something.

It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis.

And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.

Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said, No snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.

There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt? Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have traveled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid, not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military equipment is curved.

I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.

It was a crowbar.

A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood and hair.

I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner than I expected and out of breath.

“Do we have an evidence bag?” I asked.

“It’s not evidence,” she said. “Training accidents don’t need evidence.”

“I’m not planning on taking it to court,” I said. “I just don’t want to touch it, is all. Don’t want my prints on it. That might give Willard ideas.”

She checked the back of the truck.

“No evidence bags,” she said.

I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibers, so as not to confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he could get.

“We could bring a specialist out here,” Summer said. She was standing right behind me. I could sense her there.

“Can’t involve anyone else,” I said. “I didn’t even want to involve you.”

She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed stalks of grass out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

“Wasn’t planning to,” she said.

We looked at it together, close up. It was a handheld wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was painted gloss black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars. It was shaped a little like an alto saxophone. The main shaft was about three feet long, slightly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital letter J. Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready for levering nails out of planks of wood. Its design was streamlined and evolved, and simple, and brutal.

“Hardly used,” Summer said.

“Never used,” I said. “Not for construction, anyway.”

I stood up.

“We don’t need to print it,” I said. “We can assume the guy was wearing gloves when he swung it.”

Summer stood up next to me.

“We don’t need to type the blood either,” she said. “We can assume it’s Carbone’s.”

I said nothing.

“We could just leave it here,” Summer said.

“No,” I said. “We can’t do that.”

I bent down and untied my right boot. Pulled the lace all the way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together. That gave me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diameter. I draped it over my right palm and dragged the free end across the dead stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar’s tip. Then I closed my fist and lifted the heavy steel weight carefully out of the grass. I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I limped around to the front passenger seat with the crowbar swinging gently in midair and my boot half off. I sat close to the transmission tunnel and steadied the crowbar against the floor just enough to stop it touching my legs as the vehicle moved.

“Where to?” Summer asked.

“The mortuary,” I said.

I was hoping the pathologist and his staff would be out eating breakfast, but they weren’t. They were all in the building, working. The pathologist himself caught us in the lobby. He was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand. He looked at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my boot lace. Took him half of a second to understand what it was, and the other half to realize it put us all in a very awkward situation.

“We could come back later,” I said. When you’re not here.

“No,” he said. “We’ll go to my office.”

He led the way. I watched him walk. He was a small dark man with short legs, brisk, competent, a little older than me. He seemed nice enough. And I guessed he wasn’t stupid. Very few medics are. They have all kinds of complicated stuff to learn, before they get to be where they want to be. And I guessed he wasn’t unethical. Very few medics were that either, in my experience. They’re scientists at heart, and scientists generally retain a good-faith interest in facts and the truth. Or at least they retain some kind of innate curiosity. All of which was good, because this guy’s attitude was going to be crucial. He could stay out of our way, or he could sell us out with a single phone call.

His office was a plain square room full of original-issue gray steel desks and file cabinets. It was crowded. There were framed diplomas on the walls. There were shelves full of books and manuals. No specimen jars. No weird stuff pickled in formaldehyde. It could have been an army lawyer’s office, except the diplomas were from medical schools, not law schools.

He sat down in his rolling chair. Placed his file on his desk. Summer closed his door and leant on it. I stood in the middle of the floor, with the crowbar hanging in space. We all looked at each other. Waited to see who would make the opening bid.

“Carbone was a training accident,” the doctor said, like he was moving his first pawn two squares forward.

I nodded.

“No question,” I said, like I was moving my own pawn.

“I’m glad we’ve got that straight,” he said.

But he said it in a voice that meant: Can you believe this shit?

I heard Summer breathe out, because we had an ally. But we had an ally who wanted distance. We had an ally who wanted to hide behind an elaborate charade. And I didn’t altogether blame him. He owed years of service in exchange for his medical school tuition. Therefore he was cautious. Therefore he was an ally whose wishes we had to respect.

“Carbone fell and hit his head,” I said. “It’s a closed case. Pure accident, very unfortunate for all concerned.”

“But?”

I held the crowbar a little higher.

“I think this is what he hit his head on,” I said.

“Three times?”

“Maybe he bounced. Maybe there were dead twigs under the leaves, made the ground a little springy, like a trampoline.”

The doctor nodded. “Terrain can be like that, this time of year.”

“Lethal,” I said.

I lowered the crowbar again. Waited.

“Why did you bring it here?” the doctor asked.

“There might be an issue of contributory negligence,” I said. “Whoever left it lying around for Carbone to fall on might need a reprimand.”

The doctor nodded again. “Littering is a grave offense.”

“In this man’s army,” I said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We’re here to help you out, is all. With it being a closed case, we figured you wouldn’t want to clutter your place up with those plaster casts you made. Of the wound site. We figured we could haul them to the trash for you.”

The doctor nodded for a third time.

“You could do that,” he said. “It would save me a trip.”

He paused for a long moment. Then he cleared the file away from in front of him and opened some drawers and laid sheets of clean white paper on the desktop and arranged half-a-dozen glass microscope slides on the paper.

“That thing looks heavy,” he said to me.

“It is,” I said.

“Maybe you should put it down. Take the weight off your shoulder.”

“Is that medical advice?”

“You don’t want ligament damage.”

“Where should I put it down?”

“Any flat surface you can find.”

I stepped forward and laid the crowbar gently on his desk, on top of the paper and the glass slides. Unhooked my boot lace and picked the knot out of it. Squatted down and threaded it back through all the eyelets. Tightened it up and tied it off. I looked up in time to see the doctor move a microscope slide. He picked it up and scraped it against the end of the crowbar where it was matted with blood and hair.

“Damn,” he said. “I got this slide all dirty. Very careless of me.”

He made the exact same error with five more slides.

“Are we interested in fingerprints?” he said.

I shook my head. “We’re assuming gloves.”

“We should check, I think. Contributory negligence is a serious matter.”

He opened another drawer and peeled a latex glove out of a box and snapped it on his hand. It made a tiny cloud of talcum dust. Then he picked the crowbar up and carried it out of the room.

He came back less than ten minutes later. He still had his glove on. The crowbar was washed clean. The black paint gleamed. It looked indistinguishable from new.

“No prints,” he said.

He put the crowbar down on his chair and pulled a file drawer and came out with a plain brown cardboard box. Opened it up and took out two chalk-white plaster casts. Both were about six inches long and both had Carbone handwritten in black ink on the underside. One was a positive, formed by pressing wet plaster into the wound. The other was a negative, formed by molding more plaster over the positive. The negative showed the shape of the wound the weapon had made, and therefore the positive showed the shape of the weapon itself.

The doctor put the positive on the chair next to the crowbar. Lined them up, parallel. The cast was about six inches long. It was white and a little pitted from the molding process but was otherwise identical to the smooth black iron. Absolutely identical. Same section, same thickness, same contours.

Then the doctor put the negative on the desk. It was a little bigger than the positive, and a little messier. It was an exact replica of the back of Carbone’s shattered skull. The doctor picked up the crowbar. Hefted it in his hand. Lined it up, speculatively. Brought it down, very slowly, one, for the first blow, then two for the second. Then three for the last. He touched it to the plaster. The third and final wound was the best defined. It was a clear three-quarter-inch trench in the plaster, and the crowbar fitted it perfectly.

“I’ll check the blood and the hair,” the doctor said. “Not that we don’t already know what the results will be.”

He lifted the crowbar out of the plaster and tried it again. It went in again, precisely, and deep. He lifted it out and balanced it across his open palms, like he was weighing it. Then he grasped it by the straighter end and swung it, like a batter going after a high fastball. He swung it again, harder, a compact, violent stroke. It looked big in his hands. Big, and a little heavy for him. A little out of control.

“Very strong man,” he said. “Vicious swing. Big tall guy, right-handed, physically very fit. But that describes a lot of people on this post, I guess.”

“There was no guy,” I said. “Carbone fell and hit his head.”

The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his palms again.

“It’s handsome, in its way,” he said. “Does that sound strange?”

I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was everything it needed to be and nothing it didn’t. Like a Colt Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach. He slid it inside a long steel drawer. The metals scraped one on the other and then boomed faintly when he let it go and dropped it the final inch.

“I’ll keep it here,” he said. “If you like. Safer that way.”

“OK,” I said.

He closed the drawer.

“Are you right-handed?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“Colonel Willard told me you did it,” he said. “But I didn’t believe him.”

“Why not?”

“You were very surprised when you saw who it was. When I put his face back on. You had a definite physical reaction. People can’t fake that sort of thing.”

“Did you tell Willard that?”

The doctor nodded. “He found it inconvenient. But it didn’t really deflect him. And I’m sure he’s already developed a theory to explain it away.”

“I’ll watch my back,” I said.

“Some Delta sergeants came to see me too. There are rumors starting. I think you should watch your back very carefully.”

“I plan to,” I said.

“Very carefully,” the doctor said.

Summer and I got back in the Humvee. She fired it up and put it in gear and sat with her foot on the brake.

“Quartermaster,” I said.

“It wasn’t military issue,” she said.

“It looked expensive,” I said. “Expensive enough for the Pentagon, maybe.”

“It would have been green.”

I nodded. “Probably. But we should still check. Sooner or later we’re going to need all our ducks in a row.”

She took her foot off the brake and headed for the quartermaster building. She had been at Bird much longer than me and she knew where everything was. She parked again in front of the usual type of warehouse. I knew there would be a long counter inside with massive off-limits storage areas behind it. There would be huge bales of clothing, tires, blankets, mess kits, entrenching tools, equipment of every kind.

We went in and found a young guy in new BDUs behind the counter. He was a cheerful corn-fed country boy. He looked like he was working in his dad’s hardware store, and he looked like it was his life’s ambition. He was enthusiastic. I told him we were interested in construction equipment. He opened a manual the size of eight phone books. Found the correct section. I asked him to find listings for crowbars. He licked his forefinger and turned pages and found two entries. Prybar, general issue, long, claw on one end and then crowbar, general issue, short, claw on both ends. I asked him to show us an example of the latter.

The kid went away and disappeared among the tall stacks. We waited. Breathed in the unique quartermaster smell of old dust and new rubber and damp cotton twill. He came back after five long minutes with a GI crowbar. Laid it down on the counter in front of us. It landed with a heavy thump. Summer had been right. It was painted olive green. And it was a completely different item than the one we had just left in the pathologist’s office. Different section, six inches shorter, slightly thinner, slightly different curves. It looked carefully designed. It was probably a perfect example of the way the army does things. Years ago it had probably been the ninety-ninth item on someone’s reequipment agenda. A subcommittee would have been formed, with expert input from survivors of the old construction battalions. A specification would have been drawn up concerning length and weight and durability. Metal fatigue would have been investigated. Arenas of likely use would have been considered. Brittleness in the frozen winters of northern Europe would have been evaluated. Malleability in the severe heat of the equator would have been taken into account. Detailed drawings would have been made. Then tenders would have gone out. Mills all over Pennsylvania and Alabama would have priced the job. Prototypes would have been forged. They would have been tested, exhaustively. One and only one winner would have been approved. Paint would have been supplied, and the thickness and uniformity of its application would have been specified and carefully monitored. Then the whole business would have been completely forgotten. But the product of all those long months of deliberation was still coming through, thousands of units a year, needed or not.

“Thanks, soldier,” I said.

“You need to take it?” the kid asked.

“Just needed to see it,” I said.

We went back to my office. It was midmorning, a dull day, and I felt aimless. So far, the new decade wasn’t doing much for me. I wasn’t a huge fan of the 1990s yet, at that point, six days in.

“Are you going to write the accident report?” Summer asked.

“For Willard? Not yet.”

“He’ll expect it today.”

“I know. But I’m going to make him ask, one more time.”

“Why?”

“I guess because it’s a fascinating experience. Like watching maggots writhing around in something that died.”

“What died?”

“My enthusiasm for getting out of bed in the morning.”

“One bad apple,” she said. “Doesn’t mean much.”

“Maybe,” I said. “If it is just one.”

She said nothing.

“Crowbars,” I said. “We’ve got two separate cases with crowbars, and I don’t like coincidences. But I can’t see how they can be connected. There’s no way to join them up. Carbone was a million miles from Mrs. Kramer, in every way imaginable. They were in completely different worlds.”

“Vassell and Coomer join them up,” she said. “They had an interest in something that could have been in Mrs. Kramer’s house, and they were here at Bird the night Carbone was murdered.”

I nodded. “That’s what’s driving me crazy. It’s a perfect connection, except it isn’t. They took one call in D.C., they were too far from Green Valley to do anything to Mrs. Kramer themselves, and they didn’t call anyone from the hotel. Then they were here the night Carbone died, but they were in the O Club with a dozen witnesses the whole time, eating steak and fish.”

“First time they were here, they had a driver. Major Marshall, remember? But the second time, they were on their own. That feels a little clandestine to me. Like they were here for a secret reason.”

“Nothing very secret about hanging around in the O Club bar and then eating in the O Club dining room. They weren’t out of sight for a minute, all night long.”

“But why didn’t they have their driver? Why come on their own? I assume Marshall was at the funeral with them. But then they chose to drive more than three hundred miles by themselves? And more than three hundred back?”

“Maybe Marshall was unavailable,” I said.

“Marshall’s their blue-eyed boy,” she said. “He’s available when they say so.”

“Why did they come here at all? It’s a very long way for a very average dinner.”

“They came for the briefcase, Reacher. Norton’s wrong. She must be. Someone gave it to them. They left with it.”

“I don’t think Norton’s wrong. She convinced me.”

“Then maybe they picked it up in the parking lot. Norton wouldn’t have seen that. I assume she didn’t go out there in the cold and wave them off. But they left with it, for sure. Why else would they be happy to fly back to Germany?”

“Maybe they just gave up on it. They were due back in Germany anyway. They couldn’t stay here forever. They’ve got Kramer’s command to fight over.”

Summer said nothing.

“Whatever,” I said. “There’s no possible connection.”

“It’s a random universe.”

I nodded. “So they stay on the back burner. Carbone stays on the front.”

“Are we going back out to look for the yogurt pot?”

I shook my head. “It’s in the guy’s car, or in his trash.”

“Could have been useful.”

“We’ll work with the crowbar instead. It’s brand new. It was probably bought just as recently as the yogurt was.”

“We have no resources.”

“Detective Clark up in Green Valley will do it for us. He’s already looking for his crowbar, presumably. He’ll be canvassing hardware stores. We’ll ask him to widen his radius and stretch his time frame.”

“That’s a lot of extra work for him.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to offer him something. We’ll have to string him along. We’ll tell him we’re working on something that might help him.”

“Like what?”

I smiled. “We could fake it. We could give him Andrea Norton’s name. We could show her exactly what kind of a family we are.”

I called Detective Clark. I didn’t give him Andrea Norton’s name. I told him a few lies instead. I told him I recalled the damage to Mrs. Kramer’s door, and the damage to her head, and that I figured a crowbar was involved, and I told him that as it happened we had a rash of break-ins at military installations all up and down the Eastern seaboard that also seemed to involve crowbars, and I asked him if we could piggyback on the legwork he was undoubtedly already doing in terms of tracing the Green Valley weapon. He paused at that point, and I filled the silence by telling him that military quartermasters currently had no crowbars on general issue and therefore I was convinced our bad guys had used a civilian source of supply. I gave him some guff about not wanting to duplicate his efforts because we had a more promising line of inquiry to spend our time on. He paused again at that point, like cops everywhere, waiting to hear the proffered quid pro quo. I told him that as soon as we had a name or a profile or a description he would have it too, just as fast as stuff can travel down a fax line. He perked up then. Clark was a desperate man, staring at a brick wall. He asked what exactly I wanted. I told him it would be helpful to us if he could expand his canvass to a three-hundred-mile radius around Green Valley, and check hardware store purchases during a window that started late on New Year’s Eve and extended through, say, January fourth.

“What’s your promising line of inquiry?” he asked.

“There might be a military connection with Mrs. Kramer. We might be able to give you the guy on a plate all tied up with a bow.”

“I’d really like that.”

“Cooperation,” I said. “Makes the world go around.”

“Sure does,” he said.

He sounded happy. He bought the whole bill of goods. He promised to expand his search and copy me in. I hung up the phone and it rang again immediately. I picked it up and heard a woman’s voice. It sounded warm and intimate and Southern. It asked me to 10-33 a 10-16 from the MP XO at Fort Jackson, which meant Please stand by to take a secure landline call from your opposite number in South Carolina. I waited with the phone by my ear and heard an empty electronic hiss for a moment. Then there was a loud click and my oppo in South Carolina came on and told me I should know that Colonel David C. Brubaker, Fort Bird’s Special Forces CO, had been found that morning with two bullets in his head in an alley in a crummy district of Columbia, which was South Carolina’s capital city, and which was all of two hundred miles from the North Carolina golf course hotel where he had been spending his holiday furlough with his wife. And according to the local paramedics he had been dead for a day or two.

fourteen

My oppo at Jackson was a guy called Sanchez. I knew him fairly well, and I liked him better. He was smart, and he was good. I put the call on the speaker to include Summer and we talked briefly about jurisdiction, but without much enthusiasm. Jurisdiction was always a gray area, and we all knew we were beaten from the get-go. Brubaker had been on vacation, he had been in civilian clothes, he had been in a city alley, and therefore the Columbia PD was claiming him. There was nothing we could do about it. And the Columbia PD had notified the FBI, because Brubaker’s last known whereabouts were the North Carolina golf hotel, which added a possible interstate dimension to the situation, and interstate homicide was the Bureau’s bag. And also because an army officer is technically a federal employee, and killing federal employees is a separate offense, which would give them another charge to throw at the perp if by any miracle they ever found him. Neither Sanchez nor I nor Summer cared a whole hell of a lot about the difference between state courts and federal courts, but we all knew if the FBI was involved the case was well beyond our grasp. We agreed the very best we could hope for was that we might eventually see some of the relevant documentation, strictly for informational purposes only, and strictly as a courtesy. Summer made a face and turned away. I took the phone off the speaker and picked it up and spoke to Sanchez one-on-one again.

“Got a feeling?” I asked him.

“Someone he knew,” Sanchez said. “Not easy to surprise a Delta soldier as good as Brubaker was, in an alley.”

“Weapon?”

“Paramedics figured it for a nine-millimeter handgun. And they should know. They see plenty of GSWs. Apparently they do a lot of cleaning up every Friday and Saturday night, in that part of town.”

“Why was he there?”

“No idea. Rendezvous, presumably. With someone he knew.”

“Got a feeling about when?”

“The body’s stone cold, the skin is a little green, and rigor is all gone. They’re saying twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Safe bet would be to split the difference. Let’s call it the middle of the night before last. Maybe three, four A.M. City garbage truck found him at ten this morning. Weekly trash collection.”

“Where were you on December twenty-eighth?”

“Korea. You?”

“Panama.”

“Why did they move us?”

“I keep thinking we’re about to find out,” I said.

“Something weird is going on,” Sanchez said. “I checked, because I was curious, and there are more than twenty of us in the same boat, worldwide. And Garber’s signature is on all the orders, but I don’t think it’s legit.”

“I’m certain it isn’t legit,” I said. “Anything happening down there before this Brubaker situation?”

“Not a thing. Quietest week I ever spent.”

We hung up. I sat still for a long moment. Seemed to me that Columbia in South Carolina was about two hundred miles from Fort Bird. Drive southwest on the highway, cross the state line, find I-20 heading west, drive some more, and you were there. About two hundred miles. The night before last was the night we found Carbone’s body. I had left Andrea Norton’s office just before two o’clock in the morning. She could alibi me up until that point. Then I had been in the mortuary at seven o’clock, for the postmortem. The pathologist could confirm that. So I had two unconnected alibi bookends. But 0200 until 0700 still gave me a possible five-hour window, with Brubaker’s likely time of death right there in the middle of it. Could I have driven two hundred miles there and two hundred miles back in five hours?

“What?” Summer said.

“The Delta guys have already got me in the frame for Carbone. Now I’m wondering whether they’re going to be coming at me for Brubaker too. How does four hundred miles in five hours sound to you?”

“I could probably do it,” she said. “Average of eighty miles an hour all the way. Depends on what car I was using, of course, and road construction, and traffic, and weather, and cops. It’s definitely possible.”

“Terrific.”

“But it’s marginal.”

“It better be marginal. Killing Brubaker will be like killing God, to them.”

“You going over there to break the news?”

I nodded. “I think I have to. It’s a question of respect. But you inform the post commander for me, OK?”

The Special Forces adjutant was an asshole, but he was human too. He went very pale when I told him about Brubaker, and there was clearly more to it than an anticipation of mere bureaucratic hassle. From what I had heard Brubaker was stern and distant and authoritarian, but he was a real father figure, to his men individually and to his unit as a whole. And to his unit as a concept. Special Forces generally and Delta in particular hadn’t always been popular inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The army hates change and it takes a long time to get used to things. The idea of a ragtag bunch of hunter-killers had been a hard sell at the outset, and Brubaker had been one of the guys doing the selling, and he had never let up since. His death was going to hit Special Forces the way the death of a president would hit the nation.

“Carbone was bad enough,” the adjutant said. “But this is unbelievable. Is there a connection?”

I looked at him.

“Why would there be a connection?” I said. “Carbone was a training accident.”

He said nothing.

“Why was Brubaker at a hotel?”

“Because he likes to play golf. He’s got a house near Bragg from way back, but he doesn’t like the golf there.”

“Where was the hotel?”

“Outside of Raleigh.”

“Did he go there a lot?”

“Every chance he got.”

“Does his wife play golf?”

The adjutant nodded. “They play together.”

Then he paused.

“Played,” he said, and then he went quiet and looked away from me. I pictured Brubaker in my mind. I had never met him, but I knew guys just like him. One day they’re talking about how to angle a claymore mine so the little ball bearings explode outward at exactly the right angle to rip the enemy’s spines out of their backs with maximum efficiency. Next day they’re wearing pastel shirts with small crocodiles on the breast, playing golf with their wives, maybe holding hands and smiling as they ride together along the fairways in their little electric carts. I knew plenty of guys like that. My own father had been one. Not that he had ever played golf. He watched birds. He had been in most countries in the world, and he had seen a lot of birds.

I stood up.

“Call me if you need me,” I said. “You know, if there’s anything I can do.”

The adjutant nodded.

“Thanks for the visit,” he said. “Better than a phone call.”

I went back to my office. Summer wasn’t there. I wasted more than an hour with her personnel lists. I made a shortcut decision and took the pathologist out of the mix. I took Summer out. I took Andrea Norton out. Then I took all the women out. The medical evidence was pretty clear about the attacker’s height and strength. I took the O Club dining room staff out. Their NCO had said they were all hard at work, fussing over their guests. I took the cooks out, and the bar staff, and the MP gate guards. I took out anyone listed as hospitalized and nonambulatory. I took myself out. I took Carbone out, because it wasn’t suicide.

Then I counted the remaining check marks, and wrote the number 973 on a slip of paper. That was our suspect pool. I stared into space. My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Sanchez again, down at Fort Jackson.

“Columbia PD just called me,” he said. “They’re sharing their initial findings.”

“And?”

“Their medical examiner doesn’t entirely agree with me. Time of death wasn’t three or four in the morning. It was one twenty-three A.M., the night before last.”

“That’s very precise.”

“Bullet caught his wristwatch.”

“A broken watch? Can’t necessarily rely on that.”

“No, it’s firm enough. They did a lot of other tests. Wrong season for measurable insect activity, which would have helped, but the stomach contents were exactly right for five or six hours after he ate a heavy dinner.”

“What does his wife say?”

“He disappeared at eight that night, after a heavy dinner. Got up from the table and never came back.”

“What did she do about it?”

“Nothing,” Sanchez said. “He was Special Forces. Their whole marriage, he’ll have been disappearing with no warning, the middle of dinner, the middle of the night, days or weeks at a time, never able to say where or why afterward. She was used to it.”

“Did he get a phone call or something?”

“She assumes he did, at some point. She’s not really sure. She was in the spa before dinner. They’d just played twenty-seven holes.”

“Can you call her yourself? She’ll talk to you faster than civilian cops.”

“I could try, I suppose.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“The GSWs were nine-millimeter,” he said. “Two rounds fired, both of them through and through, neat entry wounds, bad exit wounds.”

“Full metal jackets,” I said.

“Contact shots. There were powder burns. And soot.”

I paused. I couldn’t picture it. Two rounds fired? Contact shots? So one of the bullets goes in, comes out, loops all the way around, comes back, and drops down and smashes his wristwatch?

“Did he have his hands on his head?”

“He was shot from behind, Reacher. A double tap, to the back of the skull. Bang bang, thank you and good night. The second round must have gone through his head and caught his watch. Downward trajectory. Tall shooter.”

I said nothing.

“Right,” Sanchez said. “How likely is all that? Did you know him?”

“Never met him,” I said.

“He was way above average. He was a real pro. And he was a thinker. Any angle, any advantage, any wrinkle, he knew it and he was ready to use it.”

“But he got himself shot in the back of the head?”

“He knew the shooter, definitely. Had to. Why else would he turn his back, in the middle of the night, in an alley?”

“You looking at people from Jackson?”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Did he have enemies at Bird?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” I said. “He had enemies up the chain of command.”

“Those pussies don’t meet people in alleys in the middle of the night.”

“Where was the alley?”

“Not in a quiet part of town.”

“So did anyone hear anything?”

“Nobody,” Sanchez said. “Columbia PD ran a canvass and came up empty.”

“That’s weird.”

“They’re civilians. What else would they be?”

He went quiet.

“You met Willard yet?” I asked him.

“He’s on his way here right now. Seems to be a real hands-on type of asshole.”

“What was the alley like?”

“Whores and crack dealers. Nothing that the Columbia city fathers are likely to put in their tourism brochures.”

“Willard hates embarrassment,” I said. “He’s going to be nervous about image.”

“Columbia’s image? What does he care?”

“The army’s image,” I said. “Willard won’t want Brubaker put next to whores and crack dealers. Not an elite colonel. He figures this Soviet stuff is going to shake things up. He figures we need good PR right now. He figures he can see the big picture.”

“The big picture is I can’t get near this case anyway. So what kind of pull does he have with the Columbia PD and the FBI? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

“Just be ready for trouble,” I said.

“Are we in for seven lean years?”

“Not that long.”

“Why not?”

“Just a feeling,” I said.

“You happy with me handling liaison down here? Or should I get them to call you direct? Brubaker is your dead guy, technically.”

“You do it,” I said. “I’ve got other things to do.”

We hung up and I went back to Summer’s lists. Nine hundred seventy-three. Nine hundred seventy-two innocent, one guilty. But which one?

Summer came back inside another hour. She walked in and gave me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a weapons requisition that Sergeant First Class Christopher Carbone had made four months ago. It was for a Heckler & Koch P7 handgun. Maybe he had liked the H&K submachine guns Delta was using, and therefore he wanted the P7 for his personal sidearm. He had asked for it to be chambered for the standard nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge. He had asked for the thirteen-round magazine, and three spares. It was a perfectly standard requisition form, and a perfectly reasonable request. I was sure it had been granted. There would have been no political sensitivities. H&K was a German outfit and Germany was a NATO country, last time I checked. There would have been no compatibility issues either. Nine-millimeter Parabellums were standard NATO loads. The U.S. Army had no shortage of them. We had warehouses crammed full of them. We could have filled thirteen-round magazines with them a million times over, every day for the rest of history.

“So?” I said.

“Look at the signature on it,” Summer said. She took my copy of Carbone’s complaint out of her inside pocket and handed it over. I spread it out on my desk, side by side with the requisition form. Looked from one to the other.

The two signatures were identical.

“We’re not handwriting experts,” I said.

“We don’t need to be. They’re the same, Reacher. Believe it.”

I nodded. Both signatures read C. Carbone, and the four capital letter Cs were very distinctive. They were fast, elongated, curling flourishes. The lower-case e on the end of each sample was distinctive too. It made a small round shape, and then the tail of the letter whipped way out to the right of the page, well beyond the name itself, horizontally, and exuberantly. The a-r-b-o-n in the middle was fast and fluid and linear. As a whole it was a bold, proud, legible, self-confident signature, developed no doubt by long years of signing checks and bar bills and leases and car papers. No signature was impossible to forge, of course, but I figured this one would have been a real challenge. A challenge that I guessed would have been impossible to meet between midnight and 0845 on a North Carolina army post.

“OK,” I said. “The complaint is genuine.”

I left it on the desk. Summer reversed it and read it through, although she must have read it plenty of times already.

“It’s cold,” she said. “It’s like a knife in the back.”

“It’s weird,” I said. “That’s what it is. I never met this guy before. I’m absolutely sure of that. And he was Delta. Not too many gentle pacifist souls over there. Why would he be offended? It wasn’t his leg I broke.”

“Maybe it was personal. Maybe the fat guy was his friend.”

I shook my head. “He’d have stepped in. He’d have stopped the fight.”

“It’s the only complaint he ever made in a sixteen-year career.”

“You been talking to people?”

“All kinds of people. Right here, and by phone far and wide.”

“Were you careful?”

“Very. And it’s the only complaint you ever had made against you.”

“You checked that too?”

She nodded. “All the way back to when God’s dog was a puppy.”

“You wanted to know what kind of a guy you’re dealing with here?”

“No, I wanted to be able to show the Delta guys you don’t have a history. With Carbone or with anyone else.”

“You’re protecting me now?”

“Someone’s going to have to. I was just over there, and they’re plenty mad.”

I nodded. Brubaker.

“I’m sure they are,” I said. I pictured Delta’s lonely prison barracks, first designed to keep people in, then used to keep strangers out, now serving to keep their unity boiling like a pressure cooker. I pictured Brubaker’s office, wherever it was, quiet and deserted. I pictured Carbone’s cell, standing empty.

“So where was Carbone’s new P7?” I said. “I didn’t find it in his quarters.”

“In their armory,” Summer said. “Cleaned, oiled, and loaded. They check their personal weapons in and out. They’ve got a cage inside their hangar. You should see that place. It’s like Santa’s grotto. Special armored Humvees wall to wall, trucks, explosives, grenade launchers, claymores, night vision stuff. They could equip a Central African dictatorship all by themselves.”

“That’s very reassuring,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Why did he file the complaint?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I pictured Carbone in the strip club, New Year’s night. I had walked in and I had seen a group of four men I took to be sergeants. The swirl of the crowd had turned three of them away from me and one of them toward me in a completely random dynamic. I hadn’t known who was going to be there, they hadn’t known I was going to show up. I had never met any of them before. The encounter was as close to pure chance as it was possible to get. Yet Carbone had tagged me for the kind of tame mayhem he must have seen a thousand times before. The kind of tame mayhem he must have joined in with a hundred times before. Show me an enlisted man who claims never to have fought a civilian in a bar, and I’ll show you a liar.

“Are you Catholic?” I asked.

“No, why?” Summer said.

“I wondered if you knew any Latin.”

“It’s not just Catholics who know Latin. I went to school.”

“OK, cui bono?” I said.

“Who benefits? What, from the complaint?”

“It’s always a good guide to motive,” I said. “You can explain most things with it. History, politics, everything.”

“Like, follow the money?”

“Approximately,” I said. “Except I don’t think there’s money involved here. But there must have been some benefit for Carbone. Otherwise why would he do it?”

“Could have been a moral thing. Maybe he was driven to do it.”

“Not if it was his first complaint in sixteen years. He must have seen far worse. I only broke one leg and one nose. It was no kind of a big deal. This is the army, Summer. I assume he hadn’t been confusing it with a gardening club all these years.”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

I slid her the slip of paper with 973 written on it.

“That’s our suspect pool,” I said.

“He was in the bar until eight o’clock,” she said. “I checked that too. He left alone. Nobody saw him again after that.”

“Anyone say anything about his mood?”

“Delta guys don’t have moods. Too much danger of appearing human.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“One beer.”

“So he just walked out of the mess at eight, no nerves, no worries?”

“Apparently so.”

“He knew the guy he was meeting,” I said.

Summer said nothing.

“Sanchez called again while you were out,” I said. “Colonel Brubaker was shot in the back of the head. A double tap, close in, from behind.”

“So he knew the guy he was meeting too.”

“Very likely,” I said. “One twenty-three in the morning. Bullet caught his watch. Between three and a half and four and a half hours after Carbone.”

“That puts you in the clear with Delta. You were still here at one twenty-three.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was. With Norton.”

“I’ll spread the word.”

“They won’t believe you.”

“Do you think there’s a connection between Carbone and Brubaker?”

“Common sense says there has to be. But I don’t see how. And I don’t see why. I mean, sure, they were both Delta soldiers. But Carbone was here and Brubaker was there, and Brubaker was a high-profile mover and shaker, and Carbone was a nobody who kept himself to himself. Maybe because he thought he had to.”

“You think we’ll ever have gays in the military?”

“We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had. World War Two, the Western Allies had fourteen million men in uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.”

“It’s a hell of a step,” she said.

“They took the same step when they let black soldiers in. And women. Everyone pissed and moaned about that too. Bad for morale, bad for unit cohesion. It was crap then and it’s crap now. Right? You’re here and you’re doing OK.”

“Are you a Catholic?”

I shook my head. “My mother taught us the Latin. She cared about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother, Joe.”

“You should call her.”

“Why?”

“To see how her leg is.”

“Maybe later,” I said.

I went back to the personnel lists and Summer went out and came back in with a map of the Eastern United States. She taped it flat to the wall below the clock and marked our location at Fort Bird with a red push-pin. Then she marked Columbia, South Carolina, where Brubaker had been found. Then she marked Raleigh, North Carolina, where he had been playing golf with his wife. I gave her a clear plastic ruler from my desk drawer and she checked the map’s scale and started calculating times and distances.

“Bear in mind most of us don’t drive as fast as you do,” I said.

“None of you drive as fast as I do,” she said.

She measured four and a half inches between Raleigh and Columbia and called it five to allow for the way U.S. 1 snaked slightly. She held the ruler against the scale in the legend box.

“Two hundred miles,” she said. “So if Brubaker left Raleigh after dinner, he could have been in Columbia by midnight, easily. An hour or so before he died.”

Then she checked the distance between Fort Bird and Columbia. She came up with a hundred and fifty miles, less than I had originally guessed.

“Three hours,” she said. “To be comfortable.”

Then she looked at me.

“It could have been the same guy,” she said. “If Carbone was killed at nine or ten, the same guy could have been in Columbia at midnight or one, ready for Brubaker.”

She put her little finger on the Fort Bird pin.

“Carbone,” she said.

Then she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the Columbia pin.

“Brubaker,” she said. “It’s a definite sequence.”

“It’s a definite guess,” I said.

She didn’t reply.

“Do we know that Brubaker drove down from Raleigh?” I said.

“We can assume he did.”

“We should check with Sanchez,” I said. “See if they found his car anywhere. See if his wife says he took it with him in the first place.”

“OK,” she said. She went out to my sergeant’s desk to make the call. Left me with the interminable personnel lists. She came back in ten minutes later.

“He took his car,” she said. “His wife told Sanchez they had two cars up at the hotel. His and hers. They always did it that way because he was always rushing off somewhere and she was always concerned about getting stuck.”

“What kind of car?” I said. I figured she would have asked.

“Chevy Impala SS.”

“Nice car.”

“He left after dinner and his wife’s assumption was that he was driving back here to Bird. That would have been normal. But the car hasn’t turned up anyplace yet. At least, not according to the Columbia PD and the FBI.”

“OK,” I said.

“Sanchez thinks they’re holding out on him, like they know something we don’t.”

“That would be normal too.”

“He’s pressing them. But it’s difficult.”

“It always is.”

“He’ll call us,” she said. “As soon as he gets anywhere.”

We got a call thirty minutes later. But not from Sanchez. Not about Brubaker or Carbone. The call was from Detective Clark, in Green Valley, Virginia. It was about Mrs. Kramer’s case.

“Got something,” he said.

He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning right in the center of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar sales would be slow in winter. Major remodeling happens from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had bought chainsaws, to keep their wood-burning stoves going. Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.

So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases. Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow down a location. He didn’t find anything that matched his parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer, he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville, Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street. According to the owner the front window had been kicked in sometime in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Because it was a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been stolen was a single crowbar.

Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a pushpin through the center of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley. The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. They were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of separation.

“Look at this,” Summer said.

I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn’t really go anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put her middle finger on Sperryville and her index finger on Green Valley.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They left D.C., they stole the crowbar in Sperryville, they broke into Mrs. Kramer’s house in Green Valley.”

“Except they didn’t,” I said. “They were just in from the airport. They didn’t have a car. And they didn’t call for one. You checked the phone records yourself.”

She said nothing.

“Plus they’re lard-ass staff officers,” I said. “They wouldn’t know how to burgle a hardware store if their lives depended on it.”

She took her hand off the map. I stepped back to my desk and sat down again and butted the personnel lists into a neat pile.

“We need to concentrate on Carbone,” I said.

“Then we need a new plan,” she said. “Detective Clark is going to stop looking for crowbars now. He’s found the one he’s interested in.”

I nodded. “Back to traditional time-honored methods of investigation.”

“Which are?”

“I don’t really know. I went to West Point. I didn’t go to MP school.”

My phone rang. I picked it up. The same warm Southern voice I had heard before went through the same 10-33, 10-16 from Jackson routine I had heard before. I acknowledged and hit the speaker button and leaned all the way back in my chair and waited. The room filled with electronic hum. Then there was a click.

“Reacher?” Sanchez said.

“And Lieutenant Summer,” I said. “We’re on the speaker.”

“Anyone else in the room?”

“No,” I said.

“Door closed?”

“Yes. What’s up?”

“Columbia PD came through again, is what. They’re feeding me stuff bit by bit. And they’re having themselves a real good time doing it. They’re gloating like crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because Brubaker had heroin in his pocket, that’s why. Three dime bags of brown. And a big wad of cash money. They’re saying it was a drug deal that went bad.”

fifteen

I was born in 1960, which made me seven during the Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American military’s collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase. Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put me high on the list of U.S. users in terms of lifetime volume consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who bought, not sold.

But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends up with a dead guy on the floor, there’s nothing in the dead guy’s pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his dope intact and the buyer’s cash. If the dead guy was the seller, then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little rummaging around.

“It’s bullshit, Sanchez,” I said. “It’s faked.”

“Of course it is. I know that.”

“Did you make that point?”

“Did I need to? They’re civilians, but they ain’t stupid.”

“So why are they gloating?”

“Because it gives them a free pass. If they can’t close the case, they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not them.”

“They found any witnesses yet?”

“Not a one.”

“Shots were fired,” I said. “Someone must have heard something.”

“Not according to the cops.”

“Willard is going to freak,” I said.

“That’s the least of our problems.”

“Are you alibied?”

“Me? Do I need to be?”

“Willard’s going to be looking for leverage. He’s going to use anything he can invent to get you to toe the line.”

Sanchez didn’t answer right away. Some kind of electronic circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.

“I think I’m fireproof here,” he said. “It’s the Columbia PD making the accusations, not me.”

“Just take care,” I said.

“Bet on it,” he said.

I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was tense and her lower lids were moving.

“What?” I said.

“You sure it was faked?” she said.

“Had to be,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “Good.” She was still standing next to the map. She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin, index finger on the Columbia pin. “We agree that it was faked. We’re sure of it. So there’s a pattern now. The drugs and the money in Brubaker’s pocket are the exact same thing as the branch up Carbone’s ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It’s a definite MO. It’s not just a guess anymore. The same guy did both. He killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It’s a clear sequence. Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks.”

I looked at her standing there. Her small brown hand was stretched like a starfish. She had clear polish on her nails. Her eyes were bright.

“Why would he ditch the crowbar?” I said. “After Carbone but before Brubaker?”

“Because he preferred a handgun,” she said. “Like anyone normal would. But he knew he couldn’t use one here. Too noisy. A mile from the main post, late in the evening, we’d have all come running. But in a bad part of a big city, nobody was going to think twice. Which is how it turned out, apparently.”

“Could he have been sure of that?”

“No,” she said. “Not entirely sure. He set up the rendezvous, so he knew where he was going. But he couldn’t be exactly certain about what he would find when he got there. So I guess he would have liked to keep a backup weapon. But the crowbar was all covered with Carbone’s blood and hair by then. There was no opportunity to clean it. He was in a hurry. The ground was frozen. No patch of soft grass to wipe it on. So he couldn’t see having it in the car with him. Maybe he was worried about a traffic stop on the way south. So he ditched it.”

I nodded. Ultimately, the crowbar was disposable. A handgun was a more reliable weapon against a fit and wary opponent. Especially in the tight confines of a city alley, as opposed to the kind of dark and wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I yawned. Closed my eyes. From the wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I opened my eyes again.

“He killed Carbone here,” I repeated. “And then he jumped in his car and drove to Columbia and killed Brubaker there.”

“Yes,” Summer said.

“But you figured he was already in a car,” I said.

“Yes,” she said again. “I did.”

“You figured he drove out on the track with Carbone, hit him in the head, arranged the scene, and then drove back here to the post. Your reasoning was pretty good. And where we found the crowbar kind of confirmed it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And then we figured he parked his car and went about his business.”

“Correct,” she said.

“But he can’t have parked his car and gone about his business. Because now we’re saying he drove straight to Columbia, South Carolina, instead. To meet with Brubaker. Three-hour drive. He was in a hurry. Not much time to waste.”

“Correct,” she said again.

“So he didn’t park his car,” I said. “He didn’t even touch the brake. He drove straight out the main gate instead. There’s no other way off the post. He drove straight out the main gate, Summer, immediately after he killed Carbone, somewhere around nine or ten o’clock.”

“Check the gate log,” she said. “There’s a copy right there on the desk.”

We checked the gate log together. Operation Just Cause in Panama had moved all domestic installations up one level on the DefCon scale and therefore all closed posts were recording entrances and exits in detail in bound ledgers that had preprinted page numbers in the top right-hand corner. We had a good clear Xerox of the page for January fourth. I was confident it was genuine. I was confident it was complete. And I was confident it was accurate. The Military Police have numerous failings, but snafus with basic paperwork aren’t any of them.

Summer took the page from me and taped it to the wall next to the map. We stood side by side and looked at it. It was ruled into six columns. There were spaces for date, time in, time out, plate number, occupants, and reason.

“Traffic was light,” Summer said.

I said nothing. I was in no position to know whether nineteen entries represented light traffic or not. I wasn’t used to Bird and it had been a long time since I had pulled gate duty anywhere else. But certainly it seemed quiet compared to the multiple pages I had seen for New Year’s Eve.

“Mostly people reporting back for duty,” Summer said.

I nodded. Fourteen lines had entries in the Time In column but no corresponding entries in the Time Out column. That meant fourteen people had come in and stayed in. Back to work, after time away from the post for the holidays. Or after time away from the post for other reasons. I was right there among them: 1-4-90. 2302, Reacher, J., Mjr, RTB. January fourth, 1990, two minutes past eleven in the evening, Major J. Reacher, returning to base. From Paris, via Garber’s old office in Rock Creek. My vehicle plate number was listed as: Pedestrian. My sergeant was there, coming in from her off-post address to work the night shift. She had arrived at nine-thirty, driving something with North Carolina plates.

Fourteen in, to stay in.

Only five exits.

Three of them were routine food deliveries. Big trucks, probably. An army post gets through a lot of food. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. Three trucks in a day seemed about right to me. Each of them was timed inward at some point during the early afternoon and then timed outward again a plausible hour or so later. The last time out was just before three o’clock.

Then there was a seven-hour gap.

The last-but-one recorded exit was Vassell and Coomer themselves, on their way out after their O Club dinner. They had passed through the gate at 2201. They had previously been timed in at 1845. At that point their Department of Defense plate number had been written down and their names and ranks had been entered. Their reason had been stated as: Courtesy visit.

Five exits. Four down.

One to go.

The only other person to have left Fort Bird on the fourth of January was logged as: 1-4-90, 2211, Trifonov, S., Sgt. There was a North Carolina passenger vehicle plate number written in the relevant space. There was no time in recorded. There was nothing in the reason column. Therefore a sergeant called Trifonov had been on-post all day or all week and then he had left at eleven minutes past ten in the evening. No reason had been recorded because there was no directive to inquire as to why a soldier was leaving. The assumption was that he was going out for a drink or a meal or for some other form of entertainment. Reason was a question the gate guards asked of people trying to get in, not trying to get out.

We checked again, just to be absolutely sure. We came up with the same result. Apart from General Vassell and Colonel Coomer in their self-driven Mercury Grand Marquis, and then a sergeant called Trifonov in some other kind of car, nobody had passed through the gate in an outward direction in a vehicle or on foot at any time on the fourth of January, apart from three food trucks in the early part of the afternoon.

“OK,” Summer said. “Sergeant Trifonov. Whoever he is. He’s the one.”

“Has to be,” I said.

I called the main gate. Got the same guy I had spoken to before, when I was checking on Vassell and Coomer earlier. I recognized his voice. I asked him to search forward through his log, starting from the page number immediately following the one we were looking at. Asked him to check exactly when a sergeant named Trifonov had returned to Bird. Told him it could be anytime after about four-thirty in the morning on January fifth. There was a moment’s delay. I could hear the guy turning the stiff parchment pages in the ledger. He was doing it slowly, paying close attention.

“Sir, five o’clock in the morning precisely,” the guy said. “January fifth, 0500, Sergeant Trifonov, returning to base.” I heard another page turn. “He left at 2211 the previous evening.”

“Remember anything about him?”

“He left about ten minutes after those Armored staffers you were asking me about before. He was in a hurry, as I recall. Didn’t wait for the barrier to go all the way up. He squeezed right underneath it.”

“What kind of car?”

“Corvette, I think. Not a new one. But it looked pretty good.”

“Were you still on duty when he got back?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“Remember anything about that?”

“Nothing that stands out. I spoke to him, obviously. He has a foreign accent.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Civilian stuff. A leather jacket, I think. I assumed he had been off duty.”

“Is he on the post now?”

I heard pages turning again. I imagined a finger, tracing slowly down all the lines written after 0500 on the morning of the fifth.

“We haven’t logged him out again, sir,” the guy said. “Not as of right now. So he must be on-post somewhere.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks, soldier.”

I hung up. Summer looked at me.

“He got back at 0500,” I said. “Three and a half hours after Brubaker’s watch stopped.”

“Three-hour drive,” she said.

“And he’s here now.”

“Who is he?”

I called post headquarters. Asked the question. They told me who he was. I put the phone down and looked straight at Summer.

“He’s Delta,” I said. “He was a defector from Bulgaria. They brought him in as an instructor. He knows stuff our guys don’t.”

I got up from my desk and stepped over to the map on the wall. Put my own fingers on the pushpins. Little finger on Fort Bird, index finger on Columbia. It was like I was validating a theory by touch alone. A hundred and fifty miles. Three hours and twelve minutes to get there, three hours and thirty-seven minutes to get back. I did the math in my head. An average speed of forty-seven miles an hour going, and forty-one coming back. At night, on empty roads, in a Chevrolet Corvette. He could have done it with the parking brake on.

“Should we have him picked up?” Summer said.

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll go over there.”

“Is that smart?”

“Probably not. But I don’t want those guys to think they got to me.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to the minute since Trifonov arrived back on-post. The weather was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove. She parked at Delta’s prison gate. The sentry let us through on foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer stopped beside me.

“You going in there?” she said.

“Just for a minute.”

“Alone?”

I nodded. “Then we’re going to their armory.”

“Not smart,” she said. “I should come in with you.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. “As a witness, I guess.”

“To what?”

“To whatever they do to you.”

I smiled, briefly.

“Terrific,” I said.

I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock-still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bumped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.

I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned toward me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.

“You spilled my drink,” he said.

I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.

“Lick it up,” I said.

We stood face-to-face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn’t about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.

I didn’t hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.

I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and stepped out into the cold fresh air.

Summer wasn’t there.

I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.

She looked at me.

“Now you know,” she said.

“Know what?”

“How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.”

She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armory was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn’t been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.

“Over here,” Summer said.

She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn’t salute. Didn’t come to attention. But he didn’t turn away either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.

“Help you?” he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different submachine-gun models. There were some M16s, A1s, and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.

In front of the guy on the desk was a logbook.

“You check them in and check them out?” I asked.

“Like valet parking,” the guy said. “Post regulations won’t allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.” He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone’s new P7.

“What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?” I asked.

“Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB.”

“Show me.”

He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.

“Nine-millimeter,” Summer said.

I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.

Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.

“Got a phone?” I said.

The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.

“Get me Sanchez at Jackson,” I said.

I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.

“What?” Sanchez said.

“Did they find the shell cases?” I said.

“No,” he said. “The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.”

“Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.”

“You found the guy?”

“I’m holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired.”

“Who is he?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.”

“One of ours?”

“Sad, but true.”

Sanchez said nothing.

“Did they find the bullets?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go? They’ll be buried in the brick somewhere.”

“Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond recognition.”

“They were jacketed,” I said. “They won’t have broken up. We could weigh them, at least.”

“They haven’t found them.”

“Are they looking?”

“I don’t know.”

“They dug up any witnesses yet?”

“No.”

“Did they find Brubaker’s car?”

“No.”

“It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t they looking for it?”

“There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.”

“Did Willard get there yet?”

“I expect him any minute.”

“Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,” I said. “And tell him you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all. That should make his day.”

Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.

“Look at this,” she said.

She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at seven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.

“Why did he take it?” I said.

“We don’t ask for a reason,” the clerk said. “We just do the paperwork.”

We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.

We detoured to take a look at it.

It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tires were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the windows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-seat car, but there was a parcel shelf. It was small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.

“No grit from the track,” she said. “No blood on the seats.”

“No yogurt pot on the floor,” I said.

“He cleaned up after himself.”

We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov’s gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.

I didn’t want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn’t anywhere in the mess.

So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone’s empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors farther down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.

I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.

So who was this guy?

NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn’t doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.

“On your feet, soldier,” I said.

He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, facedown and open, like he was saving his place.

We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of time before all the various logbooks in his life betrayed him.

We drove him back and got him to my office without incident. We sat him down and unlocked the handcuffs and redid them so that his right wrist was cuffed to the chair leg. Then we took a second pair of cuffs and did the same thing with his left. He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men’s ankles.

Summer stood next to the map, staring at the pushpins, like she was leading his gaze toward them and saying: We know.

I sat at my desk.

“What’s your name?” I said. “For the record.”

“Trifonov,” he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his throat.

“First name?”

“Slavi.”

“Slavi Trifonov,” I said. “Rank?”

“I was a colonel at home. Now I’m a sergeant.”

“Where’s home?”

“Sofia,” he said. “In Bulgaria.”

“You’re very young to have been a colonel.”

“I was very good at what I did.”

“And what did you do?”

He didn’t answer.

“You have a nice car,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “A car like that was always a dream to me.”

“Where did you take it on the night of the fourth?”

He didn’t answer.

“There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria,” I said.

“No,” he said. “There are not.”

“So what did you do there?”

“I was in the regular army.”

“Doing what?”

“Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian Army, the Bulgarian Secret Police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki.”

“Qualifications?”

“I had five years’ training with the GRU.”

“Which is what?”

He smiled. “I think you know what it is.”

I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough, and they were just as ready to turn their fury inward as outward.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“In America?” he said. “I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It will happen soon, I think. Then I’m going back. I’m proud of my country. It’s a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I’m a nationalist.”

“What are you teaching Delta?”

“Things that are out-of-date now. How to fight against the things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I think. You won.”

“You need to tell us where you were on the night of the fourth.”

He said nothing.

“Why did you defect?”

“Because I was a patriot,” he said.

“Recent conversion?”

“I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered.”

“How did you get out?”

“Through Turkey. I went to the American base there.”

“Tell me about the night of the fourth.”

He said nothing.

“We’ve got your gun,” I said. “You signed it out. You left the post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the morning.”

He said nothing.

“You fired two rounds.”

He said nothing.

“Why did you wash your car?”

“Because it’s a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A car like that was a dream to me.”

“You ever been to Kansas?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s where you’re headed. You’re not going home to Sofia. You’re going to Fort Leavenworth instead.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” I said.

Trifonov didn’t move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near his knees. I sat still too. I wasn’t sure what to do. Our own Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that. They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training methods. So I couldn’t even imagine what Trifonov had been through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I could do to him. I wasn’t above smacking people around. But I figured this guy wouldn’t say a word even if I disassembled him limb by limb.

So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and bribery.

“Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment,” I said. “You know, to the army. So we wouldn’t necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot.”

“It was you who killed Carbone,” he said. “People are talking about it.”

“People are wrong,” I said. “I wasn’t here. And I didn’t kill Brubaker. Because I wasn’t there either.”

“Neither was I,” he said. “Either.”

He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer’s map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.

“Wait,” he said.

“For what?”

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“No, sir,” he said.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

“You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?”

“You think you didn’t?”

He went quiet again. Looked down.

“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.

He looked up.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say It wasn’t me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.

“You’re going to have to prove it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“You’re going to have to. Or they’ll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren’t going to let Brubaker slide.”

He said nothing.

“Start over,” I said. “The night of January fourth, where were you?”

He just shook his head.

“You were somewhere,” I said. “That’s for damn sure. Because you weren’t here. You logged in and out. You and your gun.”

He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn’t speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.

“The night of January fourth,” I said. “Did you commit a crime?”

His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.

“OK,” I said. “Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head?”

He said nothing.

“Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president’s ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?”

“No,” he said.

“I’ll give you a clue,” I said. “Where you’re sitting, that would be about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head.”

He said nothing.

“Tell me.”

“It was a private thing,” he said.

“What kind of a private thing?”

He didn’t answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had been, chances were it wasn’t Columbia, South Carolina. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“That depends on what you did,” I said.

“I got a letter,” he said.

“Getting mail isn’t a crime.”

“From a friend of a friend.”

“Tell me about the letter.”

“There’s a man in Sofia,” he said.

He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed it, he made it sound like he thought there was something uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn’t, really. It was a story that could have been told by any of us.

There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States. She had gotten married to an American. She had become a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters. There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation. The sister’s life was hell. The communist censors had passed the letters, because anything that made America look bad was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town who knew his way around the city’s dissident network. The friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who bought machine parts in Austria. The machine-parts guy had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January second, early in the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.

He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.

His next available free time was the evening of January fourth. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centered around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.

“Still got the letter?” I asked.

He nodded. “But you won’t be able to read it, because it’s written in Bulgarian.”

“What were you wearing that night?”

“Plain clothes. I’m not stupid.”

“What kind of plain clothes?”

“Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. American. They’re all the plain clothes I’ve got.”

“What did you do to the guy?”

He shook his head. Wouldn’t answer.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s all go to Cape Fear.”

We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn’t remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.

And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn’t remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as a historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left toward a place called Southport.

“Cape Fear is off of Southport,” Summer said. “It’s an island in the ocean. I think there’s a bridge.”

But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn’t even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle. Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double-wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.

“Here,” Trifonov said. “Make a right.”

There was a wide center track with narrower tracks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar-paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.

“Her name is Elena,” Trifonov said.

We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena’s door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin housedress and men’s shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.

“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” Her accent was like Trifonov’s, but much higher-pitched. It was quite appealing.

“We need to talk to you,” Summer said, gently.

“What about?”

“About what Slavi Trifonov did for you,” I said.

“He didn’t do anything,” she said.

“But you know the name.”

She paused.

“Please come in,” she said.

I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion. But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody else in it.

“Your husband not here?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Where is he?”

She didn’t answer.

“My guess is he’s in the hospital,” Summer said. “Am I right?”

Elena just looked at her.

“Mr. Trifonov helped you,” I said. “Now you need to help him.”

She said nothing.

“If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to know which it was.”

She said nothing.

“This is very, very important,” I said.

“What if both things were bad?” she asked.

“The two things don’t compare,” I said. “Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?”

She didn’t answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” she said. “Mr. Trifonov just came here and took my husband away.”

“When?”

“The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia.”

I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy.

“How long was he here?”

“Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.”

“And that was it?”

She nodded.

“What was he wearing?”

“A leather jacket. Jeans.”

“What kind of car was he in?”

“I don’t know what it’s called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.”

“OK,” I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved toward the door.

“Will my husband come back?” Elena said.

I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.

“I seriously doubt it,” I said.

We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.

“Where did you leave the guy?” I asked him.

“On the road to Wilmington,” he said.

“When?”

“Three o’clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911. I didn’t give my name.”

“You spent three hours on him?”

He nodded, slowly. “I wanted to be sure he understood the message.”

Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north toward Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-story and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.

“What was the guy’s name?” I asked him.

“Pickles,” he said.

The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is, it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.

“Early morning of January fifth,” I said. “Sometime after three o’clock, there was an admission here.”

The guy riffed through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.

“Male or female?” he said.

“Male.”

He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.

“John Doe,” he said. “Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.”

“That’s our guy,” I said.

“Your guy?” he said, looking at my uniform.

“We might be able to take care of his bill,” I said.

He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking, One down, two hundred to go.

“He’s in post-op,” he said. He pointed toward the elevator. “Second floor.”

He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.

“Pickles,” I said.

She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.

“Five minutes only,” she said. “He’s very sick.”

Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by himself.

I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.

“You two wait outside,” I said.

Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.

“How are you, asshole?” I said.

The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.

“That was the man,” he said. “Right there. He did this to me.”

“Did what to you?”

“He shot me in the legs.”

I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.

“Front or side?” I said.

“Side,” he said.

“Front is worse,” I said. “You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you? I just met your wife.”

“Foreign bitch.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am. Watch.”

I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.

“He is very sick,” I said.

We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.

“I apologize,” I said.

“Am I in trouble?” he said.

“Not with me,” I said. “You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different.”

He smiled, briefly. He was calm.

“I trained five years with GRU,” he said. “I know how to kill people. And I know how not to.”

sixteen

We gave Trifonov his Steyr back and let him out at the Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and then legged it to his room and picked up his book. Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We parked the Humvee and walked back to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log. It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They were the only other people who left the post that night.”

“They went north,” I said. “If you want to say they threw the briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north. They didn’t go south to Columbia.”

“OK,” she said. “So the same guy didn’t do Carbone and Brubaker. There’s no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.”

“Welcome to the real world,” I said.

The real world got a whole lot worse when my phone rang twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort Jackson. She put him through.

“Willard has been and gone,” he said. “Unbelievable.”

“Told you so.”

“He pitched all kinds of hissy fits.”

“But you’re fireproof.”

“Thank God.”

I paused. “Did you tell him about my guy?”

He paused. “You told me to. Shouldn’t I have?”

“It was a dry hole. Looked good at first, but it wasn’t in the end.”

“Well, he’s on his way up to see you about it. He left here two hours ago. He’s going to be very disappointed.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” Summer asked.

“What is Willard?” I said. “Fundamentally?”

“A careerist,” she said.

“Correct,” I said.

Technically the army has a total of twenty-six separate ranks. A grunt comes in as an E-1 private, and as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid he is automatically promoted to an E-2 private after a year, and to an E-3 private first class after another year, or even a little earlier if he’s any good. Then the ladder stretches all the way up to a five-star General of the Army, although I wasn’t aware of anyone except George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower who ever made it that far. If you count the E-9 sergeant major grade as three separate steps to acknowledge the Command Sergeant Majors and the Sergeant Major of the Army, and if you count all four warrant officer grades, then a major like me has seven steps above him and eighteen steps below him. Which gives a major like me considerable experience of insubordination, going both ways, up and down, giving and taking. With a million people on twenty-six separate rungs on the ladder, insubordination was a true art form. And the canvas was one-on-one privacy.

So I sent Summer away and waited for Willard on my own. She argued about it. In the end I got her to agree that one of us should stay under the radar. She went to get a late dinner. My sergeant brought me a sandwich. Roast beef and Swiss cheese, white bread, a little mayo, a little mustard. The beef was pink. It was a good sandwich. Then she brought me coffee. I was halfway through my second cup when Willard arrived.

He came straight in. He left the door open. I didn’t get up. Didn’t salute. Didn’t stop sipping my coffee. He tolerated it, like I knew he would. He was being very tactical. As far as he knew I had a suspect that could take Brubaker’s case away from the Columbia PD and break the link between an elite colonel and drug dealers in a crack alley. So he was prepared to start out warm and friendly. Or maybe he was looking for a bonding experience with one of his staff. He sat down and started plucking at his trouser legs. He put a man-to-man expression on his face, like we had just been through some kind of a shared experience together.

“Wonderful drive from Jackson,” he said. “Great roads.”

I said nothing.

“Just bought a vintage Pontiac GTO,” he said. “Fine car. I put polished headers on it, big bore pipes. Goes like shit off a shiny shovel.”

I said nothing.

“You like muscle cars?”

“No,” I said. “I like to take the bus.”

“That’s not much fun.”

“OK, let me put it another way. I’m happy with the size of my penis. I don’t need compensation.”

He went white. Then he went red. The same shade as Trifonov’s Corvette. He glared at me like he was a real tough guy.

“Tell me about the progress on Brubaker,” he said.

“Brubaker’s not my case.”

“Sanchez told me you found the guy.”

“False alarm,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Totally.”

“Who were you looking at?”

“Your ex-wife.”

“What?”

“Someone told me she slept with half the colonels in the army. Always had, like a hobby. So I figured that might include Brubaker. I mean, it was a fifty-fifty chance.”

He stared at me.

“Only kidding,” I said. “It was nobody. Just a dry hole.”

He looked away, furious. I got up and closed my office door. Stepped back to my desk. Sat down again. Faced him.

“Your insolence is incredible,” he said.

“So make a complaint, Willard. Go up the chain of command and tell someone I hurt your feelings. See if anyone believes you. Or see if anyone believes you can’t fix a thing like that all by yourself. Watch that note go in your file. See what kind of an impression it makes at your one-star promotion board.”

He squirmed in his chair. Hitched his body from side to side and stared around the room. Fixed his gaze on Summer’s map.

“What’s that?” he said.

“It’s a map,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of the eastern United States.”

“What are the pins for?”

I didn’t answer. He got up and stepped over to the wall. Touched the pins with his fingertips, one at a time. D.C., Sperryville, and Green Valley. Then Raleigh, Fort Bird, Cape Fear, and Columbia.

“What is all this?” he said.

“They’re just pins,” I said.

He pulled the pin out of Green Valley, Virginia.

“Mrs. Kramer,” he said. “I told you to leave that alone.”

He pulled all the other pins out. Threw them down on the floor. Then he saw the gate log. Scanned down it and stopped when he got to Vassell and Coomer.

“I told you to leave them alone as well,” he said.

He tore the list off the wall. The tape took scabs of paint with it. Then he tore the map down. More paint came with it. The pins had left tiny holes in the Sheetrock. They looked like a map all by themselves. Or a constellation.

“You made holes in the wall,” he said. “I won’t have army property abused in this way. It’s unprofessional. What would visitors to this room think?”

“They’d have thought there was a map on the wall,” I said. “It was you that pulled it down and made the mess.”

He dropped the crumpled paper on the floor.

“You want me to walk over to the Delta station?” he said.

“Want me to break your back?”

He went very quiet.

“You should think about your next promotion board, Major. You think you’re going to make lieutenant colonel while I’m still here?”

“No,” I said. “I really don’t. But then, I don’t expect you’ll be here very long.”

“Think again. This is a nice niche. The army will always need cops.”

“But it won’t always need clueless assholes like you.”

“You’re speaking to a senior officer.”

I looked around the room. “But what am I saying? I don’t see any witnesses.”

He said nothing.

“You’ve got an authority problem,” I said. “It’s going to be fun watching you try to solve it. Maybe we could solve it man-to-man, in the gym. You want to try that?”

“Have you got a secure fax machine?” he said.

“Obviously,” I said. “It’s in the outer office. You passed it on your way in. What are you? Blind as well as stupid?”

“Be standing next to it at exactly nine hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll be sending you a set of written orders.”

He glared at me one last time. Then he stepped outside and slammed the door so hard that the whole wall shook and the air current lifted the map and the gate log an inch off the floor.

I stayed at my desk. Dialed my brother in Washington, but he didn’t answer. I thought about calling my mother. But then I figured there was nothing to say. Whatever I talked about, she would know I had called to ask: Are you still alive? She would know that was what was on my mind.

So I got out of my chair and picked up the map and smoothed it out. Taped it back on the wall. I picked up all seven pins and put them back in place. Taped the gate log alongside the map. Then I pulled it down again. It was useless. I balled it up and threw it in the trash. Left the map there all on its own. My sergeant came in with more coffee. I wondered briefly about her baby’s father. Where was he? Had he been an abusive husband? If so, he was probably buried in a swamp somewhere. Or several swamps, in several pieces. My phone rang and she answered it for me. Passed me the receiver.

“Detective Clark,” she said. “Up in Virginia.”

I trailed the phone cord around the desk and sat down again.

“We’re making progress now,” he said. “The Sperryville crowbar is our weapon, for sure. We got an identical sample from the hardware store and our medical examiner matched it up.”

“Good work,” I said.

“So I’m calling to tell you I can’t keep on looking. We found ours, so we can’t be looking for yours anymore. I can’t justify the overtime budget.”

“Sure,” I said. “We anticipated that.”

“So you’re on your own with it now, bud. And I’m real sorry about that.”

I said nothing.

“Anything at your end? You got a name for me yet?”

I smiled. You can forget about a name, I thought. Bud. No quo, no quid. Not that there ever was a name in the first place.

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Summer came back and I told her to take the rest of the night off. Told her to meet me for breakfast in the O Club. At nine o’clock exactly, when Willard’s orders were due. I figured we could have a long leisurely meal, plenty of eggs, plenty of coffee, and we could stroll back over about ten-fifteen.

“You moved the map,” she said.

“Willard tore it down. I put it back up.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Time will tell.”

She went back to her quarters and I went back to mine. I was in a room in the Bachelor Officers’ row. It was pretty much like a motel. There was a street named after some long-dead Medal of Honor winner and a path branching off from the sidewalk that led to my door. There were posts every twenty yards with streetlights on them. The one nearest my door was out. It was out because it had been busted with a stone. I could see glass on the path. And three guys in the shadows. I walked past the first one. He was the Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan. He tapped the face of his watch with his forefinger. The second guy did the same thing. The third guy just smiled. I got inside and closed my door. Didn’t hear them walk away. I didn’t sleep well.

They were gone by morning. I made it to the O Club OK. At nine o’clock the dining room was pretty much empty, which was an advantage. The disadvantage was that whatever food remained had been stewing on the buffet for a while. But on balance I thought it was a good situation. I was more of a loner than a gourmet. Summer and I sat across from each other at a small table in the center of the room. Between us we ate almost everything that was left. Summer consumed about a pound of grits and two pounds of biscuits. She was small, but she could eat. That was for damn sure. We took our time with our coffee and walked over to my office at ten-twenty. There was mayhem inside. Every phone was ringing. The Louisiana corporal looked harassed.

“Don’t answer your phone,” he said. “It’s Colonel Willard. He wanted immediate confirmation that you’d gotten your orders. He’s mad as hell.”

“What are the orders?”

He ducked back to his desk and offered me a sheet of fax paper. The phones kept on ringing. I didn’t take the sheet of paper. I just stood there and read it over my corporal’s shoulder. There were two closely spaced paragraphs. Willard was ordering me to examine the quartermaster’s inward delivery note file and his outward distribution log. I was to use them to work out on paper exactly what ought to be there in the on-post warehouse. Then I was to verify my conclusion by means of a practical search. Then I was to compile a list of all missing items and propose a course of action in writing to track down their current whereabouts. I was to execute the order in a prompt and timely fashion. I was to call him to confirm receipt of the order immediately it was in my hand.

It was a classic make-work punishment. In the bad old days they ordered you to paint coal white or fill sandbags with teaspoons or scrub floors with toothbrushes. This was the modern-day MP equivalent. It was a mindless task that would take two weeks to complete. I smiled.

The phones were still ringing.

“The order was never in my hand,” I said. “I’m not here.”

“Where are you?”

“Tell him someone dropped a gum wrapper in the flower bed outside the post commander’s office. Tell him I won’t have army real estate abused in that way. Tell him I’ve been on the trail since well before dawn.”

I led Summer back out onto the sidewalk, away from the ringing phones.

“Asshole,” I said.

“You should lay low,” she said. “He’ll be calling all over.”

I stood still. Looked around. Cold weather. Gray buildings, gray sky.

“Let’s take the day off,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“We’ve got things to do.”

I nodded. Carbone. Kramer. Brubaker.

“Can’t stay here,” I said. “So we can’t do much about Carbone.”

“Want to go down to Columbia?”

“Not our case. Nothing we can do that Sanchez isn’t doing.”

“Too cold for the beach,” Summer said.

I nodded again. Suddenly wished it wasn’t too cold for the beach. I would have liked to see Summer on the beach. In a bikini. A very small one, for preference.

“We have to work,” she said.

I looked south and west, beyond the post buildings. I could see the trees, cold and dead against the horizon. I could see a tall pine, dull and dormant, a little nearer. I figured it was close to where we had found Carbone.

Carbone.

“Let’s go to Green Valley,” I said. “Let’s visit with Detective Clark. We could ask him for his crowbar notes. He made a start for us. So maybe we could finish up. A four-hour drive might be a good investment at this point.”

“And four hours back.”

“We could have lunch. Maybe dinner. We could go AWOL.”

“They’d find us.”

I shook my head.

“Nobody would find me,” I said. “Not ever.”

I stayed there on the sidewalk and Summer went away and came back five minutes later in the green Chevy we had used before. She pulled in tight to the curb and buzzed her window down before I could move.

“Is this smart?” she said.

“It’s all we’ve got,” I said.

“No, I mean you’re going to be on the gate log. Time out, ten-thirty. Willard could check it.”

I said nothing. She smiled.

“You could hide in the trunk,” she said. “You could get out again when we’re through the gate.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to hide. Not because of an asshole like Willard. If he checks the log I’ll tell him the hunt for the gum-wrapper guy suddenly went interstate. Or global, even. We could go to Tahiti.”

I got in beside her and racked the seat all the way back and started thinking about bikinis again. She took her foot off the brake and accelerated down the main drag. Slowed and stopped at the gate. An MP private came out with a clipboard. He noted our plate number and we showed him ID. He wrote our names down. Glanced into the car, checked the empty rear seat. Then he nodded to his partner in the guard shack and the barrier went up in front of us, very slowly. It was a thick pole with a counterweight, red and white stripes. Summer waited until it was exactly vertical and then she dropped the hammer and we took off in a cloud of blue government-funded smoke from the Chevy’s rear tires.

The weather got better as we drove north. We slid out from under a shelf of low gray cloud into bright winter sunshine. It was an army car so there was no radio in it. Just a blank panel where the civilian model would have had AM and FM and a cassette slot. So we talked from time to time and whiled the rest away riding in aimless silence. It was a curious feeling, to be free. I had spent just about my whole life being where the military told me to be, every minute of every day. Now I felt like a truant. There was a world out there. It was going about its business, chaotic and untidy and undisciplined, and I was a part of it, just briefly. I lay back in the seat and watched it spool by, bright and stroboscopic, random images flashing past like sunlight on a running river.

“Do you wear a bikini or a one-piece?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Just checking,” I said. “I was thinking about the beach.”

“Too cold.”

“Won’t be in August.”

“Think you’ll be here in August?”

“No,” I said.

“Pity,” she said. “You’ll never know what I wear.”

“You could mail me a picture.”

“Where to?”

“Fort Leavenworth, probably,” I said. “The maximum security wing.”

“No, where will you be? Seriously.”

“I have no idea,” I said. “August is eight months away.”

“Where’s the best place you ever served?”

I smiled. Gave her the same answer I give anyone who asks that question.

“Right here,” I said. “Right now.”

“Even with Willard on your back?”

“Willard’s nothing. He’ll be gone before I am.”

“Why is he here at all?”

“My brother figures they’re copying what corporations do. Know-nothings aren’t invested in the status quo.”

“So a guy trained to write fuel consumption algorithms winds up with two dead soldiers in his first week. And he doesn’t want to investigate either one of them.”

“Because that would be old-fashioned thinking. We have to move on. We have to see the big picture.”

She smiled and drove on. Took the Green Valley ramp, going way too fast.

The Green Valley Police Department had a building north of town. It was a bigger place than I had expected, because Green Valley itself was bigger than I had expected. It encompassed the pretty town center we had already seen, but then it bulged north through some country that was mostly strip malls and light industrial units, almost all the way up to Sperryville. The police station looked big enough for twenty or thirty cops. It was built the way most places are where land is cheap. It was long and low and sprawling, with a one-story center core and two wings. The wings were built at right angles, so the place was U-shaped. The facades were concrete, molded to look like stone. There was a brown lawn in front and parking lots at both sides. There was a flagpole dead center on the lawn. Old Glory was up there, weather-beaten and limp in the windless air. The whole place looked a little grand, and a little bleached in the pale sunlight.

We parked in the right-hand lot in an empty slot between two white police cruisers. We got out into the brightness. Went in and asked the desk guy for Detective Clark. The desk guy made an internal call and then pointed us toward the left-hand wing. We walked through an untidy corridor and ended up in a room the size of a basketball court. Pretty much the whole thing was a detectives’ bullpen. There was a wooden fence that enclosed a line of four visitor’s chairs and then there was a gate with a receptionist’s desk next to it. Beyond the gate was a lieutenant’s office way off in one corner and then nothing else except three pairs of back-to-back desks covered with phones and paper. There were file cabinets against the walls. The windows were grimy and most of them had skewed and broken blinds.

There was no receptionist at the desk. There were two detectives in the room, both of them wearing tweed sport coats, both of them sitting with their backs to us. Clark was one of them. He was talking on the phone. I rattled the gate latch. Both guys turned around. Clark paused for a second, surprised, and then he waved us in. We pulled chairs around and sat at the ends of his desk, one on each side. He kept on talking into the phone. We waited. I spent the time looking around the room. The lieutenant’s office had glass walls from waist height upward. There was a big desk in there. Nobody behind it. But on it I could see two plaster casts, just like the ones our own pathologist had made. I didn’t get up and go look at them. Didn’t seem polite.

Clark hung up the phone and made a note on a yellow pad. Then he breathed out and pushed his chair way back so he could see both of us at the same time. He didn’t say anything. He knew we weren’t making a social call. But equally he didn’t want to come right out and ask if we had a name for him. Because he didn’t want to look foolish if we didn’t.

“Just passing through,” I said.

“OK,” he said.

“Looking for a little help,” I said.

“What kind of help?”

“Thought you might give us your crowbar notes. Now that you don’t need them anymore. Now that you’ve found yours.”

“Notes?”

“You listed all kinds of hardware stores. I figured it could save us some time if we picked up where you left off.”

“I could have faxed them,” he said.

“There’s probably a lot of them. We didn’t want to cause you the trouble.”

“I might not have been here.”

“We were passing by anyway.”

“OK,” he said again. “Crowbar notes.” He swiveled his chair and got up out of it and walked over to a file cabinet. Came back with a green folder about a half-inch thick. He dropped it on his desk. It made a decent thump.

“Good luck,” he said.

He sat down again and I nodded to Summer and she picked up the folder. Opened it. It was full of paper. She leafed through. Made a face. Passed it across to me. It was a long, long list of places that stretched from New Jersey to North Carolina. There were names and addresses and phone numbers. The first ninety or so had check marks against them. Then there were about four hundred that didn’t.

“You have to be careful,” Clark said. “Some places call them crowbars and some call them wrecking bars. You have to be sure they know what you’re talking about.”

“Do they have different sizes?”

“Lots of different sizes. Ours is pretty big.”

“Can I see it? Or is it in your evidence room?”

“It’s not evidence,” Clark said. “It’s not the actual weapon. It’s just an identical sample on loan from the Sperryville store. We can’t take it to court.”

“But it fits your plaster casts.”

“Like a glove,” he said. He got up again and walked into his lieutenant’s office and took the casts off the desk. Carried them back one in each hand and put them down on his own desk. They were very similar to ours. There was a positive and a negative, just like we had. Mrs. Kramer’s head had been a lot smaller than Carbone’s, in terms of diameter. Therefore the crowbar had caught less of its circumference. Therefore the impression of the fatal wound was a little shorter in length than ours. But it was just as deep and ugly. Clark picked it up and ran his fingertip through the trench.

“Very violent blow,” he said. “We’re looking for a tall guy, strong, right-handed. You seen anyone like that?”

“Every time I look in the mirror,” I said.

The cast of the weapon itself was a little shorter than ours too. But other than that, it looked very much the same. Same chalky section, pitted here and there with microscopic imperfections in the plaster, but basically straight and smooth and brutal.

“Can I see the actual crowbar?” I said.

“Sure,” Clark said. He leaned down and opened a drawer in his desk. Left it open like a display and moved his chair to get out of my way. I leaned forward and looked down and saw the same curved black thing I had seen the previous morning. Same shape, same contours, same color, same size, same claws, same octagonal section. Same gloss, same precision. It was exactly identical in every way to the one we had left behind in Fort Bird’s mortuary office.

We drove ten miles to Sperryville. I looked through Clark’s list to find the hardware store’s address. It was right there on the fifth line, because it was close to Green Valley. But there was no check mark against its phone number. There was a penciled note instead: No answer. I guessed the owner had been busy with a glazier and an insurance company. I guessed Clark’s guys would have gotten around to making a second call eventually, but they had been overtaken by the NCIC search.

Sperryville wasn’t a big place, so we just cruised around looking for the address. We found a bunch of stores on a short strip and after driving it three times we found the right street name on a green sign. It pointed us down what was basically a narrow dead-end alley. We passed between the sides of two clapboard structures and then the alley widened into a small yard and we saw the hardware store facing us at the far end. It was like a small one-story barn, painted up to look more urban than rural. It was a real mom-and-pop place. It had a family name painted on an old sign. No indication that it was part of a franchise. It was just an American small business, standing alone, weathering the booms and busts from one generation to the next.

But it was an excellent place for a dead-of-night burglary. Quiet, isolated, invisible from passersby on the main street, no living accommodation on the second floor. In the front wall it had a display window on the left set next to an entrance door on the right, separated only by the width of the door frame. There was a moon-shaped hole in the window glass, temporarily backed by a sheet of unfinished plywood. The plywood had been neatly trimmed to the right size. I figured the hole had been punched through by the sole of a shoe. It was close to the door. I figured a tall guy could put his left arm through the hole up to the shoulder and get his hand around to the door latch easily enough. But he would have had to reach all the way in first and then bend his elbow slowly and deliberately, to avoid snagging his clothes. I pictured him with his left cheek against the cold glass, in the dark, breathing hard, groping blindly.

We parked right in front of the store. Got out and spent a minute looking in the window. It was full of items on display. But whoever had put them there wasn’t about to move on to Saks Fifth Avenue anytime soon. Not for their famous holiday windows. Because there was no art involved. No design. No temptation. Everything was just lined up neatly on hand-built shelves. Everything had a price tag. The window was saying: This is what we’ve got. If you want it, come in and get it. But it all looked like quality stuff. There were some strange items. I had no idea what some of them were for. I didn’t know much about tools. I had never really used any, except knives. But it was clear to me that this store chose what it carried pretty carefully.

We went in. There was a mechanical bell on the door that rang as we entered. The plain neatness and organization we had seen in the window was maintained inside. There were tidy racks and shelves and bins. A wide-plank wooden floor. There was a faint smell of machine oil. The place was quiet. No customers. There was a guy behind the counter, maybe sixty years old, maybe seventy. He was looking at us, alerted by the bell. He was medium height and slender and a little stooped. He wore round eyeglasses and a gray cardigan sweater. They made him look intelligent, but they also made him look like he wasn’t accustomed to handling anything bigger than a small screwdriver. They made him look like selling tools was a definite second best to being at a university, teaching a course about their design and their history and their development.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“We’re here about the stolen wrecking bar,” I said. “Or the stolen crowbar, if that’s what you prefer to call it.”

He nodded.

“Crowbar,” he said. “Wrecking bar is a little uncouth, in my opinion.”

“OK, we’re here about the stolen crowbar,” I said.

He smiled, briefly. “You’re the army. Has martial law been declared?”

“We have a parallel inquiry,” Summer said.

“Are you Military Police?”

“Yes,” Summer said. She told him our names and ranks. He reciprocated with his own name, which matched the sign above his door.

“We need some background,” I said. “About the crowbar market.”

He made a face like he was interested, but not very excited. It was like asking a forensics guy about fingerprinting instead of DNA. I got the impression that crowbar development had slowed to a halt a long time ago.

“Where can I start?” he said.

“How many different sorts are there?”

“Dozens,” he said. “There are at least six manufacturers that I would consider dealing with myself. And plenty of others I wouldn’t.”

I looked around the store. “Because you only carry quality stuff.”

“Exactly,” he said. “I can’t compete with the big chains on price alone. So I have to offer absolutely top quality and service.”

“Niche marketing,” I said.

He nodded again.

“Low-end crowbars would come from China,” he said. “Mass produced, cast iron, wrought iron, low-grade forged steel. I wouldn’t be interested.”

“So what do you carry?”

“I import a few titanium crowbars from Europe,” he said. “Very expensive, but very strong. More importantly, very light. They were designed for police and firefighters. Or for underwater work, where corrosion would otherwise be an issue. Or for anyone else that needs something small and durable and easily portable.”

“But it wasn’t one of those that was stolen.”

The old guy shook his head. “No, the titanium bars are specialist items. The others I offer are slightly more mainstream.”

“And what are those?”

“This is a small store,” he said. “I have to choose what I carry very carefully. Which in some ways is a burden, but which is also a delight, because choice is very liberating. These decisions are mine, and mine alone. So obviously, for a crowbar, I would choose high-carbon chromium steel. Then the question is, should it be single-tempered or double-tempered? My honest preference would always be double-tempered, for strength. And I would want the claws to be very slim, for utility, and therefore case-hardened, for safety. That could be a lifesaver, in some situations. Imagine a man on a high roof beam, whose claw shattered. He’d fall off.”

“I guess he would,” I said. “So, the right steel, double-tempered, with the hard claws. What did you pick?”

“Well, actually I compromised with one of the items I carry. My preferred manufacturer won’t make anything shorter than eighteen inches. But I needed a twelve-inch, obviously.”

I must have looked blank.

“For studs and joists,” the old guy said. “If you’re working inside sixteen-inch centers, you can’t use an eighteen-inch bar, can you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“So I take a twelve-inch with a half-inch section from one source, even though it’s only single-tempered. I think it’s satisfactory, though. In terms of strength. With only twelve inches of leverage, the force a person generates isn’t going to overwhelm it.”

“OK,” I said.

“Apart from that particular item and the titanium specialties, I order exclusively from a very old Pittsburgh company called Fortis. They make two models for me. An eighteen-inch, and a three-footer. Both of them are three-quarter-inch section. High-carbon double-tempered chromium steel, case-hardened claws, very fine quality paint.”

“And it was the three-footer that was stolen,” I said.

He looked at me like I was clairvoyant.

“Detective Clark showed us the sample you lent him,” I said.

“I see,” he said.

“So, is the thirty-six-inch three-quarter-section Fortis a rare item?”

He made a face, like he was a little disappointed.

“I sell one a year,” he said. “Two, if I’m very lucky. They’re expensive. And appreciation for quality is declining shamefully. Pearls before swine, I say.”

“Is that the same everywhere?”

“Everywhere?” he repeated.

“In other stores. Regionally. With the Fortis crowbars.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself quite clear. They’re made for me. To my own design. To my own exact specification. They’re custom items.”

I stared at him. “They’re exclusive to this store?”

He nodded. “The privilege of independence.”

“Literally exclusive?”

He nodded again. “Unique in all the world.”

“When did you last sell one?”

“About nine months ago.”

“Does the paint wear off?”

“I know what you’re asking,” he said. “And the answer is yes, of course. If you find one that looks new, it’s the one that was stolen on New Year’s Eve.”

We borrowed an identical sample from him for comparative purposes, the same way Detective Clark had. It was dewed with machine oil and had tissue paper wrapped around the center shaft. We laid it like a trophy across the Chevy’s backseat. Then we ate in the car. Burgers, from a drive-through a hundred yards north of the tool store.

“Tell me three new facts,” I said.

“One, Mrs. Kramer and Carbone were killed by the same individual weapon. Two, we’re going to drive ourselves nuts trying to find a connection between them.”

“And three?”

“I don’t know.”

“Three, the bad guy knew Sperryville pretty well. Could you have found that store in the dark, in a hurry, unless you knew the town?”

We looked ahead through the windshield. The mouth of the alley was just about visible. But then, we knew it was there. And it was full daylight.

Summer closed her eyes.

“Focus on the weapon,” she said. “Forget everything else. Visualize it. The custom crowbar. Unique in all the world. It was carried out of that alley, right there. Then it was in Green Valley at two A.M. on January first. And then it was inside Fort Bird at nine P.M. on the fourth. It went on a journey. We know where it started, and we know where it finished. We don’t know for sure where it went in between, but we do know for certain it passed one particular point along the way. It passed Fort Bird’s main gate. We don’t know when, but we know for sure that it did.”

She opened her eyes.

“We have to get back there,” she said. “We have to look at the logs again. The earliest it could have passed the gate is six A.M. on January first, because Bird is four hours from Green Valley. The latest it could have passed the gate is, say, eight P.M. on January fourth. That’s an eighty-six-hour window. We need to check the gate logs for everybody who entered during that time. Because we know for sure that the crowbar came in, and we know for sure that it didn’t walk in by itself.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’ll be a lot of names.”

The truant feeling was completely gone. We got back on the road and headed east, looking for I-95. We found it and we turned south, toward Bird. Toward Willard on the phone. Toward the angry Delta station. We slid back under the shelf of gray cloud just before the North Carolina state line. The sky went dark. Summer put the headlights on. We passed the State Police building on the opposite shoulder. Passed the spot where Kramer’s briefcase had been found. Passed the rest area a mile later. We merged with the east–west highway spur and came off at the cloverleaf next to Kramer’s motel. We left it behind us and drove the thirty miles down to Fort Bird’s gate. The guard shack MPs signed us in at 1930 hours exactly. I told them to copy their logs starting at 0600 hours January first and ending at 2000 hours January fourth. I told them to have a Xerox record of that eighty-six-hour slice of life delivered to my office immediately.

My office was very quiet. The morning mayhem was long gone. The sergeant with the baby son was back on duty. She looked tired. I realized she didn’t sleep much. She worked all night and probably played with her kid all day. Tough life. She had coffee going. I figured she was just as interested in it as I was. Maybe more.

“Delta guys are restless,” she said. “They know you arrested the Bulgarian guy.”

“I didn’t arrest him. I just asked him some questions.”

“That’s a distinction they don’t seem willing to make. People have been in and out of here looking for you.”

“Were they armed?”

“They don’t need to be armed. Not those guys. You should have them confined to quarters. You could do that. You’re acting MP CO here.”

I shook my head. “Anything else?”

“You need to call Colonel Willard before midnight, or he’s going to write you up as AWOL. He said that’s a promise.”

I nodded. It was Willard’s obvious next move. An AWOL charge wouldn’t reflect badly on a CO. Wouldn’t make him look like he had lost his grip. An AWOL charge was always on the man who ran, fair and square.

“Anything else?” I said again.

“Sanchez wants a ten-sixteen,” she said. “Down at Fort Jackson. And your brother called again.”

“Any message?” I said.

“No message.”

“OK,” I said.

I went inside to my desk. Picked up my phone. Summer stepped over to the map. Traced her fingers across the pins, D.C. to Sperryville, Sperryville to Green Valley, Green Valley to Fort Bird. I dialed Joe’s number. He answered, second ring.

“I called Mom,” he said. “She’s still hanging in there.”

“She said soon, Joe. Doesn’t mean we have to mount a daily vigil.”

“Bound to be sooner than we think. And than we want.”

“How was she?”

“She sounded shaky.”

“You OK?”

“Not bad,” he said. “You?”

“Not a great year so far.”

“You should call her next,” he said.

“I will,” I said. “In a few days.”

“Do it tomorrow,” he said.

He hung up and I sat for a minute. Then I dabbed the cradle to clear the line and asked my sergeant to get Sanchez for me. Down at Jackson. I held the phone by my ear and waited. Summer was looking right at me.

“A daily vigil?” she said.

“She’s waiting for the plaster to come off,” I said. “She doesn’t like it.”

Summer looked at me a little more and then turned back to the map. I put the phone on speaker and laid the handset down on the desk. There was a click on the line and we heard Sanchez’s voice.

“I’ve been hassling the Columbia PD about Brubaker’s car,” he said.

“Didn’t they find it yet?” I said.

“No,” he said. “And they weren’t putting any effort into finding it. Which was inconceivable to me. So I kept on hassling them.”

“And?”

“They dropped the other shoe.”

“Which is?”

“Brubaker wasn’t killed in Columbia,” he said. “He was dumped there, is all.”

seventeen

Sanchez told us the Columbia medical examiners had found confused lividity patterns on Brubaker’s body that in their opinion meant he had been dead about three hours before being tossed in the alley. Lividity is what happens to a person’s blood after death. The heart stops, blood pressure collapses, liquid blood drains and sinks and settles into the lowest parts of the body under the simple force of gravity. It rests there and over a period of time it stains the skin liverish purple. Somewhere between three and six hours later the color fixes permanently, like a developed photograph. A guy who falls down dead on his back will have a pale chest and a purple back. Vice versa for a guy who falls down dead on his front. But Brubaker’s lividity was all over the place. The Columbia medical examiners figured he had been killed, then kept on his back for about three hours, then dumped in the alley on his front. They were pretty confident about their estimate of the three-hour duration, because three hours was the point where the stains would first start to fix. They said he had signs of early fixed lividity on his back and major fixed lividity on his front. They also said he had a broad stripe across the middle of his back where the dead flesh had been partially cooked.

“He was in the trunk of a car,” I said.

“Right over the muffler,” Sanchez said. “Three-hour journey, plenty of temperature.”

“This changes a lot of things.”

“It explains why they never found his Chevy in Columbia.”

“Or any witnesses,” I said. “Or the shell cases or the bullets.”

“So what are we looking at?”

“Three hours in a car?” I said. “At night, with empty roads? Anything up to a two-hundred-mile radius.”

“That’s a pretty big circle,” Sanchez said.

“A hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles,” I said. “Approximately. Pi times the radius squared. What’s the Columbia PD doing about it?”

“Dropping it like a hot potato. It’s an FBI case now.”

“What does the Bureau think about the dope thing?”

“They’re a little skeptical. They figure heroin isn’t our bag. They figure we’re more into marijuana and amphetamines.”

“I wish,” I said. “I could use a little of both right now.”

“On the other hand they know Delta guys go all over. Pakistan, South America. Which is where heroin comes from. So they’ll keep it in their back pocket, in case they don’t get anywhere, just like the Columbia PD was going to.”

“They’re wasting their time. Heroin? A guy like Brubaker would die first.”

“They’re thinking maybe he did.”

His end of the line clicked off. I killed the speaker and put the handset back.

“It happened to the north, probably,” Summer said. “Brubaker started out in Raleigh. We should be looking for his car somewhere up there.”

“Not our case,” I said.

“OK, the FBI should be looking.”

“I’m sure they already are.”

There was a knock at the door. It opened up and an MP corporal came in with sheets of paper under his arm. He saluted smartly and stepped a pace forward and placed the sheets of paper on my desk. Stepped the same pace back and saluted again.

“Copies of the gate log, sir,” he said. “First through fourth of this month, times as requested.”

He turned around and walked back out of the room. Closed the door. I looked at the pile of paper. There were about seven sheets in it. Not too bad.

“Let’s go to work,” I said.

Operation Just Cause helped us again. The raised DefCon level meant a lot of leave had been canceled. No real reason, because the Panama thing was no kind of a big deal, but that was how the military worked. No point in having DefCon levels if they couldn’t be raised up and dropped down, no point in moving them at all if there weren’t any associated consequences. No point in staging little foreign dramas unless the whole establishment felt a remote and vicarious thrill.

No point in canceling leave without giving people something to fill their time either. So there were extra training sessions and daily readiness exercises. Most of them were arduous and started early. Therefore the big bonus for us was that almost everyone who had gone out to celebrate New Year’s Eve was back on-post and in the rack relatively early. They must have straggled back around three or four or five in the morning, because there was very little gate activity recorded after six.

Incoming personnel during the eighteen hours we were looking at on New Year’s Day totaled nineteen. Summer and I were two of them, returning from Green Valley and D.C. after the widow trip and the visit to Walter Reed. We crossed ourselves off the list.

Incoming personnel other than ourselves on January second totaled sixteen. Twelve, on January third. Seventeen, before 2000 hours on January fourth. Sixty-two names in total, during the eighty-six-hour window. Nine of them were civilian delivery drivers. We crossed them off. Eleven of them were repeats. They had come in, gone out, come in again. Like commuters. My night-duty sergeant was one of them. We crossed her off, because she was a woman. And short. Elsewhere we deleted the second and any subsequent entries in each case.

We ended up with forty-one individuals, listed by name, rank, and initial. No way of telling which were men and which were women. No way of telling which of the men were tall and strong and right-handed.

“I’ll work on the genders,” Summer said. “I’ve still got the basic strength lists. They have full names on them.”

I nodded. Left her to it. Got on the phone and scared up the pathologist and asked him to meet me in the mortuary, right away.

I drove our Chevy between my office and his because I didn’t want to be seen walking around with a crowbar. I parked outside the mortuary entrance and waited. The guy showed up inside five minutes, walking, from the direction of the O Club. I probably interrupted his dessert. Or maybe even his main course. I slid out to meet him and leaned back in and took the crowbar out of the backseat. He glanced at it. Led me inside. He seemed to understand what I wanted to do. He unlocked his office and hit the lights and unlocked his drawer. Opened it and lifted out the crowbar that had killed Carbone. Laid it on his desk. I laid the borrowed specimen next to it. Pulled the tissue paper off it. Lined it up at the same angle. It was exactly identical.

“Are there wide variations?” the pathologist asked. “With crowbars?”

“More than you would think,” I said. “I just had a big crowbar lesson.”

“These two look the same.”

“They are the same. They’re peas in a pod. Count on it. They’re custom-made. They’re unique in all the world.”

“Did you ever meet Carbone?”

“Very briefly,” I said.

“What was his posture like?”

“In what way?”

“Did he stoop?”

I thought back to the dim interior of the lounge bar. To the hard light in the parking lot. Shook my head.

“He wasn’t tall enough to stoop,” I said. “He was a wiry guy, solid, stood up pretty straight. Kind of on the balls of his feet. He looked athletic.”

“OK.”

“Why?”

“It was a downward blow. Not a downward chop, but a horizontal swing that dipped as it hit. Maybe it was just below horizontal. Carbone was seventy inches tall. The wound was sixty-five inches off the ground, assuming he wasn’t stooping. But it was delivered from above. So his attacker was tall.”

“You told us that already,” I said.

“No, I mean tall,” he said. “I’ve been working on it. Mapping it out. The guy had to be six-four or six-five.”

“Like me,” I said.

“And as heavy as you too. Not easy to break a skull as badly as that.”

I thought back to the crime scene. It had been pocked with small hummocks of dead grass and there were wrist-thick branches here and there on the ground, but it was basically a flat area. No way one guy could have been standing higher than the other. No way of assuming a relative height difference when there really wasn’t one.

“Six-four or six-five,” I said. “Are you prepared to go to bat on that?”

“In court?”

“It was a training accident,” I said. “We’re not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?”

The doctor breathed in, breathed out.

“Six-three,” he said. “To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.”

“OK,” I said.

He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.

Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.

“Thirty-three men,” she told me. “Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers.”

“Who are they?”

“A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously.”

“We can cross him off.”

“OK, thirty-two men,” she said. “The pathologist is one of them.”

“We can take him out too.”

“Thirty-one, then,” she said. “And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o’clock.”

“Take them out,” I said. “They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak.”

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.”

“OK,” I said. “Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records.”

“Why?”

“To find out how tall they are.”

“Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t be here.”

“He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,” I said. “So you can take him out, too.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,” I said.

She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist’s. But then, I hadn’t eaten anything yet myself.

“Yes, sir?” the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.

“I’ve got a question, Chief,” I said. “Something only you will know.”

“Like what?”

“Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.”

The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can’t afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.

“No problem,” the guy said. “Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one seventy-eight. We’re overrepresented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole, which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard, which brings our median weight up three pounds to one eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat.”

“Those are this year’s figures?”

“Last year’s,” he said. “This year is only a few days old.”

“What’s the spread in height?”

“What are you looking for?”

“How many guys have we got six-three or better?”

“One in ten,” he said. “In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Super Bowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.”

“OK, Chief,” I said. “Thanks.”

I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.

Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard. Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty-eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre.

Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook. The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was shaped on the corners. We couldn’t put it together. Joe came in, and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died.

“The crowbar didn’t walk in by itself,” Summer said. “One of those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can’t have gotten here any other way.”

I said nothing.

“Want dinner?” she said.

“I think better when I’m hungry,” I said.

“We’ve run out of things to think about.”

I nodded. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together and piled them neatly. Put Summer’s original list of thirty-three names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn’t bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus the pathologist, because he wasn’t a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn’t even come at all.

“Why wasn’t Marshall here?” I said.

Summer nodded. “That’s always bothered me. It’s like Vassell and Coomer had something to hide from him.”

“All they did was eat dinner.”

“But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer’s funeral with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay home.”

I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky. Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded men with their chins ducked into their collars against the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the Mercury’s rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver’s seat.

“We should talk to him,” I said. “Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded.”

I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn’t been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.

“Are you going to call Willard?” Summer asked me.

“Probably,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Not before midnight?”

“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

“That’s a risk.”

“I’m protected,” I said.

“Might not last forever.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That’ll make everything else seem kind of academic.”

“Call Willard tonight,” she said. “That would be my advice.”

I looked at her.

“As a friend,” she said. “AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse.”

“OK,” I said.

“Do it now,” she said. “Why not?”

“OK,” I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.

“Whose orders?” I asked her.

“General Vassell’s,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

She closed the door.

“The fifth of January,” Summer said.

“The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.

“He knows something.”

“He wasn’t even here.”

“Why else would they hide him away afterward?”

“It’s a coincidence.”

“You don’t like coincidences.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”

eighteen

No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions so I walked over to the Provost Marshal’s office and took a stack of travel vouchers out of the company clerk’s desk. I carried them back to my own office and signed them all with my name on the CO lines and respectable forgeries of Leon Garber’s signature on the Authorized by lines.

“We’re breaking the law,” Summer said.

“This is the Battle of Kursk,” I said. “We can’t stop now.”

She hesitated.

“Your choice,” I said. “In or out, no pressure from me.”

She said nothing.

“These vouchers won’t come back for a month or two,” I said. “By then either Willard will be gone, or we will. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“OK,” she said.

“Go pack,” I said. “Three days.”

She left and I asked my sergeant to figure out who was next in line for acting CO. She came back with a name I recognized as the female captain I had seen in the O Club dining room. The one with the busted arm. I wrote her a note explaining I would be out for three days. I told her she was in charge. Then I picked up the phone and called Joe.

“I’m going to Germany,” I said.

“OK,” he said. “Enjoy. Have a safe trip.”

“I can’t go to Germany without stopping by Paris on the way back. You know, under the circumstances.”

He paused.

“No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”

“Wouldn’t be right not to,” I said. “But she shouldn’t think I care more than you do. That wouldn’t be right either. So you should come over too.”

“When?”

“Take the overnight flight two days from now. I’ll meet you at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle. Then we’ll go see her together.”

Summer met me on the sidewalk outside my quarters and we carried our bags to the Chevy. We were both in BDUs because we figured our best shot was a night transport out of Andrews Air Force Base. We were too late for a civilian red-eye and we didn’t want to wait all night for the breakfast flights. We got in the car and logged out at the gate. Summer was driving, of course. She accelerated hard and then dropped into a smooth rhythm that was about ten miles an hour faster than the other cars heading our way.

I sat back and watched the road. Watched the shoulders, and the strip malls, and the traffic. We drove north thirty miles and passed by Kramer’s motel. Hit the cloverleaf and jogged east to I-95. Headed north. We passed the rest area. Passed the spot a mile later where the briefcase had been found. I closed my eyes.

I slept all the way to Andrews. We got there well after midnight. We parked in a restricted lot and swapped two of our travel vouchers for two places on a Transportation Corps C-130 that was leaving for Frankfurt at three in the morning. We waited in a lounge that had fluorescent lighting and vinyl benches and was filled with the usual ragtag bunch of transients. The military is always on the move. There are always people going somewhere, any time of the night or day. Nobody talked. Nobody ever did. We all just sat there, stiff and tired and uncomfortable.

The loadmaster came to get us thirty minutes before takeoff. We filed out onto the tarmac and walked up the ramp into the belly of the plane. There was a long line of cargo pallets in the center bay. We sat on webbing jump seats with our backs to the fuselage wall. On the whole I figured I preferred the first-class section on Air France. The Transportation Corps doesn’t have stewardesses and it doesn’t brew in-flight coffee.

We took off a little late, heading west into the wind. Then we turned a slow one-eighty over D.C. and struck out east. I felt the movement. There were no windows, but I knew we were above the city. Joe was down there somewhere, sleeping.

The fuselage wall was very cold at altitude so we all leaned forward with our elbows on our knees. It was too noisy to talk. I stared at a pallet of tank ammunition until my vision blurred and I fell back to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable, but one thing you learn in the army is how to sleep anywhere. I woke up maybe ten times and spent most of the trip in a state of suspended animation. The roar of the engines and the rush of the slipstream helped induce it. It was relatively restful. It was about sixty percent as good as being in bed.

We were in the air nearly eight hours before we started our initial descent. There was no intercom. No cheery message from the pilot. Just a change in the engine note and a downward lurching movement and a sharp sensation in the ears. All around me people were standing up and stretching. Summer had her back flat against an ammunition crate, rubbing like a cat. She looked pretty good. Her hair was too short to get messy and her eyes were bright. She looked determined, like she knew she was heading for doom or glory and was resigned to not knowing which.

We all sat down again and held tight to the webbing for the landing. The wheels touched down and the reverse thrust howled and the brakes jammed on tight. The pallets jerked forward against their straps. Then the engines cut back and we taxied a long way and stopped. The ramp came down and a dim dusk sky showed through the hole. It was five o’clock in the afternoon in Germany, six hours ahead of the East Coast, one hour ahead of Zulu time. I was starving. I had eaten nothing since the burger in Sperryville the previous day. Summer and I stood up and grabbed our bags and got in line. Shuffled down the ramp with the others and out onto the tarmac. The weather was cold. It felt pretty much the same as North Carolina.

We were way out in the restricted military corner of the Frankfurt airport. We took a personnel bus to the public terminal. After that we were on our own. Some of the other guys had transport waiting, but we didn’t. We joined a bunch of civilians in the taxi line. Shuffled up, one by one. When our turn came we gave the driver a travel voucher and told him to drive us east to XII Corps. He was happy enough to comply. He could swap the voucher for hard currency at any U.S. post and I was certain he would pick up a couple of XII Corps guys going out into Frankfurt for a night on the town. No deadheading. No empty running. He was making a living off of the U.S. Army, just like plenty of Germans had for four and a half decades. He was driving a Mercedes-Benz.

The trip took thirty minutes. We drove east through suburbs. They looked like a lot of West German places. There were vast tracts of pale honey buildings built back in the fifties. The new neighborhoods ran west to east in random curving shapes, following the routes the bombers had followed. No nation ever lost a war the way Germany lost. Like everyone, I had seen the pictures taken in 1945. Defeat was not a big enough word. Armageddon would be better. The whole country had been smashed to powdered rubble by a juggernaut. The evidence would be there for all time, written in the architecture. And under the architecture. Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones and teacups and shells and rusted-out Panzerfausts. Every time ground was broken for a new foundation, a priest was standing by before the steam shovels took their first bite. I was born in Berlin, surrounded by Americans, surrounded by whole square miles of patched-up devastation. They started it, we used to say.

The suburban streets were neat and clean. There were discreet stores with apartments above them. The store windows were full of shiny items. Street signs were black-on-white, written in an archaic script that made them hard to read. There were small U.S. Army road signs here and there too. You couldn’t go very far without seeing one. We followed the XII Corps arrows, getting closer all the time. We left the built-up area and drove through a couple of kilometers of farmland. It felt like a moat. Like insulation. The eastern sky ahead of us was dark.

XII Corps was based in a typical glory-days installation. Some Nazi industrialist had built a thousand-acre factory site out in the fields, back in the 1930s. It had featured an impressive home office building and ranks of low metal sheds stretching hundreds of meters behind it. The sheds had been bombed to twisted shards, over and over again. The home office building had been only partially damaged. Some weary U.S. Army armored division had set up camp in it in 1945. Thin Frankfurt women in headscarves and faded print dresses had been brought in to pile the rubble, in exchange for food. They worked with wheelbarrows and shovels. Then the Army Corps of Engineers had fixed up the office building and bulldozed the piles of rubble away. Successive huge waves of Pentagon spending had rolled in. By 1953 the place was a flagship installation. There was cleaned brick and shining white paint and a strong perimeter fence. There were flagpoles and sentry boxes and guard shacks. There were mess halls and a medical clinic and a PX. There were barracks and workshops and warehouses. Above all there were a thousand acres of flat land and by 1953 it was covered with American tanks. They were all lined up, facing east, ready to roll out and fight for the Fulda Gap.

When we got there thirty-seven years later it was too dark to see much. But I knew that nothing fundamental would have changed. The tanks would be different, but that would be all. The M4 Shermans that had won World War Two were long gone, except for two fine examples standing preserved outside the main gate, one on each side, like symbols. They were placed halfway up landscaped concrete ramps, noses high, tails low, like they were still in motion, breasting a rise. They were lit up theatrically. They were beautifully painted, glossy green, with bright white stars on their sides. They looked much better than they had originally. Behind them was a long driveway with white-painted curbs and the floodlit front of the office building, which was now the post headquarters. Behind that would be the tank lagers, with M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks lined up shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of them, at nearly four million bucks apiece.

We got out of the taxi and crossed the sidewalk and headed for the main gate guard shack. My special unit badge got us past it. It would get us past any U.S. Army checkpoint anywhere except the inner ring of the Pentagon. We carried our bags down the driveway.

“Been here before?” Summer asked me.

I shook my head as I walked.

“I’ve been in Heidelberg with the infantry,” I said. “Many times.”

“Is that near?”

“Not far,” I said.

There were broad stone steps leading up to the doors. The whole place looked like a capitol building in some small state back home. It was immaculately maintained. We went up the steps and inside. There was a soldier at a desk just behind the doors. Not an MP. Just a XII Corps office grunt. We showed him our IDs.

“Your VOQ got space for us?” I asked.

“Sir, no problem,” he said.

“Two rooms,” I said. “One night.”

“I’ll call ahead,” he said. “Just follow the signs.”

He pointed to the back of the hallway. There were more doors there that would lead out into the complex. I checked my watch. It said noon exactly. It was still set to East Coast time. Six in the evening, in West Germany. Already dark.

“I need to see your MP XO,” I said. “Is he still in his office?”

The guy used his phone and got an answer. Pointed us up a broad staircase to the second floor.

“On your right,” he said.

We went up the stairs and turned right. There was a long corridor with offices on both sides. They had hardwood doors with reeded glass windows. We found the one we wanted and went in. It was an outer chamber with a sergeant in it. It was pretty much identical to the one back at Bird. Same paint, same floor, same furniture, same temperature, same smell. Same coffee, in the same standard-issue machine. The sergeant was like plenty I had seen before too. Calm, efficient, stoic, ready to believe he ran the place all by himself, which he probably did. He was behind his desk and he looked up at us as we came in. Spent half a second deciding who we were and what we wanted.

“I guess you need the major,” he said.

I nodded. He picked up his phone and buzzed through to the inner office.

“Go straight through,” he said.

We went in through the inner door and I saw a desk with a guy called Swan behind it. I knew Swan pretty well. Last time I had seen him was in the Philippines, three months earlier, when he was starting a tour of duty that was scheduled to last a year.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You got here December twenty-ninth.”

“Froze my ass off,” he said. “All I had was Pacific gear. Took XII Corps three days to find me a winter uniform.”

I wasn’t surprised. Swan was short, and wide. Almost cubic. He probably owned a percentile all his own, on the quartermasters’ charts.

“Your Provost Marshal here?” I said.

He shook his head. “Temporarily reassigned.”

“Garber signed your orders?”

“Allegedly.”

“Figured it out yet?”

“Not even close.”

“Me either,” I said.

He shrugged, like he was saying, Hey, the army, what can you do?

“This is Lieutenant Summer,” I said.

“Special unit?” Swan said.

Summer shook her head.

“But she’s cool,” I said.

Swan stretched a short arm over his desk and they shook hands.

“I need to see a guy called Marshall,” I said. “A major. Some kind of a XII Corps staffer.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Someone is. I’m hoping Marshall will help me figure out who. You know him?”

“Never heard of him,” Swan said. “I only just got here.”

“I know,” I said. “December twenty-ninth.”

He smiled and gave me the What can you do? shrug again and picked up his phone. I heard him ask his sergeant to find Marshall and tell him I wanted to see him at his convenience. I looked around while we waited for the response. Swan’s office looked borrowed and temporary, just like mine did back in North Carolina. It had the same kind of clock on the wall. Electric, no second hand. No tick. It said ten minutes past six.

“Anything happening here?” I said.

“Not much,” Swan said. “Some helicopter guy went shopping in Heidelberg and got run over. And Kramer died, of course. That’s shaken things up some.”

“Who’s next in line?”

“Vassell, I guess.”

“I met him,” I said. “Wasn’t impressed.”

“It’s a poisoned chalice. Things are changing. You should hear these guys talk. They’re real gloomy.”

“The status quo is not an option,” I said. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

His phone rang. He listened for a minute and put it down.

“Marshall’s not on-post,” he said. “He’s out on a night exercise in the countryside. Back in the morning.”

Summer glanced at me. I shrugged.

“Have dinner with me,” Swan said. “I’m lonely here with all these cavalry types. The O Club in an hour?”

We carried our bags over to the Visiting Officers’ Quarters and found our rooms. Mine looked pretty much the same as the one Kramer had died in, except it was cleaner. It was a standard American motel layout. Presumably some hotel chain had bid for the government contract, way back when. Then they had airfreighted all the fixtures and fittings, right down to the sinks and the towel rails and the toilet bowls.

I shaved and took a shower and dressed in clean BDUs. Knocked on Summer’s door fifty-five minutes into Swan’s hour. She opened up. She looked clean and fresh. Behind her the room looked the same as mine, except it already smelled like a woman’s. There was some kind of nice eau de toilette in the air.

The O Club occupied half of one of the ground floor wings of the main building. It was a grand space, with high ceilings and intricate plaster moldings. There was a lounge, and a bar, and a dining room. We found Swan in the bar. He was with a lieutenant colonel who was wearing Class As with a combat infantryman’s badge on the coat. It was an odd thing to see, on an Armored post. His nameplate said: Simon. He introduced himself to us. I got the feeling he was going to join us for dinner. He told us he was a liaison officer, working on behalf of the infantry. He told us there was an Armored guy down in Heidelberg, doing the same job in reverse.

“Been here long?” I asked him.

“Two years,” he said, which I was glad about. I needed some background, and Swan didn’t have it, any more than I knew anything about Fort Bird. Then I realized it was no accident that Simon was joining the party. Swan must have figured out what I wanted and set about providing it without being asked. Swan was that kind of guy.

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel,” I said, and then I nodded to Swan, like I was saying thanks. We drank cold American beers from tall frosted glasses and then we went through to the dining room. Swan had made a reservation. The steward put us at a table in the corner. I sat where I could watch the whole room at once. I didn’t see anyone I knew. Vassell wasn’t around. Nor was Coomer.

The menu was absolutely standard. We could have been in any O Club in the world. O Clubs aren’t there to introduce you to local cuisine. They’re there to make you feel at home, somewhere deep inside the army’s own interpretation of America. There was a choice of fish or steak. The fish was probably European, but the steak would have been flown in across the Atlantic. Some politician in one of the ranch states would have leveraged a sweet deal with the Pentagon.

We small-talked for a spell. We bitched about pay and benefits. Talked about people we knew. We mentioned Just Cause in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Simon told us he had been to Berlin two days previously and had gotten himself a chip of concrete from the Wall. Told us he planned to have it encased in a plastic cube. Planned to hand it on down the generations, like an heirloom.

“Do you know Major Marshall?” I asked him.

“Fairly well,” he said.

“Who is he exactly?” I asked.

“Is this official?”

“Not really,” I said.

“He’s a planner. A strategist, basically. Long-term kind of guy. General Kramer seemed to like him. Always kept him close by, made him his intelligence officer.”

“Does he have an intelligence background?”

“Not formally. But he’ll have done rotations, I’m sure.”

“So is he a part of the inner team? I heard Kramer and Vassell and Coomer mentioned all in the same breath, but not Marshall.”

“He’s on the team,” Simon said. “That’s for sure. But you know what flag officers are like. They need a guy, but they aren’t about to admit it. So they abuse him a little. He fetches and carries and drives them around, but when push comes to shove they ask his opinion.”

“Is he going to move up now Kramer’s gone? Maybe into Coomer’s slot?”

Simon made a face. “He should. He’s an Armor fanatic to the core, like the rest of them. But nobody really knows what the hell is going to happen. Kramer dying couldn’t have come at a worse time for them.”

“The world is changing,” I said.

“And what a world it was,” Simon said. “Kramer’s world, basically, beginning to end. He graduated the Point in Fifty-two, and places like this one were all buttoned up by Fifty-three, and they’ve been the center of the universe for almost forty years. These places are so dug in, you wouldn’t believe it. You know who has done the most in this country?”

“Who?”

“Not Armored. Not the infantry. This theater is all about the Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman tanks way back weighed thirty-eight tons and were nine feet wide. Now we’re all the way up to the M1A1 Abrams, which weighs seventy tons and is eleven feet wide. Every step of the way for forty years the Corps of Engineers has had work to do. They’ve widened roads, hundreds of miles of them, all over West Germany. They’ve strengthened bridges. Hell, they’ve built roads and bridges. Dozens of them. You want a stream of seventy-ton tanks rolling east to battle, you better make damn sure the roads and bridges can take it.”

“OK,” I said.

“Billions of dollars,” Simon said. “And of course, they knew which roads and bridges to look at. They knew where we were starting, and they knew where we were going. They talked to the war-gamers, they looked at the maps, and they got busy with the concrete and the rebar. Then they built way stations everywhere we needed them. Permanent hardened fuel stores, ammunition dumps, repair shops, hundreds of them, all along strictly predetermined routes. So we’re embedded here, literally. We’re dug in, literally. The Cold War battlefields are literally set in stone, Reacher.”

“People are going to say we invested and we won.”

Simon nodded. “And they’d be correct. But what comes next?”

“More investment,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “Like in the Navy, when the big battleships were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the beginning of the next. The Abrams tanks are like battleships. They’re magnificent, but they’re out-of-date. About the only way we can use them is down custom-built roads in directions we’ve already planned to go.”

“They’re mobile,” Summer said. “Like any tank.”

“Not very mobile,” Simon said. “Where is the next fight going to be?”

I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the geopolitical stuff.

“The Middle East?” I said. “Iran or Iraq, maybe. They’ve both gotten their breath back, they’ll be looking for the next thing to do.”

“Or the Balkans,” Swan said. “When the Soviets finally collapse, there’s a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for the lid to come off.”

“OK,” Simon said. “Look at the Balkans, for instance. Yugoslavia, maybe. That’ll be the first place anything happens, for sure. Right now they’re just waiting for the starting gun. What do we do?”

“Send in the Airborne,” Swan said.

“OK,” Simon said again. “We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We’re speed bumps, that’s all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that’s the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can’t airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that’s the good news. Because you don’t just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you’re looking at a six-month buildup, minimum, and that’s working right around the clock.”

“During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Simon said. “And those are my boys, and I worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of foreign armor, we’d get slaughtered. It would be a very, very anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is, they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks later. Roads aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the distance.”

Nobody spoke.

“Or take the Middle East,” Simon said. “We all know Iraq wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it’s an easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it’s a little hotter and dustier. But the war plans we’ve got will work out just fine. But do we even get that far? We’ve got the infantry sitting there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who says the Iraqis won’t roll right over them in the first two weeks?”

“Air power,” Summer said. “Attack helicopters.”

“I wish,” Simon said. “Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell, but they don’t win anything on their own. Never have, never will. Boots on the ground is what wins things.”

I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman’s standard-issue pride. But part of it was true too.

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.

“Same thing as happened with the Navy in 1941,” Simon said. “Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split. We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armored vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in the belly of a C-130. We need to get places faster and fight smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds of dinosaurs.”

Then he smiled.

“Basically we’ll have to put the infantry in charge,” he said.

“You ever talk to people like Marshall about this kind of stuff?”

“Their planners? No way.”

“What do they think about the future?”

“I have no idea. And I don’t care. The future belongs to the infantry.”

Dessert was apple pie, and then we had coffee. It was the usual excellent brew. We slid back from the future into present-day small talk. The stewards moved around, silently. Just another evening, in an Officers’ Club four thousand miles from the last one.

“Marshall will be back at dawn,” Swan told me. “Look for a scout car at the rear of the first incoming column.”

I nodded. Figured dawn in January in Frankfurt would be about 0700 hours. I set my mental alarm for six. Lieutenant Colonel Simon said good night and wandered off. Summer pushed her chair back and sprawled in it, as much as a tiny person can sprawl. Swan sat forward with his elbows on the table.

“You think they get much dope on this post?” I asked him.

“You want some?” he said.

“Brown heroin,” I said. “Not for my personal use.”

Swan nodded. “Guys here say there are Turkish guest workers in Germany who could get you some. One of the speed dealers could supply it, I’m sure.”

“You ever met a guy called Willard?” I asked him.

“The new boss?” he said. “I got the memo. Never met him. But some of the guys here know him. He was an intelligence wonk, something to do with Armor.”

“He wrote algorithms,” I said.

“For what?”

“Soviet T-80 fuel consumption, I think. Told us what kind of training they were doing.”

“And now he’s running the 110th?”

I nodded.

“I know,” I said. “Bizarre.”

“How did he do that?”

“Obviously someone liked him.”

“We should find out who. Start sending hate mail.”

I nodded again. Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

My VOQ room was so generic I lost track of where I was within a minute of closing my door. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up and crawled between the sheets. They smelled of the same detergent the army uses everywhere. I thought of my mother in Paris and Joe in D.C. My mother was already in bed, probably. Joe would still be working, at whatever it was he did. I said six A.M. to myself and closed my eyes.

Dawn broke at 0650, by which time I was standing next to Summer at XII Corps’ east road gate. We had mugs of coffee in our hands. The ground was frozen and there was mist in the air. The sky was gray and the landscape was a shade of pastel green. It was low and undulating and unexciting, like a lot of Europe. There were stands of small neat trees here and there. Dormant winter earth, giving off cold organic smells. It was very quiet.

The road ran through the gate and then turned and headed east and a little north, into the fog, toward Russia. It was wide and straight, made from reinforced concrete. The curbstones were nicked here and there by tank tracks. Big wedge-shaped chunks had been knocked out of them. A tank is a difficult thing to steer.

We waited. Still quiet.

Then we heard them.

What is the twentieth century’s signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They’re all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might lobby for a Beatles song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for that choice. But a song and screaming could never qualify. Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time. They weren’t invented after 1900.

No, the twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It’s a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the very noise they make tells you they can’t be stopped. It tells you you’re weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around and lurches straight toward you, roaring and squealing. That’s the real twentieth-century sound.

We heard the XII Corps’ Abrams column a long time before we saw it. The noise came at us through the fog. We heard the tracks, and the whine of the turbines. We heard the grind of the drive gear and felt fastpattering bass shudders through the soles of our feet as each new tread plate came off the cogs and thumped down into position. We heard grit and stone crushed under their weight.

Then we saw them. The lead tank loomed at us through the mist. It was moving fast, pitching a little, staying flat, its engine roaring. Behind it was another, and another. They were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a magnificent sight. The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it. It is wrapped in armor made out of a depleted uranium core sandwiched between rolled steel plate. The armor is dense and impregnable. Battlefield shells and rockets and kinetic devices bounce right off it. But its main trick is to stand off so far that no battlefield shell or rocket or kinetic device can even reach it. It sits there and watches enemy rounds fall short in the dirt. Then it traverses its mighty gun and fires and a second later and a mile and a half in the distance its assailant blows up and burns. It is the ultimate unfair advantage.

The lead tank rolled past us. Eleven feet wide, twenty-six feet long, nine and a half feet tall. Seventy tons. Its engine bellowed and its weight shook the ground. Its tracks squealed and clattered and slid on the concrete. Then the second tank rolled by. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The noise was deafening. The huge bulk of exotic metal buffeted the air. The gun barrels dipped and swayed and bounced. Exhaust fumes swirled all around.

There were altogether twenty tanks in the formation. They drove in through the gate and their noise and vibration faded behind us and then there was a short gap and a scout car came out of the mist straight toward us. It was a shoot-and-scoot Humvee armed with a TOW-2 antitank missile launcher. Two guys in it. I stepped into its path and raised my hand. Paused. I didn’t know Marshall and I had only ever seen him once, in the dark interior of the Grand Marquis outside Fort Bird’s post headquarters. But even so, I was pretty sure that neither of the guys in the Humvee was him. I remembered Marshall as large and dark and these guys were small, which is much more usual for Armored people. One thing there isn’t a lot of inside an Abrams is room.

The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked around to the driver’s window. Summer took up station on the passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down. Stared out at me.

“I’m looking for Major Marshall,” I said.

The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes. Some kind of score sheets.

“Marshall’s not here,” the driver said.

“So where is he?”

“Who’s asking?”

“You can read,” I said. I was wearing last night’s BDUs. They had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.

“Unit?” the guy said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Marshall went to California,” he said. “Emergency deployment to Fort Irwin.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try to be.”

“Last night sometime.”

“That’s not very specific.”

“I’m honestly not sure.”

“What kind of an emergency have they got at Irwin?”

“I’m not sure about that either.”

I nodded. Stepped back.

“Drive on,” I said.

Their Humvee moved out from the space between us, and Summer joined me in the middle of the road. The air smelled of diesel and gas turbine exhaust and the concrete was scored fresh white by the passage of the tank tracks.

“Wasted trip,” Summer said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Depends exactly when Marshall left. If it was after Swan’s phone call, that tells us something.”

We were shunted between three different offices, trying to find out exactly what time Marshall left XII Corps. We ended up in a second-story suite that housed General Vassell’s operation. Vassell himself wasn’t there. We spoke to yet another captain. He seemed to be in charge of an administrative company.

“Major Marshall took a civilian flight at 2300,” he said. “Frankfurt to Dulles. Seven-hour layover and on to LAX from National. I issued the vouchers myself.”

“When?”

“As he was leaving.”

“Which was when?”

“He left here three hours before his flight.”

“Eight o’clock?”

The captain nodded. “On the dot.”

“I was told he was scheduled for night maneuvers.”

“He was. That plan changed.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’m not sure seemed to be XII Corps’ standard-issue answer for everything.

“What’s the panic at Irwin?” I said.

“I’m not sure.”

I smiled, briefly. “When were Marshall’s orders issued?”

“At seven o’clock.”

“Written?”

“Verbal.”

“By?”

“General Vassell.”

“Did Vassell countersign the travel vouchers himself?”

The captain nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

“I need to speak to him,” I said.

“He went to London.”

“London?” I said.

“For a short-notice meeting with the British Ministry of Defense.”

“When did he leave?”

“He traveled to the airport with Major Marshall.”

“Where’s Colonel Coomer?”

“Berlin,” the guy said. “Souvenir hunting.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “He went to the airport with Vassell and Marshall.”

“No,” the captain said. “He took the train.”

“Terrific,” I said.

Summer and I went to the O Club for breakfast. We got the same corner table we had used the night before. We sat side by side, backs to the wall, watching the room.

“OK,” I said. “Swan’s office called for Marshall’s whereabouts at 1810 and fifty minutes later he had orders for Irwin. An hour after that he was off the post.”

“And Vassell lit out for London,” Summer said. “And Coomer jumped on a train for Berlin.”

“A night train,” I said. “Who goes on a night train just for the fun of it?”

“Everybody’s got something to hide,” she said.

“Except me and my monkey.”

“What?”

“The Beatles,” I said. “One of the sounds of the century.”

She just looked at me.

“What are they hiding?” she said.

“You tell me.”

She put her hands on the table, palms down. Took a breath.

“I can see part of it,” she said.

“Me too.”

“The agenda,” she said. “It was the other side of the coin from what Colonel Simon was talking about last night. Simon was salivating about the infantry taking Armored down a peg or two. Kramer must have seen all of that coming. Two-star generals aren’t stupid. So the Irwin conference on New Year’s Day was about fighting the opposite corner. It was about resistance, I guess. They don’t want to give up what they’ve got.”

“Hell of a thing to give up,” I said.

“Believe it,” she said. “Like battleship captains, way back.”

“So what was in the agenda?”

“Part defense, part offense,” she said. “That’s the obvious way to do it. Arguments against integrated units, ridicule of lightweight armored vehicles, advocacy for their own specialized expertise.”

“I agree,” I said. “But it’s not enough. The Pentagon is going to be neck-deep in position papers full of shit like that, starting any day now. For, against, if, but and however, we’re going to be bored to death with it. But there was something else in that agenda that made them totally desperate to get Kramer’s copy back. What was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me either,” I said.

“And why did they run last night?” Summer asked. “By now they must have destroyed Kramer’s copy and every other copy. So they could have lied through their teeth about what was in it, to put your mind at rest. They could even have given you a phony document. They could have said, Here you go, this was it, check it out.”

“They ran because of Mrs. Kramer,” I said.

She nodded. “I still think Vassell and Coomer killed her. Kramer croaks, the ball is in their court, in the circumstances they know it’s their responsibility to go out and round up all the loose paperwork. Mrs. Kramer goes down as collateral damage.”

“That would make perfect sense,” I said. “Except that neither one of them looked particularly tall and strong to me.”

“They’re both a lot taller and stronger than Mrs. Kramer was. Plus, you know, heat of the moment, pumped up with panic, we could be seeing ambiguous forensic results. And we don’t know how good the Green Valley people are anyway. Could be some family doctor doing a two-year term as coroner, and what the hell would he know?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I still don’t see how it could have happened. Take out the drive time from D.C., take out ten minutes to find that store and steal the crowbar, they had ten minutes to react. And they didn’t have a car, and they didn’t call for one.”

“They could have taken a taxi. Or a town car. Direct from the hotel lobby. And we’d never trace it. New Year’s Eve, it was the busiest night of the year.”

“It would have been a long ride,” I said. “Big fare. It might stand out in some driver’s memory.”

“New Year’s Eve,” she said again. “D.C. taxis and town cars are all over three states. All kinds of weird destinations. It’s a possibility.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You don’t take a taxi on a trip where you break into a hardware store and a house.”

“No reason for the driver to have seen anything. Vassell or Coomer or both could have walked into that alley in Sperryville on foot. Come back five minutes later with the crowbar under their coat. Same thing with Mrs. Kramer’s house. The cab could have stopped on the driveway. All the action was around the back.”

“Too big of a risk. A D.C. cabdriver reads the papers same as anyone else. Maybe more than anyone else, with all that traffic. He sees the story from Green Valley, he remembers his two passengers.”

“They didn’t see it as a risk. They weren’t anticipating a story. Because they thought Mrs. Kramer wasn’t going to be home. They thought she would be at the hospital. And they figured no way would a couple of trivial burglaries in Sperryville and Green Valley make it into the D.C. papers.”

I nodded. Thought back to something Detective Clark had said, days ago. I had people up and down the street, canvassing. There were some cars around.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we should check taxis.”

“Worst night of the year,” Summer said. “Like for alibis.”

“It would be a hell of a thing,” I said. “Wouldn’t it? Taking a cab to do a thing like that?”

“Nerves of steel.”

“If they’ve got nerves of steel, why did they run away last night?”

She was quiet for a moment.

“That really doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “Because they can’t run forever. They must know that. They must know that sooner or later they’re going to have to turn around and bite back.”

“I agree. And they should have done it right here. Right now. This is their turf. I don’t understand why they didn’t.”

“It will be a hell of a bite. Their whole professional lives are on the line. You should be very careful.”

“You too,” I said. “Not just me.”

“Offense is the best defense.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“So are we going after them?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Which one first?”

“Marshall,” I said. “He’s the one I want.”

“Why?”

“Rule of thumb,” I said. “Chase the one they sent farthest away, because they see him as the weakest link.”

“Now?” she said.

I shook my head.

“We’re going to Paris next,” I said. “I have to see my mom.”

nineteen

We repacked our bags and moved out of our VOQ rooms and paid a final courtesy visit to Swan in his office. He had some news for us.

“I’m supposed to arrest you both,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“You’re AWOL. Willard put a hit out on you.”

“What, worldwide?”

Swan shook his head. “This post only. They found your car at Andrews and Willard talked to Transportation Corps. So he knew you were headed here.”

“When did you get the telex?”

“An hour ago.”

“When did we leave here?”

“An hour before that.”

“Where did we go?”

“No idea. You didn’t say. I assumed you were returning to base.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Better not tell me where you’re really going.”

“Paris,” I said. “Personal time.”

“What’s going on?”

“I wish I knew.”

“You want me to call you a cab?”

“That would be great.”

Ten minutes later we were in another Mercedes-Benz, heading back the way we had come fifteen hours before.

We had a choice of Lufthansa or Air France from Frankfurt-am-Main to Paris. I chose Air France. I figured their coffee would be better, and I figured if Willard got around to checking civilian carriers he would hit on Lufthansa first. I figured he was that kind of a simpleton.

We swapped two more of the forged travel vouchers for two seats in coach on the ten o’clock flight. Waited in the gate lounge. We were in BDUs, but we didn’t really stand out. There were American military uniforms all over the airport. I saw some XII Corps MPs, prowling in pairs. But I wasn’t worried. I figured they were on routine cooperation with the civilian cops. They weren’t looking for us. I had the feeling that Willard’s telex was going to stay on Swan’s desk for an hour or two.

We boarded on time and stuffed our bags in the overhead. Buckled up and settled in. There were a dozen military on the plane with us. Paris always was a popular R&R destination for people stationed in Germany. The weather was still misty. But it wasn’t bad enough to delay us any. We took off on time and climbed over the gray city and struck out south and west across pastel fields and huge tracts of forest. Then we climbed through the cloud into the sun and we couldn’t see the ground anymore.

It was a short flight. We started our descent during my second cup of coffee. Summer was drinking juice. She looked nervous. Part excited, and part worried. I figured she had never been to Paris before. And I figured she had never been AWOL before either. I could see it was weighing on her. Truth is, it was weighing on me a little too. It was a complicating factor. I could have done without it. But I wasn’t surprised to be hit with it. It had always been the obvious next step for Willard to take. Now I figured we were going to be chased around the world by BOLO messages. Be on the lookout for. Or else we were going to have a generalized all-points bulletin dumped on us.

We landed at Roissy–Charles de Gaulle and were off the plane and in the jetway by eleven-thirty in the morning. The airport was crowded. The taxi line was a zoo, just like it had been when Joe and I arrived the last time. So we gave up on it and walked to the navette station. Waited in line and climbed into the little bus. It was packed and uncomfortable. But Paris was warmer than Frankfurt had been. There was a watery sun out and I knew the city was going to look spectacular.

“Been here before?” I said.

“Never,” Summer said.

“Don’t look at the first twenty klicks,” I said. “Wait until we’re inside the Périphérique.”

“What’s that?”

“Like a ring road. Like the Beltway. That’s where the good part starts.”

“Your mom live inside it?”

I nodded. “On one of the nicest avenues in town. Where all the embassies are. Near the Eiffel Tower.”

“Are we going straight there?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to be tourists first.”

“Why?”

“I have to wait until my brother gets in. I can’t go on my own. We have to go together.”

She said nothing to that. Just glanced at me. The bus started up and pulled away from the curb. She watched out the window the whole way. I could see by the reflection of her face in the glass that she agreed with me. Inside the Périphérique was better.

We got out at the Place de l’Opéra and stood on the sidewalk and let the rest of the passengers swarm ahead of us. I figured we should choose a hotel and dump our bags before we did anything else.

We walked south on the Rue de la Paix, through the Place Vendôme, down to the Tuileries. Then we turned right and walked straight up the Champs-Élysées. There might have been better places to walk with a pretty woman on a lazy day under a watery winter sun, but right then I couldn’t readily recall any. We made a left onto the Rue Marbeuf and came out on the Avenue George V just about opposite the George V Hotel.

“OK for you?” I said.

“Will they let us in?” Summer asked.

“Only one way to find out.”

We crossed the street and a guy in a top hat opened the door for us. The girl at the desk had a bunch of little flags on her lapel, one for each language she spoke. I used French, which pleased her. I gave her two vouchers and asked for two rooms. She didn’t hesitate. She went right ahead and gave us keys just like I had paid with gold bullion, or a credit card. The George V was one of those places. There was nothing they hadn’t seen before. Or if there was, they weren’t about to admit it to anyone.

The rooms the multilingual girl gave us both faced south and both had a partial view of the Eiffel Tower. One was decorated in shades of pale blue and had a sitting area and a bathroom the size of a tennis court. The other was three doors down the hall. It was done in parchment yellow and it had an iron Juliet balcony.

“Your choice,” I said.

“I’ll take the one with the balcony,” she said.

We dumped our bags and washed up and met in the lobby fifteen minutes later. I was ready for lunch, but Summer had other ideas.

“I want to buy clothes,” she said. “Tourists don’t wear BDUs.”

“This one does,” I said.

“So break out,” she said. “Live a little. Where should we go?”

I shrugged. You couldn’t walk twenty yards in Paris without falling over at least three clothing stores. But most of them wanted a month’s pay for a single garment.

“We could try Bon Marché,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Department store,” I said. “It means cheap, literally.”

“A department store called Cheap?”

“My kind of place,” I said.

“Anywhere else?”

“Samaritaine,” I said. “On the river, at the Pont Neuf. There’s a terrace at the top with a view.”

“Let’s go there.”

It was a long walk along the river, all the way to the tip of the Île de la Cité. It took us an hour, because we kept stopping to look at things. We passed the Louvre. We browsed the little green stalls set up on the river wall.

“What does Pont Neuf mean?” Summer asked me.

“New Bridge,” I said.

She looked ahead at the ancient stone structure.

“It’s the oldest bridge in Paris,” I said.

“So why do they call it new?”

“Because it was new once.”

We stepped into the warmth of the store. Like all such places the cosmetics came first and filled the air with scent. Summer led me up one floor to the women’s clothes. I sat in a comfortable chair and let her look around. She was gone for a good half hour. She came back wearing a complete new outfit. Black shoes, a black pencil skirt, a gray-and-white Breton sweater, a gray wool jacket. And a beret. She looked like a million dollars. Her BDUs and her boots were in a Samaritaine bag in her hand.

“You next,” she said. She took me up to the men’s department. The only pants they had with ninety-five-centimeter inseams were Algerian knockoffs of American blue jeans, so that set the tone. I bought a light blue sweatshirt and a black cotton bomber jacket. I kept my army boots on. They looked OK with the jeans and they matched the jacket.

“Buy a beret,” Summer said, so I bought a beret. It was black with a leather binding. I paid for the whole lot with American dollars at a pretty good rate of exchange. I dressed in the changing cubicle. Put my camouflage gear in the carrier bag. Checked the mirror and adjusted the beret to a rakish angle and stepped out.

Summer said nothing.

“Lunch now,” I said.

We went up to the ninth-floor café. It was too cold to sit out on the terrace, but we sat at a window and got pretty much the same view. We could see the Notre-Dame cathedral to the east and the Montparnasse Tower all the way to the south. The sun was still out. It was a great city.

“How did Willard find our car?” Summer said. “How would he even know where to look? The United States is a big country.”

“He didn’t find it,” I said. “Not until someone told him where it was.”

“Who?”

“Vassell,” I said. “Or Coomer. Swan’s sergeant used my name on the phone, back at XII Corps. So at the same time as they were getting Marshall off the post they were calling Willard back in Rock Creek, telling him I was over there in Germany and hassling them again. They were asking him why the hell he had let me travel. And they were telling him to recall me.”

“They can’t dictate where a special unit investigator goes.”

“They can now, because of Willard. They’re old buddies. I just figured it out. Swan as good as told us, but it didn’t click right away. Willard has ties to Armored from his time in Intelligence. Who did he talk to all those years? About that Soviet fuel crap? Armored, that’s who. There’s a relationship there. That’s why he was so hot about Kramer. He wasn’t worried about embarrassment for the army in general. He was worried about embarrassment for Armored Branch in particular.”

“Because they’re his people.”

“Correct. And that’s why Vassel and Coomer ran last night. They didn’t run, as such. They’re just giving Willard time and space to deal with us.”

“Willard knows he didn’t sign our travel vouchers.”

I nodded. “That’s for sure.”

“So we’re in serious trouble now. We’re AWOL and we’re traveling on stolen vouchers.”

“We’ll be OK.”

“How exactly?”

“When we get a result.”

“Are we going to?”

I didn’t answer.

After lunch we crossed the river and walked a long roundabout route back to the hotel. We looked just like tourists, in our casual clothes, carrying our Samaritaine bags. All we needed was a camera. We window-shopped in the Boulevard St.-Germain and looked at the Luxembourg Gardens. We saw Les Invalides and the École Militaire. Then we walked up the Avenue Bosquet, which took me within fifty yards of the back of my mother’s apartment house. I didn’t tell Summer that. She would have made me go in and see her. We crossed the Seine again at the Pont de l’Alma and got coffee in a bistro on the Avenue New-York. Then we strolled up the hill to the hotel.

“Siesta time,” Summer said. “Then dinner.”

I was happy enough to go for a nap. I was pretty tired. I lay down on the bed in the pale blue room and fell asleep within minutes.

Summer woke me up two hours later by calling me on the phone from her room. She wanted to know if I knew any restaurants. Paris is full of restaurants, but I was dressed like an idiot and I had less than thirty bucks in my pocket. So I picked a place I knew on the Rue Vernet. I figured I could go there in jeans and a sweatshirt without getting stared at and without paying a fortune. And it was close enough to walk. No cab fare.

We met in the lobby. Summer still looked great. Her skirt and jacket looked as good for the evening as they had for the afternoon. She had abandoned her beret. I had kept mine on. We walked up the hill toward the Champs-Élysées. Halfway there, Summer did a strange thing. She took my hand in hers. It was going dark and we were surrounded by strolling couples and I guessed it felt natural to her. It felt natural to me too. It took me a minute to realize she had done it. Or, it took me a minute to realize there was anything wrong with it. It took her the same minute. At the end of it she got flustered and looked up at me and let go again.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” I said. “It felt good.”

“It just happened,” she said.

We walked on and turned into the Rue Vernet. Found the restaurant. It was early in the evening in January and the owner found us a table right away. It was in a corner. There were flowers and a lit candle on it. We ordered water and a pichet of red wine to drink while we thought about the food.

“You’re at home here,” Summer said to me.

“Not really,” I said. “I’m not at home anywhere.”

“You speak pretty good French.”

“I speak pretty good English too. Doesn’t mean I feel at home in North Carolina, for instance.”

“But you like some places better than others.”

I nodded. “This one is OK.”

“Done any long-term thinking?”

“You sound like my brother. He wants me to make a plan.”

“Everything is going to change.”

“They’ll always need cops,” I said.

“Cops who go AWOL?”

“All we need is a result,” I said. “Mrs. Kramer, or Carbone. Or Brubaker, maybe. We’ve got three bites of the cherry. Three chances.”

She said nothing.

“Relax,” I said. “We’re out of the world for forty-eight hours. Let’s enjoy ourselves. Worrying isn’t going to get us anywhere. We’re in Paris.”

She nodded. I watched her face. Watched her try to get past it. Her eyes were expressive in the candlelight. It was like she had troubles in front of her, maybe piled high into stacks, like cartons. I saw her shoulder her way around them, to the quiet place in the back of the closet.

“Drink your wine,” I said. “Have fun.”

My hand was resting on the table. She reached out and squeezed it and picked up her glass.

“We’ll always have North Carolina,” she said.

We ordered three courses each off the fixed-price page of the menu. Then we took three hours to eat them. We kept the conversation away from work. We talked about personal things instead. She asked me about my family. I told her a little about Joe, and not much about my mother. She told me about her folks, and her brothers and sisters, and enough cousins that I lost track about who was who. Mostly I watched her face in the candlelight. Her skin had a copper tone mixed behind pure ebony black. Her eyes were like coal. Her jaw was delicate, like fine china. She looked impossibly small and gentle, for a soldier. But then I remembered her sharpshooter badges. More than I had.

“Am I going to meet your mom?” she said.

“If you want to,” I said. “But she’s very sick.”

“Not just a broken leg?”

I shook my head.

“She has cancer,” I said.

“Is it bad?”

“As bad as it gets.”

Summer nodded. “I figured it had to be something like that. You’ve been upset ever since you came over here the first time.”

“Have I?”

“It’s bound to bother you.”

I nodded in turn. “More than I thought it would.”

“Don’t you like her?”

“I like her fine. But, you know, nobody lives forever. Conceptually these things don’t come as a surprise.”

“I should probably stay away. It wouldn’t be appropriate if I came. You should go with Joe. Just the two of you.”

“She likes meeting new people.”

“She might not be feeling good.”

“We should wait and see. Maybe she’ll want to go out for lunch.”

“How does she look?”

“Terrible,” I said.

“Then she won’t want to meet new people.”

We sat in silence for a spell. Our waiter brought the check. We counted our cash and paid half each and left a decent tip. We held hands all the way back to the hotel. It felt like the obvious thing to do. We were alone together in a sea of troubles, some of them shared, some of them private. The guy with the top hat opened the door for us and wished us bonne nuit. Good night. We rode up in the elevator, side by side, not touching. When we got out on our floor Summer had to go left and I had to go right. It was an awkward moment. We didn’t speak. I could see she wanted to come with me and I sure as hell wanted to go with her. I could see her room in my mind. The yellow walls, the smell of perfume. The bed. I imagined lifting her new sweater over her head. Unzipping her new skirt and hearing it fall to the floor. I figured it would have a silk lining. I figured it would make a rustling sound.

I knew it wouldn’t be right. But we were already AWOL. We were already in all kinds of deep shit. It would be comfort and consolation, apart from whatever else it would be.

“What time in the morning?” she said.

“Early for me,” I said. “I have to be at the airport at six.”

“I’ll come with you. Keep you company.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” she said.

We stood there.

“We’ll have to get up about four,” she said.

“I guess,” I said. “About four.”

We stood there.

“Good night then, I guess,” she said.

“Sleep well,” I said.

I turned right. Didn’t look back. I heard her door open and close a second after mine.

It was eleven o’clock. I went to bed but I didn’t sleep. I just lay there and stared at the ceiling for an hour. There was city light coming in the window. It was cold and yellow and hazy. I could see the pulses from the Eiffel Tower’s party lights. They flashed gold, on and off, somewhere between fast and slow and relentless. They changed the pattern on the plaster above my head, once a second. I heard the sound of brakes on a distant street, and the yap of a small dog, and lonely footsteps far below my window, and the beep of a faraway horn. Then the city went quiet and silence crowded in on me. It howled all around me, like a siren. I raised my wrist. Checked my watch. It was midnight. I dropped my wrist back down on the bed and was hit by a wave of loneliness so bad it left me breathless.

I put the light on and rolled over to the phone. There were instructions printed on a little plate below the dial buttons. To call another guest’s room, press three and enter the room number. I pressed three and entered the room number. She answered, first ring.

“You awake?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Want company?”

“Yes,” she said.

I pulled my jeans and sweatshirt on and walked barefoot down the corridor. Knocked at her door. She opened it and reached out her hand and pulled me inside. She was still fully dressed. Still in her skirt and sweater. She kissed me hard at the door and I kissed her back, harder. The door swung shut behind us. I heard the hiss of its closer and the click of its latch. We headed for the bed.

She wore dark red underwear. It was made of silk, or satin. I could smell her perfume everywhere. It was in the room and on her body. She was tiny and delicate and quick and strong. The same city light was coming in the window. Now it bathed me in warmth. Gave me energy. I could see the Eiffel Tower’s lights on her ceiling. We matched our rhythm to their rhythm, slow, fast, relentless. Afterward we turned away from them and lay like spoons, burned out and breathing hard, close but not speaking, like we weren’t sure exactly what we had done.

I slept an hour and woke up in the same position. I had a strong sensation of something lost and something gained, but I couldn’t explain either feeling. Summer stayed asleep. She was nestled solidly into the curve of my body. She smelled good. She felt warm. She felt lithe and strong and peaceful. She was breathing slow. My left arm was under her shoulders and my right arm was draped across her waist. Her hand was cupped in mine, half-open, half-curled.

I turned my head and watched the play of light on the ceiling. I heard the faint noise of a motorbike maybe a mile away, on the other side of the Arc de Triomphe. I heard a dog bark in the distance. Other than that the city was silent. Two million people were asleep. Joe was in the air, somewhere on the Great Circle route, maybe closing in on Iceland. I couldn’t picture my mother. I closed my eyes. Tried to sleep again.

The alarm clock in my head went off at four. Summer was still asleep. I eased my arm out from under her and worked some kind of circulation back into my shoulder and slid out of bed and padded across the carpet to the bathroom. Then I put my pants on and shrugged into my sweatshirt and woke Summer with a kiss.

“Rise and shine, Lieutenant,” I said.

She stretched her arms up high and arched her back. The sheet fell away to her waist.

“Good morning,” she said.

I kissed her again.

“I like Paris,” she said. “I had fun here.”

“Me too.”

“Lots of fun.”

“Lobby in half an hour,” I said.

I went back to my own room and called room service for coffee. I was through shaving and showering before it arrived. I took the tray at the door wearing just a towel. Then I dressed in fresh BDUs and poured my first cup and checked my watch. It was four-twenty in the morning in Paris, which made it ten-twenty in the evening on the East Coast, which made it well after the end of bankers’ hours. And which made it seven-twenty in the evening on the West Coast, which was early enough that a hardworking guy might still be at his desk. I checked the plate on the phone again and hit nine for a line. Dialed the only number I had ever permanently memorized, which was the Rock Creek switchboard back in Virginia. An operator answered on the first ring.

“This is Reacher,” I said. “I need a number for Fort Irwin’s MP XO.”

“Sir, there’s a standing order from Colonel Willard that you should return to base immediately.”

“I’ll be right there, soon as I can. But I need that number first.”

“Sir, where are you now?”

“In a whorehouse in Sydney, Australia,” I said. “Give me that Irwin number.”

He gave me the number. I repeated it to myself and hit nine again and dialed it. Calvin Franz’s sergeant answered, second ring.

“I need Franz,” I said.

There was a click and then silence and I was settling in for a long wait when Franz came through.

“I need you to do something for me,” I said.

“Like what?”

“You’ve got a XII Corps guy called Marshall there. You know him?”

“No.”

“I need him to stay there until I can get there myself. It’s very important.”

“I can’t stop people leaving the post unless I arrest them.”

“Just tell him I called from Berlin. That should do it. As long as he thinks I’m in Germany, he’ll stay in California.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he’s been told to do.”

“Does he know you?”

“Not personally.”

“Then that’s an awkward conversation for me to have. Like, I can’t just walk up to a guy I never met and say, Hey, hot news, another guy you never met called Reacher wants you to know he’s stuck in Berlin.”

“So be subtle,” I said. “Tell him I asked you to ask him a question for me, because there’s no way I can get there myself.”

“What question?”

“Ask him about the day of Kramer’s funeral. Was he at Arlington? What did he do the rest of the day? Why didn’t he drive his guys to North Carolina? What reason did they give him for wanting to drive themselves?”

“That’s four questions.”

“Whatever, just make it sound like you’re asking on my behalf because California isn’t in my travel plans.”

“Where can I get back to you?”

I looked down at the phone and read out the George V’s number.

“That’s France,” he said. “Not Germany.”

“Marshall doesn’t need to know that,” I said. “I’ll be back here later.”

“When are you coming to California?”

“Within forty-eight hours, I hope.”

“OK,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” I said. “Call Fort Bird for me and ask my sergeant to get histories on General Vassell and Colonel Coomer. Specifically I want to know if either one of them has a connection with a town called Sperryville in Virginia. Born there, grew up there, family there, any kind of connection that would indicate they might know what kind of retail outlet was where. Tell her to sit on the answers until I get in touch.”

“OK,” he said again. “Is that it?”

“No,” I said. “Also tell her to call Detective Clark in Green Valley and have him fax his street canvasses relating to the night of New Year’s Eve. She’ll know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m glad someone will,” Franz said.

He paused. He was writing stuff down.

“So is that it?” he said.

“For now,” I said.

I hung up and made it down to the lobby about five minutes after Summer. She was waiting there. She had been much faster than me. But then, she didn’t have to shave and I don’t think she had made any calls or taken time for coffee. Like me, she was back in BDUs. Somehow she had cleaned her boots, or had gotten them cleaned. They were gleaming.

We didn’t have money for a cab to the airport. So we walked back through the predawn darkness to the Place de l’Opéra and caught the bus. It was less crowded than the last time but just as uncomfortable. We got brief glimpses of the sleeping city and then we crossed the Périphérique and ground slowly through the dismal outer suburbs.

We got to Roissy–Charles de Gaulle just before six. It was busy there. I guessed airports worked on floating time zones all their own. It was busier at six in the morning than it would be in the middle of the afternoon. There were crowds of people everywhere. Cars and buses were loading and unloading, red-eyed travelers were coming out and going in and struggling with bags. It looked like the whole world was on the move.

The arrivals screen showed that Joe’s flight was already on the ground. We hiked around to the customs area’s exit doors. Took our places among a big crowd of meeters and greeters. I figured Joe would be one of the first passengers through. He would have walked fast from the plane and he wouldn’t have checked any luggage. No delays.

We saw a few stragglers coming out from the previous flight. They were mostly families slowed by young children or individuals who had waited for odd-sized luggage. People in the crowd turned toward them expectantly and then turned away again when they realized they weren’t who they were looking for. I watched them do it for a spell. It was an interesting physical dynamic. Just subtle adjustments of posture were enough to display interest, and then lack of interest. Welcome, and then dismissal. A half-turn inward, and then a half-turn away. Sometimes it was nothing more than a transfer of body weight from one foot to the other.

The last stragglers were mixed in with the first people off of Joe’s flight. There were businessmen moving fast, humping briefcases and suit carriers. There were young women in high heels and dark glasses, expensively dressed. Models? Actresses? Call girls? There were government people, French and American. I could pick them out by the way they looked. Smart and serious, plenty of eyeglasses, but their shoes and suits and coats weren’t the best quality. Low-level diplomats, probably. The flight was from D.C., after all.

Joe came out about twelfth in line. He was in the same overcoat I had seen before, but a different suit and a different tie. He looked good. He was walking fast and carrying a black leather overnight bag. He was a head taller than anyone else. He came out of the door and stopped dead and scanned around.

“He looks just like you,” Summer said.

“But I’m a nicer person,” I said.

He saw me right away, because I was also a head taller than anyone else. I pointed to a spot outside of the main traffic stream. He shuffled through the crowd and made his way toward it. We looped around and joined him there.

“Lieutenant Summer,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

I hadn’t seen him look at the tapes on her jacket, where it said Summer, U.S. Army. Or at the lieutenant’s bars on her collar. He must have remembered her name and her rank from when we had talked before.

“You OK?” I asked him.

“I’m tired,” he said.

“Want breakfast?”

“Let’s get it in town.”

The taxi line was a mile long and moving slow. We ignored it. Headed straight for the navette again. We missed one and were first in line for the next. It came inside ten minutes. Joe spent the waiting time asking Summer about her visit to Paris. She gave him chapter and verse, but not about the events after midnight. I stood on the curb with my back to the roadway, watching the eastern sky above the terminal roof. Dawn was breaking fast. It was going to be another sunny day. It was the tenth of January, and the weather was the best I had seen in the new decade so far.

We got in the bus and sat in three seats together that faced sideways opposite the luggage rack. Summer sat in the middle seat. Joe sat forward of her and I sat to the rear. They were small, uncomfortable seats. Hard plastic. No legroom. Joe’s knees were up around his ears and his head was swaying from side to side with the motion. He looked pale. I guessed putting him on a bus was not much of a welcome, after an overnight flight across the Atlantic. I felt a little bad about it. But then, I was the same size. I had the same accommodation problem. And I hadn’t gotten a whole lot of sleep either. And I was broke. And I guessed being on the move was better for him than standing in the taxi line for an hour.

He brightened up some after we crossed the Périphérique and entered Haussmann’s urban splendor. The sun was well up by then and the city was bathed in gold and honey. The cafés were already busy and the sidewalks were already crowded with people moving at a measured pace and carrying baguettes and newspapers. Legislation limited Parisians to a thirty-five-hour workweek, and they spent a lot of the remaining hundred thirty-three taking great pleasure in not doing very much of anything. It was relaxing just to watch them.

We got out at the familiar spot in the Place de l’Opéra. Walked south the same way we had walked the week before, crossing the river at the Pont de la Concorde, turning west on the Quai d’Orsay, turning south into the Avenue Rapp. We got as far as the Rue de l’Université, where the Eiffel Tower was visible, and then Summer stopped.

“I’ll go look at the tower,” she said. “You guys go on ahead and see your mom.”

Joe looked at me. Does she know? I nodded. She knows.

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said. “We’ll go see how she is. If she’s up for it, maybe you could join us at lunch.”

“Call me at the hotel,” she said.

“You know where it is?” I said.

She turned and pointed north along the avenue. “Across the bridge right there and up the hill, on the left side. Straight line.”

I smiled. She had a decent sense of geography. Joe looked a little puzzled. He had seen the direction she had pointed, and he knew what was up there.

“The George V?” he said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Is that on the army’s dime?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Outstanding.”

Summer stretched up tall and kissed me on the cheek and shook Joe’s hand. We stayed there with the weak sun on our shoulders and watched her walk away toward the base of the tower. There was already a thin stream of tourists heading the same way. We could see the souvenir sellers unpacking. We stood and watched them in the distance. Watched Summer get smaller and smaller as she got farther away.

“She’s very nice,” Joe said. “Where did you find her?”

“She was at Fort Bird.”

“You figured out what’s going on there yet?”

“I’m a little closer.”

“I would hope you are. You’ve been there nearly two weeks.”

“Remember that guy I asked you about? Willard? He would have spent time with Armored, right?”

Joe nodded. “I’m sure he reported to them direct. Fed his stuff straight into their intelligence operation.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“In Armored Branch? Not really. I never paid much attention to Willard. His thing wasn’t very mainstream. It was a side issue.”

“Ever heard of a guy called Marshall?”

“Don’t remember him,” Joe said.

I said nothing. Joe turned and looked south down the avenue. Wrapped his coat tighter around him and turned his face up to the sun.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“When did you call her last?”

“The day before yesterday. It was your turn next.”

We moved off and walked down the avenue, side by side, matching our pace to the leisurely stroll of the people around us.

“Want breakfast first?” I said. “We don’t want to wake her.”

“The nurse will let us in.”

There was a car abandoned halfway up on the sidewalk. It had been in some kind of an accident. It had a smashed fender and a flat tire. We stepped out into the street to pass it by. Saw a large black vehicle double-parked on the road forty yards ahead.

We stared at it.

“Un corbillard,” Joe said.

A hearse.

We stared at it. Tried to figure which building it was waiting at. Tried to gauge the distance. The head-on perspective made it difficult. I glanced upward at the rooflines. First came a limestone Belle Époque facade, seven stories high. Then a drop to my mother’s plainer six-story building. I traced my gaze vertically all the way down the frontage. To the street. To the hearse. It was parked right in front of my mother’s door.

We ran.

There was a man in a black silk hat standing on the sidewalk. The street door to my mother’s building was open. We glanced at the man in the hat and went in through the door to the courtyard. The concierge was standing in her doorway. She had a handkerchief in her hand and tears in her eyes. She paid us no attention. We headed for the elevator. Rode up to five. The elevator was agonizingly slow.

The door to the apartment was standing open. I could see men in black coats inside. Three of them. We went in. The men in the coats stood back. They said nothing. The girl with the luminous eyes came out of the kitchen. She looked pale. She stopped when she saw us. Then she turned and walked slowly across the room to meet us.

“What?” Joe said.

She didn’t answer.

“When?” I said.

“Last night,” she said. “It was very peaceful.”

The men in the coats realized who we must be and shuffled out into the hallway. They were very quiet. They made no noise at all. Joe took an unsteady step and sat down on the sofa. I stayed where I was. I stood still in the middle of the floor.

“When?” I said again.

“At midnight,” the girl said. “In her sleep.”

I closed my eyes. Opened them again a minute later. The girl was still there. Her eyes were on mine.

“Were you with her?” I said.

She nodded.

“All the time,” she said.

“Was there a doctor here?”

“She sent him away.”

“What happened?”

“She said she felt well. She went to bed at eleven. She slept an hour, and then she just stopped breathing.”

I looked up at the ceiling. “Was she in pain?”

“Not at the end.”

“But she said she felt well.”

“Her time had come. I’ve seen it before.”

I looked at her, and then I looked away.

“Would you like to see her?” the girl said.

“Joe?” I said. He shook his head. Stayed on the sofa. I stepped toward the bedroom. There was a mahogany coffin set up on velvet-padded trestles next to the bed. It was lined with white silk and it was empty. My mother’s body was still in the bed. The sheets were made up around her. Her head was resting gently on the pillow and her arms were crossed over her chest outside the covers. Her eyes were closed. She was barely recognizable.

Summer had asked me: Does it upset you to see dead people?

No, I had said.

Why not? she had asked me.

I don’t know, I had said.

I had never seen my father’s body. I was away somewhere when he died. It had been a heart thing. Some VA hospital had done its best, but it was hopeless from the start. I had flown in on the morning of the funeral and had left again the same night.

Funeral, I thought.

Joe will handle it.

I stayed by my mother’s bed for five long minutes, eyes open, eyes dry. Then I turned and stepped back into the living room. It was crowded again. The croques-morts were back. The pallbearers. And there was an old man on the sofa, next to Joe. He was sitting stiffly. There were two walking sticks propped next to him. He had thin gray hair and a heavy dark suit with a tiny ribbon in the buttonhole. Red, white, and blue, maybe a Croix de Guerre ribbon, or the Medaille de la Résistance. He had a small cardboard box balanced on his bony knees. It was tied with a piece of faded red string.

“This is Monsieur Lamonnier,” Joe said. “Family friend.”

The old guy grabbed his sticks and started to struggle up to shake my hand but I waved him back down and stepped over close. He was maybe seventy-five or eighty. He was lean and dried-out and relatively tall for a Frenchman.

“You’re the one she called Reacher,” he said.

I nodded.

“That’s me,” I said. “I don’t remember you.”

“We never met. But I knew your mother a long time.”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

“You too,” he said.

Touché, I thought.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

“Things she refused to keep here,” the old guy said. “But things I felt should be found here, at a time like this, by her sons.”

He handed me the box, like it was a sacred burden. I took it and put it under my arm. It felt about halfway between light and heavy. I guessed there was a book in there. Maybe an old leather-bound diary. Some other stuff too.

“Joe,” I said. “Let’s go get breakfast.”

We walked fast and aimlessly. We turned into the Rue St.-Dominique and passed by two cafés at the top of the Rue de l’Exposition without stopping. We crossed the Avenue Bosquet against the light and then we made an arbitrary left into the Rue Jean Nicot. Joe stopped at a tabac and bought cigarettes. I would have smiled if I had been able to. The street was named after the guy who discovered nicotine.

We lit up together on the sidewalk and then ducked into the first café we saw. We were all done walking. We were ready for the talking.

“You shouldn’t have waited for me,” Joe said. “You could have seen her one last time.”

“I felt it happen,” I said. “Midnight last night, something hit me.”

“You could have been with her.”

“Too late now.”

“It would have been OK with me.”

“It wouldn’t have been OK with her.”

“We should have stayed a week ago.”

“She didn’t want us to stay, Joe. That wasn’t in her plan. She was her own person, entitled to her privacy. She was a mother, but that wasn’t all she was.”

He went quiet. The waiter brought us coffee and a small straw basket full of croissants. He seemed to sense the mood. He put them down gently and backed away.

“Will you see to the funeral?” I said.

Joe nodded. “I’ll make it four days from now. Can you stay?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ll get back.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll stay a week or so. I guess I’ll need to find her will. We’ll probably have to sell her place. Unless you want it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want it. You?”

“I don’t see how I could use it.”

“It wouldn’t have been right for me to go on my own,” I said.

Joe said nothing.

“We saw her last week,” I said. “We were all together. It was a good time.”

“You think?”

“We had fun. That’s the way she wanted it. That’s why she made the effort. That’s why she asked to go to Polidor. It wasn’t like she ate anything.”

He just shrugged. We drank our coffee in silence. I tried a croissant. It was OK, but I had no appetite. I put it back in the basket.

“Life,” Joe said. “What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it’s over. Like it never happened at all.”

“We’ll always remember her.”

“No, we’ll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn’t exist. As of now.”

We smoked another cigarette each and sat quiet. Then we walked back, slowly, side by side, a little burned out, at some kind of peace.

The coffin was in the corbillard when we got back to her building. They must have stood it upright in the elevator. The concierge was out on the sidewalk, standing next to the old man with the medal ribbon. He was leaning on his walking sticks. The nurse was there too, standing on her own. The pallbearers had their hands clasped in front of them. They were looking down at the ground.

“They’re taking her to the dépôt mortuaire,” the nurse said.

The funeral parlor.

“OK,” Joe said.

I didn’t stay. I said good-bye to the nurse and the concierge and shook hands with the old guy. Then I nodded to Joe and set off walking up the avenue. I didn’t look back. I crossed the Seine at the Pont de l’Alma and walked up the Avenue George V to the hotel. I went up in the elevator and back to my room. I still had the old guy’s box under my arm. I dropped it on the bed and stood still, completely unsure about what to do next.

I was still standing there twenty minutes later when the phone rang. It was Calvin Franz, calling from Fort Irwin in California. He had to say his name twice. The first time, I couldn’t recall who he was.

“I spoke to Marshall,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your XII Corps guy.”

I said nothing.

“You OK?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m fine. You spoke to Marshall.”

“He went to Kramer’s funeral. He drove Vassell and Coomer there and back. Then he claims he didn’t drive them the rest of the day because he had important Pentagon meetings all afternoon.”

“But?”

“I didn’t believe him. He’s a gofer. If Vassell and Coomer had wanted him to drive, he’d have been driving, meetings or no meetings.”

“And?”

“And knowing what kind of a hard time you would give me if I didn’t check, I checked.”

“And?”

“Those meetings must have been with himself in the toilet stall, because nobody else saw him around.”

“So what was he doing instead?”

“No idea. But he was doing something, that’s for sure. The way he answered me was just way too smooth. I mean, this all was six days ago. Who the hell remembers what meetings they had six days ago? But this guy claims to.”

“You tell him I was in Germany?”

“He seemed to know already.”

“You tell him I was staying there?”

“He seemed to take it for granted you weren’t heading for California anytime soon.”

“These guys are old buddies with Willard,” I said. “He’s promised them he’ll keep me away from them. He’s running the 110th like it’s Armored’s private army.”

“I checked those histories myself, by the way. For Vassell and Coomer, because you got me curious. There’s nothing there to suggest either one of them ever heard of any place called Sperryville, Virginia.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely. Vassell is from Mississippi and Coomer is from Illinois. Neither of them has ever lived or served anywhere near Sperryville.”

I was quiet for a second.

“Are they married?” I said.

“Married?” Franz said. “Yes, there were wives and kids in there. But they were local girls. No in-laws in Sperryville.”

“OK,” I said.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m coming to California.”

I put the phone down and walked along the corridor to Summer’s door. I knocked and waited. She opened up. She was back from sightseeing.

“She died last night,” I said.

“I know,” Summer said. “Your brother just called me from the apartment. He wanted me to make sure you were OK.”

“I’m OK,” I said.

“I’m very sorry.”

I shrugged. “Conceptually these things don’t come as a surprise.”

“When was it?”

“Midnight. She just gave up.”

“I feel bad. You should have gone to see her yesterday. You shouldn’t have spent the day with me. We shouldn’t have done all that ridiculous shopping.”

“I saw her last week. We had fun. Better that last week was the last time.”

“I would have wanted whatever extra time I could have gotten.”

“It was always going to be an arbitrary date,” I said. “I could have gone yesterday, in the afternoon, maybe. Now I’d be wishing I had stayed for the evening. If I had stayed for the evening, I’d be wishing I had stayed until midnight.”

“You were in here with me at midnight. I feel bad about that too.”

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t feel bad about it. My mother wouldn’t either. She was French, after all. If she’d known those were my options, she’d have insisted.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Well, I guess she wasn’t very broad-minded. But she always wanted whatever made us happy.”

“Did she give up because she was left alone?”

I shook my head. “She wanted to be left alone so she could give up.”

Summer said nothing.

“We’re leaving,” I said. “We’ll get a night flight back.”

“California?”

“East Coast first,” I said. “There are things I need to check.”

“What things?” she said.

I didn’t tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I couldn’t have handled laughter.

Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur Lamonnier’s box.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Something some old guy brought around. He said it’s something that should be found with my mother’s stuff.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So open it.”

I shoved it across the counterpane. “You open it.”

I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot. Her clear nail polish flashed in the light. She got the string off and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of thick sturdy cardboard you don’t see much anymore. Inside were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing in any épicerie in France. Except this one had been restrung. The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long time.

“What is it?” Summer said.

“Looks like a garrote,” I said.

“The book is in French,” she said. “I can’t read it.”

She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a nonfiction memoir. The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north squeezed down through Paris and then fanned out again to points south. You couldn’t travel anywhere without transiting the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same way. The capital city was always the center of the spiderweb.

I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamonnier. I recognized him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff way he had sat on my mother’s sofa. And his walking sticks. He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le Chemin de Fer Humain. The Human Railroad. He had been awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle, and the George Cross by the British, and the Distinguished Service Medal by the Americans.

“What is it?” Summer said.

“Seems like I just met an old Resistance hero,” I said.

“What’s it got to do with your mom?”

“Maybe she and this Lamonnier guy were sweethearts way back.”

“And he wants to tell you and Joe about it? About what a great guy he was? At a time like this? That’s a little self-centered, isn’t it?”

I read on a little more. Like most French books it used a weird construction called the past historic tense, which was reserved for written stuff only. It made it hard for a nonnative to read. And the first part of the story was not very gripping. It made the point very laboriously that trains incoming from the north disgorged their passengers at the Gare du Nord terminal, and if those passengers wanted to carry on south they had to cross Paris on foot or by car or subway or taxi to another terminal like the Gare d’Austerlitz or the Gare du Lyon before joining a southbound train.

“It’s about something called the Human Railroad,” I said. “Except there aren’t many humans in it so far.”

I passed the book to Summer and she flipped through it again.

“It’s signed,” she said.

She showed me the first blank page. There was an old faded inscription on it. Blue ink, neat penmanship. Someone had written: À Béatrice de Pierre. To Beatrice from Pierre.

“Was your mother called Beatrice?” Summer asked.

“No,” I said. “Her name was Josephine. Josephine Moutier, and then Josephine Reacher.”

She passed the book back to me.

“I think I’ve heard of the Human Railroad,” she said. “It was a World War Two thing. It was about rescuing bomber crews that were shot down over Belgium and Holland. Local Resistance cells scooped them up and passed them along a chain all the way down to the Spanish border. Then they could get back home and get back in action. It was important because trained crews were valuable. Plus it saved people from years in a POW camp.”

“That would explain Lamonnier’s medals,” I said. “One from each Allied government.”

I put the book down on the bed and thought about packing. I figured I would throw the Samaritaine jeans and sweatshirt and jacket away. I didn’t need them. Didn’t want them. Then I looked at the book again and saw that some of the pages had different edges than some of the others. I picked it up and opened it and found some halftone photographs. Most of them were posed studio portraits, reproduced head-and-shoulders six to a page. The others were clandestine action shots. They showed Allied airmen hiding in cellars lit by candles placed on barrels, and small groups of furtive men dressed in borrowed peasant clothing on country tracks, and Pyrenean guides amid snowy mountainous terrain. One of the action shots showed two men with a young girl between them. The girl was not much more than a child. She was holding both men’s hands, smiling gaily, leading them down a street in a city. Paris, almost certainly. The caption underneath the picture said: Béatrice de service à ses travaux. Beatrice on duty, doing her work. Beatrice looked to be about thirteen years old.

I was pretty sure Beatrice was my mother.

I flipped back to the pages of studio portraits and found her. It was some kind of a school photograph. She looked to be about sixteen in it. The caption was Béatrice en 1947. Beatrice in 1947. I flipped back and forth through the text and pieced together Lamonnier’s narrative thesis. There were two main tactical problems with the Human Railroad. Finding the downed airmen was not one of them. They fell out of the sky, literally, all over the Low Countries, dozens of them every moonless night. If the Resistance got to them first, they stood a chance. If the Wehrmacht got to them first, they didn’t. It was a matter of pure luck. If they got lucky and the Resistance got to them ahead of the Germans, they would be hidden, their uniforms would be exchanged for some kind of plausible disguises, forged papers would be issued, rail tickets would be bought, a courier would escort them on a train to Paris, and they would be on their way home.

Maybe.

The first tactical problem was the possibility of a spot check on the train itself, sometime during the initial journey. These were blond corn-fed farm boys from America, or redheaded British boys from Scotland, or anything else that didn’t look dark and pinched and wartime French. They stood out. They didn’t speak the language. Lots of subterfuges were developed. They would pretend to be asleep, or sick, or mute, or deaf. The couriers would do all the talking.

The second tactical problem was transiting Paris itself. Paris was crawling with Germans. There were random checkpoints everywhere. Clumsy lost foreigners stuck out like sore thumbs. Private automobiles had disappeared completely. Taxis were hard to find. There was no gasoline. Men walking in the company of other men became targets. So women were used as couriers. And then one of the dodges Lamonnier dreamed up was to use a kid he knew. She would meet airmen at the Gare du Nord and lead them through the streets to the Gare du Lyon. She would laugh and skip and hold their hands and pass them off as older brothers or visiting uncles. Her manner was unexpected and disarming. She got people through checkpoints like ghosts. She was thirteen years old.

Everyone in the chain had code names. Hers was Béatrice. Lamonnier’s was Pierre.

I took the blue cardboard jewel case out of the box. Opened it up. Inside was a medal. It was La Medaille de la Résistance. The Resistance Medal. It had a fancy red, white, and blue ribbon and the medal itself was gold. I turned it over. On the back it was neatly engraved: Josephine Moutier. My mother.

“She never told you?” Summer said.

I shook my head. “Not a word. Not one, ever.”

Then I looked back in the box. What the hell was the garrote about?

“Call Joe,” I said. “Tell him we’re coming over. Tell him to get Lamonnier back there.”

We were at the apartment fifteen minutes later. Lamonnier was already there. Maybe he had never left. I gave the box to Joe and told him to check it out. He was faster than I had been, because he started with the medal. The name on the back gave him a clue. He glanced through the book and looked up at Lamonnier when he recognized him in the author photograph. Then he scanned through the text. Looked at the pictures. Looked at me.

“She ever mention any of this to you?” he said.

“Never. You?”

“Never,” he said.

I looked at Lamonnier. “What was the garrote for?”

Lamonnier said nothing.

“Tell us,” I said.

“She was found out,” he said. “By a boy at her school. A boy of her own age. An unpleasant boy, the son of collaborators. He teased and tormented her about what he was going to do.”

“What did he do?”

“At first, nothing. That was extremely unsettling for your mother. Then he demanded certain indignities as the price of his continued silence. Naturally, your mother refused. He told her he would inform on her. So she pretended to relent. She arranged to meet him under the Pont des Invalides late one night. She had to slip out of her house. But first she took her mother’s cheese cutter from the kitchen. She replaced the wire with a string from her father’s piano. It was the G below middle C, I think. It was still missing, years later. She met the boy and she strangled him.”

“She what?” Joe said.

“She strangled him.”

“She was thirteen years old.”

Lamonnier nodded. “At that age the physical differences between girls and boys are not a significant handicap.”

“She was thirteen years old and she killed a guy?”

“They were desperate times.”

“What exactly happened?” I said.

“She used the garrote. As she had planned. It’s not a difficult instrument to use. Nerve and determination were all she needed. Then she used the original cheese wire to attach a weight to his belt. She slipped him into the Seine. He was gone and she was safe. The Human Railroad was safe.”

Joe stared at him. “You let her do that?”

Lamonnier shrugged. An expressive, Gallic shrug, just like my mother’s.

“I didn’t know about it,” he said. “She didn’t tell me until afterward. I suppose at first my instinct would have been to forbid it. But I couldn’t have taken care of it myself. I had no legs. I couldn’t have climbed down under the bridge and I wouldn’t have been steady enough for fighting. I had a man loosely employed as an assassin, but he was busy elsewhere. In Belgium, I think. I couldn’t have afforded the risk of waiting for him to get back. So on balance I think I would have told her to go ahead. They were desperate times, and we were doing vital work.”

“Did this really happen?” Joe said.

“I know it did,” Lamonnier said. “Fish ate through the boy’s belt. He floated up some days later, a short distance downstream. We passed a nervous week. But nothing came of it.”

“How long did she work for you?” I asked.

“All through 1943,” he said. “She was extremely good. But her face became well known. At first her face was her guardian. It was so young and so innocent. How could anyone suspect a face like that? Then it became a liability. She became familiar to les boches. And how many brothers and cousins and uncles could one girl have? So I had to stand her down.”

“Did you recruit her?”

“She volunteered. She pestered me until I let her help.”

“How many people did she save?”

“Eighty men,” Lamonnier said. “She was my best Paris courier. She was a phenomenon. The consequences of discovery didn’t bear thinking about. She lived with the worst kind of fear in her gut for a whole year, but never once did she let me down.”

We all sat quiet.

“How did you start?” I asked.

“I was a war cripple,” he said. “One of many. We were too medically burdensome for them to want us as hostage prisoners. We were useless as forced laborers. So they left us in Paris. But I wanted to do something. I wasn’t physically capable of fighting. But I could organize. Those are not physical skills. I knew that trained bomber crews were worth their weight in gold. So I decided to get them home.”

“Why would my mother go her whole life without mentioning this stuff?”

Lamonnier shrugged again. Weary, unsure, still mystified all those years later.

“Many reasons, I think,” he said. “France was a conflicted country in 1945. Many had resisted, many had collaborated, many had done neither. Most preferred a clean slate. And she was ashamed of killing the boy, I think. It weighed on her conscience. I told her it hadn’t been a choice. It wasn’t a voluntary action. I told her it had been the right thing to do. But she preferred to forget the whole thing. I had to beg her to accept her medal.”

Joe and I and Summer said nothing. We all sat quiet.

“I wanted her sons to know,” Lamonnier said.

Summer and I walked back to the hotel. We didn’t talk. I felt like a guy who suddenly finds out he was adopted. You’re not the man I thought you were. All my life I had assumed I was what I was because of my father, the career Marine. Now I felt different genes stirring. My father hadn’t killed the enemy at the age of thirteen. But my mother had. She had lived through desperate times and she had stepped up and done what was necessary. At that moment I started to miss her more than I would have thought possible. At that moment I knew I would miss her forever. I felt empty. I had lost something I never knew I had.

We carried our bags down to the lobby and checked out at the desk. We gave back our keys and the multilingual girl prepared a long and detailed account. I had to countersign it. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw it. It was outrageously expensive. I had figured the army might overlook the forged vouchers in exchange for a result. But now I wasn’t so sure. I figured the George V tariff might change their view. It was like adding insult to injury. We had been there one night, but we were being charged for two because we were late checking out. My room service coffee cost as much as a meal in a bistro. My phone call to Rock Creek cost as much as a three-course lunch at the best restaurant in town. My phone call to Franz in California cost as much as a five-course dinner. Summer’s call to Joe less than a mile away in my mother’s apartment asking him to get hold of Lamonnier was billed at less than two minutes and cost as much as the room service coffee. And we had been charged fees for taking incoming calls. One was from Franz to me and the other was from Joe to Summer, when he asked her to check if I was OK. That little piece of sibling consideration was going to cost the government five bucks. Altogether it was the worst hotel bill I had ever seen.

The multilingual girl printed two copies. I signed one for her and she folded the other into an embossed George V envelope and gave it to me. For my records, she said. For my court-martial, I thought. I put it in my inside jacket pocket. Took it out again about six hours later, when I finally realized who had done what, and to who, and why, and how.

twenty

We made the familiar trek to the Place de l’Opéra and caught the airport bus. It was my sixth time on that bus in about a week. The sixth time was no more comfortable than the previous five. It was the discomfort that started me thinking.

We got out at international departures and found the Air France ticket desk. Swapped two vouchers for two seats to Dulles on the eleven o’clock red-eye. That gave us a long wait. We humped our bags across the concourse and started out in a bar. Summer wasn’t conversational. I guess she couldn’t think of anything to say. But the truth was, I was doing OK at that point. Life was unfolding the same way it always had for everyone. Sooner or later you ended up an orphan. There was no escaping it. It had happened that way for a thousand generations. No point in getting all upset about it.

We drank bottles of beer and looked for somewhere to eat. I had missed breakfast and lunch and I guessed Summer hadn’t eaten either. We walked past all the little tax-exempt boutiques and found a place that was made up to look like a sidewalk bistro. We pooled our few remaining dollars and checked the menu and worked out that we could afford one course each, plus juice for her and coffee for me, and a tip for the waiter. We ordered steak frites, which turned out to be a decent slab of meat with shoestring fries and mayonnaise. You could get good food anywhere in France. Even an airport.

After an hour we moved down to the gate. We were still early and it was almost deserted. Just a few transit passengers, all shopped out, or broke like us. We sat far away from them and stared into space.

“Feels bad, going back,” Summer said. “You can forget how much trouble you’re in when you’re away.”

“All we need is a result,” I said.

“We’re not going to get one. It’s been ten days and we’re nowhere.”

I nodded. Ten days since Mrs. Kramer died, six days since Carbone died. Five days since Delta had given me a week to clear my name.

“We’ve got nothing,” Summer said. “Not even the easy stuff. We didn’t even find the woman from Kramer’s motel. That shouldn’t have been difficult.”

I nodded again. She was right. That shouldn’t have been difficult.

We boarded forty minutes before takeoff. Summer and I had seats behind an old couple in an exit row. I wished we could change places with them. I would have been glad of the extra room. We took off on time and I spent the first hour getting more and more cramped and uncomfortable. The stewardess served a meal that I couldn’t have eaten even if I had wanted to, because I didn’t have enough room to move my elbows and operate the silverware.

One thought led to another.

I thought about Joe flying in the night before. He would have flown coach. That was clear. A civil servant on a personal trip doesn’t fly any other way. He would have been cramped and uncomfortable all night long, a little more than me because he was an inch taller. So I felt bad all over again about putting him in the bus to town. I recalled the hard plastic seats and his cramped position and the way his head was jerked around by the motion. I should have sprung for a cab from the city and kept it waiting at the curb. I should have found a way to scare up some cash.

One thought led to another.

I pictured Kramer and Vassell and Coomer flying in from Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve. American Airlines. A Boeing jet. No more spacious than any other jet. An early start from XII Corps. A long flight to Dulles. I pictured them walking down the jetway, stiff, airless, dehydrated, uncomfortable.

One thought led to another.

I pulled the George V bill out of my pocket. Opened the envelope. Read it through. Read it through again. Examined every line and every item.

The hotel bill, the airplane, the bus to town.

The bus to town, the airplane, the hotel bill.

I closed my eyes.

I thought about things that Sanchez and the Delta adjutant and Detective Clark and Andrea Norton and Summer herself had said to me. I thought about the crowd of meeters and greeters we had seen in the Roissy–Charles de Gaulle arrivals hall. I thought about Sperryville, Virginia. I thought about Mrs. Kramer’s house in Green Valley.

In the end dominoes fell all over the place and landed in ways that made nobody look very good. Least of all me, because I had made many mistakes, including one big one that I knew for sure was going to come right back and bite me in the ass.

I kept myself so busy pondering my prior mistakes that I let my preoccupation lead me into making another one. I spent all my time thinking about the past and no time at all thinking about the future. About countermeasures. About what would be waiting for us at Dulles. We touched down at two in the morning and came out through the customs hall and walked straight into a trap set by Willard.

Standing in the same place they had stood six days earlier were the same three warrant officers from the Provost Marshal General’s office. Two W3s and a W4. I saw them. They saw us. I spent a second wondering how the hell Willard had done it. Did he have guys standing by at every airport in the country all day and all night? Did he have a Europe-wide trace out on our travel vouchers? Could he do that himself? Or was the FBI involved? The Department of the Army? The State Department? Interpol? NATO? I had no idea. I made an absurd mental note that one day I should try to find out.

Then I spent another second deciding what to do about the situation.

Delay was not an option. Not now. Not in Willard’s hands. I needed freedom of movement and freedom of action for twenty-four or forty-eight more hours. Then I would go see Willard. I would go see him happily. Because at that point I would be ready to slap him around and arrest him.

The W4 walked up to us with his W3s at his back.

“I have orders to place you both in handcuffs,” he said.

“Ignore your orders,” I said.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Try.”

“I can’t,” he said again.

I nodded.

“OK, we’ll trade,” I said. “You try it with the handcuffs, I’ll break your arms. You walk us to the car, we’ll go quietly.”

He thought about it. He was armed. So were his guys. We weren’t. But nobody wants to shoot people in the middle of an airport. Not unarmed people from your own unit. That would lead to a bad conscience. And paperwork. And he didn’t want a fistfight. Not three against two. I was too big and Summer was too small to make it fair.

“Deal?” he said.

“Deal,” I lied.

“So let’s go.”

Last time he had walked ahead of me and his hot-dog W3s had stayed on my shoulders. I sincerely hoped he would repeat that pattern. I guessed the W3s figured themselves for real badass sons of bitches and I guessed they were close to being correct, but it was the W4 I was most worried about. He looked like the genuine article. But he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head. So I hoped he would walk in front.

He did. Summer and I stayed side by side with our bags in our hands and the W3s formed up wide and behind us in an arrowhead pattern. The W4 led the way. We went out through the doors into the cold. Turned toward the restricted lane where they had parked last time. It was past two in the morning and the airport approach roads were completely deserted. There were lonely pools of yellow light from fixtures up on posts. It had been raining. The ground was wet.

We crossed the public pickup lane and crossed the median where the bus shelters were. We headed onward into the dark. I could see the bulk of a parking garage half-left and the green Chevy Caprice far away to the right. We turned toward it. Walked in the roadway. Most other times of the day we would have been mown down by traffic. But right then the whole place was still and silent. Past two o’clock in the morning.

I dropped my bag and used both hands and shoved Summer out of the way. Stopped dead and jerked my right elbow backward and smashed the right-hand W3 hard in the face. Kept my feet planted and twisted the other way like a violent calisthenic exercise and smacked the left-hand W3 with my left elbow. Then I stepped forward and met the W4 as he spun toward the noise and came in for me. I hit him with a straight left to the chest. His weight was moving and my weight was moving and the blow messed him up pretty good. I followed it with a right hook to his chin and put him on the ground. Turned back to the W3s to check how they were doing. They were both down on their backs. There was some blood on their faces. Broken noses, loosened teeth. A lot of shock and surprise. An excellent stun factor. I was pleased. They were good, and I was better. I checked the W4. He wasn’t doing much. I squatted down next to the W3s and took their Berettas out of their holsters. Then I twisted away and took the W4’s out of his. Threaded all three guns on my forefinger. Then I used my other hand to find the car keys. The right-hand W3 had them in his pocket. I took them out and tossed them to Summer. She was back on her feet. She was looking a little dismayed.

I gave her the three Berettas and I dragged the W4 by his collar to the nearest bus shelter. Then I went back for the W3s and dragged them over, one in each hand. I got them all lined up facedown on the floor. They were conscious, but they were groggy. Heavy blows to the head are a lot more consequential in real life than they are in the movies. And I was breathing hard myself. Almost panting. The adrenaline was kicking in. Some kind of a delayed reaction. Fighting has an effect on both parties to the deal.

I crouched down next to the W4.

“I apologize, Chief,” I said. “But you got in the way.”

He said nothing. Just stared up at me. Anger, shock, wounded pride, confusion.

“Now listen,” I said. “Listen carefully. You never saw us. We weren’t here. We never came. You waited for hours, but we didn’t show. You came back out and some thief had boosted your car in the night. That’s what happened, OK?”

He tried to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out right.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “It’s pretty weak and it makes you look real stupid. But how good does it make you look that you let us escape? That you didn’t handcuff us like you were ordered to?”

He said nothing.

“That’s your story,” I said. “We didn’t show, and your car was stolen. Stick to it or I’ll put it about that it was the lieutenant who took you down. A ninety-pound girl. One against three. People will love that. They’ll go nuts for it. And you know how rumors can follow you around forever.”

He said nothing.

“Your choice,” I said.

He shrugged. Said nothing.

“I apologize,” I said. “Sincerely.”

We left them there and grabbed our bags and ran to their car. Summer unlocked it and we slid in and she fired it up. Put it in gear and moved away from the curb.

“Go slow,” I said.

I waited until we were alongside the bus shelter and then wound the window down and tossed the Berettas out on the sidewalk. Their cover story wouldn’t hold up if they lost their weapons as well as their car. The three guns landed near the three guys and they all got up on their hands and knees and started to crawl toward them.

“Now go,” I said.

Summer hit the gas hard and the tires lit up and about a second later we were well outside handgun range. She kept her foot down and we left the airport doing about ninety miles an hour.

“You OK?” I said.

“So far,” she said.

“I’m sorry I had to shove you.”

“We should have just run,” she said. “We could have lost them in the terminal.”

“We needed a car,” I said. “I’m sick of taking the bus.”

“But now we’re way out of line.”

“That’s for sure,” I said.

I checked my watch. It was close to three in the morning. We were heading south from Dulles. Going nowhere, fast. In the dark. We needed a destination.

“You know my phone number at Bird?” I said.

“Sure,” Summer said.

“OK, pull over at the next place with a phone.”

She spotted an all-night gas station about five miles later. It was all lit up on the horizon. We pulled in and checked it out. There was a miniature grocery store behind the pumps but it was closed. At night you had to pay for your gas through a bulletproof window. There was a pay phone outside next to the air hose. It was in an aluminum box mounted on the wall. The box had phone shapes drilled into the sides. Summer dialed my Fort Bird office number and handed me the receiver. I heard one cycle of ring tone and then my sergeant answered. The night-duty woman. The one with the baby son.

“This is Reacher,” I said.

“You’re in deep shit,” she said.

“And that’s the good news,” I said.

“What’s the bad news?”

“You’re going to join me right there in it. What kind of babysitting arrangements have you got?”

“My neighbor’s girl stays. From the trailer next door.”

“Can she stay an hour longer?”

“Why?”

“I want you to meet me. I want you to bring me some stuff.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“Two dollars an hour. For the babysitter.”

“I haven’t got two dollars. That’s something I want you to bring. Money.”

“You want me to give you money?”

“A loan,” I said. “Couple of days.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you’ve got.”

“When and where?”

“When you get off. At six. At the diner near the strip club.”

“What do you need me to bring?”

“Phone records,” I said. “All calls made out of Fort Bird starting from midnight on New Year’s Eve until maybe the third of January. And an army phone book. I need to speak to Sanchez and Franz and all kinds of other people. And I need Major Marshall’s personal file. The XII Corps guy. I need you to get a copy faxed in from somewhere.”

“Anything else?”

“I want to know where Vassell and Coomer parked their car when they came down for dinner on the fourth. I want you to see if anyone noticed.”

“OK,” she said. “Is that it?”

“No,” I said. “I want to know where Major Marshall was on the second and the third. Scare up some travel clerk somewhere and see if any vouchers were issued. And I want a phone number for the Jefferson Hotel in D.C.”

“That’s an awful lot to do in three hours.”

“That’s why I’m asking you instead of the day guy. You’re better than he is.”

“Stick it,” she said. “Flattery doesn’t work on me.”

“Hope springs eternal,” I said.

We got back into the car and got back on the road. Headed east for I-95. I told Summer to go slow. If I didn’t, then the way she was likely to drive on empty roads at night would get us to the diner well before my sergeant, and I didn’t want that to happen. My sergeant would get there around six-thirty. I wanted to get there after her, maybe six-forty. I wanted to check she hadn’t done her duty and dropped a dime on me and set up an ambush. It was unlikely, but not impossible. I wanted to be able to drive by and check. I didn’t want to be already in a booth drinking coffee when Willard showed up.

“Why do you want all that stuff?” Summer asked.

“I know what happened to Mrs. Kramer,” I said.

“How?”

“I figured it out,” I said. “Like I should have at the beginning. But I didn’t think. I didn’t have enough imagination.”

“It’s not enough to imagine things.”

“It is,” I said. “Sometimes that’s what it’s all about. Sometimes that’s all an investigator has got. You have to imagine what people must have done. The way they must have thought and acted. You have to think yourself into being them.”

“Being who?”

“Vassell and Coomer,” I said. “We know who they are. We know what they’re like. Therefore we can predict what they did.”

“What did they do?”

“They got an early start and flew all day from Frankfurt. On New Year’s Eve. They wore Class As, trying to get an upgrade. Maybe they succeeded, with American Airlines out of Germany. Maybe they didn’t. Either way, they couldn’t have counted on it. They must have been prepared to spend eight hours in coach.”

“So?”

“Would guys like Vassell and Coomer be happy to wait in the Dulles taxi line? Or take a shuttle bus to the city? All cramped and uncomfortable?”

“No,” Summer said. “They wouldn’t do either thing.”

“Exactly,” I said. “They wouldn’t do either thing. They’re way too important for that. They wouldn’t dream of it. Not in a million years. Guys like that, they need to be met by a car and a driver.”

“Who?”

“Marshall,” I said. “That’s who. He’s their blue-eyed gofer. He was already over here, at their service. He must have picked them up at the airport. Maybe Kramer too. Did Kramer take the Hertz bus to the rental lot? I don’t think so. I think Marshall drove him there. Then he drove Vassell and Coomer to the Jefferson Hotel.”

“And?”

“And he stayed there with them, Summer. I think he had a room booked. Maybe they wanted him on the spot to drive them to National the next morning. He was going with them, after all. He was going to Irwin too. Or maybe they just wanted to talk to him, urgently. Just the three of them, Vassell, Coomer, and Marshall. Maybe it was easier to talk without Kramer there. And Marshall had a lot of stuff to talk about. They started his temporary detached duty in November. You told me that yourself. November was when the Wall started coming down. November was when the danger signals started coming in. So they sent him over here in November to get his ear close to the ground in the Pentagon. That’s my guess. But whatever, Marshall stayed the night with Vassell and Coomer at the Jefferson Hotel. I’m sure of it.”

“OK, so?”

“Marshall was at the hotel, and his car was in valet parking. And you know what? I checked our bill from Paris. They charged an arm and a leg for everything. Especially the phone calls. But not all the phone calls. The room-to-room calls we made didn’t show up at all. You called me at six, about dinner. Then I called you at midnight, because I was lonely. Those calls didn’t show up anywhere on the bill. Hit three for another room, and it’s free. Dial nine for a line, and it triggers the computer. There were no calls on Vassell and Coomer’s bill and therefore we thought they had made no calls. But they had made calls. It’s obvious. They made internal calls. Room to room. Vassell took the message from XII Corps in Germany, and then he called Coomer’s room to discuss what the hell to do about the situation. And then one or the other of them picked up the phone and called Marshall’s room. They called their blue-eyed gofer and told him to run downstairs and jump in his car.”

“Marshall did it?”

I nodded. “They sent him out into the night to clean up their mess.”

“Can we prove it?”

“We can make a start,” I said. “I’ll bet you three things. First, we’ll call the Jefferson Hotel and we’ll find a booking in Marshall’s name for New Year’s Eve. Second, Marshall’s file will tell us he once lived in Sperryville, Virginia. And third, his file will tell us he’s tall and heavy and right-handed.”

She went quiet. Her eyelids started moving.

“Is it enough?” she said. “Is Mrs. Kramer enough of a result to get us off the hook?”

“There’s more to come,” I said.

It was like being in a parallel universe, watching Summer driving slow. We drifted down the highway with the world going half-speed outside our windows. The big Chevy engine was loafing along a little above idle. The tires were quiet. We passed all our familiar landmarks. The State Police facility, the spot where Kramer’s briefcase had been found, the rest area, the spur to the small highway. We crawled off at the cloverleaf and I scanned the gas station and the greasy spoon and the lounge parking and the motel. The whole place was full of yellow light and fog and black shadow but I could see well enough. There was no sign of a setup. Summer turned into the lot and drove a long slow circuit. There were three eighteen-wheelers parked like beached whales and a couple of old sedans that were probably abandoned. They had the look. They had dull paint and soft tires and they were low on their springs. There was an old Ford pickup truck with a baby seat strapped to the bench. I guessed that was my sergeant’s. There was nothing else. Six-forty in the morning, and the world was dark and still and quiet.

We put the car out of sight behind the lounge bar and walked across the lot to the diner. Its windows were misted by the cooking steam. There was hot white light inside. It looked like a Hopper painting. My sergeant was alone at a booth in back. We walked in and sat down beside her. She hauled a grocery bag up off the floor. It was full of stuff.

“First things first,” she said.

She put her hand in the bag and came out with a bullet. She stood it upright on the table in front of me. It was a standard nine-millimeter Parabellum. Standard NATO load. Full metal jacket. For a sidearm or a submachine gun. The shiny brass casing had something scratched on it. I picked it up. Looked at it. There was a word engraved there. It was rough and uneven. It had been done fast and by hand. It said: Reacher.

“A bullet with my name on it,” I said.

“From Delta,” my sergeant said. “Hand-delivered, yesterday.”

“Who by?”

“The young one with the beard.”

“Charming,” I said. “Remind me to kick his ass.”

“Don’t joke about it. They’re awful stirred up.”

“They’re looking at the wrong guy.”

“Can you prove that?”

I paused. Knowing and proving were two different things. I dropped the bullet into my pocket and put my hands on the table.

“Maybe I can,” I said.

“You know who killed Carbone too?” Summer said.

“One thing at a time,” I said.

“Here’s your money,” my sergeant said. “It’s all I could get.”

She went into her bag again and put forty-seven dollars on the table.

“Thanks,” I said. “Call it I owe you fifty. Three bucks interest.”

“Fifty-two,” she said. “Don’t forget the babysitter.”

“What else have you got?”

She came out with a concertina of printer paper. It was the kind with faint blue rulings and holes in the sides. There were lines and lines of numbers on it.

“The phone records,” she said.

Then she gave me a sheet of army memo paper with a 202 number on it.

“The Jefferson Hotel,” she said.

Then she gave me a roll of curled fax paper.

“Major Marshall’s personal file,” she said.

She followed that with an army phone book. It was thick and green and had numbers in it for all our posts and installations worldwide. Then she gave me more curled fax paper. It was Detective Clark’s street canvass results, from New Year’s Eve, up in Green Valley.

“Franz in California told me you wanted it,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

She nodded. “You better believe I’m better than the day guy. And someone better be prepared to say so when they start with the force reduction.”

“I’ll tell them,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said. “Won’t help a bit, coming from you. You’ll either be dead or in prison.”

“You brought all this stuff,” I said. “You haven’t given up on me yet.”

She said nothing.

“Where did Vassell and Coomer park their car?” I asked.

“On the fourth?” she said. “Nobody knows for sure. The first night patrol saw a staff car backed in all by itself at the far end of the lot. But you can’t take that to the bank. Patrol didn’t get a plate number, so it’s not a positive ID. And the second patrol can’t remember it at all. Therefore it’s one guy’s report against another’s.”

“What exactly did the first guy see?”

“He called it a staff car.”

“Was it a black Grand Marquis?”

“It was a black something,” she said. “But all staff cars are black or green. Nothing unique about a black car.”

“But it was out of the way?”

She nodded. “On its own, far end of the lot. But the second guy can’t confirm it.”

“Where was Major Marshall on the second and the third?”

“That was easier,” she said. “Two travel warrants. To Frankfurt on the second, back here on the third.”

“An overnight in Germany?”

She nodded again. “There and back.”

We sat quiet. The counterman came over with a pad and a pencil. I looked at the menu and the forty-seven dollars on the table and ordered less than two bucks’ worth of coffee and eggs. Summer took the hint and ordered juice and biscuits. That was about as cheap as we could get, consistent with staying vertical.

“Am I done here?” my sergeant asked.

I nodded. “Thanks. I mean it.”

Summer slid out to let her get up.

“Kiss your baby for me,” I said.

My sergeant just stood there, all bone and sinew. Hard as woodpecker lips. Staring straight at me.

“My mom just died,” I said. “One day your son will remember mornings like these.”

She nodded once and walked to the door. A minute later we saw her in her pickup truck, a small figure all alone at the wheel. She drove off into the dawn mist. A rope of exhaust followed behind her and then drifted away.

I shuffled all the paper into a logical pile and started with Marshall’s personal file. The quality of the fax transmission wasn’t great, but it was legible. There was the usual mass of information. On the first page I found out that Marshall had been born in September of 1958. Therefore he was thirty-one years old. He had no wife and no children. No ex-wives either. He was wedded to the military, I guessed. He was listed at six-four and two hundred twenty pounds. The army needed to know that to keep their quartermaster percentiles up to speed. He was listed as right-handed. The army needed to know that because bolt-action sniper rifles are made for right-handers. Left-handed soldiers don’t usually get assigned as snipers. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military.

I turned the page.

Marshall had been born in Sperryville, Virginia, and had gone all the way through kindergarten and grade school and high school there.

I smiled. Summer looked at me, questions in her eyes. I separated the pages and slid them across to her and stretched over and used my finger to point out the relevant lines. Then I slid her the memo paper with the Jefferson Hotel number on it.

“Go find a phone,” I said.

She found one just inside the door, on the wall, near the register. I saw her put two quarters in, and dial, and talk, and wait. I saw her give her name and rank and unit. I saw her listen. I saw her talk some more. I saw her wait some more. And listen some more. She put more quarters in. It was a long call. I guessed she was getting transferred all over the place. Then I saw her say thank you. I saw her hang up. I saw her come back to me, looking grim and satisfied.

“He had a room,” she said. “In fact he made the booking himself, the day before. Three rooms, for him, and Vassell, and Coomer. And there was a valet parking charge.”

“Did you speak to the valet station?”

She nodded. “It was a black Mercury. In just after lunch, out again at twenty to one in the morning, back in again at twenty past three in the morning, out again finally after breakfast on New Year’s Day.”

I riffed through the pile of paper and found the fax from Detective Clark in Green Valley. The results of his house-to-house canvass. There was a fair amount of vehicle activity listed. It had been New Year’s Eve and lots of people were heading to and from parties. There had been what someone thought was a taxi on Mrs. Kramer’s road, just before two o’clock in the morning.

“A staff car could be mistaken for a taxi,” I said. “You know, a plain black sedan, clean condition but a little tired, a lot of miles on it, the same shape as a Crown Victoria.”

“Plausible,” Summer said.

“Likely,” I said.

We paid the check and left a dollar tip and counted what was left of my sergeant’s loan. Decided we were going to have to keep on eating cheap, because we were going to need gas money. And phone money. And some other expenses.

“Where to now?” Summer asked me.

“Across the street,” I said. “To the motel. We’re going to hole up all day. A little more work, and then we sleep.”

We left the Chevy hidden behind the lounge bar and crossed the street on foot. Woke the skinny guy in the motel office and asked him for a room.

“One room?” he said.

I nodded. Summer didn’t object. She knew we couldn’t afford two rooms. And we weren’t new to sharing. Paris had worked out OK for us, as far as nighttime arrangements were concerned.

“Fifteen bucks,” the skinny guy said.

I gave him the money and he smiled and gave me the key to the room Kramer had died in. I figured it was an attempt at humor. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind. I figured a room a guy had died in was better than the rooms that rented by the hour.

We walked together down the row and unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was still dank and brown and miserable. The corpse had been hauled away, but other than that it was exactly the same as when I had first seen it.

“It ain’t the George V,” Summer said.

“That’s for damn sure,” I said.

We put our bags on the floor and I put my sergeant’s paperwork on the bed. The counterpane felt slightly damp. I fiddled with the heater under the window until I got some warmth out of it.

“What next?” Summer asked.

“The phone records,” I said. “I’m looking for a call to a 919 area code.”

“That’ll be a local call. Fort Bird is 919 too.”

“Great,” I said. “There’ll be a million local calls.”

I spread the printout on the bed and started looking. There weren’t a million local calls. But there were certainly hundreds. I started at midnight on New Year’s Eve and worked forward from there. I ignored the numbers that had been called more than once from more than one phone. I figured those would be cab companies or clubs or bars. I ignored the numbers that had the same exchange code as Fort Bird. Those would be off-post housing, mainly. Soldiers on duty would have been calling home in the hour after midnight, wishing their spouses and children a happy new year. I concentrated on numbers that stood out. Numbers in other North Carolina cities. In particular I was looking for a number in another city that had been called once only maybe thirty or forty minutes after midnight. That was my target. I went through the printout, patiently, line by line, page by page, looking for it. I was in no hurry. I had all day.

I found it after the third concertina fold. It was listed at twelve thirty-two. Thirty-two minutes after 1989 became 1990. That was right about when I would have expected it. It was a call that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. That was about right too, in terms of duration. It was a solid prospect. I scanned ahead. Checked the next twenty or thirty minutes. There was nothing else there that looked half as good. I went back and put my finger under the number I liked. It was my best bet. Or my only hope.

“Got a pen?” I said.

Summer gave me one from her pocket.

“Got quarters?” I said.

She showed me fifty cents. I wrote the best-bet number on the army memo paper right underneath the D.C. number for the Jefferson Hotel. Passed it to her.

“Call it,” I said. “Find out who answers. You’ll have to go back across the street to the diner. The motel phone is busted.”

She was gone about eight minutes. I spent the time cleaning my teeth. I had a theory: If you can’t get time to sleep, a shower is a good substitute. If you can’t get time to shower, cleaning your teeth is the next best thing.

I left my toothbrush in a glass in the bathroom and Summer came through the door. She brought cold and misty air in with her.

“It was a golf resort outside of Raleigh,” she said.

“Good enough for me,” I said.

“Brubaker,” she said. “That’s where Brubaker was. On vacation.”

“Probably dancing,” I said. “Don’t you think? At half past midnight on New Year’s Eve? The desk clerk probably had to drag him out of the ballroom to the phone. That’s why the call lasted a quarter of an hour. Most of it was waiting time.”

“Who called him?”

There were codes on the printout indicating the location of the originating phone. They meant nothing to me. They were just numbers and letters. But my sergeant had supplied a key for me. On the sheet after the last concertina fold was a list of the codes and the locations they stood for. She had been right. She was better than the day guy. But then, she was an E-5 sergeant and he was an E-4 corporal, and sergeants made the U.S. Army worth serving in.

I checked the code against the key.

“Someone on a pay phone in the Delta barracks,” I said.

“So a Delta guy called his CO,” Summer said. “How does that help us?”

“The timing is suggestive,” I said. “Must have been an urgent matter, right?”

“Who was it?”

“One step at a time,” I said.

“Don’t shut me out.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’re walling up.”

I said nothing.

“Your mom died, and you’re hurting, and you’re closing in on yourself. But you shouldn’t. You can’t do this alone, Reacher. You can’t live your whole life alone.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I’m only guessing here. I’m holding my breath all the time. One long shot after another. And I don’t want to fall flat on my face. Not right in front of you. You wouldn’t respect me anymore.”

She said nothing.

“I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”

She paused. Then she smiled.

“But you need to get used to that,” I said. “Because it’s going to happen again. Right now, in fact. We’re taking the rest of the day off.”

The bed was awful. The mattress dipped in the middle and the sheets were damp. Maybe worse than damp. A place like that, if the room hadn’t been rented since Kramer died, I was pretty sure the bed wouldn’t have been changed either. Kramer had never actually gotten into it, but he had died right on top of it. He had probably leaked all kinds of bodily fluids. Summer didn’t seem to mind. But she hadn’t seen him there, all gray and white and inert.

But then I figured, What do you want for fifteen bucks? And Summer took my mind off the sheets. She distracted me big-time. We were plenty tired, but not too tired. We did well, second time around. The second time is often the best. That’s been my experience. You’re looking forward to it, and you’re not bored with it yet.

Afterward, we slept like babies. The heater finally put some temperature into the room. The sheets warmed up. The traffic sounds on the highway were soothing. Like white noise. We were safe. Nobody would think of looking for us there. Kramer had chosen well. It was a hideaway. We rolled down into the mattress dip together and held each other tight. I ended up thinking it was the best bed I had ever been in.

We woke up much later, very hungry. It was after six o’clock in the evening. Already dark outside the window. The January days were spooling by one after the other, and we weren’t paying much attention to them. We showered and dressed and headed across the street to eat. I took the army phone directory with me.

We went for the most calories for the fewest dollars but still ended up blowing more than eight bucks between us. I got my own back with the coffee. The diner had a bottomless cup policy and I exploited it ruthlessly. Then I camped out near the register and used the phone on the wall. Checked the number in the army book and called Sanchez down at Jackson.

“I hear you’re in the shit,” he said.

“Temporarily,” I said. “You heard anything more about Brubaker?”

“Like what?”

“Like, did they find his car yet?”

“Yes, they did. And it was a long way from Columbia.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Somewhere more than an hour due north of Fort Bird, and maybe east and a little south of Raleigh. How about Smithfield, North Carolina?”

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Just a feeling,” I said. “Had to be close to where I-95 meets U.S. 70. Right on a main drag. Do they think that’s where he was killed?”

“No question about it. Killed right there in his car. Someone shot him from the backseat. The windshield was blown out in front of the driver’s position and what was left of the glass was all covered in blood and brains. And there were spatters on the steering wheel that hadn’t been smudged. Therefore nobody drove the car after he died. Therefore that’s where he was killed. Right there in his car. Smithfield, North Carolina.”

“Did they find shell cases?”

“No shell cases. No significant trace evidence either, apart from the kind of normal shit they would expect to find.”

“Have they got a narrative theory?”

“It was an industrial unit parking lot. Big place, like a local landmark, with a big lot, busy in the daytime but deserted at night. They think it was a two-car rendezvous. Brubaker gets there first, the second car pulls up alongside, at least two guys get out of it, they get into Brubaker’s car, one in the front and one in the back, they sit a spell, maybe they talk a little, then the guy in the back pulls a gun and shoots. Which by the way is how they figure Brubaker’s watch got busted. They figure he had his left wrist up on the top of the wheel, the way guys do when they’re sitting in their cars. But whatever, he goes down and they drag him out and they put him in the trunk of the other car and they drive him down to Columbia and they leave him there.”

“With dope and money in his pocket.”

“They don’t know where that came from yet.”

“Why didn’t the bad guys move his car?” I said. “Seems kind of dumb to take the body to South Carolina and leave the car where it was.”

“Nobody knows why. Maybe because it’s conspicuous to drive a car full of blood with a blown windshield. Or maybe because bad guys are dumb sometimes.”

“You got notes about what Mrs. Brubaker said about the phone calls he took?”

“After dinner on the fourth?”

“No, earlier,” I said. “On New Year’s Eve. About half an hour after they all held hands and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

“Maybe. I took some pretty good notes. I could go look.”

“Be quick,” I said. “I’m on a pay phone here.”

I heard the receiver go down on his desk. Heard faint scratchy movement far away in his office. I waited. Put another pair of quarters in the slot. We were already down two bucks on toll calls. Plus twelve for eating and fifteen for the room. We had eighteen dollars left. Out of which I knew for sure I was going to be spending another ten, hopefully pretty soon. I began to wish the army didn’t buy Caprices with big V-8s in them. A little four-cylinder thing like Kramer had rented would have gotten us farther, on eight bucks’ worth of gas.

I heard Sanchez pick up the phone again.

“OK, New Year’s Eve,” he said. “She told me he was dragged out of a dinner dance around twelve-thirty in the morning. She told me she was a little bit aggrieved about it.”

“Did he tell her anything about the call?”

“No. But she said he danced better after it. Like he was all fired up. Like he was on the trail of something. He was all excited.”

“She could tell that from the way he danced?”

“They were married a long time, Reacher. You get to know a person.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks, Sanchez. I got to go.”

“Be careful.”

“Always am.”

I hung up and walked back to our table.

“Where now?” Summer said.

“Now we’re going to go see girls take their clothes off,” I said.

It was a short walk across the lot from the greasy spoon to the lounge bar. There were a few cars around, but not many. It was still early. It would be another couple of hours before the crowds really built up. The locals were still home, eating dinner, watching the sports news. Guys from Fort Bird were finishing chow time in the mess, showering, getting changed, hooking up in twos and threes, finding car keys, picking out designated drivers. But I still kept my eye out. I didn’t want to bump into a crowd of Delta people. Not outside in the dark. Time was too precious to waste.

We pulled the door and stepped inside. There was a new face behind the register. Maybe a friend or a relative of the fat guy. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. And we were in BDUs. No unit designations. No indication that we were MPs. So the new face was happy enough to see us. He figured us for a nice little upward tick in his first-hour cash flow. We walked right past him.

The place was less than one-tenth full. It felt very different that way. It felt cold and vast and empty. Like some kind of a factory. Without a press of bodies the music was louder and tinnier than ever. There were whole expanses of vacant floor. Whole acres. Hundreds of unoccupied chairs. There was only one girl performing. She was on the main stage. She was bathed in warm red light, but she looked cold and listless. I saw Summer watching her. Saw her shudder. I had said: So what are you going to do? Go work up at the strip club with Sin? Face-to-face, it wasn’t a very appealing option.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“For the key to everything,” I said. “My biggest mistake.”

“Which was?”

“Watch,” I said.

I walked around to the dressing room door. Knocked twice. A girl I didn’t know opened up. She kept the door close to her body and stuck her head around. Maybe she was naked.

“I need to see Sin,” I said.

“She’s not here.”

“She is,” I said. “She’s got Christmas to pay for.”

“She’s busy.”

“Ten dollars,” I said. “Ten dollars to talk. No touching.”

The girl disappeared and the door swung shut behind her. I stood out of the way, so the first person Sin would see would be Summer. We waited. And waited. Then the door opened up again and Sin stepped out. She was in a tight sheath dress. It was pink. It sparkled. She was tall on clear plastic heels. I stepped behind her. Got between her and the dressing room door. She turned and saw me. Trapped.

“Couple of questions,” I said. “That’s all.”

She looked better than the last time I had seen her. The bruises on her face were ten days old and were more or less healed up. Her makeup was maybe a little thicker than before. But that was the only sign of her troubles. Her eyes looked vacant. I guessed she had just shot up. Right between her toes. Whatever gets you through the night.

“Ten dollars,” she said.

“Let’s sit,” I said.

We found a table far from a speaker. It was relatively quiet there. I took a ten-spot out of my pocket and held it out. Didn’t let go of it.

“You remember me?” I said.

She nodded.

“Remember that night?” I said.

She nodded again.

“OK, here’s the thing. Who hit you?”

“That soldier,” she said. “The one you were talking to just before.”

twenty-one

I kept tight hold on the ten-dollar bill and took her through it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But none of them knew anything. None of them had any information at all, either firsthand or secondhand. There were no rumors going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room. There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before. Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had been stunned by the blows. She hadn’t seen them coming. She sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting hit.

“Tell me again,” I said. “It was the soldier, not the owner.”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“The owner never hits us,” she said. “We’re his meal ticket.”

I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet table.

“What does it mean?” Summer said.

“Everything,” I said.

“How did you know?”

I shrugged. We were back in Kramer’s motel room, folding stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last time.

“I saw it wrong,” I said. “I guess I started to realize in Paris. When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They were watching people coming out and they were kind of half-prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them, depending. That’s how it was in the bar that night. I walked in, I’m a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for a split second. But they didn’t know me and they didn’t like what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn’t shut me out. He turned toward me. I thought it was just random, but it wasn’t. I thought I was selecting him, but he was selecting me just as much.”

“It had to be random. He didn’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw them. He’d been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he was looking at.”

“So why turn toward you?”

“It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to know why I was there.”

“Did you tell him?”

I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”

“Why would he care?”

“Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart. Delta doesn’t hire dumb guys, that’s for sure. He went in and smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything. And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it. He didn’t even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met him before.”

“Why did he want you dead-ended? What was his motive?”

“He didn’t want me to find out who took the briefcase.”

“Why not?”

I sat down on the bed.

“Why did we never find the woman Kramer met in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there never was a woman,” I said. “Kramer met Carbone in here.”

She just stared at me.

“Kramer was gay too,” I said. “He and Carbone were getting it on.”

“Carbone took the briefcase,” I said. “Right out of this room. Because he had to keep the relationship secret. Just like we thought about the phantom woman, maybe he was worried there was something personal to him in it. Or maybe Kramer had been bragging about the Irwin conference. Talking about how Armored was going to fight its corner. So maybe Carbone was curious. Or even concerned. He’d been an infantryman for sixteen years. And the type of guy who gets into Delta, he’s got a lot of unit loyalty. Maybe more loyalty to his unit than to his lover.”

“I don’t believe it,” Summer said.

“You should,” I said. “It all fits. Andrea Norton more or less told us. I think she knew about Kramer. Either consciously or subconsciously, I’m not sure which. We accused her, and she wasn’t annoyed, remember? She was amused instead. Or bewildered, maybe. She was a sexual psychologist, she’d met the guy, maybe she’d picked up a vibe, professionally. Or the absence of a vibe, personally. So in our minds we had her in bed with Kramer, and she just couldn’t make it compute. So she didn’t get mad. It just didn’t connect. And we know Kramer’s marriage was a sham. No kids. He hadn’t lived at home for five years. Detective Clark wondered why he wasn’t divorced. He once asked me, Divorce isn’t a deal-breaker for a general, is it? I said, No, it isn’t. But being gay is. That’s for damn sure. Being gay is a big-time deal-breaker for a general. That’s why he kept the marriage going. It was cover, for the army. Just like the girlfriend photo in Carbone’s wallet.”

“We have no proof.”

“But we can get close. Carbone had a condom in his wallet, as well as the girlfriend photo. A buck gets ten it’s from the same pack as the one Walter Reed took off Kramer’s body. And another buck gets ten we can comb old assignment orders and find out where and when they met. Some joint exercise somewhere, like we thought all along. Plus Carbone was a vehicle guy for Delta. Their adjutant told me that. He had access to their whole stable of Humvees, any old time he wanted it. So another buck gets ten we’ll find Carbone was out in one, alone, on New Year’s Eve.”

“Was he killed for the briefcase? In the end? Like Mrs. Kramer?”

I shook my head. “Neither one of them was killed just for the briefcase.”

She just looked at me.

“Later,” I said. “One step at a time.”

“But Carbone had the briefcase. You said so. He ran off with it.”

I nodded. “And he searched it as soon as he got back to Bird. He found the agenda. He read it. And something in it made him call his CO immediately.”

“He called Brubaker? How could he do that? He couldn’t say, Hey, I was just sleeping with a general and guess what I found?”

“He could have said he found it somewhere else. On the sidewalk, maybe. But actually I’m wondering if Brubaker knew about Carbone and Kramer all along. It’s possible. Delta is a family and Brubaker was a very hands-on type of CO. It’s possible he knew. And maybe he exploited the situation. For intelligence purposes. These guys are incredibly competitive. And Sanchez told me Brubaker never missed any angle or any advantage or any wrinkle. So maybe the price of Brubaker’s tolerance was that Carbone had to pass stuff on, from the pillow talk.”

“That’s awful.”

I nodded. “Like being a whore. I told you there would be no winners here. Everyone’s going to come out looking bad.”

“Except us. If we get the results.”

“You’re going to be OK. I’m not.”

“Why?”

“Wait and see,” I said.

We carried our bags to the Chevy, which was still hidden behind the lounge bar. We put them in the trunk. The lot was fuller than it had been before. The night was heating up. I checked my watch. Almost eight o’clock on the East Coast, almost five on the West Coast. I stood still, trying to decide. If we pause for breath even for a second, we’ll be overrun again.

“I need to make two more calls,” I said.

I took the army phone book with me and we walked back to the greasy spoon. I checked every pocket for loose change and came up with a small pile. Summer contributed a quarter and a nickel. The counterman changed the pennies for silver. I fed the phone and dialed Franz at Fort Irwin. Five o’clock in the afternoon, it was the middle of his workday.

“Am I going to get past your main gate?” I asked him.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Willard’s chasing me. He’s liable to warn any place he thinks I’m going.”

“I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“Maybe you could switch your telex off for a day or two.”

“What’s your ETA?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

“Your buddies are already here. They just got in.”

“I haven’t got any buddies.”

“Vassell and Coomer. They’re fresh in from Europe.”

“Why?”

“Exercises.”

“Is Marshall still there?”

“Sure. He drove out to LAX to pick them up. They all came back together. One big happy family.”

“I need you to do two things for me,” I said.

“Two more things, you mean.”

“I need a ride from LAX myself. Tomorrow, first morning arrival from D.C. I need you to send someone.”

“And?”

“And I need you to get someone to locate the staff car Vassell and Coomer used back here. It’s a black Mercury Grand Marquis. Marshall signed it out on New Year’s Eve. By now it’s either back in the Pentagon garage or parked at Andrews. I need someone to find it and to do a full-court press on it, forensically. And fast.”

“What would they be looking for?”

“Anything at all.”

“OK,” Franz said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

I hung up and turned the pages in the army directory all the way from F for Fort Irwin to P for Pentagon. Slid my finger down the subsection to C for Chief of Staff’s Office. I left it there, briefly.

“Vassell and Coomer are at Irwin,” I said.

“Why?” Summer said.

“Hiding out,” I said. “They think we’re still in Europe. They know Willard is watching the airports. They’re sitting ducks.”

“Do we want them?” Summer said. “They didn’t know about Mrs. Kramer. That was clear. They were shocked when you told them, that night in your office. So I guess they authorized the burglary, but not the collateral damage.”

I nodded. She was right. They had been surprised, that night in my office. Coomer had gone pale and asked: Was it a burglary? It was a question that came straight from a guilty conscience. That meant Marshall hadn’t told them yet. He had kept the really bad news to himself. He had come back to the D.C. hotel at twenty past three in the morning, and he had told them the briefcase hadn’t been there, but he hadn’t told them what else had gone down. Vassell and Coomer must have been piecing it together on the fly, that night in my office, in the dark and after the event. It must have been an interesting ride home. Harsh words must have been exchanged.

“It’s down to Marshall alone,” Summer said. “He panicked, is all.”

“Technically it was a conspiracy,” I said. “Legally they all share the blame.”

“Hard to prosecute.”

“That’s JAG Corps’ problem.”

“It’s a weak case. Hard to prove.”

“They did other stuff,” I said. “Believe me, Mrs. Kramer is the least of their worries.”

I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless. I guessed she was a senior administrator, working late. I guessed she was about fifty, blonde going gray, powder on her face.

“Write this down,” I said to her. “I am a military police major called Reacher. I was recently transferred out of Panama and into Fort Bird, North Carolina. I will be standing at the E-ring checkpoint inside your building at midnight tonight. It is entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets me there.”

I paused.

“Is that it?” the woman said.

“Yes,” I said, and hung up. I scooped fifteen remaining cents back into my pocket. Closed the phone book and wedged it under my arm.

“Let’s go,” I said. We drove through the gas station and topped off the tank with eight bucks’ worth of gas. Then we headed north.

“It’s entirely up to the Chief of Staff whether he meets you there?” Summer said. “What the hell is that about?”

We were on I-95, still three hours south of D.C. Maybe two and a half hours, with Summer at the wheel. It was full dark and the traffic was heavy. The holiday hangover was gone. The whole world was back at work.

“There’s something heavy-duty going on,” I said. “Why else would Carbone call Brubaker during a party? Anything less than truly amazing could have waited, surely. So it’s heavy-duty, with heavy-duty people involved. Has to be. Who else could have moved twenty special unit MPs around the world all on the same day?”

“You’re a major,” she said. “So are Franz and Sanchez and all the others. Any colonel could have moved you.”

“But all the Provost Marshals were moved too. They were taken out of the way. To give us room to move. And most Provost Marshals are colonels themselves.”

“OK then, any Brigadier General could have done it.”

“With forged signatures on the orders?”

“Anyone can forge a signature.”

“And hope to get away with it afterward? No, this whole thing was put together by someone who knew he could act with impunity. Someone untouchable.”

“The Chief of Staff?”

I shook my head. “No, the Vice-Chief, actually, I think. Right now the Vice-Chief is a guy who came up through the infantry. And we can assume he’s a reasonably smart guy. They don’t put dummies in that job. I think he saw the signs. He saw the Berlin Wall coming down, and he thought about it, and he realized that pretty soon everything else would be coming down too. The whole established order.”

“And?”

“And he started to worry about some kind of a move by Armored Branch. Something dramatic. Like we said, those guys have got everything to lose. I think the Vice-Chief predicted trouble, and so he moved us all around to get the right people in the right places so we could stop it before it started. And I think he was right to be worried. I think Armored saw the danger coming and they planned to get a jump on it. They don’t want integrated units bossed by infantry officers. They want things the way they were. So I think that Irwin conference was about starting something dramatic. Something bad. That’s why they were so worried about the agenda getting out.”

“But change happens. Ultimately it can’t be resisted.”

“Nobody ever accepts that fact,” I said. “Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. Go down to the Navy Yards, and I guarantee you’ll find a million tons of fifty-year-old paper all stored away somewhere saying that battleships can never be replaced and that aircraft carriers are useless pieces of newfangled junk. There’ll have been admirals writing hundred-page treatises, putting their whole heart and soul into it, swearing blind that their way is the only way.”

Summer said nothing.

I smiled. “Go back in our records and you’ll probably find Kramer’s granddad saying that tanks can never replace horses.”

“What exactly were they planning?”

I shrugged. “We didn’t see the agenda. But we can make some pretty good guesses. Discrediting of key opponents, obviously. Maximum use of dirty laundry. Almost certainly collusion with defense industries. If they could get key manufacturers to say that lightweight armored vehicles can’t be made safe, that would help. They could use public propaganda. They could tell people their sons and daughters were going to be sent to war in tin cans that a peashooter could penetrate. They could try to scare Congress. They could tell them that a C-130 airlift fleet big enough to make a difference would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“That’s just standard-issue bitching.”

“So maybe there’s more. We don’t know yet. Kramer’s heart attack made the whole thing misfire. For now.”

“You think they’ll start it up again?”

“Wouldn’t you? If you had everything to lose?”

She took one hand off the wheel. Rested it in her lap. Turned slightly and looked at me.

“So why do you want to see the Chief of Staff?” she asked. “If you’re right, then it’s the Vice-Chief who’s on your side. He brought you here. He’s the one who’s been protecting you.”

“Game of chess,” I said. “Tug-of-war. Good guy, bad guy. The good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away. Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.”

“The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?”

I nodded.

“So why demand to see him?”

“Because we’re in the army, Summer,” I said. “We’re supposed to confront our enemies, not our friends.”

We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff’s face was a whole other ball game. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above it. There had been three of them during my years of service and I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart. Something made them different from the rest of us.

But they started out the same. I could have been one of them, theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get sent on somewhere else afterward. Somewhere better. You had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere overseas like Oxford or Cambridge in England. You had to get a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a master’s or a Ph.D. in economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a White House Fellow. That’s where my career path diverged. Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books. Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military. So they went their way and I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to my turf, they’d be crawling on their bellies. How I was going to do on their turf remained to be seen.

“I’m going in by myself,” I said.

“You are not,” Summer said.

“I am,” I said. “You can call it what you like. Advice from a friend, or a direct order from a superior officer. But you’re staying in the car. That’s for sure. I’ll handcuff you to the steering wheel if I have to.”

“We’re in this together.”

“But we’re allowed to be intelligent. This isn’t like going to see Andrea Norton. This is as risky as it gets. No reason for both of us to go down in flames.”

“Would you stay in the car? If you were me?”

“I’d hide underneath it,” I said.

She said nothing. Just drove, as fast as ever. We hit the Beltway. Started the long clockwise quarter-circle up toward Arlington.

Pentagon security was a little tighter than usual. Maybe someone was worried about Noriega’s leftover forces staging a two-thousand-mile northward penetration. But we got into the parking lot with no trouble at all. It was almost deserted. Summer drove a long slow circuit and came to rest near the main entrance. She killed the motor and jammed the parking brake on. She did it a little harder than she really needed to. I guessed she was making a point. I checked my watch. It was five minutes before midnight.

“Are we going to argue?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Good luck,” she said. “And give him hell.”

I slid out into the cold. Closed the door behind me and stood still for a second. The bulk of the building loomed up over me in the dark. People said it was the world’s largest office complex and right then I believed them. I started walking. There was a long ramp up to the doors. Then there was a guarded lobby the size of a basketball court. My special unit badge got me through that. Then I headed for the heart of the complex. There were five concentric pentagon-shaped corridors, called rings. Each one of them was protected by a separate checkpoint. My badge was good enough to get me through B, C, and D. Nothing on earth was going to get me into the E-ring. I stopped outside the final checkpoint and nodded to the guard. He nodded back. He was used to people waiting there.

I leaned against the wall. It was smooth-painted concrete and it felt cold and slick. The building was silent. I could hear nothing except water in pipes and the faint rush of forced-air heating and the guard’s steady breathing. The floors were shined linoleum tile and they reflected the ceiling fluorescents in a long double image that ran away to a distant vanishing point.

I waited. I could see a clock in the guard’s booth. It rolled past midnight. Past five after midnight. Then ten after. I waited. I started to figure my challenge had been ignored. These guys were political. Maybe they played a smarter game than I could conceive. Maybe they had more gloss and sophistication and patience. Maybe I was more than a little bit out of my league.

Or maybe the woman with the voice had thrown my message in the trash.

I waited.

Then at fifteen minutes past midnight I heard faraway heels echoing on the linoleum. Dress shoes, a staccato little rhythm that was part urgent and part relaxed. Like a man who was busy but not panicked. I couldn’t see him. The rap of his heels on the floor was billowing out at me around an angled corner. It ran ahead of him down the deserted corridor like an early warning signal.

I listened to the sound and watched the spot where it told me he would appear, which was right where the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling met their reflections in the floor. The sound kept on coming. Then a man stepped around the corner and walked through the flare of light. He kept on walking straight toward me, the rhythm of his heels unbroken, not slowing, not speeding up, still busy, not panicked. He came closer. He was the Chief of Staff of the Army. He was in formal evening mess dress. He was wearing a short blue jacket nipped in at the waist. Blue pants with two gold stripes. A bow tie. Gold studs and cuff links. Elaborate knots and swirls of gold braid all over his sleeves and his shoulders. He was covered with gold insignia and badges and sashes and miniature versions of his medals. He had a full head of gray hair. He was about five-nine and one-eighty. Exactly average size for the modern army.

He got within ten feet of me and I snapped to attention and saluted. It was a pure reflex action. Like a Catholic meeting the Pope. He didn’t salute back. He just looked at me. Maybe there was a protocol that forbade saluting while wearing the evening mess uniform. Or while bareheaded in the Pentagon. Or maybe he was just rude.

He put his hand out to shake.

“Very sorry I’m late,” he said. “Good of you to wait. I was at the White House. For a state dinner with some foreign friends.”

I shook his hand.

“Let’s go to my office,” he said.

He led me past the E-ring guard and we turned left into the corridor and walked a little way. Then we stepped into a suite and I met the woman with the voice. She looked more or less like I had predicted. She was wearing civilian clothes. A dark suit so severe it was more formal than a uniform. But she sounded even better in person than she had on the phone.

“Coffee, Major?” she said.

She had a fresh pot brewed. I guessed she had clicked the switch at about eleven fifty-three, so it had finished perking at midnight exactly. I guessed the Chief of Staff’s suite was that sort of place. She gave me a saucer and a cup made of transparent bone china. I was afraid of crushing it like an eggshell.

“This way,” the Chief of Staff said.

He led me into his office. My cup rattled on its saucer. His office was surprisingly plain. It had the same painted concrete walls as the rest of the building. The same type of steel desk I had seen in the Fort Bird pathologist’s office.

“Take a seat,” he said. “If you don’t mind, we’ll make this quick. It’s late.”

I said nothing. He watched me.

“I got your message,” he said. “Received and understood.”

I said nothing. He tried an icebreaker.

“Noriega’s top guys are still out there,” he said. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Thirty thousand square miles,” I said. “A lot of space for people to hide in.”

“Will we get them all?”

“No question,” I said. “Someone will sell them out.”

“You’re a cynic.”

“A realist,” I said.

“What have you got to tell me, Major?”

I sipped my coffee. The lights were low. I was suddenly aware that I was deep inside one of the world’s most secure buildings, late at night, face-to-face with the nation’s most powerful soldier. And I was about to make a serious accusation. And only one other person knew I was there, and maybe she was already in a cell somewhere.

“I was in Panama two weeks ago,” I said. “Then I was transferred out.”

“Why do you think that was?”

I took a breath. “I think the Vice-Chief wanted particular individuals on the ground in particular locations because he was worried about trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“An internal coup by your old buddies in Armored Branch.”

He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “Would that have been a realistic worry?”

I nodded. “There was a conference at Irwin scheduled for New Year’s Day. I believe the agenda was certainly controversial, probably illegal, maybe treasonous.”

The Chief of Staff said nothing.

“But it misfired,” I said. “Because General Kramer died. But there were potential problems from the fallout. So you personally intervened by moving Colonel Garber out of the 110th and replacing him with an incompetent.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So that nature would take its course and the investigation would misfire too.”

He sat still for another long moment. Then he smiled.

“Good analysis,” he said. “The collapse of Soviet communism was bound to lead to stresses inside the U.S. military. Those stresses were bound to manifest themselves with all kinds of internal plotting and planning. The internal plotting and planning was bound to be anticipated and steps were bound to be taken to nip potential trouble in the bud. And as you say, there were bound to be tensions at the very top that led to moves and countermoves.”

I said nothing.

“Like a game of chess,” he said. “The Vice-Chief moves, and I countermove. An inevitable conclusion, I suppose, because you were looking for a pair of senior individuals in which one outranks the other.”

I looked straight at him.

“Am I wrong?” I said.

“Only in two particulars,” he said. “Obviously you’re right in that there are huge changes coming. CIA was a little slow to spot Ivan’s imminent demise, so we’ve had less than a year to think things through. But believe me, we’ve thought them through. We’re in a unique situation now. We’re like a heavyweight boxer who’s trained for years for a shot at the world title, and then we wake up one morning and find our intended opponent has dropped dead. It’s a very bewildering sensation. But we’ve done our homework.”

He leaned down and opened a drawer and struggled out with an enormous loose-leaf file. It was at least three inches thick. It thumped down on his desktop. It had a green jacket with a long word stenciled on it in black. He reversed it so I could read it. It said: Transformation.

“Your first mistake is that your focus was too close,” he said. “You need to stand back and look at it from our perspective. From above. It’s not just Armored Branch that is going to change. Everyone is going to change. Obviously we’re going to move toward highly mobile integrated units. But it’s a bad mistake to see them as infantry units with a few bells and whistles tacked on. They’re going to be a completely new concept. They’ll be something that has never existed before. Maybe we’ll integrate attack helicopters too, and give the command to the guys in the sky. Maybe we’ll move into electronic warfare and give the command to the guys with the computers.”

I said nothing.

He laid his hand on the file, palm down. “My point is that nobody is going to come out of this unscathed. Yes, Armored is going to be professionally devastated. No question about that. But so is the infantry and so is the artillery, and so is transport, and so is logistics support, and so is everyone else, equally, just as much. Maybe more, for some people. Including the military police, probably. Everything is going to change, Major. There will be no stone unturned.”

I said nothing.

“This is not about Armored versus the infantry,” he said. “You need to understand that. That’s a vast oversimplification. It’s actually about everyone versus everyone else. There will be no winners, I’m afraid. But equally therefore, there will be no losers. You could choose to think about it that way. Everyone is in the same boat.”

He took his hand off the file.

“What’s my second mistake?” I said.

“I moved you out of Panama,” he said. “Not the Vice-Chief. He knew nothing about it. I selected twenty men personally and put them where I thought I needed them. I spread them around, because in my judgment it was fifty-fifty as to who was going to blink first. The light units, or the heavy units? It was impossible to predict. Once their commanders started thinking, they would all realize they have everything to lose. I sent you to Fort Bird, for instance, because I was a little worried about David Brubaker. He was a very proactive type.”

“But it was Armored who blinked first,” I said.

He nodded.

“Apparently,” he said. “If you say so. It was always going to be a fifty-fifty chance. And I guess I’m a little disappointed. Those were my boys. But I’m not defensive about them. I moved onward and upward. I left them behind. I’m perfectly happy to let the chips fall where they may.”

“So why did you move Garber?”

“I didn’t.”

“So who did?”

“Who outranks me?”

“Nobody,” I said.

“I wish,” he said.

I said nothing.

“What does an M16 rifle cost?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not a lot, I guess.”

“We get them for about four hundred dollars,” he said. “What does an Abrams M1A1 main battle tank cost?”

“About four million.”

“So think about the big defense contractors,” he said. “Whose side are they on? The light units, or the heavy units?”

I didn’t answer. I figured the question was rhetorical.

“Who outranks me?” he asked again.

“The Secretary of Defense,” I said.

He nodded. “A nasty little man. A politician. Political parties take campaign contributions. And defense contractors can see the future the same as anyone else.”

I said nothing.

“A lot for you to think about,” the Chief of Staff said. He hefted the big Transformation file back into his drawer. Replaced it on his desktop with a slimmer jacket. It was marked: Argon.

“You know what argon is?” he asked.

“It’s an inert gas,” I said. “They use it in fire extinguishers. It spreads a layer low down over a fire and prevents it from taking hold.”

“That’s why I chose the name. Operation Argon was the plan that moved you people at the end of December.”

“Why did you use Garber’s signature?”

“Like you suggested in another context, I wanted to let nature take its course. MP orders signed by the Chief of Staff would have raised a lot of eyebrows. Everyone would have switched to best behavior. Or smelled a rat and gone deeper underground. It would have made your job harder. It would have defeated my purpose.”

“Your purpose?”

“I wanted prevention, of course. That was the main priority. But I was also curious, Major. I wanted to see who would blink first.”

He handed me the file.

“You’re a special unit investigator,” he said. “By statute the 110th has extraordinary powers. You are authorized to arrest any soldier anywhere, including me, here in my office, if you so choose. So read the Argon file. I think you’ll find it clears me. If you agree, go about your business elsewhere.”

He got up from behind his desk. We shook hands again. Then he walked out of the room. Left me all alone in his office, in the heart of the Pentagon, in the middle of the night.

Thirty minutes later I got back in the car with Summer. She had kept the motor off to save gas and it was cold inside.

“Well?” she said.

“One crucial error,” I said. “The tug-of-war wasn’t the Vice-Chief and the Chief. It was the Chief himself and the Secretary of Defense.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I saw the file. There were memos and orders going back nine months. Different papers, different typewriters, different pens, no way to fake all that in four hours. It was the Chief of Staff’s initiative all along, and he was always kosher.”

“So how did he take it?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “Considering. But I don’t think he’ll feel like helping me.”

“With what?”

“With the trouble I’m in.”

“Which is?”

“Wait and see.”

She just looked at me.

“Where now?” she said.

“California,” I said.

twenty-two

The Chevy was running on fumes by the time we got to National Airport. We put it in the long-term lot and hiked back to the terminal. It was about a mile. There were no shuttle buses running. It was the middle of the night and the place was practically deserted. Inside the terminal we had to roust a clerk out of a back office. I gave him the last of our stolen vouchers and he booked us on the first morning flight to LAX. We were looking at a long wait.

“What’s the mission?” Summer said.

“Three arrests,” I said. “Vassell, Coomer, and Marshall.”

“Charge?”

“Serial homicide,” I said. “Mrs. Kramer, Carbone, and Brubaker.”

She stared at me. “Can you prove it?”

I shook my head. “I know exactly what happened. I know when, and how, and where, and why. But I can’t prove a damn thing. We’re going to have to rely on confessions.”

“We won’t get them.”

“I’ve gotten them before,” I said. “There are ways.”

She flinched.

“This is the army, Summer,” I said. “It ain’t a quilting bee.”

“Tell me about Carbone and Brubaker.”

“I need to eat,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“We don’t have any money,” Summer said.

Most places had metal grilles down over their doors anyway. Maybe they would feed us on the plane. We carried our bags over to a seating area next to a twenty-foot window that had nothing but black night outside. The seats were long vinyl benches with fixed armrests every two feet to stop people from lying down and sleeping.

“Tell me,” she said.

“It’s still a series of crazy long shots, one after the other.”

“Try me.”

“OK, start over with Mrs. Kramer. Why did Marshall go to Green Valley?”

“Because it was the obvious first place to try.”

“But it wasn’t. It was almost the obvious last place to try. Kramer had hardly been there in five years. His staff must have known that. They’d traveled with him many times before. Yet they made a fast decision and Marshall went straight there. Why?”

“Because Kramer had told them that’s where he was going?”

“Correct,” I said. “He told them he was with his wife to conceal the fact he was actually with Carbone. But then, why would he have to tell them anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there’s a category of person you have to tell something.”

“Who?”

“Suppose you’re a rich guy traveling with your mistress. You spend one night apart, you have to tell her something. And if you tell her you’re dropping in on your wife purely to keep up appearances, she has to buy it. Maybe she doesn’t like it, but she has to buy it. Because it’s expected occasionally. It’s all part of the deal.”

“Kramer didn’t have a mistress. He was gay.”

“He had Marshall.”

“No,” she said. “No way.”

I nodded. “Kramer was two-timing Marshall. Marshall was his main squeeze. They were in a relationship. Marshall wasn’t an intelligence officer but Kramer appointed him one anyway to keep him close. They were an item. But Kramer had a wandering eye. He met Carbone somewhere and started seeing him on the side. So on New Year’s Eve Kramer told Marshall he was going to see his wife and Marshall believed him. Like the rich guy’s mistress would. That’s why Marshall went to Green Valley. In his heart he knew for sure Kramer had gone there. He was the one person in the world who felt he would know for sure. It was Marshall who told Vassell and Coomer where Kramer was. But Kramer was lying to him. Like people do in relationships.”

Summer was quiet for a long moment. She just stared out at the night.

“Does this affect what happened there?” she said.

“I think it does, slightly,” I said. “I think Mrs. Kramer talked to Marshall. She must have recognized him from her time on-post in Germany. She probably knew all about him and her husband. Generals’ wives are usually pretty smart. Maybe she even knew there was a second guy in the picture. Maybe she was pissed off and taunted Marshall about it. Like, You can’t keep your man either, right? Maybe Marshall got mad and lashed out. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell Vassell and Coomer right away. Because the collateral damage wasn’t just about the burglary itself. It was also about an argument. That’s why I said Mrs. Kramer wasn’t killed just for the briefcase. I think partly she was killed because she taunted a jealous guy who lost his temper.”

“This is all just guesswork.”

“Mrs. Kramer is dead. That isn’t a guess.”

“The rest of it is.”

“Marshall is thirty-one, never been married.”

“That doesn’t prove a thing.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. There’s no proof anywhere. Proof is a scarce commodity right now.”

Summer was quiet for a beat. “Then what happened?”

“Then Vassell and Coomer and Marshall started the hunt for the briefcase in earnest. They had an advantage over us because they knew they were looking for a man, not a woman. Marshall flew back to Germany on the second and searched Kramer’s office and his quarters. He found something that led to Carbone. Maybe a diary, or a letter, or a photograph. Or a name or a number in an address book. Whatever. He flew back on the third and they made a plan and they called Carbone. They blackmailed him. They set up a swap for the next night. The briefcase for the letter or the photograph or whatever it was. Carbone accepted the deal. He was happy to because he didn’t want exposure and anyway he had already called Brubaker with the details of the agenda. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Maybe he’d been through the process before. Maybe more than once. Poor guy had been gay in the army for sixteen years. But this time it didn’t work out for him. Because Marshall killed him during the exchange.”

“Marshall? Marshall wasn’t even there.”

“He was,” I said. “You figured it out yourself. You told me about it when we were leaving the post to go see Detective Clark about the crowbar. Remember? When Willard was chasing me on the phone? You made a suggestion.”

“What suggestion?”

“Marshall was in the trunk of the car, Summer. Coomer was driving, Vassell was in the passenger seat, and Marshall was in the trunk. That’s how they got past the gate. Then they backed in at the far end of the O Club lot. Backed in, because Coomer popped the trunk before he got out. Marshall held the lid down low, but they still needed concealment. Then Vassell and Coomer went inside and started to build their cast-iron alibis. Meanwhile Marshall waits almost two hours in the trunk, holding the lid, until it’s all quiet. Then he climbs out and he drives off. That’s why the first night patrol remembers the car and the second patrol doesn’t. The car was there, and then it wasn’t. So Marshall picks Carbone up at some prearranged spot and they drive out to the woods together. Carbone is holding the briefcase. Marshall opens the trunk and gives Carbone an envelope or something. Carbone turns away into the moonlight to check it’s what he’s been promised. Even a guy as cautious as a Delta soldier would do that. His whole career is on the line. Behind him Marshall comes out with the crowbar and hits him. Not just because of the briefcase. He’s going to get the briefcase anyway. The exchange is working. And Carbone can’t afford to talk afterward. Marshall hits him partly because he’s furious at him. He’s jealous of his time with Kramer. That’s part of why he kills him. Then he retrieves the envelope and grabs the briefcase. Throws them both in the trunk. We know the rest. He’s known all along what he was going to do and he’s come equipped for the misdirection. Then he drives back to the post buildings and ditches the crowbar on the way. He parks the car in the original slot and gets back in the trunk. Vassell and Coomer come out of the O Club and they drive away.”

“And then what?”

“They drive, and they drive. They’re excited and uptight. But they know by then what their blue-eyed boy did to Mrs. Kramer. So they’re also nervous and worried. They can’t find anyplace they can stop where they can let a man who may or may not be bloodstained out of the trunk. First really safe place they find is the rest area an hour north. They park far away from other cars again and let Marshall out. Marshall hands over the briefcase. They resume their journey. They spend sixty seconds searching the briefcase and then they sling it out the window a mile farther on.”

Summer sat quiet. She was thinking. Her lower lids were jacking upward a fraction at a time.

“It’s just a theory,” she said.

“Can you explain what we know any other way?”

She thought about it. Then she shook her head.

“What about Brubaker?” she said.

A voice came out of speakers in the ceiling and told us our flight was ready to board. We picked up our bags and shuffled into line. It was still full dark outside. I counted the other passengers. Hoped there would be some spare seats, so there would be some spare breakfasts. I was very hungry. But it didn’t look good. It was going to be a pretty full flight. I guessed LA’s pull was pretty strong, in January, when you lived in D.C. I guessed people didn’t need much of an excuse to schedule meetings out there.

“What about Brubaker?” Summer said again.

We shuffled down the aisle and found our seats. We had a window and a middle. The aisle was already occupied by a nun. She was old. I hoped her hearing was shot. I didn’t want her eavesdropping. She moved and let us in. I made Summer sit next to her. I sat by the window. Buckled my belt. Kept quiet for a moment. Watched the airport scene outside. Busy guys were doing things under floodlights. Then we pushed back from the gate and started taxiing. There was no takeoff queue. We were in the air within two minutes.

“I’m not sure about Brubaker,” I said. “How did he get in the picture? Did they call him or did he call them? He knew about the agenda thirty minutes into New Year’s Day. A proactive guy like that, maybe he tried a little pressure of his own. Or maybe Vassell and Coomer were just assuming a worst-case scenario. They might have figured a senior NCO like Carbone would have called his boss. So I’m not sure who called who first. Maybe they all called each other at the same time. Maybe there were mutual threats or maybe Vassell and Coomer suggested they could all work together to find a way where everybody benefits.”

“Would that be likely?”

“Who knows?” I said. “These integrated units are going to be weird. Brubaker was certainly going to be popular, because he’s already into weird warfare. So maybe Vassell and Coomer conned him into thinking they were looking for a strategic alliance. Whatever, they all set up a rendezvous for late on the fourth. Brubaker must have specified the location. He must have driven past that spot plenty of times, back and forth from Bird to his golf place. And he must have been feeling confident. He wouldn’t have let Marshall sit behind him if he was worried.”

“How do you know it was Marshall behind him?”

“Protocol,” I said. “He’s a colonel talking to a general and another colonel. He’ll have put Vassell in the front seat and Coomer in the backseat on the passenger’s side so he could turn and see them both. Marshall could be out of sight and out of mind. He was only a major. Who needs him?”

“Did they intend to kill him? Or did it just happen?”

“They intended to, for sure. They had a plan ready. A remote place to dump the body, heroin that Marshall picked up on his overnight in Germany, a loaded gun. So we were right, after all, but purely by accident. The same people that killed Carbone drove straight out the main gate and killed Brubaker. Hardly touched the brakes.”

“Double misdirection,” Summer said. “The heroin thing, and dumping him to the south, not the north.”

“Amateur hour,” I said. “The Columbia medics must have spotted the lividity thing and the muffler burns immediately. Pure dumb luck for Vassell and Coomer that the medics didn’t tell us immediately. Plus, they left Brubaker’s car up north. That was serious brain fade.”

“They must have been tired. Stress, tension, all that driving. They came down from Arlington Cemetery, went back up to Smithfield, came back down to Columbia, went back up to Dulles. Maybe eighteen hours straight. No wonder they made an occasional mistake. But they’d have gotten away with it if you hadn’t ignored Willard.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

“It’s a very weak case,” Summer said. “In fact it’s incredibly weak. It isn’t even circumstantial. It’s just pure speculation.”

“Tell me about it. That’s why we need confessions.”

“You need to think very carefully before you confront anyone. A case as weak as this, it could be you that goes to jail. For harassment.”

I heard activity behind me and the stewardess came into view with the breakfasts. She handed one to the nun, and one to Summer, and one to me. It was a pitiful meal. There was cold juice and a hot ham and cheese sandwich. That was all. Coffee later, I assumed. I hoped. I finished everything in about thirty seconds. Summer took about thirty-one. But the nun didn’t touch her tray. She just left it right there in front of her. I nudged Summer in the ribs.

“Ask her if she’s going to eat that,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“She’s got a charitable obligation,” I said. “It’s what being a nun is all about.”

“I can’t,” she said again.

“You can.”

She sighed. “OK, in a minute.”

But she blew it. She waited too long. The nun opened the foil and started to eat the sandwich.

“Damn,” I said.

“Sorry,” Summer said.

I looked at her. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“No, before that. The last thing you said.”

“I said I can’t just ask her.”

I shook my head. “No, before the breakfasts came.”

“I said it’s a very weak case.”

“Before that.”

I saw her rewind the tape in her head. “I said Vassell and Coomer would have gotten away with it if you hadn’t ignored Willard.”

I nodded. Thought about that fact for a minute. Then I closed my eyes.

I opened them again in Los Angeles. The plane touched down and the thump and screech of tires on tarmac woke me up. Then the reverse thrust screamed and the brakes jerked me forward against my belt. It was first light outside. The dawn looked brown, like it often did there. A voice on the PA told us it was seven o’clock in the morning in California. We had been heading west for two solid days and each twenty-four-hour period was averaging more like twenty-eight. I had slept for a while and I didn’t feel tired. But I still felt hungry.

We shuffled off the plane and walked down to the baggage claim. That was where drivers met people. I scanned around. Saw that Calvin Franz hadn’t sent anyone. He had come himself instead. I was happy about that. He was a welcome sight. I felt like we were going to be in good hands.

“I’ve got news for you,” he said.

I introduced him to Summer. He shook her hand and took her bag and carried it. I guessed it was partly a courtly gesture and partly his way of hustling us out to his Humvee a little bit faster. It was parked there in the no-waiting zone. But the cops were staying well away from it. Camouflaged black-and-green Humvees tend to have that effect. We all piled in. I let Summer ride in front. Partly a courtly gesture of my own, and partly because I wanted to sprawl in the back. I was cramped from the plane.

“They found the Grand Marquis,” Franz said.

He gunned the big turbodiesel and moved off the curb. Irwin was just north of Barstow, which was about thirty miles away across the breadth of the city. I figured it would take him about an hour to get us there through the morning traffic. I saw Summer watching how he drove. Professional appraisal in her eyes. It would probably have taken her about thirty-five minutes.

“It was at Andrews,” Franz said. “Dumped there on the fifth.”

“When Marshall was recalled to Germany,” I said.

Franz nodded at the wheel. “That’s what their gate log says. Parked by Marshall with a Transportation Corps reference on the docket. Our guys trailered it to the FBI. Faster that way. They had to call in a few favors. The Bureau worked on it all night. Reluctantly at first, but then they got interested in a big hurry. It seems to be tied in with a case they’re working.”

“Brubaker,” I said.

He nodded again. “The trunk mat had parts of Brubaker on it. Blood and brain matter, to be specific. It had been scrubbed with a paper towel, but not well enough.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Lots of things. There was blood from a different source, just trace evidence of a transfer smear, maybe from a jacket sleeve or a knife blade.”

“Carbone’s,” I said. “From when Marshall was riding in the trunk afterward. Did they find a knife?”

“No,” Franz said. “But Marshall’s prints are all over the inside of the trunk.”

“They would be,” I said. “He spent several hours in there.”

“There was a single dog tag under the mat,” Franz said. “Like the chain had been broken and one of them had slipped off and gotten away.”

“Carbone’s?” I said.

“None other.”

“Amateur hour,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Mostly normal stuff. It was an untidy car. Lots of hair and fiber, fast-food wrappers, soda cans, stuff like that.”

“Any yogurt pots?”

“One,” Franz said. “In the trunk.”

“Strawberry or raspberry?”

“Strawberry. Marshall’s prints on the foil tab. Seems like he had a snack.”

“He opened it,” I said. “But he didn’t eat it.”

“There was an empty envelope,” Franz said. “Addressed to Kramer at XII Corps in Germany. Airmail, postmarked a year ago. No return address. Like a photo mailer, but it didn’t have anything in it.”

I said nothing. He was looking at me in the mirror.

“Is any of this good news?” he said.

I smiled. “It just moved us up from speculative to circumstantial.”

“A giant leap for mankind,” he said.

Then I stopped smiling and looked away. I started thinking about Carbone, and Brubaker, and Mrs. Kramer. And Mrs. Reacher. All over the world people were dying, in the early part of January 1990.

In the end it took us more than an hour to get to Irwin. I guessed it was true what people said about LA highways. The post looked the same as it usually did. As busy as always. It occupied a huge acreage of the Mojave Desert. One or the other of the armored cavalry regiments lived there on a rotating basis and acted as the home team when other units came in to exercise. There was a real spring-training atmosphere. The weather was always good, people always had fun in the sunshine playing with the big expensive toys.

“You want to take care of business right away?” Franz asked.

“Are you keeping an eye on them?”

He nodded. “Discreetly.”

“So let’s have breakfast first.”

A U.S. Army O Club was the perfect destination for people half-starved on airline food. The buffet was a mile long. Same menu as in Germany, but the orange juice and the fruit platters looked more authentic in California. I ate as much as an average rifle company and Summer ate more. Franz had already eaten. I fueled up on as much coffee as I could take. Then I pushed back from the table. Took a deep breath.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go do it.”

We went back to Franz’s office and he made a call to his guys. They told him Marshall was already out on the range, but Vassell and Coomer were sitting tight in a VOQ rec room. Franz drove us there in his Humvee. We got out on the sidewalk. The sun was bright. The air was warm and dusty. I could smell all the prickly little desert plants that were growing as far as the eye could see.

Irwin’s VOQ looked like it had been built by the same motel contractor that had gotten the XII Corps contract in Germany. There were rows of identical rooms around a sandy courtyard. On one side was a shared facility. TV rooms, table tennis, lounges. Franz led us in through a door and stepped to one side and we found Vassell and Coomer sitting knee to knee in a pair of leather armchairs. I realized I had seen them only once before, when they came to my office at Bird. That seemed disproportionate, considering how much time I had spent thinking about them.

They were both wearing crisp new BDUs in the revised desert camouflage, the pattern people were calling chocolate chip. They both looked just as fake as they had in their woodland greens. They still looked like Rotary Club members. Vassell was still bald and Coomer was still wearing eyeglasses.

They both looked up at me.

I took a breath.

Senior officers.

Harassment.

It could be you that goes to jail.

“General Vassell,” I said. “And Colonel Coomer. You are under arrest on a charge of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice in that you conspired together and with other persons to commit homicide.”

I held my breath.

But neither one of them had a reaction. Neither one of them spoke. They just gave it up. They just looked resigned. Like the other shoe had finally dropped and the inevitable had finally happened. Like they had been expecting this moment from the start. Like they had known for sure it was coming all along. I breathed out. There were supposed to be all kinds of stages in a person’s reaction to bad news. Grief, anger, denial. But these guys were already through all of that. That was clear. They were right there at the end of the process, butted hard up against acceptance.

I cued Summer to complete the formalities. There were all kinds of things from the Uniform Code that you had to spell out. All kinds of advisements and warnings. Summer ran through them better than I would have. Her voice was clear and her manner was professional. Neither Vassell nor Coomer responded at all. No bluster, no pleading, no angry protestations of innocence. They just nodded obediently in all the right places. Got up out of their chairs at the end without even being told.

“Handcuffs?” Summer asked me.

I nodded.

“For sure,” I said. “And walk them to the brig. All the way. Don’t put them in the truck. Let everybody see them. They’re a disgrace.”

I got directions from a cavalry guy and took Franz’s Humvee to go get Marshall. He was supposed to be camped out in a hut near a disused range target, observing. The disused target was described to me as an obsolete Sheridan tank. It was supposed to be fairly beat-up. The hut was supposed to be in better shape and close to the old tank. I was told to stick to the established tracks to avoid unexploded ordnance and desert tortoises. If I ran over the ordnance, I would be killed. If I ran over the tortoises, I would be reprimanded by the Department of the Interior.

I left the main post alone, at nine-thirty in the morning exactly. I didn’t want to wait for Summer. She was all tied up with processing Vassell and Coomer. I felt like we were at the end of a long journey, and I just wanted to get it over. I took a borrowed sidearm, but it was still a bad decision.

twenty-three

Irwin owned enough of the Mojave that it could be a plausible stand-in for the vast deserts of the Middle East or, if you ignored the heat and the sand, a plausible stand-in for the endless steppes of Eastern Europe. Which meant I was long out of sight of the main post buildings before I was even a tenth of the way to the promised Sheridan tank. The terrain was completely empty all around me. The Humvee felt tiny out there. It was January so there was no heat shimmer but the temperature was still pretty high. I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour. That set up a decent breeze. Normally forty miles an hour in a Humvee feels pretty fast because of its bulk. But out there in the vastness it felt like no speed at all.

A whole hour later I was still doing forty and I still hadn’t found the hut. The range went on forever. Irwin was one of the world’s great military reservations. That was for sure. Maybe the Soviets had a bigger place somewhere, but I would have been surprised. Maybe Willard could have told me. I smiled to myself and kept on going. Drove over a ridge and saw an empty plain below me. A dot on the next horizon that might have been the hut. A dust cloud maybe five miles to the west that might have been tanks on the move.

I kept to the track. Kept going at forty. Dust was trailing behind me like a tail. The air coming in the windows was hot. The plain was maybe three miles across. The dot on the horizon became a speck and then grew larger the closer I got to it. After a mile I could make out two separate shapes. The old tank on the left, and the observation hut on the right. After another mile I could make out three separate shapes. The old tank on the left, the observation hut on the right, and Marshall’s own Humvee in the middle. It was parked to the west of the building, in the morning shade. It looked like the same shoot-and-scoot adaptation I had seen at XII Corps in Germany. The building was a simple raw cinder-block square. Big holes for windows. No glass. The tank was an old M551, which was a lightweight armored-aluminum piece that had started its design life as a reconnaissance vehicle. It was about a quarter of the weight of an Abrams and it was exactly the type of thing that people like Lieutenant Colonel Simon were betting the future on. It had seen service with some of our Airborne divisions. It wasn’t a bad machine. But this example looked pretty much decomposed. It had old plywood skirts on it designed to make it resemble some kind of previous-generation Soviet armor. There had been no point in training our guys to shoot at something our other guys were still using.

I stayed on the track and coasted to a stop about thirty yards south of the hut. Opened the door and slid out into the heat. I guessed it was less than seventy degrees but after North Carolina and Frankfurt and Paris it felt like Saudi Arabia.

I saw Marshall watching me from a hole in the cinder block.

I had only seen him once and never face-to-face. He had been in the Grand Marquis on New Year’s Day, outside Bird’s post headquarters, in the dark, behind green-tinted glass. I had pegged him then as a tall dark guy and his file had confirmed it. He looked just the same now. Tall, heavy, olive skin. Thick black hair cut short. He was in desert camouflage and he was stooping a little to see out the cinder-block hole.

I stood next to my Humvee. He watched me, silently.

“Marshall?” I called.

He didn’t respond.

“You alone in there?”

No reply.

“Military police,” I called, louder. “All personnel, exit that structure immediately.”

Nobody responded. Nobody came out. I could still see Marshall through the hole. He could still see me. I guessed he was alone. If he had had a partner in there, the partner would have come out. Nobody else had a reason to be afraid of me.

“Marshall?” I called again.

He ducked out of sight. Just melted backward into the shadows inside. I took the borrowed gun out of my pocket. It was a new-issue Beretta M9. I heard an old training mantra in my head: Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired. I chambered a round. The sound was loud in the desert stillness. I saw the dust cloud in the west. It was maybe a little larger and a little closer than before. I clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire.

“Marshall?” I called.

He didn’t reply. But I heard a low voice very faintly and then a brief scratchy burst of radio static. There was no antenna on the roof of the hut. He must have had a portable field radio in there with him.

“Who are you going to call, Marshall?” I said to myself. “The cavalry?”

Then I thought: The cavalry. An armored cavalry regiment. I turned and looked west at the dust cloud. Suddenly realized how things stood. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with a proven killer. He was in a hut, I was out in the open. My partner was a ninety-pound woman about fifty miles away. His buddies were riding around in seventy-ton tanks just below the visible horizon.

I got off the track fast. Worked around to the east of the hut. I saw Marshall again. He moved from one hole to another and watched me. Just gazed out at me.

“Step out of the hut, Major,” I called.

There was silence for a long moment. Then he called back to me.

“I’m not going to do that,” he said.

“Step out, Major,” I called. “You know why I’m here.”

He ducked back into the darkness.

“As of right now you’re resisting arrest,” I called.

No reply. No sound at all. I moved on. Circled the hut. Worked around to the north. There were no holes in the north wall. Just an iron door. It was closed. I figured it wouldn’t have a lock. What was there to steal? I could walk right up to it and pull it open. Was he armed? I guessed standard procedure would make him unarmed. What kind of deadly enemy could a gunnery observer expect to face? But I guessed a smart guy in Marshall’s situation would be taking all kinds of precautions.

There was beaten earth outside the iron door where people had made informal tracks to places they had parked. What an architect would call pathways of desire. None of them led north toward me. They all led roughly west or east. Shade in the morning, shade in the afternoon. So I stayed on open ground and got within ten yards of the door. Then I stopped. A good position, on the face of it. Maybe better than going all the way in and risking a surprise. I could wait there all day. No problem. It was January. The noon sun wasn’t going to hurt me. I could wait until Marshall gave up. Or starved to death. I had eaten more recently than he had. That was for sure. And if he decided to come out shooting, I could shoot him first. No problem with that either.

The problem was with the holes in the cinder block. In the other three walls. They had looked the size of regular windows. Big enough for a man to climb through. Even a big man like Marshall. He could climb through the west wall and get to his Humvee. Or he could climb through the south wall and get to mine. Military vehicles don’t have ignition keys. They have big red starter buttons precisely so that guys can throw themselves inside in a panic and get themselves the hell out of Dodge. And I couldn’t watch the west wall and the south wall simultaneously. Not from any kind of a position that offered concealment.

Did I need concealment?

Was he armed?

I had an idea about how to find out.

Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired.

I aimed at the center of the iron door and pulled the trigger. The Beretta worked. It worked just fine. It flashed and boomed and kicked and there was an enormous clang and the round left a small bright pit in the metal ten yards away.

I let the echoes die.

“Marshall?” I called. “You’re resisting arrest. So I’m going to come around and I’m going to start firing through the window apertures. Either the rounds will kill you or the ricochets will wound you. You want me to stop at any time, you just come on out with your hands on your head.”

I heard a burst of radio static again. Inside the hut.

I moved to the west. Kept low and fast. If he was armed he was going to shoot, but he was going to miss. Give me a choice of who to get shot at by and I’ll pick a pointy-headed strategic planner any day of the week. On the other hand, he hadn’t been completely inept with Carbone or Brubaker. So I widened my radius a little to give myself a chance of getting behind his Humvee. Or behind the old Sheridan tank.

Halfway there I paused and fired. It was no kind of a good system to make a promise and then not keep it. But I aimed high on the inside face of the window reveal so that if the round hit him it would have had to come off two walls and the ceiling first. Most of the energy would be expended and it wouldn’t hurt him much. The nine-millimeter Parabellum was a decent round, but it didn’t have magical properties.

I got behind the hood of his Humvee. Rested my gun hand on the warm metal. The camouflage paint was rough. It felt like it had sand mixed in with it. I aimed up at the hut. I was down in a slight dip now and it was above me. I fired again, high on the other side of the window reveal.

“Marshall?” I called. “You want suicide by cop, that’s OK with me.”

No reply. I was three rounds down. Twelve rounds to go. A smart guy might just lie on the floor and let me blast away. All my trajectories would be upward in relation to him because I was down in a dip. And because of the windowsills. I could try banking rounds off the ceiling and the far wall but ricochets didn’t necessarily work like billiards. They weren’t predictable and they weren’t reliable.

I saw movement at the window.

He was armed.

And not with a handgun either. I saw a big wide shotgun barrel come out at me. Black. It looked about the size of a rainwater pipe. I figured it for an Ithaca Mag-10. A handsome piece. If you wanted a shotgun, the Mag-10 was about as good as it got. It was nicknamed the Roadblocker because it was effective against soft-skinned vehicles. I ducked backward and put the Humvee’s engine block between myself and the hut. Made myself as small as I could get.

Then I heard the radio again. Inside the hut. It was a very short transmission and faint and full of static and I couldn’t make out any actual words but the rhythm and the inflection of the burst came across like a three-syllable question. Maybe Say again? It was what you heard after you issued a confusing order.

I heard a repeat transmission. Say again? Then I heard Marshall’s voice. Barely audible. Four syllables. Fluffy consonants at the beginning. Affirmative, maybe.

Who was he talking to and what was he ordering?

“Give it up, Marshall,” I called. “How much shit do you want to be in?”

It was what a hostage negotiator would have called a pressure question. It was supposed to have a negative psychological effect. But it made no legal sense. If he shot me, he would go to Leavenworth for four hundred years. If he didn’t, he would go for three hundred years. No practical difference. A rational man would ignore it.

He ignored it. He was plenty rational. He ignored it and he fired the big Ithaca instead, which is exactly what I would have done.

In theory it was the moment I was waiting for. Firing a long gun that requires a physical input before it can be fired again leaves the shooter vulnerable after pulling the trigger. I should have come out from cover immediately and returned lethal aimed fire. But the sheer stunning impact of the ten-gauge cartridge slowed me down by half a second. I wasn’t hit. The spray pattern was low and tight and it caught the Humvee’s front wheel. I felt the tire blow and the truck dropped its front corner ten inches into the sand. There was smoke and dust everywhere. When I looked half a second later the shotgun barrel was gone. I fired up at the top of the window reveal. I wanted a tight ricochet that came down vertically and drilled through his head.

I didn’t get one. He called out to me.

“I’m reloading,” he said.

I paused. He probably wasn’t. A Mag-10 holds three rounds. He had only fired one. He probably wanted me to come out of cover and charge his position. Whereupon he would rear up and smile and blow me away. I stayed where I was. I didn’t have the luxury of reloading. I was four down, eleven to go.

I heard the radio again. Brief static, four syllables, a descending scale. Acknowledged, out. Fast and casual, like a piano trill.

Marshall fired again. I saw the black barrel move in the window and there was another loud explosion and the far back corner of the Humvee dropped ten inches. Just dumped itself straight down. I flattened in the dirt for a second and squinted underneath. He was shooting the tires out. A Humvee can run on flat tires. That was part of the design demand. But it can’t run on no tires. And a ten-gauge shotgun doesn’t just flatten a tire. It removes a tire. It tears the rubber right off the rim and leaves little tiny shreds of it all over a twenty-foot radius.

He was disabling his own Humvee and he was going to make a break for mine.

I got up on my knees again and crouched behind the hood. Now I was actually safer than I had been before. The big vehicle was canted right down on the passenger side so that there was a solid angled wedge of metal between me and him all the way to the desert floor. I pressed up against the front fender. Lined myself up with the engine block. Put six hundred pounds of cast iron between me and the gun. I could smell diesel. A fuel line had been hit. It was leaking fast. No tires, nothing in the tank. And no percentage in soaking my shirt with diesel and lighting it and tossing it in the hut. I had no matches. And diesel isn’t flammable the way gasoline is. It’s just a greasy liquid. It needs to be vaporized and put under intense pressure before it explodes. That was why the Humvee was designed with a diesel engine. Safety.

“Now I’m reloading,” Marshall called.

I waited. Was he or wasn’t he? He probably was. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to rush him. I had a better idea. I crawled along the Humvee’s tilted flank and stopped at the rear bumper. Looked past it and scoped out my view. To the south I could see my own Humvee. To the north I could see almost all the way to the hut. There was an open space twenty-five yards wide in between. No-man’s-land. Marshall would have to traverse twenty-five continuous yards of open ground to get from the hut to my Humvee. Right through my field of fire. He would probably run backward, shooting as he went. But his weapon packed only three rounds fully loaded. If he spaced them out, he would be firing once every eight yards. If he loosed them all off at the start full blast and unaimed, he would be naked all the rest of the way to the truck. Either option, he was going down. That was for damn sure. I had eleven Parabellums and an accurate pistol and a steel bumper to rest my wrist on.

I smiled.

I waited.

Then the Sheridan came apart behind me.

I heard a hum in the air like a shell the size of a Volkswagen was incoming and I turned in time to see the old tank smashed to pieces like it had been hit by a train. It jumped a whole foot off the ground and the fake plywood skirts splintered and spun away and the turret came off its ring and turned over slowly in the air and thumped down in the sand ten feet from me.

There was no explosion. Just a huge bass metal-to-metal thump. And then nothing but eerie silence.

I turned back. Watched the open ground. Marshall was still in the hut. Then a shadow passed over my head and I saw a shell in the air with that weird slow-motion optical illusion you get with long-range artillery. It flew right over me in a perfect arc and hit the desert floor fifty yards farther on. It kicked up a huge plume of dust and sand and buried itself deep.

No explosion.

They were firing practice rounds at me.

I heard the whine of turbines in the far distance. The faint clatter of drive sprockets and idlers and track-return rollers. The muffled roar of engines as tanks raced toward me. I heard a faint boom as a big gun fired. Then nothing. Then a hum in the air. Then more smashing and tearing of metal as the Sheridan was hit again. No explosion. A practice round is the same as a regular shell, the same size, the same weight, with a full load of propellant, but no explosive in the nose cone. It’s just a lump of dumb metal. Like a handgun bullet, except it’s five inches wide and more than a foot long.

Marshall had switched their training target.

That was what all the radio chatter had been about. Marshall had ordered them away from whatever they were doing five miles to the west. He had ordered them to move in toward him and put rounds down on his own position. They had been incredulous. Say again? Say again? Marshall had replied: Affirmative.

He had switched their training target to cover his escape.

How many tanks were out there? How long did I have? If twenty tank guns quartered the area they would hit a man-sized target before very long. Within minutes. That was clear. The law of averages absolutely guaranteed it. And to be hit by a bullet five inches wide and more than a foot long would be no fun at all. A near-miss would be just as bad. A fifty-pound chunk of metal hitting the Humvee I was hiding behind would shred it to supersonic pieces as small and sharp as K-bar blades. Even without an explosive charge the sheer kinetic energy alone would make that happen. It would be like a grenade going off right next to me.

I heard a ragged boom, boom north and west of me. Low, dull sounds. Two guns firing in a tight sequence. Closer than they had been before. The air hissed. One shell went long but the other came in low on a flat trajectory and hit the Sheridan square in the side. It went in and it came out, straight through the aluminum hull like a .38 through a tin can. If Lieutenant Colonel Simon had been there to see it, he might have changed his mind about the future.

More guns fired. One after the other. A ragged salvo. There were no explosions. But the brutal calamitous physical noise was maybe worse. It was some kind of primeval clamor. The air hissed. There was deep brainless thudding as dead shells hit the earth. There were shuddering bass peals of metal against metal, like ancient giants clashing with swords. Huge chunks of wreckage from the Sheridan cartwheeled away and clanged and shivered and skidded on the sand. There was dust and dirt everywhere in the air. I was choking on it. Marshall was still in the hut. I stayed down in a low crouch and kept my Beretta aimed at the open ground. Waited. Forced my hand to keep still. Stared at the empty space. Just stared at it, desperately. I didn’t understand. Marshall had to know he couldn’t wait much longer. He had called down a hailstorm of metal. We were being attacked by Abrams tanks. My Humvee was going to get hit any second. His only avenue of escape was going to vanish right before his eyes. It was going to flip up in the air and come down on its roof. The law of averages guaranteed it. Or else the hut would get hit and collapse all around him first. He would be buried in the rubble. One thing or the other would happen. For sure. It had to. So why the hell was he waiting?

Then I got up on my knees and stared at the hut.

Because I knew why.

Suicide.

I had offered him suicide by cop but he had already chosen suicide by tank. He had seen me coming and he had guessed who I was. Like Vassell and Coomer he had been sitting numb day after day just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And finally there it was, at last, the other shoe, coming straight at him through the desert dust in a Humvee. He had thought and he had decided and he had gotten on the radio.

He was going down, and he was taking me with him.

I could hear the tanks pretty close now. Not more than eight or nine hundred yards. I could hear the squeal and clatter of their tracks. They were still moving fast. They would be fanning out, like it said in the field manual. They would be pitching and rolling. They would be kicking up rooster tails of dust. They would be forming a loose mobile semicircle with their big guns pointing inward like the spokes of a wheel.

I crawled back and looked at my Humvee. But if I went for it Marshall would shoot me down from the safety of the hut. No question about that. The twenty-five yards of open ground must have looked as good to him as they looked to me.

I waited.

I heard the boom of a gun and the whump of a shell and I stood up and ran the other way. I heard another boom and another whump and the first shell slammed into the Sheridan and bowled it all the way over and then the second hit Marshall’s Humvee and demolished it completely. I threw myself behind the north corner of the hut and rolled tight against the base of the wall and listened to shards of metal rattling against the cinder blocks and the screeching as the old Sheridan’s armor finally came apart.

The tanks were very close now. I could hear their engine notes rising and falling as they breasted rises and crashed through dips. I could hear their tracks slapping against their skirts. I could hear their hydraulics whining as they traversed their guns.

I got to my feet. Stood up straight. Wiped dust out of my eyes. Stepped over to the iron door. Saw the bright crater my gun had made. I knew Marshall had to be either standing in the south window looking for me running or standing in the west window looking for me dead behind the wreckage. I knew he was tall and I knew he was right-handed. I fixed an abstract target in my mind. Moved my left hand and put it on the doorknob. Waited.

The next shells were fired so close that I heard boom whump boom whump with no pause in between. I pulled the door and stepped inside. Marshall was right there in front of me. He was facing away, looking south, framed by the brightness of the window. I aimed at his right shoulder blade and pulled the trigger and a shell took the roof off the hut. The room was instantly full of dust and I was hit by falling beams and corrugated sheets and stung by fragments of flying concrete. I went down on my knees. Then I collapsed on my front. I was pinned. I couldn’t see Marshall. I heaved myself back up on my knees and flailed my arms to fight off the debris. The dust was sucking upward in a ragged spiral and I could see bright blue sky above me. I could hear tank tracks all around me. Then I heard another boom whump and the front corner of the hut blew away. It was there, and then it wasn’t. It was solid, and then it was a spray of gray dust coming toward me at the speed of sound. A gale of dusty air whipped after it and knocked me off my feet again.

I struggled back up and crawled forward. Just butted my way through fallen beams and lumps of broken concrete. I threw twisted sheets of roofing iron aside. I was like a plow. Like a bulldozer, grinding forward, piling debris to the left and right of me. There was too much dust to see anything except the sunlight. It was right there in front of me. Brightness ahead, darkness behind. I kept on going.

I found the Mag-10. Its barrel was crushed. I threw it aside and plowed on. Found Marshall on the floor. He wasn’t moving. I pulled stuff off him and grabbed his collar and hauled him up into a sitting position. Dragged him forward until I came to the front wall. I put my back against it and slid upright until I felt the window aperture. I was choking and spitting dust. It was in my eyes. I dragged him upward and hauled him over the windowsill and dumped him out. Then I fell out after him. Got up on my hands and knees and grabbed his collar again and dragged him away. Outside the hut the dust was clearing. I could see tanks, maybe three hundred yards to the left and right of us. Lots of tanks. Hot metal in the harsh sunlight. They had outflanked us. They were holding in a perfect circle, engines idling, guns flat, aiming over open sights. I heard boom whump again and saw a bright muzzle flash from one of them and saw it pitch backward from the recoil. I saw its shell pass right over us. I saw it in the air. Heard it break the sound barrier with a crack like a neck snapping. Heard it smash into the remains of the hut. Felt more dust and concrete shower down on my back. I went down on my face and lay still, trapped in no-man’s-land.

Then another tank fired. I saw it jerk backward from the recoil. Seventy tons, smashed back so hard its front end came right up in the air. Its shell screamed overhead. I started moving again. I dragged Marshall behind me and crawled through the dirt like I was swimming. I had no idea what he had said on the radio. No idea what his orders had been. He had to have told them he was moving out. Maybe he had told them to disregard the Humvees. Maybe that explained their Say again? Maybe he had told them the Humvees were fair game. Maybe that was what they had found hard to believe.

But I knew they wouldn’t stop firing now. Because they couldn’t see us. Dust was drifting like smoke and the view out of a buttoned-up Abrams wasn’t great to begin with. It was like looking lengthwise through a grocery bag with a small square hole cut out of the bottom. I paused and batted dust out of the way and coughed and peered forward. We were close to my Humvee.

It looked straight and level.

It looked intact.

So far.

I stood up and raced the last ten feet and hauled Marshall around to the passenger side and opened the door and crammed him into the front. Then I climbed right in over him and dumped myself into the driver’s seat. Hit that big red button and fired it up. Shoved it into gear and stamped on the gas so hard the acceleration slammed the door shut. Then I turned the lights full on and put my foot to the floor and charged. Summer would have been proud of me. I drove straight for the line of tanks. Two hundred yards. One hundred yards. I picked my spot and aimed carefully and burst through the gap between two main battle tanks doing more than eighty miles an hour.

I slowed down after a mile. After another mile, I stopped. Marshall was alive. But he was unconscious and he was bleeding all over the place. My aim had been good. His shoulder had a big messy nine-millimeter broken-bone through-and-through gunshot wound in it and he had plenty of other cuts from the hut’s collapse. His blood was all mixed with cement dust like a maroon paste. I got him arranged on the seat and strapped him in tight with the harness. Then I broke out the first-aid kit and put pressure bandages on both sides of his shoulder and jabbed him with morphine. I wrote M on his forehead with a grease pencil like you were supposed to in the field. That way the medics wouldn’t overdose him when he got to the hospital.

Then I walked around in the fresh air for a spell. Just walked up and down the track, aimlessly. I coughed and spat and dusted myself down as well as I could. I was bruised and sore from being pelted with concrete fragments. Two miles behind me I could still hear tanks firing. I guessed they were waiting for a cease-fire order. I guessed they were likely to run out of rounds before they got one.

I kept the 2-40 A/C going all the way back. Halfway there, Marshall woke up. I saw his chin come up off his chest. Saw him glance ahead, and then at me to his left. He was full of morphine and his right arm was useless, but I was still cautious. If he grabbed the wheel with his left he might force us off the track. He might run us over some unexploded debris. Or a tortoise. So I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.

I drove him straight to the base hospital. Called Franz from the nurses’ station and ordered up a guard squad. I waited for them to arrive and promised rank and medals for anyone who helped ensure Marshall saw the inside of a courtroom. I told them to read him his rights as soon as he woke up. And I told them to mount a suicide watch. Then I left them to it and drove back to Franz’s office. My BDUs were torn up and stiff with dust and I guessed my face and hands and hair didn’t look any better because Franz laughed as soon as he saw me.

“I guess it’s tough taking desk jockeys down,” he said.

“Where’s Summer?” I said.

“Telexing JAG Corps,” he said. “Talking to people on the phone.”

“I lost your Beretta,” I said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere it’s going to take a bunch of archaeologists a hundred years to find.”

“Is my Humvee OK?”

“Better than Marshall’s,” I said.

I found my bag and an empty VOQ room and took a long hot shower. Then I transferred all my pocket stuff to a new set of BDUs and trashed the damaged ones. I figured any quartermaster would agree they were deteriorated beyond reasonable future use. I sat on the bed for a while. Just breathed in, breathed out. Then I walked back to Franz’s place. I found Summer there. She was looking radiant. She was holding a new file folder that already had a lot of pages in it.

“We’re on track,” she said. “JAG Corps says the arrests were righteous.”

“Did you lay out the case?”

“They say they’ll need confessions.”

I said nothing.

“We have to meet with the prosecutors tomorrow,” she said. “In D.C.”

“You’ll have to do it,” I said. “I won’t be around.”

“Why not?”

I didn’t answer.

“You OK?”

“Are Vassell and Coomer talking?”

She shook her head. “They haven’t said a word. JAG Corps is flying them to Washington tonight. They’ve been assigned lawyers.”

“There’s something wrong,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s been way too easy.”

I thought for a moment.

“We need to get back to Bird,” I said. “Right now.”

Franz lent me fifty bucks and gave me two blank travel vouchers. I signed them and Leon Garber countersigned them even though he was thousands of miles away in Korea. Then Franz drove us back to LAX. He used a staff car because his Humvee was full of Marshall’s blood. Traffic was light and it was a fast trip. We went in and I swapped the vouchers for seats on the first flight to D.C. I checked my bag. I didn’t want to carry it this time. We took off at three o’clock in the afternoon. We had been in California eight hours exactly.

twenty-four

Flying east the time zones stole back the hours we had gained going west. It was eleven o’clock at night at Washington National when we landed. I reclaimed my duffel from the carousel and we took the shuttle to the long-term lot. The Chevy was waiting there right where we left it. I used some of Franz’s fifty bucks and we filled the tank. Then Summer drove us back to Bird. She went as fast as always and took the same old route, down I-95. Past the State Police barracks, the place where the briefcase was found, the rest area, the cloverleaf, the motel, the lounge bar. We were timed in through Fort Bird’s main gate at three in the morning. The post was quiet. There was a night mist clamped down all over it. Nothing was stirring.

“Where to?” Summer said.

“The Delta station,” I said.

She drove us around to the old prison gates and the sentry let us in. We parked in their main lot. I could see Trifonov’s red Corvette in the darkness. It was all on its own, near the wall with the water hose. It looked very clean.

“Why are we here?” Summer said.

“We had a very weak case,” I said. “You made that point yourself. And you were right. It was very weak. The forensics with the staff car helped, but we never really got beyond purely circumstantial stuff. We can’t actually put Vassell and Coomer and Marshall at any of the scenes. Not definitively. We can’t prove Marshall ever actually touched the crowbar. We can’t prove he didn’t actually eat the yogurt for a snack. And we certainly can’t prove that Vassell and Coomer ever actually ordered him to do anything. If push came to shove, they could claim Marshall was an out-of-control lone wolf.”

“So?”

“We walked in and confronted two senior officers who were doubly insulated from a very weak and circumstantial case. What should have happened?”

“They should have fought it.”

I nodded. “They should have scoffed at it. They should have laughed it off. They should have gotten offended. They should have threatened and blustered. They should have thrown us out on our asses. But they didn’t do any of that. They just sat still for it. And their silence kind of pled themselves guilty. That was my impression. That’s how I took it.”

“Me too,” Summer said. “Certainly.”

“So why didn’t they fight?”

She was quiet for a spell.

“Guilty consciences?” she said.

I shook my head. “Spare me.”

She was quiet a moment longer.

“Shit,” she said. “Maybe they’re just waiting. Maybe they’re going to collapse the case in full view of everybody. In D.C., tomorrow, when they’ve got their lawyers there. To ruin our careers. To put us in our place. Maybe it’s a vindictive thing.”

I shook my head again. “What did I charge them with?”

“Conspiracy to commit homicide.”

I nodded. “I think they misunderstood me.”

“It was plain English.”

“They understood the words. But not the context. I was talking about one thing, and they thought I was talking about a different thing. They thought I was talking about something else entirely. They pled guilty to the wrong conspiracy, Summer. They pled guilty to something they know can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

She said nothing.

“The agenda,” I said. “It’s still out there. They never got it back. Carbone double-crossed them. They opened the briefcase up there on I-95, and the agenda wasn’t in it. It was already gone.”

“So where is it?”

“I’ll show you where,” I said. “That’s why we came back. So you can use it tomorrow. Up in D.C. Use it to leverage all the other stuff. The things we’re weak on.”

We slid out of the car into the cold. Walked across the lot to the cell block door. Stepped inside. I could hear the sounds of sleeping men. I could taste the sour dormitory air. We walked through corridors and turned corners in the dark until we came to Carbone’s billet. It was empty and undisturbed. We stepped in and I snapped the light on. Stepped over to the bed. Reached up to the shelf. Ran my fingers along the spines of the books. Pulled out the tall thin Rolling Stones souvenir. Held it. Shook it.

A four-page conference agenda fell out on the bed.

We stared at it.

“Brubaker told him to hide it,” I said.

I picked it up and handed it to Summer. Turned the light back off and stepped out into the corridor. Came face-to-face with the young Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan. He was in skivvies and a T-shirt. He was barefoot. He had been drinking beer about four hours ago, according to the way he smelled.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look who we have here.”

I said nothing.

“You woke me up talking,” he said. “And flashing lights on and off.”

I said nothing.

He glanced into Carbone’s cell. “Revisiting the scene of the crime?”

“This isn’t where he died.”

“You know what I mean.”

Then he smiled and I saw his hands bunch into fists. I slammed him back against the wall with my left forearm. His skull hit the concrete and his eyes glazed for a second. I kept my arm hard and level across his chest. Got the point of my elbow on his right bicep and spread my open fingers across his left bicep. Pinned him to the wall. Leaned on him with all my weight. Kept on leaning until he was having trouble breathing.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Read the newspaper every day this week.”

Then I fumbled in my jacket pocket with my free hand and found the bullet. The one he had delivered. The one with my name on it. I held it with my finger and thumb right down at the base. It shone gold in the faint night light.

“Watch this,” I said.

I showed him the bullet. Then I shoved it up his nose.

My sergeant was at her desk. The one with the baby son. She had coffee going. I poured two mugs and carried them into my office. Summer carried the agenda, like a trophy. She took the staple out of the paper and laid the four sheets side by side on my desk.

They were original typewritten pages. Not carbons, not faxes, not photocopies. That was clear. There were handwritten notes and penciled amendments between the lines and in the margins. There were three different scripts. Mostly Kramer’s, I guessed, but Vassell’s and Coomer’s as well, almost certainly. It had been a round-robin first draft. That was clear too. It had been the subject of a lot of thought and scrutiny.

The first sheet was an analysis of the problems that Armored was facing. The integrated units, the loss of prestige. The possibility of ceding command to others. It was gloomy, but it was conventional. And it was accurate, according to the Chief of Staff.

The second page and the third page contained more or less what I had predicted to Summer. Proposed attempts to smear key opponents, with maximum use of dirty laundry. Some of the margin notes hinted at some of the dirt, and a lot of it sounded pretty interesting. I wondered how they had gathered information like that. And I wondered if anyone in JAG Corps would follow up on it. Someone probably would. Investigations were like that. They led off in all kinds of random directions.

There were ideas for public relations campaigns. Most of them were pretty limp. These guys hadn’t mixed with the public since they took the bus up the Hudson to start their plebe year at the Point. Then there were references to the big defense contractors. There were ideas for political initiatives inside the Department of the Army and in Congress. Some of the political ideas looped right back and tied in with the defense contractor references. There were hints of some pretty sophisticated relationships there. Clearly money flowed one way and favors flowed the other way. The Secretary of Defense was mentioned by name. His help was taken pretty much for granted. On one line his name was actually underlined and a note in the margin read: bought and paid for. Altogether the first three pages were full of the kind of stuff you would expect from arrogant professionals heavily invested in the status quo. It was murky and sordid and desperate, for sure. But it wasn’t anything that would send you to jail.

That stuff came on the fourth page.

The fourth page had a curious heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile. Underneath that was a typed quotation from The Art of War by Sun-tzu: To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish. Alongside that in the margin was a penciled addendum in what I guessed was Vassell’s handwriting: While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will. Wavell.

“Who’s Wavell?” Summer said.

“An old British field marshal,” I said. “World War Two. Then he was viceroy of India. He was blind in one eye from World War One.”

Underneath the Wavell quote was another penciled note, in a different hand. Coomer’s, probably. It said: Volunteers? Me? Marshall? Those three words were ringed and connected with a long looping pencil line back to the heading: T.E.P., The Extra Mile.

“What’s that about?” Summer said.

“Read on,” I said.

Below the Sun-tzu quote was a typed list of eighteen names. I knew most of them. There were key battalion commanders from prestige infantry divisions like the 82nd and the 101st, and significant staffers from the Pentagon, and some other people. There was an interesting mix of ages and ranks. There were no really junior officers, but the list wasn’t confined to senior people. Not by any means. There were some rising stars in there. Some obvious choices, some offbeat mavericks. A few of the names meant nothing to me. They belonged to people I had never heard of. There was a guy listed called Abelson, for instance. I didn’t know who Abelson was. He had a penciled check mark against his name. Nobody else did.

“What’s the check mark for?” Summer said.

I dialed my sergeant outside at her desk.

“Ever heard of a guy called Abelson?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Find out about him,” I said. “He’s probably a light colonel or better.”

I went back to the list. It was short, but it was easy enough to interpret. It was a list of eighteen key bones in a massive evolving skeleton. Or eighteen key nerves in a complex neurological system. Remove them, and a certain part of the army would be somewhat handicapped. Today, for sure. But more importantly it would be handicapped tomorrow too. Because of the rising stars. Because of the stunted evolution. And from what I knew about the people whose names I recognized, the part of the army that would get hurt was exclusively the part with the light units in it. More specifically, those light units that looked ahead toward the twenty-first century rather than those that looked backward at the nineteenth. Eighteen people was not a large number, in a million-man army. But it was a superbly chosen sample. There had been some acute analysis going on. Some precision targeting. The movers and the shakers, the thinkers and the planners. The bright stars. If you wanted a list of eighteen people whose presence or absence would make a difference to the future, this was it, all typed and tabulated.

My phone rang. I hit Speaker and we heard my sergeant’s voice.

“Abelson was the Apache helicopter guy,” she said. “You know, the attack helicopters? The gunships? Always beating that particular drum?”

“Was?” I said.

“He died the day before New Year’s Eve. Car versus pedestrian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit-and-run.”

I clicked the phone off.

“Swan mentioned that,” I said. “In passing. Now that I think about it.”

“The check mark,” Summer said.

I nodded. “One down, seventeen to go.”

“What does T.E.P. mean?”

“It’s old CIA jargon,” I said. “It means terminate with extreme prejudice.”

She said nothing.

“In other words, assassinate,” I said.

We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The supreme proof of a commander’s courage. The surest test of his strength of will. I tried to imagine what kind of crazy isolated ego-driven fever could drive people to add grandiose quotations like those to a list of men they wanted to murder so they could keep their jobs and their prestige. I couldn’t even begin to figure it out. So I just gave it up and butted the four typewritten sheets back together and threaded the staple back through the original holes. I took an envelope from my drawer and slipped them inside it.

“It’s been out in the world since the first of the year,” I said. “And they knew it was gone for good on the fourth. It wasn’t in the briefcase, and it wasn’t on Brubaker’s body. That’s why they were resigned. They gave up on it a week ago. They killed three people looking for it, but they never found it. So they were just sitting there, knowing for sure sooner or later it was going to come back and bite them in the ass.”

I slid the envelope across the desk.

“Use it,” I told Summer. “Use it in D.C. Use it to nail their damn hides to the wall.”

By then it was already four o’clock in the morning and Summer left for the Pentagon immediately. I went to bed and got four hours’ sleep. Woke myself up at eight. I had one thing left to do, and I knew for sure there was one thing left to be done to me.

twenty-five

I got to my office at nine o’clock in the morning. The woman with the baby son was gone by then. The Louisiana corporal had taken her place.

“JAG Corps is here for you,” he said. He jerked his thumb at my inner door. “I let them go straight in.”

I nodded. Looked around for coffee. There wasn’t any. Bad start. I opened my door and stepped inside. Found two guys in there. One of them was in a visitor’s chair. One of them was at my desk. Both of them were in Class As. Both had JAG Corps badges on their lapels. A small gold wreath, crossed with a saber and an arrow. The guy in the visitor’s chair was a captain. The guy at my desk was a lieutenant colonel.

“Where do I sit?” I said.

“Anywhere you like,” the colonel said.

I said nothing.

“I saw the telexes from Irwin,” he said. “You have my sincere congratulations, Major. You did an outstanding job.”

I said nothing.

“And I heard about Kramer’s agenda,” he said. “I just got a call from the Chief of Staff’s office. That’s an even better result. It justifies Operation Argon all by itself.”

“You’re not here to discuss the case,” I said.

“No,” he said. “We’re not. That discussion is happening at the Pentagon, with your lieutenant.”

I took a spare visitor’s chair and put it against the wall, under the map. I sat down on it. Leaned back. Put my hand up over my head and played with the pushpins. The colonel leaned forward and looked at me. He waited, like he wanted me to speak first.

“You planning on enjoying this?” I asked him.

“It’s my job,” he said.

“You like your job?”

“Not all the time,” he said.

I said nothing.

“This case was like a wave on the beach,” he said. “Like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind.”

I said nothing.

“Except it did leave something behind,” he said. “It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we have to address it.”

He waited for me to speak. I thought about clamming up. Thought about making him do all the work himself. But in the end I just shrugged and gave it up.

“The brutality complaint,” I said.

He nodded. “Colonel Willard brought it to our attention. And it’s awkward. Whereas the unauthorized use of the travel warrants can be dismissed as germane to the investigation, the brutality complaint can’t. Because apparently the two civilians were completely unrelated to the business at hand.”

“I was misinformed,” I said.

“That doesn’t alter the fact, I’m afraid.”

“Your witness is dead.”

“He left a signed affidavit. That stands forever. That’s the same as if he were right there in the courtroom, testifying.”

I said nothing.

“It comes down to a simple question of fact,” the colonel said. “A simple yes or no answer, really. Did you do what Carbone alleged?”

I said nothing.

The colonel stood up. “You can talk it over with your counsel.”

I glanced at the captain. Apparently he was my lawyer. The colonel shuffled out and closed the door on us. The captain leaned forward from his chair and shook my hand and told me his name.

“You should cut the colonel some slack,” he said. “He’s giving you a loophole a mile wide. This whole thing is a charade.”

“I rocked the boat,” I said. “The army is getting its licks in.”

“You’re wrong, Reacher. Nobody wants to screw you over this. Willard forced the issue, is all. So we have to go through the motions.”

“Which are?”

“All you’ve got to do is deny it. That throws Carbone’s evidence into dispute, and since he’s not around to be cross-examined, your Sixth Amendment right to be confronted by the witness against you kicks in and it guarantees you an automatic dismissal.”

I sat still.

“How would it be done?” I said.

“You sign an affidavit just like Carbone did. His says black, yours says white, the problem goes away.”

“Official paper?”

“It’ll take five minutes. We can do it right here. Your corporal can type it and witness it. Dead easy.”

I nodded.

“What’s the alternative?” I said.

“You’d be nuts to even think about an alternative.”

“What would happen?”

“It would be like pleading guilty.”

“What would happen?” I said again.

“With an effective guilty plea? Loss of rank, loss of pay, backdated to the incident. Civilian Affairs wouldn’t let us get away with anything less.”

I said nothing.

“You’d be busted back to captain. In the regular MPs, because the 110th wouldn’t want you anymore. That’s the short answer. But you’d be nuts to even think about it. All you have to do is deny it.”

I sat there and thought about Carbone. Thirty-five years old, sixteen of them in the service. Infantry, Airborne, the Rangers, Delta. Sixteen years of hard time. He had done nothing except try to keep a secret he should never have had to keep. And try to alert his unit to a threat. Nothing much wrong with either of those things. But he was dead. Dead in the woods, dead on a slab. Then I thought about the fat guy at the strip club. I didn’t really care about the farmer. A busted nose was no big deal. But the fat guy was messed up bad. On the other hand, he wasn’t one of North Carolina’s finest citizens. I doubted if the governor was lining him up for a civic award.

I thought about both of those guys for a long time. Carbone, and the fat man in the parking lot. Then I thought about myself. A major, a star, a hotshot special unit investigator, a go-to guy headed for the top.

“OK,” I said. “Bring the colonel back in.”

The captain got up out of his chair and opened the door. Held it for the colonel. Closed it behind him. Sat down again next to me. The colonel shuffled past us and sat down at the desk.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s wrap this thing up. The complaint is baseless, yes?”

I looked at him. Said nothing.

“Well?”

You’re going to do the right thing.

“The complaint is true,” I said.

He stared at me.

“The complaint is accurate,” I said. “In every detail. It went down exactly like Carbone described.”

“Christ,” the colonel said.

“Are you crazy?” the captain said.

“Probably,” I said. “But Carbone wasn’t a liar. That shouldn’t be the last thing that goes in his record. He deserves better than that. He was in sixteen years.”

The room went quiet. We all just sat there. They were looking at a lot of paperwork. I was looking at being an MP captain again. No more special unit. But it wasn’t a big surprise. I had seen it coming. I had seen it coming ever since I closed my eyes on the plane and the dominoes started falling, end over end, one after the other.

“One request,” I said. “I want a two-day suspension included. Starting now.”

“Why?”

“I have to go to a funeral. I don’t want to beg my CO for leave.”

The colonel looked away.

“Granted,” he said.

I went back to my quarters and packed my duffel with everything I owned. I cashed a check at the commissary and left fifty-two dollars in an envelope for my sergeant. I mailed fifty back to Franz. I collected the crowbar that Marshall had used from the pathologist and I put it with the one we had on loan from the store. Then I went to the MP motor pool and looked for a vehicle to borrow. I was surprised to see Kramer’s rental still parked there.

“Nobody told us what to do with it,” the clerk said.

“Why not?”

“Sir, you tell me. It was your case.”

I wanted something inconspicuous, and the little red Ford stood out among all the olive drab and black. But then I realized the situation would be reversed out in the world. Out there, the little red Ford wouldn’t attract a second glance.

“I’ll take it back now,” I said. “I’m headed to Dulles anyway.”

There was no paperwork, because it wasn’t an army vehicle.

I left Fort Bird at twenty past ten in the morning and drove north toward Green Valley. I went much slower than before, because the Ford was a slow car and I was a slow driver, at least compared to Summer. I didn’t stop for lunch. I just kept on going. I arrived at the police station at a quarter past three in the afternoon. I found Detective Clark at his desk in the bullpen. I told him his case was closed. Told him Summer would give him the details. I collected the crowbar he had on loan and drove the ten miles to Sperryville. I squeezed through the narrow alley and parked outside the hardware store. The window had been fixed. The square of plywood was gone. I looped all three crowbars over my forearm and went inside and returned them to the old guy behind the counter. Then I got back in the car and followed the only road out of town, all the way to Washington D.C.

I took a short counterclockwise loop on the Beltway and went looking for the worst part of town I could find. There was plenty of choice. I picked a four-block square that was mostly crumbling warehouses with narrow alleys between. I found what I wanted in the third alley I checked. I saw an emaciated whore come out a brick doorway. I went in past her and found a guy in a hat. He had what I wanted. It took a minute to get some mutual trust going. But eventually cash money settled our differences, like it always does everywhere. I bought a little reefer, a little speed, and two dime rocks of crack cocaine. I could see the guy in the hat wasn’t impressed by the quantities. I could see he wrote me off as an amateur.

Then I drove to Rock Creek, Virginia. I got there just before five o’clock. Parked three hundred yards from 110th Special Unit headquarters, up on a rise, where I could look down over the fence into the parking lot. I picked out Willard’s car with no trouble at all. He had told me all about it. A classic Pontiac GTO. It was right there, near the rear exit. I slumped way down in my seat and kept my eyes wide-open and watched.

He came out at five-fifteen. Bankers’ hours. He fired up the Pontiac and backed it away from the building. I had my window cracked open for air and even from three hundred yards I could hear the rumble of the pipes. They made a pretty good V-8 sound. I figured it was a sound Summer would have enjoyed. I made a mental note that if I ever won the lottery I should buy her a GTO of her own.

I fired up the Ford. Willard came out of the lot and turned toward me. I hunkered down and let him go past. Then I waited one thousand, two thousand and U-turned and followed after him. He was an easy tail. With the window down I could have done it by sound alone. He drove fairly slow, big and obvious up ahead, near the crown of the road. I stayed well back and let the drive-time traffic fill his mirrors. He headed east toward the D.C. suburbs. I figured he would have a rental in Arlington or Maclean from his Pentagon days. I hoped it wasn’t an apartment. But I figured it would more likely be a house. With a garage, for the muscle car. Which was good, because a house was easier.

It was a house. It was on a rural street in the no-man’s-land north of Arlington. Plenty of trees, most of them bare, some of them evergreen. The lots were irregular. The driveways were long and curved. The plantings were messy. The street should have had a sign: Divorced or single male middle-income government workers only. It was that kind of a place. Not totally ideal, but a lot better than a straight suburban tract with side-by-side front yards full of frolicking kids and anxious mothers.

I drove on by and parked a mile away. Sat and waited for the darkness.

I waited until seven o’clock and I walked. There was low cloud and mist. No starlight. No moon. I was in woodland-pattern BDUs. I was as invisible as the Pentagon could make me. I figured at seven the place would still be mostly empty. I figured a lot of middle-income government workers would have ambitions to become high-income government workers, so they would stay at their desks, trying to impress whoever needed impressing. I used the street that ran parallel to the back of Willard’s street and found two messy yards next to each other. Neither house was lit. I walked down the first driveway and kept on going around the dark bulk of the house and straight through the backyard. I stood still. No dogs barked. I turned and tracked along the boundary fences until I was looking at Willard’s own backyard. It was full of dead hummocked grass. There was a rusted-out barbecue grill abandoned in the middle of the lawn. In army terms the place was not standing tall and squared away. It was a mess.

I bent a fence post until I had room to slip past it. Walked straight through Willard’s yard and around his garage to his front door. There was no porch light. The view from the street was half-open, half-obscured. Not perfect. But not bad. I put my elbow on the bell. Heard it sound inside. There was a short pause and then I heard footsteps. I stood back. Willard opened the door. No delay at all. Maybe he was expecting Chinese food. Or a pizza.

I punched him in the chest to move him backward. Stepped in after him and closed the door behind me with my foot. It was a dismal house. The air was stale. Willard was clutching the stair post, gasping for breath. I hit him in the face and knocked him down. He came up on his hands and knees and I kicked him hard in the ass and kept on kicking until he took the hint and started crawling toward the kitchen as fast as he could. He got himself in there and kind of rolled over and sat on the floor with his back hard up against a cabinet. There was fear in his face, for sure, but confusion too. Like he couldn’t believe I was doing this. Like he was thinking: This is about a disciplinary complaint? His bureaucratic calculus couldn’t compute it.

“Did you hear about Vassell and Coomer?” I asked him.

He nodded, fast and scared.

“Remember Lieutenant Summer?” I asked him.

He nodded again.

“She pointed something out to me,” I said. “Kind of obvious, but she said they would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t ignored you.”

He just stared at me.

“It made me think,” I said. “What exactly was I ignoring?”

He said nothing.

“I misjudged you,” I said. “I apologize. Because I thought I was ignoring a busybody careerist asshole. I thought I was ignoring some kind of a prissy nervous idiot corporate manager who thought he knew better. But I wasn’t. I was ignoring something else entirely.”

He stared up at me.

“You didn’t feel embarrassed about Kramer,” I said. “You didn’t feel sensitive about me harassing Vassell and Coomer. You weren’t speaking for the army when you wanted Carbone written up as a training accident. You were doing the job you were put there to do. Someone wanted three homicides covered up, and you were put there to do it for them. You were participating in a deliberate cover-up, Willard. That’s what you were doing. That’s what I was ignoring. I mean, what the hell else were you doing, ordering me not to investigate a homicide? It was a cover-up, and it was planned, and it was structured, and it was decided well in advance. It was decided on the second day of January, when Garber was moved out and you were moved in. You were put in there so that what they were planning to do on the fourth could be controlled. No other reason.”

He said nothing.

“I thought they wanted an incompetent in there, so that nature would take its course. But they went one better than that. They put a friend in there.”

He said nothing.

“You should have refused,” I said. “If you had refused, they wouldn’t have gone ahead with it and Carbone and Brubaker would still be alive.”

He said nothing.

“You killed them, Willard. Just as much as they did.”

I crouched down next to him. He scrabbled on the floor and pressed backward against the cupboard behind him. He had defeat in his eyes. But he gave it one last shot.

“You can’t prove anything,” he said.

Now I said nothing.

“Maybe it was just incompetence,” he said. “You thought about that? How are you going to prove the intention?”

I said nothing. His eyes went hard.

“You’re not dealing with idiots,” he said. “There’s no proof anywhere.”

I took Franz’s Beretta out of my pocket. The one I had brought out of the Mojave. I hadn’t lost it. It had ridden all the way with me from California. That was why I had checked my luggage, just that one time. They won’t let you carry guns inside the cabin. Not without paperwork.

“This piece is listed as destroyed,” I said. “It doesn’t officially exist anymore.”

He stared at it.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You can’t prove anything.”

“You’re not dealing with an idiot either,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It was an order. From the top. We’re in the army. We obey orders.”

I shook my head. “That excuse never worked for any soldier anywhere.”

“It was an order,” he said again.

“From who?”

He just closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know exactly who it was. And I know I can’t get to him. Not where he is. But I can get to you. You can be my messenger.”

He opened his eyes.

“You won’t do it,” he said.

“Why didn’t you refuse?”

“I couldn’t refuse. It was time to choose up sides. Don’t you see? We’re all going to have to do that.”

I nodded. “I guess we are.”

“Be smart now,” he said. “Please.”

“I thought you were one bad apple,” I said. “But the whole barrel is bad. The good apples are the rare ones.”

He stared at me.

“You ruined it for me,” I said. “You and your rotten friends.”

“Ruined what?”

“Everything.”

I stood up. Stepped back. Clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire.

He stared at me.

“Good-bye, Colonel Willard,” I said.

I put the gun to my temple. He stared at me.

“Just kidding,” I said.

Then I shot him through the center of the forehead.

It was a typical nine-millimeter full metal jacket through and through. It put the back of his skull into the cupboard behind him and left it there with a lot of smashed china. I stuffed the reefer and the speed and the crack cocaine in his pockets, along with a symbolic roll of dollar bills. Then I walked out the back door and away through his yard. I slipped through the fence and through the lot behind his and walked back to my car. I sat in the driver’s seat and opened my duffel and changed my boots. Took off the pair that had been ruined in the Mojave and put on a better pair. Then I drove west, toward Dulles. Into the Hertz return bays. Car rental bosses aren’t dumb. They know people get cars messy. They know they accumulate all kinds of crap inside. So they position big garbage cans near the return bays in the hope that renters will do the decent thing and clear some of the crap out themselves. That way they save on wages. Cut out even a minute a car, and staff costs drop a lot over a whole year. I put my old boots in one can, and the Beretta in another. As many cars as Hertz rented at Dulles in a day, those cans were headed for the crusher on a regular basis.

I walked all the way to the terminal. I didn’t feel like taking the bus. I showed my military ID and used my checkbook and bought a one-way ticket to Paris, on the same Air France red-eye Joe had taken back when the world was different.

I got to the Avenue Rapp at eight in the morning. Joe told me the cars were coming at ten. So I shaved and showered in the guest bathroom and found my mother’s ironing board and pressed my Class A uniform very carefully. I found polish in a cupboard and shined my shoes. Then I dressed. I put my full array of medals on, all four rows. I followed the Correct Order of Wear regulations and the Wear of Full Size Medals regulations. Each one hung down neatly over the ribbon in the row below. I used a cloth and cleaned them. I cleaned my other badges too, including my major’s oak leaves, one last time. Then I went into the white-painted living room to wait.

Joe was in a black suit. I was no expert on clothing but I figured it was new. It was some kind of a fine material. Silk, maybe. Or cashmere. I didn’t know. It was beautifully cut. He had a white shirt and a black tie. Black shoes. He looked good. I had never seen him look better. He was holding up. He was a little strained around the eyes, maybe. We didn’t talk. Just waited.

At five to ten we went down to the street. The corbillard showed up right on time, from the dépôt mortuaire. Behind it was a black Citroën limousine. We got in the limousine and closed the doors and it moved off after the hearse, slow and quiet.

“Just us?” I said.

“The others are meeting us there.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Lamonnier,” he said. “Some of her friends.”

“Where are we doing it?”

“Père-Lachaise,” he said.

I nodded. Père-Lachaise was a famous old cemetery. Some kind of a special place. I figured maybe my mother’s Resistance history entitled her to be buried there. Maybe Lamonnier had fixed it.

“There’s an offer in on the apartment,” Joe said.

“How much?”

“In dollars your share would be about sixty thousand.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “Give my share to Lamonnier. Tell him to find whatever old guys are still alive and spread it around. He’ll know some organizations.”

“Old soldiers?”

“Old anybody. Whoever did the right thing at the right time.”

“You sure? You might need it.”

“I’d rather not have it.”

“OK,” he said. “Your choice.”

I watched out the windows. It was a gray day. The honey tones of Paris were beaten down by the weather. The river was sluggish, like molten iron. We drove through the Place de la Bastille. Père-Lachaise was up in the northeast. Not far, but not so near you thought of it as close. We got out of the car near a little booth that sold maps to the famous graves. All kinds of people were buried at Père-Lachaise: Chopin, Molière, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison.

There were people waiting for us at the cemetery gate. There was the concierge from my mother’s building, and two other women I didn’t know. The croques-morts lifted the coffin up on their shoulders. They held it steady for a second and then set off at a slow march. Joe and I fell in behind, side by side. The three women followed us. The air was cold. We walked along gritty paths between strange European mausoleums and headstones. Eventually we came to an open grave. Excavated earth was piled neatly on one side of it and covered with a green carpet that I guessed was supposed to look like grass. Lamonnier was waiting there for us. I guessed he had gotten there well ahead of time. He probably walked slower than a funeral. Probably hadn’t wanted to hold us up, or embarrass himself.

The pallbearers set the coffin down on rope slings that were already laid out in position. Then they picked it up again and maneuvered it over the hole and used the ropes to lower it down gently. Into the hole. There was a man who read some stuff from a book. I heard the words in French and their English translations drifted through my mind. Dust to dust, certain it is, vale of tears. I didn’t really pay attention. I just looked at the coffin, down in the hole.

The man finished speaking and one of the pallbearers pulled back the green carpet and Joe scooped up a handful of dirt. He weighed it in his palm and then threw it down on the coffin lid. It thumped on the wood. The man with the book did the same thing. Then the concierge. Then both of the other women. Then Lamonnier. He lurched over on his awkward canes and bent down and filled his hand with earth. Paused with his eyes full of tears and just turned his wrist so that the dirt trailed out of his fist like water.

I stepped up and put my hand to my heart and slipped my Silver Star off its pin. Held it in my palm. The Silver Star is a beautiful medal. It has a tiny silver star in the center of a much larger gold one. It has a bright silk ribbon in red, white, and blue, all shot through with a watermark. Mine was engraved on the back: J. Reacher. I thought: J for Josephine. I tossed it down in the hole. It hit the coffin and bounced once and landed right side up, a little gleam of light in the grayness.

I called long-distance from the Avenue Rapp and got orders back to Panama. Joe and I ate a late lunch together and promised to stay in better touch. Then I headed back to the airport and flew through London and Miami and picked up a transport south. As a newly minted captain I was given a company to command. We were tasked to maintain order in Panama City during the Just Cause endgame. It was fun. I had a decent bunch of guys. Being out in the field again was refreshing. And the coffee was as good as ever. They ship it wherever we go, in cans as big as oil drums.

I never went back to Fort Bird. Never saw that sergeant again, the one with the baby son. I thought of her sometimes, when force reduction began to bite. I never saw Summer again either. I heard she talked up Kramer’s agenda so much that JAG Corps wanted the death penalty for treason, and then she finessed confessions out of Vassell and Coomer and Marshall on all the other stuff in exchange for life in prison. I heard she got promoted to captain the day after they went to Leavenworth. So she and I ended up on the same pay grade. We met in the middle. But our paths never crossed again.

I never went back to Paris either. I meant to. I thought I might go climb down under the Pont des Invalides, late at night, and just sniff the air. But it never happened. I was in the army, and I was always where someone else told me to be.

Dedicated to the memory of Adele King

ONE SHOT

A Delacorte Press Book / June 2005

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2005 by Lee Child

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Child, Lee.

One shot: a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p.    cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction.  2. Military police—Fiction.  3. Serial murders—Fiction.  4. Snipers—Fiction.  5. Middle West—Fiction.

I. Title

PS3553.H4838 O53 2005

813/.54 22

2004058246

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33547-4

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

One Shot

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

Friday. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or maybe the easiest. Because at five o’clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.

The man with the rifle drove north. Not fast, not slow. Not drawing attention. Not standing out. He was in a light-colored minivan that had seen better days. He was alone behind the wheel. He was wearing a light-colored raincoat and the kind of shapeless light-colored beanie hat that old guys wear on the golf course when the sun is out or the rain is falling. The hat had a two-tone red band all around it. It was pulled down low. The coat was buttoned up high. The man was wearing sunglasses, even though the van had dark windows and the sky was cloudy. And he was wearing gloves, even though winter was three months away and the weather wasn’t cold.

Traffic slowed to a crawl where First Street started up a hill. Then it stopped completely where two lanes became one because the blacktop was torn up for construction. There was construction all over town. Driving had been a nightmare for a year. Holes in the road, gravel trucks, concrete trucks, blacktop spreaders. The man with the rifle lifted his hand off the wheel. Pulled back his cuff. Checked his watch.

Eleven minutes.

Be patient.

He took his foot off the brake and crawled ahead. Then he stopped again where the roadway narrowed and the sidewalks widened where the downtown shopping district started. There were big stores to the left and the right, each one set a little higher than the last, because of the hill. The wide sidewalks gave plenty of space for shoppers to stroll. There were cast-iron flagpoles and cast-iron lamp posts all lined up like sentries between the people and the cars. The people had more space than the cars. Traffic was very slow. He checked his watch again.

Eight minutes.

Be patient.

A hundred yards later the prosperity faded a little. The congestion eased. First Street opened out and became slightly shabby again. There were bars and dollar stores. Then a parking garage on the left. Then yet more construction where the parking garage was being extended. Then, farther ahead, the street was blocked by a low wall. Behind it was a windy pedestrian plaza with an ornamental pool and a fountain. On the plaza’s left, the old city library. On its right, a new office building. Behind it, a black glass tower. First Street turned an abrupt right angle in front of the plaza’s boundary wall and ran away west, past untidy rear entrances and loading docks and then on under the raised state highway.

But the man in the minivan slowed before he hit the turn in front of the plaza and made a left and entered the parking garage. He drove straight up the ramp. There was no barrier, because each slot had its own parking meter. Therefore there was no cashier, no witness, no ticket, no paper trail. The man in the minivan knew all that. He wound around the ramps to the second level and headed for the far back corner of the structure. Left the van idling in the aisle for a moment and slipped out of the seat and moved an orange traffic cone from the slot he wanted. It was the last one in the old part of the building, right next to where the new part was being added on.

He drove the van into the slot and shut it down. Sat still for a moment. The garage was quiet. It was completely full with silent cars. The slot he had protected with the traffic cone had been the last one available. The garage was always packed. He knew that. That was why they were extending it. They were doubling its size. It was used by shoppers. That was why it was quiet. Nobody in their right mind would try to leave at five o’clock. Not into the rush hour traffic. Not with the construction delays. Either they would get out by four or wait until six.

The man in the minivan checked his watch.

Four minutes.

Easy.

He opened the driver’s door and slid out. Took a quarter from his pocket and put it in the meter. Twisted the handle hard and heard the coin fall and saw the clockwork give him an hour in exchange. There was no other sound. Nothing in the air except the smell of parked automobiles. Gasoline, rubber, cold exhaust.

He stood still next to the van. On his feet he had a pair of old desert boots. Khaki suede, single eyelets, white crepe soles, made by Clarks of England, much favored by Special Forces soldiers. An iconic design, unchanged in maybe sixty years.

He glanced back at the parking meter. Fifty-nine minutes. He wouldn’t need fifty-nine minutes. He opened the minivan’s sliding rear door and leaned inside and unfolded a blanket and revealed the rifle. It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten-shot box magazine, chambered for the .308. It was the exact commercial equivalent of the M-14 self-loading sniper rifle that the American military had used during his long-ago years in the service. It was a fine weapon. Maybe not quite as accurate with the first cold shot as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do. It would do just fine. He wasn’t going to be looking at extraordinary distances. It was loaded with Lake City M852s. His favorite custom cartridges. Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets. The load was better than the gun, probably. A slight mismatch.

He listened to the silence and lifted the rifle off the rear bench. Carried it away with him to where the old part of the garage finished and the new part began. There was a half-inch trench between the old concrete and the new. Like a demarcation line. He guessed it was an expansion joint. For the summer heat. He guessed they were going to fill it with soft tar. Directly above it there was yellow-and-black Caution Do Not Enter tape strung between two pillars. He dropped to one knee and slid under it. Stood up again and walked on into the raw new construction.

Parts of the new concrete floor were troweled smooth and parts were rough, still waiting for a final surface. There were wooden planks laid here and there as walkways. There were haphazard piles of paper cement sacks, some full, some empty. There were more open expansion joints. There were strings of bare lightbulbs, turned off. Empty wheelbarrows, crushed soda cans, spools of cable, unexplained lengths of lumber, piles of crushed stone, silent concrete mixers. There was gray cement dust everywhere, as fine as talc, and the smell of damp lime.

The man with the rifle walked on in the darkness until he came close to the new northeast corner. Then he stopped and put his back tight against a raw concrete pillar and stood still. Inched to his right with his head turned until he could see where he was. He was about eight feet from the garage’s new perimeter wall. Looking due north. The wall was about waist-high. It was unfinished. It had bolts cast into it to take lengths of metal barrier to stop cars hitting the concrete. There were receptacles cast into the floor to take the new parking meter posts.

The man with the rifle inched forward and turned a little until he felt the corner of the pillar between his shoulder blades. He turned his head again. Now he was looking north and east. Directly into the public plaza. The ornamental pool was a long narrow rectangle running away from him. It was maybe eighty feet by twenty. It was like a large tank of water, just sitting there. Like a big aboveground lap pool. It was bounded by four waist-high brick walls. The water lapped against their inner faces. His line of sight ran on an exact diagonal from its near front corner to its far back corner. The water looked to be about three feet deep. The fountain splashed right in the center of the pool. He could hear it, and he could hear slow traffic on the street, and the shuffle of feet below him. The front wall of the pool was about three feet behind the wall that separated the plaza from First Street. The two low walls ran close together and parallel for twenty feet, east to west, with just the width of a narrow walkway between them.

He was on the garage’s second floor, but the way First Street ran uphill meant the plaza was much less than one story below him. There was a definite downward angle, but it was shallow. On the right of the plaza he could see the new office building’s door. It was a shabby place. It had been built and it hadn’t been rented. He knew that. So to preserve some kind of credibility for the new downtown, the state had filled it with government offices. The Department of Motor Vehicles was in there, and a joint Army–Navy–Air Force–Marine Corps recruiting office. Maybe Social Security was in there. Maybe the Internal Revenue Service. The man with the rifle wasn’t really sure. And he didn’t really care.

He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach. The low crawl was a sniper’s principal mode of movement. In his years in the service he had low-crawled a million miles. Knees and elbows and belly. Standard tactical doctrine was for the sniper and his spotter to detach from the company a thousand yards out and crawl into position. In training he had sometimes taken many hours to do it, to avoid the observer’s binoculars. But this time he had only eight feet to cover. And as far as he knew there were no binoculars on him.

He reached the base of the wall and lay flat on the ground, pressed up tight against the raw concrete. Then he squirmed up into a sitting position. Then he knelt. He folded his right leg tight underneath him. He planted his left foot flat and his left shin vertical. He propped his left elbow on his left knee. Raised the rifle. Rested the end of the forestock on the top of the low concrete wall. Sawed it gently back and forth until it felt good and solid. Supported kneeling, the training manual called it. It was a good position. Second only to lying prone with a bipod, in his experience. He breathed in, breathed out. One shot, one kill. That was the sniper’s credo. To succeed required control and stillness and calm. He breathed in, breathed out. Felt himself relax. Felt himself come home.

Ready.

Infiltration successful.

Now wait until the time is right.

He waited about seven minutes, keeping still, breathing low, clearing his mind. He looked at the library on his left. Above it and behind it the raised highway curled in on stilts, like it was embracing the big old limestone building, cradling it, protecting it from harm. Then the highway straightened a little and passed behind the black glass tower. It was about level with the fourth story back there. The tower itself had the NBC peacock on a monolith near its main entrance, but the man with the rifle was sure that a small network affiliate didn’t occupy the whole building. Probably not more than a single floor. The rest of the space was probably one-man law firms or CPAs or real estate offices or insurance brokers or investment managers. Or empty.

People were coming out of the new building on the right. People who had been getting new licenses or turning in old plates or joining the army or hassling with federal bureaucracy. There were a lot of people. The government offices were closing. Five o’clock on a Friday. The people came out the doors and walked right-to-left directly in front of him, funneling into single file as they entered the narrow space and passed the short end of the ornamental pool between the two low walls. Like ducks in a shooting gallery. One after the other. A target-rich environment. The range was about a hundred feet. Approximately. Certainly less than thirty-five yards. Very close.

He waited.

Some of the people trailed their fingers in the water as they walked. The walls were just the right height for that. The man with the rifle could see bright copper pennies on the black tile under the water. They swam and rippled where the fountain disturbed the surface.

He watched. He waited.

The stream of people thickened up. Now there were so many of them coming all at once that they had to pause and group and shuffle and wait to get into single file to pass between the two low walls. Just like the traffic had snarled at the bottom of First Street. A bottleneck. After you. No, after you. It made the people slow. Now they were slow ducks in a shooting gallery.

The man with the rifle breathed in, and breathed out, and waited.

Then he stopped waiting.

He pulled the trigger, and kept on pulling.

His first shot hit a man in the head and killed him instantly. The gunshot was loud and there was a supersonic crack from the bullet and a puff of pink mist from the head and the guy went straight down like a puppet with the strings cut.

A kill with the first cold shot.

Excellent.

He worked fast, left to right. The second shot hit the next man in the head. Same result as the first, exactly. The third shot hit a woman in the head. Same result. Three shots in maybe two seconds. Three targets down. Absolute surprise. No reaction for a split second. Then chaos broke out. Pandemonium. Panic. There were twelve people caught in the narrow space between the plaza wall and the pool wall. Three were already down. The remaining nine ran. Four ran forward and five spun away from the corpses and ran back. Those five collided with the press of people still moving their way. There were sudden loud screams. There was a solid stalled mass of panicked humanity, right in front of the man with the rifle. Range, less than thirty-five yards. Very close.

His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit. His fifth missed completely. The Sierra Matchking passed close to a woman’s shoulder and hissed straight into the ornamental pool and disappeared. He ignored it and moved the Springfield’s muzzle a fraction, and his sixth shot caught a guy on the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart.

The man with the rifle stopped firing.

He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled backward three feet. He could smell burnt powder and over the ringing in his ears he could hear women screaming and feet pounding and the crunch of panicked fender benders on the street below. Don’t worry, little people, he thought. It’s over now. I’m out of here. He lay on his stomach and swept his spent shell cases into a pile. The bright Lake City brass shone right there in front of him. He scooped five of them into his gloved hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an unfinished expansion joint. Just dropped right down into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench. He heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom.

Decision?

Leave it, surely.

No time.

He jammed the five cases he had in his raincoat pocket and crawled backward on his toes and his forearms and his belly. He lay still for a moment and listened to the screaming. Then he came to his knees and stood up. Turned around and walked back the same way he had come, fast but in control, over the rough concrete, along the walkway planks, through the dark and the dust, under the yellow-and-black tape. Back to his minivan.

The rear door was still open. He rewrapped the warm rifle in its blanket and slid the door shut on it. Got in the front and started the engine. Glanced through the windshield at the parking meter. He had forty-four minutes left on it. He backed out and headed for the exit ramp. Drove down it and out the unmanned exit and made a right and a left into the tangle of streets behind the department stores. He had passed under the raised highway before he heard the first sirens. He breathed out. The sirens were heading east, and he was heading west.

Good work, he thought. Covert infiltration, six shots fired, five targets down, successful exfiltration, as cool as the other side of the pillow.

Then he smiled suddenly. Long-term military records show that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended by its infantry. But for its specialist snipers, the result is better. Way better. Twelve and a half thousand times better, as a matter of fact. A modern army scores one enemy fatality for every one-point-two combat rounds expended by a sniper. And one for one-point-two happened to be the same batting average as five for six. Exactly the same average. Simple arithmetic. So even after all those years a trained military sniper had scored exactly what his old instructors would have expected. They would have been very pleased about that.

But his old instructors had trained snipers for the battlefield, not for urban crime. With urban crime, factors unknown on the battlefield kick in fast. Those factors tend to modify the definition of successful exfiltration. In this particular case, the media reacted quickest. Not surprisingly, since the shootings took place right in front of the local NBC affiliate’s window. Two things happened even before a dozen panicked bystanders all hit 911 on their cell phones simultaneously. First, every minicam in the NBC office starting rolling. The cameras were grabbed up and switched on and pointed at the windows. Second, a local news anchor called Ann Yanni started rehearsing what she knew would be her very first network breaking-news report. She was sick and scared and badly shaken, but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. So she started drafting in her head. She knew that words set agendas, and the words that came to her first were sniper and senseless and slaying. The alliteration was purely instinctive. So was the banality. But slaying was how Ann Yanni saw it. And slaying was a great word. It communicated the randomness, the wantonness, the savagery, the ferocity. It was a motiveless and impersonal word. It was exactly the right word for the story. At the same time she knew it wouldn’t work for the caption below the pictures. Massacre would be better there. Friday Night Massacre? Rush Hour Massacre? She ran for the door and hoped her graphics guy would come up with something along those lines unbidden.

Also not present on the battlefield is urban law enforcement. The dozen simultaneous 911 cell phone calls lit up the emergency switchboard like a Christmas tree, and the local police and fire departments were rolling within forty seconds. Everything was dispatched, all of them with lights popping and sirens blaring. Every black-and-white, every available detective, every crime-scene technician, every fire engine, every paramedic, every ambulance. Initially there was complete mayhem. The 911 calls had been panicked and incoherent. But crimes were plainly involved, and they were clearly serious, so the Serious Crimes Squad’s lead detective was given temporary command. He was a high-quality twenty-year PD veteran who had come all the way up from patrolman. His name was Emerson. He was blasting through slow traffic, dodging construction, hopelessly, desperately, with no way of knowing what had happened. Robbery, drugs, gang fight, terrorism, he had no hard information. None at all. But he was calm. Comparatively. His heart rate was holding below a hundred and fifty. He had an open channel with the 911 dispatcher, desperate to hear more as he drove.

“New guy on a cell phone now,” the dispatcher screamed.

“Who?” Emerson screamed back.

“Marine Corps, from the recruiting office.”

“Was he a witness?”

“No, he was inside. But he’s outside now.”

Emerson clamped his teeth. He knew he wasn’t going to be first-on-scene. Not even close. He knew he was leading from the rear. So he needed eyes. Now. A Marine? He’ll do.

“OK,” he said. “Patch the Marine through.”

There were loud clicks and electronic sounds and then Emerson heard a new acoustic. Outdoors, distant screaming, the splash of water. The fountain, he thought.

“Who is this?” he asked.

A voice came back, calm but rushed, loud and breathy, pressed close to a cell phone mouthpiece.

“This is Kelly,” it said. “First Sergeant, United States Marine Corps. Who am I speaking with?”

“Emerson, PD. I’m in traffic, about ten minutes out. What have we got?”

“Five KIA,” the Marine said.

“Five dead?”

“Affirmative.”

Shit.

“Injured?”

“None that I can see.”

“Five dead and no injured?”

“Affirmative,” the Marine said again.

Emerson said nothing. He had seen shootings in public places. He had seen dead people. But he had never seen only dead people. Public-place shootings always produced injured along with the dead. Usually in a one-to-one ratio, at least.

“You sure about no injured?” he said.

“That’s definitive, sir,” the Marine said.

“Who are the DOAs?”

“Civilians. Four males, one female.”

“Shit.”

“Roger that, sir,” the Marine said.

“Where were you?”

“In the recruiting office.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you hear?”

“Incoming gunfire, six rounds.”

“Handguns?”

“Long gun, I think. Just one of them.”

“A rifle?”

“An autoloader, I think. It fired fast, but it wasn’t on full automatic. The KIAs are all hit in the head.”

A sniper, Emerson thought. Shit. A crazy man with an assault weapon.

“Has he gone now?” he said.

“No further firing, sir.”

“He might still be there.”

“It’s a possibility, sir. People have taken cover. Most of them are in the library now.”

“Where are you?”

“Head-down behind the plaza wall, sir. I’ve got a few people with me.”

“Where was he?”

“Can’t say for sure. Maybe in the parking garage. The new part. People were pointing at it. There may have been some muzzle flash. And that’s the only major structure directly facing the KIAs.”

A warren, Emerson thought. A damn rat’s nest.

“The TV people are here,” the Marine said.

Shit, Emerson thought.

“Are you in uniform?” he asked.

“Full dress, sir. For the recruiting office.”

“OK, do your best to keep order until my guys get there.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Then the line went dead and Emerson heard his dispatcher’s breathing again. TV people and a crazy man with a rifle, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Pressure and scrutiny and second-guessing, like every other place that ever had TV people and a crazy man with a rifle. He hit the switch that gave him the all-cars radio net.

“All units, listen up,” he said. “This was a lone nutcase with a long gun. Probably an automatic weapon. Indiscriminate firing in a public place. Possibly from the new part of the parking garage. So either he’s still in there, or he’s already in the wind. If he left, it was either on foot or in a vehicle. So all units that are more than ten blocks out, stop now and lock down a perimeter. Nobody enters or exits, OK? No vehicles, no pedestrians, nobody under any circumstances. All units that are closer than ten blocks, proceed inward with extreme caution. But do not let him get away. Do not miss him. This is a must-win, people. We need this guy today, before CNN climbs all over us.”

The man in the minivan thumbed the button on the remote on the visor and the garage door rumbled upward. He drove inside and thumbed the button again and the door came down after him. He shut the engine off and sat still for a moment. Then he got out of the van and walked through the mud room and on into the kitchen. He patted the dog and turned on the television.

Paramedics in full body armor went in through the back of the library. Two of them stayed inside to check for injuries among the sheltering crowd. Four of them came out the front and ran crouched through the plaza and ducked behind the wall. They crawled toward the bodies and confirmed they were all DOA. Then they stayed right there. Flat on the ground and immobile next to the corpses. No unnecessary exposure until the garage has been searched, Emerson had ordered.

Emerson double-parked two blocks from the plaza and told a uniformed sergeant to direct the search of the parking garage, from the top down, from the southwest corner. The uniforms cleared the fourth level, and then the third. Then the second. Then the first. The old part was problematic. It was badly lit and full of parked cars, and every car represented a potential hiding place. A guy could be inside one, or under one, or behind one. But they didn’t find anybody. They had no real problem with the new construction. It wasn’t lit at all, but there were no parked cars in that part. The patrolmen simply came down the stairwell and swept each level in turn with flashlight beams.

Nobody there.

The sergeant relaxed and called it in.

“Good work,” Emerson said.

And it was good work. The fact that they searched from the southwest corner outward left the northeast corner entirely untouched. Nothing was disturbed. So by good luck or good judgment the PD had turned in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what would eventually be seen as an immaculate investigation from beginning to end.

By seven o’clock in the evening it was going dark and Ann Yanni had been on the air eleven times. Three of them network, eight of them local. Personally she was a little disappointed with that ratio. She was sensitive to a little skepticism coming her way from the network editorial offices. If it bleeds, it leads was any news organization’s credo, but this bleeding was way out there, far from New York or LA. It wasn’t happening in some manicured suburb outside of Washington D.C. It had a tinge of weirdo-from-the-heartland about it. There was no real possibility that anyone important would walk through this guy’s crosshairs. So it was not really prime-time stuff. And in truth Ann didn’t have much to offer. None of the victims was identified yet. None of the slain. The local PD was holding its cards close to its chest until families had been notified individually. So she had no heartwarming background stories to share. She wasn’t sure which of the male victims had been family men. Or churchgoers. She didn’t know if the woman had been a mother or a wife. She didn’t have much to offer in the way of visuals, either. Just a gathering crowd held five blocks back by police barricades, and a static long shot down the grayness of First Street, and occasional close-ups of the parking garage, which was where everyone seemed to assume the sniper had been.

By eight o’clock Emerson had made a lot of progress. His guys had taken hundreds of statements. Marine Corps First Sergeant Kelly was still sure he had heard six shots. Emerson was inclined to believe him. Marines could be trusted on stuff like that, presumably. Then some other guy mentioned his cell phone must have been open the whole time, connected to another guy’s voice mail. The cellular company retrieved the recording and six gunshots were faintly audible on it. But the medical examiners had counted only five entry wounds in the five DOAs. Therefore, there was a bullet missing. Three other witnesses were vague, but they all reported seeing a small plume of water kick out of the ornamental pool.

Emerson ordered the pool to be drained.

The fire department handled it. They set up floodlights and switched off the fountain and used a pumping engine to dump the water into the city storm drains. They figured there were maybe eighty thousand gallons of water to move, and that the job would be complete in an hour.

Meanwhile crime-scene technicians had used drinking straws and laser pointers to estimate the fatal trajectories. They figured the most reliable evidence would come from the first victim. Presumably he was walking purposefully right-to-left across the plaza when the first shot came in. After that, it was possible the subsequent victims were twisting or turning or moving in other unpredictable ways. So they based their conclusions solely on the first guy. His head was a mess, but it seemed pretty clear the bullet had traveled slightly high-to-low and left-to-right as it passed through. One tech stood upright on the spot and another held a drinking straw against the side of his head at the correct angle and held it steady. Then the first guy ducked out of the way and a third fired a laser pointer through the straw. It put a tiny red spot on the northeast corner of the parking garage extension, second level. Witnesses had claimed they had seen muzzle flashes up there. Now science had confirmed their statements.

Emerson sent his crime-scene people into the garage and told them they had all the time they needed. But he told them not to come back with nothing.

Ann Yanni left the black glass tower at eight-thirty and took a camera crew down to the barricades five blocks away. She figured she might be able to identify some of the victims by process of elimination. People whose relatives hadn’t come home for dinner might be gathering there, desperate for information. She shot twenty minutes of tape. She got no specific information at all. Instead she got twenty minutes of crying and wailing and sheer stunned incredulity. The whole city was in pain and in shock. She started out secretly proud that she was in the middle of everything, and she ended up with tears in her eyes and sick to her stomach.

The parking garage was where the case was broken. It was a bonanza. A treasure trove. A patrolman three blocks away had taken a witness statement from a regular user of the garage saying that the last slot on the second level had been blocked off with an orange traffic cone. Because of it, the witness had been forced to leave the garage and park elsewhere. He had been pissed about it. A guy from the city said the cone hadn’t been there officially. No way. Couldn’t have been. No reason for it. So the cone was bagged for evidence and taken away. Then the city guy said there were discreet security cameras at the entrance and the exit, wired to a video recorder in a maintenance closet. The tape was extracted and taken away. Then the city guy said the new extension was stalled for funding and hadn’t been worked on for two weeks. So anything in there less than two weeks old wasn’t anything to do with him.

The crime-scene technicians started at the yellow-and-black Caution Do Not Enter tape. The first thing they found was a scuff of blue cotton material on the rough concrete directly underneath it. Just a peach-fuzz of barely-visible fiber. Like a guy had dropped to one knee to squirm underneath and had left a little of his blue jeans behind. They photographed the scuff and then picked it up whole with an adhesive sheet of clear plastic. Then they brought in klieg lights and angled them low across the floor. Across the two-week-old cement dust. They saw perfect footprints. Really perfect footprints. The lead tech called Emerson on his Motorola.

“He was wearing weird shoes,” he said.

“What kind of weird shoes?”

“You ever heard of crepe? It’s a kind of crude rubber. Almost raw. Very grippy. It picks everything up. If we find this guy, we’re going to find crepe-soled shoes with cement dust all over the soles. Also, we’re going to find a dog in his house.”

“A dog?”

“We’ve got dog hair here, picked up by the crepe rubber earlier. And then scraped off again where the concrete’s rough. And carpet fibers. Probably from his rugs at home and in his car.”

“Keep going,” Emerson said.

At ten to nine Emerson briefed his Chief of Police for a press conference. He held nothing back. It was the Chief’s decision what to talk about and what to conceal.

“Six shots fired and five people dead,” Emerson said. “All head shots. I’m betting on a trained shooter. Probably ex-military.”

“Or a hunter?” the Chief said.

“Big difference between shooting deer and shooting people. The technique might be the same, but the emotion isn’t.”

“Were we right to keep this away from the FBI?”

“It wasn’t terrorism. It was a lone nut. We’ve seen them before.”

“I want to be able to sound confident about bringing this one in.”

“I know,” Emerson said.

“So how confident can I sound?”

“So far we’ve got good stuff, but not great stuff.”

The Chief nodded and said nothing.

At nine o’clock exactly, Emerson took a call from the pathologist. His staff had X-rayed all five heads. Massive tissue damage, entry and exit wounds, no lodged bullets.

“Hollow points,” the pathologist said. “All of them through and through.”

Emerson turned and looked at the ornamental pool. Six bullets in there, he thought. Five through-and-throughs, and one miss. The pool was finally empty by nine-fifteen. The fire department hoses started sucking air. All that was left was a quarter-inch of scummy grit, and a lot of trash. Emerson had the lights reangled and sent twelve recruits from the Academy over the walls, six from one end and six from the other.

The crime-scene techs in the parking garage extension logged forty-eight footprints going and forty-four coming back. The perp had been confident but wary on the way in, and striding longer on the way out. In a hurry. The footprints were size eleven. They found fibers on the last pillar before the northeast corner. Mercerized cotton, at a guess, from a pale-colored raincoat, at shoulder-blade height, like the guy had pressed his back against the raw concrete and then slid around it for a look out into the plaza. They found major dust disturbance on the floor between the pillar and the perimeter wall. Plus more blue fibers and more raincoat fibers, and tiny crumbs of crepe rubber, pale in color and old.

“He low-crawled,” the lead tech said. “Knees and elbows on the way there, and knees, toes, and elbows coming backward. We ever find his shoes, they’re going to be all scraped up at the front.”

They found where he must have sat up and then knelt. Directly in front of that position, they saw varnish scrapings on the lip of the wall.

“He rested his gun there,” the lead tech said. “Sawed it back and forth, to get it steady.”

He lined himself up and aimed his gaze over the varnish scrapings, like he was aiming a rifle. What he saw in front of him was Emerson, pacing in front of the empty ornamental pool, less than thirty-five yards away.

The Academy recruits spent thirty minutes in the empty pool and came out with a lot of miscellaneous junk, nearly eight dollars in pennies, and six bullets. Five of them were just misshapen blobs of lead, but one of them looked absolutely brand new. It was a boat tail hollow point, beautifully cast, almost certainly a .308. Emerson called his lead crime-scene tech up in the garage.

“I need you down here,” he said.

“No, I need you up here,” the tech replied.

Emerson got up to the second level and found all the techs crouched in a low huddle with their flashlight beams pointing down into a narrow crack in the concrete.

“Expansion joint,” the lead tech said. “And look what fell in it.”

Emerson shouldered his way in and looked down and saw the gleam of brass.

“A cartridge case,” he said.

“The guy took the others with him. But this one got away.”

“Fingerprints?” Emerson asked.

“We can hope,” the tech said. “Not too many people wear gloves when they load their magazines.”

“How do we get it out of there?”

The tech stood up and used his flashlight beam to locate an electrical box on the ceiling. There was one close by, new, with unconnected cables spooling out like fronds. He looked on the floor directly underneath and found a rat’s nest of discarded trimmings. He chose an eighteen-inch length of ground wire. He cleaned it and bent it into an L-shape. It was stiff and heavy. Probably overspecified for the kind of fluorescent ceiling fixtures he guessed the garage was going to use. Maybe that was why the project was stalled for funding. Maybe the city was spending money in all the wrong places.

He jiggled the wire down into the open joint and slid it along until the end went neatly into the empty cartridge case. Then he lifted it out very carefully, so as not to scratch it. He dropped it straight into a plastic evidence bag.

“Meet at the station,” Emerson said. “In one hour. I’ll scare up a DA.”

He walked away, on a route exactly parallel to the trail of footprints. Then he stopped next to the empty parking bay.

“Empty the meter,” he called. “Print all the quarters.”

“Why?” the tech called back. “You think the guy paid?”

“I want to cover all the bases.”

“You’d have to be crazy to pay for parking just before you blow five people away.”

“You don’t blow five people away unless you’re crazy.”

The tech shrugged. Empty the meter? But he guessed it was the kind of insight detectives were paid for, so he just dialed his cell phone and asked the city liaison guy to come on back again.

Someone from the District Attorney’s office always got involved at this point because the responsibility for prosecution rested squarely on the DA’s shoulders. It wasn’t the PD that won or lost in court. It was the DA. So the DA’s office made its own evaluation of the evidence. Did they have a case? Was the case weak or strong? It was like an audition. Like a trial before a trial. This time, because of the magnitude, Emerson was performing in front of the DA himself. The big cheese, the actual guy who had to run for election. And reelection.

They made it a three-man conference in Emerson’s office. Emerson, and the lead crime-scene tech, and the DA. The DA was called Rodin, which was a contraction of a Russian name that had been a whole lot longer before his great-grandparents came to America. He was fifty years old, lean and fit, and very cautious. His office had an outstanding victory percentage, but that was mostly due to the fact that he wouldn’t prosecute anything less than a total certainty. Anything less than a total certainty, and Rodin gave up early and blamed the cops. At least that was how it seemed to Emerson.

“I need seriously good news,” Rodin said. “The whole city is freaking out.”

“We know exactly how it went down,” Emerson told him. “We can trace it every step of the way.”

“You know who it was?” Rodin asked.

“Not yet. Right now he’s still John Doe.”

“So walk me through it.”

“We’ve got monochrome security videotape of a light-colored minivan entering the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can’t see the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn’t great. But it’s probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with aftermarket tinted windows. And we’re also looking through old tapes right now because it’s clear he entered the garage at some previous time and illegally blocked off a particular space with a traffic cone stolen earlier from a city construction site.”

“Can we prove stolen?”

“OK, obtained,” Emerson said.

“Maybe he works for the city construction department.”

“Maybe.”

“You think the cone came from the work on First Street?”

“There’s construction all over town.”

“First Street would be closest.”

“I don’t really care where the cone came from.”

Rodin nodded. “So, he reserved himself a parking space?”

Emerson nodded in turn. “Right where the new construction starts. Therefore the cone would have looked plausible. We have a witness who saw it in place at least an hour before. And the cone has fingerprints on it. Lots of them. The right thumb and index finger match prints on a quarter we took out of the parking meter.”

“He paid to park?”

“Evidently.”

Rodin paused.

“Won’t stand up,” he said. “Defense will claim he could have placed the cone for an innocent reason. You know, selfish but innocent. And the quarter could have been in the meter for days.”

Emerson smiled. Cops think like cops, and lawyers think like lawyers.

“There’s more,” he said. “He parked, and then he walked through the new construction. At various points he left trace evidence behind, from his shoes and his clothing. And he’ll have picked trace evidence up, in the form of cement dust, mostly. Probably a lot of it.”

Rodin shook his head. “Ties him to the scene sometime during the last two weeks. That’s all. Not specific enough.”

“We’ve got a three-way lock on his weapon,” Emerson said.

That got Rodin’s attention.

“He missed with one shot,” Emerson said. “It went into the pool. And you know what? That’s exactly how ballistics labs test-fire a gun. They fire into a long tank of water. The water slows and stops the bullet with absolutely no damage at all. So we’ve got a pristine bullet with all the lands and grooves we need to tie it to an individual rifle.”

“Can you find the individual rifle?”

“We’ve got varnish scrapings from where he steadied it on the wall.”

“That’s good.”

“You bet it is. We find the rifle and we’ll match the varnish and the scratches. It’s as good as DNA.”

“Are you going to find the rifle?”

“We found a shell case. It’s got tool marks on it from the ejector mechanism. So we’ve got a bullet and a case. Together they tie the weapon to the crime. The scratches tie the weapon to the garage location. The garage location ties the crime to the guy who left the trace evidence behind.”

Rodin said nothing. Emerson knew he was thinking about the trial. Technical evidence was sometimes a hard sell. It lacked a human dimension.

“The shell case has got fingerprints on it,” Emerson said. “From when he loaded the magazine. Same thumb and index finger as on the quarter in the parking meter and on the traffic cone. So we can tie the crime to the gun, and the gun to the ammo, and the ammo to the guy who used it. See? It all connects. The guy, the gun, the crime. It’s a total slam dunk.”

“The videotape shows the minivan leaving?”

“Ninety seconds after the first 911 call came in.”

“Who is he?”

“We’ll know just as soon as the fingerprint databases get back to us.”

“If he’s in the databases.”

“I think he was a military shooter,” Emerson said. “All military personnel are in the databases. So it’s just a matter of time.”

It was a matter of forty-nine minutes. A desk guy knocked and entered. He was carrying a sheaf of paper. The paper listed a name, an address, and a history. Plus supplementary information from all over the system. Including a driver’s license photo. Emerson took the paper and glanced through it once. Then again. Then he smiled. Exactly six hours after the first shot was fired, the situation was nailed down tight. A must-win.

“His name is James Barr,” Emerson said.

Silence in the office.

“He’s forty-one years old. He lives twenty minutes from here. He served in the U.S. Army. Honorable discharge fourteen years ago. Infantry specialist, which I’m betting means a sniper. DMV says he drives a six-year-old Dodge Caravan, beige.”

He slid the papers across his desk to Rodin. Rodin picked them up and scanned them through, once, twice, carefully. Emerson watched his eyes. Saw him thinking the guy, the gun, the crime. It was like watching a Vegas slot machine line up three cherries. Bing bing bing! A total certainty.

“James Barr,” Rodin said, like he was savoring the sound of the words. He separated out the DL picture and gazed at it. “James Barr, welcome to a shitload of trouble, sir.”

“Amen to that,” Emerson said, waiting for a compliment.

“I’ll get the warrants,” Rodin said. “Arrest, and searches on his house and car. Judges will be lining up to sign them.”

He left and Emerson called the Chief of Police with the good news. The Chief said he would schedule an eight o’clock press conference for the next morning. He said he wanted Emerson there, front and center. Emerson took that as all the compliment he was going to get, even though he didn’t much like the press.

The warrants were ready within an hour, but the arrest took three hours to set up. First, unmarked surveillance confirmed Barr was home. His place was an unremarkable one-story ranch. Not immaculate, not falling down. Old paint on the siding, fresh blacktop on the driveway. Lights were on and a television set was playing in what was probably the living room. Barr himself was spotted briefly, in a lighted window. He seemed to be alone. Then he seemed to go to bed. Lights went off and the house went quiet. So then there was a pause. It was standard operating procedure to plan carefully for the takedown of an armed man inside a building. The PD SWAT team took charge. They used zoning maps from the city offices and came up with the usual kind of thing. Covert encirclement, overwhelming force on standby front and rear, sudden violent assault on the front and rear doors simultaneously. Emerson was detailed to make the actual arrest, wearing full body armor and a borrowed helmet. An assistant DA would be alongside him, to monitor the legality of the process. Nobody wanted to give a defense attorney anything to chew on later. A paramedic team would be instantly available. Two K9 officers would go along because of the crime-scene investigator’s theory about the dog in the house. Altogether thirty-eight men were involved, and they were all tired. Most of them had been working nineteen hours straight. Their regular watches, plus overtime. So there was a lot of nervous tension in the air. People figured that nobody owned just one automatic weapon. If a guy had one, he had more. Maybe full-auto machine guns. Maybe grenades or bombs.

But the arrest was a walk in the park. James Barr barely even woke up. They broke down his doors at three in the morning and found him asleep, alone in bed. He stayed asleep with fifteen armed men in his bedroom aiming fifteen submachine guns and fifteen flashlight beams at him. He stirred a little when the SWAT commander threw his blankets and pillows to the floor, searching for concealed weapons. He had none. He opened his eyes. Mumbled something that sounded like What? and then went back to sleep, curling up on the flat mattress, hugging himself against the sudden cold. He was a large man, with white skin and black hair that was going gray all over his body. His pajamas were too small for him. He looked slack, and a little older than his forty-one years.

His dog was an old mutt that woke up reluctantly and staggered in from the kitchen. The K9 team captured it immediately and took it straight out to their truck. Emerson took his helmet off and pushed his way through the crowd in the tiny bedroom. Saw a three-quarters-full pint of Jack Daniel’s on the night table, next to an orange prescription bottle that was also three-quarters full. He bent to look at it. Sleeping pills. Legal. Recently prescribed to someone called Rosemary Barr. The label said: Rosemary Barr. Take one for sleeplessness.

“Who’s Rosemary Barr?” the assistant DA asked. “Is he married?”

Emerson glanced around the room. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Suicide attempt?” the SWAT commander asked.

Emerson shook his head. “He’d have swallowed them all. Plus the whole pint of JD. So I guess Mr. Barr had trouble getting off to sleep tonight, that’s all. After a very busy and productive day.”

The air in the room was stale. It smelled of dirty sheets and an unwashed body.

“We need to be careful here,” the assistant DA said. “He’s impaired right now. His lawyer is going to say he’s not fully capable of understanding Miranda. So we can’t let him say anything. And if he does say something, we can’t listen.”

Emerson called for the paramedics. Told them to check Barr out, to make sure he wasn’t faking, and to make sure he wasn’t about to die on them. They fussed around for a few minutes, listened to his heart, checked his pulse, read the prescription label. Then they pronounced him reasonably fit and healthy, but fast asleep.

“Psychopath,” the SWAT commander said. “No conscience at all.”

“Are we even sure this is the right guy?” the assistant DA asked.

Emerson found a pair of dress pants folded over a chair and checked the pockets. Came out with a small wallet. Found the driver’s license. The name was right, and the address was right. And the photograph was right.

“This is the right guy,” he said.

“We can’t let him say anything,” the ADA said again. “We need to keep this kosher.”

“I’m going to Mirandize him anyway,” Emerson said. “Make a mental note, people.”

He shook Barr by the shoulder and got half-opened eyes in response. Then he recited the Miranda warning. The right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer. Barr tried to focus, but didn’t succeed. Then he went back to sleep.

“OK, take him in,” Emerson said.

They wrapped him in a blanket and two cops dragged him out of the house and into a car. A paramedic and the ADA rode with him. Emerson stayed in the house and started the search. He found the scuffed blue jeans in the bedroom closet. The crepe-soled shoes were placed neatly on the floor below them. They were dusty. The raincoat was in the hall closet. The beige Dodge Caravan was in the garage. The scratched rifle was in the basement. It was one of several resting on a rack bolted to the wall. On a bench underneath it were five nine-millimeter handguns. And boxes of ammunition, including a half-empty box of Lake City M852 168-grain boat tail hollow point .308s. Next to the boxes were glass jars with empty cartridge cases in them. Ready for recycling, Emerson thought. Ready for handloading. The jar nearest the front of the bench held just five of them. Lake City brass. The jar’s lid was still off, like the five latest cases had been dumped in there recently and in a hurry. Emerson bent down and sniffed. The air in the jar smelled of gunpowder. Cold and old, but not very.

Emerson left James Barr’s house at four in the morning, replaced by forensic specialists who would go through the whole place with a fine-tooth comb. He checked with his desk sergeant and confirmed that Barr was sleeping peacefully in a cell on his own with round-the-clock medical supervision. Then he went home and caught a two-hour nap before showering and dressing for the press conference.

The press conference killed the story stone dead. A story needs the guy to be still out there. A story needs the guy roaming, sullen, hidden, shadowy, dangerous. It needs fear. It needs to make everyday chores exposed and hazardous, like pumping gas or visiting the mall or walking to church. So to hear that the guy was found and arrested even before the start of the second news cycle was a disaster for Ann Yanni. Immediately she knew what the network offices were going to think. No legs, over and done with, history. Yesterday’s news, literally. Probably wasn’t much of anything anyway. Just some inbred heartland weirdo too dumb to stay free through the night. Probably sleeps with his cousin and drinks Colt 45. Nothing sinister there. She would get one more network breaking news spot to recap the crime and report the arrest, and that would be it. Back to obscurity.

So Ann Yanni was disappointed, but she hid it well. She asked questions and made her tone admiring. About halfway through she started putting together a new theme. A new narrative. People would have to admit the police work had been pretty impressive. And this perp wasn’t a weirdo. Not necessarily. So a serious bad guy had been caught by an even-more-serious police department. Right out there in the heartland. Something that had taken considerable time on the coasts in previous famous cases. Could she sell it? She started drafting titles in the back of her mind. America’s Fastest? Like a play on Finest?

The Chief yielded the floor to Detective Emerson after about ten minutes. Emerson filled in full details on the perp’s identity and his history. He kept it dry. Just the facts, ma’am. He outlined the investigation. He answered questions. He didn’t boast. Ann Yanni thought that he felt the cops had been lucky. That they had been given much more to go on than they usually got.

Then Rodin stepped up. The DA made it sound like the PD had been involved in some early minor skirmishing and that the real work was about to begin. His office would review everything and make the necessary determinations. And yes, Ms. Yanni, because he thought the circumstances warranted it, certainly he would seek the death penalty for James Barr.

James Barr woke up in his cell with a chemical hangover at nine o’clock Saturday morning. He was immediately fingerprinted and re-Mirandized once, and then twice. The right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer. He chose to remain silent. Not many people do. Not many people can. The urge to talk is usually overwhelming. But James Barr beat it. He just clamped his mouth shut and kept it that way. Plenty of people tried to talk to him, but he didn’t answer. Not once. Not a word. Emerson was relaxed about it. Truth was, Emerson didn’t really want Barr to say anything. He preferred to line up all the evidence, scrutinize it, test it, polish it, and get to a point where he could anticipate a conviction without a confession. Confessions were so vulnerable to defense accusations of coercion or confusion that he had learned to run away from them. They were icing on the cake. Literally the last thing he wanted to hear, not the first. Not like on the TV cop shows, where relentless interrogation was a kind of performance art. So he just stayed out of the loop and let his forensics people complete their slow, patient work.

James Barr’s sister was younger than him and unmarried and living in a rented downtown condo. Her name was Rosemary. Like the rest of the city’s population, she was sick and shocked and stunned. She had seen the news Friday night. And she caught it again Saturday morning. She heard a police detective say her brother’s name. At first she thought it was a mistake. That she had misheard. But the guy kept on saying it. James Barr, James Barr, James Barr. Rosemary burst into tears. First tears of confusion, then tears of horror, then tears of fury.

Then she forced herself to calm down, and got busy.

She worked as a secretary in an eight-man law firm. Like most firms in small heartland cities, hers did a little bit of everything. And it treated its employees fairly well. The salary wasn’t spectacular, but there were intangibles to compensate. One was a full package of benefits. Another was being called a paralegal instead of a secretary. Another was a promise that the firm would handle legal matters for its employees and their families free, gratis, and for nothing. Mostly that was about wills and probate and divorce, and insurance company hassles after fender benders. It wasn’t about defending adult siblings who were wrongly accused in notorious urban sniper slayings. She knew that. But she felt she had to give it a try. Because she knew her brother, and she knew he couldn’t be guilty.

She called the partner she worked for, at home. He was mostly a tax guy, so he called the firm’s criminal litigator. The litigator called the managing partner, who called a meeting of all the partners. They held it over lunch at the country club. From the start, the agenda was about how to turn down Rosemary Barr’s request in the most tactful way possible. A defense to a crime of this nature wasn’t the sort of thing they were equipped to handle. Or inclined to handle. There were public relations implications. There was immediate agreement on that point. But they were a loyal bunch, and Rosemary Barr was a good employee who had worked many years for them. They knew she had no money, because they did her taxes. They assumed her brother had no money, either. But the Constitution guaranteed competent counsel, and they didn’t have a very high opinion of public defenders. So they were caught in a genuine ethical dilemma.

The litigator resolved it. His name was David Chapman. He was a hardscrabble veteran who knew Rodin over at the DA’s office. He knew him pretty well. It would have been impossible for him not to, really. They were two of a kind, raised in the same neighborhood and working in the same business, albeit on opposite sides. So Chapman went to the smoking room and used his cell phone to call the DA at home. The two lawyers had a full and frank discussion. Then Chapman came back to the lunch table.

“It’s a slam dunk,” he said. “Ms. Barr’s brother is guilty all to hell and gone. Rodin’s case is going to read like a textbook. Hell, it’s probably going to be a textbook one day. He’s got every kind of evidence there is. There’s not a chink of daylight anywhere.”

“Was he leveling with you?” the managing partner asked.

“There’s no bullshitting between old buddies,” Chapman said.

“So?”

“All we would have to do is plead in mitigation. If we can get the lethal injection reduced to life without parole, there’s a big win right there. That’s all Ms. Barr has a right to expect. Or her damn brother, with all due respect.”

“How much involvement?” the managing partner asked.

“Sentencing phase only. Because he’ll have to plead guilty.”

“You happy to handle it?”

“Under the circumstances.”

“How many hours will it cost us?”

“Not many. There’s practically nothing we can do.”

“What grounds for mitigation?”

“He’s a Gulf War vet, I believe. So there’s probably chemical stuff going on. Or some kind of delayed post-traumatic thing. Maybe we could get Rodin to agree beforehand. We could get it done over lunch.”

The managing partner nodded. Turned to the tax guy. “Tell your secretary we’ll do everything in our power to help her brother in his hour of need.”

Barr was moved from the police station lockup to the county jail before either his sister or Chapman got a chance to see him. His blanket and pajamas were taken away and he was issued paper underwear, an orange jumpsuit, and a pair of rubber shower sandals. The county jail wasn’t a pleasant place to be. It smelled bad and it was noisy. It was radically overcrowded and the social and ethnic tensions that were kept in control on the street were left to rage unchecked inside. Men were stacked three to a cell and the guards were shorthanded. New guys were called fish, and fish were left to fend for themselves.

But Barr had been in the army, so the culture shock for him was a little less than it might have been. He survived as a fish for two hours, and then he was escorted to an interview room. He was told there was a lawyer waiting there for him. He found a table and two chairs bolted to the floor in a windowless cubicle. In one of the chairs was a guy he vaguely recognized from somewhere. On the table was a pocket tape recorder. Like a Walkman.

“My name is David Chapman,” the guy in the chair said. “I’m a criminal defense attorney. A lawyer. Your sister works at my firm. She asked us to help you out.”

Barr said nothing.

“So here I am,” Chapman said.

Barr said nothing.

“I’m recording this conversation,” Chapman said. “Putting it on tape. I take it that’s OK with you?”

Barr said nothing.

“I think we met once,” Chapman said. “Our Christmas party one year?”

Barr said nothing.

Chapman waited.

“Have the charges been explained to you?” he asked.

Barr said nothing.

“The charges are very serious,” Chapman said.

Barr stayed quiet.

“I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” Chapman said.

Barr just stared at him. Just sat still and quiet for several long minutes. Then he leaned forward toward the tape machine and spoke for the first time since the previous afternoon.

He said, “They got the wrong guy.”

“They got the wrong guy,” Barr said again.

“So tell me about the right guy,” Chapman said immediately. He was a good courtroom tactician. He knew how to get a rhythm going. Question, answer, question, answer. That was how to get a person to open up. They fell into the rhythm, and it all came out.

But Barr just retreated back into silence.

“Let’s be clear about this,” Chapman said.

Barr didn’t answer.

“Are you denying it?” Chapman asked him.

Barr said nothing.

“Are you?”

No response.

“The evidence is all there,” Chapman said. “It’s just about overwhelming, I’m afraid. You can’t play dumb now. We need to talk about why you did it. That’s what’s going to help us here.”

Barr said nothing.

“You want me to help you?” Chapman said. “Or not?”

Barr said nothing.

“Maybe it was your old wartime experience,” Chapman said. “Or post-traumatic stress. Or some kind of mental impairment. We need to focus on the reason.”

Barr said nothing.

“Denying it is not smart,” Chapman said. “The evidence is right there.”

Barr said nothing.

“Denying it is not an option,” Chapman said.

“Get Jack Reacher for me,” Barr said.

“Who?”

“Jack Reacher.”

“Who’s he? A friend?”

Barr said nothing.

“Someone you know?” Chapman said.

Barr said nothing.

“Someone you used to know?”

“Just get him for me.”

“Where is he? Who is he?”

Barr said nothing.

“Is Jack Reacher a doctor?” Chapman asked.

“A doctor?” Barr repeated.

“Is he a doctor?” Chapman asked.

But Barr didn’t speak again. He just got up from the table and walked to the cubicle’s door and pounded on it until the jailer opened it up and led him back to his overcrowded cell.

Chapman arranged to meet Rosemary Barr and the firm’s investigator at his law offices. The investigator was a retired cop shared by most of the city’s law firms. They all had him on retainer. He was a private detective, with a license. His name was Franklin. He was nothing like a private eye in a TV show. He did all his work at a desk, with phone books and computer databases. He didn’t go out, didn’t wear a gun, didn’t own a hat. But he had no equal as a fact-checker or a skip tracer and he still had plenty of friends in the PD.

“The evidence is rock solid,” he said. “That’s what I’m hearing. Emerson was in charge and he’s pretty reliable. So is Rodin, really, but for a different reason. Emerson’s a stiff and Rodin is a coward. Neither one of them would be saying what they’re saying unless the evidence was there.”

“I just can’t believe he did it,” Rosemary Barr said.

“Well, certainly he seems to be denying it,” Chapman said. “As far as I can understand him. And he’s asking for someone called Jack Reacher. Someone he knows or used to know. You ever heard that name? You know who he is?”

Rosemary Barr just shook her head. Chapman wrote the name Jack Reacher on a sheet of paper and slid it across to Franklin. “My guess is he may be a psychiatrist. Mr. Barr brought the name up right after I told him how strong the evidence is. So maybe this Reacher guy is someone who can help us out with the mitigation. Maybe he treated Mr. Barr in the past.”

“My brother never saw a psychiatrist,” Rosemary Barr said.

“To your certain knowledge?”

“Never.”

“How long has he been in town?”

“Fourteen years. Since the army.”

“Were you close?”

“We lived in the same house.”

“His house?”

Rosemary Barr nodded.

“But you don’t live there anymore.”

Rosemary Barr looked away.

“No,” she said. “I moved out.”

“Might your brother have seen a shrink after you moved out?”

“He would have told me.”

“OK, what about before? In the service?”

Rosemary Barr said nothing. Chapman turned back to Franklin.

“So maybe Reacher was his army doctor,” he said. “Maybe he has information about an old trauma. He could be very helpful.”

Franklin accepted the sheet of paper.

“In which case I’ll find him,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be talking about mitigation anyway,” Rosemary Barr said. “We should be talking about reasonable doubt. About innocence.”

“The evidence is very strong,” Chapman said. “He used his own gun.”

Franklin spent three hours failing to find Jack Reacher. First he trawled through psychiatric associations. No hits. Then he searched the Internet for Gulf War support groups. No trace. He tried Lexis-Nexis and all the news organizations. Nothing. Then he started back at the beginning and accessed the National Personnel Record Center’s database. It listed all current and former military. He found Jack Reacher’s name in there easily enough. Reacher had entered the service in 1984 and received an honorable discharge in 1997. James Barr himself had signed up in 1985 and mustered out in 1991. So there was a six-year overlap. But Reacher had been no kind of a doctor. No kind of a psychiatrist. He had been a military cop. An officer. A major. Maybe a high-level investigator. Barr had finished as a lowly Specialist E-4. Infantry, not military police. So what was the point of contact between a military police major and an infantry E-4? Something helpful, obviously, or Barr wouldn’t have mentioned the name. But what?

At the end of three hours Franklin figured he would never find out, because Reacher fell off the radar after 1997. Completely and totally. There was no trace of him anywhere. He was still alive, according to the Social Security Administration. He wasn’t in prison, according to the NCIC. But he had disappeared. He had no credit rating. He wasn’t listed as title holder to any real estate, or automobiles, or boats. He had no debts. No liens. No address. No phone number. No warrants outstanding, no judgments entered. He wasn’t a husband. Wasn’t a father. He was a ghost.

James Barr spent the same three hours in serious trouble. It started when he stepped out of his cell. He turned right to walk down to the pay phones. The corridor was narrow. He bumped into another guy, shoulder to shoulder. Then he made a bad mistake. He took his eyes off the floor and glanced at the other guy and apologized.

A bad mistake, because a fish can’t make eye contact with another prisoner. Not without implying disrespect. It was a prison thing. He didn’t understand.

The guy he made eye contact with was a Mexican. He had gang tattoos, but Barr didn’t recognize them. Another bad mistake. He should have put his gaze back on the floor and moved on and hoped for the best. But he didn’t.

Instead, he said, “Excuse me.”

Then he raised his eyebrows and half-smiled in a self-deprecating way, like he was saying, This is some place, right?

Bad mistake. Familiarity, and a presumption of intimacy.

“What are you looking at?” the Mexican said.

At that point, James Barr understood completely. What are you looking at? That was pretty much a standard opener. Barrack rooms, barrooms, street corners, dark alleys, it was not a phrase you wanted to hear.

“Nothing,” he said, and realized he had made the situation much worse.

“You calling me nothing?”

Barr put his eyes back on the floor and moved on, but it was way too late. He felt the Mexican’s stare on his back and gave up on the pay phone idea. The phones were in a dead-end lobby and he didn’t want to feel trapped. So he walked a long counterclockwise circuit and headed back to his cell. He got there OK. Didn’t look at anyone, didn’t speak. He lay down on his bunk. About two hours later, he felt OK. He guessed he could handle a little macho bluster. And he was bigger than the Mexican. He was bigger than two Mexicans.

He wanted to call his sister. He wanted to know she was OK.

He set off for the pay phones again.

He got there unmolested. It was a small space. There were four phones on the wall, four men talking, four lines of other men waiting behind them. Noise, shuffling feet, crazed laughter, impatience, frustration, sour air, the smell of sweat and dirty hair and stale urine. Just a normal prison scene, according to James Barr’s preconceptions.

Then it wasn’t a normal scene.

The men in front of him vanished. Just disappeared. They just melted out of sight. Those on the phone hung up mid-sentence and ducked back past him. Those waiting in line peeled away. In half a second the lobby went from being full and noisy to being deserted and silent.

James Barr turned around.

He saw the Mexican with the tattoos. The Mexican had a knife in his hand and twelve friends behind him. The knife was a plastic toothbrush handle wrapped with tape and sharpened to a point, like a stiletto. The friends were all stocky little guys, all with the same tattoos. They all had cropped hair with intricate patterns shaved across their skulls.

“Wait,” Barr said.

But the Mexicans didn’t wait, and eight minutes later Barr was in a coma. He was found sometime after that, on the floor, beaten pulpy, with multiple stab wounds and a cracked skull and severe subdural bleeding. Afterward, jail talk said he had had it coming. He had disrespected the Latinos. But jail talk said he hadn’t gone quietly. There was a hint of admiration. The Mexicans had suffered a little. But not nearly as much as James Barr. He was medevaced to the city hospital and sewn up and operated on to relieve pressure from a swollen brain. Then he was dumped in a secure intensive care unit, comatose. The doctors weren’t sure when he would wake up again. Maybe in a day. Maybe in a week. Maybe in a month. Maybe never. The doctors didn’t really know, and they didn’t really care. They were all local people.

The warden at the jail called late at night and told Emerson. Then Emerson called and told Rodin. Then Rodin called and told Chapman. Then Chapman called and told Franklin.

“So what happens now?” Franklin asked him.

“Nothing,” Chapman said. “It’s on ice. You can’t try a guy in a coma.”

“What about when he wakes up?”

“If he’s OK, then they’ll go ahead, I guess.”

“What if he isn’t?”

“Then they won’t. Can’t try a vegetable.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Nothing,” Chapman said. “We weren’t taking it very seriously anyhow. Barr’s guilty all to hell and gone, and there’s nothing much anyone can do for him.”

Franklin called and told Rosemary Barr, because he wasn’t sure if anyone else would have taken the trouble. He found out that nobody else had. So he broke the news himself. Rosemary Barr didn’t have much of an outward reaction. She just went very quiet. It was like she was on emotional overload.

“I guess I should go to the hospital,” she said.

“If you want,” Franklin said.

“He’s innocent, you know. This is so unfair.”

“Did you see him yesterday?”

“You mean, can I alibi him?”

“Can you?”

“No,” Rosemary Barr said. “I can’t. I don’t know where he was yesterday. Or what he was doing.”

“Are there places he goes regularly? Movies, bars, anything like that?”

“Not really.”

“Friends he hangs with?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Girlfriends?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Other family he visits?”

“There’s just the two of us. Him and me.”

Franklin said nothing. There was a long, distracted pause.

“What happens now?” Rosemary Barr asked.

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Did you find that person he mentioned?”

“Jack Reacher? No, I’m afraid not. No trace.”

“Will you keep on looking?”

“There’s really nothing more I can do.”

“OK,” Rosemary Barr said. “Then we’ll have to manage without him.”

But even as they spoke, on the phone late at night on Saturday, Jack Reacher was on his way to them.

CHAPTER 2

Reacher was on his way to them because of a woman. He had spent Friday night in South Beach, Miami, in a salsa club, with a dancer from a cruise ship. The boat was Norwegian, and so was the girl. Reacher guessed she was too tall for ballet, but she was the right size for everything else. They met on the beach in the afternoon. Reacher was working on his tan. He felt better brown. He didn’t know what she was working on. But he felt her shadow fall across his face and opened his eyes to find her staring at him. Or maybe at his scars. The browner he got, the more they stood out, white and wicked and obvious. She was pale, in a black bikini. A small black bikini. He pegged her for a dancer long before she told him. It was in the way she held herself.

They ended up having a late dinner together and then going out to the club. South Beach salsa wouldn’t have been Reacher’s first choice, but her company made it worthwhile. She was fun to be with. And she was a great dancer, obviously. Full of energy. She wore him out. At four in the morning she took him back to her hotel, eager to wear him out some more. Her hotel was a small Art Deco place near the ocean. Clearly the cruise line treated its people well. Certainly it was a much more romantic destination than Reacher’s own motel. And much closer.

And it had cable television, which Reacher’s place didn’t. He woke at eight on Saturday morning when he heard the dancer in the shower. He turned on the TV and went looking for ESPN. He wanted Friday night’s American League highlights. He never found them. He clicked his way through successive channels and then stopped dead on CNN because he heard the chief of an Indiana police department say a name he knew: James Barr. The picture was of a press conference. Small room, harsh light. Top of the screen was a caption that said: Courtesy NBC. There was a banner across the bottom that said: Friday Night Massacre. The police chief said the name again, James Barr, and then he introduced a homicide detective called Emerson. Emerson looked tired. Emerson said the name for a third time: James Barr. Then, like he anticipated the exact question in Reacher’s mind, he ran through a brief biography: Forty-one years old, local Indiana resident, U.S. Army infantry specialist from 1985 to 1991, Gulf War veteran, never married, currently unemployed.

Reacher watched the screen. Emerson seemed like a concise type of a guy. He was brief. No bullshit. He finished his statement and in response to a reporter’s question declined to specify what if anything James Barr had said during interrogation. Then he introduced a District Attorney. This guy’s name was Rodin, and he wasn’t concise. Wasn’t brief. He used plenty of bullshit. He spent ten minutes claiming Emerson’s credit for himself. Reacher knew how that worked. He had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years. Cops bust their tails, and prosecutors bask in the glory. Rodin said James Barr a few more times and then said the state was maybe looking to fry him.

For what?

Reacher waited.

A local anchor called Ann Yanni came on. She recapped the events of the night before. Sniper slaying. Senseless slaughter. An automatic weapon. A parking garage. A public plaza. Commuters on their way home after a long workweek. Five dead. A suspect in custody, but a city still grieving.

Reacher thought it was Yanni who was grieving. Emerson’s success had cut her story short. She signed off and CNN went to political news. Reacher turned the TV off. The dancer came out of the bathroom. She was pink and fragrant. And naked. She had left her towels inside.

“What shall we do today?” she said, with a wide Norwegian smile.

“I’m going to Indiana,” Reacher said.

He walked north in the heat to the Miami bus depot. Then he leafed through a greasy timetable and planned a route. It wasn’t going to be an easy trip. Miami to Jacksonville would be the first leg. Then Jacksonville to New Orleans. Then New Orleans to St. Louis. Then St. Louis to Indianapolis. Then a local bus, presumably, south into the heartland. Five separate destinations. Arrival and departure times were not well integrated. Beginning to end, it was going to take more than forty-eight hours. He was tempted to fly or rent a car, but he was short of money and he liked buses better and he figured nothing much was going to happen on the weekend anyway.

What happened on the weekend was that Rosemary Barr called her firm’s investigator back. She figured Franklin would have a semi-independent point of view. She got him at home, ten o’clock in the morning on the Sunday.

“I think I should hire different lawyers,” she said.

Franklin said nothing.

“David Chapman thinks he’s guilty,” Rosemary said. “Doesn’t he? So he’s already given up.”

“I can’t comment,” Franklin said. “He’s one of my employers.”

Now Rosemary Barr said nothing.

“How was the hospital?” Franklin asked.

“Awful. He’s in intensive care with a bunch of prison deadbeats. They’ve got him handcuffed to the bed. He’s in a coma, for God’s sake. How do they think he’s going to escape?”

“What’s the legal position?”

“He was arrested but not arraigned. He’s in a kind of limbo. They’re assuming he wouldn’t have gotten bail.”

“They’re probably right.”

“So they claim under the circumstances it’s like he actually didn’t get bail. So he’s theirs. He’s in the system. Like a twilight zone.”

“What would you like to happen?”

“He shouldn’t be in handcuffs. And he should be in a VA hospital at least. But that won’t happen until I find a lawyer who’s prepared to help him.”

Franklin paused. “How do you explain all the evidence?”

“I know my brother.”

“You moved out, right?”

“For other reasons. Not because he’s a homicidal maniac.”

“He blocked off a parking space,” Franklin said. “He premeditated this thing.”

“You think he’s guilty, too.”

“I work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got doesn’t look good.”

Rosemary Barr said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Franklin said.

“Can you recommend another lawyer?”

“Can you make that decision? Do you have a power of attorney?”

“I think it’s implied. He’s in a coma. I’m his next of kin.”

“How much money have you got?”

“Not much.”

“How much has he got?”

“There’s some equity in his house.”

“It won’t look good. It’ll be like a kick in the teeth for the firm you work for.”

“I can’t worry about that.”

“You could lose everything, including your job.”

“I’ll lose it anyway, unless I help James. If he’s convicted, they’ll let me go. I’ll be notorious. By association. An embarrassment.”

“He had your sleeping pills,” Franklin said.

“I gave them to him. He doesn’t have insurance.”

“Why did he need them?”

“He has trouble sleeping.”

Franklin said nothing.

“You think he’s guilty,” Rosemary said.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” Franklin said.

“David Chapman isn’t really trying, is he?”

“You have to consider the possibility that David Chapman is right.”

“Who should I call?”

Franklin paused.

“Try Helen Rodin,” he said.

“Rodin?”

“She’s the DA’s daughter.”

“I don’t know her.”

“She’s downtown. She just hung out her shingle. She’s new and she’s keen.”

“Is it ethical?”

“No law against it.”

“It would be father against daughter.”

“It was going to be Chapman, and Chapman knows Rodin a lot better than his daughter does, probably. She’s been away for a long time.”

“Where?”

“College, law school, clerking for a judge in D.C.”

“Is she any good?”

“I think she’s going to be.”

Rosemary Barr called Helen Rodin on her office number. It was like a test. Someone new and keen should be at the office on a Sunday.

Helen Rodin was at the office on a Sunday. She answered the call sitting at her desk. Her desk was secondhand and it sat proudly in a mostly empty two-room suite in the same black glass tower that had NBC as the second-floor tenant. The suite was rented cheap through one of the business subsidies that the city was throwing around like confetti. The idea was to kick-start the rejuvenated downtown area and clean up later with healthy tax revenues.

Rosemary Barr didn’t have to tell Helen Rodin about the case because the whole thing had happened right outside Helen Rodin’s new office window. Helen had seen some of it for herself, and she had followed the rest on the news afterward. She had caught all of Ann Yanni’s TV appearances. She recognized her from the building’s lobby, and the elevator.

“Will you help my brother?” Rosemary Barr asked.

Helen Rodin paused. The smart answer would be No way. She knew that. Like No way, forget about it, are you out of your mind? Two reasons. One, she knew a major clash with her father was inevitable at some point, but did she need it now? And two, she knew that a new lawyer’s early cases defined her. Paths were taken that led down fixed routes. To end up as a when-all-else-fails criminal-defense attorney would be OK, she guessed, all things considered. But to start out by taking a case that had offended the whole city would be a marketing disaster. The shootings weren’t being seen as a crime. They were being seen as an atrocity. Against humanity, against the whole community, against the rejuvenation efforts downtown, against the whole idea of being from Indiana. It was like LA or New York or Baltimore had come to the heartland, and to be the person who tried to excuse it or explain it away would be a fatal mistake. Like a mark of Cain. It would follow her the rest of her life.

“Can we sue the jail?” Rosemary Barr asked. “For letting him get hurt?”

Helen Rodin paused again. Another good reason to say no. An unrealistic client.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Right now he wouldn’t generate much sympathy as a plaintiff. And it’s hard to prove damages, if he’s heading for death row anyway.”

“Then I can’t pay you much,” Rosemary Barr said. “I don’t have money.”

Helen Rodin paused for a third time. Another good reason to say no. It was a little early in her career to be contemplating pro bono work.

But. But. But.

The accused deserved representation. The Bill of Rights said so. And he was innocent until proven guilty. And if the evidence was as bad as her father said it was, then the whole thing would be little more than a supervisory process. She would verify the case against him independently. Then she would advise him to plead guilty. Then she would watch his back as her father fed him through the machine. That was all. It could be seen as honest dues-paying. A constitutional chore. She hoped.

“OK,” she said.

“He’s innocent,” Rosemary Barr said. “I’m sure of it.”

They always are, Helen Rodin thought.

“OK,” she said again. Then she told her new client to meet her in her office at seven the next morning. It was like a test. A sister who really believed in her brother’s innocence would show up for an early appointment.

Rosemary Barr showed up right on time, at seven o’clock on Monday morning. Franklin was there, too. He believed in Helen Rodin and was prepared to defer his bills until he saw which way the wind was blowing. Helen Rodin herself had already been at her desk for an hour. She had informed David Chapman of the change in representation on Sunday afternoon and had obtained the audiotape of his initial interview with James Barr. Chapman had been happy to hand it over and wash his hands. She had played the tape to herself a dozen times Sunday night and a dozen more that morning. It was all anyone had of James Barr. Maybe all anyone was ever going to get. So she had listened to it carefully, and she had drawn some early conclusions from it.

“Listen,” she said.

She had the tape cued up and ready in an old-fashioned machine the size of a shoe box. She pressed Play and they all heard a hiss and breathing and room sounds and then David Chapman’s voice: I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. There was a long pause, full of more hiss, and then James Barr spoke: They got the wrong guy.… They got the wrong guy, he said again. Then Helen watched the tape counter numbers and spooled forward to Chapman saying: Denying it is not an option. Then Barr’s voice came through: Get Jack Reacher for me. Helen spooled onward to Chapman’s question: Is he a doctor? Then there was nothing on the tape except the sound of Barr beating on the interview room door.

“OK,” Helen said. “I think he really believes he didn’t do it. He claims as much, and then he gets frustrated and terminates the interview when Chapman doesn’t take him seriously. That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“He didn’t do it,” Rosemary Barr said.

“I spoke with my father yesterday,” Helen Rodin said. “The evidence is all there, Ms. Barr. He did it, I’m afraid. You need to accept that a sister maybe can’t know her brother as well as she’d like. Or if she once did, that he changed for some reason.”

There was a long silence.

“Is your father telling you the truth about the evidence?” Rosemary asked.

“He has to,” Helen said. “We’re going to see it all anyway. There’s the discovery process. We’re going to take depositions. There would be no sense in him bluffing at this point.”

Nobody spoke.

“But we can still help your brother,” Helen said in the silence. “He believes he didn’t do it. I’m sure of that, after listening to the tape. Therefore he’s delusional now. Or at least he was on Saturday. Therefore perhaps he was delusional on Friday, too.”

“How does that help him?” Rosemary Barr asked. “It’s still admitting he did it.”

“The consequences will be different. If he recovers. Time and treatment in an institution will be a lot better than time and no treatment in a maximum security prison.”

“You want to have James declared insane?”

Helen nodded. “A medical defense is our best shot. And if we establish it right now, it might improve the way they handle him before the trial.”

“He might die. That’s what the doctors said. I don’t want him to die a criminal. I want to clear his name.”

“He hasn’t been tried yet. He hasn’t been convicted. He’s still an innocent man in the eyes of the law.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No,” Helen said. “I guess it isn’t.”

There was another long silence.

“Let’s meet back here at ten-thirty,” Helen said. “We’ll thrash out a strategy. If we’re aiming for a change of hospitals, we should try for it sooner rather than later.”

“We need to find this Jack Reacher person,” Rosemary Barr said.

Helen nodded. “I gave his name to Emerson and my father.”

“Why?”

“Because Emerson’s people cleared your brother’s house out. They might have found an address or a phone number. And my father needed to know because we want this guy on our witness list, not the prosecution’s. Because he might be able to help us.”

“He might be an alibi.”

“Maybe an old army buddy, at best.”

“I don’t see how,” Franklin said. “They were different ranks and different branches.”

“We need to find him,” Rosemary Barr said. “James asked for him, didn’t he? That has to mean something.”

Helen nodded again. “I’d certainly like to find him. He might have something for us. Some exculpatory information, possibly. Or at least he might be a link to something we can use.”

“He’s out of circulation,” Franklin said.

He was two hours away, in the back of a bus out of Indianapolis. The trip had been slow, but pleasant enough. He had spent Saturday night in New Orleans, in a motel near the bus depot. He had spent Sunday night in Indianapolis. So he had slept and fed himself and showered. But mostly he had rocked and swayed and dozed on buses, watching the passing scenes, observing the chaos of America, and surfing along on the memory of the Norwegian. His life was like that. It was a mosaic of fragments. Details and contexts would fade and be inaccurately recalled, but the feelings and the experiences would weave over time into a tapestry equally full of good times and bad. He didn’t know yet exactly where the Norwegian would fall. At that point he thought of her as a missed opportunity. But she would have sailed away soon anyway. Or he would have. CNN’s intervention had shortened things, but maybe only by a fraction.

The bus was doing 55 on Route 37, heading south. It stopped in Bloomington. Six people got out. One of them left the Indianapolis paper behind. Reacher picked it up and checked the sports. The Yankees were still ahead in the East. Then he flipped to the front and checked the news. He saw the headline: Sniper Suspect Hurt in Jail Attack. He read the first three paragraphs: Brain injury. Coma. Uncertain prognosis. The journalist seemed torn between condemning the Indiana Board of Corrections for its lawless prisons and applauding Barr’s attackers for doing their civic duty.

This might complicate things, Reacher thought.

The later paragraphs carried a reprise of the original crime story, plus updated background, plus new facts. Reacher read them all. Barr’s sister had moved out of his house some months before the incident. The journalist seemed to think that was either a cause or an effect of Barr’s evident instability. Or both.

The bus moved out of Bloomington. Reacher folded the paper and propped his head against the window and watched the road. It was a black ribbon, wet with recent rain, and it unspooled beside him with the center line flashing by like an urgent Morse code message. Reacher wasn’t sure what it was saying to him. He couldn’t read it.

The bus pulled into a covered depot and Reacher came out into the daylight and found himself five blocks west of where a raised highway curled around behind an old stone building. Indiana limestone, he guessed. The real thing. It would be a bank, he thought, or a courthouse, or maybe a library. There was a black glass tower beyond it. The air was OK. It was colder than Miami but he was still far enough south that winter felt safely distant. He wasn’t going to have to refresh his wardrobe because of weather. He was in white chino pants and a bright yellow canvas shirt. Both were three days old. He figured he would get another day out of them. Then he would buy replacements, cheap. He had brown boat shoes on his feet. No socks. He felt he was dressed for the boardwalk and thought he must look a little out of place in the city.

He checked his watch. Nine-twenty in the morning. He stood on the sidewalk in the diesel fumes and stretched and looked around. The city was one of those heartland places that are neither large nor small, neither new nor old. It wasn’t booming and it wasn’t decrepit. There was probably some history. Probably some corn and soybean trading. Maybe tobacco. Maybe livestock. There was probably a river, or a railhead. Maybe some manufacturing. There was a small downtown area. He could see it ahead of him, east of where he stood. Taller structures, some stone, some brick, some billboards. He figured the black glass tower would be the flagship building. No reason to build it anyplace else than the heart of downtown.

He walked toward it. There was a lot of construction under way. Repairs, renewals, holes in the road, gravel piles, fresh concrete, heavy trucks moving slow. He crossed in front of one and hit a side street and came out along the north side of a half-finished parking garage extension. He recalled Ann Yanni’s fevered breaking-news recap and glanced up at it and then away from it to a public square. There was an empty ornamental pool with a fountain spout sticking up forlornly in the center. There was a narrow walkway between the pool itself and a low wall. The walkway was decorated with makeshift funeral tributes. There were flowers, with their stems wrapped in aluminum foil. Photographs under plastic, and small stuffed animals, and candles. There was a dusting of leftover sand. The sand had soaked up the blood, he guessed. Fire engines carry boxes of sand for accidents and crime scenes. And stainless steel shovels for removal of body parts. He glanced back at the parking garage. Less than thirty-five yards, he thought. Very close.

He stood still. The plaza was silent. The whole city was quiet. It felt stunned, like a limb briefly paralyzed after a massive bruising blow. The plaza was the epicenter. It was where the blow had landed. It was like a black hole, with emotion compressed into it too tight to escape.

He walked on. The old limestone building was a library. That’s OK, he thought. Librarians are nice people. They tell you things, if you ask them. He asked for the DA’s office. A sad and subdued woman at the checkout desk gave him directions. It wasn’t a long walk. It wasn’t a big city. He walked east past a new office building that had signs for the DMV and a military recruitment center. Behind it was a block of off-brand stores and then a new courthouse building. It was a plain flat-roof off-the-shelf design dressed up with mahogany doors and etched glass. It could have been a church from some weird denomination with a generous but strapped congregation.

He avoided the main public entrance. He circled the block until he came to the office wing. He found a door labeled District Attorney. Below it on a separate brass plate he found Rodin’s name. An elected official, he thought. They use a separate plate to make it cheaper when the guy changes every few Novembers. Rodin’s initials were A. A. He had a law degree.

Reacher went in through the door and spoke to a receptionist at a counter. Asked to see A. A. Rodin himself. “About what?” the receptionist asked, quietly but politely. She was middle-aged, well cared for, well turned out, wearing a clean white blouse. She looked like she had worked behind a desk all her life. A practiced bureaucrat. But stressed. She looked like she was carrying all the town’s recent troubles on her shoulders.

“About James Barr,” Reacher said.

“Are you a reporter?” the receptionist asked.

“No,” Reacher said.

“May I tell Mr. Rodin’s office your connection to the case?”

“I knew James Barr in the army.”

“That must have been some time ago.”

“A long time ago,” Reacher said.

“May I have your name?”

“Jack Reacher.”

The receptionist dialed a phone and spoke. Reacher guessed she was speaking to a secretary, because both he and Rodin were referred to in the third person, like abstractions. Can he see a Mr. Reacher about the case? Not the Barr case. Just the case. The conversation continued. Then the receptionist covered the phone by clamping it to her chest, below her collarbone, above her left breast.

“Do you have information?” she asked.

The secretary upstairs can hear your heart beating, Reacher thought.

“Yes,” he said. “Information.”

“From the army?” she asked.

Reacher nodded. The receptionist put the phone back to her face and continued the conversation. It was a long one. Mr. A. A. Rodin had an efficient pair of gatekeepers. That was clear. No way of getting past them without some kind of an urgent and legitimate reason. That was clear, too. Reacher checked his watch. Nine-forty in the morning. But there was no rush, under the circumstances. Barr was in a coma. Tomorrow would do it. Or the next day. Or maybe he could get to Rodin through the cop, if need be. What was his name? Emerson?

The receptionist hung up the phone.

“Please go straight up,” she said. “Mr. Rodin is on the third floor.”

I’m honored, Reacher thought. The receptionist wrote his name on a visitor pass and slipped it into a plastic sleeve. He clipped it on his shirt and headed for the elevator. Rode it to the third floor. The third floor had low ceilings and internal corridors lit by fluorescent tubes. There were three doors made of painted fiberboard that were closed and one set of double doors made of polished wood that were open. Behind those was a secretary at a desk. The second gatekeeper. She was younger than the downstairs lady but presumably more senior.

“Mr. Reacher?” she asked.

He nodded and she came out from behind her desk and led him to where the windowed offices started. The third door they came to was labeled A. A. Rodin.

“What’s the A. A. for?” Reacher asked.

“I’m sure Mr. Rodin will tell you if he wants to,” the secretary said.

She knocked on the door and Reacher heard a baritone reply from inside. Then she opened the door and stood aside for Reacher to go in past her.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re most welcome,” she said.

Reacher went in. Rodin was already on his feet behind his desk, ready to welcome his visitor, full of reflexive courtesy. Reacher recognized him from the TV. He was a guy of about fifty, fairly lean, fairly fit, gray hair cut short. In person he looked smaller. He was maybe an inch under six feet and a pound under two hundred. He was dressed in a summer-weight suit, dark blue. He had a blue shirt on, and a blue tie. His eyes were blue. Blue was his color, no doubt about it. He was immaculately shaved and wearing cologne. He was a very squared-away guy, no question. As opposed to me, Reacher thought. It was like a study in contrasts. Next to Rodin, Reacher was an unkempt giant. He was six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. His hair was two inches longer and his clothes were a thousand dollars cheaper.

“Mr. Reacher?” Rodin said.

Reacher nodded. The office was government-basic, but neat. It was cool and quiet. No real view from the window. Just the flat roofs of the off-brand stores and the DMV office, with all the ductwork showing. The black glass tower was visible in the distance. There was a weak sun in the sky. At a right angle to the window there was a trophy wall behind the desk, with college degree certificates and photographs of Rodin with politicians. There were framed newspaper headlines reporting guilty verdicts in seven different cases. On another wall was a photograph of a blonde girl wearing a mortarboard and a gown and holding a degree scroll. She was pretty. Reacher looked at her for a moment longer than he needed to.

“That’s my daughter,” Rodin said. “She’s a lawyer, too.”

“Is she?” Reacher said.

“She just opened her own office here in town.”

There was nothing in his tone. Reacher wasn’t sure whether he was proud, or disapproving.

“You’re due to meet with her, I think,” Rodin said.

“Am I?” Reacher said. “Why?”

“She’s defending James Barr.”

“Your daughter? Is that ethical?”

“There’s no law against it. It might not be sensible, but it’s not unethical.”

He said sensible with emphasis, hinting at a number of meanings. Not smart to defend a notorious case, not smart for a daughter to take on her father, not smart for anyone to take on A. A. Rodin. He sounded like a very competitive guy.

“She put your name on her provisional witness list,” he said.

“Why?”

“She thinks you have information.”

“Where did she get my name?”

“I don’t know.”

“From the Pentagon?”

Rodin shrugged. “I’m not sure. But she got it from somewhere. Therefore people have been looking for you.”

“Is that why I got in here?”

Rodin nodded.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “That’s exactly why. Generally I don’t encourage walk-ins.”

“Your staff seems to be on board with that policy.”

“I certainly hope so,” Rodin said. “Sit down, please.”

Reacher sat in the visitor chair and Rodin sat behind his desk. The window was on Reacher’s left and Rodin’s right. Neither man had the light in his eyes. It was an equitable furniture arrangement. Different from some prosecutors’ offices Reacher had known.

“Coffee?” Rodin asked.

“Please,” Reacher said.

Rodin made a call and asked for coffee.

“Naturally I’m interested in why you came to see me first,” he said. “The prosecution, I mean, rather than the defense.”

“I wanted your personal opinion,” Reacher said.

“On what?”

“On how strong a case you’ve got against James Barr.”

Rodin didn’t answer immediately. There was a short silence and then there was a knock at the door and the secretary came in with coffee. She had a silver tray with the works on it. A French press, two cups, two saucers, a sugar bowl, a tiny pitcher of cream, two silver spoons. The cups were fine china. Not government issue, Reacher thought. Rodin likes his coffee done right. The secretary put the tray on the edge of the desk, so that it was exactly halfway between the desk chair and the visitor chair.

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

“You’re most welcome,” she said, and left the room.

“Help yourself,” Rodin said. “Please.”

Reacher pushed the plunger down and poured himself a cup, no cream, no sugar. It smelled dark and strong. Coffee, done right.

“The case against James Barr is exceptionally good,” Rodin said.

“Eyewitnesses?” Reacher asked.

“No,” Rodin said. “But eyewitness testimony can be of random value. I’m almost glad we don’t have eyewitnesses. Because what we’ve got instead is exceptional physical evidence. And science doesn’t lie. It doesn’t get confused.”

“Exceptional?” Reacher said.

“A complete rock-solid evidence trail that ties the man to the crime.”

“How solid?”

“As good as it gets. The best I’ve ever seen. I’m completely confident.”

“I’ve heard prosecutors say that before.”

“Not this one, Mr. Reacher. I’m a very cautious man. I don’t prosecute capital cases unless I’m certain of the outcome.”

“Keeping score?”

Rodin gestured above and behind him at his trophy wall.

“Seven for seven,” he said. “One hundred percent.”

“In how long?”

“In three years. James Barr will make it eight for eight. If he ever wakes up.”

“Suppose he wakes up damaged?”

“If he wakes up with any brain function at all, he’s going to trial. What he did here can’t be forgiven.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“OK what?”

“You’ve told me what I wanted to know.”

“You said you had information. From the army.”

“I’ll keep it to myself for now.”

“You were a military policeman, am I right?”

“Thirteen years,” Reacher said.

“And you knew James Barr?”

“Briefly.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Not yet.”

“Mr. Reacher, if you have exculpatory information, or anything to add at all, you really need to tell me now.”

“Do I?”

“I’ll get it anyway. My daughter will submit it. She’ll be looking for a plea bargain.”

“What does the A. A. stand for?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your initials.”

“Aleksei Alekseivitch. My family came from Russia. But a long time ago. Before the October Revolution.”

“But they keep up traditions.”

“As you can see.”

“What do people call you?”

“Alex, of course.”

Reacher stood up. “Well, thanks for your time, Alex. And the coffee.”

“Are you going to see my daughter now?”

“Is there any point? You seem pretty sure of yourself.”

Rodin smiled an indulgent smile.

“It’s a matter of procedure,” he said. “I’m an officer of the court, and you’re on a witness list. I’m obliged to point out that you’re obliged to go. Anything less would be unethical.”

“Where is she?”

“In the glass tower you can see from the window.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I guess I could drop by.”

“I still need whatever information you have,” Rodin said.

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “You really don’t.”

He returned his visitor pass to the woman at the reception desk and headed back to the public plaza. Stood in the cold sun and turned a complete circle, getting a sense of the place. All cities are the same, and all cities are different. They all have colors. Some are gray. This one was brown. Reacher guessed the brick was made from local clay and had carried the color of old farmland into the facades. Even the stone was flecked with tan, like it carried deposits of iron. There were accents of dark red here and there, like old barns. It was a warm place, not busy, but it was surviving. It would rebound after the tragedy. There was progress and optimism and dynamism. All the new construction proved it. There were work zones and raw concrete curbs everywhere. Lots of planning, lots of rebuilding. Lots of hope.

The new parking garage extension anchored the north end of the downtown strip. It suggested commercial expansion. It was south and slightly west of the kill zone. Very close. Directly west and maybe twice as distant was a length of the raised highway. It ran free and clear through a curve for maybe thirty yards before curling in behind the library. Then it curled some more and passed behind the black glass tower. The tower was due north of the plaza. It had an NBC sign near the door, on a black granite slab. Ann Yanni’s workplace, Reacher guessed, as well as Rodin’s daughter’s. East of the plaza was the office building with the DMV and the recruiting office. That was where the victims had come from. They had spilled out the door. What had Ann Yanni said? At the end of a long workweek? They had hustled west across the plaza toward their parked cars or the bus depot and had stumbled into a nightmare. The narrow walkway would have slowed them down and lined them up. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Reacher walked the length of the empty ornamental pool to the revolving door at the base of the tower. He went in and checked the lobby for a directory. There was a glassed-in board made of ridged black felt with press-in white letters. NBC was on the second floor. Some of the other suites were empty, and Reacher guessed the rest changed hands fast enough to make it worth holding on to the press-in letter system. Law Offices of Helen Rodin was listed on four. The letters were a little misaligned and the spacing was off. Rockefeller Center it ain’t, Reacher thought.

He waited for the elevator in a queue of two, him and a pretty blonde woman. He looked at her and she looked at him. She got out on two and he realized it was Ann Yanni. He recognized her from the broadcast. Then he figured all he needed to do was meet Emerson from the local PD and he would have brought the whole breaking-news tableau to life.

He found Helen Rodin’s suite. It was at the front of the building. Her windows were going to overlook the plaza. He knocked. Heard a muffled reply and went in. There was an empty reception room with a secretary’s desk. The desk was unoccupied. It was secondhand, but not recently used. No secretary yet, Reacher thought. Early days.

He knocked on the inner office door. Heard the same voice make a second reply. He went in and found Helen Rodin at another secondhand desk. He recognized her from her father’s photograph. But face-to-face she looked even better. She was probably no more than thirty, quite tall, lightly built. Slim, in an athletic sort of a way. Not anorexic. Either she ran or played soccer or had been very lucky with her metabolism. She had long blonde hair and her father’s blue eyes. There was intelligence behind them. She was dressed all in black, in a pantsuit with a tight stretch top under the coat. Lycra, Reacher thought. Can’t beat it.

“Hello,” she said.

“I’m Jack Reacher,” he said.

She stared at him. “You’re kidding. Are you really?”

He nodded. “Always have been, always will be.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Not really. Everybody’s somebody.”

“I mean, how did you know to come? We couldn’t find you.”

“I saw it on the TV. Ann Yanni, Saturday morning.”

“Well, thank God for TV,” she said. “And thank God you’re here.”

“I was in Miami,” he said. “With a dancer.”

“A dancer?”

“She was Norwegian,” he said.

He walked to the window and looked out. He was four stories up and the main shopping street ran away directly south, down a hill, emphasizing his elevation. The ornamental pool was placed with its long axis exactly lined up with the street. The pool was on the street, really, except they had blocked the street off to make the plaza. Someone returning from a long spell away would be surprised to find a big tank of water where once there had been roadway. The pool was much longer and narrower than it had looked from ground level. It looked sad and empty, with just a thin layer of mud and scum on the black tile. Beyond it and slightly to the right was the new parking structure. It was slightly downhill from the plaza. Maybe half a story’s difference.

“Were you here?” Reacher asked. “When it happened?”

“Yes, I was,” Helen Rodin said quietly.

“Did you see it?”

“Not at first. I heard the first three gunshots. They came very fast. The first, and then a tiny pause, and then the next two. Then another pause, a little longer, but just a split second, really. I stood up in time for the last three. Horrible.”

Reacher nodded. Brave girl, he thought. She hears gunshots, and she stands up. She doesn’t dive under the desk. Then he thought: The first, and then a tiny pause. That was the sound of a skilled rifleman watching where his first cold shot went. So many variables. The cold barrel, the range, the wind, the zeroing, the sighting-in.

“Did you see people die?” he asked.

“Two of them,” she said behind him. “It was awful.”

“Three shots and two people?”

“He missed once. Either the fourth or the fifth shot, they’re not sure. They found the bullet in the pool. That’s why it’s empty. They drained it.”

Reacher said nothing.

“The bullet is part of the evidence,” Helen said. “It ties the rifle to the crime.”

“Did you know any of the dead people?”

“No. They were just people, I guess. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I saw flames from the gun,” Helen said. “Way over there, in the shadows, in the dark. Little spits of flame.”

“Muzzle flashes,” Reacher said.

He turned back from the window. She held out her hand.

“I’m Helen Rodin,” she said. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself properly.”

Reacher took her hand. It was warm and firm.

“Just Helen?” he said. “Not Helena Alekseyovna or something?”

She stared at him again. “How the hell did you know that?”

“I met your dad,” he said, and let go of her hand.

“Did you?” she said. “Where?”

“In his office, just now.”

“You went to his office? Today?”

“I just left there.”

“Why did you go to his office? You’re my witness. He shouldn’t have seen you.”

“He was very keen to talk.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I asked questions instead.”

“What questions?”

“I wanted to know how strong his case was. Against James Barr.”

“I’m representing James Barr. And you’re a defense witness. You should have been talking to me, not him.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Unfortunately the case against James Barr is very strong,” she said.

“How did you get my name?” Reacher asked.

“From James Barr, of course,” she said. “How else?”

“From Barr? I don’t believe it.”

“Well, listen,” she said.

She turned away to the desk and pressed a key on an old-fashioned cassette player. Reacher heard a voice he didn’t recognize say: Denying it is not an option. Helen touched the Pause key and kept her finger on it.

“His first lawyer,” she said. “We changed representation yesterday.”

“How? He was in a coma yesterday.”

“Technically my client is James Barr’s sister. His next of kin.”

Then she let go of the Pause key and Reacher heard room sounds and hiss and then a voice he hadn’t heard for fourteen years. It was exactly how he remembered it. It was low, and tense, and raspy. It was the voice of a man who rarely spoke. It said: Get Jack Reacher for me.

He stood there, stunned.

Helen Rodin pressed the Stop key.

“See?” she said.

Then she checked her watch.

“Ten-thirty,” she said. “Stick around and join in the client conference.”

She unveiled him like a conjurer on a stage. Like a rabbit out of a hat. First in was a guy Reacher immediately took for an ex-cop. He was introduced as Franklin, a freelance investigator who worked for lawyers. They shook hands.

“You’re a hard man to find,” Franklin said.

“Wrong,” Reacher said. “I’m an impossible man to find.”

“Want to tell me why?” There were instant questions in Franklin’s eyes. A cop’s questions. Like, How much use is this guy going to be as a witness? What is he? A felon? A fugitive? Will he have credibility on the stand?

“Just a hobby,” Reacher said. “Just a personal choice.”

“So you’re cool?”

“You could skate on me.”

Then a woman came in. She was in her mid- to late thirties, probably, dressed for an office, and stressed and sleepless. But behind the agitation she wasn’t unappealing. She looked like a kind and decent person. Even pretty. But she was clearly James Barr’s sister. Reacher knew that even before they were introduced. She had the same coloring and a softer, feminized, older version of the same face.

“I’m Rosemary Barr,” she said. “I’m so glad you found us. It feels providential. Now I really feel we’re getting somewhere.”

Reacher said nothing at all.

The law offices of Helen Rodin didn’t run to a conference room. Reacher figured that would come later. Maybe. If she prospered. So all four people crowded into the inner office. Helen sat at her desk. Franklin perched on a corner of it. Reacher leaned on the windowsill. Rosemary Barr paced, nervously. If there had been a rug, she would have worn holes in it.

“OK,” Helen said. “Defense strategy. At the minimum we want to pursue a medical plea. But we’ll aim higher than that. How high we eventually get will depend on a number of factors. In which connection, first, I’m sure we all want to hear what Mr. Reacher has to say.”

“I don’t think you do,” Reacher said.

“Do what?”

“Want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because you jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“Why do you think I went to see your father first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I didn’t come here to help James Barr.”

Nobody spoke.

“I came here to bury him,” Reacher said.

They all stared.

“But why?” Rosemary Barr asked.

“Because he’s done this before. And once was enough.”

CHAPTER 3

Reacher moved and propped his back against the window reveal and turned sideways so that he could see the plaza. And so that he couldn’t see his audience.

“Is this a privileged conversation?” he asked.

“Yes,” Helen Rodin said. “It is. It’s a client conference. It’s automatically protected. Nothing we say here can be repeated.”

“Is it ethical for you to hear bad news, legally?”

There was a long silence.

“Are you going to give evidence for the prosecution?” Helen Rodin asked.

“I don’t think I’ll have to, under the circumstances. But I will if necessary.”

“Then we would hear the bad news anyway. We would take a deposition from you before the trial. To guarantee no more surprises.”

More silence.

“James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best the army ever had, and not the worst. Just a good, competent rifleman. Average in almost every way.”

Then he paused and turned his head and looked down to his left. At the cheap new building with the recruitment office in it. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps.

“Four types of people join the military,” he said. “First, for people like me, it’s a family trade. Second, there are patriots, eager to serve their country. Third, there are people who just need a job. And fourth, there are people who want to kill other people. The military is the only place where it’s legal to do that. James Barr was the fourth type. Deep down he thought it would be fun to kill.”

Rosemary Barr looked away. Nobody spoke.

“But he never got the chance,” Reacher said. “I was a very thorough investigator when I was an MP, and I learned all about him. I studied him. He trained for five years. I went through his logbooks. Some weeks he fired two thousand rounds. All of them at paper targets or silhouettes. I counted a career total of nearly a quarter-million rounds fired, and not one of them at the enemy. He didn’t go to Panama in 1989. We had a very big army back then, and we required only a very small force, so most guys missed out. It burned him up. Then Desert Shield happened in 1990. He went to Saudi. But he wasn’t in Desert Storm in 1991. They made it a mostly armored campaign. James Barr sat it out in Saudi, cleaning sand out of his rifle, firing two thousand training rounds a week. Then after Desert Storm was over, they sent him to Kuwait City for the cleanup.”

“What happened there?” Rosemary Barr asked.

“He snapped,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened there. The Soviets had collapsed. Iraq was back in its box. He looked ahead and saw that war was over. He had trained nearly six years and had never fired his gun in anger and was never going to. A lot of his training had been about visualization. About seeing himself putting the reticle on the medulla oblongata, where the spinal cord broadens at the base of the brain. About breathing slow and squeezing the trigger. About the split-second pause while the bullet flies. About seeing the puff of pink mist from the back of the head. He had visualized all of that. Many times. But he had never seen it. Not once. He had never seen the pink mist. And he really wanted to.”

Silence in the room.

“So he went out one day, alone,” Reacher said. “In Kuwait City. He set up and waited. Then he shot and killed four people coming out of an apartment building.”

Helen Rodin was staring at him.

“He fired from a parking garage,” Reacher said. “Second level. It was directly opposite the apartment building’s door. The victims were American noncoms, as it happened. They had weekend passes, and they were in street clothes.”

Rosemary Barr was shaking her head.

“This can’t be true,” she said. “It just can’t be. He wouldn’t do it. And if he did, he’d have gone to prison. But he got an honorable discharge instead. Right after the Gulf. And a campaign medal. So it can’t have happened. It can’t possibly be true.”

“That’s exactly why I’m here,” Reacher said. “There was a serious problem. Remember the sequence of events. We had four dead guys, and we worked from there. In the end I followed the trail all the way to your brother. But it was a very tough trail. We took all kinds of wrong turns. And along one of them we found stuff out about the four dead guys. Stuff we really didn’t want to know. Because they had been doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.”

“What things?” Helen Rodin asked.

“Kuwait City was a hell of a place. Full of rich Arabs. Even the poor ones had Rolexes and Rolls-Royces and marble bathrooms with solid gold faucets. A lot of them had fled temporarily, for the duration. But they had left all their stuff behind. And some of them had left their families behind. Their wives and daughters.”

“And?”

“Our four dead noncoms had been doing the conquering army thing, just like the Iraqis before them. That’s how they saw it, I guess. We saw it as rape and armed robbery. As it happened they had left quite a trail that day, inside that building. And other buildings, on other days. We found enough loot in their footlockers to start another branch of Tiffany’s. Watches, diamonds, all kinds of portable stuff. And underwear. We figured they used the underwear to keep count of the wives and daughters.”

“So what happened?”

“It got political, inevitably. It went up the chain of command. The Gulf was supposed to be a big shiny success for us. It was supposed to be a hundred percent wonderful and a hundred percent squeaky clean. And the Kuwaitis were our allies, and so on and so forth. So ultimately we were told to cover for the four guys. We were told to bury the story. Which we did. Which also meant letting James Barr walk. Because whispers had gotten out and we knew his lawyer would have used them. We were afraid of blackmail. If we took Barr to trial, his lawyer would have countered with a justifiable homicide claim. He would have said Barr had been standing up for the honor of the army, in a rough-and-ready sort of a way. All the beans would have spilled in the process. We were told not to risk that. So our hands were tied. It was a stalemate.”

“Maybe it was justifiable homicide,” Rosemary Barr said. “Maybe James really did know all along.”

“Ma’am, he didn’t know. I’m very sorry, but he didn’t. He was never near any of those guys before. Didn’t know them from Adam. Didn’t say anything to me about them when I caught up to him. He hadn’t been in KC long. Not long enough to know anything. He was just killing people. For fun. He confessed to that, to me personally, before any of the other stuff ever came to light.”

Silence in the room.

“So we hushed it up and mustered him out,” Reacher said. “We said his four guys had been killed by Palestinians, which was plausible in Kuwait City in 1991. I was mildly pissed about the whole thing. It wasn’t the worst situation I had ever seen, but it wasn’t the nicest, either. James Barr got away with murder, by sheer luck. So I went to see him before he left and I told him to justify his great good fortune by never stepping out of line again, not ever, the whole rest of his life. I told him if he ever did, I would come find him and make him sorry.”

Silence in the room. It lasted minutes.

“So here I am,” Reacher said.

“This must be classified information,” Helen Rodin said. “I mean, surely it can’t ever be used. There would be a huge scandal.”

Reacher nodded. “It’s highly classified. It’s sealed inside the Pentagon. That’s why I asked if this conversation was privileged.”

“You’d get in big trouble if you talked about it.”

“I’ve been in big trouble before. I came here to find out if I needed to get in big trouble again. As it happens, I don’t think I do. I think your father can put James Barr away without my help. But my help is always available if he needs it.”

Then Helen understood.

“You’re here to pressure me,” she said. “Aren’t you? You’re telling me if I try too hard, you’ll cut me off at the knees.”

“I’m here to keep my promise,” Reacher said. “To James Barr.”

He closed the door and left them there, three silent and disappointed people in a room. Then he rode down in the elevator. Ann Yanni got in again on two. He wondered for a moment if she spent all day riding the elevators, hoping to be recognized. Hoping to be asked for an autograph. He ignored her. Got out with her in the lobby and just headed for the door.

He stood for a moment in the plaza. Deciding. James Barr’s medical condition was the complicating factor. He didn’t want to stick around until the guy woke up. If that happened at all, it might take weeks. And Reacher was not a guy who liked to stick around. He liked to be on the move. Two days in one place was about his limit. But he was stuck for alternatives. He couldn’t hint at anything to Alex Rodin. Couldn’t give him a call-me-if-you-need-me number. For one thing, he didn’t have a phone. For another, a guy as squared away and cautious as Alex Rodin was would worry away at the hint until something began to unravel. He would make the link to the Pentagon easily enough. Reacher had even asked did she get my name from the Pentagon? That had been a careless mistake. So Alex Rodin would put two and two together, eventually. He would figure, There’s something extra here, and I can find out what it is from the Pentagon. The Pentagon would stonewall him, of course. But Rodin wouldn’t like being stonewalled. He would go to the media. Ann Yanni, probably. She would be ready for another network story. And at bottom Rodin would be insecure enough about losing the case that he would simply have to know. He wouldn’t give up on it.

And Reacher didn’t want the story out there. Not unless it was absolutely necessary. Gulf War vets had it hard enough, with the chemical stuff and the uranium poisoning. All they had going for them was the conflict’s spotless just-war reputation. They didn’t need defaming by association with people like Barr and his victims. People would say, Hey, they were all doing it. And they weren’t all doing it, in Reacher’s experience. That had been a good army. So he didn’t want the story out there unless it was absolutely necessary, and he wanted to judge that for himself.

So, no hints to Alex Rodin. No call-me contingencies.

So … what, exactly?

He decided to stick around for twenty-four hours. Maybe there would be a clearer prognosis on Barr’s condition after that. Maybe somehow he could check with Emerson and get a better feel for the evidence. Then maybe he could feel OK about leaving things with Alex Rodin’s office, on a kind of forensic autopilot. If there were problems down the road maybe he would read about them in a newspaper somewhere, far in the future, on a beach or in a bar, and then he could come all the way back again.

So, twenty-four hours in a small heartland city.

He decided to go see if there was a river.

There was a river. It was a broad, slow body of water that moved west to east through an area south of downtown. Some tributary that fed the mighty Ohio, he guessed. Its north bank was straightened and strengthened with massive stone blocks along a three-hundred-yard stretch. The blocks might have weighed fifty tons each. They were immaculately chiseled and expertly fitted. They made a quayside. A wharf. They had tall fat iron mushrooms set into them, to tie off ropes. Stone paving slabs made the wharf thirty feet deep. All along its length were tall wooden sheds, open on the river side, open on the street side. The street was made of cobbles. A hundred years ago there would have been huge river barges tied up and unloading. There would have been swarms of men at work. There would have been horses and carts clattering on the cobbles. But now there was nothing. Just absolute stillness, and the slow drift of the water. Scabs of rust on the iron mushrooms, clumps of weeds between the stones.

Some of the sheds still had faded names on them. McGinty Dry Goods. Allentown Seed Company. Parker Supply. Reacher strolled the three hundred yards and looked at all of them. They were still standing, strong and square. Ripe for renovation, he guessed. A city that put an ornamental pool with a fountain in a public plaza would spruce up the waterfront. It was inevitable. There was construction all over town. It would move south. They would give someone tax breaks to open a riverside café. Maybe a bar. Maybe with live music, Thursday through Saturday. Maybe with a little museum laying out the history of the river trade.

He turned to walk back and came face-to-face with Helen Rodin.

“You’re not such a hard man to find,” she said.

“Evidently,” he said.

“Tourists always come to the docks.”

She was carrying a lawyer-size briefcase.

“Can I buy you lunch?” she said.

She walked him back north to the edge of the new gentrification. In the space of a single dug-up block the city changed from old and worn to new and repainted. Stores changed from dusty mom-and-pop places with displays of vacuum cleaner bags and washing machine hoses to new establishments showing off spotlit hundred-dollar dresses. And shoes, and four-dollar lattes, and things made of titanium. They walked past a few such places and then Helen Rodin led him into an eatery. It was the kind of place he had seen before. It was the kind of place he usually avoided. White walls, some exposed brick, engine-turned aluminum tables and chairs, weird salad combinations. Random ingredients thrown together and called inventive.

She led him to a table in the far back corner. An energetic kid came by with menus. Helen Rodin ordered something with oranges and walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese. With a cup of herbal tea. Reacher gave up on reading his menu and ordered the same thing, but with coffee, regular, black.

“This is my favorite place in town,” Helen said.

He nodded. He believed her. She looked right at home. The long straight hair, the black clothes. The youthful glow. He was older and came from a different time and a different place.

“I need you to explain something,” she said.

She bent down and opened her briefcase. Came out with the old tape player. Placed it carefully on the table. Pressed Play. Reacher heard James Barr’s first lawyer say: Denying it is not an option. Then he heard Barr say: Get Jack Reacher for me.

“You already played that for me,” he said.

“But why would he say it?” Helen asked.

“That’s what you want me to explain?”

She nodded.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Logically you’re the last person he should have asked for.”

“I agree.”

“Could he have been in any doubt about how you felt? Fourteen years ago?”

“I don’t think so. I made myself pretty clear.”

“Then why would he ask for you now?”

Reacher didn’t answer. The food came, and they started eating. Oranges, walnuts, Gorgonzola cheese, all kinds of leaves and lettuces, and a raspberry vinaigrette. It wasn’t too bad. And the coffee was OK.

“Play me the whole tape,” he said.

She put her fork down and pressed the Rewind key. Kept her hand there, one fingertip on each key, like a pianist. She had long fingers. No rings. Polished nails, neatly trimmed. She pressed Play and picked up her fork again. Reacher heard no sound for a moment until the blank leader cleared the tape head. Then he heard a prison acoustic. Echoes, distant metallic clattering. A man breathing. Then he heard a door open and the thump of another man sitting down. No scraping of chair legs on concrete. A prison chair, bolted to the floor. The lawyer started talking. He was old and bored. He didn’t want to be there. He knew Barr was guilty. He made banal small talk for a while. Grew frustrated with Barr’s silence. Then he said, full of exasperation: I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. There was a long, long pause, and then Barr’s voice came through, agitated, close to the microphone: They got the wrong guy. He said it again. Then the lawyer started up again, not believing him, saying the evidence was all there, looking for a reason behind an indisputable fact. Then Barr asked for Reacher, twice, and the lawyer asked if Reacher was a doctor, twice. Then Barr got up and walked away. There was the sound of hammering on a locked door, and then nothing more.

Helen Rodin pressed the Stop key.

“So why?” she asked. “Why say he didn’t do it and then call for a guy who knows for sure he did it before?”

Reacher just shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. But he saw in Helen’s eyes that she had an answer.

“You know something,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know you know it. But there’s got to be something there. Something he thinks can help him.”

“Does it matter? He’s in a coma. He might never wake up.”

“It matters a lot. He could get better treatment.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Are you sure? Was there a psychiatric evaluation made back then?”

“It never got that far.”

“Did he claim insanity?”

“No, he claimed a perfect score. Four for four.”

“Did you think he was nuts?”

“That’s a big word. Was it nuts to shoot four people for fun? Of course it was. Was he nuts, legally? I’m sure he wasn’t.”

“You must know something, Reacher,” Helen said. “It must be way down in there. You’ve got to dredge it up.”

He kept quiet for a moment.

“Have you actually seen the evidence?” he asked.

“I’ve seen a summary.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s terrible. There’s no question he did it. This is about mitigation, nothing more. And his state of mind. I can’t let them execute an insane person.”

“So wait until he wakes up. Run some tests.”

“They won’t count. He could wake up like a fruitcake and the prosecution will say that was caused by the blows to the head in the jailhouse fight. They’ll say he was perfectly sane at the time of the crime.”

“Is your dad a fair man?”

“He lives to win.”

“Like father, like daughter?”

She paused.

“Somewhat,” she said.

Reacher finished up his salad. Chased the last walnut around with his fork and then gave up and used his fingers instead.

“What’s on your mind?” Helen asked.

“Just a minor detail,” he said. “Fourteen years ago it was a very tough case with barely adequate forensics. And he confessed. This time the forensics seem to be a total slam dunk. But he’s denying it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“So think about what you do know,” Helen said. “Please. You must know something. You have to ask yourself, why did he come up with your name? There has to be a reason.”

Reacher said nothing. The kid who had served them came back and took their plates away. Reacher pointed at his coffee cup and the kid made another trip and refilled it. Reacher cradled it in his hands and smelled the steam.

“May I ask you a personal question?” Helen Rodin said to him.

“Depends how personal,” Reacher said.

“Why were you so untraceable? Normally guys like Franklin can find anybody.”

“Maybe he’s not as good as you think.”

“He’s probably better than I think.”

“Not everyone is traceable.”

“I agree. But you don’t look like you belong in that category.”

“I was in the machine,” Reacher said. “My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I’m out, I’m out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.”

“Like a game?”

“Like an addiction,” Reacher said. “I’m addicted to being out.”

The kid brought the check. Helen Rodin paid. Then she put her tape player back in her briefcase and she and Reacher left together. They walked north, past the construction at the bottom of First Street. She was heading to her office and he was going to look for a hotel.

A man called Grigor Linsky watched them walk. He was slumped low in a car parked at the curb. He knew where to wait. He knew where she ate when she had company.

CHAPTER 4

Reacher checked into a downtown hotel called the Metropole Palace, two blocks east of First Street, about level with the main shopping strip. He paid cash up front for one night only and used the name Jimmy Reese. He had cycled through all the presidents and vice presidents long ago and was now using second basemen from the Yankees’ nonchampionship years. Jimmy Reese had played pretty well during part of 1930 and pretty badly during part of 1931. He had come from nowhere and moved on to St. Louis for part of 1932. Then he had quit. He had died in California, age ninety-two. But now he was back, with a single room and a bath in the Metropole Palace, for one night only, due to check out the next morning before eleven o’clock.

The Metropole was a sad, half-empty, faded old place. But it had once been grand. Reacher could see that. He could picture the corn traders a hundred years ago walking up the hill from the river wharf and staying the night. He guessed the lobby had once looked like a Western saloon, but now it was thinly made over with modernist touches. There was a refurbished elevator. The rooms had swipe cards instead of keys. But he guessed the building hadn’t really changed very much. His room was certainly old-fashioned and gloomy. The mattress felt like a part of the original inventory.

He lay down on it and put his hands behind his head. Thought back more than fourteen years to Kuwait City. All cities have colors, and KC was white. White stucco, white-painted concrete, white marble. Skies burned white by the sun. Men in white robes. The parking garage James Barr had used was white, and the apartment building opposite was white. Because of the glare the four dead guys had all been wearing aviator shades. All four men had been hit in the head, but none of the shades had broken. They had just fallen off. All four bullets had been recovered, and they broke the case. They were match-grade 168-grain jacketed boat tails. Not hollow points, because of the Geneva Convention. They were an American sniper’s bullets, either Army or Marines. If Barr had used a battle rifle or a submachine gun or a sidearm, Reacher would have gotten nowhere. Because every firearm in theater except the sniper rifles used standard NATO rounds, which would have cast the net way too wide, because just about all of NATO was in-country. But Barr’s whole purpose had been to use his own specialist weapon, just for once, this time for real. And in so doing, his four thirteen-cent bullets had nailed him.

But it had been a tough, tough case. Maybe Reacher’s finest ever. He had used logic, deduction, paperwork, footwork, intuition, and ultimately elimination. At the end of the trail was James Barr, a man who had finally seen the pink mist and was strangely at peace with his capture.

He had confessed.

The confession was voluntary, fast, and complete. Reacher never laid a hand on him. Barr talked quite freely about the experience. Then he asked questions about the investigation, like he was fascinated by the process. Clearly he had not expected to be caught. Not in a million years. He was simultaneously aggrieved and admiring. He had even acted a little sympathetic when the political snafu eventually broke him loose. Like he was sorry that Reacher’s fine efforts had come to nothing.

Fourteen years later he had not confessed.

There was another difference between this time and the last time, too. But Reacher couldn’t pin it down. Something to do with how hot Kuwait City had been.

Grigor Linsky used his cell phone and called the Zec. The Zec was the man he worked for. It wasn’t just Zec. It was the Zec. It was a question of respect. The Zec was eighty years old, but he still broke arms if he smelled disrespect. He was like an old bull. He still had his strength and his attitude. He was eighty years old because of his strength and his attitude. Without them he would have died at age twenty. Or later, at thirty, which was about when he went insane and his real name finally slipped his mind.

“The lawyer went back to her office,” Linsky said. “Reacher turned east off First Street. I laid back and didn’t follow him. But he turned away from the bus depot. Therefore we can assume he’s staying in town. My guess is he checked into the Metropole Palace. There’s nothing else in that direction.”

The Zec made no reply.

“Should we do anything?” Linsky asked.

“How long is he here for?”

“That depends. Clearly he’s on a mission of mercy.”

The Zec said nothing.

“Should we do anything?” Linsky asked again.

There was a pause. Cellular static, and an old man breathing.

“We should maybe distract him,” the Zec said. “Or discourage him. I’m told he was a soldier. Therefore he will probably maintain a predictable pattern of behavior. If he’s at the Metropole, he won’t stay in tonight. Not there. No fun for a soldier. He’ll go out somewhere. Probably alone. So there could be an incident. Use your imagination. Make it a big scenario. Don’t use our own people. And make it look natural.”

“Damage?”

“Broken bones, at least. Maybe he gets a head injury. Maybe he winds up in the coma ward along with his buddy James Barr.”

“What about the lawyer?”

“Leave her alone. For now. We’ll open that can of worms later. If we need to.”

Helen Rodin spent an hour at her desk. She took three calls. The first was from Franklin. He was bailing out.

“I’m sorry, but you’re going to lose,” the investigator said. “And I’ve got a business to run. I can’t put in unbilled hours on this anymore.”

“Nobody likes hopeless cases,” Helen said diplomatically. She was going to need him again in the future. No point in holding his feet to the fire.

“Not pro bono hopeless cases,” Franklin said.

“If I get a budget, will you come back on board?”

“Sure,” Franklin said. “Just call me.”

Then they hung up, all proprieties observed, their relationship preserved. The next call came ten minutes later. It was from her father, who sounded full of concern.

“You shouldn’t have taken this case, you know,” he said.

“It wasn’t like I was spoiled for choice,” Helen said.

“Losing might be winning, if you know what I mean.”

“Winning might be winning, too.”

“No, winning will be losing. You need to understand that.”

“Did you ever set out to lose a case?” she asked.

Her father said nothing. Then he went fishing.

“Did Jack Reacher find you?” he asked, meaning: Should I be worried?

“He found me,” she said, keeping her voice light.

“Was he interesting?” Meaning: Should I be very worried?

“He’s certainly given me something to think about.”

“Well, should we discuss it?” Meaning: Please tell me.

“I’m sure we will soon. When the time is right.”

They small-talked for a minute more and arranged to meet for dinner. He tried again: Please tell me. She didn’t. Then they hung up. Helen smiled. She hadn’t lied. Hadn’t even really bluffed. But she felt she had participated. The law was a game, and like any game it had a psychological component.

The third call was from Rosemary Barr at the hospital.

“James is waking up,” she said. “He coughed up his breathing tube. He’s coming out of the coma.”

“Is he talking?”

“The doctors say he might be tomorrow.”

“Will he remember anything?”

“The doctors say it’s possible.”

An hour later Reacher left the Metropole. He stayed east of First Street and headed north toward the off-brand stores he had seen near the courthouse. He wanted clothes. Something local. Maybe not a set of bib overalls, but certainly something more generic than his Miami gear. Because he figured he might head to Seattle next. For the coffee. And he couldn’t walk around Seattle in a bright yellow shirt.

He found a store and bought a pair of pants that the label called taupe and he called olive drab. He found a flannel shirt almost the same color. Plus underwear. And he invested in a pair of socks. He changed in the cubicle and threw his old stuff away in the store’s own trash bin. Forty bucks, for what he hoped would be four days’ wear. Extravagant, but it was worth ten bucks a day to him not to carry a bag.

He came out and walked west toward the afternoon sun. The shirt was too thick for the weather, but he could regulate it by rolling up the sleeves and opening a second button. It was OK. It would be fine for Seattle.

He came out into the plaza and saw that the fountain had been restarted. It was refilling the pool, very slowly. The mud on the bottom was an inch deep and moving in slow swirls. Some people were standing and watching it. Others were walking. But nobody was using the short route past the memorial tributes, where Barr’s victims had died. Maybe nobody would ever again. Instead everyone was looping the long way around, past the NBC sign. Instinctively, respectfully, fearfully; Reacher wasn’t sure.

He picked his way among the flowers and sat on the low wall, with the sound of the fountain behind him and the parking garage in front of him. One shoulder was warmed by the sun and the other was cool in the shade. He could feel the leftover sand under his feet. He looked to his left and watched the DMV building’s door. Looked to his right and watched the cars on the raised highway. They tracked through the curve, high up in the air, one after the other, single file, in a single lane. There weren’t many of them. Traffic up there was light, even though First Street itself was already building up to the afternoon rush hour. Then he looked to his left again and saw Helen Rodin sitting down beside him. She was out of breath.

“I was wrong,” she said. “You are a hard man to find.”

“But you triumphed nonetheless,” he said.

“Only because I saw you from my window. I ran all the way down, hoping you wouldn’t wander off. That was a half hour after calling all the hotels in town and being told you aren’t registered anywhere.”

“What hotels don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“James Barr is waking up. He might be talking tomorrow.”

“Or he might not.”

“You know much about head injuries?”

“Only the ones I cause.”

“I want you to do something for me.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“You can help me,” she said. “With something important.”

“Can I?”

“And you can help yourself.”

He said nothing.

“I want you to be my evidence analyst,” she said.

“You’ve got Franklin for that.”

She shook her head. “Franklin’s too close to his old PD buddies. He won’t be critical enough. He won’t want to tear into them.”

“And I will? I want Barr to go down, remember.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly why you should do it. You want to confirm that they’ve got an unbreakable case. Then you can leave town and be happy.”

“Would I tell you if I found a hole?”

“I’d see it in your eyes. And I’d know from what you did next. If you go, it’s a strong case. If you stay around, it’s weak.”

“Franklin quit, didn’t he?”

She paused, and then she nodded. “This case is a loser, all ways around. I’m doing it pro bono. Because nobody else will. But Franklin’s got a business to run.”

“So he won’t do it for free, but I will?”

“You need to do it. I think you’re already planning to do it. That’s why you went to see my father first. He’s confident, for sure. You saw that. But you still want a peek at the data. You were a thorough investigator. You said so yourself. You’re a perfectionist. You want to be able to leave town knowing everything is buttoned down tight, according to your own standards.”

Reacher said nothing.

“This gets you a real good look,” she said. “It’s their constitutional obligation. They have to show us everything. The defense gets a full discovery process.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You’ve got no choice,” she said. “They’re not going to show you anything otherwise. They don’t show stuff to strangers off the street.”

A real good look. Leave town and be happy. No choice.

“OK,” Reacher said.

She pointed. “Walk four blocks west and one block south. The PD is right there. I’ll go upstairs and call Emerson.”

“We’re doing this now?”

“James Barr is waking up. I need this stuff out of the way early. I’m going to be spending most of tomorrow trying to find a psychiatrist who will work for free. A medical plea is still our best bet.”

Reacher walked four blocks west and one block south. It took him under the raised highway and brought him to a corner. The PD had the whole block. Their building occupied most of it and there was an L-shaped parking lot on the rest of it for their vehicles. There were black-and-whites slotted in at angles, and unmarked detective cars, and a crime-scene van, and a SWAT truck. The building itself was made of glazed tan brick. It had a flat roof with big HVAC ducts all over it. There were bars on all the windows. Razor wire here and there around the perimeter.

He went inside and got directions and found Emerson waiting for him behind his desk. Reacher recognized him from his TV spot on Saturday morning. Same guy, pale, quiet, competent, not big, not small. In person he looked like he had been a cop since birth. Since the moment of conception, maybe. It was in his pores. In his DNA. He was wearing gray flannel pants and a white short-sleeve shirt. Open neck. No tie. There was a tweed jacket on the back of his chair. His face and his body were a little shapeless, like he had been molded by constant pressures.

“Welcome to Indiana,” he said.

Reacher said nothing.

“I mean it,” Emerson said. “Really. We love it when old friends of the accused show up to tear our work to shreds.”

“I’m here for his lawyer,” Reacher said. “Not as a friend.”

Emerson nodded.

“I’ll give you the background myself,” he said. “Then my crime-scene guy will walk you through the particulars. You can see absolutely anything you want and you can ask absolutely anything you want.”

Reacher smiled. He had been a cop of sorts himself for thirteen long years, on a tough beat, and he knew the language and all its dialects. He knew the tone and he understood the nuances. And the way Emerson spoke told him things. It told him that despite the initial hostility, this was a guy secretly happy to meet with a critic. Because he knew for sure he had a solid-gold slam-dunk case.

“You knew James Barr pretty well, am I right?” Emerson asked.

“Did you?” Reacher asked back.

Emerson shook his head. “Never met him. There were no warning signs.”

“Was his rifle legal?”

Emerson nodded. “It was registered and unmodified. As were all his other guns.”

“Did he hunt?”

Emerson shook his head again. “He wasn’t an NRA member and he didn’t belong to a gun club. We never saw him out in the hills. He was never in trouble. He was just a low-profile citizen. A no-profile citizen, really. No warning signs at all.”

“You seen this kind of thing before?”

“Too many times. If you include the District of Columbia, then Indiana is tied for sixteenth place out of fifty-one in terms of homicide deaths per capita. Worse than New York, worse than California. This town isn’t the worst in the state, but it’s not the best, either. So we’ve seen it all before, and sometimes there are signs, and sometimes there aren’t, but either way around we know what we’re doing.”

“I spoke with Alex Rodin,” Reacher said. “He’s impressed.”

“He should be. We performed well. Your old buddy was toast six hours after the first shot. It was a textbook case, beginning to end.”

“No doubts at all?”

“Put it this way. I wrote it up Saturday morning and I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought since then. It’s a done deal. About the best done deal I ever saw, and I’ve seen a lot.”

“So is there any point in me walking through it?”

“Sure there is. I’ve got a crime-scene guy desperate to show off. He’s a good man, and he deserves his moment in the sun.”

Emerson walked Reacher to the lab and introduced him as a lawyer’s scout, not as James Barr’s friend. Which helped a little with the atmosphere. Then he left him there. The crime-scene guy was a serious forty-year-old called Bellantonio. His name was more exuberant than he was. He was tall, dark, thin, and stooped. He could have been a mortician. And he suspected James Barr was going to plead guilty. He thought he wasn’t going to get his day in court. That was clear. He had laid out the evidence chain in a logical sequence on long tables in a sealed police garage bay, just so that he could give visitors the performance he would never give a jury.

The tables were white canteen-style trestles and they ran all the way around the perimeter of the bay. Above them was a horizontal line of cork boards with hundreds of printed sheets of paper pinned to them. The sheets were encased in plastic page protectors and they related to the specific items found directly below. Trapped tight in the square made by the tables was James Barr’s beige Dodge Caravan. The bay was clean and brightly lit with harsh fluorescent tubes and the minivan looked huge and alien in there. It was old and dirty and smelled of gasoline and oil and rubber. The sliding rear door was open and Bellantonio had rigged a light to shine in on the carpet.

“This all looks good,” Reacher said.

“Best crime scene I ever worked,” Bellantonio said.

“So walk me through it.”

Bellantonio started with the traffic cone. It was sitting there on a square of butcher paper, looking large and odd and out of place. Reacher saw the print powder on it, read the notes above it. Barr had handled it, that was for sure. He had clamped his right hand around it, near the top, where it was narrow. More than once. There were fingerprints and palm prints. The match was a laugher. There were way more comparison points than any court would demand.

Same for the quarter from the parking meter, same for the shell case. Bellantonio showed Reacher laser-printed stills from the parking garage video, showing the minivan coming in just before the event and going out again just after it. He showed him the interior of the Dodge, showed him the automotive carpet fibers recovered from the raw new concrete, showed him the dog hairs, showed him the denim fibers and the raincoat threads. Showed him a square of rug taken from Barr’s house, showed him the matching fibers found at the scene. Showed him the desert boots, showed him how crepe rubber was the best transfer mechanism going. Showed him how the tiny crumbs of rubber found at the scene matched new scuffs on the shoes’ toes. Showed him the cement dust tracked back into Barr’s house and recovered from the garage and the basement and the kitchen and the living room and the bedroom. Showed him a comparison sample taken from the parking garage and a lab report that proved it was the same.

Reacher scanned the transcripts from the 911 calls and the radio chatter between the squad cars. Then he glanced through the crime-scene protocol. The initial sweep by the uniformed officers, the forensic examination by Bellantonio’s own people, Emerson’s inspiration with the parking meter. Then he read the arrest report. It was printed out and pinned up along with everything else. The SWAT tactics, the sleeping suspect, the ID from the driver’s license from the wallet in the pants pocket. The paramedics’ tests. The capture of the dog by the K9 officers. The clothes in the closet. The shoes. The guns in the basement. He read the witness reports. A Marine recruiter had heard six shots. A cell phone company had provided a recording. There was a graph attached. A gray smear of sound, with six sharp spikes. Left to right, they were arrayed in a pattern that matched what Helen Rodin had said she had heard. One, two-three, pause, four-five-six. The graph’s vertical axis represented volume. The shots had been faint but clear on the recording. The horizontal axis represented the time base. Six shots in less than four seconds. Four seconds that had changed a city. For a spell, at least.

Reacher looked at the rifle. It was heat-sealed into a clear plastic sleeve. He read the report pinned above it. A Springfield M1A Super Match, ten-shot box magazine, four cartridges still in it. Barr’s prints all over it. Scratches on the forestock matching varnish scrapings found at the scene. The intact bullet recovered from the pool. A ballistics lab report matching the bullet to the barrel. Another report matching the shell case to the ejector. Slam dunk. Case closed.

“OK, enough,” Reacher said.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Bellantonio said.

“Best I ever saw,” Reacher said.

“Better than a hundred eyewitnesses.”

Reacher smiled. Crime-scene techs loved to say that.

“Anything you’re not happy with?” he asked.

“I love it all,” Bellantonio said.

Reacher glanced at his reflection in the Dodge’s tinted window. The black glass made his new shirt look gray.

“Why did he leave the traffic cone behind?” he said. “He could have pitched it into the back of the van, easy as anything.”

Bellantonio said nothing.

“And why did he pay to park?” Reacher asked.

“I’m forensics,” Bellantonio said. “Not psychology.”

Then Emerson came back in and stood there, waiting to accept Reacher’s surrender. Reacher gave it up, no hesitation. He shook their hands and congratulated them on a well-worked case.

He walked back, one block north and four blocks east, under the raised highway, heading for the black glass tower. It was after five o’clock and the sun was on his back. He arrived at the plaza and saw that the fountain was still going and the pool had filled another inch. He went in past the NBC sign and rode up in the elevator. Ann Yanni didn’t show. Maybe she was preparing for the six o’clock news.

He found Helen Rodin at her secondhand desk.

“Watch my eyes,” he said.

She watched them.

“Pick your own cliché,” he said. “It’s a cast-iron, solid-gold slam dunk. It’s Willie Mays under a fly ball.”

She said nothing.

“See any doubt in my eyes?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“So start calling psychiatrists. If that’s what you really want to do.”

“He deserves representation, Reacher.”

“He stepped out of line.”

“We can’t just lynch him.”

Reacher paused. Then he nodded. “The shrink should think about the parking meter. I mean, who pays for ten minutes even if they’re not shooting people? It strikes me as weird. It’s so law-abiding, isn’t it? It kind of puts the whole event into a law-abiding envelope. Maybe he really was nuts this time. You know, confused about what he was doing.”

Helen Rodin made a note. “I’ll be sure to mention it.”

“You want to get some dinner?”

“We’re on opposite sides.”

“We had lunch.”

“Only because I wanted something from you.”

“We can still be civilized.”

She shook her head. “I’m having dinner with my father.”

“He’s on the opposite side.”

“He’s my father.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Were the cops OK?” she asked.

Reacher nodded. “They were courteous enough.”

“They can’t have been very pleased to see you. They don’t understand why you’re really here.”

“They don’t need to worry. They’ve got a great case.”

“It’s not over until the fat lady sings.”

“She’s been singing since Friday at five. Pretty loud.”

“Maybe we could have a drink after dinner,” she said. “If I can get away in time. There’s a sports bar six blocks north of here. Monday night, it’s about the only place in town. I’ll drop by and see if you’re there. But I can’t promise anything.”

“Neither can I,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll be at the hospital, unplugging James Barr’s life support.”

He rode down in the elevator and found Rosemary Barr waiting for him in the lobby. He guessed she had just gotten back from the hospital and had called upstairs and Helen Rodin had told her he was on his way down. So she had waited. She was pacing nervously, side to side, crossing and recrossing the route between the elevator bank and the street door.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

“Outside,” he said.

He led her through the door and across the plaza to the south wall of the pool. It was still filling slowly. The fountain splashed and tinkled. He sat where he had sat before, with the funeral tributes at his feet. Rosemary Barr stood in front of him, facing him, very close, her eyes on his, not looking down at the flowers and the candles and the photographs.

“You need to keep an open mind,” she said.

“Do I?” he said.

“James wanted you here, therefore he can’t be guilty.”

“That’s a leap.”

“It’s logical,” she said.

“I just saw the evidence,” he said. “More than enough for anyone.”

“I’m not going to argue about fourteen years ago.”

“You can’t.”

“But he’s innocent now.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I understand how you feel,” Rosemary said. “You think he let you down.”

“He did.”

“But suppose he didn’t? Suppose he met your conditions and this is all a mistake? How would you feel then? What would you do for him? If you’re ready to stand up against him, don’t you think you should be equally ready to stand up for him?”

“That’s too hypothetical for me.”

“It’s not hypothetical. I’m just asking, if you’re proved wrong, if he didn’t do it, will you put the same energy into helping him?”

“If I’m proved wrong, he won’t need my help.”

“Will you?”

“Yes,” Reacher said, because it was an easy promise to make.

“So you need to keep an open mind.”

“Why did you move out?”

She paused. “He was angry all the time. It was no fun living with him.”

“Angry at what?”

“At everything.”

“So maybe it’s you who should keep an open mind.”

“I could have made up a reason. But I didn’t. I told you the truth. I don’t want to hide anything. I need you to trust me. I need to make you believe. My brother’s an unhappy man, maybe even disturbed. But he didn’t do this.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Will you keep an open mind?” she asked.

Reacher didn’t answer. Just shrugged and walked away.

He didn’t go to the hospital. Didn’t unplug James Barr’s machines. He went to the sports bar instead, after a shower back at the Metropole Palace. The six blocks north of the black glass tower took him under the highway again and out into a hinterland. Gentrification had a boundary to the south, as he had seen, and now he saw it had a boundary to the north, too. The bar was a little ways beyond it. It was in a plain square building that could have started out as anything. Maybe a feed store, maybe an automobile showroom, maybe a pool hall. It had a flat roof and bricked-up windows and moss growing where blocked rainwater gutters had spilled.

Inside it was better, but generic. It was like every other sports bar he had ever been in. It was one tall room with black-painted air-conditioning ducts pinned to the ceiling. It had three dozen TV screens hanging from the walls and the ceiling. It had all the usual sports-bar stuff all over the place. Signed uniform jerseys framed under glass, football helmets displayed on shelves, hockey sticks, basketballs, baseballs, old game-day programs. The waitstaff was all female, all of them in cheerleader-style uniforms. The bar staff was male and dressed in striped umpire uniforms.

The TVs were all tuned to football. Inevitable, Reacher guessed, on a Monday night. Some of the screens were regular TVs, and some were plasmas, and some were projectors. The same event was displayed dozens of times, all with slightly different color and focus, some big, some small, some bright, some dim. There were plenty of people in there, but Reacher got a table to himself. In a corner, which he liked. A hard-worked waitress ran over to him and he ordered beer and a cheeseburger. He didn’t look at the menu. Sports bars always had beer and cheeseburgers.

He ate his meal and drank his beer and watched the game. Time passed and the place filled up and got more and more crowded and noisy, but nobody came to share his table. Reacher had that kind of an effect on people. He sat there alone, in a bubble of quiet, with a message plainly displayed: Stay away from me.

Then someone ignored the message and came to join him. It was partly his own fault. He looked away from the screen and saw a girl hovering nearby. She was juggling a bottle of beer and a full plate of tacos. She was quite a sight. She had waved red hair and a red gingham shirt open at the neck and tied off at the navel. She had tight pants on that looked like denim but had to be spandex. She had the whole hourglass thing going, big-time. And she was in shiny lizard-skin boots. Open the encyclopedia to C for Country Girl and her picture was going to be right there staring back at you. She looked too young for the beer. But she was past puberty. That was for damn sure. Her shirt buttons were straining. And there was no visible panty line under the spandex. Reacher looked at her for a second too long, and she took it as an invitation.

“Can I share your table?” she asked from a yard away.

“Help yourself,” he said.

She sat down. Not opposite him, but in the chair next to him.

“Thanks,” she said.

She drank from her bottle and kept her eyes on him. Green eyes, bright, wide open. She half-turned toward him and arched the small of her back. Her shirt was open three buttons. Maybe a 34D, Reacher figured, in a push-up bra. He could see the edge of it. White lace.

She leaned close because of the noise.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“Like what?” he said.

“Football,” she said.

“A bit,” he said.

“Did you play?”

Did you, not do you. She made him feel old.

“You’re certainly big enough,” she said.

“I tried out for Army,” he said. “When I was at West Point.”

“Did you make the team?”

“Only once.”

“Were you injured?”

“I was too violent.”

She half-smiled, not sure if he was joking.

“Want a taco?” she said.

“I just ate.”

“I’m Sandy,” she said.

So was I, he thought. Friday, on the beach.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Jimmy Reese,” he said.

He saw a flash of surprise in her eyes. He didn’t know why. Maybe she had had a boyfriend called Jimmy Reese. Or maybe she was a serious fan of the New York Yankees.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Jimmy Reese,” she said.

“Likewise,” he said, and turned back to the game.

“You’re new in town, aren’t you?” she said.

“Usually,” he said.

“I was wondering,” she said. “If you only like football a bit, maybe you would like to take me somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Like somewhere quieter. Maybe somewhere a little lonelier.”

He said nothing.

“I’ve got a car,” she said.

“You old enough to drive?”

“I’m old enough to do lots of things. And I’m pretty good at some of them.”

Reacher said nothing. She moved on her chair. Pushed it out from the table a little way. Turned toward him and looked down.

“Do you like these pants?” she asked.

“I think they suit you very well.”

“I do, too. Only problem is, they’re too tight to wear anything underneath.”

“We all have our cross to bear.”

“Do you think they’re too revealing?”

“They’re opaque. That usually does it for me.”

“Imagine peeling them off.”

“I can’t. I doubt if I would have gotten them on.”

The green eyes narrowed. “Are you a queer?”

“Are you a hooker?”

“No way. I work at the auto parts store.”

Then she paused and seemed to think again. She reconsidered. She came up with a better answer. Which was to jump up from her chair and scream and slap his face. It was a loud scream and a loud slap and everyone turned to look.

“He called me a whore,” she screamed. “He called me a damn whore!”

Chairs scraped and guys stood up fast. Big guys, in jeans and work boots and plaid shirts. Country boys. Five of them, all the same.

The girl smiled in triumph.

“Those are my brothers,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

“You just called me a whore in front of my brothers.”

Five boys, all staring.

“He called me a whore,” the girl wailed.

Rule one: Be on your feet and ready.

Rule two: Show them what they’re messing with.

Reacher stood up, slow and easy. Six-five, two-fifty, calm eyes, hands held loose by his sides.

“He called me a whore,” the girl wailed again.

Rule three: Identify the ringleader.

There were five guys. Any five guys will have one ringleader, two enthusiastic followers, and two reluctant followers. Put the ringleader down, and both of the keen sidekicks, and it’s over. The reluctant pair just run for it. So there’s no such thing as five-on-one. It never gets worse than three-on-one.

Rule four: The ringleader is the one who moves first.

A big corn-fed twentysomething with a shock of yellow hair and a round red face moved first. He stepped forward a pace and the others fell in behind him in a neat arrowhead formation. Reacher stepped forward a pace of his own to meet them. The downside of a corner table is there’s no other way to go except forward.

But that was fine.

Because, rule five: Never back off.

But, rule six: Don’t break the furniture.

Break furniture in a bar, and the owner starts thinking about his insurance policy, and insurance companies require police reports, and a patrolman’s first instinct is to throw everyone in jail and sort it out later. Which generally means: Blame it on the stranger.

“He called me a whore,” the girl said plaintively. Like her heart was broken. She was standing off to the side, looking at Reacher, looking at the five guys, looking at Reacher. Her head was turning like a spectator at a tennis game.

“Outside,” the big guy said.

“Pay your check first,” Reacher said.

“I’ll pay later.”

“You won’t be able to.”

“You think?”

“That’s the difference between us.”

“What is?”

“I think.”

“You’ve got a smart mouth, pal.”

“That’s the least of your worries.”

“You called my sister a whore.”

“You prefer sleeping with virgins?”

“Get outside, pal, or I’ll put you down right here.”

Rule seven: Act, don’t react.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s go outside.”

The big guy smiled.

“After you,” Reacher said.

“Stay here, Sandy,” the big guy said.

“I don’t mind the sight of blood,” she said.

“I’m sure you love it,” Reacher said. “One week in four, it makes you feel mighty relieved.”

“Outside,” the big guy said. “Now.”

He turned around and shooed the others toward the door. They formed up in single file and threaded between the tables. Their boots clattered on the wood. The girl called Sandy tagged after them. Other customers shrank away from them. Reacher put twenty dollars on his table and glanced up at the football game. Someone was winning, someone was losing.

He followed the girl called Sandy. Followed the blue spandex pants.

They were all waiting for him on the sidewalk. They were all tensed up in a shallow semicircle. There were yellow lamps on poles twenty yards away north and south and another across the street. The lamps gave each guy three shadows. There was neon outside the bar that filled the shadows with pink and blue. The street was empty. And quiet. No traffic. No noise, except sports bar sounds muffled by the door.

The air was soft. Not hot, not cold.

Rule eight: Assess and evaluate.

The big guy was round and smooth and heavy, like a bull seal. Maybe ten years out of high school. An unbroken nose, no scar tissue on his brows, no misshapen knuckles. Therefore, not a boxer. Probably just a linebacker. So he would fight like a wrestler. He would be a guy who wants you on the ground.

So he would start by charging. Head low.

That was Reacher’s best guess.

And Reacher was right.

The guy exploded out of the blocks and charged, head low. Driving for Reacher’s chest. Looking to drive him backward and have him stumble and fall. Whereupon the other four could all pile in together and stomp him and kick him to their hearts’ content.

Mistake.

Because, rule nine: Don’t run head-on into Jack Reacher.

Not when he’s expecting it. It’s like running into an oak tree.

The big guy charged and Reacher turned slightly sideways and bent his knees a little and timed it just right and drove all his weight up and forward off his back foot and through his shoulder straight into the big guy’s face.

Kinetic energy is a wonderful thing.

Reacher had hardly moved at all but the big guy bounced off crazily, stunned, staggering backward on stiff legs, desperately trying to stay upright, one foot tracing a lazy half-circle in the air, then the other. He came to rest six feet away with his feet firmly planted and his legs wide apart, just like a big dumb capital letter A.

Blood on his face.

Now he had a broken nose.

Put the ringleader down.

Reacher stepped in and kicked him in the groin, but left-footed. Right-footed, he would have popped bits of the guy’s pelvis out through his nose. Your big soft heart, an old army instructor had said. One day it’ll get you killed.

But not today, Reacher thought. Not here. The big guy went down. He fell on his knees and pitched forward on his face.

Then it got real easy.

The next two guys came in together shoulder-to-shoulder, and Reacher dropped the first with a head butt and the second with an elbow to the jaw. They both went straight down and lay still. Then it was over, because the last two guys ran. The last two guys always do. The girl called Sandy ran after them. Not fast. The tight spandex and the high-heeled boots impeded her. But Reacher let her go. He turned back and kicked her three downed brothers onto their sides. Checked they were still breathing. Checked their hip pockets. Found their wallets. Checked their licenses. Then he dropped them and straightened up and turned around because he heard a car pull up behind him at the curb.

It was a taxi. It was a taxi with Helen Rodin getting out of it.

She threw a bill at the driver and he took off fast, gazing straight ahead, deliberately not looking left or right. Helen Rodin stood still on the sidewalk and stared. Reacher was ten feet away from her, with three neon shadows and three inert forms on the ground behind him.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked.

“You tell me,” he said. “You live here. You know these damn people.”

“What does that mean? What the hell happened?”

“Let’s walk,” he said.

They walked south, fast, and turned a corner and went east. Then south again. Then they slowed a little.

“You’ve got blood on your shirt,” Helen Rodin said.

“But not mine,” Reacher said.

“What happened back there?”

“I was in the bar watching the game. Minding my own business. Then some underage red-haired bimbo started coming on to me. I wasn’t playing and she got it to where she found a reason to slap me. Then five guys jumped up. She said they were her brothers. We took it outside.”

“Five guys?”

“Two ran away.”

“After you beat up the first three?”

“I defended myself. That’s all. Minimum force.”

“She slapped you?”

“Right in the face.”

“What had you said to her?”

“Doesn’t matter what I said to her. It was a setup. So I’m asking you, is that how people get their kicks around here? Picking on strangers in bars?”

“I need a drink,” Helen Rodin said. “I came to meet you for a drink.”

Reacher stopped walking. “So let’s go back there.”

“We can’t go back there. They probably called the cops. You left three men on the sidewalk.”

He looked back over his shoulder.

“So let’s try my hotel,” he said. “There’s a lobby. There might be a bar.”

They walked together in silence, through dark quiet streets, four blocks south. They stayed east of the plaza and passed by the courthouse. Reacher glanced at it.

“How was dinner?” he asked.

“My father was fishing. He still thinks you’re my witness.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I can’t tell him. Your information is classified. Thank God.”

“So you let him stew.”

“He’s not stewing. He’s totally confident.”

“He should be.”

“So are you leaving tomorrow?”

“You bet I am. This place is weird.”

“Some girl comes on to you, why does that have to be a big conspiracy?”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s not unheard-of,” she said. “Well, is it? A bar, the new guy in town all alone, why shouldn’t some girl be interested? You’re not exactly repulsive, you know.”

Reacher just walked.

“What did you say to her to get slapped?”

“I wasn’t showing any interest, she kept on coming on, I asked her if she was a hooker. Something like that.”

“A hooker? That’ll get you slapped in Indiana. And her brothers would hate it.”

“It was a setup, Helen. Let’s be realistic. It’s nice of you to say it, but I’m not the sort of guy that women chase after. I know that, OK? So it was a setup.”

“No woman ever chased you before?”

“She smiled in triumph. Like she had found an opening and delivered me. Like she had succeeded at something.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“And those guys weren’t her brothers,” Reacher said. “They were all more or less the same age, and when I checked their licenses they all had different last names.”

“Oh.”

“So it was all staged. Which is weird. There are only two reasons for doing something like that. Fun, or money. A guy in a bar might have a few bucks, but that’s not enough. So they staged it for fun. Which is weird. Doubly weird, because why pick on me? They must have known they were going to get their butts kicked.”

“There were five of them. Five guys never think one guy could kick their butts. Especially not in Indiana.”

“Or maybe I was the only stranger in the bar.”

She looked ahead, down the street. “You’re at the Metropole Palace?”

He nodded. “Me and not too many other people.”

“But I called and they said you weren’t registered. I called all the hotels, looking for you this afternoon.”

“I use aliases in hotels.”

“Why on earth?”

“Just a bad habit. Like I told you. It’s automatic now.”

They went up the front steps together and in through the heavy brass door. It wasn’t late, but the place was quiet. The lobby was deserted. There was a bar in a side room. It was empty, except for a lone barman leaning back against the register.

“Beer,” Helen Rodin said.

“Two,” Reacher said.

They took a table near a curtained window and the guy brought two beers in bottles, two napkins, two chilled glasses, and a bowl of mixed nuts. Reacher signed the check and added his room number.

Helen Rodin smiled. “So who does the Metropole think you are?”

“Jimmy Reese,” Reacher said.

“Who’s he?”

“Wait,” Reacher said.

A flash of surprise in her eyes. He didn’t know why.

I’m pleased to meet you, Jimmy Reese.

“The girl was looking for me personally,” he said. “She wasn’t looking for some random lone stranger. She was looking for Jack Reacher specifically.”

“She was?”

He nodded. “She asked my name. I said Jimmy Reese. It knocked her off balance for a second. She was definitely surprised. Like, You’re not Jimmy Reese, you’re Jack Reacher, someone just told me. She paused, and then she recovered.”

“The first letters are the same. Jimmy Reese, Jack Reacher. People sometimes do that.”

“She was fast,” he said. “She wasn’t as dumb as she looked. Someone pointed her at me, and she wasn’t going to be deflected. Jack Reacher was supposed to get worked over tonight, and she was going to make sure it happened.”

“So who were they?”

“Who knows my name?”

“The police department. You were just there.”

Reacher said nothing.

“What?” Helen said. “Were they cops? Protecting their case?”

“I’m not here to attack their case.”

“But they don’t know that. They think that’s exactly why you’re here.”

“Their case doesn’t need protecting. It’s solid gold. And they didn’t look like cops.”

“Who else has an interest?”

“Rosemary Barr. She has an interest. She knows my name. And she knows why I’m here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Helen said.

Reacher said nothing.

“That’s ridiculous,” Helen said again. “Rosemary Barr is a mousy little legal secretary. She wouldn’t try a thing like that. She wouldn’t know how. Not in a million years.”

“It was a very amateur attempt.”

“Compared to what? It was five guys. Enough for most people.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Rosemary Barr was at the hospital,” Helen said. “She went over there after the client conference, and she stayed there most of the afternoon, and I bet she’s back there now. Because her brother is waking up. She wants to be with him.”

“A buck gets ten she’s got a cell phone.”

“Can’t use cell phones near the ICU. They cause interference.”

“A pay phone, then.”

“She’s too preoccupied.”

“With saving her brother.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“She’s your client,” Reacher said. “Are you sure you’re impartial?”

“You’re not thinking straight. James Barr asked for you. He wanted you here. Therefore his sister wants you here, too. She wants you to stick around long enough to figure out how you can help. And she knows you can help, or why would her brother have asked for you in the first place?”

Reacher said nothing.

“Accept it,” Helen said. “It wasn’t Rosemary Barr. It’s in her best interests to have you here, alive and well and thinking.”

Reacher took a long pull on his beer. Then he nodded. “I was followed to the bar tonight, obviously. From here. Therefore I was followed here, after lunch. If Rosemary went straight to the hospital this morning she didn’t have time to set that up.”

“So we’re back to someone who thinks you can damage the case. Why not the cops? Cops could follow you anywhere. There’s a lot of them and they all have radios.”

“Cops start trouble face-to-face. They don’t get a girl to do it for them.”

“The girl might be a cop, too.”

Reacher shook his head. “Too young. Too vacant. Too much hair.”

Helen took a pen from her purse and wrote something on her cocktail napkin. Slid it across the table.

“My cell phone number,” she said. “You might need it.”

“I don’t think anyone will sue me.”

“I’m not worried about you getting sued. I’m worried about you getting arrested. Even if it wasn’t cops actually doing it, they might have gone to the bar anyway. The owner might have called them. Or the hospital might have called them. Those three boys went to the hospital, that’s for sure. And the girl definitely knows your alias now. So you might be in trouble. If you are, listen to the Miranda and then call me.”

Reacher smiled. “Ambulance chasing?”

“Looking out for you.”

Reacher picked up the napkin. Put it in his back pocket.

“OK,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Are you still going to leave tomorrow?”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll stick around and think about why someone would use violence to protect a case that’s already a hundred percent watertight.”

Grigor Linsky called the Zec on his cell phone from his car.

“They failed,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

The Zec said nothing, which was worse than a tirade.

“They won’t be traced to us,” Linsky said.

“Will you make sure of that?”

“Certainly.”

The Zec said nothing.

“No harm, no foul,” Linsky said.

“Unless it served merely to provoke the soldier,” the Zec said. “Then there would be harm. Possibly considerable harm. He is James Barr’s friend, after all. That fact will have implications.”

Now Linsky said nothing.

“Let him see you one more time,” the Zec said. “A little additional pressure might help. But after that, don’t let him see you again.”

“And then?”

“Then monitor the situation,” the Zec said. “Make absolutely certain it doesn’t turn from bad to worse.”

Reacher saw Helen Rodin into a cab and then went upstairs to his room. He took off his shirt and put it in the bathroom sink and left it to soak in cold water. He didn’t want bloodstains on a one-day-old shirt. Three days old, maybe. But not a brand-new garment.

Questions. There were a lot of questions, but as always the key would be finding the basic question. The fundamental question. Why would someone use violence to protect a case that was already watertight? First question: Was the case already watertight? He trawled through the day in his head and heard Alex Rodin say: It’s as good as it gets. The best I’ve ever seen. Emerson had said: It’s the best done deal I ever saw. The morticianlike Bellantonio had said: It’s the best crime scene I ever worked. I love it all. Those guys all had professional self-interest in play, of course. And pride, and expediency. But Reacher himself had seen Bellantonio’s work. And had said: It’s a cast-iron solid-gold slam dunk. It’s Willie Mays under a fly ball.

Was it?

Yes, it was. It was Lou Gehrig with the bases loaded. It was as close to a certainty as human life offers.

But that wasn’t the fundamental question.

He rinsed his shirt and wrung it out hard and spread it on the room heater. Turned the heater on high and opened the window. There was no noise outside. Just silence. New York City it wasn’t. It sounded like they rolled up the sidewalks at nine o’clock. I went to Indiana, but it was closed. He lay down on the bed. Stretched out. Damp heat came off his shirt and filled the room with the smell of wet cotton.

What was the fundamental question?

Helen Rodin’s cassette tape was the fundamental question. James Barr’s voice, low, hoarse, frustrated. His demand: Get Jack Reacher for me.

Why would he say that?

Who was Jack Reacher, in James Barr’s eyes?

Fundamentally?

That was the basic question.

The best crime scene I ever worked.

The best I’ve ever seen.

Why did he pay to park?

Will you keep an open mind?

Get Jack Reacher for me.

Jack Reacher stared at his hotel room ceiling. Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Then he rolled over one way and pulled the cocktail napkin out of his back pocket. Rolled the other way and dialed the phone. Helen Rodin answered after eight rings. She sounded sleepy. He had woken her up.

“It’s Reacher,” he said.

“Are you in trouble?”

“No, but I’ve got some questions. Is Barr awake yet?”

“No, but he’s close. Rosemary went back to the hospital. She left me a message.”

“What was the weather like last Friday at five?”

“The weather? Friday? It was kind of dull. Cloudy.”

“Is that normal?”

“No, not really. It’s usually sunny. Or else raining. This time of year it’s usually one or the other. More likely sunny.”

“Was it warm or cold?”

“Not cold. But not hot. It was comfortable, I guess.”

“What did you wear to work?”

“What is this, a dirty phone call?”

“Just tell me.”

“Same as I wore today. Pantsuit.”

“No coat?”

“Didn’t need one.”

“Have you got a car?”

“A car? Yes, I’ve got a car. But I use the bus for work.”

“Use your car tomorrow. I’ll meet you at eight o’clock in your office.”

“What’s this about?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Eight o’clock. Go back to sleep now.”

He hung up. Rolled off the bed and checked his shirt. It was warm and wet. But it would be dry by morning. He hoped it wouldn’t shrink.

CHAPTER 5

Reacher woke at six. Took a long cold shower, because the room was hot. But his shirt was dry. It was as stiff as a board, and still the right size. There was no room service. He went out for breakfast. The roads were full of trucks, hauling gravel, hauling fill, mixing concrete, feeding the work zones’ appetites. He dodged them and walked south toward the waterfront. Through the gentrification frontier. He found a workingman’s diner with a basic menu. He drank coffee and ate eggs. He sat at a window and watched the street for aimless doorway lurkers or men in parked cars. Because if he had been followed the night before it was logical to assume he would be followed again. So he kept his eyes open. But he saw nobody.

Then he walked the length of First Street, north. The sun was up on his right. He used store windows as mirrors and watched his back. Plenty of people were going his way, but none of them was following him. He guessed whoever it was would be waiting for him in the plaza, ready to confirm what he expected to see: The witness went to the lawyer’s office.

The fountain was still going. The pool was nearly half full. The tributes were still there, neatly lined up, another day older, a little more faded, a little more wilted. He figured they would be there for a week or so. Until after the last of the funerals. Then they would be removed, discreetly, maybe in the middle of the night, and the city would move on to the next thing.

He sat for a moment on the NBC monolith, with his back to the tower, like a guy wasting time because he was early. Which he was. It was only seven forty-five. There were other people in the same situation. They stood around, singly or in groups of two or three, smoking last cigarettes, reading the morning news, chilling before the daily grind. Reacher looked first at men on their own with newspapers. That was a pretty traditional surveillance cover. Although in his opinion it was due for replacement with a new exiled-smoker cover. Guys standing near doorways and smoking were the new invisibles. Or guys on cell phones. You could stand there with a Nokia up to your ear forever and nobody thought twice.

In the end he settled on a guy who was smoking and talking on a cell phone. He was a short man of about sixty. Maybe more. A damaged man. There was a permanent lopsided tension in the way he held himself. An old spinal injury, maybe. Or busted ribs that had been badly set, years ago. Whatever it was, it made him look uncomfortable and querulous. He wasn’t the type of guy who would happily converse at length. But there he was, on his phone, just talking, aimlessly. He had thin gray hair, recently barbered but not stylishly. He was in a double-breasted suit that had been expensively tailored, but not in the United States. It was square and boxy, too heavy for the weather. Polish, maybe. Or Hungarian. Eastern European, certainly. His face was pale and his eyes were dark. They didn’t glance Reacher’s way, even once.

Reacher checked his watch. Seven fifty-five. He slid off the shiny granite and walked into the tower’s lobby.

Grigor Linsky stopped pretending and dialed an actual number on his phone.

“He’s here,” he said. “He just went up.”

“Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

“Yes, I’m sure he did.”

“So make that the last time. Now you stay in the shadows.”

Reacher found Helen Rodin already at her desk. She looked settled in, like she had been there a long time already. She was in the same black suit, but her shirt was different. It was a simple scoop neck, not tight. It was china blue and matched her eyes exactly. Her hair was tied back in a long pony tail. Her desk was covered with legal books. Some were facedown, some were faceup. They were all open. She had about eight pages of notes going, on a yellow legal pad. References, case notes, decisions, precedents.

“James Barr is conscious,” she said. “Rosemary called me at five this morning.”

“Is he talking?”

“Only to the doctors. They won’t let anyone else near him yet. Not even Rosemary herself.”

“What about the cops?”

“They’re waiting. But I’ll need to be there first. I can’t let him talk to the cops without representation.”

“What is he saying to the doctors?”

“That he doesn’t know why he’s there. That he doesn’t remember anything about Friday. The doctors say that’s to be expected. Amnesia is predictable with head injuries, possibly covering several days before the trauma. Several weeks, sometimes.”

“Where does that leave you?”

“With two big problems. First, he might be faking the amnesia. And that’s actually very hard to test, either way. So now I’m going to have to find a specialist opinion on that, too. And if he isn’t faking, we’re in a real gray area. If he’s sane now, and he was sane before, but he’s missing a week, then how can he get a fair trial? He won’t be able to participate in his own defense. Not if he hasn’t got the slightest idea what anyone is talking about. And the state put him in that position. They let him get hurt. It was their jail. They can’t do that and then go ahead and try him.”

“What’s your father going to think?”

“He’s going to fight it tooth and nail. Obviously. No prosecutor can afford to admit the possibility that amnesia might screw up a trial. Otherwise everyone would jump right on it. Everyone would be looking to get beat up in pretrial detention. Suddenly nobody would be able to remember anything.”

“It must have happened before.”

Helen nodded. “It has.”

“So what do the law books say?”

“I’m reading them now. As you can see. Dusky versus the United States, Wilson versus the United States.”

“And?”

“There are lots of ifs and buts.”

Reacher said nothing. Helen looked straight at him.

“It’s spinning out of control,” she said. “Now there’ll be a trial about a trial. It’s something that might need to go all the way to the Supreme Court. I’m not equipped for that. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to be the lawyer who gets people off on weird technicalities. That’s not who I am and it’s a label I can’t afford right now.”

“So plead him guilty and the hell with it.”

“When you called me last night I thought you were going to walk in here this morning and tell me he’s innocent.”

“Dream on,” Reacher said.

She looked away.

“But,” he said.

She looked back. “There’s a but?”

He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“What’s the but?”

“He’s not quite as guilty as I thought he was.”

“How?”

“Get your car and I’ll show you.”

They rode down together to a tenants-only underground parking garage. There were NBC broadcast trucks in there and cars and pickups and SUVs of various makes and vintages. There was a new blue Mustang convertible with an NBC sticker in the windshield. Ann Yanni’s, probably, Reacher thought. It was right for her. She would drive top-down on her days off and top-up during the workweek, to keep her hair OK for the cameras. Or maybe she used a lot of spray.

Helen Rodin’s ride was a small dark-green sedan so anonymous Reacher didn’t know what it was. A Saturn, maybe. It was unwashed and not new. It was a graduate student’s car, the sort of thing a person uses until a first salary kicks in and lease payments become affordable. Reacher knew all about lease payments. Baseball on the TV carried a lot of commercials. Every half-inning, and every call to the bullpen.

“Where are we going?” Helen asked.

“South,” Reacher said.

He racked his seat back and crunched a whole lot of stuff in the footwell behind him. She had her seat close to the wheel, even though she wasn’t a short woman. He ended up looking at her more or less from behind.

“What do you know?” she asked.

“It’s not what I know,” he said. “It’s what James Barr knows.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

She came up out of the garage and started south down a street parallel with First. Eight o’clock in the morning, the rush hour traffic was still heavy. Going the opposite way from the afternoon rush, he guessed.

“What does James Barr know about you?” she asked.

“Something that made him want me here,” he said.

“He ought to hate you.”

“I’m sure he does. But he still wanted me here.”

She crawled south, toward the river.

“He never met me before,” Reacher said. “Never saw me again afterward. We knew each other for three weeks, more than fourteen years ago.”

“He knew you as an investigator. Someone who broke a tough case.”

“A case he thought couldn’t be broken. He watched me do it every step of the way. He had a front row seat. He thought I was an investigative genius.”

“That’s why he wanted you here?”

Reacher nodded. “I spent last night trying to live up to his opinion.”

They crossed the river on a long iron trestle. The sun was on their left. The wharf was on their right. The slow gray water moved listlessly past it.

“Go west now,” Reacher said.

She made a right and took a two-lane county road. There were bait stores on the riverbank and shacks selling barbecue and beer and crushed ice.

“But this case was already broken,” she said. “He knew that.”

“This case was only halfway broken,” Reacher said. “That’s what he knew.”

“Halfway?”

Reacher nodded, even though he was behind her.

“There’s more to this case than Emerson saw,” he said. “Barr wanted someone else to understand that. But his first lawyer was lazy. He wasn’t very interested. That’s why Barr got so frustrated.”

“What more is there?”

“I’ll show you.”

“A lot?”

“I think so.”

“So why didn’t he just lay out the facts, whatever they are?”

“Because he couldn’t. And because nobody would have believed him anyway.”

“Why? What the hell happened here?”

There was a highway cloverleaf ahead, just like he had hoped.

“I’ll show you,” he said again. “Take the highway north.”

She powered the little car through the ramp and merged with the traffic. There was a mixed stream flowing north. Eighteen-wheelers, panel trucks, pickups, cars. The road recrossed the river on a concrete bridge. The wharf was visible to the east, in the distance. The city center was ahead, on the right. The highway rose gently on its stilts. Helen drove onward, with the roofs of low edge-of-town buildings flashing past on the left and the right.

“Be ready to take the spur that runs behind the library,” Reacher said.

It was going to be a right exit. It was announced well in advance with a sign. The broken line separating the right lane from the center lane became a solid line. Then the solid line became a narrow wedge. The through traffic was forced away to the left. The exit lane angled slightly right. They stayed in it. The wedge grew wider and was filled in with bold cross-hatched lines. Up ahead were yellow drums. They passed them by, onto the spur that would lead behind the library. Reacher twisted in his seat and checked the rear window. Nobody behind them.

“Go slow,” he said.

Two hundred yards ahead the spur started to curve, behind the library, behind the black glass tower. The roadbed was wide enough for two lanes. But the radius was too tight to make it safe for two lanes to run side by side at high speed into the corner. Traffic engineers had thought better of it. They had advised a gentler trajectory. They had marked out a single lane through the curve. It was a little wider than a normal lane, to allow for misjudgments. It started way on the left and then swung sharply to the right and cut across the apex of the curve at a more shallow angle.

“Go real slow now,” Reacher said.

The car slowed. Way up ahead of them on the left was a crescent-moon shape of white cross-hatching. Beginning right next to them on the right was a long thin triangle of white cross-hatching. Just lines of paint on the blacktop, but they shepherded people along and kept them safe.

“Pull over,” Reacher said. “Here, on the right.”

“Can’t stop here,” Helen said.

“Like you had a flat. Just pull over. Right here.”

She braked hard and turned the wheel and steered onto the cross-hatched no-man’s-land on their right. They felt the thick painted lines thumping under the tires. A juddery little rhythm. It slowed as she slowed.

She stopped.

“Back up a little,” Reacher said.

She backed up, like she was parallel parking against the concrete parapet.

“Now forward a yard,” Reacher said.

She drove forward a yard.

“OK,” he said.

He wound his window down. The traffic lane on their left was clear and smooth, but the cross-hatched no-man’s-land they were stopped on was covered with grit and trash and debris blown across it by years of passing vehicles. There were cans and bottles and detached mud flaps and tiny cubes of broken headlight glass and plastic splinters from old fender benders. Far away to the left the through traffic rumbled north on a separate bridge. There was a constant stream over there. But they sat for a whole minute before anyone else came the way they had taken. A lone pickup passed close on their left and rocked them with its slipstream. Then the spur went quiet again.

“Not busy,” Reacher said.

“It never is,” Helen said. “This doesn’t really go anywhere people need to get. It was a total waste of money. But I guess they’ve always got to be building something.”

“Look down,” Reacher said.

The highway was raised up on tall stilts. The roadbed was maybe forty feet above ground level. The parapet wall was three feet high. Beyond it, ahead and to their right, was the upper story of the library building. It had an intricate cornice, carved from limestone, and a slate roof. It felt close enough to touch.

“What?” Helen asked.

Reacher pointed with his thumb and then leaned way back so she could see across him. Directly to their right was an unobstructed view down into the plaza, with a perfectly straight line of sight along the narrow bottleneck between the end of the ornamental pool and the plaza wall. And beyond it, dead ahead, perfectly aligned, was the door of the DMV office.

“James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best, not the worst, but he was one of ours and he trained for more than five years. And training has a purpose. It takes people who aren’t necessarily very smart and it makes them seem smart by beating some basic tactical awareness into them. Until it becomes instinctive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This is where a trained sniper would have fired from. Up here on the highway. Because from here he’s got his targets walking directly toward him in a straight line. Single file, into a bottleneck. He sets up with one aiming point and never has to vary it. His targets just walk into it, one after the other. Shooting from the side is much harder. The targets are passing right to left in front of him, relatively quickly, he’s got to figure in deflection compensation, he’s got to move the rifle after each shot.”

“But he didn’t fire from here.”

“That’s my point. He should have, but he didn’t.”

“So?”

“He had a minivan. He should have parked it right where we are now. On this exact spot. He should have climbed through into the back seat and opened the sliding door. He should have fired from inside the minivan, Helen. It had tinted windows. The few cars that passed him wouldn’t have seen a thing. He should have fired his six shots, with the much easier aim, and the six cartridge cases would have ejected inside the van, and then he should have shut the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat and driven away. It would have been a much better firing position and he would have left nothing at all behind. No physical evidence of any kind, because nothing would have touched anything except his tires would have touched the road.”

“It’s farther away. It’s a longer distance to shoot.”

“It’s about seventy yards. Barr was reliable at five times that distance. Any military sniper is. With an M1A Super Match, seventy yards is the same thing as point-blank range.”

“Someone would have gotten his plate number. There’s always some traffic. They would have remembered him being here, afterward.”

“His plates were covered with mud. Probably on purpose. It would have been a great getaway. In five minutes he would have been five miles away. Much better than threading through the traffic on the surface streets.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“And he was expecting it to be sunny,” Reacher said. “You told me it usually is. Five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun would have been in the west, behind him. He would have been firing out of the sun. That’s an absolutely basic preference for a sniper.”

“Sometimes it rains.”

“That would have been OK, too. It would have washed his tire tracks out of this grit. Either way around, he should have been up here in his van. Every reason in the world says he should have been up here in his van.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“Evidently.”

“Why not?”

“We should get back to your office. That’s where you need to be now. You’ve got a lot of strategizing to do.”

Helen Rodin sat down at her desk. Reacher walked to her window and looked out into the plaza. Looked for the damaged man in the boxy suit. Didn’t see him.

“What strategizing?” Helen asked. “Barr made a choice about where to shoot from, that’s all, and it wasn’t a great choice, according to you, according to some fourteen-year-old military theory that he probably forgot all about the day he quit the service.”

“They don’t forget,” Reacher said.

“I’m not convinced.”

“That’s why he walked out on Chapman. Chapman wasn’t going to be convinced, either. That’s why he asked for me.”

“And you are convinced?”

“I’m looking at a situation where a trained sniper passed up an excellent location in favor of a much worse one.”

“He used a parking garage in Kuwait City. You said so yourself.”

“Because that was a good location. It was directly in line with the apartment building’s door. The four guys were walking directly toward him. They went down like dominoes.”

“This is fourteen years later. He’s not as good as he was. That’s all.”

“They don’t forget,” Reacher said again.

“Whatever; how does it make him less guilty?”

“Because if a person chooses a terrible B instead of a great A, there has to be a reason for it. And reasons have implications.”

“What was his reason?”

“It had to be a real good one, didn’t it? Because he trapped himself inside a building, down at street level, in a congested area, with a much harder shot, in a place whose very nature made it the best crime scene a twenty-year veteran like Emerson has ever seen.”

“OK, tell me why he would do that.”

“Because he was literally going out of his way to leave every last piece of evidence he could.”

She stared at him. “That’s crazy.”

“It was a great crime scene. Everyone was so happy with how great it was, they never stopped to realize it was way too great. Me included. It was like Crime Scene 101, Helen. It was what they must have given Bellantonio on his first day in college. It was too good to be true, therefore it wasn’t true. Everything was wrong with it. Like, why would he wear a raincoat? It was warm and it wasn’t raining and he was in a car and he was never outside. He wore it so he could scrape unique fibers off it onto the pillar. Why would he wear those stupid shoes? You look at a pair of shoes like that and you just know they track every last piece of crap around. Why did he shoot out of the dark? So that people would see his muzzle flash and pinpoint the location so they could go up there afterward and find all the other clues. Why would he scrape his rifle on the wall? That’s a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purchase. Why didn’t he take the traffic cone away with him? It would have been easier just to throw it in the back of his van than leave it there.”

“This is crazy,” Helen said.

“Two clinchers,” Reacher said. “Why did he pay to park? That bothered me from the start. I mean, who does that? But he did. And he did it just so he could leave one little extra clue. Nothing else makes any sense. He wanted to leave a quarter in the meter with his prints on it. Just to tie it all in a nice little bow. To connect it with the shell case, which he probably also left there on purpose.”

“It fell in a trench.”

“He could have gotten it out. There was plenty of wire lying around, according to Bellantonio’s report. It would have taken a second and a half.”

Helen Rodin paused. “What’s the other clincher?”

“That’s easy, once you start looking through the right end of the telescope. He wanted to be looking at the pool from the south, not the west. That was crucial. He wanted to be looking at it lengthwise, not sideways.”

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t miss, Helen. He fired into the pool deliberately. He wanted to put a bullet in the water, down the long diagonal axis, from a low angle, just like a ballistics tank, just so it could be found later, undamaged. Just so it could tie his barrel to the crime. Sideways wouldn’t have worked for him. Not enough travel distance through the water. The bullet would have hit the wall too hard. It would have gotten damaged.”

“But why the hell would he do all that?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

“Remorse? For fourteen years ago? So he could be found and punished?”

Reacher shook his head. “He would have confessed as soon as they found him. A remorseful person would have been wanting to confess.”

“So why did he do all that?”

“Because he was made to, Helen. Simple as that.”

She stared at him.

“Someone forced him to do it,” Reacher said. “He was forced to do it and he was forced to take the blame for it. He was told to go home afterward and wait for the arrest. That’s why he took the sleeping pill. He was probably going crazy, sitting there waiting for the shoe to fall.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“He was coerced,” Reacher said. “Believe it. It’s the only logical explanation. He wasn’t a lone nutcase. That’s why he said, They’ve got the wrong guy. It was a message. He was hoping someone would pick up on it. He meant they should be looking for the other guy. The guy who made him do it. The guy he feels is more responsible.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“The puppet master,” Reacher said.

Reacher checked the plaza again, from the window. The ornamental pool was about two-thirds full. The fountain was splashing merrily. The sun was out. There were no loiterers visible.

Helen Rodin got up from her desk. Just stood there behind it.

“I should be turning cartwheels,” she said.

“He still killed five people.”

“But if the coercion was substantial, it’s going to help him.”

Reacher said nothing.

“What do you think it was? A double-dare? Some kind of thrill-seeking?”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But I doubt it. On the face of it, James Barr is twenty years too old for double-dares. That’s a kid thing. And they’d have done it from the highway anyway. They would have wanted to survive to do it again.”

“So what was it?”

“Something else entirely. Something real.”

“Should we take it to Emerson?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“I think we should.”

“There are reasons not to.”

“Like?”

“For one, Emerson’s got the best done deal he ever saw. He’s not going to pick at the seams now. No cop would.”

“So what should we do?”

“We should ask ourselves three basic questions,” Reacher said. “Like who, and how, and why. It was a transaction. We need to figure out who benefits. Because James Barr certainly didn’t.”

“The who was whoever set those guys on you last night. Because he liked the way the transaction was going and he didn’t want the boat rocked by some new guy showing up.”

“Correct,” Reacher said.

“So I need to look for that person.”

“You might not want to do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“It might get your client killed,” Reacher said.

“He’s in the hospital, guarded night and day.”

“Your client isn’t James Barr. It’s Rosemary Barr. You need to think about what kind of a threat can have made James Barr do what he did. He was looking at life without parole at best. Getting strapped to the gurney at worst. He knew that well in advance. He must have. So why would he go along? Why would he walk meekly into all that? It had to have been one hell of an effective threat, Helen. And what’s the only thing Barr’s got to lose? No wife, no kids, no family at all. Except a sister.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“He was told to keep quiet, to the end. Obviously. That’s why he asked for me. It was like a coded communication. Because the puppet can’t talk about the puppet master, not now, not ever, because the threat is still out there. I think he might be trading his life for his sister’s. Which gives you a big problem. If the puppet master sees you poking around, he’ll think the puppet talked. That’s why you can’t go to Emerson.”

“But the puppet didn’t talk. You figured it out.”

“We could put an announcement in the paper. Think anyone would believe it?”

“So what should I do?”

“Nothing,” Reacher said. “There’s nothing you can do. Because the more you try to help James Barr, the more likely you are to get Rosemary Barr killed for it.”

Helen Rodin was quiet for a long moment.

“Can we protect her?” she asked.

“No,” Reacher said. “We can’t. There’s only two of us. We’d need four guys minimum, and a safe house. That would cost a lot of money.”

Helen Rodin came out from behind her desk. Walked around and stood next to Reacher and gazed out of the window. She put her hands on the sill, lightly, like a pianist’s on a keyboard. Then she turned around and leaned against the glass. She was fragrant. Some clean scent a little like soap.

“You could look for him,” she said.

“Could I?” he answered, nothing in his voice.

She nodded. “He made a mistake. He gave you a reason that’s not connected to James Barr. Not directly. He set those boys on you. Therefore you’ve got a legitimate interest in finding their employer. An independent interest. You could go after him and he wouldn’t necessarily conclude that James Barr had talked.”

“I’m not here to help the defense.”

“Then look at it as helping the prosecution. If two people were involved, then two people deserve to go down. Why let the patsy take the fall on his own?”

Reacher said nothing.

“Just look at it as helping me,” Helen said.

Grigor Linsky dialed his cell phone.

“They’re back in her office,” he said. “I can see both of them in the window.”

CHAPTER 6

Reacher rode the elevator to the top of the black glass tower and found a maintenance stairwell that led to the roof. He came out through a triangular metal hutch next to the water tank and the elevator winding gear. The roof was gray tar paper covered with gravel. It was fifteen stories up, which wasn’t much in comparison with some cities. But it felt like the highest point in Indiana. He could see the river to the south. South and west, he could see where the raised highway separated. He walked to the northwest corner, and wind whipped at him and flattened his shirt against his body and his pants against his legs. Directly below him the highway spur curled around behind the library and the tower and ran away due east. Far beyond it in the distance the northward spur carried on straight and met a cloverleaf about two miles away in the haze. A long straight road came off the cloverleaf and ran back toward him. He fixed its position in his mind, because that was the road he wanted.

He rode down to the lobby and set out walking. At street level the air was warm and still. He went north and west, which meant he missed the sports bar by a block. The road he wanted came in at a shallow angle south of it and diverted him away. It was straight and wide. Four lanes. Closest to downtown it had small run-down establishments. There was a gun store with heavy mesh on the windows. There was a barbershop with a sign: Any Style $7. There was an old-fashioned motor court on a lot that once must have stood on the edge of town. Then there was a raw cross street and beyond it the lots got bigger and the buildings got newer. Fresh commercial territory. No existing leases, nothing to tear down. Once-virgin land, now paved over.

He kept on walking and after a mile he passed a fast-food drive-through. Then a tire store. Four New Radials $99! Then a lube franchise and a dealership for small cars from Korea. America’s Best Warranty! He looked ahead, because he figured he was getting close.

Are you a hooker?

No way. I work at the auto parts store.

Not an auto parts store. The auto parts store. Maybe the only one, or at least the main one. The biggest one. Which in any city is always right there on the same strip as the tire stores and the auto dealers and the lube shops. Which in any city is always a wide new strip near a highway cloverleaf. Cities are all different, but they’re also all the same.

He spent ten minutes hiking past a Ford dealership with about a thousand new pickup trucks lined up shoulder to shoulder with their front wheels up on ramps. Behind them was a giant inflatable gorilla tied down with guy wires. The wires had tinsel bunting attached to them. Beyond the new trucks were old trucks. Trade-ins, Reacher guessed, looking for new homes. Beyond the used lot was a fire road.

And then an auto parts store.

It was a franchise operation, long and low, neat and clean. New blacktop in the lot, urgent messages in the windows. Cheap oil filters, cheap antifreeze, guaranteed brake parts, superduty truck batteries. The parking lot was about a quarter full. There were slammed Hondas with wide pipes and blue headlight bulbs and rubber-band tires on chrome wheels. There were listing pickup trucks with broken springs. There were tired sedans halfway through their third hundred thousand miles. There were two cars alone together in the end bays. The store staff’s cars, Reacher figured. They weren’t allowed to park in the prime front-and-center slots, but they wanted their rides where they could see them through the windows. One was a four-cylinder Chevy, and the other was a small Toyota SUV. The Chevy had chromed silhouettes of reclining women on the mud flaps, which made the Toyota the redhead’s car. That was Reacher’s conclusion.

He went inside. The air was set very cold and smelled of sharp chemical flavors. There were maybe a half-dozen customers walking around, looking. At the front of the store were racks full of glass and chrome things. Dress-up accessories, Reacher guessed. In back were racks of things in red cardboard boxes. Clutch plates, brake pads, radiator hoses, stuff like that, he guessed. Parts. He had never put parts on a car. In the army there had been guys to do it for him, and since the army he had never had a vehicle of his own.

Between the glamour stuff and the boring stuff was a service corral made of four counters boxed together. There were registers and computers and thick paper manuals. Behind one of the computers was a tall boy somewhere in his early twenties. Not someone Reacher had seen before. Not one of the five from the sports bar. Just a guy. He looked to be in charge. He was wearing red coveralls. A uniform, Reacher guessed, partly practical and partly suggestive of the kind of thing an Indy 500 pit mechanic might wear. Like a symbol. Like an implied promise of fast hands-on help with all kinds of matters automotive. The guy was a manager, Reacher guessed. Not the franchise owner. Not if he drove a four-cylinder Chevy to work. His name was embroidered on the left of his chest: Gary. Up close he looked sullen and unhelpful.

“I need to speak with Sandy,” Reacher said to him. “The redhead.”

“She’s in back right now,” the guy called Gary said.

“Shall I go through or do you want to go get her for me?”

“What’s this about?”

“Personal.”

“She’s here to work.”

“It’s a legal matter.”

“You’re not a cop.”

“I’m working with a lawyer.”

“I need to see some ID.”

“No, Gary, you don’t. You need to go get Sandy.”

“I can’t. I’m short-staffed today.”

“You could call her on the phone. Or page her.”

The guy called Gary just stood still. Did nothing. Reacher shrugged and bypassed the corral of counters and headed for a door in back marked No Admittance. It would be an office or a lunchroom, he guessed. Not a stockroom. A place like that, stock was unloaded directly onto the shelves. No hidden inventory. Reacher knew how modern retail worked. He read the papers people left behind on buses and in diner booths.

It was an office, small, maybe ten-by-ten, dominated by a large white laminate desk with oily handprints on it. Sandy was sitting behind it, wearing red coveralls. Hers looked a whole lot better than Gary’s. They were cinched in tight around her waist with a belt. The zipper was open about eight inches. Her name was embroidered on the left, displayed a lot more prominently than Gary’s was. Reacher figured that if he owned the franchise he would have Sandy working the counter and Gary in the office, no question.

“We meet again,” he said.

Sandy said nothing. Just looked up at him. She was working with invoices. There was a stack of them on her left, and a stack of them on her right. One of them was in her hand, frozen in midair on its journey from one stack to the other. She looked smaller than Reacher remembered, quieter, less energetic, duller. Deflated.

“We need to talk,” he said. “Don’t we?”

“I’m very sorry for what happened,” she said.

“Don’t apologize. I wasn’t offended. I just want to know how it went down.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You do, Sandy. You were there.”

She said nothing. Just placed the invoice on top of the stack to her right and used her fingers to line it up exactly.

“Who set it up?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You must know who told you about it.”

“Jeb,” she said.

“Jeb?”

“Jeb Oliver,” she said. “He works here. We hang out sometimes.”

“Is he here today?”

“No, he didn’t show.”

Reacher nodded. The guy called Gary had said: I’m short-staffed today.

“Did you see him again last night? Afterward?”

“No, I just ran for it.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know. With his mother somewhere. I don’t know him that well.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That I could help with something he had to do.”

“Did it sound like fun?”

“Anything sounds like fun on a Monday night in this town. Watching a barn plank warp sounds like fun.”

“How much did he pay you?”

Sandy didn’t answer.

“A thing like that, nobody does it for free,” Reacher said.

“Hundred dollars,” she said.

“What about the other four guys?”

“Same for them.”

“Who were they?”

“His buddies.”

“Who came up with the plan? The brothers thing?”

“It was Jeb’s idea. You were supposed to start pawing me. Only you didn’t.”

“You improvised very well.”

She smiled a little, like it had been a small unscripted success in a life that held very few of them.

“How did you know where to find me?” Reacher asked.

“We were cruising in Jeb’s truck. Around and around. Kind of standing by. Then he got word on his cell.”

“Who called him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would his buddies know?”

“I don’t think so. Jeb likes to know things that nobody else knows.”

“You want to lend me your car?”

“My car?”

“I need to go find Jeb.”

“I don’t know where he lives.”

“You can leave that part to me. But I need wheels.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m old enough to drive,” Reacher said. “I’m old enough to do lots of things. And I’m pretty good at some of them.”

She half-smiled again, because he was using her own line from the night before. She looked away, and then she looked back at him, shy, but curious.

“Was I any good?” she asked. “You know, last night, with the act?”

“You were great,” he said. “I was preoccupied, or I would have given up on the football in a heartbeat.”

“How long would you need my car for?”

“How big is this town?”

“Not very.”

“Not very long, then.”

“Is this a big deal?”

“You got a hundred bucks. So did four other guys. That’s five hundred right there. My guess is Jeb kept another five for himself. So someone paid a thousand bucks to put me in the hospital. That’s a moderately big deal. For me, anyway.”

“I wish I hadn’t gotten involved now.”

“It turned out OK.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But maybe not. We could deal. You could lend me your car and I could forget all about you.”

“Promise?”

“No harm, no foul,” Reacher said.

She ducked down and lifted her purse off the floor. Rooted through and came out with a set of keys.

“It’s a Toyota,” she said.

“I know,” Reacher said. “End of the row, next to Gary’s Chevy.”

“How did you know that?”

“Intuition,” he said.

He took the keys and closed the door on her and headed back to the corral of counters. Gary was ringing some guy up for some unidentifiable purchase. Reacher waited in line behind him. Got to the register inside about two minutes.

“I need Jeb Oliver’s address,” he said.

“Why?” Gary said.

“A legal matter.”

“I want to see some ID.”

“You had a criminal conspiracy running out of your store. If I were you, the less I knew about it, the better.”

“I want to see something.”

“What about the inside of an ambulance? That’s the next thing you’re going to see, Gary, unless you give me Jeb Oliver’s address.”

The guy paused a moment. Glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder at the line forming behind him. Apparently decided that he didn’t want to start a fight he knew he couldn’t win, with a whole bunch of people watching. So he opened a drawer and took out a file and copied an address onto a slip of paper torn off the top of a memo pad provided by an oil filter manufacturer.

“North of here,” he said. “About five miles.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said, and took the slip of paper.

The redhead’s Toyota started on the first turn of the key. Reacher let the engine idle and racked the seat back and adjusted the mirror. Clipped his belt and propped the slip of paper against the instrument panel. It meant he couldn’t see the tachometer, but he wasn’t very interested in whatever information that dial might supply. All he cared about was how much gas was in the tank, and there looked to be more than enough for five miles out and five miles back.

Jeb Oliver’s address was nothing more than a house number on a rural route. Easier to find than a road with a name, like Elm Street, or Maple Avenue. In Reacher’s experience some towns had more roads named after trees than trees themselves.

He moved out of the parking lot and drove north to the highway cloverleaf. There was the usual forest of signs. He saw the route number he wanted. It was going to be a dogleg, right and then left. East, and then north. The little SUV hummed along OK. It was tall for its width, which made it feel tippy on the turns. But it didn’t fall over. It had a small engine that kept itself working hard. The interior smelled of perfume.

The west-east part of the dogleg was some kind of a major county road. But after the turn north the blacktop narrowed and the shoulders grew ragged. There was agriculture going on to the left and the right. Some kind of a winter crop was planted in giant circles. Radial irrigation booms turned slowly. The corners where the booms didn’t reach were unplanted and stony. Superimposing circles on squares wasted more than twenty-one percent of every acre, but Reacher figured that might be an efficient trade-off in places where land was plentiful and irrigation hardware wasn’t.

He drove four more miles through the fields and passed a half-dozen tracks with mailboxes at the end of them. The mailboxes were painted with numbers and the tracks led away west and east to small swaybacked farm dwellings maybe two hundred yards off the road. He watched the numbers and slowed before he got to the Oliver place. It had a mailbox like all the others, up on a post made out of two figure-eight concrete blocks stacked end on end. The number was daubed in white on a weathered plywood rectangle wired to the concrete. The track was narrow with two muddy ruts flanking a weedy center hump. There were sharp tire tracks in the mud. New treads, wide, aggressive, from a big truck. Not the kind of tires you bought at the $99-for-four place.

Reacher turned the Toyota in and bumped down the track. At the end of it he could see a clapboard farmhouse with a barn behind it and a clean red pickup truck next to it. The truck was turned nose-out and it had a massive chrome radiator grille. A Dodge Ram, Reacher figured. He parked in front of it and got out. The house and the barn were about a hundred years old and the truck was about a month old. It had the big Hemi motor, and the crew cab, and four-wheel drive, and huge tires. It was probably worth more than the house, which was badly maintained and one winter away from serious trouble. The barn was no better. But it had new iron clasps on the doors, with a bicycle U-lock through them.

There was no sound except for a distant rainfall hiss as the irrigation booms turned slowly in the fields. No activity anywhere. No traffic on the road. No dogs barking. The air was still and full of the sharp smell of fertilizer and earth. Reacher walked to the front door and knocked twice with the flat of his hand. No response. He tried again. No response. He walked around to the back of the house and found a woman sitting on a porch glider. She was a lean and leathery person, wearing a faded print dress and holding a pint bottle of something golden in color. She was probably fifty, but she could have passed for seventy, or forty if she took a bath and got a good night’s sleep. She had one foot tucked up underneath her and was using the other to scoot the glider slowly back and forth. She wasn’t wearing shoes.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Jeb,” Reacher said.

“Not here.”

“He’s not at work, either.”

“I know that.”

“So where is he?”

“How would I know?”

“Are you his mother?”

“Yes, I am. You think I’m hiding him here? Go ahead and check.”

Reacher said nothing. The woman stared at him and rocked the glider, back and forth, back and forth. The bottle rested easy in her lap.

“I insist,” she said. “I mean it. Search the damn house.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Why should you?”

“Because if you invite me to search the house it means he’s not in it.”

“Like I said. Jeb’s not here.”

“What about the barn?”

“It’s locked from the outside. There’s only one key and he’s got it.”

Reacher said nothing.

“He went away,” the woman said. “Disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Only temporarily, I hope.”

“Is that his truck?”

The woman nodded. Took a small, delicate sip from her bottle.

“So he walked?” Reacher said.

“He was picked up. By a friend.”

“When?”

“Late last night.”

“To go where?”

“I have no idea.”

“Take a guess.”

The woman shrugged, rocked, sipped.

“Far away, probably,” she said. “He has friends all over. California, maybe. Or Arizona. Or Texas. Or Mexico.”

“Was this trip planned?” Reacher asked.

The woman wiped the neck of the bottle on the hem of her dress and held it out toward him. He shook his head. Sat down on the porch step. The old wood creaked once under his weight. The glider kept on rocking, back and forth. It was almost silent. Almost, but not quite. There was a small sound from the mechanism that came once at the end of each swing, and a little creak from a porch board as it started its return. Reacher could smell mildew from the cushions, and bourbon from the bottle.

“Cards on the table, whoever the hell you are,” the woman said. “Jeb got home last night limping. With his nose busted. And I’m figuring you for the guy who bust it.”

“Why?”

“Who else would come looking for him? I’m guessing he started something he couldn’t finish.”

Reacher said nothing.

“So he ran,” the woman said. “The pussy.”

“Did he call someone last night? Or did someone call him?”

“How would I know? He makes a thousand calls a day, he takes a thousand calls a day. His cell phone is the biggest thing in his life. Next to his truck.”

“Did you see who picked him up?”

“Some guy in a car. He waited on the road. Wouldn’t come down the track. I didn’t see much. It was dark. White lights on the front, red lights on the back, but all cars have those.”

Reacher nodded. He had seen only a single set of tire marks in the mud, from the big pickup. The car that had waited on the road was probably a sedan, too low-slung to make it down the farm track.

“Did he say how long he would be gone?”

The woman just shook her head.

“Was he scared of something?”

“He was kind of beaten down. Deflated.”

Deflated. Like the redhead in the auto parts store.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”

“You going now?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. He walked back the way he had come, listening to the glider moving, listening to the hiss of irrigation water. He backed the Toyota all the way to the road and swung the wheel and headed south.

He put the Toyota next to the Chevy and headed inside the store. Gary was still behind the register. Reacher ignored him and headed straight for the No Admittance door. The redhead was still behind the desk. She was almost through with the invoices. The stack on her right was tall, and the stack on her left had just one sheet of paper in it. She wasn’t doing anything with it. She was leaning back in the chair, unwilling to finish, unwilling to get back out to the public. Or to Gary.

Reacher put the car keys on the desk.

“Thanks for the loan,” he said.

“Did you find him?” she asked.

“He’s gone.”

She said nothing.

“You look tired,” Reacher said.

She said nothing.

“Like you’ve got no energy. No sparkle. No enthusiasm.”

“So?”

“Last night you were full of beans.”

“I’m at work now.”

“You were at work last night, too. You were getting paid.”

“You said you were going to forget all about that.”

“I am. Have a nice life, Sandy.”

She watched him for a minute.

“You too, Jimmy Reese,” she said.

He turned around and closed the door on her again and headed out to the daylight. Started walking south, back to town.

There were four people in Helen Rodin’s office when he got there. Helen herself, and three strangers. One of them was a guy in an expensive suit. He was sitting in Helen’s chair, behind her desk. She was standing next to him, head bent, talking. Some kind of an urgent conference. The other two strangers were standing near the window, like they were waiting, like they were next in line. One was a man, one was a woman. The woman had long dark hair and glasses. The man had no hair and glasses. Both were dressed casually. Both had lapel badges with their names printed large. The woman had Mary Mason followed by a bunch of letters that had to be medical. The man had Warren Niebuhr with the same bunch of letters. Doctors, Reacher figured, probably psychiatrists. The name badges made them look like they had been dragged out of a convention hall. But they didn’t seem unhappy about it.

Helen looked up from her discussion.

“Folks, this is Jack Reacher,” she said. “My investigator dropped out and Mr. Reacher agreed to take over his role.”

News to me, Reacher thought. But he said nothing. Then Helen gestured at the guy in her chair, proudly.

“This is Alan Danuta,” she said. “He’s a lawyer specializing in veterans’ issues. From D.C. Probably the best there is.”

“You got here fast,” Reacher said to him.

“I had to,” the guy said back. “Today is the critical day for Mr. Barr.”

“We’re all headed for the hospital,” Helen said. “The doctors say he’s ready for us. I was hoping that Alan would consult by phone or e-mail, but he flew right in.”

“Easier for me that way,” Danuta said.

“No, I got lucky,” Helen said. “And then even luckier, because there’s a psychiatric conference in Bloomington all week. Dr. Mason and Dr. Niebuhr drove straight down.”

“I specialize in memory loss,” Dr. Mason said.

“And I specialize in coercion,” Dr. Niebuhr said. “Dependency issues in the criminal mind, and so on.”

“So this is the team,” Helen said.

“What about his sister?” Reacher asked.

“She’s already with him.”

“We need to talk.”

“Privately?”

“Just for a moment.”

She made an excuse-me face to the others and led Reacher into the outer office.

“You get anywhere?” she asked him.

“The bimbo and the four other guys were recruited by a friend of theirs called Jeb Oliver. He paid them a hundred bucks each. I figure he kept another five for his trouble. I went to his house, but he’s gone.”

“Where?”

“Nobody knows. He was picked up by a guy in a car.”

“Who is he?”

“He works at the store with the bimbo. But he’s also a small-time dope dealer.”

“Really?”

Reacher nodded. “There’s a barn behind his house with a fancy lock on it. Maybe a meth lab, maybe a storeroom. He spends a lot of time on his cell phone. He owns a truck that had to cost twice what a store clerk makes in a year. And he lives with his mother.”

“What does that prove?”

“Drug dealers are more likely than anyone else to live with their mothers. I read it in the paper.”

“Why?”

“They’ve usually got small-time priors. They can’t pass the kind of background checks that landlords like to run.”

Helen said nothing.

“They were all hopped up last night,” Reacher said. “All six of them. Speed, probably, judging by the way the bimbo looked today. She was different. Really down, like an amphetamine hangover.”

“They were doped up? Then you were lucky.”

Reacher shook his head. “You want to fight with me, your best choice would be aspirin.”

“Where does this get us?”

“Look at it from Jeb Oliver’s point of view. He was doing something for somebody. Part work, part favor. Worth a thousand bucks. Had to be for someone higher up on one of his various food chains. And it probably wasn’t for the auto parts manager.”

“So you think James Barr was involved with a dope dealer?”

“Not necessarily involved. But maybe coerced by one for some unknown reason.”

“This raises the stakes,” Helen said.

“A little,” Reacher said.

“What should we do?”

“We should go to the hospital. Let Dr. Mason find out if Barr is bullshitting about the amnesia. If he is, then the fastest way through all of this is to slap him around until he tells us the truth.”

“What if he isn’t bullshitting?”

“Then there are other approaches.”

“Like what?”

“Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s hear what the shrinks have to say first.”

Helen Rodin drove out to the hospital in her Saturn with the lawyer Alan Danuta sitting beside her in the front and Reacher sprawling in the back. Mason and Niebuhr followed her in the Taurus they had rented that morning in Bloomington. They parked side by side in a large visitors’ lot, and all five people got out and stood for a moment and then headed together toward the building’s main entrance.

Grigor Linsky watched them walk. He was fifty feet across the lot, in the Cadillac that Jeb Oliver’s mother had seen in the dark the night before. He kept the motor running and dialed his cell phone. The Zec answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” he said.

“The soldier is very good,” Linsky said. “He’s already been out to the boy’s house.”

“And?”

“Nothing. The boy is no longer there.”

“Where is the boy?”

“Distributed.”

“Specifically?”

“His head and his hands are in the river. The rest of him is under eight yards of crushed stone in the new First Street roadbed.”

“What’s happening now?”

“The soldier and the lawyer are at the hospital. With three others. Another lawyer and two doctors, I think. Specialist counsel and expert witnesses, I imagine.”

“Are we relaxed?”

“We should be. They have to try. That’s the system here, as you know. But they won’t succeed.”

“Make sure they don’t,” the Zec said.

The hospital was on the outer edge of the city and therefore relatively spacious. Clearly there had been no real estate restraints. Just county budget restrictions, Reacher figured, that had limited the building to plain concrete and six stories. The concrete was painted white inside and out, and the stories were short of headroom. But other than those factors the place looked like any hospital anywhere. And it smelled like any hospital anywhere. Decay, disinfectant, disease. Reacher didn’t like hospitals very much. He was following the other four down a long bright corridor that led to an elevator. The two shrinks were leading the way. They seemed pretty much at home. Helen Rodin and Alan Danuta were right behind them. They were side by side, talking. The shrinks reached the elevator bank and Niebuhr hit the button. The little column of people closed up behind him. Then Helen Rodin turned back and stopped Reacher before he caught up with the others. Stepped close and spoke quietly.

“Does the name Eileen Hutton mean anything to you?”

“Why?”

“My father faxed a new witness list. He added her name.”

Reacher said nothing.

“She seems to be from the army,” Helen said. “Do you know her?”

“Should I?”

Helen came closer and turned away from the others.

“I need to know what she knows,” she said quietly.

This could complicate things, Reacher thought.

“She was the prosecutor,” he said.

“When? Fourteen years ago?”

“Yes.”

“So how much does she know?”

“I think she’s at the Pentagon now.”

“How much does she know, Reacher?”

He looked away.

“She knows it all,” he said.

“How? You never got anywhere near a courtroom.”

“Even so.”

“How?”

“Because I was sleeping with her.”

She stared at him. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You told her everything?”

“We were in a relationship. Naturally I told her everything. We were on the same side.”

“Just two lonely people in the desert.”

“We had a good thing going. Three great months. She was a nice person. Still is, probably. We were close.”

“That’s more information than I need, Reacher.”

He said nothing.

“This is way out of control now,” Helen said.

“She can’t use what she’s got. Even less than I can. It’s still classified and she’s still in the army.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“Believe it,” Reacher said.

“Then why is she on the damn list?”

“My fault,” Reacher said. “I mentioned the Pentagon to your father. When I couldn’t understand how my name had come up. He must have poked around. I thought he might.”

“It’s over before it starts if she talks.”

“She can’t.”

“Maybe she can. Maybe she’s going to. Who knows what the hell the military is going to do?”

The elevator bell rang and the small crowd shuffled closer to the doors.

“You’re going to have to talk to her,” Helen said. “She’ll be coming here for a deposition. You’re going to have to find out what she’s going to say.”

“She’s probably a one-star general by now. I can’t make her tell me anything.”

“Find a way,” Helen said. “Exploit old memories.”

“Maybe I don’t want to. She and I are still on the same side, remember. As far as Specialist E-4 James Barr is concerned.”

Helen Rodin turned away and stepped into the elevator car.

The elevator opened into a sixth-floor lobby that was all blank, painted concrete except for a steel-and-wired-glass door that led into a security airlock. Beyond that, Reacher could see signs to an ICU and two isolation wards, one male, one female, and two general wards, and a neonatal facility. Reacher guessed the whole sixth floor had been funded by the state. It wasn’t a pleasant place. It was a perfect blend of prison and hospital, and neither thing was a fun ingredient.

A guy in a Board of Corrections uniform met the party at a reception desk. Everyone was searched and everyone signed a liability waiver. Then a doctor showed up and led them to a small waiting area. The doctor was a tired man of about thirty, and the waiting area had chairs made of tubular steel and green vinyl. They looked like they had been ripped out of 1950s Chevrolets.

“Barr is awake and reasonably lucid,” the doctor said. “We’re listing him as stable, but that doesn’t mean he’s a well man. So today we’re restricting his visitors to a maximum of two at any one time, and we want them to keep things as brief as possible.”

Reacher saw Helen Rodin smile, and he knew why. The cops would want to come in pairs, and therefore Helen’s presence as defense counsel would make three at a time. Which meant that the medical restrictions were handing her a defense-only day.

“His sister is with him right now,” the doctor said. “She’d prefer it if you would wait until they’ve finished their visit before going in.”

The doctor left them there and Helen said, “I’ll go first, on my own. I need to introduce myself and get his consent for the representation. Then Dr. Mason should see him, I think. Then we’ll decide what to do next based on her conclusions.”

She spoke fast. Reacher realized she was a little nervous. A little tense. All of them were, apart from him. None of them apart from him had ever met James Barr before. Barr had become an unknown destination for each of them, all in separate ways. He was Helen’s client, albeit one that she didn’t really want. He was an object of study for Mason and Niebuhr. Maybe the subject of future academic papers, even fame and reputation. Maybe he was a condition waiting to be named. Barr’s syndrome. Same for Alan Danuta. Maybe to him the whole thing was a Supreme Court precedent waiting to be argued. A textbook chapter. A law school class. Indiana versus Barr. Barr versus the United States. They were all investing in a man they didn’t know.

They took a green vinyl chair each and settled in. The little lobby smelled of chlorine disinfectant, and it was silent. There was no sound at all except for a faint rush of water in pipes and a distant electronic pulse from a machine in another room. Nobody said anything but everyone seemed to know they were in for a long slow process. No point in starting out impatient. Reacher sat opposite Mary Mason and watched her. She was relatively young, for an expert. She seemed warm and open. She had chosen eyeglasses with large frames so that her eyes could be clearly seen. Her eyes looked kind and welcoming, and reassuring. How much of that was bedside manner and how much was for real, Reacher didn’t know.

“How do you do this?” he asked her.

“The assessment?” she said. “I start out assuming it’s more likely to be real than fake. A brain injury bad enough for a two-day coma almost always produces amnesia. Those data were settled long ago. Then I just watch the patient. True amnesiacs are very unsettled by their condition. They’re disoriented and frightened. You can see them really trying to remember. They want to remember. Fakers show up different. You can see them avoiding the days in question. They look away from them mentally. Sometimes even physically. There’s often some distinctive body language.”

“Kind of subjective,” Reacher said.

Mason nodded. “It is basically subjective. It’s very hard to prove a negative. You can use brain scans to show differing brain activity, but what the scans actually mean is still subjective. Hypnotism is sometimes useful, but courts are scared of hypnotism, generally. So yes, I’m in the opinion business, nothing more.”

“Who does the prosecution hire?”

“Someone exactly like me. I’ve worked both sides of the fence.”

“So it’s he said, she said?”

Mason nodded again. “It’s usually about which of us has more letters after her name. That’s what juries respond to.”

“You’ve got a lot of letters.”

“More than most people,” Mason said.

“How much will he have forgotten?”

“Several days, minimum. If the trauma happened Saturday, I’d be very surprised if he remembers anything after Wednesday. Before that there’ll be a shadowy period just about as long where he remembers some things and not others. But that’s the minimum. I’ve seen cases where months are missing, sometimes after concussions, not even comas.”

“Will anything come back?”

“From the initial shadowy period, possibly. He might be able to work backward from the last thing he remembers, through the preceding few days. He might be able to pick out a few previous incidents. Working forward, he’ll be much more limited. If he remembers his last lunch, he might eventually get as far as dinner. If he remembers being out at a movie, he might eventually recall driving home. But there’ll be a hard boundary somewhere. Typically it would be when he went to sleep on the last day he’s aware of.”

“Will he remember fourteen years ago?”

Mason nodded. “His long-term memory should be unimpaired. Different people seem to have different internal definitions of long-term, because there seems to be a literal chemical migration from one part of the brain to another, and no two brains are identical. The physical biology isn’t well understood. People like to use computer metaphors now, but that’s all wrong. It’s not about hard drives and random access memory. The brain is entirely organic. It’s like throwing a bag of apples down the stairs. Some bruise, some don’t. But I would say fourteen years counts as long-term for just about anybody.”

The waiting area went quiet. Reacher listened to the distant electronic pulse. It was a sinus rhythm, he guessed, from a machine that was either monitoring a heartbeat or causing one. It was running at about seventy beats a minute. It was a restful sound. He liked it. Then a door opened halfway down a corridor and Rosemary Barr stepped out of a room. She was showered and her hair was brushed but she looked thin and exhausted and sleepless and ten years older than the day before. She stood still for a moment and then looked right, looked left, and walked slowly toward the waiting area. Helen Rodin got up and went to meet her halfway. They stood together, talking low. Reacher couldn’t hear what they were saying. A two-way progress report, he guessed, first medical, then legal. Then Helen took Rosemary’s arm and led her onward to the group. Rosemary looked at the two psychiatrists, at Alan Danuta, at Reacher. She said nothing. Then she walked on alone toward the security desk. Didn’t look back.

“Avoidance,” Niebuhr said. “We’re all here to poke and prod at her brother, physically, mentally, legally, metaphorically. That’s invasive and unattractive. And to acknowledge us means to acknowledge her brother’s jeopardy.”

“Maybe she’s just tired,” Reacher said.

“I’m going in to see him now,” Helen said.

She walked back up the corridor and went into the room Rosemary had come out of. Reacher watched her until he heard the door close. Then he turned back to Niebuhr.

“Seen this kind of thing before?” he asked him.

“Coercion? Have you seen it before?”

Reacher smiled. Every psychiatrist he had ever met liked to answer questions with questions. Maybe they were taught to, day one at psychiatry school.

“I’ve seen it a lot,” he said.

“But?”

“Usually there was more evidence of a dire threat.”

“A threat against the sister isn’t dire? You came up with that hypothesis yourself, I believe.”

“His sister hasn’t been kidnapped. She’s not a prisoner somewhere. He could have arranged to have her safeguarded. Or told her to get out of town.”

“Exactly,” Niebuhr said. “We can only conclude that he was instructed not to do any such thing. Evidently he was told to leave her open, and ignorant, and vulnerable. That demonstrates to us how powerful the coercion must have been. And it demonstrated to him how powerful it was. And it demonstrated to him how powerless he was in comparison. Every day. He must have been living with deep dread, and helplessness, and guilt for his obedience.”

“Ever seen a rational man afraid enough to do what he did?”

“Yes,” Niebuhr said.

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Once or twice.”

“The threatener must be a real monster. Although I’d expect to see other factors present, as enhancers, or multipliers. Very likely a recent relationship, some kind of dependency, an infatuation, a desire to please, to impress, to be valued, to be loved.”

“A woman?”

“No, you don’t kill people to impress women. That usually has the opposite effect. This will be a man. Seductive, but not in a sexual way. Compelling, somehow.”

“An alpha male and a beta male.”

“Exactly,” Niebuhr said again. “With any final reluctance resolved by the threat to the sister. Possibly Mr. Barr was never entirely sure whether the threat was a joke or for real. But he chose not to test it. Human motivation is very complex. Most people don’t really know why they do things.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Do you know why you do things?”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said. “Other times I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe you could tell me.”

“I’m normally very expensive. That’s why I can afford to do things like this for nothing.”

“Maybe I could pay you five bucks a week, like rent.”

Niebuhr smiled uncertainly.

“Uh, no,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Then the waiting area went quiet again and stayed quiet for ten long minutes. Danuta stretched his legs way out and worked on papers inside an open briefcase that he kept balanced on his knees. Mason had her eyes closed and might have been asleep. Niebuhr stared into space. The three of them were clearly accustomed to waiting. As was Reacher himself. He had been a military cop for thirteen years, and Hurry Up and Wait was the real MP motto. Not Assist, Protect, Defend. He focused on the distant electronic heartbeat, and passed the time.

Grigor Linsky turned his car around and watched the hospital doors in his mirror. Made a bet with himself that nothing would happen for at least sixty minutes. At least sixty, but not more than ninety. Then he rehearsed an order of priority in case they didn’t all come out together. Who should he ignore and who should he tail? In the end he decided to stick with whoever acted alone. He figured that was most likely to be the soldier. His guess was the lawyers and the doctors would head back to the office. They were predictable. The soldier wasn’t.

Helen Rodin came out of James Barr’s room fifteen minutes after she went in. She walked straight back to the waiting area. Everyone looked at her. She looked at Mary Mason.

“Your turn,” she said. Mason stood up and walked away down the corridor. She took nothing with her. No briefcase, no paper, no pen. Reacher watched her until Barr’s door closed behind her. Then he leaned back in his chair, in the silence.

“I liked him,” Helen said, to nobody in particular.

“How is he?” Niebuhr asked.

“Weak,” Helen said. “Smashed up. Like he got hit by a truck.”

“Is he making sense?”

“He’s coherent. But he doesn’t remember anything. And I don’t think he’s faking.”

“How far back is he blanking?”

“I can’t tell. He remembers listening to a baseball game on the radio. Could have been last week or last month.”

“Or last year,” Reacher said.

“Did he accept your representation?” Danuta asked.

“Verbally,” Helen said. “He can’t sign anything. He’s handcuffed to the bed.”

“Did you walk him through the charges and the evidence?”

“I had to,” Helen said. “He wanted to know why I thought he needed a lawyer.”

“And?”

“He assumes he’s guilty.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Alan Danuta closed his briefcase and took it off his knees and put it on the floor. Sat up straight, fast, all in one fluid movement.

“Welcome to the gray areas,” he said. “This is where good law comes from.”

“Nothing good about it,” Helen said. “Not so far.”

“We absolutely cannot let him go to trial. The government injured him through its own negligence and now it wants to put him on trial for his life? I don’t think so. Not if he can’t even remember the day in question. What kind of a defense could he conduct?”

“My father will have kittens.”

“Obviously. We’ll have to cut him out. We’ll have to go straight to federal court. It’s a Bill of Rights issue anyway. Federal, then Appeals, then the Supremes. That’s the process.”

“That’s a long process.”

Danuta nodded.

“Three years,” he said. “If we’re lucky. The most applicable precedent is Wilson, and that case took three and a half years. Almost four.”

“And we’ve got no guarantee of winning. We might lose.”

“In which case we’ll go to trial down the road and we’ll do the best we can.”

“I’m not qualified for this,” Helen said.

“Intellectually? That’s not what I heard.”

“Tactically and strategically. And financially.”

“There are veterans’ associations that can help with the money. Mr. Barr served his country, after all. With honor.”

Helen didn’t reply to that. Just glanced Reacher’s way. Reacher said nothing. He turned away and stared at the wall. He was thinking: This guy is going to get away with murder again? Twice?

Alan Danuta moved in his chair.

“There is an alternative,” he said. “Not very exciting legally, but it’s out there.”

“What is it?” Helen asked.

“Give your father the puppet master. Under these circumstances, half a loaf is better than none. And the puppet master is the better half anyway.”

“Would he go for it?”

“You know him better than I do, presumably. But he’d be a fool not to go for it. He’s looking at a minimum three-year appeals process before he even gets Mr. Barr inside a courtroom. And any prosecutor worth his salt wants the bigger fish.”

Helen glanced at Reacher again.

“The puppet master is only a theory,” she said. “We don’t have anything that even remotely resembles evidence.”

“Your choice,” Danuta said. “But one way or the other, you can’t let Barr go to trial.”

“One step at a time,” Helen said. “Let’s see what Dr. Mason thinks.”

Dr. Mason came back twenty minutes later. Reacher watched her walk. The length of her stride and the look in her eyes and the set of her jaw told him she had arrived at a firm conclusion. There was no uncertainty there. No diffidence, no doubt. None at all. She sat back down and smoothed her skirt across her knees.

“Permanent retrograde amnesia,” she said. “Completely genuine. As clear a case as I ever saw.”

“Duration?” Niebuhr asked.

“Major League Baseball will tell us that,” she said. “The last thing he remembers is a particular Cardinals game. But my bet would be a week or more, counting backward from today.”

“Which includes Friday,” Helen said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“OK,” Danuta said. “There it is.”

“Great,” Helen said. She stood up and the others joined her and they all moved around and ended up facing the exit, either consciously or unconsciously; Reacher wasn’t sure. But it was clear that Barr was behind them, literally and figuratively. He had changed from being a man to being a medical specimen and a legal argument.

“You guys go on ahead,” he said.

“You’re staying here?” Helen asked.

Reacher nodded.

“I’m going to look in on my old buddy,” he said.

“Why?”

“I haven’t seen him for fourteen years.”

Helen stepped away from the others and came close.

“No, why?” she asked quietly.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to switch his machines off.”

“I hope you’re not.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have much of an alibi, do I?”

She stood still for a moment. Said nothing. Then she stepped back and joined the others. They all left together. Reacher watched them process out at the security desk, and as soon as they were through the steel door and in the elevator lobby he turned around and walked down the corridor to James Barr’s door. He didn’t knock. Just paused a beat and turned the handle and went inside.

CHAPTER 7

The room was overheated. You could have roasted chickens in it. There was a wide window with white venetian blinds closed against the sun. They glowed and filled the room with soft white light. There was medical equipment piled everywhere. A silent respirator, disconnected. IV stands and heart monitors. Tubes and bags and wires.

Barr was flat on his back in a bed in the middle of the room. No pillow. His head was clamped in a brace. His hair was shaved and he had bandages over the holes they had drilled in his skull. His left shoulder was wrapped in bandages that reached to his elbow. His right shoulder was bare and unmarked. The skin there was pale and thin and marbled. His chest and his sides were bandaged. The bedsheet was folded down at his waist. His arms were straight at his sides and his wrists were handcuffed to the cot rails. He had IV needles taped to the back of his left hand. There was a peg on his right middle finger that was connected by a gray wire to a box. There were red wires leading out from under the bandages on his chest. They led to a machine with a screen. The screen was showing a rolling pattern that reminded Reacher of the cellular company’s recording of the gunshots. Sharp peaks, and long troughs. The machine made a muted beep every time a peak hit the screen.

“Who’s there?” Barr asked.

His voice was weak and rusty, and slow. And scared.

“Who’s there?” he asked again. The way his head was clamped limited his field of vision. His eyes were moving, left and right, up and down.

Reacher stepped closer. Leaned over the bed. Said nothing.

“You,” Barr said.

“Me,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Barr’s right hand trembled. The motion put a ripple in the wire from the peg. The handcuff moved against the bed rail and made a quiet metallic sound.

“I guess I let you down,” he said.

“I guess you did.”

Reacher watched Barr’s eyes, because they were the only part of him that could move. He was incapable of body language. His head was immobile and most of the rest of him was trussed up like a mummy.

“I don’t remember anything,” Barr said.

“You sure?”

“It’s all blank.”

“You clear on what I’ll do to you if you’re bullshitting me?”

“I can guess.”

“Triple it,” Reacher said.

“I’m not bullshitting,” Barr said. “I just can’t remember anything.” His voice was quiet, helpless, confused. Not a defense, not a complaint. Not an excuse. Just a statement of fact, like a lament, or a plea, or a cry.

“Tell me about the ballgame,” Reacher said.

“It was on the radio.”

“Not the TV?”

“I prefer the radio,” Barr said. “For old times’ sake. That’s how it always was. When I was a kid. The radio, all the way from St. Louis. All those miles. Summer evenings, warm weather, the sound of baseball on the radio.”

He went quiet.

“You OK?” Reacher said.

“My head hurts real bad. I think I had an operation.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I don’t like baseball on the TV,” Barr said.

“I’m not here to discuss your media preferences.”

“Do you watch baseball on TV?”

“I don’t have a TV,” Reacher said.

“Really? You should get one. You can get them for a hundred bucks. Maybe less, for a small one. Look in the Yellow Pages.”

“I don’t have a phone. Or a house.”

“Why not? You’re not still in the army.”

“How would you know?”

“Nobody’s still in the army. Not from back then.”

“Some people are,” Reacher said, thinking about Eileen Hutton.

“Officers,” Barr said. “Nobody else.”

“I was an officer,” Reacher said. “You’re supposed to be able to remember stuff like that.”

“But you weren’t like the others. That’s what I meant.”

“How was I different?”

“You worked for a living.”

“Tell me about the ballgame.”

“Why don’t you have a house? Are you doing OK?”

“You worried about me now?”

“Don’t like it when folks aren’t doing so well.”

“I’m doing fine,” Reacher said. “Believe me. You’re the one with the problem.”

“Are you a cop now? Here? I never saw you around.”

Reacher shook his head. “I’m just a citizen.”

“From where?”

“From nowhere. Out in the world.”

“Why are you here?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

“Oh,” Barr said. “To nail me.”

“Tell me about the ballgame.”

“It was the Cubs at the Cardinals,” Barr said. “Close game. Cards won, bottom ninth, walk-off.”

“Home run?”

“No, an error. A walk, a steal, then a groundout to second put the runner on third, one out. Soft grounder to short, check the runner, throw to first, but the throw went in the dugout and the run scored on the error. The winning run, without a hit in the inning.”

“You remember it pretty well.”

“I follow the Cards. I always have.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t even know what day it is today.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I can’t believe that I did what they say,” Barr said. “Just can’t believe it.”

“Plenty of evidence,” Reacher said.

“For real?”

“No question.”

Barr closed his eyes.

“How many people?” he asked.

“Five.”

Barr’s chest started moving. Tears welled out of his closed eyes. His mouth opened in a ragged oval. He was crying, with his head in a vise.

“Why did I do it?” he said.

“Why did you do it the first time?” Reacher said.

“I was crazy then,” Barr said.

Reacher said nothing.

“No excuses,” Barr said. “I was a different person then. I thought I’d changed. I was sure I had. I was good afterward. I tried real hard. Fourteen years, reformed.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I would have killed myself,” Barr said. “You know, back then. Afterward. I came close, a couple of times. I was so ashamed. Except those four guys from KC turned out to be bad. That was my only consolation. I clung on to it, like redemption.”

“Why do you own all those guns?”

“Couldn’t give them up. They were reminders. And they keep me straight. Too hard to stay straight without them.”

“Do you ever use them?”

“Occasionally. Not often. Now and then.”

“How?”

“At a range.”

“Where? The cops checked.”

“Not here. I go across the line to Kentucky. There’s a range there, cheap.”

“You know the plaza downtown?”

“Sure. I live here.”

“Tell me how you did it.”

“I don’t remember doing it.”

“So tell me how you would do it. Theoretically. Like a recon briefing.”

“What would the targets be?”

“Pedestrians. Coming out of the DMV building.”

Barr closed his eyes again. “That’s who I shot?”

“Five of them,” Reacher said.

Barr started crying again. Reacher moved away and pulled a chair from against a wall. He turned it around and sat down on it, backward.

“When?” Barr said.

“Friday afternoon.”

Barr stayed quiet for a long time.

“How did they catch me?” he asked.

“You tell the story.”

“Was it a traffic stop?”

“Why would it be?”

“I would have waited until late. Maybe just after five. Plenty of people then. I would have stopped on the highway behind the library. Where it’s raised. Sun in the west, behind me, no reflection off the scope. I would have opened the passenger window and lined it all up and emptied the mag and hit the gas again. Only way to get caught would be if a state trooper pulled me over for speeding and saw the rifle. But I think I would have been aware of that. Wouldn’t I? I think I would have hidden the rifle and driven slow. Not fast. Why would I have risked standing out?”

Reacher said nothing.

“What?” Barr said. “Maybe a trooper stopped to help me right there. Was that it? While I was parked? Maybe he thought I had a flat. Or I was out of gas.”

“Do you own a traffic cone?” Reacher asked.

“A what?”

“A traffic cone.”

Barr started to say no, but then he stopped.

“I guess I’ve got one,” he said. “Not sure if I own it, exactly. I had my driveway blacktopped. They left a cone on the sidewalk to stop people driving on it. I had to leave it there three days. They never came back for it.”

“So what did you do with it?”

“I put it in the garage.”

“Is it still there?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure.”

“When was this driveway work done?”

“Start of spring, I think. Months ago.”

“You got receipts?”

Barr tried to shake his head. Winced at the pressure from the clamp.

“It was a gypsy crew,” he said. “I think they stole the blacktop from the city. Probably from where they were starting to fix First Street. I paid cash, quick and dirty.”

“You got any friends?”

“A few.”

“Who are they?”

“Just guys. One or two.”

“Any new friends?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Women?”

“They don’t like me.”

“Tell me about the ballgame.”

“I already did.”

“Where were you? In the car? At home?”

“Home,” Barr said. “I was eating.”

“You remember that?”

Barr blinked. “The shrink lady said I should try to remember the circumstances. It might bring more stuff back. I was in the kitchen, eating chicken, cold. With potato chips. I remember that. But that’s as far as I can get.”

“Drink? Beer, juice, coffee?”

“I don’t remember. I just remember listening to the game. I’ve got a Bose radio. It’s in the kitchen. There’s a TV in there too, but I always listen to the game, never watch. Like when I was a kid.”

“How did you feel?”

“Feel?”

“Happy? Sad? Normal?”

Barr went quiet again for a moment.

“The shrink lady asked the same question,” he said. “I told her normal, but actually I think I was feeling happy. Like something good was on the horizon.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I really blew that call, didn’t I?” Barr said.

“Tell me about your sister,” Reacher said.

“She was just here. Before the lawyer came in.”

“How do you feel about her?”

“She’s all I’ve got.”

“How far would you go to protect her?”

“I would do anything,” Barr said.

“What kind of anything?”

“I’ll plead guilty if they let me. She’ll still have to move, maybe change her name. But I’ll spare her what I can. She bought me the radio. For the baseball. Birthday gift.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Why are you here?” Barr asked him.

“To bury you.”

“I deserve it.”

“You didn’t fire from the highway. You were in the new parking garage.”

“On First Street?”

“North end.”

“That’s nuts. Why would I fire from there?”

“You asked your first lawyer to find me. On Saturday.”

“Why would I do that? You ought to be the last person I wanted to see. You know about Kuwait City. Why would I want that brought up?”

“What was the Cards’ next game?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try to remember. I need to understand the circumstances here.”

“I can’t remember,” Barr said. “There’s nothing there. I remember that winning run, and that’s all. The announcers were going crazy. You know how they are. They were kind of incredulous. I mean, what a stupid way to lose a ballgame. But it’s the Cubs, right? They were saying they always find some way to lose.”

“What about before the game? Earlier that day?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What would you normally be doing?”

“Not much. I don’t do much.”

“What happened in the Cardinals’ previous game?”

“I don’t recall.”

“What’s the next to last thing you remember?”

“I’m not sure. The driveway?”

“That was months ago.”

“I remember going out somewhere,” Barr said.

“When?”

“Not sure. Recently.”

“Alone?”

“Maybe with people. I’m not sure. Not sure where, either.”

Reacher said nothing. Just leaned back in his chair and listened to the quiet beep from the heart machine. It was running pretty fast. Both handcuffs were rattling.

“What’s in the IVs?” Barr asked.

Reacher squinted against the daylight and read the writing on the bags.

“Antibiotics,” he said.

“Not painkillers?”

“No.”

“I guess they think I don’t deserve any.”

Reacher said nothing.

“We go way back, right?” Barr said. “You and me?”

“Not really,” Reacher said.

“Not like we were friends.”

“You got that right.”

“But we were connected.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Weren’t we?” Barr asked.

“In a way,” Reacher said.

“So would you do something for me?” Barr asked. “As a favor?”

“Like what?” Reacher said.

“Pull the IV needles out of my hand.”

“Why?”

“So I can get an infection and die.”

“No,” Reacher said.

“Why not?”

“Not time yet,” Reacher said.

He stood up and put his chair back against the wall and walked out of the room. He processed out at the security desk and passed through the airlock and rode the elevator down to the street. Helen Rodin’s car wasn’t in the lot. She was already gone. She hadn’t waited for him. So he set out walking, all the way from the edge of town.

He picked his way past ten blocks of construction and went to the library first. It was getting late in the afternoon, but the library was still open. The sad woman at the desk told him where the old newspapers were kept. He started with the previous week’s stack of the same Indianapolis paper he had read on the bus. He ignored Sunday, Saturday, and Friday. He started with Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday, and he got a hit with the second paper he looked at. The Chicago Cubs had played a three-game series in St. Louis starting Tuesday. It was the series opener that had ended the way Barr had described. Tie game in the bottom of the ninth, a walk, a steal, a groundout, an error. The details were right there in Wednesday morning’s paper. A walk-off winning run without a hit in the inning. About ten in the evening, Tuesday. Barr had heard the announcers’ frenzied screams just sixty-seven hours before he opened fire.

Then Reacher backtracked all the way to the police station. Four blocks west, one block south. He wasn’t worried about its opening hours. It had looked like a 24/7 kind of a place to him. He went straight to the reception desk and claimed defense counsel’s right to another look at the evidence. The desk guy made a call to Emerson and then pointed Reacher straight to Bellantonio’s garage bay.

Bellantonio met him there and unlocked the door. Not much had changed, but Reacher noticed a couple of new additions. New sheets of paper, behind plastic, pinned above and below the original pages on the cork boards, like footnotes or addenda or appendices.

“Updates?” he asked.

“Always,” Bellantonio said. “We never sleep.”

“So what’s new?”

“Animal DNA,” Bellantonio said. “Exact match of Barr’s dog’s hair to the scene.”

“Where is the dog now?”

“Put to sleep.”

“That’s cold.”

“That’s cold?”

“The damn dog didn’t do anything wrong.”

Bellantonio said nothing.

“What else?” Reacher asked.

“More tests on the fibers, and more ballistics. We’re beyond definite on everything. The Lake City ammo is relatively rare, and we’ve confirmed a purchase by Barr less than a year ago. In Kentucky.”

“He used a range down there.”

Bellantonio nodded. “We found that out, too.”

“Anything else?”

“The traffic cone came from the city’s construction department. We don’t know how or when.”

“Anything else?”

“I think that’s about it.”

“What about the negatives?”

“The negatives?”

“You’re giving me all the good news. What about the questions that didn’t get answered?”

“I don’t think there were any.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

Reacher glanced around the square of cork boards, one more time, and carefully.

“You play poker?” he asked.

“No.”

“Good decision. You’re a terrible liar.”

Bellantonio said nothing.

“You should start worrying,” Reacher said. “He slides, he’s going to sue your ass for the dog.”

“He won’t slide,” Bellantonio said.

“No,” Reacher said. “I don’t suppose he will.”

Emerson was waiting outside Bellantonio’s door. Jacket on, tie off. Frustration in his eyes, the way cops get when they’re snagged up in lawyer stuff.

“Did you see him?” he asked. “At the hospital?”

“He’s blank from Tuesday night onward,” Reacher said. “You’ve got a battle on your hands.”

“Terrific.”

“You should run safer jails.”

“Rodin will bring experts in.”

“His daughter already did.”

“There are legal precedents.”

“They go both ways, apparently.”

“You want to see that piece of shit back on the street?”

“Your screwup,” Reacher said. “Not mine.”

“As long as you’re happy.”

“Nobody’s happy,” Reacher said. “Not yet.”

He left the police station and walked all the way back to the black glass tower. Helen Rodin was at her desk, studying a sheet of paper. Danuta and Mason and Niebuhr had left. She was alone.

“Rosemary asked her brother about Kuwait City,” she said. “She told me so, when she came out of his room at the hospital.”

“And?” Reacher said.

“He told her it was all true.”

“Not a fun conversation, probably.”

Helen Rodin shook her head. “Rosemary is pretty devastated. She says James is, too. He can’t believe he did it again. Can’t believe he threw fourteen years away.”

Reacher said nothing. Silence in the office. Then Helen showed Reacher the sheet of paper she was reading.

“Eileen Hutton is a Brigadier General,” she said.

“Then she’s done well,” Reacher said. “She was a major when I knew her.”

“What were you?”

“A captain.”

“Wasn’t that illegal?”

“Technically. For her.”

“She was in the JAG Corps.”

“Lawyers can break the law, same as anyone else.”

“She’s still in the JAG Corps.”

“Obviously. They don’t retrain them.”

“Based in the Pentagon.”

“That’s where they keep the smart people.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

Reacher said nothing.

“For her deposition,” Helen said.

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s scheduled for four o’clock in the afternoon. Chances are she’ll fly down in the morning and check in somewhere. Because she’ll have to stay the night in town. Too late for a flight back.”

“You going to ask me to take her out for dinner?”

“No,” Helen said. “I’m not. I’m going to ask you to take her out for lunch. Before she meets with my father. I need to know in advance what she’s here for.”

“They put Barr’s dog to sleep,” Reacher said.

“It was old.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Should it?”

“The dog didn’t do anything to anyone.”

Helen said nothing.

“Which hotel will Hutton use?” Reacher asked.

“I have no idea. You’ll have to catch her at the airport.”

“What flight?”

“I don’t know that, either. But there’s nothing direct from D.C. So I expect she’ll change planes in Indianapolis. She won’t get here before eleven in the morning.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I apologize,” Helen said. “For telling Danuta we didn’t have any evidence for the puppet master. I didn’t mean it to sound dismissive.”

“You were right,” Reacher said. “We didn’t have any evidence. At the time.”

She looked at him. “But?”

“We do now.”

“What?”

“They’ve been gilding the lily over at the police station. They’ve got fibers, ballistics, dog DNA, a receipt for the ammunition all the way from someplace in Kentucky. The traced the traffic cone to the city. They’ve got all kinds of stuff.”

“But?” Helen said again.

“But they haven’t got James Barr on tape driving in to place the cone in the garage beforehand.”

“Are you sure?”

Reacher nodded. “They must have looked at the tapes a dozen times by now. If they had found him, they’d have printed the stills and pinned them up for the world to see. But they’re not there, which means they didn’t find them. Which means James Barr didn’t drive in and leave the cone beforehand.”

“Which means someone else did.”

“The puppet master,” Reacher said. “Or another of his puppets. Sometime after Tuesday night. Barr thinks the cone was still in his garage Tuesday.”

Helen looked at him again. “Whoever it was must be on the tapes.”

“Correct,” Reacher said.

“But there’ll be hundreds of cars.”

“You can narrow it down some. You’re looking for a sedan. Something too low-slung to get itself down a farm track.”

“The puppet master really exists, doesn’t he?”

“No other explanation for how it went down.”

“Alan Danuta is probably right, you know,” Helen said. “My father will trade Barr for the puppet master. He’d be a fool not to.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Which means Barr is going to walk,” Helen said. “You understand that, right? There’s no alternative. The prosecution’s legal problems are overwhelming.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I’m not happy about it, either,” Helen said. “But for me it’s just a PR problem. I can spin my way out of it. At least I hope I can. I can blame it all on the way the jail was run. I can claim that it wasn’t me who got him off.”

“But?” Reacher said.

“What are you going to do? You came here to bury him and he’s going to walk.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Reacher said. “What choices do I have?”

“Only two that I’m scared of. One, you could give up on helping me find the guy who’s pulling the strings. I can’t do it alone and Emerson won’t even be willing to try.”

“And two?”

“You could settle things with Barr yourself.”

“That’s for sure.”

“But you can’t do that. You’d go to prison for life if you were lucky.”

“If I got caught.”

“You would get caught. I would know you did it.”

Reacher smiled. “You’d rat me out?”

“I would have to,” Helen said.

“Not if you were my lawyer. You couldn’t say a word.”

“I’m not your lawyer.”

“I could hire you.”

“Rosemary Barr would know too, and she’d rat you out in a heartbeat. And Franklin. He heard you tell the story.”

Reacher nodded.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said again.

“How do we find this guy?”

“Like you said, why would I want to?”

“Because I don’t think you’re the type who settles for half a loaf.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I think you want the truth,” Helen said. “I don’t think you like it when the wool gets pulled over your eyes. You don’t like being played for a sucker.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Plus, this whole situation stinks,” Helen said. “There were six victims here. The five who died and Barr himself.”

“That expands the definition of victimhood a little too far for me.”

“Dr. Niebuhr expects we’ll find a preexisting relationship. Probably recent. Some new friend. We could go at it that way.”

“Barr told me he doesn’t have any new friends,” Reacher said. “Only has one or two old friends.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“I think he was.”

“So is Niebuhr wrong?”

“Niebuhr’s guessing. He’s a shrink. All they do is guess.”

“I could ask Rosemary.”

“Would she know his friends?”

“Probably. They’re pretty close.”

“So get a list,” Reacher said.

“Is Dr. Mason guessing, too?”

“No question. But in her case I think she’s guessing right.”

“If Niebuhr’s wrong about the friend, what do we do?”

“We go proactive.”

“How?”

“There had to have been a guy following me last night and I know for sure there was one following me this morning. I saw him out there in the plaza. So the next time I see him I’ll have a word with him. He’ll tell me who he’s working for.”

“Just like that?”

“People usually tell me what I want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because I ask them nicely.”

“Don’t forget to ask Eileen Hutton nicely.”

“I’ll see you around,” Reacher said.

He walked south, beyond his hotel, and found a cheap place to eat dinner. Then he walked north, slowly, through the plaza, past the black glass tower, under the highway, all the way back to the sports bar. Altogether he was on the street the best part of an hour, and he saw nobody behind him. No damaged men in odd suits. Nobody at all.

The sports bar was half-empty and there was baseball on every screen. He found a corner table and watched the Cardinals play the Astros in Houston. It was a listless late-season game between two teams well out of contention. During the commercial breaks he watched the door. Saw nobody. Tuesday was even quieter than Monday, out there in the heartland.

Grigor Linsky dialed his cell.

“He’s back in the sports bar,” he said.

“Did he see you?” the Zec asked.

“No.”

“Why is he in the sports bar again?”

“No reason. He needed a destination, that’s all. He paraded around for nearly an hour, trying to make me show myself.”

Silence for a beat.

“Leave him there,” the Zec said. “Come in and we’ll talk.”

Alex Rodin called Emerson at home. Emerson was eating a late dinner with his wife and his two daughters, and he wasn’t thrilled about taking the call. But he did. He went out to the hallway and sat on the second-to-bottom stair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, the phone trapped between his shoulder and his ear.

“We need to do something about this Jack Reacher guy,” Rodin said to him.

“I don’t see how he’s a huge problem,” Emerson said. “Maybe he wants to, but he can’t make the facts go away. We’ve got more than we need on Barr.”

“This is not about facts now,” Rodin said. “It’s about the amnesia. It’s about how hard the defense is going to push it.”

“That’s up to your daughter.”

“He’s a bad influence on her. I’ve been reading the case law. It’s a real gray area. The test isn’t really about whether Barr remembers the day in question. It’s about whether he understands the process, right now, today, and whether we’ve got enough other stuff on him to convict without his direct testimony.”

“I would say we do.”

“Me too. But Helen needs to swallow that. She needs to agree. But she’s got that guy standing over her all the time, turning her head. I know her. She’s not going to suck it up until he’s out of the picture.”

“I don’t see what I can do.”

“I want you to bring him in.”

“I can’t,” Emerson said. “Not without a complaint.”

Rodin went quiet.

“Well, keep an eye on him,” he said. “He spits on the sidewalk, I want you to bring him in and do something to him.”

“This isn’t the Wild West,” Emerson said. “I can’t run him out of town.”

“An arrest might be enough. We need something that breaks the spell. He’s pushing Helen where she doesn’t want to go. I know her. On her own she’ll give Barr up, no question.”

Linsky was in pain on the way back to his car. An hour on his feet was about all he could take. A long time ago the bones in his spine had been methodically cracked with an engineer’s ball-peen hammer, one after the other, starting with the coccyx and moving upward through all the lower vertebrae, and not in rapid sequence. Generally one bone had been allowed to heal before the next was broken. When the last had healed, they had started over again. Playing the xylophone, they had called it. Playing scales. Ultimately he had lost count of how many scales they had played on him.

But he never spoke of it. Worse had happened to the Zec.

The Cadillac had a soft seat and it was a relief to get in. It had a quiet motor and a gentle ride and a nice radio. Cadillacs were the kind of things that made America such a wonderful place, along with the trusting population and the hamstrung police departments. Linsky had spent time in several different countries and there was no question in his mind about which was the most satisfactory. Elsewhere he had walked or run or crawled through dirt or hauled carts and sleds by hand. Now he drove a Cadillac.

He drove it to the Zec’s house, which stood eight miles north and west of town, next to his stone-crushing plant. The plant was a forty-year-old industrial facility built on a rich limestone seam that had been discovered under farmland. The house was a big fancy palace built a hundred years ago, when the landscape was still unspoiled, for a rich dry-goods merchant. It was bourgeois and affected in every way, but it was a comfortable house in the same way that the Cadillac was a comfortable car. Best of all it stood alone in the center of many acres of flat land. Once there had been beautiful gardens, but the Zec had razed the trees and leveled the shrubberies to create a completely flat and open vista all around. There were no fences, because how could the Zec bear to live another day behind wire? For the same reason there were no extra locks, no bolts, no bars. The openness was the Zec’s gift to himself. But it was also excellent security in its own right. There were surveillance cameras. Nobody could approach the house undetected. By day visitors were clearly visible at least two hundred yards away, and after dark night-vision enhancement picked them up only a little closer.

Linsky parked and eased himself out of the car. The night was quiet. The stone-crushing plant shut down at seven every evening and sat brooding and silent until dawn. Linsky glanced in its direction and walked toward the house. The front door opened before he got near it. Warm light spilled out and he saw that Vladimir himself had come down to welcome him, which meant that Chenko had to be there too, upstairs, which meant that the Zec had assembled all his top boys, which meant that the Zec was worried.

Linsky took a breath, but he walked inside without a moment’s hesitation. After all, what could be done to him that hadn’t been done to him before? It was different for Vladimir and Chenko, but for men with Linsky’s age and experience nothing was entirely unimaginable anymore.

Vladimir said nothing. Just closed the door again and followed Linsky upstairs. It was a three-story house. The first floor was used for nothing at all, except surveillance. All the rooms were completely empty, except one that had four TV screens on a long table, showing wide-angle views north, east, south, and west. Sokolov would be in there, watching them. Or Raskin. They alternated twelve-hour shifts. The second floor of the house had a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and an office. The third floor had bedrooms and bathrooms. The second floor was where all the business was done.

Linsky could hear the Zec’s voice from the living room, calling him. He went straight in without knocking. The Zec was in an armchair with a glass of tea clamped between his palms. Chenko was sprawled on a sofa. Vladimir pushed in behind Linsky and sat down next to Chenko. Linsky stood still and waited.

“Sit, Grigor,” the Zec said. “Nobody’s upset at you. It was the boy’s failure.”

Linsky nodded and sat down in an armchair, a little closer to the Zec than Chenko was. That maintained the hierarchy in the proper order. The Zec was eighty, and Linsky himself was more than sixty. Chenko and Vladimir were both in their forties, important men for sure, but comparative youngsters. They didn’t have the history that the Zec and Linsky shared. Not even close.

“Tea?” the Zec asked in Russian.

“Please,” Linsky said.

“Chenko,” the Zec said. “Bring Grigor a glass of tea.”

Linsky smiled inside. Chenko being made to serve him tea was a statement of the greatest importance. And he noted that Chenko did it with no unwillingness. He just got up out of his slouch and went out to the kitchen and came back in with a glass of tea on a small silver tray. Chenko was a very small man, short, wiry, no bulk at all. He had coarse black hair that stuck up in all directions even though he kept it cropped short. Vladimir was different. Vladimir was very tall and heavy and blond. Unbelievably strong. It was entirely possible that Vladimir had German genes somewhere in his background. Perhaps his grandmother had picked them up back in 1941, like germs.

“We’ve been talking,” the Zec said.

“And?” Linsky said.

“We have to confront the fact that we made a mistake. Just one, but it could prove irksome.”

“The cone,” Linsky said.

“Obviously Barr isn’t on tape placing it,” the Zec said.

“Obviously.”

“But will it be a problem?”

“Your opinion?” Linsky asked politely.

“Significance is in the eye of the beholder,” the Zec said. “The detective Emerson and the DA Rodin won’t care about it. It’s a minor detail, one they won’t feel inclined to pursue. Why would they? They’re not looking to trip themselves up. And no case is ever a hundred percent perfect. They know that. So they’ll write it off as an inexplicable loose end. They might even convince themselves that Barr used a different vehicle.”

“But?”

“But it’s still a loose end. If the soldier tugs on it, something might unravel.”

“The evidence against Barr is indisputable.”

The Zec nodded. “That’s true.”

“So won’t that be enough for them?”

“Certainly it would have been. But it’s possible that Barr no longer exists. Not in the sense that he’s a legal entity accessible to their jurisprudence. He has permanent retrograde amnesia. It’s possible that Rodin won’t be able to put him on trial. If so, Rodin will be extremely frustrated about that. He’ll be expected to seek a consolation prize. And if the consolation prize were eventually to assume a higher profile than Barr himself, how could Rodin turn it down?”

Linsky sipped his tea. It was hot and sweet.

“All this from a videotape?” he said.

“It depends entirely on the soldier,” the Zec said. “It depends on his tenacity and his imagination.”

“He was a military cop,” Chenko said in English. “Did you know that?”

Linsky glanced at Chenko. Chenko rarely spoke English in the house. He had a perfect American accent, and sometimes Linsky thought he was ashamed of it.

“That doesn’t necessarily impress me,” Linsky said in Russian.

“Or me,” the Zec said. “But it’s a factor we must weigh in the balance.”

“Silencing him now would draw attention,” Linsky said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“It would depend on how it was done.”

“How many ways are there?”

“We could use the redheaded girl again,” the Zec said.

“She would be no use against the soldier. He’s a giant, and almost certainly extensively trained in self-defense.”

“But he already has an established issue with her. Several people know she tried to set him up for a beating. Perhaps she could be found severely injured. If she was, the soldier would be the obvious prime suspect. We could let the police department silence him for us.”

“She would know who attacked her,” Vladimir said. “She would know it wasn’t the soldier.”

The Zec nodded appreciatively. Linsky watched him. He was accustomed to the Zec’s methods. The Zec liked to tease solutions out of people, like Socrates of old.

“Then perhaps she should be left unable to tell anyone anything,” the Zec said.

“Dead?”

“We’ve always found that the safest way, haven’t we?”

“But it’s possible she has many enemies,” Vladimir said. “Not just him. Maybe she’s a big-time prick-teaser.”

“Then we should firm up the link. Possibly she should be found somewhere suggestive. Maybe he invited her out to renew their acquaintance.”

“In his hotel?”

“No, outside his hotel, I think. But close by. Where she can be discovered by someone other than the soldier himself. Someone who can call the police while the soldier is still asleep. That way he’s a sitting duck.”

“Why would her body be outside his hotel?”

“Evidently he hit her and she staggered away and collapsed before she got very far.”

“The Metropole Palace,” Linsky said. “That’s where he is.”

“When?” Chenko asked.

“Whenever you like,” the Zec said.

The Astros beat the Cardinals 10–7 after a limp defensive performance by both franchises. Plenty of cheap hits, plenty of errors. A bad way to win, and a worse way to lose. Reacher had stopped paying attention halfway through. He had started thinking about Eileen Hutton instead. She was part of his mosaic. He had seen her once in the States before the Gulf War, just briefly across a crowded courtroom, just long enough to register her head-turning quality, and he had assumed he would never see her again, which he figured was a pity. But then she had showed up in Saudi as part of the long, ponderous Desert Shield buildup. Reacher had been there pretty much from the start, as a recently demoted captain. The first stage of any clean-sheet foreign deployment always resembled gang warfare between the MPs and the troops they were sent out with, but after six weeks or so the situation usually settled down some, and Desert Shield wasn’t any different. After six weeks there was a structure in place, and in terms of military law enforcement, a structure demanded in-country personnel all the way up from jailers to judges, and Hutton had shown up as one of the prosecutors they shipped in. Reacher had assumed it was volunteer duty for her, which he was happy about, because that made it likely she was unmarried.

She was unmarried. First time their paths crossed, he checked her left hand and saw no ring. Then he checked her collar and saw a major’s oak leaves. That would make it a challenge, he figured, for a recently demoted captain. Then he checked her eyes and saw that the challenge would be worth it. Her eyes were blue and full of intelligence and mischief. And promise, he figured. And adventure. He had just turned thirty-one years old, and he was up for anything.

The desert heat helped. Most of the time the temperature was above a hundred and twenty degrees, and apart from regular gas-attack practices, standard on-post dress devolved down to shorts and sleeveless undershirts. And in Reacher’s experience the close proximity of hot and nearly naked men and women always led somewhere good. Better than serving out November in Minnesota, that was for damn sure.

The initial approach had promised to be tricky, given the disparity in rank. And when it came to it he fumbled it slightly, and was saved only because she was just as up for it as he was, and wasn’t afraid to let it show. After that it had been as smooth as silk, three long months. Good times. Then new orders had come through, like they always did eventually. He hadn’t even said goodbye to her. Didn’t get the chance. Never saw her again, either.

I’ll see her again tomorrow, he thought.

He stayed in the bar until ESPN started recycling the highlights it had already shown once. Then he settled up his tab and stepped out to the sidewalk, into the yellow glare of the streetlights. He decided he wouldn’t go back to the Metropole Palace. He decided it was time for a change. No real reason. Just his normal restless instinct. Keep moving. Never stay in one place too long. And the Metropole was a gloomy old pile. Unpleasant, even by his undemanding standards. He decided to try the motor court instead. The one he had seen on his way to the auto parts store. The one next to the barbershop. Any Style $7. Maybe he could get a haircut before Hutton blew into town.

Chenko left the Zec’s house at midnight. He took Vladimir with him. If the redhead was to be beaten to death, then Vladimir would have to do it. It had to look right, forensically. Chenko was too small to inflict the kind of battering that an enraged six-foot-five, two-hundred-fifty-pound ex-soldier might be provoked to. But Vladimir was a different matter. Vladimir might well be able to do the job with a single blow, which might be convincing on the postmortem slab. A refusal, an objection, a sexual taunt, a big man might lash out once in frustration, a little harder than he intended.

They were both familiar with the girl. They had met her before, because of her connection to Jeb Oliver. They had even all worked together once. They knew where she lived, which was in a rented garden apartment that nestled on a barren patch of land in the shadow of the state highway, where it first rose on its stilts, south and west of downtown. And they knew that she lived there alone.

Reacher walked a long aimless three-block circle before approaching the motor court. He kept his own footsteps light and listened hard for the gritty crunch of a shadow behind him. He heard nothing. Saw nothing. He was alone.

The motor court was practically an antique. At one time it must have been the latest thing and consequently fairly upmarket. But since then the relentless march of time and fashion had left it behind. It was well maintained but not updated. It was exactly the kind of place he liked.

He roused the clerk and paid cash for one night only. He used the name Don Heffner, who had played second base and hit .261 during the Yankees’ lean year of 1934. The clerk gave him a big brass key and pointed him down the row to room number eight. The room was faded and a little damp. The counterpane on the bed and the drapes at the window looked original. So did the bathroom. But everything worked and the door locked tight.

He took a short shower and folded his pants and his shirt very carefully and put them flat under the mattress. That was as close as he ever got to ironing. They would look OK in the morning. He would shave and shower very carefully and go to the barbershop after breakfast. He didn’t want to devalue whatever memories Hutton might have retained. Assuming she had retained any at all.

Chenko parked east of the highway and he and Vladimir walked under it and approached the girl’s apartment building from the back, unseen. They kept close to the wall and walked around to her door. Chenko told Vladimir to keep out of sight. Then he knocked gently. There was no response, which wasn’t entirely unexpected. It was late, and she was probably already in bed. So Chenko knocked again, a little louder. And again, as loud as he dared. He saw a light come on in a window. Heard the quiet shuffle of feet inside. Heard her voice through the crack where the door met the jamb.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

“It’s me,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“We need to talk.”

“I was asleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s awful late.”

“I know,” Chenko said. “But it’s very urgent.”

There was a pause.

“Wait a minute,” she said.

Chenko heard her shuffle back toward her bedroom. Then silence. Then she came back. The door opened. She was standing there, clutching a blue robe around her.

“What?” she said.

“You need to come with us,” Chenko said.

Vladimir stepped out of the shadow.

“Why is he here?” Sandy asked.

“He’s helping me tonight,” Chenko said.

“What do you want?”

“You need to go out.”

“Like this? I can’t.”

“I agree,” Chenko said. “You need to get dressed. Like for a date.”

“A date?”

“You need to look really good.”

“But I’ll have to shower. Do my hair.”

“We have time.”

“A date with who?”

“You just have to be seen. Like you were ready for a date.”

“At this time of night? The whole town is asleep.”

“Not the whole town. We’re awake, for instance.”

“How much do I get?”

“Two hundred,” Chenko said. “Because it’s so late.”

“How long will it take?”

“Just a minute. You just have to be seen walking somewhere.”

“I don’t know.”

“Two hundred for a minute’s work isn’t bad.”

“It isn’t a minute’s work. It’ll take me an hour to get ready.”

“Two-fifty, then,” Chenko said.

“OK,” Sandy said.

Chenko and Vladimir waited in her living room, listening through the thin walls, hearing the shower running, hearing the hair dryer, the held breaths as she put on her makeup, the elastic snap of undergarments, the whisper of fabric on skin. Chenko saw that Vladimir was restless and sweating. Not because of the task ahead. But because there was a woman in a state of undress in a nearby room. Vladimir was unreliable, in certain situations. Chenko was glad he was there to supervise. If he hadn’t been, the plan would have derailed for sure.

Sandy walked into the living room after an hour, looking, as the Americans would say, like a million dollars. She was wearing a filmy black blouse that was nearly transparent. Underneath it was a black bra that molded her breasts into twin mounds of implausible roundness. She had on tight black pants that ended just below the knee. Pedal pushers? Capri pants? Chenko wasn’t sure of the name. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes. With her pale skin and her red hair and her green eyes she looked like a picture in a magazine.

Pity, Chenko thought.

“My money?” Sandy asked.

“Afterward,” Chenko said. “When we bring you back.”

“Let me see it.”

“It’s in the car.”

“So let’s go look at it,” Sandy said.

They walked in single file. Chenko led the way. Sandy came next. Vladimir brought up the rear. They walked under the highway. The car was right there ahead of them. It was cold and misted-over. There was no money in it. None at all. Chenko knew that. So he stopped six feet short and turned around. Nodded to Vladimir.

“Now,” he said.

Vladimir reached forward with his right hand and put it on Sandy’s right shoulder from behind. He used it to turn her upper body sideways and then he crashed his left fist into her right temple, a little above and in front of her ear. It was a colossal blow. Explosive. Her head snapped violently sideways and around, and her legs gave way and she fell to the ground vertically like an empty suit of clothes slipping off a hanger.

Chenko squatted down next to her. Waited a moment for the body to settle and then felt the neck for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

“You broke her neck,” he said.

Vladimir nodded.

“It’s about placement,” he said. “The main vector is mostly sideways, obviously, but you try for a little rotation, too. So it’s not so much a break. It’s more like a wrenching action. Like a hangman’s noose.”

“Is your hand OK?”

“It will be tender tomorrow.”

“Good work.”

“I try my best.”

They unlocked the car and raised the rear armrest and laid the body across the back seat. There was just enough space, side to side. She had been a small girl. Not tall. Then they got in the front together and drove off. They looped well to the east and came up on the Metropole Palace from behind. They avoided the bay where the garbage was piled and found a side alley. They stopped outside a fire exit. Vladimir slid out and opened the rear door. Pulled the body out by the shoulders and left it where it fell. Then he got back in. Chenko drove on and paused after five yards and turned in his seat. The body was lying in a heap against the alley’s far wall. Directly opposite the fire door. It looked like a plausible scenario. She had fled the soldier’s room in shame and panic, chosen not to wait for the elevator, and run down the fire stairs and out into the night. Maybe she had stumbled at that point and aggravated an injury already done to her. Maybe she had tripped and fallen against the wall, and the shock had dislodged an already-wrenched vertebra.

Chenko turned back and faced front and drove on, not fast, not slow, not drawing attention, not standing out, eight miles north and west, all the way back to the Zec’s house.

CHAPTER 8

Reacher woke himself up at seven in the morning and went out to check for a tail and to look for a drugstore. He walked a zigzag half-mile and saw nobody behind him. He found a drugstore two blocks east of the motor court and bought black coffee in a cardboard cup, a pack of throwaway razors, a can of shaving foam, and a new tube of toothpaste. He carried his purchases back by a roundabout route and put his clothes back under the mattress and sat on the bed and drank the coffee. Then he showered and shaved, using his full twenty-two-minute routine. He washed his hair twice. Then he dressed again and went out for breakfast to the only place he could find, which was the drive-through he had seen the day before. It had a small counter inside. He had more coffee and an English muffin filled with a round piece of ham and something that might have once been egg, first dried and powdered and then reconstituted. His threshold of culinary acceptability was very low, but right then he felt he might be pushing at the bottom edge of his personal envelope.

He followed the muffin with a piece of lemon pie, for a sugar hit. It was better than the muffin, so he had a second piece, with a second cup of coffee. Then he walked south to the barbershop. He pulled the door and sat down in the chair at eight-thirty exactly.

By which time the homicide investigation outside the Metropole Palace was already three hours old. The body in the alley had been discovered at half-past five in the morning by a cleaner coming in to work. The cleaner was a middle-aged man from Honduras. He didn’t touch the body. Didn’t check for vital signs. The way it was lying there told him all he needed to know. The slack emptiness of death is recognizable anywhere. The guy just rushed inside and told the night porter. Then he went home again, because he had no green card and didn’t want to be around a police investigation. The night porter dialed 911 from the desk phone and then went out through the fire door to take a look. Came back inside thirty seconds later, not having enjoyed it.

Two patrol cars and an ambulance showed up within eight minutes. Paramedics confirmed the DOA and the ambulance went away. The patrolmen blocked off the alley and the fire exit and then took a statement from the night porter. He said he had stepped out for some air and discovered the body himself, to protect the illegal from Honduras. It was close to true. Certainly the patrolmen had no reason to doubt his word. They just stood back and waited for Emerson.

Emerson got there by six twenty-five. He brought his number two, a woman called Donna Bianca, and the city ME, and Bellantonio himself to run the crime scene. Technical work occupied the first thirty minutes. Measurement, photography, the accumulation of trace evidence. Then Emerson got the OK and stepped close to the body and ran into his first major problem. The girl had no purse and no ID. Nobody had the slightest idea who she was.

Ann Yanni showed up behind the Metropole at seven-fifteen. She had an NBC crew with her, consisting of a cameraman and a sound guy with a microphone on a long boom. The microphone had a gray fur wind sock on it and the boom was ten feet long. The guy put his hips against the police tape and extended his arms as far as he could and heard Emerson’s voice in his headphones. Emerson was talking to Bianca about prostitution.

The ME had checked the girl’s arms and thighs and between her toes and found no needle tracks. So she hadn’t been there to score. So maybe she was hooking. Who else would come out the side door of a downtown hotel in the middle of the night, dressed like that? She was young and she still had her looks. Therefore she wouldn’t have been cheap. Therefore she would have been carrying a big purse full of twenties that had just come out of some businessman’s ATM. She had run into somebody waiting for her. Either somebody waiting for her specifically, or somebody waiting on the off chance for someone like her. Whoever, he had snatched her purse and hit her in the head, a little harder than necessary.

A nineteen- or twenty-year-old who wasn’t an addict wouldn’t necessarily have been fingerprinted, unless she had a vice conviction somewhere. Emerson wasn’t willing to count on that, therefore he didn’t expect to discover her identity through the databases. He expected to discover it inside the hotel, either from the night porter who had pimped her in and out, or through the john who had called her.

“Nobody leaves,” he said to Bianca. “We’ll talk to all the guests and all the staff one by one. So find a room somewhere. And tell all units to be on the lookout for a guy with more new twenties than he should have.”

“A big guy,” Bianca said.

Emerson nodded. “A real big guy. That was some punch.”

The ME took the body away to the morgue and Donna Bianca commandeered the hotel bar and the interviews were two-thirds through by eight-thirty in the morning.

The barber was a competent old guy who had probably been cutting the same style for close to fifty years. He went for what the military would have called a whitewall. He left an inch and a half on the top and used his clippers to shave the bottom and the sides up toward it. Then he flipped the clippers over and squared off the sideburns and cleaned the fuzz off the neck. It was a style Reacher was familiar with. He had worn it most of his life, except for periods when he had been too lazy to care, and a couple of six-month stretches when he had favored an all-over number-one buzz cut.

The barber did the thing with the hand mirror, to show Reacher the back.

“Happy?” he asked.

Reacher nodded. It looked OK, except that there was a half-inch margin all around where his skin was dead white. He had had longer hair in Miami and the tan hadn’t penetrated. The barber brushed the clippings off his collar and removed the towel. Reacher gave him his seven bucks and tipped him a dollar. Then he walked around the block. Nobody followed him. He unlocked his room and washed his face and shaved under his sideburns again. There was a new half-inch of stubble there. The barber’s clippers had been a little blunt.

The Metropole interviews were finished by nine-twenty and they gave Emerson absolutely nothing at all. The night porter swore blind that he knew nothing about the girl. There were only eleven guests and none of them was promising. Emerson was an experienced and talented detective and he knew that people sometimes tell the truth. And he knew that accepting the truth was as important a part of a detective’s professional arsenal as rejecting lies. So he conferred with Donna Bianca and together they concluded they had just wasted the best part of three hours on a faulty hunch.

Then a guy named Gary called, from the auto parts store.

Gary had gotten to work at eight and had found himself really short-staffed. There was still no sign of Jeb Oliver and Sandy hadn’t shown, either. At first he had been annoyed. He had called her apartment and gotten no reply. On her way, he had assumed. Late. But she never showed. Thereafter he called every thirty minutes. By nine-thirty the annoyance had given way to worry and he started thinking about auto wrecks. So he called the cops for information. The desk guy told him there had been no traffic accidents that morning. Then there was a pregnant pause and the desk guy seemed to consider another possibility and asked for a name and a description. Gary said Alexandra Dupree, known as Sandy, nineteen years old, white, petite, green and red. Ten seconds after that Gary was speaking to a detective called Emerson on a cell phone.

Gary agreed to close the store for the day and Emerson sent a patrol car to pick him up. First stop was the morgue. Gary identified the body and was white and badly shaken when he arrived in Emerson’s office. Donna Bianca calmed him down and Emerson watched him carefully. Statistics show that women get killed by husbands, boyfriends, brothers, employers, and workmates—in descending order of likelihood—well before passing strangers show up on the list of possible suspects. And sometimes a boyfriend and a workmate can be the same guy. But Emerson knew that Gary was in the clear. He was too shaken. No way could a person fake that kind of sudden shock and surprise over something he had already known about for eight or ten hours.

So Emerson started in, gently, with all the usual cop questions. Last time you saw her? Know anything about her private life? Family? Boyfriends? Ex-boyfriends? Weird phone calls? Did she have any enemies? Problems? Money troubles?

And then, inevitably: Anything unusual over the last couple of days?

And so by ten-fifteen Emerson knew all about the stranger that had come to the store the day before. Very tall, heavily built, tan, aggressive, demanding, wearing olive-green pants and an olive-green flannel shirt. He had spent two mysterious sessions with Sandy in the back office, and had borrowed her car, and had demanded Jeb Oliver’s address with menace, and Jeb Oliver was missing, too.

Emerson left Gary with Donna Bianca and went out to the corridor and used his cell to call Alex Rodin in his office.

“Your lucky day,” he said. “We’ve got a nineteen-year-old female homicide victim. Someone broke her neck.”

“How does that make me lucky?”

“Her last unexplained contact was yesterday, at her place of work, with a guy that sounds a whole lot like our pal Jack Reacher.”

“Really?”

“We got a pretty good description from her boss. And her neck was busted by a single blow to the side of the head, which ain’t easy unless you’re built like Reacher is.”

“Who was the girl?”

“A redhead from the auto parts store out toward the highway. There’s also a boy missing from the same store.”

“Where did this thing happen?”

“Outside the Metropole Palace Hotel.”

“Is that where Reacher is staying?”

“Not according to the register.”

“So is he a suspect or not?”

“Right now he looks pretty damn good for it.”

“So when are you going to bring him in?”

“As soon as I find him.”

“I’ll call Helen,” Alex Rodin said. “She’ll know where he is.”

Rodin lied to his daughter. He told her that Bellantonio needed to see Reacher to correct a possible misunderstanding about part of the prosecution’s evidence.

“What part?” Helen asked.

“Just something they discussed. Probably nothing important, but I’m playing this very cautiously. Don’t want to hand you grounds for an appeal.”

The traffic cone, Helen thought.

“He’s on his way to the airport,” she said.

“Why?”

“To say hello to Eileen Hutton.”

“They know each other?”

“Apparently.”

“That’s unethical.”

“To know each other?”

“To influence her testimony.”

“I’m sure he won’t do that.”

“When will he be back?”

“After lunch, I think.”

“OK,” Rodin said. “It’ll keep.”

But it didn’t keep, of course. Emerson left for the airport immediately. He had met Reacher twice face-to-face and could pick him out of a crowd. Donna Bianca went with him. They went in together through a restricted area and found a security office that looked out over the whole arrivals hall through one-way glass. They scanned the waiting faces carefully. No sign of Reacher. Not here yet. So they settled down to wait.

CHAPTER 9

Reacher didn’t go to the airport. He knew better. Senior military personnel spend a lot of time flying small aircraft, either fixed wing or rotary, and they don’t like it. Outside of combat, more military personnel die in plane crashes than from any other single cause. Therefore, given a choice, a smart Brigadier General like Eileen Hutton wouldn’t ride a puddle jumper down from Indianapolis. She would be happy enough with a big jet out of Washington National, but she wouldn’t contemplate a twin-prop for the final leg of her journey. No way. She would rent a car instead.

So Reacher walked south and east to the library. Asked the subdued woman at the desk where the Yellow Pages were stored. He went where she pointed and hauled the book out onto a table. Opened it to H for Hotels. Started looking. Almost certainly some JAG Corps office grunt had done the equivalent thing the previous day, but remotely, probably online. Hutton would have told him to book her a room. He would have been anxious to please, so he would have turned first to the street map and found the courthouse and the road in from the north. Then he would have chosen a decent place convenient for both. Somewhere with parking, for the rental car. Probably a chain, with an established government rate accessible by a code number.

The Marriott Suites, Reacher thought. That’s where she’ll be headed. Off the highway, south toward town, an obvious left turn east, and there it was, three blocks north of the courthouse, an easy walk, breakfast included. The office grunt had probably printed out driving directions from the internet and clipped them to her itinerary. Anxious to please. Hutton had that effect on people.

He memorized the Marriott’s number and put the book away. Then he walked out to the lobby and dialed the pay phone.

“I want to confirm a reservation,” he said.

“Name?”

“Hutton.”

“Yes, we’ve got that. Tonight only, a suite.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said, and put the phone down.

She would take an early flight out of D.C. After two decades in uniform she would be up at five, in a cab at six, boarding at seven. She would be in Indianapolis by nine, latest. Out of the Hertz lot by nine-thirty. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive. She would arrive at noon. In about an hour.

He stepped out of the lobby and looped through the plaza and headed north and east through a thin crowd of people, past the far side of the recruiting office, past the back of the courthouse. He found the Marriott easily enough and took a corner table in its coffee shop and settled down to wait.

Helen Rodin called Rosemary Barr at work. She wasn’t there. The receptionist sounded a little embarrassed about it. So Helen tried Rosemary’s home number, and got her after the second ring.

“Did they let you go?” she asked.

“Unpaid leave,” Rosemary said. “I volunteered for it. Everyone was acting awkward around me.”

“That’s awful.”

“It’s human nature. I need to make a plan. I might have to move.”

“I need a list of your brother’s friends,” Helen said.

“He doesn’t have any. The true test of friendship is adversity, isn’t it? And nobody’s visited him. Nobody’s even tried. Nobody’s called me to ask how he is.”

“I meant before,” Helen said. “I need to know who he saw, who he hung out with, who knew him well. Especially anyone new.”

“There wasn’t anyone new,” Rosemary said. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“What about old?”

“Have you got a big piece of paper?”

“I’ve got a whole yellow pad.”

“Well, you aren’t going to need it. A matchbook cover would do it. James is a very self-sufficient person.”

“He must have buddies.”

“A couple, I guess,” Rosemary said. “There’s a guy called Mike from the neighborhood. They talk about lawns and baseball, you know, guy stuff.”

Mike, Helen wrote. Guy stuff. “Anyone else?”

There was a long pause.

“Someone called Charlie,” Rosemary said.

“Tell me about Charlie,” Helen said.

“I don’t know much about him. I never really met him.”

“How long has James known him?”

“Years.”

“Including the time you lived there?”

“He never came around when I was in. I only ever saw him once. He was leaving as I was coming in. I said, Who was that? James said, That was Charlie, like he was an old pal.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s small. He’s got weird hair. Like a black toilet brush.”

“Is he local?”

“I guess so.”

“What was their point of contact?”

Another long pause.

“Guns,” Rosemary said. “They shared an interest.”

Charlie, Helen wrote. Guns.

Donna Bianca spent some time on her cell phone and mapped out the flight schedules between D.C. and Indianapolis. She knew the onward connecting flights left on the hour and took thirty-five minutes. She figured a person with a courthouse appointment at four o’clock wouldn’t aim to arrive on anything later than the two thirty-five. Which meant leaving Indianapolis at two, which meant getting in there at about one-thirty, latest, to allow for the walk between gates. Which meant leaving Washington National at eleven-thirty or twelve, latest. Which wasn’t possible. The last direct flight from National to Indianapolis was at nine-thirty. There was a morning cluster and an evening cluster. Nothing in between.

“She’ll come in on the twelve thirty-five,” she said.

Emerson checked his watch. Quarter to twelve.

“Which means Reacher will be here soon,” he said.

At ten to twelve a courier arrived at Helen Rodin’s building with six large cardboard cartons containing the defense’s copies of the prosecution’s evidence. The discovery process, mandated by the rules of due process. By the Bill of Rights, as interpreted. The courier called from the lobby and Helen told him to come on up. He had to make two trips with his handcart. He stacked the boxes in the empty secretarial pen. Helen signed for them and he left. Then she opened them. There was a mass of paperwork and dozens of photographs. And eleven new VHS cassettes. They had labels with numbers neatly printed on them that referred to a notarized sheet that described them as faithful and complete copies of the parking garage’s security tapes, made by an independent third-party contractor. Helen took them all out and stacked them separately. She would have to take them home and use her own VCR to look at them. She didn’t have a VCR in the office. Or a television set.

There was a television set in the Marriott’s coffee shop. It was mounted high in the corner, on a black articulated bracket bolted to the wall. The sound was off. Reacher watched an advertisement that featured a young woman in a filmy summer dress romping through a field of wildflowers. He wasn’t sure what product was being advertised. The dress, maybe, or makeup, or shampoo, or allergy medicine. Then a news banner popped up. Noon Report. Reacher checked his watch. Twelve exactly. He glanced toward the reception desk in the lobby. He had a clear view. No sign of Hutton. Not yet. So he glanced back at the television. Ann Yanni was on. She seemed to be live on location, downtown, out on the street. In front of the Metropole Palace Hotel. She talked silently but earnestly for a moment and then the picture cut to tape of dawn twilight. An alley. Police barriers. A shapeless form under a white sheet. Then the picture cut again. To a driver’s license photograph. Pale skin. Green eyes. Red hair. Just under the chin a caption was superimposed: Alexandra Dupree.

Alexandra. Sandy.

Now they’ve gone too far, Reacher thought.

He shivered.

Way too far.

He stared at the screen. Sandy’s face was still there. Then the picture cut again, back to tape of the early hours, to a head-and-shoulders shot of Emerson. A recorded interview. Yanni had her microphone shoved up under Emerson’s nose. He was talking. Yanni pulled the microphone back and asked a question. Emerson talked some more. His eyes were flat and empty and tired and hooded against the bright light on the camera. Even without the sound Reacher knew what he was saying. He was promising a full and complete investigation. We’ll get this guy, he was saying.

“I saw you from the desk,” a voice said.

Then it said, “And I thought to myself, don’t I know that guy?”

Reacher looked away from the TV.

Eileen Hutton was standing right there in front of him.

Her hair was shorter. She had no tan. There were fine lines around her eyes. But otherwise she looked just the same as she had fourteen years ago. And just as good. Medium height, slim, poised. Groomed. Fragrant. Feminine as hell. She hadn’t put on a pound. She was wearing civvies. Khaki chino pants, a white T, a blue oxford shirt open over it. Penny loafers, no socks, no makeup, no jewelry.

No wedding band.

“Remember me?” she said.

Reacher nodded.

“Hello, Hutton,” he said. “I remember you. Of course I do. And it’s good to see you again.”

She had a purse and a key card in her hand. A rolling carry-on with a long handle at her feet.

“It’s good to see you again, too,” she said. “But please tell me it’s a coincidence that you’re here. Please tell me that.”

Feminine as hell, except she was still a woman in a man’s world, and you could still see the steel if you knew where to look. Which was into her eyes. They ran like a stock ticker, warm, warm, welcome, welcome, with a periodic bright flash: Mess with me and I’ll rip your lungs out.

“Sit down,” Reacher said. “Let’s have lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“It’s what people do at lunch time.”

“You were expecting me. You’ve been waiting for me.”

Reacher nodded. Glanced back up at the TV set. Sandy’s driver’s license picture was on the screen again. Hutton followed his gaze.

“Is that the dead girl?” she asked. “I heard it on the radio, driving down. Sounds like a person should get combat pay, coming here.”

“What did the radio say? There’s no sound in here.”

“Homicide. Late last night. Local girl got her neck broken. A single blow to the right temple. In an alley outside a hotel. Not this one, I hope.”

“No,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t this one.”

“Brutal.”

“I guess it was.”

Eileen Hutton sat down at the table. Not across from him. In the chair next to him. Just like Sandy, at the sports bar.

“You look great,” he said. “You really do.”

She said nothing.

“It’s good to see you,” he said again.

“Likewise,” she said.

“No, I mean it.”

“I mean it, too. Believe me, if we were at some Beltway cocktail party I would be getting all misty and nostalgic with the best of them. I might still, as soon as I find out you’re not here for the reason I think you’re here.”

“What reason would that be?”

“To keep your promise.”

“You remember that?”

“Of course I do. You talked about it all one night.”

“And you’re here because the Department of the Army got a subpoena.”

Hutton nodded. “From some idiot prosecutor.”

“Rodin,” Reacher said.

“That’s the guy.”

“My fault,” Reacher said.

“Christ,” Hutton said. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Reacher said. “I didn’t tell him anything. But he told me something. He told me my name was on the defense’s witness list.”

“The defense list?”

Reacher nodded. “That surprised me, obviously. So I was confused. So I asked him if my name had come from some old Pentagon file.”

“Not in this lifetime,” Hutton said.

“As I found out,” Reacher said. “But still, I had said the magic words. I had mentioned the Pentagon. The type of guy he is, I knew he would go fishing. He’s very insecure. He likes his cases armor-plated. So I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I get to spend two days in the back of beyond and I get to perjure myself from here to breakfast time.”

“You don’t need to do that. You can claim national security.”

Hutton shook her head. “We talked about it, long and hard. We decided to stay away from anything that draws attention. That Palestinian thing was very thin. If that unravels, everything unravels. So I’m here to swear blind that James Barr was GI Joe.”

“You OK with that?”

“You know the army. None of us is a virgin anymore. It’s about the mission, and the mission is to keep a lid on the KC thing.”

“Why did they delegate you?”

“Two birds with one stone. No good to them to send someone else and still have me out there knowing the truth. This way, I can’t talk about it ever again, anywhere. Not without effectively confessing to perjury one time in Indiana. They’re not dumb.”

“I’m surprised they still care. It’s practically ancient history.”

“How long have you been out?”

“Seven years.”

“And clearly you don’t have a subscription to the Army Times.”

“What?”

“Or maybe you never knew.”

“Never knew what?”

“Where it went back then, up the chain of command.”

“Division, I supposed. But maybe not all the way to the top.”

“It stopped on a certain colonel’s desk. He was the one who nixed it.”

“And?”

“His name was Petersen.”

“And?”

“Colonel Petersen is now Lieutenant General Petersen. Three stars. Congressional liaison. About to get his fourth star. About to be named Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.”

That could complicate things, Reacher thought.

“Embarrassing,” he said.

“You bet your ass embarrassing,” Hutton said. “So believe me, this is one lid that is going to stay on. You need to bear that in mind. Whatever you want to do about your promise, you can’t talk about what happened. Any more than I can. They would find a way to get to you.”

“Neither of us needs to talk about it. It’s a done deal.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

“I think.”

“You think?”

“Ask me how they really got my name.”

“How did they really get your name?”

“From James Barr himself.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t believe it, either. But I do now.”

“Why?”

“We should have lunch. We really need to talk. Because I think there’s someone else out there who knows.”

Emerson and Bianca called it quits at twelve-fifty. Reacher never showed. The feeder flight came in on time. Nobody that could have been a female Brigadier General from the Pentagon got off. The two cops waited until the arrivals hall emptied out and went quiet. Then they got in their car and drove back to town.

Reacher and Hutton had lunch. A waitress came over, happy to get some business out of her corner table at last. The menu was coffee-shop-basic. Reacher ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee. Hutton went with chicken Caesar and tea. They ate and talked. Reacher ran through the details of the case. Then he ran through his theory. The perverse choice of location, the presumed coercion. He told Hutton about Niebuhr’s theory of the new and persuasive friend. Told her that Barr claimed he had no new friends, and very few old ones.

“Can’t be a new friend anyway,” Hutton said. “Because this is a multilayered setup. There’s the contemporaneous evidence, and the historical parallels. Second story of a parking garage fourteen years ago in KC, second story of a parking garage here and now. Virtually the same rifle. Boat tail sniper ammunition. And the desert boots. I never saw them before Desert Shield. They’re suggestive. Whoever scripted this for him knew all about his past. Which means it isn’t a new friend. It can’t be. It would take years and years before Barr would feel like sharing anything about KC.”

Reacher nodded. “But obviously he did, eventually. Which is why I said there’s someone else out there who knows.”

“We need to find that person,” Hutton said. “The mission is to keep the lid on this thing.”

“Not my mission. I don’t care if this Petersen guy gets his fourth star.”

“But you do care that a quarter million veterans don’t get their reputations trashed. The scandal would taint all of them. And they were good people.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s easy enough,” Hutton said. “If James Barr doesn’t have many friends, you don’t have a very big pool to search through. One of them has to be the guy.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Two birds with one stone,” Hutton said. “You get to the puppet master and the army gets to relax.”

“So why doesn’t the army do it for me?”

“We can’t afford to draw attention.”

“I’ve got operational problems,” Reacher said.

“No jurisdiction?”

“Worse than that. I’m about to get arrested.”

“For what?”

“For killing that girl behind the hotel.”

“What?”

“The puppet master doesn’t like me being here. He already tried something on Monday night, with that same girl as bait. So I went to see her yesterday, twice. And now they killed her and I’m sure I’m her last unexplained contact.”

“Have you got an alibi?”

“Depends on the exact timing, but probably not. I’m sure the cops are already looking for me.”

“Problem,” Hutton said.

“Only temporary,” Reacher said. “Science is on my side. If her neck was broken by a single blow to her right temple, then her head rotated a little, counterclockwise, which means the punch was thrown by a left-hander. And I’m right-handed. If I had hit her in the right temple I would have knocked her out for sure, but I wouldn’t have broken her neck. I would have had to do that separately, afterward.”

“You sure?”

Reacher nodded. “I used to do this stuff for a living, remember.”

“But will they believe you? Or will they figure you’re big enough to have done it with your weak hand?”

“I’m not going to risk finding out.”

“You’re going to run?”

“No, I’m going to stick around. But I’m going to have to stay out of their way. Which will slow me down some. A lot, in fact. Which is why I said I’ve got operational problems.”

“Can I help?”

Reacher smiled.

“It’s good to see you, Hutton,” he said. “It really is.”

“How can I help?”

“My guess is there’ll be a cop called Emerson waiting for you after you’re done with your deposition. He’ll ask you about me. Just play dumb. Just say I never showed up, you didn’t see me, you don’t know where I am, all that kind of stuff.”

She was quiet for a spell.

“You’re upset,” she said. “I can tell.”

He nodded. Rubbed his face, like he was washing without water.

“I don’t care much about James Barr,” he said. “If someone wanted to set him up so he took the punishment he should have taken fourteen years ago, that was OK with me. But this thing with the girl is different. It’s way out of line. She was just a sweet dumb kid. She meant no harm.”

Hutton was quiet for a moment longer.

“Are you sure about the threat to Barr’s sister?” she asked.

“I don’t see any other leverage.”

“But there’s no sign of a threat. As a prosecutor I couldn’t see entering it as a separate charge.”

“Why else would Barr have done what he did?”

Hutton didn’t answer.

“Will I see you later?” she asked.

“I’ve got a room not far away,” he said. “I’ll be around.”

“OK,” she said.

“Unless I’m already in jail.”

The waitress came back and they ordered dessert. Reacher asked for more coffee and Hutton got more tea. They kept on talking. Random subjects, random questions. They had fourteen years to catch up on.

Helen Rodin searched through the six cartons of evidence and found a crisp photocopy of a sheet of paper that had been found next to James Barr’s telephone. It was as close as he had gotten to a personal phone book. It had three numbers on it, written in neat and careful handwriting. Two were for his sister Rosemary, one at her condo and the other at work. The third number was for Mike. The neighborhood guy. Nothing for anyone called Charlie.

Helen dialed Mike’s number. It rang six times and cut to an answering machine. She left her office number and asked for a return call on a matter of great importance.

Emerson spent an hour with a sketch artist and came up with a pretty good likeness of Jack Reacher’s face. The drawing was then scanned into a computer and colorized. Dirty-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, medium-to-dark tan. Emerson then typed the name, and estimated the height at six-five, the weight at two-fifty, the age between thirty-five and forty-five. He put the police department’s phone number on the bottom line. Then he e-mailed it all over the place and set the printer to churn out two hundred color copies. He told every prowl car driver to take a sheaf and give one to every hotel clerk and barman in town. Then he added: every restaurant, diner, lunch counter, and sandwich shop, too.

James Barr’s friend Mike called Helen Rodin back at three o’clock in the afternoon. She asked for his address and got him to agree to a face-to-face interview. He said he was home for the rest of the day. So she called a cab and headed out. Mike lived on James Barr’s street, twenty minutes from downtown. Barr’s house was visible from Mike’s front yard. Both houses were similar. All the houses on the street were similar. They were 1950s ranches, long and low. Helen guessed they had all started out identical. But a half-century’s worth of adding on and reroofing and re-siding and ongoing landscaping had made them diverge in appearance. Some looked upmarket and some still looked basic. Barr’s place looked worn. Mike’s place looked manicured.

Mike himself was a tired fifty-something who worked the morning shift at a paint wholesaler. His wife arrived home while Helen was still introducing herself. She was also a tired fifty-something. Her name was Tammy, which didn’t suit her. She was a part-time dental nurse. She worked two mornings a week for a downtown dentist. She ushered Helen and Mike into the living room and then went away to make coffee. Helen and Mike sat down and started out with an awkward initial silence that lasted minutes.

“So, what can I tell you?” Mike asked eventually.

“You were Mr. Barr’s friend,” Helen said.

Mike glanced at the living room door. It was open.

“Just a neighbor,” he said.

“His sister called you a friend.”

“We were neighborly. Some folks might call that friendly.”

“Did you spend time together?”

“We would chat a little if he walked by with his dog.”

“About what kind of thing?”

“Our yards,” Mike said. “If he was decorating he would ask me about paint. I asked him who fixed his driveway. Things like that.”

“Baseball?”

Mike nodded. “We would talk about that.”

Tammy came in with three cups of coffee on a tray. There was cream and sugar and a small plate of cookies with them, and three paper napkins. She put the tray on a low table and sat down next to her husband.

“Help yourself,” she said.

“Thank you,” Helen said. “Thank you very much.”

They all served themselves and there was silence in the room.

“Were you ever in Mr. Barr’s house?” Helen asked.

Mike glanced at his wife.

“Once or twice,” he said.

“They weren’t friends,” Tammy said.

“Was it a surprise?” Helen asked. “That he did what he did?”

“Yes,” Tammy said. “It was.”

“So you don’t need to feel bad about mixing with him before. It wasn’t something that anyone could have predicted. These things are always a surprise. Neighbors never know.”

“You’re trying to get him off.”

“Actually I’m not,” Helen said. “But there’s a new theory that he didn’t act alone. I’m just trying to make sure that the other man gets punished, too.”

“It wasn’t Mike,” Tammy said.

“I don’t think it was,” Helen said. “Really. Not for a moment. Not now that I’ve met him. But whoever the other man is, you or Mike might know him or have heard about him or even seen him coming and going.”

“Barr didn’t really have friends,” Mike said.

“Nobody?”

“Not that he spoke about to me. He lived with his sister until she moved out. I guess that was enough for him.”

“Does the name Charlie mean anything to you?”

Mike just shook his head.

“What did Mr. Barr do when he had a job?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “He hasn’t worked for years.”

“I’ve seen a man over there,” Tammy said.

“When?”

“Now and then. Occasionally. He comes and goes. All times of the day and night, like a friend would.”

“For how long?”

“Ever since we moved here. I spend more time at home than Mike does. So I notice more.”

“When was the last time you saw this man?”

“Last week, I think. A couple of times.”

“Friday?”

“No, earlier. Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s small. He’s got funny hair. Black, like hog bristles.”

Charlie, Helen thought.

Eileen Hutton walked three fast blocks south from the Marriott and arrived at the courthouse at one minute to four exactly. Alex Rodin’s secretary came down to escort her up to the third floor. Depositions were taken in a large conference room because most witnesses brought their own lawyers and court reporters with them. But Hutton was on her own. She sat down alone on one long side of a large table and smiled as a microphone was placed in front of her and a video camera was focused on her face. Then Rodin came in and introduced himself. He brought a small team with him. An assistant, his secretary, a court reporter with her machine.

“Would you state your full name and title for the record?” he asked.

Hutton looked at the camera.

“Eileen Ann Hutton,” she said. “Brigadier General, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, United States Army.”

“I hope this won’t take long,” Rodin said.

“It won’t,” Hutton said.

And it didn’t. Rodin was trawling in a sea he hadn’t charted. He was like a man in a darkened room. All he could do was dart around randomly and hope he bumped into something. After six questions he realized he was never going to.

He asked, “How would you characterize James Barr’s military service?”

“Exemplary without being exceptional,” Hutton said.

He asked, “Was he ever in trouble?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Hutton said.

He asked, “Did he ever commit a crime?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Hutton said.

He asked, “Are you aware of recent events in this city?”

“Yes, I am,” Hutton said.

He asked, “Is there anything in James Barr’s past that might shed light on the likelihood or otherwise of his having been involved in those events?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Hutton said.

Finally he asked, “Is there any reason why the Pentagon might be more aware of James Barr than any other veteran?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Hutton said.

So at that point Alex Rodin gave up.

“OK,” he said. “Thank you, General Hutton.”

Helen Rodin walked thirty yards and stood on the street for a moment outside James Barr’s house. It had police tape across the entryway and a plywood sheet nailed over the broken front door. It looked forlorn and empty. There was nothing to see. So she used her cell phone to call a cab and had it take her to the county hospital. It was after four o’clock in the afternoon when she arrived and the sun was in the west. It lit up the white concrete building with pale shades of orange and pink.

She rode up to the sixth floor and signed in with the Board of Corrections and found the tired thirty-year-old doctor and asked him about James Barr’s condition. The doctor didn’t really answer. He wasn’t very interested in James Barr’s condition. That was clear. So Helen just walked past him and opened Barr’s door.

Barr was awake. He was still handcuffed to the cot. His head was still clamped. His eyes were open and he was staring at the ceiling. His breathing was low and slow and the heart monitor was beeping less than once a second. His arms were trembling slightly and his handcuffs were rattling against the bed frame. Quiet, dull, metallic sounds.

“Who’s there?” he said.

Helen stepped close and leaned into his field of view.

“Are they looking after you?” she asked.

“I have no complaints,” he said.

“Tell me about your friend Charlie.”

“Is he here?”

“No, he’s not here.”

“Did Mike come?”

“I don’t think they allow visitors. Just lawyers and family.”

Barr said nothing.

“Are those your only friends?” Helen said. “Mike and Charlie?”

“I guess,” Barr said. “And Mike’s more of a neighbor.”

“What about Jeb Oliver?”

“Who?”

“He works at the auto parts store.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Are you sure?”

Barr’s eyes moved and his lips pursed, like a man searching his memory, trying to be helpful, desperate for approval.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never heard of him.”

“Do you use drugs?”

“No,” Barr said. “Never. I wouldn’t do that.” He was quiet for a beat. “Truth is I don’t really do much of anything. I just live. That’s why this whole thing makes no sense to me. I spent fourteen years in the world. Why would I throw it all away now?”

“Tell me about Charlie,” Helen said.

“We hang out,” Barr said. “We do stuff.”

“With guns?”

“A little bit.”

“Where does Charlie live?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long have you been friends?”

“Five years. Maybe six.”

“And you don’t know where he lives?”

“He never told me.”

“He’s been to your place.”

“So?”

“You never went to his place?”

“He came to mine instead.”

“Do you have his phone number?”

“He just shows up, here and there, now and then.”

“Are you close?”

“Close enough.”

“How close exactly?”

“We get along.”

“Well enough to tell him what happened fourteen years ago?”

Barr didn’t answer. Just closed his eyes.

“Did you tell him?”

Barr said nothing.

“I think you told him,” Helen said.

Barr didn’t confirm or deny it.

“I’m surprised that a man doesn’t know where his friend lives. Especially a friend as close as I think Charlie is.”

“I didn’t push it,” Barr said. “I was lucky to have a friend at all. I didn’t want to ruin it with questions.”

Eileen Hutton got up from Alex Rodin’s deposition table and shook hands all around. Then she stepped out to the corridor and came face-to-face with a guy she assumed was the cop called Emerson. The one Reacher had warned her about. He confirmed it by handing her a card with his name on it.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“About what?” she asked back.

“About Jack Reacher,” Emerson said.

“What about him?”

“You know him, am I right?”

“I knew him fourteen years ago.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Fourteen years ago,” she said. “We were in Kuwait together. Then he shipped out somewhere. Or I did. I can’t remember.”

“You didn’t see him today?”

“He’s in Indiana?”

“He’s in town. Right here, right now.”

“Small world.”

“How did you get here?”

“I flew into Indianapolis and rented a car.”

“Staying overnight?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Where?”

“The Marriott.”

“Reacher killed a girl last night.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s our only suspect.”

“That would be very unlike him.”

“Call me if you see him. The station house number is on my card. And my direct extension. And my cell phone.”

“Why would I see him?”

“Like you said, it’s a small world.”

A police black-and-white crawled north through the building rush hour traffic. Past the gun store. Past the barbershop. Any Style $7. Then it eased right and turned into the motor court. The cop in the passenger seat got out and walked to the office. Gave the clerk a flyer. Laid it flat on the counter and swiveled it around and slid it across.

“Call us if this guy shows up, OK?” the cop said.

“He’s already here,” the clerk said. “But his name’s Heffner, not Reacher. I put him in room eight, last night.”

The cop stood still. “Is he in there now?”

“I don’t know. He’s come and gone a few times.”

“How long did he book for?”

“He paid one night. But he didn’t give the key back yet.”

“So he’s planning to be here again tonight.”

“I guess.”

“Unless he’s already here.”

“Unless,” the clerk said.

The cop stepped back to the office door. Signaled his partner. His partner shut the motor down and locked the car and walked over.

“Room eight, false name,” the first cop said.

“In there now?” his partner asked.

“We don’t know.”

“So let’s find out.”

They took the clerk with them. They made him stand well back. They drew their weapons and knocked on room eight’s door.

No response.

They knocked again.

No response.

“Got a master key?” the first cop asked.

The clerk handed him a key. The cop put it in the lock gently, one-handed. Turned it slowly. Opened the door a half inch and paused and then smashed it all the way open and stepped inside. His partner stepped in right behind him. Their guns traced left and right and up and down, fast and random and tense.

The room was empty.

Nothing in there at all, except a forlorn little sequence of bathroom items lined up on a shelf above the sink. A new pack of throwaway razors, open, one used. A new can of shaving foam, with dried bubbles around the nozzle. A new tube of toothpaste, twice squeezed.

“This guy travels light,” the first cop said.

“But he hasn’t checked out,” his partner said. “That’s for sure. Which means he’s coming back.”

CHAPTER 10

Reacher was falling asleep on the bed in room 310 at the Marriott Suites. He was on his back, like a dead man. He and Hutton had talked so long in the coffee shop that she had almost been late for her appointment. She had checked her watch at five to four and had thrust her key card at him and asked him to dump her bag in her room. Then she had run straight out to the street. He guessed he was supposed to leave her card at the desk afterward. But he didn’t. He didn’t have anywhere he needed to be. Not right then. So he just parked the bag and stayed inside.

He wasn’t crazy about room 310, all things considered. It was on the third floor, which made the window a difficult escape route. Room eight at the motor court had been better. Much better. Ground floor, a tangled old neighborhood, it gave a guy a sporting chance. Open the window, step out, look for an alley, or a door, or another window. That was good. This was bad. He was three floors up. A long climb. And he wasn’t even sure if the Marriott’s windows opened at all. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the main office lawyers had been worried about liability. Maybe they had foreseen a steady deluge of infants raining down on the parking lot blacktop. Or maybe it was a question of economies of scale. Maybe the cost of hinges and handles outweighed a little extra on the air-conditioning bill. Whatever, it wasn’t a great room to be in. Not by any measure. Not for the long term.

But it was OK for the short term. So he closed his eyes and drifted away. Sleep when you can, because you never know when you’re going to sleep again. That was the old army rule.

Emerson’s plan was pretty straightforward. He put Donna Bianca in room seven. Told the two patrolmen to stash their car three streets away and walk back and wait in room nine. He put a car two streets behind the motor court, and another four blocks north, where the auto dealers were, and another two blocks south. He told the clerk to stay awake and watch through the window and call Bianca in room seven as soon as he saw the guy he knew as Heffner walk in.

Eileen Hutton got back to the Marriott at four-thirty. There was no key card waiting for her at the desk. No message. So she went up in the elevator and followed the arrows to room 310 and knocked on the door. There was a short pause and then the door opened and Reacher let her in.

“How’s my room?” she asked.

“The bed’s comfortable,” he said.

“I’m supposed to call Emerson if I see you,” she said.

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

“Perjury and harboring a fugitive,” he said. “All in one day.”

She dug in her purse and came out with Emerson’s card. “You’re their only suspect. He gave me three separate phone numbers. They sound pretty serious.”

He took the card from her. Put it in his back pocket, with the cocktail napkin that had Helen Rodin’s cell number on it. He was turning into a walking phone book.

“How was the thing with Rodin?” he asked.

“Straightforward,” she said.

He said nothing. She moved around, checking the suite. Bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchenette. She took her bag and stood it neatly against a wall.

“Want to stay?” she said.

He shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said.

“OK,” she said.

“But I could come back later, if you like.”

She paused a beat.

“OK,” she said. “Come back later.”

Alex Rodin stepped back into his office and closed the door and called Emerson.

“Have you got him yet?” he asked.

“Just a matter of time,” Emerson said. “We’re looking for him all over. And we’re watching his room. He’s at the old motor court. Under a false name.”

“That’s interesting,” Rodin said. “It means he might have used a false name at the Metropole, too.”

“I’ll check,” Emerson said. “I’ll show the clerk the picture.”

“We might really be able to nail him,” Rodin said. He clicked off, thinking about two new framed headlines for his office wall. First Barr, and then Reacher.

Reacher let himself out of Hutton’s suite and used the stairs instead of the elevator. On the ground floor he turned away from the lobby and found a back corridor with a fire door at the end of it. He pushed the fire door open and held it ajar with his foot. Took Emerson’s card out of his pocket and tore it in half lengthwise and folded the half with the name on it four times. He pressed the tongue into the fire door’s lock with the ball of his thumb and wedged it there with the folded cardboard. He closed the door gently and pushed it flush with the frame with the flat of his hand. Then he walked away, past a Dumpster, through the staff lot, out to the street, heading north. The sidewalks were busy and the traffic lanes were starting to clog. He walked at a normal pace and used his height to scan the middle distance for patrol cars or cops on corners. The day was still warm. There was a weather system somewhere out there. Somewhere near. There was high pressure in the sky, clamping down, trapping the smell of damp earth and nitrogen fertilizer in the air.

He reached the raised highway and turned west in its shadow. The roadbed strode along on pillars forty feet high. Underneath it were untidy lots, some vacant and full of trash, some with old brick buildings with dark skylights in their roofs, some with new metal sheds housing body shops and spray paint operations. He passed the back of the black glass tower and stayed in the highway’s shadow and turned south, ready to pass behind the library. He stopped suddenly and crouched and fiddled with his shoe. Like he had a stone. Glanced back under his arm and saw nobody behind him. No tail.

He moved on. After the library he was exposed for forty yards. The plaza was east of him. He stopped momentarily on a spot he judged was directly below where Helen Rodin had parked the day before and where James Barr should have parked on Friday. Forty feet lower down the view was different but the geometry was the same. He could see the wilted tributes propped against the pool’s southern wall. They were small splashes of faded color in the distance. Beyond them was the DMV’s door. People were coming out in ones and twos. He checked his watch. Ten to five.

He moved on, in the open, and made it across to First Street’s northernmost block. He looped one block south and three blocks east and came up on the parking garage’s entrance from the west. He walked up the ramp and found the security camera’s lens. It was a small circle of dirty glass mounted on a plain black box that was bolted high up in the angle of two concrete beams. He waved at it. It was too high, ideally. It should have been lower, at license plate level. But all the pillars below waist height were scuffed and scraped. A rainbow of different colors. Drivers were careless. Mounted lower, the camera would have lasted a day and a half. Maybe less.

He walked up the ramps to the second level. Headed north and east, to the far back corner. The garage was still and quiet, but full. The space that James Barr had used was occupied. No room for sentiment in the scramble for downtown parking. No room for reverence.

The border between the old garage and the new construction was marked by a triple barrier of tape strung between pillars. There was standard yellow-and-black contractor’s Caution Do Not Enter tape and above it and below it were new lengths of blue-and-white Police Line Do Not Cross tape. He used his forearm and stretched all three lines higher and just ducked underneath. No need to drop to one knee. No need to scuff a pair of jeans. No need to leave a mess of fibers. Not even for a guy six inches taller than Barr, and not even with a new line of tape six inches lower than the one Barr had encountered. He was literally going out of his way to leave every last piece of evidence he could.

Reacher walked on into the gloom. The new construction was rectangular in shape. Maybe forty yards south to north, maybe two hundred east to west. Which meant Reacher arrived at the new northeast corner after thirty-five paces. He stood six feet back from the perimeter wall and looked down and right. He had a perfectly good view. No need to press up against a pillar. No need to squirm around like a horse on its back in a summer meadow.

He stood there and watched. People were coming out of the government office in increasing numbers. There was quite a flow. Some paused and lit cigarettes as soon as they were out in the air. Others moved on directly west, some fast, some slow. All of them turned and tracked around the north end of the pool. None of them walked where Barr’s victims had walked. The funeral tributes were a disincentive. A reminder. Therefore it was hard to judge what Friday’s scene had looked like. Hard, but not impossible. Reacher watched the walking people and in his mind made them forgo their respectful right turns. He made them continue straight on. They would be slow entering the bottleneck. But not too slow. And they would be close. The combination of moderate speed and proximity would exaggerate the deflection angles. It would make the job harder. It was a basic principle of long-gun use. A bird traversing the sky a hundred yards away was an easy target. The same bird at the same speed flying six feet in front of your face was an impossible target.

He pictured the people streaming right-to-left. He closed one eye and extended his arm and pointed his finger. Click, click-click, click-click-click. Six aimed shots. Four seconds. Fast. Tough geometry. Tension, exposure, vulnerability.

Six hits, including the deliberate miss.

Exceptional shooting.

They don’t forget.

He dropped his arm to his side. It was cold in the gloom. He shivered. The air was clammy and damp and full of the smell of lime. It had been hot in Kuwait City. The air had been shimmering and full of the smell of baked dust and desert sand. Reacher had stood in the parking garage and sweated. The street below him had been blinding. Murderous. Like a blast furnace.

Hot in Kuwait City.

Four shots there.

Six shots here.

He stood and watched the people coming out the DMV door. There were plenty of them. Ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty. They turned and looped north and then turned again and walked west between the pool and the NBC peacock. They gave each other space. But if they had been in the bottleneck they would have bunched up tight.

Plenty of them.

Six shots, in four seconds.

He looked for anyone not moving. Didn’t see anybody. No cops, no old men in boxy suits. He turned around and retraced his steps. Lifted the tape again and ducked under it and walked back down the ramps. Slipped out to the street and turned west, heading for the shadows under the highway. Heading for the library.

He crossed the forty yards of open ground and hugged the library’s side wall and went in through a handicapped entrance. He had to walk close to the desk, but he wasn’t worried about that. If Emerson started circulating Wanted notices he would hit the post offices and bars and hotels first. It would be a long time before he started canvassing librarians.

He made it to the lobby OK and stepped over to the pay phones. Took the cocktail napkin out of his pocket and dialed Helen Rodin’s cell. She picked up on the fifth ring. He pictured her rooting through her purse, squinting at the screen, fumbling with the buttons.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Reacher?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you alone?”

“Yes,” she said. “But you’re in trouble.”

“Who called you?”

“My father.”

“You believe him?”

“No.”

“I’m coming to see you.”

“There’s a cop in the lobby.”

“I figured. I’ll come in through the garage.”

He hung up and walked back past the desk and out the side entrance. Back under the highway. He stayed in its shelter until he was opposite the back of the black glass tower. Opposite the vehicle ramp. He checked left, checked right, and walked straight down. Past the NBC trucks, past the Mustang he figured for Ann Yanni’s, to the elevator. He pressed the call button and waited. Checked his watch. Five-thirty. Most people would be leaving the building. A down elevator was certain to stop at the lobby level. An up elevator, maybe not. He hoped.

The elevator car arrived in the garage and let three people out. They walked away. Reacher stepped in. Pressed 4. Stood back. The car rose one floor and stopped. In the lobby. The doors slid back like a theater curtain. The cop was right there, four feet from the elevator, facing away. He had his feet apart and his hands on his hips. He was almost close enough to touch. A man stepped into the elevator. He didn’t speak. Just nodded a two-guys-in-an-elevator greeting. Reacher nodded back. The guy pressed 7. The doors stayed open. The cop watched the street. The new guy jiggled the button. The cop moved. He swiped his cap off his head and ran his fingers through his hair. The doors closed. The elevator moved up.

Reacher got out on four and walked through a small knot of people on their way home. Helen Rodin had her door open and ready. He stepped inside her suite and she closed up after him. She was wearing a short black skirt and a white blouse. She looked young. Like a schoolgirl. And she looked worried. Like a conflicted person.

“I should turn you in,” she said.

“But you won’t,” Reacher said.

“No,” she said. “I should, but I won’t.”

“Truth is I liked that girl,” Reacher said. “She was a sweet kid.”

“She set you up.”

“I wasn’t offended.”

“Someone didn’t like her.”

“We can’t tell. Affection didn’t come into it. She was disposable, that’s all. A means to an end.”

“The puppet master really doesn’t want you around.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s for damn sure. But he’s shit out of luck there, because I’m not leaving now. He just guaranteed that for himself.”

“Is it safe to stay?”

“It’s safe enough. But this thing with the girl is going to slow me down. So you’re going to have to do most of the work.”

She led him into the inner office. She sat down at her desk. He stayed well away from the window. He sat on the floor and propped his back against the wall.

“I already started the work,” Helen said. “I spoke to Rosemary and talked to Barr’s neighbors. Then I went back to the hospital. I think we’re looking for a guy called Charlie. Small guy, bristly black hair. Interested in guns. I got the impression he’s kind of furtive. I think he’s going to be hard to find.”

“How long has he been on the scene?”

“Five or six years, apparently. He’s the only long-term friend anyone could name. And he’s the only one Barr owns up to.”

Reacher nodded again. “That works for me.”

“And Barr doesn’t know Jeb Oliver and doesn’t use drugs.”

“You believe him?”

“Yes, I do,” Helen said. “Really. Right now I believe everything he says. It’s like he spent fourteen years turning his life around and now he can’t believe he went back. I think he’s as upset about all this as anyone.”

“Except the victims.”

“Give him a break, Reacher. Something weird was going on.”

“Does this guy Charlie know about Kuwait City?”

“Barr wouldn’t say. But I think he does.”

“Where does he live?”

“Barr doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“He just sees him around. He just shows up now and then. Like I said, I think he’s going to be hard to find.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Did you speak to Eileen Hutton?” Helen asked.

“She’s no threat. The army is keeping the lid on.”

“Did you find the guy that was following you?”

“No,” Reacher said. “I didn’t see him again. They must have pulled him off.”

“So we’re nowhere.”

“We’re closer than we were. We can start to see a shape. We can see four guys, at least. One, the old guy in the suit. Two, this guy called Charlie. Three, someone big and very strong and left-handed.”

“Why him?”

“He killed the girl last night. The old guy is too old and it sounds like Charlie might be too small. And the physical evidence suggests a left-handed blow.”

“And number four is the puppet master.”

Reacher nodded again. “In the shadows somewhere, making plans, pulling strings. We can assume he doesn’t run around doing this kind of stuff himself.”

“But how can we get to him? If he’s pulled the guy off your tail, we can assume he’s pulled Charlie back, too. They’re hunkering down.”

“There’s another way. A big wide highway.”

“Where?”

“We missed something very obvious,” Reacher said. “We spent all this time looking down the wrong end of the gun. All we’ve done is look at who fired it.”

“What should we have done?”

“We should have thought harder.”

“About what?”

“James Barr fired four times in Kuwait City. And he fired six times here.”

“OK,” Helen said. “He fired two more shots here. So?”

“But he didn’t,” Reacher said. “Not really. Not if you think about it laterally. Truth is he fired four fewer shots here.”

“That’s ridiculous. Six is two more than four. Not four fewer.”

“Kuwait City was very hot. Unbearable in the middle of the day. You had to be nuts to be out and about. The streets were empty most of the time.”

“So?”

“So in Kuwait City James Barr killed every live human he saw. One, two, three, four, game over. The street was deserted apart from our four guys. They were the only people dumb enough to be out in the heat. And Barr took them all. He ran the table. At the time it seemed logical to me. He wanted to see the pink mist. It struck me that maybe he might have been satisfied with seeing it once, but apparently he wasn’t. So it made some kind of sense that if he didn’t stop at one, he would go all the way until he ran out of targets. And he did. In Kuwait City, he ran out of targets.”

Helen Rodin said nothing.

“But he didn’t run out of targets here,” Reacher said. “There had to have been a dozen people in that bottleneck. Or fifteen. More than ten, anyway. And he had a ten-round magazine. But he stopped shooting after six. Just stopped. He left four rounds in the gun. They’re listed right there in Bellantonio’s dog and pony show. And that’s what I meant. He fired the most he could fire in Kuwait City, and four less than the most he could fire here. Which makes the psychology different here. He chose not to run the table here. Why?”

“Because he was hurrying?”

“He had an autoloader. The voice-mail recording shows six shots in four seconds. Which means he could have fired ten in less than seven seconds. Three seconds wouldn’t have made any kind of a difference to him.”

Helen said nothing.

“I asked him,” Reacher said. “When I saw him in the hospital. I asked him how he would have done it, theoretically. Like a recon briefing. So he thought about it. He knows the area. He said he would have parked on the highway. Behind the library. He said he would have buzzed the window down and emptied the mag.”

Helen said nothing.

“But he didn’t empty the mag,” Reacher said. “He stopped shooting after six. Just stopped. Coldly and calmly. Which makes the whole dynamic different. This wasn’t a crazy man sent out to terrorize the city on a dare. He wasn’t pushed into it just for the fun of the carnage. This wasn’t random, Helen. It wasn’t psychotic. There was a specific, limited, coherent purpose behind it. Which reverses the focus. We should have seen it. We should have seen that this whole thing is about the victims, not the shooter. They weren’t just unlucky people in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“They were targets?” Helen said.

“Carefully chosen,” Reacher said. “And as soon as they were safely down, Barr packed up and left. With four bullets remaining. A random psycho episode wouldn’t have panned out like that. He’d have kept on pulling the trigger until he clicked on empty. So this wasn’t a spree. It was an assassination.”

Silence in the office.

“We need to look at who the victims were,” Reacher said. “And we need to look at who wanted them dead. That’s what’s going to lead us to where we need to be.”

Helen Rodin didn’t move.

“And we need to do it real fast,” Reacher said. “Because I don’t have much time and we already wasted the best part of three days looking at everything ass-backward.”

The tired thirty-year-old doctor on the sixth floor of the county hospital was finishing up his afternoon rounds. He had left James Barr for last. Partly because he wasn’t expecting any dramatic change in his condition, and partly because he didn’t care anyway. Looking after sick thieves and swindlers was bad enough, but looking after a mass murderer was absurd. Doubly absurd, because straight after Barr was on his feet he was going to be laid back down on a gurney and some other doctor was going to come in and kill him.

But ethical obligations are hard to ignore. As is habit. As is duty, and routine, and structure. So the doctor went into Barr’s room and picked up his chart. Took out his pen. Glanced at the machines. Glanced at the patient. He was awake. His eyes were moving.

Alert, the doctor wrote.

“Happy?” he asked.

“Not really,” Barr said.

Responsive, the doctor wrote.

“Tough shit,” he said, and put his pen away.

Barr’s right handcuff was rattling gently against the cot rail. His right hand itself was trembling and slightly cupped and the thumb and index finger were in constant motion, like he was trying to roll an imaginary ball of wax into a perfect sphere.

“Stop that,” the doctor said.

“Stop what?”

“Your hand.”

“I can’t.”

“Is that new?”

“A year or two.”

“Not just since you woke up?”

“No.”

The doctor looked at the chart. Age: Forty-one.

“Do you drink?” he asked.

“Not really,” Barr said. “A sip sometimes, to help me sleep.”

The doctor disbelieved him automatically and flipped through the chart to the tox screen and the liver function test. But the tox screen was clear and the liver function was healthy. Not a drinker. Not an alcoholic. Not even close.

“Have you seen your own physician recently?” he asked.

“I don’t have insurance,” Barr said.

“Stiffness in your arms and legs?”

“A little.”

“Does your other hand do that, too?”

“Sometimes.”

The doctor took out his pen again and scribbled on the bottom of the chart: Observed tremor in right hand, not post-traumatic, primary diagnosis alcoholism unlikely, stiffness in limbs present, possible early-onset PA?

“What’s wrong with me?” Barr asked.

“Shut up,” the doctor said. Then, duty done, he clipped the chart back on the foot of the bed and walked out of the room.

Helen Rodin searched through the evidence cartons and came out with the formal specification of charges against James Barr. Among many other technical violations of the law, the State of Indiana had listed five counts of homicide in the first degree with aggravating circumstances, and as due process required had gone on to list the five alleged victims by name, sex, age, address, and occupation. Helen scanned the page, ran her fingers down the columns for address and occupation.

“I don’t see any obvious connections,” she said.

“I didn’t mean they were all targets,” Reacher said. “Probably only one of them was. Two, at most. The others were window dressing. An assassination disguised as a spree. That’s my guess.”

“I’ll get to work,” she said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

He used the fire stairs instead of the elevator and got back to the garage unseen. He hustled up the ramp and across the street and under the highway again. The invisible man. Life in the shadows. He smiled. He stopped.

He decided to go look for a pay phone.

He found one on the side wall of a small grocery called Martha’s, two blocks north of the cheap clothing store he had used. The booth faced a wide alley that was used as a narrow parking lot. There were six slanted spaces full of six cars. Beyond them, a high brick wall topped with broken glass. The alley turned ninety degrees behind the grocery. He guessed it turned again somewhere and let out on the next block south.

Safe enough, he thought.

He took Emerson’s torn card out of his pocket. Chose the cell number. Dialed the phone. Leaned his shoulder against the wall and watched both ends of the alley at once and listened to the purr of the ring tone in his ear.

“Yes?” Emerson said.

“Guess who?” Reacher said.

“Reacher?”

“You named that tune in one.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m still in town.”

“Where?”

“Not far away.”

“You know we’re looking for you, right?”

“I heard.”

“So you need to turn yourself in.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then we’ll come find you,” Emerson said.

“Think you can?”

“It’ll be easy.”

“You know a guy called Franklin?”

“Sure I do.”

“Ask him how easy it’ll be.”

“That was different. You could have been anywhere.”

“You got the motor court staked out?”

There was a pause. Emerson said nothing.

“Keep your people there,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll be back. Or on the other hand, maybe I won’t.”

“We’ll find you.”

“Not a chance. You’re not good enough.”

“Maybe we’re tracing this call.”

“I’ll save you the trouble. I’m outside a grocery called Martha’s.”

“You should come in from the cold.”

“I’ll trade,” Reacher said. “Find out who placed the cone in the parking garage and then I’ll think about coming in.”

“Barr placed the cone.”

“You know he didn’t. His van isn’t on the tapes.”

“So he used another vehicle.”

“He doesn’t have another vehicle.”

“So he borrowed one.”

“From a friend?” Reacher said. “Maybe. Or maybe the friend placed the cone for him. Either way, you find that friend, and I’ll think about coming in to talk to you.”

“There are hundreds of cars on those tapes.”

“You’ve got the resources,” Reacher said.

“I don’t trade,” Emerson said.

“I think his name is Charlie,” Reacher said. “Small guy, wiry black hair.”

“I don’t trade,” Emerson said again.

“I didn’t kill the girl,” Reacher said.

“Says you.”

“I liked her.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“And you know I didn’t stay at the Metropole last night.”

“Which is why you dumped her there.”

“And I’m not left-handed.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Tell Bellantonio to talk to your ME.”

“We’ll find you,” Emerson said.

“You won’t,” Reacher said. “Nobody ever has before.”

Then he hung up and walked back to the street. Crossed the road and hiked half a block north and took cover behind a stack of unused concrete lane dividers in a vacant lot. He waited. Six minutes later two cruisers pulled up in front of Martha’s grocery. Lights, but no sirens. Four cops spilled out. Two went in the store and two went to find the phone. Reacher watched them regroup on the sidewalk. Watched them search the alley and check around its corner. Watched them come back. Watched them admit defeat. He saw one of the four get on his radio for a short conversation full of defensive body language. Raised palms, shrugged shoulders. Then the conversation ended and Reacher slipped away east, heading back toward the Marriott.

The Zec had only a thumb and a single finger remaining on each hand. On the right was a stump of an index finger, blackened and gnarled by frostbite. He had once spent a week outdoors in the winter, wearing an old Red Army tunic, and the way its previous owner’s water canteen had ridden on his belt had worn the fabric of the right pocket thinner than the left. On such trivial differences survival had hung. His left hand had been saved, and his right hand lost. He had felt his fingers die from the pinkie inward. He had taken his hand out of his pocket and let it freeze hard enough to go completely numb. Then he had chewed off the dead fingers before the gangrene could spread. He remembered dropping them to the ground, one by one, like small brown twigs.

His left hand retained the pinkie. The middle three fingers were missing. Two had been amputated by a sadist with garden shears. The Zec had removed the other himself, with a sharpened spoon, so as to be disqualified for labor in some machine shop or other. He couldn’t recall the specifics, but he remembered a persuasive rumor that it was better to lose another finger than work on that particular detail. Something to do with the overseer.

Ruined hands. Just two of many souvenirs of another time, another place. He wasn’t very aware of them anymore, but they made modern life difficult. Cell phones had gotten so damn small. Linsky’s number was ten digits long, and it was a pig to dial. The Zec never retained a phone long enough to make it worth storing a number. That would be madness.

Eventually he got the number entered and he concentrated hard and pressed the call button with his left-hand pinkie. Then he juggled the phone into his other palm and cupped it near his ear. He didn’t need to hold it close. His hearing was still excellent, which was a miracle all by itself.

“Yes?” Linsky said.

“They can’t find him,” the Zec said. “I shouldn’t have told you to break off our own surveillance. My mistake.”

“Where have they looked?”

“Here and there. He stayed last night at the motor court. They’ve got it staked out, but I’m sure he won’t go back. They’ve got a man at the lawyer’s office. Other than that, they’re stumbling around in the dark.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find him. Use Chenko and Vladimir. And I’ll send Raskin to you. Work together. Find him tonight and then call me.”

Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott. He knew what Emerson would be doing. He had been Emerson for thirteen years. Emerson would be running down a mental list. Likely haunts, known associates. Likely haunts at this time of day would include eating places. So Emerson would be sending cars to diners and restaurants and cafés, including the salad place that Helen Rodin liked and the sports bar. Then he would move on to known associates, which pretty much limited him to Helen Rodin herself. He would have the lobby cop ride up to the fourth floor and knock on the office door.

Then he would take a chance on Eileen Hutton.

So Reacher stopped two blocks short of the Marriott and looked around for a place to wait. He found one behind a shoe store. There was a three-sided corral made of head-high brick walls shielding a shoulder-high plastic garbage receptacle from public view. Reacher stepped in and found that if he leaned his shoulder on the trash can he could see a yard-wide sliver of the Marriott’s main door. He wasn’t uncomfortable. And it was the best-smelling garbage dump he had ever been in. The can smelled of fresh cardboard and new shoes. Better than the kind of place you find behind a fish store.

He figured if Emerson was efficient he would have to wait less than thirty minutes. Very efficient, less than twenty. Average, somewhere up around an hour. He leaned on the trash can and passed the time. It wasn’t late but the streets were already quiet. There were very few people out and about. He watched, and waited. Then the smell of new leather from the discarded shoe boxes distracted him. It started him thinking about footwear. Maybe he should drop by the store sometime and pick out a brand-new pair. He stuck his foot out and looked down. The boat shoes he had on were soft and light and the soles were thin. They had been fine for Miami. Not so good for his current situation. He could foresee a time when he would appreciate something heavier.

Then he looked down again. Rocked back and brought his feet together and took the same pace forward. And stopped. He tried it again with his other foot, and stopped again, like a freeze-frame of a man walking. He stared down, with something in the back of his mind. Something from Bellantonio’s evidence. Something among all those hundreds of printed pages.

Then he looked up again, because he sensed movement in the corner of his eye at the Marriott’s door two blocks away. He saw a squad car’s hood. It moved into his field of view and dipped once as it braked and stopped. Then two cops appeared, in uniform, walking forward. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes. He smiled. Emerson was good, but not unbelievable. The cops went in through the door. They would spend five minutes with the desk clerk. The clerk would give up Hutton’s room number without a fight. Generally speaking, hotel clerks from small heartland cities weren’t ACLU activists. And guests were gone tomorrow, but the local PD was always there.

So the cops would go to Hutton’s room. They would knock on her door. Hutton would let them in. She had nothing to hide. The cops would poke around and be on their way. Ten minutes, tops, beginning to end.

Reacher checked his watch again, and waited.

The cops were back out after eight minutes. They paused outside the doors, tiny figures far in the distance. One of them ducked his head to his collar and used his radio, calling in a negative progress report, listening for the next destination. The next likely haunt. The next known associate. Pure routine. Have a fun evening, boys, Reacher thought. Because I’m going to. That’s for damn sure. He watched them drive off and waited another minute in case they were driving his way. Then he stepped out of the brick corral and headed for Eileen Hutton.

Grigor Linsky waited in his car in a fire lane in a supermarket parking lot, framed against a window that was entirely pasted over with a gigantic orange advertisement for ground beef at a very low price. Old and spoiled, Linsky thought. Or full of Listeria. The kind of thing the Zec and I would once have killed to eat. And killed was the truth. Linsky had no illusions. None at all. The Zec and he were bad people made worse by experience. Their shared suffering had conferred no grace or nobility. Quite the reverse. Men in their situation inclined toward grace and nobility had died within hours. But the Zec and he had survived, like sewer rats, by abandoning inhibition, by fighting and clawing, by betraying those stronger than themselves, by dominating those weaker.

And they had learned. What works once works always.

Linsky watched in his mirror and saw Raskin’s car coming toward him. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the old square style, black and dusty, listing like a holed battleship. It stopped nose-to-tail with him and Raskin got out. He looked exactly like what he was, which was a second-rate Moscow hoodlum. Square build, flat face, cheap leather jacket, dull eyes. Forty-some years old. A stupid man, in Linsky’s opinion, but he had survived the Red Army’s last hurrah in Afghanistan, which had to count for something. Plenty of people smarter than Raskin hadn’t come back whole, or come back at all. Which made Raskin a survivor, which was the quality that meant more than any other to the Zec.

Raskin opened the rear door and slid into the back seat behind Linsky. He didn’t speak. Just handed over four copies of Emerson’s Wanted poster. A delivery from the Zec. How the Zec had gotten the posters, Linsky wasn’t sure. But he could make a guess. The posters themselves were pretty good. The likeness was pretty accurate. It would serve its purpose.

“Thank you,” Linsky said politely.

Raskin didn’t respond.

Chenko and Vladimir showed up two minutes later, in Chenko’s Cadillac. Chenko was driving. Chenko always drove. He parked behind Raskin’s Lincoln. Three large black cars, all in a line. Jack Reacher’s funeral procession. Linsky smiled to himself. Chenko and Vladimir got out of their car and walked forward, one small and dark, the other big and fair. They got into Linsky’s own Cadillac, Chenko in the front, Vladimir in the back next to Raskin, so that counting clockwise there was Linsky in the driver’s seat, then Chenko, then Vladimir, then Raskin. The proper pecking order, instinctively obeyed. Linsky smiled again and handed out three copies of the poster. He kept one for himself, even though he didn’t need it. He had seen Jack Reacher many times already.

“We’re going to start over,” he said. “Right from the beginning. We can assume the police will have missed something.”

Reacher pulled the fire door open and removed the cardboard plug from the lock and put it in his pocket. He stepped inside and let the door latch behind him. He followed the back corridor to the elevator and rode up to three. Knocked on Hutton’s door. He had a line in his head, from Jack Nicholson playing a hard-ass Marine colonel in some movie about Navy lawyers: Nothing beats a woman you have to salute in the morning.

Hutton took her time opening the door. He guessed she had settled down somewhere after getting rid of the cops. She hadn’t expected to be disturbed again so soon. But eventually the door opened and she was standing there. She was wearing a robe, coming fresh out of the shower. The light behind her haloed her hair. The corridor was dim and the room looked warm and inviting.

“You came back,” she said.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

He stepped into the suite and she closed the door behind him.

“The cops were just here,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I watched them all the way.”

“Where were you?”

“In a garbage dump two blocks away.”

“You want to wash up?”

“It was a very clean garbage dump. Behind a shoe store.”

“You want to go out to dinner?”

“I’d prefer room service,” he said. “I don’t want to be walking around more than I have to.”

“OK,” she said. “That makes sense. Room service it is.”

“But not just yet.”

“Should I get dressed?”

“Not just yet.”

She paused a beat.

“Why not?” she said.

“Unfinished business,” he said.

She said nothing.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

“It’s been less than three hours,” she said.

“I mean today,” he said. “As a whole. After all this time.”

Then he stepped close and cupped her face in his hands. Pushed his fingertips into her hair like he used to and traced the contours of her cheekbones with his thumbs.

“Should we do this?” she said.

“Don’t you want to?”

“It’s been fourteen years,” she said.

“Like riding a bicycle,” he said.

“Think it will be the same?”

“It’ll be better.”

“How much better?” she asked.

“We were always good,” he said. “Weren’t we? How much better could it get?”

She held still for a long moment. Then she put her hands behind his head. She pulled and he bent down and they kissed. Then again, harder. Then again, longer. Fourteen years melted away. Same taste, same feel. Same excitement. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and unbuttoned it from the bottom upward, urgently. When the last button was open she smoothed the flat of her hands over his chest, his shoulders, his back, down to his waistband, around to the front. His boat shoes came off easily. And his socks. He kicked his pants across the room and untied her belt. Her robe fell open.

“Damn, Hutton,” he said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“You either,” she said.

Then they headed for the bed, stumbling, fast and urgent, locked together like an awkward four-legged animal.

Grigor Linsky took the south side of town. He checked the salad place and then cruised down to the docks. Turned around and quartered the narrow streets, covering three sides of every block, pausing at the turns to scan the sidewalks on the fourth. The Cadillac idled along. The power steering hissed at every corner. It was slow, patient work. But it wasn’t a large city. There was no bustle. No crowds. And nobody could hide forever. That had been Grigor Linsky’s experience.

Afterward Hutton lay in Reacher’s arms and used her fingertips to trace a long slow inventory of the body she had known so well. It had changed in fourteen years. He had said You haven’t changed a bit and she had said You either, but she knew both of them had been generous. Nobody stays the same. The Reacher she had known in the desert had been younger and baked lean by the heat, as fluid and graceful as a greyhound. Now he was heavier, with knotted muscles as hard as old mahogany. The scars she remembered had smoothed out and faded and were replaced by newer marks. There were lines in his forehead. Lines around his eyes. But his nose was still straight and unbroken. His front teeth were still there, like trophies. She slid her hand down to his and felt his knuckles. They were large and hard, like walnut shells matted with scar tissue. Still a fighter, she thought. Still trading his hands for his nose and his teeth. She moved up to his chest. He had a hole there, left of center. Ruptured muscle, a crater big enough for the tip of her finger. A gunshot wound. Old, but new to her. Probably a .38.

“New York,” Reacher said. “Years ago. Everyone asks.”

“Everyone?”

“Who sees it.”

Hutton snuggled in closer. “How many people see it?”

He smiled. “You know, on beaches, stuff like that.”

“And in bed?”

“Locker rooms,” he said.

“And in bed,” she said again.

“I’m not a monk,” he said.

“Did it hurt?”

“I don’t remember. I was out for three weeks.”

“It’s right over your heart.”

“It was a little revolver. Probably a weak load. He should have tried a head shot. That would have been better.”

“For him. Not for you.”

“I’m a lucky man. Always have been, always will be.”

“Maybe. But you should take better care.”

“I try my best.”

Chenko and Vladimir stayed together and took the north side of town. They kept well away from the motor court. The cops had that situation buttoned up, presumably. So their first stop was the sports bar. They went in and walked around. It was dark inside and not very busy. Maybe thirty guys. None of them matched the sketch. None of them was Reacher. Vladimir stayed near the door and Chenko checked the men’s room. One stall had a closed door. Chenko waited until the toilet flushed and the guy came out. It wasn’t Reacher. It was just a guy. So Chenko rejoined Vladimir and they got back in the car. Started quartering the streets, slowly, patiently, covering three sides of every block and pausing at the turns to scan the sidewalks on the fourth.

Hutton propped herself on an elbow and looked down at Reacher’s face. His eyes were still the same. Set a little deeper, maybe, and a little more hooded. But they still shone blue like ice chips under an Arctic sun. Like a color map of twin snowmelt lakes in a high mountain landscape. But their expression had changed. Fourteen years ago they had been rimmed red by the desert sandstorms and clouded with some kind of bitter cynicism. They had been army eyes. Cop eyes. She remembered the way they would swing slow and lazy across a room like deadly tracers curling in toward a target. Now they were clearer. Younger. More innocent. He was fourteen years older, but his gaze was like a child’s again.

“You just had your hair cut,” she said.

“This morning,” he said. “For you.”

“For me?”

“Yesterday I looked like a wild man. They told me you were coming. I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of a bum.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Some kind, I guess.”

“What kind?”

“The voluntary kind.”

“We should eat,” she said.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“Whatever you get. We’ll share. Order big portions.”

“You can choose your own if you want.”

He shook his head. “A month from now some DoD clerk is going to go through your expenses. Better for you if he sees one meal rather than two.”

“Worried about my reputation?”

“I’m worried about your next promotion.”

“I won’t get one. I’m terminal at Brigadier General.”

“Not now that this Petersen guy owes you a big one.”

“Can’t deny two stars would be cool.”

“For me too,” Reacher said. “I got screwed by plenty of two-stars. To think I screwed one myself would be fun.”

She made a face.

“Food,” Reacher said.

“I like salads,” she said.

“Someone’s got to, I guess.”

“Don’t you?”

“Get a chicken Caesar to start and a steak to follow. You eat the rabbit food, I’ll eat the steak. Then get some kind of a big dessert. And a big pot of coffee.”

“I like tea.”

“Can’t do it,” Reacher said. “There are some compromises I just can’t make. Not even for the DoD.”

“But I’m thirsty.”

“They’ll send ice water. They always do.”

“I outrank you.”

“You always did. You ever see me drink tea because of it?”

She shook her head and got out of bed. Padded naked across to the desk. Checked the menu and dialed the phone. Ordered chicken Caesar, a sixteen-ounce sirloin, and a big pie with ice cream. And a six-cup pot of coffee. Reacher smiled at her.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Let’s take a shower.”

Raskin took the heart of downtown. He was on foot with the sketch in his hand and a list in his head: restaurants, bars, diners, sandwich shops, groceries, hotels. He started at the Metropole Palace. The lobby, the bar. No luck. He moved on to a Chinese restaurant two blocks away. In and out, fast and discreet. He figured he was pretty good for this kind of work. He wasn’t a very noticeable guy. Not memorable. Average height, average weight, unremarkable face. Just a hole in the air, which in some ways was a frustration, but in others was a major advantage. People looked at him, but they didn’t really see him. Their eyes slid right on by.

Reacher wasn’t in the Chinese place. Or the sub shop, or the Irish bar. So Raskin stopped on the sidewalk and decided to dodge north. He could check the lawyer’s office and then head toward the Marriott. Because according to Linsky those places were where the women were. And in Raskin’s experience guys who weren’t just holes in the air got to hang out with women more than the average.

Reacher got out of the shower and borrowed Hutton’s toothbrush and toothpaste and comb. Then he toweled off and walked around and collected his clothes. Put them on and tucked his shirt in. He was dressed and sitting on the bed when he heard the knock at the door.

“Room service,” a foreign voice called.

Hutton put her head out the bathroom door. She was dressed but halfway through drying her hair.

“You go,” Reacher said.

“Me?”

“You have to sign for it.”

“You can write my name.”

“Two hours from now the cops won’t have found me and they’ll come back here. Better that we don’t have a guy downstairs who knows you’re not alone.”

“You never relax, do you?”

“The less I relax, the luckier I get.”

Hutton patted her hair into shape and headed for the door. Reacher heard the rattle of a cart and the clink of plates and the scratch of a pen. Then he heard the door close and he stepped through to the living room and found a wheeled table set up in the middle of the floor. The waiter had placed one chair behind it.

“One knife,” Hutton said. “One fork. One spoon. We didn’t think of that.”

“We’ll take turns,” Reacher said. “Kind of romantic.”

“I’ll cut your steak up and you can use your fingers.”

“You could feed it to me. We should have ordered grapes.”

She smiled.

“Do you remember James Barr?” he asked.

“Too much water over the dam,” she said. “But I reread his file yesterday.”

“How good a shooter was he?”

“Not the best we ever had, not the worst.”

“That’s what I remember. I was just in the garage, taking a look. It was impressive shooting. Very impressive. I don’t remember him being that good.”

“There’s a lot of evidence there.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“Maybe he’s been practicing hard,” she said. “He was in six years but he’s been out nearly three times as long. Maybe he was a late developer.”

“Maybe,” he said.

She looked at him. “You’re not staying, are you? You’re planning on leaving right after dinner. Because of this thing with the cops. You think they’ll come back to the room.”

“They will,” Reacher said. “Count on it.”

“I don’t have to let them in.”

“A place like this, the cops will do pretty much what they want. And if they find me here, you’re in trouble.”

“Not if you’re innocent.”

“You’ve got no legitimate way of telling what I am. That’s what they’ll say.”

“I’m the lawyer here,” Hutton said.

“And I was a cop,” Reacher said. “I know what they’re like. They hate fugitives. Fugitives drive them nuts. They’ll arrest you along with me and sort it all out next month. By which time your second star will be in the toilet.”

“So where are you going?”

“No idea. But I’ll think of something.”

The street door at the bottom of the black glass tower was locked for the night. Raskin knocked on it, twice. The security guard at the lobby desk looked up. Raskin waved the sketch at him.

“Delivery,” he mouthed.

The guard got up and walked over and used a key from a bunch on a chain to unlock the door. Raskin stepped inside.

“Rodin,” he said. “Fourth floor.”

The guard nodded. The law offices of Helen Rodin had received plenty of deliveries that day. Boxes, cartons, guys with hand trucks. One more was to be expected. No big surprise. He walked back to his desk without comment and Raskin walked over to the elevator. Got in and pressed 4.

First thing he saw on the fourth floor was a city cop standing outside the lawyer’s door. Raskin knew what that meant, immediately. It meant the lawyer’s office was still a live possibility. Which meant Reacher wasn’t in there at the present time and hadn’t tried to get in there anytime recently. So Raskin wheeled around like he was confused by the corridor layout and headed around a corner. Waited a moment and then headed back to the elevator. He folded the sketch and put it in his pocket. In the lobby he gave the guard a job-done type of wave and headed back out into the night. Turned left and headed north and east toward the Marriott Suites.

The six-cup pot of coffee was more than even Reacher could manage. He quit after five. Hutton didn’t seem to mind. He guessed she thought five out of six justified his insistence.

“Come see me in Washington,” she said.

“I will,” he said. “For sure. Next time I’m there.”

“Don’t get caught.”

“I won’t,” he said. “Not by these guys.”

Then he just looked at her for a minute. Storing away the memory. Adding another fragment to his mosaic. He kissed her once on the lips and walked to the door. Let himself out into the corridor and headed for the stairs. On the ground floor he turned away from the lobby and used the fire door again. It swung shut and locked behind him and he took a deep breath and stepped out of the shadows and headed for the sidewalk.

Raskin saw him immediately. He was thirty yards away, walking fast, coming up on the Marriott from the rear. He saw a flash of glass in the streetlight. A fire door, opening. He saw a tall man stepping out. Standing still. Then the door jerked shut on a hydraulic closer and the tall man turned to watch it latch behind him and a stray beam of light was reflected off the moving glass and played briefly across his face. Just for a split second, like a handheld flashlight swinging through a fast arc. Like a camera strobe. Not much. But enough for Raskin to be certain. The man who had come through the fire door was the man in the sketch. Jack Reacher, for sure, no question. Right height, right weight, right face. Raskin had studied the details long and hard.

So he stopped dead and stepped backward into the shadows. Watched, and waited. Saw Reacher glance right, glance left, and set out walking straight ahead, due west, fast and easy. Raskin stayed where he was and counted one, two, three in his head. Then he came out of the shadows and crossed the parking lot and stopped again and peered around the corner to the west. Reacher was twenty yards ahead. Still walking, still relaxed. Still unaware. Center of the sidewalk, long strides, his arms swinging loose at his sides. He was a big guy. That was for sure. As big as Vladimir, easily.

Raskin counted to three again and let Reacher get forty yards ahead. Then he set out following. He kept his eyes fixed on the target and fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket. Dialed Grigor Linsky’s number. Reacher walked on, forty yards in the distance. Raskin put the phone to his ear.

“Yes?” Linsky said.

“I found him,” Raskin whispered.

“Where?”

“He’s walking. West from the Marriott. He’s about level with the courthouse now, two blocks to the north.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Wait,” Raskin whispered. “Hold on.”

Reacher stopped on a corner. Glanced left and turned right, toward the shadows under the raised highway. Still relaxed. Raskin watched him across waist-high trash in an empty lot.

“He’s turned north,” he whispered.

“Toward?”

“I don’t know. The sports bar, maybe.”

“OK,” Linsky said. “We’ll come north. We’ll wait fifty yards up the street from the sports bar. Call me back in three minutes exactly. Meanwhile, don’t let him out of your sight.”

“OK,” Raskin said. He clicked his phone off but kept it up at his ear and took a shortcut across the empty lot. Paused against a blank brick wall and peered around its corner. Reacher was still forty yards ahead, still in the center of the sidewalk, arms swinging, still moving fast. A confident man, Raskin thought. Perhaps overconfident.

Linsky clicked off with Raskin and immediately dialed Chenko and Vladimir. Told them to rendezvous fifty yards north of the sports bar as fast as possible. Then he dialed the Zec.

“We found him,” he said.

“Where?”

“North part of downtown.”

“Who’s on him?”

“Raskin. They’re on the street, walking.”

The Zec was quiet for a moment.

“Wait until he settles somewhere,” he said. “And then get Chenko to call the cops. He’s got the accent. He can say he’s a bartender or a desk clerk or whatever.”

Raskin stayed forty yards back. He called Linsky again and kept the connection open. Reacher kept on walking, same stride, same pace. His clothes were dull and hard to see in the darkness. His neck and his hands were tan, but a little more visible. And he had a narrow stripe of pale skin around a fresh haircut, ghostly in the gloom. Raskin fixed his eyes on it. It was a white U-shaped glow, six feet off the ground, alternately rising and falling an inch with every step Reacher took. Idiot, Raskin thought. He should have used boot polish. That’s what we’d have done in Afghanistan. Then he thought: Not that we ever had boot polish. Or haircuts.

Then he stopped because Reacher stopped forty yards ahead. Raskin stepped back into a shadow and Reacher glanced right and turned left, into the mouth of a cross-street, out of sight behind a building.

“He’s gone west again,” Raskin whispered into the phone.

“Still good for the sports bar?” Linsky asked.

“Or the motor court.”

“Either one works for us. Move up a little. Don’t lose him now.”

Raskin sprinted ten paces and slowed at the turn. Pressed himself up against the corner of the building and peered around. And stared. Problem. Not with the view. The cross-street was long and wide and straight and lit at the far end by bright lights on the four-lane that ran north to the highway. So he had an excellent view. The problem was that Reacher was no longer part of it. He had disappeared. Completely.

CHAPTER 11

Reacher had once read that boat shoes had been invented by a yachtsman looking for better grip on slippery decks. The guy had taken a regular smooth-soled athletic shoe and cut tiny stripes into the rubber with a straight razor. He had experimented and ended up with the cuts lateral and wavy and close together. They had done the trick, like a miniature tire tread. A whole new industry had grown up. The style had migrated by association from yachts to slips to marinas to boardwalks to summer sidewalks. Now boat shoes were everywhere. Reacher didn’t like them much. They were thin and light and insubstantial.

But they were quiet.

He had seen the guy in the leather coat as soon as he stepped out of the Marriott’s fire door. It would have been hard not to. Thirty yards distant, shallow angle, decent illumination from vapor lights on poles all over the place. His glance had flicked left and he had seen him quite clearly. Seen him react. Seen him stop. Seen him thereby identify himself as an opponent. Reacher had set out walking straight ahead and had scrutinized the afterimage his night vision had retained. What kind of an opponent was this guy? Reacher had closed his eyes and concentrated, two or three paces.

Generic Caucasian, medium height, medium weight, red face and fair hair tinted orange and yellow by the streetlights.

Cop or not?

Not. Because of the jacket. It was a boxy square-shouldered double-breasted style made of chestnut-colored leather. By day it would be a definite shade of red-brown. And it had a glossy patina. It was definitely shiny. Not American. Not even from the kind of fire-sale store that sells leather garments for forty-nine bucks. It was a foreign style. Eastern European, just like the suit the twisted old guy had worn in the plaza. Not cheap. Just different. Russian, Bulgarian, Estonian, somewhere in there.

So, not a cop.

Reacher walked on. He kept his own footsteps quiet and focused on the sounds behind him, forty yards back. Shorter strides, thicker soles, the slap of leather, the faint crunch of grit, the thump of a rubber three-quarter heel. This wasn’t Charlie. No way would anybody call this guy small. Not large, but definitely not small, either. And he didn’t have black hair. And this wasn’t the guy who had killed the girl. Not big enough. So, add one to the tally. Not four of them. Five of them. At least. Maybe more.

Plan?

Was this guy armed? Possibly, but only with a handgun. He hadn’t been carrying anything longer. And Reacher was sanguine about his chances as a moving target a hundred and twenty feet in front of a guy with a handgun. Handguns were across-the-room weapons, not down-the-street propositions. Average range for a successful engagement with a handgun was about twelve feet. He was ten times more distant. And he would hear the sound of the slide in the stillness. He would have time to react.

So, what was the plan? It was tempting to think about doubling back and taking the guy down. Just for fun. For retaliation. Reacher liked retaliation. Get your retaliation in first was his credo. Show them what they’re dealing with.

Maybe.

Or maybe not. Or maybe later.

He took a random turn and walked on. He kept his steps silent. He kept his pace steady. He let the guy behind him fall into the rhythm. Like hypnosis. Left, right, left, right. He forced everything out of his mind except the distant footsteps behind him. He zoomed in on them. Concentrated on them. They were there, faint but perceptible. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Left, right, left, right. Like hypnosis. He heard the sound of a cell phone being dialed. Just ten little electronic squawks, very quiet, almost inaudible, coming at him on the breeze in a random little sequence.

He walked on. Left, right, left, right. The streets were deserted. Downtown was dead after working hours were over. The city still had some way to go before it grew a vibrant urban community. That was for sure. He walked on. Heard faint sibilant whispering, forty yards behind him. The cell phone. Who are you talking to, pal? He walked on. Then he stopped on the next corner. Glanced right and turned left into a wide straight cross-street, behind the cover of a four-story building.

Then he ran. Five paces, ten, fifteen, twenty, fast and silent, across the street to the right-hand sidewalk, past the first alley he saw, into the second. He crouched back in the shadows, in a blank gray double doorway. A fire exit, maybe from a theater or a movie house. He lay down flat on his front. The guy had been used to a vertical target. Instinctively he would be looking six feet off the ground. A low shape on the floor would mean less to him.

Reacher waited. He heard footsteps on the opposite sidewalk. The guy had seen his quarry turn a tight radius from the left-hand sidewalk of one street onto the left-hand sidewalk of the next street. Therefore subconsciously he would concentrate on the left, not the right. His first thought would be to look for still-vertical shapes in the alleys and the doorways on the left.

Reacher waited. The footsteps kept on coming. Close now. Then Reacher saw the guy. He was on the left-hand sidewalk. He was moving slow. He was looking indecisive. He was glancing ahead, glancing left, glancing ahead. He had a cell phone up at his ear. He stopped. Stood still. Looked back over his right shoulder, at the doorways and the alleys on the other side of the street. Worth checking?

Yes.

The guy moved sideways and backwards like a crab, diagonally, facing the street ahead of him and searching the right-hand sidewalk all at the same time. He moved out of Reacher’s field of view like a film running in reverse. Reacher stood up silently and moved deeper into the alley into total darkness at its far end. He found a fat vertical kitchen vent and slid around behind it. Crouched on his haunches and waited.

It was a long wait. Then the footsteps came back. On the sidewalk. Into the alley. Slow, soft, careful. The guy was on his toes. No sound from the heels. Just the scrape of leather soles on grit. They rustled gently and low-level echoes of the sound came back off the alley’s walls. The guy came closer. And closer.

He came close enough to smell.

Cologne, sweat, leather. He stopped four feet from where Reacher was hidden and peered hopelessly into the darkness. Reacher thought: Another step and you’re history, pal. Just one more and it’s Game Over for you.

The guy turned around. Walked back to the street.

Reacher stood up and followed him, swift and silent. Tables turned. Now I’m behind you. Time to hunt the hunters.

Reacher was bigger than most human beings and in some ways quite clumsy, but he could be light on his feet when he needed to be and had always been good at covert pursuit. It was a skill born of long practice. Mostly it employed caution and anticipation. You had to know when your quarry was going to slow, stop, turn, check. And if you didn’t know, you had to err on the side of caution. Better to hide and fall ten extra yards behind than give yourself away.

The guy in the leather coat searched every alley and every doorway on both sides of the street. Not well, but adequately. He searched and he moved forward, prey to the mistake that all adequate people make: I didn’t screw up yet. He’s still somewhere up ahead. He spoke twice on his cell phone. Quietly, but with agitation obvious in the tenor of his whisper. Reacher slipped from shadow to shadow behind him, hanging well back because the bright lights at the end of the street were getting close. The guy’s searches became faster and more cursory. Hopeless and panicked, all at the same time. He made it to within twenty feet of the next turn and stopped dead and stood still.

And gave up. Just quit. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and listened to his phone and said something in reply and then dropped his arms to his sides and all the covert rigidity went out of his body. He slumped a little and walked straight ahead, fast and big and loud and obvious like a guy with no purpose in the world except getting directly from A to B. Reacher waited long enough to be certain it wasn’t a trick. Then he followed, moving silently from shadow to shadow.

Raskin walked past the sports bar’s door and headed up the street. He could see Linsky’s car in the distance. And Chenko’s. The two Cadillacs were parked nose-to-tail at the curb, waiting for him. Waiting for the failure. Waiting for the hole in the air. Well, here I am, he thought.

But Linsky was civil about it. Mainly because to criticize one of the Zec’s appointees was to criticize the Zec himself, and nobody would dare to do that.

“He probably took a wrong turn,” Linsky said. “Maybe he didn’t intend to be on that particular street at all. He probably doubled back through the alleys. Or else went into one of them to take a leak. Delayed himself and came out behind you.”

“Did you check behind you?” Vladimir asked.

“Of course I did,” Raskin lied.

“So what now?” Chenko asked.

“I’ll call the Zec,” Linsky said.

“He’ll be royally pissed,” Vladimir said. “We nearly had the guy.”

Linsky dialed his phone. Relayed the bad news and listened to the response. Raskin watched his face. But Linsky’s face was always unreadable. A skill born of long practice, and vital necessity. And it was a short call. A short response. Indecipherable. Just faint plastic sounds in the earpiece.

Linsky clicked off.

“We keep on looking,” he said. “On a half-mile radius of where Raskin last saw him. The Zec is sending us Sokolov. He says we’re sure of success with five of us.”

“We’re sure of nothing,” Chenko said. “Except a big pain in the ass and no sleep tonight.”

Linsky held out his phone. “So call the Zec and tell him that.”

Chenko said nothing.

“Take the north, Chenko,” Linsky said to him. “Vladimir, the south. Raskin, head back east. I’ll take the west. Sokolov can fill in where we need him when he gets here.”

Raskin headed back east, the way he had come, as fast as he could. He saw the sense in the Zec’s plan. He had last seen Reacher about fifteen minutes ago, and a furtive man moving cautiously couldn’t cover more than half a mile in fifteen minutes. So elementary logic dictated where Reacher must be. He was somewhere inside a circle a mile across. They had found him once. They could find him again.

He made it all the way down the wide straight cross-street and turned south toward the raised highway. Retracing his steps. He passed through the shadows under the highway and headed for the vacant lot on the next corner. Kept close to the wall. Made the turn.

Then the wall fell on him.

At least that was what it felt like. He was hit a staggering blow from behind and he fell to his knees and his vision went dark. Then he was hit again and his lights went out and he pitched forward on his face. Last thing he felt before he lost consciousness was a hand in his pocket, stealing his cell phone.

Reacher headed back under the highway with the cell phone warm in his hand. He leaned his shoulder against a concrete pillar as wide as a motel room and slid around it until his body was in the shadow and his hands were in the light from a lamp on a pole far above him. He took out the torn card with Emerson’s numbers on it and dialed his cell.

“Yes?” Emerson said.

“Guess who?” Reacher said.

“This isn’t a game, Reacher.”

“Only because you’re losing.”

Emerson said nothing.

“How easy am I to find?” Reacher asked.

No reply.

“Got a pen and paper?”

“Of course I do.”

“So listen up,” Reacher said. “And take notes.” He recited the plate numbers from the two Cadillacs. “My guess is one of those cars was in the garage before Friday, leaving the cone. You should trace the plates, check the tapes, ask some questions. You’ll find some kind of an organization with at least six men. I heard some names. Raskin and Sokolov, who seem to be low-level guys. Then Chenko and Vladimir. Vladimir looks good for the guy who killed the girl. He’s as big as a house. Then there’s some kind of a lieutenant whose name I didn’t get. He’s about sixty and has an old spinal injury. He talked to his boss and referred to him as the Zec.”

“Those are Russian names.”

“You think?”

“Except Zec. What kind of a name is Zec?”

“It’s not Zec. It’s the Zec. It’s a word. A word, being used as a name.”

“What does it mean?”

“Look it up. Read some history books.”

There was a pause. The sound of writing.

“You should come in,” Emerson said. “Talk to me face-to-face.”

“Not yet,” Reacher said. “Do your job and I’ll think about it.”

“I am doing my job. I’m hunting a fugitive. You killed that girl. Not some guy whose name you claim you heard, as big as a house.”

“One more thing,” Reacher said. “I think the guy called Chenko also goes by the name of Charlie and is James Barr’s friend.”

“Why?”

“The description. Small guy, dark, with black hair that sticks up like a brush.”

“James Barr has got a Russian friend? Not according to our inquiries.”

“Like I said, do your job.”

“We’re doing it. Nobody mentioned a Russian friend.”

“He sounds American. I think he was involved with what happened on Friday, which means maybe this whole crew was involved.”

“Involved how?”

“I don’t know. But I plan to find out. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“You’ll be in jail tomorrow.”

“Like I’m in jail now? Dream on, Emerson.”

“Where are you?”

“Close by,” Reacher said. “Sleep well, Detective.”

He clicked the phone off and put Emerson’s number back in his pocket and took out Helen Rodin’s. Dialed it and moved around the concrete pillar into deep shadow.

“Yes?” Helen Rodin said.

“This is Reacher.”

“Are you OK? The cop is right outside my door now.”

“Suits me,” Reacher said. “Suits him too, I expect. He’s probably getting forty bucks an hour for the overtime.”

“They put your face on the six o’clock news. It’s a big story.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Where are you?”

“Free and clear. Making progress. I saw Charlie. I gave Emerson his plate number. Are you making progress?”

“Not really. All I’ve got is five random names. No reason I can see why anybody told James Barr to shoot any one of them.”

“You need Franklin. You need research.”

“I can’t afford Franklin.”

“I want you to find that address in Kentucky for me.”

“Kentucky?”

“Where James Barr went to shoot.”

Reacher heard her juggle the phone and flip through paper. Then she came back and read out an address. It meant nothing to Reacher. A road, a town, a state, a zip.

“What’s Kentucky got to do with anything?” Helen asked.

Reacher heard a car on the street. Close by, to his left, fat tires rolling slow. He slid around the pillar and looked. A PD prowl car, crawling, lights off. Two cops in the front, craning their necks, looking right, looking left.

“Got to go,” he said. He clicked the phone off and put it on the ground at the base of the pillar. Emerson’s caller ID would have trapped the number and any cell phone’s physical location could be tracked by the recognition pulse that it sends to the network, once every fifteen seconds, regular as clockwork. So Reacher left the phone in the dirt and headed west, forty feet below the raised roadbed.

Ten minutes later he was opposite the back of the black glass tower, in the shadows under the highway, facing the vehicle ramp. There was an empty cop car parked on the curb. It looked still and cold. Settled. Like it had been there for a spell. The guy outside Helen’s door, Reacher thought. He crossed the street and walked down the ramp. Into the underground garage. The concrete was all painted dirty white and there were fluorescent tubes blazing every fifteen feet. There were pools of light and pools of darkness. Reacher felt like he was walking out of the wings across a succession of brightly-lit stages. The ceiling was low. There were fat square pillars holding up the building. The service core was in the center. The whole space was cold and silent and about forty yards deep and maybe three times as wide.

Forty yards deep.

Just like the new extension on First Street. Reacher stepped over and put his back against the front wall. Walked all the way across to the back wall. Thirty-five paces. He turned like a swimmer at the end of a lap and walked back. Thirty-five paces. He crossed diagonally to the far corner. The garage was dark back there. He threaded between two NBC vans and found the blue Ford Mustang he guessed belonged to Ann Yanni. It was clean and shiny. Recently waxed. It had small windows, because of the convertible top. A raked windshield. Tinted glass.

He tried the passenger door. Locked. He moved around the hood and tried the driver’s door. The handle moved. Unlocked. He glanced around and opened the door.

No alarm.

He reached inside and touched the unlock button. There was a triple thunk as both door locks and the trunk lock unlatched. He closed the driver’s door and stepped back to the trunk. The spare tire was under the floor. Nested inside the wheel were the jack and a length of metal pipe that both worked the jack and undid the wheel nuts. He took the pipe out and closed the trunk. Stepped around to the passenger side and opened the door and got inside the car.

The interior smelled of perfume and coffee. He opened the glove box and found a stack of road maps and a small leather folder the size of a purse diary. Inside the folder were an insurance slip and an auto registration, both made out to Ms. Janine Lorna Ann Yanni at a local Indiana address. He put the folder away again and closed the glove box. Found the right levers and lowered his seat as far as it would go. He reclined the back all the way, which wasn’t far. Then he moved the whole seat backward to give himself as much legroom as he could get. He untucked his shirt and rested the pipe in his lap and lay back in the seat. Stretched. He had about three hours to wait. He tried to sleep. Sleep when you can was the old army rule.

First thing Emerson did was contact the phone company. He confirmed that the number his caller ID had caught was a cell phone. The service contract was written out to a business operating under the name Specialized Services of Indiana. Emerson tasked a first-year detective to track the business and told the phone company to track the phone. Initial progress was mixed. Specialized Services of Indiana dead-ended because it was owned by an offshore trust in Bermuda and had no local address. But the phone company reported that the cell phone was stationary and was showing up on three cells at once, which meant it had to be in the downtown area and would be easy to triangulate.

Rosemary Barr sweet-talked her way past the Board of Corrections desk on the sixth floor of the hospital and was granted an out-of-hours visit with her brother. But when she got to his room she found he was deeply asleep. Her sweet talk was wasted. She sat for thirty minutes but James didn’t wake up. She watched the monitors. His heartbeat was strong and regular. His breathing was fine. He was still handcuffed and his head was still clamped but his body was perfectly still. She checked his chart, to make sure he was being properly cared for. She saw the doctor’s scribbled note: possible early-onset PA? She had no idea what that meant, and late in the evening she couldn’t find anyone willing to explain it to her.

The phone company marked the cell phone’s location on a large-scale city map and faxed it to Emerson. Emerson tore it out of the machine and spent five minutes trying to make sense of it. He was expecting to find the three arrows meeting at a hotel, or a bar, or a restaurant. Instead they met on a vacant lot under the raised highway. He had a brief image in his mind of Reacher sleeping rough in a cardboard box. Then he concluded that the phone was abandoned, which was confirmed ten minutes later by the patrol car he sent out to check.

And then just for formality’s sake he fired up his computer and entered the plate numbers Reacher had given him. They came back as late-model Cadillac DeVilles, both black, both registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. He wrote dead end on the sheet of paper and dropped it in a file.

Reacher woke up every time he heard the elevator motors start. The sound whined down the shaft through the cables and the moving cars rumbled. The first three times were false alarms. Just anonymous office people heading home after a long day at work. Every forty minutes or so they came down alone and walked wearily to their cars and drove away. Three times the tang of cold exhaust fumes drifted and three times the garage went quiet again and three times Reacher went back to sleep.

The fourth time, he stayed awake. He heard the elevator start and checked his watch. Eleven forty-five. Showtime. He waited and heard the elevator doors open. This time, it wasn’t just another lone guy in a suit. It was a big crowd. Eight or ten people. Noisy. It was the whole cast and crew from the NBC affiliate’s eleven o’clock news.

Reacher pressed himself down in the Mustang’s passenger seat and hid the tire iron underneath the tails of his shirt. It was cold against the skin of his stomach. He stared up at the fabric roof and waited.

A heavy guy in baggy jeans passed through the darkness within five feet of the Mustang’s front fender. He had a ragged gray beard and was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt under a torn cotton cardigan. Not on-screen talent. Maybe a cameraman. He walked on toward a silver pickup and climbed inside. Then came a man in a sharkskin suit and orange makeup. He had big hair and white teeth. Definitely on-screen talent, maybe weather, maybe sports. He passed by on the Mustang’s other side and got into a white Ford Taurus. Then came three women together, young, casual dress, maybe the studio director and the floor manager and the vision mixer. They squeezed between the Mustang’s trunk and a broadcast van. The car rocked three times as they nudged it. Then they split up and headed for their own separate rides.

Then came three more people.

Then came Ann Yanni.

Reacher didn’t notice her individually until she put her hand on her car’s door handle. She paused and called something out to one of the others. She got an answer, said something else, and then opened the door. She came in butt-first, swiveling and ducking her head. She was wearing old jeans and a new silk blouse. It looked expensive. Reacher guessed she had been on camera, but at an anchor’s desk, visible from the waist up only. Her hair was stiff with spray. She dumped herself in the seat and shut her door. Then she glanced to her right.

“Keep very quiet,” Reacher said to her. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

He jabbed the tire iron at her, under his shirt. Half-inch wide, long and straight, it looked plausible. She stared at it in shock. Face-to-face two feet away she looked thinner and older than she looked on the television screen. There were fine lines all around her eyes, full of makeup. But she was very beautiful. She had impossibly perfect features, bold and vivid and larger than life, like most TV people. Her blouse had a formal collar but was open three buttons. Prim and sexy, at the same time.

“Hands where I can see them,” Reacher said. “In your lap.” He didn’t want her to go for the horn. “Keys on the console.” He didn’t want her to hit the panic button. The new Fords he had driven had a little red button on the remote fob. He assumed it set off an alarm.

“Just sit tight,” he said. “Nice and quiet. We’ll be OK.”

He clicked the button on his side and locked the car.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“So do I,” he said.

He kept the tire iron in place and waited. Yanni sat still, hands in her lap, breathing hard, looking more and more scared as all around them her colleagues’ cars started up. Blue haze drifted. People drove away, one by one. No backward glances. The end of a long day.

“Keep very quiet,” Reacher said again, as a reminder. “Then we’ll be OK.”

Yanni glanced left, glanced right. Tension in her body.

“Don’t do it,” Reacher said. “Don’t do anything. Or I’ll pull the trigger. Gut shot. Or thigh. You’ll take twenty minutes to bleed out. Lots of pain.”

“What do you want?” Yanni asked.

“I want you to be quiet and sit still. Just for a few more minutes.”

She clamped her teeth and went quiet and sat still. The last car drove away. The white Taurus. The guy with the hair. The weatherman, or the sportscaster. There was tire squeal as he turned and engine noise as he gunned up the ramp. Then those sounds faded out and the garage went completely silent.

“What do you want?” Yanni asked again. Her voice wobbled. Her eyes were huge. She was trembling. She was thinking rape, murder, torture, dismemberment.

Reacher turned on the dome light.

“I want you to win the Pulitzer Prize,” he said.

“What?”

“Or the Emmy or whatever it is you guys get.”

“What?”

“I want you to listen to a story,” he said.

“What story?”

“Watch,” Reacher said.

He lifted his shirt. Showed her the tire iron resting against his stomach. She stared at it. Or at his shrapnel scar. Or both. He wasn’t sure. He balanced the tire iron in his palm. Held it up in the light.

“From your trunk,” he said. “Not a gun.”

He clicked the button on the door and unlocked the car.

“You’re free to go,” he said. “Whenever you want.”

She put her hand on the handle.

“But if you go, I go,” Reacher said. “You won’t see me again. You’ll miss the story. Someone else will get it.”

“We’ve been running your picture all night,” she said. “And the cops have got Wanted posters all over town. You killed Alexandra Dupree.”

Reacher shook his head. “Actually I didn’t, and that’s part of the story.”

“What story?” she said again.

“Last Friday,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t what it seemed.”

“I’m going to get out of the car now,” Yanni said.

“No,” Reacher said. “I’ll get out. I apologize if I upset you. But I need your help and you need mine. So I’ll get out. You lock the doors, start the car, keep your foot on the brake, and open your window an inch. We’ll talk through the window. You can drive off anytime you want.”

She said nothing. Just stared straight ahead as if she could make him vanish by not looking at him. He opened his door. Slid out and turned and laid the tire iron gently on the seat. Then he closed the door and just stood there. He tucked his shirt in. He heard the thunk of her door locks. She started her engine. Her brake lights flared red. He saw her reach up and switch off the dome light. Her face disappeared into shadow. He heard the transmission move out of Park. Her back-up lights flashed white as she moved the selector through Reverse into Drive. Then her brake lights went out and the engine roared and she drove off in a fast wide circle through the empty garage. Her tires squealed. Grippy rubber on smooth concrete. The squeals echoed. She lined up for the exit ramp and accelerated hard.

Then she jammed on the brakes.

The Mustang came to rest with its front wheels on the base of the ramp. Reacher walked toward it, crouching a little so he could see through the small rear window. No cell phone. She was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, hands on the wheel. The brake lights blazed red, so bright they hurt. The exhaust pipes burbled. White fumes kicked backward. Drops of water dripped out and made tiny twin pools on the floor.

Reacher walked around to her window and stayed three feet away. She buzzed the glass down an inch and a half. He dropped into a crouch so he could see her face.

“Why do I need your help?” she asked.

“Because Friday was over too soon for you,” he said. “But you can get it back. There’s another layer. It’s a big story. You’ll win prizes. You’ll get a better job. CNN will beat a path to your door.”

“You think I’m that ambitious?”

“I think you’re a journalist.”

“What does that mean?”

“That in the end, journalists like stories. They like the truth.”

She paused, almost a whole minute. Stared straight ahead. The car ticked and clicked as it warmed up. Reacher could sense the idle speed straining against the brakes. Then he saw her glance down and move her arm and shove the selector into Park. The Mustang rolled back six inches and stopped. Reacher shuffled sideways to stay level with the window. Yanni turned her head and looked straight at him.

“So tell me the story,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

He told her the story, and the truth. He sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, so as to appear immobile and unthreatening. He left nothing out. He ran through all the events, all the inferences, all the theories, all the guesses. At the end he just stopped talking and waited for her reaction.

“Where were you when Sandy was killed?” she asked.

“Asleep in the motor court.”

“Alone?”

“All night. Room eight. I slept very well.”

“No alibi.”

“You never have an alibi when you need one. That’s a universal law of nature.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“What do you want me to do?” she said.

“I want you to research the victims.”

She paused.

“We could do that,” she said. “We have researchers.”

“Not good enough,” Reacher said. “I want you to hire a guy called Franklin. Helen Rodin can tell you about him. She’s in this building, two floors above you.”

“Why hasn’t she hired this Franklin guy herself?”

“Because she can’t afford him. You can. I assume you’ve got a budget. A week of Franklin’s time probably costs less than one of your weather guy’s haircuts.”

“And then what?”

“Then we put it all together.”

“How big is this?”

“Pulitzer-sized. Emmy-sized. New-job-sized.”

“How would you know? You’re not in the business.”

“I was in the army. I would guess this is worth a Bronze Star. That’s probably a rough equivalent. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I should turn you in.”

“You can’t,” he said. “You pull out a phone and I’ll take off up the ramp. They won’t find me. They’ve been trying all day.”

“I don’t really care about prizes,” she said.

“So do it for fun,” he said. “Do it for professional satisfaction.”

He rocked sideways and took out the napkin with Helen Rodin’s number on it. Held it edge-on at the crack of the window. Yanni took it from him, delicately, trying to avoid touching his fingers with hers.

“Call Helen,” Reacher said. “Right now. She’ll vouch for me.”

Yanni took a cell phone out of her purse and turned it on. Watched the screen and waited until it was ready and then dialed the number. She passed the napkin back. Listened to the phone.

“Helen Rodin?” she said. Then she buzzed the window all the way up and Reacher didn’t hear any of the conversation. He gambled that it was really Helen she was speaking to. It was possible that she had looked at the napkin and dialed another number entirely. Not 911, because she had dialed ten digits. But she might have called the cops’ main desk. A reporter might know that number by heart.

But it was Helen on the line. Yanni buzzed the window down again and passed him her phone through the gap.

“Is this for real?” Helen asked him.

“I don’t think she’s decided yet,” Reacher said. “But it might work out.”

“Is it a good idea?”

“She’s got resources. And having the media watching our backs might help us.”

“Put her back on.”

Reacher passed the phone through the window. This time Yanni kept the glass down so that Reacher heard her end of the rest of the conversation. Initially she sounded skeptical, and then neutral, and then somewhat convinced. She arranged to meet on the fourth floor first thing in the morning. Then she clicked the phone off.

“There’s a cop outside her door,” Reacher said.

“She told me that,” Yanni said. “But they’re looking for you, not me.”

“What exactly are you going to do?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I guess I need to understand where you’re coming from first,” Yanni said. “Obviously you don’t care anything about James Barr himself. So is this all for the sister? Rosemary?”

Reacher watched her watching him. A woman, a journalist.

“Partly for Rosemary,” he said.

“But?”

“Mostly for the puppet master. He’s sitting there thinking he’s as smart as a whip. I don’t like that. Never have. Makes me want to show him what smart really is.”

“Like a challenge?”

“He had a girl killed, Yanni. She was just a dumb sweet kid looking for a little fun. He pushed open the wrong door there. So he deserves to have something come out at him. That’s the challenge.”

“You hardly knew her.”

“That doesn’t make her any less innocent.”

“OK.”

“OK what?”

“NBC will spring for Franklin. Then we’ll see where that takes us.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said. “I appreciate it.”

“You should.”

“I apologize again. For scaring you.”

“I nearly died of fright.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “I need to borrow your car.”

“My car?”

“Your car.”

“What for?”

“To sleep in and then to go to Kentucky in.”

“What’s in Kentucky?”

“Part of the puzzle.”

Yanni shook her head. “This is nuts.”

“I’m a careful driver.”

“I’d be aiding and abetting a fugitive criminal.”

“I’m not a criminal,” Reacher said. “A criminal is someone who has been convicted of a crime after a trial. Therefore I’m not a fugitive, either. I haven’t been arrested or charged. I’m a suspect, that’s all.”

“I can’t lend you my car after running your picture all night.”

“You could say you didn’t recognize me. It’s a sketch, not a photograph. Maybe it isn’t totally accurate.”

“Your hair is different.”

“There you go. I had it cut this morning.”

“But I would recognize your name. I wouldn’t lend my car to a stranger without at least knowing his name, would I?”

“Maybe I gave you a false name. You met a guy with a different name who didn’t look much like the sketch, that’s all.”

“What name?”

“Joe Gordon,” Reacher said.

“Who’s he?”

“Yankees’ second baseman in 1940. They finished third. Not Joe’s fault. He had a decent career. He played exactly one thousand games and got exactly one thousand hits.”

“You know a lot.”

“I’ll know more tomorrow if you lend me your car.”

“How would I get home tonight?”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Then you’ll know where I live.”

“I already know where you live. I checked your registration. To make sure it was your car.”

Yanni said nothing.

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d already be hurt, don’t you think?”

She said nothing.

“I’m a careful driver,” he said again. “I’ll get you home safe.”

“I’ll call a cab,” she said. “Better for you that way. The roads are quiet now and this is a distinctive car. The cops know it’s mine. They stop me all the time. They claim I’m speeding but really they want an autograph or they want to look down my shirt.”

She used her phone again and told a driver to meet her inside the garage. Then she climbed out of the car and left the motor running.

“Go park in a dark corner,” she said. “Safer for you if you don’t leave before the morning rush.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

“And do it now,” she said. “Your face has been all over the news and the cab driver will have been watching. At least I hope he was watching. I need the ratings.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said again.

Ann Yanni walked away and stood at the bottom of the ramp like she was waiting for a bus. Reacher slid into her seat and racked it back and reversed the car deep into the garage. Then he swung it around and parked nose-in in a distant corner. He shut it down and watched in the mirror. Five minutes later a green-and-white Crown Vic rolled down the ramp and Ann Yanni climbed into the back. The cab turned and drove out to the street and the garage went quiet.

Reacher stayed in Ann Yanni’s Mustang but he didn’t stay in the garage under the black glass tower. Too risky. If Yanni had a change of heart he would be a sitting duck. He could picture her getting hit by cold feet or a crisis of conscience and picking up the phone and calling Emerson. He’s fast asleep in my car in the corner of the garage at work. Right now. So three minutes after her cab left he started up again and drove out and around to the garage on First Street. It was empty. He went up to the second level and parked in the slot that James Barr had supposedly used. He didn’t put money in the meter. Just pulled out Yanni’s stack of road maps and planned his route and then pushed back on the wheel and reclined the seat and went back to sleep.

He woke himself up five hours later, before dawn, and set out on the drive south to Kentucky. He saw three cop cars before he passed the city limits. But they didn’t pay him any attention. They were too busy hunting Jack Reacher to waste time harassing a cute news anchor.

CHAPTER 12

Dawn happened somewhere way over in the east about an hour into the drive. The sky changed from black to gray to purple and then low orange sunlight came up over the horizon. Reacher switched his headlights off. He didn’t like to run with lights after daybreak. Just a subliminal thing, for the State Troopers camped out on the shoulders. Lights after dawn suggested all kinds of things, like fast through-the-night escapes from trouble hundreds of miles behind. The Mustang was already provocative enough. It was loud and aggressive and it was the kind of car that gets stolen a lot.

But the troopers that Reacher saw stayed put on the shoulder. He kept the car at a nothing-to-hide seventy miles an hour and touched the CD button on the dash. Got a blast of mid-period Sheryl Crow in return, which he didn’t mind at all. He stayed with it. Every day is a winding road, Sheryl told him. I know, he thought. Tell me about it.

He crossed the Ohio River on a long iron trestle with the sun low on his left. For a moment it turned the slow water into molten gold. Light reflected up at him from below the horizontal and made the inside of the car unnaturally bright. The trestle spars flashed past like a stroboscope. The effect was disconcerting. He closed his left eye and entered Kentucky squinting.

He kept south on a county road and waited for the Blackford River. According to Ann Yanni’s maps it was a tributary that flowed on a southeast-to-northwest diagonal into the Ohio. Near its source it formed a perfect equilateral triangle about three miles on a side with two rural routes. And according to Helen Rodin’s information James Barr’s favored firing range was somewhere inside that triangle.

But it turned out that the firing range was the triangle. Three miles out Reacher saw a wire fence on the left shoulder of the road that started directly after he crossed the Blackford on a bridge. The fence ran all the way to the next intersection and had Keep Out Live Gunfire signs on every fourth post. Then it turned a sixty-degree angle and ran three more miles north and east. Reacher followed it and where it met the Blackford again he found a gate and a gravel clearing and a complex of low huts. The gate was chained. It was hung with a hand-painted sign that read: Open 8 A.M. Until Dark.

He checked his watch. He was a half hour too early. On the other side of the road was an aluminum coach diner fronted by a gravel lot. He pulled in and stopped the Mustang right by the diner’s door. He was hungry. The Marriott’s room-service steak seemed like a long time ago.

He ate a long slow breakfast at a window table and watched the scene across the street. By eight o’clock there were three pickup trucks waiting to get into the range. At five after eight a guy showed up in a black diesel Humvee and mimed an apology for being late and unchained the gate. He stood aside and let his customers in ahead of him. Then he climbed back in his Humvee and followed them. He went through the same apologetic routine at the main hut door and then all four guys went inside and disappeared from view. Reacher called for another cup of coffee. He figured he would let the guy deal with the early rush and then stroll over when he had a moment to talk. And the coffee was good. Too good to pass up. It was fresh, hot, and very strong.

By eight-twenty he started to hear rifles firing. Dull percussive sounds, robbed of their power and impact by distance and wind and berms of earth. He figured the guns were about two hundred yards away, firing west. The shots came slow and steady, the sound of serious shooters aiming for the inner rings. Then he heard a string of lighter pops from a handgun. He listened to the familiar sounds for a spell and then left two bucks on the table and paid a twelve-dollar check at the register. Went outside and got back in the Mustang and drove through the lot and bumped up over the camber of the road and straight in through the range’s open gate.

He found the Humvee guy behind a waist-high counter in the main hut. Up close he was older than he had looked from a distance. More than fifty, less than sixty, sparse gray hair, lined skin, but ramrod straight. He had a weathered neck wider than his head and the sort of eyes that pegged him as an ex-Marine noncom even without the tattoos on his forearms and the souvenirs on the wall behind him. The tattoos were old and faded and the souvenirs were mostly pennants and unit patches. But the centerpiece of the display was a yellowing paper target framed under glass. It had a tight group of five .300 holes inside the inner ring and a sixth just clipping it.

“Help you?” the guy said. He was looking past Reacher’s shoulder, out the window, at the Mustang.

“I’m here to solve all your problems,” Reacher said.

“Really?”

“No, not really. I just want to ask you some questions.”

The guy paused. “About James Barr?”

“Good guess.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t speak to reporters.”

“I’m not a reporter.”

“That’s a five-liter Mustang out there with a couple of options on it. So it ain’t a cop car or a rental. And it’s got Indiana plates. And it’s got an NBC sticker in the windshield. Therefore my guess is you’re a reporter fixing to gin up a television story about how James Barr used my place to train and prepare.”

“Did he?”

“I told you, I’m not talking.”

“But Barr came here, right?”

“I’m not talking,” the guy said again. No malice in his voice. Just determination. No hostility. Just self-assurance. He wasn’t talking. End of story. The hut went quiet. Nothing to hear except the distant gunfire and a low rattling hum from another room. A refrigerator, maybe.

“I’m not a reporter,” Reacher said again. “I borrowed a reporter’s car, that’s all. To get down here.”

“So what are you?”

“Just a guy who knew James Barr way back. I want to know about his friend Charlie. I think his friend Charlie led him astray.”

The guy didn’t say: What friend? He didn’t ask: Who’s Charlie? He just shook his head and said, “Can’t help you.”

Reacher switched his gaze to the framed target.

“Is that yours?” he asked.

“Everything you see here is mine.”

“What range was it?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Because I’m thinking that if it was six hundred yards, you’re pretty good. If it was eight hundred, you’re very good. If it was a thousand, you’re unbelievable.”

“You shoot?” the guy asked.

“I used to,” Reacher said.

“Military?”

“Once upon a time.”

The guy turned around and lifted the frame off its hook. Laid it gently on the counter and turned it around for inspection. There was a handwritten inscription in faded ink across the bottom of the paper: 1978 U.S. Marine Corps 1000 Yard Invitational. Gunny Samuel Cash, third place. Then there were three signatures from three adjudicators.

“You’re Sergeant Cash?” Reacher said.

“Retired and scuffling,” the guy said.

“Me too.”

“But not from the Corps.”

“You can tell that just by looking?”

“Easily.”

“Army,” Reacher said. “But my dad was a Marine.”

Cash nodded. “Makes you half-human.”

Reacher traced his fingertip over the glass, above the bullet holes. A fine group of five, and a sixth that had drifted just a hair.

“Good shooting,” he said.

“I’d be lucky to do that at half the range today.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Time marches on.”

“You saying you could have done it back in the day?”

Reacher didn’t answer. Truth was he had actually won the Marine Corps 1000 Yard Invitational, exactly ten years after Cash had scraped third place. He had placed all his rounds through the precise center of the target, in a ragged hole a man could put his thumb through. He had displayed the shiny cup on one office shelf after another through twelve busy months. It had been an exceptional year. He had been at some kind of a peak, physically, mentally, every way there was. That year, he couldn’t miss, literally or metaphorically. But he hadn’t defended his title the following year, even though the MP hierarchy had wanted him to. Later, looking back, he understood how that decision marked two things: the beginning of his long slow divorce from the army, and the beginning of restlessness. The beginning of always moving on and never looking back. The beginning of never wanting to do the same thing twice.

“Thousand yards is a long way,” Gunny Cash said. “Truth is, since I left the Corps I haven’t met a man who could even put a mark on the paper.”

“I might have been able to clip the edge,” Reacher said.

Cash took the frame off the counter and turned and hung it back on its hook. He used the ball of his right thumb to level it.

“I don’t have a thousand-yard range here,” he said. “It would be a waste of ammunition and it would make the customers feel bad about themselves. But I’ve got a nice three-hundred that’s not being used this morning. You could try it. A guy who could clip the paper at a thousand should be able to do pretty well at three hundred.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Don’t you think?” Cash said.

“I guess,” Reacher said.

Cash opened a drawer and took out a new paper target. “What’s your name?”

“Bobby Richardson,” Reacher said. Robert Clinton Richardson, hit .301 in 1959, 141 hits in 134 games, but the Yanks still only finished third.

Cash took a roller ball pen from his shirt pocket and wrote R. Richardson, 300 yards, and the date and time on the paper.

“Record keeper,” Reacher said.

“Habit,” Cash said. Then he drew an X inside the inner ring. It was about half an inch tall and because of the slant of his handwriting a little less than half an inch wide. He left the paper on the counter and walked away into the room with the refrigerator noise. Came back out a minute later carrying a rifle. It was a Remington M24, with a Leupold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A standard-issue Marine sniper’s weapon. It looked to be well used but in excellent condition. Cash placed it sideways on the counter. Detached the magazine and showed Reacher that it was empty. Operated the bolt and showed Reacher that the chamber was empty, too. Reflex, routine, caution, professional courtesy.

“Mine,” he said. “Zeroed for three hundred yards exactly. By me myself, personally.”

“Good enough,” Reacher said. Which it was. An ex-Marine who in 1978 had been the third-best shooter in the world could be trusted on such matters.

“One shot,” Cash said. He took a single cartridge from his pocket. Held it up. It was a .300 Winchester round. Match grade. He stood it upright on the X on the paper target. It hid it entirely. Then he smiled. Reacher smiled back. He understood the challenge. He understood it perfectly. Hit the X and I’ll talk to you about James Barr.

At least it’s not hand-to-hand combat, Reacher thought.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Outside the air was still, and it was neither hot nor cold. Perfect shooting weather. No shivering, no risk of thermals or currents or shimmer. No wind. Cash carried the rifle and the target, and Reacher carried the cartridge in the palm of his hand. They climbed into Cash’s Humvee together and Cash fired it up with a loud diesel clatter.

“You like this thing?” Reacher asked, over the noise.

“Not really,” Cash said. “I’d be happier with a sedan. But it’s a question of image. Customers like it.”

The landscape was all low hills, covered in grass and stunted trees. Someone had used a bulldozer to carve wide straight paths through it. The paths were hundreds of yards apart and hundreds of yards long, and all of them were parallel. Each path was a separate rifle range. Each range was isolated from the others by natural hills and backed by high berms made from the earth scraped up by the bulldozer. The whole place looked like a half-built golf course. It was part green, part raw, all covered with red earth gashes. White-painted rocks and boulders delineated tracks through it, some for vehicles, some for foot traffic.

“My family has owned this land forever,” Cash said. “The range was my idea. I thought I could be like a golf pro, or tennis. You know those guys, they’ve been on the tour, they retire, they set up teaching afterward.”

“Did it work?” Reacher asked.

“Not really,” Cash said. “People come here to shoot, but to get a guy to admit he doesn’t really know how is like pulling teeth.”

Reacher saw three pickup trucks parked at separate shooting stations. The guys who had been waiting at eight o’clock were well into their morning sessions. They were all prone on coconut mats, firing, pausing, sighting, firing again.

“It’s a living,” Cash said, in answer to a question Reacher hadn’t asked. Then he pulled the Humvee off the main track and drove three hundred yards down the length of an empty range. He got out and clipped the paper target to a frame and got back in and K-turned the truck and headed back. He parked it neatly and shut it down.

“Good luck,” he said.

Reacher sat still for a moment. He was more nervous than he should have been. He breathed in and held it and felt the thrill of caffeine in his veins. Just a tiny microscopic tremble. Four fast cups of strong coffee were not an ideal preparation for accurate long-distance shooting.

But it was only three hundred yards. Three hundred yards, with a good rifle, no heat, no cold, still air. More or less the same thing as pressing the muzzle into the center of the target and pulling the trigger. He could do it with his eyes closed. There was no fundamental problem with the marksmanship. The problem was with the stakes. He wanted the puppet master more than he had wanted the Marines’ cup all those years before. A lot more. He didn’t know why. But that was the problem.

He breathed out. It was only three hundred yards. Not six. Not eight. Not a thousand. No big deal.

He slid out of the Humvee and took the rifle off the back seat. Carried it across rough earth to the coconut mat. Placed it gently with its bipod feet a yard back from the edge. Bent down and loaded it. Stepped back behind it and lined himself up and crouched, knelt, lay full length. He snuggled the stock into his shoulder. Eased his neck left and right and looked around. It felt like he was alone in the middle of nowhere. He ducked his head. Closed his left eye and moved his right eye to the scope. Draped his left hand over the barrel and pressed down and back. Now he had a tripod mount. The bipod, and his shoulder. Solid. He spread his legs and turned his feet out so they were flat on the mat. Drew his left leg up a little and dug the sole of his shoe into the mat’s fibers so the deadweight of the limb anchored his position. He relaxed and let himself sprawl. He knew he must look like a guy who had been shot, instead of a guy preparing to shoot.

He gazed through the scope. Saw the hypervivid image of great optics. He acquired the target. It looked close enough to touch. He laid the reticle where the two strokes of the X met. Squeezed the slack out of the trigger. Relaxed. Breathed out. He could feel his heart. It felt like it was loose in his chest. The caffeine was buzzing in his veins. The reticle was dancing over the X. It was hopping and jerking, left and right, up and down, in a tiny random circle.

He closed his right eye. Willed his heart to stop. Breathed out and kept his lungs empty, one second, two. Then again, in, out, hold. He pulled all his energy downward, into his gut. Let his shoulders slacken. Let his muscles relax. Let himself settle. He opened his eye again and saw that the reticle was still. He stared at the target. Feeling it. Wanting it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked and roared and the muzzle blast blew a cloud of dust out of the coconut mat and obscured his view. He lifted his head and coughed once and ducked back to the scope.

Bull’s-eye.

The X was gone. There was a neat hole drilled through the center of it, leaving only four tiny ballpoint ticks visible, one at the top and one at the bottom of each stroke. He coughed again and pushed back and stood up. Cash dropped down in his place and used the scope to check the result.

“Good shooting,” he said.

“Good rifle,” Reacher said.

Cash operated the bolt and the spent case fell out on the mat. He got to his knees and picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then he stood up and carried the rifle back toward the Humvee.

“So do I qualify?” Reacher called after him.

“For what?”

“For talking to.”

Cash turned around. “You think this was a test?”

“I sincerely hope it was.”

“You might not want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Try me,” Reacher said.

Cash nodded. “We’ll talk in the office.”

They detoured up the length of the range for Cash to retrieve the target. Then they turned and drove back to the huts. They passed the pickup guys. They were still blasting away. Cash parked and they went inside and Cash filed Reacher’s target in a drawer, under R for Richardson. Then he danced his fingers forward to B for Barr and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper.

“You looking to show your old buddy didn’t do it?” he asked.

“He wasn’t my buddy,” Reacher said. “I knew him once, is all.”

“And?”

“I don’t remember him being that great a shooter.”

“TV news said it was pretty short range.”

“With moving targets and deflection angles.”

“TV said the evidence is pretty clear.”

“It is,” Reacher said. “I’ve seen it.”

“Check these out,” Cash said.

He dealt the filed targets like a deck of cards, all along the length of the counter. Then he butted them edge-to-edge and squared them off to make room for more. Then he started a second row, directly underneath the first. In the end he had thirty-two sheets of paper displayed, two long rows of repetitive concentric circles, all of them marked J. Barr, 300 yards, with times and dates stretching back three years.

“Read them and weep,” Cash said.

Every single target showed an expert score.

Reacher stared at them, one after the other. Each inner ring was tightly packed with clean, crisp holes. Tight clusters, big and obvious. Thirty-two targets, ten rounds each, three hundred twenty rounds, all of them dead-on maximum scores.

“This is everything he did?” Reacher asked.

Cash nodded. “Like you said, I’m a record keeper.”

“What gun?”

“His own Super Match. Great rifle.”

“Did the cops call you?”

“Guy called Emerson. He was pretty decent about it. Because I’ve got to think about my own ass, because Barr trained here. I don’t want to damage my professional reputation. I’ve put in a lot of work here, and this place could get a bad name.”

Reacher scanned the targets, one more time. Remembered telling Helen Rodin: They don’t forget.

“What about his buddy Charlie?” he asked.

“Charlie was hopeless by comparison.”

Cash butted James Barr’s targets into a pile and put them back in the B slot. Then he opened another drawer and ran his fingers back to S and took out another sheaf of paper.

“Charlie Smith,” he said. “He was military too, by the look of him. But Uncle Sam’s money didn’t buy anything long-term there.”

He went through the same routine, laying out Charlie’s targets in two long rows. Thirty-two of them.

“They always showed up together?” Reacher asked.

“Like peanut butter and jelly,” Cash said.

“Separate ranges?”

“Separate planets,” Cash said.

Reacher nodded. In terms of numerical score Charlie’s targets were much worse than James Barr’s. Way worse. They were the product of a very poor shooter. One had just four hits, all of them outside the outer ring, one each in the quadrants in the corners. Across all thirty-two targets he had just eight hits inside the inner ring. One was a dead-on bull’s-eye. Dumb luck, maybe, or wind or drift or a random thermal. Seven were very close to clipping the black. Apart from that, Charlie was all over the place. Most of his rounds must have missed altogether. Percentage-wise most of his hits happened in the white between the two outer rings. Low, low scores. But his hits weren’t precisely random. There was a weird kind of consistency there. He was aiming, but he was missing. Maybe some kind of bad astigmatism in his eyes.

“What type of a guy was he?” Reacher asked.

“Charlie?” Cash said. “Charlie was a blank slate. Couldn’t read him at all. If he had been a better shot, he’d have come close to frightening me.”

“Small guy, right?”

“Tiny. Weird hair.”

“Did they talk to you much?”

“Not really. They were just two guys down from Indiana, getting off on shooting guns. I get a lot of that here.”

“Did you watch them shoot?”

Cash shook his head. “I learned never to watch anybody. People take it as a criticism. I let them come to me, but nobody ever does.”

“Barr bought his ammo here, right?”

“Lake City. Expensive.”

“His gun wasn’t cheap, either.”

“He was worth it.”

“What gun did Charlie use?”

“The same thing. Like a matched pair. In his case it was a comedy. Like a fat guy who buys a carbon fiber racing bike.”

“You got separate handgun ranges here?”

“One indoor. People use it if it rains. Otherwise I let them blast away outside, anywhere they want. I don’t care much for handguns. No art to them.”

Reacher nodded and Cash swept Charlie’s targets into a pile, careful to keep them in correct date order. Then he stacked them together and put them back in the S drawer.

“Smith is a common name,” Reacher said. “Actually I think it’s the most common name in America.”

“It was genuine,” Cash said. “I see a driver’s license before anyone gets membership.”

“Where was he from originally?”

“Accent? Somewhere way north.”

“Can I take one of James Barr’s targets?”

“What the hell for?”

“For a souvenir,” Reacher said.

Cash said nothing.

“It won’t go anywhere,” Reacher said. “I’m not going to sell it on the internet.”

Cash said nothing.

“Barr’s not coming back,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. And if you really want to cover your ass you should dump them all anyway.”

Cash shrugged and turned back to the file drawer.

“The most recent one,” Reacher said. “That would be best.”

Cash thumbed through the stack and pulled a sheet. Handed it across the counter. Reacher took it and folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Good luck with your buddy,” Cash said.

“He’s not my buddy,” Reacher said. “But thanks for your help.”

“You’re welcome,” Cash said. “Because I know who you are. I recognized you when you got behind the gun. I never forget the shape of a prone position. You won the Invitational ten years after I was in it. I was watching, from the crowd. Your real name is Reacher.”

Reacher nodded.

“Polite of you,” Cash said. “Not to mention it after I told you how I only came in third.”

“You had tougher competition,” Reacher said. “Ten years later it was all a bunch of deadbeats.”

He stopped at the last gas station in Kentucky and filled Yanni’s tank. Then he called Helen Rodin from a pay phone.

“Is the cop still there?” he asked.

“Two of them,” she said. “One in the lobby, one at my door.”

“Did Franklin start yet?”

“First thing this morning.”

“Any progress?”

“Nothing. They were five very ordinary people.”

“Where is Franklin’s office?”

She gave him an address. Reacher checked his watch. “I’ll meet you there at four o’clock.”

“How was Kentucky?”

“Confusing,” he said.

He recrossed the Ohio on the same trestle bridge with Sheryl Crow telling him all over again about how every day was a winding road. He cranked up the volume and turned left and headed west. Ann Yanni’s maps showed a highway cloverleaf forty miles ahead. He could turn north there and a couple hours later he could scoot past the whole city, forty feet in the air. It seemed like a better idea than trying the surface streets. He figured Emerson would be getting seriously frustrated. And then seriously enraged, at some point during the day. Reacher would have been. Reacher had been Emerson for thirteen years, and in this kind of a situation he would have been kicking ass big time, blanketing the streets with uniforms, trying everything.

He found the cloverleaf and joined the highway going north. He killed the CD when it started over again and settled in for the cruise. The Mustang felt pretty good at seventy miles an hour. It rumbled along, lots of power, no finesse at all. Reacher figured if he could put that drivetrain in some battered old sedan body, then that would be his kind of car.

Bellantonio had been at work in his crime lab since seven o’clock in the morning. He had fingerprinted the cell phone found abandoned under the highway and come up with nothing worth a damn. Then he had copied the call log. The last number dialed was Helen Rodin’s cell. Last-but-one was Emerson’s cell. Clearly Reacher had made both of those calls. Then came a long string of calls to several different cell phones registered to Specialized Services of Indiana. Maybe Reacher had made those too, or maybe he hadn’t. No way of knowing. Bellantonio wrote it all up, but he knew Emerson wouldn’t do anything with it. The only viable pressure point was the call to Helen Rodin, and no way could Emerson start hassling a defense lawyer about a conversation with a witness, suspect or not. That would be a waste of breath.

So he moved on to the garage tapes. He had four days’ worth, ninety-six hours, nearly three thousand separate vehicle movements. His staff had logged them all. Only three of them were Cadillacs. Indiana was the same as most heartland states. People bought pickup trucks as a first preference, then SUVs, then coupes, then convertibles. Regular sedans claimed a tiny market share, and most of them were Toyotas or Hondas or mid-sized domestics. Full-sized turnpike cruisers were very rare, and premium brands rarest of all.

The first Cadillac on tape was a bone-white Eldorado. A two-door coupe, several years old. It had parked before ten in the morning on the Wednesday and stayed parked for five hours. The second Cadillac on tape was a new STS, maybe red or gray, possibly light blue. Hard to be sure, with the murky monochrome picture. Whatever, it had parked soon after lunch on the Thursday and stayed there for two hours.

The third Cadillac was a black DeVille. It was caught on tape entering the garage just after six o’clock in the morning on the Friday. Black Friday, as Bellantonio was calling it. At six o’clock in the morning the garage would have been more or less completely empty. The tape showed the DeVille sweeping up the ramp, fast and confident. It showed it leaving again after just four minutes.

Long enough to place the cone.

The driver wasn’t really visible in either sequence. There was just a gray blur behind the windshield. Maybe it was Barr, maybe it wasn’t. Bellantonio wrote it all up for Emerson. He made a mental note to check through again to determine if four minutes was the shortest stay on the tapes. He suspected it was, easily.

Then he scanned the forensic sweep through Alexandra Dupree’s garden apartment. He had assigned a junior guy to do it, because it wasn’t the crime scene. There was nothing of interest there. Nothing at all. Except the fingerprint evidence. The apartment was a mess of prints, like all apartments are. Most of them were the girl’s, but there were four other sets. Three of them were unidentifiable.

The fourth set of prints belonged to James Barr.

James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. In the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. No doubt about it. Clear prints, perfect matches. Unmistakable.

Bellantonio wrote it up for Emerson.

Then he read a report just in from the medical examiner. Alexandra Dupree had been killed by a single massive blow to the right temple, delivered by a left-handed assailant. She had fallen onto a gravel surface that contained organic matter including grass and dirt. But she had been found in an alley paved with limestone. Therefore her body had been moved at least a short distance between death and discovery. Other physiological evidence confirmed it.

Bellantonio took a new sheet of memo paper and addressed two questions to Emerson: Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a vehicle?

The Zec spent the morning hours deciding what to do with Raskin. Raskin had failed three separate times. First with the initial tail, then by getting attacked from behind, and finally by letting his cell phone get stolen. The Zec didn’t like failure. He didn’t like it at all. At first he considered just pulling Raskin off the street and restricting him to duty in the video room on the ground floor of the house. But why would he want to depend on a failure to monitor his security?

Then Linsky called. They had been searching fourteen straight hours and had found no sign of the soldier.

“We should go after the lawyer now,” Linsky said. “After all, nothing can happen without her. She’s the focal point. She’s the one making the moves here.”

“That raises the stakes,” the Zec said.

“They’re already pretty high.”

“Maybe the soldier’s gone for good.”

“Maybe he is,” Linsky said. “But what matters is what he left behind. In the lawyer’s head.”

“I’ll think about it,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”

“Should we keep on looking?”

“Tired?”

Linsky was exhausted and his spine was killing him.

“No,” he lied. “I’m not tired.”

“So keep on looking,” the Zec said. “But send Raskin back to me.”

Reacher slowed to fifty where the highway first rose on its stilts. He stayed in the center lane and let the spur that ran behind the library pass by on his right. He kept on north for two more miles and came off at the cloverleaf that met the four-lane with the auto dealers and the parts store. He went east on the county road and then turned north again, on Jeb Oliver’s rural route. After a minute he was deep in the silent countryside. The irrigation booms were turning slowly and the sun was making rainbows in the droplets.

The heartland. Where the secrets are.

He coasted to a stop next to the Olivers’ mailbox. No way was the Mustang going to make it down the driveway. The center hump would have ripped all the parts off the bottom. The suspension, the exhaust system, the axle, the diff, whatever else was down there. Ann Yanni wouldn’t have been pleased at all. So he slid out and left the car where it was, low and crouched and winking blue in the sun. He picked his way down the track, feeling every rock and stone through his thin soles. Jeb Oliver’s red Dodge hadn’t been moved. It was sitting right there, lightly dusted with brown dirt and streaked with dried dew. The old farmhouse was quiet. The barn was closed and locked.

Reacher ignored the front door. He walked around the side of the house to the back porch. Jeb’s mother was right there on her glider. She was dressed the same but this time she had no bottle. Just a manic stare out of eyes as big as saucers. She had one foot hooked up under her and was using the other to scoot the chair about twice as fast as she had before.

“Hello,” she said.

“Jeb not back yet?” Reacher said.

She just shook her head. Reacher heard all the sounds he had heard before. The irrigation hiss, the squeak of the glider, the creak of the porch board.

“Got a gun?” he asked.

“I don’t hold with them,” she said.

“Got a phone?” he asked.

“Disconnected,” she said. “I owe them money. But I don’t need them. Jeb lets me use his cell if I need it.”

“Good,” Reacher said.

“How the hell is that good? Jeb’s not here.”

“That’s exactly what’s good about it. I’m going to break into your barn and I don’t want you calling the cops while I’m doing it. Or shooting me.”

“That’s Jeb’s barn. You can’t go in there.”

“I don’t see how you can stop me.”

He turned his back on her and continued down the track. It curved a little and led directly to the barn’s double doors. The doors, like the barn itself, were built of old planks alternately baked and rotted by a hundred summers and a hundred winters. Reacher touched them with his knuckles and felt a dry hollowness. The lock was brand new. It was a U-shaped bicycle lock like the ones city messengers used. One leg of the U ran through two black steel hasps that were bolted through the planks of the doors. Reacher touched the lock. Shook it. Heavy steel, warm from the sun. It was a pretty solid arrangement. No way of cutting it, no way of breaking it.

But a lock was only as strong as what it was fixed to.

Reacher grabbed the straight end of the lock at the bottom of the U. Pulled on it gently, and then harder. The doors sagged toward him and stopped. He put the flat of his palm against the wood and pushed them back. Held them closed with a straight left arm and yanked on the lock with his right. The bolts gave a little, but not much. Reacher figured that Jeb must have used washers on the back, under the nuts. Maybe big wide ones. They were spreading the load.

He thought: OK, more load.

He held the straight part of the lock with both hands and leaned back like a water-skier. Pulled hard and smashed his heel into the wood under the hasps. His legs were longer than his arms, so he was cramped and the kick didn’t carry much power. But it carried enough. The old wood splintered a little and something gave half an inch. He regrouped and tried it again. Something gave a little more. Then a plank in the left-hand door split completely and two bolts pulled out. Reacher put his left hand flat on the door and got his right-hand fingers hooked in the gap with a backhand grip. He took a breath and counted to three and jerked hard. The last bolt fell out and the whole lock assembly hit the ground and the doors sagged all the way open. Reacher stepped away and folded the doors back flush with the walls and let the sunlight in.

He guessed he was expecting to see a meth lab, maybe with workbenches and beakers and scales and propane burners and piles of new Baggies ready to receive the product. Or else a big stash, ready for onward distribution.

He saw none of that.

Bright light leaked in through long vertical gaps between warped planks. The barn was maybe forty feet by twenty inside. It had a bare earth floor, swept and compacted. It was completely empty except for a well-used pickup truck parked in the exact center of the space.

The truck was a Chevy Silverado, several years old. It was light brown, like fired clay. It was a working vehicle. It had been built down to a plain specification. A base model. Vinyl seats, steel wheels, undramatic tires. The load bed was clean but scratched and dented. It had no license plates. The doors were locked and there was no sign of a key anywhere.

“What’s that?”

Reacher turned and saw Jeb Oliver’s mother behind him. She had her hand tight on the doorjamb, like she was unwilling to cross the threshold.

“It’s a truck,” Reacher said.

“I can see that.”

“Is it Jeb’s?”

“I never saw it before.”

“What did he drive before that big red thing?”

“Not this.”

Reacher stepped closer to the truck and peered in through the driver’s-side window. Manual shift. Dirt and grime. High mileage. But no trash. The truck had been someone’s faithful servant, used but not abused.

“I never saw it before,” the woman said again.

It looked like it had been there for a long time. It was settled on soft tires. It didn’t smell of oil or gasoline. It was cold, inert, filmed with dust. Reacher got on his knees and checked underneath. Nothing to see. Just a frame, caked with old dirt, clipped by rocks and gravel.

“How long has this thing been in here?” he asked from the floor.

“I don’t know.”

“When did he put the lock on the door?”

“Maybe two months ago.”

Reacher stood up again.

“What did you expect to find?” the woman asked him.

Reacher turned to face her and looked at her eyes. The pupils were huge.

“More of what you had for breakfast,” he said.

She smiled. “You thought Jeb was cooking in here?”

“Wasn’t he?”

“His stepfather brings it by.”

“You married?”

“Not anymore. But he still brings it by.”

“Jeb was using on Monday night,” Reacher said.

The woman smiled again. “A mother can share with her kid. Can’t she? What else is a mother for?”

Reacher turned away and looked at the truck one more time. “Why would he keep an old truck locked in here and a new truck out in the weather?”

“Beats me,” the woman said. “Jeb always does things his own way.”

Reacher backed out of the barn and walked each door closed. Then he used the balls of his thumbs to press the bolts back into their splintered holes. The weight of the lock dragged them all halfway out again. He got it looking as neat as he could, and then he left it alone and walked away.

“Is Jeb ever coming back?” the woman called after him.

Reacher didn’t answer.

The Mustang was facing north, so Reacher drove north. He put the CD player on loud and kept going ten miles down an arrow-straight road, aiming for a horizon that never arrived.

Raskin dug his own grave with a Caterpillar backhoe. It was the same machine that had been used to level the Zec’s land. It had a twenty-inch entrenching shovel with four steel teeth on it. The shovel took long slow bites of the soft earth and laid them aside. The engine roared and slowed, roared and slowed, and pulsed clouds of diesel exhaust filled the Indiana sky.

Raskin had been born during the Soviet Union, and he had seen a lot. Afghanistan, Chechnya, unthinkable upheaval in Moscow. A guy in his position could have been dead many times over, and that fact combined with his natural Russian fatalism made him utterly indifferent to his fate.

“Ukase,” the Zec had said. An order from an absolute authority.

“Nichevo,” Raskin had said in reply. Think nothing of it.

So he worked the backhoe. He chose a spot concealed from the stone-crushers’ view by the bulk of the house. He dug a neat trench twenty inches wide, six feet long, six feet deep. He piled the excavated earth to his right, to the east, like a high barrier between himself and home. When he was finished he backed the machine away from the hole and shut it down. Climbed down from the cab and waited. There was no escape. No point in running. If he ran, they would find him anyway, and then he wouldn’t need a grave. They would use garbage bags, five or six of them. They would use wire ties to seal the several parts of him into cold black plastic. They would put bricks in with his flesh and throw the bags in the river.

He had seen it happen before.

In the distance the Zec came out of his house. A short wide man, ancient, stooped, walking at a moderate speed, exuding power and energy. He picked his way across the uneven ground, glancing down, glancing forward. Fifty yards, a hundred. He came close to Raskin and stopped. He put his ruined hand in his pocket and came out with a small revolver, his thumb and the stump of his index finger pincered through the trigger guard. He held it out, and Raskin took it from him.

“Ukase,” the Zec said.

“Nichevo,” Raskin replied. A short, amiable, self-deprecating sound, like de rien in French, like de nada in Spanish, like prego in Italian. Please. I’m yours to command.

“Thank you,” the Zec said.

Raskin stepped away to the narrow end of the trench. Opened the revolver’s cylinder and saw a single cartridge. Closed the cylinder again and turned it until it was lined up right. Then he pulled the hammer back and put the barrel in his mouth. He turned around, so that he was facing the Zec and his back was to the trench. He shuffled backward until his heels were on the edge of the hole. He stood still and straight and balanced and composed, like an Olympic diver preparing for a difficult backward pike off the high board.

He closed his eyes.

He pulled the trigger.

For a mile around black crows rose noisily into the air. Blood and brain and bone arced through the sunlight in a perfect parabola. Raskin’s body fell backward and landed stretched out and flat in the bottom of the trench. The crows settled back to earth and the faint noise of the distant stone-crushing machines rolled back in and sounded like silence. Then the Zec clambered up into the Caterpillar’s cab and started the engine. The levers all had knobs as big as pool balls, which made them easy to manipulate with his palms.

Reacher stopped fifteen miles north of the city and parked the Mustang on a big V-shaped gravel turnout made where the corners of two huge circular fields met. There were fields everywhere, north, south, east, and west, one after the other in endless ranks and files. Each one had its own irrigation boom. Each boom was turning at the same slow, patient pace.

He shut the engine down and slid out of the seat. He stood and stretched and yawned. The air was full of mist from the booms. Up close, the booms were like massive industrial machines. Like alien spaceships recently landed. There was a central vertical standpipe in the middle of each field, like a tall metal chimney. The boom arm came off it horizontally and bled water out of a hundred spaced nozzles all along its length. At the outer end the arm had a vertical leg supporting its weight. At the bottom of the leg was a wheel with a rubber tire. The wheel was as big as an airplane’s landing gear. It rolled around a worn track, endlessly.

Reacher watched and waited until the wheel in the nearest field came close. He walked over and stepped alongside it. Kept pace with it. The tire came almost to his waist. The boom itself was way over his head. He kept the wheel on his right and tracked it through its long clockwise circle. He was walking through fine mist. It was cold. The boom hissed loudly. The wheel climbed gentle rises and rolled into low depressions. It was a long, long circle. The boom was maybe a hundred and fifty feet long, which made the perimeter track more than three hundred yards. Pi times diameter. Area was pi times the radius squared, which would therefore be more than seventy-eight hundred square yards. More than one and a half acres. Which meant that the wasted corners added up to a little less than twenty-two hundred square yards. More than twenty-one percent. More than five hundred square yards in each corner. Like the shapes in the corners of a target. The Mustang was parked on one of the corners, proportionally the same size as a bullet hole.

Like one of Charlie’s bullet holes, in the corners of the paper.

Reacher arrived back where he had started, a little wet, his boat shoes muddy. He stepped away from the circle and stood still on the gravel, facing west. On the far horizon a cloud of crows rose suddenly and then settled. Reacher got back in the car and turned the ignition on. Found the clamps on the header rail and the switch on the dash and lowered the roof. He checked his watch. He had two hours until his rendezvous at Franklin’s office. So he lay back in the seat and let the sun dry his clothes. He took the folded target out of his pocket and looked at it for a long time. He sniffed it. Held it up to the sun and let the light shine through the crisp round holes. Then he put it away again in his pocket. He stared upward and saw nothing but sky. He closed his eyes against the glare and started to think about ego and motive, and illusion and reality, and guilt and innocence, and the true nature of randomness.

CHAPTER 13

Emerson read through Bellantonio’s reports. Saw that Reacher had called Helen Rodin. He wasn’t surprised. It was probably just one of many calls. Lawyers and busybodies working hard to rewrite history. No big shock there. Then he read Bellantonio’s twin questions: Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a vehicle?

Answers: probably, and probably. Southpaws weren’t rare. Line up twenty people, and four or five of them would be left-handed. And Reacher had access to a vehicle now, that was for damn sure. He wasn’t in town, and he hadn’t left on a bus. Therefore he had a vehicle, and probably had had one all along.

Then Emerson read the final sheet: James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. What the hell was that about?

According to Ann Yanni’s road maps Franklin’s office was dead-center in a tangle of streets right in the heart of the city. Not an ideal destination. Not by any means. Construction, the start of rush hour, slow traffic on surface streets. Reacher was going to be putting a lot of trust in the tint in the Ford Motor Company’s glass. That was for sure.

He started the motor and put the roof back up. Then he eased off the turnout and headed south. He repassed the Oliver place after twelve minutes, turned west on the county road, and then south again on the four-lane into town.

Emerson went back to Bellantonio’s cell phone report. Reacher had called Helen Rodin. They had business. They had matters to discuss. He would go back to her, sooner or later. Or she would go to him. He picked up the phone. Spoke to his dispatcher.

“Put an unmarked car on Helen Rodin’s office,” he said. “If she leaves the building, have her followed.”

Reacher drove past the motor court. He stayed low in the seat and glanced sideways. No sign of any activity. No obvious surveillance. He passed the barbershop, and the gun store. Traffic slowed him as he approached the raised highway. Then it slowed him more, to walking speed. His face was feet away from the pedestrians on his right. Feet away from the stalled drivers on his left. Four lanes of traffic, the two inbound lanes moving slow, the two outbound lanes static.

He wanted to get away from the sidewalk. He put his turn signal on and forced his way into the next lane. The driver behind his shoulder wasn’t happy. Don’t sweat it, Reacher thought. I learned to drive in a deuce-and-a-half. Time was when I would have rolled right over you.

The left-hand lane was moving a little faster. Reacher crept past cars on his right. Glanced ahead. There was a police cruiser three cars in front. In the right-hand lane. There was a green light in the distance. Traffic in the left-hand lane was approaching it slowly. Traffic in the right-hand lane was approaching it slower still. Each successive car reached the painted line and paused a moment and then jumped the gap. Nobody wanted to block the box. Now Reacher was two cars behind the cop. He hung back. The irritated guy behind him honked. Reacher inched forward. Now he was one car behind the cop.

The light went yellow.

The car in front of Reacher sprinted.

The light went red.

The cop stopped on the line and Reacher stopped directly alongside him.

He put his elbow on the console and cupped his head in his hand. Spread his fingers wide and covered as much of his face as he could. Stared straight head, up under the header rail, looking at the light, willing it to change.

Helen Rodin rode down two floors in the elevator and met Ann Yanni in the NBC reception area. NBC was paying for Franklin’s time, so it was only fair that Yanni should be at the conference. They rode down to the garage together and got into Helen’s Saturn. Came up the ramp and out into the sunshine. Helen glanced right and made a left. Didn’t register the gray Impala that moved off the curb twenty yards behind her.

The light stayed red an awful long time. Then it went green and the guy behind Reacher honked and the cop turned to look. Reacher took off through his field of vision and didn’t look back. He filtered into a left-turn lane and the cop car swept past on his right. Reacher watched it jam up again ahead. He didn’t want to go through the side-by-side thing again so he stuck with the left turn. Found himself back in the street with Martha’s grocery on it. It was clogged with slow traffic. He shifted on the seat and checked his pants pocket. Sifted through the coins by feel. Found a quarter. Debated with himself, twenty yards, thirty, forty.

Yes.

He pulled into Martha’s tiny lot. Left the engine running and slid out of the seat and danced around the hood to the pay phone on the wall. He put his quarter in the slot and took out Emerson’s torn card. Chose the station house number and dialed.

“Help you?” the desk guy said.

“Police?” Reacher asked.

“Go ahead, sir.”

Reacher kept his voice fast and light, rushed and low. “That guy on the Wanted poster? The thing you guys were passing around?”

“Yes, sir?”

“He’s right here, right now.”

“Where?”

“In my drive-through, the one on the four-lane north of town next to the tire store. He’s inside right now, at the counter, eating.”

“You sure it’s the guy?”

“Looks just like the picture.”

“Does he have a car?”

“Big red Dodge pickup.”

“Sir, what’s your name?”

“Tony Lazzeri,” Reacher said. Anthony Michael Lazzeri, batted .273 in 118 appearances at second base in 1935. Second-place finish. Reacher figured he would need to move around the diamond soon. The Yankees hadn’t had enough second basemen, or enough nonchampionship years.

“We’re on our way, sir,” the desk cop said.

Reacher hung up and slid back into the Mustang. Sat still until he heard the first sirens battling north.

Helen Rodin was halfway down Second Street when she caught a commotion in her mirror. A gray Impala sedan lurched out of the lane three cars behind her and pulled a crazy U-turn through the traffic and took off back the way it had come.

“Asshole,” she said.

Ann Yanni twisted in her seat.

“Cop car,” she said. “You can tell by the antennas.”

Reacher made it to Franklin’s place about ten minutes late. It was a two-story brick building. The lower floor looked like some kind of a light industrial unit, abandoned. It had steel shutters over its doors and windows. But the upstairs windows had venetian blinds with lights behind them. There was an outside staircase leading to an upper door. The door had a white plastic plate on it: Franklin Investigations. There was a parking apron at street level, just a patch of blacktop one-car deep and about six wide. Helen Rodin’s green Saturn was there, and a blue Honda Civic, and a black Chevy Suburban so long that it was overhanging the sidewalk by a foot. The Suburban was Franklin’s, Reacher guessed. The Honda was Rosemary Barr’s, maybe.

He drove past the place without slowing and circled the block. Saw nothing he didn’t want to see. So he slotted the Mustang next to the Saturn and got out and locked it. Ran up the staircase and went in the door without knocking. He found himself in a short hallway with a kitchenette to his right and what he guessed was a bathroom to his left. Up ahead he could hear voices in a large room. He went in and found Franklin at a desk, Helen Rodin and Rosemary Barr in two chairs huddled in conversation, and Ann Yanni looking out the window at her car. All four turned as he came in.

“Do you know any medical terminology?” Helen asked him.

“Like what?”

“PA,” she said. “A doctor wrote it. Some kind of an abbreviation.”

Reacher glanced at her. Then at Rosemary Barr.

“Let me guess,” he said. “The hospital diagnosed James Barr. Probably a mild case.”

“Early onset,” Rosemary said. “Whatever it is.”

“How did you know?” Helen asked.

“Intuition,” Reacher said.

“What is it?”

“Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s do this in order.” He turned to Franklin. “Tell me what you know about the victims.”

“Five random people,” Franklin said. “No connection between any of them. No real connection with anything at all. Certainly no connection to James Barr. I think you were absolutely right. He didn’t shoot them for any reason of his own.”

“No, I was absolutely wrong,” Reacher said. “Thing is, James Barr didn’t shoot them at all.”

Grigor Linsky stepped back into a shadowed doorway and dialed his phone.

“I followed a hunch,” he said.

“Which was?” the Zec asked.

“With the cops at the lawyer’s office, I figured the soldier wouldn’t be able to go see her. But obviously they still have business. So I thought maybe she would go to him. And she did. I followed her. They’re together in the private detective’s office right now. With the sister. And that woman from the television news.”

“Are the others with you?”

“We’ve got the whole block covered. East, west, north, and south.”

“Sit tight,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”

Helen Rodin said, “You want to explain that statement?”

“The evidence is rock solid,” Franklin said.

Ann Yanni smiled. A story.

Rosemary Barr just stared.

“You bought your brother a radio,” Reacher said to her. “A Bose. For the ballgames. He told me that. Did you ever buy him anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Like clothes.”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Pants?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“What size?”

“Size?” she repeated blankly.

“What size pants does your brother wear?”

“Thirty-four waist, thirty-four leg.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s relatively tall.”

“How does this help us?” Helen asked.

“You know anything about numbers games?” Reacher asked her. “Old-fashioned illegal numbers, state lotteries, the Powerball, things like that?”

“What about them?”

“What’s the hardest part of them?”

“Winning,” Ann Yanni said.

Reacher smiled. “From the players’ point of view, sure. But the hardest part for the organizers is picking truly random numbers. True randomness is very hard for humans to achieve. In the old days numbers runners used the business pages in the newspapers. They would agree in advance, maybe the second page of the stock prices, maybe the second column, the last two figures in the first six prices quoted. Or the last six, or the middle six, or whatever. That came close to true randomness. Now the big lotteries use complicated machines. But you can find mathematicians who can prove the results aren’t truly random. Because humans built the machines.”

“How does this help us?” Helen said.

“Just a train of thought,” Reacher said. “I sat all afternoon in Ms. Yanni’s car, enjoying the sun, thinking about how hard it is to achieve true randomness.”

“Your train is on the wrong track,” Franklin said. “James Barr shot five people. The evidence is crushing.”

“You were a cop,” Reacher said. “You put yourself in danger. Stakeouts, takedowns, high-pressure situations, moments of extreme stress. What’s the first thing you did afterward?”

Franklin glanced at the women.

“Went to the bathroom,” he said.

“Correct,” Reacher said. “Me too. But James Barr didn’t. Bellantonio’s report from Barr’s house shows cement dust in the garage, the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, and the basement. But not in the bathroom. So he got home, but he didn’t take a leak until after he changed and showered? And how could he shower anyway without going into the bathroom?”

“Maybe he stopped on the way.”

“He was never there.”

“He was there, Reacher. What about the evidence?”

“There’s no evidence that says he was there.”

“Are you nuts?”

“There’s evidence that says his van was there, and his shoes, and his pants, and his coat, and his gun, and his ammo, and his quarter, but there’s nothing that says he was there.”

“Someone impersonated him?” Ann Yanni asked.

“Down to the last detail,” Reacher said. “Drove his car, wore his shoes and his clothes, used his gun.”

“This is fantasy,” Franklin said.

“It explains the raincoat,” Reacher said. “A big roomy garment that covered everything except the denim jeans? Why else wear a raincoat on a warm dry day?”

“Who?” Rosemary asked.

“Watch,” Reacher said.

He stood still, and then he took a single pace forward.

“My pants are thirty-seven-inch legs,” he said. “I crossed the new part of the garage in thirty-five strides. James Barr has a thirty-four-inch leg, which means he should have done it in about thirty-eight strides. But Bellantonio’s footprint count shows forty-eight strides.”

“A very short person,” Helen said.

“Charlie,” Rosemary said.

“I thought so, too,” Reacher said. “But then I went to Kentucky. Initially because I wanted to confirm something else. I got around to thinking that maybe James Barr just wasn’t good enough. I looked at the scene. It was tough shooting. And fourteen years ago he was good, but he wasn’t great. And when I saw him in the hospital the skin on his right shoulder was unmarked. And to shoot as well as he apparently did, a guy’s got to practice. And a guy who practices builds up bruising on his shoulder. Like a callus. He didn’t have it. So I figured a guy who started out average could only have gotten worse with time. Especially if he wasn’t practicing much. That’s logical, right? Maybe he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t have done the thing on Friday. Through a simple lack of ability. That’s what I was thinking. So I went down to Kentucky to find out for sure how much worse he’d gotten.”

“And?” Helen asked.

“He’d gotten better,” Reacher said. “Way better. Not worse. Look at this.” He took the target out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “This is the latest of thirty-two sessions over the last three years. And this is much better than he was shooting when he was in the army fourteen years ago. Which is weird, right? He’s fired only three hundred twenty rounds in the last three years, and he’s great? Whereas he was firing two thousand a week back when he was only average?”

“So what does this mean?”

“He went down there with Charlie, every time. And the guy who runs the range is a Marine champion. And a real anal pack rat. He files all the used targets. Which means that Barr had at least two witnesses to what he was scoring, every time.”

“I’d want witnesses,” Franklin said. “If I was shooting like that.”

“It’s not possible to get better by not practicing,” Reacher said. “I think the truth is he had actually gotten really bad. And I think his ego couldn’t take it. Any shooter is competitive. He knew he was lousy now, and he couldn’t face it, and he wanted to cover it up. He wanted to show off.”

Franklin pointed at the target. “Doesn’t look lousy to me.”

“This is faked,” Reacher said. “You’re going to give this to Bellantonio and Bellantonio is going to prove it to you.”

“Faked how?”

“I’ll bet this was done with a handgun. Nine-millimeter, from point-blank range. If Bellantonio measures the holes, my guess is he’ll find they’re forty-six thousandths of an inch bigger than .308 holes. And if he tests the paper, he’ll find gunpowder residue on it. Because my guess is James Barr took a stroll down the range and made these holes from an inch away, not three hundred yards. Every time.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“It’s simple metaphysics. Barr was never this good. And it’s fair to assume he must have gotten worse. If he’d gotten a little worse, he’d have owned up to it. But he didn’t own up to it, so we can assume he’d gotten a lot worse. Bad enough to be seriously embarrassed about it. Maybe bad enough that he couldn’t hit the paper at all.”

Nobody spoke.

“It’s a theory that proves itself,” Reacher said. “To fake the score because of embarrassment proves he couldn’t shoot well anymore. If he couldn’t shoot well anymore, he didn’t do the thing on Friday.”

“You’re just guessing,” Franklin said.

Reacher nodded. “I was. But I’m not now. Now I know for sure. I fired a round down in Kentucky. The guy made me, like a rite of passage. I was full of caffeine. I was twitching like crazy. Now I know James Barr will have been way worse.”

“Why?” Rosemary asked.

“Because he has Parkinson’s disease,” Reacher said to her. “PA means paralysis agitans, and paralysis agitans is what doctors call Parkinson’s disease. Your brother is getting sick, I’m afraid. Shaking and twitching. And no way on earth can you fire a rifle accurately with Parkinson’s disease. My opinion, not only didn’t he do the thing on Friday, he couldn’t possibly have done it.”

Rosemary went quiet. Good news and bad news. She glanced at the window. Looked at the floor. She was dressed like a widow. Black silk blouse, black pencil skirt, black nylons, black patent leather shoes with a low heel.

“Maybe that’s why he was so angry all the time,” she said. “Maybe he felt it coming on. Felt helpless and out of control. His body started to let him down. He would have hated that. Anyone would.”

Then she looked straight at Reacher.

“I told you he was innocent,” she said.

“Ma’am, I apologize unreservedly,” Reacher said. “You were right. He reformed. He kept to his bargain. He deserves credit. And I’m sorry he’s sick.”

“Now you’ve got to help him. You promised.”

“I am helping him. Since Monday night I haven’t done anything else.”

“This is crazy,” Franklin said.

“No, it’s exactly the same as it always was,” Reacher said. “It’s someone setting James Barr up for the fall. But instead of actually making him do it, they just made it look like he did it. That’s the only practical difference here.”

“But is it possible?” Ann Yanni asked.

“Why not? Think it through. Walk it through.”

Ann Yanni walked it through. She rehearsed little movements, slowly, thoughtfully, like an actress. “He dresses in Barr’s clothes, and shoes, and maybe finds a quarter in a jar. Or in a pocket somewhere. He wears gloves, so as not to mess up Barr’s fingerprints. He’s already taken the traffic cone from Barr’s garage, maybe the day before. He gets the rifle from the basement. It’s already been loaded, by Barr himself, previously. He drives to town in Barr’s minivan. He leaves all the clues. Covers himself in cement dust. Comes back to the house and puts everything away and leaves. Fast, not even taking the time to use the bathroom. Then James Barr comes home sometime later and walks into a trap he doesn’t even know is there.”

“That’s exactly how I see it,” Reacher said.

“But where was Barr at the time?” Helen said.

“Out,” Reacher said.

“That’s a nice coincidence,” Franklin said.

“I don’t think it was,” Reacher said. “I think they arranged something to get him out of the way. He remembers going out somewhere, previously. Then being optimistic, like something good was about to happen. I think they set him up with someone. I think they engineered a chance meeting that led somewhere. I think he had a date on Friday.”

“With who?”

“Sandy, maybe. They turned her loose on me. Maybe they turned her loose on him, too. He dressed well on Friday. The report shows his wallet was in a decent pair of pants.”

“So who really did it?” Helen asked.

“Someone cold as ice,” Reacher said. “Someone who didn’t even need to use the bathroom afterward.”

“Charlie,” Rosemary said. “Got to be. Has to be. He’s small. He’s weird. He knew the house. He knew where everything was. The dog knew him.”

“He was a terrible shooter too,” Reacher said. “That’s the other reason why I went to Kentucky. I wanted to test that theory.”

“So who was it?”

“Charlie,” Reacher said. “His evidence was faked, too. But in a different way. The holes in his targets were all over the place. Except they weren’t really all over the place. The distribution wasn’t entirely random. He was trying to disguise how good he actually was. He was aiming at arbitrary points on the paper, and he was hitting those points, every time, dead-on, believe me. Once in a while he would get bored, and he’d put one through the inner ring. Or he’d pick on a quadrant outside the outer ring and put a round straight through it. One time he drilled all four corners. The point is, it doesn’t really matter what you aim at, as long as you hit it. It’s only convention that makes us aim at the ten-ring. It’s just as good practice to aim at some other spot. Even a spot off the paper, like a tree. That’s what Charlie was doing. He was a tremendous shot, training hard, but trying to look like he was missing all the time. But like I said, true randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.”

“Why would he do that?” Helen asked.

“For an alibi.”

“Making people think he couldn’t shoot?”

Reacher nodded. “He noticed that the range master was saving the used targets. He’s an ice-cold pro who thinks about every wrinkle ahead of time.”

“Who is he?” Franklin asked.

“His real name is Chenko and he hangs with a bunch of Russians. He’s probably a Red Army veteran. Probably one of their snipers. And they’re real good. They always have been.”

“How do we get to him?”

“Through the victim.”

“Square one. The victims are all dead ends. You’ll have to come up with something better than that.”

“His boss calls himself the Zec.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“It’s a word, not a name. Old-time Soviet slang. A zec was a labor camp inmate. In the Gulag in Siberia.”

“Those camps are ancient history.”

“Which makes the Zec a very old man. But a very tough old man. Probably way tougher than we can imagine.”

The Zec was tired after his stint with the backhoe. But he was used to being tired. He had been tired for sixty-three years. He had been tired since the day the recruiter came to his village, in the early fall of 1942. His village was four thousand miles from anywhere, and the recruiter was a type of Moscow Russian nobody had ever seen before. He was brisk, and self-assured, and confident. He permitted no argument. No discussion. All males between the ages of sixteen and fifty were to come with him.

The Zec was seventeen at that point. Initially he was overlooked, because he was in prison. He had slept with an older man’s wife, and then beaten the guy badly when he complained about it. The beaten guy claimed exemption from the draft because of his physical condition, and then he told the recruiter about his assailant in prison. The recruiter was anxious to make his numbers, so the Zec was hauled out of his cell and told to line up with the others in the village square. He did so quite happily. He assumed he was being given a ride to freedom. He assumed there would be a hundred opportunities just to walk away.

He was wrong.

The recruits were locked into a truck, and then a train, for a journey that lasted five weeks. Formal induction into the Red Army happened along the way. Uniforms were issued, thick woolen garments, and a coat, and a pair of felt-lined boots, and a pay book. But no actual pay. No weapons. And no training either, beyond a brief stop in a snow-covered rail yard, where a commissar brayed over and over again at the locked train through a huge metal megaphone. The guy repeated a simple twenty-word speech, which the Zec remembered ever afterward: The fate of the world is being decided at Stalingrad, where you will fight to the last for the Motherland.

The five-week journey ended on the eastern bank of the Volga, where the recruits were unloaded like cattle and forced to run straight for a small assemblage of old river ferries and pleasure cruisers. Half a mile away on the opposite bank was a vision from hell. A city, larger than anything the Zec had ever seen before, was in ruins, belching smoke and fire. The river was burning and exploding with mortar shells. The sky was full of airplanes, which lined up and fell into dives, dropping bombs, firing guns. There were corpses everywhere, and body parts, and screaming wounded.

The Zec was forced onto a small boat that had a gaily-colored striped sunshade. It was crammed tight with soldiers. Nobody had room to move. Nobody had a weapon. The boat lurched out into the freezing current and airplanes fell on it like flies on shit. The crossing lasted fifteen minutes and at the end of it the Zec was slimy with his neighbors’ blood.

He was forced off onto a narrow wooden pier and made to line up single file and then made to run toward the city, past a staging post where the second phase of his military training took place: two quartermasters were doling out loaded rifles and spare ammunition clips in an endless alternate sequence and chanting what later struck the Zec as a poem, or a song, or a hymn to complete and utter insanity, over and over again without pausing:

The one with the rifle shoots

The one without follows him

When the one with the rifle is killed

The one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots.

The Zec was handed an ammunition clip. No rifle. He was shoved forward, and blindly followed the back of the man ahead. He turned a corner. Passed in front of a Red Army machine-gun nest. At first he thought the front line must therefore be very close. But then a commissar with a flag and another huge megaphone roared at him: No retreat! If you turn back even one step we will shoot you down! So the Zec ran helplessly onward and turned another corner and stepped into a hail of German bullets. He stopped, half-turned, and was hit three times in the arms and legs. He was bowled over and came to rest lying on the shattered remains of a brick wall and within minutes was buried under a mounting pile of corpses.

He came to forty-eight hours later in an improvised hospital and made his first acquaintance with Soviet military justice: harsh, ponderous, ideological, but running strictly in accordance with its own arcane rules. The matter at issue was caused by his having half-turned: Were his wounds inflicted by the Motherland’s enemy, or had he been retreating toward his own side’s guns? Because of the physical ambiguity he was spared execution and sentenced to a penal battalion instead. Thus began a process of survival that had so far lasted sixty-three years.

A process he intended to continue.

He dialed Grigor Linsky’s number.

“We can assume the soldier is talking,” he said. “Whatever he knows, they all know now. Therefore it’s time to get ourselves an insurance policy.”

Franklin said, “We’re really no further ahead. Are we? No way is Emerson going to accept a damn thing unless we give him more than we’ve got right now.”

“So work the victim list,” Reacher said.

“That could take forever. Five lives, five life histories.”

“So let’s focus.”

“Great. Terrific. Just tell me which one you want me to focus on.”

Reacher nodded. Recalled Helen Rodin’s description of what she had heard. The first shot, and then a tiny pause, and then the next two. Then another pause, a little longer, but really only a split second, and then the last three. He closed his eyes. In his mind he pictured Bellantonio’s audio graph from the cell phone voice mail. Pictured his own mute simulation, in the gloom of the new parking garage, his right arm extended like a rifle: click, click-click, click-click-click.

“Not the first one,” he said. “Not the first cold shot. No guarantee of hitting anything with that. Therefore the first victim was meaningless. Part of the window dressing. Not the last three, either. That was bang-bang-bang. The deliberate miss, and more window dressing. The job was already done by then.”

“So, the second or the third. Or both of them.”

Click, click-click.

Reacher opened his eyes.

“The third,” he said. “There’s a rhythm there. The first cold shot, then a lead-in, and then the money shot. The target. Then a break. His eye is lagging in the scope. He’s making sure the target is down. It is. So then the last three.”

“Who was the third?” Helen asked.

“The woman,” Franklin said.

Linsky called Chenko, and then Vladimir, and then Sokolov. He explained the mission and pulled them all in tighter. Franklin’s office had no back entrance. There was just the exposed staircase. The target’s car was right there on the apron. Easy.

Reacher said, “Tell me about the woman.”

Franklin shuffled his notes. Put them in a new order of priority.

“Her name was Oline Archer,” he said. “Caucasian female, married, no children, thirty-seven years old, lived west of here in the outer suburbs.”

“Employed in the DMV building,” Reacher said. “If she was the specific target, Charlie had to know where she was and when she would be coming out.”

Franklin nodded. “Employed by the DMV itself. Been there a year and a half.”

“Doing what exactly?”

“Clerical supervisor. Doing whatever they do in there.”

“So was it work-related?” Ann Yanni asked.

“Too long of a counter delay?” Franklin said. “A bad photo on a driver’s license? I doubt it. I checked the national databases. DMV clerks don’t get killed by customers. That just doesn’t happen.”

“So what about her personal life?” Helen Rodin asked.

“Nothing jumped out at me,” Franklin said. “She was just an ordinary woman. But I’ll keep digging. I’ll go down a few levels. Got to be something there.”

“Do it fast,” Rosemary Barr said. “For my brother’s sake. We have to get him out.”

“We need medical opinions for that,” Ann Yanni said. “Regular doctors now, not psychiatrists.”

“Will NBC pay?” Helen Rodin asked.

“If it’s likely to work.”

“It should,” Rosemary said. “I mean, shouldn’t it? Parkinson’s is a real thing, isn’t it? Either he’s got it or he hasn’t.”

“It might work at trial,” Reacher said. “A plausible reason why James Barr couldn’t have done it, plus a plausible narrative about someone else doing it? That’s usually how you create reasonable doubt.”

“Plausible is a big word,” Franklin said. “And reasonable doubt is a risky concept. Better to get Alex Rodin to drop the charges altogether. Which means convincing Emerson first.”

“I can’t talk to either one of them,” Reacher said.

“I can,” Helen said.

“I can,” Franklin said.

“And I sure as hell can,” Ann Yanni said. “We all can, apart from you.”

“But you might not want to,” Reacher said.

“Why not?” Helen asked.

“You’re not going to like this part very much.”

“Why not?” Helen asked again.

“Think,” Reacher said. “Work backward. The thing with Sandy being killed, and the thing in the sports bar Monday night, why did those two things happen?”

“To tie you up. To prevent you hurting the case.”

“Correct. Two attempts, same aim, same goal, same perpetrator.”

“Obviously.”

“And the thing Monday night started with me being followed from my hotel. Sandy and Jeb Oliver and his other pals were cruising around, standing by, waiting until someone called them and told them where I ended up. So really it started with me being followed to my hotel. Much earlier in the day.”

“We’ve been through all of this.”

“But how did the puppet master get my name? How did he even know I was in town? How did he know there was a guy here who was a potential problem?”

“Someone told him.”

“Who knew, early in the day on Monday?”

Helen paused a beat.

“My father,” she said. “Since early on Monday morning. And then Emerson, presumably. Shortly afterward. They’d have talked about the case. They’d have communicated immediately if there was a danger that the wheels were coming off.”

“Correct,” Reacher said. “Then one of those two guys called the puppet master. Well before lunch on Monday.”

Helen said nothing.

“Unless one of those two guys is the puppet master,” Reacher said.

“The Zec is the puppet master. You said so yourself.”

“I said he’s Charlie’s boss. That’s all. We’ve got no way of knowing whether he’s actually at the top of the tree.”

“You’re right,” Helen said. “I don’t like this line of thinking at all.”

“Someone communicated,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. Either your father or Emerson. My name was on the street two hours after I got off the bus. So one of them is bent and the other one won’t help us either because he already likes the case exactly the way it is.”

The room went quiet.

“I need to get back to work,” Ann Yanni said.

Nobody spoke.

“Call me if there’s news,” Yanni said.

The room stayed quiet. Reacher said nothing. Ann Yanni crossed the room. Stopped next to him.

“Keys,” she said.

He dug in his pocket and handed them over.

“Thanks for the loan,” he said. “Nice car.”

Linsky watched the Mustang leave. It went north. Loud engine, loud exhaust. It was audible for a whole block. Then the street went quiet again and Linsky dialed his phone.

“The television woman is out of there,” he said.

“The private detective will stay at work,” the Zec said.

“So what if the others leave together?”

“I hope they don’t.”

“What if they do?”

“Take them all.”

Rosemary Barr asked, “Is there a cure? For Parkinson’s disease?”

“No,” Reacher said. “No cure, no prevention. But it can be slowed down. There are drugs for it. Physiotherapy helps. And sleep. The symptoms disappear when a person is asleep.”

“Maybe that’s why he wanted the pills. To escape.”

“He shouldn’t try to escape too much. Social contact is good.”

“I should go to the hospital,” Rosemary said.

“Explain to him,” Reacher said. “Tell him what really happened on Friday.”

Rosemary nodded. Crossed the room and went out the door. A minute later Reacher heard her car start up and drive away.

Franklin went out to the kitchenette to make coffee. Reacher and Helen Rodin were left alone in the office together. Reacher sat down in the chair that Rosemary Barr had used. Helen stepped to the window and looked down at the street below. She kept her back to the room. She was dressed the same as Rosemary Barr. Black shirt, black skirt, black patent-leather shoes. But she didn’t look like a widow. She looked like something from New York or Paris. Her heels were higher and her legs were long and bare and tan.

“These guys we’re talking about are Russians,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

“My father is an American,” she said.

“An American called Aleksei Alekseivitch,” Reacher said.

“Our family came here before World War One. There’s no possible connection. How could there be? These people we’re talking about are low-life Soviets.”

“What did your father do before he was the DA?”

“He was an assistant DA.”

“Before that?”

“He always worked there.”

“Tell me about his coffee service.”

“What about it?”

“He uses china cups and a silver tray. The county didn’t buy them for him.”

“So?”

“Tell me about his suits.”

“His suits?”

“On Monday he was wearing a thousand-dollar suit. You don’t see many public servants wearing thousand-dollar suits.”

“He’s got expensive tastes.”

“How does he afford them?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“One more question.”

Helen said nothing.

“Did he pressure you not to take the case?”

Helen said nothing. Looked left. Looked right. Then she turned around. “He said losing might be winning.”

“Concern for your career?”

“I thought so. I still think so. He’s an honest man.”

Reacher nodded. “There’s a fifty percent chance you’re right.”

Franklin came back in with the coffee, which was a thin own-brand brew in three nonmatching pottery mugs, two of them chipped, on a cork bar tray, with an open carton of half-and-half and a yellow box of sugar and a single pressed-steel spoon. He put the tray on the desk and Helen Rodin stared at it, like it was making Reacher’s point for him: This is how coffee is served in an office.

“David Chapman knew your name on Monday,” she said. “James Barr’s first lawyer. He’s known about you since Saturday.”

“But Chapman didn’t know I ever showed up,” Reacher said. “I assume nobody told him.”

“I knew your name,” Franklin said. “Maybe I should be in the mix, too.”

“But you knew the real reason I was here,” Reacher said. “You wouldn’t have had me attacked. You’d have had me subpoenaed.”

Nobody spoke.

“I was wrong about Jeb Oliver,” Reacher said. “He isn’t a dope dealer. There was nothing in his barn except an old pickup truck.”

“I’m glad you can be wrong about something,” Helen said.

“Jeb Oliver isn’t Russian,” Franklin said.

“Apple pie,” Reacher said.

“Therefore these guys can work with Americans. That’s what I’m saying. It could be Emerson. Doesn’t have to be the DA.”

“Fifty percent chance,” Reacher said. “I’m not accusing anybody yet.”

“If you’re right in the first place.”

“The bad guys were all over me very fast.”

“Doesn’t sound like either Emerson or the DA to me, and I know them both.”

“You can say his name,” Helen said. “His name is Alex Rodin.”

“I don’t think it’s either one of them,” Franklin said.

“I’m going back to work,” Helen said.

“Give me a ride?” Reacher asked. “Let me out under the highway?”

“No,” Helen said. “I really don’t feel like doing that.”

She picked up her purse and her briefcase and walked out of the office alone.

Reacher sat still and listened to the sounds out on the street. He heard a car door opening and closing. An engine starting. A car driving away. He sipped his coffee and said, “I guess I upset her.”

Franklin nodded. “I guess you did.”

“These guys have got someone on the inside. That’s clear, right? That’s a fact. So we should be able to discuss it.”

“A cop makes more sense than a DA.”

“I don’t agree. A cop controls only his own cases. Ultimately a prosecutor controls everything.”

“I’d prefer it that way. I was a cop.”

“So was I,” Reacher said.

“And I have to say, Alex Rodin kills a lot of cases. People say it’s caution, but it could be something else.”

“You should analyze what kind of cases he kills.”

“Like I don’t have enough to do already.”

Reacher nodded. Put his mug down. Stood up.

“Start with Oline Archer,” he said. “The victim. She’s what’s important now.”

Then he stepped to the window and checked the street. Saw nothing. So he nodded to Franklin and walked down the hallway and out the door to the top of the outside staircase.

He paused on the top step and stretched in the warmth. Rolled his shoulders, flexed his hands, took a deep breath of air. He was cramped from driving and sitting all day. And oppressed by hiding out. It felt good just to stand still and do nothing, high up and exposed. Out in the open, in the daylight. Below him to his left the cars were gone except for the black Suburban. The street was quiet. He glanced to his right. There was traffic building up on the north-south drag. To his left, there was less. He figured he would dodge west first. But a long way west, because the police station must be near. He would need to loop around it. Then he would head north. North of downtown was a warren. North of downtown was where he felt best.

He started down the stairs. As he stepped off onto the sidewalk at the bottom he heard a footfall fifteen feet behind him. A side step. Thin soles on limestone grit. Quiet. Then the unmistakable crunch-crunch of a pump-action shotgun racking a round.

Then a voice.

It said: “Stop right there.”

An American accent. Quiet, but distinct. From somewhere way north. Reacher stopped. Stood still and stared straight ahead at a blank brick wall across the street.

The voice said: “Step to your right.”

Reacher stepped to his right. A long sideways shuffle.

The voice said: “Now turn around real slow.”

Reacher turned around, real slow. He kept his hands away from his body, palms out. Saw a small figure fifteen feet away. The same guy he had seen the night before, from the shadows. Not more than five-four, not more than a hundred and thirty pounds, slight, pale, with cropped black hair that stuck up crazily. Chenko. Or Charlie. In his right hand, rock-steady, was a sawn-off with a pistol grip. In his left hand was some kind of a black thing.

“Catch,” Charlie said.

He tossed the black thing underhand. Reacher watched it tumble and sparkle through the air straight at him and his subconscious said: Not a grenade. So he caught it. Two-handed. It was a shoe. A woman’s patent-leather dress shoe, black, with a heel. It was still slightly warm.

“Now toss it back,” Charlie said. “Just like I did.”

Reacher paused. Whose shoe was it? He stared down at it.

Low heel.

Rosemary Barr’s?

“Toss it back,” Charlie called. “Nice and slow.”

Assess and evaluate. Reacher was unarmed. He was holding a shoe. Not a stone, not a rock. The shoe was lightweight and unaerodynamic. It wouldn’t do anyone any harm. It would stall and flutter in the air and Charlie would just swat it away.

“Toss it back,” Charlie said again.

Reacher did nothing. He could tear the heel off and throw it like a dart. Like a missile. But Charlie would shoot him while he was drawing his arm back and winding up. Charlie was fifteen feet away, poised, balanced, unblinking, with the gun rock-steady in his hand. Too close to miss, too far to get to.

“Last chance,” Charlie said.

Reacher soft-tossed the shoe back. A long, looping underhand throw. Charlie caught it one-handed and it was like the scene had rewound right back to the beginning.

“She’s in summer school,” Charlie said. “Think about it like that. She’s going to get acquainted with the facts of life. She’s going to work on her testimony. About how her brother planned in advance. About how he let slip what he was going to do. She’s going to be a great witness. She’s going to make the case. You understand that, right?”

Reacher said nothing.

“So the game is over now,” Charlie said.

Reacher said nothing.

“Take two steps backward,” Charlie said.

Reacher took two steps backward. They put him right on the curb. Now Charlie was twenty feet away. He was still holding the shoe. He was smiling.

“Turn around,” he said.

“You going to shoot me?” Reacher asked.

“Maybe.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’m going to find you and I’m going to make you sorry.”

“Big talk.”

“Not just talk.”

“So maybe I’ll shoot you.”

“You should.”

“Turn around,” Charlie said.

Reacher turned around.

“Now stand still,” Charlie said.

Reacher stood still. Faced the street. He kept his eyes open. Stared down at the blacktop. It was laid over ancient cobblestones. It was full of small humps in a regular pattern. He started counting them, to fill what might be the last seconds of his life. He strained to hear sounds behind him. Listened for the whisper of clothing as Charlie’s arm extended. Listened for the quiet metallic click as the trigger moved through its first tenth of an inch. Would Charlie shoot? Common sense said no. Homicides were always investigated.

But these people were crazy. And there was a fifty percent chance they owned a local cop. Or that he owned them.

Silence. Reacher strained to hear sounds behind him.

But he heard nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. One minute. Two. Then a hundred yards away to the east he heard a siren. Just two brief electronic blips from a cop car forcing a path through traffic.

“Stand still,” Charlie said again.

Reacher stood still. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Then two police cruisers turned into the street simultaneously. One from the east and one from the west. They were both moving fast. Their engines roared. Their tires howled. Their sounds beat against the brick. They jammed to a stop. Doors opened. Cops spilled out. Reacher turned his head. Charlie wasn’t there anymore.

CHAPTER 14

The arrest was fast and efficient. It went down the usual way. Guns, shouting, handcuffs, Miranda. Reacher stayed silent throughout. He knew better than to speak. He had been a cop and he knew the kind of trouble that talking can get a guy into. And the kind of delay it can cause. Say something, and the cops have to stop to write it down. And Reacher couldn’t afford for anyone to stop. Not right then.

The trip to the station house was mercifully short. Not more than four blocks. Reacher guessed it made sense that an ex-cop like Franklin would pick an office location in the neighborhood he was accustomed to. He used the drive time to work on a strategy. He figured he would be taken straight to Emerson, which gave him a fifty percent chance of being put in a room with a bad guy.

Or with a good guy.

But he ended up a hundred percent sure he was in a room with a bad guy because Emerson and Alex Rodin were both there together. Reacher was hauled out of the squad car and hustled straight to Emerson’s office. Emerson was behind the desk. Rodin was in front of it.

Can’t say a word, Reacher thought. But this has got to be real fast.

Then he thought: Which one? Rodin? Or Emerson? Rodin was wearing a suit. Blue, summer weight, expensive, maybe the same one as on Monday. Emerson was in shirtsleeves. Playing with a pen. Bouncing it off his blotter, one end, then the other.

Get on with it, Reacher thought.

“You weren’t so hard to find,” Emerson said.

Reacher said nothing. He was still handcuffed.

“Tell us about the night Alexandra Dupree was killed,” Rodin said.

Reacher said nothing.

“Tell us how it felt,” Emerson said. “When her neck snapped.”

Reacher said nothing.

“The jury’s going to hate you,” Rodin said.

Reacher said, “Phone call.”

“You want to lawyer up?” Emerson said.

Reacher said nothing.

“Who’s your lawyer?” Rodin asked.

“Your daughter,” Reacher said.

“Want us to call her?” Emerson asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe Rosemary Barr instead.”

He watched their eyes.

“The sister?” Rodin said.

“You want us to call the sister?” Emerson said.

One of you knows she ain’t going to answer, Reacher thought.

Which one?

Nothing in their eyes.

“Call Ann Yanni,” he said.

“From the TV?” Rodin said. “Why her?”

“I get a phone call,” Reacher said. “I don’t have to explain anything. I say who, you dial the number.”

“She’ll be getting ready to go on the air. The local news is at six o’clock.”

“So we’ll wait,” Reacher said. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Which one of you knows that isn’t true?

They waited, but it turned out the wait wasn’t long. Emerson placed the call to NBC and told Ann Yanni’s assistant that the police department had arrested Jack Reacher and that Reacher was requesting Yanni’s presence, reason unknown. It was a bizarre message. But Yanni was in Emerson’s office less than thirty minutes later. She was a journalist on the scent of a story. She knew that network tomorrow was better than local today.

“How can I help?” she asked.

She had presence. She was a star in her market. And she was media. Both Emerson and Rodin looked a little intimidated. Not by her as an individual. But by what she represented.

“I’m sorry,” Reacher said to her. “I know you won’t want to, and I know I said I would never tell, but under the circumstances you’re going to have to confirm an alibi for me. No choice, I’m afraid.”

He glanced at her. Saw her following his words. Saw confusion cross her face. She had no reaction. He kept his eyes on hers. No reaction.

Help me out here, girl.

One second.

Two seconds.

No reaction.

Reacher held his breath. Get with the damn program, Yanni. One more second and it’s all going to fall apart.

No reaction.

Then she nodded. She had caught on. Reacher breathed out. Good call. Professional skill. She was a person accustomed to hearing breaking news in her earpiece and repeating it live on air half a second later like she had known about it all her life.

“What alibi?” Emerson said.

Yanni glanced at him. Then at Rodin.

“I thought this was about Jack Reacher,” she said.

“It is,” Emerson said.

“But this is Joe Gordon,” she said. “At least, that’s what he told me.”

“He told you his name was Gordon?”

“When I met him.”

“Which was when?”

“Two days ago.”

“You’ve been running his picture on your show.”

“That was his picture? It looked nothing like him. The hair was totally different. No similarity at all.”

“What alibi?” Emerson said again.

“For when?” Yanni asked.

“The night the girl was killed. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

Yanni said nothing.

Rodin said, “Ma’am, if you know something, you need to tell us now.”

“I’d rather not,” Yanni said.

Reacher smiled to himself. The way she said it absolutely guaranteed that Emerson and Rodin were a minute away from begging to hear the story. She was standing there, blushing on command all the way up to her temples, her back straight, her blouse open three buttons. She was a hell of an actress. Reacher figured maybe all news anchors were.

“It’s a question of evidence,” Emerson said.

“Obviously,” Yanni said. “But can’t you just take my word?”

“For what?”

“That he didn’t do it.”

“We need details,” Rodin said.

“I have to think of my reputation,” Yanni said.

“Your statement won’t be made public if we drop the charges.”

“Can you guarantee dropping the charges?”

“Not before we hear your statement,” Emerson said.

“So it’s a Catch-22,” Yanni said.

“I’m afraid it is.”

Don’t push too far, Reacher thought. We don’t have time.

Yanni sighed. Looked down at the floor. Looked up, straight into Emerson’s eyes, furious, embarrassed, magnificent.

“We spent that night together,” she said.

“You and Reacher?”

“Me and Joe Gordon.”

Emerson pointed. “This man?”

Yanni nodded. “That man.”

“All night?”

“Yes.”

“From when to when?”

“From about eleven-forty. When the news was over. Until I got paged the next morning when you guys found the body.”

“Where were you?”

Reacher closed his eyes. Recalled the conversation the night before in the parking garage. The car window, open an inch and a half. Had he told her?

“The motor court,” Yanni said. “His room.”

“The clerk didn’t say he saw you.”

“Of course the clerk didn’t see me. I have to think about things like that.”

“Which room?”

Had he told her?

“Room eight,” Yanni said.

“He didn’t leave the room during the night?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Not at all?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

Yanni looked away. “Because we didn’t actually sleep a wink.”

The office went quiet.

“Can you offer any corroboration?” Emerson asked.

“Like what?” Yanni asked back.

“Distinguishing marks? That I can’t see right now but that someone who had been in your position would have seen?”

“Oh, please.”

“It’s the last question,” Emerson said.

Yanni said nothing. Reacher recalled switching on the Mustang’s dome light and lifting his shirt to reveal the tire iron. He moved his cuffed hands and laid them across his waistband.

“Anything?” Emerson said.

“It’s important,” Rodin said.

“He has a scar,” Yanni said. “Low down on his stomach. A horrible big thing.”

Emerson and Rodin both turned and looked at Reacher. Reacher got to his feet. Grabbed a fold of fabric in both hands and pulled his shirt out of his pants. Lifted it.

“OK,” Emerson said.

“What was that?” Rodin asked.

“Part of a Marine sergeant’s jawbone,” Reacher said. “The medics figured it must have weighed about four ounces. It was traveling at five thousand feet per second away from the epicenter of a trinitrotoluene explosion. Just surfing along on the pressure wave, until it hit me.”

He dropped his shirt back down. Didn’t try to tuck it in. The handcuffs would have made that difficult.

“Satisfied now?” he asked. “Have you embarrassed the lady enough?”

Emerson and Rodin looked at each other. One of you knows for sure I’m innocent, Reacher thought. And I don’t care what the other one thinks.

“Ms. Yanni will have to put it in writing,” Emerson said.

“You type it, I’ll sign it,” Yanni said.

Rodin looked straight at Reacher. “Can you offer corroboration?”

“Like what?”

“Something along the lines of your scar. But relating to Ms. Yanni.”

Reacher nodded. “Yes, I could. But I won’t. And if you ask again I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

Silence in the office. Emerson dug in his pocket and found a handcuff key. Turned suddenly and tossed it underarm through the air. Reacher’s hands were cuffed but he was careful to lead with his right. He caught the key in his right palm, and smiled.

“Bellantonio been talking to you?” he said.

“Why did you give Ms. Yanni a false name?” Emerson asked.

“Maybe I didn’t,” Reacher said. “Maybe Gordon is my real name.”

He tossed the key back and stepped over and held his wrists out and waited for Emerson to unlock the cuffs.

The Zec took the phone call two minutes later. A familiar voice, low and hurried.

“It didn’t work,” it said. “He had an alibi.”

“For real?”

“Probably not. But we’re not going to go there.”

“So what next?”

“Just sit tight. He can’t be more than one step away now. In which case he’ll be coming for you soon. So be locked and loaded and ready for him.”

“They didn’t fight very hard,” Ann Yanni said. “Did they?” She started the Mustang’s engine before Reacher even got his door closed.

“I didn’t expect them to,” he said. “The innocent one knows the case was weak. And the guilty one knows putting me back on the street takes me off the board about as fast as putting me in a cell right now.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve got Rosemary Barr and they know I’ll go find her. So they’ll be waiting for me, ready to rock and roll. I’ll be dead before morning. That’s the new plan. Cheaper than jail.”

They drove straight back to Franklin’s office and ran up the outside staircase and found Franklin sitting at his desk. The lights were off and his face was bathed in the glow from his computer screen. He was staring at it blankly, like it was telling him nothing. Reacher broke the news about Rosemary Barr. Franklin went very still and glanced at the door. Then the window.

“We were right here,” he said.

Reacher nodded. “Three of us. You, me, and Helen.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Me either,” Reacher said. “They’re really good.”

“What are they going to do to her?”

“They’re going to make her give evidence against her brother. Some kind of a made-up story.”

“Will they hurt her?”

“That depends on how fast she caves.”

“She’s not going to cave,” Yanni said. “Not in a million years. Don’t you see that? She’s totally dedicated to clearing her brother’s name.”

“Then they’re going to hurt her.”

“Where is she?” Franklin asked Reacher. “Best guess?”

“Wherever they are,” Reacher said. “But I don’t know where that is.”

She was in the upstairs living room, taped to a chair. The Zec was staring at her. He was fascinated by women. Once he had gone twenty-seven years without seeing one. The penal battalion he had joined in 1943 had had a few, but they were a small minority and they died fast. And then after the Great Patriotic War had been won, his nightmare progress through the Gulag had begun. In 1949 he had seen a woman peasant near the White Sea Canal. She was a stooped and bulky old crone two hundred yards away in a beet field. Then nothing, until in 1976 he saw a nurse riding a troika sled through the frozen wastes of Siberia. He was a quarryman then. He had come up out of the hole with a hundred other zecs and was walking home in a long ragged column down a long straight road. The nurse’s sled was approaching on another road that ran at right angles. The land was flat and featureless and covered with snow. The zecs could see forever. They stood and watched the nurse drive a whole mile. Then they turned their heads as one as she passed through the crossroads and watched her through another mile. The guards denied them food that night as punishment for the unauthorized halt. Four men died, but the Zec didn’t.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

Rosemary Barr said nothing. The one called Chenko had returned her shoe. He had crouched in front of her and fitted it to her foot like a store clerk. Then he had backed away and sat down next to the one called Vladimir, on the sofa. The one called Sokolov had stayed downstairs in a room full of surveillance equipment. The one called Linsky was pacing the room, white with pain. He had something wrong with his back.

“When the Zec speaks, you should answer,” the one called Vladimir said.

Rosemary looked away. She was afraid of Vladimir. More so than the others. Vladimir was huge, and he gave off an air of depravity, like a smell.

“Does she understand her position?” Linsky asked. The Zec smiled at him, and Linsky smiled back. It was a private joke between them. Any claim to rights or humane treatment in the camps was always met with a question: Do you understand your position? The question was always followed by a statement: You don’t have a position. You are nothing to the Motherland. The first time Linsky had heard the question he had been about to reply, but the Zec had hauled him away. By that point the Zec had eighteen years under his belt, and the intervention was uncharacteristic. But clearly he had felt something for the raw youngster. He had taken the kid under his wing. They had been together ever since, through a long succession of locations neither of them could name. Many books had been written about the Gulag, and documents had been discovered, and maps had been made, but the irony was that those who had participated had no idea where they had been. Nobody had told them. A camp was a camp, with wire, huts, endless forest, endless tundra, endless work. What difference did a name make?

Linsky had been a soldier and a thief. In the west of Europe or in America he would have served time, two years here, three years there, but during the Soviet Union, stealing was an ideological transgression. It showed an uneducated and antisocial preference for private property. Such a preference was answered with a swift and permanent removal from civilized society. In Linsky’s case the removal had lasted from 1963 until civilized society had collapsed and Gorbachev had emptied the Gulag.

“She understands her position,” the Zec said. “And next comes acceptance.”

Franklin called Helen Rodin. Ten minutes later she was back in his office. She was still mad at Reacher. That was clear. But she was too worried about Rosemary Barr to make a big deal out of it. Franklin stayed at his desk, one eye on his computer screen. Helen and Ann Yanni sat together at a table. Reacher stared out the window. The sky was darkening.

“We should call someone,” Helen said.

“Like who?” Reacher asked.

“My father. He’s the good guy.”

Reacher turned around. “Suppose he is. What do we tell him? That we’ve got a missing person? He’ll just call the cops, because what else can he do? And if Emerson’s the bad guy, the cops will sit on it. Even if Emerson’s the good guy, the cops will sit on it just the same. Missing adults don’t get anyone very excited. Too many of them.”

“But she’s integral to our case.”

“Their case is about her brother. So the cops will figure it’s only natural she ran away. Her brother is a notorious criminal and she couldn’t stand the shame.”

“But you saw her get kidnapped. You could tell them.”

“I saw a shoe. That’s all I can tell anybody. And I’ve got no credibility here. I’ve been playing silly games for two days.”

“So what do we do?”

Reacher turned back to the window.

“We take care of it ourselves,” he said.

“How?”

“All we need is a location. We work through the woman who was shot, we get names, we get some kind of a context, we get a place. Then we go there.”

“When?” Yanni asked.

“Twelve hours,” Reacher said. “Before dawn. They’ll be working on some kind of a timetable. They want to take care of me first, and then they want to start in on Rosemary Barr. We need to get to her before they run out of patience.”

“But that means you’ll be showing up exactly when they’re expecting you.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s like walking into a trap,” Yanni said.

Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni turned to Franklin and said, “Tell us more about the woman who was shot.”

“There’s nothing more to tell,” Franklin said. “I’ve been through everything forward and backward. She was very ordinary.”

“Family?”

“All of them are back East. Where she came from.”

“Friends?”

“Two, basically. A co-worker and a neighbor. Neither of them is interesting. Neither of them is a Russian, for instance.”

Yanni turned back to Reacher. “So maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the third shot wasn’t the money shot.”

“It must have been,” Reacher said. “Or why would he pause after it? He was double-checking he had a hit.”

“He paused after the sixth, too. For good.”

“He wouldn’t wait that long. It could have gone completely out of control by then. People could have been jumping all over each other.”

“But they weren’t.”

“He couldn’t have predicted that.”

“I agree,” Franklin said. “A thing like that, you don’t do it with your first or your last shot.”

Then his eyes lost focus. He stared at the wall, like he wasn’t seeing it.

“Wait,” he said.

He glanced at his screen.

“Something I forgot,” he said.

“What?” Reacher asked.

“What you said about Rosemary Barr. Missing persons.”

He turned back to his mouse and his keyboard and started clicking and typing. Then he hit his enter key and sat forward intently, like proximity would speed the process.

“Last chance,” he said.

Reacher knew from television commercials that computers operated at all kinds of gigahertz, which he assumed was pretty fast. But even so, Franklin’s screen stayed blank for a long, long time. There was a little graphic in the corner. It was rotating slowly. It implied a thorough and patient search through an infinite amount of data. It spun for minutes. Then it stopped. There was an electrostatic crackle from the monitor and the screen wiped down and redrew into a densely-printed document. Plain computer font. Reacher couldn’t read it from where he was.

The office went quiet.

Franklin looked up.

“OK,” he said. “There you go. At last. Finally something that isn’t ordinary. Finally we catch a break.”

“What?” Yanni said.

“Oline Archer reported her husband missing two months ago.”

CHAPTER 15

Franklin pushed his chair back to make space and the others all crowded around the screen together. Reacher and Helen Rodin ended up shoulder to shoulder. No more animosity. Just the thrill of pursuit.

Most of the document was taken up with coded headers and source information. Letters, numbers, times, origins. The substantive message was short. Two months previously, Mrs. Oline Anne Archer had made a missing persons report concerning her husband. His name was Edward Stratton Archer. He had left the marital home for work early on a routine Monday and had not returned by end-of-business on Wednesday, which was when the report was made.

“Is he still missing?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” Franklin said. He pointed to a letter A buried in the code at the top of the screen. “It’s still active.”

“So let’s go talk to Oline’s friends,” Reacher said. “We need some background here.”

“Now?” Franklin said.

“We’ve only got twelve hours,” Reacher said. “No time to waste.”

Franklin wrote down names and addresses for Oline Archer’s co-worker and neighbor. He handed the paper to Ann Yanni, because she was paying his bill.

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’ll see if the husband shows up in the databases. This could be a coincidence. Maybe he’s got a wife in every state. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Reacher said. “So don’t waste your time. Find a phone number for me instead. A guy called Cash. Former Marine. He owns the range where James Barr went to shoot. Down in Kentucky. Call him for me.”

“Message?”

“Give him my name. Tell him to get his ass in his Humvee. Tell him to drive up here tonight. Tell him there’s a whole new Invitational going on.”

“Invitational?”

“He’ll understand. Tell him to bring his M24. With a night scope. And whatever else he’s got lying around.”

Reacher followed Ann Yanni and Helen Rodin down the stairs. They got into Helen’s Saturn, the women in the front and Reacher in the back. Reacher figured they would all have preferred the Mustang, but it only had two seats.

“Where first?” Helen asked.

“Which is closer?” Reacher asked back.

“The co-worker.”

“OK, her first.”

Traffic was slow. Roads were torn up and construction traffic was lumbering in and out of work zones. Reacher glanced between his watch and the windows. Daylight was fading. Evening was coming. Time ticking away.

The co-worker lived in a plain heartland suburb east of town. It was filled with a grid of straight residential streets. The streets were lined on both sides by modest ranch houses. The houses had small lots, flags on poles, hoops over the garage doors, satellite dishes on brick chimneys. Some of the sidewalk trees had faded yellow ribbons tied around them. Reacher guessed they symbolized solidarity with troops serving overseas. Which conflict, he wasn’t sure. What the point was, he had no idea. He had served overseas for most of thirteen years and had never met anyone who cared what was tied to trees back home. As long as someone sent paychecks and food and water and bullets, and wives stayed faithful, most guys were happy enough.

The sun was going down behind them and Helen was driving slowly with her head ducked forward so she could see the house numbers early. She spotted the one she wanted and pulled into a driveway and parked behind a small sedan. It was new. Reacher recognized the brand name from his walk up the four-lane: America’s Best Warranty!

The co-worker herself was a tired and harassed woman of about thirty-five. She opened her door and stepped out to the stoop and pulled the door shut behind her to block out the noise from what sounded like a dozen kids running riot inside. She recognized Ann Yanni immediately. Even glanced beyond her, looking for a camera crew.

“Yes?” she said.

“We need to talk about Oline Archer,” Helen Rodin said.

The woman said nothing. She looked conflicted, like she knew she was supposed to think it was tasteless to talk about victims of tragedy to journalists. But apparently Ann Yanni’s celebrity status overcame her reluctance.

“OK,” she said. “What do you want to know? Oline was a lovely person and all of us at the office miss her terribly.”

The nature of randomness, Reacher thought. Random slayings always involved people described as lovely afterward. Nobody ever said She was a rat-faced fink and I’m glad she’s dead. Whoever it was did us all a favor. That never happened.

“We need to know something about her husband,” Helen said.

“I never met her husband,” the woman said.

“Did Oline talk about him?”

“A little, I guess. Now and then. His name is Ted, I think.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s in business. I’m not sure what kind of business.”

“Did Oline say anything about him being missing?”

“Missing?”

“Oline reported him missing two months ago.”

“I know she seemed terribly worried. I think he was having problems with his business. In fact I think he’d been having problems for a year or two. That’s why Oline went back to work.”

“She didn’t always work?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I think she did way back, and then she gave it up. But she had to come back. Because of circumstances. Whatever the opposite of rags to riches is.”

“Riches to rags,” Reacher said.

“Yes, like that,” the woman said. “She needed her job, financially. I think she was embarrassed about it.”

“But she didn’t give you details?” Ann Yanni asked.

“She was a very private person,” the woman said.

“It’s important.”

“She would get kind of distracted. That wasn’t like her. About a week before she was killed she was gone most of one afternoon. That wasn’t like her, either.”

“Do you know what she was doing?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Anything you remember about her husband would help us.”

The woman shook her head. “His name is Ted. That’s all I can say for sure.”

“OK, thanks,” Helen said.

She turned and headed back to her car. Yanni and Reacher followed her. The woman on the stoop stared after them, disappointed, like she had failed an audition.

Ann Yanni said, “Strike one. But don’t worry. It always happens that way. Sometimes I think we should just skip the first person on the list. They never know anything.”

Reacher was uncomfortable in the back of the car. His pants pocket had gotten underneath him and a coin was digging edge-on into his thigh. He squirmed around and pulled it out. It was a quarter, new and shiny. He looked at it for a minute and then he put it in the other pocket.

“I agree,” he said. “We should have skipped her. My fault. Stands to reason a co-worker wouldn’t know much. People are cagy around co-workers. Especially rich people fallen on hard times.”

“The neighbor will know more,” Yanni said.

“We hope,” Helen said.

They were caught in crosstown traffic. They were headed from the eastern suburbs to the western, and it was a slow, slow ride. Reacher was glancing between his watch and the windows again. The sun was low on the horizon ahead of them. Behind them it was already twilight.

Time ticking away.

Rosemary Barr moved in her chair and struggled against the tape binding her wrists.

“We know it was Charlie who did it,” she said.

“Charlie?” the Zec repeated.

“My brother’s so-called friend.”

“Chenko,” the Zec said. “His name is Chenko. And yes, he did it. Tactically it was his plan. He did well. Of course, his physique helped. He was able to wear his own shoes inside your brother’s. He had to roll the pants and the raincoat sleeves.”

“But we know,” Rosemary said.

“But who knows? And what exactly do they bring to the party?”

“Helen Rodin knows.”

“You’ll dismiss her as your lawyer. You’ll terminate the representation. Ms. Rodin will be unable to repeat anything she learned while your relationship was privileged. Linsky, am I right?”

Linsky nodded. He was six feet away, on the sofa, propped at an odd angle to rest his back.

“That’s the law,” he said. “Here in America.”

“Franklin knows,” Rosemary said. “And Ann Yanni.”

“Hearsay,” the Zec said. “Theories, speculation, and innuendo. Those two have no persuasive evidence. And no credibility, either. Private detectives and television journalists are exactly the kind of people who peddle ridiculous and alternative explanations for events like these. It’s to be expected. Its absence would be unusual. Apparently a president was killed in this country more than forty years ago and people like them still claim that the real truth has not yet been uncovered.”

Rosemary said nothing.

“Your deposition will be definitive,” the Zec said. “You’ll go to Rodin and you’ll give sworn testimony about how your brother plotted and planned. About how he told you what he was intending. In detail. The time, the place, everything. You’ll say that to your sincere and everlasting regret you didn’t take him seriously. Then some poor excuse for a public defender will take one look at your evidence and plead your brother guilty and the whole thing will be over.”

“I won’t do it,” Rosemary said.

The Zec looked straight at her.

“You will do it,” he said. “I promise you that. Twenty-four hours from now you’ll be begging to do it. You’ll be insane with fear that we might change our minds and not let you do it.”

The room went quiet. Rosemary glanced at the Zec as if she had something to say. Then she glanced away. But the Zec answered her anyway. He had heard her message loud and clear.

“No, we won’t be there with you at the deposition,” he said. “But we will know what you tell them. Within minutes. And don’t think about a little detour to the bus depot. For one thing, we’ll have your brother killed. For another, there’s no country in the world we can’t find you in.”

Rosemary said nothing.

“Anyway,” the Zec said. “Let’s not argue. It’s unproductive. And pointless. You’ll tell them what we tell you to tell them. You will, you know. You’ll see. You’ll be desperate to. You’ll be wishing we had arranged an earlier appointment for you. At the courthouse. You’ll spend the waiting time on your knees pleading for a chance to show us how word-perfect you are. That’s how it usually happens. We’re very good at what we do. We learned at the feet of masters.”

“My brother has Parkinson’s disease,” Rosemary said.

“Diagnosed when?” the Zec asked, because he knew the answer.

“It’s been developing.”

The Zec shook his head. “Too subjective to be helpful. Who’s to say it’s not a similar condition brought on suddenly by his recent injury? If not, then who’s to say such a condition is a true handicap anyway? When shooting from such a close range? If the public defender brings in an expert, then Rodin will bring in three. He’ll find doctors who will swear that Little Annie Oakley was racked with Parkinson’s disease from the very day she was born.”

“Reacher knows,” Rosemary said.

“The soldier? The soldier will be dead by morning. Dead, or a runaway.”

“He won’t run away.”

“Therefore he’ll be dead. He’ll come for you tonight. We’ll be ready for him.”

Rosemary said nothing.

“Men have come for us before in the night,” the Zec said. “Many times, in many places. And yet we’re still here. Da, Linsky?”

Linsky nodded again.

“We’re still here,” he said.

“When will he come?” the Zec asked.

“I don’t know,” Rosemary said.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” Linsky said. “He’s an American. They’re trained that four o’clock in the morning is the best time for a surprise attack.”

“Direction?”

“From the north would make the most sense. The stone-crushing plant would conceal his staging area and leave him only two hundred yards of open ground to cover. But I think he’ll double-bluff us there. He’ll avoid the north, because he knows it’s best.”

“Not from the west,” the Zec said.

Linsky shook his head. “I agree. Not down the driveway. Too straight and open. He’ll come from the south or the east.”

“Put Vladimir in with Sokolov,” the Zec said to him. “Tell them to watch the south and the east very carefully. But tell them to keep an eye out north and west, too. All four directions must be monitored continuously, just in case. Then put Chenko in the upstairs hallway with his rifle. He can be ready to deploy to whichever window is appropriate. With Chenko, one shot will be enough.”

Then he turned to Rosemary Barr.

“Meanwhile we’ll put you somewhere safe,” he told her. “Your tutorials will start as soon as the soldier is buried.”

The outer western suburbs were bedroom communities for people who worked in the city, so the traffic stayed bad all the way out. The houses were much grander than in the east. They were all two-story, all varied, all well maintained. They all had big lots and pools and ambitious evergreen landscaping. With the last of the sunset behind them they looked like pictures in a brochure.

“Tight-ass middle class,” Reacher said.

“What we all aspire to,” Yanni said.

“They won’t want to talk,” Reacher said. “Not their style.”

“They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks to me.”

They drove past the Archer place slowly. There was a cast-metal sign on thin chains under the mailbox: Ted and Oline Archer. Beyond it, across a broad open lawn, the house looked closed-up and dark and silent. It was a big Tudor place. Dull brown beams, cream stucco. Three-car garage. Nobody home, Reacher thought.

The neighbor they were looking for lived across the street and one lot to the north. Hers was a place about the same size as the Archers’ but done in an Italianate style. Stone accents, little crenellated towers, dark green sun awnings on the south-facing ground-floor windows. The evening light was fading away to darkness and lamps were coming on behind draped windows. The whole street looked warm and rested and quiet and very satisfied with itself. Reacher said, “They sleep safely in their beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm.”

“You know George Orwell?” Yanni asked.

“I went to college,” Reacher said. “West Point is technically a college.”

Yanni said, “The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it,” Reacher said.

“I’m sure these are perfectly nice people,” Helen said.

“But will they talk to us?”

“They’ll talk,” Yanni said. “Everyone talks.”

Helen pulled into a long limestone driveway and parked about twenty feet behind an imported SUV that had big chrome wheels. The front door of the house was made of ancient gray weathered oak with iron banding that had nail heads as big as golf balls. It felt like you could step through it straight into the Renaissance.

“Property is theft,” Reacher said.

“Proudhon,” Yanni said. “Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world.”

“Abraham Lincoln,” Reacher said. “In his first State of the Union.”

There was an iron knocker shaped like a quoit in a lion’s mouth. Helen lifted it and used it to thump on the door. Then she found a discreet electric bell push and pressed that, too. They heard no answering sound inside the house. Heavy door, thick walls. Helen tried again with the bell, and before she got her finger off the button, the door sucked back off copper weatherproofing strips and opened like a vault. A guy was standing there with his hand on the inside handle.

“Yes?” he said. He was somewhere in his forties, solid, prosperous, probably a golf club member, maybe an Elk, maybe a Rotarian. He was wearing corduroy pants and a patterned sweater. He was the kind of guy who gets home and immediately changes clothes as a matter of routine.

“Is your wife at home?” Helen asked. “We’d like to speak with her about Oline Archer.”

“About Oline?” the guy said. He was looking at Ann Yanni.

“I’m a lawyer,” Helen said.

“What is there to be said about Oline?”

“Maybe more than you think,” Yanni said.

“You’re not a lawyer.”

“I’m here as a journalist,” Yanni said. “But not on a human interest story. Nothing tacky. There might have been a miscarriage of justice. That’s the issue here.”

“A miscarriage in what way?”

“They might have arrested the wrong man for the shootings. That’s why I’m here. That’s why we’re all here.”

Reacher watched the guy. He was standing there, holding the door, trying to decide. In the end he just sighed and stepped back.

“You better come in,” he said.

Everyone talks.

He led the way through a muted yellow hallway to a living room. It was spacious and immaculate. Velvet furniture, little mahogany tables, a stone fireplace. No television. There was probably a separate room for that. A den, or a home theater. Or perhaps they didn’t watch television. Reacher saw Ann Yanni calculating the odds.

“I’ll get my wife,” the guy said.

He came back a minute later with a handsome woman a little younger than himself. She was wearing pressed jeans and a sweatshirt the same yellow as the hallway walls. Penny loafers on her feet. No socks. She had hair that had been expensively styled to look casual and windswept. She was medium height and lean in a way that spoke of diet books and serious time in aerobics classes.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“Ted Archer,” Helen said.

“Ted? I thought you told my husband it was about Oline.”

“We think there may be a connection. Between his situation and hers.”

“How could there be a connection? Surely what happened to Oline was completely out of the blue.”

“Maybe it wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We suspect that Oline might have been a specific target, kind of hidden behind the confusion of the other four victims.”

“Wouldn’t that be a matter for the police?”

Helen paused. “At the moment the police seem satisfied with what they’ve got.”

The woman glanced at her husband.

“Then I’m not sure we should talk about it,” he said.

“At all?” Yanni asked. “Or just to me?”

“I’m not sure if we would want to be on television.”

Reacher smiled to himself. The other side of the tracks.

“This is deep background only,” Yanni said. “It’s entirely up to you whether your names are used.”

The woman sat down on a sofa and her husband sat next to her, very close. Reacher smiled to himself again. They had subconsciously adopted the standard couple-on-a-sofa pose that television interviews used all the time. Two faces close together, ideally framed for a tight camera shot. Yanni took her cue and sat in an armchair facing them, perched right on the edge, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, a frank and open expression on her face. Helen took another chair. Reacher stepped away to the window. Used a finger to move the drapes aside. It was fully dark outside.

Time ticking away.

“Tell us about Ted Archer,” Yanni said. “Please.” A simple request, only six words, but her tone said: I think you two are the most interesting people in the world and I would love to be your friend. For a moment Reacher thought Yanni had missed her way. She would have been a great cop.

“Ted had business problems,” the woman said.

“Is that why he disappeared?” Yanni asked.

The woman shrugged. “That was Oline’s initial assumption.”

“But?”

“Ultimately she rejected that explanation. And I think she was right to. Ted wasn’t that kind of a man. And his problems weren’t those kind of problems. The fact is, he was getting screwed rotten and he was mad as hell about it and he was fighting. And people who fight don’t just walk away. I mean, do they?”

“How was he getting screwed?”

The woman glanced at her husband. He leaned forward. Boy stuff. “His principal customer stopped buying from him. Which happens. Power in the marketplace ebbs and flows. So Ted offered to renegotiate. Offered to drop his price. No dice. So he offered to drop it more. He told me he got to the point where he was giving it away. Still no dice. They just wouldn’t buy.”

“What do you think was happening?” Yanni asked. Keep talking, sir.

“Corruption,” the guy said. “Under-the-table inducements. It was completely obvious. One of Ted’s competitors was offering kickbacks. No way for an honest man to compete with that.”

“When did this start?”

“About two years ago. It was a major problem for them. Financially they went downhill very fast. No cash flow. Ted sold his car. Oline had to go out to work. The DMV thing was all she could find. They made her supervisor after about a month.” He smiled a thin smile, proud of his class. “Another year, she’d have been running the place. She’d have been Commissioner.”

“What was Ted doing about it? How was he fighting?”

“He was trying to find out which competitor it was.”

“Did he find out?”

“We don’t know. He was trying for a long time, and then he went missing.”

“Didn’t Oline include this in her report?”

The guy sat back and his wife leaned forward again. Shook her head. “Oline didn’t want to. Not back then. It was all unproven. All speculation. She didn’t want to throw accusations around. And it wasn’t definitely connected. I guess the way we’re telling it now it sounds more obvious than it was at the time. I mean, Ted wasn’t Sherlock Holmes or anything. He wasn’t on the case twenty-four/ seven. He was still doing normal stuff. He was just talking to people when he could, you know, asking questions, comparing notes, comparing prices, trying to put it all together. It was a two-year period. Occasional conversations, phone calls, inquiries, things like that. It didn’t seem dangerous, certainly.”

“Did Oline ever go to anyone with this? Later, maybe?”

The woman nodded. “She stewed for two months after he disappeared. We talked. She was up and down with it. Eventually she decided there had to be a connection. I agreed with her. She didn’t know what to do. I told her she should call the police.”

“And did she?”

“She didn’t call. She went personally. She felt they would take her more seriously face-to-face. Not that they did, apparently. Nothing happened. It was like dropping a stone down a well and never hearing the splash.”

“When did she go?”

“A week before the thing in the plaza last Friday.”

Nobody spoke. Then, kindly, gently, Ann Yanni asked the obvious question: “You didn’t suspect a connection?”

The woman shook her head. “Why would we? It seemed to be a total coincidence. The shootings were random, weren’t they? You said so yourself. On the television news. We heard you say it. Five random victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Nobody spoke.

Reacher turned away from the window.

“What business was Ted Archer in?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, I assumed you knew,” the husband said. “He owns a quarry. Huge place about forty miles north of here. Cement, concrete, crushed stone. Vertically integrated, very efficient.”

“And who was the customer who backed off?”

“The city,” the guy said.

“Big customer.”

“As big as they come. All this construction going on right now is manna from heaven for people in that business. The city sold ninety million in tax-free municipals just to cover the first year. Add in the inevitable overruns and it’s a nine-figure bonanza for somebody.”

“What car did Ted sell?”

“A Mercedes-Benz.”

“Then what did he drive?”

“He used a truck from work.”

“Did you see it?”

“Every day for two years.”

“What was it?”

“A pickup. A Chevy, I think.”

“An old brown Silverado? Plain steel wheels?”

The guy stared. “How did you know that?”

“One more question,” Reacher said. “For your wife.”

She looked at him.

“After Oline went to the cops, did she tell you who it was she talked to? Was it a detective called Emerson?”

The woman was already shaking her head. “I told Oline if she didn’t want to call she should go to the station house, but she said it was too far, because she never got that long of a lunch hour. She said she’d go to the DA instead. His office is much closer to the DMV. And Oline was like that anyway. She preferred to go straight to the top. So she took it to Alex Rodin himself.”

Helen Rodin was completely silent on the drive back to town. So silent she quivered and vibrated and shook with it. Her lips were clamped and her cheeks were sucked in and her eyes were wide-open. Her silence made it impossible for Reacher or Yanni to speak. She drove like a robot, competently, not fast, not slow, displaying a mechanical compliance with lane markers and stoplights and yield signs. She parked on the apron below Franklin’s office and left the motor running and said, “You two go on ahead. I just can’t do this.”

Ann Yanni got out and walked over to the staircase. Reacher stayed in the car and leaned forward over the seat.

“It’ll be OK,” he said.

“It won’t.”

“Helen, pull the keys and get your ass upstairs. You’re an officer of the court and you’ve got a client in trouble.” Then he opened his door and climbed out of the car and by the time he had walked around the trunk she was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.

Franklin was in front of his computer, as always. He told Reacher that Cash was on his way up from Kentucky, no questions asked. Told him that Ted Archer hadn’t shown up anywhere else in the databases. Then he noticed the silence and the tension.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“We’re one step away,” Reacher said. “Ted Archer was in the concrete business and he was frozen out of all these new city construction contracts by a competitor who was offering bribes. He tried to prove it and must have been getting very close to succeeding, because the competitor offed him.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Only by inference. We’ll never find his body without digging up First Street again. But I know where his truck is. It’s in Jeb Oliver’s barn.”

“Why there?”

“They used Oliver for things they can’t do themselves. For when they don’t want to show their faces, or for when they can’t. Presumably Archer knew them and wouldn’t have gone near them. But Oliver was just a local kid. Maybe he staged a flat tire or hitched a ride. Archer would have walked right into it. Then the bad guys hid the body and Oliver hid the truck.”

“Oline Archer didn’t suspect anything?”

“She did eventually,” Reacher said. “She sat on it two months and then presumably she pieced together enough to make some kind of sense out of it. Then she started to go public with it and all kinds of private alarm bells must have gone off, because a week later she was dead. Staged the way it was because to have a missing husband and then a murdered wife two months later would have raised too many flags. But as long as it looked random it was going to be seen as coincidental.”

“Who had Oline taken it to? Emerson?”

Reacher said nothing.

“She took it to my father,” Helen Rodin said.

There was silence for a long moment.

“So what now?” Franklin said.

“You need to hit that keyboard again,” Reacher said. “Whoever got the city contracts has pretty much defined himself as the bad guy here. So we need to know who he is. And where he’s based.”

“Public record,” Franklin said.

“So check it.”

Franklin turned away in the silence and started his fingers pattering over the keys. He pointed and clicked for a minute. Then he came up with the answer.

“Specialized Services of Indiana,” he said. “They own all the current city contracts for cement, concrete, and crushed stone. Many, many millions of dollars.”

“Where are they?”

“That was the good news.”

“What’s the bad?”

“There’s no paperwork. They’re a trust registered in Bermuda. They don’t have to file anything.”

“What kind of a system is that?”

Franklin didn’t answer.

“A Bermuda trust needs a local lawyer.” Helen’s voice was low, quiet, resigned. Reacher recalled the plate outside A. A. Rodin’s office: the name, followed by the letters that denoted the law degree.

Franklin clicked his way through two more screens.

“There’s a phone number,” he said. “That’s all we’ve got.”

“What is it?” Helen asked.

Franklin read it out.

“That’s not my father’s number,” Helen said.

Franklin clicked his way into a reverse directory. Typed in the number and the screen changed and gave him a name and a business address.

“John Mistrov,” he said.

“Russian name,” Reacher said.

“I guess so.”

“Do you know him?”

“Vaguely. He’s a wills and trusts guy. One-man band. I’ve never worked for him.”

Reacher checked his watch. “Can you find a home address?”

Franklin went into a regular directory. Typed in the name and came up with a domestic listing.

“Should I call him?” he said.

Reacher shook his head. “We’ll pay him a visit. Face-to-face works better when time is short.”

Vladimir made his way down to the ground-floor surveillance room. Sokolov was in a rolling chair in front of the long table that carried the four television monitors. From left to right they were labeled North, East, South, and West, which made sense if a person viewed the world from a clockwise perspective. Sokolov was scooting his chair slowly down the line, examining each picture, moving on, returning from West to North with a powerful push off the wall. All four screens were misty and green, because it was dark outside and the thermal imaging had kicked in. Occasionally a bright dot could be seen moving fast in the distance. An animal. Nocturnal. Fox, skunk, raccoon, or a pet cat or a lost dog far from home. The North monitor showed a glow from the crushing plant. It would fade as the idle machines cooled. Apart from that all the backgrounds were a deep olive color, because there was nothing out there except for miles of fields constantly misted with cold water from the always-turning irrigation booms.

Vladimir pulled up a second wheeled chair and sat down on Sokolov’s left. He would watch North and East. Sokolov would concentrate on the South and West. That way they each had responsibility for one likely direction and one unlikely. It was a fair distribution of labor.

Upstairs in the third-floor hallway Chenko loaded his own Super Match. Ten rounds, Lake City .308s. One thing Americans did right was ammunition. He opened all the bedroom doors to speed his access north, south, east, or west, as required. He walked to a window and turned his night scope on. Set it for seventy-five yards. He figured he would get the call when the soldier was about a hundred and fifty yards out. That was about the practical limit for the cameras. He would step to the right window and acquire the target when it was still more than a hundred yards distant. He would track its progress. He would let it come to him. When it was seventy-five yards out, he would kill it.

He raised the rifle. Checked the image. It was bright and clear. He watched a fox cross the open ground east to west. Good hunting, my little friend. He walked back to the hallway and propped the gun against the wall and sat down in a straight-backed chair to wait.

Helen Rodin insisted on staying behind in Franklin’s office. So Reacher and Yanni went out alone, in the Mustang. The streets were dark and quiet. Yanni drove. She knew her way around. The address they were looking for was a loft building carved out of an old warehouse halfway between the river wharf and the railhead. Yanni said it was a part of the new urban strategy. SoHo comes to the heartland. She said she had thought about buying in the same building.

Then she said, “We should put Helen on suicide watch.”

“She’ll be OK,” Reacher said.

“You think?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What if it was your old man?”

Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni slowed as the bulk of a large brick building loomed through the darkness.

“You can ask first,” Reacher said. “If he doesn’t answer, I’ll ask second.”

“He’ll answer,” Yanni said. “They all answer.”

But John Mistrov didn’t. He was a thin guy of about forty-five. He was dressed like a post-divorce midlife-crisis victim. Acid-rinsed too-tight jeans, black T-shirt, no shoes. They found him all alone in a big white loft apartment eating Chinese food from paper cartons. Initially he was very pleased to see Ann Yanni. Maybe hanging out with celebrities was a part of the lifestyle glamour that the new development had promised. But his early enthusiasm faded fast. It disappeared completely when Yanni ran through her suspicions and then insisted on knowing the names behind the trust.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “Surely you understand there are confidentiality issues here. Surely you understand that.”

“I understand that serious crimes have been committed,” Yanni said. “That’s what I understand. And you need to understand that, too. You need to choose up sides, right now, fast, before this thing goes public.”

“No comment,” the guy said.

“There’s no downside here,” Yanni said gently. “These names we want, they’ll all be in jail tomorrow. No comebacks.”

“No comment,” the guy said again.

“You want to go down with them?” Yanni asked. Sharply. “Like an accessory? Or do you want to get out from under? It’s your choice. But one way or the other you’re going to be on the news tomorrow night. Either doing the perp walk or standing there looking good, like, Oh my God, I had no idea, I was only too happy to help.”

“No comment,” the guy said for the third time.

Loud, clear, and smug.

Yanni gave up. Shrugged, and glanced at Reacher. Reacher checked his watch. Time ticking away. He stepped up close.

“You got medical insurance?” he asked.

The guy nodded.

“Dental plan?”

The guy nodded again.

Reacher hit him in the mouth. Right-handed, short swing, hard blow.

“Get that fixed,” he said.

The guy rocked back a step and doubled over and then came up coughing with blood all over his chin. Cut lips, loose teeth all rimed with red.

“Names,” Reacher said. “Now. Or I’ll take you apart a piece at a time.”

The guy hesitated. Mistake. Reacher hit him again. Then the guy came up with names, six of them, and descriptions, and an address, all from a position flat on the floor and all in a voice thick and bubbly with mouthfuls of blood.

Reacher glanced at Yanni.

“They all answer,” he said.

In the dark in the Mustang on the way back, Ann Yanni said, “He’ll call and warn them.”

“He won’t,” Reacher said. “He just betrayed them. So my guess is he’ll be going on a long vacation tomorrow.”

“You hope.”

“Doesn’t matter anyway. They already know I’m coming for them. Another warning wouldn’t make a difference.”

“You have a very direct style. One they don’t mention in Journalism 101.”

“I could teach you. It’s about surprise, really. If you can surprise them you don’t have to hit them very hard.”

Yanni dictated to Franklin the names that John Mistrov had given up. Four of them corresponded with names Reacher had already heard: Charlie Smith, Konstantin Raskin, Vladimir Shumilov, and Pavel Sokolov. The fifth was Grigor Linsky, which Reacher figured had to be the damaged man in the boxy suit, because the sixth name had been given simply as Zec Chelovek.

“I thought you said zec was a word,” Franklin said.

“It is,” Reacher said. “And so is Chelovek. It’s a transliteration of their word for human being. Zec Chelovek means prisoner–human being. Like Prisoner Man.”

“The others aren’t using code names.”

“Neither is the Zec, probably. Maybe that’s all he’s got left. Maybe he forgot his real name. Maybe we all would, in the Gulag.”

“You sound sorry for him,” Yanni said.

“I’m not sorry for him,” Reacher said. “I’m just trying to understand him.”

“No mention of my father,” Helen said.

Reacher nodded. “The Zec is the puppet master. He’s at the top of the tree.”

“Which means my father is just an employee.”

“Don’t worry about that now. Focus on Rosemary.”

Franklin used an online map and figured out that the address John Mistrov had spilled related to a stone-crushing plant built next to a quarry eight miles north and west of the city. Then he searched the tax rolls and confirmed that Specialized Services of Indiana was its registered owner. Then he searched the rolls all over again and found that the only other real estate registered to the trust was a house on the lot adjacent to the stone-crushing plant. Yanni said she knew the area.

“Anything else out there?” Reacher asked her.

She shook her head. “Nothing but farmland for miles.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “There you go. That’s where Rosemary is.”

He checked his watch. Ten o’clock in the evening.

“So what now?” Yanni said.

“Now we wait,” Reacher said.

“For what?”

“For Cash to get here from Kentucky. And then we wait some more.”

“For what?”

Reacher smiled.

“For the dead of night,” he said.

Franklin made coffee. Yanni told TV stories, about people she had known, about things she had seen, about governors’ girlfriends, politicians’ wives’ lovers, rigged ballots, crooked unions, about acres of marijuana growing behind circular screens of tall corn on the edges of Indiana fields. Then Franklin talked about his years as a cop. Then Reacher talked about his years since the army, the wandering, the exploring, his rootless invisible life.

Helen Rodin said nothing at all.

At eleven o’clock exactly they heard the rattle of a big diesel engine beating off the brick outside. Reacher stepped to the window and saw Cash’s Humvee nosing onto the parking apron. Too noisy, he thought. We can’t use it.

Or maybe we can.

“The Marines are here,” he said.

They heard Cash’s feet on the outside stairs. Heard his knock on the door. Reacher went out to the hallway to open up. Cash came in, brisk, solid, reassuring. He was dressed all in black. Black canvas pants, black canvas windbreaker. Reacher introduced him all around. Yanni, Franklin, Helen Rodin. Everyone shook hands and Cash took a seat. Inside twenty minutes he was up to speed and totally on board.

“Do we have a plan?” he asked.

“We’re about to make one,” Reacher said. Yanni went out to her car for the maps. Franklin cleared away the coffee cups and made space on the table. Yanni chose the right map. Spread it out flat.

“It’s like a giant chessboard out there,” she said. “Every square is a field a hundred yards across. There are roads laid out in a grid, north to south, west to east, about twenty fields apart.” Then she pointed. Slim finger, painted nail. “But right here we’ve got two roads that meet, and southeast of the corner they make we’ve got an empty space three fields wide and five fields high. No agriculture there. The northern part is the stone-crushing plant and the house is south of it. I’ve seen it and it stands about two hundred yards off the road, all alone in the middle of absolutely nothing. No landscaping, no vegetation. But no fence, either.”

“Flat?” Reacher asked.

“As a pool table,” Yanni said.

“Dark out there,” Cash said.

“As the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat,” Reacher said. “And I guess if there’s no fence it means they’re using cameras. With some kind of thermal imaging at night. Some kind of infrared.”

“How fast can you run two hundred yards?” Cash asked.

“Me?” Reacher said. “Slow enough they could mail-order a rifle to shoot me with.”

“What’s the best approach?”

“Walk in from the north,” Reacher said. “Without a doubt. We could get into the stone place straight off the road and just hike through it. Then we could lie up as long as we wanted. Good concealment until the last minute.”

“Can’t walk in from anywhere if they’ve got thermal cameras.”

“We’ll worry about that later.”

“OK, but they’ll anticipate the north.”

Reacher nodded. “We’ll pass on the north. Too obvious.”

“South or east would be next best. Because presumably the driveway comes in from the west. Probably too straight and too open.”

“They’ll be thinking the same thing.”

“Makes us both right.”

“I kind of like the driveway,” Reacher said. “What will it be? Paved?”

“Crushed limestone,” Yanni said. “They’ve got plenty to spare.”

“Noisy,” Cash said.

“It’ll have retained a little daytime heat,” Reacher said. “It’ll be warmer than the dirt. It’ll put a stripe of color down their thermal picture. If the contrast isn’t great it’ll give a shadow zone either side.”

“Are you kidding?” Cash said. “You’re going to be forty or fifty degrees hotter than ambient temperature. You’re going to show up like a road flare.”

“They’re going to be paying attention south and east.”

“Not exclusively.”

“You got a better idea?”

“What about a full frontal assault? With vehicles?”

Reacher smiled. “If it absolutely positively has to be destroyed by morning, call the United States Marine Corps.”

“Roger that,” Cash said.

“Too dangerous,” Reacher said. “We can’t give them a second’s warning and we can’t turn the place into a free-fire zone. We’ve got Rosemary to think about.”

Nobody spoke.

“I like the driveway,” Reacher said again.

Cash glanced at Helen Rodin.

“We could just call in the cops,” he said. “You know, if it’s the DA who’s the bad guy here. A couple of SWAT teams could do it.”

“Same problem,” Reacher said. “Rosemary would be dead before they got near the door.”

“Cut the power lines? Kill the cameras?”

“Same problem. It’s an announcement ahead of time.”

“Your call.”

“The driveway,” Reacher said. “I like the driveway.”

“But what about the cameras?”

“I’ll think of something,” Reacher said. He stepped over to the table. Stared down at the map. Then he turned back to Cash. “Does your truck have a CD player?”

Cash nodded. “Part of the comfort package.”

“Do you mind if Franklin drives it?”

“Franklin can have it. I’d prefer a sedan.”

“OK, your Humvee is our approach vehicle. Franklin can drive us there, let us out, and then get straight back here.”

“Us?” Yanni said. “Are we all going?”

“You bet your ass,” Reacher said. “Four of us there, with Franklin back here as the comms center.”

“Good,” Yanni said.

“We need cell phones,” Reacher said.

“I’ve got one,” Yanni said.

“Me too,” Cash said.

“Me too,” Helen said.

“I don’t,” Reacher said.

Franklin took a small Nokia out of his pocket.

“Take mine,” he said.

Reacher took it. “Can you set up a conference call? Four cell phones and your desk phone? As soon as you get back here?”

Franklin nodded. “Give me your numbers.”

“And turn the ringers off,” Reacher said.

“When are we doing this?” Cash asked.

“Four o’clock in the morning is my favorite time,” Reacher said. “But they’ll be expecting that. We learned it from them. Four in the morning is when the KGB went knocking on doors. Least resistance. It’s a biorhythm thing. So we’ll surprise them. We’ll do it at two-thirty.”

“If you surprise them you don’t have to hit them very hard?” Yanni said.

Reacher shook his head. “In this situation if we surprise them they won’t hit me very hard.”

“Where am I going to be?” Cash asked.

“Southwest corner of the gravel plant,” Reacher said. “Looking south and east at the house. You can cover the west and the north sides simultaneously. With your rifle.”

“OK.”

“What did you bring for me?”

Cash dug in the pocket of his windbreaker and came out with a knife in a sheath. He tossed it across the room. Reacher caught it. It was a standard-issue Navy SEAL SRK. Their survival-rescue knife. Carbon steel, black epoxy, seven-inch blade. Not new.

“This is it?” Reacher said.

“All I’ve got,” Cash said. “The only weapons I own are my rifle and that knife.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m a businessman, not a psycho.”

“Christ’s sake, Gunny, I’ll be taking a knife to a gunfight? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

“All I’ve got,” Cash said again.

“Great.”

“You can take a gun from the first one you cut. Face it, if you don’t get close enough to cut one of them you aren’t going to win anyway.”

Reacher said nothing.

They waited. Midnight. Twelve-thirty. Yanni fiddled with her cell phone and made a call. Reacher ran through the plan one more time. First in his head, then out loud, until everyone was clear. Details, dispositions, refinements, adjustments.

“But we might still change everything,” he said. “When we get there. No substitute for seeing the actual terrain.”

They waited. One o’clock. One-thirty. Reacher started to allow himself to think about the endgame. About what would come after the victory. He turned to Franklin.

“Who is Emerson’s number two?” he asked.

“A woman called Donna Bianca,” Franklin said.

“Is she any good?”

“She’s his number two.”

“She’ll need to be there. Afterward. It’s going to be a real three-ring circus. Too much for one pair of hands. I want you to bring Emerson and Donna Bianca out there. And Alex Rodin, of course. After we win.”

“They’ll be in bed.”

“So wake them up.”

“If we win,” Franklin said.

At one forty-five people started to get restless. Helen Rodin stepped over and squatted down next to Reacher. She picked up the knife. Looked at it. Put it back down.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because I can. And because of the girl.”

“You’ll get yourself killed.”

“Unlikely,” Reacher said. “These are old men and idiots. I’ve survived worse.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“If I get in OK, I’ll be safe enough. Room-to-room isn’t hard. People get very scared with a prowler loose in the house. They hate it.”

“But you won’t get in OK. They’ll see you coming.”

Reacher dug in his left-hand pocket and came out with the shiny new quarter that had bothered him in the car. Handed it to her.

“For you,” he said.

She looked at it. “Something to remember you by?”

“Something to remember tonight by.”

Then he checked his watch. Stood up.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

CHAPTER 16

They stood for a moment in the shadows and the silence on the parking apron below Franklin’s lighted windows. Then Yanni went to get the Sheryl Crow CD from her Mustang. She gave it to Cash. Cash unlocked the Humvee and leaned inside and put it in the player. Then he gave the keys to Franklin. Franklin climbed into the driver’s seat. Cash got in next to him with his M24 across his knees. Reacher and Helen Rodin and Ann Yanni squeezed together in the back.

“Turn the heater up,” Reacher said.

Cash leaned to his left and dialed in maximum temperature. Franklin started the engine. Backed out into the street. Swung the wheel and took off west. Then he turned north. The engine was loud and the ride was rough. The heater kicked in and the fan blew hard. The interior grew warm, and then hot. They turned west, turned north, turned west, turned north, lining up with the grid that would run through the fields. The drive was a series of long droning cruises punctuated by sharp right-angle corners. Then they made the final turn. Franklin sat up straight behind the wheel and accelerated hard.

“This is it,” Yanni said. “Dead ahead, about three miles to go.”

“Start the music,” Reacher said. “Track eight.”

Cash hit the button.

Every day is a winding road.

“Louder,” Reacher said.

Cash turned it up. Franklin drove on, sixty miles an hour.

“Two miles,” Yanni called. Then: “One mile.”

Franklin drove on. Reacher stared out the window to his right. Watched the fields flash past in the darkness. Random scatter from the headlights lit them up. The irrigation booms were turning so slowly they looked stationary. Mist filled the air.

“High beams,” Reacher called.

Franklin flicked them on.

“Music all the way up,” Reacher called.

Cash twisted the knob to maximum.

EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD.

“Half a mile,” Yanni yelled.

“Windows,” Reacher shouted.

Four thumbs hit four buttons and all four windows dropped an inch. Hot air and loud music sucked out into the night. Reacher stared right and saw the dark outline of the house flash past, isolated, distant, square, solid, substantial, dimly lit from inside. Flat land all around it. The limestone driveway, pale, very long, as straight as an arrow.

Franklin kept his foot hard down.

“Stop sign in four hundred yards,” Yanni yelled.

“Stand by,” Reacher shouted. “Showtime.”

“One hundred yards,” Yanni yelled.

“Doors,” Reacher shouted.

Three doors opened an inch. Franklin braked hard. Stopped dead on the line. Reacher and Yanni and Helen and Cash spilled out. Franklin didn’t hesitate. He took off again like it was just a normal dead-of-night stop sign. Reacher and Yanni and Cash and Helen dusted themselves down and stood close together on the crown of the road and stared north until the glow of the lights and the sound of the engine and the thump of the music were lost in the distance and the darkness.

Sokolov had picked up the Humvee’s heat signature on both the south and west monitors when it was still about half a mile shy of the house. Hard not to. A big powerful vehicle, traveling fast, trailing long plumes of hot air from open windows, what was to miss? On the screen it looked like a bottle rocket flying sideways. Then he heard it too, physically, through the walls. Big engine, loud music. Vladimir glanced his way.

“Passerby?” he asked.

“Let’s see,” Sokolov said.

It didn’t slow down. It hurtled straight past the house and kept on going north. On the screen it trailed heat like a reentry capsule. Through the walls they heard the music Doppler-shift like an ambulance’s siren as it went by.

“Passerby,” Sokolov said.

“Some asshole,” Vladimir said.

Upstairs on the third floor Chenko heard it, too. He stepped through an empty bedroom to a west-facing window and looked out. Saw a big black shape doing about sixty miles an hour, high-beam headlights, bright tail lights, music thumping and thudding so loud he could hear the door panels flexing from two hundred yards away. It roared past. Didn’t slow down. He opened the window and leaned out and craned his neck and watched the bubble of light track north into the distance. It went behind the skeletal tangle of machinery in the stone-crushing plant. But it was still visible as a moving glow in the air. After a quarter-mile the glow changed color. Red now, not white. Brake lights, flaring for the stop sign. The glow paused for a second. Then the red color died and the glow turned back to white and took off again, fast.

The Zec called up from the floor below: “Was that him?”

“No,” Chenko called back. “Just some rich kid out for a drive.”

Reacher led the way through the dark, four people single file on the edge of the blacktop with the gravel plant’s high wire fence on their left and huge circular fields across the road on their right. After the roar of the diesel and the thump of the music the silence felt absolute. There was nothing to hear except the hiss of irrigation water. Reacher raised his hand and stopped them where the fence turned a right angle and ran away east. The corner post was double-thickness and braced with angled spars. Grass and weeds from the shoulder were clumped up high. He stepped forward and checked the view. He was on a perfect diagonal from the northwest corner of the house. He had an equal forty-five-degree line of sight to the north facade and the west. Because of the diagonal the distance was about three hundred yards. Visibility was very poor. There was a glimmer of cloudy moonlight, but beyond that there was nothing at all.

He stepped back. Pointed at Cash, pointed at the base of the corner post.

“This is your position,” he whispered. “Check it out.”

Cash moved forward and knelt down in the weeds. Six feet away he was invisible. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Tracked it slowly left and right, up and down.

“Three stories plus a basement,” he whispered. “High-pitched shingle roof, plank siding, many windows, one door visible to the west. No cover at all in any direction. They bulldozed everything flat, all around. Nothing’s growing. You’re going to look like a beetle on a bed-sheet out there.”

“Cameras?”

The rifle tracked a steady line from left to right. “Under the eaves. One on the north side, one on the west. We can assume the same on the sides we can’t see.”

“How big are they?”

“How big do you want them to be?”

“Big enough for you to hit.”

“Funny man. If they were spy cameras built into cigarette lighters I could hit them from here.”

“OK, so listen up,” Reacher whispered. “This is how we’re going to do it. I’m going to get to my starting position. Then we’re all going to wait for Franklin to get back and put the comms net on the air. Then I’m going to make a move. If I don’t feel good I’m going to call in fire on those cameras. I say the word, I want you to take them out. Two shots, bang, bang. That’ll slow them down, maybe ten or twenty seconds.”

“Negative,” Cash said. “I won’t direct live rounds into a wooden structure we know contains a noncombatant hostage.”

“She’ll be in the basement,” Reacher said.

“Or the attic.”

“You’d be firing at the eaves.”

“Exactly. She’s in the attic, she hears gunfire, she hits the deck, that’s exactly where I’m aiming. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

“Spare me,” Reacher said. “Take the risk.”

“Negative. Won’t do it.”

“Christ, Gunny, you are one uptight Marine, you know that?”

Cash didn’t speak. Reacher stepped forward again and peered around the corner of the fence. Took a long hard look and pulled back.

“OK,” he said. “New plan. Just watch the west windows. You see muzzle flash, you put suppressing fire into the room it’s coming out of. We can assume the hostage won’t be in the same room as the sniper.”

Cash said nothing.

“Will you do that at least?” Reacher asked.

“You might be in the house already.”

“I’ll take my chances. Voluntary assumption of risk, OK? Helen can witness my consent. She’s a lawyer.”

Cash said nothing.

“No wonder you came in third,” Reacher said. “You need to lighten up.”

“OK,” Cash said. “I see hostile gunfire, I’ll return it.”

“Hostile is about the only kind you’re going to see, don’t you think? Since you only gave me a damn knife?”

“Army,” Cash said. “Always bitching about something.”

“What do I do?” Helen asked.

“New plan,” Reacher said. He touched the fence with his palm. “Keep low, follow the fence around the corner, stop opposite the house. Stay down. They won’t pick you up there. It’s too far. Listen to your phone. If I need a distraction I’ll ask you to run a little ways toward the house and then back again. A zigzag, or a circle. Out and back. Real fast. Just enough to put a blip on their screen. No danger. By the time they move a rifle around, you’ll be back at the fence.”

She nodded. Didn’t speak.

“And me?” Ann Yanni asked.

“You stay with Cash. You’re the ethics police. He gets cold feet about helping me out, you kick his ass, OK?”

Nobody spoke.

“All set?” Reacher asked.

“Set,” they said, one after the other.

Reacher walked away into the darkness on the other side of the road.

He kept on walking, off the blacktop, across the shoulder, across the stony margin of the field, onward, right into the field, all the way into the middle of the soaking crop. He waited until the irrigation boom rolled slowly around and caught up with him. Then he turned ninety degrees and walked south with it, directly underneath it, keeping pace, letting the ceaseless water rain down and soak his hair and his skin and his clothes. The boom pulled away as it followed its circular path and Reacher kept straight on at a tangent and walked into the next field. Waited once again for the boom to find him and then walked on under it, matching its speed, raising his arms high and wide to catch as much drenching as he could. Then that boom swung away and left him and he walked on to find the next one. And the next, and the next. When at last he was opposite the driveway entrance he simply walked in a circle, under the last boom, waiting for his cell phone to vibrate, like a man caught in a monsoon.

Cash’s cell phone vibrated against his hip and he pulled it out and clicked it on. Heard Franklin’s voice, quiet and cautious in his ear.

“Check in, please,” it said.

Cash heard Helen say: “Here.”

Yanni said, “Here,” from three feet behind him.

Cash said, “Here.”

Then he heard Reacher say: “Here.”

Franklin said, “OK, you’re all loud and clear, and the ball is in your court.”

Cash heard Reacher say: “Gunny, check the house.”

Cash lifted the rifle and swept left to right. “No change.”

Reacher said: “I’m on my way.”

Then there was nothing but silence. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. A whole minute. Two minutes.

Cash heard Reacher ask: “Gunny, do you see me?”

Cash lifted the rifle again and swept the length of the driveway from its mouth all the way to the house. “Negative. I don’t see you. Where are you?”

“About thirty yards in.”

Cash moved the rifle. Estimated thirty yards from the road and stared through the scope. Saw nothing. Nothing at all. “Good work, soldier. Keep going.”

Yanni crawled forward. Whispered in Cash’s ear. “Why don’t you see him?”

“Because he’s nuts.”

“No, explain it to me. You’ve got a night scope, right?”

“The best money can buy,” Cash said. “And it works off heat, just like their cameras.” Then he pointed away to his right. “But my guess is Reacher walked through the fields. Soaked himself in water. It’s coming straight up from the aquifer, stone cold. So right now he’s close to ambient temperature. I can’t see him; they can’t see him.”

“Smart,” Yanni said.

“Brave,” Cash said. “But ultimately dumb. Because he’s drying out every step of the way. And getting warmer.”

Reacher walked through the dark in the dirt ten feet south of the driveway. Not fast, not slow. His shoes were soaked and they were sticking to the mud. Almost coming off. He was so cold he was shivering violently. Which was bad. Shivering is a physiological reaction designed to warm a cold body fast. And he didn’t want to be warm. Not yet.

Vladimir had gotten a rhythm going. He stared at the East monitor for four seconds, then the North for three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. East, two, three, four, North, two, three. He didn’t move his chair. Just leaned a little one way, then the other. Beside him Sokolov had a similar thing going south and west. Slightly different intervals. Not perfectly synchronized. But just as good, Vladimir guessed. Maybe even better. Sokolov had spent a lot of time on surveillance.

Reacher walked on. Not fast, not slow. On the map the driveway had looked to be about two hundred yards long. On the ground it felt like an airport runway. Straight as a die. Wide. And long, long, long. He had been walking forever. And he was less than halfway to the house. He walked on. Just kept on going. Looking ahead every step of the way, watching the darkened windows far away in front of him.

He realized his hair wasn’t dripping anymore.

He touched one hand with the other. Dry. Not warm, but no longer cold.

He walked on. He was tempted to run. Running would get him there faster. But running would heat him up. He was approaching the point of no return. He was right out there in no-man’s-land. And he wasn’t shivering. He raised his phone.

“Helen,” he whispered. “I need that diversion.”

Helen took off her heels and left them neatly side by side at the base of the fence. For an absurd moment she felt like a person who piles all her clothes on the beach before she walks into the sea to drown. Then she put her palms down on the dirt like a sprinter in the blocks and took off forward. Just ran crazily, twenty feet, thirty, forty, and then she stopped dead and stood still, facing the house with her arms out wide like a target. Shoot me, she thought. Please shoot me. Then she got scared that maybe she really meant it and she turned and ran back in a wide zigzag loop. Threw herself down and crawled along the fence again until she found her shoes.

Vladimir saw her on the North monitor. Nothing recognizable. Just a brief flare that because of the phosphor technology was smeared and a little time-lagged. But he bent his head closer anyway and stared at the afterimage. One second, two. Sokolov sensed the interruption to his rhythm and glanced over. Three seconds, four.

“Fox?” Vladimir said.

“I didn’t see it,” Sokolov said. “But probably.”

“It ran away again.”

“OK, then.” Sokolov turned back to his own pair of monitors. Glanced at the West view, checked the South, and settled into his regular cadence again.

Cash had a cadence of his own. He was inching his night scope along at what he guessed was the speed of a walking man. But every five seconds he would sweep it suddenly forward and back in case his estimate was off. During one of those rapid traverses he picked up on what looked like a pale green shadow.

“Reacher, I can see you,” he whispered. “You’re visible, soldier.”

Reacher’s voice came back: “What scope have you got on that thing?”

“Litton,” Cash said.

“Expensive, right?”

“Thirty-seven hundred dollars.”

“Got to be better than a lousy thermal camera.”

Cash didn’t reply.

Reacher said: “Well, I’m hoping so, anyway.”

He walked on. Probably the most unnatural thing a human can force himself to do, to walk slowly and surely toward a building that likely has a rifle in it pointing directly at his center mass. If Chenko had any sense at all he would wait, and wait, and wait, until his target was pretty close. And Chenko seemed to have plenty of sense. Fifty yards would be good. Or thirty-five, like Chenko’s range out of the parking garage. Chenko was pretty good at thirty-five yards. That had been made very clear.

He walked on. Transferred the phone to his left and held it near his ear. Took the knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it and held it right-handed, low and easy. Heard Cash say: “You’re totally visible now, soldier. You’re shining like the north star. It’s like you’re on fire.”

Forty yards to go.

Thirty-nine.

Thirty-eight.

“Helen?” he said. “Do it again.”

He heard her voice: “OK.”

He walked on. Held his breath.

Thirty-five yards.

Thirty-four.

Thirty-three.

He breathed out. He walked on doggedly. Twenty-nine yards to go. He heard panting in his ear. Helen, running. He heard Yanni ask, off-mike: “How close is he?” Heard Cash answer: “Not close enough.”

Vladimir leaned forward and said, “There it is again.” He put his fingertip on the screen, as if touch might tell him something. Sokolov glanced across. Sokolov had spent many more hours with the screens than Vladimir. Primarily surveillance had been his job. His, and Raskin’s.

“That’s no fox,” he said. “It’s way too big.”

He watched for five more seconds. The image was weaving left and right at the very limit of the camera’s range. Recognizable size, recognizable shape, inexplicable motion. He stood up and walked to the door. Braced his hands on the frame and leaned out into the hallway.

“Chenko!” he called. “North!”

Behind his back on the West screen a shape as big as his thumb grew larger. It looked like a painting-by-numbers figure done in fluorescent colors. Lime green on the outside, then a band of chrome yellow, with a core of hot red.

Chenko walked through an empty bedroom and opened the window as high as it would go. Then he backed away into the darkness. That way he was invisible from below and invulnerable except to a shot taken from the third story of an adjacent building, and there were no adjacent buildings. He switched on his night scope and raised his rifle. Quartered the open ground two hundred yards out, up and down, left and right.

He saw a woman.

She was running crazily, barefoot, darting left and right, out and back, like she was dancing or playing a phantom game of soccer. Chenko thought: What? He squeezed the slack out of his trigger and tried to anticipate her next pirouette. Tried to guess where her chest would be a third of a second after he fired. He waited. Then she stopped moving. She stood completely still, facing the house, arms out wide like a target.

Chenko pulled the trigger.

Then he understood. He stepped back to the hallway.

“Decoy!” he screamed. “Decoy!”

Cash saw the muzzle flash and called, “Shot fired,” and jumped his scope to the north window. The lower pane was raised, the upper pane was fixed. No point in putting a round through the opening. The upward trajectory would guarantee a miss. So he fired at the glass. He figured if he could get a hail of jagged shards going, then that might ruin somebody’s night.

Sokolov was watching the crazy heat image on Vladimir’s screen when he heard Chenko’s shot and his shouted warning. He glanced back at the door and turned to the South monitor. Nothing there. Then he heard return fire and shattering glass upstairs. He pushed back from the table and stepped to the door.

“Are you OK?” he called.

“Decoy,” Chenko called back. “Has to be.”

Sokolov turned and checked all four screens, very carefully.

“No,” he called. “Negative. Definitely nothing incoming.”

Reacher touched the front wall of the house. Old plank siding, painted many times. He was ten feet south of the driveway, ten feet south of the front door, near a window that looked into a dark empty room. The window was a tall rectangle with a lower pane that slid upward behind the upper pane. Maybe the upper pane slid down over the lower pane, too. Reacher didn’t know the name for the style. He had rarely lived in houses and had never owned one. Sash? Double-hung? He wasn’t sure. The house was much older than it had looked from a distance. Maybe a hundred years. Hundred-year-old house, hundred-year-old window. But did the window still have a hundred-year-old catch? He pressed his cheek against the lower pane and squinted upward.

He couldn’t see. Too dark.

Then he heard the shooting. Two rounds, one close, one not, shattering glass.

Then he heard Cash in his ear: “Helen? You OK?”

He heard no reply.

Cash asked again: “Helen? Helen?”

No reply.

Reacher put the phone in his pocket. Worked the blade of his knife up into the gap where the bottom of the upper casement overlapped the top of the lower casement. He moved the blade right to left, slowly, carefully, feeling for a catch. He found one, dead-center. Tapped it gently. It felt like a heavy brass tongue. It would pivot through ninety degrees, in and out of a socket.

But which way?

He pushed it right to left. Solid. He pulled the knife out and worked it back in an inch left of center. Slid it back until he found the tongue again. Pushed it left to right.

It moved.

He pushed it hard, and knocked it right out of its socket.

Easy.

He lifted the lower pane high and rolled over the sill into the room.

Cash eased forward and swung his rifle through ninety degrees until it was sighted due east along the fence. He stared through the scope. Saw nothing. He moved back into cover. Raised his phone.

“Helen?” he whispered.

No response.

Reacher moved through the empty room to the door. It was closed. He put his ear against it. Listened hard. Heard nothing. He turned the handle slowly, carefully. Opened the door very slowly. Leaned out. Checked the hallway.

Empty.

There was light from an open doorway fifteen feet ahead on his left. He paused. Lifted one foot at a time and wiped the soles of his shoes on his pants. Wiped his palms. He took a single step. Tested the floor. No sound. He moved ahead slowly, silently. Boat shoes. Good for something. He kept close to the wall, where the floor would be strongest. He stopped a yard shy of the lighted doorway. Took a breath. Moved on.

Stopped in the doorway.

He was looking at two guys from behind. They were seated side by side with their backs to him at a long table. Staring at TV monitors. At ghostly green images of darkness. On the left, Vladimir. On the right, a guy he hadn’t seen before. Sokolov? Must be. To Sokolov’s right, a yard away from him, a handgun rested on the very end of the table. A Smith & Wesson Model 60. The first stainless steel revolver produced anywhere in the world. Two-and-a-half-inch barrel. A five-shooter.

Reacher took a long silent step into the room. Paused. Held his breath. Reversed the knife in his hand. Held the blade an inch from its end between the ball of his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger. Raised his arm. Cocked it behind his head. Snapped it forward.

Threw the knife.

It buried itself two inches deep in the back of Sokolov’s neck.

Vladimir glanced right, toward the sound. Reacher was already moving. Vladimir glanced back. Saw him. Pushed himself away from the table and half-rose. Reacher watched him calculate the distance between himself and the gun. Saw him decide to go for it. Reacher stepped into his charge and ducked under his swinging left hook and buried his shoulder in his chest and wrapped both arms around his back and jacked him bodily off his feet. Just lifted him up and turned him away from the table.

And then squeezed.

Best route to a silent kill against a guy as big as Vladimir was simply to crush him to death. No hitting, no shooting, no banging around. As long as his arms and his legs couldn’t connect with anything solid there would be no noise. No shouting, no screaming. Just a long labored barely-audible tubercular sound as the last breath he had taken came back out, never to be replaced.

Reacher held Vladimir a foot off the ground and squeezed with all his strength. He crushed Vladimir’s chest in a bear hug so vicious and sustained and powerful that no human could have survived it. Vladimir wasn’t expecting it. He thought this was some kind of a preamble. Not the main event. When he figured it out, he went crazy with panic. He rained desperate blows down on Reacher’s back and flailed with his feet at his shins. Stupid, Reacher thought. You’re just burning oxygen. And you ain’t getting more, pal. Better believe it. He tightened his grip. Crushed harder. And harder. And then harder, in a remorseless subliminal rhythm that said: More, and More, and More. His teeth ground together. His heart pounded. His muscles swelled as big and hard as river rocks and started burning. He could feel Vladimir’s rib cage moving, clicking, separating, cracking, crushing. And his last living breath leaking out of his starving lungs.

Sokolov moved.

Reacher staggered under Vladimir’s weight. Turned clumsily on one leg. Kicked out and caught the hilt of the knife with his heel. Sokolov stopped moving. Vladimir stopped moving. Reacher kept the pressure full on for another whole minute. Then he eased off slowly and bent down and laid the body gently on the floor. Squatted down. Breathed hard. Checked for a pulse.

No pulse.

He stood up and pulled Cash’s knife out of Sokolov’s neck and used it to cut Vladimir’s throat, ear to ear. For Sandy, he thought. Then he turned back and cut Sokolov’s throat, too. Just in case. Blood soaked the tabletop and dripped to the floor. It didn’t spurt. It just leaked. Sokolov’s heart had already stopped pumping. He squatted down again and cleaned the blade on Vladimir’s shirt, one side, then the other. He pulled the phone out of his pocket. Heard Cash say: “Helen?”

He whispered: “What’s up?”

Cash answered, “We took an incoming round. I can’t raise Helen.”

“Yanni, move left,” Reacher said. “Find her. Franklin, you there?”

Franklin said, “Here.”

“Stand by to call the medics,” Reacher said.

Cash asked, “Where are you?”

“In the house,” Reacher said.

“Opposition?”

“Unsuccessful,” Reacher said. “Where did the shot come from?”

“Third-floor window, north. Which makes sense, tactically. They’ve got the sniper up there. They can direct him based on what they see from the cameras.”

“Not anymore,” Reacher said. He dropped the phone back in his pocket. Picked up the gun. Checked the cylinder. It was fully loaded. Five Smith & Wesson .38 Specials. He moved out to the hallway with the knife in his right hand and the gun in his left. Went looking for the basement door.

Cash heard Yanni talking to herself as she moved away to his left. Low voice, but clear, like a running commentary. She was saying: “I’m moving east now, keeping low, staying tight against the fence in the darkness. I’m looking for Helen Rodin. We know they fired at her. Now she’s not answering her phone. We’re hoping she’s OK, but we’re worried that she isn’t.”

Cash listened until he couldn’t hear her anymore. He shook his head in bemusement. Then he ducked his eye to the scope and watched the house.

Rosemary Barr wasn’t in the basement. It took Reacher less than a minute to be completely certain of that. It was a wide-open space, musty, dimly lit, uninterrupted and totally empty except for the foundations of three brick chimneys.

Reacher paused at the circuit breaker box. He was tempted to throw the switch. But Chenko had a night sight, and he didn’t. So he just crept back up the stairs.

Yanni found Helen Rodin’s shoes literally by stumbling over them. They were placed neatly side by side at the base of the fence. High heels, black patent, gleaming slightly in the ragged moonlight. Yanni kicked them accidentally and heard the sound of empty footwear. She bent and picked them up. Hung them on the fence by their heels.

“Helen?” she whispered. “Helen? Where are you?”

Then she heard a voice: “Here.”

“Where?”

“Here. Keep going.”

Yanni walked on. Found a black shape rolled tight against the base of the fence.

“I dropped my phone,” Helen said. “Can’t find it.”

“Are you OK?”

“He missed me. I was leaping around like a madwoman. But the bullet came real close. It scared me. I just dropped my phone and ran.”

Helen sat up. Yanni squatted next to her.

“Look,” Helen said. She was holding something in the palm of her hand. Something bright. A coin. A quarter, new and shiny.

“What is it?” Yanni said.

“A quarter,” Helen said.

“So what?”

“Reacher gave it to me.”

Helen was smiling. Yanni could see the white of her teeth in the moonlight.

Reacher crept down the first-floor hallway. Opened doors and searched rooms to the left and right as he went. They were all empty. All unused. He paused at the bottom of the stairs. Backed away into an empty twelve-by-twenty space that might once have been a parlor. Crouched and laid the knife on the floor and pulled out his phone.

“Gunny?” he whispered.

Cash answered: “You back with us?”

“Phone was in my pocket.”

“Yanni found Helen. She’s OK.”

“Good. The basement and the first floor are clear. I think you were right after all. Rosemary must be in the attic.”

“You going upstairs now?”

“I guess I’ll have to.”

“Body count?”

“Two down so far.”

“Lots more upstairs, then.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Roger that.”

Reacher put the phone back in his pocket and retrieved the knife from the floor. Stood up and crept out to the hallway. The staircase was in the back of the house. It was wide, doglegged, and shallow-pitched. Quite grand. There was a wide landing halfway up where the dogleg reversed direction. He went up the first half-flight backward. It made more sense that way. He wanted to know right away if there was someone in the second-floor hallway looking down over the banister. He kept close to the wall. If stairs creaked at all, they creaked most in the middle of a tread. He went slowly, feeling with his heels, putting them down gently and deliberately. And quietly. Boat shoes. Good for something. After five up-and-back steps, his head was about level with the second-story floor. He raised the gun. Took another step. Now he could see the whole of the hallway. It was empty. It was a quiet carpeted space lit by a single low-wattage bulb. Nothing to see, except six closed doors, three on a side. He breathed out and made it to the half-landing. Shuffled left and crept up the second part of the dogleg going forward. Stepped off the staircase. Into the hallway.

Now what?

Six closed doors. Who was where? He moved slowly toward the front of the house. Listened at the first door. Heard nothing. He moved on. Heard nothing at the second door. Moved on again but before he reached the third door he heard sounds from the floor above. Sounds that were coming down through the floor. Sounds that he didn’t understand. Sliding, scraping, crunching noises, repeated rhythmically, with a single light footfall at the end of every sequence. Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. He stared up at the ceiling. Then the third door opened and Grigor Linsky stepped out into the hallway right in front of him. And froze.

He was wearing his familiar double-breasted suit. Gray color, boxy shoulders, cuffed pants. Reacher stabbed him in the throat. Instantly, right-handed, instinctively. He buried the blade and jerked it left. Sever the windpipe. Keep him quiet. He stepped aside to avoid the fountain of blood. Caught him under the arms from behind and dragged him back into the room he had come out of. It was a kitchen. Linsky had been making tea. Reacher turned out the light under the kettle. Put the gun and the knife on the counter. Bent down and clamped Linsky’s head between his hands and twisted it left and jerked it right. Broke his neck. The snap was loud enough to worry about. It was a very quiet house. Reacher retrieved the gun and the knife and listened at the door. Heard nothing except: Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. He stepped back into the hallway. Then he knew.

Glass.

Cash had returned fire through Chenko’s favored northern vantage point and like all good snipers had sought maximum damage from his one shot. And in turn, like all good snipers, Chenko was keeping his physical environment operational. He was cleaning up the broken glass. He had a twenty-five percent chance of being directed back to that particular window and he wanted his passage through the room clear.

Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. He was using the side of his foot to sweep the glass aside. Into a pile. Then he was stepping forward to sweep the next arc. He would want a clear two-foot walkway through the room. No danger of slipping or sliding.

How far had he got?

Reacher crept to the next staircase. It was identical to the last one. Wide, shallow, doglegged. He walked up backward, listening hard. Slide, scrape, crunch, tap. He crossed the half-landing. Kept on going forward. The third-floor hallway had the same layout as the one below, but it wasn’t carpeted. Just bare boards. There was an upright chair in the center of the corridor. All the doors were open. North was to the right. Reacher could feel night air coming in. He stayed close to the wall. Crept onward. The noises got louder. He flattened against the wall. Took a breath. Pivoted slowly and stepped to his left. Into a doorway.

Chenko was twelve feet from him. Facing away. Facing the window. The lower pane had been pushed up behind the upper pane. Both panes had been blown out. The room was cold. The floor was covered in glass. Chenko was clearing a path from the door toward the window. He had about three feet left to go. His rifle was upright against the wall, six feet from him. He was stooped, looking down, concentrating hard on his task. It was an important task. Skidding on a pebble of glass could cost him precious time in a firefight. Chenko had discipline.

And ten seconds to live.

Reacher put the knife in his pocket. Freed his right hand. Flexed it. Stepped forward. Just walked slow and silent down the path that Chenko had cleared. Four quiet paces. Chenko sensed it. He straightened. Reacher caught him around the neck from behind. One-handed. He gripped hard. Took one more long fast stride and stiff-armed Chenko forward with it and threw him out the open window, headfirst.

“I warned you,” he whispered into the darkness below. “You should have put me down when you had the chance.” Then he took out his phone.

“Gunny?” he whispered.

“Here.”

“Third-floor window, where you returned fire. You see it?”

“I see it.”

“A guy just fell out. If he gets up again, shoot him.”

Then he put the phone away and went looking for the attic door.

He found Rosemary Barr completely unharmed, sitting upright on the attic floor. Her feet were taped, her wrists were taped, her mouth was taped. Reacher put his finger to his lips. She nodded. He cut her free with the bloodstained knife and helped her stand. She was unsteady for a moment. Then she shook herself and gave a kind of nod. Then a smile. Reacher guessed that whatever fear she had felt and whatever reaction she was feeling right now had both been neutralized by some kind of a steely determination to help her brother. If she survived, he would survive. That belief had kept her going.

“Have they gone?” she whispered.

“All except Raskin and the Zec,” Reacher whispered back.

“No, Raskin killed himself. I heard them talking. The Zec made him do it. Because he let you steal his cell phone.”

“Where’s the Zec likely to be?”

“He’s in the living room most of the time. Second floor.”

“Which door?”

“Last on the left.”

“OK, stay here,” Reacher whispered. “I’ll round him up and I’ll be right back.”

“I can’t stay here. You have to get me out.”

He paused. “OK, but you’ve got to be real quiet. And don’t look left or right.”

“Why not?”

“Dead people.”

“I’m glad,” Rosemary said.

Reacher held her arm down the stairs to the third-floor hallway. Then he went ahead alone to the second. All quiet. The last door on the left was still closed. He waved her down. They made the turn together and headed to the first floor. To the front of the house. To the room he had entered through. He helped her over the sill and out the window, to the dirt below. He pointed.

“Follow the driveway to the road,” he said. “Turn right. I’ll tell the others you’re coming. There’s a guy in black with a rifle. He’s one of ours.”

She stood still for a second. Then she bent down and took off her low-heeled shoes and held them in her hands and started running like hell, due west, through the dirt, toward the road. Reacher took out his phone.

“Gunny?” he whispered.

“Here.”

“Rosemary Barr is heading your way.”

“Outstanding.”

“Round up the others and meet her halfway. There’s no more operational night vision. Then stand by. I’ll get back to you.”

“Roger that.”

Reacher put the phone away. Backtracked through the silent house, on his way to find the Zec.

CHAPTER 17

In the end, it came down to waiting. Wait, and good things come to you. And bad things. Reacher crept back to the second floor. The last door on the left was still closed. He ducked into the kitchen. Linsky was on the floor, on his back in a pool of blood. Reacher relit the flame under the kettle. Then he stepped out to the hallway. Walked quietly to the front of the house and leaned on the wall beyond the last door on the left.

And waited.

The kettle boiled after five minutes. The whistle started low and quiet, and then the note and the volume rose to full blast. Within ten seconds the second floor of the house was full of an insane shrieking. Ten seconds after that, the door on Reacher’s right opened. A small man stepped out. Reacher let him take a pace forward and then spun him around and jammed the Smith 60 hard in the base of his throat.

And stared.

The Zec. He was a wide, ancient, twisted, stooped, battered old man. A wraith. Barely human. He was covered in livid scars and patches of discolored skin. His face was lined and drooping and seething with rage and hatred and cruelty. He was unarmed. His ruined hands didn’t seem capable of holding a weapon. Reacher forced him down the hallway. Into the kitchen, backward. To the stove. The noise from the kettle was unbearable. Reacher used his left hand and killed the flame. Then he hauled the Zec back toward the living room. The kettle’s whistle died away, like an air raid siren winding down. The house went quiet again.

“It’s over,” Reacher said. “You lost.”

“It’s never over,” the Zec replied. Hoarse voice, low, guttural.

“Guess again,” Reacher said. He kept the Smith hard against the Zec’s throat. Too low and too close for him to see it. He eased the hammer back. Slowly, carefully. Deliberately. Loudly. Click-click-click-crunch. An unmistakable sound.

“I’m eighty years old,” the Zec said.

“I don’t care if you’re a hundred,” Reacher said. “You’re still going down.”

“Idiot,” the Zec said back. “I meant I’ve survived things worse than you. Since long before you were born.”

“Nobody’s worse than me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re nothing.”

“You think?” Reacher said. “You were alive this morning and you won’t be tomorrow. After eighty years. That makes me something, don’t you think?”

No answer.

“It’s over,” Reacher said. “Believe me. Long and winding road, OK, I understand all of that, but this is the end of it. Had to happen sometime.”

No response.

“You know when my birthday is?” Reacher asked.

“Obviously not.”

“It’s in October. You know what day?”

“Of course not.”

“You’re going to find out the hard way. I’m counting in my head. When I reach my birthday, I’m going to pull the trigger.”

He started counting in his head. First, second. He watched the Zec’s eyes. Fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. No response. Tenth, eleventh, twelfth.

“What do you want?” the Zec said.

Negotiation time.

“I want to talk,” Reacher said.

“Talk?”

“The twelfth,” Reacher said. “That’s how long you lasted. Then you gave it up. You know why? Because you want to survive. It’s the deepest instinct you’ve got. Obviously. Otherwise how would you have gotten as old as you are? It’s probably a deeper instinct than I could ever understand. A reflex, a habit, roll the dice, stay alive, make the next move, take the next chance. It’s in your DNA. It’s what you are.”

“So?”

“So now we’ve got ourselves a competition. What you are, against what I am.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m the guy who just threw Chenko out a third-floor window. After crushing Vladimir to death with my bare hands. Because I didn’t like what they did to innocent people. So now you’ve got to pit your strong desire to survive against my strong desire to shoot you in the head and piss in the bullet hole.”

No response.

“One shot,” Reacher said. “In the head. Lights out. That’s your choice. Another day, another roll of the dice. Or not. As the case may be.”

He saw calculation in the Zec’s eyes. Assessment, evaluation, speculation.

“I could throw you down the stairs,” he said. “You could crawl over and take a look at Vladimir. I cut his throat afterward. Just for fun. That’s who I am. So don’t think I don’t mean what I say. I’ll do it and I’ll sleep like a baby the rest of my life.”

“What do you want?” the Zec asked again.

“Help with a problem.”

“What problem?”

“There’s an innocent man I need to get out of the prison ward. So I need you to tell the truth to a detective called Emerson. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I need you to finger Chenko for the shooting, and Vladimir for the girl, and whoever it was for Ted Archer. And whatever else you’ve done. The whole nine yards. Including how you and Linsky set it all up.”

A flicker in the Zec’s eyes. “Pointless. I’d get the death penalty.”

“Yes, you would,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. But you’d still be alive tomorrow. And the next day, and the next. The appeals process lasts forever here. Ten years, sometimes. You might get lucky. There might be a mistrial, there might be a jailbreak, you might get a pardon, there might be a revolution, or an earthquake.”

“Unlikely.”

“Very,” Reacher said. “But isn’t that who you are? A guy who will take the tiniest slim fragment of a chance to live another minute, as opposed to no chance at all?”

No response.

“You already answered me once,” Reacher said. “When you quit the birthday game on the twelfth of October. That was pretty fast. There are thirty-one days in October. Law of averages said you’d be OK until the fifteenth or the sixteenth. A gambler would have waited for the twentieth. But you didn’t get past the twelfth. Not because you’re a coward. Nobody could accuse you of that. But because you’re a survivor. That’s who you are. Now what I want is some practical confirmation.”

No response.

“Thirteenth,” Reacher said. “Fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth.”

“OK,” the Zec said. “You win. I’ll talk to the detective.”

Reacher pinned him against the hallway wall with the Smith. Took out his phone. “Gunny?”

“Here.”

“Come on in, all of you. I’ll open the door. And, Franklin? Wake those guys up, like we talked about before.”

The phone went dead. Franklin had killed the comms net to make his calls.

Reacher tied the Zec’s wrists and ankles with wire torn from table lamps and left him on the living room floor. Then he went downstairs. Glanced into the surveillance room. Vladimir was on his back in a lake of blood. His eyes were open. So was his throat. Reacher could see bone. Sokolov was slumped facedown on the table. His blood was all over the place. Some of it must have seeped into the wiring, because the South monitor had shorted out. The other three pictures were still there, green and ghostly. On the West monitor four figures were visible on the driveway. Yellow haloes, red cores. Close together, moving fast. Reacher turned the lights off and closed up the room. Walked on down the hallway and opened the front door.

Yanni came in first. Then Cash. Then Rosemary. Then Helen. She was barefoot and carrying her shoes in her hand. She was covered in mud. She stopped in the doorway and hugged Reacher hard. Held him for a long moment and then moved on.

“What’s that smell?” Yanni asked.

“Blood,” Cash said. “And other organic fluids of various kinds.”

“Are they all dead?”

“All but one,” Reacher said.

He led the way upstairs. Stopped Rosemary outside the living room.

“The Zec is in there,” he said. “You OK about seeing him?”

She nodded.

“I want to see him,” she said. “I want to ask him a question.”

She stepped into the living room. The Zec was on the floor, where Reacher had left him. Rosemary stood over him, quiet, dignified, not gloating. Just curious.

“Why?” she said. “I mean, to an extent I understand what you thought you had to do. From your warped perspective. But why didn’t you just use Chenko from the highway? Why did you have to bring my brother down?”

The Zec didn’t answer. He just stared into space, seeing something, but probably not Rosemary Barr.

“Psychology,” Reacher said.

“His?”

“Ours. The public’s.”

“How?”

“There had to be a story,” Reacher said. “No, there was a story, and he had to control what the story was about. If he gave up a shooter, then the story would be about the shooter. No shooter, the story would have been about the victims. And if the story had been about the victims, too many questions would have been asked.”

“So he sacrificed James.”

“That’s what he does. There’s a long list.”

“Why?”

“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

“Joseph Stalin,” Yanni said.

Reacher kicked the Zec aside and pulled the sofa away from the window about four feet. Grabbed the Zec’s collar and hauled him up and dumped him on one end. Got him sitting up straight against the arm.

“Our star witness,” he said.

He told Cash to perch on the windowsill behind the sofa. Told Yanni to go find three dining chairs. Pushed armchairs against the side walls. Yanni came back three separate times dragging chairs behind her. Reacher put them in a line facing the sofa. He ended up with a square arrangement, sofa, dining chairs, armchairs off to the sides.

His clothes were nearly dry. Just a little dampness where the seams were thick. He ran his fingers through his hair. Patted it down. Checked his watch. Nearly four in the morning. Least resistance. A biorhythm thing.

“Now we wait,” he said.

They waited less than thirty minutes. Then they heard cars on the road far away in the distance. Tires on the blacktop, engine noise, exhaust pipes. The sounds grew louder. The cars slowed. They crunched onto the limestone driveway. There were four of them. Reacher went downstairs and opened the door. Saw Franklin’s black Suburban. Saw Emerson sliding out of a gray Crown Vic. Saw a compact woman with short dark hair getting out of a blue Ford Taurus. Donna Bianca, he assumed. He saw Alex Rodin climbing out of a silver BMW. Rodin locked it with his remote. He was the only one who did.

Reacher stood aside and let them gather in the hallway. Then he led them upstairs. He put Alex Rodin and Donna Bianca and Emerson in the dining chairs, left to right. He put Franklin in an armchair next to Yanni. Rosemary Barr and Helen Rodin were in armchairs on the other side of the room. Helen was looking at her father. He was looking at her. Cash was on the windowsill. Reacher stepped away and leaned up in the doorway.

“Start talking,” Reacher said.

The Zec stayed silent.

“I can send these guys away again,” Reacher said. “Just as easily as I brought them here. Then I’ll start counting again. At the seventeenth.”

The Zec sighed. Started talking. Slowly at first, and then faster. He told a long story. So much length and so much complexity that it got confusing. He spilled details of earlier unconnected crimes. Then he got to the bidding process for the city contracts. He named the official he had suborned. It wasn’t just about money. There had been girls too, supplied in small groups in a Caribbean villa. Some of them very young. He talked about Ted Archer’s fury, his two-year search, his close approach to the truth. He described the ambush, one Monday morning. Jeb Oliver had been used. The red Dodge Ram had been his payoff. Then the Zec paused, decided, moved on. He described the fast decision to get rid of Oline Archer two months later, when she became dangerous. He described Chenko’s subterfuge, the hasty but thorough planning, how they lured James Barr out of the way with a promise of a date with Sandy Dupree. He described the end of Jeb Oliver’s usefulness. He told them where to find his body. He told them about Vladimir killing Sandy in an effort to stop Reacher in his tracks. Altogether he talked for thirty-two minutes, hands tied behind him, then he stopped suddenly and Reacher saw calculation in his eyes. He was already thinking about the next move. The next roll of the dice. A mistrial. A jailbreak. A ten-year appeals process.

The room went quiet.

Donna Bianca said, “Unbelievable.”

Reacher said, “Keep talking.”

The Zec just looked at him.

“Something you left out,” Reacher said. “You need to tell us about your inside man. That’s what we’re all waiting for.”

The Zec switched his gaze. He looked at Emerson. Then at Donna Bianca. Then at Alex Rodin. Right to left, along the line. Then he glanced back at Reacher.

“You’re a survivor,” Reacher said. “But you’re not an idiot. There won’t be a mistrial. There won’t be a jailbreak. You’re eighty years old and you won’t survive a ten-year appeals process. You know all that. But still you agreed to talk. Why?”

The Zec said nothing.

“Because you knew sooner or later you’d be talking to a friend. Someone you own. Someone you bought and paid for. Am I right?”

The Zec didn’t move.

“Someone right here, right now, in fact,” Reacher said.

The Zec said nothing.

“One thing always bothered me,” Reacher said. “From the start. At first I didn’t know if I was right or if I was letting my ego get in the way. I went back and forth with it. Finally I decided I was right. The thing is, when I was in the service I was a hell of a good investigator. I was maybe the best they ever had. I would have put myself up against anyone. And you know what?”

“What?” Helen Rodin asked.

“I would never have thought of emptying that parking meter. Not in a million years. It would never have occurred to me to do that. So I was facing a question. Was Emerson a better investigator than me? Or did he know that quarter was there?”

Nobody spoke.

“Emerson is not better than I was,” Reacher said. “That’s just not possible. That’s what I decided.” Then he turned to the Zec. “The coin was one clue too many. You see that now? It was unnatural. Was it Chenko’s idea?”

The Zec nodded.

“You should have overruled him,” Reacher said. He turned to Emerson. “Or you should have left it there. It wasn’t like you needed it to make the case.”

“This is bullshit,” Emerson said.

Reacher shook his head. “A lot of things clicked into place after that. I read the 911 transcripts and the squad car call log. Right at the start you were awful quick to make up your mind. You had a bunch of incoherent panic calls but within twenty seconds you were on the radio telling your guys that this was a lone nutcase with an automatic rifle. There was no basis for that conclusion. Six shots fired, ragged sequence, it could have been six kids with a handgun each, firing once. But you knew it wasn’t.”

“Bullshit,” Emerson said again.

Reacher shook his head again. “Final proof was when I was negotiating with your boss here. I said he’d have to tell the truth to a detective called Emerson. I could have said the cops generically, or Alex Rodin the DA. But I didn’t. I said your name specifically, and a little light came on in his eyes. He sparred around for a minute more, for form’s sake, but basically he agreed real fast because he figured he’d be OK as long as you were in charge.”

Silence. Then Cash said, “But Oline Archer went to Alex Rodin here. He buried it. That’s what you found out.”

Reacher shook his head again. “We found out that Oline went to the DA’s office. I went there myself, first thing after I got to town. And you know what? Alex here has got himself a couple of real dragon ladies working the door. They know he doesn’t like walk-ins. Dollars to doughnuts they sent Oline on her way. That’s a matter for the police, they’ll have told her. Her co-worker said she was gone most of the afternoon. My guess is the dragon ladies sent her trekking all across town to the station house, where she sat down with Emerson here.”

Silence in the room.

The Zec struggled on the sofa. “Emerson, do something, for Christ’s sake.”

“Nothing he can do,” Reacher said. “I’m not dumb. I think ahead. I’m sure he’s got a Glock under his arm, but he’s got me behind him with a .38 and a knife, and he’s got Cash facing him with a sniper rifle hidden behind the sofa, and what can he do anyway? I guess he could try to kill us all and say there was some kind of a big massacre here, but how would that help him with NBC?”

Emerson stared at him.

“NBC?” Cash repeated.

“I saw Yanni fiddling with her phone earlier. I’m assuming she’s transmitting all of this back to the studios.”

Yanni pulled out her Nokia.

“Open channel,” she said. “Digital audio recording on three separate hard discs, plus two analog tapes as backup. They’ve all been running since well before we got in the Humvee.”

Cash stared at her. “That’s why you asked me that dumb question about the night scope. That’s why you were talking to yourself like a sports announcer.”

“She’s a journalist,” Reacher said. “She’s going to win an Emmy.”

He stepped forward and leaned over the back of Emerson’s chair and slid his hand under his coat. Came back out with a Glock nine. Handed it to Bianca.

“You’ve got arrests to make,” he said.

Then the Zec smiled, and Chenko walked into the room.

Chenko was covered in mud and his right arm was broken, or his shoulder, or his collarbone, or maybe all three. His wrist was jammed into his shirt like a sling. But there was nothing wrong with his left arm. Nothing at all. Reacher turned around to face him and saw the sawn-off rock-steady in his left hand. He thought, irrelevantly: Where did he get that from? His car? Were the cars parked to the east?

Chenko glanced at Bianca.

“Put the gun down, lady,” he said.

Bianca laid Emerson’s Glock on the floor. No sound as it touched the carpet.

“Thank you,” Chenko said.

Nobody spoke.

“I guess I was out for a little while,” Chenko said. “But I got to tell you, I feel a whole hell of a lot better now.”

“We survive,” the Zec said from across the room. “That’s what we do.”

Reacher didn’t look back at the old man. He looked at Chenko’s gun instead. It had been a Benelli Nova Pump. The stock had been cut off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off ahead of the slide. Twelve-gauge. Four-shot magazine. A handsome weapon, butchered.

“Emerson,” the Zec called. “Come over here and untie me.”

Reacher heard Emerson stand up. He didn’t look back at him. Just took a tiny pace forward and sideways, closer to Chenko. He was a foot taller and twice as wide.

“I need a knife here,” Emerson said.

“The soldier’s got a knife,” Chenko said. “I’m damn sure of that, based on what I saw happened to my buddies downstairs.”

Reacher moved a little closer to him. A big guy and a little guy directly face-to-face, separated by about three feet, most of which was occupied by the Benelli. Reacher’s waist was level with Chenko’s chest.

“Knife,” Emerson said.

“Come and get it,” Reacher said.

“Slide it across the floor.”

“No.”

“I’ll shoot,” Chenko said. “Twelve-gauge, in the gut.”

Reacher thought: And then what? A pump-action shotgun ain’t much use to a one-armed man.

“So shoot,” he said.

He felt eyes on him. He knew everyone was looking at him. Staring at him. Silence buzzed in his ears. He was suddenly aware of the smells in the room. Dust in the carpet, worn furniture, fear, tension, damp night air blowing in from the open door downstairs and the busted window upstairs and carrying with it the odor of rich earth and fertilizer and budding new growth.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot.”

Chenko did nothing. Just stood there. Reacher stood there directly in front of him. He knew exactly how the room was laid out. He had arranged it. He pictured it in his mind. Chenko was in the doorway facing the window. Everyone else was facing the other way. Reacher himself right in front of Chenko, face-to-face, close enough to touch. Cash directly behind him all the way in back, behind the sofa, on the windowsill, staring forward. Then the Zec on the sofa, looking the same way. Then Emerson in the middle of the floor, near the Zec, standing up, indecisive, watching. Then Yanni and Franklin and Helen and Rosemary Barr in the armchairs against the side walls, heads turned. Then Donna Bianca and Alex Rodin on their dining chairs, twisted around at the waist, eyes wide.

Reacher knew where everyone was, and he knew what they were looking at.

“Shoot,” he said. “Aim at my belt. That’ll work. Go ahead.”

Chenko did nothing. Just stared up at him. Reacher was so close and so big he was all Chenko could see. It was just the two of them, like they were alone in the room.

“I’ll help you out,” Reacher said. “I’ll count to three. Then you pull the trigger.”

Chenko just stood there.

“You understand?” Reacher said.

No reply.

“One,” Reacher said.

No reaction.

“Two,” Reacher said.

Then he stepped out of the way. Just took a long fast sideways shuffle to his right. Cash fired from behind the sofa at the spot where Reacher’s belt had been a split second before, and Chenko’s chest blew apart.

Then Cash put his rifle back on the floor just as silently as he had picked it up.

Two night-shift squad cars came and took the Zec and Emerson away. Then four ambulances arrived for the casualties. Bianca asked Reacher what exactly had happened to the first three. Reacher told her he had absolutely no idea. None at all. He speculated that it might have been some kind of an internal dispute. A falling-out among thieves, maybe? Bianca didn’t push it. Rosemary Barr borrowed Franklin’s cell phone and used it to call area hospitals, looking for a safe berth for her brother. Helen and Alex Rodin sat close together, talking. Gunny Cash sat in a chair and dozed. An old soldier’s habit. Sleep when you can. Yanni stepped up close to Reacher and said, “Rough men stand ready in the night.” Reacher found himself very aware of the live phone. He just smiled and said, “I’m usually in bed by twelve o’clock.”

“Me too,” Yanni said. “Alone. You remember my address?”

Reacher smiled again, and nodded. Then he went downstairs and stepped out to the front porch and walked a little ways south across the dirt until he could see past the bulk of the house to the eastern sky. Dawn was coming. Black shaded to purple right on the horizon. He turned and watched the last ambulance loading up. Vladimir’s final ride, judging by the size of the shape under the sheet on the gurney. Reacher emptied his pockets and left Emerson’s torn business card, and Helen Rodin’s cocktail napkin, and the motor court’s big brass key, and the Smith 60, and Gunny Cash’s Navy SEAL SRK, all in a neat little pile beside the front door. Then he asked the paramedics if he could ride with them to town. He figured he could walk east from the hospital and be at the bus depot before the sun was fully up. He could be in Indianapolis before lunch. Then he could buy a pair of shoes and be just about anywhere before the sun went down again.

For Maggie Griffin

Jack Reacher’s first and best friend in America

THE HARD WAY

A Delacorte Press Book / May 2006

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2006 by Lee Child

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

The hard way : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 3. Mercenary troops— Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.5. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838H37 2006

813'.54—dc22

2005051946

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33605-1

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

The Hard Way

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man’s life change forever. Not that the waiter was slow. Just that the move was slick. So slick, Reacher had no idea what he was watching. It was just an urban scene, repeated everywhere in the world a billion times a day: A guy unlocked a car and got in and drove away. That was all.

But that was enough.

The espresso had been close to perfect, so Reacher went back to the same café exactly twenty-four hours later. Two nights in the same place was unusual for Reacher, but he figured great coffee was worth a change in his routine. The café was on the west side of Sixth Avenue in New York City, in the middle of the block between Bleecker and Houston. It occupied the ground floor of an undistinguished four-story building. The upper stories looked like anonymous rental apartments. The café itself looked like a transplant from a back street in Rome. Inside it had low light and scarred wooden walls and a dented chrome machine as hot and long as a locomotive, and a counter. Outside there was a single line of metal tables on the sidewalk behind a low canvas screen. Reacher took the same end table he had used the night before and chose the same seat. He stretched out and got comfortable and tipped his chair up on two legs. That put his back against the café’s outside wall and left him looking east, across the sidewalk and the width of the avenue. He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City. Especially at night. He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people. It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.

He was served by the same waiter as the night before and ordered the same drink, double espresso in a foam cup, no sugar, no spoon. He paid for it as soon as it arrived and left his change on the table. That way he could leave exactly when he wanted to without insulting the waiter or bilking the owner or stealing the china. Reacher always arranged the smallest details in his life so he could move on at a split second’s notice. It was an obsessive habit. He owned nothing and carried nothing. Physically he was a big man, but he cast a small shadow and left very little in his wake.

He drank his coffee slowly and felt the night heat come up off the sidewalk. He watched cars and people. Watched taxis flow north and garbage trucks pause at the curbs. Saw knots of strange young people heading for clubs. Watched girls who had once been boys totter south. Saw a blue German sedan park on the block. Watched a compact man in a gray suit get out and walk north. Watched him thread between two sidewalk tables and head inside to where the café staff was clustered in back. Watched him ask them questions.

The guy was medium height, not young, not old, too solid to be called wiry, too slight to be called heavy. His hair was gray at the temples and cut short and neat. He kept himself balanced on the balls of his feet. His mouth didn’t move much as he talked. But his eyes did. They flicked left and right tirelessly. The guy was about forty, Reacher guessed, and furthermore Reacher guessed he had gotten to be about forty by staying relentlessly aware of everything that was happening around him. Reacher had seen the same look in elite infantry veterans who had survived long jungle tours.

Then Reacher’s waiter turned suddenly and pointed straight at him. The compact man in the gray suit stared over. Reacher stared back, over his shoulder, through the window. Eye contact was made. Without breaking it the man in the suit mouthed thank you to the waiter and started back out the way he had entered. He stepped through the door and made a right inside the low canvas screen and threaded his way down to Reacher’s table. Reacher let him stand there mute for a moment while he made up his mind. Then he said “Yes” to him, like an answer, not a question.

“Yes what?” the guy said back.

“Yes whatever,” Reacher said. “Yes I’m having a pleasant evening, yes you can join me, yes you can ask me whatever it is you want to ask me.”

The guy scraped a chair out and sat down, his back to the river of traffic, blocking Reacher’s view.

“Actually I do have a question,” he said.

“I know,” Reacher said. “About last night.”

“How did you know that?” The guy’s voice was low and quiet and his accent was flat and clipped and British.

“The waiter pointed me out,” Reacher said. “And the only thing that distinguishes me from his other customers is that I was here last night and they weren’t.”

“You’re certain about that?”

“Turn your head away,” Reacher said. “Watch the traffic.”

The guy turned his head away. Watched the traffic.

“Now tell me what I’m wearing,” Reacher said.

“Green shirt,” the British guy said. “Cotton, baggy, cheap, doesn’t look new, sleeves rolled to the elbow, over a green T-shirt, also cheap and not new, a little tight, untucked over flat-front khaki chinos, no socks, English shoes, pebbled leather, brown, not new, but not very old either, probably expensive. Frayed laces, like you pull on them too hard when you tie them. Maybe indicative of a self-discipline obsession.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“OK what?”

“You notice things,” Reacher said. “And I notice things. We’re two of a kind. We’re peas in a pod. I’m the only customer here now who was also here last night. I’m certain of that. And that’s what you asked the staff. Had to be. That’s the only reason the waiter would have pointed me out.”

The guy turned back.

“Did you see a car last night?” he asked.

“I saw plenty of cars last night,” Reacher said. “This is Sixth Avenue.”

“A Mercedes Benz. Parked over there.” The guy twisted again and pointed on a slight diagonal at a length of empty curb by a fire hydrant on the other side of the street.

Reacher said, “Silver, four-door sedan, an S-420, New York vanity plates starting OSC, a lot of city miles on it. Dirty paint, scuffed tires, dinged rims, dents and scrapes on both bumpers.”

The guy turned back again.

“You saw it,” he said.

“It was right there,” Reacher said. “Obviously I saw it.”

“Did you see it leave?”

Reacher nodded. “Just before eleven forty-five a guy got in and drove it away.”

“You’re not wearing a watch.”

“I always know what time it is.”

“It must have been closer to midnight.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Whatever.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“I told you, I saw him get in and drive away.”

The guy stood up.

“I need you to come with me,” he said. Then he put his hand in his pocket. “I’ll buy your coffee.”

“I already paid for it.”

“So let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To see my boss.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“A man called Lane.”

“You’re not a cop,” Reacher said. “That’s my guess. Based on observation.”

“Of what?”

“Your accent. You’re not American. You’re British. The NYPD isn’t that desperate.”

“Most of us are Americans,” the British guy said. “But you’re right, we’re not cops. We’re private citizens.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that will make it worth your while if you give them a description of the individual who drove that car away.”

“Worth my while how?”

“Financially,” the guy said. “Is there any other way?”

“Lots of other ways,” Reacher said. “I think I’ll stay right here.”

“This is very serious.”

“How?”

The guy in the suit sat down again.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Goodbye,” Reacher said.

“Not my choice,” the guy said. “Mr. Lane made it mission-critical that nobody knows. For very good reasons.”

Reacher tilted his cup and checked the contents. Nearly gone.

“You got a name?” he asked.

“Do you?”

“You first.”

In response the guy stuck a thumb into the breast pocket of his suit coat and slid out a black leather business card holder. He opened it up and used the same thumb to slide out a single card. He passed it across the table. It was a handsome item. Heavy linen stock, raised lettering, ink that still looked wet. At the top it said: Operational Security Consultants.

“OSC,” Reacher said. “Like the license plate.”

The British guy said nothing.

Reacher smiled. “You’re security consultants and you got your car stolen? I can see how that could be embarrassing.”

The guy said, “It’s not the car we’re worried about.”

Lower down on the business card was a name: John Gregory. Under the name was a subscript: British Army, Retired. Then a job title: Executive Vice President.

“How long have you been out?” Reacher asked.

“Of the British Army?” the guy called Gregory said. “Seven years.”

“Unit?”

“SAS.”

“You’ve still got the look.”

“You too,” Gregory said. “How long have you been out?”

“Seven years,” Reacher said.

“Unit?”

“U.S. Army CID, mostly.”

Gregory looked up. Interested. “Investigator?”

“Mostly.”

“Rank?”

“I don’t remember,” Reacher said. “I’ve been a civilian seven years.”

“Don’t be shy,” Gregory said. “You were probably a lieutenant colonel at least.”

“Major,” Reacher said. “That’s as far as I got.”

“Career problems?”

“I had my share.”

“You got a name?”

“Most people do.”

“What is it?”

“Reacher.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m trying to get a quiet cup of coffee.”

“You need work?”

“No,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”

“I was a sergeant,” Gregory said.

Reacher nodded. “I figured. SAS guys usually are. And you’ve got the look.”

“So will you come with me and talk to Mr. Lane?”

“I told you what I saw. You can pass it on.”

“Mr. Lane will want to hear it direct.”

Reacher checked his cup again. “Where is he?”

“Not far. Ten minutes.”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “I’m enjoying my espresso.”

“Bring it with you. It’s in a foam cup.”

“I prefer peace and quiet.”

“All I want is ten minutes.”

“Seems like a lot of fuss over a stolen car, even if it was a Mercedes Benz.”

“This is not about the car.”

“So what is it about?”

“Life and death,” Gregory said. “Right now more likely death than life.”

Reacher checked his cup again. There was less than a lukewarm eighth-inch left, thick and scummy with espresso mud. That was all. He put the cup down.

“OK,” he said. “So let’s go.”

CHAPTER 2

The blue German sedan turned out to be a new BMW 7-series with OSC vanity plates on it. Gregory unlocked it from ten feet away with a key fob remote and Reacher got in the front passenger seat sideways and found the switch and moved the seat back for legroom. Gregory pulled out a small silver cell phone and dialed a number.

“Incoming with a witness,” he said, clipped and British. Then he closed the phone and fired up the engine and moved out into the midnight traffic.

The ten minutes turned out to be twenty. Gregory drove north on Sixth Avenue all the way through Midtown to 57th Street and then two blocks west. He turned north on Eighth, through Columbus Circle, onto Central Park West, and into 72nd Street. He stopped outside the Dakota.

“Nice digs,” Reacher said.

“Only the best for Mr. Lane,” Gregory said, nothing in his voice.

They got out together and stood on the sidewalk and another compact man in a gray suit stepped out of the shadows and into the car and drove it away. Gregory led Reacher into the building and up in the elevator. The lobbies and the hallways were as dark and baronial as the exterior.

“You ever seen Yoko?” Reacher asked.

“No,” Gregory said.

They got out on five and Gregory led the way around a corner and an apartment door opened for them. The lobby staff must have called ahead. The door that opened was heavy oak the color of honey and the warm light that spilled out into the corridor was the color of honey, too. The apartment was a tall solid space. There was a small square foyer open to a big square living room. The living room had cool air and yellow walls and low table lights and comfortable chairs and sofas all covered in printed fabric. It was full of six men. None of them was sitting down. They were all standing up, silent. Three wore gray suits similar to Gregory’s and three were in black jeans and black nylon warm-up jackets. Reacher knew immediately they were all ex-military. Just like Gregory. They all had the look. The apartment itself had the desperate quiet feel of a command bunker far from some distant point where a battle was right then turning to shit.

All six men turned and glanced at Reacher as he stepped inside. None of them spoke. But five men then glanced at the sixth, which Reacher guessed identified the sixth man as Mr. Lane. The boss. He was half a generation older than his men. He was in a gray suit. He had gray hair, buzzed close to his scalp. He was maybe an inch above average height, and slender. His face was pale and full of worry. He was standing absolutely straight, racked with tension, with his fingertips spread and touching the top of a table that held an old-fashioned telephone and a framed photograph of a pretty woman.

“This is the witness,” Gregory said.

No reply.

“He saw the driver,” Gregory said.

The man at the table glanced down at the phone and then moved away from it, toward Reacher, looking him up and down, assessing, evaluating. He stopped a yard away and offered his hand.

“Edward Lane,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.” His accent was American, originally from some hardscrabble place far from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Arkansas, maybe, or rural Tennessee, but in either case overlaid by long exposure to the neutral tones of the military. Reacher said his own name and shook Lane’s hand. It was dry, not warm, not cold.

“Tell me what you saw,” Lane said.

“I saw a guy get in a car,” Reacher said. “He drove it away.”

“I need detail,” Lane said.

“Reacher is ex–U.S. Army CID,” Gregory said. “He described the Benz to perfection.”

“So describe the driver,” Lane said.

“I saw more of the car than the driver,” Reacher said.

“Where were you?”

“In a café. The car was a little north and east of me, across the width of Sixth Avenue. Maybe a twenty-degree angle, maybe ninety feet away.”

“Why were you looking at it?”

“It was badly parked. It looked out of place. I guessed it was on a fireplug.”

“It was,” Lane said. “Then what?”

“Then a guy crossed the street toward it. Not at a crosswalk. Through gaps in the traffic, at an angle. The angle was more or less the same as my line of sight, maybe twenty degrees. So most of what I saw was his back, all the way.”

“Then what?”

“He stuck the key in the door and got inside. Took off.”

“Going north, obviously, this being Sixth Avenue. Did he turn?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue baseball cap, white sneakers. The clothing was old and comfortable. The guy was average height, average weight.”

“Age?”

“I didn’t see his face. Most of what I saw was his back. But he didn’t move like a kid. He was at least in his thirties. Maybe forty.”

“How exactly did he move?”

“He was focused. He headed straight for the car. Not fast, but there was no doubt where he was going. The way he held his head, I think he was looking directly at the car the whole way. Like a definite destination. Like a target. And the way he held his shoulder, I think he might have had the key out in front of him, horizontally. Like a tiny lance. Focused, and intent. And urgent. That’s how he moved.”

“Where did he come from?”

“From behind my shoulder, more or less. He could have been walking north, and then stepped off the sidewalk at the café, north and east through the traffic.”

“Would you recognize him again?”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But only by his clothes and his walk and his posture. Nothing that would convince anyone.”

“If he crossed through the traffic he must have glanced south to see what was coming at him. At least once. So you should have seen the right side of his face. Then when he was behind the wheel, you should have seen the left side.”

“Narrow angles,” Reacher said. “And the light wasn’t great.”

“There must have been headlight beams on him.”

“He was white,” Reacher said. “No facial hair. That’s all I saw.”

“White male,” Lane said. “Thirty-five to forty-five. I guess that eliminates about eighty percent of the population, maybe more, but it’s not good enough.”

“Didn’t you have insurance?” Reacher asked.

“This is not about the car,” Lane said.

“It was empty,” Reacher said.

“It wasn’t empty,” Lane said.

“So what was in it?”

“Thank you, Mr. Reacher,” Lane said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

He turned and walked back to where he had started, next to the table with the phone and the photograph. He stood erect beside it and spread his fingers again and laid the tips lightly on the polished wood, right next to the telephone, like his touch might detect an incoming call before the electronic pulse started the bell.

“You need help,” Reacher said. “Don’t you?”

“Why would you care?” Lane asked.

“Habit,” Reacher said. “Reflex. Professional curiosity.”

“I’ve got help,” Lane said. He gestured with his free hand around the room. “Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Recon Marines, Green Berets, SAS from Britain. The best in the world.”

“You need a different kind of help. The guy who took your car, these folks can start a war against him, that’s for sure. But first you need to find him.”

No reply.

“What was in the car?” Reacher asked.

“Tell me about your career,” Lane said.

“It’s been over a long time. That’s its main feature.”

“Final rank?”

“Major.”

“Army CID?”

“Thirteen years.”

“Investigator?”

“Basically.”

“A good one?”

“Good enough.”

“110th Special Unit?”

“Some of the time. You?”

“Rangers and Delta. Started in Vietnam, ended in the Gulf the first time around. Started a second lieutenant, finished a full colonel.”

“What was in the car?”

Lane looked away. Held still and quiet for a long, long time. Then he looked back, like a decision had been made.

“You need to give me your word about something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“No cops. That’s going to be your first piece of advice, go to the cops. But I’ll refuse to do it, and I need your word that you won’t go behind my back.”

Reacher shrugged.

“OK,” he said.

“Say it.”

“No cops.”

“Say it again.”

“No cops,” Reacher said again.

“You got an ethical problem with that?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“No FBI, no nobody,” Lane said. “We handle this ourselves. Understand? You break your word, I’ll put your eyes out. I’ll have you blinded.”

“You’ve got a funny way of making friends.”

“I’m looking for help here, not friends.”

“My word is good,” Reacher said.

“Say you understand what I’ll do if you break it.”

Reacher looked around the room. Took it all in. A quiet desperate atmosphere and six Special Forces veterans, all full of subdued menace, all as hard as nails, all looking right back at him, all full of unit loyalty and hostile suspicion of the outsider.

“You’ll have me blinded,” Reacher said.

“You better believe it,” Lane said.

“What was in the car?”

Lane moved his hand away from the phone. He picked up the framed photograph. He held it two-handed, flat against his chest, high up, so that Reacher felt he had two people staring back at him. Above, Lane’s pale and worried features. Below, under glass, a woman of breathtaking classical beauty. Dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, a bud of a mouth, photographed with passion and expertise and printed by a master.

“This is my wife,” Lane said.

Reacher nodded. Said nothing.

“Her name is Kate,” Lane said.

Nobody spoke.

“Kate disappeared late yesterday morning,” Lane said. “I got a call in the afternoon. From her kidnappers. They wanted money. That’s what was in the car. You watched one of my wife’s kidnappers collect their ransom.”

Nobody spoke.

“They promised to release her,” Lane said. “And it’s been twenty-four hours. And they haven’t called back.”

CHAPTER 3

Edward Lane held the framed photograph like an offering and Reacher stepped forward to take it. He tilted it to catch the light. Kate Lane was beautiful, no question about it. She was hypnotic. She was younger than her husband by maybe twenty years, which put her in her early thirties. Old enough to be all woman, young enough to be flawless. In the picture she was gazing at something just beyond the edge of the print. Her eyes blazed with love. Her mouth seemed ready to burst into a wide smile. The photographer had frozen the first tiny hint of it so that the pose seemed dynamic. It was a still picture, but it looked like it was about to move. The focus and the grain and the detail were immaculate. Reacher didn’t know much about photography, but he knew he was holding a high-end product. The frame alone might have cost what he used to make in a month, back in the army.

“My Mona Lisa,” Lane said. “That’s how I think of that picture.”

Reacher passed it back. “Is it recent?”

Lane propped it upright again, next to the telephone.

“Less than a year old,” he said.

“Why no cops?”

“There are reasons.”

“This kind of a thing, they usually do a good job.”

“No cops,” Lane said.

Nobody spoke.

“You were a cop,” Lane said. “You can do what they do.”

“I can’t,” Reacher said.

“You were a military cop. Therefore all things being equal you can do better than them.”

“All things aren’t equal. I don’t have their resources.”

“You can make a start.”

The room went very quiet. Reacher glanced at the phone, and the photograph.

“How much money did they want?” he asked.

“One million dollars in cash,” Lane answered.

“And that was in the car? A million bucks?”

“In the trunk. In a leather bag.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s all sit down.”

“I don’t feel like sitting down.”

“Relax,” Reacher said. “They’re going to call back. Probably very soon. I can pretty much guarantee that.”

“How?”

“Sit down. Start at the beginning. Tell me about yesterday.”

So Lane sat down, in the armchair next to the telephone table, and started to talk about the previous day. Reacher sat at one end of a sofa. Gregory sat next to him. The other five guys distributed themselves around the room, two sitting, two squatting on chair arms, one leaning against the wall.

“Kate went out at ten o’clock in the morning,” Lane said. “She was heading for Bloomingdale’s, I think.”

“You think?”

“I allow her some freedom of action. She doesn’t necessarily supply me with a detailed itinerary. Not every day.”

“Was she alone?”

“Her daughter was with her.”

“Her daughter?”

“She has an eight-year-old by her first marriage. Her name is Jade.”

“She lives with you here?”

Lane nodded.

“So where is Jade now?”

“Missing, obviously,” Lane said.

“So this is a double kidnapping?” Reacher said.

Lane nodded again. “Triple, in a way. Their driver didn’t come back, either.”

“You didn’t think to mention this before?”

“Does it make a difference? One person or three?”

“Who was the driver?”

“A guy called Taylor. British, ex-SAS. A good man. One of us.”

“What happened to the car?”

“It’s missing.”

“Does Kate go to Bloomingdale’s often?”

Lane shook his head. “Only occasionally. And never on a predictable pattern. We do nothing regular or predictable. I vary her drivers, vary her routes, sometimes we stay out of the city altogether.”

“Because? You got a lot of enemies?”

“My fair share. My line of work attracts enemies.”

“You’re going to have to explain your line of work to me. You’re going to have to tell me who your enemies are.”

“Why are you sure they’re going to call?”

“I’ll get to that,” Reacher said. “Tell me about the first conversation. Word for word.”

“They called at four o’clock in the afternoon. It went pretty much how you would expect. You know, we have your wife, we have your daughter.”

“Voice?”

“Altered. One of those electronic squawk boxes. Very metallic, like a robot in a movie. Loud and deep, but that doesn’t mean anything. They can alter the pitch and the volume.”

“What did you say to them?”

“I asked them what they wanted. They said a million bucks. I asked them to put Kate on the line. They did, after a short pause.” Lane closed his eyes. “She said, you know, help me, help me.” He opened his eyes. “Then the guy with the squawk box came back on and I agreed to the money. No hesitation. The guy said he would call back in an hour with instructions.”

“And did he?”

Lane nodded. “At five o’clock. I was told to wait six hours and put the money in the trunk of the Mercedes you saw and have it driven down to the Village and parked in that spot at eleven-forty exactly. The driver was to lock it up and walk away and put the keys through a mail slot in the front door of a certain building on the southwest corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. Then he was to walk away and keep on walking away, south on West Broadway. Someone would move in behind him and enter the building and collect the keys. If my driver stopped or turned around or even looked back, Kate would die. Likewise if there was a tracking device on the car.”

“That was it, word for word?”

Lane nodded.

“Nothing else?”

Lane shook his head.

“Who drove the car down?” Reacher asked.

“Gregory,” Lane said.

“I followed the instructions,” Gregory said. “To the letter. I couldn’t risk anything else.”

“How far of a walk was it?” Reacher asked him.

“Six blocks.”

“What was the building with the mail slot?”

“Abandoned,” Gregory said. “Or awaiting renovations. One or the other. It was empty, anyway. I went back there tonight, before I came to the café. No sign of habitation.”

“How good was this guy Taylor? Did you know him in Britain?”

Gregory nodded. “SAS is a big family. And Taylor was very good indeed.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“OK what?” Lane said.

“There are some obvious early conclusions,” Reacher said.

CHAPTER 4

Reacher said, “The first conclusion is that Taylor is already dead. These guys clearly know you to some extent, and therefore we should assume they knew who and what Taylor was. Therefore they wouldn’t keep him alive. No reason for it. Too dangerous.”

Lane asked, “Why do you think they know me?”

“They asked for a specific car,” Reacher said. “And they suspected you might have a million dollars in cash lying around. They asked for it after the banks were closed and told you to deliver it before the banks reopened. Not everyone could comply with those conditions. Usually even very rich people take a little time to get a million bucks in cash together. They get temporary loans, wire transfers, they use stock as collateral, stuff like that. But these guys seemed to know that you could just cough it up instantly.”

“How do they know me?”

“You tell me.”

Nobody spoke.

“And there are three of them,” Reacher said. “One to guard Kate and Jade wherever they took them. One to watch Gregory’s back while he walked south on West Broadway, on a cell phone to a third who was waiting to move in and pick up the keys as soon as it was safe.”

Nobody spoke.

“And they’re based a minimum two hundred miles upstate,” Reacher said. “Let’s assume the initial action went down before about eleven o’clock yesterday morning. But they didn’t call for more than five hours. Because they were driving. Then they issued instructions at five o’clock for a ransom drop more than six hours later. Because they needed the six hours because two of them had to drive all the way back. Five, six hours, that’s two hundred miles, maybe two fifty, maybe more.”

“Why upstate?” Lane said. “They could be anywhere.”

“Not south or west,” Reacher said. “Or they would have asked for the ransom car south of Canal, so they could head straight for the Holland Tunnel. Not east on Long Island, or they would have wanted to be near the Midtown Tunnel. No, north on Sixth was what they wanted. That implies they were happy to head up toward the George Washington Bridge, or the Henry Hudson and the Saw Mill, or the Triboro and the Major Deegan. Eventually they hit the Thruway, probably. They could be in the Catskills or anywhere. A farm, probably. Certainly somewhere with a big garage block or a barn.”

“Why?”

“They just inherited your Mercedes Benz. Right after hijacking whatever Taylor drove to Bloomingdale’s yesterday. They need a place to hide them.”

“Taylor was driving a Jaguar.”

“There you go. Their place must look like a luxury car lot by now.”

“Why are you so sure they’re going to call back?”

“Because of human nature. Right now they’re mad as hell. They’re kicking themselves. They know you, but maybe not all that well. They took a chance and asked for a million dollars in cash, and you bagged it up without a moment’s hesitation. You shouldn’t have done that. You should have gambled and stalled. Because now they’re saying, damn it, we should have asked for more. They’re saying, we should have tested the limits. So they’re going to get back on the phone and hit you up for another chunk. They’re going to feel out exactly how much cash you’ve got lying around. They’re going to bleed you dry.”

“Why wait so long?”

“Because it’s a significant change in strategy,” Reacher said. “Therefore they’re arguing about it. They’ve been arguing about it all day. That’s human nature, too. Three guys always argue, pro and con, stick to the plan or improvise, play it safe or take the risk.”

Nobody spoke.

“How much have you got in cash?” Reacher asked.

“I’m not going to tell you,” Lane said.

“Five million,” Reacher said. “That’s what they’ll ask for next. The phone is going to ring and they’re going to ask for another five million dollars.”

Seven pairs of eyes turned toward the phone. It didn’t ring.

“In another car,” Reacher said. “They must have a big barn.”

“Is Kate safe?” Lane asked.

“Right now, she’s as safe as houses,” Reacher said. “She’s their meal ticket. And you did the right thing, asking to hear her voice the first time. That set up a good pattern. They’ll have to repeat it. The problem will come after they’ve had the last payment. That’s the toughest part of any kidnap. Giving the money away is easy. Getting the person back is hard.”

The phone stayed silent.

“So should I stall?” Lane asked.

“I would,” Reacher said. “Parcel it out. Keep it going. Buy some time.”

The phone didn’t ring. No sound in the room except the hiss of cooled air and men breathing low. Reacher glanced around. Everyone was waiting patiently. Special Forces soldiers were good at waiting. For all the occasional spectacular action they saw, they spent a lot more time waiting, standing by, passing the time in readiness. And then nine times out of ten they were stood down, action canceled.

The phone didn’t ring.

“Good conclusions,” Lane said, to nobody in particular, through the silence. “Three guys, far away. Upstate. On a farm.”

But Reacher was completely wrong. Just four miles away through the electric city darkness, right there on the island of Manhattan, a lone man pushed open a door to a small, hot room. Then he stepped back. Kate Lane and her daughter Jade passed in front of him without meeting his eyes. They stepped inside the room and saw two beds. The beds looked hard and narrow. The room felt damp and unused. The window was draped with black cloth. The cloth was duct-taped to the walls, across the top, across the bottom, down both sides.

The lone man closed the door and walked away.

CHAPTER 5

The phone rang at exactly one o’clock in the morning. Lane snatched it out of the cradle and said, “Yes?” Reacher heard a faint voice from the earpiece, distorted twice, first by a machine and then again by a bad connection. Lane said, “What?” and there was a reply. Lane said, “Put Kate on the phone. You’ve got to do that first.” Then there was a pause, and then there was a different voice. A woman’s voice, distorted, panicked, breathy. It said just one word, possibly Lane’s name, and then it exploded in a scream. The scream died into silence and Lane screwed his eyes shut and the electronic robot voice came back and barked six short syllables. Lane said, “OK, OK, OK,” and Reacher heard the line go dead.

Lane sat in silence, his eyes clamped shut, his breathing fast and ragged. Then his eyes opened and moved from face to face and stopped on Reacher’s.

“Five million dollars,” he said. “You were right. How did you know?”

“It was the obvious next step,” Reacher said. “One, five, ten, twenty. That’s how people think.”

“You’ve got a crystal ball. You can see the future. I’m putting you on the payroll. Twenty-five grand a month, like all these guys.”

“This isn’t going to last a month,” Reacher said. “It can’t. It’s going to be all over in a couple of days.”

“I agreed to the money,” Lane said. “I couldn’t stall. They were hurting her.”

Reacher nodded. Said nothing.

Gregory asked, “Instructions later?”

“In an hour,” Lane said.

The room went quiet again. More waiting. All around the room men checked their watches and settled back imperceptibly. Lane put the silent handset back in the cradle and stared off into space. But Reacher leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.

“We need to talk,” he said, quietly.

“About what?”

“Background. We should try to figure out who these guys are.”

“OK,” Lane said, vaguely. “We’ll go to the office.”

He stood up slowly and led Reacher out of the living room and through a kitchen to a maid’s room in back. It was small and plain and square and had been fixed up as an office. Desk, computer, fax machine, phones, file cabinets, shelves.

“Tell me about Operational Security Consultants,” Reacher said.

Lane sat down in the desk chair and turned it to face the room.

“Not much to tell,” he said. “We’re just a bunch of ex-military trying to keep busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever people need. Bodyguarding, mostly. Corporate security. Like that.”

There were two framed photographs on the desk. One was a smaller reprint of Kate’s stunning picture from the living room. A seven-by-five instead of a fourteen-by-eleven, in a similar expensive gold frame. The other was of another woman, about the same age, blonde where Kate was dark, blue eyes instead of green. But just as beautiful, and photographed just as masterfully.

“Bodyguarding?” Reacher said.

“Mostly.”

“You’re not convincing me, Mr. Lane. Bodyguards don’t make twenty-five grand a month. Bodyguards are big dumb lumps lucky to make a tenth of that. And if you had guys trained for close personal protection you’d have sent one of them out with Kate and Jade yesterday morning. Taylor driving, maybe Gregory riding shotgun. But you didn’t, which suggests that bodyguarding isn’t exactly the business you’re in.”

“My business is confidential,” Lane said.

“Not anymore. Not if you want your wife and daughter back.”

No reply.

“A Jaguar, a Mercedes, and a BMW,” Reacher said. “Plus more where they came from, I’m sure. Plus a co-op in the Dakota. Plus lots of cash lying around. Plus half a dozen guys on twenty-five grand a month. Altogether big bucks.”

“All legal.”

“Except you don’t want the cops involved.”

Involuntarily Lane glanced at the photograph of the blonde woman.

“No connection,” he said. “That’s not the reason.”

Reacher followed Lane’s gaze.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“Was,” Lane said.

“Was what?”

“Anne,” Lane said. “She was my first wife.”

“And?”

Silence for a long moment.

“You see, I’ve been through this before,” Lane said. “Five years ago. Anne was taken from me. In just the same way. But back then I followed procedure. I called the cops, even though the men on the phone had been very clear that I shouldn’t. The cops called the FBI.”

“And what happened?”

“The FBI screwed up somehow,” Lane said. “They must have been spotted at the ransom drop. Anne died. They found her body a month later in New Jersey.”

Reacher said nothing.

“That’s why there’s no cops this time,” Lane said.

CHAPTER 6

Reacher and Lane sat in silence for a long time. Then Reacher said, “Fifty-five minutes. You should be ready for the next call.”

“You’re not wearing a watch,” Lane said.

“I always know what time it is.”

Reacher followed him back to the living room. Lane stood by the table again, with his fingers spread on the surface. Reacher guessed he wanted to take the call with his men all around him. Maybe he needed the comfort. Or the support.

The phone rang right on time, at two o’clock in the morning exactly. Lane picked it up and listened. Reacher heard faint robot squawks from the earpiece. Lane said, “Put Kate on,” but his request must have been refused, because then he said, “Please don’t hurt her.” He listened for another minute and said, “OK.” Then he hung up.

“Five hours from now,” he said. “Seven o’clock in the morning. Same place, same routine. The blue BMW. One person only.”

“I’ll do it,” Gregory said.

The other men in the room stirred with frustration. “We should all be there,” one of them said. He was a small dark American who looked like an accountant, except for his eyes, which were as flat and dead as a hammerhead shark’s. “Ten minutes later we would know where she is. I can promise you that.”

“One man,” Lane said. “That was the instruction.”

“This is New York City,” the guy with the shark’s eyes said. “There are always people around. They can’t be expecting deserted streets.”

“Apparently they know us,” Lane said. “They would recognize you.”

“I could go,” Reacher said. “They wouldn’t recognize me.”

“You came in with Gregory. They might be watching the building.”

“Conceivable,” Reacher said. “But unlikely.”

Lane said nothing.

“Your call,” Reacher said.

“I’ll think about it,” Lane said.

“Think fast. Better if I leave here well in advance.”

“Decision in one hour,” Lane said. He moved away from the phone and headed back toward the office. Gone to count out the money, Reacher thought. He wondered briefly what five million dollars looked like. The same as one million, he guessed. But with hundreds instead of twenties.

“How much money has he got?” Reacher asked.

“A lot,” Gregory said.

“He’s down six million in two days.”

The guy with the shark’s eyes smiled.

“We’ll get it back,” he said. “You can count on that. As soon as Kate’s home safe we’ll make our move. Then we’ll see who’s down and who’s up. Someone poked a stick in the wrong hornets’ nest this time, that’s for damn sure. And they wasted Taylor. He was one of us. They’ll be sorry they were ever born.”

Reacher glanced into the guy’s empty eyes and believed every word he said. Then the guy stuck out his hand, abruptly. And a little warily. “I’m Carter Groom,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you. I think. I mean, as much as I can be, given the circumstances.”

The four other men introduced themselves with a quiet cascade of names and handshakes. Each man was polite, nothing more. Each was full of reserve in front of a stranger. Reacher tried to tie the names to faces. Gregory he already knew. A guy with a big scar over his eye was called Addison. The shortest guy among them was a Latino called Perez. The tallest was called Kowalski. There was a black guy called Burke.

“Lane told me you do bodyguarding and corporate security,” Reacher said.

Sudden silence. No reply.

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “I wasn’t convinced anyway. My guess is you guys were all operational noncoms. Fighting men. So I think your Mr. Lane is into something else entirely.”

“Like what?” Gregory asked.

“I think he’s pimping mercenaries,” Reacher said.

The guy called Groom shook his head. “Wrong choice of words, pal.”

“What would be the right choice?”

“We’re a private military corporation,” Groom said. “You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t really have an opinion.”

“Well, you better get one, and it better be a good one. We’re legal. We work for the Pentagon, just like we always did, and just like you did, back in the day.”

“Privatization,” Burke said. “The Pentagon loves it. It’s more efficient. The era of big government is over.”

“How many guys have you got?” Reacher asked. “Just what’s here?”

Groom shook his head again. “We’re the A-team. Like senior NCOs. Then there’s a Rolodex full of B-team squad members. We took a hundred guys to Iraq.”

“Is that where you’ve been? Iraq?”

“And Colombia and Panama and Afghanistan. We go anywhere Uncle Sam needs us.”

“What about where Uncle Sam doesn’t need you?”

Nobody spoke.

“My guess is the Pentagon pays by check,” Reacher said. “But there seems to be an awful lot of cash around here, too.”

No response.

“Africa?” Reacher said.

No response.

“Whatever,” Reacher said. “Not my business where you’ve been. All I need to know is where Mrs. Lane has been. For the last couple of weeks.”

“What difference does that make?” Kowalski asked.

“There was some surveillance,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? I don’t suppose the bad guys were just hanging out at Bloomingdale’s every day on the off chance.”

“Mrs. Lane was in the Hamptons,” Gregory said. “With Jade, most of the summer. They only came back three days ago.”

“Who drove them back?”

“Taylor.”

“And then they were based here?”

“Correct.”

“Anything happen out in the Hamptons?”

“Like what?” Groom asked.

“Like anything unusual,” Reacher said. “Anything out of the ordinary.”

“Not really,” Groom said.

“A woman showed up at the door one day,” Gregory said.

“What kind of a woman?”

“Just a woman. She was fat.”

“Fat?”

“Kind of heavyset. About forty. Long hair, center part. Mrs. Lane took her walking on the beach. Then the woman left. I figured it was a friend on a visit.”

“Ever saw her before?”

Gregory shook his head. “Maybe an old friend. From the past.”

“What did Mrs. Lane and Jade do after they got back here to the city?”

“I don’t think they did anything yet.”

“No, she went out once,” Groom said. “Mrs. Lane, I mean. Not Jade. On her own, shopping. I drove her.”

“Where?” Reacher asked.

“Staples.”

“The office supply store?” Reacher had seen them all over. A big chain, red and white décor, huge places full of stuff he had no need of. “What did she buy?”

“Nothing,” Groom said. “I waited twenty minutes on the curb, and she didn’t bring anything out.”

“Maybe she arranged a delivery,” Gregory said.

“She could have done that on-line. No need to drag me out in the car.”

“So maybe she was just browsing,” Gregory said.

“Weird place to browse,” Reacher said. “Who does that?”

“School is back soon,” Groom said. “Maybe Jade needed stuff.”

“In which case she’d have gone along,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? And she’d have bought something.”

“Did she take something in?” Gregory asked. “Maybe she was returning something.”

“She had her tote,” Groom said. “It’s possible.” Then he looked up, beyond Reacher’s shoulder. Edward Lane was back in the room. He was carrying a large leather duffel, and struggling with its bulk. Five million dollars, Reacher thought. So that’s what it looks like. Lane dropped the bag on the floor at the entrance to the foyer. It thumped down on the hardwood and settled like the carcass of a small fat animal.

“I need to see a picture of Jade,” Reacher said.

“Why?” Lane asked.

“Because you want me to pretend I’m a cop. And pictures are the first things cops want to see.”

“Bedroom,” Lane said.

So Reacher fell in behind him and followed him to a bedroom. It was another tall square space, painted a chalky off-white, as serene as a monastery and as quiet as a tomb. There was a cherrywood king-sized bed with pencil posts at the corners. Matching tables at each side. A matching armoire that might have held a television set. A matching desk, with a chair standing in front of it and a framed photograph sitting on it. The photograph was a ten-by-eight, rectangular, set horizontal, not vertical, on the axis that photographers call landscape, not portrait. But it was a portrait. That was for sure. It was a portrait of two people. On the right was Kate Lane. It was the same shot as in the living room print. The same pose, the same eyes, the same developing smile. But the living room print had been cropped to exclude the object of her affection, which was her daughter Jade. Jade was on the left of the bedroom picture. Her pose was a mirror-image of her mother’s. They were about to look at each other, love in their eyes, smiles about to break out on their faces like they were sharing a private joke. In the picture Jade was maybe seven years old. She had long dark hair, slightly wavy, as fine as silk. She had green eyes and porcelain skin. She was a beautiful kid. It was a beautiful photograph.

“May I?” Reacher asked.

Lane nodded. Said nothing. Reacher picked the picture up and looked closer. The photographer had caught the bond between mother and child perfectly and completely. Quite apart from the similarity in appearance there was no doubt about their relationship. No doubt at all. They were mother and daughter. But they were also friends. They looked like they shared a lot. It was a great picture.

“Who took this?” Reacher asked.

“I found a guy downtown,” Lane said. “Quite famous. Very expensive.”

Reacher nodded. Whoever the guy was, he was worth his fee. Although the print quality wasn’t quite as good as the living room copy. The colors were a little less subtle and the contours of the faces were a little plastic. Maybe it was a machine print. Maybe Lane’s budget hadn’t run to a custom hand-print where his stepdaughter was concerned.

“Very nice,” Reacher said. He put the photograph back on the desk, quietly. The room was totally silent. Reacher had once read that the Dakota was the most soundproof building in New York City. It had been built at the same time that Central Park was landscaped. The builder had packed three feet of excavated Central Park clay and mud between the floors and the ceilings. The walls were thick, too. All that mass made the building feel like it was carved from solid rock. Which must have been a good thing, Reacher figured, back when John Lennon lived here.

“OK?” Lane said. “Seen enough?”

“You mind if I check the desk?”

“Why?”

“It’s Kate’s, right?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So it’s what the cops would do.”

Lane shrugged and Reacher started with the bottom drawers. The left-hand drawer held boxes of stationery and notepaper and cards engraved simply with the name Kate Lane. The right-hand drawer was fitted with file hangers and the contents related exclusively to Jade’s education. She was enrolled at a private school nine blocks north of the apartment. It was an expensive school, judging by the bills and the canceled checks. The checks were all drawn on Kate Lane’s personal account. The upper drawers held pens and pencils, envelopes, stamps, self-stick return address labels, a checkbook. And credit card receipts. But nothing very significant. Nothing recent. Nothing from Staples, for instance.

The center drawer at the top held nothing but two American passports, one for Kate and one for Jade.

“Who is Jade’s father?” Reacher asked.

“Does it matter?”

“It might. If this was a straightforward abduction, we’d definitely have to look at him. Estranged parents are who usually snatch kids.”

“But this is a kidnap for ransom. And it’s Kate they’re talking about. Jade was just there by chance.”

“Abductions can be disguised. And her father would need to clothe and feed her. And send her to school. He might want money.”

“He’s dead,” Lane said. “He died of stomach cancer when Jade was three.”

“Who was he?”

“He owned a jewelry store. Kate ran it for a year, afterward. Not very well. She had been a model. But that’s where I met her. In the store. I was buying a watch.”

“Any other relatives? Possessive grandparents, aunts, uncles?”

“Nobody that I ever met. Therefore nobody that saw Jade in the last several years. Therefore nobody you could really describe as possessive.”

Reacher closed the center drawer. Straightened the photograph and turned around.

“Closet?” he said.

Lane pointed at one of a pair of narrow white doors. Behind it was a closet, large for a New York City apartment, small for anyplace else. It had a pull chain for a light. Inside were racks of women’s clothes and shoes. Fragrance in the air. There was a jacket neatly folded on the floor. Ready for the dry cleaner, Reacher thought. He picked it up. There was a Bloomingdale’s label in it. He checked the pockets. Nothing in them.

“What was she wearing when she went out?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Lane said.

“Who would know?”

“We all left before her,” Lane said. “I don’t think anyone was still here. Except Taylor.”

Reacher closed the closet door and stepped away to the armoire. It had double doors at the top and drawers below. One of the drawers held jewelry. One was full of miscellaneous junk like paper packets of spare buttons from new garments and discarded pocket change. One was full of lacy underwear. Bras, panties, all of them either white or black.

“May I see Jade’s room?” Reacher asked.

Lane led him through a short interior hallway. Jade’s room was all pale pastels and kid stuff. Furry bears, china dolls, toys, games. A low bed. Pajamas folded on the pillow. A nightlight still burning. A low desk covered in drawings done with wax crayons on butcher paper. A small chair, neatly tucked in.

Nothing that meant anything to a military cop.

“I’m done,” Reacher said. “I’m very sorry to intrude.”

He followed Lane back to the living room. The leather bag was still there on the floor, near the foyer. Gregory and the five other soldiers were still in their places, still quiet and pensive.

“Decision time,” Lane said. “Do we assume Reacher was observed entering the building tonight? Or not?”

“I didn’t see anyone,” Gregory said. “And I think it’s very unlikely. Round-the-clock surveillance would eat manpower. So I would say not.”

“I agree,” Lane said. “I think Reacher is still Joe Public to them. So he should be on the street at seven o’clock. We should try a little surveillance of our own.”

There was no objection. Reacher nodded.

“I’ll watch the front of the Spring Street building,” he said. “That way I’ll see one of them at least. Maybe two of them.”

“Don’t show yourself,” Lane said. “You understand my concern, right?”

“Completely,” Reacher said. “They won’t make me.”

“Surveillance only. Absolutely no intervention.”

“Don’t worry.”

“They’ll be there early,” Lane said. “So you be in position earlier.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said again. “I’ll leave right now.”

“Don’t you want to know which building you’re supposed to be watching?”

“I don’t need to know,” Reacher said. “I’ll see Gregory leave the keys.”

Then he let himself out of the apartment and rode down in the elevator. Nodded to the doorman and walked out to the street. Headed for the subway at 72nd and Broadway.

The woman who was watching the building saw him go. She had seen him arrive with Gregory, and now he was leaving alone. She checked her watch and made a note of the time. She craned her neck and tracked his progress west. Then she lost sight of him and moved back deep in the shadows.

CHAPTER 7

First in was a 9 train. Reacher used the Metrocard he had bought the day before and rode eleven stops south to Houston Street. Then he came up from under the ground and walked south on Varick. It was past three o’clock in the morning, and very quiet. In Reacher’s experience the city that doesn’t sleep sometimes did, at least for an hour or two, on some nights of the week. There was sometimes a short intermission after the late folk had rolled home and before the early people had gotten up. Then the city went silent and took a breath and shiny darkness owned the streets. That was Reacher’s time. He liked to picture the sleeping people stacked twelve, thirty, fifty stories high, often head to head with perfect strangers on opposite sides of thin apartment walls, deep in slumber, unaware of the tall quiet man striding beneath them in the shadows.

He made a left on Charlton Street, and crossed Sixth Avenue, and Charlton became Prince. Three blocks later he was on West Broadway, in the heart of SoHo, a block north of Spring Street, three hours and forty minutes ahead of schedule. He walked south, with the leisurely gait of a man with a place to go but in no hurry to get there. West Broadway was wider than the cross streets, so as he ambled past Spring he had a good view of the southwest corner. There was a narrow iron-fronted building with a dull red door set high. Three steps up to it. The building’s façade was covered with graffiti low down and laced with a complex fire escape high up. The upper-story windows were filthy and backed with some kind of a dark fabric. On the ground floor there was a single window, pasted over with faded building permits. There was a mail slot in the door, a narrow rectangle with a flap. Maybe once it had been shiny brass, but now it was dull with tarnish and pitted by corrosion.

That’s the one, Reacher thought. Got to be.

He turned east a block later on Broome and then backtracked north on Greene Street, past shuttered boutiques that sold sweaters that cost more than first-class airplane tickets and household furniture that cost more than domestic automobiles. He turned west on Prince and completed his circuit around the block. Walked south on West Broadway again and found a doorway on the east sidewalk. It had a stoop a foot and a half high. He kicked garbage out of his way and lay down on his back, his head cradled on his folded arms, his head canted sideways like a somnolent drunk, but with his eyes half-open and focused on the dull red door seventy feet away.

Kate Lane had been told not to move and to make absolutely no noise at all, but she decided to take a risk. She couldn’t sleep, obviously. Neither could Jade. How could anyone sleep, under circumstances like theirs? So Kate crept out of her bed and grasped the rail at the end and inched the whole bed sideways.

“Mom, don’t,” Jade whispered. “You’re making a noise.”

Kate didn’t answer. Just crept to the head of the bed and inched it sideways. After three more cautious back-and-forth movements she had her mattress butted up hard against Jade’s. Then she got back under the sheet and took her daughter in her arms. Held her tight. If they had to be awake, at least they could be awake together.

The clock in Reacher’s head crept around to six in the morning. Down in the brick and iron canyons of SoHo it was still dark, but the sky above was already brightening. The night had been warm. Reacher hadn’t been uncomfortable. He had been in worse spots. Many times. Often for much longer. So far he had seen no activity at the dull red door. But the early people were already out and about all around him. Cars and trucks were moving on the streets. People were passing by on both sidewalks. But nobody was looking at him. He was just a guy in a doorway.

He rolled onto his back and looked around. The door he was blocking was a plain gray metal thing. No exterior handle. Maybe a fire exit, maybe a loading dock. With a little luck he wouldn’t be disturbed before seven. He rolled on his side and gazed south and west again. Arched his back like he was relieving a cramp, then glanced north. He figured whoever was coming would be in position soon. They clearly weren’t fools. They would aim for a careful stakeout. They would check rooftops and windows and parked cars for watching cops. Maybe they would check doorways, too. But Reacher had never been mistaken for a cop. There was always something phony about a cop who dresses down. Reacher was the real thing.

Cops, he thought.

The word snagged in his mind the way a twig on a current catches on a riverbank. It hung up just briefly before spinning clear and floating away. Then he saw a real-life cop, in a car, coming north, going slow. Reacher squirmed upright and propped his back against the gray door. Rested his head against the cold hard metal. Sleeping horizontally in public seemed to be against the city’s vagrancy laws. But there seemed to be some kind of a constitutional right to sit down. New York cops see a guy lying down in a doorway or on a bench, they blip their siren and yell through their loudhailer. They see a guy sleeping upright, they give him a hard stare and move on.

The prowl car moved on.

Reacher laid down again. Folded his arms behind his head and kept his eyes half-open.

Four miles north, Edward Lane and John Gregory rode down in the Dakota’s elevator. Lane was carrying the bulging leather duffel. Outside in the gray dawn light the blue BMW waited at the curb. The man who had ferried it back from the garage got out and handed the keys to Gregory. Gregory used the remote to open the trunk and Lane dumped the bag inside. He looked at it for a second and then he slammed the lid on it.

“No heroics,” he said. “Just leave the car, leave the keys, and walk away.”

“Understood,” Gregory said. He walked around the hood and slid into the driver’s seat. Started the motor and took off west. Then he turned south on Ninth Avenue. This early in the morning, he figured the traffic would be OK.

At that same moment four miles south a man turned off Houston Street and started down West Broadway. He was on foot. He was forty-two years old, white, five feet eleven inches tall, one hundred and ninety pounds. He was wearing a jeans jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. He crossed to the west sidewalk and headed for Prince. He kept his eyes moving. Left, right, near, far. Reconnaissance. He was justifiably proud of his technique. He didn’t miss much. He never had missed much. He imagined his gaze to be twin moving searchlights, penetrating the gloom, revealing everything.

Revealing: Forty-five degrees ahead and to the left, a man sprawled in a doorway. A big man, but inert. His limbs were relaxed in sleep. His head was cradled on his arms and canted sideways at a characteristic angle.

Drunk? Passed out?

Who was he?

The man in the hooded sweatshirt paused at the Prince Street crosswalk. Waited for the light, even though there was no traffic. Used the time to complete his inspection. The big guy’s clothes were garbage, but his shoes were good. Leather, heavy, solid, proper stitched welts. Probably English. Probably three hundred dollars a pair. Maybe three-fifty. Each shoe on its own was worth twice the price of everything else the guy was wearing.

So who was he?

A bum who had stolen a pair of fancy shoes? Or not?

Not, thought the man in the hooded sweatshirt.

He turned ninety degrees and crossed West Broadway against the light. Headed straight for the doorway.

Gregory blew past a small traffic snarl at 42nd Street and caught green lights all the way to the back of the Post Office at 31st. Then the lights and his luck changed. He had to stop the BMW behind a garbage truck. He waited. Checked his watch. He had plenty of time.

The man in the hooded sweatshirt stopped one quiet pace north of the doorway. Held his breath. The guy at his feet slept on. He didn’t smell. His skin was good. His hair was clean. He wasn’t malnourished.

Not a bum with a pair of stolen shoes.

The man in the hooded sweatshirt smiled to himself. This was some asshole from some million-dollar SoHo loft, been out for some fun, had a little too much, couldn’t make it home.

A prime target.

He shuffled half a pace forward. Breathed out, breathed in. Leveled the twin searchlights on the chino pockets. Scoped them out.

There it was.

The left-hand front pocket. The familiar delicious bulge. Exactly two and five-eighths inches wide, half an inch thick, three and a quarter inches long.

Folding money.

The man in the hooded sweatshirt had plenty of experience. He could call it sight unseen. There would be a bunch of crisp new twenties from an ATM, a couple of leathery old fives and tens from taxi change, a wrapping of crumpled ones. Total: a hundred and seventy-three dollars. That was his prediction. And his predictions were usually pretty good. He doubted that he would be disappointed. But he was prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

He bent at the waist and extended his arm.

He used his fingertips to lift the top seam of the pocket. To make a little tunnel. Then he flattened his hand, palm down, and slid his index and middle fingers inside, light, like feathers. He crossed them, like scissors, or a promise. His index finger went under the cash, all the way to the first knuckle. His middle finger went over the cash. Over the fold. Like a pincer. He used light pressure. Used the pad of his middle finger to press down through the wad to the nail of his index finger. Used a brief subtle tug to break the fiber-on-fiber bond between money and pocket. Started the slow, smooth extraction.

Then his wrist broke.

Two giant hands seized it and snapped it like a rotten twig. One shattering sudden explosion of motion. A blur. At first there was no pain. Then it kicked in like a tidal wave. But by then it was too late to scream. One of the giant hands was clamped over his mouth. It was like being hit hard in the face with a first baseman’s mitt.

“I’ve got three questions,” the big guy said, quietly. “Tell me the truth and I’ll let you go. Tell me a lie and I’ll break your other wrist. We clear on that?”

The big guy had hardly moved. Just his hands, once, twice, three times, fast, efficient, and lethal. He wasn’t even breathing hard. The man in the hooded sweatshirt couldn’t breathe at all. He nodded desperately.

“OK, first question: What exactly are you doing?” The big guy took his hand away, to enable the answer.

“Your money,” the man in the hooded sweatshirt said. His voice wouldn’t work properly. It was all strangled up with pain and panic.

“Not your first time,” the big guy said. His eyes were half-open, clear blue, expressionless. Hypnotic. The man in the sweatshirt couldn’t lie.

“I call it the dawn patrol,” he said. “There’s sometimes two or three guys like you.”

“Not exactly like me,” the big guy said.

“No.”

“Bad choice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Second question: Are you alone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Third question: Do you want to walk away now?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So do it. Slow and natural. Go north. Turn right on Prince. Don’t run. Don’t look back. Just disappear. Right now.”

Gregory turned left off Hudson Street onto Houston and waited at the light at the bottom of Seventh Avenue. He was a block and a half from the fireplug and about eight minutes early. He figured he would pull in at the curb before he got to Sixth. He figured he should try to time it exactly.

Reacher’s heart rate was back to normal within about fifteen seconds. He jammed his cash deeper in his pocket and put his arms back behind his head. Let his head fall sideways and let his eyes half-close. He saw nobody near the red door. Saw nobody even glance at it.

The man in the hooded sweatshirt cradled his broken wrist and made it as far as Prince. Then he abandoned the slow and natural walk and just ran east as fast as he could. Stopped two blocks away and threw up in the gutter. Stayed there for a spell, bent at the waist, panting, his good hand on his knee, his bad hand tucked in the sweatshirt pocket like a sling.

Reacher had no watch but he figured when he saw Gregory it must have been between eight and nine minutes after seven o’clock. Below Houston the north-south blocks are long. Eight or nine minutes was about right for the walk down from the fireplug on Sixth. So Gregory was right on time. He came in on Spring from the west. He was walking briskly. His hand was in the pocket of his suit coat. He stopped on the sidewalk outside the dull red door and turned with military precision and walked up the three short steps, light and easy, balanced on the balls of his feet. Then his hand came out of his pocket and Reacher saw the flash of metal and black plastic. Saw Gregory lift the mail slot’s flap with his left hand and shovel the keys through with his right. Saw him drop the flap back into place and turn and walk away. Saw him make the left onto West Broadway. He didn’t look back. He just kept on walking, playing his part, trying to keep Kate Lane alive.

Reacher kept his eyes on the red door. Waited. Three minutes, he figured. Five million bucks was a lot of money. There would be a certain degree of impatience. As soon as the one guy confirmed that Gregory was safely distant, the other guy would be in through the door. And they would figure one long block plus a crosswalk was safely distant. So as soon as Gregory was south of Broome, the call would come.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Three minutes.

Nothing happened.

Reacher laid back, stayed relaxed, stayed casual. No outward sign of his interest. Or his concern.

Four minutes. Nothing happened.

Reacher kept his eyes half-closed but stared at the door so hard that its details etched themselves in his mind. Scars, nicks, streaks of dirt and rust, graffiti overspray. He felt that fifty years in the future he would be able to draw a picture as accurate as a Polaroid.

Six minutes. Eight. Nine.

Nothing happened.

There were all kinds of people on the sidewalks now but none of them went anywhere near the red door. There was traffic and there were trucks unloading and there were bodegas and bakeries open for business. There were people with newspapers and closed cups of coffee heading for the subway.

Nobody stepped up to the red door.

Twelve minutes. Fifteen.

Reacher asked himself: Did they see me? He answered himself: Of course they did. Close to a certainty. The mugger saw me. That was for damn sure. And these other guys are smarter than any mugger. They’re the type who see everything. Guys good enough to take down an SAS veteran outside a department store were going to check the street pretty carefully. Then he asked himself: But were they worried? Answered himself: No, they weren’t. The mugger saw a professional opportunity. That was all. To these other guys, people in doorways were like trash cans or mail boxes or fire hydrants or cruising taxis. Street furniture. You see them, you see the city. And he was alone. Cops or FBI would have come in a group. Mob-handed. There would have been a whole bunch of unexplained people hanging around looking shifty and awkward with walkie-talkies in brown paper bags made up to look like pints of liquor.

So they saw me, but they didn’t scare.

So what the hell was happening?

Eighteen minutes.

Fire hydrants, Reacher thought.

The BMW was parked on a fire hydrant. Rush hour was building. NYPD tow trucks were firing up and leaving their garages and starting their day. They all had quotas to make. How long could a sane person leave five million bucks inside an illegally parked car in New York City?

Nineteen minutes.

Reacher gave it up after twenty. Just rolled out of the doorway and stood up. Stretched once and hustled north, and then west on Prince all the way to Sixth Avenue, and then north again across Houston to the curb with the fireplug.

It was empty. No BMW.

CHAPTER 8

Reacher headed south again, all the way back to Spring Street. Six blocks, moving fast, seven minutes. He found Gregory on the sidewalk outside the dull red door.

“Well?” Gregory said.

Reacher shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a damn thing. Nobody showed up. It all turned to rat shit. Isn’t that what you SAS guys call it?”

“When we’re feeling polite,” Gregory said.

“The car is gone.”

“How is that possible?”

“There’s a back door,” Reacher said. “That’s my best guess right now.”

“Shit.”

Reacher nodded. “Like I said, rat shit.”

“We should check it out. Mr. Lane is going to want the whole story.”

They found an alley entrance two buildings west. It was gated and the gates were chained. The chains were secured with a padlock the size of a frying pan. Unbreakable. But reasonably new. Oiled, and frequently used. Above the gates was a single iron screen covering the whole width of the alley and extending twenty feet in the air.

No way in.

Reacher stepped back and looked left and right. The target building’s right-hand neighbor was a chocolate shop. A security screen was down over the window but Reacher could see confections the size of babies’ fists displayed behind it. Fakes, he guessed. Otherwise they would melt or go white. There was a light on in back of the store. He cupped his hands against the glass and peered inside. Saw a small shadowy figure moving about. He banged on the door, loud, with the flat of his hand. The small figure stopped moving and turned around. Pointed at something waist-high to Reacher’s right. There was a neatly engraved card taped to the door glass: Opening hours, 10 am–10 pm. Reacher shook his head and beckoned the small figure closer. It gave a little universal shrug of exasperation and headed his way. It was a woman. Short, dark, young, tired. She turned numerous complicated locks and opened the door against a thick steel chain.

“We’re closed,” she said, through the narrow gap.

“Department of Health,” Reacher said.

“You don’t look like it,” the woman said. And she was right. Reacher had looked convincing as a bum in a doorway. He didn’t look convincing as a city bureaucrat. So he nodded at Gregory, in his neat gray suit.

“He’s with the city,” he said. “I’m with him.”

“I was just inspected,” the woman said.

“This is about the building next door,” Reacher said.

“What about it?”

Reacher glanced behind her. A confectionery store full of luxury items that nobody really needs. Therefore, a fragile client base. Therefore, an insecure proprietor.

“Rats,” he said. “I’m the exterminator. We’ve had reports.”

The woman went quiet.

“You got a key for the alley gate?” Gregory asked her.

The woman nodded. “But you can use my back door if you want. That would be quicker.”

She took the door off the chain. Led them inside through air intense with the smell of cocoa. The front of the store was dressed up for retail, and there was a working kitchen in back. Ovens, just now warming up. Dozens of shiny trays. Milk, butter, sugar. Vats of melting chocolate. Steel work-surfaces. A rear door, at the end of a short tiled hallway. The woman let them out through it and Reacher and Gregory found themselves in a brick alley about wide enough for the kind of carts and trucks they had in 1900. The alley ran east to west across the block with a single gated exit on Thompson Street at one end and a right-angle dogleg to the gate they had already seen on Spring at the other. The target building looked just as bad from the back as it had from the front. Or maybe even worse. Less graffiti, more decay. Ice damage on the brickwork, moss from spilling gutters.

One ground floor window. And a back door.

It was the same dull red color as the front door, but it looked even more decrepit. It looked like a wooden core sheeted over with steel and last painted by some GI looking for work after Korea. Or after World War Two. Or World War One. But it had a modern lock, just one, a good solid deadbolt. The handle was an old-fashioned brass ball, black and pitted with age. Impossible to tell whether it had been touched within the last hour. Reacher grabbed it and pushed. The door gave an eighth-inch and then stopped dead against the lock’s steel tongue.

No way in.

Reacher turned back and headed for the chocolatier’s kitchen. She was squeezing molten chocolate out of a heavy linen bag through a silver nozzle, dotting a baking sheet with one squeeze every two inches.

“Want to lick the spoon?” she asked, watching him watching her.

“You ever seen anyone next door?” he asked back.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Not even coming and going?”

“Never,” she said. “It’s a vacant building.”

“Are you here every day?”

“From seven-thirty in the morning. I fire up the ovens first thing, and I turn them off at ten in the evening. Then I clean up and I’m out of here by eleven-thirty. Sixteen-hour days. I’m regular as clockwork.”

“Seven days a week?”

“Small business. We never rest.”

“Hard life.”

“For you, too.”

“Me?”

“With the rats in this town.”

Reacher nodded. “Who’s the owner next door?”

“Don’t you know?” the woman asked. “You’re with the city.”

“You could save me some time,” Reacher said. “The records are a mess.”

“I’ve got no idea,” the woman said.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Have a great day.”

“Check the building permits on the front window. They have a bunch of phone numbers on them. The owner’s probably listed. You should have seen the shit I had to list to get this place done.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

“Want a chocolate?”

“Not on duty,” he said.

He followed Gregory out of the front of the store and they turned right and checked the target building’s front window. It was backed with dark curtains. There were a dozen permits pasted to the glass. The glass was filthy with soot and the permits were dry and curled. All of them were long expired. But they still had phone numbers handwritten with a black marker pen, one number for each of the participants in the abandoned project. Architect, contractor, owner. Gregory didn’t write them down. Just took out his small silver cell phone and took a picture with it. Then he used it again, this time to make a call to the Dakota.

“Incoming,” he said.

He and Reacher walked west to Sixth Avenue and rode the C train eight stops north to 72nd Street. They came up into the daylight right next to Strawberry Fields. Walked into the Dakota’s lobby at eight-thirty exactly.

The woman who was watching the building saw them enter and made a note of the time.

CHAPTER 9

The bad news put Edward Lane on a knife edge. Reacher watched him carefully and saw him struggling for control. He paced back and forth across the living room floor and curled his hands compulsively and scratched at his palms with his nails.

“Conclusions?” he asked. Like a demand. Like an entitlement.

“I’m revising my conclusions,” Reacher said. “Maybe there aren’t three guys. Maybe there are only two. One stays with Kate and Jade, the other comes down to the city alone. He doesn’t really need to watch Gregory walk away down West Broadway because he’s planning on using the back door anyway. He’s already in the alley, out of sight.”

“Risky. Safer to be loose on the street.”

Reacher shook his head. “They did their homework. The neighbor is in her building from seven-thirty in the morning until eleven-thirty at night. Which explains the times they chose. Seven o’clock this morning, before she arrived. Eleven-forty the first night, after she left. Eleven-forty is a weirdly precise choice of time, don’t you think? There had to be some reason for it.”

Edward Lane said nothing.

Reacher said, “Or maybe there’s only one guy. On his own. It’s possible. If Kate and Jade are secured upstate, he could have come down alone.”

“Secured?”

“Locked up somewhere. Maybe bound and gagged.”

“For twelve hours at a time? There and back?”

“This is a kidnap. They’re not at a health spa.”

“Just one guy?”

“It’s possible,” Reacher said again. “And maybe he wasn’t in the alley at all. Maybe he was actually inside the building, waiting and ready. Maybe right behind the front door. Maybe Gregory dropped the keys right in his hand.”

“Will they call again?” Lane asked. “Will he?”

“Four hours from now that same argument will start all over again.”

“And?”

“What would you do?”

Lane didn’t answer directly. “If there’s only one guy, how can he argue?”

“With himself,” Reacher said. “And that’s the toughest kind of argument to have.”

Lane paced. But his hands stopped moving. It was like he had been hit with a new consideration. Reacher had been expecting it. Here it comes, he thought.

“Maybe you’re right,” Lane said. “Maybe it isn’t three guys.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Maybe it’s four guys,” Lane said. “And maybe you’re the fourth guy. Maybe that’s why you were in that coffee shop the first night. You were watching your buddy’s back. Making sure he got away OK.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It was you who elected to watch the front door this morning,” Lane said. “Because you knew nothing would happen there. You should have watched the car. You should have been on Sixth Avenue, not Spring Street. And you knew they were going to ask for five million more. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Silence in the room.

“Two questions,” Reacher said. “Why would I have gone back to the coffee shop the second night? Nothing was happening the second night. And if I was a bad guy, why would I have told Gregory I had seen anything at all?”

“Because you wanted to worm your way inside where you could steer us wrong. You knew I would send someone out to look for witnesses. That was obvious. And you were right there, like a spider waiting for a fly.”

Lane glanced around the room. Reacher followed his gaze. A quiet desperate atmosphere, subdued menace, six Special Forces veterans, all looking back at him, all as hard as nails, all full of hostility toward the stranger and all full of any fighting soldier’s suspicion of an MP. He checked their faces, one through six. Then he looked down at Kate Lane’s photograph.

“Pity,” he said. “Your wife is a beautiful woman, Mr. Lane. And your daughter is a lovely kid. And if you want to get them back, then I’m all you’ve got. Because like I said, these guys here can start a war, but they’re not investigators. They can’t find what you’re looking for. I know guys like these. Guys like these, they couldn’t find their own assholes if I gave them a mirror on a stick.”

Nobody spoke.

“You know where I live?” Reacher asked.

“I could find out,” Lane said.

“You couldn’t,” Reacher said. “Because I don’t really live anywhere. I move around. Here, there, and everywhere. So if I choose to walk out of here today, you’ll never see me again, the whole rest of your life. You can count on that.”

Lane didn’t answer.

“And therefore Kate,” Reacher said. “You’ll never see her again, either. You can count on that, too.”

“You wouldn’t get out of here alive,” Lane said. “Not unless I chose to let you.”

Reacher shook his head. “You won’t use firearms in here. Not inside the Dakota. I’m sure that would break the terms of your co-op lease. And I’m not worried about hand-to-hand combat. Not against little guys like these. You remember how it was back in the service, don’t you? Your guys stepped out of line, who did you call? The 110th Special Unit, that’s who. Hard men need harder cops. I was one of those cops. And I’m willing to be one again. Against all of you at once, if you like.”

Nobody spoke.

“I’m not here to steer you wrong,” Reacher said. “If I wanted to steer you wrong, I’d have given you descriptions of two fantasy guys this morning. Short, tall, fat, thin, whatever. Eskimos in fur hats. Africans in full tribal dress. I’d have had you chasing shadows all over the place. But I didn’t. I came back here and told you I’m sorry that actually I’m not steering you anyplace yet. Because I am sorry about that. Really. I’m sorry about the whole damn thing.”

Nobody spoke.

“But you need to hang with it,” Reacher said. “We all do. Things like this are never easy.”

The room stayed quiet. Then Lane exhaled. He nodded.

“I apologize,” he said. “Most sincerely. Please forgive me. It’s the stress.”

Reacher said, “No offense taken.”

Lane said, “One million dollars to find my wife.”

“For me?” Reacher said.

“As a fee.”

“That’s some raise. It was twenty-five grand a few hours ago.”

“The situation is more serious now than it was a few hours ago.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Will you accept?” Lane asked.

“We’ll talk about a fee afterward,” Reacher said. “If I succeed.”

“If?”

“I’m way behind the curve here. Success depends on how much longer we can keep this thing going.”

“Will they call back again?”

“Yes, I think they will.”

“Why did you mention Africans?”

“When?”

“Just now. You said Africans in full tribal dress. As an example of a fantasy description.”

“It was an example. Like you said.”

“What do you know about Africa?”

“It’s a large continent south of Europe. I’ve never been there.”

“What do we do next?”

“We think,” Reacher said.

Lane went to his office and five men went out for breakfast. Reacher stayed in the living room. Gregory stayed in there with him. They sat across from each other on a pair of low sofas. Between the sofas was a coffee table. The coffee table was topped with French polished mahogany. The sofas were covered with flowery chintz. There were velvet throw pillows. The whole room seemed ludicrously overdecorated and overstyled and overcivilized, given the issues at hand. And it was totally dominated by the portrait of Kate Lane. Her eyes were everywhere.

“Can you get her back?” Gregory asked.

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Usually this kind of a thing doesn’t end happily. Kidnapping is a brutal business. Usually it’s the exact same thing as homicide, just delayed a little.”

“That’s pretty defeatist.”

“No, it’s realistic.”

“Any chance at all?”

“Maybe some, if we’re only halfway through. Probably none, if we’re near the end. I don’t have any traction yet. And any kidnap, the endgame is always the hardest part.”

“You think they were really in the building when I dropped the keys?”

“It’s possible. And it would make sense. Why wait outside when they could wait inside?”

“OK,” Gregory said. “So how about this: That’s their base. That’s where they are. Not upstate.”

“Where are the cars?”

“In parking garages all around the city.”

“Why the five-hour delays?”

“To create a false impression.”

“It would be one hell of a double-bluff,” Reacher said. “They led us right there. Gave us the exact address.”

“But it’s conceivable.”

Reacher shrugged. “Not very. But stranger things have happened, I guess. So go call those numbers. Find out what you can. If possible, aim to have someone meet us with a key. But not right there. On the corner of Thompson. Out of sight. Just in case.”

“When?”

“Now. We need to be back here before the next ransom demand.”

Reacher left Gregory working with his cell phone on the sofa and wandered back through the kitchen to Lane’s office. Lane was at his desk, but he wasn’t doing anything productive. Just swinging his chair back and forth through a tiny arc and staring at the twin photographs in front of him. His two wives. One lost. Maybe both lost.

“Did the FBI find the guys?” Reacher asked. “The first time, with Anne?”

Lane shook his head.

“But you knew who they were.”

“Not at the time,” Lane said.

“But you found out later.”

“Did I?”

“Tell me how.”

“It became a threshold question,” Lane said. “Who would do such a thing? At first I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it. But clearly someone had, so I revised the threshold of possibilities downward. But then everyone in the world seemed to be a possibility. It was beyond my understanding.”

“You surprise me. You move in a world where hostage-taking and abduction aren’t exactly unknown.”

“Do I?”

“Foreign conflicts,” Reacher said. “Irregular forces.”

“But this was domestic,” Lane said. “This was right here in New York City. And it was my wife, not me or one of my men.”

“But you did find the guys.”

“Did I?”

Reacher nodded. “You’re not asking me if I think it could be the same people all over again. You’re not speculating. It’s like you know for sure it isn’t.”

Lane said nothing.

“How did you find them?” Reacher asked.

“Someone who knew someone heard some talk. Arms dealers, up and down their network.”

“And?”

“There was a story about four guys who had heard about a deal I had done and concluded that I had money.”

“What happened to the four guys?”

“What would you have done?”

“I would have made sure they couldn’t do it again.”

Lane nodded. “Let’s just say I’m completely confident that this isn’t the same people doing it again.”

“Have you heard any new talk?” Reacher asked.

“Not a word.”

“A rival in this business?”

“I don’t have rivals in this business. I have inferiors and junior partners. And even if I did have rivals, they wouldn’t do something like this. It would be suicide. They would know that sooner or later our paths would cross. Would you risk antagonizing a bunch of armed men you’re likely to stumble across under the radar somewhere in the back of beyond?”

Reacher said nothing.

“Will they call again?” Lane asked.

“I think they will.”

“What will they ask for?”

“Ten,” Reacher said. “That’s the next step. One, five, ten, twenty.”

Lane sighed, distracted.

“That’s two bags,” he said. “Can’t get ten million dollars in one bag.”

He showed no other outward reaction. Reacher thought: One plus five already gone, plus one promised to me, plus ten more. That’s seventeen million dollars. This guy is right now looking at a running total of seventeen million dollars, and he hasn’t even blinked yet.

“When will they call?” Lane asked.

“Drive time plus argument time,” Reacher said. “Late afternoon, early evening. Not before.”

Lane kept on swinging his chair through its tiny arc. He lapsed into silence. Then there was a quiet knock at the door and Gregory stuck his head in the room.

“I got what we need,” he said, to Reacher, not to Lane. “The building on Spring Street? The owner is a bankrupt developer. One of his lawyer’s people is meeting us there in an hour. I said we were interested in buying the place.”

“Good work,” Reacher said.

“So maybe you should revise what you said about a mirror on a stick.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe I will one day.”

“So let’s go.”

They were met at the 72nd Street curb by another new BMW 7-series sedan. This one was black. This time the driver stayed behind the wheel and Gregory and Reacher climbed in the back. The woman who was watching the building saw them go, and she noted the time.

CHAPTER 10

The guy from the bankrupt developer’s lawyer’s office was a reedy paralegal of about thirty. His suit pockets were bagged out from all the keys he carried. Clearly his firm specialized in distressed real estate. Gregory gave him an OSC business card and introduced Reacher as a contractor whose opinion he valued.

“Is the building habitable?” Gregory asked. “I mean, as of right now?”

“You worried about squatters being in there?” the reedy guy asked back.

“Or tenants,” Gregory said. “Or anybody.”

“There’s nobody in there,” the guy said. “I can assure you of that fact. No water, no power, no gas, capped sewer. Also, if I’m thinking of the right building, there’s another feature that makes it highly unlikely.”

He juggled his keys and unlocked the Thompson Street alley gate. The three men walked east together, behind the chocolate shop, to the target building’s red rear door.

“Wait,” Gregory said. Then he turned to Reacher and whispered, “If they’re in there, we need to think about how we do this. We could get them both killed right here.”

“It’s unlikely they’re in there,” Reacher said.

“Plan for the worst,” Gregory said.

Reacher nodded. Stepped back and looked up and checked the windows. They were black with filth and dusty black drapes were drawn tight behind them. Street noise was loud, even in the alley. Therefore, their approach thus far was still undetected.

“Decision?” Gregory asked.

Reacher looked around, pensive. Stepped up next to the lawyer’s guy.

“What makes you so sure there’s nobody in there?” he asked.

“I’ll show you,” the guy said. He shoved the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Then he raised his arm to stop Gregory and Reacher from crowding in too closely behind him. Because the feature that made current habitation of the building unlikely was that it had no floors.

The back door was hanging open over a yawning ten-foot pit. At the bottom of the pit was the original basement floor. It was knee-deep in trash. Above it was nothing at all. Just fifty feet of dark void, all the way up to the underside of the roof slab. The building was like a giant empty shoe box set on its end. Stumps of floor joists were faintly visible in the gloom. They had been cut off flush with the walls. The remains of individual rooms were still clearly delineated by patches of different wallpapers and vertical scars where interior partitions had been ripped out. Bizarrely, all the windows still had their drapes.

“See?” the lawyer’s guy said. “Not exactly habitable, is it?”

There was a ladder set next to the rear door. It was a tall old wooden thing. A nimble person could grasp the door frame and swing sideways and get on it and climb down into the basement trash. Then that person could pick his way forward to the front of the building and root through the garbage with a flashlight and collect anything that had fallen the thirteen feet from the letter slot above.

Or, a nimble person could be already waiting down there and could catch whatever came through the slot like a pop-up in the infield.

“Was that ladder always there?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t recall,” the guy said.

“Who else has keys to this place?” Reacher asked.

“Everyone and his uncle, probably,” the guy said. “This place has been vacant nearly twenty years. The last owner alone tried half a dozen different separate schemes. That’s half a dozen architects and contractors and God knows who else. Before that, who knows what went on? The first thing you’ll need to do is change the locks.”

“We don’t want it,” Gregory said. “We were looking for something ready to move into. You know, maybe a little paint. But this is off the charts.”

“We could be flexible on price,” the guy said.

“A dollar,” Gregory said. “That’s all I’d pay for a dump like this.”

“You’re wasting my time,” the guy said.

He leaned in over the yawning void and pulled the door closed. Then he relocked it and walked back up the alley without another word. Reacher and Gregory followed him out to Thompson Street. The guy relocked the gate and walked away south. Reacher and Gregory stayed where they were, on the sidewalk.

“Not their base, then,” Gregory said, clipped and British.

“Mirror on a stick,” Reacher said.

“Just a dead drop for the car keys. They must be up and down that ladder like trained monkeys.”

“I guess they must.”

“So next time we should watch the alley.”

“I guess we should.”

“If there is a next time.”

“There will be,” Reacher said.

“But they’ve already had six million dollars. Surely there’s going to come a point where they decide they’ve got enough.”

Reacher recalled the feel of the mugger’s hand in his pocket.

“Look south,” he said. “That’s Wall Street down there. Or take a stroll on Greene Street and look in the store windows. There’s no such thing as enough.”

“There would be for me.”

“For me, too,” Reacher said.

“That’s my point. They could be just like us.”

“Not exactly like us. I never abducted anyone. Did you?”

Gregory didn’t answer that. Thirty-six minutes later the two men were back in the Dakota, and the woman who was watching the building had made another entry in her log.

CHAPTER 11

Reacher had a late breakfast delivered from a gourmet deli on Edward Lane’s tab and he ate it alone in the kitchen. Then he lay down on a sofa and thought until he was too tired to think anymore. Then he closed his eyes and dozed, and waited for the phone to ring.

Kate and Jade were sleeping, too. It was nature’s way. They had been unable to sleep at night, so exhaustion had overtaken them midway through the day. They were on their narrow beds, close together, deep in slumber. The lone man opened their door quietly and saw them. Paused a moment, just looking. Then he backed out of the room and left them alone. No hurry, he thought. In a way he was enjoying this particular phase of the operation. He was addicted to risk. He always had been. No point in denying it. It made him who he was.

Reacher woke up and found himself all alone in the living room except for Carter Groom. The guy with the shark’s eyes. He was sitting in an armchair, doing nothing.

“You pulled guard duty?” Reacher asked.

“You’re not exactly a prisoner,” Groom said. “You’re in line to get a million bucks.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Not really. You find her, you’ll have earned it. The workman is worthy of his hire. Says so in the Bible.”

“Did you drive her often?”

“My fair share.”

“When Jade was with her, how did they ride?”

“Mrs. Lane always rode in the front. She was basically embarrassed about the whole chauffeur thing. The kid in the back, obviously.”

“What were you, back in the day?”

“Recon Marine,” Groom said. “First Sergeant.”

“How would you have handled the takedown at Bloomingdale’s?”

“Good guy or bad guy?”

“Bad guy,” Reacher said.

“How many with me?”

“Does it matter?”

Groom thought for less than a second and shook his head. “Lead guy is the important guy. Lead guy could be the only guy.”

“So how would it have gone down?”

“Only one way to do it clean,” Groom said. “You’d have to keep all the action inside the car, before they even got out. Bloomie’s is on the east side of Lexington Avenue. Lex runs downtown. So Taylor would pull over on the left and stop opposite the main entrance. Double parked, just temporarily. Whereupon our guy would grab the rear door and slide in right next to the kid. She’s belted in behind her mother. Our guy puts a gun straight to the kid’s head and grabs her hair with his free hand and holds on tight. That’s game over right there. Nobody on the street is worried. For them, it’s a pickup, not a drop-off. And Taylor would do what he’s told from that point on. What choice does he have? He’s got Mrs. Lane screaming in the seat next to him. And what can he do anyway? He can’t flip the lever and shove the seat off its runners back on the guy, because the Jaguar’s got electric seats. He can’t turn around and fight, because the gun is to the kid’s head. He can’t use violent evasive driving maneuvers because he’s in slow traffic and the guy has hold of the kid’s hair and won’t get thrown loose anyway. Game over, right there.”

“And then what?”

“Then our guy makes Taylor drive somewhere quiet. Maybe in town, more likely out of town. Then he shoots him, spine shot through the seat, so he doesn’t bust the windshield. He makes Mrs. Lane dump him out. Then he makes her drive the rest of the way. He wants to stay in the back with the kid.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s how I see it.”

“Tough on Taylor,” Groom said. “You know, that final moment, the guy tells him to pull over, put the transmission in Park, sit tight. Taylor will have known what was coming.”

Reacher said nothing.

“They haven’t found his body yet,” Groom said.

“You optimistic?”

Groom shook his head. “It’s not somewhere populated, that’s all it means. It’s a balance. You want rid of the guy early, but you keep him alive until the location is safe. He’s most likely in the countryside somewhere with the coyotes gnawing on him. Race against time whether someone finds him before he’s all eaten up.”

“How long was he with you?”

“Three years.”

“Did you like him?”

“He was OK.”

“Was he good?”

“You already asked Gregory.”

“Gregory might be biased. They were from the same unit. They were Brits together overseas. What did you think?”

“He was good,” Groom said. “SAS is a good outfit. Better than Delta, maybe. Brits are usually more ruthless. It’s in their genes. They ruled the world for a long time, and they didn’t do it by being nice. An SAS veteran would be second only to a Recon Marine veteran, that would be my opinion. So yes, Gregory was right. Taylor was good.”

“What was he like as a person?”

“Off duty he was gentle. He was good with the kid. Mrs. Lane seemed to like him. There’s two types of people here. Like an inner circle and an outer circle. Taylor was inner circle. I’m outer circle. I’m all business. I’m kind of stunted, in a social situation. I can admit it. I’m nothing, away from the action. Some of the others can be both.”

“Were you here five years ago?”

“For Anne? No, I came just after. But there can’t be a connection.”

“So I heard,” Reacher said.

The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around to four-thirty in the afternoon. For Kate and Jade, the third day. Probably fifty-four hours since the snatch. Fifty-four hours was an incredibly long time for a kidnap to sustain itself. Most were over in less than twenty-four, one way or the other, good result or bad. Most law enforcement people gave up after thirty-six. Each passing minute made the likely outcome more and more dire.

Around a quarter to five in the afternoon Lane came back into the room and people started drifting in after him. Gregory, Addison, Burke, Kowalski. Perez came in. The vigil around the telephone started up again unannounced. Lane stood next to the table. The others grouped themselves around the room, all facing the same way, inward. There was no doubt about the center of their attention.

But the phone didn’t ring.

“Has that thing got a speaker?” Reacher asked.

“No,” Lane said.

“What about in the office?”

“I can’t do it,” Lane said. “It would be a change. It would unsettle them.”

The phone didn’t ring.

“Hang in there,” Reacher said.

In her apartment across the street the woman who had been watching the building picked up her phone and dialed.

CHAPTER 12

The woman across the street was called Patricia Joseph, Patti to her few remaining friends, and she was dialing an NYPD detective named Brewer. She had his home number. He answered on the second ring.

“I’ve got some activity to report,” Patti said.

Brewer didn’t ask who his caller was. He didn’t need to. He knew Patti Joseph’s voice about as well as he knew anybody’s.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“There’s a new character on the scene.”

“Who?”

“I don’t have a name for him yet.”

“Description?”

“Very tall, heavily built, like a real brawler. He’s in his late thirties or early forties. Short fair hair, blue eyes. He showed up late last night.”

“One of them?” Brewer asked.

“He doesn’t dress like them. And he’s much bigger than the rest. But he acts like them.”

“Acts? What have you seen him do?”

“The way he walks. The way he moves. The way he holds himself.”

“So you think he’s ex-military, too?”

“Almost certainly.”

“OK,” Brewer said. “Good work. Anything else?”

“One thing,” Patti Joseph said. “I haven’t seen the wife or the daughter in a couple of days.”

Inside the Dakota living room the phone rang at what Reacher figured was five o’clock exactly. Lane snatched the receiver out of the cradle and clamped it to his ear. Reacher heard the drone and squawk of the electronic machine, faint and muffled. Lane said, “Put Kate on,” and there was a long, long pause. Then a woman’s voice, loud and clear. But not calm. Lane closed his eyes. Then the electronic squawk came back and Lane opened his eyes again. The squawk droned on for a whole minute. Lane listened, his face working, his eyes moving. Then the call ended. Just cut off before Lane had a chance to say anything more.

He put the receiver back in the cradle. His face was half-filled with hope, half-filled with despair.

“They want more money,” he said. “Instructions in an hour.”

“Maybe I should get down there right now,” Reacher said. “Maybe they’ll throw us a curveball by changing the time interval.”

But Lane was already shaking his head. “They threw us a different kind of curveball. They said they’re changing the whole procedure. It’s not going to be the same as before.”

Silence in the room.

“Is Mrs. Lane OK?” Gregory asked.

Lane said, “There was a lot of fear in her voice.”

“What about the guy’s voice?” Reacher asked. “Anything?”

“It was disguised. Same as always.”

“But beyond the sound. Think about this call and all the other calls. Word choice, word order, cadence, rhythm, flow. Is it an American or a foreigner?”

“Why would it be a foreigner?”

“Your line of work, if you’ve got enemies, some of them might be foreign.”

“It’s an American,” Lane said. “I think.” He closed his eyes again and concentrated. His lips moved like he was replaying conversations in his head. “Yes, American. Certainly a native speaker. No stumbles. Never any weird or unusual words. Just normal, like you would hear all the time.”

“Same guy every time?”

“I think so.”

“What about this time? Anything different? Mood? Tension? Is he still in control or is he losing it?”

“He sounded OK,” Lane said. “Relieved, even.” Then he paused. “Like this whole thing was nearly over. Like this might be the final installment.”

“It’s too soon,” Reacher said. “We’re not even close yet.”

“They’re calling the shots,” Lane said.

Nobody spoke.

“So what do we do now?” Gregory asked.

“We wait,” Reacher said. “Fifty-six minutes.”

“I’m sick of waiting,” Groom said.

“It’s all we can do,” Lane said. “We wait for instructions and we obey them.”

“How much money?” Reacher asked. “Ten?”

Lane looked right at him. “Guess again.”

“More?”

“Four and a half,” Lane said. “That’s what they want. Four million five hundred thousand U.S. dollars. In a bag.”

CHAPTER 13

Reacher spent the remaining fifty-five minutes puzzling over the choice of amount. It was a bizarre figure. A bizarre progression. One, five, four and a half. Altogether ten and a half million dollars. It felt like a destination figure. Like the end of a road. But it was a bizarre total. Why stop there? It made no kind of sense at all. Or did it?

“They know you,” he said to Lane. “But maybe not all that well. As it happens you could afford more, but maybe they don’t fully appreciate that. So was there a time when ten and a half million was all the cash you had?”

But Lane just said, “No.”

“Could someone out there have that impression?”

“No,” Lane said again. “I’ve had less and I’ve had more.”

“But you’ve never had exactly ten and a half?”

“No,” Lane said for the third time. “There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to believe that they’re cleaning me out at ten and a half.”

So Reacher gave it up and just waited for the phone to ring.

It rang right on time, at six in the evening. Lane picked it up and listened. He didn’t speak. He didn’t ask for Kate. Reacher figured he had learned that the privilege of hearing his wife’s voice was reserved for the first call in any given sequence. The demand call. Not the instruction call.

This instruction call lasted less than two minutes. Then the electronic squawk cut off abruptly and Lane put the receiver back in the cradle and gave a bitter little half-smile, like he was reluctantly admiring a hated opponent’s skill.

“This is the final installment,” he said. “After this, it’s over. They promise I get her back.”

Too soon, Reacher thought. Ain’t going to happen.

Gregory asked, “What do we do?”

“One hour from now,” Lane said. “One man leaves here alone with the money in the black BMW and cruises anywhere he wants. He’ll be carrying my cell phone and he’ll get a call anywhere between one and twenty minutes into the ride. He’ll be given a destination. He’s to keep the line open from that point on so they know he’s not conversing with anyone else in the car or on any other phones or on any kind of a radio net. He’ll drive to the destination he’s been given. He’ll find the Jaguar parked on the street there. The car that Taylor drove Kate in, the first morning. It’ll be unlocked. He’s to put the money on the back seat and drive away and not look back. Any chase cars, any coordination with anyone else, any tricks at all, and Kate dies.”

“They’ve got your cell phone number?” Reacher asked.

“Kate will have given it to them.”

“I’ll be the driver,” Gregory said. “If you want.”

“No,” Lane said. “I want you here.”

“I’ll do it,” Burke said. The black guy.

Lane nodded. “Thank you.”

“Then what?” Reacher asked. “How do we get her back?”

Lane said, “After they’ve counted the money, there’ll be another call.”

“On the cell or here?”

“Here,” Lane said. “It will take some time. Counting large sums is an arduous process. Not for me at this end. The money is already bricked and banded and labeled. But they won’t trust that. They’ll break the bands and examine the bills and count them by hand.”

Reacher nodded. It was a problem he had never really considered before. If the money was in hundreds, that would give them forty-five thousand bills. If they could count to a hundred every sixty seconds, that would take them four hundred and fifty minutes, which was seven and a half hours. Maybe six hours drive time, and seven and a half counting time. A long night ahead, he thought. For them and for us.

Lane said, “Why are they using the Jaguar?”

“It’s a taunt,” Reacher said. “It’s to remind you.”

Lane nodded.

“Office,” he said. “Burke, and Reacher.”

In the office Lane took a small silver Samsung phone out of a charging cradle and handed it to Burke. Then he disappeared, to his bedroom, maybe.

“Gone to get the money,” Burke said.

Reacher nodded. Gazed at the twin portraits on the desk. Two beautiful women, both equally stunning, roughly the same age, but with no real similarities. Anne Lane had been blonde and blue, somehow a child of the sixties even though she must have been born well after that decade was over. She had long straight hair parted in the middle, like a singer or a model or an actress. She had clear guileless eyes and an innocent smile. A flower child, even though house or hip hop or acid jazz would have been the thing when she got her first record player. Kate Lane was more a child of the eighties or nineties. More subtle, more worldly, more accomplished.

“No kids with Anne, right?” Reacher asked.

“No,” Burke said. “Thank God.”

So maybe motherhood accounted for the difference. There was a weight to Kate, a gravity, a heft, not physical, but somewhere deep inside her. Choose one to spend the night with, you might well pick Anne. To spend the week with, you might want Kate.

Lane came back awkwardly with a bulging leather bag. He dropped the bag on the floor and sat down at his desk.

“How long?” he asked.

“Forty minutes,” Reacher said.

Burke checked his watch.

“Yes,” he said. “Forty minutes.”

“Go wait in the other room,” Lane said. “Leave me alone.”

Burke went for the bag but Reacher picked it up for him. It was heavy and wide, and easier for a big guy to manage. He carried it to the foyer and dropped it near the door where its predecessor had waited twelve hours before. It flopped and settled like the same dead animal. Reacher took a seat and started counting off the minutes. Burke paced. Carter Groom drummed his fingers on the arm of a chair, frustrated. The Recon Marine, beached. I’m all business, he had said. I’m nothing, away from the action. Next to him Gregory sat quiet, all British reserve. Next to him was Perez, the Latino, tiny. Next to him was Addison, with the scarred face. A knife, probably, Reacher thought. Then Kowalski, taller than the others but still small next to Reacher himself. Special Forces guys were usually small. They were usually lean, fast, and whippy. Built for endurance and stamina and full of smarts and cunning. Like foxes, not like bears.

Nobody talked. There was nothing to talk about, except the fact that the end of a kidnap was always the period of greatest risk. What was there that compelled kidnappers to keep their word? Honor? A sense of business ethics? Why risk a complex transfer when a shallow grave and a bullet in the victim’s head were a whole lot safer and simpler? Humanity? Decency? Reacher glanced at Kate Lane’s picture next to the phone and went a little cold. She was closer to dead now than at any point in the last three days, and he knew it. He guessed they all knew it.

“Time,” Burke said. “I’m going.”

“I’ll carry the bag for you,” Reacher said. “You know, down to the car.”

They rode down in the elevator. In the ground floor lobby a small dark woman in a long black coat swept past surrounded by tall men in suits, like staff or assistants or bodyguards.

“Was that Yoko?” Reacher said.

But Burke didn’t answer. He just walked past the doorman and out to the curb. The black BMW was waiting there. Burke opened the rear door.

“Stick the bag on the back seat,” he said. “Easier for me that way, for a seat-to-seat transfer.”

“I’m coming with you,” Reacher said.

“That’s stupid, man.”

“I’ll be on the floor in back. It’ll be safe enough.”

“What’s the point?”

“We have to do something. You know as well as I do there’s not going to be any cute little Checkpoint Charlie scene in this story. She’s not going to come tottering toward us through the mist and the fog, smiling bravely, with Jade holding her hand. That’s not going to happen. So we’re going to have to get proactive at some point.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“After you’ve switched the bag I’ll get out around the next corner. I’ll double back and see what I can see.”

“Who says you’ll see anything?”

“They’ll have four and a half million bucks sitting in an unlocked car. My guess is they won’t leave it there very long. So I’ll see something.”

“Will it help us?”

“A lot more than sitting upstairs doing nothing will help us.”

“Lane will kill me.”

“He doesn’t have to know anything about it. I’ll be back well after you. You’ll say you have no idea what happened to me. I’ll say I went for a walk.”

“Lane will kill you if you screw it up.”

“I’ll kill myself if I screw it up.”

“I’m serious. He’ll kill you.”

“My risk.”

“Kate’s risk.”

“You still banking on the Checkpoint Charlie scenario?”

Burke paused. Ten seconds. Fifteen.

“Get in,” he said.

CHAPTER 14

Burke stuck Lane’s cell phone in a hands-free cradle mounted on the BMW’s dash and Reacher crawled into the rear footwell on his hands and knees. There was grit on the carpet. It was a rear-drive car and the transmission hump made it an uncomfortable location. Burke started up and waited for a hole in the traffic and then U-turned and headed south on Central Park West. Reacher squirmed around until the transmission tunnel was wedged above his hips and below his ribs.

“Don’t hit any big bumps,” he said.

“We’re not supposed to talk,” Burke said.

“Only after they call.”

“Believe it,” Burke said. “You see this?”

Reacher struggled a little more upright and saw Burke pointing at a small black bud on the driver’s-side A-pillar up near the sun visor.

“Microphone,” Burke said. “For the cell. Real sensitive. You sneeze back there, they’ll hear you.”

“Will I hear them? On a speaker?”

“On ten speakers,” Burke said. “The phone is wired through the audio system. It cuts in automatically.”

Reacher lay down and Burke drove on, slowly. Then he made a tight right turn.

“Where are we now?” Reacher asked.

“Fifty-seventh Street,” Burke said. “Traffic is murder. I’m going to get on the West Side Highway and head south. My guess is they’ll want us downtown somewhere. That’s where they’ve got to be. Street parking for the Jaguar would be impossible anyplace else right now. I can come back north on the East River Drive if they don’t call before we get to the Battery.”

Reacher felt the car stop and start, stop and start. Above him the money bag rolled one way and then the other.

“You serious that this could be just one guy?” Burke asked.

“Minimum of one,” Reacher said.

“Everything’s a minimum of one.”

“Therefore it’s possible.”

“Therefore we should take him down. Make him talk. Solve the whole problem right there.”

“But suppose it’s not just one guy.”

“Maybe we should gamble.”

“What were you?” Reacher asked. “Back in the day?”

“Delta,” Burke said.

“Did you know Lane in the service?”

“I’ve known him forever.”

“How would you have done the thing outside Bloomingdale’s?”

“Quick and dirty inside the car. As soon as Taylor stopped.”

“That’s what Groom said.”

“Groom’s a smart guy, for a jarhead. You disagree with him?”

“No.”

“It would be the only way. This isn’t Mexico City or Bogotá or Rio de Janeiro. This is New York. You couldn’t survive a fuss on the sidewalk. You’ve got eight beat cops right there, two on each corner, armed and dangerous, worried about terrorists. No, quick and dirty inside the car would be the only way at Bloomingdale’s.”

“But why would you have been at Bloomingdale’s at all?”

“It’s the obvious place. It’s Mrs. Lane’s favorite store. She gets all her stuff there. She loves that big brown bag.”

“But who would have known that?”

Burke was quiet for a spell.

“That’s a very good question,” he said.

Then the phone rang.

CHAPTER 15

The ring tone sounded weird, coming in over ten high-quality automobile speakers. It filled the whole car. It sounded very loud and rich and full and precise. The cellular network’s harsh electronic edge was taken right off it. It purred.

“Shut up now,” Burke said.

He leaned to his right and hit a button on the Samsung.

“Hello?” he said.

“Good evening,” a voice said back, so slowly and carefully and mechanically that it made four separate words out of two. Like: Good-Eve-Ven-Ing.

It was a hell of a voice. It was completely amazing. It was so heavily processed that there would be no chance of recognizing it again without the electronic machine. The machines were commercial items sold in spy stores. Reacher had seen them. They clamped over the telephone mouthpiece. On one side was a microphone, which was backed by circuit boards, and then came a small crude loudspeaker. Battery powered. There were rotary dials that shaped the sound. Zero to ten, for various different parameters. The dials on this machine must have been cranked all the way to eleven. The high frequencies were entirely missing. The low tones had been scooped out and turned around and reconstituted. They boomed and thumped like an irregular heartbeat. There was a phase effect that hissed and roared on every drawn breath and made the voice sound like it was hurtling through outer space. There was a metallic pulse that came and went. It sounded like a sheet of heavy steel being hit with a hammer. The volume was set very high. Over the BMW’s ten speakers the voice sounded huge and alien. Gigantic. Like a direct connection to a nightmare.

“Who am I speaking with?” it asked, slowly.

“The driver,” Burke said. “The guy with the money.”

“I want your name,” the voice said.

Burke said, “My name is Burke.”

The nightmare voice asked, “Who’s that in the car with you?”

“There’s nobody in the car with me,” Burke said. “I’m all alone.”

“Are you lying?”

“No, I’m not lying,” Burke said.

Reacher figured there might be a lie detector hooked up to the other end of the phone. Probably a simple device sold in the same kind of spy stores as the distortion machines. Plastic boxes, green lights and red lights. They were supposed to be able to detect the kind of voice stress that comes with lying. Reacher replayed Burke’s answers in his head and figured they would pass muster. It would be a crude machine and Delta soldiers were taught to beat better tests than a person could buy retail on Madison Avenue. And after a second it was clear that the box had indeed lit up green because the nightmare voice just went ahead calmly and asked, “Where are you now, Mr. Burke?”

“Fifty-seventh Street,” Burke said. “I’m heading west. I’m about to get on the West Side Highway.”

“You’re a long way from where I want you.”

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“Where do you want me?”

“Take the highway, if that’s what you prefer. Go south.”

“Give me time,” Burke said. “Traffic is real bad.”

“Worried?”

“How would you feel?”

“Stay on the line,” the voice said.

The sound of distorted breathing filled the car. It was slow and deep. Unworried, Reacher thought. A patient person, in control, in command, safe somewhere. He felt the car sprint and hook left. Onto the highway through a yellow light, he thought. Take care, Burke. A traffic stop could be real awkward tonight.

“I’m on the highway now,” Burke said. “Heading south.”

“Keep going,” the voice said. Then it lapsed back to breathing. There was an audio compressor somewhere in the chain. Either in the voice machine itself or in the BMW’s stereo. The breathing started out quiet and then ramped up slowly until it was roaring in Reacher’s ears. The whole car was filled with it. It felt like being inside a lung.

Then the breathing stopped and the voice asked, “How’s the traffic?”

“Lots of red lights,” Burke said.

“Keep going.”

Reacher tried to follow the route in his head. He knew there were plenty of lights between 57th Street and 34th Street. The Passenger Ship Terminal, the Intrepid, the Lincoln Tunnel approaches.

“I’m at Forty-second Street now,” Burke said.

Reacher thought: Are you talking to me? Or the voice?

“Keep going,” the voice said.

“Is Mrs. Lane OK?” Burke asked.

“She’s fine.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“No.”

“Is Jade OK, too?”

“Don’t worry about either one of them. Just keep on driving.”

American, Reacher thought. For sure. Behind the wall of distortion he could hear the inflections of a native speaker. Reacher had heard more than his share of foreign accents, but this wasn’t one of them.

“I’m at the Javits now,” Burke said.

“Just keep going,” the voice said back.

Young, Reacher thought. Or at least not old. All the dirt and grit in the voice came from the electronic circuitry, not from the effects of age. Not a big guy, Reacher thought. The booming bass was artificial. There was a speed and a lightness there. No big chest cavity. Or, maybe a fat guy. Maybe one of those fat guys who have high-pitched voices.

“How much farther?” Burke asked.

“You low on gas?” the voice asked.

“No.”

“So what do you care?”

The breathing came back, slow and steady. Not close yet, Reacher thought.

“Coming up on Twenty-fourth Street,” Burke said.

“Keep going.”

The Village, Reacher thought. We’re going back to Greenwich Village. The car was moving faster now. Most of the left turns into the West Village were blocked off, so there were fewer lights. And most of the traffic would be going north, not south. A clear run, relatively speaking. Reacher craned his neck and got an angle through the rear side window. He could see buildings with the evening sun reflected in their windows. They flashed past in a dizzy kaleidoscope.

The voice asked, “Where are you now?”

“Perry,” Burke said.

“Keep going. But stand by now.”

Getting close, Reacher thought. Houston? Are we going to take Houston Street? Then he thought: Stand by now? That’s a military term. But is it exclusively military? Is this guy ex-military, too? Or not? Is he a civilian? A wannabe?

“Morton Street,” Burke said.

“Left turn in three blocks,” the voice said. “On Houston.”

He knows New York City, Reacher thought. He knows that Houston is three blocks south of Morton and he knows you say it House-ton, not like the place in Texas.

“OK,” Burke said.

Reacher felt the car slow. It stopped. It waited and inched forward. Then it sprinted to catch the light. Reacher rolled heavily against the rear seat.

“East on Houston now,” Burke said.

“Keep going,” the voice said.

The traffic on Houston was slow. Cobblestones, stop signs, potholes, lights. Reacher paced it out in his head. Washington Street, Greenwich Street, Hudson Street. Then Varick, where he had come up out of the subway for his fruitless morning vigil. The car bounced over patches of frost heave and thumped into dips.

“Sixth Avenue next,” Burke said.

The voice said, “Take it.”

Burke turned left. Reacher craned his neck again and saw the apartments above his new favorite café.

The voice said, “Get in the right-hand lane. Now.”

Burke dabbed the brake hard and Reacher jolted forward and hit the front seat. He heard the turn signal click. Then the car jumped right. And slowed.

The voice said, “You’ll see your target on the right. The green Jaguar. From the first morning. Exactly halfway up the block. On the right.”

“I already see it,” Burke said.

Reacher thought: The same place? It’s right there on the same damn fireplug?

The voice said, “Stop and make the transfer.”

Reacher felt the transmission slam into Park and he heard the click of the hazard lights start up. Then Burke’s door opened and noise blew in. The suspension rocked as Burke climbed out. There was honking on the street behind. An instant traffic jam. Ten seconds later the door next to Reacher’s head opened wide. Burke didn’t look down. Just leaned in and grabbed the bag. Reacher craned his neck the other way and looked at the Jaguar upside down. Saw a flash of dark green paint. Then the door shut in his face. He heard the Jaguar’s door open. Then he heard it shut again. He heard a faint hydraulic thunk from somewhere outside. Ten seconds after that Burke was back in his seat. He was a little out of breath.

“The transfer is done,” he said. “The money is in the Jaguar.”

The nightmare voice said, “Goodbye.”

The phone clicked off. The car filled with silence. Profound and absolute.

“Go now,” Reacher said. “Turn right on Bleecker.”

Burke took off with the hazard warning still clicking. He caught the light and barged through the crosswalk. Accelerated for twenty yards and then jammed on the brakes hard. Reacher fumbled horizontally above his head and found the door handle. Pulled it and butted the door open and scrambled out. He stood up and slammed the door and paused for a second and tugged his shirt down. Then he hustled back to the corner.

CHAPTER 16

Reacher stopped while he was still on Bleecker and jammed his hands in his pockets and then restarted at a more appropriate pace. He turned left onto Sixth like a man walking home. Maybe after a busy day at work, maybe planning a stop in a bar, maybe with grocery shopping on his mind. Just blending in, which he was surprisingly good at, given that he was always a head taller than anyone else around him. The height advantage was a mixed blessing for surveillance. It made him theoretically conspicuous. But it meant he could see farther than the average guy. Simple trigonometry. He stayed in the middle of the sidewalk and looked straight ahead and put the green Jaguar firmly in his peripheral vision. Checked left. Nothing. Checked right, over the Jaguar’s roof.

And saw a guy six feet from the driver’s door.

It was the same guy he had seen the very first night. He was absolutely sure of that. Same stature, same posture, same movements, same clothes. White, a little sunburned, lean, chiseled, clean-shaven, jaw clamped, not smiling, maybe forty years old. Calm, focused, intent. Neat and quick, dodging traffic, just into his final two strides before reaching the car. Fluid, economical movements. The guy pulled the door and slid into the seat and started the engine and clipped his belt and took a long glance back over his shoulder at the traffic. Then he pulled out neatly into a gap and took off north. Reacher kept on walking south but turned his head to watch him go. The guy flashed past, out of sight.

Six seconds, beginning to end. Maybe less.

And for what?

Just a white guy, average height, average weight, dressed like every other off-duty white guy in the city. Jeans, shirt, sneakers, ball cap. Maybe forty. Unremarkable in every way. Description? Nothing to say, except: Just a guy.

Reacher glanced south at the river of traffic. There were no free cabs coming. None at all. So he turned again and jogged back to the corner of Bleecker to see if Burke had waited for him. But Burke hadn’t. So Reacher set out walking. He was too frustrated to take the subway. He needed to walk it off. He charged north on Sixth, fast and furious, and people moved out of his way like he was radioactive.

Twenty minutes and twenty blocks later he saw a Staples store on the opposite sidewalk. Red and white signs. Windows full of office supply bargains. He dodged cars and crossed over to check it out. It was a big place. He didn’t know which branch Carter Groom had taken Kate Lane to, but he figured chains carried the same stuff everywhere. He went inside and passed a corral made from inch-thick chrome bars where shopping trolleys were racked together. Beyond that on the left were the checkout registers. Beyond the trolleys on the right was a print shop full of industrial-strength photocopiers. In front of him were about twenty narrow aisles with shelves that reached the ceiling. They were piled high with an intimidating array of stuff. He started at the left front corner and zigzagged all the way through the store to the rear of the last aisle on the right. The biggest thing he saw was a desk. The smallest, either a thumbtack or a paperclip, depending on whether he judged by size or weight. He saw paper, computers, printers, toner cartridges, pens, pencils, envelopes, file boxes, plastic crates, parcel tape. He saw things he had never seen before. Software for designing houses and filing taxes. Label printers. Cell phones that took video pictures and sent e-mail.

He walked back to the front of the store with absolutely no idea at all of what Kate Lane might have been looking for.

He stood in a daze and watched a photocopier at work. It was a machine as big as a launderette dryer and it was spitting copies out so hard and so fast that it was rocking back and forth on its feet. And costing some customer a fortune. That was clear. A sign overhead said that photocopying cost between four cents and two dollars a sheet, depending on the quality of the paper and the choice between black and white and color. A lot of money, potentially. Opposite the print shop corral was a display of inkjet cartridges. They were expensive, too. Reacher had no idea what they were for. Or what they did. Or why they cost so much. He pushed past a line of people at a checkout desk and headed for the street.

Another twenty minutes and twenty blocks later he was at Bryant Park, eating a hot dog from a street vendor. Twenty minutes and twenty blocks after that he was in Central Park, drinking a bottle of still water from another street vendor. Twelve more blocks north he was still in Central Park, directly opposite the Dakota, under a tree, stopped dead, face-to-face with Anne Lane, Edward Lane’s first wife.

CHAPTER 17

The first thing Anne Lane did was tell Reacher he was wrong.

“You saw Lane’s photograph of her,” she said.

He nodded.

“We were very alike,” she said.

He nodded again.

“Anne was my sister,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for staring. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

“Were you twins?”

“I’m six years younger,” the woman said. “Which means right now I’m the same age as Anne was in that photograph. Like a virtual twin, maybe.”

“You look exactly like her.”

“I try to,” the woman said.

“It’s uncanny.”

“I try very hard.”

“Why?”

“Because it feels like I’m keeping her alive. Because I couldn’t, back when it mattered.”

“How could you have kept her alive?”

“We should talk,” the woman said. “My name is Patti Joseph.”

“Jack Reacher.”

“Come with me,” the woman said. “We have to double back. We can’t go too near the Dakota.”

She led him south through the park, to the exit at 66th Street. Across to the far sidewalk. Then north again, and into the lobby of a building at 115 Central Park West.

“Welcome to the Majestic,” Patti Joseph said. “Best place I ever lived. And just wait until you see where my apartment is.”

Reacher saw where it was five minutes later, after a walk down a corridor, and an elevator ride, and another walk down another corridor. Patti Joseph’s apartment was on the Majestic’s seventh floor, north side. Its living room window looked out over 72nd Street, directly at the Dakota’s entrance. There was a dining chair placed in front of the sill, as if the sill was a desk. On the sill was a notebook. And a pen. And a Nikon camera with a long lens, and a pair of Leica 10x42 binoculars.

“What do you do here?” Reacher asked.

“First tell me what you do there,” Patti said.

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Do you work for Lane?”

“No, I don’t.”

Patti Joseph smiled.

“I didn’t think you did,” she said. “I told Brewer, you’re not one of them. You’re not like them. You weren’t Special Forces, were you?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re too big. You wouldn’t have made it through the endurance hazing. Big men never do.”

“I was an MP.”

“Did you know Lane in the service?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Patti Joseph smiled again.

“I thought not,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be there.”

“Who is Brewer?”

“NYPD.” She pointed at the notebook and the pen and the camera and the binoculars. A big, sweeping gesture. “I do all this for him.”

“You’re watching Lane and his guys? For the cops?”

“For myself, mostly. But I check in.”

“Why?”

“Because hope springs eternal.”

“Hope of what?”

“That he’ll slip up, and I’ll get something on him.”

Reacher stepped closer to the window and glanced at the notebook. The handwriting was neat. The last entry read: 2014 hrs. Burke returns alone, no bag, in black BMW OSC-23, enters TDA.

“TDA?” Reacher asked.

“The Dakota Apartments,” Patti said. “It’s the building’s official name.”

“You ever see Yoko?”

“All the time.”

“You know Burke by name?”

“Burke was around when Anne was there.”

The last-but-one entry read: 1859 hrs. Burke and Venti leave TDA in black BMW OSC-23, with bag, Venti concealed in rear.

“Venti?” Reacher asked.

“That’s what I’ve been calling you. Like a code name.”

“Why?”

“Venti is the largest cup that Starbucks sells. Bigger than the others.”

“I like coffee,” Reacher said.

“I could make some.”

Reacher turned away from the window. The apartment was a small one-bedroom. Plain, neat, painted. Probably worth the best part of a million bucks.

“Why are you showing me all this?” he asked.

“A recent decision,” she said. “I decided to watch for new guys, and waylay them, and warn them.”

“About what?”

“About what Lane is really like. About what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“I’ll make coffee,” Patti said.

There was no stopping her. She ducked into a small pass-through kitchen and started fiddling with a machine. Pretty soon Reacher could smell coffee. He wasn’t thirsty. He had just drunk a whole bottle of water. But he liked coffee. He figured he could stay for a cup.

Patti called out, “No cream, no sugar, right?”

“How did you know that?”

“I trust my instincts,” she said.

And I trust mine, Reacher thought, although he wasn’t entirely sure what they were telling him right then.

“I need you to get to the point,” he said.

“OK,” Patti Joseph said. “I will.” And then she said: “Anne wasn’t kidnapped five years ago. That was just a cover story. Lane murdered her.”

CHAPTER 18

Patti Joseph brought Jack Reacher black coffee in a huge white Wedgwood mug. Twenty ounce. Venti. She set it on an oversized coaster and turned her back on him and sat on the dining chair at the window. Picked up the pen in her right hand and the binoculars in her left. They looked heavy. She held them the way a shot putter holds the big iron ball, balanced on her open palm, close to her neck.

“Edward Lane is a cold man,” she said. “He demands loyalty and respect and obedience. He needs those things, like a junkie needs a fix. That’s what this whole mercenary venture is about, really. He couldn’t bear losing his command position, when he left the military. So he decided to re-create it all over again. He needs to give orders and have them obeyed. Like you or I need to breathe. He’s borderline mentally ill, I think. Psychotic.”

“And?” Reacher said.

“He ignores his stepdaughter. Have you noticed that?”

Reacher said nothing. He didn’t mention Jade had been taken until later, he thought. He had her cropped out of the picture in the living room.

“My sister Anne wasn’t very obedient,” Patti said. “Nothing outrageous. Nothing unreasonable. But Edward Lane ran the marriage like a military operation. Anne couldn’t handle it. And the more she chafed, the more Lane demanded discipline. It became his fetish.”

“What did she see in him in the first place?”

“He can be charismatic. He’s strong and silent. And intelligent, in a narrow way.”

“What was she before?”

“A model.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Yes,” Patti said. “Just like the next one.”

“What happened?”

“Between them they drove the marriage on the rocks. It was inevitable, I guess. One day she told me she wanted a divorce. I was all in favor of that, of course. It was the best thing for her. But she tried to do the whole drag-out knock-down thing. Alimony, division of assets, the whole nine yards. Which was the worst possible thing she could have done. I knew it was a mistake. I told her just to get the hell out while she still could. But she had brought money to the relationship. Lane had used it for part of his initial stake. Anne wanted her share back. But Lane couldn’t even handle the insubordination of his wife wanting out of the marriage. To be made to give her money as well was out of the question for him. And it would have been a public humiliation, because he would have had to go out and find another investor. So he went completely postal. He faked a kidnapping and had her killed.”

Silence for a moment.

“The police were involved,” Reacher said. “The FBI, too. There must have been a certain level of scrutiny.”

Patti turned around to face the room. Smiled, sadly.

“Here we go,” she said. “We’ve reached the point where the little sister is sounding a little crazy and obsessed. But obviously Lane planned it well. He made it seem very real.”

“How?”

“His men. He employs a bunch of killers. They’re all used to obeying orders. And they’re all smart. They all know how to do stuff like this. And they aren’t virgins. Every single one of them has been out on covert operations. And probably every single one of them has killed before, up close and personal.”

Reacher nodded. No question about it. Every one of them has. Many times.

“You got any particular suspects in mind?” he asked.

“None of the guys you’ve seen,” Patti said. “Nobody who’s still in the A-team. I don’t think the dynamic would permit that. Not as time went by. I don’t think it would be sustainable, psychologically. But I don’t think he would have used B-teamers. He would have needed people he could have trusted completely.”

“So who?”

“A-team guys who aren’t around anymore.”

“Who would be in that category?”

“There were two,” Patti said. “A guy called Hobart and a guy called Knight.”

“Why aren’t they around anymore? Why would two trusted A-teamers just up and leave?”

“Shortly after Anne died there was an operation overseas somewhere. Apparently it went bad. Two men didn’t come back. Those two.”

“That would be a coincidence,” Reacher said. “Wouldn’t it? The two guilty men were the two who didn’t come back?”

“I think Lane made sure they didn’t come back. He needed to tidy things up.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I know,” Patti said. “The little sister is crazy, right?”

Reacher gazed at her. She didn’t look crazy. A little spacey, maybe. In a sixties way, like her sister. She had a curtain of long blonde hair, straight, parted in the middle, just the same as Anne in the photograph. Big blue eyes, a button nose, a dusting of freckles, pale skin. She was wearing a white peasant blouse and faded blue jeans. She was barefoot and braless. You could have taken her picture and put it straight on the cover of a compilation CD. The Summer of Love. The Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company. Reacher liked music like that. He had been seven during the Summer of Love, and he wished he had been seventeen.

“How do you think it went down?” he asked.

“Knight drove Anne that day,” Patti said. “That’s an established fact. He took her shopping. Waited at the curb. But she never came out of the store. Next thing anyone knew was a phone call four hours later. The usual thing. No cops, a ransom demand.”

“Voice?”

“Disguised.”

“How?”

“Like the guy was talking through a handkerchief or something.”

“How much was the ransom?”

“A hundred grand.”

“But Lane did call the cops.”

Patti nodded. “But only to cover his ass. It was like he wanted independent witnesses. Very important to retain his credibility with the other guys that weren’t in on the scheme.”

“Then what?”

“Like you see in the movies. The FBI tapped the phones and moved in on the ransom drop. Lane’s story is that they were seen. But the whole thing was phony. They waited, nobody showed up, because nobody was ever going to show up. So they brought the money home again. It was all a performance. A charade. Lane acted it all out and came home and gave the word that he was in the clear, that the cops had bought the story, that the FBI was convinced, and then Anne was killed. I’m sure of that.”

“Where was the other guy during all of this? Hobart?”

“Nobody knows for sure. He was off duty. He said he was in Philadelphia. But obviously he had been in the store, just waiting for Anne to show. He was the other half of the equation.”

“Did you go to the cops at the time?”

“They ignored me,” Patti said. “Remember, this all was five years ago, not long after the Twin Towers. Everyone was preoccupied. And the military was suddenly back in fashion. You know, everyone was looking for their daddy, so people like Lane were the flavor of the month. Ex–Special Forces soldiers were pretty cool back then. I was fighting an uphill battle.”

“What about this cop Brewer? Now?”

“He tolerates me. What else can he do? I’m a taxpayer. But I don’t suppose he’s doing anything about it. I’m realistic.”

“You got any evidence against Lane at all?”

“No,” Patti said. “None at all. All I’ve got is context and feeling and intuition. That’s all I can share.”

“Context?”

“Do you know what a private military corporation is really for? Fundamentally?”

“Fundamentally its purpose is to allow the Pentagon to escape Congressional oversight.”

“Exactly,” Patti said. “They’re not necessarily better fighters than people currently enlisted. Often they’re worse, and they’re certainly more expensive. They’re there to break the rules. Simple as that. If the Geneva Conventions get in the way, it doesn’t matter to them, because nobody can call them on it. The government is insulated.”

“You’ve studied hard,” Reacher said.

“So what kind of a man is Lane to participate?”

“You tell me.”

“He’s a sordid egomaniac weasel.”

“What do you wish you had done? To keep Anne alive?”

“I should have convinced her. I should have just gotten her out of there, penniless but alive.”

“Not easy,” Reacher said. “You were the kid sister.”

“But I knew.”

“When did you move here?”

“About a year after Anne died. I couldn’t let it rest.”

“Does Lane know you’re here?”

She shook her head. “I’m very careful. And this city is incredibly anonymous. You can go years without ever laying eyes on your neighbor.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Do?”

“You brought me here for a purpose. And you took a hell of a risk doing it.”

“I think it’s time for me to take risks.”

“What do you want me to do?” Reacher repeated.

“I want you to just walk away from him. For your own sake. Don’t dirty your hands with his business. No possible good can come of it.”

Silence for a moment.

“And he’s dangerous,” Patti said. “More dangerous than you can know. It’s not smart to be anywhere near him.”

“I’ll be careful,” Reacher said.

“They’re all dangerous.”

“I’ll be careful,” Reacher said again. “I always am. But I’m going back there now. I’ll walk away on my own schedule.”

Patti Joseph said nothing.

“But I’d like to meet with this guy Brewer,” Reacher said.

“Why? Because you want to trade guy jokes about the nutty little sister?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Because if he’s any kind of a cop at all he’ll have checked with the original detectives and the FBI agents. He might have a clearer picture.”

“Clearer which way?”

“Whichever way,” Reacher said. “I’d like to know.”

“He might be here later.”

“Here?”

“He usually comes over after I phone in a report.”

“You said he wasn’t doing anything.”

“I think he just comes for the company. I think he’s lonely. He drops by, at the end of his shift, on his way home.”

“Where does he live?”

“Staten Island.”

“Where does he work?”

“Midtown.”

“So this isn’t exactly on his way home.”

Patti Joseph said nothing.

“When does his shift end?” Reacher asked.

“Midnight.”

“He visits you at midnight? Way out of his way?”

“I’m not involved with him or anything,” Patti said. “He’s lonely. I’m lonely. That’s all.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Make an excuse to get out,” Patti said. “Check my window. If Brewer’s here, the light will be on. If he isn’t, it won’t be.”

CHAPTER 19

Patti Joseph went back to her lonely vigil at the window and Reacher let himself out and left her there. He walked clockwise around her block for caution’s sake and came up on the Dakota from the west. It was a quarter to ten in the evening. It was warm. There was music somewhere in the Park. Music and people, far away. It was a perfect late-summer night. Probably baseball up in the Bronx or out at Shea, a thousand bars and clubs just warming up, eight million people looking back on the day or looking forward to the next.

Reacher stepped inside the building.

The lobby staff called up to the apartment and let him go ahead to the elevator. He got out and turned the corner and found Gregory in the corridor, waiting for him.

“We thought you’d quit on us,” Gregory said.

“Went for a walk,” Reacher said. “Any news?”

“Too early.”

Reacher followed him into the apartment. It smelled sour. Chinese food, sweat, worry. Edward Lane was in the armchair next to the phone. He was staring up at the ceiling. His face was composed. Next to him at the end of a sofa was an empty place. A dented cushion. Recently occupied by Gregory, Reacher guessed. Then came Burke, sitting still. And Addison, and Perez, and Kowalski. Carter Groom was leaning on the wall, facing the door, vigilant. Like a sentry. I’m all business, he had said.

“When will they call?” Lane asked.

Good question, Reacher thought. Will they call at all? Or will you call them? And give them the OK to pull the triggers?

But he said: “They won’t call before eight in the morning. Drive time and counting time, it won’t be any faster than that.”

Lane glanced at his watch.

“Ten hours from now,” he said.

“Yes,” Reacher said.

Somebody will call somebody ten hours from now.

The first of the ten hours passed in silence. The phone didn’t ring. Nobody said a word. Reacher sat still and felt the chance of a happy outcome receding fast. He pictured the bedroom photograph in his mind and felt Kate and Jade moving away from him. Like a comet that had come close enough to Earth to be faintly visible but had then flung itself into a new orbit and was hurtling away into the frozen wastes of space and dwindling to a faint speck of light that would surely soon vanish forever.

“I did everything they asked,” Lane said, to nobody except himself.

Nobody replied.

The lone man surprised his temporary guests by moving toward the window, not the door. Then he surprised them more by using his fingernails to pick at the duct tape seam that held the cloth over the glass. He peeled the tape away from the wall until he was able to fold back a narrow rectangle of fabric and reveal a tall slim sliver of New York City at night. The famous view. A hundred thousand lit windows glittering against the darkness like tiny diamonds on a field of black velvet. Like nowhere else in the world.

He said, “I know you love it.”

Then he said, “But say goodbye to it.”

Then he said, “Because you’re never going to see it again.”

Halfway through the second hour Lane looked at Reacher and said, “There’s food in the kitchen, if you want some.” Then he smiled a thin humorless smile and said, “Or to be technically accurate there’s food in the kitchen whether you want some or not.”

Reacher didn’t want food. He wasn’t hungry. He had eaten a hot dog not long before. But he wanted to get the hell out of the living room. That was for sure. The atmosphere was like eight men sitting around a deathbed. He stood up.

“Thanks,” he said.

He walked quietly into the kitchen. Nobody followed him. There were dirty plates and a dozen open containers of Chinese food on the countertop. Half-eaten and cold and pungent and congealed. He left them alone and sat on a stool. Glanced to his right at the open office door. He could see the photographs on the desk. Anne Lane, identical to her sister Patti. Kate Lane, gazing fondly at the child that had been cut out of the picture.

He listened hard. No sound from the living room. Nobody coming. He got off the stool and stepped inside the office. Stood still for a moment. Desk, computer, fax machine, phones, file cabinets, shelves.

He started with the shelves.

There were maybe eighteen linear feet of them. There were phone books on them, and manuals for firearms, and a one-volume history of Argentina, and a book called Glock: The New Wave in Combat Handguns, and an alarm clock, and mugs full of pens and pencils, and an atlas of the world. The atlas was old. The Soviet Union was still in it. And Yugoslavia. Some of the African countries still had their former colonial identities. Next to the atlas there was a fat Rolodex full of five hundred index cards with names and phone numbers and MOS codes on them. Military Occupational Specialties. Most of them were 11-Bravo. Infantry. Combat arms. At random Reacher flipped to G and looked for Carter Groom. Not there. Then B for Burke. Not there, either. So clearly this was the B-team candidate pool. Some names had black lines through them with KIA or MIA notations written on the corners of the cards. Killed in Action, Missing in Action. But the rest of the names were still in the game. Nearly five hundred guys, and maybe some women, ready and available and looking for work.

Reacher put the Rolodex back and touched the computer mouse. The hard drive started up and a dialog box on the screen asked for a password. Reacher glanced at the open door and tried Kate. Access was denied. He tried O5LaneE for Colonel Edward Lane. Same result. Access denied. He shrugged and gave it up. The password was probably the guy’s birthday or his old service number or the name of his high school football team. No way of knowing, without further research.

He moved on to the file cabinets.

There were four of them, standard store-bought items made of painted steel. Maybe thirty inches high. Two drawers in each of them. Eight drawers total. Unlabeled. Unlocked. He stood still and listened again and then slid the first drawer open. It moved quietly on ball bearing runners. It had twin hanging rails with six file dividers made of thin yellow cardboard slung between them. All six were full of paperwork. Reacher used his thumb and riffed through. Glanced down, obliquely. Financial records. Money moving in and out. No amount bigger than six figures and none smaller than four. Otherwise, incomprehensible. He closed the drawer.

He opened the bottom drawer on the left. Same hanging rails. Same yellow dividers. But they were bulky with the kind of big plastic wallets that come in the glove boxes of new cars. Instruction books, warranty certificates, service records. Titles. Insurance invoices. BMW, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes Benz, Land Rover. Some had valet keys in see-through plastic envelopes. Some had spare keys and remote fobs on the kind of promotional keyrings that dealers give away. There were EZ-Pass toll records. Receipts from gas stations. Business cards from salesmen and service managers.

Reacher closed the drawer. Glanced back at the door. Saw Burke standing there, silent, just watching him.

CHAPTER 20

Burke didn’t speak for a long moment. Then he said, “I’m going for a walk.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

Burke said nothing back.

“You want company?” Reacher asked.

Burke glanced at the computer screen. Then down at the file drawers.

“I’ll keep you company,” Reacher said.

Burke just shrugged. Reacher followed him out through the kitchen. Through the foyer. Lane glanced at them from the living room, briefly, preoccupied with his thoughts. He didn’t say anything. Reacher followed Burke out to the corridor. They rode down in the elevator in silence. Stepped out to the street and turned east toward Central Park. Reacher looked up at Patti Joseph’s window. It was dark. The room behind it was unlit. Therefore she was alone. He pictured her in the chair behind the sill, in the gloom. Pictured her pen scratching on her pad of paper. 2327 hrs., Burke and Venti leave TDA on foot, head east toward Central Park. Or CP. A person who wrote TDA for the Dakota would write CP for Central Park, surely. And maybe she had dropped Venti and was using his real name now. He had told her what it was. Maybe she had written Burke and Reacher leave TDA.

Or maybe she was asleep. She had to sleep sometime.

“That question you asked,” Burke said.

“What question?” Reacher said.

“Who knew Mrs. Lane loved Bloomingdale’s?”

“What about it?”

“It was a good question,” Burke said.

“What’s the answer?”

“There’s another question,” Burke said.

“Which is?”

“Who knew she was heading there that particular morning?”

“I’m assuming you all knew,” Reacher said.

“Yes, I guess we all did, more or less.”

“Therefore it’s not much of a question.”

“I think there’s inside involvement,” Burke said. “Somebody tipped somebody off.”

“Was it you?”

“No.”

Reacher stopped at the crosswalk on Central Park West. Burke stopped beside him. He was as black as coal, a small man, about the size and shape of an old-fashioned Major League second baseman. A Hall of Famer. Like Joe Morgan. He had the same physical self-confidence in the way he held himself.

The light changed. The upright red hand blinked out and the forward-leaning white man came on. Reacher had always regretted the switch from the words WALK and DONT WALK. Given the choice, he preferred words to pictograms. And as a kid he had been scandalized by the bad punctuation. Ten thousand missing apostrophes in every city in America. It had been a secret thrill, to know better.

He stepped off the curb.

“What happened after Anne?” he asked.

“With the four guys who took her?” Burke said. “That’s strictly need-to-know.”

“I’m guessing you helped out.”

“No comment.”

“Did they admit it?”

“No,” Burke said. “They claimed it was nothing to do with them.”

“But you didn’t believe them.”

“What else were they going to say?”

They reached the far sidewalk. The park loomed ahead of them, dark and empty. The music had ended.

“Where are we going?” Reacher asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Burke said. “I just wanted to talk.”

“About the insider involvement?”

“Yes.”

They turned south together and headed for Columbus Circle. There were lights and traffic down there. Crowds on the sidewalks.

“Who do you think it was?” Reacher asked.

“I have no idea,” Burke said.

“Then that’s a pretty short conversation,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? You wanted to talk, but you don’t have much to talk about.”

Burke said nothing.

“But who got tipped off?” Reacher asked. “Not who did the tipping. I think that would be the more important answer. And I think that’s what you want to tell me.”

Burke said nothing. Just walked on in silence.

“You as good as dragged me out here,” Reacher said. “Not because you’re worried if I’m getting enough fresh air and exercise.”

Burke stayed quiet.

“You going to make me play Twenty Questions?” Reacher said.

“That might be the best way to do it,” Burke said.

“You think this is about the money?”

“No,” Burke said.

“So the money is a smokescreen?”

“Half the equation at best. Maybe a parallel aim.”

“The other half of the equation being punishment?”

“You got it.”

“You think there’s someone out there with a grudge against Lane?”

“Yes.”

“One person?”

“No.”

“How many?”

“Theoretically there might be hundreds,” Burke said. “Or thousands. Whole nations, maybe. We’ve messed with a lot of people, here and there.”

“Realistically?”

“More than one person,” Burke said.

“Two?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of a grudge?”

“What’s the worst thing one man can do to another?”

“Depends who you are,” Reacher said.

“Exactly,” Burke said. “So who are we?”

Reacher thought: Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Recon Marines, Green Berets, SAS from Britain. The best in the world.

“Special Forces soldiers,” he said.

“Exactly,” Burke said again. “So what don’t we do?”

“You don’t leave bodies behind on the battlefield.”

Burke said nothing.

“But Lane did,” Reacher said. “He left two bodies behind.”

Burke stopped on the north curve of Columbus Circle. Traffic roared all around. Headlight beams swept wild tangents. To the right, the tall silvery bulk of a brand-new building. A wide base blocking 59th Street and twin towers rising above.

“So what are you saying?” Reacher asked. “They had brothers or sons? Someone’s come out of the woodwork looking for revenge? Finally? On their behalf?”

“Doesn’t necessarily take brothers or sons,” Burke said.

“Buddies?”

“Doesn’t necessarily take buddies, either.”

“So who?”

Burke didn’t answer. Reacher stared at him.

“Christ,” he said. “You left two guys behind alive?”

“Not me,” Burke said. “Not us. It was Lane.”

“And you think they finally made it home?”

“I’m sure they would have tried hard.”

“Hobart and Knight,” Reacher said.

“You know their names.”

“Evidently.”

“How? Who have you been talking to? There’s nothing about them in those file cabinets you were looking through. Or in the computer. They’ve been erased. Like they never existed. Like they’re dirty little secrets. Which they are.”

“What happened with them?”

“They were wounded. According to Lane. We never saw them. They were in forward observation posts and we heard small arms fire. Lane went up the line and came back and said they were hit bad and couldn’t possibly make it. He said we couldn’t bring them in. He said we’d lose too many guys trying. He flat ordered us to pull out. We left them there.”

“And what do you suppose happened to them?”

“We assumed they’d be taken prisoner. In which case we assumed their life expectancy would be about a minute and a half.”

I think Lane made sure they didn’t come back.

“Where was this?” Reacher asked.

“I can’t tell you,” Burke said. “I’d go to jail.”

“Why did you stick around afterward? All this time?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Sounds like you’re unhappy with how things went down.”

“I obey orders. And I let officers decide things. That’s how it always was and that’s how it always will be.”

“Does he know they’re back? Lane?”

“You’re not listening,” Burke said. “Nobody knows they’re back. Nobody even knows if they’re alive. I’m just guessing, is all. Based on how big of a deal this all is.”

“Would they do it? Hobart and Knight? Hurt a woman and a child to put a scare into Lane?”

“You mean, is it justified? Of course it isn’t. But would they do it? Hell yes, they would do it. Pragmatic people do what works. Especially after what Lane did to them.”

Reacher nodded. “Who would be talking to them? From the inside?”

“I don’t know.”

“What were they?”

“Jarheads.”

“Like Carter Groom.”

“Yes,” Burke said. “Like Carter Groom.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Marines hate that,” Burke said. “Especially Recon Marines. They hate leaving guys behind. More than anyone. It’s their code.”

“So why does he stick around?”

“Same reason I do. Ours is not to reason why. That’s also a code.”

“Maybe in the service,” Reacher said. “Not necessarily in some half-assed private company.”

“I don’t see a difference.”

“Well, you ought to, soldier.”

“Watch your mouth, pal. I’m helping you out here. I’m earning you a million bucks. You find Hobart and Knight, you find Kate and Jade, too.”

“You think?”

“Dollars to doughnuts. A million dollars to doughnuts. So watch your mouth.”

“I don’t need to watch my mouth,” Reacher said. “If you’ve still got a code, then I’m still an officer. I can say what I like and you can stand there and take it and salute.”

Burke turned away from the swirling river of traffic in front of him and headed back north. Reacher let him get five yards away and then caught up and fell in beside him. Nothing more was said. Ten minutes later they turned onto 72nd Street. Reacher glanced up and to his left. Patti’s Joseph’s window was blazing with light.

CHAPTER 21

Reacher said, “You go on ahead. I’m going to walk some more.”

“Why?” Burke asked.

“You gave me things to think about.”

“You can’t think unless you’re walking?”

“No point looking for Hobart and Knight inside the apartment.”

“That’s for sure. They were erased.”

“One more thing,” Reacher said. “When did Lane and Kate get together?”

“Soon after Anne died. Lane doesn’t like to be alone.”

“Do they get along OK?”

“They’re still married,” Burke said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means they get along OK.”

“How well?”

“Well enough.”

“As well as he got along with Anne? The first time around?”

Burke nodded. “About the same.”

“I’ll see you later,” Reacher said.

Reacher watched Burke disappear inside the Dakota and then moved on west, away from Patti Joseph’s place. Routine caution, which paid off big time when he glanced back and saw Burke coming after him. Clearly Burke had turned around inside the Dakota’s lobby and was trying a pretty poor imitation of a clandestine tail. He was sneaking along in the shadows, his black skin and his black clothes mostly invisible but lit up like a superstar every time he passed under a streetlight.

He doesn’t trust me, Reacher thought.

A Delta noncom doesn’t trust an MP.

Well, there’s a big surprise.

Reacher walked to the end of the block and took the stairs down to the subway. To the northbound platform. Used his Metrocard at the turnstile. He figured Burke wouldn’t have a Metrocard. Lane’s people drove everywhere. In which case Burke would be hung up at the machine, swiping his credit card or feeding creased bills into the slot. In which case the tail would fail at the first hurdle. If a train came soon.

Which it didn’t.

It was midnight, and the trains were well into their off-peak schedules. Average wait time was probably fifteen or twenty minutes. Reacher was ready to get lucky, but he didn’t. He turned and saw Burke collect a brand-new card from the machine and hang back, just waiting.

Reacher thought: He doesn’t want to be on the platform with me. He’s going to come through the turnstile at the last possible minute.

Reacher waited. There were twelve people waiting with him. A knot of three, a knot of two, seven people on their own. Mostly they were well dressed. They were folks going home after movies or restaurant meals, heading back to cheaper rents in the hundreds or all the way up in Hudson Heights.

The tunnel stayed quiet. The air was warm. Reacher leaned on a pillar and waited. Then he heard the rails start their strange metallic keening. A train, half a mile away. He saw a faint light in the darkness and felt the push of hot air. Then the noise built and twelve people on the platform shuffled forward.

Reacher shuffled backward.

He pressed himself into a maintenance recess the size of a phone booth. Stood still. A train rolled in, fast, long, loud, hissing and squealing. A 1 train, local. Shiny aluminum, bright windows. It stopped. People got off, people got on. Then Burke came through the turnstile and made it through the doors just before they closed. The train moved away, left to right, and Reacher saw Burke through the windows. He was walking forward, eyes front, hunting his quarry, car by car.

He would be all the way up in the Bronx, 242nd Street, Van Cortlandt Park, before he realized his quarry wasn’t on the train at all.

Reacher came out of the recess and brushed dirt off the shoulders of his shirt. Headed for the exit and up to the street. He was down two bucks, but he was alone, which was what he wanted to be.

The doorman at the Majestic called upstairs and pointed Reacher toward the elevator. Three minutes later he was shaking hands with Brewer, the cop. Patti Joseph was in the kitchen, making coffee. She had changed her clothes. Now she was wearing a dark pant suit, prim and proper. She had shoes on. She came out of the kitchen with two mugs, the same huge Wedgwood items she had used before. She gave one to Brewer and one to Reacher and said, “I’ll leave you guys to talk. May be easier if I’m not here. I’ll go for a walk. Nighttime is about the only time it’s safe for me to be out.”

Reacher said, “Burke will be coming out of the subway in about an hour.”

Patti said, “He won’t see me.”

Then she left, with a nervous glance back, as if her future was at stake. Reacher watched the door close behind her and turned and took a better look at Brewer. He was everything anyone would expect a New York City detective to be, except magnified a little. A little taller, a little heavier, longer hair, more unkempt, more energetic. He was about fifty. Or forty-something and prematurely gray.

“What’s your interest here?” he asked.

“I crossed paths with Edward Lane,” Reacher said. “And I heard Patti’s story. So I want to know what I’m getting into. That’s all.”

“Crossed paths how?”

“Lane wants to hire me for something.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“I was in the army,” Reacher said.

“It’s a free country,” Brewer said. “You can work for whoever you want.”

Then he sat down on Patti Joseph’s sofa like he owned it. Reacher stayed away from the window. The light was on and he would be visible from the street. He leaned on the wall near the lobby and sipped his coffee.

“I was a cop once myself,” he said. “Military police.”

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“Plenty of your guys came from the same place as me. Do they impress you?”

Brewer shrugged.

“I guess I can give you five minutes,” he said.

“Bottom line,” Reacher said. “What happened five years ago?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Brewer said. “Nobody in the NYPD can tell you that. If it was a kidnap, that’s FBI business, because kidnapping is a federal crime. If it was a straightforward homicide, then that’s New Jersey business, because the body was found on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, and it hadn’t been moved postmortem. Therefore it was never really our case. Therefore we never really developed an opinion.”

“So why are you here?”

“Community relations. The kid is hurting, and she needs an ear. Plus she’s cute and she makes good coffee. Why wouldn’t I be here?”

“Your people must have gotten copied in on the paperwork.”

Brewer nodded.

“There’s a file,” he said.

“What’s in it?”

“Cobwebs and dust, mostly. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that Anne Lane died five years ago in New Jersey. She was a month decomposed when they found her. Not a pretty sight, apparently. But there was a definitive dental identification. It was her.”

“Where was this?”

“A vacant lot near the Turnpike.”

“Cause of death?”

“Fatal GSW to the back of her head. Large-caliber handgun, probably a nine, but impossible to be precise. She was out in the open. Rodents had been in and out the bullet hole. And rodents aren’t dumb. They figure they’re going to get fat on the good stuff inside, so they widen the hole before they go in. The bone was gnawed. But it was probably a nine, probably jacketed.”

“I hope you didn’t tell Patti all of that.”

“What are you? Her big brother? Of course I didn’t tell her all of that.”

“Anything else at the scene?”

“There was a playing card. The three of clubs. Shoved down the neck of her shirt, from the back. No forensics worth a damn, nobody knew what it meant.”

“Was it like a signature?”

“Or a tease. You know, some random crap to make everyone go blind trying to figure it out.”

“So what do you think?” Reacher said. “Kidnap or murder?”

Brewer yawned. “No reason to look for complications. You hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras. A guy calls in that his wife has been kidnapped, you assume it’s true. You don’t start assuming it’s a complex plot to do away with her. And it was all plausible. There were real phone calls, there was real cash money in a bag.”

“But?”

Brewer went quiet for a moment. Took a long pull on his mug of coffee, swallowed, exhaled, rested his head back on the sofa.

“Patti kinds of sucks you in,” he said. “You know? Sooner or later you have to admit it’s just as plausible the other way around.”

“Gut feeling?”

“I just don’t know,” Brewer said. “Which is a weird feeling in itself, for me. I mean, sometimes I’m wrong, but I always know.”

“So what are you doing about it?”

“Nothing,” Brewer said. “It’s an ice-cold case outside of our jurisdiction. Hell will freeze over before the NYPD voluntarily books another unsolved homicide.”

“But you keep on showing up here.”

“Like I said, the kid needs an ear. Grief is a long and complicated process.”

“You do this for all the relatives?”

“Only the ones that look like they belong in Playboy magazine.”

Reacher said nothing.

“What’s your interest here?” Brewer asked again.

“Like I said.”

“Bullshit. Lane was a combat soldier. Now he’s a mercenary. You’re not worried about whether he offed someone he shouldn’t have five years ago. Find me a guy like Lane who didn’t.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Something’s on your mind,” Brewer said.

Silence for a moment.

“One thing Patti told me,” Brewer said. “She hasn’t seen the new Mrs. Lane for a couple of days. Or the kid.”

Reacher said nothing.

Brewer said, “Maybe she’s missing and you’re looking for parallels in the past.”

Reacher stayed quiet.

Brewer said, “You were a cop, not a combat soldier. So now I’m wondering what kind of thing Edward Lane would want to hire you for.”

Reacher said nothing.

Brewer said, “Anything you want to tell me?”

“I’m asking,” Reacher said. “Not telling.”

More silence. A long hard look, cop to cop.

“As you wish,” Brewer said. “It’s a free country.”

Reacher finished his coffee and stepped into the kitchen. Rinsed his mug under the tap and left it in the sink. Then he leaned his elbows on the counter and stared straight ahead. The living room in front of him was framed by the pass-through. The high-backed chair was at the window. On the sill was the neat surveillance array. The notebook, the pen, the camera, the binoculars.

“So what do you do with the stuff she calls in? Just bury it?”

Brewer shook his head.

“I pass it on,” he said. “Outside the department. To someone with an interest.”

“Who?”

“A private detective, downtown. A woman. She’s cute, too. Older, but hey.”

“NYPD is working with private detectives now?”

“This one is in an unusual position. She’s retired FBI.”

“They’re all retired something.”

“This one was the lead agent on the Anne Lane case.”

Reacher said nothing.

Brewer smiled. “So like I said, this one has an interest.”

Reacher said, “Does Patti know?”

Brewer shook his head. “Better that Patti doesn’t. Better that Patti never finds out. It would make for a bad combination.”

“What’s this woman’s name?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Brewer said.

CHAPTER 22

Reacher left Patti Joseph’s apartment with two business cards. One was Brewer’s official NYPD issue and the other was an elegant item with Lauren Pauling engraved at the top and Private Investigator under the name. Then: Ex–Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. At the bottom was a downtown address, with 212 and 917 phone numbers for landline and cell, and e-mail, and a website URL. It was a busy card. But the whole thing looked crisp and expensive, professional and efficient. Better than Brewer’s NYPD card, and better even than Gregory’s OSC card.

Reacher tossed Brewer’s card in a Central Park West trash can and put Lauren Pauling’s in his shoe. Then he took a circuitous route back toward the Dakota. It was close to one o’clock in the morning. He circled the block and saw a cop car on Columbus Avenue. Cops, he thought. The word hung up in his mind the same way it had down in SoHo. The way a twig on a swirling current catches on a riverbank. He stopped walking and closed his eyes and tried to catch it. But it spun away again. He gave it up and turned onto 72nd Street. Turned in to the Dakota’s lobby. The night crew doorman was a dignified old guy. He called upstairs and inclined his head like an invitation to proceed. On five Gregory was out in the corridor with the door open and ready. Reacher followed him inside and Gregory said, “Nothing yet. But we’ve got seven more hours.”

The apartment was dead-of-night quiet and still smelled of Chinese food. Everyone was still in the living room. Except Burke. Burke wasn’t back yet. Gregory looked full of energy and Lane was upright in a chair but the others were slumped in various tired poses. The lights were low and yellow and the drapes were drawn and the air was hot.

“Wait with us,” Lane said.

“I need to sleep,” Reacher said. “Three or four hours.”

“Use Jade’s room,” Lane said.

Reacher nodded and headed off through the interior hallways to Jade’s room. The nightlight was still burning. The room smelled faintly of baby powder and clean skin. The bed was way too small for a guy Reacher’s size. Too small for any guy, really. It was some kind of a half-sized piece, probably from a specialized children’s boutique. There was an attached bathroom carved out of another maid’s room. A sink, a toilet, a tub with a shower over it. The shower head was on a sliding pole. It was set about three feet above the drain hole. The shower curtain was clear plastic with yellow ducks on it.

Reacher slid the head all the way to the top and stripped and took a fast shower, with a cake of pink soap shaped like a strawberry, and baby shampoo. No tears, the bottle said. I wish, he thought. Then he dried himself on a small pink towel and put the tiny fragrant pajamas on a chair and took the pillow and the sheet and the comforter off the bed and made himself a bivouac on the floor. He cleared bears and dolls out of his way. The bears were all plush and new and the dolls looked untouched. He moved the desk a foot to one side to make room and all the papers fell off it. Drawings, in crayon on cheap paper. Trees, like bright green lollipops on brown sticks, with a big gray building beyond. The Dakota, from Central Park, maybe. There was another of three stick figures, one much smaller than the others. The family, maybe. Mother, daughter, stepfather. Mother and daughter were smiling but Lane was drawn with black holes in his mouth like someone had punched half his teeth out. There was a picture of an airplane low in the sky. Green earth below, a stripe of blue above, a yellow ball for the sun. The plane’s fuselage was shaped like a sausage and had three portholes with faces in them. The wings were drawn as if from above. Like the plane was in a panic turn. The last picture was of the family again, but twice over. Two Lanes close together and side by side, two Kates, two Jades. It was like looking at the second picture again with double vision.

Reacher restacked the papers neatly and switched out the nightlight. Burrowed into the bedclothes. They covered him from his chest to his knees. He could smell baby shampoo. From his own hair, or from Jade’s pillow. He wasn’t sure. He set the alarm in his head for five in the morning. He closed his eyes, breathed once, breathed twice, and fell asleep, on a floor made hard and dense and solid by three feet of Central Park clay.

Reacher woke as planned at five o’clock in the morning, uncomfortable, still tired, and cold. He could smell coffee. He found Carter Groom in the kitchen, next to a big Krups drip machine.

“Three hours to go,” Groom said. “Think they’re going to call?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Do you think they will?”

Groom didn’t reply. Just drummed his fingers on the counter as he waited for the machine to finish. Reacher waited with him. Then Burke came in. He looked like he hadn’t slept. He didn’t say anything. Nothing pleasant, nothing hostile. He just acted like the previous evening had never existed. Groom filled three mugs with coffee. Took one, and left the room. Burke took one and followed him. Reacher drank his sitting on the counter. The clock on the wall oven said five-ten. He figured it was a little slow. He felt it was closer to a quarter past.

Time for ex–Special Agent Lauren Pauling’s wake-up call.

He stopped in the living room on his way out. Lane was still in the same chair. Immobile. Still upright. Still composed. Still stoic. Real or phony, either way, it was one hell of a display of endurance. Gregory and Perez and Kowalski were asleep on sofas. Addison was awake but inert. Groom and Burke were drinking their coffee.

“I’m going out,” Reacher said.

“Another walk?” Burke asked, sourly.

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

The old guy in the lobby was still on duty. Reacher nodded to him and turned right on 72nd and headed for Broadway. Nobody came after him. He found a pay phone and used coins from his pocket and the card from his shoe and dialed Pauling’s cell. He figured she would keep it switched on, top of her nightstand, near her pillow.

She answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

Rusty voice, not sleepy, just not yet used today. Maybe she lived alone.

Reacher asked, “You heard the name Reacher recently?”

“Should I have?” Pauling asked back.

“It will save us a lot of time if you just say yes. From Anne Lane’s sister Patti, through a cop called Brewer, am I right?”

“Yes,” Pauling said. “Late yesterday.”

“I need an early appointment,” Reacher said.

“You’re Reacher?”

“Yes, I am. Half an hour, at your office?”

“You know where it is?”

“Brewer gave me your card.”

“Half an hour,” Pauling said.

And so half an hour later Reacher was standing on a West 4th Street sidewalk, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other, watching Lauren Pauling walk toward him.

CHAPTER 23

Reacher knew it was Lauren Pauling walking toward him because of the way her eyes were fixed on his face. Clearly Brewer had passed on his physical description as well as his name. So Pauling was looking for a tall, wide, blond, untidy man waiting near her office door, and Reacher was the only possibility that morning on West 4th Street.

Pauling herself was an elegant woman of about fifty. Or maybe a little more, in which case she was carrying it well. Brewer had said she’s cute too, and he had been right. She was about an inch taller than average, dressed in a black pencil skirt that fell to her knees. Black hose, black shoes with heels. An emerald green blouse that could have been silk. A rope of big fake pearls at her neck. Hair frosted gold and blonde. It fell in big waves to her shoulders. Green eyes that smiled. A look on her face that said: I’m very pleased to meet you but let’s get straight to the good stuff. Reacher could imagine the kind of team meetings she must have run for the Bureau.

“Jack Reacher, I presume,” she said.

Reacher shoved his doughnut between his teeth and wiped his fingers on his pants and shook her hand. Then he waited at her shoulder as she unlocked her street door. Watched as she deactivated an alarm with a keypad in the lobby. The keypad was a standard three-by-three cluster with the zero alone at the bottom. She was right-handed. She used her middle finger, index finger, ring finger, index finger, without moving her hand much. Brisk, decisive motion. Like typing. Probably 8461, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. Distracted, probably. She can’t be dumb. But it was the building’s alarm. Not her personal choice of numbers. So she hadn’t given away her home system or her ATM card.

“Follow me,” she said.

Reacher followed her up a narrow staircase to the second floor. He finished his doughnut on the way. She unlocked a door and led him into an office. It was a two-room suite. Waiting room first, and then a back room for her desk and two visitor chairs. Very compact, but the décor was good. Good taste, careful application. Full of the kind of expensive stuff a solo professional leases to create an impression of confidence in a client. A little bigger, it could have been a lawyer’s place, or a cosmetic surgeon’s.

“I spoke to Brewer,” she said. “I called him at home after you called me. I woke him up. He wasn’t very happy about that.”

“I can imagine,” Reacher said.

“He’s curious about your motives.”

Lauren Pauling’s voice was low and husky, like she had been recovering from laryngitis for the last thirty years. Reacher could have sat and listened to it all day long.

“Therefore I’m curious, too,” she said.

She pointed at a leather client chair. Reacher sat down in it. She squeezed sideways around the end of her desk. She was slender and she moved well. She turned her chair to face him. Sat down.

“I’m just looking for information,” Reacher said.

“But why?”

“Let’s see if it leads me to where I need to tell you.”

“Brewer said you were a military cop.”

“Once upon a time.”

“A good one?”

“Is there any other kind?”

Pauling smiled, a little sadly, a little wistfully.

“Then you know you shouldn’t be talking to me,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a reliable witness. I’m hopelessly biased.”

“Why?”

“Think about it,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? If Edward Lane didn’t kill his wife, then who the hell did? Well, I did, that’s who. Through my own carelessness.”

CHAPTER 24

Reacher moved in his chair and said, “Nobody scores a hundred percent. Not in the real world. Not me, not you, not anybody. So get over it.”

“That’s your response?” Pauling said.

“I probably got more people killed than you ever met. I don’t beat myself up over them. Shit happens.”

Pauling nodded. “It’s the sister. She’s up there in that weird little aerie all the time. She’s like my conscience.”

“I met her,” Reacher said.

“She weighs on my mind.”

“Tell me about the three of clubs,” Reacher said.

Pauling paused, like a gear change.

“We concluded it was meaningless,” she said. “There had been a book or a movie or something where assassins left calling cards. So we tended to get a lot of that at the time. But usually they were picture cards. Mostly aces, mostly spades. There was nothing in the databases about threes. Not much about clubs, either. Then we thought maybe this was one of three connected things, you know, but there was never anything else similar to put with it. We studied symbolism and number theory. We checked with UCLA, talked to the people who study gang culture. Nothing there. We talked to semiotics people at Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian. We talked to Wesleyan in Connecticut, got some linguistics person working on it. Nothing there. We had a grad student at Columbia working on it. We had people with brains the size of planets working on it. Nothing anywhere. So the three of clubs meant nothing. It was designed to make us chase our tails. Which in itself was a meaningless conclusion. Because what we needed to know was who would want us to chase our tails.”

“Did you look at Lane back then? Even before you heard Patti’s theories?”

Pauling nodded. “We looked at him very carefully, and all his guys. More from the point of view of threat assessment, back then. Like, who knew him? Who knew he had money? Who even knew he had a wife?”

“And?”

“He’s not a very pleasant man. He’s borderline mentally ill. He has a psychotic need to command.”

“Patti Joseph says the same things.”

“She’s right.”

“And you know what?” Reacher said. “His men are mostly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, too. They’ve got a psychotic need to be commanded. I’ve talked to some of them. They’re civilians, but they’re holding fast to their old military codes. Like security blankets. Even when they don’t really enjoy the results.”

“They’re a weird bunch. All Special Forces and black ops, so naturally the Pentagon wasn’t very forthcoming. But we noticed two things. Most of them had been around the block many, many times, but there were far fewer medals among them than you would normally expect to see. And most of them got general discharges. Not honorable discharges. Including Lane himself. What do you think all of that means?”

“I suspect you know exactly what it means.”

“I’d like to hear it from your professional perspective.”

“It means they were bad guys. Either low-level and irritating, or bigger deals but with charges not proven.”

“What about the lack of medals?”

“Messy campaigns,” Reacher said. “Gratuitous collateral damage, looting, prisoner abuse. Maybe prisoners got shot. Maybe buildings got burned.”

“And Lane himself?”

“Ordered abuse or failed to prevent it. Or maybe participated in it. He told me he quit after the Gulf the first time around. I was there. There were pockets of bad behavior.”

“Stuff like that can’t be proved?”

“Special Forces operate on their own miles from anywhere. It’s a clandestine world. There would have been rumors, that’s all. Maybe a whistleblower or two. But no hard evidence.”

Pauling nodded again. “Those were our conclusions. Internally generated. We employed a lot of ex-military in the Bureau.”

“Employed,” Reacher said. “You employed the good ones. The ones with honorable discharges and medals and recommendations.”

“Is that what you got?”

“All of the above. But I had a couple of promotion hiccups, because I’m not a very cooperative guy. Gregory asked me about that. The first one of them I spoke to. The first conversation we had. He asked if I’d had career problems. He seemed happy that I had.”

“Puts you in the same boat.”

Reacher nodded. “And it kind of explains why they’re sticking with Lane. Where else are they going to get twenty-five grand a month with their records?”

“Is that what they get? That’s three hundred thousand a year.”

“It was back when I learned math.”

“Is that what Lane offered you? Three hundred grand?”

Reacher said nothing.

“What is he hiring you for?”

Reacher said nothing.

“What’s on your mind?”

“We’re not done with the information yet.”

“Anne Lane died, five years ago, in a vacant lot near the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s all the hard data we’ll ever have.”

“Gut feeling?”

“What’s yours?”

Reacher shrugged. “Brewer said something to me. He said he just didn’t know, which was weird for him, he said, because whereas he was sometimes wrong, he always knew. And I’m exactly the same. I always know. Except this time I don’t know. So what’s on my mind right now is that I have nothing on my mind.”

“I think it was a genuine kidnap,” Pauling said. “I think I blew it.”

“Do you?”

She paused a beat. Shook her head.

“Not really,” she said. “Truthfully, I just don’t know. God knows I want Lane to have done it. Obviously. And maybe he did. But for the sake of my sanity I have to acknowledge that’s mostly wishful thinking, to excuse myself. And I have to file the whole thing somewhere, mentally. So I tend to come down on the side of avoiding self-indulgence and cheap consolation. And usually the simple option is the right option anyway. So it was a simple kidnap, not an elaborate charade. And I blew it.”

“How did you blow it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve lain awake a hundred nights going over it. I don’t see how I made a mistake.”

“So maybe you didn’t blow it. Maybe it was an elaborate charade.”

“What’s on your mind, Reacher?”

He looked at her.

“Whatever it was, it’s happening again,” he said.

CHAPTER 25

Lauren Pauling sat forward in her chair and said, “Tell me.” So Reacher told her, everything, from the first night in the café, the first double espresso in its foam cup, the badly parked Mercedes Benz, the anonymous driver threading through the Sixth Avenue traffic on foot and then driving the Benz away. The second day, with Gregory scouting witnesses. The third day, with the unopened red door and the blue BMW. And then the nightmare electronic voice, guiding the black BMW back to the exact same fireplug.

“If that’s a charade it’s unbelievably elaborate,” Pauling said.

“My feeling exactly,” Reacher said.

“And insanely expensive.”

“Maybe not,” Reacher said.

“You mean because the money comes around in a big circle?”

“I haven’t actually seen any money. All I’ve seen are zippered bags.”

“Cut up newspaper?”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “If it’s a charade.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“Exactly.”

“It feels real.”

“And if it isn’t real, I can’t imagine who’s doing it. He would need people he trusts, which means A-teamers, but there’s nobody AWOL.”

“Were they getting along? Man and wife?”

“Nobody says otherwise.”

“So it’s real.”

Reacher nodded. “There’s an internal consistency to it. The initial takedown must have depended on an inside tip, as to where Kate and Jade were going to be, and when. And we can prove that inside involvement two ways. First, these people know something about Lane’s operation. They know exactly what cars he’s got, for instance.”

“And second?”

“Something that was nagging at me. Something about cops. I asked Lane to repeat what was said during the first phone call. And he did, word for word. And the bad guys never said no cops. That’s kind of standard, isn’t it? Like, Don’t go to the cops. But that was never said. Which suggests these people knew the story from five years ago. They knew Lane wouldn’t go to the cops anyway. So it didn’t need saying.”

“That would suggest that five years ago was for real.”

“Not necessarily. It might only reflect what Lane put out there for public consumption.”

“If it’s real this time, does that make it more likely it was real last time?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But whatever, give yourself a break.”

“This is like a hall of fun house mirrors.”

Reacher nodded. “But there’s one thing I can’t make fit under any scenario. Which is the initial takedown itself. The only viable method would have been quick and dirty inside the car, as soon as it stopped. Everyone agrees on that. I asked a couple of Lane’s guys, theoretically, in case there was something I hadn’t thought of. But there wasn’t. And the problem is, Bloomingdale’s is a whole block long. How could anyone have predicted exactly what yard of Lexington Avenue Taylor’s Jaguar was going to stop on? And if they didn’t predict it exactly right, then the whole thing would have fallen apart immediately, there and then. Either Kate and Jade would have been out on the sidewalk already, or Taylor would have seen the takedown guy running up, in which case he would have reacted and taken off. Or at least hit the door locks.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying real or fake there’s something wrong with this whole thing. I’m saying I can’t get a handle on what happened. I can’t get traction. I’m saying for the first time in my life I just don’t know. Like Brewer said, I’ve been wrong plenty of times, but I’ve always known before.”

“You should talk to Brewer, officially.”

“No point. NYPD can’t do anything without a complaint from Lane. Or at least a missing person report from someone with an interest.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” Reacher said.

“What way is that?”

“It’s what we called it in the service when we didn’t catch a break. When we actually had to work for a living. You know, start over at square one, re-examine everything, sweat the details, work the clues.”

“Kate and Jade are probably already dead.”

“Then I’ll make someone pay.”

“Can I help?”

“I need to know about two guys called Hobart and Knight.”

Pauling nodded. “Knight was the driver the day Anne was taken and Hobart was in Philadelphia. Now Patti Joseph talks about them. They died overseas.”

“Maybe they didn’t die overseas. They were abandoned wounded but alive. I need to know where, when, how, and what’s likely to have happened to them.”

“You think they’re alive? You think they’re back?”

“I don’t know what to think. But at least one of Lane’s guys wasn’t sleeping too well last night.”

“I met Hobart and Knight, you know. Five years ago. During the investigation.”

“Did either of them look like the guy I saw?”

“Medium-sized and ordinary-looking? Both of them, exactly.”

“That helps.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going back to the Dakota. Maybe we’ll get a call and this whole thing will be over. But more likely we won’t, and it’s just beginning.”

“Give me three hours,” Pauling said. “Then call my cell.”

CHAPTER 26

By the time Reacher got back to the Dakota it was seven o’clock and dawn had given way to full morning. The sky was a pale hard blue. No cloud. Just a beautiful late-summer day in the capital of the world. But inside the fifth floor apartment the air was foul and hot and the drapes were still drawn. Reacher didn’t need to ask whether the phone had rung. Clearly it hadn’t. The tableau was the same as it had been nine hours earlier. Lane upright in his chair. Then Gregory, Groom, Burke, Perez, Addison, Kowalski, all silent, all morose, all arrayed here and there, eyes closed, eyes open, staring into space, breathing low.

Medals not approved.

General discharges.

Bad guys.

Lane turned his head slowly and looked straight at Reacher and asked, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

“Long breakfast. What was it, five courses at the Four Seasons?”

“A diner,” Reacher said. “Bad choice. Slow service.”

“I pay you to work. I don’t pay you to be out stuffing your face.”

“You don’t pay me at all,” Reacher said. “I haven’t seen dime one yet.”

Lane kept his body facing forward and his head turned ninety degrees to the side. Like a querulous sea bird. His eyes were dark and wet and glittering.

“Is that your problem?” he asked. “Money?”

Reacher said nothing.

“That’s easily solved,” Lane said.

He kept his eyes on Reacher’s face and put his hands on the chair arms, palms down, pale parchment skin ridged with tendons and veins ghostly in the yellow light. He levered himself upright, with an effort, like it was the first time he had moved in nine hours, which it probably was. He stood unsteadily and walked toward the lobby, stiffly, shuffling like he was old and infirm.

“Come,” he said. Like a command. Like the colonel he had been. Reacher followed him to the master bedroom suite. The pencil post bed, the armoire, the desk. The silence. The photograph. Lane opened his closet. The narrower of the two doors. Inside was a shallow recess, and then another door. To the left of the inner door was a security keypad. It was the same type of three-by-three-plus-zero matrix as Lauren Pauling had used at her office. Lane used his left hand. Index finger, curled. Ring finger, straight. Middle finger, straight. Middle finger, curled. 3785, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. The keypad beeped and Lane opened the inner door. Reached inside and pulled a chain. A light came on and showed a chamber maybe six feet by three. It was stacked with cube-shaped bales of something wrapped tight in heavy heat-shrunk plastic. Dust and foreign printing on the plastic. At first Reacher didn’t know what he was looking at.

Then he realized: The printing was French, and it said Banque Centrale.

Central Bank.

Money.

U.S. dollars, bricked and banded and stacked and wrapped. Some cubes were neat and intact. One was torn open and spilling bricks. The floor was littered with empty plastic wrap. It was the kind of thick plastic that would take real effort to tear. You would have to jam a thumbnail through and hook your fingers in the hole and really strain. It would stretch. It would part reluctantly.

Lane bent at the waist and dragged the open bale out into the bedroom. Then he lifted it and swung it through a small arc and let it fall on the floor near Reacher’s feet. It skidded on the shiny hardwood and two slim bricks of cash fell out.

“There you go,” Lane said. “Dime one.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Pick it up,” Lane said. “It’s yours.”

Reacher said nothing. Just moved away to the door.

“Take it,” Lane said.

Reacher stood still.

Lane bent down again and picked up a spilled brick. He hefted it in his hand. Ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundreds.

“Take it,” he said again.

Reacher said, “We’ll talk about a fee if I get a result.”

“Take it!” Lane screamed. Then he hurled the brick straight at Reacher’s chest. It struck above the breastbone, dense, surprisingly heavy. It bounced off and hit the floor. Lane picked up the other loose brick and threw it. It hit the same spot.

“Take it!” he screamed.

Then he bent down and plunged his hands into the plastic and started hauling out one brick after another. He threw them wildly, without pausing, without straightening, without looking, without aiming. They hit Reacher in the legs, in the stomach, in the chest, in the head. Wild random salvos, ten thousand dollars at a time. A torrent. Real agony in the force of the throws. Then there were tears streaming down Lane’s face and he was screaming uncontrollably, panting, sobbing, gasping, punctuating each wild throw with: Take it! Take it! Then: Get her back! Get her back! Get her back! Then: Please! Please! There was rage and pain and hurt and fear and anger and loss in every desperate yelp.

Reacher stood there smarting slightly from the multiple impacts, with hundreds of thousands of dollars littered at his feet, and he thought: Nobody’s that good of an actor.

He thought: This time it’s real.

CHAPTER 27

Reacher waited in the inner hallway and listened to Lane calm down. He heard the sink running in the bathroom. Washing his face, he thought. Cold water. He heard the scrape of paper on hardwood and the quiet crackle of plastic as the bale of cash was reassembled. He heard Lane drag the bale back into the inner closet. He heard the door close, and he heard the keypad beep to confirm it was locked. Then he walked back to the living room. Lane followed a minute later and sat down in his chair, quietly, calmly, like nothing at all had happened, and stared at the silent phone.

It rang just before seven forty-five. Lane snatched it out of the cradle and said “Yes?” in a voice that was a shout strangled to almost nothing by sheer tension. Then his face went blank and he shook his head in impatience and irritation. Wrong caller. He listened for ten seconds more and hung up.

“Who was it?” Gregory asked.

“Just a friend,” Lane said. “A guy I reached out to earlier. He’s had his ear to the ground for me. Cops found a body in the Hudson River this morning. A floater. At the 79th Street boat basin. Unidentified white male, maybe forty years old. Shot once.”

“Taylor?”

“Has to be,” Lane said. “The river is quiet up there. And it’s an easy detour off the West Side Highway, at the boat basin. Ideal for someone heading north.”

Gregory asked: “So what do we do?”

“Now?” Lane said. “Nothing. We wait here. We wait for the right phone call. The one we want.”

It never came. Ten long hours of anticipation ended at eight o’clock in the morning and the phone did not ring. It did not ring at eight-fifteen, or eight-thirty, or eight forty-five. It did not ring at nine o’clock. It was like waiting for a stay of execution from the Governor’s mansion that never came. Reacher thought that a defense team with an innocent client must run through the same range of emotions: puzzlement, anxiety, shock, disbelief, disappointment, hurt, anger, outrage.

Then despair.

The phone did not ring at nine-thirty.

Lane closed his eyes and said, “Not good.”

Nobody replied.

By a quarter to ten in the morning all the resolve had leaked out of Lane’s body like he had accepted something inevitable. He sank into the chair cushion and laid his head back and opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

“It’s over,” he said. “She’s gone.”

Nobody spoke.

“She’s gone,” Lane said again. “Isn’t she?”

Nobody answered. The room was totally silent. Like a wake, or the bloodstained site of a fatal and tragic accident, or a funeral, or a service of remembrance, or an ER trauma room after a failed operation. Like a heart monitor that had been beeping bravely and resolutely against impossible odds had just abruptly gone quiet.

Flatline.

At ten o’clock in the morning Lane raised his head off the back of the chair and said, “OK.” Then he said it again: “OK.” Then he said, “Now we move on. We do what we have to do. We seek and destroy. As long as it takes. But justice will be done. Our kind of justice. No cops, no lawyers, no trials. No appeals. No process, no prison, no painless lethal injections.”

Nobody spoke.

“For Kate,” Lane said. “And for Taylor.”

Gregory said, “I’m in.”

“All the way,” Groom said.

“Like always,” Burke said.

Perez nodded. “To the death.”

“I’m there,” Addison said.

“I’ll make them wish they had never been born,” Kowalski said.

Reacher checked their faces. Six men, less than a rifle company, but with a whole army’s worth of lethal determination.

“Thank you,” Lane said.

Then he sat forward, newly energized. He turned to face Reacher directly. “Almost the first thing you ever said in this room was that these guys of mine could start a war against them, but first we had to find them. Do you remember that?”

Reacher nodded.

“So find them,” Lane said.

Reacher detoured via the master bedroom and picked up the framed photograph from the desk. The inferior print. The one with Jade in it. He held it carefully so as not to smudge the glass. Looked at it, long and hard. For you, he thought. For both of you. Not for him. Then he put the photograph back and walked quietly out of the apartment.

Seek and destroy.

He started at the same pay phone he had used before. Took the card out of his shoe and dialed Lauren Pauling’s cell. Said, “It’s real this time and they’re not coming back.”

She said, “Can you be at the United Nations in half an hour?”

CHAPTER 28

Reacher couldn’t get close to the U.N. Building’s entrance because of security, but he saw Lauren Pauling waiting for him in the middle of the First Avenue sidewalk. Clearly she had the same problem. No pass, no clearance, no magic words. She had a printed scarf around her shoulders. She looked good. She was ten years older than him, but he liked what he saw. He started toward her and then she saw him and they met in the middle.

“I called in a favor,” she said. “We’re meeting with an army officer from the Pentagon who liaises with one of the U.N. committees.”

“On what subject?”

“Mercenaries,” Pauling said. “We’re supposed to be against them. We signed all kinds of treaties.”

“The Pentagon loves mercenaries. It employs them all the time.”

“But it likes them to go where it sends them. It doesn’t like them to fill their down time with unauthorized sideshows.”

“Is that where they lost Knight and Hobart? On a sideshow?”

“Somewhere in Africa,” Pauling said.

“Does this guy have the details?”

“Some of them. He’s reasonably senior, but he’s new. He’s not going to tell you his name, and you’re not allowed to ask. Deal?”

“Does he know my name?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“OK, that sounds fair.”

Then her cell phone chimed. She answered it and listened and looked around.

“He’s in the plaza,” she said. “He can see us but he doesn’t want to walk right up to us. We have to go to a coffee shop on Second. He’ll follow.”

The coffee shop was one of those mostly brown places that survive on equal parts counter trade, booth trade, and to-go coffee in cardboard cups with Greek decoration on them. Pauling led Reacher to a booth all the way in back and sat so she could watch the door. Reacher slid in next to her. He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. Long habit, even in a place with plenty of mirrors, which the coffee shop had. They were tinted bronze and made the narrow unit look wide. Made everyone look tan, like they were just back from the beach. Pauling waved to the waitress and mouthed coffee and held up three fingers. The waitress came over and dumped three heavy brown mugs on the table and filled them from a Bunn flask.

Reacher took a sip. Hot, strong, and generic.

He made the Pentagon guy before he was even in through the door. There was no doubt about what he was. Army, but not necessarily a fighting man. Maybe just a bureaucrat. Dull. Not old, not young, corn-colored buzz cut, cheap blue wool suit, white broadcloth button-down shirt, striped tie, good shoes polished to a mirror shine. A different kind of uniform. It was the kind of outfit a captain or a major would wear to his sister-in-law’s second wedding. Maybe this guy had bought it for that very purpose, long before a spell of résumé-building temporary detached duty in New York City appeared in his future.

The guy paused inside the door and looked around. Not looking for us, Reacher thought. Looking for anyone else who knows him. If he sees somebody, he’ll fake a phone call and turn around and leave. Doesn’t want any awkward questions later. He’s not so dumb after all.

Then he thought: Pauling’s not so dumb, either. She knows people who can get in trouble just by being seen with the wrong folks.

But the guy evidently saw nothing to worry about. He walked on back and slid in opposite Pauling and Reacher and after a brief glance at each of their faces he centered his gaze between their heads and kept his eyes on the mirror. Up close Reacher saw that he was wearing a black subdued-order crossed-pistols lapel pin and that he had mild scarring on one side of his face. Maybe grenade or IED shrapnel at maximum range. Maybe he had been a fighting man. Or maybe it was a childhood shotgun accident.

“I don’t have much for you,” the guy said. “Private-enterprise Americans fighting overseas are rightly considered to be very bad news, especially when they go fight in Africa. So this stuff is very compartmentalized and need-to-know and it was before my time, so I simply don’t know very much about it. So all I can give you is what you can probably guess anyway.”

“Where was it?” Reacher asked.

“I’m not even sure of that. Burkina Faso or Mali, I think. One of those small West African places. Frankly there are so many of them in trouble it’s hard to keep track. It was the usual deal. Civil war. A scared government, a bunch of rebels ready to come out of the jungle. An unreliable military. So the government pays through the nose and buys what protection it can on the international market.”

“Does one of those countries speak French?”

“As their official language? Both of them. Why?”

“I saw some of the money. In plastic wrap printed in French. Banque Centrale, Central Bank.”

“How much?”

“More than you or I would earn in two lifetimes.”

“U.S. dollars?”

Reacher nodded. “Lots of them.”

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Did it work this time?”

“No,” the guy said. “The story that did the rounds was that Edward Lane took the money and ran. Can’t blame him for running, I guess. They were hopelessly outnumbered and strategically weak.”

“But not everyone got out.”

The guy nodded. “It seemed that way. But getting information out of those places is like trying to get a radio signal from the dark side of the moon. It’s mostly silence and static. And when it isn’t, it’s faint and garbled. So usually we rely on the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. And eventually we got a solid report that two Americans had been captured. A year later we got names. It was Knight and Hobart. Recon Marines back in the day, mixed records.”

“It surprises me that they stayed alive.”

“The rebels won. They became the new government. They emptied the jails, because the jails were full of their buddies. But a government needs full jails, to keep the population scared. So the old good guys became the new bad guys. Anyone who had worked for the old regime was suddenly in big trouble. And a couple of Americans were like trophies. So they were kept alive. But they suffered very cruelly. The Doctors Without Borders report was horrific. Appalling. Mutilation for sport was a fact of life.”

“Details?”

“I guess there are lots of bad things a man can do with a knife.”

“You didn’t think about a rescue attempt?”

“You’re not listening,” the guy said. “The State Department can’t admit that there are bunches of renegade American mercenaries running wild in Africa. And like I told you, the rebels became the new government. They’re in charge now. We have to be nice to them. Because all those places have got stuff that we want. There’s oil, and diamonds, and uranium. Alcoa needs tin and bauxite and copper. Halliburton wants to get in there and make a buck. Corporations from Texas want to get in there and run those same damn jails.”

“Anything about what happened in the end?”

“It’s sketchy, but you can join the dots. One died in captivity, but the other one got out, according to the Red Cross. Some kind of humanitarian gesture that the Red Cross pushed for, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the coup. They let out a whole bunch. End of story. That’s all the news there is from Africa. One died and one got out, relatively recently. But then, if you do some detective work and jump to the INS, you find a lone individual entering the U.S. from Africa shortly afterward on Red Cross documentation. And then, if you jump to the Veterans Administration, there’s a report of someone just back from Africa getting the kind of remedial outpatient care that might be consistent with tropical diseases and some of the mutilations that DWB reported on.”

Reacher asked, “Which one got out?”

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “All I’ve heard is that one got out and the other didn’t.”

“I need more than that.”

“I told you, the initial event was before my time. I’m not specifically in the loop. All I’ve got is water-cooler stuff.”

“I need his name,” Reacher said. “And I need his address, from the VA.”

“That’s a tall order,” the guy said. “I would have to go way beyond my remit. And I would need a very good reason to do that.”

“Look at me,” Reacher said.

The guy took his eyes off the mirror and glanced at Reacher.

Reacher said, “Ten-sixty-two.”

No reaction.

Reacher said, “So don’t be an asshole. Pony up, OK?”

The guy looked at the mirror again. Nothing in his face.

“I’ll call Ms. Pauling’s cell,” he said. “When, I don’t know. I just can’t say. It could be days. But I’ll get what I can as soon as I can.”

Then he slid out of the booth and walked straight to the door. Opened it and made a right turn and was lost to sight. Lauren Pauling breathed out.

“You pushed him,” she said. “You were a little rude there.”

“But he’s going to help.”

“Why? What was that ten-sixty-two thing?”

“He was wearing a military police lapel pin. The crossed pistols. MP is his day job. Ten-sixty-two is MP radio code for fellow officer in trouble, requests urgent assistance. So he’ll help. He has to. Because if one MP won’t help another, who the hell will?”

“Then that’s a lucky break. Maybe you won’t have to do it all the hard way.”

“Maybe. But he’s going to be slow. He seemed a little timid. Me, I’d have busted straight into somebody’s file cabinet. But he’s going to go through channels and ask nicely.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s getting promoted and you didn’t.”

“A timid guy like that won’t get promoted. He’s probably terminal at major.”

“He’s already a Brigadier General,” Pauling said. “Actually.”

“That guy?” Reacher stared at the door, as if it might have retained an after-image. “He was kind of young, wasn’t he?”

“No, you’re kind of old,” Pauling said. “Everything is comparative. But putting a Brigadier General on it shows how seriously the U.S. is taking this mercenary stuff.”

“It shows how seriously we’re whitewashing it.”

Silence for a moment.

“Mutilation for sport,” Pauling said. “Sounds horrible.”

“Sure does.”

Silence again. The waitress came over and offered refills of coffee. Pauling declined, Reacher accepted. Said, “NYPD found an unexplained body in the river this morning. White male, about forty. Up near the boat basin. Shot once. Lane got a call.”

“Taylor?”

“Almost certainly.”

“So what next?”

“We work with what we’ve got,” Reacher said. “We adopt the theory that Knight or Hobart came home with a grudge.”

“How do we proceed?”

“With hard work,” Reacher said. “I’m not going to hold my breath on getting anything from the Pentagon. However many scars and stars he’s got, that guy’s a bureaucrat at heart.”

“Want to talk it through? I was an investigator once. A good one, too. I thought so anyway. Until, you know, what happened.”

“Talking won’t help. I need to think.”

“So think out loud. What doesn’t fit? What’s out of place? What surprised you in any way at all?”

“The initial takedown. That doesn’t work at all.”

“What else?”

“Everything. What surprises me is that I can’t get anywhere with anything. There’s either something wrong with me, or there’s something wrong with this whole situation.”

“That’s too big,” Pauling said. “Start small. Name one thing that surprised you.”

“Is this what you did? In the FBI? In your brainstorming sessions?”

“Absolutely. Didn’t you?”

“I was an MP. I was lucky to find anyone with a brain to storm.”

“Seriously. Name one thing that surprised you.”

Reacher sipped his coffee. She’s right, he thought. There’s always something out of context even before you know what the context ought to be.

“Just one thing,” Pauling said again. “At random.”

Reacher said, “I got out of the black BMW after Burke had switched the bag into the Jaguar and I was surprised how fast the guy was into the driver’s seat. I figured I would have time to stroll around the corner and set up a position. But he was right there, practically on top of me. A few seconds, maximum. I barely got a glimpse of him.”

“So what does that mean?”

“That he was waiting right there on the street.”

“But he wouldn’t risk that. If he was Knight or Hobart, Burke would have recognized him in a heartbeat.”

“Maybe he was in a doorway.”

“Three times running? He used that same fireplug on three separate occasions. At three different times of day. Late night, early morning, rush hour. And he might be memorable, depending on the mutilation.”

“The guy I saw wasn’t memorable at all. He was just a guy.”

“Whatever, it was still hard to find appropriate cover each time. I’ve done that job. Many times. Including one special night five years ago.”

Reacher said, “Give yourself a break.”

But he was thinking: Appropriate cover.

He remembered bouncing around in the back of the car listening to the nightmare voice. Remembered thinking: It’s right there on the same damn fireplug?

The same damn fireplug.

Appropriate cover.

He put his coffee cup down, gently, slowly, carefully, and then he picked up Pauling’s left hand with his right. Brought it to his lips and kissed it tenderly. Her fingers were cool and slim and fragrant. He liked them.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

“For what?”

“He used a fireplug three times running. Why? Because a fireplug almost always guarantees a stretch of empty curb, that’s why. Because of the parking prohibition. No parking next to a hydrant. Everyone knows that. But he used the same fireplug each time. Why? There are plenty to choose from. There’s at least one on every block. So why that one? Because he liked that one, that’s why. But why did he like that one? What makes a person like one fireplug more than another?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Reacher said. “They’re all the same. They’re mass-produced. They’re identical. What this guy had was a vantage point that he liked. The vantage point came first, and the fireplug was merely the nearest one to it. The one most visible from it. As you so correctly pointed out, he needed cover that was reliable and unobtrusive, late night, early morning, and rush hour. And potentially he might have needed to be there for extended periods. As it happened Gregory was punctual both times, but he could have hit traffic. And who knew where Burke was going to be when he got the call on the car phone? Who knew how long he might take to get down there? So wherever this guy was waiting, he was comfortable doing it.”

“But does this help us?”

“You bet your ass it does. It’s the first definite link in the chain. It was a fixed, identifiable location. We need to get down to Sixth Avenue and figure out where it was. Someone might have seen him there. Someone might even know who he is.”

CHAPTER 29

Reacher and Pauling caught a cab on Second Avenue and it took them all the way south to Houston Street and then west to Sixth. They got out on the southeast corner and glanced back at the empty sky where the Twin Towers used to be and then they turned north together into a warm breeze full of trash and grit.

“So show me the famous fireplug,” Pauling said.

They walked north until they came to it, right there on the right-hand sidewalk in the middle of the block. Fat, short, squat, upright, chipped dull paint, flanked by two protective metal posts four feet apart. The curb next to it was empty. Every other legal parking spot on the block was taken. Pauling stood near the hydrant and pirouetted a slow circle. Looked east, north, west, south.

“Where would a military mind want to be?” she asked.

Reacher recited, “A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an unobstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear. He knows it provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers. He knows it offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.”

“What would the duration be?”

“Say an hour maximum, each time.”

“How did it work, the first two times?”

“He watched Gregory park, and then he followed him down to Spring Street.”

“So he wasn’t waiting inside the derelict building?”

“Not if he was working alone.”

“But he still used the back door.”

“On the second occasion, at least.”

“Why not the front door?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have we definitely decided he was working alone?”

“Only one of them came back alive.”

Pauling turned the same slow circle. “So where was his observation point?”

“West of here,” Reacher said. “He will have wanted a full-on view.”

“Across the street?”

Reacher nodded. “Middle of the block, or not too far north or south of it. Nothing too oblique. Range, maybe up to a hundred feet. Not more.”

“He could have used binoculars. Like Patti Joseph does.”

“He would still need a good angle. Like Patti has. She’s more or less directly across the street.”

“So set some limits.”

“A maximum forty-five-degree arc. That’s twenty-some degrees north to twenty-some degrees south. Maximum radius, about a hundred feet.”

Pauling turned to face the curb square-on. She spread her arms out straight and forty-five degrees apart and held her hands flat and upright like mimed karate chops. Scoped out the view. A forty-five-degree bite out of a circle with a radius of a hundred feet gave her an arc of about seventy-eight feet to look at. More than three standard twenty-foot Greenwich Village storefronts, less than four. A total of five establishments to consider. The center three were possibilities. The one to the north and the one to the south were marginal. Reacher stood directly behind her and looked over her head. Her left hand was pointing at a flower store. Then came his new favorite café. Then came a picture framer. Then a double-fronted wine store, wider than the others. Her right hand was pointing at a vitamin shop.

“A flower store would be no good,” she said. “It offers a wall behind him and a window in front of him but it wouldn’t be open at eleven-forty at night.”

Reacher said nothing.

“The wine store was probably open,” she said. “But it wouldn’t have been at seven in the morning.”

Reacher said, “Can’t hang around in a flower store or a wine store for an hour at a time. Neither one of them offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.”

“Same with all of them, then,” she said. “Except the café. The café would have been open all three times. And you can sit for an hour in a café.”

“The café would have been pretty risky. Three separate lengthy spells, someone would have remembered him. They remembered me after one cup of coffee.”

“Were the sidewalks crowded when you were here?”

“Fairly.”

“So maybe he was just out on the street. Or in a doorway. In the shadows. He might have risked it. He was on the other side from where the cars were parking.”

“No protection from the elements and no concealment. It would have been an uncomfortable hour, three times in a row.”

“He was a Recon Marine. He was in prison in Africa for five years. He’s used to discomfort.”

“I meant tactically. This part of town, he would have been afraid of getting busted for a drug dealer. Or a terrorist. South of Twenty-third Street they don’t like you to hang around at all anymore.”

“So where was he?”

Reacher looked left, looked right.

Then he looked up.

“You mentioned Patti Joseph’s place,” he said. “You called it an aerie.”

“So?”

“What’s an aerie?”

“It’s an eagle’s nest.”

“Exactly. From the Old French for lair. The point is that Patti is reasonably high up. Seven prewar floors, that’s a little above treetop height. An unobstructed view. A Recon Marine wants an unobstructed view. And he can’t guarantee that at street level. A panel truck could park right in front of him at the wrong moment.”

Lauren Pauling turned back to face the curb and spread her arms again, this time raised at an angle. She mimed the same karate chops with her hands. They bracketed the upper floors of the same five buildings.

“Where did he come from, the first time?” she asked.

“From south of me,” Reacher said. “From my right. I was facing a little north and east, at the end table. But he was coming back from Spring Street then. No way of knowing where he had started out from. I sat down, ordered coffee, and he was in the car before they even brought it to me.”

“But the second time, after Burke switched the bag, he must have been coming straight from the observation point, right?”

“He was almost at the car when I saw him.”

“Still moving?”

“Final two paces.”

“From what direction?”

Reacher moved up the sidewalk to where he had been after strolling around the corner from Bleecker. In his mind he put a green Jaguar beyond Pauling on the curb and pictured the guy’s last two fluid strides toward it. Then he lined up the apparent vector and checked the likely point of origin. Kept his eyes on it as he stepped back to Pauling.

“Actually very similar to the first time,” he said to her. “North and east through the traffic. From the south of where I was sitting.”

Pauling adjusted the position of her right arm. Brought her hand south and chopped the air a fraction to the left of the café’s most northerly table. That cut the view to just a slim section of the streetscape. Half of the building with the flower store in it, and most of the building with the café in it. Above the flower store were three stories of windows with vertical blinds behind them and printers and spider plants and stacks of paper on their sills. Fluorescent tubes on the ceilings.

“Office suites,” Pauling said.

Above the café were three stories of windows filled variously with faded drapes made of red Indian cloth, or macramé hangings, or suspended discs of stained glass. One had nothing at all. One was papered over with newsprint. One had a Che Guevara poster taped face-out on the inside of the glass.

“Apartments,” Pauling said.

Jammed between the flower store and the café was a blue recessed door. To its left was a dull silver box, with buttons and nameplates and a speaker grille. Reacher said, “A person who came out that door heading for the fireplug would have to cross north and east through the traffic, right?”

Pauling said, “We found him.”

CHAPTER 30

The silver box to the left of the blue door had six black call buttons in a vertical array. The top nameplate had Kublinski written very neatly in pale faded ink. The bottom had Super scrawled with a black marker pen. The middle four were blank.

“Low rent,” Pauling said. “Short leases. Transients. Except for Mr. or Ms. Kublinski. Judging by that handwriting style they’ve been here forever.”

“They probably moved to Florida fifty years ago,” Reacher said. “Or died. And nobody changed the tag.”

“Shall we try the super?”

“Use one of your business cards. Put your finger over the Ex- part. Make out like you’re still with the Bureau.”

“Think that’ll be necessary?”

“We need all the help we can get. This is a radical building. We’ve got Che Guevara watching over us. And macramé.”

Pauling put an elegant nail on the super’s call button and pressed. She was answered a long minute later by a distorted burst of sound from the speaker. It might have been the word yes, or who, or what. Or just a blast of static.

“Federal agents,” Pauling called. Which was remotely true. Both she and Reacher had once worked for Uncle Sam. She slipped a business card out of her purse. There was another burst of noise from the speaker.

“He’s coming,” Reacher said. He had seen plenty of buildings like this one, back in the day, when his job had been chasing AWOL soldiers. They liked cash rents and short leases. And in his experience building superintendents usually cooperated. They liked their free accommodations well enough not to jeopardize them. Better that someone else should go to jail, and they should stay where they were.

Unless the super was the bad guy, of course.

But this one seemed to have nothing to hide. The blue door opened inward and revealed a tall gaunt man in a stained wife-beater. He had a black knit cap on his head and a flat Slavic face like a length of two by-four.

“Yes?” he said. Strong Russian accent. Almost Da?

Pauling waved her card long enough for some of the words to register.

“Tell us about your most recent tenant,” she said.

“Most recent?” the guy repeated. No hostility. He sounded like a fairly smart guy struggling with the nuance of a foreign language, that was all.

Reacher asked, “Did someone sign on within the last couple of weeks?”

“Number five,” the guy said. “One week ago. He responded to a newspaper advertisement I was asked to place by the management.”

“We need to see his apartment,” Pauling said.

“I’m not sure I should let you,” the guy said. “There are rules in America.”

“Homeland Security,” Reacher said. “The Patriot Act. There are no rules in America anymore.”

The guy just shrugged and turned his tall thin frame around in the narrow space. Headed for the stairs. Reacher and Pauling followed him in. Reacher could smell coffee coming through the walls from the café. There was no apartment number one or number two. Number four was the first door they came to, at the head of the stairs at the back of the building. Then number three was on the same floor, along a hallway at the front of the building. Which meant that number five was going to be directly above it, third floor, looking east across the street. Pauling glanced at Reacher, and Reacher nodded.

“The one with nothing in the window,” he said to her.

On the third floor they passed number six at the back of the building and walked forward toward number five. The smell of coffee had faded and been replaced by the universal hallway smell of boiled vegetables.

“Is he in?” Reacher asked.

The super shook his head. “I only ever saw him twice. He’s out now for sure. I was just all over the building fixing pipes.” He used a master key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the door. Pushed it open and stood back.

The apartment was what a real estate broker would have called an alcove studio. All one room, with a crooked L that was theoretically large enough for a bed if the bed was small. A kitchen corner and a tiny bathroom with an open door. But mostly what was on show was dust and floorboards.

Because the apartment was completely empty.

Except for a single upright dining chair. The chair was not old, but it was well used. It was the kind of thing you see for sale on the Bowery sidewalks where the bankrupt restaurant dealers hawk seized inventory. It was set in front of the window and turned slightly north and east. It was about twenty feet above and three feet behind the exact spot that Reacher had chosen for coffee, two nights running.

Reacher stepped over and sat down on the chair, feet planted, relaxed but alert. The way his body settled naturally put the fireplug across Sixth directly in front of him. A shallow downward angle, easily enough to clear a parked panel truck. Enough to clear a parked semi. A ninety-foot range. No problem for anyone who wasn’t clinically blind. He stood up again and turned a full circle. Saw a door that locked. Saw three solid walls. Saw a window free of drapes. A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an unobstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear, provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers, and offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.

“Feels just like Patti Joseph’s place,” Pauling said.

“You been there?”

“Brewer described it.”

“Eight million stories,” Reacher said.

Then he turned to the super and said, “Tell us about this guy.”

“He can’t talk,” the super said.

“What do you mean?”

“He can’t speak.”

“What, like he’s a mute?”

“Not by birth. Because of a trauma.”

“Like something struck him dumb?”

“Not emotional,” the super said. “Physical. He communicated with me by writing on a pad of yellow paper. Full sentences, quite patiently. He wrote that he had been injured in the service. Like a war wound. But I noticed that he had no visible scarring. And I noticed that he kept his mouth tight shut all the time. Like he was embarrassed about me seeing something. And it reminded me very strongly of something I saw once before, more than twenty years ago.”

“Which was?”

“I am Russian. For my sins I served with the Red Army in Afghanistan. Once we had a prisoner returned to us by the tribesmen as a warning. His tongue had been cut out.”

CHAPTER 31

The super took Reacher and Pauling down to his own apartment, which was a squared-away semi-basement space in the back of the building. He opened a file cabinet and took out the current lease papers for apartment five. They had been signed exactly a week previously by a guy calling himself Leroy Clarkson. Which as expected was a blatantly phony name. Clarkson and Leroy were the first two streets coming off the West Side Highway north of Houston, just a few blocks away. At the far end of Clarkson was a topless bar. At the far end of Leroy was a car wash. In between was a tiny aluminum coach diner that Reacher had once eaten in.

“You don’t see ID?” Pauling asked.

“Not unless they want to pay by check,” the super said. “This guy paid cash.”

The signature was illegible. The Social Security number was neatly written but was no doubt just a random sequence of nine meaningless digits.

The super gave a decent physical description, but it didn’t help much because it did nothing more than match what Reacher himself had seen on two separate occasions. Late thirties, maybe forty, white, medium height and weight, clean and trim, no facial hair. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable.

“How was his health?” Reacher asked.

“Apart from the fact that he couldn’t speak?” the super said. “He seemed OK.”

“Did he say if he’d been out of town for a while?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“How long did he pay for?”

“A month. It’s the minimum. Renewable.”

“This guy’s not coming back,” Reacher said. “You should go ahead and call The Village Voice now. Get them to run your ad again.”

“What happened to your pal from the Red Army?” Pauling asked.

“He lived,” the super said. “Not happily, but he lived.”

Reacher and Pauling came out the blue door and took three paces north and stopped in for espresso. They took the end table on the sidewalk and Reacher took the same seat he had used twice before.

Pauling said, “So he wasn’t working alone.”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling said, “Because he couldn’t have made the phone calls.”

Reacher didn’t reply.

Pauling said, “Tell me about the voice you heard.”

“American,” Reacher said. “The machine couldn’t disguise the words or the cadence or the rhythm. And he was patient. Intelligent, in command, in control, not worried. Familiar with the geography of New York City. Possibly military, from a couple of phrases. He wanted to know Burke’s name, which suggests he’s familiar with Lane’s crew or he was calibrating a lie detector. Apart from that, I’m just guessing. The distortion was huge. But I felt he wasn’t old. There was a lightness there. A kind of nimbleness in his voice. Maybe he was a small guy.”

“Like a Special Forces veteran.”

“Possibly.”

“Unworried and in command makes him sound like the prime mover here. Not like a sidekick.”

Reacher nodded. “Good point. I felt that way, listening to him. It was like he was calling the shots. Like an equal partner, at the very least.”

“So who the hell is he?”

“If your Pentagon guy hadn’t told us different I’d say it was both of Hobart and Knight, both still alive, back here together, working together.”

“But it isn’t,” Pauling said. “My Pentagon guy wouldn’t get that kind of thing wrong.”

“So whichever one came back alive picked up a new partner.”

“One that he trusts,” Pauling said. “And he did it real fast.”

Reacher gazed over at the hydrant. Traffic obscured his view in waves, held back and then released by the light at Houston.

“Would a remote clicker work at this distance?” he asked.

“For a car?” Pauling said. “Maybe. I guess it would depend on the car. Why?”

“After Burke switched the bag I heard a sound like car doors locking. I guess the guy did it from up there in his room. He was watching. He didn’t want to leave the money in an unlocked car for a second longer than he had to.”

“Sensible.”

Reacher paused a beat. “But you know what isn’t sensible? Why was he up there in the room at all?”

“We know why he was up there.”

“No, why was he up there and not the other guy? We’ve got two guys here, one can talk and the other can’t. Why would the guy who can’t talk go rent the apartment? Anyone who comes into contact with him isn’t going to forget him in a hurry. And what’s an observation point for anyway? It’s for command and control. As the visible situation develops the observer is supposed to issue a stream of orders and adjustments. But this guy couldn’t even get on a cell phone. What do we suppose happened exactly, the first two times with Gregory? The guy is upstairs, he sees Gregory park, what can he do? He can’t even get on the phone and tell his partner to stand by down at Spring Street.”

“Text messaging,” Pauling said.

“What’s that?”

“You can send written words by cell phone.”

“When did that start?”

“Years ago.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Live and learn.” Then he said, “But I still don’t see why they sent the guy who couldn’t talk to meet with the building super.”

“Neither do I,” Pauling said.

“Or to run the OP. It would make more sense if he had been on the other end of the phone. He can’t talk, but he can listen.”

Silence for a moment.

“What next?” Pauling asked.

“Hard work,” Reacher said. “You up for it?”

“Are you hiring me?”

“No, you’re putting whatever else you’re doing on hold and you’re volunteering. Because if we do this right you’ll find out what happened to Anne Lane five years ago. No more sleepless nights.”

“Unless I find out five years ago was for real. Then I might never sleep again.”

“Life’s a gamble,” Reacher said. “It wouldn’t be so much fun otherwise.”

Pauling was quiet for a long moment.

“OK,” she said. “I’m volunteering.”

Reacher said, “So go hassle our Soviet pal again. Get the chair. They bought it within the last week. We’ll walk it over to the Bowery and find out where it came from. Maybe the new buddy picked it out. Maybe someone will remember him.”

CHAPTER 32

Reacher carried the chair in his hand like a bag and he and Pauling walked together east. South of Houston the Bowery had organized itself into a sequence of distinct retail areas. Like a string of unofficial malls. There were electrical supplies, and lighting fixtures, and used office gear, and industrial kitchen equipment, and restaurant front-of-house outlets. Reacher liked the Bowery. It was his kind of a street.

The chair in his hand was fairly generic, but it had a certain number of distinguishing characteristics. Impossible to describe it a moment after closing the door on it, but with it right there for direct comparison a match might be found. They started with the northernmost of six separate chaotic establishments. Less than a hundred yards of real estate, but if someone buys a used dining chair in Manhattan, chances are he buys it somewhere in that hundred yards.

Put the good stuff in the store window was the usual retail mantra. But on the Bowery the actual store windows were secondary to the sidewalk displays. And the chair in Reacher’s hand wasn’t the good stuff, in the sense that it couldn’t have been part of a large matched set, or it wouldn’t have been sold separately. Nobody with a set of twenty-four chairs leaves himself with twenty-three. So Reacher and Pauling pushed past the stuff on the sidewalk and squeezed through the narrow doors and looked at the dusty items inside. Looked at the sad leftovers, the part-sets, the singletons. They saw a lot of chairs. All the same, all different. Four legs, seats, backs, but the range of shapes and details was tremendous. None looked very comfortable. Reacher had read somewhere that there was a science to building a restaurant chair. It had to be durable, obviously, and good value for money, and it had to look reasonably inviting, but it couldn’t in reality be too comfortable or the patrons would sit all night and a potential three-sitting evening would turn into an actual two sittings and the restaurant would lose money. Portion control and table turnover were the important factors in the restaurant trade, and Reacher figured chair manufacturers were totally on board with the turnover part.

In the first three stores they found no visual matches and nobody admitted selling the chair that Reacher was carrying.

The fourth store was where they found what they wanted.

It was a double-wide place that had chrome diner furniture out front and a bunch of Chinese owners in back. Behind the gaudy padded stools on the sidewalk were piles of old tables and sets of chairs stacked six high. Behind the piles and the stacks was a jumble of oddments. Including two chairs hung high on a wall that were exact matches for the specimen in Reacher’s hand. Same style, same construction, same color, same age.

“We shoot, we score,” Pauling said.

Reacher checked again, to be certain. But there was no doubt about it. The chairs were identical. Even the grime and the dust on them matched precisely. Same gray, same texture, same consistency.

“Let’s get some help,” he said.

He carried the Sixth Avenue chair to the back of the store where a Chinese guy was sitting behind a rickety table with a closed cash box on it. The guy was old and impassive. The owner, probably. Certainly all transactions would have to pass through his hands. He had the cash box.

“You sold this chair.” Reacher held it up, and nodded back toward the wall where its siblings hung. “About a week ago.”

“Five dollars,” the old guy said.

“I don’t want to buy it,” Reacher said. “And it isn’t yours to sell. You already sold it once. I want to know who you sold it to. That’s all.”

“Five dollars,” the guy said again.

“You’re not understanding me.”

The old guy smiled. “No, I think I’m understanding you very well. You want information about the purchaser of that chair. And I’m telling you that information always has a price. In this case, the price is five dollars.”

“How about you get the chair back? Then you can sell it twice.”

“I already sold it many more times than twice. Places open, places close, assets circulate. The world goes round.”

“Who bought it, a week ago?”

“Five dollars.”

“You sure you’ve got five dollars’ worth of information?”

“I have what I have.”

“Two-fifty plus the chair.”

“You’ll leave the chair anyway. You’re sick of carrying it around.”

“I could leave it next door.”

For the first time the old guy’s eyes moved. He glanced up at the wall. Reacher saw him think: A set of three is better than a pair.

“Four bucks and the chair,” he said.

“Three and the chair,” Reacher said.

“Three and a half and the chair.”

“Three and a quarter and the chair.”

No response.

“Guys, please,” Pauling said.

She stepped up to the rickety desk and opened her purse. Took out a fat black wallet and snapped off a crisp ten from a wad as thick as a paperback book. Placed it on the scarred wood and spun it around and left it there.

“Ten dollars,” she said. “And the damn chair. So make it good.”

The old Chinese man nodded.

“Women,” he said. “Always ready to focus.”

“Tell us who bought the chair,” Pauling said.

“He couldn’t talk,” the old man said.

CHAPTER 33

The old man said, “At first I thought nothing of it. An American comes in, he hears us speaking our own language, very often he assumes we can’t speak English, and he conducts the transaction with a combination of gestures and signs. It’s a little rude in that it assumes ignorance on our part, but we’re used to it. Generally I let such a customer flounder and then I pitch in with a perfectly coherent sentence as a kind of reproach.”

“Like you did with me,” Reacher said.

“Indeed. And as I did with the man you’re evidently seeking. But he was completely unable to reply in any way at all. He just kept his mouth closed and gulped like a fish. I concluded that he had a deformity that prevented speech.”

“Description?” Reacher asked.

The old guy paused a beat to gather his thoughts and then launched into the same rundown that the Sixth Avenue super had given. A white man, late thirties, maybe forty, medium height and weight, clean and neat, no beard, no mustache. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable. Nothing remarkable or memorable about him except for the fact that he was mute.

“How much did he pay for the chair?” Reacher asked.

“Five dollars.”

“Wasn’t it unusual that a guy would want a single chair?”

“You think I should automatically call the police if someone who isn’t a restaurant owner shops here?”

“Who buys chairs one at a time?”

“Plenty of people,” the old man said. “People who are recently divorced, or down on their luck, or starting a lonely new life in a small East Village apartment. Some of those places are so tiny a single chair is all they want. At a desk, maybe, that does double duty as a dining table.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I can see that.”

The old man turned to Pauling and asked, “Was my information helpful?”

“Maybe,” Pauling said. “But it didn’t add anything.”

“You already knew about the man who couldn’t talk?”

Pauling nodded.

“Then I’m sorry,” the old man said. “You may keep the chair.”

“I’m sick of carrying it around,” Reacher said.

The old man inclined his head. “As I thought. In which case, feel free to leave it here.”

Pauling led Reacher out to the Bowery sidewalk and the last he saw of the chair was a young guy who could have been a grandson hoisting it up on a pole and hanging it back on the wall next to its two fellows.

“The hard way,” Pauling said.

“Makes no sense,” Reacher said. “Why are they sending the guy that can’t speak to meet with everyone?”

“There must be something even more distinctive about the other one.”

“I hate to think what that might be.”

“Lane abandoned those two guys. So why are you helping him?”

“I’m not helping him. This is for Kate and the kid now.”

“They’re dead. You said so yourself.”

“Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone needs to know what happened to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.”

“And that’s you?”

“I play the hand I’m dealt. No use whining about it.”

“And?”

“And they need to be avenged, Pauling. Because it wasn’t their fight. It wasn’t even remotely Jade’s fight, was it? If Hobart or Knight or whichever it was had come after Lane directly, maybe I’d have been on the sidelines cheering him on. But he didn’t. He came after Kate and Jade. And two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Neither do three wrongs.”

“In this case they do,” Reacher said.

“You never even saw Kate or Jade.”

“I saw their pictures. That was enough.”

“I wouldn’t want you mad at me,” Pauling said.

“No,” Reacher said back. “You wouldn’t.”

They walked north toward Houston Street without any clear idea of where they were going next and on the way Pauling’s cell phone must have vibrated because she pulled it out of her pocket before Reacher heard it ring. Silent cell phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.

Pauling stopped on the sidewalk and said her name loudly over the traffic noise and then listened for a minute. Said thanks and snapped the phone shut. Turned to Reacher and smiled.

“My Pentagon buddy,” she said. “Some solid information. Maybe he busted into someone’s file cabinet after all.”

“Did he get a name for us?” Reacher asked.

“Not yet. But he has a location. It was Burkina Faso. You ever been there?”

“I’ve never been anywhere in Africa.”

“It used to be called Upper Volta. It’s an ex–French colony. About the size of Colorado, population thirteen million, with a GDP about a quarter of what Bill Gates is worth.”

“But with enough spare cash to hire Lane’s crew.”

“Not according to my guy,” Pauling said. “That’s the weird thing. It’s where Knight and Hobart were captured, but there’s no record of their government contracting with Lane.”

“Would your guy expect there to be a record?”

“He says there’s always a record somewhere.”

“We need a name,” Reacher said. “That’s all. We don’t need the history of the world.”

“He’s working on it.”

“But not fast enough. And we can’t wait. We need to try something on our own.”

“Like what?”

“Our guy called himself Leroy Clarkson. Maybe it was a private joke or maybe it was something in his subconscious because he lives over there.”

“Near Clarkson or Leroy?”

“Maybe on Hudson or Greenwich.”

“That’s all gentrified now. A guy just back from five years in an African jail couldn’t afford a closet over there.”

“But a guy who was making good money before the five-year hiatus might already own a place over there.”

Pauling nodded. “We should stop by my office. Start with the phone book.”

There were a few Hobarts and half a page of Knights in the Manhattan White Pages but none of them were in the part of the West Village that would have made Leroy Clarkson an obvious pseudonym. Conceivably one of the Knights might have picked Horatio Gansevoort, and one of the Hobarts might have gone by Christopher Perry, but apart from those two the others lived where the streets were numbered or so far east that their subliminal choices would have been Henry Madison or Allen Eldridge. Or Stanton Rivington.

“Too much like daytime TV,” Pauling said.

She had other databases, the kind of things a conscientious PI with old friends in law enforcement and an internet connection can accumulate. But no unexplained Knights or Hobarts cropped up anywhere.

“He’s been away five years,” Pauling said. “Effectively he’ll have dropped out of sight, won’t he? Disconnected phone, unpaid utilities, like that?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “But not necessarily. These guys are used to sudden travel. They always were, even back in the day. They usually set up automatic payments.”

“His bank account would have emptied out.”

“Depends how much was in it to start with. If he was earning then what the others are earning now he could have paid for plenty of electric bills especially when he’s not even home to turn on the lights.”

“Lane was a much smaller deal five years ago. They all were, before the terrorism gravy train left the station. Real or phony, Anne’s ransom was only a hundred grand, not ten and a half million. Wages will have been in proportion. This guy won’t have been rich.”

Reacher nodded. “He probably rented anyway. Landlord probably threw all his stuff on the sidewalk years ago.”

“So what do we do?”

“I guess we wait,” Reacher said. “For your bureaucratic buddy. Unless we grow old and die first.”

But a minute later Pauling’s phone went off again. This time it was on her desk, out in full view, and its vibration set up a soft mechanical buzz against the wood. She answered it with her name and listened for a minute. Then she closed it slowly and put it back in place.

“We’re not much older,” she said.

“What’s he got?” Reacher asked.

“Hobart,” she said. “It was Hobart who came back alive.”

CHAPTER 34

Reacher asked, “First name?”

Pauling said, “Clay. Clay James Hobart.”

Reacher asked, “Address?”

Pauling said, “We’re waiting on an answer from the VA.”

“So let’s hit the phone books again.”

“I recycle my old phone books. I don’t keep an archive. I certainly don’t have anything from five years ago.”

“He might have family here. Who better to come back to?”

There were seven Hobarts in the book, but one of them was a duplicate. A dentist, home and office, different places, different numbers, same guy.

“Call them all,” Reacher said. “Make like a VA administrator with a paperwork glitch.”

Pauling put her desk phone on the speaker and got two answering machines with the first two calls and a false alarm on the third. Some old guy with his own VA benefits got all excited in case they were about to disappear. Pauling calmed him down and he said he had never heard of anyone called Clay James Hobart. The fourth and fifth calls were fruitless, too. The sixth call was to the dentist’s office number. He was on vacation in Antigua. His receptionist said he had no relatives called Clay James. The absolute confidence in her answer made Reacher wonder if she was more than just a receptionist. Although she wasn’t in Antigua with him. Maybe she had just worked for him a long time.

“So what now?” Pauling said.

“We’ll try the first two again later,” Reacher said. “Apart from that, it’s back to growing old together.”

But Pauling’s Pentagon buddy was on some kind of a roll because eleven minutes later her cell buzzed again and the guy came through with more information. Reacher saw Pauling put it all down on a yellow pad in fast scrawled handwriting that he couldn’t read upside down and from a distance. Two pages of notes. It was a long call. So long that when it was over Pauling checked the battery icon on her phone and plugged it into a charger.

“Hobart’s address?” Reacher asked her.

“Not yet,” Pauling said. “The VA is balking. There are confidentiality issues.”

“Where he lives isn’t a medical diagnosis.”

“That’s the point my friend is making.”

“So what did he have for us?”

Pauling flipped back to the first page of her notes.

“Lane is on an official Pentagon shit list,” she said.

“Why?”

“You know what Operation Just Cause was?”

“Panama,” Reacher said. “Against Manuel Noriega. More than fifteen years ago. I was there, briefly.”

“Lane was there, too. He was still in uniform back then. He did very well there. That’s where he made full colonel. Then he went to the Gulf the first time around and then he quit under a bit of a cloud. But not enough of a cloud to stop the Pentagon hiring him on as a private contractor afterward. They sent him to Colombia, because he had a reputation as a Central and South America expert, because of his performance during Just Cause. He took the beginnings of his present crew with him to fight one of the cocaine cartels. He took our government’s money to do it but when he got there he also took the target cartel’s money to go wipe out one of their rival cartels instead. The Pentagon wasn’t all that upset because one cartel is as bad as another to them, but they never really trusted Lane afterward and never hired him again.”

“His guys said they’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Pauling nodded. “After the Twin Towers all kinds of people went all kinds of places. Including Lane’s crew. But only as subcontractors. In other words the Pentagon hired someone they trusted and that someone laid off some of the work to Lane.”

“And that was acceptable?”

“Honor was observed. The Pentagon never wrote another check with Lane’s name on it after that first time in Colombia. But later on they needed all the warm bodies they could get, so they looked the other way.”

“He’s been getting steady work,” Reacher said. “Plenty of income. He lives like a king and most of the African money is still in its original wrappers.”

“That just shows you how big this whole racket has gotten. My guy says since Colombia, Lane has been living off the crumbs from other men’s tables. That’s been his only option. Big crumbs at first, but they’re getting smaller. There’s a lot of competition now. Apparently he got rich that one time in Africa, but whatever is left from that payment is basically all the capital he’s got.”

“He makes out like he’s the big dog. He told me he had no rivals or partners.”

“Then he was lying. Or maybe in a sense he was telling the truth. Because he’s at the bottom of the pile. Strictly speaking he has no equals. Only superiors.”

“Was he subcontracting in Burkina Faso, too?” Reacher asked.

“He must have been,” Pauling said. “Otherwise why isn’t he in the records as a principal?”

“Was our government involved there?”

“It’s possible. Certainly my official friend seems a little tense.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s why he’s helping, isn’t it? This is not one MP to another. This is a bureaucracy trying to control the situation. Trying to manage the flow of information. This is someone deciding to feed us stuff privately so we don’t go blundering about and making a lot of noise in public.”

Pauling said nothing. Then her phone went off again. She tried to pick it up with the charger attached but the wire was too short. She unclipped it and answered. Listened for fifteen seconds and turned to a new page in her pad and wrote a dollar sign, and then two numbers, and then six zeroes. She clicked off the phone and spun the pad around so that Reacher could see what she had written.

“Twenty-one million dollars,” she said. “In cash. That’s how rich Lane got in Africa.”

“You were right,” Reacher said. “Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor.”

Pauling nodded. “The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government’s central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Reacher said.

Then he said: “OK.”

“OK what?”

“What’s half of twenty-one?”

“Ten and a half.”

“Exactly. Kate’s ransom was exactly half of the Burkina Faso payment.”

Silence in the room.

“Ten and a half million dollars,” Reacher said. “It always was a weird amount. But now it makes some kind of sense. Lane probably skimmed fifty percent as his profit. So Hobart got home and figured he was entitled to Lane’s share for his suffering.”

“Reasonable,” Pauling said.

“I would have wanted more,” Reacher said. “I would have wanted all of it.”

Pauling slid her fingernail down the fine print on the H page of the phone book and used the speaker to try the first two Hobart numbers again. She got the same two answering machines. She hung up. Her little office went quiet. Then her cell buzzed again. This time she unclipped the charger first and flipped the phone open. Said her name and listened for a moment and then turned to another fresh page in her yellow pad and wrote just three lines.

Then she closed her phone.

“We have his address,” she said.

CHAPTER 35

Pauling said, “Hobart moved in with his sister. To a building on Hudson Street that I’m betting is on the block between Clarkson and Leroy.”

“A married sister,” Reacher said. “Otherwise we would have found her name in the phone book.”

“Widowed,” Pauling said. “I guess she kept her married name, but she lives alone now. Or at least she did, until her brother came home from Africa.”

The widowed sister was called Dee Marie Graziano and she was right there in the phone book at an address on Hudson. Pauling dialed up a city tax database and confirmed her domicile.

“Rent-stabilized,” she said. “Been there ten years. Even with the cheap lease it’s going to be a small place.” She copied Dee Marie’s Social Security number and pasted it into a box in a different database. “Thirty-eight years old. Marginal income. Doesn’t work much. Doesn’t even get close to paying federal income taxes. Her late husband was a Marine, too. Lance Corporal Vincent Peter Graziano. He died three years ago.”

“In Iraq?”

“I can’t tell.” Pauling closed the databases and opened Google and typed Dee Marie Graziano. Hit the return key. Glanced at the results and something about them made her click off Google and open LexisNexis. The screen rolled down and came up with a whole page of citations.

“Well, look at this,” she said.

“Tell me,” Reacher said.

“She sued the government. State and the DoD.”

“For what?”

“For news about her brother.”

Pauling hit the print button and fed Reacher the pages one by one as they came off the machine. He read the hard copy and she read the screen. Dee Marie Graziano had waged a five-year campaign to find out what had happened to her brother Clay James Hobart. It had been a long, hard, bitter campaign. That was for sure. At the outset Hobart’s employer Edward Lane of Operational Security Consultants had signed an affidavit swearing that Hobart had been a subcontractor for the United States Government at the relevant time. So Dee Marie had gone ahead and petitioned her congressman and both her senators. She had called out of state to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate. She had written to newspapers and talked to journalists. She had been prepped for the Larry King show but had been canceled prior to the recording. She had hired an investigator, briefly. Finally she had found a pro bono lawyer and sued the Department of Defense. The Pentagon had denied any knowledge of Clay James Hobart’s activities subsequent to his last day in a USMC uniform. Then Dee Marie had sued the Department of State. Some fifth-rung State lawyer had come back and promised that Hobart would be put on file as a tourist missing in West Africa. So Dee Marie had gone back to pestering journalists and had filed a string of Freedom of Information Act petitions. More than half of them had already been denied and the others were still choked in red tape.

“She was really going at it,” Pauling said. “Wasn’t she? Metaphorically she was lighting a candle for her brother every single day for five years.”

“Like Patti Joseph,” Reacher said. “This is a tale of two sisters.”

“The Pentagon knew Hobart was alive after twelve months. And they knew where he was. But they kept quiet for four years. They let this poor woman suffer.”

“What was she going to do anyway? Lock and load and go to Africa and rescue him single-handed? Bring him back to stand trial for Anne Lane’s homicide?”

“There was never any evidence against him.”

“Whatever, keeping her in the dark was probably the best policy.”

“Spoken like a true military man.”

“Like the FBI is a fount of free information?”

“She could have gone over there and petitioned the new government in Burkina Faso personally.”

“That only works in the movies.”

“You’re very cynical, you know that?”

“I don’t have a cynical bone in my body. I’m realistic, is all. Shit happens.”

Pauling went quiet.

“What?” Reacher said.

“You said lock and load. You said Dee Marie could lock and load and go to Africa.”

“No, I said she couldn’t.”

“But we agree that Hobart picked up a new partner, right?” she said. “As soon as he got back? One that he trusts, and real fast?”

“Clearly,” Reacher said.

“Could it be the sister?”

Reacher said nothing.

“The trust would be there,” Pauling said. “Wouldn’t it? Automatically? And she was there, which would explain the speed. And the commitment would have been there, on her part. Commitment, and a lot of anger. So is it possible that the voice you heard on the car phone was a woman?”

Reacher was quiet for a beat.

“It’s possible,” he said. “I guess. I mean, it never struck me that way. Never. But that could just be a preconception on my part. An unconscious bias. Because those machines are tough. They could make Minnie Mouse sound like Darth Vader.”

“You said there was a lightness to the voice. Like a small man.”

Reacher nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Therefore like a woman. With the pitch altered an octave, it’s plausible.”

“It could be,” Reacher said. “Certainly whoever it was knew the West Village streets pretty well.”

“Like a ten-year resident would. Plus military jargon, from having had a husband and a brother in the Marine Corps.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Gregory told me a woman showed up in the Hamptons. A fat woman.”

“Fat?”

“Gregory said heavyset.”

“Surveillance?”

“No, she and Kate talked. They went walking on the beach.”

“Maybe it was Dee Marie. Maybe she’s fat. Maybe she was asking for money. Maybe Kate blew her off and that was the last straw.”

“This is about more than money.”

“But that doesn’t mean this isn’t at least partly about money,” Pauling said. “And judging by where she’s living Dee Marie needs money. Her share would be more than five million dollars. She might think of it like compensation. For five years of stonewalling. A million dollars a year.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said again.

“It’s a hypothesis,” Pauling said. “We shouldn’t rule it out.”

“No,” Reacher said. “We shouldn’t.”

Pauling pulled a city directory off her shelf and checked the Hudson Street address.

“They’re south of Houston,” she said. “Between Vandam and Charlton. Not between Clarkson and Leroy. We were wrong.”

“Maybe they like a bar a few blocks north,” Reacher said. “He couldn’t have called himself Charlton Vandam anyway. That’s way too phony.”

“Whatever, they’re only fifteen minutes from here.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. This is another brick in the wall, that’s all. One or both of them, whichever, they must be long gone already. They’d be crazy to stick around.”

“You think?”

“They’ve got blood on their hands and money in their pockets, Pauling. They’ll be in the Caymans by now. Or Bermuda, or Venezuela, or wherever the hell people go these days.”

“So what do we do?”

“We head over to Hudson Street, and we hope like crazy that the trail is still a little bit warm.”

CHAPTER 36

Between them in their previous lives and afterward Reacher and Pauling had approached probably a thousand buildings that may or may not have contained hostile suspects. They knew exactly how to do it. There was efficient back-and-forth tactical discussion. They were coming from a position of weakness, in that neither of them was armed and Hobart had met Pauling twice before. She had interviewed Lane’s whole crew at length after Anne Lane’s disappearance. Chances were Hobart would remember her even after the traumatic five-year interval. Balancing those disadvantages was Reacher’s strong conviction that the Hudson Street apartment would be empty. He expected to find nothing there except hastily tossed closets and one last can of rotting trash.

There was no doorman. It wasn’t that kind of a building. It was a boxy five-story tenement faced with dull red brick and a black iron fire escape. It was the last hold-out on a block full of design offices and bank branches. It had a chipped black door with an aluminum squawk box chiseled sideways into the frame. Ten black buttons. Ten nametags. Graziano was written neatly against 4L.

“Walk-up,” Pauling said. “Central staircase. Long thin front-to-back apartments, two to a floor, one on the left, one on the right. Four-L will be on the fourth floor, on the left.”

Reacher tried the door. It was locked and solid.

“What’s at the back?” he asked.

“Probably an air shaft between this and the back of the building on Greenwich.”

“We could rappel off the roof and come in through her kitchen window.”

“I trained for that at Quantico,” Pauling said. “But I never did it for real.”

“Neither did I,” Reacher said. “Not a kitchen. I did a bathroom window once.”

“Was that fun?”

“Not really.”

“So what shall we do?”

Normally Reacher would have hit a random button and claimed to be a UPS or FedEx guy. But he wasn’t sure whether that would work with this particular building. Courier deliveries probably weren’t regular occurrences there. And he figured it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Not a plausible time for pizza or Chinese food. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner. So he just hit every button except 4L’s and said in a loud slurred voice, “Can’t find my key.” And at least two households must have had an errant member missing because the door buzzed twice and Pauling pushed it open.

Inside was a dim center hallway with a narrow staircase on the right. The staircase ran up one floor and then doubled back and started over again at the front of the building. It was covered in cracked linoleum. It was illuminated with low wattage bulbs. It looked like a death trap.

“Now what?” Pauling asked.

“Now we wait,” Reacher said. “At least two people are going to be sticking their heads out looking for whoever lost their key.”

So they waited. One minute. Two. Way above them in the gloom a door opened. Then closed again. Then another door opened. Closer. Second floor, maybe. Thirty seconds later it slammed shut.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Now we’re good to go.”

He put his weight on the bottom tread of the staircase and it creaked loudly. The second tread was the same. And the third. As he stepped onto the fourth Pauling started up behind him. By the time he was halfway up the whole structure was creaking and cracking like small arms fire.

They made it to the second floor hallway with no reaction from anywhere.

In front of them at the top of the stairs were two paired doors, one on the left and one on the right. 2L and 2R. Clearly these were railroad flats with front-to-back corridors that dog-legged halfway along their lengths to accommodate the entrances. Probably there were wall-mounted coat hooks just inside the doors. Straight ahead to the living rooms. Kitchens in the back. Turn back on yourself at the door, you would find the bathroom, and then the bedroom at the front of the building, overlooking the street.

“Not so bad,” Reacher said, quietly.

Pauling said, “I wouldn’t want to carry my groceries up to five.”

Since childhood Reacher had never carried groceries into a home. He said, “You could throw a rope off the fire escape. Haul them up through the bedroom.”

Pauling said nothing to that. They turned one-eighty together and walked the length of the hallway to the foot of the next flight of stairs. Stepped noisily up to three. 3L and 3R were right there in front of them, identical to the situation one floor below and presumably identical to the situation one floor above.

“Let’s do it,” Reacher said.

They walked through the hallway and turned and glanced up into the fourth floor gloom. They could see 4R’s door. Not 4L’s. Reacher went first. He took the stairs two at a time to cut the number of creaks and cracks by half. Pauling followed, putting her feet near the edges of the treads where any staircase is quieter. They made it to the top. Stood there. The building hummed with the kind of subliminal background noises you find in any packed dwelling in a big city. Muted traffic sounds from the street. The blare of car horns and the wail of sirens, dulled by the thickness of walls. Ten refrigerators running, window air conditioners, room fans, TV, radio, electricity buzzing through faulty fluorescent ballasts, water flowing through pipes.

4L’s door had been painted a dull institutional green many years previously. Old, but there was nothing wrong with the job. Probably a union painter, well trained by a long and painstaking apprenticeship. The careful sheen was overlaid with years of grime. Soot from buses, grease from kitchens, rail dust from the subways. There was a clouded spy lens about level with Reacher’s chest. The 4 and the L were separate cast-brass items attached straight and true with brass screws.

Reacher turned sideways and bent forward from the waist. Put his ear on the crack where the door met the jamb. Listened for a moment.

Then he straightened up.

“There’s someone in there,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 37

Reacher bent forward and listened again. “Straight ahead. A woman, talking.” Then he straightened up and stepped back. “What’s the layout going to be?”

“A short hallway,” Pauling whispered. “Narrow for six feet, until it clears the bathroom. Then maybe it opens out to the living room. The living room will be maybe twelve feet long. The back wall will have a window on the left into the light well. Kitchen door on the right. The kitchen will be bumped out to the back. Maybe six or seven feet deep.”

Reacher nodded. Worst case, the woman was in the kitchen, a maximum twenty-five feet away down a straight and direct line of sight to the door. Worse than worst case, she had a loaded gun next to her on the countertop and she knew how to shoot.

Pauling asked, “Who’s she talking to?”

Reacher whispered, “I don’t know.”

“It’s them, isn’t it?”

“They’d be nuts to still be here.”

“Who else can it be?”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling asked, “What do you want to do?”

“What would you do?”

“Get a warrant. Call a SWAT team. Full body armor and a battering ram.”

“Those days are gone.”

“Tell me about it.”

Reacher took another step back. Pointed at 4R’s door.

“Wait there,” he said. “If you hear shooting, call an ambulance. If you don’t, follow me in six feet behind.”

“You’re just going to knock?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not exactly.”

He took another step back. He was six feet five inches tall and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather. Size twelve. The soles were heavy composite items bought in from a company called Dainite. Reacher hated leather soles. They wore out too fast and stayed wet too long after rain. Dainites were better. Their heels were a five-layer stack an inch and a quarter thick. The Cheaney leather welt, the Dainite welt, two slabs of hard Cheaney leather, and a thick Dainite cap.

Each shoe on its own weighed more than two pounds.

4L’s door had three keyholes. Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into. The door itself was probably hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Same for the frame. Cheap to start with, damp and swelled all through a hundred summers, dry and shrunken all through a hundred winters. A little eaten-out and wormy.

“Stand by now,” Reacher whispered.

He put his weight on his back foot and stared at the door and bounced like a high jumper going for a record. Then he launched. One pace, two. He smashed his right heel into the door just above the knob and wood splintered and dust filled the air and the door smashed open and he continued running without breaking stride. Two paces put him in the center of the living room. He stopped dead there. Just stood still and stared. Lauren Pauling crowded in behind him and stopped at his shoulder.

Just stared.

The apartment was laid out exactly as Pauling had predicted. A dilapidated kitchen dead ahead, a twelve-foot living room on the left with a worn-out sofa and a dim window onto a light well. The air was hot and still and foul. In the kitchen doorway stood a heavyset woman in a shapeless cotton shift. She had long brown hair parted in the center of her head. In one hand she held an open can of soup and in the other she held a wooden spoon. Her eyes and her mouth were open wide in bewilderment and surprise. She was trying to scream, but shock had punched all the air out of her lungs.

In the living room, horizontal on the worn-out sofa, was a man.

Not a man Reacher had ever seen before.

This man was sick. Prematurely old. He was savagely emaciated. He had no teeth. His skin was yellow and glittered with fever. All that was left of his hair were long wisps of gray.

He had no hands.

He had no feet.

Pauling said, “Hobart?”

There was nothing left that could surprise the man on the sofa. Not anymore. With a lot of effort he just moved his head and said, “Special Agent Pauling. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

He had a tongue. But with nothing else but gums in his mouth his speech was mumbled and indistinct. And weak. And faint. But he could talk. He could talk just fine.

Pauling looked at the woman and said, “Dee Marie Graziano?”

“Yes,” the woman said.

“My sister,” Hobart said.

Pauling turned back to him. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Africa,” Hobart said. “Africa happened to me.”

He was wearing stiff new denims, dark blue. Jeans, and a shirt. The sleeves and the pant legs were rolled to clear the stumps of his wrists and his shins, which were all smeared with a clear salve of some kind. The amputations were crude and brutal. Reacher could see the end of a yellow forearm bone protruding like a broken piano key. There was no stitching of the severed flesh. No reconstruction. Mostly just a thick mass of scarring. Like burns.

“What happened?” Pauling asked again.

“Long story,” Hobart said.

“We need to hear it,” Reacher said.

“Why? The FBI is here to help me now? After kicking down my sister’s door?”

“I’m not FBI,” Reacher said.

“Me either,” Pauling said. “Not anymore.”

“So what are you now?”

“A private investigator.”

Hobart’s eyes moved to Reacher’s face. “And you?”

“The same,” Reacher said. “More or less. Freelance. I don’t have a license. I used to be an MP.”

Nobody spoke for a minute.

“I was making soup,” Dee Marie Graziano said.

Pauling said, “Go ahead. Please. Don’t let us hold you up.”

Reacher stepped back through the hallway and pushed the shattered door as far shut as it would go. When he got back to the living room Dee Marie was in the kitchen with a flame under a saucepan. She was pouring the soup from the can into it. Stirring the soup with the spoon as it flowed. Pauling was still staring at the broken abbreviated man on the sofa.

“What happened to you?” she asked him for the third time.

“First he eats,” Dee Marie called.

CHAPTER 38

His sister sat on the sofa next to him and cradled Hobart’s head and fed him the soup slowly and carefully with a spoon. Hobart licked his lips after every mouthful and from time to time started to raise one or other of his missing hands to wipe a dribble off his chin. He would look at first perplexed for a fleeting second and then rueful, as if he were amazed at how long the memory of simple physical routines endured even after they were no longer possible. Each time it happened his sister would wait patiently for his handless wrist to return to his lap and then she would wipe his chin with a cloth, tenderly, lovingly, as if he were her child and not her brother. The soup was thick and made from some kind of a light green vegetable, maybe lentils or celery or asparagus, and by the time the bowl was empty the cloth was badly stained.

Pauling said, “We need to talk.”

“About what?” Hobart asked.

“About you.”

“I’m not much to talk about. What you see is what you get.”

“And Edward Lane,” Pauling said. “We need to talk about Edward Lane.”

“Where is he?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Five years ago,” Hobart said. “In Africa.”

“What happened there?”

“I was taken alive. Not smart.”

“And Knight, too?”

Hobart nodded.

“Knight too,” he said.

“How?” Reacher asked.

“You ever been to Burkina Faso?”

“I’ve never been anywhere in Africa.”

Hobart paused for a long moment. He seemed to decide to clam up, and then he seemed to change his mind and decide to talk.

“There was a civil war,” he said. “There usually is. We had a city to defend. We usually do. This time it was the capital. We couldn’t even say its name. I learned it later. It’s called Ouagadougou. But back then we called it O-Town. You were an MP. You know how that goes. The military deploys overseas and changes names. We think we’re doing it for intelligibility, but really we’re depersonalizing the place, psychologically. Making it ours, so we don’t feel so bad when we destroy it.”

“What happened there?” Pauling asked.

“O-Town was about the size of Kansas City, Missouri. All the action was to the northeast. The tree line was about a mile outside the city limit. Two roads in, radial, like spokes in a wheel. One was north of northeast and the other was east of northeast. We called them the One O’clock Road and the Two O’clock Road. Like the face of a wristwatch? If twelve o’clock was due north, there were roads at the one o’clock position and the two o’clock position. The One O’clock Road was the one we had to worry about. That’s the one the rebels were going to be using. Except they wouldn’t exactly be using it. They would be flanking it in the jungle. They would be twenty feet off the shoulder and we’d never see them. They were nothing but infantry, with nothing that wasn’t man-portable. They were going to be creeping along in the weeds, and we wouldn’t see them until they passed the tree line and came out in the open.”

“Tree line was a mile away?” Reacher said.

“Exactly,” Hobart said. “Not a problem. They had a mile of open ground to cross and we had heavy machine guns.”

“So where was the problem?”

“If you were them, what would you have done?”

“I would have moved to my left and outflanked you to the east. With at least half my force, maybe more. I would have stayed in the weeds and moved around and come out at you maybe from the four o’clock position. Coordinated attacks. Two directions. You wouldn’t have known which was your front and which was your flank.”

Hobart nodded. A small painful motion that brought out all the tendons in his scrawny neck.

“We anticipated exactly that,” he said. “We figured they’d be tracking the One O’clock Road with half their force on the right shoulder and the other half on the left shoulder. We figured about two miles out the half that was on the right shoulder as we were looking at it would wheel ninety degrees to its left and attempt an outflanking maneuver. But that meant that maybe five thousand guys would have to cross the Two O’clock Road. Spokes in a wheel, right? We’d see them. The Two O’clock Road was dead-straight. Narrow, but a clear cut through the trees for fifty miles. We could see all the way to the horizon. It was going to be like watching a crosswalk in Times Square.”

“So what happened?” Pauling asked.

“Knight and I had been together forever. And we had been Recon Marines. So we volunteered to set up forward OPs. We crawled out about three hundred yards and found a couple of good depressions. Old shell holes, from back in the day. Those places are always fighting. Knight set up with a good view of the One O’clock Road and I set up with a good view of the Two O’clock Road. Plan was if they didn’t attempt to outflank us we’d take them head-on and if we were making good progress with that our main force would come out to join us. If their attack was heavy Knight and I would fall back to the city limit and we’d set up a secondary line of defense there. And if I saw the outflanking maneuver in progress we’d fall back immediately and reorganize on two fronts.”

Reacher asked, “So where did it all go wrong?”

“I made two mistakes,” Hobart said. Just four words, but the effort of getting them out seemed to suddenly exhaust him. He closed his eyes and his lips tightened against his toothless gums and he started wheezing from the chest.

“He has malaria and tuberculosis,” his sister said. “You’re tiring him out.”

“Is he getting care?” Pauling asked.

“We have no benefits. The VA does a little. Apart from that I take him to the Saint Vincent’s ER.”

“How? How do you get him up and down the stairs?”

“I carry him,” Dee Marie said. “On my back.”

Hobart coughed hard and dribbled blood-flecked spittle down his chin. He raised his severed wrist high and wiped himself with what was left of his bicep. Then he opened his eyes.

Reacher asked him, “What two mistakes?”

“There was an early feint,” Hobart said. “About ten point men came out of the trees a mile ahead of Knight. They were going for death or glory, you know, running and firing unaimed. Knight let them run for about fifteen hundred yards and then he dropped them all with his rifle. I couldn’t see him. He was about a hundred yards away but the terrain was uneven. I crawled over to check he was OK.”

“And was he?”

“He was fine.”

“Neither of you had been wounded?”

“Wounded? Not even close.”

“But there had been small arms fire?”

“Some.”

“Go on.”

“When I got to Knight’s position I realized I could see the Two O’clock Road even better from his hole than from mine. Plus I figured when the shooting starts it’s always better to be paired up. We could cover each other for jams and reloads. So that was my first mistake. I put myself in the same foxhole as Knight.”

“And the second mistake?”

“I believed what Edward Lane told me.”

CHAPTER 39

Reacher asked, “What did Edward Lane tell you?”

But Hobart couldn’t answer for a minute. He was consumed with another bout of coughing. His caved chest heaved. His truncated limbs flailed uselessly. Blood and thick yellow mucus rimed his lips. Dee Marie ducked back to the kitchen and rinsed her cloth and filled a glass with water. Wiped Hobart’s face very carefully and let him sip from the glass. Then she took him under the arms and hauled him into an upright position. He coughed twice more and then stopped as the fluid settled lower in his lungs.

“It’s a balance,” Dee Marie said, to nobody in particular. “We need to keep his chest clear but coughing too much wears him out.”

Reacher asked, “Hobart? What did Lane tell you?”

Hobart panted for a moment and fixed his eyes on Reacher’s in a mute appeal for patience. Then he said, “About thirty minutes after that first feint Lane showed up in Knight’s foxhole. He seemed surprised to see me there, too. He checked that Knight was OK and told him to stay with the mission. Then he turned to me and told me he had definitive new intelligence that we were going to see men crossing the Two O’clock Road but that they would be government troops coming in from the bush and circling around to reinforce us through the rear. He said they had been on a night march and were taking it slow and stealthy because they were so close to the rebels. Both sides were incoming on parallel tracks less than forty yards apart. No danger of visual contact because of how thick the vegetation was, but they were worried about noise. So Lane told me to sit tight and watch the road and just count them cross it, and the higher the number was the better I should feel about it, because they were all on our side.”

“And you saw them?”

“Thousands and thousands of them. Your basic ragtag army, all on foot, no transport, decent firepower, plenty of Browning automatic rifles, some M60s, some light mortars. They crossed two abreast and it took hours.”

“And then?”

“We sat tight. All day, and into the night. Then all hell broke loose. We had night scopes and we could see what was happening. About five thousand guys just stepped out of the trees and assembled on the One O’clock Road and started marching straight toward us. At the same time another five thousand stepped out of the brush just south of the four o’clock position and came straight at us. They were the same guys I had counted earlier. They weren’t government troops. They were rebels. Lane’s new intelligence had been wrong. At least that’s what I thought at first. Later I realized he had lied to me.”

“What happened?” Pauling said.

“At first nothing computed. The rebels started firing from way too far away. Africa’s a big continent but most of them probably missed it. At that point Knight and I were kind of relaxed. Plans are always bullshit. Everything in war is improvisation. So we expected some suppressing fire from behind us to allow us to fall back. But it never came. I was turned around staring at the city behind me. It was just three hundred yards away. But it was all dark and silent. Then I turned back and saw these ten thousand guys coming at me. Two different directions ninety degrees apart. Dead of night. Suddenly I had the feeling Knight and I were the only two Westerners left in-country. Turns out I was probably right. The way I pieced it together afterward, Lane and all the other crews had pulled out twelve hours before. He must have gotten back from his little visit with us and just hopped straight into his jeep. Mounted everyone up and headed due south for the border with Ghana. Then to the airport at Tamale, which was where we came in.”

Reacher said, “What we need to know is why he did that.”

“That’s easy,” Hobart said. “I had plenty of time to figure it out afterward, believe me. Lane abandoned us because he wanted Knight dead. I just happened to be in the wrong foxhole, that’s all. I was collateral damage.”

“Why did Lane want Knight dead?”

“Because Knight killed Lane’s wife.”

CHAPTER 40

Pauling asked, “Did Knight confess that to you directly?”

Hobart didn’t answer. Just waved the stump of his right wrist, weakly, vaguely, a dismissive little gesture.

“Did Knight confess to killing Anne Lane?”

Hobart said, “He confessed to about a hundred thousand different things.” Then he smiled, ruefully. “You had to be there. You had to know how it was. Knight was raving for four years. He was completely out of his mind for three. Me too, probably.”

“So how was it?” Pauling asked. “Tell us.”

Dee Marie Graziano said, “I don’t want to hear this again. I can’t hear this again. I’m going out.”

Pauling opened her purse and took out her wallet. Peeled off part of her wad. Didn’t count it. Just handed the sheaf of bills straight to Dee Marie.

“Get stuff,” she said. “Food, medicine, whatever you need.”

Dee Marie said, “You can’t buy his testimony.”

“I’m not trying to,” Pauling said. “I’m trying to help, that’s all.”

“I don’t like charity.”

“Then get over it,” Reacher said. “Your brother needs everything he can get.”

“Take it, Dee,” Hobart said. “Be sure to get something for yourself.”

Dee Marie shrugged, then took the money. Jammed it in the pocket of her shift and collected her keys and walked out. Reacher heard the front door open. The hinges squealed where he had damaged them. He stepped into the hallway.

“We should call a carpenter,” Pauling said, from behind him.

“Call that Soviet super from Sixth Avenue,” Reacher said. “He looked competent and I’m sure he moonlights.”

“You think?”

Reacher whispered, “He was with the Red Army in Afghanistan. He won’t freak when he sees a guy with no hands and no feet.”

“You talking about me?” Hobart called.

Reacher followed Pauling back to the living room and said, “You’re lucky to have a sister like that.”

Hobart nodded. The same slow, painful movement.

“But it’s hard on her,” he said. “You know, with the bathroom and all. She has to see things a sister shouldn’t see.”

“Tell us about Knight. Tell us about the whole damn thing.”

Hobart laid his head back on the sofa cushion. Stared up at the ceiling. With his sister gone, he seemed to relax. His ruined body settled and quieted.

“It was one of those unique moments,” he said. “Suddenly we were sure we were alone, outnumbered ten thousand to two, dead of night, in no man’s land, in the middle of a country we had no right be in. I mean, you think you’ve been in deep shit before, and then you realize you have absolutely no conception of how deep shit can really be. At first we didn’t do anything. Then we just looked at each other. That was the last moment of true peace I ever felt. We looked at each other and I guess we just took an unspoken decision to go down fighting. Better to die, we figured. We all have to die sometime, and that looked like as good an occasion as any. So we started firing. I guess we figured they’d lay some mortar rounds on us and that would be that. But they didn’t. They just kept on coming, tens and twenties, and we just kept on firing, putting them down. Hundreds of them. But they kept on coming. Now I guess it was a tactic. We started to have equipment problems, like they knew we would. Our M60 barrels overheated. We started to run short of ammunition. We only had what we had been able to carry. When they sensed it, they all charged. OK, I thought, bring it on. I figured bullets or bayonets right there in the hole would be as good as mortar rounds from a distance.”

He closed his eyes and the little room went quiet.

“But?” Reacher said.

Hobart opened his eyes. “But it didn’t happen that way. They got to the lip of the hole and stopped and just stood there. Waited in the moonlight. Watched us floundering around looking for fresh clips. We didn’t have any. Then the crowd parted and some kind of an officer walked through. He looked down at us and smiled. Black face, white teeth, in the moonlight. It hit us then. We thought we’d been in deep shit before, but that was nothing. This was deep shit. We’d just killed hundreds of their guys and we were about to be captured.”

“How did it go down?”

“Surprisingly well, at the beginning. They stole everything of any value immediately. Then they slapped us around a little bit for a minute, but it was really nothing. I had worse from the NCOs in boot camp. We had these little Stars and Stripes patches on our BDUs, and I thought maybe they counted for something. The first few days were chaos. We were chained all the time, but that was more out of necessity than cruelty. They had no jail facilities. They had nothing, really. They’d been living in the bush for years. No infrastructure. But they fed us. Appalling food, but it was the same as they were eating, and it’s the thought that counts. Then after a week it was clear the coup had succeeded, so they all moved into O-Town proper and took us with them and put us in the city prison. We were in a separate wing for about four weeks. We figured they were maybe negotiating with Washington. They fed us and left us alone. We could hear bad stuff elsewhere in the building, but we figured we were special. So altogether the first month was a day at the beach compared to what came later.”

“What came later?”

“Evidently they gave up on Washington or stopped thinking we were special because they took us out of the separate wing and tossed us in with some of the others. And that was bad. Real bad. Incredible overcrowding, filth, disease, no clean water, almost no food. We were skeletons inside a month. Savages after two. I went six months without even lying down, the first cell was so crowded. We were ankle deep in shit, literally. There were worms. At night the place crawled with them. People were dying from disease and starvation. Then they put us on trial.”

“You had a trial?”

“I guess it was a trial. War crimes, probably. I had no idea what they were saying.”

“Weren’t they speaking French?”

“That’s for government and diplomacy. The rest of them speak tribal languages. It was just two hours of noise to me, and then they found us guilty. They took us back to the big house and we found out that the part we’d already been in was the VIP accommodations. Now we were headed for general population, which was a whole lot worse. Two months later I figured I was about as low as I could go. But I was wrong. Because then I had a birthday.”

“What happened on your birthday?”

“They gave me a present.”

“Which was?”

“A choice.”

“Of what?”

“They hauled out about a dozen guys. I guess we all shared the same birthday. They took us to a courtyard. First thing I noticed was a big bucket of tar on a propane burner. It was bubbling away. Real hot. I remembered the smell from when I was a kid, from when they were blacktopping roads where I lived. My mother believed some old superstition that said if a kid sniffed the tar smell it would protect him from getting coughs and colds. She would send us out to chase the trucks. So I knew the smell real well. Then I saw next to the bucket was a big stone block, all black with blood. Then some big guard grabbed a machete and started screaming at the first guy in line. I had no idea what he was saying. The guy next to me spoke a little English and translated for me. He said we had a choice. Three choices, actually. To celebrate our birthdays we were going to lose a foot. First choice, left or right. Second choice, long pants or short pants. That was a kind of joke. It meant we could be cut above the knee or below. Our choice. Third choice, we could use the bucket or not. Our choice. You plunge the stump in there, the boiling tar seals the arteries and cauterizes the wound. Choose not to, and you bleed out and die. Our choice. But the guard said we had to choose fast. We weren’t allowed to mess around and hold up the queue behind us.”

Silence in the tiny room. Nobody spoke. There was no sound at all, except faint incongruous New York City sirens in the far distance.

Hobart said, “I chose left, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”

CHAPTER 41

For a long time the small room stayed quiet as a tomb. Hobart rolled his head from side to side to ease his neck. Reacher sat down in a small chair near the window.

Hobart said, “Twelve months later on my next birthday I chose right, long pants, and yes to the bucket.”

Reacher said, “They did this to Knight, too?”

Hobart nodded. “We thought we had been close before. But some things really bring you together.”

Pauling was leaning up in the kitchen doorway, white as a sheet. “Knight told you about Anne Lane?”

“He told me about a lot of things. But remember, we were doing seriously hard time. We were sick and starving. We had infections. We had malaria and dysentery. We were out of our heads for weeks at a time with fevers.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me he shot Anne Lane in New Jersey.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He gave me a whole bunch of different reasons. Different day, different reason. Sometimes it was that he had been having an affair with her, and she broke it off, and he got mad. Other times it was that Lane was mad at her and asked him to do it. Other times he said he was working for the CIA. Once he said she was an alien from another planet.”

“Did he kidnap her?”

Hobart nodded, slowly, painfully. “Drove her to the store, but didn’t stop there. Just pulled a gun and kept on going, all the way to New Jersey. Killed her there.”

“Immediately?” Pauling asked.

Hobart said, “Yes, immediately. She was dead a day before you ever even heard of her. There was nothing wrong with your procedures. He killed her that first morning and drove back and waited outside the store until it was time to sound the alarms.”

“Not possible,” Pauling said. “His EZ-Pass records showed he hadn’t used a bridge or a tunnel that day.”

“Give me a break,” Hobart said. “You pull the tag off the windshield and put it in the foil packet they mailed it in. Then you use a cash lane.”

“Were you really in Philadelphia?” Reacher asked.

“Yes, I really was,” Hobart said.

“Did you know what Knight was doing that day?”

“No, I really didn’t.”

“Who faked Anne’s voice on the phone?” Pauling asked. “Who set up the ransom drop?”

“Sometimes Knight would say it was a couple of his buddies. Sometimes he would say Lane took care of all of that.”

“Which version did you believe?”

Hobart’s head dropped to his chest and canted left. He stared toward the floor. Reacher asked, “Can I get you something?”

“I’m just looking at your shoes,” Hobart said. “I like nice shoes, too. Or at least I did.”

“You’ll get prosthetics. You can wear shoes with them.”

“Can’t afford them. Prosthetics, or shoes.”

Pauling said, “What was the truth about Anne Lane?”

Hobart pulled his head back to the cushion so he could look straight up at Pauling. He smiled, sadly.

“The truth about Anne Lane?” he said. “I thought about that a lot. Believe me, I obsessed over it. It became the central question of my life, because basically it was responsible for what was happening to me. The third birthday I spent in there, they took me back to the courtyard. The second choice was phrased slightly different. Long sleeves or short? Stupid question, really. Nobody ever chose short sleeves. I mean, who the hell would? I saw a thousand amputees in there and nobody ever took it above the elbow.”

Silence in the room.

“The things you remember,” Hobart said. “I remember the stink of the blood and the tar bucket and the pile of severed hands behind that big stone block. A bunch of black ones and one little white one.”

Pauling asked, “What was the truth about Anne?”

“The waiting was the hardest part. I spent a year looking at my right hand. Doing things with it. Making a fist, spreading my fingers, scratching myself with my nails.”

“Why did Knight kill Anne Lane?”

“They weren’t having an affair. Not possible. Knight wasn’t that type of a guy. I’m not saying he had scruples. He was just a little timid around women, that’s all. He did OK with trash in bars or with hookers, but Anne Lane was way out of his league. She was classy, she had personality, she had energy, she knew who she was. She was intelligent. She wouldn’t have responded to the kind of thing that Knight had to offer. Not in a million years. And Knight wouldn’t have offered anything anyway, because Anne was the CO’s wife. That’s the biggest no-no of all time for an American fighting man. In the movies they show it maybe, but not in real life. Just wouldn’t happen, and if it did, Knight would have been the last Marine on earth to try it.”

“You sure?”

“I knew him very well. And he didn’t have the kind of buddies that could have faked the voices. Certainly not a woman’s voice. He had no women friends. He didn’t have any friends outside of me and the unit. Not really. Not close enough for work like that. What Marine does? That’s when I knew he was bullshitting. There was nobody he knew where he could just walk up to them and say, hey, help me out with this phony kidnap thing, why don’t you?”

“So why did he even try bullshitting you?”

“Because he understood better than me that reality was over for us. There was really no difference between truth and fantasy for us at that point. They were of absolutely equal value. He was just amusing himself. Maybe he was trying to amuse me, too. But I was still analyzing stuff. He gave me a whole rainbow of reasons and details and facts and scenarios and I checked them over very carefully in my mind for five long years and the only story I really believed was that Lane set the whole thing up because Anne wanted out of the marriage. She wanted a divorce and she wanted alimony and Lane’s ego couldn’t take it. So he had her killed.”

“Why would Lane want Knight dead if all he had done was act on Lane’s own orders?”

“Lane was covering his ass. Tying up the loose ends. And he was avoiding being in someone else’s debt. That was the main thing, really. Ultimately that was the true reason. A guy like Lane, his ego couldn’t take that, either. Being grateful to someone.”

Silence in the room.

“What happened to Knight in the end?” Reacher asked.

“His fourth birthday,” Hobart said. “He didn’t go for the bucket. He didn’t want to go on. The pussy just quit on me. Some damn jarhead he was.”

CHAPTER 42

Ten minutes later Dee Marie Graziano got home. The squawk box in the hallway sounded and she asked for help carrying packages up the stairs. Reacher went down four flights and hauled four grocery bags back up to the apartment. Dee Marie unpacked them in the kitchen. She had bought a lot of soup, and Jell-O, and painkillers, and antiseptic creams.

Reacher said, “We heard that Kate Lane had a visitor in the Hamptons.”

Dee Marie said nothing.

“Was it you?” Reacher asked.

“I went to the Dakota first,” she said. “But the doorman told me they were away.”

“So then you went.”

“Two days later. We decided that I should. It was a long day. Very expensive.”

“You went there to warn Anne Lane’s successor.”

“We thought she should be told what her husband was capable of doing.”

“How did she react?”

“She listened. We walked on the sand and she listened to what I had to say.”

“That was all?”

“She took it all in. Didn’t react much.”

“How definite were you?”

“I said we had no proof. Equally I said we had no doubt.”

“And she didn’t react?”

“She just took it all in. Gave it a fair hearing.”

“Did you tell her about your brother?”

“It’s a part of the story. She listened to it. Didn’t say much. She’s beautiful and she’s rich. People like that are different. If it’s not happening to them, it’s not happening at all.”

“What happened to your husband?”

“Vinnie? Iraq happened to Vinnie. Fallujah. A roadside booby-trap.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They told me he was killed instantly. But they always say that.”

“Sometimes it’s true.”

“I hope it was. Just that one time.”

“The Corps or private?”

“Vinnie? The Corps. Vinnie hated private contractors.”

Reacher left Dee Marie in the kitchen and stepped back into the living room. Hobart’s head was laid back and his lips were stretched in a grimace. His neck was thin and bulging with ligaments. His torso was painfully wasted and looked bizarrely long in proportion to the stumps of his limbs.

“You need anything?” Reacher asked him.

Hobart said, “Silly question.”

“What would the three of clubs mean to you?”

“Knight.”

“How so?”

“Three was his lucky number. Club was his nickname in the Corps. Because of how he liked to party, and because of the pun on his name. Knight Club, nightclub, like that. They called him Club, back in the day.”

“He left a playing card on Anne Lane’s body. The three of clubs.”

“He did? He told me that. I didn’t believe him. I thought it was embellishment. Like a book or a movie.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I need the bathroom,” Hobart said. “Tell Dee.”

“I’ll do it,” Reacher said. “Let’s give Dee a break.”

He stepped over and bunched the front of Hobart’s shirt and hauled him upright. Slipped an arm behind his shoulders. Ducked down and caught him under the knees and lifted him up off the sofa. He was incredibly light. Probably close to a hundred pounds. Not much of him left.

Reacher carried Hobart to the bathroom and grabbed the front of his shirt again one-handed and held him vertical in the air like a rag doll. Undid his pants and eased them down.

“You’ve done this before,” Hobart said.

“I was an MP,” Reacher said. “I’ve done everything before.”

Reacher put Hobart back on the sofa and Dee Marie fed him more soup. Used the same damp cloth to clean his chin.

Reacher said, “I need to ask you both one important question. I need to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing for the last four days.”

Dee Marie answered. No guile, no hesitation, nothing phony or overrehearsed. Just a slightly incoherent and therefore completely convincing pieced-together narrative account of four random days from an ongoing nightmare. The four days had started with Hobart in Saint Vincent’s hospital. Dee Marie had taken him to the ER the night before with a severe malaria relapse. The ER doctor had admitted him for forty-eight hours of IV medication. Dee Marie had stayed with him most of the time. Then she had brought him home in a taxi and carried him on her back up the four flights of stairs. They had been alone in the apartment since then, eating what was in the kitchen cupboards, doing nothing, seeing nobody, until their door had smashed open and Reacher had ended up in the middle of their living room.

“Why are you asking?” Hobart said.

“The new Mrs. Lane was kidnapped. And her kid.”

“You thought I did it?”

“For a spell.”

“Think again.”

“I already have.”

“Why would I?”

“For revenge. For money. The ransom was exactly half the Burkina Faso payment.”

“I would have wanted all of it.”

“Me too.”

“But I wouldn’t have gone after a woman and a kid.”

“Me either.”

“So why pick me out?”

“We got a basic report on you and Knight. We heard about mutilations. No specific details. Then we heard about a guy with no tongue. We put two and two together and made three. We thought it was you.”

“No tongue?” Hobart said. “I wish. I’d take that deal.” Then he said, “But no tongue is a South American thing. Brazil, Colombia, Peru. Maybe Sicily in Europe. Not Africa. You can’t get a machete in somebody’s mouth. Lips, maybe. I saw that, sometimes. Or ears. But not the tongue.”

“We apologize,” Pauling said.

“No harm, no foul,” Hobart said.

“We’ll have the door fixed.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“And we’ll help you if we can.”

“I’d appreciate that, too. But see to the woman and the child first.”

“We think we’re already too late.”

“Don’t say that. It depends who took them. Where there’s hope, there’s life. Hope kept me going, five hard years.”

Reacher and Pauling left Hobart and Dee Marie right there, together on their battered sofa, the bowl of soup half-gone. They walked down four flights to the street and stepped out into the afternoon shadows of a fabulous late-summer day. Traffic ground past on the street, slow and angry. Horns blared and sirens barked. Fast pedestrians swerved by on the sidewalk.

Reacher said, “Eight million stories in the naked city.”

Pauling said, “We’re nowhere.”

CHAPTER 43

Reacher led Pauling north on Hudson, across Houston, to the block between Clarkson and Leroy. He said, “I think the man with no tongue lives near this spot.”

“Twenty thousand people live near this spot,” Pauling said.

Reacher didn’t reply.

“What now?” Pauling said.

“Back to the hard way. We wasted some time, that’s all. Wasted some energy. My fault entirely. I was stupid.”

“How?”

“Did you see how Hobart was dressed?”

“Cheap new denims.”

“The guy I saw driving the cars away was wearing old denims. Both times. Old, soft, washed, worn, faded, comfortable denims. The Soviet super said the same thing. And the old Chinese man. No way was the guy I saw just back from Africa. Or back from anywhere. It takes ages to get jeans and a shirt looking like that. The guy I saw has been safe at home for five years doing his laundry, not jammed up in some hellhole jail.”

Pauling said nothing.

“You can split now,” Reacher said. “You got what you wanted. Anne Lane wasn’t your fault. She was dead before you ever even heard of her. You can sleep at night.”

“But not well. Because I can’t touch Edward Lane. Hobart’s testimony is meaningless.”

“Because it’s hearsay?”

“Hearsay is sometimes OK. Knight’s dying declaration would be admissible, because the court would assume he had no motive to lie from his deathbed.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“There was no dying declaration. There were dozens of random fantasies spun over a four-year period. Hobart chose to back one of them, that’s all. And he freely admits that both he and Knight were as good as insane most of the time. I’d be laughed out of court, literally.”

“But you believed him.”

Pauling nodded. “No question.”

“So you can settle for half a loaf. Patti Joseph, too. I’ll drop by and tell her.”

“Would you be happy with half a loaf?”

“I said you can split. Not me. I’m not quitting yet. My agenda is getting longer and longer by the minute.”

“I’ll stick with it, too.”

“Your choice.”

“I know. You want me to?”

Reacher looked at her. Answered honestly. “Yes, I do.”

“Then I will.”

“Just don’t get all scrupulous on me. This thing isn’t going to be settled in any court of law with any dying declarations.”

“How is it going to be settled?”

“The first colonel I really fell out with, I shot him in the head. And so far I like Lane a lot less than that guy. That guy was practically a saint compared to Lane.”

“I’ll come with you to Patti Joseph’s.”

“No, I’ll meet you there,” Reacher said. “Two hours from now. We should travel separately.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to try to get killed.”

Pauling said she would be in the Majestic’s lobby in two hours and headed for the subway. Reacher started walking north on Hudson, not fast, not slow, center of the left-hand sidewalk. Twelve stories above him and ten yards behind his left shoulder was a north-facing window. It had heavy black cloth taped behind it. The cloth had been peeled back across a quarter of its width to make a tall narrow slit, as if a person in the room had wanted at least a partial view of the city.

Reacher crossed Morton, and Barrow, and Christopher. On West 10th he started zigzagging through the narrow tree-lined Village streets, east for a block, then north, then west, then north again. He made it to the bottom of Eighth Avenue and walked north for a spell and then started zigzagging again where the Chelsea side streets were quiet. He stopped in the lee of a brownstone’s front steps and bent down and retied his shoes. Walked on and stopped again behind a big square plastic trash bin and studied something on the ground. At West 23rd Street he turned east and then north again on Eighth. Stuck to the center of the left-hand sidewalk and slow-marched onward. Patti Joseph and the Majestic lay a little more than two miles ahead in a dead-straight line, and he had a whole hour to get there.

Thirty minutes later at Columbus Circle, Reacher entered Central Park. Daylight was fading. Shadows had been long, but now they were indistinct. The air was still warm. Reacher stuck to the paths for a spell and then he stepped off and walked a haphazard and unofficial route through the trees. He stopped and leaned against one trunk, facing north. Then another, facing east. He got back on the path and found an empty bench and sat down with his back to the stream of people walking past. He waited there until the clock in his head told him it was time to move.

Reacher found Lauren Pauling waiting in one of a group of armchairs in the Majestic’s lobby. She had freshened up. She looked good. She had qualities. Reacher found himself thinking that Kate Lane might have ended up looking like that, twenty years down the road.

“I stopped by and asked that Russian super,” she said. “He’ll go over later tonight to fix the door.”

“Good,” Reacher said.

“You didn’t get killed,” she said.

He sat down beside her.

“Something else I got wrong,” he said. “I’ve been assuming there was inside help from one of Lane’s crew. But now I don’t think there can have been. Yesterday morning Lane offered me a million bucks. This morning when he lost hope he told me to find the bad guys. Seek and destroy. He was about as serious as a man can get. Anyone watching from the inside would have to assume I was pretty well motivated. And I’ve shown them that I’m at least partially competent. But nobody has tried to stop me. And they would try, wouldn’t they? Any kind of an inside ally would be expected to. But they haven’t. I just spent two hours strolling through Manhattan. Side streets, quiet places, Central Park. I kept stopping and turning my back. I gave whoever it might be a dozen chances to take me out. But nobody tried.”

“Would they have been on your tail?”

“That’s why I wanted to start between Clarkson and Leroy. That’s got to be some kind of a base camp. They could have picked me up there.”

“How could they have done this whole thing without inside help?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“Say that again.”

“Why? You need inspiration?”

“I just like the sound of your voice.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Pauling said, low and husky, like she had been getting over laryngitis for the last thirty years.

They checked in at the desk and then rode up to seven in the elevator. Patti Joseph was out in the corridor, waiting for them. There was a little awkwardness when she and Pauling met. Patti had spent five years thinking Pauling had failed her sister, and Pauling had spent the same five years thinking pretty much the same thing. So there was ice to break. But the implied promise of news helped Patti thaw. And Reacher figured Pauling had plenty of experience with grieving relatives. Any investigator does.

“Coffee?” Patti said, before they were even in through the door.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Reacher said.

Patti went to the kitchen to set up the machine and Pauling walked straight to the window. Looked at the stuff on the sill, and then checked the view. Raised her eyebrows in Reacher’s direction and gave a small shrug that said: Weird, but I’ve seen weirder.

“So what’s up?” Patti called through.

Reacher said, “Let’s wait until we’re all sitting down.” And ten minutes later they all were, with Patti Joseph in tears. Tears of grief, tears of relief, tears of closure.

Tears of anger.

“Where is Knight now?” she asked.

“Knight died,” Reacher said. “And he died hard.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“No argument from me.”

“What are we going to do about Lane?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“I should call Brewer.”

“Brewer can’t do anything. There’s truth here, but there’s no evidence. Not the kind that a cop or a prosecutor needs.”

“You should tell the other guys about Hobart. Tell them what Lane did to their buddy. Send them down there to see for themselves.”

“Might not work. They might not care. Guys that were likely to care wouldn’t have obeyed the order in Africa in the first place. And now, even if they did care, the best way to deal with their own guilt would be to stay in denial. They’ve had five years’ practice.”

“But it might be worth it. To see with their own eyes.”

“We can’t risk it. Not unless we know for sure ahead of time what their reactions would be. Because Lane will assume Knight spilled the beans in prison. Therefore Lane will see Hobart as a loose end now. And a threat. Therefore Lane will want Hobart dead now. And Lane’s guys will do whatever the hell Lane tells them to. So we can’t risk it. Hobart’s a sitting duck, literally. A puff of wind would blow him away. And his sister would get caught in the crossfire.”

“Why are you here?”

“To give you the news.”

“Not here. In New York, in and out of the Dakota.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I’m not a fool,” Patti said. “I know what goes on. Who knows more than me? Who possibly could? And I know that the day after I stop seeing Kate Lane and Jade anymore, you show up and people put bags in cars and you hide in the back seat and you come here to interrogate Brewer about the last time one of Edward Lane’s wives disappeared.”

Reacher asked, “Why do you think I’m here?”

“I think he’s done it again.”

Reacher looked at Pauling and Pauling shrugged like maybe she agreed Patti deserved to hear the story. Like somehow she had earned the right through five long years of fidelity to her sister’s memory. So Reacher told her everything he knew. Told her all the facts, all the guesses, all the assumptions, all the conclusions. When he finished she just stared at him.

She said: “You think it’s real this time because of how good an actor he is?”

“No, I think nobody’s that good of an actor.”

“Hello? Adolf Hitler? He could work himself into all kinds of phony rages.”

Patti stood up and stepped over to an armoire drawer and pulled out a packet of photographs. Checked the contents and tossed the packet into Reacher’s lap. A fresh new envelope. A one-hour service. Thirty-six exposures. He thumbed through the stack. Top picture was of himself, face-on, coming out of the Dakota’s lobby, preparing to turn toward the subway on Central Park West. Early this morning, he thought. The B train to Pauling’s office.

“So?”

“Keep going.”

He thumbed backward and close to the end of the stack he saw Dee Marie Graziano, face on, coming out of the Dakota’s lobby. The sun in the west. Afternoon. The picture behind it showed her from the back, going in.

“That’s Hobart’s sister, am I right?” Patti said. “It has to be, according to your story. She’s in my notebook, too. Close to forty, overweight, not rich. Previously unexplained. But now I know. That’s when the Dakota doormen told her the family was in the Hamptons. Then she went out there.”

“So?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Kate Lane takes this weird woman walking on the beach, and she hears a weird and fantastical story, but there’s something about it and something about her husband that stops her from just dismissing it out of hand. Enough of a grain of truth there to make her think for a moment. Maybe enough to make her ask her husband for an explanation.”

Reacher said nothing.

Patti said, “In which case all hell would break loose. Don’t you see? Suddenly Kate is no longer a loyal and obedient wife. Suddenly she’s as bad as Anne was. And suddenly she’s a loose end, too. Maybe even a serious threat.”

“Lane would have gone after Hobart and Dee Marie, too. Not just Kate.”

“If he could find them. You only found them because of the Pentagon.”

“And the Pentagon hates Lane,” Pauling said. “They wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

“Two questions,” Reacher said. “If this is history repeating itself, Anne all over again, why is Lane pushing me to help?”

“He’s gambling,” Patti said. “He’s gambling because he’s arrogant. He’s putting on a show for his men, and he’s betting that he’s smarter than you are.”

“Second question,” Reacher said. “Who could be playing Knight’s part this time around?”

“Does that matter?”

“Yes, it matters. It’s an important detail, don’t you think?”

Patti paused. Looked away.

“It’s an inconvenient detail,” she said. “Because there’s nobody missing.” Then she said, “OK, I apologize. Maybe you’re right. Just because it was fake for Anne doesn’t mean it’s fake for Kate.” Then she said, “Just remember one thing, while you’re spending your time helping him. You’re not looking for a woman he loves. You’re looking for a prize possession. This is like somebody stole a gold watch from him, and he’s angry about it.”

Then out of what Reacher guessed was sheer habit Patti moved to the window and stood with her hands linked behind her back, staring out and down.

“It’s not over for me,” she said. “It won’t be over for me until Lane gets what he deserves.”

CHAPTER 44

Reacher and Pauling rode down to the Majestic’s lobby in silence. They stepped out to the sidewalk. Early evening. Four lanes of traffic, and lovers in the park. Dogs on leashes, tour groups, the bass bark of fire truck horns.

Pauling asked, “Where now?”

“Take the night off,” Reacher said. “I’m going back to the lions’ den.”

Pauling headed for the subway and Reacher headed for the Dakota. The doorman sent him up without making a call. Either Lane had put him on some kind of an approved list or the doorman had grown accustomed to his face. Either way it didn’t feel good. Poor security, and Reacher didn’t want to be recognized as part of Lane’s crew. Not that he expected to be around the Dakota ever again. It was way above his pay grade.

There was nobody waiting for him in the corridor on five. Lane’s door was closed. Reacher knocked and then found a bell button and pushed it. A minute later Kowalski opened up. The biggest of Lane’s guys, but no giant. Maybe six feet, maybe two hundred pounds. He seemed to be alone. There was nothing but stillness and silence behind him. He stepped back and held the door and Reacher stepped inside.

“Where is everybody?” Reacher asked.

“Out shaking the trees,” Kowalski said.

“What trees?”

“Burke has a theory. He thinks we’re being visited by ghosts from the past.”

“What ghosts?”

“You know what ghosts,” Kowalski said. “Because Burke told you first.”

“Knight and Hobart,” Reacher said.

“The very same.”

“Waste of time,” Reacher said. “They died in Africa.”

“Not true,” Kowalski said. “A friend of a friend of a friend called a VA clerk. Only one of them died in Africa.”

“Which one?”

“We don’t know yet. But we’ll find out. You know what a VA clerk makes?”

“Not very much, I guess.”

“Everyone has a price. And a VA clerk’s is pretty low.”

They moved through the foyer to the deserted living room. Kate Lane’s picture still had pride of place on the table. There was a recessed light fixture in the ceiling that put a subtle glow on it.

“Did you know them?” Reacher asked. “Knight and Hobart?”

“Sure,” Kowalski said.

“Did you go to Africa?”

“Sure.”

“So whose side are you on? Theirs or Lane’s?”

“Lane pays me. They don’t.”

“So you have a price, too.”

“Only a bullshitter doesn’t.”

“What were you, back in the day?”

“Navy SEAL.”

“So you can swim.”

Reacher stepped into the interior hallway and headed for the master bedroom. Kowalski kept close behind him.

“You going to follow me everywhere?” Reacher asked.

“Probably,” Kowalski said. “Where are you going anyway?”

“To count the money.”

“Is that OK with Lane?”

“He wouldn’t have given me the combination if it wasn’t.”

“He gave you the combination?”

I hope so, Reacher thought. Left hand. Index finger, curled. Ring finger, straight. Middle finger, straight. Middle finger, curled. 3785. I hope.

He pulled the closet door and entered 3785 on the security keypad. There was an agonizing second’s wait and then it beeped and the inner door’s latch clicked.

“He never gave me the combination,” Kowalski said.

“But I bet he lets you be the lifeguard out in the Hamptons.”

Reacher opened the inner door and pulled the chain for the light. The closet was about six feet deep and three wide. A narrow walk space on the left, money on the right. Bales of it. All of them were intact except for one that was opened and half-empty. That was the one Lane had thrown around the room and then repacked. Reacher dragged it out. Carried it to the bed and dumped it down. Kowalski stayed at his shoulder.

“You know how to count?” Reacher asked.

“Funny man,” Kowalski said.

“So count that.”

Reacher stepped back to the closet and eased in sideways and crouched. Hefted an intact plastic bale off the top of the pile and turned it over and over in his hands and checked all six sides. On one face under the legend Banque Centrale there was smaller print that said Gouvernement National, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Under that was printed: USD 1,000,000. The plastic was old and thick and grimy. Reacher licked the ball of his thumb and rubbed a small circle and saw Ben Franklin’s face. Hundred-dollar bills. Ten thousand of them in the bale. The heat shrink was original and untouched. A million bucks, unless the gentlemen bankers of Burkina Faso’s national government in O-Town had been cheating, which they probably hadn’t.

A million bucks, in a package about as heavy as a loaded carry-on suitcase.

Altogether there were ten intact bales. And ten empty wrappers.

A total of twenty million dollars, once upon a time.

“Fifty packets,” Kowalski called from the bed. “Ten thousand dollars each.”

“So how much is that?” Reacher called back.

Silence.

“What, you were out sick the day they taught multiplication?”

“It’s a lot of money.”

You got that right, Reacher thought. It’s five hundred grand. Half a million. Total of ten and a half million still here, total of ten and a half million gone.

Original grand total, back in the day, twenty-one million dollars.

The whole of the Burkina Faso payment, Lane’s capital, untouched for five years. Untouched until three days ago.

Kowalski appeared in the closet doorway with the torn wrapper. He had repacked the remaining money neatly into two equal stacks with one extra brick sideways across the top. Then he had bundled and folded the heavy plastic into a tidy package that was about half the original size and almost opaque.

Reacher said, “Were you out sick the day they taught numbers, too?”

Kowalski said nothing.

“Because I wasn’t,” Reacher said. “I showed up that day.”

Silence.

“See, there are even numbers and there are odd numbers. An even number would make two stacks the same size. I guess that’s why they call them even. But with an odd number, you’d have to lay the extra one sideways across the top.”

Kowalski said nothing.

“Fifty is an even number,” Reacher said. “Whereas, for instance, forty-nine is an odd number.”

“So what?”

“So take the ten grand you stole out of your pocket and give it to me.”

Kowalski stood still.

“Make a choice,” Reacher said. “You want to keep that ten grand, you’ll have to beat me in a fistfight. If you do, then you’ll want to take more, and you will take more, and then you’ll run. And then you’ll be on the outside, and Lane and his guys will come and shake the trees for you. You want it to be that way?”

Kowalski said nothing.

“You wouldn’t beat me anyway,” Reacher said.

“You think?”

“Demi Moore could kick your ass.”

“I’m a trained man.”

“Trained to do what? Swim? You see any water here?”

Kowalski said nothing.

“The first punch will decide it,” Reacher said. “It always does. So who are you going to back? The runt or the big guy?”

“You don’t want me for an enemy,” Kowalski said.

“I wouldn’t want you for a friend,” Reacher said. “That’s for damn sure. I wouldn’t want to go with you to Africa. I wouldn’t want to crawl up to a forward OP with you watching my back. I wouldn’t want to turn around and see you driving off into the sunset.”

“You don’t know how it was.”

“I know exactly how it was. You left two men three hundred yards up the line. You’re disgusting.”

“You weren’t there.”

“You’re a disgrace to the uniform you once wore.”

Kowalski said nothing.

“But you know which side your bread is buttered,” Reacher said. “Don’t you? And you don’t want to get caught biting the hand that feeds you. Do you?”

Kowalski held still for a long moment and then dropped the bundled package and reached behind him to his hip pocket and came back with a banded sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. It was folded in half. He dropped it on the floor and it resumed its former flat shape like a flower opening its petals. Reacher tucked it back in the open bale and heaved the bale onto the top of the stack. Pulled the chain and killed the light and closed the door. The electronic lock clicked and beeped.

“OK?” Kowalski said. “No harm, no foul, right?”

“Whatever,” Reacher said.

He led Kowalski back to the living room and then detoured to the kitchen and glanced in at the office. At the computer. At the file drawers. Something about them nagged at him. He stood in the empty silence for a second. Then a new thought struck him. Like an ice cube dropped down the back of his neck.

“What trees are they shaking?” he asked.

“Hospitals,” Kowalski said. “We figure whoever is back has got to be sick.”

“Which hospitals?”

“I don’t know,” Kowalski said. “All of them, presumably.”

“Hospitals don’t tell anyone anything.”

“You think? You know what an ER nurse makes?”

Silence for a moment.

“I’m going out again,” Reacher said. “You stay here.”

Three minutes later he was at the pay phone, dialing Pauling’s cell.

CHAPTER 45

Pauling answered on the second ring. Or the second vibration, Reacher thought. She said her name and Reacher asked, “You got a car?”

She said, “No.”

“Then jump in a cab and get over to Dee Marie’s place. Lane and his guys are out scouting hospitals, looking for either Knight or Hobart. They don’t know which one came back yet. But it’s only a matter of time before they hit Saint Vincent’s and get a match on Hobart’s name and buy his address. So I’ll meet you there. We’re going to have to move them.”

Then he hung up and flagged a cab of his own on Ninth Avenue. The driver was fast but the traffic was slow. It got a little better after they crossed Broadway. But not much. Reacher sprawled sideways on the seat and rested his head on the window. Breathed slow and easy. He thought: No use fretting about what you can’t control. And he couldn’t control Manhattan’s traffic. Red lights controlled Manhattan’s traffic. Approximately seventy-two of them between the Dakota Building and Hobart’s current billet.

Hudson Street runs one way south to north below West 14th so the cab took Bleecker and Seventh Avenue and Varick. Then it made the right into Charlton. Reacher stopped it halfway down the block and made the final approach on foot. There were three parked cars near Dee Marie’s place. But none of them was an expensive sedan with OSC plates. He glanced south at the oncoming traffic and hit 4L’s button. Pauling answered and Reacher said his name and the street door buzzed.

Up on the fourth floor the apartment door still hung open. Burst hinges, splintered frame. Beyond it were voices in the living room. Dee Marie’s, and Pauling’s. Reacher stepped inside and they stopped talking. They just glanced beyond him at the door. He knew what they were thinking. It was no kind of a secure barrier against the outside world. Dee Marie was still in her cotton shift but Pauling had changed. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She looked good. Hobart himself was where Reacher had last seen him, propped up on the sofa. He looked bad. Pale and sick. But his eyes were blazing. He was angry.

“Lane’s coming here?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Can’t discount the possibility.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to be smart. We’re going to make sure he finds an empty apartment.”

Hobart said nothing. Then he nodded, a little reluctantly.

“Where should you be?” Reacher asked him. “Medically?”

“Medically?” Hobart said. “I have no idea. I guess Dee Marie did some checking.”

Dee Marie said, “Birmingham, Alabama, or Nashville, Tennessee. One of the big university hospitals down there. I got brochures. They’re good.”

“Not Walter Reed?” Reacher said.

“Walter Reed is good when they get them fresh from the battlefield. But his left foot happened nearly five years ago. And even his right wrist is completely healed. Healed all wrong, but healed all the same. So he needs a whole lot of preliminary stuff first. Bone work, and reconstruction. And that’s after the malaria and the tuberculosis are taken care of. And the malnutrition and the parasites.”

“We can’t get him to Birmingham or Nashville tonight.”

“We can’t get him there ever. The surgery alone could be over two hundred thousand dollars. The prosthetics could be even more than that.” She picked up two brochures from a small table and handed them over. There were expensive graphics and glossy photographs on the fronts. Blue skies, green lawns, warm brick buildings. Inside were details of surgical programs and prosthetics designers. There were more photographs. Kindly men with white hair and white coats cradled mechanical limbs like babies. One-legged people in athletic vests braced themselves on sleek titanium struts at marathon start lines. The captions under the pictures were full of optimism.

“Looks good,” Reacher said. He handed the brochures back. Dee Marie put them exactly where they had been before, on the table.

“Pie in the sky,” she said.

“A motel tonight,” Pauling said. “Somewhere close. Maybe we could rent you a car. Can you drive?”

Dee Marie said nothing.

“Take the offer, Dee,” Hobart said. “Easier on you.”

“I have a license,” Dee Marie said.

“Maybe we could even rent a wheelchair.”

“That would be good,” Hobart said. “A ground floor room, and a wheelchair. Easier for you, Dee.”

“Maybe an efficiency,” Pauling said. “With a little kitchen. For the cooking.”

“I can’t afford it,” Dee Marie said.

The room went quiet and Reacher stepped out the front door and checked the hallway. Checked the stairwell. Nothing was happening. He came back inside and pulled the door as far closed as it would go. Turned left in the entry and walked past the bathroom to the bedroom. It was a small space nearly filled by a queen bed. He guessed Hobart slept there, because the night table was piled with tubes of antiseptic creams and bottles of over-the-counter painkillers. The bed was high. He pictured Dee Marie hoisting her brother on her back, turning around, reversing toward the bed, dumping him down on the mattress. He pictured her straightening him out, tucking him in. Then he pictured her heading for another night on the sofa.

The bedroom window had a wood frame and the glass was streaked with soot. There were faded drapes, three-quarters open. Ornaments on the sill, and a color photograph of a Marine Lance Corporal. Vinnie, Reacher guessed. The dead husband. Blown to bits on a Fallujah roadside. Killed instantly, or not. He had the bill of his dress cap low on his brow and the colors in the picture were vivid and smoothed and airbrushed. An off-post photographer, Reacher guessed. Two prints for about a day’s pay, two cardboard mailers included, one for the mother and one for the wife or the girlfriend. There were similar pictures of Reacher somewhere in the world. For a spell every time he got promoted he would have a picture taken and send it to his mother. She never displayed them, because he wasn’t smiling. Reacher never smiled for the camera.

He stepped close to the window and glanced north. Traffic flowed away from him like a river. He glanced south. Watched the traffic coming toward him.

And saw a black Range Rover slowing and pulling in to the curb.

License plate: OSC 19.

Reacher spun around and was out of the bedroom in three long strides. Back in the living room after three more.

“They’re here,” he said. “Now.”

Silence for a split second.

Then Pauling said, “Shit.”

“What do we do?” Dee Marie said.

“Bathroom,” Reacher said. “All of you. Now.”

He stepped over to the sofa and grabbed the front of Hobart’s denim shirt and lifted him into the air. Carried him to the bathroom and laid him gently in the tub. Dee Marie and Pauling crowded in after him. Reacher pushed his way past them and back out to the hallway.

“You can’t be out there,” Pauling said.

“I have to be,” Reacher said. “Or they’ll search the whole place.”

“They shouldn’t find you here.”

“Lock the door,” Reacher said. “Sit tight and keep quiet.”

He stood in the hallway and heard a click from the bathroom door and a second later the intercom buzzed from the street. He waited a beat and hit the button and said, “Yes?” Heard amplified traffic noise and then a voice. Impossible to tell whose it was.

It said: “VA visiting nurse service.”

Reacher smiled. Nice, he thought.

He hit the button again and said, “Come on up.”

Then he walked back to the living room and sat down on the sofa to wait.

CHAPTER 46

Reacher heard loud creaking from the staircase. Three people, he guessed. He heard them make the turn and start up toward four. Heard them stop at the head of the stairs, surprised by the broken door. Then he heard the door open. There was a quiet metallic groan from a damaged hinge and after that there was nothing but the sound of footsteps in the foyer.

First into the living room was Perez, the tiny Spanish guy.

Then Addison, with the knife scar above his eye.

Then Edward Lane himself.

Perez stepped left and stopped dead and Addison stepped right and stopped dead and Lane moved into the center of the small static arc and stood still and stared.

“The hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“I beat you to it,” Reacher said.

“How?”

“Like I told you. I used to do this for a living. I could give you guys a mirror on a stick and I’d still be hours ahead of you.”

“So where is Hobart?”

“Not here.”

“It was you who broke down the door?”

“I didn’t have a key.”

“Where is he?”

“In the hospital.”

“Bullshit. We just checked.”

“Not here. In Birmingham, Alabama, or Nashville, Tennessee.”

“How do you figure that?”

“He needs specialized care. Saint Vincent’s recommended one of those big university hospitals down south. They gave him literature.” Reacher pointed at the small table and Edward Lane broke ranks with his men and stepped over to pick up the shiny brochures. He flipped through both of them and asked, “Which one?”

Reacher said, “It doesn’t matter which one.”

“The hell it doesn’t,” Lane said.

“Hobart didn’t kidnap Kate.”

“You think?”

“No, I know.”

“How?”

“You should have bought more information than just his address. You should have asked why he was at Saint Vincent’s in the first place.”

“We did. They said malaria. He was admitted for IV chloroquine.”

“And?”

“And nothing. A guy just home from Africa can expect to have malaria.”

“You should have gotten the whole story.”

“Which is?”

Reacher said, “First, he was strapped down to a bed getting that IV chloroquine at the exact time that Kate was taken. And second, he has a pre-existing condition.”

“What condition?”

Reacher shifted his gaze and looked straight at Perez and Addison.

“He’s a quadruple amputee,” he said. “No hands, no feet, can’t walk, can’t drive, can’t hold a gun or dial a telephone.”

Nobody spoke.

“It happened in prison,” Reacher said. “Back in Burkina Faso. The new regime had a little fun. Once a year. On his birthday. Left foot, right foot, left hand, right hand. With a machete. Chop, chop, chop, chop.”

Nobody spoke.

“After you all ran away and left him behind,” Reacher said.

No reaction. No guilt, no remorse.

No anger.

Just nothing.

“You weren’t there,” Lane said. “You don’t know how it was.”

“But I know how it is now,” Reacher said. “Hobart’s not the guy you’re looking for. He’s not physically capable.”

“You sure?”

“Beyond certain.”

“I still want to find him,” Lane said.

“Why?”

No answer. Checkmate. Lane couldn’t say why without going all the way back and admitting what he had asked Knight to do for him five years previously, and he couldn’t do that without blowing his cover in front of his men.

“So we’re back at square one,” he said. “You know who it wasn’t. Great job, Major. You’re making real progress here.”

“Not quite square one,” Reacher said.

“How?”

“I’m close,” Reacher said. “I’ll give you the guy.”

“When?”

“When you give me the money.”

“What money?”

“You offered me a million bucks.”

“To find my wife. It’s too late now.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “So I won’t give you the guy. I’ll give you a mirror on a stick instead.”

Lane said, “Give me the guy.”

“Then meet my price.”

“You’re that kind of a man?”

“Only a bullshitter doesn’t have a price.”

“High price.”

“I’m worth it.”

“I could have it beaten out of you.”

“You couldn’t,” Reacher said. He hadn’t moved at all. He was sitting back on the sofa, relaxed, sprawled, arms resting easy along the back cushions, legs spread, six-five, two-fifty, a picture of supreme physical self-confidence. “You try that shit and I’ll bend you over and I’ll use Addison’s head to hammer Perez up your ass like a nail.”

“I don’t like threats.”

“This from the guy who said he’d have me blinded?”

“I was upset.”

“I was broke. I still am.”

Silence in the room.

“OK,” Lane said.

“OK what?” Reacher said.

“OK, a million bucks. When do I get the name?”

“Tomorrow,” Reacher said.

Lane nodded. Turned away. Said to his men, “Let’s go.”

Addison said, “I need the bathroom.”

CHAPTER 47

The air in the room was hot and still. Addison asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

Reacher stood up, slowly. Said, “What am I, the architect?” But he glanced over his left shoulder, at the kitchen door. Addison followed his gaze and moved a step in that direction and Reacher moved a step the other way. Just a subtle piece of psychological choreography, but due to the small size of the living room their relative positions were reversed. Now Reacher was nearer the bathroom.

Addison said, “I think that’s the kitchen.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Check it out.”

He moved into position in the mouth of the hallway and watched Addison open the kitchen door. Addison glanced inside just long enough to make sure what room it was and then he backed out. Then he stopped, in a slow-motion double-take. Checked again.

“When did Hobart go south?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Reacher said. “Today, I guess.”

“He sure left in a hurry. There’s soup on the stove.”

“You think he should have washed the dishes?”

“Most people do.”

“Most people with no hands?”

“So how was he cooking soup at all?”

“With help,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? Some welfare person, probably. The ambulance comes for Hobart, loads him up, you think some minimum-wage government housekeeper is going to stick around afterward and clean up? Because I don’t.”

Addison shrugged and closed the kitchen door.

“So where’s the bathroom?” he said.

Reacher said, “Go home and use yours.”

“What?”

“One day Hobart’s going to come back here with the kind of metal hands that can unzip his fly and he’s not going to want to think about you pissing in the same bowl as him.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not fit to piss in the same bowl as him. You left him behind.”

“You weren’t there.”

“For which you can thank your lucky stars. I’d have kicked your ass and dragged you up the line by your ears.”

Edward Lane took a step forward. “The sacrifice was necessary to save the unit.”

Reacher looked straight at him. “Sacrificing and saving are two different things.”

“Don’t question my orders.”

“Don’t question mine,” Reacher said. “Get these runts out of here. Let them piss in the gutter.”

Silence for a long moment. Nothing in Perez’s face, a scowl on Addison’s, shrewd judgment in Lane’s eyes.

“The name,” Lane said. “Tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there,” Reacher said.

Lane nodded to his men and they trooped out in the same order they had come in. First Perez, then Addison, with Lane bringing up the rear. Reacher listened to their feet on the stairs and waited for the street door to bang and then he stepped back to the bedroom. Watched them climb into the black Range Rover and take off north. He let a minute pass and when he judged they were through the light at Houston he walked back to the foyer and knocked on the bathroom door.

“They’re gone,” he said.

Reacher carried Hobart back to the sofa and sat him up like a rag doll. Dee Marie stepped into the kitchen and Pauling looked down at the floor and said, “We heard everything.”

Dee Marie said, “The soup is still warm. Lucky that guy didn’t get any closer.”

“Lucky for him,” Reacher said.

Hobart shifted his position on the sofa and said, “Don’t kid yourself. These are not pussycats. You were minutes away from getting hurt bad. Lane doesn’t hire nice people.”

“He hired you.”

“Yes, he did.”

“So?”

“I’m not a nice person,” Hobart said. “I fit right in.”

“You seem OK.”

“That’s just the sympathy vote.”

“So how bad are you?”

“I was dishonorably discharged. Kicked out of the Corps.”

“Why?”

“I refused an order. Then I beat the shit out of the guy who gave it to me.”

“What was the order?”

“To fire on a civilian vehicle. In Bosnia.”

“Sounds like an illegal order.”

Hobart shook his head. “No, my lieutenant was right. The car was full of bad guys. They wounded two of our own later that day. I screwed up.”

Reacher asked, “Suppose it had been Perez and Addison in those forward OPs in Africa? Would you have left them there?”

“A Marine’s job is to obey orders,” Hobart said. “And I had learned the hard way that sometimes officers know better.”

“Bottom line? No bullshit?”

Hobart stared into space. “I wouldn’t have left them there. No way on earth. I don’t see how anyone could. I sure as hell don’t see how they could have left me there. And I wish to God they hadn’t.”

“Soup,” Dee Marie said. “Time to stop talking and start eating.”

Pauling said, “We should move you first.”

“No need now,” Dee Marie said. “They won’t come back. Right now this is the safest place in the city.”

“It would be easier on you.”

“I’m not looking for easy. I’m looking for right.”

Then the buzzer from the street sounded and they heard a Russian accent on the intercom. The Soviet super from Sixth Avenue, come to fix the broken door. Reacher met him in the hallway. He was carrying a bag of tools and a length of spare lumber.

“Now we’re definitely OK,” Dee Marie said.

So Pauling just paid the Russian and she and Reacher walked down the stairs to the street.

Pauling was quiet and faintly hostile as they walked. She kept her distance and looked straight ahead. Avoided looking even close to Reacher’s direction.

“What?” he asked.

“We heard everything from the bathroom,” she said.

“And?”

“You signed on with Lane. You sold out. You’re working for him now.”

“I’m working for Kate and Jade.”

“You could do that for free.”

“I wanted to test him,” Reacher said. “I still need proof it’s for real this time. If it wasn’t, he’d have backed off. He’d have said the money was off the table because I was too late. But he didn’t. He wants the guy. Therefore there is a guy.”

“I don’t believe you. It’s a meaningless test. Like Patti Joseph said, Lane’s gambling. He’s putting on a show for his men and gambling that he’s smarter than you are.”

“But he had just found out that he’s not smarter than I am. I found Hobart before he did.”

“Whatever, this is about the money, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “It is.”

“At least you might try to deny it.”

Reacher smiled and kept on walking.

“You ever seen a million dollars in cash?” he asked. “Ever held a million dollars in your hands? I did, today. It’s a hell of a feeling. The weight, the density. The power. It felt warm. Like a little atom bomb.”

“I’m sure it was very impressive.”

“I wanted it, Pauling. I really did. And I can get it. I’m going to find the guy anyway. For Kate and Jade. I might as well sell his name to Lane. Doesn’t change the basic proposition.”

“It does. It makes you a mercenary. Just like them.”

“Money is a great enabler.”

“What are you going to do with a million dollars anyway? Buy a house? A car? A new shirt? I just don’t see it.”

“I’m often misunderstood,” he said.

“The misunderstanding was all mine. I liked you. I thought you were better than this.”

“You work for money.”

“But I choose who I work for, very carefully.”

“It’s a lot of money.”

“It’s dirty money.”

“It’ll spend just the same.”

“Well, enjoy it.”

“I will.”

She said nothing.

He said, “Pauling, give me a break.”

“Why would I?”

“Because first I’m going to pay you for your time and your services and your expenses, and then I’m going to send Hobart down to Birmingham or Nashville and get him fixed up right. I’m going to buy him a lifetime’s supply of spare parts and I’m going to rent him a place to live and I’m going to give him some walking-around money because my guess is he’s not very employable right now. At least not in his old trade. And then if there’s anything left, then sure, I’ll buy myself a new shirt.”

“Seriously?”

“Of course. I need a new shirt.”

“No, about Hobart?”

“Dead serious. He needs it. He deserves it. That’s for damn sure. And it’s only right that Lane should pay for it.”

Pauling stopped walking. Grabbed Reacher’s arm and stopped him, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I apologize.”

“Then make it up to me.”

“How?”

“Work with me. We’ve got a lot to do.”

“You told Lane you’d give him a name tomorrow.”

“I had to say something. I had to get him out of there.”

“Can we do it by tomorrow?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Where are we going to start?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

CHAPTER 48

They started in Lauren Pauling’s apartment. She lived in a small co-op on Barrow Street, near West 4th. The building had once been a factory and had vaulted brick ceilings and walls two feet thick. Her apartment was painted mostly yellow and felt warm and friendly. There was an alcove bedroom with no window, and a bathroom, and a kitchen, and a room with a sofa and a chair and a television set and a lot of books. There were muted rugs and soft textures and dark woods. It was a single woman’s place. That was clear. One mind had conceived it and decorated it. There were small framed photographs of children, but Reacher knew without asking that they were nephews and nieces.

He sat on the sofa and rested his head back on the cushion and stared up at the vaulted brick above. He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with. He started out with no doubt at all that he and Pauling could get the whole thing figured before morning.

That feeling lasted about thirty minutes.

Pauling dimmed the lights and lit a candle and called out for Indian food. The clock in Reacher’s head crawled around to nine-thirty. The sky outside the window turned from navy blue to black and the city lights burned bright. Barrow Street itself was quiet but the cabs on West 4th used their horns a lot. Occasionally an ambulance would scream by a couple of blocks over, heading up to Saint Vincent’s. The room felt like part of the city but a little detached, too. A little insulated. A partial sanctuary.

“Do that thing again,” Reacher said.

“What thing?”

“The brainstorming thing. Ask me questions.”

“OK, what have we got?”

“We’ve got an impossible takedown and a guy that can’t speak.”

“And the tongue thing is culturally unrelated to Africa.”

“But the money is related to Africa, because it’s exactly half.”

Silence in the room. Nothing but a faraway siren burning past, going south on Seventh Avenue.

“Start at the very beginning,” Pauling said. “What was the very first false note? The first red flag? Anything at all, however trivial or random.”

So Reacher closed his eyes and recalled the beginning: the granular feel of the foam espresso cup in his hand, textured, temperature-neutral, neither warm nor cold. He recalled Gregory’s walk in from the curb, alert, economical. His manner while questioning the waiter, watchful, aware, like the elite veteran he was. His direct approach to the sidewalk table.

Reacher said, “Gregory asked me about the car I had seen the night before and I told him it drove away before eleven forty-five, and he said no, it must have been closer to midnight.”

“A dispute about timing?”

“Not really a dispute. Just a trivial thing, like you said.”

“What would it mean?”

“That I was wrong or he was.”

Pauling said, “You don’t wear a watch.”

“I used to. I broke it. I threw it away.”

“So he was more likely to be right.”

“Except I’m usually pretty sure what time it is.”

“Keep your eyes closed, OK?”

“OK.”

“What time is it now?”

“Nine thirty-six.”

“Not bad,” Pauling said. “My watch says nine thirty-eight.”

“Your watch is fast.”

“Are you serious?”

Reacher opened his eyes. “Absolutely.”

Pauling rooted around on her coffee table and came up with the TV remote. Turned on the Weather Channel. The time was displayed in the corner of the screen, piped in from some official meteorological source, accurate to the second. Pauling checked her watch again.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m two minutes fast.”

Reacher said nothing.

“How do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it was twenty-four hours after the event that Gregory asked you about it. How precise could you have been?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What would it mean if Gregory was wrong and you were right?”

“Something,” Reacher said. “But I’m not sure what exactly.”

“What was the next thing?”

Right now more likely death than life, Gregory had said. That had been the next thing. Reacher had checked his cup again and seen less than a lukewarm eighth-inch of espresso left, all thick and scummy. He had put it down and said OK, so let’s go.

He said, “Something about getting into Gregory’s car. The blue BMW. Something rang a bell. Not right then, but afterward. In retrospect.”

“You don’t know what?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Then we arrived at the Dakota and it was off to the races.” The photograph, Reacher thought. After that, everything was about the photograph.

Pauling said, “We need to take a break. We can’t force these things.”

“You got beer in the refrigerator?”

“I’ve got white wine. You want some?”

“I’m being selfish. You didn’t blow it five years ago. You did everything right. We should take a minute to celebrate that.”

Pauling was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled.

“We should,” she said. “Because to be honest it feels really good.”

Reacher went with her to the kitchen and she took a bottle out of the refrigerator and he opened it with a corkscrew from a drawer. She took two glasses from a cupboard and set them side by side on the counter. He filled them. They picked them up and clinked them together.

“Living well is the best revenge,” he said.

They each took a sip and moved back to the sofa. Sat close together. He asked, “Did you quit because of Anne Lane?”

She said, “Not directly. I mean, not right away. But ultimately, yes. You know how these things are. It’s like a naval convoy where one of the battleships gets holed below the waterline. No visible damage, but it falls a little behind, and then a little more, and it drifts a little off course, and then when the next big engagement comes along it’s completely out of sight. That was me.”

He said nothing.

She said, “But maybe I was maxed out anyway. I love the city and I didn’t want to move, and head of the New York office is an Assistant Director’s job. It was always a long shot.”

She took another sip of wine and pulled her legs up under her and turned a little sideways so she could see him better. He turned a little too, until they were more or less facing each other from a foot away.

“Why did you quit?” she asked him.

He said, “Because they told me I could.”

“You were looking to get out?”

“No, I was looking to stay in. But as soon as they said that leaving was an option it kind of broke the spell. Made me realize I wasn’t personally essential to their plans. I guess they’d have been happy enough if I stayed, but clearly it wasn’t going to break their hearts if I went.”

“You need to be needed?”

“Not really. It just broke the spell, is all. I can’t really explain it.” He stopped talking and watched her, silent. She looked great in the candlelight. Liquid eyes, soft skin. Reacher liked women as much as any guy and more than most but he was always ready to find something wrong with them. The shape of an ear, the thickness of an ankle, height, size, weight. Any random thing could ruin it for him. But there was nothing wrong with Lauren Pauling. Nothing at all. That was for sure.

“Anyway, congratulations,” he said. “Sleep well tonight.”

“Maybe I will,” she said.

Then she said, “Maybe I won’t get the chance.”

He could smell her fragrance. Subtle perfume, soap, clean skin, clean cotton. Her hair fell to her collarbones. The shoulder seams on her T-shirt stood up a little and made enticing shadowy tunnels. She was slim and toned, except where she shouldn’t be.

He said, “Won’t get the chance why?”

She said, “Maybe we’ll be working all night.”

He said, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

“You’re not a dull boy,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, and leaned forward and kissed her, just lightly, on the lips. Her mouth was open a little and was cool and sweet from the wine. He slid his free hand under her hair to the back of her neck. Pulled her closer and kissed her harder. She did the same thing with her free hand. They held the clinch for a whole minute, kissing, two wine glasses held approximately level in midair. Then they parted and put their glasses down on the table and Pauling asked, “What time is it?”

“Nine fifty-one.”

“How do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

She held the pause for another beat and then leaned in and kissed him again. Used both her hands, one behind his head, the other behind his back. He did the same thing, symmetrically. Her tongue was cool and quick. Her back was narrow. Her skin was warm. He slid his hand under her shirt. Felt her hand bunching into a tiny fist and dragging his shirt out of his waistband. Felt her nails against his skin.

“I don’t usually do this,” she said, her mouth hard against his. “Not to people I work with.”

“We’re not working,” he said. “We’re taking a break.”

“We’re celebrating.”

“That’s for sure.”

She said, “We’re celebrating the fact that we’re not Hobart, aren’t we? Or Kate Lane.”

“I’m celebrating the fact that you’re you.”

She raised her arms over her head and held the pose and he pulled her shirt off. She was wearing a tiny black bra. He raised his arms in turn and she knelt up on the sofa and hauled his shirt up over his head. Then his T-shirt. She spread her hands like small starfish on the broad slab of his chest. Ran them south to his waist. Undid his belt. He unclipped her bra. Lifted her up and laid her down flat on the sofa and kissed her breasts. By the time the clock in his head was showing five past ten they were in her bed, naked under the sheet, locked together, making love with a kind of patience and tenderness he had never experienced before.

“Older women,” she said. “We’re worth it.”

He didn’t answer. Just smiled and ducked his head and kissed her neck below her ear, where her skin was damp and tasted of salt water.

Afterward they showered together and finished their wine and went back to bed. Reacher was too tired to think and too relaxed to care. He just floated, warm, spent, happy. Pauling snuggled against him and they fell asleep like that.

Much later Reacher felt Pauling stir and woke up to find her hands over his eyes. She asked him in a whisper, “What time is it?”

“Eighteen minutes to seven,” he said. “In the morning.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“It’s not a very useful talent. Saves me the price of a new watch, maybe.”

“What happened to the old one?”

“I stepped on it. I put it by the bed and I stood on it when I got up.”

“And that broke it?”

“I was wearing shoes.”

“In bed?”

“Saves time getting dressed.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“I don’t do it all the time. It depends on the bed.”

“What would it mean if Gregory was wrong about the time and you were right?”

He took a breath and opened his mouth to say I don’t know.

But then he stopped.

Because suddenly he saw what it would mean.

“Wait,” he said.

He lay back on the pillow and stared up at the darkened ceiling.

“Do you like chocolate?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“You got a flashlight?”

“There’s a small Maglite in my purse.”

“Put it in your pocket,” he said. “Leave the purse home. And wear pants. The skirt is no good.”

CHAPTER 49

They walked, because it was a beautiful city morning and Reacher was too restless to ride the subway or take a cab. Barrow, to Bleecker, then south on Sixth Avenue. It was already warm. They took it slow, to time it right. They turned east on Spring Street at seven-thirty exactly. Crossed Sullivan, crossed Thompson.

“We’re going to the abandoned building?” Pauling asked.

“Eventually,” Reacher said.

He stopped outside the chocolate shop. Cupped his hands against the glass and peered in. There was a light in the kitchen. He could see the owner moving about, small, dark, tired, her back to him. Sixteen-hour days, she had said. Regular as clockwork, seven days a week, small business, we never rest.

He knocked on the glass, loud, and the owner stopped and turned and looked exasperated until she recognized him. Then she shrugged and admitted defeat and walked through the front of the store to the door. Undid the locks and opened the door a crack and said, “Hello.”

Air bitter with chocolate flooded out at him.

He asked, “Can we come through to the alley again?”

“Who’s your friend this time?”

Pauling stepped forward and said her name.

The owner asked, “Are you really exterminators?”

“Investigators,” Pauling said. She had a business card ready.

“What are you investigating?”

“A woman disappeared,” Reacher said. “And her child.”

Silence for a moment.

The owner asked, “You think they’re next door?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Nobody’s next door.”

“That’s good.”

“This is just routine.”

“Would you like a chocolate?”

“Not for breakfast,” Reacher said.

“I would love one,” Pauling said.

The owner held the door wide and Pauling and Reacher stepped inside. Pauling took a moment choosing a chocolate. She settled on a raspberry fondant as big as a golf ball. Took a little bite and made a noise that sounded like appreciation. Then she followed Reacher through the kitchen and down the short tiled hallway. Out through the back door to the alley.

The rear of the abandoned building was exactly as Reacher had last seen it. The dull red door, the corroded black knob, the filthy ground floor window. He turned the knob and pushed, just in case, but the door was locked, as expected. He bent down and unlaced his shoe. Took it off and held the toe in his hand and used the heel like a two-pound hammer. Used it to break the window glass, low down and on the left, close to the door lock.

He tapped a little more and widened the hole and then put his shoe back on. Put his arm through the hole in the glass up to his shoulder and hugged the wall and groped around until he found the inside door handle. He unlocked it and withdrew his arm very carefully.

“OK,” he said.

He opened the door and stood aside to let Pauling get a good look.

“Just like you told me,” Pauling said. “Uninhabitable. No floors.”

“You up for a trip down the ladder?”

“Why me?”

“Because if I’m wrong I might just give up and stay down there forever.”

Pauling craned in and took a look at the ladder. It was right there where it had been before, propped to the right, steeply angled, leaning on the narrow piece of wall that separated the window and the door.

“I did worse at Quantico,” she said. “But that was a long time ago.”

Reacher said, “It’s only ten feet if you fall.”

“Thanks.” She turned around and backed up to the void. Reacher took her right hand in his and she sidled left and swung her left foot and left hand onto the ladder. Got steady and let Reacher’s hand go and paused a beat and climbed down into the dark. The ladder bounced and rattled a little and then he heard the crunch and rustle of trash as she hit bottom and stepped off.

“It’s filthy down here,” she called.

“Sorry,” he said.

“There could be rats.”

“Use the flashlight.”

“Will that scare them off?”

“No, but you’ll see them coming.”

“Thanks a lot.”

He leaned in over the pit and saw her flashlight beam stab the gloom. She called, “Where am I going?”

“Head for the front of the building. Directly underneath the door.”

The flashlight beam leveled out and established a direction and jerked forward. The basement walls had been whitewashed years before with some kind of lime compound and they reflected a little light. Reacher could see deep drifts of garbage everywhere. Paper, cartons, piles of unidentifiable rotted matter.

Pauling reached the front wall. The flashlight beam stabbed upward and she located the door above her. She moved left a little and lined herself up directly beneath it.

“Look down now,” Reacher called. “What do you see?”

The beam stabbed downward. Short range, very bright.

“I see trash,” Pauling called.

Reacher called, “Look closer. They might have bounced.”

“What might have bounced?”

“Dig around and you’ll see. I hope.”

The flashlight beam traced a small random circle. Then a wider one. Then it stopped dead and held steady.

“OK,” Pauling called. “Now I see. But how the hell did you know?”

Reacher said nothing. Pauling held still for a second longer and then bent down. Stood up again with her hands held high. In her right hand was the flashlight. In her left hand were two sets of car keys, one for a Mercedes Benz and one for a BMW.

CHAPTER 50

Pauling waded through the garbage back to the base of the ladder and tossed the keys up to Reacher. He caught them one-handed, left and then right. Both sets were on chrome split rings and both had black leather fobs decorated with enamel car badges. The three-pointed Mercedes star, the blue and white BMW propeller. Both had a single large car key and a remote clicker. He blew dust and fragments of trash off them and put them in his pocket. Then he leaned in over the void and caught Pauling’s arm and hauled her off the ladder to the safety of the alley. She brushed herself down and kicked the air hard to get trash off her shoes.

“So?” she said.

“We’re one for one,” he said.

He closed the dull red door and put his arm back through the hole in the window glass and hugged the wall again and clicked the lock from the inside. Extricated himself carefully and tested the knob. It was solid. Safe.

“This whole thing with the mail slot was a pure decoy,” he said. “Just a piece of nonsense designed to distract attention. The guy already had keys. He had spares from the file cabinet in Lane’s office. There was a whole bunch of car stuff in there. Some of the valet keys were filed away and some of them were missing.”

“So you were right about the time.”

Reacher nodded. “The guy was in the apartment above the café. Sitting on the chair, looking out the window. He watched Gregory park at eleven-forty and watched him walk away but he didn’t follow him down here to Spring Street. He didn’t need to. He didn’t give a damn about Spring Street. He just came out his door and crossed Sixth Avenue and used the valet key from his pocket. Immediately, much closer to eleven-forty than midnight.”

“Same thing with the blue BMW the second morning.”

“Exactly the same thing,” Reacher said. “I watched the damn door for twenty minutes and he never came anywhere near it. He never even came south of Houston Street. He was in the BMW about two minutes after Gregory got out of it.”

“And that’s why he specified the cars so exactly. He needed to match them with the stolen keys.”

“And that’s why it bugged me when Gregory let me into his car that first night. Gregory used the remote thing from ten feet away, like anyone would. But the night before the other guy didn’t do that with the Mercedes. He walked right up to it and stuck the key in the door. Who does that anymore? But he did, because he had to, because he didn’t have the remote. All he had was the valet key. Which also explains why he used the Jaguar for the final installment. He wanted to be able to lock it from the other side of the street, as soon as Burke put the money in it. For safety’s sake. He could do that with the Jaguar only, because the only remote he had was for the Jaguar. He inherited it at the initial takedown.”

Pauling said nothing.

Reacher said, “I told Lane the guy used the Jaguar as a taunt. As a reminder. But the real reason was practical, not psychological.”

Pauling was quiet for a second more. “But you’re back to saying there was inside help. Aren’t you? And there must have been, right? To steal the valet keys? But you already discounted inside help. You already decided there wasn’t any.”

“I think I’ve got that figured.”

“Who?”

“The guy with no tongue. He’s the key to the whole ballgame.”

CHAPTER 51

Pauling and Reacher trooped back through the chocolate shop and were back on the street before eight-thirty in the morning. They were back in Pauling’s office on West 4th before nine.

“We need Brewer now,” Reacher said. “And Patti Joseph.”

“Brewer’s still asleep,” Pauling said. “He works late.”

“Today he’s going to work early. He’s going to get his ass in gear. Because we need a definitive ID on that body from the Hudson River.”

“Taylor?”

“We need to know for certain it’s Taylor. I’m sure Patti has got a photograph of him. I bet she’s got a photograph of everyone who ever went in or out of the Dakota. If she gave a good clear shot to Brewer he could head for the morgue and make the ID for us.”

“Patti’s not our best buddy here. She wants to take Lane down, not help him.”

“We’re not helping him. You know that.”

“I’m not sure Patti sees the difference.”

“All we want is one lousy photograph. She can go that far.”

So Pauling called Patti Joseph. Patti confirmed that she had a file of photographs of all Lane’s men stretching back through the four years that she had occupied the Majestic apartment. At first she was reluctant to grant access to it. But then she saw that a positive ID of Taylor’s body would put some kind of pressure on Lane, either directly or indirectly. So she agreed to pick out the best full-frontal and put it aside for Brewer to collect. Then Pauling called Brewer and woke him up. He was bad-tempered about it but he agreed to pick up the picture. There was an element of self-interest there, too. ID on an as-yet-unexplained DOA would net him some NYPD Brownie points.

“Now what?” Pauling asked.

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

“Do we have time? Lane is expecting a name today.”

“Today lasts until midnight.”

“What after breakfast?”

“Maybe you’ll want to take a shower.”

“I’m OK. That basement wasn’t too bad.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the basement. I figured we might take coffee and croissants back to your place. Last time we were there we both ended up taking showers.”

Pauling said, “I see.”

“Only if you want to.”

“I know a great croissant shop.”

Two hours later Reacher was drying his hair with a borrowed towel and trying to decide whether or not to back a hunch. In general he wasn’t a big fan of hunches. Too often they were just wild-assed guesses that wasted time and led nowhere. But in the absence of news from Brewer he had time to waste and nowhere to go anyway. Pauling came out of the bedroom looking spectacular. Shoes, stockings, tight skirt, silk blouse, all in black. Brushed hair, light makeup. Great eyes, open, frank, intelligent.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Eleven-thirteen,” he said. “Give or take.”

“Sometime you’re going to have to explain how you do that.”

“If I ever figure it out you’ll be the first to know.”

“Long breakfast,” she said. “But fun.”

“For me, too.”

“What next?”

“We could do lunch.”

“I’m not hungry yet.”

“We could skip the eating part.”

She smiled.

“Seriously,” she said. “We have things to do.”

“Can we go back to your office? There’s something I want to check.”

Barrow Street was quiet but West 4th was busy with the front end of the city’s lunch break envelope. The sidewalks were packed. Reacher and Pauling had to go with the flow, slower than they would have liked. But there was no alternative. Pedestrian traffic gridlocks just the same as automotive traffic. A five-minute walk took ten. The street door below Pauling’s office was already unlocked. Other tenants were open for business and had been for hours. Reacher followed Pauling up the stairs and she used her keys and they stepped into her waiting room. He walked ahead of her into the back office where the bookshelves and the computer were.

“What do you want to check?” she asked.

“The phone book first,” he said. “T for Taylor.”

She hauled the white pages off the shelf and opened it on the desk. There were plenty of Taylors listed. It was a reasonably common name.

She asked, “Initial?”

“No idea,” he said. “Work off the street addresses. Look for private individuals in the West Village.”

Pauling used an optimistic realtor’s definition of the target area and made pencil check marks in the phone book’s margins. She ended up with seven possibilities. West 8th Street, Bank, Perry, Sullivan, West 12th, Hudson, and Waverly Place.

Reacher said, “Start with Hudson Street. Check the city directory and find out what block that address is on.”

Pauling laid the directory over the phone book and slid it down until the top edge of the directory’s jacket underlined the Taylor on Hudson Street. Then she flipped pages and traced the street number to a specific location on a specific block.

She looked up.

“It’s exactly halfway between Clarkson and Leroy,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

“What’s going on here?”

“Your best guess?”

“The guy with no tongue knew Taylor? Lived with him? Was working with him? Killed him?”

Reacher said nothing.

“Wait,” Pauling said. “Taylor was the inside man, wasn’t he? He stole the valet keys. He stopped the car outside Bloomingdale’s exactly where the other guy wanted him to. You were always worried about the initial takedown. That’s the only way it could have worked.”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling asked, “Was it really Taylor in the river?”

“We’ll know that as soon as Brewer calls.”

“The boat basin is a long way north of downtown. And downtown is where all the action seems to be.”

“The Hudson is tidal all the way to the Tappan Zee. Technically it’s an estuary, not a river. A floater could drift north as much as south.”

“What exactly is going on here?”

“We’re sweating the details and we’re working the clues. That’s what’s going on here. We’re doing it the hard way. One step at a time. Next step, we go visit the Taylor residence.”

“Now?”

“It’s as good a time as any.”

“Will we get in?”

“Do bears shit in the woods?”

Pauling took a sheet of paper and copied G. Taylor and the address from the phone book. Said, “I wonder what the G stands for.”

“He was British, don’t forget,” Reacher said. “Could be Geoffrey with a G. Or Gerald. Or Gareth or Glynn. Or Gervaise or Godfrey or Galahad.”

They walked. The noon heat raised sour smells from the milk in dumped lattes in trash cans and gutters. Panel trucks and taxis jammed the streets. Drivers hit their horns in anticipation of potential fractional delays. Second-story air conditioners dripped condensation like fat raindrops. Vendors hawked fake watches and umbrellas and cell phone accessories. The city, in full tumult. Reacher liked New York more than most places. He liked the casual indifference of it all and the frantic hustle and the total anonymity.

Hudson Street between Clarkson and Leroy had buildings on the west side and James J. Walker Park on the east. Taylor’s number matched a brick cube sixteen stories high. It had a plain entrance but a decent lobby. Reacher could see one lone guy behind a long desk. No separate doorman out on the sidewalk. Which made it easier. One guy was always easier than two. No witnesses.

“Approach?” Pauling asked.

“The easy way,” Reacher said. “The direct approach.”

They pulled the street door and stepped inside. The lobby had dark burr veneers and brushed metal accents. A granite floor. Up to the minute décor, a lot of minutes ago. Reacher walked straight to the desk and the guy behind it looked up and Reacher pointed to Pauling.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “This lady will give you four hundred bucks if you let us into Mr. G. Taylor’s apartment.”

The easy way. The direct approach. Concierges are human. And it was a well-chosen sum. Four hundred was a slightly unusual number. It wasn’t glib or run of the mill. It didn’t go in one ear and out the other. It commanded attention. It was big enough to feel like serious cash. And in Reacher’s experience it created an irresistible temptation to bargain upward toward five hundred. And in Reacher’s experience once that temptation had taken hold the battle was won. Like prostitution. Once the principle was established, all that was left was the price.

The desk guy glanced left, glanced right. Saw nobody.

No witnesses. Easier.

“Alone?” the desk guy asked.

“I don’t mind,” Reacher said. “Come with us. Send a handyman.”

The guy paused. Said, “OK, I’ll send a handyman.”

But you’ll keep the cash for yourself, Reacher thought.

“Five hundred,” the guy said.

Reacher said, “Deal.”

Pauling opened her purse and her wallet and licked her thumb and counted off five hundred-dollar bills. Folded them around her index finger and slipped them across the desk.

“Twelfth floor,” the concierge said. “Turn left, go to the door at the end on the right. The handyman will meet you there.” He pointed toward the elevator bank and picked up a walkie-talkie to summon the guy. Reacher and Pauling stepped over and pressed the up arrow. An elevator door slid open like it had been waiting for them.

“You owe me a lot of money,” Pauling said.

“I’m good for it,” Reacher said. “I’ll be rich tonight.”

“I hope the staff in my building are better than that.”

“Dream on. I was in and out of a lot of buildings, back in the day.”

“You had a bribery budget?”

“Huge. Before the peace dividend. That dropped a rock on a lot of budgets.”

The elevator car stopped on twelve and the door slid back. The corridor was part exposed brick and part white paint and the only lighting was supplied by television screens set waist-high behind glass. They were all glowing dim purple.

“Nice,” Pauling said.

Reacher said, “I like your place better.”

They turned left and found the end door on the right. It had an integrated box mounted eye-high with a peephole lens and an apartment number and a slot with a black tape sign that said Taylor. Northeast corner of the building. The corridor was still and quiet and smelled faintly of air freshener or carpet cleaner.

Reacher asked, “What is he paying for a place like this?”

“Rental?” Pauling said. She glanced at the distance between doors to judge the size of the apartments and said, “Small two-bedroom, maybe four grand a month. Maybe four and a quarter in a building like this.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Not when you make twenty-five.”

To their right the elevator bell dinged and a man in a green uniform and a tan tool belt stepped off. The handyman. He walked up and pulled a keyring from his pocket. Asked no questions. Just unlocked Taylor’s door and pushed it open and stood back.

Reacher went in first. The apartment felt empty. The air inside was hot and still. There was a foyer the size of a phone booth and then a stainless-steel kitchen on the left and a coat closet on the right. Living room dead ahead, two bedrooms side by side away to the left, one of them larger than the other. The kitchen and the living room were spotlessly clean and immaculately tidy. The décor was mid-century modern, restrained, tasteful, masculine. Dark wood floors, pale walls, thick wool rugs. There was a maple desk. An Eames lounge chair and an ottoman opposite a Florence Knoll sofa. A Le Corbusier chaise and a Noguchi coffee table. Stylish. Not cheap. Classic pieces. Reacher recognized them from pictures in magazines he had read. There was an original painting on the wall. An urban scene, busy, bright, vibrant, acrylic on canvas. There were lots of books, shelved neatly and alphabetically. A small television set. Lots of CDs and a quality music system dedicated to headphones only. No loudspeakers. A considerate guy. A good neighbor.

“Very elegant,” Pauling said.

“An Englishman in New York,” Reacher said. “Probably drank tea.”

The bigger bedroom was spare, almost monastic. White walls, a king bed, gray linens, an Italian desk light on a night table, more books, another painting by the same artist. The closet had a hanging rail and a wall of open shelves. The rail was full of suits and jackets and shirts and pants grouped precisely by season and color. Each garment was clean and pressed and ironed. Each hanger was exactly one inch from the next. The shelves were stacked with piles of T-shirts and underwear and socks. Each stack was exactly vertical and the same height as all the others. The bottom shelf held shoes. They were all solid English items like Reacher’s own, black and brown, shined like mirrors. They all had cedar shoe trees in them.

“This is amazing,” Pauling said. “I want to marry this guy.”

Reacher said nothing and moved on to the second bedroom. The second bedroom was where the money or the will or the enthusiasm had run out. It was a small plain undecorated space. It felt unused. It was dark and hot and damp. There was no lightbulb in the ceiling fixture. The room held nothing but two narrow iron beds. They had been pushed together. There were used sheets on them. Dented pillows. The window was covered with a width of black fabric. It had been duct-taped to the walls, across the top, across the bottom, down both sides. But the tape had been picked away on one side and a narrow rectangle of cloth had been folded back to provide a sliver of a view, or air, or ventilation.

“This is it,” Reacher said. “This is where Kate and Jade were hidden.”

“By who? The man who can’t talk?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “The man who can’t talk hid them here.”

CHAPTER 52

Pauling stepped over next to the twin beds and bent to examine the pillows. “Long dark hairs,” she said. “A woman’s and a girl’s. They were tossing and turning all night.”

“I bet they were,” Reacher said.

“Maybe two nights.”

Reacher walked back to the living room and checked the desk. The handyman watched him from the doorway. The desk was as neatly organized as the closet, but there wasn’t much in it. Some personal papers, some financial papers, some lease papers for the apartment. Taylor’s first name was Graham. He was a U.K. citizen and a resident alien. He had a Social Security number. And a life insurance policy, and a retirement plan. There was a console telephone on the desk. A stylish thing, made by Siemens. It looked brand new and recently installed. It had ten speed-dial buttons with paper strips next to them under plastic. The paper strips were marked with initials only. At the top was L. For Lane, Reacher guessed. He hit the corresponding button and a 212 number lit up in neat alphanumeric script in a gray LCD window. Manhattan. The Dakota, presumably. He hit the other nine buttons one after the other. The gray window showed three 212 numbers, three 917 numbers, two 718s, and a long number with 01144 at the beginning. The 212s would all be Manhattan. Buddies, probably, maybe including Gregory, because there was a G on the paper strip. The 917s would be cell phones. Maybe for the same set of guys, for when they were on the road, or for people who didn’t have landlines. The 718s would be for Brooklyn. Probably buddies who weren’t up for Manhattan rents. The long 01144 number would be for Great Britain. Family, maybe. The corresponding initial was S. A mom or a dad, possibly.

Reacher kept on pressing buttons on the phone for a while and then he finished up at the desk and went back to the second bedroom. Pauling was standing at the window, half turned away, looking through the narrow slot.

“Weird,” she said. “Isn’t it? They were right here in this room. This view was maybe the last thing they ever saw.”

“They weren’t killed here. Too difficult to get the bodies out.”

“Not literally the last view. Just the last normal thing from their old lives.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Can you feel them in here?”

Reacher said, “No.”

He tapped the wall with his knuckles and then knelt and tapped the floor. The walls felt thick and solid and the floor felt like concrete under hardwood. An apartment building was an odd place to keep people prisoner but this one felt safe enough. Terrorize your captives into silence and adjacent residents wouldn’t know much. If anything. Ever. Like Patti Joseph had said: This city is incredibly anonymous. You can go years without ever laying eyes on your neighbor.

Or his guests, Reacher thought.

“You think there are doormen here twenty-four hours?” he asked.

“I doubt it,” Pauling said. “Not this far downtown. Mine aren’t. They’re probably part-time here. Maybe until eight.”

“Then that might explain the delays. He couldn’t bring them in past a doorman. Not kicking and struggling. The first day, he would have had to wait hours. Then he kept the intervals going for consistency.”

“And to create an impression of distance.”

“That was Gregory’s guess. He was right and I was wrong. I said the Catskills.”

“It was a reasonable assumption.”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling asked, “What next?”

“I’d like to meet with your Pentagon buddy again.”

“I’m not sure if he’ll agree to. I don’t think he likes you.”

“I’m not crazy about him, either. But this is business. Make him an offer.”

“What can we offer him?”

“Tell him we’ll take Lane’s crew off the board if he helps us out with one small piece of information. He’ll take that deal. Ten minutes with us in a coffee shop will get him more than ten years of talking at the U.N. One whole band of real live mercenaries out of action forever.”

“Can we deliver that?”

“We’ll have to anyway. Sooner or later it’s going to be them or us.”

They walked back to Pauling’s office by their previous route in reverse. Saint Luke’s Place, Seventh Avenue, Cornelia Street, West 4th. Then Reacher lounged in one of Pauling’s visitor chairs while she played phone tag around the U.N. Building, looking for her friend. She got him after about an hour of trying. He was reluctant but he agreed to meet in the same coffee shop as before, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Time is moving on,” Pauling said.

“It always does. Try Brewer again. We need to hear from him.”

But Brewer wasn’t back at his desk and his cell was switched off. Reacher leaned back and closed his eyes. No use fretting about what you can’t control.

At two o’clock they went out to find a cab, well ahead of time, just in case. But they got one right away and were in the Second Avenue coffee shop forty minutes early. Pauling tried Brewer again. Still no answer. She closed her phone and put it on the table and spun it like a top. It came to rest with its antenna pointing straight at Reacher’s chest.

“You’ve got a theory,” she said to him. “Haven’t you? Like a physicist. A unified theory of everything.”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not everything. Not even close. It’s only partial. I’m missing a big component. But I’ve got a name for Lane.”

“What name?”

“Let’s wait for Brewer,” Reacher said. He waved to the waitress. The same one as before. He ordered coffee. Same brown mugs, same Bunn flask. Same hot, strong, generic taste.

Pauling’s phone buzzed with thirty minutes to go before the Pentagon guy was due to show. She answered it and said her name and listened for a spell and then she gave their current location. A coffee shop, east side of Second between 44th and 45th, booth in the back. Then she hung up.

“Brewer,” she said. “Finally. He’s meeting us here. Wants to talk face-to-face.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s leaving the morgue.”

“It’s going to be crowded in here. He’s going to arrive at the same time as your guy.”

“My guy’s not going to like that. I don’t think he likes crowds.”

“If I see him balking I’ll talk to him outside.”

But Pauling’s Pentagon friend showed up a little early. Presumably to scope out the situation ahead of the rendezvous. Reacher saw him out on the sidewalk, looking in, checking the clientele one face at a time. He was patient about it. Thorough. But eventually he was satisfied and he pulled the door. Walked quickly through the room and slid into the booth. He was wearing the same blue suit. Same tie. Probably a fresh shirt, although there was no real way of telling. One white button-down Oxford looks pretty much the same as another.

“I’m concerned about your offer,” he said. “I can’t condone illegality.”

Take the poker out of your ass, Reacher thought. Be grateful for once in your miserable life. You might be a general now but you know how things are. But he said, “I understand your concern, sir. Completely. And you have my word that no cop or prosecutor anywhere in America will think twice about anything that I do.”

“I have your word?”

“As an officer.”

The guy smiled. “And as a gentleman?”

Reacher didn’t smile back. “I can’t claim that distinction.”

“No cop or prosecutor anywhere in America?”

“I guarantee it.”

“You can do that, realistically?”

“I can do that absolutely.”

The guy paused. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Get me confirmation of something so I don’t waste my time or money.”

“Confirmation of what?”

“I need you to check a passenger name against flight manifests out of this area during the last forty-eight hours.”

“Military?”

“No, commercial.”

“That’s a Homeland Security issue.”

Reacher nodded. “Which is why I need you to do it for me. I don’t know who to call. Not anymore. But I’m guessing you do.”

“Which airport? What flight?”

“I’m not sure. You’ll have to go fishing. I’d start with JFK. British Airways, United, or American to London, England. I’d start with late evening the day before yesterday. Failing that, try flights out of Newark. No hits, try JFK again yesterday morning.”

“Definitely transatlantic?”

“That’s my assumption right now.”

“OK,” the guy said, slowly, like he was taking mental notes. Then he asked, “Who am I looking for? One of Edward Lane’s crew?”

Reacher nodded. “A recent ex-member.”

“Name?”

Reacher said, “Taylor. Graham Taylor. He’s a U.K. citizen.”

CHAPTER 53

The Pentagon guy left with a promise to liaise in due course via Lauren Pauling’s cell phone. Reacher got a coffee refill and Pauling said, “You didn’t find Taylor’s passport in his apartment.”

Reacher said, “No, I didn’t.”

“So either he’s still alive or you think someone’s impersonating him.”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling said, “Let’s say Taylor was working with the guy with no tongue. Let’s say they fell out over something, either what they did to Kate and Jade in the end, or the money, or both. Then let’s say one of them killed the other and ran, on Taylor’s passport, with all the money.”

“If it’s the guy with no tongue, why would he use Taylor’s passport?”

“Maybe he doesn’t have one of his own. Plenty of Americans don’t. Or maybe he’s on a watch list. Maybe he couldn’t get through an airport with his own name.”

“Passports have photographs.”

“They’re often old and generic. Do you look like your passport photograph?”

“A little.”

Pauling said, “A little is sometimes all you need. Going out, they don’t care as much as when you’re coming in.”

Reacher nodded and looked up and saw Brewer coming in the door. Big, fast, energetic. Something in his face, maybe frustration, maybe concern, Reacher couldn’t tell. Or perhaps the guy was just tired. He had been woken up early. He hurried through the room and slid into the booth and sat in the same spot the Pentagon guy had just vacated.

He said, “The body in the river was not the guy in Patti’s photograph.”

“You sure?” Reacher asked.

“As sure as I’ve ever been about anything. Patti’s guy is about five-nine and athletic and the floater was six-three and wasted. Those are fairly basic differences, wouldn’t you say?”

Reacher nodded. “Fairly basic.”

Pauling asked, “Did he have a tongue?”

“A what?” Brewer said.

“A tongue. Did the floater have a tongue?”

“Doesn’t everybody? What kind of question is that?”

“We’re looking for a guy who had his tongue cut out.”

Brewer looked straight at her. “Then the floater ain’t yours. I was just at the morgue. He’s got everything except a heartbeat.”

“You sure?”

“Medical examiners tend to notice things like that.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks for your help.”

“Not so fast,” Brewer said. “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About why you’re interested in this guy.”

Something in his face.

Reacher asked, “Did you get an ID?”

Brewer nodded. “From his fingerprints. They were mushy, but we made them work. He was an NYPD snitch. Relatively valuable. I’ve got buddies uptown who are relatively unhappy.”

“What kind of a snitch?”

“Methamphetamine out of Long Island. He was due to testify.”

“Where had he been?”

“He just got out of Rikers. They swept him up along with a bunch of others to keep his cover intact. Held him a few days, then turned him loose.”

“When?”

“He just got out. The ME figures he was dead about three hours after walking through the gates.”

“Then we don’t know anything about him,” Reacher said. “He’s completely unrelated.”

This time it was Brewer who said: “You sure?”

Reacher nodded. “I promise.”

Brewer gave him a long hard look, cop to cop. Then he just shrugged and said, “OK.”

Reacher said, “Sorry we can’t help.”

“Shit happens.”

“You still got Patti’s photograph?”

“Photographs,” Brewer said. “She gave me two. Couldn’t decide which one was better.”

“You still got them?”

“In my pocket.”

“Want to leave them with me?”

Brewer smiled, man to man. “You planning on returning them personally?”

“I could,” Reacher said. “But first I want to look at them.”

They were in a standard white letter-size envelope. Brewer pulled it from his inside pocket and laid it on the table. Reacher saw the name Taylor and the words For Brewer written on the front in blue ink and neat handwriting. Then Brewer left. Just stood up and walked back out to the street with the same kind of speed and energy and hustle he had used on the way in. Reacher watched him go and then he turned the envelope facedown and squared it on the table in front of him. Looked at it hard but left it unopened.

“What have we got?” he asked.

“We’ve got the same as we always had,” Pauling said. “We’ve got Taylor and the guy who can’t talk.”

Reacher shook his head. “Taylor is the guy who can’t talk.”

CHAPTER 54

Pauling said, “That’s absurd. Lane wouldn’t employ anyone who can’t talk. Why would he? And nobody mentioned it. You asked about Taylor several times. They said he was a good soldier. They didn’t say he was a good soldier except he can’t talk. They’d have mentioned that little detail, don’t you think?”

“Two words,” Reacher said. “All we need to do is add two words and the whole thing makes perfect sense.”

“What two words?”

“We’ve been saying the guy can’t talk. Truth is, he can’t afford to talk.”

Pauling paused a long moment.

Then she said: “Because of his accent.”

Reacher nodded. “Exactly. All along we’ve been saying nobody was missing, but by definition Taylor was missing from the start. And Taylor was behind this whole damn thing. He planned it, and he set it up, and he executed it. He rented the apartment and he bought the chair. He probably did other stuff we didn’t catch up with yet. And everywhere he went, he couldn’t risk opening his mouth. Not even once. Because he’s English. Because of his accent. He was realistic. He knew he had to be leaving a trail. And if whoever was tracking him came along later and heard all about an average-looking forty-year-old man with an English accent, they would have made him in a second. It would have been a total no-brainer. Who else would anyone have thought of? Because he was the last one to see Kate and Jade alive.”

“He did the same thing as Knight, five years ago. That’s how the takedown worked.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said again. “It’s the only way to explain it. Possibly he drove them to Bloomingdale’s but certainly he didn’t stop there. He just pulled a gun and kept on going. Maybe threatened to shoot Kate in front of the kid. That would have kept her quiet. Then he just dropped off the radar and started relying on a kind of double alibi he had created for himself. First, he was presumed dead. And second, all anyone would ever remember of him was a guy that couldn’t speak. A guy with no tongue. It was a perfect piece of misdirection. Weird, exotic, absolutely guaranteed to get us chasing off in the wrong direction.”

Pauling nodded. “Brilliant, in a way.”

“It was all anyone remembered,” Reacher said. “Like that old Chinese man? All he really recalled was the way the guy gulped like a fish. And the super on Sixth Avenue? We said, tell us about the guy, and he said he keeps his mouth tight shut all the time because he’s embarrassed that he can’t talk. That was the beginning and the end of his description. The obvious thing and the only thing. Everything else was trivial by comparison.”

“Open the envelope,” Pauling said. “Confirm it.”

So Reacher lifted the envelope’s flap and slid the two photographs out, facedown. He tapped the back of the top picture like a cardsharp looking for luck.

Then he flipped it over.

It was the guy he had seen twice before.

No question about it.

Taylor.

White, a little sunburned, lean, chiseled, clean-shaven, jaw clamped, not smiling, maybe forty years old. Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue ball cap, white sneakers. All the clothing worn and comfortable. It was clearly a very recent shot. Patti Joseph had caught him coming out of the Dakota one late-summer morning. It looked like he had paused on the sidewalk and lifted his gaze to check the weather. By doing so he had met the angle of Patti’s long Nikon lens perfectly.

“No doubt about it,” Reacher said. “That’s the guy I saw getting into the Mercedes and the Jaguar.”

He turned the second picture over. It was a closer shot. Maximum zoom, and therefore not quite as clear. There was a little camera shake. The focus wasn’t perfect. But it was a viable photograph. Same location, same angle, different day. Same guy. But this time his mouth was open. His lips were drawn back. He wasn’t smiling. Maybe he was just grimacing against the sudden glare of the sun after stepping out of the dark Dakota lobby. He had terrible teeth. Some were missing. The rest were gappy and uneven.

“There you go,” Reacher said. “There’s another reason. No wonder everyone told us he kept his mouth clamped shut all the time. He’s not dumb. He was concealing two pieces of evidence at the same time, not just one. His English accent, and his British dentistry. Because that’s really a no-brainer. Someone from Lane’s crew hears about a Brit with bad teeth? It would have been like wearing a nametag around his neck.”

“Where is he now? England?”

“That’s my guess. He flew home, where he feels safe.”

“With the money?”

“Checked luggage. Three bags.”

“Could he do that? With all the X-rays?”

“I don’t see why not. I once had a lesson about paper money from an expert. Right here in New York City, as a matter of fact. At Columbia University. The paper isn’t really paper, as such. It’s mostly linen and cotton fibers. More in common with the shirt on your back than a newspaper. I think it would show up like clothing on an X-ray machine.”

Pauling slid the photographs across the table and butted them together side by side in front of her. Looked at one, looked at the other. Reacher sensed her running through an explanation in her head. An analysis. A narrative.

“He’s tan from the Hamptons,” she said. “He was there all summer with the family. And then he was worried about someone checking his apartment from the street, afterward. That’s why he took the lightbulb out of the guest room and covered the window. The place had to look empty, if anyone ever checked.”

“He was very thorough.”

“And very unsentimental. He walked away from that great apartment.”

“He can rent ten apartments now.”

“That’s for sure.”

“It’s a shame,” Reacher said. “I liked him when I thought he was dead. Everyone spoke well of him.”

“I wouldn’t take recommendations from those guys.”

“I guess not. But I usually like Brits. Gregory seems OK.”

Pauling said, “He’s probably as bad as the rest of them.”

Then she stacked the photographs and slid them back.

“Well, you’ve got the name to give to Lane,” she said.

Reacher didn’t reply.

“A unified theory of everything,” she said. “Like a physicist. I don’t see why you say it’s only partial. Taylor did it all.”

“He didn’t,” Reacher said. “He didn’t make the phone calls. An American made the phone calls.”

CHAPTER 55

“Taylor had a partner,” Reacher said. “Obviously. He had to, because of the accent thing again. At first I thought it might be the guy in the river. Like you said, I thought maybe they fell out afterward. Or that Taylor got greedy and wanted the whole nine yards for himself. But that won’t work now. The guy in the river was just a regular New York corpse. An unrelated homicide. He was in Rikers at the relevant time. So, I don’t know who made the phone calls. That’s why it’s only a partial theory.”

“Lane will want to know who the partner was. He won’t settle for half a loaf.”

“You bet your ass he won’t.”

“He’s not going to pay.”

“He’ll pay part. We’ll get the rest later. When we tell him who the partner was.”

“How do we find out who the partner was?”

“The only sure way is to find Taylor and ask him.”

“Ask him?”

“Make him tell us.”

“In England?”

“If that’s where your Pentagon buddy says he went. I guess he could check for us who Taylor was sitting next to on the flight. There’s a slim chance they flew together.”

“Unlikely.”

“Very. But it’s maybe worth a try.”

So Pauling went through ten more minutes of phone tag at the U.N. and then gave up and left a voice-mail message asking the guy to check whether Taylor had had a traveling companion.

“What now?” she said.

“Wait for your guy to get back to you,” Reacher said. “Then book us a car to the airport and flights to London, if that’s where Taylor went, which it probably is. Tonight’s red-eye, I guess. I’m betting Lane will ask me to go over there. He’ll want me to do the advance work. Then he’ll bring his whole crew over for the kill. And we’ll deal with them there.”

Pauling looked up. “That’s why you promised no cop or prosecutor in America is going to think twice.”

Reacher nodded. “But their opposite numbers in England are going to get pretty uptight. That’s for damn sure.”

Reacher put Patti Joseph’s photographs back in their envelope and jammed it in the front pocket of his shirt. Kissed Pauling on the sidewalk and headed for the subway. He was outside the Dakota before five in the afternoon.

The name. Tomorrow.

Mission accomplished.

But he didn’t go inside. Instead he walked straight ahead and crossed Central Park West and went in through the gate to Strawberry Field. The John Lennon memorial, in the park. Near where Lennon was killed. Like most guys his age Reacher felt that The Beatles were part of his life. They were its soundtrack, its background. Maybe that was why he liked English people.

Maybe that was why he didn’t want to do what he was about to do.

He patted his shirt pocket and felt the photographs and ran through the narrative one more time the same way Pauling had. But there was no doubt about it. Taylor was the bad guy. No question. Reacher himself was an actual eyewitness. First the Mercedes, then the Jaguar.

No doubt about it.

Maybe there was just no joy in giving one bad guy to another.

But this is for Kate, Reacher thought. For Jade. For Hobart’s money.

Not for Lane.

He took a deep breath and stood for a second with his face tilted up to catch the last of the sun before it fell away behind the buildings to the west. Then he turned around and walked back out of the park.

Edward Lane fanned the two photographs of Taylor quite delicately between his finger and his thumb and asked one simple question: “Why?”

“Greed,” Reacher said. “Or malice, or jealousy, or all of the above.”

“Where is he now?”

“My guess is England. I’ll know soon.”

“How?”

“Sources.”

“You’re good.”

“The best you ever saw.” Or they’d have nailed you in the army.

Lane handed back the photographs and said, “He must have had a partner.”

“Obviously.”

“For the phone calls. Someone with an American accent. Who was it?”

“You’ll have to ask Taylor that.”

“In England?”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be coming back here anytime soon.”

“I want you to find him for me.”

“I want my money.”

Lane nodded. “You’ll get it.”

“I want it now.”

“Ten percent now. The rest when I’m face-to-face with Taylor.”

“Twenty percent now.”

Lane didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Or I’ll cut my losses and walk away. And you can stroll down to Barnes and Noble and buy a U.K. map and a pin. Or a mirror and a stick.”

Lane said, “Fifteen percent now.”

Reacher said, “Twenty.”

“Seventeen and a half.”

“Twenty. Or I’m out of here.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lane said. “OK, twenty percent now. But you’ll leave now, too. Right now, tonight. You can have one day’s start. That should be enough for a smart boy like you. Then we’ll follow you twenty-four hours later. The seven of us. Me, Gregory, Groom, Burke, Kowalski, Addison, and Perez. That should be enough. You know London?”

“I’ve been there before.”

“We’ll be at the Park Lane Hilton.”

“With the rest of the money?”

“Every penny of it,” Lane said. “I’ll show it to you when you meet us at the hotel and you tell us where Taylor is. I’ll give it to you when I’ve got actual visual contact with him.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Deal.” And ten minutes later he was back in the subway, heading south, with two hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash wrapped in a plastic Whole Foods shopping bag.

Reacher met Pauling at her apartment and gave her the bag and said, “Take out what I owe you and hide the rest. It’s enough to get Hobart started with the preliminaries at least.”

Pauling took the bag and held it away from her body like it was contagious. “Is this the African money?”

Reacher nodded. “Direct from Ouagadougou. Via Edward Lane’s closet.”

“It’s dirty.”

“Show me money that isn’t.”

Pauling paused a beat and then opened the bag and peeled off some bills and put them on the kitchen counter. Then she refolded the bag and put it in the oven.

“I don’t have a safe here,” she said.

“The oven will do,” Reacher said. “Just don’t forget and start to cook something.”

She took four bills from the stack on the counter and handed them to him.

“For clothes,” she said. “You’re going to need them. We leave for England tonight.”

“Your guy got back to you?”

She nodded. “Taylor was on British Airways to London less than four hours after Burke put the money in the Jaguar.”

“Alone?”

“Apparently. As far as we can tell. He was seated next to some British woman. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a partner who checked in separately and sat somewhere else. That would have been a fairly basic precaution. There were sixty-seven unaccompanied adult American males on the flight.”

“Your guy is very thorough.”

“Yes, he is. He got the whole manifest. By fax. Including the baggage manifest. Taylor checked three bags.”

“Overweight charge?”

“No. He was in business class. They might have let it slide.”

Reacher said, “I don’t need four hundred dollars for clothes.”

Pauling said, “You do if you’re traveling with me.”

I was an MP, Reacher had said to Hobart. I’ve done everything before. But he hadn’t. Thirty minutes later he was doing something he had never done in his life. He was buying clothes in a department store. He was in Macy’s on Herald Square, in the men’s department, in front of a cash register, holding a pair of gray pants, a gray jacket, a black T-shirt, a black V-neck sweater, a pair of black socks, and a pair of white boxer shorts. His choices had been limited by the availability of suitable sizes. Inseam, arm length, and chest. He was worried that his brown shoes would be a color clash. Pauling told him to buy new shoes, too. He vetoed that idea. He couldn’t afford them. So she said brown shoes would be just fine with gray pants. He shuffled to the head of the line and paid, three hundred and ninety-six dollars and change, with tax. He showered and dressed back at Pauling’s apartment and took his creased and battered passport and Patti Joseph’s envelope of photographs out of his old pants and shoved them in his new pants. Took his folding toothbrush out of his old shirt pocket and put it in his new jacket pocket. Carried his old clothes down the corridor to the compactor room and dropped them in the garbage chute. Then he waited with Pauling downstairs in the lobby, neither of them saying much, until the car service showed up to take them to the airport.

CHAPTER 56

Pauling had booked them business class on the same flight that Taylor had taken forty-eight hours previously. It was maybe even the same plane, assuming it flew a round-trip every day. But neither one of them could have been in Taylor’s actual seat. They were in a window-and-aisle pair, and the Homeland Security manifest had shown that Taylor had been in the first of a block of four in the center.

The seats themselves were strange bathtub-shaped cocoons that faced alternating directions. Reacher’s window seat faced aft and next to him Pauling faced forward. The seats were advertised as reclining into fully flat beds, which might have been true for her but was about twelve inches shy of being true for him. But the seats had compensations. The face-to-face thing meant that he was going to spend seven hours looking directly at her, which was no kind of a hardship.

“What’s the strategy?” she asked.

“We’ll find Taylor, Lane will take care of him, and then I’ll take care of Lane.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something. Like Hobart said, everything in war is improvisation.”

“What about the others?”

“That will be a snap decision. If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane gone, then I’ll leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up to the officer class and take over, I’ll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.”

“Brutal.”

“Compared to what?”

“Taylor won’t be easy to find,” she said.

“England’s a small country,” he said.

“Not that small.”

“We found Hobart.”

“With help. We were given his address.”

“We’ll get by.”

“How?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

“Tell me.”

“You know any British private investigators? Is there an international brotherhood?”

“There might be a sisterhood. I’ve got some numbers.”

“OK, then.”

“Is that your plan? Hire a London PI?”

“Local knowledge,” Reacher said. “It’s always the key.”

“We could have done that by phone.”

“We didn’t have time.”

“London alone is eight million people,” Pauling said. “Then there’s Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds. And a whole lot of countryside. The Cotswolds. Stratford upon Avon. And Scotland and Wales. Taylor stepped out the door at Heathrow two days ago. He could be anywhere by now. We don’t even know where he’s from.”

“We’ll get by,” Reacher said again.

Pauling took a pillow and a blanket from a stewardess and reclined her seat. Reacher watched her sleep for a while and then he lay down too, with his knees up and his head jammed against the bathtub wall. The cabin lighting was soft and blue and the hiss of the engines was restful. Reacher liked flying. Going to sleep in New York and waking up in London was a fantasy that could have been designed expressly for him.

The stewardess woke him to give him breakfast. Like being in the hospital, he thought. They wake you up to feed you. But the breakfast was good. Mugs of hot coffee and bacon rolls. He drank six and ate six. Pauling watched him, fascinated.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Five to five,” he said. “In the morning. Which is five to ten in the morning in this time zone.”

Then all kinds of muted bells went off and signs went on to announce the start of their approach into Heathrow Airport. London’s northerly latitude meant that at ten in the morning in late summer the sun was high. The landscape below was lit up bright. There were small clouds in the sky that cast shadows on the fields. Reacher’s sense of direction wasn’t as good as his sense of time but he figured they had looped past the city and were approaching the airport from the east. Then the plane turned sharply and he realized they were in a holding pattern. Heathrow was notoriously busy. They were going to circle London at least once. Maybe twice.

He put his forehead against the window and stared down. Saw the Thames, glittering in the sun like polished lead. Saw Tower Bridge, white stone, recently cleaned, detailed with fresh paint on the ironwork. Then a gray warship moored in the river, some kind of a permanent exhibit. Then London Bridge. He craned his neck and looked for Saint Paul’s Cathedral, north and west. Saw the big dome, crowded by ancient winding streets. London was a low-built city. Densely and chaotically packed near the dramatic curves of the Thames, spreading infinitely into the gray distance beyond.

He saw railroad tracks fanning out into Waterloo Station. Saw the Houses of Parliament. Saw Big Ben, shorter and stumpier than he remembered it. And Westminster Cathedral, white, bulky, a thousand years old. There was some kind of a giant Ferris wheel on the opposite bank of the river. A tourist thing, maybe. Green trees, everywhere. He saw Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park. He glanced north of where the palace gardens ended and found the Park Lane Hilton. A round tower, bristling with balconies. From above it looked like a squat wedding cake. Then he glanced a little farther north and found the American Embassy. Grosvenor Square. He had once used an office there, in a windowless basement. Four weeks, for some big-deal army investigation he could barely recall. But he remembered the neighborhood. He remembered it pretty well. Too rich for his blood, until you escaped east into SoHo.

He asked Pauling, “Have you been here before?”

“We did exchange training with Scotland Yard,” she said.

“That could be useful.”

“It was a million years ago.”

“Where did you stay?”

“They put us up in a college dormitory.”

“You know any hotels?”

“Do you?”

“Not the sort where they let you in wearing four hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. Mostly the sort where you wear your shoes in bed.”

“We can’t stay anywhere close to Lane and his guys. We can’t be associated with him. Not if we’re going to do something to him.”

“That’s for sure.”

“What about somewhere really great? Like the Ritz?”

“That’s the opposite problem. Four hundred dollars is too shabby for them. And we need to stay low-profile. We need the kind of place where they don’t look at your passport and they let you pay cash. Bayswater, maybe. West of downtown, a clear run back to the airport afterward.”

Reacher turned to the window again and saw Windsor Castle slide by below. And a wide six-lane east-west highway with slow traffic driving on the left. Then suburbs, two-family houses, curving roads, tiny green back yards, garden sheds, and then acres of airport parking full of small cars, many of them red. Then the airport fence. Then the chevrons at the start of the runway. Close to the ground the plane seemed huge again after feeling cramped for seven hours. After being a narrow tube it became a two-hundred-ton monster doing two hundred miles an hour. It landed hard and roared and braked and then suddenly it was quiet and docile again, rolling slowly toward the terminal. The purser welcomed the passengers to London over the public address system and Reacher turned and looked across the cabin at the exit door. Taylor’s first few steps would be easy enough to follow. After baggage claim and the taxi rank the job would get a whole lot harder. Harder, but maybe not impossible.

“We’ll get by,” he said, even though Pauling hadn’t spoken to him.

CHAPTER 57

They filled in landing cards and had their passports stamped by an official in a gray suit. My name on a piece of English paper, Reacher thought. Not good. But there was no alternative. And his name was already on the airline passenger manifest, which could apparently get faxed all over the place at the drop of a hat. They waited at the carousel for Pauling’s bag and then Reacher got stopped in Customs not because he had suspicious luggage but because he had none at all. Which made the guy stopping him a Special Branch cop or an MI5 agent in disguise, Reacher thought, not a real Customs guy. Traveling light was clearly a red flag. The detention was brief and the questions were casual, but the guy got a good look at his face and was all over his passport. Not good.

Pauling changed a wad of the O-Town dollars at a Travelex booth and they found the fast train to Paddington Station. Paddington was a good first stop, Reacher figured. His kind of an area. Convenient for the Bayswater hotels, full of trash and hookers. Not that he expected to find Taylor there. Or anywhere close. But it would make a good anonymous base camp. The railroad company promised the ride into town would be fifteen minutes, but it turned out to be closer to twenty. They came out to the street in central London just before twelve noon. West 4th Street to Eastbourne Terrace in ten short hours. Planes, trains, and automobiles.

At street level that part of London was bright and fresh and cold and to a stranger’s eyes it seemed full of trees. The buildings were low and had old cores and sagging roofs but most of them had new frontages tacked on to disguise age and disrepair. Most things were chains or franchises except for the ethnic take-out food stores and the town car services, which still seemed to be mom-and-pop operations. Or cousin-and-cousin. The roads had good smooth blacktop heavily printed with instructions for drivers and pedestrians. The pedestrians were warned to Look Left or Look Right at every possible curb and the drivers were guided by elaborate lines and arrows and crosshatching and Slow signs anywhere the direction deviated from absolutely straight, which was just about everywhere. In some places there was more white on the road than black. The welfare state, Reacher thought. It sure as hell takes care of you.

He carried Pauling’s bag for her and they walked south and east toward Sussex Gardens. From previous trips he recalled groups of row houses joined together into cheap hotels, on Westbourne Terrace, Gloucester Terrace, Lancaster Gate. The kind of places that had thick crusted carpet in the hallways and thick scarred paint on the millwork and four meaningless symbols lit up above the front doors as if some responsible standards agency had evaluated the offered services and found them to be pleasing. Pauling rejected the first two places he found before understanding that there wasn’t going to be anything better just around the next corner. So she gave up and agreed to the third, which was four neighboring townhouses knocked through to make a single long sloping not-quite-aligned building with a name seemingly picked at random from a selection of London tourist-trade hot-button buzzwords: Buckingham Suites. The desk guy was from Eastern Europe and was happy to take cash. The rate was cheap for London, if expensive for anyplace else in the world. There was no register. The Suites part of the name seemed to be justified by the presence of a small bathroom and a small table in each room. The bed was a queen with a green nylon counterpane. Beyond the bed and the bathroom and the table there wasn’t a whole lot of space left.

“We won’t be here long,” Reacher said.

“It’s fine,” Pauling said.

She didn’t unpack. Just propped her suitcase open on the floor and looked like she planned to live out of it. Reacher kept his toothbrush in his pocket. He sat on the bed while Pauling washed up. Then she came out of the bathroom and moved to the window and stood with her head tilted up, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys opposite.

“Nearly ninety-five thousand square miles,” she said. “That’s what’s out there.”

“Smaller than Oregon,” he said.

“Oregon has three and a half million people. The U.K. has sixty million.”

“Harder to hide here, then. You’ve always got a nosy neighbor.”

“Where do we start?”

“With a nap.”

“You want to sleep?”

“Well, afterward.”

She smiled. It was like the sun coming out.

“We’ll always have Bayswater,” she said.

Sex and jet lag kept them asleep until four. Their one day’s start, mostly gone.

“Let’s get going,” Reacher said. “Let’s call on the sisterhood.”

So Pauling got up and fetched her purse and took out a small device that Reacher hadn’t seen her use before. An electronic organizer. A Palm Pilot. She called up a directory and scrolled down a screen and found a name and an address.

“Gray’s Inn Road,” she said. “Is that near here?”

“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I think it’s east of here. Nearer the business district. Maybe where the lawyers are.”

“That would make sense.”

“Anyone closer?”

“These people are supposed to be good.”

“We can get there on the subway, I guess. The Central Line, I think. To Chancery Lane. I should have bought a derby and an umbrella. I would have fit right in.”

“I don’t think you would have. Those City people are very civilized.” She rolled over on the bed and dialed the phone on the night table. Reacher heard the foreign ring tone from the earpiece, a double purr instead of a single. Then he heard someone pick up and he listened to Pauling’s end of the conversation. She explained who she was, temporarily in town, a New York private investigator, ex-FBI, a member of some kind of an international organization, and she gave a contact name, and she asked for a courtesy appointment. The person on the other end must have agreed readily enough because she asked, “How does six o’clock suit you?” and then said nothing more than “OK, thank you, six o’clock it is,” and hung up.

Reacher said, “The sisterhood comes through.”

“Brotherhood,” Pauling said. “The woman whose name I had seems to have sold the business. But they were always going to agree. Like that ten-sixty-two thing you tried with the general. What if they have to come to New York? If we don’t help each other, who will?”

Reacher said, “I hope Edward Lane doesn’t have a Palm Pilot full of London numbers.”

They showered and dressed again and walked down to the subway stop at Lancaster Gate. Or, in London English, to the tube station. It had a dirty tiled lobby that looked like a ballpark toilet, except for a flower seller. But the platform was clean and the train itself was new. And futuristic. Somehow, like its name, it was more tubular than its New York counterparts. The tunnels were rounded, like they had been sucked down to an exact fit for the cars. Like the whole system could be powered by compressed air, not electricity.

It was a crowded six-stop ride through stations with famous and romantic names. Marble Arch, Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn. The names reminded Reacher of the cards in a British Monopoly set he had found abandoned on a NATO base as a kid. Mayfair and Park Lane had been the prize properties. Where the Park Lane Hilton was. Where Lane and his six guys were due in about eighteen hours.

They came up out of the Chancery Lane station at a quarter to six into full daylight and narrow streets that were choked with traffic. Black cabs, red buses, white vans, diesel fumes, small five-door sedans that Reacher didn’t recognize. Motorbikes, pedal bikes, sidewalks thick with people. Boldly striped pedestrian crossings, blinking lights, beeping signals. It was fairly cold but people were walking in shirtsleeves with jackets folded over their arms as if it was warm to them. There were no horns and no sirens. It was like the oldest parts of downtown Manhattan lopped off at the fifth floor and compressed in size and therefore heated up in speed but also somehow cooled down in temper and made more polite. Reacher smiled. Certainly he loved the open road and miles to go but he loved the crush of the world’s great cities just as much. New York yesterday, London today. Life was good.

So far.

They walked north on Gray’s Inn Road, which looked longer than they had anticipated. There were old buildings left and right, modernized on the ground floors, ancient above. A sign said that the house where Charles Dickens had lived was ahead and on the left. But for all that London was a historic city Dickens wouldn’t have recognized the place. No way. Not close. Even Reacher felt that things had changed a lot in the ten or so years since he had last been in town. He remembered red phone boxes and polite unarmed coppers in pointed hats. Now most of the phone boxes he saw were plain glass cabins and everyone was using cell phones anyway. And the cops he saw were patrolling in pairs, blank-faced, dressed in flak jackets and carrying Uzi machine pistols in the ready position. There were surveillance cameras on poles everywhere.

Pauling said, “Big brother is watching you.”

“I see that,” Reacher said. “We’re going to have to take Lane out of town. Can’t do anything to him here.”

Pauling didn’t answer. She was checking doors for numbers. She spotted the one she wanted across the street on the right. It was a narrow maroon door with a glass fanlight. Through it Reacher could see a staircase that led to suites of rooms upstairs. Not dissimilar to Pauling’s own place three thousand miles away. They crossed the street between standing traffic and checked the brass plates on the stonework. One was engraved: Investigative Services plc. Plain script, plain message. Reacher pulled the door and thought it was locked until he remembered that British doors worked the other way around. So he pushed and found that it was open. The staircase was old but it was covered in new linoleum. They walked up two flights until they found the right door. It was standing open onto a small square room with a desk set at a forty-five-degree angle so that its occupant could see out the door and the window at the same time. The occupant was a small man with thin hair. He was maybe fifty years old. He was wearing a sleeveless sweater over a shirt and a tie.

“You must be the Americans,” he said. For a second Reacher wondered how exactly he had known. Clothes? Teeth? Smell? A deduction, like Sherlock Holmes? But then the guy said, “I stayed open especially for you. I would have been on my way home by now if you hadn’t telephoned. I didn’t have any other appointments.”

Pauling said, “Sorry to hold you up.”

“Not a problem,” the guy said. “Always happy to help a fellow professional.”

“We’re looking for someone,” Pauling said. “He arrived from New York two days ago. He’s English, and his name is Taylor.”

The guy glanced up.

“Twice in one day,” he said. “Your Mr. Taylor is a popular person.”

“What do you mean?”

“A man telephoned directly from New York with the same inquiry. Wouldn’t give his name. I imagined he was trying all the London agencies one by one.”

“Was he American?”

“Absolutely.”

Pauling turned to Reacher and mouthed, Lane.

Reacher nodded. “Trying to go it alone. Trying to bilk me out of my fee.”

Pauling turned back to the desk. “What did you tell the guy on the phone?”

“That there are sixty million people in Great Britain and that possibly several hundred thousand of them are called Taylor. It’s a fairly common name. I told him that without better information I couldn’t really help him.”

“Can you help us?”

“That depends on what extra information you have.”

“We have photographs.”

“They might help eventually. But not at the outset. How long was Mr. Taylor in America?”

“Many years, I think.”

“So he has no base here? No home?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“Then it’s hopeless,” the guy said. “Don’t you see? I work with databases. Surely you do the same in New York? Bills, electoral registers, council tax, court records, credit reports, insurance policies, things like that. If your Mr. Taylor hasn’t lived here for many years he simply won’t show up anywhere.”

Pauling said nothing.

“I’m very sorry,” the guy said. “But surely you understand?”

Pauling shot Reacher a look that said: Great plan.

Reacher said, “I’ve got a phone number for his closest relative.”

CHAPTER 58

Reacher said, “We searched Taylor’s apartment in New York and we found a desk phone that had ten speed-dials programmed. The only British number was labeled with the letter S. I’m guessing it’s for his mother or father or his brother or sister. More likely a brother or sister because I think a guy like him would have used M or D for his mom or his dad. It’ll be Sam, Sally, Sarah, Sean, something like that. And the sibling relationship will probably be fairly close, or else why bother to program a speed dial? And if the relationship is fairly close, then Taylor won’t have come back to Britain without at least letting them know. Because they’ve probably got him on speed dial too, and they would worry if he wasn’t answering his phone at home. So I’m guessing they’ll have the information we need.”

“What was the number?” the guy asked.

Reacher closed his eyes and recited the 01144 number he had memorized back on Hudson Street. The guy at the desk wrote it down on a pad of paper with a blunt pencil.

“OK,” he said. “We delete the international prefix, and we add a zero in its place.” He did exactly that, manually, with his pencil. “Then we fire up the old computer and we look in the reverse directory.” He spun his chair one-eighty to a computer table behind him and tapped the space bar and unlocked the screen with a password Reacher didn’t catch. Then he pointed and clicked his way to a dialog box, where he entered the number. “This will give us the address only, you understand. We’ll have to go elsewhere to discover the exact identity of the person who lives there.” He hit submit and a second later the screen redrew and came up with an address.

“Grange Farm,” he said. “In Bishops Pargeter. Sounds rural.”

Reacher asked, “How rural?”

“Not far from Norwich, judging by the postcode.”

“Bishops Pargeter is the name of a town?”

The guy nodded. “It’ll be a small village, probably. Or a hamlet, possibly. Perhaps a dozen buildings and a thirteenth-century Norman church. That would be typical. In the county of Norfolk, in East Anglia. Farming country, very flat, windy, the Fens, that kind of thing, north and east of here, about a hundred and twenty miles away.”

“Find the name.”

“Hang on, hang on, I’m getting there.” The guy dragged and dropped the address to a temporary location elsewhere on the screen and opened up a different database. “The electoral register,” he said. “That’s always my preference. It’s in the public domain, quite legal, and it’s usually fairly comprehensive and reliable. If people take the trouble to vote, that is, which they don’t always do, of course.” He dragged the address back to a new dialog box and hit another submit command. There was a long, long wait. Then the screen changed. “Here we are,” the guy said. “Two voters at that address. Jackson. That’s the name. Mr. Anthony Jackson, and let’s see, yes, Mrs. Susan Jackson. So there’s your S. S for Susan.”

“A sister,” Pauling said. “Married. This is like Hobart all over again.”

“Now then,” the guy said. “Let’s do a little something else. Not quite legal this time, but since I’m among friends and colleagues, I might as well push the boat out.” He opened a new database that came up in old-fashioned plain DOS script. “Hacked, basically,” he said. “That’s why we don’t get the fancy graphics. But we get the information. The Department of Health and Social Security. The nanny state at work.” He entered Anthony Jackson’s name and address and then added a complex keyboard command and the screen rolled down and came back with three separate names and a mass of figures. “Anthony Jackson is thirty-nine years old and his wife Susan is thirty-eight. Her maiden name was indeed Taylor. They have one child, a daughter, age eight, and they seem to have saddled her with the unfortunate name of Melody.”

“That’s a nice name,” Pauling said.

“Not for Norfolk. I don’t suppose she’s happy at school.”

Reacher asked, “Have they been in Norfolk long? Is that where the Taylors are from? As a family?”

The guy scrolled up the screen. “The unfortunate Melody seems to have been born in London, which would suggest not.” He exited the plain DOS site and opened another. “The Land Registry,” he said. He entered the address. Hit another submit command. The screen redrew. “No, they bought the place in Bishops Pargeter just over a year ago. Sold a place in south London at the same time. Which would suggest they’re city folk heading back to the land. It’s a common fantasy. I give them another twelve months or so before they get tired of it.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said. “We appreciate your help.”

He picked up the guy’s blunt pencil from the desk and took Patti Joseph’s envelope out of his pocket and wrote Anthony, Susan, Melody Jackson, Grange Farm, Bishops Pargeter, Norfolk on it. Then he said, “Maybe you could forget all about this if the guy from New York calls again.”

“Money at stake?”

“Lots of it.”

“First come, first served,” the guy said. “The early bird catches the worm. And so on and so forth. My lips are sealed.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said again. “What do we owe you?”

“Oh, nothing at all,” the guy said. “It was my pleasure entirely. Always happy to help a fellow professional.”

Back on the street Pauling said, “All Lane has to do is check Taylor’s apartment and find the phone and he’s level with us. He could get back to a different guy in London. Or call someone in New York. Those reverse directories are available on-line.”

“He won’t find the phone,” Reacher said. “And if he did, he wouldn’t make the connection. Different skill set. Mirror on a stick.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely. So I took the precaution of erasing the number.”

“That’s called taking an unfair advantage.”

“I want to make sure I get the money.”

“Should we just go ahead and call Susan Jackson?”

“I was going to,” Reacher said. “But then you mentioned Hobart and his sister and now I’m not so sure. Suppose Susan is as protective as Dee Marie? She’d just lie to us about anything she knows.”

“We could say we were buddies passing through.”

“She’d check with Taylor before she told us anything.”

“So what next?”

“We’re going to have to go up there ourselves. To Bishops Pargeter, wherever the hell that is.”

CHAPTER 59

Obviously their hotel didn’t even come close to offering concierge service so Reacher and Pauling had to walk down to Marble Arch to find a car rental office. Reacher had neither a driver’s license nor a credit card so he left Pauling to fill in the forms and kept on going down Oxford Street to look for a bookstore. He found a big place that had a travel section in back with a whole shelf of motoring atlases of Britain. But the first three he checked didn’t show Bishops Pargeter at all. No sign of it anywhere. It wasn’t in the index. Too small, he figured. Not even a dot on the map. He found London and Norfolk and Norwich. No problem with those places. He found market towns and large villages. But nothing smaller. Then he saw a cache of Ordnance Survey maps. Four shelves, low down, against a wall. A whole series. Big folded sheets, meticulously drawn, government sponsored. For hikers, he guessed. Or for serious geography freaks. There was a choice of scales. Best was a huge thing that showed detail all the way down to some individual buildings. He pulled all the Norfolk sheets off the shelf and tried them one by one. He found Bishops Pargeter on the fourth attempt. It was a crossroads hamlet about thirty miles south and west of the Norwich outskirts. Two minor roads met. Not even the roads themselves showed up on the motoring atlases.

He bought the map for detail and the cheapest atlas for basic orientation. Then he hiked back to the rental office and found Pauling waiting with the key to a Mini Cooper.

“A red one,” she said. “With a white roof. Very cool.”

He said, “I think Taylor might be right there. With his sister.”

“Why?”

“His instinct would be to go hide somewhere lonely. Somewhere isolated. And he was a soldier, so deep down he’d want somewhere defensible. It’s flat as a pool table there. I just read the map. He’d see someone coming from five miles away. If he’s got a rifle he’s impregnable. And if he’s got four-wheel-drive he’s got a three-sixty escape route. He could just take off across the fields in any direction.”

“You can’t murder two people and steal more than ten million dollars and just go home to your sister.”

“He wouldn’t have to give her chapter and verse. He wouldn’t really have to tell her anything at all. And it might only be temporary. He might need a break. He’s been under a lot of stress.”

“You sound sorry for him.”

“I’m trying to think like him. He’s been planning for a long time and the last week must have been hell. He must be exhausted. He needs to hole up and sleep.”

“His sister’s place would be too risky, surely. Family is the first thing anyone thinks of. We did, with Hobart. We tried every Hobart in the book.”

“His sister is a Jackson, not a Taylor. Like Graziano wasn’t a Hobart. And Grange Farm is not an ancestral pile. The sister only just moved there. Anyone tracking his family would get bogged down in London.”

“There’s a kid up there. His niece. Would he put innocent people in physical danger?”

“He just killed two innocent people. He’s a little underdeveloped in the conscience department.”

Pauling swung the car key on her finger. Back and forth, thinking.

“It’s possible,” she said. “I guess. So what’s our play?”

“Taylor was with Lane three years,” Reacher said. “So he never met you and he sure as hell never met me. So it doesn’t really make much difference. He’s not going to shoot every stranger who comes to the house. He can’t really afford to. It’s something we should bear in mind, is all.”

“We’re going right to the house?”

Reacher nodded. “At least close enough to scope it out. If Taylor’s there, we back off and wait for Lane. If he isn’t, we go all the way in and talk to Susan.”

“When?”

“Now.”

The rental guy brought the Mini Cooper out from a garage space in back and Reacher shoved the passenger seat hard up against the rear bench and slid inside. Pauling got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. It was a cute car. It looked great in red. But it was a handful to drive. Stick shift, wrong side of the road, wheel on the right, early-evening traffic in one of the world’s most congested cities. But they made it back to the hotel OK. They double parked and Pauling ran in to get her bag. Reacher stayed in the car. His toothbrush was already in his pocket. Pauling got back after five minutes and said, “We’re on the west side here. Convenient for the airport. But now we need to exit the city from the east.”

“Northeast,” Reacher said. “On a highway called the M-11.”

“So I have to drive all the way through the center of London in rush hour.”

“No worse than Paris or Rome.”

“I’ve never been to Paris or Rome.”

“Well, now you’ll know what to expect if you ever get there.”

Heading east and north was a simple enough proposition but like any major city London was full of one-way systems and complex junctions. And it was full of lines of stalled traffic at every light. They made halting progress as far as a district called Shoreditch and then they found a wide road labeled A-10 that speared due north. Too early, but they took it anyway. They figured they would make the lateral adjustment later, away from the congestion. Then they found the M-25, which was a kind of beltway. They hit it clockwise and two exits later they were on the M-11, heading north and east for Cambridge, Newmarket, and ultimately Norfolk. Nine o’clock in the evening, and getting dark.

Pauling asked, “You know this area we’re going to?”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “It was Air Force country, not army. Bomber bases all over the place. Flat, spacious, close to Europe. Ideal.”

England was a lit-up country. That was for damn sure. Every inch of the highway was bathed in bright vapor glow. And people drove fast. The limit was posted at seventy miles an hour, but it was widely ignored. High eighties, low nineties seemed to be the norm. Lane discipline was good. Nobody passed on the inside. The highway exits all followed the same coherent grammar. Clear signs, plenty of warning, long deceleration lanes. Reacher had read that highway fatalities were low in Britain. Safety, through infrastructure.

Pauling asked, “What’s Grange Farm going to be like?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Technically in Old English a grange was a large barn for grain storage. Then later it became a word for the main building in a gentleman’s arable farm. So I guess we’re going to see a big house and a bunch of smaller outbuildings. Fields all around. Maybe a hundred acres. Kind of feudal.”

“You know a lot.”

“A lot of useless information,” Reacher said. “Supposed to fire my imagination.”

“But you can’t get no satisfaction?”

“None at all. I don’t like anything about this whole situation. It feels wrong.”

“Because there are no good guys. Just bad guys and worse guys.”

“They’re all equally terrible.”

“The hard way,” Pauling said. “Sometimes things aren’t black and white.”

Reacher said, “I can’t get past the feeling that I’m making a bad mistake.”

England is a small country but East Anglia was a large empty part of it. In some ways it was like driving across the prairie states. Endless forward motion without much visible result. The little red Mini Cooper hummed along. The clock in Reacher’s head crawled around to ten in the evening. The last of the twilight disappeared. Beyond the bright ribbon of road was nothing but full darkness.

They bypassed a town called Thetford. Much later they blew through a town called Fenchurch Saint Mary. The road narrowed and the streetlights disappeared. They saw a sign that said Norwich 40 Miles. So Reacher switched maps and they started hunting the turn down to Bishops Pargeter. The road signs were clear and helpful. But they were all written with the same size lettering and there seemed to be a maximum permitted length for a fingerpost. Which meant that the longer names were abbreviated. Reacher saw a sign to B’sh’ps P’ter flash by and they were two hundred yards past it before he figured out what it meant. So Pauling jammed to a stop in the lonely darkness and U-turned and went back. Paused a second and then turned off the main drag onto a much smaller road. It was narrow and winding and the surface was bad. Pitch dark beyond the headlight beams.

“How far?” Pauling asked.

Reacher spanned his finger and thumb on the map.

“Maybe nine miles,” he said. The motoring atlas had showed nothing but a blank white triangle between two roads that fanned out south of the city of Norwich. The Ordnance Survey sheet showed the triangle to be filled with a tracery of minor tracks and speckled here and there with small settlements. He put his finger on the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then he looked out the car window.

“This is pointless,” he said. “It’s too dark. We’re not even going to see the house, let alone who’s living in it.” He looked back at the map. It showed buildings about four miles ahead. One was labeled PH. He checked the legend in the corner of the sheet.

“Public house,” he said. “A pub. Maybe an inn. We should get a room. Go out again at first light.”

Pauling said, “Suits me, boss.”

He realized she was tired. Travel, jet lag, unfamiliar roads, driving stress. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We overdid it. I should have planned better.”

“No, this works,” she said. “We’re right on the spot for the morning. But how much farther?”

“Four miles to the pub now, and then five more to Bishops Pargeter tomorrow.”

“What time is it?”

He smiled. “Ten forty-seven.”

“So you can do it in multiple time zones.”

“There’s a clock on the dashboard. I can see it from here. I’m practically sitting in your lap.”

Eight minutes later they saw a glow in the distance that turned out to be the pub’s spotlit sign. It was swinging in a gentle night breeze on a high gallows. The Bishop’s Arms. There was a blacktopped parking lot with five cars in it and then a row of lit windows. The windows looked warm and inviting. Beyond the dark outline of the building there was absolutely nothing at all. Just endless flatness under a vast night sky.

“Maybe it was a coaching inn,” Pauling said.

“Can’t have been,” Reacher said. “It’s not on the way to anywhere. It was for farm laborers.”

She turned in at the entrance of the parking lot and slotted the tiny car between a dirty Land Rover and a battered sedan of indeterminate make and age. Turned the motor off and dropped her hands off the wheel with a sigh. Silence rolled in, and with it came the smell of moist earth. The night air was cold. A little damp. Reacher carried Pauling’s bag to the pub’s door. There was a foyer inside, with a swaybacked staircase on the right and a low beamed ceiling and a patterned carpet and about ten thousand brass ornaments. Dead ahead was a hotel reception counter made from dark old wood varnished to an amazing shine. It was unattended. To the left was a doorway marked Saloon Bar. It led to a room that seemed to be empty. To the right beyond the stairs was a doorway marked Public Bar. Through it Reacher could see a bartender at work and the backs of four drinkers hunched on stools. In the far corner he could see the back of a man sitting alone at a table. All five customers were drinking from pint pots of ale.

Reacher stepped up to the empty reception counter and dinged the bell. A long moment later the bartender came in through a door behind the counter. He was about sixty, large and florid. Tired. He was wiping his hands on a towel.

“We need a room,” Reacher said to him.

“Tonight?” he said back.

“Yes, tonight.”

“It’ll cost you forty pounds. But that’s with breakfast included.”

“Sounds like a bargain.”

“Which room would you like?”

“Which would you recommend?”

“You want one with a bath?”

Pauling said, “Yes, a bath. That would be nice.”

“OK, then. That’s what you can have.”

She gave him four ten-pound notes and he gave her a brass key on a tasseled fob. Then he handed Reacher a ballpoint pen and squared a register in front of him. Reacher wrote J & L Bayswater on the Name line. Then he checked a box for Place of Business rather than Place of Residence and wrote Yankee Stadium’s street address on the next line. East 161st Street, Bronx, New York, USA. He wished that was his place of business. He always had. In a space labeled Make of Vehicle he scrawled Rolls-Royce. He guessed Registration Number meant license plate and he wrote R34-CHR. Then he asked the bartender, “Can we get a meal?”

“You’re a little too late for a meal, I’m afraid,” the bartender said. “But you could have sandwiches, if you like.”

“That would be fine,” Reacher said.

“You’re Americans, aren’t you? We get a lot of them here. They come to see the old airfields. Where they were stationed.”

“Before my time,” Reacher said.

The bartender nodded sagely and said, “Go on in and have a drink. Your sandwiches will be ready soon.”

Reacher left Pauling’s bag at the foot of the stairs and stepped in through the door to the public bar. Five heads turned. The four guys at the bar looked like farmers. Red weathered faces, thick hands, blank uninterested expressions.

The guy alone at the table in the corner was Taylor.

CHAPTER 60

Like the good soldier he was Taylor kept his eyes on Reacher long enough to assess the threat level. Pauling’s arrival behind Reacher’s shoulder seemed to reassure him. A well-dressed man, a refined woman, a couple, tourists. He looked away. Turned back to his beer. Beginning to end he had stared only a fraction of a second longer than any man would in a barroom situation. And actually shorter than the farmers. They were slow and ponderous and full of the kind of entitlement a regular patron shows to a stranger.

Reacher led Pauling to a table on the other side of the room from Taylor and sat with his back to the wall and watched the farmers turn back to the bar. They did it one by one, slowly. Then the last one picked up his glass again and the atmosphere in the room settled back to what it had been before. A moment later the bartender reappeared. He picked up a towel and started wiping glasses.

Reacher said, “We should act normally. We should buy a drink.”

Pauling said, “I guess I’ll try the local beer. You know, when in Rome.”

So Reacher got up again and stepped over to the bar and tried to think back ten years to when he had last been in a similar situation. It was important to get the dialect right. He leaned between two of the farmers and put his knuckles on the bar and said, “A pint of best, please, and a half for the lady.” It was important to get the manners right too, so he turned left and right to the four farmers and added: “And will you gentlemen join us?” Then he glanced at the bartender and said: “And can I get yours?” Then the whole dynamic in the room funneled toward Taylor as the only patron as yet uninvited. Taylor turned and looked up from his table as if compelled to and Reacher mimed a drinking action and called, “What can I get you?”

Taylor looked back at him and said, “Thanks, but I’ve got to go.” A flat British accent, a little like Gregory’s. Calculation in his eyes. But nothing in his face. No suspicion. Maybe a little awkwardness. Maybe even a hint of dour amiability. A guileless half-smile, a flash of the bad teeth. Then he drained his glass and set it back on the table and got up and headed for the door.

“Goodnight,” he said, as he passed by.

The bartender pulled six and a half pints of best bitter and lined them up like sentries. Reacher paid for them and pushed them around a little as a gesture toward distribution. Then he picked his own up and said, “Cheers,” and took a sip. He carried Pauling’s half-sized glass over to her, and the four farmers and the bartender all turned toward their table and toasted them. Reacher thought: Instant social acceptance for less than thirty bucks. Cheap at twice the price. But he said, “I hope I didn’t offend that other fellow somehow.”

“Don’t know him,” one of the farmers said. “Never saw him before.”

“He’s at Grange Farm,” another farmer said. “Must be, because he was in Grange Farm’s Land Rover. I saw him drive up in it.”

“Is he a farmer?” Reacher asked.

“He don’t look like one,” the first farmer said. “I never saw him before.”

“Where’s Grange Farm?”

“Down the road apiece. There’s a family there now.”

“Ask Dave Kemp,” the third farmer said.

Reacher said, “Who’s Dave Kemp?”

“Dave Kemp in the shop,” the third farmer said, impatiently, like Reacher was an idiot. “In Bishops Pargeter. He’ll know. Dave Kemp knows everything, on account of the post office. Nosy bugger.”

“Is there a pub there? Why would someone from there drink here?”

“This is the only pub for miles, lad. Why else do you think it’s so crowded?”

Reacher didn’t answer that.

“They’re offcomers at Grange Farm,” the first farmer said, finally completing his earlier thought. “That family. Recent. From London, I reckon. Don’t know them. Organic, they are. Don’t hold with chemicals.”

And that information seemed to conclude what the farmers felt they owed in exchange for a pint of beer because they fell to talking among themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of organic farming. It felt like a well-worn argument. According to what Reacher overheard there was absolutely nothing in its favor except for the inexplicable willingness of townsfolk to pay over the odds for the resulting produce.

“You were right,” Pauling said. “Taylor’s at the farm.”

“But will he stay there now?” Reacher said.

“I don’t see why not. Your big dumb generous American act was pretty convincing. You weren’t threatening. Maybe he thought we’re just tourists looking at where our dads were based. They get them all the time here. That guy said so.”

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling said, “I parked right next to him, didn’t I? That farmer said he was in a Land Rover and there was only one Land Rover in the lot.”

Reacher said, “I wish he hadn’t been in here.”

“This is probably one of the reasons he chose to come back. English beer.”

“You like it?”

“No, but I believe Englishmen do.”

Their sandwiches were surprisingly good. Fresh crusty home-made bread, butter, rare roast beef, creamy horseradish sauce, farmhouse cheese on the side, with thin potato chips as a garnish. They ate them and finished their beers. Then they headed upstairs to their room. It was better than their suite in Bayswater. More spacious, partly due to the fact that the bed was a full, not a queen. Four feet six, not five feet. Not really a hardship, Reacher thought. Not under the circumstances. He set the alarm in his head for six in the morning. First light. Taylor will stay or Taylor will run, and either way we’ll watch him do it.

CHAPTER 61

The view out the window at six the next morning was one of infinite misty flatness. The land was level and gray-green all the way to the far horizon, interrupted only by straight ditches and occasional stands of trees. The trees had long thin supple trunks and round compact crowns to withstand the winds. Reacher could see them bending and tossing in the distance.

Outside it was very cold and their car was all misted over with dew. Reacher cleared the windows with the sleeve of his jacket. They climbed inside without saying much. Pauling backed out of the parking space and crunched into first gear and took off through the lot. Braked briefly and then joined the road, due east toward the morning sky. Five miles to Bishops Pargeter. Five miles to Grange Farm.

They found the farm before they found the village. It filled the upper left-hand square of the quadrant formed by the crossroad. They saw it first from the southwest. It was bounded by ditches, not fences. They were dug straight and crisp and deep. Then came flat fields, neatly plowed, dusted pale green with late crops recently planted. Then closer to the center were small stands of trees, almost decorative, like they had been artfully planted for effect. Then a large gray stone house. Larger than Reacher had imagined. Not a castle, not a stately home, but more impressive than a mere farmhouse had any right to be. Then in the distance to the north and the east of the house were five outbuildings. Barns, long, low, and tidy. Three of them made a three-sided square around some kind of a yard. Two stood alone.

The road they were driving on was flanked by the ditch that formed the farm’s southern boundary. With every yard they drove their perspective rotated and changed, like the farm was an exhibit on a turntable, on display. It was a big handsome establishment. The driveway crossed the boundary ditch on a small flat bridge and then ran north into the distance, beaten earth, neatly cambered. The house itself was end-on to the road, a half-mile in. The front door faced west and the back door faced east. The Land Rover was parked between the back of the house and one of the standalone barns, tiny in the distance, cold, inert, misted over.

“He’s still there,” Reacher said.

“Unless he has a car of his own.”

“If he had a car of his own he would have used it last night.”

Pauling slowed to a walk. There was no sign of activity around the house. None at all. There was thin smoke from a chimney, blown horizontal by the wind. A banked fire for a water heater, maybe. No lights in the windows.

Pauling said, “I thought farmers got up early.”

“I guess livestock farmers do,” Reacher said. “To milk the cows or whatever. But this place is all crops. Between plowing and harvesting I don’t see what they have to do. I guess they just sit back and let the stuff grow.”

“They need to spray it, don’t they? They should be out on tractors.”

“Not organic people. They don’t hold with chemicals. A little irrigation, maybe.”

“This is England. It rains all the time.”

“It hasn’t rained since we got here.”

“Eighteen hours,” Pauling said. “A new record. It rained all the time I was at Scotland Yard.”

She coasted to a halt and put the stick in neutral and buzzed her window down. Reacher did the same thing and cold damp air blew through the car. Outside was all silence and stillness. Just the hiss of wind in distant trees and the faint suggestion of morning shadows in the mist.

Pauling said, “I guess all the world looked like this once.”

“These were the north folk,” Reacher said. “Norfolk and Suffolk, the north folk and the south folk. Two ancient Celtic kingdoms, I think.”

Then the silence was shattered by a shotgun. A distant blast that rolled over the fields like an explosion. Enormously loud in the quiet. Reacher and Pauling both ducked instinctively. Then they scanned the horizon, looking for smoke. Looking for incoming fire.

Pauling said, “Taylor?”

Reacher said, “I don’t see him.”

“Who else would it be?”

“He was too far away to be effective.”

“Hunters?”

“Turn the motor off,” Reacher said. He listened hard. Heard nothing more. No movement, no reload.

“I think it was a bird scarer,” he said. “They just planted a winter crop. They don’t want the crows to eat the seeds. I think they have machines that fire blanks all day at random.”

“I hope that’s all it was.”

“We’ll come back,” Reacher said. “Let’s go find Dave Kemp in the shop.”

Pauling fired the engine up and took off again and Reacher twisted in his seat and watched the eastern half of the farm go by. It looked exactly the same as the western half. But in reverse. Trees near the house, then wide flat fields, then a ditch on the boundary. Then came the northern leg of the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then the hamlet itself, which was little more than an ancient stone church standing alone in the upper right-hand quadrant and a fifty-yard string of buildings along the shoulder of the road opposite. Most of the buildings seemed to be residential cottages but one of them was a long low multi-purpose store. It was a newspaper shop, and a grocery, and a post office. Because it sold newspapers and breakfast requisites it was already open.

“The direct approach?” Pauling asked.

“A variant,” Reacher said.

She parked opposite the store where the shoulder was graveled near the entrance to the churchyard. They got out of the car into a stiff wind that blew strong and steady out of the east. Reacher said, “Guys I knew who served here swore it blew all the way from Siberia without anything getting in its way.” The village store felt warm and snug by comparison. There was some kind of a gas heater going that put warm moisture into the air. There was a shuttered post office window and a central section that sold food and a newspaper counter at the far end. There was an old guy behind the counter. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and a muffler. He was sorting newspapers, and his fingers were gray with ink.

“Are you Dave Kemp?” Reacher asked.

“That’s my name,” the old guy said.

“We were told you’re the man to ask.”

“About what?”

“We’re here on a mission,” Reacher said.

“You’re certainly here early.”

“First come first served,” Reacher said, because the London guy had, and therefore it might sound authentic.

“What do you want?”

“We’re here to buy farms.”

“You’re Americans, aren’t you?”

“We represent a large agricultural corporation in the United States, yes. We’re looking to make investments. And we can offer very generous finders’ fees.”

The direct approach. A variant.

“How much?” Kemp asked.

“It’s usually a percentage.”

“What farms?” Kemp asked.

“You tell us. Generally we look for tidy well-run places that might have issues with ownership stability.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we want good places that were recently bought up by amateurs. But we want them quick, before they’re ruined.”

“Grange Farm,” Kemp said. “They’re bloody amateurs. They’ve gone organic.”

“We heard that name.”

“It should be top of your list. It’s exactly what you said. They’ve bitten off more than they can chew there. And that’s when they’re both at home. Which they aren’t always. Just now the chap was left alone there for a few days. It’s far too much for one man to run. Especially a bloody amateur. And they’ve got too many trees. You can’t make money growing trees.”

“Grange Farm sounds like a good prospect,” Reacher said. “But we heard that someone else is snooping around there, too. He’s been seen, recently. On the property. A rival, maybe.”

“Really?” Kemp said, excited, conflict in the offing. Then his face fell, deflated. “No, I know who you mean. That’s not a bloody rival. That’s the woman’s brother. He’s moved in with them.”

“Are you sure about that? Because it makes a difference to us, how many people we have to relocate.”

Kemp nodded. “The chap came in here and introduced himself. Said he was back from somewhere or other and his wandering days were over. He was posting a packet to America. Airmail. We don’t get much of that here. We had quite a nice chat.”

“So you’re sure he’s going to be a long-term resident? Because it makes a difference.”

“That’s what he said.”

Pauling asked, “What did he post to America?”

“He didn’t tell me what it was. It was going to a hotel in New York. Addressed to a room, not a person, which I thought was strange.”

Reacher asked, “Did you guess what it was?”

Dave Kemp, the farmer in the bar had said. Nosy bugger.

“It felt like a thin book,” Kemp said. “Not many pages. A rubber band around it. Maybe he had borrowed it. Not that I squeezed it or anything.”

“Didn’t he fill out a customs declaration?”

“We put it down as printed papers. Don’t need a form for that.”

“Thanks, Mr. Kemp,” Reacher said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“What about the fee?”

“If we buy the farm, you’ll get it,” Reacher said.

If we buy the farm, he thought. Unfortunate turn of phrase. He felt suddenly cold.

Dave Kemp had no take-out coffee so they bought Coke and candy bars and stopped to eat them on the side of the road a mile west, where they could watch the front of the farmhouse. The place was still quiet. No lights, the same thin trickle of smoke catching the wind and dispersing sideways.

Reacher said, “Why did you ask about the airmail to the States?”

“An old habit,” Pauling said. “Ask about everything, especially when you’re not sure about what’s important and what isn’t. And it was kind of weird. Taylor just got out, and the first thing he does is mail something back? What could it have been?”

“Maybe something for his partner,” Reacher said. “Maybe he’s still in the city.”

“We should have gotten the address. But we did pretty well, overall. You were very plausible. It fit very well with last night. All that false bonhomie in the bar? Assuming Kemp spreads the word, Taylor’s going to put you down as a conman looking to make a fast buck buying farms for fifty cents on the dollar.”

“I can lie with the best of them,” Reacher said. “Sadly.”

Then he shut up fast because he caught a glimpse of movement a half-mile away. The farmhouse door was opening. There was morning mist and the sun was on the other side of the house and the distance was at the outer limit of visibility but he made out four figures emerging into the light. Two big, one slightly smaller, one very small. Probably two men, a woman, and a little child. Possibly a girl.

“They’re up,” he said.

Pauling said, “I see them, but only just. Four people. The bird scarer probably woke them. Louder than a rooster. It’s the Jackson family and Taylor, right? Mommy, Daddy, Melody, and her loving uncle.”

“Must be.”

They all had things on their shoulders. Long straight poles. Comfortable for the adults, way too big for the girl.

“What are they doing?” Pauling asked.

“Those are hoes,” Reacher said. “They’re going out to the fields.”

“To dig weeds?”

“Organic farming. They can’t use herbicides.”

The tiny figures grouped together and moved north, away from the road. They dwindled to nothingness, just faint remote blurs in the mist that were more ghostly illusion than reality.

“He’s staying,” Pauling said. “Isn’t he? He must be staying. You don’t go out to hoe weeds for your sister if you’re thinking about running.”

Reacher nodded. “We’ve seen enough. The job is done. Let’s get back to London and wait for Lane.”

CHAPTER 62

They hit commuter traffic on the road to London. Lots of it. It seemed like for hundreds of miles England was one of two things: either London or a dormitory serving London. The city was like a gigantic sprawling magnet sucking inward. According to Reacher’s atlas the M-11 was just one of twenty or so radial arteries that fed the capital. He guessed they were all just as busy, all full of tiny flowing corpuscles that would get spat back out at the end of the day. The daily grind. He had never worked nine to five, never commuted. At times he felt profoundly grateful for that fact. This was one of them.

The stick shift was hard work in the congestion. Two hours into the ride they pulled off and got gas and he changed places with Pauling, even though he wasn’t on the paperwork and wasn’t insured to drive. It seemed like a minor transgression compared to what they were contemplating for later. He had driven in Britain before, years earlier, in a large British sedan owned by the U.S. Army. But now the roads were busier. Much busier. It seemed to him like the whole island was packed to capacity. Until he thought back to Norfolk. That county was empty. The island is unevenly packed, he thought. That was the real problem. Either full or empty. No middle ground. Which was unusual for Brits, in his experience. Normally Brits fudged and muddled like champions. The middle ground was where they lived.

They came to the M-25 beltway and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Decided to hit it for a quarter-circle counterclockwise and then head down to the West End on an easier route. But the M-25 itself was pretty much a parking lot.

“How do people stand this every day?” Pauling said.

“Houston and LA are as bad,” Reacher said.

“But it kind of explains why the Jacksons escaped.”

“I guess it does.”

And the traffic moved on slowly, circulating like water around a bathtub drain, before yielding to the inexorable pull of the city.

They came in through St. John’s Wood, where the Abbey Road studios were, past Regent’s Park, through Marylebone, past Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes had lived, through Marble Arch again, and onto Park Lane. The Hilton hotel was at the south end, near the truly world-class automotive insanity that was Hyde Park Corner. They parked in a commercial garage underground at a quarter to eleven in the morning. Maybe an hour before Lane and his guys were due to check in.

“Want lunch?” Pauling said.

“Can’t eat,” Reacher said. “I’m too knotted up.”

“So you’re human after all.”

“I feel like I’m delivering Taylor to an executioner.”

“He deserves to die.”

“I’d rather do it myself.”

“So make the offer.”

“Wouldn’t be good enough. Lane wants the partner’s name. I’m not up for torturing it out of the guy personally.”

“So walk away.”

“I can’t. I want retribution for Kate and Jade and I want the money for Hobart. No other way of getting either. And we have a deal with your Pentagon buddy. He delivered, so now I have to deliver. But all things considered I think I’ll skip lunch.”

Pauling asked, “Where do you want me?”

“In the lobby. Watching. Then go get yourself a room somewhere else. Leave me a note at the Hilton’s desk. Use the name Bayswater. I’ll take Lane to Norfolk, Lane will deal with Taylor, I’ll deal with Lane. Then I’ll come back and get you, whenever. Then we’ll go somewhere together. Bath, maybe. To the Roman spas. We’ll try to get clean again.”

They walked past an automobile showroom that was displaying brand-new models of the Mini Cooper they had been driving. They walked past discreet set-back entrances to blocks of mansion flats. They went up a short flight of concrete steps to the Park Lane Hilton’s lobby. Pauling detoured to a distant group of armchairs and Reacher walked to the desk. He stood in line. Watched the clerks. They were busy with their phones and their computers. There were printers and Xerox machines behind them on credenzas. Above the Xerox machines was a brass plaque that said: By statute some documents may not be photocopied. Like banknotes, Reacher thought. They needed a law, because modern Xerox machines were just too good. Above the credenzas was a line of clocks set to world time, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. He checked New York’s against the time in his head. Spot on. Then the person in front of him finished up. He moved to the head of the line.

“Edward Lane’s party,” he said. “Have they checked in yet?”

The clerk tapped his keyboard. “Not yet, sir.”

“I’m waiting for them. When they get here, tell them I’m across the lobby.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Taylor,” Reacher said. He walked away, clear of the busiest areas, and found a quiet spot. He was going to be counting eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and he didn’t want an audience. He dumped himself down in one of a group of four armchairs. He knew from long experience that nobody would try to join him. Nobody ever did. He radiated subliminal stay away signals and sane people obeyed them. Already a nearby family was watching him warily. Two kids and a mother, camped out in the next group of chairs, presumably off of an early flight and waiting for their room to be ready. The mother looked tired and the kids looked fractious. She had unpacked half their stuff, trying to keep them amused. Toys, coloring books, battered teddy bears, a doll missing an arm, battery-driven video games. He could hear the mother’s halfhearted suggestions of how to fill the time: Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you draw a picture of something you’re going to see? Like therapy.

He turned away and watched the door. People came in, a constant stream. Some weary and travel-stained, some busy and bustling. Some with mountains of luggage, some with briefcases only. All kinds of nationalities. In the next group of chairs one kid threw a bear at the other kid’s head. It missed and skidded across the tile and hit Reacher’s foot. He leaned down and picked it up. All the stuffing was out of it. He tossed it back. Heard the mother suggesting some other pointless activity: Why don’t you do this? He thought: Why don’t you shut the hell up and sit still like normal human beings?

He looked back at the door and saw Perez walk in. Then Kowalski. Then Edward Lane himself, third in line. Then Gregory, and Groom, and Addison, and Burke. Roll-on bags, duffels, suit carriers. Jeans and sport coats, black nylon warm-up jackets, ball caps, sneakers. Some shades, some earphones trailing thin wires. Tired from the overnight flight. A little creased and crumpled. But awake and alert and aware. They looked exactly like what they were: a group of Special Forces soldiers trying to travel incognito.

He watched them line up at the desk. Watched them wait. Watched them shuffle up one place at a time. Watched them check in. Watched the clerk give Lane the message. Saw Lane turn around, searching. Lane’s gaze moved over everybody in the lobby. Over Pauling, without stopping. Over the fractious family. Onto Reacher’s own face. It stopped there. Lane nodded. Reacher nodded back. Gregory took a stack of key cards from the clerk and all seven men hoisted their luggage again and started through the lobby. They eased their way through the crowds shoulders first and stopped in a group outside the ring of armchairs. Lane dropped one bag and kept hold of another and sat down opposite Reacher. Gregory sat down too, and Carter Groom took the last chair. Kowalski and Perez and Addison and Burke were left standing, making a perimeter, with Burke and Perez facing outward. Awake and alert and aware, thorough and cautious.

“Show me the money,” Reacher said.

“Tell me where Taylor is,” Lane said.

“You first.”

“Do you know where he is?”

Reacher nodded. “I know where he is. I made visual contact twice. Last night, and then again this morning. Just a few hours ago.”

“You’re good.”

“I know.”

“So tell me where he is.”

“Show me the money first.”

Lane said nothing. In the silence Reacher heard the harassed mother say: Draw a picture of Buckingham Palace. He said, “You called a bunch of London private eyes. Behind my back. You tried to get ahead of me.”

Lane said, “A man’s entitled to save himself an unnecessary expense.”

“Did you get ahead of me?”

“No.”

“Therefore the expense isn’t unnecessary.”

“I guess not.”

“So show me the money.”

“OK,” Lane said. “I’ll show you the money.” He slid the duffel off his knees and placed it on the floor and unzipped it. Reacher glanced right. Glanced left. Saw the kid about to throw the tattered bear again. Saw him catch the expression on Lane’s face and saw him shrink back toward his mother. Reacher shuffled forward on his chair and leaned down. The duffel was full of money. One of the O-Town bales, newly opened, part depleted.

“No trouble on the flight?” he asked.

Lane said, “It was X-rayed. Nobody got their panties in a wad. You’ll get it home OK. Assuming you earn it first.”

Reacher pulled back the torn plastic and put a fingernail under one of the paper bands. It was tight. Therefore full. There were four equal stacks of twenty bricks each. Total of eighty bricks, an even number. A hundred hundreds in each brick. Eighty times a hundred times a hundred was eight hundred thousand.

So far, so good.

He lifted the edge of a bill and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. Glanced across the lobby to the brass sign at the Xerox station: By statute some documents may not be photocopied. But these hadn’t been. They were real. He could feel the engraving. He could smell the paper and the ink. Unmistakable.

“OK,” he said, and sat back.

Lane leaned down and zipped the duffel. “So where is he?”

Reacher said, “First we have to talk.”

“You better be kidding me.”

“There are civilians there. Innocent people. Noncombatants. A family.”

“So?”

“So I can’t have you charging in there like maniacs. I can’t allow collateral damage.”

“There won’t be any.”

“I need to be sure of that.”

“You have my word.”

Reacher said, “Your word ain’t worth shit.”

“We won’t be shooting,” Lane said. “Let’s be clear on that. A bullet is too good for Taylor. We’ll go in and we’ll get him and we’ll bring him out without harming a hair on his or anyone else’s head. Because that’s the way I want it. I want him all in one piece. I want him alive and well and conscious and feeling everything. He’ll tell us about his partner and then he’ll die, long, slow, and hard. Over a week or two. So a gunfight is no good to me. Not because I care about noncombatants, true. But because I don’t want any accidents with Taylor. I would hate to give it to him easy. You can take my word on that.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“So where is he?”

Reacher paused. Thought about Hobart, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and kindly white-haired doctors in lab coats holding artificial limbs.

“He’s in Norfolk,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s a county, north and east of here. About a hundred and twenty miles.”

“Where in Norfolk?”

“A place called Grange Farm.”

“He’s on a farm?”

“Flat country,” Reacher said. “Like a pool table. With ditches. Easy to defend.”

“Nearest big city?”

“It’s about thirty miles south and west of Norwich.”

“Nearest town?”

Reacher didn’t reply.

“Nearest town?” Lane asked again.

Reacher glanced back at the reception desk. By statute some documents may not be photocopied. He watched a Xerox machine at work, a ghostly stripe of green light cycling horizontally back and forth beneath a lid. He glanced at the harassed mother and heard her voice in his head: Why don’t you draw a picture of something you’re going to see? He looked at the kid’s doll, missing an arm. Heard Dave Kemp’s voice, in the country store: It felt like a thin book. Not many pages. A rubber band around it. Recalled the tiny imperceptible impact of the kid’s tattered bear skidding on the tile and landing against his shoe.

Lane said, “Reacher?”

Reacher heard Lauren Pauling’s voice in his mind: A little is sometimes all you need. Going out, they don’t care as much as when you’re coming in.

Lane said, “Reacher? Hello? What’s the nearest town?”

Reacher dragged his focus back from the middle distance, slowly, carefully, painfully, and he looked directly into Lane’s eyes. He said, “The nearest town is called Fenchurch Saint Mary. I’ll show you exactly where it is. Be ready to leave in one hour. I’ll come back for you.”

Then he stood up and concentrated hard on walking infinitely slowly across the lobby floor. One foot in front of the other. Left, then right. He caught Pauling’s eye. Walked out the door. Down the concrete steps. He made it to the sidewalk.

Then he ran like hell for the parking garage.

CHAPTER 63

Reacher had parked the car, so he still had the keys. He blipped the door from thirty feet away and wrenched it open and threw himself inside. Jammed the key in the ignition and started the motor and shoved the stick in reverse. Stamped on the gas and hurled the tiny car out of the parking space and braked hard and spun the wheel and took off again forward with the front tires howling and smoking. He threw a ten-pound note at the barrier guy and didn’t wait for the change. Just hit the gas as soon as the pole was raised forty-five degrees. He blasted up the ramp and shot straight across two lanes of oncoming traffic and jammed to a stop on the opposite curb because he saw Pauling hurrying toward him. He threw open her door and she slid inside and he took off again and he was twenty yards down the road before she got the door closed behind her.

“North,” he said. “Which way is north?”

“North? North is behind us,” she said. “Go around the traffic circle.”

Hyde Park Corner. He blew through two red lights and swerved the car like a dodgem from one lane to another. Came all the way around and back onto Park Lane in the other direction doing more than sixty miles an hour. Practically on two wheels.

“Where now?” he said.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Just get me out of town.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Use the atlas. There’s a city plan.”

Reacher dodged buses and taxis. Pauling turned pages, frantically.

“Go straight,” she said.

“Is that north?”

“It’ll get us there.”

They made it through Marble Arch with the engine screaming. They got green lights all the way past the Marylebone Road. They made it into Maida Vale. Then Reacher slowed a little. Breathed out for what felt like the first time in half an hour.

“Where next?”

“Reacher, what happened?”

“Just give me directions.”

“Make a right onto St. John’s Wood Road,” Pauling said. “That will take us back to Regent’s Park. Then make a left and go out the same way we came in. And please tell me exactly what the hell is going on.”

“I made a mistake,” Reacher said. “Remember I told you I couldn’t shake the feeling I was making a bad mistake? Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad mistake. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was the biggest single mistake ever made in the history of the cosmos.”

“What mistake?”

“Tell me about the photographs in your apartment.”

“What about them?”

“Nieces and nephews, right?”

“Lots of them,” Pauling said.

“You know them well?”

“Well enough.”

“Spend time with them?”

“Plenty.”

“Tell me about their favorite toys.”

“Their toys? I don’t really know about their toys. I can’t keep up. X-boxes, video games, whatever. There’s always something new.”

“Not the new stuff. Their old favorites. Tell me about their favorite old toys. What would they have run into a fire to save? When they were eight years old?”

“When they were eight years old? I guess a teddy bear or a doll. Something they’d had since they were tiny.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Something comforting and familiar. Something they loved. The kind of thing they would want to take on a journey. Like the family next to me in the lobby just now. The mother got them all out of the suitcase to quiet them down.”

“So?”

“What did those things look like?”

“Like bears and dolls, I guess.”

“No, later. When the kids were eight years old.”

“When they were eight? They’d had them forever by then. They looked like crap.”

Reacher nodded at the wheel. “The bears all worn, with the stuffing out? The dolls all chipped, with the arms off?”

“Yes, like that. All kids have toys like that.”

“Jade didn’t. That’s precisely what was missing from her room. There were new bears and new dolls. Recent things she hadn’t taken to. But there were no old favorites there.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if Jade had been kidnapped on the way to Bloomingdale’s on a normal everyday morning I would have found all her favorite old toys still in her room afterward. But I didn’t.”

“But what does that mean?”

“It means Jade knew she was leaving. It means she packed.”

Reacher made the left at Regent’s Park and headed north, toward the M-1, which would carry them all the way back to the M-25 beltway. After the turn he drove on a little more sedately. He didn’t want to get arrested by any English traffic cops. He didn’t have time for that. He figured he was right then about two hours ahead of Edward Lane. It would take an hour for Lane to realize he had been ditched, and then it would take at least another hour for him to get hold of a car and organize a pursuit. So, two hours. Reacher would have liked more, but he figured two hours might be enough.

Might be.

Pauling said, “Jade packed?”

“Kate packed, too,” Reacher said.

“What did Kate pack?”

“Just one thing. But her most precious thing. Her best memory. The photograph with her daughter. From the bedroom. One of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen.”

Pauling paused a beat.

“But you saw it,” she said. “She didn’t take it.”

Reacher shook his head. “I saw a photocopy. From Staples, color digital, laser, two bucks a sheet. Brought home and slipped into the frame. It was very good, but not quite good enough. A little vivid in the colors, a little plastic in the contours.”

“But who packs for a kidnap? I mean, who the hell gets the chance?”

“They weren’t kidnapped,” Reacher said. “That’s the thing. They were rescued. They were liberated. They were set free. They’re alive somewhere. Alive and well and happy. A little tense, maybe. But free as birds.”

They drove on, slow and steady, through the northern reaches of London, through Finchley and Swiss Cottage, toward Hendon.

“Kate believed Dee Marie,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened. Out there in the Hamptons. Dee Marie told her about Anne, and warned her, and Kate believed her. Like Patti Joseph said, there was something about the story and something about her husband that made Kate believe. Maybe she was already feeling the same kind of things that Anne had felt five years before. Maybe she was already planning to go down the same road.”

Pauling said, “You know what this means?”

“Of course I do.”

“Taylor helped them.”

“Of course he did.”

“He rescued them, and he hid them, and he sheltered them, and he risked his life for them. He’s the good guy, not the bad guy.”

Reacher nodded. “And I just told Lane where he is.”

They made it through Hendon and negotiated their last London traffic circle and joined the M-1 motorway at its southern tip. Reacher hit the gas and forced the little Mini up to ninety-five miles an hour.

Pauling said, “What about the money?”

“Alimony,” Reacher said. “It was the only way Kate was ever going to get any. We thought it was half of the Burkina Faso payment, and it was, but in Kate’s eyes it was also half of their community property. Half of Lane’s capital. She was entitled to it. She probably put money in, way back. That’s what Lane seems to want his wives for. Apart from their trophy status.”

“Hell of a plan,” Pauling said.

“They probably thought it was the only way. And they were probably right.”

“But they made mistakes.”

“They sure did. If you really want to disappear, you take nothing with you. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s fatal.”

“Who helped Taylor?”

“Nobody.”

“He had an American partner. On the phone.”

“That was Kate herself. You were half-right, days ago. It was a woman using that machine. But not Dee Marie. It was Kate herself. It must have been. They were a team. They collaborated. She did all the talking, because Taylor couldn’t. Not easy for her. Every time Lane wanted to hear her voice for a proof of life she had to pull the machine off the mouthpiece and then put it back on again.”

“Did you really tell Lane where Taylor is?”

“As good as. I didn’t say Bishops Pargeter. I stopped myself just in time. I said Fenchurch Saint Mary instead. But that’s close. And I had already said Norfolk. I had already said thirty miles from Norwich. And I had already said Grange Farm. He’ll be able to work it out. Two minutes, with the right map.”

“He’s way behind us.”

“At least two hours.”

Pauling was quiet for a second.

Reacher said, “What?”

“He’s two hours behind us right now. But he won’t always be. We’re taking the long way around because we don’t know the English roads.”

“Neither does he.”

“But Gregory does.”

Reacher drove seven exits on the M-1, acutely aware that the road was taking him west of north, not east of north. Then he drove six clockwise exits on the M-25 beltway before finding the M-11. All completely dead time. If Gregory drove Lane straight through the center of London directly to the southern tip of the M-11 he would cut the two-hour deficit by an exactly corresponding amount.

Pauling said, “We should stop and call ahead. You know the number.”

“That’s a big gamble,” Reacher said. “At highway speeds it costs time to slow down, turn off, park, find a phone that works, call, and get back on the road. A lot of time, at British speeds. And suppose there’s no answer? Suppose they’re still out there hoeing the weeds? We’d end up doing it again and again.”

“We have to try to warn them. There’s the sister to think about. And Melody.”

“Susan and Melody are perfectly safe.”

“How can you say that?”

“Ask yourself where Kate and Jade are.”

“I have no idea where they are.”

“You do,” Reacher said. “You know exactly where they are. You saw them this morning.”

CHAPTER 64

They turned off the highway at Newmarket and set out cross-country toward Norwich. This time the road was familiar, but that didn’t make it any faster. Forward motion, without any visible result. A big sky, whipped clean by wind.

“Think about the dynamic here,” Reacher said. “Why would Kate ask Taylor for help? How could she ask any of them for help? They’re all insanely loyal to Lane. Did Knight help Anne? Kate had just heard that story. Why would she walk up cold to another of Lane’s killers and say, hey, want to help me get out of here? Want to double-cross your boss? Help me steal his money?”

Pauling said, “They already had a thing going.”

Reacher nodded at the wheel. “That’s the only way to explain it. They had already started an affair. Maybe long ago.”

“The CO’s wife? Hobart said no fighting man would do that.”

“He said no American fighting man would do that. Maybe the British SAS does things differently. And there were signs. Carter Groom is about as emotional as a fence post but he said that Kate liked Taylor and that Taylor got on well with the kid.”

“Dee Marie showing up must have acted like a kind of tipping point.”

Reacher nodded again. “Kate and Taylor made a plan and put it in action. But first they explained it to Jade. Maybe they thought it would be too much of a sudden trauma not to. They swore her to secrecy, as much as they could with an eight-year-old. And the kid did pretty well.”

“What did they tell her?”

“That she already had one replacement daddy, now she was getting another. That she already lived in one new place, now she was moving on.”

“Big secret for a kid to keep.”

“She didn’t exactly keep it,” Reacher said. “She was worried about it. She straightened it out in her head by drawing it. Maybe it was an old habit. Maybe mothers always say, draw a picture of something you’re going to see.”

“What picture?”

“There were four in her room. On her desk. Kate didn’t sanitize well enough. Or maybe she just mistook them for regular clutter. There was a big gray building with trees in front. At first I thought it was the Dakota from Central Park. Now I think it was the Grange Farm farmhouse. They must have shown her photographs, to prepare her. She got the trees just right. Thin straight trunks, round crowns. To withstand the wind. Like light green lollipops on brown sticks. And then there was a picture of a family group. I thought the guy was Lane, obviously. But there was something weird about his mouth. Like half his teeth had been punched out. So it wasn’t Lane. It was Taylor, clearly. The dentistry. Jade was probably fascinated by it. She drew her new family. Taylor, Kate, and her. To internalize the idea.”

“And you think Taylor brought them here to England?”

“I think Kate wanted him to. Maybe even begged him to. They needed a safe haven. Somewhere very distant. Out of Lane’s reach. And they were having an affair. They didn’t want to be apart. So if Taylor’s here, then Kate’s here, too. Jade did a picture of three people in an airplane. That was the journey she was going to take. Then she did one of two families together. Like double vision. I had no idea what it meant. But now my guess is that was Jackson and Taylor, and Susan and Kate, and Melody and herself. Her new situation. Her new extended family. Happy ever after on Grange Farm.”

“Doesn’t work,” Pauling said. “Their passports were still in the drawer.”

“That was crude,” Reacher said. “Wasn’t it? You must have searched a thousand desks. Did you ever see passports all alone in a drawer? Kind of ostentatiously displayed like that? I never did. They were always buried under other junk. Leaving them on show like that was a message. It said, hey, we’re still in the country. Which meant actually they weren’t.”

“How do you get out without a passport?”

“You don’t. But you once said, they don’t look as closely on the way out. You said sometimes a little resemblance is all you need.”

Pauling paused a beat. “Someone else’s passport?”

“Who do we know that fits the bill? A woman in her thirties and an eight-year-old girl?”

Pauling said, “Susan and Melody.”

“Dave Kemp told us Jackson had been alone at the farm,” Reacher said. “That was because Susan and Melody had flown to the States. They got all the correct entry stamps. Then they gave their passports to Kate and Jade. Maybe in Taylor’s apartment. Maybe over dinner. Like a little ceremony. Then Taylor booked on British Airways. He was sitting next to a British woman on the plane. We know that for sure. A buck gets ten she’s on the passenger manifest as Mrs. Susan Jackson. And another buck gets ten that next to her was a little British kid called Ms. Melody Jackson. But they were really Kate and Jade Lane.”

“But that leaves Susan and Melody stuck in the States.”

“Temporarily,” Reacher said. “What did Taylor mail back?”

“A thin book. Not many pages. With a rubber band around it.”

“Who puts a rubber band around a thin book? It was actually two very thin books. Two passports, bundled together. Mailed to Susan’s New York City hotel room, where she and Melody are right now sitting and waiting to get them back.”

“But the stamps will be out of sequence now. When they leave they’ll be exiting without having entered.”

Reacher nodded. “It’s an irregularity. But what are the people at JFK going to do about it? Deport them? That’s exactly what they want. So they’ll get home OK.”

“Sisters,” Pauling said. “This whole thing has been about the loyalty of sisters. Patti Joseph, Dee Marie Graziano, Susan Jackson.”

Reacher drove on. Said nothing.

“Unbelievable,” Pauling said. “We saw Kate and Jade this morning.”

“Setting out with their hoes,” Reacher said. “Starting out on their new lives.”

Then he accelerated a little, because the road was widening and straightening for the bypass around the town called Thetford.

John Gregory was hitting the gas, too. He was at the wheel of a rented dark green seven-seat Toyota Land Cruiser sports utility vehicle. Edward Lane was next to him in the front passenger seat. Kowalski and Addison and Carter Groom were shoulder to shoulder on the rear bench. Burke and Perez were on the jump seats way in back. They were joining the M-11 at its southern tip, having blasted straight through central London to the northeast corner of the inner city.

CHAPTER 65

This time in full daylight Reacher saw the sign to B’sh’ps P’ter a hundred yards away and slowed well in advance and made the turn like he had been driving the back roads of Norfolk all his life. It was close to two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was high and the wind was dropping. Blue skies, small white clouds, green fields. A perfect English late-summer day. Almost.

Pauling said, “What are you going to tell them?”

“That I’m sorry,” Reacher said. “I think that might be the best place to start.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll probably say it again.”

“They can’t stay there.”

“It’s a farm. Someone’s got to stay there.”

“Are you volunteering?”

“I might have to.”

“Do you know anything about farming?”

“Only what I’ve seen in the movies. Usually they get locusts. Or a fire.”

“Not here. Floods, maybe.”

“And idiots like me.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. They faked a kidnap. Don’t blame yourself for taking it seriously.”

“I should have seen it,” Reacher said. “It was weird from the start.”

They passed the Bishop’s Arms. The pub. The end of the lunch hour. Five cars in the lot. The Grange Farm Land Rover was not one of them. They drove on, roughly east, and in the distance they saw the Bishops Pargeter church tower, gray, square, and squat. Only forty-some feet tall, but it dominated the flat landscape like the Empire State Building. They drove on. They passed the ditch that marked Grange Farm’s western boundary. Heard the bird scarer again, a loud booming shotgun blast.

“I hate that thing,” Pauling said.

Reacher said, “You might end up loving it. Camouflage like that could be our best friend.”

“Could be Taylor’s best friend, too. In about sixty seconds from now. He’s going to think he’s under attack.”

Reacher nodded.

“Take a deep breath,” he said.

He slowed the car well before the small flat bridge. Turned in wide and deliberate. Left it in second gear. Small vehicle, low speed. Unthreatening. He hoped.

The driveway was long and it looped through two curves. Around unseen softness in the dirt, maybe. The beaten earth was muddy and less even than it had looked from a distance. The tiny car rocked and bounced. The farmhouse’s gable wall was blank. No windows. The smoke from the chimney was thicker now and straighter. Less wind. Reacher opened his window and heard nothing at all except the noise of his engine and the slow rolling crunch of his tires on gravel and small stones.

“Where is everybody?” Pauling said. “Still out hoeing?”

“You can’t hoe for seven hours straight,” Reacher said. “You’d break your back.”

The driveway split thirty yards in front of the house. A fork in the road. West, the formal approach to the front door. East, a shabbier track toward the spot where the Land Rover had been parked, and the barns beyond. Reacher went east. The Land Rover wasn’t there anymore. All the barn doors were closed. The whole place was quiet. Nothing was moving.

Reacher braked gently and backed up. Took the wider path west. There was a gravel circle with a stunted ash tree planted at its center. Around the tree was a circular wooden bench way too big for the thin trunk. Either the tree was a replacement or the carpenter had been thinking a hundred years ahead. Reacher drove around the circle clockwise, the British way. Stopped ten feet from the front door. It was closed. Nothing was moving anywhere, except the column of slow smoke rising from the chimney.

“What now?” Pauling asked.

“We knock,” Reacher said. “We move slow and we keep our hands visible.”

“You think they’re watching us?”

“Someone is. For sure. I can feel it.”

He killed the motor and sat for a moment. Then he opened his door. Unwound his huge frame slow and easy and stood still next to the car with his hands held away from his sides. Pauling did the same thing six feet away. Then they walked together to the front door. It was a large slab of ancient oak, as black as coal. There were iron bands and hinges, newly painted over pits of old rust and corrosion. There was a twisted ring hinged in the mouth of a lion and positioned to strike down on a nail head as big as an apple. Reacher used it, twice, putting heavy thumps into the oak slab. It resonated like a bass drum.

It brought no response.

“Hello?” Reacher called.

No response.

He called, “Taylor? Graham Taylor?”

No response.

“Taylor? Are you there?”

No answer.

He tried the knocker again, twice more.

Still no response.

No sound at all.

Except for the shuffle of a tiny foot, thirty feet away. The backward scrape of a thin sole on a stone. Reacher turned fast and glanced to his left. Saw a small bare knee pull back around the far corner of the house. Back into hiding.

“I saw you,” Reacher called.

No reply.

“Come on out now,” he called. “It’s OK.”

No response.

“Look at our car,” Reacher called. “Cutest thing you ever saw.”

Nothing happened.

“It’s red,” Reacher called. “Like a fire engine.”

No response.

“There’s a lady here with me,” Reacher called. “She’s cute, too.”

He stood still next to Pauling and a long moment later he saw a small dark head peer out from around the corner. A small face, pale skin, big green eyes. A serious mouth. A little girl, about eight years old.

“Hello,” Pauling called. “What’s your name?”

“Melody Jackson,” Jade Lane said.

CHAPTER 66

The kid was instantly recognizable from the imperfect Xerox Reacher had seen on the desk in the Dakota bedroom. She was about a year older than she had been in the picture but she had the same long dark hair, slightly wavy, as fine as silk, and the same green eyes, and the same porcelain skin. It had been a striking photograph, but the reality was way better. Jade Lane was a truly beautiful child.

“My name is Lauren,” Pauling said. “This man is called Reacher.”

Jade nodded her head. Grave and serious. She said nothing. Didn’t come closer. She was wearing a summer dress, sleeveless, green seersucker stripes. Maybe from Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue. Maybe one of her favorite garments. Maybe part of her hasty and unwise packing. She had white socks on, and thin summer sandals. They were dusty.

Pauling said, “We’re here to talk to the grown-ups. Do you know where they are?”

Thirty feet away Jade nodded her head again. Said nothing.

Pauling asked, “Where are they?”

A voice thirty feet away in the other direction said, “One of them is right here, lady,” and Kate Lane stepped out from around the other corner of the house. She was pretty much unchanged from her photograph, too. Dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, a bud of a mouth. Extremely, impossibly beautiful. Maybe a little more tired than she had been in the photographer’s studio. Maybe a little more stressed. But definitively the same woman. Outside of what the portrait had shown she was maybe five feet nine inches tall, not much more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, slim and willowy. Exactly what an ex-model should look like, Reacher figured. She was wearing a man’s flannel shirt, big and clearly borrowed. She looked great in it. But then, she would have looked great in a garbage bag with holes torn for her arms and legs and head.

“I’m Susan Jackson,” she said.

Reacher shook his head. “You’re not, but I’m very glad to meet you anyway. And Jade, too. You’ll never know how glad I am.”

“I’m Susan Jackson,” she said again. “That’s Melody.”

“We don’t have time for that, Kate. And your accent isn’t real convincing anyway.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Reacher.”

“What do you want?”

“Where’s Taylor?”

“Who?”

Reacher glanced back at Jade and then took a step toward Kate. “Can we talk? Maybe a little ways down the track?”

“Why?”

“For privacy.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to upset your daughter.”

“She knows what’s going on.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We’re here to warn you.”

“About what?”

“Edward Lane is an hour behind us. Maybe less.”

“Edward is here?” Kate said. For the first time, real fear in her face. “Edward is here in England? Already?”

Reacher nodded. “Heading this way.”

“Who are you?”

“He paid me to find Taylor.”

“So why warn us?”

“Because I just figured out it wasn’t for real.”

Kate said nothing.

“Where’s Taylor?” Reacher asked again.

“He’s out,” Kate said. “With Tony.”

“Anthony Jackson? The brother-in-law?”

Kate nodded. “This is his farm.”

“Where did they go?”

“To Norwich. For a part for the backhoe. They said we need to dredge some ditches.”

“When did they leave?”

“About two hours ago.”

Reacher nodded again. Norwich. The big city. Thirty miles there, thirty miles back. About a two-hour trip. He glanced south at the road. Nothing moving on it.

“Let’s all go inside,” he said.

“I don’t even know who you are.”

“You do,” Reacher said. “Right now I’m your best friend.”

Kate stared at Pauling for a moment and seemed reassured by the presence of another woman. She blinked once and opened the front door. Led them all in. The farmhouse itself was dark and cold inside. It had low beamed ceilings and irregular stone floors. Thick walls and flowered wallpaper and small leaded windows. The kitchen was the hub of the home. That was clear. It was a large rectangular room. There were bright copper pans hanging from hooks and sofas and armchairs and a fireplace big enough to live in and a huge old-fashioned range. There was a massive oak dining table with twelve chairs around it and a separate pine desk with a phone and stacks of papers and envelopes and jars of pens and pencils and postage stamps and rubber bands. All the furniture was old and worn and comfortable and smelled of dogs, even though there were no dogs in the house. They had belonged to the previous owners, maybe. Maybe the furniture had been included in the sale. Maybe there had been bankruptcy problems.

Reacher said, “I think you should get out, Kate. Right now. You and Jade. Until we see what happens.”

“How?” Kate asked. “The truck isn’t here.”

“Take our car.”

“I’ve never driven here before. I’ve never even been here before.”

Pauling said, “I’ll drive you.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you want to go. Until we see what happens.”

“Is he really here already?”

Pauling nodded. “He left London at least an hour ago.”

“Does he know?”

“That it was all a sham? Not yet.”

“OK,” Kate said. “Take us somewhere. Anywhere. Now. Please.”

She stood up and grabbed Jade’s hand. No purse, no coat. She was ready to go, right there and then. No pause, no hesitation. Just panic. Reacher tossed Pauling the Mini’s keys and followed them all outside again. Jade climbed through to the tiny car’s rear bench and Kate got in next to Pauling. Pauling adjusted the seat and the mirror and clipped her belt and started the engine.

“Wait,” Reacher said.

On the road a mile to the west he could see a dark green shape moving fast behind a stand of trees. Green paint. Glinting in the watery sun. Clean and polished and shiny, not filthy like the farm truck.

A mile away. Ninety seconds. No time.

“Everybody back in the house,” he said. “Right now.”

CHAPTER 67

Kate and Jade and Pauling ran straight upstairs and Reacher headed for the southeast corner of the house. Flattened himself against the wall and crept around to where he could get a look at the bridge over the ditch. He got there just in time to see a truck turn in. It was an old-style Land Rover Defender, bluff and square, an appliance more than a car, mud-and-snow tires, a brown canvas back. Two guys in it, rocking and bouncing behind the sparkling windshield. One of them was the vague shape Reacher had seen early that morning. Tony Jackson. The farmer. The other was Taylor. The truck was the Grange Farm Land Rover, newly cleaned and polished. Unrecognizable from the night before. Clearly the Norwich itinerary had included a stop at the car wash as well as the backhoe dealership.

Reacher ducked into the kitchen and shouted an all clear up the stairs. Then he went back outside to wait. The Land Rover pulled left and right through the driveway curves and paused a second as Jackson and Taylor took a long hard look at the Mini from fifty yards away. Then it sped up again and skidded to a halt in its parking spot between the back of the house and the barns. The doors opened and Jackson and Taylor climbed out. Reacher stayed where he was and Jackson walked right up to him and said, “You’re trespassing. Dave Kemp told me what you want. You talked to him this morning. In the shop? And the answer is no. I’m not selling.”

“I’m not buying,” Reacher said.

“So why are you here?”

Jackson was a lean and compact guy, not unlike Taylor himself. Same kind of height, same kind of weight. Same kind of generic English features. Similar accent. Better teeth, and lighter hair worn a little longer. But overall they could have been brothers, not just brothers-in-law.

Reacher said, “I’m here to see Taylor.”

Taylor stepped up and said, “What for?”

“To apologize to you,” Reacher said. “And to warn you.”

Taylor paused a beat. Blinked once. Then his eyes flicked left, flicked right, full of intelligence and calculation.

“Lane?” he asked.

“He’s less than an hour away.”

“OK,” Taylor said. He sounded calm. Composed. Not surprised. But Reacher didn’t expect him to be surprised. Surprise was for amateurs. And Taylor was a professional. A Special Forces veteran, and a smart and a capable one. Precious seconds spent being surprised were precious seconds wasted, and Taylor was spending the precious seconds exactly like he had been trained to: thinking, planning, revising tactics, reviewing options.

“My fault,” Reacher said. “I’m sorry.”

“I saw you on Sixth Avenue,” Taylor said. “When I was getting in the Jaguar. Didn’t think much of it, but I saw you again last night. In the pub. So then I knew. I thought you’d be heading up to your room to call Lane. But it looks like he mobilized himself faster than I thought he would.”

“He was already en route.”

“Good of you to stop by and let me know.”

“Least I could do. Under the circumstances.”

“Does he have this precise location?”

“More or less. I said Grange Farm. I stopped myself saying Bishops Pargeter. I said Fenchurch Saint Mary instead.”

“He’ll find us in the phone book. There’s no Grange Farm in Fenchurch. We’re the nearest.”

“I’m sorry,” Reacher said again.

“When did you figure it all out?”

“Just a little bit too late.”

“What tipped you off?”

“Toys. Jade packed her best toys.”

“Did you meet her yet?”

“Five minutes ago.”

Taylor smiled. Bad teeth, but a lot of warmth there. “She’s a great kid, isn’t she?”

“Seems to be.”

“What are you, a private cop?”

“I was a U.S. Army MP.”

“What’s your name?”

“Reacher.”

“How much did Lane pay you?”

“A million bucks.”

Taylor smiled again. “I’m flattered. And you’re good. But it was always only a matter of time. The longer nobody found my body, the more people would get to thinking. But this is a little quicker than I thought it would be. I thought I might have a couple of weeks.”

“You’ve got about sixty minutes.”

They gathered in the farmhouse kitchen for a council of war, all six of them, Taylor and Kate and Jade, and Jackson, and Pauling and Reacher. Jade was neither specifically included nor excluded. She just sat at the table and drew, crayons and butcher paper, the same bold colorful strokes Reacher had seen in her bedroom in the Dakota, and listened to the grown-ups talk. First thing Taylor said was, “Let’s light the fire again. It’s cold in here. And let’s have a cup of tea.”

Pauling asked, “Do we have time for that?”

“The British Army,” Reacher said. “They always have time for a cup of tea.”

There was a wicker basket of kindling sticks near the hearth. Taylor stacked a bunch of them over a pyramid of crumpled newspaper and struck a match. When the flame had taken he added bigger logs. Meanwhile Jackson was at the stove, heating a kettle of water and stuffing tea bags into a pot. He didn’t seem very worried, either. Just calm and competent and unhurried.

“What were you, back in the day?” Reacher asked him.

“First Para,” Jackson replied.

Reacher nodded. The 1st Parachute Regiment. The British equivalent of the U.S. Army Rangers, roughly. Air-mobile tough guys, not quite SAS, but close. Most SAS freshmen were 1st Para graduates.

“Lane’s got six guys with him,” Reacher said.

“The A-team?” Taylor asked. “Used to be seven guys. Before I resigned.”

“Used to be nine guys,” Reacher said.

“Hobart and Knight,” Taylor said. “Kate heard that story. From Hobart’s sister.”

“Was that the trigger?”

“Partly. And partly something else.”

“What else?”

“Hobart isn’t the only one. Not even close. He’s the worst, maybe, from what his sister said, but there are others. Lane got a lot of people killed and wounded over the years.”

“I saw his Rolodex,” Reacher said.

“He doesn’t do anything for them. Or their families.”

“Is that why you wanted the money?”

“The money is Kate’s alimony. She’s entitled to it. And how she spends it is up to her. But I’m sure she’ll do the right thing.”

Tony Jackson poured the tea from the pot, hot and sweet and strong, into five chipped and unmatched mugs. Jade was working on a glass of apple juice.

“Do we have time for this?” Pauling asked again.

“Reacher?” Taylor said. “Do we have time for this?”

“That depends,” Reacher said. “On what exactly your aim is.”

“My aim is to live happily ever after.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “This is England. If it was Kansas, I’d be worried. If it was Kansas, Dave Kemp’s little store and a hundred others like it would be selling rifles and ammunition. But this isn’t Kansas. And no way did Lane bring anything in with him on the plane. So if he shows up now, he’s unarmed. He can’t do anything more than pick rocks off the driveway and throw them at us. Walls this thick and windows this small, that isn’t going to hurt us much.”

“He could burn us out,” Pauling said. “Bottles filled with gasoline, flaming rags in them, or whatever.”

Reacher said nothing. Just glanced at Taylor. Taylor said, “He wants to take me alive, Ms. Pauling. I’m sure of that. Fire might be in his plan for me eventually, but he’d want to do it slow and controlled. Something quick and easy just wouldn’t work for him.”

“So we’re just going to sit here?”

“Like Reacher said, if he shows up now he’s harmless.”

“This might be England, but there have to be weapons available somewhere.”

Taylor nodded. “All over the place, as a matter of fact. Private armorers for the British mercenary crews, bent army quartermasters, gangs of regular bad boys. But none of them are in the Yellow Pages. It takes time to find them.”

“How much time?”

“Twelve hours minimum, I would guess, depending on your connections. So like your man said, if Lane shows up now he’s harmless, and if he wants to lock and load first, he can’t show up until at least tomorrow. Plus, he likes dawn raids. He always has. Zero-dark-thirty, that’s what Delta taught him. Attack with the first rays of the sun.”

“Are you armed here?” Reacher asked.

“This is a farm,” Jackson answered. “Farmers are always prepared for vermin control.”

Something in his voice. Some kind of lethal determination. Reacher looked between him and Taylor. Same kind of height, same kind of weight, same kind of generic English features. Overall they could have been brothers. Sometimes a little resemblance is all you need. He got up out of his chair and walked over and took a look at the phone on the pine desk. It was an old-fashioned black instrument. It had a cord and a rotary dial. No memories. No speed dials.

He turned back to Taylor.

“You wanted this,” he said.

“Did I?”

“You used the name Leroy Clarkson. To point the way to your apartment.”

Taylor said nothing.

“You could have stopped Jade from bringing her toys. You could have told Kate to leave the photograph behind. Your sister Susan could have brought Tony’s passport over for you. She could have carried it in her purse. Then there would have been three Jacksons on the airplane manifest, not two Jacksons and a Taylor. Without your real name you couldn’t have been followed back to England.”

Taylor said nothing.

“The phone in your apartment was new,” Reacher said. “You didn’t have it before, did you? You bought it so that you could leave Susan’s number in it.”

“Why would I do that?” Taylor asked.

“Because you wanted Lane to find you here.”

Taylor said nothing.

“You talked to Dave Kemp in the village store,” Reacher said. “You gave him all kinds of unnecessary details. And he’s the biggest gossip in the county. Then you went and hung out in the pub with a bunch of nosy farmers. I’m sure you would have rather stayed home, under the circumstances. With your new family. But you couldn’t do that. Because you wanted to lay a clear trail. Because you knew Lane would hire someone like me. And you wanted to help someone like me find you. Because you wanted to bring Lane here for a showdown.”

Silence in the room.

Reacher said, “You wanted to be on your home turf. And you figured this is an easy place to defend.”

More silence. Reacher glanced at Kate.

“You were upset,” he said. “Not that Lane was coming, but that he was coming now. Already. Too soon.”

Kate said nothing. But Taylor nodded. “Like I said before, he was a little faster than we expected. But yes, we wanted him to come.”

“Why?”

“You just said it. We wanted a showdown. Closure. Finality.”

“Why now?”

“I told you.”

“Reparations for the wounded aren’t urgent. Not like this.”

Kate Lane looked up from her chair by the fire.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

CHAPTER 68

In the soft light of the flames from the hearth, Kate’s simple and vulnerable beauty was emphasized to the point of heartbreak. She said, “When Edward and I first started fighting he accused me of being unfaithful. Which wasn’t actually true back then. But he was in a rage. He said if he ever caught me sleeping around he would show me how much it hurt him by doing something to Jade that would hurt me even more. He went into the kind of detail I can’t repeat now. Not in front of her. But it was very frightening. It was so frightening that I persuaded myself not to take it seriously. But after hearing about Anne and Knight and Hobart I knew I had to take it seriously. By which time I really did have something to hide. So we ran. And here we are.”

“With Lane right behind you.”

“He deserves whatever he gets, Mr. Reacher. He’s truly a monster.”

Reacher turned to Jackson. “You’re not fixing the backhoe to dredge ditches, are you? It’s not raining and the ditches look fine anyway. And you wouldn’t take time out to do something like that. Not right now. Not under these circumstances. You’re fixing the backhoe to dig graves, aren’t you?”

“At least one grave,” Taylor said. “Maybe two or three, until the whole crew goes home and leaves us alone. You got a problem with that?”

We’ll find Taylor, Reacher had said, on the plane. Lane will take care of him, and then I’ll take care of Lane. Pauling had asked him, What about the others? Reacher had said: If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane gone, then I’ll leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up and take over, I’ll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.

Pauling had said: Brutal.

Reacher had asked: Compared to what?

He looked straight at Taylor.

“No,” he answered. “I guess I don’t have a problem with that. Not really. No problem at all, in fact. I’m just not used to finding people on the same wavelength as me.”

“You keeping your million bucks?”

Reacher shook his head. “I was going to give it to Hobart.”

“That’s good,” Kate said. “That frees up some of our money for the others.”

Taylor said, “Ms. Pauling? What about you? Do you have a problem?”

Pauling said, “I ought to. I ought to have a huge problem. Once upon a time I swore an oath to uphold the law.”

“But?”

“I can’t get to Lane any other way. So no, I don’t have a problem.”

“So we’re in business,” Taylor said. “Welcome to the party.”

After they finished their tea Jackson took Reacher into a small mud room off the back of the kitchen and opened a double-door wall cupboard above a washing machine. In it were racked four Heckler & Koch G-36 automatic rifles. The G-36 was a very modern design that had showed up in service just before Reacher’s military career had ended. Therefore he wasn’t very familiar with it. It had a nineteen-inch barrel and an open folding stock and was basically fairly conventional apart from a huge superstructure that carried a bulky optical sight integrated into an oversized carrying handle. It was chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round and like most German weapons it looked very expensive and beautifully engineered.

Reacher asked, “Where did you get these from?”

“I bought them,” Jackson said. “From a bent quartermaster in Holland. Susan went over there and picked them up.”

“For this thing with Lane?”

Jackson nodded. “It’s been a heavy few weeks. Lots of planning.”

“Are they traceable?”

“The Dutch guy’s paperwork shows they were destroyed in a training accident.”

“Got ammunition?”

Jackson moved across the room and opened another cupboard, lower down. Behind a row of muddy Wellington boots Reacher could see the glint of black metal. A lot of it.

“Seventy magazines,” Jackson said. “Two thousand one hundred rounds.”

“That should do the trick.”

“We can’t use it. Not more than three or four rounds. Too noisy.”

“How close are the cops?”

“Not very. Norwich, I suppose, unless there happens to be a patrol car out. But people here have phones. Some of them even know how to use them.”

“You can turn the bird scarer off for a day.”

“Obviously. But I shouldn’t really be using that, either. An organic farm doesn’t need a bird scarer. No pesticides means plenty of insects for the birds to eat. They don’t go after the seed. Sooner or later people are going to realize that.”

“So the bird scarer is new, too?”

Jackson nodded. “Part of the planning. Set to start firing at dawn. That’s when we expect Lane to come.”

“If I had a sister and a brother-in-law I’d want them to be like you and Susan.”

“I go a long way back with Taylor. We were in Sierra Leone together. I’d do anything for him.”

“I never went to Africa.”

“Lucky you. We were fighting a bunch of rebels called the West Side Boys. I saw what they did to people. So I know what Hobart went through. Burkina Faso wasn’t far away.”

“You OK with all of this? You’ve got roots here, literally.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Take a vacation. All of you. I’ll stay.”

Jackson shook his head. “We’ll be OK. One round might do it. The G-36 is a pretty accurate piece.”

Jackson stayed in the mud room and closed and locked both cupboards. Reacher stepped back into the kitchen and sat down next to Taylor.

“Tell me about Gregory,” he said.

“What about him?”

“Is he going to stand by Lane? Or you?”

“Lane, I think.”

“Even though you served together?”

“Lane bought him. When he was in uniform Gregory always wanted an officer’s commission, but he never got it. It burned him up. And then Lane made him a kind of unofficial lieutenant. Status, at last. Meaningless bullshit, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. So I think Gregory will stick with him. Plus he’ll be offended that I didn’t share my secret. He seemed to think that two Brits abroad should share everything.”

“Does he know this area?”

Taylor shook his head. “He’s a Londoner, like me.”

“What about the others? Will any of them turn?”

“Not Kowalski,” Taylor said. “Not Perez. Turning would require some brain activity, and those two are room-temperature IQs at best. Probably not Addison, either. But Groom and Burke aren’t dumb. If they see the ship is sinking they’ll get off fast enough.”

“That’s not the same thing as turning.”

“None of them is going to come over to our side. You can forget about that. The best we can hope for is neutrality from Groom and Burke. And I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.”

“How good are they? All of them, as a whole?”

“They’re about as good as me. Which is to say they’re on a slippery slope. They used to be outstanding, but now they’re well on the way to average. Plenty of experience and ability, but they don’t train anymore. And training is important. Back in the day, training was ninety-nine percent of what we did.”

“Why did you join them?”

“The money,” Taylor said. “That’s why I joined them. Then I stayed with them because of Kate. I loved her from the first moment I saw her.”

“Did she love you back?”

“Eventually,” Taylor said.

“Not eventually,” Kate said, from her chair by the fire. “Truth is it was really pretty quick. One day I asked him why he had never had his teeth fixed and he told me that he had never even thought about it. I like that kind of self-respect and self-confidence in a man.”

“You see anything wrong with my teeth?” Taylor asked.

“Plenty,” Reacher said. “I’m surprised you can eat. Maybe that’s why you’re so small.”

Taylor said, “I am what I am.”

Exactly one hour after they came in and lit the fire they drew lots for the first round of look-out duty. Jackson and Pauling pulled the short straws. Jackson sat in the Land Rover at the back of the house and Pauling sat in the Mini at the front. That way each of them could cover a little more than one hundred eighty degrees. Across the flat land they could see a mile or more. Ninety seconds’ warning if Lane came in by road, a little more if he came in across the fields, which would be a slower approach.

Reasonable security.

As long as the daylight lasted.

CHAPTER 69

The daylight lasted until a little after eight o’clock. By then Reacher was in the Land Rover and Kate Lane was in the Mini. The sky darkened in the east and reddened in the west. Twilight rolled in fast, and with it came an evening mist that looked picturesque but cut visibility to less than a hundred yards. The bird scarer fell silent. All afternoon and into the evening it had been firing at unpredictable random intervals between a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of forty minutes. Now its sudden silence was more noticeable than its noise.

Taylor and Jackson were in one of the barns, working on the backhoe. Pauling was in the kitchen, opening cans for dinner. Jade was still at the table, drawing.

By eight-thirty visibility was so marginal that Reacher slid out of the Land Rover and headed for the kitchen. He met Jackson on the way. Jackson was coming back from the barn. His hands were covered with grease and oil.

Reacher asked, “How’s it going?”

“It’ll be ready,” Jackson said.

Then Taylor appeared out of the gloom.

“Ten hours to go,” he said. “We’re safe until dawn.”

“You sure?” Reacher said.

“Not really.”

“Me either.”

“So what does the U.S. Army field manual say about nighttime perimeter security?”

Reacher smiled. “It says you put a shitload of Claymores about a hundred yards out. If you hear one go off you know you just killed an intruder.”

“What if you don’t have any Claymores?”

“Then you hide.”

“That’s the SAS way. But we can’t hide the house.”

“We could take Kate and Jade someplace else.”

Taylor shook his head. “Better if they stay. I don’t want my focus split.”

“How do they feel about that?”

“Ask them.”

So Reacher did. He took a shortcut through the house and went out to the Mini. Told Kate to take a break for dinner. Then he offered to drive her and Jade anyplace she wanted to go, a hotel, a resort, a spa, Norwich, Birmingham, London, anywhere. She refused. She said as long as Lane was alive she wanted Taylor close by with a gun. She said a farmhouse with stone walls three feet thick was the best place she could think of to be. Reacher didn’t argue with her. Privately he agreed with Taylor. Split focus was a bad thing. And it was possible that Lane’s guys already had covert surveillance going. Maybe even likely. If so, they would have the roads covered. They would be watching cars pass by. Looking for Taylor, primarily. But if they were given the chance to see that what was supposed to be Susan and Melody Jackson was actually Kate and Jade Lane, then the whole game would change.

Dinner was a random mixture of canned stuff that Pauling had found in cupboards. She wasn’t much of a cook. She was too accustomed to dialing her Barrow Street telephone and calling out for whatever she wanted. But nobody seemed to mind. Nobody was in the mood for a gourmet menu. They planned as they ate. Agreed to set up two two-person watches, sequential, five hours each. That would take them through until dawn. One person would patrol the blind gable wall to the south, and one would do the same thing to the north. Each would be armed with a loaded G-36. The first watch would be Taylor and Jackson, and at half past one in the morning Reacher and Pauling would take over. Kate Lane would sit it out. The possibility that a hostile nighttime reconnaissance probe might identify her was too much of a risk.

Reacher cleared the table and washed the dishes and Taylor and Jackson went outside with their G-36s cocked and locked. Kate went upstairs to put Jade to bed. Pauling put logs on the fire. Watched Reacher at the sink.

“You OK?” she asked him.

“I’ve done KP before.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

He said, “We’ve got an SAS guy on one end of the house and a Parachute Regiment guy on the other. They’ve both got automatic weapons. And they’re both personally motivated. They won’t fall asleep.”

“I didn’t mean that, either. I meant with the whole thing.”

“I told you we wouldn’t be putting anybody on trial.”

Pauling nodded.

“She’s cute,” she said. “Isn’t she?”

“Who?”

“Kate. She makes me feel ancient.”

“Older women,” Reacher said. “Good for something.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. Give me a choice, I’d go home with you, not her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m weird like that.”

“I’m supposed to put people on trial.”

“So was I, once. But I’m not going to this time. And I’m OK with that.”

“Me too. That’s what’s bothering me.”

“You’ll get over it. The backhoe and a plane ticket will help.”

“Distance? Six feet of earth and three thousand air miles?”

“Works every time.”

“Does it? Really?”

“We splattered a thousand bugs on our windshield yesterday. A thousand more today. One extra won’t make any difference.”

“Lane isn’t a bug.”

“No, he’s worse.”

“What about the others?”

“They’ve got a choice. The purest kind of choice there is. They can stay or they can go. Entirely up to them.”

“Where do you think they are now?”

“Somewhere out there,” Reacher said.

A half-hour later Kate Lane came downstairs again. The tails of her borrowed shirt were tied at her waist and the sleeves were rolled to her elbows.

“Jade’s asleep,” she said. She turned sideways to squeeze past a displaced dining chair and Reacher figured it was possible to see that she was pregnant. Just. Now that he had been told.

He asked, “Is she doing OK?”

“Better than we could have hoped,” Kate said. “She’s not sleeping great. The jet lag has screwed her up. And she’s a little nervous, I guess. And she doesn’t understand why there are no animals here. She doesn’t understand arable farming. She thinks we’re hiding a whole bunch of cute little creatures from her.”

“Does she know about the new brother or sister or whatever it’s going to be?”

Kate nodded. “We waited until we were on the plane. We tried to make it all part of the adventure.”

“How was it at the airport?”

“No problem. The passports were fine. They looked at the names more than the pictures. To make sure they matched the tickets.”

Pauling said, “So much for Homeland Security.”

Kate nodded again. “We got the idea from something we read in the newspaper. Some guy left on a short-notice business trip, grabbed his passport from the drawer, and he’d been through six separate countries before he realized it was his wife’s passport that he had grabbed.”

Reacher said, “Tell me how the whole thing went down.”

“It was pretty easy, really. We did stuff in advance. Bought the voice machine, rented the room, got the chair, took the car keys.”

“Taylor did most of that, right?”

“He said people would remember me more than him.”

“He was probably right.”

“But I had to buy the voice machine. Too weird if a guy who couldn’t talk wanted one.”

“I guess.”

“Then I copied the photograph at Staples. That was tough. I had to let Groom drive me. It would have been too suspicious to insist on Graham all the time. But after that it was easy. We left for Bloomingdale’s that morning and went straight to Graham’s apartment instead. Just holed up there and waited. We kept really quiet in case anyone checked with the neighbors. We kept the lights off and covered the windows in case anyone passed by on the street. Then later we started the phone calls. Right from the apartment. I was very nervous at first.”

“You forgot to say no cops.”

“I know. I thought I’d blown it immediately. But Edward didn’t seem to notice. Then it got much easier later. With practice.”

“I was in the car with Burke. You sounded great by then.”

“I thought there was someone with him. There was something in his voice. And he kept narrating where he was. He was telling you, I guess. You must have been hidden.”

“You asked for his name in case you slipped and used it anyway.”

Kate nodded. “I knew who it was, obviously. And I thought it might sound dominating.”

“You know Greenwich Village pretty well.”

“I lived there before I married Edward.”

“Why did you split the demands into three parts?”

“Because to ask for it all at once would have been too much of a clue. We thought we better let the stress build up a little. Then maybe Edward would miss the connection.”

“I don’t think he missed it. But I think he misinterpreted it. He started thinking about Hobart and the Africa connection.”

“How bad is Hobart, really?”

“About as bad as it gets.”

“That’s unforgivable.”

“No argument from me.”

“Do you think I’m cold-blooded?”

“If I did it wouldn’t be a criticism.”

“Edward wanted to own me. Like a chattel. And he said if I was ever unfaithful he would rupture Jade’s hymen with a potato peeler. He said he would tie me up and make me watch him do it. He said that when she was five years old.”

Reacher said nothing.

Kate turned to Pauling and asked, “Do you have children?”

Pauling shook her head.

Kate said, “You blot a thing like that right out of your mind. You assume it was just the sick product of a temporary rage. Like he wasn’t quite right in the head. But then I heard the story about Anne and I knew he was capable of really doing it. So now I want him dead.”

Reacher said, “He’s going to be. Very soon.”

“They say you should never get between a lioness and her cub. I never really understood that before. Now I do. There are no limits.”

The room went as quiet as only the countryside can. The flames in the fireplace flickered and danced. Strange shadows moved on the walls.

Reacher asked, “Are you planning on staying here forever?”

“I hope to,” Kate said. “Organic farming is going to be a big thing. Better for people, better for the land. We can buy some more acres from the locals. Maybe expand a little.”

“We?”

“I feel like a part of it.”

“What are you growing?”

“Right now, just grass. We’re in the hay business for the next five years or so. We have to work the old chemicals out of the soil. And that takes time.”

“Hard to picture you as a farmer.”

“I think I’m going to enjoy it.”

“Even when Lane is out of the picture permanently?”

“In that case I guess we would go back to New York occasionally. But downtown only. I won’t go back to the Dakota.”

“Anne’s sister lives directly opposite. In the Majestic. She’s been watching Lane every day for four years.”

Kate said, “I’d like to meet her. And I’d like to see Hobart’s sister again.”

“Like a survivors’ club,” Pauling said.

Reacher got out of his chair and walked to the window. Saw nothing but nighttime blackness. Heard nothing but silence.

“First we have to survive,” he said.

They kept the fire going and dozed quietly in the armchairs. When the clock in Reacher’s head hit one-thirty in the morning he tapped Pauling on the knee and stood up and stretched. Then they headed outside together into the dead-of-night dark and cold. Called softly and met Taylor and Jackson in a huddle outside the front door. Reacher took Taylor’s weapon and headed for the south end of the house. The gun was warm from Taylor’s hands. The safety was above and behind the trigger. It had tritium markings, which made them faintly luminous. Reacher selected single fire and raised the rifle to his shoulder and checked the fit. It felt pretty good. It balanced pretty well. The carrying handle was like an exaggerated version of an M16’s, with a neat little oval aperture in the front slope to provide a line-of-sight back to the built-in scope, which was a plain 3x monocular, which according to the laws of optics pulled the target three times closer than the naked eye but also made it three stops darker, which rendered it functionally useless at night. Three stops darker than pitch black was no use to anyone. But overall the thing was a handsome weapon. It would be fine by dawn.

He put his back against the blind gable wall and settled in and waited. He could smell woodsmoke from the kitchen chimney. After a minute his eyesight adjusted and he saw that there was a little moonlight behind heavy cloud, maybe one shade lighter than total darkness. But still comforting. Nobody would see him from a distance. He was wearing gray pants and a gray jacket and he was leaning on a gray wall holding a black gun. In turn he would see headlights miles away and he would see men on foot about ten feet away. Close quarters. But at night, vision was not the sense that counted anyway. In the darkness, hearing was primary. Sound was the best early-warning system. Reacher himself could be totally silent, because he wasn’t moving. But no intruder could be. Intruders had to move.

He stepped forward two paces and stood still. Turned his head slowly left and right and scoped out a two-hundred-degree arc all around him, like a huge curved bubble of space from which he had to be aware of every sound. Assuming that Pauling was doing the same thing north of the house they had every angle of approach covered between them. At first he heard nothing. Just an absolute absence of sound. Like a vacuum. Like he was deaf. Then as he relaxed and concentrated he started to pick up tiny imperceptible sounds drifting in across the flat land. The thrill of faint breezes in distant trees. The hum of power lines a mile away. The soak of water turning earth to mud in ditches. Grains of dirt drying and falling into furrows. Field mice, in burrows. Things growing. He turned his head left and right like radar and knew that any human approach might as well be accompanied by a marching band. He would hear it clearly a hundred yards away, however quiet anyone tried to be.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Invincible.

He stood in the same spot for five straight hours. It was cold, but bearable. Nobody came. By six-thirty in the morning the sun was showing far away to his left. There was a bright horizontal band of pink in the sky. A thick horizontal blanket of mist on the ground. Gray visibility was spreading westward slowly, like an ebb tide.

The dawn of a new day.

The time of maximum danger.

Taylor and Jackson came out of the house carrying the third and fourth rifles. Reacher didn’t speak. Just took up a new station against the rear façade of the house, his shoulder against the corner, facing south. Taylor mirrored his position against the front wall. Reacher knew without looking that sixty feet behind them Jackson and Pauling were doing the same thing. Four weapons, four pairs of eyes, all trained outward.

Reasonable security.

For as long as they could bear to stay in position.

CHAPTER 70

They stayed in position all day long. All through the morning and all through the afternoon and well into the evening. Fourteen straight hours.

Lane didn’t come.

One at a time they took short meal breaks and shorter bathroom breaks. They rotated stations clockwise around the house for variety. Their eight-pound rifles started to feel like eight tons in their hands. Jackson slipped away for a minute and turned the bird scarer back on. Thereafter the stillness was periodically shattered by loud random shotgun blasts. Even though they knew for sure they were due each sentry jumped and ducked each time they arrived.

Lane didn’t come.

Kate and Jade stayed in the house, out of sight. They made food and poured drinks and carried them on trays to the windows and the doors, tea for Taylor and Jackson, coffee for Reacher, orange juice for Pauling. The sun burned through the mist and the day grew warm, and then it grew cold again in the late afternoon.

Lane didn’t come.

Jade drew pictures. Every twenty minutes or so she would bring a new one to a different window and ask for an opinion concerning its merit. When it was his turn to judge, Reacher would duck his head down and give the paper a look. Then he would turn back to the outward view and talk out of the side of his mouth. Very good, he would say. And generally the pictures merited the praise. The kid wasn’t a bad little artist. She had switched from future predictions to straightforward reportage. She drew the red Mini Cooper, she drew Pauling with her gun, she drew Taylor with a mouth like a wrecked Buick’s grille. She drew Reacher, huge, taller than the house. Then late in the day she switched from reportage to fantasy and drew farm animals in the barns, even though she had been told that the Jacksons didn’t have any, not even a dog.

Lane didn’t come.

Kate fixed sandwiches for an early dinner and Jade took to visiting the corner windows and asking everyone in turn if she could come outside and explore. Everyone in turn said no, she had to hide. On the third go-round Reacher heard her modify her request and ask Taylor if she could come out after dark, and he heard Taylor say maybe, like worn-down parents everywhere.

Lane didn’t come.

By eight-thirty in the evening visibility had died away to nothing again and Reacher had been on his feet for nineteen hours. Pauling too. Taylor and Jackson had done twenty-four, spelled only by a five-hour break. They all met in a loose huddle in the gathering gloom by the front door, shaky with fatigue, frustrated, made anxious by fruitless vigilance.

Taylor said, “He’s waiting us out.”

“Therefore he’s going to win,” Jackson said. “We can’t keep this up much longer.”

“He’s had twenty-seven hours,” Pauling said. “We have to assume he’s armed by now.”

“He’ll come tomorrow at dawn,” Taylor said.

“You sure?” Reacher asked.

“Not really.”

“Me either. Three or four in the morning would work just as well.”

“Too dark.”

“If they’ve bought guns they could have bought night vision, too.”

“How would you do it?”

“Three guys loop around and walk in from the north. The other four come up the driveway, maybe two in a car, lights off, high speed, with the other two flanking it on foot. Two directions, seven guys, their choice of seven windows, we couldn’t stop at least three of them getting inside. They’d get you or a hostage before we could react.”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine,” Taylor said.

“I’m just trying to think like them.”

“We’d get them before they got anywhere near the house.”

“Only if all four of us can stay awake and alert for the next eight hours. Or the next thirty-two hours, if he delays another day. Or the next fifty-six hours, if he delays two days. Which he might. He’s in no hurry. And he’s not dumb. If he’s decided to wait us out, why not do it properly?”

Taylor said, “We’re not moving. This place is a stronghold.”

“Three-dimensionally it’s fine,” Reacher said. “But battles are fought in four dimensions, not three. Length, breadth, and height, plus time. And time is on Lane’s side, not ours. This is a siege now. We’re going to run out of food, and sooner or later all four of us are going to be asleep at the same time.”

“So we’ll halve the guard. One man north, one man south, the other two resting but ready.”

Reacher shook his head. “No, it’s time to get aggressive.”

“How?”

“I’m going to go find them. They’ve got to be holed up somewhere close. It’s time to pay them a visit. They won’t be expecting that.”

“Alone?” Pauling said. “That’s insane.”

“I have to anyway,” Reacher said. “I didn’t get Hobart’s money yet. There’s eight hundred grand out there. Can’t let it go to waste.”

Taylor and Pauling stayed on guard and Reacher fetched the big Ordnance Survey map from the Mini’s glove box. He took Jade’s latest drawings off the kitchen table and piled them on a chair and spread out the map in their place. Then he went over it with Jackson. Jackson had a year’s worth of local knowledge, which was less than Reacher would have liked, but it was better than nothing. The map clarified most of the terrain issues all by itself with its faint orange contour lines, which were very widely spaced and which curved only gently. Flat land, probably the flattest in the British Isles. Like a pool table. Grange Farm and Bishops Pargeter were roughly in the center of a wide triangle of empty space bounded to the east by the road that ran south from Norwich to Ipswich in Suffolk and to the west by the Thetford road that Reacher and Pauling had driven three times already. Elsewhere in the triangle were meandering minor tracks and isolated farm settlements. Here and there chance and history had nestled small communities in the angles of crossroads. They were shown on the map as tiny gray squares and rectangles. Some of the rectangles represented short rows of houses. Some of the larger buildings were shown individually. The only one within any kind of a reasonable distance from Bishops Pargeter and labeled PH was the Bishop’s Arms.

This is the only pub for miles, lad, the farmer at the bar had said. Why else do you think it’s so crowded?

“Are they there, do you think?” Reacher asked.

Jackson said, “If they stopped in Fenchurch Saint Mary first and then aimed for Bishops Pargeter afterward, then that’s the only place they could have passed. But they could have gone north. Nearer Norwich there are a lot of places.”

“Can’t buy guns in Norwich,” Reacher said. “Not if you had to call Holland.”

“Shotguns up there,” Jackson said. “Nothing heavier.”

“So they probably didn’t go there,” Reacher said. He recalled the motoring atlas. The city of Norwich had been shown as a dense stain in the top-right corner of the bulge that was East Anglia. The end of the line. Not on the way to anyplace else.

“I think they stayed close,” he said.

“Then the Bishop’s Arms could be it,” Jackson said.

Five miles, Reacher thought. On foot, that’s a three-hour round trip. Back by midnight.

“I’m going to check it out,” he said.

He detoured via the mud room and collected two spare magazines for his G-36. Found Pauling’s purse in the kitchen and borrowed her little Maglite. Folded the map and put it in his pocket. Then he huddled with the others in the dark outside the front door and agreed on a password. He didn’t want to get shot at when he arrived back. Jackson suggested Canaries, which was the Norwich soccer team’s nickname, for its yellow uniforms.

“Are they any good?” Reacher asked.

“They used to be,” Jackson said. “Twenty-some years ago, they were great.”

Them and me both, Reacher thought.

“Take care,” Pauling said, and kissed him on the cheek.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

He started by walking north behind the house. Then he turned west, staying parallel to the road, about a field’s width away. There was a little leftover twilight in the sky. Just the last remnant. Torn and ragged clouds with pale stars beyond. The air was cold and a little damp. There was a knee-high blanket of thin mist clinging to the earth. The dirt was soft and heavy underfoot. He carried his G-36 by its handle, left-handed, ready to swing it up into position when needed.

Reacher, alone in the dark.

The Grange Farm boundary was a trench ten feet across with a muddy bottom six feet down. Drainage, for the flat land. Not exactly canals like in Holland, but not anything easily cleared, either. Not anything to just step across. Reacher had to slide down the near bank, struggle through the mud, and then climb up the far bank again. A mile into the trip his pants were a real mess. And he was going to have to invest some serious shoeshine time on the trip home. Or else deduct the price of a new pair of Cheaneys from Hobart’s compensation. Maybe he could detour to the source. The motoring atlas had shown Northampton about forty miles west of Cambridge. Maybe he could talk Pauling into a two-hour shopping expedition. He had let her insist on Macy’s after all.

Two miles into the trip he was very tired. And slow. Behind schedule. He changed course and moved slightly south and west. Came closer to the road. Found a tractor route through the next farmer’s fields. Huge tires had beaten the earth into hard ruts either side of a grassy center hump. He wiped his shoes on the grass and sped up a little. Found that the next ditch was crossed by an improvised trestle made of old railroad ties. Strong enough for a tractor, strong enough for him. He followed the tire tracks until they turned abruptly north. Then he struck off through the fields again on his own.

After four miles the clock in his head told him that it was ten-thirty at night. Twilight had gone completely but the rags of cloud had cleared a little and the moon was bright. The stars were out. Far away to his left he could see occasional cars passing by on the road. Three had gone west and two had gone east. Bright lights, sedate speeds. Theoretically the two heading east could have been Lane’s guys, but he doubted it. Ten and eleven in the evening was no kind of a time to attack. He guessed rural roads saw a minor traffic peak right around then. Pubs letting out, friends going home. Too many witnesses. If he knew it, then Lane knew it, too. Certainly Gregory knew it.

He kept on going. The spare magazines in his pocket were bruising his hip. Five minutes before eleven o’clock he spotted the glow from the pub’s sign. Just an electric brightness in the misty air, because the sign itself was hidden by the bulk of the building. He could smell woodsmoke from a chimney. He looped around toward the light and the smell, staying well to the north of the road, just in case Lane had watchers out. He kept to the fields until he was facing the back of the building from four hundred yards away. He saw small squares of harsh white fluorescent light. Windows. Undraped and unglamorous. Therefore kitchens and bathrooms, he guessed. Therefore frosted or pebbled glass. No view out.

He headed south, straight for the squares of light.

CHAPTER 71

Directly behind the pub the parking lot had been closed off and turned into a service yard. It was full of crates of bottles and stacks of metal beer kegs and big commercial-sized trash receptacles. There was a broken-down old car with bricks wedged under its brake drums. No wheels. Another old car, humped under a stained tarpaulin. Behind it the building had a rear door, inconspicuous among all the chaos, almost certainly unlocked during business hours to allow easy access from the kitchen to the trash pile.

Reacher ignored the door. He circled the building in the dark, clockwise, thirty feet out from the walls, well away from the spill of light from the windows.

The small bright rooms in back were clearly bathrooms. Their windows blazed with the kind of green-tinged light that comes from cheap tubes and white tile. Around the corner in the end wall to the east of the building there were no windows at all, just an unbroken expanse of brick. Around the next corner in the front wall east of the entrance there were three windows into the public bar. From a distance Reacher peered in and saw the same four farmers he had seen two nights previously. On the same stools. And the same bartender, busy as before with his beer pumps and his towel. The lighting was dim, but there was nobody else in the room. None of the tables was occupied.

Reacher moved on.

The front door was closed. The parking lot had four cars in it, haphazardly slotted side by side. None of the cars was new. None of them was the kind of thing a Park Lane rental company could have produced in a hurry. They were all old and dirty and battered. Bald tires. Dented fenders. Streaks of mud and manure. Farmers’ cars.

Reacher moved on.

West of the entrance were three more windows, into the saloon bar.

Two nights previously the saloon bar had been empty.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

Now a single table was occupied.

By three men: Groom, and Burke, and Kowalski.

Reacher could see them clearly. On the table in front of them he could see the long-dead remains of a meal and half a dozen empty glasses. And three half-full glasses. Pint mugs of beer, half-gone. It was a rectangular table. Kowalski and Burke were shoulder to shoulder on one side and Groom was opposite them, alone. Kowalski was talking and Burke was listening to him. Groom had his chair tipped back and was staring into space. There was a log fire burning in a soot-stained grate beyond him. The room was lit up warm and bright and inviting.

Reacher moved on.

Around the next corner there was a single window in the end wall to the west and through it Reacher got a different version of the same view. Groom, Burke, and Kowalski at their table. Drinking. Talking. Passing time. They were all alone in the room. The door to the foyer was closed. A private party.

Reacher backtracked four short steps and then headed for the front corner of the building on an exact forty-five-degree angle. Invisible from any window. He touched the wall and dropped to his knees. He kept his right palm on the brick and shuffled north and stretched out his left arm as far as it would go and very carefully laid his rifle on the ground directly under the west-facing window. He put it tight against the base of the wall where the shadows were deep. Then he shuffled south and stood up again and backed away on the same angle and checked. He couldn’t see the rifle. Nobody would find it, unless they tripped over it.

He backed away until he was clear of the light spill and looped through the lot. Headed for the front door. Opened it up and stepped into the foyer. The low beams, the patterned carpet, the ten thousand brass ornaments. The shiny reception desk.

The register.

He stepped to the desk. To his right he could hear sociable silence from the public bar. The farmers, drinking, not saying much. The bartender, working quietly. To his left he could hear Kowalski’s voice, muffled by the closed door. He couldn’t make out what he was saying. He couldn’t hear individual words. Just a low drone. Occasional rising intonations. Short barks of contempt. Old soldier’s bullshit, probably.

He turned the register through a hundred and eighty degrees. It moved easily, leather on shiny varnish. He opened it up. Leafed through the pages until he found his own entry. Two nights previously, J & L Bayswater, East 161st Street, Bronx, New York, USA, Rolls-Royce, R34-CHR. Then he scanned ahead. The following night three guests had registered: C. Groom, A. Burke, L. Kowalski. They had been less shy than Reacher himself about supplying personal information. Their business address had been accurately given as One 72nd Street, New York, New York, USA, which was the Dakota Building. Make of Vehicle had been given as Toyota Land Cruiser. There was a plate number entered, a British seven-character mix of letters and numbers that meant nothing to Reacher beyond the fact that the car had to be a rental from London.

No Toyota Land Cruiser in the lot.

And where were Lane, Gregory, Perez, and Addison?

He leafed backward through the book and saw that on any given night the Bishop’s Arms had a maximum of three rooms to let. So assuming that Groom and Burke and Kowalski had been given a room each, there had been no room at the inn for the others. They had gotten back into their rented Toyota and driven someplace else.

But where?

Reacher glanced at the saloon bar’s door but went the other way. Into the public bar. The bartender looked up at him and the four farmers turned slowly on their stools and started up with their complacent who-are-you barroom stares until they recognized him. Then they nodded guarded greetings and turned back to their pint glasses. The bartender stayed poised and polite, ready for fast service. Instant acceptance, for less than thirty bucks.

Reacher asked, “Where did you send the other four?”

The bartender said, “Who?”

“Seven guys showed up yesterday. Three of them are here. Where did you send the other four?”

“We’ve only got three rooms,” the guy said.

“I know that,” Reacher said. “Where’s your overspill recommendation?”

“I sent them down to Maston Manor.”

“Where’s that?”

“The other side of Bishops Pargeter. About six mile beyond.”

“I didn’t see another inn on the map.”

“It’s a country house. She takes paying guests.”

One of the farmers half-turned and said, “It’s a bed and breakfast hotel. Very nice. Classier than this place. I reckon they all drew lots and the losers stayed here.”

His friends laughed, low and slow. Barroom humor, the same the world over.

“It’s more expensive there,” the bartender said, defensively.

“It should be,” the farmer said.

“Is it on this road?” Reacher asked.

The bartender nodded. “Straight through Bishops Pargeter, past the church, past Dave Kemp’s shop, keep on about six mile. You can’t miss it. She’s got a sign. Maston Manor.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said. He headed back to the foyer. Closed the door behind him. Stepped across the patterned carpet and stopped in front of the saloon bar’s door. Kowalski was still talking. Reacher could hear him. He put his hand on the knob. Paused a beat and then turned it and pushed the door open.

CHAPTER 72

Carter Groom was facing the door on the far side of the table. He looked up just like the bartender had but Kowalski and Burke moved a lot faster than the farmers. They spun around and stared. Reacher stepped the rest of the way into the room and closed the door gently behind him. Stood completely still.

“We meet again,” he said, just to break the silence.

“You’ve got some nerve,” Groom said.

The room was decorated in the same style as the foyer. Low ceiling beams, dark varnished wood, ornate wall sconces, thousands of brass ornaments, a wall-to-wall carpet patterned in a riot of red and gold swirls. Reacher moved toward the fireplace. Tapped the toes of his shoes against the edge of the hearth to shed some mud. Took a heavy iron poker from a hook and used the end of it to scrape dirt off his heels. Then he hung the poker back up and flapped at the bottom of his pant legs with his hands. Altogether he spent more than a minute cleaning up, with his back turned, but he was watching a clear convex reflection of the table in a bright copper bucket that held kindling sticks. And nobody was moving. The three guys were just sitting there, waiting. Smart enough not to start anything in a public place.

“The situation has changed,” Reacher said. He moved on, toward the west-facing window. It had open drapes and a sliding storm pane on the inside and a regular wooden frame on the outside that would open like a door. He pulled out a chair from the table nearest to it and sat down, six feet away from the three guys, four feet and two panes of glass away from his rifle.

“Changed how?” Burke said.

“There was no kidnap,” Reacher said. “It was faked. Kate and Taylor are an item. They fell in love, they eloped. Because they wanted to be together. That was all. And they took Jade with them, obviously. But they had to dress the whole thing up, because Lane is a psychopath where his marriages are concerned. Among other things.”

“Kate’s alive?” Groom said.

Reacher nodded. “Jade too.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere in the States, I guess.”

“So why is Taylor here?”

“He wants a showdown with Lane on his own turf.”

“He’s going to get one.”

Reacher shook his head. “I’m here to tell you that’s a bad idea. He’s on a farm, and it’s surrounded by ditches too deep to drive through. So you’d be going in on foot. And he’s got a lot of help there. He’s got eight of his old SAS buddies with him, and his brother-in-law was a kind of Green Beret for the Brits, and he’s brought in six of his guys, too. They’ve got Claymores on a hundred-yard perimeter and heavy machine guns in every window. They’ve got night vision and grenade launchers.”

“They can’t possibly use them. Not here. This is England, not Lebanon.”

“He’s prepared to use them. Believe it. But actually he won’t have to. Because four of the SAS guys are snipers. They’ve got PSG1s. Heckler and Koch sniper rifles, from the black market in Belgium. They’ll drop you all three hundred yards out. With their eyes shut. Seven rounds, game over. They’re miles from anywhere. Nobody will hear. And if they do, they won’t care. This is the back of beyond. Farm country. Somebody’s always shooting something. Foxes, road signs, burglars, each other.”

The room went quiet. Kowalski picked up his drink and sipped. Then Burke did, and then Groom. Kowalski was left-handed. Burke and Groom were right-handed. Reacher said, “So your best play is to just forget it and go home now. Lane is going to die. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s no reason why you should die with him. This isn’t your fight. This is all about Lane’s ego. It’s between him and Kate and Taylor. Don’t get yourselves killed for that kind of bullshit.”

Burke said, “We can’t just walk away.”

“You walked away in Africa,” Reacher said. “You left Hobart and Knight behind, to save the unit. So now you should leave Lane behind, to save yourselves. You can’t win here. Taylor’s good. You know that. And his buddies are just as good. You’re outnumbered more than two to one. Which is totally upside down. You know that, too. A situation like this, you need to outnumber the defenders. You’re going to get your asses kicked.”

Nobody spoke.

“You should go home,” Reacher said again. “Hook up somewhere else. Maybe start up on your own.”

Groom asked, “Are you with Taylor?”

Reacher nodded. “And I’m good with a rifle. Back in the day, I won the Marine sniper trophy. I showed up in army green and I beat all of you miserable jarheads hands down. So maybe I’ll grab one of the PSGs. Maybe I’ll drop you all six hundred yards out, just for the fun of it. Or eight hundred, or a thousand.”

Silence in the room. No sound at all, except the shift and crackle of logs in the fire. Reacher looked straight at Kowalski.

“Five, seven, one, three,” he lied. “That’s the combination for Lane’s closet door. There’s still more than nine million dollars behind it. In cash. You should go get it, right now.”

No response.

“Walk away,” Reacher said. “Live to fight another day.”

“They stole all that money,” Burke said.

“Alimony. Easier than asking for it straight up. Asking for alimony is what got Anne Lane killed. Kate found that out.”

“That was a kidnap.”

Reacher shook his head. “Knight offed her. For Lane, because Anne wanted out. That’s why you all abandoned Knight in Africa. Lane was covering his ass. He sacrificed Hobart too, because he was in the same OP.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I found Hobart. Knight told him all about it. While they were busy getting their hands and feet cut off.”

Silence.

Reacher said, “Don’t get killed for this kind of crap.”

Burke looked at Groom. Groom looked at Burke. They both looked at Kowalski. There was a long pause. Then Burke looked up.

“OK,” he said. “I guess we could sit this one out.”

Groom nodded. Kowalski shrugged. Reacher stood up.

“Smart decision,” he said. He moved toward the door. Stopped at the hearth and kicked his shoes against the stone again. Asked, “Where are Lane and the others?”

Quiet for a beat. Then Groom said, “There was no room here. They went up to Norwich. The city. Some hotel up there. The guy here recommended it.”

Reacher nodded. “And when is he locking and loading?”

Another pause.

“Dawn the day after tomorrow.”

“What did he buy?”

“Submachine guns. MP5Ks, one each plus two spares. Ammunition, night vision, flashlights, various bits and pieces.”

“Are you going to call him? As soon as I’m gone?”

“No,” Burke said. “He’s not the kind of guy you call with this kind of news.”

“OK,” Reacher said. Then he stepped fast to his left and lifted the poker off its hook. Reversed it in his hands and spun around in one smooth movement and swung it hard and level and caught Carter Groom across the upper right arm, hard and straight and level, halfway between the elbow and the shoulder. The poker was a heavy iron bar and Reacher was a strong and angry man and Groom’s humerus bone shattered like a piece of dropped china. Groom opened his mouth wide in sudden pain and shock but before any kind of a scream got out Reacher had sidestepped two paces to his left and broken Kowalski’s left arm with a vicious backhanded blow. Kowalski was left-handed. Burke and Groom were right-handed. Reacher knocked Kowalski out of his way with his hip and wound up like an old newsreel of Mickey Mantle getting ready to hit one out of the park and smashed Burke across the right wrist with a line drive and pulverized every bone in there. Then he breathed out and turned away and stepped to the fireplace and put the poker back on its hook.

“Just making sure,” he said. “You didn’t entirely convince me with your answers. Especially the one about Lane’s hotel.”

Then he walked out of the saloon bar and closed the door quietly behind him. It was exactly eleven thirty-one in the evening, according to the clock in his head.

At exactly eleven thirty-two by the platinum Rolex on his left wrist Edward Lane closed the Toyota’s rear door on nine Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine guns, sixty thirty-round magazines of 9mm Parabellums, seven sets of night-vision goggles, ten flashlights, six rolls of duct tape, and two long coils of rope. Then John Gregory started the engine. Behind him on the rear bench were Perez and Addison, quiet and pensive. Lane climbed into the front passenger seat and Gregory turned the truck around and took off west. Standard Special Forces doctrine called for dawn assaults, but it also called for the insertion of a small advance force for a lengthy period of lying-up and prior surveillance.

At exactly eleven thirty-three by the clock on her night table Jade woke up, confused and hot and feverish with time-zone confusion. She sat up in bed for a spell, dazed and quiet. Then she swung her feet to the floor. Crossed the room slowly and pulled back her curtain. It was dark outside. And she could go outside in the dark. Taylor had said so. She could go visit the barns, and find the animals she knew had to be there.

Reacher retrieved his G-36 from under the saloon bar window at eleven thirty-four precisely and set out to walk back on the road, which he figured would make the return trip faster. Five miles, level ground, no hills, decent pace. He anticipated about seventy-five minutes total. He was tired, but content. Fairly satisfied. Three trigger fingers out of action, the opposing force degraded to about fifty-seven percent of its original capacity, the odds evened up to an attractive four-on-four, some useful intelligence gained. Groom’s ingrained loyalty had led him to lie about Lane’s hotel and probably about the timing of the planned attack, too. Dawn the day after tomorrow was almost certainly a clumsy and hasty camouflaging of the truth, which therefore in reality would be simply dawn tomorrow. But the shopping list had probably been right. Night vision was a no-brainer for nighttime surveillance and MP5Ks were pretty much what a guy like Lane would want for a subsequent fast and mobile assault. Light, accurate, reliable, familiar, available.

Forewarned is forearmed, Reacher thought. Not bad for an evening’s work. He walked on, energy in his stride, a grim smile on his face.

Alone in the dark. Invincible.

That feeling lasted exactly an hour and a quarter. It ended just after he walked the length of the Grange Farm driveway and saw the dark and silent bulk of the house looming in front of him. He had called the password at least half a dozen separate times. At first quietly, and then louder.

Canaries, canaries, canaries.

Canaries, canaries, canaries.

He had gotten no response at all.

CHAPTER 73

Without conscious thought Reacher raised his rifle to the ready position. Stock nestled high against his right shoulder, safety off, right index finger inside the trigger guard, barrel just a degree or two below the horizontal. Long years of training, absorbed right down at the cellular level, permanently written in his DNA. No point in having a weapon at all unless it’s ready for instant use, his instructors had screamed.

He stood absolutely still. Listened hard. Heard nothing at all. He moved his head left. Listened. Nothing. He moved his head right. Nothing.

He tried the password one more time, soft and low: Canaries.

He heard no reply.

Lane, he thought.

He wasn’t surprised. Surprise was strictly for amateurs, and Reacher was a professional. He wasn’t upset, either. He had learned a long time ago that the only way to keep fear and panic at bay was to concentrate ruthlessly on the job at hand. So he spent no time thinking about Lauren Pauling or Kate Lane. Or Jackson or Taylor. Or Jade. No time at all. He just walked backward and to his left. Preprogrammed. Like a machine. Silently. Away from the house. Making himself smaller as a target and improving his angle of view. He checked the windows. They were all dark. Just a faint red glow from the kitchen. The remains of the fire. The front door was closed. Near it was the faint shape of the Mini Cooper, cold and gray in the dark. It looked odd. Canted down at the front, like it was kneeling.

He walked toward it through the dark, slow and stealthy. Knelt down on the driver’s side near the front fender and felt for the tire. It wasn’t there. There were torn shreds of rubber and a vicious curled length of bead wire. And shards of plastic from the shattered wheel well lining. That was all. He shuffled quietly around the tiny hood to the other side. Same situation. The wheel had its alloy rim on the ground.

A front-wheel-drive car, comprehensively disabled. Both wheels. One had not been enough. A single tire can be changed. Two submachine gun bursts had been necessary. Twice the risk of detection. Although in Reacher’s experience an MP5 set to fire bursts of three sounded more innocent than a rifle firing single shots. A single gunshot was unmistakable. It was a singularity. It was a precise pinpoint of noise. An MP5 was rated to fire 900 rounds a minute. Fifteen every second. Which meant that a burst of three lasted a fifth of a second. Not quite a singularity. Altogether a different sound. Like a brief blurred purr instead. Like a distant motorcycle heard waiting at a light.

Lane, he thought again.

But when?

Seventy-five minutes previously he had been five miles away. Audibility decays according to the inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet. He had heard nothing. He was sure of that. Across land as flat and featureless and in night air as thick and damp as Norfolk’s he would have expected to hear MP5 bursts a couple of miles away. Therefore Lane had been gone at least thirty minutes. Maybe more.

He stood still and listened hard. Heard nothing. Headed for the front door. It was closed but unlocked. He dropped his left hand off the rifle and turned the handle. Pushed the door open. Raised the rifle. The house was dark. It felt empty. He checked the kitchen. It was warm. Dull red embers in the hearth. Jade’s drawings were still on the kitchen chair where he had left them. Pauling’s purse was still where he had dumped it after taking the Maglite. There were empty mugs of tea all over the place. Dishes in the sink. The room looked exactly like he had left it, except there were no people in it.

He switched on the flashlight and clamped it in his left palm under the rifle’s barrel. Used it to check all the other ground floor rooms. A formal dining room, empty, cold, dark, unused. Nobody in it. A formal parlor, furnished like the Bishop’s Arms saloon bar, still and quiet. Nobody in it. A powder room, a coat closet, the mud room. All empty.

He crept up the stairs. The first room he came to was clearly Jade’s. He saw the green seersucker sundress folded on a chair. Drawings on the floor. The battered old toys that had been missing from the Dakota were all arrayed in a line along the bed, leaning on the wall. A one-eyed bear with the fur worn down to its backing, sitting up. A doll, one eye open and one eye closed, a lipstick effect inexpertly applied with a red marker pen. The bed had been slept in. The pillow was dented and the sheets had been thrown back.

No sign of the child herself.

The next room belonged to the Jacksons. That was clear. There was a vanity table cluttered with British cosmetic brands and tortoiseshell hairbrushes and matching hand mirrors. There were framed photographs of a girl that wasn’t Jade. Melody, Reacher guessed. On the back wall there was a bed with a high headboard and freestanding armoires in matching dark veneers, full of clothes, men’s and women’s. There was a backhoe catalog on one of the night tables. Tony Jackson’s bedtime reading.

No sign of Jackson himself.

The next room was Kate’s and Taylor’s. An old queen bed, an oak night table. Austere, undecorated, like a guest room. The photograph was propped on a dresser. Kate and Jade, together. The original print. No frame. The two faces glowed in the Maglite’s beam. Love, captured on film. There was an empty tote bag. Kate’s luggage. No sign of the money. Just three empty leather duffels piled together in a corner. Reacher had carried one of them himself, down in the Dakota’s elevator to the black BMW, with Burke restless at his side.

He moved on, looking for box rooms or bathrooms. Then he stopped, halfway along the upstairs hallway.

Because there was blood on the floor.

It was a small thin stain, a foot long, curved, like flung paint. Not a puddle. Not neat. It was dynamic, suggestive of rapid movement. Reacher stepped back to the head of the stairs. Sniffed the air. There was a faint smell of gunpowder. He sighted down the hallway with the Maglite beam and saw an open bathroom door at the far end. A smashed tile on the back wall, at chest height. A neat burst, contained by a single six-inch by six-inch ceramic square. A running target, a raised gun, a squeezed trigger, three shots, a through-and-through flesh wound, probably to an upper arm. A short shooter, otherwise the downward angle would be more pronounced. The smashed tile would be lower. Perez, probably. Perez, firing maybe the first of at least seven bursts that night. This one, inside the house. Then the two Mini Cooper tires. Then four Land Rover tires, for sure. A four-wheel-drive vehicle would need all four tires taken out for a cautious man to be satisfied. A desperate driver might get somewhere on two.

Seven submachine gun bursts in the dead of night. Maybe more. Forty or more minutes ago. People here have phones, Jackson had said. Some of them even know how to use them. But they hadn’t used them. That was for sure. The Norwich cops would have arrived in less than forty minutes. Thirty miles, empty roads, lights and sirens, they could have done it in twenty-five or less. So nobody had called. Because of the MP5’s other-worldly rate of fire. Machine guns on TV or in the movies were generally old-fashioned and much slower. In order to be properly convincing. So forty or more minutes ago people wouldn’t have known what they were hearing. Just a random series of inexplicable blurred purrs, like sewing machines. Like jamming your tongue on the roof of your mouth and blowing. If they had heard anything at all.

So, Reacher thought. At least one wounded and the cavalry ain’t coming.

He eased down the stairs and back out into the night.

He circled the house, clockwise. The barns were distant and dark and quiet. The old Land Rover was collapsed on its rims, as he had been certain it would be. Four blown tires. He walked straight past it and stopped against the south gable wall. Turned the Maglite off and stared down the driveway into the darkness.

How had it happened?

He trusted Pauling because he knew her and he trusted Taylor and Jackson even without knowing them. Three professionals. Experience, savvy, plenty of active brain cells. Tired, but functioning. A long perilous approach from the intruders’ point of view. No contest. He should have been looking at four riddled bodies and a wrecked rental car. Right about then Jackson should have been firing up the backhoe. Pauling should have been cracking cans of beer and Kate should have been making toast and heating beans.

So why weren’t they?

Distraction, he figured. As ever, the answer was in Jade’s pictures. The animals in the barns. She’s not sleeping great, Kate had said. The jet lag has screwed her up. Reacher pictured the child waking, maybe around midnight, getting out of bed, running out of the house into the imagined safety of the darkness, four adults scrambling after her, confusion, panic, a search, unseen watchers rising from the grassland and moving in. Lane, blasting up the driveway in the rented Toyota SUV. Taylor and Jackson and Pauling holding their fire in case they hit each other or Kate or Jade.

Lane, headlights on now, jamming to a stop.

Lane, headlights on now, recognizing his own stepdaughter.

His own wife.

Reacher shivered once, a violent uncontrollable spasm. He closed his eyes, and then opened them again. He clicked the Maglite on and lowered the beam to light his way and walked on down the driveway. Toward the road. Toward he knew not where.

Perez flipped his night-vision goggles into the up position on his forehead and said, “OK, Reacher’s gone. He’s out of here.”

Edward Lane nodded. Paused a second and then backhanded Jackson across the face with his flashlight, once, twice, three times, massive blows, until Jackson fell. Gregory hauled him upright again and Addison tore the tape off his mouth.

Lane said, “Tell me about your diet.”

Jackson spat blood. “My what?”

“Your diet. What you eat. What your absent wife feeds you.”

“Why?”

“I want to know if you eat potatoes.”

“Everybody eats potatoes.”

“So I’ll find a peeler in the kitchen?”

CHAPTER 74

Reacher kept his flashlight beam trained down about ten feet in front of him, a narrow bright oval dancing left and right a little and bouncing as he walked. The light showed him the ruts and the dips and the holes in the beaten earth. It made it easier to hurry. He walked through the first curve in the driveway. Then he fixed his eyes on the darkness ahead and started to run toward the road.

Lane turned to Perez and said, “Go find the kitchen. Bring me what I need. And find a telephone. Call the Bishop’s Arms. Tell the others to get here now.”

“We’ve got the truck,” Perez said.

“Tell them to walk,” Lane said.

Jackson said, “Reacher will come back, you know.” He was the only one who could talk. He was the only one without tape on his mouth.

Lane said, “I know he’ll come back. I’m counting on it. Why do you think we didn’t chase him? Worst case for us he’ll walk six miles east and find nothing and walk back here again. It will take him four hours. You’ll be dead by then. He can take your place. He can watch the child die, and then Ms. Pauling, and then I’ll kill him. Slowly.”

“You’re insane. You need help.”

“I don’t think so,” Lane said.

“He’ll hitch a lift.”

“In the dead of night? Carrying an assault rifle? I don’t think so.”

“You’re nuts,” Jackson said. “You’ve lost it completely.”

“I’m angry,” Lane said. “And I think I have a right to be.”

Perez left, to find the kitchen.

Reacher ran through the second curve in the driveway. Then he slowed a little.

Then he stopped dead.

He killed the flashlight beam and closed his eyes. Stood still in the darkness and breathed hard and concentrated on the after-image of what he had just seen.

The driveway curved twice for no apparent reason. Not practical, not aesthetic. It went left and then right for some other purpose. To avoid unseen softness in the dirt, he had guessed before. To avoid a couple of badly drained sinkhole patches. And he had seen that he had been correct. All the way through the curves the track was soft and damp. Muddy, even though it hadn’t rained for days.

And the mud showed tire tracks.

Three sets.

First, Tony Jackson’s old Land Rover. The farm truck. Blocky mud-and-snow treads. Chunky, worn, in and out many hundreds of times. The Land Rover’s tracks were all over the place. Old, faded, eroded, new, clear, recent. Everywhere. Like background noise.

Second, the Mini Cooper’s tires. A very different look. Narrow, crisp, new, aggressive treads built for good adhesion and fast cornering on pavement. Just one set. Reacher had turned in the day before, slow and wide and deliberate, second gear, a small car at a moderate speed, unthreatening. He had driven through the curves and parked the car outside the house. And he had left it there. It was still there. It hadn’t moved. It hadn’t driven out again. It probably never would. It would leave on a flatbed truck.

Hence, one set of tire tracks only.

The third set was also a single set. One pass, one way. Wider tires. A large heavy vehicle, open treads, new and crisp. The kind of semi-serious off-road tires a prestige SUV would wear.

The kind of tires a rented Toyota Land Cruiser would wear.

One set only.

One way.

The Toyota was a very capable off-road vehicle. Reacher knew that. It was one of the best in the world. But it was inconceivable that it had entered the farm overland. Not in a million years. The farm was bounded by ditches ten feet across and six feet deep. Steep sides. Impossible approach and exit angles. A Humvee couldn’t do it. A Bradley couldn’t do it. An Abrams couldn’t do it. The Grange Farm ditches were better than tank traps. So the Toyota hadn’t come in overland. It had driven in across the little flat bridge and up the length of the driveway. No other way.

And it hadn’t driven out again.

One set of tire tracks.

One way.

Lane was still on the property.

Lane hit Jackson in the head with the flashlight one more time, hard. The lens smashed and Jackson went down again.

“I need a new flashlight,” Lane said. “This one seems to be broken.”

Addison smiled and took a new one out of a box. Lauren Pauling stared at the door. Her mouth was taped and her hands were bound behind her. The door was still closed. But it was going to open any minute. Through it would come either Perez or Reacher. Bad news or good.

Let it be Reacher, she thought. Please. Bugs on windshields, no scruples. Please let it be Reacher.

Lane took the new flashlight from Addison and stepped up close to Kate. Face-to-face, six inches from her. Eye to eye. They were about the same height. He lit up the flashlight beam and held it just under her chin, shining it directly upward, turning her exquisite face into a ghastly Halloween mask.

“Till death us do part,” he said. “That’s a phrase I take seriously.”

Kate turned her head away. Gasped behind the tape. Lane clamped her chin in his free hand and turned her head back.

“Forsaking all others,” he said. “I took that part seriously, too. I’m so sorry that you didn’t.”

Kate closed her eyes.

Reacher kept on walking south. To the end of the driveway, over the bridge, east on the road, away from the farm, his flashlight on all the way. In case he was being watched. He figured he needed to let them see him go. Because the human mind loves continuity. To see a small spectral night-vision figure strolling south, and south, and then east, and east, and east sets up an irresistible temptation to believe that it’s going to go east forever. It’s gone, you say. It’s out of here. And then you forget all about it, because you know where it’s going, and you don’t see it coming back because you’re not watching it anymore.

He walked east for two hundred yards and clicked off the Maglite beam. Then he walked east for another two hundred yards in the dark. Then he stopped. Turned ninety degrees and hiked north across the shoulder and slid down the boundary ditch’s nearside slope. Floundered through the thick black mud in the bottom and clawed his way up the far side with his rifle held one-handed high in the air. Then he ran, fast, straight north, stretching his stride long to hit the top of every plowed furrow.

Two minutes later he was a quarter-mile in, level with the cluster of barns, three hundred yards behind them to the east, and out of breath. He paused in the lee of a stand of trees to recover. Thumbed his fire selector to single shots. Then he put the stock against his shoulder and walked forward. West. Toward the barns.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Coming back.

Edward Lane was still face-to-face with Kate. He said, “I’m assuming you’ve been sleeping with him for years.”

Kate said nothing.

Lane said, “I hope you’ve been using condoms. You could catch a disease from a guy like that.”

Then he smiled. A new thought. A joke, to him.

“Or you could get pregnant,” he said.

Something in her terrified eyes.

He paused.

“What?” he said. “What are you telling me?”

She shook her head.

“You’re pregnant,” he said. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you? You are. I know it. You look different. I can tell.”

He put the flat of his hand on her belly. She pulled away, backward, hard against the pole she was tied to. He shuffled forward half a step. “Oh man, this is unbelievable. You’re going to die with another man’s child inside you.”

Then he spun away. Stopped, and turned back. Shook his head.

“Can’t allow that,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right. We’ll have to abort it first. I should have told Perez to find a coat hanger. But I didn’t. So we’ll find something else instead. There’s got to be something here. This is a farm after all.”

Kate closed her eyes.

“You’re going to die anyway,” Lane said, like the most reasonable man in the world.

Reacher knew they were in a barn. They had to be. That was clear. Where else could they hide their truck? He knew there were five barns in total. He had seen them in the daylight, vaguely, in the distance. Three stood around a beaten earth yard, and two stood alone. All of them had vehicle ruts heading for big doors. Storage, he had guessed, for the backhoe, and tractors, and trailers, and balers, and all kinds of other farm machinery. Now in the dark the dirt under his feet felt dry and dusty, hard and stony. It wouldn’t show tire marks. No point in risking a flash of the Maglite beam.

So which barn?

He started with the nearest, hoping to get lucky. But he didn’t get lucky. The nearest barn was one of the two that stood alone. It was a wide wooden structure made of weathered boards. The whole thing had been blown slightly off-kilter by two hundred years of relentless winds. It leaned to the west, beaten down. Reacher put his ear on a crack between two boards and listened hard. Heard nothing inside. He put his eye on the crack and saw nothing. Just darkness. There was a smell of cold air and damp earth and decayed burlap.

He moved on fifty yards to the second barn, hoping to get lucky. But he didn’t get lucky. The second barn was just as dark and quiet as the first. Musty and cold, nothing moving inside. A sharp nitrogen smell. Old fertilizer. He moved on through the blackness, slow and stealthy, toward the three barns grouped around the yard. They were a hundred yards away. He got a quarter of the way there.

Then he stopped dead.

Because in the corner of his eye he saw light to his left and behind him. Light and movement, in the house. The kitchen window. A flashlight beam, in the room. Fast shadows jumping and leaping across the inside of the glass.

Lane turned to Gregory and said, “Find some baling wire.”

“Before we do the kid?” Gregory asked.

“Why not? It can be like a preview for her. She’s going to get the same thing anyway as soon as Perez gets back with the potato peeler. I told her mother years ago what would happen if she cheated on me. And I always try to keep my word.”

“A man ought to,” Gregory said.

“We need an operating table,” Lane said. “Find something flat. And turn the truck’s lights on. I need to be able to see what I’m doing.”

“You’re sick,” Jackson said. “You need help.”

“Help?” Lane said. “No, I don’t think so. It was always a one-person procedure, as I understand. Old women, usually, in back alleys, I believe.”

Reacher moved fast and quiet to the back door of the house. Pressed himself tight against the wall on the far side. Waited. He could feel the rough stones against his back. He could hear a voice through the door. Very faintly, one side of a two-way conversation. A slight Hispanic accent. Perez, on the phone. Reacher reversed his rifle in his hands. Gripped the forestock in front of the carrying handle and took a practice swing.

Then he waited. Alone in the dark.

Gregory found an old door, rustic, made from lapped boards and Z-braced on the back. He pulled it out from a stack of discarded lumber and stood it upright.

“That’s perfect,” Lane called to him.

Perez stepped out into the night and turned to close the door behind him and Reacher swung, arms extended, hips twisting, driving forward off the back foot, wrists snapping. No good. Late. A foul ball for sure, left field, upper deck, off the façade, maybe out into the street. But Perez’s head was not a baseball. And the G-36 was not a bat. It was an eight-pound yard of steel. The sight block caught Perez in the temple and punched a shard of bone sideways through his left eye socket and on through the bridge of his nose and halfway through his right eye socket. Then it stopped when the top edge of the stock crushed his ear flat against the side of his skull. So, not a perfect swing. A millisecond earlier and two inches farther back a blow like that would have taken the top of the guy’s head off like opening a soft-boiled egg. Late as it was, it just plowed a deep messy lateral trench between his cheeks and his forehead.

Messy, but effective. Perez was dead long before he hit the ground. He was too small to go down like a tree. He just melted into the beaten earth like he was a part of it.

Lane turned to Addison and said, “Go find out what the hell Perez is up to. He should have been back by now. I’m getting bored. Nobody’s bleeding yet.”

“I’m bleeding,” Jackson said.

“You don’t count.”

“Taylor’s bleeding. Perez shot him.”

“Wrong,” Lane said. “Taylor’s stopped bleeding. For the moment.”

“Reacher’s out there,” Jackson said.

“I don’t think so.”

Jackson nodded. “He is. That’s why Perez isn’t back. Reacher got him.”

Lane smiled. “So what should I do? Go out and search? With my two men? Leaving you people all alone in here to organize a pathetic escape attempt behind my back? Is that what you’re trying to achieve? Not going to happen. Because right about now Reacher is walking past the Bishops Pargeter church. Or are you just trying to give your comrades a little hope in their hour of need? Is this British pluck? The famous stiff upper lip?”

Jackson said, “He’s out there. I know it.”

He was crouching outside the kitchen door, sorting through all the things that Perez had dropped. An MP5K with a thirty-round magazine and a ballistic nylon shoulder sling. A flashlight, now broken. Two black-handled kitchen knives, one long, one short, one serrated, one plain. A souvenir corkscrew from a car ferry operator.

And a potato peeler.

Its handle was a plain wooden peg. Once red, now faded. Tightly bound to it with thick wrapped string was a simple pressed-metal blade. Slightly pointed, with a raised flange and a slot. An old-fashioned design. Plain, utilitarian, well used.

Reacher stared at it for a moment. Then he put it in his pocket. He buried the longer knife to its hilt in Perez’s chest. Tucked the shorter knife in his own shoe. Kicked the corkscrew and the broken flashlight into the shadows. Used his thumb to clean Perez’s blood and frontal lobe off of the G-36’s monocular lens. Picked up the MP5 submachine gun and slung it over his left shoulder.

Then he headed back north and east toward the barns.

Reacher, alone in the dark. Doing it the hard way.

CHAPTER 75

Reacher stepped into the beaten earth yard. It was a little more than a hundred feet square, with barns barely visible in the dark on the north side, and the east, and the south. All three barns looked to be pretty much identical. Same vintage, same construction, same materials. They had tall sliding doors and tile roofs and wood wall planks, dull gray in the starlight. They were newer than the standalone barns, and much stronger. Straight and square and solid. Which was good news if you were Jackson the farmer, Reacher guessed. But which was bad news for him. No warped boards, no gaps, no cracks, no knot holes.

No immediate way of telling which one was currently occupied.

He stood still. North or east, he guessed. Easier for the truck. Either a straight path in, or a simple ninety-degree right hook. Not the south, he thought. It would have needed a one-eighty U-turn to reach the doors, and it had its back to the house and the driveway anyway. Not a comfortable feeling. Psychologically the possibility of a direct line of sight out the door was important. Even in the pitch dark.

He crossed the yard, slow and silent. His ruined shoes helped. The thick layer of mud on the soles kept them quiet. Like sneakers. Like walking on carpet. He made it to the near left-hand corner of the north barn and disappeared into the blackness alongside it. Circled it, clockwise. Felt the walls. Tapped them, gently. Stout boards, maybe oak, maybe an inch thick. Nailed to a frame that might have been built from foot-thick timbers itself. Like an old sailing ship. Maybe there was an inner skin of inch-thick boards. He had lived in worse places.

He came all the way around to the right-hand front corner and paused. There was no way in except for the main front doors. They were made from four-inch timbers banded together with galvanized steel straps and hung from sliders at the top. U-shaped channels were bolted to the barn’s structure, and wheels the size of the Mini Cooper’s were bolted to the doors. More U-shaped channels were set in concrete at the bottom, with smaller wheels in them. Practically industrial. The doors would slide apart like theater curtains. They would open maybe forty feet. Enough to get combine harvesters in and out, he guessed.

He crept along the front wall and put his ear on the space between the door and the wall. Heard nothing. Saw no chink of light.

Wrong one, he thought.

He turned and glanced east. Has to be, he thought. He set off toward it. Diagonally across the square. He was twenty feet from it when the door rolled back. The door was noisy. The wheels rumbled in their tracks. A yard-wide bar of bright blue light spilled out. Xenon beams. The Toyota SUV, parked inside, its headlights on. Addison stepped out through the bar of light. His MP5 was slung over his shoulder. He cast a monstrous moving shadow westward. He turned to roll the door shut again. Both hands, bent back, big effort. He got it to within six inches of closed and left it like that. Still open a crack. The bar of blue light narrowed to a thin blade. Addison clicked on a flashlight and as he turned forward its beam swung lazily across Reacher’s face. But Addison’s gaze must have lagged it by a second. Because he didn’t react. He just turned half-left and set off toward the house.

Reacher thought: Decision?

No-brainer. Take them out one at a time, and thanks for the opportunity.

He took a deep breath and stepped through the blade of light and fell in behind Addison, twenty feet back, fast and silent. Then he was fifteen feet back. Then ten. Addison knew nothing about it. He was just walking straight ahead, oblivious, the flashlight beam swinging gently in front of him.

Five feet back.

Three feet back.

Then the two figures merged in the dark. They slowed and they stopped. The flashlight hit the dirt. It rolled slowly to a halt and its yellow beam cast long grotesque shadows and made jagged boulders out of small golden stones. Addison stumbled and went down, first to his knees, then on his face, his throat ripped clean out by the knife from Reacher’s shoe.

Reacher was on his way even before Addison had stopped twitching. With an automatic rifle, two submachine guns, and a knife. But he didn’t head back to the barns. He walked on down to the house instead. Made his first port of call upstairs in the master bedroom. Then he stopped in the kitchen, at the hearth, and at the desk. Then he came back out and stepped over Perez’s corpse and a little later over Addison’s. They’re not necessarily better fighters than people currently enlisted, Patti Joseph had said, days ago. Often they’re worse. Then Taylor had said: They used to be outstanding, but now they’re well on the way to average. You all got that right, Reacher thought.

He walked onward, north and east, toward the barns.

He stopped beside the eastern barn and considered his ordnance. Rejected the G-36. It fired only single rounds or triples, and it fired the triples too slowly. Too much like the sound of a regular machine gun on the TV or in the movies. Too recognizable, in the dead of night. And it was possible that the barrel was bent. Nothing that he would be able to see with the naked eye, but he had hit Perez hard enough to do some microscopic damage. So he laid the G-36 on the ground at the base of the barn’s side wall and dropped the magazine out of Perez’s MP5. Nine rounds left. Twenty-one expended. Seven triples fired. Perez had been the designated trigger man. Which meant that Addison’s magazine should still be full. Which it was. Thirty rounds. The fat 9mm brass winked faintly in the starlight. He put Addison’s magazine in Perez’s gun. A magazine he knew to be full, in a gun he knew to be working. A sensible step for a man who planned to live through the next five minutes.

He piled Addison’s gun and Perez’s magazine on top of the discarded G-36. Rolled his shoulders and eased his neck. Breathed in, breathed out.

Showtime.

He sat on the ground with his back against the partly open door. Assembled the things he had brought from the house. A kindling stick, from the basket on the hearth. Three rubber bands, from a jar on the desk. A tortoiseshell hand mirror, from Susan Jackson’s vanity table.

The stick was a straight seventeen-inch length of an ash bough, as thick as a child’s wrist, cut to fit the kitchen grate. The rubber bands were strong but short. The kind of thing the mail carrier puts around bundles of letters. The hand mirror was probably an antique. It was round, with a handle, a little like a table tennis bat.

He fixed the tortoiseshell handle to the ash bough with the rubber bands. Then he lay down flat on his front and inched the bough forward. Toward the six-inch gap where the barn door stood open. Left-handed. He tilted the stick and turned it and manipulated it until he could see a perfect reflection of the view inside.

Reacher, with a mirror on a stick.

CHAPTER 76

The mirror showed that the barn was strong and square because it had vertical poles inside that held up the roof ridge and reinforced the timber peg rafters. The poles were foot-square balks of lumber anchored in concrete. There were twelve in total. Five of them had people tied to them. From left to right in the mirror Reacher could see Taylor, then Jackson, then Pauling, then Kate, then Jade. Their arms were pulled behind them and their wrists were tied behind the poles. Their ankles were tied together. They had duct tape across their mouths. All except Jackson. He had no tape. But his mouth was a bloody mess. He had deep cuts above both eyebrows. He wasn’t standing. He had slumped down into a semiconscious crouch at the base of his pole.

It was Taylor who had been wounded. His shirt was torn and soaked with blood, upper right arm. Pauling looked OK. Eyes a little wild above the slash of silver tape, hair all over the place, but she was functioning. Kate was as white as a sheet and her eyes were closed. Jade had slid down her pole and was sitting on her heels, head down, motionless. Maybe she had fainted.

The Toyota had been backed in and turned so that it was hard up against the end wall on the left. Its headlights were turned full on, high beam, shining down the long axis of the building, casting twelve harsh shadows from the poles.

Gregory had his MP5 slung across his back and was wrestling with some kind of a large flat panel. An old door, maybe. Or a tabletop. He was walking it across the floor of the barn, left bottom corner, right bottom corner, gripping it with both hands.

Lane was standing completely still in the middle of the floor, his right fist around his MP5’s pistol grip and his left fist around the fore grip. His finger was on the trigger and all ten of his knuckles were showing bone white. He was facing the door, sideways on to the Toyota. Its xenon headlight beams lit up his face in bizarre relief. His eye sockets were like black holes. Borderline mentally ill, people had said. Crossed that border long ago, Reacher thought.

Gregory got the big flat panel front and center and Reacher heard him say, “Where do you want this?”

Lane answered, “We need sawhorses.” Reacher moved the mirror and followed Lane’s reflection over to where Jackson was squatting. Lane kicked Jackson in the ribs and asked him, “Do you have sawhorses here?” and Jackson said, “In the other barn,” and Lane said, “I’ll send Perez and Addison for them when they get back.”

They’re not coming back, Reacher thought.

“They’re not coming back,” Jackson said. “Reacher’s out there and he’s got them.”

“You’re annoying me,” Lane said. But Reacher saw him glance toward the door anyway. And he saw what Jackson was trying to do. He was trying to focus Lane’s attention outside of the barn. Away from the prisoners. He was trying to buy time.

Smart guy, Reacher thought.

Then he saw Lane’s reflection grow large in the mirror. He pulled the ash bough back, slowly and carefully. Aimed his MP5 at a spot an inch outside the door and five feet four inches above the ground. Put your head out, he thought. Take a look. Please. I’ll put three bullets in one ear and out the other.

But no such luck. Reacher heard Lane stop just inside the door and scream, “Reacher? You out there?”

Reacher waited.

Lane called, “Perez? Addison?”

Reacher waited.

Lane screamed, “Reacher? You there? Listen up. Ten seconds from now, I’m going to shoot Jackson. In the thighs. He’ll bleed out through his femoral arteries. Then I’ll make Lauren Pauling lick it up like a dog.”

Reacher waited.

“Ten,” Lane screamed. “Nine. Eight.” His voice faded as he stalked back to the center of the barn. Reacher slid the mirror back into place. Saw Lane stop near Jackson and heard him say, “He isn’t out there. Or if he is, he doesn’t give a shit about you.” Then Lane turned again and yelled, “Seven. Six. Five.” Gregory was standing mute with the panel held vertical in front of him. Doing nothing.

“Four,” Lane screamed.

A lot can happen in a single second. In Reacher’s case he ran thoughts through his head like a card player sorting a hand. He considered taking the risk of sacrificing Jackson. Maybe Lane didn’t mean it. If he did, then certainly Lane was crazy enough to fire full auto and empty his weapon. Gregory was handicapped. Reacher could let Jackson take thirty rounds in the legs and wait until Lane was clicking on empty and then he could step in and put three through the flat board into Gregory’s center mass and three more into Lane’s head. One KIA out of five hostages wasn’t excessive. Twenty percent. Reacher had once been given a medal for an outcome worse than that.

“Three,” Lane screamed.

But Reacher liked Jackson, and there was Susan and Melody to consider. Susan, the loyal sister. Melody, the innocent child. And there was Kate Lane’s dream to think about, the new extended family farming together, growing hay, leaching the old chemicals out of the Norfolk soil, planting wholesome vegetables five years in the future.

“Two,” Lane screamed.

Reacher dropped the mirror and extended his right arm like a swimmer and hooked his fingers around the edge of the door. Crawled backward, fast, hauling the door with him. Opening it wide, staying out of sight. He dragged it through the full twenty feet of its travel.

Then he waited.

Silence inside the barn. He knew Lane’s eyes were on the black void outside. Knew his ears were straining to hear something in the stillness. The oldest of all atavistic human fears, buried deep in the primeval lizard brain, still alive a hundred thousand years after leaving the caves: There’s something out there.

Reacher heard a flat cushioned thump as Gregory dropped the panel. Then it was a footrace. From Lane’s perspective the door had opened right to left, driven by some unseen agency. Therefore that agency was now outside and to the left, at the end of the door’s long travel. Reacher stood up and stepped backward and turned and ran, counterclockwise around the barn. Around the first corner and fifty feet along the south side. Then the next corner, and a hundred feet along the back wall. Then fifty feet along the north wall. He took it slower than maximum speed. Three hundred feet, a hundred yards, four turns, in about thirty seconds. An Olympic athlete would have done it in ten, but an Olympic athlete didn’t need to be composed enough at the finish line to fire a submachine gun accurately.

He took the last corner. Came back down the front wall to the doorway, mouth shut, breathing hard through his nose, controlling the heaving in his chest.

Now he was outside and to the right.

Silence inside the barn. No movement. Reacher planted his feet and leaned his left shoulder on the wall, his elbow tucked in, his wrist turned, his hand on the MP5’s front grip, lightly, gently. His right hand was on the pistol grip and his right index finger had already moved the trigger through its first eighth-inch of slack. His left eye was closed and his right eye had lined up both iron sights. He waited. Heard a soft footfall on the barn’s concrete floor, four feet in front of him and three feet to his left. Saw a shadow in the spill of light. He waited. Saw the back of Lane’s head, just a narrow arc like a crescent moon, craning out, peering left into the darkness. Saw his right shoulder. Saw his MP5’s nylon strap biting deep into the bunched canvas fabric of his jacket. Reacher didn’t move his gun. He wanted to fire parallel with the barn, not into it. Moving his gun would put hostages in the line of fire. Taylor specifically, from what he recalled from the tortoiseshell mirror. Maybe Jackson, too. He had to be patient. He had to let Lane come to him.

Lane came to him. He inched out, back-to, craning left, leaning forward from the waist, looking away. He moved his front foot. Inched out a little more. Reacher ignored him. Concentrated exclusively on the MP5’s sights. They were dotted with tritium and implied a geometry as real to Reacher as a laser beam piercing the night. Lane inched into it. First, the right-hand edge of his skull. Then a larger sliver. Then more. Then more. Then the front sight was on the bony ridge at the back of his head. Dead-on centered. Lane was so close that Reacher could count every hair in his buzz cut.

For half a second he thought about calling Lane’s name. Making him turn around, hands raised. Telling him why he was about to die. Listing his many transgressions. Like the equivalent of a legal process.

Then he thought about a fight. Man to man. With knives, or fists. Closure. Something ceremonial. Maybe something fairer.

Then he thought about Hobart, and he pulled the trigger.

A strange blurred purr, like a sewing machine or a distant motorcycle at a light. A fifth of a second, three nine-millimeter bullets, three ejected shell cases spitting out and arcing through the spill of bright light and jangling on the stones twenty feet to Reacher’s right. Lane’s head blew up in a mist cloud that was turned blue by the light. It flopped backward and followed the rest of his body straight down. The empty thump of flesh and bone hitting concrete was clearly audible, muffled only by cotton and canvas clothing.

I hope Jade didn’t see that, Reacher thought.

Then he stepped into the doorway. Gregory was halfway through a fatal split second of hesitation. He had backed up and he was looking left, but the shots that had killed Lane had come from the right. It didn’t compute. His brain was locked.

“Shoot him,” Jackson said.

Reacher didn’t move.

“Shoot him,” Jackson said again. “Don’t make me tell you what that table was for.”

Reacher risked a glance at Taylor. Taylor nodded. Reacher glanced at Pauling. She nodded too. So Reacher put three in the center of Gregory’s chest.

CHAPTER 77

Clean-up took the rest of the night and most of the next day. Even though they were all bone-weary, by common consensus they didn’t try to sleep. Except for Jade. Kate put her to bed and sat with her while she slept. The child had fainted early and had missed most of what had gone on and seemed not to have understood the rest. Except for the fact that her ex-stepfather had been cast as a bad man. But she had been told that already and so it came as nothing more than confirmation of a view she was already comfortable with. So she slept, with no apparent ill-effects. Reacher figured that if any arrived in the days to come she would work them out with crayons on butcher paper.

Kate herself looked like she had been to hell and back. And like many people she was thriving on it. Going down there had felt really bad, and therefore coming back up again felt disproportionately better than really good. She had stared down at Lane’s body for a long moment. Seen that half his head was missing. Understood for sure that there was going to be no Hollywood moment where he reared up again, back to life. He was gone, utterly, completely, and definitively. And she had seen it happen. That kind of certainty helps a person. She walked away from the corpse with a spring in her step.

Taylor’s right tricep was all torn up. Reacher cut his shirt away with the kitchen knife from his shoe and field-dressed the wound as best he could with a first-aid kit in the upstairs bathroom. But Taylor was going to need attention. That was clear. He volunteered to delay it by a couple of days. The wound was not necessarily recognizable as a gunshot and it was unlikely anyone in the neighborhood had heard anything, but it seemed smart to distance an ER visit from mayhem in the night.

Jackson was OK apart from cut eyebrows and some facial bruising and a split lip and a couple of loose teeth. Nothing worse than he had experienced half a dozen times before, he said, after bar fights wherever 1st Para had been posted and where the local boys always seemed to have something to prove.

Pauling was fine. Reacher had cut her ropes and she had torn the tape off her mouth herself and then kissed him hard. She seemed to have had total confidence that he would show up and work something out. He wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or flattering him. Either way he didn’t mention exactly how close he had come to walking away on a phantom pursuit. Didn’t mention how lucky it was that a stray peripheral glance at the driveway’s surface had fired some random synapse in his brain.

He searched the Toyota and found Lane’s leather duffel. The one he had seen before, in the Park Lane Hilton. The eight hundred thousand dollars. It was all there. Untouched. He gave it to Pauling for safe keeping. Then he sat on the floor, leaning back on the post that Kate had been tied to, six feet away from Gregory’s corpse. He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

They hid them in a ten-acre field near the northwest corner of the farm. Fallow land, hidden by trees, unplowed for a year. Jackson finished fixing the backhoe and then fired it up and drove off with headlights blazing. Started work immediately on a massive pit that needed to be thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and nine feet deep. A ninety-yard excavation, because they had decided to bury the cars as well.

Reacher asked Pauling, “Did you check the box for extra insurance?”

She nodded.

He said, “Call them tomorrow. Tell them it was stolen.”

Taylor was walking wounded so he was excused from heavy work. Instead he scoured the whole area for every piece of physical evidence he could find. He came up with all that anyone could think of, including all twenty-seven shell casings from Perez’s MP5. Pauling scrubbed his blood off the upstairs hallway floor and replaced the shattered bathroom tile. Reacher piled the bodies inside the Toyota Land Cruiser.

The sun had been up for hours before the pit was finished. Jackson had left a neat graded slope at one end and Reacher drove the Toyota down it and smashed it hard against the earth wall at the other end. Jackson drove the backhoe to the house and used the front bucket to jack the Mini up and shove it backward. He maneuvered it all the way to the pit and rolled it down the grade and jammed it hard against the Toyota’s rear bumper. Taylor showed up with all the other items and threw them in the hole. Then Jackson started to fill it. Reacher just sat and watched. The sky was pale blue and the sun was watery. There were thin high clouds and a mild breeze that felt warm. He knew that in the flat land all around him Stone Age people had been buried in long mounds called barrows, and then Bronze Age people, and Iron Age people, and Celts, and Romans, and Saxons, and Angles, and Viking invaders in longships, and Normans, and then the English themselves for a thousand years. He guessed the land could take four more dead. He watched Jackson work until the dirt hid the top of the cars, and then he walked away, slowly, back to the house.

Exactly twelve months later to the hour the ten-acre field was neatly plowed and dusted pale green with a brand-new winter crop. Tony and Susan Jackson and Graham and Kate Taylor were working the field next to it. The sun was shining. Back at the house the nine-year-old cousins and best friends Melody Jackson and Jade Taylor were watching Jade’s baby brother, a healthy five-month-old boy named Jack.

Three thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was five hours earlier and Lauren Pauling was alone in her Barrow Street apartment, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times. She had missed a piece inside the main section that reported the deaths of three newly arrived private military contractors in Iraq. Their names were Burke, Groom, and Kowalski, and they had died two days previously when a land mine exploded under their vehicle outside of Baghdad. But she caught a piece in the Metro Section in which it was reported that the cooperative board at the Dakota Building had foreclosed on an apartment after twelve consecutive months of unpaid monthly maintenance. On entering the apartment they had found more than nine million dollars in a locked closet.

Six thousand miles west of Grange Farm it was eight hours earlier and Patti Joseph was fast asleep in a waterfront condominium in Seattle, Washington. She was ten months into a new job as a magazine copy-editor. Her perseverance and her relentless eye for detail made her good at it. She was seeing a local journalist from time to time. She was happy.

Far from Seattle, far from New York City, far from Bishops Pargeter, down in Birmingham, Alabama, Dee Marie Graziano was up early, in a hospital gymnasium, watching her brother grasp his new metal canes and walk across the floor.

Nobody knew where Jack Reacher was. He had left Grange Farm two hours after the backhoe had shut down, and there had been no news of him since.

For Katie and Jess:

Two sweet sisters

BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE

A Delacorte Press Book / May 2007

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2007 by Lee Child

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Child, Lee.

Bad Luck and Trouble : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Military police—Fiction. 3. Serial murders—Fiction. 4. Snipers—Fiction. 5. Middle West—Fiction. I. Title

PS3553.H4838 O53 2005

813'.54 22

2004058246

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33685-3

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Bad Luck and Trouble

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Dedication

1

The man was called Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a Bell 222. Franz had two broken legs, so he had to be loaded on board strapped to a stretcher. Not a difficult maneuver. The Bell was a roomy aircraft, twin-engined, designed for corporate travel and police departments, with space for seven passengers. The rear doors were as big as a panel van’s and they opened wide. The middle row of seats had been removed. There was plenty of room for Franz on the floor.

The helicopter was idling. Two men were carrying the stretcher. They ducked low under the rotor wash and hurried, one backward, one forward. When they reached the open door the guy who had been walking backward got one handle up on the sill and ducked away. The other guy stepped forward and shoved hard and slid the stretcher all the way inside. Franz was awake and hurting. He cried out and jerked around a little, but not much, because the straps across his chest and thighs were buckled tight. The two men climbed in after him and got in their seats behind the missing row and slammed the doors.

Then they waited.

The pilot waited.

A third man came out a gray door and walked across the concrete. He bent low under the rotor and held a hand flat on his chest to stop his necktie whipping in the wind. The gesture made him look like a guilty man proclaiming his innocence. He tracked around the Bell’s long nose and got in the forward seat, next to the pilot.

“Go,” he said, and then he bent his head to concentrate on his harness buckle.

The pilot goosed the turbines and the lazy whop-whop of the idling blade slid up the scale to an urgent centripetal whip-whip-whip and then disappeared behind the treble blast of the exhaust. The Bell lifted straight off the ground, drifted left a little, rotated slightly, and then retracted its wheels and climbed a thousand feet. Then it dipped its nose and hammered north, high and fast. Below it, roads and science parks and small factories and neat isolated suburban communities slid past. Brick walls and metal siding blazed red in the late sun. Tiny emerald lawns and turquoise swimming pools winked in the last of the light.

The man in the forward seat said, “You know where we’re going?”

The pilot nodded and said nothing.

The Bell clattered onward, turning east of north, climbing a little higher, heading for darkness. It crossed a highway far below, a river of white lights crawling west and red lights crawling east. A minute north of the highway the last developed acres gave way to low hills, barren and scrubby and uninhabited. They glowed orange on the slopes that faced the setting sun and showed dull tan in the valleys and the shadows. Then the low hills gave way in turn to small rounded mountains. The Bell sped on, rising and falling, following the contours below. The man in the forward seat twisted around and looked down at Franz on the floor behind him. Smiled briefly and said, “Twenty more minutes, maybe.”

Franz didn’t reply. He was in too much pain.

The Bell was rated for a 161-mph cruise, so twenty more minutes took it almost fifty-four miles, beyond the mountains, well out over the empty desert. The pilot flared the nose and slowed a little. The man in the forward seat pressed his forehead against the window and stared down into the darkness.

“Where are we?” he asked.

The pilot said, “Where we were before.”

“Exactly?”

“Roughly.”

“What’s below us now?”

“Sand.”

“Height?”

“Three thousand feet.”

“What’s the air like up here?”

“Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”

“Safe?”

“Aeronautically.”

“So let’s do it.”

The pilot slowed more and turned and came to a stationary hover, three thousand feet above the desert floor. The man in the forward seat twisted around again and signaled to the two guys way in back. Both unlocked their safety harnesses. One crouched forward, avoiding Franz’s feet, and held his loose harness tight in one hand and unlatched the door with the other. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching, and he tilted the Bell a little so the door fell all the way open under its own weight. Then he brought the craft level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and air pressure held the door wide. The second guy from the rear crouched near Franz’s head and jacked the stretcher upward to a forty-five degree slope. The first guy jammed his shoe against the free end of the stretcher rail to stop the whole thing sliding across the floor. The second guy jerked like a weightlifter and brought the stretcher almost vertical. Franz sagged down against the straps. He was a big guy, and heavy. And determined. His legs were useless but his upper body was powerful and straining hard. His head was snapping from side to side.

The first guy took out a gravity knife and popped the blade. Used it to saw through the strap around Franz’s thighs. Then he paused a beat and sliced the strap around Franz’s chest. One quick motion. At the exact same time the second guy jerked the stretcher fully upright. Franz took an involuntary step forward. Onto his broken right leg. He screamed once, briefly, and then took a second instinctive step. Onto his broken left leg. His arms flailed and he collapsed forward and his upper-body momentum levered him over the locked pivot of his immobile hips and took him straight out through the open door, into the noisy darkness, into the gale-force rotor wash, into the night.

Three thousand feet above the desert floor.

For a moment there was silence. Even the engine noise seemed to fade. Then the pilot reversed the Bell’s rotation and rocked the other way and the door slammed neatly shut. The turbines spun up again and the rotor bit the air and the nose dropped.

The two guys clambered back to their seats.

The man in front said, “Let’s go home now.”

2

Seventeen days later Jack Reacher was in Portland, Oregon, short of money. In Portland, because he had to be somewhere and the bus he had ridden two days previously had stopped there. Short of money, because he had met an assistant district attorney called Samantha in a cop bar, and had twice bought her dinner before twice spending the night at her place. Now she had gone to work and he was walking away from her house, nine o’clock in the morning, heading back to the downtown bus depot, hair still wet from her shower, sated, relaxed, destination as yet unclear, with a very thin wad of bills in his pocket.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, had changed Reacher’s life in two practical ways. Firstly, in addition to his folding toothbrush he now carried his passport with him. Too many things in the new era required photo ID, including most forms of travel. Reacher was a drifter, not a hermit, restless, not dysfunctional, and so he had yielded gracefully.

And secondly, he had changed his banking methods. For many years after leaving the army he had operated a system whereby he would call his bank in Virginia and ask for a Western Union wire transfer to wherever he happened to be. But new worries about terrorist financing had pretty much killed telephone banking. So Reacher had gotten an ATM card. He carried it inside his passport and used 8197 as his PIN. He considered himself a man of very few talents but some varied abilities, most of which were physical and related to his abnormal size and strength, but one of which was always knowing what time it was without looking, and another of which was some kind of a junior-idiot-savant facility with arithmetic. Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.

His arithmetic awareness and his inherent cynicism about financial institutions always compelled him to check his balance every time he withdrew cash. He always remembered to deduct the ATM fees and every quarter he remembered to add in the bank’s paltry interest payment. And despite his suspicions, he had never been ripped off. Every time his balance came up exactly as he predicted. He had never been surprised or dismayed.

Until that morning in Portland, where he was surprised, but not exactly dismayed. Because his balance was more than a thousand dollars bigger than it should have been.

Exactly one thousand and thirty dollars bigger, according to Reacher’s own blind calculation. A mistake, obviously. By the bank. A deposit into the wrong account. A mistake that would be rectified. He wouldn’t be keeping the money. He was an optimist, but not a fool. He pressed another button and requested something called a mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. It had faint gray printing on it, listing the last five transactions against his account. Three of them were ATM cash withdrawals that he remembered clearly. One of them was the bank’s most recent interest payment. The last was a deposit in the sum of one thousand and thirty dollars, made three days previously. So there it was. The slip of paper was too narrow to have separate staggered columns for debits and credits, so the deposit was noted inside parentheses to indicate its positive nature: (1030.00).

One thousand and thirty dollars.

1030.

Not inherently an interesting number, but Reacher stared at it for a minute. Not prime, obviously. No even number greater than two could be prime. Square root? Clearly just a hair more than thirty-two. Cube root? A hair less than ten and a tenth. Factors? Not many, but they included 5 and 206, along with the obvious 10 and 103 and the even more basic 2 and 515.

So, 1030.

A thousand and thirty.

A mistake.

Maybe.

Or, maybe not a mistake.

Reacher took fifty dollars from the machine and dug in his pocket for change and went in search of a pay phone.

He found a phone inside the bus depot. He dialed his bank’s number from memory. Nine-forty in the West, twelve-forty in the East. Lunch time in Virginia, but someone should be there.

And someone was. Not someone Reacher had ever spoken to before, but she sounded competent. Maybe a back-office manager hauled out to cover for the meal period. She gave her name, but Reacher didn’t catch it. Then she went into a long rehearsed introduction designed to make him feel like a valued customer. He waited it out and told her about the deposit. She was amazed that a customer would call about a bank error in his own favor.

“Might not be an error,” Reacher said.

“Were you expecting the deposit?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do third parties frequently make deposits into your account?”

“No.”

“It’s likely to be an error, then. Don’t you think?”

“I need to know who made the deposit.”

“May I ask why?”

“That would take some time to explain.”

“I would need to know,” the woman said. “There are confidentiality issues otherwise. If the bank’s error exposes one customer’s affairs to another, we could be in breach of all kinds of rules and regulations and ethical practices.”

“It might be a message,” Reacher said.

“A message?”

“From the past.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Back in the day I was a military policeman,” Reacher said. “Military police radio transmissions are coded. If a military policeman needs urgent assistance from a colleague he calls in a ten-thirty radio code. See what I’m saying?”

“No, not really.”

Reacher said, “I’m thinking that if I don’t know the person who made the deposit, then it’s a thousand and thirty bucks’ worth of a mistake. But if I do know the person, it might be a call for help.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Look at how it’s written. It might be a ten-thirty radio code, not a thousand and thirty dollars. Look at it on paper.”

“Wouldn’t this person just have called you on the phone?”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“An e-mail, then? Or a telegram. Or even a letter.”

“I don’t have addresses for any of those things.”

“So how do we contact you, usually?”

“You don’t.”

“A credit into your bank would be a very odd way of communicating.”

“It might be the only way.”

“A very difficult way. Someone would have to trace your account.”

“That’s my point,” Reacher said. “It would take a smart and resourceful person to do it. And if a smart and resourceful person needs to ask for help, there’s big trouble somewhere.”

“It would be expensive, too. Someone would be out more than a thousand dollars.”

“Exactly. The person would have to be smart and resourceful and desperate.”

Silence on the phone. Then: “Can’t you just make a list of who it might be and try them all?”

“I worked with a lot of smart people. Most of them a very long time ago. It would take me weeks to track them all down. Then it might be too late. And I don’t have a phone anyway.”

More silence. Except for the patter of a keyboard.

Reacher said, “You’re looking, aren’t you?”

The woman said, “I really shouldn’t be doing this.”

“I won’t rat you out.”

The phone went quiet. The keyboard patter stopped. Reacher knew she had the name right there in front of her on a screen.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I can’t just tell you. You’ll have to help me out.”

“How?”

“Give me clues. So I don’t have to come right out with it.”

“What kind of clues?”

She asked, “Well, would it be a man or a woman?”

Reacher smiled, briefly. The answer was right there in the question itself. It was a woman. Had to be. A smart, resourceful woman, capable of imagination and lateral thinking. A woman who knew about his compulsion to add and subtract.

“Let me guess,” Reacher said. “The deposit was made in Chicago.”

“Yes, by personal check through a Chicago bank.”

“Neagley,” Reacher said.

“That’s the name we have,” the woman said. “Frances L. Neagley.”

“Then forget we ever had this conversation,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t a bank error.”

3

Reacher had served thirteen years in the army, all of them in the military police. He had known Frances Neagley for ten of those years and had worked with her from time to time for seven of them. He had been an officer, a second lieutenant, then a lieutenant, a captain, a major, then a loss of rank back to captain, then a major again. Neagley had steadfastly refused promotion beyond sergeant. She wouldn’t consider Officer Candidate School. Reacher didn’t really know why. There was a lot he didn’t know about her, despite their ten-year association.

But there was a lot he did know about her. She was smart and resourceful and thorough. And very tough. And strangely uninhibited. Not in terms of personal relationships. She avoided personal relationships. She was intensely private and resisted any kind of closeness, physical or emotional. Her lack of inhibition was professional. If she felt something was right or necessary, then she was uncompromising. Nothing stood in her way, not politics or practicality or politeness or even what a civilian might call “the law.” At one point Reacher had recruited her to a special investigations unit. She had been a big part of it for two crucial years. Most people put its occasional spectacular successes down to Reacher’s leadership, but Reacher himself put them down to her presence. She impressed him, deeply. Sometimes even came close to scaring him.

If she was calling for urgent assistance, it wasn’t because she had lost her car keys.

She worked for a private security provider in Chicago. He knew that. At least she had four years ago, which was the last time he had come into contact with her. She had left the army a year later than he had and gone into business with someone she knew. As a partner, he guessed, not an employee.

He dug back in his pocket and came out with more quarters. Dialed long distance information. Asked for Chicago. Gave the company name, as he remembered it. The human operator disappeared and a robot voice came on the line with a number. Reacher broke the connection and redialed. A receptionist responded and Reacher asked for Frances Neagley. He was answered politely and put on hold. Altogether his impression was of a larger operation than he had imagined. He had pictured a single room, a grimy window, maybe two battered desks, bulging file cabinets. But the receptionist’s measured voice and the telephone clicks and the quiet hold music spoke of a much bigger place. Maybe two floors, cool white corridors, wall art, an internal phone directory.

A man’s voice came on the line: “Frances Neagley’s office.”

Reacher asked, “Is she there?”

“May I know who’s calling?”

“Jack Reacher.”

“Good. Thank you for getting in touch.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Ms. Neagley’s assistant.”

“She has an assistant?”

“Indeed.”

“Is she there?”

“She’s en route to Los Angeles. In the air right now, I think.”

“Is there a message for me?”

“She wants to see you as soon as possible.”

“In Chicago?”

“She’ll be in LA a few days at least. I think you should go there.”

“What’s this all about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not work related?”

“Can’t be. She’d have started a file. Discussed it here. She wouldn’t be reaching out to strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger. I’ve known her longer than you have.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Where is she staying in LA?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“So how am I supposed to find her?”

“She said you’d be able to track her down.”

Reacher asked, “What is this, some kind of a test?”

“She said if you can’t find her, she doesn’t want you.”

“Is she OK?”

“She’s worried about something. But she didn’t tell me what.”

Reacher kept the receiver at his ear and turned away from the wall. The metal phone cord wrapped around his chest. He glanced at the idling buses and the departures board. He asked, “Who else is she reaching out to?”

The guy said, “There’s a list of names. You’re the first to get back to her.”

“Will she call you when she lands?”

“Probably.”

“Tell her I’m on my way.”

4

Reacher took a shuttle from the bus depot to the Portland airport and bought a one-way ticket on United to LAX. He used his passport for ID and his ATM card as a debit card. The one-way walk-up fare was outrageous. Alaska Airlines would have been cheaper, but Reacher hated Alaska Airlines. They put a scripture card on their meal trays. Ruined his appetite.

Airport security was easy for Reacher. His carry-on baggage amounted to precisely none at all. He had no belt, no keys, no cell phone, no watch. All he had to do was dump his loose change in a plastic tray and take off his shoes and walk through the X-ray hoop. Thirty seconds, beginning to end. Then he was on his way to the gate, coins back in his pocket, shoes back on his feet, Neagley on his mind.

Not work related. Therefore, private business. But as far as he was aware she had no private business. No private life. She never had. She would have everyday trivia, he guessed, and everyday problems. Like anyone. But he couldn’t conceive of her needing help with any of that kind of stuff. A noisy neighbor? Any sane man would sell his stereo after one short conversation with Frances Neagley. Or give it away to charity. Drug dealers on her corner? They would end up as a line item on an inside page of the morning newspaper, corpses found in an alley, multiple knife wounds, no suspects at this time. A stalker? A groper on the elevated train? Reacher shuddered. Neagley hated to be touched. He didn’t really know why. But anything except brief accidental contact with her would earn a guy a broken arm. Maybe two broken arms.

So what was her problem?

The past, he guessed, which meant the army.

A list of names? Maybe chickens were coming home to roost. The army seemed like a long time ago to Reacher. A different era, a different world. Different rules. Maybe someone was applying today’s standards to yesterday’s situations, and complaining about something. Maybe a long-delayed internal inquiry had started up. Reacher’s special investigations unit had cut a lot of corners and busted a lot of heads. Someone, maybe Neagley herself, had come up with a catchphrase: You do not mess with the special investigators. It had been repeated endlessly, as a promise, and a warning. Deadpan, and deadly serious.

Now maybe someone was messing with the special investigators. Maybe subpoenas and indictments were flying around. But in that case why would Neagley compromise him? He was as close to untraceable as a human being in America could get. Wouldn’t she just play dumb and leave him be?

He shook his head and gave it up and got on the plane.

He used the flight time figuring out where in LA she would hole up. Back in the day it had been part of his job to find people, and he had been pretty good at it. Success depended on empathy. Think like them, feel like them. See what they see. Put yourself in their shoes. Be them.

Easier with AWOL soldiers, of course. Their aimlessness gave their decisions a special kind of purity. And they were heading away from something, not toward something. Often they would adopt a kind of unconscious geographic symbolism. If their route into a city was from the east, they would hole up on the west. They would want to put mass between themselves and their pursuers. Reacher would spend an hour with a map and a bus schedule and the Yellow Pages and often he would predict the exact block he would find them on. The exact motel.

Tougher with Neagley, because she was heading for something. Her private business, and he didn’t know where or what it was. So, first principles. What did he know about her? What would be the determining factor? Well, she was cheap. Not because she was poor or a miser, but because she didn’t see the point in spending a buck on something she didn’t need. And she didn’t need much. She didn’t need turn-down service or a mint on the pillow. She didn’t need room service or tomorrow’s weather forecast. She didn’t need fluffy robes and complementary slippers heat-sealed in cellophane. All she needed was a bed and a door that locked. And crowds, and shadows, and the kind of anonymous low-rent transient neighborhoods where bartenders and desk clerks had short memories.

So, scratch downtown. Not Beverly Hills, either.

So where? Where in the vastness of LA would she be comfortable?

There were twenty-one thousand miles of surface streets to choose from.

Reacher asked himself, Where would I go?

Hollywood, he answered. A little ways south and east of the good stuff. The wrong stretch of Sunset.

That’s where I would go, he thought.

And that’s where she’ll be.

The plane landed at LAX a little late, well after lunch. There had been no meal service on board and Reacher was hungry. Samantha the Portland prosecutor had served him coffee and a bran muffin for breakfast, but that seemed like a long time ago.

He didn’t stop to eat. Just headed out to the taxi line and got a Korean guy in a yellow Toyota minivan who wanted to talk about boxing. Reacher knew nothing about boxing and cared less. The sport’s obvious artificiality turned him off. Padded gloves and above-the-belt rules had no place in his world. And he didn’t like talking. So he just sat quietly in the back and let the guy ramble on. He watched the hot brown afternoon light through the window. Palm trees, movie billboards, light gray traffic lanes striped with endless twin tracks of rubber. And cars, rivers of cars, floods of cars. He saw a new Rolls-Royce and an old Citroën DS, both black. A bloodred MGA and a pastel blue ’57 Thunderbird, both open. A yellow 1960 Corvette nose-to-tail with a green 2007 model. He figured if you watched LA traffic long enough you would see one of every automobile ever manufactured.

The driver took the 101 north and exited a block from Sunset. Reacher got out on the off-ramp and paid the fare. Hiked south and turned left and faced east. He knew Sunset had a dense knot of cheap places right there, both sides of the boulevard, covering about three-quarters of a mile. The air was southern California warm and smelled of dust and gasoline fumes. He stood still. He had a potential mile-and-a-half walk ahead of him, down and back, and a dozen motel desks to canvass. An hour-long task, maybe more. He was hungry. He could see a Denny’s sign ahead and on the right. A chain diner. He decided to eat first and work later.

He walked past parked cars and vacant lots boxed in by hurricane fencing. Stepped over trash and softball-sized tumbleweeds. Recrossed the 101 on a long bridge. Entered the Denny’s lot by cutting across a grass shoulder and the drive-through lane. Walked past a long line of windows.

Saw Frances Neagley inside, sitting alone in a booth.

5

Reacher stood for a moment in the parking lot and watched Neagley through the window. She hadn’t changed much in the four years since he had last seen her. She had to be nearer forty than thirty now, but it wasn’t showing. Her hair was still long and dark and shiny. Her eyes were still dark and alive. She was still slim and lithe. Still spending serious time in the gym. That was clear. She was wearing a tight white T-shirt with tiny cap sleeves and it would have taken an electron microscope to find any body fat on her arms. Or anyplace else.

She was a little tan, which looked good with her coloring. Her nails were done. Her T-shirt looked like a quality item. Overall she looked richer than he remembered her. Comfortable, at home in her world, successful, accustomed to the civilian life. For a moment he felt awkward about his own cheap clothes and his scuffed shoes and his bad barbershop haircut. Like she was making it, and he wasn’t. Then the pleasure of seeing an old friend swamped the thought and he walked on through the lot to the door. Went in and stepped past the Please Wait to Be Seated sign and slid straight into her booth. She looked up at him across the table and smiled.

“Hello,” she said.

“To you, too,” he said.

“Want lunch?”

“That was my plan.”

“So let’s order, now you’re finally here.”

He said, “You sound like you were waiting for me.”

“I was. And you’re about on time.”

“Am I?”

Neagley smiled again. “You called my office guy from Portland, Oregon. He saw the caller ID. Traced it to a pay phone at the bus depot. We figured you’d head straight for the airport. Then I figured you’d take United. You must hate Alaska Airlines. Then a cab ride here. Your ETA was easy enough to predict.”

“You knew I would come here? To this diner?”

“Like you taught me, back in the day.”

“I didn’t teach you anything.”

“You did,” Neagley said. “Remember? Think like them, be them. So I was being you being me. You’d figure I’d head for Hollywood. You’d start right here on Sunset. But there’s no meal on United from Portland, so I figured you’d be hungry and want to eat first. There are a couple of possible places on the block but this one has the biggest sign and you’re no gourmet. So I decided to meet you here.”

“Meet me here? I thought I was tracking you.”

“You were. And I was tracking you tracking me.”

“Are you staying here? In Hollywood?”

She shook her head. “Beverly Hills. The Wilshire.”

“So you came out here just to scoop me up?”

“I got here ten minutes ago.”

“The Beverly Wilshire? You’ve changed.”

“Not really. It’s the world that has changed. Cheap motels don’t do it for me anymore. I need e-mail and the internet and FedEx service now. Business centers and concierges.”

“You make me feel old-fashioned.”

“You’re improving. You use ATMs now.”

“That was a good move. The bank balance message.”

“You taught me well.”

“I didn’t teach you anything.”

“Like hell.”

“But it was an extravagant move,” Reacher said. “Ten dollars and thirty cents would have worked just as well. Maybe even better, with the period between the ten and the thirty.”

Neagley said, “I thought you might need the airfare.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I found your account, obviously,” Neagley said. “Wasn’t too much more trouble to hack in and take a look. You’re not rich.”

“I don’t want to be rich.”

“I know. But I didn’t want you to have to respond to my ten-thirty on your own dime. That wouldn’t have been fair.”

Reacher shrugged and let it go. Truth was, he wasn’t rich. Truth was, he was almost poor. His savings had eroded to the point where he was starting to think about how to boost them back up again. Maybe a couple of months of casual labor were in his future. Or some other kind of a score. The waitress came over with menus. Neagley ordered without looking, a cheeseburger and a soda. Reacher matched her for speed, tuna melt and hot coffee. The waitress retrieved the menus and went away.

Reacher said, “So are you going to tell me what your ten-thirty was for exactly?”

Neagley answered him by leaning down and pulling a black three-ring binder out of a tote bag on the floor. She passed it across the table. It was a copy of an autopsy report.

“Calvin Franz is dead,” she said. “I think someone threw him out of an airplane.”

6

The past, which meant the army. Calvin Franz had been an MP and Reacher’s exact contemporary and pretty much his equal all the way through his thirteen years of service. They had met here and there in the way that brother officers often tended to, rubbing shoulders in different parts of the world for a day or two at a time, consulting on the phone, crossing paths when two or more investigations had tangled or collided. Then they had done a serious spell together in Panama. Quality time. It had been very short but very intense, and they had seen things in each other that left them feeling more like real brothers than brother officers. After Reacher had been rehabilitated from his temporary demotion disgrace and given the special investigations operation to build, Franz’s name had been near the top of his personnel wish list. They had spent the next two years together in a real unit-within-a-unit hothouse. They had become fast friends. Then as often happened in the army, new orders had come in and the special operation had been disbanded and Reacher had never seen Franz again.

Until that moment, in an autopsy photograph punched into a three-ring binder laid flat on a sticky laminate table in a cheap diner.

In life Franz had been smaller than Reacher but bigger than most other people. Maybe six-three and two-ten. Powerful upper body, low waist, short legs. Primitive, in a way. Like a caveman. But overall he had been reasonably handsome. He had been calm, resolute, capable, relaxing to be around. His manner had tended to reassure people.

He looked awful in the autopsy photograph. He was laid out flat and naked on a stainless tray and the camera’s flash had bleached his skin pale green.

Awful.

But then, dead people often looked pretty bad.

Reacher asked, “How did you get this?”

Neagley said, “I can usually get things.”

Reacher said nothing in reply to that and turned the page. Started in on the dense mass of technical information. The corpse had been measured at six feet three inches in length and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. Cause of death was given as multiple organ failure due to massive impact trauma. Both legs were broken. Ribs were cracked. The bloodstream was flooded with free histamines. The body was severely dehydrated and the stomach held nothing but mucus. There was evidence of rapid recent weight loss and no evidence of recent food consumption. Trace evidence from the recovered clothing was unexceptional, apart from unexplained ferrous oxide powder ground into both pant legs, low down, on the shins, below the knee and above the ankle.

Reacher asked, “Where was he found?”

Neagley said, “In the desert about fifty miles north and east of here. Hard sand, small rocks, a hundred yards off the shoulder of a road. No footprints coming or going.”

The waitress brought the food. Reacher paused as she unloaded her tray and then started his sandwich, left-handed, to keep his right grease-free for turning the autopsy pages.

Neagley said, “Two deputies in a car saw buzzards circling. Went to check. Hiked out there. They said it was like he had fallen out of the sky. The pathologist agrees.”

Reacher nodded. He was reading the doctor’s conclusion, which was that a free fall from maybe three thousand feet onto hard sand could have produced the right amount of impact and caused the internal injuries observed, if Franz had happened to land flat on his back, which was aerodynamically possible if he had been alive and flailing his arms during the fall. A dead weight would have fallen on its head.

Neagley said, “They made the ID through his fingerprints.”

Reacher asked, “How did you find out?”

“His wife called me. Three days ago. Seems he kept all our names in his book. A special page. His buddies, from back in the day. I was the only one she could find.”

“I didn’t know he was married.”

“It was recent. They have a kid, four years old.”

“Was he working?”

Neagley nodded. “He set up as a private eye. A one-man band. Originally, some strategic advice for corporations. But now mostly background checks. Database stuff. You know how thorough he was.”

“Where?”

“Here in LA.”

“Did all of you set up as private eyes?”

“Most of us, I think.”

“Except me.”

“It was the only marketable skill we had.”

“What did Franz’s wife want you to do?”

“Nothing. She was just telling me.”

“She doesn’t want answers?”

“The cops are on it. LA County sheriff, actually. Where he was found is technically part of LA County. Outside of the LAPD’s jurisdiction, so it’s down to a couple of local deputies. They’re working on the airplane thing. They figure it was maybe flying west out of Vegas. That kind of thing has happened to them before.”

Reacher said, “It wasn’t an airplane.”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher said, “An airplane has a stall speed of, what? A hundred miles an hour? Eighty? He’d have come out the door horizontal into the slipstream. He’d have smashed against the wing or the tail. We’d see perimortem injuries.”

“He had two broken legs.”

“How long does it take to freefall three thousand feet?”

“Twenty seconds?”

“His blood was full of free histamines. That’s a massive pain reaction. Twenty seconds between injury and death wouldn’t have even gotten it started.”

“So?”

“The broken legs were old. Two, three days minimum. Maybe more. You know what ferrous oxide is?”

“Rust,” Neagley said. “On iron.”

Reacher nodded. “Someone broke his legs with an iron bar. Probably one at a time. Probably tied him to a post. Aimed for his shins. Hard enough to break the bone and grind rust particles into the weave of his pants. Must have hurt like hell.”

Neagley said nothing.

“And they starved him,” Reacher said. “Didn’t let him drink. He was twenty pounds underweight. He was a prisoner, two or three days. Maybe more. They were torturing him.”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher said, “It was a helicopter. Probably at night. Stationary hover, three thousand feet up. Out the door and straight down.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured his old friend, tumbling, twenty seconds in the dark, cartwheeling, flailing, not knowing where the ground was. Not knowing exactly when he would hit. Two shattered legs trailing painfully behind him.

“Therefore it probably wasn’t coming from Vegas,” he said. He opened his eyes. “The round-trip would be out of range for most helicopters. It was probably coming north and east out of LA. The deputies are barking up the wrong tree.”

Neagley sat quiet.

“Coyote food,” Reacher said. “The perfect disposal method. No tracks. The airflow during the fall strips away hairs and fibers. No forensics at all. Which is why they threw him out alive. They could have shot him first, but they didn’t even want to risk ballistics evidence.”

Reacher was quiet for a long moment. Then he closed the black binder and reversed it and pushed it back across the table.

“But you know all this anyway,” he said. “Don’t you? You can read. You’re testing me again. Seeing if my brain still works.”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher said, “You’re playing me like a violin.”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Why did you bring me here?”

“Like you said, the deputies are barking up the wrong tree.”

“So?”

“You have to do something.”

“I will do something. Believe it. There are dead men walking, as of right now. You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.”

Neagley said, “No, I want you to do something else.”

“Like what?”

“I want you to put the old unit back together.”

7

The old unit. It had been a typical U.S. Army invention. About three years after the need for it had become blindingly obvious to everyone else, the Pentagon had started to think about it. After another year of committees and meetings, the suits and the brass had signed off on the idea. It had been dumped on someone’s desk and a mad panic had started to get it going. Orders had been drawn up. Obviously no sane CO had wanted to touch it with a stick, so a new unit had been carved out of the 110th MP. Success was desirable but failure had to be deniable, so they went looking for a competent pariah to command it.

Reacher had been the obvious choice.

They thought his reward was promotion back to major again, but the real satisfaction for him was the chance to do something properly for once. His way. They had given him a free hand in personnel selection. He had enjoyed that. He had figured that a special investigations unit needed the best the army had to offer, and he had figured he knew who and where they were. He had wanted a small unit, for speed and flexibility, and no clerical support, to prevent leaks. He had figured they could do their own paperwork, or not, as they deemed necessary. In the end he had settled on eight names in addition to his own: Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O’Donnell, and Karla Dixon. Dixon and Neagley were the only women and Neagley was the only NCO. The others were all officers. O’Donnell and Lowrey were captains and the rest were all majors, which was totally screwed up in terms of a coherent chain of command, but Reacher didn’t care. He knew that nine people working closely would operate laterally rather than vertically, which in the event was exactly what happened. The unit had organized itself like a small-market baseball team enjoying an unlikely pennant run: talented journeymen working together, no stars, no egos, mutually supportive, and above all ruthlessly and relentlessly effective.

Reacher said, “That was all a long time ago.”

“We have to do something,” Neagley said. “All of us. Collectively. You do not mess with the special investigators. Remember that?”

“That was just a slogan.”

“No, it was true. We depended on it.”

“For morale, that was all. It was just bravado. It was whistling in the dark.”

“It was more than that. We had one another’s backs.”

“Then.”

“And now and always. It’s a karma thing. Someone killed Franz, and we can’t just let it go. How would you feel if it was you, and the rest of us didn’t react?”

“If it was me, I wouldn’t feel anything. I’d be dead.”

“You know what I mean.”

Reacher closed his eyes again and the picture came back: Calvin Franz tumbling and cartwheeling through the darkness. Maybe screaming. Or maybe not. His old friend. “I can handle it. Or you and I together. But we can’t go back to how it was. That never works.”

“We have to go back.”

Reacher opened his eyes. “Why?”

“Because the others are entitled to participate. They earned that right over two hard years. We can’t just take it away from them unilaterally. They would resent that. It would be wrong.”

“And?”

“We need them, Reacher. Because Franz was good. Very good. As good as me, as good as you. And yet someone broke his legs and threw him out of a helicopter. I think we’re going to need all the help we can get with this. So we need to find the others.”

Reacher looked at her. Heard her office guy’s voice in his head: There’s a list of names. You’re the first to get back to her. He said, “The others should have been a lot easier to find than me.”

Neagley nodded.

“I can’t raise any of them,” she said.

8

A list of names. Nine names. Nine people. Reacher knew where three of them were, specifically or generically. Himself and Neagley, specifically, in a Denny’s on West Sunset in Hollywood. And Franz, generically, in a morgue somewhere else.

“What do you know about the other six?” he asked.

“Five,” Neagley said. “Stan Lowrey is dead.”

“When?”

“Years ago. Car wreck in Montana. The other guy was drunk.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Shit happens.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Reacher said. “I liked Stan.”

“Me too,” Neagley said.

“So where are the others?”

“Tony Swan is Assistant Director of Corporate Security for a defense manufacturer here in southern California somewhere.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not sure. A start-up. Something new. He’s only been there about a year.”

Reacher nodded. He had liked Tony Swan, too. A short, wide man. Almost cubic in shape. Affable, good-humored, intelligent.

Neagley said, “Orozco and Sanchez are out in Vegas. They run a security business together, casinos and hotels, on contract.”

Reacher nodded again. He had heard that Jorge Sanchez had left the army around the same time he had, a little frustrated and embittered. He had heard that Manuel Orozco had been planning to stay in, but overall it wasn’t a huge surprise to find that he had changed his mind. Both men were mavericks, lean, fast, leathery, impatient with bullshit.

Neagley said, “Dave O’Donnell is in D.C. Plain-vanilla private detective. Plenty of work for him there.”

“I guess there would be,” Reacher said. O’Donnell had been the meticulous one. He had done the whole unit’s paperwork, pretty much single-handed. He had looked like an Ivy League gentleman, but he had always carried a switchblade in one pocket and brass knuckles in the other. A useful guy to have around.

Neagley said, “Karla Dixon is in New York. Forensic accounting. She understands money, apparently.”

“She always understood numbers,” Reacher said. “I remember that.” Reacher and Dixon had spent the occasional hour trying to prove or disprove various famous mathematical theorems. A hopeless task, given that they were both rank amateurs, but it had passed some time. Dixon was dark and very pretty and comparatively small, a happy woman who thought the worst of people, but inevitably she had been proved right nine times out of ten.

Reacher asked, “How do you know so much about them?”

“I keep track,” Neagley said. “I’m interested.”

“Why can’t you raise them?”

“I don’t know. I put calls out, but nobody’s answering.”

“So is this an attack on all of us collectively?”

“Can’t be,” Neagley said. “I’m at least as visible as Dixon or O’Donnell and nobody has come after me.”

“Yet.”

“Maybe.”

“You called the others the same day you put the money in my bank?”

Neagley nodded.

“It’s only been three days,” Reacher said. “Maybe they’re all busy.”

“So what do you want to do? Wait for them?”

“I want to forget all about them. You and I can stand up for Franz. Just the two of us.”

“It would be better to have the old unit back together. We were a good team. You were the best leader the army ever had.”

Reacher said nothing.

“What?” Neagley said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if I wanted to rewrite history I’d start a lot further back than that.”

Neagley folded her hands together and rested them on the black binder. Slim fingers, brown skin, painted nails, tendons and sinew.

“One question,” she said. “Suppose I had gotten ahold of the others. Suppose I hadn’t bothered to try that thing with your bank. Suppose you found out years from now that Franz had been murdered and the six of us had just gone ahead and fixed it without you. How would you feel then?”

Reacher shrugged. Paused a beat.

“Bad, I guess,” he said. “Cheated, maybe. Left out.”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher said, “OK, we’ll try to find the others. But we won’t wait forever.”

Neagley had a rental car in the lot. She paid the diner check and led Reacher outside. The car was a red Mustang convertible. They climbed in together and Neagley hit a button and dropped the top. She took a pair of sunglasses from the dash and put them on. Backed out of her slot and turned south off Sunset at the next light. Headed for Beverly Hills. Reacher sat quietly beside her and squinted in the afternoon sun.

Inside a tan Ford Crown Victoria thirty yards west of the restaurant a man called Thomas Brant watched them go. He used his cell phone and called his boss, a man named Curtis Mauney. Mauney didn’t answer, so Brant left a voice mail.

He said, “She just picked up the first one of them.”

Parked five cars behind Brant’s Crown Victoria was a dark blue Chrysler sedan containing a man in a dark blue suit. He too watched the red Mustang disappear into the haze, and he too used a cell phone.

He said, “She just picked up the first one of them. I don’t know which one it is. Big guy, looks like a bum.”

Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his necktie over the front of his shirt, one-handed, while he held the phone with the other.

9

Like its name suggested, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was on Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills, directly opposite the mouth of Rodeo Drive. It was made up of two large limestone buildings, one behind the other, one old and ornate, the other new and plain. They were separated by a valet lane that ran parallel to the boulevard. Neagley nosed the Mustang into it and stopped close to a knot of black Town Cars and Reacher said, “I can’t afford to stay here.”

“I already booked your room.”

“Booked it or paid for it?”

“It’s on my card.”

“I won’t be able to pay you back.”

“Get over it.”

“This place has got to be hundreds a night.”

“I’ll let it slide for now. Maybe we’ll take some spoils of war down the track.”

“If the bad guys are rich.”

“They are,” Neagley said. “They have to be. How else would they afford their own helicopter?”

She left the key in and the motor running and opened the heavy red door and slid out. Reacher did the same thing on his side. A guy ran up and gave Neagley a valet stub. She took it and tracked around the hood of the car and took the steps up to the back of the hotel’s main lobby. Reacher followed. Watched her move. She floated, like she was weightless. She ghosted through a crowded dogleg corridor and came out in a reception area the size and shape of a baronial hall. There was a check-in desk, a bell desk, a concierge desk, all separate. There were pale velvet armchairs with beautifully dressed guests in them.

Reacher said, “I look like a bum in here.”

“Or like a billionaire. Nowadays you can’t tell.”

She led him to the counter and checked him in. She had reserved his room under the name Thomas Shannon, who had been Stevie Ray Vaughan’s giant bass player back in the day, and one of Reacher’s favorites. He smiled. He liked to avoid paper trails, whenever possible. He always had. Pure reflex. He turned to Neagley and nodded his thanks and asked, “What are you calling yourself here?”

“My real name,” she said. “I don’t do that stuff anymore. Too complicated now.”

The clerk handed over a key card and Reacher put it in his shirt pocket. He turned away from the desk and faced the room. Stone, dim chandeliers, thick carpet, flowers in huge glass vases. Perfumed air.

“Let’s make a start,” he said.

They started in Neagley’s room, which was actually a two-room suite. The living room portion was tall and square and stately and had been done up in blues and golds. It could have been a room in Buckingham Palace. There was a desk in the window with two laptop computers on it. Next to the laptops was an empty cell phone cradle and next to that was an open spiral-bound notebook, new, letter-size, the kind of thing a high school student might buy in September. Last in line was a thin stack of printed papers. Forms. Five of them. Five names, five addresses, five telephone numbers. The old unit, less two dead and two already present.

Reacher said, “Tell me about Stan Lowrey.”

“Not much to tell. He quit the army, moved to Montana, got hit by a truck.”

“Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What was he doing in Montana?”

“Raising sheep. Churning butter.”

“Alone?”

“There was a girlfriend.”

“She still there?”

“Probably. They had a lot of acres.”

“Why sheep? Why butter?”

“No call for private eyes in Montana. And Montana was where the girlfriend was.”

Reacher nodded. At first glance Stan Lowrey had not been an obvious candidate for a rural fantasy. He had been a big-boned black guy from some scruffy factory town in Western Pennsylvania, smart as a whip and hard as a railroad tie. Dark alleys and pool halls had seemed to be his natural habitat. But somewhere in his DNA there had been a clear link with the earth. Reacher wasn’t surprised he had become a farmer. He could picture him, in a raggedy old barn coat, knee-high in prairie grass, under a huge blue sky, cold but happy.

“Why can’t we raise the others?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Neagley said.

“What was Franz working on?”

“Nobody seems to have that information.”

“Didn’t the new wife say anything?”

“She isn’t new. They were married five years.”

“She’s new to me,” Reacher said.

“I couldn’t interrogate her, exactly. She was on the phone, telling me her husband was dead. And maybe she doesn’t know anyway.”

“We’re going to have to go ask her. She’s the obvious starting point here.”

“After we try the others again,” Neagley said.

Reacher picked up the five sheets of printed paper and gave three to Neagley and kept two for himself. She used her cell phone and he used a room phone on a credenza. They started dialing. His numbers were for Dixon and O’Donnell. Karla and Dave, the East Coast residents, New York and D.C. Neither one of them answered. He got their business office machines instead, and heard their long-forgotten voices. He left the same message for both of them: “This is Jack Reacher with a ten-thirty from Frances Neagley at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Get off your ass and call her back.” Then he hung up and turned to where Neagley was pacing and leaving the same kind of message for Tony Swan.

“Don’t you have home numbers for them?” he asked.

“They’re all unlisted. Which is only to be expected. Mine is, too. My guy in Chicago is working on it. But it’s not easy these days. Phone company computers have gotten a lot more secure.”

“They must be carrying cell phones,” he said. “Doesn’t everyone now?”

“I don’t have those numbers either.”

“But wherever they are they can call in and check their office voice mail remotely, can’t they?”

“Easily.”

“So why haven’t they? In three whole days?”

“I don’t know,” Neagley said.

“Swan must have a secretary. He’s an assistant director of something. He must have a whole staff.”

“All they’re saying is that he’s temporarily out of the office.”

“Let me try.” He took Swan’s number from her and hit nine for a line. Dialed. Heard the connection go through, heard Swan’s phone ringing on the other end.

And ringing, and ringing.

“No answer,” he said.

“Someone answered a minute ago,” Neagley said. “It’s his direct line.”

No answer. He held the phone at his ear and listened to the patient electronic purr. Ten times, fifteen, twenty. Thirty. He hung up. Checked the number and tried again. Same result.

“Weird,” he said. “Where the hell is he?”

He checked the paper again. Name and number. The address line was blank.

“Where is this place?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Does it have a name?”

“New Age Defense Systems. That’s how they’ve been answering.”

“What kind of a name is that for a weapons manufacturer? Like they kill you with kindness? They play Pan pipe music until you save them the trouble and slit your wrists?” He dialed information. Information told him there was no listing for New Age Defense Systems anywhere in the United States. He hung up.

“Can corporations be unlisted, too?” he asked.

Neagley said, “I guess so. In the defense business, certainly. And they’re new.”

“We have to find them. They must have a physical plant somewhere. At least an office, so Uncle Sam can send them checks.”

“OK, we’ll add that to the list. After the visit to Mrs. Franz.”

“No, before,” Reacher said. “Offices close. Widows are always around.”

So Neagley called her guy in Chicago and told him to track down a physical address for New Age Defense Systems. From the half of the conversation Reacher could hear it seemed like the best way to proceed was to hack into FedEx’s computer. Or UPS’s, or DHL’s. Everyone received packages, and couriers needed street addresses. They couldn’t use post office boxes. They had to hand stuff across the transom to actual people and get signatures in return.

“Get cell phone numbers, too,” Reacher called. “For the others.”

Neagley covered the phone. “He’s been on that for three days. It isn’t easy.” Then she hung up and walked to the window. Looked out and down at the people parking cars.

“So now we wait,” she said.

They waited less than twenty minutes and then one of Neagley’s laptops pinged to announce an e-mail incoming from Chicago.

10

The e-mail from Neagley’s guy in Chicago contained New Age’s address, courtesy of UPS. Or actually, two addresses. One in Colorado, one in East LA.

“Makes sense,” she said. “Distributed manufacture. Safer that way. In case of attack.”

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. “It’s about two lots of senators. Two lots of pork. Republicans up there, Democrats down here, they get their snouts in the trough both ways around.”

“Swan wouldn’t have gone there if that was all they were into.”

Reacher nodded. “Maybe not.”

Neagley opened a map and they checked the East LA address. It was out past Echo Park, past Dodger Stadium, somewhere in the no man’s land between South Pasadena and East LA proper.

“That’s a long way,” Neagley said. “It could take forever. Rush hour has started.”

“Already?”

“Rush hour in LA started thirty years ago. It’ll finish when the oil runs out. Or the oxygen. But whatever, we won’t make it over there before they close. So it might be better to save New Age for tomorrow and go see Mrs. Franz today.”

“Like you said in the first place. You’re playing me like a violin.”

“She’s closer, is all. And important.”

“Where is she?”

“Santa Monica.”

“Franz lived in Santa Monica?”

“Not on the ocean. But still, I bet it’s nice.”

It was nice. Way nicer than it could have been. It was a small bungalow on a small street trapped halfway between the 10 and the Santa Monica airport, about two miles inland. On the face of it, not a prime real estate location. But it was a beautifully presented house. Neagley drove past it twice, looking for a place to park. It was a tiny symmetrical structure. Two bay windows with the front door between them. An overhanging roof with a front porch below. Twin rocking chairs on the porch. Some stone, some Tudor beams, some Arts and Crafts influences, some Frank Lloyd Wright, Spanish tiles. A real confusion of styles in one very small building, but it worked. It had a lot of charm. And it was totally immaculate. The paint was perfect. It gleamed. The windows were clean. They shone. The yard was tidy. Green lawn, clipped. Bright flowers, no weeds. Short blacktop driveway, smooth as glass and swept clean. Calvin Franz had been a thorough and meticulous man, and Reacher felt he could see an expression of his old friend’s whole personality displayed right there in a little piece of real estate.

Eventually a pretty lady two streets away pulled her Toyota Camry out of a curbside spot and Neagley swerved the Mustang right in after her. She locked it up and they walked back together. It was late afternoon but still faintly warm. Reacher could smell the ocean.

He asked, “How many widows have we been to see?”

“Too many,” Neagley said.

“Where do you live?”

“Lake Forest, Illinois.”

“I’ve heard of that. It’s supposed to be a nice place.”

“It is.”

“Congratulations.”

“I worked hard for it.”

They turned together into Franz’s street, and then into his driveway. They slowed a little on the short walk to the door. Reacher wasn’t sure what they were going to find. In the past he had dealt with widows a lot fresher than one of seventeen days’ vintage. Very often they hadn’t even known they were widows until he had shown up and told them they were. He wasn’t sure what difference the seventeen days were going to make. Didn’t know where in the process she was going to be.

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“Angela,” Neagley said.

“OK.”

“The kid is called Charlie. A boy.”

“OK.”

“Four years old.”

“OK.”

They stepped up on the porch and Neagley found a bell push and laid a fingertip on it, gently, briefly, respectfully, as if the electric circuit could sense deference. Reacher heard the sound of a muted bell inside the house, and then nothing. He waited. About a minute and a half later the door was opened. Apparently by nobody. Then Reacher looked down and saw a little boy stretching up to the handle. The handle was high and the boy was small and his stretch was so extreme that the arc of the door’s travel was pulling him off his tiptoes.

“You must be Charlie,” Reacher said.

“I am,” the boy said.

“I was a friend of your dad’s.”

“My dad’s dead.”

“I know. I’m very sad about that.”

“Me too.”

“Is it OK to be opening the door all by yourself?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “It’s OK.”

He looked exactly like Calvin Franz. The resemblance was uncanny. The face was the same. The body shape was the same. The short legs, the low waist, the long arms. The shoulders were just skin and bone under a child’s T-shirt but somehow they already hinted at the simian bulk they would carry later. The eyes were Franz’s own, exactly, dark, cool, calm, reassuring. Like the boy was saying, Don’t worry, everything will turn out fine.

Neagley asked him, “Charlie, is your mom home?”

The boy nodded.

“She’s in back,” he said. He let the handle go and stepped away to let them enter. Neagley went first. The house was too small for any one part of it to be really in back of any other part. It was like one generous room divided into four quadrants. Two small bedrooms on the right with a bathroom between, Reacher guessed. A small living room in the left front corner and a small kitchenette behind it. That was all. Tiny, but beautiful. Everything was off-white and pale yellow. There were flowers in vases. The windows were shaded with white wooden shutters. Floors were dark polished wood. Reacher turned and closed the door behind him and the street noise disappeared and silence clamped down over the house. A good feeling, once upon a time, he thought. Now maybe not so good.

A woman stepped out of the kitchen area, from behind a half-wide dividing wall so abbreviated that it couldn’t have offered accidental concealment. Reacher felt she must have gone and hidden behind it, deliberately, when the doorbell rang. She looked a lot younger than him. A little younger than Neagley.

Younger than Franz had been.

She was a tall woman, white blonde, blue-eyed like a Scandinavian, and thin. She was wearing a light V-neck sweater and the bones showed in the front of her chest. She was clean and made up and perfumed and her hair was brushed. Perfectly composed, but not relaxed. Reacher could see wild bewilderment around her eyes, like a fright mask worn under the skin.

There was awkward silence for a moment and then Neagley stepped forward and said, “Angela? I’m Frances Neagley. We spoke on the phone.”

Angela Franz smiled in an automatic way and offered her hand. Neagley took it and shook it briefly and then Reacher stepped forward and took his turn. He said, “I’m Jack Reacher. I’m very sorry for your loss.” He took her hand, which felt cold and fragile in his.

“You’ve used those words more than a few times,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Reacher said.

“You’re on Calvin’s list,” she said. “You were an MP just like him.”

Reacher shook his head. “Not just like him. Not nearly as good.”

“You’re very kind.”

“It’s how it was. I admired him tremendously.”

“He told me about you. All of you, I mean. Many times. Sometimes I felt like a second wife. Like he had been married before. To all of you.”

“It’s how it was,” Reacher said again. “The service was like a family. If you were lucky, that is, and we were.”

“Calvin said the same thing.”

“I think he got even luckier afterward.”

Angela smiled again, automatically. “Maybe. But his luck ran out, didn’t it?”

Charlie was watching them, Franz’s eyes half-open, appraising. Angela said, “Thank you very much for coming.”

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Reacher asked.

“Can you raise the dead?”

Reacher said nothing.

“The way he used to talk about you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could.”

Neagley said, “We could find out who did it. That’s what we were good at. And that’s as close as we can come to bringing him back. In a manner of speaking.”

“But it won’t actually bring him back.”

“No, it won’t. I’m very sorry.”

“Why are you here?”

“To give you our condolences.”

“But you don’t know me. I came later. I wasn’t a part of all that.” Angela moved away, toward the kitchen. Then she changed her mind and turned back and squeezed sideways between Reacher and Neagley and sat down in the living room. Laid her palms on the arms of her chair. Reacher saw her fingers moving. Just a slight imperceptible flutter, like she was typing or playing an invisible piano in her sleep.

“I wasn’t part of the group,” she said. “Sometimes I wished I had been. It meant so much to Calvin. He used to say, You do not mess with the special investigators. He used it like a catchphrase, all the time. He would be watching football, and the quarterback would get sacked, something real spectacular, and he would say, Yeah baby, you do not mess with the special investigators. He would say it to Charlie. He would tell Charlie to do something, and Charlie would moan, and Calvin would say, Charlie, you do not mess with the special investigators.”

Charlie looked up and smiled. “You do not mess,” he said, in a little piping voice, but with his father’s intonation, and then he stopped, as if the longer words were too hard for him to say.

Angela said, “You’re here because of a slogan, aren’t you?”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “We’re here because of what lay behind the slogan. We cared about one another. That’s all. I’m here because Calvin would have been there for me if the shoe was on the other foot.”

“Would he have been?”

“I think so.”

“He gave up all of that. When Charlie was born. No pressure from me. But he wanted to be a father. He gave it all up apart from the easy, safe stuff.”

“He can’t have done.”

“No, I guess not.”

“What was he working on?”

“I’m sorry,” Angela said. “I should have asked you to sit down.”

There was no sofa in the room. No space for one. Any kind of a normal-sized sofa would have blocked access to the bedrooms. There were two armchairs instead, plus a half-sized wooden rocker for Charlie. The armchairs were either side of a small fireplace that held pale dried flowers in a raw china jug. Charlie’s rocker was to the left of the chimney. His name had been branded into the wood at the top of the back, with a hot poker or a soldering iron, seven letters, neat script. Tidy, but not a professional job. Franz’s own work, probably. A gift, father to son. Reacher looked at it for a moment. Then he took the armchair opposite Angela’s and Neagley perched on the arm next to him, her thigh less than an inch from his body, but not touching it.

Charlie stepped over Reacher’s feet and sat down in his wooden chair.

“What was Calvin working on?” Reacher asked again.

Angela Franz said, “Charlie, you should go out and play.”

Charlie said, “Mom, I want to stay here.”

Reacher asked, “Angela, what was Calvin working on?”

“Since Charlie came along he only did background checks,” Angela said. “It was a good business to be in. Especially here in LA. Everyone’s worried about hiring a thief or a junkie. Or dating one, or marrying one. Someone would meet someone on the internet or in a bar and the first thing they would do is Google the person and the second thing is they would call a private detective.”

“Where did he work?”

“He had an office in Culver City. You know, just a rental, one room. Where Venice meets La Cienega. It was an easy hop on the 10. He liked it there. I guess I’ll have to go and bring his things home.”

Neagley asked, “Would you give us permission to search it first?”

“The deputies already searched it.”

“We should search it again.”

“Why?”

“Because he must have been working on something bigger than background checks.”

“Junkies kill people, don’t they? And thieves, sometimes.”

Reacher glanced at Charlie, and saw Franz looking back at him. “But not in the way that it seems to have happened.”

“OK. Search it again if you want.”

Neagley asked, “Do you have a key?”

Angela got up slowly and stepped to the kitchen. Came back with two unmarked keys, one big, one small, on a steel split ring an inch in diameter. She cradled them in her palm for a moment and then she handed them to Neagley, a little reluctantly.

“I would like them back,” she said. “This is his own personal set.”

Reacher asked, “Did he keep stuff here? Notes, files, anything like that?”

“Here?” Angela said. “How could he? He gave up wearing undershirts when we moved here, to save on drawer space.”

“When did you move here?”

Angela was still standing. A slight woman, but she seemed to fill the tiny space.

“Just after Charlie came along,” she said. “We wanted a real home. We were very happy here. Small, but it was all we needed.”

“What happened the last time you saw him?”

“He went out in the morning, same as always. But he never came back.”

“When was that?”

“Five days before the deputies came over to tell me they had found his body.”

“Did he ever talk to you about his work?”

Angela said, “Charlie, do you need a drink?”

Charlie said, “I’m OK, Mom.”

Reacher asked, “Did Calvin ever talk to you about his work?”

“Not very much,” Angela said. “Sometimes the studios would want an actor checked out, to find out what bodies were buried. He would give me the showbiz gossip. That’s all, really.”

Reacher said, “When we knew him he was a pretty blunt guy. He would say what was on his mind.”

“He stayed that way. You think he upset someone?”

“No, I just wondered whether he ever got around to toning it down. And if not, whether you liked it or not.”

“I loved it. I loved everything about him. I respect honesty and openness.”

“So would you mind if I was blunt?”

“Go right ahead.”

“I think there’s something you’re not telling us.”

11

Angela Franz sat down again and asked, “What do you think I’m not telling you?”

“Something useful,” Reacher said.

“Useful? What could possibly be useful to me now?”

“Not just to you. To us, too. Calvin was yours, because you married him, OK. But he was ours too, because we worked with him. We have a right to find out what happened to him, even if you don’t want to.”

“Why do you think I’m hiding something?”

“Because every time I get close to asking you a question, you duck it. I asked you what Calvin was working on, and you made a big fuss about sitting us down. I asked you again, and you talked to Charlie about going out to play. Not to spare him hearing your answer, because you used the time you gained to decide you don’t have an answer.”

Angela looked across the tiny room, straight at him. “Are you going to break my arm now? Calvin told me he saw you break someone’s arm in an interview. Or was that Dave O’Donnell?”

“Me, probably,” Reacher said. “O’Donnell was more of a leg breaker.”

“I promise you,” Angela said. “I’m not hiding anything. Nothing at all. I don’t know what Calvin was working on and he didn’t tell me.”

Reacher looked back at her, deep into her bewildered blue eyes, and he believed her, just a little bit. She was hiding something, but it wasn’t necessarily about Calvin Franz.

“OK,” he said. “I apologize.”

He and Neagley left shortly after that, with directions to Franz’s Culver City office, after further brief condolences and another shake of the cold, fragile hand.

The man called Thomas Brant watched them go. He was twenty yards from his Crown Victoria, which was parked forty yards west of Franz’s house. He was walking up from a corner bodega with a cup of coffee. He slowed his gait and watched Reacher and Neagley from behind until they turned the corner a hundred yards ahead. Then he sipped his coffee and speed-dialed his boss, Curtis Mauney, one-handed, and left a voice mail describing what he had seen.

At that same moment, the man in the dark blue suit was walking back to his dark blue Chrysler sedan. The sedan was parked in the Beverly Wilshire’s valet lane. The man in the suit was poorer by the fifty bucks that the desk clerk had accepted as a bribe, and therefore correspondingly richer in new information, but he was puzzled by the new information’s implications. He called his boss on his cell and said, “According to the hotel the big guy’s name is Thomas Shannon, but there was no Thomas Shannon on our list.”

His boss said, “I think we can be sure that our list was definitive.”

“I guess we can.”

“Therefore it’s safe to assume that Thomas Shannon is a phony name. Obviously old habits die hard with these guys. So let’s stay on it.”

Reacher waited until they were around the corner and out of Franz’s street and said, “Did you see a tan Crown Vic back there?”

“Parked,” Neagley said. “Forty yards west of the house, on the opposite curb. A base model ’02.”

“I think I saw the same car outside of the Denny’s we were in.”

“You sure?”

“Not certain.”

“Old Crown Vics are common cars. Taxis, gypsy cabs, rent-a-wrecks.”

“I guess.”

“It was empty anyway,” Neagley said. “We don’t need to worry about empty cars.”

“It wasn’t empty outside of Denny’s. There was a guy in it.”

“If it was the same car.”

Reacher stopped walking.

Neagley asked, “You want to go back?”

Reacher paused a beat and shook his head and started walking again.

“No,” he said. “It was probably nothing.”

The 10 was jammed eastbound. Neither one of them knew enough about LA geography to risk taking surface streets, so they covered the five freeway miles to Culver City slower than walking. They got to where Venice Boulevard crossed La Cienega Boulevard, and from there Angela Franz’s directions were good enough to take them straight to her late husband’s office. It was a bland storefront place in a long low tan strip that was anchored by a small post office. Not a flagship USPS operation. Just a single-wide store. Reacher didn’t know the terminology. A suboffice? A satellite? A postal delivery station? Next to it was a discount pharmacy, and then a nail salon and a dry cleaner’s. Then Franz’s place. Franz’s place had the door glass and the window painted over from the inside with tan paint that reached head-high and left just a narrow strip above for light to come through. The top of the paint was banded with a gold coach line edged in black. The legend Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations and a telephone number had been written on the door in the same gold and black style, plain letters, three lines, chest-high, simple and to the point.

“Sad,” Reacher said. “Isn’t it? From the big green machine to this?”

“He was a father,” Neagley said. “He was taking the easy money. It was his free choice. This was all he wanted now.”

“But I’m guessing your place in Chicago doesn’t look like this.”

“No,” Neagley said. “It doesn’t.”

She took out the keyring Angela had parted with so reluctantly. She selected the bigger key and tripped the lock and pulled the door. But she didn’t go in.

Because the whole place was trashed from top to bottom.

It had been a plain square space, small for a store, large for an office. Whatever computers and telephones and other hardware it had contained were all long gone. The desk and the file cabinets had been searched and then smashed with hammers and every joint and subassembly had been torn apart in a quest for concealed hiding places. The chair had been ripped apart and the stuffing had been pulled out. The wall boards had been crowbarred off the studs and the insulation had been shredded. The ceiling had been torn down. The floor had been pulled up. The bathroom appliances had been smashed into porcelain shards. There was wreckage and paper strewn everywhere down in the crawl space, knee-high throughout and worse in places.

Trashed, from top to bottom. Like a bomb blast.

Reacher said, “LA County deputies wouldn’t be this thorough.”

“Not a chance,” Neagley said. “Not even close. This was the bad guys tying up the loose ends. Retrieving whatever Franz had on them. Before the deputies even got here. Probably days before.”

“The deputies saw this and didn’t tell Angela? She didn’t know. She said she had to come over and bring his stuff home.”

“They wouldn’t tell her. Why upset her more?”

Reacher backed away on the sidewalk. Stepped to his left and looked at the neat gold lettering on the door: Calvin Franz Discreet Investigations. He raised his hand and blocked out his old friend’s name and in his mind tried David O’Donnell in its place. Then a pair of names: Sanchez & Orozco. Then: Karla Dixon.

“I wish those guys were answering their damn phones,” he said.

“This thing is not about us as a group,” Neagley said. “It can’t be. It’s more than seventeen days old and nobody has come after me yet.”

“Or me,” Reacher said. “But then, neither did Franz.”

“What do you mean?”

“If Franz was in trouble, who would he call? The rest of us, that’s who. But not you, because you’re way upscale now and probably too busy. And not me, because nobody apart from you could ever find me. But suppose Franz got himself in deep shit and called the other guys? Because they were all more accessible than the two of us? Suppose they all came running out here to help? Suppose they’re all in the same boat now?”

“Including Swan?”

“Swan was the closest. He would have gotten here first.”

“Possible.”

“Likely,” Reacher said. “If Franz really needed someone, who else would he trust?”

“He should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have come.”

“Maybe you were next on the list. Maybe at first he thought six people were enough.”

“But what kind of a thing can disappear six people? Six of our people?”

“I hate to think,” Reacher said, and then he went quiet. In the past he would have put his people up against anyone. Many times, he had. And they had always come through, against worse opponents than you normally find among the civilian population. Worse, because military training tended to enhance a criminal’s repertoire in several important areas.

Neagley said, “No point standing here. We’re wasting time. We’re not going to find anything. I think we can assume they got what they came for.”

Reacher said, “I think we can assume they didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Rule of thumb,” Reacher said. “This place is trashed from top to bottom and side to side. Totally. And normally, when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. But these guys never stopped looking. So if they found what they came for, by chance they found it in the very last place they chose to look. And how likely is that? Not very. So I think they never stopped looking because they never found what they wanted.”

“So where is it?”

“I don’t know. What would it be?”

“Paperwork, a floppy disc, a CD-ROM, something like that.”

“Small,” Reacher said.

“He didn’t take it home. I think he was separating home and work.”

Think like them. Be them. Reacher turned around and put his back to Franz’s door as if he had just stepped out to the sidewalk. He cupped his hand and looked down at his empty palm. He had done plenty of paperwork in his life, but he had never used a computer disc or burned a CD-ROM. But he knew what one was. It was a five-inch round piece of polycarbonate. Often in a thin plastic case. A floppy disc was smaller. Square, about three inches, maybe? Letter-size paperwork would tri-fold down to eight and a half inches by about four.

Small.

But vital.

Where would Calvin Franz hide something small but vital?

Neagley said, “Maybe it was in his car. He drove back and forth, apparently. So if it was a CD, he could have kept it in his auto-changer. Like hiding it in plain sight. You know, maybe the fourth slot, after the John Coltrane stuff.”

“Miles Davis,” Reacher said. “He preferred Miles Davis. He only listened to John Coltrane on Miles Davis albums.”

“He could have made it look like stuff he had downloaded. You know, he could have written Miles Davis on it with a marker pen.”

“They’d have found it,” Reacher said. “Guys this thorough, they’d have checked everything. And I think Franz would have wanted more security than that. Plain sight means it’s right there in front of you all the time. You can’t relax. And I think Franz wanted to relax. I think he wanted to get home to Angela and Charlie and not have things on his mind.”

“So where? A safe deposit box?”

“I don’t see a bank here,” Reacher said. “And I don’t think he would have wanted to take much of a detour. Not with this traffic. Not if there was some kind of urgency. And a bank’s lobby hours don’t necessarily suit a working stiff.”

“There are two keys on the ring,” Neagley said. “Although it’s possible the smaller one was for the desk.”

Reacher turned again and looked through the gloom at the drifts of trash and wreckage. The desk lock was in there somewhere, presumably. A small steel rectangle, torn out of the wood and dumped. He turned back and stepped to the curb. Looked left, looked right. Cupped his hand again and looked down at his empty palm.

First: What would I hide?

“It’s a computer file,” he said. “Got to be. Because they knew to look for it. Any kind of handwritten paperwork, Franz wouldn’t have told them anything about it. But probably they took his computers first and found some kind of traces that told them he’d been copying files. That happens, right? Computers leave traces of everything. But Franz wouldn’t tell them where the copies were. Maybe that’s why they broke his legs. But he kept quiet, which is why they had to come out here on this wild-assed search.”

“So where is it?”

Reacher looked down at his hand again.

Where would I hide something small and vital?

“Not under any old rock,” he said. “I would want somewhere structured. Maybe somewhere kind of custodial. I would want someone to be responsible.”

“A safe deposit box,” Neagley said again. “In a bank. The small key has no markings. Banks do that.”

“I don’t like banks,” Reacher said. “I don’t like the hours and I don’t like the detour. Once, maybe, but not often. Which is the issue. Because there’s some kind of regularity involved here. Isn’t there? Isn’t that what people do with computers? They back stuff up every night. So this wouldn’t be a one-time thing. It would be a matter of routine. Which changes things somewhat. A one-time thing, you might go to extraordinary lengths. Every night, you need something safe but easy. And permanently available.”

“I e-mail stuff to myself,” Neagley said.

Reacher paused a beat. Smiled.

“There you go,” he said.

“You think that’s what Franz did?”

“Not a chance,” Reacher said. “E-mail would have come straight back to his computer, which the bad guys had. They’d have spent their time trying to break down his password instead of busting up his building.”

“So what did he do?”

Reacher turned and glanced along the row of stores. The dry cleaner, the nail salon, the pharmacy.

The post office.

“Not e-mail,” he said. “Regular mail. That’s what he did. He backed up his stuff onto some kind of a disc and every night he put it in an envelope and dropped it in the mail. Addressed to himself. To his post office box. Because that’s where he got his mail. In the post office. There’s no slot in his door. Once the envelope was out of his hand it was safe. It was in the system. With a whole bunch of custodians looking after it all day and all night.”

“Slow,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “He must have had three or four discs in rotation. Any particular day, two or three of them would be somewhere in the mail. But he went home every night knowing his latest stuff was safe. It’s not easy to rob a mail box or make a clerk give you something that doesn’t belong to you. USPS bureaucracy is about as safe as a Swiss bank.”

“The small key,” Neagley said. “Not his desk. Not a safe deposit box.”

Reacher nodded again.

“His post office box,” he said.

12

But United States Postal Service bureaucracy cut two ways. It was late in the afternoon. The dry cleaner’s was still open. The nail salon was open. The pharmacy was open. But the post office was closed. Lobby hours had ended at four o’clock.

“Tomorrow,” Neagley said. “We’re going to be in the car all day. We have to get to Swan’s place, too. Unless we separate.”

“It’s going to take two of us here,” Reacher said. “But maybe one of the others will show up and do some work.”

“I wish they would. And not because I’m lazy.” For form’s sake, like a little ritual, she pulled out her cell phone and checked the tiny screen.

No messages.

There were no messages at the hotel desk, either. No messages on the hotel voice mail. No e-mails on either one of Neagley’s laptop computers.

Nothing.

“They can’t just be ignoring us,” she said.

“No,” Reacher said. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m getting a real bad feeling.”

“I’ve had a real bad feeling ever since I went to that ATM in Portland. I spent all my money taking someone to dinner. Twice. Now I wish we had stayed in and ordered pizza. She might have paid. I wouldn’t know about any of this yet.”

“She?”

“Someone I met.”

“Cute?”

“As a button.”

“Cuter than Karla Dixon?”

“Comparable.”

“Cuter than me?”

“Is that even possible?”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Who?”

“The woman in Portland.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

Neagley didn’t answer. She just shuffled the five sheets of contact information like a card player and dealt Reacher two and kept three for herself. Reacher got Tony Swan and Karla Dixon. He used the landline on the credenza and tried Swan first. Thirty, forty rings, no answer. He dabbed the cradle and tried Dixon’s number. A 212 area code, for New York City. No answer. Six rings, and straight to a machine. He listened to Dixon’s familiar voice and waited for the beep and left her the same message he had left earlier: “This is Jack Reacher with a ten-thirty from Frances Neagley at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Get off your ass and call her back.” Then he paused a beat and added: “Please, Karla. We really need to hear from you.” Then he hung up. Neagley was closing her cell phone and shaking her head.

“Not good,” she said.

“They could all be on vacation.”

“At the same time?”

“They could all be in jail. We were a pretty rough bunch.”

“First thing I checked. They’re not in jail.”

Reacher said nothing.

Neagley said, “You really liked Karla, didn’t you? You sounded positively tender there, on the phone.”

“I liked all of you.”

“But her especially. Did you ever sleep with her?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I recruited her. I was her CO. Wouldn’t have been right.”

“Was that the only reason?”

“Probably.”

“OK.”

Reacher asked, “What do you know about their businesses? Is there any good reason why they should all be out of contact for days at a time?”

“I guess O’Donnell could have to travel overseas,” Neagley said. “His practice is pretty general. Marital stuff could take him to hotels down in the islands, I guess. Or anyplace, if he’s chasing unpaid alimony. Child abductions or custody issues could take him anywhere. People looking to adopt sometimes send detectives to Eastern Europe or China or wherever to make sure things are kosher. There are lots of possible reasons.”

“But?”

“I’d have to talk myself into really believing one of them.”

“What about Karla?”

“She could be down in the Caymans looking for someone’s money, I guess. But I imagine she’d do that on-line from her office. It’s not like the money is actually there.”

“So where is it?”

“It’s notional. It’s electricity in a computer.”

“What about Sanchez and Orozco?”

“They’re in a closed world. I don’t see why they would ever have to leave Vegas. Not professionally.”

“What do we know about Swan’s company?”

“It exists. It does business. It files. It has an address. Apart from that, not much.”

“Presumably it has security issues, or Swan wouldn’t have gotten hired.”

“All defense contractors have security issues. Or they think they ought to have, because they want to think what they do is important.”

Reacher said nothing to that. Just sat and stared out the window. It was getting dark. A long day, nearly over. He said, “Franz didn’t go to his office the morning he disappeared.”

“You think?”

“We know. Angela had his set of keys. He left them home. He was going somewhere else that day.”

Neagley said nothing.

“And the landlord at the strip mall saw the bad guys,” Reacher said. “Franz’s lock wasn’t broken. They didn’t take Franz’s key from him, because he didn’t have it in his pocket. Therefore they scammed one or bought one from the owner. Therefore the owner saw them. Therefore we need to find him tomorrow, along with everything else.”

“Franz should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have dropped everything.”

“I wish he had called you,” Reacher said. “If you had been there, none of this bad stuff would have happened.”

Reacher and Neagley ate dinner in the downstairs restaurant, front corner of the lobby, where a bottle of still water from Norway cost eight dollars. Then they said goodnight and split up and headed for their separate rooms. Reacher’s was a chintzy cube two floors below Neagley’s suite. He stripped and showered and folded his clothes and put them under the mattress to press. He got into bed and folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Thought about Calvin Franz for a minute, in random flashing images, the same way a political candidate’s biography is squeezed into a thirty second television commercial. His memory made some of the pictures sepia and some of them washed out, but in all of them Franz was moving, talking, laughing, full of drive and energy. Then Karla Dixon joined the parade, petite, dark, sardonic, laughing with Franz. Dave O’Donnell was there, tall, fair, handsome, like a stockbroker with a switchblade. And Jorge Sanchez, durable, eyes narrowed, with a hint of a smile that showed a gold tooth and was as close as he ever came to showing contentment. And Tony Swan, as wide as he was high. And Manuel Orozco, opening and closing a Zippo lighter because he liked the sound so much. Even Stan Lowrey was there, shaking his head, drumming his fingers on a table to a rhythm only he could hear.

Then Reacher blinked all the pictures away and closed his eyes and fell asleep, ten-thirty in the evening, a long day, over.

Ten-thirty in the evening in Los Angeles was one-thirty the next morning in New York, and the last British Airways flight from London, delayed, had just landed at JFK. The delay meant that the last immigration watch in British Airways’ own terminal had already gone off duty, so the plane taxied to Terminal Four and fed its passengers through the giant arrivals hall there. Third in the visitors’ line was a first-class passenger who had napped in seat 2K for most of the trip. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed, and he radiated the kind of expansive self-confident courtesy typical of people who know how lucky they are to have been rich all their lives. He was perhaps forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian. His passport was British, and it passed the Immigration agent’s scrutiny with no trouble at all, as did its owner’s manicured forefingers on the electronic fingerprint pad. Seventeen minutes after unclipping his seat belt the guy was out in the shiny New York night, walking briskly to the head of the cab line.

13

At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out somewhere for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

They ordered room service breakfast and spent the waiting time on another fruitless round of phone calls. No answer from East LA, none from Nevada, none from New York, none from Washington D.C. They didn’t leave messages. They didn’t redial or try again. And when they hung up, they didn’t talk about it. They just sat in silence until the waiter showed up and then they ate eggs and pancakes and bacon and drank coffee. Then Neagley called down to the valet station and ordered her car.

“Franz’s place first?” she asked.

Reacher nodded. “Franz is the focus here.”

So they rode the elevator down and got in the Mustang together and crawled south on La Cienega to the post office at the tip of Culver City.

They parked right outside Franz’s trashed office and walked back past the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the discount pharmacy. The post office was empty. A sign on the door said that the lobby had been open a half-hour. Clearly whatever initial rush there had been was over.

“We can’t do this when it’s empty,” Reacher said.

“So let’s find the landlord first,” Neagley said.

They asked in the pharmacy. An old man in a short white coat was standing under an old-fashioned security camera behind the dispensing counter. He told them that the guy who owned the dry cleaner’s store was the landlord. He spoke with the kind of guarded hostility that tenants always use about the people who get their rent checks. He outlined a short success story in which his neighbor had come over from Korea and opened the cleaners and used the profits to leverage the whole strip mall. The American dream in action. Reacher and Neagley thanked him and walked past the nail salon and ducked into the cleaner’s and found the right guy immediately. He was rushing around in a crowded work area heavy with the stink of chemicals. Six big drum machines were churning away. Pressing tables were hissing. Racks of bagged clothes were winding around on a motorized conveyor above head height. The guy himself was sweating. Working hard. It looked like he deserved two strip malls. Or three. Maybe he already had them. Or more.

Reacher got straight to the point. Asked, “When did you last see Calvin Franz?”

“I hardly ever saw him,” the guy answered. “I couldn’t see him. He painted over his window, first thing he ever did.” He said it like he had been annoyed about it. Like he had known he was going to have to get busy with a scraper before he could rent the unit again.

Reacher said, “You must have seen him coming and going. I bet nobody here works longer hours than you.”

“I guess I saw him occasionally,” the guy said.

“When do you guess you stopped seeing him occasionally?”

“Three, four weeks ago.”

“Just before the guys came around and asked you for his key?”

“What guys?”

“The guys you gave his key to.”

“They were cops.”

“The second set of guys were cops.”

“So were the first.”

“Did they show you ID?”

“I’m sure they did.”

“I’m sure they didn’t,” Reacher said. “I’m sure they showed you a hundred dollar bill instead. Maybe two or three of them.”

“So what? It’s my key and it’s my building.”

“What did they look like?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because we were Mr. Franz’s friends.”

“Were?”

“He’s dead. Someone threw him out of a helicopter.”

The dry cleaner just shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t remember the guys,” he said.

“They trashed your unit,” Reacher said. “Whatever they paid you for the key won’t cover the damage.”

“Fixing the unit is my problem. It’s my building.”

“Suppose it was your pile of smoldering ashes? Suppose I came back tonight and burned the whole place down?”

“You’d go to prison.”

“I don’t think so. A guy with a memory as bad as yours wouldn’t have anything to tell the police.”

The guy nodded. “They were white men. Two of them. Blue suits. A new car. They looked like everybody else I see.”

“That’s all?”

“Just white men. Not cops. Too clean and too rich.”

“Nothing special about them?”

“I’d tell you if I could. They trashed my place.”

“OK.”

“I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a nice guy.”

“He was,” Reacher said.

14

Reacher and Neagley walked back to the post office. It was a small, dusty place. Government décor. It had gotten moderately busy again. Normal morning business was in full swing. There was one clerk working and a short line of waiting customers. Neagley handed Reacher Franz’s keys and joined the line. Reacher stepped to a shallow waist-high counter in back and took a random form out of a slot. It was a demand for confirmation of delivery. He used a pen on a chain and bent down and pretended to fill out the form. He turned his body sideways and rested his elbow on the counter and kept his hand moving. Glanced at Neagley. She was maybe three minutes from the head of the line. He used the time to survey the rows of mail boxes.

They filled the whole end wall of the lobby. They came in three sizes. Small, medium, large. Six tiers of small, then below them four tiers of medium, then three tiers of large closest to the floor. Altogether one hundred eighty of the small size, ninety-six mediums, and fifty-four large. Total, three hundred thirty boxes.

Which one was Franz’s?

One of the large ones, for sure. Franz had been running a business, and it had been the kind of business that would have generated a fair amount of incoming mail. Some of it would have been in the form of thick legal-sized packages. Credit reports, financial information, court transcripts, eight-by-ten photographs. Large, stiff envelopes. Professional journals. Therefore, a large box.

But which large box?

No way of telling. If Franz had been given a free choice, he would have picked the top row, three up from the floor, right-hand end. Who wants to walk farther than he needs to from the street door and then crouch all the way down on the linoleum? But Franz wouldn’t have been given a free choice. You want a post office box, you take what’s available at the time. Dead men’s shoes. Someone dies or moves away, their box becomes free, you inherit it. Luck of the draw. A lottery. One chance in fifty-four.

Reacher put his left hand in his pocket and fingered Franz’s key. He figured it would take between two and three seconds to test it in each lock. Worst case, almost three minutes of dancing along the array. Very exposed. Worse than worst case, he could be busy trying a box right in front of its legitimate owner who had just stepped in behind him. Questions, complaints, shouts, calls to the postal police, a potential federal case. Reacher had no doubt at all that he could get out of the lobby unharmed, but he didn’t want to get out empty-handed.

He heard Neagley say: “Good morning.”

He glanced left and saw her at the head of the counter line. Saw her leaning forward, commanding attention. Saw the counter clerk’s eyes lock in on hers. He dropped the pen and took the key from his pocket. Stepped unobtrusively to the wall of boxes and tried the first lock on the left, three up from the floor.

Failure.

He rocked the key clockwise and counterclockwise. No movement. He pulled it out and tried the lock below. Failure. The one below that. Failure.

Neagley was asking a long complicated question about air mail rates. Her elbows were on the counter. She was making the clerk feel like the most important guy in the world. Reacher shuffled right and tried again, one box over, three up from the floor.

Failure.

Four down, fifty to go. Twelve seconds consumed, odds now improved from one-point-eight-five chances in a hundred to two chances in a hundred. He tried the next box down. Failure. He crouched, and tried the box nearest to the floor.

Failure.

He stayed in a crouch and shuffled right. Started the next column from the bottom up. No luck with the lowest. No luck with the one above. No luck with the third up. Nine down, twenty-five seconds elapsed. Neagley was still talking. Then Reacher was aware of a woman squeezing in on his left. Opening her box, high up. Raking out a dense mass of curled junk. Sorting it, as she stood there. Move, he begged her. Step away to the trash receptacle. She backed away. He stepped to his right and tried the fourth row. Neagley was still talking. The clerk was still listening. The key didn’t fit the top box. It didn’t fit the middle box. It didn’t fit the bottom box.

Twelve down. Odds now one in forty-two. Better, but not good. The key didn’t fit anything in the fifth row. Nor the sixth. Eighteen down. One-third gone. Odds improving all the time. Look on the bright side. Neagley was still talking. He could hear her. He knew that behind her people in the line would be getting impatient. They would be shuffling their feet. They would be looking around, bored and inquisitive.

He started on the seventh row, at the top. Rocked the key. It didn’t move. No go with the middle box. Nor the lowest. He shuffled right. Neagley had stopped talking. The clerk was explaining something. She was pretending not to understand. Reacher moved right again. The eighth row. The key didn’t fit the top box. The lobby was going quiet. Reacher could feel eyes on his back. He dropped his hand and tried the middle box in the eighth row.

Rocked the key. The small metallic sound was very loud.

Failure.

The lobby was silent.

Reacher tried the lowest box in the eighth row.

Rocked the key.

It moved.

The lock opened.

Reacher stepped back a foot and swung the little door all the way open and crouched down. The box was stuffed. Padded envelopes, big brown envelopes, big white envelopes, letters, catalogs, magazines wrapped in plastic, postcards.

Sound came back to the lobby.

Reacher heard Neagley say, “Thank you very much for your help.” He heard her footsteps on the tile. Heard the line behind her move up. Sensed people refocusing on their chances of getting their business done before they grew old and died. He slid his hand into the box and raked the contents forward. Butted everything together into a steady stack and clamped it between his palms and stood up. Jammed the stack under his arm and relocked the box and pocketed the key and walked away like the most natural thing in the world.

Neagley was waiting in the Mustang, three doors down. Reacher leaned in and dumped the stack of mail on the center console and then followed it inside. Sorted through the stack and pulled out four small padded envelopes self-addressed in Franz’s own familiar handwriting.

“Too small for CDs,” he said.

He arranged them in date order according to the postmarks. The most recent had been stamped the same morning that Franz had disappeared.

“But mailed the night before,” he said.

He opened the envelope and shook out a small silver object. Metal, flat, two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, thin, capped with plastic. Like something that would go on a keyring. It had 128 MB printed on it.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Flash memory,” Neagley said. “The new version of floppy discs. No moving parts and a hundred times the storage capacity.”

“What do we do with it?”

“We plug it into one of my computers and we see what’s on it.”

“Just like that?”

“Unless it’s password-protected. Which it probably will be.”

“Isn’t there software to help with that?”

“There used to be. But not anymore. Things get better all the time. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”

“So what do we do?”

“We spend the drive time making mental lists. Likely choices for his password. The old-fashioned way. My guess is we’ll get three tries before the files erase themselves.”

She started the motor and eased away from the curb. Pulled a neat U-turn in the strip mall’s fire lane and headed back north to La Cienega.

The man in the dark blue suit watched them go. He was low down behind the wheel of his dark blue Chrysler sedan, forty yards away, in a slot that belonged to the pharmacy. He opened his cell phone and dialed his boss.

“This time they ignored Franz’s place completely,” he said. “They talked to the landlord instead. Then they were in the post office a long time. I think Franz must have been mailing the stuff to himself. That’s why we couldn’t find it. And they’ve probably got it now.”

15

Neagley plugged the flash memory into a socket on the side of her laptop computer. Reacher watched the screen. Nothing happened for a second and then an icon appeared. It looked like a stylized picture of the physical object she had just attached. It was labeled No Name. Neagley ran her forefinger over the touch pad and then tapped it twice.

The icon blossomed into a full-screen demand for a password.

“Damn,” she said.

“Inevitable,” he said.

“Ideas?”

Reacher had busted computer passwords many times before, back in the day. As always, the technique was to consider the person and think like them. Be them. Serious paranoids used long complex mixes of lower-case and upper-case letters and numbers that meant nothing to anyone, including themselves. Those passwords were effectively unbreakable. But Franz had never been paranoid. He had been a relaxed guy, serious about but simultaneously a little amused by security demands. And he was a words guy, not a numbers guy. He was a man of interests and enthusiasms. Full of affections and loyalties. Middlebrow tastes. A memory like an elephant.

Reacher said, “Angela, Charlie, Miles Davis, Dodgers, Koufax, Panama, Pfeiffer, M*A*S*H, Brooklyn, Heidi, or Jennifer.”

Neagley wrote them all down on a new page in her spiral-bound notebook.

“Why those?” she asked.

“Angela and Charlie are obvious. His family.”

“Too obvious.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Miles Davis was his favorite music, the Dodgers were his favorite team, and Sandy Koufax was his favorite player.”

“Possibilities. What’s Panama?”

“Where he was deployed at the end of 1989. I think that was the place he had the most professional satisfaction. He’ll have remembered it.”

“Pfeiffer as in Michelle Pfeiffer?”

“His favorite actress.”

“Angela looks a little like her, doesn’t she?”

“There you go.”

“M*A*S*H?”

“His all-time favorite movie,” Reacher said.

“More than ten years ago, when you knew him,” Neagley said. “There have been a lot of good movies since then.”

“Passwords come from down deep.”

“It’s too short. Most software asks for a minimum of six characters now.”

“OK, scratch M*A*S*H.”

“Brooklyn?”

“Where he was born.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not many people did. They moved west when he was little. That’s what would make it a good password.”

“Heidi?”

“His first serious girlfriend. Hot as hell, apparently. Terrific in the sack. He was crazy about her.”

“I didn’t know anything about that. Clearly I was excluded from the guy talk.”

“Clearly,” Reacher said. “Karla Dixon was, too. We didn’t want to look emotional.”

“I’m crossing Heidi off the list. Only five letters, and he was too much into Angela now anyway. He wouldn’t have felt right using an old girlfriend’s name for a password, however hot and terrific she was. I’m crossing Pfeiffer off for the same reason. And who was Jennifer? His second girlfriend? Was she hot, too?”

“Jennifer was his dog,” Reacher said. “When he was a kid. A little black mutt. Lived for eighteen years. Broke him up when it died.”

“Possibility, then. But that’s six. We’ve only got three tries.”

“We’ve got twelve tries,” Reacher said. “Four envelopes, four flash memories. If we start with the earliest postmark we can afford to burn the first three. That information is old anyway.”

Neagley laid the four flash memories on the hotel desk in strict date order. “You sure he wouldn’t have changed his password daily?”

“Franz?” Reacher said. “Are you kidding? A guy like Franz latches onto a word that means something to him and he sticks with it forever.”

Neagley clicked the oldest memory unit into the port and waited until the corresponding icon appeared on the screen. She clicked on it and tabbed the cursor straight to the password box.

“OK,” she said. “You want to nominate a priority order?”

“Do the people names first. Then the place names. I think that’s how it would have worked for him.”

“Is Dodgers a people name?”

“Of course it is. Baseball is played by people.”

“OK. But we’ll start with music.” She typed MilesDavis and hit enter. There was a short pause and then the screen redrew and came back with the dialog box again and a note in red: Your first attempt was incorrect.

“One down,” she said. “Now sports.”

She tried Dodgers.

Incorrect.

“Two down.” She typed Koufax.

The hard drive inside her laptop chattered and the screen went blank.

“What’s happening?” Reacher asked.

“It’s dumping the data,” she said. “Erasing it. It wasn’t Koufax. Three down.”

She pulled the flash memory out of the port and tossed it through a long silver arc into the trash can. Inserted the second unit in its place. Typed Jennifer.

Incorrect.

“Four down,” she said. “Not his puppy.”

She tried Panama.

Incorrect.

“Five down.” She tried Brooklyn.

The screen went blank and the hard drive chattered.

“Six down,” she said. “Not his old hood. You’re zip for six, Reacher.”

The second unit clattered into the trash and she plugged in the third.

“Ideas?”

“Your turn. I seem to have lost my touch.”

“What about his old service number?”

“I doubt it. He was a words guy, not a numbers guy. And for me anyway my number was the same as my Social Security number. Same for him, probably, which would make it too obvious.”

“What would you use?”

“Me? I am a numbers guy. Top row of the keyboard, all in a line, easy to get to. No typing skills required.”

“What number would you use?”

“Six characters? I’d probably write out my birthday, month, day, year, and find the nearest prime number.” Then he thought for a second and said, “Actually, that would be a problem, because there would be two equally close, one exactly seven less and one exactly seven more. So I guess I’d use the square root instead, rounded to three decimal places. Ignore the decimal point, that would give me six numbers, all different.”

“Weird,” Neagley said. “I think we can be sure Franz wouldn’t do anything like that. Probably nobody else in the world would do anything like that.”

“Therefore it would be a good password.”

“What was his first car?”

“Some piece of shit, probably.”

“But guys like cars, right? What was his favorite car?”

“I don’t like cars.”

“Think like him, Reacher. Did he like cars?”

“He always wanted a red Jaguar XKE.”

“Would that be worth a try?”

A man of interests and enthusiasms. Full of affections and loyalties.

“Maybe,” Reacher said. “It’s certainly going to be something special to him. Something talismanic, something that would give him a feeling of warmth just recalling the word. Either an early role model or a longstanding object of desire or affection. So the XKE might work.”

“Should I try it? We’ve only got six left.”

“I’d try it for sure if we had six hundred left.”

“Wait a minute,” Neagley said. “What about what Angela told us? The way he kept on saying you do not mess with the special investigators?”

“That would make a hell of a long password.”

“So break it down. Either special investigators, or do not mess.”

A memory like an elephant. Reacher nodded. “We had a good time back then, basically, didn’t we? So remembering the old days might have given him a warm feeling. Especially stuck out there in Culver City, busy doing nothing much. People enjoy nostalgia, don’t they? Like that song, ‘The Way We Were.’ ”

“It was a movie, too.”

“There you go. It’s a universal feeling.”

“Which should we try first?”

Reacher heard Charlie in his mind, the little boy’s piping treble: You do not mess.

“Do not mess,” he said. “Nine letters.”

Neagley typed donotmess.

Hit enter.

Incorrect.

“Shit,” she said.

She typed specialinvestigators. Held her finger over the enter key.

“That’s very long,” Reacher said.

“Yes or no?”

“Try it.”

Incorrect.

Neagley said, “Damn,” and went quiet.

Charlie was still in Reacher’s mind. And his tiny chair, with the neat branded name at the top. He could see Franz’s steady hand at work. He could smell the smoking wood. A gift, father to son. Probably intended to be the first of many. Love, pride, commitment.

“I like Charlie,” he said.

“Me too,” Neagley said. “He’s a cute kid.”

“No, for the password.”

“Too obvious.”

“He didn’t take this kind of stuff very seriously. He was going through the motions. Easier to put in any old thing than to reprogram the software to get around it.”

“Still too obvious. And he had to be taking it seriously. At least this time. He was in big trouble and he was mailing stuff to himself.”

“So it could be a double bluff. It’s obvious but it’s the last thing anyone would think of trying. That makes for a very effective password.”

“Possible but unlikely.”

“What are we going to find on there anyway?”

“Something we really need to see.”

“Try Charlie for me.”

Neagley shrugged and typed Charlie.

Hit enter.

Incorrect.

The hard disc spun up and the memory unit erased itself.

“Nine down,” Neagley said. She pitched the third unit into the trash and plugged the fourth one in. The last one. “Three to go.”

Reacher asked, “Who did he love before Charlie?”

“Angela,” Neagley said. “Way too obvious.”

“Try it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m a gambler.”

“We’re down to our last three chances.”

“Try it,” he said again.

She typed Angela.

Hit enter.

Incorrect.

“Ten down,” she said. “Two to go.”

“What about Angela Franz?”

“That’s even worse.”

“What about her unmarried name?”

“I don’t know what it was.”

“Call her and ask.”

“Are you serious?”

“At least let’s find out.”

So Neagley thumbed through her notebook and found the number and fired up her cell phone. Introduced herself again. Small-talked for a moment. Then Reacher heard her ask the question. He didn’t hear Angela’s answer. But he saw Neagley’s eyes widen a fraction, which for her was about the same thing as falling on the floor with shock.

She hung up.

“It was Pfeiffer,” she said.

“Interesting.”

“Very.”

“Are they related?”

“She didn’t say.”

“So try it. It’s a perfect twofer. He feels good twice over and doesn’t have to feel disloyal at all.”

Neagley typed Pfeiffer.

Hit enter.

Incorrect.

16

The room was hot and stuffy. No air in it. And it seemed to have gotten smaller. Neagley said, “Eleven down. One to go. Do or die. Last chance.”

Reacher asked, “What happens if we don’t do anything?”

“Then we don’t get to see what’s on the file.”

“No, I mean do we have to do it right now? Or can it keep?”

“It’s not going anywhere.”

“So we should take a break. Come back to it later. One to go, we’ve got to pay attention.”

“Weren’t we already?”

“Clearly not the right kind of attention. We’ll go out to East LA and look for Swan. If we find him, he might have ideas. If not, then at least we’ll come back to this fresh.”

Neagley called down to the valet station again and ten minutes later they were in the Mustang heading east on Wilshire. Through Wilshire Center, through Westlake, through a dogleg south that took them straight through MacArthur Park. Then north and east on the Pasadena Freeway, past the concrete bulk of Dodger Stadium all alone in acres of empty parking. Then deep into a rat’s nest of surface streets bounded by Boyle Heights, Monterey Park, Alhambra, and South Pasadena. There were science parks and business parks and strip malls and old housing and new housing. The curbs were thick with parked cars and there was traffic everywhere, moving slow. A brown sky. Neagley had an austere Rand McNally map in the glove box. Looking at it was like looking at the surface of the earth from fifty miles up. Reacher squinted and followed the faint gray lines. Matched the street names on signposts to the street names on the map and pinpointed specific junctions about thirty seconds after they blew through them. He had his thumb on New Age’s location and steered Neagley toward it in a wide ragged spiral.

When they got there they found a low sign of chiseled granite and a big prosperous mirror-glass cube set behind a tall hurricane fence topped with coils of razor wire. The fence was impressive at first sight, but only semi-serious, in that ten seconds and a pair of bolt cutters would get a person through it unscathed. The building itself was surrounded by a wide parking lot studded with specimen trees. The way the mirror glass reflected the trees and the sky made the building look like it was there and not there simultaneously.

The main gate was lightweight and standing wide open and there was no sentry post next to it. It was just a gate. Beyond it the lot was about half-full of parked cars. Neagley paused to let a photocopier truck out and then drove in and put the Mustang in a visitor slot near the entrance lobby. She and Reacher got out and stood for a moment. It was the middle of the morning and the air was warm and heavy. The neighborhood was quiet. It sounded like a whole lot of people were concentrating very hard, or else no one was doing very much of anything.

The reception entrance had a shallow step up to double glass doors that opened for them automatically and admitted them to a large square lobby that had a slate floor and aluminum walls. There were leather chairs and a long reception counter in back. Behind the counter was a blonde woman of about thirty. She was wearing a corporate polo shirt with New Age Defense Systems embroidered above her small left breast. Clearly she had heard the doors open but she waited until Reacher and Neagley were halfway across the floor before she looked up.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’re here to see Tony Swan,” Reacher said.

The woman smiled automatically and asked, “May I know your names?”

“Jack Reacher and Frances Neagley. We were good friends of his in the service.”

“Then please take a seat.” The woman picked up her desk phone and Reacher and Neagley stepped away to the leather chairs. Neagley sat down but Reacher stayed on his feet. He watched the dull aluminum reflection of the woman on the phone and heard her say, “Two friends of Tony Swan to see him.” Then she put the phone down and smiled in Reacher’s direction even though he wasn’t looking directly at her. Then the lobby went quiet.

It stayed quiet for about four minutes and then Reacher heard the click of shoes on slate from a corridor that entered the lobby to the side of and behind the desk. A measured stride, no hurry, a person of medium height and medium weight. He watched the mouth of the corridor and saw a woman step into view. About forty years old, slim, brown hair stylishly cut. She was in a tailored black pant suit and a white blouse. She looked swift and efficient and had an open and welcoming expression on her face. She smiled a token thank you to the receptionist and walked straight past her toward Reacher and Neagley. Held out her hand and said, “I’m Margaret Berenson.”

Neagley stood up and she and Reacher said their names and shook hands with her. Up close she had old looping car crash scars under her makeup and the chilly breath of a big-time gum chewer. She was wearing decent jewelry, but no wedding band.

“We’re looking for Tony Swan,” Reacher said.

“I know,” the woman said. “Let’s find somewhere to talk.”

One of the aluminum wall panels was a door that led to a small rectangular conference room directly off the lobby. Clearly it was designed for discussions with visitors who didn’t merit admission into the inner sanctums. It was a cool spare space with a table and four chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave directly onto the parking lot. The front bumper of Neagley’s Mustang was about five feet away.

“I’m Margaret Berenson,” the woman said again. “I’m New Age’s Human Resources director. I’ll get straight to the point, which is that Mr. Swan isn’t with us anymore.”

Reacher asked, “Since when?”

“A little over three weeks ago,” Berenson said.

“What happened?”

“I’d feel more comfortable talking about it if I knew for sure you have a connection with him. Anyone can walk up to a reception counter and claim to be old friends.”

“I’m not sure how we could prove it.”

“What did he look like?”

“About five-nine tall and about five-eight wide.”

Berenson smiled. “If I told you he used a piece of stone as a paperweight, could you tell me where that piece of stone came from?”

“The Berlin Wall,” Reacher said. “He was in Germany when it came down. I saw him there just afterward. He took the train up and got himself a souvenir. And it’s concrete, not stone. There’s a trace of graffiti on it.”

Berenson nodded.

“That’s the story I heard,” she said. “And that’s the object I’ve seen.”

“So what happened?” Reacher asked. “He quit?”

Berenson shook her head.

“Not exactly,” she said. “We had to let him go. Not just him. You have to understand, this is a new company. It was always speculative, and there was always risk. In terms of our business plan, we’re not where we want to be. Not yet, anyway. So we reached the stage where we had to revise our staffing levels. Downward, unfortunately. We operated a last-in-first-out policy, and basically that meant we had to let the whole assistant management level go. I lost my own assistant director. Mr. Swan was Assistant Director of Security, so unfortunately the policy swept him away, too. We were very sorry to see him go, because he was a real asset. If things pick up, we’ll beg him to come back. But I’m sure he’ll have secured another position by then.”

Reacher glanced through the window at the half-empty parking lot. Listened to the quiet of the building. It sounded half-empty, too.

“OK,” he said.

“Not OK,” Neagley said. “I’ve been calling his office over and over for the last three days and every time I was told he had just stepped out for a minute. That doesn’t add up.”

Berenson nodded again. “That’s a professional courtesy that I insist upon. With this caliber of management it would be a disaster for an individual if his personal network of contacts heard the news secondhand. Much better if Mr. Swan can inform people himself, directly. Then he can spin it however he wants. So I insist that the remaining secretarial staff tell little white lies during the readjustment period. I don’t apologize for it, but I do hope you understand. It’s the least I can do for the people we’ve lost. If Mr. Swan can approach a new employer as if it were a voluntary move, he’s in a far better position than if everyone knew he’d been let go from here.”

Neagley thought about it for a moment, and then she nodded.

“OK,” she said. “I can see your point.”

“Especially in Mr. Swan’s case,” Berenson said. “We all liked him very much.”

“What about the ones you didn’t like?”

“There weren’t any. We would never hire people we didn’t believe in.”

Reacher said, “I called Swan and nobody answered at all.”

Berenson nodded again, still patient and professional. “We had to cut the secretarial pool, too. The ones we kept on are covering five or six phones each. Sometimes they can’t get to every call.”

Reacher asked, “So what’s up with your business plan?”

“I really can’t discuss that in detail. But I’m sure you understand. You were in the army.”

“We both were.”

“Then you know how many new weapons systems work straight out of the gate.”

“Not many.”

“Not any. Ours is taking a little longer than we hoped.”

“What kind of a weapon is it?”

“I really can’t discuss that.”

“Where is it made?”

“Right here.”

Reacher shook his head. “No, it isn’t. You’ve got a fence a three-year-old could walk through and no guard shack at the gate and an unsecured lobby. Tony Swan wouldn’t have let you get away with that if anything sensitive was happening here.”

“I really can’t comment on our procedures.”

“Who was Swan’s boss?”

“Our Director of Security? He’s a retired LAPD lieutenant.”

“And you kept him and let Swan go? Your last-in-first-out policy didn’t do you any favors there.”

“They’re all great people, the ones who stayed and the ones who went. We hated making the cut. But it was an absolute necessity.”

Two minutes later Reacher and Neagley were back in the Mustang, sitting in New Age’s parking lot, engine idling to run the air, with the full scope of the disaster plain to both of them.

“Really bad timing,” Reacher said. “Suddenly Swan is at loose ends, Franz calls him with a problem, what else is Swan going to do? He’s going to run right over there. It’s twenty minutes down the road.”

“He’d have gone anyway, unemployed or not.”

“They all would. And I guess they all did.”

“So are they all dead now?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“You got what you wanted, Reacher. It’s just the two of us.”

“I didn’t want it for these reasons.”

“I just can’t believe it. All of them?”

“Someone’s going to pay.”

“You think? We’ve got nothing. We’ve got one last chance with a password. Which by definition we’ll be too nervous to take.”

“This is no kind of a time to be getting nervous.”

“So tell me what to type.”

Reacher said nothing.

They retraced their route through the surface streets. Neagley drove in silence and Reacher pictured Tony Swan making the same drive more than three weeks earlier. Maybe with the contents of his New Age desk boxed up in his trunk, his pens and pencils and his chip of Soviet concrete. On his way to help his old buddy. Other old buddies pouring in down spokes of an invisible wheel. Sanchez and Orozco hustling over from Vegas on the 15. O’Donnell and Dixon coming in on planes from the East Coast, toting luggage, taking taxis, assembling.

Meeting and greeting.

Running into some kind of a brick wall.

Then their images faded away and he was alone again with Neagley in the car. Just the two of us. Facts were to be faced, not fought.

Neagley left the car with the Beverly Wilshire valets and they entered the lobby from the rear through the crooked corridor. They rode up in the elevator in silence. Neagley used her key and pushed open her door.

Then she stopped dead.

Because sitting in her chair by the window, reading Calvin Franz’s autopsy report, was a man in a suit.

Tall, fair, aristocratic, relaxed.

David O’Donnell.

17

O’Donnell looked up, somber. “I was going to inquire as to the meaning of all those rude and abusive messages on my answering machine.” Then he raised the autopsy report, an explanatory gesture. “But now I understand.”

Neagley asked, “How did you get in here?”

O’Donnell just said, “Oh, please.”

“Where the hell were you?” Reacher asked.

“I was in New Jersey,” O’Donnell said. “My sister was sick.”

“How sick?”

“Very sick.”

“Did she die?”

“No, she recovered.”

“Then you should have been here days ago.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

“We were worried,” Neagley said. “We thought they got you, too.”

O’Donnell nodded. “You should be worried. You should stay worried. It’s a worrying situation. I had to wait four hours for a flight. I used the time making calls. No answer from Franz, obviously. Now I know why, of course. No answer from Swan or Dixon or Orozco or Sanchez, either. My conclusion was that one of them had gotten all the others together and they had run into a problem. Not you or Reacher, because you’re too busy in Chicago and who the hell could ever find Reacher? And not me, because I was temporarily off the grid in New Jersey.”

“I wasn’t too busy,” Neagley said. “How could anyone think that? I’d have dropped everything and come running.”

O’Donnell nodded again. “At first that was the only thing that gave me hope. I figured they would have called you.”

“So why didn’t they? Don’t they like me?”

“If they hated you they’d still have called you. Without you it would have been like fighting with one hand behind their backs. Who would do that voluntarily? But in the end it’s perception that counts, not reality. You’re very high grade now compared to the rest of us. I think they might have hesitated with you. Maybe until it was too late.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that one of them, and now I see that it would have been Franz, was in trouble, and he called all of us that he perceived as readily available. Which excluded you and Reacher by definition, and me also, by bad luck, because I wasn’t where I normally am.”

“That’s how we saw it, too. Except you’re a bonus. Your sister being sick was a stroke of luck for us. And for you, maybe.”

“But not for her.”

“Stop whining,” Reacher said. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

“Nice to see you, too,” O’Donnell said. “After all these years.”

“How did you get in here?” Neagley asked.

O’Donnell shifted in his seat and took a switchblade from one coat pocket and a set of brass knuckles from the other. “A guy who can get these through airport security can get into a hotel room, believe me.”

“How did you get those through an airport?”

“My secret,” O’Donnell said.

“Ceramic,” Reacher said. “They don’t make them anymore. Because they don’t set the metal detector off.”

“Correct,” O’Donnell said. “No metal at all, apart from the switchblade spring, which is still steel. But that’s very small.”

“It’s good to see you again, David,” Reacher said.

“Likewise. But I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“The circumstances just got fifty percent happier. We thought it was just the two of us. Now it’s the three of us.”

“What have we got?”

“Very little. You’ve seen what’s in his autopsy report. Apart from that we’ve got two generic white men who tossed his office. Didn’t find anything, because he was mailing stuff to himself in a permanent loop. We found his mail box and picked up four flash memories and we’re down to the last try at a password.”

“So start thinking about computer security,” Neagley said.

O’Donnell took a deep breath and held it longer than seemed humanly possible. Then he exhaled, gently. It was an old habit.

“Tell me what words you’ve tried so far,” he said.

Neagley opened her notebook to the relevant page and handed it over. O’Donnell put a finger to his lips and read. Reacher watched him. He hadn’t seen him in eleven years, but he hadn’t changed much. He had the kind of corn-colored hair that would never show gray. He had the kind of greyhound’s body that would never show fat. His suit was beautifully cut. In the same way as Neagley, he looked settled and prosperous and successful. Like he was making it.

“Koufax didn’t work?” he asked.

Neagley shook her head. “That was our third try.”

“Should have been your first, out of this list. Franz related to icons, gods, people he admired, performances he idolized. Koufax is the only one of these that really fits the bill. The others are merely sentimental. Miles Davis perhaps, because he loved music, but ultimately he thought music was inessential.”

“Music is inessential and baseball isn’t?”

“Baseball is a metaphor,” O’Donnell said. “An ace pitcher like Sandy Koufax, a man of great integrity, all alone on the mound, the World Series, stakes high, that’s how Franz wanted to see himself. He probably wouldn’t have articulated it exactly that way, but I can tell you his password would have to be a worthy repository for his devotion. And it would be expressed in a brusque, masculine fashion, which would mean a surname only.”

“So what would you vote for?”

“It’s tough, with only one try left. I’d look like a real fool if I were wrong. What are we going to find on there anyway?”

“Something he felt was worth hiding.”

Reacher said, “Something he got his legs broken for. He didn’t give up anything. He drove them into a fury. His office looks like a tornado hit it.”

“What’s our ultimate aim here?”

“Seek and destroy. Is that good enough for you?”

O’Donnell shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I want to kill their families and piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“I’ve gotten worse. Have you changed?”

“If I have I’m ready to change back.”

O’Donnell smiled, briefly. “Neagley, what don’t you do?”

Neagley said, “You don’t mess with the special investigators.”

“Correct,” O’Donnell said. “You do not. Can we get some room service coffee?”

They drank thick strong coffee out of the kind of battered electro-plated jugs found only in old hotels. They kept pretty quiet, but each of them knew the others were tracing the same mental circles, shying away from the last attempt at the password, examining the vector, trying to find another avenue forward, failing to, and starting all over again. Finally O’Donnell put his cup down and said, “Time to shit or get off the pot. Or fish or cut bait. Or however else you want to express it. Let’s hear your ideas.”

Neagley said, “I don’t have any.”

Reacher said, “You do it, Dave. You’ve got something in mind. I can tell.”

“Do you trust me?”

“As far as I could throw you. Which would be pretty damn far, as skinny as you are. Exactly how far, you’ll find out if you screw up.”

O’Donnell got out of his chair and flexed his fingers and stepped over to the laptop on the desk. Put the cursor in the box on the screen and typed seven letters.

Took a breath and held it.

Paused.

Waited.

Hit enter.

The laptop screen redrew.

A file directory appeared. A table of contents. Big, bold, clear and obvious.

O’Donnell breathed out.

He had typed: Reacher.

18

Reacher spun away from the computer like he had been slapped and said, “Ah, man, that ain’t fair.”

“He liked you,” O’Donnell said. “He admired you.”

“It’s like a voice from the grave. Like a call.”

“You were here anyway.”

“It doubles everything. Now I can’t let him down.”

“You weren’t going to in the first place.”

“Too much pressure.”

“No such thing as too much pressure. We like pressure. We thrive on pressure.”

Neagley was at the desk, fingers on the laptop’s keyboard, staring at the screen.

“Eight separate files,” she said. “Seven of them are a bunch of numbers and the eighth is a list of names.”

“Show me the names,” O’Donnell said.

Neagley clicked on an icon and a word processor page opened. It contained a vertical list of five names. At the top, typed in bold and underlined, was Azhari Mahmoud. Then came four Western names: Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, and Anthony Matthews.

“Initials are all the same,” O’Donnell said. “Top one is Arab, anywhere from Morocco to Pakistan.”

“Syrian,” Neagley said. “That would be my guess.”

“Last four names feel British,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? Rather than American? English or Scottish.”

“Significance?” O’Donnell asked.

Reacher said, “At first glance I would say one of Franz’s background checks came up with a Syrian guy with four known aliases. Because of the five sets of common initials. Clumsy, but indicative. Maybe he’s got monogrammed shirts. And maybe the phony names are British because the paperwork is British, which would get around the kind of scrutiny that American paperwork would invite over here.”

“Possible,” O’Donnell said.

Reacher said, “Show me the numbers.”

Neagley closed the word processor document and opened the first of seven spreadsheets. It was nothing more than a page-long vertical list of fractions. At the top was 10/12. At the bottom was 11/12. In between were twenty-some similar numbers, including a repeated 10/12 and a 12/13 and a 9/10.

“Next,” Reacher said.

The next spreadsheet was essentially identical. A long vertical column, starting with 13/14 and ending with 8/9. Twenty-some similar numbers in between.

“Next,” Reacher said.

The third spreadsheet showed more or less exactly the same thing.

“Are they dates?” O’Donnell said.

“No,” Reacher said. “Thirteen-fourteen isn’t a date whether it’s month-day or day-month.”

“So what are they? Just fractions?”

“Not really. Ten-over-twelve would be written five-over-six if it was a regular fraction.”

“They’re like box scores, then.”

“For the game from hell. Thirteen for fourteen and twelve for thirteen would imply lots of extra innings and a three-figure final score, probably.”

“So what are they?”

“Show me the next one.”

The fourth spreadsheet showed the same long vertical list of fractions. The denominators were pretty much the same as in the first three, twelves and tens and thirteens. But the numerators were generally smaller. There was a 9/12, and an 8/13. Even a 5/14.

O’Donnell said, “If these are box scores, someone’s slumping.”

“Next,” Reacher said.

The trend continued. The fifth sheet had a 3/12, and a 4/13. The best was a 6/11.

“Someone’s heading back to the minor leagues,” O’Donnell said.

The sixth list had 5/13 as its best score and 3/13 as its worst. The seventh and last was about the same, varying between 4/11 and 3/12.

Neagley looked up at Reacher and said, “You figure it out. You’re the numbers guy. And Franz addressed all of this to you, after all.”

“I was his password,” Reacher said. “That’s all. He didn’t address anything to anyone. These aren’t messages. He’d have made it clearer if he was trying to communicate. These are working notes.”

“Very cryptic working notes.”

“Can you print them out for me? I can’t think without seeing them on paper.”

“I can print them in the business center downstairs. That’s why I stay in places like this now.”

O’Donnell asked, “Why would they trash an office to look for a list of numbers?”

“Maybe they didn’t,” Reacher said. “Maybe they were looking for the list of names.”

Neagley shut down the spreadsheets and reopened the word processor document. Azhari Mahmoud, Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, Anthony Matthews.

“So who is this guy?” Reacher said.

Three time zones away in New York City it was three hours later in the day and the dark-haired forty-year-old man who could have been Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or Israeli, or Italian was crouching on a bathroom floor inside an expensive Madison Avenue hotel room. The door was closed. There was no smoke detector in the bathroom, but there was an extractor fan. The British passport issued to Adrian Mount was burning in the toilet pan. As always the inside pages went up easily. The stiff red covers burned slower. Page 31 was the laminated ID page. It burned slowest of all. The plastic curled and twisted and melted. The man used the hairdryer from the bathroom wall at a distance to fan the flames. Then he used the butt-end of his toothbrush to stir the ashes and the unburned flakes of paper. He lit another match and went after anything that was still recognizable.

Five minutes later Adrian Mount was flushed away and Alan Mason was on his way down to the street in the elevator.

19

Neagley detoured to the Beverly Wilshire’s basement business center and printed out all eight of Franz’s secret files. Then she joined O’Donnell and Reacher for lunch in the lobby restaurant. She sat between the two of them with the kind of look on her face that made Reacher think she was reliving a hundred similar meals.

And Reacher was doing the same thing himself. But back in the day they had been in creased BDUs and they had eaten in O Clubs or grimy off-post diners or they had shared sandwiches and pizza around battered metal desks. Now the déjà vu was corrupted by the new context. The room was dim and tall and stylish and full of people who could have been movie agents or executives. Actors, even. Neagley and O’Donnell looked right at home. Neagley was wearing baggy black high-waisted pants and a cotton T-shirt that fitted her like a second skin. Her face was tan and flawless and her makeup was so subtle it was like she was wearing none at all. O’Donnell’s suit was gray with a slight sheen to it and his shirt was white and crisp and immaculate even though he must have put it on three thousand miles away. His tie was striped and regimental and perfectly knotted.

Reacher was in a shirt a size too small with a tear in the sleeve and a stain on the front. His hair was long and his jeans were cheap and his shoes were scuffed and he couldn’t afford to pay for the dish he had ordered. He couldn’t even afford to pay for the Norwegian water he was drinking.

Sad, he had said about Franz, when he had seen the strip mall office. From the big green machine to this?

What were Neagley and O’Donnell thinking about him?

“Show me the pages with the numbers,” he said.

Neagley passed seven sheets of paper across the table. She had marked them in pencil, top right-hand corner, to indicate their order. He scanned them all, one through seven, quickly, looking for overall impressions. A total of 183 proper fractions, not canceled. Proper, in that the numerator, the top number, was always smaller than the denominator, the bottom number. Not canceled, in that 10/12 and 8/10 were not expressed as 5/6 and 4/5, which they would have been if the arithmetic convention had been properly followed.

Therefore, they were not really fractions at all. They were scores, or results, or performance assessments. They were saying ten times out of twelve or eight times out of ten, something happened.

Or didn’t happen.

There were consistently twenty-six scores on each page, except for the fourth sheet, where there were twenty-seven.

The scores or the results or the ratios or whatever they were on the first three sheets looked pretty healthy. Expressed like a batting average or a win percentage, they hovered between a fine .870 and an excellent .907. Then there was a dramatic fall on the fourth sheet, where the overall average looked like a .574. The fifth, sixth, and seventh sheets got progressively more and more dismal, with a .368, a .308, and a .307.

“Got it yet?” Neagley asked.

“No clue,” Reacher said. “I wish Franz was here to explain it.”

“If he was here, we wouldn’t be here.”

“We could have been. We could have all gotten together from time to time.”

“Like a class reunion?”

“It might have been fun.”

O’Donnell raised his glass and said, “Absent friends.”

Neagley raised her glass. Reacher raised his. They drank water that had frozen at the top of a Scandinavian glacier ten thousand years ago and then inched downward over centuries, before melting into mountain springs and streams, to the memory of four friends, five including Stan Lowrey, who they assumed they would never see again.

But they assumed wrong. One of their friends had just gotten on a plane in Las Vegas.

20

A waiter brought their food. Salmon for Neagley, chicken for Reacher, tuna for O’Donnell, who said, “I assume you’ve been to Franz’s house.”

“Yesterday,” Neagley said. “Santa Monica.”

“Anything there?”

“A widow and a fatherless child.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing that meant anything.”

“We should go to all the houses. Swan’s first, because it’ll be the closest.”

“We don’t have his address.”

“Didn’t you ask the New Age lady?”

“Not worth it. She wouldn’t have told us. She was very correct.”

“You could have broken her leg.”

“Those were the days.”

Reacher asked, “Was Swan married?”

“I don’t think so,” Neagley said.

“Too ugly,” O’Donnell said.

“Are you married?” Neagley asked him.

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“But for the opposite reason. It would upset too many other innocent parties.”

Reacher said, “We could try that UPS thing again. Swan probably got packages at home. If he wasn’t married he probably furnished his place from catalogs. I can’t see him shopping for chairs or tables or knives and forks.”

“OK,” Neagley said. She used her cell to call Chicago, right there at the table, and looked more like a movie executive than ever. O’Donnell leaned forward and looked across her to Reacher and said, “Go over the time line for me.”

“The dragon lady at New Age said Swan got fired more than three weeks ago. Call it twenty-four or twenty-five days. Twenty-three days ago Franz went out and never came back. His wife called Neagley fourteen days after the body was found.”

“For what reason?”

“Notification, pure and simple. She’s relying on the deputies from up where it happened.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s a civilian. She looks like Michelle Pfeiffer. She’s halfway resentful of us for having been such good friends with her husband. Their son looks just like him.”

“Poor kid.”

Neagley covered her phone with her hand and said, “We got cell numbers for Sanchez, Orozco, and Swan.” She fumbled one-handed and took paper and pen from her purse. Wrote three numbers, ten digits each.

“Use them to get addresses,” Reacher said.

Neagley shook her head. “They don’t help. Sanchez’s and Orozco’s are corporate and Swan’s comes back to New Age.” She clicked off with her guy in Chicago and dialed the numbers she had listed, one after another.

“Straight to voice mail,” she said. “Switched off, all of them.”

“Inevitable,” Reacher said. “All the batteries ran out three weeks ago.”

“I really hate hearing their voices,” she said. “You know, you record your mail-box greeting, you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to you.”

“A little bit of immortality,” O’Donnell said.

A busboy took their plates away. Their waiter came back with dessert menus. Reacher scanned a list of confections priced higher than a night in a motel in most parts of the United States.

“Nothing for me,” he said. He thought Neagley was going to press him, but her cell phone rang. She answered it and listened and wrote some more on her slip of paper.

“Swan’s address,” she said. “Santa Ana, near the zoo.”

O’Donnell said, “Let’s hit the road.”

They used his car, a Hertz four-door with GPS navigation, and started the slow crawl south and east to the 5.

The man called Thomas Brant watched them go. His Crown Vic was parked a block away and he was sitting on a bench in the mouth of Rodeo Drive, surrounded by two hundred tourists. He used his cell and called Curtis Mauney, his boss. Said, “There are three of them now. It’s working like a charm. It’s like the gathering of the clans.”

Forty yards west, the man in the blue suit watched them go, too. He was slumped low in his blue Chrysler in a hairdresser’s lot on Wilshire. He dialed his boss and said, “There are three of them now. I think the new one must be O’Donnell. Therefore the bum is Reacher. They look like they’ve got the bit between their teeth.”

And three thousand miles away in New York City the dark-haired forty-year-old was in the shared airline offices at Park and 42nd. He was buying an open round-trip ticket from LaGuardia to Denver, Colorado. He was paying for it with a Visa Platinum card in the name of Alan Mason.

21

Santa Ana was way south and east, past Anaheim, down in Orange County. The township itself was twenty miles west of the Santa Ana Mountains, where the infamous winds came from. Time to time they blew in, dry, warm, steady, and they sent the whole of LA crazy. Reacher had seen their effects a couple of times. Once he had been in town after liaising with the jarheads at Camp Pendleton. Once he had been on a weekend pass from Fort Irwin. He had seen minor barroom brawls end up as multiple first-degree homicides. He had seen burnt toast end up in wife-beating and prison and divorce. He had seen a guy get bludgeoned to the ground for walking too slow on the sidewalk.

But the winds weren’t blowing that day. The air was hot and still and brown and heavy. O’Donnell’s rented GPS had a polite insistent female voice that took them off the 5 south of the zoo, opposite Tustin. Then it led them through the spacious grid of streets toward the Orange County Museum of Art. Before they got there it turned them left and right and left again and told them they were approaching their destination. Then it told them they had arrived.

Which they clearly had.

O’Donnell coasted to a stop next to a curbside mail box tricked out to look like a swan. The box was a standard USPS-approved metal item set on a post and painted bright white. Along the spine at the top was attached a vertical shape jigsawed from a wooden board. The shape had a long graceful neck and a scalloped back and a kicked-up tail. It was painted white too, except for the beak, which was dark orange, and the eye, which was black. With the bulk of the box suggesting the swell of the bird’s body it was a pretty good representation.

O’Donnell said, “Tell me Swan didn’t make that.”

“Nephew or niece,” Neagley said. “Probably a housewarming gift.”

“Which he had to use in case they visited.”

“I think it’s nice.”

Behind the box a cast concrete driveway led to a double gate in a four-foot fence. Parallel to the driveway was a narrower concrete walkway that led to a single gate. The fence was made of green plastic-coated wire. All four gateposts were topped with tiny alloy pineapples. Both gates were closed. Both had store-bought Beware of the Dog signs on them. The driveway led to an attached one-car garage. The walkway led to the front door of a small plain stucco bungalow painted a sun-baked tan. The windows had corrugated metal awnings over them, like eyebrows. The door had a similar thing, narrower, set high. As a whole the place was serious, severe, adequate, unfrivolous. Masculine.

And quiet, and still.

“Feels empty,” Neagley said. “Like there’s nobody home.”

Reacher nodded. The front yard was grass only. No plantings. No flowers. No shrubs. The grass looked dry and slightly long, like a meticulous owner had stopped watering it and mowing it about three weeks ago.

There was no visible alarm system.

“Let’s check it out,” Reacher said.

They got out of the car and walked to the single gate. It wasn’t locked or chained. They walked to the door. Reacher pushed the bell. Waited. No response. There was a slab path around the perimeter of the building. They followed it counterclockwise. There was a personnel door in the side of the garage. It was locked. There was a kitchen door in the back wall of the house. It was locked, too. The top half of it was a single glass panel. Through it was visible a small kitchen, old-fashioned, unrenovated in maybe forty years, but clean and efficient. No mess. No dirty dishes. Appliances in speckled green enamel. A small table and two chairs. Empty dog bowls neatly side by side on a green linoleum floor.

Beyond the kitchen door was a slider with a step down to a small concrete patio. The patio was empty. The slider was locked. Behind it, drapes were partially drawn. A bedroom, maybe used as a den.

The neighborhood was quiet. The house was still and silent, except for a tiny subliminal hum that raised the hairs on Reacher’s arms and sounded a faint alarm in the back of his mind.

“Kitchen door?” O’Donnell asked.

Reacher nodded. O’Donnell put his hand in his pocket and came out with his brass knuckles. Ceramic knuckles, technically. But they didn’t have much in common with cups and saucers. They were made from some kind of a complex mineral powder, molded under tremendous pressure and bound with epoxy adhesives. They were probably stronger than steel and certainly they were harder than brass. And the molding process allowed wicked shapes in the striking surfaces. Being hit by a set wielded by a guy as big as David O’Donnell would be like being hit by a bowling ball studded with sharks’ teeth.

O’Donnell fitted them to his hand and balled his fist. He stepped to the kitchen door and tapped the glass backhand, quite gently, like he was trying to attract an occupant’s attention without startling him. The glass broke and a triangular shard fell backward into the kitchen. O’Donnell’s coordination was so good that his real knuckles stopped before they reached the jagged edges. He tapped twice more and cleared a hole big enough to get a hand through. Then he slipped the knuckles off and pushed his sleeve up on his forearm and threaded his hand through and turned the inside handle.

The door sagged open.

No alarm.

Reacher went in first. Took two steps and stopped. Inside, the hum he had sensed was louder. And there was a smell in the air. Both were unmistakable. He had heard similar sounds and smelled similar smells more times than he wanted to remember.

The hum was a million flies going crazy.

The smell was dead flesh, rotting and decomposing, leaking putrid fluids and gases.

Neagley and O’Donnell crowded in behind him. And stopped.

“We knew anyway,” O’Donnell said, maybe to himself. “This is not a shock.”

“It’s always a shock,” Neagley said. “I hope it always will be.”

She covered her mouth and nose. Reacher stepped to the kitchen door. There was nothing on the hallway floor. But the smell was worse out there, and the noise was louder. There were stray flies in the air, big and blue and shiny, buzzing and darting and hitting the walls with tiny papery sounds. They were in and out of a door that was standing partially open.

“The bathroom,” Reacher said.

The house was laid out like Calvin Franz’s, but it was bigger because the lots were larger in Santa Ana than they had been in Santa Monica. Cheaper real estate, more scope. There was a center hallway and each room was a real room, not just a corner of an open plan space. Kitchen in back, living room in front, separated by a walk-in closet. On the other side of the hallway, two bedrooms separated by a bathroom.

Impossible to say where the smell was coming from. It filled the house.

But the flies were interested in the bathroom.

The air was hot and foul. No sound, except the insane thrashing of the flies. On porcelain, on tile, on papered walls, on the hollow wood of the door.

“Stay here,” Reacher said.

He walked down the hallway. Two paces. Three. He stopped outside the bathroom. Nudged the door with his foot. An angry black cloud of flies billowed out at him. He turned away and batted the air. Turned back. Used his foot again and pushed the door all the way open. Fanned the air and peered through the buzzing insects.

There was a body on the floor.

It was a dog.

Once it had been a German shepherd, big, beautiful, maybe a hundred pounds, maybe a hundred and ten. It was lying on its side. Its hair was dead and matted. Its mouth was open. Flies were feasting on its tongue and its nose and its eyes.

Reacher stepped right into the bathroom. Flies swarmed around his shins. There was nothing in the tub. The toilet was empty. All the water was gone from the throat. There were towels undisturbed on the rails. Dried brown stains on the floor. Not blood. Just leakage from failed sphincters.

Reacher backed out of the bathroom.

“It’s his dog,” he said. “Check the other rooms and the garage.”

There was nothing in the other rooms or the garage. No signs of struggle or disturbance, no sign of Swan himself. They regrouped in the hallway. The flies had settled back to their business in the bathroom.

“What happened here?” Neagley asked.

“Swan went out,” O’Donnell said. “Didn’t come back. The dog starved to death.”

“It died of thirst,” Reacher said.

Nobody spoke.

“The water bowl in the kitchen is dry,” Reacher said. “Then it drank what it could from the toilet. Probably lasted about a week.”

“Awful,” Neagley said.

“You bet. I like dogs. If I lived anywhere I’d have three or four. We’re going to rent a helicopter and we’re going to throw these guys out one by one in little pieces.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

O’Donnell said, “We’re going to need more than we’ve got now.”

Reacher said, “So let’s start looking.”

They took scraps of paper towel from the kitchen and balled them up and shoved them up their noses to combat the smell. Settled down to a long and serious search. O’Donnell took the kitchen. Neagley took the living room. Reacher took Swan’s bedroom.

They found nothing of any significance in any of those three places. Quite apart from the dog’s predicament, it was clear that Swan had gone out expecting to return. The dishwasher was half-loaded and had not been run. There was food in the refrigerator and trash in the kitchen pail. Pajamas were folded under the pillow. A half-finished book was resting on the night table. It had one of Swan’s own business cards jammed in it as a placeholder: Anthony Swan, U.S. Army (Retired), Assistant Director of Corporate Security, New Age Defense Systems, Los Angeles, California. On the bottom of the card was an e-mail address and the same direct-line phone number that Reacher and Neagley had tried so many times.

“What exactly does New Age make?” O’Donnell asked.

“Money,” Reacher said. “Although less than it used to, I guess.”

“Does it have a product or is it all research?”

“The woman we saw claimed they’re manufacturing something somewhere.”

“What exactly?”

“We have no idea.”

The three of them tackled the second bedroom together. The one at the back of the house, with the draped slider and the step down to the empty patio. The room had a bed in it but was clearly used as a den most of the time. There was a desk and a phone and a file cabinet and a wall of shelves piled high with the kind of junk that a sentimental person accumulates.

They started with the desk. Three pairs of eyes, three separate assessments. They found nothing. They moved on to the file cabinet. It was full of the kind of routine paperwork any homeowner has. Property taxes, insurance, canceled checks, paid bills, receipts. There was a personal section. Social Security, state and federal income taxes, a contract of employment from New Age Defense Systems, paycheck stubs. It looked like Swan had made a decent living. In a month he had pulled down what Reacher could make last a year and a half.

There was stuff from a veterinarian. The dog had been female. Her name had been Maisi and her shots had all been up-to-date. She had been old but in good health. There was stuff from an organization called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Swan had been a contributor. Big money. Therefore a worthwhile cause, Reacher guessed. Swan was nobody’s fool.

They checked the shelves. Found a shoe box full of photographs. They were random snaps from Swan’s life and career. Maisi the dog was in some of them. Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell were in others, and Franz, and Karla Dixon, and Sanchez and Orozco, and Stan Lowrey. All of them long ago in the past, younger, different in crucial ways, blazing with youth and vigor and preoccupation. There were random pairings and trios from offices and squad rooms all over the world. One was a formal group portrait, all nine of them in Class A uniforms after a ceremony for a unit citation. Reacher didn’t remember who had taken the picture. An official photographer, probably. He didn’t remember what the citation had been for, either.

“We need to get going,” Neagley said. “Neighbors might have seen us.”

“We’ve got probable cause,” O’Donnell said. “A friend who lives alone, no answer when we knocked on the door, a bad smell from inside.”

Reacher stepped to the desk and picked up the phone. Hit redial. There was a rapid sequence of electronic blips as the circuit remembered the last number called. Then a purring ring tone. Then Angela Franz answered. Reacher could hear Charlie in the background. He put the phone down.

“The last call he made was to Franz,” he said. “At home in Santa Monica.”

“Reporting for duty,” O’Donnell said. “We knew that already. Doesn’t help us.”

“Nothing here helps us,” Neagley said.

“But what isn’t here might,” Reacher said. “His piece of the Berlin Wall isn’t here. There’s no box of stuff from his desk at New Age.”

“How does that help us?”

“It might establish a time line. You get canned, you box up your stuff, you throw it in the trunk of your car, how long do you leave it there before you bring it in the house and deal with it?”

“A day or two, maybe,” O’Donnell said. “A guy like Swan, he’s extremely pissed when it happens, but fundamentally he’s a squared-away personality. He’d suck it up and move on fast enough.”

“Two days?”

“Max.”

“So all of this went down within two days of when New Age let him go.”

“How does that help us?” Neagley asked again.

“No idea,” Reacher said. “But the more we know the luckier we’ll get.”

They left through the kitchen and closed the door but didn’t relock it. No point. The broken glass made it superfluous. They followed the slab path around the side of the garage to the driveway. Headed back to the curb. It was a quiet neighborhood. A dormitory. Nothing was moving. Reacher scanned left and right for signs of nosy neighbors and saw none. No onlookers, no furtive eyes behind twitching drapes.

But he did see a tan Crown Victoria parked forty yards away.

Facing them.

A guy behind the wheel.

22

Reacher said, “Come to a casual stop and turn around like you’re taking one last look at the house. Make conversation.”

O’Donnell turned.

“Looks like the married officers’ quarters at Fort Hood,” he said.

“Apart from the mail box,” Reacher said.

Neagley turned.

“I like it,” she said. “The mail box, I mean.”

Reacher said, “There’s a tan Crown Vic parked on the curb forty yards west. It’s tailing us. Tailing Neagley, to be precise. It was there when I met her on Sunset and it was there again outside Franz’s place. Now it’s here.”

O’Donnell asked, “Any idea who it is?”

“None at all,” Reacher said. “But I think it’s time to find out.”

“Like we used to?”

Reacher nodded. “Exactly like we used to. I’ll drive.”

They took one last look at Swan’s house and then they turned and walked slowly back to the curb. They slid into O’Donnell’s rental, Reacher in the driver’s seat, Neagley next to him in the front, O’Donnell behind him in the back. No seat belts.

“Don’t hurt my car,” O’Donnell said. “I didn’t get the extra insurance.”

“You should have,” Reacher said. “Always a wise precaution.”

He started the engine and eased away from the curb. Checked the view ahead, checked the mirror.

Nothing coming.

He spun the wheel and stamped on the gas and pulled a fast U-turn across the width of the road. Hit the gas again and accelerated thirty yards. Jammed on the brakes and O’Donnell jumped out a yard in front of the Crown Vic and Reacher hit the gas and then the brake again and stopped dead level with the Crown Vic’s driver’s door. O’Donnell was already at the passenger window. Reacher jumped out and O’Donnell shattered the passenger glass with his knuckles and chased the driver out the other side of the car straight into Reacher’s arms. Reacher hit him once in the gut and then again in the face. Fast and hard. The guy slammed back against the side of his car and went down on his knees. Reacher picked his spot and hit him a third time, a solid elbow against the side of his head. The guy fell sideways, slowly, like a bulldozed tree. He finished up jammed in the space between the Crown Vic’s sill and the road. Sprawled out on his back, inert, unconscious, bleeding heavily from a broken nose.

“Well, that still works,” O’Donnell said.

“As long as I do the hard part,” Reacher said.

Neagley took hold of the loose folds of the guy’s sport coat and flipped him on his side, so that the blood from his nose would pool on the blacktop rather than in the back of his throat. No point in drowning him. Then she pulled the flap of his coat open, looking for a pocket.

And then she stopped.

Because the guy was wearing a shoulder holster. An old well-used item, made of worn black leather. There was a Glock 17 in it. He was wearing a belt. The belt had a pouch for a spare magazine on it. And a pancake holder with a pair of stainless-steel handcuffs in it.

Police issue.

Reacher glanced inside the Crown Vic. There were pebbles of broken glass all over the passenger seat. There was a radio mounted under the dash.

Not a taxicab radio.

“Shit,” Reacher said. “We just took down a cop.”

“You did the hard part,” O’Donnell said.

Reacher crouched and put his fingers against the guy’s neck. Felt for his pulse. It was there, strong and regular. The guy was breathing. His nose was busted bad, which would be an aesthetic problem later, but he hadn’t been very good-looking to start with.

“Why was he tailing us?” Neagley said.

“We’ll work that out later,” Reacher said. “When we’re a long way from here.”

“Why did you hit him so hard?”

“I was upset about the dog.”

“This guy didn’t do that.”

“I know that now.”

Neagley dug through the guy’s pockets. Came out with a leather ID folder. There was a chrome-plated badge pinned inside it, opposite a laminated card behind a milky plastic window.

“His name is Thomas Brant,” she said. “He’s an LA County deputy.”

“This is Orange County,” O’Donnell said. “He’s outside of his jurisdiction. As he was on Sunset and in Santa Monica.”

“Think that will help us?”

“Not very much.”

Reacher said, “Let’s get him comfortable and get the hell out of here.”

O’Donnell took Brant’s feet and Reacher took his shoulders and they piled him into the rear seat of his car. They stretched him out and arranged him and left him in what medics call the recovery position, on his side, one leg drawn up, able to breathe, unlikely to choke. The Crown Vic was spacious. The engine was off and there was plenty of fresh air coming in through the broken window.

“He’ll be OK,” O’Donnell said.

“He’ll have to be,” Reacher said.

They closed the door on him and turned back to O’Donnell’s rental. It was still right there in the middle of the street, three doors open, engine still running. Reacher got in the back. O’Donnell drove. Neagley sat next to him. The polite voice inside the GPS set about guiding them back toward the freeway.

“We should return this car,” Neagley said. “Right now. And then my Mustang. He’ll have gotten both the plate numbers.”

“And then do what for transport?” Reacher asked.

“Your turn to rent something.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“Then we’ll have to take cabs. We have to break the link.”

“That means changing hotels, too.”

“So be it.”

The GPS wouldn’t allow adjustment on the fly. A liability issue. O’Donnell pulled over and stopped and altered the destination from the Beverly Wilshire to the Hertz lot at LAX. The unit took the change in its stride. There was a second’s delay while a Calculating Route bar spooled up and then the patient voice came back and told O’Donnell to turn around and head west instead of east, toward the 405 instead of the 5. Traffic was OK through the subdivisions and heavy on the freeway. Progress was slow.

“Tell me about yesterday,” Reacher said to Neagley.

“What about it?”

“What you did.”

“I flew into LAX and rented the car. Drove to the hotel on Wilshire. Checked in. Worked for an hour. Then I drove up to the Denny’s on Sunset. Waited for you.”

“You must have been tailed all the way from the airport.”

“Clearly. The question is, why?”

“No, that’s the second question. The first question is, how? Who knew when and where you were coming in?”

“The cop, obviously. He put a flag against my name and Homeland Security tipped him off as soon as I bought my ticket.”

“OK, why?”

“He’s working on Franz. LA County deputies. I’m a known associate.”

“We all are.”

“I was the first to arrive.”

“So are we suspects?”

“Maybe. In the absence of any others.”

“How stupid are they?”

“They’re about normal. Even we looked at known associates if we struck out everywhere else.”

Reacher said, “You do not mess with the special investigators.”

“Correct,” Neagley said. “But we just messed with the LA County deputies. Big time. I hope they don’t have a similar slogan.”

“You can bet your ass they do.”

LAX was a gigantic, sprawling mess. Like every airport Reacher had ever seen it was permanently half-finished. O’Donnell threaded through construction zones and perimeter roads and made it to the car rental returns. The different organizations were all lined up, the red one, the green one, the blue one, and finally the Hertz yellow. O’Donnell parked on the end of a long nose-to-tail line and a guy in a company jacket rushed up and scanned a barcode in the rear window with a handheld reader. That was it, vehicle returned, rental over. Chain broken.

“Now what?” O’Donnell said.

Neagley said, “Now we take the shuttle bus to the terminal and we find a cab. Then we check out of the hotel and the two of us come back here with my Mustang. Reacher can find a new hotel and start work on those numbers. OK?”

But Reacher didn’t reply. He was staring across the lot, through the rental office’s plate glass windows. At the line of people inside.

He was smiling.

“What?” Neagley said. “Reacher, what?”

“In there,” Reacher said. “Fourth in line. See her?”

“Who?”

“Small woman, dark hair? I’m pretty sure that’s Karla Dixon.”

23

Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell hurried across the lot, getting surer with every step. By the time they were ten feet from the office windows they were absolutely certain. It was Karla Dixon. She was unmistakable. Dark and comparatively small, a happy woman who thought the worst of people. She was right there, now third in line. Her body language said she was simultaneously impatient with and resigned to the wait. As always she looked relaxed but never quite still, always burning energy, always giving the impression that twenty-four hours in the day were not enough for her. She was thinner than Reacher remembered. She was dressed in tight black jeans and a black leather jacket. Her thick black hair was cut short. She had a black leather Tumi roll-on next to her and a black leather briefcase slung across her shoulder.

Then as if she felt their gazes on her back she turned around and looked straight at them, nothing much in her face, as if she had last seen them minutes ago instead of years ago. She smiled a brief smile. The smile was a little sad, as if she already knew what was happening. Then she jerked her head at the clerks behind the counter as if to say, I’ll be right there but you know how it is with civilians. Reacher pointed at himself and Neagley and O’Donnell and held up four fingers and mouthed, Get a four-seat car. Dixon nodded again and turned back to wait.

Neagley said, “This is kind of biblical. People keep coming back to life.”

“Nothing biblical about it,” Reacher said. “Our assumptions were wrong, is all.”

A fourth clerk came out of a back office and took up station behind the counter. Dixon went from being third in line to being served within about thirty seconds. Reacher saw the pink flash of a New York driver’s license and the platinum flash of a credit card changing hands. The clerk typed and Dixon signed a bunch of stuff and then received a fat yellow packet and a key. She hoisted her briefcase and grabbed her roll-on and headed for the exit. She stepped out to the sidewalk. She stood in front of Reacher and Neagley and O’Donnell and looked at each of them in turn with a level, serious gaze. Said, “Sorry I’m late to the party. But then, it’s not really much of a party, is it?”

“What do you know so far?” Reacher asked her.

Dixon said, “I only just got your messages. I didn’t want to wait around in New York for a direct flight. I wanted to be on the move. First flight out was through Las Vegas. I had a two-hour layover there. So I made some calls and did some running around. Some checking. And I found out that Sanchez and Orozco are missing. It seems that about three weeks ago they just vanished off the face of the earth.”

24

Hertz had given Dixon a Ford 500, which was a decent-sized four-seat sedan. She put her bags in the trunk and climbed in the driver’s seat. Neagley sat next to her in the front and Reacher and O’Donnell squeezed in the back. Dixon started up and left the airport heading north on Sepulveda. She talked for the first five minutes. She had been working undercover as a new hire at a Wall Street brokerage house. Her client was a major institutional investor worried about illegalities. Like all undercover operatives who want to survive, she had stuck religiously to her cover, which meant she could afford no contact with her regular life. She couldn’t call her office on her brokerage-supplied cell or on her brokerage-supplied landline from her brokerage-supplied corporate apartment, or get her e-mail on her brokerage-supplied BlackBerry. Eventually she had checked in clandestinely from a Port Authority pay phone and found the long string of increasingly desperate 10-30s on her machine. So she had ditched her job and her client and headed straight for JFK and jumped on America West. From the Vegas airport she had called Sanchez and Orozco and gotten no reply. Worse, their voice mail was full, which was a bad sign. So she had cabbed over to their offices and found them deserted with three weeks’ worth of mail backed up behind the door. Their neighbors hadn’t seen them in a long time.

“So that’s it,” Reacher said. “Now we know for sure. It’s just the four of us left.”

Then Neagley talked for five minutes. She gave the same kind of clear concise briefing she had given a thousand times before. No wasted words, no omitted details. She covered all the hard intelligence and all the speculation from Angela Franz’s first phone call onward. The autopsy report, the small house in Santa Monica, the trashed Culver City office, the flash memories, the New Age building, O’Donnell’s arrival, the dead dog, the unfortunate attack on the LA County deputy outside Swan’s house in Santa Ana, the subsequent decision to ditch the Hertz cars to derail the inevitable pursuit.

“Well, that part is taken care of at least,” Dixon said. “Nobody is following us now, so this car is clean for the time being.”

“Conclusions?” Reacher asked.

Dixon thought for three hundred yards of slow boulevard traffic. Then she slid onto the 405, the San Diego Freeway, but heading north, away from San Diego, toward Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys.

“One conclusion, mainly,” she said. “This wasn’t about Franz calling only some of us because he assumed only some of us would be available. And it wasn’t about him calling only some of us because he underestimated the extent of his problem. Franz was way too smart for that. And too cautious now, apparently, what with the kid and all. So we need to shift the paradigm. Look at who’s here and who isn’t. I think this was about Franz calling only those of us who could get to him in a big hurry. Real fast. Swan, obviously, because he was right here in town, and then Sanchez and Orozco because they were only an hour or so away in Vegas. The rest of us were no good to him. Because we were all at least a day away. So this is about speed and panic and urgency. The kind of thing where half a day makes a difference.”

“Specifically?” Reacher asked.

“No idea. It’s a shame you burned the first eleven passwords. We could have seen what information was new or different.”

O’Donnell said, “It’s got to be the names. They were the only hard data.”

“Numbers can be hard data, too,” Dixon said.

“You’ll go blind figuring them out.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes numbers speak to me.”

“These won’t.”

There was quiet in the car for a moment. Traffic was moving OK. Dixon stayed on the 405 and blew through the intersection with the 10.

“Where are we headed?” she asked.

Neagley said, “Let’s go to the Chateau Marmont. It’s out of the way and discreet.”

“And expensive,” Reacher said. Something in his tone made Dixon take her eyes off the road and glance behind her. Neagley said, “Reacher’s broke.”

“I’m not surprised,” Dixon said. “He hasn’t worked in nine years.”

“He didn’t do much when he was in the army, either,” O’Donnell said. “Why change the habit of a lifetime?”

“He’s sensitive about other people paying for him,” Neagley said.

“Poor baby,” Dixon said.

Reacher said, “I’m just trying to be polite.”

Dixon stayed on the 405 until Santa Monica Boulevard. Then she struck out north and east, aiming to pass through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to hit Sunset right at the base of Laurel Canyon.

“Mission statement,” she said. “You do not mess with the special investigators. The four of us here have to make that stick. On behalf of the four of us who aren’t here. So we need a command structure and a plan and a budget.”

Neagley said, “I’ll take care of the budget.”

“Can you?”

“This year alone there’s seven billion dollars of Homeland Security money washing around the private system. Some of it comes our way in Chicago and I own half of whatever part of it sticks in our books.”

“So are you rich?”

“Richer than I was when I was a sergeant.”

“We’ll get it back anyway,” O’Donnell said. “People get killed for love or money, and our guys sure as hell didn’t get killed for love. So there’s money in this somewhere.”

“So are we agreed on Neagley staking the budget?” Dixon asked.

“What is this, a democracy?” Reacher said.

“Temporarily. Are we agreed?”

Four raised hands. Two majors and a captain, letting a sergeant pick up the tab.

“OK, the plan,” Dixon said.

“Command structure first,” O’Donnell said. “Can’t put the cart before the horse.”

“OK,” Dixon said. “I nominate Reacher for CO.”

“Me too,” O’Donnell said.

“Me three,” Neagley said. “Like it always was.”

“Can’t do it,” Reacher said. “I hit that cop. If it comes to it, I’m going to have to put my hands up for it and leave the rest of you to carry on without me. Can’t have a CO in that position.”

Dixon said, “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“We’re coming to it,” Reacher said. “For sure. Tomorrow or the next day at the latest.”

“Maybe they’ll let it go.”

“Dream on. Would we have let it go?”

“Maybe he’ll be too shamefaced to report it.”

“He doesn’t have to report it. People will notice. He’s got a busted window and a busted nose.”

“Does he even know who you are?”

“He put Neagley’s name in the machine. He was tailing us. He knows who we are.”

“You can’t put your hands up for it,” O’Donnell said. “You’ll go to jail. If it comes to it, you’ll have to get out of town.”

“Can’t do that. If they don’t get me, they’ll come after you and Neagley as accessories. We don’t want that. We need boots on the ground here.”

“We’ll get you a lawyer. A cheap one.”

“No, a good one,” Dixon said.

“Whatever, I’ll still be preoccupied,” Reacher said.

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “Neagley should be CO.”

“I decline,” Neagley said.

“You can’t decline. It’s an order.”

“It can’t be an order until you’re CO.”

“Dixon, then.”

“Declined,” Dixon said.

“OK, O’Donnell.”

“Pass.”

Dixon said, “Reacher until he goes to jail. Then Neagley. All in favor?”

Three hands went up.

“You’ll regret this,” Reacher said. “I’ll make you regret it.”

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Dixon asked, and the question sent Reacher spinning nine years into the past, to the last time he had heard anyone ask it.

“Same as ever,” he said. “We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

25

The Chateau Marmont was a bohemian old pile on Sunset, near the foot of Laurel Canyon. All kinds of movie stars and rock stars had stayed there. There were plenty of photographs on the walls. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, James Dean, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison. Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane had booked in there. John Belushi had died in there, after speedballing enough heroin and cocaine to take down every guest in the hotel. There were no photographs of him.

The desk clerk wanted IDs along with Neagley’s platinum card, so they all checked in under their real names. No choice. Then the guy told them there were only three rooms available. Neagley had to be alone, so Reacher and O’Donnell bunked together and let the women have a room each. Then O’Donnell drove Neagley back to the Beverly Wilshire in Dixon’s car to pick up their bags and check out. Then Neagley would take the Mustang back to LAX and O’Donnell would follow her in convoy to bring her back. It would be a three-hour hiatus. Reacher and Dixon would stay behind and spend the three hours working on the numbers.

They set up in Dixon’s room. According to the desk guy, Leonardo DiCaprio had been in there once, but there was no remaining sign of him. Reacher laid the seven spreadsheets side by side on the bed and watched as Dixon bent down and scanned them, the same way some people read music or poetry.

“Two key issues,” she said immediately. “There are no hundred percent scores. No ten out of ten, no nine out of nine.”

“And?”

“The first three sheets have twenty-six numbers, the fourth has twenty-seven, and the last three all have twenty-six again.”

“Which means what?”

“I don’t know. But none of the sheets is full. Therefore the twenty-six thing and the twenty-seven thing must mean something. It’s deliberate, not accidental. It’s not just a continuous list of numbers with page breaks. If it was, Franz could have gotten them onto six sheets, not seven. So it’s seven separate categories of something.”

“Separate but similar,” Reacher said. “It’s a descriptive sequence.”

“The scores get worse,” Dixon said.

“Radically.”

“And quite suddenly. They’re OK, and then they fall off a cliff.”

“But what are they?”

“No idea.”

Reacher asked, “What can be measured like that, repetitively?”

“Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse.”

“What are the categories? What are we looking at? Seven of what?”

Dixon nodded. “That’s the key. We need to understand that first.”

“Can’t be medical tests. Can’t be any kind of tests. Why stick twenty-seven questions in the middle of a sequence where everything else is twenty-six questions? That would destroy consistency.”

Dixon shrugged and stood up straight. She took off her jacket and dumped it on a chair. Walked to the window and pulled a faded drape aside and looked out and down. Then up at the hills.

“I like LA,” she said.

“Me too, I guess,” Reacher said.

“I like New York better.”

“Me too, probably.”

“But the contrast is nice.”

“I guess.”

“Shitty circumstances, but it’s great to see you again, Reacher. Really great.”

Reacher nodded. “Likewise. We thought we’d lost you. Didn’t feel good.”

“Can I hug you?”

“You want to hug me?”

“I wanted to hug all of you at the Hertz office. But I didn’t, because Neagley wouldn’t have liked it.”

“She shook Angela Franz’s hand. And the dragon lady’s, at New Age.”

“That’s progress,” Dixon said.

“A little,” Reacher said.

“She was abused, way back. That was always my guess.”

“She’ll never talk about it,” Reacher said.

“It’s sad.”

“You bet.”

Karla Dixon turned to him and Reacher took her in his arms and hugged her hard. She was fragrant. Her hair smelled of shampoo. He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, a complete slow circle. She felt light and thin and fragile. Her back was narrow. She was wearing a black silk shirt, and her skin felt warm underneath it. He set her back on her feet and she stretched up tall and kissed his cheek.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed you all, I mean.”

“Me too,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much.”

“You like life after the army?” she asked.

“Yes, I like it fine.”

“I don’t. But maybe you’re reacting better than me.”

“I don’t know how I’m reacting. I don’t know whether I’m reacting at all. I look at you people and I feel like I’m just treading water. Or drowning. You all are swimming.”

“Are you really broke?”

“Almost penniless.”

“Me too,” she said. “I earn three hundred grand a year and I’m on the breadline. That’s life. You’re well out of it.”

“I feel that way, usually. Until I have to get back in it. Neagley put a thousand and thirty bucks in my bank account.”

“Like a ten-thirty radio code? Smart girl.”

“And for my airfare. Without that I’d still be on my way down here, hitch-hiking.”

“You’d be walking. Nobody in their right mind would pick you up.”

Reacher glanced at himself in an old spotted mirror. Six-five, two-fifty, hands as big as frozen turkeys, hair all over the place, unshaven, torn shirtcuffs up on his forearms like Frankenstein’s monster.

A bum.

From the big green machine to this.

Dixon said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“I always wished we had done more than just work together.”

“Who?”

“You and me.”

“That was a statement, not a question.”

“Did you feel the same way?”

“Honestly?”

“Please.”

“Yes, I did.”

“So why didn’t we do more?”

“Wouldn’t have been right.”

“We ignored all kinds of other regulations.”

“It would have wrecked the unit. The others would have been jealous.”

“Including Neagley?”

“In her way.”

“We could have kept it a secret.”

Reacher said, “Dream on.”

“We could keep it a secret now. We’ve got three hours.”

Reacher said nothing.

Dixon said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that all of this bad stuff makes me feel that life is so short.”

Reacher said, “And the unit is wrecked now anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t you have a boyfriend back East?”

“Not right now.”

Reacher stepped back to the bed. Karla Dixon came over and stood right next to him, her hip against his thigh. The seven sheets of paper were still laid out in a line.

“Want to look at these some more?” Reacher asked.

“Not right now,” Dixon said.

“Me either.” He gathered them up and butted them together. Placed them on the nightstand and trapped them under the phone. Asked, “You sure about this?”

“I’ve been sure for thirteen years.”

“Me too. But it has to stay a secret.”

“Agreed.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her mouth. The shape of her teeth was new to his tongue. The buttons on her shirt were small and awkward.

26

Afterward they lay in bed together and Dixon said, “We need to get back to work.” Reacher rolled over to take the stack of papers off the nightstand, but Dixon said, “No, let’s do it in our heads. We’ll see more that way.”

“Will we?”

“Total of one hundred and eighty-three numbers,” she said. “Tell me about one hundred and eighty-three, as a number.”

“Not prime,” Reacher said. “It’s divisible by three and sixty-one.”

“I don’t care whether it’s prime or not.”

“Multiply it by two and you get three hundred and sixty-six, which is the number of days in a leap year.”

“So is this half a leap year?”

“Not with seven lists,” Reacher said. “Half of any kind of a year would be six months and six lists.”

Dixon went quiet.

Reacher thought: Half a year.

Half.

More than one way to skin a cat.

Twenty-six, twenty-seven.

He said, “How many days are there in half a year?”

“A regular year? Depends which half. Either one hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

“How do you make half?”

“Divide by two.”

“Suppose you multiplied by seven over twelve?”

“That’s more than half.”

“Then again by six over seven?”

“That would bring it back to exactly half. Forty-two over eighty-four.”

“There you go.”

“I don’t follow.”

“How many weeks in a year?”

“Fifty-two.”

“How many working days?”

“Two hundred sixty for five-day weeks, three hundred twelve for six-day weeks.”

“So how many days would there be in seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks?”

Dixon thought for a second. “Depends on which seven months you pick. Depends on where the Sundays fall. Depends on what day of the week January first is. Depends on whether you’re looking at a continuous run of months or cherry-picking.”

“Run the numbers, Karla. There are only two possible answers.”

Dixon paused a beat. “One hundred and eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-three.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Those seven sheets are seven months’ worth of six-day working weeks. One of the long months only had four Sundays. Hence the twenty-seven-day anomaly.”

Dixon slid out from under the sheet and walked naked to where she had left her briefcase and came back with a leather Filofax diary. She opened it and put it on the bed and took the papers off the nightstand and arranged them in a line below the diary. Her eyes flicked back and forth, seven times.

“It’s this year,” she said. “It’s the last seven calendar months. Right up to the end of last month. Take out the Sundays, you get three twenty-six-day months, then one twenty-seven-day month, and then three more twenty-six-day months.”

“There you go,” Reacher said. “Some kind of six-day-a-week figures got worse and worse over the last seven months. Some kind of results. We’re halfway there.”

“The easy half,” Dixon said. “Now tell me what the figures mean.”

“Something was supposed to happen nine or ten or twelve or thirteen times a day Monday through Saturday and didn’t always come out right.”

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. What kind of a thing happens ten or twelve times a day?”

“Not Model-T Ford production, that’s for sure. It’s got to be something small scale. Or professional. Like a dentist’s appointments. Or a lawyer’s. Or a hairdresser’s.”

“There was a nail salon near Franz’s office.”

“They do more than that in a day. And how would nails relate to four people disappearing and a Syrian with four aliases?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

“Me either,” Dixon said.

“We should shower and get dressed.”

“After.”

“After what?”

Dixon didn’t answer. Just walked back to the bed and pinned him to the pillow and kissed him again.

Two thousand horizontal and seven vertical miles away from them the dark-haired forty-year-old currently calling himself Alan Mason was in the front cabin of a United Airlines Boeing 757, en route from LaGuardia, New York, to Denver, Colorado. He was in seat 3A, with a glass of sparkling mineral water beside him on the armrest tray and a newspaper open on his lap. But he wasn’t reading it. He was gazing out the window instead, at the bright white clouds below.

And eight miles south of them the man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler was tailing O’Donnell and Neagley back from the LAX Hertz lot. He had picked them up leaving the Beverly Wilshire. He had guessed they were flying out, so he had positioned himself to follow them to the airport terminals. When O’Donnell had swung back north on Sepulveda he had needed to scramble fast to get behind them. As a result he was ten cars back all the way. Which was good, he figured, in terms of inconspicuous surveillance.

27

O’Donnell said, “We’re nowhere at all,” and Neagley said, “We need to face facts. The trail is stone cold and we have virtually no useful data.”

They were in Karla Dixon’s bedroom. Leonardo DiCaprio’s old crib. The bed was made. Reacher and Dixon were showered and dressed and their hair was dry. They were standing well apart from each other. The seven spreadsheets were laid out on the dresser with the diary next to them. No one disputed that they represented the last seven calendar months. But no one saw how that information helped them, either.

Dixon looked at Reacher and asked, “What do you want to do, boss?”

“Take a break,” Reacher said. “We’re missing something. We’re not thinking straight. We should take a break and come back to it.”

“We never used to take breaks.”

“We used to have five more pairs of eyes.”

The man in the dark blue suit called it in: “They moved to the Chateau Marmont. And there’s four of them now. Karla Dixon showed up. So they’re all present and correct and accounted for.” Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his tie over the front of his shirt.

Reacher went for a walk west on Sunset, alone. Solitude was still his natural condition. He took his money out of his pocket and counted it. Not much left. He ducked into a souvenir store and found a rail of discounted shirts. Last year’s styles. Or the last decade’s. On one end of the rail was a bunch of blue items with white patterns, shiny, some kind of a man-made material. Spread collars, short sleeves, square hems. He picked one out. It was like something his father might have worn to go bowling in the 1950s. Except three sizes larger. Reacher was much bigger than his father had been. He found a mirror and jammed the hanger up under his chin. The shirt looked like it might fit him. It was probably wide enough in the shoulders. The short sleeves would solve the problem of trying to find something to accommodate the length of his arms. His arms were like a gorilla’s, only longer and thicker.

With tax, the garment cost nearly twenty-one dollars. Reacher paid the guy at the register and then bit off the tags and stripped off his old shirt and put the new one on right there and then. Left it untucked. Tugged it down at the bottom and rolled his shoulders. With the top button open it fit pretty well. The sleeves were tight around his biceps but not so bad that his blood flow was imperiled.

“Got a trash can?” he asked.

The guy ducked down and came back with a round metal canister lined with a white plastic bag. Reacher balled up his old shirt and tossed it in.

“Barbershop near here?” he asked.

“Two blocks north,” the guy said. “Up the hill. Shoeshines and haircuts in the corner of the grocery store.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Laurel Canyon,” the guy said, like an explanation.

The grocery store sold beer out of ice chests and coffee out of press-top flasks. Reacher took a medium cup of house blend, black, and headed for the barber’s chair. It was an old-fashioned thing covered in red speckled vinyl. There were straight razors on the sink and a shoeshine chair nearby. A thin guy in a white wife-beater was sitting in it. He had needle tracks up and down his arms. He looked up and concentrated, like he was assessing the size of the task ahead of him.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Shave and a haircut?”

“Two bits?” Reacher said.

“Eight dollars,” the guy said.

Reacher checked his pocket again.

“Ten,” he said. “To include a shoeshine and the coffee.”

“That all would be twelve.”

“Ten is what I’ve got.”

The guy shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

Laurel Canyon, Reacher thought. Thirty minutes later he was down to his last dollar but his shoes were clean and his face was as smooth as it had ever been. His head was shaved almost as close. He had asked for a standard army buzz cut but the guy had given him something a whole lot closer to the Marine Corps version. Clearly not a veteran. Reacher paused a beat and checked the guy’s arms again.

He asked, “Where can a person score around here?”

“You’re not a user,” the guy said.

“For a friend.”

“You don’t have any money.”

“I can get some.”

The guy in the wife-beater shrugged and said, “There’s usually a crew behind the wax museum.”

Reacher walked back to the hotel by staying in the low canyon streets for two blocks and then coming on it from the rear. Along the way he passed a dark blue Chrysler 300C parked on the curb. A guy in a dark blue suit was behind the wheel. The suit matched the sheet metal, more or less exactly. The engine was off and the guy was just waiting. Reacher assumed it was a livery car. A limo. He figured some enterprising car service owner had gotten a better price from the Chrysler dealership than the Lincoln dealership and had switched away from Town Cars. Figured he had dressed the drivers in matching suits, looking for an edge. Reacher knew that LA was a tough market, in the limousine business. He had read about it somewhere.

Dixon and Neagley were polite about his new shirt but O’Donnell laughed at it. They all laughed at his haircut. Reacher didn’t care. He caught sight of it in Dixon’s spotted old mirror and had to agree it was a little extreme. It was a real whitewall. And he was happy to provide a moment of levity. They weren’t going to get any light relief anyplace else, that was for sure. Together they had handled two years’ worth of crimes, some of them gruesome, some of them merely venal, some of them cruel, some of them appalling, and they had joked their way through like cops everywhere. Black humor. The universal refuge. One time they had found a partially decomposed dead guy with a gardening shovel buried in what was left of his head and immediately rechristened the corpse Doug and laughed like drains. Later, in the court-martial proceeding, Stan Lowrey had slipped and used the nickname instead of the real name. A JAG defender hadn’t understood the reference. Lowrey had laughed all over again on the witness stand and said, Like, dug? Shovel in his head? Get it?

No one was laughing now. It was different when it was your own.

The spreadsheets were back on the bed. One hundred and eighty-three days over a seven-month span. A total of 2,197 events. There was a new page next to them in Dixon’s handwriting. She had extrapolated the numbers out to three hundred and fourteen days and 3,766 events in a complete year. Reacher guessed she had invited the others to brainstorm about what kind of a thing happens 3,766 times over three hundred and fourteen days in a year. But the rest of the page was blank. Nobody had come up with anything. The sheet with the five names was on the pillow. It was lying at a careless angle, like someone had been studying it and then thrown it down in frustration.

“There must be more than this,” O’Donnell said.

“What exactly do you want?” Reacher said back. “Cliffs Notes?”

“I’m saying there isn’t enough here for four people to have died for it.”

Reacher nodded.

“I agree,” he said. “It ain’t much. Because the bad guys got practically everything. His computers, his Rolodex, his client list, his phone book. All we’ve got is the tip of the iceberg. Fragments. Like archaeological remains. But we better get used to it, because this kind of thing is all we’re ever going to get.”

“So what do we do?”

“Break the habit.”

“What habit?”

“Asking me what to do. I might not be here tomorrow. I imagine those deputies are gearing up right now. You’re going to have to start thinking for yourselves.”

“Until then what do we do?”

Reacher ignored the question. Turned instead to Karla Dixon and asked, “When you rented your car, did you get the extra insurance?”

She nodded.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Take another break. Then we’ll go get some dinner. My treat. Maybe like the last supper. I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour.”

Reacher got Dixon’s Ford from the valets and drove east on Hollywood Boulevard. He passed the Entertainment Museum and Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Made the left on Highland. He was two blocks west of Hollywood and Vine, which was where the bad stuff had traditionally been. Now the bad stuff seemed to have migrated, which was usually the way. Law enforcement never really won. It just shoved stuff around, a block here, a block there.

Reacher pulled to the curb. There was a wide alley behind the wax museum. Really a vacant half-lot, gravel surface, unfenced, colonized by cars into a turning loop, recolonized by dealers into a drive-through facility. The operation was organized in the conventional triangulated manner. A buyer would drive in and slow up. A kid not more than eleven years old would approach. The driver would place his order and hand over his cash. The kid would run the cash to a bag man and then continue to a stash man and pick up the product. Meanwhile the driver would be crawling through a slow half-circle, ready to meet the kid again on the other side of the lot. Whereupon the transfer would be made and the driver would leave. The kid would run back to where he began and wait to start all over again.

A smart system. Complete separation of product and money, easy instant dispersal in three different directions if necessary, and no one was seen with anything except someone way too young to be prosecuted. The stash would be refreshed often, leaving the stash man holding the bare minimum at any one time. The cash bag would be emptied frequently, reducing potential losses and the bag man’s vulnerability.

A smart system.

A system Reacher had seen before.

A system he had exploited before.

The bag man was literally a bag man. He was sitting on a concrete block in the middle of the lot with a black vinyl duffel at his feet. He was wearing sunglasses and would be armed with whatever was the handgun of choice that week.

Reacher waited.

A black Mercedes ML slowed and pulled into the lot. A pretty SUV, tinted windows, California vanity plates spelling out an acronym Reacher didn’t understand. It paused at the entry and the kid ran up. His head barely reached the driver’s window. But his hand did. It snaked up and came back down with a folded wad. The Mercedes eased forward and the kid ran over to the bag man. The wad went into the bag and the kid headed for the stash man. The Mercedes was beginning to turn its slow half-circle.

Reacher put Dixon’s Ford in gear. Checked north, checked south. Hit the gas and turned the wheel and slammed into the lot. Ignored the worn circular path and aimed straight for the center of the space.

Straight for the bag man, accelerating, front wheels spraying gravel.

The bag man froze.

Ten feet before hitting him head-on Reacher did three things. He twitched the wheel. He stamped on the brake. And he opened his door. The car slewed right and the front wheels washed into the loose stones and the door swung out through a moving arc and caught the guy like a full-on punch. It smacked him solidly from his waist up to his face. He went over backward and the car stopped dead and Reacher leaned down and grabbed the vinyl duffel left-handed from the floor. Pitched it into the passenger seat and hit the gas and slammed his door shut and pulled a tight U-turn inside the slow Mercedes. Roared back out of the lot and bounced over the curb onto Highland. In the mirror he saw dust in the air and confusion and the bag man flat on his back and two guys running. Ten yards later he was behind the bulk of the wax museum. Then he was through the light, back on Hollywood Boulevard.

Twelve seconds, beginning to end.

No reaction. No gunshots. No pursuit.

Nor would there be any, Reacher guessed. They would have clocked the plain-vanilla Ford and the appalling shirt and the short hair and put it down to an LAPD freelance looking to supplement his pension fund. The cost of doing business. And the Mercedes driver couldn’t afford to say a word to anyone.

Yeah baby, you do not mess with the special investigators.

Reacher slowed and caught his breath and made a right and drove a complete counterclockwise scenic circle. Nichols Canyon Road, Woodrow Wilson Drive, and back on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Nobody was behind him. He stopped on a deserted hairpin up high and emptied the bag and ditched it on the shoulder. Then he counted the money. Close to nine hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and tens. Enough for dinner. Even with Norwegian water. And a tip.

He got out and checked the car. The driver’s door was a little dented, right in the center. The bag man’s face. No blood. He got back in and buckled up. Ten minutes later he was in the Chateau Marmont’s lobby, sitting in a faded velvet armchair, waiting for the others.

Twelve hundred miles northeast of the Chateau Marmont, the dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was riding the underground train from his arrival gate to the Denver airport’s main terminal. He was alone in the car, sitting down, tired, but smiling all the same at the crazy bursts of jug-band music that preceded the station announcements. He figured they had been specified by a psychologist to reduce travel stress. In which case they were working. He felt fine. A lot more relaxed than he had any right to be.

28

Dinner cost Reacher way less than nine hundred bucks. Either out of taste or preference or respect for the context or deference to his economic predicament, the others opted for a noisy hamburger barn on Sunset, just east of the Mondrian Hotel. There was no Norwegian water on offer. Just tap and domestic beer and thick juicy patties and pickles and loud vintage rhythm and blues. Reacher looked right at home, in a fifties kind of a way. The others looked a little out of place. They were at a round table set for four. Conversation stopped and started as the pleasure of being among old friends was overtaken by memories of the others who were missing. Reacher mostly listened. The dynamic of the round table meant that no one person was dominant. The center of attention bounced back and forth randomly. After thirty minutes of reminiscence and catch-up the talk turned back to Franz.

O’Donnell said, “Start at the very beginning. If we believe his wife, he quit everything except routine database mining more than four years ago. So why would he suddenly launch into something this serious?”

Dixon said, “Because someone asked him to.”

“Exactly,” O’Donnell said. “This thing starts with his client. So who was it?”

“Could have been anybody.”

“No,” O’Donnell said. “It was someone special. He went the extra mile here. He broke a four-year habit for this guy. Kind of broke faith with his wife and son, too.”

Neagley said, “It could have been a big payer.”

“Or someone he was obligated to somehow,” Dixon said.

Neagley said, “Or it might have looked routine at the get-go. Maybe he had no idea where it was leading. Maybe the client didn’t, either.”

Reacher listened. It had to be someone special. Someone he was obligated to somehow. He watched as O’Donnell took the floor, then Dixon, then Neagley. The vector bounced around between them and traced a heavy triangle in the air. Something stirred in the back of his mind. Something Dixon had said, hours ago, in the car leaving LAX. He closed his eyes, but he couldn’t get it. He spoke up and the triangle changed to a square, to include him.

“We should ask Angela,” he said. “If he had some kind of a longstanding big-deal client, he might have mentioned him at home.”

“I’d like to meet Charlie,” O’Donnell said.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Reacher said. “Unless the deputies come for me. In which case you can go on ahead without me.”

“Look on the bright side,” Dixon said. “Maybe you gave the guy a concussion. Maybe he doesn’t remember who he is, let alone who you are.”

They walked back to the hotel and split up in the lobby. No appetite for a nightcap. Just an unspoken agreement to get some sleep and start work again bright and early. Reacher and O’Donnell headed up together. Didn’t talk much. Reacher was asleep five seconds after his head hit the pillow.

He woke up again at seven o’clock in the morning. Early sun was coming in the window. David O’Donnell was coming in the door. In a hurry. Fully dressed, a newspaper under his arm, cardboard cups of coffee in both hands.

“I went for a walk,” he said.

“And?”

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “I think.”

“Who?”

“That deputy. He’s parked a hundred yards from here.”

“The same guy?”

“The same guy and the same car. He’s got a metal splint on his face and a garbage bag taped across his window.”

“Did he see you?”

“No.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Just sitting there. Like he’s waiting.”

29

They ordered breakfast in Dixon’s room. First rule, learned a long time ago: Eat when you can, because you never know when the next chance will come. Especially when you’re about to disappear into the system. Reacher shoveled eggs and bacon and toast down his throat and followed it with plenty of coffee. He was calm, but frustrated.

“I should have stayed in Portland,” he said. “I might as well have.”

“How did they find us so fast?” Dixon asked.

“Computers,” Neagley said. “Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. They can search hotel registers anytime they want now. This is a police state.”

“We are the police,” O’Donnell said.

“We used to be.”

“I wish we still were. You’d hardly have to break a sweat anymore.”

“You guys get going,” Reacher said. “I don’t want you to get snarled up in this. We can’t spare the time. So don’t let the deputy see you leave. Go visit with Angela Franz. Chase the client. I’ll get back to you when I can.”

He drained the last of his coffee and headed back to his room. Put his folding toothbrush in his pocket and hid his passport and his ATM card and seven hundred of his remaining eight hundred dollars in O’Donnell’s suit carrier. Because certain things can go missing, after an arrest. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby. Just sat in an armchair and waited. No need to turn the whole thing into a big drama, running up and down hotel corridors. Because, second rule, learned from a lifetime of bad luck and trouble: Maintain a little dignity.

He waited.

Thirty minutes. Sixty. The lobby had three morning papers, and he read them all. Every word. Sports, features, editorials, national, international. And business. There was a story about Homeland Security’s financial impact on the private sector. It quoted the same seven-billion-dollar figure that Neagley had mentioned. A lot of money. Surpassed only, the article said, by the bonanza for the defense contractors. The Pentagon still had more cash than anyone else, and it was still spreading it around like crazy.

Ninety minutes.

Nothing happened.

At the two-hour point Reacher got up and put the papers back on the rack. Stepped to the door and looked outside. Bright sun, blue sky, not much smog. A light wind tossing exotic trees. Waxed cars rolling past, slow and glittering. A fine day. The twenty-fourth day Calvin Franz hadn’t been around to see. Nearly four whole weeks. Same for Tony Swan and Jorge Sanchez and Manuel Orozco, presumably.

There are dead men walking, as of right now. You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.

Reacher stepped outside. Stood for a second, exposed, like he was expecting sniper fire. Certainly there had been time to get whole SWAT teams into position. But the sidewalk was quiet. No parked vehicles. No innocuous florists’ trucks. No bogus telephone linemen. No surveillance. He turned left on Sunset. Left again on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Walked slow and kept close to hedges and plantings. Turned left again on the winding canyon road that ran behind the hotel.

The tan Crown Vic was dead ahead.

It was parked at the far curb, alone, isolated, a hundred yards away. Still, inert, engine off. Like O’Donnell had said, its broken front passenger window was taped over with a black garbage bag, pulled taut. The driver was in the seat. Just sitting there. Not moving, except for regular turns of his head. Rearview mirror, straight ahead, door mirror. The guy had a real rhythm going. Hypnotic. Rearview mirror, straight ahead, door mirror. Reacher caught a flash of an aluminum splint fixed across his nose.

The car looked low and cold, like it hadn’t been run for many hours.

The guy was on his own, just watching and waiting.

But for what?

Reacher turned around and backtracked the way he had come. Made it back to the lobby and back to his chair. Sat down again, with the seed of a germ of a new theory in his mind.

His wife called me, Neagley had said.

What did she want you to do?

Nothing, Neagley had said. She was just telling me.

Just telling me.

And then: Charlie swinging on the door handle. Reacher had asked: Is it OK to be opening the door all by yourself? And the little boy had said: Yes, it’s OK.

And then: Charlie, you should go out and play.

And then: I think there’s something you’re not telling us.

The cost of doing business.

Reacher sat in the Chateau Marmont’s velvet lobby armchair, thinking, waiting to be proved right or wrong by whoever came through the street door first, his old unit or a bunch of fired-up LA County deputies.

30

His old unit came through the door first. What was left of it, anyway. The remnant. O’Donnell and Neagley and Dixon, all of them fast and anxious. They stopped dead in surprise when they saw him and he raised a hand in greeting.

“You’re still here,” O’Donnell said.

“No, I’m an optical illusion.”

“Outstanding.”

“What did Angela say?”

“Nothing. She doesn’t know anything about his clients.”

“How was she?”

“Like a woman whose husband just died.”

“What did you think of Charlie?”

“Nice kid. Like his dad. Franz lives on, in a way.”

Dixon said, “Why are you still here?”

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

“What’s the answer?”

“Is the deputy still out there?”

Dixon nodded. “We saw him from the end of the street.”

“Let’s go upstairs.”

They used the room that Reacher and O’Donnell were in. It was a little bigger than Dixon’s, because it was a double. The first thing Reacher did was retrieve his money and his passport and his ATM card from O’Donnell’s bag.

O’Donnell said, “Looks like you think you’re sticking around.”

“I think I am,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“Because Charlie opened the door all by himself.”

“Which means?”

“Seems to me that Angela is a pretty good mom. Normal, at worst. Charlie was clean, well fed, well dressed, well balanced, well cared for, well looked after. So we can conclude that Angela is doing a conscientious job with the parenting thing. Yet she let the kid open the door to a couple of complete strangers.”

Dixon said, “Her husband was just killed. Maybe she was distracted.”

“More likely the opposite. Her husband was killed more than three weeks ago. My guess is she’s over whatever initial reaction she had. Now she’s clinging to Charlie more than ever because he’s all she’s got left. Yet she let the kid get the door. Then she told him to go out to play. She didn’t say to go play in his room. She said, Go out. In Santa Monica? In a yard on a busy street full of passersby? Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because she knew it was safe.”

“How?”

“Because she knew that deputy was watching the house.”

“You think?”

“Why did she wait fourteen days before calling Neagley?”

“She was distracted,” Dixon said again.

“Possibly,” Reacher said. “But maybe there’s another reason. Maybe she wasn’t going to call us at all. We were ancient history. She liked Franz’s current life better. Naturally, because she was Franz’s current life. We represented the bad old days, rough, dangerous, uncouth. I think she was disapproving. Or if not, then a little jealous.”

“I agree,” Neagley said. “That’s the impression I got.”

“So why did she call you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it from the deputies’ point of view. Small department, limited resources. They find a dead guy in the desert, they ID him, they set the wheels in motion. They do it by the book. First thing they do is profile the victim. Along the way they find out that he used to be a part of a shit-hot investigative team in the military. And they find out that all but one of his old buddies are supposedly still around somewhere.”

“And they suspect us?”

“No, I think they dismiss us as suspects and they move right along. But they get nowhere. No clues, no leads, no breaks. They’re stuck.”

“So?”

“So after two weeks of frustration they get an idea. Angela has told them all about the unit and the loyalty and the old slogan, and they see an opportunity. Effectively they’ve got a freelance investigative team waiting in the wings. One that’s smart and experienced and above all one that’s going to be very highly motivated. So they prompt Angela to call us. Just to tell us, nothing more. Because they know that’s the exact same thing as winding up the Energizer Bunny. They know we’re going to get down here pretty damn fast. They know we’re going to look for answers. They know they can just stay in the shadows and watch us and piggy-back on whatever we do.”

“That’s ridiculous,” O’Donnell said.

“But I think it’s exactly what happened,” Reacher said. “Angela told them it was Neagley she had gotten on the phone, they put Neagley’s name on a watch list, they picked her up when she got to town, they tailed her and lay back in the weeds and watched the rest of us show up one by one. And they’ve been watching everything we’ve been doing ever since. Police work by proxy. That’s what Angela wasn’t telling us. The deputies asked her to set us up as stalking horses and she agreed. And that’s why I’m still here. There’s no other explanation. They figure a busted nose is the price of doing business.”

“That’s nuts.”

“Only one way to find out. Take a walk around the block and talk to the deputy.”

“You think?”

“Dixon should go. She wasn’t with us in Santa Ana. So if I’m wrong the guy probably won’t shoot her.”

31

Dixon went. She left the room without a word. O’Donnell said, “I don’t think Angela was hiding anything today. So I don’t think Franz had a client at all.”

“How hard did you press her?” Reacher asked.

“We didn’t need to press her. It was all right out there. She had nothing to tell us. It’s inconceivable that Franz would have gotten into a thing like this for anyone except a big-deal regular customer who went back years, and it’s inconceivable he could have had such a guy without Angela at least hearing a name.”

Reacher nodded. Then he smiled, briefly. He liked his old team. He could rely on them, absolutely. No second-guessing. If Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell went out with questions, they came back with answers. Always, whatever the issue, whatever it took. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.

Neagley asked, “What next?”

“Let’s talk to the deputies first,” Reacher said. “Specifically let’s see if they went out to Vegas.”

“To Sanchez and Orozco’s office? Dixon was just there. It hadn’t been disturbed.”

“She didn’t check their homes.”

Dixon came back thirty minutes later. Said, “He didn’t shoot me.”

“That’s good,” Reacher said.

“I certainly thought so.”

“Did he ’fess up to anything?”

“He didn’t confirm or deny.”

“Is he mad about his face?”

“Livid.”

“So what’s the story?”

“He called his boss. They want to meet with us. Here, an hour from now.”

“Who’s his boss?”

“A guy called Curtis Mauney. LA County Sheriff’s Department.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We can do that. We’ll see what the guy has got. We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give.”

They waited the hour downstairs in the lobby. No stress, no strain. Military service teaches a person how to wait. O’Donnell sprawled on a sofa and cleaned his fingernails with his switchblade. Dixon read the seven spreadsheets over and over and then put them away and closed her eyes. Neagley sat alone in a chair against a wall. Reacher sat under an old framed photograph of Raquel Welch. The picture had been taken outside the hotel late in the afternoon and the light was as golden as her skin. The magic hour, photographers called it. Brief, glowing, lovely. Like fame itself, Reacher figured.

The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was waiting, too. He was waiting to take a clandestine meeting in his room in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. He was uncharacteristically nervous and out of sorts. Three reasons. First, his room was dim and shabby. Not at all what he had been expecting. Second, he had a suitcase stacked against the wall. It was a dark gray hard-shell Samsonite, carefully selected like all his accessories, expensive enough to blend with his air of affluence but not ostentatious enough to attract undue attention. Inside it were bearer bonds and cut diamonds and Swiss bank access codes worth a lot of money. Sixty-five million U.S. dollars, to be exact, and the people he was going to be meeting with were not the kind of people a prudent person would trust around portable and untraceable assets.

And third, he hadn’t slept well. The night air had been full of an unpleasant smell. He had run through a mental checklist until he had identified it as dog food. Clearly there was a factory nearby and the wind was blowing in an unfortunate direction. Then he had lain awake and worried about the dog food’s ingredients. Meat, obviously. But he knew that smell was a physical mechanism that depended on the impact of actual molecules on the nasal lining. Therefore, technically, actual fragments of meat were entering his nostrils. They were in contact with his body. And there were certain meats that Azhari Mahmoud should not be in contact with, ever, under any circumstances.

He stepped to the bathroom. Washed his face for the fifth time that day. Looked at himself in the mirror. Clamped his jaw. He wasn’t Azhari Mahmoud. Not right then. He was Alan Mason, a Westerner, and there was a job to be done.

First in through the Chateau Marmont’s lobby door was the banged-up deputy himself, Thomas Brant. He had a vivid bruise on the side of his forehead and the sculptured metal splint on his face was taped to his cheekbones so tight that the skin around his eyes was distorted. He was walking like he hurt. He looked about one-third mad as hell that he had been taken down and one-third sheepish that he had let it happen and one-third pissed that he had to swallow his feelings for the sake of the job. He was followed in by an older guy that had to be his boss, Curtis Mauney. Mauney looked to be approaching fifty. He was short and solid and had the kind of worn look a guy gets when he has been in the same line of work too long. His hair was dyed a dull black that didn’t match his eyebrows. He was carrying a battered leather briefcase. He asked, “Which one of you assholes hit my guy?”

“Does it matter?” Reacher said.

“Shouldn’t have happened.”

“Don’t feel bad about it. He didn’t stand a chance. It was three-on-one. Even though one of the three was a girl.”

Neagley gave him a look that would have blinded him if looks were knives. Mauney shook his head and said, “I’m not criticizing my guy’s self-defense capabilities. I’m saying you don’t come down here and start hitting cops.”

Reacher said, “He was outside of his jurisdiction, he hadn’t identified himself, and he was acting in a suspicious manner. He was asking for it.”

“Why are you here anyway?”

“For our friend’s funeral.”

“The body hasn’t been released yet.”

“So we’ll wait.”

“Was it you who hit my guy?”

Reacher nodded. “I apologize. But all you had to do was ask.”

“For what?”

“For our help.”

Mauney looked blank. “You think we brought you here to help?”

“Didn’t you?”

Mauney shook his head.

“No,” he said. “We brought you here as bait.”

32

Thomas Brant stayed on his feet, surly, unwilling to make the kind of social gesture that sitting down as part of the group would represent. But his boss, Curtis Mauney, took a chair. He sat down and tucked his briefcase between his ankles and put his elbows on his knees.

“Let’s get a couple of things straight,” he said. “We’re LA County sheriffs. We’re not hicks from the sticks, we’re not idiots, and we’re nobody’s poor relations. We’re fast and smart and proactive and light on our feet. We knew every detail of Calvin Franz’s life within twelve hours of finding his body. Including the fact that he was one of eight survivors of an elite military unit. And within twenty-four hours we knew for sure that three other members of that unit were missing also. One from right here in LA, and two from Vegas. Which calls into question exactly how elite you all were, wouldn’t you say? You’re fifty percent MIA in the blink of an eye.”

Reacher said, “I would need to know who the opposition was before I came to any performance conclusions.”

“Whoever, it wasn’t the Red Army.”

“We never fought the Red Army. We fought the U.S. Army.”

“So I’ll ask around,” Mauney said. “I’ll check if the 81st Airborne just won any major victories.”

“Your thesis is someone’s hunting all eight of us?”

“I don’t know what my thesis is. But that’s certainly a possibility. Therefore, flushing you four out was a win-win for me. If you don’t show up, maybe they’ve already got you, which adds pieces to the puzzle. If you do show up, then you’re bait, and maybe I can use you to flush them out.”

“What if they’re not hunting all eight of us?”

“Then you can hang around here and wait for the funerals. No skin off my nose.”

“Did you go to Vegas?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know the two from Vegas are missing?”

“Because I called,” Mauney said. “We work with the Nevada Staties a lot, and they work with the Vegas cops a lot, and your guys Sanchez and Orozco went missing three weeks ago and both their apartments have been royally trashed. So that’s how I know. The telephone system. Useful technology.”

“Trashed as bad as Franz’s office?”

“Similar handiwork.”

“They miss anything?”

“Why would they?”

“People miss things.”

“Did they miss something at Franz’s place? Did we?”

Reacher had said: We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give. But Mauney was better than any asshole provost marshal. That was clear. He looked like a pretty good cop. Not dumb. But maybe playable. So Reacher nodded and said, “Franz was mailing computer files back and forth to himself for security. They missed them. You missed them. We got them.”

“From out of his post office box?”

Reacher nodded.

“That’s a federal crime,” Mauney said. “You should have gotten a warrant.”

“I couldn’t have,” Reacher said. “I’m retired.”

“Then you should have butted out.”

“So arrest me.”

“I can’t,” Mauney said. “I’m not federal.”

“What did they miss in Vegas?”

“Are we trading here?”

Reacher nodded. “But you go first.”

“OK,” Mauney said. “In Vegas they missed a napkin with writing on it. It was the kind of paper napkin you get with Chinese delivery. It was balled up and greasy in Sanchez’s kitchen trash. My guess is Sanchez was eating and the phone rang. He scribbled down a note to himself and transferred it later to a book or a file that we don’t have. Then he threw the napkin in the trash because he didn’t need it anymore.”

“How do we know it’s got anything to do with anything?”

“We don’t,” Mauney said. “But the timing is suggestive. Ordering that Chinese delivery seems to be about the last thing Sanchez ever did in Las Vegas.”

“What does the note say?”

Mauney bent down and hauled his battered briefcase up on his knees and clicked the latches. Lifted the lid. Took out a clear plastic page protector with a color photocopy in it. The photocopy was edged with smudged black where the napkin hadn’t filled the platen. It showed the creases and the grease stains and the pimpled paper texture. And a scrawled half-line in Jorge Sanchez’s familiar handwriting: 650 at $100k per. Bold, confident, forward-leaning, done with a blue fiber-tipped pen, vivid against the unbleached beige of the paper.

650 at $100k per.

Mauney asked, “What does it mean?”

Reacher said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” He was looking at the numbers, and he knew Dixon would be, too. The k abbreviation meant thousand and was fairly standard among U.S. Army personnel of Sanchez’s generation, coming either from math or engineering school or from having served long years overseas where distances were measured in kilometers instead of miles. A kilometer was nick-named a klick and measured a thousand meters, about sixty percent of a mile. Therefore $100k meant one hundred thousand dollars. The per was a standard Latin preposition meaning for each, as in miles per gallon or miles per hour.

“I think it’s an offer or a bid,” Mauney said. “Like, you can have six hundred and fifty of something for a hundred grand each.”

“Or a market report,” O’Donnell said. “Like six hundred and fifty of something were sold at a hundred grand each. Overall value, sixty-five million dollars. Some kind of a fairly big deal. Certainly big enough for people to get killed over.”

“People can get killed for sixty-five cents,” Mauney said. “Doesn’t always take millions of dollars.”

Karla Dixon was silent. Still, quiet, preoccupied. Reacher knew she had seen something in the number 650 that he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine what. It wasn’t an interesting number.

650 at $100k per.

“No bright ideas?” Mauney asked.

Nobody spoke.

Mauney said, “What did you get from Franz’s post office box?”

“A flash memory chip,” Reacher said. “For a computer.”

“What’s on it?”

“We don’t know. We can’t break the password.”

“We could try,” Mauney said. “There’s a lab we use.”

“I don’t know. We’re down to the last attempt.”

“Actually, you don’t have a choice. It’s evidence, and therefore it’s ours.”

“Will you share the information?”

Mauney nodded. “We’re in sharing mode here, apparently.”

“OK,” Reacher said. He nodded to Neagley. She put her hand in her tote bag and came out with the silver plastic sliver. Tossed it underhand to him. He caught it and passed it to Mauney.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Pointers?” Mauney asked.

“It’ll be numbers,” Reacher said. “Franz was a numbers type of guy.”

“OK.”

“It wasn’t an airplane, you know.”

“I know,” Mauney said. “That was just hick stuff to get you interested. It was a helicopter. You know how many private helicopters there are within cruise range of the place we found him?”

“No.”

“More than nine thousand.”

“Did you check Swan’s office?”

“He was canned. He didn’t have an office.”

“Did you check his house?”

“Through the windows,” Mauney said. “It hadn’t been tossed.”

“Bathroom window?”

“Pebbled glass.”

“So one last question,” Reacher said. “You checked on Swan and sent the Nevada Staties after Sanchez and Orozco. Why didn’t you call D.C. and New York and Illinois about the rest of us?”

“Because at that point I was dealing with what I had.”

“Which was what?”

“I had all four of them on tape. Franz, Swan, Sanchez, and Orozco. All four of them together. Video surveillance, the night before Franz went out and didn’t come back.”

33

Curtis Mauney didn’t wait to be asked. He raised the lid of his briefcase again and took out another clear plastic page protector. In it was a copy of a still frame from a black and white surveillance tape. Four men, shoulder to shoulder in front of some kind of a store counter. Upside down and from a distance, Reacher couldn’t make out much detail.

Mauney said, “I made the IDs by comparing a bunch of old snapshots from a shoe box in Franz’s bedroom closet.” Then he passed the photograph to his right, to Neagley. She studied it for a moment, nothing in her face except light reflected off the shiny plastic. She passed it counterclockwise, to Dixon. Dixon looked at it for ten long seconds and blinked once and passed it to O’Donnell. O’Donnell took it and studied it and shook his head and passed it to Reacher.

Manuel Orozco was on the left of the frame, glancing to his right, caught by the camera in his perpetual state of restlessness. Then came Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then came Tony Swan, front and center, looking straight ahead. On the right was Jorge Sanchez, in a buttoned-up shirt, no tie, with a finger hooked under his collar. Reacher knew that pose. He had seen it a thousand times before. It meant that Sanchez had shaved about ten hours previously, and the stubble on his throat was growing back and beginning to irritate him. Even without the time code burned into the lower right of the shot Reacher would have known he was looking at a picture taken early in the evening.

They all looked a little older. Orozco’s hair was gray at the temples and his eyes were lined and weary. Franz had maybe lost a little weight. Some of the muscle was gone from his shoulders. Swan was as wide as ever, barrel-chested, thicker in the gut. His hair was short and had crept backward maybe half an inch. Sanchez’s scowl had settled into a tracery of permanent down-turned lines running from his nose to his chin and framing his mouth.

Older, but maybe a little wiser, too. There was a lot of talent and experience and capability right there in the picture. And an easy camaraderie and a mutual trust still floating on recent renewal. Four tough guys. In Reacher’s opinion, four of the best eight in the world.

Who or what had beaten them?

Behind them, running away from the camera, were narrow store aisles that looked familiar.

“Where is this?” Reacher asked.

Mauney said, “The pharmacy in Culver City. Next to Franz’s office. The guy behind the counter remembered them. Swan was buying aspirin.”

“That doesn’t sound like Swan.”

“For his dog. It had arthritis in its hips. He gave it a quarter-tab of aspirin a day. The pharmacist said that’s a pretty common practice with dogs. Especially big dogs.”

“How much aspirin did he buy?”

“The economy bottle. Ninety-six pills, generic.”

Dixon said, “At a quarter-tab a day, that’s a year and nineteen days’ worth.”

Reacher looked at the picture again. Four guys, relaxed poses, no urgency, all the time in the world, a routine purchase, a provision on behalf of a pet animal designed to stretch more than a year into the future.

They never even saw it coming.

Who or what had beaten them?

“Can I keep this picture?” he asked.

“Why?” Mauney said. “You see something in it?”

“Four of my old friends.”

Mauney nodded. “So keep it. It’s a copy.”

“What next?”

“Stay here,” Mauney said. He dropped the lid of his case and clicked the latches, loud in the silence. “Stay visible, and call me if you see anyone sniffing around. No more independent action, OK?”

“We’re just here for the funeral,” Reacher said.

“But whose funeral?”

Reacher didn’t reply to that. Just stood up and turned and looked at Raquel Welch’s picture again. The glass in the frame was reflective and behind him he saw Mauney getting out of his chair, and the others standing up with him. When a seated person stands up, he slides forward to do it, so that when a seated group stands up they all end up temporarily closer to one another than they were when they were sitting down. Therefore their next communal move is to shuffle backward, turning, dispersing, widening the circle, respecting space. Neagley was first and fastest, of course. Mauney turned toward the door and set himself to thread through the limited space between the chairs. O’Donnell stepped the other way, toward the interior of the hotel. Dixon paralleled him, small, deft, nimble, side-stepping a coffee table.

But Thomas Brant moved the other way.

Inward.

Reacher kept his eye on the glass in front of Raquel. Watched Brant’s tan reflection. He knew instantly what was going to happen. Brant was going to tap him on his right shoulder with his left hand. Whereupon Reacher was supposed to turn inquiringly and take a massive straight right to the face.

Brant stepped closer. Reacher focused on the gold ring between the two halves of Raquel’s bikini top. Brant’s left hand snaked forward and his right hand eased back. His left hand had the index finger extended and his right hand was bunched into a fist the size of a softball. Good but not great technique. Reacher sensed that Brant’s feet were not perfectly placed. Brant was a brawler, not a fighter. He was hobbling himself about fifty percent.

Brant tapped Reacher on the shoulder.

Because he was expecting it Reacher turned much faster than he might have done and caught the incoming straight right in his left palm a foot in front of his face. Like snaring a line drive barehanded in the infield. It was a hefty blow. A lot of weight behind it. It made a hell of a smack. It stung Reacher’s palm all the way down to the tendons.

Then it was all about superhuman self-control.

Every ounce of Reacher’s animal instinct and muscle memory dictated a head butt to Brant’s damaged nose. It was a no-brainer. Use the adrenaline. Jerk forward from the waist, plenty of snap, bury that forehead deep. A move that Reacher had perfected at the age of five. A reaction that was almost mandatory a lifetime later.

But Reacher held off.

He just stood still, gripping Brant’s bunched fist. He looked into Brant’s eyes, breathed out, and shook his head.

“I apologized once,” he said. “And I’m apologizing again, right now. If that’s not good enough for you, then wait until after this is all over, OK? I’ll stick around. You can get a couple of buddies and jump me three-on-one when I’m not looking for it. That’s fair, right?”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Brant said.

“You should. But choose your buddies carefully. Don’t pick anyone who can’t afford six months in the hospital.”

“Tough guy.”

“I ain’t the one wearing the splint here.”

Curtis Mauney came over and said, “No fighting. Not now, not ever.” He hauled Brant away by the collar. Reacher waited until they were both out the door and then grimaced and shook his left hand wildly and said, “Damn, that stings.”

“Put some ice on it,” Neagley said.

“Wrap it around a cold beer,” O’Donnell said.

“Get over it and let me tell you about the number six hundred and fifty,” Dixon said.

34

They went up to Dixon’s room and she arranged the seven spreadsheets neatly on the bed. Said, “OK, what we have here is a sequence of seven calendar months. Some kind of a performance analysis. For simplicity’s sake let’s just call them hits and misses. The first three months are pretty good. Plenty of hits, not too many misses. An average success rate of approximately ninety percent. A hair over eighty-nine point five-three percent, to be precise, which I know you want me to be.”

“Move along,” O’Donnell said.

“Then in the fourth month we fall off a cliff and we get worse.”

“We know that already,” Neagley said.

“So for the sake of argument let’s take the first three months as a baseline. We know they can hit ninety percent, give or take. They’re capable of it. Let’s say they could have or should have continued that level of performance indefinitely.”

“But they didn’t,” O’Donnell said.

“Exactly. They could have, but they didn’t. What’s the result?”

Neagley said, “More misses later than earlier.”

“How many more?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Dixon said. “On this volume if they had continued their baseline success rate through the final four months they would have saved themselves exactly six hundred and fifty extra misses.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Dixon said. “Numbers don’t lie, and percentages are numbers. Something happened at the end of month three that went on to cost them six hundred and fifty avoidable future failures.”

Reacher nodded. A total of 183 days, a total of 2,197 events, a total of 1,314 successes and 883 failures. But with markedly unequal distribution. The first three months, 897 events, 802 successes, 95 failures. The next four months, 1,300 events, a miserable 502 successes, a catastrophic 798 failures, 650 of which wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t changed.

“I wish we knew what we were looking at,” he said.

“Sabotage,” O’Donnell said. “Someone got paid to screw up something.”

“At a hundred grand a time?” Neagley said. “Six hundred and fifty times over? That’s nice work if you can get it.”

“Can’t be sabotage,” Reacher said. “You could get a whole factory or office or whatever torched for a hundred grand, easy. Probably a whole town. You wouldn’t have to pay per occasion.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it ties in,” Dixon said. “Doesn’t it? There was a definite mathematical relationship between what Franz knew and what Sanchez knew.”

A minute later Reacher stepped to Dixon’s window and looked out at the view. Asked, “Would it be fair to assume that Orozco knew whatever Sanchez knew?”

“Totally,” O’Donnell said. “And vice versa, certainly. They were friends. They worked together. They must have talked all the time.”

“So all we’re missing is what Swan knew. We’ve got fragments from the other three. Nothing from him.”

“His house was clean. Nothing there.”

“So it’s at his office.”

“He didn’t have an office. He was canned.”

“But only very recently. So his office is just sitting there empty. They’re shedding staff, not hiring. So there’s no pressure on space. His office is mothballed. With his computer still right there on his desk. And maybe there are notes in the desk drawers, stuff like that.”

Neagley said, “You want to go see the dragon lady again?”

“I think we have to.”

“We should call before we drive all the way out there.”

“Better if we just show up.”

“I’d like to see where Swan worked,” O’Donnell said.

“Me too,” Dixon said.

Dixon drove. Her rental, her responsibility. She headed east on Sunset, hunting the 101. Neagley told her what she was going to have to do after that. A complex route. Slow traffic. But the ride through Hollywood itself was picturesque. Dixon seemed to enjoy it. She liked LA.

The man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler tailed them all the way. Outside the KTLA studios, just before the freeway, he dialed his phone. Told his boss, “They’re heading east. All four of them together in the car.”

His boss said, “I’m still in Colorado. Watch them for me, OK?”

35

Dixon turned in through New Age’s open gate and parked in the same visitor slot Neagley had used, head-on against the shiny corporate cube. The lot was still half-empty. The specimen trees were motionless in the heavy air. The same receptionist was on duty. Same polo shirt, same slow response. She heard the doors open but didn’t look up until Reacher put his hand on the counter.

“Help you?” she said.

“We need to see Ms. Berenson again,” Reacher said. “The Human Resources person.”

“I’ll see if she’s available,” the receptionist said. “Please take a seat.”

O’Donnell and Neagley sat down but Reacher and Dixon stayed on their feet. Dixon was too restless to spend more of the day in a chair. Reacher stood because if he sat next to Neagley he would crowd her and if he sat somewhere else she would wonder why.

They waited the same four minutes before they heard the click of Berenson’s heels on the slate. She came out of the corridor and around the corner and didn’t hesitate. Just gave the receptionist a nod of thanks and passed her by and headed on out. She gave up two types of smiles, one kind to Reacher and Neagley because she had met them before, and another kind to O’Donnell and Dixon because she hadn’t. She shook hands all around. Same scars under the makeup, same icy breath. She opened the aluminum door and stood still until everyone had filed past her into the conference room.

With five people in it the room was short one chair, so Berenson stood by the window. Polite, but also psychologically dominating. It made her visitors look upward at her and it made them squint against the light behind her. She said, “How may I help you today?” There was a little condescension in her voice. A little irritation. A slight emphasis on today.

“Tony Swan is missing,” Reacher said.

“Missing?”

“As in, we can’t find him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not a difficult concept to grasp.”

“But he could be anywhere. A new job, out of state. Or a long-delayed vacation. Somewhere he always wanted to go. People sometimes do that, in Mr. Swan’s circumstances. Like a silver lining.”

O’Donnell said, “His dog died of thirst, trapped inside his house. No silver lining there. All cloud. Swan didn’t go anywhere he planned to go.”

“His dog? How awful.”

“Roger that,” Dixon said.

“Her name was Maisi,” Neagley said.

“I don’t see how I can help,” Berenson said. “Mr. Swan left here more than three weeks ago. Isn’t this a matter for the police?”

“They’re working on it,” Reacher said. “We’re working on it, too.”

“I don’t see how I can help.”

“We’d like to see his desk. And his computer. And his diary. There might be notes. Or information, or appointments.”

“Notes about what?”

“About whatever has caused him to be missing.”

“He’s not missing because of New Age.”

“Maybe not. But people have been known to conduct private business during office hours. People have been known to jot down notes about things from their outside lives.”

“Not here.”

“Why not? You’re all business all the time?”

“There are no notes here. No paper at all. No pens or pencils. Basic security. This is a completely paperless environment. Much safer. It’s a rule. Anyone even thinks about breaking it, they get fired. Everything is done on computers here. We have an in-house network with secure firewalls and automatic random data monitoring.”

“Can we see his computer, then?” Neagley asked.

“I guess you could see it,” Berenson said. “But it won’t do you any good. Someone leaves here, within thirty minutes their desktop hard drive is taken out and destroyed. Smashed. Physically. With hammers. It’s another security rule.”

“With hammers?” Reacher said.

“It’s the only definitive method. Data can be recovered otherwise.”

“So there’s no trace of him left?”

“None at all, I’m afraid.”

“You’ve got some pretty heavy rules here.”

“I know. Mr. Swan designed them himself. In his first week. They were his first major contribution.”

“Did he talk to anybody?” Dixon asked. “Water cooler buddies? Is there anyone he would have shared a concern with?”

“Personal issues?” Berenson said. “I doubt it. The dynamic wouldn’t have been appropriate. He had to play a cop’s role here. He had to keep himself a little unapproachable, to be effective.”

“What about his boss?” O’Donnell said. “They might have shared. They were in the same boat, professionally.”

“I’ll certainly ask him,” Berenson said.

“What’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You’re very discreet.”

“Mr. Swan insisted on it.”

“Can we meet with the guy?”

“He’s out of town right now.”

“So who’s minding the store?”

“Mr. Swan is, in a way. His procedures are all still in place.”

“Did he talk to you?”

“About personal things? No, he really didn’t.”

“Was he upset or worried the week he left?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Was he making a lot of phone calls?”

“I’m sure he was. We all do.”

“What do you think might have happened to him?”

“Me?” Berenson said. “I really have no idea. I walked him to his car, and I said when things pick up again I’ll be on the phone begging him to come back, and he said he’d look forward to my call. That was the last I saw of him.”

They got back in Dixon’s car and reversed away from the mirror glass. Reacher watched the Ford’s reflection get smaller and smaller.

Neagley said, “Wasted trip. I told you we should have called.”

Dixon said, “I wanted to see where he worked.”

O’Donnell said, “Worked is the wrong word. They were using him there, that’s all. They picked his brains for a year and then kicked him out. They were buying his ideas, not giving him a job.”

“Sure looks that way,” Neagley said.

“They’re not making anything there. It’s an unsecured building.”

“Obviously. They must have a third place somewhere. A remote plant for manufacturing.”

“So why didn’t UPS get that address, too?”

“Maybe it’s secret. Maybe they don’t get mail there.”

“I’d like to know what they make.”

“Why?” Dixon asked.

“Just curious. The more we know, the luckier we get.”

Reacher said, “So go ahead and find out.”

“I don’t know anyone to ask.”

“I do,” Neagley said. “I know a guy in Pentagon procurement.”

Reacher said, “Call him.”

In his room in his Denver hotel the dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was concluding his meeting. His guest had shown up exactly on time and had been accompanied by a single bodyguard. Mason had taken both of those facts as positive signs. He appreciated punctuality in business. And being outnumbered only two-to-one was a luxury. Often he was alone with as many as six or ten on the other side of the deal.

So, a good start. It had been followed by substantive progress. No lame excuses about late delivery or lowered numbers or other difficulties. No bait and switch. No attempt to renegotiate. No jacked-up prices. Just the sale as previously discussed, six hundred and fifty units at a hundred thousand dollars each.

Mason had opened his suitcase and his client had started the long process of totaling the consideration inside. The Swiss bank balances and the bearer bonds were uncontroversial. They had reliable face values. The diamonds were more subjective. Carat weight was a given, of course, but much depended on cut and clarity. Mason’s people had in fact underestimated in order to build in a horse-trading margin. Mason’s guest quickly understood. He pronounced himself entirely satisfied and agreed that the suitcase did indeed contain sixty-five million dollars.

At which point it became his suitcase.

In exchange Mason received a key and a piece of paper.

The key was small, old, scratched and worn, plain and unlabeled. It looked like the kind of thing a hardware store cuts while a person waits. Mason was told it was the key to a padlock currently securing a shipping container waiting at the Los Angeles docks.

The piece of paper was a bill of lading, describing the shipping container’s contents as six hundred and fifty DVD players.

Mason’s guest and his bodyguard left, and Mason stepped into the bathroom and set fire to his passport in the toilet pan. A half-hour later Andrew MacBride left the hotel and headed back to the airport. He was surprised to realize that he was looking forward to hearing the jug-band music again.

Frances Neagley called Chicago from the back of Dixon’s car. She told her assistant to e-mail her contact at the Pentagon and explain that she was out of the office, in California, away from a secure phone, and that she had an inquiry about New Age’s product. She knew her guy would feel better about responding by e-mail than talking on an unsecured cell network.

O’Donnell said, “You have secure phones in your office?”

“Sure.”

“Outstanding. Who’s the guy?”

“Just a guy,” Neagley said. “Who owes me big.”

“Big enough to deliver?”

“Always.”

Dixon came off the 101 at Sunset and headed west to the hotel. The traffic was slow. Less than three miles, but a jogger could have covered them faster. When they eventually arrived they found a Crown Vic waiting out front. An unmarked cop car. Not Thomas Brant’s. This one was newer and intact and a different color.

It was Curtis Mauney’s car.

He climbed out as soon as Dixon got parked. He walked over, short, solid, worn, tired. He stopped directly in front of Reacher and paused a beat. Then he asked, “Did one of your friends have a tattoo on his back?”

A gentle tone of voice.

Quiet.

Sympathetic.

Reacher said, “Ah, Christ.”

36

Manuel Orozco had gone through four years of college on army money and had assumed he would wind up a combat infantry officer. His baby sister had gone through a major irrational panic and had assumed he would wind up KIA with serious disfiguring facial wounds such that his body would not be identified on recovery. She would never know what had happened to him. He told her about dog tags. She said they might get blown off or lost. He told her about fingerprints. She said he might lose limbs. He told her about dental identification. She said his whole jaw might get exploded. Later he realized she was worrying on a deeper level but at the time he thought the answer to her fears was to get a big tattoo across his upper back that said Orozco, M. in large black letters, with his service number equally large below. He had gotten home and peeled off his shirt in triumph and had been mystified when the kid had cried even harder.

Ultimately he had avoided the infantry and ended up a key part of the 110th MP, where Reacher had immediately rechristened him Kit Bag because his broad olive back looked like a GI duffel with its name-and-number stencil. Now fifteen years later Reacher stood in the Chateau Marmont’s sunblasted parking lot and said, “You found another body.”

“I’m afraid we did,” Mauney said.

“Where?”

“Same general area. In a gully.”

“Helicopter?”

“Probably.”

“Orozco,” Reacher said.

“That’s the name on his back,” Mauney said.

“So why ask?”

“We have to be sure.”

“All corpses should be so convenient.”

“Who’s the next of kin?”

“He has a sister somewhere. Younger.”

“So you should make the formal ID. If you would. This really isn’t the kind of thing a younger sister should see.”

“How long was he in the gully?”

“A long time.”

They got back in the car and Dixon followed Mauney all the way to a county facility north of Glendale. Nobody spoke. Reacher sat in the back next to O’Donnell and did what he was pretty sure O’Donnell was doing too, which was to run through a long involuntary sequence of remembered Orozco moments. The guy had been a comedian, part on purpose, part unwittingly. He had been of Mexican descent, born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, but for many years had pretended to be a white Australian. He had called everyone mate. As an officer his command skills had been first rate, but he had never really issued orders. He would wait until a junior officer or a grunt had grasped the general consensus and then he would say, If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please. It had become a group catchphrase every bit as ubiquitous as You do not mess.

Coffee?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

Cigarette?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

Want me to shoot this mother?

If you wouldn’t mind, mate, please.

O’Donnell said, “We knew already. This is not a surprise.”

Nobody answered him.

The county facility turned out to be a brand-new medical center with a hospital on one side of a wide new street. On the other side was a state-of-the-art receiving station for townships without morgues of their own. It was a white concrete cube set on stilts a story high. Meat wagons could roll right under the bulk of the building to hidden elevator doors. Neat, clean, discreet. Californian. Mauney parked in a line of visitor slots near some trees. Dixon parked right next to him. Everyone got out and stood for a moment, stretching, looking around, wasting time.

Nobody’s favorite trip.

Mauney led the way. There was a personnel elevator opening off a cross-hatched walkway. Mauney hit the call button and the elevator door slid back and cold chemical air spilled out. Mauney stepped on, then Reacher, then O’Donnell, then Dixon, then Neagley.

Mauney pressed 4.

The fourth floor was as cold as a meat locker. There was a miserable public viewing area with a wide internal window backed by a venetian blind. Mauney passed it by and headed through a door to a storage area. Three walls showed the fronts of refrigerated drawers. Dozens of them. The air was bitter with cold and heavy with smells and noisy from reflections off stainless steel. Mauney pulled a drawer. It came out easily on ball bearing runners. Full length. It smacked all the way open against end stops made of rubber.

Inside was a refrigerated corpse. Male. Hispanic. The wrists and the ankles were tied with rough twine that had bitten deep. The arms were behind the back. The head and the shoulders were grievously damaged. Almost unrecognizable as human.

“He fell head first,” Reacher said, softly. “He would, I guess, tied up like that. If you’re right about the helicopter.”

“No tracks to or from,” Mauney said.

Further medical details were hard to discern. Decomposition was well advanced, but due to the desert heat and dryness it looked more like mummification. The body was shrunken, diminished, collapsed, leathery. It looked empty. There was some animal damage, but not much. Contact with the gully’s walls had prevented more.

Mauney asked, “Do you recognize him?”

“Not really,” Reacher said.

“Check the tattoo.”

Reacher just stood there.

Mauney said, “Want me to call an orderly?”

Reacher shook his head and put a hand under the corpse’s icy shoulder. Lifted. The body rolled awkwardly, all of a piece, stiff, like a log or a stump. It settled facedown, the arms flung upward, tied and contorted as if the desperate struggle for freedom had continued until the very last.

Which it undoubtedly had, Reacher thought.

The tattoo was a little folded and creased and wrinkled by the sloughing looseness of the skin and the unnatural inward pressure of the upper arms.

It was a little faded by time.

But it was unmistakable.

It said: Orozco, M.

Under it was a nine-digit service number.

“It’s him,” Reacher said. “It’s Manuel Orozco.”

Mauney said, “I’m very sorry.”

There was silence for a moment. Nothing to hear, except cooled air forcing its way through aluminum vents. Reacher asked, “Are you still searching the area?”

“For the others?” Mauney said. “Not actively. It’s not like we’ve got a missing child.”

“Is Franz in here, too? In one of these damn drawers?”

“You want to see him?” Mauney asked.

“No,” Reacher said. Then he looked back at Orozco and asked, “When is the autopsy?”

“Soon.”

“Is the string going to tell us anything?”

“It’s probably too common.”

“Do we have an estimate on when he died?”

Mauney half-smiled, cop to cop. “When he hit the ground.”

“Which was when?”

“Three, four weeks ago. Before Franz, we think. But we may never know for sure.”

“We will,” Reacher said.

“How?” Mauney asked.

“I’ll ask whoever did it. And he’ll tell me. By that point he’ll be begging to.”

“No independent action, remember?”

“In your dreams.”

Mauney stayed to process paperwork and Reacher and Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell took the elevator back down to warmth and sunlight. They stood in the lot, saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just crackling and trembling and twitching with suppressed rage. It was a given that soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. Some of them even want it. But deep down they want it to be fair. Me against him, may the best man win. They want it to be noble. Win or lose, they want it to arrive with significance.

A soldier dead with his arms tied behind him was the worst kind of outrage. It was about helplessness and submission and abuse. It was about powerlessness.

It took away all the illusions.

“Let’s go,” Dixon said. “We’re wasting time.”

37

At the hotel Reacher sat for a moment with the photograph Mauney had given him. The video surveillance frame. The pharmacy. Four men in front of the counter. Manuel Orozco on the left, glancing right, restless. Then Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then Tony Swan, looking straight ahead. Then Jorge Sanchez, on the right, his finger hooked under his collar.

Four friends.

Two down for sure.

Presumably all four down.

“Shit happens,” O’Donnell said.

Reacher nodded. “And we get over it.”

“Do we?” Neagley said. “Will we this time?”

“We always have before.”

“This never happened before.”

“My brother died.”

“I know. But this is worse.”

Reacher nodded again. “Yes, it is.”

“I was hoping the other three were still OK somehow.”

“We all were.”

“But they’re not. They’re all gone.”

“Looks that way.”

“We need to work,” Dixon said. “That’s all we’ve got now.”

They went up to Dixon’s room, but work was a relative term. They were dead-ended. They had nothing to go on. Those feelings didn’t improve any when they transferred to Neagley’s room and found an e-mail response from her Pentagon contact: Sorry, no way. New Age is classified. Just seven words, blank and dismissive.

“Seems he doesn’t owe you all that big,” O’Donnell said.

“He does,” Neagley said. “Bigger than you could imagine. This says more about New Age than him and me.”

She scrolled on through her inbox. Then she stopped. There was another message from the same guy. Different version of his name, different e-mail address.

“Disposable,” Neagley said. “That’s a one-time free account.”

She clicked on the message. It said: Frances, great to hear from you. We should get together. Dinner and a movie? And I need to return your Hendrix CDs. Thanks so much for the loan. I loved them all. The sixth track on the second album is dynamically brilliant. Let me know when you’re next in Washington. Please call soonest.

Reacher said, “You own CDs?”

“No,” Neagley said. “I especially don’t own Jimi Hendrix CDs. I don’t like him.”

O’Donnell said, “You’ve been to movies and dinner with this guy?”

“Never,” Neagley said.

“So he’s confusing you with some other woman.”

“Unlikely,” Reacher said.

“It’s coded,” Neagley said. “That’s what it is. It’s the answer to my question. Got to be. A kosher reply from his official address, and then a coded follow-up from an unofficial address. His ass is covered both ways.”

Dixon asked, “What’s the code?”

“Something to do with the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”

Reacher said, “What was the second Hendrix album?”

O’Donnell said, “Electric Ladyland?”

“That was later,” Dixon said. “The first was Are You Experienced?”

“Which one had the naked women on the cover?”

“That was Electric Ladyland.”

“I loved that cover.”

“You’re disgusting. You were eight years old.”

“Nearly nine.”

“That’s still disgusting.”

Reacher said, “Axis: Bold as Love. That was the second album.”

“What was the sixth track?” Dixon asked.

“I have no idea.”

O’Donnell said, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

They walked a long way east on Sunset, until they found a record store. They went inside and found cool air and young people and loud music and the H section in the Rock/Pop aisles. There was a dense foot-and-a-half of Jimi Hendrix albums. Four old titles that Reacher recognized, plus a bunch of posthumous stuff. Axis: Bold as Love was right there, three copies. Reacher pulled one and flipped it. It was wrapped in plastic and the store’s barcode label was stuck over the second half of the track listings.

Same for the second copy.

Same for the third.

“Rip it off,” O’Donnell said.

“Steal it?”

“No, rip the plastic off.”

“Can’t do that. It’s not ours.”

“You smack cops around but you won’t damage a store’s wrapper?”

“It’s different.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to buy it. We can play it in the car. Cars have CD players, right?”

“For the last hundred years,” Dixon said.

Reacher took the CD and lined up behind a girl with more metal punched through her face than a grenade victim. He made it to the register and peeled off thirteen of his remaining eight hundred dollars and for the first time in his life became the owner of a digital product.

“Unwrap it,” O’Donnell said.

It was wrapped tight. Reacher used his fingernails to scrape up a corner and then his teeth to tear the plastic. When he got it all off he turned the CD over and ran his finger down the track list.

“ ‘Little Wing,’ ” he said.

O’Donnell shrugged. Neagley looked blank.

“Doesn’t help,” Dixon said.

“I know the song,” Reacher said.

“Please don’t sing it,” Neagley said.

“So what does it mean?” O’Donnell said.

Reacher said, “It means New Age makes a weapons system called ‘Little Wing.’ ”

“Obviously. But that doesn’t help us if we don’t know what Little Wing is.”

“Sounds aeronautical. Like a drone plane or something.”

“Nobody heard of it?” Dixon asked. “Anybody?”

O’Donnell shook his head.

“Not me,” Neagley said.

“So it really is supersecret,” Dixon said. “No loose lips in D.C. or on Wall Street or among all of Neagley’s connections.”

Reacher tried to open the CD box but found it taped shut with a title label that ran all the way across the top seam. He picked at it with his nails and it came off in small sticky fragments.

“No wonder the record business is in trouble,” he said. “They don’t make these things very easy to enjoy.”

Dixon asked, “What are we going to do?”

“What did the e-mail say?”

“You know what it said.”

“But do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did it say?”

“Find the sixth track on the second Hendrix album.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“No, it said “ ‘Please call soonest.’ ”

“That’s ridiculous,” Neagley said. “If he won’t tell me by e-mail, why would he tell me on the phone?”

“It didn’t say, ‘Please call me.’ A coded note like that, every word counts.”

“So who am I supposed to call?”

“There must be somebody. He knows you know somebody that can help.”

“Who’s going to help with a thing like this? If he won’t?”

“Who does he know you know? Maybe from Washington, since he used that word, and every word counts?”

Neagley opened her mouth to say Nobody. Reacher saw the denial forming in her throat. But then she paused.

“There’s a woman,” she said. “She’s called Diana Bond. We both know her. She’s a staffer for a guy on the Hill. The guy is on the House Defense Committee.”

“There you go. Who’s the guy?”

Neagley said a familiar but unloved name.

“You’ve got a friend who works for that asshole?”

“Not exactly a friend.”

“I should hope not.”

“Everyone needs a job, Reacher. Except you, apparently.”

“Whatever, her boss is signing the checks, so he’ll have been briefed. He’ll know what Little Wing is. Therefore she will, too.”

“Not if it’s secret.”

“That guy can’t spell his own name without help. Believe me, if he knows, she knows, too.”

“She’s not going to tell me.”

“She is. Because you’re going to play hardball. You’re going to call her and tell her that Little Wing’s name is out there, and you’re about to tell the papers that the leak came from her boss’s office, and the price for your silence is everything she knows about it.”

“That’s dirty.”

“That’s politics. She can’t be exactly unfamiliar with the process, working for that guy.”

“Do we really need to do this? Is it relevant?”

“The more we know the luckier we get.”

“I don’t want to involve her.”

“Your Pentagon buddy wants you to,” O’Donnell said.

“That’s just Reacher’s guess.”

“No, it’s more than that. Think about the e-mail. He said the sixth track was dynamically brilliant. That’s a weird phrase. He could have just said it was great. Or amazing. Or brilliant on its own. But he said dynamically brilliant, which is the letters d and b. Like this Diana Bond woman’s initials.”

38

Neagley insisted on making the call to Diana Bond alone. When they got back to the hotel she parked herself in a far corner of the lobby and did a whole lot of dialing and redialing. Then some serious talking. She came back a long twenty minutes later. Slight distaste on her face. Slight discomfort in her body language. But a measure of excitement, too.

“Took me some time to track her down,” she said. “Turns out she’s not far away. She’s up at Edwards Air Force Base for a few days. Some big presentation.”

O’Donnell said, “That’s why your guy said call her soonest. He knew she was in California. Every word counts.”

“What did she say?” Reacher asked.

“She’s coming down here,” Neagley said. “She wants to meet face-to-face.”

“Really?” Reacher said. “When?”

“Just as soon as she can get away.”

“That’s impressive.”

“You bet your ass it is. Little Wing must be important.”

“Feel bad about the call?”

Neagley nodded. “I feel bad about everything.”

They went up to Neagley’s room and looked at maps and figured out Diana Bond’s earliest possible arrival time. Edwards was on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, out in the Mojave, about seventy miles north and east, past Palmdale and Lancaster, about halfway to Fort Irwin. A two-hour wait, minimum, if Bond got away immediately. Longer if she didn’t.

“I’m going for a walk,” Reacher said.

O’Donnell said, “I’ll come with you.”

They headed east on Sunset again to where West Hollywood met regular Hollywood. It was early afternoon and Reacher felt the sun burning his head through his shaved hair. It was like the rays had extra intensity after bouncing around through glittering particles of air pollution.

“I should buy a hat,” he said.

“You should buy a better shirt,” O’Donnell said. “You can afford one now.”

“Maybe I will.”

They saw a store they had passed on the way to Tower Records. It was some kind of a popular chain. It had an artfully pale and un-crowded window, but it wasn’t expensive. It sold cotton stuff, jeans, chinos, shirts, and T-shirts. And ball caps. They were brand new but looked like they had been worn and washed a thousand times already. Reacher picked one out, blue, no writing on it. He never bought anything with writing on it. He had spent too long in uniform. Name tapes and badges and alphabet soup all over him for thirteen long years.

He loosened the strap at the back of the cap and tried it on.

“What do you think?” he asked.

O’Donnell said, “Find a mirror.”

“Doesn’t matter what I see in a mirror. You’re the one laughing at how I look.”

“It’s a nice hat.”

Reacher kept it on and moved across the store to a low table piled high with T-shirts. In the center of the table was a mannequin torso wearing two of them, one under the other, pale green and dark green. The underneath shirt showed at the hem and the sleeves and the collar. Together the two layers were reassuringly thick and hefty.

Reacher asked, “What do you think?”

“It’s a look,” O’Donnell said.

“Do they need to be different sizes?”

“Probably not.”

Reacher picked a light blue and a dark blue, both XXLs. He took off the hat and carried the three items to the register. Refused a bag and bit off the tags and stripped off his bowling shirt right there in the middle of the store. Stood and waited, naked to the waist in the chill of the air conditioning.

“Got a trash can?” he asked.

The girl behind the counter bent down and came back with a plastic item with a liner. Reacher tossed his old shirt in and put his new shirts on, one after the other. Tugged them around and rolled his shoulders to get them comfortable and jammed the cap on his head. Then he headed back to the street. Turned east.

O’Donnell asked, “What are you running from?”

“I’m not running from anything.”

“You could have kept the old shirt.”

“Slippery slope,” Reacher said. “I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I’m carrying spare pants. Then I’d need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I’ve got a house and a car and a savings plan and I’m filling out all kinds of forms.”

“People do that.”

“Not me.”

“So like I said, what are you running from?”

“From being like people, I guess.”

“I’m like people. I’ve got a house and a car and a savings plan. I fill out forms.”

“Whatever works for you.”

“Do you think I’m ordinary?”

Reacher nodded. “In that respect.”

“Not everyone can be like you.”

“That’s ass-backward. The fact is, a few of us can’t be like you.”

“You want to be?”

“It’s not about wanting. It just can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“OK, I’m running.”

“From what? Being like me?”

“From being different than I used to be.”

“We’re all different than we used to be.”

“We don’t all have to like it.”

“I don’t like it,” O’Donnell said. “But I deal with it.”

Reacher nodded. “You’re doing great, Dave. I mean it. It’s me that I worry about. I’ve been looking at you and Neagley and Karla and feeling like a loser.”

“Really?”

“Look at me.”

“All that we’ve got that you don’t is suitcases.”

“But what have I got that you don’t?”

O’Donnell didn’t answer. They turned north on Vine, middle of the afternoon in America’s second-largest city, and saw two guys with pistols in their hands jumping out of a moving car.

39

The car was a black Lexus sedan, brand new. It sped up and took off again immediately, leaving the two guys alone on the sidewalk maybe thirty yards ahead. They were the bag man and the stash man from the vacant lot behind the wax museum. The pistols were AMT Hardballers, which were stainless-steel copies of Colt Government 1911 .45 automatics. The hands holding them were shaking a little and moving up level and rotating through ninety degrees into flat movie-approved bad-boy grips.

O’Donnell’s own hands went straight to his pockets.

“They want us?” he said.

“They want me,” Reacher said. He glanced back at what was behind him. He wasn’t very worried about being hit by a badly-held .45 from thirty yards away. He was a big target but statistics were on his side. Handguns were in-room weapons. Under expert control in high-pressure situations the average range for a successful engagement was about eleven feet. But even if Reacher himself wasn’t hit, someone else might be. Or something else. A person a block away, or a low-flying plane, maybe. Collateral damage. The street was thick with potential targets. Men, women, children, plus other folks Reacher wasn’t entirely sure how to categorize.

He turned to face front again. The two guys hadn’t moved far. Not more than a couple of steps. O’Donnell’s eyes were locked hard on them.

“We should take this off the street, Dave,” Reacher said.

O’Donnell said, “Roger that.”

“Moving left,” Reacher said. He crabbed sideways and risked a glance to his left. The nearest door was a narrow tarot reader’s dive. His mind was working with a kind of icy high-pressure speed. He was moving normally, but the world around him had slowed. The sidewalk had become a four-dimensional diagram. Forward, backward, sideways, time.

“Break back a yard and left, Dave,” he said.

O’Donnell was like a blind man. His eyes were tight on the two guys and wouldn’t leave them. He heard Reacher’s voice and tracked backward and left, fast. Reacher pulled the tarot reader’s door and held it open and let O’Donnell loop in around him. The two guys were following. Now twenty yards away. Reacher crowded inside after O’Donnell. The tarot parlor was empty apart from a woman of about nineteen sitting alone at a table. The table was a dining room item about seven feet long, draped to the floor with red cloth. Packs of cards all over it. The woman had long dark hair and was wearing a purple cheesecloth dress that was probably leaking vegetable dye all over her skin.

“Got a back room?” Reacher asked her.

“Just a toilet,” she said.

“Go in there and lie down on the floor, right now.”

“What’s up?”

“You tell me.”

The woman didn’t move until O’Donnell’s hands came out of his pockets. The knuckles were on his right fist like a shark’s smile. The switchblade was in his left hand. It was closed. Then it popped open with a sound like a bone breaking. The woman jumped up and fled. An Angelina, who worked on Vine. She knew the rules of the game.

O’Donnell said, “Who are these guys?”

“They just bought me these shirts.”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

“Possibly.”

“Plan?”

“You like the Hardballer?”

“Better than nothing.”

“OK, then.” Reacher flipped up the edge of the tablecloth and crouched down and backed under the table on his knees. O’Donnell followed him to his left and dragged the cloth back into position. He touched it with his knife, a short gentle sideways stroke, and a slit appeared in front of him. He widened it to the shape of an eye with his fingers. Then he did the same in front of Reacher. Reacher braced the flat of his hands against the underside of the table. O’Donnell swapped the knife into his right hand and braced his left the same way as Reacher’s.

Then they waited.

The guys were at the door within about eight seconds. They paused and peered in through the glass and then they pulled the door and came inside. Paused again, six feet in front of the table, guns pointed straight out with the butts twisted parallel to the floor.

They took a cautious step forward.

Paused again.

O’Donnell’s right hand was wrapped with the knuckles and was gripping the knife but it was the only free hand under the table. He used it to count down. Thumb, index finger, middle finger. One, two, three.

On three Reacher and O’Donnell heaved the table up and out. They powered it through an explosive quarter-circle, three feet in the air, three feet forward. The flat of the top tipped vertical and collected the guns first and then moved on and smacked the two guys full in the chests and faces. It was a heavy table. Solid wood. Maybe oak. It put the guys straight down with no trouble at all. They went over on their backs in a cloud of tarot cards and lay still under the slab in a tangle of red cloth. Reacher got up and stepped onto the upside-down table and rode it like a surfboard. Then he jumped up and down a couple of times. O’Donnell timed it for when Reacher’s weight was off it and kicked the table backward six inches until the two guys were exposed to the waist and their gun hands were accessible. He took the Hardballers and used his switchblade to slice the webs of the two guys’ thumbs. Painful, and a real disincentive against holding pistols again until they healed, which could be a long time, depending on their approach to nutrition and antisepsis. Reacher smiled, briefly. The technique had been a part of his unit’s SOP. Then he stopped smiling, because he recalled that Jorge Sanchez had developed it, and Jorge Sanchez was dead in the desert somewhere.

“Not too much of a problem,” O’Donnell said.

“We’ve still got the good stuff,” Reacher said.

O’Donnell put his ceramic collection back in his pockets and tucked a Hardballer into his waistband under his suit coat. Handed the second gun to Reacher, who shoved it in his pants pocket and draped his T-shirts over it. Then they stepped out to the sunshine and headed north on Vine again and turned west on Hollywood Boulevard.

Karla Dixon was waiting for them in the Chateau Marmont’s lobby.

“Curtis Mauney called,” she said. “He liked that thing you did with Franz’s mail. So he got the Vegas PD to check through the stuff in Sanchez and Orozco’s office. And they found something.”

40

Mauney showed up in person thirty minutes later. He stepped through the lobby door, still tired, still carrying his battered leather briefcase. He sat down and asked, “Who is Adrian Mount?”

Reacher looked up. Azhari Mahmoud, Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, Anthony Matthews. The Syrian and his four aliases. Information Mauney didn’t know they had.

“No idea,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty much.”

Mauney balanced his briefcase on his knees and opened the lid and took out a sheet of paper. Handed it over. It was blurred and indistinct. It looked like a fax of a copy of a copy of a fax. At the top it said Department of Homeland Security. But not in the style of an official letterhead. It looked more like content hacked out of a computer file. Plain DOS script. It related to an airline booking that a guy called Adrian Mount had made on British Airways, London to New York. The booking had been finalized two weeks ago for a flight three days ago. First class, one way, Heathrow to JFK, seat 2K, last departure of the evening, expensive, paid for with a legitimate credit card. Booked through British Airways’ U.K. website, although it was impossible to say exactly where in the world the mouse had been physically clicked.

“This came in the mail?” Reacher asked.

Mauney said, “It was stored in their fax machine’s memory. It came in two weeks ago. The machine was out of paper. But we know that Sanchez and Orozco weren’t around two weeks ago. Therefore this must be a response to a request they made at least a week earlier. We think they put a bunch of names on an unofficial watch list.”

“A bunch of names?”

“We found what we think is the original request. They had notes circulating in the mail, just like Franz. Four names.” Mauney pulled a second sheet of paper from his case. It was a photocopy of a sheet of blank paper with Manuel Orozco’s spidery handwriting all over it. Adrian Mount, Alan Mason, Andrew MacBride, Anthony Matthews, check w. DHS for arrival. Fast untidy scrawl, written in a hurry, not that Orozco’s penmanship had ever been neat.

Four names. Not five. Azhari Mahmoud’s real name wasn’t there. Reacher figured that Orozco knew that whoever the hell Mahmoud was, he would be traveling under an alias. No point in having aliases if you didn’t use them.

“DHS,” Mauney said. “The Department of Homeland Security. You know how hard it is for a civilian to get cooperation out of Homeland Security? Your pal Orozco must have called in a shitload of favors. Or spent a shitload of bribe money. I need to know why.”

“Casino business, maybe.”

“Possible. Although Vegas security doesn’t necessarily worry if bad guys show up in New York. New York arrivals are more likely headed for Atlantic City. Someone else’s problem.”

“Maybe they share. Maybe there’s a network. Guys can hit Jersey first and Vegas second.”

“Possible,” Mauney said again.

“Did this Adrian Mount guy actually arrive in New York?”

Mauney nodded. “The INS computer has him entering through Terminal Four. Terminal Seven had already closed for the night. The flight was delayed.”

“And then what?”

“He checks in at a Madison Avenue hotel.”

“And then?”

“He disappears. No further trace.”

“But?”

“We move on down the list. Alan Mason flies to Denver, Colorado. Takes a room at a downtown hotel.”

“And then?”

“We don’t know yet. We’re still checking.”

“But you think they’re all the same guy?”

“Obviously they’re all the same guy. The initials are a dead giveaway.”

Reacher said, “That makes me Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”

“You sure act like it.”

“So who is he?”

“I have no idea. The INS inspector won’t remember him. Those Terminal Four guys see ten thousand faces a day. The New York hotel people won’t remember him. We haven’t spoken to Denver yet. But they probably won’t remember him, either.”

“Wasn’t he photographed at Immigration?”

“We’re working on getting the picture.”

Reacher went back to the first fax. The Homeland Security data. The advance passenger information.

“He’s British,” he said.

Mauney said, “Not necessarily. He had at least one British passport, that’s all.”

“So what’s your play?”

“We start a watch list of our own. Sooner or later Andrew MacBride or Anthony Matthews will show up somewhere. Then at least we’ll know where he’s going.”

“What do you want from us?”

“You ever heard any of those names?”

“No.”

“No friends anywhere with the initials A and M?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Enemies?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Did Orozco know anyone with those initials?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to Orozco in ten years.”

“I was wrong,” Mauney said. “About the rope on his hands and feet. I had a guy take a look at it. It isn’t very common after all. It’s a sisal product from the Indian subcontinent.”

“Where would someone get it?”

“It’s not for sale anywhere in the United States. It would have to come in on whatever gets exported from there.”

“Which is what?”

“Rolled carpets, bales of unfinished cotton fabric, stuff like that.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“No problem. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Mauney left and they went up to Dixon’s room. No real reason. They were still dead-ended. But they had to be somewhere. O’Donnell cleaned blood off his switchblade and checked over the captured Hardballers in his usual meticulous fashion. They had been manufactured by AMT not far away in Irwindale, California. They were fully loaded with jacketed .45s. They were in fine condition and fully operational. Clean, oiled, undamaged, which made it likely that they had been very recently stolen. Dope dealers were not usually careful with weapons. The Hardballers’ only limitations came from being faithful copies of a design that had been around since the year 1911. Magazine capacity was only seven rounds, which must have seemed more than OK in a world full of six-shooters, but which didn’t stack up very well against modern capacities of fifteen or more.

“Pieces of shit,” Neagley said.

“Better than throwing stones,” O’Donnell said.

“Too big for my hand,” Dixon said. “I like the Glock 19, personally.”

“I like anything that works,” Reacher said.

“The Glock holds seventeen rounds.”

“It only takes one per head. I’ve never had seventeen people after me all at once.”

“Could happen.”

The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride was on the underground train inside the Denver airport. He had time to kill so he was riding it back and forth over and over again between the main terminal and Concourse C, which was the last stop. He was enjoying the jug-band music. He felt lightened, unburdened, and free. His luggage was now minimal. No more heavy suitcase. Just an overnight roll-on and a briefcase. The bill of lading was inside the briefcase, folded into a hardcover book. The padlock key was zipped into a secure pocket.

The man in the blue suit in the blue Chrysler sedan dialed his cell phone.

“They’re back in the hotel,” he said. “All four of them.”

“Are they getting close to us?” his boss asked.

“I have no way of telling.”

“Gut feeling?”

“Yes, I think they’re getting close.”

“OK, it’s time to take them down. Leave them there and come on in. We’ll make our move in a couple of hours.”

41

O’Donnell stood up and walked to Dixon’s window and asked, “What have we got?”

It was a routine question from the past. It had been a big part of the special unit’s standard operating procedure. Like an unbreakable habit. Reacher had always insisted on constant recaps. He had insisted on combing through accumulated information, restating it, testing it, re-examining it, looking at it from new angles in the light of what had come afterward. But this time nobody answered, except Dixon, who said, “All we’ve got is four dead friends.”

The room went quiet.

“Let’s get dinner,” Neagley said. “No point in the rest of us starving ourselves to death.”

Dinner. Reacher recalled the burger barn, twenty-four hours previously. Sunset Boulevard, the noise, the thick beef patties, the cold beer. The round table for four. The conversation. The way the center of attention had rotated freely between them all. Always one talker and three listeners, a shifting pyramid that had swung first one way and then another.

One talker, three listeners.

“Mistake,” he said.

Neagley said, “Eating is a mistake?”

“No, eat if you want to. But we’re making a mistake. A major conceptual error.”

“Where?”

“My fault entirely. I jumped to a false conclusion.”

“How?”

“Why can’t we find Franz’s client?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because Franz didn’t have a client. We made a mistake. His was the first body found, so we just went ahead and assumed this whole thing was about him. Like he had to have been the prime mover here. Like he was the talker and the other three were the listeners. But suppose he wasn’t the talker?”

“So who was?”

“We’ve been saying all along he wouldn’t have put himself on the line except for someone special. Someone he was obligated to somehow.”

“But that’s back to saying he was the prime mover. With a client we can’t find.”

“No, we’re imagining the hierarchy all wrong. It doesn’t necessarily go, first the client, then Franz, then the others helping Franz. I think Franz was actually lower down the pecking order. He wasn’t at the top of the tree. See what I mean? Suppose he was actually helping one of the others? Suppose he was a listener, not the talker? Suppose this whole thing is basically Orozco’s deal? For one of his clients? Or Sanchez’s? If they needed help, who were they going to call?”

“Franz and Swan.”

“Exactly. We’ve been wrong from the start. We need to reverse the paradigm. Suppose Franz got a panic call from Orozco or Sanchez? That’s certainly someone he regards as special. That’s someone he’s obligated to somehow. Not a client, but he can’t say no. He’s got to pitch in and help, no matter what Angela or Charlie think.”

Silence in the room.

Reacher said, “Orozco contacted Homeland Security. That’s difficult to do. And it’s the only really proactive thing we’ve seen so far. It’s more than Franz seems to have done.”

O’Donnell said, “Mauney’s people think Orozco was dead before Franz. That might be significant.”

“Yes,” Dixon said. “If this was Franz’s deal, why would he farm out the heavy-duty inquiries to Orozco? I imagine Franz was better equipped to handle them himself. That kind of proves the dynamic was flowing the other way, doesn’t it?”

“It’s suggestive,” Reacher said. “But let’s not make the same mistake twice. It could have been Swan.”

“Swan wasn’t working.”

“Sanchez, then, not Orozco.”

“More likely both of them together.”

Neagley said, “Which would mean this was something based in Vegas, not here in LA. Could those numbers be something to do with casinos?”

“Possibly,” Dixon said. “They could be house win percentages taking a hit after someone worked out a system.”

“What kind of thing gets played nine or ten or twelve times a day?”

“Practically anything. There’s no real minimum or maximum.”

“Cards?”

“Almost certainly, if we’re talking about a system.”

O’Donnell nodded. “Six hundred and fifty unscheduled winning hands at an average of a hundred grand a time would get anyone’s attention.”

Dixon said, “They wouldn’t let a guy win six hundred and fifty times for four months solid.”

“So maybe it’s more than one guy. Maybe it’s a cartel.”

Neagley said, “We have to go to Vegas.”

Then Dixon’s room phone rang. She answered it. Her room, her phone. She listened for a second and handed the receiver to Reacher.

“Curtis Mauney,” she said. “For you.”

Reacher took the phone and said his name and Mauney said: “Andrew MacBride just got on a plane in Denver. He’s heading for Las Vegas. I’m telling you this purely as a courtesy. So stay exactly where you are. No independent action, remember?”

42

They decided to drive to Vegas, not fly. Faster to plan and easier to organize and no slower door to door. No way could they take the Hardballers on a plane, anyway. And they had to assume that firepower would be necessary sooner or later. So Reacher waited in the lobby while the others packed. Neagley came down first and checked them out. She didn’t even look at the bill. Just signed it. Then she dumped her bag near the door and waited with Reacher. O’Donnell came down next. Then Dixon, with her Hertz key in her hand.

They loaded their bags into the trunk and slid into their seats. Dixon and Neagley up front, Reacher and O’Donnell behind them. They headed east on Sunset and fought through the tangle of clogged freeways until they found the 15. It would run them north through the mountains and then north of east out of state and all the way to Vegas.

It would also run them close to where they knew a helicopter had hovered more than three weeks previously, at least twice, three thousand feet up, dead of night, its doors open. Reacher made up his mind not to look, but he did. After the road brought them out of the hills he found himself looking west toward the flat tan badlands. He saw O’Donnell doing the same thing. And Neagley. And Dixon. She took her eyes off the road for seconds at a time and stared to her left, her face creased against the setting sun and her lips clamped and turned down at the corners.

They stopped for dinner in Barstow, California, at a miserable roadside diner that had no virtues other than it was there and the road ahead was empty. The place was dirty, the service was slow, the food was bad. Reacher was no gourmet, but even he felt cheated. In the past he or Dixon or Neagley or certainly O’Donnell might have complained or heaved a chair through a window, but none of them did that night. They just suffered through three courses and drank weak coffee and got back on the road.

The man in the blue suit called it in from the Chateau Marmont’s parking lot: “They skipped out. They’re gone. All four of them.”

His boss asked, “Where to?”

“The clerk thinks Vegas. That’s what she heard.”

“Excellent. We’ll do it there. Better all around. Drive, don’t fly.”

The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride stepped out of the jetway inside the Las Vegas airport and the first thing he saw was a bank of slot machines. Bulky black and silver and gold boxes, with winking neon fascias. Maybe twenty of them, back to back in lines of ten. Each machine had a vinyl stool in front of it. Each machine had a narrow gray ledge at the bottom with an ashtray on the left and a cup holder on the right. Perhaps twelve of the twenty stools were occupied. The men and women on them were staring forward at the screens with a peculiar kind of fatigued concentration.

Andrew MacBride decided to try his luck. He decided to designate the result as a harbinger of his future success. If he won, everything would be fine.

And if he lost?

He smiled. He knew that if he lost he would rationalize the result away. He wasn’t superstitious.

He sat on a stool and propped his briefcase against his ankle. He carried a change purse in his pocket. It made him faster through airport security, and therefore less noticeable. He took it out and poked around in it and took out all the quarters he had accumulated. There weren’t many. They made a short line on the ledge, between the ashtray and the cup holder.

He fed them to the machine, one by one. They made satisfying metallic sounds as they fell through the slot. A red LED showed five credits. There was a large touch pad to start the game. It was worn and greasy from a million fingers.

He pressed it, again and again.

The first four times, he lost.

The fifth time, he won.

A muted bell rang and a quiet whoop-whoop siren sounded and the machine rocked back and forth a little as a sturdy mechanism inside counted out a hundred quarters. They rattled down a chute and clattered into a pressed metal dish near his knee.

Barstow, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada, was going to be about two hundred miles. At night on the 15, with due deference to one state’s Highway Patrol and the other’s State Police, that was going to take a little over three hours. Dixon said she was happy to drive all the way. She lived in New York, and driving was a novelty for her. O’Donnell dozed in the back. Reacher stared out the window. Neagley said, “Damn, we forgot all about Diana Bond. She’s coming down from Edwards. She’s going to find us gone.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Dixon said.

“I should call her,” Neagley said. But she couldn’t get a signal on her cell phone. They were way out in the Mojave, and coverage was patchy.

They arrived in Las Vegas at midnight, which Reacher figured was exactly when the place looked its absolute best. He had been there before. In daylight, Vegas looked absurd. Inexplicable, trivial, tawdry, revealed, exposed. But at night with the lights full on, it looked like a gorgeous fantasy. They approached from the bad end of the Strip and Reacher saw a plain cement bar with peeled paint and no windows and an unpunctuated four-word sign: Cheap Beer Dirty Girls. Opposite was a knot of dusty swaybacked motels and a single faded high-rise hotel. That kind of neighborhood was where he would have started hunting for rooms, but Dixon drove on without a word, toward the glittering palaces a half-mile ahead. She pulled in at one with an Italian name, and a swarm of valets and bellmen came straight at them and grabbed their bags and drove their car away. The lobby was full of tile and pools and fountains and loud with the chatter of slot machines. Neagley headed to the desk and paid for four rooms. Reacher watched over her shoulder.

“Expensive,” he said, reflexively.

“But a possible shortcut,” Neagley said back. “Maybe they knew Orozco and Sanchez here. Maybe they even gave them their security contract.”

Reacher nodded. From the big green machine to this. In which case, this had been a huge step up, at least in terms of potential salary. The whole place dripped money, literally. The pools and the fountains were symbolic. So much water in the middle of the desert spoke of breathtaking extravagance. The capital investment must have been gigantic. The cash flow must have been immense. It had been quite something if Sanchez and Orozco had been in the middle of it all, safeguarding this kind of massive enterprise. He realized he was intensely proud of his old buddies. But simultaneously puzzled by them. When he had quit the army he had been fully aware that what faced him was the beginning of the rest of his life, but he had seen ahead no further than one day at a time. He had made no plans and formed no visions.

The others had.

How?

Why?

Neagley handed out the key cards and they arranged to freshen up and meet again in ten minutes to start work. It was after midnight, but Vegas was a true twenty-four-hour town. Time had no relevance. There were famous clichés about the lack of windows and clocks in the casinos, and they were all true, as far as Reacher knew. Nothing was allowed to slow down the cash flow. Certainly nothing as mundane as a player’s bedtime. There was nothing better than a tired guy who kept on losing all night long.

Reacher’s room was on the seventeenth floor. It was a dark concrete cube tricked out to look like a centuries-old salon in Venice. Altogether it was fairly unconvincing. Reacher had been to Venice, too. He opened his folding toothbrush and stood it upright in a glass in the bathroom. That was the sum total of his unpacking. He splashed water on his face and ran a palm across his bristly head and went back downstairs to take a preliminary look around.

Even in such an upmarket joint, most of the first-floor real estate was devoted to slot machines. Patient, tireless, microprocessor-controlled, they skimmed a small but relentless percentage off the torrent of cash fed into them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bells were ringing and beepers were sounding. Plenty of people were winning, but slightly more were losing. There was very light security in the room. No real opportunity to steal or cheat either way around, given a slot’s mechanistic nature and the Nevada Gaming Board’s close scrutiny. Reacher made only two people as staff out of hundreds in the room. A man and a woman, dressed like everyone else, as bored as everyone else, but without the manic gleam of hope in their eyes.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on slots.

He moved onward, to huge rooms in back where roulette and poker and blackjack were being played. He looked up, and saw cameras. Looked left and right and ahead, and saw high rollers and security guards and hookers in increasing concentrations.

He stopped at a roulette table. The way he understood it, roulette was really no different than a slot. Assuming the wheel was honest. Customers supplied money, the wheel distributed it straight back to other customers, except for an in-built house percentage as relentless and reliable as a slot machine’s microprocessor.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on roulette.

He moved on to the card tables, which was where he figured the real action was. Card games were the only casino components where human intelligence could be truly engaged. And where human intelligence was engaged, crime came soon after. But major crime would need more than a player’s input. A player with self-discipline and a great memory and a rudimentary grasp of statistics could beat the odds. But beating the odds wasn’t a crime. And beating the odds didn’t earn a guy sixty-five million dollars in four months. The margin just wasn’t there. Not unless the original stake was the size of a small country’s GDP. Sixty-five million dollars over four months would need a dealer’s involvement. But a dealer who lost so heavily would be fired within a week. Within a day or an hour, maybe. So a four-month winning streak would need some kind of a huge scam. Collusion. Conspiracy. Dozens of dealers, dozens of players. Maybe hundreds of each.

Maybe the whole house was playing against its investors.

Maybe the whole town was.

That would be a big enough deal for people to get killed over.

There was plenty of security in the room. There were cameras aimed at the players and the dealers. Some of the cameras were big and obvious, some were small and discreet. Probably there were others that were invisible. There were men and women patrolling in evening wear, with earpieces and wrist microphones, like Secret Service agents. There were others, undercover, in plain clothes. Reacher made five of them within a minute, and assumed there were many more that he was missing.

He threaded his way back to the lobby. Found Karla Dixon waiting by the fountains. She had showered and changed out of her jeans and leather jacket into a black pant suit. Her hair was wet and slicked back. Her suit coat was buttoned and she had no blouse under it. She looked pretty good.

“Vegas was settled by the Mormons,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“No,” Reacher said.

“Now it’s growing so fast they print the phone book twice a year.”

“I didn’t know that, either.”

“Seven hundred new houses a month.”

“They’re going to run out of water.”

“No question about that. But they’ll make hay until they do. Gambling revenues alone are close to seven billion dollars a year.”

“Sounds like you’ve been reading a guide book.”

Dixon nodded. “There was one in my room. They get thirty million visitors a year. That means each one of them is losing an average of more than two hundred bucks per visit.”

“Two hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents,” Reacher said, automatically. “The definition of irrational behavior.”

“The definition of being human,” Dixon said. “Everybody thinks they’re going to be the one.”

Then O’Donnell showed up. Same suit, different tie, maybe a fresh shirt. His shoes shone in the lights. Maybe he had found a polishing cloth in his bathroom.

“Thirty million visitors a year,” he said.

Reacher said, “Dixon already told me. She read the same book.”

“That’s ten percent of the whole population. And look at this place.”

“You like it?”

“It’s making me see Sanchez and Orozco in a whole new light.”

Reacher nodded. “Like I said before. You all moved onward and upward.”

Then Neagley stepped out of the elevator. She was dressed the same as Dixon, in a severe black suit. Her hair was wet and combed.

“We’re swapping guide book facts,” Reacher said.

“I didn’t read mine,” Neagley said. “I called Diana Bond instead. She got there and waited an hour and went back again.”

“Was she pissed at us?”

“She’s worried. She doesn’t like Little Wing’s name out there. I said I’d get back to her.”

“Why?”

“She’s making me curious. I like to know things.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Right now I’d like to know if someone scammed sixty-five million bucks in this town. And how.”

“It would be a big scam,” Dixon said. “Prorated across a whole year, it would be close to three percent of the total revenue stream.”

“Two point seven eight,” Reacher said, automatically.

“Let’s make a start,” O’Donnell said.

43

They started at the concierge desk, where they asked to see the duty security manager. The concierge asked if there was a problem, and Reacher said, “We think we have mutual friends.”

There was a long wait before the duty security manager showed up. Clearly social visits were low on his agenda. Eventually a medium-sized man in Italian shoes and a thousand-dollar suit walked over. He was about fifty years old, still trim and fit, in command, relaxed, but the lines around his eyes showed he must have done at least twenty years in a previous career. A harder career. He disguised his impatience well and introduced himself and shook hands all around. He said his name was Wright and suggested they talk in a quiet corner. Pure reflex, Reacher thought. His instincts and his training told him to move potential trouble well out of the way. Nothing could be allowed to slow down the cash flow.

They found a quiet corner. No chairs, of course. No Vegas casino would give guests a comfortable place to sit away from the action. For the same reason, the lights in the bedrooms had been dim. A guest upstairs reading was no use to anyone. They stood in a neat circle and O’Donnell showed his D.C. PI license and some kind of an accreditation note from the Metro PD. Dixon matched it with her license and a card from the NYPD. Neagley had a card from the FBI. Reacher produced nothing. Just tugged his shirts down over the shape of the gun in his pocket.

Wright said to Neagley, “I was with the FBI, once upon a time.”

Reacher asked him, “Did you know Manuel Orozco and Jorge Sanchez?”

“Did I?” Wright said. “Or do I?”

“Did you,” Reacher said. “Orozco’s dead for sure, and we figure Sanchez is, too.”

“Friends of yours?”

“From the army.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“We are, too.”

“Dead when?”

“Three, four weeks ago.”

“Dead how?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we’re here.”

“I knew them,” Wright said. “I knew them pretty well. Everyone in the business knew them.”

“Did you use them? Professionally?”

“Not here. We don’t contract out. We’re too big. Same with all the larger places.”

“Everything’s in-house?”

Wright nodded. “This is where FBI agents and police lieutenants come to die. We get the pick of the litter. The salaries on offer here, they’re lining up out the door. Not a day goes by that I don’t interview at least two of them, on their last vacation before retirement.”

“So how did you know Orozco and Sanchez?”

“Because the places they look after are like training camps. Someone gets a new idea, they don’t try it out here. That would be crazy. They perfect it someplace else first. So we keep people like Orozco and Sanchez sweet because we need their advance information. We all hook up once in a while, we talk, conferences, dinners, casual drinks.”

“Were they busy? Are you busy?”

“Like one-armed paperhangers.”

“You ever heard the name Azhari Mahmoud?”

“No. Who is he?”

“We don’t know. But we think he’s here under an alias.”

“Here?”

“Somewhere in Vegas. Can you check hotel registrations?”

“I can check ours, obviously. And I can call around.”

“Try Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”

“Subtle.”

Dixon asked, “How do you guys know if a card player is cheating?”

Wright said, “If he’s winning.”

“People have to win.”

“They win as much as we let them. Any more than that, they’re cheating. It’s a question of statistics. Numbers don’t lie. It’s about how, not if.”

O’Donnell said, “Sanchez had a piece of paper with a number written on it. Sixty-five million dollars. A hundred grand, times six hundred and fifty separate occasions, over a four-month period, to be precise.”

“So?”

“Are those the kind of numbers you would recognize?”

“As what?”

“As a rip-off.”

“What’s that in a year? Almost two hundred million?”

“Hundred and ninety-five,” Reacher said.

“Conceivable,” Wright said. “We try to keep wastage below eight percent. That’s like an industry target. So we lose way more than two hundred million in a year. But having said that, two hundred million in one specific scam would be a hell of a large proportion all in one go. Unless it was something new, over and above. In which case our eight percent target is shot all to hell. In which case you’re starting to worry me.”

“It worried them,” Reacher said. “We think it killed them.”

“It would be a very big deal,” Wright said. “Sixty-five million in four months? They’d need to recruit dealers and pit bosses and security people. They’d need to jinx cameras and erase tapes. They’d have to keep the cashiers quiet. It would be industrial-scale scamming.”

“It might have happened.”

“So why aren’t the cops talking to me?”

“We’re a little ways ahead of them.”

“The Vegas PD? The Gaming Board?”

Reacher shook his head. “Our guys died across the line, in LA County. Couple of sheriffs out there are dealing with it.”

“And you’re ahead of them? What does that mean?”

Reacher said nothing. Wright was quiet for a beat. Then he looked at each face in turn. First Neagley, then Dixon, then O’Donnell, then Reacher.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me. The army? You’re the special investigators. Their old unit. They talked about it all the time.”

Reacher said, “In which case you understand our interest. You worked with people.”

“If you find something, will you cut me in?”

“Earn it,” Reacher said.

“There’s a girl,” Wright said. “She works in some awful place with a fire pit. A bar, near where the Riviera used to be. She’s tight with Sanchez.”

“His girlfriend?”

“Not exactly. Maybe once. But they’re close. She’ll know more than I do.”

44

Wright went back to work and Reacher checked with the concierge as to where the Riviera had been. He got directions back to the cheap end of the Strip. They walked. It was a warm dry desert night. The stars were out, on the far horizon, beyond the pall of smog and the wash of the streetlights. The sidewalks were matted with discarded full-color postcards advertising prostitutes. It seemed like the free market had driven the base price down to a penny under fifty bucks. Although Reacher had no doubt that sum would inflate pretty fast once some hapless punter actually got a girl to his room. The women in the pictures were pretty, although Reacher had no doubt they weren’t real. They were probably library shots of innocent swimsuit models from Rio or Miami. Vegas was a city of scams. Sanchez and Orozco must have been permanently busy. Like one-armed paperhangers, Wright had said, and Reacher was completely ready to believe him.

They got level with the peeling cement bar with the cheap beer and the dirty girls and turned right into a mess of curving streets flanked by one-story tan stucco buildings. Some were motels, some were grocery stores, some were restaurants, some were bars. All had the same kind of signs, white boards behind glass on tall poles, with horizontal racks for slot-in black letters. All the letters were in the same pinched vertical style, so it required concentration to tell one type of establishment from another. Groceries advertised six-packs of soda for $1.99, motels boasted about air and pools and cable, restaurants had all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets twenty-four hours a day. The bars majored on happy hours and permanent low prices for well shots. They all looked the same. They walked past five or six before they found one with a sign that said: Fire Pit.

The sign was outside a plain stucco shoe box short on windows. It didn’t look like a bar. It could have been anything at all. It could have been an STD clinic or a fringe church. But not inside. Inside it was definitely a Vegas bar. It was a riot of décor and noise. Five hundred people drinking, shouting, laughing, talking loud, purple walls, dark red banquettes. Nothing was straight or square. The bar itself was crowded and long and curved into an S-shape. The tail of the S curled around a sunken pit. In the center of the pit was a round fake fireplace. The flames were represented by jagged lengths of orange silk blown upright by a hidden fan. They swayed and moved and danced in beams of bright red light. Away from the fire the room was divided into plush velvet booths. All the booths were full of people. The fire pit was packed. People were standing everywhere. Music played from hidden speakers. Waitresses in abbreviated outfits threaded expertly through the crowds with trays held high.

“Lovely,” O’Donnell said.

“Call the taste police,” Dixon said.

“Let’s find the girl and take her outside,” Neagley said. She was uncomfortable in the press of people. But they couldn’t find the girl. Reacher asked at the bar for Jorge Sanchez’s friend and the woman he was talking to seemed to know exactly who he meant but said she had gone off duty at midnight. She said the girl’s name was Milena. For safety’s sake Reacher asked two of the waitresses the same question and got the same answers from both of them. Their colleague Milena was tight with a security guy called Sanchez, but she was gone for the night, home, to sleep, to get ready for another hard twelve-hour shift the next day.

Nobody would tell him where home was.

He left his name with all three women. Then he fought his way back to the others and they threaded their way out to the sidewalk. Vegas at one in the morning was still lit up and humming, but after the inside of the bar it felt as quiet and peaceful as the cold gray surface of the moon.

“Plan?” Dixon said.

“We get back here at eleven-thirty in the morning,” Reacher said. “We catch her on her way in to work.”

“Until then?”

“Nothing. We take the rest of the night off.”

They walked back to the Strip and formed up four abreast on the sidewalk for the slow stroll back to the hotel. Forty yards behind them in the traffic a dark blue Chrysler sedan braked sharply and pulled over and came to a stop by the curb.

45

The man in the dark blue suit called it in immediately: “I found them. Unbelievable. They just popped up right in front of me.”

His boss asked: “All four of them?”

“They’re right here in front of me.”

“Can you take them?”

“I think so.”

“So get it done. Don’t wait for reinforcements. Get it done and get back here.”

The guy in the suit ended the call and moved his car off the curb and swerved it across four lanes of traffic and stopped again in a side street outside a grocery that offered the cheapest cigarettes in town. He climbed out and locked up and headed down the Strip, on foot, fast, with his right hand in his coat pocket.

Las Vegas had more hotel rooms per square inch than any other place on the planet, but Azhari Mahmoud wasn’t in any of them. He was in a rented house in a suburb three miles from the Strip. The house had been leased two years ago for an operation that had been planned but not executed. It had been safe then, and it was safe now.

Mahmoud was in the kitchen, with the Yellow Pages open on the counter. He was leafing through the truck rental section, trying to figure out how big a U-Haul he was going to need.

The Strip had a permanent redevelopment tide that slopped back and forth like water in a bathtub. Once upon a time the Riviera had anchored the glamour end. It had sparked investment that had raced down the street block by block. By the time the improvements had reached the other extremity, the stakes had been raised way high and the Riviera had suddenly looked old and dowdy by comparison with the newer stuff. So the investment had bounced right back again, racing block by block in the reverse direction. The result was a perpetually moving block-long construction site that separated the brand-new stuff that had just been built from the slightly older stuff that was just about to be demolished again. The roadway and the sidewalks were being straightened as the work progressed. The new lanes continued uninterrupted. The old route looped through rubble. The city felt briefly quiet and deserted there, like an uninhabited no man’s land.

That uninhabited no man’s land was exactly where the man in the blue suit came up behind his targets. They were walking four abreast, slowly, like they had a place to go but all the time in the world to get there. Neagley was on the left, Reacher and then O’Donnell were in the center, and Dixon was on the right. Close together, but not touching. Like a marching formation, across the whole width of the sidewalk. Collectively, they made a target maybe nine feet wide. It had been Neagley who had chosen the old sidewalk. She had followed it as if by arbitrary choice and the others had simply followed her.

The man in the suit took his gun out of his right-hand pocket. The gun was a Daewoo DP-51, made in South Korea, black, small, illegally obtained, unregistered, and untraceable. Its magazine held thirteen 9mm Parabellums. It was being carried in what its owner’s long training had taught him was the only safe-transport mode: chamber empty, safety on.

He held the gun right-handed and dry-fired against the locked trigger and rehearsed the sequence. He decided to prioritize and put the biggest targets down first. In his experience that always worked best. So, center-mass into Reacher’s back, then a small jog to the right into O’Donnell’s back, then a radical swing left to Neagley, then all the way back to Dixon. Four shots, maybe three seconds, from twenty feet, which was close enough to be sure of hitting without being so close that the deflections left and right would be extreme. Maximum traverse would be a little more than twenty degrees. Simple geometry. A simple task. No problem.

He glanced all around.

Clear.

He looked behind.

Clear.

He pushed the safety down and gripped the Daewoo’s barrel in his left hand and racked the slide with his right. Felt the first fat shell push upward, neatly into the chamber.

The night was not quiet. There was a lot of urban ambient noise. Traffic on the Strip, distant rooftop condensers roaring, extractors humming, the muted rumble of a hundred thousand people playing hard. But Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears it was a complete complex split-second symphony, and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a fleshy palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger, the grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass-cased shell socketing home, the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them.

His life and his history lacked many things. He had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came, for exactly what they were. Therefore he heard the slide rack back and felt no disabling shock. No panic. No stab of disbelief. It seemed entirely natural and reasonable to him that he should be walking down a street at night and listening to a man preparing to shoot him in the back. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no self-doubt, no inhibition. There was just evidence of a purely mechanical problem laid out behind him like an invisible four-dimensional diagram showing time and space and targets and fast bullets and slow bodies.

And then there was reaction, another thirtieth of a second later.

He knew where the first bullet would be aimed. He knew that any reasonable attacker would want to put the biggest target down first. That was nothing more than common sense. So the first shot would be aimed at him.

Or possibly at O’Donnell.

Better safe than sorry.

He used his right arm and shoved O’Donnell hard in the left shoulder and sent him sprawling into Dixon and then fell away in the opposite direction and crashed into Neagley. They both stumbled and as he was going down to his knees he heard the gun fire behind him and felt the bullet pass through the V-shaped void of empty air where the center of his back had been just a split second before.

He had his hand on his Hardballer before he hit the sidewalk. He was calculating angles and trajectories before he had it out of the waistband of his pants. The Hardballer had two safeties. A conventional lever at the left rear of the frame, and a grip safety released when the butt was correctly held.

Before he had either one set to fire he had decided not to shoot.

Not immediately, anyway.

He had fallen on top of Neagley toward the inside edge of the sidewalk. Their attacker was in the center of the sidewalk. Any angle vectoring from the inside of the sidewalk through the center would launch a bullet out toward the roadway. If he missed the guy, he could hit a passing car. Even if he hit the guy, he could still hit a passing car. A jacketed .45 could go right through flesh and bone. Easily. Lots of power. Lots of penetration.

He made a split-second decision to wait for O’Donnell.

O’Donnell’s angle was better. Much better. He had fallen on top of Dixon, toward the curb. Toward the gutter. His line of sight was inward. Toward the construction. A miss or a through-and-through would do no harm at all. The bullet would spend itself in a pile of sand.

Better to let O’Donnell fire.

Reacher twisted as he hit the ground. He was in that zone where his mind was fast but the physical world was slow. He felt like his body was mired in a vat of molasses. He was screaming at it to move move move but it was responding with extreme reluctance. Beyond him Neagley was thumping dustily to earth with slow-motion precision. In the corner of his eye he saw her shoulder hitting the ground and then her momentum moving her head like a rag doll’s. He moved his own head with enormous effort, like it was strapped with heavy weights, and he saw Dixon sprawling underneath O’Donnell.

He saw O’Donnell’s left arm moving with painful slowness. Saw his hand. Saw his thumb dropping the Hardballer’s safety lever.

Their attacker fired again.

And missed again. With a preplanned shot into empty air where O’Donnell’s back had been. The guy was following a sequence. He had rehearsed. Fire-move-fire, Reacher and O’Donnell first. A sound plan, but the guy was unable to react to unexpected contingencies. He was a slow, conventional thinker. His brain had vapor-locked. Good, but not good enough.

Reacher saw O’Donnell’s hand tighten around the grip of his gun. Saw his finger squeeze the slack out of the trigger. Saw the gun move up, up, up.

Reacher saw O’Donnell fire.

A snapshot, taken from an untidy uncompleted sprawl on the sidewalk. Taken before his body mass had even settled.

Too low, Reacher thought. That’s a leg wound at best.

He forced his head around. He was right. It was a leg wound. But a leg wound from a high-velocity jacketed .45 was not a pretty thing. It was like taking a high-torque power drill and fitting it with a foot-long half-inch masonry bit and drilling right through a limb. All in a lot less than a thousandth of a second. The damage was spectacular. The guy took the slug in the lower thigh and his femur exploded from the inside like it had been strapped with a bomb. Immense trauma. Paralyzing shock. Instant catastrophic blood loss from shattered arteries.

The guy stayed vertical but his gun hand dropped and O’Donnell was instantly on his feet. He scrambled up and his hand went in and out of his pocket and he covered the twenty feet full tilt and slammed the guy in the face with his knuckles. A straight right, with two hundred pounds of charging body mass behind it. Like hitting a watermelon with a sledgehammer.

The guy went down on his back. O’Donnell kicked his gun away and crouched at his side and jammed the Hardballer into his throat.

Game over, right there.

46

Reacher helped Dixon up. Neagley got up on her own. O’Donnell was scooting around in a tight circle, trying to keep his feet out of the big welling puddle of blood coming from the guy’s leg. Clearly his femoral artery was wide open. A healthy human heart was a pretty powerful pump and this guy’s was busy dumping the whole of his blood supply onto the street. A guy his size, there had been probably fifteen pints in there at the beginning. Most of them were already gone.

“Step away, Dave,” Reacher called. “Let him bleed out. No point ruining a pair of shoes.”

“Who is he?” Dixon asked.

“We may never know,” Neagley said. “His face is a real mess.”

She was right. O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster had done its work well. The guy looked like he had been attacked with hammers and knives. Reacher walked a wide circle around his head and grabbed his collar and pulled him backward. The lake of blood changed to a teardrop shape. Reacher took advantage of dry pavement and squatted down and checked through his pockets.

Nothing in any of them.

No wallet, no ID, no nothing.

Just car keys and a remote clicker, on a plain steel ring.

The guy was pale and turning blue. Reacher put a finger on the pulse in his neck and felt an irregular thready beat. The blood coming out of his thigh was turning foamy. There was major air in his vascular system. Blood out, air in. Simple physics. Nature abhors a vacuum.

“He’s on the way out,” Reacher said.

“Good shooting, Dave,” Dixon said.

“Left-handed, too,” O’Donnell said. “I hope you noticed that.”

“You’re right-handed.”

“I was falling on my right arm.”

“Outstanding,” Reacher said.

“What did you hear?”

“The slide. It’s an evolution thing. Like a predator stepping on a twig.”

“So there’s an advantage in being closer to the cavemen than the rest of us.”

“You bet there is.”

“But who does that? Attacks without a round in the chamber?”

Reacher stepped away and looked down for a full-length view.

“I think I recognize him,” he said.

“How could you?” Dixon asked. “His own mother wouldn’t know him.”

“The suit,” Reacher said. “I think I saw it before.”

“Here?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I can’t remember.”

“Think hard.”

O’Donnell said, “I never saw that suit before.”

“Me either,” Neagley said.

“Nor me,” Dixon said. “But whatever, it’s a good sign, isn’t it? Nobody tried to shoot us in LA. We must be getting close.”

Reacher tossed the guy’s gun and car keys to Neagley and broke down a section of the construction site’s fence. He hauled the guy through the gap as fast as he could, to minimize the blood smear. The guy was still leaking a little. Reacher dragged him across rough ground past tall piles of gravel until he found a wide trench built up with plywood formwork. The trench was about eight feet deep. The bottom was lined with gravel. The formwork was there to mold concrete for a foundation. Reacher rolled the guy into the trench. He fell eight feet and crunched on the stones and settled heavily, half on his side.

“Find shovels,” Reacher said. “We need to cover him with more gravel.”

Dixon said, “Is he dead yet?”

“Who cares?”

O’Donnell said, “We should put him on his back. That way we need less gravel.”

“You volunteering?” Reacher said.

“I’ve got a good suit on. And I did all the hard work so far.”

So Reacher shrugged and vaulted down into the pit. Kicked the guy onto his back and stamped him flat and got him partway embedded in the gravel that was already there. Then he hauled himself back out and O’Donnell handed him a shovel. Between them they had to make ten trips to the gravel pile before the guy was adequately hidden. Neagley found a standpipe and unrolled a hose and turned on the water. She rinsed the sidewalk and chased watery blood into the gutter. Then she waited and followed the others out backward and hosed away their footprints from the construction site’s sand. Reacher pulled the fence back into shape. Turned a full circle and checked the view. Not perfect, but reasonable. He knew there would be plenty a competent CSI team could get its teeth into, but there was nothing that would attract anyone’s attention in the short term. They had a margin of safety. A few hours, at least. Maybe longer. Maybe concrete would get poured right at the start of the work day and the guy would become just one more missing person. Not the only person missing in a building’s foundation, he guessed, in Las Vegas.

He breathed out.

“OK,” he said. “Now we take the rest of the night off.”

They dusted themselves down and formed up and resumed their walk down the Strip, slowly, four abreast, ready to relax. But Wright was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The house security manager. For a Vegas guy, he didn’t have a great poker face. It was clear that he was uptight about something.

47

Wright hurried over to them when they came in and led them away to the same quiet corner of the lobby that they had used before.

“Azhari Mahmoud isn’t in any Las Vegas hotel,” he said. “That’s definitive. Also negative on Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”

Reacher nodded.

“Thanks for checking,” he said.

Wright said, “And I made a few panic calls to my opposite numbers. Better that than lying awake all night, worrying. And you know what I found? You guys are completely full of shit. No way is this town down sixty-five million dollars in the last four months. It just isn’t happening.”

“Can you be sure?”

Wright nodded. “We all ran emergency cash-flow audits. And there’s nothing going on. The usual bits and pieces, that’s all. Nothing else. I’m going to send you my Prozac bill. I practically overdosed tonight.”

They found a bar off the lobby and bought one another beers and sat in a line in front of four idle slots. Reacher’s was simulating a big jackpot win, over and over again, like a tempting advertisement. Four reels were clicking to a stop on four cherries and lights were flashing and strobing and chasing themselves all over the front. Four reels, eight symbols on each. Astronomical odds, even without the microprocessor’s covert intervention. Reacher tried to calculate the tonnage of quarters a player would need to get through before he could expect his first win. But he didn’t know exactly how much a quarter weighed. Some small fraction of an ounce, obviously, which would add up fast. Tendon damage would be involved, muscle strain, repetitive stress injury. He wondered if casino owners had stock in orthopedic clinics. Probably.

Dixon said, “Wright already figured it would have to be industrial-scale scamming. He came right out and said so. Dealers, pit bosses, security guys, cameras, tapes, cashiers. It’s not much more of a leap to imagine that apparent cash flow could be massaged. They could have installed a phony program that makes everything look kosher for as long as they need it to. It’s exactly what I would do.”

Reacher asked, “When would they find out?”

“When they do their books at the end of their financial year. By that point the money is either there or it’s not.”

“How would Sanchez and Orozco find out ahead of that?”

“Maybe they tapped in lower down the food chain and extrapolated backward.”

“Who would need to be involved?”

“Key people.”

“Like Wright himself?”

“Possibly,” Dixon said.

O’Donnell said, “We talked to him and a half-hour later someone was trying to shoot us in the back.”

“We need to find Sanchez’s friend,” Neagley said. “Before someone else does.”

“We can’t,” Reacher said. “No bar is going to give out a girl’s address to a bunch of complete strangers.”

“We could tell them she’s in danger.”

“Like they haven’t heard that before.”

“Some other way,” Dixon said. “The UPS thing.”

“We don’t have her second name.”

“So what do we do?”

“We suck it up and wait for morning.”

“Should we move hotels? If Wright could be a bad guy?”

“No point. He’ll have buddies all over town. Just lock your door.”

Reacher followed his own advice when he got back to his room. He clicked the security lever and put the chain on. No real defense against a determined opponent, but it would buy a second or two, and a second or two was generally all that Reacher needed.

He put the Hardballer in the bedside drawer. Put his clothes under the mattress to press and took a long hot shower. Then he started thinking about Karla Dixon.

She was alone.

Maybe she didn’t like that.

Maybe she would appreciate a little safety in numbers.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded over to the phone. But before he got to it there was a knock at his door. He changed course. Ignored the peephole. He didn’t like to put his eye to the glass undefended. Easiest thing in the world for an assailant in the corridor to wait for the lens to darken and then fire a large-caliber handgun straight through it. Such a move would make a hell of a mess. The bullet, plus shards and fragments of glass and steel, all of them through the eye and into the brain and out the back of the skull. Peepholes were a very bad idea, in Reacher’s opinion.

He took off the chain and undid the extra lock. Opened the door.

Karla Dixon.

She was still fully dressed. She would be, he guessed, for a walk through the corridors and a ride in the elevator. Black suit, no shirt.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“I was just about to call you,” Reacher said.

“Right.”

“I was on my way to the phone.”

“Why?”

“Lonely.”

“You?”

“Me for sure. You, I hoped.”

“So can I come in?”

He held the door wide. She came in. Within a minute he discovered a shirt wasn’t the only thing she wasn’t wearing under the suit.

Neagley called on the bedside phone at nine-thirty in the morning.

“Dixon’s not in her room,” she said.

“Maybe she’s working out,” Reacher said. “Jogging or something.”

Dixon smiled and moved at his side, warm and lazy.

Neagley said, “Dixon doesn’t work out.”

“Then maybe she’s in the shower.”

“I’ve tried her twice.”

“Relax. I’ll try her. Breakfast in a half-hour, downstairs.”

He hung up with Neagley and gave the phone to Dixon and told her to count to sixty and then call Neagley’s room and say she had just gotten out of the bath. Thirty minutes later they were all eating breakfast together in a lounge restaurant full of the noise of slot machines. An hour after that they were back on the Strip, heading for the bar with the fire pit again.

48

Vegas in the morning looked flat and small and exposed under the hard desert sun. The light was pitiless. It showed up every fault and compromise. What by night had looked like inspired impressionism looked like silly fakery by day. The Strip itself could have been any worn-out four-lane in America. This time they walked it in a quadrant of four, two ahead, two behind, a smaller collective target, alert and always aware of who was ahead and who was behind them.

But there was nobody ahead and nobody behind. Traffic on the street was thin and the sidewalks were empty. Vegas in the morning was as close as it ever got to quiet.

The construction zone halfway down the Strip was quiet, too.

Deserted.

No activity.

“Is it Sunday today?” Reacher asked.

“No,” O’Donnell said.

“A holiday?”

“No.”

“So why aren’t they working?”

There were no cops there. No crime-scene tape. No big investigation. Just nothing. Reacher could see where he had bent the fence panel the night before. Beyond it, the dirt and the sand were muddied where Neagley had hosed them off. The old sidewalk had a huge dry stain on it. The old roadbed’s gutter had the last of a thin damp slick running to a drain. A mess, for sure, but no construction zone was ever tidy. Not perfect, but reasonable. There was nothing overt that could have attracted anyone’s attention.

“Weird,” Reacher said.

“Maybe they ran out of money,” O’Donnell said.

“Pity. That guy’s going to start to smell soon.”

They walked on. This time they knew exactly where they were going, and in the daylight they found a shortcut through the mess of curved streets. They came up on the bar with the fire pit from a different direction. It wasn’t open yet. They sat on a low wall and waited and squinted in the sun. It was very warm, almost hot.

“Two hundred eleven clear days a year in Vegas,” Dixon said.

“Summer high of a hundred and six degrees,” O’Donnell said.

“Winter low of thirty-six.”

“Four inches of rain a year.”

“One inch of snow, sometimes.”

“I still didn’t get to my guide book,” Neagley said.

By the time the clock in Reacher’s head hit twenty to twelve, people started showing up for work. They came down the street in loose knots, separated out into ones and twos, men and women moving slowly without visible enthusiasm. As they passed by, Reacher asked all the women if they were called Milena. They all said no.

Then the sidewalk went quiet again.

At nine minutes to twelve another bunch showed up. Reacher realized he was watching the bus timetable in action. Three women walked past. Young, tired, dressed down, with big white sneakers on their feet.

None of them was called Milena.

The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around. One minute to twelve. Neagley checked her watch.

“Worried yet?” she asked.

“No,” Reacher said, because beyond her shoulder he had seen a girl he knew had to be the one. She was fifty yards away, hurrying a little. She was short and slim and dark, dressed in faded low-rider blue jeans and a short white T-shirt. She had a winking jewel lodged in her navel. She was carrying a blue nylon backpack on one shoulder. She had long jet black hair that fell forward and framed a pretty face that looked about seventeen. But judging by the way she moved she was nearer to thirty. She looked tired and preoccupied.

She looked unhappy.

Reacher got up off the wall when she was ten feet away and said, “Milena?” She slowed with the kind of sudden wariness any woman should feel when randomly accosted in the street by a giant of a stranger. She glanced ahead at the bar’s door and then across at the opposite sidewalk as if assessing her options for a fast escape. She stumbled a little as if caught between the need to stop and the urge to run.

Reacher said, “We’re friends of Jorge’s.”

She looked at him, and then at the others, and then back at him. Some kind of slow realization dawned on her face, first puzzlement, then hope, then disbelief, and then acceptance, the same sequence Reacher imagined a poker player must experience when a fourth ace shows up in his hand.

Then there was some kind of muted satisfaction in her eyes, as if contrary to all expectations a comforting myth had proved to be true.

“You’re from the army,” she said. “He told me you’d come.”

“When?”

“All the time. He said if he ever had trouble, you’d show up sooner or later.”

“And here we are. Where can we talk?”

“Just let me tell them I’m going to be late today.” She smiled a little shyly and skirted around them all and headed inside the bar. Came out again two minutes later, moving faster, standing taller, with her shoulders straighter, like a weight had been taken off them. Like she was no longer alone. She looked young but capable. She had clear brown eyes and fine skin and the kind of thin sinewy hands a person gets after working hard for ten years.

“Let me guess,” she said. She turned to Neagley. “You must be Neagley.” Then she moved on to Dixon and said, “Which makes you Karla.” She turned to Reacher and O’Donnell and said, “Reacher and O’Donnell, right? The big one and the handsome one.” O’Donnell smiled at her and she turned back to Reacher and said, “They told me you were here last night looking for me.”

Reacher said, “We wanted to talk to you about Jorge.”

Milena took a breath and swallowed and said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “We know for sure Manuel Orozco is.”

Milena said, “No.”

Reacher said, “I’m sorry.”

Dixon asked, “Where can we go to talk?”

“We should go to Jorge’s place,” Milena said. “His home. You should see it.”

“We heard it was wrecked.”

“I cleaned it up a little.”

“Is it far?”

“We can walk.”

They walked back down the Strip, all five of them, side by side. The construction zone was still deserted. No activity. But no commotion, either. No cops. Milena asked twice more whether Sanchez was dead, as if repeating the question might eventually yield the answer she wanted to hear. Both times Reacher answered, “Probably.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“His body hasn’t been found.”

“But Orozco’s has?”

“Yes. We saw it.”

“What about Calvin Franz and Tony Swan? Why aren’t they here?”

“Franz is dead. Swan too, probably.”

“For sure?”

“Franz for sure.”

“But not Swan?”

“Not for sure.”

“And not Jorge for sure?”

“Not for sure. But probably.”

“OK.” She walked on, refusing to surrender, refusing to give up hope. They passed the high-end hotels one by one, moving through sketched facsimiles of the world’s great cities all in the space of a few hundred yards. Then they saw apartment buildings. Milena led them through a left turn, and then a right, onto a parallel street. She stopped under the shade of an awning that led to the lobby of a building that might have been the best place in town four generations of improvements ago.

“This is it,” she said. “I have a key.”

She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and rooted through it and came out with a change purse. She unzipped it and took out a door key made of tarnished brass.

“How long did you know him?” Reacher asked.

She paused for a long moment, trapped into contemplating the use of the past tense, and trying to find a way of making it seem less than definitive.

“We met a few years ago,” she said.

She led them into the lobby. There was a doorman behind a desk. He greeted her with a degree of familiarity. She led them to the elevator. They went up to the tenth floor and turned right on a faded corridor. Stopped outside a door painted green.

She used her key.

Inside, the apartment wasn’t a breathtaking spread, but it wasn’t small, either. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen. Plain décor, mostly white, some bright colors, a little old-fashioned. Generous windows. Once the place must have had a fine view of the desert but now it looked straight at a newer development a block away.

It was a man’s place, simple, unadorned, undesigned.

It was a real mess.

It had been through the same kind of trauma as Calvin Franz’s office. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were solid concrete, so they hadn’t been damaged. But other than that, the treatment had been similar. All the furniture was ripped up and torn apart. Chairs, sofas, a desk, a table. Books and papers had been dumped everywhere. A TV set and stereo equipment had been smashed. CDs were littered everywhere. Rugs had been lifted and thrown aside. The kitchen had been almost demolished.

Milena’s cleaning up had been limited to piling some of the debris around the perimeter and stuffing some of the feathers back into a few of the cushions. She had stacked a few of the books and papers near the broken shelves they had come from.

Apart from that, there hadn’t been much she could do. A hopeless task.

Reacher found the kitchen trash, where Curtis Mauney had said the crumpled napkin had been found. The pail had been torn off its mounting under the sink and booted across the room. Some stuff seemed to have fallen out, and some hadn’t.

“This was more about anger than efficiency,” he said. “Destruction, almost for its own sake. Like they were just as much mad as worried.”

“I agree,” Neagley said.

Reacher opened a door and moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was wrecked. The mattress had been destroyed. In the closet, clothes were dumped everywhere. The rails had been torn down. The shelves had been smashed. Jorge Sanchez had been a neat person to start with, and his neatness had been reinforced by years of living with military restraints and standards. There was nothing left of him in his apartment. No shred, no echo.

Milena was moving around the space, listlessly, putting more stuff in tentative piles, stopping occasionally to leaf through a book or look at a picture. She used her thigh to butt the ruined sofa back to its proper position, even though no one would ever sit on it again.

Reacher asked her, “Have the cops been here?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did they have any conclusions?”

“They think whoever came here dressed up as phony contractors. Cable, or phone.”

“OK.”

“But I think they bribed the doorman. That would be easier.”

Reacher nodded. Vegas, a city of scams. “Did the cops have an opinion as to why?”

“No,” she said.

He asked her, “When did you last see Jorge?”

“We had dinner,” she said. “Here. Chinese takeout.”

“When?”

“His last night in Vegas.”

“You were here then?”

“It was just the two of us.”

Reacher said, “He wrote something on a napkin.”

Milena nodded.

“Because someone called him?”

Milena nodded again.

Reacher asked, “Who called him?”

Milena said, “Calvin Franz.”

49

Milena was looking shaky, so Reacher used his forearm to clear shards of broken china off the kitchen countertop, to give her a place to sit. She boosted herself up and sat with her elbows turned out and her hands laid flat on the laminate, palms down, trapped under her knees.

Reacher said, “We need to know what Jorge was working on. We need to know what caused all this trouble.”

“I don’t know what it was.”

“But you spent time with him.”

“A lot.”

“And you knew each other well.”

“Very well.”

“For years.”

“On and off.”

“So he must have talked to you about his work.”

“All the time.”

“So what was on his mind?”

Milena said, “Business was slow. That’s what was on his mind.”

“His business here? In Vegas?”

Milena nodded. “It was great in the beginning. Years ago, they were always busy. They had a lot of contracts. But the big places dropped them, one by one. They all set up in-house operations. Jorge said it was inevitable. Once they reach a certain size, it makes more sense.”

“We met a guy at our hotel who said Jorge was still busy. ‘Like a one-armed paperhanger.’ ”

Milena smiled. “The guy was being polite. And Jorge put a brave face on it. Manuel Orozco, too. At first they used to say, We’ll fake it until we make it. Then they said, We’ll fake it now we’re not making it anymore. They kept up a front. They were too proud to beg.”

“So what are you saying? They were going down the tubes?”

“Fast. They did a bit of muscle work here and there. Doormen at some of the clubs, running cheats out of town, stuff like that. They did some consulting for the hotels. But not much anymore. Those people always think they know better, even when they don’t.”

“Did you see what Jorge wrote on the napkin?”

“Of course. I cleared dinner away after he left. He wrote numbers.”

“What did they mean?”

“I don’t know. But he was very worried about them.”

“What did he do next? After Franz’s call?”

“He called Manuel Orozco. Right away. Orozco was very worried about the numbers, too.”

“How did it all start? Who came to them?”

“Came to them?”

Reacher asked, “Who was their client?”

Milena looked straight at him. Then she turned and twisted and looked at O’Donnell, and then Dixon, and then Neagley.

“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “They didn’t really have clients. Not anymore.”

“Something must have happened,” Reacher said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, someone must have come to them with a problem. On the job somewhere, or at the office.”

“I don’t know who came to them.”

“Jorge didn’t say?”

“No. One day they were sitting around doing nothing, the next day they were as busy as blue-assed flies. That’s what they used to call it. Blue-assed flies, not one-armed paperhangers.”

“But you don’t know why?”

Milena shook her head. “They didn’t tell me.”

“Who else might know?”

“Orozco’s wife might know.”

50

The wrecked apartment went very quiet and Reacher stared straight at Milena and said, “Manuel Orozco was married?”

Milena nodded. “They have three children.”

Reacher looked at Neagley and asked, “Why didn’t we know that?”

“I don’t know everything,” Neagley said.

“We told Mauney the next of kin was the sister.”

Dixon asked, “Where did Orozco live?”

“Down the street,” Milena said. “In a building just like this.”

Milena led them another quarter mile away from the center of town to an apartment house on the other side of the same street. Orozco’s place. It was very similar to Sanchez’s. Same age, same style, same construction, same size, a blue sidewalk awning where Sanchez’s had been green.

Reacher asked, “What is Mrs. Orozco’s name?”

“Tammy,” Milena said.

“Will she be home?”

Milena nodded. “She’ll be asleep. She works nights. In the casinos. She gets home and gets the children on the school bus and then she goes right to bed.”

“We’re going to have to wake her up.”

It was the building’s doorman who woke her up. He called upstairs on the house phone. There was a long wait and then there was a reply. The doorman announced Milena’s name, and then Reacher’s, and Neagley’s, and Dixon’s, and O’Donnell’s. The guy had picked up on the mood and he used a serious tone of voice. He left no doubt that the visit wasn’t good news.

There was another long wait. Reacher guessed Tammy Orozco would be matching the four new names with her husband’s nostalgic recollections, and putting two and two together. Then he guessed she would be putting on a housecoat. He had visited widows before. He knew how it went.

“Please go on up,” the doorman said.

They rode the elevator to the eighth floor, packed tight in a small car. Turned left on a corridor and stopped at a blue door. It was already standing open. Milena knocked anyway and then led them inside.

Tammy Orozco was a small hunched figure on a sofa. Wild black hair, pale skin, a patterned housecoat. She was probably forty but right then she could have passed for a hundred. She looked up. She ignored Reacher and O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley completely. Didn’t look at them at all. There was some hostility there. Not just jealousy or vague resentment, like Angela Franz had shown. There was real anger instead. She looked directly at Milena and said, “Manuel is dead, isn’t he?”

Milena sat down beside her and said, “These guys say so. I’m very sorry.”

Tammy asked, “Jorge too?”

Milena said, “We don’t know yet.”

The two women hugged and cried. Reacher waited it out. He knew how it went. The apartment was a larger unit than Sanchez’s. Maybe three bedrooms, a different layout, facing a different direction. The air was stale and smelled of fried food. The whole place was battered and untidy. Maybe because it had been tossed three weeks ago, or maybe it was always in a state of chaos with two adults and three children living in it. Reacher didn’t know much about children, but he guessed Orozco’s three were young, from the kind of books and toys and scattered clothing he saw lying around. There were dolls and bears and video games and complex constructions made from plastic components. Therefore the children were maybe nine, seven, and five. Approximately. But all recent. All postservice. Orozco hadn’t been married in the service. Reacher was fairly sure of that, at least.

Eventually Tammy Orozco looked up and asked, “How did it happen?”

Reacher said, “The police have all the details.”

“Did he suffer?”

“It was instantaneous,” Reacher said, as he had been trained to long ago. All service KIAs were said to have been killed instantly, unless it could be definitively proved otherwise. It was considered a comfort to the next of kin. And in Orozco’s case it was technically true, Reacher thought. After the capture, that was, and the mistreatment and the starvation and the thirst and the helicopter ride and the writhing, screaming, twenty-second free fall.

“Why did it happen?” Tammy asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“You should. It’s the very least you can do.”

“It’s why we’re here.”

“But there are no answers here.”

“There must be. Starting with the client.”

Tammy glanced at Milena, tearstained, puzzled.

“Client?” she said. “Don’t you already know who it was?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Or we wouldn’t be here asking.”

“They didn’t have clients,” Milena said, as if on Tammy’s behalf. “Not anymore. I told you that.”

“Something started this,” Reacher said. “Someone must have come to them with a problem, at their office, or out in one of the casinos. We need to know who it was.”

“That didn’t happen,” Tammy said.

“Then they must have stumbled over the problem on their own. In which case we need to know where and when and how.”

There was a long silence. Then Tammy said, “You really don’t understand, do you? This was nothing to do with them. Nothing at all. It was nothing to do with Vegas.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

“So how did it start?”

“They got a call for help,” Tammy said. “That’s how it started. One day, suddenly, out of the blue. From one of you guys in California. From one of their precious old army buddies.”

51

Azhari Mahmoud dropped Andrew MacBride’s passport in a Dumpster and became Anthony Matthews on his way to the U-Haul depot. He had a wad of active credit cards and a valid driver’s license in that name. The address on the license would withstand sustained scrutiny, too. It was an actual building, an occupied house, not just a mail drop or a vacant lot. The billing address for the credit cards matched it exactly. Mahmoud had learned a lot over the years.

He had decided to rent a medium-sized truck. In general he preferred medium options everywhere. They stood out less obviously. Clerks remembered people who demanded the biggest or the smallest of anything. And a medium truck would do the job. His science education had been meager, but he could do simple arithmetic. He knew that volume was calculated by multiplying height by width by length. Therefore he knew a pile containing six hundred and fifty boxes could be constructed by stacking them ten wide and thirteen deep and five high. At first he had thought that ten wide would be a greater dimension than any available truck could accommodate, but then he realized he could reduce the required width by stacking the boxes on their edges. It would all work out.

In fact he knew it would all work out, because he was still carrying the hundred quarters he had won in the airport.

They gave their condolences and Curtis Mauney’s name to Tammy Orozco and left her alone on her sofa. Then they walked Milena back to the bar with the fire pit. She had a living to earn and she was already three hours down on the day. She said she could get fired if she missed the happy hour crush later in the afternoon. The Strip had gotten a little busier as the day had worn on. But the construction zone was still deserted. No activity at all. The slick in the gutter had finally dried. Apart from that there was no change. The sun was high. Not blazing, but it was warm enough. Reacher started thinking about how shallow the dead guy was buried. And about decomposition, and gases, and smells, and curious animals.

“You get coyotes here?” he asked.

“In town?” Milena said. “I never saw one.”

“OK.”

“Why?”

“Just wondering.”

They walked on. Took the same shortcut they had used before. Arrived outside the bar a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Tammy’s angry,” Milena said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s to be expected,” Reacher said.

“She was there when the bad guys came to search. Asleep. They hit her on the head. She was unconscious for a week. She doesn’t remember anything. Now she blames whoever it was who called for all her troubles.”

“Understandable,” Reacher said.

“But I don’t blame you,” Milena said. “It wasn’t any of you that called. I guess half of you were involved and half of you weren’t.”

She ducked inside the bar without looking back. The door closed behind her. Reacher stepped away and sat down on the wall, where he had waited that morning.

“I’m sorry, people,” he said. “We just wasted a lot of time. My fault, entirely.”

Nobody answered.

“Neagley should take over,” he said. “I’m losing my touch.”

“Mahmoud came here,” Dixon said. “Not LA.”

“He probably made a connection. He’s probably in LA right now.”

“Why not fly direct?”

“Why carry four false passports? He’s cautious, whoever he is. He lays false trails.”

“We were attacked here,” Dixon said. “Not in LA. Makes no sense.”

“It was a collective decision to come here,” O’Donnell said. “Nobody argued.”

Reacher heard a siren on the Strip. Not the bass bark of a fire truck, not the frantic yelp of an ambulance. A cop car, moving fast. He glanced up, toward the construction zone a half-mile away. He stood up and moved right and shaded his eyes and watched the short length of the Strip he could see. One cop was nothing, he thought. If some construction foreman had finally showed up for work and found something, there would be a whole convoy.

He waited.

Nothing happened. No more sirens. No more cops. No convoy. Just a routine traffic stop, maybe. He took one step more, to widen his view, to be certain. Saw a wink of red and blue beyond the corner of a grocery store. A car, parked in the sun. A red plastic lens over the tail light. Dark blue paint on a fender.

A car.

Dark blue paint.

He said, “I know where I saw that guy before.”

52

They stood around the Chrysler at a cautious and respectful distance, like it was a roped-off exhibit in a modern art museum. A 300C, dark blue, California plates. It was parked tight to the curb, locked up, still and cold, a little travel-stained. Neagley took out the keys that Reacher had found in the dying guy’s pocket and held them at arm’s length like the guy had held the gun, and pressed the remote button once.

The blue Chrysler’s lights flashed and its doors unlocked with a ragged thunk.

“It was behind the Chateau Marmont,” Reacher said. “Just waiting. That same guy was in it. His suit matched the sheet metal exactly. I took it for a car service with a gimmick.”

“The others told them we would come,” O’Donnell said. “At first as a threat, I suppose. And then later as a consolation. So they sent the guy to take us out. He spotted us on the sidewalk, I guess, just after he hit town. We were right there in front of him. He got lucky.”

“Real lucky,” Reacher said. “May all our enemies have the same kind of extreme good fortune.”

He opened the driver’s door. The car smelled of new leather and plastic. The interior was unmarked. There were maps in the door pocket, crisp and folded. That was all. Nothing else on show. He slid in and stretched a long arm over to the glove-box lid. Opened it up. Came out with a wallet and a cell phone. That was all that was in there. No registration, no insurance. No instruction manuals. Just a wallet and a phone. The wallet was a slim thing designed to be carried in a trouser pocket. It was a stiff rectangle made of black leather with a money clip built in on one side and a credit card pocket built in on the other. There was a wad of folded cash in the clip. More than seven hundred dollars, mostly fifties and twenties. Reacher took it all. Just pulled it out of the clip and stuffed it in his own pants pocket.

“That’s two more weeks before I need to find a job,” he said. “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

He turned the wallet over. The credit card section was jammed. There was a current California driver’s license and four credit cards. Two Visas, an Amex, and a MasterCard. Expiration dates all far in the future. The license and all four cards were made out to a guy by the name of Saropian. The address on the license had a five-digit house number and a Los Angeles street name and a zip that meant nothing to Reacher.

He dropped the wallet on the passenger seat.

The cell phone was a small silver folding item with a round LCD window on the front. It was getting great reception but its battery was low. Reacher opened it up and a larger window lit up in color. There were five voice messages waiting.

He handed the phone to Neagley.

“Can you retrieve those messages?” he asked.

“Not without his code number.”

“Look at the call log.”

Neagley scrolled through menus and selected options.

“All the calls in and out are to and from the same number,” she said. “A 310 area code. Which is Los Angeles.”

“Landline or cell?”

“Could be either.”

“A grunt calling his boss?”

Neagley nodded. “And vice versa. A boss issuing orders to a grunt.”

“Could your guy in Chicago get a name and address for the boss?”

“Eventually.”

“Get him started on it. The license plate on this car, too.”

Neagley used her own cell to call her office. Reacher lifted the center armrest console and found nothing except a ballpoint pen and a car charger for the phone. He checked the rear compartment. Nothing there. He got out and checked the trunk. Spare tire, jack, wrench. Apart from that, empty.

“No luggage,” he said. “This guy didn’t plan on a long trip. He thought we were going to be easy meat.”

“We nearly were,” Dixon said.

Neagley closed the dead guy’s phone and handed it back to Reacher. Reacher dropped it on the passenger seat next to the wallet.

Then he picked it up again.

“This is an ass-backward situation,” he said. “Isn’t it? We don’t know who sent this guy, or from where, or for why.”

“But?” Dixon said.

“But whoever it was, we’ve got his number. We could call him up and say hello, if we wanted to.”

“Do we want to?”

“Yes, I think we do.”

53

They got in the parked Chrysler, for quiet. The doors were thick and heavy and closed tight and gave the kind of vacuum hush a luxury sedan was supposed to. Reacher opened the dead guy’s phone and scrolled through the call log to the last call made and then pressed the green button to make it all over again. Then he cupped the phone to his ear and waited. And listened. He had never owned a cell phone but he knew how they were used. People felt them vibrate in their pockets or heard them ring and fished them out and looked at the screen to see who was calling and then decided whether or not to answer. Altogether it was a much slower process than picking up a regular phone. It could take five or six rings, at least.

The phone rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

Then it was answered in a real hurry.

A voice said, “Where the hell have you been?”

The voice was deep. A man, not young. Not small. Behind the exasperation and the urgency there was a civilized West Coast accent, professional, but with a faint remnant of streetwise edge still in it. Reacher didn’t reply. He listened hard for background sounds from the phone. But there were none. None at all. Just silence, like a closed room or a quiet office.

The voice said, “Hello? Where the hell are you? What’s happening?”

“Who is this?” Reacher asked, like he had every right to know. Like he had gotten an accidental wrong number.

But the guy didn’t bite. He had seen the caller ID.

“No, who are you?” he asked back, slowly.

Reacher paused a beat and said, “Your boy failed last night. He’s dead and buried, literally. Now we’re coming for you.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice said, “Reacher?”

“You know my name?” Reacher said. “Doesn’t seem fair that I don’t know yours.”

“Nobody ever said life was fair.”

“True. But fair or not, enjoy what’s left of it. Buy yourself a bottle of wine, rent a DVD. But not a box set. You’ve got about two days, max.”

“You’re nowhere.”

“Look out your window.”

Reacher heard sudden movement. The rustle of jacket tails, the oiled grind of a swivel chair. An office. A guy in a suit. A desk facing the door.

Only about a million of those in the 310 area code.

“You’re nowhere,” the voice said again.

“We’ll see you soon,” Reacher said. “We’re going to take a helicopter ride together. Just like you did before. But with one big difference. My friends were reluctant, presumably. But you won’t be. You’ll be begging to jump out. You’ll be pleading. I can absolutely promise you that.”

Then he closed the phone and dropped it in his lap.

Silence in the car.

“First impressions?” Neagley asked.

Reacher breathed out.

“An executive,” he said. “A big guy. A boss. Not dumb. An ordinary voice. A solo office with a window and a closed door.”

“Where?”

“Couldn’t tell. There were no background sounds. No traffic, no airplanes. And he didn’t seem too worried that we have his phone number. The registration is going to come back phony as hell. This car, too, I’m sure.”

“So what now?”

“We head back to LA. We never should have left.”

“This is about Swan,” O’Donnell said. “Got to be, right? We can’t make a case for it being about Franz, it’s not about Sanchez or Orozco, so what else is left? He must have gotten into something immediately after he quit New Age. Maybe he had it all lined up and waiting.”

Reacher nodded. “We need to talk to his old boss. We need to see if he shared any private concerns before he left.” He turned to Neagley. “So set up the thing with Diana Bond again. The Washington woman. About New Age and Little Wing. We need a bargaining chip. Swan’s old boss might talk more if he knows we have something solid to keep quiet about in exchange. Besides, I’m curious.”

“Me too,” Neagley said.

They stole the Chrysler. Didn’t even get out. Reacher took the key from Neagley and started it up and drove it around to the hotel. He waited in the drop-off lane while the others went inside to pack. He quite liked the car. It was quiet and powerful. He could see its exterior styling reflected in the hotel’s window. It looked good in blue. It was square and bluff and about as subtle as a hammer. His kind of machine. He checked the controls and the toys and plugged the dead guy’s phone into its charger and closed the armrest lid on it.

Dixon came out of the lobby first, trailing a bellhop carrying her luggage and a valet sprinting ahead to get her car. Then came Neagley and O’Donnell together. Neagley was stuffing a credit card receipt into her purse and closing her cell phone all at the same time.

“We got a hit on the license plate,” she said. “It traces back to a shell corporation called Walter, at a commercial mail drop in downtown LA.”

“Cute,” Reacher said. “Walter for Walter Chrysler. I bet the phone comes back to a corporation called Alexander, for Graham Bell.”

“The Walter Corporation leases a total of seven cars,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “We need to bear that in mind. They’ll have major reinforcements waiting somewhere.”

Dixon said she would drive O’Donnell back in her rental. So Reacher popped the Chrysler’s trunk and Neagley heaved her bags in and then slid in beside him on the passenger seat.

“Where are we holing up?” Dixon asked, through the window.

“Somewhere different,” Reacher said. “So far they’ve seen us in the Wilshire and the Chateau Marmont. So now we need a change of pace. We need the kind of place they won’t think to look. Let’s try the Dunes on Sunset.”

“What is that?”

“A motel. My kind of place.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s fine. It has beds. And doors that lock.”

Reacher and Neagley took off first. Traffic was slow all the way out of town and then the 15 emptied and Reacher settled in for the cruise across the desert. The car was quiet and swift and civilized. Neagley spent the first thirty minutes playing phone tag around Edwards Air Force Base, trying to get Diana Bond on the line before her cell coverage failed. Reacher tuned her out and concentrated on the road ahead. He was an adequate driver, but not great. He had learned in the army and had never received civilian instruction. Never passed a civilian test, never held a civilian license. Neagley was a much better driver than he was. And much faster. She finished her calls and fidgeted with impatience. Kept glancing over at the speedometer.

“Drive it like you stole it,” she said. “Which you did.”

So he accelerated a little. Started passing people, including a medium-sized U-Haul truck lumbering west in the right-hand lane.

Ten miles shy of Barstow, Dixon caught up with them and flashed her lights and pulled alongside and O’Donnell made eating motions from the passenger seat. Like helpless masochists they stopped at the same diner they had used before. No alternative for miles, and they were all hungry. They hadn’t eaten lunch.

The food was as bad as before and the conversation was desultory. Mostly they talked about Sanchez and Orozco. About how hard it was to keep a viable small business going. Especially about how hard it was for ex-military people. They entered the civilian world with all the wrong assumptions. They expected the same kind of certainties they had known before. The straightforwardness, the transparency, the honesty, the shared sacrifice. Reacher felt that part of the time Dixon and O’Donnell were actually talking about themselves. He wondered exactly how well they were doing, behind their facades. Exactly how it all looked on paper for them, at tax time. And how it was going to look a year from then. Dixon was in trouble because she had walked out on her last job. O’Donnell had been out for a spell with his sister. Only Neagley seemed to have no worries. She was an unqualified success. But she was one out of nine. A hit rate a fraction better than eleven percent, for some of the finest graduates the army had ever produced.

Not good.

You’re well out of it, Dixon had said.

I usually feel that way, he had replied.

All that we’ve got that you don’t is suitcases, O’Donnell had said.

But what have I got that you don’t? he had replied.

He finished the meal a little closer to an answer than before.

After Barstow came Victorville and Lake Arrowhead. Then the mountains reared in front of them. But first, this time to their right, were the badlands where the helicopter had flown. Once again Reacher told himself he wouldn’t look, but once again he did. He took his eyes off the road and glanced north and west for seconds at a time. Sanchez and Swan were out there somewhere, he guessed. He saw no reason to hope otherwise.

They passed through an active cell and Neagley’s phone rang. Diana Bond, all set to leave Edwards at a moment’s notice. Reacher said, “Tell her to meet us at that Denny’s on Sunset. Where we were before.” Neagley made a face and he said, “It’s going to taste like Maxim’s in Paris after that place we just stopped.”

So Neagley arranged the rendezvous and he kicked the transmission down and climbed onto Mount San Antonio’s first low slopes. Less than an hour later they were checking in at the Dunes Motel.

The Dunes was the kind of place where no room went even close to three figures for the night and where guests were required to leave a security deposit for the TV remote, which was issued with great ceremony along with the key. Reacher paid cash from his stolen wad for all four rooms, which got around the necessity for real names and ID. They parked the cars out of sight of the street and regrouped in a dark battered lounge next to a laundry room, as anonymous as four people could get in Los Angeles County.

Reacher’s kind of place.

An hour later Diana Bond called Neagley to say she was pulling into the Denny’s lot.

54

They walked a short stretch of Sunset and stepped into the Denny’s neon lobby and found a tall blonde woman waiting for them. She was alone. She was dressed all in black. Black jacket, black blouse, black skirt, black stockings, black high-heeled shoes. Serious East Coast style, a little out of place on the West Coast and seriously out of place in a Denny’s on the West Coast. She was slim, attractive, clearly intelligent, somewhere in her late thirties.

She looked a little irritated and preoccupied.

She looked a little worried.

Neagley introduced her all around. “This is Diana Bond,” she said. “From Washington D.C. via Edwards Air Force Base.”

Diana Bond had nothing with her except a small crocodile purse. No briefcase, not that Reacher expected notes or blueprints. They led her through the shabby restaurant and found a round table in back. Five people wouldn’t fit in a booth. A waitress came over and they ordered coffee. The waitress came back with five heavy mugs and a flask, and poured. They each took a preliminary sip, in silence. Then Diana Bond spoke. She didn’t start with small talk. Instead she said, “I could have you all arrested.”

Reacher nodded.

“I’m kind of surprised you haven’t,” he said. “I was kind of expecting to find a bunch of agents here with you.”

Bond said, “One call to the Defense Intelligence Agency would have done it.”

“So why didn’t you make that call?”

“I’m trying to be civilized.”

“And loyal,” Reacher said. “To your boss.”

“And to my country. I really would urge you not to pursue this line of inquiry.”

Reacher said, “That would give you another wasted journey.”

“I’d be very happy to waste another journey.”

“Our tax dollars at work.”

“I’m pleading with you.”

“Deaf ears.”

“I’m appealing to your patriotism. This is a question of national security.”

Reacher said, “Between the four of us here, we’ve got sixty years in uniform. How many have you got?”

“None.”

“How many has your boss got?”

“None.”

“Then shut up about patriotism and national security, OK? You’re not qualified.”

“Why on earth do you need to know about Little Wing?”

“We had a friend who worked for New Age. We’re trying to complete his obituary.”

“He’s dead?”

“Probably.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“But again, I would appeal to you not to press this.”

“No deal.”

Diana Bond paused a long moment. Then she nodded.

“I’ll trade,” she said. “I’ll give you outline details, and in return you swear on those sixty years in uniform that they’ll go no further.”

“Deal.”

“And after I talk to you this one time, I never hear from you again.”

“Deal.”

Another long pause. Like Bond was wrestling with her conscience.

“Little Wing is a new type of torpedo,” she said. “For the Navy’s Pacific submarine fleet. It’s fairly conventional apart from an enhanced control capability because of new electronics.”

Reacher smiled.

“Good try,” he said. “But we don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“We were never going to believe your first answer. Obviously you were going to try to blow us off. Plus, most of those sixty years we mentioned were spent listening to liars, so we know one when we see one. Plus, some of those sixty years were spent reading all kinds of Pentagon bullshit, so we know how they use words. A new torpedo would more likely be called ‘Little Fish.’ Plus, New Age was a clean-sheet start-up with a free choice of where to build, and if they were working for the Navy they’d have chosen San Diego or Connecticut or Newport News, Virginia. But they didn’t. They chose East LA instead. And the closest places to East LA are Air Force places, including Edwards, where you just came from, and the name is Little Wing, so it’s an airborne device.”

Diana Bond shrugged.

“I had to try,” she said.

Reacher said, “Try again.”

Another pause.

“It’s an infantry weapon,” she said. “Army, not Air Force. New Age is in East LA to be near Fort Irwin, not Edwards. But you’re right, it’s airborne.”

“Specifically?”

“It’s a man-portable shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. The next generation.”

“What does it do?”

Diana Bond shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You’ll have to. Or your boss goes down.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Compared to what?”

“All I’ll say is that it’s a revolutionary advance.”

“We’ve heard that kind of thing before. It means it’ll be out-of-date a year from now, rather than the usual six months.”

“We think two years, actually.”

“What does it do?”

“You’re not going to call the newspapers. You’d be selling out your country.”

“Try us.”

“Are you serious?”

“As lung cancer.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Suck it up. Or your boss needs a new job tomorrow. As far as that goes, we’d be doing our country a favor.”

“You don’t like him.”

“Does anyone?”

“The newspapers wouldn’t publish.”

“Dream on.”

Bond was quiet for a minute more.

“Promise it will go no further,” she said.

“I already have,” Reacher said.

“It’s complicated.”

“Like rocket science?”

“You know the Stinger?” Bond asked. “The current generation?”

Reacher nodded. “I’ve seen them in action. We all have.”

“What do they do?”

“They chase the heat signature of jet exhaust.”

“But from below,” Bond said. “Which is a key weakness. They have to climb and maneuver at the same time. Which makes them relatively slow and relatively cumbersome. They show up on downward-looking radar. It’s possible for a pilot to outmaneuver them. And they’re vulnerable to countermeasures, like decoy flares.”

“But?”

“Little Wing is revolutionary. Like most great ideas, it starts with a very simple premise. It completely ignores its target on the way up. It does all its work on the way down.”

“I see,” Reacher said.

Bond nodded. “Going up, it’s just a dumb rocket. Very, very fast. It reaches about eighty thousand feet and then it slows and stops and topples. Starts to fall back down again. Then the electronics switch on and it starts hunting its target. It has boosters to maneuver with, and control surfaces, and because gravity is doing most of the work, the maneuvering can be incredibly precise.”

“It falls on its prey from above,” Reacher said. “Like a hawk.”

Bond nodded again.

“At unbelievable speed,” she said. “Way supersonic. It can’t miss. And it can’t be stopped. Airborne missile defense radar always looks downward. Decoy flares always launch downward. The way things have been until now, planes are very vulnerable from above. They could afford to be. Because very little came at them from above. But it’s different now. That’s why this is so sensitive. We’ve got about a two-year window in which our surface-to-air capability will be completely unbeatable. For about two years anyone using Little Wing will be able to shoot down anything that flies. Maybe longer. It depends how fast people are with new countermeasures.”

Reacher said, “The speed will make countermeasures difficult.”

“Almost impossible,” Bond said. “Human reaction times will be too slow. So defenses will have to be automated. Which means we’ll have to trust computers to tell the difference between a bird a hundred yards up and Little Wing a mile up and a satellite fifty miles up. Potentially it will be chaos. Civilian airlines will want protection, obviously, because of terrorism worries. But the skies above civilian airports are thick with stacked planes. False deployment would be the norm, not the exception. So they’d have to turn off their protection for takeoff and landing, which makes them totally vulnerable just when they can’t afford to be.”

“A can of worms,” Dixon said.

“But a theoretical can of worms,” O’Donnell said. “We understand Little Wing isn’t working very well.”

“This can go no further,” Bond said.

“We already agreed.”

“Because these are commercial secrets now.”

“Much more important than defense secrets.”

“The prototypes were fine,” Bond said. “The beta testing was excellent. But they ran into problems with production.”

“Rockets or electronics or both?”

“Electronics,” Bond said. “The rocket technology is more than forty years old. They can do the rocket production in their sleep. That happens up in Denver, Colorado. It’s the electronics packs that are giving them the problems. Down here in LA. They haven’t even started mass production yet. They’re still doing bench assembly. Now even that is screwed up.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. He stared out the window for a moment and then took a stack of napkins out of the dispenser and fanned them out and then butted them back together into a neat pile. Weighted them down with the sugar container. The restaurant had pretty much emptied out. There were two guys alone in separate booths at the far end of the room. Landscape workers, tired and hunched. Apart from them, no business. Outside on the street the afternoon light was fading. The red and yellow neon from the restaurant’s huge sign was becoming comparatively brighter and brighter. Some passing cars on the boulevard already had their headlights on.

“So Little Wing is the same old same old, really,” O’Donnell said, in the silence. “A Pentagon pipe dream that does nothing but burn dollars.”

Diana Bond said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

“It never is.”

“It’s not a total failure. Some of the units work.”

“They said the same thing about the M16 rifle. Which was a real comfort when you were out on patrol with one.”

“But the M16 was perfected eventually. Little Wing will be, too. And it will be worth waiting for. You know which is the world’s best-protected airplane?”

Dixon said, “Air Force One, probably. Politicians’ asses always come first.”

Bond said, “Little Wing could take it out without breaking a sweat.”

“Bring it on,” O’Donnell said. “Easier than voting.”

“You should read the Patriot Act. You could be arrested for even thinking that.”

“Jails aren’t big enough,” O’Donnell said.

Their waitress came back and hovered. Clearly she was hoping for something more lucrative from such a big table than five bottomless cups of coffee. Dixon and Neagley took the hint and ordered ice cream sundaes. Diana Bond passed. O’Donnell ordered a hamburger. The waitress stood and looked pointedly at Reacher. He wasn’t seeing her. He was still playing with his pile of napkins. Weighting it down with the sugar canister, lifting the sugar off, putting it back.

“Sir?” the waitress said.

Reacher looked up.

“Apple pie,” he said. “With ice cream. And more coffee.”

The waitress went away and Reacher went back to his pile of napkins. Diana Bond retrieved her purse from the floor and made a big show of dusting it off.

“I should get back,” she said.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much for coming.”

55

Diana Bond left for the long drive back to Edwards and Reacher neatened his stack of napkins and placed the sugar container back on top of it, exactly centered. The desserts arrived and more coffee was poured and O’Donnell’s burger was served. Reacher got halfway through his pie and then he stopped eating. He sat in silence for a moment, staring out the window again. Then he moved suddenly and pointed at the sugar container and looked straight at Neagley and asked, “You know what that is?”

“Sugar,” she said.

“No, it’s a paperweight,” he said.

“So?”

“Who carries a gun with the chamber empty?”

“Someone trained that way.”

“Like a cop. Or an ex-cop. Ex-LAPD, maybe.”

“So?”

“The dragon lady at New Age lied to us. People take notes. They doodle. They work better with pencil and paper. There are no completely paperless environments.”

O’Donnell said, “Things might have changed since you last held a job.”

“The first time we talked she told us that Swan used his piece of the Berlin Wall as a paperweight. It’s kind of hard to use a paperweight in a completely paperless environment, isn’t it?”

O’Donnell said, “It could have been a figure of speech. Paperweight, souvenir, desk ornament, is there a difference?”

“First time we were there, we had to wait to get in the lot. Remember?”

Neagley nodded. “There was a truck coming out the gate.”

“What kind of a truck?”

“A photocopier truck. Repair or delivery.”

“Kind of hard to use a photocopier in a completely paperless environment, right?”

Neagley said nothing.

Reacher said, “If she lied about that, she could have lied about a whole bunch of stuff.”

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “New Age’s Director of Security is ex-LAPD. I bet most of his foot soldiers are, too. Safeties on, chambers empty. Basic training.”

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “Call Diana Bond again. Get her back here, right now.”

“She only just left,” Neagley said.

“Then she hasn’t got far. She can turn around. I’m sure her car has a steering wheel.”

“She won’t want to.”

“She’ll have to. Tell her if she doesn’t there’ll be a whole lot more than her boss’s name in the newspaper.”

It took a little more than thirty-five minutes for Diana Bond to get back. Slow traffic, inconvenient highway exits. They saw her car pull into the lot. A minute later she was back at the table. Standing beside it, not sitting at it. Angry.

“We had a deal,” she said. “I talk to you one time, you leave me alone.”

“Six more questions,” Reacher said. “Then we leave you alone.”

“Go to hell.”

“This is important.”

“Not to me.”

“You came back. You could have kept on driving. You could have called the DIA. But you didn’t. So quit pretending. You’re going to answer.”

Silence in the room. No sound, except tires on the boulevard and a distant hum from the kitchen. A dishwasher, maybe.

“Six questions?” Bond said. “OK, but I’ll be counting carefully.”

“Sit down,” Reacher said. “Order dessert.”

“I don’t want dessert,” she said. “Not here.” But she sat down, in the same chair she had used before.

“First question,” Reacher said. “Does New Age have a rival? A competitor somewhere with similar technology?”

Diana Bond said, “No.”

“Nobody all bitter and frustrated because they were outbid?”

“No,” Bond said again. “New Age’s proposition was unique.”

“OK, second question. Does the government really want Little Wing to work?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t it?”

“Because governments can get nervous about developing new attack capabilities without having appropriate defense capabilities already in place.”

“That’s a concern I’ve never heard mentioned.”

“Really? Suppose Little Wing is captured and copied? The Pentagon knows how much damage it can do. Are we happy to face having the thing turned around against us?”

“It’s not an issue,” Bond said. “We would never do anything if we thought like that. The Manhattan Project would have been canceled, supersonic fighters, everything.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Now tell me about New Age’s bench assembly.”

“Is this the third question?”

“Yes.”

“What about their bench assembly?”

“Tell me what it is, basically. I never worked in the electronics business.”

“It’s assembly by hand,” Bond said. “Women in sterile rooms at laboratory benches in shower caps using magnifying glasses and soldering irons.”

“Slow,” Reacher said.

“Obviously. A dozen units a day instead of hundreds or thousands.”

“A dozen?”

“That’s all they’re averaging right now. Nine or ten or twelve or thirteen a day.”

“When did they start bench assembly?”

“Is this the fourth question?”

“Yes, it is.”

“They started bench assembly about seven months ago.”

“How did it go?”

“Is this the fifth question?”

“No, it’s a follow-up.”

“It went fine for the first three months. They hit their targets.”

“Six days a week, right?”

“Yes.”

“When did they hit problems?”

“About four months ago.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Is this the last question?”

“No, it’s another follow-up.”

“After assembly the units are tested. More and more of them weren’t working.”

“Who tests them?”

“They have a quality control director.”

“Independent?”

“No. He was the original development engineer. At this stage he’s the only one who can test them because he’s the only one who knows how they’re supposed to work.”

“What happens to the rejects?”

“They get destroyed.”

Reacher said nothing.

Diana Bond said, “Now I really have to go.”

“Last question,” Reacher said. “Did you cut their funding because of their problems? Did they fire people?”

“Of course not,” Bond said. “Are you nuts? That’s not how it works. We maintained their budget. They maintained their staff. We had to. They had to. We have to make this thing work.”

56

Diana Bond left for the second time and Reacher went back to his pie. The apples were cold and the crust was leathery and the ice cream had melted all over the plate. But he didn’t care. He wasn’t really tasting anything.

O’Donnell said, “We should celebrate.”

“Should we?” Reacher said.

“Of course we should. We know what happened now.”

“And that means we should celebrate?”

“Well, doesn’t it?”

“Lay it out for me and see for yourself.”

“OK, Swan wasn’t pursuing some private concern here. He was investigating his own company. He was checking why the success rate fell away so badly after the first three months. He was worried about insider involvement. Therefore he needed clerical help on the outside because of eavesdropping and random data monitoring in his office. Therefore he recruited Franz and Sanchez and Orozco. Who else would he trust?”

“And?”

“First they analyzed the production figures. Which were all those numbers we found. Seven months, six days a week. Then they ruled out sabotage. New Age had no rivals that stood to gain anything and the Pentagon wasn’t working against them behind the scenes.”

“So?”

“What else was there? They figured the quality control guy had falsely condemned six hundred and fifty working units and the firm was booking them in as destroyed but actually selling them out the back door for a hundred grand apiece to someone called Azhari Mahmoud, a.k.a. whoever. Hence the list of names and the note on Sanchez’s napkin.”

“And?”

“They confronted New Age prematurely and got killed for it. The firm cooked up a story to cover Swan’s disappearance and the dragon lady fed it to you.”

“So now we should celebrate?”

“We know what happened, Reacher. We always used to celebrate.”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s a home run,” O’Donnell said. “Isn’t it? And you know what? It’s almost funny. You said we should talk to Swan’s old boss? Well, I think we already did. Who else could it have been on that cell phone? That was New Age’s Director of Security.”

“Probably.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“What did you say way back in that Beverly Hills hotel room?”

“I don’t know. Lots of things.”

“You said you wanted to piss on their ancestors’ graves.”

“And I will.”

“You won’t,” Reacher said. “And neither will I, or any of us. Which isn’t going to feel good. That’s why we can’t celebrate.”

“They’re right here in town. They’re sitting ducks.”

“They sold six hundred and fifty working electronics packs out the back door. Which has implications. Somebody wants the technology, they buy one pack and copy it. Somebody buys six hundred and fifty, it’s because they want the missiles themselves. And they don’t buy the electronics down here unless they’re also buying the rockets and the launch tubes up there in Colorado. That’s what we’ve got to face here. Some guy called Azhari Mahmoud now owns six hundred and fifty brand-new latest-generation SAMs. Whoever he is, we can guess what he wants them for. It’ll be some kind of a big, big deal. So we have to tell someone, folks.”

Nobody spoke.

“And a thin minute after we drop that dime, we’re buried up to our armpits in federal agents. We won’t be able to cross the street without permission, let alone go get these guys. We’ll have to sit back and watch them get lawyers and eat three squares a day for the next ten years while they run through all their appeals.”

Nobody spoke.

“So that’s why we can’t celebrate,” Reacher said. “They messed with the special investigators and we can’t lay a glove on them.”

57

Reacher didn’t sleep a wink that night. Not a second, not a minute. They messed with the special investigators and we can’t lay a glove on them. He tossed and turned and lay awake, hour after hour. His eyes were jammed wide open but images and fevered hallucinations flooded at him. Calvin Franz, walking, talking, laughing, full of drive and energy and sympathy and concern. Jorge Sanchez, the narrowed eyes, the hint of a smile, the gold tooth, the endless cynicism that was ultimately as reassuring as constant good humor. Tony Swan, short, wide, bulky, sincere, a thoroughly decent man. Manuel Orozco, the absurd tattoo, the fake accent, the jokes, the metallic clunk of the ever-present Zippo.

Friends all.

Friends unavenged.

Friends abandoned.

Then others swam into sight, as real as if they were hovering just below the ceiling. Angela Franz, clean, carefully dressed, eyes wide with panic. The boy Charlie, rocking in his little wooden chair. Milena, slipping like a ghost from the harsh Vegas sun into the darkness of the bar. Tammy Orozco on her sofa. Her three children, bewildered, roaming through their wrecked apartment, looking for their father. They appeared to Reacher as two girls and a boy, nine, seven, and five, even though he had never met them. Swan’s dog was there, a long swishing tail, a deep rumble of a bark. Even Swan’s mail box was there, blinding in the Santa Ana light.

Reacher gave it up at five in the morning and got dressed again and went out for a walk. He turned west on Sunset and stamped his way through a whole angry mile, hoping against hope that someone would bump him or jostle him or get in his way so that he could snap and snarl and yell and ease his frustration. But the sidewalks were deserted. Nobody walked in LA, especially not at five in the morning, and certainly nowhere near a giant stranger in an obvious rage. The boulevard was quiet, too. No traffic, except occasional anonymous thirdhand sedans bearing humble employees to work, and a lone farting Harley carrying a fat gray-haired jerk in leathers. Reacher was offended by the noise and gave the guy the finger. The bike slowed and for a delicious moment Reacher thought the guy was going to stop and make an issue out of it. But, no luck. The guy took one look and twisted the throttle and took off again, fast.

Up ahead on the right Reacher saw a vacant corner lot fenced with wire. At a bus bench in the side street was a small crowd of day laborers, waiting for the sun, waiting for work, tiny brown men with tired stoic faces. They were drinking coffee from a mission cart set up outside some kind of a community center. Reacher headed in that direction and paid a hundred of his stolen dollars for a cup. He said it was a donation. The women behind the cart accepted it without a question. They had seen weirder, he guessed, in Hollywood.

The coffee was good. As good as Denny’s. He sipped it slowly and leaned back on the vacant lot’s fence. The wire gave slightly and supported his bulk like a trampoline. He floated there, not quite upright, coffee in his mouth, fog in his brain.

Then the fog cleared, and he started thinking.

About Neagley, principally, and her mysterious contact at the Pentagon.

He owes me, she had said. Bigger than you could imagine.

By the time he finished the coffee and tossed the empty cup he had a faint glimmer of new hope, and the outline of a new plan. Odds of success, about fifty-fifty. Better than roulette.

He was back at the motel by six in the morning. He couldn’t raise the others. No answer from their rooms. So he headed on down Sunset and found them in Denny’s, in the same booth Neagley had used at the very beginning. He slid into the remaining unoccupied seat and the waitress dealt him a paper place mat and clattered a knife and a fork and a mug after it. He ordered coffee, pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, and jelly.

“You’re hungry,” Dixon said.

“Starving,” he said.

“Where were you?”

“Walking.”

“Didn’t sleep?”

“Not even close.”

The waitress came back and filled his mug. He took a long sip. The others went quiet. They were picking at their food. They looked tired and dispirited. He guessed that none of them had slept well, or at all.

O’Donnell asked, “When do we drop the dime?”

Reacher said, “Maybe we don’t.”

Nobody spoke.

“Ground rules,” Reacher said. “We have to agree something from the start. If Mahmoud has got the missiles, then this thing is bigger than we are. We have to suck it up and move on. There’s too much at stake. Either he’s paramilitary and wants to turn the whole Middle East into a no-fly zone, or he’s a terrorist planning a day of action that’s going to make the Twin Towers look like a day at the beach. Either way around, we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of KIA. Maybe tens of thousands. Those kind of numbers trump any interest of ours. Agreed?”

Dixon and Neagley nodded and looked away.

O’Donnell said, “There’s no if about it. We have to assume Mahmoud has got the missiles.”

“No,” Reacher said. “We have to assume he’s got the electronics. We don’t know if he’s got the rockets and the launch tubes yet. It’s even money. Fifty-fifty. Either he collected the rockets first, or the electronics first. But he’s got to have both before we drop the dime.”

“How do we find out?”

“Neagley hits up her Pentagon guy. She calls in whatever markers she’s holding. He organizes some kind of audit out in Colorado. If anything is missing up there, then it’s game over for us. But if everything is still present and correct and accounted for, then it’s game on.”

Neagley checked her watch. Just after six in the west, just after nine in the east. The Pentagon would have been humming for an hour. She took out her phone and dialed.

58

Neagley’s buddy wasn’t dumb. He insisted on calling back from outside the building, and not on his own cell phone, either. And he was smart enough to realize that any pay phone within a mile radius of the Pentagon would be continuously monitored. So there was a whole hour’s delay while he got himself across the river and halfway across town to a phone on a wall outside a bodega on New York Avenue.

Then the fun began.

Neagley told him what she wanted. He gave her all kinds of reasons why it wasn’t possible. She started calling in her markers, one by one. The guy owed her a lot of heavy-duty favors. That was clear. Reacher felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. If your balls were in a vise, better that it wasn’t Neagley’s hand on the lever. The guy caved and agreed within ten minutes. Then it became a logistical discussion. How should the job be done, by whom, what should be considered proof positive. Neagley suggested Army CID should roll up unannounced and match the books with physical inventory. Her guy agreed, and asked for a week. Neagley gave him four hours.

Reacher spent the four hours asleep. Once the plan was settled and the decision was made he relaxed to the point where he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He went back to his room and lay down on the bed. A maid came in after an hour. He sent her away again and went back to sleep. Next thing he knew Dixon was at his door. She told him that Neagley was waiting in the lounge, with news.

Neagley’s news was neither good nor bad. It was somewhere in between. New Age had no physical plant in Colorado. Just an office. They contracted out their raw missile production, to one of the established aerospace manufacturers in Denver. That manufacturer had a number of Little Wing assemblies available for inspection. An Army CID officer had seen them all and counted them all, and his final tally was precisely what the books said it should be. Everything was present, correct, and accounted for. No problem. Except that exactly six hundred and fifty of the units were currently stored in a separate secure warehouse, crated up and awaiting transport to a facility in Nevada, where they were due to be decommissioned and destroyed.

“Why?” O’Donnell asked.

“Current production is specified as Mark Two,” Neagley said. “They’re junking what’s left of the Mark Ones.”

“Which just happens to be exactly six hundred and fifty units.”

“You got it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The Mark Twos have a small fluorescent arrow painted on them. To make loading easier in the dark.”

“That’s all?”

“You got it.”

“It’s a scam.”

“Of course it’s a scam. It’s a way of making the paperwork look legal when Mahmoud’s people drive them through the factory gate.”

Reacher nodded. A gate guard would fight to the death to prevent the unauthorized removal of ordnance. But if he saw paperwork with a reason on it, he would pass the load through with a smile and a cheery wave. Even if the reason was the absence of a small painted arrow on something that cost more than he made in a year. Reacher had seen the Pentagon junk stuff for less.

He asked, “How do the electronics packs fit on?”

“In,” Neagley said. “Not on. There’s an access port in the side. You unscrew it and plug the pack in. Then there’s some testing and calibration.”

“Could I do it?”

“I doubt it. You’d need training. In the field it’s going to be a specialist’s job.”

“So Mahmoud couldn’t do it, either. Or his people.”

“We have to assume they’ve got a guy. They wouldn’t spend sixty-five million dollars without being shown how to put the things together.”

“Can we nix that transport order?”

“Not without raising an alarm. Which would be the same thing as dropping the dime.”

“You still got any markers left on your guy?”

“A couple.”

“Tell him to have someone call you the second those units roll out.”

“And until then?”

“Until then Mahmoud doesn’t have the missiles. Until then we have complete freedom of action.”

59

At that instant it became a race against time. When the warehouse door opened in Colorado, a door of a different kind would slam shut in LA. But there was still a lot to prepare. There was still a lot to discover. Including exact locations. Clearly New Age’s glass cube in East LA wasn’t the center of anything. For one thing, there was no helicopter there.

And they needed exact identities.

They needed to know who knew, and who flew.

“I want them all,” Reacher said.

“Including the dragon lady?” Neagley asked.

“Starting with the dragon lady. She lied to me.”

They needed equipment, clothing, communications, and alternative vehicles.

And training, Neagley thought.

“We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty,” she said. “We’re a million miles from what we used to be.”

“We’re not too bad,” O’Donnell said.

“Time was when you’d have put a double tap through that guy’s eyes,” she said. “Not a lucky low shot to his leg.”

They sat in the lounge like four out-of-towners discussing how to spend their day. As far as ordnance went, they had two Hardballers and the Daewoo DP-51 from Vegas. Thirteen rounds each for the Hardballers, eleven for the Daewoo. Not nearly good enough. O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley had personal cell phones registered to their real names and real addresses and Reacher had nothing. Not nearly good enough. They had a Hertz Ford 500 rented in Dixon’s real name and the captured Chrysler. Not nearly good enough. O’Donnell was in a thousand-dollar suit from his East Coast tailor and Neagley and Dixon had jeans, jackets, and evening wear. Not nearly good enough.

Neagley swore that budget was not a problem. But that didn’t help with the time factor. They needed four untraceable pay-as-you-go cell phones, four anonymous cars, and work clothes. That was a day’s shopping right there. Then they needed guns and ammunition. Best case, a free choice for each of them and a lot of spare rounds. Worst case, one more make-do handgun and a lot of spare rounds. That was another day’s shopping. Like most cities, LA had a thriving black market in untraceable weapons, but it would take time to penetrate.

Two days of material preparation.

Maybe two days of surveillance and research.

“We don’t have time to train,” Reacher said.

Azhari Mahmoud had time for a leisurely lunch. He took it in a sidewalk café in Laguna Beach. He was staying in a rented townhouse a short walk away. Safe enough. The lease was legitimate. The development had a large transient population. It wasn’t unusual to see U-Haul trucks parked overnight. Mahmoud’s was two streets away, in a lot, locked up and empty.

It wouldn’t be empty for long.

His contacts at New Age had insisted that Little Wing must not be used inside the United States. He had readily agreed. He had said he planned to use the weapon in Kashmir, on the border, against the Indian Air Force. He had lied, of course. He had been amazed that they had taken him for a Pakistani. He had been amazed that they cared what his intentions were. Maybe they were patriotic. Or maybe they had relatives who flew a lot, domestically.

But it had been politic to go along to get along. Hence the temporary inconvenience of the shipping container and the dockside location. But there was an easy remedy. Southern California was full of day laborers. Mahmoud calculated that loading the U-Haul would take them a little less than thirty minutes.

They figured the clothes and the phones would be easy. Any mall would have what they needed. Guns were guns, either obtainable in time or not. Dixon wanted a Glock 19. Neagley’s hands were bigger, so she nominated a Glock 17. O’Donnell was a Beretta guy, by choice. Reacher didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on shooting anybody. He was planning on using his bare hands. But he said he would take a Glock or a SIG or a Beretta or an H&K, or anything that used 9mm Parabellums. That way, all four of them would be using the same ammunition. More efficient.

Cars were more difficult still. It was hard to find a truly anonymous car. In the end O’Donnell suggested that the best bet would be rice rockets, small Japanese sedans and coupes tricked out with loud big-bore mufflers and lowered suspensions and cotton-reel tires and blue headlights. And black windows. Three-or four-year-old examples would be cheap, and they were everywhere on the street. Close to invisible, in southern California. And O’Donnell figured they were a very effective disguise, psychologically. They were so closely identified in the public mind with Latino gangbangers that nobody would think a white ex-soldier was inside behind the darkened glass.

They gave the cars and the phones priority over the guns. That way two or three of them could start the surveillance, at least. And if they were going to Radio Shack for the phones, they might as well duck into the Gap or a jeans store for clothes, too. After that, wired and blending in, they could separate and hit used-car lots until they found the wheels they needed.

All of which required cash money. Lots of it. Which required a visit to a teller’s window by Neagley. Reacher drove her in the captured Chrysler and waited outside a bank in Beverly Hills. Fifteen minutes later she came out with fifty thousand dollars in a brown sandwich bag. Ninety minutes later they had clothes and phones. The phones were straightforward talk-only pay-as-you-go cells, no camera function, no games, no calculators. They bought car chargers and earpieces to go with them. The clothes were soft gray denim shirts and pants and black canvas windbreakers bought from an off-brand store on Santa Monica Boulevard, two sets each for O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley and one set for Reacher, plus gloves and watch caps and boots from a hiking store on Melrose.

They changed at the motel and spent ten minutes in the lounge storing one another’s numbers in their phones and learning how to set up conference calls. Then they headed north and west to Van Nuys Boulevard, looking for cars. All cities had at least one strip full of auto dealers, and LA had more than one. LA had many. But O’Donnell had heard that Van Nuys north of the Ventura Freeway was the best of them all. And he had heard right. It was a cornucopia. Unlimited choice, new or pre-owned, cheap or expensive, no awkward questions. Four hours after they arrived, most of Neagley’s automotive budget was gone and they owned four used Hondas. Two slammed Civics and two slammed Preludes, two silver and two white. All four were beat up and well on their way to being worn out. But they started and stopped and steered, and no one would give them a second glance.

Including the captured Chrysler, they had five cars to ferry back to Sunset, but only four drivers, so they had to make two trips. Then they took a Honda each and battled out to East LA for a swing past New Age’s glass cube. But traffic was slow and it was late in the day when they got there. The place was locked up and deserted. Nothing to see.

They planned via a four-way mobile conference call and went out for dinner in Pasadena. They found a burger bar on a busy street and sat at a table for four, two opposite two, shoulder to shoulder in their new gray denims. A uniform, of sorts. Nobody admitted it but Reacher knew they all felt good. Focused, energized, in motion, up against high stakes. They talked about the past. Escapades, capers, scandals, outrages. Years fell away and Reacher’s mind’s eye swapped the gray for green and Pasadena for Heidelberg or Manila or Seoul.

The old unit, back together.

Almost.

Back on Sunset two hours later, O’Donnell and Neagley volunteered to take first watch at New Age. They planned to get there before five the next morning. Reacher and Dixon were left with the task of buying guns. Before he went to bed, Reacher took the dead guy’s phone out of the captured Chrysler and redialed the number he had spoken to from Vegas. There was no answer. Just voice mail. Reacher didn’t leave a message.

60

In Reacher’s experience the best way to get hold of a random untraceable gun was to steal it from someone who had already stolen it. Or from someone who owned it illegally. That way there were no official comebacks. Sometimes there could be unofficial comebacks, like with the guys behind the wax museum, but they could be handled with minimal hassle.

But to get hold of four specific weapons was a taller order. Groups were always harder to supply than individuals. Limiting the ammunition requirement made it harder still. Concerns about condition and maintenance made it harder again. During his first cup of coffee of the day he ran an idle calculation. The 9mm Parabellum was certainly a popular load, but there were still plenty of .380s and .45s and .22s and .357s and .40s on the street, in all their many different variations. So if there was, say, a one-in-four chance that any particular robbery would yield a pistol that used 9mm Parabellums, and a one-in-three chance that the prize wasn’t already trashed beyond redemption, they would have to stage forty-eight separate thefts to guarantee getting what they wanted. They would be at it all day. It would be a crime wave all its own.

Then he thought about finding a bent army quartermaster. Fort Irwin wasn’t far away. Or better still, a bent Marine quartermaster. Camp Pendleton was farther away than Irwin, but the roads were better, and therefore it was closer in a sense. And there was an institutional belief among Marines that the Beretta M9 was an unreliable weapon. Armorers were very ready to condemn them as faulty. Some were, some weren’t. The ones that weren’t went out the back door for a hundred bucks each. Same principle as New Age’s own scam. But setting up a buy could take days. Even weeks. Trust had to be gained. Not easy. Years ago he had done it undercover, several times. A lot of work for not very much of a tangible gain.

Karla Dixon thought she had a better idea. She ran through it over breakfast. Obviously she dismissed the notion of going to a store and buying guns legally. Neither she nor Reacher knew the exact details relevant to California, but they both assumed there would be registration and an ID requirement and maybe some kind of cooling-off period involved. So Dixon proposed driving out of LA County into a neighboring county heavier with Republican voters, which in practical terms meant south into Orange. Then she proposed finding pawn shops and using generous applications of Neagley’s cash to get around whatever lesser regulations might apply down there. She thought enhanced local respect for the Second Amendment plus enhanced profit margins would do the trick. And she figured there would be a big choice of merchandise. They could cherry-pick exactly what they wanted.

Reacher wasn’t as confident as she was, but he agreed anyway. He suggested she change out of her denims and into her black suit. He suggested they take the blue Chrysler, not one of the beat-up Hondas. That way she would look like a concerned middle-class citizen. Fewer alarm bells would ring. She would buy one piece at a time. He would pose as her adviser. Her neighbor, maybe, calling on some relevant weapons experience from his past.

“The others got this far, didn’t they?” Dixon asked.

“Further,” Reacher said.

She nodded. “They knew it all. Who, what, where, why, and how. But something brought them down. What was it?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. He had been asking himself the same question for days.

They left for Orange County right after breakfast. They didn’t know what time pawn shops opened for business, but they guessed they would be quieter earlier in the day than later. Reacher drove, the 101 and then the 5, the same way O’Donnell’s GPS had led them down to Swan’s house. But this time they stayed with the freeway a little longer and exited on the other side, to the east. Dixon wanted to try Tustin first. She had heard bad things about it. Or good things, depending on your point of view.

She asked, “What are you going to do when this is over?”

“Depends if I survive.”

“You think you won’t?”

“Like Neagley said, we’re not what we used to be. The others weren’t, for sure.”

“I think we’ll be OK.”

“I hope so.”

“Feel like dropping by New York afterward?”

“I’d like to.”

“But?”

“I don’t make plans, Karla.”

“Why not?”

“I already had this conversation with Dave.”

“People make plans.”

“I know. People like Calvin Franz. And Jorge Sanchez and Manuel Orozco. And Tony Swan. He planned to give his dog an aspirin every day for the next fifty-four and a half weeks.”

They nosed around the surface streets that ran parallel with the freeway. Strip malls and gas stations and drive-through banks lay stunned and sleepy under the morning sun. Mattress dealers and tanning salons and furniture outlets were doing no business at all.

Dixon asked, “Who needs a tanning salon in southern California?”

They found their first pawn shop next to a book store in an upmarket strip mall. But it was all wrong. First, it was closed. Metal lattice shutters were down over the windows. Second, it dealt in the wrong kind of stuff. The displays were full of antique silver and jewelry. Flatware, fruit bowls, napkin rings, pins, pendants on fine chains, ornate picture frames. Not a Glock to be seen. No SIG-Sauers, no Berettas, no H&Ks.

They moved on.

Two spacious blocks east of the freeway they found the right kind of place. It was open. Its windows were full of electric guitars, and chunky men’s rings made of nine-carat gold inset with small diamonds, and cheap watches.

And guns.

Not in the window itself, but clearly visible in a long glass display case that stood in for a counter. Maybe fifty handguns, revolvers and automatics, black and nickel, rubber grips and wooden, all in a neat line. The right kind of place.

But the wrong kind of owner.

He was an honest man. Law-abiding. He was white, somewhere in his thirties, a little overweight, good genes ruined by too much eating. He had a gun dealer’s license displayed on the wall behind his head. He ran through the obligations it imposed on him like a priest reciting liturgy. First, a purchaser would have to obtain a handgun safety certificate, which was like a license to buy. Then she would have to submit to three separate background checks, the first of which was to confirm that she wasn’t trying to buy more than one weapon in the same thirty-day period, the second of which was to comb through state records for evidence of criminality, and the third of which was to do exactly the same thing at the federal level via the NCIC computer.

Then she would have to wait ten days before collecting her purchase, just in case she was contemplating a crime of passion.

Dixon opened her purse and made sure the guy got a good look at the wad of cash inside. But he wasn’t moved. He just glanced at it and glanced away.

They moved on.

Thirty miles away, north of west, Azhari Mahmoud was standing in the sun, sweating lightly, and watching as his shipping container emptied and his U-Haul filled. The boxes were smaller than he had imagined. Inevitable, he supposed, because the units they contained were no bigger than cigarette packs. To book them down as home theater components had been foolish, he thought. Unless they could be passed off as personal DVD players. The kind of thing people took on airplanes. Or MP3 players, maybe, with the white wires and the tiny earphones. That would have been more plausible.

Then he smiled to himself. Airplanes.

Reacher drove east, navigating in a random zigzag from one off-brand billboard to the next, searching for the cheapest part of town. He was sure that there was plenty of financial stress all the way from Beverly Hills to Malibu, but it was hidden and discreet up there. Down in parts of Tustin it was on open display. As soon as the tire franchises started offering four radials for less than a hundred bucks he started paying closer attention. And he was rewarded almost immediately. He spotted a place on the right and Dixon saw a place on the left simultaneously. Dixon’s place looked bigger so they headed for the next light to make a U and along the way they saw three more places.

“Plenty of choice,” Reacher said. “We can afford to experiment.”

“Experiment how?” Dixon asked.

“The direct approach. But you’re going to have to stay in the car. You look too much like a cop.”

“You told me to dress like this.”

“Change of plan.”

Reacher parked the Chrysler where it wasn’t directly visible from inside the store. He took Neagley’s wad from Dixon’s bag and jammed it in his pocket. Then he hiked over to take a look. It was a big place for a pawn shop. Reacher was more used to dusty single-wide urban spaces. This was a double-fronted emporium the size of a carpet store. The windows were full of electronics and cameras and musical instruments and jewelry. And rifles. There were a dozen sporting guns racked horizontally behind a forest of vertical guitar necks. Decent weapons, although Reacher didn’t think of them as sporting. Nothing very fair about hunting a deer by hiding a hundred yards away behind a tree with a box of high-velocity bullets. He figured it would be much more sporting to strap on a set of antlers and go at it head to head. That would give the poor dumb animal an even chance. Or maybe better than an even chance, which he figured was why hunters were too chicken to try it.

He stepped to the pawn shop’s door and glanced inside. And gave it up, immediately. The place was too big. Too many staff. The direct approach only worked with a little one-on-one privacy. He walked back to the car and said, “My mistake. We need a smaller place.”

“Across the street,” Dixon said.

They pulled out of the lot and headed west a hundred yards and pulled a U at the light. Came back and bumped up into a cracked concrete lot in front of a beer store. Next to it was a no-name vitamin shop and then another pawnbroker. Not urban, but single-wide and dusty, for sure. Its window was full of the usual junk. Watches, drum kits, cymbals, guitars. And visible in the inside gloom, a wired-glass case all across the back wall. It was full of handguns. Maybe three hundred of them. They were all hanging upside down off nails through their trigger guards. There was a lone guy behind the counter, all on his own.

“My kind of place,” Reacher said.

He went in alone. At first glance the proprietor looked very similar to the first guy they had met. White, thirties, solid. They could have been brothers. But this one would have been the black sheep of the family. Where the first one had glowing pink skin, this one had a gray pallor from unwise consumption choices and smudged blue and purple tattoos from reform school or prison. Or the Navy. He had reddened eyes that jumped around in his head like he was wired with electricity.

Easy, Reacher thought.

He pulled most of Neagley’s wad from his pocket and fanned the bills out and butted them back together and dropped them on the counter from enough of a height to produce a good solid sound. Used money in decent quantities was heavier than most people thought. Paper, ink, dirt, grease. The proprietor held his vision together long enough to take a good long look at it and then he said, “Help you?”

“I’m sure you can,” Reacher said. “I just had a civics lesson down the street. Seems that if a person wants to buy himself four pistols he has to jump through all kinds of hoops.”

“You got that right,” the guy said, and pointed behind him with his thumb. There was a gun dealer’s license on the wall, framed and hung just the same as the first guy’s.

“Any way around those hoops?” Reacher asked. “Or under them, or over them?”

“No,” the guy said. “Hoops is hoops.” Then he smiled, like he had said something exceptionally profound. For a second Reacher thought about taking him by the neck and using his head to break the glass in the cabinet. Then the guy looked down at the money again and said, “I got to obey the California statutes.” But he said it in a certain way and his eyes hit a sweet spot of focus and Reacher knew something good was coming.

“You a lawyer?” the guy asked.

“Do I look like a lawyer?” Reacher asked back.

“I talked to one once,” the guy said.

Many times more than once, Reacher thought. Mostly in locked rooms where the table and chairs are bolted to the floor.

“There’s a provision,” the guy said. “In the statutes.”

“Is there?” Reacher asked.

“A technicality,” the guy said. It took him a couple of tries before he got the whole word out. He had trouble with the harsh consonants. “Me or you or anybody can’t sell or give a gun to someone else without all the formalities.”

“But?”

“Me or you or anybody is entitled to loan one out. A temporary and infrequent loan lasting less than thirty days is OK.”

“Is that right?” Reacher said.

“It’s in the statute.”

“Interesting.”

“Like between family members,” the guy said. “Husband to wife, father to daughter.”

“I can see that.”

“Or like between friends,” the guy said. “A friend can loan a gun to a friend, thirty days, temporary.”

“Are we friends?” Reacher asked.

“We could be,” the guy said.

Reacher asked, “What kind of things do friends do for one another?”

The guy said, “Maybe they loan each other things. Like one loans out a gun, and the other loans out some money.”

“But only temporarily,” Reacher said. “Thirty days.”

“Loans can go bad. Sometimes you just have to write them off. It’s a risk. People move away, they fall out. You can never tell with friends.”

Reacher left the money where it was. Stepped away to the wired glass cabinet. There was some junk in there. But some good stuff, too. About fifty-fifty revolvers and automatics. The automatics were about two-thirds cheap and one-third premium brands. The premium brands ran about one-in-four nine-millimeter.

Total choice, thirteen suitable pistols. From a stock of about three hundred. Four and a third percent. Worse than his breakfast calculation, by a factor of close to two.

Seven of the suitable pistols were Glocks. Clearly they had been fashionable once, but weren’t anymore. One of them was a 19. The other six were 17s. In terms of visual condition they ranged from good to mint.

“Suppose you loaned me four Glocks,” Reacher said.

“Suppose I didn’t,” the guy said.

Reacher turned around. The money was gone from the counter. Reacher had expected that. There was a gun in the guy’s hand. Reacher had not expected that.

We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty, Neagley had said. We’re a million miles from what we used to be.

Roger that, Reacher thought.

The gun was a Colt Python. Blued carbon steel, walnut grips, .357 Magnum, eight-inch barrel. Not the biggest revolver in the world, but not very far from it. Certainly it wasn’t the smallest revolver in the world. And it was maybe one of the most accurate.

“That isn’t very friendly,” Reacher said.

“We ain’t friends,” the guy said.

“It’s also kind of dumb,” Reacher said. “I’m in a very bad mood right now.”

“Suck it up. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

Reacher paused, and then he raised his hands, halfway, palms out, fingers spread, unthreatening. The guy said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

The store was narrow. Reacher was all the way in back. The guy was behind the counter, a third of the way to the door. The aisle was cramped. The sunlight was bright in the window.

The guy said, “Leave the building, Elvis.”

Reacher stood still for a moment. Listened hard. Glanced left, glanced right, checked behind him. There was a door in the back left corner. Probably just a bathroom. Not an office. There was paperwork piled behind the counter. Nobody piles paperwork behind the counter if they have a separate room for it. Therefore the guy was alone. No partner, no backup.

No more surprises.

Reacher put the kind of look on his face that he had seen in Vegas. The rueful loser. It was worth a try, you got to be in it to win it. Then he kept his hands up at his shoulders and stepped forward. One pace. Two. Three. His fourth pace put him directly level with the guy. Just the width of the counter between them. Reacher was facing the door. The guy was ninety degrees to his left. The counter was maybe thirty inches deep. Two and a half feet.

Reacher’s left arm moved, straight out sideways from the shoulder.

The boxer Muhammad Ali’s reach was reckoned to be about forty inches and his hands were once timed at an average eighty miles an hour as they moved through it. Reacher was no Ali. Not even close. Especially not on his weaker side. His left hand moved at about sixty miles an hour, maximum. That was all. But sixty miles an hour was the same thing as a mile a minute, which was the same thing as eighty-eight feet per second. Which meant that Reacher’s left hand took a little less than thirty-thousandths of a second to cross the counter. And halfway through its travel it bunched into a fist.

And thirty-thousandths of a second was way too brief an interval for the guy to pull the Python’s trigger. Any revolver is a complex mechanical system and one as big as the Python is heavier in its action than most. Not very susceptible to accidental discharge. The guy’s finger didn’t even tighten. He took Reacher’s fist in his face before his brain had even registered that it was moving. Reacher was a lot slower than Muhammad Ali but his arms were a lot longer. Which meant that the guy’s head accelerated through a whole extra foot and a half before Reacher’s arm was fully extended. And then the guy’s head kept on accelerating. It kept on accelerating right until it crashed against the wall behind the counter and shattered the glass over the gun dealer’s license.

At that point it stopped accelerating and started a slow downward slide to the floor.

Reacher was over the counter before the guy had even settled. He kicked the Python away and used his heel to break the guy’s fingers. Both hands. Necessary in a weapons-rich environment, and faster than tying wrists. Then he reclaimed Neagley’s cash from the guy’s pocket and found his keys. Vaulted back over the counter and stepped to the back of the store and opened the wired glass cabinet. Took all seven Glocks and pulled a suitcase out of a display of used luggage and piled the guns inside. Then he wiped his fingerprints off the keys and his palm prints off the counter and headed outside to the sunshine.

They stopped at a legitimate firearms dealer in Tustin and bought ammunition. Plenty of it. There seemed to be no restrictions on that kind of purchase. Then they headed back north. Traffic was slow. About level with Anaheim, they took a call from O’Donnell in East LA.

“Nothing’s happening here,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“No activity at all. You shouldn’t have made that call from Vegas. It was a bad mistake. You threw them into a panic. They’ve gone into full-on lockdown mode.”

61

Reacher and Dixon stayed on the 101 all the way to Hollywood and dumped the Chrysler in the motel lot and took a Honda each for the trek out to East LA. Reacher’s was a silver Prelude coupe with a chipped and nervous four-cylinder motor. It had wide tires that tramlined on bad asphalt and a throaty muffler note that entertained him for the first three blocks and then started to annoy him. The upholstery stank of detailing fluid and there was a crack in the windshield that lengthened perceptibly every time he hit a bump. But the seat racked back far enough for him to get comfortable and the air conditioning worked. Altogether not a bad surveillance vehicle. He had driven far worse, many times.

They got a four-way conference call going on the cell phones and parked far from one another. Reacher was two blocks from the New Age building and had a partial view of the front entrance, from about sixty yards on a diagonal between a document storage facility and a plain gray warehouse. New Age’s gate was shut and the lot looked pretty much empty. The reception area doors were closed. The whole place looked quiet.

“Who’s in there?” Reacher asked.

“Maybe nobody,” O’Donnell said. “We’ve been here since five and nobody’s gone in.”

“Not even the dragon lady?”

“Negative.”

“No receptionist?”

“Negative.”

“Do we have their phone number?”

Neagley said, “I have their switchboard number.” She recited it and Reacher clicked off and thumbed it into his phone and hit the green button.

Ring tone.

But no reply.

He dialed back into the conference call.

“I was hoping to follow someone over to the manufacturing plant.”

“Not going to happen,” O’Donnell said.

Silence on the phones. No action at the glass cube.

Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.

“Enough,” Reacher said. “Back to base. Last one there buys lunch.”

Reacher was the last one back. He wasn’t a fast driver. The other three Hondas were already in the lot when he got there. He put his Prelude in an inconspicuous corner and took the suitcase of stolen guns out of the Chrysler’s trunk and locked it in his room. Then he walked down to Denny’s. First thing he saw there was Curtis Mauney’s unmarked car in the parking lot. The Crown Vic. The LA County sheriff. Second thing he saw was Mauney himself, through the window, inside the restaurant, sitting at a round table with Neagley and O’Donnell and Dixon. It was the same table they had shared with Diana Bond. Five chairs, one of them empty and waiting. Nothing on the table. Not even ice water or napkins or silverware. They hadn’t ordered. They hadn’t been there long. Reacher went in and sat down and there was a moment of tense silence and then Mauney said, “Hello again.”

A gentle tone of voice.

Quiet.

Sympathetic.

Reacher asked, “Sanchez or Swan?”

Mauney didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “What, both of them?”

“We’ll get to that. First tell me why you’re hiding.”

“Who says we’re hiding?”

“You left Vegas. You’re not registered at any LA hotel.”

“Doesn’t mean we’re hiding.”

“You’re in a West Hollywood dive under false names. The clerk gave you up. As a group you’re fairly distinctive, physically. It wasn’t hard to find you. And it was an easy guess that you’d come in here for lunch. If not, I was prepared to come back at dinner time. Or breakfast time tomorrow.”

Reacher said, “Jorge Sanchez or Tony Swan?”

Mauney said, “Tony Swan.”

62

Mauney said, “We’ve learned a thing or two, over the last few weeks. We let the buzzards do the work for us now. We’re out there like ornithologists, anytime we get a spare half hour. You get up on the roof of your car with your binoculars, you can usually see what you need. Two birds circling, it’s probably a snake-bit coyote. More than two, it’s probably a bigger deal.”

Reacher asked, “Where?”

“Same general area.”

“When?”

“Some time ago.”

“Helicopter?”

“No other way.”

“No doubt about the ID?”

“He was on his back. His hands were tied behind him. His fingerprints were preserved. His wallet was in his pocket. I’m very sorry.”

The waitress came over. The same one they had seen before. She paused near the table and sensed the mood and went away again.

Mauney asked, “Why are you hiding?”

“We’re not hiding,” Reacher said. “We’re just waiting for the funerals.”

“So why the false names?”

“You brought us here as bait. Whoever they are, we don’t want to make it easy for them.”

“Don’t you know who they are yet?”

“Do you?”

“No independent action, OK?”

“We’re on Sunset Boulevard here,” Reacher said. “Which is LAPD turf. Are you speaking for them?”

“Friendly advice,” Mauney said.

“Noted.”

“Andrew MacBride disappeared in Vegas. Arrived, didn’t check in anywhere, didn’t rent a car, didn’t fly out. Dead end.”

Reacher nodded. “Don’t you just hate that?”

“But a guy called Anthony Matthews rented a U-Haul.”

“The last name on Orozco’s list.”

Mauney nodded. “Endgame.”

“Where did he take it?”

“I have no idea.” Mauney slid four business cards out of his top pocket. He fanned them out and placed them carefully on the table. His name and two phone numbers were printed on them. “Call me. I mean it. You might need help. You’re not up against amateurs here. Tony Swan looked like a real tough guy. What was left of him.”

Mauney went back to work and the waitress came over again five minutes later and hovered. Reacher guessed no one was very hungry anymore, but they all ordered anyway. Old habits. Eat when you can, don’t risk running out of energy later. Swan would have approved. Swan ate anywhere, anytime, all the time. Autopsies, exhumations, crime scenes. In fact Reacher was pretty sure that Swan had been eating a roast beef sandwich when they discovered Doug, the decomposed dead guy with the shovel in his head.

Nobody confirmed it.

Nobody talked at all. The sun was bright outside the window. A beautiful day. Blue sky, small white clouds. Cars passed by on the boulevard, customers came and went. Phones rang, landlines in the kitchen and cells in other people’s pockets. Reacher ate methodically and mechanically without the slightest idea what was on his plate.

“Should we move?” Dixon asked. “Now that Mauney knows where we are?”

“I don’t like it that the clerk gave us up,” O’Donnell said. “We should steal his damn TV remotes.”

“We don’t need to move,” Reacher said. “Mauney is no danger to us. And I want to know about it when they find Sanchez.”

“So what next?” Dixon asked.

“We rest up,” Reacher said. “We go out again after dark. We pay New Age a visit. We’re not getting anywhere with surveillance, so it’s time to go proactive.”

He left ten bucks on the table for the waitress and paid the check at the register. Then they all stepped outside to the sunshine and stood blinking in the lot for a moment before heading back to the Dunes.

Reacher fetched the suitcase and they gathered in O’Donnell’s room and checked over the stolen Glocks. Dixon took the 19 and said she was happy with it. O’Donnell sorted through the remaining six 17s and picked out the best three among them. He paired them with the magazines from the rejects so that he and Neagley and Reacher would have fast reloads the first time around. Dixon would have to reload manually after her first seventeen shots. Not a huge issue. If a handgun engagement wasn’t over inside seventeen shots, then someone wasn’t paying attention, and Reacher trusted Dixon to pay attention. She always had, in the past.

Reacher asked, “What kind of security can we expect around their building?”

“State of the art locks,” Neagley said. “An intruder alarm on the gate. I imagine the door opener at reception will be wired as a proximity sensor at night. Plus another intruder alarm, probably. Plus motion sensors all over the place inside. Plus intruder alarms on some of the individual office doors, maybe. All hard-wired out through the phone lines. Possibly with wireless backup, maybe even a satellite uplink.”

“And who’s going to respond?”

“That’s a very good question. Not the cops, I think. Too low-rent. My guess is it will all pipe straight through to their own security people.”

“Not the government?”

“That would make sense, for sure. The Pentagon is spending zillions there, you’d think the government would want to be involved. But I doubt if they are. Not everything makes sense nowadays. They gave airport security to private contractors. And the nearest DIA office is a long way away. So I think New Age’s security will be handled in-house, however cool Little Wing is.”

“How long will we have after we breach the gate?”

“Who says we’re going to? We don’t have keys and you can’t pick a lock like that with a rusty nail. I don’t think we’ll be able to beat any of the locks.”

“I’ll worry about the locks. How long will we have, after we’re inside?”

“Two minutes,” Neagley said. “A situation like that, the two-minute rule is the only thing we can rely on.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We’ll go at one in the morning. Dinner at six. Get some rest.”

The others headed for the door. He followed them out, with the keys to the captured Chrysler in his hand. Neagley looked at him, quizzically.

“We don’t need it anymore,” he said to her. “I’m going to give it back. But first I’m going to have it washed. We should try to be civilized.”

Reacher drove the Chrysler back to Van Nuys Boulevard, north of the Ventura Freeway. The auto strip, where there were car-related enterprises of every kind lined up side by side, one after the other. Dealers, obviously, new and used, cheap and expensive, gaudy and restrained, but also tire shops, wheel shops, paintless dent repair, lube franchises, muffler-and-shock shops, and accessory stores.

And car washes.

There was a huge choice. Machine washing, brushless hand washing, underbody steam cleaning, three-stage waxing, full service detailing. He drove a mile up and a mile back and picked out four places that offered everything. He stopped at the first of them and asked for the total treatment. A swarm of guys in coveralls took over and he stood in the sun and watched them work. First the interior was vacuumed out and then the whole car was dragged through a glass tunnel on a moving chain and was sprayed by a sequence of nozzles with water and all kinds of foams and fluids. Guys with sponges washed the sheet metal and guys on plastic steps lathered the roof. Then the car passed under a roaring air dryer and was driven out to the apron, where other guys waited to attack the interior with aerosols and rags. They went over every inch and left it gleaming and immaculate and damp with oily residue. Reacher paid and tipped and pulled his gloves out of his pocket and put them on and drove the car away.

He stopped a hundred yards farther on, at the second place he had picked out, and asked for the whole process to be repeated all over again. The receptionist looked puzzled for a second and then shrugged and waved a crew over. Reacher stood in the sun again and watched the show. The vacuum, the shampoo, the interior, the aerosols, and the towels. He paid and tipped and put his gloves back on and drove back to the motel.

He left the car in a corner of the lot, in the sun, where it would dry. Then he walked a long block south to Fountain Avenue. Found a place that had started out as a pharmacy and then had become the kind of drugstore that sold all kinds of small household items. He went in and bought four flashlights. Three-cell Maglites, black, powerful enough to be useful, small enough to be maneuverable, big enough to be used as clubs. The girl at the register put them in a white bag with I love LA on it, three capital letters and a red heart-shaped symbol. Reacher carried the bag back to the motel, swinging it gently, listening to the quiet rustle of plastic.

They couldn’t face Denny’s again for dinner. They called out to Domino’s instead, for pizzas, and ate them in the battered lounge next to the laundry room. They drank soda from a noisy red machine outside the door. A perfect meal, for what they had in mind. Some empty calories, some fats, some complex carbohydrates. Time-release energy, good for about twelve hours. An army doctor had explained it all to them, many years before.

“Objectives for tonight?” O’Donnell asked.

“Three,” Reacher said. “First, Dixon hits the reception desk for anything useful. Second, Neagley finds the dragon lady’s office and hits that. You and I hit the other offices for whatever else they’ve got. A hundred and twenty seconds, in and out. Then third, we ID the security people when they show up.”

“We’re waiting around afterward?”

“I am,” Reacher said. “You guys are heading back.”

Reacher went up to his room and brushed his teeth and took a long hot shower. Then he stretched out full length on the bed and took a nap. The clock in his head woke him at half past midnight. He stretched and brushed his teeth again and dressed. Gray denim pants, gray shirt, black windbreaker zipped all the way up. Boots, tightly laced. Gloves on. The Chrysler keys in one pants pocket, the spare Glock mag in the other. The captured cell phone from Vegas in one shirt pocket, his own phone in the other. The Maglite in one jacket pocket, the Glock itself in the other. Nothing else.

He walked out to the lot at ten minutes before one o’clock. The others were already there, a shadowy trio standing well away from any pools of light.

“OK,” he said. He turned to O’Donnell and Neagley. “You guys drive your Hondas.” He turned to Dixon. “Karla, you drive mine. You park it close, facing west, and you leave the keys in for me. Then you ride back with Dave.”

Dixon said, “Are you really going to leave the Chrysler there?”

“We don’t need it.”

“It’s full of our prints and hair and fiber.”

“Not anymore. A bunch of guys up on Van Nuys just made sure of that. Now let’s go.”

They bumped fists like ballplayers, an old ritual, and then they dispersed and climbed into their cars. Reacher slid into the Chrysler and started it up, the heavy V-8 beat slow and loud in the darkness. He heard the Hondas start, their smaller engines coughing and popping and their big-bore mufflers throbbing. He backed out of his slot and turned and headed for the exit. In his mirror he saw three pairs of bright blue headlights strung out behind him. He swung east on Sunset and south on La Brea and then east again on Wilshire and saw the others following him all the way, a ragged little convoy hanging together in the light nighttime traffic.

63

The great city went quiet after they passed MacArthur Park and hit the 110. To their right, downtown was silent and deserted. There were lights on in Chinatown, but no visible activity. In the other direction Dodger Stadium was huge and dark and empty. Then they came off the freeway and plunged into the surface streets to the east. Navigation had been difficult by day and was worse by night. But Reacher had made the trip three times before, twice as a passenger and once as a driver, and he figured he could spot the turns.

And he did, without a problem. He slowed three blocks before New Age’s building and let the others close up behind him. Then he led them through a wide two-block circle, for caution’s sake. Then a closer pass, on a one-block radius. There was mist in the air. The glass cube looked dark and deserted. The ornamental trees in the lot were up-lit with decorative spots and the light spilled a little and reflected off the building’s mirror siding, but apart from that there was no specific illumination. The razor wire on the fence looked dull gray in the darkness and the main gate was closed. Reacher slowed next to it and dropped his window and stuck his arm out and made a circular gesture with his gloved finger in the air, like a baseball umpire signaling a home run. One more go-round. He led them through three-quarters of a round trip and then pointed at the curb where he wanted them to park. First Neagley, then O’Donnell behind her, then Dixon in his own silver Prelude. They slowed and stopped and he made throat-cutting gestures and they shut their motors down and climbed out. O’Donnell detoured all the way to the gate and came back and said, “It’s a very big lock.” Reacher was still at the wheel of the idling Chrysler. His window was still open. He said, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“We doing this stealthy?”

“Not very,” Reacher said. “I’ll meet you at the gate.”

They walked ahead and he put the Chrysler in gear and followed them, slowly. The roads all around New Age’s block were standard twenty-two-foot blacktop ribbons, typical of new business park construction. No sidewalks. This was LA. Twenty-one thousand miles of surface streets, probably fewer than twenty-one thousand yards of sidewalk. New Age’s gate was set in a curved scallop maybe twenty feet deep, so that arriving vehicles could pull off the roadway and wait. Total distance between the gate and the far curb, forty-two feet. Automatically the manic part of Reacher’s mind told him that was the same as fourteen yards or 504 inches or .795 percent of a mile, or a hair over 1,280 centimeters in European terms. He turned ninety degrees into the scallop and straightened head-on and brought the Chrysler’s front bumper to within an inch of the gate. Then he reversed straight back all the way until he felt the rear tires touch the far curb. He put his foot hard on the brake and slotted the transmission back into drive and dropped all four windows. Night air blew in, sharp and cold. The others looked at him and he pointed to where he wanted them, two on the left of the gate and one on the right.

“Start the clock,” he called. “Two minutes.”

He kept his foot on the brake and hit the gas until the transmission was wound up tight and the whole car was rocking and bucking and straining. Then he slipped his foot off the brake and stamped down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. It covered the forty-two feet of available distance with the rear tires smoking and howling and then it smashed head-on into the gate. The lock ruptured instantly and the gate smashed open and flung back and about a dozen airbags exploded inside the Chrysler, out of the steering wheel and the passenger fascia and the header rails and the seats. Reacher was ready for them. He was driving one-handed and had his other arm up in front of his face. He stopped the driver’s airbag with his elbow. No problem. The four open windows defused the percussion shock and saved his eardrums. But the noise still deafened him. It was like sitting in a car and having someone fire a .44 at him. Ahead of him on the front wall of the building a blue strobe started flashing urgently. If there was an accompanying siren, he couldn’t hear it.

He kept his foot hard down. The car stumbled for a split second after the impact with the gate and then it picked up the pace again and laid rubber all the way through the lot. He lined up the steering and risked a glance in the mirror and saw the others running full speed after him. Then he faced front and put both hands on the wheel and aimed for the reception area doors.

He was doing close to fifty miles an hour when he reached them. The front wheels hit the shallow step and the whole car launched and smashed through the doors about a foot off the ground. Glass shattered and the door frames tore right out of the walls and the car continued on inside more or less uninterrupted. It hit the slate floor with the brakes locked hard and skidded straight on and demolished the reception counter completely and knocked down the wall behind it and ended up buried in rubble to the base of the windshield, with the wreckage of the reception counter strewn all around under its midsection.

Which is going to make Dixon’s research difficult, Reacher thought.

Then he shut his mind to that problem and unclipped his belt and forced his door open. Spilled out onto the lobby floor and crawled away. All around him tiny white alarm strobes were flashing. His hearing was coming back. A loud siren was sounding. He got to his feet and saw the others hurdling the wreckage in the doorway and running inside from the lot. Dixon was heading straight for the back of the lobby and O’Donnell and Neagley were heading for the mouth of the corridor where the dragon lady had come out twice before. Their flashlights were already on and bright cones of light were jerking and bouncing in front of them through clouds of swirling white dust. He pulled his own flashlight out and switched it on and followed them.

Twenty-one seconds gone, he thought.

There were two elevators halfway down the corridor. Their indicator panels showed it to be a three-story building. He didn’t press the call button. He figured the alarm would have already shut down the elevators. Instead he flung open an adjacent door and hit the stairs. Ran all the way up to the third floor, two steps at a time. The sound of the siren was unbearable in the stairwell. He burst out into the third-floor corridor. He didn’t need his flashlight. The alarm strobes were lighting the place up like the disco from hell. The corridor was lined on both sides with maple doors twenty feet apart. Offices. The doors had nameplates on them. Long black plastic rectangles, engraved with letters cut through to a white base layer. Directly in front of him Neagley was busy kicking down a door labeled Margaret Berenson. The stop-motion effect of the alarm strobes made her movements weird and jerky. The door wouldn’t give. She pulled out her Glock and fired three aimed shots into the lock. Three loud explosions. The spent brass kicked out of the pistol’s ejection port and rolled away on the carpet, frozen by the strobes into a long golden chain. Neagley kicked the door again and it sagged open. She went inside.

Reacher moved on. Fifty-two seconds gone, he thought.

He passed a door labeled Allen Lamaison. Twenty carpeted feet farther on he saw another door: Anthony Swan. He braced himself against the opposite wall and wound up and delivered a mighty kick with his heel, just above the lock. The maple splintered and the door sagged but the catch held. He finished the job with a sharp blow from the flat of his gloved hand and tumbled inside.

Sixty-three seconds gone, he thought.

He stood stock-still and played his flashlight beam all around his dead friend’s office. It was untouched. It was like Swan had just stepped out to the bathroom or gone out for lunch. There was a coat hanging on a hat stand. It was a khaki windbreaker, old, worn, plaid-lined like a golf jacket, short and wide. There were file cabinets. Phones. A leather chair, crushed in places by the weight of a heavy barrel-shaped man. There was a computer on the desk. And a new blank notepad. And pens, and pencils. A stapler. A clock. A small pile of papers.

And a paperweight, holding the papers down. A lump of Soviet concrete, irregular in shape, the size of a fist, gray and polished to a greasy shine by handling, one flat face with faint traces of blue and red sprayed graffiti still on it.

Reacher stepped to the desk and put the lump of concrete in his pocket. Took the pile of papers from under it and rolled them tight and put them in his other pocket. Suddenly became aware of a softness under his feet. He played the flashlight beam downward. Saw rich red colors reflected back. Ornate patterns. Thick pile. An Oriental rug. Brand new. He recalled the cord on Orozco’s wrists and ankles and Curtis Mauney’s words: It’s a sisal product from the Indian subcontinent. It would have to come in on whatever gets exported from there.

Eighty-nine seconds gone, he thought. Thirty-one to go.

He stepped to the window. Saw Karla Dixon far below in the darkness, already on her way out of the lot. Her pants and her jacket were scuffed and coated with white dust. She looked like a ghost. From crawling around in the wallboard dust, he guessed. She was carrying papers and some kind of a white three-ring binder. She was lit up in short blue pulses by the strobe on the front of the building.

Twenty-six seconds to go.

He saw O’Donnell run out below like he was escaping from a burning house, taking giant strides, carrying stuff clutched to his chest. And then Neagley a second later, running hard, long dark hair streaming out behind her, arms pumping, with a thick wad of green file folders gripped in each hand.

Nineteen seconds to go.

He crossed the office and touched the jacket on the hat stand, gently, on the shoulder, like Swan was still in it. Then he stepped back behind the desk and sat down in the chair. It creaked once as he settled. He heard the sound quite clearly over the siren.

Twelve seconds to go.

He looked out at the manic flashing in the corridor and knew he could just wait. Sooner or later, maybe in less than a minute, the men who had killed his friends would show up. As long as there were fewer than thirty-four of them he could sit right where he was and take them all down, one by one.

Five seconds to go.

Except that he couldn’t, of course. Nobody was that dumb. After the first three or four KIAs had piled up in the doorway, the rest of them would regroup in the corridor and start thinking about tear gas and reinforcements and body armor. Maybe they would even think about calling the cops or the FBI. And Reacher knew there was no way to be sure of putting the right guys down before he lost a three-or four-day siege against a whole bunch of trained SWAT teams.

One second to go.

He exploded out of the chair and out through the broken door and jinked left into the corridor and right into the stairwell. Neagley had wedged the door open for him. He hit the first floor about ten seconds over budget. He dodged around the inert Chrysler in the lobby and was out in the lot fifteen seconds late. Through the wrecked gate and out in the street forty seconds late. Then he ran toward the pale gleam of the silver Prelude. It was a hundred yards away, distant and innocent and alone. The other two Hondas were already gone. He covered the hundred yards in twenty seconds and hurled himself inside. He slammed his door after him and struggled upright in his seat. He was breathing hard, mouth wide open. He turned his head and saw a set of headlights in the far distance, moving very fast, coming toward him, swinging around corners, then diving low from braking.

64

Altogether three cars showed up. They came in fast and stopped short all over the road outside the wrecked gate and they stayed there, parked at random angles, engines still running, headlights blazing through the night mist. They were brand-new Chrysler 300Cs, dark blue, pretty much identical to the one already parked in New Age’s lobby.

Altogether five guys got out of the three cars. Two from the first, one from the second, two from the third. Reacher was a hundred yards away and watching through tinted glass and the corner of New Age’s fence and he was dazzled by the six headlights, so he couldn’t make out much detail. But the guy who had arrived alone in the second car seemed to be in charge. He was a slight man, wearing a short raincoat that looked to be black. Under it he had some kind of a white T-shirt. He was staring at the breached gate and gesturing the others to stay well away from it, as if it was somehow dangerous.

An ex-cop, Reacher thought. Instinctively reluctant to contaminate a crime scene.

Then the five guys formed up close together in a tight arrowhead formation, with the man in the raincoat closest to the wreckage. They advanced on it, slow and wary, one step at a time, leaning forward from their waists, heads thrust forward, like they were puzzled by what they were seeing. Then they stopped and backtracked fast and retreated behind their cars. The engines shut down and the headlight beams shut off and the scene went dark.

Not too dumb, Reacher thought. They figure this could be an ambush. They think we could still be in there.

He watched them until his night vision came back. Then he took out the cell phone he had brought back from Vegas and beeped his way through all the menus until he was on the last number the phone had dialed. He hit the call button and put the phone to his ear and watched out the window to see which of the five guys would answer.

His money was on the guy in the raincoat.

Wrong.

None of the five guys answered.

None of them reacted. None of them pulled a phone from a pocket to check the caller ID. None of them even moved. The ring tone in Reacher’s ear went on and on and then cut to voice mail. He clicked off and redialed and the same thing happened. He watched, and nobody moved a muscle. It was inconceivable that a Director of Security would be out on an emergency alert without his cell phone switched on. It was inconceivable that a Director of Security would ignore an incoming call in such circumstances. Therefore none of these five was the director of security. Not the guy in the raincoat. He was third man on the totem pole, at best, allowing for Swan’s number-two spot. And he was acting like a guy in third place. He was slow, and ponderous. He had no instinctive grasp of tactics. Anybody with half a brain would have figured out his best course of action long ago. A small square building, potential armed hostiles inside, three solid cars at his disposal, he should have solved his problem already. All three cars go in, high speed, different directions, they circle the building, they draw fire, two guys go in the back, two guys go in the front, game over.

Civilians, Reacher thought.

He waited.

Eventually the guy in the raincoat made the right decision. Painfully slow, but he got there in the end. He ordered everyone back in their cars and they maneuvered for a spell and then burst into the lot at high speed. Reacher watched them circle the building a couple of times and then he started the Honda and headed west.

Reacher kept on the surface streets and stayed off the freeway. He had noticed that the freeways were thick with cops at night, and he hadn’t seen any anywhere else. So he erred on the side of caution. He got lost near Dodger Stadium and ended up driving an aimless circle that took him right past the LA Police Academy. He stopped in Echo Park and checked in with the others by phone. They were nearly home, streaming west at circumspect speeds like bombers returning from a night raid.

They regrouped in O’Donnell’s room dead-on three o’clock in the morning. The captured paperwork was laid out on the bed in three neat piles. Reacher unrolled Swan’s stuff from his pocket and added it to the line. It wasn’t very interesting. Most of it was a memorandum about future overtime requirements for his secretarial staff. The rest of it was a justification for the overtime they had already worked.

O’Donnell’s collection wasn’t very interesting either, but it was instructive in a negative way. It proved that the glass cube was purely an administrative center. It had been relatively unsecured because it contained very little worth stealing. Some minor design work happened there, and some component sourcing, but most of the square footage was given over to management functions. Personnel stuff, corporate finance stuff, routine transport, and maintenance and bureaucracy. Nothing inherently valuable.

Which made it all the more important to find the plant location.

Which was where Dixon’s stuff made all the difference. She had dug through the wreckage of the reception area and crawled under the crashed Chrysler and in about fifty seconds flat she had come up with solid gold. In the shattered remains of a locked drawer she had found New Age’s internal phone directory. Now it was right there on the bed, a thick wad of loose-leaf pages punched into a white three-ring binder, a little battered and covered in dust. The cover was printed with New Age’s corporate logo and most of the pages were printed with names that meant nothing, with matching four-digit telephone extensions. But right at the front of the book was a block diagram detailing the company’s various divisions. Names were printed in boxes, and lines connected the boxes downward through all the various hierarchies. The Security Division was headed by a guy called Allen Lamaison. His number two had been Tony Swan. Below Swan two lines led to two other guys, and below them five more lines fanned out to five more guys, one of which had the name Saropian, and who was as dead as Tony Swan, in a Vegas hotel foundation. A total staff of nine, two down, seven survivors.

“Turn to the back,” Dixon said.

The last section had account numbers for FedEx and UPS and DHL. Plus full street addresses and landline phone numbers for two of New Age’s operations, which was what courier services needed. The East LA glass cube, the contracting office up in Colorado.

And then, bizarrely, a third address, with a note printed in bold and underlined: No deliveries to this location.

The third address was for the electronics manufacturing plant.

It was in Highland Park, halfway between Glendale and South Pasadena. Six and a half miles north and east of downtown, nine miles east of where they were standing.

Close enough to taste.

“Now turn back a few pages,” Dixon said.

Reacher leafed backward. There was a whole section showing remote telephone extensions out there in the manufacturing plant.

“Check under P,” Dixon said.

The P section started with a guy called Pascoe and finished with a guy called Purcell. Halfway through the list was Pilot’s office.

Dixon said, “We found the helicopter.”

Reacher nodded. Then he smiled at her. Pictured her running in with her flashlight, running out fifty seconds later covered in dust. His old team. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.

Neagley had personnel files on the whole Security Division. Nine green file folders. One was Saropian’s, one was Tony Swan’s. Reacher didn’t look at either of those. No point. He started with the top boy, Allen Lamaison. There was a Polaroid photograph clipped to the first sheet inside. Lamaison was a bulky thick-necked man with dark blank eyes and a mouth too small for his jaw. His personal information was on the next sheet and showed he had done twenty years inside the LAPD, the last twelve in Robbery-Homicide. He was forty-nine years old.

Next up were the two guys sharing the third spot in the hierarchy. The first of them was called Lennox. Forty-one years old, ex-LAPD, gray buzz cut, heavy build, meaty red face.

The second was the guy in the raincoat. His name was Parker. Forty-two years old, ex-LAPD, tall, slim, a pale hard face disfigured by a broken nose.

“They’re all ex-LAPD,” Neagley said. “According to the data, they all quit around the same time.”

“After a scandal?”

“There are always scandals. It’s statistically difficult to quit the LAPD any other way.”

“Could your guy in Chicago get their histories?”

Neagley shrugged. “We might be able to get into their computer. And we know some people. We might get some word of mouth.”

“What was on Berenson’s office floor?”

“A new Oriental rug. Persian style, but almost certainly a copy from Pakistan.”

Reacher nodded. “Swan’s place, too. They must have done the whole executive floor.”

Neagley dialed her cell for the call to her Chicago guy’s voice mail and Reacher put Parker’s details on one side and checked the photographs of the four remaining foot soldiers. Then he closed their files and butted them together into a neat stack and piled it on top of Parker’s jacket, like a category.

“I saw these five tonight,” he said.

“What were they like?” O’Donnell asked.

“Lousy. Really slow and stupid.”

“Where were the other two?”

“Highland Park, presumably. That’s where the good stuff is.”

O’Donnell slid the five separated files toward him and asked, “How did we lose four guys to the Keystone Kops?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said.

65

Eventually, as he knew he would, Reacher opened Tony Swan’s New Age personnel file. He didn’t get past the Polaroid photograph. It was a year old and not remotely close to studio quality but it was much clearer than Curtis Mauney’s video surveillance still. Ten years after the army Swan’s hair had been shorter than when he was in. Back then the craze for shaved heads had already started among enlisted men but hadn’t spread upward to officers. Swan had worn a regular style, parted and brushed. But over the years it must have thinned and he had changed to an all-over half-inch Caesar. In the army it had been a chestnut brown. Now it was a dusty gray. His eyes were pouched and he had grown balls of fat and muscle at the hinges of his jaw. His neck was wider than ever. Reacher was amazed that anyone made shirts with collars that size. Like automobile tires.

“What next?” Dixon asked, in the silence. Reacher knew it wasn’t a genuine inquiry. She was just trying to stop him reading. Trying to spare his feelings. He closed the file. Dropped it on the bed well away from the other files, in a category all its own. Swan deserved better than to be associated with his recent colleagues, even on paper.

“Who knew, and who flew,” Reacher said. “That’s what we need. Anyone else can live a little longer.”

“When will we know?”

“Later today. You and Dave can go scope out Highland Park. Neagley and I are going back to East LA. In an hour. So take a nap, and make it count.”

Reacher and Neagley left the motel at five in the morning, in separate Hondas, driving one-handed and talking to each other on the phone like commuters everywhere. Reacher said he guessed that when the alarm call came in, Lamaison and Lennox had headed straight for Highland Park. Standard emergency protocol, he figured, because Highland Park was the more sensitive location. The attack in East LA might have been nothing more than a decoy. But an uneventful night would allay those fears and they would head to the scene of the real crime around dawn. They would declare the glass cube unusable for normal operations and give everyone the day off. Except for department heads, who would be called in to inventory the damage and list what was missing.

Neagley agreed with his analysis. And she grasped the next part of the plan without having to ask, which was one of the reasons why Reacher liked her so much.

They parked a hundred yards apart on different streets, hiding in plain sight. The sun was over the horizon and the dawn was gray. Reacher was fifty yards from New Age’s building and could see his car reflected in the mirror glass, tiny and distant and anonymous, one of hundreds dumped all around. There was a flatbed truck backed up to the wrecked reception area. A steel cable snaked inside into the gloom. The guy called Parker was still there in his raincoat. He was directing operations. He had one foot soldier with him. Reacher guessed the other three had been sent up to Highland Park to relieve Lamaison and Lennox.

The flatbed’s cable jerked and tightened and started hauling. The blue Chrysler came out of the lobby backward, a lot slower than it had gone in. It had scars on the paint and some front-end damage. The windshield was starred and a little concave. But overall the car was in excellent shape. As subtle as a hammer, as vulnerable as a hammer. It came to rest on the flatbed and the driver strapped the wheels down and drove it away. As soon as it was out of the lot its undamaged twin drove in. Another blue 300C, fast and confident. It stopped just inside and Allen Lamaison climbed out to inspect the smashed gate.

Reacher recognized him instantly from his file photograph. In the flesh he was about six feet tall and could have been two hundred and forty pounds. Big shoulders, small hips, thin legs. He looked fast and agile. He was dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and a red necktie. He was holding the necktie flat against his chest with one hand, even though the weather wasn’t windy. He took a brief look at the gate and climbed back in his car and drove on through the lot. He got out again just short of the shattered doors and Parker came over in his raincoat and they started talking.

Just to be sure, Reacher took out the phone he had brought back from Vegas and redialed. Fifty yards away Lamaison’s hand went straight to his pocket and came out with a phone. He glanced at the caller ID on the screen and froze.

Got you, Reacher thought.

He wasn’t expecting an answer. But Lamaison picked up. He flicked the phone open and brought it up to his face and said, “What?”

“How’s your day going?” Reacher asked.

“It only just started,” Lamaison said.

“How was your night?”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Plenty of folks have tried,” Reacher said. “I’m still here. They aren’t.”

“Where are you?”

“We got out of town. Safer that way. But we’ll be back. Maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe next year. You better get used to looking over your shoulder. That’s something you’re going to be doing a lot of.”

“I’m not scared of you.”

“Then you’re a fool,” Reacher said, and clicked off. He saw Lamaison stare at his phone, and then dial a number. Not a call back. Reacher waited, but his phone stayed silent, and Lamaison started talking, evidently to someone else.

Ten minutes later Lennox showed up in another blue 300C. Black suit, gray buzz cut, heavy build, meaty red face. The other number three, Swan’s junior, Parker’s equal. He was carrying a cardboard tray of coffee and disappeared into the building. Fifty minutes after that Margaret Berenson showed up. The dragon lady. Human Resources. Seven o’clock in the morning. She was in a mid-sized silver Toyota. She made a right off the roadway and drove through the lot and parked neatly in a slot close to the door. Then she picked her way inside through the wreckage. Lamaison came out briefly and dispatched the remaining foot soldier to the gate, for sentry duty. Parker made a second line of defense at the door. He was still in his raincoat. Two more managers showed up. Probably financial and the building super, Reacher figured. The sentry waved them through the absent gate and Parker checked them in at the door. Then some kind of a CEO showed up. An old guy, a Jaguar sedan, deference at the gate, a ramrod posture from Parker. The old guy conferred with Parker through the Jaguar’s window and went away again. Clearly he had a hands-off management style.

Then the scene went quiet, and it stayed quiet for more than two hours.

Halfway through the wait Dixon called in from Highland Park. She and O’Donnell had been on station since before six in the morning. They had seen the three foot soldiers show up. They had seen Lamaison and Lennox leave. They had seen workers show up. They had driven all around the plant on a two-block radius, for a fuller picture.

“It’s the real deal,” Dixon said. “Multiple buildings, serious fence, excellent security. And it’s got a helipad out back. With a helicopter on it. A white Bell 222.”

At half past nine in the morning the dragon lady left. She picked her way through the mess and stood on the shallow step outside the reception area for a moment and then headed back toward her Toyota. Reacher’s cell phone rang. The Radio Shack pay-as-you-go, not the Vegas guy’s. It was Neagley.

“Both of us go?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Reacher said. “You close, me deep. Time to rock and roll.”

He pulled his gloves on and started his Honda at the same time that Berenson started her Toyota. She had made a right coming in, and therefore she would make a left going out. Reacher eased off the curb and drove twenty yards and U-turned in the mouth of the next side street. He was stiff from sitting still so long. He came back slowly, along New Age’s fence. Berenson was hustling through the lot. A block away he could see Neagley’s Honda, riding low, trailing a cloud of white vapor. Berenson reached the wrecked gate and swept through without pausing. Made the left. Neagley made a parallel left and fell in twenty yards behind her. Reacher slowed and waited and then made his own turn and tucked in about seventy yards behind Neagley and ninety behind Berenson.

66

The Prelude was a low-slung coupe and therefore Reacher didn’t have the best angle in the world, but most of the time he got a decent view of the silver Toyota up ahead. Berenson was driving well under the speed limit. Maybe she had points on her license. Or things on her mind. Or maybe the car-crash scars were more vivid in her memory than they were on her face. She made a right onto a road called Huntington Drive, which Reacher was pretty sure had been a part of the old Route 66. She headed north and east on it. Reacher started singing to himself, about getting his kicks. Then he stopped. Berenson was slowing and her turn signal was flashing. She was getting ready to make a left. She was heading for South Pasadena.

His phone rang. Neagley.

“I’ve been behind her too long,” she said. “I’m taking three sides of the next block. You move up for a spell.”

He kept the line open and accelerated. Berenson had turned into a road called Van Horne Avenue. He turned into it about fifty yards behind her. He couldn’t see her. The road curved too much. He accelerated again and eased off and came around a final curve and spotted her about forty yards ahead. He cruised on and in his mirror he saw Neagley swing back on the road behind him.

Monterey Hills gave way to South Pasadena and at the municipal line the road changed its name to Via Del Rey. A pretty name, and a pretty place. The California dream. Low hills, curving streets, trees, perpetual spring, perpetual blossom. Reacher had grown up on grim military bases in Europe and the Pacific and people had given him picture books to show him what home was all about. Most of the pictures had looked exactly like South Pasadena.

Berenson made a left and then a right and pulled into a quiet residential cul-de-sac. Reacher glimpsed small smug houses basking in the morning sun. He didn’t follow Berenson. The slammed Honda was pretty anonymous in most of LA, but not in a street like that. He braked and came to a stop thirty yards farther on. Neagley pulled in behind him.

“Now?” she asked, on the phone.

There were two main ways to engineer a visit with someone returning to their home. Either you let them settle and then gave them a compelling reason why they should let you in later, or you followed hard on their heels and rushed them while they still had their keys out or their door open.

“Now,” Reacher said.

They slid out and locked up and ran. Safe enough. A lone man running could look suspicious. A lone woman rarely did. A man and a woman running together were usually taken as jogging buddies, or a couple just out having fun.

They made it into the cul-de-sac and saw nothing at first. There was a rise, and then a curve. They made it through the curve in time to see a garage door opening next to a house about a third of the way down the street, on the right. Berenson’s silver Toyota was waiting on a blacktop driveway. The house was small and neat. Faced with brick. Painted trim. The front yard was full of rocks and gravel and all kinds of colorful blooms. There was a basketball hoop over the garage. The rising door was letting in enough light to show a tangle of kid stuff stacked against a wall inside. A bike, a skateboard, a Little League bat, knee pads, helmets, gloves.

The Toyota’s brake lights went off and it crept forward. Neagley sprinted. She was much faster than Reacher. She made it inside the garage just as the door started back down. Reacher arrived about ten seconds after her and used his foot to trip the safety mechanism. He waited until the door rose again to waist height and then he ducked under it and stepped inside.

Margaret Berenson was already out of her car. Neagley had one gloved hand in her hair and the other clamped around both of her wrists from behind. Berenson was struggling, but not much. She stopped altogether after Neagley forced her face down and tapped it twice against the Toyota’s hood. At that point she went limp and started yelling. She stopped yelling exactly a second later after Neagley straightened her up again and turned her toward Reacher and Reacher popped her in the solar plexus, once, gently, just enough to drive the air out of her lungs.

Then Reacher stepped away and hit the button and the door started down again. There was a weak bulb in the opener on the ceiling and as the sunlight cut off it was replaced by a dim yellow glow. At the right rear of the garage there was a door to the outside, and another on the left that would lead to the interior of the house. There was an alarm pad next to it.

“Is it set?” Reacher asked.

“Yes,” Berenson said, breathlessly.

“No,” Neagley said. She nodded toward the bike and the skateboard. “The kid is about twelve years old. Mom was out early this morning. The kid made the school bus on his own for once. Probably unusual. Setting the alarm won’t be a part of his normal routine.”

“Maybe Dad set it.”

“Dad is long gone. Mom isn’t wearing a ring.”

“Boyfriend?”

“You must be kidding.”

Reacher tried the door. It was locked. He pulled the keys out of the Toyota’s ignition and thumbed through the ring and found a house key. It fit the lock and turned. The door opened. No warning beeps. Thirty seconds later, no lights, no siren.

“You tell a lot of lies, Ms. Berenson,” he said.

Berenson said nothing.

Neagley said, “She’s Human Resources. It’s what they do.”

Reacher held the door and Neagley bundled Berenson through a laundry room and into a kitchen. The house had been built before developers started making kitchens as big as aircraft hangars, so it was just a small square room full of cabinets and appliances a few years off the pace. There was a table and two chairs. Neagley forced Berenson down into one and Reacher headed back to the garage and rooted around until he found a half-used roll of duct tape on a shelf. With gloves on he couldn’t unpick the end so he stepped back to the kitchen and used a knife from a maple block. He taped Berenson tight to the chair, torso, arms, legs, fast and efficient.

“We were in the army,” he said to her. “We mentioned that, right? When we needed information, our first port of call was the company clerk. That’s you. So start talking.”

“You’re crazy,” Berenson said back.

“Tell me about the car wreck.”

“The what?”

“Your scars.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Was it bad?”

“Awful.”

“This could be much worse.” Reacher put the kitchen knife on the table and followed it with the Glock from one pocket and Tony Swan’s lump of concrete from the other. “Stab wounds, gunshot wounds, blunt trauma. I’ll let you choose.”

Berenson started to cry. Hopeless, helpless sobs and wails. Her shoulders shook and her head dropped and tears dripped into her lap.

“Not helping,” Reacher said. “You’re crying at the wrong guy.”

Berenson lifted her head and turned and looked at Neagley. Neagley’s face was about as expressive as Swan’s lump of concrete.

“Start talking,” Reacher said.

“I can’t,” Berenson said. “He’ll hurt my son.”

“Who will?”

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Lamaison?”

“I can’t say.”

“It’s time to make up your mind, Margaret. We want to know who knew and who flew. Right now we’re including you in. You want us to include you out, you’ve got some serious talking to do.”

“He’ll hurt my son.”

“Lamaison will?”

“I can’t say who.”

“Look at it from our side, Margaret. If in doubt, we’ll take you out.”

Berenson said nothing.

“Be smart, Margaret,” Reacher said. “Whoever is threatening your son, you make a good case against him, he’ll be dead. He won’t be able to hurt anyone.”

“I can’t rely on that.”

“Just shoot her,” Neagley said. “She’s wasting our time.”

Reacher stepped to the refrigerator and opened it. Took out a plastic bottle of Evian water. Flat, French, gallon for gallon three times as expensive as gasoline. He unscrewed the top and took a long drink. Offered the bottle to Neagley. She shook her head. He emptied the rest of the water in the sink and stepped back to the table and used the kitchen knife to saw an oval hole in the bottom of the bottle. He fitted it over the Glock’s muzzle. Adjusted it neatly so that the screw neck lined up exactly with the barrel.

“A home-made silencer,” he said. “The neighbors won’t hear a thing. It only works once, but once is all it has to.”

He held the gun a foot and a half from Berenson’s face and aimed it so that she was staring straight into the bottle with her right eye.

Berenson started talking.

67

In retrospect it was a tale that Reacher could have scripted in advance. The original development engineer up at the Highland Park plant was now the quality control manager and he had started showing signs of severe stress. His name was Edward Dean and he lived way to the north, beyond the mountains. By chance his annual performance review was scheduled three weeks after he started his weird behavior. Being a trained professional, Margaret Berenson noticed his distress, and she pursued the matter.

At first Dean claimed his move north was the root of his problem. He had wanted a relaxed lifestyle and had bought acres of land out in the desert some ways south of Palmdale. The commute was killing him. Berenson didn’t buy that. All Angelinos had the commute from hell. So then Dean said his neighbors were problematical. There were outlaw bikers and meth labs close by. Berenson was readier to believe that. Stories about the badlands were legion. But a pained echo in a chance remark about Dean’s daughter led her to believe that the kid was in some way the problem. She was fourteen years old. Berenson put two and two together and made five. She figured maybe the kid was hanging with the bikers or experimenting with crystal and causing big problems at home.

Then she revised her opinion. The quality problems up at Highland Park became common knowledge inside the company. Berenson knew that Dean had a difficult split responsibility. As a director of the corporation he had a fiduciary duty to see it do well. But he also had a parallel responsibility to the Pentagon to make sure New Age sold it only the good stuff. Berenson figured the conflict in his mind was causing his stress. But overall he was doing the right thing according to the law, so she shelved her concerns.

Then Tony Swan disappeared.

He just vanished. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t. Being a trained professional, Margaret Berenson noticed his absence. She followed up. She had split responsibilities of her own. Swan had classified knowledge. There were national security implications. She got into it like a dog with a bone. She asked all kinds of questions of all kinds of people.

Then one day she got home and found Allen Lamaison on her driveway, playing one-on-one basketball with her son.

Berenson was afraid of Lamaison. Always had been. How much, she hadn’t really realized until she saw him tousle her twelve-year-old’s hair with a hand big enough to crush the child’s skull. He suggested the kid stay outside and practice his foul throws while he went inside for an important chat with Mom.

The chat started with a confession. Lamaison told Berenson exactly what had happened to Swan. Every detail. And he hinted as to the reason. This time Berenson put two and two together and made four. She recalled Dean’s stress. By and by Lamaison revealed that Dean was cooperating with a special project, because if he didn’t his daughter would disappear and be found weeks later with blood running down to her ankles amid a happy band of bikers.

Or on the other hand, maybe she would never be found at all.

Then Lamaison said the exact same thing could happen to Berenson’s son. He said a lot of outlaw bikers were happy to swing both ways. Most of them had been in prison, and prison distorted a person’s tastes.

He issued a warning, and two instructions. The warning was that sooner or later two men and two women would show up and start asking questions. Old friends from Swan’s service days. The first instruction was that they were to be deflected, firmly, politely, and definitively. The second instruction was that nothing of this current conversation was ever to be revealed.

Then he made Berenson take him upstairs and perform a certain sexual act on him. To seal their understanding, he said.

Then he went out and sank a few more baskets with her son.

Then he drove away.

Reacher believed her. In his life he had listened to people telling lies, and less often to people telling the truth. He knew how to distinguish between the two. He knew what to trust and what to distrust. He was a supremely cynical man, but his special talent lay in retaining a small corner of open-mindedness. He believed the basketball part, and the prison reference, and the sex act. People like Margaret Berenson didn’t make up that kind of stuff. They couldn’t. Their frames of reference weren’t wide enough. He took the kitchen knife and cut the duct tape off her. Helped her to her feet.

“So who knew?” he asked.

“Lamaison,” Berenson said. “Lennox, Parker, and Saropian.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“What about the other four ex-LAPD?”

“They’re different. From a different era and a different place. Lamaison wouldn’t really trust them on a thing like this.”

“So why did he hire them?”

“Warm bodies. Numbers. And he trusts them on everything else. They do what he tells them.”

“Why did he hire Tony Swan? Swan was always going to be a rod for his back.”

“Lamaison didn’t hire Swan. He didn’t want him. But I convinced our CEO we needed some diversity of background. It wasn’t healthy to have all of them from the same place.”

“So you hired him?”

“Basically. I’m sorry.”

“Where did all the bad stuff happen?”

“Highland Park. The helicopter is there. And there are outbuildings. It’s a big place.”

“Is there somewhere you can go?” Reacher asked.

“Go?” Berenson said.

“For a couple of days, until this is over.”

“It won’t be over. You don’t know Lamaison. You can’t beat him.”

Reacher looked at Neagley.

“Can we beat him?” he asked.

“Like a drum,” she said.

Berenson said, “But there are four of them.”

“Three,” Reacher said. “Saropian is already down. Three of them, four of us.”

“You’re crazy.”

“They’re going to think so. That’s for damn sure. They’re going to think I’m completely psychotic.”

Berenson was quiet for a long moment.

“I could go to a hotel,” she said.

“When does your son get home?”

“I’ll go get him out of school.”

Reacher nodded. “Pack your bags.”

Berenson said, “I will.”

“Who flew?” Reacher asked.

“Lamaison, Lennox, and Parker. Just the three of them.”

“Plus the pilot,” Reacher said. “That’s four.”

Berenson went upstairs to pack and Reacher put the kitchen knife away. Then he put Swan’s rock back in his pocket and pulled the Evian bottle off the Glock.

“Would that really have worked?” Neagley asked. “As a silencer?”

“I doubt it,” Reacher said. “I read it in a book once. It worked on the page. But in the real world I imagine it would have exploded and blinded me with shards of flying plastic. But it looked good, didn’t it? It added an extra element. Better than just pointing the gun.”

Then his phone rang. His Radio Shack pay-as-you-go, not Saropian’s cell from Vegas. It was Dixon. She and O’Donnell had been on station in Highland Park for four and a half hours. They had seen all they were going to see, and they were starting to feel conspicuous.

“Head home,” Reacher said. “We’ve got what we need.”

Then Neagley’s phone rang. Her personal cell, not her pay-as-you-go. Her Chicago guy. Ten-thirty in LA, lunch time in Illinois. She listened, not moving, not asking questions, just absorbing information. Then she clicked off.

“Preliminary data from the LAPD grapevine,” she said. “In twenty years Lamaison fought eighteen Internal Affairs investigations and won all of them.”

“Charges?”

“You name it. Excessive force, bribery, corruption, missing dope, missing money. He’s a bad guy, but smart.”

“How does a guy like that get a job with a defense contractor?”

“How does he get one with the LAPD in the first place? And then promotions on top? By putting up a front and working hard to keep his record clean, that’s how. And by having a partner who knew when and how to keep quiet.”

“His partner was probably just as bad. It usually works that way.”

“You should know,” Neagley said.

Forty minutes later Berenson came downstairs with two bags. An expensive black leather carry-on, and a bright green nylon duffel with a sports logo on it. Hers, and the kid’s, Reacher guessed. She loaded them into the Toyota’s trunk. Reacher and Neagley walked down to get their cars and drove them back and formed up into a close protection convoy. Same basic method as surveillance, different purpose. Neagley stayed tight, and Reacher hung back. After a mile he decided O’Donnell had been wrong about the tricked-out Hondas being the most invisible cars in California. The Toyota fit that bill better. He was staring right at it and could barely see it.

Berenson stopped at a school. It was a big tan spread with the kind of black-hole silence around it that schools get when all the kids are inside working. After twenty minutes she came back out with a brown-haired boy in tow. He was small. He barely reached her shoulder. He looked a little puzzled, but happy enough to be dragged away from class.

Then Berenson drove a little ways on the 110 and came off in Pasadena and headed for an inn on a quiet street. Reacher approved of her choice. The place had a lot in back where the Toyota wouldn’t be seen from the road, and a bellman at the door, and two women behind a counter inside. Plenty of vigilant eyes before the elevators and the rooms. Better than a motel.

Reacher and Neagley stayed on site to give Berenson and her kid time to settle in. They figured ten minutes would do it. They used the time getting lunch, in a bar off the lobby. Club sandwiches, coffee for Reacher, soda for Neagley. Reacher liked club sandwiches. He liked the way he could pick his teeth afterward with the tasseled thing that had held the sandwich together. He didn’t want to be talking to people with chicken fibers caught in there.

His phone rang as he was finishing up his coffee. Dixon again. She was back at the motel, with O’Donnell. There was an urgent message waiting at the desk. From Curtis Mauney.

“He wants us up at that place north of Glendale,” Dixon said. “Right now.”

“Where we went for Orozco?”

“Yes.”

“Because they found Sanchez?”

“He didn’t say. But Reacher, he didn’t tell us to meet him at the morgue. He said meet him at the hospital across the street. So if it’s Sanchez, he’s still alive.”

68

Dixon and O’Donnell were starting from the Dunes Motel and Reacher and Neagley were starting from the inn in Pasadena. Both locations were exactly equidistant from the hospital north of Glendale. Ten miles, along different sides of the same shallow triangle.

Reacher expected that he and Neagley would get there first. The way the freeways lined up with the flanks of the San Gabriel mountains gave them a straight shot on the 210. Dixon and O’Donnell would be heading northeast, at right angles to the freeways, a difficult trip battling surface congestion all the way.

But the 210 was jammed. Within a hundred yards of the ramp it was completely static. A river of stalled cars curved ahead into the distance, winking in the sun, burning gas, going nowhere. A classic LA panorama. Reacher checked his mirror and saw Neagley’s Honda right behind him. Hers was a Civic, white, about four model-years old. He couldn’t see her behind the wheel. The screen was tinted too dark. It had a band of plastic across the top, dark blue with the words No Fear written across it in jagged silver script. Very appropriate, he thought, for Neagley.

He called her on the phone.

“Accident up ahead,” she said. “I heard it on the radio.”

“Terrific.”

“If Sanchez made it this far, he can make it a few minutes more.”

Reacher asked, “Where did they go wrong?”

“I don’t know. This wasn’t the toughest thing they ever faced.”

“So something tripped them up. Something unpredictable. Where would Swan have started?”

“With Dean,” Neagley said. “The quality control guy. His behavior must have been the trigger. Bad numbers on their own don’t necessarily mean much. But bad numbers plus a stressed-out quality control guy mean a lot.”

“Did he get the whole story out of Dean?”

“Probably not. But enough to join the dots. Swan was a lot smarter than Berenson.”

“What was his next step?”

“Two steps in parallel,” Neagley said. “He secured Dean’s situation, and he started the search for corroborating evidence.”

“With help from the others.”

“More than help,” Neagley said. “He was basically subcontracting. He had to, because his office situation was insecure.”

“So he didn’t talk to Lamaison at any point?”

“Not a chance. First rule, trust no one.”

“So what tripped them up?”

“I don’t know.”

“How would Swan have secured Dean’s situation?”

“He’d have talked to the local cops. Asked for protection, or at least asked for a car to swing by on a regular basis.”

“Lamaison is ex-LAPD. Maybe he still has buddies on the job. Maybe they tipped him off.”

“Doesn’t work,” Neagley said. “Swan didn’t talk to the LAPD. Dean lived over the hill. Outside of LAPD jurisdiction.”

Reacher paused a beat.

“Which actually means that Swan didn’t talk to anyone,” he said. “Because that’s Curtis Mauney’s kingdom up there, and he didn’t know anything about Dean or New Age. Or even anything about Swan, except through Franz.”

“Swan wouldn’t leave Dean unprotected.”

“So maybe Dean wasn’t the trigger. Maybe Swan didn’t know anything about him. Maybe he found a different way in.”

“Which was?” Neagley asked.

“No idea,” Reacher said. “Maybe Sanchez will be able to tell us.”

“You think he’s alive?”

“Hope for the best.”

“But plan for the worst.”

They clicked off. Their lane moved a little. In a minute and a quarter of conversation they had covered about five car lengths. In the next five minutes of silence they covered about ten more, six times slower than walking. All around them people were enduring. They were talking on the phone, reading, shaving, applying makeup, smoking, eating, listening to music. Some were tanning. They were hitching up their sleeves and holding their arms out their open windows.

Reacher’s pay-as-you-go rang. Neagley again.

“More from Chicago,” she said. “We’re into parts of the LAPD mainframe. Lennox and Parker were about as bad as Lamaison. The two of them were partners together. They resigned rather than face their twelfth IA inquiry in twelve years. They must have been out of work about a week before Lamaison hired them on at New Age.”

“I’m glad I don’t hold New Age stock.”

“You do. It’s all Pentagon money. Where do you think it comes from?”

“Not from me,” Reacher said.

Two hundred yards later the freeway straightened and rose in front of them and they saw the source of the delay, in the far distance, in the haze. There was a broken-down car in the left lane. A trivial blockage, but the whole road was at a standstill. Reacher clicked off with Neagley and called Dixon.

“You there yet?” he asked.

“Maybe ten minutes away.”

“We’re stuck in traffic. Call us if there’s good news. Call us if there’s bad news too, I guess.”

It took another quarter of an hour to reach the stalled car and some bold lane changes to get past it. Then the flow freed up and everyone continued on their way at seventy miles an hour like nothing had happened. Reacher and Neagley were at the county facility ten minutes later. Ten miles in forty minutes. Average speed, fifteen miles an hour. Not great.

They ignored the morgue and parked in the hospital’s visitor lot. They walked through the sun to the main entrance. Reacher saw O’Donnell’s Honda in the lot, and then Dixon’s. The main entrance gave onto a lobby full of red plastic chairs. Some of them were occupied. Most of them weren’t. The place was fairly quiet. There was no sign of Dixon or O’Donnell. Or Curtis Mauney. There was a long desk with people behind it. Not nurses. Just clerks. Reacher asked one of them for Mauney and got no response. He asked for Jorge Sanchez and got no response. He asked about emergency John Doe admissions and got redirected to another desk around a corner.

The new desk reported no recent John Doe admissions and knew nothing about a patient named Jorge Sanchez or an LA County sheriff named Curtis Mauney. Reacher pulled out his phone but was asked not to use it inside the building in case its signal upset delicate medical equipment. He stepped out to the lot and called Dixon.

No reply.

He tried O’Donnell’s number.

No reply.

Neagley said, “Maybe they’re switched off. Because they’re in an ICU or something.”

“Who with? They never heard of Sanchez here.”

“They have to be here somewhere. They just got here.”

“This feels wrong,” Reacher said.

Neagley took Mauney’s card out of her pocket. Handed it over. Reacher dialed Mauney’s cell number.

No answer.

His landline.

No answer.

Then Neagley’s phone rang. Her personal cell, not her pay-as-you-go. She answered. Listened. Her face went pale. Literally bloodless, like wax.

“That was Chicago,” she said. “Curtis Mauney was Allen Lamaison’s partner. They were together twelve years in the LAPD.”

69

Something tripped them up. Something unpredictable. Neagley had been right, but only half-right. Dean had been a major factor, but not the original trigger. Swan had gotten to him much later in the process, some different way, after the others were already on board. No other way to explain the scale of the disaster. Reacher stood in the hospital lot and closed his eyes and pictured the scene. Saw Swan talking to Dean, the final part of the puzzle, at home, north of the mountains, out in the desert near Palmdale, a city refugee’s paradise, a sanctuary, a young girl moving silently past an open doorway, fear on Dean’s face, concern on Swan’s. Reacher saw Swan extracting the whole story, as always reassuring and solid and confident. Then Reacher saw Swan driving straight to some dusty sheriff’s office, talking to Mauney, explaining, asking for help, demanding it. Then he saw Swan leaving, and Mauney picking up a phone. Sealing Swan’s fate right there and then. And Franz’s, and Orozco’s, and Sanchez’s.

Something unpredictable.

Reacher opened his eyes and said, “We’re not going to lose another two. Not while I live and breathe.”

They abandoned Neagley’s Civic in the hospital lot and used Reacher’s Prelude. They had nowhere to go. They were just moving for the sake of moving. And talking for the sake of talking. Neagley said, “They knew we’d show up sooner or later. The suspense was killing them. So they manipulated the timeline to suit themselves. Mauney pushed Angela Franz into calling me. He spun the bait story to keep Thomas Brant on board. He was tracking us every step of the way and feeding us things we already knew to keep us close and asking us what else we’d found out and waiting to see if we’d give up and get out of their hair. And when we never did, they decided to go ahead and take us out. First Vegas, and then now.”

They swung back onto the 210. It was flowing fast and free.

“Plan?” Neagley asked.

“No plan,” Reacher said.

The phone directory that Dixon had captured was in O’Donnell’s room at the motel, but they didn’t want to go anywhere near Sunset Boulevard. Not at that point. So they pieced together half-remembered fragments of the manufacturing plant’s Highland Park address and headed in that direction.

They found Highland Park easily enough. It was a decent place full of streets and houses and business parks and small clean hi-tech manufacturing enterprises. It was harder to find New Age’s specific location. They weren’t expecting a billboard and didn’t get one. Instead they looked for unmarked buildings and serious fences and helipads. They found several. It was that kind of a neighborhood.

“Dixon called the helicopter a Bell 222,” Reacher said. “Could you recognize one of those if you saw one?”

“I’ve seen three in the last five minutes,” Neagley said.

“She said it was white.”

“Two in the last five minutes.”

“Where?”

“The second one was a mile back. Two lefts and a right. The first one was three places before that.”

“Both places with fences?”

“Check.”

“Outbuildings?”

“Both of them.”

Reacher braked and pulled an illegal U across the full width of the road and headed back the way they had come. He took two lefts and a right and slowed and Neagley pointed at a collection of gray metal buildings squatting behind a fence that would have looked right at home outside a supermax prison. It was at least eight feet tall and close to four feet thick, two faces of tight barbed wire with giant coils of razor wire heaped between them and huge concertinas of the same stuff piled on top. It was one hell of a barrier. There were four buildings behind it. One was a large shed and three were smaller constructions. There was a huge concrete rectangle with a long-nosed helicopter parked on it, white, still, and quiet.

“That’s a Bell 222?” Reacher asked.

“Unmistakable,” Neagley said.

“So is this the place?”

“Hard to say.”

Next to the helipad was an orange windsock on a tall pole. It was hanging limp in the warm dry air. There was a small parking lot full of thirteen cars. Nothing expensive. No blue Chryslers.

“What would assembly workers drive?” Reacher asked.

“Cars like those,” Neagley said.

Reacher drove on, past one place, past another. The third place in line was very similar to the first. A serious fence, four blank buildings with gray metal siding, a parking lot full of cheap cars, a helipad, a parked Bell 222, white. No names, no markings, no signs.

Reacher said, “We need the exact address.”

“We don’t have time. The Dunes is a long way from here.”

“But Pasadena isn’t.”

They made the short hop east on York Boulevard and the 110. Pulled up outside the inn in Pasadena fifteen minutes later. Five minutes after that they were in Margaret Berenson’s room. They told her what they needed. They didn’t tell her why. They wanted to preserve an illusion of competence, for her sake.

Berenson told them the first place they had seen was the place they wanted.

Fifteen minutes later they cruised past the first place again. The fence was appalling. Brutal. A main battle tank might have breached it. A car almost certainly wouldn’t. Not a Honda Prelude. Not even a big lump like the Chrysler. Not even a heavy truck. It was a question of the wire’s resilience. The outer strands would stretch like guitar strings before they broke, dissipating the force of impact, slowing the vehicle, robbing its momentum. Then the inner coils would compress. Like a sponge. Like a spring. The vehicle would tangle and slow and stall. No way through on wheels. And no way through on foot. An individual with a bolt cutter would bleed to death before he was a quarter of the way in. And there was no way over the top, either. The concertinas were too broad and too loosely coiled to allow scaling by ladder.

Reacher drove all the way around the block. The whole facility occupied a couple of acres. It was roughly square, about a hundred yards on a side. Four buildings, one large, three small. Dried brown grass and cinder footpaths between them. The fence was four hundred yards long in total and had no weak spots. And only one gate. It was a wide steel assembly that slid sideways on wheels. Welded to its top rail was more concertina wire. Flanking it was a guard hut.

“Pentagon requirement,” Neagley said. “Has to be.”

There was a guard in the hut. An old guy, gray hair. Gray uniform. A belt around his hips, a gun in the belt. A simple job. The right pass and the right paperwork, he would hit a button and the gate would roll back. No pass and no paperwork, he wouldn’t and it wouldn’t. There was a lightbulb above the guy’s head. It would be lit after dark. It would throw a soft yellow halo for twenty feet all around.

“No way through,” Reacher said.

“Are they even in there?”

“Must be. It’s like a private jail. Safer than stashing them anywhere else. And it’s where they put the others.”

“How did it go down?”

“Mauney arrested them in the hospital lot. Maybe he had help from Lamaison’s guys. Crowded place, total surprise, what were they going to do?”

Reacher drove on. The Prelude was an unremarkable car, but he didn’t want it to be seen too many times in the same place. He turned a corner and parked a quarter of a mile away. Didn’t speak. Because he had nothing to say.

Neagley’s phone rang again. Her personal cell. She answered. Listened. Clicked off. Closed her eyes.

“My Pentagon guy,” she said. “The missiles just rolled out the gate in Colorado.”

70

If Mahmoud has got the missiles, then this thing is bigger than we are. We have to suck it up and move on. Reacher looked at Neagley. She opened her eyes and stared right back.

“How much do they weigh?” Reacher asked.

“Weigh?”

“As in weight. Pounds and ounces.”

“I don’t know. They’re new. I never saw one.”

“Guess.”

“Heavier than a Stinger. Because they do more. But still man-portable. Crated, with launch tubes and spare parts and manuals, say fifty pounds each.”

“That’s sixteen and a quarter tons.”

“A semi,” Neagley said.

“Average speed on the interstates, fifty miles an hour?”

“Probably.”

“North on I-25 to I-80, then west to Nevada, that’s about nine hundred miles. So we’ve got eighteen hours. Call it twenty-four, because the driver will take a rest period.”

“They’re not going to Nevada,” Neagley said. “Nevada is bullshit, because they’re going to use these things, not destroy them.”

“Wherever. Anywhere significant is eighteen hours from Denver.”

Neagley shook her head. “This is insane. We can’t wait twenty-four hours. Or eighteen. You said it yourself, there could be ten thousand KIAs.”

“But not yet.”

“We can’t wait,” Neagley said again. “Easier to stop the truck on the way out of Denver. It could be headed anywhere. It could be headed to New York. JFK, or LaGuardia. Or Chicago. You want to think about Little Wing deployed at O’Hare?”

“Not really.”

“Every minute we delay makes that truck harder to find.”

“Moral dilemma,” Reacher said. “Two people we know, or ten thousand we don’t.”

“We have to tell someone.”

Reacher said nothing.

“We have to, Reacher.”

“They might not listen. They didn’t listen about September eleventh.”

“You’re clutching at straws. They’ve changed. We have to tell someone.”

“We will,” Reacher said. “But not yet.”

“Karla and Dave will have a better chance with a couple of SWAT teams on their side.”

“You’re kidding. They’ll wind up as collateral damage in a heartbeat.”

Neagley said, “We can’t even get through the fence. Dixon will die, O’Donnell will die, ten thousand other people will die, and we’ll die.”

“You want to live forever?”

“I don’t want to die today. Do you?”

“I really don’t care one way or the other.”

“Seriously?”

“I never have. Why would I?”

“You are psychotic.”

“Look on the bright side.”

“Which is what?”

“Maybe none of the bad stuff will happen.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe we’ll win. You and me.”

“Here? Maybe. But later? Dream on. We have no idea where that truck is going.”

“We can find out later.”

“You think?”

“It’s what we’re good at.”

“Good enough to gamble ten thousand lives against two?”

“I hope so,” Reacher said.

He drove a mile south and parked again on a curving side street outside a custom Harley motorcycle shop. He could see New Age’s helicopter in the far distance.

He asked, “What is their security going to be like?”

“Normally?” Neagley said. “Motion detectors on the fence and big locks on all the doors and a guy in the sentry hut twenty-four hours a day. That’s all they need, normally. But today isn’t going to be normal. You can forget about that. They know we’re still out here. The whole of New Age security is going to be in there, locked and loaded.”

“Seven men.”

“Seven we know about. Maybe more.”

“Maybe.”

“And they’re going to be inside the fence. We’re going to be outside the fence.”

“Let me worry about the fence.”

“There’s no way through it.”

“Doesn’t need to be. There’s a gate. What time does it get full dark?”

“Say nine o’clock, to be safe.”

“They won’t fly before dark. We’ve got seven hours. Seven out of our twenty-four.”

“We never had twenty-four.”

“You elected me CO. We’ve got what I say we’ve got.”

“They could have shot them both already.”

“They didn’t shoot Franz or Orozco or Swan. They’re worried about ballistics.”

“This is insane.”

“I’m not going to lose another two,” Reacher said.

They drove around New Age’s block one more time, fast and unobtrusive, and fixed the geography in their minds. The gate was in the center of the front face of the square. The main building was front and center behind it at the end of a short driveway. In back of that the three outbuildings were scattered. One was close to the helipad. One was a little farther away. The last was standing on its own, maybe thirty yards from anything else. All four buildings were set on concrete pads. They had gray galvanized siding. No signs, no labels. It was a severe, practical establishment. There were no trees. No landscaping. Just uneven brown grass and hard dirt paths and a parking lot.

“Where are the Chryslers?” Reacher asked.

“Out,” Neagley said. “Looking for us.”

They headed back to the hospital in Glendale. Neagley collected her car from the lot. They stopped in at a supermarket. Bought a pack of wooden kitchen matches. And two cases of Evian water. Twelve one-liter bottles, nested together in packs of six and shrink-wrapped in plastic. They stopped again down the street at an auto parts store. Bought a red plastic five-gallon gasoline can and a bag of polishing rags.

Then they stopped at a gas station and filled the cars and the can.

They headed southwest out of Glendale and ended up in Silver Lake. Reacher called Neagley on the phone and said, “We should drop by the motel now.”

Neagley said, “They might still have surveillance going.”

“Which is exactly why we should drop by. If we can take one of them out now, that’s one less to worry about later.”

“Might be more than one.”

“Bring it on. The more the merrier.”

Sunset Boulevard ran right through Silver Lake, south of the reservoir. It was a very long road. Reacher found it and headed west. Six miles later he cruised past the motel without slowing. Neagley was twenty yards behind him in her Civic. He led her through a left turn and parked a block away. There were service alleys that gave them a roundabout route into the back of the motel. They walked through the alleys fifteen feet apart. No sense in making two people into a single target. Reacher went first, with his hand wrapped around the Glock in his pocket. He entered the motel lot slowly, from the rear, through a tight passage lined with trash receptacles. The lot looked innocent enough. Eight cars, five out-of-state plates, no blue Chryslers. Nobody in the shadows. He went to the right. He knew that fifteen feet behind him Neagley would go to the left. It was their default arrangement, established many years before. R for Reacher, L for her middle initial. He made a complete half-circuit of the building. There was nobody out of place. Nobody suspicious. Nobody in the lounge, nobody in the laundry room. Across the width of the lot he could see the clerk all alone in the office.

He stepped out to the sidewalk and checked the street. It was clear. Some activity, but nothing significant. Some cars, but none to worry about. He stepped back into the lot and waited for Neagley to complete her own half-circuit on the other side. She checked the sidewalk and checked the street and stepped back and checked the office. Nothing. She shook her head and they headed for O’Donnell’s room, by different routes, still fifteen feet apart, just in case.

O’Donnell’s lock was broken.

Or more accurately, O’Donnell’s lock was OK, but the door jamb was broken. The wood was splintered. Someone had used a wrecking bar or a tire iron to lever the door open. Reacher slid the Glock out of his pocket and waited on the hinge side of the door and Neagley joined him on the handle side. She nodded and he slammed the door open with his foot and she dropped to her knees and spun into the doorway with her gun out in front. Another old default arrangement. Whoever was on the hinge side opened the door, whoever was on the handle side entered low to minimize the target. Generally anyone hiding in a room with a gun would then aim high, at where he expected center mass to be.

But there was nobody hiding in the room.

It was completely empty. But it was completely trashed. Searched, and wrecked. All the New Age paperwork was gone, the reject Glock 17s were gone, the spare ammunition was gone, the AMT Hardballers were gone, Saropian’s Daewoo DP-51 was gone, the Maglites were gone. O’Donnell’s clothes were strewn all around. His thousand-dollar suit had been torn off the closet hanger and trampled. His bathroom stuff was all over the place.

Dixon’s room was the same. Empty, but trashed.

And Neagley’s.

And Reacher’s own. His folding toothbrush was on the floor, stepped on and crushed.

“Bastards,” he said.

They gave the whole place one more go-round, the motel itself, and then a one-block radius outside. Nobody there. Neagley said, “They’re all waiting for us in Highland Park.”

Reacher nodded. Between them they had two Glocks and sixty-eight rounds. Plus their recent purchases in the Prelude’s trunk.

Two against seven or more.

No time.

No element of surprise.

A fortified position with no way in.

A hopeless situation.

“We’re good to go,” Reacher said.

71

Waiting for dark was always a long and tedious process. Sometimes the earth seemed to spin fast, and sometimes it seemed to spin slow. This was slow. They were parked in a quiet street three blocks from New Age’s factory, opposite sides of the street, Neagley’s Civic facing west, Reacher’s Prelude facing east. They both had a view of the place. Things had changed behind the fence. The assembly workers’ cars were gone from the lot. In their place were six blue Chrysler 300Cs. Clearly, operations had been abandoned for the day. The decks had been cleared for the coming battle. Beyond the cars they could see the helicopter in the distance, a quarter-mile away. It was nothing more than a small white shape, but they figured they would be able to tell if it started up. And if it started up, all bets were off.

Reacher had both his phones set to vibrate. Neagley buzzed him twice, to pass the time. She was actually close enough to roll down her window and yell, but he guessed she didn’t want to attract attention.

The first time, she asked, “Have you been sleeping with Karla?”

“When?” Reacher said, buying time.

“On this trip.”

“Twice,” Reacher said. “That’s all.”

“I’m glad.”

“Thank you.”

“You both always wanted to.”

The second time she called was fifteen minutes later.

“You made a will?” she asked.

“No point,” Reacher said. “Now they broke my toothbrush, I don’t own anything.”

“How does that feel?”

“Bad. I liked that toothbrush. It’s been with me a long time.”

“No, I mean the rest of it.”

“It feels OK. I don’t see that Karla or Dave are really any happier than me.”

“Right now they’re not, for sure.”

“They know we’re coming.”

“All of us going down together will really cheer them up.”

“Better than going down alone,” Reacher said.

A big white semi labored west on I-70 in Colorado, heading for the state of Utah. It was less than half-full, a little over sixteen tons in a rig designed for a forty-ton payload. So it was running light, but it was running slow, because of the mountains. It would stay slow until the turn south on I-15. Then it would run a little easier, all the way down to California. Its driver had budgeted an average fifty miles an hour for the whole trip. Eighteen hours maximum, door-to-door. He wasn’t going to take a rest period. How could he? He was a man on a mission, with no time for frivolities.

Azhari Mahmoud checked his map for the third time. He figured he needed three hours. Or maybe more. He had to cross just about the whole of Los Angeles, south to north. He wasn’t expecting it to be easy. The U-Haul was slow and a pig to drive, and he was sure that the traffic was going to be awful. He decided to give himself four hours. If he arrived early, he could wait. No harm in that. He set his alarm and lay down on the bed and tried to will himself to sleep.

Reacher stared straight ahead at the eastern horizon, trying to judge the light. The tint on the windshield didn’t help. It was overly optimistic, optically. It made the sky look darker than it really was. He buzzed his window down and leaned out. In reality, not good. There was still at least an hour of daylight left. Then maybe an hour of dusk. Then full dark. He buzzed the window up and settled back and rested. Forced his heartbeat down and slowed his breathing and relaxed.

He stayed relaxed until Allen Lamaison called him.

72

Lamaison called Reacher on his Radio Shack pay-as-you-go, not on Saropian’s cell from Vegas. The caller ID showed he was using Karla Dixon’s phone at his end. Openly provocative. There was a lot of smug satisfaction in his voice.

“Reacher?” he said. “We need to talk.”

“So talk,” Reacher said.

“You’re useless.”

“You think?”

“You’ve lost every round so far.”

“Except Saropian.”

“True,” Lamaison said. “And I’m very unhappy about that.”

“But you better get used to it. Because you’re going to lose another six, and then you and I are going to go around and around.”

“No,” Lamaison said. “That’s not going to happen. We’re going to make a deal.”

“Dream on.”

“The terms are excellent. Want to hear them?”

“You better be quick. I’m downtown right now. I’ve got an appointment with the FBI. I’m going to tell them all about Little Wing.”

“Tell them what?” Lamaison said. “There’s nothing to tell. We had some defective units that were destroyed. It says so, in black and white, on Pentagon-approved paperwork.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Anyway, you’re nowhere near the FBI,” Lamaison said. “You’re working out how to rescue your friends.”

“You think?”

“You wouldn’t trust their safety to the FBI.”

“You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit.”

“You wouldn’t be here at all if you didn’t give a shit. Tony Swan and Calvin Franz and Manuel Orozco and Jorge Sanchez told us all about it. Before they died. Apparently we’re not supposed to mess with the special investigators.”

“That was just a slogan. It was old then, and it’s really old now.”

“They still put a lot of stock in it. So do Ms. Dixon and Mr. O’Donnell. Their faith in you is quite touching. So let’s talk about our deal. You can save your friends a world of hurt.”

“How?”

“You and Ms. Neagley come in now, we’ll hold you all for a week. Until the heat dies down. Then we’ll let you go. All four of you.”

“Or?”

“We’ll break O’Donnell’s arms and legs and use his switchblade all over Dixon. After having a little guy time with her first. Then we’ll put them both in the helicopter.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Don’t worry about Little Wing,” Lamaison said. “That’s a done deal. Can’t be stopped now. They’re going to Kashmir anyway. You ever been there? It’s a dump. A real shit hole. Bunch of towel heads fighting one another. Why should you care?”

Reacher said nothing.

Lamaison said, “Do we have a deal?”

“No.”

“You should reconsider. Dixon won’t enjoy what we’ve got in mind.”

“Why would I trust you? I’ll walk in and you’ll shoot me in the head.”

“I agree, it’s a risk,” Lamaison said. “But I think you’ll take it. Because you’re responsible for your people’s situation. You let them down. You’re their leader, and you screwed up. I’ve heard a lot about you. In fact I’m sick of hearing your name. You’ll do what it takes to help them.”

“Where are you?” Reacher asked.

“I’m sure you know.”

Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield. Factored in the effect of the window tint and tried to judge the light.

“We’re two hours away,” he said, with a little tension in his voice.

“Where are you?”

“We’re south of Palmdale.”

“Why?”

“We were going to visit with Dean. To piece it all together, the same way Swan did.”

“Turn around,” Lamaison said. “Right now. For Ms. Dixon’s sake. I bet she’s a screamer. My guys will be all over her. I’ll put her on the phone and let you listen.”

Reacher paused.

“Two hours,” he said. “We’ll talk again.”

He clicked off and dialed Neagley.

“We go in sixty minutes,” he said.

Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Sixty minutes later the sky in the east was a dark navy blue, almost black. Visibility was fading fast. Years before, a pedantic schoolteacher in the Pacific somewhere had explained to Reacher that first comes twilight, and then comes dusk, and then comes night. She had insisted that twilight and dusk were not the same thing. If he needed a generic word for evening darkness, he was to use gloaming.

Gloaming was what he had right then. Plenty of it, but not quite as much as he would have liked.

He dialed Neagley and clicked off after one ring. Her window dropped and she waved. A small pale hand in the darkness. He started his car and eased away from the curb. No lights. He headed east toward the arriving night and made a right and three blocks later he was skirting New Age’s fence, clockwise, along the back line of their property. He made another right and came down the side of their lot and coasted to a stop against the curb about two-thirds of the way down. If New Age’s place was a clock, he was stopped on the four. If it was a compass, he was a little ways south of east.

He got out and stood still and listened. Heard nothing. Saw nothing. Highland Park was a populated area, but New Age’s place was part of a commercial zone. The work day was over. People were gone. The streets were dark and quiet.

He opened the Prelude’s trunk. Used his fist to smash the courtesy light. Used his thumbnail to slit the plastic around the Evian bottles. He took one out and unscrewed the top and took a long drink. Then he poured the rest of the water away in the gutter. Stood the empty bottle upright in the trunk. He repeated the process eleven more times. Ended up with a neat line of twelve empty one-liter bottles.

Then he took out the gas can.

Five gallons, U.S. liquid measure, which added up to close to nineteen liters. He filled the bottles, very carefully. The benzene fragrance of unleaded gasoline came up at him. He liked it. It was one of the world’s great smells. When the twelfth bottle was full he put the can on the ground. Seven liters still in it. Almost two gallons.

He tore open the bag of polishing rags.

They were foot-square pieces of white cotton jersey. Like undershirts. He rolled them tight, like cigars, and eased them down into the necks of the bottles. Half-in, half-out. The gasoline soaked upward, pale and colorless.

Molotov cocktails. A crude but effective weapon, invented by Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, named by Finns during their struggle against the Red Army in 1939, as a taunt toward the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. I never knew a tank could burn so long, a Finnish veteran had once recalled.

Tanks, buildings, it was all the same to Reacher.

He rolled a thirteenth rag and laid it on the ground. Dripped gas from the can on it until it was soaked. He found the box of wooden kitchen matches and jammed them in his pocket. Lifted the twelve bottles of gas out of the trunk, one by one, carefully, and stood them upright on the road six feet behind the Prelude’s rear bumper. Then he picked up the thirteenth rag and closed the trunk lid and trapped the rag in it, three-quarters out. In the darkness it looked like the car had a tiny white tail. Like a silver lamb.

Showtime, he thought.

He struck a match and held it against the rag trapped in the trunk lid until the rag was burning bright. Then he flicked the match away and picked up the first Molotov cocktail. Lit its wick off the burning rag and stepped back and hurled it high in the air, over the fence. It tumbled through a lazy blazing arc and burst against the base of the main building’s end wall. Gas exploded and flared and then settled into a small burning pool.

He threw the second bomb. Same procedure. He lit the wick off the burning rag, stepped back, and threw hard. The bottle sailed through the same arc and hit the same place and burst. There was a brief white-hot flare and then the pool of flames settled and spread wider. They started to lick upward against the siding.

He threw the third bomb directly into the fire. And the fourth. He aimed the fifth a little to the left. It started a brand-new fire. He followed it with the six and the seventh. His shoulder started to ache from the effort of the giant throws. The grass all around the building’s end wall started to burn. Smoke started to drift. He threw the eighth bottle into the gap between the two fires. It fell short and burst and set fire to the grass about eight feet out. Now there was a large irregular patch of flames, maybe ten feet wide, maybe eight feet deep. Maybe four feet high, red and orange and green with chemical acceleration.

He threw the ninth bottle harder, and farther to the left. It exploded near the building’s door. The tenth bottle followed it. It didn’t burst. It rolled and leaked and burning gasoline welled out and flames raced and crackled through the dry grass. He paused and picked his spot and used the eleventh bottle to fill the gap on the building’s corner. The twelfth and last bottle followed it. He heaved it hard and it hit the siding high up and burst into flames and burning gas spattered the whole end wall.

He opened the trunk lid and knocked the burning rag out and stamped on it. Then he stepped to the fence and peered through. The grass at the base of the building’s end wall and all along the front wall as far as the door was burning fiercely. Flames were leaping high and smoke was pouring upward. The building itself was built of metal and was resisting. But it would be getting warm inside.

Soon be getting warmer, Reacher thought.

He screwed the lid on the gas can and wound up and hurled it like a discus thrower. It soared up over the fence and spun and wobbled through the air and landed dead center in the flames. Thin red flammable plastic, two gallons of gas inside. There was a split second’s pause and then the can exploded in a huge white fireball. For a time it looked like the whole place was on fire. And when the fireball eventually died the flames left behind were twice as high as before and the paint on the siding was starting to burn.

Reacher got back in the Prelude and started up and pulled a ragged U-turn and headed back the way he had come. The muffler burbled. He hoped Dixon and O’Donnell could hear it, wherever they were. Three blocks later he was back where he started. He pulled in behind Neagley’s Civic and killed his motor and sat still and watched out his window. He could see the glow in the distance, far to his left. Clouds of billowing smoke, drifting, up-lit by bright leaping flames below. A decent blaze, getting worse by the minute.

Impressive.

He raised an imaginary glass to Comrade Molotov.

Then he leaned back in his seat and waited for the fire department to show up.

73

The fire department showed up inside four minutes. Clearly New Age had an alarm system hard-wired straight into the precinct house. A Pentagon requirement, Reacher guessed, like the guard shack at the gate. Far to his right in the distance he heard the faint bass bark of sirens and saw blue lights flashing on the horizon. He saw Neagley start her car and put it in gear. He started his own. And then he waited. The sirens grew louder. They changed to a manic continuous shriek, once, then again, at busy intersections. Then they died back to random barking. The blue lights got brighter. The trucks were two blocks away. Headlight beams were bright in the gloom. Neagley eased off the curb. Reacher followed her. She drove ahead and waited on the stop line. Reacher was right behind her. The fire trucks were a block away, bearing down, coming on fast, honking and flashing. Neagley swooped out and made the left, right in front of the convoy. Reacher followed her, tires chirping, just yards in front of the leading truck. Its siren blared at him angrily. Neagley drove a couple of hundred yards. One block. Two. Onto New Age’s block. She followed the fence along the front of the property. Reacher was behind her all the way. The sirens behind him were yelping furiously. Then Neagley pulled over, like a good citizen. Reacher tucked in behind her. The trucks lurched left and roared past them both. Then more or less immediately they braked hard and turned and headed for New Age’s gate. There were three of them. A whole engine company. A priority client.

New Age’s gate was rolling back. Because a fire alarm was better than any kind of pass or paperwork.

Then Neagley slammed her car twenty feet into a side street and was out of her seat and running hard through the darkness. Reacher followed her all the way. They crossed the road at maximum speed and caught up with the last truck as it slowed to turn in. They stayed on its left, on the blind side, away from the guard shack, away from the fire. Away from the center of attention. They ran hard to keep pace. They tracked the truck all the way in through the gate. Its siren was still sounding. Its engine was roaring. It was deafening. Smoke was drifting from the fire, sharp and acrid on the night air. The truck roared straight ahead. Neagley turned a hard left and ran down the inside face of the fence. Reacher headed half-left through the grass. He gave it ten long seconds of maximum effort and then flung himself down and rolled and crammed himself flat on his front with his face hard down in the dirt.

A minute later he raised his head.

He was sixty yards from the fire. Between him and it were the three trucks, huge, noisy, blue lights flashing, headlights blazing. Beyond the trucks he could see flames. He could see people moving around. New Age security. They were over by the far fence, trying to see who or what had started the fire. They were darting forward and dropping back, beaten by the heat. Firemen were running everywhere, hauling equipment, unrolling hoses.

Chaos.

Reacher turned his head and strained hard to see through the darkness. Saw a flat humped shape in the grass forty feet away that had to be Neagley.

They were inside the fence.

Undetected.

It took eight minutes for LA’s bravest to put out the fire. Then they spent another thirty-one dousing the ashes and taking notes and following up in one way or another. Total duration of their visit, thirty-nine minutes. Reacher spent the first twenty of them surveying the buildings from as close as he dared to get. Then he spent the final nineteen crawling backward as far as he could go. By the time the trucks finished up and rolled out the gate he was jammed up in the far back corner of the property, a hundred and fifty yards from the action.

The closest thing to him was the helicopter. It was still standing on its pad, about halfway along the lot’s diagonal, maybe seventy yards away. Beyond it was the closest of the small outbuildings. The pilot’s office, Reacher guessed. He had seen a guy in a leather jacket run out the door. Behind him in a blaze of light he had seen charts and maps pinned on a wall.

Equidistant from the helicopter and the pilot’s office and thirty yards south of both was the parking lot. It was full of the six blue Chryslers, all of them cold and quiet.

Beyond the pilot’s office was the second small outbuilding. A store room of some kind, Reacher guessed. The fire chief had been allowed to take a fast look inside.

Then came the main building. The hub of the operation. The assembly line. Where women in shower caps labored over laboratory benches. All around it people were still out in the open and moving around. Reacher was pretty sure he recognized Lamaison, by his size and his shape, stamping around in the last of the smoke, yelling orders, directing operations. Lennox and Parker were there, too. Plus others. Hard to say how many. Too much darkness and confusion and milling about. Three at least. Maybe four, or even five.

The third small outbuilding was set far back, away from everything else, toward the corner directly opposite Reacher’s. Its door had not opened at any point, and nobody had gone anywhere near it. Not Lamaison or his people, not the firefighters.

That was the prison, Reacher guessed.

The main gate to the street was closed again. It had rolled back into place with a loud shrieking sound after the last fire truck was through and then it had slammed shut with an impact that had sent a shudder through the roll of concertina wire welded to its top rail. The guard was still in his shack. His silhouette was clear behind the glass. The light above his head was spilling out in a soft twenty-foot circle, perfectly round, broken only by four bars of shadow from the window frames.

Beyond the main building the security guys were still looking for something. Lamaison had four of them formed up for a briefing. He split them into two pairs and sent them off to check the fence, one pair clockwise, the other counterclockwise. Each pair walked slowly, parallel to the boundary, scuffing the grass with their feet, looking down, looking up, looking at the wire. A hundred and fifty yards away Reacher rolled onto his back. Checked the sky. It was close to full dark. The smog that was tan by day was now dull black, like a blanket. There was no moon. No light at all, except the last imperceptible taint of daylight and a little orange scatter from the city’s lights.

Reacher rolled onto his front again. The security guys were still in pairs and moving slow. Lamaison was stepping back into the main building. Parker and Lennox were nowhere to be seen. Inside already, Reacher guessed. He watched the searchers. First one pair, then the other. Two different directions. The clockwise guys were Neagley’s. The counterclockwise guys were his. They had about a hundred and fifty yards to cover before they got anywhere near him. A little over four minutes, at their current pace. They were concentrating on the fence and a strip maybe fifteen feet wide just inside it. Like the warning track around a baseball field. They had no flashlights. They were searching by feel alone. They would have to fall over something to find it. Reacher crawled twenty yards inward. Found a dip behind a hummock in the grass and pressed himself down into it. No man’s land. The property covered about two acres, which was 9,680 square yards. Reacher occupied roughly two of them. Neagley, roughly the same. Four square yards out of 9,680. Odds of one in 2,420 against being randomly discovered. If they stayed still and quiet, that was.

Which Reacher couldn’t afford to do.

Because the clock in his head had ticked around to the two-hour mark. He got up on his elbows and pulled out his phone and dialed Dixon’s cell.

74

More than a hundred yards away, Lamaison answered the call. Reacher kept his thumb over the phone’s bright LCD window. He wanted to preserve his night vision and he didn’t want the searchers to look up and see a tiny disembodied face bathed in a distant blue glow. He spoke as normally as he dared.

“We’re stuck on the 210,” he said. “There’s a stalled car up ahead.”

“Bullshit,” Lamaison said. “You’re right here in the neighborhood. You’ve been throwing gasoline bombs over my fence.” His voice was loud and angry. Over the cellular circuits it came through edgy and penetrating. A little grating and distorted. Reacher slipped the pad of his index finger over the earpiece perforations and glanced up at the searchers. They were a hundred and twenty yards away. They hadn’t reacted.

“What bombs?” he said, into the phone.

“You heard me.”

“We’re on the freeway. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit, Reacher. You’re right here. You started a fire. But it was pathetic. It took them all of five minutes to put it out. I’m sure you saw them do it.”

Eight minutes, actually, Reacher thought. Give me some damn credit. But he said nothing. Just watched his pair of searchers. They were a hundred and ten yards away.

“The deal is off,” Lamaison said.

“Wait,” Reacher said. “I’m still thinking about the deal. But I’m not an idiot. I want a proof of life. You could have shot them already.”

“They’re still alive.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“I’ll call you when we’re through this traffic. You can bring them to the gate.”

“No way. They stay where they are.”

“Then we can’t do business.”

Lamaison said, “I’ll ask them a question for you.”

The searchers were ninety yards away.

“What question?” Reacher said.

“Think of a question only they can answer. We’ll ask them and call you back.”

“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said. “I don’t answer the phone when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving. What’s the question?”

Reacher said, “Ask them who they were with before they joined the 110th MP.” Then he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.

The searchers were about seventy yards away. Reacher crawled another twenty yards inward, slow and cautious, parallel with the fence. The searchers managed another ten yards while he was doing it. Now they were forty yards away, coming on slowly, five feet apart, scuffing the grass, peering outward at the fence, checking for breaches.

Reacher saw light at the front of the main building. The door, opening. A tall shape stepped out. Parker, probably. He closed the door behind him and hustled around the near gable wall and headed for the distant shack thirty yards away. He unlocked the door and went in and less than a minute later he came back out and locked up again.

The prison, Reacher thought. Thank you.

The searchers were twenty yards away. Eighteen and a quarter meters, sixty feet, 720 inches, one-point-one-three percent of a mile. Reacher shuffled ahead a little and closed the gap. The searchers stumbled on. Now they were ten yards ahead, on a diagonal, maybe eight yards to Reacher’s left.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

He hauled it out and cupped it in his hand. The caller ID said Dixon, which meant Lamaison. The answers to his question, recently relayed by Parker.

I said I’d call you, Reacher thought. Can’t talk now.

He jammed the phone back in his pocket and waited. The searchers were almost dead level with him, eight yards to his left. They moved on. Reacher squirmed around, a silent half-circle on the ground. The searchers walked on. Reacher completed the circle. Now he was behind them. He got silently to his feet. Took short quiet strides, stepping high to keep his soles from brushing the grass with telltale rustles. He fell in behind the two guys, ten feet back, then eight, then six, centered exactly between them. They were a decent size. Maybe six-two, two-ten, pale and meaty. Blue suits, white shirts, crew cuts. Broad shoulders, thick necks.

He hit the first guy with a massive straight right, dead-center in the back of the neck, two hundred and fifty pounds and days of rage behind the blow. The guy’s neck snapped forward and his skull snapped back and bounced straight off Reacher’s fist and smashed forward again until his chin smacked his chest. Whiplash. Like a crash test dummy rear-ended by a speeding truck. The guy went straight down in a heap and his buddy turned toward him in shock and Reacher danced through a short shuffle step and headbutted him full in the face. He knew it was a great one by the sound alone. Bone, gristle, muscle, flesh, the unmistakable crunch of serious damage. The guy stayed vertical but unconscious for a second and then went down flat.

Reacher rolled the first guy on his back and sat on his chest and pinched his nose with one hand and blocked his mouth with his other palm. Then he waited until the guy suffocated. It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. Then he did the same thing with the other guy. Another minute.

Then he checked their pockets. The first guy had a cell phone and a gun and a wallet full of cash money and credit cards. Reacher took the gun and the cash money, left the cell phone and the credit cards. The gun was a SIG P226, nine-millimeter. The cash money was a little less than two hundred dollars. The second guy had another phone, another SIG, another wallet.

Plus Dave O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster.

It was right there in his jacket pocket. Either a reward for good work at the hospital takedown, or a stolen souvenir. Spoils of war. Reacher put it in his own pocket and jammed the SIGs in his waistband and the cash in his back pocket. Then he wiped his hands on the second guy’s jacket and crawled away, low and fast, peering into the dark where he imagined Neagley to be. He had heard nothing from that direction. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t worried. Neagley against two guys in the dark was about as reliable as the sun setting in the west.

He found another broad dip in the grass and lay down on his elbows and pulled out his phone. Called Dixon’s number.

“Where the hell were you?” Lamaison asked him.

“I told you,” Reacher said. “I don’t pick up when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving.”

“So why didn’t I pick up?”

“Whatever,” Lamaison said. “Where are you now?”

“Close by.”

“Before the 110th Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll call you back in ten. When we arrive.”

He clicked off and sat up cross-legged in the dirt. He had his proof-of-life answers. Only problem was, neither one of them was even remotely true.

75

Reacher crawled south through the grass, looking for Neagley in the dark. He made it through fifty fast yards and found a corpse instead. He blundered right into it, hands and then knees. It was a man, cooling fast. Blue suit, white shirt. Broken neck.

“Neagley?” he whispered.

“Here,” she whispered back.

She was twenty feet away, lying on her side, propped up on one elbow.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Feeling good.”

“Was there another one?”

“Behind you,” she said. “To your right.”

Reacher turned. Same kind of guy, same kind of suit, same kind of shirt.

Same kind of injury.

“Any problems?” he asked.

“Easy,” she said. “And quieter than you. I heard that head butt all the way over here.”

They bumped fists in the dark, the old ritual, about as much physical contact as she liked to permit.

“Lamaison thinks we’re on the outside looking in,” Reacher said. “He’s trying to scam us with a deal. If we surrender they’ll lock us all up for a week and then let us go when the heat dies down.”

“Like we’d believe that.”

“One of my guys had Dave’s knuckleduster.”

“That’s not a good sign.”

“They’re OK so far. I asked for a proof of life. Personal questions. Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”

“That’s bullshit. There was no 53rd MP. And Dave was posted to the 110th straight out of Officer Candidate School.”

“They’re talking to us,” Reacher said. “Fifty-three is a prime number. Karla knew I’d pick up on that.”

“So?”

“Five and three make eight. She’s telling us there are eight hostiles.”

“Four left, then. Lennox, Parker, and Lamaison. Plus one. Who’s the fourth?”

“That’s Dave’s message. He’s a words guy. One-three-one. Thirteenth letter of the alphabet, first letter of the alphabet.”

“M and A,” Neagley said.

“Mauney,” Reacher said. “Curtis Mauney is here.”

“Excellent,” Neagley said. “Saves hunting him down later.”

They bumped fists again. Then cell phones started to ring. Loud and piercing and insistent. Two of them, different tones, unsynchronized. One each in the dead guys’ pockets. Reacher had no doubt at all the same thing was happening fifty yards away. Two more dead guys, two more pockets, two more ringing phones. A conference call. Lamaison was touching base with his foot patrol.

Something unpredictable.

The phones rang six times each and stopped. Silence came back.

“What would you do now?” Reacher asked. “If you were Lamaison?”

Neagley said, “I’d get guys in those Chryslers and turn the head-lights on bright and fix myself a little motor patrol. I’d run us down in less than a minute.”

Reacher nodded. Against a man on foot, the lot felt big. Against a car, it would feel small. Against more than one car it would feel tiny. In the dark it felt safe. With xenon beams blazing away it would feel like a goldfish bowl. He pictured cars bouncing over the rough ground, pictured himself trapped in their lights, darting left, darting right, shading his eyes, one car chasing, two cars converging.

He glanced at the fence.

“Correct,” Neagley said. “The fence keeps us in just as well as it kept us out. We’re two balls on a pool table and someone’s about to turn on the lights and pick up a cue.”

“What are they going to do if they don’t find us?”

“How are they not going to find us?”

“Suppose.”

Neagley shrugged and said, “They’re going to assume we got out somehow.”

“And then?”

“They’re going to panic.”

“How?”

“They’re going to kill Karla and Dave and hunker down.”

Reacher nodded.

“That’s my guess, too,” he said.

He got up and ran. Neagley followed.

76

Reacher ran straight for the helicopter. It was sixty yards away, large and white and luminous in the city’s nighttime glow. Neagley jogged at his side, patiently. Reacher was no kind of a sprinter. He was slow and heavy. And he had stuff bouncing around in his pockets. Any college athlete would have done the sixty yards in six or seven seconds. Neagley would have done it in eight. Reacher took closer to fifteen. But he got there in the end. He got there just as the main building’s door burst open and light and men spilled out. He dodged left and kept the chopper between him and them. Neagley crowded in at his elbow. Three guys were heading for the parking lot, fast and urgent. Parker and Lennox. And Lamaison. They were all hurrying. For every yard they covered, Reacher and Neagley moved a corresponding inch around the Bell, clockwise, touching its belly lightly with their fingertips, using its bulk as a shield. It was cold and dewed over with night mist, like a car parked on the street. It felt slimy. It smelled of oil and kerosene.

Thirty yards away three Chryslers started up. Three V-8 engines, suddenly loud in the stillness. Three transmissions slammed into gear. Three pairs of headlights flicked on. They were unbelievably bright in the darkness. They were crisp, focused, hard-edged, and superwhite. Then they got worse. One by one they switched to high beam. New lenses lit up. Huge cones of dazzling light swayed and bounced as the cars began to move. Reacher and Neagley slid around the Bell’s long pointed nose and hugged the other flank. The cars separated like a shell burst and accelerated and headed off in random changing directions.

Within ten seconds they had found all four dead guys.

The cars slewed to a stop at the two sites fifty yards apart. One car where Neagley had been, two where Reacher had been. Their lights went still and threw long grotesque quadruple shadows off the four humped shapes. Three distant figures ran around, flashing instantly from extreme brightness into total darkness as they moved through the beams.

“We can’t stay here,” Neagley said. “They’re going to come back this way and light us up like we’re on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.”

“How long have we got?”

“They’re going to check the fence pretty thoroughly. Four minutes, maybe.”

“Start counting,” Reacher said. He pushed off the helicopter’s flank and ran for the main building. Forty yards, ten seconds. The door had been left ajar. Lights had been left on. Reacher paused. Then he walked straight in, very quietly, with his hand on his Glock in his pocket. Saw nobody inside. The place seemed to be deserted. There were small walled-off offices on the right and a big open-plan work area on the left, behind a floor-to-ceiling plate glass screen. The work area had long laboratory benches and bright lights and complex extraction ducts on the ceiling to control dust and a grounded metal grid on the floor to control static electricity. A sliding door in the screen was open. The air coming out smelled of warm silicon boards. Like a brand-new TV.

The offices on the right were little more than eight-by-eight cubicles with head-high walls and doors. One was labeled Edward Dean. The development engineer. Now the quality control guy. The next door was labeled Margaret Berenson. The dragon lady. A remote facility, Reacher guessed, for when she had to deal with Human Resources issues without dragging assembly personnel all the way south to the glass cube in East LA. The next door was Tony Swan’s. Same principle. Two centers, two offices.

The next door was Allen Lamaison’s.

It was standing open.

Reacher took a breath. Took his Glock out of his pocket. Stepped into the doorway. Stood still. Saw an eight-by-eight cube, desk, chair, fabric walls, phones, file cabinets, stacks of papers, memos.

Nothing unusual or out of place.

Except for Curtis Mauney behind the desk.

And a suitcase standing against a wall.

Neagley stepped into the room.

“Sixty seconds gone,” she said.

Mauney just sat there at the desk, immobile. Some kind of blank resignation on his face, like a man with a bad diagnosis waiting for a second opinion he knows will be no better. His hands were empty. They were curled together on the desktop like mating crabs.

“Lamaison was my partner,” he said, like an excuse.

Reacher nodded.

“Loyalty,” he said. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

The suitcase was a dark gray hard-shell Samsonite, set neatly against the wall beside the end of the desk. Not the biggest thing Reacher had ever seen. Nothing like the giants some people wrestle through the airport. But it wasn’t small, either. It wasn’t a carry-on. It had plastic stick-on initials in shallow recesses next to the latches. The initials said: AM.

“Seventy seconds gone,” Neagley said.

Mauney asked, “What are you going to do?”

“With you?” Reacher asked. “Nothing yet. Relax.”

Neagley aimed her gun at Mauney’s face and Reacher stepped up beside the desk and knelt down and laid the suitcase flat on the carpet. Tried the latches. They were locked. He put his Glock on the floor and jammed the tips of his index fingers under the tips of the latches and braced his thumbs and bunched his shoulders and heaved. Reacher, against two thin pressed-metal tongues. No contest. The locks broke instantly.

He lifted the lid.

“Eighty seconds gone,” Neagley said.

“Payday,” Reacher said.

The case was full of fancy engraved paper certificates and letters from foreign banks and small suede drawstring bags that felt heavy in his hand.

“Sixty-five million dollars,” Neagley said, over his shoulder.

“At a guess,” Reacher said.

“Ninety seconds gone,” Neagley said.

Reacher turned his head and looked at Mauney and asked, “How much of this is yours?”

“Some of it,” Mauney said. “Not much, I guess.”

Reacher made neat creases and folded the paperwork and handed it to Neagley. He followed it with the drawstring bags. Neagley slid everything into her pockets. Reacher left the suitcase where it was, flat on the floor, empty, the lid up like a clam. He picked up his gun and stood and turned back to Mauney.

“Wrong,” he said. “None of it is yours.”

“Two minutes gone,” Neagley said.

“Your friends are here,” Mauney said.

“I know,” Reacher said.

“Lamaison was my partner.”

“You told me that already.”

“I’m just saying.”

“So do they know you here?”

“I’ve been here before,” Mauney said. “Many times.”

“Pick up the phone.”

“Or?”

“I’ll shoot you in the head.”

“You will anyway.”

“I should,” Reacher said. “You gave up six of my friends.”

Mauney nodded.

“I knew how this would end,” he said. “When we didn’t get you at the hospital.”

“LA traffic,” Reacher said. “It can bite you in the ass.”

“Two minutes fifteen,” Neagley said.

Mauney asked, “Are we making a deal here?”

“Pick up the phone.”

“And what?”

“Tell the gate guard to open up exactly one minute from now.”

Mauney hesitated. Reacher put the Glock’s muzzle against Mauney’s temple. Mauney picked up the phone. Dialed. Reacher listened hard and heard ring tones from the earpiece and the Chryslers idling a hundred yards away on the open ground and a muted bell forty yards away in the guard shack.

The call was answered. Mauney said, “This is Mauney. Open the gate one minute from now.” Then he hung up. Reacher turned to Neagley.

“Am I your CO?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You are.”

“Then listen up,” he said. “When the gate opens we head for our cars and we get out of here as fast as we possibly can.”

“And then?” she asked.

“We come back later.”

“In time?”

Reacher nodded. “We’ll make it in time if we’re fast right now. They’re already in their cars. So we have to really go for it. You’re a lot faster than me, so I’ll be behind you. But don’t wait for me. Don’t even look back. We can’t afford to lose a yard, either one of us.”

“Understood,” she said. “Three minutes gone.”

Reacher grabbed Mauney’s collar and hauled him to his feet. Dragged him out from behind the desk, out of the office, down the hallway, into the open area. Over to the main doorway. And then a yard outside, into the night. The smell of wet ash was strong. The three Chryslers were moving again in the distance. They were turning tight circles on the open ground and their headlights were sweeping random patterns against the fence like searchlights in a prison movie.

“Wait for the starting gun,” Reacher said to Neagley.

He watched the gate. Saw the guard move in his booth, saw the concertina wire sway, heard the tortured screech of wheels on a metal rail. Saw the gate start to move. He put the Glock to Mauney’s temple and pulled the trigger. Mauney’s skull exploded and Neagley and Reacher took off at full speed, like sprinters out of their blocks.

Neagley was ahead after half a step. Reacher stopped dead and watched her go. She flew through the pool of light from the guard hut and dodged like a running back around the end of the moving gate. She raced out to the street. Then she was lost to sight.

Reacher turned and ran in the opposite direction. Fifteen seconds later he was back where he had started, behind the Bell’s long nose.

77

Maybe they had seen Neagley go, and assumed Reacher was ahead of her. Or maybe they had just seen the gate move, or heard its sound through their open windows. Certainly they must have heard the gunshot. Possibly they imagined the rest. But they took the bait. They reacted instantly. All three cars braked and maneuvered and turned and accelerated and headed for the street, fishtailing like crazy and spraying huge rooster tails of dirt high in the air. They went out through the gate like stock cars through a turn. Their headlights lit up the street like day.

Reacher watched them go.

He waited for the night to go dark and quiet again. Then he counted to ten and moved slowly along the Bell’s starboard flank. He ignored the cockpit door. He moved right past it and put his hand on the rear door’s handle.

He tried it.

It was unlocked.

He glanced over his shoulder at the pilot’s hut. No movement there. He eased the handle down. The latch came free. The door opened. It was wide and light and tinny. Like a panel van’s. Not at all what he was expecting. Not heavy and pneumatic like an airliner’s.

He held the door two feet open and looped around it and climbed inside. Pulled the door after him and paused and then closed it against the latch with one sudden decisive click. He ducked down and peered out the window and watched the pilot’s hut.

No reaction.

He turned around in a crouch and knelt on the cabin floor in the darkness. From the inside the Bell looked like a swelled-up version of a minivan. A little wider and a little longer than the kind of things soccer moms drove in television commercials. Less boxy. A little more contoured. Narrower at the front, wider at floor level, pinched in a little more at head height, narrower at the rear. There would have been seven seats, two in the cockpit, three in the center row, two way in back, except that the center row was missing. The seats were all bulky high-backed recliners, faced with black leather. They had headrests and arms. Captains’ chairs. They had safety harnesses. Below the waistline the bulkheads were lined with black carpet. Above, they were padded with black quilted vinyl. Very corporate. But a little out-of-date. Leased secondhand, Reacher guessed. The whole interior smelled faintly of jet fuel.

There was a space behind the rearmost seats. For bags, Reacher guessed. A luggage compartment. Just like a minivan. It wasn’t a huge space. But it was big enough. He found the levers and flopped the seat backs forward. Climbed over and sat down on the floor, sideways, with his legs out straight and his back jammed against the side bulkhead. He took the captured SIGs out of his waistband and laid them on the floor, next to his knees. He leaned forward and hauled the seat backs upright. They clicked and locked in place. Then he slumped down to test whether he could get low enough to keep his head out of sight.

Probably, he thought.

He raised his head again. The cabin windows were misted with dew. Dark and gray and featureless. Like television screens, turned off. Nothing was happening outside. Noises were dulled. Clearly the carpet and the quilting doubled as soundproofing layers.

He waited.

Five minutes.

Ten.

Then the misted windows lit up with bright moving shapes and shadows. The cars, coming back. Three sets of headlight beams, bouncing and turning. They played on the glass for a moment and then they stopped and stabilized. Then they died altogether. The cars, back in the lot. Parked.

Reacher strained to hear.

He heard nothing except slow footsteps and low voices. Agitation, not triumph. The unmistakable sound of failure.

The search was over.

No success.

He waited.

78

He waited and grew cold and cramped from sitting still. He pictured the scene forty yards away, Mauney’s body in the doorway, the empty Samsonite in the office, discussion, argument, pacing, panic, confusion, apprehension. The side of his face was inches from the seat back in front of him. The leather was close enough to smell. Normally he would have been in severe distress. He hated confinement. Claustrophobia was as close as he ever came to fear. But right then he had other things on his mind.

He waited.

Twenty long minutes.

Then a door opened up front and the helicopter dipped and settled as its undercarriage compressed and recovered. Someone had climbed aboard. The door closed. A seat creaked. A harness buckle clicked. Switches clicked. Faint orange light jumped from dozens of instrument faces and threw sudden shadows on the roof. A fuel pump whirred and chattered. Reacher leaned forward from the waist and moved his head until one eye was lined up with the gap between the seats. He saw the pilot’s leather sleeve. Nothing more. The rest of the guy was invisible behind his bulky chair. His hand was dancing over switches and touching the faces of dials one by one as he ran through preflight checks. He was talking to himself, quietly, reciting a long list of required technicalities like an incantation.

Reacher pulled his head back.

Then there was an incredibly loud noise.

It was halfway between a gunshot and a split-second blast of compressed air. It came again, and again, and again, faster and faster. The starter mechanism, forcing the rotor around. The floor shook. Then the engines fired up and gears meshed and the rotor caught and settled to a lazy whop-whop idle. The torque rocked and twisted the whole craft on its struts, just a little, rhythmically, like it was dancing. The interior was filled with a loud thrumming noise. Driveshafts whirred and spun overhead. Jet exhaust whined outside, high-pitched and piercing. Reacher jammed the muzzles of the captured SIGs under his legs so that they wouldn’t bounce and rattle and slide. He took his Glock from his pocket and held it down by his side.

He waited.

A minute later the rear door was wrenched open. A blast of louder noise flooded in. After the noise came the acrid smell of kerosene. After the kerosene came Karla Dixon. Reacher moved his head an inch and saw her dumped on the floor head first like a log. She came to rest on her side, facing away. Her wrists and ankles were tied with rough sisal rope. Her hands were behind her back. The last time he had seen her horizontal had been in his bed in Vegas.

Two minutes later O’Donnell was wrestled in, feet-first. He was bigger and heavier and landed harder. He was tied up the same way as Dixon. He rolled facedown alongside her, his feet next to her head. They lay there together like cordwood, moving a little, struggling against the ropes.

Then the struts bounced again and Lennox and Parker climbed aboard. They shut their doors and dumped themselves down in the rear seats. The seat back in front of Reacher sagged against a loose mechanism and touched him on the cheek. He jammed his head harder into the corner. His crew cut scraped across the carpet.

The rotor turned slowly, whop, whop, whop.

The suspension knelt and rose, knelt and rose, front left corner, right rear corner, less than an inch, like dancing.

Reacher waited.

Then the door up front opposite the pilot wrenched open and Allen Lamaison dumped himself in the seat and said, “Go.” Reacher heard the turbines spin up and felt the thrill and shiver of vibration fill the cabin and heard the rotor note change to an urgent accelerating whip-whip-whip and felt the whole craft go light on its wheels.

Then they were airborne.

Reacher felt the floor come up at him. He heard the wheels pull upward into their wells. He felt rotation and drift and a long steady climb and then the floor tilted forward as the nose went down for speed. He braced himself against spread fingers to stop himself sliding into the seat in front of him. He heard the engine noise settle to a muted whine and then the unique pendulum sensation of helicopter transport came right back at him. He had done his fair share of fast miles in rotary aircraft, a lot of them sitting on the floor.

A familiar experience.

For now.

79

By the clock in Reacher’s head the cruise lasted exactly twenty minutes, which was about what he was expecting. He had figured modern corporate machines would be a little faster than the Hueys he had been accustomed to in the service. He figured a military AH-1 might have taken twenty-plus minutes to get itself beyond the mountains, so twenty dead seemed reasonable for something with black leather seats and a carpet.

He spent the twenty minutes with his head well down. Animal instinct, a million years old and still displayed by dogs and children: If I can’t see them, they can’t see me. He kept his arms and legs moving through silent fractions of an inch and kept his muscles tensing and relaxing in a bizarre miniaturized version of a gymnasium work-out. He was no longer cold, but he didn’t want to get any stiffer. The noise in the cabin was loud but not overwhelming. The engine whine was whipping away in the slipstream. The rotor noise was blending with the rush of air and could be tuned out. There was no conversation going on. No talking. Reacher heard nothing from anyone.

Until the twenty-minute cruise came to an end.

He felt the helicopter slow down. Felt the floor come level and then tip backward a couple of degrees as the nose flared upward. The craft rotated left a little. Like a horse reined in on a movie screen. The cabin got louder. Now they were moving slowly, trapped in a bubble of their own noise.

He bent forward from the waist and put an eye to the gap between the seats and saw Lamaison leaning over with his forehead pressed against his window. Saw him change direction and lean toward the pilot. Heard him speak. Or maybe he only imagined that he heard him speak. He had reconstructed the orders in his head a thousand times since opening Franz’s file days before. He felt that he knew them, word for word, in all their cruel inevitability.

“Where are we?” Lamaison asked, in Reacher’s mind, and maybe also in reality.

“The badlands,” the pilot said.

“What’s below us now?”

“Sand.”

“Height?”

“Three thousand feet.”

“What’s the air like up here?”

“Still. A few thermals, but no wind.”

“Safe?”

“Aeronautically.”

“So let’s do it.”

Reacher felt the helicopter come to a stationary hover. The engine note dropped down to a deeper key and the rotor thrashed loudly. The floor moved in tiny unstable circles, like a spinning top come to rest. Lamaison turned in his seat and nodded once to Parker and once to Lennox. Reacher heard the click of safety-harness catches and then the weight came up off the seats in front of him. Leather cushions inhaled and tired springs recovered and moved the seat backs a precious inch farther from his face. There was no light other than the orange glow from the cockpit. Parker was on the left and Lennox was on the right. They were both in strange half-crouches, knees bent and heads ducked because of limited headroom, feet apart for stability on the moving floor, arms thrust outward for balance. One of them was going to die easy and one of them was going to die hard.

It depended on which one of them was going to open the door.

Lennox was going to open the door.

He half-turned and grabbed his trailing safety harness and held on tight with his left hand. Then he crabbed sideways and used his right to grope for the interior door release. He got there and unlatched it and pushed. The door swung half-open and wind and noise howled in. The pilot was half-turned in his own seat, watching over his shoulder, and he tilted the craft a little so the door fell the rest of the way open under its own weight. Then he brought it level again and put it into a slow clockwise rotation so that motion and inertia and air pressure held the door wide against its hinge.

Lennox turned back. Big, red-faced, meaty, crouched like an ape, his left hand tight on his harness strap, his right pawing the air like a man on ice.

Reacher leaned forward and used his left hand to find the seat-release lever. He put his thumb below the pivot and two fingers above it and twisted. The seat back flopped forward. He used his left hand to force it all the way horizontal. He held it there. The cushions exhaled again. He brought the Glock up in his right hand and twisted from the waist and laid his right forearm flat on the seat back. Closed one eye and picked a spot an inch above Lennox’s navel.

And pulled the trigger.

The blast was muted in the general roar. Audible, but not as bad as it would have been in a library. The bullet hit Lennox low in the midsection. Reacher figured it was an instant through-and-through. Inevitable, with a nine-millimeter from a range of about four feet. Which was why he was shooting at Lennox and not at Parker. Reacher was not remotely afraid of flying, but he preferred the aircraft he was in to be undamaged. A shot through Parker’s midsection might have hit a hydraulic line or an electrical cable. Through Lennox it went straight out the open door into the night, harmlessly.

Lennox stayed in his awkward half-crouch. A bloom of blood haloed the hole in his shirt. It looked black in the dim orange light. His left hand came off the harness and pawed the air, a perfect mirror image of his right. He crouched there, balanced, symmetrical, a foot from the door sill, nothing behind him except the void, catastrophic physical shock on his face.

Reacher moved the Glock a small fraction and shot him again, this time through the sternum. He figured that on a guy as big and as old as Lennox the sternum would be a well-calcified plate maybe three-eighths of an inch thick. The bullet would pass through it for sure, but not before the smashing and splintering of the bone had transferred a little forward momentum into the target. Like the effect of a tiny punch. Maybe enough effect and enough momentum to take the guy with it a little and put him down backward, rather than just dumping him in a vertical heap like a head shot would have. There was too much articulation in the human neck for a head shot to have done what Reacher wanted it to.

But it was his knees that did Lennox in, not his breastbone. He came down just a fraction in back of vertical, like a guy aiming to squat on his heels. But he was big and heavy and he was forty-one years old and his knees had stiffened. They bent a little more than ninety degrees and then they stopped bending. His upper-body mass was pitched backward by the sudden obstruction and his ass hit square on the door sill and the weight of his shoulders and his head rolled him over the pivot and took him right out the door into the night. The last Reacher saw of him was the soles of his shoes, still well apart, whipping away into the windy darkness like afterthoughts.

By that point it was much less than two seconds since he had dropped the seat, but to Reacher it seemed like two lifetimes. Franz’s and Orozco’s, maybe. He felt infinitely fluent and languid. He was floating in a state of grace and torment, planning his moves like chess, minutely aware of potentials and drawbacks and threats and opportunities. The others in the cabin had barely reacted at all. O’Donnell was facedown, trying to lift his head far enough to turn. Dixon was trying to roll onto her back. The pilot was half-turned, immobile in his seat. Parker was frozen in his absurd crouch. Lamaison was gazing at the empty air where Lennox had been, like he was completely unable to understand what had just happened.

Then Reacher stood up.

He dropped the second seat and climbed out over it like a nightmare apparition, a sudden giant figure from nowhere looming silently into the noisy orange glow. Then he stood still, close to fully upright, his head jammed up hard against the roof, his feet a yard apart, perfectly triangulated for maximum stability. His left hand held a SIG, pointing straight at Parker’s face. His right held his Glock, pointing straight at Lamaison’s. Both guns were motionless. His face was expressionless. The rotor thrashed on. The Bell continued its slow clockwise rotation. The door held wide open, pushed back like a sail. Gales of noise and wind and kerosene stink blew in.

O’Donnell arched his back and got his head high enough to turn. His eyes tracked left to Reacher’s boots and closed for a second. Dixon toppled onto her back and rolled over on her bound arms and settled on her other shoulder, facing the rear.

The pilot stared. Parker stared. Lamaison stared.

The time of maximum danger.

Reacher could not afford to fire forward. The chance of hitting some essential cockpit avionics was far too great. He couldn’t afford to put a gun down and work on freeing O’Donnell or Dixon, because Parker was loose in the cabin not more than four feet away. He couldn’t take Parker down hand to hand, because he couldn’t even move. There was no floor space. O’Donnell and Dixon were occupying it all.

Whereas Lamaison was still strapped in his seat. The pilot was still strapped in his. All the pilot had to do was throw the Bell all over the sky until everyone in the back fell out. They would sacrifice Parker that way, but Reacher couldn’t see Lamaison losing sleep over that decision.

Stalemate, if they understood.

Victory, if they seized the moment.

80

They didn’t understand. They didn’t seize the moment. Instead O’Donnell got his head and his feet off the floor and porpoised desperately six inches closer to Reacher and Dixon rolled back the other way and a precious foot of free space opened up between them. Reacher stepped gratefully into it and smashed Parker in the gut with the SIG’s muzzle. The breath punched out of Parker’s lungs and he folded up at the waist and staggered one instinctive step, straight into the channel that O’Donnell and Dixon had created. Reacher dodged past him like a bullfighter and planted the sole of his boot flat on Parker’s ass and shoved him hard from behind and sent him stumbling on stiff legs straight across the cabin and blindly out the door into the night. Before his scream had died Reacher had his left arm hooked around Lamaison’s throat with the SIG pointing straight at the pilot and the Glock jammed hard into the back of Lamaison’s neck.

After that, it got easier.

The pilot stayed frozen at the controls. The Bell hung there in its noisy hover. The rotor beat loud and the whole craft kept on turning slow. The door stayed open, wide and inviting, pinned back by the airflow. Reacher clamped his elbow and hauled backward on Lamaison’s neck and pulled him up out of the seat until his shoulder straps went tight. Then he put the Glock on the floor and fished in his pocket for O’Donnell’s knuckleduster. He held it between his fingers like a tool and glanced behind him. He extended his arm and pushed Dixon onto her front and used the knuckleduster’s wicked spines to rub at the bonds on her wrists. She tensed her arms and the sisal fibers ruptured slowly, one by one. Reacher felt each success quite clearly through the hard ceramic material, tiny dull harmonic pings, sometimes two at once. Lamaison started to struggle and Reacher tightened his elbow, which had the advantage of choking Lamaison into submission but the disadvantage of aiming the SIG behind the pilot instead of straight at him. But the pilot made no attempt to take advantage. He didn’t react at all. He just sat there, hands on the stick, feet on the pedals, keeping the Bell turning slow.

Reacher kept on sawing away, blindly. One minute. Two. Dixon kept on moving her arms, offering new strands, testing progress. Lamaison struggled harder. He was a big guy, strong and powerful, thick neck, broad shoulders. And he was scared. But Reacher was bigger, and Reacher was stronger, and Reacher was angry. More angry than Lamaison was scared. Reacher tightened his arm. Lamaison struggled on. Reacher debated taking time out to hit him, but he wanted him conscious, for later. So he just worried on at the ropes and suddenly a whole skein of sisal fibers unraveled and Dixon’s wrists came free and she pushed herself up into a kneeling position. Reacher gave her the knuckleduster and his Glock and swapped the SIG from his left hand to his right.

After that, it got a whole lot easier.

Dixon did the smart thing, which was to ignore the knuckleduster and haul herself across the cabin like a mermaid to Lamaison’s pockets, where she found a wallet and another SIG and O’Donnell’s switchblade. Two seconds later her feet were free, and five seconds after that O’Donnell was free. Both of them had been tied up for hours, and they were stiff and cramped and their hands were shaking pretty badly. But they didn’t have difficult tasks ahead of them. There was only the pilot to subdue. O’Donnell grabbed the guy’s collar in one fist and jammed a SIG’s muzzle up under his chin. There was no chance of him missing with a contact shot, however badly his hands were shaking. No chance at all. The pilot understood that. He stayed passive. Reacher stuck his SIG in Lamaison’s ear and leaned the other way, toward the pilot, and asked, “Height?”

The pilot swallowed and said, “Three thousand feet.”

“Let’s take it up a little,” Reacher said. “Let’s try five thousand feet.”

81

The climb took the Bell out of its slow rotation and the open door flapped around for a moment and then slammed itself shut. The cabin went quiet. Almost silent, by comparison. O’Donnell still had his gun to the pilot’s head. Reacher still had Lamaison arched backward in his seat. Lamaison had his hands on Reacher’s forearm, hauling downward, but listlessly. He had gone strangely passive and inert. Like he sensed exactly what was threatened, but couldn’t believe it was really going to happen.

Like Swan couldn’t, Reacher thought. Like Orozco couldn’t, and Franz couldn’t, and Sanchez couldn’t.

He felt the Bell top out and level off. Heard the rotor bite stationary air, felt the turbines settle to a fast urgent whine. The pilot glanced in his direction and nodded.

“More,” Reacher said. “Let’s do another two hundred and eighty feet. Let’s make it a whole mile.”

The engine noise changed and the rotor noise changed and the craft moved upward again, slowly, precisely. It turned a little and then came back to a hover.

The pilot said, “One mile.”

Reacher asked, “What’s below us now?”

“Sand.”

Reacher turned to Dixon and said, “Open the door.”

Lamaison found some new energy. He bucked and thrashed in his seat and said, “No, please, please, no.”

Reacher tightened his elbow and asked, “Did my friends beg?”

Lamaison just shook his head.

“They wouldn’t,” Reacher said. “Too proud.”

Dixon moved back in the cabin and grabbed Lennox’s seat harness in her left hand. Held on tight and groped for the door release with her right. She was smaller than Lennox had been and for her it was more of a stretch. But she got there. She clicked the release and pushed off hard with spread fingertips and the door swung open. Reacher turned to the pilot and said, “Do that spinning thing again.” The pilot set up the slow clockwise rotation and the door opened up all the way and pinned itself back against its hinge straps. Shattering noise and cold night air poured in. The mountains showed black on the horizon. Beyond them the glow of Los Angeles was visible, fifty miles away, a million bright lights trapped under air as thick as soup. Then that view rotated away and was replaced by desert blackness.

Dixon sat down on Parker’s folded seat. O’Donnell tightened his hold on the pilot’s collar. Reacher twisted Lamaison’s neck up and back with his forearm hard against his throat. Pulled him upward against the limits of the harness. Held him there. Then he reached over and used the SIG’s muzzle to hit the harness release. The belts came free. Reacher pulled Lamaison backward all the way over the top of the seat and dumped him on the floor.

Lamaison saw his chance, and he took it. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and scrabbled his heels on the carpet, trying to get his feet under him. But Reacher was ready. Readier than he had ever been. He kicked Lamaison hard in the side and swung an elbow that caught him on the ear. Wrestled him facedown on the floor and got a knee between his shoulder blades and jammed the SIG against the top of his spine. Lamaison’s head was up and Reacher knew he was staring out into the void. His feet were drumming on the carpet. He was screaming. Reacher could hear him clearly over the noise. He could feel his chest heaving.

Too late, Reacher thought. You reap what you sow.

Lamaison flailed weak backhand blows that didn’t come close to landing. Then he put his hands flat on the floor and tried to buck Reacher off. No chance, Reacher thought. Not unless you can do a push-up with two hundred and fifty pounds riding on your back. Some guys could. Reacher had seen it done. But Lamaison couldn’t. He was strong, but not strong enough. He strained for a spell and collapsed.

Reacher swapped the SIG into his left hand and looped his right over Lamaison’s neck from behind like a pincer. Lamaison had a big neck, but Reacher had big hands. He jammed his thumb and the tip of his middle finger into the hollows behind Lamaison’s ears and squeezed hard. Lamaison’s arteries compressed and his brain starved for oxygen and he stopped screaming and his feet stopped drumming. Reacher kept the pressure on for a whole extra minute and then rolled him over and spun him around and sat him up like a drunk.

Grabbed his belt and his collar.

Pushed him across the floor on his ass, feet-first.

He got him as far as the door sill and held him there, arms pinned behind him. The helicopter turned, slowly. The engines whined and the rotor beat out discrete bass thumps of sound. Reacher felt every one of them in his chest, like heartbeats. Minutes passed and fresh air blew in and Lamaison came around to find himself sitting upright on the edge with his feet hanging out over the void like a guy on a high wall.

A mile above the desert floor. Five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet.

Reacher had rehearsed a speech. He had started composing it in the Denny’s on Sunset, with Franz’s file in his hand. He had perfected it over the following days. It was full of fine phrases about loyalty and retribution, and heartfelt eulogies for his four dead friends. But when it came to it he didn’t say much. No point. Lamaison wouldn’t have heard a word. He was crazy with terror and there was too much noise. A cacophony. In the end Reacher just leaned forward and put his mouth close to Lamaison’s ear and said, “You made a bad mistake. You messed with the wrong people. Now it’s time to pay.”

Then he straightened Lamaison’s arms behind his back and pushed. Lamaison slid an inch and then lunged forward to try to jack his ass backward on the sill. Reacher pushed again. Lamaison folded up and his chest met his knees. He was staring straight down into the blackness. One mile. A speeding car would take a whole minute to cover it.

Reacher pushed. Lamaison let his shoulders go slack. No leverage.

Reacher put his heel flat against the small of Lamaison’s back.

Bent his leg.

Let go of Lamaison’s arms.

Straightened his leg, fast and smooth.

Lamaison went over the edge and disappeared into the night.

There was no scream. Or maybe there was. Maybe it was lost in the rotor noise. O’Donnell nudged the pilot and the pilot yawed the craft and reversed the rotation and the door slammed neatly shut. The cabin went quiet. Silent, by comparison. Dixon hugged Reacher hard. O’Donnell said, “You certainly left it until the last minute, didn’t you?”

Reacher said, “I was trying to decide whether to let them throw you out before I saved Karla. Tough decision. Took some time.”

“Where’s Neagley?”

“Working, I hope. The missiles rolled out of the gate in Colorado eight hours ago. And we don’t know where they’re going.”

82

There was nothing the pilot could do to them without killing himself also, so they left him alone in the cockpit. But not before checking the fuel load. It was low. Much less than an hour’s flying time. There was no cell reception. Reacher told the pilot to lose height and drift south to find a signal. Dixon and O’Donnell latched the rear seat backs upright and sat down. They didn’t strap themselves in. Reacher guessed they were done with confinement. He lay on his back on the floor with his arms and legs flung wide like a snow angel. He was tired and dispirited. Lamaison was gone, but no one had come back.

O’Donnell asked, “Where would you take six hundred and fifty SAMs?”

“The Middle East,” Dixon said. “And I’d send them by sea. The electronics through LA and the tubes through Seattle.”

Reacher raised his head. “Lamaison said they were going to Kashmir.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes and no. I think he was choosing to believe a lie to salve his own conscience. Whatever else he was, he was a citizen. He didn’t want to know the truth.”

“Which is?”

“Terrorism here in the States. Got to be. It’s obvious. Kashmir is a squabble between governments. Governments have purchasing missions. They don’t run around with Samsonite suitcases full of bearer bonds and bank access codes and diamonds.”

Dixon asked, “Is that what you found?”

“Highland Park. Sixty-five million dollars’ worth. Neagley’s got it all. You’re going to have to convert it for us, Karla.”

“If I survive. My plane back to New York might get blown up.”

Reacher nodded. “If not tomorrow, then the next day, or the next.”

“How do we find them? Eight hours at fifty miles an hour is already a radius of four hundred miles. Which is a half-million-square-mile circle.”

“Five hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and twenty,” Reacher said, automatically. “Assuming you use only three decimal places for pi. But that’s the bargain we made. We could stop them when the circle was small, or we could come for you guys.”

“Thanks,” O’Donnell said.

“Hey, I voted to stop the truck. Neagley overruled me.”

“So how do we do this?”

“You ever seen a really great centerfielder play baseball? He never chases the ball. He runs to where the ball is about to arrive. Like Mickey Mantle.”

“You never saw Mantle play.”

“I saw newsreels.”

“The United States is close to four million square miles. That’s bigger than center field at Yankee Stadium.”

“But not much,” Reacher said.

“So where do we run to?”

“Mahmoud isn’t dumb. In fact he strikes me as a very smart and cautious guy. He just spent sixty-five million dollars on what are basically just components. He must have insisted that part of the deal was that someone would show him how to screw the damn things together.”

“Who?”

“What did Neagley’s woman friend tell us? The politician? Diana Bond?”

“Lots of things.”

“She told us that New Age’s engineer does the quality control tests because so far he’s the only guy in the world who knows how Little Wing is supposed to work.”

Dixon said, “And Lamaison had him on a string somehow.”

“He was threatening the guy’s daughter.”

O’Donnell said, “So Lamaison was going to pimp him out. Lamaison was going to take him somewhere. And you threw Lamaison out of the damn helicopter before you asked him.”

Reacher shook his head. “Lamaison talked about the whole thing like it was firmly in the past. He said it was a done deal. There was something in his voice. Lamaison wasn’t taking anyone anywhere.”

“So who?”

“Not who,” Reacher said. “The question is, where?”

Dixon said, “If there’s only one guy, and Lamaison wasn’t planning to take him somewhere, they’ll have to bring the missiles to him.”

“Which is ridiculous,” O’Donnell said. “You can’t bring a semi full of missiles to a garden apartment in Century City or wherever.”

“The guy doesn’t live in Century City,” Reacher said. “He lives way out in the desert. The middle of nowhere. The back of beyond. Where better to bring a semi full of missiles?”

“Cell phones are up,” the pilot called.

Reacher pulled out his Radio Shack pay-as-you-go. Found Neagley’s number. Hit the green button. She answered.

“Dean’s place?” he asked.

“Dean’s place,” she said. “For sure. I’m twenty minutes away.”

83

The Bell had GPS, but not the kind that drew a road map on a screen. Not like O’Donnell’s rental car. The Bell’s system produced a pair of always-changing latitude and longitude readings instead, pale green numbers, plain script. Reacher told the pilot to get himself somewhere south of Palmdale and wait. The pilot was nervous about fuel. Reacher told him to lose altitude. Helicopters sometimes survived engine failures at a few hundred feet. They rarely survived at a few thousand.

Then Reacher called Neagley back. She had gotten Dean’s address from Margaret Berenson in the Pasadena hotel. But she had no GPS, either. She was adrift in the dark, behind two last-generation headlights made weaker by blue paint on the lenses. And cell coverage was patchy. Reacher lost her twice. Before he lost her a third time he told her to find Dean’s spread and drive in tight circles with her lights on bright.

Reacher took Lamaison’s seat up front and pressed his forehead to the window the same way Lamaison had. Dixon and O’Donnell took side windows in back. Between them they covered a one-eighty panorama. Maybe more. For safety’s sake Reacher had the pilot turn wide circles once in a while, in case what they wanted was way behind them.

They saw nothing.

Nothing at all, except vast featureless blackness and occasional pinpoints of orange light. Gas stations maybe, or tiny parking lots outside small grocery stores. They saw occasional cars on lonely roads, but none of them was Neagley’s Civic. Yellow headlight beams, not blue. Reacher tried his phone again. No service.

“Fuel’s really low,” the pilot said.

“Highway on the left,” Dixon called.

Reacher looked down. Not much of a highway. There were five cars on it within a linear mile, two heading south and three heading north. He closed his eyes and pictured the maps he had looked at.

“We shouldn’t be seeing a north-south highway,” he said. “We’re too far west.”

The Bell tilted and swung away east on a long fast curve and came level again.

The pilot said, “I’m going to have to set down soon.”

“You’ll set down when I tell you,” Reacher said.

North of the mountains the air was better. Some dust, some heat shimmer, but basically it was clear to the horizon. Way far ahead in the distance a tiny grid of lights winked and twinkled. Palmdale, presumably. A nice place, Reacher had heard. Expanding. Desirable. Therefore expensive. Therefore a guy looking for acres and isolation and maximum bang for the buck would stay well away from it.

“Turn south,” he said. “And climb.”

“Climbing eats fuel,” the pilot said.

“We need a better angle.”

The Bell climbed, slowly, a couple of hundred feet. The pilot dropped the nose and turned a wide circle, like he was hosing the horizon with an imaginary searchlight.

They saw nothing.

There was no cell coverage.

“Higher,” Reacher said.

“Can’t do it,” the pilot said. “Look at the dial.”

Reacher found the fuel gauge. The needle was riding the end stop. Officially the tanks were empty. He closed his eyes again and pictured the map. Berenson had said Dean had complained about the commute from hell. To Highland Park he had only two choices. Either Route 138 on the east flank of Mount San Antonio, or Route 2, to the west, past the Mount Wilson Observatory. Route 2 was probably smaller and twistier. And it joined the 210 at Glendale. Which probably made it more hellish than the eastern approach. No reason to choose it unless it was a total no-brainer. Which meant Dean was starting from somewhere due south of Palmdale, not east of south. Reacher looked straight ahead and waited until the distant grid of lights slid back into view.

“Now pull a one-eighty and head back,” he said.

“We’re out of fuel.”

“Just do it.”

The craft turned in its own length. Dipped its nose and clattered onward.

Sixty seconds later they found Neagley.

A mile in front and four hundred feet down they saw a cone of blue light turning and pulsing like a beacon. It looked like Neagley had the Civic on maximum lock and was driving a thirty-foot circle and flashing between dipped and brights as she went. The effect was spectacular. The beams swept and leapt and threw moving shadows and cleared a couple of hundred feet where there were no obstructions. Like a lighthouse on a rocky shore. There were small buttes and mesas and gullies, thrown into dramatic relief. To the north, low buildings. Power lines to the east. To the west the fractured land fell away into a shallow arroyo maybe forty feet wide and twenty deep.

“Land there,” Reacher said. “In the ditch. And keep the wheels up.”

The pilot said, “Why?”

“Because that’s the way I want it.”

The pilot drifted west a little and dropped a couple of hundred feet and turned to line up with the arroyo. Then he took the Bell down like an elevator. A siren went off to warn that he was landing with the undercarriage up. He ignored it and kept on going. He slowed twenty feet off the ground and eased on down and pancaked gently on the arroyo’s rocky bed. Stones crunched and metal grated and the floor tipped a foot from horizontal. Out the windows Reacher could see Neagley’s lights coming toward them through a sandstorm kicked up by the rotor wash.

Then the fuel ran out.

The engines died and the rotor shuddered to a stop.

The cabin went quiet.

Reacher was first out the door. He batted his way through clouds of warm dust and sent Dixon and O’Donnell ahead to meet with Neagley and then turned back to the Bell. He opened the cockpit door and looked in at the pilot. The guy was still strapped to his seat. He was flicking the face of the fuel gauge with his fingernail.

“Nice landing,” Reacher said. “You’re a good pilot.”

The guy said, “Thanks.”

“That thing with the rotation,” Reacher said. “The way it kept the door open up there. Smart move.”

“Basic aerodynamics.”

“But then, you had plenty of practice.”

The pilot said nothing.

“Four times,” Reacher said. “That I know about, at least.”

The pilot said nothing.

“Those men were my friends,” Reacher said.

“Lamaison told me I had to do it.”

“Or?”

“I would lose my job.”

“That’s all? You let them throw four live human beings out of your helicopter to save your job?”

“I’m paid to follow instructions.”

“You ever heard about a trial at Nuremberg? That excuse really doesn’t cut it anymore.”

The pilot said, “It was wrong, I know.”

“But you did it anyway.”

“What choice did I have?”

“Lots of choices,” Reacher said. Then he smiled. The pilot relaxed a little. Reacher shook his head like he was bemused by it all and leaned in and patted the guy on the cheek. Left his hand there, far side of the guy’s face, a friendly gesture. He worked his thumb up toward the guy’s eye socket, pressed his index finger on the guy’s temple, worked his other three fingers behind the guy’s ear, into his hair. Then he broke the guy’s neck, one-handed, with a single convulsive twist. Then he bounced the guy’s head around, front to back, side to side, to make sure the spinal cord was properly severed. He didn’t want the guy to wake up a paraplegic. He didn’t want the guy to wake up at all.

He walked away and left him there, still strapped in his seat. Turned back after fifty feet and checked. A helicopter in a ditch, slightly tilted, wheels up, tanks empty. A crash. The pilot still on board, impact injuries, an unfortunate accident. Not perfect, but reasonable.

Neagley had parked a hundred feet from the arroyo, which was about half the distance to Edward Dean’s front door. Her lights were still on bright. When Reacher got to the car he turned and looked back and checked again. The Bell was hidden pretty well. The crown of the rotor was visible, but only just. The blades themselves drooped out of sight under their own weight. The dust was settling. Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell were standing together in a tight group of three.

“We OK?” Reacher asked.

Dixon and O’Donnell nodded. Neagley didn’t.

“You mad with me?” Reacher asked her.

“Not really,” she said. “I would have been if you’d screwed up.”

“I needed you to work out where the missiles were headed.”

“You already knew.”

“I wanted a second opinion. And the address.”

“Well, here we are. No missiles.”

“They’re still in transit.”

“We hope.”

“Let’s go see Mr. Dean.”

They piled into the tiny Civic and Neagley drove the hundred feet to Dean’s door. Dean opened up on the first knock. Clearly he had been rousted by the helicopter drone and the flashing lights. He didn’t look much like a rocket scientist. More like a coach at a third-rate high school. He was tall and loose-limbed and had a shock of sandy hair. He was maybe forty years old. He was barefoot and dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Night attire. It was close to midnight.

“Who are you people?” he asked.

Reacher explained who they were, and why they were there.

Dean had no idea what he was talking about.

84

Reacher had been expecting some kind of a denial. Lamaison had warned Berenson to stay quiet, and clearly he would have done the same or more with Dean. But Dean’s denial seemed genuine. The guy was puzzled, not evasive.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Reacher said. “We know what you did with the electronics packs, and we know why you had to do it.”

Suddenly there was something in Dean’s face. Just like with Margaret Berenson.

Reacher said, “We know about the threat against your daughter.”

“What threat?”

“Where is she?”

“Away. Her mother, too.”

“School’s not out.”

“An urgent family matter.”

Reacher nodded. “You sent them away. That was smart. “

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Reacher said, “Lamaison is dead.”

There was a flash of hope in Dean’s eyes, just for a split second, hard to see in the darkness.

“I threw him out of the helicopter,” Reacher said.

Dean said nothing.

“You like bird watching? Wait a day and drive a mile or two south and get up on the roof of your car. Two buzzards circling, it’s probably a snake-bit coyote. More than two, it’s Lamaison. Or Parker, or Lennox. They’re all out there somewhere.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Reacher said, “Show him, Karla.”

Dixon pulled out the wallet she had taken from Lamaison’s pocket. Dean took it from her and turned to the light burning in his hallway. He spilled the contents into his palm and shuffled through them. Lamaison’s driver’s license, his credit cards, a New Age photo ID, his Social Security card.

“Lamaison is dead,” Reacher said again.

Dean put the stuff back in the wallet and handed it back to Dixon.

“You got his wallet,” he said. “Doesn’t prove you got him.”

“I can show you the pilot,” Reacher said. “He’s dead, too.”

“He just landed.”

“I just killed him.”

“You’re crazy.”

“And you’re off the hook.”

Dean said nothing.

“Take your time,” Reacher said. “Get used to it. But we need to know who’s coming, and when.”

“Nobody’s coming.”

“Someone has to be.”

“That was never the deal.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Tell me again,” Dean said. “Lamaison’s dead?”

“He killed four of my friends,” Reacher said. “If he wasn’t dead, I sure as hell wouldn’t be standing here wasting time with you.”

Dean nodded, slowly. He was getting used to it.

“But I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “OK, I signed off on phony paperwork, I admit that, six hundred and fifty times, which is terrible, but that was all I did. There was never anything about me assembling units or showing anyone else how to do it.”

“Who else knows how?”

“It’s not difficult. It’s plug and play. It’s simple. It has to be. Soldiers are going to do it. No offense. I mean, in the field, at night, under stress.”

“Simple for you.”

“Relatively simple for anyone.”

“Soldiers never do anything until they’re shown how.”

“Sure, they’ll have training.”

“From who?”

“We’ll set up a course at Fort Irwin. I guess I’ll teach the first class.”

“Lamaison knew that?”

“It’s standard practice.”

“So he pimped you out for a preview.”

Dean just shook his head. “He didn’t. He didn’t say anything about a preview. And he could have. It wasn’t like I was in a position to refuse him anything.”

“Nine hours,” Neagley said.

“Another hundred and thirty thousand square miles,” Dixon said.

A hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred thirty-five, Reacher thought, automatically. The increase alone was as big as most of California and more than half of Texas. The area of a circle was equal to pi times the radius squared, and it was the squared part that made it increase so fast.

“They’re coming here,” he said. “They have to be.”

Nobody answered.

Dean led them inside. His house was a long low shack built from concrete and timber. The concrete had been left raw and was fading to a yellowed patina. The timber was stained dark brown. There was a big living room with Navajo rugs and worn furniture and a fireplace heaped with last winter’s ash. There were plenty of books in the room. CDs were piled everywhere. There was a stereo with vacuum tube amplifiers and horn speakers. Altogether the place looked exactly like a city refugee’s dream.

Dean went to make coffee in the kitchen and Dixon said, “Nine hours twenty-six minutes.” Neagley and O’Donnell didn’t get the point, but Reacher did. Assuming three decimal places for pi and a speed of fifty for the truck, then nine hours and twenty-six minutes made the potential search area exactly seven hundred thousand square miles.

“Mahmoud is cautious,” Reacher said. “He’s not going to buy a pig in a poke. Either it’s his money and he doesn’t want to waste it, or it’s someone else’s money and he doesn’t want to get his head cut off for screwing up. He’s coming.”

“Dean says not.”

“Dean says he wasn’t told in advance. There’s a difference.”

Dean came back and served the coffee and nobody spoke for a quarter of an hour. Then Reacher turned to Dean and asked, “Did you do your own electrical work here?”

Dean said, “Some of it.”

“Got any plastic cable ties?”

“Lots of them. Workshop out back.”

“You should drive north,” Reacher said. “Head for Palmdale, get some breakfast.”

“Now?”

“Now. Stay for lunch. Don’t come back until the afternoon.”

“Why? What’s going to happen here?”

“I’m not sure yet. But whatever, you shouldn’t be around.”

Dean sat still for a moment. Then he got up and found his keys and left. They heard his car start up. Heard the crunch of power steering on gravel. Then the noise faded to nothing and the house went quiet again.

Dixon said, “Nine hours forty-six minutes.” Reacher nodded. The circle was now three-quarters of a million square miles in size.

“He’s coming,” Reacher said.

The circle reached a million square miles at seventeen minutes past one in the morning. Reacher found an atlas in a bookcase and traced a likely route and worked out that Denver was eighteen hours away, which made six in the morning a likely rendezvous time. Ideal, from Mahmoud’s point of view. Lamaison would have told him about the threat against the daughter, and he would figure under any circumstances the kid would be home at six in the morning. And therefore a perfect reminder of Dean’s vulnerability. Maybe Mahmoud was dropping by unannounced, but there was no doubt he expected to get what he wanted.

Reacher got up and went for a stroll, first outside, and then inside. The property consisted of the house and a garage block and the workshop that Dean had mentioned. Beyond that, there was nothing. It was pitch dark but Reacher could feel vast silent emptiness all around. Inside, the house was simple. Three bedrooms, a den, a kitchen, the living room. One of the bedrooms was the daughter’s. There were inkjet prints of photographs pinned up on a board. Groups of teenage girls, three or four at a time. The kid and her friends, presumably. By a process of elimination Reacher worked out which girl appeared in every picture. Dean’s daughter, he assumed. Her camera, her room. She was a tall blonde girl, maybe fourteen, still a little awkward, braces on her teeth. But a year or two into the future she was going to be spectacular, and she was going to stay that way for thirty years. A hostage to fortune. Reacher understood Dean’s distress, and wished Lamaison had screamed a little more on the way down.

People say the darkest hour is just before dawn, but people are wrong. By definition the darkest hour is in the middle of the night. By five in the morning the sky in the east was lightening. By five-thirty visibility was pretty good. Reacher took another walk. Dean had no neighbors. He was living in the middle of thousands of empty acres. The view was clear to every horizon. Worthless, sunblasted land. The power lines ran south to north and disappeared in the haze. A stony driveway came in from the southeast. It was at least a mile long, maybe more. Reacher walked a little ways down it and turned around and checked what Mahmoud would see when he arrived. The helicopter was out of sight. By chance a lone mesquite bush blocked the rotor crown from view. Reacher moved Neagley’s Civic behind the garage block and checked again. Perfect. A somnolent group of three buildings, low and dusty, almost part of the landscape. A hundred yards out he saw a flat broken fragment of rock the size and shape of a coffin. He walked over there and took Tony Swan’s lump of concrete out of his pocket and rested it on the slab, like a monument. He walked back and ducked into the workshop. The door was unlocked. The place was laid out neatly and smelled of machine oil heated by the sun. He found a tray of black plastic cable ties and took eight of the biggest. They were about two feet long, thick and stiff. For strapping heavy cable into perforated conduit boxes.

Then he went back inside the house to wait.

Six o’clock arrived, and Mahmoud didn’t. Now the circle measured more than two and a half million square miles. Six-fifteen came and went, two-point-six million square miles. Six-thirty, two-point-seven million.

Then, at exactly six thirty-two, the telephone bell dinged, just once, brief and soft and muted.

“Here we go,” Reacher said. “Someone just cut the phone line.”

They moved to the windows. They waited. Then five miles south and east they saw a tiny white dot winking in the early sun. A vehicle, closing fast, trailing a cloud of khaki dust that was backlit by the dawn like a halo.

85

They moved away from the windows and waited in the living room, tense and silent. Five minutes later they heard the crunch of stones under tires and the wet muffled beat of a worn Detroit V-8. The crunching stopped and the engine died and they heard a parking brake ratchet on. A minute after that they heard a tinny door slam and the sound of random footsteps on gravel. The driver, stumbling around, yawning and stretching.

A minute after that, they heard a knock at the door.

Reacher waited.

The knock came again.

Reacher counted to twenty and walked down the hall. Opened the door. Saw a man standing on the step, framed against the light, with a mid-sized panel truck parked behind him. The truck was a rented U-Haul, white and red, top-heavy, a little ungainly. Reacher felt like he had seen it before. He had never seen the man before. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian.

In turn Azhari Mahmoud saw a disheveled giant of a white man. Two meters tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty gray denims and work boots. A crazy scientist, he thought. Right at home in a desert shack.

“Edward Dean?” he said.

“Yes,” Reacher said. “Who are you?”

“No cell coverage here, I notice.”

“So?”

“And I took the precaution of cutting your landline ten miles down the road.”

“Who are you?”

“My name doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of Allen Lamaison’s. That’s all you need to know. You are to extend me the same courtesies that you would extend to him.”

“I don’t extend courtesies to Allen Lamaison,” Reacher said. “So get lost.”

Mahmoud nodded. “Let me put it another way. The threat that Lamaison made is still operative. And today it will benefit me, not him.”

“Threat?” Reacher said.

“Against your daughter.”

Reacher said nothing.

Mahmoud said, “You’re going to show me how to arm Little Wing.”

Reacher glanced at the U-Haul.

“I can’t,” he said. “All you have are the electronics.”

“The missiles are on their way,” Mahmoud said. “They’ll be here very soon.”

“Where are you going to use them?”

“Here and there.”

“Inside the United States?”

“It’s a target-rich environment.”

“Lamaison said Kashmir.”

“We might ship some units to select friends.”

“We?”

“We’re a big organization.”

“I won’t do it.”

“You will. Like you did before. For the same reason.”

Reacher paused a beat and said, “You better come in.”

He stepped aside. Mahmoud was accustomed to deference, so he squeezed past and walked ahead into the hallway. Reacher hit him hard in the back of the head and sent him stumbling toward the living room door, where Frances Neagley stepped out and dropped him with a neat uppercut. A minute later he was hog-tied on the hallway floor with one figure-eight cable tie binding his left wrist to his right ankle and another binding his right wrist to his left ankle. The ties were zipped hard and the flesh around them was already swelling. Mahmoud was bleeding from the mouth and moaning. Reacher kicked him in the side and told him to shut up. Then he stepped back into the living room and waited for the truck from Denver.

The truck from Denver was a white eighteen-wheeler. Its driver was hog-tied next to Mahmoud a minute after climbing down from the cab. Then Reacher dragged Mahmoud out of the house and left him faceup in the sun next to his U-Haul. Mahmoud’s eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive. O’Donnell dragged the driver out and dumped him next to his truck. They all stood for a moment and looked around one last time and then crammed themselves into Neagley’s Civic and headed south, fast. As soon as cell coverage kicked in they stopped and Neagley called her Pentagon buddy. Seven o’clock in the west, ten in the morning in the east. She told the guy where to look and what he would find. Then they drove on. Reacher watched out the back window and before they even hit the mountains he saw a whole squadron of choppers heading west on the horizon. Bell AH-1s, from some nearby Homeland Security base, he assumed. The sky was thick with them.

After the mountains they talked about money. Neagley gave Dixon the financial instruments and the diamonds, and they all agreed she should carry them back to New York and convert them to cash. First call would be to repay Neagley’s expense budget, second call would be to set up trust funds for Angela and Charlie Franz, and Tammy Orozco and her three children, and Sanchez’s friend Milena, and the third call would be to make one last donation to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in the name of Tony Swan’s dog, Maisi.

Then it got awkward. Neagley was OK for salary, but Reacher sensed that Dixon and O’Donnell were hurting. Hurting, and tempted, but sensitive about asking. So he went ahead and admitted he was flat broke and suggested they take whatever little margin was left over and divide it up four ways between themselves, as wages. Everyone agreed.

After that, they didn’t talk much at all. Lamaison was gone, Mahmoud was in the system, but no one had come back. And Reacher had gotten around to asking himself the big question: If the stalled car on the 210 had not delayed his arrival at the hospital, would he have performed any better than Dixon or O’Donnell? Than Swan, or Franz, or Sanchez, or Orozco? Maybe the others were asking themselves the same question about him. Truth was, he didn’t know the answer, and he hated not knowing.

Two hours later they were at LAX. They abandoned the Civic in a fire lane and walked away from it, heading for different terminals and different airlines. Before they split up they stood on the sidewalk and bumped fists one last time, and said goodbyes they promised would be temporary. Neagley headed inside to American. Dixon went looking for America West. O’Donnell searched for United. Reacher stood in the heat with anxious people swirling all around him and watched them walk away.

Reacher left California with close to two thousand dollars in his pocket, from the dealers behind the wax museum in Hollywood, and from Saropian in Vegas, and from the two guys at New Age’s place in Highland Park. As a result he didn’t run low on cash for almost four weeks. Finally he stopped by an ATM in the bus depot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As always he worked out his balance first, and then checked to see if the bank’s calculation matched his own.

For the second time in his life, it didn’t.

The machine told him that the balance in his account was more than a hundred thousand dollars bigger than he was expecting. Exactly a hundred and eleven thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two dollars and eighteen cents bigger, according to his own blind calculation.

111,822.18.

Dixon, obviously. The spoils of war.

At first he was disappointed. Not with the amount. It was more money than he had seen in a long time. He was disappointed with himself, because he couldn’t perceive any message in the number. He was sure Dixon would have adjusted the total by a few dollars or cents one way or the other to give him a wry smile. But he couldn’t get it. It wasn’t prime. No even number greater than two could be prime. It had hundreds of factors. Its reciprocal was boring. Its square root was a long messy string of digits. Its cube root was worse.

111,822.18.

Then he grew disappointed with Dixon. Because the more he thought about it, the more he analyzed it, the more he was sure it really was a boring number.

Dixon’s head wasn’t in the game.

She had let him down.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

He pressed the button for the mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. Faint gray printing, the last five transactions against his account. Neagley’s original deposit from Chicago was still there, first on the list. Then second, his fifty-dollar withdrawal at the Portland bus depot, up in Oregon. Then third, his airfare from Portland to LAX, way back at the beginning.

Then fourth, a new deposit in the sum of one hundred and one thousand, eight hundred ten dollars, and eighteen cents.

Then fifth, on the same day, another deposit, in the sum of ten thousand and twelve dollars exactly.

101810.18.

10012.

He smiled. Dixon’s head was in the game after all. Totally, completely in the game. The first deposit was 10-18, repeated for emphasis. Military police radio code for mission accomplished, twice over. 10-18, 10-18. Herself and O’Donnell, rescued. Or Lamaison and Mahmoud, beaten. Or both things.

Nice, Karla, he thought.

The second deposit was her zip code: 10012. Greenwich Village. Where she lived. A geographic reference.

A hint.

She had asked: Feel like dropping by New York afterward?

He smiled again and balled up the slip of thin paper and dropped it in the trash. Took a hundred dollars from the machine and headed on inside the depot and bought a ticket for the first bus he saw. He had no idea where it was going.

He had answered: I don’t make plans, Karla.

For the real Frances L. Neagley

NOTHING TO LOSE

A Delacorte Press Book / June 2008

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2008 by Lee Child

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

Nothing to lose / Lee Child.

p. cm.

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Colorado—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838N67 2008

813'.54—dc22

2007043735

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33780-5

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Nothing to Lose

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Dedication

1

The sun was only half as hot as he had known sun to be, but it was hot enough to keep him confused and dizzy. He was very weak. He had not eaten for seventy-two hours, or taken water for forty-eight.

Not weak. He was dying, and he knew it.

The images in his mind showed things drifting away. A rowboat caught in a river current, straining against a rotted rope, pulling, tugging, breaking free. His viewpoint was that of a small boy in the boat, sitting low, staring back helplessly at the bank as the dock grew smaller.

Or an airship swinging gently on a breeze, somehow breaking free of its mast, floating up and away, slowly, the boy inside seeing tiny urgent figures on the ground, waving, staring, their faces tilted upward in concern.

Then the images faded, because now words seemed more important than pictures, which was absurd, because he had never been interested in words before. But before he died he wanted to know which words were his. Which applied to him? Was he a man or a boy? He had been described both ways. Be a man, some had said. Others had been insistent: The boy’s not to blame. He was old enough to vote and kill and die, which made him a man. He was too young to drink, even beer, which made him a boy. Was he brave, or a coward? He had been called both things. He had been called unhinged, disturbed, deranged, unbalanced, delusional, traumatized, all of which he understood and accepted, except unhinged. Was he supposed to be hinged? Like a door? Maybe people were doors. Maybe things passed through them. Maybe they banged in the wind. He considered the question for a long moment and then he batted the air in frustration. He was babbling like a teenager in love with weed.

Which is exactly all he had been, a year and a half before.

He fell to his knees. The sand was only half as hot as he had known sand to be, but it was hot enough to ease his chill. He fell facedown, exhausted, finally spent. He knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that if he closed his eyes he would never open them again.

But he was very tired.

So very, very tired.

More tired than a man or a boy had ever been.

He closed his eyes.

2

The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road, formed where one town’s blacktop finished and the other’s started. Hope’s highway department had used thick dark asphalt rolled smooth. Despair had a smaller municipal budget. That was clear. They had top-dressed a lumpy roadbed with hot tar and dumped gray gravel on it. Where the two surfaces met there was an inch-wide trench of no-man’s-land filled with a black rubbery compound. An expansion joint. A boundary. A line. Jack Reacher stepped over it midstride and kept on walking. He paid it no attention at all.

But he remembered it later. Later, he was able to recall it in great detail.

Hope and Despair were both in Colorado. Reacher was in Colorado because two days previously he had been in Kansas, and Colorado was next to Kansas. He was making his way west and south. He had been in Calais, Maine, and had taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally, all the way to San Diego in California. Calais was the last major place in the Northeast, San Diego was the last major place in the Southwest. One extreme to the other. The Atlantic to the Pacific, cool and damp to hot and dry. He took buses where there were any and hitched rides where there weren’t. Where he couldn’t find rides, he walked. He had arrived in Hope in the front passenger seat of a bottle-green Mercury Grand Marquis driven by a retired button salesman. He was on his way out of Hope on foot because that morning there had been no traffic heading west toward Despair.

He remembered that fact later, too. And wondered why he hadn’t wondered why.

In terms of his grand diagonal design, he was slightly off course. Ideally he should have been angling directly southwest into New Mexico. But he wasn’t a stickler for plans, and the Grand Marquis had been a comfortable car, and the old guy had been fixed on Hope because he had three grandchildren to see there, before heading onward to Denver to see four more. Reacher had listened patiently to the old guy’s family tales and had figured that a saw-tooth itinerary first west and then south was entirely acceptable. Maybe two sides of a triangle would be more entertaining than one. And then in Hope he had looked at a map and seen Despair seventeen miles farther west and had been unable to resist the detour. Once or twice in his life he had made the same trip metaphorically. Now he figured he should make it for real, since the opportunity was right there in front of him.

He remembered that whim later, too.

The road between the two towns was a straight two-lane. It rose very gently as it headed west. Nothing dramatic. The part of eastern Colorado that Reacher was in was pretty flat. Like Kansas. But the Rockies were visible up ahead, blue and massive and hazy. They looked very close. Then suddenly they didn’t. Reacher breasted a slight rise and stopped dead and understood why one town was called Hope and the other Despair. Settlers and homesteaders struggling west a hundred and fifty years before him would have stopped over in what came to be called Hope and would have seen their last great obstacle seemingly within touching distance. Then after a day’s or a week’s or a month’s repose they would have moved on again and breasted the same slight rise and seen that the Rockies’ apparent proximity had been nothing more than a cruel trick of topography. An optical illusion. A trick of the light. From the top of the rise the great barrier seemed once again remote, even unreachably distant, across hundreds more miles of endless plains. Maybe thousands more miles, although that too was an illusion. Reacher figured that in truth the first significant peaks were about two hundred miles away. A long month’s hard trekking on foot and in mule-drawn carts, across featureless wilderness and along occasional decades-old wheel ruts. Maybe six weeks’ hard trekking, in the wrong season. In context, not a disaster, but certainly a bitter disappointment, a blow hard enough to drive the anxious and the impatient from hope to despair in the time between one glance at the horizon and the next.

Reacher stepped off Despair’s gritty road and walked through crusted sandy earth to a table rock the size of a car. He levered himself up and lay down with his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky. It was pale blue and laced with long high feathery clouds that might once have been vapor trails from coast-to-coast red-eye planes. Back when he smoked he might have lit a cigarette to pass the time. But he didn’t smoke anymore. Smoking implied carrying at least a pack and a book of matches, and Reacher had long ago quit carrying things he didn’t need. There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush. There was nothing waiting for him anywhere else, either. No storage unit in a distant city, nothing stashed with friends. He owned the things in his pockets and the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. That was all, and that was enough. Everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t.

He got to his feet and stood on tiptoe, high on the rock. Behind him to the east was a shallow bowl maybe ten miles in diameter with the town of Hope roughly in its center, eight or nine miles back, maybe ten blocks by six of brick-built buildings and an outlying clutter of houses and farms and barns and other structures made of wood and corrugated metal. Together they made a warm low smudge in the haze. Ahead of him to the west were tens of thousands of flat square miles, completely empty except for ribbons of distant roads and the town of Despair about eight or nine miles ahead. Despair was harder to see than Hope. The haze was thicker in the west. The place looked larger than Hope had been, and teardrop-shaped, with a conventional plains downtown mostly south of the main drag and then a wider zone of activity beyond it, maybe industrial in nature, hence the smog. Despair looked less pleasant than Hope. Cold, where Hope had looked warm; gray, where Hope had been mellow. It looked unwelcoming. For a brief moment Reacher considered backtracking and striking out south from Hope itself, getting back on course, but he dismissed the thought even before it had fully formed. Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever. Everyone’s life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was Reacher’s.

He was angry at himself later, for being so inflexible.

He climbed off the rock and rejoined the road twenty yards west of where he had left it. He stepped up onto the left-hand edge and continued walking, long strides, an easy pace, a little faster than three miles an hour, facing oncoming traffic, the safest way. But there was no oncoming traffic. No traffic in either direction. The road was deserted. No vehicles were using it. No cars, no trucks. Nothing. No chance of a ride. Reacher was a little puzzled, but mostly unconcerned. Many times in his life he had walked a lot more than seventeen miles at a stretch. He raked the hair off his forehead and pulled his shirt loose on his shoulders and kept on going, toward whatever lay ahead.

3

Despair’s downtown area began with a vacant lot where something had been planned maybe twenty years before but never built. Then came an old motor court, shuttered, maybe permanently abandoned. Across the street and fifty yards west was a gas station. Two pumps, both of them old. Not the kind of upright rural antiques Reacher had seen in Edward Hopper’s paintings, but still a couple of generations off the pace. There was a small hut in back with a grimy window full of quarts of oil arrayed in a pyramid. Reacher crossed the apron and stuck his head in the door. It was dark inside the hut and the air smelled of creosote and hot raw wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt. He was about thirty, and lean.

“Got coffee?” Reacher asked him.

“This is a gas station,” the guy said.

“Gas stations sell coffee,” Reacher said. “And water, and soda.”

“Not this one,” the guy said. “We sell gas.”

“And oil.”

“If you want it.”

“Is there a coffee shop in town?”

“There’s a restaurant.”

“Just one?”

“One is all we need.”

Reacher ducked back out to the daylight and kept on walking. A hundred yards farther west the road grew sidewalks and according to a sign on a pole changed its name to Main Street. Thirty feet later came the first developed block. It was occupied by a dour brick cube, three stories high, on the left side of the street, to the south. It might once have been a dry goods emporium. It was still some kind of a retail enterprise. Reacher could see three customers and bolts of cloth and plastic household items through its dusty ground-floor windows. Next to it was an identical three-story brick cube, and then another, and another. The downtown area seemed to be about twelve blocks square, bulked mostly to the south of Main Street. Reacher was no kind of an architectural expert, and he knew he was way west of the Mississippi, but the whole place gave him the feel of an old Connecticut factory town, or the Cincinnati riverfront. It was plain, and severe, and unadorned, and out of date. He had seen movies about small-town America in which the sets had been artfully dressed to look a little more perfect and vibrant than reality. This place was the exact opposite. It looked like a designer and a whole team of grips had worked hard to make it dowdier and gloomier than it needed to be. Traffic on the streets was light. Sedans and pick-up trucks were moving slow and lazy. None of them was newer than three years old. There were few pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Reacher made a random left turn and set about finding the promised restaurant. He quartered a dozen blocks and passed a grocery store and a barber shop and a bar and a rooming house and a faded old hotel before he found the eatery. It took up the whole ground floor of another dull brick cube. The ceiling was high and the windows were floor-to-ceiling plate glass items filling most of the walls. The place might have been an automobile showroom in the past. The floor was tiled and the tables and chairs were plain brown wood and the air smelled of boiled vegetables. There was a register station inside the door with a Please Wait to Be Seated sign on a short brassed pole with a heavy base. Same sign he had seen everywhere, coast to coast. Same script, same colors, same shape. He figured there was a catering supply company somewhere turning them out by the millions. He had seen identical signs in Calais, Maine, and expected to see more in San Diego, California. He stood next to the register and waited.

And waited.

There were eleven customers eating. Three couples, a three-some, and two singletons. One waitress. No front-of-house staff. Nobody at the register. Not an unusual ratio. Reacher had eaten in a thousand similar places and he knew the rhythm, subliminally. The lone waitress would soon glance over at him and nod, as if to say I’ll be right with you. Then she would take an order, deliver a plate, and scoot over, maybe blowing an errant strand of hair off her cheek in a gesture designed to be both an apology and an appeal for sympathy. She would collect a menu from a stack and lead him to a table and bustle away and then revisit him in strict sequence.

But she didn’t do any of that.

She glanced over. Didn’t nod. Just looked at him for a long second and then looked away. Carried on with what she was doing. Which by that point wasn’t much. She had all her eleven customers pacified. She was just making work. She was stopping by tables and asking if everything was all right and refilling coffee cups that were less than an inch down from the rim. Reacher turned and checked the door glass to see if he had missed an opening-hours sign. To see if the place was about to close up. It wasn’t. He checked his reflection, to see if he was committing a social outrage with the way he was dressed. He wasn’t. He was wearing dark gray pants and a matching dark gray shirt, both bought two days before in a janitorial surplus store in Kansas. Janitorial supply stores were his latest discovery. Plain, strong, well-made clothing at reasonable prices. Perfect. His hair was short and tidy. He had shaved the previous morning. His fly was zipped.

He turned back to wait.

Customers turned to look at him, one after the other. They appraised him quite openly and then looked away. The waitress made another slow circuit of the room, looking everywhere except at him. He stood still, running the situation through a mental database and trying to understand it. Then he lost patience with it and stepped past the sign and moved into the room and sat down alone at a table for four. He scraped his chair in and made himself comfortable. The waitress watched him do it, and then she headed for the kitchen.

She didn’t come out again.

Reacher sat and waited. The room was silent. No talking. No sounds at all, except for the quiet metallic clash of silverware on plates and the smack of people chewing and the ceramic click of cups being lowered carefully into saucers and the wooden creak of chair legs under shifting bodies. Those tiny noises rose up and echoed around the vast tiled space until they seemed overwhelmingly loud.

Nothing happened for close to ten minutes.

Then an old crew-cab pick-up truck slid to a stop on the curb outside the door. There was a second’s pause and four guys climbed out and stood together on the sidewalk outside the restaurant’s door. They grouped themselves into a tight little formation and paused another beat and came inside. They paused again and scanned the room and found their target. They headed straight for Reacher’s table. Three of them sat down in the empty chairs and the fourth stood at the head of the table, blocking Reacher’s exit.

4

The four guys were each a useful size. The shortest was probably an inch under six feet and the lightest was maybe an ounce over two hundred pounds. They all had walnut knuckles and thick wrists and knotted forearms. Two of them had broken noses and none of them had all their teeth. They all looked pale and vaguely unhealthy. They were all grimy, with ingrained gray dirt in the folds of their skin that glittered and shone like metal. They were all dressed in canvas work shirts with their sleeves rolled to their elbows. They were all somewhere between thirty and forty. And they all looked like trouble.

“I don’t want company,” Reacher said. “I prefer to eat alone.”

The guy standing at the head of the table was the biggest of the four, by maybe an inch and ten pounds. He said, “You’re not going to eat at all.”

Reacher said, “I’m not?”

“Not here, anyway.”

“I heard this was the only show in town.”

“It is.”

“Well, then.”

“You need to get going.”

“Going?”

“Out of here.”

“Out of where?”

“Out of this restaurant.”

“You want to tell me why?”

“We don’t like strangers.”

“Me either,” Reacher said. “But I need to eat somewhere. Otherwise I’ll get all wasted and skinny like you four.”

“Funny man.”

“Just calling it like it is,” Reacher said. He put his forearms on the table. He had thirty pounds and three inches on the big guy, and more than that on the other three. And he was willing to bet he had a little more experience and a little less inhibition than any one of them. Or than all of them put together. But ultimately, if it came to it, it was going to be his two hundred and fifty pounds against their cumulative nine hundred. Not great odds. But Reacher hated turning back.

The guy who was standing said, “We don’t want you here.”

Reacher said, “You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit what you want.”

“You won’t get served in here.”

“You could order for me.”

“And then what?”

“Then I could eat your lunch.”

“Funny man,” the guy said again. “You need to leave now.”

“Why?”

“Just leave now.”

Reacher asked, “You guys got names?”

“Not for you to know. And you need to leave.”

“You want me to leave, I’ll need to hear it from the owner. Not from you.”

“We can arrange that.” The guy who was standing nodded to one of the guys in the seats, who scraped his chair back and got up and headed for the kitchen. A long minute later he came back out with a man in a stained apron. The man in the apron was wiping his hands on a dish towel and didn’t look particularly worried or perturbed. He walked up to Reacher’s table and said, “I want you to leave my restaurant.”

“Why?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t need to explain myself.”

“You the owner?”

“Yes, I am.”

Reacher said, “I’ll leave when I’ve had a cup of coffee.”

“You’ll leave now.”

“Black, no sugar.”

“I don’t want trouble.”

“You already got trouble. If I get a cup of coffee, I’ll walk out of here. If I don’t get a cup of coffee, these guys can try to throw me out, and you’ll spend the rest of the day cleaning blood off the floor and all day tomorrow shopping for new chairs and tables.”

The guy in the apron said nothing.

Reacher said, “Black, no sugar.”

The guy in the apron stood still for a long moment and then headed back to the kitchen. A minute later the waitress came out with a single cup balanced on a saucer. She carried it across the room and set it down in front of Reacher, hard enough to slop some of the contents out of the cup and into the saucer.

“Enjoy,” she said.

Reacher lifted the cup and wiped the base on his sleeve. Set the cup down on the table and emptied the saucer into it. Set the cup back on the saucer and squared it in front of him. Then he raised it again and took a sip.

Not bad, he thought. A little weak, a little stewed, but at heart it was a decent commercial product. Better than most diners, worse than most franchise places. Right in the middle of the curve. The cup was a porcelain monstrosity with a lip about three-eighths of an inch thick. It was cooling the drink too fast. Too wide, too shallow, too much mass. Reacher was no big fan of fine china, but he believed a receptacle ought to serve its contents.

The four guys were still clustered all around. Two sitting, two standing now. Reacher ignored them and drank, slowly at first, and then faster as the coffee grew cold. He drained the cup and set it back on the saucer. Pushed it away, slowly and carefully, until it was exactly centered on the table. Then he moved his left arm fast and went for his pocket. The four guys jumped. Reacher came out with a dollar bill and flattened it and trapped it under the saucer.

“So let’s go,” he said.

The guy standing at the head of the table moved out of the way. Reacher scraped his chair back and stood up. Eleven customers watched him do it. He pushed his chair in neatly and stepped around the head of the table and headed for the door. He sensed the four guys behind him. Heard their boots on the tile. They were forming up in single file, threading between tables, stepping past the sign and the register. The room was silent.

Reacher pushed the door and stepped outside to the street. The air was cool, but the sun was out. The sidewalk was concrete, cast in five-by-five squares. The squares were separated by inch-wide expansion joints. The joints were filled with black compound.

Reacher turned left and took four steps until he was clear of the parked pick-up and then he stopped and turned back, with the afternoon sun behind him. The four guys formed up in front of him, with the sun in their eyes. The guy who had stood at the head of the table said, “Now you need to get out.”

Reacher said, “I am out.”

“Out of town.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “Make a left, and then Main Street is four blocks up. When you get there, turn either left or right, west or east. We don’t care which. Just keep on walking.”

Reacher asked, “You still do that here?”

“Do what?”

“Run people out of town.”

“You bet we do.”

“You want to tell me why you do?”

“We don’t have to tell you why we do.”

Reacher said, “I just got here.”

“So?”

“So I’m staying.”

The guy on the end of the line pushed his rolled cuffs above his elbows and took a step forward. Broken nose, missing teeth. Reacher glanced at the guy’s wrists. The width of a person’s wrists was the only failsafe indicator of a person’s raw strength. This guy’s were wider than a long-stemmed rose, narrower than a two-by-four. Closer to the two-by-four than the rose.

Reacher said, “You’re picking on the wrong man.”

The guy who had been doing all the talking said, “You think?”

Reacher nodded. “I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.”

“You a momma’s boy?”

“She liked to see fair play.”

“There are four of us. One of you.”

Reacher’s hands were down by his sides, relaxed, gently curled. His feet were apart, securely planted. He could feel the hard concrete through the soles of his shoes. It was textured. It had been brushed with a yard broom just before it dried, ten years earlier. He folded the fingers of his left hand flat against his palm. Raised the hand, very slowly. Brought it level with his shoulder, palm out. The four guys stared at it. The way his fingers were folded made them think he was hiding something. But what? He snapped his fingers open. Nothing there. In the same split second he moved sideways and heaved his right fist up like a convulsion and caught the guy who had stepped forward with a colossal uppercut to the jaw. The guy had been breathing through his mouth because of his broken nose and the massive impact snapped his jaw shut and lifted him up off the ground and dumped him back down in a vertical heap on the sidewalk. Like a puppet with the strings cut. Unconscious before he got halfway there.

“Now there are only three of you,” Reacher said. “Still one of me.”

They weren’t total amateurs. They reacted pretty well and pretty fast. They sprang back and apart into a wide defensive semicircle and crouched, fists ready.

Reacher said, “You can still walk away.”

The guy who had been doing the talking said, “You got lucky.”

“Only suckers get sucker punched.”

“Won’t happen twice.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “Get out of town. You can’t take us three-on-one.”

“Try me.”

“Can’t be done. Not now.”

Reacher nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe one of you will stay on your feet long enough to get to me.”

“You can count on it.”

“But the question you need to ask is, which one of you will it be? Right now you’ve got no way of knowing. One of you will be driving the other three to the hospital for a six-month stay. You want me out of town bad enough to take those odds?”

Nobody spoke. Stalemate. Reacher rehearsed his next moves. A right-footed kick to the groin of the guy on his left, spin back with an elbow to the head for the guy in the middle, duck under the inevitable roundhouse swing incoming from the guy on the right, let him follow through, put an elbow in his kidney. One, two, three, no fundamental problem. Maybe a little cleanup afterward, more feet and elbows. Main difficulty would be limiting the damage. Careful restraint would be required. It was always wiser to stay on the right side of the line, closer to brawling than homicide.

In the distance beyond the three guys Reacher could see people going about their lawful business on the sidewalks. He could see cars and trucks driving slow on the streets, pausing at four-way stops, moving on.

Then he saw one particular car blow straight through a four-way and head in his direction. A Crown Victoria, white and gold, black push bars on the front, a light bar on the roof, antennas on the trunk lid. A shield on the door, with DPD scrolled across it. Despair Police Department. A heavyset cop in a tan jacket visible behind the glass.

“Behind you,” Reacher said. “The cavalry is here.” But he didn’t move. And he kept his eyes on the three guys. The cop’s arrival didn’t necessarily guarantee anything. Not yet. The three guys looked mad enough to move straight from a verbal warning to an actual assault charge. Maybe they already had so many they figured one more wouldn’t make any difference. Small towns. In Reacher’s experience they all had a lunatic fringe.

The Crown Vic braked hard in the gutter. The door swung open. The driver took a riot gun from a holster between the seats. Climbed out. Pumped the gun and held it diagonally across his chest. He was a big guy. White, maybe forty. Black hair. Wide neck. Tan jacket, brown pants, black shoes, a groove in his forehead from a Smokey the Bear hat that was presumably now resting on his passenger seat. He stood behind the three guys and looked around. Surveyed the scene. Not exactly rocket science, Reacher thought. Three guys surrounding a fourth? We’re not discussing the weather here.

The cop said, “Back off now.” Deep voice. Authoritative. The three guys stepped backward. The cop stepped forward. They swapped their relative positions. Now the three guys were behind the cop. The cop moved his gun. Pointed it straight at Reacher’s chest.

“You’re under arrest,” he said.

5

Reacher stood still and asked, “On what charge?”

The cop said, “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” He swapped the gun into one hand and used the other to take the handcuffs out of the holder on his belt. He held them on the flat of his palm and one of the guys behind him stepped forward and took them from him and looped around behind Reacher’s back.

“Put your arms behind you,” the cop said.

“Are these guys deputized?” Reacher asked.

“Why would you care?”

“I don’t. But they should. They put their hands on me without a good reason, they get their arms broken.”

“They’re all deputized,” the cop said. “Especially including the one you just laid out.”

He put both hands back on his gun.

“Self-defense,” Reacher said.

“Save it for the judge,” the cop said.

The guy behind him pulled Reacher’s arms back and cuffed his wrists. The guy who had done all the talking opened the cruiser’s rear door and stood there holding it like a hotel doorman with a taxicab.

“Get in the car,” the cop said.

Reacher stood still and considered his options. Didn’t take him long. He didn’t have any options. He was handcuffed. He had a guy about three feet behind him. He had a cop about eight feet in front of him. Two more guys three feet behind the cop. The riot gun was some kind of a Mossberg. He didn’t recognize the model, but he respected the brand.

“In the car,” the cop said.

Reacher moved forward and looped around the open door and jacked himself inside butt-first. The seat was covered in heavy vinyl and he slid across it easily. The floor was covered in pimpled rubber. The security screen was clear bulletproof plastic. He braced his feet, one in the left foot well and one in the right. Uncomfortable, with his hands cuffed behind him. He figured he was going to get bounced around.

The cop got back in the front. The suspension yielded to his weight. He reholstered the Mossberg. Slammed his door and put the transmission in drive and stamped on the gas. Reacher was thrown back against the cushion. Then the guy braked hard for a stop sign and Reacher was tossed forward. He twisted as he went and took the blow against the plastic screen with his shoulder. The cop repeated the procedure at the next four-way. And the next. But Reacher was OK with it. It was to be expected. He had driven the same way in the past, in the days when he was the guy in the front and someone else was the guy in the back. And it was a small town. Wherever the police station was, it couldn’t be far.

The police station was four blocks west and two blocks south of the restaurant. It was housed in another undistinguished brick building on a street wide enough to let the cop park nose-in to the curb on a diagonal. There was one other car there. That was all. Small town, small police department. The building had two stories. The cops had the ground floor. The town court was upstairs. Reacher guessed there were cells in the basement. His trip to the booking desk was uneventful. He didn’t make trouble. No point. No percentage in being a fugitive on foot in a town where the line was twelve miles away in one direction and maybe more in the other. The desk was manned by a patrolman who could have been the arresting officer’s kid brother. Same size and shape, same face, same hair, a little younger. Reacher was uncuffed and gave up the stuff from his pockets and his shoelaces. He had no belt. He was escorted down a winding stair and put in a six-by-eight cell fronted by ancient ironwork that had been painted maybe fifty times.

“Lawyer?” he asked.

“You know any?” the desk guy asked back.

“The public defender will do.”

The desk guy nodded and locked the gate and walked away. Reacher was left on his own. The cell block was otherwise empty. Three cells in a line, a narrow corridor, no windows. Each cell had a wall-mounted iron tray for a bed and a steel toilet with a sink built into the top of the tank. Bulkhead lights burned behind wire grilles on the ceilings. Reacher ran his right hand under cold water at the sink and massaged his knuckles. They were sore, but not damaged. He lay down on the cot and closed his eyes.

Welcome to Despair, he thought.

6

The public defender never showed. Reacher dozed for two hours and then the cop who had arrested him clattered down the stairs and unlocked the cell and gestured for him to get up.

“The judge is ready for you,” he said.

Reacher yawned. “I haven’t seen my lawyer.”

“Take it up with the court,” the cop said. “Not with me.”

“What kind of a half-assed system have you got here?”

“The same kind we’ve always had.”

“I think I’ll stay down here.”

“I could send your three remaining buddies in for a visit.”

“Save gas and send them straight to the hospital.”

“I could put you in handcuffs first. Strap you to the bed.”

“All by yourself?”

“I could bring a stun gun.”

“You live here in town?”

“Why?”

“Maybe I’ll come visit you one day.”

“I don’t think you will.”

The cop stood there waiting. Reacher shrugged to himself and swung his feet to the floor. Pushed himself upright and stepped out of the cell. Walking was awkward without his shoelaces. On the stairs he had to hook his toes to stop his shoes falling off altogether. He shuffled past the booking desk and followed the cop up another flight. A grander staircase. At the top was a wooden double door, closed. Alongside it was a sign on a short post with a heavy base. Same kind of thing as the restaurant sign, except this one said: Town Court. The cop opened the left-hand panel and stood aside. Reacher stepped into a courtroom. There was a center aisle and four rows of spectator seating. Then a bullpen rail and a prosecution table and a defense table, each with three wheelback chairs. There was a witness stand and a jury box and a judge’s dais. All the furniture and all the structures were made out of pine, lacquered dark and then darkened more by age and polish. The walls were paneled with the same stuff. There were flags behind the dais, Old Glory and something Reacher guessed was the state flag of Colorado.

The room was empty. It echoed and smelled of dust. The cop walked ahead and opened the bullpen gate. Pointed Reacher toward the defense table. The cop sat down at the prosecution table. They waited. Then an inconspicuous door in the back wall opened and a man in a suit walked in. The cop jumped up and said, “All rise.” Reacher stayed in his seat.

The man in the suit clumped up three steps and slid in behind the dais. He was bulky and somewhere over sixty and had a full head of white hair. His suit was cheap and badly cut. He picked up a pen and straightened a legal pad in front of him. He looked at Reacher and said, “Name?”

“I haven’t been Mirandized,” Reacher said.

“You haven’t been charged with a crime,” the old guy said. “This isn’t a trial.”

“So what is it?”

“A hearing.”

“About what?”

“It’s an administrative matter, that’s all. Possibly just a technicality. But I do need to ask you some questions.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy asked, “Name?”

“I’m sure the police department copied my passport and showed it to you.”

“For the record, please.”

The guy’s tone was neutral and his manner was reasonably courteous. So Reacher shrugged and said, “Jack Reacher. No middle initial.”

The guy wrote it down. Followed up with his date of birth, and his Social Security number, and his nationality. Then he asked, “Address?”

Reacher said, “No fixed address.”

The guy wrote it down. Asked, “Occupation?”

“None.”

“Purpose of your visit to Despair?”

“Tourism.”

“How do you propose to support yourself during your visit?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. I didn’t anticipate a major problem. This isn’t exactly London or Paris or New York City.”

“Please answer the question.”

“I have a bank balance,” Reacher said.

The guy wrote it all down. Then he sniffed and skipped his pen back over the lines he had already completed and paused. Asked, “What was your last address?”

“An APO box.”

“APO?”

“Army Post Office.”

“You’re a veteran?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How long did you serve?”

“Thirteen years.”

“Until?”

“I mustered out ten years ago.”

“Unit?”

“Military Police.”

“Final rank?”

“Major.”

“And you haven’t had a permanent address since you left the army?”

“No, I haven’t.”

The guy made a pronounced check mark against one of his lines. Reacher saw his pen move four times, twice in one direction and twice in the other. Then the guy asked, “How long have you been out of work?”

“Ten years,” Reacher said.

“You haven’t worked since you left the army?”

“Not really.”

“A retired major couldn’t find a job?”

“This retired major didn’t want to find a job.”

“Yet you have a bank balance?”

“Savings,” Reacher said. “Plus occasional casual labor.”

The guy made another big check mark. Two vertical scratches, two horizontal. Then he asked, “Where did you stay last night?”

“In Hope,” Reacher said. “In a motel.”

“And your bags are still there?”

“I don’t have any bags.”

The guy made another check mark.

“You walked here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“No buses, and I didn’t find a ride.”

“No. Why here?”

“Tourism,” Reacher said again.

“What had you heard about our little town?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Yet you decided to visit?”

“Evidently.”

“Why?”

“I found the name intriguing.”

“That’s not a very compelling reason.”

“I have to be somewhere. And thanks for the big welcome.”

The guy made a fourth big check mark. Two vertical lines, two horizontal. Then he skipped his pen down his list, slowly and methodically, fourteen answers, plus four diversions to the margin for the check marks. He said, “I’m sorry, but I find you to be in contravention of one of Despair’s town ordinances. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Leave town.”

“What ordinance?”

“Vagrancy,” the guy said.

7

Reacher said, “There’s a vagrancy ordinance here?”

The judge nodded and said, “As there is in most Western towns.”

“I never came across one before.”

“Then you’ve been very lucky.”

“I’m not a vagrant.”

“Homeless for ten years, jobless for ten years, you ride buses or beg rides or walk from place to place performing occasional casual labor, what else would you call yourself?”

“Free,” Reacher said. “And lucky.”

The judge nodded again, and said, “I’m glad you see a silver lining.”

“What about my First Amendment right of free assembly?”

“The Supreme Court ruled long ago. Municipalities have the right to exclude undesirables.”

“Tourists are undesirable? What does the Chamber of Commerce think about that?”

“This is a quiet, old-fashioned town. People don’t lock their doors. We don’t feel the need. Most of the keys were lost years ago, in our grandparents’ time.”

“I’m not a thief.”

“But we err on the side of caution. Experience elsewhere shows that the itinerant jobless have always been a problem.”

“Suppose I don’t go? What’s the penalty?”

“Thirty days’ imprisonment.”

Reacher said nothing. The judge said, “The officer will drive you to the town line. Get a job and a home, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. But don’t come back until you do.”

The cop took him downstairs again and gave him back his cash and his passport and his ATM card and his toothbrush. Nothing was missing. Everything was there. Then the cop handed over his shoelaces and waited at the booking desk while he threaded them through the eyelets in his shoes and pulled them tight and tied them off. Then the cop put his hand on the butt of his gun and said, “Car.” Reacher walked ahead of him through the lobby and stepped out the street door. It was late in the day, late in the year, and it was getting dark. The cop had moved his cruiser. Now it was parked nose-out.

“In the back,” the cop said.

Reacher heard a plane in the sky, far to the west. A single engine, climbing hard. A Cessna or a Beech or a Piper, small and lonely in the vastness. He pulled the car door and slid inside. Without handcuffs he was a lot more comfortable. He sprawled sideways, like he would in a taxi or a Town Car. The cop leaned in after him, one hand on the roof and one on the door, and said, “We’re serious. You come back, we’ll arrest you, and you’ll spend thirty days in that same cell. Always assuming you don’t look at us cross-eyed and we shoot you for resisting.”

“You married?” Reacher asked.

“Why?”

“I thought not. You seem to prefer jerking off.”

The cop stood still for a long moment and then slammed the door and got in the front. He took off down the street and headed north. Six blocks to Main Street, Reacher figured. If he turns left, takes me onward, to the west, maybe I’ll let it go. But if he turns right, takes me back east to Hope, maybe I won’t.

Reacher hated turning back.

Forward motion was his organizing principle.

Six blocks, six stop signs. At each one the cop braked gently and slowed and looked left and looked right and then rolled forward. At Main Street he came to a complete halt. He paused. Then he hit the gas and nosed forward and swung the wheel.

And turned right.

East.

Back toward Hope.

8

Reacher saw the dry goods emporium and the gas station and the abandoned motor court and the vacant unbuilt lot slide by and then the cop accelerated to a steady sixty miles an hour. The tires rumbled over the rough road and stray pebbles spattered the underside and bounced and skittered away to the shoulders. Twelve minutes later the car slowed and coasted and braked and came to a stop. The cop climbed out and put his hand on the butt of his gun and opened Reacher’s door.

“Out,” he said.

Reacher slid out and felt Despair’s grit under his shoes.

The cop jerked his thumb, to the east, where it was darker.

“That way,” he said.

Reacher stood still.

The cop took the gun off his belt. It was a Glock nine millimeter, boxy and dull in the gloom. No safety catch. Just a latch on the trigger, already compressed by the cop’s meaty forefinger.

“Please,” the cop said. “Just give me a reason.”

Reacher stepped forward, three paces. Saw the moon rising on the far horizon. Saw the end of Despair’s rough gravel and the start of Hope’s smooth blacktop. Saw the inch-wide trench between, filled with black compound. The car was stopped with its push bars directly above it. The expansion joint. The boundary. The line. Reacher shrugged and stepped over it. One long pace, back to Hope.

The cop called, “Don’t bother us again.”

Reacher didn’t reply. Didn’t turn around. Just stood and faced east and listened as the car backed up and turned and crunched away across the stones. When the sound was all gone in the distance he shrugged again and started walking.

He walked less than twenty yards and saw headlights a mile away, coming straight at him out of Hope. The beams were widely spaced, bouncing high, dipping low. A big car, moving fast. It came at him out of the gathering darkness and when it was a hundred yards away he saw it was another cop car. Another Crown Vic, painted black and white, police spec, with push bars, lights, and antennas. It stopped short of him and a spotlight mounted on the windshield pillar lit up and swiveled jerkily and played its beam all the way up and down him twice, coming to rest on his face, blinding him. Then it clicked off again and the car crept forward, tires hissing on the smooth asphalt surface, and stopped again with the driver’s door exactly alongside him. The door had a gold shield painted on it, with HPD scrolled across the middle. Hope Police Department. The window buzzed down and a hand went up and a dome light came on inside. Reacher saw a woman cop at the wheel, short blonde hair backlit by the weak yellow bulb above and behind her.

“Want a ride?” she asked.

“I’ll walk,” Reacher said.

“It’s five miles to town.”

“I walked out here, I can walk back.”

“Riding is easier.”

“I’m OK.”

The woman was quiet for a moment. Reacher listened to the Crown Vic’s engine. It was idling patiently. Belts were turning, a muffler was ticking as it cooled. Then Reacher moved on. He took three steps and heard the car’s transmission go into reverse and then the car came alongside him again, driving backward, keeping pace as he walked. The window was still down. The woman said, “Give yourself a break, Zeno.”

Reacher stopped. Said, “You know who Zeno was?”

The car stopped.

“Zeno of Cittium,” the woman said. “The founder of Stoicism. I’m telling you to stop being so long-suffering.”

“Stoics have to be long-suffering. Stoicism is about the unquestioning acceptance of destinies. Zeno said so.”

“Your destiny is to return to Hope. Doesn’t matter to Zeno whether you walk or ride.”

“What are you anyway—a philosopher or a cop or a cab driver?”

“The Despair PD calls us when they’re dumping someone at the line. As a courtesy.”

“This happens a lot?”

“More than you’d think.”

“And you come on out and pick us up?”

“We’re here to serve. Says so on the badge.”

Reacher looked down at the shield on her door. HPD was written across the scroll in the center, but To Protect was written at the top of the escutcheon, with And Serve added at the bottom.

“I see,” he said.

“So get in.”

“Why do they do it?”

“Get in and I’ll tell you.”

“You going to refuse to let me walk?”

“It’s five miles. You’re grumpy now, you’ll be real cranky when you arrive in town. Believe me. We’ve seen it before. Better for all of us if you ride.”

“I’m different. Walking calms me down.”

The woman said, “I’m not going to beg, Reacher.”

“You know my name?”

“Despair PD passed it on. As a courtesy.”

“And a warning?”

“Maybe. Right now I’m trying to decide whether to take them seriously.”

Reacher shrugged again and put his hand on the rear door handle.

“Up front, you idiot,” the woman said. “I’m helping you, not arresting you.”

So Reacher looped around the trunk and opened the front passenger door. The seat was all hemmed in with radio consoles and a laptop terminal on a bracket, but the space was clear. No hat. He crammed himself in. Not much legroom, because of the security screen behind him. Up front the car smelled of oil and coffee and perfume and warm electronics. The laptop screen showed a GPS map. A small arrow was pointing west and blinking away at the far edge of a pink shape labeled Hope Township. The shape was precisely rectangular, almost square. A fast and arbitrary land allocation, like the state of Colorado itself. Next to it Despair township was represented by a light purple shape. Despair was not rectangular. It was shaped like a blunt wedge. Its eastern border matched Hope’s western limit exactly, then it spread wider, like a triangle with the point cut off. Its western line was twice as long as its eastern and bordered gray emptiness. Unincorporated land, Reacher figured. Spurs came off I-70 and I-25 and ran through the unincorporated land and clipped Despair’s northwestern corner.

The woman cop buzzed her window back up and craned her neck and glanced behind her and K-turned across the road. She was slightly built under a crisp tan shirt. Probably less than five feet six, probably less than a hundred and twenty pounds, probably less than thirty-five years old. No jewelry, no wedding band. She had a Motorola radio on her collar and a tall gold badge bar pinned over her left breast. According to the badge her name was Vaughan. And according to the badge she was a pretty good cop. She seemed to have won a bunch of awards and commendations. She was good-looking, but different from regular women. She had seen stuff they hadn’t. Reacher was familiar with the concept. He had served with plenty of women, back in the MPs.

He asked, “Why did Despair run me out?”

The woman called Vaughan turned out the dome light. Now she was front-lit by red instrument lights from the dash and the pink and purple glow from the GPS screen and white scatter from the headlight beams on the road.

“Look at yourself,” she said.

“What about me?”

“What do you see?”

“Just a guy.”

“A blue-collar guy in work clothes, fit, strong, healthy, and hungry.”

“So?”

“How far did you get?”

“I saw the gas station and the restaurant. And the town court.”

“Then you didn’t see the full picture,” Vaughan said. She drove slow, about thirty miles an hour, as if she had plenty more to say. She had one hand on the wheel, with her elbow propped on the door. Her other hand lay easy in her lap. Five miles at thirty miles an hour was going to take ten minutes. Reacher wondered what she had to tell him, that less than ten minutes wouldn’t cover.

He said, “I’m more green-collar than blue.”

“Green?”

“I was in the army. Military cop.”

“When?”

“Ten years ago.”

“You working now?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“Well what?”

“You were a threat.”

“How?”

“West of downtown Despair is the biggest metal recycling plant in Colorado.”

“I saw the smog.”

“There’s nothing else in Despair’s economy. The metal plant is the whole ballgame.”

“A company town,” Reacher said.

Vaughan nodded at the wheel. “The guy who owns the plant owns every brick of every building. Half the population works for him full time. The other half works for him part time. The full-time people are happy enough. The part-time people are insecure. They don’t like competition from outsiders. They don’t like people showing up, looking for casual labor, willing to work for less.”

“I wasn’t willing to work at all.”

“You tell them that?”

“They didn’t ask.”

“They wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Standing around every morning waiting for a nod from the foreman does things to people. It’s kind of feudal. The whole place is feudal. The money the owner pays out in wages comes right back at him, in rents. Mortgages too. He owns the bank. No relief on Sundays, either. There’s one church and he’s the lay preacher. You want to work, you have to show up in a pew from time to time.”

“Is that fair?”

“He likes to dominate. He’ll use anything.”

“So why don’t people move on?”

“Some have. Those who haven’t never will.”

“Doesn’t this guy want people coming in to work for less?”

“He likes the people he owns, not strangers.”

“So why were those guys worried?”

“People always worry. Company towns are weird.”

“And the town judge toes their line?”

“It’s an elected position. And the vagrancy ordinance is for real. Most towns have one. We do, for sure, in Hope. No way around it, if someone complains.”

“But nobody complained in Hope. I stayed there last night.”

“We’re not a company town.”

Vaughan slowed. Hope’s first built-up block was ahead in the distance. Reacher recognized it. A mom-and-pop hardware store. That morning an old guy had been putting stepladders and wheelbarrows out on the sidewalk, building a display. Now the store was all closed up and dark.

He asked, “How big is the Hope PD?”

Vaughan said, “Me and two others and a watch commander.”

“You got sworn deputies?”

“Four of them. We don’t use them often. Traffic control, maybe, if we’ve got construction going on. Why?”

“Are they armed?”

“No. In Colorado, deputies are civilian peace officers. Why?”

“How many deputies does the Despair PD have?”

“Four, I think.”

“I met them.”

“And?”

“Theoretically, what would the Hope PD do if someone showed up and got in a dispute with one of your deputies and busted his jaw?”

“We’d throw that someone’s sorry ass in jail, real quick.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Zero tolerance for assaults on peace officers, plus an obligation to look after our own, plus pride and self-respect.”

“Suppose there was a self-defense issue?”

“Civilian versus a peace officer, we’d need some kind of amazing reasonable doubt. You’d have felt the same in the MPs.”

“That’s for damn sure.”

“So why did you ask?”

Reacher didn’t answer directly. Instead he said, “I’m not a Stoic, really. Zeno preached the passive acceptance of fate. I’m not like that. I’m not very passive. I take challenges personally.”

“So?”

“I don’t like to be told where I can go and where I can’t.”

“Stubborn?”

“It annoys me.”

Vaughan slowed some more and pulled in at the curb. Put the transmission in Park and turned in her seat.

“My advice?” she said. “Get over it and move on. Despair isn’t worth it.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Go get a meal and a room for the night,” Vaughan said. “I’m sure you’re hungry.”

Reacher nodded.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said. “And it was a pleasure to meet you.”

He opened the door and slid out to the sidewalk. Hope’s version of Main Street was called First Street. He knew there was a diner a block away on Second Street. He had eaten breakfast there. He set out walking toward it and heard Vaughan’s Crown Vic move away behind him. He heard the civilized purr of its motor and the soft hiss of its tires on the asphalt. Then he turned a corner and didn’t hear it anymore.

An hour later he was still in the diner. He had eaten soup, steak, fries, beans, apple pie, and ice cream. Now he was drinking coffee. It was a better brew than at the restaurant in Despair. And it had been served in a mug that was cylindrical in shape. Still too thick at the rim, but much closer to the ideal.

He was thinking about Despair, and he was wondering why getting him out of town had been more important than keeping him there and busting him for the assault on the deputy.

9

The diner in Hope had a bottomless cup policy for its coffee and Reacher abused it mercilessly. He drank most of a Bunn flask all on his own. His waitress became fascinated by the spectacle. She didn’t need to be asked for refills. She came back every time he was ready, sometimes before he was ready, as if she was willing him to break some kind of a world record for consumption. He left her a double tip, just in case the owner fined her for her generosity.

It was full dark when he left the diner. Nine o’clock in the evening. He figured it would stay dark for another ten hours. Sunrise was probably around seven, in that latitude at that time of year. He walked three blocks to where he had seen a small grocery. In a city it would have been called a bodega and in the suburbs it would have been franchised, but in Hope it was still what it had probably always been, a cramped and dusty family-run enterprise selling the things people needed when they needed them.

Reacher needed water and protein and energy. He bought three one-liter bottles of Poland Spring and six chocolate chip PowerBars and a roll of black thirteen-gallon garbage bags. The clerk at the register packed them all carefully into a paper sack and Reacher took his change and carried the sack four blocks to the same motel he had used the night before. He got the same room, at the end of the row. He went inside and put the sack on the nightstand and lay down on the bed. He planned on a short rest. Until midnight. He didn’t want to walk seventeen miles twice on the same day.

Reacher got off the bed at midnight and checked the window. No more moon. There was thick cloud and patches of distant starlight. He packed his purchases into one of the black garbage bags and slung it over his shoulder. Then he left the motel and headed up to First Street in the darkness and turned west. There was no traffic. No pedestrians. Few lit windows. It was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. The sidewalk ended twenty feet west of the hardware store. He stepped off the curb onto the asphalt and kept on going. Route-march speed, four miles an hour. Not difficult on the smooth flat surface. He built up a rhythm to the point where he felt he could keep on walking forever and never stop.

But he did stop. He stopped five miles later, a hundred yards short of the line between Hope and Despair, because he sensed a shape ahead of him in the blackness. A hole in the darkness. A car, parked on the shoulder. Mostly black, some hints of white.

A police cruiser.

Vaughan.

The name settled in his mind and at the exact same time the car’s lights flicked on. High beams. Very bright. He was pinned. His shadow shot out behind him, infinitely long. He shielded his eyes, left-handed, because his bag was in his right. He stood still. The lights stayed on. He stepped off the road and looped out over the crusted sand to the north. The lights died back and the spot on the windshield pillar tracked him. It wouldn’t leave him. So he changed direction and headed straight for it.

Vaughan turned the light off and buzzed her window down as he approached. She was parked facing east, with two wheels on the sand and the rear bumper of the car exactly level with the expansion joint in the road. Inside her own jurisdiction, but only just. She said, “I thought I might see you here.”

Reacher looked at her and said nothing.

She asked, “What are you doing?”

“Taking a stroll.”

“That all?”

“No law against it.”

“Not here,” Vaughan said. “But there is if you take three more steps.”

“Not your law.”

“You’re a stubborn man.”

Reacher nodded. “I wanted to see Despair and I’m going to.”

“It isn’t that great of a place.”

“I like to make my own mind up about things like that.”

“They’re serious, you know. Either you’ll spend thirty days in jail or they’ll shoot you.”

“If they find me.”

“They’ll find you. I found you.”

“I wasn’t hiding from you.”

“Did you hurt a deputy over there?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking about the question you asked me.”

“I don’t know for sure what he was.”

“I don’t like the idea of deputies getting hurt.”

“You wouldn’t have liked the deputy. If that’s what he was.”

“They’ll be looking for you.”

“How big is their department?”

“Smaller than ours. Two cars, two guys, I think.”

“They won’t find me.”

“Why are you going back?”

“Because they told me not to.”

“Is it worth it?”

“What would you do?”

Vaughan said, “I’m an estrogen-based life-form, not testosterone. And I’m all grown up now. I’d suck it up and move on. Or stay in Hope. It’s a nice place.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Reacher said.

“You won’t. Either I’ll be picking you up right here a month from now or I’ll be reading about you in the newspaper. Beaten and shot while resisting arrest.”

“Tomorrow,” Reacher said. “I’ll buy you a late dinner.”

He moved on, one pace, two, three, and then he stepped over the line.

10

He got off the road immediately. The Hope PD had predicted that he would rise to the challenge. It was an easy guess that the Despair PD would make the same assessment. And he didn’t want to blunder into a parked Despair cruiser. That event would have an altogether different conclusion than a pleasant chat with the pretty Officer Vaughan.

He looped fifty yards into the scrub north of the road. Near enough to retain a sense of direction, far enough to stay out of a driver’s peripheral vision. The night was cold. The ground was uneven. No chance of getting close to four miles an hour. No chance at all. He had no flashlight. A light would hurt him more than help him. It would be visible for a mile. It would be worse than climbing up on a rock and yelling Here I am.

A slow mile later the clock in his head told him it was quarter to two in the morning. He heard an aero engine again, far away to the west, blipping and feathering. A single-engine plane, coming in to land. A Cessna, or a Beech, or a Piper. Maybe the same one he had heard take off, hours before. He listened to it until he imagined it had touched down and taxied. Then he started walking again.

Four hours later he was about level with the center of downtown, three hundred yards out in the scrub. He knew he must have left a healthy trail of footprints, but he didn’t particularly care. He doubted that the Despair PD maintained a kennel full of bloodhounds or ran aerial surveillance from a helicopter. As long as he stayed off the roads and the sidewalks he was as good as invisible.

He sensed the bulk of another boat-sized table rock and hunkered down behind it. The night was still cold. He unwrapped his stuff and drank water and ate a PowerBar. Then he repacked his bag and stood up behind the rock and turned to study the town. He leaned against the rock with his elbows out and his forearms flat on its top surface and his chin resting on his stacked fists. At first he saw nothing. Just darkness and stillness and the hidden glow from occasional lit windows. Farther in the distance he saw more lights and sensed more activity. The residential areas, he guessed. He figured people were getting up for work.

Ten minutes later he saw headlight beams coming north. Two, three sets. Their light funneled through the cross-streets and bounced and dipped and threw long shadows straight toward him. He stayed where he was, just watching. The beams paused at Main Street and then swept west. More came after them. Soon every cross-street was lit up bright by long processions of vehicles. It was like the day was dawning in the south. There were sedans and pick-up trucks and old-model SUVs. They all drove north to Main Street and paused and jostled and swung west, toward where Vaughan had said the recycling plant was.

A company town.

Six o’clock in the morning.

The people of Despair, going to work.

Reacher followed them on foot, four hundred yards to the north. He stumbled on through the crusted scrub, tracking the road. The last truck got ahead of him and he followed the red chain of tail lights with his eyes. A mile or more ahead the horizon was lit up with an immense glow. Not dawn. That was going to happen behind him, to the east. The glow to the west was from arc lighting. There seemed to be a huge rectangle of lights on poles surrounding some kind of a massive arena. It looked to be about a mile long. Maybe a half-mile wide. The biggest metal recycling plant in Colorado, Vaughan had said.

No kidding, Reacher thought. Looks like the biggest in the world.

White steam and dirty black smoke drifted here and there in the glow. In front of it the long convoy of vehicles peeled off and parked in neat rows on acres of beaten scrub. Their headlights swung and bounced and then shut down, one by one. Reacher holed up again, a quarter-mile short and a quarter-mile north of the gate. Watched men file inside, shuffling forward in a long line, lunch pails in their hands. The gate was narrow. A personnel entrance, not a vehicle entrance. Reacher guessed the vehicle entrance was on the other side of the complex, convenient for the highway spurs.

The sky was lightening behind him. Landscape features were becoming visible. The terrain was basically flat, but up close it was pitted with enough humps and dips and rocks to provide decent concealment. The earth was sandy and tan. There were occasional scrubby bushes. There was nothing interesting anywhere. Nothing to attract hikers. Not attractive picnic territory. Reacher expected to spend the day alone.

The last worker filed inside and the personnel gate closed. Reacher moved on, staying hidden, but looking for elevation where he could find it. The recycling plant was truly enormous. It was ringed by an endless solid wall welded out of metal plates painted white. The wall was topped with a continuous horizontal cylinder six feet in diameter. Impossible to climb. Like a supermax prison. His initial estimate of the size of the place had been conservative. It looked bigger than the town itself. Like a tail that wags a dog. Despair was not a town with a plant attached. It was a factory with a dormitory outside its gates.

Work was starting inside. Reacher heard the groan of heavy machinery and the ringing sound of metal on metal and saw the flare and spark of cutting torches. He moved all the way around to the northwest corner, fifteen minutes’ fast walk. The vehicle gate was right there. A section of the wall was standing open. A wide road ran from the horizon straight to it. The road looked to be smooth and solid. Built for heavy trucks.

The road was a problem. If Reacher wanted to continue his counterclockwise progress, he would have to cross it somewhere. He would be exposed. His dark clothes would stand out in the coming daylight. But to who, exactly? He guessed the Despair cops would stay in town east of the plant. And he didn’t expect any roving surveillance teams out of the plant itself.

But that was exactly what he got.

Two white Chevy Tahoes came out of the vehicle gate. They drove fifty yards down the road and then plunged off it, one to the left and one to the right, onto beaten tracks of packed scrub created by endless previous excursions. The Tahoes had raised off-road suspensions and big white-lettered tires and the word Security stenciled in black across their doors. They drove slowly, maybe twenty miles an hour, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, as if they intended to lap the plant all day long.

Reacher hated turning back.

He struck out west, staying in the dips and washes as far as possible and keeping boulders between himself and the plant. Ten minutes later the natural terrain gave way to where the land had been cleared and graded for the road. The near shoulder was maybe ten yards wide, made of packed sand dotted with stunted second-growth weeds. The roadbed was fifteen or sixteen yards wide. Two lanes, with a bright yellow line between. Smooth blacktop. The far shoulder was another ten yards wide.

Total distance, thirty-five yards, minimum.

Reacher was no kind of a sprinter. As any kind of a runner, he was pretty slow. His best attempt at speed was barely faster than a quick walk. He crouched just east of the last available table rock and watched for the Tahoes.

They came around much less often than he had predicted. Which was inexplicable, but good. What wasn’t good was that the road itself was starting to get busy. Reacher knew he should have seen that coming. The largest recycling plant in Colorado clearly needed input, and it clearly produced output. They didn’t dig stuff out of the scrub and then bury it again. They trucked scrap in and then trucked ingots out. A lot of scrap, and a lot of ingots. Shortly after seven o’clock in the morning a flat-bed semi roared out of the gate and lumbered onto the road. It had Indiana plates and was laden with bright steel bars. It drove a hundred yards and was passed by another flat-bed heading inward. This one had Oregon plates and was loaded with crushed cars, dozens of them, their chipped and battered paint layered like thin stripes. A container truck with Canadian plates left the plant and passed the Oregon semi. Then the counterclockwise Tahoe showed up and bounced across the roadbed and kept on going. Three minutes later its clockwise partner rotated in the opposite direction. Another semi left the plant and another headed in. A mile west Reacher saw a third approaching, wobbling and shimmering in the morning haze. Way behind it, a fourth.

It was like Times Square.

Inside the plant, giant gantry cranes were moving and cascades of welding sparks were showering everywhere. Smoke was rising and fierce blasts of heat from furnaces were distorting the air. There were muted noises, the chatter of air hammers, clangs of sheet metal, metallic tearing sounds, deep sonorous rings like massive impacts on a blacksmith’s anvil.

Reacher drank more water and ate another PowerBar. Then he repacked his plastic sack and waited for the Tahoes to pass one more time and just got up and walked across the road. He passed within forty yards of two speeding trucks, one inbound, one outbound. He accepted the risk of being seen. For one thing, he had no real choice. For another, he figured it was a question of degrees of separation. Would a truck driver tell a plant foreman he had seen a pedestrian? Would the plant foreman call the security office? Would the security office call the town cops?

Unlikely. And even if it happened, response time would be slow. Reacher would be back in the weeds well before the Crown Vics showed up. And the Crown Vics would be no good off-road. The Tahoes would stick to their own private itineraries.

Safe enough.

He made it onward to where the rocks and the humps and the dips resumed and headed south, tracking the long side of the plant. The wall continued. It was maybe fourteen feet high, welded out of what looked like the roofs of old cars. Each panel had a slight convex curve. They made the whole thing look quilted. The six-foot cylinder along the top looked to be assembled from the same material, molded in giant presses to the correct contour, and welded together in a seamless run. Then the whole assembly had been sprayed glossy white.

It took Reacher twenty-six minutes to walk the length of the plant, which made it more than a mile long. At its far southwest corner he saw why the Tahoes were so slow. There was a second walled compound. Another huge rectangle. Similar size. Tire tracks showed that the Tahoes were lapping it too, passing and repassing through a fifty-yard bottleneck in a giant distorted figure 8. Reacher was suddenly exposed. His position was good, relative to the first compound. Not so good, relative to the second. The clockwise Tahoe would sweep through the gap and make a wide turn and come pretty close. He backed off again, aiming for a low boulder. He got halfway across a shallow pan of scrub.

Then he heard tires on dirt.

He dropped flat to the ground, facedown, watching.

11

The white Tahoe came through the bottleneck at twenty miles an hour. Reacher heard its tires on the scrub. They were wide and soft, squirming on the loose surface, squelching small stones, shooting them left and right. He heard the hiss of a power-steering pump and the wet throb of a big V-8 as the vehicle turned. It came through a shallow curve, close enough for Reacher to smell its exhaust.

He lay still.

The truck drove on. Didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. The driver was high up in the left-hand seat. Reacher knew like most drivers his eyes were following the turn he intended to make. He was anticipating the curve. Looking ahead and to his left, not sideways to his right.

Bad technique, for a security guard.

Reacher lay still until the Tahoe was long gone. Then he stood up and dusted himself off and headed west and sat down again behind the low boulder he had been heading for.

The second compound was walled with fieldstone, not metal. It was residential. There was ornamental planting, including screens of trees placed to block any view of industrial activity. There was a huge house visible in the distance, built out of wood in a chalet style more suitable to Vail than Despair. There were outbuildings, including an oversized barn that was probably an aircraft hangar, because inside the whole length of the far wall was a wide graded strip of dirt that could only be a runway. It had three windsocks on poles, one at each end and one in the middle.

Reacher moved on. He stayed well away from the fifty-yard bottleneck. Too easy to be spotted. Too easy to be run over. Instead, he looped west again and aimed to circle the residential compound too, as if both enclosures were one giant obstacle.

By noon he was holed up way to the south, looking back at the recycling plant from the rear. The residential compound was closer, and to his left. Far beyond it to the northwest was a small gray smudge in the distance. A low building, or a group of buildings, maybe five or six miles away. Indistinct. Maybe close to the road. Maybe a gas station or a truck stop or a motel. Probably outside of Despair’s town limit. Reacher couldn’t make out any detail. He turned back to the nearer sights. Work continued inside the plant. Nothing much was happening at the house. He saw the Tahoes circling and watched the trucks on the distant road. There was a continuous stream of them. Mostly flat-beds, but there were some container trucks and some box trucks. They came and went and the sky was stained dark with diesel in a long ribbon all the way to the horizon. The plant belched smoke and flame and sparks. Its noise was softened by distance, but up close it must have been fearsome. The sun was high and the day had gotten warm.

He watched and listened and then he headed east, for a look at the far side of town.

It was bright daylight, so he stayed cautious and moved slow. There was a long empty gap between the plant and the town itself. Maybe three miles. He covered them in a straight line, well out in the scrub. By the middle of the afternoon he was level with where he had been at six o’clock in the morning, but due south of the settlement, not due north, looking at the backs of houses, not the fronts of commercial buildings.

The houses were neat and uniform, cheaply but adequately built. They were mostly one-story ranches with shingle siding and asphalt roofs. Some were painted, some were stained wood. Some had garages, some didn’t. Some had picket fences around their yards, some yards were open. Most had satellite dishes, tilted up and facing southwest like a regiment of expectant faces. People were visible, here and there. Mostly women, some children. Some men. The part-time workers, Reacher guessed, unlucky today. He moved along a hundred-yard arc, left and right, east and west, changing his point of view. But what he saw didn’t change. Houses, in a strange little suburb, tight in to the town, but miles from anywhere else, with empty vastness all around. The skies were high and huge. The Rockies looked a million miles away. Reacher suddenly understood that Despair had been built by people who had given up. They had come over the rise and seen the far horizon and had quit there and then. Just pitched camp and stayed where they were. And their descendants were still in town, working or not working according to the plant owner’s whim.

Reacher ate his last PowerBar and drained the last of his water. He hacked a hole in the scrub with his heel and buried the wrappers and the empty bottles and his garbage bag. Then he dodged from rock to rock and got a little closer to the houses. The low noise coming from the distant plant was getting quieter. He guessed it was close to quitting time. The sun’s last rays were kissing the tops of the distant mountains. The temperature was falling.

The first cars and pick-up trucks straggled back close to twelve hours after they had left. A long day. They were heading east, toward darkness, so they had their headlights on. Their beams swung south down the cross-streets, bouncing and dipping, coming Reacher’s way. Then they turned again, and scattered toward driveways and garages and car ports and random patches of oil-stained earth. They stopped moving, one after another, and the beams died. Engines stopped. Doors creaked open and slammed shut. Lights were on inside houses. The blue glow of televisions was visible behind windows. The sky was darkening.

Reacher moved closer. Saw men carrying empty lunch pails into kitchens, or standing next to their cars, stretching, rubbing their eyes with the backs of their hands. He saw hopeful boys with balls and mitts looking for a last game of catch. He saw some fathers agree and some refuse. He saw small girls run out with treasures that required urgent inspection.

He saw the big guy who had blocked the end of the restaurant table. The guy who had held the police car’s door like a concierge with a taxicab. The senior deputy. He got out of the old listing crew-cab pick-up truck that Reacher had seen outside the restaurant. He clutched his stomach with both hands. He passed by his kitchen door and stumbled on into his yard. There was no picket fence. The guy kept on going, past a cultivated area, out into the scrub beyond.

Straight toward Reacher.

Then the guy stopped walking and stood still on planted feet and bent from the waist and threw up in the dirt. He stayed doubled up for maybe twenty seconds and then straightened, shaking his head and spitting.

Reacher moved closer. He got within twenty yards and then the guy bent again and threw up for a second time. Reacher heard him gasp. Not in pain, not in surprise, but in annoyance and resignation.

“You OK?” Reacher called, out of the gloom.

The guy straightened up.

“Who’s there?” he called.

Reacher said, “Me.”

“Who?”

Reacher moved closer. Stepped into a bar of light coming from a neighbor’s kitchen window.

The guy said, “You.”

Reacher nodded. “Me.”

“We threw you out.”

“Didn’t take.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“We could discuss that further, if you like. Right now. Right here.”

The guy shook his head. “I’m sick. Not fair.”

Reacher said, “It wouldn’t be fair if you weren’t sick.”

The guy shrugged.

“Whatever,” he said. “I’m going inside now.”

“How’s your buddy? With the jaw?”

“You bust him up good.”

“Tough,” Reacher said.

“I’m sick,” the guy said again. “I’m going inside. I didn’t see you, OK?”

“Bad food?”

The guy paused. Then he nodded.

“Must have been,” he said. “Bad food.”

He headed for his house, slow and stumbling, holding his belt one-handed, like his pants were too big for him. Reacher watched him go, and then he turned and walked back to the distant shadows.

He moved fifty yards south and fifty yards east of where he had been before, in case the sick guy changed his mind and decided he had seen something after all. He wanted some latitude, if the cops started a search in the guy’s back yard. He wanted to begin the chase outside of a flashlight beam’s maximum range.

But no cops showed up. Clearly the guy never called. Reacher waited the best part of thirty minutes. Way to the west he heard the aero engine again, straining hard, climbing. The small plane, taking off once more. Seven o’clock in the evening. Then the noise died away and the sky went full dark and the houses closed up tight. Clouds drifted in and covered the moon and the stars. Apart from the glow from draped windows the world went pitch black. The temperature dropped like a stone. Nighttime, in open country.

A long day.

Reacher stood up and loosened the neck of his shirt and set off east, back toward Hope. When the lit houses fell away he looped left into the dark and skirted where he knew the dry goods emporium and the gas station and the abandoned motor court and the vacant lot must be. He couldn’t see the line of the road. He moved toward where he figured it must be, as close as he dared. Eventually he saw a black stripe in the darkness. Indistinct, but different from the black plain that was the scrubland. He lined himself up with it and fixed its direction in his mind and retreated sideways a safe ten yards and then moved on forward. Walking was difficult in the dark. He stumbled into bushes. He held his hands out in front of him to ward off table rocks. Twice he tripped on low football-sized boulders, and fell. Twice he got up and brushed himself off and staggered onward.

Stubborn, Vaughan had said.

Stupid, Reacher thought.

The third time he tripped was not on a rock. It was on something altogether softer and more yielding.

12

Reacher sprawled forward and some kind of a primitive instinct made him avoid landing right on top of the thing he had tripped on. He kicked his legs up and tucked his head in and rolled, like judo. He ended up on his back, winded, and hurting from having landed on sharp stones, one under his shoulder and one under his hip. He lay still for a moment and then rolled on his front and pushed himself to his knees and shuffled around until he was facing the way he had come. Then he opened his eyes wide and stared back into the blackness.

Too dark to see.

No flashlight.

He shuffled forward on both knees and one hand, with the other held low in front of him and curled into a fist. A slow yard later it touched something.

Soft.

Not fur.

Cloth.

He spread his fingers. Clamped them loosely. Rubbed his fingertips and the ball of his thumb left and right. Squeezed.

A leg. He had his hand on a human leg. The size and heft of a thigh was unmistakable. He could feel a hamstring under his fingers and a long quadriceps muscle under his thumb. The cloth was thin and soft. Probably cotton twill, worn and washed many times. Old chinos, maybe.

He moved his hand to the left and found the back of a knee. He pushed his thumb around and underneath and found the kneecap. It was jammed down in the sand. He skipped his hand three feet to the right and slid it up a back to a shoulder blade. Walked his fingers to a neck, and a nape, and an ear.

No pulse.

Cold flesh. No warmer than the nighttime air.

Below the ear was a collar. Knit, rolled, faintly abrasive. A polo shirt, maybe. He shuffled closer on his knees and opened his eyes so wide the muscles in his face hurt.

Too dark to see.

Five senses. Too dark to see, nothing to hear. He wasn’t about to try tasting anything. That left smell, and touch. Reacher had smelled more than his fair share of deceased organisms. This one wasn’t particularly offensive. Unwashed clothes, stale sweat, ripe hair, dry sun-baked skin, the faintest trace of methane from early decomposition. No voided bowel or bladder.

No blood.

No perfume, no cologne.

No real information.

So, touch. He used both hands and started with the hair. It was not long, not short, and tousled. Maybe an inch and a half or two inches. Wiry, with a tendency to wave. Caucasian. Impossible to say what color. Under it was a small, neat skull.

Man or woman?

He ran his thumbnail the length of the spine. No bra strap under the shirt, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He poked and probed the back of the ribcage like a blind man reading Braille. Light skeleton, pronounced backbone, light and stringy musculature. Narrow shoulders. Either a thin boy, slightly wasted, or a fit woman. The kind who runs marathons or rides her bike for a hundred miles at a time.

So, which?

Only one way to find out.

He found folds of cloth at the hip and the shoulder and rolled the body on its side. It was reasonably heavy. The way his hands were spaced told him it was maybe five-eight in height, and the weight was probably close to one-forty, which made it probable it was male. A woman marathon runner would have been much lighter, maybe a hundred and five. He kept hold of the bunches of cloth and eased the body past the vertical and let it flop on its back. Then he spread his fingers and started again at the head.

A man, for sure.

The forehead was ridged and bony and the chin and the upper lip were rough with maybe four days of stubble. The cheeks and the throat were smoother.

A young man, not much more than a boy.

The cheekbones were pronounced. The eyes were hard and dry, like marbles. The facial skin was firm and shrunken. It was slightly gritty with grains of sand, but not much had stuck. The skin was too dry. The mouth was dry, inside and out. The tendons in the neck were obvious. They stood out like cords. No fat anywhere. Barely any flesh at all.

Starved and dehydrated, Reacher thought.

The polo shirt had two buttons, both of them undone. No pocket, but it had a small embroidered design on the left chest. Under it there was a thin pectoral muscle and hard ribs. The pants were loose at the waist. No belt. The shoes were some kind of athletic sneakers, hook-and-loop closures, thick waffle soles.

Reacher wiped his hands on his own pants and then started again from the feet upward, looking for a wound. He went at it like a conscientious airport screener starting a patient full-body search. He did the front and rolled the body again and did the back.

He found nothing.

No gashes, no gunshot wounds, no dried blood, no swellings, no contusions, no broken bones.

The hands were small and fairly delicate, but a little calloused. The nails were ragged. No rings on the fingers. No pinkie ring, no class ring, no wedding band.

He checked the pants pockets, two front, two rear.

He found nothing.

No wallet, no coins, no keys, no phone. Nothing at all.

He sat back on his heels and stared up at the sky, willing a cloud to move and let some moonlight through. But nothing happened. The night stayed dark. He had been walking east, had fallen, had turned around. Therefore he was now facing west. He pushed back off his knees and stood up. Made a quarter-turn to his right. Now he was facing north. He started walking, slowly, with small steps, concentrating hard on staying straight. He bent and swept his hands flat on the scrub and found four stones the size of baseballs. Straightened again and walked on, five yards, ten, fifteen, twenty.

He found the road. The packed scrub gave way to the tarred pebbles. He used his toe to locate the edge. He bent and butted three of his stones together and stacked the fourth on top, like a miniature mountain cairn. Then he turned a careful one-eighty and walked back, counting his paces. Five yards, ten, fifteen, twenty. He stopped and squatted and felt ahead of him.

Nothing.

He shuffled forward with his arms out straight, patting downward, searching, until his right palm came down on the corpse’s shoulder. He glanced up at the sky. Still solid.

Nothing more to be done.

He stood up again and turned left and blundered on through the dark, east toward Hope.

13

The closer he got to the Hope town line, the more he let himself drift left toward the road. Hope wasn’t a big place, and he didn’t want to miss it in the dark. Didn’t want to walk on forever, all the way back to Kansas. The clock in his head said that it was midnight. He had made good progress, close to three miles an hour, despite falling four more times and detouring every thirty minutes to confirm he wasn’t drastically off course.

Despair’s cheap road crunched loudly under his feet but the hard level surface allowed him to speed up. He hit a good rhythm and covered what was left of the last mile in less than fifteen minutes. It was still very cold. Still pitch dark. But he sensed the new blacktop ahead. He felt it coming. Then he felt the surface change under his feet. His left foot pushed off rough stones and his right foot landed on velvet-smooth asphalt.

He was back over the line.

He stood still for a second. Held his arms wide and looked up at the black sky. Then bright headlights hit him head-on and he was trapped in their beams. A spotlight clicked on and played over him, head to foot and back again.

A cop car.

Then the beams died as suddenly as they had appeared and a dome light came on inside the car and showed a small figure at the wheel. Tan shirt, fair hair. Half a smile.

Vaughan.

She was parked head-on, with her push bars twenty yards inside her own jurisdiction, just waiting in the dark. Reacher walked toward her, moving left, skirting her hood and her fender. He stepped to the passenger door and put his hand on the handle. Opened it up and crammed himself into the space inside. The interior was full of soft radio chatter and the smell of perfume.

He asked, “So are you free for a late dinner?”

She said, “I don’t eat with jerks.”

“I’m back, like I said I would be.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Not really.”

“I’m working the graveyard shift. I don’t get off until seven.”

“Breakfast, then. Drinking coffee with jerks is not the same as eating with them.”

“I don’t drink coffee for breakfast. I need to sleep in the daytime.”

“Tea, then.”

“Tea has caffeine, too.”

“Milk shake?”

“Maybe.” She was resting easy in the seat, one elbow on the door and the other hand in her lap.

“How did you see me coming?” Reacher asked. “I didn’t see you.”

“I eat a lot of carrots,” Vaughan said. “And our video has night-vision enhancement.” She leaned forward and tapped a black box mounted high on the dash. “Traffic camera and a hard disc recorder.” She moved her hand again and hit a key on the computer. The screen changed to a ghostly green wide-angle image of the scene ahead. The road was lighter than the scrub. It had retained more of the daytime heat than its surroundings. Or less. Reacher wasn’t sure.

“I saw you half a mile away,” Vaughan said. “A little green speck.” She tapped another key and spooled back through the time code and Reacher saw himself, a luminous sliver in the dark, getting bigger, coming closer.

“Very fancy,” he said.

“Homeland Security money. Got to spend it on something.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“An hour.”

“Thanks for waiting.”

Vaughan started the motor and backed up a little and then turned across the width of the road, in a wide arc that took the front wheels off the blacktop and through the sand on the shoulder. She got straightened up and accelerated.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Not really,” Reacher said.

“You should eat anyway.”

“Where?”

“The diner will still be open. It stays open all night.”

“In Hope? Why?”

“This is America. It’s a service economy.”

“Whatever, I might go take a nap instead. I walked a long way.”

“Go eat in the diner first.”

“Why?”

“Because I think you should. Nutrition is important.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Someone was asking about you.”

“Who?”

“Some girl.”

“I don’t know any girls.”

“She wasn’t asking about you personally,” Vaughan said. “She was asking if anyone had been thrown out of Despair more recently than her.”

“She was thrown out?”

“Four days ago.”

“They throw women out, too?”

“Vagrancy isn’t a gender-specific offense.”

“Who is she?”

“Just some kid. I told her about you. No names, but I said you might be eating in the diner tonight. I was assuming you would get out OK. I try to live on the sunny side of the street. So I think she might come looking for you.”

“What does she want?”

“She wouldn’t tell me,” Vaughan said. “But my impression was her boyfriend is missing.”

14

Reacher got out of Vaughan’s cruiser on First Street and walked straight down to Second. The diner was all lit up inside and three booths were occupied. A guy on his own, a young woman on her own, two guys together. Maybe some Hope residents commuted for work. Not to Despair, obviously, but maybe to other towns. Maybe to other states, like Kansas or Nebraska. And those were big distances. Maybe they all got back too late to face KP at home. Or maybe they were shift workers, just starting out, with long trips ahead of them.

The sidewalks close to the diner were deserted. No girls hanging around. No girls watching who was going in and coming out. No girls leaning on walls. No girls hiding in the shadows. Reacher pulled the door and went in and headed for a booth in the far corner where he could sit with his back protected and see the whole room at once. Pure habit. He never sat any other way. A waitress came over and gave him a napkin and silverware and a glass of ice water. Not the same waitress he had met before, during his caffeine marathon. This one was young, and not particularly tired, even though it was very late. She could have been a college student. Maybe the diner stayed open all night to give people jobs, as well as meals. Maybe the owner felt some kind of a civic responsibility. Hope seemed to be that kind of a town.

The menu was in a chromium clip at the end of the table. It was a laminated card with pictures of the food on it. The waitress came back and Reacher pointed to a grilled cheese sandwich and said, “And coffee.” The waitress wrote it down and walked away and Reacher settled back and watched the street through the windows. He figured that the girl who was looking for him might pass by once every fifteen or twenty minutes. It was what he would have done. Longer intervals might make her miss his visit. Most diner customers were in and out pretty fast. He was sure there was a trade association somewhere with the exact data. His personal average was certainly less than half an hour. Shorter if he was in a hurry, longer if it was raining. The longest stay he could recall might be upward of two hours. The shortest in recent memory was the day before, in Despair. One fast cup of coffee, supervised by hostile glares.

But nobody passed by on the sidewalk. Nobody glanced in through the windows. The waitress came over with his sandwich and a mug of coffee. The coffee was fresh and the sandwich was OK. The cheese was sticky in his mouth and less flavorful than a Wisconsin product would have been, but it was palatable. And Reacher was no kind of a gourmet. He rated food quality as either adequate or not adequate, and the adequate category was always by far the larger of the two. So he ate and drank and enjoyed it all well enough.

After fifteen minutes he gave up on the girl. He figured she wasn’t coming. Then he changed his mind. He quit staring out at the sidewalk and started looking at the other customers inside the diner and realized she was already in there, waiting for him.

The young woman, sitting three booths away.

Stupid, Reacher, he thought.

He had figured that if their relative positions had been reversed he would have walked by every fifteen or twenty minutes and checked through the windows. But in reality, he wouldn’t have done that. He would have come in out of the cold and sat down and waited for his mark to come to him.

Like she had.

Pure common sense.

She was maybe nineteen or twenty years old, dirty blonde hair with streaks, wearing a short denim skirt and a white sweatshirt with a word on it that might have been the name of a college football team. Her features didn’t add up all the way to beauty, but she had the kind of irresistible glowing good health that he had seen before in American girls of her station and generation. Her skin was perfect. It was honey-colored with the remnant of a great summer tan. Her teeth were white and regular. Her eyes were vivid blue. Her legs were long, and neither lean nor heavy. Shapely, Reacher thought. An old-fashioned word, but the right one. She was wearing sneakers with tiny white socks that ended below her ankles. She had a bag. It was beside her on the bench. Not a purse, not a suitcase. A messenger bag, gray nylon, with a broad flap.

She was the one he was waiting for. He knew that because as he watched her in his peripheral vision he could see her watching him in hers. She was sizing him up and deciding whether to approach.

Deciding against, apparently.

She had had a full fifteen minutes to make her decision. But she hadn’t gotten up and walked over. Not because of good manners. Not because she hadn’t wanted to disturb him while he was eating. He suspected her concept of etiquette didn’t quite stretch that far, and even if it did, then a missing boyfriend would have overwhelmed it. She just didn’t want to get involved with him. That was all. Reacher didn’t blame her. Look at yourself, Vaughan had said. What do you see? He had no illusions about what the girl three booths away was seeing. No illusions about his appearance or his appeal, in the eyes of someone like her. It was late at night, she was looking at an old guy twice her age, huge, untidy, disheveled, somewhat dirty, and surrounded by an electric stay-away aura he had spent years cultivating, like a sign on the rear end of a fire truck: Stay Back 200 Feet.

So she was going to sit tight and wait him out. That was clear. He was disappointed. Primarily because of the questions surrounding the dead boy in the dark, but also because in a small corner of his mind he would have liked to be the kind of guy that pretty girls could walk up to. Not that he would have taken it anywhere. She was wholesome and he was twice her age. And her boyfriend was dead, which made her some kind of a widow.

She was still watching him. He had moved his gaze so that he could see her reflection in the window next to her. She was looking up, looking down, kneading her fingers, glancing suddenly in his direction as new thoughts came to her, and then glancing away again as she resolved them. As she found reasons to stay well away from him. He gave it five more minutes and then fished in his pocket for cash. He didn’t need a check. He knew what the sandwich and the coffee cost, because the prices had been printed on the menu. He knew what the local sales tax percentage was, and he was capable of calculating it for himself in his head. He knew how to work out a fifteen percent tip, for the college-age waitress who had also stayed well away from him.

He folded small bills lengthwise and left them on the table. Got up and headed for the door. At the last minute he changed direction and stepped over to the young woman’s booth and slid in opposite her.

“My name is Reacher,” he said. “I think you wanted to talk to me.”

The girl looked at him and blinked and opened her mouth and closed it again and spoke at the second attempt.

She said, “Why would you think that?”

“I met a cop called Vaughan. She told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That you were looking for someone who had been to Despair.”

“You’re mistaken,” the girl said. “It wasn’t me.”

She wasn’t a great liar. Not great at all. Reacher had come up against some real experts, in his previous life. This one had all the tells on display. The gulps, the false starts, the stammers, the fidgets, the glances to her right. Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When they were lying. This girl was glancing right so much she was in danger of getting whiplash.

“OK,” Reacher said. “I apologize for disturbing you.”

But he didn’t move. He stayed where he was, sitting easy, filling most of a vinyl bench made for two. Up close the girl was prettier than she had looked from a distance. She had a dusting of freckles and a mobile, expressive mouth.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Just a guy,” Reacher said.

“What kind of a guy?”

“The judge in Despair called me a vagrant. So I’m that kind of a guy, I guess.”

“No job?”

“Not for a long time.”

She said, “They called me a vagrant, too.”

Her accent was unspecific. She wasn’t from Boston or New York or Chicago or Minnesota or the Deep South. Maybe somewhere in the Southwest. Arizona, perhaps.

He said, “In your case I imagine they were inaccurate.”

“I’m not sure of the definition, exactly.”

“It comes from the Old French word waucrant,” Reacher said. “Meaning one who wanders idly from place to place without lawful or visible means of support.”

“I’m in college,” she said.

“So you were unfairly accused.”

“They just wanted me out of there.”

“Where do you go to school?”

She paused. Glanced to her right.

“Miami,” she said.

Reacher nodded. Wherever she went to school, it wasn’t Miami. Probably wasn’t anywhere in the East. Was probably somewhere on the West Coast. Southern California, possibly. Unskilled liars like her often picked a mirror image, when lying about geography.

“What’s your major?” he asked.

She looked straight at him and said, “The history of the twentieth century.” Which was probably true. Young people usually told the truth about their areas of expertise, because they were proud of them, and they were worried about getting caught out on alternatives. Often they didn’t have alternatives. Being young, it came with the territory.

“Feels like yesterday to me,” he said. “Not history.”

“What does?”

“The twentieth century.”

She didn’t reply. Didn’t understand what he meant. She remembered maybe eight or nine years of the old century, maximum, and from a kid’s perspective. He remembered slightly more of it.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She glanced to her right. “Anne.”

Reacher nodded again. Whatever her name was, it wasn’t Anne. Anne was probably a sister’s name. Or a best friend’s. Or a cousin’s. Generally people liked to stay close to home with phony names.

The girl who wasn’t called Anne asked, “Were you unfairly accused?”

Reacher shook his head. “A vagrant is exactly what I am.”

“Why did you go there?”

“I liked the name. Why did you go there?”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a place.”

“How much of it did you see?”

“Most of it, the second time.”

“You went back?”

“I took a good look around, from a distance.”

“And?”

“It still wasn’t much of a place.”

The girl went quiet. Reacher saw her weighing her next question. How to ask it. Whether to ask it. She put her head on one side and looked beyond him.

“Did you see any people?” she asked.

“Lots of people,” Reacher said.

“Did you see the airplane?”

“I heard one.”

“It belongs to the guy with the big house. Every night he takes off at seven and comes back at two o’clock in the morning.”

Reacher asked, “How long were you there?”

“One day.”

“So how do you know the plane flies every night?”

She didn’t answer.

“Maybe someone told you,” Reacher said.

No reply.

Reacher said, “No law against joyriding.”

“People don’t joyride at night. There’s nothing to see.”

“Good point.”

The girl was quiet for another minute, and then she asked, “Were you in a cell?”

“Couple of hours.”

“Anyone else in there?”

“No.”

“When you went back, what people did you see?”

Reacher said, “Why don’t you just show me his picture?”

“Whose picture?”

“Your boyfriend’s.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Your boyfriend is missing. As in, you can’t find him. That was Officer Vaughan’s impression, anyway.”

“You trust cops?”

“Some of them.”

“I don’t have a picture.”

“You’ve got a big bag. Probably all kinds of things in there. Maybe a few pictures.”

She said, “Show me your wallet.”

“I don’t have a wallet.”

“Everyone has a wallet.”

“Not me.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t prove a negative.”

“Empty your pockets.”

Reacher nodded. He understood. The boyfriend is some kind of a fugitive. She asked about my job. She needs to know I’m not an investigator. An investigator would have compromising ID in his wallet. He lifted his butt off the bench and dug out his cash, his old passport, his ATM card, his motel key. His toothbrush was in his room, assembled, standing upright in a plastic glass next to the sink. The girl looked at his stuff and said, “Thanks.”

He said, “Now show me his picture.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Isn’t he?”

“He’s my husband.”

“You’re young, to be married.”

“We’re in love.”

“You’re not wearing a ring.”

Her left hand was on the table. She withdrew it quickly, into her lap. But there had been no ring on her finger, and no tan line.

“It was kind of sudden,” she said. “Kind of hurried. We figured we’d get rings later.”

“Isn’t it a part of the ceremony?”

“No,” she said. “That’s a myth. I’m not pregnant either, just in case that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Not for a minute.”

“Good.”

“Show me the picture.”

She hauled the gray messenger bag into her lap and rooted around for a moment and came out with a fat leather wallet. There was a billfold part straining against a little strap, and a change-purse part. There was a plastic window on the outside with a California driver’s license behind it, with her picture on it. She unpopped the little strap and opened the billfold and riffled through a concertina of plastic photograph windows. Slid a slim fingertip into one of them and eased a snapshot out. She passed it across the table. It had been cut down out of a standard six-by-four one-hour print. The edges were not entirely straight. It showed the girl standing on a street with golden light and palm trees and a row of neat boutiques behind her. She was smiling widely, vibrant with love and joy and happiness, leaning forward a little as if her whole body was clenching with the onset of uncontrollable giggles. She was in the arms of a guy about her age. He was very tall and blond and heavy. An athlete. He had blue eyes and a buzz cut and a dark tan and a wide smile.

“This is your husband?” Reacher asked.

The girl said, “Yes.”

15

Reacher squared the snapshot on the tabletop in front of him. Looked at the girl across from him and asked, “How old is this photo?”

“Recent.”

“May I see your driver’s license?”

“Why?”

“Something I need to check.”

“I don’t know.”

“I already know your name isn’t Anne. I know you don’t go to school in Miami. My guess would be UCLA. This photograph looks like it was taken somewhere around there. It has that LA kind of feel.”

The girl said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m not here to hurt you.”

She paused and then slid her wallet across the table. He glanced at her license. Most of it was visible behind the milky plastic window. Her name was Lucy Anderson. No middle name. Anderson, hence Anne, perhaps.

“Lucy,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

“I’m sorry about not telling you the truth.”

“Don’t worry about it. Why should you?”

“My friends call me Lucky. Like a mispronunciation. Like a nickname.”

“I hope you always are.”

“Me too. I have been so far.”

Her license said she was coming up to twenty years old. It said her address was an apartment on a street he knew to be close to the main UCLA campus. He had been in LA not long before. Its geography was still familiar to him. Her sex was specified as female, which was clearly accurate, and her eyes were listed as blue, which was an understatement.

She was five feet eight inches tall.

Which made her husband at least six feet four. Maybe six feet five. He towered over her. He was huge. He looked to be well over two hundred pounds. Maybe Reacher’s own size. Maybe even bigger. His arms were as thick as the palm trunks behind him.

Not the guy in the dark. Not even close. Way too big. The guy in the dark had been Lucy Anderson’s size.

Reacher slid the wallet back across the table. Followed it with the photograph.

Lucy Anderson asked, “Did you see him?”

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“He has to be there somewhere.”

“What’s he running from?”

She looked to the right. “Why would he be running from something?”

“Just a wild guess,” Reacher said.

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy.”

“How did you know my name wasn’t Anne? How did you know I’m not in school in Miami?”

“A long time ago I was a cop. In the military. I still know things.”

Her skin whitened behind her freckles. She fumbled the photograph back into its slot and fastened the wallet and thrust it deep into her bag.

“You don’t like cops, do you?” Reacher asked.

“Not always,” she said.

“That’s unusual, for a person like you.”

“Like me?”

“Safe, secure, middle class, well brought up.”

“Things change.”

“What did your husband do?”

She didn’t answer.

“And who did he do it to?”

No answer.

“Why did he go to Despair?”

No response.

“Were you supposed to meet him there?”

Nothing.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” Reacher said. “I didn’t see him. And I’m not a cop anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.”

“What would you do now? If you were me?”

“I’d wait right here in town. Your husband looks like a capable guy. He’ll probably show up, sooner or later. Or get word to you.”

“I hope so.”

“Is he in school, too?”

Lucy Anderson didn’t answer that. Just secured the flap of her bag and slid off the bench sideways and stood up and tugged the hem of her skirt down. Five-eight, maybe one-thirty, blonde and blue, straight, strong, and healthy.

“Thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good luck,” he said. “Lucky.”

She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and walked to the door and pushed out to the street. He watched her huddle into her sweatshirt and step away through the cold.

He was in bed before two o’clock in the morning. The motel room was warm. There was a heater under the window and it was blasting away to good effect. He set the alarm in his head for six-thirty. He was tired, but he figured four and a half hours would be enough. In fact they would have to be enough, because he wanted time to shower before heading out for breakfast.

16

It was a cliché that cops stop in at diners for doughnuts before, during, and after every shift, but clichés were clichés only because they were so often true. Therefore Reacher slipped into the same back booth at five to seven in the morning and fully expected to see Officer Vaughan enter inside the following ten minutes.

Which she did.

He saw her cruiser pull up and park outside. Saw her climb out onto the sidewalk and press both hands into the small of her back and stretch. Saw her lock up and pirouette and head for the door. She came in and saw him and paused for a long moment and then changed direction and slid in opposite him.

He asked, “Strawberry, vanilla, or chocolate? It’s all they’ve got.”

“Of what?”

“Milk shakes.”

“I don’t drink breakfast with jerks.”

“I’m not a jerk. I’m a citizen with a problem. You’re here to help. Says so on the badge.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The girl found me.”

“And had you seen her boyfriend?”

“Her husband, actually.”

“Really?” Vaughan said. “She’s young to be married.”

“I thought so, too. She said they’re in love.”

“Cue the violins. So had you seen him?”

“No.”

“So where’s your problem?”

“I saw someone else.”

“Who?”

“Not saw, actually. It was in the pitch dark. I fell over him.”

“Who?”

“A dead guy.”

“Where?”

“On the way out of Despair.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely,” Reacher said. “A young adult male corpse.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

“I wanted time to think about it.”

“You’re yanking my chain. There’s what out there, a thousand square miles? And you just happen to trip over a dead guy in the dark? That’s a coincidence as big as a barn.”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “I figure he was doing the same thing I was doing. Walking east from Despair to Hope, staying close enough to the road to be sure of his direction, far enough away to be safe. That put him in a pretty specific channel. I might have missed him by a yard, but I was never going to miss him by a mile.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“But he didn’t make it all the way,” Reacher said. “I think he was exhausted. His knees were driven pretty deep in the sand. I think he fell on his knees and pitched forward on his front and died. He was emaciated and dehydrated. No wounds, no trauma.”

“What, you autopsied this guy? In the dark?”

“I felt around.”

“Felt?”

“Touch,” Reacher said. “It’s one of the five senses we rely on.”

“So who was this guy?”

“Caucasian, by the feel of his hair. Maybe five-eight, one-forty. Young. No ID. I don’t know if he was dark or fair.”

“This is unbelievable.”

“It happened.”

“Where exactly?”

“Maybe four miles out of town, eight miles short of the line.”

“Definitely in Despair, then.”

“No question.”

“You should call the Despair PD.”

“I wouldn’t piss on the Despair PD if it was on fire.”

“Well, I can’t help you. It’s not my jurisdiction.”

The waitress came over. The day-shift woman, the witness to the coffee marathon. She was busy and harassed. The diner was filling up fast. Small-town America, at breakfast time. Reacher ordered coffee and eggs. Vaughan ordered coffee, too. Reacher took that as a good sign. He waited until the waitress had bustled away and said, “You can help me.”

Vaughan said, “How?”

“I want to go back and take a look, right now, in the daylight. You can drive me. We could be in and out, real fast.”

“It’s not my town.”

“Unofficial. Off duty. Like a tourist. You’re a citizen. You’re entitled to drive on their road.”

“Would you be able to find the place again?”

“I left a pile of stones on the shoulder.”

“I can’t do it,” Vaughan said. “I can’t poke around over there. And I sure as hell can’t take you there. You’ve been excluded. It would be unbelievably provocative.”

“Nobody would know.”

“You think? They’ve got one road in and one road out and two cars.”

“Right now they’re eating doughnuts in their restaurant.”

“You sure you didn’t dream this?”

“No dreaming involved,” Reacher said. “The kid had eyeballs like marbles and the inside of his mouth was parched like shoe leather. He’d been wandering for days.”

The waitress came back with the coffee and the eggs. The eggs had a sprig of fresh parsley arrayed across them. Reacher picked it off and laid it on the side of the plate.

Vaughan said, “I can’t drive a Hope police cruiser in Despair.”

“So what else have you got?”

She was quiet for a long moment. She sipped her coffee. Then she said, “I have an old truck.”

She made him wait on the First Street sidewalk near the hardware store. Clearly she wasn’t about to take him home while she changed her clothes and her vehicle. A wise precaution, he thought. Look at yourself, she had said. What do you see? He was getting accustomed to negative answers to that question. The hardware store was still closed. The window was full of tools and small consumer items. The aisle behind the door was piled high with the stuff that would be put out on the sidewalk later. For many years Reacher had wondered why hardware stores favored sidewalk displays. There was a lot of work involved. Repetitive physical labor, twice a day. But maybe consumer psychology dictated that large utilitarian items sold better when associated with the rugged outdoors. Or maybe it was just a question of space. He thought for a moment and came to no firm conclusion and moved away and leaned on a pole that supported a crosswalk sign. The morning had come in cold and gray. Thin cloud started at ground level. The Rockies weren’t visible at all, neither near nor far.

Close to twenty minutes later an old Chevrolet pick-up truck pulled up on the opposite curb. Not a bulbous old classic from the forties or a swooping space-age design from the fifties or a muscley El Camino from the sixties. Just a plain secondhand American vehicle about fifteen years old, worn navy blue paint, steel rims, small tires. Vaughan was at the wheel. She was wearing a red Windbreaker zipped to the chin and a khaki ball cap pulled low. A good disguise. Reacher wouldn’t have recognized her if he hadn’t been expecting her. He used the crosswalk and climbed in next to her, onto a small vinyl seat with an upright back. The cab smelled of leaked gasoline and cold exhaust. There were rubber floor mats under his feet, covered with desert dust, worn and papery with age. He slammed the door and Vaughan took off again. The truck had a wheezy four-cylinder motor. In and out real fast, he had said. But clearly fast was going to be a relative concept.

They covered Hope’s five miles of road in seven minutes. A hundred yards short of the line Vaughan said, “We see anybody at all, you duck down.” Then she pressed harder on the gas and the expansion joint thumped under the wheels and the tires set up a harsh roar over Despair’s sharp stones.

“You come here much?” Reacher asked.

“Why would I?” Vaughan said.

There was no traffic ahead. Nothing either coming or going. The road speared straight into the hazy distance, rising and falling. Vaughan was holding the truck at a steady sixty. A mile a minute, probably close to its comfortable maximum.

Seven minutes inside enemy territory, she started to slow.

“Watch the left shoulder,” Reacher said. “Four stones, piled up.”

The weather had settled to a luminous gray light. Not bright, not sunny, but everything was illuminated perfectly. No glare, no shadows. There was some trash on the shoulder. Not much, but enough that Reacher’s small cairn was not going to stand out in glorious isolation like a beacon. There were plastic water bottles, glass beer bottles, soda cans, paper, small unimportant parts of vehicles, all caught on a long ridge of pebbles that had been washed to the side of the road by the passage of tires. Reacher twisted around in his seat. Nobody behind. Nobody ahead. Vaughan slowed some more. Reacher scanned the shoulder. The stones had felt big and obvious in his hands, in the dark. But now in the impersonal daylight they were going to look puny in the vastness.

“There,” Reacher said.

He saw his little cairn thirty yards ahead on the left. Three stones butted together, the fourth balanced on top. A speck in the distance, in the middle of nowhere. To the south the land ran all the way to the horizon, flat and essentially featureless, dotted with pale bushes and dark rocks and pitted with wash holes and low ridges.

“This is the place?” Vaughan asked.

“Twenty-some yards due south,” Reacher said.

He checked the road again. Nothing ahead, nothing behind.

“We’re OK,” he said.

Vaughan passed the cairn and pulled to the right shoulder and turned a wide circle across both lanes. Came back east and stopped exactly level with the stones. She put the transmission in park and left the engine running.

“Stay here,” she said.

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. He got out and stepped over the stones and waited on the shoulder. He felt tiny in the lit-up vastness. In the dark the world had shrunk to an arm’s length around him. Now it felt huge again. Vaughan stepped alongside him and he walked south with her through the scrub, at a right angle to the road, five paces, ten, fifteen. He stopped after twenty paces and confirmed his direction by glancing behind him. Then he stood still and checked all around, first on a close radius, and then wider.

He saw nothing.

He stood on tiptoe and craned his neck and searched.

There was nothing there.

17

Reacher turned a careful one-eighty and stared back at the road to make sure he hadn’t drifted too far either west or east. He hadn’t. He was right on target. He walked five paces south, turned east, walked five more paces, turned around, walked ten steps west.

Saw nothing.

“Well?” Vaughan called.

“It’s gone,” he said.

“You were just yanking my chain.”

“I wasn’t. Why would I?”

“How accurate could you have been, with the stones? In the dark?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

Vaughan walked a small quiet circle, all around. Shook her head.

“It isn’t here,” she said. “If it ever was.”

Reacher stood still in the emptiness. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear, except Vaughan’s truck idling patiently twenty yards away. He walked ten more yards east and started to trace a wide circle. A quarter of the way through it, he stopped.

“Look here,” he said.

He pointed at the ground. At a long line of shallow crumbled oval pits in the sand, each one a yard apart.

Vaughan said, “Footprints.”

“My footprints,” Reacher said. “From last night. Heading home.”

They turned west and backtracked. Followed the trail of his old footprints back toward Despair. Ten yards later they came to the head of a small diamond-shaped clearing. The clearing was empty.

“Wait,” Reacher said.

“It’s not here,” Vaughan said.

“But it was here. This is the spot.”

The crusted sand was all churned up by multiple disturbances. There were dozens of footprints, facing in all directions. There were scrapes and slides and drag marks. There were small depressions in the scrub, some fairly precise, but most not, because of the way the dry sand had crumbled and trickled down into the holes.

Reacher said, “Tell me what you see.”

“Activity,” Vaughan said. “A mess.”

“A story,” Reacher said. “It’s telling us what happened.”

“Whatever happened, we can’t stay here. This was supposed to be in and out, real fast.”

Reacher stood up straight and scanned the road, west and east.

Nothing there.

“Nobody coming,” he said.

“I should have brought a picnic,” Vaughan said.

Reacher stepped into the clearing. Crouched down and pointed two-fingered at a pair of neat parallel depressions in the center of the space. Like two coconut shells had been pressed down into the sand, hard, on a north-south axis.

“The boy’s knees,” he said. “This is where he gave it up. He staggered to a stop and half-turned and fell over.” Then he pointed to a broad messed-up stony area four feet to the east. “This is where I landed after I tripped over him. On these stones. I could show you the bruises, if you like.”

“Maybe later,” Vaughan said. “We need to get going.”

Reacher pointed to four sharp impressions in the sand. Each one was a rectangle about two inches by three, at the corners of a larger rectangle about two feet by five.

“Gurney feet,” he said. “Folks came by and collected him. Maybe four or five of them, judging by all the footprints. Official folks, because who else carries gurneys?” He stood up and checked and pointed north and west, along a broad ragged line of footprints and crushed vegetation. “They came in that way, and carried him back out in the same direction, back to the road. Maybe to a coroner’s wagon, parked a little ways west of my cairn.”

“So we’re OK,” Vaughan said. “The proper authorities have got him. Problem solved. We should get going.”

Reacher nodded vaguely and gazed due west. “What should we see over there?”

“Two sets of incoming footprints,” Vaughan said. “The boy’s and yours, both heading east out of town. Separated by time, but not much separated by direction.”

“But it looks like there’s more than that.”

They skirted the clearing and formed up again west of it. They saw four separate lines of footprints, fairly close together.

“Two incoming, two outgoing,” Reacher said.

“How do you know?” Vaughan asked.

“The angles. Most people walk with their toes out.”

The newer of the incoming tracks showed big dents in the sand a yard or more apart, and deep. The older showed smaller dents, closer together, less regular, and shallower.

“The kid and me,” Reacher said. “Heading east. Separated in time. I was walking, he was stumbling and staggering.”

The two outgoing tracks were both brand new. The sand was less crumbled and therefore the indentations were more distinct, and fairly deep, fairly well spaced, and similar.

“Reasonably big guys,” Reacher said. “Heading back west. Recently. Not separated in time.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means they’re tracking the kid. Or me. Or both of us. Finding out where we’d been, where we’d come from.”

“Why?”

“They found the body, they were curious.”

“How did they find the body in the first place?”

“Buzzards,” Reacher said. “It’s the obvious way, on open ground.”

Vaughan stood still for a moment. Then she said, “Back to the truck, right now.”

Reacher didn’t argue. She had beaten him to the obvious conclusion, but only by a heartbeat.

18

The old Chevy was still idling patiently. The road was still empty. But they ran. They ran and they flung the truck’s doors open and dumped themselves inside. Vaughan slammed the transmission into gear and hit the gas. They didn’t say a word until they thumped back over the Hope town line, eight long minutes later.

“Now you’re really a citizen with a problem,” Vaughan said. “Aren’t you? The Despair cops might be dumb, but they’re still cops. Buzzards show them a dead guy, they find the dead guy’s tracks, they find a second set of tracks that show some other guy caught up with the dead guy along the way, they find signs of a whole lot of falling down and rolling around, they’re going to want a serious talk with the other guy. You can bet on that.”

Reacher said, “So why didn’t they follow my tracks forward?”

“Because they know where you were going. There’s only Hope, or Kansas. They want to know where you started. And what are they going to find?”

“A massive loop. Buried PowerBar wrappers and empty water bottles, if they look hard enough.”

Vaughan nodded at the wheel. “Clear physical evidence of a big guy with big feet and long legs who paid a planned clandestine visit the night after they threw a big guy with big feet and long legs out of town.”

“Plus one of the deputies saw me.”

“You sure?”

“We talked.”

“Terrific.”

“The dead guy died of natural causes.”

“You sure? You felt around in the dark. They’re going to put that boy on a slab.”

“I’m not in Despair anymore. You can’t go there, they can’t come here.”

“Small departments don’t work homicides, you idiot. We call in the State Police. And the State Police can go anywhere in Colorado. And the State Police get cooperation anywhere in Colorado. And you’re in my logbook from yesterday. I couldn’t deny it even if I wanted to.”

“You wouldn’t want to?”

“I don’t know anything about you. Except that I’m pretty sure you beat on a deputy in Despair. You practically admitted that to me. Who knows what else you did?”

“I didn’t do anything else.”

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher asked, “What happens next?”

“Always better to get out in front of a thing like this. You should call in and volunteer information.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was a soldier. I never volunteer for anything.”

“Well, I can’t help you. It’s out of my hands. It was never in my hands.”

“You could call,” Reacher said. “You could call the State Police and find out what their thinking is.”

“They’ll be calling us soon enough.”

“So let’s get out in front, like you said. Early information is always good.”

Vaughan didn’t reply to that. Just lifted off the gas and slowed as they hit the edge of town. The hardware guy had his door open and was piling his stuff on the sidewalk. He had some kind of a trick stepladder that could be put in about eight different positions. He had set it up like a painter’s platform good for reaching second-story walls. Vaughan made a right on the next block and then a left, past the back of the diner. The streets were broad and pleasant and the sidewalks had trees. She pulled in to a marked-off parking space outside a low brick building. The building could have been a suburban post office. But it wasn’t. It was the Hope Police Department. It said so, in aluminum letters neatly fixed to the brick. Vaughan shut off the engine and Reacher followed her down a neat brick path to the police station’s door. The door was locked. The station was closed. Vaughan used a key from her bunch and said, “The desk guy gets in at nine.”

Inside, the place still looked like a post office. Dull, worn, institutional, bureaucratic, but somewhat friendly. Accessible. Oriented toward service. There was a public inquiry counter and a space behind it with two desks. A watch commander’s office behind a solid door, in the same corner a postmaster’s would be. Vaughan stepped past the counter and headed for a desk that was clearly hers. Efficient and organized, but not intimidating. There was an old-model computer front and center, and a console telephone next to it. She opened a drawer and found a number in a book. Clearly contact between the Hope PD and the State Police was rare. She didn’t know the number by heart. She dialed the phone and asked for the duty desk and identified herself and said, “We have a missing person inquiry. Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty years of age, five-eight, one-forty. Can you help us with that?” Then she listened briefly and her eyes flicked left and then right and she said, “We don’t have a name.” She was asked another question and she glanced right and said, “Can’t tell if he’s dark or fair. We’re working from a black-and-white photograph. It’s all we have.”

Then there was a pause. Reacher saw her yawn. She was tired. She had been working all night. She moved the phone a little ways from her ear and Reacher heard the faint tap of a keyboard in the distant state office. Denver, maybe, or Colorado Springs. Then a voice came back on and Vaughan clamped the phone tight and Reacher didn’t hear what it had to say.

Vaughan listened and said, “Thank you.”

Then she hung up.

“Nothing to report,” she said. “Apparently Despair didn’t call it in.”

“Natural causes,” Reacher said. “They agreed with me.”

Vaughan shook her head. “They should have called it in anyway. An unexplained death out in open country, that’s at least a county matter. Which means it would show up on the State Police system about a minute later.”

“So why didn’t they call it in?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not our problem.”

Reacher sat down at the other desk. It was a plain government-issue piece of furniture, with steel legs and a thin six-by-three fiberboard top laminated with a printed plastic approximation of rosewood or koa. There was a modesty panel and a three-drawer pedestal bolted to the right-hand legs. The chair had wheels and was covered with gray tweed fabric. Military Police furniture had been different. The chairs had been covered with vinyl. The desks had been steel. Reacher had sat behind dozens of them, all over the world. The views from his windows had been dramatically different, but the desks had been all the same. Their contents, too. Files full of dead people and missing people. Some mourned, some not.

He thought of Lucy Anderson, called Lucky by her friends. The night before, in the diner. He recalled the way she had wrung her hands. He looked across at Vaughan and said, “It is our problem, kind of. The kid might have people worried about him.”

Vaughan nodded. Went back to her book. Reacher saw her flip forward from C for Colorado State Police to D for Despair Police Department. She dialed and he heard a loud reply in her ear, as if physical proximity made for more powerful electrical current in the wires. She ran through the same faked inquiry, missing person, Caucasian male, about twenty, five-eight, one-forty, no name, coloring unclear because of a monochrome photograph. There was a short pause and then a short reply.

Vaughan hung up.

“Nothing to report,” she said. “They never saw such a guy.”

19

Reacher sat quiet and Vaughan moved stuff around on her desk. She put her keyboard in line with her monitor and put her mouse in line with her keyboard and squared her phone behind it and then adjusted everything until all the edges were either parallel or at perfect right angles to each other. Then she put pencils away in drawers and flicked at dust and crumbs with the edge of her palm.

“The gurney marks,” she said.

“I know,” Reacher said. “Apart from them, I could have invented this whole thing.”

“If they were gurney marks.”

“What else could they have been?”

“Nothing, I guess. They were from one of those old-fashioned stretchers, with the little skids, not the wheels.”

“Why would I invent anything anyway?”

“For attention.”

“I don’t like attention.”

“Everyone likes attention. Especially retired cops. It’s a recognized pathology. You try to insinuate yourselves back into the action.”

“Are you going to do that when you retire?”

“I hope not.”

“I don’t, either.”

“So what’s going on over there?”

“Maybe the kid was local,” Reacher said. “They knew who he was, so he wasn’t a candidate for your missing persons inquiry.”

Vaughan shook her head. “Still makes no sense. Any unexplained death out-of-doors has got to be reported to the county coroner. In which case it would have showed up on the state system. Purely as a statistic. The State Police would have said, Well, hey, we heard there was a dead guy in Despair this morning, maybe you should check it out.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Because nothing has been called in from Despair. Which just doesn’t add up. What the hell are they doing with the corpse? There’s no morgue over there. Not even any cold storage, as far as I know. Not even a meat locker.”

“So they’re doing something else with him,” Reacher said.

“Like what?”

“Burying him, probably.”

“He wasn’t road kill.”

“Maybe they’re covering something up.”

“You claim he died of natural causes.”

“He did,” Reacher said. “From wandering through the scrub for days. Maybe because they ran him out of town. Which might embarrass them. Always assuming they’re capable of embarrassment.”

Vaughan shook her head again. “They didn’t run him out of town. We didn’t get a call. And they always call us. Always. Then they drive them to the line and dump them. This week there’s been you and the girl. That’s all.”

“They never dump them to the west?”

“There’s nothing there. It’s unincorporated land.”

“Maybe they’re just slow. Maybe they’ll call it in later.”

“Doesn’t compute,” Vaughan said. “You find a dead one, you put one hand on your gun and the other on your radio. You call for backup, you call for the ambulance, you call the coroner. One, two, three. It’s completely automatic. There and then.”

“Maybe they aren’t as professional as you.”

“It’s not about being unprofessional. It’s about making a spur-of-the-moment decision to break procedure and not to call the coroner. Which would require some kind of real reason.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Maybe there were no cops involved. Maybe someone else found him.”

“Civilians don’t carry stretchers in their cars,” Reacher said.

Vaughan nodded vaguely and got up. Said, “We should get out of here before the day guy gets in. And the watch commander.”

“Embarrassed to be seen with me?”

“A little. And I’m a little embarrassed that I don’t know what to do.”

The breakfast rush at the diner was over. A degree of calm had been restored. Reacher ordered coffee. Vaughan said she was happy with tap water. She sipped her way through half a glass and drummed her fingers on the table.

“Start over,” she said. “Who was this guy?”

“Caucasian male,” Reacher said.

“Not Hispanic? Not foreign?”

“I think Hispanics are Caucasians, technically. Plus Arabs and some Asians. All I’m going on is his hair. He wasn’t black. That’s all I know for sure. He could have been from anywhere in the world.”

“Dark-skinned or pale?”

“I couldn’t see anything.”

“You should have taken a flashlight.”

“I’m still glad I didn’t.”

“How did his skin feel?”

“Feel? It felt like skin.”

“You should have been able to tell something. Olive skin feels different from pale skin. A little smoother and thicker.”

“Really?”

“I think so. Don’t you?”

Reacher touched the inside of his left wrist with his right forefinger. Then he tried his cheek, under his eye.

“Hard to tell,” he said.

Vaughan stretched her arm across the table. “Now compare.”

He touched the inside of her wrist, gently.

She said, “Now try my face.”

“Really?”

“Purely for research purposes.”

He paused a beat, then touched her cheek with the ball of his thumb. He took his hand away and said, “Texture was thicker than either one of us. Smoothness was somewhere between the two of us.”

“OK.” She touched her own wrist where he had touched it, and then her face. Then she said, “Give me your wrist.”

He slid his hand across the table. She touched his wrist, with two fingers, like she was taking his pulse. She rubbed an inch north and an inch south and then leaned over and touched his cheek with her other hand. Her fingertips were cold from her water glass and the touch startled him. He felt a tiny jolt of voltage in it.

She said, “So he wasn’t necessarily white, but he was younger than you. Less lined and wrinkled and weather-beaten. Less of a mess.”

“Thank you.”

“You should use a good moisturizer.”

“I’ll bear that advice in mind.”

“And sunscreen.”

“Likewise.”

“Do you smoke?”

“I used to.”

“That’s not good for your skin either.”

Reacher said, “He might have been Asian, with the skimpy beard.”

“Cheekbones?”

“Pronounced, but he was thin anyway.”

“Wasted, in fact.”

“Noticeably. But he was probably wiry to begin with.”

“How long does it take for a wiry person to get wasted?”

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe five or six days in a hospital bed or a cell, if you’re sick or on a hunger strike. Less if you’re moving about out-of-doors, keeping warm, burning energy. Maybe only two or three days.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a lot of wandering,” she said. “We need to know why the good folks of Despair put in two or three days sustained effort to keep him out of there.”

Reacher shook his head. “Might be more useful to know why he was trying so hard to stay. He must have had a damn good reason.”

20

Vaughan finished her water and Reacher finished his coffee and asked, “Can I borrow your truck?”

“When?”

“Now. While you sleep.”

Vaughan said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll use it to go back to Despair, you’ll get arrested, and I’ll be implicated.”

“Suppose I don’t go back to Despair?”

“Where else would you want to go?”

“I want to see what lies to the west. The dead guy must have come in that way. I’m guessing he didn’t come through Hope. You would have seen him and remembered him. Likewise with the girl’s missing husband.”

“Good point. But there’s not much west of Despair. A lot of not much, in fact.”

“Got to be something.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “It’s a long loop around. You have to go back practically all the way to Kansas.”

Reacher said, “I’ll pay for the gas.”

“Promise me you’ll stay out of Despair.”

“Where’s the line?”

“Five miles west of the metal plant.”

“Deal.”

Vaughan sighed and slid her keys across the table.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll walk home. I don’t want you to see where I live.”

The old Chevy’s seat didn’t go very far back. The runners were short. Reacher ended up driving with his back straight and his knees splayed, like he was at the wheel of a farm tractor. The steering was vague and the brakes were soft. But it was better than walking. Much better, in fact. Reacher was done with walking, for a day or two at least.

His first stop was his motel in Hope. His room was at the end of the row, which put Lucy Anderson in a room closer to the office. She couldn’t be anywhere else. He hadn’t seen any other overnight accommodation in town. And she wasn’t staying with friends, because they would have been with her in the diner the night before, in her hour of need.

The motel had its main windows all in back. The front of the row had a repeating sequence of doors and lawn chairs and head-high pebbled-glass slits that put daylight into the bathrooms. Reacher started with the room next to his own and walked down the row, looking for the white blur of underwear drying over a tub. In his experience women of Lucy Anderson’s station and generation were very particular about personal hygiene.

The twelve rooms yielded two possibilities. One had a larger blur than the other. Not necessarily more underwear. Just bigger underwear. An older or a larger woman. Reacher knocked at the other door and stepped back and waited. A long moment later Lucy Anderson opened up and stood in the inside shadows, warily, with one hand on the handle.

Reacher said, “Hello, Lucky.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know why your husband went to Despair, and how he got there.”

She was wearing the same sneakers, and the same kind of abbreviated socks. Above them was a long expanse of leg, smooth and toned and tanned to perfection. Maybe she played soccer for UCLA. Maybe she was a varsity star. Above the expanse of leg was a pair of cut-off denims, frayed higher on the outside of her thighs than the inside, which was to say frayed very high indeed, because the effective remaining inseam had to have been less than three-quarters of an inch.

Above the shorts was another sweatshirt, mid-blue, with nothing written on it.

She said, “I don’t want you looking for my husband.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to find him.”

“Why not?”

“It’s obvious.”

“Not to me,” Reacher said.

She said, “I’d like you to leave me alone now.”

“You were worried about him yesterday. Today you’re not?”

She stepped forward into the light, just a pace, and glanced left and right beyond Reacher’s shoulders. The motel’s lot was empty. Nothing there, except Vaughan’s old truck parked at Reacher’s door. Lucy Anderson’s sweatshirt was the same color as her eyes, and her eyes were full of panic.

“Just leave us alone,” she said, and stepped back into her room and closed the door.

Reacher sat a spell in Vaughan’s truck, with a map from her door pocket. The sun was out again and the cab was warm. In Reacher’s experience cars were always either warm or cold. Like a primitive calendar. Either it was summer or winter. Either the sun came through the glass and the metal, or it didn’t.

The map confirmed what Vaughan had told him. He was going to have to drive a huge three-and-a-half-sided rectangle, first east almost all the way back to the Kansas line, then north to I-70, then west again, then south on the same highway spur the metal trucks used. Total distance, close to two hundred miles. Total time, close to four hours. Plus four hours and two hundred miles back, if he obeyed Vaughan’s injunction to keep her truck off Despair’s roads.

Which he planned to.

Probably.

He pulled out of the lot and headed east, retracing the route he had come in on with the old guy in the Grand Marquis. The mid-morning sun was low on his right. The old truck’s battered exhaust was leaking fumes, so he kept the windows cracked. No electric winders. Just old-fashioned handles, which he preferred for the precision they permitted. He had the left window down less than an inch, and the right window half as much. At a steady sixty the wind whistled in and sounded a mellifluous high-pitched chord, underpinned by the bass growl of a bad bearing and the tenor burble of the tired old motor. The truck was a pleasant traveling companion on the state roads. On I-70 it was less pleasant. Passing semis blew it all over the place. The geometry was out and it had no stability. Reacher’s wrists ached after the first ten highway miles, from holding it steady. He stopped once for gas and once for coffee and both times he was happy to get a break.

The spur came off I-70 west of Despair and petered out into a heavy-duty county two-lane within thirty miles. Reacher recognized it. It was the same piece of road he had observed leaving the plant at the other end. Same sturdy construction, same width, same coarse blacktop, same sand shoulders. Exactly four hours after leaving the motel he slowed and coasted and crossed the rumble strip and came to a stop with two wheels in the sand. Traffic was light, limited to trucks of all types heading in and out of the recycling plant twenty miles ahead. They were mostly flat-bed semis, but with some container trucks and box vans mixed in. Plates were mostly from Colorado and its adjacent states, but there were some from California and Washington and New Jersey and some from Canada. They blew past and their bow waves rocked the old truck on its suspension.

Despair itself was invisible in the far distance, except for the hint of a smudge on the horizon and a thin pall of smog hanging motionless in the air. Five miles closer but still fifteen miles away was the group of low gray buildings Reacher had seen before, now on his right, a tiny indistinct blur. A gas station, maybe. Or a motel. Or both. Maybe a full-blown truck stop, with a restaurant. Maybe it was the kind of place he could get a high-calorie meal.

Maybe it was the kind of place Lucy Anderson’s husband and the unidentified dead guy might have gotten a high-calorie meal, on their way into Despair. In the case of the unidentified dead guy at least, maybe his last meal ever.

Maybe someone would remember them.

Maybe the place was outside Despair’s city limit.

Maybe it wasn’t.

Reacher checked his mirror and put the truck in gear and bumped his right-hand wheels back onto the road and headed for the horizon. Twelve minutes later he stopped again, just short of a pole that held a small green sign that said: Entering Despair, Pop. 2691. A hundred yards the wrong side of the line was the group of low buildings.

They weren’t gray. That had been a trick of light and haze and distance.

They were olive green.

Not a gas station.

Not a motel.

No kind of a truck stop.

21

There were six low green buildings. They were identical metal prefabrications clustered together according to exact specifications and precise regulations. They were separated by roadways of uniform width graded from raw dirt and edged with white-painted boulders of small and consistent size. They were ringed by a razor-wire fence, tall, straight, and true. The fence continued west to enclose a parking lot. The lot was filled with six up-armored Humvees. Each one had a machine-gun mount on top. Next to the parking lot there was a slender radio mast protected by a fence all its own.

Not a motel.

Not a truck stop.

A military facility.

Specifically, an army facility. More specifically, a Military Police facility. More specifically still, a temporary advanced encampment for a combat MP unit. An FOB, a forward operating base. Reacher recognized the format and the equipment mix. Confirmation was right there on a board at the gate. The gate was a white counterbalanced pole with a guard shack next to it. The board was on stilts next to the shack and was painted glossy army green and had a formal unit ID stenciled on it in white.

Not a National Guard unit.

Not reservists.

A regular army unit, and a pretty good one, too. At least it always had been, back in Reacher’s day, and there was no reason to believe it had gotten sloppy in the intervening years. No reason at all.

How sloppy it hadn’t gotten was proved almost immediately.

The guard shack was a metal affair with tall wide windows on all four sides. Four guys in it. Two stayed where they were, and would forever, no matter what. The other two came out. They were dressed in desert BDUs and boots and armored vests and helmets and they were carrying M16 rifles. They ducked under the boom and formed up side by side and sloped arms and stepped out to the roadway. They executed a perfect left turn and jogged toward Reacher’s truck, exactly in step, at exactly seven miles an hour, like they had been trained to. When they were thirty yards away they separated to split the target they were presenting. One guy headed for the sand and came up on Reacher’s right and stood off ten yards distant and swapped his rifle into the ready position. The other guy stayed on the blacktop and looped around and checked the truck’s load bed and then came back and stood off six feet from Reacher’s door and called out in a loud clear voice.

He said, “Sir, please lower your window.”

And keep your hands where I can see them, Reacher thought. For your own safety. He wound the window all the way down and glanced left.

“Sir, please keep your hands where I can see them,” the guy said. “For your own safety.”

Reacher put his hands high on the wheel and kept on staring left. The guy he was looking at was a specialist, young but with some years in, with pronounced squint lines either side of his eyes. He was wearing glasses with thin black frames. The name tape on the right side of his vest said Morgan. In the distance a truck’s air horn sounded and the soldier stepped closer to the curb and a semi blasted past from behind in a howl of sound and wind and grit. There was a long whine of stressed tires and Reacher’s truck rocked on its springs and then silence came down again. The soldier stepped back to where he had been before and took up the same stance, wary but challenging, in control but cautious, his M16 held barrel-down but ready.

“At ease, Corporal,” Reacher said. “Nothing to see here.”

The guy called Morgan said, “Sir, that’s a determination I’ll need to make for myself.”

Reacher glanced ahead. Morgan’s partner was still as a statue, the stock of his M16 tucked tight into his shoulder. He was a private first class. He was sighting with his right eye, aiming low at Reacher’s front right-hand tire.

Morgan asked, “Sir, why are you stopped here?”

Reacher said, “Do I need a reason?”

“Sir, you appear to me to be surveilling a restricted military installation.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I’m not.”

“Sir, why are you stopped?”

“Stop calling me sir, will you?”

“Sir?”

Reacher smiled to himself. An MP with Morgan’s years in had probably read a whole foot-thick stack of orders titled Members of the Public, Domestic, Required Forms of Address, endlessly revised, revisited, and updated.

“Maybe I’m lost,” Reacher said.

“You’re not local?”

“No.”

“Your vehicle has Colorado plates.”

“Colorado is a big state,” Reacher said. “More than a hundred thousand square miles, soldier, the eighth largest in the Union. By land area, that is. Only the twenty-second largest by population. Maybe I come from a remote and distant corner.”

Morgan went blank for a second. Then he asked, “Sir, where are you headed?”

The question gave Reacher a problem. The spur off I-70 had been small and hard to find. No way could a driver headed for Colorado Springs or Denver or Boulder have taken it by mistake. To claim a navigation error would raise suspicion. To raise suspicion would lead to a radio check against Vaughan’s plates, which would drag her into something she was better left out of.

So Reacher said, “I’m headed for Hope.”

Morgan took his left hand off his rifle and pointed straight ahead.

“That way, sir,” he said. “You’re on track. Twenty-two miles to downtown Hope.”

Reacher nodded. Morgan was pointing south but hadn’t taken his eyes off Reacher’s hands. He was a good soldier. Experienced. Well turned out. His BDUs were old but in good order. His boots were worn and scratched but well cared for and immaculately brushed. The top of his eyeglass frame ran exactly parallel with the lip of his helmet. Reacher liked soldiers in eyeglasses. Eyeglasses added a vulnerable human detail that balanced the alien appearance of the weapons and the armor.

The face of the modern army.

Morgan stepped in close to Reacher’s fender again and another truck blew by. This one was a New Jersey semi loaded with a closed forty-foot shipping container. Like a giant brick, doing sixty miles an hour. Noise, wind, a long tail of swirling dust. Morgan’s BDU pants flattened against his legs and skittering miniature tornadoes of dust danced all around his feet. But he didn’t blink behind his glasses.

He asked, “Sir, does this vehicle belong to you?”

Reacher said, “I’m not sure you’re entitled to information like that.”

“In the vicinity of a restricted military installation I would say I’m entitled to pretty much any information I want.”

Reacher didn’t answer that.

Morgan said, “Do you have registration and insurance?”

“Glove box,” Reacher said, which was a pretty safe guess. Vaughan was a cop. Most cops kept their paperwork straight. Too embarrassing, if they didn’t.

Morgan asked, “Sir, may I see those documents?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“Sir, now it seems to me that you’re approaching a restricted military installation in a stolen load-bearing vehicle.”

“You already checked the back. It’s empty.”

Morgan said nothing.

“Relax, Corporal,” Reacher said. “This is Colorado, not Iraq. I’m not looking to blow anything up.”

“Sir, I wish you hadn’t used those words.”

“At ease, Morgan. I was speaking negatively. I was telling you what I wasn’t going to do.”

“No laughing matter.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“I need to see those vehicle documents, sir.”

“You’re overstepping your authority.”

“Sir, I need to see them real quick.”

“You got a JAG lawyer on post?”

“Negative, sir.”

“You happy to make this decision on your own?”

Morgan didn’t answer. He stepped close to the fender again and a tanker truck blew by. It had an orange hazardous chemicals diamond on the back and a stainless-steel body polished so bright that Reacher saw himself reflected in it like a funhouse mirror. Then its slipstream died away and Morgan stepped back into position and said, “Sir, I need you to show me those documents. Just wave them at me, if you like. To prove to me you can put your hands on them.”

Reacher shrugged and leaned over and opened the glove box lid. Dug through ballpoint pens and envelopes of facial tissues and other miscellaneous junk and found a small plastic wallet. The wallet was black and was printed with a silver shape resembling a steering wheel. It was the kind of cheap thing found for sale at gas stations and car washes, alongside air fresheners shaped like conifer trees and ball compasses that attached to windshields with suction cups. The plastic was stiff and brittle with age and the black color had leached to a dusty gray.

Reacher opened the wallet, out of Morgan’s sight. On the left behind a plastic window was a current insurance certificate. On the right, a current registration.

Both were made out to David Robert Vaughan, of Hope, Colorado.

Reacher kept the wallet open with his thumb and waved it in Morgan’s direction, long enough for the documents to register, short enough for neither of them to be read.

Morgan said, “Sir, thank you.”

Reacher put the wallet back in the glove box and slammed the lid.

Morgan said, “Sir, now it’s time to be moving along.”

Which gave Reacher another problem. If he moved forward, he would be in Despair township. If he U-turned, Morgan would wonder why he had suddenly gotten cold feet and abandoned Hope as a destination, and would be tempted to call in the plate.

Which was the greater danger?

Morgan, easily. A contest between the Despair PD and a combat MP unit was no kind of a contest at all. So Reacher put the truck in gear and turned the wheel.

“Have a great day, Corporal,” he said, and hit the gas. A yard later he passed the little green sign and temporarily increased Despair’s population by one, all the way up to 2692.

22

The sturdy two-lane continued basically straight for five miles to the recycling plant’s vehicle gate. An unsignposted left fork speared off into the brush and formed the western end of Despair’s only through road. Reacher paused for an approaching semi loaded with bright steel bars and then waited again for a container truck heading for Canada. Then he made the left and bounced up onto the uneven surface and drove on and saw all the same stuff he had seen the day before, but in reverse order. The plant’s long end wall, welded metal, bright white paint, the sparks and the smoke coming from the activity inside, the moving cranes. He stretched a long arm across the cab and dropped the passenger window and heard the noise of clanging hammers and smelled the acrid odors of chemical compounds.

He got to the acres of parking near the personnel gate and saw the clockwise security Tahoe bouncing across the scrub in the distance far to his right. Its counterclockwise partner was right there in the lot, black tinted windows, coming on slow, looking to cross the road at a right angle. Reacher sped up and the Tahoe slowed down and crossed right behind him. Reacher saw it slide past, huge in his mirror. He drove on and then the plant was behind him and downtown Despair was looming up three miles ahead on the right. The low brick cubes, sullen in the afternoon light. The road was clear. It rose and fell and meandered gently left and right, avoiding any geological formation larger than a refrigerator. Cheap engineering, never graded or straightened since its origin as a cart track.

A mile ahead, a cop car pulled out of a side street.

It was unmistakable. A Crown Vic, white and gold, black push bars on the front, a light bar on the roof, antennas on the trunk lid. It nosed out and paused a beat and turned left.

West.

Straight toward Reacher.

Reacher checked his speed. He was doing fifty, which was all that was comfortable. He had no idea of the local limit. He dropped to forty-five, and cruised on. The cop was less than a mile away, coming on fast. Closing speed, more than a hundred miles an hour. Time to contact, approximately thirty-five seconds.

Reacher cruised on.

The sun was behind him, and therefore in the cop’s eyes, which was a good thing. The old Chevy truck had a plain untinted windshield, which was a bad thing. Ten seconds before contact Reacher took his left hand off the wheel and put it against his forehead, like he was massaging his temple against a headache. He kept his speed steady and stared straight ahead.

The cop car blew past.

Reacher put his hand back on the wheel and checked his mirror.

The cop was braking hard.

Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and ran a fast calculation. He had maybe fifteen miles to go before the Hope town line and the arthritic old Chevy would top out at about seventy, max, which gave him a thirteen-minute trip. The Crown Vic was not a fantastically powerful car but the Police Interceptor option pack gave it a low axle ratio for fast acceleration and twin exhausts for better breathing. It would do ninety, comfortably. Therefore it would overhaul him within three minutes, just about level with the abandoned motor court, at the start of twelve whole miles of empty road.

Not good.

Behind him the Crown Vic was pulling through a fast U-turn.

Why?

Despair was a company town but its road had to be a public thoroughfare. Any Hope resident would use it to head home off the Interstate. Some Kansas residents would do the same. Unfamiliar vehicles in Despair could not possibly be rarities.

Reacher checked the mirror again. The Crown Vic was accelerating after him. Nose high, tail squatting low.

Maybe the security guy in the counterclockwise Tahoe had called it in. Maybe he had seen Reacher’s face and recognized it. Maybe the deputies from the family restaurant took turns as the security drivers.

Reacher drove on. He hit the first downtown block.

Ten blocks ahead, a second Crown Vic pulled out.

And stopped, dead across the road.

Reacher braked hard and hauled on the wheel and pulled a fast right into the checkerboard of downtown streets. A desperation move. He was the worst guy in the world to win a car chase. He wasn’t a great driver. He had taken the evasive-driving course at Fort Rucker during the MP Officers’ Basic School and had impressed nobody. He had scraped a passing grade, mostly out of charity. A year later the school had moved to Fort Leonard Wood and the obstacle course had gotten harder and he knew he would have failed it. Time and chance. Sometimes it helps a person.

Sometimes it leaves a person unprepared.

He hit three four-way stops in succession and turned left, right, left without pausing or thinking. The streets were boxed in tight by dour brick buildings but his sense of direction was better than his driving and he knew he was heading east again. Downtown traffic was light. He got held up by a woman driving slow in an old Pontiac but the blocks were short and he solved his problem by turning right and left again and bypassing her one block over.

The chase car didn’t show behind him. Statistics were on his side. He figured the downtown area was about twelve blocks square, which meant there were about 288 distinct lengths of road between opportunities to turn off, which meant that if he kept moving, the chances of direct confrontation were pretty low.

But the chances of ever getting out of the maze were pretty low, too. As long as the second cop was blocking Main Street at its eastern end, then Hope was unavailable as a destination. And presumably the metal plant Tahoes were on duty to the west. And presumably Despair was full of helpful citizens with four-wheel-drive SUVs that would be a lot quicker over open ground than Vaughan’s ancient Chevy. They could get up a regular posse.

Reacher turned a random left, just to keep moving. The chase car flashed through the intersection, dead ahead. It moved left to right and disappeared. Reacher turned left on the same street and saw it in his mirror, moving away from him. Now he was heading west. His gas tank was more than a quarter full. He turned right at the next four-way and headed north two blocks to Main Street. He turned east there and took a look ahead.

The second Crown Vic was still parked across the road, blocking both lanes just beyond the dry goods store. Its light bar was flashing red, as a warning to oncoming traffic. It was nearly eighteen feet long. One of the last of America’s full-sized sedans. A big car, but at one end it was leaving a gap of about four feet between the front of its hood and the curb, and about three feet between its trunk and the curb at the other.

No good. Vaughan’s Chevy was close to six feet wide.

Back at Fort Rucker the evasive driving aces had a mantra: Keep death off the road: Drive on the sidewalk. Which Reacher could do. He could get past the cop with two wheels up on the curb. But then what? He would be faced with a twelve-mile high-speed chase, in a low-speed vehicle.

No good.

He turned right again and headed back to the downtown maze. Saw the first Crown Vic flash past again, this time hunting east to west, three blocks away. He turned left and headed away from it. He slowed and started looking for used-car lots. In the movies, you parked at the end of a line of similar vehicles and the cops blew past without noticing.

He found no used-car lots.

In fact he found nothing much at all. Certainly nothing useful. He saw the police station twice, and the grocery store and the barber shop and the bar and the rooming house and the faded old hotel that he had seen before, on his walk down to the restaurant he had been thrown out of. He saw a storefront church. Some kind of a strange fringe denomination, something about the end times. The only church in town, Vaughan had said, where the town’s feudal boss was the lay preacher. It was an ugly one-story building, built from brick, with a squat steeple piled on top to make it taller than the neighboring buildings. The steeple had a copper lightning rod on it and the grounding strap that ran down to the street had weathered to a bright verdigris green. It was the most colorful thing on display in Despair, a vivid vertical slash among the dullness.

He drove on. He looked, but he saw nothing else of significance. He would have liked a tire bay, maybe, where he could get the old Chevy up on a hoist and out of sight. He could have hidden out and gotten Vaughan’s bad geometry fixed, all at the same time.

He found no tire bays.

He drove on, making random turns left and right. He saw the first Crown Vic three more times in the next three minutes, twice ahead of him and once behind him in his mirrors. The fourth time he saw it was a minute later. He paused at a four-way and it came up at the exact same moment and paused in the mouth of the road directly to his right. Reacher and the cop were at right angles to each other, nose to nose, ten feet apart, immobile. The cop was the same guy who had arrested him. Big, dark, wide. Tan jacket. He looked over and smiled. Gestured Go ahead like he was yielding, as if he had been second to the line.

Reacher was a lousy driver, but he wasn’t stupid. No way was he going to let the cop get behind him, heading in the same direction. He jammed the old Chevy into reverse and backed away. The cop darted forward, turning, aiming to follow. Reacher waited until the guy was halfway through the maneuver and jammed the stick back into Drive and snaked past him, close, flank to flank. Then he hung a left and a right and a left again until he was sure he was clear.

Then he drove on, endlessly. He concluded that his random turns weren’t helping him. He was as likely to turn into trouble as away from it. So mostly he stayed straight, until he ran out of street. Then he would turn. He ended up driving in wide concentric circles, slow enough to be safe, fast enough that he could kick the speed up if necessary without the weak old motor bogging down.

He passed the church and the bar and the grocery and the faded old hotel for the third time each. Then the rooming house. Its door slid behind his shoulder and opened. In the corner of his eye he saw a guy step out.

A young guy.

A big guy.

Tall, and blond, and heavy. An athlete. Blue eyes and a buzz cut and a dark tan. Jeans and a white T-shirt under a gray V-neck sweater.

Reacher stamped on the brake and turned his head. But the guy was gone, moving fast, around the corner. Reacher shoved the stick into Reverse and backed up. A horn blared and an old SUV swerved. Reacher didn’t stop. He entered the four-way going backward and stared down the side street.

No guy. Just empty sidewalk. In his mirror Reacher saw the chase car three blocks west. He shoved the stick back into Drive and took off forward. Turned left, turned right, drove more wide aimless circles.

He didn’t see the young man again.

But he saw the cop twice more. The guy was nosing around through distant intersections like he had all the time in the world. Which he did. Two-thirty in the afternoon, half the population hard at work at the plant, the other half baking pies or slumped in armchairs watching daytime TV, the lone road bottlenecked at both ends of town. The cop was just amusing himself. He had Reacher trapped, and he knew it.

And Reacher knew it, too.

No way out.

Time to stand and fight.

23

Some jerk instructor at the Fort Rucker MP School had once trotted out the tired old cliché to assume makes an ass out of you and me. He had demonstrated at the classroom chalkboard, dividing the word into ass, u, and me. On the whole Reacher had agreed with him, even if the guy was a jerk. But sometimes assumptions just had to be made, and right then Reacher chose to assume that however half-baked the Despair cops might be, they wouldn’t risk shooting with bystanders in the line of fire. So he pulled to the curb outside the family restaurant and got out of Vaughan’s truck and took up a position leaning on one of the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows.

Behind him, the same waitress was on duty. She had nine customers eating late lunches. A trio, a couple, four singletons, equally distributed around the room.

Collateral damage, just waiting to happen.

The window glass was cold on Reacher’s shoulders. He could feel it through his shirt. The sun was still out but it was low in the sky and the streets were in shadow. There was a breeze. Small eddies of grit blew here and there on the sidewalk. Reacher unbuttoned his cuffs and folded them up on his forearms. He arched his back against the cramp he had gotten from sitting in the Chevy’s undersized cab for so long. He flexed his hands and rolled his head in small circles to loosen his neck.

Then he waited.

The cop showed up two minutes and forty seconds later. The Crown Vic came in from the west and stopped two intersections away and paused, like the guy was having trouble processing the information visible right in front of him. The truck, parked. The suspect, just standing there. Then the car leapt forward and came through the four-ways and pulled in tight behind the Chevy, its front fender eight feet from where Reacher was waiting. The cop left the engine running and opened his door and slid out into the roadway. Déjà vu all over again. Big guy, white, maybe forty, black hair, wide neck. Tan jacket, brown pants, the groove in his forehead from his hat. He took his Glock off his belt and held it straight out two-handed and put his spread thighs against the opposite fender and stared at Reacher across the width of the hood.

Sound tactics, except for the innocents behind the glass.

The cop called out, “Freeze.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Reacher said. “Yet.”

“Get in the car.”

“Make me.”

“I’ll shoot.”

“You won’t.”

The guy went blank for a beat and then shifted his focus beyond Reacher’s face to the scene inside the restaurant. Reacher was absolutely certain that the Despair PD had no Officer Involved Shooting investigative team, or even any kind of Officer Involved Shooting protocol, so the guy’s hesitation was down to pure common sense. Or maybe the guy had relatives who liked to lunch late.

“Get in the car,” the guy said again.

Reacher said, “I’ll take a pass on that.” He stayed relaxed, leaning back, unthreatening.

“I’ll shoot,” the cop said again.

“You can’t. You’re going to need backup.”

The cop paused again. Then he shuffled to the left, back toward the driver’s door. He kept his eyes and the gun tight on Reacher and fumbled one-handed through the car window and grabbed up his Motorola microphone and pulled it all the way out until its cord went tight. He brought it to his mouth and clicked the button. Said, “Bro, the restaurant, right now.” He clicked off again and tossed the microphone back on the seat and put both hands back on the gun and shuffled back to the fender.

And the clock started ticking.

One guy would be easy.

Two might be harder.

The second guy had to move, but Reacher couldn’t afford for him to arrive.

No sound, except the idling cruiser and the distant clash of plates inside the restaurant kitchen.

“Pussy,” Reacher called. “A thing like this, you should have been able to handle it on your own.”

The cop’s lips went tight and he shuffled toward the front of the car, tracking with his gun, adjusting his aim. He reached the front bumper and felt for the push bars with his knees. Came on around, getting nearer.

He stepped up out of the gutter onto the sidewalk.

Reacher waited. The cop was now on his right, so Reacher shuffled one step left, to keep the line of fire straight and dangerous and inhibiting. The Glock tracked his move, locked in a steady two-handed grip.

The cop said, “Get in the car.”

The cop took one step forward.

Now he was five feet away, one cast square of concrete sidewalk.

Reacher kept his back against the glass and moved his right heel against the base of the wall.

The cop stepped closer.

Now the Glock’s muzzle was within a foot of Reacher’s throat. The cop was a big guy, with long arms fully extended, and both feet planted apart in a useful combat stance.

Useful if he was prepared to fire.

Which he wasn’t.

Taking a gun from a man ready to use it was not always difficult. Taking one from a man who had already decided not to use it verged on the easy. The cop took his left hand off the gun and braced to grab Reacher by the collar. Reacher slid right, his back hard on the window, washed cotton on clean glass, no friction at all, and moved inside the cop’s aim. He brought his left forearm up and over, fast, one two, and clamped his hand right over the Glock and the cop’s hand together. The cop was a big guy with big hands, but Reacher’s were bigger. He clamped down and squeezed hard and forced the gun down and away in one easy movement. He got it pointing at the ground and increased the squeeze to paralyze the cop’s trigger finger and then he looked him in the eye and smiled briefly and jerked forward off his planted heel and delivered a colossal head butt direct to the bridge of the cop’s nose.

The cop sagged back on rubber legs.

Reacher kept tight hold of the guy’s gun hand and kneed him in the groin. The cop went down more or less vertically but Reacher kept his hand twisted up and back so that the cop’s own weight dislocated his elbow as he fell. The guy screamed and the Glock came free pretty easily after that.

Then it was all about getting ready in a hurry.

Reacher scrambled around the Crown Vic’s hood and hauled the door open. He tossed the Glock inside and slid in the seat and buckled the seat belt and pulled it snug and tight. The seat was still warm from the cop’s body and the car smelled of sweat. Reacher put the transmission in reverse and backed away from the Chevy and spun the wheel and came back level with it, in the wrong lane, facing east, just waiting.

24

The second cop showed up within thirty seconds, right on cue. Reacher saw the flare of flashing red lights a second before the Crown Vic burst around a distant corner. It fishtailed a little, then accelerated down the narrow street toward the restaurant, hard and fast and smooth.

Reacher let it get through one four-way, and another, and when it was thirty yards away he stamped on the gas and took off straight at it and smashed into it head-on. The two Crown Vics met nose to nose and their rear ends lifted off the ground and sheet metal crumpled and hoods flew open and glass burst and airbags exploded and steam jetted everywhere. Reacher was smashed forward against his seat belt. He had his hands off the wheel and his elbows up to fend off the punch of his airbag. Then the airbag collapsed again and Reacher was tossed back against the headrest. The rear of his car thumped back to earth and bounced once and came to rest at an angle. He pulled the Mossberg pump out of its between-the-seats holster and forced the door open against the crumpled fender and climbed out of the car.

The other guy hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.

He had taken the impact of his airbag full in the face and was lying sideways across the front bench with blood coming out of his nose and his ears. Both cars were wrecked as far back as the windshield pillars. The passenger compartments were basically OK. Full-sized sedans, five-star crash ratings. Reacher was pretty sure both cars were undrivable but he was no kind of an automotive expert and so he made sure by racking the Mossberg twice and firing two booming shots into the rear wheel wells, shredding the tires and ripping up all kinds of other small essential components. Then he tossed the pump back through the first Crown Vic’s window and walked over and climbed into Vaughan’s Chevy and backed away from all the wreckage. The waitress and the nine customers inside the restaurant were all staring out through the windows, mouths wide open in shock. Two of the customers were fumbling for their cell phones.

Reacher smiled. Who are you going to call?

He K-turned the Chevy and made a right and headed north for Main Street and made another right and cruised east at a steady fifty. When he hit the lonely road after the gas station he kicked it up to sixty and kept one eye on the mirror. Nobody came after him. He felt the roughness under his tires but the roar was quieter than before. He was a little deaf from the airbags and the twin Mossberg blasts.

Twelve minutes later he bumped over the expansion joint and cruised into Hope, at exactly three o’clock in the afternoon.

He didn’t know how long Vaughan would sleep. He guessed she had gotten her head on the pillow a little after nine that morning, which was six hours ago. Eight hours’ rest would take her to five o’clock, which was reasonable for an on-deck time of seven in the evening. Or maybe she was already up and about. Some people slept worse in the daytime than the night. Habit, degree of acclimatization, circadian rhythms. He decided to head for the diner. Either she would be there already or he could leave her keys with the cashier.

She was there already.

He pulled to the curb and saw her alone in the booth they had used before. She was dressed in her cop uniform, four hours before her watch. She had an empty plate and a full coffee cup in front of her.

He locked the truck and went in and sat down opposite her. Up close, she looked tired.

“Didn’t sleep?” he asked.

“Is it that obvious?”

“I have a confession to make.”

“You went to Despair. In my truck. I knew you would.”

“I had to.”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you drove out to the west?”

“I try to stay out of Despair.”

“There’s a military base just inside the line. Fairly new. Why would that be?”

Vaughan said, “There are military bases all over.”

“This was a combat MP unit.”

“They have to put them somewhere.”

“Overseas is where they need to put them. The army is hurting for numbers right now. They can’t afford to waste good units in the back of beyond.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a good unit.”

“It was.”

“So maybe it’s about to ship out.”

“It just shipped back in. It just spent a year under the sun. The guy I spoke to had squint lines like you wouldn’t believe. His gear was worn from the sand.”

“We have sand here.”

“Not like that.”

“So what are you saying?”

The waitress came by and Reacher ordered coffee. Vaughan’s cup was still full. Reacher said, “I’m asking why they pulled a good unit out of the Middle East and sent it here.”

Vaughan said, “I don’t know why. The Pentagon doesn’t explain itself to neighboring police departments.”

The waitress brought a cup for Reacher and filled it from a Bunn flask. Vaughan asked, “What does a combat MP unit do exactly?”

Reacher took a sip of coffee and said, “It guards things. Convoys or installations. It maintains security and repels attacks.”

“Actual fighting?”

“When necessary.”

“Did you do that?”

“Some of the time.”

Vaughan opened her mouth and then closed it again as her mind supplied the answer to the question she was about to ask.

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “What’s to defend in Despair?”

“And you’re saying these MPs made you drive on through?”

“It was safer. They would have checked your plate if I hadn’t.”

“Did you get through OK?”

“Your truck is fine. Although it’s not exactly yours, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who is David Robert Vaughan?”

She looked blank for a second. Then she said, “You looked in the glove box. The registration.”

“A man with a gun wanted to see it.”

“Good reason.”

“So who is David Robert?”

Vaughan said, “My husband.”

25

Reacher said, “I didn’t know you were married.” Vaughan turned her attention to her lukewarm coffee and took a long time to answer.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” she said. “Would you expect me to?”

“Not really, I suppose.”

“Don’t I look married?”

“Not one little bit.”

“You can tell just by looking?”

“Usually.”

“How?”

“Fourth finger, left hand, for a start.”

“Lucy Anderson doesn’t wear a ring either.”

Reacher nodded. “I think I saw her husband today.”

“In Despair?”

“Coming out of the rooming house.”

“That’s way off Main Street.”

“I was dodging roadblocks.”

“Terrific.”

“Not one of my main talents.”

“So how did they not catch you? They’ve got one road in and one road out.”

“Long story,” Reacher said.

“But?”

“The Despair PD is temporarily understaffed.”

“You took one of them out?”

“Both of them. And their cars.”

“You’re completely unbelievable.”

“No, I’m a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, I don’t.”

“They’ll come looking for you here.”

“No question. But not soon.”

“How long?”

“They’ll be hurting for a couple of days. Then they’ll saddle up.”

Reacher left her alone with her truck keys on the table in front of her and walked down to Third Street and bought socks and underwear and a dollar T-shirt in an old-fashioned outfitters next to a supermarket. He stopped in at a pharmacy and bought shaving gear and then headed up to the hardware store at the western end of First Street. He picked his way past ladders and wheelbarrows and wound through aisles filled with racks of tools and found a rail of canvas work pants and flannel shirts. Traditional American garments, made in China and Cambodia, respectively. He chose dark olive pants and a mud-colored check shirt. Not as cheap as he would have liked, but not outrageous. The clerk folded them up into a brown paper bag and he carried it back to the motel and shaved and took a long shower and dried off and dressed in the new stuff. He crammed his old gray janitor uniform in the trash receptacle.

Better than doing laundry.

The new clothes were as stiff as boards, to the point where walking around was difficult. Clearly the Far Eastern garment industry took durability very seriously. He did squats and bicep curls until the starch cracked and then he stepped out and walked down the row to Lucy Anderson’s door. He knocked and waited. A minute later she opened up. She looked just the same. Long legs, short shorts, plain blue sweatshirt. Young, and vulnerable. And wary, and hostile. She said, “I asked you to leave me alone.”

He said, “I’m pretty sure I saw your husband today.”

Her face softened, just for a second.

“Where?” she asked.

“In Despair. Looks like he’s got a room there.”

“Was he OK?”

“He looked fine to me.”

“What are you going to do about him?”

“What would you like me to do about him?”

Her face closed up again. “You should leave him alone.”

“I am leaving him alone. I told you, I’m not a cop anymore. I’m a vagrant, just like you.”

“So why would you go back to Despair?”

“Long story. I had to.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re a cop.”

“You saw what was in my pockets.”

“You left your badge in your room.”

“I didn’t. You want to check? My room is right here.”

She stared at him in panic and put both hands on the door jambs like he was about to seize her around her waist and drag her away to his quarters. The motel clerk stepped out of the office, forty feet to Reacher’s left. She was a stout woman of about fifty. She saw Reacher and saw the girl and stopped walking and watched. Then she moved again but changed direction and started heading toward them. In Reacher’s experience motel clerks were either nosy about or else completely uninterested in their guests. He figured this one was the nosy kind. He stepped back a pace and gave Lucy Anderson some air and held up his hands, palms out, friendly and reassuring.

“Relax,” he said. “If I was here to hurt you, you’d already be hurt by now, don’t you think? You and your husband.”

She didn’t answer. Just turned her head and saw the clerk’s approach and then ducked back to the inside shadows and slammed her door, all in one neat move. Reacher turned away but knew he wasn’t going to make it in time. The clerk was already within calling distance.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Reacher stopped. Turned back. Said nothing.

The woman said, “You should leave that girl alone.”

“Should I?”

“If you want to stay here.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I try to maintain standards.”

“I’m trying to help her.”

“She thinks the exact opposite.”

“You’ve talked?”

“I hear things.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“You look like a cop.”

“I can’t help that.”

“You should investigate some real crimes.”

Reacher said, “I’m not investigating any kind of crimes. I told you, I’m not a cop.”

The woman didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “What real crimes?”

“Violations.”

“Where?”

“At the metal plant in Despair.”

“What kind of violations?”

“All kinds.”

“I don’t care about violations. I’m not an EPA inspector. I’m not any kind of an inspector.”

The woman said, “Then you should ask yourself why that plane flies every night.”

26

Reacher got halfway back to his room and saw Vaughan’s old pick-up turn in off the street. It was moving fast. It bounced up over the curb and headed through the lot straight at him. Vaughan was at the wheel in her cop uniform. Incongruous. And urgent. She hadn’t taken time to go fetch her official cruiser. She braked hard and stopped with her radiator grille an inch away from him. She leaned out the window and said, “Get in, now.”

Reacher asked, “Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“None at all.”

“Really?”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“I’m prepared to. I’ll use my gun and my cuffs if that’s what it takes. Just get in the car.”

Reacher studied her face through the windshield glass. She was serious about something. And determined. That was for sure. The evidence was right there in the set of her jaw. So he climbed in. Vaughan waited until he closed his door behind him and asked, “You ever done a ride-along with a cop before? All night? A whole watch?”

“Why would I? I was a cop.”

“Well, whatever, you’re doing one tonight.”

“Why?”

“We got a courtesy call. From Despair. You’re a wanted man. They’re coming for you. So tonight you stay where I can see you.”

“They can’t be coming for me. They can’t even have woken up yet.”

“Their deputies are coming. All four of them.”

“Really?”

“That’s what deputies do. They deputize.”

“So I hide in your car? All night?”

“Damn straight.”

“You think I need protection?”

“My town needs protection. I don’t want trouble here.”

“Those four won’t be any trouble. One of them is already busted up and one was throwing his guts up the last time I saw him.”

“So you could take them?”

“With one hand behind my back and my head in a bag.”

“Exactly. I’m a cop. I have a responsibility. No fighting in my streets. It’s unseemly.” She pulled a tight U-turn in the motel lot and headed back the way she had come. Reacher asked, “When will they get here?”

“The plant shuts down at six. I imagine they’ll head right over.”

“How long will they stay?”

“The plant opens up again at six tomorrow morning.”

Reacher said, “You don’t want me in your car all night.”

“I’ll do what it takes. Like I said. This is a decent place. I’m not going to let it get trashed, either literally or metaphorically.”

Reacher paused and said, “I could leave town.”

“Permanently?” Vaughan asked.

“Temporarily.”

“And go where?”

“Despair, obviously. I can’t get in trouble there, can I? Their cops are in the hospital and their deputies will be here all night.”

Vaughan made a right and a left and headed down Second Street toward the diner. She stayed quiet for a moment and then she said, “There’s another one in town today.”

“Another what?”

“Another girl. Just like Lucy Anderson. But dark, not blonde. She blew in this afternoon and now she’s sitting around and staring west like she’s waiting for word from Despair.”

“From a boyfriend or a husband?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly a dead boyfriend or husband, Caucasian, about twenty years old, five-eight and one-forty.”

“Possibly.”

“I should go there.”

Vaughan drove past the diner and kept on driving. She drove two blocks south and came back east on Fourth Street. No real reason. Just motion, for the sake of it. Fourth Street had trees and retail establishments behind the north sidewalk and trees and a long line of neat homes behind the south. Small yards, picket fences, foundation plantings, mailboxes on poles that had settled to every angle except the truly vertical.

“I should go there,” Reacher said again.

“Wait until the deputies get here. You don’t want to pass them on the road.”

“OK.”

“And don’t let them see you leave.”

“OK.”

“And don’t make trouble over there.”

“I’m not sure there’s anybody left to make trouble with. Unless I meet the judge.”

27

For the second time that day Vaughan gave up her pick-up truck and walked home to get her cruiser. Reacher drove the truck to a quiet side street and parked facing north in the shadow of a tree and watched the traffic on First Street directly ahead of him. He had a limited field of view. But there wasn’t much to see, anyway. Whole ten-minute periods passed without visible activity. Not surprising. Residents returning from the Kansas direction would have peeled off into town down earlier streets. And no one in their right mind was returning from Despair, or heading there. The daylight was fading fast. The world was going gray and still. The clock in Reacher’s head was ticking around, relentlessly.

When it hit six-thirty-two he saw an old crew-cab pick-up truck flash through his field of vision. Moving smartly, from the Despair direction. A driver, and three passengers inside. Big men, close together. They filled the cramped quarters, shoulder to shoulder.

Reacher recognized the truck.

He recognized the driver.

He recognized the passengers.

The Despair deputies, right on time.

He paused a beat and started the old Chevy’s engine and moved off the curb. He eased north to First Street and turned left. Checked his mirror. The old crew-cab was already a hundred yards behind him, moving away in the opposite direction, slowing down and getting ready to turn. The road ahead was empty. He passed the hardware store and hit the gas and forced the old truck up to sixty miles an hour. Five minutes later he thumped over the expansion joint and settled in to a noisy cruise west.

Twelve miles later he coasted past the vacant lot and the shuttered motor court and the gas station and the household goods store and then he turned left into Despair’s downtown maze. First port of call was the police station. He wanted to be sure that no miraculous recoveries had been made, and that no replacement personnel had been provided.

They hadn’t, and they hadn’t.

The place was dark inside and quiet outside. No lights, no activity. There were no cars at the curb. No stand-in State Police cruisers, no newly-deputized pick-up trucks, no plain sedans with temporary Police signs stickered on their doors.

Nothing.

Just silence.

Reacher smiled. Open season and lawless, he thought, like a bleak view of the future in a movie. The way he liked it. He U-turned through the empty diagonal parking slots and headed back toward the rooming house. He parked on the curb out front and killed the motor and wound the window down. Heard a single aero engine in the far distance, climbing hard. Seven o’clock in the evening. The Cessna or the Beech or the Piper, taking off again. You should ask yourself why that plane flies every night, the motel clerk had said.

Maybe I will, Reacher thought. One day.

He climbed out of the truck. The rooming house was built of dull brick, on a corner lot. Three stories high, narrow windows, flat roof, four stone steps up to a doorway set off center in the façade. There was a wooden board on the wall next to the door, under a swan-neck lamp with a dim bulb. The board had been painted maroon way back in its history, and the words Rooms to Rent had been lettered in white over the maroon by a careful amateur. A plain and to-the-point announcement. Not the kind of place Reacher favored. Such establishments implied residency for longer periods than he was interested in. Generally they rented by the week, and had electric cooking rings in the rooms. Practically the same thing as setting up housekeeping.

He went up the stone steps and pushed the front door. It was open. Behind it was a square hallway with a brown linoleum floor and a steep staircase on the right. The walls were painted brown with some kind of a trick effect that matched the swirls in the linoleum. A bare bulb was burning dimly a foot below the ceiling. The air smelled of dust and cabbage. There were four interior doors, all dull green, all closed. Two were in back and two were in front, one at the foot of the staircase and the other directly opposite it across the hallway. Two front rooms, one of which would house the owner or the super. In Reacher’s experience the owner or the super always chose a ground-floor room at the front, to monitor entrances and exits. Entrances and exits were very important to owners and supers. Unauthorized guests and multiple occupancies were to be discouraged, and tenants had been known to try to sneak out quietly just before final payment of long-overdue rent had been promised.

He opted to start with the door at the foot of the staircase. Better surveillance potential. He knocked and waited. A long moment later the door opened and revealed a thin man in a white shirt and a black tie. The guy was close to seventy years old, and his hair was the same color as his shirt. The shirt wasn’t clean. Neither was the tie, but it had been carefully knotted.

“Help you?” the old guy said.

“Is this your place?” Reacher asked.

The old guy nodded. “And my mother’s before me. In the family for close to fifty years.”

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Reacher said. “From California. I heard he was staying here.”

No reply from the old man.

“Young guy,” Reacher said. “Maybe twenty. Very big. Tan, with short hair.”

“Nobody like that here.”

“You sure?”

“Nobody here at all.”

“He was seen stepping out your door this afternoon.”

“Maybe he was visiting.”

“Visiting who, if there’s nobody here at all?”

“Visiting me,” the old man said.

“Did he visit you?”

“I don’t know. I was out. Maybe he knocked on my door and got no reply and left again.”

“Why would he have been knocking on your door?”

The old guy thought for a moment and said, “Maybe he was at the hotel and wanted to economize. Maybe he had heard the rates were cheaper here.”

“What about another guy, shorter, wiry, about the same age?”

“No guys here at all, big or small.”

“You sure?”

“It’s my house. I know who’s in it.”

“How long has it been empty?”

“It’s not empty. I live here.”

“How long since you had tenants?”

The old guy thought for another moment and said, “A long time.”

“How long?”

“Years.”

“So how do you make a living?”

“I don’t.”

“You own this place?”

“I rent it. Like my mother did. Close to fifty years.”

Reacher said, “Can I see the rooms?”

“Which rooms?”

“All of them.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe you. I think there are people here.”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I’m a suspicious person.”

“I should call the police.”

“Go right ahead.”

The old guy stepped away into the gloom and picked up a phone. Reacher crossed the hallway and tried the opposite door. It was locked. He walked back and the old guy said, “There was no answer at the police station.”

“So it’s just you and me,” Reacher said. “Better that you lend me your passkey. Save yourself some repair work later, with the door locks.”

The old guy bowed to the inevitable. He took a key from his pocket and handed it over. It was a worn brass item with a length of furred string tied through the hole. The string had an old metal eyelet on it, as if the eyelet was all that was left of a paper label.

There were three guest rooms on the ground floor, four on the second, and four on the third. All eleven were identical. All eleven were empty. Each room had a narrow iron cot against one wall. The cots were like something from an old-fashioned fever hospital or an army barracks. The sheets had been washed so many times they were almost transparent. The blankets had started out thick and rough and had worn thin and smooth. Opposite the beds were chests of drawers and freestanding towel racks. The towels were as thin as the sheets. Near the ends of the beds were pine kitchen tables with two-ring electric burners plugged into outlets with frayed old cords. At the ends of the hallways on each of the floors were shared bathrooms, tiled black and white, with iron claw-foot tubs and toilets with cisterns mounted high on the walls.

Basic accommodations, for sure, but they were in good order and beautifully kept. The bathroom fitments were stained with age, but not with dirt. The floors were swept shiny. The beds were made tight. A dropped quarter would have bounced two feet off the blankets. The towels on the racks were folded precisely and perfectly aligned. The electric burners were immaculately clean. No crumbs, no spills, no dried splashes of bottled sauce.

Reacher checked everywhere and then stood in the doorway of each room before leaving it, smelling the air and listening for echoes of recent hasty departures. He found nothing and sensed nothing, eleven times over. So he headed back downstairs and returned the key and apologized to the old guy. Then he asked, “Is there an ambulance service in town?”

The old guy asked, “Are you injured?”

“Suppose I was. Who would come for me?”

“How bad?”

“Suppose I couldn’t walk. Suppose I needed a stretcher.”

The old man said, “There’s a first-aid station up at the plant. And an infirmary. In case a guy gets hurt on the job. They have a vehicle. They have a stretcher.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said.

He drove Vaughan’s old Chevy on down the street. Paused for a moment in front of the storefront church. It had a painted sign running the whole width of the building: Congregation of the End Times. In one window it had a poster written in the same way that a supermarket would advertise brisket for three bucks a pound: The Time Is at Hand. A quotation from the Book of Revelation. Chapter one, verse three. Reacher recognized it. The other window had a similar poster: The End Is Near. Inside, the place was as dark and gloomy as its exterior messages. Rows of metal chairs, a wood floor, a low stage, a podium. More posters, each one predicting with confident aplomb that the clock was ticking. Reacher read them all and then drove on, to the hotel. It was dark when he got there. He remembered the place from earlier daytime sightings as looking dowdy and faded, and by night it looked worse. It could have been an old city prison, in Prague, maybe, or Warsaw, or Leningrad. The walls were featureless and the windows were blank and unlit. Inside it had an empty and unappealing dining room on the left and a deserted bar on the right. Dead ahead in the lobby was a deserted reception desk. Behind the reception desk was a small swaybacked version of a grand staircase. It was covered with matted carpet. There was no elevator.

Hotels were required by state and federal laws and private insurance to maintain accurate guest records. In case of a fire or an earthquake or a tornado, it was in everyone’s interest to know who was resident in the building, and who wasn’t. Therefore Reacher had learned a long time ago that when searching a hotel the place to start was with the register. Which over the years had become increasingly difficult, with computers. There were all kinds of function keys to hit and passwords to discover. But Despair as a whole was behind the times, and its hotel was no exception. The register was a large square book bound in old red leather. Easy to grab, easy to swivel around, easy to open, easy to read.

The hotel had no guests.

According to the handwritten records the last room had rented seven months previously, to a couple from California, who had arrived in a private car and stayed two nights. Since then, nothing. No names that might have corresponded to single twenty-year-old men, either large or small. No names at all.

Reacher left the hotel without a single soul having seen him and got back in the Chevy. Next stop was two blocks over, in the town bar, which meant mixing with the locals.

28

The bar was on the ground floor of yet another dull brick cube. One long narrow room. It ran the full depth of the building and had a short corridor with restrooms and a fire door way in back. The bar itself was on the left and there were tables and chairs on the right. Low light. No music. No television. No pool table, no video games. Maybe a third of the bar stools and a quarter of the chairs were occupied. The after-work crowd. But not exactly happy hour. All the customers were men. They were all tired, all grimy, all dressed in work shirts, all sipping beer from tall glasses or long-neck bottles. Reacher had seen none of them before.

He stepped into the gloom, quietly. Every head turned and every pair of eyes came to rest on him. Some kind of universal barroom radar. Stranger in the house. Reacher stood still and let them take a good look. A stranger for sure, but not the kind you want to mess with. Then he sat down on a stool and put his elbows on the bar. He was two gaps away from the nearest guy on his left and one away from the nearest guy on his right. The stools had iron bases and iron pillars and shaped mahogany seats that turned on rough bearings. The bar itself was made from scarred mahogany that didn’t match the walls, which were paneled with pine. There were mirrors all over the walls, made of plain reflective glass screen-printed with beer company advertisements. They were framed with rustic wood and were fogged with years of alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke.

The bartender was a heavy pale man of about forty. He didn’t look smart and he didn’t look pleasant. He was ten feet away, leaning back with his fat ass against his cash register drawer. Not moving. Not about to move, either. That was clear. Reacher raised his eyebrows and put a beckoning expression on his face and got no response at all.

A company town.

He swiveled his stool and faced the room.

“Listen up, guys,” he called. “I’m not a metalworker and I’m not looking for a job.”

No response.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to work here. I’m not interested. I’m just a guy passing through, looking for a beer.”

No response. Just sullen and hostile stares, with bottles and glasses frozen halfway between tables and mouths.

Reacher said, “First guy to talk to me, I’ll pay his tab.”

No response.

“For a week.”

No response.

Reacher turned back and faced the bar again. The bartender hadn’t moved. Reacher looked him in the eye and said, “Sell me a beer or I’ll start busting this place up.”

The bartender moved. But not toward his refrigerator cabinets or his draft pumps. Toward his telephone instead. It was an old-fashioned instrument next to the register. The guy picked it up and dialed a long number. Reacher waited. The guy listened to a lot of ring tone and then started to say something but then stopped and put the phone down again.

“Voice mail,” he said.

“Nobody home,” Reacher said. “So it’s just you and me. I’ll take a Budweiser, no glass.”

The guy glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder, out into the room, to see if any ad hoc coalitions were forming to help him out. They weren’t. Reacher was already monitoring the situation in a dull mirror directly in front of him. The bartender decided not to be a hero. He shrugged and his attitude changed and his face sagged a little and he bent down and pulled a cold bottle out from under the bar. Opened it up and set it down on a napkin. Foam swelled out of the neck and ran down the side of the bottle and soaked into the paper. Reacher took a ten from his pocket and folded it lengthways so it wouldn’t curl and squared it in front of him.

“I’m looking for a guy,” he said.

The bartender said, “What guy?”

“A young guy. Maybe twenty. Suntan, short hair, as big as me.”

“Nobody like that here.”

“I saw him this afternoon. In town. Coming out of the rooming house.”

“So ask there.”

“I did.”

“I can’t help you.”

“This guy looked like a college athlete. College athletes drink beer from time to time. He was probably in here once or twice.”

“He wasn’t.”

“What about another guy? Same age, much smaller. Wiry, maybe five-eight, one-forty.”

“Didn’t see him.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You ever work up at the plant?”

“Couple of years, way back.”

“And then?”

“He moved me here.”

“Who did?”

“Mr. Thurman. He owns the plant.”

“And this bar, too?”

“He owns everything.”

“And he moved you? He sounds like a hands-on manager.”

“He figured I’d be better working here than there.”

“And are you?”

“Not for me to say.”

Reacher took a long pull on his bottle. Asked, “Does Mr. Thurman pay you well?”

“I don’t complain.”

“Is that Mr. Thurman’s plane that flies every night?”

“Nobody else here owns a plane.”

“Where does he go?”

“I don’t ask.”

“Any rumors?”

“No.”

“You sure you never saw any young guys around here?”

“I’m sure.”

“Suppose I gave you a hundred bucks?”

The guy paused a beat and looked a little wistful, as if a hundred bucks would make a welcome change in his life. But in the end he just shrugged again and said, “I’d still be sure.”

Reacher drank a little more of his beer. It was warming up a little and tasted metallic and soapy. The bartender stayed close. Reacher glanced at the mirrors. Checked reflections of reflections. Nobody in the room was moving. He asked, “What happens to dead people here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You got undertakers in town?”

The bartender shook his head. “Forty miles west. There’s a morgue and a funeral home and a burial ground. No consecrated land in Despair.”

“The smaller guy died,” Reacher said.

“What smaller guy?”

“The one I was asking you about.”

“I didn’t see any small guys, alive or dead.”

Reacher went quiet again and the bartender said, “So, you’re just passing through?” A meaningless, for-the-sake-of-it conversational gambit, which confirmed what Reacher already knew. Bring it on, he thought. He glanced at the fire exit in back and checked the front door in the mirrors. He said, “Yes, I’m just passing through.”

“Not much to see here.”

“Actually I think this is a pretty interesting place.”

“You do?”

“Who hires the cops here?”

“The mayor.”

“Who’s the mayor?”

“Mr. Thurman.”

“There’s a big surprise.”

“It’s his town.”

Reacher said, “I’d like to meet him.”

The bartender said, “He’s a very private man.”

“I’m just saying. I’m not asking for an appointment.”

Six minutes, Reacher thought. I’ve been working on this beer for six minutes. Maybe ten more to go. He asked, “Do you know the judge?”

“He doesn’t come in here.”

“I didn’t ask where he goes.”

“He’s Mr. Thurman’s lawyer, up at the plant.”

“I thought it was an elected position.”

“It is. We all voted for him.”

“How many candidates were on the ballot?”

“He was unopposed.”

Reacher said, “Does this judge have a name?”

The bartender said, “His name is Judge Gardner.”

“Does Judge Gardner live here in town?”

“Sure. You work for Mr. Thurman, you have to live in town.”

“You know Judge Gardner’s address?”

“The big house on Nickel.”

“Nickel?”

“All the residential streets here are named for metals.”

Reacher nodded. Not so very different from the way streets on army bases were named for generals or Medal of Honor winners. He went quiet again and waited for the bartender to fill the silence, like he had to. Like he had been told to. The guy said, “A hundred and some years ago there were only five miles of paved road in the United States.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “Apart from city centers, of course, which were cobbled anyway, not really paved. Not with blacktop, like now. Then county roads got built, then state, then the Interstates. Towns got passed by. We were on the main road to Denver, once. Not so much anymore. People use I-70 now.”

Reacher said, “Hence the closed-down motel.”

“Exactly.”

“And the general feeling of isolation.”

“I guess.”

Reacher said, “I know those two young guys were here. It’s only a matter of time before I find out who they were and why they came.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“One of them died.”

“You told me that already. And I still don’t know anything about it.”

Eleven minutes, Reacher thought. Five to go. He asked, “Is this the only bar in town?”

The guy said, “One is all we need.”

“Movies?”

“No.”

“So what do people do for entertainment?”

“They watch satellite television.”

“I heard there’s a first-aid station at the plant.”

“That’s right.”

“With an ambulance.”

“An old one. It’s a big plant. It covers a big area.”

“Are there a lot of accidents?”

“It’s an industrial operation. Shit happens.”

“Does the plant pay disability?”

“Mr. Thurman looks after people if they get hurt on the job.”

Reacher nodded and sipped his beer. Watched the other customers sipping theirs, directly and in the mirrors. Three minutes, he thought.

Unless they’re early.

Which they were.

Reacher looked to his right and saw two deputies step in through the fire door. He glanced in a mirror and saw the other two walk in the front.

29

The telephone. A useful invention, and instructive in the way it was used. Or not used. Four deputies heading east to make a surprise arrest would not tip their hand with a courtesy telephone call. Not in the real world. They would swoop down unannounced. They would aim to grab up their prey unawares. Therefore their courtesy call was a decoy. It was a move in a game. A move designed to flush Reacher westward into safer territory. It was an invitation.

Which Reacher had interpreted correctly.

And accepted.

And the bartender had not called the station house. Had not gotten voice mail. Had not made a local call at all. He had dialed too many digits. He had called a deputy’s cell, and spoken just long enough to let the deputy know who he was, and therefore where Reacher was. Whereupon he had changed his attitude and turned talkative and friendly, to keep Reacher sitting tight. Like he had been told to, beforehand, should the opportunity arise.

Which is why Reacher had not left the bar. If the guy wanted to participate, he was welcome to. He could participate by cleaning up the mess.

And there was going to be a mess.

That was for damn sure.

The deputies who had come in the back walked through the short corridor past the restrooms and stopped where the main room widened out. Reacher kept his eyes on them. Didn’t turn his head. A two-front attack was fairly pointless in a room full of mirrors. He could see the other guys quite clearly, smaller than life and reversed. They had stopped a yard inside the front door and were standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

The big guy who had thrown up the night before was one of the pair that had come in the front. With him was the guy Reacher had smacked outside the family restaurant. Neither one of them looked in great shape. The two who had come in the back looked large and healthy enough, but manageable. Four against one, but no real cause for concern. Reacher had first fought four-on-one when he was five years old, against seven-year-olds, on his father’s base in the Philippines. He had won then, easily, and he expected to win now.

But then the situation changed.

Two guys stood up from the body of the room. They put their glasses down and dabbed their lips with napkins and scraped their chairs back and stepped forward and separated. One went left, and one went right. One lined up with the guys in back, and one lined up with the guys in front. The newcomers were not the biggest people Reacher had ever seen, but they weren’t the smallest, either. They could have been the deputies’ brothers or cousins. They probably were. They were dressed the same and looked the same and were built the same.

So, thirteen minutes previously the bartender had not been glancing into the room in hopes of immediate short-term assistance. He had been catching the ringers’ eyes and tipping them off: Stand by, the others are on their way. Reacher clamped his jaw and the beer in his stomach went sour. Mistake. A bad one. He had been smart, but not smart enough.

And now he was going to pay, big time.

Six against one.

Twelve hundred pounds against two-fifty.

No kind of excellent odds.

He realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled, long and slow. Because: Dum spero speri. Where there’s breath, there’s hope. Not an aphorism Zeno of Cittium would have understood or approved of. Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism. But the saying worked well enough for Reacher, when all else failed. He took a last sip of Bud and set the bottle back on his napkin. Swiveled his stool and faced the room. Behind him he sensed the bartender moving away to a safe place by the register. In front of him he saw the other customers sidling backward toward the far wall, cradling their glasses and bottles, huddling together, hunkering down. Beside him guys slipped off their stools and melted across the room into the safety of the crowd.

There was movement at both ends of the bar.

Both sets of three men took long paces forward.

Now they defined the ends of an empty rectangle of space. Nothing in it, except Reacher alone on his stool, and the bare wooden floor.

The six guys weren’t armed. Reacher was pretty sure about that. Vaughan had said that in Colorado police deputies were limited to civilian status. And the other two guys were just members of the public. Plenty of members of the public in Colorado had private weapons, of course, but generally people pulled weapons at the start of a fight, not later on. They wanted to display them. Show them off. Intimidate, from the get-go. Nobody in Reacher’s experience had ever waited to pull a gun.

So, unarmed combat, six-on-one.

The big guy spoke, from six feet inside the front door. He said, “You’re in so much trouble you couldn’t dig your way out with a steam shovel.”

Reacher said, “You talking to me?”

“Damn straight I am.”

“Well, don’t.”

“You showed up one too many times, pal.”

“Save your breath. Go outside and throw up. That’s what you’re good at.”

“We’re not leaving. And neither are you.”

“Free country.”

“Not for you. Not anymore.”

Reacher stayed on his stool, tensed up and ready, but not visibly. Outwardly he was still calm and relaxed. His brother Joe had been two years older, physically very similar, but temperamentally very different. Joe had eased into fights. He had met escalation with escalation, reluctantly, slowly, rationally, patiently, a little sadly. Therefore he had been a frustrating opponent. Therefore according to the peculiar little-boy dynamics of the era, Joe’s enemies had turned on Reacher himself, the younger brother. The first time, confronted with four baiting seven-year-olds, the five-year-old Reacher had felt a jolt of real fear. The jolt of fear had sparked wildly and jumped tracks in his brain and emerged as intense aggression. He had exploded into action and the fight was over before his four assailants had really intended it to begin. When they got out of the pediatric ward they had stayed well away from him, and his brother, forever. And in his earnest childhood manner Reacher had pondered the experience and felt he had learned a valuable lesson. Years later during advanced army training that lesson had been reinforced. At the grand strategic level it even had a title: Overwhelming Force. At the individual level in sweaty gyms the thugs doing the training had pointed out that gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t around to train anyone. They were already dead. Therefore: Hit early, hit hard.

Overwhelming force.

Hit early, hit hard.

Reacher called it: Get your retaliation in first.

He slipped forward off his stool, turned, bent, grasped the iron pillar, spun, and hurled the stool head-high as hard as he could at the three men at the back of the room. Before it hit he launched the other way and charged the new guy next to the guy with the damaged jaw. He led with his elbow and smashed it flat against the bridge of the guy’s nose. The guy went down like a tree and before he hit the boards Reacher jerked sideways from the waist and put the same elbow into the big guy’s ear. Then he bounced away from the impact and backed into the guy with the bad jaw and buried the elbow deep in his gut. The guy folded forward and Reacher put his hand flat on the back of the guy’s head and powered it downward into his raised knee and then shoved the guy away and turned around fast.

The stool had hit one of the deputies and the other new guy neck-high. Wood and iron, thrown hard, spinning horizontally. Maybe they had raised their hands instinctively and broken their wrists, or maybe they hadn’t been fast enough and the stool had connected. Reacher wasn’t sure. But either way the two guys were sidelined for the moment. They were turned away, bent over, crouched, with the stool still rolling noisily at their feet.

The other deputy was untouched. He was launching forward with a wild grimace on his face. Reacher danced two steps and took a left hook on the shoulder and put a straight right into the center of the grimace. The guy stumbled back and shook his head and Reacher’s arms were clamped from behind in a bear hug. The big guy, presumably. Reacher forced him backward and dropped his chin to his chest and snapped a reverse head butt that made solid contact. Not as good as a forward-going blow, but useful. Then Reacher accelerated all the way backward and crushed the breath out of the guy against the wall. A mirror smashed and the arms loosened and Reacher pulled away and met the other deputy in the center of the room and dodged an incoming right and snapped a right of his own to the guy’s jaw. Not a powerful blow, but it rocked the guy enough to open him up for a colossal left to the throat that put him down in a heap.

Eight blows delivered, one taken, one guy down for maybe a seven count, four down for maybe an eight count, the big guy still basically functional.

Not efficient.

Time to get serious.

The bartender had said: Mr. Thurman looks after people if they get hurt on the job. Reacher thought: So let him. Because these guys are following Thurman’s orders. Clearly nothing happens here except what Thurman wants.

The deputy in the back of the room was rolling around and clutching his throat. Reacher kicked him in the ribs hard enough to break a couple and then forced the guy’s forearm to the floor with one foot and stamped on it with the other. Then he moved on to the two guys he had hit with the stool. The second deputy, and the new guy. One was crouched down, clutching his forearm, whimpering. Reacher put the flat of his foot on the guy’s backside and drove him headfirst into the wall. The other guy had maybe taken the edge of the seat in the chest, like a dull blade. He was having trouble breathing. Reacher kicked his feet out from under him and then kicked him in the head. Then he turned in time to dodge a right hook from the big guy. He took it in the shoulder. Looked for a response. But his balance wasn’t good. Floor space was limited by inert assailants. The big guy threw a straight left and Reacher swatted it away and bulldozed a path back to the center of the room.

The big guy followed, fast. Threw a straight right. Reacher jerked his head to the side and took the blow on the collarbone. It was a weak punch. The guy was pale in the face. He threw a wild breathless haymaker and Reacher stepped back out of range and glanced around.

One stool damaged, one mirror broken, five guys down, twenty spectators still passive. So far so good. The big guy stepped back and straightened like they were in a timeout and called, “Like you said, one of us would stay on his feet long enough to get to you.”

Reacher said, “You’re not getting to me. Not even a little bit.” Which puzzled him, deep down. He was close to winning a six-on-one bar brawl and he had nothing to show for it except two bruised shoulders and an ache in his knuckles. It had gone way better than he could have hoped.

Then it started to go way worse.

The big guy said, “Think again.” He put his hands in his pants pockets and came out with two switchblades. Neat wooden handles, plated bindings, plated buttons. He stood in the dusty panting silence and popped the first blade with a precision click and then paused and popped the second.

30

The two small clicks the blades made were not attractive sounds. Reacher’s stomach clenched. He hated knives. He would have preferred it if the guy had pulled a pair of six-shooters. Guns can miss. In fact they usually did, given stress and pressure and trembling and confusion. After-action reports proved it. The papers were always full of DOAs gunned down with seven bullets to the body, which sounded lethal until you read down into the third paragraph and learned that a hundred and fifty shots had been fired in the first place.

Knives didn’t miss. If they touched you, they cut you. The only opponents Reacher truly feared were small whippy guys with fast hands and sharp blades. The big deputy was not fast or nimble, but with knives in his hands dodged blows would not mean dull impacts to the shoulders. They would mean open wounds, pouring blood, severed ligaments and arteries.

Not good.

Reacher clubbed a spectator out of his seat and grabbed the empty chair and held it out in front of him like a lion tamer. The best defense against knives was distance. The best countermove was entanglement. A swung net or coat or blanket was often effective. The blade would hang up in the fabric. But Reacher didn’t have a net or a coat or a blanket. A horizontal forest of four chair legs was all he had. He jabbed forward like a fencer and then fell back and shoved another guy out of his seat. Picked up the second empty chair and threw it overhand at the big guy’s head. The big guy turned away reflexively and brought his right hand up to shield his face and took the chair on the forearm. Reacher stepped back in and jabbed hard. Got one chair leg in the guy’s solar plexus and another in his gut. The guy fell back and took a breath and then came on hard, arms swinging, the blades hissing through the air and winking in the lights.

Reacher danced backward and jabbed with his chair. Made solid contact with the guy’s upper arm. The guy spun one way and then the other. Reacher moved left and jabbed again. Got a chair leg into the back of the guy’s head. The guy staggered one short step and then came back hard, hands low and apart, the blades moving through tiny dangerous arcs.

Reacher backed off. Shoved a third spectator out of his seat and threw the empty chair high and hard. The big guy flinched away and jerked his arms up and the chair bounced off his elbows. Reacher was ready. He stepped in and jabbed hard and caught the guy low down in the side, below the ribs, above the waist, two hundred and fifty pounds of weight punched through the blunt end of a chair leg into nothing but soft tissue.

The big guy stopped fighting.

His body froze and went rigid and his face crumpled. He dropped both knives and clamped both hands low down on his stomach. For a long moment he stood like a statue and then he jerked forward from the waist and bent down and puked a long stream of blood and mucus on the floor. He staggered away in a crouch and fell to his knees. His shoulders sagged and his face went waxy and bloodless. His stomach heaved and he puked again. More blood, more mucus. He braced his spread fingertips either side of the spreading pool and tried to push himself upward. But he didn’t make it. He collapsed sideways in a heap. His eyes rolled up in his head and he rolled on his back and he started breathing fast and shallow. One hand moved back to his stomach and the other beat on the floor. He threw up again, projectile, a fountain of blood vertically into the air. Then he rolled away and curled into a fetal ball.

Game over.

The bar went silent. No sound, except ragged breathing. The air was full of dust and the stink of blood and vomit. Reacher was shaky with excess adrenaline. He forced himself back under control and put his chair down quietly and bent and picked up the fallen knives. Pressed the blades back into the handles against the wood of the bar and slipped both knives into one pocket. Then he stepped around in the silence and checked his results. The first guy he had hit was unconscious on his back. The elbow to the bridge of the nose was always an effective blow. Too hard, and it can slide shards of bone into the frontal lobes. Badly aimed, it can put splinters of cheekbone into the eye sockets. But this one had been perfectly judged. The guy would be sick and groggy for a week, but he would recover.

The guy who had started the evening with a busted jaw had added a rebroken nose and a bad headache. The new guy at the back of the room had a broken arm from the stool and maybe a concussion from being driven headfirst into the wall. The guy next to him was unconscious from the kick in the head. The deputy who the stool had missed had busted ribs and a broken wrist and a cracked larynx.

Major damage all around, but the whole enterprise had been voluntary from the start.

So, five for five, plus some kind of a medical explanation for the sixth. The big guy had stayed in the fetal position and looked very weak and pale. Like he was hollowed out with sickness. Reacher bent down and checked the pulse in his neck and found it weak and thready. He went through the guy’s pockets and found a five-pointed star in the front of the shirt. The badge was made of pewter and two lines were engraved in its center: Township of Despair, Police Deputy. Reacher put it in his own shirt pocket. He found a bunch of keys and a thin wad of money in a brass clip. He kept the keys and left the cash. Then he looked around until he found the bartender. The guy was where he had started, leaning back with his fat ass against his register drawer.

“Call the plant,” Reacher said. “Get the ambulance down here. Take care with the big guy. He doesn’t look good.”

His beer was where he had left it, still upright on its napkin. He drained the last of it and set the bottle back down again and walked out the front door into the night.

31

It took ten minutes of aimless driving south of the main drag before he found Nickel Street. The road signs were small and faded and the headlights on Vaughan’s old truck were weak and set low. He deciphered Iron and Chromium and Vanadium and Molybdenum and then lost metals altogether and ran through a sequence of numbered avenues before he hit Steel and Platinum and then Gold. Nickel was a dead end off Gold. It had sixteen houses, eight facing eight, fifteen of them small and one of them bigger.

Thurman’s pet judge Gardner lived in the big house on Nickel, the bartender had said. Reacher paused at the curb and checked the name on the big house’s mailbox and then pulled the truck into the driveway and shut it down. Climbed out and walked to the porch. The place was a medium-sized farmhouse-style structure and looked pretty good relative to its neighbors, but there was no doubt that Gardner would have done better for himself if he had gotten out of town and made it to the Supreme Court in D.C. Or to whatever Circuit included Colorado, or even to night traffic court in Denver. The porch sagged against rotted underpinnings and the paint on the clapboards had aged to dust. Millwork had dried and split. There were twin newel posts at the top of the porch steps. Both had decorative ball shapes carved into their tops and both balls had split along the grain, like they had been attacked with cleavers.

Reacher found a bell push and tapped it twice with his knuckle. An old habit, about not leaving fingerprints if not strictly necessary. Then he waited. In Reacher’s experience the average delay when knocking at a suburban door in the middle of the evening was about twenty seconds. Couples looked up from the television and looked at each other and asked, Who could that be? At this time of night? Then they mimed their way through offer and counteroffer and finally decided which one of them should make the trip down the hall. Before nine o’clock it was usually the wife. After nine, it was usually the husband.

It was Mrs. Gardner who opened up. The wife, after a twenty-three-second delay. She looked similar to her husband, bulky and somewhere over sixty, with a full head of white hair. Only the amount of the hair and the style of her clothing distinguished her gender. She had the kind of large firm curls that women get from big heated rollers and she was wearing a shapeless gray dress that reached her ankles. She stood there, patterned and indistinct behind a screen door. She said, “May I help you?”

Reacher said, “I need to see the judge.”

“It’s awful late,” Mrs. Gardner said, which it wasn’t. According to an old longcase clock in the hallway behind her it was eight twenty-nine, and according to the clock in Reacher’s head it was eight thirty-one, but what the woman meant was: You’re a big ugly customer. Reacher smiled. Look at yourself, Vaughan had said. What do you see? Reacher knew he was no kind of an ideal nighttime visitor. Nine times out of ten only Mormon missionaries were less welcome than him.

“It’s urgent,” he said.

The woman stood still and said nothing. In Reacher’s experience the husband would show up if the doorstep interview lasted any longer than thirty seconds. He would crane his neck out of the living room and call, Who is it, dear? And Reacher wanted the screen door open long before that happened. He wanted to be able to stop the front door from closing, if necessary.

“It’s urgent,” he said again, and pulled the screen door. It screeched on worn hinges. The woman stepped back, but didn’t try to slam the front door. Reacher stepped inside and let the screen slap shut behind him. The hallway smelled of still air and cooking. Reacher turned and closed the front door gently and clicked it against the latch. At that point the thirty seconds he had been counting in his head elapsed and the judge stepped out to the hallway.

The old guy was dressed in the same gray suit pants Reacher had seen before, but his suit coat was off and his tie was loose. He stood still for a moment, evidently searching his memory, because after ten long seconds puzzlement left his face and was replaced by an altogether different emotion, and he said, “You?”

Reacher nodded.

“Yes, me,” he said.

“What do you want? What do you mean by coming here?”

“I came here to talk to you.”

“I meant, what are you doing in Despair at all? You were excluded.”

“Didn’t take,” Reacher said. “So sue me.”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“Please do. But they won’t answer, as I’m sure you know. Neither will the deputies.”

“Where are the deputies?”

“On their way up to the first-aid station.”

“What happened to them?”

“I did.”

The judge said nothing.

Reacher said, “And Mr. Thurman is up in his little airplane right now. Out of touch for another five and a half hours. So you’re on your own. It’s initiative time for Judge Gardner.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to invite me into your living room. I want you to ask me to sit down and whether I take cream and sugar in my coffee, which I don’t, by the way. Because so far I’m here with your implied permission, and therefore I’m not trespassing. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“You’re not only trespassing, you’re in violation of a town ordinance.”

“That’s what I’d like to talk about. I’d like you to reconsider. Consider it an appeals process.”

“Are you nuts?”

“A little unconventional, maybe. But I’m not armed and I’m not making threats. I just want to talk.”

“Get lost.”

“On the other hand I am a large stranger with nothing to lose. In a town where there is no functioning law enforcement.”

“I have a gun.”

“I’m sure you do. In fact I’m sure you have several. But you won’t use any of them.”

“You think not?”

“You’re a man of the law. You know what kind of hassle comes afterward. I don’t think you want to face that kind of thing.”

“You’re taking a risk.”

“Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk.”

The judge said nothing to that. Didn’t yield, didn’t accede. Impasse. Reacher turned to the wife and took all the amiability out of his face and replaced it with the kind of thousand-yard stare he had used years ago on recalcitrant witnesses.

He asked, “What do you think, Mrs. Gardner?”

She started to speak a couple of times but couldn’t get any words past a dry throat. Finally she said, “I think we should all sit down and talk.” But the way she said it showed she wasn’t all the way scared. She was a tough old bird. Probably had to be, to have survived sixty-some years in Despair, and marriage to the boss man’s flunky.

Her husband huffed once and turned around and led the way into the living room. A sofa, an armchair, another armchair, with a lever on the side that meant it was a recliner. There was a coffee table and a large television set wired to a satellite box. The furniture was covered in a floral pattern that was duplicated in the drapes. The drapes were closed and had a ruffled pelmet made from the same fabric. Reacher suspected that Mrs. Gardner had sewed them herself.

The judge said, “Take a seat, I guess.”

Mrs. Gardner said, “I’m not going to make coffee. I think under the circumstances that would be a step too far.”

“Your choice,” Reacher said. “But I have to tell you I’d truly appreciate some.” He paused a moment and then sat down in the armchair. Gardner sat in the recliner. His wife stood for a moment longer and then sighed once and headed out of the room. A minute later Reacher heard water running and the quiet metallic sound of an aluminum percolator basket being rinsed.

Gardner said, “There is no appeal.”

“There has to be,” Reacher said. “It’s a constitutional issue. The Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process. At the very least there must be the possibility of judicial review.”

“Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

“You want to go to federal court over a local vagrancy ordinance?”

“I’d prefer you to concede that a mistake has been made, and then go ahead and tear up whatever paperwork was generated.”

“There was no mistake. You are a vagrant, as defined by law.”

“I’d like you to reconsider that.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“I’d like to understand why it’s so important to you to have free rein in our town.”

“And I’d like to understand why it’s so important to you to keep me out.”

“Where’s your loss? It’s not much of a place.”

“It’s a matter of principle.”

Gardner said nothing. A moment later his wife came in, with a single mug of coffee in her hand. She placed it carefully on the table in front of Reacher’s chair and then backed away and sat down on the sofa. Reacher picked up the mug and took a sip. The coffee was hot, strong, and smooth. The mug was cylindrical, narrow in relation to its height, made of delicate bone china, and it had a thin lip.

“Excellent,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much. I’m really very grateful.”

Mrs. Gardner paused a beat and said, “You’re really very welcome.”

Reacher said, “You did a great job with the drapes, too.”

Mrs. Gardner didn’t reply to that. The judge said, “There’s nothing I can do. There’s no provision for an appeal. Sue the town, if you must.”

Reacher said, “You told me you’d welcome me with open arms if I got a job.”

The judge nodded. “Because that would remove the presumption of vagrancy.”

“There you go.”

“Have you gotten a job?”

“I have prospects. That’s the other thing we need to talk about. It’s not healthy that this town has no functioning law enforcement. So I want you to swear me in as a deputy.”

There was silence for a moment. Reacher took the pewter star from his shirt pocket. He said, “I already have the badge. And I have a lot of relevant experience.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Just trying to fill a hole.”

“You’re completely insane.”

“I’m offering my services.”

“Finish your coffee and get out of my home.”

“The coffee is hot and it’s good. I can’t just gulp it down.”

“Then leave it. Get the hell out. Now.”

“So you won’t swear me in?”

The judge stood up and planted his feet wide and made himself as tall as he could get, which was about five feet nine inches. His eyes narrowed as his brain ran calculations about present dangers versus future contingencies. He was silent with preoccupation for a long moment and then he said, “I’d rather deputize the entire damn population. Every last man, woman, and child in Despair. In fact, I think I will. Twenty-six hundred people. You think you can get past them all? Because I don’t. We aim to keep you out, mister, and we’re going to. You better believe it. You can take that to the bank.”

32

Reacher thumped back over the expansion joint at nine-thirty in the evening and was outside the diner before nine-thirty-five. He figured Vaughan might swing by there a couple of times during the night. He figured that if he left her truck on the curb she would see it and be reassured that he was OK. Or at least that her truck was OK.

He went inside to leave her keys at the register and saw Lucy Anderson sitting alone in a booth. Short shorts, blue sweatshirt, tiny socks, big sneakers. A lot of bare leg. She was gazing into space and smiling. The first time he had seen her he had characterized her as not quite a hundred percent pretty. Now she looked pretty damn good. She looked radiant, and taller, and straighter. She looked like a completely different person.

She had changed.

Before, she had been hobbled by worry.

Now she was happy.

He paused at the register and she noticed him and looked over and smiled. It was a curious smile. There was a lot of straightforward contentment in it, but a little triumph, too. A little superiority. Like she had won a significant victory, at his expense.

He handed Vaughan’s keys to the cashier and the woman asked, “Are you eating with us tonight?” He thought about it. His stomach had settled. The adrenaline had drained away. He realized he was hungry. No sustenance since breakfast, except for coffee and some empty calories from the bottle of Bud in the bar. And he had burned plenty of calories in the bar. That was for sure. He was facing an energy deficit. So he said, “Yes, I guess I’m ready for dinner.”

He walked over and slid into Lucy Anderson’s booth. She looked across the table at him and smiled the same smile all over again. Contentment, triumph, superiority, victory. Up close the smile looked a lot bigger and it had a bigger effect. It was a real megawatt grin. She had great teeth. Her eyes were bright and clear and blue. He said, “This afternoon you looked like Lucy. Now you look like Lucky.”

She said, “Now I feel like Lucky.”

“What changed?”

“What do you think?”

“You heard from your husband.”

She smiled again, a hundred percent happiness.

“I sure did,” she said.

“He left Despair.”

“He sure did. Now you’ll never get him.”

“I never wanted him. I never heard of him before I met you.”

“Really,” she said, in the exaggerated and sarcastic way he had heard young people use the word. As far as he understood it, the effect was intended to convey: How big of an idiot do you think I am?

He said, “You’re confusing me with someone else.”

“Really.”

Look at yourself, Vaughan had said. What do you see?

“I’m not a cop,” Reacher said. “I was one once, and maybe I still look like one to you, but I’m not one anymore.”

She didn’t answer. But he knew she wasn’t convinced. He said, “Your husband must have left late this afternoon. He was there at three and gone before seven.”

“You went back?”

“I’ve been there twice today.”

“Which proves you were looking for him.”

“I guess I was. But only on your behalf.”

“Really.”

“What did he do?”

“You already know.”

“If I already know, it can’t hurt to tell me again, can it?”

“I’m not stupid. My position is I don’t know about anything he’s done. Otherwise you’ll call me an accessory. We have lawyers, you know.”

“We?”

“People in our position. Which you know all about.”

“I’m not a cop, Lucky. I’m just a passing stranger. I don’t know all about anything.”

She smiled again. Happiness, triumph, victory.

Reacher asked, “Where has he gone?”

“Like I’d tell you that.”

“When are you joining him, wherever he is?”

“In a couple of days.”

“I could follow you.”

She smiled again, impregnable. “Wouldn’t do you any good.”

The waitress came by and Reacher asked her for coffee and steak. When she had gone away again he looked across at Lucy Anderson and said, “There are others in the position you were in yesterday. There’s a girl in town right now, just waiting.”

“I hope there are plenty of us.”

“I think maybe she’s waiting in vain. I know that a boy died out there a day or two ago.”

Lucy Anderson shook her head.

“Not possible,” she said. “I know that none of us died. I would have heard.”

“Us?”

“People in our position.”

“Somebody died.”

“People die all the time.”

“Young people? For no apparent reason?”

She didn’t answer that, and he knew she never would. The waitress brought his coffee. He took a sip. It was not as good as Mrs. Gardner’s, either in terms of brew or receptacle. He put the mug down and looked at the girl again and said, “Whatever, Lucy. I wish you nothing but good luck, whatever the hell you’re doing and wherever the hell you’re going.”

“That’s it? No more questions?”

“I’m just here to eat.”

He ate alone, because Lucy Anderson left before his steak arrived. She smiled and slid out of the booth and walked away. More accurately, she skipped away. Light on her feet, happy, full of energy. She pushed out through the door and instead of huddling into her shirt against the chill she squared her shoulders and turned her face upward and breathed the night air like she was in an enchanted forest. Reacher watched her until she was lost to sight and then gazed into space until his food showed up.

He was through eating by ten-thirty and headed back to the motel. He dropped by the office, to pay for another night’s stay. He always rented rooms one night at a time, even when he knew he was going to hang out in a place longer. It was a reassuring habit. A comforting ritual, intended to confirm his absolute freedom to move on. The day clerk was still on duty. The stout woman. The nosy woman. He assembled a collection of small bills and waited for his change and said, “Go over what you were telling me about the metal plant.”

“What was I telling you?”

“Violations. Real crimes. You were interested in why the plane flies every night.”

The woman said, “So you are a cop.”

“I used to be. Maybe I still have the old habits.”

The woman shrugged and looked a little sheepish. Maybe even blushed a little.

“It’s just silly amateur stuff,” she said. “That’s what you’ll think.”

“Amateur?”

“I’m a day trader. I do research on my computer. I was thinking about that operation.”

“What about it?”

“It seems to make way too much money. But what do I know? I’m not an expert. I’m not a broker or a forensic accountant or anything.”

“Talk me through it.”

“Business sectors go up and down. There are cycles, to do with commodity prices and supply and demand and market conditions. Right now metal recycling as a whole is in a down cycle. But that place is raking it in.”

“How do you know?”

“Employment seems to be way up.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

“It files taxes, federal and state. I looked at the figures, to pass the time.”

And because you’re a nosy neighbor, Reacher thought.

“And?” he asked.

“It’s reporting great profits. If it was a public company, I’d be buying stock, big time. If I had any money, that is. If I wasn’t a motel clerk.”

“OK.”

“But it’s not a public company. It’s private. So it’s probably making more than it’s reporting.”

“So you think they’re cutting corners out there? With environmental violations?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Would that make much difference? I thought rules were pretty slack now anyway.”

“Maybe.”

“What about the plane?”

The woman glanced away. “Just silly thoughts.”

“Try me.”

“Well, I was just thinking, if the fundamentals don’t support the profits, and it’s not about violations, then maybe there’s something else going on.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe that plane is bringing stuff in every night. To sell. Like smuggling.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Stuff that isn’t metal.”

“From where?”

“I’m not sure.”

Reacher said nothing.

The woman said, “See? What do I know? I have too much time on my hands, that’s all. Way too much. And broadband. That can really do a person’s head in.”

She turned away and busied herself with an entry in a book and Reacher put his change in his pocket. Before he left he glanced at the row of hooks behind the clerk’s shoulder and saw that four keys were missing. Therefore four rooms were occupied. His own, Lucy Anderson’s, one for the woman with the large underwear, and one for the new girl in town, he guessed. The dark girl, who he hadn’t met yet, but who he might meet soon. He suspected that she was going to be in town longer than Lucy Anderson, and he suspected that at the end of her stay she wasn’t going to be skipping away with a smile on her face.

He went back to his room and showered, but he was too restless to sleep. So as soon as the stink of the bar fight was off him he dressed again and went out and walked. On a whim he stopped at a phone booth under a streetlight and pulled the directory and looked up David Robert Vaughan. He was right there in the book. Vaughan, D. R., with an address on Fifth Street, Hope, Colorado.

Two blocks south.

He had seen Fourth Street. Perhaps he should take a look at Fifth Street, too. Just for the sake of idle curiosity.

33

Fifth Street was more or less a replica of Fourth Street, except that it was residential on both sides. Trees, yards, picket fences, mailboxes, small neat houses resting quietly in the moonlight. A nice place to live, probably. Vaughan’s house was close to the eastern limit. Nearer Kansas than Despair. It had a plain aluminum mailbox out front, mounted on a store-bought wooden post. The post had been treated against decay. The box had Vaughan written on both sides with stick-on italic letters. They had been carefully applied and were perfectly aligned. Rare, in Reacher’s experience. Most people seemed to have trouble with stick-on letters. He imagined that the glue was too aggressive to allow the correction of mistakes. To get seven letters each side level and true spoke of meticulous planning. Maybe a straightedge had been taped in position first, and then removed.

The house and the yard had been maintained to a high standard, too. Reacher was no expert, but he could tell the difference between care and neglect. The yard had no lawn. It was covered with golden gravel, with shrubs and bushes pushing up through the stones. The driveway was paved with small riven slabs that seemed to be the same color as the gravel. The same slabs made a narrower winding walkway to the door. More slabs were set here and there in the gravel, like stepping-stones. The bushes and the shrubs were neatly pruned. Some of them had small flowers on their branches, all closed up for the night against the chill.

The house itself was a low one-story ranch maybe fifty years old. At the right-hand end was a single attached garage and at the left was a T-shaped bump-out that maybe housed the bedrooms, one front, one back. Reacher guessed the kitchen would be next to the garage and the living room would be between the kitchen and the bedrooms. There was a chimney. The siding and the roof tiles were not new, but they had been replaced within living memory and had settled and weathered into pleasant maturity.

A nice house.

An empty house.

It was dark and silent. Some drapes were halfway open, and some were all the way open. No light inside, except a tiny green glow in one window. Probably the kitchen, probably a microwave clock. Apart from that, no sign of life. Nothing. No sound, no subliminal hum, no vibe. Once upon a time Reacher had made his living storming darkened buildings, and more than once it had been a matter of life or death to decide whether they were occupied or not. He had developed a sense, and his sense right then was that Vaughan’s house was empty.

So where was David Robert?

At work, possibly. Maybe they both worked nights. Some couples chose to coordinate their schedules that way. Maybe David Robert was a nurse or a doctor or worked night construction on the Interstates. Maybe he was a journalist or a print worker, involved with newspapers. Maybe he was in the food trade, getting stuff ready for morning markets. Maybe he was a radio DJ, broadcasting through the night on a powerful AM station. Or maybe he was a long-haul trucker or an actor or a musician and was on the road for lengthy spells. Maybe for months at a time. Maybe he was a sailor or an airline pilot.

Maybe he was a state policeman.

Vaughan had asked: Don’t I look married?

No, Reacher thought. You really don’t. Not like some people do.

He found a leafy cross-street and walked back north to Second Street. Vaughan’s truck was still parked where he had left it. The diner’s lights were spilling out all over it. He walked another block and came out on First Street. There was no cloud in the sky. Plenty of moon. To his right there was silvery flatness all the way to Kansas. To his left the Rockies were faintly visible, dim and blue and bulky, with their north-facing snow channels lit up like ghostly blades, impossibly high. The town was still and silent and lonely. Not quite eleven-thirty in the evening, and no one was out and about. No traffic. No activity at all.

Reacher was no kind of an insomniac, but he didn’t feel like sleep. Too early. Too many questions. He walked a block on First Street and then headed south again, toward the diner. He was no kind of a social animal either, but right then he wanted to see people, and he figured the diner was the only place he was going to find any.

He found four. The college-girl waitress, an old guy in a seed cap eating alone at the counter, a middle-aged guy alone in a booth with a spread of tractor catalogs in front of him, and a frightened Hispanic girl alone in a booth with nothing.

Dark, not blonde, Vaughan had said. Sitting around and staring west like she’s waiting for word from Despair.

She was tiny. She was about eighteen or nineteen years old. She had long center-parted jet-black hair that framed a face that had a high forehead and enormous eyes. The eyes were brown and looked like twin pools of terror and tragedy. Under them were a small nose and a small mouth. Reacher guessed she had a pretty smile but didn’t use it often and certainly hadn’t used it for weeks. Her skin was mid-brown and her pose was absolutely still. Her hands were out of sight under the table but Reacher was sure they were clasped together in her lap. She was wearing a blue San Diego Padres warm-up jacket with a blue scoop-neck T-shirt under it. There was nothing on the table in front of her. No plate, no cup. But she hadn’t just arrived. The way she was settled meant she must have been sitting there for ten or fifteen minutes at least. Nobody could have gotten so still any faster.

Reacher stepped to the far side of the register and the college-girl waitress joined him there. Reacher bent his head, at an angle, universal body language for: I want to talk to you quietly. The waitress moved a little closer and bent her own head at a parallel angle, like a co-conspirator.

“That girl,” Reacher said. “Didn’t she order?”

The waitress whispered, “She has no money.”

“Ask her what she wants. I’ll pay for it.” He moved away to a different booth, where he could watch the girl without being obvious about it. He saw the waitress approach her, saw incomprehension on the girl’s face, then doubt, then refusal. The waitress stepped over to Reacher’s booth and whispered, “She says she can’t possibly accept.”

Reacher said, “Go back and tell her there are no strings attached. Tell her I’m not hitting on her. Tell her I don’t even want to talk to her. Tell her I’ve been broke and hungry, too.”

The waitress went back. This time the girl relented. She pointed to a couple of items on the menu. Reacher was sure they were the cheapest choices. The waitress went away to place the order and the girl turned a little in her seat and inclined her head in a courteous little nod, full of dignity, and the corners of her mouth softened like the beginnings of a smile. Then she turned back and went still again.

The waitress came straight back to Reacher and he asked for coffee. The waitress whispered, “Her check is going to be nine-fifty. Yours will be a dollar and a half.” Reacher peeled a ten and three ones off the roll in his pocket and slid them across the table. The waitress picked them up and thanked him for the tip and asked, “So when were you broke and hungry?”

“Never,” Reacher said. “My whole life I got three squares a day from the army and since then I’ve always had money in my pocket.”

“So you made that up just to make her feel better?”

“Sometimes people need convincing.”

“You’re a nice guy,” the waitress said.

“Not everyone agrees with that.”

“But some do.”

“Do they?”

“I hear things.”

“What things?”

But the girl just smiled at him and walked away.

From a safe distance Reacher watched the Hispanic girl eat a tuna melt sandwich and drink a chocolate milk shake. Good choices, nutritionally. Excellent value for his money. Protein, fats, carbs, some sugar. If she ate like that every day she would weigh two hundred pounds before she was thirty, but in dire need on the road it was wise to load up. After she was finished she dabbed her lips with her napkin and pushed her plate and her glass away and then sat there, just as quiet and still as before. The clock in Reacher’s head hit midnight and the clock on the diner’s wall followed it a minute later. The old guy in the seed cap crept out with a creaking arthritic gait and the tractor salesman gathered his paperwork together and called for another cup of coffee.

The Hispanic girl stayed put. Reacher had seen plenty of people doing what she was doing, in cafés and diners near bus depots and railroad stations. She was staying warm, saving energy, passing time. She was enduring. He watched her profile and figured she was a lot closer to Zeno’s ideal than he was. The unquestioning acceptance of destinies. She looked infinitely composed and patient.

The tractor salesman drained his final cup and gathered his stuff and left. The waitress backed away to a corner and picked up a paperback book. Reacher curled his fist around his mug to keep it warm.

The Hispanic girl stayed put.

Then she moved. She shifted sideways on her vinyl bench and stood up all in one smooth, delicate motion. She was extremely petite. Not more than five-nothing, not more than ninety-some pounds. Below the T-shirt she was wearing jeans and cheap shoes. She stood still and faced the door and then she turned toward Reacher’s booth. There was nothing in her face. Just fear and shyness and loneliness. She came to some kind of a decision and stepped forward and stood off about a yard and said, “You can talk to me if you really want to.”

Reacher shook his head. “I meant what I said.”

“Thank you for my dinner.” Her voice matched her physique. It was small and delicate. It was lightly accented, but English was probably her primary language. She was from southern California for sure. The Padres were probably her home team.

Reacher asked, “You OK for breakfast tomorrow?”

She was still for a moment while she fought her pride and then she shook her head.

Reacher asked, “Lunch? Dinner tomorrow?”

She shook her head.

“You OK at the motel?”

“That’s why. I paid for three nights. It took all my money.”

“You have to eat.”

The girl said nothing. Reacher thought, Ten bucks a meal is thirty bucks a day, three days makes ninety, plus ten for contingencies or phone calls makes a hundred. He peeled five ATM-fresh twenties off his roll and fanned them on the table. The girl said, “I can’t take your money. I couldn’t pay it back.”

“Pay it forward instead.”

The girl said nothing.

“You know what pay it forward means?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It means years from now you’ll be in a diner somewhere and you’ll see someone who needs a break. So you’ll help them out.”

The girl nodded.

“I could do that,” she said.

“So take the money.”

She stepped closer and picked up the bills.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me. Thank whoever helped me way back. And whoever helped him before that. And so on.”

“Have you ever been to Despair?”

“Four times in the last two days.”

“Did you see anyone there?”

“I saw lots of people.”

She moved closer still and put her slim hips against the end of his table. She hoisted a cheap vinyl purse and propped it on the laminate against her belly and unsnapped the clasp. She dipped her head and her hair fell forward. Her hands were small and brown and had no rings on the fingers or polish on the nails. She rooted around in her bag for a moment and came out with an envelope. It was stiff and nearly square. From a greeting card, probably. She opened the flap and pulled out a photograph. She held it neatly between her thumb and her forefinger and put her little fist on the table and adjusted its position until Reacher could see the picture at a comfortable angle.

“Did you see this man?” she asked.

It was another standard one-hour six-by-four color print. Glossy paper, no border. Shot on Fuji film, Reacher guessed. Back when it had mattered for forensic purposes he had gotten pretty good at recognizing film stock by its color biases. This print had strong greens, which was a Fuji characteristic. Kodak products favored the reds and the warmer tones. The camera had been a decent unit with a proper glass lens. There was plenty of detail. Focus was not quite perfect. The choice of aperture was not inspired. The depth of field was neither shallow nor deep. An old SLR, Reacher thought, therefore bought secondhand or borrowed from an older person. There was no retail market for decent film cameras anymore. Everyone had moved into digital technology. The print in the girl’s hand was clearly recent, but it looked like a much older product. It was a pleasant but unexceptional picture from an old SLR loaded with Fujicolor and wielded by an amateur.

He took the print from the girl and held it between his own thumb and forefinger. The bright greens in the photograph were in a background expanse of grass and a foreground expanse of T-shirt. The grass looked watered and forced and manicured and was probably in a city park somewhere. The T-shirt was a cheap cotton product being worn by a thin guy of about nineteen or twenty. The camera was looking up at him, as if the photograph was being taken by a much shorter person. The guy was posing quite formally and awkwardly. There was no spontaneity in his stance. Maybe repeated fumbles with the camera’s controls had required him to hold his position a little too long. His smile was genuine but a little frozen. He had white teeth in a brown face. He looked young, and friendly, and amiable, and fun to be around, and completely harmless.

Not thin, exactly.

He looked lean and wiry.

Not short, not tall. About average, in terms of height.

He looked to be about five feet eight.

He looked to weigh about a hundred and forty pounds.

He was Hispanic, but as much Mayan or Aztec as Spanish. There was plenty of pure Indian blood in him. That was for sure. He had shiny black hair, not brushed, a little tousled, neither long nor short. Maybe an inch and a half or two inches, with a clear tendency to wave.

He had prominent cheekbones.

He was casually dressed, and casually turned out.

He hadn’t shaved.

His chin and his upper lip were rough with black stubble.

His cheeks and his throat, not so much.

Young.

Not much more than a boy.

The girl asked, “Did you see him?”

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“Maria.”

“What’s his name?”

“Raphael Ramirez.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty.”

“Did you take this picture?”

“Yes.”

“In a park in San Diego?”

“Yes.”

“With your dad’s camera?”

“My uncle’s,” the girl said. “How did you know?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He looked again at Raphael Ramirez in the photograph. Maria’s boyfriend. Twenty years old. Five-eight, one-forty. The build. The hair, the cheekbones, the stubble.

The girl asked, “Did you see him?”

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t see him.”

34

The girl left the diner. Reacher watched her go. He thought that an offer to walk her back to the motel might be misinterpreted, as if he was after something more for his hundred bucks than a feel-good glow. And she was in no kind of danger, anyway. Hope seemed to be a safe enough place. Unlikely to be packs of malefactors roaming the streets, mainly because nobody was roaming the streets. It was the middle of the night in a quiet, decent place in the middle of nowhere. So Reacher let her walk away and sat alone in his booth and roused the college girl from her book and had her bring him more coffee.

“You’ll never sleep,” she said.

“How often does Officer Vaughan swing by during the night?” he asked.

The girl smiled the same smile she had used before, right after she said I hear things.

“At least once,” she said, and smiled again.

He said, “She’s married.”

She said, “I know.” She took the flask away and headed back to her book and left him with a steaming mug. He dipped his head and inhaled the smell. When he looked up again he saw Vaughan’s cruiser glide by outside. She slowed, as if she was noting that her truck was back. But she didn’t stop. She slid right by the diner’s window and drove on down Second Street.

Reacher left the diner at one o’clock in the morning and walked back to the motel. The moon was still out. The town was still quiet. The motel office had a low light burning. The rooms were all dark. He sat down in the plastic lawn chair outside his door and stretched his legs straight out and put his hands behind his head and listened to the silence, eyes wide open, staring into the moonlight.

It didn’t work. He didn’t relax.

You’ll never sleep, the waitress had said.

But not because of the coffee, he thought.

He got up again and walked away. Straight back to the diner. There were no customers. The waitress was reading her book. Reacher stepped straight to the register and took Vaughan’s truck keys off the counter. The waitress looked up but didn’t speak. Reacher stepped back to the door and caught it before it closed. Headed out across the sidewalk to the truck. Unlocked it, got in, started it up. Five minutes later he thumped over the line and was back in Despair.

The first twelve miles of empty road were predictably quiet. The town was quiet, too. Reacher slowed at the gas station and coasted down to twenty miles an hour and took a good look around. Main Street was deserted and silent. No cars on the streets, nobody on the sidewalks. The police station was dark. The rooming house was dark. The bar was closed up and shuttered. The hotel was just a blank façade, with a closed street door and a dozen dark windows. The church was empty and silent. The green grounding strap from the lightning rod was stained gray by the moonlight.

He drove on until the street petered out into half-colonized scrubland. He pulled a wide circle on the packed sand and stopped and idled with the whole town laid out north of him. It was lit up silver by the moon. It was just crouching there, silent and deserted and insignificant in the vastness.

He threaded his way back to Main Street. Turned left and headed onward, west, toward the metal plant.

The plant was shut down and dark. The wall around it glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. The personnel gate was closed. The acres of parking were deserted. Reacher followed the wall and steered the truck left and right until its weak low beams picked up the Tahoes’ tracks. He followed their giant figure 8, all the way around the plant and the residential compound. The plantings were black and massive. The windsocks hung limp in the air. The plant’s vehicle gate was shut. Reacher drove slowly past it and then bumped up across the truck road and drove another quarter-turn through the dirt and stopped where the figure 8’s two loops met, in the throat between the plant’s metal wall and the residential compound’s fieldstone wall. He shut off his lights and shut down the engine and rolled down the windows and waited.

He heard the plane at five past two in the morning. A single engine, far in the distance, feathering and blipping. He craned his neck and saw a light in the sky, way to the south. A landing light. It looked motionless, like it would be suspended up there forever. Then it grew imperceptibly bigger and started hopping slightly, side to side, up and down, but mostly down. A small plane, on approach, buffeted by nighttime thermals and rocked by a firm hand on nervous controls. Its sound grew closer, but quieter, as the pilot shed power and looked for a glide path.

Lights came on beyond the fieldstone wall. A dull reflected glow. Runway markers, Reacher guessed, one at each end of the strip. He saw the plane move in the air, jumping left, correcting right, lining up with the lights. It was coming in from Reacher’s left. When it was three hundred yards out he saw that it was a smallish low-wing monoplane. It was white. When it was two hundred yards out he saw that it had a fixed undercarriage, with fairings over all three wheels, called pants by airplane people. When it was a hundred yards out he identified it as a Piper, probably some kind of a Cherokee variant, a four-seater, durable, reliable, common, and popular. Beyond that, he had no information. He knew a little about small planes, but not a lot.

It came in low left-to-right across his windshield in a high-speed rush of light and air and sound. It cleared the fieldstone wall by six feet and dropped out of sight. The engine blipped and feathered and then a minute later changed its note to a loud angry buzzing. Reacher imagined the plane taxiing like a fat self-important insect, white in the moonlight, bumping sharply over rough ground, turning abruptly on its short wheelbase, heading for its barn. Then he heard it shut down and stunned silence flooded in his windows, even more intense than before.

The runway lights went off.

He saw and heard nothing more.

He waited ten minutes for safety’s sake and then started the truck and backed up and turned and drove away on the blind side, with the bulk of the plant between him and the house. He bumped through the acres of empty parking, skirted the short end of the plant, and joined the truck route. He put his headlights on and got comfortable in his seat and settled to a fast cruise on the firm wide surface, heading out of town westward, toward the MPs and whatever lay forty miles beyond them.

35

The MPs were all asleep, except for two on sentry duty inside the guard shack. Reacher saw them as he drove past, bulky figures in the gloom, dressed in desert camos and vests, MP brassards, no helmets. They had an orange nightlight burning near the floor, to preserve their night vision. They were standing back to back, one watching the southern approach, one the northern. Reacher slowed and waved, and then hit the gas again and kept on going.

Thirty miles later the solid truck road swung sharply to the right and speared north through the darkness toward the distant Interstate. But the old route it must have been built over meandered on straight ahead, unsignposted and apparently aimless. Reacher followed it. He bumped down off the flat coarse blacktop onto a surface as bad as Despair’s own road. Lumpy, uneven, cheaply top-dressed with gravel on tar. He followed it between two ruined farms and entered an empty spectral world with nothing on his left and nothing on his right and nothing ahead of him except the wandering gray ribbon of road and the silver moonlit mountains remote in the distance. Nothing happened for four more miles. He seemed to make no progress at all through the landscape. Then he passed a lone roadside sign that said: Halfway County Route 37. A mile later he saw a glow in the air. He came up a long rise and the road peaked and fell away into the middle distance and suddenly laid out right in front of him was a neat checkerboard of lit streets and pale buildings. Another mile later he passed a sign that said: Halfway Township. He slowed and checked his mirrors and pulled to the shoulder and stopped.

The town in front of him was aptly named. Another trick of topography put the moonlit Rockies closer again. The hardy souls who had struggled onward from Despair had been rewarded for forty miles of actual travel with an apparent hundred miles of progress. But by then they would have been wise enough and bitter enough not to get carried away with enthusiasm, so they had given their next resting place the suitably cautious name of Halfway, perhaps secretly hoping that their unassuming modesty would be further rewarded by finding out that they were in fact more than halfway there. Which they weren’t, Reacher thought. Forty miles was forty miles, optical illusions notwithstanding. They were only a fifth of the way there. But the wagons had rolled out of Despair with only the optimists aboard, and the town of Halfway reflected their founding spirit. The place looked crisp and bright and livelier in the dead of night than Despair had in the middle of the day. It had been rebuilt, perhaps several times. There was nothing ancient visible. The structures Reacher could make out seemed to be seventies’ stucco and eighties’ glass, not nineteenth-century brick. In the age of fast transportation there was no real reason why one nearby town rather than another should be chosen for investment and development, except for inherited traits of vibrancy and vigor. Despair had suffered and Halfway had prospered, and the optimists had won, like they sometimes deserved to.

Reacher coasted down the rise into town. It was a quarter past three in the morning. Plenty of places were lit up but not many were actually open. A gas station and a coffee shop was about all, at first sight. But the town and the county shared the same name, which in Reacher’s experience implied that certain services would be available around the clock. County police, for instance. They would have a station somewhere, manned all night. There would be a hospital, too, with a 24-7 emergency room. And to serve the gray area in between, where perhaps the county police were interested and the emergency room had failed, there would be a morgue. And it would be open for business night and day. A county town with a cluster of dependent municipalities all around it had to provide essential services. There was no morgue in Hope or Despair. Not even a meat locker, Vaughan had said, and presumably other local towns were in the same situation. And shit happened, and ambulances had to go somewhere. Dead folks couldn’t be left out in the street until the next business day. Usually.

Morgues were normally close to hospitals, and a redeveloped county seat would normally have a new hospital, and new hospitals were normally built on the outskirts of towns, where land was empty and available and cheap. Halfway had one road in from the east, and a spider web of four roads out north and west, and Reacher found the hospital a half mile out on the second exit road he tried. It was a place the size of a university campus, long, low, and deep, with buildings like elongated ski chalets. It looked calm and friendly, like sickness and death were really no big deal. It had a vast parking lot, empty except for a cluster of battered cars near a staff entrance and a lone shiny sedan in a section marked off with ferocious warning signs: MD Parking Only. Steam drifted from vents from a building in back. The laundry, Reacher guessed, where sheets and towels were being washed overnight by the drivers of the battered cars, while the guy from the shiny sedan tried to keep people alive long enough to use them in the morning.

He avoided the front entrances. He wanted dead people, not sick people, and he knew how to find them. He had visited more morgues than wards in his life, by an order of magnitude. Morgues were usually well hidden from the public. A sensitivity issue. They were often not signposted at all, or else labeled something anodyne like Special Services. But they were always accessible. Meat wagons had to be able to roll in and out unobstructed.

He found Halfway’s county morgue in back, next to the hospital laundry, which he thought was a smart design. The laundry’s drifting steam would camouflage the output of the morgue’s crematorium chimney. The place was another low, wide, chalet-style building. It had a high steel fence, and a sliding gate, and a guard shack.

The fence was solid, and the gate was closed, and there was a guard in the shack.

Reacher parked off to one side and climbed out of the truck and stretched. The guard watched him do it. Reacher finished stretching and glanced around like he was getting his bearings and then headed straight for the shack. The guard slid back the bottom part of his window and ducked his head down, like he needed to line up his ears with the empty space to hear properly. He was a middle-aged guy, lean, probably competent but not ambitious. He was a rent-a-cop. He was wearing a dark generic uniform with a molded plastic shield like something from a toy store. It said Security on it. Nothing more. It could have done double duty at an outlet mall. Maybe it did. Maybe the guy worked two jobs, to make ends meet.

Reacher ducked his own head toward the open section of window and said, “I need to check some details on the guy Despair brought in yesterday morning.”

The guard said, “The attendants are inside.”

Reacher nodded as if he had received new and valuable information and waited for the guy to hit the button that would slide the gate.

The guy didn’t move.

Reacher asked, “Were you here yesterday morning?”

The guard said, “Everything after midnight is morning.”

“This would have been daylight hours.”

The guard said, “Not me, then. I get off at six.”

Reacher said, “So can you let me through? To ask the attendants?”

“They change at six, too.”

“They’ll have paperwork in there.”

The guard said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t let you through. Law enforcement personnel only. Or paramedics with a fresh one.”

Reacher said, “I am law enforcement. I’m with the Despair PD. We need to check something.”

“I’d need to see some credentials.”

“They don’t give us much in the way of credentials. I’m only a deputy.”

“I’d have to see something.”

Reacher nodded and took the big guy’s pewter star out of his shirt pocket. Held it face out, with the pin between his thumb and forefinger. The guard looked at it carefully. Township of Despair, Police Deputy.

“All they give us,” Reacher said.

“Good enough for me,” the guy said, and hit the button. A motor spun up and a gear engaged and drove the gate along a greased track. As soon as it was three feet open Reacher stepped through and headed across a yard through a pool of yellow sulfur light to a personnel door labeled Receiving. He went straight in and found a standby room like a million others he had seen. Desk, computer, clipboards, drifts of paper, bulletin boards, low wood-and-tweed armchairs. Everything was reasonably new but already battered. There were heaters going but the air was cold. There was an internal door, closed, but Reacher could smell sharp cold chemicals through it. Two of the low armchairs were occupied by two guys. They were white, young, and lean. They looked equally equipped for either manual or clerical labor. They looked bored and a little irreverent, which is exactly what Reacher expected from people working night shifts around a cold store full of stiffs. They glanced up at him, a little put out by the intrusion into their sealed world, a little happy about the break in their routine.

“Help you?” one of them said.

Reacher held up his pewter star again and said, “I need to check something about the guy we brought in yesterday.”

The attendant who had spoken squinted at the star. “Despair?”

Reacher nodded and said, “Male DOA, young, not huge.”

One guy heaved himself out of his chair and dumped himself down in front of the desk and tapped the keyboard to wake the computer screen. The other guy swiveled in his seat and grabbed a clipboard and licked his thumb and leafed through sheets of paper. They both reached the same conclusion at the same time. They glanced at each other and the one who had spoken before said, “We didn’t get anything from Despair yesterday.”

“You sure about that?”

“Did you bring him in yourself?”

“No.”

“You sure he was DOA? Maybe he went to the ICU.”

“He was DOA. No doubt about it.”

“Well, we don’t have him.”

“No possibility of a mistake?”

“Couldn’t happen.”

“Your paperwork is always a hundred percent?”

“Has to be. Start of the shift, we eyeball the toe tags and match them against the list. Procedure. Because people get sensitive about shit like dead relatives going missing.”

“Understandable, I guess.”

“So tonight we’ve got five on the list and five in the freezer. Two female, three male. Not a one of them young. And not a one of them from Despair.”

“Anywhere else they could have taken him?”

“Not in this county. And no other county would have accepted him.” The guy tapped some more keys. “As of this exact minute the last Despair stiff we had was over a year ago. Accident at their metal plant. Adult male all chewed up, as I recall, by a machine. Not pretty. He was so spread out we had to put him in two drawers.”

Reacher nodded and the guy spun his chair and put himself back-to against the desk with his feet straight out and his elbows propped behind him.

“Sorry,” he said.

Reacher nodded again and stepped back outside to the pool of sulfur light. The door sucked shut behind him, on a spring closer. To assume makes an ass out of you and me. Ass, u, me. The classroom jerks at Rucker had added: You absolutely have to verify. Reacher walked back across the concrete and waited for the gate to grind open a yard and stepped through and climbed into Vaughan’s truck.

He had verified.

Absolutely.

36

Reacher drove a mile and stopped at Halfway’s all-night coffee shop and ate a cheeseburger and drank three mugs of coffee. The burger was rare and damp and the coffee was about as good as the Hope diner’s. The mug was a little worse, but acceptable. He read a ragged copy of the previous morning’s newspaper all the way through and then jammed himself into the corner of his booth and dozed upright for an hour. He left the place at five in the morning, when the first of the breakfast customers came in and disturbed him with bright chatter and the smell of recent showers. He filled Vaughan’s truck at the all-night gas station and then drove back out of town, heading east on the same rough road he had come in on, the mountains far behind him and the dawn waiting to happen up ahead.

He kept the speedometer needle fixed on forty and passed the MP post again fifty-two minutes later. The place was still quiet. Two guys were in the guard shack, one facing north and one facing south. Their nightlight was still burning. He figured reveille would be at six-thirty and chow at seven. The night watch would eat dinner and the day watch would eat breakfast all in the same hour. Same food, probably. Combat FOBs were light on amenities. He waved and kept on going at a steady forty miles an hour, which put him next to the metal plant at exactly six o’clock in the morning.

The start of the workday.

The arena lights were already on and the place was lit up bright and blue, like day. The parking lot was filling up fast. Headlights were streaming west out of town, dipping, turning, raking the rough ground, stopping, clicking off. Reacher parked neatly between a sagging Chrysler sedan and a battered Ford pick-up. He slid out and locked up and put the keys in his pocket and joined a converging crowd of men shuffling their way toward the personnel gate. An uneasy feeling. Same sensation as entering a baseball stadium wearing the colors of the visiting team. Stranger in the house. All around him guys glanced at him curiously and gave him a little more space than they were giving each other. But nothing was said. There was no overt hostility. Just wariness and covert inspection, as the crowd shuffled along through the predawn twilight, a yard at a time.

The personnel gate was a double section of the metal wall, folded back on hinges complex enough to accommodate the quilted curves of the wall’s construction. The dirt path through it was beaten dusty by a million footsteps. Close to the gate there was no jostling. No impatience. Men lined up neatly like automatons, not fast, not slow, but resigned. They all needed to clock in, but clearly none of them wanted to.

The line shuffled slowly forward, a yard, two, three.

The guy in front of Reacher stepped through the gate.

Reacher stepped through the gate.

Immediately inside there were more metal walls, head-high, like cattle chutes, dividing the crowd left and right. The right-hand chute led to a holding pen where Reacher guessed the part-time workers would wait for the call. It was already a quarter full with men standing quiet and patient. The guys going left didn’t look at them.

Reacher went left.

The left-hand chute dog-legged immediately and narrowed down to four feet in width. It carried the line of shuffling men past an old-fashioned punch-clock centered in a giant slotted array of time cards. Each man pulled his card and offered it up to the machine and waited for the dull thump of the stamp and then put the card back again. The rhythm was slow and relentless. The whisk of stiff paper against metal, the thump of the stamp, the click as the card was bottomed back in its slot. The clock was showing six-fourteen, which was exactly right according to the time in Reacher’s head.

Reacher walked straight past the machine. The chute turned again and he followed the guy in front for thirty feet and then stepped out into the northeast corner of the arena. The arena was vast. Just staggeringly huge. The line of lights on the far wall ran close to a mile into the distance and dimmed and shrank and blended into a tiny vanishing point in the southwest corner. The far wall itself was at least a half-mile away. The total enclosed area must have been three hundred acres. Three hundred football fields.

Unbelievable.

Reacher stepped aside to let the line of men get past him. Here and there in the vastness small swarms of guys were already busy. Trucks and cranes were moving. They threw harsh shadows in the stadium lights. Some of the cranes were bigger than anything Reacher had seen in a dockyard. Some of the trucks were as big as earth-moving machines. There were gigantic crushers set on enormous concrete plinths. The crushers had bright oily hydraulic rams thicker than redwood trunks. There were crucibles as big as sailboats and retorts as big as houses. There were piles of wrecked cars ten stories high. The ground was soaked with oil and rainbow puddles of diesel and littered with curled metal swarf and where it was dry it glittered with shiny dust. Steam and smoke and fumes and sharp chemical smells were drifting everywhere. There was roaring and hammering rolling outward in waves and beating against the metal perimeter and bouncing straight back in again. Bright flames danced behind open furnace doors.

Like a vision of hell.

Some guys seemed to be heading for preassigned jobs and others were milling in groups as if waiting for direction. Reacher skirted around behind them and followed the north wall, tiny and insignificant in the chaos. Way ahead of him the vehicle gate was opening. Five semi trailers were parked in a line, waiting to move out. On the road they would look huge and lumbering. Inside the plant they looked like toys. The two security Tahoes were parked side by side, tiny white dots in the vastness. Next to them was a stack of forty-foot shipping containers. They were piled five high. Each one looked tiny.

South of the vehicle gate was a long line of prefabricated metal offices. They were jacked up on short legs to make them level. They had lights on inside. At the left-hand end of the line two offices were painted white and had red crosses on their doors. The first-aid station. Next to it a white vehicle was parked. The ambulance. Next to the ambulance was a long line of fuel and chemical tanks. Beyond them a sinister platoon of men in thick aprons and black welding masks used cutting torches on a pile of twisted scrap. Blue flames threw hideous shadows. Reacher hugged the north wall and kept on moving. Men looked at him and looked away, unsure. A quarter of the way along the wall his path was blocked by a giant pyramid of old oil drums. They were painted faded red and stacked ten high, stepped like a staircase. Reacher paused and glanced around and levered himself up to the base of the tier. Glanced around again and climbed halfway up the stack and then turned and stood precariously and held on tight and used the elevation to get an overview of the whole place.

He hadn’t seen the whole place.

Not yet.

There was more.

Much more.

What had looked like the south boundary was in fact an interior partition. Same height as the perimeter walls, same material, same color, same construction, with the sheer face and the horizontal cylinder. Same purpose, as an impregnable barrier. But it was only an internal division, with a closed gate. Beyond it the outer perimeter enclosed at least another hundred acres. Another hundred football fields. The gate was wide enough for large trucks. There were deep ruts in the ground leading to it. Beyond it there were heavy cranes and high stacks of shipping containers piled in chevron shapes. The containers looked dumped, as if casually, but they were placed and combined carefully enough to block a direct view of ground-level activity from any particular direction.

The internal gate had some kind of a control point in front of it. Reacher could make out two tiny figures stumping around in small circles, bored, their hands in their pockets. He watched them for a minute and then lifted his gaze again beyond the partition. Cranes, and screens. Some smoke, some distant sparks. Some kind of activity. Other than that, nothing to see. Plenty to hear, but none of it was useful. It was impossible to determine which noises were coming from where. He waited another minute and watched the plant’s internal traffic. Plenty of things were moving, but nothing was heading for the internal gate. It was going to stay closed. He turned east and looked at the sky. Dawn was coming.

He turned back and got his balance and climbed down the oil drum staircase. Stepped off to the rough ground and a voice behind him said, “Who the hell are you?”

37

Reacher turned slowly and saw two men. One was big and the other was a giant. The big guy was carrying a two-way radio and the giant was carrying a two-headed wrench as long as a baseball bat and probably heavier than ten of them. The guy was easily six-six and three hundred and fifty pounds. He looked like he wouldn’t need a wrench to take a wrecked car apart.

The guy with the radio asked again, “Who the hell are you?”

“EPA inspector,” Reacher said.

No reply.

“Just kidding,” Reacher said.

“You better be.”

“I am.”

“So who are you?”

Reacher said, “You first. Who are you?”

“I’m the plant foreman. Now, who are you?”

Reacher pulled the pewter star from his pocket and said, “I’m with the PD. The new deputy. I’m familiarizing myself with the community.”

“We didn’t hear about any new deputies.”

“It was sudden.”

The guy raised his radio to his face and clicked a button and spoke low and fast. Names, codes, commands. Reacher didn’t understand them, and didn’t expect to. Every organization had its own jargon. But he recognized the tone and he guessed the general drift. He glanced west and saw the Tahoes backing up and turning and getting set to head over. He glanced south and saw groups of men stopping work, standing straight, preparing to move.

The foreman said, “Let’s go visit the security office.”

Reacher stood still.

The foreman said, “A new deputy should want to visit the security office. Meet useful folks. Establish liaison. If that’s what you really are.”

Reacher didn’t move. He glanced west again and saw the Tahoes halfway through their half-mile of approach. He glanced south again and saw knots of men walking his way. The crew in the aprons and the welders’ masks was among them. Ten guys, clumping along awkwardly in heavy spark-proof boots. Plenty of others were coming in from other directions. Altogether maybe two hundred men were converging. Five minutes into the future there was going to be a big crowd by the oil drums. The giant with the wrench took a step forward. Reacher stood his ground and looked straight at him, and then checked west again, and south. The Tahoes were already close and slowing. The workers were forming up shoulder to shoulder. They were close enough that Reacher could see tools in their hands. Hammers, pry bars, cutting torches, foot-long cold chisels.

The foreman said, “You can’t fight them all.”

Reacher nodded. The giant on his own would be hard, but maybe feasible, if he missed with the first swing of the wrench. Then four-on-one or even six-on-one might be survivable. But not two-hundred-on-one. No way. Not two hundred and fifty pounds against twenty tons of muscle. He had two captured switchblades in his pocket, but they would be of limited use against maybe a couple of tons of improvised weaponry.

Not good.

Reacher said, “So let’s go. I can give you five minutes.”

The foreman said, “You’ll give us whatever we want.” He waved to the nearer Tahoe and it turned in close. Reacher heard oily stones and curly fragments of metal crushing under its tires. The giant opened its rear door and used his wrench to make a sweeping Get in gesture. Reacher climbed up into the back seat. The vehicle had a plain utilitarian interior. Plastic and cloth. No wood or leather, no bells or whistles. The giant climbed in after him and crowded him against the far door panel. The foreman climbed in the front next to the driver and slammed his door and the vehicle took off again and turned and headed for the line of office buildings south of the vehicle gate. It drove through the middle of the approaching crowd, slowly, and Reacher saw faces staring in at him through the windows, gray skin smeared with grease, bad teeth, white eyes wide with fascination.

The security office was at the north end of the array, closest to the vehicle gate. The Tahoe stopped directly outside of it next to a tangled pile of webbing straps, presumably once used to tie down junk on flat-bed trailers. Reacher spilled out of the car ahead of the giant and found himself at the bottom of a short set of wooden steps that led up to the office door. He pushed through the door and found himself inside a plain metal prefabricated box that had probably been designed for use on construction sites. There were five small windows fitted with thick plastic glass and covered from the outside with heavy steel mesh. Other than that it looked a lot like the ready room he had seen at the Halfway county morgue. Desk, paper, bulletin boards, armchairs, all of it showing the signs of casual abuse a place gets when its users are not its owners.

The foreman pointed Reacher toward a chair and then left again. The giant dragged a chair of his own out of position and turned it around and dumped himself down in it so that he was blocking the door. He laid the wrench on the floor. The floor was warped plywood and the wrench made an iron clatter as it dropped. Reacher sat in a chair in a corner. Wooden arms, tweed seat and back. It was reasonably comfortable.

“Got coffee?” he asked.

The giant paused a second and said, “No.” A short word and a negative answer, but at least it was a response. In Reacher’s experience the hardest part of any adversarial conversation was the beginning. An early answer was a good sign. Answering became a habit.

He asked, “What’s your job?”

The giant said, “I help out where I’m needed.” His voice was like a normal guy’s, but muffled by having to come out of such a huge chest cavity.

“What happens here?” Reacher asked.

“Metal gets recycled.”

“What happens in the secret section?”

“What secret section?”

“To the south. Behind the partition.”

“That’s just a junkyard. For stuff that’s too far gone to use. Nothing secret about it.”

“So why is it locked and guarded?”

“To stop people getting lazy. Someone gets tired of working, dumps good stuff in there, we lose money.”

“You part of management?”

“I’m a supervisor.”

“You want to supervise my way out of here?”

“You can’t leave.”

Reacher glanced out the window. The sun was over the horizon. In five minutes it would be over the east wall. I could leave, he thought. The vehicle gate was open and trucks were moving out. Time it right, get past the big guy, run for the gate, hop aboard a flat-bed, game over. With the wrench on the floor the big guy was less of a problem than he had been before. He was unarmed, and down in a low chair. He was heavy, and gravity was gravity. And big guys were slow. And Reacher had knives.

“I played pro football,” the big guy said.

“But not very well,” Reacher said.

The big guy said nothing.

“Or you’d be doing color commentary on Fox, or living in a mansion in Miami, not slaving away here.”

The big guy said nothing.

“I bet you’re just as bad at this job.”

The big guy said nothing.

I could leave, Reacher thought again.

But I won’t.

I’ll wait and see what happens.

He waited twenty more minutes before anything happened. The giant sat still and quiet by the door and Reacher whiled the time away in the corner. He wasn’t unhappy. He could kill time better than anyone. The morning sun rose higher and came streaming in through the plastic window. The rays cast a clouded beam over the desk. All the colors of the rainbow were in it.

Then the door opened and the giant sat up straight and scooted his chair out of the way and the foreman walked in again. He still had his two-way radio in his hand. Behind him in the bright rectangle of daylight Reacher could see the plant working. Trucks were moving, cranes were moving, swarms of men were beavering away, sparks were showering, loud noises were being made. The foreman stopped halfway between the door and Reacher’s chair and said, “Mr. Thurman wants to see you.”

Seven o’clock, Reacher thought. Vaughan was ending her watch. She was heading to the diner in Hope, looking for breakfast, looking for her truck, maybe looking for him. Or maybe not.

He said, “I can give Mr. Thurman five minutes.”

“You’ll give Mr. Thurman however long he wants.”

“He might own you, but he doesn’t own me.”

“Get up,” the foreman said. “Follow me.”

38

The trailer next door was an identical metal box, but better appointed inside. There was carpet, the armchairs were leather, and the desk was mahogany. There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.

On the corner of the desk was a Bible.

Behind the desk was a man Reacher assumed was Mr. Thurman. He was wearing a three-piece suit made of wool. He looked to be close to seventy years old. He looked pink and plump and prosperous. He had white hair, worn moderately long and combed and teased into waves. He had a big patient smile on his face. He looked like he had just stepped out of a television studio. He could have been a game show host, or a televangelist. Reacher could picture him, clutching his chest and promising God would fell him with a heart attack unless the audience sent him money.

And the audience would, Reacher thought. With a face like that, the idiots would bury him under fives and tens.

The foreman waited for a nod, then left again. Reacher sat down in a leather armchair and said, “I’m Jack Reacher. You’ve got five minutes.”

The guy behind the desk said, “I’m Jerry Thurman. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Reacher said, “Now you’ve got four minutes and fifty-six seconds.”

“Actually, sir, I’ve got as long as it takes.” Thurman’s voice was soft and mellifluous. His cheeks quivered as he spoke. Too much fat, not enough muscle tone. Not an attractive sight. “You’ve been making trouble in my town and now you’re trespassing on my business premises.”

“Your fault,” Reacher said. “If you hadn’t sent those goons to the restaurant I would have eaten a quick lunch and moved on days ago. No reason to stay. You’re not exactly running the Magic Kingdom here.”

“I don’t aim to. This is an industrial enterprise.”

“So I noticed.”

“But you knew that days ago. I’m sure the people in Hope were quick to tell you all about us. Why poke around?”

“I’m an inquisitive person.”

“Evidently,” Thurman said. “Which raised our suspicions a little. We have proprietary processes here, and methodologies of our own invention, which might all be called industrial secrets. Espionage could hurt our bottom line.”

“I’m not interested in metal recycling.”

“We know that now.”

“You checked me out?”

Thurman nodded.

“We made inquiries,” he said. “Last night, and this morning. You are exactly what you claimed to be, in Judge Gardner’s vagrancy hearing. A passerby. A nobody who used to be in the army ten years ago.”

“That’s me.”

“But you’re a very persistent nobody. You made a ludicrous request to be sworn in as a deputy. After taking a badge from a man in a fight.”

“Which he started. On your orders.”

“So we ask ourselves, why are you so keen to know what happens here?”

“And I ask myself, why are you so keen to hide it?”

Thurman shook his great white head.

“We’re not hiding anything,” he said. “And you’re no danger to me commercially, so I’ll prove it to you. You’ve seen the town, you’ve met some of the folks who live here, and now I’m going to give you a tour of the plant. I’ll be your personal guide and escort. You can see everything and ask me anything.”

They went in Thurman’s personal vehicle, which was a Chevy Tahoe the same style and vintage as the security vehicles, but painted black, not white. Same modest interior. A working truck. The keys were already in the ignition. Habit, probably. And safe enough. Nobody would use the boss’s car without permission. Thurman drove himself and Reacher sat next to him in the front. They were alone in the vehicle. They headed to the west wall, away from the vehicle gate, moving slow. Thurman started talking immediately. He described the various office functions, which in order of appearance were operations management, and invoicing, and purchasing, and he pointed out the first-aid station, and described its facilities and capabilities, and made a mildly pointed comment about the people Reacher had put in there. Then they moved on to the line of storage tanks, and he described their capacities, which were five thousand gallons each, and their contents, which were gasoline for the Tahoes and some of the other trucks, and diesel for the cranes and the crushers and the heavier equipment, and a liquid chemical called trichloroethylene, which was an essential metal degreaser, and oxygen and acetylene for the cutting torches, and kerosene, which fueled the furnaces.

Reacher was bored rigid after sixty seconds.

He tuned Thurman out and looked at things for himself. Didn’t see much. Just metal, and people working with it. He got the general idea. Old stuff was broken up and melted down, and ingots were sold to factories, where new stuff was made, and eventually the new stuff became old stuff and showed up again to get broken up and melted down once more.

Not rocket science.

Close to a mile later they arrived at the internal partition and Reacher saw that a truck had been parked across the gate, as if to hide it. Beyond the wall no more sparks were flying and no more smoke was rising. Activity seemed to have been abandoned for the day. He asked, “What happens back there?”

Thurman said, “That’s our junkyard. Stuff that’s too far gone to work with goes in there.”

“How do you get it in, with that truck in the way?”

“We can move the truck if we need to. But we don’t need to often. Our processes have gotten very developed. Not much defeats us anymore.”

“Are you a chemist or a metallurgist or what?”

Thurman said, “I’m a born-again-Christian American and a businessman. That’s how I would describe myself, in that order of importance. But I hire the best talent I can find, at the executive level. Our research and development is excellent.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. Thurman turned the wheel and steered a slow curve and headed back north, close to the east wall. The jaws of a giant crusher were closing on about ten wrecked cars at once. Beyond it a furnace door swung open and men ducked away from the blast of heat. A crucible moved slowly on an overhead track, full of liquid metal, all bubbling and crusting.

Thurman asked, “Are you born again?”

Reacher said, “Once was enough for me.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“You should think about it.”

“My father used to say, why be born again, when you can just grow up?”

“Is he no longer with us?”

“He died a long time ago.”

“He’s in the other place, then, with an attitude like that.”

“He’s in a hole in the ground in Arlington Cemetery.”

“Another veteran?”

“A Marine.”

“Thank you for his service.”

“Don’t thank me. I had nothing to do with it.”

Thurman said, “You should think about getting your life in order, you know, before it’s too late. Something might happen. The Book of Revelation says, the time is at hand.”

“As it has every day since it was written, nearly two thousand years ago. Why would it be true now, when it wasn’t before?”

“There are signs,” Thurman said. “And the possibility of precipitating events.” He said it primly, and smugly, and with a degree of certainty, as if he had regular access to privileged insider information.

Reacher said nothing in reply.

They drove on, past a small group of tired men wrestling with a mountain of tangled steel. Their backs were bent and their shoulders were slumped. Not yet eight o’clock in the morning, Reacher thought. More than ten hours still to go.

“God watches over them,” Thurman said.

“You sure?”

“He tells me so.”

“Does he watch over you, too?”

“He knows what I do.”

“Does he approve?”

“He tells me so.”

“Then why is there a lightning rod on your church?”

Thurman didn’t answer that. He just clamped his mouth shut and his cheeks drooped lower than his jawbone. They arrived at the mouth of the cattle chute leading to the personnel gate. He stopped the truck and jiggled the stick into Park and sat back in his seat.

“Seen enough?” he asked.

“More than enough,” Reacher said.

“Then I’ll bid you goodbye,” Thurman said. “I imagine our paths won’t cross again.” He tucked his elbow in and offered his hand, sideways and awkwardly. Reacher shook it. It felt soft and warm and boneless, like a child’s balloon filled with water. Then Reacher opened his door and slid out and walked through the doglegged chute and back to the acres of parking.

Every window in Vaughan’s truck was smashed.

39

Reacher stood for a long moment and ran through his options and then unlocked the truck and swept pebbles of broken glass off the seats and the dash. He raked them out of the driver’s footwell. He didn’t want the brake pedal to jam halfway through its travel. Or the gas pedal. The truck was slow enough already.

Three miles back to town, twelve to the line, and then five to the center of Hope. A twenty-mile drive, cold and slow and very windy. Like riding a motorcycle without eye protection. Reacher’s face was numb and his eyes were watering by the end of the trip. He parked outside the diner a little before nine o’clock in the morning. Vaughan’s cruiser wasn’t there. She wasn’t inside. The place was three-quarters empty. The breakfast rush was over.

Reacher took the back booth and ordered coffee and breakfast from the day-shift waitress. The college girl was gone. The woman brought him a mug and filled it from a flask and he asked her, “Did Officer Vaughan stop by this morning?”

The woman said, “She left about a half-hour ago.”

“Was she OK?”

“She seemed quiet.”

“What about Maria? The girl from San Diego?”

“She was in before seven.”

“Did she eat?”

“Plenty.”

“What about Lucy? The blonde from LA?”

“Didn’t see her. I think she left town.”

“What does Officer Vaughan’s husband do?”

The waitress said, “Well, not much anymore,” as if it was a dumb question to ask. As if that particular situation should have been plain to everybody.

That particular situation wasn’t plain to Reacher.

He said, “What, he’s unemployed?”

The woman started to answer him, and then she stopped, as if she suddenly remembered that the situation wasn’t necessarily plain to everybody, and it wasn’t her place to make it plain. As if she was on the point of revealing something that shouldn’t be revealed, like private neighborhood business. She just shook her head with embarrassment and bustled away with her flask. She didn’t speak at all when she came back five minutes later with his food.

Twenty minutes later Reacher got back in the damaged truck and drove south and crossed Third Street, and Fourth, and turned left on Fifth. Way ahead of him he could make out Vaughan’s cruiser parked at the curb. He drove on and pulled up behind it, level with the mailbox with the perfectly aligned letters. He idled in the middle of the traffic lane for a moment. Then he got out and walked ahead and put a palm on the Crown Vic’s hood. It was still very warm. She had left the diner nearly an hour ago, but clearly she had driven around a little afterward. Maybe looking for her Chevy, or looking for him. Or neither, or both. He got back in the truck and backed up and swung the wheel and bumped up onto her driveway. He parked with the grille an inch from her garage door and slid out. Didn’t lock up. There didn’t seem to be much point.

He found the winding path and followed it through the bushes to her door. He hooked her keyring on his finger and tapped the bell, briefly, just once. If she was awake, she would hear it. If she was asleep, it wouldn’t disturb her.

She was awake.

The door opened and she looked out of the gloom straight at him. Her hair was wet from the shower and combed back. She was wearing an oversized white T-shirt. Possibly nothing else. Her legs were bare. Her feet were bare. She looked younger and smaller than before.

She said, “How did you find me?”

He said, “Phone book.”

“You were here last night. Looking. A neighbor told me.”

“It’s a nice house.”

She said, “I like it.”

She saw the truck keys on his finger. He said, “I have a confession to make.”

“What now?”

“Someone broke all the windows.”

She pushed past him and stepped out to the path. Turned to face the driveway and studied the damage and said, “Shit.” Then it seemed to dawn on her that she was out in the yard barefoot in her nightwear and she pushed back inside.

“Who?” she asked.

“One of a thousand suspects.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“Where?”

“I stopped by the metal plant.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the glass.” He slipped the keys off his finger and held them out. She didn’t take them. Instead she said, “You better come in.”

The house was laid out the way he had guessed. Right to left it went garage, mudroom, kitchen, living room, bedrooms. The kitchen seemed to be the heart of the home. It was a pretty space with painted cabinets and a wallpaper border at the top of the walls. The dishwasher was running and the sink was empty and the counters were tidy but there was enough disarray to make the room feel lived in. There was a four-place table with only three chairs. There were what Reacher’s mother had called “touches.” Dried flowers, bottles of virgin olive oil that would never be used, antique spoons. Reacher’s mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child. But over the years he had come to see what his mother had meant. And Vaughan’s kitchen had personality.

Her personality, he guessed.

It seemed to him that one mind had chosen everything and one pair of hands had done everything. There was no evidence of compromise or dueling tastes. He knew that way back a kitchen was considered a woman’s domain. Certainly it had been that way in his mother’s day, but she had been French, which had made a difference. And since then he had been led to believe that things had changed. Guys cooked now, or at least left six-packs lying around, or put oil stains on the linoleum from fixing motorcycle engines.

There was no evidence of a second person in the house. None at all. Not a trace. From his position by the sink Reacher could see into the living room through an arch that was really just a doorway with the door taken out. There was a single armchair in there, and a TV set, and a bunch of moving boxes still taped shut.

Vaughan said, “Want coffee?”

“Always.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

“No.”

“Don’t have coffee, then.”

“It keeps me awake until bedtime.”

“What’s the longest you ever stayed awake?”

“Seventy-two hours, maybe.”

“Working?”

He nodded. “Some big deal, twenty years ago.”

“A big MP deal?”

He nodded again. “Somebody was doing something to somebody. I don’t recall the details.”

Vaughan rinsed her coffee pot and filled her machine with water. The machine was a big steel thing with Cuisinart embossed on it in large letters. It looked reliable. She spooned coffee into a gold basket and hit a switch. She said, “Last night the deputies from Despair headed home after an hour.”

“They found me in the bar,” Reacher said. “They flushed me west with the phone call and then came after me. It was a trap.”

“And you fell for it.”

“They fell for it. I knew what they were doing.”

“How?”

“Because twenty years ago I used to stay up for seventy-two hours at a time dealing with worse folks than you’ll ever find in Despair.”

“What happened to the deputies?”

“They joined their full-time buddies in the infirmary.”

“All four of them?”

“All six of them. They added some on-site moral support.”

“You’re a one-man crime wave.”

“No, I’m Alice in Wonderland.”

Now Vaughan nodded.

“I know,” she said. “Why aren’t they doing anything about it? You’ve committed assault and battery on eight individuals, six of them peace officers, and you’ve wrecked two police cars. And yet you’re still walking around.”

“That’s the point,” Reacher said. “I’m still walking around, but in Hope, not in Despair. That’s weirdness number one. All they ever want to do is keep people out of there. They’re not interested in the law or justice or punishment.”

“What’s weirdness number two?”

“They came at me six against one and I walked away with two bruises and sore knuckles from pounding on them. They’re all weak and sick. One of them even had to call it quits so he could find time to throw up.”

“So what’s that about?”

“The clerk at my motel figures they’re breaking environmental laws. Maybe there’s all kinds of poisons and pollution out there.”

“Is that what they’re hiding?”

“Possibly,” Reacher said. “But it’s kind of odd that the victims would help to hide the problem.”

“People worry about their jobs,” Vaughan said. “Especially in a company town, because they don’t have any alternatives.” She opened a cabinet and took out a mug. It was white, perfectly cylindrical, four inches high, and two and a half inches wide. It was made of fine bone china as thin as paper. She filled it from the pot and immediately from the aroma Reacher knew it was going to be a great one. She glanced at the living room but carried the mug to the kitchen table instead, and placed it down in front of one of the three chairs. Reacher glanced at the boxes and the lone armchair in the living room and said, “Just moved in?”

“A year and a half ago,” Vaughan said. “I guess I’m a little slow unpacking.”

“From where?”

“Third Street. We had a little cottage with an upstairs, but we decided we wanted a ranch.”

“We?”

“David and I.”

Reacher asked, “So where is he?”

“He’s not here right now.”

“Should I be sorry about that?”

“A little.”

“What does he do?”

“Not so much anymore.” She sat in one of the chairs without the mug in front of it and tugged the hem of her T-shirt down. Her hair was drying and going wavy again. She was naked under the shirt, and confident about it. Reacher was sure of that. She was looking straight at him, like she knew he knew.

He sat down opposite her.

She asked, “What else?”

“My motel clerk figures the plant makes way too much money.”

“That’s common knowledge. Thurman owns the bank, and bank auditors gossip. He’s a very rich man.”

“My motel clerk figures he’s smuggling dope or something with his little airplane.”

“Do you think he is?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s your conclusion?”

“Not entirely.”

“So what else?”

“A quarter of the plant is screened off. There’s a secret area. I think he’s got a contract to recycle military scrap. Hence the wealth. A Pentagon contract is the fastest way on earth to get rich these days. And hence the MP unit down the road. Thurman is breaking up classified stuff back there, and people would be interested in it. Armor thickness, materials, construction techniques, circuit boards, all that kind of stuff.”

“So that’s all? Legitimate government business?”

“No,” Reacher said. “That’s not all.”

40

Reacher took the first sip of his coffee. It was perfect. Hot, strong, smooth, and a great mug. He looked across the table at Vaughan and said, “Thank you very much.”

She said, “What else is going on there?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a hell of a vigilante effort going on about something. After the PD ended up depopulated I went to see the local judge about getting sworn in as a deputy.”

“You weren’t serious.”

“Of course not. But I pretended I was. I wanted to see the reaction. The guy panicked. He went crazy. He said he’d deputize the whole population first. They’re totally serious about keeping strangers out.”

“Because of the military stuff.”

“No,” Reacher said. “That’s the MPs’ job. Any hint of espionage, Thurman’s people would get on the radio and the MPs would lock and load and about a minute later the whole town would be swarming with Humvees. The townspeople wouldn’t be involved.”

“So what’s going on?”

“At least two other things.”

“Why two?”

“Because their responses are completely incoherent. Which means there are at least two other factions in play, separate and probably unaware of each other. Like this morning, Thurman had me checked out. He saw that my paper trail went cold ten years ago, and therefore I was no obvious danger to him, and then he ran your plate and saw that I was in some way associated with a cop from the next town, and therefore in some way untouchable, so he played nice and gave me a guided tour. But meanwhile without all that information someone else was busy busting your windows. And nobody busts a cop’s windows for the fun of it. Therefore the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

“Thurman gave you a tour?”

“He said he’d show me everything.”

“And did he?”

“No. He stayed away from the secret area. He said it was just a junkyard.”

“Are you sure it isn’t?”

“I saw activity in there earlier. Smoke and sparks. Plus it’s carefully screened off. Who does that, for a junkyard?”

“What are the two other factions?”

“I have no idea. But these young guys are involved somehow. Lucy Anderson’s husband and the dead guy. And Lucy Anderson’s husband is another example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. They sheltered him and moved him on but threw his wife out of town like a pariah. How much sense does that make?”

“He moved on?”

“I saw him at the rooming house at three o’clock and he was gone by seven. No trace of him, and nobody would admit he had ever been there.”

“The plane flies at seven,” Vaughan said. “Is that connected?”

“I don’t know.”

“No trace at all?”

“No physical sign, and a lot of zipped lips.”

“So what’s going on?”

“When was the last time any normal person entered Despair and stayed as long as he wanted and left of his own accord? To your certain knowledge?”

“I don’t know,” Vaughan said. “Months, certainly.”

“There was an entry in the hotel register from seven months ago.”

“That sounds about right.”

“I met the new girl last night,” Reacher said. “Sweet kid. Her name is Maria. I’m pretty sure the dead guy was her boyfriend. She showed me his picture. His name was Raphael Ramirez.”

“Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She asked me if I’d seen him. Truth is, I didn’t actually see him. It was dark. And I can’t give her news like that without being completely sure.”

“So she’s still swinging in the wind.”

“I think she knows, deep down.”

“What happened to the body?”

“It didn’t go to the county morgue. I checked on that.”

“We knew that already.”

“No, we knew it didn’t go straight to the morgue. That was all. So I wondered if it had been dumped somewhere out of town and found later by someone else. But it wasn’t. Therefore it never left Despair. And the only meat wagon and the only stretcher in Despair belong to the metal plant. And the metal plant has furnaces that could vaporize a corpse in five minutes flat.”

Vaughan got up and poured herself a glass of water, from a bottle in the refrigerator. She stood with her hips against the counter and stared out the window. Her heels were on the floor but most of her weight was on her toes. Her T-shirt had one lateral wrinkle where the base of her spine met her butt. The cotton material was very slightly translucent. The light was all behind her. Her hair was dry and there was fine golden down on her neck.

She looked spectacular.

She asked, “What else did Maria say?”

Reacher said, “Nothing. I didn’t ask her anything else.”

“Why ever not?”

“No point. The wives and the girlfriends aren’t going to tell us anything. And what they do say will be misleading.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ve got a vested interest. Their husbands and their boyfriends aren’t just hiding out in Despair on their own account. They’re aiming to get help there. They’re aiming to ride some kind of an underground railroad for fugitives. Despair is a way station, in and out. The women want to keep it all secret. Lucy Anderson was OK with me until I mentioned I used to be a cop. Then she started hating me. She thought I was still a cop. She thought I was here to bust her husband.”

“What kind of fugitives?”

“I don’t know what kind. But the Anderson guy was the right kind and Raphael Ramirez was the wrong kind.”

Vaughan took Reacher’s mug from him and refilled it from the machine. Then she refilled her glass from the refrigerator and sat down and said, “May I ask you a personal question?”

Reacher said, “Feel free.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Caring, I suppose. Caring about what’s happening in Despair. Bad stuff happens everywhere, all the time. Why does this matter to you so much?”

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I have to be somewhere, doing something.”

“That’s still no answer.”

“Maria,” Reacher said. “She’s the answer. She’s a sweet kid, and she’s hurting.”

“Her boyfriend is a fugitive from the law. You said so yourself. Maybe she deserves to be hurting. Maybe Ramirez is a dope dealer or something. Or a gang member or a murderer.”

“Ramirez looked like a harmless guy to me.”

“You can tell by looking?”

“Sometimes. Would Maria hang out with a bad guy?”

“I haven’t met her.”

“Would Lucy Anderson?”

Vaughan said nothing.

“I don’t like company towns,” Reacher said. “I don’t like feudal systems. I don’t like smug fat bosses lording it over people. And I don’t like people so broken down that they put up with it.”

“You see something you don’t like, you feel you have to tear it down?”

“Damn right I do. You got a problem with that?”

“No.”

They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and water in silence. Vaughan took her free hand out of her lap and laid it on the table, her fingers spread and extended. They were the closest part of her to Reacher. He wondered whether it was a gesture, either conscious or subconscious. An approach, or an appeal for a connection.

No wedding band.

He’s not here right now.

He put his own free hand on the table.

She asked, “How do we know they were fugitives at all? Maybe they were undercover environmental activists, checking on the pollution. Maybe the Anderson guy fooled them and Ramirez didn’t.”

“Fooled them how?”

“I don’t know. But it worries me, if they’re using poisons over there. We share the same water table.”

“Thurman mentioned something called trichloroethylene. It’s a metal degreaser. I don’t know whether it’s dangerous or not.”

“I’m going to check it out.”

“Why would the wife of an environmental activist be scared of cops?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Anderson guy wasn’t fooling anyone. He was a guest there. They gave him a place to stay and protection. He was helped.”

“But Lucy Anderson wasn’t. She was thrown out.”

“Like I said, the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.”

“And Ramirez was killed.”

“Not killed. Left to die.”

“So why help one and shun the other?”

“Why shun him at all? Why not just round him up and dump him at the line, like they did with me and Lucy?”

Vaughan sipped her water.

“Because Ramirez was different in some way,” she said. “More specifically dangerous to them.”

“Then why not just take him out immediately? Disappear him? The end result would have been the same.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” Reacher said. “Maybe they didn’t shun him or keep him out. Maybe they never even knew he was there. Maybe he was sniffing around on the periphery, staying out of sight, trying to find a way in. Desperate enough to keep trying, not good enough to succeed.”

Vaughan took her hand off the table.

“We need to know exactly who he was,” she said. “We need to talk to Maria.”

“She won’t tell us anything.”

“We can try. We’ll find her in the diner. Meet me there, later.”

“Later than what?”

“We both need to sleep.”

Reacher said, “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Is your husband in prison?”

Vaughan paused a beat, and then smiled, a little surprised, a little sad.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

41

Reacher walked back to the motel, alone. Lucy Anderson’s door was open. A maid’s cart was parked outside. The bed was stripped and all the towels were on the floor. The closet was empty. I think she left town, the waitress had said, in the diner. Reacher watched for a moment and then he moved on. Good luck, Lucky, he thought, whatever the hell you’re doing and wherever the hell you’re going. He unlocked his own door and took a long hot shower and climbed into bed. He was asleep within a minute. The coffee didn’t fight him at all.

He woke up in the middle of the afternoon with the MPs on his mind. The forward operating base. Its location. Its equipment mix. The place came at him like an analysis problem from the classrooms at Fort Rucker.

What was it for?

Why was it there?

The old County Route 37 wandered east to west through Hope, through Despair, through Halfway, and presumably onward. First he saw it laid out like a ribbon, like a line on a map, and then he pictured it in his head like a rotating three-dimensional diagram, like something on a computer screen, all green webs of origins and layers. Way back in its history it had been a wagon trail. Beaten earth, crushed rock, ruts and weeds. Then it had been minimally upgraded, when Model Ts had rolled out of Dearborn and flooded the country. Then Hope Township had upgraded ten miles of it again, for the sake of civic pride. They had done a conscientious job. Maybe foundation reinforcement had been involved. Certainly there had been grading and leveling. Maybe a little straightening. Possibly a little widening. Thick blacktop had been poured and rolled.

Despair Township had done none of that. Thurman and his father and his grandfather or whoever had owned the town before had ignored the road. Maybe they had grudgingly dumped tar and pebbles on it every decade or so, but fundamentally it was still the same road it had been back when Henry Ford ruled the world. It was narrow, weak, lumpy, and meandering.

Unfit for heavy traffic.

Except west of the metal plant. There, a thirty-five-mile stretch had been co-opted and rebuilt. Probably from the ground up. Reacher pictured a yard-deep excavation, drainage, a rock foundation, a thick concrete roadbed, rebar, a four-inch asphalt layer rolled smooth and true by heavy equipment. The shoulders were straight and the camber was good. Then after thirty-five miles the new road had been driven through virgin territory to meet the Interstate, and the old Route 37 had wound onward as before, once again in its native state, narrow, weak, and lumpy.

Weak, strong, weak.

There was no military presence east of Despair or west of the fork, across the weak parts of the road.

The MP base straddled the strong part.

The truck route.

Close to Despair, but not too close.

Not sealing the town like a trap, but guarding one direction only and leaving the other wide open.

The base was equipped with six up-armored Humvees, each one an eight-ton rhinoceros, each one reasonably fast and reasonably maneuverable, each one topped with a belt-fed 7.62-caliber M60 machine gun on a free-swinging mount.

Why all that?

Reacher lay in bed and closed his eyes and heard barking voices from the Rucker classrooms: This is what you know. What’s your conclusion?

His conclusion was that nobody was worried about espionage.

He got out of bed at four o’clock and took another long hot shower. He knew he was out of step with the Western world in terms of how often he changed his clothes, but he tried to compensate by keeping his body scrupulously clean. The motel soap was white and came in a small thin paper-wrapped morsel, and he used the whole bar. The shampoo was a thick green liquid in a small plastic bottle. He used half of it. It smelled faintly of apples. He rinsed and stood under the water for a moment more and then shut it off and heard someone knocking at his door. He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded across the room and opened up.

Vaughan.

She was in uniform. Her HPD cruiser was parked neatly behind her. She was staring in at him, openly curious. Not an unusual reaction. Look at yourself. What do you see? He was a spectacular meso-morph, built of nothing except large quantities of bone and sinew and muscle. But with his shirt off most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts, plus a dimpled .38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest, and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen, all criss-crossed and puckered by seventy clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a mobile army surgical hospital. Souvenirs, in the first instance of childhood mayhem, in the second of a psychopath with a small revolver, and in the third, shrapnel from a bomb blast. Survivable, because childhood mayhem was always survivable, and because the .38 that hit him had been packed with a weak load, and because the shrapnel had been someone else’s bone, not white-hot metal. He had been a lucky man, and his luck was written all over his body.

Ugly, but fascinating.

Vaughan’s gaze traveled upward to his face.

“Bad news,” she said. “I went to the library.”

“You get bad news at libraries?”

“I looked at some books and used their computer.”

“And?”

“Trichloroethylene is called TCE for short. It’s a metal degreaser.”

“I know that.”

“It’s very dangerous. It causes cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, all kinds of cancers. Plus heart disease, problems with the nervous system, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, even diabetes. The EPA says a concentration of five parts per billion is acceptable. Some places have been measured twenty or thirty times worse than that.”

“Like where?”

“There was a case in Tennessee.”

“That’s a long way from here.”

“This is serious, Reacher.”

“People worry too much.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

He nodded.

“I know,” he said. “And Thurman uses five thousand gallons at a time.”

“And we drink the groundwater.”

“You drink bottled water.”

“Lots of people use tap.”

“The plant is twenty miles away. There’s a lot of sand. A lot of natural filtration.”

“It’s still a concern.”

Reacher nodded. “Tell me about it. I had two cups of coffee right there. One in the restaurant and one at the judge’s house.”

“You feel OK?”

“Fine. And people seem OK here.”

“So far.”

She went quiet.

He said, “What else?”

“Maria is missing. I can’t find her anywhere. The new girl.”

42

Vaughan hung around in the open doorway and Reacher grabbed his clothes and dressed in the bathroom. He called out, “Where did you look?”

“All over,” Vaughan called back. “She’s not here in the motel, she’s not in the diner, she’s not in the library, she’s not out shopping, and there isn’t anywhere else to go.”

“Did you speak to the motel clerk?”

“Not yet.”

“Then that’s where we’ll go first. She knows everything.” He came out of the bathroom, buttoning his shirt. The shirt was almost due for the trash, and the buttonholes were still difficult. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his pockets.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The clerk was in the motel office, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, doing something with a ledger and a calculator. But she had no useful information. Maria had left her room before seven o’clock that morning, dressed as before, on foot, carrying only her purse.

“She ate breakfast before seven,” Reacher said. “The waitress in the diner told me.”

The clerk said she hadn’t come back. That was all she knew. Vaughan asked her to open Maria’s room. The clerk handed over her passkey immediately. No hesitation, no fuss about warrants or legalities or due process. Small towns, Reacher thought. Police work was easy. About as easy as it had been in the army.

Maria’s room was identical to Reacher’s, with only very slightly more stuff in it. A spare pair of jeans hung in the closet. They were neatly folded over the bar of a hanger. Above them on the shelf were one spare pair of cotton underpants, one bra, and one clean cotton T-shirt, all folded together in a low pile. On the floor of the closet was an empty suitcase. It was a small, sad, battered item. Blue in color, made from fiberboard, with a crushed lid, as if it had been stored for years with something heavy on top of it.

On the shelf next to the bathroom sink was a vinyl wash bag, white, with improbable pink daisies on it. It was empty, but it had clearly been overstuffed during transit. Its contents were laid out next to it, in a long line. Soaps, shampoos, lotions and ointments and unguents of every possible kind.

No personal items. They would have been in her purse.

“Day trip,” Vaughan said. “She’s expecting to return.”

“Obviously,” Reacher said. “She paid for three nights.”

“She went to Despair. To look for Ramirez.”

“That would be my guess.”

“But how? Did she walk?”

Reacher shook his head. “I would have seen her. It’s seventeen miles. Six hours, for her. If she left at seven she wouldn’t have arrived before one in the afternoon. I was on the road between eight-thirty and nine. I didn’t pass her along the way.”

“There’s no bus or anything. There’s never any traffic.”

“Maybe there was,” Reacher said. “I came in with an old guy in a car. He was visiting family, and then he was moving on to Denver. He’d head straight west. No reason to loop around. And if he was dumb enough to give me a ride, he’d have given Maria a ride for sure.”

“If he happened to leave this morning.”

“Let’s find out.”

They returned the passkey and got into Vaughan’s cruiser. She fired it up and they headed west to the hardware store. The sidewalk was piled high with an elaborate display. Ladders, buckets, barrows, gasoline-driven machines of various types. The owner was inside, wearing a brown coat. He confirmed that he had been building the display early that morning. He thought hard and memory dawned in his eyes and he confirmed that he had seen a small dark girl in a blue warm-up jacket. She had been standing on the far sidewalk, right at the edge of town, half-turned, looking east but clearly aiming to head west, gazing at the empty traffic lane with a mixture of optimism and hopelessness. A classic hitchhiker’s pose. Then later the store owner had seen a large bottle-green car heading west, a little before eight o’clock. He described the car as looking basically similar to Vaughan’s cruiser, but without all the police equipment.

“A Grand Marquis,” Reacher said. “Same platform. Same car. Same guy.”

The store owner had not seen the car stop or the girl get in. But the inference was clear. Vaughan and Reacher drove the five miles to the town line. No real reason. They saw nothing. Just the smooth blacktop behind and the ragged gritty ribbon ahead.

“Is she in danger?” Vaughan asked.

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “But she’s probably not having the best day of her life.”

“How will she get back?”

“I suspect she decided to worry about that later.”

“We can’t go there in this car.”

“So what else have you got?”

“Just the truck.”

“Got sunglasses? It’s breezy, without the windshield.”

“Too late. I already had it towed. It’s being fixed.”

“And then you went to the library? Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not so much anymore.”

“Since when? Since what?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Your husband?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

Reacher said, “We need to find Maria.”

“I know.”

“We could walk.”

“It’s twelve miles.”

“And twelve miles back.”

“Can’t do it. I’m on duty in two hours.”

Reacher said, “She’s domiciled in Hope. At least temporarily. Now she’s missing. The HPD should be entitled to head over there in a car and make inquiries.”

“She’s from San Diego.”

“Only technically.”

“Technicalities matter, Reacher.”

“She took up residency.”

“With one change of underwear?”

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

“Despair could ask us for reciprocity.”

“They already grabbed it. Their deputies came by last night.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Says who?”

“Are you bullying me?”

“You’re the one with the gun.”

Vaughan started to say something, then shook her head and sighed and said, “Shit.” Then she jammed her foot on the gas and the Crown Vic shot forward. The tires had traction on Hope’s blacktop but lost it on Despair’s loose gravel. The rear wheels spun and howled and the car stumbled for a second and then accelerated west in a cloud of blue smoke.

They drove eleven miles into the setting sun with nothing to show for it except eyestrain. The twelfth mile was different. Way ahead in the glare Reacher saw the familiar distant sights, all in sharp silhouette and shortened perspective. Vague smudges, on the horizon. The vacant lot, on the left. The abandoned motor court, low and forlorn. The gas station, on the right. Farther on, the dry goods store in the first brick building.

Plus something else.

From a mile away it looked like a shadow. Like a lone cloud was blocking the sun and casting a random shape on the ground. He craned his neck and looked up at the sky. Nothing there. The sky was clear. Just the gray-blue of approaching evening.

Vaughan drove on.

Three-quarters of a mile out the shape grew width, and depth, and height. The sun blazed behind it and winked around its edges. It looked like a low wide pile of something dark. Like a gigantic truck had strewn earth or asphalt right across the road, shoulder to shoulder, and beyond.

The pile looked to be fifty feet wide, maybe twenty deep, maybe six high.

From a half-mile out, it looked to be moving.

From a quarter-mile out, it was identifiable.

It was a crowd of people.

Vaughan slowed, instinctively. The crowd was two or three hundred strong. Men, women, and children. They were formed up in a rough triangle, facing east. Maybe six people at the front. Behind the six, twenty more. Behind the twenty, sixty more. Behind the sixty, a vast milling pool of people. The whole width of the road was blocked. The shoulders were blocked. The rearguard spilled thirty feet out into the scrub on both sides.

Vaughan stopped, fifty yards out.

The crowd compressed. People pushed inward from the sides. They made a human wedge. A solid mass. Two or three hundred people. They held together, but they didn’t link arms.

They didn’t link arms because they had weapons in their hands.

Baseball bats, pool cues, ax handles, broom handles, split firewood, carpenters’ hammers. Two or three hundred people, pressed tight together, and moving. Moving as one. They were rocking in place from foot to foot and jabbing their weapons up and down in the air. Nothing wild. Their movements were small and rhythmic and controlled.

They were chanting.

At first Reacher heard only a primitive guttural shout, repeated over and over. Then he dropped his window an inch and heard the words Out! Out! Out! He hit the switch again and the glass thumped back up.

Vaughan was pale.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“Is this some weird Colorado tradition?” Reacher asked.

“I never saw it before.”

“So Judge Gardner went and did it. He deputized the whole population.”

“They don’t look drafted. They look like true believers. What are we going to do?”

Out! Out! Out!

Reacher watched for a moment and said, “Drive on and see what happens.”

“Are you serious?”

“Try it.”

Vaughan took her foot off the brake and the car crept forward.

The crowd surged forward to meet it, short steps, crouched, weapons moving.

Vaughan stopped again, forty yards out.

Out! Out! Out!

Reacher said, “Use your siren. Scare them.”

“Scare them? They’re doing a pretty good job scaring me.”

The crowd had quit rocking from side to side. Now people were rocking back and forth instead, one foot to the other, jabbing their clubs and sticks forward, whipping them back, jabbing them forward again. They were dressed in work shirts and faded sundresses and jean jackets, but collectively in terms of their actions they looked entirely primitive. Like a weird Stone Age tribe, threatened and defensive.

“Siren,” Reacher said.

Vaughan lit it up. It was a modern synthesized unit, shatteringly loud in the emptiness, sequencing randomly from a basic whoop-whoop-whoop to a manic pock-pock-pock to a hysterical digital cackling.

It had no effect.

No effect at all.

The crowd didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t miss a beat.

Reacher said, “Can you get around them?”

Vaughan shook her head. “This car is no good on the scrub. We’d bog down and they’d be all over us.”

“So fake them out. Drift left, then sneak past on the right real fast.”

“You think?”

“Try it.”

She took her foot off the brake again and crept forward. She turned the wheel and headed for the wrong side of the road and the crowd in front of her tracked the move, slow and infinitely fluid. Two or three hundred people, moving as one, like a pool of gray mercury, changing shape like an ameba. Like a disciplined herd. Vaughan reached the left shoulder.

“Can’t do it,” she said. “There’s too many of them.”

She stopped again, ten feet from the front rank.

She killed the siren.

The chanting grew louder.

Out! Out! Out!

Then the note dropped lower and the rhythm changed down. As one, the people started banging their clubs and sticks on the ground and shouting only every other beat.

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!

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

Crowds had nine lives.

“What now?” Vaughan asked.

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

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!

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

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

He said, “Back up a little.”

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

“What now?” she asked.

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

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!

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

Vaughan asked, “What do we do?”

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

“We’re not in a Humvee.”

“I’m just saying.”

“What do we do in a Crown Vic?”

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

They screamed a command.

And charged.

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

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

43

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

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

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

“You got serious doubts?”

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

“So what do we do?”

“We verify.”

“How?”

“We call Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

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

“You know his name?”

“No.”

“Number?”

“No.”

“Great plan.”

“He was visiting three grandchildren in Hope. You need to get back to town and check with families that have three kids. Ask them if Grandpa just came by in his green Mercury. One of them will say yes. Then you’ll get a number for his next stop. It’ll be a brother or a sister in Denver, with four more kids for the old guy to visit.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going back to Despair.”

He got out of the car at five-thirty-five, a little more than eight miles west of Hope, a little more than eight miles east of Despair. Right in the heart of no-man’s-land. He watched Vaughan drive away and then he turned and started walking. He stayed on the road itself, for speed. He ran calculations in his head. This is what you know. Twenty-six hundred inhabitants, possibly a quarter of them too old or too young to be useful. Which left more than eighteen hundred people, with maximum availability after six o’clock in the evening, when the plant closed for the day. Newly deputized, newly marshaled, unsure of themselves, inexperienced. Daytime visibility had enabled deployment in large masses. In the dark, they would have to spread out, like a human perimeter. But they would want to stick fairly close together, for morale and effectiveness and mutual support. Therefore no outliers, and no sentinels. Children would be held close in family groups. Each element of the perimeter would want visual contact with the next. Which meant that groups or individuals wouldn’t want to be more than maybe ten feet apart. Some people would have flashlights. Some would have dogs. All in all, worst case, they could assemble a human chain eighteen thousand feet long, which was six thousand yards, which was the circumference of a circle a fraction more than a mile in diameter.

A circle a mile in diameter would barely enclose the town. It couldn’t enclose the town and the plant together. And it would bunch up on the road in and the road out, especially the road in, from Hope. Cover would be thin elsewhere. Probably very thin. Possibly guys with trucks would be out in the scrub. Possibly the security Tahoes from the plant would be on the prowl. Teenage boys would be unpredictable. Excited by the adventure, and hungry for glory. But easily bored. In fact all of them would get bored. And tired, and low. Efficiency would peak during the first hour, would wane over the next two or three, would be poor before midnight, and would be nonexistent in the small hours of the night.

What’s your conclusion?

Not a huge problem, Reacher thought. The sun was down behind the distant mountains. There was a soft orange glow on the horizon. He walked on toward it.

At seven o’clock he pictured Vaughan starting her night watch, in Hope. At seven-fifteen he was a mile from where the crowd had gathered before, in Despair. It was getting dark. He couldn’t see anybody in the distance, and therefore nobody could see him in the distance. He struck off the road into the scrub, south and west, at an angle, hustling, unwilling to slow down. The town ahead was dark and quiet. Very quiet. By seven-thirty he was six hundred yards out in the sand and he realized he hadn’t heard the plane take off. No aero engine, no light in the sky.

Why not?

He paused in the stillness and put together a couple of possible scenarios. Then he moved on, holding a wide radius, quiet and stealthy and invisible in the darkness.

By eight o’clock he was making his first approach. He was expected out of the east, therefore he was coming in from the southwest. Not a guarantee of safety, but better than a poke in the eye. Competent individuals would be distributed all around, but not equally. He had already outflanked most of the people he needed to worry about. He had seen one truck, a battered pick-up with four lights on a bar on its roof. It had been bouncing slowly along, over rough ground, heading away from him.

He moved up through the scrub and paused behind a rock. He was fifty yards from the back of a long line of workers’ housing. Low one-story dwellings, well separated laterally, because desert land was cheap and septic systems didn’t work with too much density. The gaps between the houses were three times as wide as the houses themselves. The sky had a minimal gray glow, moon behind cloud. There were guards in the gaps between the houses. Left to right he could make out an individual, a small group, another individual, and another. They all had sticks or clubs or bats. Together they made a chain that went: armed guard, house, armed guard, house, armed guard, house, armed guard.

They thought the houses themselves were defensive elements.

They were wrong.

He could hear dogs barking here and there in the distance, excited and unsettled by the unfamiliar evening activity. Not a problem. Dogs that barked too much were no more use than dogs that didn’t bark at all. The guy second from the right between the houses had a flashlight. He was clicking it on at predictable intervals, sweeping an arc of ground in front of him, and then clicking it off again to save the battery.

Reacher moved left.

He lined himself up behind a house that was entirely dark. He dropped to the ground and low-crawled straight for it. The army record for a fifty-yard low crawl was about twenty seconds. At the other extreme, snipers could spend all day crawling fifty yards into position. On this occasion Reacher budgeted five minutes. Fast enough to get the job done, slow enough to get it done safely. Generally the human brain noticed speed and discontinuity. A tortoise heading inward worried nobody. A cheetah bounding in got everyone’s attention. He kept at it, slow and steady, knees and elbows, head down. No pauses. No stop-start. He made it through ten yards. Then twenty. And thirty. And forty.

After forty-five yards he knew he was no longer visible from the spaces between the houses. The angle was wrong. But he stayed low all the way, until he crawled right into the back stoop. He stood up and listened for reaction, either outside the house or inside.

Nothing.

The stoop was a simple wooden assembly three steps high. He went up, slowly, feet apart, shuffling, putting his weight where the treads were bolted to the side rails. If a stair squeaked, ninety-nine times in a hundred it squeaked in the center, where it was weakest. He put his hand on the door handle and lifted. If a door squeaked, ninety-nine times in a hundred it was because it had dropped on its hinges. Upward pressure helped.

He eased the door up and in and stepped through the opening and turned and closed it again. He was in a dark and silent kitchen. A worn linoleum floor, the smell of fried food. Counters and cabinets, ghostly in the gloom. A sink, and a faucet with a bad washer. It released a fat drip every twenty-three seconds. The drip spattered against a ceramic surface. He pictured the perfect teardrop exploding into a coronet shape, flinging tinier droplets outward in a perfect circle.

He moved through the kitchen to the hallway door. Smelled dirty carpet and worn furniture from a living room on his right. He moved through the hallway to the front of the house. The front door was a plain hollow slab, with a rectangle of painted beading on it. He turned the handle and lifted. Eased it open, silently.

There was a screen door beyond it.

He stood still. There was no way to open a screen door quietly. No way at all. Lightweight construction, tight plastic hinges, a crude spring mechanism. Guaranteed to raise a whole symphony of screeching and slapping sounds. The door had a horizontal bar in the center, designed to add strength and resist warping. The upper void was less than three feet square. The lower void, the same. Both were meshed with nylon screen. The screen had been doing its job for many years. That was clear. It was filthy with dust and insect corpses.

Reacher pulled out one of his captured switchblades. Turned back to the hallway to muffle the sound and popped the blade. He slit a large X in the lower screen, corner to corner. Pressed the blade back in the handle and put the knife back in his pocket and sat down on the floor. Leaned back and jacked himself off the ground, like a crab. Shuffled forward and went out through the X feetfirst. Headfirst would have been more intuitive. The desire to see what was out there was overwhelming. But if what was out there was an ax handle or a bullet, better that it hit him in the legs than the head. Much better.

There was nothing out there. No bullet, no ax handle. He ducked and squirmed and got his shoulders through the gap and stood up straight and alert, one swift movement. He was standing on a front stoop made of concrete. A plain slab, four-by-four, cracked, canted down in one corner on an inadequate foundation. Ahead of him was a short path and a dark street. More houses on the other side. No guards between them. The guards were all behind him now, by a distance equal to half a house’s depth. And they were all facing the wrong way.

44

Reacher threaded between houses and stayed off the roads where possible. He saw nobody on foot. Once he saw a moving vehicle two streets away. An old sedan, lights on bright. A designated supervisor, possibly, on an inspection tour. He ducked low behind a wooden fence and waited until the car was well away from him. Then he moved on and pressed up behind the first of the brick-built downtown blocks. He stood with his back against a wall and planned his moves. He was reasonably familiar with Despair’s geography. He decided to stay away from the street with the restaurant on it. The restaurant was almost certainly still open for business. Close to nine in the evening, maybe late for normal supper hours, but with mass community action going on all night it was probably committed to staying open and supplying refreshments for the troops. Maybe the moving car had been a volunteer ferrying coffee.

He stayed in the shadows and used a narrow cross-street and turned and walked past the storefront church. It was empty. Maybe Thurman had been inside earlier, praying for success. In which case he was going to be sadly disappointed. Reacher moved on without a sound and turned again and headed for the police station. The streets were all dark and deserted. The whole active population was on the perimeter, staring out into the gloom, unaware of what was happening behind its back.

The street with the police station on it had one streetlight burning. It cast a weak pool of yellow light. The police station itself was dark and still. The street door was locked. Old wood, a new five-lever deadbolt inexpertly fitted. Reacher took out the keys he had taken from the deputy in the bar. He looked at the lock and looked at the keys and selected a long brass item and tried it. The lock turned, with plenty of effort. Either the key was badly cut, or the lock’s tongue was binding against the striker plate, or both. But the door opened. It swung back and a smell of institutional floor polish wafted out. Reacher stepped inside and closed the door behind him and walked through the gloom the same way he had walked before, to the booking desk. Like the town’s hotel, the Despair PD was still in the pen-and-paper age. Arrest records were kept in a large black ledger with gold-painted edges. Reacher carried it to a window and tilted it so that it caught what little light was coming through. Then he opened it up and flipped forward through the pages until he found his own entry, dated three days previously and timed in the middle of the afternoon: Reacher, J, male vagrant. The entry had been made well in advance of the town court hearing. Reacher smiled. So much for the presumption of innocence, he thought.

The entry immediately before his own was three days older and said: Anderson, L, female vagrant.

He flipped backward, looking for Lucy Anderson’s husband. He didn’t expect to find him, and he didn’t find him. Lucy Anderson’s husband had been helped, not hindered. Then he went looking for Ramirez. No trace. Nowhere in the book. Never arrested. Therefore the guy hadn’t escaped from custody. He had never been picked up at all. If he had ever been there at all. If the dead guy in the dark wasn’t someone else.

He leafed backward, patiently, a random three-month sample. Saw six names, Bridge, Churchill, White, King, Whitehouse, Andrews, five male, one female, all vagrants, roughly one every two weeks.

He flipped ahead again, past his own entry, looking for Maria herself. She wasn’t there. There was only one entry after his own. It was in new handwriting, because the desk cop had been driving Despair’s second Crown Vic and was therefore currently out sick with whiplash. The new entry had been made just seven hours previously and said: Rogers, G, male vagrant.

Reacher closed the book and stacked it back on the desk and walked to the head of the basement stair. He felt his way down and opened the cell block door. It was very bright inside. All the bulkhead lights were burning. But all the cells were empty.

A circle a mile in diameter would barely enclose the town. Reacher’s next stop was out of town, which meant passing through the perimeter again, this time heading in the other direction. Easy at first, hard later. Easy to sneak up to the line, relatively easy to penetrate it, hard to walk away with a thousand eyes on his back. He didn’t want to be the only thing moving, in front of a static audience. Better that the line moved, and broke over him like a wave over a rock.

He sorted through the bunch of keys.

Found the one he wanted.

Then he put the keys in his pocket and moved back to the booking desk and started opening drawers. He found what he wanted in the third drawer he tried. It was full of miscellaneous junk. Rubber bands, paper clips, dry ballpoint pens, slips of paper with scratched-out notes, a plastic ruler.

And a tin ashtray, and a quarter-full pack of Camel cigarettes, and three books of matches.

He cleared a space on the floor under the booking desk and put the arrest ledger in its center, standing on its edge, open to ninety degrees, with the pages fanned out. He piled every scrap of paper he could find on it and around it. He balled up memos and posters and old newspapers and built a pyramid. He hid two matchbooks in it, with the covers bent back and the matches bent forward at varying angles.

Then he lit a cigarette, with a match from the third book. He inhaled, gratefully. Camels had been his brand, way back in history. He liked Turkish tobacco. He smoked a half-inch and folded the cigarette into the matchbook in a T shape and used a paper clip to keep it secure. Then he nestled the assembly into the base of his paper pyramid and walked away.

He left the street door open two inches, to set up a breeze.

He had seen the big deputy’s house from the back, the first night, when the guy got home from work and threw up in the yard. It was a five-minute walk that took him ten, due to stealth and caution. The house was another swaybacked old ranch. No landscaping, no real yard. Just beaten earth, including a foot-wide path to the door and twin ruts leading to a parking place close to the kitchen.

The old crew-cab pick-up was right there on it.

The driver’s door was unlocked. Reacher slid in behind the wheel. The seat was worn and sagging. The windows were dirty and the upholstery smelled of sweat and grease and oil. Reacher pulled the bunch of keys and found the car key. Plastic head, distinctive shape. He tried it, just to be sure. He put it in the ignition and turned two clicks. The wheel unlocked and the dials lit up. He turned it back again and climbed over the seats and lay down in the rear of the cab.

It took more than thirty minutes for the townspeople to realize their police station was on fire. By which time it was well ablaze. From his low position in the truck Reacher saw smoke and sparks and an orange glow and the tentative start of leaping flames well before anyone reacted. But eventually someone on the perimeter must have smelled something or gotten bored and shuffled a full circle in the dirt and paused long enough to study the horizon behind.

There was uncertainty and confused shouting for about a minute.

Then there was pandemonium.

Discipline broke down instantly. The perimeter collapsed inward like a leaking balloon. Reacher lay still and people streamed past him, few and hesitant at first, then many and fast. They were running, singly and in groups, yelling, shouting, fascinated, uncertain, looking at nothing except the bright glow ahead of them. Reacher craned his head and saw them coming from all directions. The cross-streets were suddenly crowded with dozens of people, then hundreds. The flow was all one way. The downtown maze swallowed them all. Reacher sat up and turned and watched the last of the backs disappear around corners and between buildings.

Newly deputized, newly marshaled, unsure of themselves, inexperienced.

He smiled.

Like moths to a flame, he thought. Literally.

Then he scrambled over the seat backs and turned the key all the way. The engine turned over once and fired. He drove away slowly, with the lights off, heading a little south of west, through the deserted scrubland. He saw headlights on the roadway to his right. Four moving vehicles. Almost certainly the security Tahoes were coming in from the plant, plus probably the ambulance, plus maybe some firefighting equipment. He kept on going, looping west through the empty land, slowly, bouncing over washboard undulations and jarring over rocks. The wheel squirmed in his hands. He peered ahead through the dirty windshield and averaged less than twenty miles an hour. Faster than running, but even so, it took more than seven minutes before he saw the white gleam of the plant’s wall in the darkness.

45

Reacher kept on going until the residential compound’s fieldstone wall loomed up at him. It was hard to see in the darkness. But it was easy to climb. Plenty of toeholds, in the unmortared joints. He drove halfway around its circumference and parked the truck opposite where he guessed the oversized barn would be. He killed the engine and got out quietly and was over the wall less than ten seconds later. The runway was right in front of him. Maybe sixty feet wide, maybe nine hundred yards long, beaten flat, carefully graded, well maintained. At each end was a low hump, a concrete emplacement for a floodlight set to wash horizontally along the runway’s length. Across it and directly ahead was a wide expanse of scrub, dotted here and there with landscaped areas. The plants were all sharp-leaved things that looked silver under the night sky. Native, adapted to the desert. Xeric plants, or xerophilous, drought tolerant, from the Greek prefix xero-, meaning dry. Hence Xerox, for copying without wet chemicals. Zeno of Cittium would have been puzzled by Xeroxing, but he would have approved of xeriscaping. He believed in going with the flow. The unquestioning acceptance of destiny. He believed in basking in the sun and eating green figs, instead of spending time and effort trying to change nature with irrigation.

Reacher crossed the runway. Ahead of him and behind the last planted area was the big barn. He headed straight for it. It was a three-sided building, open at the front. It was entirely filled with a white airplane. A Piper Cherokee, parked nose-out, settled dead level on its tricycle undercarriage, dormant and still and dewed over with cold. Close to ten o’clock in the evening. Close to the halfway point of its normal nightly flight plan. But that night, it was still on the ground. It hadn’t flown at all.

Why not?

Reacher walked right into the barn and skirted the right-hand wing tip. Came back to the fuselage and found the step and climbed on the wing and peered in through the window. He had spent time in small planes, when the army had wanted him to get somewhere faster than a jeep or a train could have gotten him. He had found them small and trivial and somehow unserious. They were like flying cars. He had told himself they were better built than cars, but he hadn’t found much concrete evidence to convince himself with. Thin metal, bent and folded and riveted, flimsy clips and wires, coughing engines. Thurman’s Cherokee was a plain four-seat workhorse, a little worn, a little stained. It had tinny doors and a divided windshield and a dash less complicated than most new sedans. One window had a small crack. The seats looked caved in and the harnesses looked tangled and frayed.

There was no paperwork in the cabin. No charts, no maps, no scribbled latitudes and longitudes. There was no real freight capacity. Just a couple of small holds in various nacelles and voids, and the three spare seats. People don’t joyride at night, Lucy Anderson had said. There’s nothing to see. Therefore Thurman was carrying something, somewhere, in or out. Or visiting a friend. Or a mistress. Maybe that was what lay preacher meant. You preached, and you got laid.

Reacher climbed down off the wing. He strolled through the gloom and took a look at the other outbuildings. There was a three-car garage, at the end of a straight quarter-mile driveway that led to an ornamental iron gate in the wall. There was another, smaller, barn. The house itself was magnificent. It was built of oiled boards that shone halfway between blond and dark. It had numerous peaked gables, like a mountain chalet. Some windows were two stories high. Paneling glowed dark inside. There were cathedral ceilings. There were fieldstone accents and rich rugs and clubby leather sofas and armchairs. It was the kind of gentleman’s retreat that should always smell of cigar smoke. Reacher could still taste the part-smoked cigarette in his mouth. He walked all the way around the house, thinking about Camels, and camels, and the eyes of needles. He arrived back at the big barn, and took a last look at the airplane. Then he retraced his steps through the landscaping, across the runway, to the wall. Ten seconds later he was back in the stolen truck.

The fieldstone wall had been easy to climb, but the metal wall was going to be impossible. It was a sheer eight-foot-high vertical plane, topped with a continuous horizontal cylinder six feet in diameter. Like a toilet roll balanced on a thick hardcover book. It was a design derived from prison research. Reacher knew the theory. He had been professionally interested in prisons, back in the day. Stone walls or brick walls or wire fences could be climbed, however high they were. Broken glass set in the tops could be padded or cushioned. Rolls of barbed wire could be crushed or cut. But six-foot cylinders were unbeatable. Compared to the length of an arm or the span of a hand, their surfaces were slick and flat and offered no grip at all. Getting over one was like trying to crawl across a ceiling.

So he drove on, through the empty acres of parking, hoping against hope that the personnel gate would be open, and if it wasn’t, that one of the deputy’s keys would unlock it. But it wasn’t open, and none of the keys fit. Because it didn’t have a keyhole. It had a gray metal box instead, set into the wall well to the right, where the gate’s arc of travel wouldn’t obscure it. The box was the kind of thing that normally held an outdoor electrical outlet. It opened against a spring closure. Inside was a ten-digit keypad. A combination lock. One through nine, plus zero, laid out like a telephone. A possible 3,628,800 variants. It would take seven months to try them all. A fast typist might do it in six.

Reacher drove on, tracking the north wall in the Tahoes’ established ruts, hoping against hope that the vehicle gate would be open. He was slightly optimistic. The Tahoes had left in a hurry, and the ambulance. And people in a hurry didn’t always clean up after themselves.

The vehicle gate was open.

It was built like a double door. Each half cantilevered outward and then swung through a hundred degrees on a wheeled track. And both halves were standing wide open. Together they made a mouth, a chute, a funnel, a V-shaped invitation leading directly to an empty forty-foot gap in the wall, and to the darkness beyond.

Reacher parked the deputy’s truck nose-out, right across the wheeled track, blocking the gate’s travel, and he took the keys with him. He figured maybe the gate was motorized, or on a time switch. And come what may, he wanted to keep it open. He didn’t want it to close with him on the wrong side. Climbing out would be as impossible as climbing in.

He walked a hundred feet into the plant. Felt the familiar terrain underfoot, heavy and sticky with grease and oil, crunchy with shards of metal. He stood still, and sensed giant shapes ahead. The crushers, and the furnaces, and the cranes. He glanced right, and half-saw the line of offices and storage tanks. Beyond them, nearly a mile away and invisible in the night, the secret compound. He took half a step in its direction.

Then the lights came on.

There was an audible whoomp as electricity surged through cables thicker than wrists and in a split second the whole place lit up blue and brighter than day. A shattering sensation. Physical in its intensity. Reacher screwed his eyes shut and clamped his arms over his head and tried hard not to fall to his knees.

46

Reacher opened his eyes in a desperate hooded squint and saw Thurman walking toward him. He turned and saw the plant foreman heading in from a different direction. He turned again and saw the giant with the three-foot wrench blocking his path to the gate.

He stood still and waited, blinking, squinting, the muscles around his eyes hurting from clamping so hard. Thurman stopped ten feet away from him and then walked on and came close and took up a position alongside him, nearly shoulder to shoulder, as if they were two old buddies standing together, surveying a happy scene.

Thurman said, “I thought our paths were not going to cross again.”

Reacher said, “I can’t be responsible for what you think.”

“Did you set our police station on fire?”

“You’ve got a human wall all around the town. How could I have gotten through?”

“Why are you here again?”

Reacher paused a beat. Said, “I’m thinking about leaving the state.” Which was permanently true. Then he said, “Before I go, I thought I’d drop by the infirmary and pay my respects to my former opponents. Tell them no hard feelings.”

Thurman said, “I think the hard feelings are all on the other side.”

“Then they can tell me no hard feelings. Clearing the air is always good for a person’s mental well-being.”

“I can’t permit a visit to the infirmary. Not at this hour.”

“You can’t prevent one.”

“I’m asking you to leave the premises.”

“And I’m denying your request.”

“There’s only one patient here at the moment. The others are all home now, on bed rest.”

“Which one is here?”

“Underwood.”

“Which one is Underwood?”

“The senior deputy. You left him in a sorry state.”

“He was sick already.”

“You need to leave now.”

Reacher smiled. “That should be your town motto. It’s all I ever hear. Like New Hampshire, live free or die. It should be Despair, you need to leave now.”

Thurman said, “I’m not joking.”

“You are,” Reacher said. “You’re a fat old man, telling me to leave. That’s pretty funny.”

“I’m not alone here.”

Reacher turned and checked the foreman. He was standing ten feet away, empty hands by his sides, tension in his shoulders. Reacher turned again and glanced at the giant. He was twenty feet away, holding the wrench in his right fist, resting its weight in his left palm.

Reacher said, “You’ve got an office boy and a broken-down old jock with a big spanner. I’m not impressed.”

“Maybe they have guns.”

“They don’t. They’d have them out already. No one waits to pull a gun.”

“They could still do you considerable harm.”

“I doubt it. The first eight you sent didn’t do much.”

“Are you really willing to try?”

“Are you? If it goes the wrong way, then you’re definitely alone with me. And with your conscience. I’m here to visit the sick, and you want to have me beaten up? What kind of a Christian are you?”

“God guides my hand.”

“In the direction you want to go anyway. I’d be more impressed if you picked up a message telling you to sell up and give all your money to the poor and go to Denver to care for the homeless.”

Thurman said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m going to the infirmary now. You are, too. Your choice whether you walk there or I carry you there in a bucket.”

Thurman’s shoulders slumped in an all-purpose sigh and shrug and he raised a palm to his two guys, one after the other, like he was telling a couple of dogs to stay. Then he set off walking, toward the line of cabins. Reacher walked at his side. They passed the security office, and Thurman’s own office, and the three other offices Reacher had seen before on his tour, the one marked Operations, the one marked Purchasing, the last marked Invoicing. They passed the first white-painted unit and stopped outside the second. Thurman heaved himself up the short flight of steps and opened the door. He went inside and Reacher followed.

It was a real sick bay. White walls, white linoleum floor, the smell of antiseptic, soft nightlights burning. There were sinks with lever taps, and medicine cabinets, and blood pressure cuffs, and sharp disposal cans on the walls. There was a rolling cart with a kidney-shaped steel dish on it. A stethoscope was curled in the dish.

There were four hospital cots. Three were empty, one was occupied, by the big deputy. He looked pretty bad. Pale, inert, listless. He looked smaller than before. His hair looked thinner. His eyes were open, dull and unfocused. His breathing was shallow and irregular. There was a medical chart clipped to the rail at the foot of his bed. Reacher used his thumb and tilted it horizontal and scanned it. Neat handwriting. Professional notations. The guy had a whole lot of things wrong with him. He had fever, fatigue, weakness, breathlessness, headaches, rashes, blisters, sores, chronic nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and signs of complex internal problems. Reacher dropped the chart back into position and asked, “You have a doctor working here?”

Thurman said, “A trained paramedic.”

“Is that enough?”

“Usually.”

“For this guy?”

“We’re doing the best we can.”

Reacher stepped alongside the bed and looked down. The guy’s skin was yellow. Jaundice, or the nightlight reflected off the walls. Reacher asked him, “Can you talk?”

Thurman said, “He’s not very coherent. But we’re hoping he’ll get better.”

The big deputy rolled his head from one side to the other. Tried to speak, but got hung up with a dry tongue in a dry mouth. He smacked his lips and breathed hard and started again. He looked straight up at Reacher and his eyes focused and glittered and he said, “The …” And then he paused for breath and blinked and started over, apparently with a new thought. A new subject. He said, haltingly, “You did this to me.”

“Not entirely,” Reacher said.

The guy rolled his head again, away and back, and gasped once, and said, “No, the …” And then he stopped again, fighting for breath, his voice reduced to a meaningless rasp. Thurman grabbed Reacher’s elbow and pulled him back and said, “We need to leave now. We’re tiring him.”

Reacher said, “He needs to be in a proper hospital.”

“That’s the paramedic’s decision. I trust my people. I hire the best talent I can find.”

“Did this guy work with TCE?”

Thurman paused a beat. “What do you know about TCE?”

“A little. It’s a poison.”

“No, it’s a degreaser. It’s a standard industrial product.”

“Whatever. Did this guy work with it?”

“No. And those that do are well protected.”

“So what’s wrong with him?”

“You should know. Like he said, you did this to him.”

“You don’t get symptoms like these from a fistfight.”

“I heard it was more than a fistfight. Do you ever stop to reflect on the damage you cause? Maybe you ruptured something inside of him. His spleen, perhaps.”

Reacher closed his eyes. Saw the barroom again, the dim light, the tense silent people, the air thick with raised dust and the smell of fear and conflict. He stepped in and jabbed hard and caught the guy low down in the side, below the ribs, above the waist, two hundred and fifty pounds of weight punched through the blunt end of a chair leg into nothing but soft tissue. He opened his eyes again and said, “All the more reason to get him checked out properly.”

Thurman nodded. “I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow. If that’s what it takes, so that you can move on with a clear conscience.”

“My conscience is already clear,” Reacher said. “If people leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, what comes at them is their problem.”

“Even if you overreact?”

“Compared to what? There were six of them. What were they going to do to me? Pat me on the cheek and send me on my way?”

“I don’t know what their intentions were.”

“You do,” Reacher said. “Their intentions were your intentions. They were acting on your instructions.”

“And I was acting on the instructions of a higher authority.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“You should join us. Come the Rapture, you don’t want to be left behind.”

“The Rapture?”

“People like me ascend to heaven. People like you stay here without us.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said. “Bring it on.”

Thurman didn’t answer that. Reacher took a last look at the guy in the bed and then stepped away and walked out the door, down the steps, back to the blazing arena. The foreman and the guy with the wrench stood where they had been before. They hadn’t moved at all. Reacher heard Thurman close the infirmary door and clatter down the steps behind him. He moved on and felt Thurman follow him toward the gate. The guy with the wrench was looking beyond Reacher’s shoulder, at Thurman, waiting for a sign, maybe hoping for a sign, slapping the free end of the wrench against his palm.

Reacher changed direction.

Headed straight for the guy.

He stopped a yard away and stood directly face-to-face and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re in my way.”

The guy glanced in Thurman’s direction and waited. Reacher said, “Have a little self-respect. You don’t owe that old fool anything.”

The guy said, “I don’t?”

“Not a thing,” Reacher said. “None of you does. He owes you. You all should wise up and take over. Organize. Have a revolution. You could lead it.”

The guy said, “I don’t think so.”

Thurman called out, “Are you leaving now, Mr. Reacher?”

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“Are you ever coming back?”

“No,” Reacher lied. “I’m done here.”

“Do I have your word?”

“You heard me.”

The giant glanced beyond Reacher’s shoulder again, hope in his eyes. But Thurman must have shaken his head or given some other kind of a negative instruction, because the guy just paused a beat and then stepped aside, one long sideways pace. Reacher walked on, back to the sick deputy’s truck. It was where he had left it, with all its windows intact.

47

From the plant to the Hope town line was fifteen miles by road, but Reacher made it into a twenty-mile excursion by looping around to the north, through the scrub. He figured that the townsfolk would have reorganized fairly fast, and there was no obvious way of winning the consequent twin confrontations at both ends of Main Street. So he avoided them altogether. He hammered the deputy’s old truck across the rough ground and navigated by the glow of the fire to his right. It looked to be going strong. In his experience brick buildings always burned well. The contents went first, and then the floors and the ceilings, and then the roof, with the outer walls holding up and forming a tall chimney to enhance the air flow. And when the walls finally went, the collapse blasted sparks and embers all over the place, to start new fires. Sometimes a whole city block could be taken out by one cigarette and one book of matches.

He skirted the town on a radius he judged to be about four miles and then he shadowed the road back east a hundred yards out in the dirt. When the clock in his head hit midnight he figured he was less than a mile short of the line. He veered right and bounced up onto the tarred pebbles and finished the trip like a normal driver. He thumped over the line and Hope’s thick blacktop made the ride go suddenly quiet.

Vaughan was waiting a hundred yards ahead.

She was parked on the left shoulder with her lights off. He slowed and held his arm out his window in a reassuring wave. She put her arm out her own window, hand extended, fingers spread, an answering gesture. Or a traffic signal. He coasted and feathered the brakes and the steering and came to a stop with his fingertips touching hers. To him the contact felt one-third like a mission-accomplished high-five, one-third like an expression of relief to be out of the lions’ den again, and one-third just plain good. He didn’t know what it felt like to her. She gave no indication. But she left her hand there a second longer than she needed to.

“Whose truck?” she asked.

“The senior deputy’s,” Reacher said. “His name is Underwood. He’s very sick.”

“With what?”

“He said I did it to him.”

“Did you?”

“I gave a sick man a couple of contusions, which I don’t feel great about. But I didn’t give him diarrhea or blisters or sores and I didn’t make his hair fall out.”

“So is it TCE?”

“Thurman said not.”

“You believe him?”

“Not necessarily.”

Vaughan held up a plastic bottle of water.

Reacher said, “I’m not thirsty.”

“Good,” Vaughan said. “This is a sample. Tap water, from my kitchen. I called a friend of a friend of David’s. He knows a guy who works at the state lab in Colorado Springs. He told me to take this in for testing. And to find out how much TCE Thurman actually uses.”

“The tank holds five thousand gallons.”

“But how often does it get used up and refilled?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can we find out?”

“There’s a purchasing office, probably full of paperwork.”

“Can we get in there?”

“Maybe.”

Vaughan said, “Go dump that truck back over the line. I’ll drive you to town. We’ll take a doughnut break.”

So Reacher steered the truck backward into the sand and left it there, keys in. Way behind him he could see a faint red glow on the horizon. Despair was still on fire. He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked forward and crossed the line again and climbed in next to Vaughan.

“You smell of cigarettes,” she said.

“I found one,” he said. “I smoked a half-inch, for old times’ sake.”

“They give you cancer, too.”

“I heard that. You believe it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do, absolutely.”

She took off east, at a moderate speed, one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap. He asked her, “How’s your day going?”

“A gum wrapper blew across the street in front of me. Right there in my headlights. Violation of the anti-littering ordinance. That’s about as exciting as it gets in Hope.”

“Did you call Denver? About Maria?”

She nodded.

“The old man picked her up,” she said. “By the hardware store. He confirmed her name. He knew a lot about her. They talked for half an hour.”

“Half an hour? How? It’s less than a twenty-minute drive.”

“He didn’t let her out in Despair. She wanted to go to the MP base.”

They got to the diner at twenty minutes past midnight. The college-girl waitress was on duty. She smiled when she saw them walk in together, as if some kind of a long-delayed but pleasant inevitability had finally taken place. She looked to be about twenty years old, but she was grinning away like a smug old matchmaker from an ancient village. Reacher felt like there was a secret he wasn’t privy to. He wasn’t sure that Vaughan understood it either.

They sat opposite each other in the back booth. They didn’t order doughnuts. Reacher ordered coffee and Vaughan ordered juice, a blend of three exotic fruits, none of which Reacher had ever encountered before.

“You’re very healthy,” he said.

“I try.”

“Is your husband in the hospital? With cancer, from smoking?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

Their drinks arrived and they sipped them in silence for a moment and then Reacher asked, “Did the old guy know why Maria wanted to go to the MPs?”

“She didn’t tell him. But it’s a weird destination, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Reacher said. “It’s an active-service forward operating base. Visitors wouldn’t be permitted. Not even if she knew one of the grunts. Not even if one of the grunts was her brother or her sister.”

“Combat MPs use women grunts?”

“Plenty.”

“So maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she was reporting back on duty, after furlough.”

“Then why would she have booked two more nights in the motel and left all her stuff there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she was just checking something.”

“She’s too small for a combat MP.”

“They have a minimum size?”

“The army always has had, overall. These days, I’m not sure what it is. But even if she squeezed in, they’d put her somewhere else, covertly.”

“You sure?”

“No question. Plus she was too quiet and timid. She wasn’t military.”

“So what did she want from the MPs? And why isn’t she back yet?”

“Did the old guy actually see her get in?”

“Sure,” Vaughan said. “He waited, like an old-fashioned gentleman.”

“Therefore a better question would be, if they let her in, what did they want from her?”

Vaughan said, “Something to do with espionage.”

Reacher shook his head. “I was wrong about that. They’re not worried about espionage. They’d have the plant buttoned up, east and west, probably with a presence inside, or at least on the gates.”

“So why are they there?”

“They’re guarding the truck route. Which means they’re worried about theft, of something that would need a truck to haul away. Something heavy, too heavy for a regular car.”

“Something too heavy for a small plane, then.”

Reacher nodded. “But that plane is involved somehow. This morning I was barging around and therefore they had to shut down the secret operation for a spell, and tonight the plane didn’t fly. I didn’t hear it, and I found it later, right there in its hangar.”

“You think it only flies when they’ve been working on the military stuff?”

“I know for sure it didn’t when they hadn’t been, so maybe the obverse is true, too.”

“Carrying something? In or out?”

“Maybe both. Like trading.”

“Secrets?”

“Maybe.”

“People? Like Lucy Anderson’s husband?”

Reacher drained his mug. Shook his head. “I can’t make that work. There’s a logic problem with it. Almost mathematical.”

“Try me,” Vaughan said. “I did four years of college.”

“How long have you got?”

“I’d love to catch whoever dropped the gum wrapper. But I could put that on the back burner, if you like.”

Reacher smiled. “There are three things going on over there. The military contract, plus something else, plus something else again.”

“OK,” Vaughan said. She moved the saltshaker, the pepper shaker, and the sugar shaker to the center of the table. “Three things.”

Reacher moved the saltshaker to one side, immediately. “The military contract is what it is. Nothing controversial. Nothing to worry about, except the possibility that someone might steal something heavy. And that’s the MPs’ problem. They’re straddling the road, they’ve got six Humvees, they’ve got thirty miles of empty space for a running battle, they can stop any truck they need to. No special vigilance required from the townspeople. No reason for the townspeople to get excited at all.”

“But?”

Reacher cupped his hands and put his left around the pepper shaker and his right around the sugar shaker. “But the townspeople are excited about something. All of them. They are vigilant. Today they all turned out in defense of something.”

“What something?”

“I have no clue.” He held up the sugar shaker, in his right hand. “But it’s the bigger of the two unknowns. Because everyone is involved in it. Let’s call it the right hand, as in the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.”

“What’s the left hand?”

Reacher held up the pepper shaker, in his left hand. “It’s smaller. It involves a subset of the population. A small, special subgroup. Everyone knows about the sugar, most don’t know about the pepper, a few know about both the sugar and the pepper.”

“And we don’t know about either.”

“But we will.”

“How does this relate to Lucy Anderson’s husband not being taken out by plane?”

Reacher held up the sugar shaker. A large glass item, in his right hand. “Thurman flies the plane. Thurman is the town boss. Thurman directs the larger unknown. It couldn’t happen any other way. And if the Anderson guy had been a part of it, everyone would have been aware. Including the town cops and Judge Gardner. Thurman would have made sure of that. Therefore Lucy Anderson would not have been arrested, and she would not have been thrown out as a vagrant.”

“So Thurman’s doing something, and everyone is helping, but a few are also working on something else behind his back?”

Reacher nodded. “And that something the few are working on behind his back involves these young guys.”

“And the young guys either get through or they don’t, depending on who they bump into first, the many right-hand people or the few left-hand people.”

“Exactly. And there’s a new one now. Name of Rogers, just arrested, but I didn’t see him.”

“Rogers? I’ve heard that name before.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wherever, he was one of the unlucky ones.”

“The odds will always be against them.”

“Exactly.”

“Which was Ramirez’s problem.”

“No, Ramirez didn’t bump into anyone,” Reacher said. “I checked the records. He was neither arrested nor helped.”

“Why? What made him different?”

“Great question,” Reacher said.

“What’s the answer?”

“I don’t know.”

48

The clock in Reacher’s head hit one in the morning and the clock on the diner’s wall followed it a minute later. Vaughan looked at her watch and said, “I better get back in the saddle.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“Go get some sleep.”

“OK.”

“Will you come with me to Colorado Springs? To the lab, with the water sample?”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, today, whatever it is now.”

“I don’t know anything about water.”

“That’s why we’re going to the lab.”

“What time?”

“Leave at ten?”

“That’s early for you.”

“I don’t sleep anyway. And this is the end of my pattern. I’m off duty for four nights now. Ten on, four off. And we should leave early because it’s a long ride, there and back.”

“Still trying to keep me out of trouble? Even on your downtime?”

“I’ve given up on keeping you out of trouble.”

“Then why?”

Vaughan said, “Because I’d like your company. That’s all.”

She put four bucks on the table for her juice. She put the salt and the pepper and the sugar back where they belonged. Then she slid out of the booth and walked away and pushed through the door and headed for her car.

Reacher showered and was in bed by two o’clock in the morning. He slept dreamlessly and woke up at eight. He showered again and walked the length of the town to the hardware store. He spent five minutes looking at ladders on the sidewalk, and then he went inside and found the racks of pants and shirts and chose a new one of each. This time he went for darker colors and a different brand. Prewashed, and therefore softer. Less durable in the long term, but he wasn’t interested in the long term.

He changed in his motel room and left his old stuff folded on the floor next to the trash can. Maybe the maid had a needy male relative his size. Maybe she would know how to launder things so they came out at least marginally flexible. He stepped out of his room and saw that Maria’s bathroom light was on. He walked to the office. The clerk was on her stool. Behind her shoulder, the hook for Maria’s room had no key on it. The clerk saw him looking and said, “She came back this morning.”

He asked, “What time?”

“Very early. About six.”

“Did you see how she got here?”

The woman looked both ways and lowered her voice and said, “In an armored car. With a soldier.”

“An armored car?”

“Like you see on the news.”

Reacher said, “A Humvee.”

The woman nodded. “Like a jeep. But with a roof. The soldier didn’t stay. Which I’m glad about. I’m no prude, but I couldn’t permit a thing like that. Not here.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “She already has a boyfriend.”

Or had, he thought.

The woman said, “She’s too young to be fooling around with soldiers.”

“Is there an age limit?”

“There ought to be.”

Reacher paid his bill and walked back down the row, doing the math. According to the old man’s telephone testimony, he had let Maria out at the MP base around eight-thirty the previous morning. She had arrived back in a Humvee at six. The Humvee wouldn’t have detoured around the Interstates. It would have come straight through Despair, which was a thirty-minute drive, max. Therefore she had been held for twenty-one hours. Therefore her problem was outside of the FOB’s local jurisdiction. She had been locked in a room and her story had been passed up the chain of command. Phone tag, voice mails, secure telexes. Maybe a conference call. Eventually, a decision taken elsewhere, release, the offer of a ride home.

Sympathy, but no help.

No help about what?

He stopped outside her door and listened. The shower wasn’t running. He waited one minute in case she was toweling off and a second minute in case she was dressing. Then he knocked. A third minute later she opened the door. Her hair was slick with water. The weight gave it an extra inch of length. She was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt. No shoes. Her feet were tiny, like a child’s. Her toes were straight. She had been raised by conscientious parents, who had cared about appropriate footwear.

“You OK?” he asked her, which was a dumb question. She didn’t look OK. She looked small and tired and lost and bewildered.

She didn’t answer.

He said, “You went to the MP base, asking about Raphael.”

She nodded.

He said, “You thought they could help you, but they didn’t.”

She nodded.

He said, “They told you it was Despair PD business.”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “Maybe I could help you. Or maybe the Hope PD could. You want to tell me what it’s all about?”

She said nothing.

He said, “I can’t help you unless I understand the problem.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “I can’t tell anyone.”

The way she said the word can’t was definitive. Not surly or angry or moody or plaintive, but calm, considered, mature, and ultimately just plain informative. As if she had looked at a whole bunch of options, and boiled them down to the only one that was viable. As if a world of trouble was surely inevitable if she opened her mouth.

She couldn’t tell anyone.

Simple as that.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Hang in there.”

He walked away, to the diner, and had breakfast.

He guessed Vaughan planned to pick him up at the motel, so at five to ten he was sitting in the plastic lawn chair outside his door. She showed up three minutes past the hour, in a plain black Crown Vic. Dull paint, worn by time and trouble. An unmarked squad car, like a detective would drive. She stopped close to him and buzzed the window down. He said, “Did you get promoted?”

“It’s my watch commander’s ride. He took pity on me and loaned it out. Since you got my truck smashed up.”

“Did you find the litterbug?”

“No. And it’s a serial crime now. I saw the silver foil later. Technically that’s two separate offenses.”

“Maria is back. The MPs brought her home early this morning.”

“Is she saying anything?”

“Not a word.” He got out of the chair and walked around the hood and slid in beside her. The car was very plain. Lots of black plastic, lots of mouse-fur upholstery of an indeterminate color. It felt like a beat-up rental. The front was full of police gear. Radios, a laptop on a bracket, a video camera on the dash, a hard-disc recorder, a red bubble light on a curly cord. But there was no security screen between the front and the rear, and therefore the seat was going to rack all the way back. It was going to be comfortable. Plenty of legroom. The water sample was on the rear seat. Vaughan was looking good. She was in old blue jeans and a white Oxford shirt, the neck open two buttons and the sleeves rolled to her elbows.

She said, “You’ve changed.”

“In what way?”

“Your clothes, you idiot.”

“New this morning,” he said. “From the hardware store.”

“Nicer than the last lot.”

“Don’t get attached to them. They’ll be gone soon.”

“What’s the longest you ever wore a set of clothes?”

“Eight months,” Reacher said. “Desert BDUs, during Gulf War One. Never took them off. We had all kinds of supply snafus. No spares, no pajamas.”

“You were in the Gulf, the first time?”

“Beginning to end.”

“How was it?”

“Hot.”

Vaughan pulled out of the motel lot and headed north to First Street. Turned left, east, toward Kansas. Reacher said, “We’re taking the long way around?”

“I think it would be better.”

Reacher said, “Me too.”

It was an obvious cop car and the roads were empty and Vaughan averaged ninety most of the way, charging head-on toward the mountains. Reacher knew Colorado Springs a little. Fort Carson was there, which was a major army presence, but it was really more of an Air Force town. Aside from that, it was a pleasant place. Scenery was pretty, the air was clean, it was often sunny, the view of Pikes Peak was usually spectacular. The downtown area was neat and compact. The state lab was in a stone government building. It was a satellite operation, an offshoot of the main facility in Denver, the capital. Water was a big deal all over Colorado. There wasn’t much of it. Vaughan handed over her bottle and filled out a form and a guy wrapped the form around the bottle and secured it with a rubber band. Then he carried it away, ceremoniously, like that particular quart had the power to save the world, or destroy it. He came back and told Vaughan that she would be notified of the results by phone, and to please let the lab know some figures for Despair’s total TCE consumption. He explained that the state used a rough rule-of-thumb formula, whereby a certain percentage of evaporation could be assumed, and a further percentage of absorption by the ground could be relied upon, so that what really mattered was how much was running off and how deep an aquifer was. The state knew the depth of Halfway County’s aquifer to the inch, so the only variable would be the exact amount of TCE heading down toward it.

“What are the symptoms?” Vaughan asked. “If it’s there already?”

The lab guy glanced at Reacher.

“Prostate cancer,” he said. “That’s the early warning. Men go first.”

They got back in the car. Vaughan was distracted. A little vague. Reacher didn’t know what was on her mind. She was a cop and a conscientious member of her community, but clearly she was worrying about more than a distant chemical threat to her water table. He wasn’t sure why she had asked him to travel with her. They hadn’t spoken much. He wasn’t sure that his company was doing her any good at all.

She pulled out off the curb and drove a hundred yards on a tree-lined street and stopped at a light at a T-junction. Left was west and right was east. The light turned green and she didn’t move. She just sat there, gripping the wheel, looking left, looking right, as if she couldn’t choose. A guy honked behind her. She glanced in the mirror and then she glanced at Reacher.

She said, “Will you come with me to visit my husband?”

49

Vaughan turned left into the hills and then left again and headed south, following a sign for Pueblo. Years before, Reacher had traveled the same road. Fort Carson lay between Colorado Springs and Pueblo, south of one and north of the other, bulked a little ways west of the main drag.

“You OK with this?” Vaughan asked him.

“I’m fine with it.”

“But?”

“It’s an odd request,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“And it’s an odd word,” he said. “You could have said, come and meet my husband. Or see him. But you said visit. And who gets visitors? You already told me he isn’t in jail. Or in the hospital. So where is he? In a rooming house, working away from home? Permanently on duty somewhere? Locked in his sister’s attic?”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t in the hospital,” Vaughan said. “I said he didn’t have cancer from smoking.”

She forked right, away from an I-25 on-ramp, and used a state four-lane that seemed way too wide for the traffic it was getting. She drove a mile between green hills and turned left through a grove of pines on a worn gray road that had no center line. There was no wire and no painted sign, but Reacher was sure the land on both sides was owned by the army. He knew there were thousands of spare acres beyond the northern tip of Fort Carson, requisitioned decades ago at the height of Hot or Cold War fever, and never really used for much. And what he was seeing out the window looked exactly like Department of Defense property. It looked the same everywhere. Nature, made uniform. A little sullen, a little halfhearted, somewhat beaten down, neither raw nor developed.

Vaughan slowed after another mile and made a right into a half-hidden driveway. She passed between two squat brick pillars. The bricks were smooth tan items and the mortar was yellow. Standard army issue, back in the middle fifties. The pillars had hinges but no gates. Twenty yards farther on was a modern billboard on thin metal legs. The billboard had some kind of a corporate logo and the words Olympic TBI Center on it. Twenty yards later another billboard said: Authorized Personnel Only. Twenty yards after that the driveway’s shoulders had been mowed, but not recently. The mown section ran on straight for a hundred yards and led to a carriage circle in front of a group of low brick buildings. Army buildings, long ago deemed surplus to requirements and sold off. Reacher recognized the architecture. Brick and tile, green metal window casements, green tubular handrails, radiused corners built back when chamfered edges had looked like the future. In the center of the carriage circle was a round patch of weedy dirt, where once a CO would have been proud of a rose garden. The change of ownership was confirmed by a repeat of the first billboard, next to the main entrance hall: the corporate logo, plus Olympic TBI Center again.

A section of lawn on the right had been hacked out and replaced by gravel. There were five cars on it, all of them with local plates, none of them new or clean. Vaughan parked the Crown Vic on the end of the line and shut it down, first the shifter, then the brake, then the key, a slow and deliberate sequence. She sat back in her seat and dropped her hands to her lap.

“Ready?” she asked.

“For what?” he said.

She didn’t answer. Just opened her door and swiveled on the sticky mouse-fur seat and climbed out. Reacher did the same on his side. They walked together to the entrance. Three steps up, through the doors, onto the kind of mottled green tile floor Reacher had walked a thousand times before. The place was recognizably mid-fifties U.S. Army. It felt abandoned and run-down and there were new mandated smoke detectors sloppily wired through exposed plastic conduits, but otherwise it couldn’t have changed much. There was an oak hutch on the right, where once a busy sergeant would have sat. Now it was occupied by a mess of what looked like medical case notes and a civilian in a gray sweatshirt. He was a thin sullen man of about forty. He had unwashed black hair worn a little too long. He said, “Hello, Mrs. Vaughan.” Nothing more. No warmth in his voice. No enthusiasm.

Vaughan nodded but didn’t look at the guy or reply. She just walked to the back of the hall and turned into a large room that in the old days might have served any one of a number of different purposes. It might have been a waiting room, or a reception lounge, or an officers’ club. Now it was different. It was dirty and badly maintained. Stained walls, dull floor, dust all over it. Cobwebs on the ceiling. It smelled faintly of antiseptic and urine. It had big red waist-high panic buttons wired through more plastic conduit. It was completely empty, except for two men strapped into wheelchairs. Both men were young, both were entirely slack and still, both had open mouths, both had empty gazes focused a thousand miles in front of them.

Both had shaved heads, and misshapen skulls, and wicked scars.

Reacher stood still.

Looked at the panic buttons.

Thought back to the medical files.

He was in a clinic.

He looked at the guys in the wheelchairs.

He was in a residential home.

He looked at the dust and the dirt.

He was in a dumping ground.

He thought back to the initials on the billboard.

TBI.

Traumatic Brain Injury.

Vaughan had moved on, into a corridor. He caught up with her, halfway along its length.

“Your husband had an accident?” he said.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“Then what?”

“Figure it out.”

Reacher stopped again.

Both men were young.

An old army building, mothballed and then reused.

“War wounds,” he said. “Your husband is military. He went to Iraq.”

Vaughan nodded as she walked.

“National Guard,” she said. “His second tour. They extended his deployment. Didn’t armor his Humvee. He was blown up by an IED in Ramadi.”

She turned into another corridor. It was dirty. Dust balls had collected against the baseboards. Some were peppered with mouse droppings. The lightbulbs were dim, to save money on electricity. Some were out and had not been changed, to save money on labor.

Reacher asked, “Is this a VA facility?”

Vaughan shook her head.

“Private contractor,” she said. “Political connections. A sweetheart deal. Free real estate and big appropriations.”

She stopped at a dull green door. No doubt fifty years earlier it had been painted by a private soldier, in a color and in a manner specified by the Pentagon, with materials drawn from a quartermaster’s stores. Then the private soldier’s workmanship had been inspected by an NCO, and the NCO’s approval had been validated by an officer’s. Since then the door had received no further attention. It had dulled and faded and gotten battered and scratched. Now it had a wax pencil scrawl on it: D. R. Vaughan, and a string of digits that might have been his service number, or his case number.

“Ready?” Vaughan asked.

“When you are,” Reacher said.

“I’m never ready,” she said.

She turned the handle and opened the door.

50

David Robert Vaughan’s room was a twelve-foot cube, painted dark green below a narrow cream waist-high band, and light green above. It was warm. It had a small sooty window. It had a green metal cabinet and a green metal footlocker. The footlocker was open and held a single pair of clean pajamas. The cabinet was stacked with file folders and oversized brown envelopes. The envelopes were old and torn and frayed and held X-ray films.

The room had a bed. It was a narrow hospital cot with locked wheels and a hand-wound tilting mechanism that raised the head at an angle. It was set to a forty-five-degree slope. In it, under a tented sheet, leaning back in repose like he was relaxing, was a guy Reacher took to be David Robert Vaughan himself. He was a compact, narrow-shouldered man. The tented sheet made it hard to estimate his size. Maybe five-ten, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. His skin was pink. He had blond stubble on his chin and his cheeks. He had a straight nose and blue eyes. His eyes were wide open.

Part of his skull was missing.

A saucer-sized piece of bone wasn’t there. It left a wide hole above his forehead. Like he had been wearing a small cap at a jaunty angle, and someone had cut all around the edge of it with a saw.

His brain was protruding.

It swelled out like an inflated balloon, dark and purple and corrugated. It looked dry and angry. It was draped with a thin manmade membrane that stuck to the shaved skin around the hole. Like Saran Wrap.

Vaughan said, “Hello, David.”

There was no response from the guy in the bed. Four IV lines snaked down toward him and disappeared under the tented sheet. They were fed from four clear plastic bags hung high on chromium stands next to the bed. A colostomy line and a urinary catheter led away to bottles mounted on a low cart parked under the bed. A breathing tube was taped to his cheek. It curved neatly into his mouth. It was connected to a small respirator that hissed and blew with a slow, regular rhythm. There was a clock on the wall above the respirator. Original army issue, from way back. White Bakelite rim, white face, black hands, a firm, quiet, mechanical tick once a second.

Vaughan said, “David, I brought a friend to see you.”

No response. And there never would be, Reacher guessed. The guy in the bed was completely inert. Not asleep, not awake. Not anything.

Vaughan bent and kissed her husband on the forehead.

Then she stepped over to the cabinet and tugged an X-ray envelope out of the pile. It was marked Vaughan, D. R. in faded ink. It was creased and furred. It had been handled many times. She pulled the film out of the envelope and held it up against the light from the window. It was a composite image that showed her husband’s head from four different directions. Front, right side, back, left side. White skull, blurred gray brain matter, a matrix of bright pinpoints scattered all through it.

“Iraq’s signature injury,” Vaughan said. “Blast damage to the human brain. Severe physical trauma. Compression, decompression, twisting, shearing, tearing, impact with the wall of the skull, penetration by shrapnel. David got it all. His skull was shattered, and they cut the worst of it away. That was supposed to be a good thing. It relieves the pressure. They give them a plastic plate later, when the swelling goes down. But David’s swelling never went down.”

She put the film back in the envelope, and shuffled the envelope back into the pile. She pulled another one out. It was a chest film. White ribs, gray organs, a blinding shape that was clearly someone else’s wristwatch, and small bright pinpoints that looked like drops of liquid.

“That’s why I don’t wear my wedding band,” Vaughan said. “He wanted to take it with him, on a chain around his neck. The heat melted it and the blast drove it into his lungs.”

She put the film back in the stack.

“He wore it for good luck,” she said.

She butted the paperwork into a neat pile and moved to the foot of the bed. Reacher asked, “What was he?”

“Infantry, assigned to the First Armored Division.”

“And this was IED versus Humvee?”

She nodded. “An improvised explosive device against a tin can. He might as well have been on foot in his bathrobe. I don’t know why they call them improvised. They seem pretty damn professional to me.”

“When was this?”

“Almost two years ago.”

The respirator hissed on.

Reacher asked, “What was his day job?”

“He was a mechanic. For farm equipment, mostly.”

The clock ticked, relentlessly.

Reacher asked, “What’s the prognosis?”

Vaughan said, “At first it was reasonable, in theory. They thought he would be confused and uncoordinated, you know, and perhaps a little unstable and aggressive, and certainly lacking all his basic life and motor skills.”

“So you moved house,” Reacher said. “You were thinking about a wheelchair. You bought a one-story and took the door off the living room. You put three chairs in the kitchen, not four. To leave a space.”

She nodded. “I wanted to be ready. But he never woke up. The swelling never went away.”

“Why not?”

“Make a fist.”

“A what?”

“Make a fist and hold it up.”

Reacher made a fist and held it up.

Vaughan said, “OK, your forearm is your spinal cord and your fist is a bump on the end called your brain stem. Some places in the animal kingdom, that’s as good as it gets. But humans grew brains. Imagine I scooped out a pumpkin and fitted it over your fist. That’s your brain. Imagine the pumpkin goo was kind of bonded with your skin. This is how it was explained to me. I could hit the pumpkin or you could shake it a little and you’d be OK. But imagine suddenly twisting your wrist, very violently. What’s going to happen?”

“The bond is going to shear,” Reacher said. “The pumpkin goo is going to unstick from my skin.”

Vaughan nodded again. “That’s what happened to David’s head. A shearing injury. The very worst kind. His brain stem is OK but the rest of his brain doesn’t even know it’s there. It doesn’t know there’s a problem.”

“Will the bond re-form?”

“Never. That just doesn’t happen. Brains have spare capacity, but neuron cells can’t regenerate. This is all he will ever be. He’s like a brain-damaged lizard. He’s got the IQ of a goldfish. He can’t move and he can’t see and he can’t hear and he can’t think.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Battlefield medicine is very good now. He was stable and in Germany within thirteen hours. In Korea or Vietnam he would have died at the scene, no question.”

She moved to the head of the bed and laid her hand on her husband’s cheek, very gently, very tenderly. Said, “We think his spinal cord is severed too, as far as we can tell. But that doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

The respirator hissed and the clock ticked and the IV lines made tiny liquid sounds and Vaughan stood quietly and then she said, “You don’t shave very often, do you?”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said.

“But you know how?”

“I learned at my daddy’s knee.”

“Will you shave David?”

“Don’t the orderlies do that?”

“They should, but they don’t. And I like him to look decent. It seems like the least I can do.” She took a supermarket carrier bag out of the green metal cabinet. It held men’s toiletries. Shaving gel, a half-used pack of disposable razors, soap, a washcloth. Reacher found a bathroom across the hall and stepped back and forth with the wet cloth, soaping the guy’s face, rinsing it, wetting it again. He smoothed blue gel over the guy’s chin and cheeks and lathered it with his fingertips and then set about using the razor. It was difficult. A completely instinctive sequence of actions when applied to himself became awkward on a third party. Especially on a third party who had a breathing tube in his mouth and a large part of his skull missing.

While he worked with the razor, Vaughan cleaned the room. She had a second supermarket bag in the cabinet that held cloths and sprays and a dustpan and brush. She stretched high and bent low and went through the whole twelve-foot cube very thoroughly. Her husband stared on at a point miles beyond the ceiling and the respirator hissed and blew. Reacher finished up and Vaughan stopped a minute later and stood back and looked.

“Good work,” she said.

“You too. Although you shouldn’t have to do that yourself.”

“I know.”

They repacked the supermarket bags and put them away in the cabinet. Reacher asked, “How often do you come?”

“Not very often,” Vaughan said. “It’s a Zen thing, really. If I visit and he doesn’t know I’ve visited, have I really visited at all? It’s self-indulgent to come here just to make myself feel like a good wife. So I prefer to visit him in my memory. He’s much more real there.”

“How long were you married?”

“We’re still married.”

“I’m sorry. How long?”

“Twelve years. Eight together, then he spent two in Iraq, and the last two have been like this.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-four. He could live another sixty years. Me too.”

“Were you happy?”

“Yes and no, like everyone.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Now?”

“Long term.”

“I don’t know. People say I should move on. And maybe I should. Maybe I should accept destiny, like Zeno. Like a true Stoic. I feel like that, sometimes. But then I panic and get defensive. I feel, first they do this to him, and now I should divorce him? But he wouldn’t know anyway. So it’s back to the Zen thing. What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should take a walk,” Reacher said. “Right now. Alone. Walking by yourself is always good. Get some fresh air. See some trees. I’ll bring the car and pick you up before you hit the four-lane.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll find some way to pass the time.”

51

Vaughan said goodbye to her husband and she and Reacher walked back along the dirty corridors and through the dismal lounge to the entrance hall. The guy in the gray sweatshirt said, “Goodbye, Mrs. Vaughan.” They walked out to the carriage circle and headed for the car. Reacher leaned against its flank and Vaughan kept on going. He waited until she was small in the distance and then he pushed off the car and headed back to the entrance. Up the steps, in the door. He crossed to the hutch and asked, “Who’s in charge here?”

The guy in the gray sweatshirt said, “I am, I guess. I’m the shift supervisor.”

Reacher asked, “How many patients here?”

“Seventeen,” the guy said.

“Who are they?”

“Just patients, man. Whatever they send us.”

“You run this place according to a manual?”

“Sure. It’s a bureaucracy, like everywhere.”

“You got a copy of the manual available?”

“Somewhere.”

“You want to show me the part where it says it’s OK to keep the rooms dirty and have mouse shit in the corridors?”

The guy blinked and swallowed and said, “There’s no point cleaning, man. They wouldn’t know. How could they? This is the vegetable patch.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“It’s what it is, man.”

“Wrong answer,” Reacher said. “This is not the vegetable patch. This is a veterans’ clinic. And you’re a piece of shit.”

“Hey, lighten up, dude. What’s it to you?”

“David Robert Vaughan is my brother.”

“Really?”

“All veterans are my brothers.”

“He’s brain dead, man.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then listen up. And listen very carefully. A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward. The people here deserve your best, and I’m damn sure their relatives deserve it.”

“Who are you anyway?”

“I’m a concerned citizen,” Reacher said. “With a number of options. I could embarrass your corporate parent, I could call the newspapers or the TV, I could come in here with a hidden camera, I could get you fired. But I don’t do stuff like that. I offer personal choices instead, face-to-face. You want to know what your choice is?”

“What?”

“Do what I tell you, with a cheery smile.”

“Or?”

“Or become patient number eighteen.”

The guy went pale.

Reacher said, “Stand up.”

“What?”

“On your feet. Now.”

“What?”

Reacher said, “Stand up, now, or I’ll make it so you never stand up again.”

The guy paused a beat and got to his feet.

“At attention,” Reacher said. “Feet together, shoulders back, head up, gaze level, arms straight, hands by your sides, thumbs in line with the seams of your pants.” Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable. Calm, patient voice, huge physique. The dissonance was striking. It was a case of whatever worked. It had worked then, and it was working now. The guy in the sweatshirt was swallowing hard and blinking and standing in a rough approximation of parade-ground order.

Reacher said, “Your patients are not just whatever they send you. Your patients are people. They served their country with honor and distinction. They deserve your utmost care and respect.”

The guy said nothing.

Reacher said, “This place is a disgrace. It’s filthy and chaotic. So listen up. You’re going to get off your skinny ass and you’re going to organize your people and you’re going to get it cleaned up. Starting right now. I’m going to come back, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next month, and if I can’t see my face in the floor I’m going to turn you upside down and use you like a mop. Then I’m going to kick your ass so hard your colon is going to get tangled up in your teeth. Are we clear?”

The guy paused and shuffled and blinked. Then he said, “OK.”

“With a cheery smile,” Reacher said.

The guy forced a smile.

“Bigger,” Reacher said.

The guy forced dry lips over dry teeth.

“That’s good,” Reacher said. “And you’re going to get a haircut, and every day you’re going to shower, and every time Mrs. Vaughan comes by you’re going to stand up and welcome her warmly and you’re going to personally escort her to her husband’s room, and her husband’s room is going to be clean, and her husband is going to be shaved, and the window is going to be sparkling, and the room is going to be full of sunbeams, and the floor is going to be so shiny Mrs. Vaughan is going to be in serious danger of slipping on it and hurting herself. Are we clear?”

“OK.”

“Are we clear?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“Yes.”

“Crystal?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“You’ve got sixty seconds to get started, or I’ll break your arm.”

The guy made a phone call while still standing and then used a walkie-talkie and fifty seconds later there were three guys in the hallway. Dead on sixty seconds a fourth guy joined them. A minute later they had buckets and mops out of a maintenance closet and a minute after that the buckets were full of water and all five guys were casting about, as if facing an immense and unfamiliar task. Reacher left them to it. He walked back to the car and set off in pursuit of Vaughan.

He caught up with her a mile down the DoD road. She slid in next to him and he drove on, retracing their route, through the pines, through the hills. She said, “Thank you for coming.”

“No problem,” he said.

“You know why I wanted you to?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“You wanted someone to understand why you live like you live and do what you do.”

“And?”

“You wanted someone to understand why it’s OK to do what you’re going to do next.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is entirely up to you. And either way is good with me.”

She said, “I lied to you before.”

He said, “I know.”

“Do you?”

He nodded at the wheel. “You knew about Thurman’s military contract. And the MP base. The Pentagon told you all about them, and the Halfway PD, too. Makes sense that way. I bet it’s right there in your department phone book, in your desk drawer, M for military police.”

“It is.”

“But you didn’t want to talk about it, which means that it’s not just any old military scrap getting recycled there.”

“Isn’t it?”

Reacher shook his head. “It’s combat wrecks from Iraq. Has to be. Hence the New Jersey plates on some of the incoming trucks. From the port facilities there. Why would they bypass Pennsylvania and Indiana for regular scrap? And why would they put regular scrap in closed shipping containers? Because Thurman’s place is a specialist operation. Secret, miles from nowhere.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I understand. You didn’t want to talk about it. You didn’t even want to think about it. That’s why you tried to stop me from ever going there. Get over it, you said. Move on. There’s nothing to see.”

“There are blown-up Humvees there,” she said. “They’re like monuments to me. Like shrines. To the people who died. Or nearly died.”

Then she said, “And to the people who should have died.”

They drove on, across the low slopes of the mountains, back to I-70, back toward the long loop near the Kansas line. Reacher said, “It doesn’t explain Thurman’s taste for secrecy.”

Vaughan said, “Maybe it’s a respect thing with him. Maybe he sees them as shrines, too.”

“Did he ever serve?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did he lose a family member?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anyone sign up from Despair?”

“Not that I heard.”

“So it’s not likely to be respect. And it doesn’t explain the MPs, either. What’s to steal? A Humvee is a car, basically. Armor is plain steel sheet, when it’s fitted at all. An M60 wouldn’t survive any kind of a blast.”

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher said, “And it doesn’t explain the airplane.”

Vaughan didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “And nothing explains all these young guys.”

“So you’re going to stick around?”

He nodded at the wheel.

“For a spell,” he said. “Because I think something is about to happen. That crowd impressed me. Would they have that much passion for the beginning of something? Or the middle of something? I don’t think so. I think they were all stirred up because they’re heading for the end of something.”

52

They hit Hope at five in the afternoon. The sun was low. Reacher pulled off First Street and headed down to Third, to the motel. He stopped outside the office. Vaughan looked at him inquiringly and he said, “Something I should have done before.”

They went in together. The nosy clerk was at the counter. Behind her, three keys were missing from their hooks. Reacher’s own, for room twelve, plus Maria’s, room eight, plus one for the woman with the large underwear, room four.

Reacher said, “Tell me about the woman in room four.”

The clerk looked at him and paused a second, like she was gathering her thoughts, like she was under pressure to assemble an accurate capsule biography. Like she was in court, on the witness stand.

“She’s from California,” she said. “She’s been here five days. She paid cash for a week.”

Reacher said, “Anything else?”

“She’s a fuller-figured person.”

“Age?”

“Young. Maybe twenty-five or -six.”

“What’s her name?”

The clerk said, “Mrs. Rogers.”

Back in the car Vaughan said, “Another one. But a weird one. Her husband wasn’t arrested until yesterday, but she’s been here five whole days? What does that mean?”

Reacher said, “It means our hypothesis is correct. My guess is they were on the road together up until five days ago, he found the right people in Despair and went into hiding, she came directly here to wait it out, then he got flushed out by the mass mobilization yesterday and bumped into the wrong people and got picked up. The whole town was turned upside down. Every rock was turned over. He was noticed.”

“So where is he now?”

“He wasn’t in a cell. So maybe he got back with the right people again.”

Vaughan said, “I knew I had heard the name. His wife came in with the supermarket delivery guy. He drives in from Topeka, Kansas, every few days. He gave her a ride. He mentioned it to me. He told me her name.”

“Truck drivers check in with you?”

“Small towns. No secrets. Maria came in the same way. That’s how I knew about her.”

“How did Lucy Anderson come in?”

Vaughan paused a beat.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never heard of her before the Despair PD dumped her at the line. She wasn’t here before.”

“So she came in from the west.”

“I guess some of them do. Some from the east, some from the west.”

“Which raises a question, doesn’t it? Maria came in from the east, from Kansas, but she asked the old guy in the green car to let her out at the MP base west of Despair. How did she even know it was there?”

“Maybe Lucy Anderson told her. She would have seen it.”

“I don’t think they talked at all.”

“Then maybe Ramirez told her about it. Maybe on the phone to Topeka. He came in from the west and saw it.”

“But why would he notice it? Why would he care? Why would it be a topic of conversation with his girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

Reacher asked, “Is your watch commander a nice guy?”

“Why?”

“Because he better be. We need to borrow his car again.”

“When?”

“Later tonight.”

“Later than what?”

“Than whatever.”

“How much later?”

“Eight hours from now.”

Vaughan said, “Eight hours is good.”

Reacher said, “First we’re going shopping.”

They got to the hardware store just as it was closing. The old guy in the brown coat was clearing his sidewalk display. He had wheeled the leaf blowers inside and was starting in on the wheelbarrows. Reacher went in and bought a slim flashlight and two batteries and a two-foot wrecking bar from the old guy’s wife. Then he went back out and bought the trick stepladder that opened to eight different positions. For storage or transport it folded into a neat package about four feet long and a foot and a half wide. It was made of aluminum and plastic and was very light. It fit easily on the Crown Vic’s rear bench.

Vaughan invited him over for dinner, at eight o’clock. She was very formal about it. She said she needed the intervening two hours to prepare. Reacher spent the time in his room. He took a nap, and then he shaved and showered and cleaned his teeth. And dressed. His clothes were new, but his underwear was past its prime, so he ditched it. He put on his pants and his shirt and raked his fingers through his hair and checked the result in the mirror and deemed it acceptable. He had no real opinion about his appearance. It was what it was. He couldn’t change it. Some people liked it, and some people didn’t.

Fifty yards from Vaughan’s house, he couldn’t see the watch commander’s car. Either it was in the driveway, or Vaughan had given it back. Or gotten an emergency call. Or changed her plans for the evening. Then from thirty yards away, he saw the car right there on the curb. A hole in the darkness. Dull glass. Black paint, matte with age. Invisible in the gloom.

Perfect.

He walked through the plantings on her stepping-stone path and touched the bell. The average delay at a suburban door in the middle of the evening, about twenty seconds. Vaughan got there in nine flat. She was in a black knee-length sleeveless A-line dress, and black low-heel shoes, like ballet slippers. She was freshly showered. She looked young and full of energy.

She looked stunning.

He said, “Hello.”

She said, “Come in.”

The kitchen was full of candlelight. The table was set with two chairs and two places and an open bottle of wine and two glasses. Aromas were coming from the stove. Two appetizers were standing on the counter. Lobster meat, avocado, pink grapefruit segments, on a bed of lettuce.

She said, “The main course isn’t ready. I screwed up the timing. It’s something I haven’t made for a while.”

“Three years,” Reacher said.

“Longer,” she said.

“You look great,” he said.

“Do I?”

“The prettiest view in Colorado.”

“Better than Pikes Peak?”

“Considerably. You should be on the front of the guide book.”

“You’re flattering me.”

“Not really.”

She said, “You look good, too.”

“That’s flattery for sure.”

“No, you clean up well.”

“I try my best.”

She asked, “Should we be doing this?”

He said, “I think so.”

“Is it fair to David?”

“David never came back. He never lived here. He doesn’t know.”

“I want to see your scar again.”

“Because you’re wishing David had come back with one. Instead of what he got.”

“I guess.”

Reacher said, “We were both lucky. I know soldiers. I’ve been around them all my life. They fear grotesque wounds. That’s all. Amputations, mutilations, burns. I’m lucky because I didn’t get one, and David is lucky because he doesn’t know he did.”

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher said, “And we’re both lucky because we both met you.”

Vaughan said, “Show me the scar.”

Reacher unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off. Vaughan hesitated a second and then touched the ridged skin, very gently. Her fingertips were cool and smooth. They burned him, like electricity.

“What was it?” she asked.

“A truck bomb in Beirut.”

“Shrapnel?”

“Part of a man who was standing closer.”

“That’s awful.”

“For him. Not for me. Metal might have killed me.”

“Was it worth it?”

Reacher said, “No. Of course not. It hasn’t been worth it for a long time.”

“How long a time?”

“Since 1945.”

“Did David know that?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “He knew. I know soldiers. There’s nothing more realistic than a soldier. You can try, but you can’t bullshit them. Not even for a minute.”

“But they keep on showing up.”

“Yes, they do. They keep on showing up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Never have.”

“How long were you in the hospital?”

“A few weeks, that’s all.”

“As bad a place as David is in?”

“Much worse.”

“Why are the hospitals so bad?”

“Because deep down to the army a wounded soldier that can’t fight anymore is garbage. So we depend on civilians, and civilians don’t care either.”

Vaughan put her hand flat against his scar and then slid it around his back. She did the same with her other hand, on the other side. She hugged his waist and held the flat of her cheek against his chest. Then she raised her head and craned her neck and he bent down and kissed her. She tasted of warmth and wine and toothpaste. She smelled like soap and clean skin and delicate fragrance. Her hair was soft. Her eyes were closed. He ran his tongue along the row of unfamiliar teeth and found her tongue. He cradled her head with one hand and put the other low on her back.

A long, long kiss.

She came up for air.

“We should do this,” she said.

“We are doing it,” he said.

“I mean, it’s OK to do this.”

“I think so,” he said again. He could feel the end of her zipper with the little finger of his right hand. The little finger of his left hand was down on the swell of her ass.

“Because you’re moving on,” she said.

“Two days,” he said. “Three, max.”

“No complications,” she said. “Not like it might be permanent.”

“I can’t do permanent,” he said.

He bent and kissed her again. Moved his hand and caught the tag of her zipper and pulled it down. She was naked under the dress. Warm, and soft, and smooth, and lithe, and fragrant. He stooped and scooped her up, one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders. He carried her down the hallway, to where he imagined the bedrooms must be, kissing her all the way. Two doors. Two rooms. One smelled unused, one smelled like her. Her carried her in and put her down and her dress slipped from her shoulders and fell. They kissed some more and her hands tore at the button on his pants. A minute later they were in her bed.

Afterward, they ate, first the appetizer, then pork cooked with apples and spices and brown sugar and white wine. For dessert, they went back to bed. At midnight, they showered together. Then they dressed, Reacher in his pants and shirt, Vaughan in black jeans and a black sweater and black sneakers and a slim black leather belt.

Nothing else.

“No gun?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t carry my gun off duty,” she said.

“OK,” he said.

At one o’clock, they went out.

53

Vaughan drove. She insisted on it. It was her watch commander’s car. Reacher was happy to let her. She was a better driver than him. Much better. Her panic one-eighty had impressed him. Backward to forward, at full speed. He doubted if he could have done it. He figured if he had been driving the mob would have caught them and torn them apart.

“Won’t they be there again?” Vaughan asked.

“Possible,” he said. “But I doubt it. It’s late, on the second night. And I told Thurman I wouldn’t be back. I don’t think it will be like yesterday.”

“Why would Thurman believe you?”

“He’s religious. He’s accustomed to believing things that comfort him.”

“We should have planned to take the long way around.”

“I’m glad we didn’t. It would have taken four hours. It wouldn’t have left time for dinner.”

She smiled and they took off, north to First Street, west toward Despair. There was thick cloud in the sky. No moon. No stars. Pitch black. Perfect. They thumped over the line and a mile before the top of the rise Reacher said, “It’s time to go stealthy. Turn all the lights off.”

Vaughan clicked the headlights off and the world went dark and she braked hard.

“I can’t see anything,” she said.

“Use the video camera,” he said. “Use the night vision.”

“What?”

“Like a video game,” he said. “Watch the computer screen, not the windshield.”

“Will that work?”

“It’s how tank drivers do it.”

She tapped keys and the laptop screen lit up and then stabilized into a pale green picture of the landscape ahead. Green scrub on either side, vivid boulders, a bright ribbon of road spearing into the distance. She took her foot off the brake and crawled forward, her head turned, staring at the thermal image, not the reality. At first she steered uncertainly, her hand-eye coordination disrupted. She drifted left and right and overcorrected. Then she settled in and got the hang of the new technique. She did a quarter-mile perfectly straight, and then she sped up and did the next quarter a little faster, somewhere between twenty and thirty.

“It’s killing me not to glance ahead,” she said. “It’s so automatic.”

“This is good,” Reacher said. “Stay slow.” He figured that at twenty or thirty there would be almost no engine noise. Just a low purr, and a soft burble from the pipes. There would be surface noise at any speed, from the tires on the grit, but that would get better closer to town. He leaned left and put his head on her shoulder and watched the screen. The landscape reeled itself in, silent and green and ghostly. The camera had no human reactions. It was just a dumb unblinking eye. It didn’t glance left or right or up or down or change focus. They came over the rise and the screen filled with blank cold sky for a second and then the nose of the car dipped down again and they saw the next nine miles laid out in front of them. Green scrub, scattered rocks glowing lighter, the ribbon of road, a tiny flare of heat on the horizon where the embers of the police station were still warm.

Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield a couple of times, but without headlights there was nothing to see. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Which meant that anyone waiting far ahead in the distance wasn’t seeing anything either. Not yet anyway. He recalled walking back to Hope, stepping over the line, not seeing Vaughan’s cruiser at all. And that was a newer car, shinier, with white doors and polished reflectors in the light bar on the roof. He hadn’t seen it. But she had seen him. I saw you half a mile away, she had said. A little green speck. He had seen himself on the screen afterward, a luminous sliver in the dark, getting bigger, coming closer.

Very fancy, he had said.

Homeland Security money, she had replied. Got to spend it on something.

He stared at the screen, watching for little green specks. The car prowled onward, slow and steady, like a black submarine loose in deep water. Two miles. Four. Still nothing ahead. Six miles. Eight. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, except the idling motor and the squelching tires and Vaughan’s tense breathing as she gripped the wheel and squinted sideways at the laptop screen.

“We must be getting close,” she whispered.

He nodded, on her shoulder. The screen showed buildings maybe a mile ahead. The gas station hut, slightly warmer than its surroundings. The dry goods store, with daytime heat trapped in its brick walls. A background glow from the downtown blocks. A pale blur in the air a little ways south and west, above where the police station had been.

No little green specks.

He said, “This is where they were yesterday.”

She said, “So where are they now?”

She slowed a little and drifted onward. The screen held steady. Geography and architecture, nothing more. Nothing moving.

“Human nature,” Reacher said. “They got all pumped up yesterday and thought they’d gotten rid of us. They don’t have the stamina to do it all again.”

“There could be one or two out and about.”

“Possible.”

“They’ll call ahead and warn the plant.”

“That’s OK,” Reacher said. “We’re not going to the plant. Not yet anyway.”

They drifted on, slow and dark and silent. The vacant lot and the abandoned motor court barely showed up on the screen. Thermally they were just parts of the landscape. The gas station and the household goods store shone brighter. Beyond them the other blocks glowed mid-green. There were window-sized patches of brighter color, and heat was leaking from roofs with imperfect insulation. But there were no pinpoints of light. No little green specks. No crowds, no small groups of shuffling people, no lone sentries.

Not dead ahead anyway.

The camera’s fixed angle was useless against the cross-streets. It showed their mouths to a depth of about five feet. That was all. Reacher stared sideways into the darkness as they rolled past each opening. Saw nothing. No flashlights, no match flares, no lighter sparks, no cigarette coals glowing red. The tire noise had dropped away to almost nothing. Main Street was worn down to the tar. No more pebbles. Vaughan was holding her breath. Her foot was feather light on the pedal. The car rolled onward, a little faster than walking, a lot slower than running.

Two green specks stepped out ahead.

They were maybe a quarter of a mile away, at the west end of Main Street. Two figures, emerging from a cross-street. A foot patrol. Vaughan braked gently and came to a stop, halfway through town. Six blocks behind her, six ahead.

“Can they see us?” she whispered.

“I think they’re facing away,” Reacher said.

“Suppose they’re not?”

“They can’t see us.”

“There are probably more behind us.”

Reacher turned and stared through the rear window. Saw nothing. Just pitch black night. He said, “We can’t see them, they can’t see us. Laws of physics.”

The screen lit up with a white flare. Cone-shaped. Moving. Sweeping.

“Flashlight,” Reacher said.

“They’ll see us.”

“We’re too far away. And I think they’re shining it west.”

Then they weren’t. The screen showed the beam turning through a complete circle, flat and level, like a lighthouse. Its heat burned the screen dead white as it passed. Its light lit up the night mist like fog.

Vaughan asked, “Did they see us?”

Reacher watched the screen. Thought about the reflectors in the Crown Vic’s headlights. Polished metal, like cats’ eyes. He said, “Whoever they are, they’re not moving. I don’t think they have enough candlepower.”

“What do we do?”

“We wait.”

They waited two minutes, then three, then five. The idling engine whispered. The flashlight beam snapped off. The image on the laptop screen collapsed back to two narrow vertical specks, distant, green, barely moving. There was nothing to see through the rear window. Just empty darkness.

Vaughan said, “We can’t stay here.”

Reacher said, “We have to.”

The green specks moved, from the center of the screen to the left-hand edge. Slow, blurred, a ghost trail of luminescence following behind them. Then they disappeared, into a cross-street. The screen stabilized. Geography, and architecture.

“Foot patrol,” Reacher said. “Heading downtown. Maybe worried about fires.”

“Fires?” Vaughan said.

“Their police station burned down last night.”

“Did you have something to do with that?”

“Everything,” Reacher said.

“You’re a maniac.”

“Their problem. They’re messing with the wrong guy. We should get going.”

“Now?”

“Let’s get past them while their backs are turned.”

Vaughan feathered the gas and the car rolled forward. One block. Two. The screen held steady. Geography, and architecture. Nothing more. The tires were quiet on the battered surface.

“Faster,” Reacher said.

Vaughan sped up. Twenty miles an hour. Thirty. At forty the car set up a generalized whoosh from the engine and the exhaust and the tires and the air. It seemed painfully loud. But it generated no reaction. Reacher stared left and right into the downtown streets and saw nothing at all. Just black voids. Vaughan gripped the wheel and held her breath and stared at the laptop screen and ten seconds later they were through the town and in open country on the other side.

Four minutes after that, they were approaching the metal plant.

54

The thermal image showed the sky above the plant to be lurid with heat. It was coming off the dormant furnaces and crucibles in waves as big as solar flares. The metal wall was warm. It showed up as a continuous horizontal band of green. It was much brighter at the southern end. Much hotter around the secret compound. It glowed like crazy on the laptop screen.

“Some junkyard,” Reacher said.

“They’ve been working hard in there,” Vaughan said. “Unfortunately.”

The acres of parking seemed to be all empty. The personnel gate seemed to be closed. Reacher didn’t look at it directly. He was getting better information below the visible spectrum, down in the infrared.

Vaughan said, “No sentries?”

Reacher said, “They trust the wall. As they should. It’s a great wall.”

They drove on, slow and dark and silent, past the lot, past the north end of the plant, onto the truck route. Fifty yards later, they stopped. The Tahoes’ beaten tracks showed up on the screen, almost imperceptibly lighter than the surrounding scrub. Compacted dirt, no microscopic air holes, therefore no ventilation, therefore slightly slower to cool at the end of the day. Reacher pointed and Vaughan turned the wheel and bumped down off the blacktop. She stared at the screen and got lined up with the ruts. The car bucked and bounced across the uneven ground. She followed the giant figure 8. The camera’s dumb eye showed nothing ahead except gray-green desert. Then it picked up the fieldstone wall. The residential compound. The stones had trapped some daytime heat. The wall showed up as a low speckled band, like a snake, fifty yards to the right, low and fluid and infinitely long.

Vaughan circled the compound in the Tahoes’ tracks, almost all the way around, to a point Reacher judged to be directly behind the airplane barn. They parked and shut down and Reacher switched the interior light to the off position and they opened their doors and climbed out. It was pitch dark. The air felt fresh and cold. The clock in his head showed one-thirty in the morning.

Perfect.

They walked fifty yards to the fieldstone wall. They climbed it easily and dropped down on the other side. The back of the airplane barn was directly ahead of them, huge, looming, darker than the sky. They headed straight for it, past cypress trees and over stony ground. The barn was standing dark and empty. The plane was out. Reacher listened hard. Heard nothing. He signaled and Vaughan came up alongside him.

“Step one,” he whispered. “We just verified that when they work by day, the plane flies by night.”

Vaughan asked, “What’s step two?”

“We verify whether they’re bringing stuff in, or taking stuff out, or both.”

“By watching?”

“You bet.”

“How long have we got?”

“About half an hour.”

They stepped into the barn. It was vast and pitch dark. It smelled of oil and gasoline and wood treated with creosote. The floor was beaten dirt. Most of the space was completely empty, ready to receive the returning plane. They felt their way around the walls. Vaughan risked a peek with the flashlight. She clamped its head in her palm and reduced its light to a dull red glow. There were shelves on the walls, loaded with gas cans and quarts of oil and small components boxed up in cardboard. Oil filters, maybe, and air filters. Service items. In the center of the back wall was a horizontal drum wrapped with thin steel cable. The drum was set in a complex floor-mounted bracket and had an electric motor bolted to its axle. A winch. To its right the walls were lined with more shelves. There were spare tires. More components. The whole place felt halfway between tidy and chaotic. It was a workspace, nothing more. There were no obvious hiding places. And there were arc lights faintly visible, high above them in the rafters. If they were turned on, the space would be as bright as day.

Vaughan turned off the flashlight.

“No good,” she said.

Reacher nodded in the dark. Led the way back out of the barn, to the taxiway, which was a broad strip of dirt beaten and graded the same as the runway. Either side of it were patches of cultivated garden a hundred yards square, spiky silver bushes and tall slender trees set in gravel. Xeriscaping, near enough to the barn for a reasonable view, far enough away that light spill would fall short. Reacher pointed and whispered, “We’ll take one each. Hunker down and don’t move until I call you. The runway lights will come on behind you, but don’t worry about them. They’re set to shine flat, north and south.”

She nodded and he went left and she went right. She was invisible in the gloom after three paces. He crawled his way to the garden’s center and lay down on his front with bushes either side of him and a tree towering over him. Ahead at an angle he had a good oblique view into the barn. He guessed Vaughan would have a complementary view from the other direction. Together they had the whole thing covered. He pressed himself into the ground and waited.

He heard the plane at five after two in the morning. The single engine, distant, lonely, far away, feathering and blipping. He pictured the landing light as he had seen it before, hanging in the sky, hopping a little, heading down. The sound grew closer but quieter, as Thurman found his glide path and backed off the power. The runway lights came on. They were brighter than Reacher had expected. He felt suddenly vulnerable. He could see his own shadow ahead of him, tangled up with the shadows of the leaves all around him. He craned his neck and looked for Vaughan. Couldn’t see her. The engine noise grew louder. Then the hangar lights came on. They were very bright. They threw a hard edge of shadow from the barn’s roof that came within six feet of him. He looked ahead and saw the giant from the metal plant standing in the barn, his hand on a light switch, a huge shadow thrown out beyond him, almost close enough for Reacher to touch. Nine hundred yards away to his right the plane’s engine blipped and sputtered and he heard a rush of air and felt a tiny thump through the ground as the wheels touched down. The engine noise dropped to a rough idle as the plane coasted and then it ramped back up to a roar as the plane taxied. Reacher heard it coming in behind him, unbearably loud. The ground shook and trembled. The plane came in between the two garden areas and the noise thundered and the propeller wash blasted dust off the ground. It slowed and darted right on its unstable wheelbase and the engine revved hard and it turned a tight circle and came to rest in front of its barn, facing outward. It rocked and shuddered for a second and then the engine shut down and the exhaust popped twice and the propeller jerked to a stop.

Silence came back, like a blanket.

The runway lights died.

Reacher watched.

The plane’s right-hand door opened and Thurman eased himself out onto the wing step. Big, bulky, stiff, awkward. He was still in his wool suit. He climbed down and stood for a second and then walked away toward the house.

He was carrying nothing.

No bag, no valise, no briefcase, no kind of a package.

Nothing.

He stepped beyond the light spill and disappeared. The giant from the metal plant hauled the steel cable out of the barn and hooked it to an eye below the tail plane. He walked back to the winch and hit a button and the electric motor whined and the plane was pulled slowly backward into the barn. It stopped in its parked position and the giant unhooked the cable and rewound the winch all the way. Then he squeezed around the wing tip and killed the lights and walked away into the darkness.

Carrying nothing.

He had opened no compartments or cubbies, he had checked no holds or nacelles, and he had retrieved nothing from the cabin.

Reacher waited twenty long minutes, for safety’s sake. He had never blundered into trouble through impatience, and he never planned to. When he was sure all was quiet he crawled out from the planted area and crossed the taxiway and called softly to Vaughan. He couldn’t see her. She was well concealed. She came up from the darkness at his feet and hugged him briefly. They walked to the darkened barn and ducked under the Piper’s wing and regrouped next to the fuselage.

Vaughan said, “So now we know. They’re taking stuff out, not in.”

Reacher said, “But what, and to where? What kind of range does this thing have?”

“With full tanks? Around seven or eight hundred miles. The state cops had a plane like this, once. It’s a question of how fast you fly and how hard you climb.”

“What would be normal?”

“A little over half-power might get you eight hundred miles at a hundred and twenty-five knots.”

“He’s gone seven hours every night. Give him an hour on the ground, call it six hours in the air, three there, three back, that’s a radius of three hundred and seventy-five miles. That’s a circle nearly four hundred thousand square miles in area.”

“That’s a lot of real estate.”

“Can we tell anything from the vector he comes in on?”

Vaughan shook her head. “He has to line up with the runway and land into the wind.”

“There’s no big tank of gas here. Therefore he refuels at the other end. Therefore he goes where you can buy gas at ten or eleven at night.”

“Which is a lot of places,” Vaughan said. “Municipal airfields, flying clubs.”

Reacher nodded. Pictured a map in his head and thought: Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, part of Oklahoma, part of Texas, New Mexico, the northeast corner of Arizona, Utah. Always assuming Thurman didn’t just fly an hour each way and spend five at dinner somewhere close by in Colorado itself. He said, “We’re going to have to ask him.”

“Think he’ll tell us?”

“Eventually.”

They ducked back under the wing and retraced their steps behind the barn to the wall. A minute later they were back in the car, following the ghostly green image of the Tahoes’ ruts counterclockwise, all the way around the metal plant to the place where Reacher had decided to break in.

55

The white metal wall was blazing hot in the south and cooler in the north. Vaughan followed it around and stopped halfway along its northern stretch. Then she pulled a tight left and bounced out of the ruts and nosed slowly head-on toward the wall and stopped with her front bumper almost touching it. The front half of the hood was directly below the wall’s horizontal cylinder. The base of the windshield was about five feet down and two feet out from the cylinder’s maximum bulge.

Reacher got out and dragged the stepladder off the rear bench. He laid it on the ground and unfolded it and adjusted it into an upside-down L-shape. Then he estimated by eye and relaxed the angle a little beyond ninety degrees and locked all the joints. He lifted it high. He jammed the feet in the gutter at the base of the Crown Vic’s windshield, where the hood’s lip overlapped the wipers. He let it fall forward, gently. It hit the wall with a soft metallic noise, aluminum on painted steel. The long leg of the L came to rest almost vertical. The short leg lay on top of the cylinder, almost horizontal.

“Back up about a foot,” he whispered.

Vaughan moved the car and the base of the ladder pulled outward to a kinder angle and the top fell forward by a corresponding degree and ended up perfectly flat.

“I love hardware stores,” Reacher said.

Vaughan said, “I thought this kind of wall was supposed to be impregnable.”

“We’re not over it yet.”

“But we’re close.”

“Normally they come with guard towers and searchlights, to make sure people don’t bring cars and ladders.”

Vaughan shut the engine down and jammed the parking brake on tight. The laptop screen turned itself off and they were forced back to the visible spectrum, which didn’t contain anything very visible. Just darkness. Vaughan carried the flashlight and Reacher took the wrecking bar from the trunk. He levered himself up onto the hood and crouched under the swell of the cylinder. He stepped forward to the base of the windshield and turned again and started to climb the ladder. He carried the wrecking bar in his left hand and gripped the upper rungs with his right. The aluminum squirmed against the steel and set up a weird harmonic in the hollows of the wall. He slowed down to quiet the noise and made it to the angle and leaned forward and crawled along the short horizontal leg of the L on his hands and knees. He shuffled off sideways and lay like a starfish on the cylinder’s top surface. Six feet in diameter, almost nineteen feet in circumference, effectively flat enough to be feasible, but still curved enough to be dangerous. And the white paint was slick and shiny. He raised his head cautiously and looked around.

He was six feet from where he wanted to be.

The pyramid of old oil drums was barely visible in the dark, two yards to the west. Its top tier was about eight feet south and eighteen inches down from the top of the wall. He swam forward and grabbed the ladder again. It shifted sideways toward him. No resistance. He called down, “Get on the bottom rung.”

The ladder straightened under Vaughan’s weight. He hauled himself toward it and clambered over it and turned around and lay down again on the other side. Now he was exactly where he wanted to be. He called, “Come on up.”

He saw the ladder flex and sway and bounce a little and the strange harmonic keening started up again. Then Vaughan’s head came into view. She paused and got her bearings and made it over the angle and climbed off and lay down in the place he had just vacated, uneasy and spread-eagled. He handed her the wrecking bar and hauled the ladder up sideways, awkwardly, crossing and uncrossing his hands until he had the thing approximately balanced on top of the curve. He glanced right, into the arena, and tugged the ladder a little closer to him and then fed it down on the other side of the wall until the short leg of the L came to rest on an oil drum two tiers down from the top. The long leg came to rest at a gentle slope, like a bridge.

“I love hardware stores,” he said again.

“I love solid ground,” Vaughan said.

He took the wrecking bar back from her and stretched forward and got both hands on the ladder rails. He jerked downward, hard, to make sure it was seated tight. Then he supported all his weight with his arms, like he was chinning a bar, and let his legs slide off the cylinder. He kicked and struggled until he got his feet on the ladder. Then he climbed down, backward, his ass in the air where the slope was gentle, in a more normal position after the angle. He stepped off onto the oil drum and glanced around. Nothing to see. He held his end of the ladder steady and called up to Vaughan, “Your turn.”

She came down the same way he had, backward, butt high like a monkey, then more or less vertically after the turn, ending up standing on the drum between his outstretched arms, which were still on the ladder. He left them there for a minute and then he moved and said, “Now it’s easy. Like stairs.”

They clambered down the pyramid. The empty drums boomed softly. They stepped off onto the sticky dirt and crunched out into the open.

“This way,” Reacher said.

They covered the quarter-mile to the vehicle gate in less than five minutes. The white Tahoes were parked close together near one end of it and there was a line of five flat-bed semis near the other. No tractor units attached. Just the trailers, jacked up at their fronts on their skinny parking legs. Four were facing outward, toward the gate. They were loaded with steel bars. Product, ready to go. The fifth was facing inward, toward the plant itself. It was loaded with a closed shipping container, dark in color, maybe blue, with the words CHINA LINES stenciled on it. Scrap, incoming. Reacher glanced at it and passed it by and headed toward the line of offices. Vaughan walked with him. They ignored the security hut, and Thurman’s own office, and Operations, and Purchasing, and Invoicing, and the first white-painted infirmary unit. They stopped outside the second. Vaughan said, “Visiting the sick again?”

Reacher nodded. “He might talk, without Thurman here.”

“The door might be locked.”

Reacher raised the wrecking bar.

“I have a key,” he said.

But the door wasn’t locked. And the sick deputy wasn’t talking. The sick deputy was dead.

The guy was still tucked tight under the sheet, but he had taken his last breath some hours previously. That was clear. And maybe he had taken it alone. He looked untended. His skin was cold and set and waxy. His eyes were clouded and open. His hair was thin and messy, like he had been tossing on the pillow, listlessly, looking for companionship or comfort. His chart had not been added to or amended since the last time Reacher had seen it. The long list of symptoms and complaints was still there, unresolved and apparently undiagnosed.

“TCE?” Vaughan said.

“Possible,” Reacher said.

We’re doing the best we can, Thurman had said. We’re hoping he’ll get better. I’ll have him taken to the hospital in Halfway tomorrow.

Bastard, Reacher thought.

“This could happen in Hope,” Vaughan said. “We need the data for Colorado Springs. For the lab.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Reacher said.

They stood by the bedside for a moment longer and then they backed out. They closed the door gently, as if it would make a difference to the guy, and headed down the steps and then up the line to the office marked Purchasing. Its door was secured with a padlock through a hasp. The padlock was strong and the hasp was strong but the screws securing the hasp to the jamb were weak. They yielded to little more than the weight of the wrecking bar alone. They pulled out of the wood frame and fell to the ground and the door sagged open an inch. Vaughan turned the flashlight on and hid its beam in her palm. She led the way inside. Reacher followed and closed the door and propped a chair against it.

There were three desks inside and three phones and a whole wall of file cabinets, three drawers high, maybe forty inches tall. A hundred and forty cubic feet of purchase orders, according to Reacher’s automatic calculation.

“Where do we start?” Vaughan whispered.

“Try T for TCE.”

The T drawers were about four-fifths of the way along the array, as common sense and the alphabet dictated they should be. They were crammed with papers. But none of the papers referred to trichloroethylene. Everything was filed according to supplier name. The T drawers were all about corporations called Tri-State and Thomas and Tomkins and Tribune. Tri-State had renewed a fire insurance policy eight months previously, Thomas was a telecommunications company that had supplied four new cell phones three months previously, Tomkins had put tires on two front-loaders six months ago, and Tribune delivered binding wire on a two-week schedule. All essential activity for the metal plant’s operation, no doubt, but none of it chemical in nature.

“I’ll start at A,” Vaughan said.

“And I’ll start at Z,” Reacher said. “I’ll see you at M or N, if not before.”

Vaughan was faster than Reacher. She had the flashlight. He had to rely on stray beams spilling from the other end of the array. Some things were obviously irrelevant. Anything potentially questionable, he had to haul it out and peer at it closely. It was slow work. The clock in his head ticked around, relentlessly. He started to worry about the dawn. It wasn’t far away. At one point he found something ordered in the thousands of gallons, but on close inspection it was only gasoline and diesel fuel. The supplier was Western Energy of Wyoming and the purchaser was Thurman Metals of Despair, Colorado. He crammed the paper back in place and moved left to the V drawers. The first file he pulled was for medical supplies. Saline solution, IV bags, IV stands, miscellaneous requisites. Small quantities, enough for a small facility.

The supplier was Vernon Medical of Houston, Texas.

The purchaser was Olympic Medical of Despair, Colorado.

Reacher held the paper out to Vaughan. An official purchase order, on an official company letterhead, complete with the same corporate logo they had seen twice on the billboards south of Colorado Springs. Main office address, inside the metal plant, two cabins down.

“Thurman owns Olympic,” Reacher said. “Where your husband is.”

Vaughan was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t think I like that.”

Reacher said, “I wouldn’t either.”

“I should get him out of there.”

“Or get Thurman out of there.”

“How?”

“Keep digging.”

They got back to work. Reacher got through V, and U, and skipped T because they had already checked it. He learned that Thurman’s oxyacetylene supplier was Utah Gases and his kerosene supplier was Union City Fuels. He found no reference to trichloroethylene. He was opening the last of the S drawers when Vaughan said, “Got it.”

“Kearny Chemical of New Jersey,” she said. “TCE purchases going back seven years.”

She lifted the whole file cradle out of the drawer and shone the flashlight on it and riffed through the papers with her thumb. Reacher saw the word trichloroethylene repeated over and over, jumping around from line to line like a kid’s badly drawn flip cartoon.

“Take the whole thing,” he said. “We’ll add up the quantities later.”

Vaughan jammed the file under her arm and pushed the drawer shut with her hip. Reacher moved the chair and opened the door and they stepped out together to the dark. Reacher stopped and used the flashlight and found the fallen screws and pushed them back into their holes with his thumb. They held loosely and made the lock look untouched. Then he followed Vaughan as she retraced their steps, past Operations, past Thurman’s digs, past the security office. She waited for him and they dodged around the China Lines container together and headed out into open space.

Then Reacher stopped again.

Turned around.

“Flashlight,” he said.

Vaughan gave up the flashlight and he switched it on and played the beam across the side of the container. It loomed up, huge and unreal in the sudden light, high on its trailer like it was suspended in midair. It was forty feet long, corrugated, boxy, metal. Completely standard in every way. It had CHINA LINES painted on it in large letters, dirty white, and a vertical row of Chinese characters, plus a series of ID numbers and codes stenciled low in one corner.

Plus a word, handwritten in capitals, in chalk.

The chalk was faded, as if it had been applied long ago at the other end of a voyage of many thousands of miles.

The word looked like CARS.

Reacher stepped closer. The business end of the container had a double door, secured in the usual way with four foot-long levers that drove four sturdy bolts that ran the whole height of the container and socketed home in the box sections top and bottom. The levers were all in the closed position. Three were merely slotted into their brackets, but the fourth was secured with a padlock and guaranteed by a tell-tale plastic tag.

Reacher said, “This is an incoming delivery.”

Vaughan said, “I guess. It’s facing inward.”

“I want to see what’s inside.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious.”

“There are cars inside. Every junkyard has cars.”

He nodded in the dark. “I’ve seen them come in. From neighboring states, tied down on open flat-beds. Not locked in closed containers.”

Vaughan was quiet for a beat. “You think this is army stuff from Iraq?”

“It’s possible.”

“I don’t want to see. It might be Humvees. They’re basically cars. You said so yourself.”

He nodded again. “They are basically cars. But no one ever calls them cars. Certainly not the people who loaded this thing.”

“If it’s from Iraq.”

“Yes, if.”

“I don’t want to see.”

“I do.”

“We need to get going. It’s late. Or early.”

“I’ll be quick,” he said. “Don’t watch, if you don’t want to.”

She stepped away, far enough into the darkness that he couldn’t see her anymore. He held the flashlight in his teeth and stretched up tall and jammed the tongue of the wrecking bar through the padlock’s hoop. Counted one two and on three he jerked down with all his strength.

No result.

Working way above his head was reducing his leverage. He got his toes on the ledge where the box was reinforced at the bottom and grabbed the vertical bolt and hauled himself up to where he could tackle the problem face-to-face. He got the wrecking bar back in place and tried again. One, two, jerk.

No result.

Case-hardened steel, cold rolled, thick and heavy. A fine padlock. He wished he had bought a three-foot bar. Or a six-foot pry bar. He thought about finding some chain and hooking a Tahoe up to it. The keys were probably in. But the chain would break before the padlock. He mused on it and let the frustration build. Then he jammed the wrecking bar home for a third try. One. Two. On three he jerked downward with all the force in his frame and jumped off his ledge so that his whole bodyweight reinforced the blow. A two-fisted punch, backed up by two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass.

The padlock broke.

He ended up sprawled in the dirt. Curved fragments of metal hit him in the head and the shoulder. The wrecking bar clanged off the ledge and caught him in the foot. He didn’t care. He climbed back up and broke the tag and smacked the levers out of their slots and opened the doors. Metal squealed. He lit up the flashlight and took a look inside.

Cars.

The restlessness of a long sea voyage had shifted them neatly to the right side of the container. There were four of them, two piled on two, longitudinally. Strange makes, strange models. Dusty, sandblasted, pastel colors.

They were grievously damaged. They were opened like cans, ripped, peeled, smashed, twisted. They had holes through their sheet metal the size of telephone poles.

They had pale rectangular license plates covered with neat Arabic numbers. Off-white backgrounds, delicate backward hooks and curls, black diamond-shaped dots.

Reacher turned in the doorway and called into the darkness, “No Humvees.” He heard light footsteps and Vaughan appeared in the gloom. He leaned down and took her hand and pulled her up. She stood with him and followed the flashlight beam as he played it around.

“From Iraq?” she asked.

He nodded. “Civilian vehicles.”

“Suicide bombers?” she asked.

“They’d be blown up worse than this. There wouldn’t be anything left at all.”

“Insurgents, then,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t stop at the roadblocks.”

“Why bring them here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Roadblocks are defended with machine guns. These things were hit by something else entirely. Just look at the damage.”

“What did it?”

“Cannon fire, maybe. Some kind of big shells. Or wire-guided missiles.”

“Ground or air?”

“Ground, I think. The trajectories look like they were pretty flat.”

“Artillery versus sedans?” Vaughan said. “That’s kind of extreme.”

“You bet it is,” Reacher said. “Exactly what the hell is going on over there?”

They closed the container and Reacher scratched around in the sand with the flashlight until he found the shattered padlock. He threw the separate pieces far into the distance. Then they hiked the quarter-mile back to the oil drum pyramid and scaled the wall in the opposite direction. Out, not in. It was just as difficult. The construction was perfectly symmetrical. But they got over. They climbed down and stepped off onto the Crown Vic’s hood and slid back to solid ground. Reacher folded the ladder and packed it in the rear seat. Vaughan put the captured Kearny Chemical file in the trunk, under the mat.

She asked, “Can we take the long way home? I don’t want to go through Despair again.”

Reacher said, “We’re not going home.”

56

They found Despair’s old road and followed it west to the truck route. They turned their headlights on a mile later. Four miles after that they passed the MP base, close to four o’clock in the morning. There were two guys in the guard shack. The orange nightlight lit their faces from below. Vaughan didn’t slow but Reacher waved anyway. The two guys didn’t wave back.

Vaughan asked, “Where to?”

“Where the old road forks. We’re going to pull over there.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to watch the traffic. I’m working on a theory.”

“What theory?”

“I can’t tell you. I might be wrong, and then you wouldn’t respect me anymore. And I like it better when a woman respects me in the morning.”

Thirty minutes later Vaughan bumped down off the new blacktop and U-turned in the mouth of the old road and backed up on the shoulder. When the sun came up they would have a view a mile both ways. They would be far from inconspicuous, but also far from suspicious. Crown Vics were parked on strategic bends all over America, all day every day.

They cracked their windows to let some air in and reclined their seats and went to sleep. Two hours, Reacher figured, before there would be anything to see.

Reacher woke up when the first rays of the morning sun hit the left-hand corner of the windshield. Vaughan stayed asleep. She was small enough to have turned in her seat. Her cheek was pressed against the mouse fur. Her knees were up and her hands were pressed together between them. She looked peaceful.

The first truck to pass them by was heading east toward Despair. It was a flat-bed semi with Nevada plates on both ends. It was loaded with a tangle of rusted-out junk. Washing machines, tumble dryers, bicycle frames, bent rebar, road signposts all folded and looped out of shape by accidents. The truck thundered by with its exhaust cackling on the overrun as it coasted through the bend. Then it was gone, in a long tail of battered air and dancing dust.

Ten minutes later a second truck blew by, an identical flat-bed doing sixty, from Montana, heaped with wrecked cars. Its tires whined loud and Vaughan woke up and glanced ahead at it and asked, “How’s your theory doing?”

Reacher said, “Nothing to support it yet. But also nothing to disprove it.”

“Good morning.”

“To you, too.”

“Sleep long?”

“Long enough.”

The next truck was also heading east, an ugly ten-wheel army vehicle with two guys in the cab and a green box on the back, a standardized NATO payload hauler built in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and about as pretty as an old pair of dungarees. It wasn’t small, but it was smaller than the preceding semis. And it was slower. It barreled through the curve at about fifty miles an hour and left less of a turbulent wake.

“Resupply,” Reacher said. “For the MP base. Beans, bullets, and bandages, probably from Carson.”

“Does that help?”

“It helps the MPs. The beans anyway. I don’t suppose they’re using many bullets or bandages.”

“I meant, does it help with your theory?”

“No.”

Next up was a semi coming west, out of Despair. The bed was loaded with steel bars. A dense, heavy load. The tractor unit’s engine was roaring. The exhaust note was a deep bellow and black smoke was pouring from the stack.

Vaughan said, “One of the four we saw last night.”

Reacher nodded. “The other three will be right behind it. The business day has started.”

“By now they know we broke into that container.”

“They know somebody did.”

“What will they do about it?”

“Nothing.”

The second of the outgoing semis appeared on the horizon. Then the third. Before the fourth showed up another incoming truck blew by. A container truck. A blue China Lines container on it. Heavy, by the way the tires stressed and whined.

New Jersey plates.

Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. The truck disappeared in the morning haze and the fourth outgoing load passed it. Then the dust settled and the world went quiet again. Vaughan arched her back and stretched, perfectly straight from her heels to her shoulders.

“I feel good,” she said.

“You deserve to.”

“I needed you to know about David.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Reacher said. He was turned in his seat, watching the western horizon a mile away. He could see a small shape, wobbling in the haze. A truck, far away. Small, because of the distance. Square, and rigid. A box truck, tan-colored.

He said, “Pay attention now.”

The truck took a minute to cover the mile and then it roared past. Two axles, plain, boxy. Tan paint. No logo on it. No writing of any kind.

It had Canadian plates, from Ontario.

“Prediction,” Reacher said. “We’re going to see that truck heading out again within about ninety minutes.”

“Why wouldn’t we? It’ll unload and go home.”

“Unload what?”

“Whatever is in it.”

“Which would be what?”

“Scrap metal.”

“From where?”

“Ontario’s biggest city is Toronto,” Vaughan said. “So from Toronto, according to the law of averages.”

Reacher nodded. “Route 401 in Canada, I-94 around Detroit, I-75 out of Toledo, I-70 all the way over here. That’s a long distance.”

“Relatively.”

“Especially considering that Canada probably has steel mills all its own. I know for sure they’re thick on the ground around Detroit and all over Indiana, which is practically next door. So why haul ass all the way out here?”

“Because Thurman’s place is a specialist operation. You said so yourself.”

“Canada’s army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.”

Vaughan said, “Combat wrecks.”

Reacher said, “Canada isn’t fighting in Iraq. Canadians had more sense.”

“So what was in that truck?”

“My guess is nothing at all.”

Plenty more trucks passed by in both directions, but they were all uninteresting. Semi trailers from Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Washington State, and California, loaded with crushed cars and bales of crushed steel and rusted industrial hulks that might once have been boilers or locomotives or parts of ships. Reacher looked at them as they passed and then looked away. He kept his focus on the eastern horizon and the clock in his head. Vaughan got out and brought the captured file from under the mat in the trunk. She took the papers out of the cardboard cradle and turned them over and squared them on her knee. Licked her thumb and started with the oldest page first. It was dated a little less than seven years previously. It was a purchase order for five thousand gallons of trichloroethylene, to be delivered prepaid by Kearny Chemical to Thurman Metals. The second-oldest page was identical. As was the third. The fourth fell into the following calendar year.

Vaughan said, “Fifteen thousand gallons in the first year. Is that a lot?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “We’ll have to let the state lab be the judge.”

The second year of orders came out the same. Fifteen thousand gallons. Then the third year jumped way up, to five separate orders for a total of twenty-five thousand gallons. A refill every seventy-some days. An increase in consumption of close to sixty-seven percent.

Vaughan said, “The start of major combat operations. The first wrecks.”

The fourth year held steady at twenty-five thousand gallons.

The fifth year matched it exactly.

“David’s year,” Vaughan said. “His Humvee was rinsed with some of those gallons. What was left of it.”

The sixth year she looked at jumped again. Total of six orders. Total of thirty thousand gallons. Iraq, getting worse. A twenty percent increase. And the current year looked set to exceed even that. There were already six orders in, and the year still had a whole quarter to run. Then Vaughan paused and looked at the six pages again, one by one, side by side, and she said, “No, one of these is different.”

Reacher asked, “Different how?”

“One of the orders isn’t for trichloroethylene. And it isn’t in gallons. It’s in tons, for something called trinitrotoluene. Thurman bought twenty tons of it.”

“When?”

“Three months ago. Maybe they misfiled it.”

“From Kearny?”

“Yes.”

“Then it isn’t misfiled.”

“Maybe it’s another kind of degreaser.”

“It isn’t.”

“You heard of it?”

“Everyone has heard of it. It was invented in 1863 in Germany, for use as a yellow dye.”

“I never heard of it,” Vaughan said. “I don’t like yellow.”

“A few years later they realized it decomposes in an exothermic manner.”

“What does that mean?”

“It explodes.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“Trichloroethylene is called TCE,” Reacher said. “Trinitrotoluene is called TNT.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“Everyone has heard of it.”

“Thurman bought twenty tons of dynamite? Why?”

“Dynamite is different. It’s nitroglycerine soaked into wood pulp and molded into cylinders wrapped in paper. TNT is a specific chemical compound. A yellow solid. Much more stable. Therefore much more useful.”

“OK, but why did he buy it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he busts things up with it. It melts easily, and pours. That’s how they get it into shell casings and bombs and shaped charges. Maybe he uses it like a liquid and forces it between seams he can’t cut. He was boasting to me about his advanced techniques.”

“I never heard any explosions.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re twenty miles from the plant. And maybe they’re small and controlled.”

“Is it a solvent, when it’s liquid?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a reagent, that’s all I know. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Some complicated formula, lots of sixes and threes and twos.”

Vaughan riffled back through the pages she had already examined.

“Whatever, he never bought any before,” she said. “It’s something new.”

Reacher glanced ahead through the windshield. Saw the tan box truck heading back toward them. It was less than a mile away. He took the red bubble light off the dash and held it in his hand.

“Stand by,” he said. “We’re going to stop that truck.”

“We can’t,” Vaughan said. “We don’t have jurisdiction here.”

“The driver doesn’t know that. He’s Canadian.”

57

Vaughan was a cop from a small quiet town, but she handled the traffic stop beautifully. She started the car when the truck was still a quarter-mile away and put it in gear. Then she waited for the truck to pass and pulled out of the old road onto the new and settled in its wake. She hung back a hundred yards, to be clearly visible in its mirrors. Reacher opened his window and clamped the bubble light on the roof. Vaughan hit a switch and the light started flashing. She hit another switch and her siren quacked twice.

Nothing happened for ten long seconds.

Vaughan smiled.

“Here it comes,” she said. “The Who, me? moment.”

The truck started to slow. The driver lifted off and the cab pitched down a degree as weight and momentum settled on the front axle. Vaughan moved up fifty yards and drifted left to the crown of the road. The truck put its turn signal on. It rolled ahead and then braked hard and aimed for a spot where the shoulder was wide. Vaughan skipped past and tucked in again and the two vehicles came to a stop, nose-to-tail in the middle of nowhere, forty miles of empty road behind them and more than that ahead.

She said, “A search would be illegal.”

Reacher said, “I know. Just tell the guy to sit tight, five minutes. We’ll wave him on when we’re done.”

“With what?”

“We’re going to take a photograph.”

Vaughan got out and cop-walked to the driver’s window. She spoke for a moment, then walked back. Reacher said, “Back up on the other shoulder, at right angles. We need to see the whole truck, side-on with the camera.”

Vaughan checked ahead and behind and jockeyed forward and back and then reversed across the blacktop in a wide curve and came to rest sideways on the opposite shoulder, with the front of her car pointed dead-center at the side of the truck. It was a plain, simple vehicle. A stubby hood, a cab, twin rails running back from it with a box body bolted on. The box had alloy skin and was corrugated every foot for strength and rigidity. Tan paint, no writing.

Reacher said, “Camera.”

Vaughan hit laptop keys and the screen lit up with a picture of the truck.

Reacher said, “We need to see the thermal image.”

Vaughan said, “I don’t know if it works in the daytime.” She hit more keys and the screen blazed white. No detail, no definition. Everything was hot.

Reacher said, “Turn down the sensitivity.”

She toggled keys and the screen dimmed. Ahead through the windshield the real-time view stayed unchanged but the image on the laptop screen faded to nothing and then came back ghostly green. Vaughan played around until the road surface and the background scrub showed up as a baseline gray, barely visible. The truck itself glowed a hundred shades of green. The hood was warm, with a bright center where the engine was. The exhaust pipe was a vivid line, with green gases shimmering out the end in clouds. The rear differential was hot and the tires were warm. The cab was warm, a generalized green block with a slight highlight where the driver was sitting and waiting.

The box body was cold at the rear. It stayed cold until it suddenly got warmer three-quarters of the way forward. A section five feet long directly behind the cab was glowing bright.

Reacher said, “Take it down some more.”

Vaughan tapped a key until the tires went gray and merged with the road. She kept on going until the grays went black and the picture simplified to just five disembodied elements in just two shades of green. The engine, hot. The exhaust system, hot. The differential case, warm. The cab, warm.

The first five feet of the box body, warm.

Vaughan said, “It reminds me of the wall around the metal plant. Hotter at one end than the other.”

Reacher nodded. Stuck his arm out the window, waved the driver onward, and peeled the bubble light off the roof. The truck lurched as the gears caught and it pulled across the rumble strip and got straight in the traffic lane and lumbered slowly away, first gear, then second, then third. The laptop screen showed a vivid plume of hot exhaust that swelled and swirled into a lime-green cloud before cooling and dissipating and falling away into blackness.

Vaughan asked, “What did we just see?”

“A truck on its way to Canada.”

“That’s all?”

“You saw what I saw.”

“Is this part of your theory?”

“Pretty much all of it.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Later.”

“Than what?”

“When it’s safely across the border.”

“Why then?”

“Because I don’t want to put you in a difficult position.”

“Why would it?”

“Because you’re a cop.”

“Now you’re trying to keep me out of trouble?”

Reacher said, “I’m trying to keep everybody out of trouble.”

They turned around and drove back to where the old road forked. They bumped down off the new blacktop and this time they kept on going, between the two ruined farms, all the way to Halfway township. First stop was the coffee shop, for a late breakfast. Second stop was a Holiday Inn, where they rented a bland beige room and showered and made love and went to sleep. They woke up at four, and did all the same things in reverse order, like a film run backward. They made love again, showered again, checked out of the hotel, and headed back to the coffee shop for an early dinner. By five-thirty they were on the road again, heading east, back toward Despair.

Vaughan drove. The setting sun was behind her, bright in her mirror. It put a glowing rectangle of light on her face. The truck route was reasonably busy in both directions. The metal plant ahead was still sucking stuff in and spitting it out again. Reacher watched the license plates. He saw representatives from all of Colorado’s neighboring states, plus a container truck from New Jersey, heading outward, presumably empty, and a flat-bed semi from Idaho heading inward, groaning under a load of rusted steel sheet.

He thought: license plates.

He said, “I was in the Gulf the first time around.”

Vaughan nodded. “You wore the same BDUs every day for eight months. In the heat. Which is a delightful image. I felt bad enough putting these clothes back on.”

“We spent most of the time in Saudi and Kuwait, of course. But there were a few covert trips into Iraq itself.”

“And?”

“I remember their license plates being silver. But the ones we saw last night in the container were off-white.”

“Maybe they changed them since then.”

“Maybe. But maybe they didn’t. Maybe they had other things to worry about.”

“You think those weren’t Iraqi cars?”

“I think Iran uses off-white plates.”

“So what are you saying? We’re fighting in Iran and nobody knows? That’s not possible.”

“We were fighting in Cambodia in the seventies and nobody knew. But I think it’s more likely there’s a bunch of Iranians heading west to Iraq to join in the fun every day. Maybe like commuting to a job. Maybe we’re stopping them at the border crossings. With artillery.”

“That’s very dangerous.”

“For the passengers, for sure.”

“For the world,” Vaughan said.

They passed the MP base just before six-fifteen. Neat, quiet, still, six parked Humvees, four guys in the guard shack. All in order, and recently resupplied.

For what?

They slowed for the last five miles and tried to time it right. Traffic had died away to nothing. The plant was closed. The lights were off. Presumably the last stragglers were heading home, to the east. Presumably the Tahoes were parked for the night. Vaughan made the left onto Despair’s old road and then found the ruts in the gathering gloom and followed them like she had the night before, through the throat of the figure 8 and all the way to the spot behind the airplane barn. She parked there and went to pull the key but Reacher put his hand on her wrist and said, “I have to do this part alone.”

Vaughan said, “Why?”

“Because this has to be face-to-face. And the whole deal here is that you’re permanent and I’m not. You’re a cop from the next town, with a lot of years ahead of you. You can’t go trespassing and breaking and entering all over the neighborhood.”

“I already have.”

“But nobody knew. Which made it OK. This time it won’t be OK.”

“You’re shutting me out?”

“Wait on the road. Any hassle, take off for home. I’ll make my own way back.”

He left the ladder and the wrecking bar and the flashlight where they were, in the car. But he took the captured switchblades with him. He put one in each pocket, just in case.

Then he hiked the fifty yards through the scrub and climbed the fieldstone wall.

58

It was still too light to make any sense out of hiding. Reacher just leaned against the barn’s board wall, near the front corner, outside, on the blind side, away from the house. He could smell the plane. Cold metal, oil, unburned hydrocarbons from the tanks. The clock in his head showed one minute before seven in the evening.

He heard footsteps at one minute past.

Long strides, a heavy tread. The big guy from the plant, hustling. Lights came on in the barn. A bright rectangle of glare spilled forward, shadowed with wings and propeller blades.

Then nothing, for two minutes.

Then more footsteps. Slower. A shorter stride. An older man with good shoes, overweight, battling stiffness and limping with joint pain.

Reacher took a breath and stepped around the corner of the barn, into the light.

The big guy from the plant was standing behind the Piper’s wing, just waiting, like some kind of a servant or a butler. Thurman was on the path leading from the house. He was dressed in his wool suit. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue tie.

He was carrying a small cardboard carton.

The carton was about the size of a six-pack of beer. There was no writing on it. The top flaps were folded shut, one under the other. It wasn’t heavy. Thurman was carrying it two-handed, out in front of his body, reverentially, but without strain. He stopped dead on the path but didn’t speak. Reacher watched him try to find something to say, and then watched him give up. So he filled the silence himself. He said, “Good evening, folks.”

Thurman said, “You told me you were leaving.”

“I changed my mind.”

“You’re trespassing.”

“Probably.”

“You need to leave now.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“I meant it before, and I mean it now.”

“I’ll leave when I’ve seen what’s in that box.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I’m curious about what part of Uncle Sam’s property you’re smuggling out of here every night.”

The big guy from the plant squeezed around the tip of the Piper’s wing and stepped out of the barn and put himself between Reacher and Thurman, closer to Thurman than Reacher. Two against one, explicitly. Thurman looked beyond the big guy’s shoulder directly at Reacher and said, “You’re intruding.” Which struck Reacher as an odd choice of word. Interfering, trespassing, butting in, he would have expected.

“Intruding on what?” he asked.

The big guy asked his boss, “You want me to throw him out?”

Reacher saw Thurman thinking about his answer. There was debate in his face, some kind of a long-range calculus that went far beyond the possible positive or negative outcome of a two-minute brawl in front of an airplane hangar. Like the old guy was playing a long game, and thinking eight moves ahead.

Reacher said, “What’s in the box?”

The big guy said, “Shall I get rid of him?”

Thurman said, “No, let him stay.”

Reacher said, “What’s in the box?”

Thurman said, “Not Uncle Sam’s property. God’s property.”

“God brings you metal?”

“Not metal.”

Thurman stood still for a second. Then he stepped around his underling, still carrying the box two-handed out in front of him, like a wise man bearing a gift. He knelt and laid it at Reacher’s feet, and then stood up and backed away again. Reacher looked down. Theoretically the box might be booby-trapped, or he might get hit on the head while he crouched down next to it. But he felt either thing was unlikely. The instructors at Rucker had said: be skeptical, but not too skeptical. Too much skepticism led to paranoia and paralysis.

Reacher knelt next to the box.

Unlaced the criss-crossed flaps.

Raised them.

The box held crumpled newspaper, with a small plastic jar nested in it. The jar was a standard medical item, sterile, almost clear, with a screw lid. A sample jar, for urine or other bodily fluids. Reacher had seen many of them.

The jar was a quarter full with black powder.

The powder was coarser than talc, finer than salt.

Reacher asked, “What is it?”

Thurman said, “Ash.”

“From where?”

“Come with me and find out.”

“Come with you?”

“Fly with me tonight. I have nothing to hide. And I’m a patient man. I don’t mind proving my innocence, over and over and over again, if I have to.”

The big guy helped Thurman up onto the wing and watched as he folded himself in through the small door. Then he passed the box up. Thurman took it and laid it on a rear seat. The big guy stood back and let Reacher climb up by himself. Reacher ducked low and led with his legs and made it into the co-pilot’s seat. He slammed the door and squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was ever going to get, and then he buckled his harness. Beside him Thurman buckled his and hit a bunch of switches. Dials lit up and pumps whirred and the whole airframe tensed and hummed. Then Thurman hit the starter button and the exhaust coughed and the propeller blade jerked around a quarter of the way and then the engine caught with a roar and the prop spun up and the cabin filled with loud noise and furious vibration. The plane lurched forward, uncertain, earthbound, darting slightly left and right. It waddled forward out of the hangar. Dust blew up all over the place. The plane moved on, down the taxiway, the prop turning fast, the wheels turning slow. Reacher watched Thurman’s hands. He was operating the controls the same way an old guy drives a car, leaning back in his seat, casual, familiar, automatic, using the kind of short abbreviated movements born of long habit.

The taxiway led through two clumsy turns to the north end of the runway. The lights were on. Thurman got centered on the graded strip and hit the power and the vibration leached forward out of the cabin into the engine and the wheels started thumping faster below. Reacher turned and saw the cardboard carton slide backward on the seat and nestle against the back cushion. He glanced ahead and saw lit dirt below and rushing darkness above. Then the plane went light and the nose lifted. The plane clawed its way into the night sky and climbed and turned and Reacher looked down and saw first the runway lights go off and then the hangar lights. Without them, there was little to see. The wall around the metal plant was faintly visible, a huge white rectangle in the gloaming.

The plane climbed hard for a minute and then leveled off and Reacher was dumped forward in his seat against his harness straps. He looked over at the dash and saw the altimeter reading two thousand feet. Airspeed was a little over a hundred and twenty. The compass reading was southeast. Fuel was more than half-full. Trim was good. The artificial horizon was level. There were plenty of green lights, and no reds.

Thurman saw him checking and asked, “Are you afraid of flying, Mr. Reacher?”

Reacher said, “No.”

The engine was loud and the vibration was setting up a lot of buzzes and rattles. Wind was howling around the screens and whistling in through cracks. Altogether the little Piper reminded Reacher of the kind of old cars people used as taxis at suburban railroad stations. Sagging, worn out, clunky, but capable of making it through the ride. Maybe.

He asked, “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

Reacher watched the compass. It was holding steady on south and east. There was an LED window below the compass with two green numbers showing. A GPS readout, latitude and longitude. They were below the fortieth parallel and more than a hundred degrees west. Both numbers were ticking downward, slowly and in step. South and east, at a modest speed. He called up maps in his mind. Empty land ahead, the corner of Colorado, the corner of Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle. Then the compass swung a little farther south, and Reacher realized that Thurman had been skirting the airspace around Colorado Springs. An Air Force town, probably a little trigger-happy. Better to give it a wide berth.

Thurman kept the height at two thousand feet and the speed at a hundred and a quarter and the compass stayed a little south of southeast. Reacher consulted his mental maps again and figured that if they didn’t land or change course they were going to exit Colorado just left of the state’s bottom right-hand corner. The time readout on the dash showed seventeen minutes past seven in the evening, which was two minutes fast. Reacher thought about Vaughan, alone in her car. She would have heard the plane take off. She would be wondering why he hadn’t come back over the wall.

Thurman said, “You broke into a container last night.”

Reacher said, “Did I?”

“It’s a fair guess. Who else would have?”

Reacher said nothing.

Thurman said, “You saw the cars.”

“Did I?”

“Let’s assume so, like intelligent men.”

“Why do they bring them to you?”

“There are some things any government feels it politic to conceal.”

“What do you do with them?”

“The same thing we do with the wrecks towed off I-70. We recycle them. Steel is a wonderful thing, Mr. Reacher. It goes around and around. Peugeots and Toyotas from the Gulf might once have been Fords and Chevrolets from Detroit, and they in turn might once have been Rolls-Royces from England or Holdens from Australia. Or bicycles or refrigerators. Some steel is new, of course, but surprisingly little of it. Recycling is where the action is.”

“And the bottom line.”

“Naturally.”

“So why don’t you buy yourself a better plane?”

“You don’t like this one?”

“Not much,” Reacher said.

They flew on. There was nothing but darkness ahead, relieved occasionally by tiny clusters of yellow light far below. Hamlets, farms, gas stations. At one point Reacher saw brighter lights in the distance to the left and the right. Lamar, probably, and La Junta. Small towns, made larger by comparison with the emptiness all around them. Sometimes cars were visible on roads, tiny cones of blue light crawling slowly.

Reacher asked, “How is Underwood doing? The deputy?”

Thurman paused a moment. Then he said, “He passed on.”

“In the hospital?”

“Before we could get him there.”

“Will there be an autopsy?”

“He has no next of kin to request one.”

“Did you call the coroner?”

“No need. He was old, he got sick, he died.”

“He was about forty.”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s in store for all of us.”

“You don’t sound very concerned.”

“A good Christian has nothing to fear in death. And I own a town, Mr. Reacher. I see births and deaths all the time. One door closes, another opens.”

Thurman leaned back, his gut between him and the stick, his hands held low. The engine held fast on a mid-range roar and the whole plane shivered with vibration and bucked occasionally on rough air. The latitude number counted down slowly, and the longitude number slower still. Reacher closed his eyes. Flight time to the state line would be about seventy or eighty minutes. He figured they weren’t going to land in Colorado itself. There wasn’t much left of it. Just empty grassland. He figured they were going to Oklahoma, or Texas.

They flew on. The air got steadily worse. Reacher opened his eyes. Downdrafts dropped them into troughs like a stone. Then updrafts hurled them back up again. They were sideswiped by gusts of wind. Not like in a big commercial Boeing. No juddering vibration and bouncing wings. No implacable forward motion. Just violent physical displacement, like a pinball caught between bumpers. There was no storm outside. No rain, no lightning. No thunderheads. Just roiling evening thermals coming up off the plains in giant waves, invisible, compressing, decompressing, making solid walls and empty voids. Thurman held the stick loosely and let the plane buck and dive. Reacher moved in his seat and smoothed the harness straps over his shoulders.

Thurman said, “You are afraid of flying.”

“Flying is fine,” Reacher said. “Crashing is another story.”

“An old joke.”

“For a reason.”

Thurman started jerking the stick and hammering the rudder. The plane rose and fell sharply and smashed from side to side. At first Reacher thought they were seeking smoother air. Then he realized Thurman was deliberately making things worse. He was diving where the downdrafts were sucking anyway and climbing with the updrafts. He was turning into the side winds and taking them like roundhouse punches. The plane was hammering all over the sky. It was being tossed around like the insignificant piece of junk it was.

Thurman said, “This is why you need to get your life in order. The end could come at any time. Maybe sooner than you expect.”

Reacher said nothing.

Thurman said, “I could end it for you now. I could roll and stall and power dive. Two thousand feet, we’d hit the deck at three hundred miles an hour. The wings would come off first. The crater would be ten feet deep.”

Reacher said, “Go right ahead.”

“You mean that?”

“I dare you.”

An updraft hit and the plane was thrown upward and then the decompression wave came in and the lift under the wings dropped away to a negative value and the plane fell again. Thurman dropped the nose and hit the throttle and the engine screamed and the Piper tilted into a forty-five-degree power dive. The artificial horizon on the dash lit up red and a warning siren sounded. It was barely audible over the scream of the engine and the battering airflow. Then Thurman pulled out of the dive. He jerked the nose up. The airframe groaned as the main spar stressed and the plane curved level and then rose again through air that was momentarily calmer.

Reacher said, “Chicken.”

Thurman said, “I have nothing to fear.”

“So why pull out?”

“When I die, I’m going to a better place.”

“I thought the big guy got to make that decision, not you.”

“I’ve been a faithful servant.”

“So go for it. Go to a better place, right now. I dare you.”

Reacher said nothing. Thurman flew on, straight and level, through air that was calming down. Two thousand feet, a hundred and twenty-five knots, south of southeast.

“Chicken,” Reacher said again. “Phony.”

Thurman said, “God wants me to complete my task.”

“What, he told you that in the last two minutes?”

“I think you’re an atheist.”

“We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”

Thurman didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Just remember, it was you who was afraid to die, not me.”

They flew on, twenty more minutes. The air went still and quiet. Reacher closed his eyes again. Then dead-on an hour and a quarter total elapsed time Thurman moved in his seat. Reacher opened his eyes. Thurman hit a couple of switches and fired up his radio and held the stick with his knees and clamped a headset over his ears. The headset had a microphone on a boom that came off the left-hand earpiece. Thurman flicked it with his fingernail and said, “It’s me, on approach.” Reacher heard a muffled crackling reply and far below in the distance saw lights come on. Red and white runway lights, he assumed, but they were so far away they looked like a tiny pink pinpoint. Thurman started a long slow descent. Not very smooth. The plane was too small and light for finesse. It jerked and dropped and leveled and dropped again. Laterally it was nervous. It darted left, darted right. The pink pinpoint jumped around below them and drew closer and resolved into twin lines of red and white. The lines looked short. The plane wobbled and stumbled in the air and dipped low and then settled on a shallow path all the way down. The runway lights rushed up to meet it and started blurring past, left and right. For a second Reacher thought Thurman had left it too late, but then the wheels touched down and bounced once and settled back and Thurman cut the power and the plane rolled to a walk with half the runway still ahead of it. The engine note changed to a deep roar and the walk picked up to taxiing speed and Thurman jerked left off the runway and drove a hundred yards to a deserted apron. Reacher could see the vague outlines of brick buildings in the middle distance. He saw a vehicle approaching, headlights on. Big, dark, bulky.

A Humvee.

Camouflage paint.

The Humvee parked twenty feet from the Piper and the doors opened and two guys climbed out.

Battledress uniform, woodland pattern.

Soldiers.

59

Reacher sat for a moment in the sudden silence with his ears ringing and then he opened the Piper’s door and climbed out to the wing. Thurman passed him the cardboard carton. Reacher took it one-handed and slid down to the tarmac. The two soldiers snapped to attention and threw salutes and stood there like a ceremonial detail, expectantly. Thurman climbed down behind Reacher and took the box from him. One of the soldiers stepped forward. Thurman bowed slightly and offered the box. The soldier bowed slightly and took it and turned on his heel and slow-marched back to the Humvee. His partner fell in behind him, line astern. Thurman followed them. Reacher followed Thurman.

The soldiers stowed the box in the Humvee’s load bed and then climbed in the front. Reacher and Thurman got in the back. Big vehicle, small seats, well separated by the massive transmission tunnel. A diesel engine. They turned a tight circle on the apron and drove toward a building that stood alone in a patch of lawn. Lights were on in two ground floor windows. The Humvee parked and the soldiers retrieved the box from the load bed and slow-marched it into the building. A minute later they came back out again without it.

Thurman said, “Job done, for tonight, at least.”

Reacher asked, “What was in the jar?”

“People,” Thurman said. “Men, maybe women. We scrape them off the metal. When there’s been a fire, that’s all that’s left of them. Soot, baked onto steel. We scrape it off and collect it in twists of paper, and then we put the day’s gleanings into jars. It’s as close as we can get to giving them a proper burial.”

“Where are we?”

“Fort Shaw, Oklahoma. Up in the panhandle. They deal with recovered remains here. Among other things. They’re associated with the identification laboratory in Hawaii.”

“You come here every night?”

“As often as necessary. Which is most nights, sadly.”

“What happens now?”

“They give me dinner, and they gas up my plane.”

The soldiers climbed back into the front seats and the Humvee turned again and drove a hundred yards to the main cluster of buildings. A fifties army base, one of thousands in the world. Brick, green paint, whitewashed curbs, swept blacktop. Reacher had never been there before. Had never even heard of it. The Humvee parked by a side door that had a sign that said it led to the Officers’ Club. Thurman turned to Reacher and said, “I won’t ask you to join me for dinner. They’ll have set just one place, and it would embarrass them.”

Reacher nodded. He knew how to find food on post. Probably better food than Thurman would be eating in the O Club.

“I’ll be OK,” he said. “And thanks for asking.”

Thurman climbed out and disappeared through the O Club door. The grunts in the front of the Humvee craned around, unsure about what to do next. They were both privates first class, probably stationed permanently in the States. Maybe they had a little Germany time under their belts, but nothing else of significance. No Korea time. No desert time, certainly. They didn’t have the look. Reacher said, “Remember wearing diapers, when you were two years old?”

The driver said, “Sir, not specifically, sir.”

“Back then I was a major in the MPs. So I’m going to take a stroll now, and you don’t need to worry about it. If you want to worry about it, I’ll dig out your CO and we’ll do the brother officer thing, and he’ll OK it and you’ll look stupid. How does that sound?”

The guy wasn’t totally derelict. Not totally dumb. He asked, “Sir, what unit, and where?”

Reacher said, “110th MP. HQ was in Rock Creek, Virginia.”

The guy nodded. “It still is. The 110th is still in business.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Sir, you have a pleasant evening. Chow in the mess until ten, if you’re interested.”

“Thanks, soldier,” Reacher said. He climbed out and the Humvee drove away and left him. He stood still for a moment in the sharp night air and then set out walking to the standalone building. Its original purpose was unclear to him. No reason to have a physically separated building unless it held infectious patients or explosives, and it didn’t look like either a hospital or an armory. Hospitals were bigger and armories were stronger.

He went in the front door and found himself in a small square hallway with stairs ahead of him and doors either side. The upstairs windows had been dark. The lit windows had been on the ground floor. If in doubt, turn left was his motto. So he tried the left-hand door and came up empty. An administrative office, lights blazing, nobody in it. He stepped back to the hallway and tried the right-hand door. Found a medic with the rank of captain at a desk, with Thurman’s jar in front of him. The guy was young for a captain, but medics got promoted fast. They were usually two steps ahead of everyone else.

“Help you?” the guy said.

“I flew in with Thurman. I was curious about his jar.”

“Curious how?”

“Is it what he says it is?”

“Are you authorized to know?”

“I used to be. I was an MP. I did some forensic medicine with Nash Newman, who was probably your ultimate boss back when you were a second lieutenant. Unless he had retired already. He’s probably retired now.”

The guy nodded. “He is retired now. But I heard of him.”

“So are there human remains in the jar?”

“Probably. Almost certainly, in fact.”

“Carbon?”

“No carbon,” the guy said. “In a hot fire all the carbon is driven off as carbon dioxide. What’s left of a person after cremation are oxides of potassium, sodium, iron, calcium, maybe a little magnesium, all inorganic.”

“And that’s what’s in the jar?”

The guy nodded again. “Entirely consistent with burned human flesh and bone.”

“What do you do with it?”

“We send it to the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.”

“And what do they do with it?”

“Nothing,” the guy said. “There’s no DNA in it. It’s just soot, basically. The whole thing is an embarrassment, really. But Thurman keeps on showing up. He’s a sentimental old guy. We can’t turn him away, obviously. So we stage a sweet little ceremony and accept whatever he brings. Can’t trash it afterward, either. Wouldn’t be respectful. So we move it off our desks onto Hawaii’s. I imagine they stick it in a closet and forget all about it.”

“I’m sure they do. Does Thurman tell you where it comes from?”

“Iraq, obviously.”

“But what kind of vehicles?”

“Does it matter?”

“I would say so.”

“We don’t get those details.”

Reacher asked, “What was this building originally?”

“A VD clinic,” the medic said.

“You got a phone I could use?”

The guy pointed to a console on his desk.

“Have at it,” he said.

Reacher dialed 411 upside down and got the number for David Robert Vaughan, Fifth Street, Hope, Colorado. He said the number once under his breath to memorize it and then dialed it.

No answer.

He put the phone back in the cradle and asked, “Where’s the mess?”

“Follow your nose,” the medic said. Which was good advice. Reacher walked back to the main cluster and circled until he smelled the aroma of fried food coming out of a powerful extraction vent. The vent came through the wall of a low lean-to addition to a larger square one-story building. The mess kitchen, and the mess. Reacher went in and got a few questioning looks but no direct challenges. He got in line and picked up a cheeseburger the size of a softball, plus fries, plus beans, plus a mug of coffee. The burger was excellent, which was normal for the army. Mess cooks were in savage competition to produce the best patty. The coffee was excellent, too. A unique standardized blend, in Reacher’s opinion the best in the world. He had been drinking it all his life. The fries were fair and the beans were adequate. All in all, probably better than the limp piece of grilled fish the officers were getting.

He took more coffee and sat in an armchair and read the army papers. He figured the two PFCs would come get him when Thurman was ready to leave. They would drive their guests out to the flight line and salute smartly and finish their little show in style, just after midnight. Taxiing, takeoff, the climb, then ninety minutes in the air. That would get them back to Despair by two, which seemed to be the normal schedule. Three hours’ worth of free aviation fuel, plus a free four-hour dinner. Not bad, in exchange for a quarter-full jar of soot. A born-again-Christian American and a businessman was how Thurman had described himself. Whatever kind of a Christian he was, he was a useful businessman. That was for damn sure.

The mess kitchen closed. Reacher finished the papers and dozed. The PFCs never showed. At twelve-ten in the morning Reacher woke up and heard the Piper’s engine in the distance and by the time the sound registered in his mind it was revving hard. By the time he made it outside the little white plane was on the runway. He stood and watched as it lifted off and disappeared into the darkness above.

60

The Humvee came back from the flight line and the two PFCs got out and nodded to Reacher like nothing was wrong. Reacher said, “I was supposed to be on that plane.”

The driver said, “No sir, Mr. Thurman told us you had a one-way ticket tonight. He told us you were heading south from here, on business of your own. He told us you were all done in Colorado.”

Reacher said, “Shit.” He thought back to Thurman, in front of the airplane barn. The deliberate pause. Debate in his face, some kind of a long-range calculus, like he was playing a long game, thinking eight moves ahead.

Fly with me tonight.

I won’t ask you to join me for dinner.

Reacher shook his head. He was ninety minutes’ flying time from where he needed to be, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with no airplane.

Outwitted by a seventy-year-old preacher.

Dumb.

And tense.

I think they were all stirred up because they’re heading for the end of something.

What, he had no idea.

When, he had no clue.

He checked the map in his head. There were no highways in the Oklahoma panhandle. None at all. Just a thin red tracery of state four-lanes and county two-lanes. He glanced at the Humvee and at the PFCs and said, “You guys want to drive me out to a road?”

“Which road?”

“Any road that gets traffic more than once an hour.”

“You could try 287. That goes south.”

“I need to go north. Back to Colorado. Thurman wasn’t entirely frank with you.”

“287 goes north, too. All the way up to I-70.”

“How far is that?”

“Sir, I believe it’s dead-on two hundred miles.”

Hitchhiking had gotten more and more difficult in the ten years since Reacher left the army. Drivers were less generous, more afraid. The West was sometimes better than the East, which helped. Day was always better than night, which didn’t. The Humvee from Fort Shaw let him out at twelve-forty-five, and it was a quarter past one in the morning before he saw his first northbound vehicle, a Ford F150 that didn’t even slow down to take a look. It just blew past. Ten minutes later an old Chevy Blazer did the same thing. Reacher blamed the movies. They made people scared of strangers. Although in reality most movies had the passing strangers messed up by the locals, not the other way around. Weird inbred families that hunted people for sport. But mostly Reacher blamed himself. He knew he was no kind of an attractive roadside proposition. Look at yourself. What do you see? Maria from San Diego was the kind of person that got rides easily. Sweet, small, unthreatening, needy. Vaughan would do OK, too. Hulks six-five in height were a riskier bet.

At ten of two a dark Toyota pick-up at least slowed and took a look before passing by, which was progress of a sort. Five after two, a twenty-year-old Cadillac swept past. It had an out-of-tune motor and a collapsed rear suspension and an old woman low down behind the wheel. White hair, thin neck. What Reacher privately called a Q-tip. Not a likely prospect. Then at a quarter past two an old Suburban heaved into view. In Reacher’s experience new Suburbans were driven by uptight assholes, but old models were plain utilitarian vehicles often driven by plain utilitarian people. Their bulk often implied a kind of no-nonsense self-confidence on the part of their owners. The kind of self-confidence that said strangers weren’t necessarily a problem.

The best hope so far.

Reacher stepped off the shoulder and put one foot in the traffic lane. Cocked his thumb in a way that suggested need, but not desperation.

The Suburban’s brights came on.

It slowed.

It stopped altogether fifteen feet short of where Reacher was standing. A smart move. It gave the guy behind the wheel a chance to look over his potential passenger without the kind of social pressure that face-to-face proximity would imply. Reacher couldn’t see the driver. Too much dazzle from the headlights.

A decision was made. The headlights died back to low beam and the truck rolled forward and stopped again. The window came down. The driver was a fat red-faced man. He was clinging to the wheel like he would fall out of his chair if he didn’t. He said, “Where are you headed?” His voice was slurred.

Reacher said, “North into Colorado. I’m trying to get to a place called Hope.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Me neither, until a few days ago.”

“How far away?”

“Maybe four hours.”

“Is it on the way to Denver?”

“It would be a slight detour.”

“Are you an honest man?”

Reacher said, “Usually.”

“Are you a good driver?”

“Not really.”

“Are you drunk?”

Reacher said, “Not even a little bit.”

The guy said, “Well, I am. A lot. So you drive to wherever it is you want to go, keep me out of trouble, let me sleep it off, and then point me toward Denver, OK?”

Reacher said, “Deal.”

Hitchhiking usually carried with it the promise of random personal encounters and conversations made more intense by the certainty that their durations would necessarily be limited. Not this time. The florid guy heaved himself over into the passenger seat and collapsed its back against a worn mechanism and went straight to sleep without another word. He snored and bubbled far back in his throat and he thrashed restlessly. According to the smell of his breath he had been drinking bourbon all evening. A lot of bourbon, probably with bourbon chasers. He was still going to be illegal when he woke up in four hours’ time and pressed on to Denver.

Not Reacher’s problem.

The Suburban was old and worn and grimy. Its total elapsed mileage was displayed in a window below the center of the speedometer in LED figures like a cheap watch. A lot of figures, starting with a two. The motor wasn’t in great shape. It still had power but it had a lot of weight to haul and it didn’t want to go much faster than sixty miles an hour. There was a cell phone on the center console. It was switched off. Reacher glanced at his sleeping passenger and switched it on. It wouldn’t spark up. No charge in the battery. There was a charger plugged into the cigarette lighter. Reacher steered with his knees and traced the free end of the wire and shoved it into a hole on the bottom of the phone. Tried the switch again. The phone came on with a tinkly little tune. The sleeping guy just snored on.

The phone showed no service. The middle of nowhere.

The road narrowed from four lanes to two. Reacher drove on. Five miles ahead he could see a pair of red tail lights. Small lights, set low, widely spaced. Moving north a little slower than the Suburban. The speed differential was maybe five miles an hour, which meant it took sixty whole minutes to close the gap. The lights were on a U-Haul truck. It was cruising at about fifty-five. When Reacher came up behind it, it sped up to a steady sixty. Reacher pulled out and tried to pass, but the Suburban wouldn’t accelerate. It bogged down at about sixty-two, which would have put Reacher on the wrong side of the road for a long, long time. Maybe forever. So he eased off and tucked in behind the truck and battled the frustration of having to drive just a little slower than he wanted to. The cell phone was still showing no service. There was nothing to see behind. Nothing to see to the sides. The world was dark and empty. Thirty feet ahead, the U-Haul’s back panel was lit up bright by the Suburban’s headlights. It was like a rolling billboard. An advertisement. It had a picture of three trucks parked side by side at an angle: small, medium, and large. Each was shown in U-Haul’s distinctive orange and white colors. Each had U-Haul painted on its front. Each promised an automatic transmission, a gentle ride, a low deck, air conditioning, and cloth seats. A price of nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents was advertised in large figures. Reacher eased the Suburban closer to check the fine print. The bargain price was for in-town use of a small truck for one day, mileage extra, subject to contract terms. Reacher eased off again and fell back.

U-Haul.

You haul. We don’t. Independence, self-reliance, initiative.

In general Reacher didn’t care for the corruption of written language. U for you, EZ for easy, hi for high, lo for low. He had spent many years in school learning to read and spell and he wanted to feel that there had been some point to it. But he couldn’t get too worked up about U-Haul. What was the alternative? Self-Drive Trucks? Too clunky. Too generic. No kind of a catchy business name. He followed thirty feet behind the bright rolling billboard and the triple U-Haul logos blurred together and filled his field of view.

U for you.

Then he thought: You for U.

You did this to me.

To assume makes an ass out of u and me.

He checked the phone again.

No signal. They were in the middle of the Comanche National Grassland. Like being way out at sea. The closest cell tower was probably in Lamar, which was about an hour ahead.

The drunk guy slept noisily and Reacher followed the wallowing U-Haul truck for sixty solid minutes. Lamar showed up ahead as a faint glow on the horizon. Probably not more than a couple of streetlights, but in contrast to the black grassland all around it felt like a destination. There was a small municipal airfield to the west. And there was cell coverage. Reacher glanced down and saw two bars showing on the phone’s signal strength meter. He dialed Vaughan’s home number from memory.

No answer.

He clicked off and dialed information. Asked for the Hope PD. Let the phone company connect him. He figured his sleeping passenger could spring for the convenience. He heard the ring tone and then there was a click and more ring tone. Automatic call forwarding, he guessed. The Hope PD building wasn’t manned at night. Vaughan had mentioned a day guy, but no night guy. Incoming calls would be rerouted out straight to the nighttime prowl car. To a cell provided by the department, or to a personal cell. Ten nights out of fourteen it would be Vaughan answering. But not tonight. She was off duty. It would be another officer out there chasing gum wrappers. Maybe a deputy.

A voice in his ear said, “Hope PD.”

Reacher said, “I need to talk to Officer Vaughan.”

The guy in the passenger seat stirred, but didn’t wake up.

The voice in Reacher’s ear said, “Officer Vaughan is off duty tonight.”

Reacher said, “I know. But I need her cell number.”

“I can’t give that to you.”

“Then call it yourself and ask her to call me back on this number.”

“I might wake her.”

“You won’t.”

Silence.

Reacher said, “This is important. And be quick. I’ll be heading out of range in a minute.”

He clicked off. The town of Lamar loomed up ahead. Low dark buildings, a tall water tower, a lit-up gas station. The U-Haul pulled off for fuel. Reacher checked the Suburban’s gauge. Half-full. A big tank. But a thirsty motor and many miles to go. He followed the U-Haul to the pumps. Unplugged the phone. It showed decent battery and marginal reception. He put it in his shirt pocket.

The pumps were operational but the pay booth was closed up and dark. The guy from the U-Haul poked a credit card into a slot on the pump and pulled it out again. Reacher used his ATM card and did the same thing. The pump started up and Reacher selected regular unleaded and watched in horror as the numbers flicked around. Gas was expensive. That was for damn sure. More than three bucks for a gallon. The last time he had filled a car, the price had been a dollar. He nodded to the U-Haul guy, who nodded back. The U-Haul guy was a youngish well-built man with long hair. He was wearing a tight black short-sleeve shirt with a clerical collar. Some kind of a minister of religion. Probably played the guitar.

The phone rang in Reacher’s pocket. He left the nozzle wedged in the filler neck and turned away and answered. The Hope cop said, “Vaughan didn’t pick up her cell.”

Reacher said, “Try your radio. She’s out in the watch commander’s car.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why is she out in the watch commander’s car?”

“Long story.”

“You’re the guy she’s been hanging with?”

“Just call her.”

“She’s married, you know.”

“I know. Now call her.”

The guy stayed on the line and Reacher heard him get on the radio. A call sign, a code, a request for an immediate response, all repeated once, and then again. Then the sound of dead air. Buzzing, crackling, the heterodyne whine of nighttime interference from high in the ionosphere. Plenty of random noise.

But nothing else.

No reply from Vaughan.

61

Reacher got out of the gas station ahead of the minister in the U-Haul and headed north as fast as the old Suburban would go. The drunk guy slept on next to him. He was leaking alcohol through his pores. Reacher cracked a window. The night air kept him awake and sober and the whistle masked the snoring. Cell coverage died eight miles north of Lamar. Reacher guessed it wouldn’t come back until they got close to the I-70 corridor, which was two hours ahead. It was four-thirty in the morning. ETA in Hope, around dawn. A five-hour delay, which was an inconvenience, but maybe not a disaster.

Then the Suburban’s engine blew.

Reacher was no kind of an automotive expert. He didn’t see it coming. He saw the temperature needle nudge upward a tick, and thought nothing of it. Just stress and strain, he figured, because of the long fast cruise. But the needle didn’t stop moving. It went all the way up into the red zone and didn’t stop until it was hard against the peg. The motor lost power and a hot wet smell came in through the vents. Then there was a muffled thump under the hood and strings of tan emulsion blew out of the ventilation slots in front of the windshield and spattered all over the glass. The motor died altogether and the Suburban slowed hard. Reacher steered to the shoulder and coasted to a stop.

Not good, he thought.

The drunk guy slept on.

Reacher got out in the darkness and headed around to the front of the hood. He used the flats of his hands to bounce some glow from the headlight beams back onto the car. He saw steam. And sticky tan sludge leaking from every crevice. Thick, and foamy. A mixture of engine oil and cooling water. Blown head gaskets. Total breakdown. Repairable, but not without hundreds of dollars and a week in the shop.

Not good.

Half a mile south he could see the U-Haul’s lights coming his way. He stepped around to the passenger door and leaned in over the sleeping guy and found a pen and an old service invoice in the glove compartment. He turned the invoice over and wrote: You need to buy a new car. I borrowed your cell phone. Will mail it back. He signed the note: Your hitchhiker. He took the Suburban’s registration for the guy’s address and folded it into his pocket. Then he ran fifty feet south and stepped into the traffic lane and held his arms high and waited to flag the U-Haul down. It picked him up in its headlights about fifty yards out. Reacher waved his arms above his head. The universal distress signal. The U-Haul’s headlights flicked to bright. The truck slowed, like Reacher knew it would. A lonely road, and a disabled vehicle and a stranded driver, both of them at least fleetingly familiar to the Good Samaritan behind the wheel.

The U-Haul came to rest a yard in front of Reacher, halfway on the shoulder. The window came down and the guy in the dog collar stuck his head out.

“Need help?” he said. Then he smiled, wide and wholesome. “Dumb question, I guess.”

“I need a ride,” Reacher said. “The engine blew.”

“Want me to take a look?”

Reacher said, “No.” He didn’t want the minister to see the drunk guy. From a distance he was out of sight on the reclined seat, below the window line. Close up, he was big and obvious. Abandoning a broken-down truck in the middle of nowhere was one thing. Abandoning a comatose passenger was another. “No point, believe me. I’ll have to send a tow truck. Or set fire to the damn thing.”

“I’m headed north to Yuma. You’re welcome to join me, for all or part of the way.”

Reacher nodded. Called up the map in his head. The Yuma road crossed the Hope road about two hours ahead. The same road he had come in on originally, with the old guy in the green Grand Marquis. He would need to find a third ride, for the final western leg. His ETA was now about ten in the morning, with luck. He said, “Thanks. I’ll jump out about halfway to Yuma.”

The guy in the dog collar smiled his wholesome smile again and said, “Hop in.”

The U-Haul was a full-sized pick-up frame overwhelmed by a box body a little longer and wider and a lot taller than a pick-up’s load bed. It sagged and wallowed and the extra weight and aerodynamic resistance made it slow. It struggled up close to sixty miles an hour and stayed there. Wouldn’t go any faster. Inside it smelled of warm exhaust fumes and hot oil and plastic. But the seat was cloth, as advertised, and reasonably comfortable. Reacher had to fight to stay awake. He wanted to be good company. He didn’t want to replicate the drunk guy’s manners.

He asked, “What are you hauling?”

The guy in the collar said, “Used furniture. Donations. We run a mission in Yuma.”

“We?”

“Our church.”

“What kind of a mission?”

“We help the homeless and the needy.”

“What kind of a church?”

“We’re Anglicans, plain vanilla, middle of the road.”

“Do you play the guitar?”

The guy smiled again. “We try to be inclusive.”

“Where I’m going, there’s an End Times Church.”

The minister shook his head. “An End Times congregation, maybe. It’s not a recognized denomination.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Have you read the Book of Revelation?”

Reacher said, “I’ve heard of it.”

The minister said, “Its correct title is The Revelation of Saint John the Divine. Most of the original is lost, of course. It was written either in Ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Koine Greek, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Latin, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Elizabethan English and printed, with opportunities for error and confusion at every single stage. Now it reads like a bad acid trip. I suspect it always did. Possibly all the translations and all the copying actually improved it.”

“What does it say?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Are you serious?”

“Some of our homeless people make more sense.”

“What do people think it says?”

“Broadly, the righteous ascend to heaven, the unholy are left on earth and are visited by various colorful plagues and disasters, Christ returns to battle the Antichrist in an Armageddon scenario, and no one winds up very happy.”

“Is that the same as the Rapture?”

“The Rapture is the ascending part. The plagues and the fighting are separate. They come afterward.”

“When is all this supposed to happen?”

“It’s perpetually imminent, apparently.”

Reacher thought back to Thurman’s smug little speech in the metal plant. There are signs, he had said. And the possibility of precipitating events.

Reacher asked, “What would be the trigger?”

“I’m not sure there’s a trigger, as such. Presumably a large element of divine will would be involved. One would certainly hope so.”

“Pre-echoes, then? Ways to know it’s coming?”

The minister shrugged at the wheel. “End Times people read the Bible like other people listen to Beatles records backward. There’s something about a red calf being born in the Holy Land. End Times enthusiasts are real keen on that part. They comb through ranches, looking for cattle a little more auburn than usual. They ship pairs to Israel, hoping they’ll breed a perfect redhead. They want to get things started. That’s another key characteristic. They can’t wait. Because they’re all awfully sure they’ll be among the righteous. Which makes them self-righteous, actually. Most people accept that who gets saved is God’s decision, not man’s. It’s a form of snobbery, really. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”

“That’s it? Red calves?”

“Most enthusiasts believe that a major war in the Middle East is absolutely necessary, which is why they’ve been so unhappy about Iraq. Apparently what’s happening there isn’t bad enough for them.”

“You sound skeptical.”

The guy smiled again.

“Of course I’m skeptical,” he said. “I’m an Anglican.”

There was no more conversation after that, either theological or secular. Reacher was too tired and the guy behind the wheel was too deep into night-driving survival mode, where nothing existed except the part of the road ahead that his headlights showed him. His eyes were wedged open and he was sitting forward, as if he knew that to relax would be fatal. Reacher stayed awake, too. He knew the Hope road wouldn’t be signposted and it wasn’t exactly a major highway. The guy behind the wheel wouldn’t spot it on his own.

It arrived exactly two hours into the trip, a lumpy two-lane crossing their path at an exact right angle. It had stop signs, and the main north-south drag didn’t. By the time Reacher called it and the minister reacted and the U-Haul’s overmatched brakes did their job they were two hundred yards past it. Reacher got out and waved the truck away and waited until its lights and its noise were gone. Then he walked back through the dark empty vastness. Predawn was happening way to the east, over Kansas or Missouri. Colorado was still pitch black. There was no cell phone signal.

No traffic, either.

Reacher took up station on the west side of the junction, standing on the shoulder close to the traffic lane. East-west drivers would have to pause at the stop sign opposite, and they would get a good look at him twenty yards ahead. But there were no east-west drivers. Not for the first ten minutes. Then the first fifteen, then the first twenty. A lone car came north, trailing the U-Haul by twenty miles, but it didn’t turn off. It just blasted onward. An SUV came south, and slowed, ready to turn, but it turned east, away from Hope. Its lights grew small and faint and then they disappeared.

It was cold. There was a wind coming out of the east, and it was moving rain clouds into the sky. Reacher turned his collar up and crossed his arms over his chest and trapped his hands under his biceps for warmth. Cloudy diffused streaks of pink and purple lit up the far horizon. A new day, empty, innocent, as yet unsullied. Maybe a good day. Maybe a bad day. Maybe the last day. The end is near, Thurman’s church had promised. Maybe a meteorite the size of a moon was hurtling closer. Maybe governments had suppressed the news. Maybe rebels were right then forcing the locks on an old Ukrainian silo. Maybe in a research lab somewhere a flask had cracked or a glove had torn or a mask had leaked.

Or maybe not. Reacher stamped his feet and ducked his face into his shoulder. His nose was cold. When he looked up again he saw headlights in the east. Bright, widely spaced, far enough away that they seemed to be static. A large vehicle. A truck. Possibly a semi trailer. Coming straight toward him, with the new dawn behind it.

Four possibilities. One, it would arrive at the junction and turn right and head north. Two, it would arrive at the junction and turn left and head south. Three, it would pause at the stop sign and then continue west without picking him up. Four, it would pause and cross the main drag and then pause again to let him climb aboard.

Chances of a happy ending, twenty-five percent. Or less, if it was a corporate vehicle with a no-passenger policy because of insurance hassles.

Reacher waited.

When the truck was a quarter-mile away he saw that it was a big rigid panel van, painted white. When it was three hundred yards away he saw that it had a refrigerator unit mounted on top. Fresh food delivery, which would have reduced the odds of a happy outcome if it hadn’t been for the stop signs. Food drivers usually didn’t like to stop. They had schedules to keep, and stopping a big truck and then getting it back up to speed could rob a guy of measurable minutes. But the stop signs meant he had to slow anyway.

Reacher waited.

He heard the guy lift off two hundred yards short of the junction. Heard the hiss of brakes. He raised his hand high, thumb extended. I need a ride. Then he raised both arms and waved. The distress semaphore. I really need a ride.

The truck stopped at the line on the east side of the junction. Neither one of its direction indicators was flashing. A good sign. There was no traffic north or south, so it moved on again immediately, diesel roaring, gears grinding, heading west across the main drag, straight toward Reacher. It accelerated. The driver looked down. The truck kept on moving.

Then it slowed again.

The air brakes hissed loud and the springs squealed and the truck came to a stop with the cab forty feet west of the junction and the rear fender a yard out of the north-south traffic lane. Reacher turned and jogged back and climbed up on the step. The window came down and the driver peered out from seven feet south. He was a short, wiry man, incongruously small in the huge cab. He said, “It’s going to rain.”

Reacher said, “That’s the least of my problems. My car broke down.”

The guy at the wheel said, “My first stop is Hope.”

Reacher said, “You’re the supermarket guy. From Topeka.”

“I left there at four this morning. You want to ride along?”

“Hope is where I’m headed.”

“So quit stalling and climb aboard.”

Dawn chased the truck all the way west, and overtook it inside thirty minutes. The world lit up cloudy and pale gold and the supermarket guy killed his headlights and sat back and relaxed. He drove the same way Thurman had flown his plane, with small efficient movements and his hands held low. Reacher asked him if he often carried passengers and he said that about one morning in five he found someone looking for a ride. Reacher said he had met a couple of women who had ridden with him.

“Tourists,” the guy said.

“More than that,” Reacher said.

“You think?”

“I know.”

“How much?”

“All of it.”

“How?”

“I figured it out.”

The guy nodded at the wheel.

“Wives and girlfriends,” he said. “Looking to be close by while their husbands and boyfriends pass through the state.”

“Understandable,” Reacher said. “It’s a tense time for them.”

“So you know what their husbands and boyfriends are?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “I do.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Not my business.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone?”

“There’s a cop called Vaughan,” Reacher said. “I’m going to have to tell her. She has a right to know. She’s involved, two ways around.”

“I know her. She’s not going to be happy.”

Reacher said, “Maybe she will be, maybe she won’t be.”

“I’m not involved,” the guy said. “I’m just a fellow traveler.”

“You are involved,” Reacher said. “We’re all involved.”

Then he checked his borrowed cell phone again. No signal.

There was nothing on the radio, either. The supermarket guy hit a button that scanned the whole AM spectrum from end to end, and he came up with nothing. Just static. A giant continent, mostly empty. The truck hammered on, bouncing and swaying on the rough surface. Reacher asked, “Where does Despair get its food?”

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “And I don’t care.”

“Ever been there?”

“Once. Just to take a look. And once was enough.”

“Why do people stay there?”

“I don’t know. Inertia, maybe.”

“Are there jobs elsewhere?”

“Plenty. They could head west to Halfway. Lots of jobs there. Or Denver. That place is expanding, for sure. Hell, they could come east to Topeka. We’re growing like crazy. Nice houses, great schools, good wages, right there for the taking. This is the land of opportunity.”

Reacher nodded and checked his cell phone again. No signal.

They made it to Hope just before ten in the morning. The place looked calm and quiet and unchanged. Clouds were massing overhead and it was cold. Reacher got out on First Street and stood for a moment. His cell phone showed good signal. But he didn’t dial. He walked down to Fifth and turned east. From fifty yards away he saw that there was nothing parked on the curb outside Vaughan’s house. No cruiser, no black Crown Vic. Nothing at all. He walked on, to get an angle and check the driveway.

The old blue Chevy pick-up was in the driveway. It was parked nose-in, tight to the garage door. It had glass in its windows again. The glass was still labeled with paper barcodes and it was crisp and clear except where it was smeared in places with wax and handprints. It looked very new against the faded old paint. The ladder and the wrecking bar and the flashlight were in the load bed. Reacher walked up the stepping-stone path to the door and rang the bell. He heard it sound inside the house. The neighborhood was still and silent. He stood on the step for thirty long seconds and then the door opened.

Vaughan looked out at him and said, “Hello.”

62

Vaughan was dressed in the same black clothes she had worn the night before. She looked still and calm and composed. And a little distant. A little preoccupied. Reacher said, “I was worried about you.”

Vaughan said, “Were you?”

“I tried to call you twice. Here, and in the car. Where were you?”

“Here and there. You better come in.”

The kitchen looked just the same as before. Neat, clean, decorated, three chairs at the table. There was a glass of water on the counter and coffee in the machine.

Reacher said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get right back.”

“Don’t apologize to me.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You want coffee?”

“After you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“Like hell.”

“OK, we shouldn’t have done what we did the night before last.”

“Which part?”

“You know which part. You took advantage. I started to feel bad about it. So when you didn’t come back with the plane I switched off my phone and my radio and drove out to Colorado Springs and told David all about it.”

“In the middle of the night?”

Vaughan shrugged. “They let me in. They were very nice about it, actually. They treated me very well.”

“And what did David say?”

“That’s cruel.”

Reacher shook his head. “It isn’t cruel. It’s a simple question.”

“What’s your point?”

“That David no longer exists. Not as you knew him. Not in any meaningful sense. And that you’ve got a choice to make. And it’s not a new choice. There have been mass casualties from the Civil War onward. There have been tens of thousands of men in David’s position over more than a century. And therefore there have been tens of thousands of women in your position.”

“And?”

“They all made a choice.”

“David still exists.”

“In your memory. Not in the world.”

“He’s not dead.”

“He’s not alive, either.”

Vaughan said nothing. Just turned away and took a fine china mug from a cupboard and filled it with coffee from the machine. She handed the mug to Reacher and asked, “What was in Thurman’s little box?”

“You saw the box?”

“I was over the wall ten seconds after you. Did you really think I was going to wait in the car?”

“I didn’t see you.”

“That was the plan. But I saw you. I saw the whole thing. Fly with me tonight? He ditched you somewhere, didn’t he?”

Reacher nodded. “Fort Shaw, Oklahoma. An army base.”

“You fell for it.”

“I sure did.”

“You’re not as smart as you think.”

“I never claimed to be smart.”

“What was in the box?”

“A plastic jar.”

“What was in the jar?”

“Soot,” Reacher said. “People, after a fire. They scrape it off the metal.”

Vaughan sat down at her table.

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“Worse than terrible,” Reacher said. “Complicated.”

“How?”

Reacher sat down opposite her.

“You can breathe easy,” he said. “There are no wrecked Humvees at the plant. They go someplace else.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Humvees don’t burn like that. Mostly they bust open and people spill out.”

Vaughan nodded. “David wasn’t burned.”

Reacher said, “Only tanks burn like that. No way out of a burning tank. Soot is all that’s left.”

“I see.”

Reacher said nothing.

“But how is that complicated?” she asked.

“It’s the first in a series of conclusions. Like a logical chain reaction. We’re using main battle tanks over there. Which isn’t a huge surprise, I guess. But we’re losing some, which is a huge surprise. We always expected to lose a few, to the Soviets. But we sure as hell didn’t expect to lose any to a bunch of ragtag terrorists with improvised explosive devices. In less than four years they’ve figured out how to make shaped charges good enough to take out main battle tanks belonging to the U.S. Army. That doesn’t help our PR very much. I’m real glad the Cold War is over. The Red Army would be helpless with laughter. No wonder the Pentagon ships the wrecks in sealed containers to a secret location.”

Vaughan got up and walked over to her counter and picked up her glass of water. She emptied it in the sink and refilled it from a bottle in her refrigerator. Took a sip.

“I got a call this morning,” she said. “From the state lab. My tap water sample was very close to five parts per billion TCE. Borderline acceptable, but it’s going to get a lot worse if Thurman keeps on using as much of the stuff as he uses now.”

“He might stop,” Reacher said.

“Why would he?”

“That’s the final conclusion in the chain. We’re not there yet. And it’s only tentative.”

“So what was the second conclusion?”

“What does Thurman do with the wrecked tanks?”

“He recycles the steel.”

“Why would the Pentagon deploy MPs to guard recycled steel?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Pentagon wouldn’t. Nobody cares about steel. The MPs are there to guard something else.”

“Like what?”

“Only one possibility. A main battle tank’s front and side armor includes a thick layer of depleted uranium. It’s a byproduct from enriching natural uranium for nuclear reactors. It’s an incredibly strong and dense metal. Absolutely ideal for armor plate. So the second conclusion is that Thurman is a uranium specialist. And that’s what the MPs are there for. Because depleted uranium is toxic and somewhat radioactive. It’s the kind of thing you want to keep track of.”

“How toxic? How radioactive?”

“Tank crews don’t get sick from sitting behind it. But after a blast or an explosion, if it turns to dust or fragments or vapor, you can get very sick from breathing it, or by being hit by shrapnel made of it. That’s why they bring the wrecks back to the States. And that’s what the MPs are worried about, even here. Terrorists could steal it and break it up into small jagged pieces and pack them into an explosive device. It would make a perfect dirty bomb.”

“It’s heavy.”

“Incredibly.”

“They’d need a truck to steal it. Like you said.”

“A big truck.”

Reacher sipped his coffee and Vaughan sipped her water and said, “They’re cutting it up at the plant. With hammers and torches. That must make dust and fragments and vapor. No wonder everyone looks sick.”

Reacher nodded.

“The deputy died from it,” he said. “All those symptoms? Hair loss, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, blisters, sores, dehydration, organ failure? That wasn’t old age or TCE. It was radiation poisoning.”

“Are you sure?”

Reacher nodded again. “Very sure. Because he told me so. From his deathbed he said The, and then he stopped, and then he started again. He said, You did this to me. I thought it was a new sentence. I thought he was accusing me. But it was really all the same sentence. He was pausing for breath, that’s all. He was saying, The U did this to me. Like some kind of a plea, or an explanation, or maybe a warning. He was using the chemical symbol for uranium. Metal-workers’ slang, I guess. He was saying, The uranium did this to me.”

Vaughan said, “The air at the plant must be thick with it. And we were right there.”

Reacher said, “Remember the way the wall glowed? On the infrared camera? It wasn’t hot. It was radioactive.”

63

Vaughan sipped her bottled water and stared into space, adjusting to a new situation that was in some ways better than she had imagined, and in some ways worse. She asked, “Why do you say there are no Humvees there?”

Reacher said, “Because the Pentagon specializes. Like I told you. It always has, and it always will. The plant in Despair is about uranium recycling. That’s all. Humvees go somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper. Because they’re easy. They’re just cars.”

“They send cars to Despair, too. We saw them. In the container. From Iraq or Iran.”

Reacher nodded.

“Exactly,” he said. “Which is the third conclusion. They sent those cars to Despair for a reason.”

“Which was what?”

“Only one logical possibility. Depleted uranium isn’t just for armor. They make artillery shells and tank shells out of it, too. Because it’s incredibly hard and dense.”

“So?”

“So the third conclusion is that those cars were hit with ammunition made from depleted uranium. They’re tainted, so they have to be processed appropriately. And they have to be hidden away. Because we’re using tanks and DU shells against thin-skinned civilian vehicles. That’s overkill. That’s very bad PR. Thurman said there are some things any government feels it politic to conceal, and he was right.”

“What the hell is happening over there?”

Reacher said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Vaughan raised her glass halfway and stopped. She looked at it like she was having second thoughts about ingesting anything and put it back down on the table. She said, “Tell me what you know about dirty bombs.”

“They’re the same as clean bombs,” Reacher said. “Except they’re dirty. A bomb detonates and creates a massive spherical pressure wave that knocks things over and pulps anything soft, like people, and small fragments of the casing are flung outward on the wave like bullets, which does further damage. That effect can be enhanced by packing extra shrapnel inside the casing around the explosive charge, like nails or ball bearings. A dirty bomb uses contaminated metal for the extra shrapnel, usually radioactive waste.”

“How bad is the result?”

“That’s debatable. With depleted uranium, the powdered oxides after a high-temperature explosion are certainly bad news. There are fertility issues, miscarriages, and birth defects. Most people think the radiation itself isn’t really a huge problem. Except that, like I said, it’s debatable. Nobody really knows for sure. Which is the exact problem. Because you can bet your ass everyone will err on the side of caution. Which multiplies the effect, psychologically. It’s classic asymmetric warfare. If a dirty bomb goes off in a city, the city will be abandoned, whether it needs to be or not.”

“How big would the bomb need to be?”

“The bigger the better.”

“How much uranium would they need to steal?”

“The more the merrier.”

Vaughan said, “I think they’re already stealing it. That truck we photographed? The front of the load compartment was glowing just like the wall.”

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “That was something else entirely.”

64

Reacher said, “Walk to town with me. To the motel.”

Vaughan said, “I don’t know if I want to be seen with you. Especially at the motel. People are talking.”

“But not in a bad way.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Whatever, I’ll be gone tomorrow. So let them talk for one more day.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe earlier. I might need to stick around to make a phone call. Apart from that, I’m done here.”

“Who do you need to call?”

“Just a number. I don’t think anyone will answer.”

“What about all this other stuff going on?”

“So far all we’ve got is the Pentagon washing its dirty linen in private. That’s not a crime.”

“What’s at the motel?”

“I’m guessing we’ll find room four is empty.”

They walked together through the damp late-morning air, two blocks north from Fifth Street to Third, and then three blocks west to the motel. They bypassed the office and headed on down the row. Room four’s door was standing open. There was a maid’s cart parked outside. The bed was stripped and the bathroom towels were dumped in a pile on the floor. The closets were empty. The maid had a vacuum cleaner going.

Vaughan said, “Mrs. Rogers is gone.”

Reacher nodded. “Now let’s find out when and how.”

They backtracked to the office. The clerk was on her stool behind the counter. Room four’s key was back on its hook. Now only two keys were missing. Reacher’s own, for room twelve, and Maria’s, for room eight.

The clerk slid off her stool and stood with her hands spread on the counter. Attentive, and helpful. Reacher glanced at the phone beside her and asked, “Did Mrs. Rogers get a call?”

The clerk nodded. “Six o’clock last night.”

“Good news?”

“She seemed very happy.”

“What then?”

“She checked out.”

“And went where?”

“She called a cab to take her to Burlington.”

“What’s in Burlington?”

“Mostly the airport bus to Denver.”

Reacher nodded. “Thanks for your help.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“That depends on your point of view.”

Reacher was hungry and he needed more coffee, so he led Vaughan another block north and another block west to the diner. The place was practically empty. Too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. Reacher stood for a second and then slid into the booth that Lucy Anderson had used the night he had met her. Vaughan sat across from him, where Lucy had sat. The waitress delivered ice water and silverware. They ordered coffee, and then Vaughan asked, “What exactly is going on?”

“All those young guys,” Reacher said. “What did they have in common?”

“I don’t know.”

“They were young, and they were guys.”

“And?”

“They were from California.”

“So?”

“And the only white one we saw had a hell of a tan.”

“So?”

Reacher said, “I sat right here with Lucy Anderson. She was cautious and a little wary, but basically we were getting along. She asked to see my wallet, to check I wasn’t an investigator. Then later I said I had been a cop, and she panicked. I put two and two together and figured her husband was a fugitive. The more she thought about it, the more worried she got. She was very hostile the next day.”

“Figures.”

“Then I caught a glimpse of her husband in Despair and went back to check the rooming house where he was staying. It was empty, but it was very clean.”

“Is that important?”

“Crucial,” Reacher said. “Then I saw Lucy again, after her husband had moved on. She said they have lawyers. She talked about people in her position. She sounded like she was part of something organized. I said I could follow her to her husband and she said it wouldn’t do me any good.”

The waitress came over with the coffee. Two mugs, two spoons, a Bunn flask full of a brand-new brew. She poured and walked away and Reacher sniffed the steam and took a sip.

“But I was misremembering all along,” he said. “I didn’t tell Lucy Anderson that I had been a cop. I told her I had been a military cop. That’s why she panicked. And that’s why the rooming house was so clean. It was like a barracks ready for inspection. Old habits die hard. The people passing through it were all soldiers. Lucy thought I was tracking them.”

Vaughan said, “Deserters.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s why the Anderson guy had such a great tan. He had been in Iraq. But he didn’t want to go back.”

“Where is he now?”

“Canada,” Reacher said. “That’s why Lucy wasn’t worried about me following her. It wouldn’t do me any good. No jurisdiction. It’s a sovereign nation, and they’re offering asylum up there.”

“The truck,” Vaughan said. “It was from Ontario.”

Reacher nodded. “Like a taxi service. The glow on the camera wasn’t stolen uranium. It was Mrs. Rogers’s husband in a hidden compartment. Body heat, like the driver. The shade of green was the same.”

65

Vaughan sat still and quiet for a long time. The waitress came back and refilled Reacher’s mug twice. Vaughan didn’t touch hers.

She asked, “What was the California connection?”

Reacher said, “Some kind of an anti-war activist group out there must be running an escape line. Maybe local service families are involved. They figured out a system. They sent guys up here with legitimate metal deliveries, and then their Canadian friends took them north over the border. There was a couple at the Despair hotel seven months ago, from California. A buck gets ten they were the organizers, recruiting sympathizers. And the sympathizers policed the whole thing. They busted your truck’s windows. They thought I was getting too nosy, and they were trying to move me on.”

Vaughan pushed her mug out of the way and moved the salt and the pepper and the sugar in front of her. She put them in a neat line. She straightened her index finger and jabbed at the pepper shaker. Moved it out of place. Jabbed at it again, and knocked it over.

“A small subgroup,” she said. “The few left-hand people, working behind Thurman’s back. Helping deserters.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan asked, “Do you know who they are?”

“No idea.”

“I want to find out.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to have them arrested. I want to call the FBI with a list of names.”

“OK.”

“Well, don’t you want to?”

Reacher said, “No, I don’t.”

Vaughan was too civilized and too small town to have the fight in the diner. She just threw money on the table and stalked out. Reacher followed her, like he knew he was supposed to. She headed toward the quieter area on the edge of town, or toward the motel again, or toward the police station. Reacher wasn’t sure which. Either she wanted solitude, or to demand phone records from the motel clerk, or to be in front of her computer. She was walking fast, in a fury, but Reacher caught her easily. He fell in beside her and matched her pace for pace and waited for her to speak.

She said, “You knew about this yesterday.”

He said, “Since the day before.”

“How?”

“The same way I figured the patients in David’s hospital were military. They were all young men.”

“You waited until that truck was over the border before you told me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want you to have it stopped.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted Rogers to get away.”

Vaughan stopped walking. “For God’s sake, you were a military cop.”

Reacher nodded. “Thirteen years.”

“You hunted guys like Rogers.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And now you’ve gone over to the dark side?”

Reacher said nothing.

Vaughan said, “Did you know Rogers?”

“Never heard of him. But I knew ten thousand just like him.”

Vaughan started walking again. Reacher kept pace. She stopped fifty yards short of the motel. Outside the police station. The brick façade looked cold in the gray light. The neat aluminum letters looked colder.

“They had a duty,” Vaughan said. “You had a duty. David did his duty. They should do theirs, and you should do yours.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Soldiers should go where they’re told,” she said. “They should follow orders. They don’t get to choose. And you swore an oath. You should obey it. They’re traitors to their country. They’re cowards. And you are, too. I can’t believe I slept with you. You’re nothing. You’re disgusting. You make my skin crawl.”

Reacher said, “Duty is a house of cards.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I went where they told me. I followed orders. I did everything they asked, and I watched ten thousand guys do the same. And we were happy to, deep down. I mean, we bitched and pissed and moaned, like soldiers always do. But we bought the deal. Because duty is a transaction, Vaughan. It’s a two-way street. We owe them, they owe us. And what they owe us is a solemn promise to risk our lives and limbs if and only if there’s a damn good reason. Most of the time they’re wrong anyway, but we like to feel some kind of good faith somewhere. At least a little bit. And that’s all gone now. Now it’s all about political vanity and electioneering. That’s all. And guys know that. You can try, but you can’t bullshit a soldier. They blew it, not us. They pulled out the big card at the bottom of the house and the whole thing fell down. And guys like Anderson and Rogers are over there watching their friends getting killed and maimed and they’re thinking, Why? Why should we do this shit?”

“And you think going AWOL is the answer?”

“I think the answer is for civilians to get off their fat asses and vote the bums out. They should exercise control. That’s their duty. That’s the next-biggest card at the bottom of the house. But that’s gone, too. So don’t talk to me about AWOL. Why should the grunts on the ground be the only ones who don’t go AWOL? What kind of a two-way street is that?”

“You served thirteen years and you support deserters?”

“I understand their decision. Precisely because I served those thirteen years. I had the good times. I wish they could have had them, too. I loved the army. And I hate what happened to it. I feel the same as I would if I had a sister and she married a creep. Should she keep her marriage vows? To a point, sure, but no further.”

“If you were in now, would you have deserted?”

Reacher shook his head. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough.”

“It takes courage?”

“For most guys, more than you would think.”

“People don’t want to hear that their loved ones died for no good reason.”

“I know. But that doesn’t change the truth.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” Reacher said. “You hate the politicians, and the commanders, and the voters, and the Pentagon.” Then he said, “And you hate that David didn’t go AWOL after his first tour.”

Vaughan turned and faced the street. Held still. Closed her eyes. She stood like that for a long time, pale, a small tremble in her lower lip. Then she spoke. Just a whisper. She said, “I asked him to. I begged him. I said we could start again anywhere he wanted, anywhere in the world. I said we could change our names, anything. But he wouldn’t agree. Stupid, stupid man.”

Then she cried, right there on the street, outside her place of work. Her knees buckled and she staggered a step and Reacher caught her and held her tight. Her tears soaked his shirt. Her body trembled. She wrapped her arms around him. She crushed her face into his chest. She wailed and cried for her shattered life, her broken dreams, the telephone call two years before, the chaplain’s visit to her door, the X-rays, the filthy hospitals, the unstoppable hiss of the respirator.

Afterward they walked up and down the block together, aimlessly, just to be moving. The sky was gray with low cloud and the air smelled like rain was on the way. Vaughan wiped her face on Reacher’s shirt tail and ran her fingers through her hair. She blinked her eyes clear and swallowed and took deep breaths. They ended up outside the police station again and Reacher saw her gaze trace the line of twenty aluminum letters fixed to the brick. Hope Police Department. She said, “Why didn’t Raphael Ramirez make it?”

Reacher said, “Because Ramirez was different.”

66

Reacher said, “One phone call from your desk will explain it. We might as well go ahead and make it. Since we’re right here anyway. Maria has waited long enough.”

Vaughan said, “One call to who?”

“The MPs west of Despair. You were briefed about them, they’ll have been briefed about you. Therefore they’ll cooperate.”

“What do I ask them?”

“Ask them to fax Ramirez’s summary file. They’ll say, Who? You’ll tell them, Bullshit, you know Maria was just there, so you know they know who he is. And tell them we know Maria was there for twenty-one hours, which is enough time for them to have gotten all the paperwork in the world.”

“What are we going to find?”

“My guess is Ramirez was in prison two weeks ago.”

The Hope Police Department’s fax machine was a boxy old product standing alone on a rolling cart. It had been square and graceless to start with, and now it was grubby and worn. But it worked. Eleven minutes after Vaughan finished her call it sparked up and started whirring and sucked a blank page out of the feeder tray and fed it back out with writing on it.

Not much writing. It was a bare-bones summary. Very little result for twenty-one hours of bureaucratic pestering. But that was explained by the fact that it had been the army doing the asking and the Marines doing the answering. Inter-service cooperation wasn’t usually very cooperative.

Raphael Ramirez had been a private in the Marine Corps. At the age of eighteen he had been deployed to Iraq. At the age of nineteen he had served a second deployment. At the age of twenty he had gone AWOL ahead of a third deployment. He had gone on the run but had been arrested five days later in Los Angeles and locked up awaiting court martial back at Pendleton.

Date of arrest, three weeks previously.

Reacher said, “Let’s go find Maria.”

They found her in her motel room. Her bed had a dent where she had been sitting, staying warm, saving energy, passing time, enduring. She answered the door tentatively, as if she was certain that all news would be bad. There was nothing in Reacher’s face to change her mind. He and Vaughan led her outside and sat her in the plastic lawn chair under her bathroom window. Reacher took room nine’s chair and Vaughan took room seven’s. They dragged them over and positioned them and made a tight little triangle on the concrete apron.

Reacher said, “Raphael was a Marine.”

Maria nodded. Said nothing.

Reacher said, “He had been to Iraq twice. He didn’t want to go back a third time. So nearly four weeks ago he went on the run. He headed up to LA. Maybe he had friends there. Did he call you?”

Maria said nothing.

Vaughan said, “You’re not in trouble, Maria. Nobody’s going to get you for anything.”

Maria said, “He called most days.”

Reacher asked, “How was he?”

“Scared. Scared to death. Scared of being AWOL, scared of going back.”

“What happened in Iraq?”

“To him? Not much, really. But he saw things. He said the people we were supposed to be helping were killing us, and we were killing the people we were supposed to be helping. Everybody was killing everybody else. In bad ways. It was driving him crazy.”

“So he ran. And he called most days.”

Maria nodded.

Reacher said, “But then he didn’t call, for two or three days. Is that right?”

“He lost his cell phone. He was moving a lot. To stay safe. Then he got a new phone.”

“How did he sound on the new phone?”

“Still scared. Very worried. Even worse.”

“Then what?”

“He called to say he had found some people. Or some people had found him. They were going to get him to Canada. Through a place called Despair, in Colorado. He said I should come here, to Hope, and wait for his call. Then I should join him in Canada.”

“Did he call from Despair?”

“No.”

“Why did you go to the MPs?”

“To ask if they had found him and arrested him. I was worried. But they said they had never heard of him. They were army, he was Marine Corps.”

“And so you came back here to wait some more.”

Maria nodded.

Reacher said, “It wasn’t exactly like that. He was arrested in LA. The Marines caught up with him. He didn’t lose his phone. He was in jail for two or three days.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“He wasn’t allowed to.”

“Did he break out again?”

Reacher shook his head. “My guess is he made a deal. The Marine Corps offered him a choice. Five years in Leavenworth, or go undercover to bust the escape line that ran from California all the way to Canada. Names, addresses, descriptions, techniques, routes, all that kind of stuff. He agreed, and they drove him back to LA and turned him loose. That’s why the MPs didn’t respond. They found out what was going on and were told to stonewall you.”

“So where is Raphael now? Why doesn’t he call?”

Reacher said, “My father was a Marine. Marines have a code. Did Raphael tell you about it?”

Maria said, “Unit, corps, God, country.”

Reacher nodded. “It’s a list of their loyalties, in priority order. Raphael’s primary loyalty was to his unit. His company, in fact. Really just a handful of guys. Guys like him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think he agreed to the deal but couldn’t carry it through. He couldn’t betray guys just like him. I think he rode up to Despair but didn’t call in to the Marines. I think he hung around on the edge of town and stayed out of sight, because he was conflicted. He didn’t want to know who was involved, because he was afraid he might have to give them away later. He hung out for days, agonizing. He got thirsty and hungry. He started hallucinating and decided to walk over to Hope, and find you, and get out some other way.”

“So where is he?”

“He didn’t make it, Maria. He collapsed halfway. He died.”

“But where is his body?”

“The people in Despair took care of it.”

“I see.”

Then for the second time in an hour Reacher watched a woman cry. Vaughan held her and Reacher said, “He was a good man, Maria. He was just a kid who couldn’t take any more. And in the end he didn’t betray what he believed in.” He said those things over and over again, in different orders, and with different emphases, but they didn’t help.

Maria was all cried out after twenty minutes and Vaughan led her back inside. Then she joined Reacher again and they walked away together. She asked, “How did you know?”

Reacher said, “No other rational explanation.”

“Did he really do what you said? Agonized and then sacrificed himself?”

“Marines are good at self-sacrifice. On the other hand maybe he double-crossed the Corps from the get-go. Maybe he planned all along to head straight to Hope and grab Maria and disappear.”

“It doesn’t take four days to walk from Despair to Hope.”

“No,” Reacher said. “It doesn’t.”

“So he probably did the right thing.”

“I hope that was Maria’s impression.”

“Do you think he told them about the people in California?”

“I don’t know.”

“This will carry on if he didn’t.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It could get out of hand.”

“You could make a couple of calls. They’re in the hotel register in Despair, name and address. You could check and see who they are, and whether they’re still around, or whether they’ve disappeared into federal custody.”

“I’m sorry about what I said before.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

They walked on, and then Reacher said, “And you weren’t wrong, when you did what you did the night before last. Otherwise whoever killed David killed you too. You want to give them that? Because I don’t. I want you to have a life.”

“That sounds like the beginnings of a farewell speech.”

“Does it?”

“Why stay? The Pentagon is washing its dirty linen in private, which isn’t a crime. And we seem to have decided this other thing isn’t a crime either.”

“There’s one more thing on my mind,” Reacher said.

67

Reacher and Vaughan walked back to the diner, where Reacher ate for the first time since the burger he had scored in the Fort Shaw mess the night before. He topped up his caffeine level with four mugs of coffee and when he had finished he said, “We need to go see those MPs. Now you’ve established contact we might get away with a face-to-face meeting.”

Vaughan said, “We’re going to drive through Despair again?”

Reacher shook his head. “Let’s take your truck and go cross-country.”

They peeled the paper barcodes off the new glass and Vaughan fetched paper towels and Windex from her kitchen and they wiped the wax and the handprints off the screen. Then they set off, early in the afternoon. Vaughan took the wheel. They drove five miles west on Hope’s road and risked another nine on Despair’s. The air was clear and the mountains were visible ahead, first invitingly close and then impossibly distant. Three miles before Despair’s first vacant lot they slowed and bumped down off the road, onto the scrub, and started a long loop to the north. They kept the town on their left, on a three-mile radius. It was just a blur in the distance. Not possible to tell if it was guarded by mobs or sentries, or abandoned altogether.

It was slow going across the open land. Undergrowth scraped along the underside and low bushes slapped at their flanks. The ladder and the wrecking bar in the load bed bounced and rattled. The flashlight rolled from side to side. Occasionally they found dry washes and followed them through looping meanders at a higher speed. Then it was back to picking their way around table rocks bigger than the Chevy itself and keeping the sun centered on the top rail of the windshield. Four times they drove into natural corrals and had to back up and start over. After an hour the town fell away behind them and the plant showed up ahead on the left. The wall glowed white in the sun. The parking lot looked empty. No cars. There was no smoke rising from the plant. No sparks, no noise. No activity at all.

Reacher said, “What day is it?”

Vaughan said, “It’s a regular workday.”

“Not a holiday?”

“No.”

“So where is everybody?”

They steered left and narrowed the gap between themselves and the plant. The Chevy was raising a healthy dust plume in the air behind it. It would be visible to a casual observer. But there were no casual observers. They slowed and stopped two miles out and waited. Five minutes. Ten. Then fifteen. No circulating Tahoes came around.

Vaughan asked, “What exactly is on your mind?”

“I like to be able to explain things to myself,” Reacher said.

“What can’t you explain?”

“The way they were so desperate to keep people out. The way they shut down the secret compound for the day just because I was barging around within half a mile of it. The way they found Ramirez’s body and dealt with it so fast and efficiently. It was no surprise to them. It’s like they set themselves up to be constantly vigilant for intruders. To expect them, even. And they worked out procedures in advance for dealing with them. And everyone in town is involved. The first day I showed up, even the waitress in the restaurant knew exactly what to do. Why would they go to those lengths?”

“They’re playing ball with the Pentagon. Keeping private things private.”

“Maybe. But I’m not sure. Certainly the Pentagon wouldn’t ask for that. Despair is already in the middle of nowhere and the plant is three miles out of town and the bad stuff happens in a walled-off compound inside it. That’s good enough for the Pentagon. They wouldn’t ask local people to go to bat for them. Because they trust walls and distance and geography, not people.”

“Maybe Thurman asked the people himself.”

“I’m sure he did. I’m certain of it. But why? On behalf of the Pentagon, or for some other reason of his own?”

“Like what?”

“Only one logical possibility. Actually, an illogical possibility. Or a logical impossibility. One word from the MPs and we’ll know. If they talk to us at all.”

“What word?”

“Either yes or no.”

There were four guys in the guard shack, which seemed to be their usual daytime deployment. Overkill, in Reacher’s opinion, which meant the post was most likely commanded by a lieutenant, not a sergeant. A sergeant would have had two in the shack and the other two either resting up with the others or out on mobile patrol in a Humvee, depending on the perceived threat assessment. But officers had to sign off on fuel requisitions, which would nix the mobile Humvee, and officers didn’t like men sitting around with nothing to do, which is why the shack was overcrowded. But Reacher didn’t expect the grunts to be unhappy about it. Or about anything. They had been in Iraq, and now they weren’t. The only question in his mind was whether their officer had been in Iraq with them. If he had, he might be reasonable. If he hadn’t, he might be a royal pain in the ass.

Vaughan drove past the base and U-turned and came back and parked facing the right way, tight on the shoulder, close to but not blocking the gate. Like she would outside a fire station. Respectful. Unwilling to put a foot wrong in the dance that had to be coming.

Two guys came out of the guard shack immediately. They were the same two Reacher had seen before. Morgan, the bespectacled specialist with the squint lines, and his partner, the silent private first class. Reacher kept his hands clearly visible and slid out of the truck. Vaughan did the same thing on her side. She introduced herself by name, and as an officer with the Hope PD. Morgan saluted her, in a way Reacher knew meant the MPs had run her plate the first time around, despite his best efforts, and that they had found out what her husband had been, and what he was now.

Which will help, he thought.

Then Morgan turned and looked straight at him.

“Sir?” he said.

“I was an MP myself,” Reacher said. “I did your lieutenant’s job about a million years ago.”

“Sir, which unit?”

“The 110th.”

“Rock Creek, Virginia,” Morgan said. A statement, not a question.

Reacher said, “I went there a couple of times, to get my ass kicked. The rest of the time, I was on the road.”

“On the road where?”

“Everywhere you’ve ever been, and about a hundred other places.”

“Sir, that’s interesting, but I’m going to have to ask you to move your vehicle.”

“At ease, Corporal. We’ll move it as soon as we’ve talked to your lieutenant.”

“On what subject, sir?”

“That’s between him and us,” Reacher said.

“Sir, I can’t justify disturbing him on that basis.”

“Move along, soldier. I’ve read the manual, too. Let’s skip a few pages, to where you’ve already determined that this is important.”

“Is this about the missing Marine private?”

“Much more interesting.”

“Sir, it would help me to have fuller particulars.”

“It would help you to have a million dollars and a date with Miss America, too. But what are the chances, soldier?”

Five minutes later Reacher and Vaughan were inside the wire, inside one of the six green metal buildings, face-to-face across a desk with a one-striper called Connor. He was a small lean man. He was maybe twenty-six years old. He had been to Iraq. That was for sure. His BDUs were beat up and sandblasted and his cheekbones were burned shiny. He looked competent, and probably was. He was still alive, and he wasn’t in disgrace. In fact he was probably headed for a captain’s rank, pending paperwork. Medals too, maybe. He asked, “Is this an official visit from the Hope PD?”

Vaughan said, “Yes.”

“You’re both members of the department?”

Vaughan said, “Mr. Reacher is a civilian adviser.”

“So how can I help?”

Reacher said, “Long story short, we know about the DU salvage at Thurman’s plant.”

Connor said, “That bothers me a little.”

Reacher said, “It bothers us a little, too. Homeland Security rules require us to maintain a register of chemically sensitive sites within twenty miles.” He said it as if it was true, which it might have been. Anything was possible, with Homeland Security. “We should have been told.”

“You’re more than twenty miles from the plant.”

“Twenty exactly to downtown,” Reacher said. “Only fifteen to the town limit.”

“It’s classified,” Connor said. “You can’t put it in a register.”

Reacher nodded. “We understand that. But we should have been made aware of it, privately.”

“Sounds like you are aware of it.”

“But now we want to verify some details. Once bitten, twice shy.”

“Then you need to speak to the Department of Defense.”

“Better if we don’t. They’ll wonder how we got wind of it. Your guys talking will be their first guess.”

“My guys don’t talk.”

“I believe you. But do you want to take a chance on the Pentagon believing you?”

Connor said, “What details?”

“We think we’re entitled to know when and how the scrap DU gets transported out, and what route is used.”

“Worried about it rolling down First Street?”

“You bet.”

“Well, it doesn’t.”

“It all goes west?”

Connor said, “It goes nowhere.”

Vaughan said, “What do you mean?”

“You guys aren’t the only ones with your panties in a wad. Colorado’s pretty uptight. They want to close the Interstate and use an armed convoy. Which they can’t contemplate on a regular basis. Once every five years is what they’re thinking.”

“How long ago did the first convoy leave?”

“It didn’t. The first convoy will happen about two years from now.”

Reacher said, “So right now they’re stockpiling the stuff at the plant?”

Connor nodded. “The steel moves out, the DU stays.”

“How much have they got there?”

“As of right now, maybe twenty tons.”

“Have you seen it?”

Connor shook his head. “Thurman reports monthly by mail.”

“You like that?”

“What’s not to like?”

“The guy is sitting on a mountain of dangerous stuff.”

“And? What could he possibly do with it?”

68

Reacher and Vaughan got back in the truck and Vaughan said, “Was that answer a yes or a no?”

“Both,” Reacher said. “No, it doesn’t get moved out, yes, it’s all still there.”

“Is that a good both or a bad both?”

Reacher ducked his head and looked up through the screen. The sun was a dull glow behind the cloud, but it was still way above the horizon.

“Four hours until dark,” he said. “We’ve got time for a considered decision.”

“It’s going to rain.”

“Probably.”

“Which will wash more TCE into the aquifer.”

“Probably.”

“We’re not going to sit here until dark, in the rain.”

“No, we’re not. We’re going to the Holiday Inn in Halfway again.”

“Only if we get separate rooms.”

“Shut up, Vaughan. We’re going to get the same room we got before, and we’re going to do all the same things.”

The same room was not available, but they got one just like it. Same size, same décor, same colors. Indistinguishable. They did all the same things in it. Showered, went to bed, made love. Vaughan was a little reserved at first, but got into it later. Afterward she said that David had been better in bed. Reacher wasn’t offended. She needed to believe it. And it was probably true.

They lay in the rucked sheets and Vaughan explored Reacher’s scars. She had small hands. The bullet hole in his chest was too big for the tip of her little finger. Her ring finger fitted it better. Every woman he had been naked with was fascinated by it, except the woman he had gotten it for. She had preferred to forget. The rain started after an hour. It was heavy. It drummed on the hotel’s roof and sheeted against the window. A cozy feeling, in Reacher’s opinion. He liked being inside, in bed, listening to rain. After an hour Vaughan got up and went to shower. Reacher stayed in bed and leafed through the Bible that the Gideons had left in the nightstand.

Vaughan came back and asked, “Why does it matter?”

“Why does what matter?”

“That Thurman is stockpiling depleted uranium?”

Reacher said, “I don’t like the combination. He’s got twenty tons of radioactive waste and twenty tons of TNT. He’s an End Times enthusiast. I spoke to a minister last night. He said that End Times people can’t wait to get things started. Thurman himself said there might be precipitating events on the way. He said it kind of smugly, like he secretly knew it was true. And the whole town seems to be waiting for something to happen.”

“Thurman can’t start the Armaggedon. It’ll happen when it happens.”

“These people are fanatics. They seem to think they can nudge things along. They’re trying to breed red cows in Israel.”

“How would that help?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Cows aren’t dangerous.”

“Another requirement seems to be a major war in the Middle East.”

“We’ve already got one.”

“Not major enough.”

“How could it be worse?”

“Lots of ways.”

“Personally I don’t see any.”

“Suppose another country joined in?”

“They’d be crazy to.”

“Suppose someone fired the first shot for them?”

“How would they?”

Reacher said, “Suppose a dirty bomb went off in Manhattan or D.C. or Chicago. What would we do?”

“According to you, we’d evacuate the city.”

“And then?”

“We’d investigate.”

Reacher nodded. “We’d have people in hazmat suits crawling all over the wreckage. What would they find?”

“Evidence.”

“For sure. They’d identify the materials involved. Suppose they found TNT and depleted uranium?”

“They’d make a list of possible sources.”

“Correct. Everyone in the world can buy TNT, but DU is rarer. It’s a byproduct of an enrichment process that occurs in maybe twenty places.”

“Nuclear powers.”

“Exactly.”

“A list of twenty suspects wouldn’t help.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said again. “And the intended victim isn’t going to stand up and take responsibility, because the intended victim didn’t know anything about anything in the first place. But suppose we were nudged in the preferred direction?”

“How?”

“Remember Oklahoma City? The Federal Building? That was a big explosion, but they knew it was a Ryder truck. Within hours. They’re great at putting tiny fragments together.”

“But presumably one uranium fragment is like another.”

“But suppose you were a state-sponsored terrorist from overseas. You’d want maximum bang for the buck. So if you didn’t have quite enough uranium when you were building your bomb, you might use other stuff to pack it out.”

“What other stuff?”

“Maybe pieces of wrecked cars,” Reacher said.

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher said, “Suppose the guys in the hazmat suits found fragments of Peugeots and Toyotas sold only in certain markets. Suppose they found fragments of Iranian license plates.”

Vaughan was quiet for a moment, working it out. “Iran is working with uranium. They’re boasting about it.”

“There you go,” Reacher said. “What would happen next?”

“We’d make certain assumptions.”

“And?”

“We’d attack Iran.”

“And after that?”

“Iran would attack Israel, Israel would retaliate, everyone would be fighting.”

“Precipitating events,” Reacher said.

“That’s insane.”

“These are people that believe red cows signal the end of the world.”

“These are people who care enough to make sure ash gets a proper burial.”

“Exactly. Because by anyone’s standards that’s a meaningless gesture. Maybe it’s just camouflage. To make sure no one looks at them too closely.”

“We have no evidence.”

“We have an End Times nutcase with technical expertise and twenty tons of TNT and twenty tons of DU and four Iranian cars and a limitless supply of shipping containers, some of which were last seen in the Middle East.”

Vaughan said, “You think it’s possible?”

“Anything is possible.”

“But no judge in America would sign off on a search warrant. Not with what we’ve got. It’s not even circumstantial. It’s just a crazy theory.”

Reacher said, “I’m not looking for a search warrant. I’m waiting for dark.”

Darkness came two hours later. With it came doubts from Vaughan. She said, “If you’re really serious about this, you should call the State Police. Or the FBI.”

Reacher said, “I would have to give my name. I don’t like to do that.”

“Then talk to that MP lieutenant. He already knows your name. And it’s his bag after all.”

“He’s looking at medals and a promotion. He won’t want to rock the boat.”

It was still raining. A steady, hard downpour.

Vaughan said, “You’re not a one-man justice department.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Apart from legalities?”

“Yes, apart from those.”

“I don’t want you to go there. Because of the radiation.”

“It won’t hurt me.”

“OK, I don’t want to go there. You said there were fertility issues and birth defects.”

“You’re not pregnant.”

“I hope.”

“Me too.”

“But these things can linger. I might want children one day.”

That’s progress, Reacher thought. He said, “It’s the dust that’s the problem. And this rain will damp it down. And you don’t have to come in. Just drive me there.”

They left thirty minutes later. Halfway was a small place but it took a long time to get out of it. People were driving cautiously, like they usually did in storms in places that were normally dry. The roads were running with water, like rivers. Vaughan put her wipers on high. They batted back and forth, furiously. She found the turn east and took it. Within a minute the old Chevy was the only car on the road. The only car for miles around. Rain battered the windshield and drummed on the roof.

“This is good,” Reacher said.

“You think?”

“Everyone will be indoors. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”

They passed the MP post thirty minutes later. There were still four guys in the guard shack. They were dressed in rain capes. Their orange nightlight was on. It made a thousand dull jewels from the raindrops on the windows.

Vaughan asked, “Will Thurman fly in this weather?”

Reacher said, “He doesn’t need to. They weren’t working today.”

They drove on. Up ahead they saw a horizontal sliver of blue light. The plant, lit up. Much smaller than before. Like it had moved ten miles south, toward the horizon. But as they got closer they saw that it hadn’t moved. The glow was smaller because only the farthest quarter was illuminated. The secret compound.

Vaughan said, “Well, they’re working now.”

“Good,” Reacher said. “Maybe they left the gates open.”

They hadn’t. The personnel gate and the main vehicle gate were both closed. The bulk of the plant was dark. Nearly a mile beyond it the secret compound was bright and distant and tempting.

Vaughan said, “Are you sure about this?”

Reacher said, “Absolutely.”

“OK, where?”

“Same place as before.”

The Tahoes’ beaten ruts were soft and full of water. The little Chevy spun its wheels and fishtailed and clawed its way forward. Vaughan found the right place. Reacher said, “Back it in.” The wheels spun and the truck bumped up out of the ruts and Vaughan stopped it with its tailgate well under the curve of the metal cylinder, which put its rear window about where the base of the Crown Vic’s windshield had been.

“Good luck,” she said. “And be careful.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “My biggest risk will be pneumonia.”

He got out into the rain and was soaked to the skin even before he got his stuff out of the load bed. He knelt in the mud beside the truck and adjusted the ladder to the relaxed L-shape that had worked before. He put the flashlight in one pocket and hooked the crook of the wrecking bar in the other. Then he lifted the ladder vertically into the back of the pick-up and jammed its feet into the right angle between the load bed floor and the back wall of the cab. He let it fall forward and the short leg of the L came down flat on top of the cylinder, aluminum against steel, a strange harmonic clonk that sounded twice, once immediately and then once again whole seconds later, as if the impact had raced all around the miles of hollow wall and come back stronger.

Reacher climbed into the load bed. Rain lashed the metal and bounced up to his knees. It drummed on the steel cylinder above his head and sheeted down off the bulge of its maximum curvature like a thin waterfall. Reacher stepped sideways and up and started climbing. Rain hammered his back. Gravity pulled the wrecking bar vertical and it hit every tread on the ladder. Steel against aluminum against steel. The harmonics came back, a weird metallic keening modulated by the thrash of the rain. He made it over the angle of the L and stopped. The cylinder was covered in shiny paint and the paint was slick with running water. Maneuvering had been hard before. Now it was going to be very difficult.

He fumbled the flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on. He held it between his teeth and watched the water and picked the spot where half of it was sluicing one way and half the other. The geometric dead-center of the cylinder. The continental divide. He lined up with it and eased off the ladder and sat down. An uneasy feeling. Wet cotton on wet paint. Insecure. No friction. Water was dripping off him and threatening to float him away like an aquaplaning tire.

He sat still for a long moment. He needed to twist from the waist and lift the ladder and reverse it. But he couldn’t move. The slightest turn would unstick him. Newton’s Law of Motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If he twisted his upper body to the left, the torque would spin his lower body to the right, and he would slide right off the cylinder. An effective design, derived from prison research.

Fourteen feet to the ground. He could survive a controlled fall, if he didn’t land on a tangle of jagged scrap. But without the ladder on the inside it wasn’t clear how he would ever get out again.

Perhaps the gates had simpler switches on the inside. No combination locks.

Perhaps he could improvise a ladder out of scrap metal. Perhaps he could learn to weld, and build one.

Or perhaps not.

He thought: I’ll worry about all that later.

He sat for a moment more in the rain and then nudged himself forward and rolled over onto his stomach as he slid and his palms squealed against the wet metal and the wrecking bar thumped and banged and then ninety degrees past top dead-center he was free-falling through empty air, one split second, and two, and three.

He hit the ground a whole lot later than he thought he would. But there was no scrap metal under him and his knees were bent and he went down in a heap and rolled one way and the wrecking bar went the other. The flashlight spun away. The breath was knocked out of him. But that was all. He sat up and a fast mental inventory revealed no physical damage, beyond mud and grease and oil all over his clothes, from the sticky earth.

He got to his feet and wiped his hands on his pants. Found the flashlight. It was a yard away, still burning bright. He carried it in one hand and the wrecking bar in the other and stood for a moment behind the pyramid of old oil drums. Then he stepped out and set off walking, south and west. Dark shapes loomed up at him. Cranes, gantries, crushers, crucibles, piles of metal. Beyond them the distant inner compound was still lit up.

The lights made a T shape.

A very shallow T. The crossbar was a blazing blue line half a mile long. Above it light spill haloed in the wet air. Below it the T shape’s vertical stroke was very short. Maybe fourteen feet tall. That was all. Maybe thirty feet wide. A very squat foundation for such a long horizontal line.

But it was there.

The inner gate was open.

An invitation. A trap, almost certainly. Like moths to a flame. Reacher looked at it for a long moment and then slogged onward. The flashlight beam showed rainbow puddles everywhere. Oil and grease, floating. Rain was washing down through the sand and capillary action was pulling waste back to the surface. Walking was difficult. Within ten paces Reacher’s shoes were carrying pounds of sticky mud. He was getting taller with every step. Every time the flashlight showed him a pile of old I-beams or a tangle of old rebar he stopped and scraped his soles. He was wetter than if he had fallen into a swimming pool. His hair was plastered to his head and water was running into his eyes.

Ahead he could see the white security Tahoes, blurred and ghostly in the darkness. They were parked side by side to the left of the main vehicle gate. Three hundred yards away. He headed straight for them. The trip took him seven minutes. Half-speed, because of the soft ground. When he got there, he turned right and checked the vehicle gate. No luck. On the inside it had the same gray box as on the outside. The same keypad. The same three-million-plus combinations. He turned away from it and tracked along the wall and walked past the security office, and Thurman’s office, and the operations office. He stopped outside Purchasing. Scraped his shoes and climbed the steps and used his fingernails to pull the screws out of the padlock hasp. The door sagged open. He went inside.

He headed straight for the row of file cabinets. Aimed toward the right-hand end. Opened the T drawer. Pulled the Thomas file. The telecoms company. The cell phone supplier. Clipped to the back of the original purchase order was a thick wad of paper. The contracts, the details, the anytime minutes, the taxes, the fees, the rebates, the makes, the models. And the numbers. He tore off the sheet with the numbers and folded it into his pants pocket. Then he headed back out to the rain.

Close to one mile and forty minutes later he was approaching the inner gate.

69

The inner gate was still open. The inner compound was still blazing with light. Up close, the light was painfully bright. It spilled out in a solid bar the width of the opening and spread and widened like a lighthouse beam that reached a hundred yards.

Reacher hugged the wall and approached from the right. He stopped in the last foot of shadow and listened hard. Heard nothing over the pelting rain. He waited one slow minute and then stepped into the light. His shadow moved behind him, fifty feet long.

No reaction.

He walked in, fast and casual. No alternative. He was as lit up and vulnerable as a stripper on a stage. The ground under his feet was rutted with deep grooves. He was up to his ankles in water. Ahead on the left was the first artful pile of shipping containers. They were stacked in an open V, point outward. To their right and thirty feet farther away was a second V. He aimed for the gap between them. Stepped through, and found himself alone in an arena within an arena within an arena.

Altogether there were eight stacks of shipping containers arranged in a giant circle. They hid an area of maybe thirty acres. The thirty acres held cranes and gantries and crushers, and parked backhoes and bulldozers, and carts and dollies and trailers loaded with smaller pieces of equipment. Coils of baling wire, cutting torches, gas bottles, air hammers, high pressure spray hoses, hand tools. All grimy and battered and well used. Here and there leather welders’ aprons and dark goggles were dumped in piles.

Apart from the industrial infrastructure, there were two items of interest.

The first, on the right, was a mountain of wrecked main battle tanks.

The mountain was maybe thirty feet high and fifty across at the base. It looked like an elephants’ graveyard, from a grotesque prehistoric nightmare. Bent gun barrels reared up, like giant tusks or ribs. Turret assemblies were dumped and stacked haphazardly, characteristically low and wide and flat, peeled open like cans. Humped engine covers were stacked on their ends, like plates in a rack, some of them torn and shattered. Side skirts were everywhere, some of them ripped like foil. Parts of stripped hulls were tangled in the wreckage. Some of them had been taken apart by Thurman’s men. Most of them had been taken apart much farther away, by different people using different methods. That was clear. There were traces of desert camouflage paint in some places. But not many. Most of the metal was scorched dull black. It looked cold in the blue light and it glistened in the rain, but Reacher felt he could see smoke still rising off it, and hear men still screaming under it.

He turned away. Looked left.

The second item of interest was a hundred yards east.

It was an eighteen-wheel semi truck.

A big rig. Ready to roll. A tractor, a trailer, a blue forty-foot China Lines container on the trailer. The tractor was a huge square Peterbilt. Old, but well maintained. The trailer was a skeletal flat-bed. The container looked like every container Reacher had ever seen. He walked toward it, a hundred yards, two minutes through mud and water. He circled the rig. The Peterbilt tractor was impressive. A fine paint job, an air filter the size of an oil drum, bunk beds behind the front seats, twin chrome smokestacks, a forest of antennas, a dozen mirrors the size of dinner plates. The container looked mundane and shabby in comparison. Dull paint, faded lettering, a few dings and dents. It was clamped tight to the trailer. It had a double door, secured with the same four foot-long levers and the same four long bolts that he had seen before. The levers were all in the closed position.

There were no padlocks.

No plastic tell-tale tags.

Reacher put the wrecking bar in one hand and pulled himself up with the other and got a precarious slippery foothold on the container’s bottom ledge. Got his free hand on the nearest lever and pushed it up.

It wouldn’t move.

It was welded to its bracket. An inch-long worm of metal had been melted into the gap. The three other levers were the same. And the doors had been welded to each other and to their frames. A neat patient sequence of spot welds had been applied, six inches apart, their bright newness hidden by flicks of dirty blue paint. Reacher juggled the wrecking bar and jammed the flat of the tongue into the space between two welds and pushed hard.

No result. Impossible. Like trying to lift a car with a nail file.

He climbed down, and looked again at the trailer clamps. They were turned tight. And welded.

He dropped the wrecking bar and walked away. He covered the whole of the hidden area, and the whole of the no-man’s-land that lay beyond the stacks of piled containers, and the whole length of the perimeter track inside the wall. A long walk. It took him more than an hour. He came back to the inner circle the other way. From the side opposite the inner gates. They were two hundred yards away.

And they were closing.

70

The gates were motorized. Driven by electricity. That was Reacher’s first absurd conclusion. They were moving slowly, but smoothly. A consistent speed. Too smooth and too consistent for manual operation. Relentless, at about a foot a second. They were already at a right angle to the wall. Each gate was fifteen feet wide. Five yards. The total remaining arc of travel for each of them was therefore about eight yards.

Twenty-four seconds.

They were two hundred yards away. No problem for a college sprinter on a track. Debatable for a college sprinter in six inches of mud. Completely impossible for Reacher. But still he started forward involuntarily, and then slowed as the arithmetic reality hit him.

He stopped altogether when he saw four figures walk in through the closing gap.

He recognized them immediately, by their size and shape and posture and movement. On the right was Thurman. On the left was the giant with the wrench. In the middle was the plant foreman. He was pushing Vaughan in front of him. The three men were walking easily. They were dressed in yellow slickers and sou’wester hats and rubber boots. Vaughan had no protection against the weather. She was soaked to the skin. Her hair was plastered against her head. She was stumbling, as if every few paces she was getting a shove in the back.

They all kept on coming.

Reacher started walking again.

The gates closed, with a metallic clang that sounded twice, first in real time and then again as an echo. The echo died, and Reacher heard a solenoid open and a bolt shoot home, a loud precise sound like a single shot from a distant rifle.

The four figures kept on coming.

Reacher kept on walking.

They met in the center of the hidden space. Thurman and his men stopped. They stood still five feet short of an imaginary line that ran between the pile of wrecked tanks and the eighteen-wheeler. Reacher stopped five feet on the other side. Vaughan kept on going. She picked her way through the mud and made it to Reacher’s side and turned around. Put a hand on his arm.

Two against three.

Thurman called, “What are you doing here?”

Reacher could hear the rain beating against the slickers. Three guys, three sets of shoulders, three hats, stiff plastic material.

He said, “I’m looking around.”

“At what?”

“At what you’ve got here.”

Thurman said, “I’m losing patience.”

Reacher said, “What’s in the truck?”

“What kind of incredible arrogance makes you think you’re entitled to an answer to that question?”

“No kind of arrogance,” Reacher said. “Just the law of the jungle. You answer, I leave. You don’t, I don’t.”

Thurman said, “My tolerance for you is nearly exhausted.”

“What’s in the truck?”

Thurman breathed in, breathed out. Glanced to his right, at his foreman, and then beyond the foreman at the giant with the wrench. He looked at Vaughan, and then back at Reacher. Reacher said, “What’s in the truck?”

Thurman said, “There are gifts in the truck.”

“What kind?”

“Clothes, blankets, medical supplies, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, dried and powdered foodstuffs, purified water, antibiotics, vitamins, sheets of construction-grade plywood. Things like that.”

“Where from?”

“They were bought with tithes from the people of Despair.”

“Why?”

“Because Jesus said, it is more blessed to give than to receive.”

“Who are the gifts for?”

“Afghanistan. For refugees and displaced persons and those living in poverty.”

“Why is the container welded shut?”

“Because it has a long and perilous journey ahead of it, through many countries and many tribal areas where warlords routinely steal. And padlocks on shipping containers can be broken. As you well know.”

“Why put it all together here? In secret?”

“Because Jesus said, when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret. We follow scripture here, Mr. Reacher. As should you.”

“Why turn out the whole town in defense of a truckful of gifts?”

“Because we believe that charity should know neither race nor creed. We give to Muslims. And not everyone in America is happy with that policy. Some feel that we should give only to fellow Christians. An element of militancy has entered the debate. Although in fact it was the prophet Muhammad himself who said a man’s first charity should be to his own family. Not Jesus. Jesus said whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. He said love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.”

Reacher said, “Where are the cars from Iran?”

“The what?”

“The cars from Iran.”

Thurman said, “Melted down and shipped out.”

“Where is the TNT?”

“The what?”

“You bought twenty tons of TNT from Kearny Chemical. Three months ago.”

Thurman smiled.

“Oh, that,” he said. “It was a mistake. A typo. A coding error. A new girl in the office was one number off, on Kearny’s order form. We got TNT instead of TCE. They’re adjacent in Kearny’s inventory. If you were a chemist, you’d understand why. We sent it back immediately, on the same truck. Didn’t even unload. If you had troubled yourself to break into Invoicing as well as Purchasing, you would have seen our application for a credit.”

“Where is the uranium?”

“The what?”

“You pulled twenty tons of depleted uranium out of these tanks. And I just walked all over this compound and I didn’t see it.”

“You’re standing on it.”

Vaughan looked down. Reacher looked down.

Thurman said, “It’s buried. I take security extremely seriously. It could be stolen and used in a dirty bomb. The state is reluctant to let the army move it. So I keep it in the ground.”

Reacher said, “I don’t see signs of digging.”

“It’s the rain. Everything is churned up.”

Reacher said nothing.

Thurman said, “Satisfied?”

Reacher said nothing. He glanced right, at the eighteen-wheeler. Left, at the parked backhoe. Down, at the ground. The rain splashed in puddles all around and thrashed against the slickers ten feet away.

“Satisfied?” Thurman asked again.

Reacher said, “I might be. After I’ve made a phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t, actually.”

Reacher said nothing.

Thurman said, “But anyway, this is not the right time for phone calls.”

Reacher said, “Not the right place either. I’ll wait until I get back to town. Or back to Hope. Or Kansas.”

Thurman turned and glanced at the gate. Turned back. Reacher nodded. Said, “Suddenly you want to check on what numbers I know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“I want some courtesy and respect.”

“And I want to hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium. I think both of us are going to be disappointed.”

Thurman said, “Turn out your pockets.”

Reacher said, “Worried about those numbers? Maybe I memorized them.”

“Turn out your pockets.”

“Make me.”

Thurman went still and his eyes narrowed and debate crossed his face, the same kind of long-range calculus that Reacher had seen before, in front of the airplane hangar. The long game, eight moves ahead. Thurman spent a second or two on it and then he stepped back, abruptly, and raised his right arm. His plastic sleeve came out into the downpour and made noise. He waved his two employees forward. They took two long strides and stopped again. The plant foreman kept his hands loose at his sides and the big guy slapped the wrench in and out of his palm, wet metal on wet skin.

Reacher said, “Not a fair fight.”

Thurman said, “You should have thought about that before.”

Reacher said, “Not fair to them. They’ve been cutting uranium. They’re sick.”

“They’ll take their chances.”

“Like Underwood did?”

“Underwood was a fool. I give them respirators. Underwood was too lazy to keep his on.”

“Did these guys wear theirs?”

“They don’t work in here. They’re perfectly healthy.”

Reacher glanced at the foreman, and then at the giant. Asked, “Is that right? You don’t work in here?”

Both guys shook their heads.

Reacher asked, “Are you healthy?”

Both guys nodded.

Reacher asked, “You want that state of affairs to last more than the next two minutes?”

Both guys smiled, and moved a step closer.

Vaughan said, “Just do it, Reacher. Turn out your pockets.”

“Still looking out for me?”

“It’s two against one. And one of them is the same size as you and the other one is bigger.”

“Two against two,” Reacher said. “You’re here.”

“I’m no use. Let’s just suck it up and move on.”

Reacher shook his head and said, “What’s in my pockets is my business.”

The two guys took another step. The foreman was on Reacher’s right and the big guy was on his left. Both of them close, but not within touching distance. The rain on their clothing was loud. Water was running out of Reacher’s hair into his eyes.

He said, “You know we don’t have to do this. We could walk out of here friends.”

The foreman said, “I don’t think so.”

“Then you won’t walk out of here at all.”

“Brave talk.”

Reacher said nothing.

The foreman glanced across at the big guy.

He said, “Let’s do it.”

Get your retaliation in first.

Reacher feinted left, toward the giant. The big guy rocked back, surprised, and the foreman rocked forward, toward the action. Momentum, moving west. A perfect little ballet. Reacher planted his heel very carefully in the mud and jerked the other way, to his right, to the east, and smashed the foreman in the stomach with his elbow. A five-hundred-pound collision. One guy moving left, one guy moving right, an elbow the size of a pineapple moving fast. The stomach is high in the midsection. Behind it lies the celiac plexus, the largest autonomic nerve center in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes called the solar plexus. A heavy blow can shut the whole thing down. Result, great pain and diaphragm spasms. Consequence, a fall to the ground and a desperate struggle to breathe.

The foreman went down.

He fell facefirst into a foot-wide rut filled with water. Reacher kicked him in the side to roll him out of it. He didn’t want the guy to drown. He stepped over the writhing form into clear air and glanced around through the bright blue light. Thurman had backed off twenty feet. Vaughan was rooted to the spot. The big guy was crouched eight feet away, holding his wrench like a clean-up hitter waiting on a high fastball.

Reacher kept his eyes on the big guy’s eyes and said, “Vaughan, step away. This guy is going to start swinging. He could hit you by mistake.” But he sensed Vaughan wasn’t moving. So he danced away east, dragging the fight with him. The big guy followed, big feet in rubber boots splashing awkwardly through standing water. Reacher dodged north, toward Thurman. Thurman backed off again, keeping his distance. Reacher stopped. The big guy wound up for a swing. The huge wrench slashed horizontal, at shoulder height. Reacher stepped back a pace and the wrench missed and its wild momentum carried the big guy through a complete circle.

Reacher backed off another pace.

The big guy followed.

Reacher stopped.

The big guy swung.

Reacher stepped back.

Thirty acres. Reacher wasn’t fast and he wasn’t nimble but he was a lot more mobile than anyone who outweighed him by a hundred pounds. And he had the kind of natural stamina that came from being exactly what he was born to be. He wasn’t on the downside of twenty years of weight rooms and steroids. Unlike his opponent. The big guy was breathing hard and every missed swing was jacking his fury and his adrenaline rush all the way up to carelessness. Reacher kept on moving and stopping and dodging and stopping again. Eventually the big guy learned. With his fifth swing he aimed for a spot three feet behind Reacher’s back. Reacher saw it coming in the guy’s crazed eyes and dodged the other way. Forward. The wrench hissed through empty air and Reacher rolled around the guy’s spinning back and bent his knees and smashed his elbow up into the guy’s kidney. Then he stepped away, two paces, three, and stood still and shook his arms loose and rolled his shoulders. The big guy turned. His back looked stiff and his knees were weakening. He charged and swung and missed and Reacher dodged away.

Like a bullfight. Except the big guy’s IQ was marginally higher than a bull’s. After a dozen fruitless swings he recognized that his tactics were futile. He sent the wrench spinning away into the marshy ground and got ready to charge. Reacher smiled. Because by then the damage was done. The guy was panting and staggering a little. The violent exertions and the adrenaline overload had spent him. He was going to lose. He didn’t know it. But Reacher knew it.

And Thurman knew it.

Thurman was hurrying back toward the gate. Hurrying, but slowly. An old man, a heavy coat, awkward footwear, mud on the ground. Reacher called, “Vaughan, don’t let him leave. He has to stay here.” He saw her move in the corner of his eye. A small soaked figure, darting north. Then he saw the giant launch himself. A crazed lunge, across fifteen feet of distance. Three hundred and fifty pounds, coming on like a train. Reacher felt small and static by comparison. The guy might have been fast on a football field but he was slow now. His boots churned in the liquid mud. No grip. No traction. He came in on a flailing run and Reacher feinted left and stepped right and tripped him. The guy splashed down in the water and slid a full yard and Reacher turned away and was hit in the back by what felt like a truck. He went down hard and got a mouthful of mud and reflexively rolled away and jacked himself back up and dodged and missed a punch from the plant foreman by about an inch and a half.

Two against one again.

Inefficient.

The foreman launched another big roundhouse swing and Reacher swatted it away and saw the giant struggling to get up. His hands and knees were scrabbling and sliding in the mud. Fifty feet north Vaughan had hold of Thurman’s collar. He was struggling to get free. Maybe winning. Then the foreman swung again and Reacher moved and the foreman’s fist glanced off his shoulder. But not before stinging a bruise from where he had been hit before, in the bar.

Which hurt.

OK, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Reacher planted his back heel in the mud and leaned in and launched a flurry of heavy punches, a fast deadly rhythm, four blows, right, left, right, left, one to the gut, two to the jaw, three to the head, and four, a crushing uppercut under the chin, like he was his demented five-year-old self all over again, but five times heavier and eight times more experienced. The foreman was already on his way down when the uppercut landed. It lifted him back up and then dropped him like the earth had opened up. Reacher spun away and lined up and kicked the scrabbling giant in the head, like he was punting a football, instep against ear. The impact pinwheeled the guy’s body a whole two feet and dropped him back in the mud.

The foreman lay still.

The giant lay still.

Game over.

Reacher checked his hands for broken bones and found none. He stood still and got his breathing under control and glanced north through the light. Thurman had broken free of Vaughan’s grasp and was heading for the gate again, slipping and sliding and twisting and turning to fend her off. His hat was gone. His hair was wet and wild. Reacher set off in their direction. Paused to collect the giant wrench from where it had fallen. He hefted it up and carried it on his shoulder like an ax. He trudged onward, heavily. A slow-motion chase. He caught Vaughan ten yards from the gate and passed her and clamped a hand on Thurman’s shoulder and pressed downward. The old guy folded up and went down on his knees. Reacher moved onward, to the gate. He found the little gray box. Flipped the lid. Saw the keypad. Swung the wrench and smashed it to splinters. Hit it again. And again. It fell out of its housing in small broken pieces. A small metal chassis hung up on thin trailing wires. Reacher chopped downward with the wrench until the wires tore and ruptured and the chassis fell to the ground.

Thurman was still on his knees. He said, “What are you doing? Now we can’t get out of here.”

“Wrong,” Reacher said. “You can’t, but we can.”

“How?”

“Wait and see.”

“It’s not possible.”

“Would you have given me the combination?”

“Never.”

“So what’s the difference?”

Vaughan said, “Reacher, what the hell is in your pockets?”

“Lots of things,” Reacher said. “Things we’re going to need.”

71

Reacher trudged through the mud and rolled Thurman’s men into what medics called the recovery position. On their sides, arms splayed, necks at a natural angle, one leg straight and the other knee drawn up. No danger of choking. A slight danger of drowning, if the puddles didn’t stop filling. The rain was still hard. It thrashed against their slickers and drummed on the sides of their boots.

Thurman poked and prodded at the shattered box where the keypad had been. No result. The gates stayed closed. He gave up and slipped and slid back to the center of the hidden area. Reacher and Vaughan fought their way across to the eighteen-wheeler. It was just standing there, shut down and silent and oblivious.

Vaughan said, “You really think this is a bomb?”

Reacher said, “Don’t you?”

“Thurman was mighty plausible. About the gifts for Afghanistan.”

“He’s a preacher. It’s his job to be plausible.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“What if I’m right?”

“How much damage could it do?”

“If they built it right I wouldn’t want to be within three miles of it when it goes off.”

“Three miles?”

“Twenty tons of TNT, twenty tons of shrapnel. It won’t be pretty.”

“How do we get out of here?”

“Where’s your truck?”

“Where we left it. They ambushed me. Opened the outer gate and drove me through the plant in Thurman’s SUV. It’s parked the other side of the inner gate. Which you just made sure will never open again.”

“No big deal.”

“You can’t climb the wall.”

“But you can,” Reacher said.

They talked for five fast minutes about what to do and how to do it. Knives, welds, the average size and thickness of a car’s roof panel, canvas straps, knots, trailer hitches, four-wheel-drive, low-range gearing. Thurman was pacing aimlessly a hundred yards away. They left him there and headed through the mud to the wall. They picked a spot ten feet left of the gate. Reacher took the two switchblades out of his pocket and handed them to Vaughan. Then he stood with his back to the wall, directly underneath the maximum radius of the horizontal cylinder above. Rain sheeted off it and soaked his head and shoulders. He bent down and curled his left palm and made a stirrup. Vaughan lined up directly in front of him, facing him, and put her right foot in the stirrup. He took her weight and she balanced with her wrists on his shoulders and straightened her leg and boosted herself up. He cupped his right hand under her left foot. She stood upright in his palms and her weight fell forward and her belt buckle hit him in the forehead.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Nothing we haven’t done before,” he said, muffled.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Reacher was six feet five inches tall and had long arms. In modest motel rooms he could put his palms flat on an eight-foot ceiling. Vaughan was about five feet four. Arms raised, she could probably stretch just shy of seven feet. Total, nearly fifteen feet. And the wall was only fourteen feet high.

He lifted. Like starting a bicep curl with a free weights bar loaded with a hundred and twenty pounds. Easy, except that his hands were turned in at an unnatural angle. And his footing was insecure, and Vaughan wasn’t a free weights bar. She wasn’t rigid and she was wobbling and struggling to balance.

“Ready?” he called.

“Wait one,” she said.

He felt her weight move in his hands, left to right, right to left, shifting, equalizing, preparing.

“Now go,” she said.

He did four things. He boosted her sharply upward, used her momentary weightlessness to shift his hands flat under her shoes, stepped forward half a pace, and locked his arms straight.

She fell forward and met the bulge of the cylinder with the flats of her forearms. The hollow metal construction boomed once, then again, much delayed.

“OK?” he called.

“I’m there,” she said.

He felt her go up on tiptoes in his palms. Felt her reach up and straighten her arms. According to his best guess her hands should right then have been all the way up on the cylinder’s top dead-center. He heard the first switchblade pop open. He swiveled his hands a little and gripped her toes. For stability. She was going to need it. He moved out another few inches. By then she should have been resting with her belly against the metal curve. Rain was streaming down all over him. He heard her stab downward with the knife. The wall clanged and boomed.

“Won’t go through,” she called.

“Harder,” he called back.

She stabbed again. Her whole body jerked and he dodged and danced underneath her, keeping her balanced. Like acrobats in a circus. The wall boomed.

“No good,” she called.

“Harder,” he called.

She stabbed again. No boom. Just a little metallic clatter, then nothing.

“The blade broke,” she called.

Reacher’s arms were starting to ache.

“Try the other one,” he called. “Be precise with the angle. Straight downward, OK?”

“The metal is too thick.”

“It’s not. It’s from an old piece-of-shit Buick, probably. It’s like aluminum foil. And that’s a good Japanese blade. Hit it hard. Who do you hate?”

“The guy that pulled the trigger on David.”

“He’s inside the wall. His heart is the other side of the metal.”

He heard the second switchblade open. Then there was silence for a second. Then a convulsive jerk through her legs and another dull boom through the metal.

A different boom.

“It’s in,” she called. “All the way.”

“Pull on it,” he called back.

He felt her take her weight on the wooden handle. He felt her twist as she wrapped both fists around it. He felt her feet pull up out of his hands. Then he felt them come back.

“It’s slicing through,” she called. “It’s cutting the metal.”

“It will,” he called back. “It’ll stop when it hits a weld.”

He felt it stabilize a second later. Called, “Where is it?”

“Right at the top.”

“Ready?”

“On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”

She jerked herself upward and he helped as much as he could, fingertips and tiptoes, and then her weight was gone. He came down in a heap and rolled away in case she was coming down on top of him. But she wasn’t. He got to his feet and walked away to get a better angle and saw her lying longitudinally on top of the cylinder, legs spread, both hands wrapped tight around the knife handle. She rested like that for a second and then shifted her weight and slid down the far side of the bulge, slowly at first, then faster, swinging around, still holding tight to the knife handle. He saw her clasped hands at the top of the curve, and then her weight started pulling the blade through the metal, fast at first where a track was already sliced and then slower as the blade bit through new metal. It would jam again at the next weld, which he figured was maybe five feet down the far side, allowing for the size of a typical car’s roof panel, minus a folded flange at both sides for assembly purposes, which would be about a quarter of the way around the cylinder’s circumference, which would mean she would be hanging off the wall at full stretch with about four feet of clear air under the soles of her shoes.

A survivable fall.

Probably.

He waited what seemed like an awful long time, and then he heard two hard thumps on the outside of the wall. They each sounded twice, once immediately and then again as the sound raced around the hollow circle and came back. He closed his eyes and smiled. Their agreed signal. Out, on her feet, no broken bones.

“Impressive,” Thurman said, from ten yards away.

Reacher turned. The old guy was still hatless. His blow-dried waves were ruined. Ninety yards beyond him his two men were still down and inert.

Four minutes, Reacher thought.

Thurman said, “I could do what she did.”

“In your dreams,” Reacher said. “She’s fit and agile. You’re a fat old man. And who’s going to boost you up? Real life is not like the movies. Your guys aren’t going to wake up and shake their heads and get right to it. They’re going to be puking and falling down for a week.”

“Are you proud of that?”

“I gave them a choice.”

“Your lady friend can’t open the gate, you know. She doesn’t have the combination.”

“Have faith, Mr. Thurman. A few minutes from now you’re going to see me ascend.”

Reacher strained to hear sounds from the main compound, but the rain was too loud. It hissed in the puddles and pattered on the mud and clanged hard against the metal of the wall. So he just waited. He took up station six feet from the wall and a yard left of where Vaughan had gone over. Thurman backed off and watched.

Three minutes passed. Then four. Then without warning a long canvas strap snaked up and over the wall and the free end landed four feet to Reacher’s right. The kind of thing used for tying down scrap cars to a flat-bed trailer. Vaughan had driven Thurman’s Tahoe up to the security office and had found a strap of the right length in the pile near the door and had weighted its end by tying it around a scrap of pipe. He pictured her after the drive back, twenty feet away through the metal, swinging the strap like a cowgirl with a rope, building momentum, letting it go, watching it sail over.

Reacher grabbed the strap and freed the pipe and retied the end into a generous two-foot loop. He wrapped the canvas around his right hand and walked toward the wall. Kicked it twice and backed off a step and put his foot in the loop and waited. He pictured Vaughan securing the other end to the trailer hitch on Thurman’s Tahoe, climbing into the driver’s seat, selecting four-wheel-drive for maximum traction across the mud, selecting the low-range transfer case for delicate throttle control. He had been insistent about that. He didn’t want his arms torn off at the shoulders when she hit the gas.

He waited. Then the strap went tight above him and started to quiver. The canvas around his hand wrapped tight. He pushed down into the loop with his sole. He saw the strap pull across the girth of the cylinder. No friction. Wet canvas on painted metal, slick with rain. The canvas stretched a little. Then he felt serious pressure under his foot and he lifted smoothly into the air. Slowly, maybe twelve inches a second. Less than a mile an hour. Idle speed, for the Tahoe’s big V-8. He pictured Vaughan behind the wheel, concentrating hard, her foot like a feather on the pedal.

“Goodbye, Thurman,” he said. “Looks like it’s you that’s getting left behind this time.”

Then he looked up and got his left hand on the bulge of the cylinder and pushed back and hauled with his right to stop his wrapped knuckles crushing against the metal. His hips hit the maximum curve and he unwrapped his hand and hung on and let himself be pulled up to top dead-center. Then he dropped the strap and let the loop around his foot pull his legs up sideways and then he kicked free of the loop and came to rest spread-eagled on his stomach along the top of the wall. He jerked his hips and sent his legs down the far side and squealed his palms across ninety degrees of wet metal and pushed off and fell, two long split seconds. He hit the ground and fell on his back and knocked the wind out of himself. He rolled over and forced some air into his lungs and crawled up on his knees.

Vaughan had stopped Thurman’s Tahoe twenty feet away. Reacher got to his feet and walked over to it and unhooked the strap from the trailer hitch. Then he climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You OK?” she asked.

“Fine. You?”

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and I fell out of an apple tree. Scared, but a good scared.” She changed to high-range gearing and took off fast. Two minutes later they were at the main vehicle gate. It was standing wide open.

“We should close it,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“To help contain the damage. If I’m right.”

“Suppose you’re not?”

“Maximum of five phone calls will prove it one way or the other.”

“How do we close it? They don’t seem to have any manual override.”

They stopped just outside the gate and got out and walked over to the gray metal box on the wall. Reacher flipped the lid. One through nine, plus zero.

“Try six-six-one-three,” he said.

Vaughan looked blank but stepped up and raised her index finger. Pressed six, six, one, three, neat and rapid. There was silence for a second and then motors whined and the gates started closing. A foot a second, wheels rumbling along tracks. Vaughan asked, “How did you know?”

“Most codes are four figures,” Reacher said. “ATM cards, things like that. People are used to four-figure codes.”

“Why those four figures?”

“Lucky guess,” Reacher said. “Revelation is the sixty-sixth book in the King James Bible. Chapter one, verse three says the time is at hand. Which seems to be Thurman’s favorite part.”

“So we could have gotten out without climbing.”

“If we had, they could have, too. I want them in there. So I had to smash the lock.”

“Where to now?”

“The hotel in Despair. The first phone call is one that you get to make.”

72

They abandoned Thurman’s Tahoe next to where Vaughan’s old Chevy was waiting. They transferred between vehicles and bumped through the deserted parking lot and found the road. Three miles later they were in downtown Despair. It was still raining. The streets and the sidewalks were dark and wet and completely deserted. The middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. They threaded through the cross-streets and pulled up outside the hotel. The façade was as blank and gloomy as before. The street door was closed but not locked. Inside the place looked just the same. The empty dining room on the left, the deserted bar on the right, the untended reception desk dead ahead. The register on the desk, the large square leather book. Easy to grab, easy to swivel around, easy to open, easy to read. Reacher put his fingertip under the last registered guests, the couple from California, from seven months previously. He tilted the book, so that Vaughan had a clear view of their names and addresses.

“Call them in,” he said. “And if they’re helping the deserters, do whatever your conscience tells you to.”

“If?”

“I think they might be into something else.”

Vaughan made the call from her cell and they sat in faded armchairs and waited for the call back. Vaughan said, “Gifts are a perfectly plausible explanation. Churches send foreign aid all the time. Volunteers, too. They’re usually good people.”

“No argument from me,” Reacher said. “But my whole life has been about the people that aren’t usual. The exceptions.”

“Why are you so convinced?”

“The welding.”

“Locks can be broken.”

“The container was welded to the trailer. And that’s not how containers get shipped. They get lifted off and put on boats. By cranes. That’s the whole point of containers. The welding suggests they don’t mean for that container to leave the country.”

Vaughan’s phone rang. A three-minute wait. From a cop’s perspective, the upside of all the Homeland Security hoopla. Agencies talked, computers were linked, databases were shared. She answered and listened, four long minutes. Then she thanked her caller and clicked off.

“Can’t rule out the AWOL involvement,” she said.

“Because?” Reacher asked.

“They’re listed as activists. And activists can be into all kinds of things.”

“What kind of activists?”

“Religious conservatives.”

“What kind?”

“They run something called the Church of the Apocalypse in LA.”

“The Apocalypse is a part of the End Times story,” Reacher said.

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher said, “Maybe they came here to recruit Thurman as a brother activist. Maybe they recognized his special potential.”

“They wouldn’t have stayed in this hotel. They’d have been guests in his house.”

“Not the first time. He didn’t know them yet. The second time, maybe. And the third and the fourth, maybe the fifth and the sixth. Depends how hard they had to work to convince him. There’s a four-month gap between their first visit and when he ordered the TNT from Kearny.”

“He said that was a bureaucratic error.”

“Did you believe him?”

Vaughan didn’t answer.

“Four phone calls,” Reacher said. “That’s all it’s going to take.”

They drove west to the edge of town. Three miles away through the rainy darkness they could see the plant’s lights, faint and blue and distant, blurred by the rain on the windshield, a fragmented sepulchral glow way out in the middle of nowhere. Empty space all around it. They parked on a curb facing out of town, level with the last of the buildings. Reacher eased his butt off the seat and took the cell phone he had borrowed out of his pocket. Then he took out the sheet of paper he had taken from the purchasing office. The new cell phone numbers. The paper was wet and soggy and he had to peel apart the folds very carefully.

“Ready?” he asked.

Vaughan said, “I don’t understand.”

He dialed the third number down. Heard ring tone in his ear, twice, four times, six times, eight. Then the call was answered. A muttered greeting, in a voice he recognized. A man’s voice, fairly normal in tone and timbre, but a little dazed, and muffled twice, first by coming from a huge chest cavity, and again by the cellular circuitry.

The big guy, from the plant.

Reacher said, “How are you? Been awake long?”

The guy said, “Go to hell.”

Reacher said, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I’m not sure about the likelihood of things like that. You guys are the theologians, not me.”

No reply.

Reacher asked, “Is your buddy awake, too?”

No reply.

Reacher said, “I’ll call him and see for myself.”

He clicked off and dialed the second number on the list. It rang eight times and the plant foreman answered.

Reacher said, “Sorry, wrong number.”

He clicked off.

Vaughan asked, “What exactly are you doing?”

“How did the insurgents hurt David?”

“With a roadside bomb.”

“Detonated how?”

“Remotely, I assume.”

Reacher nodded. “Probably by radio, from the nearest ridge line. So if Thurman has built a bomb, how will he detonate it?”

“The same way.”

“But not from the nearest hill. He’ll probably want a lot more distance than that. He’ll probably want to be out of state somewhere. Maybe at home here in Colorado, or in his damn church. Which would take a very powerful radio. In fact, he’d probably have to build one himself, to be sure of reliability. Which is a lot of work. So my guess is he decided to use one that someone else already built. Someone like Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular.”

“Cell phone?”

Reacher nodded again. “It’s the best way. The phone companies spend a lot of time and money building reliable networks. Look at their commercials. They’re proud of the fact that you can call anywhere from anywhere. Some of them even give you free long distance.”

“And the number is on that list?”

“It would make sense,” Reacher said. “Two things happened at the same time, three months ago. Thurman ordered twenty tons of TNT, and four new cell phones. Sounds like a plan to me. He already had everything else he needed. My guess is he kept one phone for himself, and gave two to his inner circle, so they could have secure communications between themselves, separate from anything else they were doing. And my guess is the fourth phone is buried in the heart of that container, with the ringer wired to a primer circuit. The ringer on a cell phone puts out a decent little voltage. Maybe they fitted a standby battery, and maybe they connected an external antenna. Maybe one of those antennas on the Peterbilt was a cell antenna from Radio Shack, wired back to the trailer.”

“And you’re going to call that number?”

Reacher said, “Soon.”

He dialed the first number on the list. It rang, and then Thurman answered, fast and impatient, like he had been waiting for the call. Reacher asked, “You guys over the wall yet?”

Thurman said, “We’re still here. Why are you calling us?”

“You starting to see a pattern?”

“The last phone was Underwood’s. He’s dead, so he won’t answer. So there’s no point calling it.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“How long are you going to keep us here?”

“Just a minute more,” Reacher said. He clicked off and laid the phone on the Chevy’s dash. Stared out through the windshield.

Vaughan said, “You can’t do this. It would be murder.”

Reacher said, “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Thurman should know that quotation better than anyone. It’s from the Bible. Matthew, chapter twenty-six, verse fifty-two. Slightly paraphrased. Also, they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, chapter eight, verse seven. I’m sick of people who claim to live by the scriptures cherry-picking the parts they find convenient, and ignoring all the rest.”

“You could be completely wrong about him.”

“Then there’s no problem. Gifts don’t explode. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“But you might be right.”

“In which case he shouldn’t have lied to me. He should have confessed. I would have let him take his chance in court.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We’ll never know now.”

“He doesn’t seem worried enough.”

“He’s used to saying things and having people believe him. And he told me he’s not afraid of dying. He told me he’s going to a better place.”

“You’re not a one-man justice department.”

“He’s no better than whoever blew up David’s Humvee. Worse, even. David was a combatant, at least. And out on the open road. Thurman is going to have that thing driven to a city somewhere. With children and old people all around. Thousands of them. And more thousands maybe not quite close enough. He’s going to put thousands more people in your situation.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“And for what?” Reacher said. “For some stupid, deluded fantasy.”

Vaughan said nothing.

Reacher checked the final number. Entered it into his phone. Held the phone flat on his palm and held it out to Vaughan.

“Your choice,” he said. “Green button to make the call, red button to cancel it.”

Vaughan didn’t move for a moment. Then she took her hand off the wheel. Folded three fingers and her thumb. Held her index finger out straight. It was small, neat, elegant, and damp, and it had a trimmed nail. She held it still, close to the phone’s LED window.

Then she moved it.

She pressed the green button.

Nothing happened. Not at first. Reacher wasn’t surprised. He knew a little about cell phone technology. He had read a long article, in a trade publication abandoned on an airplane. Press the green button, and the phone in your hand sends a request by radio to the nearest cell tower, called a base transceiver station by the people who put it there. The phone says: Hey, I want to make a call. The base transceiver station forwards the plea to the nearest base station controller, by microwave if the bean counters got their way during the planning phase, or by fiber optic cable if the engineers got theirs. The base station controller bundles all the near-simultaneous requests it can find and moves them on to the closest mobile switching center, where the serious action starts.

Maybe at this point a ring tone starts up in your earpiece. But it means nothing. It’s a placebo. It’s there to reassure you. So far you’re not even close to connected.

The mobile switching center identifies the destination phone. Checks if it’s switched on, that it’s not busy, that it’s not set to call divert. Speech channels are limited in number, and therefore expensive to operate. You don’t get near one unless there’s a viable chance of an answer.

If all is well, a speech channel clicks in. It extends first from your local mobile switching center to its distant opposite number. Maybe by fiber optics, maybe by microwave, maybe by satellite if the distance is great. Then the distant mobile switching center hits up its closest base station controller, which hits up its closest base transceiver station, which emits a radio blast to the phone you’re looking for, an 850 megahertz or a 1.9 gigahertz pulse surfing on a perfect spherical wavefront close to the speed of light. A nanosecond later, the circuit is complete. The tone in your ear morphs from phony to real and the target phone starts its urgent ringing.

Total time lag, an average of seven whole seconds.

Vaughan took her finger back and stared forward out the windshield. The Chevy’s engine was still running and the wipers were still beating back and forth. The windshield smeared in perfect arcs. There was still a little protective wax on the glass.

Two seconds.

“Nothing,” Vaughan said.

Reacher said, “Wait.”

Four seconds.

Five.

They stared into the distance. The blue arena lights hung and shimmered in the wet air, pale and misty, fractured by intervening raindrops like twinkling starlight.

Six seconds.

Seven.

Then: The silent horizon lit up with an immense white flash that filled the windshield and bloomed instantly higher and wider. The rain all around turned to steam as the air superheated and jets of white vapor speared up and out in every direction like a hundred thousand rockets had launched simultaneously. The vapor was followed by a halo of black soot that punched instantly from a tight cap to a raging black hemisphere a mile high and a mile wide. It rolled and tore and folded back on itself and was pierced by violent trails of steam as supersonic white-hot shrapnel flung through it at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour.

No sound. Not then. Just blinding light and silence.

In still air the sound would have taken fourteen seconds to arrive from three miles away. But the air wasn’t still. It was moving fast in a massive compression wave. The wave carried the sound with it. It arrived three seconds after the light. The truck rocked back against the brake and the air roared with the rolling violence of the explosion, first a crisp deafening crump and then a banshee screaming from the shrapnel in the air and an otherworldly pelting sound as a million blasted fragments obliterated everything in their path and fell to earth and tore up the scrub and boiled and hissed where they lay. Then the decompression wave blew in the other way as air rushed back to fill the vacuum, and the truck rocked again, and the black cloud was pulverized to nothing by the violent wind, and then there was nothing to see except tongues of random flame and spouts of drifting steam, and nothing to hear except the steady patter of shrapnel falling back to earth from three miles up, and after ten long seconds there was not even that, just the patient rain on the Chevy’s roof.

73

Vaughan called out the whole of the Hope PD for crowd control. Within thirty minutes she had all four of her deputies and her brother officer and her watch commander and the desk guy all lined up on the western edge of Despair’s last block. Nobody was allowed through. The state cops showed up next. Within an hour they had three cars there. Five more showed up within the next four hours. They had taken the long way around. Everyone knew there had been uranium at the plant. The state cops confirmed that the MPs had the road blocked to the west, on a five-mile perimeter. It was close to dawn and they were already stopping incoming trucks.

Dawn came and the rain finally stopped and the sky turned hard blue and the air turned crystal clear. Like nerves after pain, Reacher had read once, in a poem. The morning was too cool to raise steam off the soaked ground. The mountains looked a thousand miles away, but every detail was visible. Their rocky outcrops, their pine forests, their tree lines, their snow channels. Reacher borrowed a pair of binoculars from Vaughan’s watch commander and climbed to the third floor of the last building to the west. He struggled with a jammed window and crouched and put his elbows on the sill and focused into the distance.

Not much to see.

The white metal wall was gone. Just a few rags and tatters of shredded metal remained, blown and tumbled hundreds of yards in every direction. The plant itself was mostly a black smoking pit, with cranes and gantries knocked over and smashed and bent. Crushers had been toppled off their concrete pads. Anything smaller had been smashed to pieces too small to reliably identify. The office buildings were gone entirely. Thurman’s residential compound had been obliterated. The house had been smashed to matchwood. The fieldstone wall was a horizontal rock field spread south and west like grains of spilled salt on a table. The plantings were all gone. Occasional foot-high stumps were all that was left of the trees. The airplane barn had been demolished. No sign of the Piper.

Immense damage.

Better here than somewhere else, Reacher thought.

He came downstairs to a changed situation. Federal agencies had arrived. Gossip was flowing. Air Force radar in Colorado Springs had detected metal fifteen thousand feet up. It had hung there for a long second before falling back to earth. Radiation-sniffing drone planes had been dispatched and were closing in on wide circular paths. The rain was seen as a mercy. DU dust was believed to be strongly hygroscopic. Nothing bad would drift. Every contractor within a hundred miles, in Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas, had been contacted. A hurricane fence nearly nineteen miles long was needed. The site was going to be fenced off forever, on a three-mile radius. The fence was going to be hung with biohazard signs every six feet. The agencies already owned the signs, but not the wire.

No hard information was volunteered by the townsfolk. No hard questions were asked by the agencies. The word on everyone’s lips was accident. An accident at the plant. It was second nature, a part of the hardscrabble culture. An accident at the mill, an accident at the mine. Consistent with history. If the agencies had doubts, they knew better than to voice them. The Pentagon had begun to stonewall even before the last fragments had cooled.

State officials arrived, with contingency plans. Food and water was to be trucked in. Buses were to be laid on, for job searches in neighboring towns. Special welfare would be provided, for the first six months. Transitional help of every kind would be afforded. After that, any stragglers would be strictly on their own.

First Reacher and then Vaughan were pushed steadily east by the official activity. By the middle of the afternoon they were sitting together in the Chevy outside the dry goods store, with nothing more to do. They took one last look to the west and then set off down the road toward Hope.

They went to Vaughan’s house, and showered, and dressed again. Vaughan said, “David’s hospital is going to fold.”

“Someone else will step in,” Reacher said. “Someone better.”

“I’m not going to abandon him.”

“I don’t think you should.”

“Even though he won’t know.”

“He knew beforehand. And it was important to him.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I know soldiers.”

Reacher took the borrowed phone out of his pocket and dropped it on the bed. Followed it with the registration, from the old Suburban’s glove box. Asked Vaughan to mail both things back, with no return address on the package. She said, “That sounds like the start of a farewell speech.”

“It is,” Reacher said. “And the middle, and the end.”

They hugged, a little formally, like two strangers who shared many secrets. Then Reacher left. He walked down her winding path, and walked four blocks north to First Street. He got a ride very easily. A stream of vehicles was heading east, emergency workers, journalists, men in suits in plain sedans, contractors. The excitement had made them friendly. There was a real community spirit. Reacher rode with a post-hole digger from Kansas who had signed up to dig some of the sixteen thousand holes necessary for the new fence. The guy was cheerful. He was looking at months of steady work.

Reacher got out in Sharon Springs, where there was a good road south. He figured San Diego was about a thousand miles away, or more, if he followed some detours.

For Rae Helmsworth and

Janine Wilson. They know why.

GONE TOMORROW

A Delacorte Press Book / June 2009

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2009 by Lee Child

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

Gone tomorrow: a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33855-0

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex–police officers—

Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Conspiracies—Fiction. I.

Title.

PS3553.H4838G66 2009

813′.54—dc22 2008039207

www.bantamdell.com

v3.0_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Gone Tomorrow

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Dedication

Chapter 1

Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first-timers.

Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook. They told us what to look for. They used pragmatic observation and psychological insight and came up with a list of behavioral indicators. I learned the list from an Israeli army captain twenty years ago. He swore by it. Therefore I swore by it too, because at the time I was on three weeks’ detached duty mostly about a yard from his shoulder, in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in Lebanon, sometimes in Syria, sometimes in Jordan, on buses, in stores, on crowded sidewalks. I kept my eyes moving and my mind running free down the bullet points.

Twenty years later I still know the list. And my eyes still move. Pure habit. From another bunch of guys I learned another mantra: Look, don’t see, listen, don’t hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.

The list is twelve points long if you’re looking at a male suspect. Eleven, if you’re looking at a woman. The difference is a fresh shave. Male bombers take off their beards. It helps them blend in. Makes them less suspicious. The result is paler skin on the lower half of the face. No recent exposure to the sun.

But I wasn’t interested in shaves.

I was working on the eleven-point list.

I was looking at a woman.

I was riding the subway, in New York City. The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, heading uptown, two o’clock in the morning. I had gotten on at Bleecker Street from the south end of the platform into a car that was empty except for five people. Subway cars feel small and intimate when they’re full. When they’re empty they feel vast and cavernous and lonely. At night their lights feel hotter and brighter, even though they’re the same lights they use in the day. They’re all the lights there are. I was sprawled on a two-person bench north of the end doors on the track side of the car. The other five passengers were all south of me on the long bench seats, in profile, side on, far from each other, staring blankly across the width of the car, three on the left and two on the right.

The car’s number was 7622. I once rode eight stops on the 6 train next to a crazy person who talked about the car we were in with the same kind of enthusiasm that most men reserve for sports or women. Therefore I knew that car number 7622 was an R142A model, the newest on the New York system, built by Kawasaki in Kobe, Japan, shipped over, trucked to the 207th Street yards, craned onto the tracks, towed down to 180th Street and tested. I knew it could run two hundred thousand miles without major attention. I knew its automated announcement system gave instructions in a man’s voice and information in a woman’s, which was claimed to be a coincidence but was really because the transportation chiefs believed such a division of labor was psychologically compelling. I knew the voices came from Bloomberg TV, but years before Mike became mayor. I knew there were six hundred R142As on the tracks and that each one was a fraction over fifty-one feet long and a little more than eight feet wide. I knew that the no-cab unit like we had been in then and I was in now had been designed to carry a maximum of forty people seated and up to 148 standing. The crazy person had been clear on all that data. I could see for myself that the car’s seats were blue plastic, the same shade as a late summer sky or a British Air Force uniform. I could see that its wall panels were molded from graffiti-resistant fiberglass. I could see its twin strips of advertisements running away from me where the wall panels met the roof. I could see small cheerful posters touting television shows and language instruction and easy college degrees and major earning opportunities.

I could see a police notice advising me: If you see something, say something.

The nearest passenger to me was a Hispanic woman. She was across the car from me, on my left, forward of the first set of doors, all alone on a bench built for eight, well off center. She was small, somewhere between thirty and fifty, and she looked very hot and very tired. She had a well-worn supermarket bag looped over her wrist and she was staring across at the empty place opposite with eyes too weary to be seeing much.

Next up was a man on the other side, maybe four feet farther down the car. He was all alone on his own eight-person bench. He could have been from the Balkans, or the Black Sea. Dark hair, lined skin. He was sinewy, worn down by work and weather. He had his feet planted and he was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Not asleep, but close to it. Suspended animation, marking time, rocking with the movements of the train. He was about fifty, dressed in clothes far too young for him. Baggy jeans that reached only his calves, and an oversized NBA shirt with a player’s name on it that I didn’t recognize.

Third up was a woman who might have been West African. She was on the left, south of the center doors. Tired, inert, her black skin made dusty and gray by fatigue and the lights. She was wearing a colorful batik dress with a matching square of cloth tied over her hair. Her eyes were closed. I know New York reasonably well. I call myself a citizen of the world and New York the capital of the world, so I can make sense of the city the same way a Brit knows London or a Frenchman knows Paris. I’m familiar but not intimate with its habits. But it was an easy guess that any three people like these already seated on a late-night northbound 6 train south of Bleecker were office cleaners heading home from evening shifts around City Hall, or restaurant service workers from Chinatown or Little Italy. They were probably set for Hunts Point in the Bronx, or maybe all the way up to Pelham Bay, ready for short fitful sleeps before more long days.

The fourth and the fifth passengers were different.

The fifth was a man. He was maybe my age, wedged at forty-five degrees on the two-person bench diagonally opposite me, all the way across and down the length of the car. He was dressed casually but not cheaply. Chinos, and a golf shirt. He was awake. His eyes were fixed somewhere in front of him. Their focus changed and narrowed constantly, like he was alert and speculating. They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes. They had a certain canny, calculating shrewdness in them.

But it was passenger number four that I was looking at.

If you see something, say something.

She was seated on the right side of the car, all alone on the farther eight-person bench, across from and about halfway between the exhausted West African woman and the guy with the ballplayer’s eyes. She was white and probably in her forties. She was plain. She had black hair, neatly but unstylishly cut and too uniformly dark to be natural. She was dressed all in black. I could see her fairly well. The guy nearest to me on the right was still sitting forward and the V-shaped void between his bent back and the wall of the car made my line of sight uninterrupted except for a forest of stainless-steel grab bars.

Not a perfect view, but good enough to ring every bell on the eleven-point list. The bullet headings lit up like cherries on a Vegas machine.

According to Israeli counterintelligence I was looking at a suicide bomber.

Chapter 2

I dismissed the thought immediately. Not because of racial profiling. White women are as capable of craziness as anyone else. I dismissed the thought because of tactical implausibility. The timing was wrong. The New York subway would make a fine target for a suicide bombing. The 6 train would be as good as any other and better than most. It stops under Grand Central Terminal. Eight in the morning, six at night, a crowded car, forty seated, 148 standing, wait until the doors open on packed platforms, push the button. A hundred dead, a couple of hundred grievously injured, panic, infrastructure damage, possibly fire, a major transportation hub shut down for days or weeks and maybe never really trusted again. A significant score, for people whose heads work in ways we can’t quite understand.

But not at two o’clock in the morning.

Not in a car holding just six people. Not when Grand Central’s subway platforms would hold only drifting trash and empty cups and a couple of old homeless guys on benches.

The train stopped at Astor Place. The doors hissed open. No one got on. No one got off. The doors thumped shut again and the motors whined and the train moved on.

The bullet points stayed lit up.

The first was the obvious no-brainer: inappropriate clothing. By now explosive belts are as evolved as baseball gloves. Take a three-foot by two-foot sheet of heavy canvas, fold once longitudinally, and you have a continuous pocket a foot deep. Wrap the pocket around the bomber, and sew it together in back. Zippers or snaps can lead to second thoughts. Insert a stockade of dynamite sticks into the pocket all the way around, wire them up, pack nails or ball bearings into the voids, sew the top seam shut, add crude shoulder straps to take the weight. Altogether effective, but altogether bulky. The only practical concealment, an oversized garment like a padded winter parka. Never appropriate in the Middle East, and plausible in New York maybe three months in twelve.

But this was September, and it was as hot as summer, and ten degrees hotter underground. I was wearing a T-shirt. Passenger number four was wearing a North Face down jacket, black, puffy, shiny, a little too large and zipped to her chin.

If you see something, say something.

I took a pass on the second of the eleven points. Not immediately applicable. The second point is: a robotic walk. Significant at a checkpoint or in a crowded marketplace or outside a church or a mosque, but not relevant with a seated suspect on public transportation. Bombers walk robotically not because they’re overcome with ecstasy at the thought of imminent martyrdom, but because they’re carrying forty extra pounds of unaccustomed weight, which is biting into their shoulders through crude suspender straps, and because they’re drugged. Martyrdom’s appeal goes only so far. Most bombers are browbeaten simpletons with a slug of raw opium paste held between gum and cheek. We know this because dynamite belts explode with a characteristic doughnut-shaped pressure wave that rolls up the torso in a fraction of a nanosecond and lifts the head clean off the shoulders. The human head isn’t bolted on. It just rests there by gravity, somewhat tied down by skin and muscles and tendons and ligaments, but those insubstantial biological anchors don’t do much against the force of a violent chemical explosion. My Israeli mentor told me the easiest way to determine that an open-air attack was caused by a suicide bomber rather than by a car bomb or a package bomb is to search on an eighty- or ninety-foot radius and look for a severed human head, which is likely to be strangely intact and undamaged, even down to the opium plug in the cheek.

The train stopped at Union Square. No one got on. No one got off. Hot air billowed in from the platform and fought the interior air conditioning. Then the doors closed again and the train moved on.

Points three through six are variations on a subjective theme: irritability, sweating, tics, and nervous behavior. Although in my opinion sweating is as likely to be caused by physical overheating as by nerves. The inappropriate clothing, and the dynamite. Dynamite is wood pulp soaked with nitroglycerine and molded into baton-sized sticks. Wood pulp is a good thermal insulator. So sweating comes with the territory. But the irritability and the tics and the nervous behavior are valuable indicators. These people are in the last weird moments of their lives, anxious, scared of pain, woozy with narcotics. They are irrational by definition. Believing or half-believing or not really believing at all in paradise and rivers of milk and honey and lush pastures and virgins, driven by ideological pressures or by the expectations of their peers and their families, suddenly in too deep and unable to back out. Brave talk in clandestine meetings is one thing. Action is another. Hence suppressed panic, with all its visible signs.

Passenger number four was showing them all. She looked exactly like a woman heading for the end of her life, as surely and certainly as the train was heading for the end of the line.

Therefore point seven: breathing.

She was panting, low and controlled. In, out, in, out. Like a technique to conquer the pain of childbirth, or like the result of a ghastly shock, or like a last desperate barrier against screaming with dread and fear and terror.

In, out, in, out.

Point eight: suicide bombers about to go into action stare rigidly ahead. No one knows why, but video evidence and surviving eyewitnesses have been entirely consistent in their reports. Bombers stare straight ahead. Perhaps they have screwed their commitment up to the sticking point and fear intervention. Perhaps like dogs and children they feel that if they’re not seeing anyone, then no one is seeing them. Perhaps a last shred of conscience means they can’t look at the people they’re about to destroy. No one knows why, but they all do it.

Passenger number four was doing it. That was for sure. She was staring across at the blank window opposite so hard she was almost burning a hole in the glass.

Points one through eight, check. I shifted my weight forward in my seat.

Then I stopped. The idea was tactically absurd. The time was wrong.

Then I looked again. And moved again. Because points nine, ten, and eleven were all present and correct too, and they were the most important points of all.

Chapter 3

Point nine: mumbled prayers. To date all known attacks have been inspired, or motivated, or validated, or invigilated by religion, almost exclusively the Islamic religion, and Islamic people are accustomed to praying in public. Surviving eyewitnesses report long formulaic incantations run through and repeated endlessly and more or less inaudibly, but with visibly moving lips. Passenger number four was really going at it. Her lips were moving below her fixed stare, in a long, panting, ritualistic recitation that seemed to repeat itself every twenty seconds or so. Maybe she was already introducing herself to whatever deity she expected to meet on the other side of the line. Maybe she was trying to convince herself that there really was a deity, and a line.

The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got off. No one got on. I saw the red exit signs above the platform: 22nd and Park, northeast corner, or 23rd and Park, southeast corner. Unremarkable lengths of Manhattan sidewalk, but suddenly attractive.

I stayed in my seat. The doors closed. The train moved on.

Point ten: a large bag.

Dynamite is a stable explosive, as long as it’s fresh. It doesn’t go off by accident. It needs to be triggered by blasting caps. Blasting caps are wired with detonator cord to an electricity supply and a switch. The big plungers in old Western movies were both things together. The first part of the handle’s travel spun up a dynamo, like a field telephone, and then a switch was tripped. Not practical for portable use. For portable use you need a battery, and for a linear yard of explosive you need some volts and amps. Tiny AA cells put out a weak volt and a half. Not enough, according to prevailing rules of thumb. A nine-volt battery is better, and for a decent kick you want one of the big square soup-can-sized cells sold for serious flashlights. Too big and too heavy for a pocket, hence the bag. The battery nestles in the bottom of the bag, wires come off it to the switch, then they head on out through an unobtrusive slit in the back of the bag, and then they loop up under the hem of the inappropriate garment.

Passenger number four was wearing a black canvas messenger bag, urban style, looped in front of one shoulder and behind the other, and hauled around into her lap. The way the stiff fabric bulged and sagged made it look empty apart from a single heavy item.

The train stopped at 28th Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. The doors closed and the train moved on.

Point eleven: hands in the bag.

Twenty years ago point eleven was a recent addition. Previously the list had ended at point ten. But things evolve. Action, and then reaction. Israeli security forces and some brave members of the public had adopted a new tactic. If your suspicions were aroused, you didn’t run. No point, really. You can’t run faster than shrapnel. What you did instead was grab the suspect in a desperate bear hug. You pinned their arms to their sides. You stopped them reaching the button. Several attacks were prevented that way. Many lives were saved. But the bombers learned. Now they are taught to keep their thumbs on the button at all times, to make the bear hug irrelevant. The button is in the bag, next to the battery. Hence, hands in the bag.

Passenger number four had her hands in her bag. The flap was bunched and creased between her wrists.

The train stopped at 33rd Street. The doors opened. No one got off. A lone passenger on the platform hesitated and then stepped to her right and entered the next car. I turned and looked through the little window behind my head and saw her take a seat close to me. Two stainless bulkheads, and the coupler space. I wanted to wave her away. She might survive at the other end of her car. But I didn’t wave. We had no eye contact and she would have ignored me anyway. I know New York. Crazy gestures on late-night trains carry no credibility.

The doors stayed open a beat longer than normal. For a mad second I thought of trying to shepherd everyone out. But I didn’t. It would have been a comedy. Surprise, incomprehension, maybe language barriers. I wasn’t sure that I knew the Spanish word for bomb. Bomba, maybe. Or was that lightbulb? A crazy guy ranting about lightbulbs wasn’t going to help anyone.

No, lightbulb was bombilla, I thought.

Maybe.

Possibly.

But certainly I didn’t know any Balkan languages. And I didn’t know any West African dialects. Although maybe the woman in the dress spoke French. Some of West Africa is francophone. And I speak French. Une bombe. La femme là-bas a une bombe sous son manteau. The woman over there has a bomb under her coat. The woman in the dress might understand. Or she might get the message some other way and simply follow us out.

If she woke up in time. If she opened her eyes.

In the end I just stayed in my seat.

The doors closed.

The train moved on.

I stared at passenger number four. Pictured her slim pale thumb on the hidden button. The button probably came from Radio Shack. An innocent component, for a hobby. Probably cost a buck and a half. I pictured a tangle of wires, red and black, taped and crimped and clamped. A thick detonator cord, exiting the bag, tucked under her coat, connecting twelve or twenty blasting caps in a long, lethal parallel ladder. Electricity moves close to the speed of light. Dynamite is unbelievably powerful. In a closed environment like a subway car the pressure wave alone would crush us all to paste. The nails and the ball bearings would be entirely gratuitous. Like bullets against ice cream. Very little of us would survive. Bone fragments, maybe, the size of grape pits. Possibly the stirrup and the anvil from the inner ear might survive intact. They are the smallest bones in the human body and therefore statistically the most likely to be missed by the shrapnel cloud.

I stared at the woman. No way of approaching her. I was thirty feet away. Her thumb was already on the button. Cheap brass contacts were maybe an eighth of an inch apart, that tiny gap perhaps narrowing and widening fractionally and rhythmically as her heart beat and her arm trembled.

She was good to go, and I wasn’t.

The train rocked onward, with its characteristic symphony of sounds. The howl of rushing air in the tunnel, the thump and clatter of the expansion joints under the iron rims, the scrape of the current collector against the live rail, the whine of the motors, the sequential squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through curves and the wheel flanges bit down.

Where was she going? What did the 6 train pass under? Could a building be brought down by a human bomb? I thought not. So what big crowds were still assembled after two o’clock in the morning? Not many. Nightclubs, maybe, but we had already left most of them behind, and she wouldn’t get past a velvet rope anyway.

I stared on at her.

Too hard.

She felt it.

She turned her head, slowly, smoothly, like a preprogrammed movement.

She stared right back at me.

Our eyes met.

Her face changed.

She knew I knew.

Chapter 4

We looked straight at each other for the best part of ten seconds. Then I got to my feet. Braced against the motion and took a step. I would be killed thirty feet away, no question. I couldn’t get any deader by being any closer. I passed the Hispanic woman on my left. Passed the guy in the NBA shirt on my right. Passed the West African woman on my left. Her eyes were still closed. I handed myself from one grab bar to the next, left and right, swaying. Passenger number four stared at me all the way, frightened, panting, muttering. Her hands stayed in her bag.

I stopped six feet from her.

I said, “I really want to be wrong about this.”

She didn’t reply. Her lips moved. Her hands moved under the thick black canvas. The large object in her bag shifted slightly.

I said, “I need to see your hands.”

She didn’t reply.

“I’m a cop,” I lied. “I can help you.”

She didn’t reply.

I said, “We can talk.”

She didn’t reply.

I let go of the grab bars and dropped my hands to my sides. It made me smaller. Less threatening. Just a guy. I stood as still as the moving train would let me. I did nothing. I had no option. She would need a split second. I would need more than that. Except that there was absolutely nothing I could do. I could have grabbed her bag and tried to tear it away from her. But it was looped around her body and its strap was a wide band of tightly woven cotton. The same knit as a fire hose. It was prewashed and preaged and predistressed like new stuff is now but it would still be very strong. I would have ended up jerking her off her seat and dumping her down on the floor.

Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near her. She would have hit the button before my hand was halfway there.

I could have tried to jerk the bag upward and swipe behind it with my other hand to rip the detonator cord out of its terminals. Except that for the sake of her easy movement there would be enough spare length in the cord that I would have needed to haul it through a giant two-foot arc before I met any resistance. By which time she would have hit the button, if only in involuntary shock.

I could have grabbed at her jacket and tried to tear some other wires loose. But there were fat pockets of goose feathers between me and the wires. A slippery nylon shell. No touch, no feel.

No hope.

I could have tried to incapacitate her. Hit her hard in the head, knock her out, one punch, instantaneous. But as fast as I still am, a decent swing from six feet away would have taken most of half a second. She had to move the ball of her thumb an eighth of an inch.

She would have gotten there first.

I asked, “Can I sit down? Next to you?”

She said, “No, stay away from me.”

A neutral, toneless voice. No obvious accent. American, but she could have been from anywhere. Up close she didn’t look really wild or deranged. Just resigned, and grave, and scared, and tired. She was staring up at me with the same intensity she had been using on the opposite window. She looked completely alert and aware. I felt completely scrutinized. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.

“It’s late,” I said. “You should wait for rush hour.”

She didn’t reply.

“Six more hours,” I said. “It will work much better then.”

Her hands moved, inside her bag.

I said, “Not now.”

She said nothing.

“Just one,” I said. “Show me one hand. You don’t need both of them in there.”

The train slowed hard. I staggered backward and stepped forward again and reached up to the grab bar close to the roof. My hands were damp. The steel felt hot. Grand Central, I thought. But it wasn’t. I glanced out the window expecting lights and white tile and saw the glow of a dim blue lamp instead. We were stopping in the tunnel. Maintenance, or signaling.

I turned back.

“Show me one hand,” I said again.

The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at my waist. With my hands high my T-shirt had ridden up and the scar low on my stomach was visible above the waistband of my pants. Raised white skin, hard and lumpy. Big crude stitches, like a cartoon. Shrapnel, from a truck bomb in Beirut, a long time ago. I had been a hundred yards from the explosion.

I was ninety-eight yards closer to the woman on the bench.

She stared on. Most people ask how I had gotten the scar. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to talk about bombs. Not with her.

I said, “Show me one hand.”

She asked, “Why?”

“You don’t need two in there.”

“Then what good can it do you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had no real idea what I was doing. I’m not a hostage negotiator. I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I’m a very silent person. It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.

Maybe that’s why I was talking.

The woman moved her hands. I saw her take a solo grip inside her bag with her right and she brought her left out slowly. Small, pale, faintly ridged with veins and tendons. Middle-aged skin. Plain nails, trimmed short. No rings. Not married, not engaged to be. She turned her hand over, to show me the other side. Empty palm, red because she was hot.

“Thank you,” I said.

She laid her hand palm-down on the seat next to her and left it there, like it was nothing to do with the rest of her. Which it wasn’t, at that point. The train stopped in the darkness. I lowered my hands. The hem of my shirt fell back into place.

I said, “Now show me what’s in the bag.”

“Why?”

“I just want to see it. Whatever it is.”

She didn’t reply.

She didn’t move.

I said, “I won’t try to take it away from you. I promise. I just want to see it. I’m sure you can understand that.”

The train moved on again. Slow acceleration, no jerk, low speed. A gentle cruise into the station. A slow roll. Maybe two hundred yards, I thought.

I said, “I think I’m entitled to at least see it. Wouldn’t you agree?”

She made a face, like she didn’t understand.

She said, “I don’t see why you’re entitled to see it.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Because I’m involved here. And maybe I can check it’s fixed right. For later. Because you need to do this later. Not now.”

“You said you were a cop.”

“We can work this out,” I said. “I can help you.” I glanced over my shoulder. The train was creeping along. White light up ahead. I turned back. The woman’s right hand was moving. She was juggling it into a firmer grip and slowly shaking it free of the bag, all at once.

I watched. The bag snagged on her wrist and she used her left hand to free it up. Her right hand came out.

Not a battery. No wires. No switch, no button, no plunger.

Something else entirely.

Chapter 5

The woman had a gun in her hand. She was pointing it straight at me. Low down, dead center, on a line between my groin and my navel. All kinds of necessary stuff in that region. Organs, spine, intestines, various arteries and veins. The gun was a Ruger Speed-Six. A big old .357 Magnum revolver with a short four-inch barrel, capable of blowing a hole in me big enough to see daylight through.

But overall I was a lot more cheerful than I had been a second before. Many reasons. Bombs kill people all at once, guns kill one at a time. Bombs don’t need aiming, and guns do. The Speed-Six weighs north of two pounds fully loaded. A lot of mass for a slender wrist to control. And Magnum rounds produce searing muzzle flash and punishing recoil. If she had used the gun before, she would know that. She would have what shooters call Magnum flinch. A split second before pulling the trigger her arm would clench and her eyes would close and her head would turn away. She had a decent chance of missing, even from six feet. Most handguns miss. Maybe not on the range, with ear defenders and eye protection and time and calm and nothing at stake. But in the real world, with panic and stress and the shakes and a thumping heart, handguns are all about luck, good or bad. Mine or hers.

If she missed, she wouldn’t get a second shot.

I said, “Take it easy.” Just to be making sounds. Her finger was bone-white on the trigger, but she hadn’t moved it yet. The Speed-Six is a double-action revolver, which means that the first half of the trigger’s pull moves the hammer back and rotates the cylinder. The second half drops the hammer and fires the gun. Complex mechanics, which take time. Not much, but some. I stared at her finger. Sensed the guy with the ballplayer’s eyes, watching. I guessed my back was blocking the view from farther up the car.

I said, “You’ve got no beef with me, lady. You don’t even know me. Put the gun down and talk.”

She didn’t reply. Maybe something passed across her face, but I wasn’t watching her face. I was watching her finger. It was the only part of her that interested me. And I was concentrating on the vibrations coming up through the floor. Waiting for the car to stop. My crazy fellow passenger had told me that the R142As weigh thirty-five tons each. They can do sixty-two miles an hour. Therefore their brakes are very powerful. Too powerful for finesse at low speeds. No feathering is possible. They clamp and jerk and grind. Trains often skid the last yard on locked wheels. Hence the characteristic screech as they stop.

I figured the same would apply even after our slow crawl. Maybe more so, relatively speaking. The gun was essentially a weight on the end of a pendulum. A long thin arm, two pounds of steel. When the brakes bit down, momentum would carry the gun onward. Uptown. Newton’s Law of Motion. I was ready to fight my own momentum and push off the bars the other way and jump downtown. If the gun jerked just five inches north and I jerked just five inches south I would be in the clear.

Maybe four inches would do it.

Or four and a half, for safety’s sake.

The woman asked, “Where did you get your scar?”

I didn’t answer.

“Were you gut shot?”

“Bomb,” I said.

She moved the muzzle, to her left and my right. She aimed at where the scar was hidden by the hem of my shirt.

The train rolled on. Into the station. Infinitely slow. Barely walking pace. Grand Central’s platforms are long. The lead car was heading all the way to the end. I waited for the brakes to bite. I figured there would be a nice little lurch.

We never got there.

The gun barrel moved back to my center mass. Then it moved vertical. For a split second I thought the woman was surrendering. But the barrel kept on moving. The woman raised her chin high, like a proud, obstinate gesture. She tucked the muzzle into the soft flesh beneath it. Squeezed the trigger halfway. The cylinder turned and the hammer scraped back across the nylon of her coat.

Then she pulled the trigger the rest of the way and blew her own head off.

Chapter 6

The doors didn’t open for a long time. Maybe someone had used the emergency intercom or maybe the conductor had heard the shot. But whatever, the system went into full-on lockdown mode. It was undoubtedly something they rehearsed. And the procedure made a lot of sense. Better that a crazed gunman was contained in a single car, rather than being allowed to run around all over town.

But the waiting wasn’t pleasant. The .357 Magnum round was invented in 1935. Magnum is Latin for big. Heavier bullet, and a lot more propellant charge. Technically the propellant charge does not explode. It deflagrates, which is a chemical process halfway between burning and exploding. The idea is to create a huge bubble of hot gas that accelerates the bullet down the barrel, like a pent-up spring. Normally the gas follows the bullet out of the muzzle and sets fire to the oxygen in the air close by. Hence muzzle flash. But with a hard contact shot to the head like passenger number four had chosen, the bullet makes a hole in the skin and the gas pumps itself straight in after it. It expands violently under the skin and either rips itself a huge star-shaped exit wound, or it blows all the flesh and skin right off the bone and unwraps the skull completely, like peeling a banana upside down.

That was what had happened in this case. The woman’s face was reduced to rags and tatters of bloody flesh hanging off shattered bone. The bullet had traveled vertically through her mouth and had dumped its massive kinetic energy in her brain pan, and the sudden huge pressure had sought relief and found it where the plates of her skull had sealed themselves way back in childhood. They had burst open again and the pressure had pasted three or four large fragments of bone all over the wall above and behind her. One way or the other her head was basically gone. But the graffiti-resistant fiberglass was doing its job. White bone and dark blood and gray tissue was running down the slick surface, not sticking, leaving thin snail trails behind. The woman’s body had collapsed into a slumped position on the bench. Her right index finger was still hooked through the trigger guard. The gun had bounced off her thigh and was resting on the seat next to her.

The sound of the shot was still ringing in my ears. Behind me I could hear muted sounds. I could smell the woman’s blood. I ducked forward and checked her bag. Empty. I unzipped her jacket and opened it up. Nothing there. Just a white cotton blouse and the stink of voided bowel and bladder.

I found the emergency panel and called through to the conductor myself. I said, “Suicide by gunshot. Last-but-one car. It’s all over now. We’re secure. No further threat.” I didn’t want to wait until the NYPD assembled SWAT teams and body armor and rifles and came in all stealthy. That could take a long time.

I didn’t get a reply from the conductor. But a minute later his voice came through the train PA. He said, “Passengers are advised that the doors will remain closed for a few minutes due to an evolving incident.” He spoke slowly. He was probably reading from a card. His voice was shaky. Not at all like the smooth tones of the Bloomberg anchors.

I took a last look around the car and sat down three feet from the headless corpse and waited.

Whole episodes of TV cop shows could have run before the real-life cops even arrived. DNA could have been extracted and analyzed, matches could have been made, perpetrators could have been hunted and caught and tried and sentenced. But eventually six officers came down the stairs. They were in caps and vests and they had drawn their weapons. NYPD patrolmen on the night shift, probably out of the 14th Precinct on West 35th Street, the famous Midtown South. They ran along the platform and started checking the train from the front. I got up again and watched through the windows above the couplers, down the whole length of the train, like peering into a long lit-up stainless-steel tunnel. The view got murky farther down, due to dirt and green impurities in the layers of glass. But I could see the cops opening doors car by car, checking, clearing, turning the passengers out and hustling them upstairs to the street. It was a lightly loaded night train and it didn’t take long for them to reach us. They checked through the windows and saw the body and the gun and tensed up. The doors hissed open and they swarmed onboard, two through each set of doors. We all raised our hands, like a reflex.

One cop blocked each of the doorways and the other three moved straight toward the dead woman. They stopped and stood off about six feet. Didn’t check for a pulse or any other sign of life. Didn’t hold a mirror under her nose, to check for breathing. Partly because it was obvious she wasn’t breathing, and partly because she didn’t have a nose. The cartilage had torn away, leaving jagged splinters of bone between where the internal pressure had popped her eyeballs out.

A big cop with sergeant’s stripes turned around. He had gone a little pale but was otherwise well into a pretty good impersonation of just another night’s work. He asked, “Who saw what happened here?”

There was silence at the front of the car. The Hispanic woman, the man in the NBA shirt, and the African lady. They were all sitting tight and saying nothing. Point eight: a rigid stare ahead. They were all doing it. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The guy in the golf shirt said nothing. So I said, “She took the gun out of her bag and shot herself.”

“Just like that?”

“More or less.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?”

“Where and when?”

“On the run-in to the station. Whenever that was.”

The guy processed the information. Suicide by gunshot. The subway was the NYPD’s responsibility. The deceleration zone between 41st and 42nd was the 14th Precinct’s turf. His case. No question. He nodded. Said, “OK, please all of you exit the car and wait on the platform. We’ll need names and addresses and statements from you.”

Then he keyed his collar microphone and was answered by a loud blast of static. He answered that in turn with a long stream of codes and numbers. I guessed he was calling for paramedics and an ambulance. After that it would be up to the transportation people to get the car unhooked and cleaned and the schedule back on track. Not difficult, I thought. There was plenty of time before the morning rush hour.

We got out into a gathering crowd on the platform. Transport cops, more regular cops arriving, subway workers clustering all around, Grand Central personnel showing up. Five minutes later an FDNY paramedic crew clattered down the stairs with a gurney. They came through the barrier and stepped on the train and the first-response cops stepped off. I didn’t see what happened after that because the cops started moving through the crowd, looking around, making ready to find a passenger each and walk them away for further inquiries. The big sergeant came for me. I had answered his questions on the train. Therefore he made me first in line. He led me deep into the station and put me in a hot stale white-tiled room that could have been part of the transport police facility. He sat me down alone in a wooden chair and asked me for my name.

“Jack Reacher,” I said.

He wrote it down and didn’t speak again. Just hung around in the doorway and watched me. And waited. For a detective to show up, I guessed.

Chapter 7

The detective who showed up was a woman and she came alone. She was wearing pants and a gray short-sleeve shirt. Maybe silk, maybe man-made. Shiny, anyway. It was untucked and I guessed the tails were hiding her gun and her cuffs and whatever else she was carrying. Inside the shirt she was small and slim. Above the shirt she had dark hair tied back and a small oval face. No jewelry. Not even a wedding band. She was somewhere in her late thirties. Maybe forty. An attractive woman. I liked her immediately. She looked relaxed and friendly. She showed me her gold shield and handed me her business card. It had numbers on it for her office and her cell. It had an NYPD e-mail address. She said the name on it out loud for me. The name was Theresa Lee, with the t and the h pronounced together, like the or theme or therapy. Theresa. She wasn’t Asian. Maybe the Lee came from an old marriage or was an Ellis Island version of Leigh, or some other longer and more complicated name. Or maybe she was descended from Robert E.

She said, “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen many more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.

So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.

Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.

“We have a copy,” she said. “It’s supposed to be confidential.”

“It’s been out in the world for twenty years,” I said. “Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.”

“Where did you see it?”

“In Israel,” I said. “Just after it was written.”

“How?”

So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defense budget, suddenly getting cut loose.

“Officer or enlisted man?” she asked.

“Final rank of major,” I said.

“And now?”

“I’m retired.”

“You’re young to be retired.”

“I figured I should enjoy it while I can.”

“And are you?”

“Never better.”

“What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?”

“Music,” I said. “Those blues clubs on Bleecker.”

“And where were you headed on the 6 train?”

“I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.”

“To where?”

“Wherever.”

“Short visit?”

“The best kind.”

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.”

“Where’s your luggage?”

“I don’t have any.”

Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, “I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.” She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.

“It was only half-wrong,” I said. “The suicide part was right.”

“I suppose so,” she said. “The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.”

“Better than a false negative.”

“I suppose so,” she said again.

I asked, “Do we know who she was?”

“Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?”

I said, “I have no idea.”

She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, “These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her head scarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.”

“Good point,” she said.

“And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.”

“They kill themselves for raisins?”

“I’d love to see their faces.”

“Are you a linguist?”

“I speak English,” I said. “And French. And why would a woman bomber want virgins anyway? A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we made of it all.”

Theresa Lee didn’t comment on that. Instead she asked, “Are you OK?”

I took it to be an inquiry as to whether I was shaken up. As to whether I should be offered counseling. Maybe because she took me for a taciturn man who was talking too much. But I was wrong. I said, “I’m fine,” and she looked a little surprised and said, “I would be regretting the approach, myself. On the train. I think you tipped her over the edge. Another couple of stops and she might have gotten over whatever was upsetting her.”

We sat in silence for a minute after that and then the big sergeant stuck his head in and nodded Lee out to the corridor. I heard a short whispered conversation and then Lee came back in and asked me to head over to West 35th Street with her. To the precinct house.

I asked, “Why?”

She hesitated.

“Formality,” she said. “To get your statement typed up, to close the file.”

“Do I get a choice in the matter?”

“Don’t go there,” she said. “The Israeli list is involved. We could call this whole thing a matter of national security. You’re a material witness, we could keep you until you grew old and died. Better just to play ball like a good citizen.”

So I shrugged and followed her out of the Grand Central labyrinth to Vanderbilt Avenue, where her car was parked. It was an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria, battered and grimy, but it worked OK. It got us over to West 35th just fine. We went in through the grand old portal and she led me upstairs to an interview room. She stepped back and waited in the corridor and let me go in ahead of her. Then she stayed in the corridor and closed the door behind me and locked it from the outside.

Chapter 8

Theresa Lee came back twenty minutes later with the beginnings of an official file and another guy. She put the file on the table and introduced the other guy as her partner. She said his name was Docherty. She said he had come up with a bunch of questions that maybe should have been asked and answered at the outset.

“What questions?” I asked.

First she offered me coffee and the bathroom. I said yes to both. Docherty escorted me down the corridor and when we got back there were three foam cups on the table, next to the file. Two coffees, one tea. I took a coffee and tried it. It was OK. Lee took the tea. Docherty took the second coffee and said, “Run through it all again.”

So I did, concisely, bare bones, and Docherty fussed a bit about how the Israeli list had produced a false positive, the same way that Lee had. I answered him the same way I had answered her, that a false positive was better than a false negative, and that looking at it from the dead woman’s point of view, whether she was heading for a solo exit or planning to take a crowd with her might not alter the personal symptoms she would be displaying. For five minutes we had a collegiate atmosphere going, three reasonable people discussing an interesting phenomenon.

Then the tone changed.

Docherty asked, “How did you feel?”

I asked, “About what?”

“While she was killing herself.”

“Glad that she wasn’t killing me.”

Docherty said, “We’re homicide detectives. We have to look at all violent deaths. You understand that, right? Just in case.”

I said, “Just in case of what?”

“Just in case there’s more than meets the eye.”

“There isn’t. She shot herself.”

“Says you.”

“No one can say different. Because that’s what happened.”

Docherty said, “There are always alternative scenarios.”

“You think?”

“Maybe you shot her.”

Theresa Lee gave me a sympathetic look.

I said, “I didn’t.”

Docherty said, “Maybe it was your gun.”

I said, “It wasn’t. It was a two-pound piece. I don’t have a bag.”

“You’re a big guy. Big pants. Big pockets.”

Theresa Lee gave me another sympathetic look. Like she was saying, I’m sorry.

I said, “What is this? Good cop, dumb cop?”

Docherty said, “You think I’m dumb?”

“You just proved it. If I shot her with a .357 Magnum, I’d have residue on me up to my elbow. But you just stood outside the men’s room while I washed my hands. You’re full of shit. You haven’t fingerprinted me and you haven’t Mirandized me. You’re blowing smoke.”

“We’re obliged to make certain.”

“What does the medical examiner say?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“There were witnesses.”

Lee shook her head. “No use. They didn’t see anything.”

“They must have.”

“Their view was blocked by your back. Plus they weren’t looking, plus they were half-asleep, and plus they don’t speak much English. They had nothing to offer. Basically I think they wanted to get going before we started checking green cards.”

“What about the other guy? He was in front of me. He was wide awake. And he looked like a citizen and an English speaker.”

“What other guy?”

“The fifth passenger. Chinos and a golf shirt.”

Lee opened the file. Shook her head. “There were only four passengers, plus the woman.”

Chapter 9

Lee took a sheet of paper out of the file and reversed it and slid it halfway across the table. It was a handwritten list of witnesses. Four names. Mine, plus a Rodriguez, a Frlujlov, and an Mbele.

“Four passengers,” she said again.

I said, “I was on the train. I can count. I know how many passengers there were.” Then I reran the scene in my head. Stepping off the train, waiting among the small milling crowd. The arrival of the paramedic crew. The cops, stepping off the train in turn, moving through the throng, taking an elbow each, leading the witnesses away to separate rooms. I had gotten grabbed first, by the big sergeant. Impossible to say whether four cops had followed behind us, or only three.

I said, “He must have slipped away.”

Docherty asked, “Who was he?”

“Just a guy. Alert, but nothing special about him. My age, not poor.”

“Did he interact in any way with the woman?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did he shoot her?”

“She shot herself.”

Docherty shrugged. “So he’s just a reluctant witness. Doesn’t want paperwork showing he was out and about at two in the morning. Probably cheating on his wife. Happens all the time.”

“He ran. But you’re giving him a free pass and looking at me instead?”

“You just testified that he wasn’t involved.”

“I wasn’t involved, either.”

“Says you.”

“You believe me about the other guy but not about myself?”

“Why would you lie about the other guy?”

I said, “This is a waste of time.” And it was. It was such an extreme, clumsy waste of time that I suddenly realized it wasn’t for real. It was stage-managed. I realized that, in fact, in their own peculiar way, Lee and Docherty were doing me a small favor.

There’s more than meets the eye.

I said, “Who was she?”

Docherty said, “Why should she be someone?”

“Because you made the ID and the computers lit up like Christmas trees. Someone called you and told you to hold on to me until they get here. You didn’t want to put an arrest on my record so you’re stalling me with all this bullshit.”

“We didn’t particularly care about your record. We just didn’t want to do the paperwork.”

“So who was she?”

“Apparently she worked for the government. A federal agency is on its way to question you. We’re not allowed to say which one.”

They left me locked in the room. It was an OK space. Grimy, hot, battered, no windows, out-of-date crime prevention posters on the walls and the smell of sweat and anxiety and burnt coffee in the air. The table, and three chairs. Two for the detectives, one for the suspect. Back in the day maybe the suspect got smacked around and tumbled out of the chair. Maybe he still did. It’s hard to say exactly what happens, in a room with no windows.

I timed the delay in my head. The clock had already been running about an hour, since Theresa Lee’s whispered talk in the Grand Central corridor. So I knew it wasn’t the FBI coming for me. Their New York field office is the largest in the nation, based down in Federal Plaza, near City Hall. Ten minutes to react, ten minutes to assemble a team, ten minutes to drive uptown with lights and sirens. The FBI would have arrived long ago. But that left a whole bunch of other three-letter agencies. I made a bet with myself that whoever was heading my way would have IA as the last two letters on their badges. CIA, DIA. Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency. Maybe others recently invented and hitherto unpublicized. Middle-of-the-night panics were very much their style.

After a second hour tacked on to the first I figured they must be coming all the way from D.C., which implied a small specialist outfit. Anyone else would have a field office closer to hand. I gave up speculating and tipped my chair back and put my feet on the table and went to sleep.

I didn’t find out exactly who they were. Not then. They wouldn’t tell me. At five in the morning three men in suits came in and woke me up. They were polite and businesslike. Their suits were mid-priced and clean and pressed. Their shoes were polished. Their eyes were bright. Their haircuts were fresh and short. Their faces were pink and ruddy. Their bodies were stocky but toned. They looked like they could run half-marathons without much trouble, but without much enjoyment, either. My first impression was recent ex-military. Gung-ho staff officers, head-hunted into some limestone building inside the Beltway. True believers, doing important work. I asked to see ID and badges and credentials, but they quoted the Patriot Act at me and said they weren’t obliged to identify themselves. Probably true, and they certainly enjoyed saying so. I considered clamming up in retaliation, but they saw me considering, and quoted some more of the Act at me, which left me in no doubt at all that a world of trouble lay at the end of that particular road. I am afraid of very little, but hassle with today’s security apparatus is always best avoided. Franz Kafka and George Orwell would have given me the same advice. So I shrugged and told them to go ahead and ask their questions.

They started out by saying that they were aware of my military service and very respectful of it, which was either a bullshit boilerplate platitude, or meant that they had been recruited out of the MPs themselves. Nobody respects an MP except another MP. Then they said that they would be observing me very closely and would know whether I was telling the truth or lying. Which was total bullshit, because only the best of us can do that, and these guys weren’t the best of us, otherwise they would have been in very senior positions, meaning that right then they would have been home and asleep in a Virginia suburb, rather than running up and down I-95 in the middle of the night.

But I didn’t have anything to hide, so I told them again to go ahead.

They had three areas of concern. The first: Did I know the woman who had killed herself on the train? Had I ever seen her before?

I said, “No.” Short and sweet, quiet but firm.

They didn’t follow up with supplementaries. Which told me roughly who they were and exactly what they were doing. They were somebody’s B-team, sent north to dead-end an open investigation. They were walling it off, burying it, drawing a line under something somebody had been only half-suspicious about to begin with. They wanted a negative answer to every question, so that the file could be closed and the matter put to bed. They wanted a positive absence of loose ends, and they didn’t want to draw attention to the issue by making it a big drama. They wanted to get back on the road with the whole thing forgotten.

The second question was: Did I know a woman called Lila Hoth?

I said, “No,” because I didn’t. Not then.

The third question was more of a sustained dialog. The lead agent opened it. The main man. He was a little older and a little smaller than the other two. Maybe a little smarter, too. He said, “You approached the woman on the train.”

I didn’t reply. I was there to answer questions, not to comment on statements.

The guy asked, “How close did you get?”

“Six feet,” I said. “Give or take.”

“Close enough to touch her?”

“No.”

“If you had extended your arm, and she had extended hers, could you have touched hands?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a maybe. I know how long my arms are. I don’t know how long hers were.”

“Did she pass anything to you?”

“No.”

“Did you accept anything from her?”

“No.”

“Did you take anything from her after she was dead?”

“No.”

“Did anyone else?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did you see anything fall from her hand, or her bag, or her clothing?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you anything?”

“Nothing of substance.”

“Did she speak to anyone else?”

“No.”

The guy asked, “Would you mind turning out your pockets?”

I shrugged. I had nothing to hide. I went through each pocket in turn and dumped the contents on the battered table. A folded wad of cash money, and a few coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My clip-together toothbrush. The Metrocard that had gotten me into the subway in the first place. And Theresa Lee’s business card.

The guy stirred through my stuff with a single extended finger and nodded to one of his underlings, who stepped up close to pat me down. He did a semi-expert job and found nothing more and shook his head.

The main guy said, “Thank you, Mr. Reacher.”

And then they left, all three of them, as quickly as they had come in. I was a little surprised, but happy enough. I put my stuff back in my pockets and waited for them to clear the corridor and then I wandered out. The place was quiet. I saw Theresa Lee doing nothing at a desk and her partner Docherty walking a guy across the squad room to a cubicle in back. The guy was a worn-out mid-sized forty-something. He had on a creased gray T-shirt and a pair of red sweatpants. He had left home without combing his hair. That was clear. It was gray and sticking up all over the place. Theresa Lee saw me looking and said, “Family member.”

“The woman’s?”

Lee nodded. “She had contact details in her wallet. That’s her brother. He’s a cop himself. Small town in New Jersey. He drove straight over.”

“Poor guy.”

“I know. We didn’t ask him to make the formal ID. She’s too messed up. We told him that a closed casket is the way to go. He got the message.”

“So are you sure it’s her?”

Lee nodded again. “Fingerprints.”

“Who was she?”

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Am I done here?”

“The feds finished with you?”

“Apparently.”

“Then beat it. You’re done.”

I made it to the top of the stairs and she called after me. She said, “I didn’t mean it about tipping her over the edge.”

“Yes, you did,” I said. “And you might have been right.”

I stepped out to the dawn cool and turned left on 35th Street and headed east. You’re done. But I wasn’t. Right there on the corner were four more guys waiting to talk to me. Similar types as before, but not federal agents. Their suits were too expensive.

Chapter 10

The world is the same jungle all over, but New York is its purest distillation. What is useful elsewhere is vital in the big city. You see four guys bunched on a corner waiting for you, you either run like hell in the opposite direction without hesitation, or you keep on walking without slowing down or speeding up or breaking stride. You look ahead with studied neutrality, you check their faces, you look away, like you’re saying, Is that all you got?

Truth is, it’s smarter to run. The best fight is the one you don’t have. But I have never claimed to be smart. Just obstinate, and occasionally bad-tempered. Some guys kick cats. I keep walking.

The suits were all midnight blue and looked like they came from the kind of store that has a foreign person’s name above the door. The men inside the suits looked capable. Like NCOs. Wise to the ways of the world, proud of their ability to get the job done. They were certainly ex-military or ex-law enforcement, or ex-both. They were the kind of guys who had taken a step up in salary and a step away from rules and regulations, and who regarded both moves as equally valuable.

They separated into two pairs when I was still four paces away. Left me room to pass if I wanted to, but the front guy on the left raised both palms a little and patted the air, in a kind of dual-purpose please stop and we’re no threat gesture. I spent the next step deciding. You can’t let yourself get caught in the middle of four guys. Either you stop early or you barge on through. At that point my options were still open. Easy to stop, easy to keep going. If they closed ranks while I was still moving, they would go down like bowling pins. I weigh two-fifty and was moving at four miles an hour. They didn’t, and weren’t.

Two steps out, the lead guy said, “Can we talk?”

I stopped walking. Said, “About what?”

“You’re the witness, right?”

“But who are you?”

The guy answered by peeling back the flap of his suit coat, slow and unthreatening, showing me nothing except a red satin lining and a shirt. No gun, no holster, no belt. He put his right fingers into his left inside pocket and came out with a business card. Leaned forward and handed it to me. It was a cheap product. The first line said: Sure and Certain, Inc. The second line said: Protection, Investigation, Intervention. The third line had a telephone number, with a 212 area code. Manhattan.

“Kinko’s is a wonderful place,” I said. “Isn’t it? Maybe I’ll get some cards that say John Smith, King of the World.”

“The card is legit,” the guy said. “And we’re legit.”

“Who are you working for?”

“We can’t say.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“Better that you talk to us than our principal. We can keep things civilized.”

“Now I’m really scared.”

“Just a couple of questions. That’s all. Help us out. We’re just working stiffs, trying to get paid. Like you.”

“I’m not a working stiff. I’m a gentleman of leisure.”

“Then look down on us from your lofty perch and take pity.”

“What questions?”

“Did she give anything to you?”

“Who?”

“You know who. Did you take anything from her?”

“And? What’s the next question?”

“Did she say anything?”

“She said plenty. She was talking all the way from Bleecker to Grand Central.”

“Saying what?”

“I didn’t hear very much of it.”

“Information?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Did she mention names?”

“She might have.”

“Did she say the name Lila Hoth?”

“Not that I heard.”

“Did she say John Sansom?”

I didn’t answer. The guy asked, “What?”

I said, “I heard that name somewhere.”

“From her?”

“No.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“What kind of a thing?”

“Anything at all.”

“Tell me what difference it would make.”

“Our principal wants to know.”

“Tell him to come ask me himself.”

“Better to talk to us.”

I smiled and walked on, through the alley they had created. But one of the guys on the right side-stepped and tried to push me back. I caught him shoulder-to-chest and spun him out of my way. He came after me again and I stopped and started and feinted left and right and slid in behind him and shoved him hard in the back so that he stumbled on ahead of me. His jacket had a single center vent. French tailoring. British suits favor twin side vents and Italian suits favor none at all. I leaned down and caught a coat tail in each hand and heaved and tore the seam all the way up the back. Then I shoved him again. He stumbled ahead and veered right. His coat was hanging off him by the collar. Unbuttoned at the front, open at the back, like a hospital gown.

Then I ran three steps and stopped and turned around. It would have been much more stylish to just keep on walking slowly, but also much dumber. Insouciance is good, but being ready is better. The four of them were caught in a moment of real indecision. They wanted to come get me. That was for sure. But they were on West 35th Street at dawn. At that hour virtually all the traffic would be cops. So in the end they just gave me hard looks and moved away. They crossed 35th in single file and headed south at the corner.

You’re done.

But I wasn’t. I turned to move away and a guy came out of the precinct house and ran after me. Creased gray T-shirt, red sweatpants, gray hair sticking up all over the place. The family member. The brother. The small-town cop from Jersey. He caught up with me and grabbed my elbow in a wiry grip and told me he had seen me inside and had guessed I was the witness. Then he told me his sister hadn’t committed suicide.

Chapter 11

I took the guy to a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. A long time ago I was sent on a one-day MP seminar at Fort Rucker, to learn sensitivity around the recently bereaved. Sometimes MPs had to deliver bad news to relatives. We called them death messages. My skills were widely held to be deficient. I used to walk in and just tell them. I thought that was the nature of a message. But apparently I was wrong. So I was sent to Rucker. I learned good stuff there. I learned to take emotions seriously. Above all I learned that cafés and diners and coffee shops were good environments for bad news. The public atmosphere limits the likelihood of falling apart, and the process of ordering and waiting and sipping punctuates the flow of information in a way that makes it easier to absorb.

We took a booth next to a mirror. That helps, too. You can look at each other in the glass. Face-to-face, but not really. The place was about half-full. Cops from the precinct, taxi drivers on their way to the West Side garages. We ordered coffee. I wanted food too, but I wasn’t going to eat if he didn’t. Not respectful. He said he wasn’t hungry. I sat quiet and waited. Let them talk first, the Rucker psychologists had said.

He told me that his name was Jacob Mark. Originally Markakis in his grandfather’s day, back when a Greek name was no good to anyone, except if you were in the diner business, which his grandfather wasn’t. His grandfather was in the construction business. Hence the change. He said I could call him Jake. I said he could call me Reacher. He told me he was a cop. I told him I had been one once, in the military. He told me he wasn’t married and lived alone. I said the same went for me. Establish common ground, the teachers at Rucker had said. Up close and looking past his physical disarray he was a squared-away guy. He had any cop’s weary gloss, but under it lay a normal suburban man. With a different guidance counselor he might have become a science teacher or a dentist or an auto parts manager. He was in his forties, already very gray, but his face was youthful and unlined. His eyes were dark and wide and staring, but that was temporary. Some hours ago, when he went to bed, he must have been a handsome man. I liked him on sight, and I felt sorry for his situation.

He took a breath and told me his sister’s name was Susan Mark. At one time Susan Molina, but many years divorced and reverted. Now living alone. He talked about her in the present tense. He was a long way from acceptance.

He said, “She can’t have killed herself. It’s just not possible.”

I said, “Jake, I was there.”

The waitress brought our coffee and we sipped in silence for a moment. Passing time, letting reality sink in just a little more. The Rucker psychologists had been explicit: The suddenly bereaved have the IQ of labradors. Indelicate, because they were army, but accurate, because they were psychologists.

Jake said, “So tell me what happened.”

I asked him, “Where are you from?”

He named a small town in northern New Jersey, well inside the New York Metro area, full of commuters and soccer moms, prosperous, safe, contented. He said the police department was well funded, well equipped, and generally understretched. I asked him if his department had a copy of the Israeli list. He said that after the Twin Towers every police department in the country had been buried under paper, and every officer had been required to learn every point on every list.

I said, “Your sister was behaving strangely, Jake. She rang every bell. She looked like a suicide bomber.”

“Bullshit,” he said, like a good brother should.

“Obviously she wasn’t,” I said. “But you would have thought the same thing. You would have had to, with your training.”

“So the list is more about suicide than bombing.”

“Apparently.”

“She wasn’t an unhappy person.”

“She must have been.”

He didn’t reply. We sipped a little more. People came and went. Checks were paid, tips were left. Traffic built up on Eighth.

I said, “Tell me about her.”

He asked, “What gun did she use?”

“An old Ruger Speed-Six.”

“Our dad’s gun. She inherited it.”

“Where did she live? Here, in the city?”

He shook his head. “Annandale, Virginia.”

“Did you know she was up here?”

He shook his head again.

“Why would she come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would she be wearing a winter coat?”

“I don’t know.”

I said, “Some federal agents came and asked me questions. Then some private guys found me, just before you did. They were all talking about a woman called Lila Hoth. You ever hear that name from your sister?”

“No.”

“What about John Sansom?”

“He’s a congressman from North Carolina. Wants to be a senator. Some kind of hard-ass.”

I nodded. I remembered, vaguely. Election season was gearing up. I had seen newspaper stories and television coverage. Sansom had been a late entrant to politics and was a rising star. He was seen as tough and uncompromising. And ambitious. He had done well in business for a spell and before that he had done well in the army. He hinted at a glamorous Special Forces career, without supplying details. Special Forces careers are good for that kind of thing. Most of what they do is secret, or can be claimed to be.

I asked, “Did your sister ever mention Sansom?”

He said, “I don’t think so.”

“Did she know him?”

“I can’t see how.”

I asked, “What did she do for a living?”

He wouldn’t tell me.

Chapter 12

He didn’t need to tell me. I already knew enough for a ballpark guess. Her fingerprints were on file and three shiny pink ex–staff officers had hustled up the highway but had left again within minutes. Which put Susan Mark somewhere in the defense business, but not in an elevated position. And she lived in Annandale, Virginia. Southwest of Arlington, as I recalled. Probably changed since I was last there. But probably still a decent place to live, and still an easy commute to the world’s largest office building. Route 244, one end to the other.

“She worked at the Pentagon,” I said.

Jake said, “She wasn’t supposed to talk about her job.”

I shook my head. “If it was really a secret, she would have told you she worked at Wal-Mart.”

He didn’t answer. I said, “I had an office in the Pentagon once. I’m familiar with the place. Try me.”

He paused a beat and then he shrugged and said, “She was a civilian clerk. But she made it sound exciting. She worked for an outfit called CGUSAHRC. She never told me much about it. She made it sound like a hush-hush thing. People can’t talk so much now, after the Twin Towers.”

“It’s not an outfit,” I said. “It’s a guy. CGUSAHRC means Commanding General, United States Army, Human Resources Command. And it’s not very exciting. It’s a personnel department. Paperwork and records.”

Jake didn’t reply. I thought I had offended him, by belittling his sister’s career. Maybe the Rucker seminar hadn’t taught me enough. Maybe I should have paid more attention. The silence went on a beat too long and grew awkward. I asked, “Did she tell you anything about it at all?”

“Not really. Maybe there wasn’t much to tell.” He said it with a hint of bitterness, as if his sister had been caught in a lie. I said, “People dress things up, Jake. It’s human nature. And usually there’s no harm in it. Maybe she just wanted to compete, with you being a cop.”

“We weren’t close.”

“You were still family.”

“I guess.”

“Did she enjoy her job?”

“She seemed to. And it must have suited her. She had the right skills, for a records department. Great memory, meticulous, very organized. She was good with computers.”

The silence came back. I started to think about Annandale again. A pleasant but unremarkable community. A dormitory, basically. Under the present circumstances it had just one significant characteristic.

It was a very long way from New York City.

She wasn’t an unhappy person.

Jake said, “What?”

I said, “Nothing. None of my business.”

“But what?”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

There’s more than meets the eye.

I asked, “How long have you been a cop?”

“Eighteen years.”

“All in the same place?”

“I trained with the State Troopers. Then I moved over. Like a farm system.”

“Have you seen many suicides in Jersey?”

“One or two a year, maybe.”

“Anyone see any of them coming?”

“Not really. They’re usually a big surprise.”

“Like this one.”

“You got that right.”

“But behind each one of them there must have been a reason.”

“Always. Financial, sexual, some kind of shit about to hit the fan.”

“So your sister must have had a reason.”

“I don’t know what.”

I went quiet again. Jake said, “Just say it. Tell me.”

“Not my place.”

“You were a cop,” he said. “You’re seeing something.”

I nodded. Said, “My guess is that out of the suicides you’ve seen, maybe seven out of ten happened at home, and three out of ten, they drove to some local lane and hitched up the hosepipe.”

“More or less.”

“But always somewhere familiar. Somewhere quiet and alone. Always at some kind of a destination. You get there, you compose yourself, you do it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I never heard of a suicide where the person travels hundreds of miles from home and does it while the journey is still in progress.”

“I told you.”

“You told me she didn’t kill herself. But she did. I saw her do it. But I’m saying she did it in a very unconventional manner. In fact I don’t think I ever heard of a suicide inside a subway car before. Under one, maybe, but not inside. Did you ever hear of a suicide on public transportation, during the ride?”

“So?”

“So nothing. I’m just asking, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because. Think like a cop, Jake. Not like a brother. What do you do when something is way out of line?”

“You dig deeper.”

“So do it.”

“It won’t bring her back.”

“But understanding a thing helps a lot.” Which was also a concept they taught at Fort Rucker. But not in the psychology class.

I got a refill of coffee and Jacob Mark picked up a packet of sugar and turned it over and over in his fingers so that the powder fell from one end of the paper rectangle to the other, repeatedly, like an hourglass. I could see his head working like a cop and his heart working like a brother. It was all right there in his face. Dig deeper. It won’t bring her back.

He asked, “What else?”

“There was a passenger who took off before the NYPD got to him.”

“Who?”

“Just a guy. The cops figured he didn’t want his name in the system. They figured he was maybe cheating on his wife.”

“Possible.”

“Yes,” I said. “Possible.”

“And?”

“Both the feds and the private guys asked me if your sister had handed me anything.”

“What kind of anything?”

“They didn’t specify. I’m guessing something small.”

“Who were the feds?”

“They wouldn’t say.”

“Who were the private guys?”

I hitched up off the bench and took the business card out of my back pocket. Cheap stock, already creased, and already rubbed a little blue from my jeans. New pants, fresh dye. I put it on the table and reversed it and slid it across. Jake read it slowly, maybe twice. Sure and Certain, Inc. Protection, Investigation, Intervention. The telephone number. He took out a cell and dialed. I heard a delay and a chirpy little three-note ding-dong tone and a recorded message. Jake closed his phone and said, “Not in service. Phony number.”

Chapter 13

I took a second refill of coffee. Jake just stared at the waitress like he had never heard of the concept. Eventually she lost interest and moved away. Jake slid the business card back to me. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and he said, “I don’t like this.”

I said, “I wouldn’t like it, either.”

“We should go back and talk to the NYPD.”

“She killed herself, Jake. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they need to know. They don’t care how or where or why.”

“They should.”

“Maybe so. But they don’t. Would you?”

“Probably not,” he said. I saw his eyes go blank. Maybe he was rerunning old cases in his head. Big houses, leafy roads, lawyers living the high life on their clients’ escrow money, unable to make good, ducking out ahead of shame and scandal and disbarment. Or teachers, with pregnant students. Or family men, with boyfriends in Chelsea or the West Village. The local cops, full of tact and rough sympathy, large and intrusive in the neat quiet dwellings, checking the scenes, establishing the facts, typing reports, closing files, forgetting, moving on to the next thing, not caring how or where or why.

He said, “You got a theory?”

I said, “It’s too early for a theory. All we got so far is facts.”

“What facts?”

“The Pentagon didn’t entirely trust your sister.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“She was on a watch list, Jake. She must have been. As soon as her name hit the wires, those feds saddled up. Three of them. That was a procedure.”

“They didn’t stay long.”

I nodded. “Which means they weren’t very suspicious. They were being cautious, that’s all. Maybe they had some small thing on their minds, but they didn’t really believe it. They came up here to rule it out.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Information,” I said. “That’s all the Human Resources Command has got.”

“They thought she was passing information?”

“They wanted to rule it out.”

“Which means at some point they must have ruled it in.”

I nodded again. “Maybe she was seen in the wrong office, opening the wrong file cabinet. Maybe they figured there was an innocent explanation, but they wanted to be sure. Or maybe something went missing and they didn’t know who to watch, so they were watching them all.”

“What kind of information?”

“I have no idea.”

“Like a copied file?”

“Smaller,” I said. “A folded note, a computer memory. Something that could be passed from hand to hand in a subway car.”

“She was a patriot. She loved her country. She wouldn’t do that.”

“And she didn’t do that. She didn’t pass anything to anyone.”

“So we’ve got nothing.”

“We’ve got your sister hundreds of miles from home with a loaded gun.”

“And afraid,” Jake said.

“Wearing a winter jacket in ninety-degree weather.”

“With two names floating around,” he said. “John Sansom and Lila Hoth, whoever the hell she is. And Hoth sounds foreign.”

“So did Markakis, once upon a time.”

He went quiet again and I sipped coffee. Traffic was getting slower on Eighth. The morning rush was building. The sun was up, a little south of east. Its rays were not aligned with the street grid. They came in at a low angle and threw long diagonal shadows.

Jake said, “Give me somewhere to start.”

I said, “We don’t know enough.”

“Speculate.”

“I can’t. I could make up a story, but it would be full of holes. And it might be completely the wrong story to begin with.”

“Try it. Give me something. Like brainstorming.”

I shrugged. “You ever met any ex–Special Forces guys?”

“Two or three. Maybe four or five, counting the Troopers I knew.”

“You probably didn’t. Most Special Forces careers never happened. It’s like people who claim to have been at Woodstock. Believe them all, the crowd must have been ten million strong. Or like New Yorkers who saw the planes hit the towers. They all did, to listen to them. No one was looking the wrong way at the time. People who say they were Special Forces are usually bullshitting. Most of them never made it out of the infantry. Some of them were never in the army at all. People dress things up.”

“Like my sister.”

“It’s human nature.”

“What’s your point?”

“I’m working with what we’ve got. We’ve got two random names, and election season starting up, and your sister in HRC.”

“You think John Sansom is lying about his past?”

“Probably not,” I said. “But it’s a common area of exaggeration. And politics is a dirty business. You can bet that right now someone is checking on the guy who did Sansom’s dry cleaning twenty years ago, wanting to know if he had a green card. So it’s a no-brainer to assume that people are fact-checking his actual biography. It’s a national sport.”

“So maybe Lila Hoth is a journalist. Or a researcher. Cable news, or something. Or talk radio.”

“Maybe she’s Sansom’s opponent.”

“Not with a name like that. Not in North Carolina.”

“OK, let’s say she’s a journalist or a researcher. Maybe she put the squeeze on an HRC clerk for Sansom’s service record. Maybe she picked your sister.”

“Where was her leverage?”

I said, “That’s the first big hole in the story.” Which it was. Susan Mark had been desperate and terrified. It was hard to imagine a journalist finding that kind of leverage. Journalists can be manipulative and persuasive, but no one is particularly afraid of them.

“Was Susan political?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Maybe she didn’t like Sansom. Didn’t like what he stood for. Maybe she was cooperating. Or volunteering.”

“Then why would she be so scared?”

“Because she was breaking the law,” I said. “Her heart would have been in her mouth.”

“And why was she carrying the gun?”

“Didn’t she normally carry it?”

“Never. It was an heirloom. She kept it in her sock drawer, like people do.”

I shrugged. The gun was the second big hole in the story. People take their guns out of their sock drawers for a variety of reasons. Protection, aggression. But never just in case they feel a spur-of-the-moment impulse to off themselves far from home.

Jake said, “Susan wasn’t very political.”

“OK.”

“Therefore there can’t be a connection with Sansom.”

“Then why did his name come up?”

“I don’t know.”

I said, “Susan must have driven up. Can’t take a gun on a plane. Her car is probably getting towed right now. She must have come through the Holland Tunnel and parked way downtown.”

Jake didn’t reply. My coffee was cold. The waitress had given up on refills. We were an unprofitable table. The rest of the clientele had changed twice over. Working people, moving fast, fueling up, getting ready for a busy day. I pictured Susan Mark twelve hours earlier, getting ready for a busy night. Dressing. Finding her father’s gun, loading it, packing it into the black bag. Climbing into her car, taking 236 to the Beltway, going clockwise, maybe getting gas, hitting 95, heading north, eyes wide and desperate, drilling the darkness ahead.

Speculate, Jake had said. But suddenly I didn’t want to. Because I could hear Theresa Lee in my head. The detective. You tipped her over the edge. Jake saw me thinking and asked, “What?”

“Let’s assume the leverage,” I said. “Let’s assume it was totally compelling. So let’s assume Susan was on her way to deliver whatever information she was told to get. And let’s assume these were bad people. She didn’t trust them to release whatever hold they had over her. Probably she thought they were going to up the stakes and ask for more. She was in, and she didn’t see a way of getting out. And, above all, she was very afraid of them. So she was desperate. So she took the gun. Possibly she thought she could fight her way out, but she wasn’t optimistic about her chances. All in all, she didn’t think things were going to end well.”

“So?”

“She had business to attend to. She was almost there. She never intended to shoot herself.”

“But what about the list? The behaviors?”

“Same difference,” I said. “She was on the way to where she expected someone else to end her life, maybe some other way, either literally or figuratively.”

Chapter 14

Jacob Mark said, “It doesn’t explain the coat.” But I thought he was wrong. I thought it explained the coat pretty well. And it explained the fact that she parked downtown and rode up on the subway. I figured she was looking to come upon whoever she was meeting from an unexpected angle, out of a hole in the ground, armed, dressed all in black, ready for some conflict in the dark. Maybe the winter parka was the only black coat she owned.

And it explained everything else, too. The dread, the sense of doom. Maybe the mumbling had been her way of rehearsing pleas, or exculpations, or arguments, or maybe even threats. Maybe repeating them over and over again had made them more convincing to her. More plausible. More reassuring.

Jake said, “She can’t have been on her way to deliver something, because she didn’t have anything with her.”

“She might have had something,” I said. “In her head. You told me she had a great memory. Units, dates, time lines, whatever they needed.”

He paused, and tried to find a reason to disagree.

He failed.

“Classified information,” he said. “Army secrets. Jesus, I can’t believe it.”

“She was under pressure, Jake.”

“What kind of secrets does a personnel department have anyway, that are worth getting killed for?”

I didn’t answer. Because I had no idea. In my day HRC had been called PERSCOM. Personnel Command, not Human Resources Command. I had served thirteen years without ever thinking about it. Not even once. Paperwork and records. All the interesting information had been somewhere else.

Jake moved in his seat. He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair and clamped his palms on his ears and moved his head through a complete oval, like he was easing stiffness in his neck, or acting out some kind of inner turmoil that was bringing him full circle, back to his most basic question.

He said, “So why? Why did she just up and kill herself before she got where she was going?”

I paused a beat. Café noises went on all around us. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clink and scrape of crockery, the sound of TV news from sets high on the walls, the ding of the short-order bell.

“She was breaking the law,” I said. “She was in breach of all kinds of trusts and professional obligations. And she must have suspected some kind of surveillance. Maybe she had even been warned. So she was tense, right from the moment she got in her car. All the way up she was watching for red lights in her mirror. Every cop at every toll was a potential danger. Every guy she saw in a suit could have been a federal agent. And on the train, any one of us could have been getting ready to bust her.”

Jake didn’t reply.

I said, “And then I approached her.”

“And?”

“She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.”

“Why would she think you were going to arrest her?”

“She must have thought I was a cop.”

“Why would she think you were a cop?”

I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.

“She was paranoid,” I said. “Understandably.”

“You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.”

“Maybe she thought I was undercover.”

“She was a records clerk, according to you. She wouldn’t have known what undercover cops look like.”

“Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.”

“Why?”

“I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.”

He asked, “What exactly did you say?” So I told him, and he said, “Jesus, that even sounds like Internal Affairs bullshit.”

I think you tipped her over the edge.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty-dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, “I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.”

I said, “Family?”

“Molina, the ex-husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.”

“Susan had a son?”

“What’s it to you?”

The IQ of labradors.

I said, “Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?”

He went blank for a second. Said, “He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.”

I said, “Call him.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.”

“Call him now.”

“I’ll wake him up.”

“I sure hope you will.”

“He needs to be prepared for this.”

“First he needs to be answering his phone.”

So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter. Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, “Voice mail.”

Chapter 15

I said, “Go to work. Call the LAPD or the USC campus cops and ask for some favors, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.”

“They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”

I said, “Just do it.”

Jake said, “Come with me.”

I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”

“You’ll never find them.”

“They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”

We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News. The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.

I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge. Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.

I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.

Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: Garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.

They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, “We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Because I already did.”

“But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.”

“To you?”

“To our principal.”

“Who are you guys?”

“I gave you our card.”

“And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you knew was disconnected. I imagined that’s tough to do. So I was impressed. But then I figured in fact that’s impossible to do, given Manhattan’s population. Someone dies or moves away, their number gets recycled pretty fast. So then I guessed you had access to a list of numbers that never work. Phone companies keep a few, for when a number shows up in the movies or on TV. Can’t use real numbers for that, because customers might get harassed. So then I guessed you know people in the movie and TV business. Probably because most of the week you rent out as sidewalk security when there’s a show in town. Therefore the closest you get to action is fending off autograph hunters. Which must be a disappointment to guys like you. I’m sure you had something better in mind when you set up in business. And worse, it implies a certain erosion of abilities, through lack of practice. So now I’m even less worried about you than I was before. So all in all I’d say the card was a mistake, in terms of image management.”

The guy said, “Can we buy you a cup of coffee?”

I never say no to a cup of coffee, but I was all done with sitting down, so I agreed to go-cups only. We could sip and talk as we walked. We stopped in at the next Starbucks we saw, which as in most cities was half a block away. I ignored the fancy brews and got a tall house blend, black, no room for cream. My standard order, at Starbucks. A fine bean, in my opinion. Not that I really care. It’s all about the caffeine for me, not the taste.

We came out and carried on down Eighth. But four people made an awkward group for mobile conversation and the traffic was loud, so we ended up ten yards into the mouth of a cross street, static, with me in the shade, leaning on a railing, and the other three in the sun in front of me and leaning toward me like they had points to make. At our feet a burst garbage bag leaked cheerful sections of the Sunday newspaper on the sidewalk. The guy who did all the talking said, “You’re seriously underestimating us, not that we want to get into a pissing contest.”

“OK,” I said.

“You’re ex-military, right?”

“Army,” I said.

“You’ve still got the look.”

“You too. Special Forces?”

“No. We didn’t get that far.”

I smiled. An honest man.

The guy said, “We got hired as the local end for a temporary operation. The dead woman was carrying an item of value. It’s up to us to recover it.”

“What item? What value?”

“Information.”

I said, “I can’t help you.”

“Our principal was expecting digital data, on a computer chip, like a USB flash memory stick. We said no, that’s too hard to get out of the Pentagon. We said it would be verbal. Like, read and memorized.”

I said nothing. Thought back to Susan Mark on the train. The mumbling. Maybe she wasn’t rehearsing pleas or exculpations or threats or arguments. Maybe she was running through the details she was supposed to deliver, over and over again, so she wouldn’t forget them or get them confused in her stress and her panic. Learning by rote. And saying to herself, I’m obeying, I’m obeying, I’m obeying. Reassuring herself. Hoping that it would all turn out right.

I asked, “Who is your principal?”

“We can’t say.”

“What was his leverage?”

“We don’t know. We don’t want to know.”

I sipped my coffee. Said nothing.

The guy said, “The woman spoke to you on the train.”

“Yes,” I said. “She did.”

“So now the operational assumption is that whatever she knew, you know.”

“Possible,” I said.

“Our principal is convinced of it. Which gives you a problem. Data on a computer chip, no big deal. We could hit you over the head and turn out your pockets. But something in your head would need to be extracted some other way.”

I said nothing.

The guy said, “So you really need to tell us what you know.”

“So you’ll look competent?”

The guy shook his head. “So you’ll stay whole.”

I took another sip of coffee and the guy said, “I’m appealing to you, man to man. Soldier to soldier. This is not about us. We go back empty, sure, we’ll get fired. But Monday morning we’ll be working again, for someone else. But if we’re out of the picture, you’re exposed. Our principal brought a whole crew. Right now they’re on a leash, because they don’t fit in here. But if we’re gone, they’re off the leash. No alternative. And you really don’t want them talking to you.”

“I don’t want anyone talking to me. Not them, not you. I don’t like talking.”

“This is not a joke.”

“You got that right. A woman died.”

“Suicide is not a crime.”

“But whatever drove her to it might be. The woman worked at the Pentagon. That’s national security, right there. You need to get out in front of this. You should talk to the NYPD.”

The guy shook his head. “I’d go to jail before I crossed these people. You hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear you,” I said. “You’ve gotten comfortable with your autograph hunters.”

“We’re the kid gloves here. You should take advantage.”

“You’re no kind of gloves at all.”

“What were you, in the service?”

“MPs,” I said.

“Then you’re a dead man. You never saw anything like this.”

“Who is he?”

The guy just shook his head.

“How many?”

The guy shook his head again.

“Give me something.”

“You’re not listening. If I won’t talk to the NYPD, why the hell would I talk to you?”

I shrugged and drained my cup and pushed off the railing. Took three steps and tossed the cup into a trash basket. I said, “Call your principal and tell him he was right and you were wrong. Tell him the woman’s information was all on a memory stick, which is right now in my pocket. Then resign by phone and go home and stay the hell out of my way.”

I crossed the street between two moving cars and headed for Eighth. The leader called after me, loud. He said my name. I turned and saw him holding his cell phone at arm’s length. It was pointing at me and he was staring at its screen. Then he lowered it and all three guys moved away and a white truck passed between us and they were out of sight before I realized I had been photographed.

Chapter 16

Radio Shacks are about a tenth as common as Starbucks, but they’re never more than a few blocks away. And they open early. I stopped in at the next one I saw and a guy from the Indian subcontinent stepped forward to help me. He seemed keen. Maybe I was the first customer of the day. I asked him about cell phones with cameras. He said practically all of them had cameras. Some of them even had video. I told him I wanted to see how good the still pictures came out. He picked up a random phone and I stood in the back of the store and he snapped me from the register. The resulting image was small and lacked definition. My features were indistinct. But my overall size and shape and posture were captured fairly well. Well enough to be a problem, anyway. Truth is, my face is plain and ordinary. Very forgettable. My guess is most people recognize me by my silhouette, which is not ordinary.

I told the guy I didn’t want the phone. He tried to sell me a digital camera instead. It was full of megapixels. It would take a better picture. I said I didn’t want a camera, either. But I bought a memory stick from him. A USB device, for computer data. Smallest capacity he had, lowest price. It was for window dressing only, and I didn’t want to spend a fortune. It was a tiny thing, in a big package made of tough plastic. I had the guy open it up with scissors. You can ruin your teeth on stuff like that. The stick came with a choice of two soft neoprene sleeves, blue or pink. I used the pink. Susan Mark hadn’t looked particularly like a pink type of woman, but people see what they want to see. A pink sleeve equals a woman’s property. I put the stick in my pocket next to my toothbrush and thanked the guy for his help and left him to ditch the trash.

I walked two and a half blocks east on 28th Street. Plenty of people were behind me all the way, but I didn’t know any of them, and none of them seemed to know me. I went down into the subway at Broadway and swiped my card. Then I missed the next nine downtown trains. I just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and let them all go. Partly to take a break, partly to kill time until the rest of the city’s businesses opened up, and partly to check I hadn’t been followed. Nine sets of passengers came and went, and nine times I was all alone on the platform for a second or two. No one showed the slightest interest in me. When I was done with watching for people I started watching for rats instead. I like rats. There are a lot of myths about them. Sightings are rarer than people think. Rats are shy. Visible rats are usually young or sick or starving. They don’t bite sleeping babies’ faces for the fun of it. They’re tempted by traces of food, that’s all. Wash your kid’s mouth before you put it to bed and it’ll be OK. And there are no giant rats as big as cats. All rats are the same size.

I saw no rats at all, and eventually I got restless. I stood up and turned my back on the track and looked at the posters on the wall. One of them was a map of the whole subway system. Two were advertisements for Broadway musicals. One was an official notice prohibiting something called subway surfing. There was a black-and-white illustration of a guy clamped like a starfish on the outside of a subway car’s door. Apparently the older stock on the New York system had toe boards under the doors, designed to bridge part of the gap between the car and the platform, and small rain gutters above the doors, designed to stop dripping water getting in. I knew the new R142As had neither feature. My crazy co-rider had told me so. But with the older cars it was possible to wait on the platform until the doors closed, and then jam your toes on the toe board, and hook your fingertips in the rain gutter, and hug the car, and get carried through the tunnels on the outside. Subway surfing. A lot of fun for some, maybe, but now illegal.

I turned back to the track and got on the tenth train to pull in. It was an R train. It had toe boards and rain gutters. But I rode inside, two stops to the big station at Union Square.

I came up in the northwest corner of Union Square and headed for a huge bookstore I remembered on 17th Street. Campaigning politicians usually publish biographies ahead of election season, and news magazines are always full of coverage. I could have looked for an internet café instead, but I’m not proficient with the technology and anyway internet cafés are much rarer than they were. Now everyone carries small electronic devices named after fruits or trees. Internet cafés are going the same way as phone booths, killed by new wireless inventions.

The bookstore had tables at the front of the ground floor. They were piled high with new titles. I found the nonfiction releases and came up empty. History, biography, economics, but no politics. I moved on and found what I wanted on the back side of the second table. Commentary and opinion from the left and the right, plus ghosted candidate autobiographies with shiny jackets and glossy air brushed photographs. John Sansom’s book was about a half-inch thick and was called Always on a Mission. I took it with me and rode up on the escalator to the third floor, where the store directory told me the magazines were. I picked out all the news weeklies and carried them with the book to the military history shelves. I spent a moment there with some nonfiction publications and confirmed what I had suspected, which was that the army’s Human Resources Command didn’t do anything that the Personnel Command hadn’t done before it. It was a change of name only. A rebranding. No new functions. Paperwork and records, like always.

Then I sat on a window sill and settled in to read the stuff I had picked up. My back was hot from the sun coming in through the glass, and my front was cold from an air conditioning vent directly above me. I used to feel bad about reading stuff in stores, with no intention to buy. But the stores themselves seem happy enough about it. They even encourage it. Some of them provide armchairs for the purpose. A new business model, apparently. And everyone does it. The store was only just open, but already the whole place looked like a refugee center. There were people everywhere, sitting or sprawled on the floor, surrounded by piles of merchandise much bigger than mine.

The news weeklies all had campaign reports, squeezed in between advertisements and stories about medical breakthroughs and technology updates. Most of the coverage was top-ticket stuff, but the House and Senate contests got a few lines each. We were four months ahead of the first primaries and fourteen months ahead of the elections themselves, and some candidates were already lame ducks, but Sansom was still solidly in his race. He was polling well throughout his state, he was raising lots of money, his blunt manner was seen as refreshing, and his military background was held to qualify him for just about everything. Although in my opinion that’s like saying a sanitation worker could be mayor. Maybe so, maybe not. There’s no logic in the assumption. But clearly most journalists liked the guy. And clearly they had him earmarked for bigger things. He was seen as a potential presidential candidate either four or eight years down the line. One writer even hinted he could be airlifted out of his Senate race to become his party’s vice-presidential nominee this time around. He was already some kind of a celebrity.

His book cover was stylish. It was made up of his name and the title and two photographs. The larger was a blurred and grainy action picture blown up big enough to form a background to the whole thing. It showed a young man in worn and unbuttoned battledress and full camouflage face paint under a beanie hat. Laid over it was a newer studio portrait of the same guy, many years farther down the road, in a business suit. Sansom, obviously, then and now. His whole pitch, in a single visual.

The recent picture was well lit and perfectly focused and artfully posed and showed him to be a small lean guy, maybe five-nine and a hundred and fifty pounds. A whippet or a terrier rather than a pit bull, full of endurance and wiry stamina, like the best Special Forces soldiers always are. Although the older picture was probably from an earlier time in a regular unit. The Rangers, maybe. In my experience Delta guys of his vintage favored beards and sunglasses and kaffiyeh scarves pulled down to their throats. Partly because of where they were likely to serve, and partly because they liked to appear disguised and anonymous, which in itself was part necessity and part dramatic fantasy. But probably his campaign manager had selected the photograph himself, accepting the junior unit in exchange for a picture that was recognizable, and recognizably American. Maybe people who looked like weird Palestinian hippies wouldn’t go down well in North Carolina.

The stuff inside the cover flap featured his full name and military rank, written out with a degree of formality: Major John T. Sansom, U.S. Army, Retired. Then it said he was the winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and two Silver Stars. Then it said he had been a successful CEO, of something called Sansom Consulting. Again, his whole pitch, right there. I wondered what the rest of the book was for.

I skimmed it and found it fell into five main sections: his early life, his time in the service, his subsequent marriage and family, his time in business, and his political vision for the future. The early stuff was conventional for the genre. Hardscrabble local youth, no money, no frills, his mom a pillar of strength, his dad working two jobs to make ends meet. Almost certainly exaggerated. If you take political candidates as a population sample, then the United States is a Third World country. Everyone grows up poor, running water is a luxury, shoes are rare, a square meal is cause for jubilant celebration.

I skipped ahead to where he met his wife and found more of the same platitudes. She was wonderful, their kids were great. End of story. I didn’t understand much of the business part. Sansom Consulting had been a bunch of consultants, which made sense, but I couldn’t work out exactly what they had done. They had made suggestions, basically, and then bought into the corporations they were advising, and then sold their stakes and gotten rich. Sansom himself had made what he described as a fortune. I wasn’t sure how much he meant. I feel pretty good with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. I suspected Sansom came out with more than that, but he didn’t specify how much more. Another four zeroes? Five? Six?

I looked at the part about his political vision for the future and didn’t find much I hadn’t already gleaned from the news magazines. It boiled down to giving the voters everything they wanted. Low taxes, you got it. Public services, have at it. It made no sense to me. But all in all Sansom came across as a decent guy. I felt he would try to do the right thing, as much as any of them can. I felt he was in it for all the right reasons.

There were photographs in the middle of the book. All except one were bland snapshots tracing Sansom’s life from the age of three months to the present day. They were the kind of things that I imagine most guys could dig out of a shoebox in the back of a closet. Parents, childhood, schooldays, his service years, his bride-to-be, their kids, business portraits. Normal stuff, probably interchangeable with the pictures in all the other candidate biographies.

But the photograph that was different was bizarre.

Chapter 17

The photograph that was different was a news picture I had seen before. It was of an American politician called Donald Rumsfeld, in Baghdad, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, back in 1983. Donald Rumsfeld had twice been Secretary of Defense, but at the time of the picture had been a special Presidential envoy for Ronald Reagan. He had gone to Baghdad to kiss Saddam’s ass and pat him on the back and give him a pair of solid gold spurs as a gift and a symbol of America’s everlasting gratitude. Eight years later we had been kicking Saddam’s ass, not kissing it. Sixteen years after that, we killed him. Sansom had captioned the picture Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Political commentary, I supposed. Or a business homily, although I could find no mention of the actual episode in the text itself.

I turned back to his service career, and prepared to read about it carefully. That was my area of expertise, after all. Sansom joined the army in 1975 and left in 1992. A seventeen-year window, four years longer than mine, by virtue of starting nine years earlier and quitting five years earlier. A good era, basically, compared to most. The Vietnam paroxysm was over, and the new professional all-volunteer army was well established and still well funded. It looked like Sansom had enjoyed it. His narrative was coherent. He described basic training accurately, described Officer Candidate School well, was entertaining about his early infantry service. He was open about being ambitious. He picked up every qualification available to him and moved to the Rangers and then the nascent Delta Force. As usual he dramatized Delta’s induction process, the hell weeks, the attrition, the endurance, the exhaustion. As usual he didn’t criticize its incompleteness. Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.

But overall I felt Sansom was pretty honest. Truth is, most Delta missions are aborted before they even start, and most that do start fail. Some guys never see action. Sansom didn’t dress it up. He was straightforward about the patchy excitement, and frank about the failures. Above all he didn’t mention goatherds, not even once. Most Special Forces after-action reports blame mission failures on itinerant goat tenders. Guys are infiltrated into what they claim are inhospitable and virtually uninhabited regions, and are immediately discovered by local peasants with large herds of goats. Statistically unlikely. Nutritionally unlikely, given the barren terrain. Goats have to eat something. Maybe it was true one time, but since then it has become a code. Much more palliative to say, We were hunkered down and a goatherd stumbled over us than to say, We screwed up. But Sansom never mentioned either the ruminant animals or their attendant agricultural personnel, which was a big point in his favor.

In fact, he didn’t mention much of anything. Certainly not a whole lot in the success column. There was what must have been fairly routine stuff in West Africa, plus Panama, plus some SCUD hunting in Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. Apart from that, nothing. Just a lot of training and standing by, which was always followed by standing down and then more training. His was maybe the first unexaggerated Special Forces memoir that I had ever seen. More than that, even. Not just unexaggerated. It was downplayed. Minimized, and de-emphasized. Dressed down, not up.

Which was interesting.

Chapter 18

I took a lot of care getting back to the coffee shop on Eighth. Our principal brought a whole crew. And by now they all knew roughly what I looked like. The Radio Shack guy had told me how pictures and video could be phoned through from one person to another. For my part I had no idea what the opposition looked like, but if their principal had been forced to hire guys in nice suits as local camouflage, then his own crew probably looked somewhat different themselves. Otherwise, no point. I saw lots of different-looking people. Maybe a couple hundred thousand. You always do, in New York City. But none of them showed any interest in me. None of them stayed with me. Not that I made it easy. I took the 4 train to Grand Central, walked two circuits through the crowds, took the shuttle to Times Square, walked a long and illogical loop from there to Ninth Avenue, and came on the diner from the west, straight past the 14th Precinct.

Jacob Mark was already inside.

He was in a back booth, cleaned up, hair brushed, wearing dark pants and a white shirt and a navy windbreaker. He could have had off-duty cop tattooed across his forehead. He looked unhappy but not frightened. I slid in opposite him and sat sideways, so I could watch the street through the windows.

“Did you talk to Peter?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“But?”

“I think he’s OK.”

“You think or you know?”

He didn’t answer, because the waitress came by. The same woman from the morning. I was too hungry to be sensitive about whether or not Jake was going to eat. I ordered a big platter, tuna salad with eggs and a bunch of other stuff. Plus coffee to drink. Jake followed my lead and got a grilled cheese sandwich and water.

I said, “Tell me what happened.”

He said, “The campus cops helped me out. They were happy to. Peter’s a football star. He wasn’t home. So they rousted his buddies and got the story. Turns out Peter is away somewhere with a woman.”

“Where?”

“We don’t know.”

“What woman?”

“A girl from a bar. Peter and the guys were out four nights ago. The girl was in the place. Peter left with her.”

I said nothing.

Jake said, “What?”

I asked, “Who picked up who?”

He nodded. “This is what makes me feel OK. He did all the work. His buddies said it was a four-hour project. He had to put everything into it. Like a championship game, the guys said. So it wasn’t Mata Hari or anything.”

“Description?”

“A total babe. And these are jocks talking, so they mean it. A little older, but not much. Maybe twenty-five or -six. You’re a college senior, that’s an irresistible challenge, right there.”

“Name?”

Jake shook his head. “The others kept their distance. It’s an etiquette thing.”

“Their regular place?”

“On their circuit.”

“Hooker? Decoy?”

“No way. These guys get around. They ain’t dumb. They can tell. And Peter did all the work, anyway. Four hours, everything he had ever learned.”

“It would have been over in four minutes if she had wanted it to be.”

Jake nodded again. “Believe me, I’ve been through it a hundred times. Any funny business, an hour would have been enough to make it look kosher. Two, tops. Nobody would stretch it to four. So it’s OK. More than OK, from Peter’s point of view. Four days with a total babe? What were you doing when you were twenty-two?”

“I hear you,” I said. When I was twenty-two I had the same kind of priorities. Although a four-day relationship would have seemed long to me. Practically like engagement, or marriage.

Jake said, “But?”

“Susan was delayed four hours on the Turnpike. I’m wondering what kind of a deadline could have passed, to make a mother feel like killing herself.”

“Peter’s OK. Don’t worry about it. He’ll be home soon, weak at the knees but happy.”

I said nothing more. The waitress came by with the food. It looked pretty good, and there was a lot of it. Jake asked, “Did the private guys find you?”

I nodded and told him the story between forkfuls of tuna.

He said, “They knew your name? That’s not good.”

“Not ideal, no. And they knew I talked to Susan on the train.”

“How?”

“They’re ex-cops. They’ve still got friends on the job. No other explanation.”

“Lee and Docherty?”

“Maybe. Or maybe some day guy who came in and read the file.”

“And they took your picture? That’s not good, either.”

“Not ideal,” I said again.

“Any sign of this other crew they were talking about?” he asked.

I checked the window and said, “So far, nothing.”

“What else?”

“John Sansom isn’t exaggerating about his career. He seems to have done nothing very special. And that kind of a claim isn’t really worth refuting.”

“Dead end, then.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “He was a major. That’s one automatic promotion plus two on merit. He must have done something they liked. I was a major too. I know how it works.”

“What did you do that they liked?”

“Something they regretted later, probably.”

“Length of service,” Jake said. “You stick around, you get promoted.”

I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. Plus this guy won three of the top four medals available to him, one of them twice. So he must have done something special. Four somethings, in fact.”

“Everybody gets medals.”

“Not those medals. I got a Silver Star myself, which is pocket change to this guy, and I know for a fact they don’t fall out of the box with the breakfast cereal. And I got a Purple Heart too, which Sansom apparently didn’t. He doesn’t mention one in his book. And no politician would forget about a wound in action. Not in a million years. But it’s relatively unusual to win a gallantry medal without a wound. Normally the two things go hand in hand.”

“So maybe he’s bullshitting about the medals.”

I shook my head again. “Can’t be done. Maybe with a combat pip on a Vietnam ribbon, something like that, but these are heavy-duty awards. This guy’s got everything except the Medal of Honor.”

“So?”

“So I think he is bullshitting about his career, but in reverse. He’s leaving stuff out, not putting stuff in.”

“Why would he?”

“Because he was on at least four secret missions, and he still can’t talk about them. Which makes them very secret indeed, because the guy is in the middle of an election campaign, and the urge to talk must be huge.”

“What kind of secret missions?”

“Could be anything. Black ops, covert actions, against anybody.”

“So maybe Susan was asked for details.”

“Impossible,” I said. “Delta’s orders and operational logs and after-action reports aren’t anywhere near HRC. They’re either destroyed or locked up for sixty years at Fort Bragg. No disrespect, but your sister couldn’t have gotten within a million miles of them.”

“So how does this help us?”

“It eliminates Sansom’s combat career, that’s how. If Sansom is involved at all, it’s in some other capacity.”

“Is he involved?”

“Why else would his name have been mentioned?”

“What capacity?”

I put my fork down and drained my cup and said, “I don’t want to stay in here. It’s ground zero for this other crew. It’s the first place they’ll check.”

I left a tip on the table and headed for the register. This time the waitress was pleased. We were in and out in record time.

Manhattan is both the best and the worst place in the world to be hunted. The best, because it is teeming with people, and every square yard of it has literally hundreds of witnesses all around. The worst, because it is teeming with people, and you have to check each and every one of them, just in case, which is tiring, and frustrating, and fatiguing, and which eventually drives you crazy, or makes you lazy. So for the sake of convenience we went back to West 35th and walked the shady side of the street, up and down opposite the row of parked cop cars, which seemed like the safest stretch of sidewalk in the city.

“What capacity?” Jake asked again.

“What did you tell me were the reasons behind the suicides you saw in Jersey?”

“Financial or sexual.”

“And Sansom didn’t make his money in the army.”

“You think he was having an affair with Susan?”

“Possible,” I said. “He could have met her at work. He’s the kind of guy who is always in and out of the place. Photo opportunities, stuff like that.”

“He’s married.”

“Exactly. And it’s election season.”

“I don’t see it. Susan wasn’t like that. So suppose he wasn’t having an affair with her.”

“Then maybe he was having one with another HRC staffer, and Susan was a witness.”

“I still don’t see it.”

“Me either,” I said. “Because I don’t see how information would be involved. Information is a big word. An affair is a yes-no answer.”

“Maybe Susan was working with Sansom. Not against him. Maybe Sansom wanted dirt on someone else.”

“Then why would Susan come to New York, instead of D.C. or North Carolina?”

Jake said, “I don’t know.”

“And why would Sansom ask Susan for anything, anyway? He’s got a hundred better sources than an HRC clerk he didn’t know.”

“So where’s the connection?”

“Maybe Sansom had an affair long ago, with someone else, when he was still in the army.”

“He wasn’t married then.”

“But there were rules. Maybe he was banging a subordinate. That resonates now, in politics.”

“Did that happen?”

“All the time,” I said.

“To you?”

“As often as possible. Both ways around. Sometimes I was the subordinate.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“Not then. But there would be questions now, if I was running for office.”

“So you think there are rumors about Sansom, and Susan was asked to confirm them?”

“She couldn’t confirm the behavior. That kind of stuff is in a different set of files. But maybe she could confirm that person A and person B served in the same place at the same time. That’s exactly what HRC is good for.”

“So maybe Lila Hoth was in the army with him. Maybe someone is trying to link the two names, for a big scandal.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It all sounds pretty good. But I’ve got a local tough guy too scared to talk to the NYPD, and I’ve got all kinds of dire threats, and I’ve got a story about some barbarian crew ready to slip the leash. Politics is a dirty business, but is it that bad?”

Jake didn’t answer.

I said, “And we don’t know where Peter is.”

“Don’t worry about Peter. He’s a grown-up. He’s a defensive tackle. He’s going to the NFL. He’s three hundred pounds of muscle. He can take care of himself. Remember the name. Peter Molina. One day you’re going to read about him in the paper.”

“But not soon, I hope.”

“Relax.”

I said, “So what do you want to do now?”

Jake shrugged and stumped around, up and down on the sidewalk, an inarticulate man further stymied by the complexity of his emotions. He stopped, and leaned on a wall, directly across the street from the 14th Precinct’s door. He looked at all the parked vehicles, left to right, the Impalas and the Crown Vics, marked and unmarked, and the strange little traffic carts.

“She’s dead,” he said. “Nothing is going to bring her back.”

I didn’t speak.

“So I’m going to call the funeral director,” he said.

“And then?”

“Nothing. She shot herself. Knowing the reason won’t help. Most of the time you never really know the reason, anyway. Even when you think you do.”

I said, “I want to know the reason.”

“Why? She was my sister, not yours.”

“You didn’t see it happen.”

He said nothing. Just gazed at the parked cars opposite. I saw the vehicle that Theresa Lee had used. It was fourth from the left. One of the unmarked Crown Vics farther along the row was newer than the others. Shinier. It winked in the sun. It was black, with two short thin antennas on the trunk lid, like needles. Federal, I thought. Some big-budget agency with the pick of the litter when it came to transportation choices. And communications devices.

Jake said, “I’m going to tell her family, and we’re going to bury her, and we’re going to move on. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Maybe there’s a reason we don’t care how or where or why. Better not to know. No good can come of it. Just more pain. Just something bad about to hit the fan.”

“Your choice,” I said.

He nodded and said nothing more. Just shook my hand and moved away. I saw him walk into a garage on the block west of Ninth, and four minutes later I saw a small green Toyota SUV drive out. It went west with the traffic. I guessed he was heading for the Lincoln Tunnel, and home. I wondered when I would see him again. Between three days and a week, I thought.

I was wrong.

Chapter 19

I was still directly across the street from the 14th Precinct’s door when Theresa Lee came out with two guys in blue suits and white button-down shirts. She looked tired. She had caught the call at two in the morning, which put her on the night watch, so she should have quit around seven and been home in bed by eight. She was way into overtime. Good for her bank balance, not so good for anything else. She stood in the sunlight and blinked and stretched and then she saw me on the far sidewalk and did a classic double take. She smacked the guy next to her on the elbow and said something and pointed straight at me. I was too far away to hear her words, but her body language screamed, Hey, that’s him right there, with a big exclamation point in the vehemence of her physical gesture.

The guys in the suits automatically checked left for traffic, which told me they were based in town. Odd-numbered streets run east to west, even numbers run west to east. They knew that, in their bones. Therefore they were local. But they were more used to driving than walking, because they didn’t check for bicycle messengers coming the wrong way. They just hustled across the street, dodging cars, scrambling, splitting up and coming at me from the left and the right simultaneously, which told me they were field-trained to some degree, and in a hurry. I guessed the Crown Vic with the needle antennas was theirs. I stood in the shade and waited for them. They had black shoes and blue ties and their undershirts showed through at the neck, white under white. The left sides of their suit coats bulged more than the right. Right-handed agents with shoulder holsters. They were late thirties, early forties. In their prime. Not rookies, not out to pasture.

They saw that I wasn’t going anywhere, so they slowed up a little and approached me at a fast walk. FBI, I thought, closer to cops than paramilitaries. They didn’t show me ID. They just assumed I knew what they were.

“We need to talk to you,” the left-hand guy said.

“I know,” I said.

“How?”

“Because you just ran through traffic to get here.”

“Do you know why?”

“No idea. Unless it’s to offer me counseling because of my traumatic experience.”

The guy’s mouth set in an impatient scowl, like he was ready to bawl me out for my sarcasm. Then his expression changed a little to a wry smile, and he said, “OK, here’s my counsel. Answer some questions and then forget you were ever on that train.”

“What train?”

The guy started to reply, and then stopped, late to catch on that I was yanking his chain, and embarrassed about looking slow.

I said, “What questions?”

He asked, “What’s your phone number?”

I said, “I don’t have a phone number.”

“Not even a cell?”

“Especially not even,” I said.

“Really?”

“I’m that guy,” I said. “Congratulations. You found me.”

“What guy?”

“The only guy in the world who doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“Are you Canadian?”

“Why would I be Canadian?”

“The detective told us you speak French.”

“Lots of people speak French. There’s a whole country in Europe.”

“Are you French?”

“My mother was.”

“When were you last in Canada?”

“I don’t recall. Years ago, probably.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“You got any Canadian friends or associates?”

“No.”

The guy went quiet. Theresa Lee was still on the sidewalk outside the 14th Precinct’s door. She was standing in the sun and watching us from across the street. The other guy said, “It was just a suicide on a train. Upsetting, but no big deal. Shit happens. Are we clear?”

I said, “Are we done?”

“Did she give you anything?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely. Are we done?”

The guy asked, “You got plans?”

“I’m leaving town.”

“Heading where?”

“Someplace else.”

The guy nodded. “OK, we’re done. Now beat it.”

I stayed where I was. I let them walk away, back to their car. They got in and waited for a gap in the traffic and eased out and drove away. I guessed they would take the West Side Highway all the way downtown, back to their desks.

Theresa Lee was still on the sidewalk.

I crossed the street and threaded between two parked blue-and-white prowl cars and stepped up on the curb and stood near her, far enough away to be respectful, close enough to be heard, facing the building so I wouldn’t have the sun in my eyes. I asked, “What was that all about?”

She said, “They found Susan Mark’s car. It was parked way down in SoHo. It was towed this morning.”

“And?”

“They searched it, obviously.”

“Why obviously? They’re making a lot of fuss about something they claim is no big deal.”

“They don’t explain their thinking. Not to us, anyway.”

“What did they find?”

“A piece of paper, with what they think is a phone number on it. Like a scribbled note. Screwed up, like trash.”

“What was the number?”

“It had a 600 area code, which they say is a Canadian cellular service. Some special network. Then a number, then the letter D, like an initial.”

“Means nothing to me,” I said.

“Me either. Except I don’t think it’s a phone number at all. There’s no exchange number and then it has one too many digits.”

“If it’s a special network maybe it doesn’t need an exchange number.”

“It doesn’t look right.”

“So what was it?”

She answered me by reaching behind her and pulling a small notebook out of her back pocket. Not official police issue. It had a stiff black board cover and an elastic strap that held it closed. The whole book was slightly curled, like it spent a lot of time in her pocket. She slipped the strap and opened it up and showed me a fawn-colored page with 600-82219-D written on it in neat handwriting. Her handwriting, I guessed. Information only, not a facsimile. Not an exact reproduction of a scribbled note.

600-82219-D.

“See anything?” she asked.

I said, “Maybe Canadian cell phones have more numbers.” I knew that phone companies the world over were worried about running out. Adding an extra digit would increase an area code’s capacity by a factor of ten. Thirty million, not three. Although Canada had a small population. A big land mass, but most of it was empty. About thirty-three million people, I thought. Smaller than California. And California got by with regular phone numbers.

Lee said, “It’s not a phone number. It’s something else. Like a code or a serial number. Or a file number. Those guys are wasting their time.”

“Maybe it’s not connected. Trash in a car, it could be anything.”

“Not my problem.”

I asked, “Was there luggage in the car?”

“No. Nothing except the usual kind of crap that piles up in a car.”

“So it was supposed to be a quick trip. In and out.”

Lee didn’t answer. She yawned and said nothing. She was tired.

I asked, “Did those guys talk to Susan’s brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“He seems to want to sweep it all under the rug.”

“Understandable,” Lee said. “There’s always a reason, and it’s never very attractive. That’s been my experience, anyway.”

“Are you closing the file?”

“It’s already closed.”

“You happy with that?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Statistics,” I said. “Eighty percent of suicides are men. Suicide is much rarer in the East than the West. And where she did it was weird.”

“But she did it. You saw her. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no dispute. It wasn’t a homicide, cleverly disguised.”

“Maybe she was driven to it. Maybe it was a homicide by proxy.”

“Then all suicides are.”

She glanced up and down the street, wanting to go, too polite to say so. I said, “Well, it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You leaving town?”

I nodded. “I’m going to Washington, D.C.”

Chapter 20

I took the train from Penn Station. More public transportation. Getting there was tense. Just a three-block walk through the crowds, but I was watching for people checking faces against their cell phone screens, and it seemed like the entire world had some kind of an electronic device out and open. But I arrived intact and bought a ticket with cash.

The train itself was full and very different from the subway. All the passengers faced forward, and they were all hidden behind high-backed chairs. The only people I could see were alongside me. A woman in the seat next to me, and two guys across the aisle. I figured all three of them for lawyers. Not major leaguers. Double- or Triple-A players, probably, senior associates with busy lives. Not suicide bombers, anyway. The two men had fresh shaves and all three of them were irritable, but apart from that nothing rang a bell. Not that the D.C. Amtrak would attract suicide bombers anyway. It was tailor-made for a suitcase bomb instead. At Penn the track is announced at the last minute. The crowd mills around on the concourse and then rushes down and piles on. No security. Identical black roll-ons are stacked on the luggage racks. Easy enough for a guy to get off in Philadelphia and leave his bag behind, and then explode it a little later, by cell phone, as the train pulls into Union Station without him, right in the heart of the capital.

But we got there OK and I made it out to Delaware Avenue unharmed. D.C. was as hot as New York had been, and damper. The sidewalks ahead of me were dotted with knots of tourists. Family groups, mostly, from far and wide. Dutiful parents, sullen children, all dressed in gaudy shorts and T-shirts, maps in their hands, cameras at the ready. Not that I was either well dressed or a frequent visitor. I had worked in the area from time to time, but always on the left of the river. But I knew where I was going. My destination was unmistakable and right there in front of me. The U.S. Capitol. It had been built to impress. Foreign diplomats were supposed to visit during the fledgling days of the Republic and come away convinced that the new nation was a player. The design had succeeded. Beyond it across Independence Avenue were the House offices. At one time I had a rudimentary grasp of Congressional politics. Investigations had sometimes led all the way to committees. I knew that the Rayburn Building was full of bloated old hacks who had been in Washington forever. I figured a relatively new guy like Sansom would have been given space in the Cannon Building instead. Prestigious, but not top drawer.

The Cannon Building was on Independence and First, crouching opposite the far corner of the Capitol like it was paying homage or mounting a threat. It had all kinds of security at the door. I asked a guy in a uniform if Mr. Sansom of North Carolina was inside. The guy checked a list and said yes, he was. I asked if I could messenger a note to his office. The guy said yes, I could. He supplied a pencil and special House notepaper and an envelope. I addressed the envelope to: Major John T. Sansom, U.S. Army, Retired, and added the date and the time. On the paper I wrote: Early this morning I saw a woman die with your name on her lips. Not true, but close enough. I added: Library of Congress steps in one hour. I signed it: Major Jack-none-Reacher, U.S. Army, Retired. There was a box to check at the bottom. It asked: Are you my constituent? I checked the box. Not strictly true. I didn’t live in Sansom’s district, but no more so than I didn’t live in any of the other 434 districts. And I had served in North Carolina, three separate times. So I felt I was entitled. I sealed the envelope and handed it in and went back outside to wait.

Chapter 21

I walked in the heat on Independence as far as the Air and Space Museum and then about-turned and headed for the library. I sat down on the steps fifty minutes into the hour. The stone was warm. There were men in uniform behind the doors above me, but none of them came out. Threat assessment exercises must have placed the library low on the list.

I waited.

I didn’t expect Sansom himself to show. I figured I would get staffers instead. Maybe campaign workers. How old and how many, I couldn’t guess. Between one and four, maybe, between postgrad and professional. I was interested to find out. One youngster would show that Sansom wasn’t taking my note very seriously. Four senior people would suggest he had sensitivity on the issue. And maybe something to hide.

The sixty-minute deadline came and went and I got no staffers and no campaign workers, neither young nor old. Instead I got Sansom’s wife, and his head of security. Ten minutes after the hour was up I saw a mismatched couple climb out of a Town Car and pause at the foot of the steps and look around. I recognized the woman from the pictures in Sansom’s book. In person she looked exactly like a millionaire’s wife should. She had expensive salon hair and good bones and a lot of tone and was probably two inches taller than her husband. Four, in heels. The guy with her looked like a Delta veteran in a suit. He was small, but hard and wiry and tough. The same physical type as Sansom himself, but rougher than Sansom had looked in his photographs. His suit was conservatively tailored out of good material, but he had it all bunched and creased like well-worn battledress.

The two of them stood together and glanced around at the people in the vicinity and eliminated one possibility after another. When I was all that was left I raised a hand in greeting. I didn’t stand. I figured they would walk up and stop below me, so if I stood I would be looking about three feet over their heads. Less threatening to stay seated. More conducive to conversation. And more practical, in terms of energy expenditure. I was tired.

They came up toward me, Mrs. Sansom in good shoes, taking precise delicate steps, and the Delta guy pacing himself alongside her. They stopped two levels below me and introduced themselves. Mrs. Sansom called herself Elspeth, and the guy called himself Browning, and said it was spelled like the automatic rifle, which I guessed was supposed to put it in some kind of a menacing context. He was news to me. He wasn’t in Sansom’s book. He went on to list his whole pedigree, which started out with military service at Sansom’s side, and which went on to include civilian service as head of security during Sansom’s business years, and then head of security during Sansom’s House terms, and which was projected to include the same kind of duty during Sansom’s Senate terms and beyond. The whole presentation was about loyalty. The wife, and the faithful retainer. I guessed I was supposed to be in no doubt at all about where their interests lay. Overkill, possibly. Although I felt that sending the wife from the get-go was a smart move, politically. Most scandals go sour when a guy is dealing with something his wife doesn’t know about. Putting her in the loop from the start was a statement.

She said, “We’ve won plenty of elections so far and we’re going to win plenty more. People have tried what you’re trying a dozen times. They didn’t succeed and you won’t, either.”

I said, “I’m not trying anything. And I don’t care about who wins elections. A woman died, that’s all, and I want to know why.”

“What woman?”

“A Pentagon clerk. She shot herself in the head, last night, on the New York subway.”

Elspeth Sansom glanced at Browning and Browning nodded and said, “I saw it on-line. The New York Times and the Washington Post. It happened too late for the printed papers.”

“A little after two o’clock in the morning,” I said.

Elspeth Sansom looked back at me and asked, “What was your involvement?”

“Witness,” I said.

“And she mentioned my husband’s name?”

“That’s something I’ll need to discuss with him. Or with the New York Times or the Washington Post.”

“Is that a threat?” Browning asked.

“I guess it is,” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Always remember,” he said. “You don’t do what John Sansom has done in his life if you’re soft. And I’m not soft, either. And neither is Mrs. Sansom.”

“Terrific,” I said. “We’ve established that none of us is soft. In fact we’re all as hard as rocks. Now let’s move on. When do I get to see your boss?”

“What were you in the service?”

“The kind of guy even you should have been scared of. Although you probably weren’t. Not that it matters. I’m not looking to hurt anyone. Unless someone needs to get hurt, that is.”

Elspeth Sansom said, “Seven o’clock, this evening.” She named what I guessed was a restaurant, on Dupont Circle. “My husband will give you five minutes.” Then she looked at me again and said, “Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in.”

They got back in the Town Car and drove away. I had three hours to kill. I caught a cab to the corner of 18th Street and Mass Avenue and found a store and bought a pair of plain blue pants and a blue checked shirt with a collar. Then I walked on down to a hotel I saw two blocks south on 18th. It was a big place, and quite grand, but big grand places are usually the best for a little off-the-books convenience. I nodded my way past the lobby staff and took an elevator up to a random floor and walked the corridor until I found a maid servicing an empty room. It was past four o’clock in the afternoon. Check-in time was two. Therefore the room was going to stay empty that night. Maybe the next night, too. Big hotels are rarely a hundred percent full. And big hotels never treat their maids very well. Therefore the woman was happy to take thirty bucks in cash and a thirty-minute break. I guessed she would move on to the next room on her list and come back later.

She hadn’t gotten to the bathroom yet, but there were two clean towels still on the rack. Nobody could possibly use all the towels that a big hotel provides. There was a cake of soap still wrapped next to the sink and half a bottle of shampoo in the stall. I brushed my teeth and took a long shower. I dried off and put on my new pants and shirt. I swapped my pocket contents over and left my old garments in the bathroom trash. Thirty bucks for the room. Cheaper than a spa. And faster. I was back on the street inside twenty-eight minutes.

I walked up to Dupont and spied out the restaurant. Afghan cuisine, outside tables in a front courtyard, inside tables behind a wooden door. It looked like the kind of place that would fill up with power players willing to drop twenty bucks for an appetizer worth twenty cents on the streets of Kabul. I was OK with the food but not with the prices. I figured I would talk to Sansom and then go eat somewhere else.

I walked on P Street west to Rock Creek Park, and clambered down close to the water. I sat on a broad flat stone and listened to the stream below me and the traffic above. Over time the traffic got louder and the water got quieter. When the clock in my head hit five to seven I scrambled back up and headed for the restaurant.

Chapter 22

At seven in the evening D.C. was going dark and all the Dupont establishments had their lights on. The Afghan place had paper lanterns strung out all over the courtyard. The curb was clogged with limousines. Most of the courtyard tables were already full. But not with Sansom and his party. All I saw were young men in suits and young women in skirts. They were gathered in pairs and trios and quartets, talking, making calls from their cells, reading e-mails on handheld devices, taking papers from briefcases and stuffing them back. I guessed Sansom was inside, behind the wooden door.

There was a hostess podium close to the sidewalk but before I got to it Browning pushed through a knot of people and stepped in front of me. He nodded toward a black Town Car twenty yards away and said, “Let’s go.”

I said, “Where? I thought Sansom was here.”

“Think again. He wouldn’t eat in a place like this. And we wouldn’t let him even if he wanted to. Wrong demographic, too insecure.”

“Then why bring me here?”

“We had to bring you somewhere.” He stood there like it meant absolutely nothing to him whether I went along or walked away. I said, “So where is he?”

“Close by. He’s got a meeting. He can give you five minutes before it starts.”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go.”

There was a driver already in the Town Car. The engine was already running. Browning and I climbed in the back and the driver pulled out and drove most of the way around the circle and then peeled off south and west down New Hampshire Avenue. We passed the Historical Society. As I recalled New Hampshire Avenue there wasn’t much ahead of us except for a string of hotels and then George Washington University.

We didn’t stop at any of the hotels. We didn’t stop at George Washington University. Instead we swept a fast right onto Virginia Avenue and drove a couple hundred yards and pulled into the Watergate. The famous old complex. The scene of the crime. Hotel rooms, apartments, offices, the Potomac dark and slow beyond them. The driver stopped outside an office building. Browning stayed in his seat. He said, “These are the ground rules. I’ll take you up. You’ll go in alone. But I’ll be right outside the door. Are we clear?”

I nodded. We were clear. We got out. There was a security guy in a uniform at a desk inside the door, but he paid us no attention. We got in the elevator. Browning hit four. We rode up in silence. We got out of the elevator and walked twenty feet across gray carpet to a door marked Universal Research. A bland title and an unremarkable slab of wood. Browning opened it and ushered me inside. I saw a waiting room, medium budget. An unoccupied reception desk, four low leather chairs, inner offices to the left and the right. Browning pointed me left and said, “Knock and enter. I’ll wait for you here.”

I stepped over to the left-hand door and knocked and entered.

There were three men waiting for me in the inner office.

None of them was Sansom.

Chapter 23

The room was a plain spare space mostly empty of furniture. The three guys were the three federal agents who had made the trip up to the 14th Precinct in New York City. They didn’t seem pleased to see me again. They didn’t speak at first. Instead their leader took a small silver object out of his pocket. A voice recorder. Digital. Office equipment, made by Olympus. He pressed a button and there was a short pause and then I heard his voice ask, “Did she tell you anything?” The words were fuzzy with distortion and clouded by echo, but I recognized them. From the interview, at five o’clock that morning, me in the chair, sleepy, them alert and standing, the smell of sweat and anxiety and burnt coffee in the air.

I heard myself reply, “Nothing of substance.”

The guy clicked another button and the recorded sound died away. He put the device back in his pocket and pulled a folded sheet of paper from another. I recognized it. It was the House notepaper the Capitol guard had given me at the door of the Cannon Office Building. The guy unfolded it and read out loud, “Early this morning I saw a woman die with your name on her lips.” He held the paper out toward me so that I could see my own handwriting.

He said, “She told you something of substance. You lied to federal investigators. People go to prison for that.”

“But not me,” I said.

“You think? What makes you special?”

“Nothing makes me special. But what makes you federal investigators?”

The guy didn’t answer.

I said, “You can’t have it both ways around. You want to play all cloak and dagger and refuse to show ID, then how should I know who you are? Maybe you were NYPD file clerks, showing up early for work, looking to pass the time. And there’s no law about lying to civilians. Or your bosses would all be in jail.”

“We told you who we were.”

“People claim all kind of things.”

“Do we look like file clerks?”

“Pretty much. And maybe I didn’t lie to you, anyway. Maybe I lied to Sansom.”

“So which was it?”

“That’s my business. I still haven’t seen ID.”

“What exactly are you doing here in Washington? With Sansom?”

“That’s my business too.”

“You want to ask him questions?”

“You got a law against asking people questions?”

“You were a witness. Now you’re investigating?”

“Free country,” I said.

“Sansom can’t afford to tell you anything.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe not.”

The guy paused a beat and said, “You like tennis?”

I said, “No.”

“You heard of Jimmy Connors? Bjorn Borg? John McEnroe?”

I said, “Tennis players, from way back.”

“What would happen if they played the U.S. Open next year?”

“I have no idea.”

“They would get their asses kicked all over the court. They would get their heads handed to them on a plate. Even the women would beat them. Great champions in their day, but they’re old men now and they come from a whole different era. Time moves on. The game changes. You understand what I’m telling you?”

I said, “No.”

“We’ve seen your record. You were hot shit back in prehistory. But this is a new world now. You’re out of your depth.”

I turned and glanced at the door. “Is Browning still out there? Or did he dump me?”

“Who is Browning?”

“The guy who delivered me here. Sansom’s guy.”

“He’s gone. And his name isn’t Browning. You’re a babe in the woods.”

I said nothing. Just heard the word babe and thought about Jacob Mark, and his nephew Peter. A girl from a bar. A total babe. Peter left with her.

One of the other two guys in the room said, “We need you to forget all about being an investigator, OK? We need you to stick to being a witness. We need to know how Sansom’s name is linked with the dead woman. You’re not going to leave this room until we find out.”

I said, “I’ll leave this room exactly when I decide to. It will take more than three file clerks to keep me somewhere I don’t want to be.”

“Big talk.”

I said, “Sansom’s name is already way out there, anyway. I heard it from four private investigators in New York City.”

“Who were they?”

“Four guys in suits with a phony business card.”

“Is that the best you can do? That’s a pretty thin story. I think you heard it from Susan Mark herself.”

“Why do you even care? What could an HRC clerk know that would hurt a guy like Sansom?”

Nobody spoke, but the silence was very strange. It seemed to carry in it an unstated answer that spiraled and ballooned crazily upward and outward, like: It’s not just Sansom we’re worried about, it’s the army, it’s the military, it’s the past, it’s the future, it’s the government, it’s the country, it’s the whole wide world, it’s the entire damn universe.

I asked, “Who are you guys?”

No answer.

I said, “What the hell did Sansom do back then?”

“Back when?”

“During his seventeen years.”

“What do you think he did?”

“Four secret missions.”

The room went quiet.

The lead agent asked, “How do you know about Sansom’s missions?”

I said, “I read his book.”

“They’re not in his book.”

“But his promotions and his medals are. With no clear explanation of where else they came from.”

Nobody spoke.

I said, “Susan Mark didn’t know anything. She can’t have. It’s just not possible. She could have turned HRC upside down for a year without finding the slightest mention.”

“But someone asked her.”

“So what? No harm, no foul.”

“We want to know who it was, that’s all. We like to keep track of things like that.”

“I don’t know who it was.”

“But clearly you want to know. Otherwise why would you be here?”

“I saw her shoot herself. It wasn’t pretty.”

“It never is. But that’s no reason to get sentimental. Or in trouble.”

“You worried about me?”

No one answered.

“Or are you worried I’ll find out something?”

The third guy said, “What makes you think the two worries are different? Maybe they’re the same thing. You find out something, you’ll be locked up for life. Or caught in the crossfire.”

I said nothing. The room went quiet again.

The lead agent said, “Last chance. Stick to being a witness. Did the woman mention Sansom’s name or not?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”

“But his name is out there anyway.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“And you don’t know who’s asking.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“OK,” the guy said. “Now forget all about us and move on. We have no desire to complicate your life.”

“But?”

“We will if we have to. Remember the trouble you could make for people, back in the 110th? It’s much worse now. A hundred times worse. So do the smart thing. If you want to play, stick to the senior circuit. Stay away from this. The game has changed.”

They let me go. I went down in the elevator and walked past the guy at the door and stood on a broad paved area and looked at the river flowing slowly by. Reflected lights moved with the current. I thought about Elspeth Sansom. She impressed me. Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in. Perfect misdirection. She had suckered me completely. I had bought a shirt I didn’t need or want.

Not soft.

That was for damn sure.

The night was warm. The air was heavy and full of waterborne smells. I headed back toward Dupont Circle. A mile and a quarter, I figured. Twenty minutes on foot, maybe less.

Chapter 24

Restaurant meals in D.C. rarely run shorter than an hour or longer than two. That had been my experience. So I expected to find Sansom finishing up his entrée or ordering his dessert. Maybe already drinking coffee and thinking about a cigar.

Back at the restaurant about half the courtyard tables had turned over their clientele. There were new boys in suits, and new girls in skirts. More pairs now than threesomes or quartets, and more romance than work. More bright chatter designed to impress, and less scanning of electronic devices. I walked past the hostess station and the woman there called after me and I said, “I’m with the Congressman.” I pushed through the wooden door and scanned the inside room. It was a low rectangular space full of dim light and spicy smells and loud conversation and occasional laughter.

Sansom wasn’t in it.

No sign of him, no sign of his wife, no sign of the guy who had called himself Browning, no pack of eager staffers or campaign volunteers.

I backed out again and the woman at the hostess station looked at me quizzically and asked, “Who were you joining?”

I said, “John Sansom.”

“He isn’t here.”

“Evidently.”

A kid at a table next to my elbow said, “North Carolina Fourteenth? He left town. He’s got a fundraiser breakfast tomorrow in Greensboro. Banking and insurance, no tobacco. I heard him tell my guy all about it.” His last sentence was directed at the girl opposite him, not at me. Maybe the whole speech was. My guy. Clearly the kid was a hell of an important player, or wanted to be.

I stepped back to the sidewalk and stood still for a second and then set out for Greensboro, North Carolina.

I got there on a late bus that was scheduled to stop first in Richmond, Virginia, and then in Raleigh, and then in Durham, and then in Burlington. I didn’t notice the itinerary. I slept all the way. We arrived in Greensboro close to four o’clock in the morning. I walked past bail bond offices and shuttered pawn shops and ignored a couple of greasy spoon eateries until I found the kind of diner I wanted. I wasn’t choosing on the basis of food. All diner food tastes the same to me. I was looking for phone books and racks of free local newspapers and it took a long walk to find them. The place I picked was just opening for business. A guy in an undershirt was greasing a griddle. Coffee was dripping into a flask. I hauled the Yellow Pages to a booth and checked H for hotels. Greensboro had plenty. It was a decent-sized place. Maybe a quarter-million people.

I figured a fundraising breakfast would take place in a fairly upscale location. Donors are rich, and they don’t go to the Red Roof Inn for five hundred dollars a plate. Not if they work in banking and insurance. I guessed the Hyatt or the Sheraton. Greensboro had both. Fifty-fifty. I closed the Yellow Pages and started leafing through the free papers, looking for confirmation. Free papers carry all kinds of local coverage.

I found a story about the breakfast in the second paper I opened. But I was wrong about the hotels. Not the Hyatt, not the Sheraton. Instead Sansom was fixed up at a place called the O. Henry Hotel, which I guessed was named for the famous North Carolina writer. There was an address given. The event was planned to start at seven in the morning. I tore out the story and folded it small and put it in my pocket. The guy behind the counter finished his preparations and brought me a mug of coffee without asking. I took a sip. Nothing better than a fresh brew in the first minute of its life. Then I ordered the biggest combo on the menu and sat back and watched the guy cook it.

I took a cab to the O. Henry Hotel. I could have walked, and it took longer to find the cab than to make the drive, but I wanted to arrive in style. I got there at a quarter after six. The hotel was a modern facsimile of a stylish old place. It looked like an independent establishment, but probably wasn’t. Few hotels are. The lobby was rich and dim and full of clubby leather armchairs. I walked past them to the reception desk with as much panache and confidence as was possible for a guy in a creased nineteen-dollar shirt. There was a young woman on duty behind the counter. She looked tentative, as if she had just come in and wasn’t settled yet. She looked up at me and I said, “I’m here for the Sansom breakfast.”

The young woman didn’t reply. She struggled to find a reaction, like I was embarrassing her with too much information. I said, “They were supposed to leave my ticket here.”

“Your ticket?”

“My invitation.”

“Who was?”

“Elspeth,” I said. “Mrs. Sansom, I mean. Or their guy.”

“Which guy?”

“Their security person.”

“Mr. Springfield?”

I smiled to myself. Springfield was a manufacturer of autoloader rifles, the same as Browning was. The guy liked word games, which was fun, but dumb. False names work better if they’re completely unconnected with reality.

I asked, “Have you seen them yet this morning?” It was an attempt at finesse. I was guessing Greensboro wasn’t in Sansom’s own Congressional district. A Senate campaign needed statewide funding and exposure. I figured Sansom’s own patch was already sewn up tight, and that by now he would be trawling farther afield. Therefore he had probably stayed in the hotel overnight, to be ready for the early start. But I couldn’t be sure. To ask if he had come down from his room yet would make me look like an idiot if he lived five minutes away. To ask if he had arrived yet would make me look just as bad, if he lived two hundred miles away. So I aimed for neutrality.

The woman said, “They’re still upstairs, as far as I know.”

I said, “Thanks,” and walked back into the lobby, away from the elevators, so she wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I waited until her phone rang and she started tapping on her keyboard and concentrating on her computer screen, and then I drifted around the edge of the room and hit the up button.

I figured that Sansom would be in a big suite, and that the big suites would all be on the top floor, so I hit the highest number the elevator had to offer. A long moment later I stepped out into a hushed carpeted corridor and saw a uniformed cop standing easy outside a double mahogany door. A patrolman, from the Greensboro PD. Not young. A veteran, with first dibs on some effortless overtime. A token presence. I walked toward him with a rueful smile on my face, like Hey, you’re working, I’m working, what’s a guy to do? I figured he must have processed a few visitors already. Room service coffee, staffers with legitimate reasons to be there, maybe journalists. I nodded to him and said, “Jack Reacher for Mr. Sansom,” and leaned beyond him and knocked on the door. He didn’t react. Didn’t complain. Just stood there, like the window-dressing he was. Whatever Sansom was going to be next, right then he was still only a Congressman from the sticks, and he was a long way from getting serious protection.

There was a short delay, and then the suite door opened. Sansom’s wife stood there with her hand on the inside handle. She was dressed, coiffed, made up, and ready for the day.

“Hello, Elspeth,” I said. “Can I come in?”

Chapter 25

I saw a fast, expert, politician’s-wife calculation run behind Elspeth Sansom’s eyes. First instinct: Throw the bum out. But: There was a cop in the corridor, and probably media in the building, and almost certainly hotel staff within earshot. And local people talk. So she swallowed once and said, “Major Reacher, how nice to see you again,” and stood back to give me room to pass.

The suite was large and dark because of draped windows and full of heavy furniture in rich and muted colors. There was a living room with a breakfast bar and an open door that must have led to a bedroom. Elspeth Sansom walked me to the middle of the space and stopped, like she didn’t know what to do with me next. Then John Sansom stepped out of the bedroom to see what the fuss was all about.

He was in pants and a shirt and a tie and socks. No shoes. He looked small, like a miniature man. Wiry build, narrow through the shoulders. His head was a little large compared to the rest of his body. His hair was cut short and neatly brushed. His skin was tanned, but in a creased, active, outdoors kind of a way. Rugged. No sun lamps for this guy. He glowed with wealth, and power, and energy, and charisma. It was easy to see how he had won plenty of elections. Easy to see why the news weeklies were in love with him. He looked at me and then looked at his wife and asked, “Where’s Springfield?”

Elspeth said, “He went downstairs to check on things. They must have passed in the elevators.”

Sansom nodded, not much more than a fast up-and-down with his eyelids. A practiced decision maker, and a pragmatic man, not much given to crying over spilled milk. He glanced at me and said, “You don’t give up.”

I said, “I never have.”

“Didn’t you listen to those federal boys in Washington?”

“Who were they, exactly?”

“Those guys? You know how it is. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But whatever, they were supposed to warn you off.”

“Didn’t resonate.”

“They copied me on your record. I told them they’d fail.”

“They talked to me like I was a moron. And they called me too old. Which makes you way too old.”

“I am way too old. For most of this shit, anyway.”

“You got ten minutes?”

“I can give you five.”

“You got coffee?”

“You’re wasting time.”

“We’ve got plenty of time. More than five minutes, anyway. More than ten, even. You need to lace your shoes and put a jacket on. How long can that take?”

Sansom shrugged and stepped over to the breakfast bar and poured me a cup of coffee. He carried it back and gave it to me and said, “Now cut to the chase. I know who you are and why you’re here.”

“Did you know Susan Mark?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Never met her, never even heard of her before last night.”

I was watching his eyes, and I believed him. I asked, “Why would an HRC clerk be coerced into checking you out?”

“Is that what was happening?”

“Best guess.”

“Then I have no idea. HRC is the new PERSCOM, right? What did you ever get from PERSCOM? What did anyone? What have they got there? Dates and units, that’s all. And my life is public record anyway. I’ve been on CNN a hundred times. I joined the army, I went to OCS, I was commissioned, I was promoted three times, and I left. No secrets there.”

“Your Delta missions were secrets.”

The room went a little quieter. Sansom asked, “How do you know that?”

“You got four good medals. You don’t explain why.”

Sansom nodded.

“That damn book,” he said. “The medals are a matter of record, too. I couldn’t disown them. It wouldn’t have been respectful. Politics is a minefield. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Either way around, they can always get to you.”

I said nothing. He looked at me and asked, “How many people are going to make the connection? Besides you, I mean?”

“About three million,” I said. “Maybe more. Everyone in the army, and all the vets with enough eyesight left to read. They know how things work.”

He shook his head. “Not that many. Most people don’t have inquiring minds. And even if they do, most people respect secrecy in matters like that. I don’t think there’s a problem.”

“There’s a problem somewhere. Otherwise why was Susan Mark being asked questions?”

“Did she actually mention my name?”

I shook my head. “That was to get your attention. I heard your name from a bunch of guys I’m assuming were employed by the person asking the questions.”

“And what’s in this for you?”

“Nothing. But she looked like a nice person, caught between a rock and a hard place.”

“And you care?”

“You do too, if only a little bit. You’re not in politics just for what you can get out of it for yourself. At least I sincerely hope you’re not.”

“Are you actually my constituent?”

“Not until they elect you President.”

Sansom was quiet for a beat and then he said, “The FBI briefed me, too. I’m in a position where I can do favors for them, so they make a point of keeping me in the loop. They say the NYPD feels you’re reacting to this whole thing with a measure of guilt. Like you pushed too hard on the train. And guilt is never a sound basis for good decisions.”

I said, “That’s just one woman’s opinion.”

“Was she wrong?”

I said nothing.

Sansom said, “I’m not going to tell you a damn thing about the missions.”

I said, “I don’t expect you to.”

“But?”

“How much could come back and bite you in the ass?”

“Nothing in this life is entirely black and white. You know that. But no crimes were committed. And no one could get to the truth through an HRC clerk, anyway. This is a fishing expedition. This is half-baked amateur muck-raking journalism at its worst.”

“I don’t think it is,” I said. “Susan Mark was terrified and her son is missing.”

Sansom glanced at his wife. Back at me. He said, “We didn’t know that.”

“It hasn’t been reported. He’s a jock at USC. He left a bar with a girl five days ago. Hasn’t been seen since. He’s presumed AWOL, having the time of his life.”

“And you know this how?”

“Through Susan Mark’s brother. The boy’s uncle.”

“And you don’t buy the story?”

“Too coincidental.”

“Not necessarily. Boys leave bars with girls all the time.”

“You’re a parent,” I said. “What would make you shoot yourself, and what would make you not?”

The room went quieter still. Elspeth Sansom said, “Shit.” John Sansom got the kind of faraway look in his eyes that I had seen before from good field officers reacting to a tactical setback. Rethink, redeploy, reorganize, all in a fast second or two. I saw him scanning back through history and coming to a firm conclusion. He said, “I’m sorry about the Mark family’s situation. I really am. And I would help if I could, but I can’t. There’s nothing in my Delta career that could be accessed through HRC. Nothing at all. Either this is about something else entirely, or someone is looking in the wrong place.”

“Where else would they look?”

“You know where. And you know they wouldn’t even get close. And someone who knew enough to want Delta records would know where to look for them, and where not to, surely. So this is not about Special Forces. Can’t be.”

“So what else could it be about?”

“Nothing. I’m spotless.”

“Really?”

“Completely. One hundred percent. I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t have gotten into politics if I had the tiniest thing to hide. Not the way things are now. I never even had a parking ticket.”

“OK,” I said.

“I’m sorry about the woman on the subway.”

“OK,” I said again.

“But now we really have to go. We have some serious begging to do.”

I asked, “You ever heard the name Lila Hoth?”

“Lila Hoth?” Sansom said. “No, I never heard that name.”

I was watching his eyes, and I felt he was telling the absolute truth. And lying through his teeth. Both at the same time.

Chapter 26

I passed Springfield on my return trip through the hotel lobby. I was heading for the street door, he was coming out of a dining room. Beyond him I saw round tables with snowy white tablecloths and large floral decorations in their centers. Springfield looked at me with no surprise in his face. It was as if he was judging my performance, and finding it satisfactory. As if I had gotten to his principals in about the span of time he had expected. Not fast, not slow, but right there in the middle of the window he had allowed. He gave me a look of professional appraisal and moved on without a word.

I went back to New York the same way I had left it, but in reverse. Cab to the Greensboro depot, bus to D.C., and then the train. The trip took all day and some of the evening. The bus schedule and the train schedule were not well integrated, and the first two trains from D.C. were sold out. I spent the travel time thinking, firstly about what Sansom had said, and what he hadn’t. Nothing in this life is entirely black and white. But no crimes were committed. And no one could get to the truth through an HRC clerk, anyway. No denial of questionable activity. Almost the opposite. Practically a confession. But he felt he hadn’t strayed outside the envelope. No crimes. And he had absolute confidence that the details were locked away forever. Altogether a common position, among sharp-end ex-military. Questionable was a big word for all of us. Twelve letters, and a textbook’s worth of implications. Certainly my own career would not withstand extended scrutiny. I don’t lose sleep over it. But in general I’m happy that the details stay locked away. And so was Sansom, clearly. I know my details. But what were his? Something damaging to him, obviously. Either personally, or to his election bid. Or both, inevitably. The feds had made that perfectly clear. Sansom can’t afford to tell you anything. But damaging in a wider context too, or why else would the feds be involved in the first place?

And who the hell was Lila Hoth?

I asked myself these questions all the way through the jolting bus ride, and all the way through the long layover at Union Station, and then I gave them up when the train I made rolled north through Baltimore. I had gotten nowhere with them, and by then I was thinking about something else, anyway. I was thinking about where exactly in New York City Susan Mark had been headed. She had driven in from the south and had planned to ditch her car and arrive at her destination by subway. Tactically smart, and no other choice, probably. She wouldn’t have worn her winter coat in the car. Too hot. She probably had it on the back seat, or more likely in the trunk, with the bag and the gun, where the gun would be safe from prying eyes. Therefore she chose to park, and get out, and get herself battle-ready at a distance and in relative privacy.

But not at too much of a distance. Not too far from her ultimate destination. Because she had been delayed. She was seriously late. Therefore if she was headed way uptown, she would have parked in midtown. But she had parked downtown. In SoHo. Probably joined the train at Spring Street, one stop before I had. She was still sitting tight past 33rd Street. Then things had unraveled. If they hadn’t, I figured she would have stayed on the train through Grand Central and gotten out at 51st Street. Maybe 59th. But no farther, surely. Sixty-eighth was a stop too far. Well into the Upper East Side. A whole new neighborhood. If she was headed all the way up there, she would have used the Lincoln Tunnel, not the Holland, and she would have driven farther north before she parked. Because time was tight for her. So the 59th Street station was her upper limit. But having gotten wherever she was going, I felt she would have aimed to double back, even if just a little. Amateur psychology. Approach from the south, overshoot, come back from the north. And hope her opponents were facing the wrong way.

So I drew a box in my head, 42nd Street to 59th, and Fifth Avenue to Third. Sixty-eight square blocks. Containing what?

About eight million different things.

I stopped counting them well before we hit Philadelphia. By then I was distracted by the girl across the aisle. She was in her middle twenties, and completely spectacular. Maybe a model, maybe an actress, maybe just a great-looking lawyer or lobbyist. A total babe, as a USC jock might say. Which got me thinking about Peter Molina again, and the apparent contradiction in someone expert enough to use him for leverage against a source that was worthless.

Our principal brought a whole crew. New York City has six main public transportation gateways: the Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK airports, plus Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, plus the Port Authority bus depot. Newark has three terminals, LaGuardia has three plus the shuttle terminal, JFK has eight, Penn Station is big, Grand Central is huge, and the Port Authority is a warren. Total manpower required to make a sensible attempt at surveillance would run close to forty people. Eighty or more, to allow for round-the-clock coverage. And eighty people was an army, not a crew. So I got off the train with no more than normal caution. Which, fortunately, was enough.

Chapter 27

I saw the watcher immediately. He was leaning on a pillar in the center of the Penn Station concourse, inert, with the kind of complete physical immobility that comes from being settled in for a long period of duty. He was stock-still, and the world was moving busily past him, like a river flows around a rock. He had a clamshell phone in his hand, open, held low down against his thigh. He was a tall guy, but reedy. Young, maybe thirty. At first sight, not impressive. He had pale skin with a shaved head and a dusting of ginger stubble. Not a great look. Scarier than an autograph hunter, maybe, but not by much. He was dressed in a shirt with a floral pattern and over it was a short tight leather jacket that was probably brown, but which looked lurid orange under the lights. He was staring at the oncoming crowd with eyes that had long ago grown tired, and then bored.

The concourse was full of people. I moved with the flow, slowly, hemmed in. I was carried along on the current. The watcher was about thirty feet away, ahead and on my left. His eyes were not moving. He was letting people walk through a fixed field of vision. I was about ten feet away from it. It was going to be like stepping through a metal detector hoop at the airport.

I slowed a little, and someone bumped into my back. I turned briefly, to check that they weren’t tag-teaming me. They weren’t. The person behind me was a woman with a stroller the size of an SUV, with two babies in it, maybe twins. There are a lot of twins in New York City. Plenty of older mothers, therefore plenty of laboratory fertilization. The twins in the stroller behind me were both crying, maybe because it was late and they were tired, or maybe they were just confused and bewildered by the forest of legs all around them. Their noise blended with the general hubbub. The concourse was tiled and full of echoes.

I drifted left, aiming to move six lateral feet in the next ten forward. I got near the edge of the stream and passed through the watcher’s point of focus. His eyes were bright blue, but filmed with fatigue. He didn’t react. Not at first. Then after a long second’s delay his eyes opened wider and he raised his phone and flicked the lid to light the screen. He glanced at it. Glanced back at me. His mouth opened in surprise. By that point I was about four feet away from him.

Then he fainted. I lunged forward and caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. A Good Samaritan, helping out with a sudden medical emergency. That was what people saw, anyway. But only because people see what they want to see. If they had replayed the brief sequence in their heads and scrutinized it very carefully they might have noticed that I had lunged slightly before the guy had started to fall. They might have noticed that whereas my right hand was certainly moving to catch him by the collar, it was only moving a split second after my left hand had already stabbed him in the solar plexus, very hard, but close in to our bodies, hidden and surreptitious.

But people see what they want to see. They always have, and they always will. I crouched over the guy like the responsible member of the public I was pretending to be, and the woman with the stroller trundled on behind me. After that, a small crowd gathered, full of concern. New York’s hostile reputation is undeserved. People are generally very helpful. A woman crouched down next to me. Other people stood close and looked down. I could see their legs and their shoes. The guy in the leather jacket was flat on the floor, twitching with chest spasms and gasping desperately for air. A hard blow to the solar plexus will do that to a person. But so will a heart attack and any number of other medical conditions.

The woman next to me asked, “What happened?”

I said, “I don’t know. He just keeled over. His eyes rolled up.”

“We should call the ambulance.”

I said, “I dropped my phone.”

The woman started to fumble in her purse. I said, “Wait. He might have had an episode. We need to check if he’s carrying a card.”

“An episode?”

“An attack. Like a seizure. Like epilepsy, or something.”

“What kind of a card?”

“People carry them. With instructions. We might have to stop him biting his tongue. And maybe he has medication with him. Check his pockets.”

The woman reached out and patted the guy’s jacket pockets, on the outside. She had small hands, long fingers, lots of rings. The guy’s outside pockets were empty. Nothing there. The woman folded the jacket back and checked inside. I watched, carefully. The shirt was unlike anything I had ever seen. Acrylic, floral, a riot of pastel colors. The jacket was cheap and stiff. Lined with nylon. There was an inside label, quite ornate, with Cyrillic writing on it.

The guy’s inside pockets were empty, too.

“Try his pants,” I said. “Quick.”

The woman said, “I can’t do that.”

So some take-charge executive dropped down next to us and stuck his fingers in the guy’s front pants pockets. Nothing there. He used the pocket flaps to roll the guy first one way and then the other, to check the back pockets. Nothing there, either.

Nothing anywhere. No wallet, no ID, no nothing at all.

“OK, we better call the ambulance,” I said. “Do you see my phone?”

The woman looked around and then burrowed under the guy’s arm and came back with the clamshell cell. The lid got moved on the way and the screen lit up. My picture was right there on it, big and obvious. Better quality than I thought it would be. Better than the Radio Shack guy’s attempt. The woman glanced at it. I knew people kept pictures on their phones. I’ve seen them. Their partners, their dogs, their cats, their kids. Like a home page, or wallpaper. Maybe the woman thought I was a big-time egotist who used a picture of himself. But she handed me the phone anyway. By that time the take-charge executive was already dialing the emergency call. So I backed away and said, “I’ll go find a cop.”

I forced my way into the tide of people again and let it carry me onward, out the door, to the sidewalk, into the dark, and away.

Chapter 28

Now I wasn’t that guy anymore. No longer the only man in the world without a cell phone. I stopped in the hot darkness three blocks away on Seventh Avenue and looked over my prize. It was made by Motorola. Gray plastic, somehow treated and polished to make it look like metal. I fiddled my way through the menus and found no pictures other than my own. It had come out quite well. The cross street west of Eighth, the bright morning sun, me frozen in the act of turning around in response to my shouted name. There was plenty of detail, from head to toe. Clearly huge numbers of megapixels had been involved. I could make out my features fairly well. And I thought I looked pretty good, considering I had hardly slept. There were cars and a dozen bystanders nearby, to give a sense of scale, like the ruler painted on the wall behind a police mug shot. My posture looked exactly like what I see in the mirror. Very characteristic.

I had been nailed but good, photographically.

That was for damn sure.

I went back to the call register menu and checked for calls dialed. There were none recorded. I checked calls received, and found only three, all within the last three hours, all from the same number. I guessed the watcher was supposed to delete information on a regular basis, maybe even after every call, but had gotten lazy about three hours ago, which was certainly consistent with his demeanor and his reaction time. I guessed the number the calls had come in from represented some kind of an organizer or dispatcher. Maybe even the big boss himself. If it had been a cell phone number, it would have been no good to me. No good at all. Cell phones can be anywhere. That’s the point of cell phones.

But it wasn’t a cell phone number. It was a 212 number.

A Manhattan landline.

Which would have a fixed location. That’s the nature of landlines.

The best method of working backward from a phone number depends on how high up the food chain you are. Cops and private eyes have reverse telephone directories. Look up the number, get a name, get an address. The FBI has all kinds of sophisticated databases. The same kind of thing, but more expensive. The CIA probably owns the phone companies.

I don’t have any of that stuff. So I take the low-tech approach.

I dial the number and see who answers.

I hit the green button and the phone brought up the number for me. I hit the green button again and the phone started dialing. There was ring tone. It cut off fairly fast and a woman’s voice said, “This is the Four Seasons, and how may I help you?”

I said, “The hotel?”

“Yes, and how may I direct your call?”

I said, “I’m sorry, I have the wrong number.”

I clicked off.

The Four Seasons Hotel. I had seen it. I had never been in it. It was a little above my current pay grade. It was on 57th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue. Right there in my sixty-eight square-block box, a little west and a lot north of its geographic center. But a short walk for someone getting off the 6 train at 59th Street. Hundreds of rooms, hundreds of telephone extensions, all routed out through the main switchboard, all carrying the main switchboard’s caller ID.

Helpful, but not very.

I thought for a moment and looked around very carefully and then reversed direction and headed for the 14th Precinct.

I had no idea what time an NYPD detective would show up for a night watch, but I expected Theresa Lee to be there within about an hour. I expected to have to wait for her in the downstairs lobby. What I didn’t expect was to find Jacob Mark already in there ahead of me. He was sitting on an upright chair against a wall and drumming his fingers on his knees. He looked at me with no surprise at all and said, “Peter didn’t show up for practice.”

Chapter 29

Right there in the precinct lobby Jacob Mark talked for about five straight minutes, with the kind of rambling fluency that is typical of the truly anxious. He said that the USC football people had waited four hours and then called Peter’s father, who had called him. He said that for a star senior on a full scholarship to miss practice was completely unthinkable. In fact to make practice no matter what else was going on was a major part of the culture. Earthquakes, riots, wars, deaths in the family, mortal disease, everyone showed up. It emphasized to the world how important football was, and by implication how important the players were to the university. Because jocks were respected by most, but disrespected by some. And there was an unspoken mandate to live up to the majority’s ideals and change the minority’s minds. Then there were the straightforward machismo issues. To miss practice was like a firefighter declining a turn-out, like a hit-by-pitch batter rubbing his arm, like a gunslinger staying inside the saloon. Unthinkable. Unheard of. Doesn’t happen. Hangovers, broken bones, torn muscles, bruises, it didn’t matter. You showed up. Plus Peter was going to the NFL, and increasingly pro teams look for character. They’ve been burned too many times. So missing practice was the same thing as trashing his meal ticket. Inexplicable. Incomprehensible.

I listened without paying close attention. I was counting hours instead. Close to forty-eight since Susan Mark had missed her deadline. Why hadn’t Peter’s body been found?

Then Theresa Lee showed up with news.

But first Lee had to deal with Jacob Mark’s situation. She took us up to the second floor squad room and heard him out and asked, “Has Peter been officially reported missing?”

Jake said, “I want to do that right now.”

“You can’t,” Lee said. “At least, not to me. He’s missing in LA, not in New York.”

“Susan was killed here.”

“She committed suicide here.”

“The USC people don’t take missing persons reports. And the LAPD won’t take it seriously. They don’t understand.”

“Peter’s twenty-two years old. It’s not like he’s a child.”

“He’s been missing more than five days.”

“Duration isn’t significant. He doesn’t live at home. And who is to say he’s missing? Who is to say what his normal pattern might be? Presumably he goes for long periods without contact with his family.”

“This is different.”

“What’s your policy over there in Jersey?”

Jake didn’t answer.

Lee said, “He’s an independent adult. It’s like he got on a plane and went on vacation. It’s like his friends were at the airport and watched him go. I can see where the LAPD is coming from on this.”

“But he missed football practice. That doesn’t happen.”

“It just did, apparently.”

“Susan was being threatened,” Jake said.

“By who?”

Jake looked at me. “Tell her, Reacher.”

I said, “Something to do with her job. There was a lot of leverage. Had to be. I think a threat against her son would be consistent.”

“OK,” Lee said. She looked around the squad room and found her partner, Docherty. He was working at one of a pair of twinned desks in the back of the space. She looked back at Jake and said, “Go make a full report. Everything you know, and everything you think you know.”

Jake nodded gratefully and headed toward Docherty. I waited until he was gone and asked, “Are you reopening the file now?”

Lee said, “No. The file is closed and it’s staying closed. Because as it happens there’s nothing to worry about. But the guy’s a cop and we have to be courteous. And I want him out of the way for an hour.”

“Why is there nothing to worry about?”

So she told me her news.

She said, “We know why Susan Mark came up here.”

“How?”

“We got a missing persons report,” she said. “Apparently Susan was helping someone with an inquiry, and when she didn’t show, the individual concerned got worried and came in to report her missing.”

“What kind of inquiry?”

“Something personal, I think. I wasn’t here. The day guys said it all sounded innocent enough. And it must have been, really, or why else come to the police station?”

“And Jacob Mark shouldn’t know this why?”

“We need a lot more detail. And getting it will be easier without him there. He’s too involved. He’s a family member. He’ll scream and yell. I’ve seen it before.”

“Who was the individual concerned?”

“A foreign national briefly here in town for the purpose of conducting the research that Susan was helping with.”

“Wait,” I said. “Briefly here in town? Staying in a hotel?”

“Yes,” Lee said.

“The Four Seasons?”

“Yes,” Lee said.

“What’s his name?”

“It’s a her, not a him,” Lee said. “Her name is Lila Hoth.”

Chapter 30

It was very late in the evening but Lee called anyway and Lila Hoth agreed to meet with us at the Four Seasons, right away, no hesitation. We drove over in Lee’s unmarked car and parked in the hotel’s curbside loading zone. The lobby was magnificent. All pale sandstone and brass and tan paint and golden marble, suspended halfway between dim intimacy and bright modernism. Lee showed her badge at the desk and the clerk called upstairs and then pointed us toward the elevators. We were headed for another high floor and the way the clerk had spoken made me feel that Lila Hoth’s room wasn’t going to be the smallest or the cheapest in the place.

In fact Lila Hoth’s room was another suite. It had a double door, like Sansom’s in North Carolina, but no cop outside. Just a quiet empty corridor. There were used room service trays here and there, and some of the doorknobs had Do Not Disturb signs or breakfast orders on them. Theresa Lee paused and double-checked the number and knocked. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the right-hand panel opened and we saw a woman standing inside the doorway, with soft yellow light directly behind her. She was easily sixty, maybe more, short and thick and heavy, with steel-gray hair cut plain and blunt. Dark eyes, lined and hooded. A white slab of a face, meaty, immobile, and bleak. A guarded, unreadable expression. She was wearing an ugly brown housedress made of thick man-made material.

Lee asked, “Ms. Hoth?”

The woman ducked her head and blinked and moved her hands and made a kind of all-purpose apologetic sound. The universal dumb show for not understanding. I said, “She doesn’t speak English.” Lee said, “She spoke English fifteen minutes ago.” The light behind the woman was coming from a table lamp set deep inside the room. Its glow dimmed briefly as a second figure stepped in front of it and headed our way. Another woman. But much younger. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Very elegant. And very, very beautiful. Rare, and exotic. Like a model. She smiled a little shyly and said, “It was me speaking English fifteen minutes ago. I’m Lila Hoth. This is my mother.”

She bent and spoke fast in a foreign language, Eastern European, quietly, more or less straight into the older woman’s ear. Explanation, context, inclusion. The older woman brightened and smiled. We introduced ourselves by name. Lila Hoth spoke for her mother. She said her name was Svetlana Hoth. We all shook hands, back and forth, quite formally, crossing wrists, two people on our side and two on theirs. Lila Hoth was stunning. And very natural. She made the girl I had seen on the train look contrived in comparison. She was tall but not too tall, and she was slender but not too slender. She had dark skin, like a perfect beach tan. She had long dark hair. No makeup. Huge, hypnotic eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen. As if they were lit from within. She moved with a kind of lithe economy. Half the time she looked young and leggy and gamine, and half the time she looked all grown up and self-possessed. Half the time she seemed unaware of how good she looked, and half the time she seemed a little bashful about it. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress that probably came from Paris and cost more than a car. But she didn’t need it. She could have been in something stitched together from old potato sacks without diminishing the effect.

We followed her inside and her mother followed us. The suite was made up of three rooms. A living room in the center, and bedrooms either side. The living room had a full set of furniture, including a dining table. There were the remnants of a room service supper on it. There were shopping bags in the corners of the room. Two from Bergdorf Goodman, and two from Tiffany. Theresa Lee pulled her badge and Lila Hoth stepped away to a credenza under a mirror and came back with two slim booklets which she handed to her. Their passports. She thought official visitors in New York needed to see papers. The passports were maroon and each had an eagle graphic printed in gold in the center of the cover and words in Cyrillic above and below it that looked like NACHOPT YKPAIHA in English. Lee flipped through them and stepped away and put them back on the credenza.

Then we all sat down. Svetlana Hoth stared straight ahead, blank, excluded by language. Lila Hoth looked at the two of us, carefully, establishing our identities in her mind. A cop from the precinct, and the witness from the train. She ended up looking straight at me, maybe because she thought I had been the more seriously affected by events. I wasn’t complaining. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She said, “I am so very sorry about what happened to Susan Mark.”

Her voice was low. Her diction was precise. She spoke English very well. A little accented, a little formal. As if she had learned the language from black and white movies, both American and British.

Theresa Lee didn’t speak. I said, “We don’t know what happened to Susan Mark. Not really. Beyond the obvious facts, I mean.”

Lila Hoth nodded, courteously, delicately, and a little contritely. She said, “You want to understand my involvement.”

“Yes, we do.”

“It’s a long story. But let me say at the very beginning that nothing in it could possibly explain the events on the subway train.”

Theresa Lee said, “So let’s hear the story.”

And so we heard it. The first part of it was background information. Purely biographical. Lila Hoth was twenty-six years old. She was Ukrainian. She had been married at the age of eighteen to a Russian. The Russian had been knee-deep in nineties-style Moscow entrepreneurship. He had grabbed oil leases and coal and uranium rights from the crumbling state. He had become a single-figure billionaire. Next step was to become a double-figure billionaire. He didn’t make it. It was a tight bottleneck. Everyone wanted to squeeze through, and there wasn’t room for everyone to succeed. A rival had shot the Russian in the head, one year ago, outside a nightclub. The body had lain in the snow on the sidewalk all the next day. A message, Moscow style. The newly-widowed Lila Hoth had taken the hint and cashed out and moved to London with her mother. She liked London and planned on living there forever, awash with money but with nothing much to do.

She said, “There’s a presumption that young people who get rich will do things for their parents. You see it all the time with pop stars and movie stars and athletes. And such a thing is a very Ukrainian sentiment. My father died before I was born. My mother is all I have left. So, of course, I offered her anything she wanted. Houses, cars, holidays, cruises. She refused them all. All she wanted was a favor. She wanted me to help her track down a man from her past. It was like the dust had settled after a long and turbulent life, and at last she was free to concentrate on what meant most to her.”

I asked, “Who was the man?”

“An American soldier named John. That was all we knew. At first my mother claimed him only as an acquaintance. But then it emerged that he had been very kind to her, at a particular time and place.”

“Where and when?”

“In Berlin, for a short period in the early eighties.”

“That’s vague.”

“It was before I was born. It was in 1983. Privately I thought trying to find the man was a hopeless task. I thought my mother was becoming a silly old woman. But I was happy to go through the motions. And, don’t worry, she doesn’t understand what we’re saying.”

Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded at nothing in particular.

I asked, “Why was your mother in Berlin?”

“She was with the Red Army,” her daughter said.

“Doing what?”

“She was with an infantry regiment.”

“As what?”

“She was a political commissar. All regiments had one. In fact, all regiments had several.”

I asked, “So what did you do about tracing the American?”

“My mother was clear that her friend John had been in the army, not the Marines. That was my starting point. So I telephoned from London to your Department of Defense and asked what I should do. After many explanations I was transferred to the Human Resources Command. They have a press office. The man I spoke to was quite touched. He thought it was a sweet story. Possibly he saw a public relations aspect, I don’t know. Some good news at last, perhaps, instead of all the bad. He said he would make inquiries. Personally I thought he was wasting his time. John is a very common name. And as I understand it, most American soldiers rotate through Germany, and most visit Berlin. So I thought the pool of possibilities would grow enormous. Which apparently it did. The next thing I knew was weeks later when a clerk called Susan Mark telephoned me. I wasn’t home. She left a message. She said she had been assigned the task. She told me that some names that sound like John are actually contractions of Jonathan, spelled without the letter h. She wanted to know if my mother had ever seen the name written down, perhaps on a note. I asked my mother and called Susan Mark back and told her we were sure it was John with the letter h. The conversation with Susan turned out to be very pleasant, and we had many more. We almost became friends, I think, the way you sometimes can on the phone. Like pen-pals, but talking instead of writing. She told me a lot about herself. She was a very lonely woman, and I think our conversations brightened her days.”

Lee asked, “And then what?”

“Eventually I received news from Susan. She said she had arrived at some preliminary conclusions. I suggested we meet here in New York, almost as a way to consummate our friendship. You know, dinner and maybe a show. As a way of saying thank you for her efforts, certainly. But she never arrived.”

I asked, “What time were you expecting her?”

“About ten o’clock. She said she would leave after work.”

“Too late for dinner and a show.”

“She planned to stay over. I booked a room for her.”

“When did you get here?”

“Three days ago.”

“How?”

“British Airways from London.”

I said, “You hired a local crew.”

Lila Hoth nodded.

I asked, “When?”

“Just before we got here.”

“Why?”

“It’s expected,” she said. “And sometimes useful.”

“Where did you find them?”

“They advertise. In the Moscow papers, and in the expatriate papers in London. It’s good business for them, and it’s a kind of status check for us. If you go overseas unassisted, you look weak. And it’s better not to do that.”

“They told me you brought a crew of your own.”

She looked surprised.

“I don’t have a crew of my own,” she said. “Why on earth would they say that? I don’t understand it.”

“They said you brought a bunch of scary types.”

For a second she looked mystified and a little annoyed. Then some kind of comprehension dawned in her face. She seemed to be a fast analyst. She said, “Perhaps they were inventive, strategically. When Susan didn’t arrive, I sent them out looking. I thought, I’m paying them, they might as well do some work. And my mother has a lot of hope invested in this business. So I didn’t want to come all this way, and then fail at the last minute. So I offered them a bonus. We grow up believing that money talks loudest, in America. So perhaps those men were making up a story for you. Perhaps they were inventing a scary alternative. To make sure they got their extra money. So that you would be tempted to talk to them.”

I said nothing.

Then something else dawned in her face. Some new realization. She said, “I have no crew, as you call it. Just one man. Leonid, one of my husband’s old team. He couldn’t get a new job. He’s a bit of a lame duck, I’m afraid. So I kept him on. Right now he’s at Penn Station. He’s waiting for you. The police told me that the witness had gone to Washington. I assumed you would take the train, and come back the same way. Did you not?”

I said, “Yes, I came back on the train.”

“Then Leonid must have missed you. He had your picture. He was supposed to ask you to telephone me. Poor man, he must still be there.”

She stood up and headed for the credenza. For the room phone. Which gave me a temporary tactical problem. Because Leonid’s cell was in my pocket.

Chapter 31

In principle I know how to turn off a cell phone. I have seen it done, and I have done it myself on more than one occasion. On most models you hold down the red button for two long seconds. But the phone was in my pocket. No room to open it, and no chance of finding the red button by feel alone. Too suspicious to take it out and turn it off in full view of everyone.

Lila Hoth hit nine for a line and dialed.

I put my hand in my pocket and used my thumbnail and found the catch and unlatched the battery. Separated it from the phone and turned it sideways to avoid any chance of accidental electrical contact.

Lila Hoth waited, and then she sighed and hung up.

“He’s hopeless,” she said. “But very loyal.”

I tried to track Leonid’s likely progress in my head. Cops, paramedics, probably an obligatory trip to the Saint Vincent’s emergency room, no ID, possibly no English, maybe worries and questions and detention. Then the trip back uptown.

How long of a detention, I didn’t know.

How fast of a trip, I couldn’t predict.

I said, “The local crew mentioned John Sansom’s name.”

Lila Hoth sighed again and shook her head in a tiny display of exasperation. She said, “I briefed them when we arrived, obviously. I told them the story. And we all got along quite well. I think all of us felt that we were wasting our time, humoring my mother. We shared jokes about it, frankly. One of the men was reading the newspaper about Sansom. He said, here’s an American soldier called John, of roughly the right vintage. He said, maybe Sansom is the guy you’re looking for. For a day or two it became a kind of catchphrase. An in-joke, I suppose. We would say, let’s just call John Sansom and have done with it. I was really only joking, of course, because what are the chances? A million to one, perhaps. And they were joking too, really, but later they became somehow quite earnest about it. Perhaps because of the impact it would have, because he is such a famous politician.”

“What impact? What did your mother do with this guy called John?”

Svetlana Hoth stared on into space, uncomprehending. Lila Hoth sat down again. She said, “My mother has never spoken in detail about it. Certainly it can’t have been espionage. My mother was not a traitor. I say that not as a loyal daughter, but as a realist. She is still alive. Therefore she was never suspected. And her American friend was not a traitor, either. Liaising with foreign traitors was a KGB function, not army. And personally I doubt that her interest was romantic. It was more likely aid of some sort, personal help, either financial or political. Possibly covert. Those were bad times for the Soviet Union. But possibly it was romantic. All she has ever said is that the man was very kind to her. She plays her cards close to her chest.”

“Ask her again, now.”

“I have asked her many times, as you can imagine. She’s reluctant to say.”

“But you think Sansom isn’t actually involved?”

“No, not at all. That was a joke that got out of hand. That’s all. Unless, of course, it really is a million-to-one thing. Which would be extraordinary, don’t you think? To joke about something and have it turn out to be true?”

I said nothing.

Lila Hoth said, “Now may I ask you a question? Did Susan Mark give you the information intended for my mother?”

Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded again. I began to suspect she recognized the words my mother. Like a dog that wags its tail when it hears its name. I said, “Why would you think Susan Mark gave me information?”

“Because the people I hired here told me you told them that she had. Computerized, on a USB memory stick. They gave me that message, and transmitted your photograph, and resigned their commission. I’m not sure why. I was paying them very well.”

I moved in my chair and stuck my hand in my pocket. Scrabbled down past the disassembled phone and found the Radio Shack stick. I felt the soft pink neoprene sleeve against my fingernails. I pulled it out and held it up and watched Lila Hoth’s eyes very carefully.

She looked at the stick the way a cat looks at a bird.

She asked, “Is that really it?”

Theresa Lee moved in her chair and looked at me. Like she was asking, Are you going to say it, or am I? Lila Hoth caught the glance and asked, “What?”

I said, “The whole thing looked very different to me, I’m afraid. Susan Mark was terrified on the train. She was in big trouble. She didn’t look like a person coming to town to meet a friend for dinner and a show.”

Lila Hoth said, “I told you at the beginning, I can’t explain that.”

I put the memory stick back in my pocket. Said, “Susan didn’t bring an overnight bag.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“And she dumped her car and approached by subway. Which is weird. If you were prepared to book a room for her, I’m sure you would have sprung for valet parking.”

“Sprung?”

“Paid for.”

“Of course.”

“And she was carrying a loaded gun.”

“She lived in Virginia. I heard it’s compulsory there.”

“It’s legal there,” I said. “Not compulsory.”

“I can’t explain it. I’m sorry.”

“And her son is missing. Last seen leaving a bar, with a woman of your age and roughly your description.”

“Missing?”

“Disappeared.”

“A woman of my description?”

“A total babe.”

“What does that mean?”

“A good-looking young woman.”

“What bar?”

“Somewhere in LA.”

“Los Angeles?”

“In California.”

“I haven’t been to Los Angeles. Never in my life. I have only been in New York.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Look around you. I have been here in New York three days on a tourist visa and I occupy three rooms in a commercial hotel. I have no crew, as you call it. I have never been to California.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Looks are subjective. And I’m not the only woman my age. There are six billion people in the world. Trending young, for sure. Half of them are fifteen or younger. Which means there are still three billion people sixteen or older. Following the curve, perhaps twelve percent of them are in their middle twenties. That’s three hundred and sixty million people. About half are women. That’s a hundred and eighty million. Even if only one in a hundred of them might be judged good-looking, in a bar in California, then it’s still ten times more likely that John Sansom was my mother’s friend than I had anything to do with Susan Mark’s son.”

I nodded. Arithmetically, Lila Hoth was right on the money. She said, “And it’s probably true that Peter is away somewhere with a girl, anyway. Yes, I know his name. In fact I know all about him. Susan told me. On the phone. We talked about all our problems. She hated her son. She despised what he is. He is everything she disliked. He is just a shallow fraternity boy with immature attitudes. He rejected her in favor of his father. And do you know why? Because he was obsessed with his ancestry. And Susan was adopted. Did you even know that? Her son thought of her only as a person conceived out of wedlock. He hated her for it. I know more about Susan than anybody. I talked to her many times. I listened to her. She was a lonely, isolated woman. I was her friend. She was excited to come here and meet me.”

At that point I sensed that Theresa Lee needed to get going and I certainly wanted to be out of there before young Leonid showed up again. So I nodded and shrugged as if I had nothing more to say and no further issues to pursue. Lila Hoth asked if I would give her the stick that Susan Mark had given to me. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. I didn’t answer at all. We just shook hands all around once more, and then we made an exit. The door closed behind us and we walked through the silent corridor and the elevator chimed open. We stepped in and we looked at each other in the mirrored walls and Lee said, “Well, what did you think?”

“I thought she was beautiful,” I said. “One of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.”

“Apart from that.”

“Amazing eyes.”

“Apart from her eyes.”

“I thought she was lonely too. Lonely and isolated. She was talking about Susan, but she could have been talking about herself.”

“What about her story?”

“Do good-looking people automatically get more credibility?”

“Not from me, pal. And get over it, anyway. Thirty years from now she’ll look just like her mother. Did you believe her?”

“Did you?”

Lee nodded. “I believed her. Because a story like that is ridiculously easy to check. Only a fool would give us so many chances to prove her wrong. Like, does the army really have press officers?”

“Hundreds of them.”

“So all we have to do is find the one she spoke to, and ask. We could even track the phone calls from London. I could liaise with Scotland Yard. I’d love to do that. Can you imagine? Docherty interrupts me, I say, Butt out, pal, I’m on the phone with Scotland Yard here. It’s every detective’s dream.”

“NSA will have the calls,” I said. “A foreign number into the DoD? They’re already part of an intelligence analysis somewhere.”

“And we could track Susan Mark’s calls out of the Pentagon. If they talked as often as Lila claimed, we’d see them easily. International to the U.K., they’re probably flagged up separately.”

“So go for it. Check.”

“I guess I will,” she said. “And she must know I could. She struck me as an intelligent woman. She knows British Airways and Homeland Security can track her in and out of the country. She knows we can tell if she ever flew to LA. She knows we can just go ahead and ask Jacob Mark whether his sister was adopted. It’s all so easy to confirm. It would be crazy to lie about stuff like that. Plus she came in to the precinct house and involved herself voluntarily. And she just showed me her passport. Which is the exact opposite of suspicious behavior. Those are big points in her favor.”

I took the cell phone from my pocket and reassembled the battery. I hit the on switch and the screen lit up. It was showing a missed call. Lila Hoth, presumably, from her room, ten minutes ago. I saw Lee looking at the phone and I said, “It’s Leonid’s. I took it from him.”

“He actually found you?”

“I found him. Which is why I had gotten as far as this hotel.”

“Where is he now?”

“Walking home from Saint Vincent’s Hospital, probably.”

“Is this something you really want to be telling to an NYPD detective?”

“He fainted. I helped. That’s all. Talk to the witnesses.”

“Whatever, it’s going to put the cat among the pigeons with Lila.”

“She thinks gun ownership is compulsory in Virginia. She probably thinks mugging is compulsory in New York. She grew up with propaganda.”

We got out of the elevator in the lobby and headed for the street door. Lee asked, “But if all of this is so innocent, why are there feds involved?”

“If the story is true, then an American soldier met with a Red Army political commissar back during the Cold War. The feds want to be absolutely sure it’s innocent. That’s why HRC’s response was delayed by weeks. They were taking policy decisions and putting surveillance in place.”

We got into Lee’s car. She said, “You aren’t agreeing with me all the way, are you?”

I said, “If the Hoth family business is innocent, so be it. But something wasn’t innocent. That’s for damn sure. And we’re saying that other something brought Susan Mark to the exact same place at the exact same time. Which is a hell of a coincidence.”

“And?”

“How many times have you known a million-to-one chance turn out a winner?”

“Never.”

“Me either. But I think it’s happening here. John Sansom is a million-to-one against, but I think he’s involved.”

“Why?”

“I spoke to him.”

“In Washington?”

“Actually I had to follow him to North Carolina.”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“That’s what he said. Then I asked him if he had heard the name Lila Hoth. He said no. I was watching his face. I believed him, and I thought he was lying, too. Both at the same time. And maybe he was.”

“How?”

“Maybe he had heard the name Hoth, but not Lila. So technically, no, he hadn’t heard the name Lila Hoth. But maybe he had heard the name Svetlana Hoth. Maybe he was very familiar with it.”

“What would that mean?”

“Maybe more than we think. Because if Lila Hoth is telling the truth, then there’s a kind of weird logic working here. Why would Susan Mark bust a gut on a case like this?”

“She had sympathy.”

“Why would she in particular?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because she was adopted. Born out of wedlock, presumably wondering about her real folks from time to time. Sympathetic to other people in the same situation. Like Lila Hoth, maybe. Some guy was very kind to her mother before she was born? There are a lot of ways to interpret a phrase like that.”

“For example?”

“Best case, he gave her a warm coat in winter.”

“And worst case?”

“Maybe John Sansom is Lila Hoth’s father.”

Chapter 32

Lee and I went straight back to the precinct. Jacob Mark had finished his business with Docherty. That was clear. And something had changed. That was clear too. They were sitting opposite each other across Docherty’s desk. Not talking anymore. Jake looked happier. Docherty had a patient expression on his face, like he had just wasted an hour. He didn’t look resentful about it. Cops are accustomed to wasting time. Statistically most of what they do leads nowhere. Lee and I walked over to them and Jake said, “Peter called his coach.”

I asked, “When?”

“Two hours ago. The coach called Molina and Molina called me.”

“So where is he?”

“He didn’t say. He had to leave a message. His coach never answers his phone over dinner. Family time.”

“But Peter’s OK?”

“He said he won’t be back anytime soon. Maybe ever. He’s thinking about quitting football. There was a girl giggling in the background.”

Docherty said, “She must be some girl.”

I asked Jake, “You OK with that?”

Jake said, “Hell no. But it’s his life. And he’ll change his mind, anyway. The only question is how fast.”

“I meant, are you happy that the message was for real?”

“The coach knows his voice. Better than I do, probably.”

“Anyone try calling him back?”

“All of us. But his phone is off again.”

Theresa Lee said, “So we’re satisfied?”

“I guess.”

“Feeling better?”

“Relieved.”

“May I ask you a question about another subject?”

“Shoot.”

“Was your sister adopted?”

Jake paused. Switched gears. Nodded. “We both were. As babies. Separately, three years apart. Susan first.” Then he asked, “Why?”

Lee said, “I’m corroborating some new information received.”

“What new information?”

“It seems that Susan came up here to meet a friend.”

“What friend?”

“A Ukrainian woman called Lila Hoth.”

Jake glanced at me. “We’ve been through this. I never heard that name from Susan.”

Lee asked him, “Would you expect to? How close were you? It seems to be a fairly recent friendship.”

“We weren’t very close.”

“When was the last time you talked?”

“A few months ago, I guess.”

“So you’re not completely up-to-date with her social life.”

Jake said, “I guess not.”

Lee asked, “How many people knew that Susan was adopted?”

“I guess she didn’t advertise it. But it wasn’t a secret.”

“How fast would a new friend find out?”

“Fast enough, probably. Friends talk about stuff like that.”

“How would you describe Susan’s relationship with her son?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“An important one.”

Jake hesitated. He clammed up and turned away, physically, like he was literally dodging the issue. Like he was flinching from a blow. Maybe because he was reluctant to wash dirty linen in public, in which case his body language was really all the answer we needed. But Theresa Lee wanted chapter and verse. She said, “Talk to me, Jake. Cop to cop. This is something I need to know about.”

Jake was quiet for a spell. Then he shrugged and said, “I guess you could call it a love-hate relationship.”

“In what way exactly?”

“Susan loved Peter, Peter hated her.”

“Why?”

More hesitation. Another shrug. “It’s complicated.”

“How?”

“Peter went through a phase, like most kids do. Like girls want to be long-lost princesses, or boys want their grandfathers to have been admirals or generals or famous explorers. For a spell everyone wants to be something they’re not. Peter wanted to live in a Ralph Lauren advertisement, basically. He wanted to be Peter Molina the Fourth, or at least the Third. He wanted his father to have an estate in Kennebunkport, and his mother to have the remnants of an old fortune. Susan didn’t handle it well. She was the daughter of a drug-addicted teenage whore from Baltimore, and she made no secret of it. She thought honesty was the best policy. Peter handled it badly. They never really got past it, and then the divorce came, and Peter chose up sides, and they never got over it.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“I could see both points of view. I never inquired about my real mother. I didn’t want to know. But I went through a spell where I wished she was a grand old lady with diamonds. I got over it. But Peter didn’t, which is stupid, I know, but understandable.”

“Did Susan like Peter as a person, as opposed to loving him as a son?”

Jake shook his head. “No. Which made things even worse. Susan had no sympathy for jocks and letter jackets and all that stuff. I guess in school and college she had bad experiences with people like that. She didn’t like that her son was turning into one of them. But that stuff was important to Peter, in its own right at first, and then later as a weapon against her. It was a dysfunctional family, no question.”

“Who knows this story?”

“You mean, would a friend know?”

Lee nodded.

Jake said, “A close friend might.”

“A close friend she met quite recently?”

“There’s no timetable. It’s about trust, isn’t it?”

I said, “You told me Susan wasn’t an unhappy person.”

Jake said, “And she wasn’t. I know that sounds weird. But adopted people have a different view of family. They have different expectations. Believe me, I know. Susan was at peace with it. It was a fact of life, that’s all.”

“Was she lonely?”

“I’m sure she was.”

“Did she feel isolated?”

“I’m sure she did.”

“Did she like to talk on the phone?”

“Most women do.”

Lee asked him, “Have you got kids?”

Jake shook his head again.

“No,” he said. “I don’t have kids. I’m not even married. I tried to learn from my big sister’s experience.”

Lee stayed quiet for a spell and then she said, “Thanks, Jake. I’m happy that Peter’s OK. And I’m sorry I had to bring all that bad stuff up.” Then she walked away and I followed her and she said, “I’ll check the other things too, but it will take time, because those channels are always slow, but right now my guess is that Lila Hoth will pan out just fine. She’s two for two so far, on the adoption thing and the mother-son thing. She knows stuff only a genuine friend would know.”

I nodded agreement. “You interested in the other thing? Whatever it was that got Susan so scared?”

“Not until I see actual evidence of a crime committed in New York City, somewhere between Ninth Avenue and Park, and 30th Street and 45th.”

“That’s this precinct?”

She nodded. “Anything else would be volunteer work.”

“You interested in Sansom?”

“Not even a little bit. Are you?”

“I feel like I should warn him, maybe.”

“About what? A million-to-one possibility?”

“It’s actually much shorter odds than a million to one. There are five million men called John in America. Second only to James, for popularity. That’s one in thirty guys. Which means that in 1983 there could have been about thirty-three thousand Johns in the U.S. Army. Discount it maybe ten percent for military demographics, the chances are about one in thirty thousand.”

“Those are still very big odds.”

“I think Sansom should know, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Call it a brother officer thing. Maybe I’ll head back to D.C.”

“No need. Save yourself the trip. He’s coming here. Tomorrow mid-day, for a fundraiser lunch at the Sheraton. With all the heavy hitters from Wall Street. Seventh Avenue and 52nd Street. We got a memo.”

“Why? He wasn’t getting much protection in Greensboro.”

“He isn’t getting much protection here, either. In fact he isn’t getting any. But we get memos about everything. That’s how it is now. That’s the new NYPD.” Then she walked away, leaving me all alone in the middle of the empty squad room. And leaving me feeling a little uneasy. Maybe Lila Hoth really was as pure as the driven snow, but I couldn’t shake the sensation that Sansom was walking into a trap, just by coming to the city.

Chapter 33

It has been a long time since you could sleep well in New York for five dollars a night, but you can still do it for fifty, if you know how. The key is starting late. I walked down to a hotel I had used before, near Madison Square Garden. It was a big place, once grand, now just a faded old pile, perpetually close to renovation or demolition but never actually getting there. After midnight the front-of-house staff shrinks down to a lone night porter responsible for everything including the desk. I walked up to him and asked if he had a room available. He made a show of tapping on a keyboard and looking at a screen and then he said yes, he did have a room available. He quoted a price of a hundred and eighty-five dollars, plus tax. I asked if I could see the room before I committed. It was the kind of hotel where that kind of request seemed reasonable. And sensible. Mandatory, even. The guy came out from behind the desk and took me up in the elevator and along a corridor. He opened a door with a pass card attached to his belt by a curly plastic cord and stood back to let me enter.

The room was OK. It had a bed in it, and a bathroom. Everything I needed, and nothing I didn’t. I took two twenties out of my pocket and said, “Suppose we don’t worry about that whole registration process downstairs?”

The guy said nothing. They never do, at that point. I took out another ten and said, “For the maid, tomorrow.”

The guy shuffled a little like I was putting him on the spot, but then his hand came out and he took the money. He said, “Be out by eight,” and he walked away. The door closed behind him. Maybe a central computer would show that his pass card had unlocked the room, and when, but he would claim that he had shown me the accommodations, and that I had been unmoved by their attractions, and that I had left again immediately. It was probably a claim he made on a regular basis. I was probably the fourth guy he had stowed away that week. Maybe the fifth, or the sixth. All kinds of things happen in city hotels, after the day staff has quit.

I slept well and woke up feeling good and I was out five minutes before eight. I forced my way through the crowds heading in and out of Penn Station and got breakfast in the back booth of a place on 33rd. Coffee, eggs, bacon, pancakes, and more coffee, all for six bucks, plus tax, plus tip. More expensive than North Carolina, but only slightly. The battery on Leonid’s cell was still about half-charged. An icon was showing some bars blank and some bars lit. I figured I had enough juice for a few calls. I dialed 600 and then aimed to dial 82219 but before I got halfway through the sequence the earpiece started up with a fast little triplet trill pitched somewhere between a siren and a xylophone. A voice came on and told me my call could not be completed as dialed. It asked me to check and try again. I tried 1-600 and got exactly the same result. I tried 011 for an international line, and then 1 for North America, and then 600. A circuitous route, but the outcome was no better. I tried 001 as the international code in case the phone thought it was still in London. No result. I tried 8**101, which was the Eastern European international code for America, in case the phone had been hauled all the way from Moscow a year ago. No result. I looked at the phone’s keypad and thought about using a 3 in place of the D, but the system was already beeping at me well before I got there.

So, 600-82219-D was not a phone number, Canadian or otherwise. Which the FBI must have known. Maybe they had considered the possibility for about a minute, and then dismissed it out of hand. The FBI is a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them. So back on 35th Street they had buried their real questions for me behind a smokescreen.

What else had they asked me?

They had gauged my level of interest, they had asked yet again if Susan had given me anything, and they had confirmed that I was leaving town. They had wanted me incurious, and empty-handed, and gone.

Why?

I had no idea.

And what exactly was 600-82219-D, if it wasn’t a phone number?

I sat another ten minutes with a final cup of coffee, sipping slowly, eyes open but not seeing much, trying to sneak up on the answer from below. Like Susan Mark had planned to sneak up out of the subway. I visualized the numbers in my mind, strung out, separately, together, different combinations, spaces, hyphens, groups.

The 600 part rang a faint bell.

Susan Mark.

600.

But I couldn’t get it.

I finished my coffee and put Leonid’s cell back in my pocket and headed north toward the Sheraton.

The hotel was a huge glass pillar with a plasma screen in the lobby that listed all the day’s events. The main ballroom was booked for lunch by a group calling itself FT. Fair Tax, or Free Trade, or maybe even the Financial Times itself. Plausible cover for a bunch of Wall Street fat cats looking to buy yet more influence. Their affair was due to start at noon. I figured Sansom would try to arrive by eleven. He would want some time and space and calm beforehand, to prepare. This was a big meeting for him. These were his people, and they had deep pockets. He would need sixty minutes, minimum. Which gave me two more hours to kill. I walked over to Broadway and found a clothing store two blocks north. I wanted another new shirt. I didn’t like the one I was in. It was a symbol of defeat. Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in. If I was going to see Elspeth Sansom again I didn’t want to be wearing a badge of my failure and her success.

I chose an insubstantial thing made from thin khaki poplin and paid eleven bucks for it. Cheap, and it should have been. It had no pockets and the sleeves ended halfway down my forearms. With the cuffs folded back they hit my elbows. But I liked it well enough. It was a satisfactory garment. And it was purchased voluntarily, at least.

By ten-thirty I was back in the Sheraton’s lobby. I sat in a chair with people all around me. They had suitcases. Half of them were heading out, waiting for cars. Half of them were heading in, waiting for rooms.

By ten-forty I had figured out what 600-82219-D meant.

Chapter 34

I got up out of my chair and followed engraved brass signs to the Sheraton’s business center. I couldn’t get in. You needed a room key. I hung around at the door for three minutes and then another guy showed up. He was in a suit and he looked impatient. I put on a big display of hunting through my pants pockets and then I stepped aside with an apology. The other guy pushed ahead of me and used his key and opened the door and I stepped in after him.

There were four identical work stations in the room. Each had a desk, a chair, a computer, and a printer. I sat down far from the other guy and killed the computer’s screen saver by tapping on the keyboard’s space bar. So far, so good. I checked the screen icons and couldn’t make much sense of them. But I found that if I held the mouse pointer over them, as if hesitating or ruminating, then a label popped up next to them. I identified the Internet Explorer application that way and clicked on it twice. The hard drive chattered and the browser opened up. Much faster than the last time I had used a computer. Maybe technology really was moving on. Right there on the home page was a shortcut to Google. I clicked on it, and Google’s search page appeared. Again, very fast. I typed army regulations in the dialog box and hit enter. The screen redrew in an instant and gave me whole pages of options.

For the next five minutes I clicked and scrolled and read.

I got back to the lobby ten minutes before eleven. My chair had been taken. I went out to the sidewalk and stood in the sun. I figured Sansom would arrive by Town Car and come in through the front door. He wasn’t a rock star. He wasn’t the President. He wouldn’t come in through the kitchen or the loading dock. The whole point was for him to be seen. The need to enter places undercover was a prize he had not yet won.

The day was hot. But the street was clean. It didn’t smell. There were a pair of cops on the corner south of me, and another pair on the corner to the north. Standard NYPD deployment, in midtown. Proactive, and reassuring. But not necessarily useful, given the range of potential threats. Alongside me, departing hotel guests climbed into taxis. The city’s rhythm ground on relentlessly. Traffic on Seventh Avenue flowed, and stopped at the light, and flowed again. Traffic from the cross-streets flowed, and stopped, and started. Pedestrians bunched on the corners and struck out for the opposite sidewalks. Horns honked, trucks roared, the sun bounced off high glass and beat down hard.

Sansom arrived in a Town Car at five past eleven. Local plates, which meant he had ridden up most of the way on the train. Less convenient for him, but a smaller carbon footprint than driving all the way, or flying. Every detail mattered, in a campaign. Politics is a minefield. Springfield climbed out of the front passenger seat even before the car had stopped, and then Sansom and his wife climbed out of the back. They stood for a second on the sidewalk, ready to be gracious if there were people to greet them, ready not to be disappointed if there weren’t. They scanned faces and saw mine and Sansom looked a little quizzical and his wife looked a little worried. Springfield headed in my direction but Elspeth waved him off with a small gesture. I guessed she had appointed herself damage control officer as far as I was concerned. She shook my hand like I was an old friend. She didn’t comment on my shirt. Instead she leaned in close and asked, “Do you need to talk to us?”

It was a perfect politician’s-wife inquiry. She freighted the word need with all kinds of meanings. Her emphasis cast me both as an opponent and a collaborator. She was saying, We know you have information that might hurt us, and we hate you for it, but we would be truly grateful if you would be kind enough to discuss it with us first, before you make it public.

Practically a whole essay, all in one short syllable.

I said, “Yes, we need to talk.”

Springfield scowled but Elspeth smiled like I had just promised her a hundred thousand votes and took my arm and led me inside. The hotel staff didn’t know or care who Sansom was, except that he was the speaker for the group that was paying a hefty fee for the ballroom, so they summoned up a whole lot of artificial enthusiasm and showed us to a private lounge and bustled about with bottles of lukewarm sparkling water and pots of weak coffee. Elspeth played host. Springfield didn’t speak. Sansom took a call on his cell from his chief of staff back in D.C. They talked for four minutes about economic policy, and then for a further two about their afternoon agenda. It was clear from the context that Sansom was heading back to the office directly after lunch, for a long afternoon’s work. The New York event was a fast hit-and-run, nothing more. Like a drive-by robbery.

The hotel people finished up and left and Sansom clicked off and the room went quiet. Canned air hissed in through vents and kept the temperature lower than I would have liked. For a moment we sipped water and coffee in silence. Then Elspeth Sansom opened the bidding. She asked, “Is there any news on the missing boy?”

I said, “A little. He skipped football practice, which apparently is rare.”

“At USC?” Sansom said. He had a good memory. I had mentioned USC only once, and in passing. “Yes, that’s rare.”

“But then he called his coach and left a message.”

“When?”

“Last night. Dinnertime on the Coast.”

“And?”

“Apparently he’s with a woman.”

Elspeth said, “That’s OK, then.”

“I would have preferred a live real-time conversation. Or a face-to-face meeting.”

“A message isn’t good enough for you?”

“I’m a suspicious person.”

“So what do you need to talk about?”

I turned to Sansom and asked him, “Where were you in 1983?”

He paused, just a fraction of a beat, and something flickered behind his eyes. Not shock, I thought. Not surprise. Resignation, possibly. He said, “I was a captain in 1983.”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked where you were.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Were you in Berlin?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You told me you were spotless. You still stand by that?”

“Completely.”

“Is there anything your wife doesn’t know about you?”

“Plenty of things. But nothing personal.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“You ever heard the name Lila Hoth?”

“I already told you I haven’t.”

“You ever heard the name Svetlana Hoth?”

“Never,” Sansom said. I was watching his face. It was very composed. He looked a little uncomfortable, but apart from that he was communicating nothing.

I asked him, “Did you know about Susan Mark before this week?”

“I already told you I didn’t.”

“Did you win a medal in 1983?”

He didn’t answer. The room went quiet again. Then Leonid’s cell rang in my pocket. I felt a vibration and heard a loud electronic tune. I fumbled the phone out and looked at the small window on the front. A 212 number. The same number that was already in the call register. The Four Seasons Hotel. Lila Hoth, presumably. I wondered whether Leonid was still missing, or whether he had gotten back and told his story and now Lila was calling me specifically.

I pressed random buttons until the ringing stopped and I put the phone back in my pocket. I looked at Sansom and said, “I’m sorry about that.”

He shrugged, as if apologies were unnecessary.

I asked, “Did you win a medal in 1983?”

He said, “Why is that important?”

“You know what 600-8-22 is?”

“An army regulation, probably. I don’t know all of them verbatim.”

I said, “We figured all along that only a dumb person would expect HRC to have meaningful information about Delta operations. And I think we were largely right. But a little bit wrong, too. I think a really smart person might legitimately expect it, with a little lateral thinking.”

“In what way?”

“Suppose someone knew for sure that a Delta operation had taken place. Suppose they knew for sure it had succeeded.”

“Then they wouldn’t need information, because they’ve already got it.”

“Suppose they wanted to confirm the identity of the officer who led the operation?”

“They couldn’t get that from HRC. Just not possible. Orders and deployment records and after-action reports are classified and retained at Fort Bragg under lock and key.”

“But what happens to officers who lead successful missions?”

“You tell me.”

“They get medals,” I said. “The bigger the mission, the bigger the medal. And army regulation 600-8-22, section one, paragraph nine, subsection D, requires the Human Resources Command to maintain an accurate historical record of each and every award recommendation, and the resulting decision.”

“Maybe so,” Sansom said. “But if it was a Delta mission, all the details would be omitted. The citation would be redacted, the location would be redacted, and the meritorious conduct would not be described.”

I nodded. “All the record would show is a name, a date, and an award. Nothing else.”

“Exactly.”

“Which is all a smart person thinking laterally really needs, right? An award proves a mission succeeded, the lack of a citation proves it was a covert mission. Pick any random month, say early in 1983. How many medals were awarded?”

“Thousands. Hundreds and hundreds of Good Conduct Medals alone.”

“How many Silver Stars?”

“Not so many.”

“If any,” I said. “Not much was happening early in 1983. How many DSMs were handed out? How many DSCs? I bet they were as rare as hens’ teeth early in 1983.”

Elspeth Sansom moved in her chair and looked at me and said, “I don’t understand.”

I turned toward her but Sansom raised a hand and cut me off. He answered for me. There were no secrets between them. No wariness. He said, “It’s a kind of back door. Direct information is completely unavailable, but indirect information is out there. If someone knew that a Delta mission had taken place and succeeded, and when, then whoever got the biggest unexplained medal that month probably led it. Wouldn’t work in wartime, because big medals would be too common. But in peacetime, when nothing else is going on, a big award would stick out like a sore thumb.”

“We invaded Grenada in 1983,” Elspeth said. “Delta was there.”

“October,” Sansom said. “Which would add some background noise later in the year. But the first nine months were pretty quiet.”

Elspeth Sansom looked away. She didn’t know what her husband had been doing during the first nine months of 1983. Perhaps she never would. She said, “So who is asking?”

I said, “An old battleaxe called Svetlana Hoth, who claims to have been a Red Army political commissar. No real details, but she says she knew an American soldier named John in Berlin in 1983. She says he was very kind to her. And the only way that inquiring about it through Susan Mark makes any sense is if there was a mission involved and the guy named John led it and got a medal for it. The FBI found a note in Susan’s car. Someone had fed her the regulation and the section and the paragraph to tell her exactly where to look.”

Elspeth glanced at Sansom, involuntarily, with a question in her face that she knew would never be answered: Did you get a medal for something you did in Berlin in 1983? Sansom didn’t respond. So I tried. I asked him straight out, “Were you on a mission in Berlin in 1983?”

Sansom said, “You know I can’t tell you that.” Then he seemed to lose patience with me, and he said, “You seem like a smart guy. Think about it. What possible kind of operation could Delta have been running in Berlin in 1983, for God’s sake?”

I said, “I don’t know. As I recall, you guys worked very hard to stop people like me knowing what you were doing. And I don’t really care, anyway. I’m trying to do you a favor here. That’s all. One brother officer to another. Because my guess is something is going to come back and bite you in the ass and I thought you might appreciate a warning.”

Sansom calmed down pretty fast. He breathed in and out a couple of times and said, “I do appreciate the warning. And I’m sure you understand that I’m not really allowed to deny anything. Because logically, denying something is the same as confirming something else. If I deny Berlin and every other place I wasn’t, then eventually by a process of elimination you could work out where I was. But I’ll go out on a limb just a little, because I think we’re all on the same side here. So listen up, soldier. I was not in Berlin at any point in 1983. I never met any Russian women in 1983. I don’t think I was very kind to anyone, the whole year long. There were a lot of guys in the army called John. Berlin was a popular destination for sightseeing. This person you have been talking to is looking for someone else. It’s as simple as that.”

Sansom’s little speech hung in the air for a moment. We all sipped our drinks and sat quiet. Then Elspeth Sansom checked her watch and her husband saw her do it and said, “You’ll have to excuse us now. Today we have some really serious begging to do. Springfield will be happy to see you out.” Which I thought was an odd proposal. It was a public hotel. It was my space as much as Sansom’s. I could find my own way out, and I was entitled to. I wasn’t going to steal the spoons, and even if I did, they weren’t Sansom’s spoons. But then I figured he wanted to set up a little quiet time for Springfield and me, in a lonely corridor somewhere. For further discussion, perhaps, or for a message. So I stood up and headed for the door. Didn’t shake hands or say goodbye. It didn’t seem to be that kind of a parting.

Springfield followed me to the lobby. He didn’t speak. He seemed to be rehearsing something. I stopped and waited and he caught up to me and said, “You really need to leave this whole thing alone.”

I asked, “Why, if he wasn’t even there?”

“Because to prove that he wasn’t there you’ll start asking where he was instead. Better that you never know.”

I nodded. “This is personal to you too, isn’t it? Because you were right there with him. You went wherever he went.”

He nodded back. “Just let it go. You really can’t afford to turn over the wrong rock.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll be erased, if you do. You won’t exist anymore. You’ll just disappear, physically and bureaucratically. That can happen now, you know. This is a whole new world. I’d like to say I would help with the process, but I wouldn’t get the chance. Not even close. Because a whole bunch of other people would come for you first. I would be so far back in line that even your birth certificate would be blank before I got anywhere near you.”

“What other people?”

He didn’t answer.

“Government?”

He didn’t answer.

“Those federal guys?”

He didn’t answer. Just turned back and headed for the elevators. I stepped out to the Seventh Avenue sidewalk and Leonid’s phone started ringing in my pocket again.

Chapter 35

I stood on Seventh Avenue with my back to the traffic and answered Leonid’s phone. I heard Lila Hoth’s voice, soft in my ear. Precise diction, quaint phrasing. She said, “Reacher?”

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “I need to see you, quite urgently.”

“About what?”

“I think my mother might be in danger. Myself also, possibly.”

“From what?”

“Three men were downstairs, asking questions at the desk. While we were out. I think our rooms have been searched, too.”

“What three men?”

“I don’t know who they were. Apparently they wouldn’t say.”

“Why talk to me about it?”

“Because they were asking about you too. Please come and see us.”

I asked, “You’re not upset about Leonid?”

She said, “Under the circumstances, no. I think that was just an unfortunate misunderstanding. Please come.”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “I would very much appreciate your help.” She spoke politely, appealingly, a little submissively, even diffidently, like a supplicant. But not with standing all of that something extra in her voice made me fully aware that she was so beautiful that the last time any guy had said no to her was probably a decade in the past. She sounded vaguely commanding, like everything was already a done deal, like to ask was to get. Just let it go, Springfield had said, and of course I should have listened to him. But instead I told Lila Hoth, “I’ll meet you in your hotel lobby, fifteen minutes from now.” I thought that avoiding her suite would be enough of a safeguard, against whatever complications might ensue. Then I closed the phone and headed straight for the Sheraton’s taxi line.

The Four Seasons’s lobby was divided into a number of separate areas on two separate levels. I found Lila Hoth and her mother at a corner table in a dim paneled space that seemed to be a tea room during the day and might have been a bar by night. They were alone. Leonid wasn’t there. I checked carefully all around and saw no one else worth worrying about. No unexplained men in mid-priced suits, nobody lingering over the morning newspaper. No apparent surveillance at all. So I slid into a seat, next to Lila, across from her mother. Lila was wearing a black skirt and a white shirt. Like a cocktail waitress, except that the fabrics and the cut and the fit were like nothing a cocktail waitress could afford. Her eyes were twin points of light in the gloom, as blue as a tropical sea. Svetlana was in another shapeless housedress, this time muddy maroon. Her eyes were dull. She nodded uncomprehendingly as I sat down. Lila extended her hand and shook mine quite formally. The contrast between the two women was enormous, in every way. In terms of age and looks, obviously, but also in terms of energy, vivacity, manners, and disposition.

I settled in and Lila got straight to the point. She asked, “Did you bring the memory stick?”

I said, “No,” although I had. It was in my pocket, with my toothbrush and Leonid’s phone.

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Somewhere safe?”

“Completely.”

She asked, “Why did those men come here?”

I said, “Because you’re poking around in something that’s still a secret.”

“But the press officer at the Human Resources Command was enthusiastic about it.”

“That’s because you lied to him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You told him it was about Berlin. But it wasn’t. Berlin in 1983 was no kind of fun, but it was stable. It was a Cold War tableau, frozen in time. Maybe there was a little back and forth between the CIA and the KGB and the Brits and the Stasi, but there was no real U.S. Army involvement. For our guys it was just a tourist destination. Take the train, see the Wall. Great bars, and great hookers. Probably ten thousand guys called John passed through, but they didn’t do anything except spend money and catch the clap. Certainly they didn’t fight and they didn’t win medals. So tracking one of them down would be next to impossible. Maybe HRC was prepared to waste a little time, just in case something good came of it. But from the beginning it was a ridiculous task. So you can’t have gotten a positive outcome from Susan Mark. She can’t have told you anything about Berlin that made it worth coming over here. Just not possible.”

“So why did we come?”

“Because during those first few phone calls you softened her up and you made her your friend and then when you judged the time was right you told her what you really wanted. And exactly how to find it. For her ears only. Not Berlin. Something else entirely.”

An unguarded person with nothing to hide would have responded instantly and openly. Probably with outrage, possibly with hurt feelings. An amateur bluffer would have faked it, with bluster and noise. Lila Hoth just sat quiet for a beat. Her eyes showed the same kind of fast response as John Sansom’s had, back in his room in the O. Henry Hotel. Rethink, redeploy, reorganize, all in a brief couple of seconds.

She said, “It’s very complicated.”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “But it’s entirely innocent.”

I said, “Tell that to Susan Mark.”

She inclined her head. The same gesture I had seen before. Courteous, delicate, and a little contrite. She said, “I asked Susan for help. She agreed, quite willingly. Clearly her actions created difficulties for her with other parties. So, yes, I suppose I was the indirect cause of her troubles. But not the direct cause. And I regret what happened, very, very much. Please believe me, if I had known beforehand, I would have said no to my mother.”

Svetlana Hoth nodded and smiled.

I said, “What other parties?”

Lila Hoth said, “Her own government, I think. Your government.”

“Why? What did your mother really want?”

Lila said she needed to explain the background first.

Chapter 36

Lila Hoth had been just seven years old when the Soviet Union had fallen apart, so she spoke with a kind of historical detachment. She had the same kind of distance from former realities that I had from the Jim Crow years in America. She told me that the Red Army had deployed political commissars very widely. Every infantry company had one. She said that command and discipline were shared uneasily between the commissar and a field officer. She said that rivalry was common and bitter, not necessarily between the two as individuals, but between tactical common sense and ideological purity. She made sure I understood the general background, and then she moved on to specifics.

Svetlana Hoth had been a political commissar assigned to an infantry company. Her company had gone to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion of 1979. Initial combat operations had been satisfactory for the infantry. Then they had turned disastrous. Attritional losses had become heavy and constant. At first there had been denial. Then Moscow had reacted, belatedly. The order of battle had been reorganized. Companies had been merged. Tactical common sense had suggested retrenchment. Ideology had required renewed offensives. Morale had required unity of ethnicity and geographical origin. Companies had been reconstituted to include sniper teams. Expert marksmen were brought in, with their companion spotters. Thus pairs of ragged men used to living off the land had arrived.

Svetlana’s sniper was her husband.

His spotter was Svetlana’s younger brother.

The situation had improved, both in military and in personal terms. Svetlana’s and other family and regional groupings had spent down time together very happily. Companies had dug in and settled down and achieved acceptable safety and security. Offensive requirements were satisfied by regular nighttime sniper operations. The results were excellent. Soviet snipers had long been the best in the world. The Afghan mujahideen had no answer to them. Late in 1981 Moscow had reinforced a winning hand by shipping new weapons. A new-model rifle had been issued. It was recently developed and still top secret. It was called the VAL Silent Sniper.

I nodded. Said, “I saw one once.”

Lila Hoth smiled, briefly, with a hint of shyness. And with a hint of national pride, perhaps, for a country that no longer existed. Probably just a shadow of the pride her mother had felt, way back when. Because the VAL was a great weapon. It was a very accurate silenced semi-automatic rifle. It fired a heavy nine-millimeter bullet at a subsonic velocity, and could defeat all types of contemporary body armor and thin-skinned military vehicles at ranges out to about four hundred yards. It came with a choice of powerful day telescopes or electronic night scopes. It was a nightmare, from an opponent’s point of view. You could be killed with no warning at all, silently, suddenly, and randomly, asleep in bed in a tent, in the latrines, eating, dressing, walking around, in the light, in the dark.

I said, “It was a fine piece.”

Lila Hoth smiled again. But then the smile faded. The bad news started. The stable situation lasted a year, and then it ended. The Soviet infantry’s inevitable military reward for good performance was to be handed ever more dangerous tasks. The same the world over, the same throughout history. You don’t get a pat on the back and a ride home. You get a map instead. Svetlana’s company was one of many ordered to push north and east up the Korengal Valley. The valley was six miles long. It was the only navigable route out of Pakistan. The Hindu Kush mountains reared up on the far left, impossibly barren and high, and the Abas Ghar range blocked the right flank. The six-mile trail in between was a major mujahideen supply line out of the North West Frontier, and it had to be cut.

Lila said, “The British wrote the book over a hundred years ago, about operations in Afghanistan. Because of their empire. They said, when contemplating an offensive, the very first thing you must plan is your inevitable retreat. And they said, you must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women. The company commanders had read that book. The political commissars had been told not to. They had been told that the British had failed only because of their political un-soundness. Soviet ideology was pure, and therefore success was guaranteed. With that delusion our very own Vietnam began.”

The push up the Korengal Valley had been backed by air and artillery power and had succeeded for the first three miles. A fourth had been won yard by yard against opposition that had seemed ferocious to the grunts but strangely muted to the officers.

The officers were right.

It was a trap.

The mujahideen waited until Soviet supply lines were stretched four miles long and then they dropped the hammer. Helicopter resupply was largely interdicted by a constant barrage of U.S.-supplied shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles. Coordinated attacks pinched off the salient at its origin. Late in 1982 thousands of Red Army troops were essentially abandoned in a long thin chain of inadequate and improvised encampments. The winter weather was awful. Freezing blasts of wind howled constantly along the pass between the mountain ranges. And there were evergreen holly bushes everywhere. Pretty and picturesque in the right context, but not for soldiers forced to work among them. They were gratingly noisy in the wind and they limited mobility and they tore skin and shredded uniforms.

Then harassment raids had started.

Prisoners had been taken, in ones and twos.

Their fate was appalling.

Lila quoted lines that the old British writer Rudyard Kipling had put in a doom-laden poem about failed offensives and groaning abandoned battlefield casualties and cruel Afghan tribeswomen with knives: When you’re wounded on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your God like a soldier. Then she said what had been true even at the zenith of the British Empire’s power was still true, and worse. Soviet infantrymen would go missing and hours later in the dark the winter wind would carry the sound of their screaming, from unseen enemy camps close by. The screaming would start at a desperate pitch and move slowly and surely upward into insane banshee wailing. Sometimes it would last ten or twelve hours. Most corpses were never recovered. But sometimes bodies would be returned, missing hands and feet, or whole limbs, or heads, or ears, or eyes, or noses, or penises.

Or skin.

“Some were flayed alive,” Lila said. “Their eyelids would be cut away, and their heads forced down in a frame so they would have no choice but to watch their skin being peeled back, first from their faces, and then from their bodies. The cold anesthetized their wounds to some extent and stopped them dying of shock too soon. Sometimes the process lasted a very long time. Or sometimes they would be roasted alive on fires. Parcels of cooked meat would show up near our emplacements. At first the men thought they were gifts of food, perhaps from sympathetic locals. But then they realized.”

Svetlana Hoth stared on into the room, not seeing anything, looking even bleaker than before. Maybe the tone of her daughter’s voice was prompting memories. Certainly the tone of her daughter’s voice was very compelling. Lila had not lived through or witnessed the events she was describing, but it sounded like she had. It sounded like she had witnessed them yesterday. She had moved on from historical detachment. It struck me that she would make a fine storyteller. She had the gift of narrative.

She said, “They liked to capture our snipers best of all. They hated our snipers. I think snipers are always hated, perhaps because of the way they kill. My mother was very worried about my father, obviously. And her baby brother. They went out most nights, into the low hills, with the electronic scope. Not too far. Maybe a thousand yards, to find an angle. Maybe a little more. Far enough to be effective, but close enough to feel safe. But nowhere was really safe. Everywhere was vulnerable. And they had to go. Their orders were to shoot the enemy. Their intention was to shoot the prisoners. They thought it would be a mercy. It was an awful time. And my mother was pregnant by then. With me. I was conceived in a rock trench hacked out of the Korengal floor, under a greatcoat that dated back to the end of World War Two, and on top of two others that were possibly even older. My mother said they had old bullet holes in them, maybe from Stalingrad.”

I said nothing. Svetlana stared on. Lila put her hands on the table and tangled her fingers loosely together. She said, “For the first month or so my father and my uncle came back every morning, safe. They were a good team. Perhaps the best.”

Svetlana stared on. Lila took her hands off the table and paused a beat. Then she sat up straight and squared her shoulders. A change of pace. A change of subject. She said, “There were Americans in Afghanistan at that time.”

I said, “Were there?”

She nodded.

I said, “What Americans?”

“Soldiers. Not many, but some. Not always, but sometimes.”

“You think?”

She nodded again. “The U.S. Army was definitely there. The Soviet Union was their enemy, and the mujahideen were their allies. It was the Cold War by proxy. It suited President Reagan very well to have the Red Army worn down. It was a part of his anti-communist strategy. And he enjoyed the chance to capture some of our new weapons for intelligence purposes. So teams were sent. Special Forces. They were in and out on a regular basis. And one night in March of 1983, one of those teams found my father and my uncle and stole their VAL rifle.”

I said nothing.

Lila said, “The loss of the rifle was a defeat, of course. But what was worse was that the Americans gave my father and my uncle to the tribeswomen. There was no need for that. Obviously they had to be silenced, because the American presence was entirely covert and had to be concealed. But the Americans could have killed my father and my uncle themselves, quickly and quietly and easily. They chose not to. My mother heard their screams all the next day and far into the night. Her husband, and her brother. Sixteen, eighteen hours. She said even screaming that badly she could still tell them apart, by the sound of their voices.”

Chapter 37

I glanced around the Four Seasons’s dim tea room and moved in my chair and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.”

Lila Hoth said, “I’m telling you the truth.”

I shook my head. “I was in the U.S. Army. I was a military cop. Broadly speaking I knew where people went, and where they didn’t. And there were no U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Not back then. Not during that conflict. It was purely a local affair.”

“But you had a dog in the fight.”

“Of course we did. Like you did when we were in Vietnam. Was the Red Army in-country there?” It was a rhetorical question, designed to make a point, but Lila Hoth took it seriously. She leaned forward across the table and spoke to her mother, low and fast, in a foreign language that I presumed was Ukrainian. Svetlana’s eyes opened a little and she cocked her head to one side as if she was recalling some small matter of arcane historical detail. She spoke back to her daughter, low and fast, and long, and then Lila paused a second to marshal her translation and said, “No, we sent no troops to Vietnam, because we had confidence that our socialist brothers from the People’s Republic could complete their task unaided. Which, my mother says, apparently they did, quite splendidly. Little men in pajamas defeated the big green machine.”

Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded.

I said, “Just like a bunch of goatherders kicked her ass.”

“Undisputedly. But with a lot of help.”

“Didn’t happen.”

“But you admit that material help was provided, surely. To the mujahideen. Money, and weapons. Especially surface-to-air missiles, and things of that nature.”

“Like in Vietnam, only the other way around.”

“And Vietnam is an excellent example. Because, to your certain knowledge, whenever did the United States provide military aid anywhere in the world without also sending what they called military advisers?”

I didn’t answer.

She asked, “For instance, how many countries have you served in?”

I said nothing.

She asked, “When did you join the army?”

“In 1984,” I said.

“Then these events of 1982 and 1983 were all before your time.”

“Only just,” I said. “And there is such a thing as institutional memory.”

“Wrong,” she said. “Secrets were kept and institutional memories were conveniently erased. There’s a long history of illegal American military involvements all around the world. Especially during Mr. Reagan’s presidency.”

“You learn that in high school?”

“Yes, I did. And remember, the communists were gone long before I was in high school. Thanks, in part, to Mr. Reagan himself.”

I said, “Even if you’re right, why assume Americans were involved on that particular night? Presumably your mother didn’t see it happen. Why not assume your father and your uncle were captured directly by the mujahideen?”

“Because their rifle was never found. And my mother’s position was never fired on at night by a sniper. My father had twenty rounds in his magazine, and he was carrying twenty spare. If the mujahideen had captured him directly, then they would have used his rifle against us. They would have killed forty of our men, or tried to, and then they would have run out of ammunition and abandoned the gun. My mother’s company would have found it eventually. There was a lot of back-and-forth skirmishing. Our side overran their positions, and vice versa. It was like a crazy circular chase. The mujahideen were intelligent. They had a habit of doubling back to positions we had previously written off as abandoned. But over a period of time our people saw all their places. They would have found the VAL, empty and rusting, maybe in use as a fence post. They accounted for all their other captured weapons that way. But not that VAL. The only logical conclusion is that it was carried straight to America, by Americans.”

I said nothing.

Lila Hoth said, “I’m telling you the truth.”

I said, “I once saw a VAL Silent Sniper.”

“You told me that already.”

“I saw it in 1994,” I said. “We were told it had just been captured. Eleven whole years after you claim it was. There was a big urgent panic, because of its capabilities. The army wouldn’t wait eleven years to get in a panic.”

“Yes, it would,” she said. “To unveil the rifle immediately after its capture might have started World War Three. It would have been a direct admission that your soldiers were in direct face-to-face contact with ours, without any declaration of hostilities. Illegal at the very least, and completely disastrous in geopolitical terms. America would have lost the moral high ground. Support inside the Soviet Union would have been strengthened. The fall of communism would have been delayed, perhaps for years.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Tell me, what happened in your army, in 1994, after the big urgent panic?”

I paused, in the same way that Svetlana Hoth had. I recalled the historical details. They were surprising. I checked and rechecked. Then I said, “Not very much happened, actually.”

“No new body armor? No new camouflage? No tactical reaction of any kind?”

“No.”

“Is that logical, even for an army?”

“Not especially.”

“When was the last equipment upgrade before that?”

I paused again. Sought more historical details. Recalled the PASGT, introduced to much excitement and fanfare and acclaim during my early years in uniform. The Personal Armor System, Ground Troops. A brand-new Kevlar helmet, rated to withstand all manner of assault by small arms fire. A thick new body-armor vest, to be worn either over or under the battledress blouse, rated safe even against long guns. Specifically, as I recalled, rated safe against incoming nine-millimeter rounds. Plus new camouflage patterns, carefully designed to work better, and available in two flavors, woodland and desert. The Marines got a third option, blue and gray, for urban environments.

I said nothing.

Lila Hoth asked, “When was the upgrade?”

I said, “In the late eighties.”

“Even with a big urgent panic, how long does it take to design and manufacture an upgrade like that?”

I said, “A few years.”

“So let’s review what we know. In the late eighties you received upgraded equipment, explicitly designed for better personal protection. Do you think it is possible that was the result of a direct stimulus derived from an unrevealed source in 1983?”

I didn’t answer.

We all sat quiet for a moment. A silent and discreet waiter came by and offered us tea. He recited a long list of exotic blends. Lila asked for a flavor I had never heard of, and then she translated for her mother, who asked for the same thing. I asked for regular coffee, black. The waiter inclined his head about a quarter of an inch, as if the Four Seasons was willing to accommodate all and any requests, however appallingly proletarian they might be. I waited until the guy had retreated again and asked, “How did you figure out who you are looking for?”

Lila said, “My mother’s generation expected to fight a land war with you in Europe, and they expected to win. Their ideology was pure, and yours wasn’t. After a swift and certain victory, they expected to take many of you prisoner, possibly millions of you. In that phase, part of a political commissar’s duties would have been to classify enemy combatants, to cull the ideologically irretrievable from the herd. To aid them in that task, they were made familiar with the structure of your military.”

“Made familiar by who?”

“By the KGB. It was an ongoing program. There was a lot of information available. They knew who did what. In the case of elite units, they even knew names. Not just the officers, but the enlisted men too. Like a true soccer fan knows the personnel and the strengths and the weaknesses of all the other teams in the league, bench players included. For incursions into the Korengal Valley, my mother reasoned that there were only three realistic options. Either SEALs from the Navy, or Recon Marines from the Corps, or Delta Force from the army. Contemporary intelligence argued against the SEALs or the Marines. There was no circumstantial evidence of their involvement. No specific information. The KGB had people throughout your organizations, and they reported nothing. But there was significant radio traffic out of Delta bases in Turkey, and out of staging posts in Oman. Our radar picked up unexplained flights. It was a logical conclusion that Delta was running the operations.”

The waiter came back with a tray. He was a tall dark guy, quite old, probably foreign. He had an air about him. The Four Seasons probably put him front and center because of it. His bearing suggested he might once have been a tea expert in some dark paneled place in Vienna or Salzburg. In reality he had probably been unemployed in Estonia. Maybe he had been drafted along with the rest of Svetlana’s generation. Maybe he had endured the Korengal winters along with her, somewhere down the line in an ethnic grouping of his own. He made a big show of serving the tea and arranging the lemons on a plate. My coffee came in a nice cup. He put it down in front of me with elegantly disguised disapproval. When he was gone again Lila said, “My mother estimated that the raid would have been led by a captain. A lieutenant would have been too junior and a major would have been too senior. The KGB had personnel lists. There were a lot of captains assigned to Delta at the time. But there had been some radio analysis. Someone had heard the name John. That narrowed the field.”

I nodded. Pictured a massive dish antenna somewhere, maybe in Armenia or Azerbaijan, a guy in a hut, headphones on, rubber cups clamped tight on his ears, sifting through the frequencies, hearing the whine and screech of scrambled channels, stumbling on a fragment of plain speech, writing the word John on a pad of coarse brown paper. A lot of stuff is snatched from the ether. Most of it is useless. A word that you understand is like a nugget of gold in a pan, or like a diamond in a rock. And a word that they understand is like a bullet in the back.

Lila said, “My mother knew all about your army’s medals. They were held to be important, as criteria for classifying prisoners. Badges of honor, that would become badges of dishonor immediately upon capture. She knew that the VAL rifle would be worth a major award. But which award? Remember, there had been no declaration of hostilities. And most of your major awards specify gallantry or heroism while in action against an armed enemy of the United States. Technically whoever stole the VAL from my father was not eligible for any of those awards, because technically the Soviet Union was not an enemy of the United States. Not in the military sense. Not in a formal political way. There had been no declaration of war.”

I nodded again. We had never been at war with the Soviet Union. On the contrary, for four long years we had been allies in a desperate struggle against a common foe. We had cooperated, extensively. The World War Two-era Red Army greatcoat that Lila Hoth claimed to have been conceived under had almost certainly been made in America, as part of the Lend-Lease program. We had shipped a hundred million tons of woolen and cotton goods to the Russians. Plus fifteen million pairs of leather boots, four million rubber tires, two thousand railroad locomotives, and eleven thousand freight cars, as well as all the obvious heavy metal, like fifteen thousand airplanes, seven thousand tanks, and 375,000 army trucks. All free, gratis, and for nothing. Winston Churchill had called the program the least sordid in all of history. Legends had grown up around it. The Soviets were said to have asked for condoms, and in an attempt to impress and intimidate, they had specified that they should be eighteen inches long. The United States had duly shipped them, in cartons stamped Size: Medium.

So went the story.

Lila asked, “Are you listening?”

I nodded. “The Superior Service Medal would have fit the bill. Or the Legion of Merit, or the Soldier’s Medal.”

“Not big enough.”

“Thanks. I won all three.”

“Capturing the VAL was a really big coup. A sensation. It was a completely unknown weapon. Its acquisition would have been rewarded with a really big medal.”

“But which one?”

“My mother concluded it would be the Distinguished Service Medal. That one is big, but different. The applicable standard is exceptionally meritorious service to the United States Government in a duty of great responsibility. It is completely independent of formal declared combat activities. It is normally awarded to politically pliable Brigadier Generals and above. My mother was under orders to execute all holders of the DSM immediately. Below the rank of Brigadier General it is awarded only very rarely. But it’s the only significant medal a Delta captain could have won that night in the Korengal Valley.”

I nodded. I agreed. I figured Svetlana Hoth was a pretty good analyst. Clearly she had been well trained, and well informed. The KGB had done a decent job. I said, “So you went looking for a guy called John who had been a Delta captain and won a DSM, both in March of 1983.”

Lila nodded. “And to be certain, the DSM had to come without a citation.”

“And you made Susan Mark help.”

“I didn’t make her. She was happy to help.”

“Why?”

“Because she was upset by my mother’s story.”

Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded.

Lila said, “And she was a little upset by my story, too. I’m a fatherless child, the same as her.”

I asked, “How did John Sansom’s name come up even before Susan reported back? I don’t believe that it was from a bunch of New York private eyes sitting around reading the newspaper and making jokes.”

“It’s a very rare combination,” Lila said. “John, Delta, DSM, but never a one-star general. We noticed it in the Herald Tribune, when his Senate ambitions were announced. We were in London. You can buy that paper all over the world. It’s a version of the New York Times. John Sansom might well be the only man in your army’s history who matches those criteria four for four. But we wanted to be absolutely sure. We needed final confirmation.”

“Before what? What do you want to do to the guy?”

Lila Hoth looked surprised.

“Do?” she said. “We don’t want to do anything. We just want to talk to him, that’s all. We want to ask him, why? Why would he do that, to two other human beings?”

Chapter 38

Lila Hoth finished her tea, and put her cup down on her saucer. Bone china clinked politely on bone china. She asked, “Will you go get Susan’s information for me?”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “My mother has waited a long time.”

I asked, “Why has she?”

“Time, chance, means, opportunity. Money, mostly, I suppose. Her horizons have been very narrow, until recently.”

I asked, “Why was your husband killed?”

“My husband?”

“Back in Moscow.”

Lila paused, and said, “It was the times.”

“Same for your mother’s husband.”

“No. I told you, if Sansom had shot him in the head, like what happened to my husband, or stabbed him in the brain, or broken his neck, or whatever else Delta soldiers were taught to do, it would have been different. But he didn’t. He was cruel instead. Inhuman. My father couldn’t even roll to his rifle, because they had stolen his rifle.”

I said nothing.

She said, “You want a man like that in your Senate?”

“As opposed to what?”

“Will you give me Susan’s confirmation?”

“No point,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t get anywhere near John Sansom. If any of what you say actually happened, then it’s a secret, and it’s going to stay a secret for a very long time. And secrets are protected, especially now. There are already two federal agencies at work on this. You just had three guys asking questions. At best, you’ll be deported. Your feet won’t touch the ground, all the way back to the airport. They’ll put you on the plane in handcuffs. In coach. The Brits will pull you off the plane at the other end and you’ll spend the rest of your life under surveillance.”

Svetlana Hoth stared into space.

I said, “And at worst, you’ll just disappear. Right here. One minute you’ll be on the street, and then you won’t be. You’ll be rotting in Guantanamo, or you’ll be on your way to Syria or Egypt so they can kill you there.”

Lila Hoth didn’t speak.

“My advice?” I said. “Forget all about it. Your father and your uncle were killed in a war. They weren’t the first, and they won’t be the last. Shit happens.”

“We just want to ask him why.”

“You already know why. There had been no declaration of hostilities, therefore he couldn’t kill your guys. It’s about the rules of engagement. There’s a heavy-duty briefing before every mission.”

“So he let someone else do it for him.”

“It was the times. Like you said, it might have started World War Three. It was in everyone’s interest to avoid that.”

“Have you looked at the file? Did Susan really have the confirmation? Just tell me, yes or no. I won’t do anything without actually seeing it. I can’t.”

“You won’t do anything, period.”

“It wasn’t right.”

“Invading Afghanistan in the first place wasn’t right. You should have stayed home.”

“Then so should you, from all the places you went.”

“No argument from me.”

“What about freedom of information?”

“What about it?”

“America is a country of laws.”

“True. But do you know what the laws actually say now? You should read the Herald Tribune more carefully.”

“Are you going to help us?”

“I’ll ask the concierge to call you a cab to the airport.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s the best help anyone could give you.”

“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

I didn’t answer.

“Anything at all?”

“No,” I said.

We all went quiet after that. The tea expert brought the check. It was in a padded leather wallet. Lila Hoth signed it. She said, “Sansom should be called to account.”

“If it was him,” I said. “If it was anybody.” I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dumped it on the table. I pushed my chair back and got ready to leave.

Lila said, “Please keep the phone.”

I said, “Why?”

“Because my mother and I are staying. Just a few more days. And I would really like to be able to call you, if I wanted to.” She wasn’t coy in the way she said it. Not coquettish. No lowered eyelids, no batted lashes. No hand on my arm, no attempt to seduce, no attempt to change my mind. It was just a plain statement, neutrally delivered.

Then she said, “Even if you’re not a friend,” and I heard the tiniest bat-squeak of a threat in her voice. Just a faint far-off chime of menace, a hint of danger, barely audible behind the words, accompanied by an imperceptible chill in her amazing blue eyes. Like a warm summer sea changing to sunlit winter ice. Same color, different temperature.

Or maybe she was just sad, or anxious, or determined.

I looked at her with a level gaze and put the phone back in my pocket and stood up and walked away. There were plenty of cabs on 57th Street, but none of them was empty. So I walked. The Sheraton was three blocks west and five blocks south. Twenty minutes, max. I figured I could get there before Sansom finished his lunch.

Chapter 39

I didn’t get to the Sheraton before Sansom finished his lunch, partly because the sidewalks were clogged with people moving slow in the heat, and partly because it had been a short lunch. Which I guessed made sense. Sansom’s Wall Street audience wanted to spend maximum time making money and minimum time giving it away. I didn’t make it onto the same Amtrak as him, either. I missed a D.C. train by five minutes, which meant I trailed him back to the capital a whole hour and a half in arrears.

The same guard was on duty at the Cannon Building’s door. He didn’t recognize me. But he let me in anyway, mainly because of the Constitution. Because of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the Government. My pocket junk inched through an X-ray machine and I stepped through a metal detector and was patted down even though I knew the light had flashed green. There was a gaggle of House pages inside the lobby and one of them called ahead and then walked me to Sansom’s quarters. The corridors were wide and generous and confusing. The individual offices seemed small but handsome. Maybe they had once been large and handsome, but now they were broken up into reception anterooms and multiple inner spaces, partly for senior staff to use, I guessed, and partly to make eventual labyrinthine access to the big guy seem more of a gift than it really was.

Sansom’s place looked the same as all the others. A door off the corridor, lots of flags, lots of eagles, some oil paintings of old guys in wigs, a reception desk with a young woman behind it. Maybe a staffer, maybe an intern. Springfield was leaning on the corner of her desk. He saw me and nodded without a smile and pushed off the desk and came to the door to meet me and jerked his thumb farther along the corridor.

“Cafeteria,” he said.

We got there down a flight of stairs. It was a wide low room full of tables and chairs. Sansom was nowhere in it. Springfield grunted like he wasn’t surprised and concluded that Sansom had returned to his office while we were out looking for him, by an alternate route, possibly via a colleague’s billet. He said the place was a warren and that there were always conversations to be had and favors to be sought and deals to be struck and votes to be traded. We walked back the same way we had come and Springfield stuck his head around an inner door and then backed away and motioned me inside.

Sansom’s inner office was a rectangular space larger than a closet and smaller than a thirty-dollar motel room. It had a window and paneled walls covered with framed photographs and framed newspaper headlines and souvenirs on shelves. Sansom himself was in a red leather chair behind a desk, with a fountain pen in his hand and a whole lot of papers spread out in front of him. He had his jacket off. He had the weary, airless look of a man who had been sitting still for a long time. He hadn’t been out. The cafeteria detour had been a charade, presumably designed to allow someone to make an exit without me seeing him. Who, I didn’t know. Why, I didn’t know. But I sat down in the visitor chair and found it still warm from someone else’s body. Behind Sansom’s head was a large framed print of the same picture I had seen in his book. Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, in Baghdad. Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Next to it was a cluster of smaller pictures, some of Sansom standing with groups of people, some of him alone and shaking hands and smiling with other individuals. Some of the group shots were formal, and some were of wide smiles and confetti-strewn stages after election victories. I saw Elspeth in most of them. Her hair had changed a lot over the years. I saw Springfield in some of the others, his small wary shape easily recognizable even though the images were tiny. The two-shots were what news photographers call grip-and-grins. Some of the individuals in them I recognized, and some I didn’t. Some had autographed the pictures with extravagant dedications, and some hadn’t.

Sansom said, “So?”

I said, “I know about the DSM in March of 1983.”

“How?”

“Because of the VAL Silent Sniper. The battleaxe I told you about is the widow of the guy you took it from. Which is why you reacted to the name. Maybe you never heard of Lila Hoth or Svetlana Hoth, but you met with some other guy called Hoth back in the day. That’s for damn sure. It was obvious. You probably took his dog tags and had them translated. You’ve probably still got them, as souvenirs.”

There was no surprise. No denial. Sansom just said, “No, actually those tags were locked up with the after-action reports, and everything else.”

I said nothing.

Sansom said, “His name was Grigori Hoth. He was about my age at the time. He seemed competent. His spotter, not so much. He should have heard us coming.”

I didn’t reply. There was a long silence. Then the situation seemed to hit home and Sansom’s shoulders fell and he sighed and he said, “What a way to get found out, right? Medals are supposed to be rewards, not penalties. They’re not supposed to screw you up. They’re not supposed to follow you around the rest of your life like a damn ball and chain.”

I said nothing.

He asked, “What are you going to do?”

I said, “Nothing.”

“Really?”

“I don’t care what happened in 1983. And they lied to me. First about Berlin, and they’re still lying to me now. They claim to be mother and daughter. But I don’t believe them. The alleged daughter is the cutest thing you ever saw. The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch. I first met them with a cop from the NYPD. She said thirty years from now the daughter will look just like the mother. But she was wrong. The younger one will never look like the older one. Not in a million years.”

“So who are they?”

“I’m prepared to accept that the older one is for real. She was a Red Army political commissar who lost her husband and her brother in Afghanistan.”

“Her brother?”

“The spotter.”

“But the younger woman is posing?”

I nodded. “As a billionaire expatriate widow from London. She says her husband was an entrepreneur who didn’t make the cut.”

“And she’s not convincing?”

“She dresses the part. She acts it well. Maybe she lost a husband somewhere along the line.”

“But? What is she really?”

“I think she’s a journalist.”

“Why?”

“She knows things. She’s got the right kind of inquiring mind. She’s analytical. She monitors the Herald Tribune. She’s a hell of a storyteller. But she talks too much. She’s in love with words and she embroiders details. She can’t help herself.”

“For example?”

“She went for some extra pathos. She made out that the political commissars were in the trenches along with the grunts. She claims she was conceived on a rock floor under a Red Army greatcoat. Which is bullshit. Commissars were big-time rear-echelon pussies. They stayed well away from the action. They clustered together back at HQ, writing pamphlets. Occasionally they would visit up the line, but never if there was any danger involved.”

“And you know this how?”

“You know how I know it. We expected to fight a land war with them in Europe. We expected to win. We expected to take millions of them prisoner. MPs were trained to handle them all. The 110th was going to direct operations. Delusional, maybe, but the Pentagon took it very seriously. We were taught more about the Red Army than we were about the U.S. Army. Certainly we were told exactly where to find the commissars. We were under orders to execute them all immediately.”

“What kind of journalist?”

“Television, probably. The local crew she hired was tied to the television business. And have you ever seen Eastern European television? All the anchors are women, and they all look sensational.”

“What country?”

“Ukraine.”

“What angle?”

“Investigative, historical, with a little human interest mixed in. The younger one probably heard the older one’s story and decided to run with it.”

“Like the History Channel in Russian?”

“In Ukrainian,” I said.

“Why? What’s the message? They want to embarrass us now? After more than twenty-five years?”

“No, I think they want to embarrass the Russians. There’s a lot of tension right now between Russia and the Ukraine. I think they’re taking America’s evil for granted, and saying that big bad Moscow shouldn’t have put poor helpless Ukrainians in harm’s way.”

“So why haven’t we seen the story already?”

“Because they’re way behind the times,” I said. “They’re looking for confirmation. They still seem to have some kind of journalistic scruples over there.”

“Are they going to get confirmation?”

“Not from you, presumably. And no one else knows anything for sure. Susan Mark didn’t live long enough to say yea or nay. So the lid is back on. I advised them to forget all about it and head home.”

“Why are they posing as mother and daughter?”

“Because it’s a great con,” I said. “It’s appealing. It’s like reality TV. Or those magazines they sell in the supermarket. Clearly they studied our culture.”

“Why wait so long?”

“It takes time to build a mature television industry. They probably wasted years on important stuff.”

Sansom nodded vaguely, and said, “It’s not true that no one knows anything for sure. You seem to know plenty.”

“But I’m not going to say anything.”

“Can I trust you on that?”

“I served thirteen years. I know all kinds of things. I don’t talk about them.”

“I’m not happy about how easy it was for them to approach Susan Mark. And I’m not happy we didn’t know about her from the get-go. We never even heard of her before the morning after. This whole thing was like an ambush. We were always behind the curve.”

I was looking at the photographs on the wall behind him. Looking at the tiny figures. Their shapes, their postures, their silhouettes. I said, “Really?”

“We should have been told.”

I said, “Have a word with the Pentagon. And with those guys from the Watergate.”

Sansom said, “I will.” Then he went quiet, as if he was rethinking and reassessing, more calmly and at a slower pace than his usual fast field-officer style. The lid is back on. He seemed to examine that proposition for a spell, from all kinds of different angles. Then he shrugged, and got a slightly sheepish look on his face, and he asked, “So what do you think of me now?”

“Is that important?”

“I’m a politician. It’s a reflex inquiry.”

“I think you should have shot them in the head.”

He paused and said, “We had no silenced weapons.”

“You did. You had just taken one from them.”

“Rules of engagement.”

“You should have ignored them. The Red Army didn’t travel with forensics labs. They would have had no idea who shot who.”

“So what do you think of me?”

“I think you shouldn’t have handed them over. That was uncalled for. That was going to be the point of the story, as a matter of fact, on Ukrainian TV. The idea was to get the old woman next to you and let her ask you why.”

Sansom shrugged again. “I wish she could. Because the truth is, we didn’t hand them over. We turned them loose instead. It was a calculated risk. A kind of double bluff. They’d lost their rifle. Everyone would have assumed that the mujahideen had taken it. Which was a sorry outcome and a major disgrace. It was clear to me that they were very scared of their officers and their political commissars. So they would have been falling over themselves to tell the truth, that it was Americans, not Afghans. It would have been a kind of exculpation. But their officers and their commissars knew how scared they were of them, so the truth would have sounded like a bullshit story. Like a pathetic excuse. It would have been discounted immediately, as a fantasy. So I felt it was safe enough to let them go. The truth would have been out there in plain sight, but unrecognized.”

I said, “So what happened?”

Sansom said, “I guess they were more scared than I thought. Too scared to go back at all. I guess they just wandered, until the tribes-people found them. Grigori Hoth was married to a political commissar. He was scared of her. That’s what happened. And that’s what killed him.”

I said nothing.

He said, “Not that I expect anyone to believe me.”

I didn’t reply.

He said, “You’re right about tension between Russia and the Ukraine. But there’s tension between Russia and ourselves, too. Right now there’s plenty of it. If the Korengal part of the story gets out, things could blow up big. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Except different. At least the Soviets were sane, in their way. This bunch, not so much.”

After that we sat in silence for what felt like a long time, and then Sansom’s desk phone rang. It was his receptionist on the line. I could hear her voice through the earpiece, and through the door. She rattled off a list of things that needed urgent attention. Sansom hung up and said, “I have to go. I’ll call a page to see you out.” He stood up and came around the desk and walked out of the room. Just like an innocent man with nothing to hide. He left me all alone, sitting in my chair, with the door open. Springfield had gone, too. I could see no one in the outer office except the woman at the desk. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. No page showed up.

We were always behind the curve, Sansom had said. I waited a long minute and then started squirming around like I was restless. Then after a plausible interval I got out of my chair. I stumped around with my hands clasped behind my back, like an innocent man with nothing to hide, just waiting around on turf that was not his own. I headed over to the wall behind the desk, like it was a completely random destination. I studied the pictures. I counted faces I knew. My initial total came to twenty-four. Four presidents, nine other politicians, five athletes, two actors, Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Elspeth, and Springfield.

Plus someone else.

I knew a twenty-fifth face.

In all of the celebratory election-night victory pictures, right next to Sansom himself, was a guy smiling just as widely, as if he was basking in the glow of a job well done, as if he was not-very-modestly claiming his full share of the credit. A strategist. A tactician. A Svengali. A behind-the-scenes political fixer.

Sansom’s chief of staff, presumably.

He was about my age. In all of the pictures he was dusted with confetti or tangled with streamers or knee-deep in balloons and he was grinning like an idiot, but his eyes were cold. They had a canny, calculating shrewdness in them.

They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes.

I knew why the cafeteria charade had been staged.

I knew who had been sitting in Sansom’s visitor chair before me.

We were always behind the curve.

Liar.

I knew Sansom’s chief of staff.

I had seen him before.

I had seen him wearing chinos and a golf shirt, riding the 6 train late at night in New York City.

Chapter 40

I checked all the celebration pictures, very carefully. The guy from the subway was in all of them. Different angles, different years, different victories, but it was definitely the same guy, literally at Sansom’s right hand. Then a page bustled into the office and two minutes later I was back on the Independence Avenue sidewalk. Fourteen minutes after that I was back inside the railroad station, waiting for the next train back to New York. Fifty-eight minutes after that I was on it, sitting comfortably, leaving town, watching the dismal rail yards through the window. Far to my left a gang of men wearing hard hats and orange high-visibility vests was working on a section of track. Their vests glowed through the smog. The fabric must have had tiny beads of reflective glass mixed into the plastic weave. Safety, through chemistry. The vests were more than highly visible. They were attention-getting. They drew the eye. I watched the guys work until they were just tiny orange dots in the distance, and then until they were completely lost to sight, which was more than a mile later. And at that point I had everything I was ever going to get. I knew everything I was ever going to know. But I didn’t know that I knew. Not then.

The train rolled into Penn and I got a late dinner in a place directly across the street from where I had gotten breakfast. Then I walked up to the 14th Precinct on West 35th. The night watch had started. Theresa Lee and her partner Docherty were already in place. The squad room was quiet, like all the air had been sucked out of it. Like there had been bad news. But no one was rushing around. Therefore the bad news had happened somewhere else.

The receptionist at the bullpen gate had seen me before. She turned on her swivel chair and glanced at Lee, who made a face like it wouldn’t kill her one way or the other whether she ever spoke to me again, or not. So the receptionist turned back and made a face of her own, like the choice to stay or to go was entirely mine. I squeaked the hinge and threaded my way between desks to the back of the room. Docherty was on the phone, mostly listening. Lee was just sitting there, doing nothing. She looked up as I approached and she said, “I’m not in the mood.”

“For what?”

“Susan Mark,” she said.

“Any news?”

“None at all.”

“Nothing more on the boy?”

“You sure are worried about that boy.”

“And you’re not?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Is the file still closed?”

“Tighter than a fish’s asshole.”

“OK,” I said.

She paused a beat and sighed and said, “What have you got?”

“I know who the fifth passenger was.”

“There were only four passengers.”

“And the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.”

“Did this alleged fifth passenger commit a crime somewhere between 30th Street and 45th?”

“No,” I said.

“Then the file stays closed.”

Docherty put his phone down and glanced at his partner with an eloquent look on his face. I knew what the look meant. I had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years and had seen that kind of look many times before. It meant that someone else had caught a big case, and that Docherty was basically glad that he wasn’t involved, but a little wistful too, because even if being at the heart of the action was a pain in the neck bureaucratically, it was maybe a whole lot better than watching from the sidelines.

I asked, “What happened?”

Lee said, “Multiple homicide over in the 17th. A nasty one. Four guys under the FDR Drive, beaten and killed.”

“With hammers,” Docherty said.

I said, “Hammers?”

“Carpentry tools. From the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Just purchased. They were found at the scene. The price tags are still on them, under the blood.”

I asked, “Who were the four guys?”

“No one knows,” Docherty said. “That seems to have been the point of the hammers. Their faces are pulped, their teeth are smashed out, and their fingertips are ruined.”

“Old, young, black, white?”

“White,” Docherty said. “Not old. In suits. Nothing to go on, except they had phony business cards in their pockets, with some corporate name that isn’t registered anywhere in New York State, and a phone number that is permanently disconnected because it belongs to a movie company.”

Chapter 41

Docherty’s desk phone rang and he picked it up and started listening again. A friend in the 17th, presumably, with more details to share. I looked at Lee and said, “Now you’re going to have to reopen the file.”

She asked, “Why?”

“Because those guys were the local crew that Lila Hoth hired.”

She looked at me and said, “What are you? Telepathic?”

“I met with them twice.”

“You met some crew twice. Nothing says these are the same guys.”

“They gave me one of those phony business cards.”

“All those crews use phony business cards.”

“With the same kind of phone number?”

“Movies and TV are the only places to get those numbers.”

“They were ex-cops. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“I care about cops, not ex-cops.”

“They said Lila Hoth’s name.”

“No, some crew said her name. Doesn’t mean these dead guys did.”

“You think this is a coincidence?”

“They could be anybody’s crew.”

“Like who else’s?”

“Anybody in the whole wide world. This is New York. New York is full of private guys. They roam in packs. They all look the same and they all do the same stuff.”

“They said John Sansom’s name, too.”

“No, some crew said his name.”

“In fact they were the first place I heard his name.”

“Then maybe they were his crew, not Lila’s. Would he have been worried enough to have his own people up here?”

“He had his chief of staff on the train. That’s who the fifth passenger was.”

“There you go, then.”

“You’re not going to do anything?”

“I’ll inform the 17th, for background.”

“You’re not going to reopen your file?”

“Not until I hear about a crime my side of Park Avenue.”

I said, “I’m going to the Four Seasons.”

It was late and I was pretty far west and I didn’t find a cab until I hit Sixth Avenue. After that it was a fast trip to the hotel. The lobby was quiet. I walked in like I had a right to be there and rode the elevator to Lila Hoth’s floor. Walked the silent corridor and paused outside her suite.

Her door was open an inch.

The tongue of the security deadbolt was out and the spring closer had trapped it against the jamb. I paused another second and knocked.

No response.

I pushed the door and felt the mechanism push back. I held it open forty-five degrees against my spread fingers and listened.

No sound inside.

I opened the door all the way and stepped in. Ahead of me the living room was dim. The lights were off but the drapes were open and there was enough of a glow from the city outside to show me that the room was empty. Empty, as in no people in it. Also empty as in checked-out-of and abandoned. No shopping bags in the corners, no personal items stowed either carefully or carelessly, no coats over chairs, no shoes on the floor. No signs of life at all.

The bedrooms were the same. The beds were still made, but they had suitcase-sized dents and rucks on them. The closets were empty. The bathrooms were strewn with used towels. The shower stalls were dry. I caught a faint trace of Lila Hoth’s perfume in the air, but that was all.

I walked through all three rooms one more time and then stepped back to the corridor. The door closed behind me. I heard the spring inside the hinge doing its work and I heard the deadbolt tongue settle against the jamb, metal on wood. I walked away to the elevator and hit the down button and the door slid back immediately. The car had waited for me. A nighttime protocol. No unnecessary elevator movement. No unnecessary noise. I rode back to the lobby and walked to the desk. There was a whole night staff on duty. Not as many people as during the day, but way too many for the fifty-dollar trick to have worked. The Four Seasons wasn’t that kind of a place. A guy looked up from a screen and asked how he could help me. I asked him when exactly the Hoths had checked out.

“The who, sir?” he asked back. He spoke in a quiet, measured, nighttime voice, like he was worried about waking the guests stacked high above him.

“Lila Hoth and Svetlana Hoth,” I said.

The guy got a look on his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about and refocused on his screen and hit a couple of keys on his keyboard. He scrolled up and down and hit a couple more keys and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find a record of any guests under that name.”

I told him the suite number. He hit a couple more keys and his mouth turned down in puzzled surprise and he said, “That suite hasn’t been used at all this week. It’s very expensive and quite hard to rent.”

I double-checked the number in my head and I said, “I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.”

The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half-turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.

Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.

The cops had shotguns.

The feds had something else.

Chapter 42

Seven men. Seven weapons. The police shotguns were Franchi SPAS-12s. From Italy. Probably not standard NYPD issue. The SPAS-12 is a futuristic, fearsome-looking item, a semi-automatic 12-gauge smooth-bore weapon with a pistol grip and a folding stock. Advantages, many. Drawbacks, two. Cost was the first, but clearly some specialist division inside the police department had been happy to sign off on the purchase. Semi-automatic operation was the second drawback. It was held to be theoretically unreliable in a powerful shotgun. People who have to shoot or die worry about it. Mechanical failure happens. But I wasn’t about to bet on four mechanical failures happening all at once, for the same reason I don’t buy lottery tickets. Optimism is good. Blind faith is not.

Two of the feds had Glock 17s in their hands. Nine-millimeter automatic pistols from Austria, square, boxy, reliable, well proven through more than twenty years of useful service. I had retained a mild personal preference for the Beretta M9, like the Franchi also from Italy, but a million times out of a million-and-one the Glock would get the job done just as well as the Beretta.

Right then the job was to keep me standing still, ready for the main attraction.

The fed leader was in the exact center of the semicircle. Three men on his left, three on his right. He was holding a weapon I had seen before only on television. I remembered it well. A cable channel, in a motel room in Florence, Texas. Not the Military Channel. The National Geographic Channel. A program about Africa. Not civil wars and mayhem and disease and starvation. A wildlife documentary. Gorillas, not guerillas. A bunch of zoological researchers was tracking an adult male silverback. They wanted to put a radio tag in its ear. The creature weighed close to five hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. They put it down with a dart gun loaded with primate tranquillizer.

That was what the fed leader was pointing at me.

A dart gun.

The National Geographic people had taken great pains to reassure their viewers that the procedure was humane. They had shown detailed diagrams and computer simulations. The dart was a tiny feathered cone, with a surgical steel shaft. The tip of the shaft was a sterile ceramic honeycomb laced with anesthetic. The dart fired at high velocity and the shaft buried itself a half-inch into the gorilla. And stopped. The tip wanted to keep on going. Momentum. Newton’s Law of Motion. The shock and the inertia exploded the ceramic matrix and the potion contained in the honeycomb flung itself onward, not quite droplets, not quite an aerosol. Like a heavy mist spreading under the skin, flooding tissue the way a paper towel soaks up a spilled drop of coffee. The gun itself was a one-shot deal. It had to be loaded with a single dart, and a single tiny bottle of compressed gas to power it. Nitrogen, as I recalled. Reloading was laborious. It was better to hit first time.

The researchers had hit first time in the documentary film. The gorilla had been groggy after eight seconds, and in a coma after twenty. Then it had woken up in perfect health ten hours later.

But it had weighed twice what I weigh.

Behind me was the hotel’s reception counter. I could feel it against my back. It had a ledge about fourteen inches wide set probably forty-two inches off the floor. Bar height. Convenient for a customer to spread his papers on. Convenient to sign things on. Behind that was a drop to a regular desk-height counter for the clerks. It was maybe thirty inches deep. Or more. I wasn’t sure. But the total obstacle was a high and wide hurdle impossible to clear from a standing start. Especially when facing the wrong way. And pointless, anyway. Clearing the counter would not put me in another room. I would still be right there, just behind the counter rather than in front of it. No net gain, and maybe a big net loss if I landed awkwardly on a rolling chair or got tangled up in a telephone wire.

I turned my head and glanced behind me. No one there. The desk people had filed out, left and right. They had been coached. Maybe even rehearsed. The seven men in front of me had a clear field of fire.

No way forward, no way back.

I stood still.

The fed leader was sighting down the barrel of his dart gun and aiming directly at my left thigh. My left thigh made a moderately large target. No fat under the skin. Just hard flesh, full of capillaries and other aids to rapid and efficient blood circulation. Completely unprotected, except for my new blue pants, which were made of thin summer-weight cotton. Don’t come dressed like that, or you won’t get in. I tensed up, as if muscle tone would make the damn thing bounce off. Then I relaxed again. Muscle tone hadn’t helped the gorilla, and it wouldn’t help me. Way behind the seven men I could see a paramedic crew in a gloomy corner. Fire department uniforms. Three men, one woman. They were standing and waiting. They had a wheeled gurney ready.

When all else fails, start talking.

I said, “If you guys have more questions, I’m quite happy to sit down for a conversation. We could get some coffee, keep things civilized. Decaf, if you prefer. Since it’s late. They’ll make fresh, I’m sure. This is the Four Seasons, after all.”

The fed leader didn’t answer. He shot me instead. With the dart gun, from about eight feet, straight into the meat of my thigh. I heard a blast of compressed gas and felt pain in my leg. Not a sting. A dull, thumping blow, like a knife wound. Then a split second of nothing, like disbelief. Then a sharp, angry reaction. I thought if I was a gorilla I would want to tell the damn researchers to stay home and leave my ears alone.

The fed leader lowered the gun.

Nothing happened for a second. Then I felt my heart accelerate and my blood pressure spike and fall. I heard rushing in my temples, like Chinese food twenty years ago. I looked down. The dart’s feathered butt was tight against my pants. I pulled it out. The shaft was smeared with blood. But the tip was gone. The ceramic material had fragmented to powder and the liquid it had held in suspension was already inside me, doing its work. A fat dot of blood welled out of the wound and soaked into the cotton fabric of my pants, following the warp and the weft like a map of an epidemic spreading through city streets. My heart was beating hard. I could feel blood rushing around inside me. I wanted to stop it. No practical way to do that. I leaned back against the counter. Just temporary, I figured. For relief. The seven men in front of me seemed to slide suddenly sideways. Like a wheel play in baseball. I wasn’t sure if they had moved or if I had moved my head. Or perhaps the room had moved. Certainly there was a whole lot of fast rotation going on. Some kind of a spinning sensation. The edge of the counter hit me under the shoulder blades. Either it was rising up or I was sliding down. I put my hands back and flat on its surface. I tried to steady it. Or myself. No luck. The edge hit me in the back of the head. My internal clock wasn’t working right. I was trying to count seconds. I wanted to get to nine. I wanted to outlast the silverback. Some last vestige of pride. I wasn’t sure if I was succeeding.

My ass hit the ground. My vision went. It didn’t go dim or dark. It brightened instead. It got full of mad whirling silver shapes, flashing horizontally right to left. Like a fairground ride running a thousand times too fast. Then I started a sequence of crazy dreams, urgent and breathless and vivid. Full of action and color. Afterward I realized that the start of the dreams marked the point where I officially lost consciousness, lying there on the Four Seasons’s lobby floor.

Chapter 43

I don’t know when exactly I woke up. The clock in my head still wasn’t running right. But I surfaced eventually. I was on a cot. My wrists and my ankles were fastened to the rails with plastic handcuffs. I was still fully dressed. Apart from my shoes. Those were gone. In my fuddled state I heard my dead brother’s voice in my head. A line he liked to use as a kid: Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away and he’s got to run after you in his socks. I moved my toes. Then I moved my hips. I could feel that my pockets were empty. They had taken my stuff. Maybe they had listed it all on a form and bagged it up.

I ducked my head to my shoulder and scraped my chin across my shirt. Stubble, a little more than I remembered. Maybe eight hours’ worth. The gorilla on the National Geographic Channel had slept for ten. Score one for Reacher, except they had probably used a lighter dose on me. At least I hoped they had. That huge primate had crashed down like a tree.

I raised my head again and looked around. I was inside a cell, and the cell was inside a room. No window. Bright electric light. New construction inside old construction. A row of three simple cages made of bright new spot-welded steel, sitting in a line inside a big old room made of brick. The cells were each about eight feet square and eight feet tall. They were roofed with bars, the same as their sides. They were floored with steel tread plate. The tread plate was folded up at the edges, to make a shallow inch-deep tray. To contain spilled liquids, I guessed. All kinds of liquids can get spilled in cells. The tray was spot-welded inside a horizontal rail that ran around the bottom of all the vertical bars. There were no bolts through the floors. The cells were not fixed down. They were just sitting there, three freestanding structures parked in a big old room.

The big old room itself had a high barreled ceiling. The brick was all painted fresh white, but it looked soft and worn. There are guys who can look at the dimensions of bricks and the bricklaying patterns they make and tell you exactly where a building is and exactly when it was constructed. I am not one of them. But even so the place looked like the East Coast to me. Nineteenth century, built by hand. Immigrant labor, working fast and dirty. I was probably still in New York. And I was probably underground. The place felt like a basement. Not damp, not cool, but somehow stabilized in terms of temperature and humidity by virtue of being buried.

I was in the center cage of the three. I had the cot I was strapped to, and a toilet. That was all. Nothing else. The toilet was enclosed by a three-sided U-shaped privacy screen about three feet high. The toilet tank had a dished top that made a sink. I could see a faucet. Just one. Cold water only. The other two cages looked the same. Cots, toilets, nothing else. Leading away from each of the cells were recent excavations in the outer room’s floor. Narrow trenches, three of them, exactly parallel, dug up and refilled and smoothed over with new concrete. Sewer lines to the toilets, I guessed, and water lines to the faucets.

The other two cages were empty. I was all alone.

In the far corner of the outer room where the walls met the roof there was a surveillance camera. A beady glass eye. A wide-angle lens, presumably, to see the whole room at once. To see into all three cells. I guessed there would be microphones, too. Many more than one, probably, some of them close by. Electronic eavesdropping is hard. Clarity is important. Room echo can ruin everything.

My left leg hurt a little. A puncture wound and a bruise, right where the dart had hit. The blood on my pants had dried. There wasn’t much of it. I tested the strength of the cuffs around my wrists and my ankles. Unbreakable. I bucked and jerked against them for half a minute. Not trying to get free. Just checking whether I would pass out again from the effort, and aiming to attract attention from whoever was watching through the surveillance camera and listening through the microphones.

I didn’t pass out again. My head ached a little as it cleared, and the exertion didn’t make my leg throb any less. But apart from those minor symptoms I felt pretty good. The attention I attracted was delayed well over a minute and took the form of a guy I had never seen before walking in with a hypodermic syringe. Some kind of a medical technician. He had a wet cotton ball in his other hand, ready to swab my elbow. He stopped outside my cage and looked in at me through the bars.

I asked him, “Is that a lethal dose?”

The guy said, “No.”

“Are you authorized to give a lethal dose?”

“No.”

“Then you better back off. Because however many times you shoot me up, I’m always going to wake up later. And one of those times, I’m going to come and get you. Either I’ll make you eat that thing, or I’ll stick it up your ass and inject you from the inside.”

“It’s a painkiller,” the guy said. “An analgesic. For your leg.”

“My leg is fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Just back off.”

So he did. He went out through a stout wooden door painted the same white as the walls. The door looked old. It was vaguely gothic in shape. I had seen similar doors in old public buildings. City schools, and police stations.

I dropped my head back to the cot. I had no pillow. I stared up through the bars at the ceiling and prepared to settle in. But less than a minute later two of the men I knew came in through the wooden door. Two of the federal agents. The two sidekicks, not the leader. One of them had a Franchi 12 with him. It looked loaded and cocked and ready. The other guy had some kind of a tool in his hand and a bunch of thin chains looped over his arm. The guy with the shotgun stepped up close to my bars and poked the barrel through and jammed the muzzle into my throat and kept it there. The guy with the chains unlocked my gate. Not with a key, but by spinning a dial left and right. A combination lock. He opened the gate and came inside and stopped beside my cot. The tool in his hand was like a pair of pliers, but with blades instead of milled grips. Some kind of a cutter. He saw me looking at it and smiled. He leaned forward, above my waist. The shotgun muzzle pressed harder into my throat. A wise precaution. Even with my hands strapped down I could have folded forward from the waist and delivered a pretty good head butt. Not my best, maybe, but with plenty of snap from the neck I could have put the guy to sleep for longer than I had been out. Longer than the silverback, perhaps. I already had a headache. Another big impact wouldn’t have made it much worse.

But the Franchi muzzle stayed firmly in place and I was reduced to the status of a spectator. The guy with the chains untangled them and laid them in place, like a trial run. One would cuff my wrists to my waist, one would chain my ankles, and the third would connect the first two together. Standard-issue prison restraints. I would be able to shuffle along a foot at a time and lift my hands as far as my hips, but that was all. The guy got the chains all locked and fastened and tested, and then he used the tool to cut off the plastic cuffs. He backed out of the cage and left the gate open and his partner pulled the Franchi away.

I guessed I was supposed to slide off the cot and stand up. So I stayed where I was. You have to ration your opponents’ victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way maybe you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.

But the two feds had had the same training I’d had. That was clear. They didn’t stand there getting all beaten and frustrated. They just walked away, and the guy who had fitted the chains called back from the door and said, “Coffee and muffins through here, any old time you want them.” Which put the onus right back on me, exactly like it was designed to. Not stylish to wait an hour and then hobble through and wolf stuff down like I was desperate. That would be getting beat in public, by my own hunger and thirst. Not stylish at all. So I waited just a token interval and then I slid off the cot and shuffled out of the cage.

The wooden door led to a room about the same size and shape as the one the cages were in. Same construction, same color paint. No window. There was a large wooden table in the center of the floor. Three chairs on the far side, full of the three feds. One chair on my side, empty. Waiting for me. On the table, all lined up neatly, was the stuff from my pockets. My roll of cash, flattened out and trapped under a sprinkling of coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My toothbrush. The Metrocard I had bought for use on the subway. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card, that she had given to me in the white-tiled room under Grand Central Terminal. The phony business card that Lila Hoth’s local crew had given to me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 35th Street. The computer memory I had bought at Radio Shack, with its loud pink neoprene sleeve. Plus Leonid’s clamshell cell phone. Nine separate items, each one of them stark and lonely under the bright bulbs on the ceiling.

To the left of the table was another door. Same gothic shape, same wooden construction, same new paint. I guessed it led onward to another room, the third of three in an L-shaped chain. Or the first of three, depending on your point of view. Depending on whether you were a captive or a captor. To the right of the table was a low chest of drawers that looked like it belonged in a bedroom. On it were a pile of napkins and a tube of nested foam cups and a steel vacuum bottle and a paper plate with two blueberry muffins. I shuffled over in my socks and poured a cup of coffee from the bottle. The operation was easier than it might have been, because the chest was low. My chained hands didn’t hamper me much. I carried the cup low and two-handed to the table. Sat down in the vacant chair. Dipped my head and sipped from the cup. The action made me look like I was yielding, like it was designed to. Or bowing, or deferring. The coffee was pretty bad too, and only lukewarm.

The fed leader cupped his hand and held it behind my stack of money, as if he was considering picking it up. Then he shook his head, as if money was too prosaic a subject for him. Too mundane. He moved his hand onward and stopped it behind my passport.

He asked, “Why is it expired?”

I said, “Because no one can make time stand still.”

“I meant, why haven’t you renewed it?”

“No imminent need. Like you don’t carry a condom in your wallet.”

The guy paused a beat and asked, “When was the last time you left the country?”

I said, “I would have sat down and talked to you, you know. You didn’t need to shoot me with a dart like I was something escaped from the zoo.”

“You had been warned many times. And you had been markedly uncooperative.”

“You could have put my eye out.”

“But I didn’t. No harm, no foul.”

“I still haven’t seen ID. I don’t even know your name.”

The guy said nothing.

I said, “No ID, no names, no Miranda, no charges, no lawyer. Brave new world, right?”

“You got it.”

“Well, good luck with that,” I said. I glanced at my passport, as if I had suddenly remembered something. I raised my hands as far as they would go and leaned forward. I shuffled my coffee cup well out of my way, which left it in the space between my passport and my ATM card. I picked up my passport and squinted down at it and leafed through the pages at the back. I shrugged, like my memory had been playing tricks on me. I went to put the passport back. But I was inexact with its placement. A little hampered by the chains. The stiff edge of the little booklet caught my coffee cup and tipped it over. Coffee spilled out and splashed on the table and flowed right over the far edge and into the fed leader’s lap. He did the thing that everyone does. He jumped back, half-stood, and batted at the air as if he could divert the liquid one molecule at a time.

“Sorry,” I said.

His pants were soaked. So now the onus was on him. Two choices: either disrupt the rhythm of the interrogation by taking a break to change, or continue with wet pants. I saw the guy debating. He wasn’t quite as inscrutable as he thought he was.

He chose to continue with wet pants. He detoured to the chest of drawers and dabbed at himself with napkins. Then he brought some back and dried the table. He made a big effort not to react, which was a reaction in itself.

He asked again, “When was the last time you left the country?”

I said, “I don’t recall.”

“Where were you born?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Everyone knows where they were born.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“We’ll sit here all day, if necessary.”

“I was born in West Berlin,” I said.

“And your mother is French?”

“She was French.”

“What is she now?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Are you sure you’re an American citizen?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“A straightforward one.”

“The State Department gave me a passport.”

“Was your application truthful?”

“Did I sign it?”

“I imagine you did.”

“Then I imagine it was truthful.”

“How? Were you naturalized? You were born overseas to a foreign parent.”

“I was born on a military base. That counts as U.S. sovereign territory. My parents were married. My father was an American citizen. He was a Marine.”

“Can you prove all of that?”

“Do I have to?”

“It’s important. Whether or not you’re a citizen could affect what happens to you next.”

“No, how much patience I have will affect what happens to me next.”

The guy on the left stood up. He was the one who had held the Franchi’s muzzle hard against my throat. He went directly left from behind the table and walked out, through the wooden door, into the third room. I glimpsed desks, computers, cabinets, and lockers. No other people. The door closed softly behind him and the room we were in went quiet.

The main guy asked, “Was your mother Algerian?”

I said, “I just got through telling you she was French.”

“Some French people are Algerian.”

“No, French people are French and Algerian people are Algerian. It’s not rocket science.”

“OK, some French people were originally immigrants from Algeria. Or from Morocco, or Tunisia, or elsewhere in North Africa.”

“My mother wasn’t.”

“Was she a Muslim?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m making inquiries.”

I nodded. “Safer to inquire about my mother than yours, probably.”

“What do you mean?”

“Susan Mark’s mother was a teenage crack whore. Maybe yours worked with her. Maybe they turned tricks together.”

“Are you trying to make me mad?”

“No, I’m succeeding. You’re all red in the face and you’ve got wet pants. And you’re getting absolutely nowhere. All in all I don’t think this particular session will be written up for the training manual.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“But it’s heading that way.”

The guy paused and regrouped. He used his index finger to realign the nine items in front of him. He got them straight and then he pushed the computer memory an inch toward me. He said, “You concealed this from us when we searched you. Susan Mark gave it to you on the train.”

I said, “Did I? Did she?”

The guy nodded. “But it’s empty, and it’s too small anyway. Where is the other one?”

“What other one?”

“This one is obviously a decoy. Where is the real one?”

“Susan Mark gave me nothing. I bought that thing at Radio Shack.”

“Why?”

“I liked the look of it.”

“With the pink sleeve? Bullshit.”

I said nothing.

He said, “You like the color pink?”

“In the right place.”

“What place would that be?”

“A place you haven’t been in a long time.”

“Where did you conceal it?”

I didn’t answer.

“Was it in a body cavity?”

“You better hope not. You just touched it.”

“Do you enjoy that kind of thing? Are you a fairy?”

“That kind of question might work down at Guantanamo, but it won’t work with me.”

The guy shrugged and used his fingertip and pulled the stick back into line, and then he moved the phony business card and Leonid’s cell phone both forward an inch, like he was moving pawns on a chessboard. He said, “You’ve been working for Lila Hoth. The card proves you were in communication with the crew she hired, and your phone proves she called you at least six times. The Four Seasons’s number is in the memory.”

“It’s not my phone.”

“We found it in your pocket.”

“Lila Hoth didn’t stay at the Four Seasons, according to them.”

“Only because we told them to cooperate. We both know she was there. You met her there twice, and then she broke the third rendezvous.”

“Who is she, exactly?”

“That’s a question you should have asked before you agreed to work for her.”

“I wasn’t working for her.”

“Your phone proves that you were. It’s not rocket science.”

I didn’t answer.

He asked, “Where is Lila Hoth now?”

“Don’t you know?”

“How would I know?”

“I assumed you scooped her up when she checked out. Before you started shooting darts at me.”

The guy said nothing.

I said, “You were there earlier in the day. You searched her room. I assumed you were watching her.”

The guy said nothing.

I said, “You missed her, right? She walked right past you. That’s terrific. You guys are an example to us all. A foreign national with some kind of weird Pentagon involvement, and you let her go?”

“It’s a setback,” the guy said. He seemed a little embarrassed, but I figured he need not have been. Because leaving a hotel under surveillance is relatively easy to do. You do it by not doing it. By not leaving immediately. You send your bags down with the bellman in the service elevator, the agents cluster in the lobby, you leave the passenger elevator at a different floor and you hole up somewhere for two hours until the agents give up and leave. Then you walk out. It takes nerve, but it’s easy to do, especially if you have booked another room under another name, which Lila Hoth certainly had, for Leonid, at least.

The guy asked, “Where is she now?”

I asked, “Who is she?”

“The most dangerous person you ever met.”

“She didn’t look it.”

“That’s why.”

I said, “I have no idea where she is.”

There was a long pause and then the guy moved the phony business card and the cell phone back into line and advanced Theresa Lee’s card in their place. He asked, “How much does the detective know?”

“What does it matter?”

“We have a fairly simple sequence of tasks in front of us. We need to find the Hoths, we need to recover the real memory stick, but above all we need to contain the leak. So we need to know how far it has spread. So we need to know who knows what.”

“Nobody knows anything. Least of all me.”

“This is not a contest. You don’t get points for resisting. We’re all on the same side here.”

“Doesn’t feel that way to me.”

“You need to take this seriously.”

“Believe me, I am.”

“Then tell us who knows what.”

“I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know who knows what.”

I heard the door on my left open again. The leader looked across and nodded some kind of consent. I turned in my seat and saw the guy from the left-hand chair. He had a gun in his hand. Not the Franchi 12. The dart gun. He raised it and fired. I spun away, but far too late. The dart caught me high in the upper arm.

Chapter 44

I woke up all over again, but I didn’t open my eyes immediately. I felt like the clock in my head was back on track, and I wanted to let it calibrate and settle in undisturbed. Right then it was showing six o’clock in the evening. Which meant I had been out about another eight hours. I was very hungry and very thirsty. My arm hurt the same way my leg had. A hot little bruise, right up there at the top. I could feel that I still had no shoes. But my wrists and my ankles were no longer fastened to the rails of the cot. Which was a relief. I stretched lazily and rubbed a palm across my face. More stubble. I was heading for a regular beard.

I opened my eyes. Looked around. Discovered two things. One: Theresa Lee was in the cage to my right. Two: Jacob Mark was in the cage to my left.

Both of them were cops.

Neither one of them had shoes on.

That was when I started to worry.

If I was right and it was six o’clock in the evening, then Theresa Lee had been hauled in from home. And Jacob Mark had been brought in from work. They were both looking at me. Lee was standing behind her bars, about five feet away. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt. She had bare feet. Jake was sitting on his cot. He was wearing a police officer’s uniform, minus the belt and the gun and the radio and the shoes. I sat up on my cot and swung my feet to the floor and ran my hands through my hair. Then I stood up and stepped over to the sink and drank from the faucet. New York City, for sure. I recognized the taste of the water. I looked at Theresa Lee and asked her, “Do you know exactly where we are?”

She said, “Don’t you?”

I shook my head.

She said, “We have to assume this place is wired for sound.”

“I’m sure it is. But they already know where we are. So we won’t be giving them anything they don’t already have.”

“I don’t think we should say anything.”

“We can discuss geographic facts. I don’t think the Patriot Act prohibits street addresses, at least not yet.”

Lee said nothing.

I said, “What?”

She looked uneasy.

I said, “You think I’m playing games with you?”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “You think I’m here to trap you into saying something on tape?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Those clubs on Bleecker are nearer Sixth Avenue than Broadway. You had the A train right there. Or the B or the C or the D. So why were you on the 6 train at all?”

“Law of nature,” I said. “We’re hardwired. In our brains. Middle of the night, full dark, all mammals head east instinctively.”

“Really?”

“No, I just made that up. I had nowhere to go. I came out of a bar and turned left and walked. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

Lee said nothing.

I said, “What else?”

She said, “You have no bags. I never saw a homeless person with nothing. Most of them haul more stuff around than I own. They use shopping carts.”

“I’m different,” I said. “And I’m not a homeless person. Not like them.”

She said nothing.

I asked her, “Were you blindfolded when they brought you here?”

She looked at me for a long moment and then she shook her head and sighed. She said, “We’re in a closed firehouse in Greenwich Village. On West 3rd. Street level and above is disused. We’re in the basement.”

“Do you know exactly who these guys are?”

She didn’t speak. Just glanced up at the camera. I said, “Same principle. They know who they are. At least I hope they do. Doesn’t hurt for them to know that we know, too.”

“You think?”

“That’s the point. They can’t stop us thinking. Do you know who they are?”

“They didn’t show ID. Not today, and not that first night either, when they came to talk to you at the precinct.”

“But?”

“Not showing ID can be the same thing as showing it, if you’re the only bunch that never does. We’ve heard some stories.”

“So who are they?”

“They work directly for the Secretary of Defense.”

“That figures,” I said. “The Secretary of Defense is usually the dumbest guy in the government.”

Lee glanced up at the camera again, as if I had insulted it. As if she had caused it to be insulted. I said, “Don’t worry. These guys look ex-military to me, in which case they already know how dumb the Secretary of Defense is. But even so, Defense is a Cabinet position, which means ultimately these guys are working for the White House.”

Lee paused a beat and asked, “Do you know what they want?”

“Some of it.”

“Don’t tell us.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“But is it big enough for the White House?”

“Potentially, I guess.”

“Shit.”

“When did they come for you?”

“This afternoon. Two o’clock. I was still asleep.”

“Did they have the NYPD with them?”

Lee nodded, and a little hurt showed in her eyes.

I asked, “Did you know the patrolmen?”

She shook her head. “Hotshot counterterrorism guys. They write their own rules and keep themselves separate. They ride around in special cars all day long. Fake taxis, sometimes. One in the front, two in the back. Did you know that? Big circles, up on Tenth, down on Second. Like the B-52s used to patrol the skies.”

“What time is it now? About six after six?”

She looked at her watch, and looked surprised.

“Dead-on,” she said.

I turned the other way.

“Jake?” I said. “What about you?”

“They came for me first. I’ve been here since noon. Watching you sleep.”

“Any word from Peter?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You snore, you know that?”

“I was full of gorilla tranquillizer. From a dart gun.”

“You’re kidding.”

I showed him the bloodstain on my pants, and then the one on my shoulder.

“That’s insane,” he said.

“Were you at work?”

He nodded. “The dispatcher called my car back to base, and they were waiting for me.”

“So your department knows where you are?”

“Not specifically,” he said. “But they know who took me away.”

“That’s something,” I said.

“Not really,” he said. “The department won’t do anything for me. Guys like these come for you, suddenly you’re tainted. You’re presumed guilty of something. People were already inching away from me.”

Lee said, “Like when Internal Affairs comes calling.”

I asked her, “Why isn’t Docherty here?”

“He knows less than me. In fact he went out of his way to know less than me. Didn’t you notice that? He’s an old hand.”

“He’s your partner.”

“Today he is. By next week he’ll have forgotten he ever had a partner. You know how these things work.”

Jake said, “There are only three cells here. Maybe Docherty is somewhere else.”

I asked, “Have these guys talked to you yet?”

Both of them shook their heads.

I asked, “Are you worried?”

Both of them nodded. Lee asked, “Are you?”

“I’m sleeping well,” I said. “But I think that’s mostly because of the tranquillizers.”

At six-thirty they brought us food. Deli sandwiches, in plastic clamshell packs that were turned sideways and pushed through the bars. Plus bottles of water. I drank my water first and refilled the bottle from the tap. My sandwich was salami and cheese. Finest meal I ever ate.

At seven o’clock they took Jacob Mark away for questioning. No restraints. No chains. Theresa Lee and I sat on our cots, about eight feet apart, separated by bars. We didn’t talk much. Lee seemed depressed. At one point she said, “I lost some good friends when the towers came down. Not just cops. Firefighters, too. People that I had worked with. People that I had known for years.” She said it as if she thought those truths should insulate her from the craziness that came afterward. I didn’t answer her. Mostly I sat quiet and reran conversations in my head. All kinds of people had been talking at me. For hours. John Sansom, Lila Hoth, the guys in the next room. I was running through what they had all said, the same way a cabinet maker runs his palm over a length of planed wood, looking for the rough spots. There were a few. There were strange half-comments, odd nuances, little off-key implications. I didn’t know what any of them meant. Not then. But knowing that they were there was useful in itself.

At seven-thirty they brought Jacob Mark back and took Theresa Lee away in his place. No restraints. No chains. Jake got on his cot and sat cross-legged with his back to the camera. I looked at him. An inquiry. He gave a millimetric shrug and rolled his eyes. Then he kept his hands in his lap, out of sight of the camera, and made a gun with his right thumb and forefinger. He tapped his thigh and looked at mine. I nodded. The dart gun. He put two fingers down between his knees and held a third in front and to the left. I nodded again. Two guys behind the table, and the third to the left with the gun. Probably in the doorway to the third room. On guard. Hence no restraints and no chains. I massaged my temples and while my hands were still up I mouthed, “Where are our shoes?” Jake mouthed back, “I don’t know.”

After that we sat in silence. I didn’t know what Jake was thinking about. His sister, probably. Or Peter. I was considering a binary choice. There are two ways to fight something. From the inside, or from the outside. I was an outside type of guy. Always had been.

At eight o’clock they brought Theresa Lee back and took me away again.

Chapter 45

No restraints. No chains. Clearly they thought I was afraid of the dart gun. Which I was, to a degree. Not because I fear small puncture wounds. And not because I have anything against sleep, in and of itself. I like sleep as much as the next guy. But I didn’t want to waste any more time. I felt like I couldn’t afford another eight hours on my back.

The room was populated exactly as Jacob Mark had semaphored it. The main guy was already sitting in the center chair. The guy who had fitted the chains that morning was the one who had brought me in, and he left me in the middle of the room and went to take his place at the table on the main guy’s right. The guy who had wielded the Franchi was standing off to the left with the dart gun in his hands. My possessions were still on the table. Or, they were back on the table. I doubted that they had been there while Jake or Lee had been in the room. No point. No reason. No relevance. They had been laid out all over again, especially for me. Cash, passport, bank card, toothbrush, Metrocard, Lee’s business card, the phony business card, the memory stick, and the cell phone. Nine items. All present and correct. Which was good, because I needed to take at least seven of them with me.

The guy in the center chair said, “Sit down, Mr. Reacher.”

I moved toward my chair and I felt all three of them relax. They had been working all night and all day. Now they were into their third straight hour of interrogation. And interrogation is heavy work. It demands close attention and mental flexibility. It wears you out. So the three guys were tired. Tired enough to have lost their edge. As soon as I headed for my chair, they moved out of the present and into the future. They thought their troubles were over. They started thinking about their approach. Their first question. They assumed I would get to my chair and sit down and be ready to hear it. Be ready to answer it.

They were wrong.

Half a step short of my destination I raised my foot to the edge of the table and straightened my leg and shoved. Shoved, not kicked, because I had no shoes on. The table jerked back and the far edge hit the two seated guys in the stomach and pinned them against their chair backs. By that point I was already moving to my left. I came up from a crouch at the third guy and tore the dart gun up and out of his hands and while he was all straight and exposed I kneed him hard in the groin. He gave up on the gun and folded forward and I high-stepped and changed feet and kneed him in the face. Like a folk dance from Ireland. I spun away and leveled the gun and pulled the trigger and shot the main guy in the chest. Then I went over the table and battered the other guy in the head with the dart gun’s butt, once, twice, three times, hard and vicious, until he went quiet and stopped moving.

Four noisy violent seconds, from beginning to end. Four discrete units of action and time, separately packaged, separately unleashed. The table, the dart gun, the main guy, the second guy. One, two, three, four. Smooth and easy. The two guys I had hit were unconscious and bleeding. The guy on the floor from a shattered nose, and the guy at the table from a gash to his scalp. Next to him the main guy was on his way under, chemically assisted, the same way I had been twice before. It was interesting to watch. There was some kind of muscle paralysis involved. The guy was sliding down in his chair, helpless, but his eyes were moving like he was still aware of things. I remembered the whirling shapes, and I wondered if he was seeing them too.

Then I turned and watched the door to the third room. There was still the medical technician unaccounted for. Maybe others. Maybe lots of others. But the door stayed closed. The third room stayed quiet. I knelt and checked under the third guy’s jacket. No Glock. He had a shoulder holster but it was empty. Standard procedure, probably. No firearms in any closed room with a prisoner present. I checked the other two guys. Same result. Government-issue nylon shoulder rigs, both of them empty.

The third room stayed quiet.

I checked pockets. They were all empty. All sanitized. Nothing there at all, except neutral items like tissues and lonely dimes and pennies trapped down in the seams. No house keys, no car keys, no phones. Certainly no wallets, no badge holders, and no IDs.

I picked up the dart gun again and held it one-handed, out and ready. Moved to the third room’s door. Swung it open and raised the gun and pretended to aim. A gun is a gun, even if it’s empty and the wrong kind. It’s all about first impressions and subliminal reactions.

The third room was unoccupied.

No medical technician, no backup agents, no support staff. Nobody at all. Nothing there, except gray office furniture and fluorescent light. The room itself was the same as the first two, an old brick basement chamber painted flat white. Same size, same proportions. It had another door, which I guessed led onward, either to a fourth room or a stairwell. I crossed to it and eased it open.

A stairwell. No paint, beyond an ancient peeling layer of institutional green. I closed the door again and checked the office furniture. Three desks, five cabinets, four lockers, all gray, all plain and functional, all made of steel, all locked. With combination locks, like the cells, which made sense, because there had been no keys in the agents’ pockets. The desks held no piles of paper. Just three sleeping computers and three console telephones. I hit space bars and woke up each screen in turn. Each one asked for a password. I lifted receivers and hit redial buttons and got the operator every time. Extremely conscientious security. Painstaking, and consistent. Finish a call, dab the cradle, dial zero, hang up. The three guys weren’t perfect, but they weren’t idiots, either.

I stood still for a long moment. I was disappointed about the combination locks. I wanted to find their stores and reload the dart gun and shoot the other two agents with it. And I wanted my shoes.

I wasn’t going to get either satisfaction.

I padded my way back to the cells. Jacob Mark and Theresa Lee looked up, looked away, looked back. Classic double-takes, because I was alone and I had the dart gun in my hands. I guessed they had heard the noises and assumed I was getting smacked around. I guessed they hadn’t expected me back so soon, or at all.

Lee asked, “What happened?”

I said, “They fell asleep.”

“How?”

“I guess my conversation bored them.”

“So now you’re really in trouble.”

“As opposed to what?”

“You were innocent before.”

I said, “Grow up, Theresa.”

She didn’t answer. I checked the locks on the cell gates. They were fine items. They looked high quality and very precise. They had milled top-hat knobs graduated with neat engraving all around the edges, from the number one to the number thirty-six. The knobs turned both ways. I spun them and felt nothing at all in my fingers except the purr of slight and consistent mechanical resistance. The feel of great engineering. Certainly I didn’t feel any tumblers falling.

I asked, “Do you want me to get you out?”

Lee said, “You can’t.”

“If I could, would you want me to?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because then you’d really be in trouble. If you stay, you’re playing their game.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “Jake? What about you?”

He asked, “Did you find our shoes?”

I shook my head. “But you could borrow theirs. They’re about your size.”

“What about you?”

“There are shoe stores on Eighth Street.”

“You going to walk there barefoot?”

“This is Greenwich Village. If I can’t walk around barefoot here, where can I?”

“How can you get us out?”

“Nineteenth-century problems and solutions, versus twenty-first century expediency. But it will be difficult. So I need to know whether to start. And you need to make up your mind real fast. Because we don’t have much time.”

“Before they wake up?”

“Before the Home Depot closes.”

Jake said, “OK, I want out.”

I looked at Theresa Lee.

She said, “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.”

“Feel like sticking around and proving that? Because that’s hard to do. Proving a negative always is.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “I was telling Sansom about how we studied the Red Army. You know what they were most afraid of? Not us. They were most afraid of their own people. Their worst torment was spending their whole lives proving their own innocence, over and over again.”

Lee nodded.

“I want out,” she said.

“OK,” I said. I checked the things I needed to check. Estimated dimensions and weights by eye.

“Sit tight,” I said. “I’ll be back in less than an hour.”

First stop was the next room. The three federal agents were still out cold. The main guy would stay that way for eight solid hours. Or maybe much longer, because his body mass was less than two-thirds of mine. For a bad second it struck me that I might have killed him. A dose calibrated for a man of my size might have been dangerous for a smaller person. But the guy was breathing steadily right then. And he had started it, so the risk was his.

The other two would be waking up much earlier. Maybe fairly soon. Concussion was unpredictable. So I ducked through to the anteroom and tore all of the computer cords out of the walls and carried them back and used them to truss the two guys up like chickens. Wrists, elbows, ankles, necks, all tight and interconnected. Multi-strand copper cores, tough plastic sheathing, unbreakable. I peeled my socks off and tied them together in line and used them for a gag on the guy with the head wound. Unpleasant for him, but I figured he was getting a hazardous duty supplement in his pay, and he might as well earn it. I left the other guy’s mouth alone. His nose was smashed, and gagging him would have been the same thing as suffocating him. I hoped he would appreciate my benevolence in the fullness of time.

I checked my work and reloaded my pockets with my possessions from the table and then I left the building.

Chapter 46

The staircase led up to the first floor and came out in back of what had once been the place where the fire trucks parked. There was a wide empty floor full of rat shit and the kind of mysterious random trash that accumulates in abandoned buildings. The big vehicle doors were locked shut with rusted iron bars and old padlocks. But there was a personnel door in the left-hand wall. Getting to it wasn’t easy. There was a half-cleared path. The trash on the floor had been mostly kicked to the side by the passage of feet, but there was still enough debris left around to make barefoot walking difficult. I ended up sweeping stuff out of the way with the side of my foot and stepping into the spaces I had made, one pace at a time. Slow progress. But I got there in the end.

The personnel door was fitted with a new lock, but it was designed to keep people out, not in. On the inside was just a simple lever. On the outside was a combination dial. I found a heavy brass hose coupler on the floor and used it to wedge the door open a crack. I left it that way for my return and stepped out to an alley and two careful paces later I was on the West 3rd Street sidewalk.

I headed straight for Sixth Avenue. Nobody looked at my feet. It was a hot night and there was plenty more attractive skin on display. I looked at some of it myself. Then I flagged down a cab and it took me twenty blocks north and half a block east to the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Docherty had mentioned the address. Hammers had been bought there, prior to the attack under the FDR Drive. The store was getting ready to close up, but they let me in anyway. I found a five-foot pry bar in the contractor section. Cold rolled steel, thick and strong. The trip back to the registers took me through the gardening section and I decided to kill two birds with one stone by picking up a pair of rubber gardening clogs. They were ugly, but better than literally nothing. I paid with my ATM card, which I knew would leave a computer trail, but there was no reason to conceal the fact that I was out buying tools. That purchase was about to become obvious in other ways.

Cabs cruised the street outside like vultures, looking for people with stuff too awkward to carry. Which made no sense economically. Save five bucks at the big-box store, spend eight hauling it home. But the arrangement suited me fine right then. Within a minute I was on my way back south. I got out on 3rd near but not right next to the firehouse.

Ten feet ahead of me I saw the medical tech step into the alley.

The guy looked clean and rested. He was wearing chinos and a white T-shirt and basketball shoes. Staff rotation, I figured. The agents held the fort all day, and then the medical guy took over at night. To make sure the prisoners were still alive in the morning. Efficient, rather than humane. I imagined that the flow of information was considered more important than any individual’s rights or welfare.

I put the pry bar in my left hand and hustled hard in my loose rubber shoes and made it to the personnel door before the guy was all the way through it. I didn’t want him to kick the hose coupler away and let it close behind him. That would give me a problem I didn’t need. The guy heard me and turned in the doorway and his hands came up defensively and I shoved him hard and tumbled him inside. He slid on the trash and went down on one knee. I picked him up by the neck and held him at arm’s length and eased the brass coupler aside with my toe and let the door close until it clicked. Then I turned back and was about to explain the guy’s options to him but I saw that he already understood them. Be good, or get hit. He chose to be good. He went into a crouch and raised his hands in a small abbreviated gesture of surrender. I hefted the pry bar in my left hand and straight-armed the guy onward toward the head of the stairs. He was meek all the way down to the basement. He gave me no trouble on the way through the office room. Then we got to the second room and he saw the three guys on the floor and sensed what was in store for him. He tensed up. Adrenaline kicked in. Fight or flight. Then he looked at me again, a huge determined man in ludicrous shoes, holding a big metal bar.

He went quiet.

I asked him, “Do you know the combinations for the cells?”

He said, “No.”

“So how do you give painkiller injections?”

“Through the bars.”

“What happens if someone has a seizure and you can’t get in the cell?”

“I have to call.”

“Where is your equipment?”

“In my locker.”

“Show me,” I said. “Open it.”

We went back to the anteroom and he led me to a locker and spun the combination dial. The door swung open. I asked him, “Can you open any of the other cabinets?”

He said, “No, just this one.”

His locker had a bunch of shelves inside, piled high with all kinds of medical stuff. Wrapped syringes, a stethoscope, small phials of colorless liquids, packs of cotton balls, pills, bandages, gauze, tape.

Plus a shallow box of tiny nitrogen capsules.

And a box of wrapped darts.

Which made some kind of bureaucratic sense. I imagined the management conference back when they were writing the operations manual. The Pentagon. Staff officers in charge. Some junior ranks present. An agenda. Some DoD counsel insisting that the dart gun’s ammunition be held by a qualified medical officer. Because anesthetic was a drug. And so on and so forth. Then some other active-duty type saying that compressed nitrogen wasn’t medical. A third guy pointing out it made no sense at all to keep the propellant separate from the load. Around and around. I imagined exasperated agents eventually giving up and giving in. OK, whatever, let’s move on.

I asked, “What exactly is in the darts?”

The guy said, “Local anesthetic to help the wound site, plus a lot of barbiturate.”

“How much barbiturate?”

“Enough.”

“For a gorilla?”

The guy shook his head. “Reduced dose. Calculated for a normal human.”

“Who did the calculation?”

“The manufacturer.”

“Knowing what it was for?”

“Of course.”

“With specifications and purchase orders and everything?”

“Yes.”

“And tests?”

“Down at Guantánamo.”

“Is this a great country, or what?”

The guy said nothing.

I asked him, “Are there side effects?”

“None.”

“You sure? You know why I’m asking, right?”

The guy nodded. He knew why I was asking. I was fresh out of computer cords, so I had to keep half an eye on him while I found the gun and loaded it. Loading it was a jigsaw puzzle. I wasn’t familiar with the technology. I had to proceed on common sense and logic alone. Clearly the trigger mechanism tripped the gas release. Clearly the gas propelled the dart. But guns are basically simple machines. They have fronts and backs. Cause and effect happens in a rational sequence. I got the thing charged up inside forty seconds.

I said, “You want to lie down on the floor?”

The guy didn’t answer.

I said, “You know, to save bumping your head.”

The guy got down on the floor.

I asked him, “Any preference as to where? Arm? Leg?”

He said, “It works best into muscle mass.”

“So roll over.”

He rolled over and I shot him in the ass.

I reloaded the thing twice more and put darts into the two agents that were liable to wake up. Which gave me at least an eight-hour margin, unless there were other unanticipated arrivals on the horizon. Or unless the agents were supposed to call in with status checks every hour. Or unless there was a car already on its way to take us back to D.C. Which conflicting thoughts made me feel half-relaxed and half-urgent. I carried the pry bar through to the cell block. Jacob Mark looked at me and said nothing. Theresa Lee looked at me and said, “They sell shoes like that on Eighth Street now?”

I didn’t answer. Just stepped around to the back of her cell and jammed the flat end of the pry bar under the bottom of the structure. Then I leaned my weight on the bar and felt the whole thing move, just a little. Just a fraction of an inch. Not much more than the natural flex of the metal.

“That’s stupid,” Lee said. “This thing is a self-contained freestanding cube. You might be able to tip it over, but I’ll still be inside.”

I said, “Actually it’s not freestanding.”

“It’s not bolted to the floor.”

“But it’s clamped down by the sewer connection. Under the toilet.”

“Will that help?”

“I hope so. If I tip it up and the sewer connection holds, then the floor will tear off, and you can crawl out.”

“Will it hold?”

“It’s a gamble. It’s a kind of competition.”

“Between what?”

“Nineteenth-century legislation and a sleazy twenty-first-century welding shop with a government contract. See how the floor isn’t welded all the way around? Just in some places?”

“That’s the nature of spot welding.”

“How strong is it?”

“Plenty strong. Stronger than the toilet pipe, probably.”

“Maybe not. There was cholera in New York in the nineteenth century. A big epidemic. It killed lots of people. Eventually the city fathers figured out what was causing it, which was cesspools mixing with the drinking water. So they built proper sewers. And they specified all kinds of standards for the pipes and the connectors. Those standards are still in the building code, all these years later. A pipe like this has a flange lapping over the floor. I’m betting it’s fixed stronger than the spot welds. Those nineteenth-century public works guys erred on the side of caution. More so than some modern corporation wanting Homeland Security money.”

Lee paused a beat. Then she smiled, briefly. “So either I get illegally busted out of a government jail cell, or the sewer pipe gets torn out of the floor. Either way I’m in the shit.”

“You got it.”

“Great choice.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Go for it.”

Two rooms away I heard a telephone start to ring.

I knelt down and eased the tip of the pry bar into the position it needed to be in, which was under the bottom horizontal rail of the cell, but not so far under that it also caught the edge of the floor tray. Then I kicked it sideways a little until it was directly below one of the upside-down T-welds, where the force would be carried upward through one of the vertical bars.

Two rooms away the telephone stopped ringing.

I looked at Lee and said, “Stand on the toilet seat. Let’s give it all the help we can.”

She climbed up and balanced. I took up all the slack in the pry bar and then leaned down hard and bounced, once, twice, three times. Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, multiplied by sixty inches of leverage. Three things happened. First, the pry bar dug itself a shallow channel in the concrete under the cage, which was mechanically inefficient. Second, the whole assemblage of bars distorted out of shape a little, which was also inefficient. But third, a bright bead of metal pinged loose and skittered away.

“That was a spot,” Lee called. “As in spot-weld.”

I moved the pry bar and found a similar position twelve inches to the left. Wedged the bar tight, took up the slack, and bounced. Same three results. The grind of powdered concrete, the screech of bending bars, and the ping of another metal bead torn loose.

Two rooms away a second phone started to ring. A different tone. More urgent.

I stood back and caught my breath. Moved the pry bar again, this time two feet to the right. Repeated the procedure, and was rewarded with another broken weld. Three down, many more to go. But now I had approximate hand-holds in the bottom rail, where the pry bar had forced shallow U-shaped bends into the metal. I put the pry bar down and squatted facing the cell and shoved my hands palms-up into the holds. Grasped hard and breathed hard and prepared to lift. When I quit watching the Olympics the weightlifters were moving more than five hundred pounds. I figured I was capable of much less than that. But I figured much less than that might do the trick.

Two rooms away the second telephone stopped ringing.

And a third started.

I heaved upward.

I got the side of the cell about a foot off the ground. The tread plate floor shrieked and bent like paper. But the welds held. The third telephone stopped ringing. I looked up at Lee and mouthed, “Jump.” She got the message. She was a smart woman. She jumped high off the toilet and smashed her bare feet down together right where two welds were under pressure. I felt nothing through my hands. No impact. No shock. Because the welds broke immediately and the floor bent down into a radical V-shaped chute. Like a mouth. The opening was about a foot wide and a foot deep. Good, but not good enough. A kid might have gotten through it, but Lee wasn’t going to.

But at least we had proved the principle. Score one for the nineteenth-century city fathers.

Two rooms away all three phones started to ring simultaneously. Competing tones, fast and urgent.

I caught my breath again and after that it was just a question of repeating the triple procedures over and over again, two welds at a time. The pry bar, the weightlifting, the jump. Lee wasn’t a big woman, but even so we needed to tear free a line of welds nearly six feet long before the floor would bend down enough to let her out. It was a question of simple arithmetic. The straight edge of the floor became part of a curved circumference, in a ratio of one-to-three against us. It took us a long time to get the job done. Close to eight minutes. But we got it done eventually. Lee came out on her back, feetfirst, like a limbo dancer. Her shirt got caught and rode up to reveal a smooth tan stomach. Then she wriggled free and crabbed clear and stood up and hugged me hard. And longer than she needed to. Then she broke away and I rested for a minute and wiped my hands on my pants.

Then I repeated the whole procedure all over again, for Jacob Mark.

Two rooms away phones rang and stopped, rang and stopped.

Chapter 47

We got out fast. Theresa Lee took the lead agent’s shoes. They were big on her, but not by much. Jacob Mark took the medical technician’s whole outfit. He figured that an incomplete out-of-town cop’s uniform would be conspicuous on the street, and he was probably right. The change was worth the delay. He looked much better in the chinos and the T-shirt and the basketball sneakers. They fit close to perfectly. There was a nickel-sized bloodstain on the back of the pants, but that was the only disadvantage. We left the medical guy sleeping in his underwear.

Then we headed out. Up the stairs, across the littered floor, through the alley, to the 3rd Street sidewalk. It was crowded. It was still hot. We turned left. No real reason. Just a random choice. But a lucky one. We got about five steps away and I heard the blare of a horn behind us and the yelp of tires and I glanced back and saw a black car jamming to a stop ten feet the other side of the firehouse. A Crown Vic, new and shiny. Two guys spilled out. I had seen them before. And I knew for sure that Theresa Lee had seen them before. Blue suits, blue ties. The FBI. They had talked to Lee in the precinct house, and they had talked to me on 35th Street. They had asked me questions about Canadian phone numbers. Now twenty feet behind us they ran for the alley and ducked in. They didn’t see us at all. But if we had turned right we would have collided head-on with them as they got out of their car. So we had been lucky. We celebrated by hustling hard, straight for Sixth Avenue. Jacob Mark got there first. He was the only one of us with decent shoes.

We crossed Sixth Avenue and followed Bleecker for a spell and then found refuge on Cornelia Street, which was narrow and dark and relatively quiet, except for diners at sidewalk café tables. We stayed well away from them and they paid no attention to us. They were more interested in their food. I didn’t blame them. It smelled good. I was still very hungry, even after the salami and cheese. We headed up to the quiet end of the street and took inventory there. Lee and Jake had nothing. All their stuff was locked away in the firehouse basement. I had what I had reclaimed from the table in the second room, the important components of which were my cash, my ATM card, my Metrocard, and Leonid’s cell phone. The cash amounted to forty-three dollars and change. The Metrocard had four rides left on it. Leonid’s cell was almost out of battery. We agreed it was beyond certain that my ATM number and Leonid’s phone number were already flagged up in various computer systems. If we used either one, someone would know within seconds. But I wasn’t too worried. Information has to be useful to be damaging. If we escaped from West 3rd and days later withdrew cash in Oklahoma City or New Orleans or San Francisco, then that data would be significant. If we withdrew cash immediately a couple of blocks from the firehouse, then that data was useless. It told them nothing they didn’t already know. And there are so many cell antennas in New York that triangulation is difficult. A ballpark location is helpful out in the sticks. Not so much in the city. A target area two blocks wide and two deep can contain fifty thousand people and take days to search.

So we moved on and found an ATM in a bright blue bank lobby and I withdrew all the cash I could, which was three hundred bucks. Apparently I had a daily limit. And the machine was slow. Probably on purpose. Banks cooperate with law enforcement. They sound the alarm and then slow down the transaction. The idea is to give the cops time to show up. Maybe possible, in some places. Not very likely, with city traffic to deal with. The machine waited and waited and waited and then it coughed up the bills. I took them and smiled at the machine. Most of them have surveillance cameras built in, connected to digital recorders.

We moved on again and Lee spent ten of my new dollars in a deli. She bought an emergency cell phone charger. It operated off a penlight battery. She plugged it into Leonid’s phone and called Docherty, her partner. It was ten after ten, and he would be getting ready for work. He didn’t pick up the call. Lee left a message and then switched off the phone. She said cell phones had GPS chips in them. I didn’t know that. She said the chips bleeped away every fifteen seconds and could be pinned down within fifteen feet. She said GPS satellites were much more precise than antenna triangulation. She said the way to use a cell on the run was to keep it switched off except for brief moments just before leaving one location and moving on to the next. That way the GPS trackers were always one step behind.

So we moved on again. We were all aware of cop cars on the streets. We saw plenty of them. The NYPD is a big operation. The largest police department in America. Maybe the largest in the world. We found a noisy bistro in the heart of NYU territory after skirting north of Washington Square Park and then heading east. The place was dark and packed with undergraduate students. Some of the food it sold was recognizable. I was hungry and still dehydrated. I guessed my systems had been working overtime to flush out the double dose of barbiturate. I drank whole glasses of tap water and ordered a kind of shake made of yogurt and fruit. Plus a burger, and coffee. Jake and Lee ordered nothing. They said they were too shaken to eat. Then Lee turned to me and said, “You better tell us what exactly is going on.”

I said, “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“We just crossed that line.”

“They didn’t show ID. You were entitled to assume the detention was illegal. In which case busting out wasn’t a crime. In fact it was probably your duty.”

She shook her head. “I knew who they were, ID or no ID. And it’s not the busting out that I’m worried about. It’s the shoes. That’s what’s going to screw me. I stood over the guy and stole his footwear. I was looking right at him. That’s premeditation. They’ll say I had time to reflect and react appropriately.”

I looked at Jake, to see whether he wanted to be included, or whether he still figured that innocence was bliss. He shrugged, as if to say in for a penny, in for a pound. So I let the waitress finish up serving my order and then I told them what I knew. March of 1983, Sansom, the Korengal Valley. All the details, and all the implications.

Lee said, “There are American troops in the Korengal Valley right now. I just read about it. In a magazine. I guess it never stops. I hope they’re doing better than the Russians did.”

“They were Ukrainians,” I said.

“Is there a difference?”

“I’m sure the Ukrainians think so. The Russians put their minorities out front, and their minorities didn’t like it.”

Jake said, “I get it about World War Three. At the time, I mean. But this is a quarter-century later. The Soviet Union isn’t even a country anymore. How can a country be aggrieved about something, if it doesn’t even exist today?”

“Geopolitics,” Lee said. “It’s about the future, not the past. Maybe we want to do similar stuff again, in Pakistan or Iran or wherever. It makes a difference if the world knows we did it before. It sets up preconceptions. You know that. You’re a cop. You like it when we can’t mention prior convictions in court?”

Jake said, “So how big of a deal do you think this is?”

“Huge,” Lee said. “As big as can be. For us, anyway. Because overall it’s still small. Which is ironic, right? You see what I mean? If three thousand people knew, there’s not much anyone could do about it. Or three hundred, even. Or thirty. It would be out there, end of story. But right now only the three of us know. And three is a small number. Small enough to be contained. They can make three people disappear without anyone noticing.”

“How?”

“It happens, believe me. Who’s going to pay attention? You’re not married. Me either.” She looked at me and asked, “Reacher, are you married?”

I shook my head.

She paused a second. She said, “No one left behind to ask questions.”

Jake said, “What about people where we work?”

“Police departments do what they’re told.”

“This is insane.”

“This is the new world.”

“Are they serious?”

“It’s a cost-benefit analysis. Three innocent people versus a big geopolitical deal? What would you do?”

“We have rights.”

“We used to.”

Jake said nothing in reply to that. I finished my coffee and washed it down with another glass of tap water. Lee called for the check and waited until it had arrived and I had paid it, and then she turned Leonid’s phone back on. It came to life with a merry little tune and locked on to its network and ten seconds after that its network recognized it and told it there was a text message waiting. Lee hit the appropriate button and started scrolling.

“It’s from Docherty,” she said. “He hasn’t dumped me yet.”

Then she read and scrolled, read and scrolled. I counted fifteen-second intervals in my head, and imagined the GPS chip sending out a little burst of data for every one of them, saying, Here we are! Here we are! I got up to ten. A hundred and fifty seconds. Two and a half minutes. It was a long message. And it was full of bad news, according to Lee’s face. Her lips compressed and her eyes narrowed. She checked back on a couple of paragraphs and then she shut the thing down again and handed it back to me. I put it in my pocket. She looked straight at me and said, “You were right. The dead guys under the FDR Drive were Lila Hoth’s crew. I guess the 17th called everyone in the phone book and checked out the only one that didn’t answer. They broke into their offices and found billing records made out to Lila Hoth, in care of the Four Seasons Hotel.”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “But here’s the thing. Those billing records go back three months, not three days. And the other data is in. Homeland Security has no record of two women called Hoth ever entering the country. Certainly not three days ago on British Airways. And Susan Mark never called London, either from work or from home.”

Chapter 48

Use the phone and move on immediately was the rule. We took Broadway north. Taxis and police cruisers sped past us. Headlight beams washed over us. We hustled as far as Astor Place and then ducked underground and burned three of my four remaining Metrocard rides on the 6 train north. Where it all began. Another bright new R142A car. It was eleven in the evening and there were eighteen passengers in addition to ourselves. We got three spaces together on one of the eight-person benches. Lee sat in the middle. On her left Jake half-turned and bent his head, ready for quiet talk. On her right I did the same thing. Jake asked, “So which is it? Are the Hoths phony or is the government already covering its ass by erasing data?”

Lee said, “Could be either.”

I said, “The Hoths are phony.”

“You think or you know?”

“It was too easy at Penn Station.”

“How?”

“They sucked me in. Leonid let me see him. He was wearing a jacket that looked bright orange under the lights. It was practically the same as the safety vests I saw some railroad workers wearing. It drew my eye. I was supposed to notice it. Then he let me hit him. Because I was supposed to take the phone from him and find out about the Four Seasons. They manipulated me. There are layers upon layers here. They needed to talk to me but they didn’t want me to see everything. They didn’t want to show their whole hand. So they set up a way in for me. They lured me to the hotel and tried a sweet, easy approach. Just one guy acting incompetent at the railroad station, and then the soft soap. They even had a backup plan, which was coming to the precinct house and making the missing persons report. Either way I would have showed up eventually.”

“What do they want from you?”

“Susan’s information.”

“Which was what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are they?”

“Not journalists,” I said. “I guess I was wrong about that. Lila was acting one thing, acting another thing. I don’t know what she really is.”

“Is the old woman for real?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are they now? They bailed out of the hotel.”

“They always had somewhere else. They had two tracks running. Public consumption, and private business. So I don’t know where they are now. Their alternative place, obviously. Some long-term secure location, I guess. Here in the city, probably. Maybe a town-house. Because they have a crew with them. People of their own. Bad people. Those private guys were right. How bad, they just found out the hard way. With the hammers.”

Lee said, “So the Hoths are covering their asses too.”

“Wrong tense,” I said. “They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.”

The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, “If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.”

“Yes,” I said. “It could have been.”

The doors closed. The train moved on.

Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, “What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.”

I said, “Thanks for pointing that out.”

You tipped her over the edge.

Your fault, specifically.

The train rattled into the 28th Street station.

We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark’s case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross-street toward Madison. I was feeling pretty good by then. I had spent sixteen hours out of seventeen fast asleep, and I was full of food and fluids. But Lee and Jake looked beat. They had nowhere to go and weren’t used to it. Obviously they couldn’t go home. They couldn’t go to friends, either. We had to assume all their known haunts were being watched.

Lee said, “We need a plan.”

I liked the look of the block we were on. New York has hundreds of separate micro-neighborhoods. Flavor and nuance vary street by street, sometimes building by building. Park and Madison in the high 20s are slightly seedy. The cross-streets are a little down at the heel. Maybe once they were high end, and maybe one day they will be again, but right then they were comfortable. We hid out under sidewalk scaffolding for a spell and watched drunks staggering home from bars, and people from nearby apartment houses walking their dogs before bed. We saw a guy with a Great Dane the size of a pony, and a girl with a rat terrier the size of the Great Dane’s head. Overall I preferred the rat terrier. Small dog, big personality. The little guy thought he was boss of the world. We waited until the clock passed midnight and then we snaked back and forth west and east until we found the right kind of hotel. It was a narrow place with an out-of-date illuminated sign backed with low-wattage bulbs. It looked a little run-down and grimy. Smaller than I would have liked. Bigger places work much better. Greater chance of empty rooms, more anonymity, less supervision. But all in all the place we were looking at was feasible.

It was a decent target for the fifty-dollar trick.

Or maybe we could even get away with forty.

In the end we had to bid our way up to seventy-five, probably because the night porter suspected we had some kind of a sexual threesome in mind. Maybe because of the way Theresa Lee was looking at me. There was something going on in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what. But clearly the night porter saw an opportunity to raise his rate. The room he gave us was small. It was in back of the building and had twin beds and a narrow window on an air shaft. It was never going to show up in a tourist brochure, but it felt secure and clandestine and I could tell that Lee and Jake felt good about spending the night in it. But equally I could tell that neither one of them felt good about spending two nights in it, or five, or ten.

“We need help,” Lee said. “We can’t live like this indefinitely.”

“We can if we want to,” I said. “I’ve lived like this for ten years.”

“OK, a normal person can’t live like this indefinitely. We need help. This problem isn’t going to go away.”

“It could,” Jake said. “From how you were figuring it before. If three thousand people knew, it wouldn’t be a problem anymore. So all we have to do is tell three thousand people.”

“One at a time?”

“No, we should call the newspapers.”

“Would they believe us?”

“If we were convincing.”

“Would they print the story?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Who knows what goes on with newspapers now? Maybe they would check with the government about a thing like this. Maybe the government would tell them to sit on it.”

“What about freedom of the press?”

Lee said, “Yes, I remember that.”

“So who the hell will help us?”

“Sansom,” I said. “Sansom will help us. He’s got the biggest investment here.”

“Sansom is the government. He had his own guy trailing Susan.”

“Because he has a lot to lose. We can use that.” I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dropped it on the bed next to Theresa Lee. “Text Docherty in the morning. Get the number for the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. Call Sansom’s office and demand to speak with him personally. Tell him you’re a police officer in New York and that you’re with me. Tell him we know his guy was on the train. Then tell him we know the DSM wasn’t for the VAL rifle. Tell him we know there’s more.”

Chapter 49

Theresa Lee picked up the phone and held it for a moment like it was a rare and precious jewel. Then she put it on the night stand and asked, “What makes you think there’s more?”

I said, “Overall there has to be more. Sansom won four medals, not just one. He was a regular go-to guy. He must have done all kinds of things.”

“Like what?”

“Whatever needed doing. For whoever needed it done. Not just the army. Delta guys were loaned out, from time to time. To the CIA, on occasion.”

“To do what?”

“Covert interventions. Coups. Assassinations.”

“Marshal Tito died in 1980. In Yugoslavia. You think Sansom did that?”

“No, I think Tito got sick. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a backup plan, in case he stayed healthy.”

“Brezhnev died in 1982. In Russia. Then Andropov, pretty soon after that. Then Chernenko, real quick. It was like an epidemic.”

“What are you? A historian?”

“Amateur. But whatever, all that led to Gorbachev, and progress. You think that was us? You think that was Sansom?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“But whatever, none of that kind of stuff relates to March of 1983 in Afghanistan.”

“But think about it. Stumbling into a Soviet sniper team in the dark was a totally random chance. Would they have sent a go-to ace like Sansom walking around in the hills, hoping for the best? A hundred times out of a hundred-and-one he would have come up empty. That’s a massive risk for very little reward. That’s no kind of mission planning. A mission needs an achievable objective.”

“A lot of them fail.”

“Of course they do. But they all start out with a realistic target. More realistic than blundering around in a thousand square miles of empty mountains hoping for a random face-to-face encounter. So there must have been something else going on.”

“That’s pretty vague.”

“There’s more,” I said. “And it’s not so vague. People have been talking to me for days. And I’ve been listening. Some of what I heard doesn’t make much sense. Those federal guys snarled me up at the Watergate in D.C. I asked them what was going on. Their reaction was weird. It was like the sky was about to fall. It was way out of proportion for some technical trespass twenty-five years ago.”

“Geopolitics isn’t simple.”

“I agree. And I’m the first to admit I’m no kind of an expert. But even so it seemed way over the top.”

“That’s still vague.”

“I spoke to Sansom in D.C. At his office. He seemed sour about the whole thing. Gloomy, and kind of troubled.”

“It’s election season.”

“But grabbing up the rifle was kind of cool, wasn’t it? Nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about what the army used to call dash and daring. So his reaction was wrong.”

“Still vague.”

“He knew the sniper’s name. Grigori Hoth. From his dog tags. I figured he had the tags as souvenirs. He said, no, those tags were locked up with the after-action reports and everything else. It was like a slip of the tongue. And everything else? What did that mean?”

Lee said nothing.

I said, “We talked about the fate of the sniper and the spotter. Sansom said he had no silenced weapons. Which was like another slip of the tongue. Delta would never set up for clandestine nighttime incursions without silenced weapons. They’re particular about stuff like that. Which suggests to me that the whole VAL episode was an accidental byproduct of something else entirely. I thought the rifle was the story. But this thing is like an iceberg. Most of it is still hidden.”

Lee said nothing.

I said, “Then we talked about the geopolitics. He saw a danger, for sure. He’s worried about Russia, or the Russian Federation, or whatever it is they call themselves now. He thinks they’re unstable. He said things could blow up big, if the Korengal part of the story gets out. You hear that? The Korengal part of the story? It was like a third slip of the tongue. It was effectively a direct admission that there’s more. Direct from the horse’s mouth.”

Lee didn’t answer. Jacob Mark asked, “What kind of more?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s information-intensive. Right from the start Lila Hoth was looking for a USB memory. And the feds assume there’s one out there somewhere. They said their task is to recover the real memory stick. Real, because they took a look at the one I bought and assumed it was a decoy. They said, it’s empty and it’s too small anyway. Hear that? Too small? Which means there are some big files in play. Lots of information.”

“But Susan didn’t have anything with her.”

“True. But everybody assumes she did.”

“What kind of information?”

“I have no idea. Except that Springfield talked to me here in New York. Sansom’s security guy, at the Sheraton. In a quiet corridor. He was very uptight. He was warning me off. He chose a specific metaphor. He said, you can’t afford to turn over the wrong rock.”

“So?”

“What happens when you turn over a rock?”

“Things crawl out.”

“Exactly. Present tense. Things crawl out. This is not about things just lying there, that died twenty-five years ago. This is about things that are squirming and wriggling right now. This is about things that are alive today.”

I saw Theresa Lee thinking it through. She glanced at the phone on the night table. Her eyes narrowed. I guessed she was rehearsing the morning call to Sansom. She said, “He’s kind of careless, isn’t he? He made three slips of the tongue.”

I said, “He was a Delta officer the best part of seventeen years.”

“And?”

“You don’t last seventeen days if you’re careless.”

“So?”

“He seems very engaged to me. He’s aware of everything to do with his campaign. How he looks, what he says, how he travels. Every last little implication.”

“So?”

“So I don’t think he’s careless.”

“He made three slips of the tongue.”

“Did he? I’m not so sure. I wonder if he was setting a trap instead. He read my record. I was a good MP, and pretty close to his generation. I think maybe he was looking for help, any old place he could get it.”

“You think he was recruiting you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I think maybe he was dropping a couple of breadcrumbs, and waiting to see if I would follow them.”

“Because?”

“Because he wants the lid back on, and he’s not sure who can do it for him.”

“He doesn’t trust the DoD guys?”

“Would you?”

“That’s not my world. Would you trust them?”

“About as far as I can spit.”

“Doesn’t he trust Springfield?”

“With his life. But Springfield is just one guy. And Sansom has a big problem. So maybe he figures if some other guy is in, he might as well stay in. The more the merrier.”

“So he’s bound to help us.”

“Not bound,” I said. “His jurisdiction is strictly limited. But he might be inclined. Which is why I want you to call him.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

“Because I’m not going to be here at start of business tomorrow.”

“You’re not?”

“I’ll meet you at ten, in Madison Square Park. A couple of blocks south of here. Be careful getting there.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Where?”

“To look for Lila Hoth.”

“You won’t find her.”

“Probably not. But she’s got a crew. Maybe they’ll find me. I’m sure they’re out looking for me. And they’ve got my picture.”

“You’re going to use yourself as bait?”

“Whatever works.”

“I’m sure the cops are out looking for you too. And the Defense Department, and the FBI. Maybe people we’ve never even heard of.”

“Busy night all around.”

“Take care, OK?”

“Always.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Now.”

Chapter 50

New York City. One o’clock in the morning. The best place and the worst place in the world to be hunted. The streets were still warm. Traffic was light. Whole ten-second intervals went by with no cars on Madison. There were still people around. Some of them were asleep, in doorways or on benches. Some of them were walking, either purposefully or aimlessly. I took the aimless route. I chose 30th Street and crossed to Park, and then Lex. I was never trained in the art of staying invisible. They picked smaller guys for that. The normal-sized people. They took one look at me and gave up on the whole proposition. They assumed that a guy my size would always be too easy to make. But I get by. I taught myself a few techniques. Some of them are counterintuitive. Night is better than day, because places are lonelier. When places are lonelier, I stand out less, not more. Because when people look for me, they look for a big guy. And size is easier to judge when there are handy comparisons all around. Put me in a crowd of fifty civilians, and I stand out, literally head and shoulders above the rest. On my own, people are less sure. No benchmarks. People are bad at judging height in isolation. We know that from experiments with eyewitness testimony. Stage an incident, ask for first impressions, and the same guy can be described as anywhere between five-eight and six-four. People see, but they don’t look.

Except for people trained to look.

I paid a lot of attention to cars. No way to find an individual in New York City except by cruising the streets. The place is just too big for any alternative method. The NYPD’s blue and white cruisers were easy to spot. Their light bars made a distinctive silhouette even far in the distance. Every time I saw one coming I paused in the nearest doorway and laid myself down. Just another homeless guy. Unconvincing in winter, because I didn’t have a mound of old blankets over me. But the weather was still hot. The real homeless people were still in T-shirts.

Unmarked cop cars were harder to make. Their front-end silhouettes were the same as everything else’s, which was the point. But domestic politics and law enforcement budgets restrict choice to a specific handful of makes and models. And most individual vehicles are characteristically neglected. They’re dirty, they sag, they wallow.

Except for unmarked federal cars. Same makes, same models, but often new and clean and waxed and polished. Easy enough to spot, but not easy to distinguish from certain car service rides. Limousine companies use some of the same makes and models. Crown Vics, and their Mercury equivalents. And livery drivers keep their cars clean. I spent some time horizontal in doorways only to see T&LC plates flash past. Taxi and Limousine Commission. Which frustrated me, until I remembered Theresa Lee’s comment about the NYPD’s counterterrorism squad cruising around in fake cabs. After that I erred on the side of caution.

I figured Lila Hoth’s crew would have rentals. Hertz, Avis, Enterprise, or whoever else was new on the scene. Again, a fairly specific handful of makes and models, mostly domestic pieces-of-shit, but new and clean and well maintained. I saw plenty of vehicles that fit the bill, and plenty that didn’t. I took all reasonable precautions to stay out of law enforcement’s way, and I made all reasonable efforts to let Lila Hoth’s people see me. The late hour helped. It simplified things. It categorized the population. Innocent bystanders were mostly home in bed.

I walked for half an hour, but nothing happened.

Until one-thirty in the morning.

Until I looped around to 22nd and Broadway.

Chapter 51

By chance I saw the girl with the rat terrier again. She was walking south on Broadway, heading for 22nd. The little guy was peeing on some posts and ignoring others. I passed them by and the dog noticed me and barked. I turned around to reassure it that I was no kind of a major danger and I saw in the corner of my eye a black Crown Vic come through the 23rd Street light. Clean, shiny, the spike of needle antennas on the trunk lid shown up by the headlights of a car thirty yards behind it.

It slowed to a walk.

Broadway is double-wide on that block. Six lanes, all headed south, divided after the light by a short pedestrian refuge in the middle. I was on the left-hand sidewalk. Next to me, an apartment house. Beyond that, retail stores. On my right, six lanes away, the Flatiron Building. Beyond that, retail stores.

Dead ahead, a subway entrance.

The girl with the dog turned left behind me and entered the apartment building. I saw a doorman behind a desk. The Crown Vic stopped in the second of the six lanes. The car behind it pulled past and the wash of its headlights showed me two guys silhouetted in the Crown Vic’s front seats. They were sitting still. Maybe checking a photograph, maybe calling in for instructions, maybe calling for backup.

I sat down on a low brick wall that ran around a planted area in front of the apartment house. The subway entrance was ten feet away.

The Crown Vic stayed where it was.

Far south of me the Broadway sidewalk was wide. Adjacent to the retail operations it was cast from concrete. The half next to the curb was a long subway grate. The subway entrance ten feet from me was a narrow staircase. The south end of the 23rd Street station. The N and the R and the W trains. The uptown platform.

I made a bet with myself that it was a HEET entrance. A high entry-exit turnstile. Not a money wager. Something far more important. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I waited.

The guys in the car sat still.

At one-thirty in the morning the subway was well into its nighttime hours. Twenty-minute gaps between trains. I heard no rumbling or roaring from below. There was no rush of air. The trash on the distant sidewalk grates lay still.

The Crown Vic turned its front wheels. I heard the hiss of its power steering pump and the squelch of its tires on the road. It turned sharply across four lanes and straightened through a tight S and stopped on the curb alongside me.

The two guys stayed inside.

I waited.

It was a federal car, for sure. A pool car. Standard LX specification, not the Police Interceptor model. Black paint, plastic wheel covers. The sidewalk wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t deserted, either. People were hurrying home alone, or strolling slower in couples. There were clubs on the cross streets to the south. I could tell, because small random knots of dazed people appeared from time to time and craned out into the traffic lanes, looking for cruising cabs.

The guys in the car moved. One tilted right and one tilted left, the way two people do in a car when they are both groping for the interior door handles at the same time.

I watched the subway grates in the sidewalk, forty yards south of me.

Nothing doing. Still air. No moving trash.

The two guys got out of their car. They were both in dark suits. Their jackets were creased low down in back, from driving. The passenger came around and stood with the driver in the gutter close to the Crown Vic’s hood. They were level with me, maybe twenty feet away across the width of the sidewalk. They had their shields already clipped on their breast pockets. FBI, I guessed, although I wasn’t close enough to be sure. All those civilian shields look the same to me. The passenger called, “Federal agents.” As if he needed to.

I didn’t respond.

They stayed in the gutter. Didn’t step up on the curb. A subliminal defense mechanism, I guessed. The curb was like a tiny rampart. It offered no real protection, but once they breached it they would have to commit. They would have to act, and they weren’t sure how that would go.

The subway grates stayed still and silent.

The passenger called, “Jack Reacher?”

I didn’t answer. When all else fails, play dumb.

The driver called, “Stay right where you are.”

My shoes were made of rubber, and much less tight and firm than I am used to. But even so I felt the first faint pre-echo of subway rumble through them. A train, either starting downtown from 28th Street, or heading uptown from 14th. A fifty-fifty chance. A downtown train was no good to me. I was on the wrong side of Broadway. An uptown train was what I wanted.

I watched the distant sidewalk grates.

The trash lay still.

The passenger called, “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I put one hand in my pocket. Partly to locate my Metrocard, and partly to see what would happen next. I knew that Quantico training placed great emphasis on public safety. Agents are instructed to draw their weapons only in situations of dire emergency. Many never draw their weapons at all, all the way from graduation to retirement, not even once. There were innocent people all around. An apartment house lobby directly behind me. The field of fire was high and wide and handsome, and full of collateral tragedies just waiting to happen. Passersby, traffic, babies asleep in low-floor bedrooms.

The two agents drew their weapons.

Two identical moves. Two identical weapons. Glock pistols, taken smooth and fast and easy from shoulder holsters. Both guys were right-handed.

The passenger called, “Don’t move.”

Far to my left the trash on the subway grates stirred. An uptown train, heading my way. The dam of air in front of it moving fast, building pressure, finding escape. I stood up and walked around the railing to the head of the stairs. Not fast, not slow. I went down one step at a time. Behind me I heard the agents coming after me. Hard soles on concrete. They had better shoes than me. I turned my Metrocard in my pocket and pulled it out facing the right way around.

The fare control was high. Floor-to-ceiling bars, like a jail cell. There were two turnstiles, one on the left, one on the right. Both were narrow and full-height. No supervision necessary. No need for a manned booth. I slid my card and the last credit on it lit up the go light green and I pushed on through. Behind me the agents came to a dead stop. A regular turnstile, they would have jumped right over and explained later. But the unmanned HEET entrance took away that option. And they weren’t carrying Metrocards of their own. They probably lived out on Long Island and drove to work. Spent their days at desks or in cars. They stood helplessly behind the bars. No opportunity for shouted threats or negotiations, either. I had timed it just right. The dam of air was already there in the station, skittering dust and rolling empty cups around. The first three cars were already around the curve. The train yelped and groaned and stopped and I stepped right on without even breaking stride. The doors closed and the train bore me away and the last I saw of the agents was the two of them standing there on the wrong side of the turnstile with their guns down by their sides.

Chapter 52

I was on an R train. The R train follows Broadway to Times Square and then straightens a little until 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, where it hangs a tight right and stops at 59th and Fifth and then 60th and Lex before heading on under the river and east to Queens. I didn’t want to go to Queens. A fine borough, no question, but unexciting at night, and anyway I felt in my gut that the action lay elsewhere. In Manhattan, for sure. On the East Side, probably, and not far from 57th Street. Lila Hoth had used the Four Seasons as a decoy. Which put her real base somewhere close by, almost certainly. Not adjacent, but comfortably proximate.

And her real base was a townhouse, not an apartment or another hotel. Because she had a crew with her, and they had to be able to come and go undetected.

There are a lot of townhouses on the east side of Manhattan.

I stayed on the train through Times Square. A bunch of people got on there. For the minute it took to get up to 49th Street we had twenty-seven passengers on board. Then five people got out at 49th and the population started to decline. I got out at 59th and Fifth. Didn’t leave the station. I just stood on the platform and watched the train go onward without me. Then I sat on a bench and waited. I figured the agents at 22nd Street would have gotten on their radio. I figured cops might be heading for the R train stations in a long sequential cascade. I pictured them sitting in their cars or standing on the sidewalks, timing the train’s underground progress, tensing up, then relaxing again as they assumed I had passed by beneath them and was headed farther up the line. I pictured them staying around for five minutes or so, and then giving it up. So I waited. Ten whole minutes. Then I left. I came up from under the ground and found no one looking for me. I was alone on a deserted corner with the famous old Plaza Hotel directly in front of me, all lit up, and the park behind me, all dark.

I was two blocks north and a block and a half west of the Four Seasons.

I was exactly three blocks west of where Susan Mark would have come up out of the 6 train, right back at the beginning.

And right then I understood that Susan Mark had never been headed to the Four Seasons Hotel. Not dressed in black and ready for combat. No combat was possible in a hotel lobby or corridor or suite. No advantage was won by wearing black where there were lights. So Susan had been headed somewhere else. Directly to the secret location, presumably, which had to be on a dark, discreet cross-street. But which still had to be in the original sixty-eight-block box, between 42nd Street and 59th, between Fifth Avenue and Third. Most likely in one of the upper quadrants, given the nature of the area. Either the upper left, or the upper right. One of two sixteen-block sub-boxes, maybe.

Which would contain what?

About two million different things.

Which was four times better than eight million different things, but not so much better that I started jumping for joy. Instead I headed east across Fifth Avenue and resumed my aimless walking, watching for cars, staying in the shadows. There were many fewer homeless people than down in the 20s, and I figured that lying in doorways would be more provocative than not. So I watched the traffic and prepared either to run or to fight, depending on who found me first.

I crossed Madison Avenue and headed for Park. Now I was directly behind the Four Seasons, which was two blocks due south. The street was quiet. Mostly flagship retail and boutique commercial, all closed up. I turned south on Park and then east again on 58th. Didn’t see much. Some townhouses, but each one looked the same as all the others. Blank five- and six-story brownstone façades, barred windows low down, shuttered windows above, no lights. Some of them were consulates belonging to small nations. Some of them were trophy offices for charitable foundations and small corporations. Some of them were residential, but broken up into multiple apartments. Some of them were definitely single-family homes, but all the single families appeared to be fast asleep behind locked doors.

I crossed Park and headed for Lex. Sutton Place was up ahead. Quiet, and very residential. Mostly apartments, but some houses. Historically the neighborhood was centered more to the south and the east, but optimistic brokers had pushed its borders north and especially west, all the way to Third Avenue. The new fringes were fairly anonymous.

Ideal territory for a hideout.

I strolled on, west and east, north and south, 58th, 57th, 56th, Lexington, Third, Second. I quartered a lot of blocks. Nothing jumped out at me. And no one jumped out at me. I saw plenty of cars, but all of them were barreling happily from A to B. None of them was showing the characteristic hesitant half-pace of a car whose driver is also making visual sweeps of the sidewalks. I saw plenty of people, but most of them were far in the distance and entirely innocent. Insomniac dog walkers, medical personnel heading home from the East Side hospitals, garbage workers, apartment house doormen out taking the air. One of the dog walkers came close enough to speak. The dog was an elderly gray mutt and the walker was an elderly white woman of about eighty. Her hair was done and she was fully made up. She was wearing an old-fashioned summer dress that really needed long white gloves to be complete. The dog paused and looked at me mournfully and the woman took that to be a sufficient social introduction. She said, “Good evening.”

It was close to three o’clock, and therefore technically morning. But I didn’t want to appear quarrelsome. So I just said, “Hello.”

She said, “Did you know that word is a recent invention?”

I said, “What word?”

“Hello,” she said. “It was developed as a greeting only after the invention of the telephone. People felt they needed something to say when they picked up the receiver. It was a corruption of the old word halloo. Which was really an expression of temporary shock or surprise. You would come upon something unexpected, and you would go, Halloo! Perhaps people were startled by the shrillness of the telephone bell.”

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps they were.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“I’ve used them,” I said. “Certainly I’ve heard them ring.”

“Do you find the sound to be disturbing?”

“I always assumed that was the point.”

“Well, goodbye,” the woman said. “It has been most pleasant chatting with you.”

Only in New York, I thought. The woman moved on, with her old dog by her side. I watched her go. She headed east and then south on Second Avenue and was lost to sight. I turned around and got set to head west again. But twenty feet ahead of me a gold Chevy Impala jammed to a stop in the gutter and Leonid climbed out of the back.

Chapter 53

Leonid stood on the curb and the car took off again and then stopped again twenty feet behind me. The driver got out. Good moves. I was boxed on the sidewalk, one guy in front of me, another guy behind. Leonid looked the same but different. Still tall, still thin, still bald apart from the ginger stubble, but now he was in sensible clothes and he had shed his sleepy demeanor. He was in black shoes, black knit pants, and a black hooded sweatshirt. He looked alive and alert and very dangerous. He looked like more than a gangster. More than a brawler or a hoodlum. He looked like a professional. Trained, and experienced.

He looked like an ex-soldier.

I backed up against the wall of the building next to me so that I could watch both guys at once. Leonid on my left, and the other guy on my right. The other guy was a squat man somewhere in his thirties. He looked more Middle Eastern than East European. Dark hair, no neck. Not huge. Like Leonid, but compressed vertically and therefore expanded laterally. He was dressed the same, in cheap black sweats. I looked at the knit pants and a word lodged in my mind.

The word was: disposable.

The guy took a step toward me.

Leonid did the same.

Two choices, as always: fight or flight. We were on 56th Street’s southern sidewalk. I could have run straight across the road and tried to get away. But Leonid and his pal were probably faster than me. The law of averages. Most humans are faster than me. The old lady in the summer dress was probably faster than me. Her old gray mutt was probably faster than me.

And running away was bad enough. Running away and then getting caught immediately was totally undignified.

So I stayed where I was.

On my left, Leonid took another step closer.

On my right, the short guy did the same thing.

Whatever the army had failed to teach me about staying out of sight, they had made up for by teaching me a lot about fighting. They had taken one look at me and sent me straight to the gym. I was like a lot of military children. We had weird backgrounds. We had lived all over the world. Part of our culture was to learn from the locals. Not history or language or political concerns. We learned fighting from them. Their favored techniques. Martial arts from the Far East, full-on brawling from the seamier parts of Europe, blades and rocks and bottles from the seamier parts of the States. By the age of twelve we had it all boiled down to a kind of composite uninhibited ferocity. Especially uninhibited. We had learned that inhibitions will hurt you faster than anything else. Just do it was our motto, well before Nike started making shoes. Those of us who signed up for military careers of our own were recognized and mentored and offered further tuition, where we were taken apart and put back together again. We thought we were tough when we were twelve. At eighteen, we thought we were unbeatable. We weren’t. But we were very close to it, by the age of twenty-five.

Leonid took another step.

The other guy did the same.

I looked back at Leonid and saw brass knuckles on his hand.

Same for the short guy.

They had slipped them on, fast and easy. Leonid side-stepped. So did the other guy. They were perfecting their angles. I was backed up against a building, which gave me a hundred and eighty degrees of empty space in front of me. Each one of them wanted forty-five degrees of that space on his right and forty-five on his left. That way, if I bolted, they had every exit direction equally covered. Like doubles players, in tennis. Long practice, mutual support, and instinctive understanding.

They were both right-handed.

First rule when you’re fighting against brass knuckles: Don’t get hit. Especially not in the head. But even blows against arms or ribs can break bones and paralyze muscles.

The best way not to get hit is to pull out a gun and shoot your opponents from a distance of about ten feet. Close enough not to miss, far enough to remain untouched. Game over. But I didn’t have that option. I was unarmed. The next best way is either to keep your opponents far away or crush them real close. Far away, they can swing all night and never connect. Real close, they can’t swing at all. The way to keep them far away is to exploit superior reach, if you have it, or use your feet. My reach is spectacular. I have very long arms. The silverback on the television show looked stumpy in comparison to me. My instructors in the army were always making puns about my reach, based on my name. But I was facing two guys, and I wasn’t sure if kicking was an option I could add in. For one thing, I had lousy shoes. Rubber gardening clogs. They were loose on my feet. They would come off. And kicking with bare feet leads to broken bones. Feet are even punier than hands. Except in karate school, where there are rules. There are no rules on the street. Second thing, as soon as one foot is off the ground, you’re unbalanced and potentially vulnerable. Next thing you know, you’re on the floor, and then you’re dead. I had seen it happen. I had made it happen.

I braced my right heel against the wall behind me.

I waited.

I figured they would pile on together. Simultaneous launches, ninety degrees apart. Arrowing inward, more or less in step. The good news was they wouldn’t be trying to kill me. Lila Hoth would have forbade that. She wanted things from me, and corpses have nothing to offer.

The bad news was that plenty of serious injuries fall short of fatal.

I waited.

Leonid said, “You don’t have to get hurt, you know. You can just come with us, if you like, and talk to Lila.” His English was less upmarket than hers. His accent was rough. But he knew all the words.

I said, “Go with you where?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. You would have to wear a blindfold.”

I said, “I’ll take a pass on the blindfold. But you don’t have to get hurt, either. You can just move on, and tell Lila you never saw me.”

“But that wouldn’t be true.”

“Don’t be a slave to the truth, Leonid. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes it bites you right in the ass.”

The upside of a concerted attack by two opponents is that they have to communicate a start signal. Maybe it’s just a glance or a nod, but it’s always there. It’s a split second of warning. I figured Leonid for the main man. The one who speaks first usually is. He would announce the attack. I watched his eyes, very carefully.

I said, “Are you mad about what happened at the railroad station?”

Leonid shook his head. “I let you hit me. It was necessary. Lila said so.”

I watched his eyes.

I said, “Tell me about Lila.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know who she is.”

“Come with us, and ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“She’s a woman with a job to do.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Come with us, and ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“An important job. A necessary job.”

“Which involves what?”

“Come with us, and ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

No answer. No further conversation. I sensed them tensing up. I watched Leonid’s face. Saw his eyes widen and his head duck forward in a tiny nod. They came straight for me, together. I pushed off the wall behind me and put my fists against my chest and stuck my elbows out like airplane wings and charged them as hard as they were charging me. We met at a singular point like a collapsing triangle and my elbows caught both of them full in the face. On my right I felt the short guy’s upper teeth punch out and on my left I felt Leonid’s lower jaw give way. Impact equals mass times velocity squared. I had plenty of mass, but my shoes were spongy and my feet were slick inside them from the heat and so my velocity was slower than it might have been.

Which reduced the impact a little.

Which left them both on their feet.

Which gave me a little more work to do.

I spun back instantly and clubbed the short guy with an enormous roundhouse right to the ear. No style. No finesse. Just a big ugly punch. His ear flattened against his head and took some of the force away, but plenty more went straight on through the crushed gristle into his skull. His neck snapped sideways and he hit his other ear with his own far shoulder. By that point I was squelching back the other way in my lousy footwear and driving my elbow deep into Leonid’s gut. Same place I had hit him in Penn Station, but ten times harder. I almost popped his spine out of his back. I used the bounce to jump in the other direction, to the short guy again. He was hunching away and ready for a standing eight count. I put a low right in his kidney. That straightened him up and spun him around toward me. I bent my knees and drove forward and butted him between the eyes. Explosive. Whatever bones my elbow hadn’t broken gave way and he went down like a sack. Leonid tapped me on the shoulder with his knuckleduster. He thought it was a punch, but in his depleted state a tap was all he could manage. I took my time and wound up and aimed carefully and dropped him with an uppercut to the jaw. His jaw was already broken from my elbow. Now it got broken a little more. Bone and flesh spattered out in a lazy red arc and showed up quite clearly in the streetlights. Teeth, I figured, and maybe part of his tongue.

I was a little shaken. As always. Excess adrenaline was burning me up. The adrenal gland is a slow son of a bitch. Then it overcom-pensates. Too much, too late. I took ten seconds to get my breath. Ten more to calm down. Then I hauled both guys across the sidewalk and into a sitting position against the wall where I had been standing. Their hooded sweatshirts stretched a yard long as I was hauling on them. Cheap clothes. Disposable, in case they had gotten soaked with my blood. I got the two guys positioned so they wouldn’t fall over and choke and then I dislocated their right elbows. They were both right-handed, and the odds were that I would be seeing them again. In which case I wanted them out of action. No permanent damage. Three weeks in a light cast would fix them up, good as new.

They had cell phones in their pockets. I took both of them. Both had my picture. Both call registers were blank. There was nothing else. No money. No keys. No material evidence. No clue as to where they had come from. No likelihood that they would be in a position to tell me anytime soon, either. I had hit them too hard. They were out for the count. And even when they woke up there was no guarantee they would remember anything anyway. Maybe not even their names. Concussion has unpredictable effects. Paramedics aren’t kidding around when they ask concussion victims what day it is and who the president is.

No regrets on my part. Better to err on the side of safety. Guys in fights who think ahead to the aftermath usually don’t get that far. They become the aftermath. So no regrets. But no net gain, either. Which was frustrating. Not even the brass knuckles fit my hand. I tried both sets on, and they were way too small. I dropped them down a storm drain twenty feet away.

Their car was still idling at the curb. It had New York plates. No navigation system. Therefore no digital memory with a base location. I found a rental agreement in the door pocket made out to a name I had never heard and a London address that I assumed was fake. In the glove box I found instruction manuals for the car and a small spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. The notebook had nothing written in it. I took the pen and walked back to the two guys and held Leonid’s head steady with my left palm clamped down hard. Then I wrote on his forehead with the ballpoint, digging deep in his skin and tracing big letters over and over again for clarity.

I wrote: Lila, call me.

Then I stole their car and drove away.

Chapter 54

I drove south on Second Avenue and took 50th Street all the way east to the end and dumped the car on a hydrant half a block from the FDR Drive. I hoped the guys from the 17th Precinct would find it and get suspicious and run some tests. Clothes are disposable. Cars, not so much. If Lila’s people had used that Impala to drive away from the hammer attack, then there would be some trace evidence inside. I couldn’t see any with the naked eye, but CSI units don’t rely on human vision alone.

I wiped the wheel and the shifter and the door handles with the tail of my shirt. Then I dropped the keys down a grate and walked back to Second and stood in a shadow and looked for a cab. There was a decent river of traffic flowing downtown and each car was lit up by the headlights behind it. I could see how many people were inside each vehicle. I was mindful of Theresa Lee’s information: fake taxis, circling uptown on Tenth, down on Second, one guy in the front, two in the back. I waited for a cab that was definitively empty apart from its driver and I stepped out and flagged it down. The driver was a Sikh from India with a turban and a full beard and very little English. Not a cop. He took me south to Union Square. I got out there and sat on a bench in the dark and watched the rats. Union Square is the best place in the city to see them. By day the Parks Department dumps blood-and-bone fertilizer on the flower beds. By night the rats come out and feast on it.

At four o’clock I fell asleep.

At five o’clock one of the captured phones vibrated in my pocket.

I woke up and spent a second checking left and right and behind, and then I fumbled the phone out of my pants. It wasn’t ringing. Just buzzing away to itself. Silent mode. The small monochrome window on the front said: Restricted Call. I opened it up and the big color screen on the inside said the same thing. I put the phone to my ear and said, “Hello.” A new word, recently invented. Lila Hoth answered me. Her voice, her accent, her diction. She said, “So, you decided to declare war. Clearly there are no rules of engagement for you.”

I said, “Who are you exactly?”

“You’ll find out.”

“I need to know now.”

“I’m your worst nightmare. As of about two hours ago. And you still have something that belongs to me.”

“So come and get it. Better still, send some more of your guys. Give me some more light exercise.”

“You got lucky tonight, that’s all.”

I said, “I’m always lucky.”

She asked, “Where are you?”

“Right outside your house.”

There was a pause. “No, you’re not.”

“Correct,” I said. “But you just confirmed that you’re living in a house. And that right now you’re at a window. Thank you for that information.”

“Where are you really?”

“Federal Plaza,” I said. “With the FBI.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your call.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“Close to you,” I said. “Third Avenue and 56th Street.”

She started to reply, and then she stopped herself immediately. She got no further than an inchoate little th sound. A voiced dental fricative. The start of a sentence that was going to be impatient and querulous and a little smug. Like, That’s not close to me.

She wasn’t anywhere near Third and 56th.

“Last chance,” she said. “I want my property.” Her voice softened. “We can make arrangements, if you like. Just leave it somewhere safe, and tell me where. I’ll have it picked up. We don’t need to meet. You could even get paid.”

“I’m not looking for work.”

“Are you looking to stay alive?”

“I’m not afraid of you, Lila.”

“That’s what Peter Molina said.”

“Where is he?”

“Right here with us.”

“Alive?”

“Come over and find out.”

“He left a message with his coach.”

“Or maybe I played a tape he made before he died. Maybe he told me his coach never answers the phone at dinnertime. Maybe he told me a lot of things. Maybe I forced him to.”

I asked, “Where are you, Lila?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “But I could have you picked up.”

A hundred feet away I saw a police car cruising 14th Street. Moving slow. Pink flashes at the window as the driver moved his head right and left.

I asked, “How long have you known Peter Molina?”

“Since I picked him up in the bar.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Come over and find out.”

I said, “You’re on borrowed time, Lila. You killed four Americans in New York. No one is going to ignore that.”

“I killed nobody.”

“Your people did.”

“People that have already left the country. We’re fireproof.”

“We?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“If your people acted on your orders, then you’re not fireproof. That’s a conspiracy.”

“This is a nation of laws and trials. There’s no evidence.”

“Car?”

“No longer exists.”

“You’ll never be fireproof from me. I’ll find you.”

“I hope you do.”

A hundred feet away the police car slowed to a crawl.

I said, “Come out and meet with me, Lila. Or go home. One or the other. But either way you’re beaten here.”

She said, “We’re never beaten.”

“Who is we?”

But there was no answer. The phone went dead. Nothing there, except the dumb silence of an empty line.

A hundred feet away the police car stopped.

I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket.

Two cops climbed out of the car and headed into the square.

I stayed where I was. Too suspicious to get up and run. Better to sit tight. I wasn’t alone in the park. There were maybe forty people in there with me. Some of them seemed to be a permanent population. Others were temporary strays. New York is a big city. Five boroughs. Journeys home are long. Often easier to rest along the way.

The cops shone a flashlight beam in a sleeping guy’s face.

They moved on. Lit up the next guy.

And the next.

Not good.

Not good at all.

But I was not the only person to reach that conclusion. Here and there around the square I saw shapes rising up from benches and shuffling away in different directions. Maybe people with outstanding warrants, dealers with stuff in their backpacks, surly loners who didn’t want contact, helpless paranoids wary of the system.

Two cops, an acre of ground, maybe thirty people still on benches, maybe ten newly mobile.

I watched.

The cops kept on coming. Their flashlight beams jerked through the nighttime haze. Long shadows were thrown. They checked a third guy, and then a fourth. Then a fifth. More people stood up. Some left altogether, and others simply moved from bench to bench. The square was full of shapes, some inert, some moving. Everything was in slow motion. A tired, lazy dance.

I watched.

New indecision in the cops’ body language. Like herding cats. They approached the people still on benches. They turned away and jerked their beams on the people moving out. They kept on walking, bending, turning. No pattern. Just random movement. They kept on coming. They got within ten yards of me.

Then they quit.

They played their flashlight beams one last time around a token circle and then they headed back to their car. I watched it drive away. I stayed on my bench and breathed out and started thinking about the GPS chips in the captured cell phones in my pockets. Part of me said it was impossible that Lila Hoth would have access to tracking satellites. But another part of me focused on her saying, We’re never beaten. And we is a big word. Only two letters, but a large implication. Maybe the bad guys from the Eastern bloc had grabbed more than oil and gas leases. Maybe they had taken over other kinds of infrastructure. The old Soviet intelligence machine had to have gone somewhere. I thought about laptop computers and broadband connections and all kinds of technology I didn’t fully understand.

I kept the phones in my pockets, but I got up off the bench and headed for the subway.

Which was a bad mistake to make.

Chapter 55

The Union Square subway station is a major hub. It has an entrance hall as big as an underground plaza. Multiple entrances, multiple exits, multiple lines, multiple tracks. Stairs, booths, long rows of turnstiles. Plus long banks of machines for refreshing Metrocards, or buying new ones. I used cash and bought a new card. I fed two twenty-dollar bills edge-first into the slot and was rewarded with twenty rides plus three free as a bonus. I collected my card and turned around and moved away. It was close to six o’clock in the morning. The station was filling up with people. The work day was starting. I passed a newsstand. It had a thousand different magazines. And squat bales of fresh tabloids ready for sale. Thick papers, piled high. Two separate titles. Both headlines were huge. One had three words, big letters, plenty of powdery black ink: FEDS SEEK TRIO. The other had three words too: FEDS HUNT TRIO. Practically a consensus. On balance I preferred seek to hunt. More passive, less committed. Almost benign. I figured anyone would prefer to be sought than hunted.

I turned away.

And saw two cops watching me carefully.

Two mistakes in one. First theirs, which was then compounded by mine. Their mistake was conventional. The federal agents at 22nd and Broadway had put the word out that I had escaped by subway. Whereupon law enforcement generally had assumed that I would escape by subway again. Because given the choice, law enforcement always fights the last battle one more time.

My mistake was to walk straight into their lazy trap.

Because there were booths, there were supervisors. Because there were supervisors, there were no high entry-exit turnstiles. Just regular thigh-high bars. I swiped my new card and pushed on through. The plaza changed shape to a long wide walkway. Arrows pointed left and right and up and down, for different lines and different directions. I passed by a guy playing a violin. He had positioned himself where the echoes would help him. He was pretty good. His instrument had a solid, gutty tone. He was playing a mournful old piece I recognized from a movie about the Vietnam War. Perhaps not an inspired choice for early commuters. His violin case was open at his feet and not very full of contributions. I turned casually as if I was checking him out and saw the two cops step over the turnstile behind me.

I turned a random corner and followed a narrower passageway and found myself on an uptown platform. It was crowded with people. And it was part of a symmetrical pair. Ahead of me was the platform edge, and then the line, and then a row of iron pillars holding up the street above, and then the downtown line, and then the downtown platform. Two sets of everything, including two sets of commuters. Tired people, facing each other numbly, waiting to head out in opposite directions.

The live rails were back to back either side of the central iron pillars. They were shrouded, like live rails are in stations. The shrouds were three-sided box sections, open on the sides that faced the trains.

Behind me and far to my left, the cops pushed their way onto the platform. I checked the other way. To my right. Two more cops pushed into the crowd. They were wide and bulky with equipment. They moved people gently out of their way, palms against shoulders, short backhand moves, rhythmic, like swimming.

I moved to the middle of the platform. I edged forward until my feet were on the yellow warning stripe. I moved laterally until I had a pillar directly behind me. I looked left. Looked right. No trains were coming.

The cops kept moving. Behind them four more showed up. Two on one side of me, two on the other, threading through the crowd slowly and surely.

I craned forward.

No headlights in the tunnels.

The crowd moved and bunched beside me, pushed on by new arrivals, disturbed by the ripples of the cops’ relentless progress, pulled forward by the subliminal certainty any subway rider feels that the train must be coming soon.

I checked again, over my shoulders, left and right.

Cops on my platform.

Eight of them.

No cops at all on the platform opposite.

Chapter 56

People are scared of the third rail. No reason to be, unless you plan on touching it. Hundreds of volts, but they don’t jump out at you. You have to go looking for them, to get in trouble.

Easy enough to step over, even in lousy shoes. I figured whatever my rubber footwear would subtract in terms of precision control, it would add in terms of electrical insulation. But even so, I planned my moves very carefully, like stage choreography. Jump down, land two-footed in the center of the uptown line, right foot on the second rail, left foot beyond the third rail, squeeze through the gap between two pillars, right foot over the next third rail, left foot on the downtown track, small careful mincing steps, then a sigh of relief and a scramble up onto the downtown platform and away.

Easy enough to do.

Easy enough for the cops to do right behind me.

They had probably done it before.

I hadn’t.

I waited. Checked behind me, left and right. The cops were close. Close enough to be slowing down and forming up and deciding exactly how they were going to do what would need to be done next. I didn’t know what their approach would be. But whatever, they were going to take it slow. They didn’t want a big stampede. The platform was crowded and any kind of sudden activity would put people over the edge. Which would lead to lawsuits.

I checked left. Checked right. No trains were coming. I wondered if the cops had stopped them. Presumably there was a well-rehearsed procedure. I took a half-step forward. People slipped in behind me, between me and the pillar. They started pressing against my back. I braced the other way against them. The warning strip at the edge of the platform was yellow paint over raised circular bumps. No danger of slipping or sliding.

The cops had formed up into a shallow semicircle. They were about eight feet from me. They were moving inward, shoveling people outward, collapsing their perimeter, slow and cautious. People were watching from the downtown platform opposite. They were nudging each other and pointing at me and going up on tiptoe.

I waited.

I heard a train. On my left. A moving glow in the tunnel. It was coming on fast. Our train. Uptown. Behind me the crowd stirred. I heard the rush of air and the squeal of iron rims. Saw the lighted cab sway and jerk through the curve. I figured it was doing about thirty miles an hour. About forty-four feet per second. I wanted two seconds. I figured that would be enough. So I would have to go when the train was eighty-eight feet away. The cops wouldn’t follow. Their reaction time would rob them of the margin they needed. And they were eight feet back from the platform edge to start with. And they had different priorities from me. They had wives and families and ambitions and pensions. They had houses and yards and lawns to mow and bulbs to plant.

I took another tiny step forward.

The headlight was coming straight at me. Head-on. Rocking and jerking. It made it hard to judge distance.

Then: I heard a train on my right.

A downtown train, approaching fast from the other direction. Symmetrical, but not perfectly synchronized. Like a pair of drapes closing, with the left-hand drape leading the right.

By how much?

I needed a three-second lag, for a total gap of five, because climbing up the downtown platform was going to take me a whole lot longer than jumping off the uptown.

I paused a whole second, guessing, estimating, feeling it, trying to judge.

The trains howled inward, one from the left, then one from the right.

Five hundred tons, and five hundred tons.

Closing speed, maybe sixty miles an hour.

The cops edged closer.

Decision time.

I went.

I jumped down, with the uptown train a hundred feet away. I landed two-footed between the rails and got steady and minced through the steps I had planned. Like a dance diagram in a book. Right foot, left foot high over the live rail, hands on the pillars. I paused a split second and checked right. The downtown train was very close. Behind me the uptown train slammed past. Its brakes were shrieking and grinding. A furious wind tore at my shirt. Lighted windows strobed by in the corner of my eye.

I stared right.

The downtown train looked huge.

Decision time.

I went.

Right foot high over the live rail, left foot down in the rail bed. The downtown train was almost on me. Just yards away. It was rocking and jerking. Its brakes were clamping hard. I could see the driver. His mouth was wide open. I could feel the air damming ahead of his cab.

I abandoned the choreography. Just flung myself toward the far platform. It was less than five feet away, but it felt infinitely distant. Like the plains horizon. But I got there. I stared right and saw every rivet and bolt on the front of the downtown train. It was coming right at me. I got my palms flat on the platform edge and vaulted up. I thought the dense press of people was going to knock me right back down. But hands grabbed at me and pulled me up. The train slammed past my shoulder and the wash of air spun me around. Windows flashed past. Oblivious passengers read books and papers or stood and swayed. Hands hauled on me and dragged me into the crowd. People all around me were screaming. I saw their mouths open in panic but I couldn’t hear them. The yelp of the train’s brakes was drowning them out. I put my head down and barged on through the crowd. People stepped left and right to let me pass. Some of them slapped me on the back as I went by. A ragged cheer followed me out.

Only in New York.

I pushed through an exit turnstile and headed for the street.

Chapter 57

Madison Square Park was seven blocks north. I had the best part of four hours to kill. I spent the time shopping and eating on Park Avenue South. Not because I had things to buy. Not because I was especially hungry. But because it’s always best to give pursuers what they don’t expect. Fugitives are supposed to run far and fast. They’re not supposed to dawdle through the immediate neighborhood, in and out of stores and cafés.

It was just after six in the morning. Delis and supermarkets and diners and coffee shops were all that was open. I started in a Food Emporium that had an entrance on 14th Street and an exit on 15th. I spent forty-five minutes in there. I took a basket and wandered the aisles and pretended to choose stuff. Less conspicuous than just hanging out. Less conspicuous than wandering the aisles without a basket. I didn’t want an alert manager to call anything in. I developed a fantasy where I had an apartment nearby. I stocked its imaginary kitchen with enough stuff to last two whole days. Coffee, of course. Plus pancake mix, eggs, bacon, a loaf of bread, butter, some jam, a pack of salami, a quarter-pound of cheese. When I got bored and the basket got heavy I left it in a deserted aisle and slipped out the back of the store.

Next stop was a diner four blocks north. I walked on the right-hand sidewalk with my back to the traffic. In the diner I ate pancakes and bacon that someone else had shopped for and cooked. More my style. I spent another forty minutes in there. Then I moved on half a block to a French brasserie. More coffee, and a croissant. Someone had left a New York Times on the chair across from me. I read it from end to end. No mention of a manhunt in the city. No mention of Sansom’s Senate race in the national section.

I split the final two hours four separate ways. I moved from a supermarket on the corner of Park and 22nd to a Duane Reade drugstore opposite and then to a CVS pharmacy on Park and 23rd. Visible evidence suggested that the nation spent more on hair care than food. Then at twenty-five minutes to ten I stopped shopping and stepped out to the bright new morning and looped around and took a good long careful look at my destination from the mouth of 24th Street, which was a shadowed anonymous canyon between two huge buildings. I saw nothing that worried me. No unexplained cars, no parked vans, no pairs or trios of dressed-down people with wires in their ears.

So at ten o’clock exactly I stepped into Madison Square Park.

I found Theresa Lee and Jacob Mark side by side on a bench near a dog run. They looked rested but nervous, and stressed, each in their own way. Each for their own reasons, presumably. They were two of maybe a hundred people sitting peacefully in the sun. The park was a rectangle of trees and lawns and paths. It was a small oasis, one block wide and three tall, fenced, surrounded by four busy sidewalks. Parks are reasonably good places for a clandestine rendezvous. Most hunters are attracted by moving targets. Most believe that fugitives stay in motion. Three of a hundred people sitting still while the city swirls around them attract less attention than three of a hundred hustling hard down the street.

Not perfect, but an acceptable risk.

I checked all around one last time and sat down next to Lee. She handed me a newspaper. One of the tabloids I had already seen. The HUNT headline. She said, “It claims we shot three federal agents.”

“We shot four,” I said. “Don’t forget the medical guy.”

“But they make it sound like we used real guns. They make it sound like the guys died.”

“They want to sell papers.”

“We’re in trouble.”

“We knew that already. We didn’t need a journalist to tell us.”

She said, “Docherty came through again. He was texting messages to me all night long, while the phone was off.”

She lifted up off the bench and took a sheaf of paper out of her back pocket. Three sheets of yellowed hotel stationery, folded four ways.

I said, “You took notes?”

She said, “They were long messages. I didn’t want to keep the phone on if there were things I needed to review.”

“So what do we know?”

“The 17th Precinct checked transportation gateways. Standard procedure, after a major crime. Four men left the country three hours after the likely time of death. Through JFK. The 17th is calling them potential suspects. It’s a plausible scenario.”

I nodded.

“The 17th Precinct is right,” I said. “Lila Hoth told me so.”

“You met with her?”

“She called me.”

“On what?”

“Another phone I took from Leonid. He and a pal found me. It didn’t work out exactly how I wanted, but I made some limited contact.”

“She confessed?”

“More or less.”

“So where is she now?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’m guessing somewhere east of Fifth, south of 59th.”

“Why?”

“She used the Four Seasons as a front. Why travel?”

Lee said, “There was a burnt-out rental car in Queens. The 17th thinks the four guys used it to get out of Manhattan. Then they ditched it and used that elevated train thing to get to the airport.”

I nodded again. “Lila said the car they used no longer exists.”

“But here’s the thing,” Lee said. “The four guys didn’t head back to London or Ukraine or Russia. They were routed through to Tajikistan.”

“Which is where?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Those new places confuse me.”

“Tajikistan is right next to Afghanistan. They share a border. Also with Pakistan.”

“You can fly direct to Pakistan.”

“Correct. Therefore either those guys were from Tajikistan, or from Afghanistan itself. Tajikistan is where you go to get into Afghanistan without being too obvious about it. You cross the border in a pick-up truck. Roads are bad, but Kabul is not too far away.”

“OK.”

“And here’s the other thing. Homeland Security has a protocol. Some kind of computer algorithm. They can trace groups of people through similar itineraries and linked bookings. Turns out those four guys entered the country three months ago from Tajikistan, along with some other folks, including two women with passports from Turkmenistan. One was sixty, and the other was twenty-six. They came through immigration together and claimed to be mother and daughter. And Homeland Security is prepared to swear their passports were genuine.”

“OK.”

“So the Hoths were not Ukrainian. Everything they told us was a lie.”

We all chewed on that for twenty long seconds, in silence. I went through all the stuff Lila had told us and deleted it, item by item. Like pulling files from a drawer, and leafing through them, and then pitching them in the trash.

I said, “We saw their passports at the Four Seasons. They looked Ukrainian to me.”

Lee said, “They were phony. Or they would have used them at immigration.”

I said, “Lila had blue eyes.”

Lee said, “I noticed.”

“Where exactly is Turkmenistan?”

“Also next to Afghanistan. A longer border. Afghanistan is surrounded by Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, clockwise from the Gulf.”

“Easier when it was all the Soviet Union.”

“Unless you lived there.”

“Are Turkmenistan and Afghanistan ethnically similar?”

“Probably. All those borders are completely arbitrary. They’re accidents of history. What matters are the tribal divisions. Lines on a map have got nothing to do with it.”

“Are you an expert?”

“The NYPD knows more about that region than the CIA. We have to. We’ve got people over there. We’ve got better intelligence than anyone.”

“Could a person from Afghanistan get a passport from Turkmenistan?”

“By relocating?”

“By asking for help and getting it.”

“From an ethnic sympathizer?”

I nodded. “Maybe under the counter.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Some Afghan people have bright blue eyes. Especially the women. Some weird genetic strand in the population.”

“You think the Hoths are from Afghanistan?”

“They knew a hell of a lot about the conflict with the Soviets. A little dressed up, but they got most of the details right.”

“Maybe they read books.”

“No, they got the feelings right. And the atmosphere. Like the ancient greatcoats. Details like that were not widely available. That’s insider information. In public the Red Army made out it was superbly equipped, for obvious reasons. Our propaganda said the same thing about them, for equally obvious reasons. But it wasn’t true. The Red Army was falling apart. A lot of what the Hoths said sounded like firsthand information to me.”

“So?”

“Maybe Svetlana really did fight there. But on the other side.”

Lee paused a beat. “You think the Hoths are Afghan tribes-women?”

“If Svetlana fought there, but not for the Soviets, then they must be.”

Lee paused again. “In which case Svetlana was telling the whole story from the other side. Everything was inverted. Including the atrocities.”

“Yes,” I said. “She didn’t suffer them. She committed them.”

We all went quiet again, another twenty seconds. I kept my eyes moving all around the park. Look, don’t see, listen, don’t hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive. But nothing jumped out at me. Nothing untoward was happening. People were coming and going, people were taking dogs to the run, a line was forming at a hamburger stand. Early, but every hour of the day or night is lunchtime for someone. It depends on when the day starts. Lee was going through her notes. Jacob Mark was staring at the ground, but his gaze was focused somewhere far below the surface. Finally he leaned forward and turned his head and looked at me. I thought: Here it comes. The big question. The bump in the road.

He asked, “When Lila Hoth called you, did she mention Peter?”

I nodded. “She picked him up in the bar.”

“Why spend four hours doing that?”

“Tradecraft. And for fun and finesse. Because she could.”

“Where is he now?”

“She said he’s here in the city.”

“Is he OK?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“Do you think he’s OK?”

I didn’t answer.

He said, “Talk to me, Reacher.”

I said, “No.”

“No you won’t talk to me?”

“No, I don’t think he’s OK.”

“But he might be.”

“I could be wrong.”

“What did she tell you?”

“I said I wasn’t scared of her, and she said that’s what Peter Molina had said, too. I asked if he was OK, and she said I should come over and find out for myself.”

“So he could be OK.”

“It’s possible. But I think you should be realistic.”

“About what? Why would two Afghan tribeswomen want to mess with Peter?”

“To get to Susan, of course.”

“For what? The Pentagon is supposed to be helping Afghanistan.”

I said, “If Svetlana was a fighting tribeswoman, then she was one of the mujahideen. And when the Russians went home, the mujahideen did not go back to tending their goats. They moved right along. Some of them became the Taliban, and the rest of them became Al Qaeda.”

Chapter 58

Jacob Mark said, “I have to go to the cops about Peter.” He got halfway off the bench before I leaned across Theresa Lee and put my hand on his arm.

“Think hard,” I said.

“What’s to think about? My nephew is a kidnapping victim. He’s a hostage. The woman confessed.”

“Think about what the cops will do. They’ll call the feds immediately. The feds will lock you up again and put Peter on the back burner, because they’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“I have to try.”

“Peter’s dead, Jake. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to face it.”

“There’s still a chance.”

“Then the fastest way to find him is to find Lila. And we can do that better than those feds.”

“You think?”

“Look at their track record. They missed her once, and they let us break out of jail. I wouldn’t send them to look for a book in a library.”

“How the hell do we find her on our own?”

I looked at Theresa Lee. “Did you speak to Sansom?”

She shrugged, like she had good news and bad. She said, “I spoke to him briefly. He said he might want to come up here personally. He said he would call me back to coordinate the where and the when. I said he couldn’t do that, because I was keeping the phone switched off. So he said he would call Docherty’s cell instead, and I should call Docherty and pick up the message. So I did, and Docherty didn’t answer. So I tried the precinct switchboard. The dispatcher said Docherty was unavailable.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it means he just got arrested.”

Which changed everything. I understood that even before Lee got around to spelling it out. She handed me her folded notes. I took them, like receiving the baton in a relay race. I was to go onward, as fast as I could. She was spilling off the track, her race finished. She said, “You understand, right? I have to turn myself in now. He’s my partner. I can’t let him face this madness alone.”

I said, “You thought he would ditch you in a heartbeat.”

“But he didn’t. And I have my own standards, anyway.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Maybe not. But I won’t turn my back on my partner.” “You’re just taking yourself off the board. You can’t help anyone from a jail cell. Outside is always better than inside.”

“It’s different for you. You can be gone tomorrow. I can’t. I live here.”

“What about Sansom? I need a time and a place.” “I don’t have that information. And you should take care with Sansom, anyway. He sounded weird on the phone. I couldn’t tell whether he was real mad or real worried. It’s hard to say whose side he’s going to be on, when and if he gets here.”

Then she gave me Leonid’s first cell phone, and the emergency charger. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, just briefly, just a little. An all-purpose substitute for a hug and a good-luck gesture. And right after that our temporary three-way partnership fell apart completely. Jacob Mark was on his feet even before Lee had started to get up. He said, “I owe it to Peter. OK, they might put me back in a cell, but at least they’ll be out looking for him.”

“We could look for him,” I said.

“We have no resources.”

I looked at them both and asked, “Are you sure about this?”

They were sure about it. They walked away from me, out of the park, to the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, where they stood and craned their necks, looking for a police car, the same way people stand when they are trying to hail a cab. I sat alone for a minute, and then I got up and walked the other way.

Next stop, somewhere east of Fifth and south of 59th.

Chapter 59

Madison Square Park nestles against the south end of Madison Avenue, right where it starts at 23rd Street. Madison Avenue runs straight for a hundred fifteen blocks, to the Madison Avenue Bridge, which leads to the Bronx. You can get to Yankee Stadium that way, although other routes are better. I planned on covering maybe a third of its length, to 59th Street, which was a little north and west of where Lila Hoth had said she wasn’t, on Third and 56th.

It was as good a place to start as any.

I took the bus, which was a slow, lumbering vehicle, which made it a counterintuitive choice for a wild-eyed fugitive, which made it perfect cover for me. Traffic was heavy and we passed plenty of cops, some on foot, some in cars. I looked out the window at them. None of them looked back in at me. A man on a bus is close to invisible.

I stopped being invisible when I got out at 59th Street. Prime retail territory, therefore prime tourist territory, therefore reassuring pairs of policemen on every corner. I took a cross-street over to Fifth and found a line of vendors at the base of Central Park and bought a black T-shirt with New York City written on it, and a pair of counterfeit sunglasses, and a black baseball cap with a red apple on it. I changed shirts in a restroom in a hotel lobby and came back to Madison looking a little different. It was four hours since any on-duty cop had spoken to his watch commander. And people forget a lot in four hours. I figured that tall and khaki shirt would be all that anyone remembered. Nothing I could do about my height, but the new black upper body might let me slide by. Plus the writing on the shirt, and the shades, and the hat, all of which made me look like a regular out-of-town idiot.

Which I was, basically. I had no real clue as to what I was doing. Finding any concealed hideout is difficult. Finding one in a densely-populated big city is close to impossible. I was just quartering random blocks, following a geographic hunch that could have been completely wrong to start with, trying to find reasons to narrow it further. The Four Seasons Hotel. Not adjacent, but comfortably proximate. Which meant what? A two-minute drive? A five-minute walk? In which direction? Not south, I thought. Not across 57th Street, which is a major cross-town thoroughfare. Two-way, six lanes. Always busy. In the micro-geography of Manhattan, 57th Street was like the Mississippi River. An obstacle. A boundary. Much more inviting to slip away to the north, to the quieter, darker blocks beyond.

I watched the traffic and thought: not a two-minute drive. Driving implied a lack of control, a lack of flexibility, and delays, and one-way streets and avenues, and parking difficulties, and potentially memorable vehicles waiting in loading zones, and license plates that could be traced and checked.

Walking was better than driving, in the city, whoever you were.

I took 58th Street, and walked to the hotel’s back entrance. It was just as splendid as the front entrance. There was brass and stone and there were flags flying and porters in uniform and doormen in top hats. There was a long line of limousines waiting at the curb. Lincolns, Mercedes, Maybachs, Rolls-Royces. Well over a million dollars’ worth of automotive product, all crammed into about eighty feet. There was a loading dock, with a gray roll-up door, closed.

I stood next to a bell boy, with my back to the hotel door. Where would I go? Across the street was nothing but a solid line of high buildings. Mostly apartment houses, with the ground floors leased to prestige clients. Directly opposite was an art gallery. I squeezed between two chrome bumpers and crossed the street and glanced at some of the paintings in the window. Then I turned and looked back from the far sidewalk.

To the left of the hotel, on the side nearer Park Avenue, there was nothing very interesting.

Then I looked to the right, along the block as it approached Madison, and I got a new idea.

The hotel itself was recent construction on an insane budget. Neighboring buildings were all quiet and prosperous and solid, some of them old, some of them new. But at the western end of the block there were three old piles in a row. Narrow, single-front, five-story brick, weathered, peeling, spalling, stained, somewhat decrepit. Dirty windows, sagging lintels, flat roofs, weeds along the cornice, old iron fire escapes zigzagging down the top four floors. The three buildings looked like three rotten teeth in a bright smile. One had an old out-of-business restaurant for a ground-floor tenant. One had a hardware store. The third had an enterprise abandoned so long ago I couldn’t tell what it had been. Each had a narrow door set unobtrusively alongside its commercial operation. Two of the doors had multiple bell pushes, signifying apartments. The door next to the old restaurant had a single bell push, signifying a sole occupier for the upper four floors.

Lila Hoth was not a Ukrainian billionaire from London. That had been a lie. So whoever she really was, she had a budget. A generous budget, certainly, to allow for suites in the Four Seasons as and when necessary. But presumably not an infinite budget. And townhouses in Manhattan run to twenty or more million dollars to buy, minimum. And multiple tens of thousands of dollars a month to rent.

Privacy could be achieved much more cheaply in tumbledown mixed-use buildings like the three I was looking at. And maybe there would be other advantages, too. No doormen nearby, fewer prying eyes. Plus maybe a presumption that an operation like a restaurant or a hardware store would get deliveries at all hours of the night and day. Maybe all kinds of random comings and goings could happen without attracting much notice at all.

I moved down the street and stood on the curb opposite the three old piles and stared up at them. People pushed past me in a continuous stream on the sidewalk. I stepped into the gutter, to get out of the way. There were two cops on the far corner of Madison and 57th. Fifty yards away, on a diagonal. They were not looking my way. I looked back at the buildings and reviewed my assumptions in my head. The 6 train at 59th and Lexington was close by. The Four Seasons was close by. Third Avenue and 56th Street was not close by. That’s not close to me. Anonymity was guaranteed. Cost was limited. Five for five. Perfect. So I figured maybe I was looking for a place just like one of the three right in front of me, located somewhere within a fan-shaped five-minute radius east or west of the hotel’s back door. Not north, or Susan Mark would have parked in midtown and aimed to get out of the subway at 68th Street. Not south, because of 57th Street’s psychological barrier. Not somewhere else entirely, because they had used the Four Seasons as a front. Somewhere else entirely, they would have used a different hotel. New York City does not lack for impressive establishments.

Impeccable logic. Maybe too impeccable. Confining, certainly. Because if I stuck with the assumption that Susan Mark would have gotten out at 59th Street and aimed to approach from the north, and that 57th Street was a conceptual barrier to the south, then 58th Street was the whole ballgame, right there. And cross-town blocks in Manhattan take about five minutes to walk. Therefore a five-minute radius left or right out of the hotel’s back door would end on either the exact block where I was currently loitering, or the next one to the east, between Park and Lex. And tumbledown mixed-use properties are rare on blocks like those. Big money chased them away long ago. It was entirely possible I was looking at the only three left standing in the whole of the zip code.

Therefore it was entirely possible I was looking at Lila Hoth’s hideout.

Entirely possible, but most unlikely. I believe in luck as much as the next guy, but I’m not insane.

But I believe in logic too, probably more so than the next guy, and logic had led me to the spot. I went over it all again, and ended up believing myself.

Because of one extra factor.

Which was that the same logic led someone else there, too.

Springfield stepped down into the gutter next to me and said, “You think?”

Chapter 60

Springfield was wearing the same suit I had seen him in before. Gray summer-weight wool, with a silky weave and a slight sheen. It was creased and crumpled, like he slept in it. Which maybe he did.

He said, “You think this is the place?”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy checking all around me. I looked at hundreds of people and dozens of cars. But I saw nothing to worry about. Springfield was alone.

I turned back.

Springfield asked the question again. “You think this is it?”

I asked, “Where’s Sansom?”

“He stayed home.”

“Why?”

“Because this kind of thing is difficult, and I’m better than he is.”

I nodded. It was an article of faith with NCOs that they were better than their officers. And they were usually right. Certainly I had been happy with mine. They had done plenty of good work for me.

I asked, “So what’s the deal?”

“What deal?”

“Between you and me.”

“We don’t have a deal,” he said. “Yet.”

“Are we going to have a deal?”

“We should talk, maybe.”

“Where?”

“Your call,” he said. Which was a good sign. It meant that if there was going to be a trap or an ambush in my immediate future, it was going to be improvised, and therefore not optimally efficient. Maybe even to the point of being survivable.

I asked him, “How well do you know the city?”

“I get by.”

“Make two lefts and go to 57 East 57th. I’ll be ten minutes behind you. I’ll meet you inside.”

“What kind of a place is that?”

“We can get coffee there.”

“OK,” he said. He took one more look at the building with the old restaurant at its base and then he crossed the street diagonally through the traffic and turned left onto Madison Avenue. I went the other way, just as far as the Four Seasons’s back door. The Four Seasons’s back door was right there on 58th Street. It was a block-through building. Which meant its front door was on 57th Street. At 57 East 57th, to be precise. I would be inside about four minutes ahead of Springfield. I would know if he had brought a crew. I would see whether anyone came in before him, or with him, or after him. I walked through to the lobby from the rear and took off my hat and my glasses and stood in a quiet corner and waited.

Springfield came in alone, right on time, which was four minutes later. No time for hurried deployment out on the street. No time for conversation. Probably no time even for a cell phone call. Most people slow their walk a little, dialing and talking.

There was a guy in formal morning dress near the door. A black tail coat, and a silver tie. Not a concierge, not a bell captain. Some kind of a greeter, although his title was probably much grander. He started toward Springfield and Springfield glanced at him once and the guy ducked away like he had been slapped. Springfield had that kind of a face.

He paused a moment and got his bearings and headed for the tea room, where I had once met the Hoths. I stayed in my corner and watched the street door. There was no backup. No plain sedans stopped outside. I gave it ten minutes, and then added two more, just in case. Nothing happened. Just the regular ebb and flow of a high-end city hotel. Rich people came, rich people went. Poor people scurried around and did things for them.

I walked into the tea room and found Springfield in the same chair that Lila Hoth had used. The same dignified old waiter was on duty. He came over. Springfield asked for mineral water. I asked for coffee. The waiter nodded imperceptibly and went away again.

Springfield said, “You met the Hoths here, twice.”

I said, “Once at this exact table.”

“Which is technically a problem. Associating with them in any way at all could be classed as a felony.”

“Because?”

“Because of the Patriot Act.”

“Who are the Hoths, exactly?”

“And running across the subway tracks was also a felony. You could get up to five years in the state pen for that, technically. So they tell me.”

“I also shot four federal agents with darts.”

“No one cares about them.”

“Who are the Hoths?”

“I can’t volunteer information.”

“So why are we here?”

“You help us, we’ll help you.”

“How can you help me?”

“We can make all your felonies disappear.”

“And how can I help you?”

“You can help us find what we lost.”

“The memory stick?”

Springfield nodded. The waiter came back with his tray. Mineral water, and coffee. He arranged things carefully on the table and backed away.

I said, “I don’t know where the memory stick is.”

“I’m sure you don’t. But you got as close to Susan Mark as anyone. And she left the Pentagon with it, and it isn’t in her house or her car or anywhere else she ever went. So we’re hoping you saw something. Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you, but it might to us.”

“I saw her shoot herself. That was about all.”

“There must have been more.”

“You had your chief of staff on the train. What did he see?”

“Nothing.”

“What was on the memory stick?”

“I can’t volunteer information.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“Why do you need to know?”

I said, “I like to know at least the basic shape of the trouble I’m about to get myself into.”

“Then you should ask yourself a question.”

“What question?”

“The one you haven’t asked yet, and the one you should have, right at the start. The key question, you dumbass.”

“What is this? A contest? NCOs against officers?”

“That battle was over long ago.”

So I spooled backward to the beginning, looking for the question I had never asked. The beginning was the 6 train, and passenger number four, on the right side of the car, alone on her eight-person bench, white, in her forties, plain, black hair, black clothes, black bag. Susan Mark, citizen, ex-wife, mother, sister, adoptee, resident of Annandale, Virginia.

Susan Mark, civilian worker at the Pentagon.

I asked, “What exactly was her job?”

Chapter 61

Springfield took a long drink of water and then smiled briefly and said, “Slow, but you got there in the end.”

“So what was her job?”

“She was a systems administrator with responsibility for a certain amount of information technology.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means she knew a bunch of master passwords for the computers.”

“Which computers?”

“Not the important ones. She couldn’t launch missiles or anything. But obviously she was authorized for HRC records. And some of the archives.”

“But not the Delta archives, right? They’re in North Carolina. At Fort Bragg. Not the Pentagon.”

“Computers are networked. Everything is everywhere and nowhere now.”

“And she had access?”

“Human error.”

“What?”

“There was a measure of human error.”

“A measure?”

“There are a lot of systems administrators. They share common problems. They help each other. They have their own chat room, and their own message board. Apparently there was a defective line of code which made individual passwords less opaque than they should have been. So there was some leakage. We think they knew all about it, actually, but they liked it that way. One person could get in and help another person with minimum fuss. Even if the code had been correct, they would probably have deleted it.”

I remembered Jacob Mark saying, She was good with computers.

I said, “So she had access to Delta’s archives?”

Springfield just nodded.

I said, “But you and Sansom quit five years before I did. Nothing was computerized back then. Certainly not the archives.”

“Times change,” Springfield said. “The U.S. Army as we know it is about ninety years old. We’ve got ninety years’ worth of crap all built up. Rusty old weapons that somebody’s grandfather brought back as souvenirs, captured flags and uniforms all moldering away, you name it. Plus literally thousands and thousands of tons of paper. Maybe millions of tons. It’s a practical problem. Fire risk, mice, real estate.”

“So?”

“So they’ve been cleaning house for the last ten years. The artifacts are either sent to museums or trashed, and the documents are scanned and preserved on computers.”

I nodded. “And Susan Mark got in and copied one.”

“More than copied one,” Springfield said. “She extracted one. Transferred it to an external drive, and then deleted the original.”

“The external drive being the memory stick?”

Springfield nodded. “And we don’t know where it is.”

“Why her?”

“Because she fit the bill. The relevant part of the archive was traced through the medal award. HRC people keep the medal records. Like you said. She was the systems administrator. And she was vulnerable through her son.”

“Why did she delete the original?”

“I don’t know.”

“It must have increased the risk.”

“Significantly.”

“What was the document?”

“I can’t volunteer information.”

“When was it dug out of the box room and scanned?”

“A little over three months ago. It’s a slow process. Ten years into the program and they’re only up to the early 1980s.”

“Who does the work?”

“There’s a specialist staff.”

“With a leak. The Hoths were over here more or less immediately.”

“Evidently.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“Steps are being taken.”

“What was the document?”

“I can’t volunteer information.”

“But it was a big file.”

“Big enough.”

“And the Hoths want it.”

“I think that’s clear.”

“Why do they want it?”

“I can’t volunteer information.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I mean it a lot.”

“Who are the Hoths?”

He just smiled and made a circular once again gesture with his hand. I can’t volunteer information. A great NCO’s answer. Four words, the third of which was perhaps the most significant.

I said, “You could ask me questions. I could volunteer guesses. You could comment on them.”

He said, “Who do you think the Hoths are?”

“I think they’re native Afghans.”

He said, “Go on.”

“That’s not much of a comment.”

“Go on.”

“Probably Taliban or Al Qaeda sympathizers, or operatives, or flunkies.”

No reaction.

“Al Qaeda,” I said. “The Taliban mostly stay home.”

“Go on.”

“Operatives,” I said.

No reaction.

“Leaders?”

“Go on.”

“Al Qaeda is using women leaders?”

“They’re using whatever works.”

“Doesn’t seem plausible.”

“That’s what they want us to think. They want us searching for men that don’t exist.”

I said nothing.

“Go on,” he said.

“OK, the one who calls herself Svetlana fought with the mujahideen and knew you captured the VAL rifle from Grigori Hoth. They used Hoth’s name and his story to get sympathy over here.”

“Because?”

“Because now Al Qaeda wants documentary proof of whatever else it was that you guys were doing that night.”

“Go on.”

“Which Sansom got a big medal for. So it must have looked pretty good, once upon a time, way back when. But now you’re worried about exposure. So I’m assuming it wouldn’t look so good anymore.”

“Go on.”

“Sansom is miserable, but the government has got its panties in a wad, too. So it’s both personal and political.”

“Go on.”

“Did you get a medal that night?”

“The Superior Service Medal.”

“Which comes directly from the Secretary of Defense.”

Springfield nodded. “A nice little bauble, for a lowly sergeant.”

“So the trip was more political than military.”

“Obviously. We weren’t officially at war with anyone at the time.”

“You know the Hoths killed four people, and probably Susan Mark’s son too, right?”

“We don’t know it. But we suspect it.”

“So why haven’t you busted them?”

“I work security for a Congressman. I can’t bust anyone.”

“Those feds could.”

“Those feds work in mysterious ways. Apparently they consider the Hoths to be A-grade enemy combatants, and a very significant target, and extremely dangerous, but not currently operational.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means that right now there’s more to be gained by leaving them in place.”

“Which actually means they can’t find them.”

“Of course.”

“You happy about that?”

“The Hoths don’t have the memory stick, or they wouldn’t still be looking for it. So I don’t really care either way.”

“I think you should,” I said.

“You think that’s their place? Where you were?”

“This block or the next.”

“I think this one,” he said. “Those feds searched their hotel suite. While they were out.”

“Lila told me.”

“They had shopping bags. Like window dressing. To make the place look right.”

“I saw them.”

“Two from Bergdorf Goodman, and two from Tiffany. Those stores are close together, about a block from those old buildings. If their base was on the block east of Park, they’d have gone to Bloomingdales instead. Because they weren’t really shopping. They just wanted accessories in their suite, to fool people.”

“Good point,” I said.

“Don’t go looking for the Hoths,” Springfield said.

“You worried about me now?”

“You could lose two ways around. They’re going to think the same as us, that even if you don’t have the stick, then somehow you know where it went. And they might be even more vicious and persuasive than we are.”

“And?”

“They might actually tell you what’s on it. In which case from our point of view you would become a loose end.”

“How bad is it?”

“I’m not ashamed. But Major Sansom would be embarrassed.”

“And the United States.”

“That too.”

The waiter came back and inquired as to whether we needed anything else. Springfield said yes. He reordered for both of us. Which meant he had more to talk about. He said, “Run down exactly what happened on the train.”

“Why weren’t you there, instead of the chief of staff? It was more like your line of work than his.”

“It came on us fast. I was in Texas, with Sansom. Raising money. We didn’t have time for proper deployment.”

“Why didn’t the feds have someone on the train?”

“They did. They had two people on the train. Two women. Undercover, borrowed from the FBI. Special Agents Rodriguez and Mbele. You blundered into the wrong car and rode with them all the way.”

“They were good,” I said. And they were. The Hispanic woman, small, hot, tired, her supermarket bag wrapped around her wrist. The West African woman in the batik dress. “They were very good. But how did you all know she was going to take that train?”

“We didn’t,” Springfield said. “It was a huge operation. A big scramble. We knew she was in a car. So we had people waiting at the tunnels. The idea was to follow her from there, to wherever she was going.”

“Why wasn’t she arrested on the Pentagon steps?”

“There was a short debate. Those feds won it. They wanted to roll up the whole chain in one go. And they might have.”

“If I hadn’t screwed it up.”

“You said it.”

“She didn’t have the memory stick. So nothing was going to get rolled up anyway.”

“She left the Pentagon with it, and it isn’t in her house or her car.”

“You sure about that?”

“Her house has been torn down to the slab and I could eat the largest remaining part of her car.”

“How well did they search the subway train?”

“Car number 7622 is still in the yards at 207th Street. They say it might take a month or more to rebuild.”

“What the hell was on that memory stick?”

Springfield didn’t answer.

One of the captured phones in my pocket started to vibrate.

Chapter 62

I pulled all three phones out of my pocket and laid them on the table. One of them was skittering around, an eighth of an inch at a time. Vigorous vibration. Its window said Restricted Call. I opened it up and put it to my ear and said, “Hello?”

Lila Hoth asked, “Are you still in New York?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Are you near the Four Seasons?”

I said, “Not very.”

“Go there now. I left a package for you at the desk.”

I asked, “When?”

But the line went dead.

I glanced at Springfield and said, “Wait here.” Then I hustled out to the lobby. Saw no retreating back heading for the door. The scene was tranquil. The greeter in the tail coat was standing idle. I walked to the desk and gave my name and asked if they were holding anything for me. A minute later I had an envelope in my hands. It had my name handwritten across the front in thick black letters. It had Lila Hoth’s name up in the top left corner, where the return address would be. I asked the desk clerk when it had been delivered. He said more than an hour ago.

I asked, “Did you see who dropped it off?”

“A foreign gentleman.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“No, sir.”

The envelope was padded, about six inches by nine. It was light. It had something stiff in it. Round, and maybe five inches in diameter. I carried it back to the tea room and sat down again with Springfield. He said, “From the Hoths?”

I nodded.

He said, “It could be full of anthrax spores.”

“Feels more like a CD,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Afghan folk music, maybe.”

“I hope not,” he said. “I’ve heard Afghan folk music. At length and up close.”

“You want me to wait to open it?”

“Until when?”

“Until you’re out of range.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

So I tore open the envelope and shook it. A single disc spilled out and made a plastic sound against the wood of the table.

“A CD,” I said.

“A DVD actually,” Springfield said.

It was home-made. It was a blank disc manufactured by Memorex. The words Watch This had been written across the label side with a black permanent marker. Same handwriting as the envelope. Same pen. Lila Hoth’s handwriting and Lila Hoth’s pen, presumably.

I said, “I don’t have a DVD player.”

“So don’t watch it.”

“I think I have to.”

“What happened on the train?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can play DVDs on a computer. Like people watch movies on their laptops on airplanes.”

“I don’t have a computer.”

“Hotels have computers.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

“There are other hotels in the city.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Sheraton. Where we were before.”

So Springfield paid our tea-room bill with a platinum credit card and we walked from the Four Seasons to the Sheraton. The second time I had made that trip. It took just as long. Crowded sidewalks, people moving slow in the heat. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and very warm. I was watching for cops the whole way, which didn’t aid our progress. But we got there in the end. The plasma screen in the lobby listed a whole bunch of events. The ballroom was booked by a trade association. Something to do with cable television. Which made me think of the National Geographic Channel, and the silverback gorilla.

Springfield opened the door to the business center with his key card. He didn’t come in with me. He told me he would wait in the lobby, and then he walked away. Three of the four work stations were occupied. Two women, one man, all of them in dark suits, all of them with leather briefcases propped open and spilling paper. I took the empty chair and set about trying to figure out how to play a DVD on a computer. I found a slot on the tower unit that looked fit for the purpose. I pushed the disc in and met with some temporary resistance and then a motor whirred and the unit sucked at the disc and pulled it from my grasp.

Nothing much happened for five seconds. Just a lot of stopping and starting and whirring. Then a big window opened on the screen. It was blank. But it had a graphic in the bottom corner. Like a picture of a DVD player’s buttons. Play, pause, fast forward, rewind, skip. I moved the mouse and the pointer arrow changed to a chubby little hand as it passed over the buttons.

The phone in my pocket started to vibrate.

Chapter 63

I took the phone out of my pocket and opened it up. Glanced around the room. My three temporary colleagues were all hard at work. One had a bar chart on her screen. Columns of bold bright colors, some of them high, some of them low. The man was reading e-mail. The other woman was typing fast.

I put the phone to my ear and said, “Hello.”

Lila Hoth asked, “Have you got it yet?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Have you watched it yet?”

“No.”

“I think you should.”

“Why?”

“You’ll find it educational.”

I glanced again at the occupants of the room and asked, “Is there sound on it?”

“No, it’s a silent movie. Unfortunately. It would be better with sound.”

I didn’t answer.

She asked, “Where are you?”

“In a hotel business center.”

“The Four Seasons?”

“No.”

“Are there computers in the business center?”

“Yes.”

“You can play a DVD on a computer, you know.”

“So I was told.”

“Can anyone else see the screen?”

I didn’t answer.

“Play it,” she said. “I’ll stay on the line. I’ll do a commentary. Like a special edition.”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “Like a director’s cut,” and laughed a little.

I moved the mouse and put the chubby little hand over the play button. It waited there, patiently.

I clicked the mouse.

The tower unit made more whirring sounds and the blank window on the screen lit up and showed two distorted horizontal lines. They flashed twice and then the picture settled to a wide-angle view of an open outdoor space. It was night. The camera was steady. Mounted high on a tripod, I guessed. The scene was brightly lit by harsh halogen lights just out of shot. The color was raw. The space looked foreign. Beaten earth, a dark khaki tone. Small stones and one large rock. The rock was flat, bigger than a king-sized bed. It had been drilled and fitted with four iron rings. One at each corner.

There was a naked man tied to the rings. He was short and thin and wiry. He had olive skin and a black beard. He was maybe thirty years old. He was on his back, stretched into a wide X shape. The camera was positioned maybe a yard from his feet. At the top of the picture his head was jerking from side to side. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. Tendons in his neck stood out like ropes.

He was screaming, but I couldn’t hear him.

It was a silent movie.

Lila Hoth spoke in my ear.

She asked, “What are you seeing?”

I said, “A guy on a slab.”

“Keep watching.”

“Who is he?”

“He was a taxi driver who ran an errand for an American journalist.”

The camera angle was about forty-five degrees, I guessed. It made the taxi driver’s feet look large and his head look small. He thrashed and bucked for a whole minute. He was raising his head and banging it down on the rock. Trying to knock himself out. Or trying to kill himself, maybe. No luck. A slender figure ducked into the shot at the top of the frame and slipped a folded square of cloth under the guy’s head. The figure was Lila Hoth. No question about it. The video definition was not great, but there was no mistaking her. The hair, the eyes, the way she moved.

The square of cloth was probably a towel.

I said, “I just saw you.”

“With the pad? It’s necessary, to avoid self-inflicted injury. And it puts their heads at an angle. It tempts them to look.”

“At what?”

“Keep watching.”

I glanced around the room. My three temporary colleagues were all still working. They were all focused hard on their own business.

On my screen nothing happened for close to twenty seconds. The taxi driver wailed away, silently. Then Svetlana Hoth stepped into the frame from the side. She was unmistakable, too. The fireplug body, the blunt steel-gray hair.

She had a knife in her hand.

She crawled up on the rock and squatted beside the guy. She stared up at the camera for a long second. Not vanity. She was judging its angle, trying not to block its view. She adjusted her position until she was crouching unobtrusively in the angle made by the guy’s left arm and the side of his chest.

The guy was staring at the knife.

Svetlana leaned forward and to her right and placed the tip of the blade on a spot about half-way between the guy’s groin and his navel. She pressed down. The guy jerked uncontrollably. A fat worm of blood welled out of the cut. The blood looked black under the lights. The guy screamed on and on. I could see that his mouth was forming words. No! and Please! are clear in any language.

“Where was this?” I asked.

Lila Hoth said, “Not far from Kabul.”

Svetlana moved the blade up toward the guy’s navel. Blood chased it all the way. She kept it moving. Like a surgeon or a wholesale butcher, casual and practiced and expert. She had made similar cuts many times before. The blade kept on moving. It stopped above the guy’s sternum.

Svetlana put the knife down.

She used her index finger and traced the line of the cut. Blood lubricated its progress. She pressed down and put her finger right in the cut, to the first knuckle. She slid it up and down. She paused occasionally.

Lila Hoth said, “She’s checking that she’s all the way through the muscle wall.”

I said, “How do you know? You can’t see these pictures.”

“I can hear your breathing.”

Svetlana picked up the knife again and returned to the places where her finger had paused. She used the tip of the blade quite delicately and nicked through what seemed to be minor obstructions.

Then she sat back.

The taxi driver’s belly was open, like a zipper had been pulled. The long straight cut gaped a little. The wall of muscle was ruptured. It was no longer able to hold back the pressure from inside.

Svetlana rocked forward again. She used both hands. She worked them into the cut and parted the skin quite carefully and rooted around inside. She was in there up to her wrists. She tensed and squared her shoulders.

She lifted out the guy’s intestines.

They made a shining, glistening pink mass about the size of a soft soccer ball. Coiled, sloppy, moving, wet and steaming.

She laid the mass on the guy’s chest, quite gently.

Then she slid off the rock and stepped out of the frame.

The camera’s unblinking eye stared on.

The taxi driver looked down in horror.

Lila Hoth said, “Now it’s just a matter of time. The cut doesn’t kill them. We don’t sever any important vessels. The bleeding stops quite fast. It’s about pain and shock and infection. The strong ones resist all three. They die of hypothermia, we think. Their core temperature is compromised, obviously. It depends on the weather. Our record is eighteen hours. People say they’ve seen two full days, but I don’t believe them.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“That’s what Peter Molina said.”

“He saw this?”

“He’s on it. Keep watching. Fast forward, if you like. Without the sound it’s not so much fun anyway.”

I checked all around the room again. Three people, working hard. I put the fat hand on the fast forward button and clicked. The picture leapt into fast motion. The taxi driver’s head moved back and forth through a tiny jerky arc.

Lila Hoth said, “Normally we don’t do this one at a time. It’s better to have a sequence. The second guy waits until the first guy dies, and so on. It builds up the dread. You should see them, just willing the previous guy to live a minute longer. But eventually they die, and the spotlight moves on. That’s when they have heart attacks. You know, if they’re going to. If they’re susceptible. But we can’t always arrange a live sequence. That’s why we use the video now, for an approximation.”

I wanted to tell her she was crazy again, but I didn’t, because she would have told me about Peter Molina again.

“Keep watching,” she said.

The picture spooled onward. The taxi driver’s arms and legs twitched. Strange brittle movements, at double speed. His head rolled left and right.

Lila Hoth said, “Peter Molina saw all of this. He was willing the guy to hold on. Which was strange, because of course the guy died months ago. But that’s the effect. Like I told you, the video is a fair equivalent.”

“You’re sick,” I said. “You’re also dead. You know that? Like you just stepped out in the road. The truck hasn’t hit you yet, but it’s going to.”

“Are you the truck?”

“You bet your ass.”

“I’m glad. Keep watching.”

I clicked the fast forward button again and again, and the picture sped up to four times normal speed, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two. Time rushed by. An hour. Ninety minutes. Then the image went perfectly still. The taxi driver stopped moving. He lay completely inert for a long time and then Lila Hoth rushed into the frame. I hit the play button to get back to normal speed. Lila bent near the guy’s head and felt for a pulse. Then she raised her head and smiled a happy smile.

Straight at the camera.

Straight at me.

On the phone she asked, “Is it over yet?”

I said, “Yes.”

“A disappointment. He didn’t last long. He was sick. He had parasites. Worms. We could see them writhing in his guts the whole time. It was disgusting. I guess they died too. Parasites die if their host dies.”

“Like you’re going to die.”

“We’re all going to die, Reacher. The only questions are when and how.”

Behind me one of the business executives got up and headed for the door. I turned in my chair and tried to keep my body between him and the screen. I don’t think I succeeded. He looked at me strangely and left the room.

Or maybe he had heard my end of the phone conversation.

“Keep watching,” Lila said in my ear.

I hit fast forward again. The taxi driver lay dead near Kabul for a spell and then the picture shut down and was replaced by a flurry of video noise. Then it opened up on a new scene. I hit play. Normal speed. An interior. Same kind of harsh light. Impossible to say whether it was night or day. Impossible to say where it was. A basement, maybe. Floor and walls seemed to be painted white. There was a broad stone slab, like a table. Smaller than the Afghan rock. Rectangular, manufactured for a purpose. Part of an old kitchen, possibly.

A huge young man was tied to the slab.

He was maybe half my age and twenty percent bigger all around.

He’s three hundred pounds of muscle, Jacob Mark had said. He’s going to the NFL.

Lila Hoth asked, “Do you see him yet?”

“I see him.”

He was naked. Very white under the lights. Different in every way from the Kabul taxi driver. Pale skin, tousled fair hair. No beard. But he was moving just the same. His head was jerking back and forth and he was screaming words. No! and Please! are recognizable in any language. And this was English. I could lip read quite easily. I could even sense the tone. Disbelief, mainly. The kind of tone a person uses when what was assumed to be an empty threat or even a cruel joke turns out to have been deadly serious.

I said, “I’m not going to watch this.”

Lila Hoth said, “You should. Or you’ll never be sure. Maybe we let him go.”

“When was this?”

“We set a deadline and we kept it.”

I didn’t reply.

“Watch it.”

“No.”

She said, “But I want you to watch it. I need you to watch it. It’s a question of maintaining the sequence. Because I think you’re going to be next.”

“Think again.”

“Watch it.”

I watched it. Maybe we let him go. You’ll never be sure.

They didn’t let him go.

Chapter 64

Afterward I hung up the phone and put the DVD in my pocket and made it to the lobby restroom and threw up in a stall. Not really because of the pictures. I have seen worse. But because of anger and fury and frustration. All those corrosive emotions boiled up inside me and had to find some release. I rinsed my mouth and washed my face and drank some water from the tap and stood for a moment in front of the mirror.

Then I emptied my pockets. I kept my cash, and my passport, and my ATM card, and my subway card, and Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I kept my toothbrush. I kept the phone that had rung. I dumped the other two phones in the trash, with the emergency charger, and the business card from the four dead guys, and the notes Theresa Lee had made from her partner’s messages.

I dumped the DVD, too.

And the Radio Shack memory stick, pink sleeve and all.

I didn’t need a decoy anymore.

Then, cleansed, I headed out to see if Springfield was still around.

He was. He was in the lobby bar, in a chair, with his back to a right-angle corner. He had a glass of water on the table in front of him. He was relaxed, but he was watching everything. You can take the man out of Special Forces, and so on and so forth. He saw me coming. I sat down next to him. He asked, “Was it folk music?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was folk music.”

“On a DVD?”

“There was some dancing, too.”

“I don’t believe you. You’ve gone all pale. Afghan folk dancing is pretty bad, I know, but it ain’t that bad.”

“It was two guys,” I said. “They had their bellies slit open and their guts lifted out.”

“Live on camera?”

“And then dead on camera.”

“Soundtrack?”

“Silent.”

“Who were the guys?”

“One was a taxi driver from Kabul and the other was Susan Mark’s son.”

“I don’t take taxis in Kabul. I prefer my own transportation. But it sucks for USC. They’re down a defensive tackle. Hard to find. I checked him out. Great feet, they say.”

“Not anymore.”

“Are the Hoths on the tape?”

I nodded. “Like a confession.”

“Doesn’t matter. They know we’re going to kill them anyway. Doesn’t really matter what we kill them for.”

“It matters to me.”

“Wise up, Reacher. That was the whole point of sending you the package. They want to make you mad and suck you in. They can’t find you. So they want you to come find them.”

“Which I will.”

“Your future plans are your business. But you need to take care. You need to understand. Because this has been their tactic for two hundred years. That’s why their abuse was always within earshot of the front lines. They wanted to bring out the rescue parties. Or provoke revenge attacks. They wanted a never-ending supply of prisoners. Ask the British. Or the Russians.”

“I’ll take plenty of care.”

“I’m sure you’ll try. But you’re not going anywhere until we’ve finished with you, about the train.”

“Your guy saw what I saw.”

“It’s in your interests to help us.”

“Not so far. All I have is promises.”

“All charges will be dropped when we have the memory stick in our possession.”

“Not good enough.”

“You want it in writing?”

“No, I want the charges dropped now. I need some freedom of action here. I can’t be looking out for cops the whole time.”

“Freedom of action for what?”

“You know what.”

“OK, I’ll do what I can.”

“Not good enough.”

“I can’t give you guarantees. All I can do is try.”

“What are the chances you can succeed?”

“None at all. But Sansom can.”

“Are you authorized to speak for him?”

“I’ll have to call him.”

“Tell him no more bullshit, OK? We’re past that stage now.”

“OK.”

“And talk to him about Theresa Lee and Jacob Mark, too. And Docherty. I want a clean slate for all of them.”

“OK.”

“And Jacob Mark is going to need counseling. Especially if he sees a copy of that DVD.”

“He won’t.”

“But I want him looked after. The ex-husband, as well. Molina.”

“OK.”

“Two more things,” I said.

“You drive a hard bargain, for a guy with nothing to offer.”

“Homeland Security traced the Hoths coming in from Tajikistan with their crew. Three months ago. Some kind of a computer algorithm. I want to know how many people were in the party.”

“To estimate the size of the opposing force?” “Exactly.” “And?”

“I want to meet with Sansom again.” “Why?”

“I want him to tell me what is on that memory stick.” “Not going to happen.”

“Then he doesn’t get it back. I’ll keep it and take a look for myself.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You’ve actually got the stick?”

“No,” I said. “But I know where it is.”

Chapter 65

Springfield asked, “Where is it?”

I said, “I can’t volunteer information.”

“You’re full of shit.”

I shook my head. “Not this time.”

“You sure? You can take us there?”

“I can get you within fifteen feet. The rest is up to you.”

“Why? Is it buried? In a bank vault? In a house?”

“None of the above.”

“So where is it?”

“Call Sansom,” I said. “Set up a meeting.”

Springfield finished what was left of his water and a waiter came by with the check. Springfield paid with his platinum card, the same way he had for both of us at the Four Seasons. Which I had taken to be a good sign. It had indicated a positive dynamic. So I chose to push my luck a little further.

“Want to get me a room?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because it’s going to take time for Sansom to get me off the most-wanted list. And I’m tired. I was up all night. I want to take a nap.”

Ten minutes later we were on a high floor, in a room with a queen-sized bed. A nice space, but tactically unsatisfactory. Like all high-floor hotel rooms it had a window that was no good to me and therefore only one way out. I could see that Springfield was thinking the same thing. He was thinking I was a lunatic to put myself in there.

I asked him, “Can I trust you?”

He said, “Yes.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Give me your gun.”

“I’m not armed.”

“Answers like that don’t help with the trust thing.”

“Why do you want it?”

“You know why. So if you bring the wrong people to my door I can defend myself.”

“I won’t.”

“Reassure me.”

He stood still for a long moment. I knew he would rather stick a needle in his eye than give up his weapon. But he ran some calculations in his head and reached around under his suit coat to the small of his back and came out with a nine-millimeter Steyr GB pistol. The Steyr GB had been the sidearm of choice for 1980s-era U.S. Special Forces. He reversed it and handed it to me butt-first. It was a fine old piece, well worn but well maintained. It had eighteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

“Thank you,” I said.

He didn’t reply. Just walked out of the room. I double-locked the door after him, and put the chain on, and propped a chair under the handle. I emptied my pockets on the night stand. I put my clothes under the mattress to press. I took a long hot shower.

Then I lay down and went to sleep, with Springfield’s gun under the pillow.

I was woken up four hours later by a knock at the door. I don’t like to look through spy holes in hotel doors. Too vulnerable. All an assailant in the corridor has to do is wait until the lens darkens and then fire a gun straight through it. Even a silenced .22 would be completely lethal. There is nothing very substantial between the cornea and the brain stem. But there was a full-length mirror on the wall inside the door. For last-minute clothing checks, I guessed, before going out. I took a towel from the bathroom and wrapped it around my waist and collected the gun from under the pillow. I moved the chair and opened the door against the chain. Stood back on the hinge side and checked the view in the mirror.

Springfield, and Sansom.

It was a narrow crack and the image was reversed by the mirror and the corridor lighting was dim, but I recognized them easily enough. They were alone, as far as I could tell. And they were going to stay alone, unless they had brought more than nineteen people with them. No safety catch on the Steyr. Just a hefty double-action pull for the first shot, and then eighteen more. I took the slack out of the trigger and the chain off the door.

They were alone.

They came in, Sansom first, and then Springfield. Sansom looked the same as the morning I first saw him. Tanned, rich, powerful, full of energy and charisma. He was in a navy suit with a white shirt and a red tie and he looked as fresh as a daisy. He took the chair I had been using under the door handle and carried it back to the table near the window and sat down. Springfield closed the door and put the chain back on. I kept hold of the gun. I nudged the mattress off the box spring with my knee and pulled my clothes out one-handed.

“Two minutes,” I said. “Talk among yourselves.”

I dressed in the bathroom and came back out and Sansom asked, “Do you really know where that memory stick is?”

“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”

“Why do you want to know what’s on it?”

“Because I want to know how embarrassing it is.”

“You don’t want me in the Senate?”

“I don’t care how you spend your time. I’m curious, that’s all.”

He asked, “Why won’t you tell me where it is right now?”

“Because I have something else to do first. And I need you to keep the cops out of my hair while I’m doing it. So I need a way of keeping your mind on the job.”

“You could be conning me.”

“I could be, but I’m not.”

He said nothing back.

I asked, “Why do you want to be in the Senate anyway?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You were a good soldier and now you’re richer than God. Why not go live on the beach?”

“These things are a way of keeping score. I’m sure you have your own way of keeping score.”

I nodded. “I compare the number of answers I get to the number of questions I ask.”

“And how are you doing with that?”

“Lifetime average close to a thousand.”

“Why ask at all? If you know where the stick is, just go get it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s going to take more resources than I could mobilize.”

“Where is it?”

I didn’t answer.

“Is it here in New York?”

I didn’t answer.

He asked, “Is it secure?”

I said, “It’s safe enough.”

“Can I trust you?”

“Plenty of people have.”

“And?”

“I think most of them would be willing to give me a character reference.”

“And the others?”

“There’s no pleasing some folks.”

He said, “I saw your service record.”

I said, “You told me that.”

“It was mixed.”

“I tried my best. But I had a mind of my own.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I got bored. You?”

“I got old.”

“What is on that stick?”

He didn’t answer. Springfield was standing mute, in the lee of the TV cabinet, closer to the door than the window. Pure habit, I guessed. Simple reflex. He was invisible to a potential external sniper and close enough to the corridor to be all over an intruder the second the door swung open. Training stays with a person. Especially Delta training. I stepped over and gave him his gun back. He took it without a word and put it in his waistband.

Sansom said, “Tell me what you know so far.”

I said, “You were airlifted from Bragg to Turkey, and then Oman. Then India, probably. Then Pakistan, and the North West Frontier.”

He nodded and said nothing. He had a faraway look in his eyes. I guessed he was reliving the journey in his mind. Transport planes, helicopters, trucks, long miles on foot.

All long ago.

“Then Afghanistan,” I said.

“Go on,” he said.

“Probably you stayed on the flank of the Abas Ghar and headed south and west, following the line of the Korengal Valley, maybe a thousand feet from the floor.”

“Go on.”

“You stumbled over Grigori Hoth and took his rifle and let him wander away.”

“Go on.”

“Then you kept on walking, to wherever it was you had been ordered to go.”

He nodded.

I said, “That’s all I know so far.”

He asked, “Where were you in March of 1983?”

“West Point.”

“What was the big news?”

“The Red Army was trying to stop the bleeding.”

He nodded again. “It was an insane campaign. No one has ever beaten the tribesmen in the North West Frontier. Not in the whole of history. And they had our own experience in Vietnam to study. Some things just can’t be done. It was a slow-motion meat grinder. Like getting pecked to death by birds. We were very happy about it, obviously.”

“We helped,” I said.

“We sure did. We gave the mujahideen everything they wanted. For free.”

“Like Lend-Lease.”

“Worse,” Sansom said. “Lend-Lease was about helping friends that happened to be bankrupt at the time. The mujahideen were not bankrupt. Quite the reverse. There were all kinds of weird tribal alliances that stretched all the way to Saudi. The mujahideen had more money than we did, practically.”

“And?”

“When you’re in the habit of giving people everything they want, it’s very hard to stop.”

“What more did they want?”

“Recognition,” he said. “Tribute. Acknowledgment. Courtesy. Face time. It’s hard to know exactly how to characterize it.”

“So what was the mission?”

“Can we trust you?”

“You want to get the file back?”

“Yes.”

“So what was the mission?”

“We went to see the mujahideen’s top boy. Bearing gifts. All kinds of gaudy trinkets, from Ronald Reagan himself. We were his personal envoys. We had a White House briefing. We were told to pucker up and kiss ass at every possible opportunity.”

“And did you?”

“You bet.”

“It was twenty-five years ago.”

“So?”

“So who cares anymore? It’s a detail of history. And it worked, anyway. It was the end of Communism.”

“But it wasn’t the end of the mujahideen. They stayed in business.”

“I know,” I said. “They became the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But that’s a detail, too. Voters in North Carolina aren’t going to remember the history. Most voters can’t remember what they had for breakfast.”

“Depends,” Sansom said.

“On what?”

“Name recognition.”

“What name?”

“The Korengal was where the action was. Just a small salient, but that was where the Red Army met its end. The mujahideen there were doing a really fine job. Therefore the local mujahideen leader there was a really big deal. He was a rising star. He was the one we were sent to meet. And we did. We met with him.”

“And you kissed his ass?”

“Every which way we could.”

“Who was he?”

“He was a fairly impressive guy, initially. Young, tall, good-looking, very intelligent, very committed. And very rich, by the way. Very connected. He came from a billionaire family in Saudi. His father was a friend of Reagan’s Vice President. But the guy himself was a revolutionary. He quit the easy life for the cause.”

“Who was he?”

“Osama bin Laden.”

Chapter 66

The room stayed quiet for a long moment. Just muted city sounds from the window, and the hiss of air from a vent above the bathroom. Springfield moved away from his position by the TV cabinet and sat down on the bed.

I said, “Name recognition.”

Sansom said, “It’s a bitch.”

“You got that right.”

“Tell me about it.”

“But it’s a big file,” I said.

“So?”

“So it’s a long report. And we’ve all read army reports.”

“And?”

“They’re very dry.” Which they were. Take Springfield’s Steyr GB, for instance. The army had tested it. It was a miracle of modern engineering. Not only did it work exactly like it should, it also worked exactly like it shouldn’t. It had a complex gas-delayed blow-back system that meant it could be loaded with substandard or elderly or badly assembled rounds and still fire. Most guns have problems with variable gas pressures. Either they blow up with too much or fail to cycle with too little. But the Steyr could handle anything. Which was why Special Forces loved it. They were often far from home with no logistics, forced to rely on whatever they could scrounge up locally. The Steyr GB was a metal marvel.

The army report called it technically acceptable.

I said, “Maybe they didn’t mention you by name. Maybe they didn’t mention him by name. Maybe it was all acronyms, for Delta leader and local commander, all buried in three hundred pages of map references.”

Sansom said nothing.

Springfield looked away.

I asked, “What was he like?”

Sansom said, “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. My whole life counts for nothing now, except I’m the guy who kissed Osama bin Laden’s ass. That’s all anyone will ever remember.”

“But what was he like?”

“He was a creep. He was clearly committed to killing Russians, which we were happy about at first, but pretty soon we realized he was committed to killing everyone who wasn’t exactly the same as him. He was weird. He was a psychopath. He smelled bad. It was a very uncomfortable weekend. My skin was crawling the whole time.”

“You were there a whole weekend?”

“Honored guests. Except not really. He was an arrogant son of a bitch. He lorded it over us the whole time. He lectured us on tactics and strategy. Told us how he would have won in Vietnam. We had to pretend to be impressed.”

“What gifts did you give him?”

“I don’t know what they were. They were wrapped. He didn’t open them. Just tossed them in a corner. He didn’t care. Like they say at weddings, our presence was present enough. He thought he was proving something to the world. The Great Satan was bending its knee before him. I nearly puked a dozen times. And not just because of the food.”

“You ate with him?”

“We were staying in his tent.”

“Which will be called their HQ in the report. The language will be very neutral. The ass-kissing won’t be mentioned. It will be three hundred tedious pages about a rendezvous attempted and a rendezvous kept. People will die of boredom before you’re halfway over the Atlantic. Why are you so worried?”

“The politics is awful. The Lend-Lease thing. Inasmuch as bin Laden wasn’t dipping into his own personal fortune, it’s like we were subsidizing him. Paying him, almost.”

“Not your fault. That’s White House stuff. Did any sea captain get it in the neck for delivering Lend-Lease stuff to the Soviets during World War Two? They didn’t stay our friends, either.”

Sansom said nothing.

I said, “It’s just words on a page. They won’t resonate. People don’t read.”

Sansom said, “It’s a big file.”

“The bigger the better. The bigger it is, the more buried the bad parts will be. And it will be very dated. I think we used to spell his name differently back then. With a u. It was Usama. Or UBL. Maybe people won’t even notice. Or you could say it was someone else entirely.”

“You sure you know where that stick is?”

“Certain.”

“Because you sound like you don’t. You sound like you’re trying to console me, because you know it’s staying out there for the world to see.”

“I know where it is. I’m just trying to get a handle on why you’re so uptight. People have survived worse.”

“You ever used a computer?”

“I used one today.”

“What makes for the biggest files?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“Long documents?”

“Wrong. Large numbers of pixels make for the biggest files.”

“Pixels?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“OK,” I said. “I see. It’s not a report. It’s a photograph.”

Chapter 67

The room went quiet again. The city sounds, the forced air. Sansom got up and used the bathroom. Springfield moved back to his former position by the TV cabinet. There were bottles of water on the cabinet, with paper collars that said if you drank the water you would be charged eight dollars.

Sansom came out of the bathroom.

“Reagan wanted the photograph,” he said. “Partly because he was a sentimental old geezer, and partly because he was a suspicious old man. He wanted to check we had followed his orders. The way I remember it, I’m standing next to bin Laden with the mother of all shit-eating grins on my face.”

Springfield said, “With me on the other side.”

Sansom said, “Bin Laden knocked down the Twin Towers. He attacked the Pentagon. He’s the world’s worst terrorist. He’s a very, very recognizable figure. He’s completely unmistakable. That photograph will kill me in politics. Stone dead. Forever.”

I asked, “Is that why the Hoths want it?”

He nodded. “So that Al Qaeda can humiliate me, and the United States along with me. Or vice versa.”

I stepped over to the TV cabinet and took a bottle of water. Unscrewed the cap and took a long drink. The room was on Springfield’s card, which meant that Sansom was paying. And Sansom could afford eight bucks.

Then I smiled, briefly.

“Hence the photograph in your book,” I said. “And on your office wall. Donald Rumsfeld with Saddam Hussein, in Baghdad.”

“Yes,” Sansom said.

“Just in case. To show that someone else had done the very same thing. Like a trump card, just lying there in the weeds. No one knew it was a trump. No one even knew it was a card.”

“It’s not a trump,” Sansom said. “It’s not even close. It’s like a lousy four of clubs. Because bin Laden is way worse than Saddam ever was. And Rumsfeld wasn’t looking to get elected to anything afterward. He was appointed to everything he did after that, by his friends. He had to be. No sane person would have voted for him.”

“You got friends?”

“Not many.”

“No one ever said much about Rumsfeld’s photograph.”

“Because he wasn’t running for office. If he had ever gotten into an election campaign, that would have been the most famous photograph in the world.”

“You’re a better man than Rumsfeld.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Educated guess.”

“OK, maybe. But bin Laden is worse than Saddam. And that image is poison. It doesn’t even need a caption. There I am, grinning up at the world’s most evil man like a puppy dog. People fake pictures like that for attack ads. And this one is real.”

“You’ll get it back.”

“When?”

“How are we doing with the felony charges?”

“Slow.”

“But sure?”

“Not very. There’s good news and bad news.”

“Give me the bad news first.”

“It’s very unlikely that the FBI will want to play ball. And it’s certain the Department of Defense won’t.”

“Those three guys?”

“They’re off the case. Apparently they’re injured. One has a broken nose and one has a cut head. But they’ve been replaced. The DoD is still hot to trot.”

“They should be grateful. They need all the help they can get.”

“Doesn’t work like that. There are turf wars to be won.”

“So what’s the good news?”

“We think the NYPD is prepared to be relaxed about the subway.”

“Terrific,” I said. “That’s like canceling a parking ticket for Charles Manson.”

Sansom didn’t reply.

I asked him, “What about Theresa Lee and Jacob Mark? And Docherty?”

“They’re back at work. With federal paper on file commending them for helping Homeland Security with a sensitive investigation.”

“So they’re OK and I’m not?”

“They didn’t hit anybody. They didn’t bruise any egos.”

“What are you going to do with the memory stick when you get it back?”

“I’m going to check it’s right, then I’m going to smash it up, and burn the pieces, and grind the ash to dust, and flush it down about eight separate toilets.”

“Suppose I asked you not to do that?”

“Why would you?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Depending on your point of view it was either late in the afternoon or early in the evening. But I had just woken up, so I figured it was time for breakfast. I called down to room service and ordered a big tray. About fifty bucks’ worth, at Sheraton New York prices, with taxes and tips and charges and fees. Sansom didn’t bat an eye. He was sitting forward in his chair, seething with frustration and impatience. Springfield was much more relaxed. He had shared that mountain journey a quarter of a century earlier, and he had shared the ignominy. Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. But Springfield had nothing riding on it. No aims, no plans, no ambitions. And it showed. He was still exactly what he had been back then, just a guy doing his job.

I asked, “Could you have killed him?”

“He had bodyguards,” Sansom said. “Like an inner circle. Loyalties over there are fanatical. Think of the Marines, or the Teamsters, and multiply by a thousand. We were disarmed a hundred yards from the camp. We were never alone with him. There were always people milling about. Plus kids and animals. They lived like the Stone Age.”

“He was a long lanky streak of piss,” Springfield said. “I could have reached up and snapped his scrawny neck any old time I wanted to.”

“Did you want to?”

“You bet I did. Because I knew. Right from the start. Maybe I should have done it right when the flashbulb went off. Like a bread-stick in an Italian restaurant. That would have made a better picture.”

I said, “Suicide mission.”

“But it would have saved a lot of lives later.”

I nodded. “Just like if Rumsfeld had stuck a shiv in Saddam.”

The room service guy brought my meal and I moved Sansom out of his chair and ate at the table. Sansom took a cell phone call and confirmed that as of that moment I was off the hook for the subway transgression. I was no longer a person of interest as far as the NYPD was concerned. But then he made a second call and told me the jury was still out at the FBI, and the signs did not look good at all. Then he made a third call and confirmed that the DoD brass definitely would not let go. They were like dogs with a bone. I was in all kinds of trouble at the federal level. Obstruction of justice, assault and battery, wounding with a deadly weapon.

“End of story,” Sansom said. “I would have to go to the Secretary direct.”

“Or the President,” I said.

“I can’t do either. On the face of it the DoD is currently in hot pursuit of an active Al Qaeda cell. Can’t argue against that, in today’s climate.”

Politics is a minefield. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“OK,” I said. “Just as long as I know the shape of the battlefield.”

“It’s not your battle, strictly speaking.”

“Jacob Mark will feel better with a little closure.”

“You’re doing this for Jacob Mark? The feds can give him all the closure he needs.”

“You think? The feds are nowhere. How long do you want to drag this out?”

“So are you doing it for Jacob Mark or for me?”

“I’m doing it for myself.”

“You’re not involved.”

“I like a challenge.”

“There are lots of other challenges in the world.”

“They made it personal. They sent me that DVD.”

“Which was tactical. If you react, they win.”

“No, if I react, they lose.”

“This isn’t the Wild West.”

“You got that right. This is the timid West. We need to roll the clock back.”

“Do you even know where they are?”

Springfield glanced at me.

I said, “I’m working on a couple of ideas.”

“Do you still have an open channel of communication?”

“She hasn’t called me since the DVD.”

“Since she set you up, you mean.”

“But I think she’s going to call again.”

“Why?”

“Because she wants to.”

“She might win. One false step, and you’re her prisoner. You’ll end up telling her what she wants to know.”

I asked him, “How many times have you flown commercial since September eleventh?”

He said, “Hundreds.”

“And I bet every single time some small corner of your mind was hoping there were hijackers on board. So you could see them marching up the aisle, so you could jump up and beat the shit out of them. Or die trying.”

Sansom inclined his head and his mouth turned down in a rueful little smile. The first I had seen from him for a long time.

“You’re right,” he said. “Every single time.”

“Why?”

“I would want to protect the airplane.”

“And you would want to unload your frustrations. And burn off your hate. I know I would. I liked the Twin Towers. I liked the way the world used to be. You know, before. I have no political skills. I’m not a diplomat or a strategist. I know my weaknesses, and I know my strengths. So all in all for a guy like me the chance to meet an active Al Qaeda cell seems pretty much like all my birthdays and Christmases rolled into one.”

“You’re crazy. This is not a thing to be done alone.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Homeland Security will find them eventually. Then they’ll put something together. NYPD, FBI, SWAT teams, equipment, hundreds of guys.”

“A huge operation with lots of disparate components.”

“But carefully planned.”

“You been on operations like that before?”

“Couple of times.”

“How did they work out for you?”

Sansom didn’t answer.

I said, “Alone is always better.”

“Maybe not,” Springfield said. “We checked on Homeland Security’s computer algorithm. The Hoths brought a large party with them.”

“How many?”

“Nineteen men.”

Chapter 68

I finished my breakfast. The coffee pot was empty. So I finished my eight-dollar bottle of water and lobbed it end over end toward the trash can. It struck the rim with a hollow plastic sound and bounced out and rolled away across the carpet. Not a good sign, if I were superstitious. But I’m not.

“Total of nineteen men,” I said. “Four left the country already and two are walking wounded with broken jaws and elbows. That leaves thirteen on active service.”

Sansom said, “Broken jaws and elbows? How did that happen?”

“They were out looking for me. They might be hot shit in the hills with grenade launchers, but scuffling on the street seems not to be their main strength.”

“Did you write on their foreheads?”

“One of them. Why?”

“The FBI got a call from the Bellevue emergency room. Two unidentified foreigners were dumped there after a beating. One of them had writing on his forehead.”

“Punishment,” I said. “The Hoths must have been displeased with their performance. So they gave them up, to encourage the others.”

“Ruthless people.”

“Where are they now?”

“Secure rooms in the hospital. Because one of them was there before. Some previous emergency at Penn Station. He’s not saying anything. The FBI is trying to work out who the hell he is.”

“What’s taking them so long? I wrote Lila’s name on his head. I wrote, Lila, call me. How many people named Lila is the Bureau interested in right now?”

Sansom shook his head. “Give them some credit. The part with the name had been skinned off with a knife.”

I stepped over and opened the second bottle of eight-dollar water. Took a sip. It tasted good. But no better than two-dollar water. Or free water, from the tap.

“Thirteen people,” I said.

“Plus the Hoths themselves,” Springfield said.

“OK, fifteen.”

“Suicide mission.”

“We’re all going to die,” I said. “The only questions are how and when.”

“We can’t actively help you,” Sansom said. “You understand that, right? This is going to end with a minimum of one and a maximum of fifteen homicides on the streets of New York City. We can’t be a part of that. We can’t be within a million miles of it.”

“Because of politics?”

“Because of a lot of reasons.”

“I’m not asking for help.”

“You’re a maniac.”

“They’re going to think so.”

“You got a schedule in mind?”

“Soon. No sense in waiting.”

“The minimum one homicide would be you, of course. In which case I wouldn’t know where to look for my photograph.”

“So keep your fingers crossed for me.”

“The responsible thing would be for you to tell me now.”

“No, the responsible thing would be for me to get a job as a school bus driver.”

“Can I trust you?”

“To survive?”

“To keep your word.”

“What did you learn in Officer Candidate School?”

“That brother officers are to be trusted. Especially brother officers of equal rank.”

“There you go, then.”

“But we weren’t really brothers. We were in very different branches of the service.”

“You got that right. I was working hard while you were flying all over the world kissing terrorist ass. You didn’t even get a Purple Heart.”

He didn’t answer.

“Just kidding,” I said. “But you better hope I’m not the first homicide, or you might be hearing that kind of thing all the time.”

“So tell me now.”

“I need you watching my back.”

He said, “I read your record.”

“You told me that.”

“You got your Purple Heart for being blown up by that truck bomb in Beirut. The Marine barracks.”

“I remember it well.”

“You got a disfiguring scar.”

“Want to see it?”

“No. But you need to remember, that wasn’t the Hoths.”

“What are you, my therapist?”

“No. But that doesn’t make my statement any the less true.”

“I don’t know who it was in Beirut. Nobody does, for sure. But whoever, they were the Hoths’ brother officers.”

“You’re motivated by revenge. And you still feel guilty about Susan Mark.”

“So?”

“So you might not be operating at peak efficiency.”

“Worried about me?”

“About myself, mainly. I want my photograph back.”

“You’ll get it.”

“At least give me a clue where it is.”

“You know what I know. I figured it out. So you’ll figure it out.”

“You were a cop. Different skill set.”

“So you’ll be slower. But it ain’t rocket science.”

“So what kind of science is it?”

“Think like a regular person for once. Not like a soldier or a politician.”

He tried. He failed. He said, “At least tell me why I shouldn’t destroy it.”

“You know what I know.”

“What does that mean?”

“Or maybe you don’t know what I know. Because you’re too close to yourself. Me, I’m just a member of the public.”

“So?”

“I’m sure you’re a hell of a guy, Sansom. I’m sure you’d be a great senator. But at the end of the day any senator is just one out of a hundred. They’re all fairly interchangeable. Can you give me a name? Of one individual senator who truly made a difference to anything?”

Sansom didn’t answer.

“Can you tell me how you personally are going to screw Al Qaeda?”

He started to talk about the Armed Services Committee, and Foreign Relations, and Intelligence, and budgets, and oversight. Like a boilerplate speech. Like he was out on the stump. I asked him, “What part of all that wouldn’t be done by whoever else might get the job, assuming you don’t?”

He didn’t answer. I asked him, “Imagine a cave in the north west of Pakistan. Imagine the Al Qaeda brass sitting there, right now. Are they tearing their hair out and saying, holy shit, we better not let John Sansom make it to the U.S. Senate? Are you top of their agenda?”

He said, “Probably not.”

“So why do they want the photograph?”

“Small victories,” he said. “Better than nothing.”

“It’s a lot of work for a small victory, don’t you think? Two agents plus nineteen men plus three months?”

“The United States would be embarrassed.”

“But not very. Look at the Rumsfeld photograph. Nobody cared. Times change, things move on. People understand that, if they even notice at all. Americans are either very mature and sensible, or very oblivious. I’m never quite sure which. But either way, that picture would be a damp squib. It might destroy you personally, but destroying one American at a time isn’t how Al Qaeda operates.”

“It would hurt Reagan’s memory.”

“Who cares? Most Americans don’t even remember him. Most Americans think Reagan is an airport in Washington.”

“I think you’re underestimating.”

“And I think you’re overestimating. You’re too close to the process.”

“I think that photograph would hurt.”

“But who would it hurt? What does the government think?”

“You know that the Defense Department is trying like crazy to get it back.”

“Is it? Then why did they give the job to their B-team?”

“You think those guys were their B-team?”

“I sincerely hope so. If that was their A-team, we should all move to Canada.”

Sansom didn’t answer.

I said, “The picture might do you some local damage in North Carolina. But apparently that’s all. We’re not seeing any kind of maximum effort from the DoD. Because there’s no real national downside.”

“That’s not an accurate read.”

“OK, it’s bad for us. It’s evidence of a strategic error. It’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, and it’s going to put egg on our face. But that’s all. It’s not the end of the world. We’re not going to fall apart.”

“So Al Qaeda’s expectations are too high? You’re saying they’re wrong too? They don’t understand the American people the way you do?”

“No, I’m saying this whole thing is a little lopsided. It’s slightly asymmetric. Al Qaeda fielded an A-team and we fielded a B-team. Therefore their desire to grab that photograph is just a little bit stronger than our desire to hold on to it.”

Sansom said nothing.

“And we have to ask, why wasn’t Susan Mark just told to copy it? If their aim was to embarrass us, then copying it would have been a better idea. Because when it came to light, and skeptics claimed it had been faked, which they would, then the original would still be on file, and we couldn’t have denied it with a straight face.”

“OK.”

“But Susan Mark wasn’t told to copy it. She was told to steal it, effectively. To take it away from us. With no trace left behind. Which added considerable risk and visibility.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means they want to have it, and equally they want us not to have it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You need to cast your mind back. You need to figure out exactly what that camera saw. Because Al Qaeda doesn’t want to publicize that photograph. They stole it because they want to suppress it.”

“Why would they?”

“Because however bad it is for you, there’s something in it that’s even worse for Osama bin Laden.”

Chapter 69

Sansom and Springfield went quiet, like I knew they would. They were casting their minds back a quarter of a century, to a dim tent above the Korengal Valley floor. They were stiffening and straightening, subconsciously repeating their formal poses. One on the left, one on the right, with their host between them. The camera lens, trained on them, aimed, zoomed, adjusted, focused. The strobe, charging, then popping, bathing the scene with light.

What exactly did the camera see?

Sansom said, “I don’t remember.”

“Maybe it was us,” Springfield said. “Simple as that. Maybe meeting with Americans looks like bad karma now.”

“No,” I said. “That’s good PR. It makes bin Laden look powerful and triumphant, and it makes us look like patsies. It has to be something else.”

“It was a zoo in there. Chaos and mayhem.”

“It has to be something fatally inappropriate. Little boys, little girls, animals.”

Sansom said, “I don’t know what they would regard as inappropriate. They have a thousand rules over there. Could be something he was eating, even.”

“Or smoking.”

“Or drinking.”

“There was no alcohol there,” Springfield said. “I remember that.”

“Women?” I asked.

“No women, either.”

“Has to be something. Were there other visitors there?”

“Only tribal.”

“No foreigners?”

“Only us.”

“It has to be something that makes him look compromised, or weak, or deviant. Was he healthy?”

“He seemed to be.”

“So what else?”

“Deviant from their laws or deviant like we mean it?”

“Al Qaeda HQ,” I said. “Where the men are men and the goats are scared.”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. We were tired. We had just walked a hundred miles through the front lines.”

Sansom had gone quiet. Like I knew he would. Eventually he said, “This is a real bitch.”

I said, “I know it is.”

“I’m going to have to make a big decision.”

“I know you are.”

“If that picture hurts him more than it hurts me, I’m going to have to release it.”

“No, if it hurts him at all, even a little bit, you’re going to have to release it. And then you’re going to have to suck it up and face the consequences.”

“Where is it?”

I didn’t answer.

“OK,” he said. “I have to watch your back. But I know what you know. And you figured it out. Which means I can figure it out. But slower. Because it ain’t rocket science. Which means the Hoths can figure it out too. Are they going to be slower? Maybe not. Maybe they’re picking it up right now.”

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe they are.”

“And if they’re going to suppress it, maybe I should just go ahead and let them.”

“If they’re going to suppress it, that means it’s a valuable weapon that could be used against them.”

Sansom said nothing.

I said, “Remember Officer Candidate School? Something about all enemies, foreign and domestic?”

“We take the same oath in Congress.”

“So should you let the Hoths suppress the picture?”

He was quiet for a very long time.

Then he spoke.

“Go,” he said. “Go get the Hoths before they get the picture.”

I didn’t go. Not right then. Not immediately. I had things to think about, and plans to make. And deficiencies to overcome. I wasn’t equipped. I was wearing rubber gardening clogs and blue pants. I was unarmed. None of those things was good. I wanted to go in the dead of night, properly dressed in black. With proper shoes. And weapons. The more the merrier.

The outfit would be easy.

The weapons, not so much. New York City is not the best place on the planet to get hold of a private arsenal at the drop of a hat. There were probably places in the outer boroughs selling overpriced junk under the counter, but there were places in the outer boroughs selling used cars too, and fastidious drivers were well advised to stay away from them.

Problem.

I looked at Sansom and said, “You can’t actively help me, right?”

He said, “No.”

I looked at Springfield and said, “I’m heading out to a clothing store now. I figure on getting black pants and a black T-shirt and black shoes. With a black windbreaker, maybe triple-XL, kind of baggy. What do you think?”

Springfield said, “We don’t care. We’ll be gone when you get back.”

I went to the store on Broadway where I bought the khaki shirt prior to Elspeth Sansom’s visit. It was doing a little business and had plenty of items in stock. I found everything I needed there apart from socks and shoes. Black jeans, plain black T-shirt, and a black cotton zip-up windbreaker made for a guy with a much bigger gut than mine. I tried it on and as expected it fit OK in the arms and the shoulders and ballooned way out in front like a maternity smock.

Perfect, if Springfield had taken the hint.

I dressed in the changing cubicle and trashed my old stuff and paid the clerk fifty-nine dollars. Then I took her recommendation and moved on three blocks to a shoe store. I bought a pair of sturdy black lace-ups and a pair of black socks. Close to a hundred bucks. I heard my mother’s voice in my head, from long ago: At a price like that, you better make them last. Don’t scuff them up. I stepped out of the store and stamped down on the sidewalk a couple of times to settle the fit. I stopped in at a drugstore and bought a pair of generic white boxers. I figured that since everything else was new I should complete the ensemble.

Then I started back to the hotel.

Three paces later the phone in my pocket started to vibrate.

Chapter 70

I backed up against a building on the corner of 55th Street and pulled the phone out of my pocket. Restricted Call. I opened the phone and raised it to my ear.

Lila Hoth said, “Reacher?”

I said, “Yes?”

“I’m still standing out in the road. I’m still waiting for the truck to hit me.”

“It’s coming.”

“But when will it arrive?”

“You can sweat a spell. I’ll be with you inside a couple of days.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I know where you are.”

“Good. That will simplify things.”

“And I know where the memory stick is, too.”

“Again, good. We’ll keep you alive long enough for you to tell us. And then maybe a few more hours, just for the fun of it.”

“You’re a babe in the woods, Lila. You should have stayed home and tended your goats. You’re going to die and that photograph is going all around the world.”

“We have a fresh blank DVD,” she said. “The camera is charged up and ready for your starring role.”

“You talk too much, Lila.”

She didn’t answer.

I closed the phone and headed back through the gathering evening darkness to the hotel. I went up in the elevator and unlocked my room and sat down on the bed to wait. I waited for a long time. Close to four hours. I thought I was waiting for Springfield. But in the end it was Theresa Lee who showed up.

She knocked on the door eight minutes before midnight. I did the thing with the chain and the mirror again and let her in. She was dressed in a version of the first outfit I had ever seen her in. Pants, and a silk short-sleeve shirt. Untucked. Dark gray, not mid-gray. Less silvery. More serious.

She was carrying a black gymnasium bag. Ballistic nylon. The way it hung from her hand I guessed it held heavy items. The way the heavy items moved and clinked I guessed they were made of metal. She put the bag on the floor near the bathroom and asked, “Are you OK?”

“Are you?”

She nodded. “It’s like nothing ever happened. We’re all back on the job.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“I have no idea. A man I never saw before delivered it to the precinct.”

“Springfield?”

“No, the name he gave was Browning. He gave me the bag and said in the interests of crime prevention I should make sure you never got your hands on it.”

“But you brought it anyway?”

“I’m guarding it personally. Safer than leaving it around.”

“OK.”

“You would have to overpower me. And assaulting police officers is against the law.”

“True.”

She sat down on the bed. A yard from me. Maybe less.

She said, “We raided those three old buildings on 58th Street.”

“Springfield told you about them?”

“He said his name was Browning. Our counterterrorism people went in two hours ago. The Hoths aren’t there.”

“I know.”

“They were, but they aren’t anymore.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“They turned in Leonid and his buddy. Therefore they’ve moved somewhere Leonid and his buddy don’t know. Layers upon layers.”

“Why did they turn in Leonid and his buddy?”

“To encourage the other thirteen. And to feed the machine. We’ll rough them up a little, the Arab media will call it torture, they’ll get ten new recruits. Net gain of eight. And Leonid and his pal are no big loss, anyway. They were hopeless.”

“Will the other thirteen be better?”

“Law of averages says yes.”

“Thirteen is an insane number.”

“Fifteen, including the Hoths themselves.”

“You shouldn’t do it.”

“Especially unarmed.”

She glanced at the bag. Then she looked back at me. “Can you find them?”

“What are they doing for money?”

“We can’t trace them that way. They stopped using credit cards and ATMs six days ago.”

“Which makes sense.”

“Which makes them hard to find.”

I asked, “Is Jacob Mark safely back in Jersey?”

“You think he shouldn’t be involved?”

“No.”

“But I should?”

“You are,” I said. “You brought me the bag.”

“I’m guarding it.”

“What else are your counterterrorism people doing?”

“Searching,” she said. “With the FBI and the Department of Defense. There are six hundred people on the street right now.”

“Where are they looking?”

“Anywhere bought or rented inside the last three months. The city is cooperating. Plus they’re inspecting hotel registers and business apartment leases and warehouse operations, across all five boroughs.”

“OK.”

“Word on the street is it’s all about a Pentagon file on a USB memory stick.”

“Close enough.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Close enough.”

“Where is it?”

“Nowhere between Ninth Avenue and Park and 30th Street and 45th.”

“I suppose I deserve that.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“Do you really know? Docherty figures you don’t. He figures you’re trying to bluff your way out of trouble.”

“Docherty is clearly a very cynical man.”

“Cynical or right?”

“I know where it is.”

“So go get it. Leave the Hoths for someone else.”

I didn’t answer that. Instead I said, “Do you spend time in the gym?”

“Not much,” she said. “Why?”

“I’m wondering how hard it would be to overpower you.”

“Not very,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

She asked, “When are you planning on setting out?”

“Two hours,” I said. “Then another two hours to find them, and attack at four in the morning. My favorite time. Something we learned from the Soviets. They had doctors working on it. People hit a low at four in the morning. It’s a universal truth.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I’m not.”

“You won’t find them in two hours.”

“I think I will.”

“The missing file is about Sansom, right?”

“Partially.”

“Does he know you’ve got it?”

“I haven’t got it. But I know where it is.”

“Does he know that?”

I nodded.

Lee said, “So you made a bargain with him. Get me and Docherty and Jacob Mark out of trouble, and you’ll lead him to it.”

“The bargain was designed to get myself out of trouble, first and foremost.”

“Didn’t work for you. You’re still on the hook with the feds.”

“It worked for me as far as the NYPD is concerned.”

“And it worked for the rest of us all around. For which I thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She asked, “How are the Hoths planning to get out of the country?”

“I don’t think they are. I think that option disappeared a few days ago. I think they expected things to go more smoothly than they have. Now it’s about finishing the job, do or die.”

“Like a suicide mission?”

“That’s what they’re good at.”

“Which makes it worse for you.”

“If they like suicide, I’m happy to help.”

Lee moved on the bed and the tail of her shirt got trapped underneath her and the silk pulled tight over the shape of the gun on her hip. A Glock 17, I figured, in a pancake holster.

I asked her, “Who knows you’re here?”

“Docherty,” she said.

“When is he expecting you back?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

I said nothing.

She said, “What do you want to do right now?”

“Honest answer?”

“Please.”

“I want to unbutton your shirt.”

“You say that to a lot of police officers?”

“I used to. Police officers were all the people I knew.”

“Danger makes you horny?”

“Women make me horny.”

“All women?”

“No,” I said. “Not all women.”

She was quiet for a long moment and then she said, “Not a good idea.”

I said, “OK.”

“You’re taking no for an answer?”

“Aren’t I supposed to?”

She was quiet for another long moment and then she said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“About it not being a good idea.”

“Excellent.”

“But I worked Vice for a year. Entrapment stings. We needed proof that that guy had a reasonable expectation of what he thought he was going to get. So we made him take his shirt off first. As proof of intent.”

“I could do that,” I said.

“I think you should.”

“You going to arrest me?”

“No.”

I peeled my new T-shirt off. Tossed it across the room. It landed on the table. Lee spent a moment staring at my scar, the same way Susan Mark had on the train. The awful raised tracery of stitches from the shrapnel from the truck bomb at the Beirut barracks. I let her look for a minute and then I said, “Your turn. With the shirt.”

She said, “I’m a traditional kind of girl.”

“What does that mean?”

“You would have to kiss me first.”

“I could do that,” I said. And I did. Slowly and gently and a little tentatively at first, in a way that felt exploratory, and in a way that gave me time to savor the new mouth, the new taste, the new teeth, the new tongue. It was all good. Then we passed some kind of a threshold and got into it harder. A short minute later we were completely out of control.

Afterward she showered, and then I showered. She dressed, and I dressed. She kissed me one more time, and told me to call her if I needed her, and wished me luck, and walked out through the door. She left the black bag on the floor near the bathroom.

Chapter 71

I hefted the bag over to the bed. About eight pounds, I figured. It hit the rucked sheet and made a satisfying metallic sound. I unzipped it and parted the flaps like a mouth and looked inside.

First thing I saw was a file folder.

It was legal-sized, and khaki in color, and made of thick paper or thin card, depending on your point of view. It held twenty-one printed-out sheets. Immigration records, for twenty-one separate people. Two women, nineteen men. Citizens of Turkmenistan. They had entered the United States from Tajikistan three months ago. Linked itineraries. There were digital photographs and digital fingerprints, from the immigration booths at JFK. The photographs had a slight fish-eye distortion. They were in color. I recognized Lila and Svetlana easily. And Leonid and his buddy. I didn’t know the other seventeen. Four of them already had exit notations. They were the four who had left. I dropped their sheets in the trash and laid out the unknown thirteen on the bed for a better look.

All thirteen faces looked bored and tired. Local flights, connections, a long transatlantic flight, jet lag, a long wait in JFK’s immigration hall. Sullen glances at the camera, faces held level, eyes swiveling up toward the lens. Which told me all thirteen were somewhat short in stature. I cross-checked with Leonid’s sheet. His gaze was just as bored and tired as the others, but it was level. He was the tallest of the party. I checked Svetlana Hoth’s sheet. She was the shortest. The others were all somewhere in between, small wiry Middle Eastern men worn down to bone and muscle and sinew by climate and diet and culture. I looked hard at them, one through thirteen, over and over again, until I had their expressions fixed firmly in my mind.

Then I turned back to the bag.

At the minimum I was hoping for a decent handgun. At best I was hoping for a short submachine gun. My point to Springfield about the baggy jacket was to make him see that I would have room to carry something under it, slung high on my chest on a shortened strap and then concealed by the excess fabric zipped over it. I had hoped he would get the message.

He had. He had gotten the message. He had come through in fine style.

Better than the minimum.

Better even than the best case.

He had given me a silenced short submachine gun. A Heckler & Koch MP5SD. The suppressed version of the classic MP5. No butt or stock. Just a pistol grip, a trigger, a housing for a curved thirty-round magazine, and then a six-inch barrel radically fattened by a double-layered silencer casing. Nine-millimeter, fast, accurate, and quiet. A fine weapon. It was fitted with a black nylon strap. The strap had already been tightened up and reduced in length to its practical minimum. As if Springfield was saying, I heard you, pal.

I laid the gun on the bed.

He had supplied ammunition, too. It was right there in the bag. A single curved magazine. Thirty rounds. Short and fat, shiny brass cases winking in the light, polished lead noses nearly as bright. Nine-millimeter Parabellums. From the Latin motto si vis pacem para bellum. If you wish for peace, prepare for war. A wise saying. But thirty rounds was not a lot. Not against fifteen people. But New York City is not easy. Not for me, not for Springfield.

I lined up the magazine next to the gun.

Checked the bag again, in case there was more.

There wasn’t.

But there was a bonus of a kind.

A knife.

A Benchmade 3300. A black machined handle. An auto-opening mechanism. Illegal in all fifty states unless you were active-service military or law enforcement, which I wasn’t. I thumbed the release and the blade snicked out, fast and hard. A double-edged dagger with a spear point. Four inches long. I am no kind of a knife fetishist. I don’t have favorites. I don’t really like any of them. But if you asked me to rely on one for combat, I would pick something close to what Springfield had supplied. The automatic mechanism, the point, the two-edged blade. Ambidextrous, good for stabbing, good for slashing either coming or going.

I closed it up and put it on the bed next to the H&K.

There were two final items in the bag. A single leather glove, black, sized and shaped for a large man’s left hand. And a roll of black duct tape. I put them on the bed, in line with the gun and the magazine and the knife.

Thirty minutes later I was all dressed up and locked and loaded and riding south on the R train.

Chapter 72

The R train uses older cars with some front- and rear-facing seats. But I was on a side bench, all alone. It was two o’clock in the morning. There were three other passengers. I had my elbows on my knees and I was staring at myself in the glass opposite.

I was counting bullet points.

Inappropriate clothing, check. The windbreaker was zipped to my chin and looked way too hot and way too big on me. Under it the MP5’s strap was looped around my neck and the gun itself was resting diagonally grip-high and barrel-low across my body and it didn’t show at all.

A robotic walk: not immediately applicable with a seated suspect on public transportation.

Points three through six: irritability, sweating, tics, and nervous behavior. I was sweating, for sure, maybe a little more than the temperature and the jacket called for. I was feeling irritable too, maybe even a little more than usual. But I looked at myself hard in the glass and saw no tics. My eyes were steady and my face was composed. I saw no nervous behavior, either. But behavior is about external display. I was a little nervous inside. That was for damn sure.

Point seven: breathing. I wasn’t panting. But I was prepared to accept that I was breathing a little harder and steadier than normal. Most of the time I am not aware of breathing at all. It just happens, automatically. An involuntary reflex, deep in the brain. But now I could feel a relentless in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth rhythm. In, out, in, out. Like a machine. Like a man using equipment, underwater. I couldn’t slow it down. I wasn’t feeling much oxygen in the air. It was going in and coming out like an inert gas. Like argon or xenon. It wasn’t doing me any good at all.

Point eight: a rigid forward stare. Check, but I excused myself because I was using it to assess all the other points. Or because it was a symbol of pure focus. Or concentration. Normally I would be gazing around, and not rigidly.

Point nine: mumbled prayers. Not happening. I was still and silent. My mouth was closed and not moving at all. In fact my mouth was closed so hard my back teeth were hurting and the muscles in the corners of my jaw were standing out like golf balls.

Point ten: a large bag. Not present.

Point eleven: hands in the bag. Not relevant.

Point twelve: a fresh shave. Hadn’t happened. I hadn’t shaved for days.

So, six for twelve. I might or might not be a suicide bomber.

And I might or might not be a suicide. I stared at my reflection and thought back to my first sight of Susan Mark: a woman heading for the end of her life, as surely and certainly as the train was heading for the end of the line.

I took my elbows off my knees and sat back. I looked at my fellow passengers. Two men, one woman. Nothing special about any of them. The train rocked on south, with all its sounds. The rushing air, the clatter of expansion joints under the wheels, the scrape of the current collector, the whine of the motors, the squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through the long gentle curves. I looked back at myself in the dark window opposite and smiled.

Me against them.

Not the first time.

And not the last.

I got out at 34th Street and stayed in the station. Just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and walked myself through my theories one more time. I replayed Lila Hoth’s history lesson from the days of the British Empire: When contemplating an offensive, the very first thing you must plan is your inevitable retreat. Had her superiors back home followed that excellent advice? I was betting not. For two reasons. First, fanaticism. Ideological organizations can’t afford rational considerations. Start thinking rationally, and the whole thing falls apart. And ideological organizations like to force their foot soldiers into no-way-out operations. To encourage persistence. The same way explosive belts are sewn together in back, not zippered or snapped.

And second, a plan for retreat carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Inevitably. A third or a fourth or a fifth bolt-hole bought or rented three months ago would show up in the city records. Just-in-case reservations at hotels would show up, too. Same-day reservations would show up. Six hundred agents were combing the streets. I guessed they would find nothing at all, because the planners back in the hills would have anticipated their moves. They would have known that all trails would be exhausted as soon as the scent was caught. They would have known that by definition the only safe destination is an unplanned destination.

So now the Hoths were out in the cold. With their whole crew. Two women, thirteen men. They had quit their place on 58th Street and they were scuffling, and improvising, and crawling below the radar.

Which was exactly where I lived. They were in my world.

It takes one to find one.

I came up from under the ground into Herald Square, which is where Sixth Avenue and Broadway and 34th Street all meet. By day it’s a zoo. Macy’s is there. At night it’s not deserted, but it’s quiet. I walked south on Sixth and west on 33rd and came up along the flank of the faded old pile where I had bought my only uninterrupted night of the week. The MP5 was hard and heavy against my chest. The Hoths had only two choices: sleep on the street, or pay off a night porter. Manhattan has hundreds of hotels, but they break down quite easily into separate categories. Most of them are mid-market or better, where staffs are large and scams don’t work. Most of the down-market dumps are small. And the Hoths had fifteen people to accommodate. Five rooms, minimum. To find five empty unobtrusive rooms called for a big place. With a bent night porter working alone. I know New York reasonably well. I can make sense of the city, especially from the kind of angles most normal people don’t consider. And I can count the number of big old Manhattan hotels with bent night porters working alone on my thumbs. One was way west on 23rd Street. Far from the action, which was an advantage, but also a disadvantage. More of a disadvantage than an advantage, overall.

Second choice, I figured.

I was standing right next to the only other option.

The clock in my head was ticking past two-thirty in the morning. I stood in the shadows and waited. I wanted to be neither early nor late. I wanted to time it right. Left and right I could see traffic heading up on Sixth and down on Seventh. Taxis, trucks, some civilians, some cop cars, some dark sedans. The cross-street itself was quiet.

At a quarter to three I pushed off the wall and turned the corner and walked to the hotel door.

Chapter 73

The same night porter was on duty. Alone. He was slumped on a chair behind the desk, staring morosely into space. There were fogged old mirrors in the lobby. My jacket was puffed out in front of me. I felt I could see the shape of the MP5’s pistol grip and the curve of its magazine and the tip of its muzzle. But I knew what I was looking at. I assumed the night porter didn’t.

I walked up to him and said, “Remember me?”

He didn’t say yes. Didn’t say no. Just gave a kind of all-purpose shrug that I took to be an invitation to open negotiations.

“I don’t need a room,” I said.

“So what do you need?”

I took five twenties out of my pocket. A hundred bucks. Most of what I had left. I fanned the bills so he could see all five double-digits and laid them on his counter.

I said, “I need to know the room numbers where you put the people who came in around midnight.”

“What people?”

“Two women, thirteen men.”

“Nobody came in around midnight.”

“One of the women was a babe. Young. Bright blue eyes. Not easy to forget.”

“Nobody came in.”

“You sure?” “Nobody came in.”

I pushed the five bills toward him. “You totally sure?” He pushed the bills right back.

He said, “I’d like to take your money, believe me. But nobody came in tonight.”

I didn’t take the subway. I walked instead. A calculated risk. It exposed me to however many of the six hundred federal agents happened to be in the vicinity, but I wanted my cell phone to work. I had concluded that cell phones don’t work in the subway. I had never seen anyone using one down there. Presumably not because of etiquette. Presumably because of a lack of signal. So I walked. I used 32nd Street to get over to Broadway, and then I followed Broadway south, past luggage outlets and junk jewelry stores and counterfeit perfume wholesalers, all of them closed up and shuttered for the night. It was dark down there, and messy. A micro-neighborhood. I could have been in Lagos, or Saigon.

I paused at the corner of 28th Street to let a taxi slide by.

The phone in my pocket started to vibrate.

I backed into 28th and sat down on a shadowed stoop and opened the phone.

Lila Hoth said, “Well?”

I said, “I can’t find you.”

“I know.”

“So I’ll deal.”

“You will?”

“How much cash have you got?”

“How much do you want?”

“All of it.”

“Have you got the stick?”

“I can tell you exactly where it is.”

“But you don’t actually have it?”

“No.”

“So what was the thing you showed us in the hotel?”

“A decoy.”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“A hundred.”

“I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars.”

I said, “You can’t get on a bus or a train or a plane. You can’t get out. You’re trapped, Lila. You’re going to die here. Don’t you want to die a success? Don’t you want to be able to send that coded e-mail home? Mission accomplished?”

“Seventy-five thousand.”

“A hundred.”

“OK, but only half tonight.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“You’ll have to.”

I said, “Seventy-five, all of it tonight.”

“Sixty.”

“Deal.”

“Where are you?”

“Way uptown,” I lied. “But I’m on the move. I’ll meet you in Union Square in forty minutes.”

“Where is that?”

“Broadway, between 14th Street and 17th.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safe enough.”

“I’ll be there,” she said.

“Just you,” I said. “Alone.”

She clicked off.

I moved on two blocks to the north end of Madison Square Park and sat on a bench a yard from a homeless woman who had a shopping cart piled high like a dump truck. I fished in my pocket for Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. I read it in the dim glow of a streetlight. I dialed her cell number. She answered after five rings.

“This is Reacher,” I said. “You told me to call you if I needed you.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Am I still off the hook with the NYPD?”

“Absolutely.”

“So tell your counterterrorism people that forty minutes from now I’ll be in Union Square and I’ll be approached by a minimum of two and a maximum of maybe six of Lila Hoth’s crew. Tell your guys they’re theirs for the taking. But tell them to leave me alone.”

“Descriptions?”

“You looked in the bag, right? Before you delivered it?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’ve seen their pictures.”

“Where in the square?”

“I’ll aim for the southwest corner.”

“So you found her?”

“First place I looked. She’s in a hotel. She paid off the night porter. And put a scare in him. He denied everything and called her room from the desk the minute I was out of the lobby.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she called me less than a minute later. I like coincidences as much as the next guy, but that kind of timing is too good to be true.”

“Why are you meeting with her crew?”

“I set up a deal with her. I told her to come alone. But she’ll double-cross me and send some of her people instead. It will help me if your guys grab them up. I don’t want to have to shoot them all.”

“Got a conscience?”

“No, I’ve got thirty rounds of ammunition. Which isn’t really enough. I need to parcel it out.”

Nine blocks later I entered Union Square. I walked all around it once and crossed it on both diagonals. Saw nothing that worried me. Just somnolent shapes on benches. One of New York City’s zero-dollar hotels. I sat down near the statue of Gandhi and waited for the rats to come out.

Chapter 74

Twenty minutes into my forty I saw the NYPD’s counterterrorism squad begin to assemble. Good moves. They came in beat-up unmarked sedans and confiscated minivans full of dents and scrapes. I saw an off-duty taxicab park outside a coffee shop on 16th Street. I saw two guys climb out of the back and cross the road. Altogether I counted sixteen men, and I was prepared to accept that I had missed maybe four or five others. If I didn’t know better I would have suspected that a long late session in a martial arts gym had just let out. All the guys were young and fit and bulky and moved like trained athletes. They were all carrying gym bags. They were all inappropriately dressed. They had on Yankees warm-up jackets, or dark windbreakers like mine, or thin fleece parkas, like it was already November. To hide their Kevlar vests, I guessed, and maybe their badges, which would be on chains around their necks.

None of them eyeballed me directly but I could tell they had spotted me and identified me. They formed up in ones and twos and threes all around me and then they stepped back in the dark and disappeared. They just melted into the scenery. Some sat on benches, some lay in nearby doorways, some went places I didn’t see.

Good moves.

Thirty minutes into my forty I was feeling pretty optimistic.

Five minutes later, I wasn’t.

Because the feds showed up.

Two more cars stopped, right on Union Square West. Black Crown Vics, waxed and bright and shiny. Eight men stepped out. I sensed the NYPD guys stirring. Sensed them staring through the dark, sensed them glancing at each other, sensed them asking, Why the hell are those guys here?

I was good with the NYPD. Not so, with the FBI and the Department of Defense.

I glanced at Gandhi. He told me nothing at all.

I pulled out the phone again and hit the green button to bring up Theresa Lee’s number. She was the last call I had made. I hit the green button again to dial. She answered immediately.

I said, “The feds are here. How did that happen?”

“Shit,” she said. “Either they’re monitoring our dispatcher or one of our guys is looking for a better job.”

“Who takes precedence tonight?”

“They do. Always. You should get the hell out of there.”

I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket. The eight guys from the Crown Vics stepped into the shadows. The square went quiet. There was a faulty letter in a lit-up sign to my left. It sputtered on and off at random intervals. I heard rats in the mulch behind me.

I waited.

Two minutes. Three.

Then thirty-nine minutes into my forty I sensed human movement far to my right. Footfalls, disturbed air, holes in the darkness. I watched and saw figures moving through shadows and dim light.

Seven men.

Which was good news. The more now, the fewer later.

And which was flattering. Lila was risking more than half her force, because she thought I would be hard to take.

All seven men were small, and neat, and wary. They were all dressed like me, in dark clothes baggy enough to conceal weapons. But they weren’t going to shoot me. Lila’s need to know was like body armor. They saw me and paused thirty yards away.

I sat still.

In theory this should have been the easy part. They approach me, the NYPD guys move in, I walk away and go about my business.

But not with the feds on the scene. At best they would want all of us. At worst they would want me more than them. I knew where the memory stick was. Lila’s people didn’t.

I sat still.

Thirty yards away the seven men separated. Two stood still, anchored half-right of my position. Two scooted left and looped around and headed for my other flank. Three walked on, to get around behind me.

I stood up. The two men on my right started to move in. The two on my left were halfway through their flanking maneuver. The three behind me were out of sight. I guessed the NYPD guys were already on their feet. I guessed the feds were moving too.

A fluid situation.

I ran.

Straight ahead, to the subway gazebo twenty feet in front of me. Down the stairs. I heard feet clattering after me. Loud echoes. A big crowd. Probably close to forty people, all strung out in a crazy Pied Piper chase.

I made it into a tiled corridor and out again into the underground plaza. No violinist this time. Just stale air and trash and one old guy pushing a broom with a threadbare head a yard wide. I ran past him and stopped and skidded on my new soles and changed direction and headed for the uptown R train. I jumped the turnstile and ran onto the platform and all the way to the end.

And stopped.

And turned.

Behind me three separate groups followed one after the other. First came Lila Hoth’s seven men. They raced toward me. They saw I had nowhere to go. They stopped. I saw looks of wolfish satisfaction on their faces. Then I saw their inevitable conclusion: too good to be true. Some thoughts are clear in any language. They turned suddenly and saw the NYPD counterterrorism squad hustling right behind them.

And right behind the NYPD guys were four of the eight federal agents.

No one else on the platform. No civilians. On the downtown platform opposite was a lone guy on a bench. Young. Maybe drunk. Maybe worse. He was staring across at the sudden commotion. It was twenty minutes to four in the morning. The guy looked dazed. Like he wasn’t making much sense out of what he was seeing.

It looked like a gang war. But what he was actually seeing was a fast and efficient takedown by the NYPD. None of their guys stopped running. They all piled in yelling with weapons drawn and badges visible and they exploited their big physiques and their three-to-one numerical advantage and simply swamped the seven men. No contest. No contest at all. They clubbed all seven to the ground and threw them on their fronts and slammed cuffs on their wrists and hauled them away. No pauses. No delays. No Miranda warnings. Just maximum speed and brutality. Perfect tactics. Literally seconds later they were gone again. Echoes clattered and died. The station went quiet. The guy opposite was still staring but suddenly he was seeing nothing except a silent platform with me standing alone at one end and the four federal agents about thirty feet from me. Nothing between us. Nothing at all. Just harsh white light and empty space.

Nothing happened for the best part of a minute. Then across the tracks I saw the other four federal agents arrive on the downtown platform. They took up position directly opposite me and stood still. They all smiled a little, like they had made a smart move in a game of chess. Which they had. No point in more cross-track exploits. The four agents on my side were between me and the exit. At my back was a blank white wall and the mouth of the tunnel.

Checkmate.

I stood still. Breathed the tainted underground air and listened to the faint roar of ventilation and the rumble of distant trains elsewhere in the system.

The agent nearest me took a gun out from under his coat.

He took a step toward me.

He said, “Raise your hands.”

Chapter 75

Nighttime schedules. Twenty-minute gaps between trains. We had been down there maybe four minutes. Therefore arithmetically the maximum delay before the next train would be sixteen minutes. The minimum would be no delay at all.

The minimum delay didn’t happen. The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.

“Raise your hands,” the lead agent called again. He was a white man of about forty. Certainly ex-military. DoD, not FBI. Similar type to the three I had already met. But maybe a little older. Maybe a little wiser. Maybe a little better. Maybe this was an A-team, not a B-team.

“I’ll shoot,” the lead agent called. But he wouldn’t. Empty threat. They wanted the memory stick. I knew where it was. They didn’t.

Median delay before the next train, eight minutes. As likely to be more than less. The guy with the gun took another step forward. His three colleagues followed. Across the tracks the other four stood still. The young guy on the bench was watching, vacantly.

The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.

The lead agent said, “All this hassle could be over a minute from now. Just tell us where it is.”

I said, “Where what is?”

“You know what.”

“What hassle?”

“We’re running out of patience. And you’re missing one important factor.”

“Which is?”

“Whatever intellectual gifts you have, they’re hardly likely to be unique. In fact they’re probably fairly ordinary. Which means that if you figured it out, we can figure it out too. Which means your continued existence would become surplus to requirements.”

“So go ahead,” I said. “Figure it out.”

He raised his gun higher and straighter. It was a Glock 17. Maybe twenty-five ounces fully loaded. By far the lightest service pistol on the market. Made partly from plastic. The guy had short, thick arms. He could probably hold the pose indefinitely.

“Last chance,” he said.

Across the tracks the young guy got off his bench and walked away. Long inconsistent strides, not entirely in a straight line. He was prepared to waste a two-dollar Metrocard swipe in exchange for a quiet life. He made it to the exit and disappeared from sight.

No witnesses.

Median delay before the next train, maybe six minutes.

I said, “I don’t know who you are.”

The guy said, “Federal agents.”

“Prove it.”

The guy kept his gun aimed at my center mass but nodded over his shoulder at the agent behind him, who stepped out and moved forward into the no-man’s-land between us. He paused there and put his hand in his inside jacket pocket and came back with a leather badge holder. He held it eye-height to me and let it fall open. There were two separate pieces of ID in it. I couldn’t read either one of them. They were too far away, and both of them were behind scratched plastic windows.

I stepped forward.

He stepped forward.

I got within four feet of him and saw a standard Defense Intelligence Agency ID in the upper window of the wallet. It looked genuine and it was in date. In the lower window was some kind of a warrant or commission that stated the holder was to be afforded every assistance because he was acting directly for the President of the United States.

“Very nice,” I said. “Beats working for a living.”

I stepped back.

He stepped back.

The lead agent said, “No different than you were doing, back in the day.”

“Back in prehistory,” I said.

“What is this, an ego thing?”

Median delay before the next train, five minutes.

“It’s a practical thing,” I said. “If you want something done properly, you do it yourself.”

The guy dropped the angle of his arm below the horizontal. Now he was aiming at my knees.

“I’ll shoot,” he said. “You don’t think or talk or remember with your legs.”

No witnesses.

If all else fails, start talking.

I asked, “Why do you want it?”

“Want what?”

“You know what.”

“National security.”

“Offense or defense?”

“Defense, of course. It would ruin our credibility. It would set us back years.”

“You think?”

“We know.”

I said, “Keep working on those intellectual gifts.”

He aimed his gun more precisely. At my left shin.

He said, “I’ll count to three.”

I said, “Good luck with that. Tell me if you get stuck along the way.”

He said, “One.”

Then: The rails hissed in the track bed next to me. Strange metallic harmonic sounds speeding ahead of a train way back in the tunnel. The harmonics were chased all the way by the push of hot air and a deeper rumbling. A curve in the tunnel wall was lit up by a headlight. Nothing happened for a long second. Then the train rushed into view, moving fast, canted over by the camber of the curve. It rocked and straightened and came on at speed and then the brakes bit down and moaned and shrieked and the train slowed and pulled in right alongside us, all bright shining stainless steel and hot light, hissing, grinding, and groaning.

An uptown R train.

Maybe fifteen cars, each one of them dotted with a small handful of passengers.

Witnesses.

I glanced back at the lead agent. His Glock was back under his coat.

We were at the north end of the platform. The R train uses older cars. Each car has four sets of doors. The lead car was halted right next to us. I was more or less in line with the first set of doors. The DoD guys were closer to sets three and four.

The doors opened, the whole length of the train.

Way down at the back end two people got out. They walked away and were gone.

The doors stayed open.

I turned to face the train.

The DoD guys turned to face the train.

I stepped forward.

They stepped forward.

I stopped.

They stopped.

Choices: I could get on through door one, whereupon they would get on through doors three and four. Into the same car. We could ride together all night long. Or I could let the train go without me and spend a minimum twenty more minutes trapped with them on the same platform as before.

The doors stayed open.

I stepped forward.

They stepped forward.

I stepped into the car.

They stepped into the car.

I paused a beat and backed right out again. Back to the platform.

They backed out.

We all stood still.

The doors closed in front of me. Like a final curtain. The rubber bumpers thumped together.

I felt the draw of electricity in the air. Volts and amps. Massive demand. The motors spun up and whined. Five hundred tons of steel started to roll.

The R train uses older cars. They have toe boards and rain gutters. I ducked forward and hooked my fingers into the gutter and jammed my right toes onto the board. Then my left. I flattened myself against the metal and the glass. I hugged the car’s exterior curve like a starfish. The MP5 dug into my chest. I clung on, fingers and toes. The train moved. Breeze tugged at me. The hard edge of the tunnel came right at me. I held my breath and spread my hands and feet wider and ducked my head and laid my cheek against the glass. The train sucked me sideways into the tunnel with about six inches to spare. I glanced back past my locked elbow and saw the lead agent standing still on the platform, one hand in his hair, the other raising his Glock and then lowering it again.

Chapter 76

It was a nightmare ride. Incredible speed, howling blackness, battering noise, unseen obstructions hurtling straight at me, extreme physical violence. The whole train swayed and bounced and bucked and jerked and rocked under me. Every single expansion joint threatened to tear me loose. I dug all eight fingers hard into the shallow gutter and pressed upward with the balls of my thumbs and downward with my toes and held on desperately. Wind tore at my clothes. The door panels swayed and juddered. My head bounced against them like a jackhammer.

I rode nine blocks like that. Then we hit 23rd Street and the train braked hard. I was pitched forward against my left hand’s grip and my right foot’s resistance. I hung on tight and was carried sideways straight into the station’s dazzling brightness at thirty miles an hour. The platform rushed past. I was clamped on the lead car like a limpet. It stopped right at the north end of the station. I arched my body and the doors slid open under me. I stepped inside and collapsed into the nearest seat.

Nine blocks. Maybe a minute. Enough to cure me of subway surfing for life.

There were three other passengers in my car. None of them even looked at me. The doors sucked shut. The train moved on.

I got out at Herald Square. Where 34th Street meets Broadway and Sixth. Ten to four in the morning. Still on schedule. I was twenty blocks and maybe four minutes north of where I got on the train in Union Square. Too far and too fast for organized DoD resistance. I came up from under the ground and walked east to west along Macy’s imposing flank. Then I headed south on Seventh all the way to the door of Lila Hoth’s chosen hotel.

The night porter was behind the counter. I didn’t unzip my jacket for him. I didn’t think it would be necessary. I just walked up to him and leaned over and slapped him on the ear. He fell off his stool. I vaulted over the counter and caught him by the throat and hauled him upright.

I said, “Tell me the room numbers.”

And he did. Five separate rooms, not adjacent, all of them on the eighth floor. He told me which one the women were in. The men were spread out over the other four. Originally thirteen guys, and eight available beds. Five short straws.

Or five on sentry duty.

I took the roll of black duct tape out of my pocket and used about eight yards of it to bind the porter’s arms and legs. A dollar and a half from any hardware store, but as much a part of standard-issue Special Forces equipment as the thousand-dollar rifles and the satellite radios and the navigation systems. I stuck a final six-inch length across his mouth. I stole his pass card. Just tore it right off its curly cord. Then I left him out of sight on the floor behind the counter and headed for the elevator bank. Got in and pressed the highest number available, which was eleven. The doors slid shut and the car bore me upward.

At that point I unzipped my jacket.

I settled the gun at a nice angle on its strap and I took the leather glove out of my other pocket and slipped it on my left hand. The MP5SD has no fore grip. Not like the stubby K variant, which has a fat little handle under the muzzle. With the SD you use your right hand on the pistol grip and your left hand supports the barrel casing. The inner barrel has thirty holes drilled in it. The powder in the round neither burns nor explodes. It does both. It deflagrates. It creates a bubble of superheated gas. Some of the gas escapes through the thirty holes, which quiets the noise and slows the bullet to a subsonic velocity. No point in silencing a gun if its bullet is going to create a supersonic snap all its own. A slow bullet is a quiet bullet. Just like the VAL Silent Sniper. The escaping gas comes through the thirty holes and expands and swirls around in the inner silencer chamber. Then it passes to the second chamber and expands some more and swirls some more. Expanding cools the gas. Basic physics. But not by much. Maybe it reduces from superheated to extremely hot. And the outer barrel casing is metal. Hence the glove. No one uses an MP5SD without one. Springfield was the kind of guy who thinks of everything.

On the left side of the gun was a combined safety and fire selector switch. The older versions of the SD that I remembered had a three-position lever. S, E, and F. S for safe, E for single shots, and F for automatic fire. German abbreviations, presumably. E for ein, or one, and so on and so forth, even though Heckler & Koch had been owned by a British corporation for many years. I guessed they decided that tradition counts. But Springfield had given me a newer model. The SD4. It had a four-position selector switch. No abbreviations. Just pictograms. For foreign convenience, or illiterate users. A plain white dot for safe, one little white bullet shape for single shots, three bullet shapes for three-round bursts, and a long string of bullet shapes for continuous automatic fire.

I chose three-round bursts. My favorite. One pull of the trigger, three nine-millimeter rounds inside a quarter of a second. An inevitable degree of muzzle climb, minimized by careful control and the weight of the silencer, resulting in a neat little stitch of three fatal wounds climbing a vertical line maybe an inch and a half high.

Works for me.

Thirty rounds. Ten bursts. Eight targets. One burst each, plus two left over for emergencies.

The elevator chimed open on the eleventh floor, and I heard Lila Hoth’s voice in my head, talking about old campaigns long ago in the Korengal: You must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women.

I stepped out of the elevator into a silent corridor.

Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground. The eighth floor was three below me. Two ways down: stairs or elevator. I preferred the stairs, especially with a silenced weapon. The smart defensive tactic would be to put a man in the stairwell. Early warning for them. Easy pickings for me. He could be dealt with quietly and at leisure.

The stairwell had a battered door set next to the elevator core. I eased it open and started down. The stairs were dusty concrete. Each floor was marked with a large number painted by hand in green paint. I was quiet all the way down to nine. Supersilent after that. I paused and peered over the metal rail.

No sentry in the stairwell.

The landing inside the eighth floor door was empty. Which was a disappointment. It made the job on the other side of the door twenty-five percent harder. Five men in the corridor, not four. And the way the rooms were distributed meant that some of them would be on my left, and some on my right. Three and two, or two and three. A long second spent facing the wrong way, and then a crucial spin.

Not easy.

But it was four in the morning. The lowest ebb. A universal truth. The Soviets had studied it, with doctors.

I paused on the stairwell side of the door and took a deep breath. Then another. I put my gloved hand on the handle. I took the slack out of the MP5’s trigger.

I pulled the door.

I held it at forty-five degrees with my foot. Cradled the MP5’s barrel in my glove. Looked and listened. No sound. Nothing to see. I stepped into the corridor. Whipped one way. Whipped the other.

No one there.

No sentries, no guards, no nothing. Just a length of dirty matted carpet and dim yellow light and two rows of closed doors. Nothing to hear, except the subliminal hum and shudder of the city and muted faraway sirens.

I closed the stairwell door behind me.

I checked numbers and walked quickly to Lila’s door. Put my ear on the crack and listened hard.

I heard nothing.

I waited. Five whole minutes. Ten. No sound. No one can stay still and silent longer than me.

I dipped the porter’s pass card into the slot. A tiny light flashed red. Then green. There was a click. I smashed the handle down and was inside a split second later.

The room was empty.

The bathroom was empty.

There were signs of recent occupation. The toilet roll was loose and ragged. The sink was wet. A towel was used. The bed was rucked. The chairs were out of position.

I checked the other four rooms. All empty. All abandoned. Nothing left behind. No evidence pointing toward an imminent return.

Lila Hoth, one step ahead.

Jack Reacher, one step behind.

I took my glove off and zipped up again and rode down to the lobby. I hauled the night porter into a sitting position against the back of his counter and tore the tape off his mouth.

He said, “Don’t hit me again.”

I said, “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Not my fault,” he said. “I told you the truth. You asked what rooms I put them in. Past tense.”

“When did they leave?”

“About ten minutes after you came the first time.”

“You called them?”

“I had to, man.”

“Where did they go?”

“I have no idea.”

“What did they pay you?”

“A thousand,” he said.

“Not bad.”

“Per room.”

“Insane,” I said. Which it was. For that kind of money they could have gone back to the Four Seasons. Except they couldn’t. Which was the point.

I paused in the shadows on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. Where did they go? But first, how did they go? Not in cars. On the way in they had fifteen people. They would have needed three cars, minimum. And faded old piles with night porters working alone don’t have valet parking.

Taxis? Possible, on the way in, late in the evening from midtown. Going out again, at three in the morning on Seventh Avenue? Eight people would have required at least two simultaneous empty cabs.

Unlikely.

Subway? Possible. Probable, even. There were three lines within a block’s walk. Nighttime schedules, a maximum twenty-minute wait on the platform, but then escape either uptown or downtown. But to where? Nowhere that needed a long walk at the other end. A gaggle of eight people hustling hard on the sidewalk was very noticeable. There were six hundred agents on the streets. The only other hotel option I knew was way west of even the Eighth Avenue line. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe more. Too big a risk of exposure.

So, the subway, but to where?

New York City. Three hundred and twenty square miles. Two hundred and five thousand acres. Eight million separate addresses. I stood there and sorted possibilities like a machine.

I drew a blank.

Then I smiled.

You talk too much, Lila.

I heard her voice in my head again. From the tea room at the Four Seasons. She was talking about the old Afghan fighters. Complaining about them, from her pretended perspective. In reality she was boasting about her own people, and the Red Army’s fruitless back-and-forth skirmishing against them. She had said: The mujahideen were intelligent. They had a habit of doubling back to positions we had previously written off as abandoned.

I set off back to Herald Square. To the R train. I could get out at Fifth and 59th. From there it was a short walk to the old buildings on 58th Street.

Chapter 77

The old buildings on 58th Street were all dark and quiet. Four-thirty in the morning, in a neighborhood that does little business before ten. I was watching from fifty yards away. From a shadowed doorway on the far sidewalk across Madison Avenue. There was crime-scene tape across the door with the single bell push. The left-hand building of the three. The one with the abandoned restaurant on the ground floor.

No lights in the windows.

No signs of activity.

The crime-scene tape looked unbroken. And inevitably it would have been accompanied by an official NYPD seal. A small rectangle of paper, glued across the gap between door and jamb, at keyhole height. It was probably still there, untorn.

Which meant there was a back door.

Which was likely, with a restaurant on the premises. Restaurants generate all kinds of unpleasant garbage. All day long. It smells, and it attracts rats. Not acceptable to pile it on the sidewalk. Better to dump it in sealed cans outside the kitchen door, and then wheel the cans to the curb for the nighttime pick-up.

I moved twenty yards south to widen my angle. Saw no open alleys. The buildings were all cheek-by-jowl, all along the block. Next to the door with the crime-scene tape was the old restaurant’s window. But next to that was another door. Architecturally it was part of the restaurant building’s neighbor. It was set into the ground floor of the next building along. But it was plain, it was black, it was unlabeled, it was a little scarred, it had no step, and it was a lot wider than a normal door. It had no handle on the outside. Just a keyhole. Without a key it opened only from the inside. I made a bet with myself that it let out of a covered alley. I figured that the restaurant’s neighbor was two rooms wide on the ground floor, and three rooms wide above. At the second floor level the block was solid. But below that, at street level, there were passageways leading to rear entrances, all of them discreetly boxed in and built over. Air rights in Manhattan are worth a fortune. The city sells itself up and down, as well as side to side.

I moved back to my shadowed doorway. I was counting time in my head. Forty-four minutes from the time Lila’s guys had been due to grab me up. Maybe thirty-four from the time Lila had expected their mission-accomplished call. Maybe twenty-four from the time she had finally accepted that things had not gone well. Maybe fourteen from the time she had first been tempted to call me.

Lila, you talk too much.

I pressed back in the darkness and waited. The scene in front of me was absolutely deserted. Occasional cars or taxicabs on Madison. No traffic at all on 58th. No pedestrians anywhere. No dog walkers, no partygoers staggering home. Garbage collection was over. Bagel deliveries hadn’t started.

The dead of night.

The city that doesn’t sleep was at least resting comfortably.

I waited.

Three minutes later the phone in my pocket started to vibrate.

I kept my eyes on the restaurant building and opened the phone. Raised it to my ear and said, “Yes?”

She asked, “What happened?”

“You didn’t show.”

“Did you expect me to?”

“I didn’t give it much thought.”

“What happened to my people?”

“They’re in the system.”

“We can still deal.”

“How? You can’t afford to lose any more men.”

“We can work something out.”

“OK. But the price just went up.”

“How much?”

“Seventy-five.”

“Where are you now?”

“Right outside your house.”

There was a pause.

There was movement at a window. Fourth floor, the left-hand of two. A darkened room. Faint, ghostly, barely perceptible from fifty yards.

Maybe the shift of a drape.

Maybe a white shirt.

Maybe imaginary.

She said, “No, you’re not outside my house.”

But she didn’t sound sure.

She said, “Where do you want to meet?”

I said, “What does it matter? You won’t show.”

“I’ll send someone.”

“You can’t afford to. You’re down to your last six guys.”

She started to say something, and stopped.

I said, “Times Square.”

“OK.”

“Tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Why?”

“I want people around.”

“That’s too late.”

“For what?”

“I want it now.”

“Tomorrow at ten. Take it or leave it.”

She said, “Stay on the line.”

“Why?”

“I have to count my money. To check that I have seventy-five.”

I unzipped my jacket.

I put my glove on.

I heard Lila Hoth, breathing.

Fifty yards away the black door opened. The covered alley. A man stepped out. Small, dark, wiry. And wary. He checked the sidewalk, left and right. He peered across the street.

I put the phone in my pocket. Still open. Still live.

I raised the MP5.

Submachine guns were developed for close-quarters combat, but many of them are as accurate as rifles out to medium ranges. Certainly the H&K was reliable out to at least a hundred yards. Mine was fitted with iron sights. I moved the selector lever to single shot and put the front sight square on the guy’s center mass.

Fifty yards away he stepped to the curb. Scanned right, scanned left, scanned ahead. He saw the same nothing I was seeing. Just cool air and a thin night mist.

He stepped back to the door.

A taxicab passed by in front of me.

Fifty yards away the guy pushed the door.

I waited until I judged his momentum was all set to move forward. Then I pulled the trigger and shot him in the back. Bull’s-eye. A slow bullet. A perceptible delay. Fire, hit. The SD is advertised as silent. It isn’t. It makes a sound. Louder than the polite little spit you would get in a movie. But not worse than the kind of thump you would get from dropping a phone book on a table from about a yard. Noticeable in any environment, but not remarkable in a city.

Fifty yards away the guy pitched forward and went down with his torso in the alley and his legs on the sidewalk. I put a second bullet into him for safety’s sake and let the gun fall against its strap and took the phone back out of my pocket.

I said, “You still there?”

She said, “We’re still counting.”

You’re one short, I thought.

I zipped my jacket. Started walking. I hugged the far side of Madison and overshot 58th by a couple of yards. I crossed the avenue and came around the corner with my shoulder tight against the frontage of the buildings. I needed to keep below her line of sight. I passed the first old building. Passed the second.

I said from forty feet below her, “I have to go now. I’m tired. Times Square, tomorrow morning at ten, OK?”

She answered from forty feet above me. She said, “OK, I’ll send someone.”

I clicked off and put the phone back in my pocket and dragged the dead guy all the way into the alley. I closed the door behind us, slowly and quietly.

Chapter 78

There was a light in the alley. A single dim bulb, in a dirty bulkhead fixture. I recognized the dead guy from the photographs in Springfield’s Homeland Security folder. He had been number seven of the original nineteen. I didn’t remember his name. I dragged him the length of the space. The floor was old concrete, worn to a shine. I searched him. Nothing in his pockets. No ID. No weapon. I left him by a small wheeled trash receptacle covered in baked-on grime so old it didn’t smell anymore.

Then I found the inner door to the building, and unzipped my jacket, and waited. I wondered how long it would take for them to get worried about the missing guy. Less than five minutes, I figured. I wondered how many there would be in the search party. Just one, probably, but I hoped for more.

They waited seven minutes and sent two men. The inner door opened and the first guy stepped out. Number fourteen on Springfield’s list. He took a pace toward the alley door and the second guy stepped out after him. Number eight on Springfield’s list.

Then three things happened.

First, the first guy stopped. He saw that the alley door was closed. Which did not compute. It could not be opened from the outside without the key. Therefore the original searcher would have left it standing open while he prowled the sidewalk. But it was closed. Therefore the original searcher was already back inside.

The first guy turned around.

Second thing, the second guy also turned around. To close the inner door quietly and precisely. I let him get it done.

Then he raised his eyes and saw me.

The first guy saw me.

Third thing, I shot them both. Two three-round bursts, brief muted purring explosions each a quarter of a second long. I aimed for the base of their throats and let the muzzle climb stitch upward toward their chins. They were small men. Their necks were narrow and mostly full of arteries and spinal cords. Ideal targets. The noise of the gun was much louder in the roofed alley than it had been out in the open. Loud enough for me to worry about it. But the inner door was closed. And it was a stout piece of wood. Once upon a time it had been an outer door, before some earlier owner had sold his air rights.

The two guys went down.

My spent shell cases rattled away across the concrete.

I waited.

No immediate reaction.

Eight rounds gone. Twenty-two remaining. Seven men captured, three more down, three still walking and talking.

Plus the Hoths themselves.

I searched the new dead guys. No ID. No weapons. No keys, which meant the inner door wasn’t locked.

I left the two new bodies next to the first one, in the shadow of the trash can.

Then I waited. I didn’t expect anyone else to come through the door. Presumably the old Brits on the North West Frontier had eventually gotten wise about sending out rescue parties. Presumably the Red Army had. Presumably the Hoths knew their history. They ought to have. Svetlana had written some of it.

I waited.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I pulled it out and checked the window on the front. Restricted Call. Lila. I ignored her. I was all done talking. I put the phone back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.

I put my gloved fingers on the inner door’s handle. I eased it down. I felt the latch let go. I was fairly relaxed. Three men had gone out. Conceivable that any one of them might return. Or all three of them. If anyone was inside, watching and waiting, there would be a fatal split second of delay for recognition and a decision, friend or foe. Like a Major League batter sorting a fastball from a curveball. A fifth of a second, maybe more.

But no delay for me. Anyone I saw was my enemy.

Anyone at all.

I opened the door.

No one there.

I was looking at an empty room. The abandoned restaurant’s kitchen. It was dark and dismantled. There were shells of old cabinets and gaps in the countertops where appliances had been hauled away to the secondhand stores on the Bowery. There were old pipes in the walls where once faucets had been attached. There were hooks in the ceiling, where once saucepans had hung. There was a large stone table in the center of the room. Cool, smooth, slightly dished from years of wear. Maybe once pastry had been rolled on it.

More recently Peter Molina had been murdered on it.

There was no doubt in my mind that it was the table I had seen in the DVD. No doubt at all. I could see where the camera must have been positioned. I could see where the lights had been set. I could see knots of frayed rope on the table legs, where Peter’s wrists and ankles had been tied.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I ignored it.

I moved on.

There were two swinging doors leading to the dining room. One in, one out. Standard restaurant practice. No collisions. The doors had porthole windows set eye-high to an average man of fifty years ago. I ducked down and peered through. An empty room, large and rectangular. Nothing in it except a lone orphan chair. Dust and rat shit on the floor. Yellow light coming in from the street through the big filthy window.

I pushed the out door with my foot. Its hinges yelped a little but it opened. I stepped into the dining room. Turned left and left again. Found a back hallway with restrooms. Two doors, labeled Ladies and Gentlemen. Brass signs, proper words. No pictograms. No stick figures in skirts or pants.

Plus two more doors, one in each of the side walls. Brass signs: Private. One would lead back to the kitchen. The other would lead to the stairwell, and the upper floors.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I ignored it.

Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground. Couldn’t do it. Not an available option. Around the time the Israeli list was being written the SAS in Britain had been developing a tactic of rappelling off roofs into upper-story windows, or smashing through the roof tile itself, or blowing through directly from one adjacent attic to another. Fast, dramatic, and usually very successful. Nice work if you could get it. I couldn’t. I was stuck with the pedestrian approach.

For the time being, at least.

I opened the stairwell door. It swept an arc through a tiny thirty-inch by thirty-inch ground floor hallway. Directly across from me, close enough to touch, was the door that led out to the residential entrance. To the street door with the single bell push and the crime-scene tape.

Directly out of the tiny hallway rose a single narrow staircase. It turned back on itself halfway up and rose the rest of the way to the second floor out of sight.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I pulled it out and checked it. Restricted Call. I put it back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.

I started up the stairs.

Chapter 79

The safest way up the first half of a dog-legged staircase is to walk backward, looking upward, with your feet spread wide. Backward and looking upward, because if overhead resistance comes your way, you need to be facing it. Feet spread wide, because if stairs are going to creak, they’re going to creak most in the middle and least at the edges.

I shuffled up like that to the halfway break and then sidled sideways and went up the second half going forward. I came out in a second floor hallway that was twice the size of the first floor version but still tiny. Thirty inches by sixty. One room to the left, one to the right, and two dead ahead. Doors all closed.

I stood still. If I was Lila I would have one guy in each of the two rooms dead ahead. I would have them listening hard with weapons drawn. I would have them ready to fling open their doors and start up two parallel fields of fire. They could get me going up or coming down. But I wasn’t Lila and she wasn’t me. I had no idea of her likely deployment. Except that as her numbers diminished I felt she would want to keep her remaining guys reasonably close. Which would put them on the third floor, not the second. Because the flutter I had seen had been at a fourth floor window.

At the fourth floor window on the left, to be precise, looking at the building from the outside. Which meant her room was the room on the right, looking at it from the inside. I doubted that there would be any significant difference in the floor plans as I went up. It was a cheap, utilitarian structure. No call for custom features. Therefore a walk through the second floor room on the right would be the same thing as a walk through Lila’s room two floors above. It would give me the lie of the land.

I squeezed the slack out of the MP5’s trigger and put my gloved fingers on the door handle. Pushed down. Felt the latch let go.

I opened the door.

An empty room.

In fact, an empty and part-demolished studio apartment. It was as deep as but half the width of the restaurant dining room below. A long, narrow space. A closet in back, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a living area. I could see the layout at a single glance because all the dividing walls had been torn back to the studs. The bathroom fitments were all still there, odd and naked behind a vertical array of old two-by-twos, like ribs, like the spaced bars of a cage. The kitchen equipment was intact. The floors were pine boards, except for ragged-edged old-fashioned mosaic in the bathroom and linoleum tile in the kitchen. The whole place smelled of vermin and rotten plaster. The window over the street was black with soot. It was bisected diagonally by the bottom of the fire escape.

I walked quietly to the window. The fire escape was a standard design. A narrow iron ladder came down from the floor above and gave onto a narrow iron walkway under the windows themselves. Beyond the walkway a counterbalanced section lay ready to fold down toward the sidewalk under the weight of a fleeing person.

The window was a sash design. The lower pane was designed to slide upward inside the upper pane. Where the panes met they were locked together with a simple brass tongue in a slot. The lower pane had brass handles, like the ones you see on old file cabinets. The handles had been painted over many times. So had the window frames.

I undid the lock and put three fingers into each of the handles and heaved. The frame moved an inch, and stuck. I increased the pressure. I got close to the force I had used on the barred cages in the firehouse basement. The frame shuddered upward, an inch at a time, sticking on the left, sticking on the right, fighting me all the way. I got my shoulder under the bottom rail and straightened my legs. The frame moved another eight inches and jammed solid. I stepped back. Night air came in at me. Total gap, about twenty inches.

More than enough.

I got one leg out, bent at the waist, ducked through, got the other leg out.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I ignored it.

I went up the iron ladder, one slow quiet step after another. Halfway up my head was at the level of the third floor sills and I could see both front room windows.

Both had closed drapes. Old soot-colored cotton material behind soot-stained glass. No apparent light inside. No sounds. No evidence of activity. I turned and looked down at the street. No pedestrians. No passersby. No traffic.

I moved on upward. To the fourth story. Same result. Dirty glass, closed drapes. I paused a long time under the window where I had seen movement. Or imagined movement. I heard nothing and sensed nothing.

I moved up to the fifth floor. The fifth floor was different. No drapes. Empty rooms. The floors were stained and the ceilings sagged and bowed. Rainwater leaks.

The fifth floor windows were locked. The same simple brass tongue-and-slot mechanisms I had seen below, but there was nothing I could do about them without busting the glass. Which would make noise. Which I was prepared to do, but not yet. I wanted to time it right.

I hauled the strap around until the MP5 hung down my back and I got a foot up on the window sill. I stepped up and grabbed the crumbling cornice high above my head. I heaved myself over it. Not an elegant process. I am no kind of a graceful gymnast. I finished up panting and sprawled facedown on the roof with a face full of weeds. I lay there for a second to get my breath and then I got to my knees and looked around for a trapdoor. I found one about forty feet back, right above where I judged the stairwell hallway would be. It was a simple shallow upside-down wooden box sheathed in lead and hinged on one side. Presumably locked from below, probably with a hasp and a padlock. The padlock would be strong, but the hasp would be screwed into the frame, and the frame would be weak from age and rot and water damage.

No contest.

Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: Attack from the high ground.

Chapter 80

The lead sheath around the trapdoor lid had been beaten with felt hammers into gentle curves. No sharp corners. I got my gloved fingers under the edge opposite the hinge and yanked hard. No result. So I got serious. Two hands, eight fingers, bent legs, deep breath. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think about Peter Molina. So instead I pictured Lila Hoth’s insane smile at the camera right after she checked the Kabul taxi driver’s departed pulse.

I jerked the lid.

And the night started to unravel, right there and then.

I had hoped that the hasp’s screws would pull out of either the door or the frame. But they pulled out of both together. The padlock with the hasp still attached free-fell ten feet and thumped hard on the bare wooden floor below. A loud, emphatic, tympanic sound. Deep, resonant, and clear, followed immediately by the tinkle of the hasp itself and the patter of six separate screws.

Not good.

Not good at all.

I laid the trapdoor lid back and squatted on the roof and watched and listened.

Nothing happened for a second.

Then I heard a door open down on the fourth floor.

I aimed the MP5.

Nothing happened for another second. Then a head came into view up the stairs. Dark hair. A man. He had a gun in his hand. He saw the padlock on the floor. I saw the wheels turning in his head. Padlock, floor, screws, vertical fall. He peered upward. I saw his face. Number eleven on Springfield’s list. He saw me. The cloud above me was all lit up by the city’s glow. I guessed I was silhouetted quite clearly. He hesitated. I didn’t. I shot him more or less vertically through the top of his head. A burst of three. A triple tap. A brief muted purr. He went down with a loud clatter of shoes and hands and limbs, with two final big thumps as first the remains of his head and then his gun hit the boards. I watched the stairs for another long second and then vaulted through the open trapdoor and fell through the air and landed feetfirst next to the guy, which made another loud noise.

We were all through with secrecy.

Eleven rounds gone, nineteen remaining, four men down, two still up.

Plus the Hoths.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

Not now, Lila.

I picked up the guy’s gun and opened the door to the front room on the left and backed into the shadow. Rested my shoulder on the wall and looked out at the stairs.

No one came up.

Stalemate.

The gun I had taken from the dead guy was a Sig-Sauer P220, with a fat silencer on it. Swiss manufacture. Nine-millimeter Parabellum, nine rounds in a detachable box magazine. The same ammunition I was using. I thumbed the rounds out and dropped them loose into my pocket. I put the empty gun on the floor. Then I stepped back to the hallway and ducked into the front room on the right. It was bare and empty. I paced out the studio layout as I remembered it from below. Closet, bathroom, kitchen, living room. I made it to what I guessed was the center of the living room and stamped down hard. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. I figured Lila was directly below me, listening. I wanted to shake her up, way back in the lizard part of her brain. The scariest feeling of all. There’s something up there.

I stamped again.

I got a response.

The response came in the form of a bullet smashing up through the boards three feet to my right. It tore a splintered hole and buried itself in the ceiling above me and left dust and traces of smoke in the air.

No gunshot. They all had silencers.

I fired back, a triple tap vertically downward, straight through the same hole. Then I stepped away to where I guessed their kitchen was.

Fourteen rounds gone. Sixteen remaining. Nine loose in my pocket.

Another shot came up through the floor. Seven feet from me. I fired back. They fired back. I fired back one more time and figured they were starting to understand the pattern, so I crept out to the hallway and the head of the stairs.

Where I found that they had been figuring exactly the same thing: that I was getting into the rhythm. A guy was sneaking up on me. Number two on Springfield’s list. He had another Sig P220 in his hand. With a silencer. He saw me first. Fired once, and missed. I didn’t. I put a triple tap into the bridge of his nose and it climbed to the middle of his forehead and blood and brain spattered on the wall behind him and he went back down where he had come from in a heap.

His gun went with him.

My spent brass tinkled away across the pine.

Twenty-three rounds gone. Seven left, plus nine loose.

One guy up, plus the Hoths themselves.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

Too late for bargains, Lila.

I ignored her. I pictured her crouching one floor below. Svetlana at her side. One last guy between them and me. How would they use him? They weren’t dumb. They were the heirs of a long and tough tradition. They had dodged and weaved and feinted through the hills for two hundred years. They knew what they were doing. They wouldn’t send the guy up the stairs. Not again. That was fruitless. They would try to outflank me. They would send the guy up the fire escape. They would distract me with the phone and let the guy line up through the glass and shoot me in the back.

When?

Either immediately or much later. No middle ground. They would want me either surprised or bored.

They chose immediately.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

I stepped back into the left-hand room and checked the view. The iron ladder rose right-to-left from my perspective. I would see the guy’s head as he came up from below. Which was good. But my angle wasn’t good. The street was narrow. Nine-millimeter Parabellums are handgun rounds. They are considered suitable for urban environments. They are much more likely than a rifle round to stick in the target and go no farther. Subsonic Parabellums, more likely still. But nothing is guaranteed. And there were innocent non-combatants across the street. Bedroom windows, slumbering children. Through-and-through bull’s-eyes could reach them. Wild deflections could reach them. And ricochets, or fragments. Certainly out-and-out misses could reach them.

Collateral damage, just waiting to happen.

I crept through the room and flattened myself against the window wall. Glanced out. Nothing there. I extended my arm and flipped the window latch. Tried the handles. The window was stuck. I glanced out again. Nothing there. I stepped in front of the glass and grabbed the handles and heaved. The window moved and stuck and moved again and then shot up in the frame and slammed open so hard the pane cracked end to end.

I backed up against the wall again.

Listened hard.

Heard the dull muted clang of rubber soles on iron. A steady little rhythm. He was coming up fast, but he wasn’t running. I let him come. I let him get all the way up. I let him get his head and shoulders in the room. Dark hair, dark skin. He was number fifteen on Springfield’s list. I lined up parallel with the front wall of the building. He glanced left. He glanced right. He saw me. I pulled the trigger. A triple tap. He moved his head.

I missed. Maybe the first or the last of the three bullets tore his ear off but he stayed alive and conscious and fired back wildly and then ducked back outside. I heard him fall against the narrow iron walkway.

Now or never.

I went out after him. He was scrambling headfirst down the stairs. He made it back to the fourth floor and rolled on his back and raised his gun like it was a hundred-pound weight. I came down the ladder after him and leaned away from the building and stitched a triple tap into the center of his face. His gun spun and clanged end over end two floors down and lodged ten feet above the sidewalk.

I breathed in.

I breathed out.

Six men down. Seven arrested. Four back home. Two in a locked ward.

Nineteen for nineteen.

The fourth floor window was open. The drapes were drawn back. A studio apartment. Derelict, but not demolished. Lila and Svetlana Hoth were standing together behind the kitchenette counter.

Twenty-nine rounds gone.

One left.

I heard Lila’s voice in my head again: You must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially by the women.

I climbed over the sill and stepped into the room.

Chapter 81

The apartment was laid out the same as the ruined place on the second floor. Living room at the front, then the kitchenette, then the bathroom, then the closet in back. The walls were still up. The plaster was all still in place. There were two lights burning. There was a folded-up bed against the wall in the living room. Plus two hard chairs. Nothing else. The kitchenette had two parallel counters and one wall cupboard. A tiny space. Lila and Svetlana were crammed hip-to-hip in it. Svetlana on the left, Lila on the right. Svetlana was in a brown housedress. Lila was in black cargo pants and a white T-shirt. The shirt was cotton. The pants were made of rip-stop nylon. I guessed they would rustle as she moved. She looked as beautiful as ever. Long dark hair, bright blue eyes, perfect skin. A quizzical half-smile. It was a bizarre scene. Like a radical fashion photographer had posed his best model in a gritty urban setting.

I aimed the MP5. Black and wicked. It was hot. It stank of gunpowder and oil and smoke. I could smell it quite clearly.

I said, “Put your hands on the counter.”

They complied. Four hands appeared. Two brown and gnarled, two paler and slim. They spread them like starfish, two blunt and square, two longer and more delicate.

I said, “Step back and lean on them.”

They complied. It made them more immobile. Safer.

I said, “You’re not mother and daughter.”

Lila said, “No, we’re not.”

“So what are you?”

“Teacher and pupil.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to shoot a daughter in front of her mother. Or a mother in front of her daughter.”

“But you would shoot a pupil in front of her teacher?”

“Maybe the teacher first.”

“So do it.”

I stood still.

Lila said, “If you mean it, this is where you do it.”

I watched their hands. Watched for tension, or effort, or moving tendons, or increased pressure on their fingertips. For signs they were about to go somewhere.

There were no such signs.

The phone vibrated in my pocket.

In the silent room it made a tiny sound. A whir, a hum, a grind. A rhythmic little pulse. It jumped and buzzed against my thigh.

I stared at Lila’s hands. Flat. Still. Empty. No phone.

She said, “Perhaps you should answer that.”

I juggled the MP5’s grip into my left hand and pulled out the phone. Restricted Call. I opened it and put it to my ear.

Theresa Lee said, “Reacher?”

I said, “What?”

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call you for twenty minutes.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Where are you?”

“How did you get this number?”

“You called my cell, remember? Your number is in the call log.”

“Why is your number blocked?”

“Precinct switchboard. I’m on the landline now. Where the hell are you?”

“What’s up?”

“Listen carefully. You have bad information. Homeland Security got back to us again. One of the Tajikistan party missed a connection in Istanbul. He came in through London and Washington instead. There are twenty men, not nineteen.”

Lila Hoth moved and the twentieth man stepped out of the bathroom.

Chapter 82

Scientists measure time all the way down to the picosecond. A trillionth of a regular second. They figure all kinds of things can happen in that small interval. Universes can be born, particles can accelerate, atoms can be split. What happened to me in the first few picoseconds was a whole bunch of different things. First, I dropped the phone, still open, still live. By the time it was down level with my shoulder whole lines of conversation with Lila were screaming in my head. On the same phone, minutes ago, from Madison Avenue. I had said, You’re down to your last six guys. She had started to reply, and then she had stopped. She had been about to say, No, I’ve got seven. Like earlier, when she had started to say, That’s not close to me. The voiced dental fricative. But she had stopped herself. She had learned.

For once, she hadn’t talked too much.

And I hadn’t listened enough.

By the time the phone was down level with my waist I was focusing on the twentieth guy himself. He looked just like the previous four or five. He could have been their brother or their cousin, and probably was. Certainly he looked familiar. Small, sinewy, dark hair, lined skin, body language bridging wariness and aggression. He was dressed in a pair of dark knit sweatpants. A dark knit sweatshirt. He was right-handed. He was holding a silenced hand-gun. He was sweeping it through a long upward arc. He was aiming to bring it level. His finger was tightening on the trigger. He was going to shoot me in the chest.

I was holding the MP5 left-handed. The magazine was empty. The last round was already chambered. It had to count. I wanted to change hands. I didn’t want to fire from my weaker side, under my weaker eye.

No choice. To change hands would take half a second. Five hundred billion picoseconds. Too long. The other guy’s arm was nearly there. By the time the phone was down around my knees my right palm was slapping upward to meet the barrel. I was turning and straightening and tucking the grip back toward my chest. My right palm stopped and cradled the barrel and my left index finger squeezed the trigger with exaggerated calm. Lila was moving on my left. She was stepping out into the room. My finger completed its squeeze and the gun fired and my last round hit the twentieth guy in the face.

The phone hit the floor. It sounded like the padlock. A loud wooden thump.

My last spent shell case ejected and rattled away across the room.

The twentieth guy went down in a clatter of limbs and head and gun, dead before he hit the boards, shot through the base of the brain.

A head shot. A hit. Not bad for my left hand. Except that I had been aiming for his center mass.

Lila kept on moving. Gliding, swooping, ducking down.

She came back up with the dead guy’s gun. Another Sig P220, another silencer.

Swiss manufacture.

A nine-round detachable box magazine.

If Lila was scrambling for the gun, it was the only one in the apartment. In which case it had been fired at least three times, through the ceiling.

Maximum six rounds left.

Six versus zero.

Lila pointed the gun at me.

I pointed mine at her.

She said, “I’m faster.”

I said, “You think?”

Way off to my left Svetlana said, “Your gun is empty.”

I glanced at her. “You speak English?”

“Fairly well.”

“I reloaded upstairs.”

“Bullshit. I can see from here. You’re set to three-round bursts. But you fired only once. Therefore that was your last bullet.”

We stood like that for what seemed like a long time. The P220 was as steady as a rock in Lila’s hand. She was fifteen feet from me. Behind her the dead guy was leaking fluid all over the floor. Svetlana was in the kitchen. There were all kinds of smells in the air. There was a draft from the open window. Air was moving in and stirring through the room and funneling up the staircase and out through the hole in the roof.

Svetlana said, “Put your gun down.”

I said, “You want the memory stick.”

“You don’t have it.”

“But I know where it is.”

“So do we.”

I said nothing.

Svetlana said, “You don’t have it but you know where it is. Therefore you employed a deductive process. Do you think you are uniquely talented? Do you think that deductive processes are unavailable to others? We all share the same facts. We can all arrive at the same conclusions.”

I said nothing.

She said, “As soon as you told us you knew where it was, we set about thinking. You spurred us on. You talk too much, Reacher. You made yourself disposable.”

Lila said, “Put the gun down. Have a little dignity. Don’t stand there like an idiot, holding an empty gun.”

I stood still.

Lila dropped her arm maybe ten degrees and fired into the floor between my feet. She hit a spot level with and exactly equidistant between the toecaps of my shoes. Not an easy shot. She was a great markswoman. The floorboard splintered. I flinched a little. The Sig’s silencer was louder than the H&K’s. Like a phone book smashed down, not dropped. A wisp of wood smoke drifted upward, where the friction of the bullet had burned the pine. The spent shell case ejected in a brassy arc and tinkled away.

Five rounds left.

Lila said, “Put the gun down.”

I looped the strap up over my head. Held the gun by the grip down by my side. It was no longer any use to me, except as a seven-pound metal club. And I doubted that I would get near enough to either one of them for a club to be effective. And if I did, I would prefer bare-knuckle hand-to-hand combat. A seven-pound metal club is good. But a two-hundred-fifty-pound human club is better.

Svetlana said, “Throw it over here. But carefully. If you hit one of us, you die.”

I swung the gun slowly and let it go. It cartwheeled lazily through the air and bounced off its muzzle and clattered against the far wall.

Svetlana said, “Now take off your jacket.”

Lila pointed her gun at my head.

I complied. I shrugged the jacket off and threw it across the room. It landed next to the MP5. Svetlana came out from behind the kitchen counter and rooted through the pockets. She found the nine loose Parabellum rounds and the part-used roll of duct tape. She stood the nine loose rounds upright on the counter, in a neat little line. She put the roll of tape next to it.

She said, “Glove.”

I complied. I bit the glove off and tossed it after the jacket.

“Shoes and socks.”

I hopped from foot to foot and leaned back against the wall to steady myself and undid my laces and eased my shoes off and peeled my socks down. I threw them one after the other toward the pile.

Lila said, “Take your shirt off.”

I said, “I will if you will.”

She dropped her arm ten degrees and put another round into the floor between my feet. The bang of the silencer, the splintering wood, the smoke, the hard tinkle of the spent case.

Four left.

Lila said, “Next time I’ll shoot you in the leg.”

Svetlana said, “Your shirt.”

So for the second time in five hours I peeled my T-shirt off at a woman’s request. I kept my back against the wall and threw the shirt overhand into the pile. Lila and Svetlana spent a moment looking at my scars. They seemed to like them. Especially the shrapnel wound. The tip of Lila’s tongue came out, pink and moist and pointed between her lips.

Svetlana said, “Now your pants.”

I looked at Lila and said, “I think your gun is empty.”

She said, “It isn’t. I have four left. Two legs and two arms.”

Svetlana said, “Take your pants off.”

I unbuttoned. I unzipped. I pushed the stiff denim down. I stepped out. I kept my back against the wall and kicked the pants toward the pile. Svetlana picked them up. Went through the pockets. Made a pile of my possessions on the kitchen counter next to the nine loose rounds and the roll of tape. My cash, plus a few coins. My old expired passport. My ATM card. My subway card. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card. And my clip-together toothbrush.

“Not much,” Svetlana said.

“Everything I need,” I said. “Nothing I don’t.”

“You’re a poor man.”

“No, I’m a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.”

“The American dream, then. To die rich.”

“Opportunity for all.”

“We have more than you, where we come from.”

“I don’t like goats.”

The room went quiet. It felt damp and cold. I stood there in nothing except my new white boxers. The P220 was rock steady in Lila’s hand. Muscles like thin cords stood out in her arm. Next to the bathroom the dead guy continued to leak. Outside the window it was five o’clock in the morning and the city was starting to stir.

Svetlana bustled about and balled up my gun and my shoes and my clothes into a tidy bundle and threw it behind the kitchen counter. She followed it with the two hard chairs. She picked up my phone, and shut it off, and tossed it away. She was clearing the space. She was emptying it. The living room part of the studio was about twenty feet by twelve. I was backed up against the center of one of the long walls. Lila tracked around in front of me, keeping her distance, pointing the gun. She stopped in the far corner, by the window. Now she was facing me at a shallow angle.

Svetlana went into the kitchen. I heard a drawer rattle open. Heard it close. Saw Svetlana come back.

With two knives.

They were long butcher’s tools. For gutting or filleting or boning. They had black handles. Steel blades. Wicked wafer-thin cutting edges. Svetlana threw one of them to Lila. She caught it expertly by the handle with her free hand. Svetlana moved to the corner opposite her. They had me triangulated. Lila was forty-five degrees to my left, Svetlana was forty-five degrees to my right.

Lila twisted her upper body and jammed the P220’s silencer hard into the angle where the front wall met the side. She found the catch at the heel of the butt with her thumb and dropped the magazine. It fell out and hit the floor in the corner of the room. Three rounds showed in the slot. Therefore one was still chambered. She threw the gun itself into the other corner, behind Svetlana. The gun and the magazine were now twenty feet apart, one behind one woman, and the other behind the other.

“Like a treasure hunt,” Lila said. “The gun won’t fire without the magazine in place. To prevent an accidental discharge if a round is mistakenly left in the chamber. The Swiss are very cautious people. So you need to pick up the gun, and then pick up the magazine. Or vice versa. But first, of course, you need to get past us.”

I said nothing.

She said, “If you should succeed, in a mad wounded scramble, then I recommend you use the first round on yourself.”

And then she smiled, and stepped forward a pace. Svetlana did the same. They held their knives low, fingers below the handle, thumbs above. Like street fighters. Like experts.

The long blades winked in the light.

I stood still.

Lila said, “We’re going to enjoy this more than you could possibly imagine.”

I did nothing.

Lila said, “A delay is good. It heightens the anticipation.”

I stood still.

Lila said, “But if we get bored waiting, we’ll come and get you.”

I said nothing. Stood still.

Then I reached behind me and came out with my Benchmade 3300, from where it had been duct-taped to the small of my back.

Chapter 83

I thumbed the release and the blade snapped out with a sound that was halfway between a click and a thump. A loud sound, in the silent room. And an unhappy sound. I don’t like knives. I never have. I have no real talent with them.

But I have as much of an instinct for self-preservation as any guy.

Maybe more than most.

And by that point I had been scuffling since the age of five, and all of my defeats had been minor. And I’m the kind of guy who watches and learns. I had seen knife fights all over the world. The Far East, Europe, the hardscrabble scrublands outside army bases in the southern United States, in streets, in alleys, outside bars and pool halls.

First rule: Don’t get cut early. Nothing weakens you faster than blood loss.

Svetlana was more than a foot shorter than me and she was thick and wide and her arms were proportional. Lila was taller, more loose-limbed, more graceful. But all in all I figured that even against blades six inches longer than mine, I still had the advantage.

Plus I had just changed the game, and they were still dealing with the surprise.

Plus they were fighting for fun, and I was fighting for my life.

I wanted to get to the kitchen, so I danced toward Svetlana, who was between me and it. She was up on her toes, knife down at her knees, feinting left, feinting right. I kept my blade down low, to match hers. She swung. I arched back. Her blade hissed past my thigh. I jammed my ass back and my shoulders forward and clubbed her with an overarm left hook. It grazed her eyebrow and then caught her full on the side of the nose.

She looked astonished. Like most knife fighters she thought it was all about the steel. She forgot that people have two hands.

She rocked back on her heels and Lila came in from my left. Blade low. Darting, jabbing. Mouth open in an ugly grimace. Concentrating hard. She understood. This was no longer a game. No longer fun. She ducked in, she ducked out, feinting, backing off, always working. For a time we all danced like that. Frantic, breathless, abrupt abbreviated movements, dust and sweat and fear in the air, their eyes locked on my blade, mine switching constantly between theirs.

Svetlana stepped in. Stepped out. Lila came at me, balanced, up on her toes. I kept my hips back and my shoulders forward. I swung my blade hard for Lila’s face. Huge. Convulsive. Like I was aiming to throw a ball four hundred feet. Lila ducked back. She knew the swing was going to miss, because she was going to make it miss. Svetlana knew it was going to miss, because she trusted Lila.

I knew it was going to miss, because I planned not to let it hit.

I stopped the violent maneuver halfway through and reversed direction and aimed a vicious surprise backhand straight at Svetlana. I sliced her forehead. A solid blow. I felt the blade hit bone. A lock of her hair hit her chest. The Benchmade worked exactly the way it should. D2 steel. You could have dropped a ten-dollar bill on it and gotten two fives in exchange. I put a six-inch horizontal gash halfway between Svetlana’s hairline and her eyebrows. Open to the bone.

She rocked back and stood still.

No pain. Not yet.

Forehead cuts are never fatal. But they bleed a lot. Within seconds blood was sheeting down into her eyes. Blinding her. If I had been wearing shoes I could have killed her there and then. Bring her down with a blow to the knees, and then kick her head to pulp. But I wasn’t about to risk the bones in my feet against her fireplug body. Lack of mobility would have killed me just as fast.

I danced back.

Lila came straight after me.

I kept my hips back and dodged the hissing arc of her blade. Left, right. I hit the wall behind me. I timed it and waited until her arm was across her body and turned sideways and shoulder-charged her and bounced her away. I spun onward to where Svetlana was tottering around and trying to wipe the pouring blood from her eyes. I swatted her knife arm away and stepped in and nicked her neck above her collar bone and dodged back out.

Then Lila cut me.

She had figured out the reach issue. She was holding her knife in her fingertips way at the end of the handle. She lunged in. Her hair was flying. Her shoulders were hunched forward. She was looking for every half-inch of advantage she could get. She stopped on a stiff front leg and bent low and leaned in and slashed wildly at my stomach.

And hit it.

A bad cut. A wild swing, a strong arm, a razor-sharp blade. Very bad. It was a long diagonal slice below my navel and above the waistband of my boxers. No pain. Not yet. Just a brief strange signal from my skin, telling me it was no longer all connected together.

I paused a beat. Disbelief. Then I did what I always do when someone hurts me. I stepped in, not away. Her momentum had carried her knife beyond my hip. My blade was low. I slashed backhand at her thigh and cut her deep and then pushed off my back foot and hit her in the face with my left fist. Bull’s-eye. A major, stunning blow. She spun away and I barged on toward Svetlana. Her face was a mask of blood. She swung her blade right. Then left. She opened up. I stepped in and slashed down on the inside of her right forearm. I cut her to the bone. Veins, tendons, ligaments. She howled. Not from pain. That would come later. Or not. She howled from fear, because she was done. Her arm was useless. I spun her around with a blow to the shoulder and stabbed her in the kidney. All four inches, with a savage sideways jerk. Safe to do. No ribs in that region. No chance of hitting bone and jamming the blade. Lots of blood flows through the kidneys. All kinds of arteries. Ask any dialysis patient. All of a person’s blood passes through the kidneys many times a day. Pints of it. Gallons of it. Now in Svetlana’s case it was going in and it wasn’t coming back out.

She went down to her knees. Lila was trying to clear her head. Her nose was broken. Her flawless face was ruined. She charged me. I feinted left and moved right. We danced around Svetlana’s kneeling form. A whole circle. I got back to where I had started and ducked away to the kitchenette. Stepped between the counters. Grabbed one of the hard chairs that Svetlana had piled there. I threw it left-handed at Lila. She ducked away and hunched and it smashed against her back.

I came out of the kitchen and stepped behind Svetlana and put a hand in her hair and hauled her head back. Leaned around and cut her throat. Ear to ear. Hard work, even with the Benchmade’s great blade. I had to pull and tug and saw. Muscle, fat, hard flesh, ligaments. The steel scraped across bone. Weird tubercular sounds came up at me out of her severed windpipe. Wheezing and gasping. There were fountains of blood as her arteries went. It pulsed and sprayed way out in front of her. It hit the far wall. It soaked my hand and made it slippery. I let go of her hair and she pitched forward. Her face hit the boards with a thump.

I stepped away, panting.

Lila faced me, panting.

The room felt burning hot and it smelled of coppery blood.

I said, “One down.”

She said, “One still up.”

I nodded. “Looks like the pupil was better than the teacher.”

She said, “Who says I was the pupil?”

Her thigh was bleeding badly. There was a neat slice in the black nylon of her pants and blood was running down her leg. Her shoe was already soaked. My boxers were soaked. They had turned from white to red. I looked down and saw blood welling out of me. A lot of it. It was bad. But my old scar had saved me. My shrapnel wound, from Beirut, long ago. The ridged white skin from the clumsy MASH stitches was tough and gnarled and it had slowed Lila’s blade and deflected it shallower. Without it the tail of the cut would have been much longer and deeper. For years I had resented the hasty work by the emergency surgeons. Now I was grateful for it.

Lila’s busted nose started to bleed. The blood ran down to her mouth and she coughed and spat. Looked down at the floor. Saw Svetlana’s knife. It was mired in a spreading pool of blood. The blood was already thickening. It was soaking into the old boards. It was running into the cracks between them. Lila’s left arm moved. Then it stopped. To bend down and pick up Svetlana’s knife would make her vulnerable. Likewise for me. I was five feet from the P220. She was five feet from the magazine.

The pain started. My head spun and buzzed. My blood pressure was falling.

Lila said, “If you ask nicely I’ll let you walk away.”

“I’m not asking.”

“You can’t win.”

“Dream on.”

“I’m prepared to fight to the death.”

“You don’t have a choice in the matter. That decision has already been made.”

“You could kill a woman?”

“I just did.”

“One like me?”

“Especially one like you.”

She spat again and breathed hard through her mouth. She coughed. She looked down at her leg. She nodded and said, “OK.” She looked up at me with her amazing eyes.

I stood still.

She said, “If you mean it, this is where you do it.”

I nodded. I meant it. So I did it. I was weak, but it was easy. Her leg was slowing her down. She was having trouble with her breathing. Her sinuses were smashed. Blood was pooling in the back of her throat. She was dazed and dizzy, from when I had hit her. I took the second chair from the kitchen and charged her with it. Now my reach was unbeatable. I backed her into the corner with it and hit her with it twice until she dropped her knife and fell. I sat down beside her and strangled her. Slowly, because I was fading fast. But I didn’t want to use the blade. I don’t like knives.

Afterward I crawled back to the kitchen and rinsed the Benchmade under the tap. Then I used its dagger point to cut butterfly shapes out of the black duct tape. I pinched my wound together with my fingers and used the butterflies to hold it together. A dollar and a half. Any hardware store. Essential equipment. I struggled back into my clothes. I reloaded my pockets. I put my shoes back on.

Then I sat down on the floor. Just for a minute. But it turned out longer. A medical man would say I passed out. I prefer to think I just went to sleep.

Chapter 84

I woke up in a hospital bed. I was wearing a paper gown. The clock in my head told me it was four in the afternoon. Ten hours. The taste in my mouth told me most of them had been chemically assisted. I had a clip on my finger. It had a wire. The wire must have been connected to a nurses’ station. The clip must have detected some kind of an altered heartbeat pattern, because about a minute after I woke up a whole bunch of people came in. A doctor, a nurse, then Jacob Mark, then Theresa Lee, then Springfield, then Sansom. The doctor was a woman and the nurse was a man.

The doctor fussed around for a minute, checking charts and staring at monitors. Then she picked up my wrist and checked my pulse, which seemed a little superfluous with all the high technology at her disposal. Then in answer to questions I hadn’t asked, she told me I was in Bellevue Hospital and that my condition was very satisfactory. Her ER people had cleaned the wound and sutured it and filled me full of antibiotics and tetanus injections and given me three units of blood. She told me to avoid heavy lifting for a month. Then she left. The nurse went with her.

I looked at Theresa Lee and asked, “What happened to me?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Of course I remember. But what’s the official version?”

“You were found on the street in the East Village. Unexplained knife wound. Happens all the time. They ran a tox screen and found traces of barbiturate. They put you down as a dope deal gone bad.”

“Did they tell the cops?”

“I am the cops.”

“How did I get to the East Village?”

“You didn’t. We brought you straight here.”

“We?”

“Me and Mr. Springfield.”

“How did you find me?”

“We triangulated the cell phone. Which led us to the general area. The exact address was Mr. Springfield’s idea.”

Springfield said, “A certain mujahideen leader told us all about doubling back to abandoned hideouts twenty-five years ago.”

I asked, “Is there going to be any comeback?”

John Sansom said, “No.”

Simple as that.

I said, “Are you sure? There are nine corpses in that house.”

“The DoD guys are there right now. They’ll issue a loud no comment. With a knowing smirk. Designed to make everyone give them the credit.”

“Suppose the wind changes direction? That happens from time to time. As you know.”

“As a crime scene, it’s a mess.”

“I left blood there.”

“There’s a lot of blood there. It’s an old building. If anyone runs tests they’ll come up with rat DNA, mostly.”

“There’s blood on my clothes.”

Theresa Lee said, “The hospital burned your clothes.”

“Why?”

“Biohazard.”

“They were brand-new.”

“They were soaked with blood. No one takes a risk with blood anymore.”

“Right-hand fingerprints,” I said. “Inside the window handles and on the trapdoor.”

“Old building,” Sansom said. “It will be torn down and redeveloped before the wind changes.”

“Shell cases,” I said.

Springfield said, “Standard DoD issue. I’m sure they’re delighted. They’ll probably leak one to the media.”

“Are they still looking for me?”

“They can’t. It would confuse the narrative.”

“Turf wars,” I said.

“Which they just won, apparently.”

I nodded.

Sansom asked, “Where is the memory stick?”

I looked at Jacob Mark. “You OK?”

He said, “Not really.”

I said, “You’re going to have to hear some stuff.”

He said, “OK.”

I hauled myself into a sitting position. Didn’t hurt at all. I guessed I was full of painkiller. I pulled my knees up and tented the sheet and moved the hem of my paper gown and took a peek at the cut. Couldn’t see it. I was wrapped with bandages from my hips to my ribcage.

Sansom said, “You told us you could get us within fifteen feet.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. Time has moved on. We’re going to have to do it by dead reckoning.”

“Great. You were bullshitting all along. You don’t know where it is.”

“We know the general shape of it,” I said. “They planned for the best part of three months and then executed during the final week. They coerced Susan by using Peter as leverage. She drove up from Annandale, got stuck in a four-hour traffic jam, say from nine in the evening until one in the morning, and then she arrived in Manhattan just before two in the morning. I assume we know exactly when she came out of the Holland Tunnel. So what we have to do is work backward and figure out exactly where her car was jammed up at midnight.”

“How does that help us?”

“Because at midnight she threw the memory stick out her car window.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because when she arrived she didn’t have a cell phone with her.”

Sansom glanced at Lee. Lee nodded. Said, “Keys and a wallet. That was all. Not in her car, either. The FBI inventoried the contents.”

Sansom said, “Not everyone uses a cell phone.”

“True,” I said. “And I’m that guy. The only guy in the world without a cell phone. Certainly a person like Susan would have had one.”

Jacob Mark said, “She had one.”

Sansom said, “So?”

“The Hoths set a deadline. Almost certainly midnight. Susan didn’t show, the Hoths went to work. They made a threat, and they carried it out. And they proved it. They phoned through a cell phone picture. Maybe a live video clip. Peter on the slab, that long first cut. Susan’s life changed, effectively, on the stroke of midnight. She was helpless in a traffic jam. The phone in her hand was suddenly appalling and repugnant. She threw it out the window. Followed it with the memory stick, which was the symbol of all her troubles. They’re both still there, in the trash on the side of I-95. No other explanation.”

Nobody spoke.

I said, “The median, probably. Subconsciously Susan would have put herself in the overtaking lane, because she was in a hurry. We could have triangulated the cell phone, but I think it’s too late now. The battery will be dead.”

Silence in the room. A whole minute. Just the hum and beep of medical equipment.

Sansom said, “That’s insane. The Hoths must have known they were losing control of the stick as soon as they phoned the picture through. They were giving up their leverage. Susan could have driven straight to the police.”

“Two answers,” I said. “The Hoths were insane, in a way. They were fundamentalists. They could act the part in public, but underneath it was all black and white for them. No nuance. A threat was a threat. Midnight was midnight. But anyway, their risk was minimal. They had a guy tailing Susan all the way. He could have stopped her going off message.”

“Who?”

“The twentieth guy. I don’t think going to Washington was a mistake. It wasn’t a missed connection in Istanbul. It was a last-minute change of plan. They suddenly realized that for a thing like this they needed someone on the ground in D.C. Or across the river, more likely, in one of the Pentagon dormitories. So the twentieth guy went straight there. Then he followed Susan all the way up. Five or ten cars back, like you do. Which was fine, until the traffic jammed up. Five or ten cars back in a traffic jam is as bad as a mile. All boxed in, maybe a big SUV in front of you, blocking the view. He didn’t see what happened. But he stayed with her. He was on the train, wearing an NBA shirt. I thought he looked familiar, when I saw him again. But I couldn’t confirm it, because I shot him in the face a split second later. He got all messed up.”

More silence. Then Sansom asked, “So where was Susan at midnight?”

I said, “You figure it out. Time, distance, average speed. Get a map and a ruler and paper and pencil.”

Jacob Mark was from Jersey. He started talking about Troopers he knew. About how the Troopers could help. They patrolled I-95 night and day. They knew it like the backs of their hands. They had traffic cameras. Their recorded pictures could calibrate the paper calculations. The highway department would cooperate. Everyone got into a big conversation. They paid me no more attention. I lay back on my pillow and they all started edging out of the room. Last out was Springfield. He paused in the doorway and looked back and asked, “How do you feel about Lila Hoth?”

I said, “I feel fine.”

“Really? I wouldn’t. You nearly got taken down by two girls. It was sloppy work. Things like that, you do them properly or not at all.”

“I didn’t have much ammunition.”

“You had thirty rounds. You should have used single shots. Those triple taps were all about anger. You let emotion get in the way. I warned you about that.”

He looked at me for a long second with nothing in his face. Then he stepped out to the corridor and I never saw him again.

Theresa Lee came back two hours later. She had a shopping bag with her. She told me the hospital wanted its bed, so the NYPD was putting me in a hotel. She had bought clothes for me. She showed me. Shoes, socks, jeans, boxers, and a shirt, all sized the same as the items the ER staff had burned. The shoes and the socks and the jeans and the boxers were fine. The shirt was weird. It was made of soft, worn white cotton. It was almost furry, down at a microscopic level. It was long-sleeved and tight. It had three buttons at the neck. It was like an old-fashioned undershirt. I was going to look like my grandfather. Or like a gold miner in California, way back in 1849.

“Thank you,” I said.

She told me the others were working on the math problem. She told me they were arguing about the route Susan would have used from the Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Locals used shortcuts through surface streets that looked wrong according to the road signs.

I said, “Susan wasn’t a local.”

She agreed. She felt that Susan would have used the obvious signposted route.

Then she said, “They won’t find the picture, you know.”

I said, “You think?”

“Oh, they’ll find the stick, for sure. But they’ll say it was unreadable, or run over and damaged or broken, or there was nothing sinister on it after all.”

I didn’t answer.

“Count on it,” she said. “I know politicians, and I know the government.”

Then she asked, “How do you feel about Lila Hoth?”

I said, “All in all I’m regretting the approach on the train. With Susan. I wish I had given her a couple more stops.”

“I was wrong. She couldn’t possibly have gotten over it.”

“The opposite,” I said. “Was there a sock in her car?”

Lee thought back to the FBI inventory. Nodded.

“Clean?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“So think about Susan setting out. She’s living a nightmare. But she’s not sure exactly how bad it is. She can’t bring herself to believe it’s as bad as she suspects. Maybe it’s all a sick joke or an empty threat. Or a bluff. But she’s not sure. She’s dressed in what she wore for work. Black pants, white blouse. She’s heading for an unknown situation in the big bad city. She’s a woman on her own, she lives in Virginia, she’s been around the military for years. So she takes her gun. It’s probably still wrapped in a sock, like she stores it in her drawer. She puts it in her bag. She leaves. She gets stuck in the jam. She calls ahead. Maybe the Hoths call her. They won’t listen. They’re fanatics and they’re foreign. They don’t understand. They think a traffic jam is a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.”

“Then she gets the midnight message.”

“And she changes. The point is, she has time to change. She’s stuck in traffic. She can’t take off. She can’t go to the cops. She can’t drive into a telephone pole at ninety miles an hour. She’s trapped. She has to sit there and think. No alternative. And she arrives at a decision. She’s going to avenge her son. She makes a plan. She takes the gun out of the sock. Stares at it. She sees an old black jacket dumped on the back seat. Maybe it was there since the winter. She wants dark clothing. She puts it on. Eventually the traffic moves. She drives on to New York.”

“What about the list?”

“She was a normal person. Maybe working around to killing someone else produces the same feelings as working around to killing yourself. That’s what she was doing. She was climbing up on the plateau. But she wasn’t quite there yet. I disturbed her too early. So she quit. She took the other way out. Maybe by 59th Street she would have been ready.”

“Better that she was spared that fight.”

“Maybe she would have won. Lila would have been expecting her to take something out of her pocket or her bag. There would have been an element of surprise.”

“She had a six-shooter. There were twenty-two of them.”

I nodded. “She’d have died, for sure. But maybe she would have died satisfied.”

A day later in the hotel Theresa Lee came back to visit. She told me that Sansom had scoped out a likely target area about half a mile long and the Jersey highway people had closed it off with orange barrels. Three hours into the search they found Susan’s cell phone. A second later, four feet away, they found the memory stick. It had been run over. It was crushed. It was unreadable.

I left New York the next day. I moved south. I spent a large part of the next two weeks obsessing over what might have been in that picture. I came up with all kinds of speculations, some involving technical breaches of Sharia law, some involving domesticated animals. Alternating with the lurid imagined scenarios from the Korengal tent were repeated flashback memories of hitting Lila Hoth in the face. The straight left, the crunch of bone and cartilage under my fist. The ruined appearance. The episode replayed constantly in my mind. I didn’t know why. I had just cut her with a knife and later I strangled her, and I could barely remember those acts at all. Maybe hitting women ran counter to my subliminal values. Which was entirely illogical.

But eventually the images faded and I grew bored with imagining Osama bin Laden having his way with goats. By the time a month had passed I had forgotten all of it. My cut had healed very nicely. The scar was thin and white. The stitches were neat and tiny. My lower body was like a textbook illustration: This one is how it should be done, and that one is how it shouldn’t. But I never forgot how those earlier, clumsier stitches had saved me. What goes around comes around. A benign legacy, from the truck bomb in Beirut, planned and paid for and driven there by persons unknown.

For my sisters-in-law, Leslie and Sally,

two women of rare charm and quality

61 Hours is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Title page art from an original photograph by Mateusz Stachowski

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

61 hours : a Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33953-3

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Retired military personnel—Fiction. 3. Witnesses—Protection—Fiction. 4. Assassins—Fiction. 5. Winter storms—Fiction. 6. South Dakota—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Sixty-one hours.

PS3553.H4838A614 2010

813′.54—dc22

2009052804

www.bantamdell.com

v3.0_r3

Book design by Virginia Norey

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

61 Hours

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Dedication

Chapter 1

Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors’ entrance. There was a bitter wind out of the north. It was thick with fat lazy flakes. There was a storm sixty miles away. The radio had been full of it.

The lawyer got in through the door and stamped the snow off his feet. There was no line. It was not a regular visiting day. There was nothing ahead of him except an empty room and an empty X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around doing nothing. He nodded to them, even though he didn’t know them. But he considered himself on their side, and they on his. Prison was a binary world. Either you were locked up, or you weren’t. They weren’t. He wasn’t.

Yet.

He took a gray plastic bin off the top of a teetering stack and folded his overcoat into it. He took off his suit coat and folded it and laid it on top of the overcoat. It was hot in the prison. Cheaper to burn a little extra oil than to give the inmates two sets of clothes, one for the summer and one for the winter. He could hear their noise ahead of him, the clatter of metal and concrete and the random crazy yells and the screams and the low grumble of other disaffected voices, all muted by doglegged corridors and many closed doors.

He emptied his pants pockets of keys, and wallet, and cell phone, and coins, and nested those clean warm personal items on top of his suit coat. He picked up the gray plastic bin. Didn’t carry it to the X-ray belt. Instead he hefted it across the room to a small window in a wall. He waited there and a woman in uniform took it and gave him a numbered ticket in exchange for it.

He braced himself in front of the metal detector hoop. He patted his pockets and glanced ahead, expectantly, as if waiting for an invitation. Learned behavior, from air travel. The guards let him stand there for a minute, a small, nervous man in his shirt sleeves, empty-handed. No briefcase. No notebook. Not even a pen. He was not there to advise. He was there to be advised. Not to talk, but to listen, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to put what he heard anywhere near a piece of paper.

The guards beckoned him through. A green light and no beep, but still the first guard wanded him and the second patted him down. The third escorted him deeper into the complex, through doors designed never to be open unless the last and the next were closed, and around tight corners designed to slow a running man’s progress, and past thick green glass windows with watchful faces behind.

The lobby had been institutional, with linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. And the lobby had been connected to the outside, with gusts of cold air blowing in when the door was opened, and salt stains and puddles of snowmelt on the floor. The prison proper was different. It had no connection to the outside. No sky, no weather. No attempt at décor. It was all raw concrete, already rubbed greasy where sleeves and shoulders had touched it, still pale and dusty where they hadn’t. Underfoot was grippy gray paint, like the floor of an auto enthusiast’s garage. The lawyer’s overshoes squeaked on it.

There were four interview rooms. Each was a windowless concrete cube divided exactly in half by a wall-to-wall desk-height counter with safety glass above. Caged lights burned on the ceiling above the counter. The counter was cast from concrete. The grain of the form-work lumber was still visible in it. The safety glass was thick and slightly green and was divided into three overlapping panes, to give two sideways listening slots. The center pane had a cut-out slot at the bottom, for documents. Like a bank. Each half of the room had its own chair, and its own door. Perfectly symmetrical. The lawyers entered one way, and the inmates entered the other. Later they left the same way they had come, each to a different destination.

The guard opened the door from the corridor and stepped a yard into the room for a visual check that all was as it should be. Then he stood aside and let the lawyer enter. The lawyer stepped in and waited until the guard closed the door behind him and left him alone. Then he sat down and checked his watch. He was eight minutes late. He had driven slow, because of the weather. Normally he would have regarded it as a failure to be late for an appointment. Unprofessional, and disrespectful. But prison visits were different. Time meant nothing to prisoners.

Another eight minutes later the other door opened, in the wall behind the glass. A different guard stepped in and checked and then stepped back out and a prisoner shuffled in. The lawyer’s client. He was white, and enormously overweight, marbled with fat, and completely hairless. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He had wrist and waist and ankle chains that looked as delicate as jewelry. His eyes were dull and his face was docile and vacant, but his mouth was moving a little, like a simpleminded person struggling to retain complex information.

The door in the wall behind the glass closed.

The prisoner sat down.

The lawyer hitched his chair close to the counter.

The prisoner did the same.

Symmetrical.

The lawyer said, “I’m sorry I’m late.”

The prisoner didn’t answer.

The lawyer asked, “How are you?”

The prisoner didn’t answer. The lawyer went quiet. The air in the room was hot. A minute later the prisoner started talking, reciting, working his way through lists and instructions and sentences and paragraphs he had committed to memory. From time to time the lawyer said, “Slow down a bit,” and on each occasion the guy paused and waited and then started up again at the head of the previous sentence with no change in his pace and no alteration to his singsong delivery. It was as if he had no other way of communicating.

The lawyer had what he considered to be a pretty good memory, especially for detail, like most lawyers, and he was paying a lot of attention, because to concentrate on the process of remembering distracted him from the actual content of the instructions he was getting. But even so some small corner of his mind had counted fourteen separate criminal proposals before the prisoner finally finished up and sat back.

The lawyer said nothing.

The prisoner said, “Got all that?”

The lawyer nodded and the prisoner lapsed into a bovine stillness. Or equine, like a donkey in a field, infinitely patient. Time meant nothing to prisoners. Especially this one. The lawyer pushed his chair back and stood up. His door was unlocked. He stepped out to the corridor.

Five minutes to four in the afternoon.

Sixty hours to go.

The lawyer found the same guard waiting for him. He was back in the parking lot two minutes later. He was fully dressed again and his stuff was back in his pockets, all reassuringly weighty and present and normal. It was snowing harder by then and the air was colder and the wind was wilder. It was going dark, fast and early. The lawyer sat for a moment with his seat heating and his engine running and his wipers pushing berms of snow left and right on the windshield glass. Then he took off, a wide slow turn with his tires squeaking against the fresh fall and his headlight beams cutting bright arcs through the white swirl. He headed for the exit, the wire gates, the wait, the trunk check, and then the long straight road that led through town to the highway.

Fourteen criminal proposals. Fourteen actual crimes, if he relayed the proposals and they were acted upon, which they surely would be. Or fifteen crimes, because he himself would then become a co-conspirator. Or twenty-eight crimes, if a prosecutor chose to call each separate issue a separate conspiracy, which a prosecutor might, just for the fun of it. Or just for the glory. Twenty-eight separate paths to shame and ignominy and disbarment, and trial and conviction and imprisonment. Life imprisonment, almost certainly, given the nature of one of the fourteen proposals, and only then after a successful plea bargain. A failed plea bargain was too awful to contemplate.

The lawyer made it around the highway cloverleaf and merged into the slow lane. All around him was the thick gray of falling snow in the late afternoon. Not much traffic. Just occasional cars and trucks going his way, some of them faster and some of them slower, answered by occasional cars and trucks going the other way, across the divider. He drove one-handed and jacked up off the seat and took out his cell phone. Weighed it in his hand. He had three choices. One, do nothing. Two, call the number he had been told to call. Three, call the number he really should call, which under the circumstances was 911, with hasty backups to the local PD and the Highway Patrol and the county sheriffs and the Bar Association, and then a lawyer of his own.

He chose the second option, like he knew he would. Choice number one would get him nowhere, except a little later, when they came to find him. Choice number three would get him dead, slowly and eventually, after what he was sure would be hours or even days of hideous agony. He was a small nervous man. No kind of a hero.

He dialed the number he had been told to dial.

He checked it twice and hit the green button. He raised the phone to his ear, which in many states would be a twenty-ninth crime all its own.

But not in South Dakota.

Not yet.

Small mercies.

The voice that answered was one he had heard four times before. Coarse, and rough, and laced with a kind of rude animal menace. A voice from what the lawyer thought of as another world entirely. It said, “Shoot, buddy,” with a smile and an overtone of cruel enjoyment, as if the speaker was enjoying his absolute power and control, and the lawyer’s own consequent discomfort and fear and revulsion.

The lawyer swallowed once and started talking, reciting the lists and the instructions and the sentences and the paragraphs in much the same way they had been relayed to him. He started talking seven miles and seven minutes from a highway bridge. The bridge didn’t look much like a bridge. The roadbed continued absolutely level, but the land below it fell away a little into a wide shallow gulch. The gulch was dry most of the year, but five months from then spring melt water would rage through it in a torrent. The highway engineers had smoothed the gulch into a neat culvert and packed forty giant concrete tubes under the roadbed, all to stop the foundation getting washed away once a year. It was a system that worked well in the spring. It had only one drawback, which showed up in the winter. To counter it the engineers had placed signs ahead in both directions. The signs said: Bridge Freezes Before Road.

The lawyer drove and talked. Seven minutes into his monologue he reached the most obviously naked and blunt and brutal and egregious of the fourteen proposals. He recited it into the phone the same way he had heard it in the prison, which was neutrally and without emotion. The coarse voice on the other end of the phone laughed. Which made the lawyer shudder. A core moral spasm came up literally from deep inside him. It jerked his shoulders noticeably and ground the phone across his ear.

And moved his hand on the wheel.

His front tires slipped a little on the bridge ice and he corrected clumsily and his rear tires swung the other way and fishtailed once, twice, three times. He slid across all three lanes. Saw a bus coming the opposite way through the falling snow. It was white. It was huge. It was moving fast. It was coming straight at him. The back part of his brain told him a collision was inevitable. The front part of his brain told him no, he had space and time and a grass median and two stout metal barriers between him and any kind of oncoming traffic. He bit his lip and relaxed his grip and straightened up and the bus blew past him exactly parallel and twenty feet away.

He breathed out.

The voice on the phone asked, “What?”

The lawyer said, “I skidded.”

The voice said, “Finish the report, asshole.”

The lawyer swallowed again and resumed talking, at the head of the previous sentence.

The man driving the white bus in the opposite direction was a twelve-year veteran of his trade. In the small world of his specialized profession he was about as good as it got. He was properly licensed and well trained and adequately experienced. He was no longer young, and not yet old. Mentally and physically he was up there on a broad plateau of common sense and maturity and peak capability. He was not behind schedule. He was not speeding. He was not drunk. He was not high.

But he was tired.

He had been staring into featureless horizontal snow for the best part of two hours. He saw the fishtailing car a hundred yards ahead. Saw it dart diagonally straight at him. His fatigue produced a split second of dull delay. Then the numb tension in his tired body produced an over-reaction. He yanked the wheel like he was flinching from a blow. Too much, too late. And unnecessary, anyway. The sliding car had straightened and was already behind him before his own front tires bit. Or tried to. They hit the bridge ice just as the steering told them to turn. They lost grip and skated. All the weight was in the rear of the bus. The huge cast-iron engine block. The water tank. The toilet. Like a pendulum, way back there. The rear of the bus set about trying to overtake the front of the bus. It didn’t get far. Just a few crucial degrees. The driver did everything right. He fought the skid. But the steering was feather light and the front tires had lost traction. There was no feedback. The back of the bus came back in line and then swung out the other way.

The driver fought hard for three hundred yards. Twelve long seconds. They felt like twelve long hours. He spun the big plastic wheel left, spun it right, tried to catch the skid, tried to stop it building. But it built anyway. It gathered momentum. The big pendulum weight at the back slammed one way, slammed the other. The soft springs crushed and bounced. The tall body tilted and yawed. The back of the bus swung forty-five degrees left, then forty-five right. Bridge Freezes Before Road. The bus passed over the last of the concrete tubes and the front tires bit again. But they bit while they were turned diagonally toward the shoulder. The whole bus turned in that direction, as if following a legitimate command. As if it was suddenly obedient again. The driver braked hard. Fresh snow dammed in front of the tires. The bus held its new line. It slowed.

But not enough.

The front tires crossed the rumble strip, crossed the shoulder, and thumped down off the blacktop into a shallow ditch full of snow and frozen mud. The underbody crashed and banged and scraped on the pavement edge for ten long feet before all momentum was spent. The bus came to rest at an angle, tilted a little, the front third in the ditch, the rear two-thirds still on the shoulder, and the engine compartment hanging out in the traffic lane. The front wheels hung down to the limit of their travel. The engine had stalled out and there was no sound beyond hot components hissing against the snow, and the air brake gently exhaling, and the passengers screaming, then gasping, then going very quiet.

The passengers were a homogenous bunch, all except for one. Twenty white-haired seniors plus a younger man, in a bus that could seat forty. Twelve of the seniors were widowed women. The other eight made up four old married couples. They were from Seattle. They were a church group on a cultural tour. They had seen the Little Town on the Prairie. Now they were on the long haul west to Mount Rushmore. A side trip to the geographic center of the United States had been promised. National parks and grasslands would be visited along the way. A fine itinerary, but the wrong season. South Dakota weather in the winter was not famously hospitable. Hence the fifty percent take up on the tickets, even though the tickets were cheap.

The odd passenger out was a man at least thirty years younger than the youngest of the others. He was sitting alone three rows behind the last of the seniors. They thought of him as a kind of stowaway. He had joined the bus that same day, at a rest stop just east of a town called Cavour. After the Little Town on the Prairie, before the Dakotaland Museum. There had been no explanation. He had just gotten on the bus. Some had seen him in prior conversation with the driver. Some said money had changed hands. No one was sure what to think. If he had paid for his passage, then he was more like a steerage passenger than a stowaway. Like a hitchhiker, but not quite.

But in any case he was considered a nice enough fellow. He was quiet and polite. He was a foot taller than any of the other passengers and evidently very strong. Not handsome like a movie star, but not ugly, either. Like a just-retired athlete, maybe. Perhaps a football player. Not the best dressed of individuals. He was wearing a creased untucked shirt under a padded canvas jacket. He had no bag, which was strange. But overall it was vaguely reassuring to have such a man on board, especially after he had proved himself civilized and not in any way threatening. Threatening behavior from a man that size would have been unseemly. Good manners from a man that size were charming. Some of the bolder widowed ladies had thought about striking up a conversation. But the man himself seemed to discourage any such attempt. He slept through most of the drive time and all his responses to conversational gambits had so far been entirely courteous but brief, and completely devoid of substance.

But at least they knew his name. One of the men had introduced himself, on his way back down the aisle from the toilet. The tall stranger had looked up from his seat and paused, just a beat, as if assessing the costs and benefits of a response. Then he had taken the proffered hand and said, “Jack Reacher.”

Chapter 2

Reacher woke up when the momentum of the skid smashed his head against the window. He knew where he was, instantly. On a bus. He spent the next split second calculating the odds. Snow, ice, reasonable speed, not much traffic. Either we’re going to hit the divider or fall off the shoulder. Worst case, we’re going to tip over. OK for him. Maybe not so good for the old folks in front of him. But probably survivable. He was more worried about the aftermath. Twenty old people, shaken up, maybe injured, cuts, bruises, broken bones, stranded miles from anywhere in a gathering winter storm.

Not good.

Then he spent the next eleven and a half seconds holding on, gently resisting the alternating inertia of the fishtails. He was the rearmost passenger, so he was feeling it worst. The folks nearer the front were swinging through smaller arcs. But they were fragile. He could see their necks snapping from side to side. He could see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. The guy was hanging in there. Not bad. But he was going to lose. A luxury bus was a very unwieldy type of vehicle. Be careful what you wish for. He had been in Marshall, Minnesota, for no very memorable reason, and he had hitched a ride with a guy heading west to Huron, South Dakota, but for some private reason the guy wouldn’t take him all the way and had dumped him at a rest stop outside of a place called Cavour. Which had seemed like bad luck, initially, because Cavour was not exactly teeming with transcontinental traffic. But two cups of coffee later a white luxury forty-seat bus had pulled in and only twenty people had gotten out, which meant empty places were there to be had. The driver looked like a straightforward kind of a guy, so Reacher had approached him in a straightforward kind of a fashion. Twenty bucks for a ride to Rapid City? The guy asked for forty and settled for thirty and Reacher had climbed aboard and been very comfortable all day long. But the comfort had come from soft springs and vague steering, neither one of which was doing anyone any favors at the current moment.

But seven seconds in, Reacher was getting optimistic. With no foot on the gas, the bus was slowing. Didn’t feel like it, but it had to be true. Simple physics. Newton’s Laws of Motion. As long as no other traffic hit them, they would wobble around for a spell and then come to rest, maybe side-on, maybe facing the wrong way, but still right side up and drivable. Then he felt the front tires bite again and saw they were going to drive straight off the road. Which was bad. But the driver braked hard and held tight through a whole lot of thumping and banging and scraping and they ended up half on and half off the blacktop, which was OK, except they had their asses hanging out in the traffic lane, which was not OK, and there were suddenly no active mechanical sounds at all, like the bus was dead, which was definitely not OK.

Reacher glanced back and saw no oncoming headlights. Not right then. He got up and walked to the front of the bus and saw flat land ahead, all white with snow. No cliffs. No embankment. Therefore no danger from a weight transfer. So he ducked back and started encouraging the geezers to move up the bus toward the front. That way if an eighteen-wheeler slammed into them it might just shear off the rear of the bus without killing anyone. But the geezers were shaken and reluctant to move. They just sat there. So Reacher moved back up front. The driver was inert in his seat, blinking a little and swallowing down his adrenaline rush.

Reacher said to him, “Good work, pal.”

The guy nodded. “Thanks.”

Reacher said, “Can you get us out of this ditch?”

“I don’t know.”

“Best guess?”

“Probably not.”

Reacher said, “OK, have you got flares?”

“What?”

“Flares. Right now the back of the bus is sticking out in the traffic lane.”

The guy was unresponsive for a moment. Dazed. Then he leaned down and unlatched a locker beside his feet and came out with three warning flares, dull red cardboard tubes with steel spikes on the end. Reacher took them from him and said, “Got a first-aid kit?”

The guy nodded again.

Reacher said, “Take it and check the passengers for cuts and bruises. Encourage them to move up front as far as they can. Preferably all together in the aisle. If we get hit, it’s going to be in the ass.”

The driver nodded for a third time and then shook himself like a dog and got into gear. He took a first-aid kit from another latched compartment and got up out of his seat.

Reacher said, “Open the door first.”

The guy hit a button and the door sucked open. Freezing air blew in, with thick swirls of snow on it. Like a regular blizzard. Reacher said, “Close the door after me. Stay warm.”

Then he jumped down into the ditch and fought through the ice and the mud to the shoulder. He stepped up on the blacktop and ran to the rear corner of the vehicle. Blowing snow pelted his face. He lined up on the lane markers and ran thirty paces back the way they had come. A curved trajectory. Thirty paces, thirty yards. Ninety feet. Near enough to eighty-eight. Eighty-eight feet per second was the same thing as sixty miles an hour, and plenty of lunatics would be driving sixty even in a snowstorm. He leaned down and jabbed a flare spike into the blacktop. The crimson flame ignited automatically and burned fiercely. He continued the curve and ran another thirty paces. Used the second flare. Ran another thirty and used the third to complete a warning sequence: three seconds, two, one, move the hell over.

Then he ran back and floundered through the ditch again and hammered on the door until the driver broke off his medical ministrations and opened up. Reacher climbed back inside. He brought a flurry of snow in with him. He was already seriously cold. His face was numb. His feet were freezing. And the interior of the bus itself was already cooling. The windows all along one side were already pasted with clumps of white. He said, “You should keep the engine running. Keep the heaters going.”

The driver said, “Can’t. The fuel line could be cracked. From where we scraped.”

Reacher said, “I didn’t smell anything when I was outside.”

“I can’t take the risk. Everyone is alive right now. I don’t want to burn them up in a fire.”

“You want to freeze them to death instead?”

“Take over with the first aid. I’ll try to make some calls.”

So Reacher ducked back and started checking the old folks. The driver had gotten through the first two rows. That was clear. All four of the window-seat passengers were sporting Band-Aids over cuts from the metal edges around the glass. Be careful what you wish for. Better view, but higher risk. One woman had a second Band-Aid on the aisle side of her face, presumably from where her husband’s head had hit her after bouncing around like a rag doll.

The first broken bone was in row three. A delicate old lady, built like a bird. She had been swinging right when the bus changed direction and swung left. The window had tapped her hard on the shoulder. The blow had bust her collar bone. That was clear. Reacher could see it in the way she was cradling her arm. He said, “Ma’am, may I take a look at that?”

She said, “You’re not a doctor.”

“I had some training in the army.”

“Were you a medic?”

“I was a military cop. We got some medical training.”

“I’m cold.”

“Shock,” Reacher said. “And it’s snowing.”

She turned her upper body toward him. Implied consent. He put his fingertips on her collar bone, through her blouse. The bone was as delicate as a pencil. It was snapped halfway along its length. A clean break. Not compound.

She asked, “Is it bad?”

“It’s good,” Reacher said. “It did its job. A collar bone is like a circuit breaker. It breaks so that your shoulder and your neck stay OK. It heals fast and easy.”

“I need to go to the hospital.”

Reacher nodded. “We’ll get you there.”

He moved on. There was a sprained wrist in row four, and a broken wrist in row five. Plus a total of thirteen cuts, many minor contusions, and a lot of shock reaction.

The temperature was dropping like a stone.

Reacher could see the flares out the rear side windows. They were still burning, three distinct crimson puffballs glowing in the swirling snow. No headlights coming. None at all. No traffic. He walked up the aisle, head bent, and found the driver. The guy was in his seat, holding an open cell phone in his right hand, staring through the windshield, drumming his left-hand fingertips on the wheel.

He said, “We’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of a problem?”

“I called 911. The Highway Patrol is all either sixty miles north of here or sixty miles east. There are two big storms coming in. One from Canada, one off the Lakes. There’s all kinds of mayhem. All the tow trucks went with them. They’ve got hundred-car pile-ups. This highway is closed behind us. And up ahead.”

No traffic.

“Where are we?”

“South Dakota.”

“I know that.”

“Then you know what I mean. If we’re not in Sioux Falls or Rapid City, we’re in the middle of nowhere. And we’re not in Sioux Falls or Rapid City.”

“We have to be somewhere.”

“GPS shows a town nearby. Name of Bolton. Maybe twenty miles. But it’s small. Just a dot on the map.”

“Can you get a replacement bus?”

“I’m out of Seattle. I could get one maybe four days after the snow stops.”

“Does the town of Bolton have a police department?”

“I’m waiting on a call.”

“Maybe they have tow trucks.”

“I’m sure they do. At least one. Maybe at the corner gas station, good for hauling broken-down half-ton pick-up trucks. Not so good for vehicles this size.”

“Maybe they have farm tractors.”

“They’d need about eight of them. And some serious chains.”

“Maybe they have a school bus. We could transfer.”

“The Highway Patrol won’t abandon us. They’ll get here.”

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

“Jay Knox.”

“You need to think ahead, Mr. Knox. The Highway Patrol is an hour away under the best of circumstances. Two hours, in this weather. Three hours, given what they’re likely dealing with. So we need to get a jump. Because an hour from now this bus is going to be an icebox. Two hours from now these wrinklies are going to be dropping like flies. Maybe sooner.”

“So what gets your vote?”

Reacher was about to answer when Knox’s cell phone rang. The guy answered it and his face lightened a little. Then it fell again. He said, “Thanks,” and closed the phone. He looked at Reacher and said, “Apparently the town of Bolton has a police department. They’re sending a guy. But they’ve got problems of their own and it will take some time.”

“How much time?”

“At least an hour.”

“What kind of problems?”

“They didn’t say.”

“You’re going to have to start the engine.”

“They’ve got coats.”

“Not good enough.”

“I’m worried about a fire.”

“Diesel fuel is a lot less volatile than gasoline.”

“What are you, an expert?”

“I was in the army. Trucks and Humvees were all diesel. For a reason.” Reacher glanced back down the aisle. “Got a flashlight? Got an extinguisher?”

“Why?”

“I’ll check the underbody. If it looks all clear I’ll knock twice on the floor. You start up, if anything goes on fire I’ll put it out and knock again and you can shut it down.”

“I don’t know.”

“Best we can do. And we have to do something.”

Knox was quiet for a spell and then he shrugged and opened up a couple more compartments and came out with a silver Maglite and an extinguisher bottle. Reacher took them and waited for the door to open and climbed out into the spectral crimson world of the flares. Down into the ditch again. This time he trudged counterclockwise around the front of the bus because the oblique angle put more of the left side above the blacktop than the right. Crawling around in the freezing ditch was not an attractive prospect. Crawling around on the shoulder was marginally better.

He found the fuel filler door and sat down in the snow and then swiveled around and lay on his back and wriggled into position with his head under the side of the bus. He switched the flashlight on. Found the fat tube running from the filler mouth to the tank. It looked intact. The tank itself was a huge squared-off cylinder. It was a little dented and scraped from the impact. But nothing was leaking out of it. The fuel line running back toward the engine compartment looked OK. Snow soaked through Reacher’s jacket and his shirt and freezing damp hit his skin.

He shivered.

He used the butt end of the Maglite and banged twice on a frame spar.

He heard relays clicking and a fuel pump start up. It wheezed and whined. He checked the tank. Checked the line, as far as the flashlight beam would let him. He kicked against the snow and pushed himself farther under the bus.

No leaks.

The starter motor turned over.

The engine started. It clattered and rattled and settled to a hammer-heavy beat.

No leaks.

No fire.

No fumes.

He fought the cold and gave it another minute and used the time to check other things. The big tires looked OK. Some of the front suspension members were a little banged up. The floor of the luggage hold was dented here and there. Some small tubes and hoses were crushed and torn and split. Some Seattle insurer was about to get a fair-sized bill. That was clear.

He scrabbled out and stood up and brushed off. His clothes were soaked. Snow swirled all around him. Fat, heavy flakes. There were already two fresh inches on the ground. His footsteps from four minutes ago were already dusted white. He followed them back to the ditch and floundered around to the door. Knox was waiting for him. The door opened and he climbed aboard. Blowing snow howled in after him. He shivered. The door closed.

The engine stopped.

Knox sat down in his seat and hit the starter button. Way at the back of the bus Reacher heard the starter motor turning, churning, straining, wheezing, over and over again.

Nothing happened.

Knox asked, “What did you see down there?”

“Damage,” Reacher said. “Lots of things all banged up.”

“Crushed tubes?”

“Some.”

Knox nodded. “The fuel line is pinched off. We just used up what was left in the pipe, and now no more is getting through. Plus the brakes could be shot. Maybe it’s just as well the engine won’t run.”

“Call the Bolton PD again,” Reacher said. “This is serious.”

Knox dialed and Reacher headed back toward the passengers. He hauled coats off the overhead racks and told the old folks to put them on. Plus hats and gloves and scarves and mufflers and anything else they had.

He had nothing. Just what he stood up in, and what he stood up in was soaked and freezing. His body heat was leaching away. He was shivering, just a little, but continuously. Small crawling thrills, all over his skin. Be careful what you wish for. A life without baggage had many advantages. But crucial disadvantages, too.

He headed back to Knox’s seat. The door was leaking air. The bus was colder at the front than the back. He said, “Well?”

Knox said, “They’re sending a car as soon as possible.”

“A car won’t do it.”

“I told them that. I described the problem. They said they’ll work something out.”

“You seen storms like this before?”

“This is not a storm. The storm is sixty miles away. This is the edge.”

Reacher shivered. “Is it coming our way?”

“No question.”

“How fast?”

“Don’t ask.”

Reacher left him there and walked down the aisle, all the way past the last of the seats. He sat on the floor outside the toilet, with his back pressed hard against the rear bulkhead, hoping to feel some residual heat coming in from the cooling engine.

He waited.

Five minutes to five in the afternoon.

Fifty-nine hours to go.

Chapter 3

Forty-five minutes later the lawyer got home. A long, slow trip. His driveway was unplowed and he worried for a moment that his garage door would be frozen shut. But he hit the remote and the half-horsepower motor on the ceiling inside did its job and the door rose up in its track and he drove in. Then the door wouldn’t shut after him, because the clumps of snow his tires had pushed in triggered the door’s child safety feature. So he fussed with his overshoes once more and took a shovel and pushed the snow back out again. The door closed. The lawyer took off his overshoes again and stood for a moment at the mud room door, composing himself, cleansing himself, taking a mental shower. Twenty minutes to six. He walked through to the warmth of his kitchen and he greeted his family, as if it was just another day.

By twenty minutes to six the inside of the bus was dark and icy and Reacher was hugging himself hard and shivering violently. Ahead of him the twenty old people and Knox the driver were all doing pretty much the same thing. The windows on the windward side of the bus were all black with stuck snow. The windows on the leeward side showed a gray panorama. A blizzard, blowing in from the north and the east, driven hard and relentlessly by the winter wind, hitting the aerodynamic interruption of the dead vehicle, boiling over it and under it and around it and swirling into the vacuum behind it, huge weightless flakes dancing randomly up and down and left and right.

Then: faint lights in the gray panorama.

White lights, and red, and blue, pale luminous spheres snapping and popping and moving through the gloom. The faint patter of snow chains in the eerie padded silence. A cop car, coming toward them on the wrong side of the divided highway, nosing slow and cautious through the weather.

A long minute later a cop was inside the bus. He had come through the ditch and in through the door, but he had just gotten out of a heated car and he was wearing winter boots and waterproof pants and gloves and a parka and a plastic rain shield over a fur hat with ear flaps, so he was in pretty good shape. He was tall and lean and had lined blue eyes in a face that had seen plenty of summer sun and winter wind. He said his name was Andrew Peterson and that he was second-in-command over at the Bolton PD. He took off his gloves and moved through the aisle, shaking hands and introducing himself by name and rank over and over again, to each individual and each couple, in a manner designed to appear guileless and frank and enthusiastic, like a good old country boy just plain delighted to help out in an emergency. But Reacher was watching those lined blue eyes and thinking that his front was false. Reacher was thinking that Peterson was actually a fairly shrewd man with more things on his mind than a simple road rescue.

That impression was reinforced when Peterson started asking questions. Who were they all? Where were they from? Where had they started today? Where were they headed tonight? Did they have hotel reservations up ahead? Easy answers for Knox and the twenty old folks, a tour group, from Seattle, hustling from one scheduled stop at the Dakotaland Museum to the next at Mount Rushmore, and yes, they had confirmed reservations at a tourist motel near the monument, thirteen rooms, for the four married couples, plus four pairs who were sharing, plus four individuals who had paid a singles supplement, plus one for Knox himself.

All true information, but not exactly necessary, under the circumstances.

Peterson made Knox show him the motel paperwork.

Then he turned to Reacher. Smiled and said, “Sir, I’m Andrew Peterson, from the Bolton PD, deputy chief. Would you mind telling me who you are?”

Plenty of heartland cops were ex-military, but Reacher didn’t think Peterson was. He wasn’t getting the vibe. He figured him for a guy who hadn’t traveled much, a straight-arrow kid who had done well in a local high school and who had stuck around afterward to serve his community. Expert in a casual way with all the local stuff, a little out of his depth with anything else, but determined to do his best with whatever came his way.

“Sir?” Peterson said again.

Reacher gave his name. Peterson asked him whether he was part of the group. Reacher said no. So Peterson asked him what he was doing on the bus. Reacher said he was heading west out of Minnesota, hoping to turn south before too long, hoping to find better weather.

“You don’t like our weather?”

“Not so far.”

“And you hitched a ride on a tour bus?”

“I paid.”

Peterson looked at Knox, and Knox nodded.

Peterson looked back at Reacher and asked, “Are you on vacation?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“Then what exactly is your situation?”

“My situation doesn’t matter. None of this matters. None of us expected to be where we are right now. This whole thing was entirely unpredictable. It was an accident. Therefore there’s no connection between us and whatever it is that’s on your mind. There can’t be.”

“Who says I have something on my mind?”

“I do.”

Peterson looked at Reacher, long and hard. “What happened with the bus?”

“Ice, I guess,” Reacher said. “I was asleep at the time.”

Peterson nodded. “There’s a bridge that doesn’t look like a bridge. But there are warning signs.”

Knox said, “A car coming the other way was sliding all over the place. I twitched.” His tone was slightly defensive. Peterson gave him a look full of sympathy and empty of judgment and nodded again. He said, “A twitch will usually do it. It’s happened to lots of people. Me included.”

Reacher said, “We need to get these people off this bus. They’re going to freeze to death. I am, too.”

Peterson was quiet for a long second. There’s no connection between us and whatever it is that’s on your mind. Then he nodded again, definitively, like his mind was made up, and he called out, “Listen up, folks. We’re going to get you to town, where we can look after you properly. The lady with the collar bone and the lady with the wrist will come with me in the car, and there will be alternative transportation right along for the rest of you.”

The step down into the ditch was too much for the injured women, so Peterson carried one and Reacher carried the other. The car was about ten yards away, but the snow was so thick by then that Reacher could barely see it, and when he turned back after Peterson had driven away he couldn’t see the bus at all. He felt completely alone in the white emptiness. The snow was in his face, in his eyes, in his ears, on his neck, swirling all around him, blinding him. He was very cold. He felt a split second of panic. If for some reason he got turned around and headed in the wrong direction, he wouldn’t know it. He would walk until he froze and died.

But he took a long step sideways and saw the crimson haloes of the flares. They were still burning valiantly. He used them to work out where the bus must be and headed for it. Came up against its leeward side and tracked around the front, back into the wind, through the ditch to the door. Knox let him in and they crouched together in the aisle and peered out into the darkness, waiting to see what kind of a ride had been sent for them.

Five to six in the evening.

Fifty-eight hours to go.

At six o’clock the fourteen criminal proposals finally made it to paper. The guy who had answered the lawyer’s call was plenty bright in a street-smart kind of way, but he had always figured that the best part of intelligence was to know your limitations, and his included a tendency to get a little hazy about detail when under pressure. And he was going to face some pressure now. That was for damn sure. Turning proposals into actions was going to require the sanction of some seriously cautious people.

So he wrote everything down, fourteen separate paragraphs, and then he unplugged a brand-new untraceable pay-as-you-go cell from its charger and started to dial.

The ride that had been sent for them was a school bus, but not exactly. Definitely a standard Blue Bird vehicle, normal size, normal shape, regular proportions, but gray, not yellow, with heavy metal mesh welded over the windows, and the words Department of Corrections stenciled along the flanks.

It looked almost new.

Knox said, “Better than nothing.”

Reacher said, “I’d go in a hearse if it had a heater.”

The prison vehicle K-turned across all three lanes and sawed back and forth for a while until it was lined up exactly parallel with the dead bus, with its entrance step about halfway down the dead bus’s length. Reacher saw why. The dead bus had an emergency exit, which was a window panel ready to pop out. Peterson had seen the ditch and the passengers and the panel, and had made a good decision and called ahead. Peterson was a reasonably smart guy.

Normally eighteen random seniors might have needed an amount of coaxing before stepping through an open hatch into a blizzard and the arms of a stranger, but the bitter cold had quieted their inhibitions. Knox helped them up top, and Reacher lifted them down. Easy work, apart from the cold and the snow. The lightest among the passengers was an old guy not more than ninety-five pounds. The heaviest was a woman closer to two hundred. The men all wanted to walk the short distance between the two vehicles. The women were happy to be carried.

The prison bus might have been almost new, but it was far from luxurious. The passenger area was separated from the driver by a bright steel cage. The seats were narrow and hard and faced with shiny plastic. The floor was rubber. The mesh over the windows was menacing. But there was heat. Not necessarily a kindness from the state to its convicts. But the bus manufacturer had built it in, for the school kids that the vehicle was designed to carry. And the state had not ripped it out. That was all. A kind of passive benevolence. The driver had the temperature turned up high and the blower on max. Peterson was a good advance man.

Reacher and Knox got the passengers seated and then they ducked back out into the cold and hauled suitcases out of the dead bus’s luggage hold. The old folks would need nightwear and prescriptions and toiletries and changes of clothes. There were a lot of suitcases. They filled the prison bus’s spare seats and most of the aisle. Knox sat down on one. Reacher rode standing next to the driver, as close to a heater vent as he could get.

The wind buffeted the bus but the tires had chains and progress was steady. They came off the highway after seven miles and rumbled past a rusted yield sign that had been peppered by a shotgun blast. They hit a long straight county two-lane. They passed a sign that said Correctional Facility Ahead. Do Not Stop For Hitchhikers. The sign was brand new, crisp and shiny with reflective paint. Reacher was not pleased to see it. It would make moving on in the morning a little harder than it needed to be.

The inevitable question was asked less than a minute later. A woman in the front seat looked left, looked right, looked a little embarrassed, but spoke anyway. She said, “We’re not going to be put in jail, are we?”

“No, ma’am,” Reacher said. “A motel, probably. I expect this was the only bus free tonight.”

The prison driver said, “Motels are all full,” and didn’t speak again.

Five to seven in the evening.

Fifty-seven hours to go.

The county two-lane ran straight for more than ten miles. Visibility was never more than ten yards at a time. The falling snow was bright in the headlight beams, and beyond it was guesswork. Flat land, Reacher figured, judging by the unchanging engine note. No hills, no dales. Just prairie, flattened further by what was surely going to be a whole extra foot of snow by the morning.

Then they passed a sign: Bolton City Limit. Pop. 12,261. Not such a small place after all. Not just a dot on the map. The driver didn’t slow. The chains chattered onward, another mile, then another. Then there was the glow of a street lamp in the air. Then another. Then a cop car, parked sideways across the mouth of a side street, blocking it. The car had its red roof lights turning lazily. The car had been stationary for a long time. That was clear. Its tire tracks were half-full of fresh snow.

The bus clattered on for another quarter-mile and then slowed and turned three times. Right, left, right again. Then Reacher saw a low wall, with a loaf of snow on top and a lit sign along its length: Bolton Police Department. Behind the wall was a big parking lot half-full with civilian vehicles. Sedans, trucks, crew-cab pick-ups. They all looked recently driven and recently parked. Fresh tire tracks, clear windshields, melting slush on their hoods. The bus eased past them and slowed and came to a stop opposite a lit entrance lobby. The engine settled to a noisy idle. The heater kept on going. The police station was long and low. Not a small operation. The roof was flat and had a forest of antennas poking up through the snow. The lobby door was flanked by a pair of trash cans. Like two proud sentinels.

The lobby looked warm.

The prison driver hauled on a handle and opened the bus door and a guy in a police parka came out of the lobby with a snow shovel and started clearing the path between the trash cans. Reacher and Knox started hauling suitcases out of the aisle, out of the bus, into the police station. The snow was letting up a little, but the air was colder than ever.

Then the passengers made the transfer. Knox helped them down the step, Reacher helped them along the path, the guy in the parka saw them in through the door. Some sat down on benches, some stayed standing, some milled around. The lobby was a plain square space with dull linoleum on the floor and shiny paint on the walls. There was a reception counter in back and the wall behind it was covered with cork boards and the cork boards were covered with thumb-tacked notices of different sizes and types. Sitting in front of them on a stool was an old guy in civilian clothes. Not a cop. An aide of some kind.

The guy in the parka disappeared for a moment and came back with a man Reacher took to be Bolton’s chief of police. He was wearing a gun belt and a uniform with two metal bars stuck through the fabric on both peaks of his shirt collar. Like an army captain’s insignia. The guy himself was what Peterson was going to be about fifteen years into the future, a tall lean plainsman going a little stooped and soft with age. He looked tired and preoccupied, and beset by problems, and a little wistful, like a guy more content with the past than the present, but also temporarily happy, because he had been handed a simple problem that could be easily solved. He took up a position with his back against the counter and raised his hands for quiet, even though no one was talking.

He said, “Welcome to Bolton, folks. My name is Chief Tom Holland, and I’m here to see that you all get comfortable and taken care of tonight. The bad news is that the motels are all full, but the good news is that the people of Bolton are not the kind of folks who would let a group of stranded travelers such as yourselves sleep a night on cots in the high school gymnasium. So the call went out for empty guest rooms and I’m glad to say we got a good response and we have more than a dozen people right here, right now, ready to invite you into their homes just like honored visitors and long lost friends.”

There was a little low talking after that. A little surprise, a little uncertainty, then a lot of contentment. The old folks brightened and smiled and stood taller. Chief Holland ushered their hosts in from a side room, five local couples and four local men and four local women who had come alone. The lobby was suddenly crowded. People were milling about and shaking hands and introducing themselves and grouping together and hunting through the pile for their suitcases.

Reacher kept count in his head. Thirteen knots of people, which implied thirteen empty guest rooms, which exactly mirrored the thirteen Mount Rushmore motel rooms on Knox’s official paperwork. Peterson was a good advance man.

Reacher wasn’t on Knox’s official paperwork.

He watched as the lobby emptied. Suitcases were hoisted, arms were offered, the doors were opened, pairs and threesomes and foursomes walked out to the waiting vehicles. It was all over inside five minutes. Reacher was left standing alone. Then the guy in the parka came back in and closed the doors. He disappeared down a doglegged corridor. Chief Holland came back. He looked at Reacher and said, “Let’s wait in my office.”

Five to eight in the evening.

Fifty-six hours to go.

Chapter 4

Holland’s office was like a thousand Reacher had seen before. Plain municipal décor, tendered out, the job won by the under-bidder. Sloppy gloss paint all over the place, thick and puckered and wrinkled, vinyl tile on the floor, a veneered desk, six last-generation file cabinets in an imperfect line against the wall under an institutional clock. There was a framed photograph centered on the cabinets under the clock. It showed Chief Holland as a straighter, stronger, younger man, standing and smiling with a woman and a child. A family portrait, maybe ten or more years old. The woman was attractive in a pale, fair-haired, strong-featured way. Holland’s wife, presumably. The child was a girl, maybe eight or nine, her face white and indistinct and unformed. Their daughter, presumably. There was a pair of dice on the desk. Big old bone cubes, worn from use and age, the dots rubbed and faded, the material itself veined where soft calcium had gone and harder enamel had remained. But apart from the photograph and the dice there was nothing personal in the room. Everything else was business.

Holland sat down behind the desk in a worn leather chair. There was an undraped picture window behind his head, triple-glazed against the cold. Clean glass. Darkness outside. Snow on the outer sill, a heater under the inner sill.

Reacher took a visitor chair in front of the desk.

Holland didn’t speak.

Reacher asked, “What am I waiting for?”

“We wanted to offer you the same hospitality we offered the others.”

“But I was a harder sell?”

Holland smiled a tired smile. “Not really. Andrew Peterson volunteered to take you in himself. But he’s busy right now. So you’ll have to wait.”

“Busy doing what?”

“What cops do.”

Reacher said, “This is a bigger place than I expected. The tour bus GPS showed it as a dot on the map.”

“We grew. That GPS data is a little out of date, I guess.”

The office was overheated. Reacher had stopped shivering and was starting to sweat. His clothes were drying, stiff and dirty. He said, “You grew because you got a prison built here.”

“How do you figure that?”

“New prison bus. New sign after the highway.”

Holland nodded. “We got a brand-new federal facility. We competed for it. Everybody wanted it. It’s like getting Toyota to open an assembly plant. Or Honda. Lots of jobs, lots of dollars. Then the state put their new penitentiary in the same compound, which was more jobs and more dollars, and the county jail is there, too.”

“Which is why the motels are full tonight? Visiting day tomorrow?”

“Total of three visiting days a week, all told. And the way the bus lines run, most people have to spend two nights in town. Heads on beds six nights a week. Motel owners are like pigs in shit. And the diners, and the pizza parlors, and the shuttle bus people. Like I told you, jobs and dollars.”

“Where’s the compound?”

“Five miles north. The gift that keeps on giving.”

“Lucky you,” Reacher said.

Holland was quiet for a beat. Then he said, “I learned a long time ago, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

The guy in the parka knocked and walked straight in and handed Holland a closed file folder. The clock on the wall showed eight in the evening, which was about right according to the clock in Reacher’s head. Holland swiveled his chair and opened the file folder ninety degrees and kept it tilted up at an awkward angle, to stop Reacher seeing the contents. But they were clearly reflected in the window glass behind Holland’s head. They were crime scene photographs, glossy color eight-by-tens with printed labels pasted in their bottom corners. Holland leafed through them. An establishing shot, then a progressive sequence of close-ups. A sprawled black-clad body, large, probably male, probably dead, snow on the ground, blunt force trauma to the right temple. No blood.

In the tour bus Knox had closed his cell phone and said: The town of Bolton has a police department. They’re sending a guy. But they’ve got problems of their own and it will take some time.

Holland closed the file. Said nothing. A reserved, taciturn man. Like Reacher himself. In the end they just sat opposite each other without speaking. Not a hostile silence, but even so there was an undercurrent to it. Holland kept his palm on the closed file and glanced from time to time between it and his visitor, as if he wasn’t yet sure which represented his bigger problem.

Eight o’clock in the evening in Bolton, South Dakota, was nine o’clock in the evening in Mexico City. Seventeen hundred miles south, sixty degrees warmer. The man who had taken the call from the untraceable pay-as-you-go cell was about to make a call of his own, from his walled city villa to a walled rural compound a hundred miles away. There another man would listen without comment and then promise a decision within twelve hours. That was how it usually went. Nothing worthwhile was achieved without reflection and rumination. With reflection and rumination impulsive mistakes could be avoided, and bold strokes could be formulated.

Holland’s office was quiet and still and the door was closed, but Reacher heard noise in the rest of the station house. Comings and goings, close to thirty minutes’ worth. Then silence again. A watch change, he guessed. Unlikely timing for a three-shift system. More likely a two-shift system. The day watch clocking off, the night watch coming on, twelve hours and twelve hours, maybe half past eight in the morning until half past eight at night. Unusual, and probably not permanent. Probably indicative of some kind of short-term stress.

They’ve got problems of their own.

Andrew Peterson came back to the station house just before nine-twenty in the evening. He ducked his head into Holland’s office and Holland joined him in the corridor with the file of crime scene photographs. The impromptu conference didn’t last long. Less than five minutes. Reacher assumed that Peterson had seen the dead guy in situ and therefore didn’t need to study pictures of him. The two cops came back into the office and stood in the center of the floor with quitting time written all through their body language. A long day, and another long day tomorrow, but until then, nothing. It was a feeling Reacher recognized from the years he had held a job. It was a feeling he had shared on some days. But not on days when dead guys had shown up in his jurisdiction.

Peterson said, “Let’s go.”

Twenty-five past nine in the evening.

Fifty-four and a half hours to go.

Twenty-five past nine in the evening in South Dakota was twenty-five past ten in the evening in the walled compound a hundred miles from Mexico City. The compound’s owner was an exceptionally short man who went by the name of Plato. Some people assumed that Plato was Brazilian, and had followed the Brazilian habit of picking a short catchy name to stand in for whatever long sequence of patronymics littered his birth certificate. Like the way the soccer star Edson Arantes do Nascimento had called himself Pelé. Or the way another named Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite had called himself Kaká. Others claimed that Plato was Colombian, which would have been in many ways more logical, given his chosen trade. Others insisted he was indeed Mexican. But all agreed that Plato was short, not that anyone would dare say so to his face. His local driver’s license claimed five feet three inches. The reality was five feet one in elevator shoes, and four feet eleven without them.

The reason no one dared mention his stature to his face was a former associate named Martinez. Martinez had argued with Plato and lost his temper and called him a midget. Martinez had been delivered to the best hospital in Mexico City, unconscious. There he had been taken to an operating room and laid on the table and anesthetized. He had been measured from the top of his scalp downward, and where the tape showed four feet and ten inches, lines had been drawn on his shins, a little closer to his knees than his ankles. Then a full team of surgeons and nurses had performed a double amputation, neatly and carefully and properly. Martinez had been kept in the hospital for two days, and then delivered home in an ambulance. Plato had delivered a get-well gift, with a card expressing the wish that the gift be appreciated and valued and kept permanently on display. Under the circumstances the wish was correctly interpreted as a command. Martinez’s people had thought the gift was a tank of tropical fish, from its size and apparent weight and because it was clearly full of sloshing liquid. When they unwrapped it they saw that it was indeed a fish tank. But it contained no fish. It was full of formaldehyde and contained Martinez’s feet and ankles and part of his shins, ten inches’ worth in total.

Thus no one ever again mentioned Plato’s height.

He had taken the call from the walled villa in the city and had promised a decision within twelve hours, but it really wasn’t worth investing that much time on a relatively minor issue concerning a relatively minor outpost of a large and complex international organization. So after just an hour and a half his mind was made up: He would authorize the silencing of the witness. He would send his man in as soon as was practical.

And he would go one step further. He would add a fifteenth item to the list. He was a little dismayed that it had not already been proposed. But then, he was Plato, and they weren’t.

He would break the chain, for safety’s sake.

He would have the lawyer silenced, too.

Chapter 5

Peterson led Reacher out into the freezing night and asked if he was hungry. Reacher said yes, he was starving. So Peterson drove to a chain restaurant next to a gas station on the main route out to the highway. His car was a standard police specification Ford Crown Victoria, with winter tires on the front and chains on the back. Inside it smelled of heat and rubber and hamburger grease and warm circuit boards. Outside it had nearly stopped snowing.

“Getting too cold to snow,” Peterson said. Which seemed to be true. The night sky had partially cleared and a vast frigid bowl of arctic air had clamped down. It struck through Reacher’s inadequate clothing and set him shivering again on the short walk through the restaurant lot.

He said, “I thought there was supposed to be a big storm coming.”

Peterson said, “There are two big storms coming. This is what happens. They’re pushing cold air ahead of them.”

“How long before they get here?”

“Soon enough.”

“And then it’s going to warm up?”

“Just a little. Enough to let it snow.”

“Good. I’ll take snow over cold.”

Peterson said, “You think this is cold?”

“It ain’t warm.”

“This is nothing.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “I spent a winter in Korea. Colder than this.”

“But?”

“The army gave me a decent coat.”

“And?”

“At least Korea was interesting.” Which needled Peterson a little. The restaurant was empty and looked ready to close up. But they went in anyway. They took a table for two, a thirty-inch square of laminate that looked undersized between them.

Peterson said, “The town of Bolton is plenty interesting.”

“The dead guy?”

“Yes,” Peterson said. Then he paused. “What dead guy?”

Reacher smiled. “Too late to take it back.”

“Don’t tell me Chief Holland told you.”

“No. But I was in his office a long time.”

“Alone?”

“Not for a minute.”

“But he let you see the photographs?”

“He tried hard not to. But your cleaning staff did a good job on his window.”

“You saw them all?”

“I couldn’t tell if the guy was dead or unconscious.”

“So you suckered me with that jab about Korea.”

“I like to know things. I’m hungry for knowledge.”

A waitress came by, a tired woman in her forties wearing sneakers under a uniform that featured a knotted necktie over a khaki shirt. Peterson ordered pot roast. Reacher followed his lead, and asked for coffee to drink.

Peterson asked, “How long were you in the army?”

“Thirteen years.”

“And you were an MP?”

Reacher nodded.

“With medical training?”

“You’ve been talking to the bus passengers.”

“And the driver.”

“You’ve been checking me out.”

“Of course I have. Like crazy. What else do you think I was doing?”

“And you want me in your house tonight.”

“You got a better place to go?”

“Where you can keep an eye on me.”

“If you say so.”

“Why?”

“There are reasons.”

“Want to tell me what they are?”

“Just because you’re hungry for knowledge?”

“I guess.”

“All I’ll say is right now we need to know who’s coming and going.”

Peterson said nothing more, and a minute later dinner arrived. Plates piled high, mashed potatoes, plenty of gravy. The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength.

Peterson asked, “What exactly did you do in the MPs?”

Reacher said, “Whatever they told me to.”

“Serious crimes?”

“Sometimes.”

“Homicides?”

“Everything from attempted to multiple.”

“How much medical training did you get?”

“Worried about the food here?”

“I like to know things, too.”

“I didn’t get much medical training, really. I was trying to make the old folks feel better, that’s all.”

“They spoke well of you.”

“Don’t trust them. They don’t know me.”

Peterson didn’t reply.

Reacher asked, “Where was the dead guy found? Where the police car was blocking the side street?”

“No. That was different. The dead guy was somewhere else.”

“He wasn’t killed there.”

“How do you know?”

“No blood in the snow. Hit someone hard enough in the head to kill them, the scalp splits. It’s inevitable. And scalps bleed like crazy. There should have been a pool of blood a yard across.”

Peterson ate in silence for a minute. Then he asked: “Where do you live?”

Which was a difficult question. Not for Reacher himself. There was a simple answer. He lived nowhere, and always had. He had been born the son of a serving military officer, in a Berlin infirmary, and since the day he had been carried out of it swaddled in blankets he had been dragged all over the world, through an endless blur of military bases and cheap off-post accommodations, and then he had joined up himself and lived the same way on his own account. Four years at West Point was his longest period of residential stability, and he had enjoyed neither West Point nor stability. Now that he was out of the service, he continued the transience. It was all he knew and it was a habit he couldn’t break.

Not that he had ever really tried.

He said, “I’m a nomad.”

Peterson said, “Nomads have animals. They move around to find pasture. That’s the definition.”

“OK, I’m a nomad without the animals part.”

“You’re a bum.”

“Possibly.”

“You got no bags.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“It’s weird behavior. Cops don’t like weird behavior.”

“Why is it weirder to move around than spend every day in the same place?”

Peterson was quiet for a spell and then he said, “Everyone has possessions.”

“I’ve got no use for them. Travel light, travel far.”

Peterson didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Whatever, I’m no concern of yours. I never heard of Bolton before. If the bus driver hadn’t twitched I’d have been at Mount Rushmore tonight.”

Peterson nodded, reluctantly.

“Can’t argue with that,” he said.

Five minutes to ten in the evening.

Fifty-four hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles to the south, inside the walled compound a hundred miles from Mexico City, Plato was eating too, a rib eye steak flown in all the way from Argentina. Nearly eleven in the evening local time. A late dinner. Plato was dressed in chinos and a white button-down shirt and black leather penny loafer shoes, all from the Brooks Brothers’ boys’ collection. The shoes and the clothes fit very well, but he looked odd in them. They were made for fat white middle-class American children, and Plato was old and brown and squat and had a shaved bullet head. But it was important to him to be able to buy clothes that fit right out of the box. Made-to-measure was obviously out of the question. Tailors would wield the tape and go quiet and then call out small numbers with studied and artificial neutrality. Alteration of off-the-rack items was just as bad. Visits from nervous local seamstresses and the furtive disposal of lengths of surplus fabric upset him mightily.

He put down his knife and his fork and dabbed his lips with a large white napkin. He picked up his cell phone and hit the green button twice, to return the last call he had received. When it was answered he said, “We don’t need to wait. Send the guy in and hit the witness.”

The man in the city villa asked, “When?”

“As soon as would be prudent.”

“OK.”

“And hit the lawyer, too. To break the chain.”

“OK.”

“And make sure those idiots know they owe me big.”

“OK.”

“And tell them they better not bother me with this kind of shit ever again.”

Halfway through the pot roast Reacher asked, “So why was that street blocked off?”

Peterson said, “Maybe there was a power line down.”

“I hope not. Because that would be a strange sense of priorities. You leave twenty seniors freezing on the highway for an hour to guard a power line on a side street?”

“Maybe there was a fender bender.”

“Same answer.”

“Does it matter? You were already on your way into town by that point.”

“That car had been there two hours or more. Its tracks were full of snow. But you told us no one was available.”

“Which was true. That officer wasn’t available. He was doing a job.”

“What job?”

“None of your business.”

“How big is your department?”

“Big enough.”

“And they were all busy?”

“Correct.”

“How many of them were busy sitting around doing nothing in parked cars?”

“You got concerns, I suggest you move here and start paying taxes and then talk to the mayor or Chief Holland.”

“I could have caught a chill.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Too early to say.”

They went back to eating. Until Peterson’s cell phone rang. He answered and listened and hung up and pushed his plate to one side.

“Got to go,” he said. “You wait here.”

“I can’t,” Reacher said. “This place is closing up. It’s ten o’clock. The waitress wants us out of here. She wants to go home.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I can’t walk. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go and it’s too cold to walk, anyway.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’ll stay in the car. Just ignore me.”

“OK,” Peterson said, but he didn’t look happy about it. Reacher left a twenty dollar bill on the table. The waitress smiled at him. Which she should, Reacher thought. Two pot roasts and a cup of coffee at South Dakota prices, he was leaving her a sixty percent tip. Or maybe it was all tip, if Bolton was one of those towns where cops ate for free.

The Crown Vic was still faintly warm inside. Peterson hit the gas and the chains bit down and the car pushed through the snow on the ground. There was no other traffic except for snowplows taking advantage of the lull in the fall. Reacher had a problem with snowplows. Not the machines themselves, but the compound word. A plow turned earth over and left it in place. Snowplows didn’t do that with snow. Snowplows were more properly bulldozers. But whatever, Peterson overtook them all, didn’t pause at corners, didn’t yield, didn’t wait for green lights.

Reacher asked, “Where are we going?”

“Western suburbs.”

“Why?”

“Intruders.”

“In a house?”

“On the street. It’s a Neighborhood Watch thing.” No further explanation. Peterson just drove, hunched forward over the wheel, tense and anxious. Reacher sprawled in the seat beside him, wondering what kind of intruders could get a police department’s deputy chief to respond so urgently to a busybody’s call.

Seventeen hundred miles south the man in the walled Mexico City villa dialed long distance to the United States. His final task of the day. Eleven o’clock local time, ten o’clock Mountain Time in the big country to the north. The call was answered and the man in the villa relayed Plato’s instructions, slowly and precisely. No room for misunderstanding. No room for error. He waited for confirmation and then he hung up. He didn’t call Plato back. No point. Plato didn’t understand the concept of confirmation. For Plato, obedience followed command the same way night followed day. It was inevitable. The only way it wouldn’t happen was if the world had stopped spinning on its axis.

Chapter 6

Peterson had his dashboard radio turned up high and Reacher picked out four separate voices from four separate cars. All of them were prowling the western suburbs and none of them had seen the reported intruders. Peterson aimed his own car down the streets they hadn’t checked yet. He turned right, turned left, nosed into dead ends, backed out again, moved on. There was a moon low in the sky and Reacher saw neat suburban developments, small houses in straight rows, warm lights behind windows, all the sidewalks and driveways and yards rendered blue and flat and uniform by the thick blanket of snow. Roofs were piled high with white. Some streets had been visited by the plows and had high banks of snow in the gutters. Some were still covered with an undisturbed fresh layer, deep but not as deep as the yards and the driveways. Clearly this current fall was the second or the third in a week or so. Roads were covered and cleared, covered and cleared, in an endless winter rhythm.

Reacher asked, “How many intruders?”

Peterson said, “Two reported.”

“In a vehicle?”

“On foot.”

“Doing what?”

“Just walking around.”

“So stick to the plowed streets. Nobody walks around in six inches of snow for the fun of it.”

Peterson slowed for a second and thought about it. Then he turned without a word and picked up a plowed trail and retraced it. The plow had zigzagged through main drags and cross-streets. The snow had been sheared thin and low and white. The excess was piled high to the sides, still soft and clean.

They found the intruders four minutes later.

There were two of them, shoulder to shoulder in a close standoff with a third man. The third man was Chief Holland. His car was parked twenty feet away. It was an unmarked Crown Vic. Either navy blue or black. It was hard to say, in the moonlight. Police specification, with antennas on the trunk lid and concealed emergency lights peeping up out of the rear parcel shelf. The driver’s door was open and the engine was running. Twin puddles of black vapor had condensed and pooled in the thin snow beneath the twin exhausts. Holland had gotten out and stepped ahead and confronted the two guys head-on. That was clear.

The two guys were tall and heavyset and unkempt. White males, in black Frye boots, black jeans, black denim shirts, black leather vests, fingerless black gloves, black leather bandanas. Each had an unzipped black parka thrown over everything else. They looked exactly like the dead guy in the crime scene photographs.

Peterson braked and stopped and stood off and idled thirty feet back. His headlights illuminated the scene. The standoff looked like it wasn’t going well for Holland. He looked nervous. The two guys didn’t. They had Holland crowded back with a snow bank behind him. They were in his space, leaning forward. Holland looked beaten. Helpless.

Reacher saw why.

The holster on Holland’s belt was unsnapped and empty, but there was no gun in his hand. He was glancing down and to his left.

He had dropped his pistol in the snow bank.

Or had it knocked from his hand.

Either way, not good.

Reacher asked, “Who are they?”

Peterson said, “Undesirables.”

“So undesirable that the chief of police joins the hunt?”

“You see what I see.”

“What do you want to do?”

“It’s tricky. They’re probably armed.”

“So are you.”

“I can’t make Chief Holland look like an idiot.”

Reacher said, “Not his fault. Cold hands.”

“He just got out of his car.”

“Not recently. That car has been idling in place for ten minutes. Look at the puddles under the exhaust pipes.”

Peterson didn’t reply. And didn’t move.

Reacher asked again, “Who are they?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Just curious. They’re scaring you.”

“You think?”

“If they weren’t they’d be cuffed in the back of this car by now.”

“They’re bikers.”

“I don’t see any bikes.”

“It’s winter,” Peterson said. “They use pick-up trucks in winter.”

“That’s illegal now?”

“They’re tweakers.”

“What are tweakers?”

“Crystal meth users.”

“Amphetamines?”

“Methylated amphetamine. Smoked. Or to be technically accurate, vaporized and inhaled. Off of glass pipes or busted lightbulbs or aluminum foil spoons. You heat it up and sniff away. Makes you erratic and unpredictable.”

“People are always erratic and unpredictable.”

“Not like these guys.”

“You know them?”

“Not specifically. But generically.”

“They live in town?”

“Five miles west. There are a lot of them. Kind of camping out. Generally they keep themselves to themselves, but people don’t like them.”

Reacher said, “The dead guy was one of them.”

Peterson said, “Apparently.”

“So maybe they’re looking for their buddy.”

“Or for justice.” Peterson watched and waited. Thirty feet ahead the body language ballet continued as before. Chief Holland was shivering. With cold, or fear.

Or both.

Reacher said, “You better do something.”

Peterson did nothing.

Reacher said, “Interesting strategy. You’re going to wait until they freeze to death.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “Only problem is, Holland will freeze first.”

Peterson said nothing.

“I’ll come with you, if you like.”

“You’re a civilian.”

“Only technically.”

“You’re not properly dressed. It’s cold out.”

“How long can it take?”

“You’re unarmed.”

“Against guys like that, I don’t need to be armed.”

“Crystal meth is not a joke. No inhibitions.”

“That just makes us even.”

“Users don’t feel pain.”

“They don’t need to feel pain. All they need to feel is conscious or unconscious.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “You go left and I’ll go right. I’ll turn them around and you get in behind them.”

Thirty feet ahead Holland said something and the two guys crowded forward and Holland backed off and tripped and sat down heavily in the snow bank. Now he was more than an arm’s length from where his gun must have fallen.

Half past ten in the evening.

Reacher said, “This won’t wait.”

Peterson nodded. Opened his door.

“Don’t touch them,” he said. “Don’t start anything. Right now they’re innocent parties.”

“With Holland down on his ass?”

“Innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law. I mean it. Don’t touch them.” Peterson climbed out of the car. Stood for a second behind his open door and then stepped around it and started forward. Reacher matched him, pace for pace.

The two guys saw them coming.

Reacher went right and Peterson went left. The car had been a comfortable seventy degrees. The evening air was sixty degrees colder. Maybe more. Reacher zipped his jacket all the way and shoved his hands deep in his pockets and hunched his shoulders so that his collar rode up on his neck. Even so he was shivering after five paces. It was beyond cold. The air felt deeply refrigerated. The two guys ahead stepped back, away from Holland. They gave him room. Holland struggled to his feet. Peterson stepped alongside him. His gun was still holstered. Reacher tracked around over the thin white glaze and stopped six feet behind the two guys. Holland stepped forward and dug around in the snow bank and retrieved his weapon. He brushed it clean and checked the muzzle for slush and stuck it back in his holster.

Everyone stood still.

The shaved snow on the street was part bright white powder and part ice crystals. They shone and glittered in the moonlight. Peterson and Holland were staring straight at the two guys and even though he was behind them Reacher was pretty sure the two guys were staring right back. He was shivering hard and his teeth were starting to chatter and his breath was fogging in front of him.

Nobody spoke.

The guy on Reacher’s right was more than six feet tall and close to four feet wide. Some of the bulk was goose-feather insulation in the black winter parka, but most of it was flesh and bone. The guy on Reacher’s left was a little smaller in both directions, and more active. He was restless, moving from foot to foot, twisting at the waist, rolling his shoulders. Cold, for sure, but not actively shivering. Reacher guessed the twitching was all about chemistry, not temperature.

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “Guys, either you need to move right along, or one of you needs to loan me a coat.”

The two men turned around, slowly. The big guy on the right had a white slab of a face buried deep in a beard. The beard was rimed with frost. Like a polar explorer, or a mountaineer. The smaller guy on the left had two days of stubble and jumpy eyes. His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish pecking at the surface. Thin mobile lips, bad teeth.

The big guy on the right asked, “Who are you?”

Reacher said, “Go home. It’s too cold for foolishness on the street.”

No reply.

Behind the two guys Peterson and Holland did nothing. Their guns were holstered and their holsters were snapped shut. Reacher planned his next moves. Always better to be prepared. He anticipated no major difficulty. He would have preferred the bigger guy to be on his left, because that would have maximized the impact from a right-handed blow by allowing a marginally longer swing, and he always liked to put the larger of a pair down first. But he was prepared to be flexible. Maybe the jittery guy should go down first. The bigger guy was likely to be slower, and maybe less committed, without the chemical assistance.

Reacher said, “Coat or float, guys.”

No answer from the two men. Then behind them Chief Holland came to life. He stepped forward one angry pace and said, “Get the hell out of my town.”

Then he shoved the smaller guy in the back.

The smaller guy stumbled toward Reacher and then braced against the motion and spun back and started to whirl a fast one-eighty toward Holland with his fist cocking behind him like a pitcher aiming to break the radar gun. Reacher caught the guy by the wrist and held on for a split second and then let go again and the guy staggered through the rest of his turn all unbalanced and uncoordinated and ineffectual and ended with a weak late swing that missed Holland entirely.

But then he turned right back and aimed a second swing straight at Reacher. Which in Reacher’s opinion took the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing right off the table. He stepped left and the incoming fist buzzed by an inch from his chin. The force behind it spun the guy onward and Reacher kicked his feet out from under him and dumped him facedown on the ice. Whereupon the bigger guy started wading in, huge thighs, short choppy steps, fists like hams, trumpets of steam from his nose like an angry bull in a kid’s picture book.

Easy meat.

Reacher matched the guy’s charge with momentum of his own and smashed his elbow horizontally into the middle of the white space between the guy’s beard and his hairline. Like running full-tilt into a scaffolding pipe. Game over, except the smaller guy was already up on his knees and scrabbling for grip, hands and feet, like a sprinter in the blocks. So Reacher kicked him hard in the head. The guy’s eyes rolled up and he toppled sideways and lay still with his legs folded under him.

Reacher put his hands back in his pockets.

Peterson said, “Jesus.”

The two guys lay close together, black humps on the moonlit ice, steam rising off them in a cloud. Peterson said nothing more. Holland stalked back to his unmarked car and used the radio and came back a long minute later and said, “I just called for two ambulances.”

He was looking straight at Reacher.

Reacher didn’t respond.

Holland asked, “You want to explain why I had to call for two ambulances?”

Reacher said, “Because I slipped.”

“What?”

“On the ice.”

“That’s your story? You slipped and just kind of blundered into them?”

“No, I slipped when I was hitting the big guy. It softened the blow. If I hadn’t slipped you wouldn’t be calling for two ambulances. You’d be calling for one ambulance and one coroner’s wagon.”

Holland looked away.

Peterson said, “Go wait in the car.”

The lawyer went to bed at a quarter to eleven. His children had preceded him by two hours and his wife was still in the kitchen. He put his shoes on a rack and his tie in a drawer and his suit on a hanger. He tossed his shirt and his socks and his underwear in the laundry hamper. He put on his pajamas and took a leak and brushed his teeth and climbed under the covers and stared at the ceiling. He could still hear the laugh in his head, from the phone call just before he spun out on the highway. A bark, a yelp, full of excitement. Full of anticipation. Full of glee. Eliminate the witness, he had recited, and the man on the phone had laughed with happiness.

Reacher got back in Peterson’s car and closed the door. His face was numb with cold. He angled the heater vents up and turned the fan to maximum. He waited. Five minutes later the ambulances showed up, with flashing lights pulsing bright red and blue against the snow. They hauled the two guys away. They were still out cold. Concussions, and probably some minor maxillary damage. No big deal. Three days in bed and a cautious week’s convalescence would fix them up good as new. Plus painkillers.

Reacher waited in the car. Thirty feet ahead of him through the clear frigid air he could see Holland and Peterson talking. They were standing close together, half-turned away, speaking low. Judging by the way they never glanced back, Reacher guessed they were talking about him.

Chief Holland was asking: “Could he be the guy?”

Peterson was saying, “If he’s the guy, he just put two of his allies in the hospital. Which would be strange.”

“Maybe that was a decoy. Maybe they staged it. Or maybe one of them was about to say something compromising. So he had to shut them up.”

“He was protecting you, Chief.”

“At first he was.”

“And then it was self-defense.”

“How sure are you he’s not the guy?”

“One hundred percent. It’s just not feasible. It’s a million-to-one chance he’s here at all.”

“No way he could have caused the bus to crash right there?”

“Not without running up the aisle and physically attacking the driver. And no one said he did. Not the driver, not the passengers.”

“OK,” Holland said. “So could the driver be the guy? Did he crash on purpose?”

“Hell of a risk.”

“Not necessarily. Let’s say he knows the road because he’s driven it before, summer and winter. He knows where it ices up. So he throws the bus into a deliberate skid.”

“A car was coming right at him.”

“So he says now.”

“But he could have been injured. He could have killed people. He could have ended up in the hospital or in jail for manslaughter, not walking around.”

“Maybe not. Those modern vehicles have all kinds of electronic systems. Traction control, anti-lock brakes, stuff like that. All he did was fishtail around a little and drive off the shoulder. No big deal. And then we welcomed him with open arms, like the Good Samaritan.”

Peterson said, “I could talk to Reacher, tonight. He was a witness on the bus. I could talk to him and get a better picture.”

Holland said, “He’s a psychopath. I want him gone.”

“The roads are closed.”

“Then I want him locked up.”

“Really?” Peterson said. “Tell the truth, Chief, he strikes me as a smart guy. Think about it. He saved you from a busted nose and he saved me from having to shoot two people. He did us both a big favor with what he did tonight.”

“Accidentally.”

“Maybe on purpose.”

“You think he knew what he was doing? Right there and then?”

“Yes, I think he did. I think he’s the sort of guy who sees things five seconds before the rest of the world.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve spent a little time with him.”

Holland shrugged.

“OK,” he said. “Talk to him. If you really want to.”

“Can we use him for more? He’s ex-military. He might know something.”

“About what?”

“About what’s out there to the west.”

“You like him?”

“Doesn’t matter if we like him. We can use him. It would be negligent not to, under the current circumstances.”

“That’s an admission of defeat.”

“No sir, it’s common sense. Better to ask for help beforehand than get our asses kicked afterward.”

“How much would we have to tell him?”

“Most of it,” Peterson said. “Maybe all of it. He’d probably figure it out anyway.”

“Is this what you would do if you were chief?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

Holland thought about it. Nodded.

“OK,” he said again. “Good enough for me. Talk to him.”

Five minutes to eleven in the evening.

Fifty-three hours to go.

Chapter 7

Peterson drove home in his squad car. Which Reacher thought was unusual. In his experience town cops dumped their squads in a motor pool and rode home in their personal vehicles. Then the next watch climbed in and drove away while the motors and the seats were still warm. But Peterson said the Bolton PD had a lot of cars. Every member of the department was issued with one. And every member of the department was required to live within ten minutes’ drive of the station house.

Peterson lived within two minutes’ drive, a mile out of town to the east, in a house sitting on a remnant of an old farm. The house was a solid wooden thing shaped like a pound cake, painted red with white trim, with warm yellow light in some of the windows. There was a matching barn. Both roofs were piled high with snow. The surrounding land was white and frozen and flat and silent. The lot was square. Maybe an acre. It was bounded by barbed-wire strung on wizened posts. Maybe a foot of the fence showed above the fall.

The driveway was plowed in a Y-shape. One leg led to the barn and the other led to the front of the house. Peterson parked in the barn. It was a big old open-fronted structure with three bays. One was occupied by a Ford pick-up truck with a plow blade on it, and one was full of stacked firewood. Reacher climbed out of the car and Peterson joined him and they backtracked down the plowed strip and turned the tight angle and headed for the house.

The front door was a plain slab of wood painted the same red as the siding. It opened up just as Peterson and Reacher got close enough to touch it. A woman stood in the hallway with warm air and warm light behind her. She was about Peterson’s age, well above medium height, and slender. She had fair hair pulled back into a ponytail and was wearing black pants and a wool sweater with a complex pattern knitted into it.

Peterson’s wife, presumably.

All three of them paused in a mute pantomime of politeness, Peterson anxious to get in from the cold, his wife anxious not to let the heat out of the house, Reacher not wanting to just barge in uninvited. After a long second’s hesitation the woman swung the door wider and Peterson put a hand on Reacher’s back and he stepped inside. The hallway had a polished board floor and a low ceiling and wallpapered walls. On the left was a parlor and on the right was a dining room. Straight ahead in the back of the house was a kitchen. There was a wood stove going hard somewhere. Reacher could smell it, hot iron and a trace of smoke.

Peterson made the introductions. He spoke quietly, which made Reacher think there must be sleeping children upstairs. Peterson’s wife was called Kim and she seemed to know all about the accident with the bus and the need for emergency quarters. She said she had made up a pull-out bed in the den. She said it apologetically, as if a real bedroom would have been better.

Reacher said, “Ma’am, the floor would have been fine. I’m very sorry to put you to any trouble at all.”

She said, “It’s no trouble.”

“I hope to move on in the morning.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to. It will be snowing hard before dawn.”

“Maybe later in the day, then.”

“They’ll keep the highway closed, I’m afraid. Won’t they, Andrew?”

Peterson said, “Probably.”

His wife said, “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to.”

Reacher said, “Ma’am, that’s very generous. Thank you.”

“Did you leave your bags in the car?”

Peterson said, “He doesn’t have bags. He claims he has no use for possessions.”

Kim said nothing. Her face was blank, as if she was having difficulty processing such information. Then she glanced at Reacher’s jacket, his shirt, his pants. Reacher said, “I’ll head out to a store in the morning. It’s what I do. I buy new every few days.”

“Instead of laundry?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s logical.”

“You’ll need a warm coat.”

“Apparently.”

“Don’t buy one. Too expensive, for just a few days. We can lend you one. My dad is your size. He keeps a coat here, for when he visits. And a hat and gloves.” She turned away and opened a closet door and leaned in to the back and wrestled a hanger off the rail. Came out with an enormous tan parka, the color of mud. It had fat horizontal quilts of down the size of inner tubes. It was old and worn and had darker tan shapes all over it where patches and badges had been unpicked from it. The shapes on the sleeves were chevrons.

“Retired cop?” Reacher asked.

“Highway Patrol,” Kim Peterson said. “They get to keep the clothes if they take the insignia off.”

The coat had a fur-trimmed hood, and it had a fur hat jammed in one pocket and a pair of gloves jammed in the other.

“Try it on,” she said.

It turned out that her father was not Reacher’s size. He was bigger. The coat was a size too large. But too big is always better than too small. Reacher pulled it into position and looked down at where the stripes had been. He smiled. They made him feel efficient. He had always liked his sergeants. They did good work.

The coat smelled of mothballs. The hat smelled of another man’s hair. It was made of tan nylon and rabbit fur.

“Thank you,” Reacher said. “You’re very kind.” He shrugged the coat off again and she took it from him and hung it on a hook on the hallway wall, just inside the entrance, next to where Peterson was hanging his own police-issue parka. Then they all headed for the kitchen. It ran left to right across most of the width of the house. There was all the usual kind of kitchen stuff in it, plus a beat-up table and six chairs, and a family-room area with a battered sofa and two armchairs and a television set. The wood stove was at the far end of the room. It was roaring like a locomotive. Beyond it was a closed door.

“That’s the den,” Kim said. “Go straight in.”

Reacher assumed he was being dismissed for the night, so he turned to say thanks once again, but found that Peterson was following right behind him. Kim said, “He wants to talk to you. I can tell, because he isn’t talking to me.”

The man who had been told to kill the witness and the lawyer set about cleaning the gun he had been given for the job. It was a Glock 17, not old, not new, well proven, well maintained. He stripped it, brushed it out, oiled it, and reassembled it. The cheeks of the grip were stippled, and there was some accumulated grime in the microscopic valleys. He worked it out with a Q-tip soaked in solvent. The maker’s name was embossed near the heel, an overcomplicated and rather amateur graphic featuring a large letter G surrounding the rest of the word. It was easy to see the G merely as an outline, and therefore to overlook it. At first glance the name appeared to be LOCK. There was dirt over the whole thing. The man soaked the Q-tip again and started working and had it clean a minute later.

Peterson’s den was a small, dark, square, masculine space. It was in the back corner of the house and had two outside walls with two windows. The drapes were made of thick plaid material and were drawn back, open. The other two walls had three doors in them. The door back to the family room, plus maybe a closet and a small bathroom. The remainder of the wall space was lined with yard-sale cabinets and an old wooden desk with a small refrigerator on it. On top of the refrigerator was an old-fashioned alarm clock with a loud tick and two metal bells. Out in the body of the room there was a low-slung leather chair that looked Scandinavian, and a two-seat sofa that had been pulled out and made up into a narrow bed.

Reacher sat down on the bed. Peterson took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and twisted the tops off and pitched the caps into a trash basket and handed one of the bottles to Reacher. Then he lowered himself into the leather chair.

He said, “We have a situation here.”

Reacher said, “I know.”

“How much do you know?”

“I know you’re pussyfooting around a bunch of meth-using bikers. Like you’re scared of them.”

“We’re not scared of them.”

“So why pussyfoot around?”

“We’ll get to that. What else do you know?”

“I know you’ve got a pretty big police station.”

“OK.”

“Which implies a pretty big police department.”

“Sixty officers.”

“And you were working at full capacity all day and all evening, even to the point where the off-duty chief and the off-duty deputy chief had to respond to a citizen’s call at ten o’clock in the evening. Which seems to be because most of your guys are on roadblock duty. Basically you’ve got your whole town locked down.”

“Because?”

“Because you’re worried about someone coming in from the outside.”

Peterson took a long pull on his beer and asked, “Was the bus crash for real?”

Reacher said, “I’m not your guy.”

“We know you’re not. You had no control. But maybe the driver is our guy.”

Reacher shook his head. “Too elaborate, surely. Could have gone wrong a thousand different ways.”

“Was he really fighting the skid?”

“As opposed to what?”

“Causing it, maybe.”

“Wouldn’t he have just killed the engine and faked a breakdown? Nearer the cloverleaf?”

“Too obvious.”

“I was asleep. But what I saw after I woke up looked real to me. I don’t think he’s your guy.”

“But he could be.”

“Anything’s possible. But if it was me, I would have come in as a prison visitor. Chief Holland told me you get plenty of them. Heads on beds, six nights a week.”

“We know them all pretty well. Not too many short sentences out there. The faces don’t change. And we watch them. Anyone we don’t know, we call the prison to check they’re on the list. And they’re mostly women and children anyway. We’re expecting a man.”

Reacher shrugged. Took a pull from his bottle. The beer was Miller. Next to him the refrigerator started humming. Warm air had gotten in when Peterson had opened the door. Now the machinery was fighting it.

Peterson said, “The prison took two years to build. There were hundreds of construction workers. They built a camp for them, five miles west of us. Public land. There was an old army facility there. They added more huts and trailers. It was like a little village. Then they left.”

“When?”

“A year ago.”

“And?”

“The bikers moved in. They took the place over.”

“How many?”

“There are more than a hundred now.”

“And?”

“They’re selling methamphetamine. Lots of it. East and west, because of the highway. It’s a big business.”

“So bust them.”

“We’re trying to. It isn’t easy. We have no probable cause for a search out there. Which isn’t normally a problem. A meth lab in a trailer, life expectancy is usually a day or two. They blow up. All you need to do is follow the fire department. All kinds of volatile chemicals. But these guys are very careful. No accidents yet.”

“But?”

“We caught a break. A big-time guy out of Chicago came west to negotiate a bulk purchase. He met with their top boy right here in Bolton. Neutral ground, and civilized. He bought a sample out the back of a pick-up truck in the restaurant parking lot, right where we had dinner.”

“And?”

“We have a witness who saw the whole transaction. The Chicago guy got away, but we grabbed the dope and the money and busted the biker. He’s in the county lock-up right now, awaiting trial.”

“Their top boy? Didn’t that give you probable cause to search his place?”

“His truck is registered in Kentucky. His driver’s license is from Alabama. He claims that he drove up here. He says he doesn’t live here. We had nothing to link him to. We can’t get a warrant based on the fact that he dresses like some other guys we’ve seen. Judges don’t work that way. They want more.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“We’re going to roll him. We’ll offer him a plea bargain and he’ll give us what we need to clean out the whole mess.”

“Has he agreed?”

“Not yet. He’s waiting us out. Waiting to see if the witness forgets stuff. Or dies.”

“Who’s the witness?”

“A nice old lady, here in town. She’s seventy-plus. Used to be a teacher and a librarian. Perfect credibility.”

“Is she likely to forget stuff or die?”

“Of course she is. That’s how these people do it. They scare the witnesses. Or kill them.”

“Which is why you’re worried about strangers coming to town. You think they’re coming for her.”

Peterson nodded. Said nothing.

Reacher took a long pull on his bottle and asked, “Why assume it will be a stranger? Couldn’t the bikers come over and take care of it for themselves?”

Peterson shook his head. “We’re all over any biker who shows up in town. As you saw tonight. Everyone watches for them. So it won’t be a biker. It would be self-defeating. Their whole strategy is to deny us probable cause.”

“OK.”

Peterson said, “Someone else is on his way. Has to be. On their behalf. Someone we won’t recognize when he gets here.”

Chapter 8

Reacher took a third long pull on his bottle and said, “It’s not the bus driver.”

Peterson asked, “How sure are you?”

“How much money are these guys getting for their meth?”

“Two hundred bucks a gram, as far as we know, and we guess they’re moving it in pick-up trucks, which is a whole lot of grams. They could be making millions.”

“In which case they can afford professionals. A professional hit man with a day job as a bus driver is an unlikely combination.”

Peterson nodded. “OK, it’s not the bus driver. Mr. Jay Knox is innocent.”

“And you can vouch for all the prison visitors?”

“We watch them. They hit the motels, they get on the shuttle buses to the prison, they come back, they leave the next day. Any change to that pattern, we’d be all over them, too.”

“Where’s the witness?”

“At home. Her name is Janet Salter. She’s a real sweetie. Like a storybook grandma. She lives on a dead-end street, fortunately. We have a car blocking the turn, all day and all night. You saw it.”

“Not enough.”

“We know. We have a second car outside her house and a third parked one street over, watching the back. Plus women officers in the house, the best we’ve got, minimum of four at all times, two awake, two asleep.”

“When is the trial?”

“A month if we’re lucky.”

“And she won’t leave? You could stash her in a hotel. Maybe in the Caribbean. That’s a deal I would take right now.”

“She won’t leave. She’s very stubborn.”

“Does she know the danger she’s in?”

“We explained the situation to her. But she wants to do the right thing. She says it’s a matter of principle.”

“Good for her.”

Peterson nodded. “Good for us, too. Because we’ll nail the whole lot of them. But hard on us, also. Because we’re using a lot of resources.”

Reacher nodded in turn. “Which is why you’re pussyfooting. Why you’re not confronting the bikers. Because an all-out war right now would stretch you too thin.”

“And because we have to sell this thing to a jury. We can’t let defense counsel make out it’s all part of a harassment campaign. Plus, the bikers aren’t dumb. They keep their noses clean. Technically as individuals they haven’t done anything wrong yet. At least not in public.”

“In fact the opposite seems to be true. I saw the photographs.”

“Exactly,” Peterson said. “It looks like one of our good citizens beat one of theirs to death.”

The clock on the refrigerator ticked on and hit five to midnight. Fifty-two hours to go. Outside the window the moon had crept higher. The fallen snow was bright. The air was still. No wind. The cold was so intense Reacher could feel it striking through the farmhouse walls. There was a buffer zone about a foot deep, where the cold came creeping in before the heat from the iron stove overwhelmed it and beat it back.

Reacher asked, “Is Chief Holland up to the job?”

Peterson said, “Why do you ask?”

“First impressions. He looks a little overmatched to me.”

“Holland is a good man.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

“Did you discuss your superiors when you were in the army?”

“All the time. With people of equal rank.”

“Are we of equal rank?”

“Approximately.”

“So what were your superiors like?”

“Some of them were good, and some of them were assholes.”

“Holland’s OK,” Peterson said. “But he’s tired. His wife died. Then his daughter grew up and left home. He’s all alone, and he feels a little beaten down.”

“I saw the photograph in his office.”

“Happier days. They made a nice family.”

“So is he up to the job?”

“Enough to ask for help when he needs it.”

“Who’s he asking?”

“You.”

Reacher finished his Miller. He was warm, and comfortable, and tired. He said, “What could I possibly do for him?”

Peterson said, “There was an old army facility where they built the construction camp.”

“You told me that already.”

“We need to understand exactly what it was.”

“Don’t you know?”

Peterson shook his head. “It was put in a long time ago. There’s a single stone building, about the size of a house.”

“Is that all?”

Peterson nodded. “A long straight road leading to a single small building all alone on the prairie.”

“And it’s the size of a house?”

“Smaller than this one.”

“What shape?”

“Square. Rectangular. Like a house.”

“With a roof?”

“Of course.”

“Because I’m wondering if it was a missile silo. There are plenty of them in the Dakotas.”

“It’s not a silo.”

“Then it could be anything. Could be something they started and didn’t finish.”

“We don’t think so. There’s a kind of folk memory with the older people. They say there were hundreds of engineers out there for months. And a security cordon. And a lot of coming and going. That’s a lot of effort for a thing the size of a house.”

“I’ve heard of stranger things.”

“We need to know. Chances are we’re going to need to go out there and make a hundred arrests. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“Call somebody. Call the Department of the Army.”

“We have. We’ve called, the county board has called, the state government has called.”

“And?”

“Nobody ever got a reply.”

“How old are your older people?”

“Does that matter?”

“I’m asking when the place was built. Did they see all these engineers for themselves? Or just hear stories about them from their parents or grandparents?”

“The place is about fifty years old.”

“How long since soldiers were seen out there?”

“Never. The place was never used.”

Reacher shrugged. “So it’s an abandoned Cold War facility. Maybe never even completed. One day it seemed like a good idea, the next day it didn’t. That kind of thing happened all the time, way back when, because strategy was fluid. Or because nobody had the faintest idea what they were doing. But it’s no big deal. A stone house is going to be more resistant to small arms fire than a hut or a trailer, but I’m assuming you’re not planning on a shooting war out there anyway.”

“We need to know for sure.”

“I can’t help you. I never served here. Never heard any talk.”

“You could make some back-channel calls. Maybe you still know people.”

“I’ve been out a very long time.”

“You could go west and take a look.”

“It’s a stone building. Army stone is the same as anyone else’s.”

“Then why the hundreds of engineers?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“We’re wondering if it’s an underground facility. Maybe the stone building is just a stair head. Their lab could be down there. Which would explain the lack of fires and explosions in the trailers. They could have turned the whole place into a fortress. There could be food and water and weapons down there. This whole thing could turn into a siege. We don’t want that.”

Peterson stood up and stepped over to the desk and took two fresh bottles from the refrigerator. Which told Reacher they were only halfway through their conversation. Maybe only a third of the way through, if there was a six-pack in there.

Peterson said, “There’s more.”

“No kidding,” Reacher said.

“We’ve got their top boy locked up, but command and control is still happening. They’re still functioning.”

“So he’s got a deputy.”

“Gangs don’t work like that.”

“So he’s still communicating. Cell phone or smuggled notes.”

“Not happening.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Definitely.”

“Then it’s through his lawyer. A private conference every day, they’re pretending to discuss the case, your guy is really issuing verbal instructions, his lawyer is passing them on.”

“That’s what we guessed. But that’s not happening, either.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they have concealed video and audio in the conference rooms.”

“For privileged discussions between lawyers and clients? Is that legal?”

“Maybe. It’s a brand-new prison. And there’s a lot of fine print in some of the new federal legislation.”

“He’s not a federal prisoner.”

“OK, so no, it’s probably not entirely legal.”

“But you’re doing it anyway?”

“Yes,” Peterson said. “And we haven’t heard a single instruction or business detail. No notes passed, nothing written down.”

“You ever heard of the Fourth Amendment? This could screw your case.”

“We’re not planning on using anything we hear. The prosecutor doesn’t even know we’re doing it. We just want advance warning, that’s all, in the police department, in case they decide to move against the witness.”

“She’ll be OK. You’ve got her buttoned up tight. It’s only a month. You’re on the hook for a little overtime, but that’s all.”

“We competed for that prison.”

“Holland told me. Like a Toyota plant. Or Honda.”

“It was a give and take process.”

“It always is.”

“Correctional staff get tax breaks, we built houses, we expanded our school.”

“And?”

“Final item was we had to sign on to their crisis plan.”

“Which is what?”

“If there’s an escape, we have a preassigned role.”

“Which is what?”

“The whole of the Bolton PD moves up to a prearranged perimeter a mile out.”

“All of you?”

“Every last one of us. On duty or off. Awake or asleep. Healthy or sick.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s what we had to agree. For the good of the town.”

“Not good,” Reacher said.

“Not good at all,” Peterson said. “If that siren goes off, we drop everything and head north. All of us. Which means if that siren goes off anytime in the next month, we leave Janet Salter completely unprotected.”

Chapter 9

Reacher finished most of his second beer and said, “That’s insane.”

“Only in reality,” Peterson said. “Not on paper. The Highway Patrol is theoretically available to us as backup. And the feds offered us witness protection for Mrs. Salter. But the Highway Patrol is usually hours away all winter long, and Mrs. Salter refused the protection. She says the bikers are the ones who should be locked up miles from home, not her.”

“Problem,” Reacher said.

“Tell me about it,” Peterson said.

Reacher glanced at the moonlit view out the window and said, “But it’s not exactly ideal escaping weather, is it? Not right now. Maybe not for months. There’s two feet of virgin snow on the ground for five miles all around. If someone gets through whatever kind of a fence they have out there, they’ll die of exposure inside an hour. Or get tracked by a helicopter. Their footsteps will be highly visible.”

Peterson said, “No one escapes on foot anymore. They stow away on a food truck or something.”

“So why form a perimeter a mile out?”

“Nobody said their crisis plan makes any sense.”

“So fake it. Leave some folks in place. At least the women in the house.”

“We can’t. There will be a head count. We’ll be audited. We don’t comply to the letter, we’ll get hit with federal supervision for the next ten years. The town signed a contract. We took their money.”

“For the extra cars?”

Peterson nodded. “And for housing. Everyone lives within ten minutes, everyone gets a car, everyone keeps his radio on, everyone responds instantaneously.”

“Can’t you stick Mrs. Salter in a car and take her with you?”

“We’re supposed to keep civilians away. We certainly can’t take one with us. She would refuse, anyway. It would be like arresting her. Can’t do that.”

“Has anyone escaped so far?”

“No. It’s a brand-new prison. They’re doing OK.”

“So hope for the best.”

“You don’t get it. We would hope for the best. If this was about random chance or coincidence, we wouldn’t be sweating it. But it isn’t. Because the same guy who wants us out of Janet Salter’s house has the actual personal power to make that happen, any old time he wants to.”

“By escaping on cue?” Reacher said. “I don’t think so. I know prisons. Escapes take a long time to organize. He would have to scope things out, make a plan, find a truck driver, build trust, get money, make arrangements.”

“There’s more. It gets worse.”

“Tell me.”

“Part two of the crisis plan is for a prison riot. The corrections people move in off the fence and we take over the towers and the gate.”

“All of you?”

“Same as part one of the plan. And prison riots don’t take a long time to organize. They can start in a split second. Prisons are riots just waiting to happen, believe me.”

There was no third bottle of beer. No more substantive conversation. Just a few loose ends to tie up, and a little reiteration. Peterson said, “You see? The guy can time it almost to the minute. The wrong thing gets said to the wrong person, a minute later a fight breaks out, a minute after that there’s a full-blown riot brewing, we get the call, ten minutes after that we’re all more than five miles from Janet Salter’s house.”

“He’s in lock-up,” Reacher said. “The county jail, right? Which is a separate facility. Nobody riots in lock-up. They’re all awaiting trial. They’re all busy making out like they’re innocent.”

“He’s a biker. He’ll have friends in the main house. Or friends of friends. That’s how prison gangs work. They look after their own. And there are lots of ways of communicating.”

“Not good,” Reacher said again.

“Not good at all,” Peterson said. “When the siren sounds, we leave the old-timer civilian on the desk, and that’s it. He’s supposed to call us back if there’s a terrorist alert, but short of that, our hands are tied.”

“You expecting a terrorist alert?”

“Not here. Mount Rushmore has symbolic value, but that’s Rapid City’s problem.”

Reacher asked, “Did you expand the police department, too? Like the school?”

Peterson nodded. “We had to. Because the town grew.”

“How much did you expand?”

“We doubled in size. By which time we were competing with the prison for staff. It was hard to keep standards up. Which is a big part of Chief Holland’s problem. It’s like half of us are his from the old days, and half of us aren’t.”

“I can’t help him,” Reacher said. “I’m just a guy passing through.”

“You can make those calls to the army. That would help him. If we get through the next month, we’re going to need that information.”

“I’ve been out too long. It’s a new generation now. They’ll hang up on me.”

“You could try.”

“I wouldn’t get past the switchboard.”

“Back when I came on the job we had a special emergency number for the FBI office in Pierre. The system changed years ago, but I still remember the number.”

“So?”

“I’m guessing there’s a number you remember, too. Maybe not for a switchboard.”

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson said, “Make the calls for us. That’s all, I promise. We’ll handle the rest, and then you can get on your way.”

Reacher said nothing.

“We can offer you a desk and chair.”

“Where?”

“At the police station. Tomorrow.”

“You want me to come to work with you? To the police station? You don’t quite trust me yet, do you?”

“You’re in my house. With my wife and children sleeping in it.”

Reacher nodded.

“Can’t argue with that,” he said.

But Kim Peterson wasn’t sleeping. Not right then. Ten minutes after Andrew Peterson left him alone Reacher got tired of the stale hop smell from the four empty beer bottles, so he trapped their necks between his knuckles and carried them two in each hand out to the kitchen, hoping to find a trash bin. Instead he found Kim Peterson tidying her refrigerator. The room was dark but the light inside the appliance was bright. She was bathed in a yellow glow. She was wearing an old candlewick bathrobe. Her hair was down. Reacher held up the four bottles, as a mute inquiry.

“Under the sink,” Kim Peterson said.

Reacher bent down and opened the cabinet door. Lined up the bottles neatly with six others already there.

“Got everything you need?” she asked him.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Did Andrew ask you to do something for him?”

“He wants me to make some calls.”

“About the army camp?”

Reacher nodded.

“Are you going to do it?”

Reacher said, “I’m going to try.”

“Good. That place drives him crazy.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Promise?”

“Ma’am?”

“Promise me, if he asks, would you help him any way you can? He works too hard. He’s responsible for everything now. Chief Holland is overwhelmed. He barely knows half his department. Andrew has to do everything. Which is hard. On him and on me.”

There was a tiny bathroom off the den and Reacher used it to take a long hot shower. Then he folded his clothes over the back of the chair that Peterson had used and climbed under the covers. The sofa springs creaked and twanged under his weight. He rolled one way, rolled the other, listened to the loud tick of the clock, and was asleep a minute later.

Five to one in the morning.

Fifty-one hours to go.

Chapter 10

Reacher woke up at ten to seven, to a silent sepulchral world. Outside the den windows the air was thick with heavy flakes. They were falling gently but relentlessly onto a fresh accumulation that was already close to a foot deep. There was no wind. Each one of the billions of flakes came parachuting straight down, sometimes wavering a little, sometimes spiraling, sometimes sidestepping an inch or two, each one disturbed by nothing except its own featherweight instability. Most added their tiny individual masses to the thick white quilt they landed on. Some stuck to fantastic vertical feathered shapes on power lines and fence wires, and made the shapes taller.

The bed was warm but the room was cold. Reacher guessed that the iron stove had been banked overnight, its embers hoarded, its air supply cut off. He wondered for a moment about the correct protocol for a houseguest under such circumstances. Should he get up and open the dampers and add some wood? Would that be helpful? Or would it be presumptuous? Would it upset a delicate and long-established combustion schedule and condemn his hosts to an inconvenient midnight visit to the woodpile two weeks down the road?

In the end Reacher did nothing. Just kept the covers pulled up to his chin and closed his eyes again.

Five to seven in the morning.

Forty-five hours to go.

*  *  *

Seventeen hundred miles to the south the day was already an hour older. Plato was eating breakfast in the smaller of his two outdoor dining rooms. The larger was reserved for formal dinners, and therefore little used, because formal dinners meant business dinners, and most of his current business associates were Russians, and Russians didn’t much care for the evening heat a hundred miles from Mexico City. They preferred air conditioning. Plato supposed it was a question of what they were accustomed to. He had heard that parts of Russia were so cold you could spit, and the saliva would freeze and bounce off the ground like a marble. Personally he didn’t believe it. He was prepared to accept that parts of Russia recorded very low temperatures, and certainly some of the extreme numbers he had seen in almanacs and weather reports might indeed freeze a small volume of organic liquid in the space and time between mouth and ground. But to survive in such an environment he was sure a human would have to wear a ski mask, possibly made from silk or a more modern synthetic material, and spitting was categorically impossible while wearing a ski mask. And he understood that in general extremely low temperatures went hand in hand with extremely low humidity, which would discourage spitting anyway, maybe even to the point of impracticality. Thus the anecdote was illustrative without being functionally true.

Plato was proud of his analytical abilities.

He was thinking about Russians because he had received an intriguing proposal from one of them, an hour ago by telephone. It was the usual kind of thing. A cousin of a friend of a brother-in-law wanted a bulk quantity of a certain substance, and could Plato help the man? Naturally Plato’s first priority was to help Plato, so he had viewed the proposal through that lens, and he had arrived at an interesting conclusion, which might, with a little honing and salesmanship, be turned into an advantageous deal. Dramatically advantageous, in fact, and completely one-sided in his own favor, of course, but then, he was Plato, and the unnamed Russian cousin wasn’t.

There were three main factors.

First, the deal would require a fundamental shift in the Russian’s initial baseline assumption, in that the bulk quantity would not be transported to the Russian, but the Russian would be transported to the bulk quantity.

Second, the deal would require complete faith on Plato’s part in the notion that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.

And third, the deal would change things a little, up in South Dakota. Therefore the situation up there had to remain pristine, and viable, and immaculate, and perfectly attractive. Perfectly marketable, in other words. Which meant the witness and the lawyer had to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

Plato reached for his phone.

At fourteen minutes past seven the old farmhouse was still quiet. At fifteen minutes past, it burst into life. Reacher heard the thin beep and wail of alarm clocks through walls and ceilings, and then the stumbling tread of footsteps on the second floor. Four sets. Parents, and two children. Two boys, Reacher figured, judging by the uninhibited clumsiness of their progress. Doors opened and closed, toilets flushed, showers ran. Ten minutes later there was noise in the kitchen. The gulp and hiss of a coffee machine, the padded slam of the refrigerator door, the scrape of chair legs on floorboards. Again, Reacher wondered about applicable protocol. Should he just go out and join the family at breakfast? Or would that scare the children? He supposed it would depend on their ages and their constitutions. Should he wait to be invited? Or should he wait until the children had left for school? Would they be going to school at all, with a foot of new snow on the ground?

He showered fast and dressed in the tiny bathroom and made the bed and sat on it. A minute later he heard the scrape of a chair and small fast feet on the boards and an inexpert knock on his door. It opened immediately and a boy stuck his head inside. The kid was maybe seven years old. He was a miniature version of Andrew Peterson. His face was equal parts resentment at being sent to do a chore, and apprehension for what he might find, and open curiosity about what he had actually found.

He stared for a second and said, “Mama says come get a cup of coffee.”

Then he disappeared.

By the time Reacher got through the door both children had left the kitchen. He could hear them running up the stairs. He imagined he could see disturbances in the air behind them, dust and vortexes, like a cartoon. Their parents were sitting quietly at the table. They were dressed the same as the day before, Peterson in uniform, his wife in sweater and pants. They weren’t talking. Any kind of conversation would have been drowned out by running feet above. Reacher took coffee from the pot and by the time he was back at the table Peterson had gotten up and was on his way out to the barn to start the pick-up to plow his way out to the street. His wife was on her way upstairs to make sure the children were ready. A minute later both boys ran down the stairs and crashed out through the door. Reacher heard the rattle of a heavy diesel engine and saw a glimpse of yellow through the snow. The school bus, apparently right on schedule, undeterred by the weather.

A minute after that, the house was completely silent. Kim didn’t come back to the kitchen. Reacher got nothing to eat. No big deal. He was used to being hungry. He sat alone until Peterson stuck his head in the hallway and called for him. He took the borrowed Highway Patrol coat from the hook and headed out.

Five to eight in the morning.

Forty-four hours to go.

The lawyer was wrestling with his garage door again. There was a new foot of snow out on the driveway and it had drifted a little against the door, jamming it in its tracks. He had his overshoes on, and he had his shovel in his hand. The motor on the garage ceiling was straining. He grabbed the inside handle and jerked upward. The mechanism’s chains bucked and bounced and the door came up in a rush and the peak of the snowdrift outside fell inward. He shoveled it back out and then started his car and got ready to face his day.

His day began with breakfast. He had taken to eating it out. In some ways, normal small-town behavior. A coffee shop, some banter, some networking, some connections. All valuable. But not worth more than a half-hour’s investment. Forty-five minutes at the most. Now he was spending at least an hour in his booth. Sometimes, an hour and a half.

He was afraid to go to work.

The message forms his firm used were yellow. Every morning his secretary handed him a wad. Most were innocent. But some said Client requests conference re. case #517713. There was no case with that number. No file. Nothing written down. Such a note was a code. An instruction, really, to head up to the prison and take mental dictation.

Most days he got no such note. Some days he did. There was no way of predicting it. It was a part of his morning ritual now, to stand in front of his secretary’s desk, with his hand out and his heart in his mouth, waiting to see what his life would do to him next.

Reacher saw nothing on the ride downtown except snow. Snow on the ground, snow in the air. Snow everywhere. The world was slow and silent and shrunken. Traffic was light and was huddled together in narrow rutted lanes in the middle of roads. Small waffles of snow pelted up off tires in cautious rooster tails. Small convoys joined up and crept along like slow trains, doing twenty miles an hour, or less. But Peterson’s cruiser was warm and safe and solid. A heavy car on flat land, with chains on the back and winter tires on the front. No problem.

By day through the snow the police station looked longer and lower than it had by night. It was a sprawling one-story building built of white brick. It had a flat roof with microwave dishes and radio antennas bolted to steel superstructures. It reminded Reacher of a classic State Police barracks. Maybe it had been built from a standardized blueprint. There were plenty of squad cars in the lot, still warm, just parked. Day-watch personnel, presumably, coming in from home for briefing ahead of their eight-thirty start. There was a small front-loader working between the cars, bustling around on rubber caterpillar tracks, shoveling snow into a pile that was already eight feet high. Peterson seemed relaxed. Reacher figured he was feeling good about the snow. It limited fast access to anywhere, including Janet Salter’s house. Intruders would wait for a better day. Stealthy approaches were hard to make through thigh-high drifts.

Reacher took the parka but left the gloves and the hat in the car. Too personal. He would replace them with items of his own. Inside the lobby there was a different old guy on the stool behind the counter. The day-watch aide. Same kind of age as the guy the night before, same kind of civilian clothing, but a different individual. Peterson led Reacher right past him and down a corridor into a large open-plan squad room. It was full of noise and talk and men and women in uniform. They had go-cups of coffee, they were making notes, they were reading bulletins, they were getting ready to head out. There were close to thirty of them. A sixty-strong department, split equally between day and night duty. Some were young, some were old, some were neat, some were a mess. A real mixed bag. We doubled in size, Peterson had said. It was hard to keep standards up. Reacher saw the proof right there in front of him. It was easy enough to pick out the new hires from the old hands, and easy to see the friction between them. Unit cohesion had been disrupted, and professionalism had been compromised. Us and them. Reacher saw Chief Holland’s problem. He was dealing with two departments in one. And he didn’t have the energy for it. He should have retired. Or the mayor should have canned him, before the ink was dry on the prison deal.

But new or old, all the cops were punctual. By eight-thirty the room was almost completely deserted. Clearly the roadblocks were eating manpower, and presumably snow days brought fender benders by the dozen. Only two cops stayed behind. Both were in uniform. One had a name badge that said Kapler. The other had a name badge that said Lowell. Neither one was wearing a belt. No guns, no radios, no cuffs. Both were somewhere in their mid-thirties. Kapler was dark, with the remnant of a fading tan. Lowell was fair and red-faced, like a local boy. Both looked fit and strong and active. Neither looked happy. Kapler went clockwise and Lowell went counterclockwise and they emptied out-trays all around the room and carried the resulting piles of paper away through a blank door farther down the corridor.

Reacher asked, “What’s that all about?”

Peterson said, “Normal clerical duties.”

“While you’re hurting for manpower? I don’t think so.”

“So what’s your guess?”

“Disciplinary. They did something wrong and they’ve been grounded. Holland took their guns away.”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Are they new or old?”

“Lowell has been here a spell. He’s local. An old Bolton family. Kapler’s new, but not too new. He came up from Florida two years ago.”

“Why? For the weather? I thought that worked the other way around.”

“He needed a job.”

“Because? What went wrong for him down there?”

“Why should something have gone wrong?”

“Because with the greatest possible respect, if you’re in Florida law enforcement, South Dakota is the kind of place you go when you run out of alternatives.”

“I don’t know the details. He was hired by Chief Holland and the mayor.”

“So what did Lowell do to deserve him as a partner?”

“Lowell’s an odd duck,” Peterson said. “He’s a loner. He reads books.”

“What did they do to get themselves grounded?”

“I can’t talk about it. And you’ve got work to do. Pick any desk you like.”

Reacher picked a desk way in the back corner. An old habit. It was a plain laminate thing, and the chair was adjusted for a small person. It was still warm. There was a keyboard and a screen on the desk, and a console telephone. The screen was blank. Switched off. The phone had buttons for six lines and ten speed dials.

Peterson said, “Dial nine for a line.”

I’m guessing there’s a number you remember, too. Maybe not for a switchboard.

Reacher dialed. Nine for a line, then a Virginia area code, then seven more digits. A number he remembered.

He got a recording, which was not what he remembered.

The recording featured a man’s voice, speaking slowly and ponderously, with undue emphasis on his first three words. His message said, “You have reached the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time. Otherwise, please choose from the following menu.” Then came a long droning list, press one for this, press two for that, three for the other thing, agriculture, manufacturing, non-food service industries.

Reacher hung up.

“You know another number?” Peterson said.

“No.”

“Who were you calling?”

“A special unit. An investigative department. Kind of elite. Like the army’s own FBI, but much smaller.”

“Who did you get instead?”

“Some government office. Something about labor statistics.”

“I guess things change.”

“I guess they do,” Reacher said.

Then he said, “Or maybe they don’t. At least, not fundamentally.”

He dialed again. The same number. He got the same recording. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time. He dialed 110. Heard a click and a purr and a new dial tone. A new voice, live, after just one ring.

It said, “Yes?” A Southern accent, a man, probably late twenties, almost certainly a captain, unless the world had gone mad and they were letting lieutenants or NCOs answer that particular phone now, or, worse still, civilians.

Reacher said, “I need to speak to your commanding officer.”

“Whose commanding officer?”

“Yours.”

“Who exactly do you think you’re speaking with?”

“You’re the 110th MP HQ in Rock Creek, Virginia.”

“Are we?”

“Unless you changed your phone number. There used to be a live operator. You had to ask for room 110.”

“Who exactly am I speaking with?”

“I used to work for the 110th.”

“In what capacity?”

“I was its first CO.”

“Name?”

“Reacher.”

Silence for a moment.

Reacher asked, “Does anyone go ahead and actually choose from that menu?”

“Sir, if you worked for the 110th, you’ll know that this is an active and open emergency channel. I’ll have to ask you to state your business immediately.”

“I want to talk to your commanding officer.”

“Concerning?”

“A favor I need. Tell him to look me up in the files and call me back.” Reacher read out the number from a label stuck to the console in front of him.

The guy on the other end hung up without a word.

Five to nine in the morning.

Forty-three hours to go.

Chapter 11

At nine-thirty the phone on Reacher’s borrowed desk rang, but the call was not for him. He stretched the cord and passed the handset to Peterson. Peterson gave his name and rank and then listened for the best part of a minute. He asked whoever it was on the other end to stay in touch, and then he passed the handset back. Reacher hung it up. Peterson said, “We need your information just as soon as you can get it.”

Reacher pointed at the console in front of him. “You know how it is with kids today. They never write, they never call.”

“I’m serious.”

“What changed?”

“That was the DEA on the line. The actual Drug Enforcement Administration. The actual federal bureau. From Washington D.C. A courtesy call. Turns out they have a wiretap on a guy they think is a Russian dope dealer. New to the scene, trying to make a name, trawling for deals, out of Brooklyn, New York. A guy in Mexico called Plato just called him about a property for sale five miles west of a town called Bolton, in South Dakota.”

“A property for sale?”

“Those were the words they used.”

“So what is this? Real estate or dope dealing?”

“If there’s an underground lab out there, then it’s both, isn’t it? And that’s going to be the DEA’s next question. It’s a no-brainer. They’ll be building their file and they’ll call us to ask what exactly that place is.”

“Tell them to call the Department of the Army direct. Quicker all around.”

“But that would make us look like idiots. We can’t admit we’ve had a place next to us for fifty years and we don’t even know what it is.”

Reacher shrugged. Pointed at the phone again. “You’ll know as soon as I do. Which might be never.”

“You were their commanding officer? An elite unit?”

Reacher nodded. “For a spell.” Then he said: “Plato is a weird name for a Mexican, don’t you think? Sounds more like a Brazilian name to me.”

“No, Yugoslavian,” Peterson said. “Like that old dictator.”

“That was Tito.”

“I thought he was a South African bishop.”

“That was Tutu.”

“So who was Plato?”

“An ancient Greek philosopher. The pupil of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle.”

“So what has Brazil got to do with all of that?”

“Don’t ask,” Reacher said.

Kapler and Lowell came back to the squad room. They distributed memos still hot and curled from the photocopier, one into every in-tray, and then they slouched out again. Peterson said, “That’s their day’s work done, right there. Now comes a five-hour lunch break, probably. What a waste.”

“What did they do?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“That bad?”

“No, not really.”

“So what was it?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Yes you can.”

“OK, three days ago they were out of radio contact for an hour. Wouldn’t say why or how or what they were doing. We can’t allow that. Because of the prison plan.”

The phone rang again at twenty minutes to ten. Reacher picked it up and said, “Yes?”

A woman’s voice asked, “Major Reacher?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Keep talking.”

“You taught a class in your last year in the service.”

“Did I?”

“About integrating military and federal investigations. I took the class. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Keep talking.”

“What do you want me to say?” Right then Reacher wanted her to say plenty, because she had a great voice. It was warm, slightly husky, a little breathy, a little intimate. He liked the way it whispered in his ear. He liked it a lot. In his mind he pictured its owner as blonde, not more than thirty-five years old, not less than thirty. Probably tall, probably a looker. Altogether a terrific voice, for sure.

But not a voice he recognized, and he said so.

The voice said, “I’m very disappointed. Maybe even a little hurt. Are you sure you don’t remember me?”

“I need to speak to your CO.”

“That will have to wait. I can’t believe you don’t know who I am.”

“Can I take a guess?”

“Go ahead.”

“I think you’re some kind of a bullshit filter. I think your CO wants to know if I’m for real. If I say I remember you, I fail the test. Because I don’t. We never met. Maybe I wish we had, but we didn’t.”

“But I took your class.”

“You didn’t. You read my file, that’s all. The course title was for public consumption only. The class was about screwing the feds, not cooperating with them. If you had been in the room with me, you’d know that.”

“Good work.” A smile in the voice. “You just passed the test.”

“So who are you, really?”

“I’m you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m CO of the 110th Special Unit.”

“Really?”

“Really and truly.”

“Outstanding. Congratulations. How is it?”

“I’m sure you can imagine. I’m sitting at your old desk, right now, both metaphorically and literally. Do you remember your desk?”

“I had a lot of desks.”

“Here at Rock Creek.”

Actually Reacher remembered it pretty well. An old-style government desk, made of steel, painted green, the finish on the edges already worn back to bright metal by the time he inherited it.

The voice said, “There’s a big dent on the right hand side. People say you made it, with someone’s head.”

“People say?”

“Like a folk legend. Is it true?”

“I think the movers did it.”

“It’s perfectly concave.”

“Maybe they dropped a bowling ball.”

“I prefer the legend.”

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

The voice said, “Make one up for me.”

“What?”

“Let’s keep this off the record. Give me a code name.”

“This is a private conversation.”

“Not really. Our system shows you’re calling from a police station. I’m sure it has a switchboard and recording devices.”

Reacher said, “OK, keep talking. I should try to make the name fit the person.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Read the phone book. That would work for me.”

Another smile in the voice. “People say the dent in the desk came from a colonel’s head. They say that’s why you got canned from the 110th.”

“I didn’t get canned. I got new orders, that’s all.”

“Only because no one liked that particular colonel. But you definitely walked the plank. That’s what people say.”

“Amanda.”

“Amanda? OK, that’s who I am. You need me again, call the number and ask for Amanda. Now, what can I do for you today?”

“There’s a small town in South Dakota called Bolton. Roughly in the middle of the state, twelve or thirteen miles north of I-90.”

“I know where it is. Our system includes your coordinates. I’m looking at Bolton right now.”

“Looking at it how?”

“On my laptop. With Google Earth.”

“You guys have it easy.”

“Technology is indeed a wonderful thing. How can I help you?”

“Five miles west of town is an abandoned Cold War installation. I need to know what it was.”

“Can’t you tell what it was?”

“I haven’t seen it. And apparently there isn’t much to see. It could be nothing. But I want you to check it out for me.”

“You sure it isn’t a missile silo? The Dakotas are full of them.”

“They say it isn’t a silo. Doesn’t sound like one, either.”

“OK, hold on. I’m zooming and scrolling. According to the most recent image the only thing west of town looks like a prison camp. Fifteen huts and an older building, in two lines of eight. Plus a long straight road. Maybe two miles of it.”

“Does the older building look like a house?”

“From above it looks exactly like a house.”

“OK, but I need more than that.”

“You want me to come all the way up to South Dakota and go out there and look at it with you?”

“Since I’m stuck here in a snowstorm with nothing much else to do, that would be great. But a records check will do it. It’ll show up somewhere. I need to know its purpose, its scope, and its architecture.”

“Call me back at close of business.”

Then there was a click, and the voice was gone.

Five to ten in the morning.

Forty-two hours to go.

Chapter 12

The lawyer parked his car in his office lot and put on his overshoes. He took them off again inside his building’s lobby and placed them in a plastic grocery bag and carried the bag with his briefcase to the elevator. His secretary greeted him at her cubicle outside his door. He didn’t answer. He didn’t yet know whether it was or wasn’t a good morning. He just held out his hand for his message slips.

There were eight of them.

Three were trivial inter-office issues.

Four were legitimate legal matters.

The last was a request for a client conference at the prison, on an urgent matter relating to case number 517713, at noon.

Reacher sat alone for a spell and then wandered out and found Peterson in an empty office off the corridor near the entrance to the squad room. The office had four desks boxed together in the center of the space. The walls had long horizontal pin boards extending waist-high to head-high. Peterson was tacking yesterday’s crime scene photographs to the boards. The dead guy, dressed in black. The establishing shot, the close-ups. Snow on the ground, blunt force trauma to the right temple. No blood.

Peterson said, “We just got the autopsy report. He was definitely moved.”

Reacher asked, “Were there other injuries?”

“Some perimortem bruising.”

“Are there bad parts of town?”

“Some are worse than others.”

“Have you checked the bars?”

“For what?”

“Newly cleaned floors, suspicious stains.”

“You think this was a bar fight?”

“Somewhere in the low rent district, but not in the war zone.”

“Why?”

“Tell me what the pathologist said about the weapon.”

“It was round, fairly smooth, probably machined metal or wood, maybe a fence post or a rainwater pipe.”

“Neither one of those,” Reacher said. “A fence post or a rainwater pipe has a uniform diameter. Too wide to grip hard enough to swing hard enough. My guess is it was a baseball bat. And baseball bats are relatively hard to find in the winter. They’re in closets or garages or basements or attics. Except sometimes they’re under bars, where the bartender can grab them real quick. Not in the good part of town, of course, and in the war zone they’d probably want a shotgun.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Where do the prison guards drink?”

“You think it was one of them?”

“It takes two to tango. Prison guards are used to the rough and tumble.”

Peterson was quiet for a beat. “Anything else?”

Reacher shook his head. “I’m going out. I’ll be back later.”

The snow was still heavy. Peterson’s car was already just a humped white shape in the lot. Reacher turned up the hood of his borrowed coat and walked straight past it. He made it out to the sidewalk and peered left, peered right. The snow swirled around him and blew in under his hood and clogged his hair and his eyelashes and drifted down his neck. Directly opposite him was some kind of a public square or town park and beyond that was an array of commercial establishments. The distance was too great and the snow was too thick to make out exactly what they were. But one of them had a plume of steam coming out of a vent on the roof, which made it likely that it was either a dry cleaner or a restaurant, which made it a fifty-fifty chance that a late breakfast could be gotten there.

Reacher headed over, floundering through plowed snow, slipping and sliding through the square. His ears and nose and chin went numb. He kept his hands in his pockets. The place with the steam was a coffee shop. He stepped inside, to hot wet air. A counter, and four tables. Jay Knox was alone at one of them. The bus driver. Judging by the state of his table he had finished a large meal some time ago. Reacher stepped up opposite him and put his hand on a chair back, ready to pull it out, like a request. Knox seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see him. Just preoccupied, and a little sullen.

Reacher sat down anyway and asked, “You making out OK?”

Knox shrugged. “They put me with some people.”

“And?”

“I suppose they’re nice enough.”

“But you came out for a long slow breakfast.”

“I don’t like to impose.”

“Didn’t they offer?”

“I don’t particularly like them, OK?”

Reacher said nothing.

Knox asked, “Where did they put you?”

“With the cop who came to the bus.”

“So why are you here? Didn’t the cop give you breakfast?”

Reacher didn’t answer. Just said: “Any news?”

“The tow trucks got here this morning. They pulled the bus off the highway. We’re leasing a replacement out of Minneapolis. Should be here soon after the storm passes.”

“Not so bad.”

“Except that it will come with its own driver. Which means I’ll be a passenger all the way back to Seattle. Which means I won’t get paid, effective four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“Not so good.”

“They should do something about that damn bridge.”

“Have you seen anything of the passengers?”

“They’re scattered here and there. One of them has her arm in a sling and one of them has a cast on her wrist. But generally they’re not bitching too much. I don’t think any of them has called a lawyer yet. Actually some of them are looking on the bright side, like this whole thing is a magical mystery tour.”

“Not so bad,” Reacher said again.

Knox didn’t answer. Just got up suddenly and took stuff off a nearby hook and jammed a hat on his head, and wound a muffler around his neck, and struggled into a heavy coat, all borrowed, judging by the sizes and the colors. He nodded once at Reacher, a slightly bad-tempered farewell, and then he walked to the door and stepped out into the snow.

A waitress came by and Reacher ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu.

Plus coffee.

Five to eleven in the morning.

Forty-one hours to go.

The lawyer left his briefcase in his office but carried his overshoes in their grocery bag. He put them on in his building’s lobby and retraced his steps through the lot to his car. He buckled up, started the engine, heated the seat, turned on the wipers. He knew that the highway was still closed. But there were alternative routes. Long, straight South Dakota roads, stretching all the way to the horizon.

He fumbled his overshoes off and put a leather sole on the brake pedal and moved the shifter to Drive.

Reacher was halfway through a heaping plate of breakfast when Peterson came in. He was dressed in his full-on outdoors gear. It was clear that Reacher was supposed to be impressed by how easily Peterson had found him. Which Reacher might or might not have been, depending on how many other places Peterson had tried first.

Peterson put his hand on the chair that Knox had used, and Reacher invited him to sit with a gesture from his loaded fork. Peterson sat down and said, “I’m sorry you didn’t get breakfast at the house.”

Reacher chewed and swallowed and said, “No problem. You’re being more than generous as it is.”

“Kim suffers from loneliness, that’s all. It isn’t her favorite time of day, when the boys and I leave the house. She usually hides out in her room.”

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson asked, “Have you ever been lonely?”

Reacher said, “Sometimes.”

“Kim would say you haven’t. Not unless you had sat on a back porch day after day in South Dakota and looked all around and seen nothing for a hundred miles in any direction.”

“Isn’t she local?”

“She is. But being used to something doesn’t mean you have to like it.”

“I guess not.”

“We checked the bars. We found one with a very clean floor.”

“Where?”

“North. Where the prison guards drink.”

“Any cooperative witnesses?”

“No, but the bartender is missing. Lit out in his truck yesterday.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“Thank you,” Peterson said.

“You’re welcome.” Reacher speared half a slice of bacon and a half-circle of set egg yolk and ate it.

“Any other thoughts?” Peterson asked.

“I know how the guy you put in jail is communicating.”

“How?”

“He made a friend on the inside. Or coerced somebody. Your guy is briefing the second guy, and the second guy is briefing his own lawyer. Like a parallel track. You’re bugging the wrong room.”

“There are dozens of lawyer visits every day.”

“Then you better start sifting through them.”

Peterson was quiet for a beat. “Anything else?”

Reacher nodded. “I need to find a clothing store. I more or less promised your wife. Cheap, and nothing fancy. You know somewhere like that?”

The clothing store that Peterson recommended was a long block west of the public square. It carried sturdy garments for sturdy farmers. There were summer and winter sections, without many obvious differences between the two. Some of the items were off-brand makes, and others had recognizable labels but visible defects. There was a limited choice of dull colors. Prices were low, even for footwear. Reacher started from the ground up with a pair of black waterproof boots. Then he started in on the garments. His rule when confronted with a choice was to take either olive green or blue. Olive green, because he had been in the army. Blue, because a girl had once told him it picked out his eyes. He went with olive green, because it almost matched his borrowed coat, which was tan. He chose pants with a flannel lining, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and a sweater made of thick cotton. He added white underwear and a pair of black gloves and a khaki watch cap. Total damage was a hundred and thirty bucks. The store owner took a hundred and twenty for cash. Four days of wear, probably, at the rate of thirty dollars a day. Which added up to more than ten grand a year, just for clothes. Insane, some would say. But Reacher liked the deal. He knew that most folks spent much less than ten grand a year on clothes. They had a small number of good items that they kept in closets and laundered in basements. But the closets and basements were surrounded by houses, and houses cost a whole lot more than ten grand a year, to buy or to rent, and to maintain and repair and insure.

So who was really nuts?

He dressed in a changing cubicle and dumped his old stuff in a trash barrel behind the counter. He jammed the hat on his head and tugged it down over his ears. He covered it with the borrowed parka’s hood. He zipped up. He put on the gloves. He stepped out to the sidewalk.

And was still cold.

The air was meat-locker chilled. He felt it in his gut, his ribs, his legs, his ass, his eyes, his face, his lungs. Like the worst of Korea, but in Korea he had been younger, and he had been there under orders, and he had been getting paid. This was different. The snow danced and swirled all around him. A freshening wind pushed at him. His nose started running. His vision blurred. He took breaks in doorways. He turned a ten-minute walk to the police station into a twenty-minute winter odyssey.

When he arrived, he found full-on mayhem.

Five minutes before noon.

Forty hours to go.

It sounded like half the phones in the place were ringing. The old guy behind the reception counter had one in each hand and was talking into both of them. Peterson was alone in the squad room, on his feet behind a desk, a phone trapped between his ear and his shoulder, the cord bucking and swaying as he moved. He was gesticulating with both hands, short, sharp, decisive motions, like a general moving troops, as if the town of Bolton was laid out in front of him on the desk top, like a map.

Reacher watched and listened. The situation made itself clear. No rocket science was involved. A major crime against a person had been committed and Peterson was moving people out to deal with it while making sure his existing obligations were adequately covered. The crime scene seemed to be on the right hand edge of the desk, which was presumably Bolton’s eastern limit. The existing obligations seemed to be slightly south and west of downtown, which was presumably where Janet Salter lived. The vulnerable witness. Peterson was putting more resources around her than at the scene, which indicated either proper caution or that the victim at the scene was already beyond help.

Or both.

A minute later Peterson stopped talking and hung up. He looked worried. Expert in a casual way with all the local stuff, a little out of his depth with anything else. He said, “We’ve got a guy shot to death in a car.”

Reacher said, “Who?”

“The plates come back to a lawyer from the next county. He’s had five client conferences up at the jail. All of them since we busted the biker. Like you said. He’s their parallel track. And now their plan is made. So they’re cleaning house and breaking the chain.”

“Worse than that,” Reacher said.

Peterson nodded. “I know. Their guy isn’t on his way. We missed him. He’s already here.”

Chapter 13

Twice Peterson tried to get out of the squad room and twice he had to duck back to answer a phone. Eventually he made it to the corridor. He looked back at Reacher and said, “You want to ride along with me?”

Reacher asked, “You want me there?”

“If you like.”

“I really need to be somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“I should go introduce myself to Mrs. Salter.”

“What for?”

“I want to know the lay of the land. Just in case.”

Peterson said, “Mrs. Salter is covered. I made sure of that. Don’t worry about it.” Then he paused and said, “What? You think they’re going to move on her today? You think this dead lawyer is a diversion?”

“No, I think they’re breaking the chain. But it looks like I’m going to be here a couple of days. Because of the snow. If that escape siren goes off anytime soon, then I’m all you’ve got. But I should introduce myself to the lady first.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m trying to be helpful, that’s all. To repay your hospitality.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m not your guy.”

“I know that.”

“But?”

“You could be helpful at the crime scene.”

“You’ll be OK. You know what to do, right? Take plenty of photographs and pay attention to tire tracks and footprints. Look for shell cases.”

“OK.”

“But first call your officers in Mrs. Salter’s house. I don’t want a big panic when I walk up the driveway.”

“You don’t know where she lives.”

“I’ll find it.”

In summer it might have taken ten minutes to find Mrs. Salter’s house. In the snow it took closer to thirty, because lines of sight were limited and walking was slow. Reacher retraced the turns that the prison bus had made, struggling through drifts, slogging through unplowed areas, slipping and sliding along vehicle ruts. It was still snowing hard. The big white flakes came down on him, came up at him, whipped all around him. He found the main drag south. He knew that ahead of him was the restaurant. Beyond that was the parked cop car. He kept on going. He was very cold, but he was still functioning. The new clothes were doing their job, but nothing more.

There were cars heading north and south, lights on, wipers thrashing. Not many of them, but enough to keep him on the shoulder and out of the tire tracks, which would have been easier going. He guessed the roadway under the snow was wide, but right then traffic was confining itself to two narrow lanes near the center, made of four separate parallel ruts. Each passing car confirmed the collective decision not to wander. With each passing tire the ruts grew a little deeper and their side walls grew a little higher. The snow was dry and firm. The ruts were lined on the bottom with broken lattices of tread prints, smooth and greasy and stained brown in places.

Reacher passed the restaurant. The lunch hour was in full swing. The windows were fogged with steam. Reacher struggled on. Four hundred yards later he saw the parked cop car. It had pulled out of the southbound ruts and broken through the little walls and made smaller ruts of its own, like a railroad switch. It had parked parallel with the traffic and was completely blocking the side street. Its motor was turned off but its roof lights were turning. The cop in the driver’s seat was not moving his head. He was just staring through the windshield, looking neither alert nor enthusiastic. Reacher slogged through a wide turn and approached him from his front left side. He didn’t want to surprise the guy.

The cop buzzed the window down. Called out, “You Reacher?”

Reacher nodded. His face felt too cold for coherent speech. The cop’s nameplate said Montgomery. He was unshaven and overweight. Somewhere in his late twenties. In the army his ass would have been kicked to hell and back a hundred times. He said, “The Salter house is ahead on the left. You can’t miss it.”

Reacher struggled on. There were no big ruts in the side street. Just two lone tracks, one car coming, one car going. The tracks were already mostly refilled with snow. The change of watch, some hours earlier. The night guy going home, the day guy coming in. The day guy had gunned it a little after the turn. That was clear. His tracks slalomed through a minor fishtail before straightening.

The street curved gently and was lined on both sides by big old houses in big flat lots. The houses looked Victorian. They could have been a hundred years old. They had all been prosperous once and most of them still were. Clearly they had been built during an earlier boom. They predated the federal prison dollars by a century. Their details were obscured by snow, but they had heft and solidity and gingerbread trim. Peterson had called Janet Salter a storybook grandma, and Reacher had expected a storybook grandma’s house to be a small cottage with gingham curtains. Especially considering this storybook grandma had been a teacher and a librarian. Maybe Janet Salter had a different kind of story. Reacher was looking forward to meeting her. He had never known either one of his own grandmothers. He had seen a black and white photograph of himself as a baby on a stern woman’s knee. His father’s mother, he had been told. His mother’s mother had died when he was four, before ever having visited.

The second cop car was parked up ahead. No lights. It was facing him. The cop inside was watching him closely. Reacher floundered onward and stopped ten feet short. The cop opened his door and climbed out and tracked around. His boots set powder flying and small snowballs skittering. He said, “You Reacher?”

Reacher nodded.

“I have to search you.”

“Says who?”

“The deputy chief.”

“Search me for what?”

“Weapons.”

“She’s more than seventy years old. I wouldn’t need weapons.”

“True. But you’d need weapons to get past the officers in the house.”

This cop was a sharp-looking guy the right side of middle age. Compact, muscled, competent. A department of two halves, one better, one worse. A new hire at the end of the street, an old hand outside the house. Reacher planted his feet and unzipped his coat and stood with his arms held wide. Cold air rushed in under his coat. The cop patted him down and squeezed his coat pockets from both sides at once.

“Go ahead,” he said. “They’re expecting you.”

The driveway was long and the house was ornate. It could have been airlifted straight from Charleston or San Francisco. It had all the bells and whistles. A wraparound rocking-chair porch, dozens of windows, fish scale siding. It had turrets, and more stained glass than a church. Reacher made it up the steps onto the porch and clumped across the boards and stamped the snow off his boots. The front door was a carved multi-paneled thing. It had a bell pull next to it, a cast weight on the end of a wire that looped over pulleys and entered the house through a small bronze eye. Probably ordered by mail from Sears Roebuck a century ago, and delivered by wagon in a wooden box packed with straw, and fitted by a man more used to cart wheels and horseshoes.

Reacher pulled on it. He heard a chime deep inside the house, delayed by a second, low and polite and sonorous. Another second later a policewoman opened the door. She was small and dark and young and was in full uniform. Her gun was in its holster. But the holster was unsnapped, and she looked to be fully on the ball. Women officers in the house, Peterson had said, the best we’ve got, minimum of four at all times, two awake, two asleep.

The woman asked, “Are you Reacher?”

Reacher nodded.

“Come on in.”

The hallway was dark and paneled and fairly magnificent. There were oil paintings on the walls. Ahead was a substantial staircase that rose out of sight. All around were closed doors, maybe chestnut, each of them polished to a shine by a century of labor. There was a large Persian carpet. There were antiquated steam radiators connected with fat pipes. The radiators were working. The room was warm. There was a bentwood hat stand, loaded down with four new police-issue winter parkas. Reacher shrugged off his unzipped coat and hung it on a spare peg. It looked like he felt, an old battered item surrounded by current models.

The woman cop said, “Mrs. Salter is in the library. She’s expecting you.”

Reacher said, “Which one is the library?”

“Follow me.” The cop stepped ahead like a butler. Reacher followed her to a door on the left. She knocked and entered. The library was a large square room with a high ceiling. It had a fireplace and a pair of glass doors to the garden. Everything else was books on shelves, thousands of them. There was a second woman cop in front of the glass doors. She was standing easy with her hands folded behind her back, looking outward. She didn’t move. Just glanced back, got a nod from her partner, and glanced away again.

There was an older woman in an armchair. Mrs. Salter, presumably. The retired teacher. The librarian. The witness. She looked at Reacher and smiled politely.

She said, “I was just about to take some lunch. Would you care to join me?”

Five to one in the afternoon.

Thirty-nine hours to go.

Chapter 14

Janet Salter prepared the lunch herself. Reacher watched her do it. He sat in a spacious kitchen while she moved from refrigerator to counter to stove to sink. The impression he had formed from Peterson’s casual description did not match the reality. She was more than seventy years old, for sure, gray-haired, not tall, not short, not fat, not thin, and she certainly looked kind and not in the least forbidding, but as well as all of that she was ramrod straight and her bearing was vaguely aristocratic. She looked like a person used to respect and obedience, possibly from a large and important staff. And Reacher doubted that she was a real grandmother. She wore no wedding band and the house looked like no children had set foot in it for at least fifty years.

She said, “You were one of the unfortunates on the bus.”

Reacher said, “I think the others were more unfortunate than me.”

“I volunteered this house, of course. I have plenty of space here. But Chief Holland wouldn’t hear of it. Not under the circumstances.”

“I think he was wise.”

“Because extra bodies in the house would have complicated his officers’ operations?”

“No, because extra bodies in the house could have become collateral damage in the event of an attack.”

“Well, that’s an honest answer, at least. But then, they tell me you’re an expert. You were in the army. A commanding officer, I believe.”

“For a spell.”

“Of an elite unit.”

“So we told ourselves.”

“Do you think I am wise?” she asked. “Or foolish?”

“Ma’am, in what respect?”

“In agreeing to testify at the trial.”

“It depends on what you saw.”

“In what way?”

“If you saw enough to nail the guy, then I think you’re doing the right thing. But if what you saw was inconclusive, then I think it’s an unnecessary risk.”

“I saw what I saw. I am assured by all concerned that it was sufficient to secure a conviction. Or to nail the guy, as you put it. I saw the conversation, I saw the inspection of the goods, I saw the counting and transfer of money.”

“At what distance?”

“Perhaps twenty yards.”

“Through a window?”

“From inside the restaurant, yes.”

“Was the glass clean? Steamed up?”

“Yes and no.”

“Direct line of sight?”

“Yes.”

“Weather?”

“Cool and clear.”

“Time?”

“It was the middle of the evening.”

“Was the lot lit up?”

“Brightly.”

“Is your eyesight OK?”

“I’m a little farsighted. I sometimes wear spectacles to read. But never otherwise.”

“What were the goods?”

“A brick of white powder sealed tight in a wax paper wrap. The paper was slightly yellowed with age. There was a pictorial device stenciled on it, in the form of a crown, a headband with three points, and each point had a ball on it, presumably to represent a jewel.”

“You saw that from twenty yards?”

“It’s a benefit of being farsighted. And the device was large.”

“No doubts whatsoever? No interpretation, no gaps, no guesswork?”

“None.”

“I think you’ll make a great witness.”

She brought lunch to the table. It was a salad in a wooden bowl. The bowl was dark with age and oil, and the salad was made of leaves and vegetables of various kinds, plus tuna from a can, and hard boiled eggs that were still faintly warm. Janet Salter’s hands were small. Pale, papery skin. Trimmed nails, no jewelry at all.

Reacher asked her, “How many other people were in the restaurant at the time?”

She said, “Five, plus the waitress.”

“Did anyone else see what was happening?”

“I think they all did.”

“But?”

“Afterward they pretended not to have seen. Those who dwell in the community to our west are well known here. They frighten people. Simply by being there, I think, and by being different. They are the other. Which is inherently disturbing, apparently. In practice, they do us no overt harm. We exist together in an uneasy standoff. But I can’t deny an undercurrent of menace.”

Reacher asked, “Do you remember the army camp being built out there?”

Janet Salter shook her head. “Chief Holland and Mr. Peterson have asked me the same question endlessly. But I know no more than they do. I was away in school when it was built.”

“People say it took months to build. Longer than a semester, probably. Didn’t you hear anything when you were back in town?”

“I went to school overseas. International travel was expensive. I didn’t return during the vacations. In fact I didn’t return for thirty years.”

“Where overseas?”

“Oxford University, in England.”

Reacher said nothing.

Janet Salter asked, “Have I surprised you?”

Reacher shrugged. “Peterson said you were a teacher and a librarian. I guess I pictured a local school.”

“Mr. Peterson has any South Dakotan’s aversion to grandeur. And he’s quite right, anyway. I was a teacher and a librarian. I was Professor of Library Science at Oxford, and then I helped run the Bodleian Library there, and then I came back to the United States to run the library at Yale, and then I retired and came home to Bolton.”

“What’s your favorite book?”

“I don’t have one. What’s yours?”

“I don’t have one, either.”

Janet Salter said, “I know all about the crisis plan at the prison.”

“They tell me it has never been used.”

“But as with all things, one imagines there will be a first time, and that it will come sooner or later.”

Plato skipped lunch, which was unusual for him. Normally he liked the ritual and ceremony of three meals a day. His staff duly prepared a dish, but he didn’t show up to eat it. Instead he walked on a serpentine path through the scrub on his property, moving fast, talking on his cell phone, his shirt going dark with sweat. His guy in the American DEA had made a routine scan through all their wiretap transcripts and had called with a warning. Plato didn’t like warnings. He liked solutions, not problems. His DEA guy knew that, and had already reached out to a colleague. No way to stop the hapless Russian getting busted, but things could be delayed until after the deal was done, so that the money could disappear safely into the ether and Plato could walk away enriched and unscathed. All it would cost was four years of college tuition. The colleague had a sixteen-year-old and no savings. Plato had asked how much college cost, and had been mildly shocked at the answer. A person could buy a decent car for that kind of money.

Plato had only one remaining problem. The place in South Dakota was a multi-purpose facility. Most of its contents could be sold, but not all of them. Some of them had to be moved out first. Like selling a house. You left the stove, you took the sofa.

He trusted no one. Which helped, most of the time. But at other times it gave him difficulties. Like now. Who could he ask to pack and ship? He couldn’t call Allied Van Lines. FedEx and UPS were no good.

His reluctant conclusion was that if you wanted something done properly, you had to do it yourself.

Janet Salter patted the air to make Reacher stay where he was and started to clear the table around him. She asked, “How much do you know about methamphetamine?”

Reacher said, “Less than you, probably.”

“I’m not that kind of girl.”

“But you’re that kind of librarian. I’m sure you’ve researched it extensively.”

“You first.”

“I was in the military.”

“Which implies?”

“Certain situations and certain operations called for what the field manuals described as alertness, focus, motivation, and mental clarity, for extended periods. The doctors had all kinds of pep pills available. Straight meth was on its way out when I came on the job, but it had been around before that, for decades.”

Janet Salter nodded. “It was called Pervitin. A German refinement of a Japanese discovery. It was in widespread use during World War Two. It was baked into candy bars. Fliegerschokolade, which means flyers’ chocolate, and Panzerschokolade, which means tankers’ chocolate. The Allies had it, also. Just as much, actually. Maybe more. They called it Desoxyn. I’m surprised anyone ever slept.”

“They had morphine for sleeping.”

“But now it’s controlled. Because it causes terrible damage to those who abuse it. So it has to be manufactured illegally. Which is relatively easy to do, in small home laboratories. But the manufacture of anything requires raw materials. For methamphetamine you need ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. You can buy it in bulk, if you can get past the regulations. Or you can extract it from over-the-counter decongestant medicines. To do that you need red phosphorus and iodine. Or lithium, from certain types of batteries. That’s an alternative method, called the Birch reduction.”

“You can get it direct from acacia trees in West Texas,” Reacher said. “Plus mescaline and nicotine. A wonderful tree, the acacia.”

“But this is not West Texas,” Janet Salter said. “This is South Dakota. My point is, you can’t make bricks without straw. If they’re shipping out vast quantities of finished product, they must be shipping in vast quantities of raw materials. Which must be visible. There must be truckloads involved. Why can’t Chief Holland get at them that way, without involving me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think Chief Holland has gotten lazy.”

“Peterson claimed they gave you the option of backing out.”

“But don’t you see? That’s no option at all. I couldn’t live with myself. It’s a matter of principle.”

“Peterson claims you were offered federal protection.”

“And perhaps I should have accepted it. But I much preferred to stay in my own home. The justice system is supposed to penalize perpetrators, not witnesses. That’s a matter of principle, too.”

Reacher glanced at the kitchen door. A cop in the hallway, a cop at the rear window, two more sleeping upstairs ready for the night watch, a car outside, another car one block over, a third at the end of the street. Plus alert townsfolk, and a paranoid police HQ. Plus snow all over the place.

All good, unless the siren sounded.

Reacher asked, “Are you a grandmother?”

Janet Salter shook her head. “We didn’t have children. We waited, and then my husband died. He was English, and much older than me. Why do you ask?”

“Peterson was talking about your credibility on the stand. He said you look like a storybook grandma.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have those storybooks.”

“Where were you raised?”

“On Marine Corps bases.”

“Which ones?”

“It felt like all of them.”

“I was raised here in South Dakota. My father was the last in a long line of robber barons. We traded, we bought land from the native inhabitants at twelve cents an acre, we bought thousands of government stakes through surrogates, we mined gold, we invested in the railroad. At insider rates, of course.”

Reacher said, “Hence this house.”

Janet Salter smiled. “No, this is where we came when we hit hard times.”

Out in the hallway the bell chimed once, quiet and civilized. Reacher stood up and stepped to the door and watched. The policewoman on duty was sitting on the bottom stair. She got up and crossed the dim space and opened the front door. Chief Holland came in, with a soft flurry of snow and a cloud of cold air. He stamped his feet on the mat and shivered as the warmth hit him. He took off his parka. The policewoman hung it up for him, right on top of Reacher’s borrowed coat.

Holland crossed the hallway and nodded to Reacher and pushed past him to the kitchen door. He told Janet Salter that he had no significant news for her, and that he was dropping by merely to pay his respects. She asked him to wait in the library. She said she would make coffee and bring it in. Reacher watched her fill an old percolator made of thick dull aluminum. It had a cord insulated with fabric. It was practically an antique. It could have been melted down from a surplus B-24 Liberator after World War Two. Reacher stood ready to help, but she waved him away and said, “Go and wait with the chief in the library.” So Reacher joined Holland in the book-lined room and asked, “How are things?”

Holland said, “What things?”

“The car out on the eastern town limit. With the dead guy in it.”

“We’re not sure if our initial assumption was correct. About breaking the chain, I mean. It could have been a simple robbery gone wrong.”

“How so?”

“The guy was a lawyer, but there was no briefcase in the car. You ever heard of that? A lawyer without a briefcase? Maybe someone took it.”

“Was there a wallet in his pocket?”

“Yes.”

“A watch on his wrist?”

“Yes.”

“Was he expected up at the jail?”

“Not according to the visitor lists. His client made no request. But his office claims he got a call.”

“Then it wasn’t a simple robbery. He was decoyed out there. He had no briefcase because he wasn’t planning on writing anything down. Not in his current line of work.”

“Maybe. We’ll keep the line of inquiry open.”

“Who made the call to his office?”

“A male voice. Same as the first five times. From a cell phone we can’t trace.”

“Who was the client he saw at the jail?”

“Some deadbeat simpleton we’ll never get anything out of. We arrested him eight weeks ago for setting fire to a house. We’re still waiting for a psychological evaluation. Because he won’t speak to anyone he doesn’t want to. Not a word.”

“Sounds like your biker friend chose well.”

The percolator started burping and gulping out in the kitchen. It was loud. Reacher could hear it quite clearly. The smell of brewing coffee drifted in and filled the air. Colombian, Reacher figured, ground coarse, reasonably fresh. He said, “Mrs. Salter and I were talking about raw material supply to the lab you figure they’ve got out there.”

“You think we’re negligent? You think we’re putting her at risk when we have a viable alternative?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“We’ve tried, believe me. Nothing comes through Bolton. We’re damn sure of that. Therefore they’re being supplied from the west. The Highway Patrol is responsible for the highway. We have no jurisdiction there. All we control is the county two-lane that runs north to the camp. We put cars there on a random basis. Literally random. I roll actual dice on my desk.”

Reacher said, “I saw them there.”

Holland nodded. “I do it like that because we can’t afford for the pattern to be predictable in any way at all. But so far we haven’t been lucky. They watch us pretty carefully, I suppose.”

“OK.”

“The trial will do it for us. Or the plea bargain the night before. It won’t come any earlier than that. One more month, that’s all.”

“Peterson told me there’s no way to fudge the crisis plan.”

“He’s right. We objected, of course, but the deal was done by the mayor. Lots of money, lots of strings attached. We’d have Justice Department monitors all over us forever.”

“A gift horse.”

“More trouble than it’s worth,” Holland said. “But then, I don’t own a motel.”

Plato’s walled compound extended across a hundred acres. His walking path through the scrub was more than three miles long. He got his next idea at the farthest point from the house. It was characteristically bold. The DEA was going to bust the Russian. That was a given. Plato wasn’t going to stand in their way. The agents had to see the guy take possession. But possession of what, exactly? Enough to make the charges stick, for sure. But not necessarily everything the guy was about to pay for. That would be excessively generous, under the circumstances. A small margin could be retained. A large margin, in fact. Possibly most of the agreed amount. Because what the hell could the Russian guy do? Rant and rave in a supermax cell somewhere, about the unfairness of life? He would be doing that, anyway. So Plato could take the guy’s money, and then sell the stuff all over again to someone else. Like selling a house, except this time you take the stove and the lightbulbs and the glass from the windows.

The scheme would more than double his transportation problem, but he could deal with that. He was sure a solution would present itself. The details would fall into place.

Because he was Plato, and they weren’t.

Janet Salter brought the coffee to the library on a silver tray. A china pot, some cream, some sugar, three tiny cups, three saucers, three spoons. Clearly the on-duty policewomen were not included. Probably there had been prior discussion about separation of professional and social obligations. Probably the policewomen were happy with the final outcome. Reacher had been in their situation many times. Always better to compartmentalize and focus.

Janet Salter poured the coffee. The cup was far too small for Reacher’s hand, but the coffee was good. He sniffed the steam and took a sip. Then Chief Holland’s cell phone rang. Holland balanced his cup and dragged the phone from his pocket and checked the window. He opened the phone one-handed and answered. He listened to the caller for eight seconds. Then he hung up and smiled, widely and gratefully and happily.

He said, “We just caught the guy who shot the lawyer.”

Five minutes to two in the afternoon.

Thirty-eight hours to go.

Chapter 15

Reacher rode back to the station with Holland. The unmarked Crown Vic churned its way out of the side street and locked into the established ruts and headed home smooth and easy. Peterson was waiting in the squad room. He was smiling too, just as widely and gratefully and happily as Holland was. Reacher wasn’t smiling. He had serious doubts. Based in bitter experience. A fast and easy resolution to a major problem was too good to be true. And things that were too good to be true usually weren’t. A basic law of nature.

He asked, “So who was the shooter?”

Peterson said, “Jay Knox. The bus driver.”

Reacher got the story secondhand by standing off to one side and listening as Peterson briefed Holland. Forty minutes earlier a cop in a patrol car had seen a pedestrian floundering through deep snow alongside a rural road a mile out of town. Peterson named the cop in the car and called him one of ours. An old hand, presumably. From the good half of the department. Maybe someone Holland actually knew. As instructed the cop in the car was operating at a level of high alert, but even so he thought the guy on foot was more likely a stranded driver than a murderer. He stopped and offered the guy a ride. There was something off about the guy’s response. He was surly, and uncooperative, and evasive. The cop therefore cuffed him and searched him.

And found a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol in his pocket. It smelled like it had been recently fired and its magazine was one round short of full.

The cop arrested the pedestrian and drove him to the station. At the booking desk he was recognized as the bus driver. His hands and his clothing were swabbed for gunshot residue. The tests came up positive. Jay Knox had fired a gun at some point in the past few hours. His prints were all over the Glock. His rights had been read to him. He was in a holding cell. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer. But he wasn’t talking, either.

Holland left to take a look at Knox in his cell. It was an urge that Reacher had seen before. It was like going to the zoo. After a big capture people would show up just to stare at the guy. They would stand in front of the bars for a moment and take it all in. Afterward they would claim there was something in the guy’s face they always knew was wrong. If not, they would talk about the banality of evil. About how there were no reliable signs.

Peterson stayed in the squad room. He was tying up the loose ends in his head. Another urge Reacher had seen before. A dangerous urge. If you work backward, you see what you want to see.

Reacher asked, “How many rounds in the victim?”

“One,” Peterson said. “In the head.”

“Nine millimeter?”

“Almost certainly.”

“It’s a common round.”

“I know.”

“Does the geography work?”

“Knox was picked up about four miles from the scene.”

“On foot? That’s too far, surely.”

“There has to have been a vehicle involved.”

“Why?”

“Wait until you see the photographs.”

The photographs were delivered thirty minutes later. They were in the same kind of file folder Reacher had seen the night before in Holland’s office. They were the same kind of photographs. Glossy eight-by-tens, with printed labels pasted in their bottom corners. There were plenty of them. They were color prints, but they were mostly gray and white. Snow on the ground, snow in the air. The camera shutter had frozen the falling flakes in strange dark suspended shapes, like ash from a volcano, like specks and impurities.

The first picture was an establishing shot taken from a distance, looking west to east. It showed a snowbound road with two pairs of ruts clustered close to the crown of the camber. A lone car was sitting dead center in the westbound ruts. Its headlights were on. It hadn’t veered or swerved. It had just rolled to a halt, like a train on a track.

The second picture had been taken about a hundred feet closer. Three things were apparent. First, there was a figure in the driver’s seat. A man, held upright by a tight seat belt, his head lolling forward. Second, the glass in the rear passenger-side window was misted with a large pink stain. And third, there was absolutely nothing on the road itself except virgin snow and four wheel ruts. No other disturbance at all.

The third photograph confirmed that fact. For the third shot, the camera had ignored the car completely. The lens had been trained directly west to east along the road right above where the yellow line was buried under the snow. It was a featureless picture. Nothing to see. Passing tires had dug trenches, the base of the ruts had been crushed downward, small side walls had been thrown upward, tiny avalanches had fallen outward from the top of the side walls, and those small fallen fragments had been smoothed over by a crust of fresh snow.

Nothing else.

“Good pictures,” Reacher said.

“I did my best,” Peterson said.

“Fine work.”

“Thank you.”

“No footprints,” Reacher said.

“Agreed,” Peterson said.

The fourth photograph was a close-up of one of the eastbound ruts. Nothing to see there either, except broken and confused pieces of tread marks, the same small waffles and lattices Reacher had seen all over town. No way to reconstruct anything worth sending to a lab.

The fifth picture was a close-up of the car, taken from the front right side. It was a small neat sedan, a make Reacher didn’t recognize.

“Infiniti,” Peterson said. “It’s Japanese. Nissan’s luxury division. That model has a V-6 engine and full-time four-wheel-drive. There are snow tires on it, all around. It’s practical, and it’s about as showy as a South Dakota lawyer wants to get.”

It was painted a light silver color. It was basically clean, but grimed over by several recent winter trips. The way the light reflected off the snow and played over the paint made it look ghostly and insubstantial. The driver’s window was all the way open. The dead guy was pinned upright against the seat back by the belt. Some snow had blown in on him. His chin was on his chest. He could have been asleep, except for the hole in his head.

The hole was the subject of photograph number five. It was in the center of the guy’s forehead. Like a third eye. Clearly the guy had been looking out the window, halfway between sideways and straight ahead. He had been shot right down his line of sight. He had been looking at the gun. The exit wound had spattered stuff all over the window diagonally behind him. His head had then slumped down and rotated back to a central position.

The rest of the photographs were of the body and the interior of the vehicle from every conceivable angle. Take plenty of photographs, Reacher had said, and Peterson had complied to the letter. There was a pair of rubber overshoes neatly placed in the passenger foot well. There was a small multi-purpose chrome hammer mounted centrally on the dash. Reacher had seen them advertised in mail order brochures on airplanes. They could tap the windshield out if the doors were jammed after a wreck. They had a blade concealed in the handle to cut seat belts. Ideal accessories for cautious, meticulous, organized people interested in cars. But Reacher wondered whether one had actually ever been used in earnest in the whole history of automotive transport. He suspected not.

The Infiniti’s shifter was in Park. Its ignition key was turned to the run position. The tachometer showed an 800-rpm idle. The odometer showed fewer than ten thousand miles. Cabin temperature was set at sixty-nine degrees. The radio was tuned to a local AM station. The tick on the volume knob was all the way over at the eight o’clock position. Turned down low. The gas dial showed the tank to be close to full.

Reacher said, “Tell me the story.”

Peterson said, “OK, Knox is in a vehicle. He’s driving. He’s heading east. The lawyer is heading west. They’re both driving slow, because the road is bad. Knox sees the lawyer coming. He winds his window down. Puts his arm out and flags the lawyer down. The lawyer slows and stops. He winds his own window down. Maybe he thinks that Knox is going to warn him about a danger up ahead. Driver to driver, like people do in adverse conditions. Instead, Knox shoots him and drives on.”

“Who found the body?”

“Another guy heading east. Maybe five or ten minutes after it happened. He slowed, took a look, and called us from a gas station two miles farther on. No cell phone.”

“Is Knox right-handed?”

“I don’t know. But most people are.”

“Did you find a shell case?”

“No.”

“If Knox is right-handed, then he was shooting diagonally across his body. He would want reasonable arm extension. The muzzle was probably out the window, just a little. The ejection port on a Glock is on the right side of the gun. So he had to be very careful with his position. He had to keep the ejection port inside the car. Kind of cramped. No opportunity to aim down the barrel. Yet he hit the guy right between the eyes. Not easy. Is Knox that good a shot?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should try to find out.”

Peterson said, “I figure the shell case hit the door frame or the windshield, at an angle, and it bounced away inside Knox’s vehicle.”

“So tell me about Knox’s vehicle.”

“Prearranged. He got to town yesterday and met someone today. Maybe a biker. The biker handed over a vehicle, maybe a pick-up truck. Knox did the deed and returned the vehicle and was walking home when we arrested him.”

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson said, “The people where we put him last night said he made a point of being out all day. They say he wasn’t very good company. Like he had things on his mind.”

“I met him this morning in the coffee shop.”

“How was he?”

“Not very good company. He said because he wasn’t getting paid as of yesterday. Maybe he was worried about losing his job.”

“He was nervous about his mission.”

“How did he know what the lawyer was driving?”

“Whoever delivered the car told him.”

“How did he know the lawyer was going to be on that road at that time?”

“Simple arithmetic. The decoy appointment was for noon. Easy enough to work backward in terms of the clock. Easy enough in terms of location, too, given that everyone knew the highway was closed.”

“I just don’t buy how he got here in the first place. It was way too complicated. And he said a car was heading straight at him. He couldn’t prearrange that. He couldn’t invent it, either. He had twenty-one potential witnesses on board.”

“None of them saw it.”

“He couldn’t know that in advance.”

Peterson said, “Maybe there really was a car coming at him. Maybe he made a split-second decision to exploit it, instead of faking a breakdown nearer the cloverleaf. Was there any delay before he reacted?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know. I was asleep.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“Not what cops like to hear.”

“I know. I was a cop. Doesn’t make it any less true.”

“He had a gun in his pocket and he fired it.”

Reacher asked, “Case closed?”

“That’s a big step.”

“But?”

“Right now, yes, I think it is.”

“So put your money where your mouth is. Pull those cops out of Janet Salter’s house.”

Peterson paused. “Not my decision.”

“What would you do if it was?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will Holland do it?”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

Five minutes to three in the afternoon.

Thirty-seven hours to go.

Chapter 16

Holland didn’t do it. Not, he said, because he believed Knox to be innocent. But because the stakes were high enough for the bad guys to justify a second attempt, and a third, and if necessary a fourth and a fifth. Therefore Janet Salter’s protection would stay in place until the trial had run its course.

Then Jay Knox started talking, and things changed again.

Knox said he carried the gun for his own personal protection, and always had. He said he was down and depressed and frustrated about the incident with the bus, and annoyed that his employers were going to dock his pay. He didn’t like the creeps he had been billeted with. He had lingered over his breakfast in the coffee shop as long as he could, but Reacher had disturbed him, so he had set out on a long angry walk. He was trying to burn off his feelings. But he had arrived at a small trestle bridge over an icy stream and seen a road sign: Bridge Freezes Before Road. He had lost his temper and pulled out the Glock and shot the sign. For which he was prepared to apologize, but he added that pretty much every damn road sign he had seen in the area was pockmarked by bullet holes or shotgun pellets.

He remembered where the bridge was. He remembered where he had been standing. He was fairly exact about it. He could make a pretty good guess about where his spent shell case must have gone.

Peterson knew where the trestle bridge was, obviously. Its location made geographic sense, given the site of Knox’s arrest. He figured that if Knox had really been out there, then his footprints might still be vaguely visible as smooth dents under the new accumulation. Certainly nobody else would have been walking there. Locals had more sense. He sent a patrol car to check. It had a metal detector in the trunk. Standard equipment, in jurisdictions that had gun crime and snow.

Ten minutes later the cop from the patrol car called in from the trestle bridge. He had found footprints. And he had found the shell case. It was buried in the snow at the end of a short furrow the length of a finger. It had hissed and burned its way in there. The furrow had been lightly covered by new fall, but was still visible, if you knew what you were looking for. And the cop confirmed that there was a new bullet hole in the warning sign, raw and bright, almost certainly a nine millimeter, in the space between the e of Bridge and the F of Freezes.

Peterson conferred with Holland and they agreed the man they were looking for was both still unidentified and already located in the vicinity.

And only halfway through his business.

Jay Knox was a free man five minutes later. But he was told his Glock would stay in the police station, just in case, until he was ready to leave town. It was a deal Knox agreed to readily enough. Reacher saw him walk out of the lobby into the snow, reprieved but still defeated, relieved but still frustrated. Peterson and Holland conferred again and put the department on emergency alert. Even Kapler and Lowell were sent back to active duty. The entire force was ordered into cars and told to cruise the streets and look for odd faces, odd vehicles, odd behavior, a mobile expression of any police department’s primal fear: There’s someone out there.

Peterson pinned the new crime scene photographs to the boards in the small office off the corridor outside the squad room. He put them on the wall opposite the pictures of the black-clad guy lying dead in the snow. He said, “We just made fools of ourselves and wasted a lot of time.”

Reacher said, “Not really a lot of time.”

“What would your elite unit do next?”

“We’d speculate about automobile transmissions and cautious people.”

“What does that mean?”

“Apart from Knox not being the guy, I think you were exactly right about how it went down. The absence of footprints in the snow pretty much proves it. Two cars stopped cheek to cheek, just shy of exactly level. The bad guy waved the lawyer down. The lawyer stopped. The question is, why did he stop?”

“It’s the obvious thing to do.”

Reacher nodded. “I agree, on a road like that. In summer, at normal speeds, it wouldn’t happen. But in the snow, sure. You’re crawling along, you figure the other guy either needs your help or has some necessary information for you. So you stop. But if you’re the kind of guy who’s cautious enough to fuss with overshoes and mount an emergency hammer on your dash and listen to AM radio for the weather report and keep your gas tank full at all times, then you’re probably a little wary about that whole kind of thing. You’d keep the transmission in gear and your foot on the brake. So you can take off again right away, if necessary. Maybe you would open your window just a crack. But your lawyer didn’t do that. He put his shift lever in Park and opened his window all the way.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means he was ready for a full-blown transaction. A conversation, a discussion, the whole nine yards. He turned his radio down, ready for it. Which means maybe he knew the guy who stopped him. Which is possibly plausible, given the kind of people he seems to have been mixing with.”

“So what would you do now?”

“We’d already be tearing his life apart.”

“Difficult for us to do. He lived in the next county. Outside of our jurisdiction.”

“You need to get on the phone and cooperate.”

“Like you used to with the feds?”

“Not exactly,” Reacher said.

Plato finished his afternoon walk with a visit to his prisoner. The guy was chained in the open, by his ankle, to a steel post anchored deep in the earth. He was a thief. He had gotten greedy. Plato’s operations were cash businesses, obviously, and vast quantities of bills had to be stored for long periods, in the ground, in cellars, hidden here and there, to the point where damp and rodent damage claimed a ballpark figure of ten percent of incoming assets. A hundred grand out of every million just fell apart and rotted away. Except this guy’s division was claiming wastage closer to twelve percent. Which was an anomaly. Which on examination turned out to be caused by the guy skimming, a quarter-million here, a half-million there. To some extent Plato was tolerant of mistakes, but not of disloyalty.

Hence the guy, chained to the post by the ankle.

Winter weather a hundred miles from Mexico City was not fiercely hot. There were no biting insects in the air or in the ground, and the snakes were asleep, and the small night mammals were generally timid. So the guy would die either of thirst or starvation, depending on the rains.

Unless he chose not to.

There was a hatchet within easy reach. The blade was keen, and the guy’s shin bone was right there. He hadn’t used it yet. But Plato thought he would. It was usually about fifty-fifty. Proof of that proposition was all over the area, some widows, equal numbers of broken men hopping around on crutches.

In the South Dakota squad room the clock ticked around to five to four in the afternoon. Thirty-six hours to go. Peterson said, “Five to four here is five to five in the East. Close of business. Time to call your old unit back. We still need that information.”

Reacher wandered over to the desk in the corner of the squad room. He sat down. Didn’t dial the phone. Close of business in Virginia was five o’clock, not five to. Precision was important. It had mattered to him, and he had no doubt it mattered to his current successor.

Peterson asked, “What did you think of Mrs. Salter?”

“She’s probably very well read.”

“As a witness?”

“Excellent.”

“Is she holding up?”

“She’s scared.”

“Can’t blame her.”

“What about raw material supply to the lab? For that matter, what about intercepting the finished product as they ship it out?”

“We’re trying. But to guarantee anything we’d have to be on that road all day and all night and all week.”

“With the right people, too,” Reacher said. “Some of your guys look asleep at the switch. But whatever, you need to tell Mrs. Salter you’re doing everything you can. Right now she feels all the weight is on her shoulders.”

“We told her nothing is obligatory.”

“Some people see obligation in their own way.” Reacher picked up the phone. Hit nine for a line. Dialed the number he remembered and waited for the start of the recording. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time. He hit 110. The same male voice answered. The captain, from the south. The same one-word greeting.

“Yes?”

Reacher said, “Amanda, please.”

There was a click and a purr and a second of dial tone and the voice came on. Warm, husky, breathy, intimate. It said, “You’re a pain in the ass.”

Reacher said, “Am I?”

“As if I don’t have enough to do.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Your place five miles west of Bolton isn’t exactly front and center in the records. There’s nothing listed in the establishments register.”

“There wouldn’t be. It’s abandoned. Maybe never even used in the first place.”

“Was it sold?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just yielded back. It’s on what the cops here call public land.”

“I went back fifty years in the title register and found no transfers.”

“So maybe it’s still ours.”

“In which case it would be costing us something. Biannual inspections and a little maintenance at the least. But there’s no expenditure record.”

“There has got to be something. Not even the army builds places and then forgets all about them.”

“Is it fenced?”

“I don’t know. I’m five miles away. Why?”

“Because not even the army builds places and then forgets all about them. Therefore the absence of records could mean it’s on a different list. It could have been a secret installation.”

Reacher said, “They all were.”

“Some more than others.”

“The old folks here remember a security cordon.”

“There was always a security cordon.”

“How secret could it be? They put construction workers on the site.”

“Secret then, abandoned now. Maybe because it was very weird. Which could be important to you. But if you really want to know, I’m going to have to do some digging.”

“Can you?”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Cost me what?”

Warm, husky, breathy, intimate. “I want to know the story behind the dent in the desk.”

“You don’t have time. You’ve got enough to do.”

“Right now I’m just hanging out, waiting on a call.”

“Something interesting?”

“It’s pretty good.”

“Tell me about it.”

“That’s not the deal. This is about you telling me.”

“I don’t want to talk through a switchboard.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about. Obviously the colonel’s head was righteous, or you would have been busted at the time. And the statute of limitations ran out long ago on damage to government property.”

“How hard will you dig?”

“As hard as you want me to.”

“When is your call coming through?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“Then we don’t have time for the story. Get me what I need by tomorrow, and I’ll tell you then.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“I was hoping for something for nothing.”

“At least give me a hint.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t a colonel. It was a one-star general.”

Plato decided on an early dinner, because he was hungry, because he had skipped lunch. So he showed up in his kitchen. It was something he liked to do occasionally. He felt it demonstrated solidarity with the people who worked for him. He felt it was inclusive and democratic. But it always came out feudal. His people would bob and bow and scrape and get all flushed and flustered. Probably because they were afraid of him. But they had no reason. He had never victimized his domestic staff. None of them had ever suffered. Not the current generation, anyway. Two of their predecessors were buried on the property, but no one presently in his employ knew anything about that.

He ordered a cold appetizer and a hot entrée and took a beer from the refrigerator and went to wait in the smaller outdoor dining area. He took out his cell and dialed the walled villa a hundred miles away in the city. He asked, “How are we doing in South Dakota?”

The man in the villa said, “The lawyer was taken care of six hours ago.”

“And the witness?”

“Not yet.”

“So when?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Very soon.”

Plato felt his blood pressure build behind his temples. He looked at the next twenty-four hours in his mind. He liked to think visually. He liked to see chronological intervals laid out in a linear fashion, like ticks on a ruler. He inspected them at close quarters, like a bird swooping low over the sea, and he filled some of them in, and left others blank. He said, “Call the guy and tell him the thing with the witness can’t wait.”

The man in the villa said, “I will.”

Plato hung up and redialed. The airfield. He put his plane on standby. It was to be fueled and ready for takeoff at a moment’s notice. The flight plan should show Canada, but that would be a decoy. The reality would be seventeen hundred miles there and seventeen hundred miles back. Fuel was to be made available at the mid-point for the return leg.

Then he made a third call. He needed six men to go with him. Good men, but not so good he couldn’t afford to leave them behind. If it came to that.

Which, he hoped, it would.

*  *  *

Reacher stopped thinking about the woman with the voice when he heard shouting in the police station lobby. One-sided shouting. A phone call. It had started out formal, gotten polite, then gotten a little defensive, and then gotten exasperated. It had ended with yelling. It had been followed by a three-way back and forth. The old guy from the desk to Holland’s office, Peterson to Holland’s office, the old guy back to the lobby, Peterson back to the squad room.

Peterson said, “Biker trouble. One of them just called. Three of their people are missing over here, and why aren’t we doing anything about it?”

Reacher said, “What did you tell them?”

“We said we’re working on it.”

“And?”

“They said we better work harder, or they’ll come to town and work on it themselves. They said they’ll give us until tomorrow.”

Five to five in the afternoon.

Thirty-five hours to go.

Chapter 17

Peterson left again and Reacher sat alone in the empty squad room and looked out the window. It was still snowing. The flakes came down through pools of yellow sodium light. The sky was dark. The day was ending. Twelve thousand nearby souls were huddling in houses, staying warm, looking at the television, getting ready to eat. To the north the prison was seething. To the west the bikers were doing who knew what. And somewhere an unknown marksman was rehearsing a second shot.

Peterson came back and said, “Chief Holland thinks they’re bluffing. He says their whole strategy all along has been to stay inside the law and deny us probable cause.”

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson asked, “What do you think?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Which is what?”

“Reconnaissance.”

“You want us to go over there?”

“No, I’ll go,” Reacher said. “I need to see the place anyway. To find out what it is.”

“You have people working on that.”

“No substitute for a live eyeball.”

“You’re just going to show up there?”

“I’ll say I’m from the army. A biannual inspection of our property.”

“On your own?”

“Why not?”

“Won’t work. They’ll want to see ID.”

“They won’t. These are not regular citizens.”

Peterson asked, “When would you go?”

“As soon as possible,” Reacher said. “No point in the dark. Let’s say first light tomorrow.”

Peterson said the department had a spare unmarked car. Reacher could use it. First light would depend on the weather, but it would be somewhere between seven and eight o’clock. So Peterson said, “I’ll drive you home now. You should get some rest.”

Reacher shook his head. “You should drive me to Janet Salter’s instead. She has rooms to spare. She told me she volunteered them after the bus crash. Then she told me she knew about the crisis plan at the prison. It was like a coded message. She wants someone there who won’t leave if the siren sounds. Imagine how that would feel.”

Peterson thought about it for a second, and nodded. Started to say something, and stopped. “I was going to say I’ll bring your bags over. But you don’t have any.”

“Tell Kim I got new clothes. Tell her you saw me in them. I think she was a little worried. And tell her I’ll look after her dad’s parka. And tell her thanks again for her hospitality.”

It was still snowing, but the roads between the police station and Janet Salter’s house were still passable. They had been plowed at least once during the day. The plow blades had thrown up steep banks either side, so that the wheel ruts were now four small trenches inside one giant trench. Sound was absorbed. The world was silent. The flakes came down invisible until they hit the headlight beams. They settled vertically and implacably ahead of the creeping car.

The way the plows had narrowed the roads meant that Peterson couldn’t turn into Janet Salter’s street. The parked cop car filled its whole width. The car’s red lights turned lazily and made the falling flakes pink, like garnets, or blood spatter. Reacher climbed out of Peterson’s ride and zipped up and squeezed awkwardly between the parked cruiser’s trunk and the snow bank behind it. The cop in the cruiser paid no attention. Reacher trudged alone down the center of the street. The tracks from the change of watch that morning were long gone, smoothed over and obscured. The air was bitter. A cold day was slipping away, and a savage night was moving in to replace it.

Reacher climbed up on Janet Salter’s porch and pulled the bell wire. Pictured the cop inside getting up off her perch on the bottom stair and stepping across the Persian rug. The door opened. The cops had swapped their positions. This was the one from the library window. She was tall and had fair hair pulled back in an athletic ponytail. Her hand was resting on her gun. She was alert, but not tense. Professionally cautious, but happy about the tiny break in routine.

Reacher hung his borrowed coat on the hat stand and headed for the library. Janet Salter was in the same armchair as before. She wasn’t reading. She was just sitting there. The other woman cop was behind her. The one that had been in the hallway earlier. The small, dark one. She was staring out the window. The drapes were wide open.

Janet Salter said, “You had to rush off before you finished your coffee. Would you like me to make some more?”

“Always,” Reacher said. He followed her to the kitchen and watched her fill the antique percolator. The faucets over the sink were just as old. But nothing in the room was decrepit or dowdy. Good stuff was good stuff, however long ago it had been installed.

She said, “I understand you’ll stay here tonight.”

He said, “Only if it’s convenient.”

“Were you not comfortable at the Peterson place?”

“I was fine. But I don’t like to impose too long.”

“One night was too long?”

“They have enough on their plate.”

“You travel light.”

“What you see is what you get.”

“Mr. Peterson told me.”

“Told you, or warned you?”

“Is it a phobia? Or a philia? Or a consciously existential decision?”

“I’m not sure I ever inquired that deeply.”

“A phobia would be a fear, of course, possibly of commitment or entanglement. A philia would imply love, possibly of freedom or opportunity. Although technically a philia shades toward issues of abnormal appetite, in your case possibly for secrecy. We must ask of people who fly beneath the radar, why, exactly? Is radar in itself unacceptable, or is the terrain down there uniquely attractive?”

“Maybe it’s the third thing,” Reacher said. “Existential.”

“Your disavowal of possessions is a little extreme. History tells us that asceticism has powerful attractions, but even so most ascetics owned clothes, at least. Shirts anyway, even if they were only made of hair.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“You could afford to carry a small bag, I think. It wouldn’t change who you are.”

“I’m afraid it would. Unless it was empty, which would be pointless. To fill a small bag means selecting, and choosing, and evaluating. There’s no logical end to that process. Pretty soon I would have a big bag, and then two or three. A month later I’d be like the rest of you.”

“And that horrifies you?”

“No, I think to be like everyone else would be comfortable and reassuring. But some things just can’t be done. I was born different.”

“That’s your answer? You were born different?”

“I think it’s clear we’re not all born the same.”

Janet Salter poured the coffee, this time straight into tall china mugs, as if she thought silver trays and ceremony were inappropriate for an ascetic, and as if she had noticed his earlier discomfort with the undersized cup.

She said, “Well, whatever your precise diagnosis might be, I’m glad to have you here. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

Five to six in the evening.

Thirty-four hours to go.

After the coffee was finished Janet Salter started to make dinner. Reacher offered to eat out, but she said it was as easy to cook for six as five, which told him the two cops on night watch would be getting up and forming a foursome for most of the evening. Which was reassuring.

With her permission he used the food preparation time to inspect the house. He wasn’t interested in the first floor or the second floor. He wanted to see the basement. South Dakota had tornadoes, and he was pretty sure a house of any quality would have been planned with an underground safety zone. He went down a flight of stairs from a small back hallway off the kitchen and found a satisfactory situation. The prairie topsoil had been too deep for the excavation to reach bedrock, so the whole space was basically a huge six-sided wooden box built from massive balks of timber banded with iron. The walls and floor were thick to provide stability, and the ceiling was thick to prevent the rest of the house crashing through after a direct hit. There was a thicket of floor-to-ceiling posts throughout the space, not more than six feet apart, each one hewn and smoothed from the trunk of a tree. Four of them were paneled with wallboard, to form a furnace room. The furnace was a stained green appliance. It was fed by a thin fuel line, presumably from an oil tank buried outside in the yard. It had a pump and a complicated matrix of wide iron pipes that led out and up through the ceiling. An old installation. Maybe the first in town. But it was working fine. The burner was roaring and the pump was whirring and the pipes were hissing. It was keeping the whole basement warm.

The stairs leading upward could be closed off at the bottom with a stout door that opened outward. It could be secured from the inside with an iron bar propped across iron brackets. It was a fine tornado shelter, no question. Probably an adequate bomb shelter. Almost certainly resistant to any kind of small arms fire. Reacher had seen .50 caliber machine guns chew through most things, but hundred-year-old foot-thick close-grain hardwood would probably hold up until their barrels overheated and warped.

He came back upstairs encouraged and found the night-watch cops up and about. They were with their daytime partners in the kitchen. Janet Salter was moving around inside their cordon. There was an atmosphere of habit and comfort. Clearly the strange little household was getting used to getting along together. The oven was on and it was warming the room. The glass in the window was fogged with moisture. Reacher stepped into the library and checked the view to the rear. Nothing to see. Just a vague sense of flat land receding into the frigid distance. The snow was easing. The falling flakes themselves seemed stunned by the cold.

Reacher turned back from the window and found Janet Salter stepping in through the door. She said, “May we talk?”

Reacher said, “Sure.”

She said, “I know the real reason why you’re here, of course. I know why you’re inspecting the house. You have volunteered to defend me, if the siren should happen to sound, and you’re making yourself familiar with the terrain. And I’m very grateful for your kindness. Even though your psychological imperatives may mean you won’t be here for quite long enough. The trial might not happen for a month. How many new shirts would that be?”

“Eight,” Reacher said.

She didn’t reply.

Reacher said, “There would be no shame in bowing out, you know. No one could blame you. And those guys will get nailed for something else, sooner or later.”

“There would be considerable shame in it,” she said. “And I won’t do it.”

“Then don’t talk to me about psychological imperatives,” Reacher said.

She smiled. Asked, “Are you armed?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Do retired plumbers carry wrenches the rest of their lives?”

She pointed to a low shelf. “There’s a book that might interest you. A work of history. The large volume, with the leather binding.”

It was a big old thing about a foot and a half high and about four inches thick. It had a leather spine with raised horizontal ribs and a quaint title embossed in gold: An Accurate Illustrated History of Mr. Smith’s & Mr. Wesson’s Hand Guns. Which sounded Victorian, which did not compute. Smith & Wesson had made plenty of handguns in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but not nearly enough to fill a book four inches thick.

Janet Salter said, “Take a look at it.”

Reacher pulled the book off the shelf. It was heavy.

She said, “I think you should read it in bed tonight.”

It was heavy because it wasn’t a book. Reacher opened the leather-bound cover and expected to see faded pages with half-tone engravings or hand-tinted line drawings, maybe alternated with tissue paper leaves to protect the art. Instead the cover was a lid and inside was a box with two molded velvet cavities. The velvet was brown. Nested neatly in the two cavities was a matched pair of Smith & Wesson revolvers, one reversed with respect to the other, cradled butt to muzzle, like quotation marks either end of a sentence. The revolvers were Smith & Wesson’s Military and Police models. Four-inch barrels. They could have been a hundred years old, or fifty. Plain simple steel machines, chequered walnut grips, chambered for the .38 Special, lanyard eyelets on the bottom of the butts, put there for officers either military or civil.

Janet Salter said, “They were my grandfather’s.”

Reacher asked, “Did he serve?”

“He was an honorary commissioner, back when Bolton first got a police department. He was presented with the guns. Do you think they still work?”

Reacher nodded. Revolvers were usually reliable forever. They had to be seriously banged up or rusted solid to fail. He asked, “Have they ever been used?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you have any oil?”

“I have sewing-machine oil.”

“That will do.”

“Do we need anything else?”

“Ammunition would help.”

“I have some.”

“How old?”

“About a week.”

“You’re well prepared.”

“It seemed the right time to be.”

“How many rounds?”

“A box of a hundred.”

“Good work.”

“Put the book back now,” she said. “The policewomen need not know. In my experience professionals are offended by amateur plans.”

After dinner the phone rang. It was Peterson, at the police station. He told Janet Salter that the phone on the back corner desk had rung. The 110th MP. The woman wouldn’t talk to him. She wanted Reacher to call her back.

Janet Salter’s phone was in the hallway. It was newer than the house, but not recently installed. It had a push-button dial, but it also had a cord and was about the size of a portable typewriter. It was on a small table with a chair next to it. Like phones used to be, back when one instrument was enough for a household and using it was a kind of ceremony.

Reacher dialed the number he remembered. He waited for the recording and dialed 110.

“Yes?”

“Amanda, please.”

There was a click. Then the voice. No dial tone. She already had the phone in her hand. She said, “Either you’re crazy or the world is.”

Reacher said, “Or both.”

“Whichever, I’m about ready to give up on you.”

“Why?”

“Because the place you’re pestering me about doesn’t exist.”

Five to seven in the evening.

Thirty-three hours to go.

Chapter 18

Reacher moved on the hallway chair and said, “The place exists. For sure. I’d believe stone and eyewitness reports before I believed army paperwork.”

The voice said, “But you haven’t actually seen the stone for yourself.”

“Not yet. But why would anyone invent a story like that?”

“Then the place must have been unbelievably secret. They built it but never listed it anywhere.”

“And then they let a construction camp get built right over it? How does that work?”

“Everything changed, that’s how. It was top secret fifty years ago, and it was totally defunct by five years ago. Typical Cold War scenario. Probably declassified in the early nineties.”

“I don’t care when it was declassified. I just want to know what it is.”

“I could get on a plane. But you’re closer.”

Reacher asked, “How’s your case?”

“Still waiting. Which doesn’t encourage me. It will probably fall apart by morning.”

“You working all night?”

“You know how it is.”

“So use the down time. Check Congressional appropriations for me. The purpose will be redacted, but the money will be listed. It always is. We can make a start that way.”

“You know how big the defense budget was fifty years ago? You know how many line items there were?”

“You’ve got all night. Look for South Dakota involvement, House or Senate. I don’t see any real strategic value up here, so it could have been a pork barrel project.”

“Checking those records is a lot of work.”

“What did you expect? A life of leisure? You should have joined the Navy.”

“We have a deal, Reacher. Remember? So tell me about the one-star general.”

“You’re wasting time.”

“I’ve got time to waste. Sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t.”

“It’s a long story.”

“The best stories always are. Summarize if you like, but make sure you hit all the main points.”

“I’m on someone else’s phone here. I can’t run up a big bill.”

The voice said, “Wait one.” There was a click and a second of dead air and then the voice came back. “Now you’re on the government’s dime.”

“You could be working the money for me.”

“I am. I already put a guy on it thirty-five minutes ago. I maintain standards here, believe me. However good you were, I’m better.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“So, once upon a time, what happened?”

Reacher paused.

“I went to Russia,” he said. “Well after the fall of communism. We got a weird invitation to go inspect their military prisons. Nobody had the faintest idea why. But the general feeling was, why not? So we flew to Moscow and took a train way east. It was a big old Soviet-era thing with bunks and a dining car. We were on it for days. The food was awful. But awful in a way that felt familiar. So one night I went for a stroll up and down the train and stopped in at the kitchen. They were serving us American MREs. Our very own meals, ready to eat.”

“U.S. Army rations? On a Soviet train?”

“A Russian train by then, technically. They had coal-fired stoves in the kitchen car. Samovars and everything. They were heating pans of water and ripping open MRE packs and mixing them together. They had boxes and boxes of them.”

“Did they try to hide them?”

“The cooks didn’t know what they were. They couldn’t read English. Probably couldn’t read anything.”

“So how had our MREs gotten there?”

“That’s tomorrow’s installment. You need to get back to work.”

“I’m just waiting on a call.”

“From where?”

“I can’t say.”

“You know you want to tell me.”

“Fort Hood.”

“What about?”

“An infantry captain killed his wife. Which happens. But this wasn’t any old wife. She had a job with Homeland Security. It’s possible the guy has ties overseas. It’s possible he was stealing documents from her and killed her to cover it up.”

“Where overseas?”

“What we call nonstate actors.”

“Terrorists?”

“Terrorist organizations, anyway.”

“Nice. That’s a Bronze Star right there.”

“If I get the guy. Right now he’s in the wind.”

“Tell me if he heads for South Dakota.”

She laughed. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Younger than your desk.”

Five miles away in the prison mess hall all traces of the evening meal had been cleared away. But more than fifty men were still seated on the long benches. Some were white, some were brown, and some were black. All wore orange jumpsuits. They were sitting in three segregated groups, far from each other, like three island nations in a sea of linoleum.

Until a white man got up and walked across the room and spoke to a black man.

The white man was white in name only. His skin was mostly blue with tattoos. He was built like a house. He had hair to his waist and a beard that reached his chest. The black man was a little shorter, but probably heavier. He had biceps the size of footballs and a scalp shaved so close it gleamed.

The white man said, “The Mexicans owe us two cartons of smokes.”

The black man didn’t react in any way at all. Why would he? White and brown had nothing to do with him.

The white man said, “The Mexicans say you owe them two cartons of smokes.”

No reaction.

“So we’ll collect direct from you. What goes around comes around.”

Which was a technically acceptable proposition. A prison was an economy. Cigarettes were currency. Like dollar bills earned selling a car in New York could be used for buying a TV in Los Angeles. But economic cooperation implied the existence of laws and treaties and detente, and all three were in short supply between black and white.

Then the white man said, “We’ll collect in the form of ass. Something tender. The youngest and sweetest you got. Two nights, and then you’ll get her back.”

In Janet Salter’s house the four women cops were handing over. The day watch was going off duty, and the night watch was coming on. One of the night watch came out of the kitchen and took up her post in the hallway. The other headed for the library. The day watch climbed the stairs. Janet Salter herself said she was headed for the parlor. Reacher guessed she wanted to spend some time on her own. Being protected around the clock was socially exhausting for all parties concerned. But she invited him in with her.

The parlor was different from the library in no significant way at all. Similar furniture, similar décor, similar shelves, thousands more books. The window gave a view across the porch to the front. It had almost stopped snowing. The cop in the car on the street had gotten out from time to time to scrape his windows. That was obvious. There was a loaf of snow a foot high on the roof and the hood and the trunk, but the glass was clear. The cop was still awake and alert. Reacher could see his head turning. He was checking ahead, in the mirror, half-left, half-right. Not bad, for what must have been the twelfth hour of twelve. The good half of the Bolton PD made for a decent unit.

Janet Salter was wearing a cardigan sweater. It was long on her and the pockets were bagged. By, it turned out, a rag and a can of oil. She took them out and put them on a side table. The rag was white and the can was a small old green thing with Singer printed on it.

She said, “Go get the book I showed you.”

The night-watch cop in the library turned around when Reacher came in. She was a small neat round-shouldered person made wider by her equipment belt. Her eyes flicked up, flicked down, flicked away. No threat. She turned back to the window. Behind her Reacher took the fake book off the shelf and hefted it under his arm. He carried it back to the parlor. Janet Salter closed the door behind him. He opened the leather box on the floor and lifted out the first revolver.

The Smith & Wesson Military and Police model had been first produced in 1899 and last modified three years later in 1902. The average height of American men in 1902 had been five feet and seven inches, and their hands had been proportionately sized. Reacher was six feet and five inches tall and had hands the size of supermarket chickens, so the gun was small for him. But his trigger finger fit through the guard, which was all that mattered. He pressed the thumb catch and swung the cylinder out. It was empty. He locked it back in and dry fired. Everything worked. But he felt the microscopic grind and scrape of steel that had been greased in the factory many decades earlier and never touched since. So he went to work with the rag and the can and tried again five minutes later and was much happier with the result. He repeated the process on the second gun. He capped the oil and folded the rag. Asked, “Where is the ammunition?”

Janet Salter said, “Upstairs in my medicine cabinet.”

“Not a logical place, given that the guns were in the library.”

“I thought I might have time, if it came to it.”

“Lots of dead people thought that.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“This is a serious business.”

She didn’t answer. Just got up and left the room. Reacher heard the creak of the stairs. She came back with a crisp new box of a hundred Federal .38 Specials. Semi-wadcutters with hollow points. A good choice. She had been well advised by somebody. The 158-grain load was not the most powerful in the world, but the mushrooming effect of the hollow points would more than make up for it.

Reacher loaded six rounds into the first gun and kept the second empty. He said, “Look away and then look back and point your finger straight at me.”

Janet Salter said, “What?”

“Just do it. Like I’m talking in class.”

“I wasn’t that kind of teacher.”

“Pretend you were.”

So she did. She made a good job of it. Maybe undergraduate students at Oxford University hadn’t been exactly what the world imagined. Her finger ended up pointing straight between his eyes.

“Good,” he said. “Now do it again, but point at my chest.”

She did it again. Ended up pointing straight at his center mass.

“OK,” he said. “That’s how to shoot. The gun barrel is your finger. Don’t try to aim. Don’t even think about it. Just do it, instinctively. Point at the chest, because that’s the biggest target. Even if you don’t kill him, you’ll ruin his day.”

Janet Salter said nothing. Reacher handed her the empty gun.

“Try the trigger,” he said.

She did. The hammer rose, the cylinder turned, the hammer fell. Nice and easy. She said, “I suppose there will be a certain amount of recoil.”

Reacher nodded. “Unless the laws of physics changed overnight.”

“Will it be bad?”

Reacher shook his head. “The .38 Special is a fairly friendly round. For the shooter, I mean. Not much bang, not much kick.”

She tried the trigger again. The hammer rose, the cylinder turned, the hammer fell.

“Now do it over and over,” he said.

She did. Four, five, six times.

She said, “It’s tiring.”

“It won’t be if it comes to it. And that’s what you’ve got to do. Put six rounds in the guy. Don’t stop until the gun is empty.”

“This is awful,” she said.

“It won’t be if it comes to it. It’ll be you or him. You’ll be surprised how fast that changes your perspective.”

She passed the gun back to him. He asked her, “Where are you going to keep it?”

“In the book, I guess.”

“Wrong answer. You’re going to keep it in your pocket. At night you’re going to keep it under your pillow.” He loaded six rounds into it. Locked the cylinder in place and passed it back. He said, “Don’t touch the trigger until you’re ready to kill the guy.”

“I won’t be able to.”

“I think you will.”

She asked, “Are you going to keep the other one?”

He nodded. “I’ll be sure to turn it in before I leave.”

Five to eight in the evening.

Thirty-two hours to go.

The prison siren started to wail.

Chapter 19

The siren was five miles away to the north, but its sound came through the frigid night very clearly. It was somewhere between loud and distant, somewhere between mournful and urgent, somewhere between everyday and alien. It shrieked and howled, it rose and fell, it screamed and whispered. It rolled across the flat land and down the silent snowy streets and shattered the crystal air it passed through.

The cops in the house reacted instantly. They had rehearsed, probably physically, certainly mentally. They had prepared themselves for the tough choice. The woman from the hallway ducked her head into the parlor. Conflict was all over her face. There was the sound of footsteps from the floor above. The day watch was scrambling. The woman from the library ran straight for her parka on the hat rack. Outside on the street the nearest cop car was already turning around. Broken slabs of snow were sliding off its roof and its hood and its trunk. The car from the mouth of the road was backing up fast. There were running feet on the stairs.

The woman from the hallway said, “Sorry.”

Then she was gone. She grabbed her coat and spilled out the door, the last to leave. The cop cars had their doors open. Reacher could hear furious radio chatter. The cops from the house threw themselves into the cars and the cars spun their wheels and slewed and churned away down the street. Reacher watched them go. Then he stepped back and closed the front door. His borrowed coat had fallen to the floor in the scramble. He put it back on a hook. It hung all alone on the rack.

The siren wailed on.

But the house went absolutely silent. Then over the sound of the siren Reacher heard the patter of chains on snow and the grind of a big engine revving fast and urgent in a low gear. He checked the parlor window. Bright headlights. A Crown Vic. Unmarked. Black or dark blue. Hard to say, in the moonlight. It crunched to a stop at the end of the driveway and Chief Holland climbed out. Parka, hat, boots. Reacher tucked his gun in his waistband at the back and draped his sweater over it. He stepped out to the hallway. He opened the front door just as Holland made it up on the porch.

Holland looked surprised.

He said, “I didn’t know you were here.”

Reacher said, “It made more sense. There are empty beds here and Kim Peterson doesn’t need protection.”

“Was this Andrew’s idea or yours?”

“Mine.”

“Is Mrs. Salter OK?”

“She’s fine.”

“Let me see her.”

Reacher stepped back and Holland stepped in and closed the door. Janet Salter came out of the parlor. Holland asked her, “Are you OK?”

She nodded. She said, “I’m fine. And I’m very grateful that you came. I appreciate it very much. But really you should be on your way to the prison.”

Holland nodded. “I was. But I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“Rules are rules.”

“Even so.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m sure Mr. Reacher will prove more than capable.”

Holland glanced back at Reacher. Wretched conflict in his face, just like the cop from the hallway. Reacher asked him, “What’s happening up there?”

Holland said, “Blacks and whites having at it. A regular prison riot.”

“First ever?”

“Correct.”

“Great timing.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Bottom line, what happens if you don’t go?”

“The department is disgraced, and I get fired. After that, no one really knows.”

“So go.”

“I don’t want to.” A simple statement. The way Holland said it and the way he stood there afterward made Reacher think he had more on his mind than his duty to Mrs. Salter. He wanted to stay indoors, comfortable, in the warm, where he was safe.

Holland was scared.

Reacher asked him, “Have you ever worked a prison before?”

Holland said, “No.”

“There’s nothing to it. You’ll be on the fence and in the towers. Anyone tries to get through, you shoot them dead. Simple as that. They know the rules. And they won’t try anyway. Not at a moment’s notice in this kind of weather. They’ll stay inside, fighting. They’ll burn out eventually. They always do. You’re going to get cold and bored, but that’s all.”

“Have you worked prisons?”

“I’ve worked everything. Including personal protection. And with all due respect, I can do at least as good a job as you. So you should let me. That way everyone wins.”

“I don’t know.”

“I can look after the situation here, you can take care of your people up there.”

“It could last for hours. Even days.”

“Actually it could last for weeks. But if it looks like it’s going to, then you can regroup.”

“You think?”

Reacher nodded. “You can’t work around the clock for days on end. Not all of you. No one could expect that. You can establish some flexibility after the first panic is over.”

Holland didn’t answer. Outside the siren suddenly died. It just cut off mid-wail and absolute silence came crashing back. A total absence of sound, like the air itself was refreezing.

Reacher said, “That probably means you’re all supposed to be up there by now.”

Holland nodded, slow and unsure, once, then twice. He looked at Janet Salter and said, “At least come with me in the car. I need to know you’re safe.”

Janet Salter said, “That’s not permitted, Chief Holland. Rules are rules. But don’t worry. I’ll be safe here, with Mr. Reacher.”

Holland stood still a moment longer. Then he nodded a third time, more decisively. His mind was made up. He turned abruptly and headed out the door. His car was still running. A thin cloud of exhaust was pooling behind the trunk. He climbed in and K-turned and drove away and out of sight. White vapor trailed after him and hung and dispersed. The small sound of his chains on the packed snow died back to nothing.

Reacher closed the door.

The house went quiet again.

Tactically the best move would have been to lock Janet Salter in the basement. But she refused to go. She just stood in the hallway with her hand on the butt of the gun in her pocket. She looked all around, one point of the compass, then the next, as if she suddenly understood that the four walls that were supposed to protect her were really just four different ways in. There were doors and windows all over the place. Any one of them could be forced or busted in an instant.

Second best would have been to stash her in her bedroom. Second floor break-ins were much less common than first floor. But she wouldn’t go upstairs, either. She said she would feel she had nowhere to run.

“You won’t be running,” Reacher said. “You’ll be shooting.”

“Not while you’re here, surely.”

“Twelve holes in the guy are better than six.”

She was quiet for a beat. She looked at him like he was an alien.

She asked, “Shouldn’t you be patrolling outside?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It would take me far too long to get from front to back, if I had to. And my finger wouldn’t fit in the trigger guard with gloves on. And it’s too cold to go out without gloves.”

“So we just wait in here?”

Reacher nodded. “That’s right. We wait in here.”

They waited in the parlor. Reacher figured it was the best choice. It overlooked the front, and given the snow on the ground, frontal approach was the most likely. And even if an actual approach was not attempted, the parlor was still the best room. The way it looked out under the lip of the porch roof and across the whole of its depth meant that a potential sniper would have to line up front and center to get a shot. He would be spotted twenty paces before he even raised the rifle to his eye.

There were many other possible dangers. Bombs or fire bombs were top of the list. But if that kind of thing was coming their way, it didn’t really matter which room they were in.

The clock ticked past nine and marked the end of their first hour alone. The street outside was deserted. Reacher made a careful sweep of the interior perimeter. The front door, locked. The first floor windows, all closed. The French doors in the library, locked. The back door, locked. Second story windows, all good. Most of them were inaccessible without a ladder. The only viable possibility was a bedroom window at the front, which had the back edge of the porch roof directly under its sill. But there was a lot of snow out there. The porch roof itself would be slippery and treacherous. Safe enough.

The weather was changing. A light wind was rising. The night sky was clearing. The moon was bright and stars were visible. The temperature felt like it was dropping. Every window Reacher checked had a layer of air in front of it that was pulsing with cold. The wind didn’t help. It found invisible cracks and made invisible drafts and sucked heat out of the whole structure.

The wind didn’t help safety, either. It made strange sounds. Rustling, cracking, crackling noises, the brittle chafing of frozen foliage, hollow clicks and clonks from frozen tree limbs, a faint keening from the weird shapes on the power lines. In absolute terms the sounds were quiet, but Reacher could have done without them. He was depending on hearing the soft crunch and slide of feet on snow, and the chances of doing that were diminishing. And Janet Salter was talking from time to time, which made things worse, but he didn’t want to shut her up. She was nervous, understandably, and talking seemed to help her. He got back from a circuit of the house and she asked him, “How many times have you done this kind of thing before?”

He kept his eyes on the window and said, “Once or twice.”

“And clearly you survived.”

He nodded. “So far.”

“What’s your secret of success?”

“I don’t like getting beaten. Better for all concerned that it just doesn’t happen.”

“That’s a heavy burden to carry, psychologically. That kind of burning need for dominance, I mean.”

“Are there people who enjoy getting beaten?”

“It’s not black and white. You wouldn’t have to enjoy it. But you could be at peace with whatever comes your way. You know, win some, lose some.”

“Doesn’t work that way. Not in my line of work. You win some, and then you lose one. And then it’s game over.”

“You’re still in the army, aren’t you?”

“No, I’ve been out for years.”

“In your head, I mean.”

“Not really.”

“Don’t you miss it?”

“Not really.”

“I heard you on the phone, with the woman in Virginia. You sounded alive.”

“That was because of her. Not the army. She’s got a great voice.”

“You’re lonely.”

“Aren’t you?”

She didn’t answer. The clock ticked on. Nobody approached the house.

After an hour and a half Reacher had made four security sweeps and felt he knew the house pretty well. It had been built for an earlier generation, which had been in some ways tougher, and in some ways gentler. The windows had catches and the doors had locks, all solid well-machined pieces of brass, but nothing like the armor on sale at any modern hardware store. Which meant that there were forty-three possible ways in, of which fifteen were realistically practical, of which eight might be anticipated by a solo opponent of normal intelligence, of which six would be easy to defeat. The remaining two would be difficult to beat, but feasible, made harder by Janet Salter’s wandering presence. Lines of fire were always complicated. He thought again about insisting she lock herself downstairs, but she saw him thinking and started talking again, as if to head him off. He was at the parlor window, craning left, craning right, and she asked, “Was it your mother or your father who was a Marine?”

He said, “Excuse me?”

“You told me you grew up on Marine Corps bases. I was wondering which of your parents made that necessary. Although I suppose it could have been both of them. Was that permitted? A husband and wife serving together?”

“I don’t imagine so.”

“So which one was it?”

“It was my father.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Not much to tell. Nice guy, but busy.”

“Distant?”

“He probably thought I was. There were a hundred kids on every base. We ran around all day. We were in a world of our own.”

“Is he still alive?”

“He died a long time ago. My mother, too.”

“It was the same for me,” Janet Salter said. “I made myself distant. I was always reading.”

He didn’t reply, and she went quiet again. He watched the street. Nothing happening. He moved to the library and checked the yard. Nothing happening. The last of the cloud was moving away and the moon was brightening. It was a blue, cold, empty world out there.

Except that it wasn’t empty.

But nobody came.

Hide and seek. Maybe the oldest game in the world. Because of ancient thrills and fears buried deep in the back of every human’s brain. Predator and prey. The irresistible shiver of delight, crouching in the dark, hearing the footsteps pass by. The rush of pleasure in doubling back and wrenching open the closet door and discovering the victim. The instant translation of primeval terrors into modern-day laughter.

This was different.

There would be no laughter. There would be short seconds of furious gunfire and the stink of smoke and blood and then sudden deafened silence and a world-stands-still pause to look down and check yourself for damage. Then another pause to check your people. Then the shakes and the gulps and the need to throw up.

No laughter.

And this wasn’t hide and seek. Nobody was really hiding, and nobody was really seeking. Whoever was out there knew full well where Janet Salter was. An exact address would have been provided. Maybe turn-by-turn directions, maybe GPS coordinates. And she was just sitting right there, waiting for him. No art. Just brutality. Which disappointed Reacher a little. He was good at hide and seek. The real-world version, not the children’s game. Good at hiding, better at seeking. His former professional obligations had led him in that direction. He had been a good hunter of people. Fugitives, mainly. He had learned that empathy was the key. Understand their motives, their circumstances, their goals, their aims, their fears, their needs. Think like them. See what they see. Be them. He had gotten to the point where he could spend an hour with a case file, a second hour thinking, a third with maps and phone books, and then predict pretty much the exact building the guy would be found in.

He checked the view to the front.

No one there.

Just an empty white world that seemed to be frozen solid.

He glanced back at Janet Salter and said, “I need you to watch the front for me.”

“OK.”

“I’ll be in the hallway for a spell. Anyone comes in through the kitchen or the library, I can get them in the corridor.”

“OK.”

“Stay back in the shadows, but keep your eyes peeled.”

“OK.”

“You see anything at all, you call out to me, loud and clear, with concise information. Numbers, location, direction, and description.”

“OK.”

“And do it standing up.”

“Why?”

“So if you fall asleep on the job I’ll hear you fall down.”

She took up a good position, well back in the room, invisible from outside, but with a decent angle. Her hand was still on the gun in her pocket. He stepped out to the hallway and moved the chair to the other side of the telephone table, so he could sit facing the rear of the house. He put his gun in his lap. Picked up the phone. Dialed the number he remembered.

“Yes?”

“Amanda, please.”

A pause. A click. The voice. It said, “You have got to be kidding me. Two hours ago you gave me two weeks’ worth of work, and already you’re calling me for a result?”

“No, I’m not, but I can’t give you two weeks anyway. I need something by tomorrow at the latest.”

“What are you, nuts?”

“You said you were better than me, and I could have done it in a day. So a night should be good enough for you.”

“What is that, psychology? You took motivation classes up at West Point?”

Reacher kept his hand on his gun and his eyes on the kitchen door. He asked, “Did you catch your guy yet?”

“No, can’t you tell?”

“Where are you looking?”

“All the airports, plus boats on the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and New Orleans.”

“He’s in a motel a little ways north of Austin. Almost certainly Georgetown. Almost certainly the second motel north of the bus depot.”

“What, he’s wearing a secret ankle bracelet I don’t know about?”

“No, he’s scared and alone. He needs help. Can’t get it anyplace except the overseas folks he’s in bed with. But he’s waiting to call them. They’ll help him if he’s clean, they’ll ditch him if he’s compromised. Maybe they’ll even kill him. He knows that. A fugitive from the law, that’s OK with them. A political fugitive, not so much. They’d worry about us tracking him all the way home, wherever home is. So he needs to know the news. He needs a media market that covers Fort Hood’s business. If it stays a plain vanilla domestic homicide, he’ll make the call. If it doesn’t, he’ll end up putting his gun in his mouth.”

“We haven’t released the background.”

“Then he’ll take a day or two to be sure, and then he’ll call them.”

“But he could have gone anywhere for that. Waco, Dallas, Abilene, even.”

“No, he made a careful choice. Abilene is too far and too small. And Waco and Dallas are too patriotic. He thinks that TV and radio there might sit on the espionage angle. What is he, Fourth Infantry? Audiences in Waco and Dallas don’t want to hear about a Fourth Infantry captain going bad. He knows that. But Austin is much more liberal. And it’s the state capital, so the news stations are a little looser. He needs the real skinny, and he knows that Austin is where he’s going to get it.”

“You said Georgetown.”

“He’s afraid of the actual city. Too many cops, too much going on. He didn’t drive, did he? Too afraid of cops on the highway. His car is still on the post, right?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So he took the bus from Hood and stopped short. Georgetown is right there, close to Austin, but not too close. He watched out the window, all the way in. One motel after another. He mapped them in his head. He got out at the depot and walked back the way he came. Didn’t want unfamiliar territory. Didn’t want to walk too far, either. Too exposed. Too vulnerable. But even so he didn’t like the place nearest the depot. It felt too obvious. So he picked the second place. He’s there right now, in his room with the chain on, watching all the local channels.”

The voice didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Wait one.” He laid the phone gently on the table and got up. Checked the kitchen, checked the library. Nothing doing. He checked the parlor. Janet Salter was still on her feet, rock solid, deep in the shadows.

Nothing to see on the street.

No one coming.

Reacher went back to the hallway and sat down again in the chair and picked up the phone. The voice asked, “Anything else?”

“Not that it matters, but he sat in the front third of the bus.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“It was a kind of camouflage. He didn’t want to give himself away as a fugitive. He thinks bad boys sit in back. He’s a Fourth Infantry captain. Probably a straight-laced kind of a guy. He remembers his school bus. The greasers sat in back. He didn’t.”

No answer.

“Georgetown,” Reacher said. “Second motel north of the bus depot. Check it out.”

No answer.

Reacher asked, “Where are your nearest people?”

“I have people at Hood.”

“So send them down. It’s about fifty miles. What can it cost you?”

No answer.

Reacher said, “And don’t forget, I need my information by tomorrow.”

He hung up. He put the chair back where it was supposed to be and stepped across the hallway and into the parlor. He checked the window.

Nothing to see.

No one coming.

Five to ten in the evening.

Thirty hours to go.

Chapter 20

The clock ticked on. Reacher took every completed minute to be a small victory. A prison riot could not last forever. Its initial phase would be relatively short. Hostages would be taken, territory would be seized, a standoff would ensue. Tactical adjustments would be made. The corrections officers would regroup. The cops would be released from duty. Reacher knew that.

Therefore the guy knew that, too.

Reacher didn’t understand why he didn’t come. His target was an old woman in a house. What was he waiting for?

At half past ten Janet Salter volunteered to make coffee. Reacher wouldn’t let her. Maybe that was what the guy was waiting for. The percolator needed water. Water came from the faucet. The faucet was over the sink. The sink was under the window. A preoccupied gray head two feet the other side of the glass might be a tempting target. So he made the coffee himself, after a duly cautious inspection of the vicinity. An unnecessary inspection, as it turned out. He stepped out the back door without coat, gloves, or hat. The cold hit him like a fist. It was raging. It was searching. It stunned him. Way below zero. Too far below to even guess at a number.

He stepped back in. Nobody was waiting out there for a target of opportunity. Impossible. After a minute you would be shaking too hard to see, let alone shoot. After an hour you would be in a coma. After two, you would be dead.

Which thoughts clarified things a little. There would be no long stealthy approach on foot through the snow. The danger would come from the front. The guy would have to drive up, jump out, and move fast. So after the percolator finished gulping and hissing Reacher poured two mugs and carried them back to the parlor, where he told Janet Salter they would take turns at the window, ten minutes on, ten minutes off, all through the next hour.

The next hour passed slowly. No one approached the house. The world outside was dead. Deep frozen. Nothing was moving, except the wind. It was blowing steadily out of the west. It was scouring powder into small stunted drifts and exposing ridges of ice that glittered blue in the moonlight. A spectral, elemental scene. Janet Salter did something with a dial on a wall and turned the heat up. Not good, in Reacher’s opinion. Warmth made people sleepy. But he didn’t want her to freeze. He had read about old folks, dead in their homes, overcome by hypothermia.

She asked, “Have you ever been here in winter before?”

He said, “I’ve never been here in any season.”

“North Dakota, perhaps?”

“I’ve been in the Dakota Building in New York City.”

“Which was named for here,” she said. “At the time it was built, the city didn’t extend much past 34th Street. It seemed lunatic to build fancy apartments all the way up on 72nd Street, and on the West Side, too. People said, you might as well put them in the Dakota Territory. The name stuck. The man who built it owned part of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which brings us full circle, really, doesn’t it, back to that can of oil.”

She was talking for the sake of talking. Reacher let her. He kept his eye on the street and filtered most of it out. She got into a long disquisition on the state’s history. Explorers and traders, Lewis and Clark, the Sioux Nation, Fort Pierre, sodbusters and pioneers, the gold rush, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Custer, the Black Hills, Wounded Knee, the Dust Bowl, some guy called Brokaw she claimed had been on network TV.

Five to eleven in the evening.

Twenty-nine hours to go.

Reacher completed his eighth circuit of the interior perimeter. He saw nothing to get concerned about. Nothing to see from any window except frozen moonlit emptiness. Nothing to hear except the rush of water in the heating pipes and a faint creaking as the ice outside got colder. It was clamping down. The earth was in its grip. He thought back to the sodbusters and the pioneers that Janet Salter had talked about. Why the hell had they stayed?

He was on his way back down the stairs when she called out.

She said, “Someone’s coming.”

She spoke loud and clear. But she added no information. No numbers, no location, no direction, no description. He stepped into the parlor and eased past her to the window. Saw a guy approaching on foot in the middle of the road, from the left. He was small, but swaddled in an enormous coat with a hood. He had a ski mask on. Plus a muffler, plus gloves, plus boots. Nothing in his hands. His hands were held out to the sides, for balance, and they were empty.

The guy moved on, slowly, tentatively, unsure of his footing. He stopped directly opposite the end of Janet Salter’s driveway. Just stood there.

Reacher asked, “Do you know who he is?”

She said, “Wait.”

The guy turned around, a stiff and ungainly half-circle, and faced the other way. A dog trotted up to him. A big white thing. Lots of fur. The guy turned around again, and man and dog walked on.

Janet Salter said, “A neighbor. A she, actually. Mrs. Lowell. But it was hard to be sure, the way she was dressed.”

Reacher breathed out and said, “Is she the cop’s wife?”

“Ex-wife. Officer Lowell moved out a year ago. There was some kind of unpleasantness.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know.”

“I saw Lowell today. Peterson called him an odd duck. Said he read books.”

“He does. He comes over and borrows some of mine from time to time. My family and his go way back.”

“Do you know his partner?”

“Officer Kapler? I’ve met him, certainly. He moved here from Florida. Which struck me as odd.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. He stayed at the window and watched Mrs. Lowell and her dog round a curve and move out of sight.

They didn’t speak again for thirty minutes. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked on toward midnight. He asked, “Are you tired?”

Janet Salter said, “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“You could go to bed, if you like. I can take care of things down here.”

“Would you take care of things standing up? So if you fell asleep I would hear you fall down?”

Reacher smiled. “I won’t fall asleep.”

“And I won’t go to bed. This is my responsibility. I shouldn’t be involving you at all.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved.”

“You could be killed.”

“Unlikely.”

She asked, “Are you married?”

Reacher kept his eyes on the window and said, “No.”

“Were you ever?”

“No.”

“Were you an only child?”

“I had a brother two years older. He worked for the Treasury Department. He was killed in the line of duty.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“Do you always deflect sympathy that way?”

“Usually.”

“So you’re the last of your family’s line.”

“I suppose so. But it wasn’t much of a line in the first place.”

“Just like me. Scoundrels, all of them.”

“Where were your gold mines?”

“The Black Hills. Why?”

“Peterson thinks the army place west of here could be mostly underground. I was wondering if there were old workings they could have used.”

“No mines here. Just prairie topsoil and rock.”

“Were your parents alive when you went off to college?”

“Why?”

“Because if they were, they probably wrote you with all the local news. Maybe rumor and gossip, too. They must have told you something about that place. Maybe not exact enough for your scholarly mind to pass on as fact, but you must have heard some little thing.”

“Nothing worth repeating.”

“Try me.”

“All I know is that it was built and never used. Apparently because its purpose was too revolting. There was a minor scandal about it.”

“What was its purpose?”

“I don’t know. No one spoke of it to me.”

Five minutes to midnight.

Twenty-eight hours to go.

Nobody came.

A thousand miles away down in Texas two fast cars covered the fifty miles south from Hood in less than forty minutes. Six men in the cars, all warrant officers working for the 110th Special Unit, all currently W3s, all wanting to be W4s, all well aware that this kind of assignment could get them their promotions. They pulled off the main drag south and wheeled through the center of Georgetown and found the bus depot. It was middle-of-the-night quiet. Cool air, trash, the stink of spilled diesel. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. They parked their cars a block farther on next to pawn shops and bail bond offices and hustled back the way they had come. They counted the motels. The first was a brick place behind a parking lot that was covered with broken blacktop. The second was right next to it, set end-on to the street, made of red wood, twelve rooms, a sign on a pole advertising free cable and free breakfast and no vacancies.

An office, first door on the left.

A clerk in the office, half-awake.

A passkey, in the desk drawer.

The six W3s split up, three to the rear, three to the front. One of the front guys stood back, ready for anything. The other two entered every room, bold as you like, guns drawn, for close-up in-their-face flashlight examinations of the somnolent forms they found.

All twelve rooms.

Their man wasn’t there.

Reacher prowled through Janet Salter’s house one more time. By that point he was totally accustomed to its sounds. The creak of the boards, the creak of the stairs, an occluded right-angle joint in a steam pipe that hissed louder than all the others, a window sash that trembled a little in its frame because of the freshening wind. The smell of the air was changing. Tiny eddying drafts were stirring odors out of the rugs and the drapes. They were not unpleasant. Just old. Dyed wool, dusty velvet, mothballs, beeswax furniture polish, cigar smoke, pipe tobacco. Ancient, deep aromas, like an olfactory portrait of how prosperous frontier families used to live. Reacher sensed them behind the local mineral smell from the new oil on the gun he was carrying with him everywhere.

He came back to the parlor. Janet Salter’s gun was still in her pocket. Her hand was still resting on its butt. He asked her, “You still OK?”

She said with great formality, “I have reached the conclusion that I am privileged.”

“In what way?”

“I’m experiencing the chance to live out my principles. I believe that ordinary citizens must confront wickedness. But I believe in due process, too. I believe in an accused’s right to a fair trial and I believe in his right to confront the witnesses against him. But it’s so easy to talk the talk, isn’t it? Not everyone gets the opportunity to walk the walk. But now I am.”

“You’re doing great,” Reacher said.

He eased past her to the window.

Saw the wild bounce of headlight beams on the street.

A car, coming on fast.

Chapter 21

It was Peterson, leading what looked like most of the Bolton PD. Six cars, seven, eight. Then a ninth. They jammed and slid and crunched to a stop all over the road. Twelve cops spilled out, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. They drew their weapons and formed up for an approach driven partly by desperate haste and partly by extreme caution. Because they had no idea what they were going to find.

Either tranquillity, or a double homicide.

Reacher stepped out to the hallway and lined up on the hinge side of the front door. He flung it open and stayed well out of sight. He didn’t want to get fired on by mistake. Fifteen nervous cops made for an unpredictable situation.

He called, “Peterson? This is Reacher. We’re all clear.”

No answer.

He tried again. “Peterson?”

Icy air flooded in. Peterson’s voice came with it. “Reacher?”

Reacher called back, “All clear in here. Holster your weapons and come on in.”

They came in at a run, all fifteen of them, Peterson first, then the four women, then the three guys from the stake-out cars, then seven more bodies Reacher didn’t know. They brought gusts and billows of freezing air in with them. They all had red, chapped faces. The warm inside air hit them and they all started wrenching open their parkas and pulling the gloves from their hands and the hats from their heads.

The four women formed up around Janet Salter like a cordon and bustled her off to the kitchen. Peterson ordered the three night-watch cars to their positions and sent the remaining seven men back to the station. Reacher watched normality restored from the parlor window. Within five minutes all was as it had been five hours earlier.

Peterson asked, “So what happened here?”

“Nothing at all,” Reacher said. “What happened there?”

“A riot. Not that we saw much of anything. They shut it down very fast.”

“Because it was phony. It was a diversion.”

Peterson nodded. “But their guy never came here.”

“And the big question is, why the hell not?”

“Because he saw you.”

“But I didn’t see him. Which begs another big question. If he’s good enough that he saw me without me seeing him, why didn’t he just go for it?”

“I have no idea.”

“I saw a woman with a big white dog.”

“When?”

“A little after eleven.”

“Mrs. Lowell. She’s a neighbor. She walks her dog every night.”

“You should have told me that. I might have shot her.”

“I’m sorry.” Peterson clamped his palms tight on his nose. It must have been hurting. His skin had vaulted sixty degrees warmer in sixty seconds. Then he ran his fingers through his hair. “Bad thing to say, I guess, but I kind of wish the guy had come tonight. I’m not sure we can take another month of this.”

Reacher said, “I don’t think you’ll have to. I think they’re fresh out of diversions.”

“They can start another riot any old time they want to.”

“They can’t. That’s the point. Prison riots need a critical mass. About a third of the population would riot every day of the week, given the chance. Another third never would. It’s the middle third that counts. The swing votes. Like an election. And they’re spent now. Their passion has gone. It will take a year before they’re back in the game.”

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, “And your biker pal can’t organize an escape fast enough. So you’re in the clear now. You’re safe.”

“You think?”

“You might never hear that siren again.”

Five to one in the morning.

Twenty-seven hours to go.

At a quarter past one the phone in the hallway rang. Janet Salter came out of the kitchen to answer it. She passed the receiver to Peterson. Peterson listened for a second and went to find Reacher in the parlor.

“It’s the woman from the 110th MP,” he said. “How does she know this number?”

“She has a caller ID system,” Reacher said. “With coordinates. She’s probably watching this house right now, on Google Earth.”

“But it’s dark.”

“Don’t ask me how it works.” He stepped out to the hallway and sat down in the chair. Picked up the receiver. Asked, “You got my answers for me?”

The voice said, “Not yet.”

“So why are you calling so late? I could have been fast asleep.”

“I just wanted to tell you I got my guy.”

“Was I right?”

“I’m not going to answer that question. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”

“So I was right.”

“Actually, not quite. He was in the third motel north of the bus depot.”

“Because the first two were close together? He had to go on to the third, for distance?”

“You’re good.”

“I used to do this for a living.”

“I’m duly impressed.”

“How was he?”

“You tell me.”

Reacher said, “He was awake. He had a loaded firearm and shoes on. His bag was packed and his jacket was on the back of a chair. He struggled for less than ten seconds and then he gave it up.”

“You’re very good.”

“Not good enough to survive the general’s head.”

“I still want to hear that story.”

“Then get me my answers. A fair exchange is no robbery.”

“We’re close. We can see the money coming out of Congress. But we can’t see it arriving at the Department of the Army. It’s dropping out of sight somewhere along the way. We’re narrowing it down. We’ll get there.”

“When?”

“Give me the rest of the night. Call me at eight o’clock in the morning.”

“You’re good, too.”

“I try.”

Reacher said, “There’s a local rumor about a scandal. Word on the street is the place was never used because its purpose was too revolting.”

“On the street?”

“In an old lady’s parlor, anyway.”

“OK. But old ladies get revolted by all kinds of things.”

“I guess.”

“Anything else?”

“You can search with your Google thing, right?”

“That’s what it’s for.”

“Check a Florida cop called Kapler for me. He left the state two years ago. I want to know why.”

“Why?”

“I like to know things. He moved from Florida to South Dakota. Who does that?”

“First name?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s helpful.”

“How many Florida cops called Kapler can there be?”

“Probably more than ten, and less than a hundred.”

“With employment problems two years ago?”

“Anything else?”

Reacher asked, “What are you wearing?”

“What is this, a dirty phone call now?”

Reacher smiled. “No, I’m just trying to picture the scene. For old times’ sake. I know the desk. Same office?”

“I assume so. Upstairs, third on the left.”

“That’s the one.” Reacher saw it in his mind. Stone stairs, a metal handrail, a narrow corridor floored with linoleum, lines of doors left and right with fluted glass windows in them, offices behind each one, each office equipped according to some complex DoD protocol. His had had the metal desk, two phones with a total of three lines, a vinyl chair on casters, file cabinets, and two visitor chairs with springy bent-tube legs. Plus a glass light shade shaped like a bowl and hung from the ceiling on three metal chains. Plus an out-of-date map of the United States on the wall, made after Hawaii and Alaska had joined the Union but before the interstate highway system had been completed.

Made, in fact, around the same time that the strange installation near Bolton, South Dakota, was being put in.

The voice said, “I’m wearing my ACUs with a T-shirt. I’ve got the jacket on, because it’s cold tonight.”

Reacher said, “You’re in Virginia. You don’t know what cold is.”

“Quit whining. You’re still in double figures up there. Negative, but hey. Minus eleven degrees. But the radar shows colder air moving in from the west.”

“How could it get colder?”

“You’re going to get what Wyoming just had, that’s how.”

“You talking to meteorologists?”

“No, I’m looking at the Weather Channel.”

“What did Wyoming just have?”

“They were thirty below zero.”

“Terrific.”

“You can take it. You’re a big guy. Probably a Norseman way back, by the look of you.”

“What, Google Earth can see through roof tiles now?”

“No, there’s a photo of you in your file.”

“What about you?”

“Yes, there’s a photo of me in my file, too.”

“Not what I meant, smart-ass. I don’t have your file.”

“I’m a one-eyed fifty-year-old hunchback.”

“I thought so, judging by your voice.”

“Asshole.”

“I’m thinking maybe five-six or five-seven, but thin. Your voice is all in your throat.”

“You saying I’m flat-chested?”

“34A at best.”

“Damn.”

“Blonde hair, probably short. Blue eyes. From northern California.”

She asked, “Age?”

Reacher had been thirty-two years old, the first time he sat behind that battered desk. Which was both old and young for a command of that importance. Young, because he had been something of a star, but old, too, in that he had gotten there a little later than a star should, because he wasn’t an organization man and hadn’t been entirely trusted. He said, “You’re thirty or thirty-one,” because he knew that when it came to a woman’s age it was always better to err on the side of caution.

She said, “Flattery will get you everywhere.” Then she said, “Got to go. Call me later.”

* * *

The household got right back into its settled routine. Peterson left, and the two day-watch women went up to bed. Janet Salter showed Reacher to the front upstairs room with the window over the porch roof. In principle the most vulnerable, but he wasn’t worried. Sheer rage would overcome any theoretical tactical disadvantage. He hated to be woken in the night. An intruder came through that window, he would go straight back out like a spear.

Five to two in the morning.

Twenty-six hours to go.

Chapter 22

Reacher had planned on sleeping until eight, but he was woken at half past six. By Peterson. The guy came into the bedroom and some primal instinct must have made him pause and kick the bed frame and then step smartly back. He must have figured that was the safest thing to do. He must have figured if he leaned over and shook Reacher gently by the shoulder he could get his arm broken.

And he might have been right.

Reacher said, “What?”

Peterson said, “First light is less than an hour away.”

“And?”

“You need to get going.”

“Where?”

“The biker camp. Remember? You offered.”

Janet Salter was already in her kitchen. Reacher found her there. She was dressed for the day. She had coffee going. The old percolator was slurping and rattling. He said, “I have to go out.”

She nodded. “Mr. Peterson told me. Will you be OK?”

“I hope so.”

“I don’t see how. There are a hundred people out there, and all you have is a six-shooter.”

“We need information.”

“Even so.”

“I’ve got the Fourth Amendment. That’s all the protection I need. If I get hurt or don’t come back, the cops get probable cause for a search. The bikers don’t want that. They’ll treat me with kid gloves.”

“That’s hard to imagine.”

“Will you be OK here?”

“I hope so.”

“If the cops leave again, take your gun and lock yourself in the basement. Don’t open the door to anyone except me.”

“Should we have a password?”

“You can ask about my favorite book.”

“You don’t have one. You told me that.”

“I know. So that will be the correct answer.” The percolator finished and Reacher poured a generous measure into one of six white mugs standing on the counter.

Janet Salter asked, “Will the police leave again?”

“Probably not.”

“There could be another riot.”

“Unlikely. Prison riots are rare. Like revolutions in a nation’s history. The conditions have to be exactly right.”

“An escape, then.”

“Even less likely. Escapes are hard. The prison people make sure of that.”

“Are you saying my problems are over?”

“It’s possible.”

“So are you going to come back here or not?”

“I think the highway is still closed.”

“When it opens again, where will you go next?”

“I don’t know.”

Janet Salter said, “I think you’ll head for Virginia.”

“She might be married.”

“You should ask her.”

Reacher smiled. Said, “Maybe I will.”

Peterson briefed him in the hallway. He said the spare unmarked car was outside, warmed up and running. It was reliable. It had been recently serviced. It had a full tank. It had chains on the back and winter tires on the front. There was no direct route to the camp. The way to go was to head south toward the highway, but turn west a mile short of the cloverleaf on the old road that ran parallel.

“The road the lawyer was killed on,” Reacher said.

“That was all the way to the east,” Peterson said. “But still, perhaps you shouldn’t stop if someone tries to flag you down.”

“I won’t,” Reacher said. “Count on it.”

He was to keep on the old road for five miles, and then make a right and head back north on a county two-lane that wandered a little for about eight miles before hitting the ruler-straight section that the army engineers had put in fifty years before. That section was two miles long, and it ran right up to the camp, where he would find the fifteen wooden huts and the old stone building, laid out in two neat lines of eight, running precisely east to west.

“The stone building is in the back left corner,” Peterson said.

Five to seven in the morning.

Twenty-one hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles south it was five to eight in the morning. Plato had finished his breakfast and was about to break the habit of a lifetime. He was about to cut out his middleman in the walled city villa and call his guy in the States direct.

He dialed.

He got an answer.

He asked, “Is the witness dead yet?”

There was a pause on the line. His guy said, “You know there was always going to be a delay between the two.”

“How long has that delay been so far?”

His guy knew what to say. “Too long.”

“Correct,” Plato said. “I arranged a riot at the prison last night.”

“I know.”

“Evidently you didn’t make use of it.”

“There was a man in the house.”

“And?”

“I had no instructions.”

“That’s your answer? You needed instructions?”

“I thought perhaps there were complexities I wasn’t grasping.”

Plato breathed out. “How can I hurt you?”

His guy knew what to say. “In ways I don’t want to be hurt.”

“Correct,” Plato said. “But I need you to be more specific. I need you to focus on what’s at stake.”

His guy said, “You’ll kill the person nearest and dearest to me.”

“Yes, I will, eventually. But first there will be a delay, which seems to be a concept you’re very familiar with. I’ll cripple her and mutilate her and let her live for a year or so. Then I’ll kill her. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So for your own sake, get the job done. I don’t care about bystanders. Wipe out the entire damn town if you have to. The entire state, for all I care. How many people live in South Dakota, anyway?”

“About eight hundred thousand.”

“OK. That’s your upper limit for collateral damage. Get it done.”

“I will. I promise.”

Plato hung up and poured himself another cup of coffee.

The spare unmarked was another dark Crown Vic. It smelled dusty and tired inside. Its heater was set to seventy degrees and the fan was blowing hard in a desperate attempt to get there. The weather was way down in a whole new dimension. The temperature was dropping fast. The ground was bone hard and the air was solid with microscopic nubs of snowflakes borne on the wind. They were chilled and shriveled to sharp fragments. They hurled themselves against the windshield and made complex frozen traceries. The wipers wouldn’t shift them. The blades just scraped over them. Reacher set the heater on defrost and waited until the blown air melted oval holes of clarity.

Then he left.

He K-turned across the width of Janet Salter’s street. The ruts were frozen solid. The Crown Vic’s tires bumped up and down. The stake-out car at the end of the road backed up to let him squeeze by. He turned right and drove away from town. The wheel ruts that had been soft the day before were now as hard as concrete trenches. It was like driving a train on a track. He didn’t need to steer. The chains on the back dug in and splintered the ice and the front tires hammered left and right and kept him basically straight. The world outside was entirely white. There was pale light in the sky but no sun. The air was too full of ice. It was like dust. Like mist. The wind was blowing right-to-left in front of him. Small streamlined drifts had built up and frozen solid, against fence posts and power poles. The weird shapes on the power lines had shifted to the east, as if the whole world was tilted.

Reacher found the turn a mile short of the cloverleaf. Getting out of the frozen ruts was difficult. He had to slow to a walk and turn the wheel way over and churn his way out one tire at a time, four separate climbs, four separate drops. He found new ruts running west and settled in for five more miles of autopilot. He repeated the escape maneuver at the next turn and headed north toward the camp. The new road was different. It hadn’t seen much traffic. There were no established ruts. It was just a narrow ribbon of frozen snow. The front wheels skated and wandered a little. The blowing ice pattered left-to-right against the driver’s window. The road humped and dipped and curved left and right for no apparent reason. The camber tilted one way, then the other. Not a great piece of civil engineering. Reacher slowed a little and concentrated hard. To slide into a ditch would be fatal. No chance of a tow before he froze. Even a blown tire would be a disaster. The wheel nuts were probably frozen solid.

Five slow careful miles, then six, then seven. Then the horizon changed. Up ahead the road widened and straightened and flattened. Dramatically. Radically. In the murky distance it looked as broad and flat as a freeway. Maybe even broader and flatter. It looked like a sixteen-lane superhighway. It was a magnificent, surreal piece of road. It was built up slightly proud of the land around it, it was absolutely flat, and it was absolutely straight, for two whole miles.

And it was plowed.

There was not a speck of snow on it. Just smooth gray concrete, scraped and brushed and salted. High piles of snow had been pushed to the sides, and smoothed, and shaped, so that the frozen prairie wind was launching off the western berm and not landing again until it was past the eastern. The tiny fragments of ice were howling past five feet in the air. The road surface itself was clear and dry, like the middle of summer.

Reacher slowed and bumped up onto it. The chains thumped and chattered. The front end tracked straight and true. He kept to a steady thirty and peered ahead. He could make out blond smudges on the horizon. Wooden huts, in a neat row. Two miles away. The car pattered and juddered. The chains were not good on dry concrete.

He kept on going.

Half a mile out he saw activity ahead. A hundred yards out he saw what it was. Pick-up trucks with plow blades lowered were grinding back and forth. A lot of them. Maybe thirty or forty of them. Beyond them bulky black-clad figures with shovels were working in a line. Other bulky figures were walking backward, hurling stuff from their cupped hands in long arcs, like farm laborers feeding chaff to chickens. Salt, presumably. Or grit, or sand, or some other kind of de-icing chemical. Or all of the above. They were clearing the whole camp. They wanted the whole place immaculate. As good as the road.

The huts were raw lumber, bleached and faded a little, but not much. Not brand new, but not old, either. On the left behind the first row of huts Reacher saw the roof of the old stone building. It was tall and peaked and made of slate. It was covered with a foot of snow. It had twin ornate chimneys. The huts themselves were roofed with tarpaper. They had stovepipe vents. There were power lines running from gable to gable. There were concrete paths running from door to door. All were swept clear of snow. What had not been removed completely was piled neatly left and right. In front of the huts was a long line of shapes under black tarpaulins, side by side, like dominoes. Motorcycles, presumably. Big ones. Maybe thirty of them. Harleys, probably, laid up for winter.

Reacher slowed and came to a stop fifty yards out. People had stopped working and were staring at his car. Gloved hands were stacked on shovel handles. Chins were resting on the hands. The salt throwers had paused. One after the other the pick-up trucks came to rest. Their idling exhaust was carried away on the wind.

Reacher took his foot off the brake and inched forward. Nobody moved. Reacher kept on coming, ten yards, then twenty. He stopped again. He was close enough. He didn’t switch off. The Crown Vic’s dash was showing the outside temperature at twelve degrees below zero. If he switched the engine off he might never get it started again. He had read a book set above the Arctic Circle where you had to thaw the engine block with blowlamps.

He jammed his watch cap down on his ears and pulled his hood up. Zipped his coat to his chin. Put his gloves on, left and then right.

He climbed out of the car.

Twenty yards ahead the crowd had gotten larger. Men, women, and children. Maybe a hundred people in total. As advertised. They were all shapeless and hidden in coats and hats and mufflers. Their breath was condensing around their heads, an unbroken cloud that hung motionless and then rose and whipped away in the wind. The cold was stunning. It was getting worse. It seemed to attack from the inside out. Reacher was shivering after five seconds of exposure. His face was numb after ten. He walked ten paces and stopped. Olive green pants, a tan coat, an obvious police car behind him, South Dakota plates. Not even remotely convincing.

Twenty yards ahead a guy threaded through the crowd. Sidestepping, shuffling, leading with his left shoulder, then his right. Black coat, hat, gloves. His body language was like every interrupted workman in the world. Irritated, but curious. He swiped his padded forearm across his brow and paused and thought and moved forward again. He stepped out of the ranks and stopped a yard in front of the crowd.

Reacher said, “Who the hell are you?”

The guy said, “Piss off.”

Reacher stepped forward. One pace, two, three.

“You’re not very polite,” he said.

“Show me where it says I have to be.”

“Well, you’re walking around on my property.”

“How so?”

“I’m from the army. I’m here to check on our real estate. A two-year maintenance inspection. Your tax dollars at work.”

“That’s a joke.”

Reacher said, “Whatever, I need to take a look around.”

“I told you to piss off.”

“I know. But what are the odds I’m going to take you seriously?”

“You can’t fight a hundred people.”

“I won’t need to. Looks like two-thirds of you are women and children. That leaves maybe thirty guys. Or forty, say. But half of them look too fat to move. They pitch in, they’re going to get all kinds of coronaries. The others, maybe half of them are pussies. They’ll run away. That leaves maybe eight or ten guys, max. And one of me is worth eight or ten of you, easy.”

No answer.

“Plus, I’m from the army. You mess with me, the next guy you see will be driving a tank.”

Silence for a beat. Just the scouring howl of the wind, and the rattle of ice particles against wood. The guy in front looked at Reacher, at his clothes, at his car, and came to some kind of a decision. He asked, “What do you need to see?”

Reacher said, “The stone building.”

“That’s not ours.”

“None of this is yours.”

“I mean, we’re not using it.”

“You shouldn’t be using anything.”

“Squatters’ rights. It’s an abandoned facility. We know the law.”

Reacher said nothing. Just stepped left and skirted the crowd. They all stood still and let him by. No move to block him. A policy decision. He glanced at the corner hut. It was a plain, utilitarian structure. Maybe fifty feet long, its blank slab siding pierced only by two small square windows. It had a door in its narrow end. All around it the snow had been cleared away meticulously. Directly behind it was the stone building. There was no snow around it, either. Just clear, swept paths.

Reacher turned around.

He said, “If you’re not using it, why clear the snow?”

The same guy came out of the crowd again.

He said, “For the satisfaction of a job well done.”

The stone building was a strange little thing. It could have been copied from the plans for a small but fairly ornate and old-fashioned suburban house. It had all kinds of details and moldings and curlicues and gables and rain gutters and eaves. Like a Gothic folly a rich man might put in his garden for guests.

But there were crucial differences, too. Where a guesthouse in a garden would have windows, the stone building had recesses only. Like an optical illusion. The right size and shape, but not filled with glass. Filled instead by unbroken expanses of stone, the same neat mortared blocks as the rest of the walls. There was a portico, but the front door under it made no attempt at illusion. It was just a meaty steel slab, completely plain. It had huge hinges. It would open outward, not inward. Like a blast door. A pressure wave outside would hold it shut, not burst it open. It had a handle and a keyhole. Reacher tried the handle. It didn’t move. The keyhole was large. Smaller than the hole for a church key, bigger than the hole for a house key. The steel around it was rimed with frost. Reacher rubbed it away with his gloved thumb, and saw no nicks or scratches in the metal. The lock was not in regular use. No key had been inserted and withdrawn, day in and day out.

He asked, “You know what this place is?”

The guy who had followed him said, “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But I need to know how our security is holding up.”

The guy said, “We heard things.”

“From who?”

“The construction guys that were here before.”

“What things?”

“About atomic bombs.”

“They said there were nuclear weapons in here?”

“No. They said it was a clinic.”

“What kind of a clinic?”

“They said if we had been attacked in winter, in a city, like New York or Chicago, people would have been in coats and gloves, so only their faces would have been burned. You know, miles from the center. Closer in, you would have been vaporized. But if you survived, you could come here and get a new face.”

“Like plastic surgery?”

“No, like prosthetics. Like masks. They said that’s what’s in there, thousands and thousands of plastic faces.”

Reacher walked on around the strange little structure. It was the same on all four sides. Heavy stone, fake windows, details, moldings. A bizarre parody. Entertaining, but not instructive without getting inside. Which wasn’t going to happen.

He walked away. Then on a sudden whim he stopped at the nearest hut. The first in the back row, which was in line with the second in the front row. The crowd had followed him in a long untidy straggle that looped all the way back to where he had started. Like a thin question mark, curling through the gaps and the passages. Steam hung above it. Nearest to him was the guy who had done all the talking. He was about six feet away.

Reacher pushed the hut’s door. It swung halfway open.

The guy close to him said, “That’s not yours.”

“It’s bolted down on army concrete. That’s good enough for me.”

“You got no warrant.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was all done talking. It was too cold. His face was numb and his teeth were hurting. He just pushed the door all the way open and took a look inside.

The hut was dark. And warm. There was a paraffin stove going. Reacher could smell the sweet wet kerosene. There were twelve cots in the room, six to a side, and a boxed-in section at the far end that might have been a bathroom. Plain gray blankets on the cots, cardboard shipping cartons filled with folded clothes, burlap drapes at the small square windows.

There was a young woman sitting on the farthest cot on the right. No coat, because of the heat. No hat. She was maybe eighteen or twenty. She looked a little sullen and grimy, but behind that she was pretty. Long fair hair, strong vivid features. Tall, and slender. For a second Reacher thought he had seen her before. But he hadn’t. She was a type, that was all. Like Kim Peterson. A South Dakotan. Wherever this bunch was from, they had picked up local recruits.

Reacher backed out and pulled the door shut behind him. Turned to the guy six feet away and said, “Want to show me the other huts?”

“Whatever.” No reluctance. The guy just started his limbs moving inside his heavy clothing and trudged on down the paths and pushed open one door after another. Fourteen of the fifteen huts were the same. Rows of cots, crude drapes, paraffin stoves, shipping boxes, gray blankets, folded clothes. No benches, no work tables, no glass vessels, no gas rings, no laboratory equipment of any kind. No people, either. The girl in the first hut was the only one not outside and working. Maybe she was sick.

The last hut in the back row was a kitchen. It had two domestic stoves shoved side by side for cooking, and plain deal tables pushed against the walls for use as work-surfaces, and crude shelves stacked with plates and bowls and mugs, and more shelves lined with a few meager supplies. Jars almost empty of flour and sugar and coffee, single boxes of cereal and pasta standing alone in spaces that could have taken dozens.

There was no laboratory equipment.

Reacher hunched down in his coat and came out between two huts. His car was still there, idling faithfully. Beyond it the plowed road narrowed into the distance, high, wide, and handsome. As flat as glass. Fifty summers, fifty winters, it hadn’t heaved or cracked at all. The voice from Virginia had asked: You know how big the defense budget was fifty years ago? They had poured maybe four hundred thousand yards of concrete, and then forgotten all about them.

“Have a nice day,” Reacher said, and headed for his car.

Five minutes to nine in the morning.

Nineteen hours to go.

Chapter 23

The drive back was the same as the drive out, except for a strange slow-motion near-collision at the first turn. Reacher had driven the wide plowed road fast and the next eight narrow snowbound miles slow, and then he had coasted and tried to work out a trajectory to get himself through the left turn and into the eastbound ruts on the old road that ran parallel with the highway. But at the same time a fuel tanker was trying to get out of those same ruts for a left turn of its own up toward the camp. It was a squat vehicle with a company name painted along its flank. Paraffin for the heaters, maybe, or gasoline for the pick-up trucks, or diesel for a generator. It changed down to a low gear and turned very early and came right across Reacher’s lane. He braked hard, hoping his chains would bite, but the Crown Vic’s onboard electronics wouldn’t allow the wheels to lock. The car rolled on with all kinds of thumping and banging coming from the brake pistons. The fuel truck kept on coming. Reacher yanked the wheel. The front tires lost their grip and skated. The Crown Vic’s front left corner missed the back of the truck by an inch. The truck roared on, low gear, walking pace, oblivious. Reacher watched it go in his mirror. He had ended up stationary at a right angle across the old road, with his front wheels in one of the eastbound ruts and his back wheels in one of the westbound. He had to rock between Drive and Reverse and hit the gas hard to break free.

But after that it was plain sailing all the way.

* * *

The cop in the stake-out car at the end of Janet Salter’s street was Kapler. Better than Montgomery, from the day before. Kapler looked Reacher over very carefully and then backed up to let him by. Reacher parked nose to tail with the second stake-out car and hustled up the driveway. The day-watch cop in the hallway let him in. He asked, “All quiet?”

She said, “So far.”

“Is Mrs. Salter OK?”

“She’s fine.”

“Let me see her.” Just like Chief Holland the night before, and just as pointless. If anything bad had happened, the cops wouldn’t be sitting around doing nothing.

The day-watch woman said, “She’s in the library.”

Reacher found her there, in her usual chair. This time she was reading, an old book with no dust jacket and a title too small to read from a distance. Her gun was still in her pocket. Reacher could make out its shape. She looked up and said, “Kid gloves?”

He said, “Plastic. Less classy than kid. But nothing to complain about.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Plenty.”

He got back in the car and headed for the police station. Found Peterson in the squad room. Reacher said, “Holland was right. They weren’t coming over here. They were bluffing. Or someone was bluffing on their behalf. We have no idea who actually called here. Could have been the shooter himself, trying to create time and space, trying to point you in the wrong direction.”

“Well, whoever, they failed. And now we’re going to bust them all.”

“Then you better do it quickly. They’re about to move out.”

“They told you that?”

“Think back to that call from the DEA. Have you ever sold a house?”

“Once.”

“You cleaned it up, right? Made it look real good?”

“I painted the siding.”

“They’ve got the snow all plowed. Everything is immaculate. They’ve got their stuff in shipping boxes. They’ve run down their food supplies to nothing. Whoever owns the place is selling it out from under them.”

“When are they going?”

“Soon.”

“Did they give you any trouble?”

“Not really.”

“Did they believe you were from the army?”

“Not for a minute. But they’ve been told to keep their noses clean, as of right now. The place needs to be a controversy-free zone. Whoever owns the place doesn’t want the title damaged. So they didn’t give me a hard time.”

“Nobody owns that place. It’s all public land.”

“It makes a profit for somebody. Therefore somebody thinks he owns it. The bikers are his employees, that’s all. Worker bees. And now they’ve got their marching orders. They’re moving on to the next project.”

“Plato the Mexican.”

“Whoever.”

Peterson asked, “Did you find a lab?”

Reacher said, “I want to see the product from the restaurant parking lot.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way my mind works. One step at a time.”

Peterson shrugged and led the way back to the corridor, around a corner, to an evidence room. There was a half-width counter outside it, unoccupied. Peterson stepped past it and took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door.

“Wait there,” he said.

He went in and came out ten seconds later with a clear plastic evidence bag. It was big. Stapled to it was a chain-of-custody form with four separate dates and times and locations and signatures on it. Inside it was the package that Janet Salter had described. The brick of white powder, hard and smooth under the wax paper wrap. The picture stenciled on it, the crown, the headband, the three points, the three balls representing jewels.

Reacher asked, “Did you test it?”

“Of course,” Peterson said. “It’s meth. No question. Just short of a kilo, very high purity, almost clinical. Good stuff, if you like that kind of thing.”

“Two hundred grand’s worth, right there.”

“A million on the streets of Chicago, after they cut it and retail it.”

“Any idea what the picture means?”

“No. They always put some kind of logo on. This is a brand-conscious market.”

“You got the money in there too, that the Chicago guy paid?”

“Of course.”

“Can I see it?”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I just like looking at stuff like that.”

So Peterson ducked back in and came back out with another evidence bag. Same size. Same kind of form stapled to it. Full of bricks of bills, all banded together.

“OK?” Peterson asked.

“How long would it take you to earn that much?”

“After taxes? I don’t want to think about it.”

“Is that really wax paper on the dope?”

“No, it’s some kind of cellophane or glassine. It’s a little yellowed because it’s old stock. But it’s proper pharmaceutical quality. This is a very high-end operation.”

“OK.”

“So did you find their lab?”

“No.”

“Did you see the stone building?”

“Only from the outside.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No, but I know what it isn’t.”

Reacher headed for the squad room. For the desk in the back corner. He picked up the phone, dialed nine for a line, and then the number he remembered.

“Yes?”

“Amanda, please.”

A click. A purr. The voice. It sounded tired. A little frustrated. It said, “I could be in Afghanistan right now. In fact if you don’t stop calling me I might just put in for a transfer.”

Reacher said, “The food might be better. Can’t beat a goat’s eyeballs in yogurt.”

“You ever been there?”

“No, but I met someone who had.”

“I’ve got no news for you.”

“I know. You can’t see the money hitting the Department of the Army.”

“I tried and failed.”

“You didn’t. The money never went to the army.”

“Why not?”

“Garbage in, garbage out.”

“What does that mean?”

“We started with a false assumption. They told me about an army facility. A small stone building with a two-mile road. I just went out there. It’s not a road. It’s a runway. It’s an Air Force place, not army.”

Chapter 24

The voice from Virginia said, “Well, that changes things a little.”

Reacher said, “There’s another local rumor about prosthetic faces.”

“Yes, I saw a note about that. There’s a file. Apparently the Pentagon got some calls from local folks in South Dakota. County and state government. But it’s bullshit. The plastic face places were always nearer the metro areas. Why put one out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Why have them at all? If everyone is burned the same, why would anyone care?”

No reply.

Reacher asked, “Do you know anyone in the Air Force?”

“Not for secrets.”

“Might not be a secret. Could be entirely routine. We’re back at square one, as far as assumptions are concerned.”

“OK, I’ll make some calls. But first I’m going to take a nap.”

“You can sleep when you’re dead. This is urgent. The runway is plowed. Two whole miles. Nobody does that for fun. Therefore someone or something is due to show up. And I saw a fuel tanker. Maybe for the return trip. Maybe someone’s planning on some heavy lifting.”

Silence for a beat. “Anything else?”

He asked, “Are you married?”

She asked, “Are you?”

“No.”

“Were you ever?”

“No.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

She hung up.

Five minutes to ten in the morning.

Eighteen hours to go.

Peterson was two desks away, hanging up on a call of his own. He said, “The DEA is blowing me off. Their guy wasn’t interested.”

Reacher asked, “Why not?”

“He said there’s no lab out there.”

“How does he know?”

“They have satellites and thermal imaging. They’ve reviewed the data and can’t see any heat. Therefore as far as they’re concerned it’s just a real estate deal. Until proven otherwise.”

“The lab is underground.”

“The DEA says not. Their imaging can see into basements. They say there’s nothing down there.”

“They’re wrong.”

“You didn’t see a lab.”

“They have meth, they must have a lab.”

“We don’t know that there’s anything under the ground at all. Not for sure.”

“We do,” Reacher said. “Nobody builds a two-mile runway for nothing. That’s long enough to land any kind of plane. Any kind of bomber, any kind of transport. And nobody lands bombers or transports next to a building smaller than a house. You were right. The building is a stair head. Which means there’s something under it. Probably very big and very deep.”

“But what exactly?”

Reacher pointed at his phone. “You’ll know when I know.”

* * *

A half-hour later Peterson got a call to say that the highway had reopened. The weather radar was showing nothing incoming from the west except supercooled air, and all across the state the snowplows and the salt spreaders had finished their work, and the Highway Patrol had conferred with the Department of Transportation, and traffic was flowing again. Then Jay Knox called to say he had been told the replacement bus was about three hours out. So Peterson lit up the phone tree and set up a two o’clock rendezvous for the passengers in the police station lobby. All twenty of them. The ladies with the broken bones were fit to travel. A two o’clock departure would get the group to Mount Rushmore a little less than two days late. Not bad, all in all, for South Dakota in the winter.

Then he looked at Reacher and asked, “Are you going with them?”

Reacher said, “I paid my money.”

“So are you going?”

“I’m a restless man.”

“Yes or no?”

“Depends what happens before two o’clock, I guess.”

What happened before two o’clock was that Janet Salter decided to go out for a walk.

Peterson took the call from one of the women cops in the house. Mrs. Salter was going stir crazy. She had cabin fever. She felt cooped up. She was accustomed to taking walks, to the grocery, to the drugstore, to the restaurant, sometimes just for the fun of it. She had already been a prisoner in her own home for close to a week. She was taking her civic responsibilities seriously, but with responsibilities came rights, and stepping out like a free woman was one of them.

“She’s crazy,” Reacher said. “It’s freezing cold.”

“She’s a native,” Peterson said. “This is nothing to her.”

“It must be twenty degrees below zero.”

Peterson smiled, like an insider against an outsider. He said, “The coldest day we ever had was minus fifty-eight. Back in February of 1936. Then less than five months later in July we had the hottest day we ever had, a hundred and twenty exactly.”

“Whatever, she’s still crazy.”

“You want to try to talk her out of it?”

Reacher tried. He drove over there with Peterson. Janet Salter was in her kitchen with the two day-watch cops. Her percolator was all fired up. Reacher could smell fresh coffee and hot aluminum. She poured him a mug and said, “The officers tell me you told Mr. Peterson that the bikers are preparing to leave.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s how it looked to me.”

“Therefore it should be safe enough to take a little stroll.”

“The guy with the gun is not a biker. Never was.”

“But whoever he is, he won’t be waiting outside. You said so yourself, last night. It’s too cold.”

“It’s also too cold to go for a walk.”

“Nonsense. If we keep up a brisk pace, we’ll enjoy it.”

“We?”

“I certainly hope you’ll accompany me.”

Five to eleven in the morning.

Seventeen hours to go.

Peterson improvised a plan that looked a lot like the Secret Service taking the President for a walk. He deployed the three stake-out cars to the town’s southern, western, and eastern approaches, and told them to stand by to move like a rolling cordon if necessary. He and the two day-watch women would be on foot, boxing in Mrs. Salter at an appropriate tactical distance. Reacher would walk with her, always keeping himself between her and any passing traffic. A human shield, although Peterson didn’t put it that way.

They all wrapped up in all the clothes they had and stepped through the door. The wind was steady out of the west. All the way from Wyoming. It was bitter. Reacher had been in Wyoming in the winter, and survived. He made a mental note never to risk it again. Peterson ranged ahead and one of the day-watch women trailed behind and the other kept pace on the opposite sidewalk. Reacher stayed at Janet Salter’s shoulder. She had a scarf wrapped around the lower portion of her face. Reacher didn’t. As long as the wind was on his back, the situation was tolerable. But when they turned and headed north to town, his nose and cheeks and chin went numb and his eyes started to water. He pulled his hood forward and shielded his face as much as was prudent. He felt he needed some kind of peripheral vision. The sidewalk was humped and ridged with glazed snow. Walking on it was difficult.

Janet Salter asked him, “What are you thinking about?”

Her voice was muffled, literally. Her words came out thick and soft and then froze and whipped away on the wind.

“I’m thinking about February of 1936,” Reacher said. “Minus fifty-eight degrees, the height of the Depression, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, why the hell didn’t you all move to California?”

“Lots of folks did. The others had no choice but to stay. And that year had a warm summer, anyway.”

“Peterson told me. A hundred-seventy-eight-degree swing.”

“Did he tell you about the chinooks?”

“No.”

“Chinooks are hot winds out of the Black Hills. One day in January of 1943 it was minus four degrees, and then literally two minutes later it was plus forty-five. A forty-nine degree swing in a hundred and twenty seconds. The most dramatic ever recorded in America. Everyone had broken windows from the thermal shock.”

“Wartime,” Reacher said.

“The hinge of fate,” Janet Salter said. “That exact day the Germans lost control of the airfields at Stalingrad, many thousands of miles away. It was the beginning of the end for them. Maybe the wind knew.”

They trudged onward. Peterson stayed well ahead, one of the women cops stayed well behind, the other kept pace directly across the street. They got level with the restaurant parking lot. It was full of people heading in and out. Most of them were inadequately dressed and all of them looked thoroughly miserable.

“Prison visitors,” Janet Salter said. “We seem to get more passing trade now than anywhere in the state except Mount Rushmore.” Which made Reacher think about the replacement bus from Minneapolis, due to leave town at two o’clock. He had no particular interest in oversized sculptures, but he knew there was a road there that led south. And south was Nebraska, then Kansas, then Oklahoma, then Texas, where it was warm. Or alternatively a person could turn left in Kansas, and then cross Missouri, and the southern tip of Illinois, and Kentucky, and end up in Virginia.

Janet Salter said, “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you?”

Reacher said, “No.”

He turned left and right from the waist. Scanned all around. There were more people up ahead than he had seen in a long time. And more cars. They were snuffling slowly along the frozen roads. Huge sheets of ice were creaking and cracking under their weight. Multiple threats, but all of them were trapped into ponderous slow motion by the weather. And there were cop cars among them. Every tenth or twelfth vehicle was a police cruiser, driving slow on a random endless loop, cautious and vigilant.

Reacher asked, “Where are we going?”

Janet Salter asked, “Where would you like to go?”

“This is your trip.”

“Bolton is a relatively dull town. We lack exciting destinations.”

“We could get lunch.”

“It’s too early.”

“Brunch, then.”

“Brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch, and I’ve already had breakfast. Therefore brunch is no longer an option today.”

“Cup of coffee?”

“Everywhere is full up. Visiting days are difficult. We’d never get a table for five.”

“Then let’s head back.”

“Already?”

Reacher didn’t answer. For a moment it looked like she would keep on going, maybe forever, but then she stopped and nodded. Reacher tried to whistle ahead to Peterson, but his lips were too cold and cracked to make a sound. So they waited side by side until Peterson turned around to check. Reacher waved, everyone turned back, and the little procession retraced its steps, with the woman cop now in the lead and Peterson trailing behind.

Five minutes to noon.

Sixteen hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles south it was lunch time. For the second day in succession Plato wasn’t eating. And for the second time in succession he was breaking the habit of a lifetime. He was dialing his guy in South Dakota. And his guy was answering. Which annoyed Plato considerably, because it meant his guy had his phone switched on, which meant his guy wasn’t at that very moment in the act of killing the damn witness.

His guy said, “She wasn’t in the house.”

Plato said, “Find her.”

Heading back put the westerly wind on Reacher’s other cheek, which was a wash in terms of comfort. Otherwise the inbound trip compared to the outbound was both better and worse. Better, because they were moving away from the populated areas, and fewer people meant fewer threats. Worse, because whatever threats remained were behind Reacher’s back. He couldn’t easily check over his shoulder. His torso tended to move independently inside the giant coat. A backward glance merely put his whole face inside his hood. So he was forced to rely on Peterson’s vigilance behind him. He walked on, regarding each completed safe step as a separate minor triumph.

Janet Salter said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I was inconsiderate. I’ve put you all to a lot of trouble.”

“All part of a day’s work. No reason why you shouldn’t go out once in a while.”

They crunched onward, slipping and sliding occasionally, forming up in single file where the footstep trail narrowed around obstacles. Reacher had a high pile of plowed snow between himself and the roadway. After most steps his left foot came down on its lower slope. It was like limping. He kept his eyes on the oncoming traffic. There wasn’t much. A few pick-up trucks, a few old-model SUVs, a few salt-caked cars. Nothing to worry about. Then Lowell drove by in his squad car, and slowed in surprise, and waved. Janet Salter waved back. Lowell sped up again. Then came nothing for a spell, and then came a big dark sedan, heading north toward them. A Ford Crown Victoria. Navy blue. Easy to be sure in the bright clear light. Chief Holland’s car. The guy stopped the width of a traffic lane away and rolled down his window. He ignored Reacher completely. Looked straight at Janet Salter, some kind of concern in his face. She stopped and faced him. She said, “I’m out for a walk. That’s all. Nothing to worry about. Mr. Peterson is doing a fine job.”

Holland said, “You heading home now?”

“We’re on our way.”

“Can I offer you a ride?”

“Thank you, but I would rather walk. A measure of fresh air and exercise was the point of this little adventure.”

“OK.”

“But please join us back at the house, for coffee, if you like.”

“OK,” Holland said again.

He checked his mirrors and U-turned across the width of the road. Frozen ruts splintered under his wheels. He got lined up in the southbound lane but didn’t race on ahead. He kept pace instead, crawling slowly, holding a lateral line with himself on the left behind the wheel, then his empty passenger seat, then the berm of plowed snow, then Reacher, then Janet Salter. His front tires were made of hard winter compound, and they crunched and scrabbled slowly. He had chains on the back. Each link rotated into position and made its own distinct sound. He put his flashing lights on, to warn the traffic behind him of his low speed. He had strobes concealed in the rear parcel shelf, matched by more behind the radiator grille. Reacher guessed they would do the job. From a distance the unmarked car would look like a regular police cruiser.

Janet Salter said, “This is ridiculous.”

Reacher said, “He’s just doing his job.”

“I don’t like the attention.”

“You’re important to him.”

“Only because he can use me.”

“You’re a prominent citizen. You’re the kind of person a chief of police worries about.”

Janet Salter said, “The only prominent citizens in this town are the prison staff. Believe me. That’s how it works now.”

They walked on, with the idling car crunching slowly alongside them. Where there were no buildings on their right the wind blew in hard and strong and uninterrupted, a mass of frozen air whistling relentlessly over the flat land, with nothing in its path to roil it up or make it turbulent. It was still carrying tiny spicules of ice. They came in horizontal and pattered against the side of Reacher’s hood. They could have been airborne for hundreds of miles, maybe all the way from the Rocky Mountains.

Janet Salter asked, “Are you cold?”

Reacher smiled, as much as his numb face would let him.

“I know,” he said. “This is nothing.”

They got back in the house and peeled off layers and endured the pain of thawing. Reacher’s ears burned and his nose and chin prickled and itched. Peterson and the two women cops had to have been feeling the same, but they showed no signs of distress. Probably a matter of local South Dakota pride. Chief Holland was entirely OK. He had been riding in a heated car, out of the wind. But still he gave a theatrical shiver as soon as he stepped into the hallway. Relief, Reacher figured, now that Janet Salter’s exposure was over and they had gotten away with it.

The two women cops took up their established positions. Janet Salter went to work with her percolator. Reacher and Peterson and Holland watched her from the hallway. Then the phone rang. Janet Salter asked someone to pick it up. Peterson got it. He listened for a second and held the receiver out to Reacher.

“For you,” he said. “It’s the woman from the 110th MP.”

Reacher took the phone. Peterson and Holland trooped into the kitchen and left him alone. Instinctive politeness. Reacher put the phone to his ear and the voice from Virginia said, “I called a guy in the Air Force.”

“And?”

“We’re getting there. Slowly, but not because it’s a secret. Quite the opposite. Because the place was abandoned and forgotten years ago. It fell off the active list when God’s dog was still a puppy. Nobody can remember a thing about it.”

“Not even what it was?”

“All the details are archived. All my guy has seen so far is a report about how hard it was to build. The design was compromised several times during construction because of the kind of terrain they found. Some kind of schist. You know what that is?”

“Bedrock, I guess,” Reacher said. “Probably hard, if it caused difficulties.”

“It proves they were excavating underground.”

“That’s for sure. Not a bad result, for the first two hours.”

“One hour,” the voice said. “I took a nap first.”

“You’re a bad person.”

“Last time I checked, you’re not my boss.”

“Anything else?”

“I got a hit on a Florida cop called Kapler. Miami PD, born there thirty-six years ago, upped and quit two years ago for no apparent reason. No health issues, not in debt. I’ll get more when I’m in the Miami PD records.”

“You can do that with Google?”

“No, I’m using a few other resources. I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said. “Anything else?”

There was a pause. “My guy isn’t talking.”

“From Fort Hood?”

“Not a word.”

“Where is he?”

“Back on post, in a cell.”

“Did he live on-post or off-post?”

“Off.”

“So he’s looking at Texas law for the homicide or the Uniform Code for the treason. That’s a rock and a hard place. Either way he’s going to fry. He doesn’t have an incentive to talk.”

“What would you do?”

“What’s your goal?”

“The nonstate actors. Who he’s talking to, and how, and why.”

“The why is easy. He probably served in Iraq or Afghanistan and got seduced by all the humanitarian bullshit and made friends and got played like a fish. The how will be cell phone or e-mail or an encrypted website. The who will be very interesting, I agree.”

“So how do I get him to talk?”

“Order him to. You outrank him. He’s trained to obey.”

“That won’t be enough. It never is.”

“Are his parents still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Siblings?”

“A younger brother, training with the Navy SEALs.”

“That’s good. That’s close to perfect, in fact. You need to bring your boy north, and sit him down, and offer him a deal.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can, in terms of publicity. Tell him he’s going to fry, no question, but for what is up to him. Domestic violence by returning officers is up, what, a thousand percent? Nobody condones it, but most folks kind of understand it. So tell him if he cooperates, that’s all the world will know about him. But tell him if he doesn’t cooperate, then you’ll do the treason thing out in the open. His parents will be ashamed and mortified, his brother will have to quit the SEALs, his old high school will disown him.”

“Will that work?”

“All he’s got left is his name. He’s Fourth Infantry. That stuff matters over there.”

No reply.

“Believe me,” Reacher said. “Let him get out with honor.”

“Domestic violence is honorable?”

“Compared to the alternative.”

“OK, I’ll give it a try.”

“Don’t forget about me,” Reacher said. “I need to know what the Air Force built here. The scope, purpose and architecture, same as I always did. As soon as possible.”

“Anything else?”

“Are you married?”

She hung up without answering.

All six people that were awake and in the house had coffee. Janet Salter herself, Holland, Peterson, Reacher, and the two women cops. Maybe they joined in because they needed to get warm. They all got halfway through their first cup, and then Holland’s cell phone rang. He balanced his mug and opened the phone one-handed and listened for a minute. Then he closed the phone again and stuffed it back in his pocket.

“Highway Patrol,” he said. “The bikers are leaving. Right now. Thirty-six pick-up trucks just hit the highway.”

Five to one in the afternoon.

Fifteen hours to go.

Chapter 25

Reacher rode back to the station house with Holland and got the story on the way. The Highway Patrol was out in force on the highway to check that there were no remaining weather problems. One of their number had been parked on the eastbound shoulder. He had been watching the traffic coming and going, but then in the left corner of his eye had seen a long fast convoy heading down the snowy ribbon that led from the construction camp. It was quite a sight. Between thirty and forty pick-up trucks driving nose to tail, each one with three people in the cab and a tarp-covered motorbike and piles of boxes strapped down in the load bed. They had slowed and turned and then streamed and snaked and swooped around the cloverleaf and merged onto the highway and accelerated west. Like a train, the officer had said. Like the Northern Pacific itself. The convoy looked a quarter-mile long and was taking twenty whole seconds to pass any given point.

The desk sergeant confirmed the news. Highway Patrol cruisers were calling in reports, one after the other. The convoy was now ten miles west of Bolton, and still moving fast. But not fast enough to get ticketed. They were holding to an easy sixty-five, driving straight and true, still steadfastly keeping their noses clean.

* * *

They used the office with the crime scene photographs. Four desks boxed together, four chairs. Holland and Peterson sat side by side, and Reacher sat facing Holland, with his back to the pictures of the dead guy dressed in black. He asked, “You happy to just let them go?”

Holland asked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“They were selling meth.”

“This is a small town at heart,” Holland said. “We operate under small town rules. If I see the back of a thing, that’s generally as good as solving it.”

Peterson said, “End of problem.”

“Not really,” Reacher said. “They cleaned up and got out because the real estate closing is about to happen. And a closing needs a good title. Janet Salter is the last little smudge on it. She’s in more danger now than she ever was. She’s the only thing standing between someone and a lot of money.”

“Plato the Mexican.”

“Whoever.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Holland said. “We have seven officers in place, and they’re staying there. We’ll be OK.”

“Unless the siren goes off again.”

“You say it won’t.”

Reacher said, “An educated guess is still a guess. Just remember, this is the time to start worrying, not to stop.”

Holland said, “You see me relaxing, I hereby give you permission to kick my butt. We may have our problems, and we may not be the U.S. Army, but we’ve struggled along so far. You should remember that.”

Reacher nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. Not your fault. It’s the mayor’s fault. Who would sign off on a plan like that?”

“Anyone would,” Holland said. “Those are jobs that can’t be shipped overseas. Which is the name of the game right now.”

The room went quiet for a moment.

Peterson said, “The motels are all full.”

Reacher said, “I know that.”

“So where is the bad guy sleeping?”

“In his car. Or in the next county.”

“Where is he eating?”

“Same answer.”

“So should we use roadblocks? There are only three ways in.”

“No,” Holland said. “False premise. We set up a static perimeter, he might be already behind us. We have to stay mobile.” Then he went quiet again, as if he was running through a mental agenda and checking that all the items on it had been covered. Which they must have been, because his next move was to stand up and walk out of the room without another word. Reacher heard the slap of his boot soles against the linoleum and then the slam of a door. His office, presumably. Work to do.

Peterson said, “We should get lunch. You could come back to the house. You could be company for Kim. She would like that.”

“Because she’s lonely?”

“Yes.”

“Then you and I shouldn’t be the only human specimens she sees all day. Go pick her up and we’ll have lunch in town, the three of us.”

“Hard to get a table.”

“I’ll wait on line while you’re on the road.”

“Where?”

“The coffee shop where you found me yesterday. Across the square.”

Peterson said, “But,” and then nothing more.

“I know,” Reacher said. “I can see the police station from there. I can see when the bus is ready to leave.”

The walk across the square to the coffee shop was short, but it was straight into the wind. The blowing ice hurt for the first few steps, like tiny needles, but then Reacher’s face went numb and he didn’t feel them anymore. The line for a table was out the door. Reacher took his place behind a woman and a child wrapped in comforters that were probably borrowed from their motel beds. A guy commits a federal crime in Florida or Arizona, ends up in prison in South Dakota, the family has to follow. For the first year or two, anyway. After that, maybe not. A lot to lose.

The line moved slowly but steadily and Reacher got level with the steamed window. Inside he could see vague shapes bustling about. Two waitresses. Steady wages, maybe not much in tips. Families of prisoners didn’t have much money. If they did, they weren’t families of prisoners. Or, worst case, their guy was in a Club Fed somewhere, doing woodwork for a year, or reading books.

The mother and child squeezed their motel comforters in through the door. Reacher waited his turn on the sidewalk. He was pressed up against the building and out of the wind. Then a woman with three kids straggled out and Reacher ducked in. He waited at the register until a waitress glanced at him. He mouthed the word three and held up three fingers. The waitress nodded and swiped a rag across a table and beckoned him over. He dumped his coat on the back of a chair and peeled off his hat and gloves. He sat down and saw Peterson’s car stop outside at the curb, a long black and white shape through the fog on the glass. He saw Peterson cross the sidewalk. His wife wasn’t with him. Peterson cut to the head of the line and stepped in through the door. No one complained. Peterson was in uniform.

Reacher stayed in his seat and Peterson shed his coat and sat down to an awkward silence that was broken only by the arrival of the waitress with an order pad in her hand. Not the kind of place that offered extra minutes for study of the menu. Peterson ordered a hamburger and water and Reacher got grilled cheese and coffee. Reacher was facing the window, and Peterson turned around to look at it, and then turned back with a satisfied smile.

“I know,” Reacher said. “It’s all steamed up. But a bus is a pretty big thing. I’ll be able to make it out.”

“You won’t leave.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Kim didn’t want to come. She doesn’t care much for crowds, either.”

“Crowds, or this kind of crowd?”

“Both.”

They were two people at a table for four, and the line was still out the door, but nobody wanted to sit with them. People came in, glanced over, maybe took half a step, and then stopped and glanced away. The world was divided into two halves, people who liked cops and people who didn’t. The military had been exactly the same. Reacher had eaten next to empty chairs, many, many times.

Peterson asked, “What would you do, if you were me?”

“About what?”

“The department.”

“It’s not yours.”

“I’m next in line.”

“I would start some serious training. Then I would renegotiate the deal with the prison. Their crisis plan is completely unsustainable.”

“It worked OK last night, apart from the thing with Mrs. Salter.”

“That’s the point. That’s like saying it worked OK, except it didn’t. You have to plan for the contingencies.”

“I’m not much of a politician.”

“Please tell me there’s a review period built in.”

“There is. But they’ll say it’s rare that our help is needed. And if we get through this month with Mrs. Salter we won’t have any negatives to show them.”

There was no more conversation. Peterson kept quiet, and Reacher had nothing more to say. Without Kim there, the whole thing was a bust. But the food was OK. The coffee was fresh. No real alternative, given the turnover of customers. There were three flasks behind the counter and all three of them were constantly dripping and emptying. The sandwich was nicely fried, and Reacher was ready for the calories. Like throwing coal into a furnace. Being cold was like being on a diet. He understood why all the locals he met looked basically the same, all lean and fair and slender. Fair, because of their genetic inheritance. Lean and slender, because they were freezing their asses off for half the year.

First Reacher and then Peterson finished eating, and immediately they felt the covetous stares from the people lining up inside the door. So Reacher paid, and left a generous tip, which earned him a tired smile from the waitress. Then he and Peterson stepped out to the sidewalk, just in time to see a big yellow bus pull up in the police station lot.

Five to two in the afternoon.

Fourteen hours to go.

The bus was the same size and shape and style as the vehicle that had crashed two days earlier. Same amenities. It had blanked-out windows at the rear, where the washroom was. Same number of seats. Same kind of door. It had entered the lot from the north, so the door was facing away from the police station lobby. Reacher stood with Peterson in the square with the wind on his back and watched a thin line of wrapped-up old folks come out and walk around. There were all kinds of grateful farewells going on. The locals, shaking hands, getting hugged, giving out addresses and phone numbers. He saw the lady with the busted collar bone. She was in a coat with one empty sleeve. He saw the woman with the cracked wrist. She was cradling one hand and someone else was carrying her bag. Most of the others had their Band-Aids off. Their cuts were all healed up. The new driver was crouching down and slotting suitcases into the hold under the floor. The old folks were detouring around him one after the other and gripping the handrails carefully and climbing slowly up the step. Reacher saw them inside through the windows, white cotton-ball heads moving down the aisle, pausing, choosing their places, getting settled.

Last aboard was Jay Knox himself, once the driver, now just a passenger. He walked down the aisle and dumped himself in a window seat three rows behind the last of the seniors. Reacher’s seat. Near the rear wheels, where the ride was roughest. No point in traveling, if you’re not feeling it.

The new driver latched the hold compartments and bounced up the step. A second later the door sucked shut behind him. The engine started. Reacher heard the heavy diesel rattle. Heard the air brake release and the snick of a gear. The engine roared and the bus moved away, out of the lot, onto the road. The icy wind battered at it. It headed south toward the highway. Reacher watched it go, until it was lost to sight.

Peterson clapped him on the back.

Reacher said, “A viable mode of transportation just left town without me on it. I just broke the habit of a lifetime.”

Plato dialed his guy again. Direct. A risk, but he was enough of an analyst to know that caution sometimes had to be abandoned. To know that chronology couldn’t be beaten. To know that timing was everything. The clock ticked on, whoever you were. Even if you were Plato.

His guy answered.

Plato asked, “Do you have news for me?”

“Not yet. I’m sorry.”

Plato paused. “It almost seems like it would be easier just to do the job than find new ways of delaying it.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It seems like you’re working very hard to save the wrong life.”

“I’m not.”

“Focus on the life you really want to save.”

“I will. I am.”

“You have a deadline. Please don’t let me down.”

Reacher walked back to the station. Peterson drove. They met in the silent lobby and stood there for a second. They had nothing to do, and both of them knew it. Then Holland came out of his office and said, “We should go up to the camp. To take a look around. Now that it’s empty. While we’ve still got daylight.”

Chapter 26

They went in Holland’s car. It was a better fit for three people than Peterson’s cruiser, because it had no security screen between the front seats and the rear. Reacher rode in the back, sprawled sideways, comfortable, watching the roads he had driven that morning. Conditions were still bad. The wind was still strong. The snow was frozen so hard it looked like part of the earth, and it was being scoured into long sharp ridges and runnels. It was blinding white under the pale afternoon sun. Like the Ice Age.

They turned onto the old road parallel with the highway and again onto the wandering two-lane up toward the camp. The first eight miles were as bad as before. Icy humps and dips, reversed cambers, constant deviations from straight. Then, as before, the horizon changed. The clear gray concrete, massively wide, infinitely long, the aerodynamic berms of snow, the visible wind howling above the surface.

Holland slowed and bumped up on the new level and stopped and kept his foot on the brake, like a plane waiting to launch. He said, “You see what you want to see, don’t you? I was here a dozen times in my life and thought this was just a road. Kind of fancy, maybe, but I guess I figured hey, that’s the military for you.”

“It used to be narrower,” Peterson said. “That’s what made it hard to see. The winds put dirt all over it. Only the middle part was ever used. These guys plowed it for the first time in fifty years. Not just snow. They pushed the dirt off.”

“It’s a piece of work,” Holland said. “That’s for sure.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Reacher said. “It’s got to be a yard thick. By volume it’s probably the largest man-made object in South Dakota.”

They all looked a minute longer and then Holland took his foot off the brake and the snow chains chattered and the car rolled on. Two whole miles. The tan shapes of the huts loomed up, with the slate roof of the stone building standing tall behind them, under its cap of snow. Holland parked about where Reacher had. The scene ahead was different. No people. No trucks. No bikes. Just the empty plowed spaces, and the wooden huts all forlorn and abandoned among them.

They all got out of the car. Put their hats on, put their gloves on, zipped up their coats. The temperature was still dropping. Way below zero degrees, and the wind made it worse. The cold struck upward through the soles of Reacher’s boots. His face went numb after seconds. Holland and Peterson were putting on a show of taking it in their stride, but Reacher knew they had to be hurting. Their faces were mottled red and white, and they were blinking, and they were coughing and gasping a little.

They all headed straight for the stone building. It looked no different than it had in the morning. Partly forbidding, partly just plain weird. Peterson tried the door. It didn’t move. He rubbed the new frost off the keyhole with his thumb, the same way Reacher had. He said, “There are no scratches here. The lock wasn’t in regular use.”

“Didn’t need to be,” Reacher said. “They unlocked it a year ago and relocked it this morning.”

“So where’s the key?”

“That’s a good question.”

Holland said, “They took it with them.”

Reacher said, “I don’t think they did.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because this place is getting sold. Wouldn’t they have been told to leave the key for the new owner?”

“So where is it?”

“Under the mat, probably.”

“There is no mat.”

“Under a flowerpot, then.”

“What flowerpot?”

“Figure of speech,” Reacher said. “People leave keys in prearranged locations.”

All three of them turned a slow circle, looking at everything there was to see. Which wasn’t much. Just snow, and concrete, and the huts, and the building itself.

“What’s it going to look like?” Peterson asked. “Just a key?”

“Big,” Reacher said. “It’s a blast door, so the lock will be complex. Lots of moving parts. Hard to turn. So the key will be big and strong. Probably T-shaped, like a clock key, probably made out of some kind of fancy steel. Probably cost the Pentagon a thousand bucks all on its own.”

“Maybe they buried it in the snow. We have a metal detector in the car.”

“But I’m guessing the Russian guy from Brooklyn doesn’t. Which means it isn’t in the snow. That’s no kind of customer relations. You can’t ask a guy to dig around in a snow bank for an hour.”

“So where is it?”

There were stone ledges and carved moldings and Gothic features all over the building. Eye-level and below was too obvious. Reacher walked a circuit and ran his hands along everything up to about eight feet off the ground. Nothing there. And anything higher would be inaccessible, unless the Russian was figuring on bringing a folding ladder.

Reacher stopped walking and looked around all over again and said, “It has to be somewhere definite. Like under the third thing from the left or the fourth thing from the right.”

Peterson said, “What kind of thing?”

“Hut, bed, anything.”

“Can’t we just jimmy the door with a tire iron?”

“It’s a blast door. Designed to stand up to a big pressure wave.”

“But we’d be pulling outward, not pushing inward.”

“Pressure waves are followed by vacuums. Compression and then rarefaction. Compression pushes in, rarefaction sucks back out, and just as hard. Both ways around, that’s a strong door.”

Peterson said, “So we better start searching.”

“What’s your lucky number?”

“Three.”

“So start with the third hut, under the third mattress.”

“Counting from where?”

Reacher paused. “That’s another good question. Front row, from the left, probably. But ultimately any counting system could be called subjective. And therefore potentially confusing. The only real objectivity would be in saying the nearest or the farthest.”

“From where?”

“Here. The locked door.”

“That’s assuming it’s in a hut at all.”

“It’s not in the snow and it can’t be in the building itself. What else is there?”

Peterson headed for the nearest hut. The first in the back row, opposite the second in the front row. The first one Reacher had checked that morning. The door was unlocked. Peterson pushed it open and stepped inside. Reacher and Holland followed him. The burlap drapes were still at the windows. Everything else portable was gone. There was nothing to see except the twelve cots, now stripped back to striped blue mattress ticking and dull iron frames. The place looked sad and abandoned and empty.

But it was warm.

The paraffin heater had its burner turned to the off position, but it was still giving out plenty of residual heat. It was glorious. Reacher stripped off his gloves and held his hands out to it. Simple physics meant that it had to be cooling all the time, and maybe three hours from then it would be merely lukewarm, and three hours after that it would be stone cold, but right then it was completely magnificent. Still too hot to touch, in fact. The combination of cast iron and recent hydrocarbon combustion was a wonderful thing. Reacher said, “You guys go search somewhere else. I’m staying right here.”

Peterson said, “With a bit of luck they’ll all be the same.”

They were. All three of them hustled to the farthest hut to check it out, and they found the same situation. Empty room, stripped beds, warm stove. They started the serious search right there. The warmth made them patient and painstaking. They checked every mattress, every cot frame, every nook, and every cranny. They checked the toilet tank in the bathroom area. They looked for loose boards, listened for hollows in the walls, and opened every bulkhead light fixture.

They found nothing.

Five to three in the afternoon.

Thirteen hours to go.

They searched the kitchen next. Reacher figured it was a strong possibility. A kitchen was an unambiguous location. A singularity. There was only one of them. Even more definite than the first hut or the last. But the key wasn’t in it. The jars of flour and sugar and coffee were still there, but too empty to hide a metal object from even the most cursory of shakes. It wasn’t shoved to the back of the shelves, it wasn’t taped to the underside of a table, it wasn’t in the cornflake dregs like a toy, it wasn’t nested in a pile of bowls.

After the kitchen they worked back toward the stone building, hut by hut. They got better and faster at searching each step of the way, from sheer practice and repetition, because each hut was identical to all the others. They got to where they could have done it blindfolded, or asleep. But even so, they got the same result everywhere. Which was no result at all.

They arrived back where they had begun, in the hut nearest the stone building. They were reluctant to start searching it, because they felt sure they would be disappointed, and drawing a blank in the last of fifteen places carried with it some kind of finality. Reacher walked through the space, stopping at the stove, moving on to the last bed on the right.

He said, “There was a girl sitting here this morning.”

Holland stepped alongside him. “What girl?”

“Just a biker, maybe nineteen or twenty. The only one I saw inside. The others were all out working on the snow.”

“Was she sick?”

“She looked OK to me.”

“Was she locked up?”

“No, the door was open.”

“Maybe she was guarding the key. Like that was her function.”

“Maybe she was. But where did she leave it?”

“What did she look like?”

“Tall and thin and blonde, like the rest of you.”

“You think she was local?”

“Meth is a rural thing,” Reacher said. Then he thought: Tall and thin and blonde. He asked, “Are you getting a cell signal out here?”

“Sure,” Holland said. “Flat land all around. Wind and dust and microwaves, they’re all the same to us.”

“Let me use your phone.”

Holland handed it over and Reacher dialed the number he remembered.

“Yes?”

“Amanda, please.”

A click. A purr. The voice. It said, “Where the hell are you?”

Reacher said, “What? Now you’re my mother?”

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

“I’m out at the Air Force place. Trying to get in. Looking for the key. I need to know the top twenty ingenious places you’ve ever found a small hidden object.”

“VCR slot, kettle, shoe, inside a TV set, the battery compartment of a transistor radio, a hollowed-out book, cut into the foam inside the seat of a car, in a bar of soap, in a tub of cream cheese.”

“That’s only nine. You’re hopeless.”

“Give me time.”

“There isn’t any of that kind of stuff here.”

“So what is there?”

Reacher walked around the hut and described everything he was seeing.

The voice said, “The toilet tank.”

“Checked them all.”

“Any torn mattresses?”

“No.”

“Loose boards?”

“No.”

“So burn the place down and sift the ashes. An Air Force key is probably made of the same stuff as warheads. It would survive, easy.”

“Why were you trying to get hold of me?”

“Because I know what that place is.”

Chapter 27

Peterson and Holland had heard the thin squawk of her words from the earpiece. They stepped closer. Reacher sat down on the bed, where the biker girl had been. The voice on the phone said, “That place was built as an orphanage.”

Reacher said, “Underground?”

“It was fifty years ago. The height of the Cold War. Everyone was going nuts. My guy faxed me the file. The casualty predictions were horrendous. The Soviets were assumed to have missiles to spare, by the hundreds. A full scale launch, they’d have been scratching their heads for targets. We ran scenarios, and it all came down to the day of the week and the time of the year. Saturday or Sunday or during the school vacations, it was assumed everyone would get it pretty much equally. But weekdays during the semester, they predicted a significant separation between the adult population and the juvenile, in terms of physical location. Parents would be in one place, their kids would be in another, maybe in a shelter under a school.”

“Or under their desks,” Reacher said.

“Wherever,” the voice said. “The point is that the survival numbers two weeks after the launch were very skewed. They showed a lot more kids than adults. Some guy on House Appropriations started obsessing about it. He wanted places for these kids to go. He figured they might be able to get to undamaged regional airports and be flown out to remote areas. He wanted combination radiation shelters and living accommodations built. He talked to the Air Force. He scratched their backs, they scratched his. He was from South Dakota, so that’s where they started.”

“The local scuttlebutt is about a scandal,” Reacher said. “Building an orphanage doesn’t sound especially scandalous.”

“You don’t understand. The assumption was there would be no adults left. Maybe a sick and dying pilot or two, that’s all. Some harassed bureaucrat with a clipboard. The idea was that these kids would be dumped out of the planes and left alone to lock themselves underground and manage the best they could. On their own. Like wild, feral animals. It wasn’t a pretty picture. They got reports from psychologists saying there would be tribalism, fighting, killing, maybe even cannibalism. And the median age of the survivors was supposed to be seven. Then the psychologists talked to the grown-ups, and it turned out that their worst fear was that they would die and their kids would live on without them. They needed to hear that things would be OK, you know, with doctors and nurses and clean sheets on the bed. They didn’t want to hear about how things were really going to be. So there was a lot of fuss and then the idea was dropped, as a matter of civilian morale.”

“So this place just stood here for fifty years?”

“Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else.”

“Do we know what the compromises were?”

“No. The plans were lost decades ago.”

“So is the place empty?”

“They filled it with junk they needed to store and then they forgot all about it.”

“Is the stuff still in there?”

“I’m assuming so.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s in another file. But it can’t be very exciting. It’s something that was already surplus to requirements fifty years ago.”

“Are you going to find out?”

“My guy has requested the file.”

“How’s my weather?”

“Stick your head out the door.”

“I mean, what’s coming my way?”

A pause. “It’ll be snowing again tomorrow. Clear and cold until then.”

“Where would a bunch of bikers have hidden a key?”

“I don’t know. I can’t help you.”

Five minutes to four in the afternoon.

Twelve hours to go.

Reacher handed the phone back to Holland. The light from the window was dimming. The sun was way in the west and the stone building was casting a long shadow. They set about searching the hut. Their last chance. Every mattress, every bed frame, the toilet tank, the floorboards, the walls, the light fixtures. They did it slowly and thoroughly, and got even slower and more thorough as they approached the end of the room and started running out of options.

They found nothing.

Peterson said, “We could get a locksmith, maybe from Pierre.”

Reacher said, “A bank robber would be better. A safe cracker. Maybe they’ve got one up at the prison.”

“I can’t believe they never used the place. It must have cost a fortune.”

“The defense budget was practically unlimited back then.”

“I can’t believe they couldn’t find an alternative use for it.”

“The design was compromised somehow.”

“Even so. Somebody could have used it.”

“Too landlocked for the Navy. We’re close to the geographic center of the United States. Or so they said on the bus tour.”

“The Marines could have used it for winter training.”

“Not with South in the name of the state. Too chicken. The Marines would have insisted on North Dakota. Or the North Pole.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to sleep underground.”

“Marines sleep where they’re told. And when.”

“Actually I heard they do their winter training near San Diego.”

“I was in the army,” Reacher said. “Marine training makes no sense to me.”

They braved the cold again and took a last look at the stone building and its stubborn door. Then they walked back to the car and climbed in and drove away. Two miles along the runway, where battered planes were to have spilled ragged children. Then eight miles on the old two-lane, up which no adult would have come to the rescue. The Cold War. A bad time. In retrospect, probably less dangerous than imagined. Some Soviet missiles were mere fictions, some were painted tree trunks, some were faulty. And the Soviets had psychologists too, preparing reports in the Cyrillic alphabet about seven-year-olds of their own, and about tribalism and fighting and killing and cannibalism. But at the time things had seemed very real. Reacher had been two years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In the Pacific. He had known nothing about it. But later his mother had told him how she and his father had calculated the southern drift of the poisoned wind. Two weeks, they thought. There were guns in the house. And on the base there were corpsmen with pills.

Reacher asked, “How accurate are your weather reports?”

Peterson said, “Usually pretty good.”

“They’re calling for snow again tomorrow.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Then someone’s going to show up soon. They didn’t plow that runway for nothing.”

Far to the east and a little to the south a plane was landing on another long runway, at Andrews Air Force Base in the state of Maryland. Not a large plane. A business jet, leased by the army, assigned to an MP prisoner escort company. It was carrying six people. A pilot, a co-pilot, three prisoner escorts, and a prisoner. The prisoner was the Fourth Infantry captain from Fort Hood. He was in civilian clothes and was hobbled by standard restraint chains around his wrists and waist and ankles, all interconnected. The plane taxied and the steps were lowered and the prisoner was hustled down them to a car parked on the apron. He was put in the back seat. Waiting for him there was a woman officer in a Class A army uniform. An MP major. She was a little above average height. She was slender. She had long dark hair tied back. Tanned skin, deep brown eyes. She had intelligence and authority and youth and mischief in her face, all at the same time. She was wearing ribbons for a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

There was no driver in the front of the car.

The woman said, “Good afternoon, Captain.”

The captain didn’t speak.

The woman said, “My name is Susan Turner. My rank is major, and I command the 110th MP, and I’m handling your case. You and I are going to talk for a minute, and then you’re going to get back on the plane, and you’re either going to head back to Texas, or straight over to Fort Leavenworth. One or the other. You understand?”

Her voice was warm. It was a little husky, a little breathy, a little intimate. All in her throat. It was the kind of voice that could tease out all kinds of confidences.

The infantry captain knew it.

He said, “I want a lawyer.”

Susan Turner nodded.

“You’ll get one,” she said. “You’ll get plenty. Believe me, before long you’re going to be completely up to your ass in lawyers. It’s going to be like you wandered into a Bar Association convention with a hundred dollar bill tied around your neck.”

“You can’t talk to me without a lawyer.”

“That’s not quite accurate. You don’t have to say anything to me without a lawyer. I can talk to you all I want. See the difference?”

The guy said nothing.

“I have some bad news,” Susan Turner said. “You’re going to die. You know that, right? You are completely busted. You are more busted than the most busted person who ever lived. There’s no way anyone can save you. That’s exactly what you’re going to hear from the lawyers. No matter how many you get. They’re all going to say the same thing. You’re going to be executed, and probably very soon. I won’t give you false hope. You’re a dead man walking.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, “Actually you’re a dead man sitting, at this point. Sitting in a car, and listening to me. Which you should do, because you’ve got two very important choices coming up. The second is what you eat for your last meal. Steak and ice cream are the most popular picks. I don’t know why. Not that I give a shit about dietary issues. It’s your first choice I’m interested in. Want to guess what that is?”

The guy said nothing.

“Your first choice is what you go down for. Either Texas will kill you for killing your wife, or Leavenworth will kill you for betraying your country. I’ll be frank with you, in my opinion neither one does you much credit. But the Texas issue, maybe people will understand it a little bit. Combat stress, multiple tours of duty, all that kind of thing. All that post-traumatic stuff. Some people might even call you a kind of victim.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, “But the treason issue, that’s different. There’s no excuse for that. Your mom and your dad, they’re going to have to sell their house and move. Maybe change their name. Maybe they won’t be able to sell, and they’ll just hang themselves in the basement.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, “Not much ceiling height in a basement. It’ll be slow. Like strangulation. Maybe they’ll hold hands.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner moved in her seat. Long legs, sheathed in dark nylon. “And think about your kid brother. All those years of looking up to you? All gone. He’ll have to leave the Navy. Who would trust him on their team? The brother of a traitor? That’s a life sentence for him, too. He’ll end up working construction. He’ll drink. He’ll curse your rotten name every day of his life. Maybe he’ll kill himself, too. Gunshot, probably. In the mouth or behind the ear.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, “So here’s the deal. Talk to me now, answer all my questions, full and complete disclosure, all the details, and we’ll keep the treason absolutely private.”

The guy said nothing.

Turner said, “But if you don’t talk to me, we’ll do the investigation in public. Right out in the open. We’ll tell CNN where your folks live, and we’ll call the Navy about your brother. Not the officers. We’ll call his buddies first.”

Silence for a long moment.

Then the guy said, “OK.”

“OK what?”

“OK, I’ll talk to you.”

“OK you’ll talk to me what?”

“OK, I’ll talk to you, ma’am.”

Turner rolled her window down. She called out, “Tell the pilot to go get his dinner.”

Plato put the phone down on his pilot. The guy had called to say the weather in the north was due to take a turn for the worse at some point within the next twenty-four hours. More snow. Which Plato already knew. He had satellite television. He had a huge mesh dish bolted to a concrete pad right next to his house. The dish was connected to a box, and the box was connected to an enormous Sony LCD screen on the end wall of the living room. It was tuned to the Weather Channel.

The Sony screen was not the only thing on the end wall. There were eighteen oil paintings next to it, all jostling for space. There were forty-three more on the two long walls. Twenty on the other end wall. A total of eighty-one works of art. Mostly second-rate pieces by fourth-rate painters. Or third-rate pieces by third-rate painters. Or fourth-rate pieces by second-rate painters. One was a Monet, supposedly, but Plato knew it had to be a forgery. Monet was a prolific artist. Widely distributed, often copied. Someone had once said that of the two thousand pictures Monet had painted in his lifetime, six thousand were in the United States alone. Plato wasn’t a fool. He knew what he had. And he knew why he had it. He didn’t much care for art. Not his thing. Each canvas was a souvenir, that was all, of a ruined life.

In the spaces between the paintings he had nailed small inverted horseshoe-shaped arrays of thin brass pins. Dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. He hadn’t counted for a long time. Over each array was draped as many necklaces or bracelets as would fit. He had diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Gold chains, silver chains, platinum chains. He had earrings hung from single pins. He had finger rings looped over single pins. Wedding bands, engagement rings, signet rings, class rings, big diamond solitaires.

Hundreds and hundreds of them.

Maybe even thousands.

It was all a question of time.

It was a subject that interested him. It was dominated by class. How long could people last, after running out of cash, before they had to start selling their bodies? How many layers did people have, between defeat and surrender, between problem and ruin? For poor people, really no time at all, and no layers at all. They needed his product, so as soon as their meager paychecks ran out, which was usually payday itself, they would start fighting and stealing and cheating, and then they would take to the streets, and they would do whatever it was they had to do. He got nothing but money from them.

Rich people were different. Bigger paychecks, which lasted longer, but not forever. Then would start the slow depletion of savings accounts, stocks, bonds, investments of all kinds. Then desperate hands would root through drawers and jewelry boxes. First would come forgotten pieces, pieces that were not liked, pieces that had been inherited. Those items would find their way to him after long slow journeys, from nice suburbs in Chicago and Minneapolis and Milwaukee and Des Moines and Indianapolis. They would be followed by paintings snatched from walls, rings pulled from fingers, chains unlatched from necks. A second wave would follow, as parents were looted, then a third, as grandparents were visited. When nothing was left, the rich people would succumb, too. Maybe at first in hotels, fooling themselves, but always eventually out on the street, in the cold, kneeling in filthy alleyways, men and women alike, doing what needed to be done.

All a matter of time.

Holland parked in the lot and headed for his office. Peterson and Reacher headed for the squad room. It was deserted, as usual. No messages on the back corner desk, nothing in voice mail. Reacher picked up the phone and then put it back. He tapped the space bar on the keyboard and the computer screen lit up and showed a graphic of a police shield that had Bolton Police Department written across it. The graphic was large and a little ragged. A little digital. A tower unit a yard away was humming and whirring and chattering. A hard drive, getting up to speed.

Reacher asked, “Have you got databases in here?”

Peterson asked, “Why?”

“We could check on Plato. He seems to be the prime mover here, whoever he is.”

Peterson sat down at the next desk along and tapped his own keyboard. Clicked here, clicked there, typed a password. Then some kind of dialog box must have come up, because Reacher saw him use his left forefinger on the shift key, his right forefinger on a capital P, then on a lowercase l, then an a, a t, and an o.

Plato.

“Nothing,” Peterson said. “Just a redirect to Google, who says he’s a Greek philosopher.”

“Got a list of known aliases?”

Peterson typed some more. Nine keystrokes. Presumably aka, then a space, then Plato.

“South American,” he said. “Citizenship unknown. Real name unknown. Age unknown. Believed to live in Mexico. Believed to own pawn shops in five United States cities, suspected narcotics trafficker, suspected involvement in prostitution.”

“Nice guy.”

“No arrest record. Nothing in Mexico, either.”

“Is that it?”

“The federal databases will have more. But I can’t access them.”

Reacher picked up the phone again, and then put it back. Rock Creek had more on its plate than his trivial business. He wondered if he was becoming an embarrassment. Or a bore. Like the grizzled old noncoms who still lived close to army posts and sat in grunt bars all night, full of piss and wind and out-of-date bullshit and nonsense. Or like retired city cops, the ones who hadn’t saved enough to move south, still patronizing the same old saloons and butting in on every conversation.

Peterson said, “We could go up to the prison. It’s in the federal system. They’ve got computers. I know some of the guys there.”

Five minutes to five in the afternoon.

Eleven hours to go.

Chapter 28

The prison was five miles due north, at the end of a continuation of the same road that led up to town from the highway. The road was straight, as if a planner had laid a ruler on a map. It was plowed and salted and pretty much clear from constant use. Visiting day. The shuttle buses had been busy.

The five miles took eight minutes. For the first seven Reacher saw nothing ahead except a late gloomy sky and ice in the air. Then he saw the prison. There was a diffuse glow on the far horizon that resolved itself into hundreds of separate puffballs of blue-white light high above a glittering razor-wire fence. The fence was long and maybe twelve feet tall. Maybe twelve feet thick. It had inner and outer screens of taut wire. The space in between was piled high with loose coils. More loose coils were fixed along the top. They were moving and swaying in the wind, flashing and winking in the light. The light came from stadium fixtures on tall poles set every thirty feet. Huge upside-down metal bowls in groups of four, with powerful bulbs in them. There were watchtowers set every hundred feet, tall splay-legged structures with lit-up glassed-in cabins and outside walkways. There were searchlights on the walkways. The lights on the poles were blazing, and their glow came back up off the undisturbed snow seemingly twice as bright. Behind the fence was a three-hundred-yard expanse of lit-up snow-covered yard, and then huddled in the center of the giant rectangle was a cluster of new concrete buildings. They covered an area the size of a large village. Or a small town. The buildings were all lit up, inside and out. They had small mean windows in heavy blank façades, like the portholes in the side of a ship. Their roofs were all covered with snow, like a thick uniform blanket.

“The gift horse,” Peterson said. “Our cash cow.”

“Impressive,” Reacher said.

And it was. As a whole the place was huge. Many hundreds of acres. The vast pool of bright light set against the prairie darkness made it look like an alien spacecraft, just hovering there, unsure whether to land or to whisk away again to a more hospitable location.

At its far end the road broadened out into a wide square plaza in front of the main gate. The plaza was lined at its edges with bus benches and trash cans. Peterson drove straight through it. The gate was really a tunnel, walled and roofed with wire, tall enough for prison buses, wide enough to form two separated lanes, one in, one out. Each lane had three gates forming two pens. Peterson drove into the first and was momentarily locked in, a closed gate behind him, a closed gate ahead. A guard in cold-weather gear came out of a door, looked them over, stepped back inside, and the gate ahead opened. Peterson rolled forward thirty feet. The whole procedure was repeated. Then the last gate opened and Peterson drove out and headed for the buildings on a thoroughfare that was both rutted by vehicles and beaten flat by footsteps. Clearly the shuttle buses discharged their passengers outside the gate. Reacher pictured the woman and the child he had seen at the coffee shop, wrapped in their borrowed motel comforters, trudging through the snow, trudging back.

Peterson parked as close to the visitor door as he could get. Behind the door was an empty lobby, sad and institutional, with wet linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There was an idle X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around and not doing much of anything. Peterson knew them. They knew him. A minute later he and Reacher had been hustled through a side door into a ready room. New construction, but it was already a little trashed and battered. It was hot. It smelled of old coffee, and new sweat, and wet wool coats, and cheap polyester uniforms. There were five low chairs in it, and a desk with a computer on it. A guard fired it up and typed in a password and then left the room.

“Federal prison, federal databases,” Peterson said. Those databases were evidently a little unfamiliar to him, because it took a whole lot of pointing and clicking and typing before he got anywhere. A whole lot of pursed lips and sudden inhalations and exhalations. But eventually he took his hands off the keyboard and sat back to read.

“Same stuff at first,” he said. “South American, exact origins unknown, real identity unknown, exact age unknown but believed to be in his forties, believed to live in Mexico, pawn shops in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Indianapolis, suspected dope in the same five cities, suspected prostitution in the same five cities.”

Reacher asked, “Anything new?”

“We didn’t have the names of those cities before.”

“Apart from that.”

“Nothing proven. There’s a standard warning about how tough he is. He made it to the top tier, and you don’t do that by being a choirboy. They figure he must have killed hundreds of people. That seems to be an entry-level requirement. Des Moines doesn’t impress anybody, but Chicago surely does. He’s not an amateur.”

Then Peterson started clicking and scrolling again. More pursed lips, more deliberate breathing. He said, “The guy owns his own plane.”

“So do plenty of people.”

“It’s a Boeing 737. A regular airliner, converted for private use. Supposedly purchased from a bankrupt Mexican airline.”

Reacher said nothing.

Peterson clicked and scrolled.

“He’s very small,” he said. “Four feet eleven inches.”

“Really?”

“What are you?”

“Six feet five.”

“You’ve got eighteen inches on him. That’s a foot and a half.”

Reacher said, “He’s practically a dwarf.”

Peterson said, “Someone else once called him a dwarf, and woke up in the hospital with his legs cut off.”

Susan Turner made it back to her office in Rock Creek after a long slow drive through rush hour traffic. She parked in her reserved space and went in through the front door and up the stone stairs. The handrail was still metal. The second floor corridor was still narrow. The floor was still linoleum. There were still lines of doors left and right, with fluted glass windows in them, with offices behind each one. All unchanged, she thought, since Reacher’s day. Repainted, possibly, but not fundamentally altered. Each office was still equipped according to the current DoD protocol. Hers had the famous metal desk, three phones with a total of thirty lines, an ergonomic task chair on casters, file cabinets, and two visitor chairs with springy bent-tube legs. Her light shade was made of glass and shaped like a bowl and was hung from the ceiling on three metal chains. It was fitted with an energy-saving bulb. She had a desktop computer with a fast and secure government intranet connection. She had a laptop wirelessly connected to a separate network. She had an up-to-date map of the world on the wall.

She sat down. No messages. Nothing from the Air Force. Reacher hadn’t called again. She plugged her digital voice recorder into her USB hub. Her conversation with her prisoner uploaded to an audio file. Voice recognition software would turn it into a written document. Both new files would be forwarded to the proper destinations. Arrests would be made in Texas and Florida and New York City. A unit citation would follow, plus a Bronze Star recommendation for herself, like night follows day.

Reacher had won a Bronze Star, way back when. She knew that, because she had his personal file on her desk. It was a thick old thing, straining against a furred cardboard jacket. She had been through it many times. Jack-none-Reacher, born October 29th. A military family, but not a legacy career, because his father had been a Marine. His mother had been French. He had graduated West Point. He had served thirteen years. He had been an MP from the start, which as far as Susan was concerned put him on the side of the angels, but even so he had been in and out of trouble the whole time. He had said what needed to be said, and he hadn’t cared who he said it to. He had done what needed to be done, and he hadn’t cared who he did it to. He had cut corners, and cut heads. He had been busted back to captain for busting a civilian’s leg. Demotion was always a coded message. Time to move on, buddy. But he had stayed in. He had stayed in and battled back to major again. Which had to be the biggest comeback of all time. Then he had led the 110th. Its first CO. Its founder, in effect.

Her predecessor, but no kind of role model.

Yet at intervals through his thirteen years he had won a Silver Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, a Soldier’s Medal, a Purple Heart, and the Bronze Star. Clearly he had talent to burn. Which meant that with a more corporate attitude and an army father and an American mother, he could have been Chief of Staff by now.

A bizarre career.

The Silver Star and the Purple Heart came from Beirut. Reacher had been an army liaison officer serving with the Marine Corps at the time of the barracks bombing. He had been badly wounded in the attack, and then heroic in the immediate aftermath. All the other medal citations were redacted, which meant they involved secrets.

He had been hospitalized in Beirut and then airlifted to Germany for convalescence. His medical summary was in the file. He was a healthy person. The wound had healed fast and completely. It had left what the army called a disfiguring scar, which implied a real mess. He was six feet five inches tall and at the time of the report from Germany had weighed two hundred and forty pounds. No internal weaknesses had been detected. His eyesight was rated excellent.

He had many formal qualifications. He was rated expert on all small arms. He had won an inter-service thousand-yard rifle competition with a record score. Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chain saw thrown at you.

A hard man, but intelligent.

His photograph was stapled to the inside cover of the file. It was a color picture, a little faded by the intervening years. His hair was short and unruly. He had bright blue eyes, a little hooded. His gaze was direct and unflinching. He had two noticeable scars. One was at the corner of his left eye. The other was on his upper lip. His face looked like it had been chipped out of rock by a sculptor who had ability but not much time. All flat hard planes. He had a neck. Thick, for sure, but it was there. His shoulders were broad. His arms were long, and his hands were large.

His mouth was set in a wry smile that was halfway between patient and exasperated. Like he knew he had to get his picture taken, but like he had just gotten through telling the photographer the guy had three more seconds before his camera got rammed down his throat.

Jack-none-Reacher.

Altogether Susan felt that he would be interesting to know, possibly rewarding as a friend, certainly dangerous as an enemy.

She picked up her phone and dialed her guy in the Air Force. Asked him if there was news. There wasn’t. She asked when it would come through. Her guy said soon. She said soon wasn’t soon enough.

Her guy said, “Trying to impress someone?”

She said, “No,” and hung up.

The last page of Reacher’s file was a standard cross-reference index that listed related mentions in other files. There were seventy-three citations. They were all classified, which was no big deal. Virtually all military paper was classified. The first seventy-two citations were dated at various points during his thirteen years of service and were classified at a level that would make them awkward for her to get hold of. Operational reports, obviously. The seventy-third citation was classified at a lower level, but it was ancient. Dated way back. So far back, in fact, that Jack-none-Reacher would have been just six years old at the time. A little boy. Which was strange. A contemporary report about family issues would be in the Marine Corps archives, not army. Because of his father.

So why was the army holding paper on a six-year-old kid?

She e-mailed the Human Resources Command for a one-time password that would grant her temporary access to the record.

The process for leaving the prison involved all the same moves in reverse, with the addition of a thorough physical inspection of the departing vehicle. Peterson stopped in the first locked cage and two guards came out with flashlights and one checked the trunk and the other checked the back seat. Then they swapped responsibilities and did it all over again. The center gate opened and Peterson rolled forward into the second cage. A third guard checked their IDs and waved them away.

Peterson asked, “What do you think?”

Reacher asked, “About what?”

“Their security.”

“Adequate.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all it needs to be.”

“I think it’s pretty good.”

“Human nature will get them in the end. They’re only a year or so into it. All it will take is for two guards to get lazy at the same time. Bound to happen sooner or later. It always does.”

“Pessimist.”

“Realist.”

Peterson smiled and his car rolled on through the snow toward town.

Seventeen hundred miles south a small convoy of three black Range Rovers rolled through the heat toward Plato’s compound. The trucks were all less than a month old, they all had blacked-out windows, and they were all the Sport model, which was really a rebodied Land Rover LR3 with a supercharged Jaguar engine under the hood. Fine trucks for rough but unchallenging roads, which were what Plato’s part of the Michoacán was all about. Each truck was carrying two men, for a total of six. All of them were local thirty-somethings with twenty years’ experience, all of them were dressed in dark suits, and all of them were heavily armed.

And all of them had worked for Plato before.

Which meant that all of them were a little afraid.

The three cars made the last turn and started the last dusty mile to the gate. All three drivers knew they were already being tracked with binoculars. They had passed the point of no return. They held a steady fifty and maintained a tight formation and then slowed far enough out to be unthreatening. People said Plato’s gatemen had anti-tank missiles. Or rocket-propelled grenades, at the very least. Plus surface-to-air missiles for government helicopters. Maybe true, maybe not, but no one was in the mood to find out for sure.

The three cars stopped well short of the gate and the six men climbed out from behind their black windows and stood still in the early-evening heat. No one approached them. They knew that they were being identified at a distance. Beyond that there would be no intervention. They knew that their good behavior was guaranteed not by a physical search, but by the fact that they all had sisters and mothers and grandmothers and female cousins all within easy reach. Watching a relative’s skin being peeled off her face was not pleasant. Living with her afterward was worse.

A gasoline engine started and a gear engaged and the gate was driven back. A minute later the last of the cars was inside the compound and the gear reversed and the gate closed again.

Peterson let Reacher out at Janet Salter’s house. It was his new default destination, night and day. He crunched up the driveway and the woman cop from the hallway let him in. Janet Salter was in the library, in her usual chair, in a pool of light, reading. The other woman cop was at the window, with her back to the room. Situation normal. All quiet.

Janet Salter held up her book and said, “I’m reading Sherlock Holmes.”

Reacher said, “The dog that didn’t bark in the night?”

“Exactly.”

“I already thought about that. Your neighbor lives upwind. Doesn’t mean no one was here, just because her dog didn’t get a sniff.”

“There’s a companion volume you should see, in the parlor,” Janet Salter said. She put her book down and got up out of her chair. Reacher followed her to the front room. She closed the door. Didn’t show him a book. Instead she asked, “Are the bikers really gone?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“Are they coming back?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So am I safe now?”

“Not really.”

“Why did Chief Holland let them go?”

“Small town rules,” Reacher said.

“Which now mean that if I go ahead and testify as planned, only one man will, as you put it, get nailed.”

“That’s true.”

“Which absolutely wasn’t the deal. The idea was to nail them all. Now they’ll just become some other town’s problem.”

“And then the next, and the next.”

“It isn’t right.”

“It’s how things work.”

“I mean it isn’t right to put me at so much risk for so little reward.”

“You want to pull out?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

Five minutes to six in the evening.

Ten hours to go.

Chapter 29

Janet Salter sat down in a parlor chair. Reacher checked the view from the window. Nothing there. Just the cop in his car, a good one, his head moving left, moving right, checking the mirror.

Reacher said, “I think it’s too late to make a practical difference.”

Janet Salter asked, “Why?”

“You could talk to Holland right now, but Holland can’t talk to the prosecutor before tomorrow, and the prosecutor can’t file the papers until maybe the next day, and the news might take another day to filter through. But the bad guys are in a hurry. That place makes money for them. They can’t afford any down time.”

Janet Salter said, “So I’m in, and I can’t get out?”

“Hang tough,” Reacher said. “You’ll be OK.”

“I wouldn’t have been OK last night, except for you. And you won’t be here forever.”

“I won’t need to be,” Reacher said. “The bad guys won’t wait forever.”

Janet Salter went to make dinner. She said cooking relaxed her. The night-watch cops got up and came downstairs. The house felt safe. Dark and cold outside, bright and warm inside. Pots and pans on the stove top fogged the kitchen windows, so Reacher prowled between the library and the parlor and the hallway. He saw nothing from the windows except snow and ice and moving shadows. The wind was still blowing. Not ideal conditions for careful surveillance, but Reacher felt the situation was acceptable. Seven cops on the case, with himself as backup. Safe enough.

Then the phone rang.

Reacher was in the hallway at the time and Janet Salter called through from the kitchen and asked him to answer it. It was Peterson. He said, “I have something I need you to see.”

“Where?”

“At the station, on a computer.”

“Can you bring it over?”

“No.”

“I can’t leave here.”

“You said we might never hear that siren again. No escapes, no more riots.”

“An educated guess is still a guess.”

“I’ll pick you up and bring you straight back.”

“You can’t promise that. Suppose the siren sounds while I’m over there?”

“I’ll still bring you back. I swear, on the lives of my children.”

“You’d get in trouble.”

“I’ll fight it. And I’ll win.”

“You should be the chief, you know that?” Reacher said. “The sooner the better.”

Peterson arrived five minutes later. He spoke to his people and then he found Janet Salter and told her he was borrowing Reacher for a quarter of an hour. He looked her in the eye and promised her that none of his officers would leave the house until Reacher was back. She was uneasy, but she seemed to believe him. Reacher put his coat on and climbed into Peterson’s car and five minutes after that he was back in the squad room.

Peterson sat down at a desk with a computer and started pointing and clicking and pursing his lips and inhaling and exhaling. He came up with a blank gray square in the middle of the screen. The square had a play arrow laid over its center portion.

“Surveillance video,” Peterson said. “From the prison interview room. It’s digital. They e-mail it to us.”

“OK.”

“It’s the biker and his lawyer. Earlier this afternoon. We never canceled the surveillance. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Inefficiency.” Peterson moved the mouse and clicked on the play arrow. The gray square changed to a grainy color picture of the interview room shot from above. The camera was presumably hidden in a light fixture, on the lawyer’s side of the glass partition. It showed a man in a gray suit sitting forward in his chair with his elbows on the concrete counter and his face a foot from the glass. Opposite him on the other side of the barrier was a guy in an orange jumpsuit. He was tall and solidly built. He had long black hair and a graying beard. His pose mirrored his lawyer’s. Elbows on the counter, face a foot from the glass.

Conspiratorial.

“Now listen,” Peterson said.

The lawyer said something in a whisper. Reacher couldn’t hear it.

“Where’s the mike?” he asked.

“In the light with the camera.” Peterson stabbed a key and the computer beeped the volume all the way up. Then he dragged a red dot backward a fraction and the segment played again. Reacher craned closer. The audio quality was very poor, but this time the lawyer’s sentence was at least intelligible.

The lawyer had said, “You know, the ancient Greeks tell us that a six-hour wait solves all our problems.”

Peterson paused the replay. “Ancient Greeks, right? Like ancient Greek philosophers? You said Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher. It’s a code. It’s a message.”

Reacher nodded. “When was this?”

“Two o’clock this afternoon. So a six-hour wait would take us to eight o’clock. It’s six o’clock now. Which gives them two more hours. They’ve already wasted two-thirds of their time.”

Reacher stared at the screen.

“Play it again,” he said.

Peterson dragged the red dot back. Hit play. The lawyer’s head, moving forward an inch. The scratchy, whispery sound. The ancient Greeks tell us that a six-hour wait solves all our problems.

Reacher said, “I don’t hear it that way. He’s not saying we have a six-hour period during which at some random point all our problems might be solved. I think he’s saying that six hours from then something specific is going to happen in order to solve them.”

“You think?”

“Just my opinion.”

“What kind of thing will happen?”

“The siren will sound. It’s their only way to get at Mrs. Salter.”

“How can a lawyer make the siren sound?”

“He can’t. But maybe they can together.”

“How?”

“What happens up there at eight o’clock? Are they eating? Feeding time at the zoo is always a good time for a riot.”

“They eat earlier.”

“TV time? An argument about CBS or NBC?”

“You said another riot won’t happen.”

“Something is going to happen. That lawyer is talking about a future event with a fairly high degree of confidence.”

Peterson went pale. Papery white, under his reddened winter skin.

“Jesus,” he said. “Eight o’clock is head-count time. They lock them in their cells for the night and check them off. Suppose that guy got out this afternoon and they don’t know it yet? They’re going to be one short. One minute past eight, they’re going to hit the panic button.”

They drove straight back to Janet Salter’s house. Dinner was almost ready. About ten minutes away. Spaghetti and sauce and cheese, with salad in the old wooden bowl. Janet Salter offered to set an extra place for Peterson. Peterson said yes. But nothing more. He just accepted the invitation and then stepped away from the kitchen activity and took Reacher by the elbow and dragged him into the parlor. He said, “I’m staying right here when the siren goes off.”

Reacher said, “Good.”

“Two are better than one.”

“Always.”

“Are you armed?”

“Yes. And so is Mrs. Salter.”

“How will their guy arrive?”

“From the front, in a car. Too cold for anything else.”

“Anything we can do ahead of time?”

Reacher said, “No.”

Peterson said, “We could warn the prison, I suppose. If the siren went off right now, their guy might be out of position.”

“We don’t want him out of position,” Reacher said. “We want him walking up the driveway at two minutes past eight. Exactly when and where we expect him. You said it yourself, we need this thing to be over.”

Seventeen hundred miles south Plato came out of his house and found the three idling Range Rovers parked in a neat nose-to-tail line. The six men that had come with them were standing easy in pairs, heads up, sunglasses on, hands clasped behind their backs. Plato looked at them carefully. He knew them. He had used them before. They were solid but unspectacular performers. Competent, but uninspired. Not the best in the world. Second-rate, B-students, adequate. There were a lot of words with which to describe them.

He looked at the trucks. Three of them, all identical. British. Each the cost of a college education. Maybe not Harvard. He counted them from the front, one, two, three. Then from the back, three, two, one. He had to choose. He never occupied the same relative position in a convoy two times in a row. Too predictable. Too dangerous. He wanted a two-in-three chance of surviving the first incoming round, if there was to be one. He figured a second round would miss. The supercharged engines had great acceleration. Better than turbocharged. No lag.

He chose car number three. A double bluff, in a way. Slightly counterintuitive. If number one or number two was blown up, number three might get trapped by the flaming wreckage. He would be expected to expect that. He would be presumed to be in car number one, for that very reason. Which burnished his two-in-three chances a little. Convoys opened up at speed. Rack and pinion steering, fast reactions, number three’s driver could swerve with plenty of time to spare.

He inclined his head, toward the third car. One of the men standing next to it stepped up smartly and opened the rear door. Plato climbed in. There was a step. Which was necessary, given his stature. He got settled on the rear seat. Cream leather, piped with black. An armrest on the door to his right, an armrest pulled down in the center of the bench. Air conditioning, set low. Very comfortable.

The two men climbed into the front. Doors closed, a forward gear was engaged. The convoy moved off. The gate was grinding back as they approached it. They slowed, slipped through, sped up. They cruised through the first dusty mile.

Plato looked at the men in front of him.

Many words to describe them.

The best was: disposable.

Janet Salter’s kitchen table was cramped for seven people. Peterson and the four women cops had guns on their hips, which made them wide. Reacher himself was not narrow, elbow to elbow. But perhaps as a consequence the atmosphere was cozy. At first Janet Salter was tense, as were Reacher and Peterson for other reasons. The four women cops were happy to talk. Then Janet Salter began to relax, and Reacher and Peterson took a mutual unspoken decision to save it for when it was going to count. They joined in. Everyone told stories. Janet Salter had attended a small local elementary school, a long time ago. The farm boys had been sewn into their winter underwear in November and not released until March. By January the smell was awful. By February it was unbearable.

Peterson’s experience had been different. He was half Janet Salter’s age. His school was exactly the same as he saw in all the TV shows he watched. He felt part of America, until he looked at a map. Seven hundred miles from the nearest Major League team. A long way from anywhere. Something timid in his head had told him he would never leave. He confessed it quite openly.

Two of the women cops were from North Dakota. They had come south for jobs. And for warmer weather, one said with a smile. Their educations had been similar to Peterson’s. Reacher didn’t say much. But he knew what they were talking about. Lockers, the gym, the principal’s office. He had been to seven elementary schools, all of them overseas on foreign bases, but all of them imported direct from the United States as standardized kits of parts. Outside he had been in the steamy heat of Manila or Leyte, or the damp cold of Germany or Belgium, but inside he could have been in North Dakota or South Dakota or Maine or Florida. At times he had been twelve thousand miles from the nearest Major League team. Something in his head had told him he would never stay still.

They had fruit for dessert and coffee and then they cleared the table and washed the dishes, all of them together, part professional, part collegial. Then the day-watch women went off duty, and went upstairs. The night-watch women headed for the hallway and the library. Janet Salter picked up her book. Reacher and Peterson went to the parlor to wait.

Five minutes to seven in the evening.

Nine hours to go.

Chapter 30

Peterson kept checking his watch. Reacher kept time in his head. Seven o’clock. Five past. Ten past. A quarter past. No activity on the street. The view out from under the lip of the porch stayed the same. Snow, ice, wind, Peterson’s parked car, the lookout police cruiser, its vigilant driver. Peterson took the Glock out of his holster and checked it over and put it back. Reacher had the Smith & Wesson in his pants pocket. He didn’t need to check it was there. He could feel its weight.

Peterson was at the window. Reacher sat down, in Janet Salter’s chair. He was thinking about the runway, and the old stone building, and the wooden huts.

The first wooden hut, in particular.

He asked, “Does Kim have a sister?”

Peterson said, “No.”

“A niece or a cousin?”

“No nieces. Some cousins. Why?”

“That girl I saw in the hut, sitting on the bed. She looked familiar. At first I thought I had seen her before. But I don’t see how. So now I’m trying to pin it down. Either she was just a local type, or she looks like someone else I saw.”

“There’s no real local type here.”

“You think? You and Chief Holland look the same.”

“He’s older.”

“Apart from that.”

“A little, maybe. But there’s no local type.”

“Then that girl looked like someone I saw. On my first night here, I think. And the only woman I saw on my first night here was Kim.”

“And the old ladies on the bus.”

“No resemblance.”

“The waitress in the restaurant?”

“Not her.”

“Kim doesn’t have sisters. Or nieces. And I think all her cousins are boys.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“Maybe you saw a guy. Brothers and sisters can look alike. Lowell has a sister who looks just like him. Remember him? The officer you met?”

“Tough on her,” Reacher said.

“What did this mystery girl look like anyway?”

“Tall and thin and blond.”

“We’re all tall and thin and blond.”

“My point exactly.”

“But you can tell us apart.”

Reacher said, “If I concentrate.”

Peterson smiled briefly and turned back to the window. Reacher joined him there. Twenty past seven. All quiet.

Far to the east and a little to the south Susan Turner dialed her phone again. Her guy in the Air Force answered on the first ring. He said he had been about to pick up the phone and call her himself. Because he had news. The relevant file had just come through.

“So what’s down there under the ground?” Susan asked.

He told her.

“That’s vague,” she said. “Is there any way you can get more detail?”

“You told me this was private and off the record.”

“It is.”

“You sound like your next promotion depends on it.”

“I’m trying to help someone, that’s all. And vagueness won’t do it.”

“Who are you trying to help?”

Susan Turner paused.

“A friend,” she said.

“How good of a friend?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How good do you want him to be?”

“Good enough to be worth checking some more.”

Her guy said, “OK, I’ll check some more. I’ll get back to you.”

At seven-thirty Janet Salter started moving around. Reacher heard her in the hallway. He heard the cop on the bottom stair say that dinner had been great. He heard Janet Salter reply politely. Then she came into the parlor. Reacher wanted to put her in the basement, but he decided to wait until the siren sounded. That would be the time she would be most likely to comply, he thought, when she heard that banshee wail again.

She asked, “What is about to happen?”

Peterson asked, “Why do you think something is about to happen?”

“Because you’re here, Mr. Peterson, instead of being home with Mrs. Peterson and your children. And because Mr. Reacher has gone even quieter than usual.”

Peterson said, “Nothing is going to happen.”

Reacher said, “There’s an eight o’clock head count up at the jail. We think they’re going to come out one short. They’re going to hit the panic button.”

“At eight o’clock?”

“Maybe one minute past.”

“An escape?”

Peterson said, “We think it might have already happened. They’ll find out when they count heads.”

“I see.”

“I won’t leave,” Peterson said.

“I’m grateful for your concern. But I shall make you leave. You’re our next chief of police. For the town’s sake, nothing must stand in the way of that.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No, it’s how good decisions are made. One must take oneself out of the equation.”

“I can’t do it.”

“A deal is a deal, even if Chief Holland didn’t stick to his with me.”

“I won’t go.”

“You will.”

The United States Air Force Security Forces were headquartered at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. They had no direct equivalent of the army’s MP Corps 110th Special Unit. The closest they came was the Phoenix Raven program, which was an integrated set of specialized teams. One of those teams was led by a guy who had just gotten off the phone with Susan Turner in Virginia, and who had just gotten back on the phone with a file clerk a thousand miles away in a records depository.

The clerk said, “What I gave you is all I have.”

“Too vague.”

“It is what it is.”

“There has got to be more.”

“There isn’t.”

“How hard have you looked?”

“Staring at a piece of paper won’t make words appear on it.”

“Where did the delivery originate?”

“You want me to trace one particular cargo flight from fifty years ago?”

“Can you?”

“Not a hope. I’m sorry, Major. But we’re talking ancient history here. You might as well ask me what Neanderthal Man had for lunch a million years ago last Thursday.”

By ten to eight Janet Salter’s house had gone absolutely silent. Some kind of drumbeat of dread had passed between one inhabitant and the next. The cop in the hallway had gotten up off the bottom stair and was standing behind the door. The cop in the library had stepped closer to the window. Peterson was watching the street. Janet Salter was straightening books on the parlor shelves. She was butting their spines into line. Small, nervous, exact movements with the knuckles of her right hand.

Reacher was lounging in a chair. Eyes closed. Nothing could happen before the siren sounded.

The clock ticked on.

Five to eight in the evening.

Eight hours to go.

Chapter 31

The clock in Reacher’s head hit eight exactly. Nothing happened. The world outside stayed icy and quiet. Nothing to hear except the sound of the wind, and the brush and rattle of frozen evergreens, and the creaking and stirring of tree limbs, and the primeval tectonic shudders as the earth itself got colder.

One minute past eight.

Nothing happened.

Two minutes past eight.

Nothing happened.

No sound.

No siren.

No one came.

Peterson glanced at Reacher. Reacher shrugged. Janet Salter looked out the window. No action on the street. The cop in the hallway moved. Reacher heard the boards creak under her feet.

Three minutes past eight.

Nothing happened.

Four minutes past.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Nothing happened.

No sound, no siren.

Nothing at all.

At a quarter past eight they gave it up and stopped worrying. Peterson was certain the head count could not have been delayed. Prisons ran on strict routines. If the cells weren’t locked for the night at eight exactly, there would be entries to be made in operational logs, and reports to be filed in triplicate, and supervisors called upon to explain. Way too much trouble for any reason short of a riot in progress, and if a riot was in progress the siren would have sounded, anyway. Therefore the bid had failed. Or the lawyer had been blowing smoke.

All clear.

“You sure?” Reacher asked.

“Absolutely,” Peterson said.

“So prove it. Put your money where your mouth is.”

“How?”

“Go home.”

And Peterson did. He spun it out until twenty past, and then he put his coat on and crunched down the driveway and climbed in his car and drove away. Janet Salter stopped straightening books and started reading one instead. The cop in the hallway went back to her perch on the bottom stair. The cop in the library stepped back from the glass. Reacher sat in the kitchen and tried to decide whether to disturb Janet Salter by asking permission, or whether just to go ahead and make more coffee himself. He knew how to work a percolator. His mother had had one, even though she was French. In the end he went ahead and fired it up unbidden. He listened to it gulp and hiss and when it quieted down he poured himself a mug. He raised it in a mock salute to his reflection in the window and took a sip.

At eight thirty the phone rang in the hallway. The cop got up from the bottom stair and answered it. It was for Reacher. The voice from Virginia. The cop put two forked fingers under her eyes and then pointed them at the door. You watch the front, and I’ll give you some privacy. Reacher nodded and sat down and picked up the phone.

The voice said, “Forty tons of surplus aircrew requirements left over from World War Two.”

“That’s vague.”

“Tell me about it. My guy did his best for me, but that’s all he knows.”

“What kind of surpluses did they have after World War Two?”

“Are you kidding? All kinds of things. The atom bomb changed everything. They went from having lots of planes carrying small bombs to a few planes carrying big bombs. They could have had forty spare tons of pilots’ underwear alone. Plus they changed from prop planes to jets. They got helmets. It could be forty tons of those old-style leather hats.”

“I wish I had one of those right now.”

“Quit whining.”

“What’s the temperature here?”

A pause. “Minus fourteen degrees.”

“Feels worse.”

“It’s going to get worse. The Weather Channel radar looks horrible.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“Hey, you asked.”

“Hats and underwear?”

“Got to be something to do with a generational change of equipment or a reduced number of aircrew. Or both.”

“Anything on the size or architecture of the place itself?”

“That stuff was lost a long time ago.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”

“My guy talked. From Fort Hood. Like you said he would.”

“I’m glad.”

“I owe you.”

“No, we’re even.”

“No, I do. It’s my first major score.”

“Really? How long have you been in the job?”

“Two weeks.”

“I had no idea. You sound like you’ve been there forever.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

“It was meant as one,” Reacher said.

“Then I thank you.”

“You should be out celebrating.”

“I sent my people out.”

“Good move. Give them all the credit. They’ll appreciate it, but the brass will always know who really did the work. You’ll win both ways around.”

“Is that how you did it?”

“Always. I made out that I did nothing much. A lot of the time that was true, of course.”

“Not what your file suggests.”

“You still looking at that old thing?”

“It’s a saga.”

“Not fair. This is a very asymmetrical relationship in terms of information.”

“Dude, life sucks.”

“What did you just call me?”

“I was trying to sound blonde and Californian.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“You’re not blonde or Californian.”

“Is that OK?”

“Brunette could work for me. Brown eyes?”

“You got it.”

“Long hair, right?”

“Longer than it should be.”

“Excellent.”

“You want to revisit the A-cup thing, too?”

“Got to be honest. I’m just not hearing it.”

She laughed. “OK, I confess. You’re right.”

“Height?”

“Five feet seven.”

“Pale or dark?”

“Neither, really. But I tan well.”

“You want to see South Dakota in the winter?”

She laughed again. “I prefer the beach.”

“Me too. Where are you from?”

“Montana. A small town you never heard of.”

“Try me. I’ve been to Montana.”

“Hungry Horse?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Told you,” she said. “It’s near Whitefish.”

“You like the army?”

“Did you?”

“You’ve got my file,” Reacher said.

“And half the time I’m thinking, man, if you hated it that bad, you should have just gotten out while the getting was good.”

“I never hated it. Not for a minute. I just wanted to fix what was wrong with it.”

“Above your pay grade.”

“I learned that, eventually.” Reacher looked around the hallway. The closed door, the dark paneling, the oil paintings, the Persian carpet. The rare woods, the wax, the polish, the patina. He had all the information he was ever going to get from or through the 110th. No real reason to keep on talking.

The voice asked, “What are you doing in South Dakota, anyway?”

He said, “I was on a bus that crashed. I got hung up here.”

“Life is a gamble.”

“But the deck is stacked. No bus that I was on ever crashed in a warm place.”

“You behaving yourself up there?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“These files get tagged if an outside agency asks to take a look. You know, the FBI or a local police department or something. And yours is tagged to hell and back. Folks have been all over you for the last twelve years.”

“Anything from here in the last two days?”

“A transcript went out to someone called Thomas Holland at the Bolton PD.”

“The Chief of Police. Probably routine. He wanted to know I was qualified, because he wanted my help. Back when he thought the stone building was an army place. Any follow-up?”

“No.”

“That’s because I’m behaving myself.”

A long pause.

Time to go.

He asked, “What’s your name?”

“Does it matter?”

“I could find out. The way the army is now, you’re probably on a website somewhere.”

“Are you kidding? The 110th? No way. We don’t exist.”

“So what’s your name?”

“Susan.”

“Nice name.”

“I think so, too.”

Another long pause.

Time to go.

He asked, “Is your Air Force guy at Lackland?”

“Yes. Talking to their records guys in Colorado.”

“Ask him to try one more time. Obviously that stuff was flown in. There has to be a cargo manifest somewhere.”

“I’ll try.”

“Call me back?” he asked.

“You bet,” she said.

Reacher went back to the kitchen and took another cup of coffee. The house was quiet. No significant sound from the outside. No significant sound from the inside either, except for the subliminal vibe of calm alert people concentrating hard on the business at hand. It was the kind of silence Reacher had heard a hundred times before. He carried his mug to the parlor and found Janet Salter reading there. She looked up from her book and said, “You’re drinking coffee.”

Reacher said, “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. But doesn’t it keep you awake?”

He nodded. “Until I want to go to sleep.”

“How was she?”

“Who?”

“The woman in Virginia.”

“She was fine.” Reacher stepped to the window and took a look at the street. Snow, ice, the parked cruiser, frozen foliage moving stiffly in the wind. A little moonlight, a little high cloud, a distant orange glow from vapor lamps on the streets to the north and the east. He said, “All quiet.”

Janet Salter asked, “Do you think the state penitentiary and the federal prison have the same lock-down time as the county jail?”

“I imagine so.”

“Then we’re safe for a spell, aren’t we? Heads have been counted and there’s no opportunity for mass disturbance until the morning.”

“In principle.”

“But?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“Is that your motto?”

“One of many.”

“What are the others?”

“Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty.”

“You’re as hard on yourself as you are on others.”

“Cruel but fair.”

“I can’t stand this kind of tension much longer.”

“I hope you won’t have to.”

“For the first time in my life I’m afraid. Fear is a very elemental thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s a choice,” Reacher said. “That’s all.”

“Surely everyone’s afraid of death.”

“That was another motto. I’m not afraid of death. Death’s afraid of me.”

“You sound like you were trying to convince yourself.”

“We were. All the time. Believe me.”

“So you are afraid of death.”

“We all have to go sometime. Depends what form it takes, I guess.”

Janet Salter went quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I met my successor at Yale two years ago. At a library conference. It was an interesting experience. I imagine you feel the same way, talking to the woman in Virginia.”

“She isn’t my successor. Not directly. There could have been six or seven other people in between me and her. Maybe more. It’s a distant connection. Almost archaeological.”

“Is she better than you?”

“Probably.”

“That’s how I felt, too. At first I was depressed about it. Then I realized actually I should feel encouraged about it. Progress is being maintained. The world is still moving forward.”

“How long have you been retired?”

“A little more than ten years.”

“So you got back here before the prison was built.”

“Years before. It was a different town then. But not too different, I suppose. The real change is still to come. We’re still in a transitional phase. The real change will come when we get used to it. At the moment we’re a town with a prison in it. Soon we’ll be a prison town.”

“So what was it like?”

“Gentle,” Janet Salter said. “Quiet. Half the size. No fast food, only one motel. Chief Holland was a young man with a family. Like Andrew Peterson is now. I don’t know why, but that symbolizes the change for me. Everything felt cheerful and young and lighthearted. Not old and tired and bitter, like it is now.”

“What happened to Holland’s wife?”

“Cancer. But mercifully quick. Their daughter was fifteen at the time. Which could have been awkward, but she seemed to handle it quite well. She was very like her mother, which could have been awkward for the chief too, but he was already involved in the early stages of planning the prison by then, which took his mind off it.”

“And what was the Lowell divorce all about?”

“I told you, I don’t know. But the fact that no one speaks of it invites speculation, doesn’t it?”

“His fault or hers?”

“Oh, his, I think.”

“Peterson said he has a sister who looks just like him.”

“In a way. Much younger than him. More like a niece.”

“Are you going to stay here, even when it’s a prison town?”

“Me? I’m far too old to start over somewhere else. What about you?”

“I couldn’t stay here. It’s too cold.”

“Eventually you’ll want to stay somewhere.”

“Hasn’t happened so far.”

“See how you feel thirty years from now.”

“That’s a far horizon.”

“It will come faster than you expect.”

Reacher put his empty mug on a low table. He wasn’t sure whether to stay in the room or to leave her alone to read. He wasn’t sure which she would prefer.

“Sit,” she said. “I’ll have plenty of time to read after all this fuss is over.”

He sat.

She asked, “Are you warm enough?”

He said, “I’m fine.” Which he was. The ancient radiator under the window was putting out plenty of heat. The hot water in the pipes was coursing around the house relentlessly. He could hear it. He could hear the occluded right angle joint at the top of the stairs, hissing a little louder than the others. He pictured the burner in the basement, roaring, and the pump, running hard. Unlimited heat, available around the clock. Much better than the arrangement in Andrew Peterson’s farmhouse. The old iron woodstove, banked and cooling all night, barely warm by morning.

He stared into space for a second.

He said, “Stupid.”

Janet Salter asked him, “Who or what?”

“Me.”

“Why?”

“I need to make a phone call.” He got up and stepped out to the hallway. Spoke to the cop sitting on the bottom stair. Said, “I need Andrew Peterson’s home number.”

The cop said, “I’m not sure I’m at liberty to give it to you.”

“Then dial it for me. I won’t look.”

She dialed it for him. Checked that she was getting ring tone, and then handed the receiver to him. Kim Peterson answered. Reacher introduced himself and said, “I’m very sorry to disturb you, but I need to speak with Andrew.”

“He just got home.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s important.”

There was a long delay. Maybe Kim had to go drag Peterson out of his den. But he came on the line eventually.

“Problem?” he asked.

“The opposite,” Reacher said. “I know where the key is. For the stone building.”

Five to nine in the evening.

Seven hours to go.

Chapter 32

Reacher stayed on the line and Peterson spent a minute talking to himself about what to do next. Like he was thinking out loud. He said, “The prison was locked down an hour ago, so the siren is not going to sound. It can’t, really, can it? There’s no opportunity. The guy could come without the siren, I suppose, but in that case we’ll still have plenty of bodies in the way. Four in the house, three on the street. All of them are good people. I made sure of that. So right now it doesn’t really matter whether you’re there or not, does it? You’re superfluous. In a temporary sense. So it’s safe enough for you to come out. Do you agree?”

“Safe enough,” Reacher said.

“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

Reacher went back to the parlor. Janet Salter looked up at him. He told her he was going out, and where, and why. He said, “If the cops have to leave, what do you do?”

She said, “Lock myself in the basement.”

“With?”

“My gun.”

“When?”

“Straightaway, I suppose.”

“Correct,” Reacher said. “Straightaway, immediately, instantly, no delay at all, before the cops are even out through the door. You lock yourself in, and you stay there until I get back.”

“With the password.”

“Correct,” Reacher said again. “And even if the cops don’t actually leave, you go down there if you sense any kind of commotion at all. Any kind of uneasiness, any kind of extra nervousness, any kind of heightened alert, OK?”

“You think the man might come with the police still in the house?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst. If the cops get a bad feeling, they won’t tell you right away. They won’t want to look stupid afterward, if it turns out to be nothing. So it’s up to you to figure it out. Trust your gut. Any doubt at all, get the hell down there, fast. A stray bullet can kill you just the same as one that was aimed.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Two hours, maybe.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You will if you do what I say.”

“I will. I promise. I’ll go down and lock the door and wait for the password.”

Reacher nodded. Said nothing.

Safe enough.

Reacher went out to the hallway and climbed into his giant coat. Checked the pockets for hat and gloves and gun. All present and correct. The telephone rang. The woman from the bottom stair answered it. She handed the receiver to Reacher without a word.

“Yes?” he said, expecting Peterson.

The voice from Virginia said, “We got a partial cargo manifest.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life paying off the favor. You know how hard it must have been to find? An irrelevant piece of paper from fifty years ago?”

“They’ve got clerks, the same as we did. What else have they got to do?”

“They claim plenty.”

“Don’t believe them. What’s on the manifest?”

“Forty tons of war surplus flown in from the old Eighth Air Force bases in the United Kingdom. From the old World War Two bomber fields in East Anglia. They closed a bunch down in the middle fifties. Runways weren’t long enough anymore.”

“Does it specify what kind of surplus?”

“Yes and no. Generically it says aircrew requirements, and specifically there’s a manufacturer’s name that no one remembers, and a code that no one understands anymore.”

“Not even the Lackland guys?”

“Not even them. This is ancient history we’re dealing with here.”

“The way I remember my ancient history, we didn’t bring World War Two surplus back from Europe. We either junked it over there or sold it off over there. Kept the money in the local currencies and used it for Fulbright scholarships. Two birds with one stone. We got rid of a lot of old crap and we spread peace and brotherhood and understanding all at the same time. Through educational exchange.”

“Those were the days.”

“What was the code?”

“N06BA03.”

“Means nothing to me.”

“Means nothing to anyone. Could be underwear. Or hats.”

“We wouldn’t have flown forty tons of underwear or hats all the way back from Europe. No sense in that. Cheaper just to give them away, or burn them.”

“So maybe it was something we couldn’t give away. Or sell. Or burn. For security reasons. Sidearms, maybe. I think World War Two pilots carried them. In case they were shot down over enemy territory.”

“What was the manufacturer’s name?”

“Some outfit called Crown Laboratories.”

“Say again?”

“Crown Laboratories.”

Reacher said, “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Forty tons? They have got to be kidding me.”

“Reacher, what?”

“I got to go.”

As soon as he saw the leading edge of Peterson’s headlight beams on the street he stepped out the door and crossed the porch and hustled down the driveway. The cold hit him like a hammer. Peterson’s tires crunched and crackled over the frozen snow. The car pulled up and Reacher climbed in. The heater was blowing lukewarm air. Reacher kept his hat and gloves on. Peterson K-turned and bounced across the ruts and headed back to the main drag. Turned right and drove south, slower than he would in summer, faster than he would in traffic. There was nothing else on the road. Only nine in the evening, but the whole state seemed closed up for the night. People were all huddled inside, and Peterson’s car was the only thing moving across the landscape.

They made the turn ten miles later and drove on, parallel with the highway. The cloud was thin and high and there was plenty of moonlight. There was still ice on the wind, coming steadily at them out of the west. It crusted on the windshield, a thin abrasive layer that the wipers couldn’t shift. Like diamond dust. Peterson put the heater on defrost and ducked his head to look through warmed circles that got smaller with every mile.

They turned right again on the wandering county two-lane. Now the wind was on their left-hand side and the windshield cleared again. The old runway loomed up ahead, gray and massive in the night. It was still clear. They bumped up on it and the tire chains ground and rattled.

They drove two fast miles.

Saw red tail lights ahead.

A parked car. Its tail lights faced them and beyond its dark end-on bulk was a pool of white from its headlights. There was a swirl of exhaust from its pipes, pooling, eddying, drifting, then blowing away.

Peterson slowed and put his lights on bright. The parked car was empty. It was a Ford Crown Victoria. No markings. Either dark blue or black. Hard to say, in the glare.

“Chief Holland’s car,” Peterson said.

They parked alongside it and climbed out into the stunning cold and found Holland himself at the first hut’s door. Fur hat, zipped parka, thick gloves, heavy boots, moving stiff and clumsy in all the clothing, his breath clouding in front of him.

Holland wasn’t pleased to see them.

He said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

He sounded angry.

Peterson said, “Reacher figured out where the key is.”

“I don’t care who figured out what. You shouldn’t have come. Neither one of you. It’s completely irresponsible. Suppose the siren goes off?”

“It won’t.”

“You think?”

“It can’t. Can it? The cells are locked and the head counts are done.”

“You trust their procedures?”

“Of course.”

“You’re an idiot, Andrew. You need to stop drinking the damn Kool-Aid. That place is a complete mess. Especially the county lock-up, which is what we’re interested in right now. If you think they do a proper head count every night, then I’ve got a beachfront lot to sell you. Fifty bucks an acre, about a mile from here.”

“It’s a brand-new place.”

“Brand-new metal and concrete. Same old human beings working there.”

“So what are you saying? The head count could be faulty?”

“I’m saying dollars to doughnuts there was no head count at all. I’m saying at five to eight they sound a horn and expect everyone to wander home and then at eight the cell doors lock up electronically.”

“Even if that’s true, there’s no danger until morning.”

“They do night patrols, son. Ten scheduled, one an hour. I’m guessing they skip nine of them. But at some point they walk around with flashlights, checking beds, doing what they were supposed to do at eight o’clock.”

“Are you serious?”

“Human nature, Andrew. Get used to it.”

“Should we go back?”

Holland paused a beat. “No, we have to go back that way, anyway. Worst case, Mrs. Salter will be alone for five minutes. Maybe ten. It’s a gamble. We’ll take it. But I wish you hadn’t come in the first place.”

Reacher asked, “Why are you here?”

Holland looked at him. “Because I figured out where the key is.”

“Good work.”

“Not really. Anyone with a brain could figure it out on a night like this.”

“Where is it?” Peterson asked.

It was inside the paraffin stove in the first hut. A fine hiding place, with built-in time-delayed access. Too hot to think about searching earlier, now cool to the touch. Like Peterson’s own banked wood stove. The voice from Virginia had said, Burn the place down and sift the ashes. An Air Force key is probably made of the same stuff as warheads. It would survive, easy. And the voice had been right. The key had survived. It was fine. It had been dropped on the burner core and it had heated and cooled with no bad consequences. It was a large T-shaped device about three inches across. Complex teeth, the dull glitter of rare and exotic metal. Titanium, maybe. From way back, when paranoia permitted no skeptical questions about cost.

Reacher fished it out of the stove. He handed it to Holland. Holland carried it to the stone building’s door. He slipped it into the lock. Turned it. The lock sprang back.

Chapter 33

Reacher tried the handle. It turned downward sixty degrees with a hefty motion that was halfway between precise and physical. Like an old-fashioned bank vault. The door itself was very heavy. It felt like it weighed a ton, literally. Its outer skin was a two-inch-thick steel plate. Inset by two inches in every direction on the back was a ten-inch-deep rectangular protuberance that socketed home between the jambs and the lintel and the floor saddle. The protuberance was like a welded steel box. Probably packed with ceramics. When closed, the whole thing would make a seamless foot-thick part of the wall. The hinges were massive. But not recently oiled. They shrieked and squeaked and protested. But the door came open. Reacher hauled it through a short two-foot arc and then slipped in behind it and leaned into it and pushed it the rest of the way. Like pushing a broken-down truck.

Nothing but darkness inside the stone building.

“Flashlights,” Holland said.

Peterson hustled back and visited both cars and returned with three flashlights. They clicked on one after the other and beams played around and showed a bare concrete bunker maybe twenty feet deep and thirty feet wide. Two stories high. The stone was outside veneer only. For appearances. Underneath it the building was brutal and utilitarian and simple and to the point. In the center of the space it had the head of a spiral stair that dropped straight down through the floor into a round vertical shaft. The air coming up out of it smelled still and dry and ancient. Like a tomb. Like a pharaoh’s chamber in a pyramid. The hole for the stairwell was perfectly circular. The floor was cast from concrete two feet thick. The stairs themselves were welded from simple steel profiles. They wound round and down into distant blackness.

“No elevator,” Peterson said.

“Takes too much power,” Reacher said. He was fighting the pedantic part of his brain that was busy pointing out that a spiral was a plane figure. Two dimensions only. Thus a spiral staircase was a contradiction in terms. It was a helical staircase. A helix was a three-dimensional figure. But he didn’t say so. He had learned not to. Maybe Susan in Virginia would have understood. Or maybe not.

“Can you imagine?” Holland said, in the silence. “You’re seven years old and you’re looking to head down there and you know you won’t be coming back up until you’re grown?”

“If you got here at all,” Reacher said. “Which you wouldn’t have. The whole concept was crazy. They built the world’s most expensive storage facility, that’s all.”

Close to the stairwell shaft there were two wide metal ventilation pipes coming up through the floor. Maybe two feet in diameter. They came up about a yard and stopped, like broad chimneys on a flat roof. Directly above both of them were circular holes in the concrete ceiling. One shaft would have been planned as an intake, connected to one of the building’s fake chimneys, fitted with fans and filters and scrubbers to clean the poisoned air. The other would have been the exhaust, to be vented up and out through the second fake chimney. An incomplete installation. Never finished. Presumably the fake chimneys were capped internally. Some temporary fix that had lasted fifty years. There was no sign of rain or snow inside the bunker.

Reacher stepped over to one of the pipes and shone his flashlight beam straight down. Like looking down a well. He couldn’t see bottom. The pipe was lined on the inside with stainless steel. Smooth and shiny. Efficient air movement. No turbulence. No furring, no accumulation of dirt. Regular cleaning had not been on the agenda. There would have been no one left alive to do it.

Reacher stepped back and leaned over the stair rail and shone his flashlight beam straight down the stairwell. Saw nothing except stairs. They wound on endlessly, wrapped around a simple steel pipe. No handrail on the outer circumference. The space was too tight.

“This place is very deep,” he said.

His voice echoed back at him.

“Probably needed to be,” Holland said.

The stairs had once been painted black, but their edges were worn back to dull metal by the passage of many feet. The safety rail around the opening was scuffed and greasy.

Peterson said, “I’ll go first.”

Five to ten in the evening.

Six hours to go.

Reacher waited until Peterson’s head was seven feet down, and then he followed. The stairs were in a perfectly round vertical shaft lined with smooth concrete. Space was cramped. There had been construction difficulties. The voice from Virginia had read him notes from faxed files: The design was compromised several times during construction because of the kind of terrain they found. Clearly the terrain had meant they hadn’t drilled beyond the bare minimum. The diameter was tight. Reacher’s shoulders brushed the concrete on one side and the central pipe on the other. But it was his feet that were the major problem. They were too big. A helical staircase has treads that narrow from the outside to the inside. Reacher was walking on his heels the whole way. Coming back up, he would be walking on his toes.

They went down, and down, and down, Peterson first, then Reacher, then Holland. Fifty feet, then seventy-five, then a hundred. Their flashlight beams jerked and stabbed through the gloom. The steel under their feet clanged and boomed. The air was still and dry. And warm. Like a mine, insulated from the surface extremes.

Reacher called, “See anything yet?”

Peterson called back, “No.”

They kept on going, corkscrewing down, and down, and down, their flashlight beams turning perpetually clockwise, washing the troweled concrete wall. They passed through strange acoustic nodes where the whole shaft resonated like the bore of an oboe and the sound of their feet on the metal set up weird harmonic chords, as if the earth’s core was singing to them.

Two hundred feet.

Then more.

Then Peterson called, “I’m there, I think.”

Reacher clattered on after him, two more full turns.

Then he came to a dead stop, deep underground.

He sat down, on the second-to-last step.

He used his flashlight, left, right, up, down.

Not good.

He heard the voice from Virginia in his head again: Something about the construction compromises made it useless for anything else.

Damn straight they did.

The stairwell shaft ended in an underground chamber made of concrete. It was perfectly circular. Like a hub. Maybe twenty feet in diameter. The size of a living room. But round. Like a living room in a movie about the future. It had eight open doorways leading off to eight horizontal corridors, one at each point of the compass, like bicycle spokes. The corridors were dark. Deep in shadow. The doorways were straight and square and true. The chamber’s floor was hard and flat and dry and smooth. The walls were hard and flat and dry and smooth. The ceiling was hard and flat and dry and smooth. Altogether the whole place was a neat, crisp, exact piece of construction. Well designed, well engineered, well built. Ideal for its intended purpose.

Which was an orphanage.

For children.

What made it useless for anything else was that the ceiling was only five feet six inches above the floor. That was all. Bad terrain. The round chamber and the accompanying spoked corridors had been burrowed laterally into a thin and ungenerous seam between upper and lower plates of unyielding hard rock. The low ceiling was a necessary concession to reality. And a professional disappointment, probably. But theoretically adequate for a pack of unaccompanied kids, all runty and starving. Reacher could picture the engineers confronting the unexpected problem, poring over geological surveys, looking up tables of average height versus age, shrugging their shoulders, revising their plans, signing off on the inevitable. Technically acceptable, they would have said, which was the only standard military engineers understood.

But the place was not acceptable for anything else, technically or otherwise. Not even close. Not acceptable for Marine training or any other kind of military purpose. Not acceptable for any kind of full-grown adult. Peterson had advanced maybe ten feet into the space and he was buckled at the knees and his head was ducked way down. He was crouching. His shoulders were on the ceiling. He was waddling painfully, ludicrously stooped, like a Russian folk dancer.

And Peterson was three inches shorter than Reacher.

Reacher stood up again. He was on the bottom step. Nine inches above the round chamber’s floor. Its ceiling was level with his waist. His whole upper body was still inside the shaft.

Not good.

Holland came on down and crowded in behind him. Said, “We won’t hear the siren way down here.”

“Does your cell phone work?”

“Not a chance.”

“Then we better be quick.”

“After you,” Holland said. “Mind your head.”

Reacher had a choice. He could shuffle along on his knees or scoot along on his butt. He chose to scoot on his butt. Slow and undignified, but less painful. He snaked downward off the last stair like a clumsy gymnast and sat down and scuttled a cautious yard, heels and knuckles and ass, like a kid playing at being a crab. Ahead of him the two ventilation shafts came down through the low ceiling and ended a stubby foot below the concrete. Three separate parallel bores, one wide for the stairs, two narrow for the pipes, all ending the prescribed distance below the surface in a ludicrous horizontal slot burrowed laterally and grudgingly into the rock.

Reacher said, “I was already taller than this when I was seven.”

His voice came back to him with a strange humming echo. The acoustics were weird. The concrete he was sitting on was neither warm nor cold. There was a faint smell of kerosene in the air. And a draft. Air was coming down the stairwell shaft and circulating back up through the ventilation shafts. A venturi effect. The stone building’s door was open more than two hundred feet above them and the wind was blowing hard across it and sucking air out of the bunker. The same way a spray gun sucks paint out of a reservoir or a carburetor sucks gas out of a fuel line. But nature abhors a vacuum, so some circulatory layer was feeding air right back in, just as fast.

“Move,” Holland said.

Reacher scuttled another yard. Holland ducked down and stepped off the last stair and came after him, crouching like Peterson, spinning slowly, playing his flashlight beam around a whole wide circle.

“Eight doorways,” he said. “Eight choices. Which one has the lab?”

The same strange, humming echo, like Holland’s voice was everywhere and nowhere.

Reacher said, “There is no lab.”

“Has to be. Where there’s meth there’s a lab.”

“There was a lab,” Reacher said. “Once upon a time. But it wasn’t here. It was a big place in New Jersey or California or somewhere. It had a sign outside.”

“What are you talking about?”

Reacher played his flashlight beam low across the floor. Started at the bottom step and followed a faint track of dirt and scuffs that curled counterclockwise across the concrete to a doorway more or less opposite where he was sitting. South, if he was north, or north, if he was south. He had been turned around so many times by the staircase he had lost his bearings.

“Follow me,” he said.

He scooted off. He found it faster to turn around and travel backward. Push with his feet, pivot on his hands, dump down on his ass, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It was warm work. He pulled off his hat and his gloves and unzipped his coat. Then he resumed. Holland and Peterson followed him all the way, bent over, crouching, waddling, always in his view. He could hear knee joints popping and cracking. Ligaments, and fluid. Holland’s, he guessed. Peterson was younger and in better shape.

He made it to the doorway and swiveled around and shone his flashlight down the length of the corridor. It was a tunnel maybe a hundred feet long, perfectly horizontal, like a coal seam. It was five feet six inches high, and about the same in width. The left-hand half was an unobstructed hundred-foot walkway. The right-hand half was built up into a long low continuous concrete shelf, a hundred feet long, about two feet off the floor. A sleeping shelf, he guessed. He imagined bedrolls laid head to toe all along its length, maybe twenty of them. Twenty sleeping children. Five feet each.

But the place had never been used. There were no bedrolls. No sleeping children. What was on the shelf instead was the war surplus flown back fifty years earlier from the old U.S. bomber bases in Europe. Aircrew requirements. Hundreds and hundreds of bricks of white powder, wrapped smooth and tight in yellowing glassine, each packet printed with the crown device, the headband, the three points, the three balls representing jewels. A registered trademark, presumably, for a now defunct but once entirely legitimate and government-contracted outfit called Crown Laboratories, whoever and wherever they had been.

Peterson said, “I don’t believe it.”

The packs looked to be stacked ten high and ten deep in groups of a hundred and there were maybe a hundred and fifty groups along the whole length of the shelf. A total of fifteen thousand, minus those already removed. The stack was a little depleted at the near end. It looked like a brick wall in the process of patient demolition.

Holland asked, “Is this forty tons?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not even close. This is only about a third of it. There should be another two stacks just like this.”

“How many packs in forty tons?” Peterson asked.

“Nearly forty-five thousand.”

“That’s insane. That’s forty-five billion in street value.”

“Your granddaddy’s tax dollars at work.”

“What was it for?”

“World War Two aircrew,” Reacher said. “Bombers, mostly. None of us have any idea what that war was like for them. Toward the end they were flying twelve hour trips, sometimes more, Berlin and back, deep into Germany, day after day after day. Every trip they were doing stuff that had never been done before, in terms of precision and endurance. And they were in mortal danger, every single minute. Every second. Casualties were terrible. They would have been permanently terrified and demoralized, except they were always too exhausted to think. Pep pills were the only way to keep them in the air.”

“These aren’t pills.”

“Delivery method was up to the medical officers. Some made it up into pills, some preferred drinking it dissolved in water, some recommended inhaling it, some liked suppositories. Probably some prescribed all four ways at once.”

“I had no idea.”

“It was general issue, like boots or ammunition. Like food.”

“Can’t have been good for them.”

“Some of the planes had little wires soldered near the end of the throttle travel. The last quarter-inch. War boost, it was called. If you needed it, you hauled the throttle back and busted the wire and got maximum power. It strained the engine, which wasn’t good, but it saved your life, which was good. Same exact principle with the dope.”

“How much did they get through?”

“Way more than we can guess. The Air Force in Europe was hundreds of thousands strong back then. And demand was pretty strong, too. It was a tough gig. I’m sure I would have snorted my body weight before my first tour was half-done.”

“And this much was left over?”

“This could have been a month’s supply. Suddenly not needed anymore. Shutting down production was pretty haphazard at the end.”

“Why is it here?”

“Couldn’t just junk it. Couldn’t sell it. Certainly couldn’t burn it. The whole of Europe would have gotten high as kites off the smoke.”

They went quiet. Just stared.

Then Holland said, “Let’s find the rest.”

The rest was shared between the next two tunnels to the left. The same hundred-foot shelves, the same meticulous stacks of packets, the same dull flashlight reflections off the yellowed glassine. A full fifteen thousand bricks in the second tunnel, another full fifteen thousand in the third.

Holland dropped to his knees. Clenched his fists. Smiled wide.

“Close to ninety thousand pounds, all told,” he said. “The damn DEA will have to listen to us now. This has got to be the biggest drug bust in history. And we did it. Little old us. The Bolton PD, in South Dakota. We’re going to be famous. We’re going to be legends. No more poor relations. The damn prison staff can kiss my ass.”

“Congratulations,” Reacher said.

“Thank you.”

“But it’s not all good. Plato found it a year before you did.”

“How?”

“Rumor and logic, I guess. He knew it had been used in the war, and he knew there was likely to be surplus stock somewhere, so he tracked it down. He’s probably got guys in the Air Force. That’s probably why we found the cargo manifest. It was on top of a pile somewhere, because someone else had been looking for it already.”

Peterson said, “I can’t believe the bikers left it all sitting here. The temptation to take some with them must have been huge.”

Reacher said, “I get the impression that if Plato tells you to leave something, you leave it.” He shuffled a little farther into the tunnel, picturing a long line of sweating men fifty years ago passing the two-pound packets hand to hand to hand and then stacking them neatly like craftsmen. Probably the shortest guys had been detailed for the work. He didn’t know what the Air Force’s height requirement had been fifty years earlier. But probably some of the guys had been standing straight, and some of them hadn’t. They had probably roped the packs down the ventilation tubes in kitbags. Five or ten at a time, maybe more. Trestles and pulleys on the surface. Some kind of an improvised system. Too laborious to carry them all down the stairs one by one. Probably the bikers had brought them back up the same way. The fact that the ventilation pipes were unfinished and open at both ends must have been too obvious to ignore.

He shuffled a little farther in and made another discovery.

There was a lateral link feeding sideways off the main tunnel. Like part of a circle’s circumference butting up against its radius. He squeezed down it and came out in the next tunnel along. He shuffled deeper in and found two more lateral links, one to the left, one to the right. The whole place was a warren. A maze. There was a total of eight spokes, and three separate rings. Each ring had its own curved shelf. Lots more linear feet for sleeping children. Lots of corners. Some turned only left, some turned only right. There were no four-way junctions. Everything was a T, upright at the far end of the spokes, rotated randomly left or right at the other turns. A bizarre layout. The plan view on the blueprint must have looked like a Celtic brooch. Maybe there had been more construction compromises than just the ceiling height. Possibly the whole thing was supposed to be like an odd truncated underground version of the Pentagon itself, but rounded off, not angular, and with some of the links between rings and spokes not made.

The wedges of solid rock separating the spokes and the rings had been hollowed out in ten separate places. Bathrooms, maybe, never installed, or kitchens, never installed, or storerooms for subsistence rations, never supplied. Everything was faced with smooth crisp concrete. It was dry and dusty. The air smelled old. The whole place was absolutely silent.

Peterson called, “Take a look at this.”

Reacher couldn’t locate his voice. It came through all the tunnels at once, from everywhere, humming and singing and fluttering and riding the walls.

Reacher called, “Where are you?”

Peterson said, “Here.”

Which didn’t help. Reacher threaded his way back to the main circular hall and asked again. Peterson was in the next tunnel along. Reacher scooted over and joined him there. Peterson was looking at a fuel tank. It was a big ugly thing that had been welded together out of curved sections of steel small enough to have been dropped down the ventilation shafts. It was sitting on a shelf. It was maybe forty feet long. It was big enough to hold maybe five thousand gallons. It was sweating slightly and it smelled of kerosene. Not original to the place. The welds were crude. Technically unacceptable. Air Force mechanics would have done better work.

Peterson stooped forward and rapped it with his knuckles. The sound came back dull and liquid. Reacher thought back to the fuel truck that had nearly creamed him in the snow at the bottom of the old county two-lane.

“Great,” he said. “We’re two hundred feet underground with five thousand gallons of jet fuel in a home-made tank.”

“Why jet fuel? It smells like kerosene.”

“Jet fuel is kerosene, basically. So it’s one or the other. And there’s way more here than they need for the heaters in the huts. And they just got it. After they already knew they were leaving. And after plowing the runway. So a plane is coming in. Probably soon. It’s going to refuel. Holland needs to tell the DEA about that. They’re going to need to be fast.”

“It won’t come in the dark. There are no runway lights.”

“Even so. Time is tight. How far away is the nearest DEA field office?”

Peterson didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “How did they fill a tank all the way down here?”

“They backed the fuel truck to the door and dropped the hose down the air shaft.”

“That would need a long hose.”

“They have long hoses for houses with big yards.”

Then Holland called out, “Guys, take a look at this.”

His voice reached them with a strange hissing echo, all around the circular room, like a whispering gallery. He was in a tunnel directly opposite. Reacher scooted and Peterson stooped and scuffled and they made their way over to him. He was playing his flashlight beam close and then far, all the way down the hundred-foot length and back again.

It was like something out of a fairy tale.

Like Aladdin’s cave.

Chapter 34

Holland’s flashlight beam threw back bright reflections off gold, off silver, off platinum. It set up glitter and refraction and sparkle off brilliant diamonds and deep green emeralds and rich red rubies and bright blue sapphires. It showed old muted colors, landscapes, portraits, oils on canvas, yellow gilt frames. There were chains and lockets and pins and necklaces and bracelets and rings. They were coiled and piled and tangled and tossed all the way along the shelf. Yellow gold, rose gold, white gold. Old things. New things. A hundred linear feet of loot. Paintings, jewelry, candlesticks, silver trays, watches. Small gold clocks, tiny suede bags with drawstrings, a cut-glass bowl entirely filled with wedding bands.

“Unredeemed pledges,” Peterson said. “In transit, from Plato’s pawn shops.”

“Barter,” Reacher said. “For his dope.”

“Maybe both,” Holland said. “Maybe both things are the same in the end.”

They all shuffled down the tunnel. They were unable to resist. The shelf was a hundred feet long and maybe thirty-two inches wide. More than two hundred and fifty square feet of real estate. The size of a decent room. There was no space on it large enough to put a hand. It was more or less completely covered. Some of the jewelry was exquisite. Some of the paintings were fine. All of the items were sad. The fruits of desperation. The flotsam and jetsam of ruined lives. Hard times, addiction, burglary, loss. Under the triple flashlight beams the whole array flashed and danced and glittered and looked simultaneously fabulous and awful. Someone’s dreams, someone else’s nightmares, all secret and buried two hundred feet down.

A hundred pounds’ weight, or a thousand.

A million dollars’ worth, or ten.

“Let’s go,” Reacher said. “We’ve got better things to do. We shouldn’t waste time here.”

The climb back to the surface was long and hard and tiring. Reacher counted the steps. There were two hundred and eighty of them. Like walking up a twenty-story building. He had to take each step on his toes. Good exercise, he guessed, but right then he wasn’t looking for exercise. The air got colder all the way. It had been maybe thirty degrees underground. It was about minus twenty on the surface. A fifty-degree drop. One degree every five or six steps. Fast enough to notice, but no sudden shock. Reacher zipped his coat and put on his hat and his gloves about a third of the way up. Holland surrendered next. Peterson made it halfway up before he succumbed.

They rested inside the stone building for a minute. Outside the moonlight was still bright. Peterson collected the flashlights and shut them down. Holland stood with his hand on the stair rail. He was red in the face from exertion and breathing hard.

Reacher said to him, “You need to make a call.”

“Do I?”

“The siren could have come and gone while we were downstairs.”

“In which case we’re already too late.” Holland pulled out his cell and dialed. Identified himself, asked a question, listened to the reply.

And smiled.

“All clear,” he said. “Sometimes you gamble and win.”

Then he waited until Peterson left to carry the flashlights back to the cars. He watched him go and turned back to Reacher and said, “You and I figured out the key. You knew the meth was there. But I want to give Andrew the credit. He’s going to be the next chief. A thing like this, it would help him with the guys. And the town. A thing like this, it would set him up right.”

“No question,” Reacher said.

“So would you be OK with that?”

“Fine with me,” Reacher said.

“Good.”

Reacher pushed the door closed against the yowling hinges and Holland locked it up and pocketed the key. They walked together back to the cars and Holland pulled his right glove off in the freezing air and offered his hand to Peterson. Peterson snatched his own glove off and shook.

“Now listen up,” Holland said.

He leaned in to his car and unhooked his radio mike from the dash and pulled it out all the way until the cord went straight and tight. He thumbed the key and called in an all-points code and spoke.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight Deputy Chief Peterson broke open what I’m sure will prove to be our country’s largest-ever drug bust. Start of business tomorrow he’ll be calling the DEA in Washington with the details and about thirty seconds after that this department will be among the most celebrated in the nation. He has my congratulations. As do you all. Just another fine night’s work in a long and distinguished tradition.”

He clicked off and tossed the mike on his seat.

Peterson said, “Thank you, Chief.”

Holland said, “You’re welcome. But you still shouldn’t have come.”

Five minutes to eleven in the evening.

Five hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles south Plato’s three-car convoy waited at an inconspicuous gate in a hurricane fence around an airfield. The gate was a battered, saggy affair, chained and padlocked. The fence was matted with trash and weeds at its base. But the airfield itself was fit for its purpose. It had been military, then civilian, then military again, then civilian again. It had a long runway and hangars and offices and apron parking for hobby planes. They were all lined up neatly, hooded and blinded in the dark by canvas covers.

Plato’s was not a hobby plane. It was a Boeing 737. The largest craft on the field by far. It was twenty years old and Plato was its third owner. Not that anyone knew. Only geeks could date planes, and geeks knew better than to broadcast their conclusions. Plato told the world it had been custom built for him a year ago, up there in Washington state. In reality it had been flown to a facility in Arizona and stripped back to its aluminum skin and the paint had been replaced by a gray-tinted wash that made the bare metal look dark and shiny and evil. People who owed him services regularly spent days and weeks going over it with clay bars and carnauba wax. It was polished like a show car. Plato was proud of it. He was the first in his family to own a Boeing.

A dusty pick-up truck with one headlight drove around the perimeter track inside the fence and stopped short of the gate. A guy got out and clicked open the padlock and clattered the chain out of the way. He lifted and pulled and swung the gate open. The three-car convoy drove through.

Plato was Plato and Range Rovers were Range Rovers, so they didn’t stick to the perimeter road. Instead they drove in a straight line, across bumpy grass, across smooth taxiways, across the runway, across the apron. They held a wide respectful curve around the Boeing and parked side by side between two Cessnas and a Piper. The six men climbed out and formed a loose cordon. Plato got out into it. He was in no danger, but it helped to appear as if he was, both in terms of caution and reputation. There was an old-fashioned set of rolling stairs set next to the Boeing’s forward door. The word Mexicana was still visible on it, peeled and fading. Three men went up. After a minute one stuck his head back out and nodded. All clear.

Plato went up and took his seat, which was 1A, front row on the left. Legroom against the bulkhead was not an issue for him. The old first class cabin was intact. Four rows of four wide leather seats. Behind them economy class had been removed. There was just empty space back there. The plane was rated for a hundred and eighty passengers, and twenty years ago an average passenger was reckoned to weigh two hundred pounds including checked bags. Which gave a total lift capacity of thirty-six thousand pounds, which was about sixteen tons.

Plato sat while his men inspected their equipment. It had been supplied and loaded onto the plane by a guy who owed Plato a favor. Therefore it was all present and correct, on pain of death. But his guys checked anyway. Cold-weather clothing, aluminum ladders, flashlights, automatic weapons, ammunition, some food and water. Anything else necessary would be supplied at the destination.

The pilots had finished their preflight checks. The first officer stepped out of the cockpit and waited in the aisle. Plato caught his eye and nodded. Like a guy telling a butler when to serve the soup. The first officer went back to the flight deck and the engines started up. The plane taxied, lined up with the runway, paused, shuddered against the brakes, rolled forward, accelerated, and then rose majestically into the night.

Reacher rode back to town in Peterson’s car. Holland followed them in his own car. Reacher got out at the end of Janet Salter’s street and waved them both away. Then he eased past the parked cruiser and walked through the snow to the house. Janet Salter was still up when he walked in. She looked him up and down and side to side like she was inspecting him for damage. Then she asked, “Successful?”

Reacher said, “So far so good.”

“Then you should call the girl in Virginia and tell her. You were awfully abrupt before. You hung up on her, basically.”

“She’s probably off duty. It’s late.”

“Try her.”

So Reacher wrestled his way out of his coat and hung it up and sat down in the hallway chair. He dialed the number he remembered. Asked for Amanda.

She was still on duty.

He said, “N06BA03 is clearly a pharmaceutical code for methamphetamine.”

She said, “Forty tons?”

“Almost intact.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s what we thought.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. The local cops are on it.”

“What does forty tons look like?”

“Repetitive.”

“How the hell can forty tons of methamphetamine get lost in the system?”

“I don’t know. Stuff gets lost all the time. Shit happens. Maybe they weren’t very proud of it. Values change all of a sudden, wartime to peacetime. Maybe that’s why they hid it behind the code. And as soon as everyone forgot what the code meant, they forgot the stuff was there. Out of sight and out of mind.”

She didn’t reply.

He said, “Thanks for your help, Susan.”

“You’re most welcome.”

“Tell your buddy at Lackland there are records clerks taking money for combing the archives. That stuff wasn’t found by accident. Maybe you can pay off the favor that way.”

“Bronze Stars all around. Anything else?”

“Nothing on Kapler?”

“He resigned for no reason. That’s all there is. Which is strange, I agree, but there’s no hard data anywhere. Either he’s clean, or someone cleaned up after him.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”

“Anything else?”

Reacher said, “No, I guess we’re all done here.”

She said, “So this is goodbye?”

He said, “I guess it is.”

“It’s been nice talking to you.”

“For me, too. Stay lucky, Susan. And thanks again.”

“You bet.”

She hung up. He sat in the chair for a moment with his eyes closed and the receiver on his lap. When it started beeping at him he put it back in the cradle and got up and walked to the kitchen.

Janet Salter was in the kitchen with a book under her arm. Reacher found her there. She was filling a glass with water from the tap. She was on her way to bed. Reacher stood aside and she passed him and headed for the stairs. Reacher waited a moment and went to make one last check of the house. The cop in the library was standing easy, six feet from the window, alert and implacable. The cop in the hallway was in the telephone chair, sitting forward, her elbows on her knees. Reacher checked the view from the parlor and then headed upstairs to his room. He kept the lights off and the drapes open. The snow on the porch roof was thick and glazed and frozen. The street was empty. Just the parked cruiser, the cop inside, and ruts and ice and the relentless wind.

All quiet.

In Virginia Susan Turner’s desktop computer made a sound like a bell. The secure government intranet. An incoming e-mail. The temporary password, from the Human Resources Command. She copied and pasted it to a dialog box in the relevant database. The ancient report came up as an Adobe document. Like an on-line photocopy. The seventy-third citation from the cross-reference index in the back of Jack Reacher’s service file.

It was the history of an experiment run by an army psychological unit, of which she knew there had been many, way back when. So many, in fact, that they had mostly sat around on their fat butts until inspiration had struck. This bunch had been interested in genetic mutation. The science was well understood by that point. DNA had been discovered. Then anecdotal evidence had come in about a kids’ movie being shown on service bases. It was a cheap sci-fi flick about a monster. Some rubber puppet filmed in extreme close-up. The creature’s first appearance was held to be a cinematographic masterpiece. It came up out of a lagoon. Shock was total. Children in the audience screamed and recoiled physically. The reaction seemed to be universal.

The psychologists agreed that to recoil from a source of extreme danger was a rational response derived from evolution. But they knew about mutation. Giraffes were sometimes born with longer or shorter necks than their parents’, for instance. Either useful or not, depending on circumstances. Time would tell. Evolution would judge. So they wondered if children were ever born without the recoil reflex. Counterproductive, in terms of the survival of the species. But possibly useful to the military.

They sent prints of the movie to remote bases in the Pacific. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, because they wanted the largest possible test sample. The Pacific, because they wanted children not yet exposed to the movie, or even rumors of it. They set up inconspicuous cameras above the cinema screens. The cameras were focused on the front rows of the audience. The shutters were triggered by the film sprockets, timed to snap just after the monster emerged from the murk. Hundreds of children were invited to showings in batches, four- to seven-year-olds, which was an age group apparently considered mature in terms of emotional response but not yet socialized out of honest and unguarded expression.

There was a long illustrative sequence of still photographs in the document. A little blurred, a little dark, but they all showed the same thing. Small children, eyes wide, mouths open, slamming back against their seats, some of them launching themselves right over their seat backs, arms thrown up around their heads, ducking away in fear and panic.

Then came an exception.

One photograph was focused on a front row of fifteen seats. Fifteen children. All boys. They all looked about six years old. Fourteen of them were slamming backward. One was jumping forward. He was larger than the others. He had short tousled hair, light in color. He was diving up and out, trying to get to the screen. His right arm was raised aggressively. There was something in his hand.

Susan Turner was pretty sure it was an open switchblade.

The aggressive boy was not formally named in the document. He had been studied briefly but then his father had been cut new orders and the boy had gotten lost in the system. The experiment had petered out shortly afterward. But the results gleaned to that point had been retained as a completed file. The aggressive boy had been labeled with long words, none of which meant anything to Susan.

The last page of the file was its own cross-reference index. There were no backward links to any other personnel file than Reacher’s.

Susan returned to the technical preamble. The delay between the appearance of the monster and the click of the shutter had been set at eighteen frames, which was three-quarters of a second. She was impressed. Not so much with the forward leap. She knew people like that. She was one herself. But for a six-year-old to have gotten a switchblade up and open in his hand in less than a second was something else.

Janet Salter’s house stayed all quiet for less than ten seconds. Then first one, then two, then three, then four police radios burst to life with loud static and codes and urgent words, and cell phones rang, and the hall phone rang, and stumbling footsteps crossed the floor in the day watch’s bedroom, and doors opened, and there were tramping feet on the stairs, and people started talking all at once, loud and scared and horrified.

Reacher stepped out of his room and hustled down to the hallway. The four women cops were standing all together on the rug, two in uniform, two in night clothes, all talking on phones, all white and shocked and looking around wide-eyed in helpless restless panic, all full of adrenaline, all with nowhere to go.

Reacher said, “What?”

One of the cops said, “It’s Andrew Peterson.”

“What about him?”

“He’s been shot and killed.”

Chapter 35

The guy from the car on the street came in and joined the confusion. Reacher had no doubt the guys in the other two cars were equally distracted. For the moment Janet Salter’s security was worth exactly less than jack shit. So he kept half his attention on the parlor window and used the other half to piece the story together from the babble of voices. It wasn’t difficult. The hard facts seemed to be: Following Chief Holland’s most recent orders, the department was still on high alert. Therefore mobile patrols were constant, and vigilance was high. No street was visited less than every twenty minutes. Every pedestrian was eyeballed, as was every car and every truck. Every lot was checked regularly, every alley, every approach.

A unit driven solo by the new guy Montgomery had nosed into a snowbound parking lot north and east of downtown and Montgomery had seen Peterson’s car apparently empty and idling with its driver’s window all the way down and its nudge bars pushed up hard against a blank brick wall. On closer inspection Montgomery had found the car not to be empty. Peterson was sprawled across the front seats, dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Reacher stayed at the parlor window, watching the silent street, thinking about Peterson, leaving the cops to their private grief in the hallway. He could hear their voices. They were passing through a short phase of denial. Maybe the story was wrong. Which Reacher considered theoretically plausible, but very unlikely. Operational reports called in from the field were occasionally unreliable. And head wounds sometimes produced misleading impressions. Deep comas could be mistaken for death. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred hoping for the best was a waste of time. Reacher knew that. He was an optimist, but not a fool.

The bad news was confirmed five minutes later by Chief Holland himself. He drove up and parked and came in through the cold. Three items on his agenda. First, he wanted to break the news to his crew personally. Second, he wanted to make sure they got their minds back on their job. He sent the lone male officer back to his car on the street, he sent the day-watch women back to bed, he sent one of the night-watch women back to the library, and he told the other to focus hard on the front door. His face was calm and his voice was quiet and his manner was controlled. He was a decent CO. Out of his league, perhaps, in over his head, no question, but he was still walking and talking. Which was more than Reacher had seen from some COs he had known, when the shit had hit the fan.

The third item on Holland’s agenda was something halfway between an invitation and a command. He stepped into the parlor and looked straight at Reacher and asked him to come out and take a look at the crime scene.

Janet Salter had gotten up because of the noise and was hiding out in the kitchen. Reacher found her there. She was still fully dressed. She had her gun in her pocket. She knew exactly what he was about to tell her. She waved it away impatiently and said, “I know what to do.”

He said, “Do you?”

She nodded. “The basement, the gun, the password.”

“When?”

“Immediately anything happens.” Then she said, “Or before. Perhaps now.”

“Not a bad idea,” Reacher said. “The guy is out there, and close by.”

“I know what to do,” she said again.

Reacher climbed into the front passenger seat of Holland’s unmarked sedan. Holland backed up and turned and drove toward town. He made a left at the park and a right that led past the coffee shop and onward past the clothing store that Reacher had used. Then he threaded right and left and right again through back streets to a long block of two-story brick buildings. They were plain and square. Maybe once they had been stores or offices or warehouses. Maybe once they had been the hub of Bolton’s commercial district. Now they were decrepit. Most of them looked abandoned. Three in a line had been demolished to make an empty space. A gap, perhaps a hundred feet by forty. It seemed to be in use as a temporary parking lot, maybe busy by day but now empty at night. It was humped with frozen snow and rutted by tire tracks made days ago when the surface had still been soft.

The empty lot was guarded by two police cruisers. Their red lights were turning. Their beams danced crazily and rhythmically across surfaces far, then near, then far, then near. Each car held a lone cop. Reacher didn’t know either of them. They were just sitting there. There were no crowds to hold back. It was way too late and way too cold for rubberneckers.

Peterson’s car was all the way on the left side of the lot. It was still idling. Its driver’s window was still down. The short vertical nudge bars on its front bumper were pressed up hard against a blank brick wall. Which was the side of the next building along.

Holland parked at the curb and climbed out. Reacher followed him and zipped his coat and pulled his hat down over his ears. The side street they were on ran north to south and they were out of the wind. It was cold, but not impossible. They walked together into the lot. No danger of messing up any evidence on the ground. No danger of obscuring tire tracks or footprints. There weren’t any. The rutted snow was like corrugated iron, but harder. And it was glazed and slippery. They struggled on and approached Peterson’s car from the rear. Its exhaust pipes were burbling patiently. The whole vehicle was just sitting there, like a faithful servant waiting for its master’s next command.

Sheets of ice creaked under their feet as Reacher and Holland walked to the driver’s door. They looked in through the open window. Peterson’s feet were in the driver’s foot well, and his body was twisted at the waist. He had fallen sideways. His gun was still in its holster. His head was flung back, his neck bent, one cheek pressed down on the upholstery, as if he was staring at an item of great interest on the inside panel of the passenger door.

Reacher tracked back around the trunk, his knees passing through the small white cloud of exhaust, and back along the far flank of the car, to the front passenger door. He put his gloved hand on the handle and opened it up. Crouched down. Peterson stared at him through sightless eyes. He had a third eye in the center of his forehead. An entry wound, perfectly placed, just like the lawyer on the two-lane to the east. Nine millimeter, almost certainly. Fairly close range. There were faint burns on the skin, and faint powder tattoos. About five feet, probably.

There was no exit wound. The bullet was still inside Peterson’s head, crushed and deformed and tumbled. Unusual, for a nine-millimeter at close range. But not impossible. Clearly Peterson’s skull had been thick.

There was no doubt he was dead. Reacher knew enough about ballistics and human biology and he had seen enough dead people to be absolutely sure. But still he checked. He took off his glove and put warm twinned fingers on the cold skin behind Peterson’s ear. No pulse. Nothing at all, except the waxy feel of a corpse, part soft, part hard, both solid and insubstantial, already completely alien to a living touch.

Reacher put his glove back on.

The car’s transmission was controlled by a lever on the steering column. It was still in drive. The heater was set at seventy degrees. The radio volume was turned down very low. There were regular gasps of quiet static and occasional murmuring voices, all of them unintelligible.

“OK,” Reacher said.

“Seen enough?” Holland asked.

“Yes.”

“So what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he drive straight home?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was looking for the shooter,” Holland said.

“You all are.”

“But that wasn’t his job tonight. So he was freelancing. You know why?”

“No.”

“He was trying to impress you.”

“Me?”

“You were practically mentoring him. You were helping him. Maybe you were even pushing him.”

“Was I?”

“You told him what to do about the dead lawyer. All those photographs? You told him what to do about the dead biker. You discussed things. He was going to be the next chief. He wanted to be a good one. He was ready to listen to anybody.”

“I didn’t tell him to go searching for the shooter all alone in the middle of the night.”

“He wanted to break the case.”

“You all do.”

“He wanted your respect.”

“Or yours,” Reacher said. “Maybe he was trying to live up to the bullshit you put on the radio tonight. About the meth? You made him feel like a fraud.”

Silence for a beat.

Holland asked, “What happened here?”

Reacher said, “He saw someone in the lot. Almost certainly in a car or a truck. Too cold to be on foot. He drove in. A wide circle. He stopped, cheek to cheek. Pretty close. He turned down his radio and opened his window, ready to talk. But the guy just went ahead and shot him. He fell over and died and his foot slipped off the brake. The car drove itself into the wall.”

“Same basic setup as the lawyer.”

“Pretty much.”

“Was it quick?”

“Head shots usually are.”

They went quiet. Just stood and shivered in the freezing air.

Holland said, “Should we look for a shell case?”

Reacher shook his head. “Same deal as the lawyer. The shell case ejected inside the shooter’s vehicle.”

Holland didn’t speak. Reacher could see the question in his face. Who was the guy? It was right there in his eyes.

An awkward question, with an unappealing answer.

Reacher said, “Now I see why you wanted me here. You wanted me to be the one to reach the conclusion. And say it out loud. Me, not you. An independent voice.”

Holland didn’t speak.

Reacher said, “OK, let’s not go there. Not just yet. Let’s think for a minute.”

They went back to the station house. Holland parked in the slot reserved for him and they walked between the garbage cans to the door. They went to the squad room, to the desk that Peterson had used. Holland said, “You should check his messages. Voice mail and e-mail. Something might have come in that led him there.”

Reacher said, “You’re clutching at straws.”

“Allow me the privilege.”

“Did he even come here first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he even have time?”

“Probably not. But we should check the messages anyway. Because we need to be sure, with a thing like this.”

“You should do the checking. It’s your department. I’m just a civilian.”

Holland said, “I don’t know how. I never learned. I’m not good with technology. I’m old school. Everyone knows that. I’m the past. Andrew was the future.”

So Reacher puzzled his way through the telephone console and the computer keyboard. No passwords were required. No PINs. Everything was set up for fast and casual access. There was only one voice mail message. It was from Kim Peterson, much earlier in the evening, just after six o’clock, just after Reacher and her husband had hustled back to Janet Salter’s house after watching the surveillance video from the prison.

Kim’s recorded voice was suspended somewhere between panicked and brave and resigned and querulous.

She had asked, “When are you coming home?”

Reacher moved on to e-mail. He opened the application. Two messages downloaded. The first was from the DEA in Washington D.C. An agent there was confirming his belief that there was no meth lab under the facility west of Bolton, South Dakota. Expensive satellite surveillance time proved it. Peterson was thanked for his interest and asked to get back in touch should new information come to light.

The second e-mail was a routine nightly round-robin BOLO bulletin from the Highway Patrol. Statewide coordination. Be on the lookout. For, in this instance, a whole bunch of stuff, including any or all of three stolen cars and four stolen trucks taken that day from random locations around the state, a stolen snowplow taken from a highway maintenance depot east of Mitchell, a thing called an Isuzu N-series pump and a de-icing truck stolen by two absconded employees from a commercial airfield east of Rapid City, a stolen Ithaca shotgun from Pierre, four suspects believed to be at large in a 1979 Chevrolet Suburban after a messy and aborted burglary in Sioux Falls, and finally Peterson’s own contribution, a bartender fleeing a suspected Bolton homicide in a 2005 Ford pick-up truck.

Reacher said, “Nothing.”

Holland sat down.

“So say it,” he said. “Let’s go there now.”

“Three questions,” Reacher said. “Why did the lawyer stop on the road with such total confidence? Why did Peterson stop in the lot? And why was he killed tonight of all nights?”

“Answers?”

“Because the lawyer felt safe to do so. Because Peterson felt safe to do so. And because you announced the meth bust on the police department radio net.”

Holland nodded.

“The shooter is one of us,” he said. “He’s a cop.”

Five minutes to midnight.

Four hours to go.

Chapter 36

Holland and Reacher hashed it out between them, like people do, searching for weaknesses in a theory, finding none, and thereby strengthening it to the point of certainty. A bent cop already in town explained why the watch for incoming strangers had proved fruitless. A bent cop in a car, flashing his lights, maybe patting the air with a gloved hand out a window, explained why a cautious lawyer would come to a dead stop on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere. A bent cop, hearing Holland’s triumphant radio message earlier that night, explained why Peterson had died so soon afterward. The guy would have realized the need for action before morning. Start of business tomorrow he’ll be calling the DEA in Washington with the details, Holland had said. A no-brainer. And a bent cop parked in a lot, maybe waving urgently, explained why Peterson had come straight to his side, completely unsuspecting, completely unready.

And a bent cop hauled unwillingly away by the siren and the crisis plan explained why Janet Salter had lived through the prison riot, all five hours of it.

Holland said, “It’s my fault. What I said on the radio got Andrew killed.”

“I might have done the same,” Reacher said. “In fact, sometimes I did do the same.”

“I was trying to help him.”

“Unintended consequences. Don’t blame yourself.”

“How can I not?”

“Why did he even go there? He wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t just passing by, because it wasn’t on his way home.”

“He was always on duty, in his head, at least. And it could have been on his way home. More or less. I mean, it was a very minor detour. Two extra minutes, maybe. And that was Andrew, through and through. Always willing to give a little extra to the cause. Always ready to try one last thing, check one last place.”

Reacher said nothing.

Holland said, “I’m assuming the Mexican is behind all of this. The one we keep hearing about.”

Reacher said, “Plato.”

Holland asked, “How long ago do you suppose he turned our guy around?”

“A year,” Reacher said. “This whole business seems to be a year old.”

“Was it money?”

“Most things are.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“A new guy, I’m guessing. I hardly know them. Not enough to trust any of them, anyway. This department is a mess. Which is my fault too, I guess. I couldn’t keep up.”

Reacher said nothing.

Holland asked, “Where do we start?”

“Tell me about Kapler.”

“He had problems in Miami. Nothing was proved against him. But there were rumors. It was Miami, and there was drug money around.”

“Terrific.”

“They were just rumors.”

“You should look at him. And Lowell. What happened to him a year ago? You should look at this guy Montgomery, too. People who are all alone when they discover crimes are sometimes the same people that committed them.”

“Should I bring them in?”

“Safest thing to do would be to bring everyone in. The whole damn department. Sit them down right here in this room, and you’d know for sure your guy was right in front of you.”

Holland said, “Can I do that?”

“Sure you can.”

“Should I do it?”

Reacher said nothing. Any cop’s most basic question: Suppose we’re wrong?

Holland said, “The crew at Mrs. Salter’s must be OK. They didn’t go anywhere tonight. Did they? They weren’t waiting in abandoned lots. They have alibis. Each other, and you.”

“True.”

“So I could leave them in place.”

“But you should warn them first,” Reacher said. “If our guy senses the net is tightening, he might make one last attempt.”

“They’d nail him.”

“Not if you don’t warn them first. A fellow cop comes to their door, what are they going to do? Shoot first and ask questions later?”

“They’d nail him afterward.”

“Which would be too late.”

“It would be a suicide mission.”

“Maybe he’s ready for one. He must know he’s going to get nailed sooner or later. He must know he’s dead whatever happens. He’s between a rock and a hard place. Two homicides or three, either way he’s going to fry.”

“He might not come in at all. He might disobey my order.”

“Then he’ll identify himself for you. He’ll paint a target on his own back. He’ll save you the trouble.”

“So should I do it? Should I call them in?”

“I would,” Reacher said. “It’s any police department’s basic duty. Get criminals off the streets.”

Holland made the calls. First came seven individual conversations, with the four women and the three men stationed with Mrs. Salter. The subtext was awkward. One of your fellow officers is a killer. Trust no one except yourselves. Then he made a general all-points call on the radio net and ordered all other officers, whoever they were, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, on duty or not, to report to base exactly thirty minutes from then. Which Reacher thought was a minor tactical error. Better to have required their immediate presence. Which might not have gotten them there any faster in practice, but to set even a short deadline gave the bad guy the sense he still had time and space to act, to finish his work, and in ideal conditions of chaos and confusion, too, with cops running around all over the place. It was going to be a risky half-hour.

Holland put the microphone back on its rest, and picked up the phone again. He said, “Kim Peterson hasn’t been informed yet.”

Reacher said, “Don’t do it by phone. That’s not right.”

“I know. I’m calling the front desk. Because I want you to do it. The desk guy can drive you. He can pick you up again in an hour. An hour should do it.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t have time to do it myself. I’ll be busy here.”

“I don’t have standing,” Reacher said. “I’m just a stranger passing through.”

“You met her,” Holland said. “You spent a night in her house.”

“It’s your job, not mine.”

“I’m sure you’ve done it before.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I’m sure you were good at it.”

“Not very.”

“You have to do it,” Holland said. “I just can’t, OK? Don’t make me, OK?”

Plato spent an hour in seat 1A, front of the cabin, left-hand side, and then he got restless. Air travel at night bored him. By day there was a view, even from seven miles up. Mostly empty and brown, to be sure, but with enough roads and houses and towns to remind him there were new customers down there, just waiting to be recruited and served. But at night he couldn’t see them. There was nothing except darkness and strings of distant lights.

He got up and walked down the aisle, past his men, past the last first class seat, into the empty space where economy class had been. He looked at the equipment on the floor. His men had checked it. He checked it again, because he was Plato and they weren’t.

Food, water, all uninteresting. Seven coats, seven hats, seven pairs of gloves. All new, all adequate. The coats were big puffy things filled with goose feathers. North Face, a popular make, all black. Six were medium, and one was a boy’s size. The submachine guns were H&K MP5Ks. Short, stubby, futuristic, lethal. His favorite. There were seven small backpacks, each containing spare magazines and flashlights.

Immediately Plato diagnosed a problem. The backpack straps would have to be let out close to their maximum length, to fit over the bulky coats. An obvious conclusion. Simply a question of thinking ahead. But it hadn’t been done.

He was Plato, and they weren’t.

The ladders were made by an American company called Werner. Aluminum, thirty-two feet long at their maximum extension, rated for two hundred and fifty pounds. They were all plastered with yellow warning stickers. They rattled slightly. They were picking up vibrations from the engines. They probably weighed about twenty pounds each. There were four of them. Eighty pounds. They would be left behind. Better to use the airlift capacity for forty extra glassine bricks, than four useless ladders.

The same with the six useless men, of course. They would be left behind, too. Nine hundred pounds of replaceable flesh and blood, versus four hundred and fifty extra bricks of meth? No contest.

Plato was already visualizing the return trip. He knew he would succeed. He had many advantages. Most of them were innate and overwhelming. His man on the ground was insurance, nothing more.

* * *

Caleb Carter was considered low man on the totem pole. Which he thought was richly ironic. He knew a little about totem poles, and Native American culture in general. He knew a little about a lot of things, but in a random unstructured way that had paid no dividends in terms of high school grades or employment opportunities. So he had turned to the Department of Corrections. The default choice, for his graduating class. Probably the default choice for many graduating classes to come. He had been trained and equipped with a radio and a polyester uniform and assigned to the night watch at the county lock-up. He was the youngest and newest member of a four-man team. Hence, low man on the totem pole.

Except that calling a new guy the low man on the totem pole was completely ass-backward. Totem poles were what? Twenty, thirty feet high? Native Americans weren’t dumb. They put the most important guy at the bottom. At eye level. What important guy wanted to be twenty or thirty feet off the ground, where no one could see him? Like supermarkets. The eye-level shelf was reserved for the best stuff. The high-margin items. The big corporations hired experts to figure out stuff like that. Eye level was what it was all about. Thus the low man was really the high man, and the high man was really the low man. In a manner of speaking. A common misperception. A kind of linguistic inversion. Caleb Carter didn’t know how it had come about.

Night watch was an easy job. The cells were locked before they came on duty, and weren’t unlocked until after they had left. In practice Caleb’s team had only one real responsibility, which was to monitor the population for medical emergencies. Guys could start foaming at the mouth or banging their heads on the wall. Some of them weren’t fully aware of what prescriptions they should be taking. Some of them tried to hang themselves with jumpsuit legs, all twisted up and knotted. They were a sorry bunch.

The monitoring process involved ten tours of inspection, one every hour. Naturally most of them got blown off. Sometimes all of them. Easier to sit in the ready room, playing poker for pennies or looking at porn on the computer or chilling with the ear buds in. At first Caleb had been disconcerted by the negligence. New job, new life, he had started out with a measure of energy and drive. He had been prepared to take it seriously. But any new guy’s first duty was to fit in. So he did. After a month he couldn’t remember what he had been upset about. What did the department want for their lousy ten bucks per?

But the riot in the big house the night before had shaken things up a little. The watch leader had mandated three tours in the aftermath. He had even done one of them himself. Tonight he was looking for two, but four hours into the shift they hadn’t even done the first of them, so clearly they were really on track for one only. Which was about due right then, and naturally Caleb would get to do it, because he was high man on the totem pole. Which he was OK with. He would do it, real soon, but not immediately, because right then he was occupied with clicking through a bunch of sites featuring naked fat girls and barnyard animals. Work could wait.

Reacher slipped out of a battered sedan at the end of the Petersons’ driveway and stood and watched the desk guy drive away. Then he headed for the house. It was like walking into a white tunnel. Plowed snow was piled five feet high, left and right. Up ahead was the Y-shaped junction, right to the barn, left to the house. The wind was strong. The land was flat and open. Reacher had never been colder. He knew that with certainty. A superlative had been achieved. One day in Saudi Arabia at the start of Desert Shield the noontime temperature had hit a hundred and forty degrees. Now in South Dakota he was suffering through minus thirty, which was more like minus fifty with the windchill. Neither extreme had been comfortable. But he knew which one he preferred.

He made it to the Y-shaped split. He turned left, toward the house. The path was OK. The underfoot surface had been salted and sprinkled with grit. Maybe the last domestic chore Andrew Peterson had ever done. Ten minutes’ work. He had made it easier to inform his widow of his death.

The house loomed up ahead. Red boards, red door, made brown by the blue of the moon. Soft yellow light behind the window glass. A faint smell of wood smoke from the chimney. Reacher walked on. It was so cold he felt like he had forgotten how. Like a stroke victim. He had to concentrate. Left foot, right foot, one step, the next, consciously and deliberately. Like he was learning a brand-new skill.

He made it to the door. He paused a second and coughed freezing air from his lungs and raised his hand and knocked. The thickness of his glove and the way he was shaking turned what was supposed to be a crisp double tap into a ragged sequence of dull padded thumps. The worst sound in the world. After midnight, a cop’s family alone in a house, a knock at the door. No possibility of good news. Kim would understand that in the first split second. The only issue was how hard and how long she was going to fight it. Reacher knew how it would be. He had knocked on plenty of different doors, after midnight.

She opened up. One glance, and the last absurd hope drained from her face. It wasn’t her husband. He hadn’t dropped his keys in the snow. He hadn’t gotten inexplicably drunk and couldn’t find the keyhole.

She fell down, like a trapdoor had opened under her.

Caleb Carter took a black four-cell Maglite from the rack at the door and checked his radio. It was turned on and working. The Maglite gave a decent beam. Batteries were OK. There was a clipboard screwed to the wall. There was a pen tied to it with a ratty piece of string. Caleb presigned for the fifth tour. The first four notations were bogus. No one looked up. He left the ready room and headed down the corridor.

In terms of jurisdiction the county lock-up was entirely separate from the state penitentiary, which in turn was entirely separate from the federal prison. But all three facilities shared the same site and the same architecture. Economy of scale, ease of operation. The lock-up was mostly filled with arrested local folks who either couldn’t get or couldn’t make bail. Pretrial. Innocent until proven guilty. Caleb knew some of them from high school. About a quarter of the inmates were post-trial, found guilty and sentenced, waiting out a few days until the system moved them to their next destination.

A sorry bunch.

There were sixty cells, laid out in a two story V, fifteen cells to a section. East wing lower, east wing upper, west wing lower, west wing upper. At the point of the V there was a metal staircase, and beyond it was a single story mess hall and rec room, so that the lower floor was actually shaped like a Y.

All sixty cells had occupants. They always did. The money had come from outside of Bolton, and it was like the politicians in Pierre or Washington or wherever wanted their investment to be well used. It was widely accepted around the town that laws got tighter if there was a vacancy. And vice versa. If there was an empty bed, an ounce of herb in your car would get you hauled in. But if all sixty beds were taken, two ounces would get you nothing more than a smack on the head.

Law enforcement. Caleb’s chosen career.

He started at the far end of the east wing lower. Walked all the way to the end wall, turned around, clicked his flashlight on, and came back slower. The cells were on his left. He overhanded the flashlight up on his shoulder, which not only looked cool but put the beam in line with his eyes. The cells had bars at the front, cots on the right, combined sinks and toilets in the back left corner, desks no wider than shelves opposite the cots. The cots had men in them. Most were asleep, rumbling, mumbling, and snoring under thin gray sheets. Some were awake, their narrow furtive eyes reflecting back like rats.

He turned the corner of the V and checked the west wing lower. Fifteen cells, fifteen cots, fifteen men in them, twelve sleeping, three awake, none in distress.

He climbed the stairs to the east wing upper. Same result. He didn’t know why they bothered. The place was a warehouse, that was all. A kind of cheap hotel. Did hotel staff check their guests every hour? He didn’t think so.

Procedure was such bullshit.

He passed the head of the stairs to the west wing upper. He walked it a little faster than normal. The shadows of the bars moved as his Maglite beam passed over them. Cell one, empty space on the left, humped form under the sheet on the right, awake, cell two, empty space on the left, humped form under the sheet on the right, asleep, cell three, the same.

And so on, and so on, all the way down the row. Cell six had the fat guy in it. The one who wouldn’t talk. Except to the biker in cell seven.

But the biker wasn’t in cell seven.

Cell seven, west wing upper, was empty.

Chapter 37

Reacher was too slow to catch Kim Peterson before she hit the deck. He bent down awkwardly in his big coat and slid an arm under her shoulders and sat her up. She was gone. Fainted clean away. Absurdly his main worry was that the door was open and heat was leaking out of the house. So he jammed his other arm under her knees and lifted her up. He turned away and kicked the door shut behind him and carried her through to the family room and laid her on the battered sofa near the stove.

He had seen women faint before. He had knocked on plenty of doors after midnight. He knew what to do. Like everything else in the army it had been thoroughly explained. Fainting after a shock was a simple vasovagal reflex. The heart rate drops, the blood vessels dilate, the hydraulic power that forces blood to the brain falls away. There were five points in the treatment plan. First, catch the victim. He had already blown that. Second, lay her down with her feet high and her head low, so that gravity could help her blood get back to her brain. Which he did. He swiveled her so that her feet were up on the sofa arm and her head was below them on the cushion. Third, check her pulse. Which he did, in her wrist. He took off his gloves and touched his fingers to her skin, just like he had with her husband. The result was different. Her pulse was tapping away just fine.

Fourth point in the treatment plan: stimulate the victim, with loud yells or light slaps. Which had always felt unbearably cruel to him, with new widows. But he gave it a go. He spoke in her ear and touched her cheek and patted her hand gently.

No response.

He tried again, a little more firmly. Louder voice, a heavier touch. Nothing happened, except that above his head the floorboards creaked. One of the boys, turning over in his sleep. He went quiet for a moment. Stayed still. Silence came back. The family room was warm but not hot. The stove was banked. He took off his hat and unzipped his coat. Bent down and spoke again. Touched her cheek, touched her hand.

Kim Peterson opened her eyes.

Point five in the treatment plan: persuade the victim to lie still for fifteen or twenty minutes. In this case, easy. No persuasion necessary. Kim Peterson didn’t move. She just lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling, inquiringly, speculatively, her eyes moving and narrowing and widening, as if there was something written up there, something complex and difficult to understand.

He asked, “Do you remember me?”

She said, “Of course.”

“I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“Andrew’s dead.”

“I’m afraid he is. I’m sorry.”

“When?”

“Within the last hour.”

“How?”

“He was shot. It was instantaneous.”

“Who shot him?”

“We think the guy they’ve all been looking for.”

“Where?”

“In the head.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No, I mean whereabouts did it happen?”

“I’m sorry. It was downtown. In a vacant lot.”

“What was he doing there?”

“His duty. He was checking something out.”

She said, “He was a good man, you know.”

“I know.”

“I have two boys.”

“I know.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to take it one step at a time. One day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. One second at a time.”

“OK.”

“Starting now.”

“OK.”

“First thing is, we need to get someone here. Right now. Someone who can help. Someone who can be with you. Because you shouldn’t be alone. Is there someone I can call?”

“Why didn’t Chief Holland come?”

“He wanted to. But he has a big investigation to start.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He can’t just let it go.”

“No, I mean I don’t believe he wanted to come.”

“He feels responsible. A good chief always does.”

“He should have come.”

“Who can I call for you?”

“Neighbor.”

“What’s her name?”

“Alice.”

“What’s her number?”

“Button number three on the telephone.”

Reacher looked around. There was a phone on the wall at the kitchen end of the room. A cordless handset and a black console. All kinds of buttons, and a big red LED zero in a window. No messages. He said, “Stay right there, OK?”

He moved away from her and walked into the kitchen. Picked up the phone. It had a regular keypad, for dialing regular numbers. It had a memory button. Presumably the memory button allowed the keypad to recall speed dials. Presumably buttons one and two were Andrew, office and cell. He pressed memory and three. The phone dialed itself and he heard ring tone. It lasted a good long spell. Then a voice answered. A woman, sleepy but concerned. A little worried. Maybe her husband was on the road. Maybe she had grown kids in another town. Late-night phone calls were as bad as knocks on the door.

Reacher asked, “Is this Alice?”

“Yes, it is. Who are you?”

Reacher said, “I’m with Kim Peterson. Your neighbor. She needs you to come right over. Her husband was killed tonight.”

There was silence on the line. Then Alice spoke. But Reacher didn’t hear what she said. Her words were drowned out by another sound. Sudden. Loud. From outside. Wailing and howling. Screaming and whispering. Rising and falling. The new sound rolled in across the frozen fields like a wave. It smashed against the side of the house and battered against the windows.

The prison siren.

Five minutes to one in the morning.

Three hours to go.

Chapter 38

Reacher saw a crazy diagram in his mind, exploding in four dimensions, time and space and distance: cops all over town, all moving randomly north, south, east, west, all answering Holland’s summons, all heading for the station house, all hearing the siren, all changing direction at once, the seven on duty with Janet Salter rushing straight out into the night, joining the confusion, getting set, heading for the prison, leaving Janet Salter all alone behind them.

All alone and wide open and vulnerable to a last-ditch swing by the bad guy before he either ran for his life or tried to blend back in.

I know what to do, Janet Salter had said.

Reacher hung up the phone and called softly to Kim.

“I got to go,” he said. “Alice is on her way.”

He got the front door open and stopped. The siren howled on. It was deafening. The plowed path was right there in front of him. Fifty feet to the split in the Y, fifty more to the street. Then a mile to town and another mile to the Salter house.

He was on foot.

No car.

He closed the door behind him and moved out and slipped and skidded and made the tight turn and headed for the barn. The old Ford pick-up was still in there. With the plow blade.

No key in it.

He hustled all the way back to the house. Pounded on the door. A long, long wait. He pounded some more. Then Kim Peterson opened up again. Shock was over. She was deep into her nightmare. She was crying hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I need the key for the pick-up truck.”

She didn’t answer.

“Kim, I’m sorry, but I really need the key.”

She said, “It’s on Andrew’s key ring. In his pocket.”

“Is there a spare?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s a very old truck.”

“There has to be a spare.”

“I think it was lost.” She looked away and turned and walked back down the hallway. She staggered and put out a hand and steadied herself against the wall. Reacher put the door on the latch and stepped outside to wait. For Alice. The neighbor. South Dakota farm country was big and empty. Houses were not adjacent. Not even close together. Alice would drive. He could borrow her vehicle.

He waited.

The siren howled on.

Alice came on foot.

He saw her a hundred yards away in the moonlight. She was a tall woman, disheveled after hasty dressing, hurrying, slipping and sliding on the ice, gloved hands out like a tightrope walker, wild hair spilling from under a knitted cap. She came right to left along the road, a pale face glancing anxiously at the Peterson house, arms and legs jerky and uncoordinated by treacherous conditions underfoot. Reacher moved away from the door, into the cold, down the path, to the split in the Y, and on toward the street. He met her at the bottom of the driveway. Asked, “Don’t you have a car?”

She said, “It wouldn’t start.”

He glanced left, toward the road to town.

She glanced ahead, at the house.

She asked, “How’s Kim?”

He said, “Bad.”

“What happened?”

“Andrew was shot and killed. Some guy in a vacant lot.”

“That’s awful.”

“You better go in. It’s going to be a long night.”

“It will be longer than a night.”

“You OK with that?”

“I’ll have to be.”

“Call her dad. She said he sometimes comes to visit.”

“I will.”

“Good luck.”

She moved on up the driveway.

He headed left down the street.

I know what to do, Janet Salter had said.

A minute later Reacher was a hundred yards short of the corner that would put him on the main east-west county two-lane. To his right, the center of town. To his left, the boondocks. He wanted a cop to be living way out there. The maximum ten minutes. Someone he could trust. Not Kapler or Lowell or Montgomery. He wanted one of the majority. He wanted the guy at home, off duty, asleep, then waking up, getting dressed, stumbling out into the cold, firing up his cruiser, heading west.

He wanted to flag the guy down and demand a ride.

He got part of what he wanted.

When he was still seventy yards short of the turn he saw lights in the east. Pulsing red and blue strobes, a mile away, coming on fast. The reflectivity of the snow made it look like there was a whole lit-up acre on the move. Like a UFO gliding in to land. A huge bright dancing circle of horizontal light. He hustled hard to meet it. His feet slipped and skated. His arms thrashed and windmilled. His face was already frozen. It felt like it had been beaten with a bat and then anesthetized by a dentist. The cop car was doing sixty miles an hour, on chains and winter tires. He was doing three miles an hour, on legs that were stiff and slow and unresponsive. He was slipping and sliding, like running in place. Like a slapstick movie. The corner was still fifty yards away.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He didn’t need to make it.

The cop saw him.

The car slowed and turned into Peterson’s street and came north toward him. Bright headlights, electric blue flashers, deep red flashers, painful white strobes popping right in his eyes. He came to a stop and planted his feet and stood still and raised his arms and waved. The universal distress semaphore. Big overlapping half-circles with each hand.

The cop car slowed.

At the last minute he sidestepped and the car slid to a stop alongside him. The driver’s window came down. A woman at the wheel. Her face was pale and swollen with sleep. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were red. He didn’t know her.

He said, “I have to get to the Salter house.” His words were unclear. His lips were numb. The upper part of his face was a frozen slab. The lower half was just as bad. The hinge in his jaw was hardly working at all.

The cop said, “What?”

“I need a ride.”

“Where?”

“Janet Salter’s house.”

Five miles away the prison siren howled on. There was radio chatter in the car. A dispatcher’s voice, low and fast, trying not to sound urgent. Probably the old guy already back at the police station desk. There was alcohol on the woman’s breath. Maybe bourbon. A nightcap. Maybe two or three of them.

She asked, “Who the hell are you?”

Reacher said, “I’ve been working with Holland and Peterson.”

“Peterson’s dead.”

“I know that.”

“Are you the MP?”

“Yes. And I need a ride.”

She said, “Can’t do it.”

“So why did you turn in for me?”

“I didn’t. I’m heading for my position.”

“The prison isn’t this way.”

“We make a perimeter a mile out. I get the northeast corner. This is how I’m supposed to get to it.”

“What happened?”

“The biker escaped. His cell is empty.”

“No,” Reacher said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“Not possible. It’s a fake. It’s a decoy.”

“He’s either in there or not, pal. And they say not.”

“He’s hiding out in there. In a broom closet or something. It’s a fake.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’ve seen it before. Two problems with escaping. Getting out, and then beating the manhunt. The smart ones hide first. Inside. Until the manhunt dies. Then they go. But this guy isn’t going anywhere. He’s doing the first part only. As a decoy.”

The cop didn’t answer.

“Think about it,” Reacher said. “Escaping is harder than it looks. I promise you, he’s still in there. Tomorrow he’ll get hungry and come on out from wherever he holed up. Big smile on his face. Because it will be too late by then.”

“You’re nuts.”

“He’s still in there. Believe me. Take a chance. Be the one.”

“You’re crazy.”

“OK, suppose I am. Suppose the guy really is out. He was gone more than five hours ago. You know that. So what the hell is the point of a one-mile perimeter now?”

The cop didn’t answer.

The siren howled on.

“Five minutes,” Reacher said. “Please. That’s all I need from you.”

The cop didn’t answer. Just hit the button and the gas and her window thumped back up and the car moved off. He leaned toward it and it accelerated and the rear three-quarter panel smacked him in the hip and spun him around and dumped him down hard on his back. He lay breathless in the frozen snow and watched the acre of lights move away into the distance.

I know what to do, Janet Salter had said.

Reacher got up and struggled onward to the corner and the siren died. It cut off mid-wail and tiny brittle echoes of its last howl came back off the ice and then nighttime silence swarmed in. Not the dull padded silence of fresh snowfall, but the weird keening, crackling, scouring, rustling hiss of a deep-frozen world. The thump of his footsteps ran ahead of him through veins and sheets of ice. The wind was still out of the west, in his face, hurling tiny frozen needles at him. He looked back. He had made it through a hundred and fifty yards. That was all. He had two miles ahead of him. There was nothing on the road. He was completely alone.

He was very cold.

He half-walked, half-ran, in the wheel ruts, his heels sliding wildly after every step until they locked into the next broken fissure, where a tire chain had cracked the surface. He was breathing hard, freezing air burning down his windpipe and searing his lungs. He was coughing and gasping.

Two miles to go. Maybe thirty whole minutes. Too long. Insane. He thought: Surely one of them had the balls to stay with her. One of the seven. One of the women. Damn the rules. Damn the plan. Peterson was dead. Still warm. Enough justification right there. Surely one of them would gut it out and tell the feds to go to hell. At least one. Maybe more. Maybe two or three.

Maybe all of them.

Or maybe none of them.

I know what to do, Janet Salter had said.

Did she?

Had she done it?

* * *

Reacher pounded on. One step, and another, and another. The wind pushed back at him. Ice fragments pattered against his coat. All the feeling had gone out of his feet and his hands. The water in his eyes felt like it was freezing solid.

Dead ahead was a bank. It stood alone in a small parking lot. The edge of town. The first building. It had a sign on a tall concrete pillar. Red numbers. Time and temperature. Twenty past one in the morning. Minus thirty degrees.

He struggled on, faster. He felt he was getting somewhere. Left and right there was one building after another. A grocery store, a pharmacy, party favors, DVD rental. Auto parts, UPS, a package store, a dry cleaner. All with parking lots. All spread out. All for customers with cars. He hurried on. He was sweating and shivering, all at the same time. The buildings closed in. They grew second stories. Downtown. The big four-way was a hundred yards ahead. Right to the prison, left to the highway. He cut the corner on a cross-street. Turned south at the police station. The wind was howling through the forest of antennas on its roof.

A mile to go.

He ran alone down the center of the main drag. A solitary figure. Ungainly. Short, choppy steps. He was bringing his feet up and dropping them down more or less vertically. It was the only way to stay upright. No fluid, loping stride. The ice didn’t allow it. His vision was blurring. His throat burned. All around him every window was dark and blank. He was the only thing moving, in a white empty world.

Reacher passed the family restaurant. It was closed up and quiet. Dark inside. Ghostly inverted chairs were stacked on tables like a silent anxious crowd all with upraised arms. Four hundred yards to Janet Salter’s street. Forty seconds, for a decent athlete. Reacher took two minutes. The roadblock car was long gone. Just its ruts remained. Empty, like a railroad switch. Reacher picked his way over them. Headed on down the street. Past one house, past the next. The wind hissed through evergreens. The earth creaked and groaned under his feet.

Janet Salter’s driveway.

Lights in the house.

No movement.

No sound.

Nothing out of place.

All quiet.

He rested for a second, his hands on his knees, his chest heaving.

Then he hurried up toward the house.

Chapter 39

Reacher stepped up on Janet Salter’s porch. Her door was locked. He pulled the handle for the bell. The wire spooled out of the little bronze eye. It spooled back in. The bell bonged, a second later, quiet and polite and discreet, deep inside the silent house.

No response.

Which was good. She wouldn’t hear it in the basement. And even if she did, she wouldn’t come out to answer it.

He hoped.

I know what to do, she had said. The basement, the gun, the password.

He peered in through a stained glass panel. The hallway lights were still on. He got a blue distorted view of the room. The chair. The telephone table. The stairs, the rug, the paintings. The empty hat stand.

No movement. No one there. No sign of disturbance.

All quiet.

Forty-three possible ways in, according to his earlier calculation, fifteen of them practical, eight of them easy. He backed away from the door and recrossed the porch. Stepped down and floundered through deep crusty snow alongside foundation plantings, around the side of the house, to the rear. He knew from his earlier inspection that the lock on the kitchen door was a sturdy brass item with a tongue neatly fitted into a heavy escutcheon plate. The plate was set into the jamb, which was a strip of century-old softwood. It was painted, whereas the front door’s jamb was a piece of lacquered chestnut, fine-grained and milled and exquisite. Harder to replace. All things considered, breaking in at the rear would be the considerate thing to do.

He stepped back and took a breath and raised his boot and smashed his heel into the wood directly under the lock. No second attempt necessary. He was a big man, and he was anxious, and he was too cold for patience. The door stayed whole, but the escutcheon plate tore out of the jamb and clattered to the floor and the door swung open.

“It’s me,” he called. “Reacher.” She might not have heard the bell, but she might have heard the splintering wood. He didn’t want her to have a heart attack.

“It’s me,” he called again.

He stepped into the kitchen. Pushed the door shut behind him. It hung within an inch of fully closed. All the familiar sounds and smells came back to him. The hissing of the pipes. The percolator, now cold. He stepped into the small back hallway. He clicked on the light. The door at the bottom of the stairs was closed.

“Janet?” he called. “It’s me, Reacher.”

No response.

He tried again, louder. “Janet?”

No response.

He went down the back stairs. Knocked hard on the basement door.

He called, “Janet?”

No response.

He tried the handle.

The door opened.

He took off his glove and got his gun out of his pocket. He stepped into the basement. It was dark. He listened. No sound, except the roar of the furnace and the squeal of the pump. He fumbled his left hand across the wall and found the switch and clicked on the light.

The basement was empty. Nothing but sudden shadows from the vertical balks of timber jumping across a bare expanse of floor. He walked through to the furnace room. Empty. Nothing there, except the old green appliance loudly burning oil.

He walked back to the door. Stared back up the stairs over the front sight of his gun. No one there. No movement, no sound.

He called, “Janet?”

No response.

Not good.

He climbed back up to the kitchen. Walked through it to the hallway. It was the same as he had seen it through the stained glass panel from the front. All quiet. The chair, the table, the rug, the paintings, the hat stand. No movement. No disturbance.

He found her in the library. She was in her favorite chair. She had a book in her lap. Her eyes were open. There was a bullet hole in the center of her forehead.

Like a third eye.

Nine millimeter, almost certainly.

Reacher’s mind stayed blank for a long, long time. It was his body that hurt. From thawing. His ears burned like someone was holding a blowlamp on them. Then his nose, then his cheeks, then his lips, then his chin, then his hands. He sat in the chair in the hallway and rocked back and forth and hugged himself in agony. His feet started hurting, then his ribs, then the long bones in his arms and his legs. It felt like they were all broken and crushed.

Janet Salter had not had a thick skull. The back of it was blown all over her favorite chair, driven deep into the split the exiting bullet had made in the stuffing.

I’ll have plenty of time to read, she had said, after all this fuss is over.

Reacher cradled his head in his hands. Put his elbows on his knees and stared down at the floor.

I am privileged, she had said. Not everyone gets the opportunity to walk the walk.

Reacher rubbed his eyes. His hands came away bloody. The ice spicules driven on the wind had peppered his face with a thousand tiny pinpricks. Unnoticeable, when his flesh had been frozen. Now they were raising a thousand tiny beads of blood. He rubbed both palms over every inch of his face, like he was washing. He wiped his palms on his pants. He stared down at the floor. Traced each whorl of muted color in the rug, one by one. When he reached the center of each meandering pattern he stopped and raised his eyes. Janet Salter stared back at him. She was diagonally opposite him. A straight line. A vector. Left of the stair post, in through the library door, across its width, to her chair. A small comma had formed below the bullet hole in her forehead. Not really blood. Just ooze. Leakage.

Each time he looked at her for as long as he could bear, and then he dropped his gaze again, back to the rug.

I don’t like getting beaten, he had said. Better for all concerned that it just doesn’t happen.

Protect and serve.

Always on duty.

Empty words.

He was a fraud and a fake and a failure.

He always had been.

He sat in the chair. No one came. The house hummed on around him. It didn’t know. It made its noises, oblivious. Water moved in the pipes, a sash rattled in a frame, the busted back door creaked back and forth as it moved in the wind. Outside the foliage hissed and the whole frozen planet shuddered and groaned.

He picked up the phone.

He dialed the number he remembered.

You have reached the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you know your party’s extension, you may dial it at any time.

He dialed 110.

A click. A purr.

“Yes?”

Reacher said, “Susan, please.”

“Who?”

“Amanda.”

A click. A purr.

Susan said, “Reacher?”

He didn’t answer.

“Reacher? You OK?”

He said nothing.

She said, “Talk to me. Or hang up.”

He asked her, “Have you ever been hungry?”

“Hungry? Of course. Sometimes.”

“I was once hungry for six straight months. In the Gulf. Desert Shield and Desert Storm. When we had to go throw Saddam out of Kuwait. We got there right at the beginning. We stayed there right to the end. We were hungry the whole time. There was nothing to eat. My unit, I mean. And some of the other rear echelon people. Which we thought was OK. We sucked it up. A big deal like that, there had to be snafus. Supply chains are always a problem. Better that whatever there was went to the guys doing the fighting. So no one made a big fuss. But it was no kind of fun. I got thin. It was miserable. Then we went home and I ate like a pig and I forgot all about it.”

“And then?”

“And then years later we were on that Russian train. They had American rations. I was bored at the time. We got back and I made it a little project to find out what had been going on. Like a hobby. One thing led to another and I traced it all back. Turned out a logistics guy had been selling our food for ten years. You know, a bit here, a bit there, all over the world. Africa, Russia, India, China, anyone who would pay for crap like that. He was pretty careful. No one noticed, the way the stockpiles were. But the Gulf caught him out. Suddenly there was a huge demand, and the stockpiles just weren’t there anymore. He was shipping it to us on paper, but we were starving in the desert.”

“The general?”

“Recent promotion. He was a colonel most of the time. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was reasonably cautious. His tracks were well covered. But I wouldn’t let it go. It was him against me. It was personal. My people had been hungry because of him. I was in his bank accounts and everything. You know what he spent the money on?”

“What?”

“Not much. He saved most of it. For his retirement. But he bought a 1980 Corvette. He thought it was a classic. Like a collector’s item. But the 1980 Corvette was the worst Corvette ever made. It was a piece of shit. They junked the 350 and put in a 305, for emissions. It was making 180 horsepower. I could run faster than a 1980 Corvette. Something just went off in my head. I mean, starving for some kind of a criminal mastermind would be one thing. Doing it for a complete idiot was something else. A complete, tasteless, clueless, sordid, pathetic little idiot.”

“So you hauled him in?”

“I built that case like it was Ethel Rosenberg. I was out of my mind. I checked it forward and backward and forward again. I could have taken it to the Supreme Court. I brought him in. I told him I was upset. He was in a Class A uniform. He had all kinds of busywork medals. He laughed at me. A kind of patronizing sneer. Like he was better than me. I thought, you bought a 1980 Corvette, asshole. Not me. So who’s better? Then I hit him. I popped him in the gut to fold him over and then I banged his head on my desk.”

“What happened?”

“I broke his skull. He was in a coma six months. He was never quite all there afterward. And you were right. I was canned, basically. No more 110th for me. Only the strength of the case saved me. They didn’t want it in the newspaper. I would have been busted big time otherwise. So I moved on.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t remember. I was too ashamed of myself. I did a bad thing. And I blew the best command I ever had.”

Susan didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “I got to thinking about it afterward. You know, why had I done it? I couldn’t answer. Still can’t.”

“You did it for your guys.”

“Maybe.”

“You were putting the world to rights.”

“Not really. I don’t want to put the world to rights. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”

She said nothing.

He said, “I just don’t like people who put the world to wrongs. Is that a phrase?”

“It should be. What happened?”

“Nothing more, really. That’s the story. You should ask for a new desk. There’s no honor in that old one.”

“I mean, what happened tonight?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

Susan said, “Tell me. I know something happened.”

“How?”

“Because you called me.”

“I’ve called you plenty.”

“When you needed something. So you need something now.”

“I’m OK.”

“It’s in your voice.”

“I’m losing two-zip.”

“How?”

“Two KIA.”

“Who?”

“A cop and an old woman.”

“Two-zip? It isn’t a game.”

“You know damn well it’s a game.”

“It’s people.”

“I know it’s people. I’m looking at one of them right now. And the only thing stopping me putting my gun to my head is pretending it’s a game.”

“You got a gun?”

“In my pocket. A nice old .38.”

“Leave it in your pocket, OK?”

Reacher said nothing.

Susan said, “Don’t touch it, OK?”

“Give me a good reason.”

“A .38 won’t necessarily get the job done. You know that. We’ve all seen it happen. You could end up like the general.”

“I’ll aim carefully. Square on. I’ll make sure.”

“Don’t do it, Reacher.”

“Relax. I’m not going to shoot myself. Not my style. I’m just going to sit here until my head explodes all on its own.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“It’s just that I don’t like to think of it as a game.”

“You know it’s a game. It has to be a game. That’s the only way to make it bearable.”

“OK, it’s a game. What are we in? The final quarter?”

“Overtime.”

“So give me the play by play so far. Brief me. Bring me up to date. Like we were working together.”

“I wish we were.”

“We are. What have we got?”

He didn’t answer.

She said, “Reacher, what have we got?”

So Reacher took a breath and began to tell her what they had, slowly at first, and then faster as he picked up on the old shorthand rhythms he remembered from years of talking to people who understood what he understood, and saw what he saw, and grasped what didn’t need to be spelled out. He told her about the bus, and the meth, and the trial, and the jail, and the police department, and the crisis plan, and the lawyer, and the witness protection, and the riot, and Plato, and the underground storage, and Peterson, and Janet Salter.

Her first response was: “Put your hand in your pocket.”

He asked, “Why?”

“Take out your gun.”

“Now that’s OK?”

“More than OK. It’s necessary. The bad guy saw you.”

“When?”

“While you were alone with Salter in the house. He had five hours.”

“He didn’t come. He was up at the prison the whole time.”

“That’s an assumption. We don’t know that for sure. He could have checked in, dropped off the radio net, slipped away, gone back. And do we even know that they really called the roll at all? A thing like that, sure, it’s in the plan as written, but who’s to say it actually gets done, you know, in real life, in a situation like that, right when the shit is hitting the fan?”

“Whatever, I didn’t see him.”

“He doesn’t know that. If he saw you, he’s going to assume you saw him. He’s going to come after you.”

“That’s a lot of ifs and assumptions.”

“Reacher, think about it. What’s to stop this guy getting away with it? He popped the lawyer, and Peterson, and Salter, three rounds from a throw-down pistol. He’s saving a fourth for you, and then he’s home free. Nobody will ever know who he was.”

“I already don’t know who he was.”

“He’s not sure of that. And he’s not sure you won’t figure it out eventually. You’re his last obstacle.”

“Why hasn’t he come after me already?”

“No safe opportunity yet. That’s the only possible reason. He’s going to be cautious with you. More so than with the others. The lawyer was a patsy, Peterson was a bumpkin, and Salter was a harmless old lady. You’re different.”

“Not so very different.”

“You need to pull back to Rapid City. Hole up somewhere and talk to the FBI.”

“I don’t have a vehicle.”

“You have a telephone. You’re talking on it right now. Put it down and then call the FBI. Keep your guard up until they get there.”

He didn’t answer.

She asked, “Are you going to do that?”

“I doubt it.”

“You weren’t responsible for those people, you know.”

“Says who?”

“All of this would have happened just the same without you. It’s a million-to-one chance you were there at all.”

“Peterson was a nice guy. And a good cop. He wanted to be a better cop. He was one of those guys who knew enough to know he didn’t know everything. I liked him.”

Susan said nothing.

“I liked Mrs. Salter, too. She was a noble old bird.”

“You need to get out of there. You’re outnumbered. Plato won’t come alone.”

“I hope he doesn’t.”

“It’s dangerous.”

Reacher said, “For him.”

Susan said, “Do you remember as a kid, watching a movie about a creature in a lagoon?”

“Is that thing still in my file?”

“In the back index.”

“And you read it?”

“I was interested.”

“They got it wrong. And they took away my blade, which pissed me off.”

“How did they get it wrong?”

“I wasn’t some kind of a genetic freak. I was born as scared as anyone. Maybe more so. I lay awake crying with the best of them. But I got tired of it. I trained myself out of it. An act of will. I rerouted fear into aggression. It was easy enough to do.”

“At the age of six?”

“No, I was an old hand by then. I was four when I started. I had the job done by the time I was five.”

“Is that what you’re doing now? Rerouting guilt into aggression?”

“I took an oath. Same as you did. All enemies, foreign and domestic. Looks like I’ve got one of each here. Plato, and whoever his bent cop is.”

“Your oath lapsed.”

“It never lapses.”

She asked, “How does a six-year-old have his own switchblade, anyway?”

“Didn’t you have one?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you have one now?”

“No.”

“You should get one.”

She said, “And you should go to Rapid City and do this thing properly.”

“We’re short of time.”

“You have no legal standing.”

“So put another tag on my file. Or save them all some effort. Just Xerox it. Three copies, FBI, DEA, and the local South Dakota people. Send them out overnight.”

“You’re not thinking straight. You’re punishing yourself. You can’t win them all. You don’t have to win them all.”

“They put you in charge of the 110th?”

“And I’ll stay in charge. As long as I want.”

“This time it was really important.”

“They’re all important.”

“Not like this. I’m staring at a nice old lady with a hole in her head. She mattered more to me than being hungry.”

“Stop looking at her.”

Reacher looked down at the floor.

Susan said, “You can’t change the past.”

“I know.”

“You can’t atone. And you don’t need to, anyway. That guy deserved to be in a coma, maybe forever.”

“Maybe.”

“Go to Rapid City.”

“No.”

“Then come to Virginia. We’ll deal with this together.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Don’t you want to come to Virginia?”

“Sure I do.”

“So do it.”

“I will. Tomorrow.”

“Do it now.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“There was a question you used to ask me.”

“Was there?”

“You stopped asking it.”

“What was it?”

“You used to ask if I was married.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

Reacher looked up again. Janet Salter stared right back at him.

He said, “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone.

Five minutes to two in the morning.

Two hours to go.

Chapter 40

Three hours into the flight, and Plato was getting tense. Unsurprisingly. His life was like a video game. One thing popped up at him after another. Each thing had to be dealt with efficiently and comprehensively. From the most important to the least. Not that even the least important thing was trivial. He spent fifteen hundred dollars a month on rubber bands alone. Just to bind up all the cash that he took to the bank. There were no small problems. And plenty of big ones. And his performance was judged not only on substance, but also on style. Drama was weakness. Especially for him.

The irony was that he had been large as a child. Until he was seven he was as big or bigger than anyone else. At eight he was still fully competitive. At nine he was in the ballpark. Then he had stopped growing. No one knew why. No one knew if it was genetic, or a disease, or an environmental factor. Maybe mercury, or lead, or some other heavy metal. Certainly it was not a lack of food or proper care. His parents had always been present and competent. At first they had turned a blind eye. The assumption was that such a thing would correct itself. But it didn’t. So first his father had turned away, and then his mother.

Now no one turned away.

His cell phone was switched on. Normal rules did not apply to him. It rang and he answered it. His man on the ground. Some fellow cop had found out too much and had been taken out. Plato didn’t care. Collateral damage. Unimportant. Some other guy was sniffing around, too, and would have to be dealt with. An ex–military cop. Plato didn’t care about that, either. Unimportant. Not his problem.

But then, finally, the big news: The witness was dead.

Plato smiled.

He said, “You just saved a life.”

Then he made a call of his own. Brooklyn, New York. He announced the news. The last obstacle had been removed. South Dakota was now definitively a trouble-free zone. The title was impregnable. Absolutely guaranteed. The Russian agreed to wire the money immediately. Plato listened hard and imagined he heard the click of the mouse.

He smiled again.

A done deal.

He closed his phone and looked out his window. Seat 1A, the best on the plane. His plane. He looked down at America spread out below. Dark and massive. Strings of lights. He checked his watch. Fifty-seven more minutes. Then, once again, and as always, show time. Another challenge. Another triumph.

Reacher went upstairs and found Janet Salter’s bedroom. It was at the back of the house, directly above the library. It was a pleasant, fragrant room that smelled of talcum powder and lavender. Its bathroom was directly above half of the kitchen. There was a medicine cabinet above the sink. In it was an array of basic toiletry items, plus the box of .38 ammunition, eighty-eight rounds remaining of the original hundred.

Reacher put the box in his coat pocket and closed the mirror. He went back down the stairs and stepped into the library and stood over Janet Salter and moved her book and one soft arm and took her gun out of her cardigan pocket. It was still fully loaded. It had not been fired. He put it in his own pocket and replaced the book and the arm and stepped away.

The cop who had killed the lawyer and the Deputy Chief and Mrs. Salter sat in his car and stared out the windshield. He was in his designated position on the makeshift perimeter, personally responsible for the eighth of a mile of snow on his left and the eighth of a mile of snow on his right. Not that any escaper would use anything except the road, even in summer. In any season the terrain was too flat and featureless for concealment. The dogs would run him down in a minute. Going cross-country and hiding in ditches and culverts was strictly for the kind of old black and white chain-gang movie that gets shown late at night on the minor satellite channels. No, these days any sane fugitive would come straight down the road, strapped to the chassis of an empty delivery truck.

Not that there actually was a fugitive. Plato had been clear about that. There were all kinds of voids in the prison architecture. Overhead plenum chambers where ducts branched, underfloor matrixes where pipes split. All kinds of inspection panels. All perfectly safe, because none of the voids actually led anywhere. But useful for purposes short of an actual break-out. A sandwich and a bottle to pee in, a guy could hold out ten or twelve hours.

Which would be enough.

The cop checked his guns. Habit. Instinct. First his official piece, in his holster, and then his other piece, in his pocket. Loaded. A round in the chamber, and fourteen more in the magazine.

He wouldn’t need the fourteen in the magazine.

Reacher took one last careful tour through Janet Salter’s house. He was fairly sure he wouldn’t be coming back to it, and there were certain things he needed to fix in his mind. He looked at the front door, the back door, the basement door, the kitchen, the hallway, the library, Janet Salter’s position in it, and the book on her lap. Somewhere between five and eight minutes, he thought, for her to get as comfortable as she looked, given that she had been starting out from a state of extreme panic. It would have taken her that kind of time to relax, even in the safe and reassuring company of a trusted figure like a town cop.

So, allowing a minute’s margin for her protective detail to clear the area, someone had been between six and nine minutes late to the roll call up at the prison.

Someone would remember.

Maybe.

If there had been a roll call at all.

If the guy had even gone.

Reacher zipped his coat and jammed his hat down over his ears and covered it with his hood. Put his gloves on, opened the front door, and stepped out once again into the cold. It crowded in on him, battered at him, tormented him, froze him. But he ignored it. An act of will. He closed the door and walked down the driveway and made the turns and headed back toward the station. He stayed vigilant all the way, right up there in the kind of hyper-alert zone that made him feel he could draw and fire a thousand times faster than any opponent. The kind of zone that made him feel he could mine the ore and smelt the metal and draw the blueprint and cast the parts and build his own gun, all before any opponent got the drop on him.

I’m not afraid of death.

Death’s afraid of me.

Fear into aggression.

Guilt into aggression.

The police station was completely deserted apart from the civilian aide back on duty behind the reception counter. He was a tall creaky individual about seventy years old. He was sitting glumly on his stool. Reacher asked for the news. The guy said there wasn’t any. Reacher asked how long the department would stay deployed. The guy said he didn’t know. The department had no experience of such a thing. There had never been an escape before.

“There was no escape tonight,” Reacher said. “The guy is hiding out inside.”

“That’s your opinion?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Based on what?”

“Common sense,” Reacher said.

“Then I should think they’ll give it another hour or so. The perimeter is a mile out. Two hours is long enough to decide the guy is already through, or maybe not coming at all.”

“Tell me how the roll call works. For the department, at the prison.”

“I do it from here. By radio. I work through the list, they answer me from their cars or their collar mikes, I check them off.”

“How did it go tonight?”

“All present and correct.”

“No absentees?”

“None at all.”

“Misfires? Hesitations?”

“None.”

“When did you do it?”

“I started when I heard the siren. It takes about five minutes, beginning to end.”

“So they’re self-certifying, aren’t they?”

“I don’t follow.”

Reacher said, “You don’t really know where they are or what they’re doing. All you know is if they answer your call or not.”

“I ask them where they are. They tell me. Either they’re in position or close to it. And the prison warden is entitled to check.”

“How?”

“He can go up in a tower and eyeball. The land is flat. Or he can tap in to our radio net and call the roll himself, if he wants.”

“Did he tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

Reacher asked, “Who was last into position tonight?”

“I can’t say. Early in the alphabet, they’re all still in motion. Late in the alphabet, they’re all already on station.”

“So they tell you.”

“Why would I doubt them?”

“You need to call Chief Holland,” Reacher said. “Mrs. Salter is dead.”

Reacher wandered through the silent station, the squad room, Holland’s office, the bathrooms, and he came to rest in the room with the crime scene photographs pinned to the walls. The biker, and the lawyer. He sat with his back to the biker and looked at the lawyer. He didn’t know the guy’s name. Didn’t know much about him at all. But he knew enough to know the guy was basically the same as Janet Salter. A man, not a woman, a frozen road, not a warm book-lined room, but they were both half-wise, half-unworldly people lulled into a false sense of security, tricked into relaxing. The shift lever in Park and the window all the way down in the door were the same things as Janet Salter’s comfortable posture and the book on her lap.

Understand their motives, their circumstances, their goals, their aims, their fears, their needs. Think like them. See what they see. Be them.

They were both all the way there. Not partway, not halfway. They were completely trusting. They had opened up, literally. Doors, windows, hearts, minds. Not half-worried, not half-formal, not half-suspicious.

They were all the way there.

Not just any cop could do that to them.

It was a cop they both knew, had met before, were familiar with.

Peterson had asked: What would your elite unit do now?

Answer: Reacher or Susan or any of the other 110th Special Unit COs in between them would put their feet up on the damaged desk and send a pair of eager lieutenants to map out both lives, to list all known acquaintances in the Bolton PD in order of intimacy. Then he or she or any of the others would cross-reference the lists, and a name would show up in common.

Reacher had no pair of eager lieutenants.

But there were other approaches.

A minute later Reacher heard footsteps in the corridor. Arrhythmic. The slap of one sole, followed by the scrape of the other. The old guy from the counter. He had a slight limp. He stuck his head in the door and said, “Chief Holland is on his way. He’s leaving his post up there. He shouldn’t, but he is.”

Reacher nodded. Said nothing.

The old guy said, “It’s a terrible thing that happened to Mrs. Salter.”

“I know.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet. Did anyone call anything in?”

“Like who?”

“A neighbor, maybe. A shot was fired.”

“Inside the house?”

“In her library.”

The old guy shrugged. “Houses are far apart. Everyone has storm windows. Most of them are triple-glazed and on a night like this all of them are shut tight.”

Reacher said nothing.

The old guy asked, “Is it one of us?”

“Why would it be?”

“Chief Holland called a meeting. Just before the siren. Can’t see any other reason for it. Can’t see any other way of doing it, either. The lawyer, I mean, then Mr. Peterson and Mrs. Salter. The three of them, fast and easy, just like that. It has to be one of us. And then you asked who was last in position tonight.”

“Were you a cop?”

“I was with this department thirty years.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’d like to get my hands on the guy.”

“You spoke to him tonight. At some point. Either just before or just after.”

“They all sounded normal to me.”

“Do you know them well?”

“Not the new guys.”

“Was anybody particularly close with Mrs. Salter?”

“A lot of them were. She’s a fixture. Was a fixture.”

Seven miles up and four hundred miles south Plato’s cell phone rang again. The money he had taken from the Russian was hammering its way around the world. From one jurisdiction to another, shady and untraceable, an automated all-night trip that was scheduled to take seven hours in total. But it was always banking hours somewhere. The deposit flashed across a screen in Hong Kong and tripped a code that meant the account holder should be notified. So the clerk that saw it dialed a number that bounced through five separate call forwarding triggers before ringing out inside the Boeing high above Nebraska. Plato answered and listened without comment. He was already the richest man he had ever met. He always would be. He was Plato, and they weren’t. Not his parents, not the Russian, not his old associate Martinez, not anybody.

The bank clerk in Hong Kong hung up with Plato and dialed another number. Brooklyn, New York. After three in the morning over there, but the call was answered immediately, by the Russian, who was paying more than Plato was.

A lot more.

The clerk said, “I told him the money was in his account.”

The Russian said, “So now reverse the transaction.”

The clerk clicked and scrolled.

“Done,” he said.

The Russian said, “Thank you.”

From Brooklyn the Russian dialed Mexico City, a number deep inside a local law enforcement agency with a long name he couldn’t begin to translate. A colonel answered. The Russian told him that all was proceeding exactly according to plan.

The colonel said, “Plato is already in the air. He took off more than three hours ago.”

The Russian said, “I know.”

The colonel said, “I want fifteen percent.”

The Russian went quiet for a moment. He pretended to be annoyed. He had promised ten percent. A ninety-ten split was what had been discussed all along. But privately he had budgeted for eighty-twenty. Eighty percent of Plato’s business had been his aim. To get eighty-five percent would be an unexpected bonus. A free gift. The colonel was a shallow, unambitious man. Limited in every way. Which was why he was a colonel, and not a general.

The Russian said, “You drive a hard bargain.”

The colonel said, “Take it or leave it.”

“You make it sound like I don’t have a choice.”

“You don’t.”

A long silence, purely for effect.

“OK,” the Russian said. “You get fifteen percent.”

The colonel said, “Thank you.”

The Russian hung up and dialed again, a number he knew belonged to an untraceable cell currently located on a night table in a Virginia bedroom. After three in the morning down there, the same as Brooklyn. The same time zone. The untraceable cell belonged to a tame DEA agent who belonged to the Russian’s cousin’s friend’s brother-in-law. The guy answered in Virginia and the Russian told him all was going exactly according to plan.

The guy asked, “Do I have your word?”

The Russian smiled to himself. Office politics at their very best. The cousin’s friend’s brother-in-law’s bent DEA guy had overruled Plato’s bent DEA guy and had agreed that the Russian could take over the rest of Plato’s U.S. operations just as long as he didn’t take the government meth out of the hole in the ground in South Dakota. In fact if the government meth could just disappear altogether, then so much the better. Too embarrassing all around. Embarrassing that it was still there, embarrassing that it had been forgotten about, embarrassing that it even existed at all. Even bent guys had departmental loyalties.

The Russian said, “You have my word on that.”

The guy in Virginia said, “Thank you.”

The Russian smiled again at the absurdity of it all. But he would comply. Why wouldn’t he? It was a treasure trove, for sure, but he had longer-term goals. And he wouldn’t miss what he never had. And it wasn’t as if he had paid for it, anyway.

He hung up again and composed a text message on another phone, and hit send.

Seven miles above Nebraska, three rows behind Plato, in seat 4A, a silent phone vibrated once in a pocket, a solid mechanical thrill against the muscle of a thigh. The fifth of the six disposable Mexicans pulled out the phone and checked the screen. He was the guy who had driven Plato in the Range Rover to the airfield. He showed it to the man sitting next to him, in seat 4B, who was the sixth of the six, and who had sat with him earlier in the front of the truck. Both men nodded. Neither man spoke. Neither man even smiled. They were both way too tense.

The text said: Do it.

A minute later Reacher heard Holland’s car in the frozen stillness. He heard the low mutter of its engine and the soft crunch of its tires on the ice. Then the sigh and the silence as it shut down, and the creak and slam of the door, and the sound of Holland’s boots on the snow. He heard the lobby door open and imagined he felt the pulse of cold air coming in from the lot. He heard Holland’s steps in the corridor and then he arrived and filled the doorway, stooped, bent, defeated, like he was right at the end of something.

Holland said, “Are you sure?”

Reacher nodded. “No doubt about it.”

“Because sometimes they can still be alive.”

“Not this time.”

“Should we check?”

“No point.”

“What was it?”

“Nine millimeter between the eyes. Same as the other two.”

“Anything left behind?”

“Nothing.”

“So we’re no closer. We still don’t know who it is.”

Reacher nodded.

“But I know how to find out,” he said.

Chapter 41

Reacher said, “It’s going to snow again soon. The runway is going to get covered again and the bikers aren’t there to plow it anymore. Weather is unpredictable, therefore time is tight. Therefore Plato is on his way, probably right now. Because he needs to get his jewelry out before the sale goes through. He’s probably going to double-cross the Russian and take some of the meth, too. Maybe most of it. He’s got a big plane. So my guess is he told his guy to be there to help. So the guy will pull off the perimeter at some point and head up there. Maybe real soon. All we have to do is get there before him. We’ll hide out and see who shows up. He’ll walk straight into our arms.”

Holland said, “You think?”

“For sure.”

“We could be waiting there for hours.”

“I don’t think so. Plato needs to get in and get out. He can’t afford to get trapped in a storm. A big plane on the ground, no proper facilities, he could be stuck until the start of summer.”

“What kind of help would he need, anyway?”

“Got to be something.”

“He’ll bring people with him. It’s just walking up and down a staircase.”

“You don’t buy a dog and bark yourself.”

“You sure?”

“They’re going to land a big plane in the middle of nowhere. Someone might hear it. Anything might happen. A local cop is always useful.”

“We have to hide out up there? It’s very cold.”

“Cold?” Reacher said. “This is nothing.”

Holland thought about it for a minute. Reacher watched him carefully. Holland’s mouth worked silently and his eyes danced left and right. He started out reluctant, and then he got right into it.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Five minutes to three in the morning.

One hour to go.

Holland drove. His unmarked car was still warm inside. The roads were still frozen and empty. The middle of the night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing was moving, except the wind. They passed the end of Janet Salter’s street. It was deserted. Holland was sitting close to the wheel, belted in his seat, his parka still zipped, its material stiff and awkward against him. Reacher was sprawled in the passenger seat, no belt, his coat open, its tails hauled around into his lap, his gloves off, his hands in his pockets. The ruts on the road were worn and wizened by the cold. The front tires hopped left and right, just a little. The chains on the back whirred and clattered. There was a moon high in the sky, close to full, pale and wan, behind thin tattered ribbons of frozen cloud.

Reacher asked, “How long are you guys supposed to stay deployed on the perimeter?”

Holland said, “There’s no set time. It will be a gut call by the warden.”

“Best guess?”

“Another hour.”

“So any cop we see before then is our boy.”

“If we see one at all.”

“I think we will,” Reacher said.

They made the turn on the old county two-lane parallel with the highway and headed west. Five miles, not fast, not slow. Wind and ice in the air. Then they turned again, north, on the narrow wandering ribbon, eight long miles. Then the runway loomed up, spectacular as always, imposing, massive, wide, flat, infinitely long in the headlight beams, still clear and dry. Holland didn’t slow down. He just thumped straight up on the moonlit concrete and held his line and held his speed. There was nothing but gray darkness ahead. No lights. No activity. Nothing moving. No one there. The wooden huts looked black in the distance, and behind them loomed the stone building, larger and blacker still.

Two hundred yards out Holland took his foot off the gas and coasted. He was still upright, still close to the wheel, still belted in, still trapped and mummified by the stiff nylon of his coat.

“Where should I put the car?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Reacher said. He was still sprawled out, no belt, his hands in his pockets.

“We should hide it. The guy will see it. If he comes.”

Reacher said, “He’s already here.”

“What?”

“He just arrived.”

The car coasted and slowed. It rolled to a stop thirty yards from the first line of huts. Holland kept his foot on the floor. Not on the brake. The lever was still in gear. The engine’s idle speed was not enough to push through the resistance of the snow chains. The whole car just hung there, trembling a little, not quite moving, not quite inert, right on the cusp.

Holland asked, “How long have you known?”

Reacher said, “For sure, about three minutes. Beyond a reasonable doubt, about thirty minutes. Retrospectively, about thirty-one hours. But back then I didn’t know I knew.”

“Something I said?”

“Stuff you didn’t say. Stuff you didn’t do.”

“Like what?”

“Most recently you didn’t slow down and kill your headlights when we hit the runway. The guy could have been here already. But you knew he wasn’t. Because you’re the guy.”

Holland said, “You’re wrong.”

Reacher said, “I’m afraid not. We spent an hour underground earlier tonight, and the first thing you should have done when we got back to the surface was call the Salter house. But you didn’t. I had to remind you. Turned out she was OK, because the guy hadn’t gotten to her during that hour. And you knew that in advance, because you’re the guy. Which is why you didn’t think to call. You should have faked it better.”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “I had a conversation with Peterson last night. He came over at eight o’clock, when we thought the head count at the jail was going to come up one short. We were worried. We were tense. He took me to one side and asked me, was I armed? I said yes. I told him Mrs. Salter was, too. Obvious questions, in a situation like that. You didn’t ask those questions the night before. You should have.”

Holland said, “Maybe I assumed. I knew Mrs. Salter had guns in the house. She asked me for advice about ammunition.”

“And it was good advice you gave. But you should have made absolutely sure those guns weren’t still in the box that night. Verbally at least, if not visually. Anyone would have done that, except a guy who knew for sure they weren’t going to be needed.”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “Right back at the beginning, we found you confronting those bikers on the street. But you weren’t really confronting them, were you? You were listening to them. You were getting your instructions. A regular ten-minute lecture. Plato had decided. Kill the lawyer, kill Janet Salter. They were passing on the message. Then you heard Peterson’s car behind you and you threw your gun down in the snow, just to give yourself a reason to be standing there so long. Then you shoved one of them and started a fight. All staged, for Peterson’s benefit. And mine, I guess. And that thing about rolling the dice? No way could they have avoided random checks so long, unless you were calling them and tipping them off. You were all working for the same guy. Which is why you let them leave town without a word.”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “Then much later Peterson and I put you on the spot. We showed up here just when it was safe for you to get the key out of the stove. You knew where it was. But you hadn’t figured it out. You had been told. You were there to set things up. But we all went downstairs together. Because you couldn’t think of a convincing way of stopping that from happening. And so Peterson saw stuff he was obviously going to react to. So you put that crap on the radio so when you killed him straight afterward there would be sixty suspects in the frame, and not just you. And then you lied to me about Kapler. You tried to point me in the wrong direction. There were no rumors about drug money in Miami. If there were, my friend in Virginia would have found them long ago.”

Holland said, “I could have killed Peterson here. At the time. Underground.”

“True. But not me, too. You knew that. You’re scared of me. You checked my record with the army. The woman in Virginia told me that. Your tag is on my file. So you knew the lawyer and Peterson and Janet Salter were one thing, and you knew I was another thing. They were easy. You waited on the road and put your strobes on and waved him down and the lawyer stopped right there. Why wouldn’t he? He probably knew you. A chief of police from the next county? You’ve probably had breakfast together half a dozen times. And Peterson would follow you anywhere. And Janet Salter was probably thrilled to see you. Until you pulled your gun.”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “Three shell cases. Two of them right inside this car, and the third picked up off Janet Salter’s floor. I’m guessing you dumped them in the trash cans right outside the police station. Should I call the old guy on the desk and ask him to take a look?”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m guessing the fourth round is chambered right now. My round. Some kind of an old throw-down pistol. Maybe lost property, maybe a cold case. Or maybe the bikers supplied it. Want to empty your pockets and prove me wrong?”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “But my round is going to stay right there in the chamber. Because I’m not like the other three. You knew that. You sensed it, maybe, and then you confirmed it with the army. So you were cautious with me. As you should be. I notice things. You’ve been trying to get to me for the last three hours. Dragging me here, dragging me there, always talking to me, always trying to figure out how much I knew, always biding your time, always waiting for your moment. Like right now. Back in the station house, you were debating with yourself. You didn’t want to bring me here, and then you did want to bring me here. Because maybe your moment might just come out here. But it hasn’t, and it didn’t, and it never will. You’re a smart guy and a good shot, Holland, but I’m smarter and better. Believe me. Deep down you’re just a worn out old country mouse. You can’t compete. Like right now. You’re all zipped up and belted in, and I’m not. I could shoot your eyes out before you even got your hand on your gun. It’s been that way for the last three hours. Not because I really knew yet. But because that’s just the way I am.”

Holland said nothing.

“But I should have known,” Reacher said. “I should have known thirty-one hours ago. The first time the siren went off. It was staring me in the face. I couldn’t understand how the guy had seen me without me seeing him. And I knew he would have to show up in a car, on the street, from the front. Because of the cold. And he did exactly that. And I saw him. I saw you. A minute after everyone else left, you showed up. Bold as brass, fast and easy, in a car, from the front. You came to kill Janet Salter.”

“I came to guard her.”

“I’m afraid not. The riot could have lasted hours. Even days. You said so yourself. But you left your motor running.”

Holland said nothing.

Reacher said, “You left your motor running because you planned to be in and out real fast. You figured you could afford to be a little late up at the prison. Like you were tonight, presumably. But I was in the house. You were surprised to see me there. You needed time to think. So you hung around, all conflicted. Mrs. Salter and I thought you were conflicted about two competing duties. But really you were trying to decide whether I had one of Mrs. Salter’s guns in my belt, and if so, whether you could draw faster than me. You concluded that I did, and you couldn’t. So eventually you left. You decided to try again another day. I’m sure Plato was upset about that. He was probably very impatient. But you did the job for him in the end.”

Holland was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “You know why, right?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“How?”

“I finally figured it out. I saw the photograph in your office. She looks just like her mother.”

“Then you understand.”

“She wasn’t a prisoner. They made a half-assed attempt at hiding her, but she was there out of choice. That was clear. I guess she liked the lifestyle.”

“Didn’t make her any less vulnerable.”

“No excuse. There were other ways of dealing with it.”

Holland said, “I know. I’m sorry.”

“That’s it? Three dead and you’re sorry?”

Holland didn’t answer. He just sat still for a moment longer. Then he took his foot off the floor and stamped down on the gas. The car leapt forward. Dry concrete under the wheels, a big V-8, twin exhausts, plenty of torque, heavy-duty suspension, not much squat, a fast rear axle, good for zero to sixty in eight seconds. Reacher was hurled back against the seat. They were thirty yards from the side of the hut. Ninety feet. That was all. The headlights blazed against it. It filled the windshield. It was coming right at them. The engine roared.

After thirty of the ninety feet Reacher had a Smith & Wesson out of his pocket. After sixty he had its muzzle jammed hard in Holland’s ear. Before they hit he had his left hand hooked over Holland’s seat back, his arm rigid, his shoulder locked. The front end of the car punched straight through the wooden siding. The airbags exploded. The windshield shattered. The front wheels kicked up on the hut floor and the whole car went airborne. The front bumper hit a bed frame and smacked it like a cue ball and drove it into the paraffin stove. The stove tore out from under its pipe connection and clanged away like a barrel and the car fell to earth and plowed on and hit the bed again and smashed it into the next bed across the aisle. The header rail above the windshield hit the unmoored stovepipe and bent it with a shriek and its raw end scraped the length of the car’s roof and then the car was all the way inside the hut, still moving fast, the chains on the back thrashing and grinding across the wooden floor. Reacher kicked Holland in the knee and forced his foot off the gas. The car crushed beds two-deep against the far wall and punched out the other side into the moonlight and landed hard and came to rest nose-down half-in and half-out of the hut in a tangle of bent iron frames and tumbling plywood sheets. Both headlights were out and there was all kinds of grinding and rattling coming from under the hood. There was hissing and wheezing and ticking from stressed components. There was dust and splinters all around and frigid air was pouring in through the shattered front glass like liquid.

The Smith’s muzzle was still hard in Holland’s ear.

Reacher was still upright in his seat, still braced easily against the back of Holland’s chair. The passenger airbag had inflated against his squared shoulder, and then it had collapsed again.

He said, “I told you, Holland, you can’t compete.”

Holland didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “You damaged the car. How am I going to get back to town?”

Holland asked, “What are you going to do with me?”

Reacher said, “Let’s take a walk. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I’ll have plenty of time to read, Janet Salter had said, after all this fuss is over.

You reap what you sow.

They climbed out of the wrecked car into the cold and the wind and stepped away into the narrow lane that separated the first row of huts from the second. Holland walked ahead and Reacher followed ten feet behind with the old .38 six-shooter held low and easy. It was the one Janet Salter had cradled through so many hours.

Reacher said, “Tell me about Plato.”

Holland stopped and turned around and said, “I never met him. It was all on the phone, or through the bikers.”

“Is he as bad as he sounds?”

“Worse.”

“What’s supposed to happen tonight?”

“Like you figured. He’s going to take the jewelry out and steal back some of the meth.”

“And you were supposed to help?”

“I was supposed to be here, yes. I have some equipment for him, and the key to the door.”

“OK,” Reacher said. Then he raised the .38 and pulled the trigger and shot Holland between the eyes. The gun kicked gently in his hand and the sound was the same as a 158-grain .38 always was outdoors in quiet cold air, a fractured spitting crack that rolled away across the flat land and faded fast, because it had nothing to bounce back from. Holland went down with a loud rustle of heavy nylon and the stiffness of his coat pitched him half-sideways and left him lying on one shoulder with his face turned up to the moon. Thirty-eight hundredths of an inch was mathematically a little larger than nine millimeters, so the third eye in his forehead was a little larger than Janet Salter’s had been, but his face was a little larger too, so overall the effect was proportional.

Chief Thomas Holland, RIP.

His body settled and his blood leaked out and his cell phone started ringing in his pocket.

Chapter 42

Reacher got to the phone by the third ring. It was in Holland’s parka, in a chest pocket. It was faintly warm. Reacher hit the green button and raised the phone to his ear and said, “Yes?”

“Holland?” Practically a yell. A bad connection, very loud background noise, a Spanish accent, nasal and not deep.

A small man.

Plato.

Reacher didn’t answer.

“Holland?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“We’re fifteen minutes out. We need the landing lights.”

Then the phone went dead.

We? How many? Landing lights? What landing lights? Reacher stood still for a second. He had seen no electricity supply out to the runway. No humped glass lenses along its length. It was just a flat slab of concrete. It was possible the Crown Vic’s headlights were supposed to do the job, in which case Plato was shit out of luck, because the Crown Vic’s headlights were both busted. But then, headlights couldn’t stretch two miles. Not even halogen, not even on bright.

Fifteen minutes.

Now fourteen and change.

Reacher put the phone in his own pocket and then checked through the rest of Holland’s pockets. Found the T-shaped key to the stone building’s door, and a scuffed old Glock 17. The throw-down pistol. There were fourteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

His round.

He put the key and the Glock in his pocket and took another Glock out of Holland’s holster. His official piece. It was newer. Fully loaded. He put his gloves back on and bunched Holland’s shirt collar and jacket collar and parka collar all together in his fist and dragged the body to the nearest hut and all the way inside. Left it dumped in the center of the floor. Then he hustled back to the car.

Thirteen minutes and change.

The car was canted down at the front, half-in and half-out of the hut. He squeezed along its flank and in through the hole in the shattered wall and stood where the stove had been and opened the trunk.

All kinds of stuff in there. But three basic categories: normal car stuff where the Ford Motor Company had planned it to be, regular cop gear neatly stowed in plastic trays, and then other things thrown in on top of everything else. In the first category: a spare tire and a scissor jack. In the second category: a fluorescent traffic jacket, four red road flares, three nested traffic cones, a first-aid kit, a green tackle box for small items, two tarps, three rolls of crime-scene tape, a bag of white rags, a lockbox for a handgun. In the third category: a long coil of greasy rope, an engine hoist with pulleys and tripod legs, unopened boxes of big heavy-duty garbage bags.

Nothing even remotely resembling a landing light.

Twelve minutes and change.

He pictured the scene from a pilot’s point of view. An airliner, a Boeing 737, descending, on approach, dim blue-gray moonlit tundra ahead and below. Visible to some degree, but uniform, and featureless. The guy would have GPS navigation, but he would need help from the ground. That was clear. But he wouldn’t be expecting any kind of mainstream FAA-approved bullshit. That was clear, too. Nothing was going to be done by the book.

What would he need?

Something improvised, obviously.

Fire, maybe?

World War Two bomber pilots landing in East Anglian fog were guided in by long parallel trenches pumped full of gasoline and set ablaze. Small planes landing secret agents in occupied Europe looked for fields with three bonfires arranged in an L-shape.

Was Holland supposed to have set fires?

Eleven minutes and change.

No, not fires.

Reacher slammed the trunk lid and kicked away debris from behind the car. He squeezed around to the front and hauled away tangled bed frames from under the fenders and dragged splintered plywood off the hood. The engine was still running. It smelled hot and oily and the bearings were knocking loudly. He squeezed back and opened the driver’s door and dumped himself in Holland’s seat and put the transmission in reverse. Hit the gas and the car jerked and sputtered and dragged itself backward the way it had come. In through the hole in the far wall, across the floor, out through the hole in the near wall. It thumped down tail-first and Reacher spun the wheel and jammed the lever into Drive and headed for the northeastern corner of the runway. The top right corner, from the Boeing’s point of view. He braked to a stop and slid out and opened the trunk again and grabbed the four red road flares from the plastic tray. He tossed three into the passenger seat as he passed and spiked the fourth into the concrete. It ignited automatically and burned fiercely. A bright crimson puffball. Visible from a long way on a road, presumably even farther from the air.

He got back in the car and headed for the opposite corner. The top left. He had no headlights, but the moonlight was enough. Just. A hundred yards. He used the second flare. Then he set off down the length of the two-mile stretch. No fun at all. The windshield glass was gone and the wind was biting. And the car was slow. And getting slower. It felt close to stalling out. It smelled of burning oil. The engine was knocking and vibrating. The temperature gauge in the dash was climbing steadily toward the red.

Not good.

Nine minutes and change.

Two miles should have taken two minutes, but the wounded car took more than four. Reacher used the third flare in the southwestern corner. The bottom left, from the pilot’s point of view. He got back in the car. Backed up, turned the wheel, headed out. The car started juddering uncontrollably. It started losing all its power. The temperature needle jammed hard against its end stop. Steam and black smoke started coming out from under the hood. Thick clouds of it.

A hundred yards to go. That was all. One more corner.

The car made fifty yards and died. It just ground to a stop and stayed there, refusing to go on, hissing and inert, right in the middle of the runway’s southern edge. The transmission was gone, or the oil pressure, or the water, or something, or everything.

Reacher got out and ran the rest of the way.

He spiked the last flare and stood back.

The crimson glow in the four distant corners was way brighter than anything else around it. And it came back off the shaped berms of plowed snow twice as bright. Adequate, from the Boeing’s flight deck. Looking forward and down from an oblique angle there would be no doubt about the shape and location of the landing strip. The car was dark and dead right across the middle of the near end, but it was no worse than an airport fence.

Two minutes and change.

Job done.

Except that Reacher was stuck two whole miles from where he needed to be, and it was a cold night for walking. Except that he was pretty sure he wouldn’t need to be walking. He was pretty sure he could get a ride, if he wanted one, before too long. Maybe even before he froze. Which was good. Except that given the state of his current information it was highly likely his ride would get him to the stone building a little after Plato got there. Which was not good. Not good at all. And not even remotely what he had intended.

Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired.

He hustled back through the frigid air to the dead car, and he leaned on its flank and watched the night sky in the south.

And waited.

* * *

A minute later Reacher saw lights above the horizon. Like stars that weren’t stars. Tiny electric pinpricks that hung and twinkled and grew and danced a little, up and down, side to side. Spotlights in an airplane’s landing gear, for sure, approaching head-on, maybe ten miles out.

Then he saw lights below the horizon, too. Yellower, weaker, pooled on the ground, less stable, bouncing, moving much slower. Headlights. A road vehicle. Two of them, in fact, one behind the other on the wandering snowbound two-lane, approaching head-on, crawling along, doing maybe thirty, maybe five miles out.

His ride.

Close, but not close enough.

He leaned back in the cold and waited and watched.

The Boeing got there first. It started out small and silent, and then it got bigger and noisier. It came in low and flat, all broad supportive wings and swirling heat shimmer and deafening jet whine and stabbing beams of light. Its nose was up and its undercarriage was down, the trailing wheels hanging lower than the leading wheels, like talons on a giant bird of prey ready to swoop in and seize the crippled car like an eagle takes a lamb. Reacher ducked and the plane passed right over his head, huge and almost close enough to touch, and the roiled air and shattering noise that trailed behind it threatened to knock him flat. He straightened again and turned and watched over the roof of the car as the plane skimmed and hung and deliberated and floated, a hundred yards, two, three, and then it put down decisively with a loud yelp of rubber and a puff of black smoke and then its nose tipped down and it ran fast and flat and true before the reverse thrusters cut in and slowed it in a bellowing scream.

Reacher turned back and faced south.

The road vehicles were still heading his way. They were moving slowly and carefully along the moonlit two-lane, cautious because of the curves and the ice and the bad surface, but relentless, a miniature convoy with a destination in mind. Their headlight beams swung left, swung right, bounced up, dipped down. The first vehicle was a strange open-frame truck, with a big coil of heavy flexible pipe wrapped over a drum immediately behind the cab, and then a pump built into a square steel frame, and then a second coil of pipe on a second drum. The vehicle right behind it was the same general size and type, but behind the cab it had a big white tank, and a cherry-picker bucket, and a long articulated boom arm folded up and tied down for travel.

The first truck was painted in the colors of the Shell Oil Company.

It had the word Isuzu across its grille.

The statewide BOLO bulletin: an Isuzu N-series pump and a de-icing truck stolen by two absconded employees from a commercial airfield east of Rapid City. Stolen on Plato’s orders, presumably, so that his 737 could be refueled from the underground tank and then flown away safely through bitter night skies.

Reacher pushed off the flank of the car and waited. The pump truck’s headlights hit him, and it slowed, and then its lights flicked up to bright, and then it stopped dead. For a second Reacher was conscious of his dark pants and khaki hat and tan coat. The coat was old, but it still looked like Highway Patrol issue. And the dead Crown Vic was parked crosswise, as if to block access to the runway. And no one uses plain Crown Vics except law enforcement. But the Rapid City guys must have been told that a bent cop would be waiting there to meet them, because after just a brief pause the pump truck moved on again, with the de-icer close behind. Reacher raised his hand, partly like a greeting, partly like a traffic stop, and a minute later he was sitting in the warmth inside the pump truck’s cab, riding up the runway toward whatever was waiting for him at the other end.

Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning.

Twenty-eight minutes to go.

Chapter 43

The Boeing had taxied and turned and was parked as near as it could get to the first line of huts. Up close, it looked gigantic. A huge plane, high and wide and long, at temporary rest in the middle of nowhere, towering over the silent buildings behind it, hissing and whistling, an active, living presence in a passive, frozen landscape. Its engines were still spooling noisily and its belly light was still flashing red and its forward door was latched wide open. Lights were on inside. An aluminum housepainter’s ladder had been extended down from the cabin to the runway surface below. It looked thin and puny and insubstantial next to the giant plane.

There were seven men on the ground. Or what looked like six men and a boy. There was no mistaking Plato. Four feet and eleven inches tall, but that abstract measurement did not convey the reality. He had a big man’s heft and thickness and muscularity, and a big man’s stiffness and posture and movement, but a small child’s stature. He was not dwarfish. He was not a freak. His limbs and his torso and his neck and his head were all reasonably well proportioned. He was like an NFL linebacker reduced in size by exactly twenty-five percent. That was all. He was a miniature tough guy. Like a toy.

He looked to be somewhere between forty and fifty years old. He was wearing a black goose-down jacket, and a black woolen watch cap, and black gloves. He looked very cold. The six men with him were younger. In their thirties, maybe. They were dressed the same as him. Black down jackets, black hats, black gloves. They were normal-sized Hispanic men, Spanish not Indian, neither short nor tall, and they looked very cold, too.

The pump truck drove around and parked close to the Boeing’s wing and the de-icer parked behind it. Both drivers got out. They had no visible reaction to the abject temperature. They were Rapid City guys. They knew about cold. They had down jackets of their own. They were both white, medium height, and lean. Hardscrabble people, rural roots, worn down to the bare essentials. Arms, legs, heads, bodies. Maybe thirty years old, but they looked forty. Maybe a couple of generations off the farm.

Reacher stayed in his seat for a moment, keeping warm, and watching.

Plato was moving around inside a loose cordon formed by his six guys. No real reason for that. Maybe habit, maybe appearances. And Plato and his six guys were armed. They all had Heckler & Koch MP5Ks slung around their necks on nylon straps. Short stubby weapons, black and wicked. Thirty-round magazines. They rested raised and proud and prominent on the puffy coats. Butts to the right, muzzles to the left. All seven guys were right-handed. All seven guys had backpacks, too. Black nylon. The backpacks looked mostly empty apart from small heavy loads at the bottom. Flashlights, Reacher assumed. For deep underground. And spare magazines, presumably. For the guns. Always good to have. On full auto thirty rounds came out of an MP5 in two short seconds.

Submachine guns. A bullet manufacturer’s very best friends.

Reacher climbed out of the pump truck’s cab. Into the cold and the wind. The Rapid City guys were still doing OK with it, but all seven Mexicans were shivering hard. They had expressions of total disbelief on their faces. They had left a balmy evening knowing they were heading for somewhere cold, but understanding the word and feeling the feeling were two completely different things. Plato’s gun was bouncing a little on his chest because his whole body was trembling. He was walking small tight circles and stamping his feet. But part of that might have been plain annoyance. He was clearly tense. He had a hard brown face and his mouth was set down in a grimace.

The Rapid City guys didn’t read it right.

The guy who had driven the pump truck stepped up and spread his hands and smiled what he clearly hoped was a cunning smile, and he said, “Here we are.”

A self-evident statement. Plato looked at him blankly and said, “And?”

“We want more money.” A plan, obviously. Clearly discussed and pre-agreed with his buddy. Bar talk. Irresistible, over a third beer. Or a fourth. Show the guy the prize, and then yank it back and ask for more.

Can’t fail.

Plato asked, “How much more?”

Good English, lightly accented, a little slow and indistinct because of a cold face and the jet whine in the background.

The pump driver was used to talking over jet whine. He worked at an airport.

He said, “The same again.”

“Double?”

“You got it.”

Plato’s eyes flicked across three of his guys and came to rest on a fourth. He asked in Spanish, which because of the cold was slow enough for Reacher to follow: “Do you know how to work this equipment?”

The fourth guy said, “I think so.”

“Think or know?”

“I’ve done it before. With the fuel, I mean. Many times. The de-icing, not so much. No call for it. But how hard can it be? It’s just a spray, for the wings.”

“Tell me yes or no.”

“Yes.”

Plato turned back to the Rapid City guys. Put his gloved hands on his gun and raised it up and machine-gunned them both in the chest. Just like that. Full auto. First one, and then the other. Two brief bursts of fire, barely separated at all. Nine or ten rounds each. An impossibly fast cyclic rate. Shattering noise. Searing, vivid, foot-long muzzle flash. A hosing stream of ejected brass. The spent cases bounced and skittered away. The two guys went down in a mist of blood from their ripped bodies and a cloud of feathers from their torn jackets, first one, then immediately the other, with ragged bloody holes in their chests big enough to plunge a fist in. They fell side by side, dead before they hit the ground, their hearts torn apart. They thumped down and settled at once, rags and flesh, two small mounds close together.

The gunsmoke whipped away in the wind and the sudden noise faded and the jet whine came back, low and steady.

Twenty feet above them the pilot looked out the Boeing’s door.

Reacher was impressed. Long bursts, tightly grouped. Great trigger control, great aim, and no muzzle climb at all. With gloves on, too. Plato had done this before. No question about that.

No one spoke.

Plato moved his thumb and tripped the release and the part-used magazine fell out and plinked against the concrete. Then he held his hand palm-up and waited. The guy nearest to him scurried around and dug down in Plato’s own backpack and came out with a fresh magazine. He slapped it into Plato’s waiting palm. Plato clicked it into its housing, and tugged on it once to check it was secure, and then he turned to Reacher.

He said, “You must be Chief Holland.”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“Finally we meet.”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t the door open and the equipment set up for me?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was thinking: What equipment?

Plato said, “Your daughter is still under my direct control, you know.”

Reacher said, “Where is she?”

“She moved on with the rest of them. She’s living her dream.”

“Is she OK?”

“So far. But my threat against her still stands.”

Reacher said, “My car broke down. The equipment is still in the trunk.”

“Where’s your car?”

“At the other end of the runway.”

Plato didn’t answer directly. The sign of a good leader. No sense in fussing about what couldn’t be changed. He just turned to one of his men and said in Spanish, “Take the de-icing truck and fetch the equipment we need from the trunk of Chief Holland’s car.”

The guy headed for the de-icer’s cab and Plato turned back to Reacher and asked, “Where is the key for the stair head door?”

Reacher took it out of his pocket and held it up. Plato stepped through his human cordon. Reacher rehearsed two possible moves. Drive the key through Plato’s eye, or drop it on the ground and drive a massive uppercut through Plato’s chin and snap his puny neck.

He did neither thing. Plato had five MP5Ks right behind him. Within a split second seventy-five nine-millimeter rounds would be in the air. Most of them would miss. But not all of them.

The de-icer truck crunched into gear and moved away.

Plato stepped up next to Reacher. The top of his head was exactly level with Reacher’s breastbone. His chin was exactly level with Reacher’s waistband. A tiny man. A miniature tough guy. A toy. Reacher reassessed the uppercut. Bad idea. Almost impossible to launch a blow from so low down. Better to drive an elbow vertically through the crown of his skull.

Or shoot him.

Plato took the key.

He said, “Now take your coat off.”

Reacher said, “What?”

“Take your coat off.”

“Why?”

“Are you arguing with me?”

Six hands on six submachine guns.

Reacher said, “I’m asking you a question.”

Plato said, “You and I are going underground.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’ve been down there before. None of us have. You’re our local guide.”

“I can go down there with my coat on.”

“True. But you’re in civilian clothing. Therefore, no gun belt. The weather is cold and your coat is closed at the front. Therefore, your guns are in your outer pockets. I’m a smart guy. Therefore, I don’t wish to enter an unfamiliar environment with an armed adversary.”

“Am I your adversary?”

“I’m a smart guy,” Plato said again. “The safe assumption is that everyone is my adversary.”

Reacher said, “It’s cold.”

Plato said, “Your daughter’s grave will be colder.”

Six hands on six submachine guns.

Reacher unzipped his coat. He shrugged it off and dropped it. It hit the ground with a padded clank. The Glocks, the Smiths, the box of rounds, the cell phone. Plastic and metal and cardboard. Thirty degrees below zero. Windy. A cotton sweater. Within seconds he was shivering worse than any of them.

Plato stood still. Not long, Reacher thought, before the de-icer truck got back and the driver described the smashed-up Ford. Therefore not long before someone looked down the row and found the damaged hut. Not long before someone searched the other huts. Not long before someone started asking awkward questions.

Time to get going.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Twenty-seven minutes to four in the morning.

Twenty-two minutes to go.

Chapter 44

They walked over to the stone building, seven men, single file, a strange little procession. Plato first, four feet eleven, then Reacher, six feet five, then Plato’s five guys, all of them halfway between the two extremes. Plato’s sixth guy was still safely away in the de-icer truck, looting Holland’s dead car. The stone building was standing there waiting for them, quiet and indifferent in the moonlit gloom, the same way it had stood for fifty long years. The stone, the slate, the blind windows, the chimneys, the moldings and the curlicues and the details.

The portico, and the steel slab door.

Plato put the key in the lock. Turned it. The lock sprang back. Then he stood still and waited. Reacher took the hint. He turned the handle down sixty degrees, precise and physical, like a bank vault. He pulled the door through a short arc. The hinges squealed. He stepped in behind it and pushed it all the way open, like pushing a truck.

Plato stood still and raised his hand, palm up. The man behind him stepped up and dug down in his backpack and came out with a flashlight. He slapped it into Plato’s palm, the way an OR nurse feeds tools to a surgeon. Plato clicked it on and transferred it to his other hand and snapped his fingers and pointed at Reacher. The guy behind him swung his own backpack off his shoulder and took out his flashlight and handed it over.

It was a four-cell Maglite. From Ontario, California. The de facto gold standard for man-portable illumination. Alloy construction. Reliable and practically indestructible. Reacher clicked it on. He played the beam around the bare concrete chamber.

No change.

The place was exactly as he and two dead men had left it more than four and a half hours earlier. The circular stair head, the two unfinished ventilation pipes jutting up through the floor. The stale dry air, the stirring breeze, the smell of old fears long forgotten.

“After you, Mr. Holland,” Plato said.

Which disappointed Reacher a little. He had lost his coat, but he still had his boots. He had entertained the idea of letting Plato go first, and then kicking his head off about a hundred feet down.

But, obviously, so had Plato. A smart guy.

So Reacher went first, as awkward as before. Big boot heels, small steps, clanging metal. The sound of the whining jets faded as he went down, and he heard Plato issuing a stream of instructions in Spanish: “Wait until the de-icer gets back, then set up the equipment, then start the refueling. Get the other three doors open on the plane, and get the other three ladders in position. Figure out how the de-icer works and figure out how close to take-off we need to use it. And put a man on lookout a hundred feet south. That’s the only direction we have to worry about. Rotate every twenty minutes. Or more often, if you want. Your call. I want the lookout alert at all times, not frozen to death.”

Then Plato stopped talking and Reacher heard his feet on the stairs above him. Smaller steps, more precise. The metal still clanged, but quieter. The two flashlight beams went down and around, down and around, always clockwise, separated vertically by twenty feet, and not synchronized. Reacher took it slow. He was Holland now, in more than name. He was improvising, and hoping his moment would come.

On the surface the de-icer truck got back with the necessary equipment all piled on and around the passenger seat. The engine hoist, the rope, the garbage bags. The hoist was a sturdy metal thing, with three legs and a boom arm like the jib of a small crane. It was designed to be set up at the front of a car, with the jib leaning in over the engine compartment. The pulleys would produce multiplication of effort, according to ancient mechanical principles, allowing a lone operator to lift a heavy iron block.

Three of Plato’s guys carried the hoist into the bunker and set it up with the jib leaning in over one of the ventilation shafts. Like fishing from a barrel. They started threading the rope through the pulleys. No free lunch. More weight meant less speed. Pull the rope a yard, and with one pulley in play a light weight would move the same yard, but with two pulleys in play a heavier weight would move just eighteen inches, and with three pulleys in play a heavier weight still would move just twelve inches. And so on. A trade-off.

They chose to thread two pulleys. A balance of speed and capacity.

The guy who had driven the truck said nothing about the Ford.

Two hundred and eighty awkward steps. Reacher completed seventy of them, a quarter of the way down, and then he began to speed up. He saw a window of opportunity ahead. Set up the equipment, then start the refueling, Plato had said. Which meant that there would be some busywork up top before one of his guys came down to connect the pump truck’s hose to the fuel tank. Five minutes, maybe. Possibly ten. And five or ten minutes alone with Plato deep underground could be productive. So he aimed to get to the bottom as far ahead as possible. To prepare. So he sped up as much as he could. Which wasn’t much.

And which wasn’t nearly enough.

Plato matched him step for step. Gained on him, even. For a man of Plato’s stature, the winding stair was broad and palatial. Like something from a Hollywood production. And his feet were dainty. He was nimble and agile in comparison.

Reacher slowed down again. Better to save energy and avoid busting an ankle.

* * *

The guy who had sat in seat 4A was standing with the guy from seat 4B in the lee of the pump truck, out of sight of the stone building, hidden from the Boeing’s flight deck windows, invisible to the sentry a hundred feet down the runway. The guy from 4A had texted the Russian: Cop car damaged. No getaway possible.

The Russian had replied: I will double your money.

The guy from 4B glanced over at the de-icer truck. The guy from 4A followed his gaze. A diesel engine, a little clumsy, not fast, distinctive in appearance, and stolen. But it was a vehicle.

He said nothing.

The phone buzzed again against his palm.

The Russian had offered: I will triple your money. Do it.

Triple the money was a fortune beyond comprehension. But even that paled against the prospect of a life without Plato in it.

The guy from 4B nodded. He had just driven the truck. He knew it worked.

The guy from 4A texted: OK.

Reacher passed through the second of the oboe nodes. Two-thirds of the way down. The individual sounds of four separate feet on metal merged and melded into a keening ghostly song that pulsed up and down the shaft and hung and oscillated in the still dead air, like an elegy for a tragedy about to happen. Reacher shivered and kept on going down into the darkness, his flashlight held between gloved thumb and forefinger, his other three fingers spread and brushing the wall. Above him Plato’s beam turned and jumped and stabbed. Reacher’s heel hit the two hundredth step. Eighty more to go.

The pump truck was basically a simple device. A relatively recent invention. In the old days tankers refueled planes directly. In the modern world airports put fuel tanks underground, and skeletal trucks drove out on the tarmac and linked nozzles under manholes to nozzles under airplane wings. The hose on the reel directly behind the cab spooled out and connected to the underground source, and the hose on the reel at the other end of the truck spooled out and connected to the plane. In between was a pump, to suck fuel out of the ground and push it onward into the airplane’s tanks. A simple, linear proposition. The guys from seats 4A and 4B maneuvered the truck as close as they could get it to the stone building’s door, which put it about halfway between the tank far below them and the thirsty Boeing. One jacked the first nozzle on his shoulder and the other operated the electric motor that unwound the drum. The one with the nozzle on his shoulder walked the hose into the building and fed it down the second ventilation shaft, the one that the guys with the rope weren’t using.

Reacher made it to the bottom. Same situation as before. He rested on the last step, nine inches off the round chamber’s floor, its ceiling level with his waist, his upper body still inside the shaft, his face an inch from the curved concrete wall. Plato crowded in behind him, the same way Holland had before. Reacher felt the H&K’s muzzle on his back.

Plato said, “Move.”

Reacher ducked way down and got his shoulders under the ceiling and waddled forward, painfully, his legs hurting, his neck bent at ninety degrees. He dropped to his knees and folded himself sideways and sat down. He shuffled through half a turn and scooted away backward, undignified, slow and awkward and claustrophobic, heels and knuckles and ass, once, then twice.

Plato stepped off the bottom stair and just walked straight into the chamber.

He took three confident strides and then stopped and looked around, erect, upright, with four clear inches between the top of his head and the concrete.

He said, “So where’s my stuff?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was adrift. The world had flipped underneath him. All his life, to be taller had been to be better. More dominant, more powerful, more noticed, more advantaged. You got credibility, you got treated with respect, you got promoted faster, you earned more, you got elected to things. Statistics bore it out.

You won fights, you got less hassle, you ruled the yard.

To be born tall was to win life’s lottery.

Born small, two strikes against.

But not down there.

Down there to be tall was a losing ticket.

Down there was a world where the small guy could win.

“Where’s my stuff?” Plato said again, with his hand on his gun.

Reacher took his own hand off the floor and started to point, but then there were twin ragged thumps behind him, and a slap, and another thump. He shuffled around and saw that three packs of garbage bags had been dropped down the ventilation shaft, plus the tail end of a greasy coil of rope. Things he had seen before, in the trunk of Holland’s car.

Plato said, “We have work to do. It’s not exactly rocket science. We put the stuff in the bags, we tie the bags to the rope, they haul them up.”

Reacher asked, “How much stuff?”

“The plane will carry sixteen tons.”

“You’ll be here all week.”

“I don’t think so. I have about ten hours. The biker will come out of his little hidey-hole in the jail just after lunch time. And I arranged with the warden that he will keep your whole department on station right up to that point. So we’ll be undisturbed. And a ton and a half an hour should be possible. Especially with you down here to help. But don’t worry. The hard work will be done on the surface.”

Reacher said nothing.

Plato said, “But we’ll do the jewelry first. Where is it?”

Reacher started to point again, but right next to him a brass collar on the end of a thick black hose dropped through the other ventilation shaft, right next to him. It thumped down on the floor and excess hose came tumbling down after it and coiled all around it. Then he heard feet on the steps way above. Distant tinkling and pattering in the stair shaft, getting louder, getting nearer. A man on his way down.

Refueling was about to begin.

Plato asked, “Where’s the jewelry?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was estimating time. Two hundred and eighty steps. Somewhere between two and three minutes before the refueling guy arrived, however fast he moved. And two or three minutes should be enough. It was a long time since Reacher had been in a fight that had lasted longer than two or three minutes.

A window of opportunity.

“Where’s the jewelry?” Plato said again.

Reacher said, “Find it yourself.”

The sound of feet on the stairs got a little louder.

Plato smiled. He pushed back his cuff and made a show of checking the time on the watch on his wrist, slow and nonchalant. Then he darted forward, fast and nimble and agile, and he aimed a kick at Reacher’s side. From a sitting position Reacher swatted Plato’s foot aside and came up on his knees and Plato stumbled away and Reacher pivoted up and lunged after him.

And hit his head hard on the ceiling, and scraped his knuckles, and collapsed back to his knees. Plato righted himself after a step and danced in and delivered the belated kick, a decent hard blow to the ribs on Reacher’s back.

Then he stepped away and smiled again.

He said, “Where’s the jewelry?”

Reacher didn’t answer. His knuckles were bleeding and he was pretty sure his scalp was torn. The ceiling crowded down on him.

Plato put both hands on his gun.

He said, “You get one free pass. And that was it. Where’s the jewelry?”

So Reacher used his flashlight beam and found the right corridor. Even from a distance the reflection came back bright and lurid. Plato walked toward it, fast and jaunty, no problem at all, right up on his toes, like he was outside on the street with just the sky above him.

He called over his shoulder, “Bring some bags.”

Reacher shuffled over and grabbed a pack of bags, and then he shuffled after Plato, hobbled, restricted, constrained, humiliated, following the little man like a giant caged ape.

Plato was in the right corridor. He was doing what Holland had done. He was playing his flashlight beam the length of the shelf and back again, over the gold and the silver and the platinum, and the diamonds and the rubies and the sapphires and the emeralds, and the clocks and the paintings and the platters and the candlesticks. But not with greed or wonderment in his face. He was assessing the size of the packaging task, that was all.

He said, “You can start bagging this shit up. But first show me the powder.”

Reacher led him across the chamber, heels and knuckles and ass, low and deferential, all the way to the third of the three tunnels packed with meth. Still a staggering sight. Bricks stacked ten high, ten deep, a whole solid wall of them a hundred feet long, undisturbed for fifty years, old yellowing glassine glowing dull in the flashlight beams. Fifteen thousand packs. More than thirteen tons.

“Is this all of it?” Plato asked.

“A third of it,” Reacher said.

The feet on the staircase grew louder. The fuel guy was hustling.

Plato said, “We’ll take what’s here. Plus more. Until the plane is full.”

Reacher said, “I thought you sold it to the Russian.”

Plato said, “I did.”

“But you’re going to take it anyway?”

“Only some of it.”

“That’s a double-cross.”

Plato laughed. “You killed three people for me and now you’re upset that I’m stealing? From some dumb Russian you never met?”

“I would prefer you to be true to your word, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because I want my daughter to be OK.”

“She’s with those guys out of choice. And ten hours from now I’ll have no further use for her, anyway. I’m never doing business here again.”

“You’ll have no further use for me, either,” Reacher said.

“I’ll let you live,” Plato said. “You did well for me. Slow, but you got there in the end.”

Reacher said nothing.

“I am true to my word,” Plato said. “Just not with Russians.”

Behind them they heard the last loud footstep on the last metal stair and then the first quiet footstep on the concrete floor. They turned and saw one of Plato’s men arrive, like all of them about five seven in height, therefore stooped but not too much. He had his gun on his chest and a flashlight in his hand. He was looking all around. Not curious. Just a guy getting the job done. He found the fuel line and picked it up one-handed and pulled it out straight and jerked it and heaved serpentine waves into it to work out the kinks. He asked in Spanish where the tank was and Reacher waited until Plato translated the question and then he pointed his flashlight beam at the relevant corridor. The guy hauled the heavy hose after him and disappeared.

Plato said, “Go start bagging the jewelry.”

Reacher left him communing with his stock-in-trade and shuffled the long way around. Five thousand gallons in a home-made tank. He wanted to be sure the connection was secure. He was going to be down there until Plato died, which was a minimum of a few more minutes and a maximum of ten more hours, and he preferred one thing to worry about at a time.

He found Plato’s guy finishing up. The brass end of the hose was neatly socketed into a matching brass fitment brazed into the end wall of the tank. The guy was nudging it one way, nudging it the other, feeling for looseness or play. He seemed to find none, so he opened a tap on the tank side of the joint. Reacher heard the fuel flow into the hose. Not much of it. Three gallons, maybe four. That was all. Gravity only, into the length of hose that lay on the floor at a lower level than the tank itself. For the rest, the pump would have to prime itself and then suck hard and haul it all up and out.

Reacher watched the joint. A single fat drop of kerosene formed where two fiber washers were compressed. It beaded large and waited and then fell to the floor and made a tiny wet stain.

That was all.

No more.

Safe enough.

Plato’s guy crouched a little and duck-walked back to the stairs and headed upward. Reacher shuffled on around the perimeter of the circular chamber and disappeared into a corridor far from the jewelry and far from the meth.

Chapter 45

Do it. Short simple words, a short simple command. Or a short simple plea, or a short simple request. Or a short simple half of a bargain. A very attractive bargain. Do it, and get extremely rich, and live happily forever with respect and veneration from your whole community. They would be the men who took down Plato. Saints. Heroes. Songs would be sung, tales would be told.

The guy from seat 4A looked at the guy from seat 4B. They both swallowed hard. They were getting very close to doing it. Dangerously close. A hundred feet south a new sentry had just rotated into position. He was facing away, alert and on guard. Way far beyond him the flares still burned at the distant end of the runway. Fifty yards the other side of the Boeing’s tail the third flare still burned. Fifty yards beyond the de-icer truck in the other direction the fourth flare was still a bright crimson puffball. Blue moon, white snow, red flame.

The other three guys were working in the plane. Opening the doors, setting the ladders, working out a system for hauling the stuff hand-to-hand along a human chain and then getting it up into the plane and stacking it safely on the floor of the old economy section.

The guy from seat 4A hoisted the end of the second hose on his shoulder. The guy from seat 4B hit the switch and the drum began to unwind.

Sixteen minutes to four in the morning.

Eleven minutes to go.

Reacher heard Plato moving about. Heard him step out of the corridor into the round chamber. Reacher was sitting on the floor in the first of the curved connecting tunnels. In what he was calling the B-ring. Like a miniature Pentagon, but round and underground. The central chamber was the A-ring. Then came the B-ring, and then the C-ring, and all around the outside was the D-ring. All partially interconnected by the eight straight spokes. More than seventeen hundred linear feet of tunnel. Twenty-four separate junctions. Twelve random left turns, twelve random right turns. Plus a total of ten hollowed-out bathrooms and kitchens and storage chambers.

A warren.

A maze.

Reacher had been in it before, and Plato hadn’t.

No cell signal, his guys all busy on the surface, no possibility of reinforcement.

Reacher waited.

Plato called, “Holland?”

The sound of the word boomed and echoed and took unpredictable paths and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Reacher waited.

Plato called, “Holland? Get your ass over here. Our deal isn’t finished yet. Remember, I’ll cripple her and mutilate her and let her live for a year before I finish her off.”

Reacher said nothing.

Plato called, “Holland?”

No response from Reacher. Five seconds. Ten.

“Holland?”

Reacher said nothing. The big gamble came right then. Right at that exact moment in time. Fifty-fifty. Live or die. A smart guy with a dawning problem would hustle straight up the stairs and send foot soldiers down in his place. A dumb guy would stay to fight it out.

But so might a smart guy overcome by ego, and arrogance, and a sense of superiority, and a need never to appear weak because he was only four feet eleven inches tall.

Fifty-fifty.

Live or die.

Plato stayed.

He called, “Holland? Where are you?”

A trace of worry in his voice.

Reacher put his mouth close to the curved concrete and said, “Holland’s dead.”

The sound rode the walls and went all around and came back to him, a quiet spoken sentence, everywhere and nowhere, conversational, but full of menace. Reacher heard Plato’s feet scuffling on the concrete floor. He was spinning in place, trying to locate the voice.

Plato’s feet went quiet and he called out, “What did you say?”

Reacher moved along an empty spoke into the C-ring. A slow, silent shuffle. No sound at all, except the whisper of fabric when the seat of his pants hit the floor. Which didn’t matter anyway. All sounds were everywhere. They hissed and sang and branched and traveled.

Reacher put his mouth to the wall and said, “I shot Holland in the head. Now I’m coming for you.”

“Who are you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Tell me.”

“I was a friend of Janet Salter’s.”

“Who?”

“The witness. Didn’t you even know her name?”

“Are you the military cop?”

“You’re about to find out who I am.”

A smart guy would have run for the stairs.

Plato stayed.

He called out, “Do you think you can beat me?”

Reacher called back, “Do you think bears shit in the woods?”

“You think you can beat me down here?”

“I can beat you anywhere.”

A long pause.

“Where are you?” Plato called.

“Right behind you,” Reacher said. Loud voice, booming echo. Fast feet scuffling on concrete. No answer. Reacher moved on, in the dark, his flashlight off. He heard Plato enter a corridor. A straight spoke. The sound of his feet narrowed and then bloomed and the tap of his heels came back from the right and the left simultaneously. Reacher scooted left, then right. Into a straight spoke of his own. Adjacent to Plato’s, apparently. He saw the glow of Plato’s flashlight as it passed the mouth of the C-ring. He moved on and stopped and lay down on his side, curled like a letter S, in the mouth of the straight spoke, just three feet from the main chamber. Down on the floor, to show a small target. Away from the vertical surfaces, because bullets rode walls, too. Not just sound. Any combat veteran would say the same. Narrow alleys, confined spaces, near-misses didn’t ricochet at gaudy angles. They buzzed and burrowed close to the brick or the stone. Flattening yourself against a hard surface did the other guy a favor, not you. Counterintuitive, and difficult to resist, but true.

He heard Plato stop in the mouth of his corridor. Saw the glow from his light. He was facing into the main chamber. Two possibilities. One, he would turn right, away from the tunnel where Reacher was waiting. Or two, he would turn left, toward it.

Hide and seek. Maybe the oldest game in the world.

The guy from seat 4A walked the second hose into the stone building. He wrestled it across the floor and around the stair head and pulled it over to the same ventilation shaft the first hose was in. He put it up on his shoulder again and faced the void and kicked with his knee until the nozzle fell into the shaft. Then he fed the hose down after it, yard by yard, ten feet, twenty, thirty, forty, like he was chinning himself backward along an endless monkey bar. When he had a good sixty feet in the shaft he ducked out from under it and laid it down against the lip. He kicked it straight on the floor and checked it for kinks.

All good.

Up the shaft from the tank, through the pump, and straight back down the same shaft again.

A simple, linear proposition.

Do it.

He walked back out to the cold and found his friend. Asked him, “Can you hit the sentry from here?”

The guy from seat 4B looked down at his H&K. A four and a half inch barrel. A great weapon, but no more accurate than a fine handgun. And he was shivering hard. And not just from the cold.

He said, “No.”

“So sneak up on him. If he sees you, tell him you’re there to relieve him. Keep him talking. I’ll hit the others as soon as they come this way out of the plane. Wait until you hear me fire, and let him have it.”

The guy from seat 4B said nothing.

“For your mother. And your sisters. And the daughters you’ll have one day.”

The guy from seat 4B nodded. He turned around. He headed south. Slowly at first, and then faster.

Plato turned right. Away from where Reacher was waiting. A disappointment. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps just a delay, and then eventually a benefit. Because the flashlight glow was dimming and brightening, then dimming and brightening, slowly and regularly and rhythmically. Which told Reacher that Plato was walking slowly around the circumference of the chamber, counterclockwise, playing the beam into one corridor at a time, pausing, checking carefully, and then moving on. No net loss. After all, in a circular space, turning right was ultimately the same thing as turning left. And counterclockwise was better than clockwise. Much better. For a number of reasons, which were about to be made plain.

To Plato, especially.

Reacher waited.

The flashlight beam moved on.

Then: from far above Reacher heard tiny sounds. Brief muted purrs. Four of them. Quiet enough to be close to the point of not being audible at all. Maybe the pump truck’s starter motor turning over. Maybe the de-icer. Maybe something to do with the plane.

Maybe anything.

But if Reacher had been forced to guess worst case, he would have pegged them as triple taps from fast submachine guns.

Of which there were six on the surface.

Plato heard them, too. His flashlight beam stopped dead.

Silence.

Nothing more.

A long wait.

Then the flashlight beam moved on.

Reacher saw Plato from the back through the circular lattice of steel that was the bottom five and a half feet of the staircase. He was twenty feet away. A hundred and eighty degrees opposite. His flashlight beam was horizontal in the corridor directly across from Reacher’s.

Reacher moved his right arm. He cocked it behind him, ready.

Plato moved on, still counterclockwise, still slow. His body was facing forward, walking a perfect circuit. His head was turned. He was looking to his right at a square ninety degree angle down each of the radial spokes. The flashlight was in his left hand, the beam across his body. Which meant that the gun was in his right hand. The gun was still strapped around his neck. Which meant that the muzzle was facing left, which was fundamentally the wrong way, for a right-handed guy walking a counterclockwise circle. It was facing inward, not outward. A bad mistake. It would take a fast awkward flex of the elbow and a complicated tangle in the strap to correct in a hurry.

Reacher smiled.

Not such a smart guy after all.

Plato kept on coming.

A quarter turn to go. Two more spokes.

One more spoke.

Then: vibration in the hose that led away from the fuel tank. The pump had started, way up there on the surface. Reacher heard the swish and rush of liquid as the pump primed itself and sucked air and created a vacuum and fuel moved in to fill it. He heard a hiss of air from the tank as it began to empty, quiet at first, then louder.

The flashlight beam moved on.

It arrived.

It played down the long tunnel, concentrated just above Reacher’s curled form. But scatter from the lens picked him up. Plato froze, a yard away. Just a split second. Reacher sensed it. And used it to whip his right arm forward. Like a desperate throw from the outfield, bottom of the ninth, the opposition’s winning run heading for the plate. The Maglite was a foot and a half long. Heavy alloy, four D cells. Cross-hatching on the body. Great grip. Ferocious acceleration. Tremendous leverage. Muscle, fury, anger. Geometry and physics.

Reacher’s flashlight hit Plato butt-end-first square on the forehead. A solid punch. Reacher spun on his hip and scythed with his legs and kicked Plato’s feet out from under him. Plato crashed down, flat on the floor. Reacher rolled onto his back, rolled onto his other side, rolled right on top of Plato.

And the world flipped again. Now the horizontal was vertical and the vertical was horizontal. No disadvantage in being tall. In fact, just the opposite. On the floor, the big guy always wins.

Reacher started hammering heavy blows into Plato’s face, one, two, three, hard and vicious. Then he scrabbled for the H&K and got his hand on it just as Plato did. The two of them started a desperate tug of war. Plato was strong. Unbelievably, phenomenally strong for a man of his size. And impervious to pain. Reacher had his left hand on the gun and was using his right to hammer more blows to Plato’s head. Four, five, six, seven. Plato was bucking and writhing and tossing left, tossing right. Reacher was on top of him, smothering him, all two hundred and fifty pounds, and he was in danger of getting thrown off. Plato was snarling and biting, curling and rearing. Reacher jammed the heel of his hand under Plato’s nose and smashed his head down on the concrete, one, two, three. Then four.

No result.

Plato started kicking for Reacher’s groin, bucking, thrashing, like he was swimming backstroke. Reacher pinned the H&K and clambered off and smashed a right to Plato’s ribs. Plato coughed once, coughed twice, and blood foamed on his lips. He jerked up from the waist and tried to get Reacher with a head butt. Reacher clamped a giant palm over Plato’s moving teeth and smashed his head back down on the floor.

Plato’s eyes stayed open.

Then suddenly: sloshing, gushing, pouring liquid. Loud, forceful, relentless. Like a fire hose. Like ten fire hoses. Like a hundred. Like a waterfall. Roaring. The stink of kerosene. Reacher kept his left hand on the gun and scrabbled with his right and found Plato’s flashlight and jammed his elbow in Plato’s throat and played the beam toward the sound.

Liquid was sheeting out of the nearer ventilation shaft. A flooding, drenching, torrential flow. Hundreds of gallons. A deluge. It hammered on the concrete and bounced and spattered and pooled and raced across the floor. Like a lake. Like a tide. Within seconds the floor was soaked. The air was full of fumes. The flashlight beam danced and shivered and swam through them.

Kerosene.

Jet fuel.

And it kept on coming. Like a giant faucet. Unstoppable. Like a burst dam. Gushing, sheeting, rushing, pouring, drenching. Plato bucked and jerked and twisted and got his throat out from under Reacher’s elbow and said, “What the hell is it? A leak?”

“Not a leak,” Reacher said.

“Then what?”

Reacher watched the flow. Relentless and powerful. And pulsing. It was the pump on the surface, running hard. Two hoses in the same shaft. One up, one down. One emptying the tank, the other wide open and dumping the contents straight back underground.

“What is it?” Plato said.

“It’s a triple-cross,” Reacher said.

His head was already aching from the fumes. His eyes were starting to sting.

“What?” Plato said.

“The Russian bought some of your guys. You’re out of business.”

“They think they can drown me?”

“No,” Reacher said. “They’re not going to drown you.”

There was no possibility of drowning. There was too much floor area. Five thousand gallons would level out less than two inches deep.

He said, “They’re going to burn you to death.”

“Bullshit,” Plato said.

Reacher said nothing.

“How?” Plato said. “They’re going to drop a match down the stairs? It would go out on the way.”

Reacher said nothing. Plato wrenched away. Got to his knees. His nose was broken and leaking blood. Blood was coming out of his mouth. His teeth were smashed. One eye was closed. Both eyebrows were cut.

He put his hands on the H&K.

Then he took them off again.

Reacher nodded.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said. “The muzzle flash on that thing? With these fumes in the air? You want to do their work for them?”

Plato said, “How are they going to do it?”

Reacher said nothing. He was thinking. Picturing the scene on the surface, running options through his head.

See what they see.

Be them.

Not a match.

Plato was right.

A match would go out.

The guy from 4B gunned the de-icer truck and spun the wheel and took off east toward the top right corner of the runway. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. He spun the wheel again and slewed through a tight circle and the guy from 4A jumped out of the passenger seat and ducked down and grabbed the burning flare at its base and pulled its spike out of the concrete. He held it away from his body and climbed back in the truck and kept the door open and held the flare at arm’s length in the slipstream. It burned brighter and it smoked and flickered. But it didn’t go out. The truck raced back. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.

The deluge kept on coming. It was never-ending. It poured and sheeted and hammered. The ventilation shaft was like a bathtub faucet increased in size by a factor of a hundred. Reacher was on his knees. His pants were soaked. The fuel was already a good half-inch deep. The fumes were thick. Breathing was hard.

Plato said, “So what do we do?”

Reacher said, “How fast can you run up a flight of stairs?”

Plato got to his feet.

“Faster than you,” he said.

They were face-to-face, nose to nose, Reacher on his knees, Plato on his feet.

“I don’t think so,” Reacher said.

I’ll have plenty of time to read after all this fuss is over.

Reacher unleashed the uppercut from his knees. A colossal, primitive, primeval blow, driven all the way from the center of the earth, pulsing through the wet concrete, through his knee, his thigh, his waist, his upper body, his shoulder, his arm, his wrist, his fist, every muscle and every fiber twitching just once, rippling fast in perfect propulsive sequence and harmony.

Plato’s jaw shattered and his head snapped back like a rag doll. He hung motionless for a split second and then he splashed down, hard and vertical.

Reacher was pretty sure he was dead when he hit the floor.

Then he made absolutely certain of it.

He clamped his hands on Plato’s ears and jerked his head one way and then the other until he felt the vertebrae pull apart and then he kept on doing it until he was sure the spinal cord was torn all the way to mush.

The deluge kept on coming, rushing, sheeting, torrential. The round chamber, once still and dry and ancient, was soaked with chemical stink and boiling with fumes, the fuel suddenly close to an inch deep, with small urgent waves racing outward from a frothing maelstrom directly under the roaring pipe.

Surely everyone’s afraid of death, Janet Salter had said.

Depends on what form it takes, he had answered.

He ran.

He splashed across the floor on his knees and ducked his shoulders down and got his head up inside the stair shaft and crawled and clawed and scrabbled to his feet. He leaned in toward the center pole and took the stairs three at a time, galloping madly, his left hand sliding up over the steel, his right hand pawing crazily at the wall, batting and clutching and grasping at every extra second. The sound of his feet on the metal was drowned out by the waterfall roar of the fuel from below. He charged on, three at a time, four at a time, not breathing, anaerobic, up and up and up, round and round and round, not counting, just running, running, running, climbing, churning, hammering, straining, hurling himself toward the surface.

The de-icer truck jammed to a stop and K-turned and backed up and straightened. Directly behind it, the stone building. Directly ahead of it, the runway. The guy from 4A got out and ran crouched with his arm straight and the flare in his hand. He stopped in the doorway and turned and held the flare behind him and paused for a second and then swung his arm and lobbed it in. The flare tumbled end over end, a bright pink firework hissing through the air. It hit the unfinished lip of the ventilation shaft and kicked up and turned over once more and then dropped straight down and out of sight.

Five minutes to four in the morning.

Sixty-one hours gone.

Chapter 46

It was four days before the site was cool enough to inspect. By that point there was a long line of agencies waiting to join the hunt. First on the scene were Homeland Security, the Air Force, the FBI, the Highway Patrol, and a group of specialist arson investigators drafted in by the government. The incident had attracted intense interest. The North American Air Defense Command had been the first to spot it. Their satellites had seen a bloom of amazing heat and their computers had interpreted it as either a missile launch or a missile strike. Their Russian equivalents had seen the same thing. Within seconds the White House had been on the phone, reassuring, and receiving matching reassurances. There were launch silos in South Dakota, yes, but not at that location. And in turn, no Russian missile had been fired at America.

The National Guard was sent in to secure a wide perimeter. Through it crept the waiting agencies, one by one. They set up forward operating bases five miles out. They sent patrols forward, as close as they dared. Then came news from the nearby town of Bolton of a strange toxic cloud borne on the westerly wind. The patrols were pulled back. Hazmat gear was issued. Doctors were dispatched to Bolton. Reported symptoms were confusing. It was as if a light dose of a psychostimulant drug had been administered to the entire population. Temporary euphoria and excitement were reported, as was difficulty in sleeping and enhanced sexual appetite. The air was tested. No conclusion was reached. The wind had been blowing strongly for days, all the way from Wyoming. No symptoms were reported farther east in the state.

The patrols crept inward again.

Their first discovery was a crashed vehicle four miles south of the epicenter. It was an airport de-icing truck reported as stolen from a commercial airfield east of Rapid City. It seemed to have been driving south on the old county two-lane leading away from the site. The road was snowbound and the surface was bad. It seemed that the truck had skidded off the road and turned over at least twice. It was an ungainly vehicle.

Two bodies were found close by. Two unidentified men of Hispanic origin, wearing dark suits apparently purchased in Mexico, under brand-new winter parkas. The men had severe perimortem injuries, presumably caused by the crash, but they had died of exposure, presumably after crawling away from the wreckage. They were both carrying illegal fully automatic weapons. One gun seemed to have fired three rounds, and the other, nine. With that news, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms joined the roster of waiting agencies.

The patrols crept closer. By the middle of the second day the forward operating bases had been moved up to the southern edge of an old Air Force runway. At that new location they discovered a damaged and undriveable unmarked police car. It was positively identified by locals as the Bolton PD’s property. It had been issued to the department’s chief, Tom Holland. Holland had disappeared on the night of the fire. The Bolton PD was in disarray. It was dealing with three recent homicides, one of the victims being its own deputy chief, Andrew Peterson.

An observant fire officer taking a walk found the burned-out husks of two road flares, one in each corner of the old runway, apparently carefully placed. Which suggested the possibility of an unauthorized night landing by an airplane. No flight plan had been recorded with the FAA. But through binoculars some agents claimed to see twisted wreckage just south of the epicenter that might or might not have been the remains of a large airliner. With that news, the National Transportation Safety Board joined the queue.

By the middle of the third day the Air Defense satellites showed the outer perimeter to have cooled to seventy degrees. The patrols moved up. The outer perimeter seemed to be about a hundred yards in diameter. Clearly some kind of fireball had bloomed, burned, and died back, but it had been brief compared to the main fire. The arson theorists began to run simulations on their laptops. Close inspection of the area inside the perimeter showed grievous damage. There was a dusting of ash a hundred feet out that might have been the remains of a human being. There was scorched and twisted aluminum that the NTSB claimed was the remains of an airliner, possibly a Boeing, possibly a 737.

The patrols moved up, into a dead world of twisted smoking fragments, some made of iron, some made of steel, some possibly from a vehicle, some smaller pieces possibly from weapons. Piled everywhere was debris from the plane. No attempt was made to quantify human remains. It would have been a hopeless task. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, literally.

The only remotely intact structure was a small concrete stair head bunker disguised to look like a stone house. The Air Force claimed ownership. The original plans were lost, but anecdotally it was known to have been built fifty years previously, to contemporary blast-proof construction standards. It had stood up well. The roof was damaged. The interior concrete was blistered and spalled and calcified, but still reasonably solid. There were three circular shafts dropping down through the floor. It was surmised that once there had been steel casings for two ventilation ducts, and a spiral staircase probably also made of steel, but they had first melted and then vaporized.

Which proved, the arson people said, that the fire had started underground.

They donned protective gear and were lowered what turned out to be a total of two hundred and ten feet into the earth. They found a sequence of small tunnels and chambers, more blistered and spalled and calcified concrete, some ash that might once have been organic, and, amazingly, more than one thousand intact diamonds.

The arson specialists set up shop in the Bolton police station and connected their laptops wirelessly to their mainframes back home. They started work. They drew three-dimensional models of the underground facility. They made some guesses and assumptions. They knew from police records that a pump truck had been stolen along with the de-icer. So, if the aluminum had been an airplane, and if there had been an underground storage tank, then the accelerant might have been jet fuel. Which was consistent with their estimates of the fire’s temperature, the upper limit of which they felt was defined by the survival of the diamonds, and the lower limit by the fact that the snow on the ground had been melted for two miles in every direction.

Major Susan Turner saw the news every evening on the television, and read it every morning in the papers, and followed it all day online. She stayed in her office in Rock Creek, waiting by the phone. She slept in her visitor chairs, leaning back in one, her feet up on the other. The phone never rang.

After a week the arson theorists presented their best guesses. The fire had been a refueling accident. Possibly due to undischarged static electricity arcing between the plane and the hose, more likely due to vapor build-up underground and a spark from a boot heel on concrete. The fire had burned mostly two hundred and ten feet below the surface, with enhanced thermodynamic characteristics due to a strange aerodynamic stasis in which a gale of air had howled down the stair shaft and the products of combustion had blasted up the twin ventilation shafts, in exactly opposite directions but with perfectly equal masses and velocities, in what amounted to a controlled and everlasting explosion in a narrow vertical cylinder made of fireproof material. Like a rocket blasting off, but upside down, heading for the center of the earth, not the sky. The roof damage was felt to prove it. Two temporary caps placed in the fake chimneys fifty years earlier had blown out and were found six hundred yards away. It was estimated that the narrow cone of flame might have reached a thousand feet above grade, thereby mimicking the heat signature of a launching missile.

It was felt the initial phase of the fire might have lasted four hours. Then when the fuel load had depleted below a certain critical point the stasis had collapsed and a fireball had bloomed upward and outward, at a lower but still tremendous temperature, and had burned for an hour or so before collapsing again and finally burning out.

The toxic cloud in Bolton could not be explained. The Air Force admitted to storing surplus aircrew requirements from World War Two in the facility, all of it tanned leather in the form of helmets and boots and flying jackets, and it was felt that chemical residue from the tanning process might have been responsible for temporary adverse medical effects.

The presence of the diamonds was not explained, either. A theory was advanced that they had been stolen in Europe in the last days of the war, and entrusted to a quartermaster to be smuggled home, but had been mislaid and routed to the wrong destination.

After a series of discreet phone calls from the Pentagon, both the FBI and the local agencies in South Dakota concluded that in the absence of remains positively identifiable as human, no homicide investigation could be opened.

Two weeks later Kim Peterson moved with her children to a small rented house in Sioux Falls, to be nearer her father and their grandfather. Not exactly a teeming metropolis, but at least there were things to be seen from her kitchen window.

* * *

Four weeks later Susan Turner was deployed to Afghanistan. Elements of the 110th were operating there, and her presence was required. On her last day in Virginia she put Jack Reacher’s old service file in a khaki envelope and marked it Return to Human Resources Command. She left it front and center on the damaged desk. Then she walked out of the old Rock Creek office, and closed the door with the fluted glass window, and walked down the narrow linoleum corridor, and down the stone stairs, and out to her waiting car.

For my editor

the one and only

Kate Miciak

Worth Dying For is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Title page art from an original photograph by Kinsey R. Christin

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Child, Lee.

Worth dying for : a Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33934-2

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 3. Missing children—Fiction. 4. Nebraska—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838W67 2010

813′.54—dc22      2010023100

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Carlos Beltran.

Cover art: based on photograph © Ryan McVay (background), © Chase Jarvis (car) /Getty Images.

v3.1_r1

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Worth Dying For

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Dedication

Chapter 1

Eldridge Tyler was driving a long straight two-lane road in Nebraska when his cell phone rang. It was very late in the afternoon. He was taking his granddaughter home after buying her shoes. His truck was a crew-cab Silverado the color of a day-old newspaper, and the kid was flat on her back on the small rear seat. She was not asleep. She was lying there wide-awake with her legs held up. She was staring fascinated at the huge white sneakers wobbling around in the air two feet above her face. She was making strange sounds with her mouth. She was eight years old. Tyler figured she was a late developer.

Tyler’s phone was basic enough to be nothing fancy, but complex enough to have different ringtones against different numbers. Most played the manufacturer’s default tune, but four were set to sound a low urgent note halfway between a fire truck siren and a submarine’s dive klaxon. And that sound was what Tyler heard, in the late afternoon, on the long straight two-lane road in Nebraska, ten miles south of the outlet store and twenty miles north of home. So he fumbled the phone up from the console and hit the button and raised it to his ear and said, “Yes?”

A voice said, “We might need you.”

Tyler said, “Me?”

“Well, you and your rifle. Like before.”

Tyler said, “ ‘Might’?”

“At this stage it’s only a precaution.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a guy sniffing around.”

“Close?”

“Hard to say.”

“How much does he know?”

“Some of it. Not all of it yet.”

“Who is he?”

“Nobody. A stranger. Just a guy. But he got involved. We think he was in the service. We think he was a military cop. Maybe he didn’t lose the cop habit.”

“How long ago was he in the service?”

“Ancient history.”

“Connections?”

“None at all, that we can see. He won’t be missed. He’s a drifter. Like a hobo. He blew in like a tumbleweed. Now he needs to blow out again.”

“Description?”

“He’s a big guy,” the voice said. “Six-five at least, probably two-fifty. Last seen wearing a big old brown parka and a wool cap. He moves funny, like he’s stiff. Like he’s hurting bad.”

“OK,” Tyler said. “So where and when?”

“We want you to watch the barn,” the voice said. “All day tomorrow. We can’t let him see the barn. Not now. If we don’t get him tonight, he’s going to figure it out eventually. He’s going to head over there and take a look.”

“He’s going to walk right into it, just like that?”

“He thinks there are four of us. He doesn’t know there are five.”

“That’s good.”

“Shoot him if you see him.”

“I will.”

“Don’t miss.”

“Do I ever?” Tyler said. He clicked off the call and dumped the phone back on the console and drove on, the little girl’s new shoes waving in his mirror, dead winter fields ahead, dead winter fields behind, darkness to his left, the setting sun to his right.

The barn had been built long ago, when moderate size and wooden construction had been appropriate for Nebraska agriculture. Its function had since been supplanted by huge metal sheds built in distant locations chosen solely on the basis of logistical studies. But the old place had endured, warping slowly, rotting slowly, leaning and weathering. All around it was an apron of ancient blacktop that had been heaved by winter frosts and cracked by summer sun and laced with wiry weeds. The main door was a slider built of great balks of timber banded together with iron, hung off an iron rail by iron wheels, but the gradual tilt of the building had jammed it solid in its tracks. The only way in was the judas hole, which was a small conventional door inset in the slider, a little left of its center, a little smaller than man-sized.

Eldridge Tyler was staring at that small door through the scope on his rifle. He had been in position an hour early, well before dawn, a precaution he considered prudent. He was a patient man. And thorough. And meticulous. He had driven his truck off the road and followed winding tractor ruts through the dark, and he had parked in an ancient three-sided shelter designed long ago to keep spring rain off burlap fertilizer sacks. The ground was frozen hard and he had raised no dust and left no sign. He had shut down the big V-8 and stepped back to the shelter’s entrance and tied a tripwire across it, made of thin electric cable insulated with black plastic, set shin-high to a tall man.

Then he had walked back to his truck, and he had climbed into the load bed, and he had stepped on the roof of the cab, and he had passed his rifle and a canvas tote bag up onto a half-loft built like a shelf under the shelter’s peaked roof. He had levered himself up after them, and crawled forward, and eased a loose louver out of the ventilation hole in the loft’s gable wall, which would give him a clear view of the barn exactly a hundred and twenty yards north, just as soon as there was light in the sky. No luck involved. He had scouted the location many years before, the first time his four friends had called on him for help, and he had prepared well, driving in the nails for the tripwire, pacing out the distance to the barn, and loosening the louver. Now he had once again gotten comfortable up on the half-loft, and he had kept as warm as he could, and he had waited for the sun to come up, which it had eventually, pale and wan.

His rifle was the Grand Alaskan model built in America by the Arnold Arms Company. It was chambered for the .338 Magnum and fitted with a 26-inch barrel and had a stock carved from exhibition-grade English walnut. It was a seven-thousand-dollar item, good against most anything on four legs, better than good against anything on two. The scope was by Leica, a nine-hundred-dollar Ultravid with a standard crosshairs engraving on the reticle. Tyler had it zoomed through about two-thirds of its magnification so that at a hundred and twenty yards it showed a circular slice of life about ten feet high and ten feet across. The pale morning sun was low in the east, and its soft gray light was coming in almost horizontal across the dormant land. Later it would rise a little and swing south, and then it would fall away into the west, all of which was good, because it meant even a target wearing a brown coat would stand out well against the brown of the faded timber balks, all day long.

Tyler worked on the assumption that most people were right-handed, and therefore his target would stand a little left of center so that his right hand when extended would meet the handle in the middle of the judas hole’s narrow panel. He further figured that a man who was stiff and hurting would stand in close, to limit his required range of movement to what was most comfortable. The door itself was less than six feet high, but because it was inset in the larger slider its lower edge was about nine inches above the grade. A man six feet five inches tall had the center of his skull about seventy-three inches off the ground, which in terms of the vertical axis put the optimum aiming point about six inches below the top of the judas hole. And a man who weighed 250 pounds would be broad in the shoulders, which at the moment of trying to open the door would put the center of his skull maybe a foot and a half left of his right hand, which in terms of the horizontal axis would put the aiming point about six inches beyond the left edge of the door.

Six inches down, six inches left. Tyler reached back and pulled two plastic packages of long-grain rice from his canvas tote bag. Brand-new from the grocery store, five pounds each. He stacked them under the rifle’s forestock and tamped the fine walnut down into them. He snuggled behind the butt and put his eye back to the scope and laid the crosshairs on the top left corner of the door. He eased them down, and eased them left. He laid his finger gently against the trigger. He breathed in, and breathed out. Below him his truck ticked and cooled and the living smells of gasoline and cold exhaust drifted up and mixed with the dead smells of dust and old wood. Outside, the sun continued to climb and the light grew a little stronger. The air was damp and heavy, cold and dense, the kind of air that keeps a baseball inside the park, the kind of air that cradles a bullet and holds it straight and true.

Tyler waited. He knew he might have to wait all day, and he was prepared to. He was a patient man. He used the dead time visualizing the sequence of possible events. He imagined the big man in the brown coat stepping into the scope’s field of view, stopping, standing still, turning his back, putting his hand on the handle.

A hundred and twenty yards.

A single high velocity round.

The end of the road.

Chapter 2

Jack Reacher was the big man in the brown coat, and for him that particular road had started four miles away, in the middle of an evening, with a ringing telephone in a motel lounge at a crossroads, where a driver who had given him a ride had let him out before turning in a direction Reacher didn’t want to go. The land all around was dark and flat and dead and empty. The motel was the only living thing in sight. It looked like it had been built forty or fifty years earlier in a burst of commercial enthusiasm. Perhaps great possibilities had been anticipated for that location. But clearly the great possibilities had never materialized, or perhaps they had been illusions to begin with. One of the four crossroad lots held the abandoned shell of a gas station. Another had a poured foundation, perhaps for a large store or even a small mall, with nothing ever built on it. One was completely empty.

But the motel had endured. It was an adventurous design. It looked like the drawings Reacher had seen as a kid in boys’ comic books, of space colonies set up on the moon or on Mars. The main building was perfectly round, with a domed roof. Beyond it each cabin was a circular domed structure of its own, trailing away from the mothership in a lazy curl, getting smaller as they went to exaggerate the perspective. Family rooms near the office, individual accommodations down the line. All the siding was painted silver, and there were vertical aluminum accents spaced to frame the windows and the doors. Concealed neon lighting in the eaves of the circular roofs cast a ghostly blue glow. The paths all around were made of gray gravel boxed in with timbers that were also painted silver. The pole the motel sign was set on was disguised with painted plywood to look like a space rocket resting on a tripod of slim fins. The motel’s name was the Apollo Inn, and it was written in letters that looked like the numbers on the bottom of a bank check.

Inside, the main building was mostly an open space, except for a slice boxed off for a back office and what Reacher guessed were two restrooms. There was a curved reception counter and a hundred feet opposite there was a curved bar. The place was basically a lounge, with a pie-shaped parquet dancefloor and huddles of red velvet chairs set around cocktail tables equipped with lamps with tasseled shades. The interior of the domed roof was a concave cyclorama washed by red neon. There was plenty more indirect lighting everywhere else, all of it red or pink. There was tinkly piano music playing softly over hidden loudspeakers. The whole place was bizarre, like a 1960s vision of Las Vegas transplanted to outer space.

And the whole place was deserted, apart from one guy at the bar and one guy behind it. Reacher waited at the reception counter and the guy behind the bar hustled over and seemed genuinely surprised when Reacher asked him for a room, as if such requests were rare. But he stepped to it smartly enough and coughed up a key in exchange for thirty dollars in cash. He was more than middle-aged, maybe fifty-five or sixty, not tall, not lean, with a full head of hair dyed a lively russet color that Reacher was more used to seeing on Frenchwomen of a certain age. He put Reacher’s thirty bucks in a drawer and made a fussy notation in a book. Probably the heir of the lunatics who had built the place. Probably worked nowhere else his whole life, probably making ends meet by pulling quintuple duty as manager, desk clerk, barman, handyman, and maid. He closed the book and put it in a different drawer and set off back toward the bar.

“Got coffee over there?” Reacher asked him.

The guy turned and said, “Sure,” with a smile and a measure of satisfaction in his voice, as if an ancient decision to set a Bunn flask going every night had been finally vindicated. Reacher followed him through the neon wash and propped himself on a stool three spaces away from the other customer. The other customer was a man of about forty. He was wearing a thick tweed sport coat with leather patches at the elbows. He had those elbows on the bar, and his hands were curled protectively around a rocks glass full of ice and amber liquid. He was staring down at it with an unfocused gaze. Probably not his first glass of the evening. Maybe not even his third or his fourth. His skin was damp. He looked pretty far gone.

The guy with the dyed hair poured coffee into a china mug decorated with the NASA logo and slid it across the bar with great pride and ceremony. Maybe a priceless antique.

“Cream?” he asked. “Sugar?”

“Neither,” Reacher said.

“Passing through?”

“Aiming to turn east as soon as I can.”

“How far east?”

“All the way east,” Reacher said. “Virginia.”

The guy with the hair nodded sagely. “Then you’ll need to go south first. Until you hit the Interstate.”

“That’s the plan,” Reacher said.

“Where did you start out today?”

“North of here,” Reacher said.

“Driving?”

“Hitching rides.”

The guy with the hair said nothing more, because there was nothing more to say. Bartenders like to stay cheerful, and there was no cheerful direction for the conversation to go. Hitching a ride on a back road in the dead of winter in the forty-first least densely populated state of America’s fifty was not going to be easy, and the guy was too polite to say so. Reacher picked up the mug and tried to hold it steady. A test. The result was not good. Every tendon and ligament and muscle from his fingertips to his ribcage burned and quivered and the microscopic motion in his hand set up small concentric ripples in the coffee. He concentrated hard and brought the mug to his lips, aiming for smoothness, achieving lurching, erratic movement. The drunk guy watched him for a moment and then looked away. The coffee was hot and a little stewed, but it had caffeine in it, which was really all it needed. The drunk guy took a sip from his glass and put it back on its coaster and stared at it miserably. His lips were parted slightly and bubbles of moisture were forming in their corners. He sipped again. Reacher sipped again, slower. Nobody spoke. The drunk guy finished up and got a refill. Jim Beam. Bourbon, at least a triple. Reacher’s arm started to feel a little better. Coffee, good for what ails you.

Then the phone rang.

Actually, two phones rang. One number, two instruments, one over on the reception desk, the other on a shelf behind the bar. Quintuple duty. The guy with the hair couldn’t be everywhere at once. He picked up and said, “This is the Apollo Inn,” just as proudly and brightly and enthusiastically as if it was the establishment’s first-ever call on opening night. Then he listened for a spell and pressed the mouthpiece to his chest and said, “Doctor, it’s for you.”

Automatically Reacher glanced backward, looking for a doctor. No one there. Beside him the drunk guy said, “Who is it?”

The bartender said, “It’s Mrs. Duncan.”

The drunk guy said, “What’s her problem?”

“Her nose is bleeding. Won’t stop.”

The drunk guy said, “Tell her you haven’t seen me.”

The guy with the hair relayed the lie and put the phone down. The drunk guy slumped and his face dropped almost level with the rim of his glass.

“You’re a doctor?” Reacher asked him.

“What do you care?”

“Is Mrs. Duncan your patient?”

“Technically.”

“And you’re blowing her off?”

“What are you, the ethics board? It’s a nosebleed.”

“That won’t stop. Could be serious.”

“She’s thirty-three years old and healthy. No history of hypertension or blood disorders. She’s not a drug user. No reason to get alarmed.” The guy picked up his glass. A gulp, a swallow, a gulp, a swallow.

Reacher asked, “Is she married?”

“What, marriage causes nosebleeds now?”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said. “I was a military cop. Sometimes we would get called off-post, or to the married quarters. Women who get hit a lot take a lot of aspirin, because of the pain. But aspirin thins the blood, so the next time they get hit, they don’t stop bleeding.”

The drunk guy said nothing.

The barman looked away.

Reacher said, “What? This happens a lot?”

The drunk guy said, “It’s a nosebleed.”

Reacher said, “You’re afraid of getting in the middle of a domestic dispute?”

No one spoke.

“There could be other injuries,” Reacher said. “Maybe less visible. She’s your patient.”

No one spoke.

Reacher said, “Bleeding from the nose is the same as bleeding from anyplace else. If it doesn’t stop, she’s going to pass out. Like a knife wound. You wouldn’t leave her sitting there with a knife wound, would you?”

No one spoke.

“Whatever,” Reacher said. “Not my business. And you’d be no good anyway. You’re not even fit to drive out there, wherever she is. But you should call someone.”

The drunk guy said, “There isn’t anyone. There’s an emergency room sixty miles away. But they’re not going to send an ambulance sixty miles for a nosebleed.”

Reacher took another sip of coffee. The drunk guy left his glass alone. He said, “Sure, I would have a problem driving. But I’d be OK when I got there. I’m a good doctor.”

“Then I’d hate to see a bad one,” Reacher said.

“I know what’s wrong with you, for instance. Physically, I mean. Mentally, I can’t comment.”

“Don’t push it, pal.”

“Or what?”

Reacher said nothing.

“It’s a nosebleed,” the doctor said again.

“How would you treat it?” Reacher asked.

“A little local anesthetic. Pack the nasal cavities with gauze. The pressure would stop the bleeding, aspirin or no aspirin.”

Reacher nodded. He’d seen it done that way before, in the army. He said, “So let’s go, doctor. I’ll drive.”

Chapter 3

The doctor was unsteady on his feet. He did the usual drunk-guy thing of walking across a flat floor and making it look like he was walking up a hill. But he got out to the lot OK and then the cold air hit him and he got some temporary focus. Enough to find his car keys, anyway. He patted one pocket after another and eventually came out with a big bunch on a worn leather fob that had Duncan Transportation printed on it in flaking gold.

“Same Duncan?” Reacher asked.

The guy said, “There’s only one Duncan family in this county.”

“You treat all of them?”

“Only the daughter-in-law. The son goes to Denver. The father and the uncles treat themselves with roots and berries, for all I know.”

The car was a Subaru wagon. It was the only vehicle in the lot. It was reasonably new and reasonably clean. Reacher found the remote on the fob and clicked it open. The doctor made a big show of heading for the driver’s door and then ruefully changing direction. Reacher got in and racked the seat back and started the engine and found the lights.

“Head south,” the doctor said.

Reacher coughed.

“Try not to breathe on me,” he said. “Or the patient.”

He put his hands on the wheel the same way a person might maneuver two baseball gloves on the end of two long sticks. When they got there he clamped his fingers and held on tight, to relieve the pressure on his shoulders. He eased out of the lot and turned south. It was full dark. Nothing to see, but he knew the land was flat and infinite all around.

“What grows here?” he asked, just to keep the doctor awake.

“Corn, of course,” the guy said. “Corn and more corn. Lots and lots of corn. More corn than a sane man ever wants to see.”

“You local?”

“From Idaho originally.”

“Potatoes.”

“Better than corn.”

“So what brought you to Nebraska?”

“My wife,” the guy said. “Born and raised right here.”

They were quiet for a moment, and then Reacher asked, “What’s wrong with me?”

The doctor said, “What?”

“You claimed you knew what’s wrong with me. Physically, at least. So let’s hear it.”

“What is this, an audition?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t need one.”

“Go to hell. I’m functioning.”

“Prove it.”

“I know what you did,” the guy said. “I don’t know how.”

“What did I do?”

“You strained everything from your flexor digiti minimi brevis to your quadratus lumborum, both sides of your body, just about symmetrically.”

“Try English, not Latin.”

“You damaged every muscle, tendon, and ligament associated with moving your arms, all the way from your little fingers to the anchor on your twelfth rib. You’ve got severe pain and discomfort and your fine motor control is screwed up because every system is barking.”

“Prognosis?”

“You’ll heal.”

“When?”

“A few days. Maybe a week. You could try aspirin.”

Reacher drove on. He cracked his window an inch, to suck out the bourbon fumes. They passed a small cluster of three large homes, set close together a hundred yards off the two-lane road at the end of a long shared driveway. They were all hemmed in together by a post-and-rail fence. They were old places, once fine, still sturdy, now maybe a little neglected. The doctor turned his head and took a long hard look at them, and then he faced front again.

“How did you do it?” he asked.

“Do what?” Reacher said.

“How did you hurt your arms?”

“You’re the doctor,” Reacher said. “You tell me.”

“I’ve seen the same kind of symptoms twice before. I volunteered in Florida after one of the hurricanes. A few years ago. I’m not such a bad guy.”

“And?”

“People who get caught outside in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind either get bowled along the street or they catch on to a cyclone fence and try to haul themselves to safety. Like dragging their own body weight against the resistance of a gale. Unbelievable stress. That’s how the injuries happen. But yours aren’t more than a couple of days old, judging by the way you look. And you said you came in from the north. No hurricanes north of here. And it’s the wrong season for hurricanes, anyway. I bet there wasn’t a hurricane anywhere in the world this week. Not a single one. So I don’t know how you hurt yourself. But I wish you well for a speedy recovery. I really do.”

Reacher said nothing.

The doctor said, “Left at the next crossroads.”

They got to the Duncan house five minutes later. It had exterior lighting, including a pair of spots angled up at a white mailbox, one from each side. The mailbox had Duncan written on it. The house itself looked like a restored farmhouse. It was modest in terms of size but immaculate in terms of condition. There was a front lawn of hibernating grass with an antique horse buggy parked on it. Tall spoked wheels, long empty shafts. There was a long straight driveway leading to an outbuilding big enough to have been a working barn back when work was done around the place. Now it was a garage. It had three sets of doors. One set was standing open, as if someone had left in a hurry.

Reacher stopped the car level with a path that led to the front door.

“Showtime, doctor,” he said. “If she’s still here.”

“She will be,” the guy said.

“So let’s go.”

They got out of the car.

Chapter 4

The doctor took a leather bag from the back of the car. Then he repeated his uphill drunk-guy stumble all the way along the path, this time with more reason, because the gravel surface was difficult. But he made it unassisted to the door, which was a fine piece of old wood with glassy white paint carefully applied to it. Reacher found a brass button and laid a knuckle on it. Inside he heard the sound of an electric bell, and then nothing for a minute, and then the sound of slow feet on floorboards. Then the door opened a crack and a face looked out.

Quite a face. It was framed by black hair and had pale skin and frightened eyes at the top, and then a red-soaked handkerchief pressed tight at the apex of a triangular red gush that had flooded downward past the mouth and neck to the blouse below. There was a string of blood-soaked pearls. The blouse was silk and it was wet to the waist. The woman took the handkerchief away from her nose. She had split lips and blood-rimed teeth. Her nose was still leaking, a steady stream.

“You came,” she said.

The doctor blinked twice and focused hard and turned down his mouth in a frown and nodded. He said, “We should take a look at that.”

“You’ve been drinking,” the woman said. Then she looked at Reacher and asked, “Who are you?”

“I drove,” Reacher said.

“Because he’s drunk?”

“He’ll be OK. I wouldn’t let him do brain surgery, but he can stop the bleeding.”

The woman thought about it for a moment and then she nodded and put the handkerchief back to her face and opened the door wide.

They used the kitchen. The doctor was drunk as a skunk but the procedure was simple and the guy retained enough muscle memory to get himself through it. Reacher soaked cloths in warm water and passed them across and the doctor cleaned the woman’s face and jammed her nostrils solid with gauze and used butterfly closures on her cut lips. The anesthetic took the pain away and she settled into a calm and dreamy state. It was hard to say exactly what she looked like. Her nose had been busted before. That was clear. Apart from that she had good skin and fine bone structure and pretty eyes. She was slim and fairly tall, well dressed and solidly prosperous. As was the house itself. It was warm. The floors were wide planks, lustrous with a hundred years of wax. There was a lot of millwork and fine detail and subtle pastel shades. Books on the shelves, paintings on the walls, rugs on the floors. In the living room there was a wedding photograph in a silver frame. It showed a younger and intact version of the woman with a tall reedy man in a gray morning suit. He had dark hair and a long nose and bright eyes and he looked very smug. Not an athlete or a manual worker, not a professor or a poet. Not a farmer, either. A businessman, probably. An executive of some kind. An indoors type of guy, soft, with energy but no vigor.

Reacher headed back to the kitchen and found the doctor washing his hands in the sink and the woman brushing her hair without the help of a mirror. He asked her, “You OK now?”

She said, “Not too bad,” slow and nasal and indistinct.

“Your husband’s not here?”

“He decided to go out for dinner. With his friends.”

“What’s his name?”

“His name is Seth.”

“And what’s your name?”

“My name is Eleanor.”

“You been taking aspirin, Eleanor?”

“Yes.”

“Because Seth does this a lot?”

She paused a long, long time, and then she shook her head.

“I tripped,” she said. “On the edge of the rug.”

“More than once, all in a few days? The same rug?”

“Yes.”

“I’d change that rug, if I were you.”

“I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

They waited ten minutes in the kitchen while she went upstairs to take a shower and change. They heard the water run and stop and heard her call down that she was OK and on her way to bed. So they left. The front door clicked behind them. The doctor staggered to the car and dumped himself in the passenger seat with his bag between his feet. Reacher started up and reversed down the driveway to the road. He spun the wheel and hit the gas and took off, back the way they had come.

“Thank God,” the doctor said.

“That she was OK?”

“No, that Seth Duncan wasn’t there.”

“I saw his picture. He doesn’t look like much to me. I bet his dog’s a poodle.”

“They don’t have a dog.”

“Figure of speech. I can see a country doctor being worried about getting in the middle of a domestic dispute where the guy drinks beer and wears a sleeveless T-shirt and has a couple of pit bull terriers in the yard, with broken-down appliances and cars. But apparently Seth Duncan doesn’t.”

The doctor said nothing.

Reacher said, “But you’re scared of him anyway. So his power comes from somewhere else. Financial or political, maybe. He has a nice house.”

The doctor said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Was it him?”

“Yes.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s done it before?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“A lot. Sometimes it’s her ribs.”

“Has she told the cops?”

“We don’t have cops. We depend on the county. They’re usually sixty miles away.”

“She could call.”

“She’s not going to press charges. They never do. If they let it go the first time, that’s it.”

“Where does a guy like Duncan go to eat dinner with his friends?”

The doctor didn’t answer, and Reacher didn’t ask again.

The doctor said, “Are we heading back to the lounge?”

“No, I’m taking you home.”

“Thanks. That’s good of you. But it’s a long walk back to the motel.”

“Your problem, not mine,” Reacher said. “I’m keeping the car. You can hike over and pick it up in the morning.”

Five miles south of the motel the doctor stared all over again at the three old houses standing alone at the end of their driveway, and then he faced front and directed Reacher left and right and left along the boundaries of dark empty fields to a new ranch house set on a couple of flat acres bounded by a post-and-rail fence.

“Got your key?” Reacher asked him.

“On the ring.”

“Got another key?”

“My wife will let me in.”

“You hope,” Reacher said. “Good night.”

He watched the doctor stumble through the first twenty feet of his driveway and then he K-turned and threaded back to the main north-south two-lane. If in doubt, turn left, was his motto, so he headed north a mile and then he pulled over and thought. Where would a guy like Seth Duncan go for dinner with his friends?

Chapter 5

A steakhouse, was Reacher’s conclusion. A rural area, farm country, a bunch of prosperous types playing good old boy, rolling up their sleeves, loosening their ties, ordering a pitcher of domestic beer, getting sirloins cooked rare, smirking about the coastal pussies who worried about cholesterol. Nebraska counties were presumably huge and thinly populated, which could put thirty or more miles between restaurants. But the night was dark and steakhouses always had lit signs. Part of the culture. Either the word Steakhouse in antique script along the spine of the roof, all outlined in neon, or an upmarket nameboard all blasted with spotlights.

Reacher killed his headlights and climbed out of the Subaru and grabbed one of the roof rails and stepped up on the hood and then crouched and eased himself up on the roof. He stood tall, his eye line eleven feet above the grade in a flat part of the world. He turned a full 360 and peered into the darkness. Saw the ghostly blue glow of the motel far off to the north, and then a distant pink halo maybe ten miles south and west. Maybe just a gas station, but it was the only other light to be seen. So Reacher drove south and then west. He stopped twice more to fix his bearings. The glow in the air grew brighter as he homed in on it. Red neon, made slightly pink by the night mist. Could be anything. A liquor store, another motel, an Exxon station.

It was a steakhouse. He came up on it end-on. It was a long low place with candles in the windows and siding like a barn and a swaybacked roof like an old mare in a field. It was standing alone in an acre of beaten dirt. It had a bright sign along its ridgeline, a bird’s nest of glass tubing and metal supports spelling out the word Steakhouse in antique script and red light. It was ringed with parked cars, all of them nose-in like suckling pigs or jets at a terminal. There were sedans and pick-up trucks and SUVs, some of them new, some of them old, most of them domestic.

Reacher parked the doctor’s Subaru on its own near the road. He climbed out and stood for a moment in the cold, rolling his shoulders, trying to get his upper body comfortable. He had never taken aspirin and wasn’t about to start. He had been banged up in the hospital a couple of times, with IV morphine drips in his arms, and he remembered that experience quite fondly. But outside of the ICU he was going to rely on time and willpower. No other option.

He walked to the steakhouse door. Inside it was a small square lobby with another door. Inside that was an unattended maitre d’ lectern with a reading light and a reservations book. To the right was a small dining room with two couples finishing up their meals. To the left, the exact same thing. Ahead, a short corridor with a larger room at the end of it. Low ceilings, unfinished wood on the walls, brass accents. A warm, intimate place.

Reacher stepped past the lectern and checked the larger room. Directly inside the arch was a table for two. It had one guy at it, eating, wearing a red Cornhuskers football jacket. The University of Nebraska. In the main body of the room was a table for eight. It was occupied by seven men, coats and ties, three facing three plus the guy from the wedding photograph at the head. He was a little older than the picture, a little bonier, even more smug, but it was the same guy. No question. He was unmistakable. The table held the wreckage of a big meal. Plates, glasses, serrated knives with worn wooden handles.

Reacher stepped into the room. As he moved the guy alone at the table for two stood up smoothly and sidestepped into Reacher’s path. He raised his hand like a traffic cop. Then he placed that hand on Reacher’s chest. He was a big man. Nearly as tall as Reacher himself, a whole lot younger, maybe a little heavier, in good shape, with some level of mute intelligence in his eyes. Strength and brains. A dangerous mixture. Reacher preferred the old days, when muscle was dumb. He blamed education. The end of social promotion. There was a genetic price to be paid for making athletes attend class.

Nobody looked over from the big table.

Reacher said, “What’s your name, fat boy?”

The guy said, “My name?”

“It’s not a difficult question.”

“Brett.”

Reacher said, “So here’s the thing, Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I’ll take it off your wrist.”

The guy dropped his hand. But he didn’t move out of the way.

“What?” Reacher asked.

The guy asked, “Are you here to see Mr. Duncan?”

“What do you care?”

“I work for Mr. Duncan.”

“Really?” Reacher said. “What do you do for him?”

“I schedule his appointments.”

“And?”

“You don’t have one.”

“When can I get one?”

“How does never work for you?”

“Not real well, Brett.”

“Sir, you need to leave.”

“What are you, security? A bodyguard? What the hell is he?”

“He’s a private citizen. I’m one of his assistants, that’s all. And now we need to get you back to your car.”

“You want to walk me out to the lot?”

“Sir, I’m just doing my job.”

The seven men at the big table were all hunched forward on their elbows, conspiratorial, six of them listening to a story Duncan was telling, laughing on cue, having a hell of a time. Elsewhere in the building there were kitchen noises and the sharp sounds of silverware on plates and the thump of glasses going down on wooden tabletops.

Reacher said, “Are you sure about this?”

The young man said, “I’d appreciate it.”

Reacher shrugged.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned and threaded his way back around the lectern and through the first door and through the second and out to the cold night air. The big guy followed him all the way. Reacher squeezed between two trucks and headed across open ground toward the Subaru. The big guy followed him all the way. Reacher stopped ten feet short of the car and turned around. The big guy stopped too, face-to-face. He waited, standing easy, relaxed, patient, competent.

Reacher said, “Can I give you some advice?”

“About what?”

“You’re smart, but you’re not a genius. You just swapped a good tactical situation for a much worse one. Inside, there were crowded quarters and witnesses and telephones and possible interventions, but out here there’s nothing at all. You just gave away a big advantage. Out here I could take my sweet time kicking your ass and there’s no one to help you.”

“Nobody’s ass needs to get kicked tonight.”

“I agree. But whatever, I still need to give Mr. Duncan a message.”

“What message?”

“He hits his wife. I need to explain to him why that’s a bad idea.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“I’ve seen the evidence. Now I need to see Duncan.”

“Sir, get real. You won’t be seeing anything. Only one of us is going back in there tonight, and it won’t be you.”

“You enjoy working for a guy like that?”

“I have no complaints.”

“You might, later. Someone told me the nearest ambulance is sixty miles away. You could be lying out here for an hour.”

“Sir, you need to get in your car and move right along.”

Reacher put his hands in his coat pockets, to immobilize his arms, to protect them from further damage. He said, “Last chance, Brett. You can still walk away. You don’t need to get hurt for scum like that.”

“I have a job to do.”

Reacher nodded, and said “Listen, kid,” very quietly, and the big guy leaned in fractionally to hear the next part of the sentence, and Reacher kicked him hard in the groin, right footed, a heavy boot on the end of a driving leg, and then he stepped back while the guy jackknifed ninety degrees and puked and retched and gasped and spluttered. Then Reacher kicked him again, a solid blow to the side of the head, like a soccer player pivoting to drive a volleyed crossfield pass into the goal. The guy pinwheeled on the balls of his feet and went down like he was trying to screw himself into the ground.

Reacher kept his hands in his pockets and headed for the steakhouse door again.

Chapter 6

The party was still in full swing in the back room. No more elbows on tables. Now all seven men were leaning back expansively, enjoying themselves, spreading out, owning the space. They were all a little red in the face from the warmth and the beer, six of them half-listening to the seventh boasting about something and getting ready to one-up him with the next anecdote. Reacher strolled in and stepped behind Duncan’s chair and took his hands out of his pockets. He put them on Duncan’s shoulders. The room went absolutely silent. Reacher leaned on his hands and pulled them back a little until Duncan’s chair was balanced uneasily, up on two legs. Then he let go and the chair thumped forward again and Duncan scrambled up out of it and stood straight and turned around, equal parts fear and anger in his face, plus an attempt to play it cool for his pals. Then he looked around and couldn’t find his guy, which took out some of the cool and some of the anger and left all of the fear.

Reacher asked, “Seth Duncan?”

The bony man didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “I have a message for you, pal.”

Duncan said, “Who from?”

“The National Association of Marriage Counselors.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Probably.”

“What’s the message?”

“It’s more of a question.”

“OK, what’s the question?”

“The question is, how do you like it?” Reacher hit him, a straight right to the nose, a big vicious blow, his knuckles driving through cartilage and bone and crushing it all flat. Duncan went over backward and landed on the table. He bounced once and plates broke and glasses tipped over and knives skittered away and fell to the floor.

Duncan made no attempt to get up.

Reacher walked away, down the corridor, past the lectern, back to the lot.

The key the red-headed guy had given him was marked with a big figure six, so Reacher parked next to the sixth cabin and went inside and found a miniature version of the lounge, a purely circular space except for a straight section boxed off for a bathroom and a closet. The ceiling was domed and washed with light. The bed was against the wall, on a platform that had been custom built to fit the curve. There was a tub-shaped armchair and a small round table next to it, with an old-fashioned glass television on a larger table nearby. There was an old-fashioned telephone next to the bed. It had a rotary dial. The bathroom was small but adequate, with a showerhead over a tub, and the closet was about the same size as the bathroom.

Everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t.

He undressed and left his clothes on the bed and took a shower. He ran the water as hot as he could stand and let it play over his neck, his shoulders, his arms, his ribs. He raised one arm, then the other, then both of them together. They moved, but they moved like a newly constructed machine in need of some further development. The good news was that his knuckles didn’t hurt at all.

Seth Duncan’s doctor was more than two hundred miles away in Denver, Colorado. A first-class medical man, no question, but obviously impractical for emergency services. And the nearest ER was an hour away. And no one in his right mind would go near the local quack. So Duncan had a friend drive him to his uncle Jasper Duncan’s place. Because his uncle Jasper Duncan was the kind of guy who could handle odd things at odd hours. He lived five miles south of the motel crossroads, in the northernmost of the three old houses that stood all alone at the end of their long shared driveway. The house was a warren, filled with all kinds of things saved against the day they might be useful. Uncle Jasper himself was more than sixty years old, built like the bole of an oak, a man of various arcane skills, a reservoir of folk wisdom and backwoods knowledge.

Jasper sat Seth Duncan in a kitchen chair and took a look at the injury. Then he went away and rooted around and came back with a syringe and some local anesthetic. It was a veterinary product, designed for hogs, but mammals were mammals, and it worked. When the site was properly numb, Jasper used a strong thumb and a strong forefinger to set the bone and then went away again and rooted around and came back with an old aluminum facial splint. It was the kind of thing he could be counted on to have at hand. He worked at it and reshaped it to fit and taped it over his nephew’s nose. He stopped up the nostrils with wads of gauze and used warm water to sponge away the blood.

Then he got on the phone and called his neighbors.

Next to him lived his brother Jonas Duncan, and next to Jonas lived their brother Jacob Duncan, who was Seth Duncan’s father. Five minutes later all four men were sitting around Jasper’s kitchen table, and a council of war had started.

Jacob Duncan said, “First things first, son. Who was the guy?”

Seth Duncan said, “I never saw him before.”

Jonas said, “No, first things first: Where the hell was your boy Brett?”

“The guy jumped him in the parking lot. Brett was escorting him out. The guy kicked him in the balls and then kicked him in the head. Just left him lying there.”

“Is he OK?”

“He’s got a concussion. Doesn’t know what day it is. Useless piece of shit. I want him replaced.”

“Plenty more where he came from,” Jonas said.

Jasper asked, “So who was this guy?”

“He was a big man in a brown coat. With a watch cap on his head. That’s all I saw. That’s all I remember. He just came in and hit me.”

“Why would he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t he say anything?”

“Just some bullshit. But Brett said he was driving the doctor’s car.”

“He doesn’t know what day it is but he remembers what car the guy was in?”

“I guess concussions are unpredictable.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t the doctor who hit you?”

“I told you, I never saw the guy before. I know the doctor. And the damn doctor wouldn’t hit me, anyway. He wouldn’t dare.”

Jacob Duncan said, “What aren’t you telling us, son?”

“I have a bad headache.”

“I’m sure you do. But you know that’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“But you know you have to. We can’t let a thing like this go by.”

Seth Duncan looked left, looked right. He said, “OK, I had a dispute with Eleanor tonight. Before I went out. No big deal. But I had to slap her.”

“How hard?”

“I might have made her nose bleed.”

“How bad?”

“You know she’s delicate.”

The kitchen went quiet for a moment. Jonas Duncan said, “So let’s try to piece it together. Your wife called the doctor.”

“She’s been told not to do that.”

“But maybe she did anyway. Because she’s delicate. And maybe the doctor wasn’t home. Maybe he was in the motel lounge, like he usually is, halfway through a bottle of Jim Beam, like he usually is. Maybe Eleanor reached him there.”

“He’s been told to stay away from her.”

“But maybe he didn’t obey. Sometimes doctors have strange notions. And perhaps he was too drunk to drive. He usually is. Because of the bourbon. So perhaps he asked someone else to drive him. Because of his level of concern.”

“Who else?”

“Another guy in the lounge.”

“Nobody would dare do that.”

“Nobody who lives here, I agree. Nobody who knows not to. But a stranger might do it. And it’s a motel, after all. That’s what motels are for. Strangers, passing through.”

“OK, so then what?”

“Maybe the stranger didn’t like what he saw at your house, and he came to find you.”

“Eleanor gave me up?”

“She must have. How else would the guy have known where to look? He can’t know his way around, if he’s a stranger.”

Jacob Duncan asked, “What exactly did he say to you?”

“Some bullshit about marriage counseling.”

Jonas Duncan nodded and said, “There you go. That’s how it played out. We’ve got a passerby full of moral outrage. A guest in the motel.”

Seth Duncan said, “I want him hurt bad.”

His father said, “He will be, son. He’ll be hurt bad and sent on his way. Who have we got?”

Jasper said, “Not Brett, I guess.”

Jonas said, “Plenty more where he came from.”

Jacob Duncan said, “Send two of them. Have them call me for orders before they deploy.”

Chapter 7

Reacher dressed again after his shower, coat and all, because the room was cold, and then he turned the lights off and sat in the tub armchair and waited. He didn’t expect Seth Duncan to call the cops. Apparently the cops were a county department, sixty miles away. No local ties. No local loyalties. And calling the cops would require a story, and a story would unravel straight to a confession about beating his wife. No smug guy would head down that route.

But a smug guy who had just lost a bodyguard might have access to a replacement, or two or three. And whereas bodyguarding was generally a reactive profession, those two or three substitutes might be persuaded to go proactive for one night only, especially if they were Brett’s friends. And Reacher knew it wouldn’t be hard to track him down. The Apollo Inn was probably the only public accommodation in two hundred square miles. And if the doctor’s drinking habits were well-known in the neighborhood, it wouldn’t be difficult to puzzle out the chain of causation. The phone call, the treatment, the intervention.

So Reacher dressed again and laced his boots and sat in the dark and kept his ears open for tires on gravel.

More than four hundred and fifty miles due north of where Reacher was sitting, the United States finished and Canada began. The world’s longest land border followed the 49th Parallel, over mountains and roads and rivers and streams, and through towns and fields and woods, its western portion running perfectly straight for nearly nineteen hundred miles, all the way from Washington State to Minnesota, every inch of it undefended in the military sense, most of it unfenced and unmarked, but much of it surveilled more closely than people knew. Between Washington State and Minnesota there were fifty-four official crossings, seventeen manned around the clock, thirty-six manned through daylight hours only, and one entirely unstaffed but equipped with telephones connected to remote Customs offices. Elsewhere the line was randomly patrolled by a classified number of agents, and more isolated spots had cameras, and great lengths of it had motion sensors buried in the earth. The governments on both sides of the line had a pretty good idea of what was happening along its length.

A pretty good idea, but not perfect knowledge. In the state of Montana, east of the Rockies, below the tree line, the land spent a hundred miles flattening from jagged peaks to gentle plains, most of it thickly forested with conifers, the woods interrupted only by sparkling streams and freshwater lakes and occasional sandy needle-strewn paths. One of those paths connected through labyrinthine miles of twists and turns to a dirt fire road, which ran south and in turn connected to a wandering gravel road, which many miles later ended as an inconspicuous left-hand turn off a minor county two-lane far to the north of a small no-account town called Hogg Parish.

A gray panel truck made that left-hand turn. It rolled slowly along the gravel, crunching quietly, getting bounced left and right by the ruts and the bad camber, its springs creaking, its headlights off and its parking lights on. It burrowed ever deeper into the bitter cold and the darkness, endlessly. Then eventually it turned onto the fire road, beaten dirt now under its wheels, bare frozen trunks to the left and right, a narrow slice of night sky visible overhead, plenty of stars, no moon, the GPS satellites thousands of miles up connecting perfectly, guiding it, showing it the limits of safety.

It crawled onward, many miles, and then the fire road petered out and the sandy track began. The truck slowed to a walk and locked into the ruts it had made on its many previous trips. It followed them left and right through arbitrary turns and curves, between scarred trees where the clearance was tight, with stubs of low branches scraping the sides. It drove for more than an hour and then came to a stop in a location chosen long before, exactly two miles south of the border. No one was certain where the motion sensors had been buried, but most assumed that a belt a mile either side of the line was the practical limit. Like a minefield. Another mile had been added as a safety margin, and a small area of underbrush had been hacked out to allow the truck to turn.

The truck backed up and turned and stopped astride the sandy track, facing south, in position, ready. It shut down and settled and its lights went off.

It waited.

Reacher waited in the dark in his tub armchair, forty minutes, an hour, tracing the next day’s intended route in his head. South to the Interstate, and then east. The Interstate would be easy. He had hitchhiked most of the network before. There were on-ramps and rest areas and a vast traveling population, some of it commercial, some of it private, a fair proportion of it lonely and ready for company. The problem would come before the Interstate, on the middle-of-nowhere trek down to it. Since climbing out of the car that had dumped him at the crossroads he had heard no traffic at all. Nighttime was always worse than daytime, but even so it was rare in America to be close to a road and hear nothing go by. In fact he had heard nothing at all, no wind, no night sounds, and he had been listening hard, for tires on gravel. It was like he had gone deaf. He raised his hand awkwardly and clicked his fingers near his ear, just to be sure. He wasn’t deaf. It was just the middle of the night, in the countryside. That was all. He got up and used the bathroom and sat back down.

Then he heard something.

Not a passing vehicle, not wind, not night sounds.

Not tires on gravel.

Footsteps on gravel.

Chapter 8

Footsteps on gravel. One pair. A light, hesitant tread, approaching. Reacher watched the window and saw a shape flit across it. Small, slight, head ducked down into the collar of a coat.

A woman.

There was a knock at the door, soft and tentative and padded. A small nervous hand, wearing a glove. A decoy, possibly. Not beyond the wit of man to send someone on ahead, all innocent and unthreatening, to get the door open and lull the target into a sense of false security. Not unlikely that such a person would be nervous and hesitant about her role.

Reacher crossed the floor silently and headed back to the bathroom. He eased the window up and clipped out the screen and rested it in the bathtub. Then he ducked his head and climbed out, scissoring his legs over the sill, stepping down to the gravel. He walked one of the silver timbers that boxed the path, like a tightrope, silently. He went counterclockwise around the circular cabin and came up on the woman from behind.

She was alone.

No cars on the road, nobody in the lot, nobody flattened on either side of his door, nobody crouched under his window. Just the woman, standing there on her own. She looked cold. She was wearing a wool coat and a scarf. No hat. She was maybe forty, small, dark, and worried. She raised her hand and knocked again.

Reacher said, “I’m here.”

She gasped and spun around and put her hand on her chest. Her mouth stayed open and made a tiny O. He said, “I’m sorry if I startled you, but I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

She said, “Perhaps you should have been.”

“Well, in fact, perhaps I was. But not you.”

“Can we go inside?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m the doctor’s wife.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Reacher said.

“Can we go inside?”

Reacher found the key in his pocket and unlocked the door from the outside. The doctor’s wife stepped in and he followed her and locked the door again behind them. He crossed the room and closed the bathroom door against the night air coming in through the open window. He turned back to find her standing in the middle of the space. He indicated the armchair and said, “Please.”

She sat down. Didn’t unbutton her coat. She was still nervous. If she had been carrying a purse, she would have had it clamped hard on her knees, defensively. She said, “I walked all the way over here.”

“To pick up the car? You should have let your husband do that, in the morning. That’s what I arranged with him.”

“He’s too drunk to drive.”

“He’ll be OK by morning, surely.”

“Morning’s too late. You have to get going. Right now. You’re not safe here.”

“You think?”

“My husband said you’re heading south to the Interstate. I’ll drive you there.”

“Now? It’s got to be a hundred miles.”

“A hundred and twenty.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“You’re not safe here. My husband told me what happened. You interfered with the Duncans. You saw. They’ll punish him for sure, and we think they’ll come after you, too.”

“ ‘They’?”

“The Duncans. There are four of them.”

“Punish him how?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Last time they wouldn’t let him come here for a month.”

“Here? To the lounge?”

“It’s his favorite place.”

“How could they stop him coming here?”

“They told Mr. Vincent not to serve him. The owner.”

“Why would the owner of this place do what the Duncans tell him?”

“The Duncans run a trucking business. All of Mr. Vincent’s supplies come through them. He signed a contract. He kind of had to. That’s how the Duncans work. So if Mr. Vincent doesn’t play ball, a couple of deliveries will be late, a couple lost, a couple damaged. He knows that. He’ll go out of business.”

Reacher asked, “What will they figure to do to me?”

The woman said, “They hire football players right out of college. Cornhuskers. The ones who were good enough to get scholarships, but not good enough to go to the NFL. Guards and tackles. Big guys.”

Brett, Reacher thought.

The woman said, “They’ll connect the dots and figure out where you are. I mean, where else could you be? They’ll pay you a visit. Maybe they’re already on their way.”

“From where?”

“The Duncan depot is twenty miles from here. Most of their people live close to it.”

“How many football players have they got?”

“Ten.”

Reacher said nothing.

The woman said, “My husband heard you say you’re headed for Virginia.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Is that where you live?”

“As much as anywhere else.”

“We should get going. You’re in big trouble.”

“Not unless they send all nine at once,” Reacher said.

“All nine what?”

“Football players.”

“I said there were ten.”

“I already met one of them. He’s currently indisposed. They’re one short, as of tonight.”

“What?”

“He got between me and Seth Duncan.”

“What did you do to Seth Duncan?”

“I broke his nose.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus. Why?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, sweet, sweet Jesus. Where are the car keys?”

“What will happen to Mrs. Duncan?”

“We need to get going. Right this minute.”

“First answer the question.”

“Mrs. Duncan will be punished too. For calling my husband. She’s been told not to do that. Just like he’s been told not to go treat her.”

“He’s a doctor. He doesn’t get a choice. They take an oath, don’t they?”

“What’s your name?”

“Jack Reacher.”

“We have to go, Mr. Reacher. Right now.”

“What will they do to Mrs. Duncan?”

“This isn’t your business,” the woman said. Which, strictly speaking, was fairly close to Reacher’s own opinion at that point. His business was to get himself to Virginia, and he was being offered a ride through the hardest part of the journey, fast and free. I-80 awaited, two hours away. An on-ramp, the last of the night drivers, the first stirrings of morning traffic. Maybe breakfast. Maybe there was a rest area or a truck stop with a greasy spoon café. Bacon, eggs, coffee.

“What will they do to her?” he asked again.

The woman said, “Probably nothing much.”

“What kind of nothing much?”

“Well, they might put her on a coagulant. One of the uncles seems to have medical supplies. Or maybe they’ll just stop her taking so much aspirin. So she doesn’t bleed so bad next time. And they’ll probably ground her for a month. That’s all. Nothing too serious. Nothing for you to worry about. They’ve been married ten years, after all. She’s not a prisoner. She could leave if she wanted to.”

“Except this time she inadvertently got her husband’s nose broken. He might take that out on her, if he can’t take it out on me.”

The doctor’s wife said nothing. But it sounded like she was agreeing. The strange round room went quiet. Then Reacher heard tires on gravel.

Chapter 9

Reacher checked the window. There were four tires in total, big knobbly off-road things, all of them on a Ford pick-up truck. The truck had a jacked suspension and lights on a roof bar and a snorkel air intake and a winch on the front. There were two large shapes in the gloom inside. The shapes had thick necks and huge shoulders. The truck nosed slowly down the row of cabins and stopped twenty feet behind the parked Subaru. The headlights stayed on. The engine idled. The doors opened. Two guys climbed out.

They both looked like Brett, only bigger. Late twenties, easily six-six or six-seven, probably close to three hundred pounds each, big waists made tiny by huge chests and arms and shoulders. They had cropped hair and small eyes and fleshy faces. They were the kind of guys who ate two dinners and were still hungry afterward. They were wearing red Cornhuskers football jackets made gray by the blue light from the cabin’s eaves.

The doctor’s wife joined Reacher at the window.

“Sweet Jesus,” she said.

Reacher said nothing.

The two guys closed the truck’s doors and stepped back in unison to the load bed and unlatched a tool locker bolted across its width behind the cab. They lifted the lid and one took out an engineer’s ball-peen hammer and the other took out a two-headed wrench at least a foot and a half long. They left the lid open and walked forward into the truck’s headlight wash and their shadows jumped ahead of them. They were light on their feet and nimble for their size, like football players usually were. They paused for a moment and looked at the cabin’s door, and then they turned away.

Toward the Subaru.

They attacked it in a violent frenzy, an absolute blitzkrieg, two or three minutes of uncontrolled smashing and pounding. The noise was deafening. They smashed every shard of glass out of the windshield, they smashed the side windows, the back window, the headlights, the taillights. They hammered jagged dents into the hood, into the doors, into the roof, into the fenders, into the tailgate. They put their arms through the absent glass and smashed up the dials and the switches and the radio.

Shit, Reacher thought. There goes my ride.

“My husband’s punishment,” the doctor’s wife whispered. “Worse this time.”

The two guys stopped as suddenly as they had started. They stood there, one on each side of the wrecked wagon, and they breathed hard and rolled their shoulders and let their weapons hang down by their sides. Pebbles of broken automotive glass glittered in the neon and the boom and clang of battered sheet metal echoed away to absolute silence.

Reacher took off his coat and dumped it on the bed.

The two guys formed up shoulder to shoulder and headed for the cabin’s door. Reacher opened it up and stepped out to meet them head-on. Win or lose, fighting inside would bust up the room, and Vincent the motel owner had enough problems already.

The two guys stopped ten feet away and stood there, side by side, symmetrical, their weapons in their outside hands, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, all flushed and sweating in the chill.

Reacher said, “Pop quiz, guys. You spent four years in college learning how to play a game. I spent thirteen years in the army learning how to kill people. So how scared am I?”

No answer.

“And you were so bad at it you couldn’t even get drafted afterward. I was so good at it I got all kinds of medals and promotions. So how scared are you?”

“Not very,” said the guy with the wrench.

Wrong answer. But understandable. Being a good enough guard or tackle in high school to get a full-boat free ride to the big school in Lincoln was no mean achievement. Playing even a cameo role on the field in Memorial Stadium made a guy close to the best of the best. And failing to make the National Football League was no kind of real disgrace. The dividing line between success and failure in the world of sports was often very narrow, and the reasons for falling on one side or the other were often very arbitrary. These guys had been the elite for most of twenty years, the greatest thing their neighborhood had ever seen, then their town, then their county, maybe their state. They had been popular, they had been feted, they had gotten the girls. And they probably hadn’t lost a fight since they were eight years old.

Except they had never had a fight. Not in the sense meant by people paid to fight or die. Pushing and shoving at the schoolyard gate or on the sidewalk outside the soda shop or late at night after a start-of-summer keg party was as far from fighting as two fat guys tossing lame spirals in the park were from the Super Bowl. These guys were amateurs, and worse, they were complacent amateurs, accustomed to getting by on bulk and reputation alone. In the real world, they would be dead before they even landed a blow.

Case in point: bad choice of weapons. Best are shooting weapons, second best are stabbing weapons, third best are slashing weapons. Blunt instruments are way down the list. They slow hand speed. Their uncontrolled momentum is disadvantageous after a miss. And: If you have to use them, the backhand is the only way to go, so that you accelerate and strike in the same sudden fluid motion. But these guys were shoulder to shoulder with their weapons in their outer hands, which promised forehand swings, which meant that the hammer or the wrench would have to be swung backward first, then stopped, then brought forward again. The first part of the move would be a clear telegraph. All the warning in the world. No surprise. They might as well put a notice in the newspaper, or send a cable by Western Union.

Reacher smiled. He had been raised on military bases all around the world, battling hardcore Marine progeny, honing his skills against gangs of resentful native youths in dusty Pacific streets and damp European alleys. Whatever hardscrabble town in Texas or Arkansas or Nebraska these guys had come up in had been a feather bed by comparison. And while they had been studying the playbook and learning to run and jump and catch, he had been broken down and built back up by the kind of experts who could snap your neck so fast you never knew it had happened until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you.

The guy with the wrench said, “We’ve got a message for you, pal.”

Reacher said, “Really?”

“Actually it’s more of a question.”

“Any difficult words? You need more time?” Reacher stepped forward and a little to his right. He put himself directly in front of the two guys, equidistant, seven feet away, so that if he was six on a clock face, they were eleven and one. The guy with the wrench was on his left, and the guy with the hammer was on his right.

The guy with the wrench moved first. He dumped his weight on his right foot and started a short, compact backswing with the heavy metal tool, a backswing that looked designed to bounce off tensed muscles after perhaps forty degrees or a couple of feet, and then snap forward again through a low horizontal arc, aiming to break Reacher’s left arm between the shoulder and the elbow. The guy wasn’t a total idiot. It was a decent first try.

But it was uncompleted.

Reacher had his weight on his left foot, and he had his right foot moving a split second after the wrench, driving the same way at the same speed, maybe even a little faster, and before the wrench stopped moving backward and started moving forward, the heel of Reacher’s boot met the big guy’s knee and drove right through it, smashing the kneecap deep into the joint, bursting it, rupturing ligaments, tearing tendons, dislocating the joint, turning it inside out, making it fold forward the way no knee is designed to go. The guy started to drop and before he was past the first vertical inch and before the first howl was starting in his throat Reacher was stepping past him, on the outside, shouldering him aside, deleting him from memory, forgetting all about him. He was now essentially an unarmed one-legged man, and one-legged men had never featured near the top of Reacher’s concerns.

The guy with the hammer had a split-second choice to make. He could spin on the forehand, but that would give him almost a full circle to move through, because Reacher was now almost behind him, and anyway his crippled buddy was in the way of the spin, just waiting helplessly for a face-to-face collision. Or the guy could flail on the backhand, a Hail Mary blind swing into the void behind him, hoping for surprise, hoping for a lucky contact.

He chose to flail behind him.

Which Reacher was half-expecting and wholly rooting for. He watched the lunge, the arm moving, the wrist flicking back, the elbow turning inside out, and he planted his feet and jerked from the waist and drove the heel of his hand into the knob of the guy’s elbow, that huge force jabbing one way, the weight of the swinging hammer pulling the other way, the elbow joint cracking, the wrist overextending, the hammer falling, the guy instantly crumpling and dancing and hopping and trying to force his body to a place where his elbow stayed bent the right way around, which pulled him through a tight counterclockwise circle and left him unsteady and unbalanced and face-to-face with Reacher, who paused less time than it took for the hammer to hit the floor and then head-butted him hard in the face, a savage, snapping movement, solid bone-to-bone contact, and then Reacher danced away toward the wrecked Subaru and turned and planned the next second and a half.

The guy who had held the wrench was down, rolling around, in Reacher’s judgment stunned not so much by the pain, most of which would be still to come, but by the awful dawning knowledge that life as he knew it was over, the momentary fears he might have experienced as an athlete after a bad on-field collision finally come true, his future now holding nothing but canes and braces and limps and pain and frustration and unemployment. The guy who had held the hammer was still on his feet, back on his heels, blinking, his nose pouring blood, one arm limp and numb, his eyes unfocused, not a whole lot going on in his head.

Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet. So he stepped back to the guy who had held the hammer and risked his hands and his arms and crashed a low right hook into the skinny triangle below the guy’s pectorals and above his six-pack abdominals, a huge blow, timed and jerked and delivered to perfection, straight into the solar plexus, hitting it like a switch, and the guy went into all kinds of temporary distress and sagged forward and down. Reacher waited until he was bent low enough for the finishing kick to the face, delivered hard but with a degree of mercy, in that smashed teeth and a busted jaw were better than out-and-out brain damage.

Then he turned to the guy who had held the wrench and waited until he rolled the right way and put him to sleep with a kick to the forehead. He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.

The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.

“What?” Reacher asked her.

Chapter 10

The Ford pick-up truck was still idling patiently. Its headlights were still on. The two guys lay slack and heaped in the gloom beyond the bright beams, steaming slightly, four cubic yards of bone and muscle, six hundred pounds of beef, now horizontal, not vertical. They were going to be very hard to move. The doctor’s wife said, “Now what the hell are we going to do?”

Reacher said, “About what?”

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing good can possibly come of it.”

“Why not? What the hell is going on here? Who are these people?”

“I told you. Football players.”

“Not them,” Reacher said. “The Duncans. The people who sent them.”

“Did they see me?”

“These two? I doubt it.”

“That’s good. I really can’t get involved in this.”

“Why not? What’s going on here?”

“This isn’t your business.”

“Tell that to them.”

“You seemed so angry.”

“Me?” Reacher said. “I wasn’t angry. I was barely interested. If I had been angry, we’d be cleaning up with a fire hose. As it is we’re going to need a forklift truck.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Tell me about the Duncans.”

“They’re a family. That’s all. Seth, and his father, and two uncles. They used to farm. Now they run a trucking business.”

“Which one of them hires the football players?”

“I don’t know who makes the decisions. Maybe it’s a majority thing. Or maybe they all have to agree.”

“Where do they live?”

“You know where Seth lives.”

“What about the other three? The old guys?”

“Just south of here. Three houses all alone. One each.”

“I saw them. Your husband was staring at them.”

“Did you see his hands?”

“Why?”

“He was probably crossing his fingers for luck. Whistling past the graveyard.”

“Why? Who the hell are they?”

“They’re a hornet’s nest, that’s what. And you just poked it with a stick and now you’re going to leave.”

“What was I supposed to do? Let them hit me with shop tools?”

“That’s what we do. We take our punishments and we keep smiles on our faces and our heads down. We go along to get along.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She paused. Shook her head.

“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Not really. So we tell ourselves. If you throw a frog in hot water, he’ll jump right out again. Put him in cold water and heat it up slowly, he’ll let himself get boiled to death without ever noticing.”

“And that’s you?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s us.”

“Give me the details.”

She paused again. She shook her head again.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no. You won’t hear anything bad about the Duncans from me. I want that on the record. I’m a local girl, and I’ve known them all my life. They’re a fine family. There’s nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all.”

The doctor’s wife took a long hard look at the wrecked Subaru and then she set off walking home. Reacher offered her a ride in the pickup truck, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He watched her walk out of the motel lot until she was swallowed by the dark and lost to sight. Then he turned back to the two guys on the gravel outside his door. No way could he lift an unconscious human weighing three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds of free weights on a bar, maybe. But not three hundred pounds of inert flesh and blood the size of a refrigerator.

He opened the pick-up’s door and climbed into the cab. It smelled of pine disinfectant and hot oil. He found the gearshift and took off forward on a curve and then stopped and backed up until the tailgate was in line with where the two guys lay. He got out again and stepped around the hood and looked at the winch that was bolted to the frame at the front. It was electric. It had a motor connected to a drum wrapped with thin steel cable. The cable had a snap hook on the end. There was a release ratchet and a winding button.

He hit the ratchet and unwound the cable, ten feet, twenty, thirty. He flipped it up over the hood, over the roof of the cab, between two lights on the light bar, over the load bed, and down to where the guys were lying behind the truck. He dropped the tailgate flat and bent and fastened the hook to the front of the first guy’s belt. He walked back to the front of the truck and found the winding button and pressed.

The motor started and the drum turned and the slack pulled out of the cable. Then the cable went tight and quivered like a bowstring and burred a groove into the front edge of the hood and pulled a crease into the light bar on the roof. The drum slowed, and then it dug in and kept on turning. The truck squatted low on its springs. Reacher walked back and saw the first guy getting dragged by his belt toward the load bed, scuffling along the ground, waist first, arms and legs trailing. The guy dragged all the way to the edge of the tailgate. Then the cable came up vertically and shrieked against the sheet metal and the guy’s belt stretched oval and he started up into the air, spinning a little, his back arched, his head and legs and arms hanging down. Reacher waited and timed it and pulled and pushed and shoved and got him up over the angle and watched as he dragged onward into the load bed. Reacher stepped back to the front and waited a beat and then stopped the winch. He came back and leaned into the load bed and released the hook, and then he did the same things all over again for the second guy, like a veterinarian called out to a couple of dead heifers.

Reacher drove five miles south and slowed and stopped just before the shared driveway that ran west toward the three houses huddled together. They had been painted white a generation ago and still managed a gray gleam in the moonlight. They were substantial buildings, arranged along a short arc without much space between them. There was no landscaping. Just threadbare gravel and weeds and three parked cars, and then a heavy post-and-rail fence, and then flat empty fields running away into the darkness.

There was a light behind a ground floor window in the house on the right. No other signs of activity.

Reacher pulled thirty feet ahead and then backed up and turned and reversed into the driveway. Gravel crunched and scrabbled under his tires. A noisy approach. He risked fifty yards, which was about halfway. Then he stopped and slid out and unlatched the tailgate. He climbed up into the load bed and grabbed the first guy by the belt and the collar and heaved and hauled and half-dragged and half-rolled him to the edge and then put the sole of his boot against the guy’s hip and shoved him over. The guy fell three feet and thumped down on his side and settled on his back.

Return to sender.

Reacher went back for the second guy and pushed and pulled and hauled and rolled him out of the truck right on top of his buddy. Then he latched the tailgate again and vaulted over the side to the ground and got behind the wheel and took off fast.

The four Duncans were still around the table in Jasper’s kitchen. Not a planned meeting, but they had a permanently long agenda and they were taking advantage of circumstances. Foremost in their minds was an emerging delay on the Canadian border. Jacob said, “We’re getting pressure from our friend to the south.”

Jonas said, “We can’t control what we can’t control.”

“Try telling that to him.”

“He’ll get his shipment.”

“When?”

“Whenever.”

“He paid up front.”

“He always does.”

“A lot of money.”

“It always is.”

“But this time he’s agitated. He wants action. And here’s the thing. It was very strange. He called me, and it was like jumping into the conversation halfway through.”

“What?”

“He was frustrated, obviously. But also a little surly, like we weren’t taking him seriously. Like he had made prior communications that had gone unheeded. Like we had ignored warnings. I felt like he was on page three and I was on page one.”

“He’s losing his mind.”

“Unless.”

“Unless what?”

“Unless one of us took a couple of his calls already.”

Jonas Duncan said, “Well, I didn’t.”

“Me either,” Jasper Duncan said.

“You sure?”

“Of course.”

“Because there’s really no other explanation here. And remember, this is a guy we can’t afford to mess with. This is a deeply unpleasant person.”

Jacob’s brothers both shrugged. Two men in their sixties, gnarled, battered, built like fireplugs. Jonas said, “Don’t look at me.”

“Me either,” Jasper said again.

Only Seth Duncan hadn’t spoken. Not a word. Jacob’s son.

His father asked, “What aren’t you telling us, boy?”

Seth looked down at the table. Then he looked up, awkwardly, the aluminum plate huge on his face. His father and his two uncles stared right back at him. He said, “It wasn’t me who broke Eleanor’s nose tonight.”

Chapter 11

Jasper Duncan took a part-used bottle of Knob Creek whiskey from his kitchen cabinet and stuck three gnarled fingers and a blunt thumb in four chipped glasses. He put them on the table and pulled the cork from the bottle and poured four generous measures. He slid the glasses across the scarred wood, a little ceremony, focused and precise. He sat down again and each man took an initial sip, and then the four glasses went back to the table, a ragged little volley of four separate thumps in the quiet of the night.

Jacob Duncan said, “From the beginning, son.”

Seth Duncan said, “I’m dealing with it.”

“But not very well, by the sound of it.”

“He’s my customer.”

Jacob shook his head. “He was your contact, back in the day, but we’re a family. We do everything together, and nothing apart. There’s no such thing as a side deal.”

“We were leaving money on the table.”

“You don’t need to go over ancient history. You found a guy willing to pay more for the same merchandise, and we surely appreciate that. But rewards bring risks. There’s no such thing as something for nothing. No free lunch. So what happened?”

“We’re a week late.”

“We aren’t. We don’t specify dates.”

Seth Duncan said nothing.

Jacob said, “What? You guaranteed a date?”

Seth Duncan nodded.

Jacob said, “That was dumb, son. We never specify dates. You know we can’t afford to. There are a hundred factors outside of our control. The weather, for one.”

“I used a worst-case analysis.”

“You think too much. There’s always something worse than the worst. Count on it. So what happened?”

“Two guys showed up. At my house. Two days ago. His people. Tough guys.”

“Where was Brett?”

“I had to tell him I was expecting them.”

“Were you?”

“More or less.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Because I’m dealing with it.”

“Not very well, son. Apparently. What did they do?”

“They said they were there to deliver a message from their boss. An expression of displeasure. I said I understood. I explained. I apologized. They said that wasn’t good enough. They said they had been told to leave marks. I said they couldn’t. I said I have to be out and about. I have a business to run. So they hit Eleanor instead. To make their point.”

“Just like that?”

“They asked first. They made me agree. They made her agree, too. They made me hold her. They took turns. I told her sorry afterward. She said, what’s the difference? Them then or me later? Because she knew I was agitated.”

“And then what?”

“I asked for another week. They gave me forty-eight hours.”

“So they came back again? Tonight?”

“Yes. They did it all over again.”

“So who was the guy in the restaurant? One of them?”

“No, he wasn’t one of them. I told you, I never saw him before.”

Jonas Duncan said, “He was a passerby. Like we figured. From what he said at the time, to the boy. A passerby full of the wrong end of the stick on this occasion.”

Jacob said, “Well, at least he’s out of our hair.”

Then they heard faint sounds outside. Tires on gravel. A vehicle, on their driveway. It came slow, whining in a low gear. It seemed to stop halfway. The engine kept on running. There was a pause, and then a ragged thump, dull, percussive, somehow mixed with the sound of breath expelled, and then another pause, and another sound. Then the vehicle drove away, faster this time, with acceleration and gear changes, and the world went quiet again.

Jonas Duncan was first out the door. From fifty yards he could see strange humped shapes in the moonlight. From twenty he saw what they were. From five he saw what condition they were in. He said, “Not out of our hair. Not exactly. Not yet.”

Jacob Duncan said, “Who the hell is this guy?”

Seth Duncan and his uncle Jasper didn’t speak.

Reacher parked the pick-up truck next to the wrecked Subaru and found the motel owner waiting at his door. Mr. Vincent. His hair looked black in the light.

“Changing the locks?” Reacher asked him.

The guy said, “I hope I won’t have to.”

“But?”

“I can’t let you stay here.”

Reacher said, “I paid thirty dollars.”

“I’ll refund it, of course.”

“That’s not the point. A deal is a deal. I didn’t damage anything.”

Vincent said nothing.

Reacher said, “They already know I’m here. Where else could I be?”

“It was OK before.”

“Before what?”

“Before they told me not to let you stay here. Ignorance of the law is no offense. But I can’t defy them now. Not after they informed me.”

“When did they inform you?”

“Two minutes ago. By phone.”

“You always do what they tell you?”

Vincent didn’t answer.

“Dumb question, I suppose,” Reacher said.

“I’d lose everything I’ve worked for. And my family before me. All those years.”

“Since 1969?” Reacher asked.

“How did you know that?”

“Just a lucky guess. The moon landing and all. The Apollo program.”

“Do you remember 1969?”

“Vaguely.”

“I loved it. So many things were going on. I don’t know what happened afterward. It really seemed like the start of a new era.”

“It was,” Reacher said. “Just not the era you expected.”

“I’m sorry about this.”

“You going to offer to drive me down to the Interstate now?”

“I can’t do that either. We’re not supposed to help you in any way at all.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Any of us. They’re putting the word out.”

“Well, I seem to have inherited a truck,” Reacher said. “I can drive myself.”

“Don’t,” Vincent said. “They’ll report it stolen. The county police will stop you. You won’t get halfway there.”

“The Duncans control the cops too?”

“No, not really. But a stolen truck is a stolen truck, isn’t it?”

“They want me to stay here?”

“They do now. You started a war. They want to finish it.”

Chapter 12

Reacher stood in the cold between the truck and the motel cabin and looked all around. There was nothing much to see. The blue glow of the neon reached only as far as the dead Subaru, and then it faded away. Overhead was a moon and a billion chilly stars.

Reacher said, “You still got coffee in the pot?”

Vincent said, “I can’t serve you.”

“I won’t rat you out.”

“They might be watching.”

“They’re driving two guys sixty miles to the hospital.”

“Not all of them.”

“This is the last place they’ll look. They told you to move me on. They’ll assume you obeyed.”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s make a deal,” Reacher said. “I’ll move on, to spare you the embarrassment. You can keep the thirty bucks, because this isn’t your fault. In return I want a cup of coffee and some answers.”

The lounge was dark, except for a lone work light behind the bar. No more soft reds and pinks. Just a harsh fluorescent tube, with a pronounced flicker and a green color cast and a noisy component. The music was off and the room was silent, apart from the buzz of the light and the rush of air in the heating system. Vincent filled the Bunn machine with water and spooned ground coffee from a can the size of a drum into a paper filter the size of a hat. He set it going and Reacher listened to the water gulping and hissing and watched the precious brown liquid streaming down into the flask.

Reacher said, “Start at the beginning.”

Vincent said, “The beginning is a long time ago.”

“It always is.”

“They’re an old family.”

“They always are.”

“The first one I knew was old man Duncan. He was a farmer, from a long line of farmers. I guess the first one came here on a land grant. Maybe after the Civil War. They grew corn and beans and built up a big acreage. The old man inherited it all. He had three sons, Jacob, Jasper, and Jonas. It was an open secret that the boys hated farming. But they kept the place going until the old man died. So as not to break his heart. Then they sold up. They went into the trucking business. Much less work. They split up their place and sold it off to their neighbors. Which made sense all around. What was a big spread back in the days of horses and mules wasn’t so big anymore, with tractors and all, and economies of scale. Land prices were high back then, but the boys sweetened the deals. They gave discounts, if their neighbors signed up to use Duncan Transportation to haul away their harvests. Which again made sense all around. Everyone was getting what they wanted. Everyone was happy.”

“Until?”

“Things went sour kind of slowly. There was a dispute with one of the neighbors. Ancient history now. This was twenty-five years ago, probably. But it was an acrimonious situation. It festered all one summer, and then that guy didn’t get his crop hauled away. The Duncans just wouldn’t do it. It rotted on the ground. The guy didn’t get paid that year.”

“He couldn’t find someone else to haul it?”

“By then the Duncans had the county all sewn up. Not worth it for some other outfit to come all the way here just for one load.”

“The guy couldn’t haul it himself?”

“They had all sold their trucks. No need for them, as far as they could see, because of the contracts, and they needed the money for mortgages anyway.”

“The guy could have rented. One time only.”

“He wouldn’t have gotten out of his gate. The fine print said only a Duncan truck could haul anything off a farm. No way to contest it, not in court, and definitely not on the ground, because the football players were on the scene by then. The first generation. They must be old men themselves by now.”

“Total control,” Reacher said.

Vincent nodded.

“And very simple,” he said. “You can work all year, but you need your harvest trucked away, or it’s the same thing as sitting on your butt and growing nothing. Farmers live season to season. They can’t afford to lose a whole crop. The Duncans found the perfect pinch point. Whether by accident or design, I don’t really know. But as soon as they realized what they had, they sure started enjoying it.”

“How?”

“Nothing real bad. People pay a little over the odds, and they mind their manners. That’s about all, really.”

“You too, right?”

Vincent nodded again. “This place needed some fixing, ten years ago. The Duncans loaned me the money, interest-free, if I signed up with them for my deliveries.”

“And you’re still paying.”

“We’re all still paying.”

“Why sit still and take it?”

“You want a revolution? That’s not going to happen. People have got to eat. And the Duncans are smart. No one thing is really that bad. You understand?”

“Like a frog in warm water,” Reacher said. “That’s how the doctor’s wife described it to me.”

“That’s how we all describe it.”

“You still get boiled to death in the end.”

“Long time coming.” Vincent turned away and filled a mug with coffee. Another NASA logo. He pushed it across the bar. He said, “My mother was related to Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon. Fifteenth cousin or something.”

Reacher sniffed the steam and tried the coffee. It was excellent. It was fresh, hot, and strong. Vincent said, “President Nixon had a speech prepared, you know, just in case they got stuck up there. In case they couldn’t lift off the surface. Can you imagine? Just sitting there, looking up at Earth in the sky, waiting for the air to run out?”

Reacher said, “Aren’t there laws? Monopolies, or restraint of trade or something?”

Vincent said, “Going to a lawyer is the same thing as going bankrupt. A lawsuit takes what? Two, three years? Two or three years without your crop getting hauled is suicide. And have you ever worked on a farm? Or run a motel? Believe me, at the end of the day you don’t feel like cracking the law books. You feel like getting some sleep.”

Reacher said, “Wrecking the doctor’s car wasn’t a small thing.”

Vincent said, “I agree. It was worse than usual. We’re all a little unsettled by that.”

“ ‘All’?”

“We all talk to each other. There’s a phone tree. You know, for when something happens. We share information.”

“And what are people saying?”

“The feeling is maybe the doctor deserved it. He was way out of line.”

“For treating his patient?”

“She wasn’t sick. It was an intervention.”

“I think you’re all sick,” Reacher said. “I think you’re all a bunch of spineless cowards. How hard would it be to do something? One guy on his own, I agree, that’s difficult. But if everyone banded together and called another trucker, they’d come. Why wouldn’t they? If there’s enough business here for the Duncans, there’s enough for someone else.”

“The Duncans might sue.”

“Let them. Then they’ve got three years of legal bills and no income. The shoe would be on the other foot.”

“I don’t think another trucker would take the business. They carve things up. They don’t poach, in a place like this.”

“You could try.”

Vincent didn’t answer.

“Whatever,” Reacher said. “I really don’t care who gets an ear of corn hauled away, or how, or if, or when. Or a bushel of beans. Or a peck or a quart or however the hell you measure beans. You can sort it out for yourselves. Or not. It’s up to you. I’m on my way to Virginia.”

“It’s not that easy,” Vincent said. “Not here. People have been scared so long they can’t even remember what it’s like not to be scared anymore.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vincent asked, “What are you going to do?”

Reacher said, “That depends on the Duncans. Plan A is to hitch a ride out of here. But if they want a war, then plan B is to win it. I’ll keep on dumping football players on their driveway until they got none left. Then I’ll walk on up and pay them a visit. Their choice.”

“Stick to plan A. Just go. That’s my advice.”

“Show me some traffic and I might.”

“I need something from you.”

“Like what?”

“Your room key. I’m sorry.”

Reacher dug it out of his pocket and placed it on the bar. A big brass item, marked with a figure six.

Vincent said, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

“Better that you don’t know,” Reacher said. “The Duncans might ask you. And you’d tell them, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d have to,” Vincent said.

There was no more conversation. Reacher finished his coffee and walked out of the lounge, back to the truck. The winch cable had bent the light bar on the roof, so that from the front the whole thing looked a little cross-eyed. But the key turned and the engine started. Reacher drove out of the motel lot. If in doubt, turn left, was his motto. So he headed south, rolling slow, lights off, letting his eyes adjust to the nighttime gloom, looking for a direction to follow.

Chapter 13

The road was a narrow straight ribbon, with dark empty fields to the right, and dark empty fields to the left. There was enough moonlight and enough starlight to make out shapes, but there weren’t many shapes to make out. There was an occasional tree here and there, but mostly the land had been plowed flat all the way to the horizon. Then three miles out Reacher saw two buildings far to the west, one large, one small, both standing alone in a field. Even at a distance and even in the dark he could tell both buildings were old and made of wood. They were no longer quite square, no longer quite upright, as if the earth was sucking them back down into itself, an inch at a time, a corner at a time.

Reacher slowed and turned into a track that was nothing more than a pair of deep parallel ruts put there by the passage of tractor tires. There was a raised hump of grass between them. The grass was frozen solid, like wire. The pick-up truck lurched and bounced and pattered. Small stones scrabbled under the wheels and skittered away. The track ran straight, then turned, then turned again, following the checkerboard pattern of the fields. The ground was bone hard. No dust came up. The two old buildings got nearer, and larger. One was a barn. The other was a smaller structure. They were about a hundred yards apart. Maybe a hundred and twenty. They were both fringed with dormant vegetation, where errant seeds had blown against their sides, and then fallen and taken root. In the winter the vegetation was nothing more than dry tangled sticks. In the summer it might be a riot of colorful vines.

Reacher looked at the barn first. It stood alone, surrounded by worn-out blacktop. It was built of timbers that looked as hard as iron, but it was rotting and leaning. The door was a slider big enough to admit some serious farm machinery. But the tilt of the building had jammed it in its tracks. The lower right-hand corner was wedged deep in the earth. The iron wheel on the rail above it had lifted off its seat. There was a judas hole in the slider. A small regular door, inset. It was locked. There were no windows.

Reacher got back in the truck and headed for the smaller shed. It was three-sided, open at the narrow end that faced away from the barn. The tractor ruts ran all the way inside. It was for storage of some kind. Or it had been, once upon a time, long ago. It was about twice as long and a little wider than the truck.

Perfect.

Reacher drove in, all the way, and stopped with the hood of the truck under a kind of mezzanine half-loft built like a shelf under the peak of the roof. He shut the engine down and climbed out and walked back the way he had come, out of the shed, then twenty yards more. He turned and checked. The truck was completely hidden.

He smiled.

He thought: Time for bed.

He set out walking.

He walked in the tractor ruts. The ground under his feet was uneven and hard, and progress was slower than it would have been on the grassy hump in the center of the track, but even frozen grass can bruise and show footsteps, and Reacher always preferred to leave no trail. He made it back to the road and turned north and walked where the centerline would have been, if anyone had ever painted one. The night was still and quiet, the air frigid, the stars still bright overhead. Nothing else was moving. Up ahead there was no blue glow. The motel’s lights had been turned off for the night.

He walked three fast road miles, less than an hour, and came up on the crossroads from the south. He stopped a hundred yards out and checked. On his left, the abandoned mall foundation. Beyond it, the abandoned gas station. On his right, nothing, and beyond that, the motel, dark and silent, just shapes and shadows.

No parked cars.

No parked trucks.

No watchers.

No ambush.

Reacher moved on. He came up on the motel from the rear, at the end of the curl of cabins, behind the smallest of them. All was quiet. He stayed off the gravel and minced along the silver timbers to his bathroom window. It was still open. The screen was still in the bathtub. He sat on the sill and ducked his head and swiveled his legs up and slid inside. He closed the window against the cold and turned and looked around.

His towels were where he had left them after his shower. Vincent hadn’t made up the room. Reacher guessed that was tomorrow’s task. No great urgency. No one was expecting a sudden demand for accommodation. Not in the wilds of Nebraska, not in the depths of winter.

Reacher stepped through to the main room and found an undisturbed situation. All was exactly as he had left it. He kept the lights off and the drapes open. He untucked the bed all around and slid in, fully dressed, boots and all. Not the first time he had slept that way. Sometimes it paid to be ready. Hence the boots, and the untucked bedding. He rolled left, rolled right, got as comfortable as he could, and a minute later he was fast asleep.

He woke up five hours later and found out he had been wrong. Vincent was not pulling quintuple duty. Only quadruple. He employed a maid. A housekeeper. Reacher was woken by the sound of her feet on the gravel. He saw her through the window. She was heading for his door, getting ready to make up his room. He threw aside the covers and sat up, feet on the floor, blinking. His arms felt a little better. Or maybe they were still numb from sleep. There was mist and cold gray light outside, a bitter winter morning, not long after dawn.

People see what they expect to see. The housekeeper used a pass-key and pushed the door wide open and stepped into what she thought was a vacant room. Her eyes passed over Reacher’s shape on the bed and moved on and it was a whole long second before they came back again. She didn’t really react. She showed no big surprise. No yelp, no scream. She looked like a solid, capable woman. She was about sixty years old, maybe more, white, blunt and square, with blond hair fading slowly to yellow and gray. Plenty of old German genes in there, or Scandinavian.

“Excuse me,” she said. “But Mr. Vincent believed this room to be empty.”

“That was the plan,” Reacher said. “Better for him that way. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“You’re the fellow the Duncans told him to turn out,” she said. Not a question. Just a statement, a conclusion derived from shared intelligence on the phone tree.

“I’ll move on today,” Reacher said. “I don’t want to cause him any trouble.”

“I’m afraid it’s you that will have the trouble. How do you plan to move on?”

“I’ll hitch a ride. I’ll set up south of the crossroads. I’ve done it before.”

“Will the first car you see stop?”

“It might.”

“What are the chances?”

“Low.”

“The first car you see won’t stop. Because almost certainly the first car you see will be a local resident, and that person will get straight on the phone and tell the Duncans exactly where you are. We’ve had our instructions. The word is out. So the second car you see will be full of the Duncans’ people. And the third, and the fourth. You’re in trouble, sir. The land is flat here and it’s wintertime. There’s nowhere to hide.”

Chapter 14

The housekeeper moved through the room in an orderly, preprogrammed way, following a set routine, ignoring the anomaly represented by an illicit guest seated on the bed. She checked the bathroom, as if assessing the size of the task ahead of her, and then she butted the tub armchair with her thigh, moving it back an inch to the position decreed for it by the dents in the carpet.

Reacher asked, “You got a cell phone?”

The woman said, “Sure. Some minutes on it, too.”

“You going to rat me out?”

“Rat who out? This is an empty room.”

Reacher asked, “What’s to the east of here?”

“Nothing worth a lick to you,” the woman said. “The road goes to gravel after a mile, and doesn’t really take you anywhere.”

“West?”

“Same thing.”

“Why have a crossroads that doesn’t lead anywhere, east or west?”

“Some crazy plan,” the woman said. “About fifty years ago. There was supposed to be a strip right here, all commercial, a mile long, with houses east and west. A couple of farms were sold for the land, but that’s about all that happened. Even the gas station went out of business, which is pretty much the kiss of death, wouldn’t you say?”

“This motel is still here.”

“By the skin of its teeth. Most of what Mr. Vincent earns comes from feeding whiskey to the doctor.”

“Big cash flow right there, from what I saw last night.”

“A bar needs more than one customer.”

“He’s paying you.”

The woman nodded. “Mr. Vincent is a good man. He helps where he can. I’m a farmer, really. I work the winters here, because I need the money. To pay the Duncans, basically.”

“Haulage fees?”

“Mine are higher than most.”

“Why?”

“Ancient history. I wouldn’t give up.”

“On what?”

“I can’t talk about it,” the woman said. “It’s a forbidden subject. It was the start of everything bad. And I was wrong, anyway. It was a false allegation.”

Reacher got up off the bed. He headed for the bathroom and rinsed his face with cold water and brushed his teeth. Behind him the woman stripped the bed with fast, practiced movements of her wrists, sheets going one way, blankets the other. She said, “You’re heading for Virginia.”

Reacher said, “You know my Social Security number too?”

“The doctor told his wife you’re a military cop.”

“Were, as in used to be. Not anymore.”

“So what are you now?”

“Hungry.”

“No breakfast here.”

“So where?”

“There’s a diner an hour or so south. In town. Where the county cops get their morning coffee and doughnuts.”

“Terrific.”

The housekeeper stepped out to the path and took fresh linens from a cart. Bottom sheet, top sheet, pillowcases. Reacher asked her, “What does Vincent pay you?”

“Minimum wage,” she said. “That’s all he can afford.”

“I could pay you more than that to cook me breakfast.”

“Where?”

“Your place.”

“Risky.”

“Why? You a terrible cook?”

She smiled, briefly. “Do you tip well?”

“If the coffee’s good.”

“I use my mother’s percolator.”

“Was her coffee good?”

“The best.”

“So we’re in business.”

“I don’t know,” the woman said.

“They’re not going to be conducting house-to-house searches. They expect to find me out in the open.”

“And when they don’t?”

“Nothing for you to worry about. I’ll be long gone. I like breakfast as much as the next guy, but I don’t take hours to eat it.”

The woman stood there for a minute, unsure, a crisp white pillowcase held flat across her chest like a sign, or a flag, or a defense. Then she said, “OK.”

Four hundred and fifty miles due north, because of the latitude, dawn came a little later. The gray panel truck sat astride the sandy path, hidden, inert, dewed over with cold. Its driver woke up in the dark and climbed down and took a leak against a tree, and then he drank some water and ate a candy bar and got back in his sleeping bag and watched the pale morning light filter down through the needles. He knew at best he would be there most of the day, or most of two days, and at worst most of three or four days. But then would come his share, of money and fun, and both things were worth waiting for.

He was patient by nature.

And obedient.

Reacher stood still in the middle of the room and the housekeeper finished up around him. She made the bed tight enough to bounce a dime, she changed the towels, she replaced a tiny vial of shampoo, she put out a new morsel of paper-wrapped soap, she folded an arrowhead into the toilet roll. Then she went to get her truck. It was a pickup, a battered old item, very plain, with rust and skinny tires and a sagging suspension. She looped around the wrecked Subaru and parked with the passenger door next to the cabin door. She checked front and rear, long and hard, and then she paused. Reacher could see she wanted to forget the whole thing and take off without him. It was right there in her face. But she didn’t. She leaned across the width of the cab and opened the door and flapped her hand. Hurry up.

Reacher stepped out of the cabin and into the truck. The woman said, “If we see anyone, you have to duck down and hide, OK?”

Reacher agreed, although it would be hard to do. It was a small truck. A Chevrolet, grimy and dusty inside, all worn plastic and vinyl, with the dash tight against his knees and the window into the load bed tight against the back of his seat.

“Got a bag?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I could put it on my head.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said. She drove off, the worn old transmission taking a second to process her foot’s command, something rattling under the hood, a holed muffler banging away like a motorcycle. She turned left out of the lot and drove through the crossroads and headed south. There was no other traffic. In the daylight the land all around looked flat and featureless and immense. It was all dusted white with frost. The sky was high and blank. After five minutes Reacher saw the two old buildings in the west, the sagging barn and the smaller shed with the captured pick-up in it. Then three minutes later they passed the Duncans’ three houses standing alone at the end of their long shared driveway. The woman’s hands went tight on the wheel and Reacher saw she had crossed her fingers. The truck rattled onward and she watched the mirror more than the road ahead and then a mile later she breathed out and relaxed.

Reacher said, “They’re only people. Three old guys and a skinny kid. They don’t have magic powers.”

“They’re evil,” the woman said.

They were in Jonas Duncan’s kitchen, eating breakfast, biding their time, waiting for Jacob to come out with it. He had a pronouncement to make. A decision. They all knew the signs. Many times Jacob had sat quiet and distracted and contemplative, and then eventually he had delivered a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis that had cut to the heart of the matter, or a proposal that had killed three or four birds with one stone. So they waited for it, Jonas and Jasper patiently enjoying their meal, Seth struggling with it a little because chewing had become painful for him. Bruising was spreading out from under his aluminum mask. He had woken up with two black eyes the size and color of rotting pears.

Jacob put down his knife and his fork. He dabbed his lips with his cuff. He folded his hands in front of him. He said, “We have to ask ourselves something.”

Jonas was hosting, so he was entitled to the first response.

“What something?” he asked.

“We have to consider whether it might be worth trading a little dignity and self-respect for a useful outcome.”

“In what way?”

“We have a provocation and a threat. The provocation comes from the stranger in the motel throwing his weight around in matters that don’t concern him. The threat comes from our friend to the south getting impatient. The first thing must be punished, and the second thing shouldn’t have happened at all. No date should have been guaranteed. But it was, so we have to deal with it, and without judgment either. No doubt Seth was doing what he thought was best for all of us.”

Jonas asked, “How do we deal with it?”

“Let’s think about the other thing first. The stranger from the motel.”

Seth said, “I want him hurt bad.”

“We all do, son. And we tried, didn’t we? Didn’t work out so well.”

“What, now we’re afraid of him?”

“We are, a little bit, son. We lost three guys. We’d be stupid not to be at least a little concerned. And we’re not stupid, are we? That’s one thing a Duncan will never be accused of. Hence my question about self-respect.”

“You want to let him walk?”

“No, I want to tell our friend to the south that the stranger is the problem. That he’s somehow the reason for the delay. Then we point out to our friend that he’s already got two of his boys up here, and if he wants a bit of giddy-up in the shipment process, then maybe those two boys could be turned against the stranger. That’s a win all around, isn’t it? Three separate ways. First, those two boys are off Seth’s back, as of right now, and second, the stranger gets hurt or killed, and third, some of the sting comes out of our friend’s recent attitude, because he comes to see that the delay isn’t really our fault at all. He comes to see that we’re beleaguered, by outside forces, in ways that he’ll readily understand, because no doubt he’s beleaguered too, from time to time, in similar ways. In other words, we make common cause.”

Silence for a moment.

Then Jasper Duncan said, “I like it.”

Jacob said, “I like it too. Otherwise I wouldn’t be proposing it. The only downside is a slight blow to our self-respect and dignity, in that it won’t be our own hands on the man who transgressed against us, and we’ll be admitting to our friend to the south that there are problems in this world that we can’t solve all by ourselves.”

“No shame in that,” Jonas said. “This is a very complicated business.”

Seth asked, “You figure his boys are better than our boys?”

“Of course they are, son,” Jacob said. “As good as our boys are, his are in a different league. There’s no comparison. Which we need to bear in mind. Our friend to the south needs to remain our friend, because he would make a very unpleasant enemy.”

“But suppose the delay doesn’t go away?” Jasper asked. “Suppose nothing changes? Suppose the stranger gets nailed today and we still can’t deliver for a week? Then our friend to the south knows we were lying to him.”

“I don’t think the stranger will get nailed in one day,” Jacob said.

“Why not?”

“Because he seems to be a very capable person. All the evidence so far points in that direction. It could take a few days, by which time our truck could well be on its way. And even if it isn’t, we could say that we thought it prudent to keep the merchandise out of the country until the matter was finally resolved. Our friend might believe that. Or, of course, he might not.”

“It’s a gamble, then.”

“Indeed it is. But it’s probably the best we can do. Are we in or out?”

“We should offer assistance,” Jasper said. “And information. We should require compliance from the population.”

Jacob said, “Naturally. Our friend would expect nothing less. Instructions will be issued, and sanctions will be advertised.”

“And our boys should be out there too. Ears and eyes open. We need to feel we made some contribution, at least.”

“Naturally,” Jacob said again. “So are we in or out?”

No one spoke for a long moment. Then Jasper said, “I’m in.”

“Me too,” Jonas said.

Jacob Duncan nodded and unfolded his hands.

“That’s a majority, then,” he said. “Which I’m mighty relieved to have, because I took the liberty of calling our friend to the south two hours ago. Our boys and his are already on the hunt.”

“I want to be there,” Seth said. “When the stranger gets it.”

Chapter 15

Reacher was half-expecting something nailed together from sod and rotten boards, like a Dust Bowl photograph, but the woman drove him down a long gravel farm track to a neat two-story dwelling standing alone in the corner of a spread that might have covered a thousand acres. The woman parked behind the house, next to a line of old tumbledown barns and sheds. Reacher could hear chickens in a coop, and he could smell pigs in a sty. And earth, and air, and weather. The countryside, in all its winter glory. The woman said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but how much are you planning to pay me?”

Reacher smiled. “Deciding how much food to give me?”

“Something like that.”

“My breakfast average west of the Mississippi is about fifteen bucks with tip.”

The woman looked surprised. And satisfied.

“That’s a lot of money,” she said. “That’s two hours’ wages. That’s like having a nine-day workweek.”

“Not all profit,” Reacher said. “I’m hungry, don’t forget.”

She led him inside through a door to a back hallway. The house was what Seth Duncan’s place might have been before the expensive renovations. Low ceilings overhead, small panes of wavy glass in the windows, uneven floors underfoot, the whole place old and antique and outdated in every possible way, but cleaned and tidied and well maintained for a hundred consecutive years. The kitchen was immaculate. The stove was cold.

“You didn’t eat yet?” Reacher asked.

“I don’t eat,” the woman said. “Not breakfast, at least.”

“Dieting?”

The woman didn’t answer, and Reacher immediately felt stupid.

“I’m buying,” he said. “Thirty bucks. Let’s both have some fun.”

“I don’t want charity.”

“It isn’t charity. I’m returning a favor, that’s all. You stuck your neck out bringing me here.”

“I was just trying to be a decent person.”

“Me too,” Reacher said. “Take it or leave it.”

She said, “I’ll take it.”

He said, “What’s your name? Most times when I have breakfast with a lady, I know her name at least.”

“My name is Dorothy.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Dorothy. You married?”

“I was. Now I’m not.”

“You know my name?”

“Your name is Jack Reacher. We’ve all been informed. The word is out.”

“I told the doctor’s wife.”

“And she told the Duncans. Don’t blame her for it. It’s automatic. She’s trying to pay down her debt, like all of us.”

“What does she owe them?”

“She sided with me, twenty-five years ago.”

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were driving north in a rented Impala. They were based in a Courtyard Marriott, which was the only hotel in the county seat, which was nothing more than a token grid of streets set in the middle of what felt like a billion square miles of absolutely nothing at all. They had learned to watch their fuel gauge. Nebraska was that kind of place. It paid to fill up at every gas station you saw. The next one could be a million miles away.

They were from Vegas, which as always meant they were really from somewhere else. New York, in Cassano’s case, and Philadelphia, in Mancini’s. They had paid their dues in their hometowns, and then they had gotten hired together in Miami, like playing triple-A ball, and then they had moved up to the big show out in the Nevada desert. Tourists were told that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that wasn’t true as far as Cassano and Mancini were concerned. They were traveling men, always on the move, tasked to roam around and deal with the first faint pre-echoes of trouble long before it rolled in and hit their boss where he lived.

Hence the trip to the vast agricultural wastelands, nearly eight hundred miles north and east of the glitter and the glamour. There was a snafu in the supply chain, and it was a day or two away from getting extremely embarrassing. Their boss had promised certain specific things to certain specific people, and it would do him no good at all if he couldn’t deliver. So Cassano and Mancini had so far been on the scene for seventy-two hours straight, and they had smacked some beanpole yokel’s wife around, just to make their point. Then some other related yokel had called with a claim that the snafu was being caused by a stranger poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Bullshit, possibly. Quite probably entirely unconnected. Just an excuse. But Cassano and Mancini were only sixty miles away, so their boss was sending them north to help, because if the yokel’s statement was indeed a lie, then it indicated vulnerability, and therefore minor assistance rendered now would leverage a better deal later. An obvious move. This was American business, after all. Forcing down the wholesale price was the name of the game.

They came up the crappy two-lane and rolled through the crappy crossroads and pulled in at the motel. They had seen it before. It looked OK at night. Not so good in the daylight. In the daylight it looked sad and botched and halfhearted. They saw a damaged Subaru standing near one of the cabins. It was all smashed up. There was nothing else to see. They parked in the lot outside the lounge and got out of the rental car and stood and stretched. Two city boys, yawning, scoured by the endless wind. Cassano was medium height, dark, muscled, blank-eyed. Mancini was pretty much the same. They both wore good shoes and dark suits and colored shirts and no ties and wool overcoats. They were often mistaken for each other.

They went inside, to find the motel owner. Which they did, immediately. They found him behind the bar, using a rag, wiping a bunch of sticky overlapping rings off the wood. Some kind of a sad-sack loser, with dyed red hair.

Cassano said, “We represent the Duncan family,” which he had been promised would produce results. And it did. The guy with the hair dropped the rag and stepped back and almost came to attention and saluted, like he was in the army, like a superior officer had just yelled at him.

Cassano said, “You sheltered a guy here last night.”

The guy with the hair said, “No, sir, I did not. I tossed him out.”

Mancini said, “It’s cold.”

The guy behind the bar said nothing, not following.

Cassano said, “If he didn’t sleep here, where the hell did he sleep? You got no local competition. And he didn’t sleep out under a hedge. For one thing, there don’t seem to be any hedges in Nebraska. For another, he’d have frozen his ass off.”

“I don’t know where he went.”

“You sure?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Any kindly souls here, who would take a stranger in?”

“Not if the Duncans told them not to.”

“Then he must have stayed here.”

“Sir, I told you, he didn’t.”

“You checked his room?”

“He returned the key before he left.”

“More than one way into a room, asshole. Did you check it?”

“The housekeeper already made it up.”

“She say anything?”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

“She finished. She left. She went home.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dorothy.”

Mancini said, “Tell us where Dorothy lives.”

Chapter 16

Dorothy’s idea of a fifteen-dollar breakfast turned out to be a regular feast. Coffee first, while the rest of it was cooking, which was oatmeal, and bacon, and eggs, and toast, big heaping portions, lots of everything, all the food groups, all piping hot, served on thick china plates that must have been fifty years old, and eaten with ancient silverware that had heavy square Georgian handles.

“Fabulous,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome. Thank you for mine.”

“It isn’t right, you know. People not eating because of the Duncans.”

“People do all kinds of things because of the Duncans.”

“I know what I’d do.”

She smiled. “We all talked like that, once upon a time, long ago. But they kept us poor and tired, and then we got old.”

“What do the young people do here?”

“They leave, just as soon as they can. The adventurous ones go all over the place. It’s a big country. The others stay closer to home, in Lincoln or Omaha.”

“Doing what?”

“There are jobs there. Some boys join the State Police. That’s always popular.”

“Someone should call those boys.”

She didn’t answer.

He asked, “What happened twenty-five years ago?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“You can, to me. No one will know. If I ever meet the Duncans, we’ll be discussing the present day, not ancient history.”

“I was wrong anyway.”

“About what?”

She wouldn’t answer.

He asked, “Were you the neighbor with the dispute?”

She wouldn’t answer.

He asked, “You want help cleaning up?”

She shook her head. “You don’t wash the dishes in a restaurant, do you?”

“Not so far.”

“Where were you, twenty-five years ago?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Somewhere in the world.”

“Were you in the army then?”

“Probably.”

“People say you beat up three Cornhuskers yesterday.”

“Not all at once,” he said.

“You want more coffee?”

“Sure,” he said, and she recharged the percolator and set it going again. He asked, “How many farms contracted with the Duncans?”

“All of us,” she said. “This whole corner of the county. Forty farms.”

“That’s a lot of corn.”

“And soybeans and alfalfa. We rotate the crops.”

“Did you buy part of the old Duncan place?”

“A hundred acres. A nice little parcel. It squared off a corner. It made sense.”

“How long ago was that?”

“It must be thirty years.”

“So things were good for the first five years?”

“I’m not going to tell you what happened.”

“I think you should,” he said. “I think you want to.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Like you said, I had three football players sent after me. I’d like to understand why, at least.”

“It was because you busted Seth Duncan’s nose.”

“I’ve busted lots of noses. Nobody ever retaliated with retired athletes before.”

She poured the coffee. She placed his mug in front of him. The kitchen was warm from the stove. It felt like it would stay warm all day long. She said, “Twenty-five years ago Seth Duncan was eight years old.”

“And?”

“This corner of the county was like a little community. We were all spread out and isolated, of course, but the school bus kind of defined it. Everybody knew everybody else. Children would play together, big groups of them, at one house, then another.”

“And?”

“No one liked going to Seth Duncan’s place. Girls especially. And Seth played with girls a lot. More so than with boys.”

“Why didn’t they like it?”

“No one spelled it out. A place like this, a time like that, such things were not discussed. But something unpleasant was going on. Or nearly going on. Or in the air. My daughter was eight years old at the time. Same age as Seth. Almost the same birthday, as a matter of fact. She didn’t want to play there. She made that clear.”

“What was going on?”

“I told you, no one said.”

“But you knew,” Reacher said. “Didn’t you? You had a daughter. Maybe you couldn’t prove anything, but you knew.”

“Have you got kids?”

“None that I know about. But I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. And I’ve been human all my life. Sometimes people just know things.”

The woman nodded. Sixty years old, blunt and square, her face flushed from the heat and the food. She said, “I suppose today they would call it inappropriate touching.”

“On Seth’s part?”

She nodded again. “And his father’s, and both his uncles’.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes, it was.”

“What did you do?”

“My daughter never went there again.”

“Did you talk to people?”

“Not at first,” she said. “Then it all came out in a rush. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Nobody’s girl wanted to go there.”

“Did anyone talk to Seth’s mother?”

“Seth didn’t have a mother.”

Reacher said, “Why not? Had she left?”

“No.”

“Had she died?”

“She never existed.”

“She must have.”

“Biologically, I suppose. But Jacob Duncan was never married. He was never seen with a woman. No woman was ever seen with any of them. Their own mother had passed on years before. It was just old man Duncan and the three of them. Then the three of them on their own. Then all of a sudden Jacob was bringing a little boy to kindergarten.”

“Didn’t anyone ask where the kid came from?”

“People talked a little, but they didn’t ask. Too polite. Too inhibited. I suppose we all thought Seth was a relative. You know, maybe orphaned or something.”

“So what happened next? You all stopped your kids from going there to play, and that’s what caused the trouble?”

“That’s how it started. There was a lot of talk and whispers. The Duncans were all alone in their little compound. They were shunned. They resented it.”

“So they retaliated?”

“Not at first.”

“So when?”

“After a little girl went missing.”

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini got back in their rented Impala and fired up the engine. The car had a bolt-on navigation system, a couple of extra dollars a day, but it was useless. The screen came up with nothing more than a few thin red lines, like doodles on a pad. None of the roads had names. Just numbers, or else nothing at all. Most of the map was blank. And it was either inaccurate or incomplete, anyway. The crossroads wasn’t even marked. Just like Vegas, to be honest. Vegas was growing so fast no GPS company could keep up with it. So Cassano and Mancini were used to navigating the old-fashioned way, which was to scribble down turn-by-turn directions freely given by a source who was anxious to be accurate, in order to avoid a worse beating than he was getting along with the initial questions. And the motel guy had been more anxious than most, right after the first two smacks. He was no kind of hero. That was for sure.

“Left out of the lot,” Mancini read out loud.

Cassano turned left out of the lot.

Dorothy the housekeeper made a third pot of coffee. She rinsed the percolator and filled it again and set it going. She said, “Seth Duncan had a hard time in school. He got bullied. Eight-year-old boys can be very tribal. I guess they felt they had permission to go after him, because of the whispers at home. And none of the girls stuck with him. They wouldn’t go to his house, and they wouldn’t even talk to him. That’s how children are. That’s how it was. All except one girl. Her parents had raised her to be decent and compassionate. She wouldn’t go to his house, but she still talked to him. Then one day that little girl just disappeared.”

Reacher said, “And?”

“It’s a horrible thing, when that happens. You have no idea. There’s a kind of crazy period at first, when everyone is mad and worried but can’t bring themselves to believe the worst. You know, a couple of hours, maybe three or four, you think she’s playing somewhere, maybe out picking flowers, she’s lost track of the time, she’ll be home soon, right as rain. No one had cell phones back then, of course. Some people didn’t even have regular phones. Then you think the girl has gotten lost, and everyone starts driving around, looking for her. Then it goes dark, and then you call the cops.”

Reacher asked, “What did the cops do?”

“Everything they could. They did a fine job. They went house to house, they used flashlights, they used loud-hailers to tell everyone to search their barns and outbuildings, they drove around all night, then at first light they got dogs and called in the State Police and the State Police called in the National Guard and they got a helicopter.”

“Nothing?”

The woman nodded.

“Nothing,” she said. “Then I told them about the Duncans.”

“You did?”

“Someone had to. As soon as I spoke up, others joined in. We were all pointing our fingers. The State Police took us very seriously. I guess they couldn’t afford not to. They took the Duncans to a barracks over near Lincoln and questioned them for days. They searched their houses. They got help from the FBI. All kinds of laboratory people were there.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Not a trace.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Every test was negative. They said the child hadn’t been there.”

“So what happened next?”

“Nothing. It all fizzled out. The Duncans came home. The little girl was never seen again. The case was never solved. The Duncans were very bitter. They asked me to apologize, for naming names, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t give it up. My husband, neither. Some folks were on our side, like the doctor’s wife. But most weren’t, really. They saw which way the wind was blowing. The Duncans withdrew into themselves. Then they started punishing us. Like revenge. We didn’t get our crop hauled that year. We lost it all. My husband killed himself. He sat right in that chair where you’re sitting and he put his shotgun under his chin.”

“I’m sorry.”

The woman said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Who was the girl?”

No reply.

“Yours, right?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “It was my daughter. She was eight years old. She’ll always be eight years old.”

She started to cry, and then her phone started to ring.

Chapter 17

The phone was a clunky old Nokia. It was on the kitchen counter. It hopped and buzzed and trilled the old Nokia tune that Reacher had heard a thousand times before, in bars, on buses, on the street. Dorothy snatched it up and answered. She said hello and then she listened, to what sounded like a fast slurred message of some kind, maybe a warning, and then she clicked off and dropped the phone like it was scalding hot.

“That was Mr. Vincent,” she said. “Over at the motel.”

Reacher said, “And?”

“Two men were there. They’re coming here. Right now.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know. Men we’ve never seen before.” She opened the kitchen door and glanced down a hallway toward the front of the house. There was silence for a second and then Reacher heard the distant hiss of tires on blacktop, the moan of a slowing engine, the sound of brakes, and then the crunch of a wheel on gravel, then another, then two more together, as a car turned in and bumped onto the track.

The woman said, “Get out of here. Please. They can’t know you’re here.”

“We don’t know who they are.”

“They’re Duncan people. Who else would they be? I can’t let them find you here. It’s more than my life is worth.”

Reacher said, “I can’t get out of here. They’re already on the track.”

“Hide out back. Please. I’m begging you. They can’t find you here. I mean it.” She stepped out to the hallway, ready to meet them head-on at the front door. They were close, and moving fast. The gravel was loud. She said, “They might search. If they find you, tell them you snuck in the yard. Over the fields. Please. Tell them I didn’t know. Make them believe you. Tell them you’re nothing to do with me.” Then she closed the door on him and was gone.

Angelo Mancini folded the sheet of handwritten directions and put it in his pocket. They were on some lumpy, bumpy, piece-of-shit farm track, heading for some broken-down old woebegone piece-of-shit farmhouse that belonged in a museum or a history book. The navigation screen showed nothing at all. Just white space. Roberto Cassano was at the wheel, hitting every pothole. What did he care? They were Hertz’s tires, not his. Up ahead the front door opened and an old woman appeared on the step, clutching the jamb, like she would fall over if she let go.

Mancini said, “That’s a woman with a guilty secret, right there. Count on it.”

“Looks that way,” Cassano said.

Reacher checked the view across the yard at the back. Maybe sixty feet to the parked pick-up, maybe sixty more to the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties. He eased the door open. He turned back and checked the door to the front hallway. It was closed, but he could hear the car. It was crunching to a stop. Its doors were opening. He sensed the woman out there, staring at it, fearful and panicking. He shrugged and turned again to leave. His gaze passed over the kitchen table.

Not good.

They might search.

Tell them I didn’t know.

The table held the remains of two breakfasts.

Two oatmeal bowls, two plates all smeared with egg, two plates all full of toast crumbs, two spoons, two knives, two forks, two coffee mugs.

He put his toast plate on his egg plate, and he put his oatmeal bowl on his toast plate, and he put his coffee mug in his oatmeal bowl, and he put his knife and fork and spoon in his pocket. He picked up the teetering stack of china and carried it with him, across the kitchen, out the door. He held the stack one-handed and pulled the door shut after him and set off across the yard. The ground was beaten dirt mixed with crushed stone and matted with winter weeds. It was reasonably quiet underfoot. But the shakes in his arm were rattling the mug in the bowl. He was making a tinkling noise with every step he took. It sounded as loud as a fire alarm. He passed the pick-up truck. Headed onward to a barn. It was an old swaybacked thing made from thin tarred boards. It was in poor condition. It had twin doors. Hinged in the conventional way, not sliders. The hinges were shot and the doors were warped. He hooked a heel behind one of them and forced his ass into the gap and pushed with his hip and scraped his way inside, back first, then his shoulders, then the stack of crockery.

It was dark inside. No light in there, except blinding sparkles from chinks between the boards. They threw thin lines and spots of illumination across the floor. The floor was earth, soaked in old oil, matted with flakes of rust. The air smelled of creosote. He put the stack of china down. All around him was old machinery, uniformly brown and scaly with decay. He didn’t know what any of it was. There were tines and blades and wheels and metal all bent and welded into fantastical shapes. Farm stuff. Not his area of expertise. Not even close.

He stepped back to the leaning doors and peered through a crack and looked and listened, and drew up rules of engagement in his head. He couldn’t touch these guys, not unless he was prepared to go all the way and make them disappear forever, and their car, and then force Vincent at the motel to hold his tongue, also forever. Anything less than that, and it would all come back to Dorothy sooner or later. So prudence dictated he should stay quiet and out of sight, which he was prepared to do, maybe, just possibly, depending on what he heard from the house. One scream might be nerves or fright. Two screams, and he was going in there, come what may.

He heard nothing.

And he saw nothing, for ten long minutes. Then a guy stepped out the back door, into the yard, and another came out behind him. They walked ten paces and stopped and stood there side by side like they owned the place. They gazed left, gazed ahead, gazed right. City boys. They had shined shoes and wool pants and wool overcoats. They were both on the short side of six feet, both heavy in the chest and shoulders, both dark. Both regular little tough guys, like something out of a television show.

They tracked left a little, toward the pick-up truck. They checked the load bed. They opened a door and checked the cab. They moved on, toward the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties.

Directly toward Reacher.

They came pretty close.

Reacher rolled his shoulders and snapped his elbows and flapped his wrists and tried to work some feeling into his arms. He made a fist with his right hand, and then his left.

The two guys walked on, closer still.

They looked left. They looked right. They sniffed the air.

They stopped.

Shiny shoes, wool coats. City boys. They didn’t want to be wading through pig shit and chicken feathers and turning over piles of old crap. They looked at each other and then the one on the right turned back to the house and called out, “Hey, old lady, get your fat ass out here right now.”

Forty yards away, Dorothy stepped out the door. She paused a beat and then walked toward the two guys, slow and hesitant. The two guys walked back toward her, just as slow. They all met near the pickup truck. The guy on the left stood still. The guy on the right caught Dorothy by the upper arm with one hand and used the other to take a pistol out from under his coat. A shoulder holster. The gun was some kind of a nickel-plated semiautomatic. Or stainless steel. Reacher was too far away to make out the brand. Maybe a Colt. Or maybe a copy. The guy raised it across his body and laid its muzzle against Dorothy’s temple. He held the gun flat, like a punk in a movie. His thumb and three fingers were wrapped tight around the grip. The fourth finger was on the trigger. Dorothy flinched away. The guy hauled on her arm and pulled her back.

He called out, “Reacher? Is that your name? You there? You hiding somewhere? You listening to me? I’m going to count to three. Then you come on out. If you don’t, I’m going to shoot the old cow. I’ve got a gun to her head. Tell him, grandma.”

Dorothy said, “There’s no one here.”

The yard went quiet. Three people, all alone in a thousand acres.

Reacher stood still, right where he was, on his own in the dark.

He saw Dorothy close her eyes.

The guy with the gun said, “One.”

Reacher stood still.

The guy said, “Two.”

Reacher stood still.

The guy said, “Three.”

Chapter 18

Reacher stood still and watched through the crack. There was a long second’s pause. Then the guy who had been counting dropped his hand and stuffed the gun back under his coat. He let go of the woman’s arm. She staggered away a step. The two guys looked left, looked right, looked at each other. They shrugged. A test, passed. A precaution, properly explored. They turned and headed away around the side of the house and disappeared from sight. A minute later Reacher heard doors slam and an engine start and the crunch and whine of a car backing down the track. He heard it make the blacktop, he heard it change gear, he heard it drive away.

The world went quiet again.

Reacher stayed right where he was, on his own in the dark. He wasn’t dumb. Easiest thing in the world for one of the guys to be hiding behind the corner of the house, while his buddy drove away like a big loud decoy. Reacher knew all the tricks. He had used most of them. He had invented some of them himself.

Dorothy stood in the yard with one hand on the side of her truck, steadying herself. Reacher watched her. He guessed she was about thirty seconds away from gathering her wits and taking a breath and shouting that the guys were gone and he could come out now. Then he saw twenty-five years of habitual caution get the better of her. She pushed off the truck and walked the same path the two guys had taken. She was gone a whole minute. Then she came back, around the other side of the house. A full circle. Flat land all around. Wintertime. No place to hide.

She called, “They’re gone.”

He picked up the stack of plates and shouldered his way out between the barn’s warped doors. He blinked in the light and shivered in the cold. He walked on and met her near the pick-up truck. She took the plates from him. He said, “You OK?”

She said, “I was a little worried there for a minute.”

“The safety catch was on. The guy never moved his thumb. I was watching. It was a bluff.”

“Suppose it hadn’t been a bluff? Would you have come out?”

“Probably,” Reacher said.

“You did good with these plates. I suddenly remembered them, and thought I was a goner for sure. Those guys looked like they wouldn’t miss much.”

“What else did they look like?”

“Rough,” she said. “Menacing. They said they were here representing the Duncans. Representing them, not working for them. That’s something new. The Duncans never used outsiders before.”

“Where will they go next?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they know, either. Nowhere to hide is pretty much the same as nowhere to look, isn’t it?”

“The doctor’s, maybe?”

“They might. The Duncans know you had contact.”

“Maybe I should head over there.”

“And maybe I should get back to the motel. I think they hurt Mr. Vincent. He didn’t sound too good on the phone.”

“There’s an old barn and an old shed south of the motel. Off the road, to the west. Made of wood. All alone in a field. Whose are they?”

“They’re nobody’s. They were on one of the farms that got sold for the development that never happened. Fifty years ago.”

“I have a truck in there. I took it from the football players last night. Give me a ride?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not driving you past the Duncan place again.”

“They don’t have X-ray vision.”

“They do. They have a hundred pairs of eyes.”

“So you want me to walk past their place?”

“You don’t have to. Head west across the fields until you see a cell tower. One of my neighbors leases half an acre to the phone company. That’s how he pays his haulage. Turn north there and skirt the Duncan place on the blind side and then you’ll see the barns.”

“How far is it?”

“It’s a morning’s walk.”

“I’ll burn up all that breakfast.”

“That’s what breakfast is for. Make sure you turn north, OK? South takes you near Seth Duncan’s house, and you really don’t want to go there. You know the difference between north and south?”

“I walk south, I get warmer. North, I get colder. I should be able to figure it out.”

“I’m serious.”

“What was your daughter’s name?”

“Margaret,” the woman said. “Her name was Margaret.”

So Reacher walked around the back of the barns and the sheds and the coops and the sties and struck out across the fields. The sun was nothing more than a bright patch of luminescence in the high gray sky, but it was enough to navigate by. After ten o’clock in the morning in Nebraska in the wintertime, and it was solidly east of south, behind his left shoulder. He kept it there for forty minutes, and then he saw a cell phone tower looming insubstantial in the mist. It was tall and skeletal, with a microwave receptor the shape of a bass drum, and cell antennas the shape of fungo bats. It had a tangle of dead brown weeds at its base, and it was surrounded by a token barbed-wire fence. In the far distance beyond it was a farmhouse similar to Dorothy’s. The neighbor’s, presumably. The ground underfoot was hard and lumpy, all softball-sized clods and clarts of frozen earth, the wreckage from last year’s harvest. They rolled away either left or right or were crushed under his heels as he walked.

He turned north at the tower. The sun had moved on. Now it was high and almost behind him, an hour before the season’s drab version of noon. There was no warmth in it. Just light, a little brighter than the rest of the day. Far ahead, to the right, he could see a smudge on the horizon. The three Duncan houses, he guessed, grouped together at the end of their long shared driveway. He couldn’t make out any detail. Certainly nothing man-sized. Which meant no one there could make out any man-sized detail either, in reverse. Same number of miles east to west as west to east, same gray gloom, same mist. But even so, he tracked left a little, following a curve, maintaining his distance, making sure.

Dorothy the housekeeper sat Mr. Vincent down in a red velvet chair and sponged the blood off his face. He had a split lip and a cut brow and a lump the size of an egg under his eye. He had apologized for being so slow with his warning call. He had passed out, he said, and had scrambled for the phone as soon as he came around.

Dorothy told him to hush up.

On the other side of the circular room one of the bar stools was lying on its side and a mirrored panel on the bar back had been shattered. Shards of slivered glass had fallen among the bottles like daggers. One of the NASA mugs was broken. Its handle had come right off.

Angelo Mancini had the doctor’s shirt collar bunched in his left hand and he had his right hand bunched into a fist. The doctor’s wife was sitting in Roberto Cassano’s lap. She had been ordered to, and she had refused. So Mancini had hit her husband, hard, in the face. She had refused again. Mancini had hit her husband again, harder. She had complied. Cassano had his hand on her thigh, his thumb an inch under the hem of her skirt. She was rigid with fear and shuddering with revulsion.

“Talk to me, baby,” Cassano whispered, in her ear. “Tell me where you told Jack Reacher to hide.”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“You were with him twenty minutes. Last night. The weirdo at the motel told us so.”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

“So what were you doing there for twenty minutes? Did you have sex with him?”

“No.”

“You want to have sex with me?”

She didn’t answer.

“Shy?” Cassano asked. “Bashful? Cat got your tongue?”

He moved his hand another inch, upward. He licked the woman’s ear. She ducked away. Just twisted at the waist and leaned right over, away from him.

He said, “Come back, baby.”

She didn’t move.

He said, “Come back,” a little louder.

She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn’t want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time anyway, just to show her who was boss. Mancini hit the doctor one more time, just for fun. Traveling men, roaming around, getting the job done. But wasting their time in Nebraska, that was for sure. No one knew a damn thing. The whole place was as barren as the surface of the moon, with much less to do. Who would stay? This guy Reacher was long gone, obviously, totally in the wind, probably halfway to Omaha by the time the sun came up, rumbling along in the stolen truck, completely unnoticed by the county cops, who clearly sat around all night with their thumbs up their butts, because hadn’t they missed every single one of the deliveries roaring through from Canada to Vegas? For months? Hadn’t they? Every single one?

Assholes.

Yokels.

Retards.

All of them.

Cassano jerked upright and spilled the doctor’s wife off his lap. She sprawled on the floor. Mancini punched the doctor one more time, and then they left, back to the rented Impala parked outside.

Reacher kept the three smudged shapes far to his right and tracked onward. He was used to walking. All soldiers were. Sometimes there was no alternative to a long fast advance on foot, so soldiers trained for it. It had been that way since the Romans, and it was still that way, and it would stay that way forever. So he kept on going, satisfied with his progress, enjoying the small compensations that fresh air and country smells brought with them.

Then he smelled something else.

Up ahead was a tangle of low bushes, like a miniature grove. Wild raspberries or wild roses, maybe, a remnant, somehow spared by the plows, now bare and dormant but still thick and dense with thorns. There was a thin plume of smoke coming from them, from right in the middle, horizontal and almost invisible on the wind. It smelled distinctive. Not a wood fire. Not a cigarette.

Marijuana.

Reacher was familiar with the smell. All cops are, even military cops. Grunts get high like anyone else, off duty. Sometimes even on duty. Reacher guessed what he was smelling was a fine sativa, probably not imported junk from Mexico, probably a fine homegrown strain. And why not, in Nebraska? Corn country was ideal for a little clandestine farming. Corn grew as high as an elephant’s eye, and dense, and a twenty-foot clearing carved out a hundred yards from the edge of a field was as secret a garden as could be planted anywhere. More profitable than corn too, even with all the federal subsidies. And these people had their haulage fees to meet. Maybe someone was sampling his recent harvest, judging its quality, setting its price in his mind.

It was a kid. A boy. Maybe fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. Reacher walked on and looked down into the chest-high thicket and found him there. He was quite tall, quite thin, with the kind of long center-parted hair Reacher hadn’t seen on a boy for a long time. He was wearing thick pants and a surplus parka from the old West German army. He was sitting on a spread-out plastic grocery bag, his knees drawn up, his back against a large granite rock that jutted up from the ground. The rock was wedge-shaped, as if it had been broken out of a bigger boulder and rolled into a different position far from its source. And the rock was why the plows had spared the thicket. Big tractors with vague steering had given it a wide berth, and nature had taken advantage. Now the boy was taking advantage in turn, hiding from the world, getting through his day. Maybe not a semicommercial grower after all. Maybe just an amateur enthusiast, with mail-order seeds from Boulder or San Francisco.

“Hello,” Reacher said.

“Dude,” the boy said. He sounded mellow. Not high as a kite. Just cruising gently a couple of feet off the ground. An experienced user, probably, who knew how much was too much and how little was too little. His thought processes were slow, and right there in his face. First: Am I busted? Then: No way.

“Dude,” he said again. “You’re the man. You’re the guy the Duncans are looking for.”

Reacher said, “Am I?”

The kid nodded. “You’re Jack Reacher. Six-five, two-fifty, brown coat. They want you, man. They want you real bad.”

“Do they?”

“We had Cornhuskers at the house this morning. We’re supposed to keep our eyes peeled. And here you are, man. You snuck right up on me. I guess your eyes were peeled, not mine. Am I right?” Then he lapsed into a fit of helpless giggles. He was maybe a little higher than Reacher had thought.

Reacher said, “You got a cell phone?”

“Hell yes. I’m going to text my buddies. I’m going to tell them I’ve seen the man, large as life, twice as natural. Hey, maybe I could put you on the line with them. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it? Would you do that? Would you talk to my buds? So they know I’m not shitting them?”

“No,” Reacher said.

The kid went instantly serious. “Hey, I’m with you, man. You got to lie low. I can dig that. But, dude, don’t worry. We’re not going to rat you out. Me and my buds, I mean. We’re on your side. You’re putting it to the Duncans. We’re with you all the way.”

Reacher said nothing. The kid concentrated hard and lifted his arm high out of the brambles and held out his joint.

“Share?” he said. “That would be a kick too. Smoking with the man.”

The joint was fat and well rolled, in yellow paper. It was about half gone.

“No, thanks,” Reacher said.

“Everyone hates them,” the kid said. “The Duncans, I mean. They’ve got this whole county by the balls.”

“Show me a county where someone doesn’t.”

“Dude, I hear you. The system stinks. No argument from me on that score. But the Duncans are worse than usual. They killed a kid. Did you know that? A little girl. Eight years old. They took her and messed her up real bad and killed her.”

“Did they?”

“Hell yes. Definitely.”

“You sure?”

“No question, my friend.”

“It was twenty-five years ago. You’re what, fifteen?”

“It happened.”

“The FBI said different.”

“You believe them?”

“As opposed to who? A stoner who wasn’t even born yet?”

“The FBI didn’t hear what I hear, man.”

“What do you hear?”

“Her ghost, man. Still here, after twenty-five years. Sometimes I sit out here at night and I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.”

Chapter 19

Our ship has come in. An old, old phrase, from old seafaring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it. No radio, no phone, no telegraph, no mail. No news at all. Then maybe, just maybe, one chance day the ship would come back, weather-beaten, its sails hoving into view, its hull riding low in the channel waters, loaded with spices from India, or silks from China, or tea, or coffee, or rum, or sugar. Enough profit to repay the costs and the loans in one fell swoop, with enough left over to live generously for a decade. Subsequent voyages were all profit, enough to make a man rich beyond his dreams. Our ship has come in.

Jacob Duncan used that phrase, at eleven-thirty that morning. He was with his brothers, in a small dark room at the back of his house. His son, Seth, had gone home. Just the three elders were there, stoic, patient, and reflective.

“I got the call from Vancouver,” Jacob said. “Our man in the port. Our ship has come in. The delay was about weather in the Luzon Strait.”

“Where’s that?” Jasper asked.

“Where the South China Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. But now our goods have arrived. They’re here. Our truck could be rolling tonight. Tomorrow morning, at the very latest.”

“That’s good,” Jasper said.

“Is it?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You were worried before, in case the stranger got nailed before the delay went away. You said that would prove us liars.”

“True. But now that problem is gone.”

“Is it? Seems to me that problem has merely turned itself inside out. Suppose the truck gets here before the stranger gets nailed? That would prove us liars, too.”

“We could hold the truck up there.”

“We couldn’t. We’re a transportation company, not a storage company. We have no facilities.”

“So what do we do?”

“We think. That’s what we do. Where is that guy?”

“We don’t know.”

“We know he hasn’t slept or eaten since yesterday. We know we’ve had our boys out driving the roads all morning and they haven’t seen a damn thing. So where is he?”

Jonas Duncan said, “Either he’s snuck in a chicken coop somewhere, or he’s out walking the fields.”

“Exactly,” Jacob said. “I think it’s time to turn our boys off the nice smooth roads. I think it’s time they drove out across the land, big circles, sweeping and beating.”

“We only have seven of them left.”

“They all have cell phones. First sight of the guy, they can call the boys from the south and turn the problem over to the professionals. If they need to, that is. Or at least they can get some coordinated action going. Let’s turn them loose.”

By that point Reacher was starting to hurry. He was about four hundred yards due west of the three Duncan houses, which was about as close as he intended to get. He was walking parallel to the road. He could already see the wooden buildings ahead. They were tiny brown pinpricks on the far horizon. Nothing between him and them. Flat land. He was watching for trucks. He knew they would be coming. By now his hunters would have checked the roads, and found nothing. Therefore they would have concluded he was traveling cross-country. They would be putting trucks in the fields, and soon, if they hadn’t already. It was predictable. Fast, mobile patrols, cell phone communications, maybe even radios, the whole nine yards. Not good.

He slogged onward, another five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The three Duncan houses fell away behind his shoulder. The wooden buildings up ahead stayed resolutely on the horizon, but they got a little larger, because they were getting a little closer. Four hundred yards away was another bramble thicket, spreading wide and chest-high, but apart from that there was nothing in sight taller than an inch. Reacher was dangerously exposed, and he knew it.

In Las Vegas a Lebanese man named Safir took out his phone and dialed a number. The call was answered six blocks away by an Italian man named Rossi. There were no pleasantries. No time for any. The first thing Safir said was “You’re making me angry.”

Rossi said nothing in reply. He couldn’t really afford to. It was a question of protocol. He was absolutely at the top of his own particular tree, and it was a big tree, high, wide, and handsome, with roots and branches spreading everywhere, but there were bigger trees in the forest, and Safir’s was one of them.

Safir said, “I favored you with my business.”

Rossi said, “And I’m grateful for that.”

“But now you’re embarrassing me,” Safir said. Which, Rossi thought, was a mistake. It was an admission of weakness. It made it clear that however big Safir was, he was worried about someone bigger still. A food chain thing. At the bottom were the Duncans, then came Rossi, then came Safir, and at the top came someone else. It didn’t matter who. The mere existence of such a person put Safir and Rossi in the same boat. For all their graduated wealth and power and glory, they were both intermediaries. Both scufflers. Common cause.

Rossi said, “You know that merchandise of this quality is hard to source.”

Safir said, “I expect promises to be kept.”

“So do I. We’re both victims here. The difference between us is that I’m doing something about it. I’ve got boots on the ground up in Nebraska.”

“What’s the problem there?”

“They claim a guy is poking around.”

“What, a cop?”

“No,” Rossi said. “Absolutely not a cop. The chain is as secure as ever. Just a passerby, that’s all. A stranger.”

“Who?”

“Nobody. Just a busybody.”

“So how is this nobody busybody stranger holding things up?”

“I don’t think he is, really. I think they’re lying to me. I think they’re just making excuses. They’re late, that’s all.”

“Unsatisfactory.”

“I agree. But this is a seller’s market.”

“Who have you got up there?”

“Two of my boys.”

“I’m going to send two of mine.”

“No point,” Rossi said. “I’m already taking care of it.”

“Not to Nebraska, you idiot,” Safir said. “I’m going to send two of my boys across town to babysit you. To keep the pressure on. I want you to be very aware of what happens to people who let me down.”

The Port of Vancouver had been combined with the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority and the shiny new three-in-one business had been renamed Port Metro Vancouver. It was the largest port in Canada, the largest port in the Pacific Northwest, the fourth largest port on the West Coast of North America, and the fifth largest port in North America overall. It occupied 375 miles of coastline, and had twenty-five separate terminals, and handled three thousand vessel arrivals every year, for a total annual cargo throughput of a hundred million tons, which averaged out to considerably more than a quarter-million tons every day. Almost all of those tons were packed into intermodal shipping containers, which, like a lot of things, traced their origins all the way back to United States Department of Defense drawings made in the 1950s, because in the 1950s the U.S. DoD had been one of the few agencies in the world with the will and the energy to make drawings at all, and the only one with the power to make them stick.

Intermodal shipping containers were corrugated metal boxes. They could be easily swapped between different modes of transport, like ships, or railroad flatcars, or semitrucks. Hence, intermodal. They were all a little more than eight feet high and eight feet wide. The shortest and rarest were twenty feet long. Most were forty feet long, or forty-five, or forty-eight, or fifty-three. But traffic was always measured by reference to the basic minimum length, in multiples called twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs. A twenty-foot container was scored as a one, a forty-foot as a two, and so on. Port Metro Vancouver handled two million TEUs a year.

The Duncans’ shipment came in a twenty-foot container. The smallest available. One TEU. Gross weight was 6,110 pounds, and net weight was 4,850 pounds, which meant that there were 1,260 pounds of cargo inside, in a space designed to handle more than sixty thousand. In other words, the box was about ninety-eight percent empty. But that proposition was not as wasteful or as inefficient as it first appeared. Each of the pounds that the container carried was worth more than gold.

It was lifted off a South Korean ship by a gantry crane, and it was placed gently on Canadian soil, and then it was immediately picked up again by another crane, which shuttled it to an inspection site where a camera read its BIC code. BIC was the Bureau International des Containers, which was headquartered in Paris, France, and the code was a combination of four letters from the Latin alphabet and seven numbers. Together they told Port Metro Vancouver’s computers who owned the container, and where it had come from, and what was in it, and that those contents had been precleared by Canadian Customs, none of which information was in the least little bit true. The code also told the computers where the container was going, and when, which was true, to a limited extent. It was going onward into the interior of Canada, and it was to be loaded immediately, without delay, onto a semitruck that was already waiting for it. So it was shuttled on ahead, through a sniffer designed to detect smuggled nuclear material, a test that it passed very easily, and then out to the marshaling yard. At that point the port computers generated an automatic text message to the waiting driver, who fired up his truck and swung into position. The container was lowered onto his flatbed and clamped down. A minute later it was rolling, and ten minutes after that it was through the port gates, heading east, sitting high and proud and alone on a trailer more than twice its length, its minimal weight barely noticed by the roaring diesel.

Reacher walked on through the dirt, another hundred yards, and then he stopped and turned a full circle and checked all around. There was no activity ahead of him. Nothing to the west. Nothing to the east. Just flat, empty land. But behind him, way far to the south, there was a truck. Maybe a mile away, maybe more. It was driving across the fields, bumping and lurching and pattering across the rough ground, faint light glinting off its dull chrome bumper.

Chapter 20

Reacher dropped into a crouch. He was dressed in olive and brown and tan, and the acres of winter dirt all around him were olive and brown and tan, too. Decomposing stalks and leaves, lumps of fertile earth, some of them cracked and powdered by frosts and winds. There was still mist in the air. It hung motionless and invisible, an atmospheric layer like the finest gauze.

The truck a mile to the south kept on moving. The field was immense and rectangular and the truck was roughly in the middle of it. It was following an endless series of S-shaped curves, steering sequentially half-left, then straight ahead, then half-right, then straight ahead, then half-left. Rhythmic and regular and relentless, the driver’s view sweeping the horizon like a searchlight beam.

Reacher stayed down in his crouch. Static targets attract the eye much less than moving targets. But he knew that sooner or later the truck was going to get close to him. That was inevitable. At some point he was going to have to move on. But where? There was no natural cover. No hills, no woods, no streams, no rivers. Nothing at all. And he was a slow runner, and not very agile. Not that anyone was fast enough or agile enough to win a game of man-versus-truck on flat and infinitely spacious land.

The truck kept on coming, tiny in the distance, slow and patient and methodical. Half-left, straight ahead, half-right. Its half-right turns aimed it directly at him. Now it was about a thousand yards away. He couldn’t make out the driver. Therefore in return the driver couldn’t make him out. Not yet, anyway. But it was only a matter of time. It would be at a distance of about two hundred yards, he figured, when his vague crouching shape resolved itself. Maybe a hundred and fifty, if the windshield was grimy. Maybe a hundred, if the driver was shortsighted or bored or lazy. Then there would be a blank moment of dawning realization, and then there would be acceleration. Maximum speed over the rough ground would be about thirty miles an hour. Somewhere between seven and fifteen seconds, he figured, between launch and arrival.

Not enough.

Better to go sooner than later.

But where?

He turned around, slow and cautious. Nothing to the east. Nothing to the west. But three hundred yards due north was the bramble thicket he had noted before. The second such thing he had seen within a two-mile span. A tangle of chest-high bushes, a miniature grove, wild raspberries or wild roses, bare and dormant, thick and dense with thorns. Spared by the plows. The first had been spared because of a large rock in its center. There was no possible reason for the second to be any different. No farmer on earth would spare wildflowers year after year through a hundred seasons just for sentiment alone.

The thicket was the place to go.

Three hundred yards for Reacher. Slow as he was, maybe sixty seconds.

A thousand yards for the truck. Fast as it was, maybe seventy seconds.

A ten-second margin.

No-brainer.

Reacher ran.

He came up out of his crouch and started pounding away, stiff clumsy strides, arms pumping, mouth open, breathing hard. Ten yards, twenty, then thirty. Then forty, then fifty. Far behind him he heard the sudden muffled roar of an engine. He didn’t look back. Just kept on going, slipping and sliding, feeling painfully slow.

Two hundred yards to go.

He kept on running, maximum speed. He heard the truck behind him all the way. Still muffled. Still comfortably distant. But moving fast. Revving motor, whistling belts, sucking air, juddering springs, pattering tires.

A hundred yards to go.

He risked a glance back. Clearly the truck had gotten a late jump. It was still farther away than it might have been. But even so it was gaining handily. It was coming on fast. It was an SUV, not a pick-up. Domestic, not foreign. GMC, maybe. Dark red. Not new. A high blunt snout and a chrome bumper the size of a bathtub.

Fifty yards to go. Ten seconds. He stopped twenty yards out and turned in place. Faced south. He stood still, panting hard. He raised his arms level with his shoulders.

Come and get me.

The truck hammered on. Straight at him. He sidestepped right, one long pace, two, three. He lined it up perfectly. The truck directly ahead of him, the hidden rock directly behind him. The truck kept on coming. He walked backward, then ran backward, up on his toes, dainty, watching all the way. The truck kept on coming, lurching, hopping, bouncing, roaring. Twenty yards away, then ten, then five. Reacher moved with it. Then, when he felt the first brambles against the backs of his legs, he jerked sideways and flung himself out of the truck’s path and rolled away and waited for the truck to smash through the thicket and wreck itself on the rock.

Didn’t happen.

The guy at the wheel braked hard and slewed to a stop with his front bumper a yard into the brush. A local boy. He knew what was in there. Reacher heard the gearbox smack into reverse and the truck backed up and the front wheels turned and the gear changed again and the truck came straight at him, fast and enormous. The tires were big off-road items with dirty white letters and savage tread. They were squirming and churning and clods of earth were spattering up off all of them equally. Four-wheel drive. The motor was roaring. A big V-8. Reacher was on the ground and he could see suspension members and shock absorbers and exhaust headers and differential casings the size of soccer balls. He got up and feinted right and flung himself left. He rolled away and the truck turned tight but missed him, crunching over the clods of earth a foot from his face. He could smell hot oil and gasoline and exhaust fumes. There was a cacophony of sound. The motor, grinding gears, yelping springs. The truck slammed into reverse again and came at Reacher backward. By that point he was up on his knees, deciding. Where next? In or out? In the thicket, or out in the open?

No choice at all.

Out in the open was suicide. At close quarters the truck was relatively clumsy, but he couldn’t run and jink and dodge forever. No one could. Exhaustion would tell in the end. So he got to his feet and waded into the brambles. The thorns tore at his pants. The truck came after him, driving backward, narrowing its radius. The driver was staring over his shoulder. A big guy. Big neck. Big shoulders. Short hair. Reacher headed straight for the center of the thicket. Long thorny tendrils latched together and tugged at his ankles. He ripped his way onward. The driver turned the wheel as far as it would go. The truck’s radius tightened, but not enough. Reacher ducked inside its turn and barged on.

He made it to the rock.

It was a hell of a rock. Much bigger than the first one he had seen. Maybe the parent of the first one he had seen. The first one had been wedge-shaped, as if it had been busted out of a larger boulder. This second rock looked like that larger boulder. It was shaped like a pie with a broad piece broken out of it, but not flat like a pie. It was humped and round. Like an orange, with three or four segments missing, half-buried in the earth. Maybe fifty thousand years ago an Ice Age glacier had rolled it all the way down from Canada, and the weight of a billion tons of frozen snow had cracked it apart, and the smaller fragment had been pushed onward two more miles before grinding to a stop and weathering gently over the next countless centuries. The larger fragment had stayed right in place, and it was still there, waist-deep in the rich dirt, itself gently weathered, a huge granite ball with a worn and shallow triangular notch in it, like a bite, like an open mouth, facing south toward its smaller relation. The bite was maybe ten feet wide at the opening, and it narrowed down to a point maybe five feet later.

Reacher came to rest with his back against the boulder, on the east side, the bite a quarter-circle away, behind his right shoulder. The truck turned and drove out of the thicket and for a crazy moment Reacher thought the guy was giving up and going home, but then the truck turned again, a wide lazy circle out on the dirt, and it came back, slow and menacing, head-on, straight at him. The driver was smiling behind the windshield glass, a wide feral grin of triumph. The first of the brambles collapsed under the chrome bumper. The driver was holding the wheel carefully, two-handed, aiming precisely.

Aiming to pin Reacher by the legs against the rock.

Reacher scrambled up onto the granite slope, backward, palms and soles, like a crab. He worked and scuffled and stood upright on the top of the dome, balanced uneasily maybe five feet in the air. The truck came to rest with its front bumper an inch from the rock, its hood a little below the level of Reacher’s feet, its roof a little above. The motor calmed to an idle and Reacher heard four ragged thumps as the doors locked from the inside. The driver was worried. Didn’t want to be dragged out of his seat for a fistfight. Smart guy. Now Reacher’s options were reduced. He could step down on the hood and try to kick the windshield in, but automotive glass was tougher than it looked, and all the guy had to do was take off suddenly and Reacher would be thrown clear, unless he grabbed the roof bars, but his arms were hurting too much to survive a wild-ass ride all the way across Nebraska, clinging to the top of a bouncing truck at thirty or more miles an hour.

Impasse.

Or maybe not. The guy had laid out his tactics for all to see. He hadn’t used his phone. He wanted to capture Reacher all by himself, for the glory of it. He intended to do it by using his truck like a hammer and the rock like an anvil. But he wouldn’t wait forever. He would dial his buddies just as soon as frustration got the better of him.

Time to go.

Reacher scrambled down the far side of the rock and waded into the thorny growth. He heard the truck back up and swing around after him. It appeared on his right, crunching through the brambles, holding a tight curve as if it was rounding a traffic circle, driving slow, staying deliberate. Reacher faked a break for the open land and the driver bought it and steered maybe ten degrees out of the circle, and then Reacher ducked back toward the rock and slid around the granite circumference and tucked himself into the shallow triangular bite, right at the point of the V, shoulders tight against the converging walls. The truck paused a second and then leapt ahead and steered a tight loop out on the dirt and came right back at him, head-on again, the same low gear, the same low menacing speed, closer and closer, ten feet, five feet, three feet, then two feet.

Then simultaneously the left end and the right end of the truck’s front bumper jammed hard against the narrowing walls of rock, and the truck came to a stop, immobile, right where Reacher wanted it, the big chrome bumper making a new boundary, closing off the shallow triangle a foot from Reacher’s thighs. He could feel the heat from the radiator and the idling beat of the motor resonated in his chest. He could smell oil and gas and rubber and exhaust fumes. He put his hands on the bulbous chrome and started easing down toward a sitting position, intending to slide feetfirst underneath the vehicle and wriggle away on his back.

Didn’t work.

The driver wanted Reacher more than he wanted an undamaged front bumper.

Reacher got halfway to the ground and then he heard a snick and a crunch as the transfer box changed down to low-range gearing. Ideal for pulling stumps. Or for crushing chrome. The engine roared and all four tires bit down hard and the truck pushed forward against nothing except the resistance of its own sheet metal. Both ends of the bumper shrieked and deformed and then crumpled and flattened and the truck kept on coming, one inch, then two, then three. The tires turned slowly but relentlessly, one knob of tread at a time. The bumper crushed from the outside in, grinding and scraping, as the massive V-8 torque turned the bulbous cosmetic panel into a piece of flattened junk.

Now the center of the bumper was six inches from Reacher’s chest.

And it kept on coming. The bumper flattened all the way to where the steel brackets bolted it to the frame. Sterner stuff. The engine roared louder and the truck dug in hard and squatted and strained on its suspension. One front tire lost traction for a second and spun wildly and spattered dirt and stones and shredded pieces of bramble into the wheel well. The whole truck rocked and bucked and danced in place and then the tire bit again and the tailpipes bellowed and the steel brackets collapsed and gave an inch and the truck lurched forward.

Four inches from Reacher’s chest.

Then three.

Then the brackets gave a little more and the hot metal touched Reacher’s coat.

Time to go.

He turned his head sideways and pushed up on the chrome with his hands and forced himself downward, like immersing himself in water. He got halfway there, and then the sheet metal itself behind the bumper started giving way, shrieking and bending and crushing, the curves inverting, the contours flattening. The engine roared and the pipes bellowed louder and the truck lurched forward another inch and the center of the bumper tapped Reacher on the side of his face. He scraped on down, one ear on the hot chrome and the other on the cold granite. He kicked and scrabbled with his heels and got his feet out from under him and he forced his butt through the brambles and got down on his back. Right above his face the last tiny triangle of clear air disappeared as the fenders gave way and what was left of the bumper folded violently into a forward-facing point and hit the granite.

The driver didn’t let up.

The guy kept his foot down hard. Clearly he didn’t know exactly where Reacher was. Because he couldn’t see. Clearly he hoped he had him pinned by the chest. The truck bucked and squatted and pushed. Reacher was flat on his back underneath it, straining tires to his left, straining tires to his right, throbbing exhaust pipes above him, all kinds of ribbed and dirty metal components inches from his face. Things were racing and whirring and turning. There were nuts and bolts and tubes and belts. Reacher didn’t know much about cars. Didn’t know how to fix them, didn’t know how to break them. And he had no tools, anyway.

Or did he?

He patted his pockets, out of habit and desperation, and felt hard metal inside. Dorothy’s silverware. From breakfast. The knife, the fork, the spoon. Heavy old items, hastily concealed, never returned. He pulled them out. They had long thick handles, some kind of early stainless steel.

Right above his nose was a broad flat pan, on the bottom of the engine block. Like a shallow square container, seen from below. Black and dirty. The sump, he figured. For the engine oil. He saw a hexagonal bolt head right in the center of it. For changing the oil. The guy at the service station would undo the bolt, and the oil would come out. The new oil would go in the top.

The guy at the service station would have a wrench.

Reacher didn’t.

The engine roared and strained. The truck shook and juddered. Reacher scuttled backward a yard and got his hands way up above his head and he clamped the knife handle on one side of the hex bolt and the fork handle on the other. He held them tight with thumbs and forefingers and used half his strength to keep them hard together and the other half to turn them counterclockwise.

Nothing.

He took a breath and clamped his teeth and ignored the pain in his arms and tried again. Still nothing. He changed his technique. He clamped the bolt with the very ends of the silverware handles held between his right thumb and forefingers, and he used his left hand to rotate the whole assembly.

The bolt moved.

Just a little. He took another breath and held it and clamped hard until the flesh on his fingers was crushed white and flat and he eased the knife and the fork around. The bolt was set very tight and it turned and grated reluctantly, and grit and dirt in the threads threatened to stick it fast, but he kept on going, smooth and steady, breathing hard, concentrating, and after two and a half turns the oil inside must have started seeping out and flushing the threads, because all of a sudden resistance gave way and the bolt started moving fast and smooth and easy. Reacher dropped the silverware and scooted farther out of the way and used his fingertips high above his head to spin the bolt right out. The engine was still revving hard and as soon as the bolt was out of the hole the enormous pressure inside just dumped the oil out on the ground in a half-inch jet. It hissed and hosed and splattered on the frozen dirt and bounced back up and coated the nearby brambles slick and black, hot and smoking.

Reacher got his arms back down by his sides and wriggled out under the rear of the truck, feetfirst, on his back, the undergrowth impeding him, tearing at him, scratching him. He grasped the rear bumper and hauled and pulled and twisted himself up in a crouch. He wanted a fist-sized rock to bust the rear window, but he couldn’t find one, so he contented himself with banging on it with his hand, once, twice, hard, and harder, and then he turned and ran.

Chapter 21

Reacher ran thirty yards across the winter dirt and stopped. Inside the truck the driver was twisted around in his seat, staring back at him, pawing and fumbling blindly at the wheel and the gearshift. The truck backed up, straining, still locked in low gear, the engine revving fast and the ground speed grinding slow. Reacher had no idea how long it would take for a hard-worked engine with no oil in it to seize up and die.

Not long, he hoped.

He danced sideways, left, and left, and left, and the truck tracked him all the way, coming on slow, the crushed bumper plastered across the front like an ugly afterthought, the axles locked up for maximum traction, the tires squirming and hopping and grinding out new ruts all their own. The driver hit the gas and jerked the wheel to his left, aiming to decode Reacher’s decoy dance and hit him after the inevitable sudden change of direction at its end, but Reacher double-bluffed him and jumped to his own left, and the truck missed him by ten whole feet.

The truck stopped dead and Reacher saw the guy tugging on levers and heard the transmission change back to normal-speed road duty. The truck made a big forty-foot loop out on the dirt and headed back in. Reacher stood still and watched it and sidestepped right, and right, and right, and then he triple-bluffed and jumped right again while the truck slammed left and missed him again. The truck ended up with its battered nose deep in the thicket. All kinds of unpleasant noises were coming out of it. Deep banging sounds, like tuneless church bells. Bearings, Reacher thought. The big ends. He knew some terminology. He had heard car guys talking, on military bases. He saw the driver glance down in alarm, as if red warning lights were blazing on the dash. There was steam in the air. And blue smoke.

The truck backed up, one more time.

Then it died.

It swung through a short backward arc and stopped, ready for a change of gear, which happened, but it didn’t move on again. It just bounced forward a foot against the slack in its suspension and seized up solid. The engine noise shut off and Reacher heard wheezing and hissing and ticking and saw steam jetting out and a final fine black spray from underneath, like a cough, like a death rattle.

The driver stayed where he was, in his seat, behind locked doors.

Reacher looked again for a rock, and couldn’t find one.

Impasse.

But not for long.

Reacher saw them first. He had a better vantage point. Flames, coming out of the seams between the hood and the fenders, low down at the front of the vehicle. The flames were small and colorless at first, boiling the air above them, spreading fast, blistering the paint around them. Then they got bigger and turned blue and yellow and started spilling black smoke from their edges. The hood was a big square pressing and within a minute all four seams surrounding it were alive with flame and the paint all over it was cooking and bubbling and splitting from the heat underneath.

The driver just sat there.

Reacher ran over and tried his door. Still locked. He banged on the window glass, dull padded thumps from his fist, and he pointed urgently at the hood. But it was impossible that the guy didn’t already know he was on fire. His wiper blades were alight. Black smoke was rolling off them and swirling up the windshield in coils. The guy was looking right at them, then looking at Reacher, back and forth, panic in his eyes.

He was as worried about Reacher as he was about the fire.

So Reacher backed off ten feet and the door opened up and the guy jumped out, a big slabby white boy, very young, maybe six-six, close to three hundred pounds. He ran five feet and stopped dead. His hands bunched into fists. Behind him the flames started shooting out of the wheel wells at the front of the truck, starting downward, curling back up around the sheet metal, burning hard. The front tires were smoking. The guy just stood there, rooted. So Reacher ran in again, and the guy swung at him, and missed. Reacher ducked under the blow and popped the guy in the gut and then grabbed him by the collar. The guy went straight down in a crouch and cradled his head defensively. Reacher pulled him back to his feet and hauled him away across the field, fast, thirty feet, forty, then fifty. He stopped and the guy swung again and missed again. Reacher feinted with a left jab and threw in a huge right hook that caught the guy on the ear. The guy wobbled for a second and then went down on his ass. Just sat there, blinking, in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere. Twenty yards away the truck was burning fiercely, all the way back to the windshield pillars. The front tires were alight and the hood was buckled.

Reacher asked, “How much gas is in the tank?”

The guy said, “Don’t hit me again.”

“Answer my question.”

“I filled it this morning.”

So Reacher grabbed him again and pulled him up and hauled him farther away, another thirty feet, then ten more. The guy stumbled all the way and eventually resisted and said, “Please don’t hit me again.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You just tried to kill me with a truck.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You’re sorry about that?”

“I had to do it.”

“Just following orders?”

“I’m surrendering, OK? I’m out of the fight now. Like a POW.”

“You’re bigger than me. And younger.”

“But you’re a crazy man.”

“Says who?”

“We were told. About last night. You put three of us in the hospital.”

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

The guy said, “Brett.”

“What is this, the Twilight Zone? You’ve all got the same name?”

“Only three of us.”

“Out of ten, right?”

“Yes.”

“Thirty percent. What are the odds?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “Who’s in charge here?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Who told you to come out this morning and kill me with a truck?”

“Jacob Duncan.”

“Seth Duncan’s father?”

“Yes.”

“You know where he lives?”

The guy nodded and pointed into the distance, south and east, beyond the burning vehicle. The flames had moved inside it. The glass had shattered and the seats were on fire. There was a column of black smoke in the air, thick and dirty. It was going straight up and then hitting a low atmospheric layer and spreading sideways. Like a miniature mushroom cloud.

Then the gas tank exploded.

An orange fireball kicked the rear of the truck clear off the ground and a split second later a dull boom rolled across the dirt on a pressure wave hard enough to make Reacher stagger a step and hot enough to make him flinch away. Flames leapt fifty feet in the air and died instantly and the truck crashed back to earth, now all black and skeletal inside a hot new fire that roiled the air a hundred feet above it.

Reacher watched for a second. Then he said, “OK, Brett, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to jog over to Jacob Duncan’s place, and you’re going to tell him three things. You listening to me?”

The big guy looked away from the fire and said, “Yes.”

“OK, first, if Duncan wants to, he can send his six remaining boys after me, and each one will delay me a couple of minutes, but then I’ll come right over and kick his ass. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Second, if he prefers, he can skip getting the six boys hurt, and he can come out and meet with me face to face, right away. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“And third, if I see those two out-of-towners again, they’ll be going home in a bucket. Is that clear? Got all that?”

“Yes.”

“You got a cell phone?”

“Yes,” the guy said.

“Give it to me.”

The guy dug in a pocket and came back with a phone, black and tiny in his giant red paw. He handed it over and Reacher pulled it apart. He had seen cell phones dropped on sidewalks, and he knew what was in there. A battery, and a SIM card. He pulled off the cover and clipped out the battery and tossed it twenty feet in one direction, and he took out the SIM card and threw the rest of the phone twenty feet in the other direction. He balanced the SIM card on his palm and held it out, a tiny silicon wafer with gold tracks on it.

“Eat it,” he said.

The guy said, “What?”

“Eat it. That’s your forfeit. For being a useless tub of lard.”

The guy paused a second and then he took it, delicately, finger and thumb, and he opened his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He closed his mouth and worked up some saliva and swallowed.

“Show me,” Reacher said.

The guy opened his mouth again and stuck out his tongue. Like a kid at the clinic. The card was gone.

“Now sit down,” Reacher said.

“What?”

“Like you were before.”

“I thought you wanted me to head for the Duncans’ place.”

“I do,” Reacher said. “But not yet. Not while I’m still in the neighborhood.”

The guy sat down, a little worried, facing south, his legs straight out and his hands on his knees and his upper body curled forward a little.

“Arms behind you,” Reacher said. “Lean back on your hands.”

“Why?”

Enemy ordnance.

“Just do it,” Reacher said.

The guy got his arms behind him and put his weight on his hands. Reacher stepped behind him and crashed the sole of his boot through the guy’s right elbow. The guy went down flat and shrieked and rolled and whimpered. Then he sat up again and cradled his broken arm and stared at Reacher accusingly. Reacher stepped around behind him again and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The guy toppled slowly, forward at first, and then he twisted sideways as his gut got in the way of further progress. He sprawled out and landed softly on one shoulder and lay still, like a large letter L on a dirty brown page. Reacher turned away and slogged on north, toward the two wooden buildings on the horizon.

Chapter 22

The Canadian semitruck with the Duncans’ shipment aboard was making good time, heading due east on Route 3 in British Columbia, driving mostly parallel to the die-straight international border, with Alberta up ahead. Route 3 was a lonely road, mountainous, with steep grades and tight turns. Not ideal for a large vehicle. Most drivers took Route 1, which looped north out of Vancouver before turning east later. A better road, all things considered. Route 3 was quiet by comparison. It had long stretches of nothing but asphalt ribbon and wild scenery. And very little traffic. And occasional gravel turnouts, for rest and recuperation.

One of the gravel turn-outs was located a mile or so before Waterton Lakes National Park. In U.S. terms it was directly above the Washington-Idaho state line, about halfway between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, about a hundred miles north of both. The turn-out had an amazing view. Endless forest to the south, the snowy bulk of the Rockies to the east, magnificent lakes to the north. The semitruck driver pulled off and parked there, but not for the view. He parked there because it was a prearranged location, and because a white panel van was waiting there for him. The Duncans had been in business a long time, because of luck and caution, and one of their cautionary principles was to transfer their cargo between vehicles as soon as possible after import. Shipping containers could be tracked. Indeed, they were designed to be tracked, by the BIC code. Better not to risk a delayed alert from a suspicious Customs agent. Better to move the goods within hours, into something anonymous and forgettable and untraceable, and white panel vans were the most anonymous and forgettable and untraceable vehicles on earth.

The semitruck parked and the panel van K-turned on the gravel and backed up to it and stopped rear-to-rear with it. Both drivers got out. They didn’t speak. They just stepped out into the roadway and craned their necks and checked what was coming, one east, one west. Nothing was coming, which was not unusual for Route 3, so they jogged back to their vehicles and got to work. The van driver opened his rear doors, and the truck driver climbed up on his flatbed and cut the plastic security seal and smacked the bolts and levers out of their brackets and opened the container’s doors.

One minute later the cargo was transferred, all 1,260 pounds of it, and another minute after that the white van had K-turned again and was heading east, and the semitruck was trailing behind it for a spell, its driver intending to turn north on 95 and then loop back west on Route 1, a better road, back to Vancouver for his next job, which was likely to be legitimate, and therefore better for his blood pressure but worse for his wallet.

In Las Vegas the Lebanese man named Safir selected his two best guys and dispatched them to babysit the Italian man named Rossi. An unwise decision, as it turned out. Its unwisdom was made clear within the hour. Safir’s phone rang and he answered it, and found himself talking to an Iranian man named Mahmeini. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer, but there was no transactional equality in their business relationship. Mahmeini was Safir’s customer in the same way a king might have been a boot maker’s customer. Much more powerful, imperious, superior, dismissive, and likely to be lethally angry if the boots were defective.

Or late.

Mahmeini said, “I should have received my items a week ago.”

Safir couldn’t speak. His mouth was dry.

Mahmeini said, “Please look at it from my point of view. Those items are already allocated, to certain people in certain places, for certain date-specific uses. If they are not delivered in time, I’ll take a loss.”

“I’ll make good,” Safir said.

“I know you will. That’s the purpose of my call. We have much to discuss. Because my loss won’t be a onetime thing. It will be ongoing. My reputation will be ruined. Why would my contacts ever trust me again? I’ll lose their business forever. Which means you’ll have to compensate me forever. In effect I will own you for the rest of your life. Do you see my point?”

All Safir could say was “I believe the shipment is actually on its way, as of right now.”

“A week late.”

“I’m suffering too. And I’m trying to do something about it. I made my contact send two of his men up there. And then I sent two of my men over to him, to make sure he concentrates.”

“Men?” Mahmeini said. “You employ men? Or boys?”

“They’re good people.”

“You’re about to find out what men are. I’m sending two of mine. To you. To make sure you concentrate.”

Then the phone went dead, and Safir was left sitting there, awaiting the arrival of two Iranian tough guys in an office that had, just an hour ago, been stripped of the better half of its security.

Reacher made it to the two wooden buildings without further trouble, which was no big surprise to him. Six remaining football players and two out-of-towners made a total of just eight warm bodies, and he guessed the out-of-towners would be riding together, which made a total of just seven roving vehicles loose in a county that must have covered many hundreds of square miles. One random encounter had been fortuitous in the extreme. Two would be incalculably unlikely.

The old barn was still locked and listing, and the pick-up truck was still hidden in the smaller shelter. Undiscovered and undisturbed, as far as Reacher could tell. It was cold and inert. The air in the shelter was dry, and it smelled of dust and mouse droppings. The countryside all around was empty and silent.

Reacher opened up the tool locker in the pick-up’s load bed and took a look at the contents. The biggest thing left in there was an adjustable wrench about a foot long. Some kind of polished steel alloy. It weighed about a pound and a half. Made in the U.S.A. Not the greatest weapon in the world, but better than nothing. Reacher put it in his coat pocket and rooted around for more. He came up with two screwdrivers, one a stubby Phillips cross-head design with a rubber handle, and one a long slender thing with a regular blade for a regular slotted screw. He put them in his other pocket and closed the locker and climbed in the cab. He started up and backed out and then he followed the deep tractor ruts all the way east to the road, where he turned north and headed for the motel.

Safir’s two tough guys arrived in Rossi’s office carrying guns in shoulder holsters and black nylon bags in their hands. They unpacked the bags on Rossi’s desk, right in front of him. The first bag carried just one item, and the second bag carried two items. From the first bag came a belt sander, already loaded with a fresh loop of coarse-grain abrasive. From the second bag came a propane blowtorch and a roll of duct tape.

Tools of the trade.

And therefore an unmistakable message, to a guy in Rossi’s world. In Rossi’s world victims were taped naked to chairs, and belt sanders were fired up and applied to tender areas like knees or elbows or chests. Or faces, even. Then blowtorches were sparked to life for a little extra fun.

Nobody spoke.

Rossi dialed his phone. Three rings, and Roberto Cassano answered, in Nebraska. Rossi said, “What the hell is happening up there? This thing really can’t wait.”

Cassano said, “We’re chasing shadows.”

“Chase them harder.”

“What’s the point? Who knows whether this guy has anything to do with anything? You told us you figure he’s an excuse. So whatever happens to him isn’t going to make the shipment show up any faster.”

“Have you ever told a lie?”

“Not to you, boss.”

“To anyone else?”

“Sure.”

“Then you know how it goes. You arrange things to make sure you don’t get caught out. And I think that’s what those Duncan bastards are going to do. They’re going to hold the shipment somewhere until the guy gets caught. To make it look like they were telling the truth all along. Like cause and effect. So whether we want to or not, we’re going to have to play their game their way. So find this asshole, will you? And fast. This thing can’t wait.”

Rossi clicked off the call. One of the Lebanese guys had been unrolling the belt sander’s cord. Now he bent down and plugged it in. He flicked the switch, just a blip, just a second, and the machine started and whirred and stopped.

A test.

A message.

Reacher drove to the motel and parked next to the doctor’s wrecked Subaru. It was still there, outside cabin six. He got out and squatted down front and rear and used the smaller screwdriver from his pocket to take the plates off the pick-up truck. Then he took the plates off the Subaru and put them on the pick-up. He tossed the pick-up’s plates into the load bed and put the screwdriver back in his pocket and headed for the lounge.

Vincent was in there, behind the bar, wiping it with a rag. He had a black eye and a thick lip and a swelling the size of a mouse’s back on his cheek. One of the mirrors behind him was broken. Pieces of glass the shape of lightning bolts had fallen out. Old wallboard was exposed, taped and yellowing, earthbound and prosaic. The room’s cheerful illusion was diminished.

Reacher said, “I’m sorry I got you in trouble.”

Vincent asked, “Did you spend the night here?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

Reacher checked himself in the broken mirror. One ear was scabbing over where he had scraped it on the rock. His face had scratches from the thorns. His hands, too, and his back, where his coat and shirt and sweater had ridden up. He asked, “Did those guys have a list of places they were looking?”

Vincent said, “I imagine they’ll go house to house.”

“What are they driving?”

“A rental.”

“Color?”

“It was something dark. Dark blue, maybe? A Chevrolet, I think.”

“Did they say who they were?”

“Just that they were representing the Duncans. That’s how they put it. I’m sorry I told them about Dorothy.”

“She did OK,” Reacher said. “Don’t worry about it. She’s had bigger troubles in her life.”

“I know.”

“You think the Duncans killed her kid?”

“I would like to. It would fit with what we think we know about them.”

“But?”

“There was no evidence. Absolutely none at all. And it was a very thorough investigation. Lots of different agencies. Very professional. I doubt if they missed anything.”

“So it was just a coincidence?”

“It must have been.”

Reacher said nothing.

Vincent asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“A couple of things,” Reacher said. “Maybe three. Then I’m out of here. I’m going to Virginia.”

He walked back out to the lot and climbed into the pick-up truck. He fired it up and took off, out to the road, toward the doctor’s house.

Chapter 23

Mahmeini’s two tough guys arrived in Safir’s Las Vegas office about an hour after Safir’s own two tough guys had left it. Mahmeini’s men were not physically impressive. No straining shirt collars, no bulging muscles. They were small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, and not very clean. Safir was Lebanese and he knew plenty of Iranians. Most of them were the nicest people in the world, especially when they lived somewhere else. But some of them were the worst. These two had brought nothing with them. No bags, no tools, no equipment. They didn’t need any. Safir knew they would have guns under their arms and knives in their pockets. It was the knives he was worried about. Guns were fast. Knives were slow. And these two Iranians could be very slow with knives. And very inventive. Safir knew that for a fact. He had seen one of their victims, out in the desert. A little decomposed, but even so the cops had taken longer than they should even to determine the sex of the corpse. Which was no surprise. There had been no external evidence of gender. None at all.

Safir dialed his phone. Three rings, and one of his guys answered, six blocks away. Safir said, “Give me a progress report.”

His guy said, “It’s all messed up.”

“Evidently. But I need more than that.”

“OK, it turns out Rossi’s contacts are a bunch of Nebraska people called Duncan. They’re all in an uproar over some guy poking around. Nothing to do with anything, probably, but Rossi thinks the Duncans are going to stall until the guy is down, to save face, because they’ve been claiming the guy is the cause of the delay. Which Rossi thinks is most likely bullshit, but the whole thing has gone completely circular. Rossi thinks nothing is going to happen now until the guy is captured. He’s got boys up there, working on it.”

“How hard?”

“As hard as they can, I guess.”

“Tell Rossi to tell them to work harder. Much, much harder. And make sure he knows I’m serious, OK? Tell him I’ve got people in my office too, and if I’m going to get hurt over this, then he’s going to get hurt first, and twice as bad.”

Reacher remembered the way to the doctor’s house from the night before. In daylight the roads looked different. More open, less secret. More exposed. They were just narrow ribbons of blacktop, built up a little higher than the surrounding dirt, unprotected by hedgerows, unshaded by trees. The morning mist had risen up and was now a layer of low cloud at about five hundred feet. The whole sky was like a flat lit panel, casting baleful illumination everywhere. No glare, no shadows.

But Reacher arrived OK. The plain ranch house, the couple of flat acres, the post-and-rail fence. In the daylight the house looked raw and new. There was a satellite dish on the roof. There were no cars in the driveway. No dark blue Chevrolet. No neighbors, either. The nearest house might have been a mile away. On three sides there was nothing beyond the doctor’s fence except dirt, tired and hibernating, waiting for plowing and seeding in the spring. On the fourth side was the road, and then more dirt, flat and featureless all the way to the horizon. The doctor and his wife were not gardeners. That was clear. Their lot was all grass, from the base of the fence posts to the foundation of the house. No bushes, no evergreens, no flowerbeds.

Reacher parked on the driveway and walked to the door. It had a spy hole. A little glass lens, like a fat drop of water. Common in a city. Unusual in a rural area. He rang the bell. There was a long delay. He guessed he wasn’t the first visitor of the day. More likely the third. Hence the reluctance on the part of the doctor and his wife to open up. But open up they did, eventually. The spy hole darkened and then lightened again and the door swung back slowly and Reacher saw the woman he had met the night before, standing there in the hallway, looking a little surprised but plenty relieved.

“You,” she said.

“Yes, me,” Reacher said. “Not them.”

“Thank God.”

“When were they here?”

“This morning.”

“What happened?”

The woman didn’t answer. She just stepped back. A mute invitation. Reacher stepped in and walked down the hallway and found out pretty much what had happened when he came face-to-face with the doctor. The guy was a little damaged, in much the same way that Victor was, over at the motel. Bruising around the eyes, swellings, blood in the nostrils, splits in the lips. Loose teeth too, probably, judging by the way the guy was pursing his mouth and moving his tongue, as if he was pressing them home, or counting how many were left. Four blows, Reacher figured, each one hard but subtly different in placement. Expert blows.

Reacher asked, “Do you know who they are?”

The doctor said, “No. They’re not from around here.” His words were thick and indistinct and hard to decipher. Loose teeth, split lips. And a hangover, presumably. “They said they were representing the Duncans. Not working for them. So they’re not hired hands. We don’t know who they are or what their connection is.”

“What did they want?”

“You, of course.”

Reacher said, “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”

The doctor said, “It is what it is.”

Reacher turned back to the doctor’s wife. “Are you OK?”

She said, “They didn’t hit me.”

“But?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Why are you here?”

“I need medical treatment,” Reacher said.

“What kind?”

“I got scratched by thorns. I want to get the cuts cleaned.”

“Really?”

“No, not really,” Reacher said. “I need some painkillers, that’s all. I haven’t been able to rest my arms like I hoped.”

“What do you really want?”

“I want to talk,” Reacher said.

They started in the kitchen. They cleaned his cuts, purely as a way of occupying themselves. The doctor’s wife said she had trained as a nurse. She poured some thin stinging liquid into a bowl and used cotton balls. She started on his face and neck and then did his hands. She made him take off his shirt. His back was all ripped up by the long scrabbling escape from under the truck. He said, “I had breakfast with Dorothy this morning. At her place.”

The doctor’s wife said, “You shouldn’t be telling us that. It could get her in trouble.”

“Only if you rat her out to the Duncans.”

“We might have to.”

“She said she’s a friend of yours.”

“Not really a friend. She’s much older.”

“She said you stood by her, twenty-five years ago.”

The woman said nothing. Just continued her careful ministrations behind his back. She was thorough. She was opening each scratch with thumb and forefinger, and swabbing extensively. The doctor said, “Would you like a drink?”

“Too early for me,” Reacher said.

“I meant coffee,” the doctor said. “You were drinking coffee last night.”

Reacher smiled. The guy was trying to prove he could remember something. Trying to prove he hadn’t been really drunk, trying to prove he wasn’t really hungover.

“A cup of coffee is always welcome,” Reacher said.

The doctor stepped away to the sink and got a drip machine going. Then he came back and took Reacher’s arm, like doctors do, his fingertips in Reacher’s palm, lifting, turning, manipulating. The doctor was small and Reacher’s arm was big. The guy was struggling like a butcher with a side of beef. He dug the fingers of his other hand deep into Reacher’s shoulder joint, poking, feeling, probing.

“I could give you cortisone,” he said.

“Do I need it?”

“It would help.”

“How much?”

“A little. Maybe more than a little. You should think about it. It would ease the discomfort. Right now it’s nagging at you. Probably making you tired.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Go for it.”

“I will,” the doctor said. “In exchange for some information.”

“Like what?”

“How did you hurt yourself?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Call it professional interest.”

The doctor’s wife finished her work. She tossed the last cotton ball on the table and handed Reacher his shirt. He shrugged it on and started buttoning it. He said, “It was like you figured. I was caught in a hurricane.”

The doctor said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Not a natural weather event. I was in an underground chamber. It caught on fire. There was a stair shaft and two ventilation shafts. I was lucky. The flames went up the ventilation shafts. I was on the stairs. So I wasn’t burned. But air to feed the fire was coming down the stair shaft just as hard as the flames were going back up the ventilation shafts. So it was like climbing through a hurricane. It blew me back down twice. I couldn’t keep my feet. In the end I had to haul myself up by the arms.”

“How far?”

“Two hundred and eighty steps.”

“Wow. That would do it. Where was this?”

“That’s outside of your professional interest.”

“Then what happened?”

“That’s outside of your professional interest, too.”

“Recent event, yes?”

“Feels like yesterday,” Reacher said. “Now go get the needle.”

It was a long needle. The doctor went away and came back with a stainless-steel syringe that looked big enough for a horse. He made Reacher take his shirt off again and sit forward with his elbow on the table. He eased the sharp point deep into the joint, from the back. Reacher felt it pushing and popping through all kinds of tendons and muscles. The doctor pressed the plunger, slow and steady. Reacher felt the fluid flood the joint. Felt the joint loosen and relax, in real time, immediately, like healing insanely accelerated. Then the doctor did the other shoulder. Same procedure. Same result.

“Wonderful,” Reacher said.

The doctor asked, “What did you want to talk about?”

“A time long ago,” Reacher said. “When your wife was a kid.”

Chapter 24

Reacher dressed again and all three of them took mugs of fresh coffee to the living room, which was a narrow rectangular space with furniture arranged in an L shape along two walls, and a huge flat screen television on a third wall. Under the screen was a rack loaded with audiovisual components all interconnected with thick wires. Flanking the screen were two serious loudspeakers. Set into the fourth wall was an undraped picture window that gave a great view of a thousand acres of absolutely nothing at all. Dormant lawn, the postand-rail fence, then dirt all the way to the horizon. No hills, no dales, no trees, no streams. But no trucks or patrols, either. No activity of any kind. Reacher took an armchair where he could see the door and the view both at the same time. The doctor sat on a sofa. His wife sat next to him. She didn’t look enthusiastic about talking.

Reacher asked her, “How old were you when Dorothy’s kid went missing?”

She said, “I was fourteen.”

“Six years older than Seth Duncan.”

“About.”

“Not quite in his generation.”

“No.”

“Do you remember when he first showed up?”

“Not really. I was ten or eleven. There was some talk. I’m probably remembering the talk, rather than the event.”

“What did people say?”

“What could they say? No one knew anything. There was no information. People assumed he was a relative. Maybe orphaned. Maybe there had been a car wreck in another state.”

“And the Duncans never explained?”

“Why would they? It was nobody’s business but theirs.”

“What happened when Dorothy’s little girl went missing?”

“It was awful. Almost like a betrayal. It changed people. A thing like that, OK, it puts a scare in you, but it’s supposed to have a happy ending. It’s supposed to turn out right. But it didn’t.”

“Dorothy thought the Duncans did it.”

“I know.”

“She said you stood by her.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Reacher said, “You were fourteen. She was what? Thirty? Thirty-five? More than twice your age. So it wasn’t about solidarity between two women or two mothers or two neighbors. Not in the normal sense. It was because you knew something, wasn’t it?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Call it professional interest.”

“It was a quarter of a century ago.”

“It was yesterday, as far as Dorothy is concerned.”

“You’re not from here.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “I’m on my way to Virginia.”

“So go there.”

“I can’t. Not yet. Not if I think the Duncans did it and got away with it.”

“Why does it matter to you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But it does.”

“The Duncans get away with plenty, believe me. Every single day.”

“But I don’t care about that other stuff. I don’t care who gets their harvest hauled or when or how much they pay for it. You all can take care of that for yourselves. It’s not rocket science.”

The doctor’s wife said, “I was the Duncans’ babysitter that year.”

“And?”

“They didn’t really need one. They rarely went out. Or actually they went out a lot, but then they came right back. Like a trick or a subterfuge. Then they would be real slow about driving me home. It was like they were paying me to be there with them. With all four of them, I mean, not just with Seth.”

“How long did you work for them?”

“About six times.”

“And what happened?”

“In what way?”

“Anything bad?”

She looked straight at him. “You mean, was I interfered with?”

He asked, “Were you?”

“No.”

“Did you feel in any danger?”

“A little.”

“Was there any inappropriate behavior at all?”

“Not really.”

“So what was it made you stand by Dorothy when the kid went missing?”

“Just a feeling.”

“What kind of a feeling?”

“I was fourteen, OK? I didn’t really understand anything. But I knew I felt uncomfortable.”

“Did you know why?”

“It dawned on me slowly.”

“What was it?”

“They were disappointed that I wasn’t younger. They made me feel I was too old for them. It creeped me out.”

“You felt too old for them at fourteen?”

“Yes. And I wasn’t, you know, very mature. I was a small girl.”

“What did you feel would have happened if you had been younger?”

“I really don’t want to think about it.”

“And you told the cops about how you felt?”

“Sure. We all told them everything. The cops were great. It was twenty-five years ago, but they were very modern. They took us very seriously, even the kids. They listened to everybody. They told us we could say anything, big or small, important or not, truth or rumor. So it all came out.”

“But nothing was proved.”

The doctor’s wife shook her head. “The Duncans were clean as a whistle. Pure as the driven snow. I’m surprised they didn’t get the Nobel Prize.”

“But still you stood by Dorothy.”

“I knew what I felt.”

“Did you think the investigation was OK?”

“I was fourteen. What did I know? I saw dogs and guys in FBI jackets. It was like a television show. So, yes, I thought it was OK.”

“And now? Looking back?”

“They never found her bike.”

The doctor’s wife said that most farm kids started driving their parents’ beat-up pick-up trucks around the age of fifteen, or even a little earlier, if they were tall enough. Younger or shorter than that, they rode bikes. Big old Schwinn cruisers, baseball cards in the spokes, tassels on the handlebars. It was a big county. Walking was too slow. The eight-year-old Margaret had ridden away from the house Reacher had seen, down the track Reacher had seen, all knees and elbows and excitement, on a pink bicycle bigger than she was. Neither she nor the bike was ever seen again.

The doctor’s wife said, “I kept on expecting them to find the bike. You know, maybe on the side of a road somewhere. In the tall grass. Just lying there. That’s what happens on the television shows. Like a clue. With a footprint, or maybe the guy had dropped a piece of paper or something. But it didn’t happen that way. Everything was a dead end.”

“So what was your bottom line at the time?” Reacher asked. “On the Duncans. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” the woman said. “Because facts are facts, aren’t they?”

“Yet you still stood by Dorothy.”

“Partly because of the way I felt. Feelings are different than facts. And partly because of the aftermath. It was horrible for her. The Duncans were very self-righteous. And people were starting to wake up to the power they had over them. It was like the thought police. First Dorothy was supposed to apologize, which she wouldn’t, and then she was supposed to just shut up and carry on like nothing had ever happened. She couldn’t even grieve, because somehow that would have been like accusing the Duncans all over again. The whole county was uneasy about it. It was like Dorothy was supposed to take one for the team. Like one of those old legends, where she had to sacrifice her child to the monster, for the good of the village.”

There was no more talk. Reacher collected the three empty coffee cups and carried them out to the kitchen, partly to be polite, partly because he wanted to check the view through a different window. The landscape was still clear. Nothing coming. Nothing happening. After a minute the doctor joined him in the room, and asked, “So what are you going to do now?”

Reacher said, “I’m going to Virginia.”

“OK.”

“With two stops along the way.”

“Where?”

“I’m going to drop in on the county cops. Sixty miles south of here. I want to see their paperwork.”

“Will they still have it?”

Reacher nodded. “A thing like that, lots of different departments cooperating, everyone on their best behavior, they’ll have built a pretty big file. And they won’t have junked it yet. Because technically it’s still an open case. Their notes will be in storage somewhere. Probably a whole cubic yard of them.”

“Will they let you see them? Just like that?”

“I was a cop of sorts myself, thirteen years. I can usually talk my way past file clerks.”

“Why do you want to see it?”

“To check it for holes. If it’s OK, I’ll keep on running. If it’s not, I might come back.”

“To do what?”

“To fill in the holes.”

“How will you get down there?”

“Drive.”

“Showing up in a stolen truck won’t help your cause.”

“It’s got your plates on it now. They won’t know.”

“My plates?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll swap them back again. If the paperwork’s OK, then I’ll leave the truck right there near the police station with the proper plates on it, and sooner or later someone will figure out whose it is, and word will get back to the Duncans, and they’ll know I’m gone for good, and they’ll start leaving you people alone again.”

“That would be nice. What’s your second stop?”

“The cops are the second stop. First stop is closer to home.”

“Where?”

“We’re going to drop in on Seth Duncan’s wife. You and me. A house call. To make sure she’s healing right.”

Chapter 25

The doctor was immediately dead set against the idea. It was a house call he didn’t want to make. He looked away and paced the kitchen and traced his facial injuries with his fingertips and pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth. Then eventually he said, “But Seth might be there.”

Reacher said, “I hope he is. We can check he’s healing right, too. And if he is, I can hit him again.”

“He’ll have Cornhuskers with him.”

“He won’t. They’re all out in the fields, looking for me. The few that remain, that is.”

“I don’t know about this.”

“You’re a doctor. You took an oath. You have obligations.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous.”

“You’re a crazy man, you know that?”

“I prefer to think of myself as conscientious.”

Reacher and the doctor climbed into the pick-up truck and headed back to the county two-lane and turned right. They came out on the road a couple of miles south of the motel and a couple of miles north of the three Duncan houses. Two minutes later the doctor stared at them as they passed by. Reacher took a look, too. Enemy territory. Three white houses, three parked vehicles, no obvious activity. By that point Reacher assumed the second Brett had delivered his messages. He assumed they had been heard and then immediately dismissed as bravado. Although the burned-out truck should have counted for something. The Duncans were losing, steadily and badly, and they had to know it.

Reacher made the left where he had the night before in the Subaru wagon, and then he threaded through the turns until Seth Duncan’s house appeared ahead on his right. It looked much the same lit by daylight as it had by electricity. The white mailbox with Duncan on it, the hibernating lawn, the antique horse buggy. The long straight driveway, the outbuilding, the three sets of doors. This time two of them were standing open. The back ends of two cars were visible in the gloom inside. One was a small red sports car, maybe a Mazda, very feminine, and the other was a big black Cadillac sedan, very masculine.

The doctor said, “That’s Seth’s car.”

Reacher smiled. “Which one?”

“The Cadillac.”

“Nice car,” Reacher said. “Maybe I should go smash it up. I’ve got a wrench of my own now. Want me to do that?”

“No,” the doctor said. “For God’s sake.”

Reacher smiled again and parked where he had the night before and they climbed out together and stood for a moment in the chill. The cloud was still low and flat, and mist was peeling off the underside of it and drifting back down to earth, ready for afternoon, ready for evening. The mist made the air itself look visible, gray and pearlescent, shimmering like a fluid.

“Showtime,” Reacher said, and headed for the door. The doctor trailed him by a yard or two. Reacher knocked and waited and a long minute later he heard feet on the boards inside. A light tread, slow and a little hesitant. Eleanor.

She opened up and stood there, with her left hand cupping the edge of the door and her right-hand fingers spidered against the opposite wall, as if she needed help with stability, or as if she thought her horizontal arm was protecting the inside of the house from the outside. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater. No necklace. Her lips had scabbed over, dark and thick, and her nose was swollen, the white skin tight over yellow contusions that were not quite hidden by her makeup.

“You,” she said.

“I brought the doctor,” Reacher said. “To check on how you’re doing.”

Eleanor Duncan glanced at the doctor’s face and said, “He looks as bad as I do. Was it Seth? Or one of the Cornhuskers? Either way, I apologize.”

“None of the above,” Reacher said. “It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.”

Eleanor Duncan didn’t answer that. She just took her right hand off the wall and trailed it through a courtly gesture and invited them in. Reacher asked, “Is Seth home?”

“No, thank goodness,” Eleanor said.

“His car is here,” the doctor said.

“His father picked him up.”

Reacher asked, “How long will he be gone?”

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “But it seems they have much to discuss.” She led the way to the kitchen, where she had been treated the night before, and maybe on many previous occasions. She sat down in a chair and tilted her face to the light. The doctor stepped up and took a look. He touched the wounds very lightly and asked questions about pain and headaches and teeth. She gave the kind of answers Reacher had heard from many people in her situation. She was brave and somewhat self-deprecating. She said yes, her nose and mouth still hurt a little, and yes, she had a slight headache, and no, her teeth didn’t feel entirely OK. But her diction was reasonably clear and she had no loss of memory and her pupils were reacting properly to light, so the doctor was satisfied. He said she would be OK.

“And how is Seth?” Reacher asked.

“Very angry at you,” Eleanor said.

“What goes around comes around.”

“You’re much bigger than him.”

“He’s much bigger than you.”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at Reacher for another long second, and then she looked away, seemingly very unsure of herself, an expression of complete uncertainty on her face, its extent limited only by the immobility caused by the stiff scabs on her lips and the frozen ache in her nose. She was hurting bad, Reacher thought. She had taken two blows, he figured, probably the first to her nose and the second aimed lower at her mouth. The first had been hard enough to do damage without breaking the bone, and the second had been hard enough to draw blood without smashing her teeth.

Two blows, carefully aimed, carefully calculated, carefully delivered.

Expert blows.

Reacher said, “It wasn’t Seth, was it?”

She said, “No, it wasn’t.”

“So who was it?”

“I’ll quote your earlier conclusion. It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.”

“They were here?”

“Twice.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’ve been saying they represent the Duncans.”

“Well, they don’t. The Duncans don’t need to hire people to beat me. They’re perfectly capable of doing that themselves.”

“How many times has Seth hit you?”

“A thousand, maybe.”

“That’s good. Not from your point of view, of course.”

“But good from the point of view of your own clear conscience?”

“Something like that.”

She said, “Have at Seth all you like. All day, every day. Beat him to a pulp. Break every bone in his body. Be my guest. I mean it.”

“Why do you stay?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whole books have been written on that subject. I’ve read most of them. Ultimately, where else would I go?”

“Anywhere else.”

“It’s not that simple. It never is.”

“Why not?”

“Trust me, OK?”

“So what happened?”

She said, “Four days ago two men showed up here. They had East Coast accents. They were kind of Italian. They were wearing expensive suits and cashmere overcoats. Seth took them into his den. I didn’t hear any of the discussion. But I knew we were in trouble. There was a real animal stink in the house. After twenty minutes they all trooped out. Seth was looking sheepish. One of the men said their instructions were to hurt Seth, but Seth had bargained it down to hurting me. At first I thought I was going to be raped in front of my husband. That was what the atmosphere was like. The animal stink. But, no. Seth held me in front of him and they took turns hitting me. Once each. Nose, and then mouth. Then yesterday evening they came back and did all the same things over again. Then Seth went out for a steak. That’s what happened.”

“I’m very sorry,” Reacher said.

“So am I.”

“Seth didn’t tell you who they were? Or what they wanted?”

“No. Seth tells me nothing.”

“Any ideas?”

“They were investors,” she said. “I mean, they were here on behalf of investors. That’s the only sense I can make out of it.”

“Duncan Transportation has investors?”

“I suppose so. I imagine it’s not a wonderfully profitable business. Gas is very expensive right now, isn’t it? Or diesel, or whatever it is they use. And it’s wintertime, which must hurt their cash flow. There’s nothing to haul. Although, really, what do I know? Except that they’re always complaining about something. And I see on the news that apparently ordinary banks are difficult right now, for small businesses. So maybe they had to find a loan through unconventional sources.”

“Very unconventional,” Reacher said. “But if this is all about some financial issue with Duncan Transportation, why are those guys looking for me?”

“Are they looking for you?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “They are. They were at my house this morning. They hit me four times and threatened to do much worse to my wife. And all they ever asked was where Reacher was. It was the same at the motel, apparently. Mr. Vincent was visited. And Dorothy, the woman who works for him. His housekeeper.”

“That’s awful,” Eleanor said. “Is she OK?”

“She survived.”

“Is your wife OK?”

“A little shaken.”

“I can’t explain it,” Eleanor said. “I know nothing about Seth’s business.”

Reacher asked, “Do you know anything about Seth himself?”

“Like what?”

“Like who he is, and where he came from.”

“Do you guys want a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Reacher said. “Tell me where Seth came from.”

“That old question? He’s adopted, like a lot of people.”

“Where from?”

“He doesn’t know, and I don’t think his father knows for sure, either. It was some kind of charity network. There was a degree of anonymity involved.”

“No stories at all?”

“None.”

“Doesn’t Seth remember anything? People say he was ready for kindergarten when he got here. He should have some memories of where he was before.”

“He won’t talk about it.”

“What about the missing girl?”

“That other old question? Lord knows I’m not blind to Seth’s faults, or his family’s, but as I understand it they were cleared after an investigation by a federal agency. Isn’t that good enough for people?”

“You weren’t here at the time?”

“No, I grew up in Illinois. Just outside of Chicago. Seth was twenty-two when I met him. I was trying to be a journalist. The only job I could find was at a paper out of Lincoln. I was doing a story about corn prices, of course. That’s all that was in that paper, that and college sports. Seth was the new CEO of Duncan Transportation. I interviewed him for the story. Then we had a cocktail. At first, I was bowled over. Later, not so much.”

“Are you going to be OK?”

“Are you? With two tough guys looking for you?”

“I’m leaving,” Reacher said. “Heading south and then east, to Virginia. You want to ride along? You could hit the Interstate and never come back.”

Eleanor Duncan said, “No.”

“You sure?”

“I am.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“You helped me already. More than I can say. You broke his nose. I was so happy.”

Reacher said, “You should come with me. You should get the hell out. It’s crazy to stay, talking like that. Feeling like that.”

“I’ll outlast him,” the woman said. “That’s my mission, I think, to outlast them all.”

Reacher said nothing more. He just looked around the kitchen, at the stuff she would inherit if she succeeded in outlasting them all. There was a lot of stuff, all of it expensive and high quality, a lot of it Italian, some of it German, some of it American. Including a Cadillac key in a glass bowl.

“Is that Seth’s key?” Reacher asked.

Eleanor said, “Yes, it is.”

“Does he keep his car gassed up?”

“Usually. Why?”

“I’m going to steal it,” Reacher said.

Chapter 26

Reacher said, “I’ve got at least an hour’s drive ahead of me. I could use something more comfortable than a truck. And the doctor should keep the truck anyway. He might need it around here. For his job.”

Eleanor Duncan said, “You won’t get away with it. You’ll be driving a stolen car straight through where the county police are based.”

“They won’t know it’s stolen. Not if Seth doesn’t tell them.”

“But he will.”

“Tell him not to. Tell him if he does, I’ll come back here and break his arms. Tell him to keep quiet and pick it up tomorrow. I’ll leave it somewhere along the way.”

“He won’t listen.”

“He will.”

“He doesn’t listen to anyone.”

“He listens to those two out-of-towners.”

“Because he’s scared of them.”

“He’s scared of me, too. He’s scared of everybody. Believe me, that’s how Seth is.”

Nobody spoke. Reacher took the Cadillac key from the bowl, and gave the pick-up key to the doctor, and headed for the door.

Seth Duncan was at his father’s kitchen table, opposite the old man himself, elbow to elbow with his uncle Jonas on one side and his uncle Jasper on the other. The four men were still and subdued, because they weren’t alone in the room. Roberto Cassano was there, leaning on the sink, and Angelo Mancini was there, leaning on the door. Cassano had made a point of smoothing his shirt into the waistband of his pants, even though it was already immaculate, and Mancini had opened his coat and pressed the heels of his hands into the small of his back, as if it was aching from driving, but really both men’s gestures had been designed to show off their pistols in their shoulder holsters. The pistols were Colt Double Eagles. Stainless-steel semi-automatics. A matched pair. The Duncans had seen the weapons and gotten the point, and so they were sitting quiet and saying nothing.

Cassano said, “Tell me again. Explain it to me. Convince me. How is this stranger disrupting the shipment?”

Jacob Duncan said, “Do I tell your boss how to run his business?”

“I guess not.”

“Because it’s his business. Presumably it has a thousand subtleties that I don’t fully understand. So I stay well out of it.”

“And Mr. Rossi stays well out of your business. Until he gets inconvenienced.”

“He’s welcome to find an alternative source.”

“I’m sure he will. But right now there’s a live contract.”

“We’ll deliver.”

“When?”

“As soon as this stranger is out of our hair.”

Cassano just shook his head in frustration.

Mancini said, “You guys need to change your tactics. The stranger was in the fields, OK, no question, but now he’s not anymore. He’s back in the truck he took from those two donkeys last night. He had it stashed somewhere. You should be looking for it. You should be checking the roads again.”

Seth Duncan’s Cadillac was new enough to have all the bells and whistles, but old enough to be a straight-up turnpike cruiser. It wasn’t competing against BMW and Mercedes-Benz for yuppie money, like the current models were. It was competing against planes and trains for long-distance comfort, like traditional full-boat Caddies always had. Reacher liked it a lot. It was a fine automobile. It was long and wide and weighed about two tons. It was smooth and silent. It was relaxed. It was a one-finger, one-toe kind of car, designed for sprawling. It had black paint and black leather and black glass. And a warm-toned radio and a three-quarters-full tank of gas.

Reacher had got in it and racked its seat back and eased it out of the garage and K-turned it behind the house and nosed it cautiously back to the two-lane. He had turned left, south, and wafted on down the road in a rolling cocoon of calm and quiet. The landscape didn’t change at all. Straight road ahead, dirt to the right, dirt to the left, clouds overhead. He saw no other traffic. Ten miles south of where he started there was an old roadhouse standing alone in the weedy remnant of a beaten-earth parking lot. It was closed down and boarded up, with a bad roof and ancient Pabst Blue Ribbon and Miller High Life signs on the walls, barely visible behind layers of mud. After that there was nothing, all the way to the horizon.

Roberto Cassano stepped out of Jacob Duncan’s back door and walked across weedy gravel to where he couldn’t be overheard. A thin plume of black smoke rose far to the north. The burned-out truck, still smoldering. The stranger’s work.

Cassano dialed his cell and got Rossi after three rings. He said, “They’re sticking to their story, boss. We’re not going to get the shipment until they get the stranger.”

Rossi said, “That makes no sense.”

“Tell me about it. It’s Alice in Wonderland.”

“How much pressure have you applied?”

“To the Duncans themselves? That’s my next question. How much pressure do you want us to apply?”

There was a long pause, with a breath, like a sigh, resigned. Rossi said, “The problem is, they sell great stuff. I won’t find better. I won’t find anything half as good. So I can’t burn them. Because I’m going to need them again, in the future. Over and over. No question about that.”

“So?”

“So play their game. Find the damn stranger.”

The doctor stepped out of Eleanor Duncan’s door and stared hard at the pick-up truck. He didn’t want to get in it. Didn’t want to drive it. Didn’t want to be seen with it. Didn’t want to be anywhere near it. It was a Duncan vehicle. It had been misappropriated, and the manner of its misappropriation had been a major humiliation for the Duncans. Two Cornhuskers tossed aside, contemptuously. Therefore to be involved with the truck in any way at all would be an outrageous provocation. Insane. He would be punished, severely and forever.

But he was a doctor.

And sober, unfortunately.

Therefore clearheaded.

He had patients. He had responsibilities. To Vincent at the motel, for one. To Dorothy the housekeeper, for another. Both were shaken up. And he was a married man. His wife was eight miles away, scared and alone.

He looked at the key in his hand and the truck in the driveway. He mapped out a route in his head. He could park behind Dorothy’s house and keep the truck out of sight. He could park on the wrong side of the motel office and achieve the same result. Then he could dump the truck to the north and hike across the fields to home.

Total exposure, maybe two miles on minor tracks, and four on the two-lane road.

Ten minutes.

That was all.

Safe enough.

Maybe.

He climbed in the cab and started the engine.

The anonymous white van was still on Route 3, still in Canada, but it had left British Columbia behind and had entered Alberta. It was making steady progress, heading east, completely unnoticed. Its driver was making no calls. His phone was switched off. The assumption was that cell towers close to the 49th Parallel were monitored for activity. Perhaps conversations were recorded and analyzed. Homeland Security departments on both sides of the border had computer programs with sophisticated software. Individual words could trigger alerts. And even without compromising language, an electronic record of where a guy had been, and when, was always best avoided. For the same reason, all gas purchases were made with cash, in the local currency, and at every stop the driver turned his collar up and pulled his hat down low, in case there were cameras connected to digital recorders or distant control rooms.

The van rolled on, making steady progress, heading east.

Rossi clicked off the call with Cassano and thought hard for five minutes, and then he dialed Safir, six blocks away. He took a breath and held it and asked, “Have you ever seen better merchandise?”

Safir said, “You don’t have to play the salesman. I already fell for your pitch.”

“And you’ve always been satisfied, right?”

“I’m not satisfied now.”

“I understand,” Rossi said. “But I want to discuss something with you.”

“Equals discuss,” Safir said. “We’re not equals. I tell, you ask.”

“OK, I want to ask you something. I want to ask you to take a step back and consider something.”

“For example?”

“I need this shipment, you need this shipment, everyone needs this shipment. So I want to ask you to put our differences aside and make common cause. Just for a day or two.”

“How?”

“My contacts in Nebraska have a bug up their ass.”

“I know all about that,” Safir said. “My men gave me a full report.”

“I want you to send them up there to help.”

“Send who? Up where?”

“Your men. To Nebraska. There’s no point in having them here in my office. Your interests are my interests, and I’m already working as hard as I can on this. So I’m thinking your guys could go help my guys and between us we could solve this problem.”

The doctor made it to Dorothy’s farmhouse unobserved and parked in the yard behind it, nose to tail with Dorothy’s own pick-up. He found her in her kitchen, washing dishes. Breakfast dishes, presumably. Hers and Reacher’s. Which had been a crazy risk.

He asked, “How are you holding up?”

She said, “I’m OK. You look worse than me.”

“I’ll survive.”

“You’re in a Duncan truck.”

“I know.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Like cooking breakfast for the guy was dumb.”

“He was hungry.”

The doctor asked, “You need anything?”

“I need to know how this is going to end.”

“Not well, probably. He’s one guy, on his own. And there’s no guarantee he’ll even stick around.”

“You know where he is right now?”

“Yes. More or less.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I won’t.”

Dorothy said, “You should go check on Mr. Vincent. He was hurt pretty bad.”

“That’s where I’m headed next,” the doctor said.

Safir clicked off the call with Rossi and thought hard for ten long minutes, and then he dialed his customer Mahmeini, eight blocks across town. He took a breath and held it and asked, “Have you ever seen better merchandise?”

Mahmeini said, “Get to the damn point.”

“There’s a kink in the chain.”

“Chains don’t have kinks. Hoses have kinks. Chains have weak links. Are you confessing? You’re the weak link?”

“I’m just saying. There’s a speed bump. A Catch-22. It’s crazy, but it’s there.”

“And?”

“We all have a common goal. We all want that shipment. And we’re not going to get it until the speed bump disappears. That’s a fact, unfortunately. There’s nothing any of us can do about it. We’re all victims here. So I’m asking you to put our differences aside and make common cause, just for a day or two.”

“How?”

“I want you to take your guys out of my office and send them up to Nebraska. I’m sending my guys. We could all work together and solve this problem.”

Mahmeini went quiet. Truth was, he was nothing more than a link in a chain, too, the same as Safir, the same as Rossi, who he knew all about, the same as the Duncans, who he knew all about too, and Vancouver. He knew the lay of the land. He had done due diligence. He had done the research. They were all links in a chain, except that he was the penultimate link, the second to last, and therefore he was under the greatest strain. Because right next to him at the top were Saudis, unbelievably rich and beyond vicious. A bad combination.

Mahmeini said, “Ten percent discount.”

Safir said, “Of course.”

Mahmeini said, “Call me back with the arrangements.”

The doctor parked to the rear of the motel lounge, between its curved wall and a circular stockade that hid the trash cans and the propane tanks, nose to tail with Vincent’s own car, which was an old Pontiac sedan. Not a perfect spot. The truck would be clearly visible from certain angles, both north and south. But it was the best he could do. He got out and paused in the chill and checked the road. Nothing coming.

He found Vincent in the lounge, just sitting there in one of his red velvet armchairs, doing absolutely nothing at all. He had a black eye and a split lip and a swelling the size of a hen’s egg on his cheek. Exactly like the doctor himself, in fact. They were a matched pair. Like looking in a mirror.

The doctor asked, “You need anything?”

Vincent said, “I have a terrible headache.”

“Want painkillers?”

“Painkillers won’t help. I want this to be over. That’s what I want. I want that guy to finish what he started.”

“He’s on his way to Virginia.”

“Great.”

“He said he’s going to check in with the county cops along the way. He said he’s going to come back if there’s something wrong with the case file from twenty-five years ago.”

“Ancient history. They’ll have junked the file.”

“He says not.”

“Then they won’t let him see it.”

“He says they will.”

“But what can he find now, that they didn’t find then? Saying all that just means he’s never coming back. He’s softening the blow, that’s all he’s doing. He’s slipping away, with an excuse. He’s leaving us in the lurch.”

The strange round room went quiet.

“You need anything?” the doctor asked again.

“Do you?” Vincent asked back. “You want a drink?”

“Are you allowed to serve me?”

“It’s a little late to worry about that kind of thing, don’t you think? You want one?”

“No,” the doctor said. “I better not.” Then he paused and said, “Well, maybe just one, for the road.”

Safir called Rossi back and said, “I want a twenty percent discount.”

Rossi said, “In exchange for what?”

“Helping you. Sending my boys up there.”

“Fifteen percent. Because you’ll be helping yourself too.”

“Twenty,” Safir said. “Because I’m talking about sending more boys than just mine.”

“How so?”

“I’ve got guys babysitting me too. Two of them. Right here, right now. I told you that, didn’t I? So you think I’m taking my guys out of your office while I’ve still got guys in my own office? Well, dream on. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, believe me. So I got my customer to agree to send his guys, too. Like a shared sacrifice. And anyway, a thing like this, we’ll all want our fingers in the pie.”

Rossi paused.

“OK,” he said. “That’s good. That’s real good. Between us we’ll have six men up there. We can take care of this thing real fast. We’ll be out of the woods in no time at all.”

“Arrangements?”

Rossi said, “The nearest civilization is sixty miles south. Where the county offices are. The only accommodation is a Courtyard Marriott. My guys are based there. I’ll tell them to pull back there right now and I’ll book a couple more rooms. Then everyone can meet up as soon as possible, and then they can all get going.”

The two-lane road stayed arrow-straight the whole way. Reacher kept the Cadillac rolling along at a steady sixty per, covering a mile a minute, no stress at all. Fifty minutes from where he started he passed a lonely bar on the right shoulder. It was a small hunched building made of wood, with dirty windows with beer signs in them, and three cars in its lot, and a nameboard that said Cell Block. Which was marginally appropriate. Reacher figured that if he squinted the place might look like a jail from an old Western movie. He blew past it and a mile later the far horizon changed. A water tower and a Texaco sign loomed up out of the afternoon gloom. Civilization. But not much of it. The place looked small. It was just a checkerboard of a dozen low-rise blocks dumped down on the dirt in the middle of nowhere.

Eight hundred yards out there was a Chamber of Commerce billboard that listed five different ways a traveler could spend his money. If he wanted to eat, there were two restaurants. One was a diner and one wasn’t. Reacher recognized neither name. Not chains. If a traveler needed to fix his car, there was a service station and a tire shop. If he wanted to sleep, the only choice was a Courtyard Marriott.

Chapter 27

Reacher blew straight past the billboard and then slowed and checked ahead. In his experience most places reserved the main drag for profit-and-loss businesses. Municipal enterprises like cops and county offices would be a block or two over. Maybe more. Something to do with tax revenues. A town couldn’t charge as much for a lot on a back street.

He slowed a little more and passed the first building. It was on the left. It was an aluminum coach diner, as advertised on the billboard, as mentioned by Dorothy the housekeeper. It was the place where the county cops got their morning coffee and doughnuts. And their afternoon snacks, apparently. There was a black and white Dodge police cruiser parked outside. Plus two working pick-up trucks, both of them farm vehicles, both of them dented and dirty. Next up in terms of infrastructure was a gas station across the street, Texaco, with three service bays attached. Then came a long sequence of miscellaneous enterprises, on the left and the right: a hardware store, a liquor store, a bank, tire bays, a John Deere dealership, a grocery, a pharmacy. The street was broad and muddy and had diagonal parking on both sides.

Reacher drove all the way through town. At the end of it was a genuine crossroads, signposted left to an ethanol plant and right to a hospital and straight ahead to I-80, another sixty miles farther on. He U-turned shoulder-to-shoulder and came back again, north on the main drag. There were three side streets on the right, and three on the left. They all had names that sounded like people. Maybe original Nebraska settlers, or famous football players, or coaches, or champion corn growers. He made the first right, on a street named McNally, and saw the Marriott hotel up ahead. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, which was awkward. The old files would be in the police station or a county storeroom, and either way the file clerks would be quitting at five. He had one hour. That was all. Access alone might take thirty minutes to arrange, and there was probably plenty of paper, which would take much more than the other thirty to read. He was going to have to wait for the morning.

Or, maybe not.

Worth a try.

He rolled ahead and took a look at the hotel on the way. He wasn’t sure what the difference was between a regular Marriott and a Courtyard Marriott. Maybe one was high-rise and the other was low-rise. This was a low-rise, just two stories, H-shaped, a lobby flanked by two modest wings of bedrooms. There was a parking lot out front with marked spaces for about twenty cars, only two of them occupied. Same again at the rear of the building. Twenty spaces, only two of them occupied. Plenty of vacancies. Wintertime, in the middle of nowhere.

He made a left and came back north again, parallel to the main drag, three blocks over. He saw the second restaurant. It was a rib shack. It boasted a dry rub recipe direct from Kansas. He turned left again just beyond it and came back to the main street and pulled in at the diner. The cop car was still there. Still parked. The diner wasn’t busy. Reacher could see in through the windows. Two cops, three civilians, a waitress, and a cook behind a hatch.

Reacher locked the Cadillac and walked in. The cops were face-to-face in a booth, each of them wide and bulky, each of them taking up most of a two-person bench. One of them was about Reacher’s age, and one of them was younger. They had gray uniforms, with badges and insignia, and nameplates. The older cop was called Hoag. Reacher walked past him and stopped and pantomimed a big double take and said, “You’re Hoag, right? I don’t believe it.”

The cop said, “Excuse me?”

“I remember you from Desert Storm. Don’t I? The Gulf, in 1991? Am I right?”

The cop said, “I’m sorry, my friend, but you’ll have to help me out here. There’s been a lot of water over the dam since ’91.”

Reacher offered his hand. He said, “Reacher, 110th MP.”

The cop wiped his hand on his pants and shook. He said, “I’m not sure I was ever in contact with you guys.”

“Really? I could have sworn. Saudi, maybe? Just before? During Desert Shield?”

“I was in Germany just before.”

“I don’t think it was Germany. But I remember the name. And the face, kind of. Did you have a brother in the Gulf? Or a cousin or something?”

“A cousin, sure.”

“Looks just like you?”

“Back then, I guess. A little.”

“There you go. Nice guy, right?”

“Nice enough.”

“And a fine soldier, as I recall.”

“He came home with a Bronze Star.”

“I knew it. VII Corps, right?”

“Second Armored Cavalry.”

“Third Squadron?”

“That’s the one.”

“I knew it,” Reacher said again. An old, old process, exploited by fortune-tellers everywhere. Steer a guy through an endless series of yes-no, right-wrong questions, and in no time at all a convincing illusion of intimacy built itself up. A simple psychological trick, sharpened by listening carefully to answers, feeling the way, and playing the odds. Most people who wore nametags every day forgot they had them on, at least initially. And a lot of heartland cops were ex-military. Way more than the average. And even if they weren’t, most of them had big families. Lots of brothers and cousins. Virtually certain that at least one of them would have been in the army. And Desert Storm had been the main engagement for that whole generation, and VII Corps had been by far its largest component, and a Bronze Star winner from the Second Armored Cavalry was almost certainly from the Third Squadron, which had been the tip of the spear. An algorithm. Playing the odds. No-brainers all the way.

Reacher asked, “So what’s your cousin doing now?”

“Tony? He’s back in Lincoln. He got out before the second go-round, thank God. He’s working for the railroad. Two kids, one in junior high and one in college.”

“That’s terrific. You see him much?”

“Now and then.”

“Be sure to remember me to him, OK? Jack Reacher, 110th MP. One desert rat to another.”

“So what are you doing now? He’s bound to ask.”

“Me? Oh, the same old, same old.”

“What, you’re still in?”

“No, I mean I was an investigator, and I’m still an investigator. But private now. My own man, not Uncle Sam’s.”

“Here in Nebraska?”

“Just temporarily,” Reacher said. Then he paused. “You know what? Maybe you could help me out. If you don’t mind me asking.”

“What do you need?”

“You guys going on duty or going off?”

“We’re coming on. We got the night shift ahead of us.”

“Mind if I sit down?”

The cop called Hoag scooted over, all swishing vinyl and creaking leather. Reacher perched on the part of the bench he had vacated. It was warm. He said, “I knew this other guy, name of McNally. Another Second Armored guy, as a matter of fact. Turns out he has a friend of a friend who has an aunt in this county. She’s a farmer. Her daughter disappeared twenty-five years ago. Eight years old, never seen again. The woman never really got over it. Your department handled it, with the FBI as the icing on the cake. McNally’s friend of a friend thinks the FBI screwed up. So McNally hired me to review the paperwork.”

“Twenty-five years ago?” Hoag said. “Before my time.”

“Right,” Reacher said. “I guess we were both in basic back then.”

“And the kid was never seen again? That means it’s an open case. Cold, but open. Which means the paperwork should still exist. And someone should remember it.”

“That’s exactly what McNally was hoping.”

“And he’s looking to screw the FBI? Not us?”

“The story is you guys did a fine job.”

“And what did the FBI do wrong?”

“They didn’t find the kid.”

“What good will all this do?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “You tell me. You know how it is with people. It might put some minds at rest, I guess.”

“OK,” Hoag said. “I’ll put the word out at the station house. Someone will get you in, first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Any chance of doing something tonight? If I could get this done by midnight, it would cut McNally’s bill by one day. He doesn’t have much money.”

“You turning down a bigger paycheck?”

“One veteran to another. You know how it is. Plus I’ve got business elsewhere. I need to get to Virginia as soon as I can.”

Hoag checked his watch. Twenty minutes past four. He said, “All that old stuff is in the basement under the county clerk’s office. You can’t be in there after five o’clock.”

“Any way of getting it out?”

“Oh, man, that’s asking a lot.”

“I don’t need court exhibits. I don’t want the physical evidence, assuming there is any. I just want the paperwork.”

“I could get my ass kicked real bad.”

“I just want to read it. Where’s the harm in that? In and out in one night. Who’s even going to know?”

“There’s probably a lot of it. Boxes and boxes.”

“I’ll help with the grunt work.”

“McNally was Second Armored? Same as Tony?”

Reacher nodded. “But Second Squadron, not Third. Not quite in Tony’s class.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Marriott. Where else?”

There was a long pause. The younger cop looked on. Hoag was well aware of his scrutiny. Reacher watched the dynamic unfold. Hoag cycled through proper civil caution to a kind of nostalgic old-school can-do soldier-to-soldier recklessness. He looked at Reacher and said, “OK, I know a guy. We’ll get this done. But it’s better that you’re not there. So go wait for us. We’ll deliver.”

So Reacher drove back to the Courtyard Marriott and put the Cadillac way in the rear, behind the building itself, where it couldn’t be seen from the front. Safer that way, in case Seth Duncan couldn’t be stopped from getting on the horn and spreading the word. Then he walked back and waited at the lobby desk for the clerk to finish on the phone. He seemed to be taking a couple of bookings from someone. When he was done Reacher bought a night in a ground floor room, which turned out to be way in the back of the H, very quiet and very adequate, very clean and very well equipped, all green and tan colors and brass accents and pale wood. Then forty minutes later Hoag and his partner showed up in a borrowed K-9 van loaded with eleven cardboard cartons of files. Five minutes after that, all eleven cartons were in Reacher’s room.

And five minutes after that, but sixty miles to the north, the doctor left the motel lounge. He had talked with Vincent a bit, just shooting the shit, but mostly he had drunk three triples of Jim Beam. Nine measures of bourbon, in a little more than an hour. And it was cloudy and going dark, which meant that his glance up and down the road didn’t reveal what it would have if the sun had been brighter. He climbed into the pick-up truck and started the motor and backed out from his place of concealment. He swung the wheel and crossed the lot and turned right on the two-lane.

Chapter 28

The six remaining Cornhuskers had split up and were operating solo. Two were parked north on the two-lane, two were parked south, one was out cruising the tangle of lanes to the southeast, and the sixth was out cruising the tangle of lanes to the southwest.

The doctor ran into the two to the north.

Almost literally. His plan was to dump the truck as soon as he found some neutral no-man’s-land and then walk home cross-country. He was getting his bearings and looking around as he drove, staring left and right, the bourbon making him slow and numb. His gaze came back to the traffic lane and he saw he was about one second away from colliding head-on with another truck parked half on and half off the shoulder. It was just sitting there, facing the wrong way, with its lights off. Eyes to brain to hands, everything buffered by the bourbon fog, a split second of delay, a wrench of the wheel, and suddenly he was heading diagonally for another truck parked on the other shoulder, thirty yards farther on. He stamped on the brake and all four wheels locked up and he skidded and came to a stop more or less sideways.

The second truck pulled out and blocked the road ahead of him.

The first truck pulled out and blocked the road behind him.

In Las Vegas Mahmeini dialed his phone. His main guy answered, eight blocks away, in Safir’s office. Mahmeini said, “Change of plan. You two are going to Nebraska, right now. Use the company plane. The pilot will have the details.”

His guy said, “OK.”

Mahmeini said, “It’s a two-part mission. First, find this stranger everybody is talking about and take him out. Second, get close to the Duncans. Build up some trust. Then take out Safir’s guys, and Rossi’s too, so that from this point onward we’re bypassing two links in the chain. In the future we can deal direct. Much more profit that way. Much more control, too.”

His guy said, “OK.”

The doctor sat still behind the wheel, shaking with shock and fear and adrenaline. The Cornhuskers climbed out of their vehicles. Big guys. Red jackets. They walked toward the doctor’s stalled truck, taking it slow and easy, one from the left, one from the right. They stood for a second, one each side of the pick-up’s cab, still and quiet in the afternoon gloom. Then one opened the passenger door, and one opened the driver’s door. The guy at the passenger door stood ready to block an escape, and the guy at the driver’s door reached inside and hauled the doctor out by the collar of his coat. The doctor went down like a deadweight, straight to the blacktop, and the guy hauled him up again and hit him hard in the gut and then turned him around and hit him twice more, low in the back, right over his kidneys. The doctor fell to his knees and puked bourbon on the road.

The guy who had been waiting at the passenger door walked back to his vehicle and parked it where it had been before. Then he put the doctor’s truck right behind it. He rejoined his buddy and between them they wrestled the doctor up into the cab of the first guy’s truck. Then they drove away, one on the right, one on the left, with the doctor jammed between them on the three-person bench, shaking and shivering, his chin on his chest.

In Las Vegas Safir dialed his phone, and his guy answered, in Rossi’s office, six blocks away. Safir said, “New developments. I’m sending you two to Nebraska. I’ll fax the details to the airport.”

His guy said, “OK.”

Safir said, “Rossi’s guys will meet you at the hotel. Mahmeini is sending guys too. The six of you will work together until the stranger is down. In the meantime, try and get something going with the Duncans. Build a relationship. Then take Rossi’s guys out. That way we’re one step closer to the motherlode. We can double our margin.”

His guy said, “OK.”

“And if you get the chance, take Mahmeini’s guys out too. I think I can get next to his customer. I mean, where else can he get stuff like this? We could maybe quadruple our margin.”

His guy said, “OK, boss.”

The Cornhuskers drove south, five fast miles, and then they slowed and turned in to the Duncans’ shared driveway. The doctor looked up at the change of speed and direction and moaned a strangled inarticulate sigh and closed his eyes and dropped his head again. The guy on his right smacked an elbow in his ribs. He said, “You need to get that voice working better, my friend. Because you’ve got some explaining to do.”

They took it slow all the way up to the houses, formal and ceremonial, mission accomplished, and they parked out front and got out and hauled their prize out after them. They marched him to Jacob Duncan’s door and knocked. A minute later Jacob Duncan opened it up and one of the Cornhuskers put his hand flat on the doctor’s back and shoved him inside, and said, “We found this guy using the truck we lost. He put his own damn plates on it.”

Jacob Duncan looked at the doctor for ten long seconds. He raised his hand and patted him gently on the cheek. Pale skin, damp and clammy, lumps and bruises. Then he bunched the front of the doctor’s shirt in his fist and dragged him farther into the hallway. He turned and pushed him onward, through the dark depths of the house, toward the kitchen in back. Their prisoner, in the system.

Jacob Duncan turned back to the Cornhuskers.

“Good work, boys,” he said. “Now go finish the job. Find Reacher. He’s on foot again, clearly. If the doctor knows where he is, he’s sure to tell us soon, and we’ll let you know. But in the meantime, keep looking.”

Roberto Cassano was still in Jacob Duncan’s kitchen. Angelo Mancini was still in there with him. They saw the sad-sack doctor stumble in from the hallway, all drunk and raggedy and terrified, with Mancini’s earlier handiwork still clearly visible all over his face. Then Cassano’s phone rang. He checked the screen and saw that it was Rossi calling and he stepped out the back door and walked across the weedy gravel. He hit the button and raised the phone and Rossi said, “Complications.”

Cassano said, “Such as?”

“I had to calm things down at this end. It was getting out of control. I had to talk to people, change a few perceptions. Long story short, you’re getting reinforcements. Two of Safir’s guys, and two of Mahmeini’s.”

“That should shorten the process.”

“Initially,” Rossi said. “But then it’s going to get very difficult. A buck gets ten they’re coming with instructions to cut us out of the chain. Mahmeini is probably looking to cut Safir out too. So don’t let any of them get close to the Duncans. Not for a minute. Don’t let the Duncans make any new friends. And watch your step as soon as the stranger is down. You’re going to have four guys gunning for you.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“I want you to stay alive. And in control.”

“Rules of engagement?”

“Put Safir’s guys down for sure. That way we remove the link above us. We can sell direct to Mahmeini, at Safir’s prices.”

“OK.”

“And put Mahmeini’s guys down too, if you have to, for self-defense. But make sure to make it look like Safir’s guys or the Duncans did it. I still need Mahmeini himself. There’s no wiggle room there. I have no access to the ultimate buyer without him.”

“OK.”

“So leave right now. Pull back to the hotel and lie low. You’ll meet the others there, probably very soon. Make contact and make a plan.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“The Iranians will claim they are. But they can stick that where the sun don’t shine. You know the people and the terrain. Keep on top of it and be very careful.”

“OK, boss,” Cassano said. And two minutes later he and Mancini were back in their rented blue Impala, heading south on the arrow-straight two-lane, sixty miles to go.

The white van was still on Route 3, still in Canada, still heading east, more than halfway across Alberta, with Saskatchewan up ahead. It had just skipped a right turn on Route 4, which led south to the border, where the modest Canadian blacktop ribbon changed to the fullblown majesty of U.S. Interstate 15, which ran all the way to Las Vegas and then Los Angeles. The change of status in what had once been the same horse trail was emblematic of the two nations’ sense of self, and as well as that it was taken to be a very dangerous road. It was an obvious artery, with two big prizes at the end of it, and so it was assumed to be monitored very carefully. Which was why the white van had passed up the chance of its speed and convenience and was still laboring east on the minor thoroughfare, toward a small town called Medicine Hat, where it intended to finally turn south and lose itself in the wild country around Pakowki Lake, before finding a nameless rutted track that ran deep into the woods, and all the way to America.

The Duncans made the doctor stand upright at the head of the table. They sat and looked at him and said nothing for a minute, Jacob and Seth on one side, Jasper and Jonas on the other. Finally Jacob asked, “Was it an act of deliberate rebellion?”

The doctor didn’t answer. His throat was swollen and painful from vomiting, and he didn’t understand the question anyway.

Jacob asked, “Or was it some imagined sense of entitlement?”

The doctor didn’t answer.

“We need to know,” Jacob said. “You must tell us. This is a fascinating subject. It needs to be thoroughly explored.”

The doctor said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But perhaps your wife does,” Jacob said. “Should we go pick her up and bring her here and ask her?”

“Leave my wife out of it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Please. Please leave her alone.”

“She could entertain us. She used to, you know. We knew her long before you did. She came here half a dozen times. To this very house. She was happy to. Of course, we were paying her, which might have influenced her attitude. You should ask her, about what she used to do for money.”

“She babysat.”

“Is that what she says? I suppose she would, now.”

“That’s what she did.”

“Ask her again sometime. Catch her in an unguarded moment. She was a girl of many talents, your wife, once upon a time. She might tell you all about it. You might enjoy it.”

“What do you want?”

Jacob Duncan said, “We want to know the psychology behind what you did.”

“What did I do?”

“You put your license plates on our truck.”

The doctor said nothing.

Jacob Duncan said, “We want to know why. That’s all. It’s not much to ask. Was it just impertinence? Or was it a message? Were you retaliating for our having disabled your own vehicle? Were you claiming a right? Were you making a point? Were you scolding us for having gone too far?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor said.

“Or did someone else change the plates?”

“I don’t know who changed them.”

“But it wasn’t you?”

“No.”

“Where did you find the truck?”

“At the motel. This afternoon. It was next to my car. With my plates on it.”

“Why didn’t you change them back?”

“I don’t know.”

“To drive with phony plates is a criminal offense, isn’t it? A misdemeanor at best. Should medical practitioners indulge in criminal behavior?”

“I guess not.”

“But you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to us. We’re not a court of law. Or a state medical board. But you should rehearse an excuse. You might lose your job. Then what would your wife do for money? She might have to return to her old ways. A comeback tour, of sorts. Not that we would have her back. I mean, who would? A raddled old bitch like that?”

The doctor said nothing.

“And you treated my daughter-in-law,” Jacob Duncan said. “After being told not to.”

“I’m a doctor. I had to.”

“The Hippocratic oath?”

“Exactly.”

“Which says, ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

“I didn’t do any harm.”

“Look at my son’s face.”

The doctor looked.

“You did that,” Jacob said.

“I didn’t.”

“You caused it to be done. Which is the same thing. You did harm.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“So who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do. The word is out. Surely you’ve heard it? We know you people talk about us all the time. On the phone tree. Did you think it was a secret?”

“It was Reacher.”

“Finally,” Jacob said. “We get to the point. You were his co-conspirator.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You asked him to drive you to my son’s house.”

“I didn’t. He made me go.”

“Whatever,” Jacob said. “There’s no use crying over spilt milk. But we have a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“Where is Reacher now?”

Chapter 29

Reacher was in his ground floor room at the Courtyard Marriott, knee-deep in old police reports. He had used the flat-bladed screwdriver from his pocket to slit the tape on all eleven cartons, and he had sampled the first page out of every box to establish the correct date order. He had shuffled the cartons into a line, and then he had started a quick-and-dirty overview of the records, right from the very beginning.

As expected, the notes were comprehensive. It had been a high-profile case with many sensitivities, and there had been three other agencies on the job—the State Police, the National Guard, and the FBI. The county PD had taken pains to be very professional. Multi-agency cases were essentially competitions, and the county PD hadn’t wanted to lose. The department had recorded every move and covered every base and covered every ass. In some ways the files were slices of history. They had been nowhere near a computer. They were old-fashioned, human, and basic. They were typewritten, probably on old IBM electric machines. They had misaligned lines and corrections made with white fluid. The paper itself was foxed and brown, thin and brittle, and musty. There were no reams of cell phone records, because no one had had cell phones back then, not even the cops. No DNA samples had been taken. There were no GPS coordinates.

The files were exactly like the files Reacher himself had created, way back at the start of his army career.

Dorothy had called the cops from a neighbor’s house, at eight in the evening on an early summer Sunday. Not 911, but the local switchboard number. There was a transcript of the call, by the look of it probably not from a recording. Probably reconstructed from the desk sergeant’s memory. Dorothy’s last name was Coe. Her only child, Margaret, had last been seen more than six hours previously. She was a good girl. No problems. No troubles. No reasons. She had been wearing a green dress and had ridden away on a pink bicycle.

The desk sergeant had called the captain and the captain had called a detective who had just gotten off the day shift. The detective was called Miles Carson. Carson had sent squad cars north and the hunt had begun. The weather had been good and there had been an hour of twilight and then darkness had fallen. Carson himself had arrived on scene within forty minutes. The next twelve hours had unfolded pretty much the way Dorothy had described over breakfast, the house-to-house canvass, the flashlight searches, the loud-hailer appeals to check every barn and outbuilding, the all-night motor patrols, the arrival of the dogs at first light, the State Police contribution, the National Guard’s loan of a helicopter.

Miles Carson was a thorough man, but he had gotten no result.

In principle Reacher might have criticized a couple of things. No reason to wait until dawn to call in the dogs, for instance. Dogs can work in the dark. But it was a moot point anyway, because as soon as Margaret had gotten on her bicycle, her scent had disappeared, suspended in the air, whisked away by the breeze, insulated by rubber tires. The dogs tracked her to her own driveway, and that was all. The loud-hailer appeals for folks to search their own property were curiously circular too, because what was a guilty party going to do? Turn himself in? Although, in Carson’s defense, foul play was not yet suspected. The first Carson had heard about local suspicions had come at nine the next morning, when Dorothy Coe had broken down and spilled the beans about the Duncans. That interview had lasted an hour and filled nine pages of notes. Then Carson had gotten right on it.

But from the start, the Duncans had looked innocent.

They even had an alibi. Five years earlier they had sold the family farm, retaining only a T-shaped acre that encompassed their driveway and their three houses, and in the country way of things they had never gotten around to marking off their new boundaries. Their neighbors’ last plowed furrows were their property line. But eventually they decided to put up a post-and-rail fence. It was a big production, much heavier and sturdier than was standard. They hired four local teenagers to come do the work. The four boys had been there all day on that Sunday, dawn to dusk, measuring, sawing, digging deep holes for the posts. The three Duncans and the eight-year-old Seth had been right there with them, all day, dawn to dusk, supervising, directing, checking up, helping out. The four boys confirmed that the Duncans had never left the property, and no one had stopped by, least of all a little girl in a green dress on a pink bicycle.

Even so, Carson had hauled the Duncans in for questioning. By that point a hint of foul play was definitely in the air, so the State Police had to be involved, because of jurisdiction issues, so the Duncans were taken to a State barracks over near Lincoln. Seth went with them and was questioned by female officers, but had nothing to say. The three adults were grilled for days. Nebraska, in the 1980s. Rules and procedures were pretty loose where child kidnapping was suspected. But the Duncans admitted nothing. They allowed their property to be searched, voluntarily. Carson’s people did the job thoroughly, which wasn’t hard because there wasn’t much property. Just the T-shaped acre of land, bounded by the unfinished post-and-rail fence, and the three houses themselves. Carson’s people found nothing. Carson called the FBI, who sent a team equipped with the latest 1980s technology. The FBI found nothing. The Duncans were released, driven home, and the case went cold.

Reacher crawled across the room, back to the first carton, hands and knees, overview completed, ready to start in on the fine details.

The doctor didn’t answer. He just stood there, bruised, sore, shaking, sweating. Jacob Duncan repeated the question: “Where is Reacher now?”

The doctor said, “I would like to sit down.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“A little.”

“At the motel?”

“No,” the doctor said. “I figured Mr. Vincent wouldn’t serve me.”

“So where were you drinking?”

“At home.”

“And then you walked to the motel?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I needed something from my car. Some medical equipment.”

“So you were already drunk when you stole our truck?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t have done it if I was sober.”

“Where is Reacher now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like a drink?”

The doctor said, “A drink?”

“You’re familiar with the concept, I think.”

“Yes, I would like a drink.”

Jacob Duncan got up and stepped across his kitchen to a cabinet on the wall. He opened it up and took out a bottle of Wild Turkey, almost full. From another cabinet he took a glass. He carried both back to the table and set them down. He took stuff off a chair in the corner, a pair of boots, old mail, a ball of string, and he carried the chair across the room and placed it behind the doctor.

He said, “Sit down, please. And help yourself.”

The doctor sat down and shuffled the chair closer to the table and uncorked the bottle. He poured himself a generous measure and drank it all in one go. He poured a second glass.

Jacob Duncan asked, “Where is Reacher now?”

The doctor said, “I don’t know.”

“I think you do. And it’s time to make your choice. You can sit here with us and drink my fine bourbon and pass the time of day in pleasant conversation. Or we could do it another way. We could have Seth break your nose, for instance. I’m pretty certain he would like to. Or we could have your wife join us, and we could subject her to petty humiliations. My guess is she wouldn’t put up much of a fight, having known us all these years. No marks, no overt damage. But the shared experience might have an effect on your marriage, in the years to come, you having shown yourself unable to defend her. Because she’ll see it as unwilling, not unable. You should think about it.”

“Reacher’s gone,” the doctor said.

“Gone?”

“He left this afternoon.”

“How?”

“He got a ride.”

“Impossible,” Jacob said. “We blocked the road, north and south.”

“Not in time.”

“Did you see him go?”

“He was at the motel. I think he changed the plates, because he was going to use your truck. But someone else came along and he hitched a ride, which was better.”

“Who came along?”

“Not one of us. Just someone driving through.”

“What kind of car?”

“I’m not good with cars. I think it was white.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

The doctor drank most of his second glass. Gulp, swallow, gulp, swallow. He said, “He’s going to Virginia.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor said. He filled his glass again. “But that’s all he’s ever talked about, right from the first moment he got here. He’s on his way to Virginia, and always was.”

“What’s in Virginia?”

“He didn’t say. A woman, perhaps. That’s the impression I got.”

“From what?”

“Just a feeling.”

Jacob Duncan said, “You’re nervous.”

The doctor said, “Of course I am.”

“Why? You’re just sharing a drink with your neighbors.”

The doctor said nothing.

Jacob Duncan said, “You think he’s coming back?”

“I don’t.”

“Is he coming back?”

The doctor said nothing.

“Tell us.”

The doctor said, “He was a military cop. He knows how to do things.”

“What things?”

“He said he’s going to visit with the county police. Tomorrow morning, I suppose. He said he’s going to look at the file from twenty-five years ago. If it’s OK, he’s going to Virginia. If it’s not, he’s coming back here.”

“Why would he?”

“To get you, that’s why.”

Up in Canada, the white van had made the right turn just shy of the town called Medicine Hat, and was heading south on the lonely road that led down toward Pakowki Lake. It was already full dark up there. No lights at all, and no moon or stars either, because of the clouds. The road was bad. It was pitted with potholes. It twisted and it wandered, and it rose and it fell. It was hard going, and not entirely safe. It was dangerous, even, because at that stage a broken axle or a busted half-shaft would ruin everything. So the driver turned left, on a rough grassy track he had used before, and bumped and bounced two hundred yards to a picnic spot provided for summer visitors. In winter it was always deserted. The driver had seen bears there, and coyotes, and red foxes, and moose, and twice he thought he had seen elk, although they might have been shadows, and once he thought he had seen a wolf, but it might have been just another coyote. But he had never seen people. Not in winter. Not even once.

He parked under a towering pine and shut down for the night.

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini pulled their rented Impala around the back of the Marriott and slotted it next to a black Cadillac that was standing alone in the rear of the lot. They got out and stretched and checked their watches. They figured they had time for a quick dinner before their reinforcements arrived. The diner or the rib shack? They liked neither one. Why would they? They had taste, and the retard local yokels sure as hell didn’t. But they were hungry, and they had to eat somewhere.

They pondered for a second and decided on the diner. They turned away from the hotel lobby and headed for the main drag.

The Duncans let the doctor finish a third glass of Wild Turkey, and then they sent him on his way. They pushed him out the door and told him to walk home. They watched him down the driveway, and then they turned and strolled back and regrouped in Jacob’s kitchen. Jacob put the bottle back in the cupboard, and put the glass in the sink, and returned the chair to the corner of the room. His brother Jasper asked, “So what do you think?”

Jacob said, “About what?”

“Should we call the county and stop them showing Reacher the files?”

“I don’t see how we could do that.”

“We could try.”

“It would draw attention.”

Jonas asked, “Should we call Eldridge Tyler? Strictly as a backup?”

“Then we would owe him something.”

“It would be a wise investment, if Reacher is coming back.”

“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Jacob said. “That’s my first thought, certainly.”

“But?”

“Ultimately I guess it depends on what he finds, and what he doesn’t find.”

Chapter 30

Reacher found a statement from the little girl’s father. It was long and detailed. Cops weren’t dumb. Fathers were automatic suspects when little girls disappeared. Margaret’s father had been Arthur Coe, universally known as Artie. At the time of his daughter’s disappearance he was thirty-seven years old. Relatively ancient for a father of an eight-year-old, back in the 1980s. He was a local man. He was a Vietnam veteran. He had refused an offer from the local Selective Service board to classify his farmwork as an essential occupation. He had served, and he had come back. A brave man. A patriot. He had been fixing machinery in an outbuilding when Margaret had ridden away, and he had still been fixing it four hours later, when his wife came to tell him that the kid was still out. He had dropped everything and started the search. His statement was full of the same kind of feelings Dorothy had described over breakfast, the unreality, the hope against hope, the belief that the kid was just out playing somewhere, surely to God, maybe picking flowers, that she had lost track of time, that she would be home soon, right as rain. Even after twenty-five years the typewritten words still reeked of shock and pain and misery.

Arthur Coe was an innocent man, Reacher thought.

He moved on, to a packet marked by hand Margaret Coe Biography. Just a regular manila envelope, quite thin, as would befit an eight-year-old’s short life story. The gummed flap had never been licked, but it was stuck down anyway, from dampness in the storage facility. Reacher eased it open. There were sheets of paper inside, plus a photograph in a yellowed glassine jacket. Reacher eased it out. And was surprised.

Margaret Coe was Asian.

Vietnamese, possibly, or Thai, or Cambodian, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. Dorothy wasn’t. Arthur probably hadn’t been, either. Not a native Nebraskan farmworker. Therefore Margaret was adopted. She had been a sweet little thing. The photograph was dated on the back, in a woman’s handwriting, with an added note: Nearly eight! Beautiful as ever! It was a color picture, probably amateur, but proficient. Better than a snapshot. It had been thought about and composed, and taken with a decent camera. A good likeness, obviously, to have been given to the police. It showed a little Asian girl, standing still, posing, smiling. She was small and slight and slender. She had trust and merriment in her eyes. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a white blouse.

She was a lovely child.

Reacher heard the stoner’s voice in his mind, from earlier in the day: I hear that poor ghost screaming, man, screaming and wailing and moaning and crying, right here in the dark.

And at that point Reacher took a break.

Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe took a pork chop from her refrigerator. The chop was part of a pig a friend had slaughtered a mile away, part of a loose cooperative designed to get people through tough times. Dorothy trimmed the fat, and put a little pepper on the meat, and a little mustard, and a little brown sugar. She put the chop in an open dish and put the dish in the oven. She set her table, one place, a knife, a fork, and a plate. She took a glass and filled it with water and put it next to the plate. She folded a square of paper towel for a napkin. Dinner, for one.

Reacher was hungry. He had eaten no lunch. He called the desk and asked for room service and the guy who had booked him in told him there was no room service. He apologized for the lack. Then he went ahead and mentioned the two restaurants named on the billboard Reacher had already seen. The guy promised a really excellent meal could be gotten at either one of them. Maybe he was on a retainer from the Chamber of Commerce.

Reacher put his coat on and headed down the hallway to the lobby. Two more guests were checking in. Both men. They looked Middle Eastern. Iranian, possibly. They were small and rumpled and unshaven and not very clean. One of them glanced at Reacher and Reacher nodded politely and headed for the door. It was dark outside, and cold. Reacher figured he would use the diner for breakfast, and therefore the rib shack for dinner. So he turned right on the back street and hustled.

The doctor walked fast to beat the cold and made it home inside an hour. His wife was waiting for him. She was worried. He had some explaining to do. He started talking and got through the whole story before she spoke a word. At the end he went quiet and she said, “So it’s a gamble, isn’t it? Is that what you’re saying? Like a horse race. Will Reacher come back before Seth gets home and finds out that you just sat there and watched his car get stolen?”

The doctor said, “Will Reacher come back at all?”

“I think he will.”

“Why would he?”

“Because the Duncans took that kid. Who else do you think did it?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here. I was in Idaho. I was a kid myself. So were you.”

“Believe me.”

“I do. But I wish you would tell me exactly why I should.”

She said nothing.

The doctor said, “Maybe Seth won’t go home. Maybe he’ll spend the night at his father’s place.”

“That’s possible. People say he often does. But we shouldn’t assume.” She started moving around the house, checking the window locks, checking the door locks, front and back. She said, “We should wedge the doors with furniture.”

“Then they’ll come in the window.”

“Tornado glass. It’s pretty strong.”

“Those guys weigh three hundred pounds. You saw what they did to my car.”

“We have to do something.”

“They’ll burn us out. Or they’ll just stand on the step and tell us to open up. Then what are we going to do? Disobey them?”

“We could hold out a day or two. We have food and water.”

“Might be longer than a day or two. Might be forever. Even if you’re right, there’s no guarantee Reacher will find the proof. There probably isn’t any proof. How can there be? The FBI would have found it at the time.”

“We have to hope.”

Reacher ordered baby back ribs with coleslaw and a cup of coffee. The place was dim and dirty and the walls were covered with old signs and advertisements. Probably all fake. Probably all ordered in bulk from a restaurant supplier, probably all painted in a Taiwanese factory and then scuffed and scratched and battered by the next guy along on the production line. But the ribs turned out to be good. The rub was subtle and the meat was tender. The coleslaw was crisp. The coffee was hot. And the check was tiny. Tip money, anyplace east of the Mississippi or south of Sacramento.

Reacher paid and left and walked back to the hotel. Two guys were in the lot, hauling bags out of the trunk of a red Ford Taurus. More guests. The Marriott was experiencing a regular wintertime bonanza. The Taurus was new and plain. Probably a rental. The guys were big. Arabs of some kind. Syrians, maybe, or Lebanese. Reacher was familiar with that part of the world. The two guys looked at him as he passed and he nodded politely and walked on. A minute later he was back in his room, with faded and brittle paper in his hands.

That night the Duncans ate lamb, in Jonas Duncan’s kitchen. Jonas fancied himself a hell of a cook. And in truth he wasn’t too bad. His roast usually came in on the right side of OK, and he served it with potatoes and vegetables and a lot of gravy, which helped. And a lot of liquor, which helped even more. All four Duncans ate and drank together, two facing two across the table, and then they cleaned up together, and then Jasper looked at his brother Jacob and said, “We still have six boys capable of walking and talking. We need to decide how to deploy them tonight.”

Jacob said, “Reacher won’t come back tonight.”

“Can we guarantee that?”

“We can’t really guarantee anything at all, except that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west.”

“Therefore it’s better to err on the side of caution.”

“OK,” Jacob said. “Put one to the south and tell the other five to get some rest.”

Jasper got on the phone and issued the instructions. Then he hung up and the room went quiet and Seth Duncan looked at his father and said, “Drive me home?”

His father said, “No, stay a little longer, son. We have things to talk about. Our shipment could be here this time tomorrow. Which means we have preparations to make.”

Cassano and Mancini got back from the diner and went straight to Cassano’s room. Cassano called the desk and asked if any pairs of guests had just checked in. He was told yes, two pairs had just arrived, separately, one after the other. Cassano asked to be connected with their rooms. He spoke first to Mahmeini’s men, and then to Safir’s, and he set up an immediate rendezvous in his own room. He figured he could establish some dominance by keeping the others off balance, by denying them any kind of thinking time, and by bringing them to his own turf, not that he would want anyone to think that a shitty flophouse room in Nebraska was his kind of place. But he knew psychology, and he knew no one gets the upper hand without working on the details.

The Iranians arrived first. Mahmeini’s men. Only one of them spoke, which Cassano thought was OK, given that he spoke for Rossi, and Mancini didn’t. No names were exchanged. Again, OK. It was that kind of business. The Iranians were not physically impressive. They were small and ragged and rumpled, and they seemed quiet and furtive and secretive. And strange. Cassano opened the minibar door and told them to help themselves. Whatever they wanted. But neither man took a thing.

The Lebanese arrived five minutes later. Safir’s men. Arabs, for sure, but they were big, and they looked plenty tough. Again, only one of them spoke, and he gave no names. Cassano indicated that they should sit on the bed, but they didn’t. They leaned on the wall instead. They were trying for menace, Cassano figured. And nearly succeeding. A little psychology of their own. Cassano let the room go quiet and he looked at them all for a minute, one after the other, four men he had only just met, and who would soon be trying to kill him.

He said, “It’s a fairly simple job. Sixty miles north of here there’s a corner of the county with forty farms. There’s a guy running around causing trouble. Truth is, it’s not really very important, but our mutual supplier is taking it personally. Business is on hold until the guy goes down.”

Mahmeini’s man said, “We know all that. Next?”

“OK,” Cassano said. “Next is we all move up there and work together and take care of the problem.”

“Starting when?”

“Let’s say tomorrow morning, first light.”

“Have you seen the guy?”

“Not yet.”

“Got a name?”

“Reacher.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“It’s an American name. What’s yours?”

“My name doesn’t matter. Got a description?”

“Big guy, blue eyes, white, six-five, two-fifty, brown coat.”

Mahmeini’s man said, “That’s worthless. This is America. This is farm country. It’s full of settlers and peasants. They all look like that. I mean, we just saw a guy exactly like that.”

Safir’s guy said, “He’s right. We saw one too. We’re going to need a much better description.”

Cassano said, “We don’t have one. But it will be easier when we get up there. Reacher stands out, apparently. And the local population is prepared to help us. They’ve been told to phone in with sightings. And there’s no cover up there.”

Mahmeini’s man said, “So where is he hiding out?”

“We don’t know. There’s a motel, but he’s not in it. Maybe he’s sleeping rough.”

“In this weather? Is that likely?”

“There are sheds and barns. I’m sure we’ll find him.”

“And then what?”

“We put him down.”

“Risky.”

“I know. He’s tough. So far he’s taken out four of the local people.”

Mahmeini’s man said, “I don’t care how tough he thinks he is. And I don’t care how many local people he’s taken out either. Because I’m sure they’re all idiots up there. I mean it’s risky because this isn’t the Wild West anymore. Do we have a safe exit strategy?”

Cassano said, “They tell me he’s a kind of hobo. So nobody is going to miss him. There’s not going to be an investigation. There aren’t even any cops up there.”

“That helps.”

“And it’s farm country. Like you said. There must be backhoes all over the place. We’ll bury him. Alive, preferably, the way our supplier is talking.”

Chapter 31

The physical search of the area was described four separate ways, in four separate files, the first from the county PD, the second from the State Police, the third from the National Guard’s helicopter unit, and the fourth from the FBI. The helicopter report was thin and useless. Margaret Coe had been wearing a green dress, which didn’t help in corn country in early summer. And the pilot had stayed above a thousand feet, to stop his downdraft damaging the young plants. Priorities had to be observed in a farm state, even when a kid was missing. Nothing significant had been seen from the air. No freshly turned earth, no flash of pink or chrome from the bike, no flattened stalks in any of the fields. Nothing at all, in fact, except an ocean of corn.

A waste of time and aviation fuel.

Both the county PD and the State Police had covered the forty farms at ground level. First had come the loud-hailer appeals in the dark, and the next day every house had been visited and every occupant had been asked to verify that they hadn’t seen the kid and that they had searched their outbuildings thoroughly. There was near-universal cooperation. Only one old couple confessed they hadn’t checked properly, so the cops searched their place for themselves. Nothing was found. The motel had been visited, every cabin checked, the Dumpster emptied, the lot searched for evidence. Nothing was found.

The Duncan compound showed up in three files. Everyone except the helicopter unit had been there. First the county PD had gone in, then the county PD and the State Police together, then the State Police on its own, and then finally the FBI, which had been a lot of visits and a lot of people for such a small place. The searches had been intense, because the smallness of the place had struck people as somehow sinister in itself. Reacher could sense it between the lines, quite clearly, even a quarter-century later. Rural cops. They had been confused and disconcerted. It was almost like the Duncans hated the land. They had stripped away every inch of it they could. They had kept a single track driveway, plus token shoulders, plus a grudging five or ten yards beyond the foundations of their three houses. That was all. That was the whole extent of the place.

But the smallness had made it easy to search. The reports were meticulous. The piles of heavy lumber for the half-built fence had been taken apart and examined. Gravel had been raked up, and lines of men had walked slow and bent over, staring at the ground, and the dogs had covered literally every square inch ten times each.

Nothing was found.

The search moved indoors. As intense as it had been outside, it was twice as thorough inside. Absolutely painstaking. Reacher had searched a lot of places, a lot of times, and he knew how hard it was. But four times in quick succession not a single corner had been cut, and not a single effort had been spared. Stuff had been taken apart, and voids in walls had been opened up, and floors had been lifted. Reacher knew why. Nothing was stated on paper, and nothing was admitted, but again, he could read it right there between the lines. They were looking for a kid, certainly, but by that point they were also looking for parts of a kid.

Nothing was found.

The FBI contribution was a full-on forensics sweep, 1980s-style. It was documented and described at meticulous length on sheets of Bureau paper that had been photocopied and collated and stapled and passed on as a courtesy. Hairs and fibers had been collected, every flat surface had been fingerprinted, all kinds of magic lights and devices and gadgets had been deployed. A corpse-sniffing dog had been flown in from Denver and then sent back again after producing a null result. Technicians with a dozen different specialist expertises had been in and out for twelve solid hours.

Nothing was found.

Reacher closed the file. He could hear it in his head right then, the same way they must have heard it all those years ago: the sound of a case going cold.

Sixty miles north Dorothy Coe was standing at her sink, washing her plate and her knife and her fork and her glass, and scrubbing the oven dish that her chop had cooked in. She dried it all with a thin linen towel and put it all away, the plate and the glass in a cupboard, the silverware in a drawer, the oven dish in another cupboard. She put her napkin in the trash and wiped her table with a rag and pushed her chair in neatly. Then she stepped out to her front parlor. She intended to sit a spell, and then go to bed, and then get up early and drive to the motel. Maybe she could help Mr. Vincent fix the mirror behind his bar. Maybe she could even glue the handle back on his NASA mug.

Reacher sat a spell on the floor in his Marriott room, thinking. It was ten o’clock in the evening. His job was done, two hours ahead of his pretended midnight schedule. He got to his feet and packed up all eleven cartons and folded their flaps into place. He stacked them neatly in the center of the floor, two piles of four and one of three. He dialed nine for a line, from the bedside table, and then he dialed the switchboard number he remembered from the transcript of Dorothy Coe’s original panic call, twenty-five years earlier. It was still an active number. It was answered. Reacher asked for Hoag, not really expecting to get him, but there was a click and a second of dead air and then the guy himself came on.

“I’m done,” Reacher told him.

“Find anything?”

“You guys did a fine job. Nothing for you to worry about. So I’m moving out.”

“So soon? You’re not staying for the nightlife?”

“I’m a simple soul. I like peace and quiet.”

“OK, leave the stuff right there. We’ll swing by and pick it up. We’ll have it back in the basement before the file jockeys even get in tomorrow. They’ll never know a thing. Mission accomplished.”

“I owe you,” Reacher said.

“Forget it,” Hoag said. “Be all you can be, and all that shit.”

“The chance would be a fine thing,” Reacher said. He hung up and grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He was way in the back of the H-shaped layout, and he had to walk all the way forward to the lobby before getting outside and looping back around to where his car was parked. The stairs came down from the second floor just before the lobby, in a space that would have been another room in the wing, if it had been a one-story structure. Just as Reacher got to them, a guy stepped off the last stair and fell in alongside him, heading the same way, to the lobby, to the door. He was one of the guys Reacher had seen checking in at the desk. Small and rumpled. Unshaven. Iranian, possibly. The guy glanced across. Reacher nodded politely. The guy nodded back. They walked on together. The guy had car keys swinging from his finger. A red tag. Avis. The guy glanced at Reacher again, up and across. Reacher glanced back. He held the door. The guy stepped out. Reacher followed. The guy looked at him again. Some kind of speculation in his eyes. Some kind of intense curiosity.

Reacher stepped left, to loop around the length of the H on the outside. The Iranian guy stayed with him. Which made some kind of possible sense, after Reacher glanced ahead and saw two cars parked back there. Seth Duncan’s Cadillac, and a dark blue Chevrolet. Prime rental material. Avis probably had thousands of them.

A dark blue Chevrolet.

Reacher stopped.

The other guy stopped.

Chapter 32

Nobody knows how long it takes for thoughts to form. People talk about electrical impulses racing through nerves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but that’s mere transmission. That’s mail delivery. The letter is written in the brain, sparked to life by some sudden damp chemical reaction, two compounds arcing across synapses and reacting like lead and acid in an automobile battery, but instead of sending twelve dumb volts to a turn signal the brain floods the body with all kinds of subtle adjustments all at once, because thoughts don’t necessarily happen one at a time. They come in starbursts and waterfalls and explosions and they race away on parallel tracks, jostling, competing, fighting for supremacy.

Reacher saw the dark blue Chevrolet and instantly linked it through Vincent’s testimony back at the motel to the two men he had seen from Dorothy Coe’s barn, while simultaneously critiquing the connection, in that Chevrolets were very common cars and dark blue was a very common color, while simultaneously recalling the two matched Iranians and the two matched Arabs he had seen, and asking himself whether the rendezvous of two separate pairs of strange men in winter in a Nebraska hotel could be just a coincidence, and if indeed it wasn’t, whether it might then reasonably imply the presence of a third pair of men, which might or might not be the two tough guys from Dorothy’s farm, however inexplicable those six men’s association might be, however mysterious their purpose, while simultaneously watching the man in front of him dropping his car key, and moving his arm, and putting his hand in his coat pocket, while simultaneously realizing that the guys he had seen on Dorothy’s farm had not been staying at Vincent’s motel, and that there was nowhere else to stay except right there, sixty miles south at the Marriott, which meant that the Chevrolet was likely theirs, at least within the bounds of reasonable possibility, which meant that the Iranian with the moving arm was likely connected with them in some way, which made the guy an enemy, although Reacher had no idea how or why, while simultaneously knowing that likely didn’t mean shit in terms of civilian jurisprudence, while simultaneously recalling years of hard-won experience that told him men like this Iranian went for their pockets in dark parking lots for one of only four reasons: either to pull out a cell phone to call for help, or to pull out a wallet or a passport or an ID to prove their innocence or their authority, or to pull out a knife, or to pull out a gun. Reacher knew all that, while also knowing that violent reaction ahead of the first two reasons would be inexcusable, but that violent reaction ahead of the latter two reasons would be the only way to save his life.

Starbursts and waterfalls and explosions of thoughts, all jostling and competing and fighting for supremacy.

Better safe than sorry.

Reacher reacted.

He twisted from the waist in a violent spasm and started a low sidearm punch aimed at the center of the Iranian’s chest. Chemical reaction in his brain, instantaneous transmission of the impulse, chemical reaction in every muscle system from his left foot to his right fist, total elapsed time a small fraction of a second, total distance to target less than a yard, total time to target another small fraction of a second, which was good to know right then, because the guy’s hand was all the way in his pocket by that point, his own nervous system reacting just as fast as Reacher’s, his elbow jerking up and back and trying to free whatever the hell it was he wanted, be it a knife, or a gun, or a phone, or a driver’s license, or a passport, or a government ID, or a perfectly innocent letter from the University of Tehran proving he was a world expert on plant genetics and an honored guest in Nebraska just days away from increasing local profits a hundredfold and eliminating world hunger at one fell swoop. But right or wrong Reacher’s fist was homing in regardless and the guy’s eyes were going wide and panicked in the gloom and his arm was jerking harder and the brown skin and the black hair on the back of his moving hand was showing above the hem of his pocket, and then came his knuckles, all five of them bunched and knotted because his fingers were clamping hard around something big and black.

Then Reacher’s blow landed.

Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his ribcage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate-glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked. It ended up six or eight feet away from the guy, completely out of his reach, safe, not retrievable, partly because of the distance itself and partly because the guy was down and he wasn’t moving at all.

In fact he was looking like he might never move again.

Something Reacher had heard about, but never actually seen.

His army medic friends had called it commotio cordis, their name for low-energy trauma to the chest wall. Low energy only in the sense that the damage wasn’t done by a car wreck or a shotgun blast but by a line drive in baseball or a football collision or a punch in a fight or a bad fall onto a blunt object. Gruesome research on laboratory animals proved it was all about luck and timing. Electrocardiograms showed waveforms associated with the beating of the heart, one of which was called the T-wave, and the experiments showed that if the blow landed when the T-wave was between fifteen and thirty milliseconds short of its peak, then lethal cardiac dysrhythmias could occur, stopping the heart just like a regular heart attack. And in a high-stress environment like a confrontation in a parking lot, a guy’s heart was pounding away much harder than normal and therefore it was bringing those T-wave peaks around much faster than usual, as many as two or possibly three times a second, thereby dramatically increasing the odds that the luck and the timing would be bad, not good.

The Iranian lay completely still.

Not breathing.

No visible pulse.

No signs of life.

The standard first-aid remedies taught by the army medics were artificial respiration and external chest compressions, eighty beats a minute, as long as it took, but Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter. So he let nature take its course for a minute, and then he helped it along a little with heavy pressure from his finger and thumb on the big arteries in the guy’s neck. Four minutes without oxygen to the brain was reckoned to be the practical limit. Reacher gave it five, just to be certain, squatting there, looking around, listening hard. No one reacted. No one came. The Iranian died, the slack tensions of deep unconsciousness fading away, the absolute soft limpness of recent death replacing them. Reacher stood up and found the car key and picked up the Glock. The key was marked with the Chevrolet stove bolt logo, but it wasn’t for the blue car. Reacher stabbed the unlock button and nothing happened. The Glock was close to new and fully loaded, seventeen bright nine-millimeter Parabellums in the magazine and one in the chamber. Reacher put it in his pocket with his screwdrivers.

He walked back to the front lot and tried again with the key. A yellow Chevy Malibu answered him. It flashed all four of its turn signals and unlocked all four of its doors. It was new and plain and clean. An obvious rental. He got in and pushed the seat back and started it up. The tank was close to full. There were rental papers in the door pocket, dated that day and made out to a Las Vegas corporation under a name that communicated nothing. There were bottles of water in the cup holders, one part-used, one unopened. Reacher backed out of the slot and drove around to the back of the H and stopped with the dead guy between the wall and the car. He found the remote button and popped the trunk. He got out and checked the space. It was not a very big opening and not a very big trunk, but then, the Iranian was not a very big guy.

Reacher bent down and went through the Iranian’s pockets. He found a phone and a knife and a wallet and a handkerchief and about a dollar in coins. He left the coins and stripped the battery out of the phone and put the battery back in one of the dead guy’s pockets and the rest of the phone in another. The knife was a switchblade with a pearl handle. Heavy, solid, and sharp. A decent implement. He put it in his own pocket, with his adjustable wrench. He checked the wallet. It held close to four hundred bucks in cash, plus three credit cards, plus a driver’s license from the state of Nevada made out to a guy named Asghar Arad Sepehr at a Las Vegas address. The photograph was plausible. The credit cards were in the same name. The cash was mostly twenties, crisp and fresh and fragrant, straight from an ATM. Reacher kept the cash and wiped the wallet with the handkerchief and put it back in the dead guy’s pocket. Then he hoisted him up, two hands, collar and belt, and turned and made ready to fold him into the yellow Malibu’s trunk.

Then he stopped.

He got a better idea.

He carried the guy over to Seth Duncan’s Cadillac and laid him gently on the ground. He found the Cadillac key in his pocket and opened the trunk and picked the guy up again and put him inside. An old-fashioned turnpike cruiser. A big trunk. Plenty of space. He closed the lid on the guy. He opened the driver’s door and used the handkerchief to wipe everything he had touched that day, the wheel, the gearshift, the mirror, the radio knobs, the door handles inside and out. Then he blipped the remote and locked up again and walked away, back to the Malibu. It was yellow, but apart from that it was fairly anonymous. Domestic brand, local plates, conventional shape. Probably less conspicuous out on the open road than the Cadillac, despite the garish color. And probably less likely to be reported stolen. Out-of-state guys with guns and knives in their pockets generally kept a lot quieter than outraged local citizens.

He checked left, checked right, checked behind, checked ahead. All quiet. Just cold air and silence and stillness and a night mist falling. He got back in the Malibu and kept the headlights off and turned around and nosed slowly out of the lot. He drove the length of McNally Street and paused. To the left was I-80, sixty miles south, a fast six-lane highway, a straight shot east all the way to Virginia. To the right were the forty farms, and the Duncans, and the Apollo Inn, and Eleanor, and the doctor and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, all of them sixty miles north.

Decision time.

Left or right? South or north?

He flicked the headlights on and turned right and headed back north.

Chapter 33

The Duncans had moved from Jonas Duncan’s kitchen to Jasper’s, because Jasper still had a mostly full bottle of Knob Creek in his cupboard. All four men were around the table, elbow to elbow, amber half-inches of bourbon in thick chipped glasses set out in front of them. They were sipping slow and talking low. Their latest shipment was somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours away. Usually a time for celebration. Like the night before Christmas. But this time they were a little subdued.

Jonas asked, “Where do you suppose it is right now?”

“Parked up for the night,” Jacob said. “At least I hope so. Close to the border, but waiting for daylight. Prudence is the key now.”

“Five hundred miles,” Jonas said. “Crossing time plus ten hours, maybe. Plus contingencies.”

Jasper asked, “How long do you suppose it takes to read a police file?”

“Good question,” Jacob said. “I’ve been giving it a little thought, naturally. It must be a very big file. And it must be stored away somewhere. Let’s say government workers start at nine in the morning. Let’s say they quit at five. Let’s say there’s some measure of bureaucracy involved in gaining access to the file. So let’s say noon tomorrow would be a practical starting point. That would give him five hours tomorrow, and maybe the full eight on the day after. That might be enough.”

“So he won’t come back for forty-eight hours at least.”

“I’m only guessing. I can’t be sure.”

“Even so. We’ll have plenty of margin.”

Seth Duncan said, “He won’t come back at all. Why would he? A hundred people read that file and said there was nothing wrong with it. And this guy isn’t a hundred times smarter than anyone else. He can’t be.”

Nobody spoke.

Seth said, “What?”

His father said, “He doesn’t have to be smarter than anyone else, son. Certainly not a hundred times smarter. He just has to be smart in a different way. Lateral is what they call it.”

“But there’s no evidence. We all know that.”

“I agree,” Jacob said. “But that’s the damn point. It’s not about what’s in the file. It’s about what isn’t in the file.”

The Malibu was like half a Cadillac. Four cylinders instead of eight, one ton instead of two, and about half as long. But it worked OK. It was cruising nicely. Not that Reacher was paying much attention to it. He was thinking about the dead Iranian, and the odds against hitting a T-wave window. The guy had been small, built like a bird, and Reacher tended to assume that people opposite him on the physical spectrum were also opposite him on the personality spectrum, so that in place of his own placid nature he imagined the guy was all strung out and nervous, which might have meant that back there in the parking lot the guy’s heart was going as fast as a hundred and eighty beats a minute, which meant those T-waves were coming around fast and furious, three times a second, which meant that the odds of hitting one of those crucial fifteen-millisecond windows ahead of a peak were about forty-five in a thousand, or a little better than one in twenty.

Unlucky. For the Iranian, certainly. But no cause for major regret. Most likely Reacher would have had to put him down anyway, one way or another, sooner or later, probably within just a few more heartbeats. It would have been practically inevitable. Once a gun was pulled, there were very few other available options. But still, it had been a first. And a last, probably, at least for a spell. Because Reacher was pretty sure the next guy he met would be a football player. He figured the Duncans knew he had gone out of town, possibly for a day, possibly forever. He figured they would have gotten hold of the doctor long ago and squeezed that news out of him. And they were realistic but cautious people. They would have stood down five of their boys for the night, and left just one lone sentry to the south. And that one lone sentry would have to be dealt with. But not via commotio cordis. Reacher wasn’t about to aim a wild punch at a Cornhusker’s center mass. Not in this lifetime. He would break his hand.

He kept the Malibu humming along, eight miles, nine, and then he started looking ahead for the bar he had seen on the shoulder. The small wooden building. The Cell Block. Maybe just outside the city limit. Unincorporated land. Maybe a question of licensing or regulation. There was mist in the air and the Malibu’s headlights made crisp little tunnels. Then they were answered by a glow in the air. A halo, far ahead on the left. Neon, in kelly green, and red, and blue. Beer signs. Plus yellow tungsten from a couple of token spots in the parking lot.

Reacher slowed and pulled in and parked his yellow car next to a pick-up that was mostly brown with corrosion. He got out and locked up and headed for the door. From close-up the place looked nothing at all like a prison. It was just a shack. It could once have been a house or a store. Even the sign was written wrong. The words Cell Block were stenciled like a notation on an electrician’s blueprint. Like something technological. There was noise inside, the warm low hubbub and hoo-hah of a half-empty late-evening bar in full swing, plus a little music under it, probably from a jukebox, a tune Reacher didn’t recognize but was prepared to like.

He went in. The door opened directly in the left front corner of the main public room. The bar ran front to back on the right, and there were tables and chairs on the left. There were maybe twenty people in the room, mostly men. The decoration scheme was really no scheme at all. Wooden tables, wheelback chairs, bar stools, board floor. There was no prison theme. In fact the electronic visuals from outside were continued inside. The stenciled words Cell Block were repeated on the bar back, flanked by foil-covered cutouts of radio towers with lightning bolts coming out of them.

Reacher threaded sideways between tables and caught the barman’s eye and the barman shuffled left to meet him. The guy was young, and his face was open and friendly. He said, “You look confused.”

Reacher said, “I guess I was expecting bars on the windows, maybe booths in the old cells. I thought maybe you would be wearing a suit with arrows all over it.”

The guy didn’t answer.

“Like an old prison,” Reacher said. “Like a cell block.”

The guy stayed blank for a second, and then he smiled.

“Not that kind of cell block,” he said. “Take out your phone.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Well, if you did, you’d find it wouldn’t work here. No signal. There’s a null zone about a mile wide. That’s why people come here. For a little undisturbed peace and quiet.”

“They can’t just not answer?”

“Human nature doesn’t really work that way, does it? People can’t ignore a ringing phone. It’s about guilty consciences. You know, wives or bosses. All kinds of hassle. Better that their phones don’t ring at all.”

“So do you have a pay phone here? Strictly for emergencies?”

The guy pointed. “Back corridor.”

“Thanks,” Reacher said. “That’s why I came in.”

He threaded down the line of stools, some of them occupied, some of them not, and he found an opening that led to the restrooms and a rear door. There was a pay phone on the wall opposite the ladies’ room. It was mounted on a cork rectangle that was dark and stained with age and marked with scribbled numbers in faded ink. He checked his pockets for quarters and found five. He wished he had kept the Iranian’s coins. He dialed the same number he had used a quarter of an hour ago, and Dorothy Coe had used a quarter of a century ago. The call was answered and he asked for Hoag, and he was connected inside ten short seconds.

“One more favor,” he said. “You got phone books for the whole county, right?”

Hoag said, “Yes.”

“I need a number for a guy called Seth Duncan, about sixty miles north of you.”

“Wait one,” Hoag said. Reacher heard the click and patter of a keyboard. A computer database, not a paper book. Hoag said, “That’s an unlisted number.”

“Unlisted as in you don’t have it, or as in you can see it but you won’t tell me?”

“Unlisted as in please don’t ask me, because you’ll be putting me on the spot.”

“OK, I won’t ask you. Anything under Eleanor Duncan?”

“No. There are four Duncans, all male names. All unlisted.”

“So give me the doctor instead.”

“What doctor?”

“The local guy up there.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “I don’t have his name.”

“Then I can’t help you. This thing is purely alphabetical by last name. It’s going to say Smith, Dr. Bill, or whatever. Something like that. In very small letters.”

“Got to be a contact number for a doctor. There might be an emergency. Got to be some way of getting hold of the guy.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Wait,” Reacher said. “I know how. Give me the Apollo Inn.”

“Apollo like the space rocket?”

“Exactly like the space rocket.”

The keyboard pattered and Hoag read out a number, a 308 area code for the western part of the state, and then seven more digits. Reacher repeated them once in his head and said, “Thanks,” and hung up and redialed.

Ten miles south, Mahmeini’s man was dialing too, calling home. He got Mahmeini on his cell, and said, “We have a problem.”

Mahmeini said, “Specifically?”

“Asghar has run out on us.”

“Impossible.”

“Well, he has. I sent him down to the car to get me a bottle of water. He didn’t come back, so I checked. The car is gone, and he’s gone too.”

“Call him.”

“I tried ten times. His phone is off.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find him.”

“I have no idea where to look.”

Mahmeini said, “He drinks, you know.”

“I know. But there’s no bar in town. Just a liquor store. And it will be closed by now. And he wouldn’t have driven to the liquor store anyway. He would have walked. It’s only about three blocks away.”

“There must be a bar. This is America. Ask the concierge.”

“There is no concierge. This isn’t the Bellagio. They don’t even put water in the rooms.”

“There must be someone at the desk. Ask him.”

“I can’t go anywhere. I don’t have a car. And I can’t ask the others for help. Not now. That would be an admission of weakness.”

“Find a way,” Mahmeini said. “Find a bar, and find a way of getting there. That’s an order.”

Reacher listened to the ring tone. It was loud and sonorous and resonant in his ear, the product of a big old-fashioned earpiece maybe an inch and a half across, buried deep inside a big old-fashioned plastic handset that probably weighed a pound. He pictured the two phones ringing in the motel, fifty miles north, one at the desk, one behind the bar. Or maybe there were more than two phones. Maybe there was a third extension in a back office, and a fourth in Vincent’s private quarters. Maybe the whole place was a regular rat’s nest of wiring, just like the inside of a lunar module. But however many phones there were, they all rang for a long period, and then one of them was answered. Vincent came on and said, “This is the Apollo Inn,” just like Reacher had heard him say it before, very brightly and enthusiastically, like it was a brand-new establishment taking its first-ever call on its first-ever night in business.

Reacher said, “I need Eleanor Duncan’s phone number.”

Vincent said, “Reacher? Where are you?”

“Still out of town. I need Eleanor’s number.”

“Are you coming back?”

“What could possibly keep me away?”

“Are you not going to Virginia?”

“Eventually, I hope.”

“I don’t have Eleanor’s number.”

“Isn’t she on the phone tree?”

“No, how could she be? Seth might answer.”

“OK, is the doctor there?”

“Not right now.”

“Slow night, then.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Do you have his number?”

“Hold the line,” Vincent said. There was a thump as he put the handset down, maybe on the bar, and then a pause, just about long enough for him to walk across the lounge, and then the sound of a second handset being raised, maybe at the desk. The two open lines picked up on each other and Reacher heard the room’s slow echo hissing and bouncing off the round domed ceiling. Vincent read out a number, the area code and seven more digits, and Reacher repeated them once in his head and said, “Thanks,” and hung up and redialed.

The guy at the Marriott’s desk told Mahmeini’s man that yes, there was a bar, not exactly in town but ten miles north, on the left shoulder of the two-lane, called the Cell Block, a pleasant place, reasonably priced, and that yes, it was usually open late, and that yes, there was a taxi service in town, and that yes, he would be happy to call a cab immediately.

And so less than five minutes later Mahmeini’s man was sliding across stained vinyl into the rear seat of an ancient Chevy Caprice, and the driver was pulling out of the lot, and heading down McNally Street, and making the right at the end.

The doctor answered a lot faster than Vincent had. Reacher said, “I need Eleanor Duncan’s phone number.”

The doctor said, “Reacher? Where are you?”

“Still out of town.”

“Are you coming back?”

“What, are you missing me?”

“I didn’t tell the Duncans about the Cadillac.”

“Good man. Has Seth gone home yet?”

“He was still with his father when I left.”

“Will he stay?”

“People say he often does.”

“You OK?”

“Not too bad. I was in the truck. The Cornhuskers got me.”

“And?”

“Nothing much. Just words, really.”

Reacher pictured the guy, maybe standing in his hallway or his kitchen, quaking, shaking, watching the windows, checking the doors. He asked, “Are you sober?”

The doctor said, “A little.”

“ ‘A little’?”

“That’s about as good as it gets these days, I’m afraid.”

“I need Eleanor Duncan’s number.”

“She’s not listed.”

“I know that.”

“She’s not on the phone tree.”

“But she’s your patient.”

“I can’t.”

“How much more trouble could you be in?”

“It’s not just that. There are confidentiality issues, too. I’m a doctor. Like you said, I took an oath.”

“We’re making an omelet here,” Reacher said. “We’re going to have to break some eggs.”

“They’ll know it came from me.”

“If it comes to it, I’ll tell them different.”

The doctor went quiet, and then he sighed, and then he recited a number.

“Thanks,” Reacher said. “Take care. Best to your wife.” He hung up and redialed and listened to yet more ring tone, the same languid electronic purr, but this time from a different place, from somewhere inside the restored farmhouse, among the pastel colors and the fancy rugs and the oil paintings. He figured that if Seth was home, then Seth would answer. It seemed to be that kind of a relationship. But he bet himself a buck Seth wasn’t home. The Duncans were in two kinds of trouble, and Reacher’s experience told him they would huddle together until it passed. So Eleanor was probably home alone, and would pick up. Or not. Maybe she would just ignore the bell, whatever the barman thirty feet away thought about human nature.

She picked up.

“Hello?” she said.

Reacher asked, “Is Seth there?”

“Reacher? Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter where I am. Where’s Seth?”

“He’s at his father’s. I don’t expect him home tonight.”

“That’s good. You still up and dressed?”

“Why?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

Chapter 34

The old Caprice’s rear bench was contoured like two separate bucket seats, not by design but by age and relentless wear and tear. Mahmeini’s man settled into the right-hand pit, behind the front passenger seat, and cocked his head to the left so he could see out the windshield. He saw the blank back of a billboard in the headlight beams, and then he saw nothing. The road ahead was straight and empty. No oncoming lights, which was a disappointment. One drink on Asghar’s part might be overlooked. Or even two. Or three, followed by a prompt return. But a night of it would be considered desertion.

The wheezing old motor had the needle trembling over the sixty mark. A mile a minute. Nine more miles to go. Nine minutes.

Reacher said, “Exactly one hour and ten minutes from now, I want you to take a drive. In your little red sports car.”

Eleanor Duncan said, “A drive? Where?”

“South on the two-lane,” Reacher said. “Just drive. Eleven miles. As fast as you want. Then turn around and go home again.”

“Eleven miles?”

“Or twelve. Or more. But not less than ten.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter why. Will you do it?”

“Are you going to do something to the house? You want me out of the way?”

“I won’t come near the house. I promise. No one will ever know. Will you do it?”

“I can’t. Seth took my car key. I’m grounded.”

“Is there a spare?”

“He took that too.”

Reacher said, “He’s not carrying them around in his pocket. Not if he keeps his own key in a bowl in the kitchen.”

Eleanor said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Do you know where they are?”

“Yes. They’re on his desk.”

“On or in?”

“On. Just sitting there. Like a test for me. He says obedience without temptation is meaningless.”

“Why the hell are you still there?”

“Where else could I go?”

“Just take the damn keys, will you? Stand up for yourself.”

“Will this hurt Seth?”

“I don’t know how you want me to answer that question.”

“I want you to answer it honestly.”

“It might hurt him indirectly. And eventually. Possibly.”

There was a long pause. Then Eleanor said, “OK, I’ll do it. I’ll drive south eleven miles on the two-lane and come back again. An hour and ten minutes from now.”

“No,” Reacher said. “An hour and six minutes from now. We’ve just been talking for four minutes.”

He hung up and stepped back to the main public room. The barman was working like a good barman should, using fast, efficient movements, thinking ahead, watching the room. He caught Reacher’s eye and Reacher detoured toward him and the guy said, “I should get you to sign a napkin or something. Like a memento. You’re the only guy who ever came in here to use a phone, not avoid one. You want a drink?”

Reacher scanned what the guy had to offer. Liquor of all kinds, beer on tap, beer in bottles, sodas. No sign of coffee. He said, “No, thanks, I’m good. I should hit the road.” He moved on, shuffling sideways between the tables, and he pushed out the door and walked back to his car. He got in, started up, backed out, and drove away north.

Mahmeini’s man saw a glow in the air, far ahead on the left. Neon, green and red and blue. The driver kept his foot down for a minute more, and then he lifted off and coasted. The engine coughed and the exhaust popped and sputtered and the taxi slowed. Way far up the road in the distance were a pair of red taillights. Very faint and far away. Almost not there at all. The taxi braked. Mahmeini’s man saw the bar. Just a simple wooden building. There were two weak spotlights under the eaves at the front. They threw two pools of token light into the lot. There were plenty of parked vehicles. But no yellow rental.

The taxi pulled in and stopped. The driver looked back over his shoulder. Mahmeini’s man said, “Wait for me.”

The driver said, “How long?”

“A minute.” Mahmeini’s man got out and stood still. The taillights in the north had disappeared. Mahmeini’s man watched the darkness where they had been, just for a second. Then he walked to the wooden building’s door. He entered. He saw a large room, with chairs and tables on the left and a bar on the right. There were about twenty customers in the room, mostly men, none of them Asghar Arad Sepehr. There was a barman behind the bar, serving a customer, lining up the next, glancing over at the new arrival. Mahmeini’s man threaded between the tables toward him. He felt that everyone was watching him. A small man, foreign, unshaven, rumpled, and not very clean. The barman’s customer peeled away, holding two foaming glasses of beer. The barman moved on, to the next customer, serving him, but glancing beyond him for the next in line, as if he was planning two moves ahead.

Mahmeini’s man said, “I’m looking for someone.”

The barman said, “I guess we all are, sir. That’s the very essence of human nature, isn’t it? It’s an eternal quest.”

“No, I’m looking for someone I know. A friend of mine.”

“A lady or a gentleman?”

“He looks like me.”

“Then I haven’t seen him. I’m sorry.”

“He has a yellow car.”

“Cars are outside. I’m inside.”

Mahmeini’s man turned and scanned the room, and thought about the red taillights in the north, and turned back and asked, “Are you sure?”

The barman said, “I don’t want to be rude, sir, but really, if two of you had been in here tonight, someone would have called Homeland Security already. Don’t you think?”

Mahmeini’s man said nothing.

“Just saying,” the barman said. “This is Nebraska. There are military installations here.”

Mahmeini’s man asked, “Then was someone else just here?”

“This is a bar, my friend. People are in and out all night long. That’s kind of the point of the place.”

The barman turned back to his current customer. Interaction over. Mahmeini’s man turned and scanned the room, one more time. Then he gave it up and moved away, between the tables, back to the door. He stepped into the lot and took out his phone. No signal. He stood still for a second and glanced north at where the red lights had gone, and then he climbed back into the taxi. He closed the door against a yowling hinge and said, “Thank you for waiting.”

The driver looked back over his shoulder and asked, “Where to now?”

Mahmeini’s man said, “Let me think about that for a minute.”

Reacher kept the Malibu at a steady sixty. A mile a minute. Hypnotic. Power line poles flashed past, the tires sang, the motor hummed. Reacher took the fresh bottle of water from the cup holder and opened it and drank from it one-handed. He switched his headlights to bright. Nothing to see ahead of him. A straight road, then mist, then darkness. He checked the mirror. Nothing to see behind him. He checked the dials and the gauges. All good.

Eleanor Duncan checked her watch. It was a small Rolex, a present from Seth, but probably real. She had counted ahead an hour and six minutes from when she had hung up the phone, and she had forty-five minutes still to go. She stepped out of the living room into the hallway, and stepped out of the hallway into her husband’s den. It was a small square space. She had no idea of its original purpose. Maybe a gun room. Now it was set up as a home office, but with an emphasis on gentlemanly style, not clerical function. There was a club chair made of leather. The desk was yew. It had a light with a green glass shade. There were bookshelves. There was a rug. The air in the room smelled like Seth.

There was a shallow glass bowl on the desk. From Murano, near Venice, in Italy. It was green. A souvenir. It had paper clips in it. And her car keys, just sitting there, two small serrated lances with big black heads. For her Mazda Miata. A tiny red two-seat convertible. A fun car. Carefree. Like the old British MGs and Lotuses used to be, but reliable.

She took one of the keys.

She stepped back to the hallway. Eleven miles. She thought she knew what Reacher had in mind. So she opened the coat closet and took out a silk headscarf. Pure white. She folded it into a triangle and tied it over her hair. She checked the mirror. Just like an old-fashioned movie star. Or an old-fashioned movie star after a knockout round with an old-fashioned heavyweight champion.

She left by the back door and walked through the cold to the garage, Seth’s empty bay to the right, hers in the middle, the doors all open. She got in her car and unlatched the clips above the windshield and dropped the top. She started up and backed out and turned and waited in the driveway, the motor running, the heater warming, her heart beating hard. She checked her watch. Twenty-nine minutes to go.

Reacher cruised onward, sixty miles an hour, three more minutes, and then he slowed down and put his lights back on bright. He watched the right shoulder. The old abandoned roadhouse loomed up at him, right on cue, pinned and stark in his headlight beams. The bad roof, the beer signs on the walls behind the mud, the bruised earth all around where cars had once parked. He pulled off the road and into the lot. Loose stones popped and crunched and slithered under his tires. He drove a full circuit.

The building was long and low and plain, like a barn cut off at the knees. Rectangular, except for two separate square bump-outs added at the back, one at each end of the structure, the first for restrooms, probably, and the second for a kitchen. Efficient, in terms of plumbing lines. Between the bump-outs was a shallow U-shaped space, like a bay, empty apart from a little windblown trash, enclosed on three sides, open only to the dark empty fields to the east. It was maybe thirty feet long and twelve feet deep.

Perfect, for later.

Reacher came back around to the south gable wall and parked thirty feet from it, out of sight from the north, facing the road at a slight diagonal angle, like a cop on speed trap duty. He killed the lights and kept the motor running. He got out into the cold and looped around the hood and walked to the corner of the building. He leaned on the old boards. They felt thin and veined, frozen by a hundred winters, baked by a hundred summers. They smelled of dust and age. He watched the darkness in the north, where he knew the road must be.

He waited.

Chapter 35

Reacher waited twenty long minutes, and then he saw light in the north. Very faint, maybe five or six miles away, really just a high hemispherical glow in the mist, trembling a little, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening again. A moving bubble of light. Very white. Almost blue. A car, coming south toward him, pretty fast.

Eleanor Duncan, presumably, right on time.

Reacher waited.

Two minutes later she was two miles closer, and the high hemispherical glow was bigger, and stronger, still bouncing, still trembling, but now it had a strange asynchronous pulse inside it, the bouncing now going two ways at once, the strengthening and the weakening now random and out of phase.

There were two cars on the road, not one.

Reacher smiled. The sentry. The football player, posted to the south. A college graduate. Not a dumb guy. He knew his five buddies had been sent home to bed because absolutely nothing was going to happen. He knew he had been posted as a precaution only, just for the sake of it. He knew he was facing a long night of boredom, staring into the dark, no chance of glory. So what’s a guy going to do, when Eleanor Duncan suddenly blasts past him from behind, in her little red sports car? He’s going to see major brownie points on the table, that’s what. He’s going to give up on the blank hours ahead, and he’s going to pull out and follow her, and he’s going to dream of a promotion to the inner circle, and he’s going to imagine a scene and he’s going to rehearse a speech, because he’s going to pull Seth Duncan aside tomorrow, first thing in the morning, very discreetly, like an old friend or a trusted aide, and he’s going to whisper Yes, sir, I followed her all the way and I can show you exactly where she went. Then he’s going to add No, sir, I told no one else, but I thought you should know. Then he’s going to hop and shuffle in a modest and self-deprecating way and he’s going to say, Well, yes, sir, I thought it was much more important than sentry duty, and I’m glad you agree I did the right thing.

Reacher smiled again.

Human nature.

Reacher waited.

Two more minutes, and the traveling bubble of light was another two miles closer, now much flatter and more elongated. Two cars, with some little distance between them. Predator and prey, some hundreds of yards apart. There was no red glow in the bubble. The football player’s headlights were falling short of the Mazda’s paint. The guy was maybe a quarter of a mile back, following the Mazda’s taillights, no doubt thinking he was doing a hell of a job of staying inconspicuous. Maybe not such a smart guy. The Mazda had a mirror, and halogen headlights on a Nebraska winter night were probably visible from outer space.

Reacher moved.

He pushed off the corner of the building and looped around the Malibu’s hood and got in the driver’s seat. He locked the selector in first gear and put his left foot hard on the brake and his right foot on the gas. He goosed the pedal until the transmission was straining against the brake and the whole car was wound up tight and ready to launch. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the headlight switch.

He waited.

Sixty seconds.

Ninety seconds.

Then the Mazda flashed past, right to left, instantaneously, a tiny dark shape chasing a huge pool of bright light, its top down, a woman in a headscarf at the wheel, all chased in turn by tire roar and engine noise and the red flare of taillights. Then it was gone. Reacher counted one and flicked his headlights on and took his foot off the brake and stamped on the gas and shot forward and braked hard and stopped again sideways across the crown of the road. He wrenched open the door and spilled out and danced back toward the Malibu’s trunk, toward the shoulder he had just left. Two hundred yards to his right a big SUV was starting a panic stop. Its headlights flared yellow against the Malibu’s paint and then they nosedived into the blacktop as the truck’s front suspension crushed under the force of violent braking. Huge tires howled and the truck lost its line and slewed to its right and went into a four-wheel slide and its near-side wheels tucked under and its high center of gravity tipped over and its far-side wheels came up in the air. Then they crashed back to earth and the rear end fishtailed violently a full ninety degrees and the truck snapped around and came to rest parallel with the Malibu, less than ten feet away, stalled out and silent, the scream of stressed rubber dying away, thin drifts of moving blue smoke following it and catching it and stopping and rising all around it and billowing away into the cold night air.

Reacher pulled the Iranian’s Glock from his pocket and stormed the driver’s door and wrenched it open and danced back and pointed the gun. In general he was not a big fan of dramatic arrests, but he knew from long experience what worked and what didn’t with shocked and unpredictable subjects, so he screamed GET OUT OF THE CAR GET OUT OF THE CAR GET OUT OF THE CAR as loud as he could, which was plenty loud, and the guy behind the wheel more or less tumbled out, and then Reacher was on him, forcing him down, flipping him, jamming him facedown into the blacktop, his knee in the small of the guy’s back, the Glock’s muzzle hard in the back of the guy’s neck, all the time screaming STAY DOWN STAY DOWN STAY DOWN, all the while watching the sky over his shoulder for more lights.

There were no more lights. No one else was coming. No backup. The guy hadn’t called it in. He was planning a solo enterprise. All the glory for himself. As expected.

Reacher smiled.

Human nature.

The scene went quiet. Nothing to hear, except the Malibu’s patient idle. Nothing to see, except four high beams stabbing the far shoulder. The air was full of the smell of burned rubber and hot brakes, and gas, and oil. The Cornhusker lay completely still. Hard not to, with 250 pounds on his back, and a gun to his head, and television images of SWAT arrests in his mind. Maybe real images. Country boys get arrested from time to time, the same as anyone else. And things had happened fast, all dark and noise and blur and panic, enough that maybe the guy hadn’t really seen Reacher’s face yet, or recognized his description from the Duncans’ warnings. Maybe the guy hadn’t put two and two together. Maybe he was waiting it out like a civilian, waiting to explain to a cop that he was innocent, like people do. Which gave Reacher a minor problem. He was about to transition away from what the guy might have taken to be a legitimate law enforcement takedown, straight to what the guy was going to know for sure was a wholly illegitimate kidnap attempt. And the guy was big. Six-six or a little more, two-ninety or a little more. He had on a large red football jacket and baggy jeans. His feet were the size of boats.

Reacher said, “Tell me your name.”

The guy’s chin and his lips and his nose were all jammed hard down on the blacktop. He said, “John,” like a gasp, like a grunt, just a soft expulsion of breath, quiet and indistinct.

“Not Brett?” Reacher asked.

“No.”

“That’s good.” Reacher shifted his weight, turned the guy’s head, jammed the Glock in his ear, saw the whites of his eyes. “Do you know who I am?”

The guy on the ground said, “I do now.”

“You know the two things you really need to understand?”

“What are they?”

“Whoever you think you are, I’m tougher than you, and I’m more ruthless than you. You have absolutely no idea. I’m worse than your worst nightmare. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Really believe it? Like you believe in Mom and apple pie?”

“Yes.”

“You know what I did to your buddies?”

“Yes.”

“What did I do?”

“You finished them.”

“Correct. But here’s the thing, John. I’m prepared to work with you, to save your life. We can do this, if we try. But if you step half an inch out of line, I’ll kill you and walk away and I’ll never think about you again and I’ll sleep like a baby the whole rest of my life. We clear on that?”

“Yes.”

“So you want to try?”

“Yes.”

“Are you thinking about some stupid move? Are you quarterbacking it right now? You planning to wait until my attention wanders?”

“No.”

“Good answer, John. Because my attention never wanders. You ever seen someone get shot?”

“No.”

“It’s not like the movies, John. Big chunks of disgusting stuff come flying out. Even a flesh wound, you never really recover. Not a hundred percent. You get infections. You’re weak and hurting, forever.”

“OK.”

“So stand up now.” Reacher got up out of his crouch and moved away, pointing the gun, aiming it two-handed at arm’s length for theatrical effect, tracking the guy’s head, a big pale target. First the guy went fetal for a second, and then he gathered himself and got his hands under him and jacked himself to his knees. Reacher said, “See the yellow car? You’re going to go stand next to the driver’s door.”

The guy said, “OK,” and got to his feet, a little unsteady at first, then firmer, taller, squarer. Reacher said, “Feeling good now, John? Feeling brave? Getting ready? Going to rush over and get me?”

The guy said, “No.”

“Good answer, John. I’ll put a double tap in you before you move the first muscle. Believe me, I’ve done it before. I used to get paid to do it. I’m very good at it. So move over to the yellow car and stand next to the driver’s door.” Reacher tracked him all the way around the Malibu’s hood. The driver’s door was still open. Reacher had left it that way, for the sake of a speedy exit. The guy stood in its angle. Reacher aimed the gun across the roof of the car and opened the passenger door. The two men stood there, one on each side, both doors open like little wings.

Reacher said, “Now get in.”

The guy ducked and bent and slid into the seat. Reacher backed off a step and aimed the gun down inside the car, a low trajectory, straight at the guy’s hips and thighs. He said, “Don’t touch the wheel. Don’t touch the pedals. Don’t put your seat belt on.”

The guy sat still, with his hands in his lap.

Reacher said, “Now close your door.”

The guy closed his door.

Reacher asked, “Feeling heroic yet, John?”

The guy said, “No.”

“Good answer, my friend. We can do this. Just remember, the Chevrolet Malibu is an OK mid-range product, especially for Detroit, but it doesn’t accelerate for shit. Not like a bullet, anyway. This gun of mine is full of nine-millimeter Parabellums. They come out of the barrel doing nine hundred miles an hour. Think a four-cylinder GM motor can outrun that?”

“No.”

“Good, John,” Reacher said. “I’m glad to see all that education didn’t go to waste.”

Then he looked up across the roof of the car, and he saw light in the mist to the south. A high hemispherical glow, trembling a little, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening again. Very white. Almost blue.

A car, coming north toward him, pretty fast.

Chapter 36

The oncoming car was about two miles away. Doing about sixty, Reacher figured. Sixty was about all the road was good for. Two minutes. He said, “Sit tight, John. Stop thinking. This is your time of maximum danger. I’m going to play it very safe. I’ll shoot first and ask questions later. Don’t think I won’t.”

The guy sat still behind the Malibu’s wheel. Reacher watched across the roof of the car. The bubble of light in the south was still moving, still bouncing and trembling and strengthening and weakening, but coherently this time, naturally, in phase. Just one car. Now about a mile away. One minute.

Reacher waited. The glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the blacktop, then twin fierce sources spaced feet apart, both of them oval in shape, both of them low to the ground, both of them blue-white and intense. They kept on coming, flickering and floating and jittering ahead of a firm front suspension and fast go-kart steering, at first small because of the distance, and then small because they were small, because they were mounted low down on a small low car, because the car was a Mazda Miata, tiny, red in color, slowing now, coming to a stop, its headlights unbearably bright against the Malibu’s yellow paint.

Then Eleanor Duncan killed her lights and maneuvered around the Malibu’s trunk, half on the road and half on the shoulder, and came to a stop with her elbow on the door and her head turned toward Reacher. She asked, “Did I do it right?”

Reacher said, “You did it perfectly. The headscarf was a great touch.”

“I decided against sunglasses. Too much of a risk at night.”

“Probably.”

“But you took a risk. That’s for sure. You could have gotten creamed here.”

“He’s an athlete. And young. Good eyesight, good hand-eye coordination, lots of fast-twitch muscles. I figured I’d have time to jump clear.”

“Even so. He could have wrecked both vehicles. Then what would you have done?”

“Plan B was shoot him and ride back with you.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Need anything else?”

“No, thanks. Go on home now.”

“This guy will tell Seth, you know. About what I did.”

“He won’t,” Reacher said. “He and I are going to work something out.”

Eleanor Duncan said nothing more. She just put her lights back on and her car in gear and drove away, fast and crisp, the sound of her exhaust ripping the night air behind her. Reacher glanced back twice, once when she was half a mile away and again when she was gone altogether. Then he slid into the Malibu’s passenger seat, alongside the guy called John, and he closed his door. He held the Glock right-handed across his body. He said, “Now you’re going to park this car around the back of this old roadhouse. If the speedo gets above five miles an hour, I’m going to shoot you in the side. Without immediate medical attention you’ll live about twenty minutes. Then you’ll die, in hideous agony. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. Truth is, John, I’ve made it happen, more than once. We clear?”

“Yes.”

“Say it, John. Say we’re clear.”

“We’re clear.”

“How clear are we?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to say we’re crystal clear.”

“You got it. Crystal.”

“OK, so let’s do it.”

The guy fumbled the lever into gear and turned the wheel and drove a wide circle, painfully slow, bumping up on the far shoulder, coming around to the near shoulder, bumping down onto the beaten earth of the old lot, passing the south gable wall, turning sharply behind the building. Reacher said, “Pull ahead and then back in, between the two bump-outs, like parallel parking. Do they ask for that in the Nebraska test?”

The guy said, “I passed in Kentucky. In high school.”

“Does that mean you need me to explain it to you?”

“I know how to do it.”

“OK, show me.”

The guy pulled ahead of the second square bump-out and lined up and backed into the shallow U-shaped bay. Reacher said, “All the way, now. I want the back bumper hard against the wood and I want your side of the car hard against the building. I want you to trash your door mirror, John. Totally trash it. Can you do that for me?”

The guy paused and then turned the wheel harder. He did pretty well. He got the rear bumper hard against the bump-out and he trashed his door mirror good, but he left about an inch between his flank of the car and the back of the building. He checked behind him, checked left, and then looked at Reacher like he was expecting praise.

“Close enough,” Reacher said. “Now shut it down.”

The guy killed the lights and turned off the motor.

Reacher said, “Leave the key.”

The guy said, “I can’t get out. I can’t open my door.”

Reacher said, “Crawl out after me.” He opened his own door and slid out and backed off and stood tall and aimed the gun two-handed.

The guy came out after him, hands and knees, huge and awkward, feet-first, ass high up in the air. He got straight and turned around and said, “Want me to close the door?”

Reacher said, “You’re thinking again, aren’t you, John? You’re thinking it’s dark out here, now the lights are off, and maybe I can’t see too well. You’re figuring maybe this would be a good time. But it isn’t. I can see just fine. An owl has got nothing on me in the eyesight department, John. An owl with night-vision goggles sees worse. Believe it, kid. Just hang in there. You can get through this.”

“I’m not thinking anything,” the guy said.

“So close the door.”

The guy closed the door.

“Now step away from the car.”

The guy stepped away. The car was crammed tight in the back southwest quarter of the shallow bay, occupying a fifteen-by-six footprint within the total thirty-by-twelve space. It would be invisible from the road, either north or south, and no one was going to be in the fields to the east until spring plowing. Safe enough.

Reacher said, “Now move to your right.”

“Where?”

“So when I aim the gun at you I’m aiming parallel with the road.”

The guy moved, two steps, three, and then he stopped and turned and faced front, with his back to the forty empty miles between him and the Cell Block bar.

Reacher asked him, “How close is the nearest house?”

He said, “Miles away.”

“Close enough to hear a gunshot in the night?”

“Maybe.”

“What would they think if they did?”

“Varmint. This is farm country.”

Reacher said, “I’d be happier if you heard the gun go off, John. At least once. I’d be happier if you knew what it was like to have a bullet coming your way. It might help you with all that thinking. It might help you reach sensible conclusions.”

“I won’t try anything.”

“Do I have your word on that?”

“Absolutely.”

“So we’re bonded now, John. I’m trusting you. Am I wise to do that?”

“Absolutely.”

“OK, turn around and walk back to your truck.” Reacher kept ten feet behind the guy all the way, around the back corner of the building, along the face of the south gable wall, across the old lot, back to the two-lane. Reacher said, “Now get in the truck the same way you got out of the car.”

The guy closed the driver’s door and tracked around the hood and opened the passenger door. Reacher watched him all the way. The guy climbed into the passenger seat and lifted his feet one at a time into the driver’s footwell, and then he jacked himself up and over the console between the seats, on the heels of his hands, squirming, scraping, ducking his head. Reacher watched him all the way. When he was settled, Reacher climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door. He swapped the gun into his left hand for a second and put his seat belt on. Then he swapped the gun back to his right and said, “I’ve got my seat belt on, John, but you’re not going to put yours on, OK? Just in case you’re getting ideas. Just in case you’re thinking about driving into a telephone pole. See the point? You do that, and I’ll be fine, but you’ll be hurt bad, and then I’ll shoot you anyway. We clear on that?”

The guy said, “Yes.”

“Say it, John.”

“I’m clear on that.”

“How clear?”

“Crystal.”

“And we’re bonded, right? I have your word, don’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?”

“At the Duncan Transportation depot.”

“Where is that?”

“From here? About thirty miles, give or take, north and then west.”

“OK, John,” Reacher said. “Take me there.”

Chapter 37

Mahmeini’s man was in his room at the Courtyard Marriott. He was on the phone with Mahmeini himself. The conversation had not started well. Mahmeini had been reluctant to accept that Sepehr had lit out. It was inconceivable to him. It was like being told the guy had grown a third arm. Just not humanly possible.

Mahmeini’s man said, “He definitely wasn’t in the bar.”

“By the time you got there.”

“He was never there. It was a most unpleasant place. I didn’t like it at all. They looked at me like I was dirt. Like I was a terrorist. I doubt if they would even have served me. Asghar wouldn’t have lasted five minutes without getting in a fight. And there was no sign of trouble. There was no blood on the floor. Which there would have been. Asghar is armed, and he’s fast, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

Mahmeini said, “Then he went somewhere else.”

“I checked all over town. Which didn’t take long. The sidewalks roll up when it gets dark. There’s nowhere to hide. He isn’t here.”

“Women?”

“Are you kidding me? Here?”

“Did you try his phone again?”

“Over and over.”

There was a long, long pause. Mahmeini, in his Las Vegas office, processing data, changing gears, improvising. He said, “OK, let’s move on. This business is important. It has to be taken care of tomorrow. So you’ll have to manage on your own. You can do that. You’re good enough.”

“But I don’t have a car.”

“Get a ride from Safir’s boys.”

“I thought of that. But the dynamic would be weird. I wouldn’t be in charge. I would be a passenger, literally. And how would I explain why I let Asghar take off somewhere and leave me high and dry? We can’t afford to look like idiots here. Or weak. Not in front of these people.”

“So get another car. Tell the others you told Asghar to go on ahead, or somewhere else entirely, for some other purpose.”

“Get another car? From where?”

Mahmeini said, “Rent one.”

“Boss, this isn’t Vegas. They don’t even have room service here. The nearest Hertz is back at the airport. I’m sure it’s closed until the morning. And I can’t get there anyway.”

Another long, long pause. Mahmeini, recalibrating, re-evaluating, reassessing, planning on the fly. He asked, “Did the others see the first car you were in?”

His guy said, “No. I’m sure they didn’t. We all arrived separately, at different times.”

Mahmeini said, “OK. You’re right about the dynamic. We need to be visibly in charge. And we need to keep the others off balance. So here’s what you’re going to do. Find a suitable car, within the hour. Steal one, if you have to. Then call the others, in their rooms. I don’t care what time it is. Midnight, one o’clock, whatever. Tell them we’ve decided to start the party early. Tell them you’re leaving for the north immediately. Give them five minutes, or you’re going without them. They’ll be in disarray, packing up and running down to the parking lot. You’ll be waiting in your new car. But they won’t know it’s new. And they won’t even notice that Asghar isn’t with you. Not in the dark. Not in all the confusion. Then drive fast. Like a bat out of hell. Be the first one up there. When the others get there, tell them you turned Asghar loose, on foot, behind the lines. That will worry them. It will keep them even more off balance. They’ll be looking over their shoulders all the time. That’s it. That’s what you’re going to do. That’s pretty much a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, wouldn’t you say?”

Mahmeini’s man put his coat on and carried his bag down to the lobby. The desk guy had gone off duty. Presumably there was an all-purpose night porter holed up in a back room somewhere, but Mahmeini’s man didn’t see any sign of him. He just walked out, bag in hand, looking for a car to steal. Which in many ways was a backward step and an affront to his dignity. Guys in his position had left car theft behind a long time ago. But needs must. And he still remembered how. There would be no technical difficulty. He would perform with his usual precision. The difficulty would come from being forced to work with such a meager pool of potential targets.

He had two requirements. First, he needed a vehicle with a degree of prestige. Not necessarily much, but at least some. He couldn’t be seen in a rusted and listing pick-up truck, for instance. That would not be remotely appropriate or plausible for a Mahmeini operative, especially one tasked to impress the Duncans. Image was by no means everything, but it greased the skids. Perception was reality, at least half the time.

Second, he needed a car that wasn’t brand-new. Late-model cars had too much security built in. Computers, micro-chips in the keys, matching micro-chips in the keyholes. Nothing was unbeatable, of course, but a quick-and-dirty street job had its practical limits. Newer cars were best tackled with tow trucks or flat-beds, and then patient hours hidden away with ethernet cables and laptop computers. Lone men in the dark needed something easier.

So, a clean sedan from a mainstream manufacturer, not new, but not too old either. Easy to find in Vegas. Five minutes, tops. But not in rural Nebraska. Not in farm country. He had just walked all over town looking for Asghar, and ninety percent of what he had seen had been utilitarian, either pick-up trucks or ancient four-wheel drives, and ninety-nine percent of those had been worn out, all battered and corroded and failing. Apparently Nebraskans didn’t have much money, and even if they did they seemed to favor an ostentatiously blue-collar lifestyle.

He stood in the cold and reviewed his options. He mapped out the blocks he had quartered before, and he tried to identify the kind of density he needed, and he came up with nothing. He had seen a sign to a hospital, and hospital parking lots were often good, because doctors bought new cars and sold their lightly used cast-offs to nurses and medical students, but for all he knew the hospital was miles away, certainly too far to walk without a guarantee of success.

So he started in the Marriott lot.

And finished there.

He walked all around the H-shaped hotel and saw three pick-up trucks, two with fitted camper beds, and an old Chrysler sedan with Arizona plates and a dented fender and sun-rotted paint, and a blue Chevrolet Impala, and a red Ford Taurus, and a black Cadillac. The pick-ups and the old Chrysler were out of the question for obvious reasons. The Impala and the Taurus were out of the question because they were too new, and they were obviously rentals, because they had bar code stickers in the rear side windows, which meant that almost certainly they belonged to Safir’s guys and Rossi’s guys, and he couldn’t call them down to the lot and have them find him sitting in one of their own cars.

Which left the Cadillac. Right age, right style. Local plates, neat, discreet, well looked after, clean and polished. Black glass. Practically perfect. A no-brainer. He put his bag on the ground right next to it and dropped flat and shuffled on his back until his head was underneath the engine. He had a tiny LED Maglite on his key chain, and he fumbled it out and lit it up and went hunting. Cars of that generation had a module bolted to the frame designed to detect a frontal impact. A simple accelerometer, with a two-stage function. Worst case, it would trigger the airbags. Short of that, it would unlock the doors, so that first responders could drag dazed drivers to safety. A gift to car thieves everywhere, therefore not much publicized, and replaced almost immediately with more sophisticated systems.

He found the module. It was a simple tin can, square and small, cheap and basic, all caked in dry dirt, with wires coming out of it. He took out his knife and used the butt end of the handle and banged hard on the module. Dirt flaked off, but nothing else happened. He thought the dirt was maybe insulating the force of the blow, so he popped the blade on his knife and scraped the front of the module clean. Then he closed the blade and tried again. Nothing happened. He tried a third time, hard enough to worry about the noise he was making, bang, and the message got through. The Cadillac’s dim electronic brain thought it had just suffered a minor frontal impact, not serious enough for the airbags, but serious enough to consider the first responders. There were four ragged thumps from above, and the doors unlocked.

Technology. A wonderful thing.

Mahmeini’s man scrambled out and stood up. A minute later his bag was on the back seat and he was in the driver’s seat. It was set way back. There was enough leg room for a giant. More proof, as if he needed any. Like he had told Rossi’s guy, American peasants were all huge. He found the button and buzzed the cushion forward, on and on, about a foot, and then he jacked the seat back upright and got to work.

He used the tip of his blade to force the steering lock, and then he pulled off the column shroud and stripped the wires he needed with the knife and touched them together. The engine started and a chime told him he didn’t have his seat belt on. He buckled up and backed out and turned around and waited in the narrow lane parallel to the long side of the H, the engine idling silently, the climate control already warming.

Then he pulled out his phone and went through the Marriott switchboard, first to Safir’s guys, then to Rossi’s, in both cases following Mahmeini’s script exactly, telling them that plans had changed, that the party was starting early, that he and Asghar were leaving for the north immediately, and that they had five minutes to get their asses in gear, no more, or they would be left behind.

The SUV was a GMC Yukon, metallic gold in color, equipped to a high standard with a couple of option packs. It had beige leather inside. It was a nice truck. Certainly the kid called John seemed proud of it, and Reacher could see why. He was looking forward to owning it for the next twelve hours, or however long his remaining business in Nebraska might take.

He said, “Got a cell phone, John?”

The guy paused a fatal beat and said, “No.”

Reacher said, “And you were doing so well. But now you’re screwing up. Of course you’ve got a cell phone. You’re part of an organization. You were on sentry duty. And you’re under thirty, which means you were probably born with a minutes plan.”

The guy said, “You’re going to do to me what you did to the others.”

“What did I do?”

“You crippled them.”

“What were they going to do to me?”

The guy didn’t answer that. They were on the two-lane road, north of the motel, well out in featureless farm country, rolling steadily along, nothing to see beyond the headlight beams. Reacher was half-turned in his seat, his left hand on his knee, his right wrist resting on his left forearm, the Glock held easy in his right hand.

Reacher said, “Give me your cell phone, John.” He saw movement in the guy’s eyes, a flash of speculation, a narrowing of the lids. Fair warning. The guy jacked his butt off the seat and took one hand off the wheel and dug in his pants pocket. He came out with a phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He went to hand it over, but he lost his grip on it for a moment and juggled it and dropped it in the passenger footwell.

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Reacher smiled.

“Good try, John,” he said. “Now I bend over to pick it up, right? And you cave the back of my skull in with your right fist. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

The guy said nothing.

Reacher said, “So I guess we’ll leave it right where it is. If it rings, we’ll let it go to voice mail.”

“I had to try.”

“Is that an apology? You promised me.”

“You’re going to break my legs and dump me on the side of the road.”

“That’s a little pessimistic. Why would I break both of them?”

“It’s not a joke. Those four guys you hurt will never work again.”

“They’ll never work for the Duncans again. But there are other things to do in life. Better things.”

“Like what?”

“You could shovel shit on a chicken farm. You could whore yourself out in Tijuana. With a donkey. Either thing would be better than working for the Duncans.”

The guy said nothing. Just drove.

Reacher asked, “How much do the Duncans pay you?”

“More than I could get back in Kentucky.”

“In exchange for what, precisely?”

“Just being around, mostly.”

Reacher asked, “Who are those Italian guys in the overcoats?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know.”

They were in the blue Impala, already ten miles north of the Marriott, Roberto Cassano at the wheel, Angelo Mancini sitting right beside him. Cassano was working hard to stay behind Safir’s boys in their red Ford, and both drivers were working hard to keep Mahmeini’s guys in sight. The big black Cadillac was really hustling. It was doing more than eighty miles an hour. It was way far outside of its comfort zone. It was bouncing and wallowing and floating. It was quite a sight. Angelo Mancini was staring ahead at it. He was obsessed with it.

He asked, “Is it a rental?”

Cassano was much quieter. Occupied by driving, certainly, concentrating on the crazy high-speed dash up the road, definitely, but thinking, too. Thinking hard.

He said, “I don’t think it’s a rental.”

“So what is it? I mean, what? Those guys have their own cars standing by in every state? Just in case? How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” Cassano said.

“I thought at first maybe it’s a limo. You know, like a car service. But it isn’t. I saw the little squirt driving it himself. Not a car service driver. Just a glimpse, but it was him. The one who mouthed off at you.”

Cassano said, “I didn’t like him.”

“Me either. And even less now. They’re way bigger than we are. Way bigger than we thought. I mean, they have their own cars on standby in every state? They fly in on the casino plane, and there’s a car there for them, wherever? What’s that about?”

“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.

“Is it a funeral car? Do the Iranians run funeral parlors now? That could work, right? Mahmeini could call the nearest parlor and say, send us one of your cars.”

“I don’t think the Iranians took over the funeral business.”

“So what else? I mean, how many states are there? Fifty, right? That’s at least fifty cars standing by.”

“Not even Mahmeini can be active in all fifty states.”

“Maybe not Alaska and Hawaii. But he’s got cars in Nebraska, apparently. How far up the list is Nebraska likely to be?”

“I don’t know,” Cassano said again.

“OK,” Mancini said. “You’re right. It has to be a rental.”

“I told you it’s not a rental,” Cassano said. “It can’t be. It’s not a current model.”

“Times are tough. Maybe they rent older cars now.”

“It’s not even last year’s model. Or the year before. That’s practically an antique. That’s an old-guy car. That’s your neighbor’s granddad’s Cadillac.”

“Maybe they have rent-a-wreck here.”

“Why would Mahmeini need that?”

“So what is it?”

“It doesn’t really matter what it is. You’re not looking at the big picture. You’re missing the point.”

“Which is what?”

“That car was already at the hotel. We parked right next to it, remember? Late afternoon, when we got back. Those guys were there before us. And you know what that means? It means they got there before Rossi even asked Mahmeini to send them. Something really weird is going on here.”

The metallic gold GMC Yukon turned left off the north-south two-lane and headed west toward Wyoming on another two-lane that was just as straight and featureless as the first. Reacher pictured planners and engineers a century before, hard at work, leaning over parchment maps and charts with long rulers and sharp pencils, drawing roads, dispatching crews, opening up the interior. He asked, “How far now, John?”

The kid said, “We’re real close,” which as always turned out to be a relative statement. Real close in some places meant fifty yards, or a hundred. In Nebraska it meant ten miles and fifteen minutes. Then Reacher saw a group of dim lights, off to the right, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The truck slowed and turned, another precise ninety-degree angle, and headed north on a blacktop strip engineered in a different way from the standard county product. A private approach road, leading toward what looked like a half-built or half-demolished industrial facility of some kind. There was a concrete rectangle the size of a football field, possibly an old parking lot but more likely the floor slab of a factory that had either never been completed or had been later dismantled. It was enclosed on all four sides by a head-high hurricane fence that was topped by a mean and token allocation of razor wire. Here and there the fence posts carried lights, like domestic backyard fixtures, containing what must have been regular sixty- or hundred-watt bulbs. The whole enormous space was empty, apart from two gray panel vans in a marked-off bay big enough to handle three.

The approach road was scalloped out at one point to allow access in and out of the concrete rectangle through a pair of gates. Then it ran onward toward a long low one-story building built of brick in an unmistakable style. Classic 1940s industrial architecture. The building was an office block, built to serve the factory it once stood next to. The factory would have been a defense plant, almost certainly. Give a government a choice of where to build in wartime, and it will seek the safe center of a landmass, away from coastal shelling and marauding airplanes and potential invasion sites. Nebraska and other heartland states had been full of such places. The ones lucky enough to be engaged on fantasy Cold War systems were probably still in business. The ones built to produce basic war-fighting items like boots and bullets and bandages had perished before the ink was dry on the armistice papers.

The kid called John said, “This is it. We live in the office building.”

The building had a flat roof with a brick parapet, and a long line of identical windows, small panes framed with white-painted steel. In the center was an unimpressive double door with a lobby behind it and dim bulkhead lights either side of it. In front of the doors was a short concrete path that led from an empty rectangle made of cracked and weedy paving stones, the size of two tennis courts laid end to end. Managerial parking, presumably, back in the day. There were no lights on inside the building. It just stood there, dead to the world.

Reacher asked, “Where are the bedrooms?”

John said, “To the right.”

“And your buddies are in there now?”

“Yes. Five of them.”

“Plus you, that’s six legs to break. Let’s go do it.”

Chapter 38

Reacher made the guy get out of the truck the same way he had before, through the passenger door, awkward and unbalanced and unable to spring any surprises. He tracked him with the Glock and glanced beyond the wire and asked, “Where are all the harvest trucks?”

The guy said, “They’re in Ohio. Back at the factory, for refurbishment. They’re specialist vehicles, and some of them are thirty years old.”

“What are the two gray vans for?”

“This and that. Service and repairs, tires, things like that.”

“Are there supposed to be three?”

“One is out. It’s been gone a few days.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

Reacher asked, “When do the big trucks get back?”

The guy said, “Spring.”

“What’s this place like in the early summer?”

“Pretty busy. The first alfalfa crop gets harvested early. There’s a lot of preparation ahead of time and a lot of maintenance afterward. This place is humming.”

“Five days a week?”

“Seven, usually. We’re talking forty thousand acres here. That’s a lot of output.” The guy closed the passenger door and took a step. Then he stopped dead, because Reacher had stopped dead. Reacher was staring ahead at the empty rectangle in front of the building. The cracked stones. The managerial parking lot. Nothing in it.

Reacher asked, “Where do you normally park your truck, John?”

“Right out front there, by the doors.”

“Where do your buddies park?”

“Same place.”

“So where are they?”

The nighttime silence clamped down and the young man’s mouth came open a little, and he whirled around as if he was expecting his friends to be hiding somewhere behind him. Like a practical joke. But they weren’t. He turned back and said, “I guess they’re out. They must have gotten a call.”

“From you?” Reacher asked. “When you saw Mrs. Duncan?”

“No, I swear. I didn’t call. You can check my phone.”

“So who called them?”

“Mr. Duncan, I guess. Mr. Jacob, I mean.”

“Why would he?”

“I don’t know. Nothing was supposed to happen tonight.”

“He called them but he didn’t call you?”

“No, he didn’t call me. I swear. Check my phone. He wouldn’t call me anyway. I’m on sentry duty. I was supposed to stay put.”

“So what’s going on, John?”

“I don’t know.”

“Best guess?”

“The doctor. Or his wife. Or both of them together. They’re always seen as the weakest link. Because of his drinking. Maybe the Duncans think they have information.”

“About what?”

“You, of course. About where you are and what you’re doing and whether you’re coming back. That’s what’s on their minds.”

“It takes five guys to ask those questions?”

“Show of force,” the kid said. “That’s what we’re here for. A surprise raid in the middle of the night can shake people up.”

“OK, John,” Reacher said. “You stay here.”

“Here?”

“Go to bed.”

“You’re not going to hurt me?”

“You already hurt yourself. You showed no fight at all against a smaller, older man. You’re a coward. You know that now. That’s as good to me as a dislocated elbow.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a gun.”

Reacher put the Glock back in his pocket. He folded the flap down and stood with his arms out, hands empty, palms forward, fingers spread.

He said, “Now I don’t. So bring it on, fat boy.”

The guy didn’t move.

“Go for it,” Reacher said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

The guy didn’t move.

“You’re a coward,” Reacher said again. “You’re pathetic. You’re a waste of good food. You’re a useless three-hundred-pound sack of shit. And you’re ugly, too.”

The guy said nothing.

“Last chance,” Reacher said. “Step up and be a hero.”

The guy walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, toward the dark building. He stopped twenty feet later and looked back. Reacher looped around the rear of the Yukon, to the driver’s door. He got in. The seat was too far back. The kid was huge. But Reacher wasn’t about to adjust it in front of the guy. Some stupid male inhibition, way in the back of his brain. He just started up and turned and drove away, and fixed it on the fly.

The Yukon drove OK, but the brakes were a little spongy. The result of the panic stop, probably, back at the old roadhouse. Five years’ wear and tear, all in one split second. But Reacher didn’t care. He wasn’t braking much. He was hustling hard, concentrating on speeding up, not slowing down. Twenty miles was a long distance, through the empty rural darkness.

He saw nothing the whole way. No lights, no other vehicles. No activity of any kind. He got back to the main two-lane north of the motel and five minutes later he passed the place. It was all closed up and dark. No blue neon. No activity. No cars, except the wrecked Subaru. It was still there, beaded over with dew, low down on slowly softening tires, sad and inert, like roadkill. Reacher charged onward past it, and then he made the right and the left and the right, along the boundaries of the dark empty fields, like twice before, to the plain ranch house with the post-and-rail fence and the flat, featureless yard.

There were lights on in the house. Plenty of them. Like a cruise ship at night on the open ocean. But there was no sign of uproar. There were no cars on the driveway. No pick-up trucks, no SUVs. No large figures in the shadows. No sound, no movement. Nothing. The front door was closed. The windows were intact.

Reacher turned in and parked in the driveway and walked to the door. He stood right in front of the spy hole and rang the bell. There was a whole minute’s delay. Then the spy hole darkened and lightened and locks and chains rattled and the doctor opened up. He looked tired and battered and worried. His wife was standing behind him in the hallway, in the bright light, with the phone to her ear. The phone was the old-fashioned kind, big and black on a table, with a dial and a curly wire. The doctor’s wife was not talking. She was just listening, concentrating hard, her eyes narrowing and widening.

The doctor said, “You came back.”

Reacher said, “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Are you OK? The Cornhuskers are out and about.”

“We know,” the doctor said. “We just heard. We’re on the phone tree right now.”

“They didn’t come here?”

“Not yet.”

“So where are they?”

“We’re not sure.”

Reacher said, “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.” He stepped back and Reacher stepped in. The hallway was very warm. The whole house was warm, but it felt smaller than before, like a desperate little fortress. The doctor closed the door and turned two keys and put the chain back on. He asked, “Did you see the police files?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“And?”

“They’re inconclusive,” Reacher said. He moved on into the kitchen. He heard the doctor’s wife say, “What?” She sounded puzzled. Maybe a little shocked. He glanced back at her. The doctor glanced back at her. She said nothing more. Just continued to listen, eyes moving, taking mental notes. The doctor followed Reacher into the kitchen.

“Want coffee?” he asked.

I’m not drunk, he meant.

Reacher said, “Sure. Lots of it.”

The doctor set about filling the machine. The kitchen was even warmer than the hallway. Reacher took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair.

The doctor asked, “What do you mean, ‘inconclusive’?”

Reacher said, “I mean I could make up a story about how the Duncans did it, but there’s really no proof either way.”

“Can you find proof? Is that why you came back?”

Reacher said, “I came back because those two Italian guys who were after me seem to have joined up with a regular United Nations of other guys. Not a peacekeeping force, either. I think they’re all coming here. I want to know why.”

“Pride,” the doctor said. “You messed with the Duncans, and they won’t tolerate that. Their people can’t handle you, so they’ve called in reinforcements.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Reacher said. “Those Italians were here before me. You know that. You heard what Eleanor Duncan said. So there’s some other reason. They have some kind of a dispute with the Duncans.”

“Then why would they help the Duncans in their own dispute with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many of them are coming?” the doctor asked.

From the hallway his wife said, “Five of them.” She had just gotten off the phone. She stepped into the kitchen and said, “And they’re not coming. They’re already here. That was the message on the phone tree. The Italians are back. With three other men. Three cars in total. The Italians in their blue Chevy, plus two guys in a red Ford, and one guy in a black car that everyone swears is Seth Duncan’s Cadillac.”

Chapter 39

Reacher poured himself a cup of coffee and thought for a long moment then said, “I left Seth Duncan’s Cadillac at the Marriott.”

The doctor’s wife asked, “So how did you get back here?”

“I took a Chevy Malibu from one of the bad guys.”

“That thing in the driveway?”

“No, that’s a GMC Yukon I took from a football player.”

“So what happened with the Cadillac?”

“I left a guy stranded. I stole his car, and then I guess he stole mine. Probably not deliberate tit for tat. Probably just coincidental, because there wasn’t really an infinite choice down there. He didn’t want some piece-of-shit pick-up truck, obviously, and he didn’t want anything with big-time security built in. The Cadillac fit the bill. Probably the only thing that did. Or else he was just plain lazy, and didn’t want to look around too long. The Cadillac was right there. We were all in the same hotel.”

“Did you see the guys?”

“I didn’t see the Italians. But I saw the other four.”

“That makes six, not five. Where’s the other one?”

“I’ll tell you something,” Reacher said. “The guy who took the Cadillac put his bag on the back seat, not in the trunk.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where the sixth guy is. In the trunk. I put him there.”

“Does he have air?”

“He doesn’t need air. Not anymore.”

“Sweet Jesus. What happened?”

Reacher said, “I think whatever else they’re doing, they’re coming here to get me first. Like a side issue of some kind. Like mission creep. I don’t know why, but that’s the only way I can explain it. The way I see it, they all assembled tonight in the Marriott and the Italians announced the mission and gave the others a description, probably vague and definitely secondhand, because they haven’t actually laid eyes on me yet, and then I bumped into one of the others after that, in the lobby, and he was looking at me, like he was asking himself, is that the guy? Can it be? Can it? I could see him thinking. We got out to the lot and he put his hand in his pocket and I hit him. You ever heard of commotio cordis?”

“Chest wall trauma,” the doctor said. “Causes fatal cardiac dysrhythmias.”

“Ever seen it?”

“No.”

“Neither had I. But I’m here to tell you, it works real good.”

“What was in his pocket?”

“A knife and a gun and an ID from Vegas.”

“Vegas?” the doctor said. “Do the Duncans have gambling debts? Is that the dispute?”

“Possible,” Reacher said. “No question the Duncans have been living beyond their means for a long time. They’ve been getting some extra income from somewhere.”

“Why say that? They’ve been extorting forty farms for thirty years. And a motel. That’s a lot of money.”

“No, it isn’t,” Reacher said. “Not really. This isn’t the wealthiest area in the world. They could be taking half of what everyone earns, and that wouldn’t buy them a pot to piss in. But Seth lives like a king and they pay ten football players just to be here. They couldn’t do all that on the back of a seasonal enterprise.”

The doctor’s wife said, “We should worry about that later. Right now the Cornhuskers are on the loose, and we don’t know where or why. That’s what’s important tonight. Dorothy Coe might be coming over.”

“Here?” Reacher asked. “Now?”

The doctor said, “That’s what happens sometimes. With the women, mostly. It’s a support thing. Like a sisterhood. Whoever feels the most vulnerable clusters together.”

His wife said, “Which is always Dorothy and me, and sometimes others too, depending on exactly what the panic is.”

“Not a good idea,” Reacher said. “From a tactical point of view, I mean. It gives them one target instead of multiple targets.”

“It’s strength in numbers. It works. Sometimes those boys can act a little inhibited. They don’t necessarily like witnesses around, when they’re sent after women.”

They took cups of coffee and waited in the dining room, which had a view of the road. The road was dark. There was nothing moving on it. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the nighttime terrain. They sat quiet for a spell, on hard upright chairs, with the lights off to preserve their view out the window, and then the doctor said, “Tell us about the files.”

“I saw a photograph,” Reacher said. “Dorothy’s kid was Asian.”

“Vietnamese,” the doctor’s wife said. “Artie Coe did a tour over there. Something about it affected him, I guess. When the boat people thing started, they stepped up and adopted.”

“Did many people from here go to Vietnam?”

“A fair number.”

“Did the Duncans go?”

“I don’t think so. They were in an essential occupation.”

“So was Arthur Coe.”

“Different strokes for different folks.”

“Who was chairman of the local draft board?”

“Their father. Old Man Duncan.”

“So the boys didn’t keep on farming to please him. They kept on to keep their asses out of the war.”

“I suppose.”

“Good to know,” Reacher said. “They’re cowards, too, apart from anything else.”

The doctor said, “Tell us about the investigation.”

“Long story,” Reacher said. “There were eleven boxes of paper.”

“And?”

“The investigation had problems,” Reacher said.

“Like what?”

“One was a conceptual problem, and the others were details. The lead detective was a guy called Carson, and the ground kind of shifted under his feet over a twelve-hour period. It started out as a straightforward missing persons issue, and then it slowly changed to a potential homicide. And Carson didn’t really revisit the early phase in light of the later phase. The first night, he had people checking their own outbuildings. Which was reasonable, frankly, with a missing kid. But later he never really searched those outbuildings independently. Only one of them, basically, for an old couple who hadn’t done it themselves. Everyone else self-certified, really. In effect they said, no sir, the kid ain’t here, and she never was, I promise. At some point Carson should have started over and treated everyone as a potential suspect. But he didn’t. He focused on the Duncans only, based on information received. And the Duncans came out clean.”

“You think it was someone else?”

“Could have been anyone else in the world, just passing through. If not, it could have been any of the local residents. Probably not Dorothy or Arthur Coe themselves, but that still leaves thirty-nine possibilities.”

The doctor’s wife said, “I think it was the Duncans.”

“Three separate agencies disagree with you.”

“They might be wrong.”

Reacher nodded in the dark, his gesture unobserved.

“They might be,” he said. “There might have been another conceptual error. A failure of imagination anyway. It’s clear that the Duncans never left their compound, and it’s clear that the girl never showed up there. There are reliable witnesses to both of those facts. Four boys were building a fence. And the science came up negative, too. But the Duncans could have had an accomplice. A fifth man, essentially. He could have scooped up the kid and taken her somewhere else. Carson never even thought about that. He never checked known associates. And he should have, probably. You wait five years to build a fence, and you happen to be doing it on the exact same day a kid disappears? Could have been a prefabricated alibi. Carson should have wondered, at least. I would have, for sure.”

“Who would the fifth man have been?”

“Anyone,” Reacher said. “A friend, maybe. One of their drivers, perhaps. It’s clear a vehicle was involved, otherwise why was the bike never found?”

“I always wondered about the bike.”

“Did they have a friend? Did you ever see one, when you were babysitting?”

“I saw a few people, I guess.”

“Anyone close? This would have been a very intimate type of relationship. Shared enthusiasms, shared passions, absolute trust. Someone into the same kind of thing they were into.”

“A man?”

“Almost certainly. The same kind of creep.”

“I’m not sure. I can’t remember. Where would he have taken her?”

“Anywhere, theoretically. And that was another major mistake. Carson never really looked anywhere else, apart from the Duncans’ compound. It was crazy not to search the transportation depot, for instance. As a matter of fact I don’t think that was a real problem, because it seems like that place is real busy in the early part of the summer, seven days a week. Something to do with alfalfa, whatever that is. No one would take an abducted child to a work site full of witnesses. But there was one other place Carson should have checked for sure. And he didn’t. He ignored it completely. Possibly because of ignorance or confusion.”

“Which was where?”

But Reacher didn’t get time to answer, because right then the window blazed bright and the room filled with moving lights and shadows. They played over the walls, the ceiling, their faces, alternately stark white and deep black.

Headlight beams, strobing through the posts of the fence.

A car, coming in fast from the east.

Chapter 40

It was Dorothy Coe coming in from the east, in her ratty old pick-up truck. Reacher knew it a second after he saw her lights. He could hear her holed muffler banging away like a motorcycle. Like a Harley-Davidson moving away from a stoplight. She came on fast and then she braked hard and stopped dead and stood off just short of the house. She had seen the gold Yukon in the driveway. She had recognized it, presumably. A Cornhusker’s car. She probably knew it well. The doctor’s wife stepped out to the hallway and undid the locks and the chain and opened the front door and waved. Dorothy Coe didn’t move an inch. Twenty-five years of habitual caution. She thought it could be a trick or a decoy. Reacher joined the doctor’s wife on the step. He pointed to the Yukon and then to himself. Big gestures, like semaphore. My truck. Dorothy Coe moved on again and turned in. She shut down and got out and walked to the door. She had a wool hat pulled down over her ears and she was wearing a quilted coat open over a gray dress. She asked, “Did the Cornhuskers come here?”

The doctor’s wife said, “Not yet.”

“What do you think they want?”

“We don’t know.”

They all stepped back inside and the doctor closed up after them, locks and chain, and they went back to the dining room, now four of them. Dorothy Coe took off her coat, because of the heat. They sat in a line and watched the window like a movie screen. Dorothy Coe was next to Reacher. He asked her, “They didn’t go to your place?”

She said, “No. But Mr. Vincent saw one, passing the motel. About twenty minutes ago. He was watching out the window.”

Reacher said, “That was me. I came in that way, in the truck I took. There are only five of them left now.”

“OK. I understand. But that concerns me a little.”

“Why?”

“I would expect at least one of us to have seen at least one of them, roaming around somewhere. But no one has. Which means they aren’t all spread out. They’re all bunched up. They’re hunting in a pack.”

“Looking for me?”

“Possibly.”

“Then I don’t want to bring them here. Want me to leave?”

“Maybe,” Dorothy said.

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“No,” his wife said.

Impasse. No decision. They all turned back to the window and watched the road. It stayed dark. The cloud was clearing a little. There was faint moonlight in the sky. It was almost one o’clock in the morning.

The motel was closed down for the night, but Vincent was still in the lounge. He was still watching out the window. He had seen the gold Yukon go by. He had recognized it. He had seen it before, many times. It belonged to a young man called John. A very unpleasant person. A bully, even by Duncan standards. Once he had made Vincent get down on his knees and beg not to be beaten. Beg, like a dog, with limp hands held up, pleading and howling, five whole minutes.

Vincent had called in the Yukon sighting, to the phone tree, and then he had gone back to the window and watched some more. Twenty minutes had gone by without incident. Then he saw the five men everyone was talking about. Their strange little convoy pulled into his lot. The blue Chevrolet, the red Ford, Seth Duncan’s black Cadillac. He knew from the phone tree that someone else was using Seth’s car. No one knew how or why. But he saw the guy. A small man slid out of the driver’s seat, rumpled and unshaven, foreign, like people from the Middle East he had seen on the news. Then the two men who had roughed him up climbed out of the Chevrolet. Then two more got out of the Ford, tall, heavy, dark-skinned. Also foreign. They all stood together in the gloom.

Vincent didn’t automatically think the five men were there for him. There could be other reasons. His lot was the only stopping place for miles. Plenty of drivers used it, for all kinds of purposes, passersby checking their maps, taking off their coats, getting things from the trunk, sometimes just stretching their legs. It was private property, no question, properly deeded, but it was used almost like a public facility, like a regular roadside turnout.

He watched. The five men were talking. His windows were ordinary commercial items, chosen by his parents in 1969. They were screened on the inside and opened outward, with little winding handles. Vincent thought about opening the one he was standing behind. Just a crack. It was almost an obligation. He might hear what the five men were saying. He might get valuable information, for the phone tree. Everyone was expected to contribute. That was how the system worked. So he started to turn the handle, slowly, a little at a time. At first it went easily. But then it jammed. The casement was stuck to the insulating strip. Paint and grime and long disuse. He used finger and thumb, and tried to ease some steady pressure into it. He wanted to pop it loose gently. He didn’t want to make a loud plastic sound. The five men were still talking. Or, rather, the man from the Cadillac was talking, and the other four were listening.

Mahmeini’s man was saying, “I let my partner out a mile back. He’s going to work behind the lines. He’s more use to me that way. Pincer movements are always best.”

Roberto Cassano said, “Is he going to coordinate with the rest of us?”

“Of course he is. What else would he do? We’re a team, aren’t we?”

“You should have kept him around. We need to make a plan first.”

“For this? We don’t need to make a plan. It’s just flushing a guy out. How hard can it be? You said it yourself, the locals will help.”

“They’re all asleep.”

“We’ll wake them up. With a bit of luck we’ll get it done before morning.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll spend the day leaning on the Duncans. We all need that delivery, and since we all had to drag ourselves up here, we might as well all spend our time on what’s important.”

“So where do we start?”

“You tell me. You’ve spent time here.”

“The doctor,” Cassano said. “He’s the weakest link.”

Mahmeini’s man said, “So where’s the doctor?”

“South and west of here.”

“OK, go talk to him. I’ll go somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“Because if you know he’s the weakest link, then so does Reacher. Dollars to doughnuts, he ain’t there. So you go waste your time, and I’ll go do some work.”

Vincent gave up on cracking the window. He could tell there was no way it would open without a ripping sound, and drawing attention right then would not be a good idea. And the impromptu conference in his lot was breaking up anyway. The small rumpled man slid back into Seth Duncan’s Cadillac and the big black car crunched through a wide arc over the gravel. Its headlight beams swept across Vincent’s window. He ducked just in time. Then the Cadillac turned left on the two-lane and took off south.

The other four men stayed right where they were. They watched until the Cadillac’s taillights were lost to sight, and then they turned back and started talking again, face-to-face in pairs, each one of them with his right hand in his right-hand coat pocket, for some strange reason, all four of them symmetrical, like a formal tableau.

Roberto Cassano watched the Cadillac go and said, “He doesn’t have a partner. There’s nobody working behind the lines. What lines, anyway? It’s all bullshit.”

Safir’s main man said, “Of course he has a partner. We all saw him, right there in your room.”

“He’s gone. He ran out. He took whatever car they rented. That guy is on his own now. He stole that Cadillac from the lot. We saw it there earlier.”

No reply.

Cassano said, “Unless one of you had a hand in it. Or both of you.”

“What are you saying?”

“We’re all grown-ups here,” Cassano said. “We know how the world works. So let’s not pretend we don’t. Mahmeini told his guys to take the rest of us out, and Safir told you guys to take the rest of us out, and Rossi sure as hell told us to take the rest of you out. I’m being honest here. Mahmeini and Safir and Rossi are all the same. They all want the whole pie. We all know that.”

Safir’s guy said, “We didn’t do anything. We figured you did. We were talking about it all the way up here. It was obvious that Cadillac isn’t a rental.”

“We didn’t do anything to the guy. We were going to wait for later.”

“Us too.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Swear?”

“You swear first.”

Cassano said, “On my mother’s grave.”

Safir’s guy said, “On mine too. So what happened?”

“He ran out. Must have. Maybe chicken. Or short on discipline. Maybe Mahmeini isn’t what we think he is. Which raises possibilities.”

Nobody spoke.

Cassano said, “We have a vote here, don’t you think? The four of us? We could take out Mahmeini’s other boy, and leave each other alone. That way Rossi and Safir end up with fifty percent more pie each. They could live with that. And we sure as hell could.”

“Like a truce?”

“Truces are temporary. Call it an alliance. That’s permanent.”

Nobody spoke. Safir’s guys glanced at each other. Not a difficult decision. A two-front war, or a one-front war? History was positively littered with examples of smart people choosing the latter over the former.

Vincent was still watching out the window. He saw quiet conversation, low tones, some major tension there, then some easing, the body language relaxing, some speculative looks, some tentative smiles. Then all four men took their hands out of their pockets and shook, four separate ways, wrists crossing, some pats on the back, some slaps on the shoulder. Four new friends, all suddenly getting along just great.

There was a little more talk after that, all of it fast and breezy, like simple obvious steps were being planned and confirmed, and then there were more pats on the back and slaps on the shoulder, all shuffling mobile Catch you later kind of stuff, and then the two big dark-skinned men climbed back into their red Ford. They closed their doors and got set to go and then the Italian who had done all the talking suddenly remembered something and turned back and tapped on the driver’s glass.

The window came down.

The Italian had a gun in his hand.

The Italian leaned in and there were two bright flashes, one hard after the other, like orange camera strobes right there inside the car, behind the glass, all six windows lighting up, and two loud explosions, then a pause, then two more, two more bright flashes, two more loud explosions, evenly spaced, carefully placed.

Then the Italian stepped away and Vincent saw the two dark-skinned men all slumped down in their seats, somehow suddenly much smaller, deflated, diminished, smeared with dark matter, their heads lolling down on their chests, their heads altered and misshapen, parts of their heads actually missing.

Vincent fell to the floor under the inside sill of his window and vomited in his throat. Then he ran for the phone.

Angelo Mancini opened the red Ford’s trunk and found two nylon roll-aboard suitcases, which more or less confirmed a personal theory of his. Real men carried their bags. They didn’t wheel them around like women. He unzipped one of the bags and rooted around and came up with a bunch of shirts on wire hangers, all folded together concertina-style. He took one and tore it off the hanger and crushed the hanger flat and opened the Ford’s filler neck and used the hanger to poke the shirt down into the tube, one sleeve in, the body all bunched up, the other sleeve trailing out. He lit the trailing cuff with a paper match from a book he had taken from the diner near the Marriott. Then he walked away and got in the blue Chevrolet’s passenger seat and Roberto Cassano drove him away.

The road beyond the post-and-rail fence outside the dining room window stayed dark. The doctor got up and left the room and came back with four mugs of fresh coffee on a plastic tray. His wife sat quiet. Next to her Dorothy Coe sat quiet. The sisterhood, enduring, waiting it out. Just one long night out of more than nine thousand in the last twenty-five years, most of them tranquil, presumably, but some of them not. Nine thousand separate sunsets, each one of them heralding who knew what.

Reacher was waiting it out, too. He knew that Dorothy wanted to ask what he had found in the county archive. But she was taking her time getting around to it, and that was OK with him. He wasn’t about to bring it up unannounced. He had dealt with his fair share of other people’s tragedy, all of it bad, none of it easy, but he figured there was nothing worse than the Coe family story. Nothing at all. So he waited, ten silent minutes, then fifteen, and finally she asked, “Did they still have the files?”

He answered, “Yes, they did.”

“Did you see them?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you see her photograph?”

“She was very beautiful.”

“Wasn’t she?” Dorothy said, smiling, not with pride, because the kid’s beauty was not her achievement, but with simple wonderment. She said, “I still miss her. Which I think is strange, really, because the things I miss are the things I actually had, and they would be gone now anyway. The things I didn’t get to see would have happened afterward. She would be thirty-three now. All grown up. And I don’t miss those things, because I don’t have a clear picture of what they might have been. I don’t know what she might have become. I don’t know if she would have been a mother herself, and stayed around here, or if she would have been a career girl, maybe a lawyer or a scientist, living far away in a big city.”

“Did she do well in school?”

“Very well.”

“Any favorite subjects?”

“All of them.”

“Where was she going that day?”

“She loved flowers. I like to think she was going searching for some.”

“Did she roam around often?”

“Most days, when she wasn’t in school. Sundays especially. She loved her bike. She was always going somewhere. Those were innocent times. We thought it was safe here. She did the same things I did, when I was eight.”

Reacher paused a beat and said, “I was a cop of sorts for a long time. So may I ask you a serious question?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Do you really want to know what happened to her?”

“Can’t be worse than what I imagine.”

Reacher said, “I’m afraid it can. And it sometimes is. That’s why I asked. Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

She didn’t speak for a long moment.

Then she said, “My neighbor’s son hears her ghost screaming.”

“I met him,” Reacher said. “He smokes a lot of weed.”

“I hear it too, sometimes. Or I think I do. It makes me wonder.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither do I, really. I mean, look at me.”

Reacher did. A solid, capable woman, about sixty years old, blunt and square, worn down by work, worn down by hardship, fading slowly to gray.

She said, “Yes, I really want to know what happened to her.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

Two minutes later the phone rang. An old-fashioned instrument. The slow peal of a mechanical bell, a low sonorous sound, doleful and not at all urgent. The doctor’s wife jumped up and ran out to the hallway to answer. She said hello, but nothing more. She just listened. The phone tree again. The others heard the thin distorted crackle of a loud panicked voice from the earpiece, and they sensed a gasping shuffle out there in the hallway. Some kind of surprising news. Dorothy Coe fidgeted in her chair. The doctor got to his feet. Reacher watched the window. The road stayed dark.

The doctor’s wife came back in, more puzzled than worried, more amazed than frightened. She said, “Mr. Vincent just saw the Italians shoot the men from the red car. With a gun. They’re dead. Both of them. Then they set the car on fire. Right outside his window. In the motel lot.”

Nobody spoke, until Reacher said, “Well, that changes things a little.”

“How?”

“I thought maybe we had six guys working for the same organization, with some kind of a two-way relationship, them and the Duncans. But we don’t. They’re three pairs. Three separate organizations, plus the Duncans make four. Which makes it a food chain. The Duncans owe somebody something, and that somebody owes somebody else, and so on, all the way up the line. They’re all invested, and they’re all here to safeguard their investment. And as long as they’re all here, they’re all trying to cut each other out. They’re all trying to shorten the chain.”

“So we’re caught in the middle of a gang war?”

“Look on the bright side. Six guys showed up this afternoon, and now there are only three of them left. Fifty percent attrition. That works for me.”

The doctor said, “We should call the police.”

His wife said, “No, the police are sixty miles away. And the Cornhuskers are right here, right now. That’s what we need to worry about tonight. We need to know what they’re doing.”

Reacher asked, “How do they normally communicate?”

“Cell phone.”

“I’ve got one,” Reacher said. “In the truck I took. Maybe we could listen in. Then we’d know for sure what they’re doing.”

The doctor undid the locks and unlatched the chain and they all crowded out to the driveway. Reacher opened the Yukon’s passenger door and rooted around in the footwell and came out with the cell phone, slim and black, like a candy bar. He stood in the angle of the door and flipped it open and said, “They’ll use conference calls, right? This thing will ring and all five of them will be on?”

“More likely vibrate, not ring,” the doctor said. “Check the settings and the call register and the address book. You should be able to find an access number.”

“You check,” Reacher said. “I’m not familiar with cell phones.” He tracked around the back of the truck and handed the phone to the doctor. Then he looked to his left and saw light in the mist to the east. A high hemispherical glow, trembling, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening, very white, almost blue.

A car, coming west toward them, pretty fast.

It was about half a mile away. Just like before, the misty glow resolved itself to a fierce source low down above the surface of the road, then to twin fierce sources, spaced just feet apart, oval in shape, low to the ground, blue-white and intense. And just like before, the ovals kept on coming, getting closer, flickering and jittering because of firm suspension and fast steering. They looked small at first, because of the distance, and they stayed small because they were small, because the car was a Mazda Miata, low and tiny and red. Reacher recognized it about two hundred feet out.

Eleanor Duncan.

The sisterhood, clustering together.

A hundred feet out the Mazda slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather, no further need for instant identification. No more sentries to distract.

Fifty feet out, it braked hard, ready for the turn in, and red light flared in the mist behind it.

Twenty feet out, it swung wide and started to turn.

Ten feet out, Reacher remembered three things.

First, Eleanor Duncan was not on the phone tree.

Second, his gun was in his coat.

Third, his coat was in the kitchen.

The Mazda swung in fast and crunched over the gravel and jammed to a stop right behind Dorothy Coe’s pick-up. The door opened wide and Seth Duncan unfolded his lanky frame and stepped out.

He was holding a shotgun.

Chapter 41

Seth Duncan had a huge aluminum splint on his face, like a dull metal patch taped to a large piece of rotten fruit. All kinds of sick moonlit colors were spreading out from under it. Yellows, and browns, and purples. He was wearing dark pants and a dark sweater with a new parka over it. The shotgun in his hands was an old Remington 870 pump. Probably a 12-gauge, probably a twenty-inch barrel. A walnut stock, a seven-round tubular magazine, altogether a fine all-purpose weapon, well proven, more than four million built and sold, used by the navy for shipboard security, used by the Marines for close-quarters combat, used by the army for heavy short-range firepower, used by civilians for hunting, used by cops as a riot gun, used by cranky homeowners as a get-off-my-lawn deterrent.

Nobody moved.

Reacher watched carefully and saw that Seth Duncan was holding the Remington pretty steady. His finger was on the trigger. He was aiming it from the hip, straight back at Reacher, which meant he was aiming it at Dorothy Coe and the doctor and his wife too, because buckshot spreads a little, and all four of them were clustered tight together, on the driveway, ten feet from the doctor’s front door. All kinds of collateral damage, just waiting to happen.

Nobody spoke.

The Mazda idled. Its door was still open. Seth Duncan started to move up the driveway. He raised the Remington’s stock to his shoulder and closed one eye and squinted along the barrel and walked forward, slow and steady. A useless maneuver on rough terrain. But feasible on smooth gravel. The Remington stayed dead on target.

He stopped thirty feet away. He said, “All of you sit down. Right where you are. Cross-legged on the ground.”

Nobody moved.

Reacher asked, “Is that thing loaded?”

Duncan said, “You bet your ass it is.”

“Take care it doesn’t go off by accident.”

“It won’t,” Duncan said, all nasal and inarticulate, because of his injury, and because his cheek was pressed hard against the Remington’s walnut stock.

Nobody moved. Reacher watched and thought. Behind him he heard the doctor stir and heard him ask, “Can we talk?”

Duncan said, “Sit down.”

The doctor said, “We should discuss this. Like reasonable people.”

“Sit down.”

“No, tell us what you want.”

A brave try, but in Reacher’s estimation the wrong tactic. The doctor thought there was something to be gained by spinning things out, by using up the clock. Reacher thought the exact opposite was true. He thought there was no time to waste. None at all. He said, “It’s cold.”

Duncan said, “So?”

“Too cold to sit down outside. Too cold to stand up outside. Let’s go inside.”

“I want you outside.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

“Then let them go get their coats.”

“Why should I?”

“Self-respect,” Reacher said. “You’re wearing a coat. If it’s warm enough not to need one, then you’re a pussy. If it’s cold enough to bundle up, then you’re making innocent people suffer unnecessarily. If you think you’ve got a beef with me, OK, but these folks have never hurt you.”

Seth Duncan thought about it for a second, the gun still up at his shoulder, his head still bent down to it, an eye still closed. He said, “OK, one at a time. The others stay here, like hostages. Mrs. Coe goes first. Get your coat. Nothing else. Don’t touch the phone.”

Nobody moved for a beat, and then Dorothy Coe peeled out of the cluster and walked to the door and stepped inside. She was gone a minute, and then she came back wearing her coat, this time buttoned over her dress. She resumed her position.

Duncan said, “Sit down, Mrs. Coe.”

Dorothy tugged her coat down and sat, not cross-legged, but with her knees drawn up to one side.

Reacher said, “Now the doctor’s wife.”

Duncan said, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m just saying. Ladies first, right?”

“OK, the doctor’s wife. Go. Same rules. Just the coat. Don’t touch the phone. Don’t forget I have hostages here. Including your beloved husband.”

The doctor’s wife peeled out of the cluster. A minute later she was back, wearing her wool coat, and a hat, and gloves, and a muffler.

“Sit down,” Duncan said.

She sat down, right next to Dorothy Coe, cross-legged, her back straight, her hands on her knees, her gaze level and aimed at a faraway spot in the fields. Nothing there, but Reacher guessed it was better than looking at her tormentor.

Reacher said, “Now the doctor.”

“OK, go,” Duncan said.

The doctor peeled out and was gone a minute. He came back in a blue parka, all kinds of nylon and Gore-Tex and zippered compartments. He sat down without waiting to be told.

Reacher said, “Now me.”

Duncan said, “No, not you. Not now, not ever. You stay right there. I don’t trust you.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Sit down.”

“Make me.”

Duncan leaned into the gun, the final percent, like he was ready to fire.

He said, “Sit down.”

Reacher didn’t move. Then he glanced to his right and saw lights in the mist, and he knew that his chance had gone.

The Cornhuskers came on fast, five of them in five separate vehicles, a tight little high-speed convoy, three pick-up trucks and two SUVs. They all jammed to a stop on the road in line with the fence, five vehicles all nose to tail, and five doors were flung open, and five guys spilled out, all of them in red jackets, all of them moving fast, the smallest of them the size of a house. They swarmed straight in, climbing the fence in unison, moving across the dormant lawn on a broad front, coming in wide of the Remington’s potential trajectory. The Remington stayed rock steady in Seth Duncan’s hands. Reacher was watching its muzzle. It wasn’t moving at all, its blued steel dark in the moonlight, trained dead on his chest from thirty feet, the smooth bore at its center looking big enough to stick a thumb in.

Duncan said, “Take the three others inside, and keep them there.”

Rough hands grabbed at the doctor, and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, hauling them back to their feet, by their arms and shoulders, pulling them away, hustling them across the last of the gravel, pushing them in through the door. Eight people went in, and a minute later four came out, all of them football players, all of them crunching back to where Reacher was standing.

Duncan said, “Hold him.”

Reacher was spending no time on regret or recrimination. No time at all. The time for ruing mistakes and learning from them came later. As always he was focused in the present and the immediate future. People who wasted time and energy cursing recent errors were certain losers. Not that Reacher saw an easy path to certain victory. Not right then. Not in the short term. Right then he saw nothing ahead but a world of hurt.

The four big guys stepped up close. No opportunity. The Remington stayed trained on its target and two guys came in from wide positions, never getting between Reacher and the gun. They stepped alongside him and grabbed an arm each, big strong hands on his elbows from behind, on his wrists from in front, pushing one, pulling the other, straightening his arms, bending his elbows back, kicking his feet apart, hooking their ankles in front of his ankles, holding him immobile. A third guy came up behind him and stood between his spread feet and wrapped massive arms around his chest. The fourth backed off and stood ten feet from Duncan.

Reacher didn’t struggle. No point. Absolutely no point at all. Each of the three men holding him was taller than him by inches and outweighed him by fifty pounds. No doubt they were all slow and stupid and untutored, but right then sheer dumb bulk was doing the job just fine. He could move his feet a little, and he could move his head a little, but that was all, and all he could do with his feet was move them backward, which would pitch him forward on his face, except that the guy who had him in the bear hug from behind would hold him upright. And all he could do with his head was duck his chin to his chest, or jerk it back a couple of inches. Not enough to hurt the guy behind him.

He was stuck, and he knew it.

Seth Duncan lowered the gun to his hip again. He walked forward with it and then handed it off to the fourth guy. He walked on without it and stopped face-to-face with Reacher, a yard away. His eyes were bloodshot and his breathing was low and shallow. He was quivering a little. Some kind of fury or excitement. He said, “I have a message for you, pal.”

Reacher said, “Who from? The National Association of Assholes?”

“No, from me personally.”

“What, you let your membership lapse?”

“Ten seconds from now we’ll know who’s a member of that club, and who isn’t.”

“So what’s the message?”

“It’s more of a question.”

“OK, so what’s the question?”

“The question is, how do you like it?”

Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honor. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.

It said: I’m still standing.

The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn’t flinch up and back. He started with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect improvised head butt straight into Duncan’s knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher’s brow and the delicate bones in Duncan’s hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighter than nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.

“Asshole,” Reacher said.

Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurt and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy, to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.

Get him.

The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.

Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.

The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.

The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher’s throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher’s forehead.

Immobile.

The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the center of Reacher’s face and

CRACK

BLACK

Chapter 42

Jacob Duncan convened an unscheduled middle-of-the-night meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas’s or Jasper’s, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.

“I just got off the phone,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.”

Jasper asked, “How?”

“He captured Jack Reacher.”

Jonas asked, “How?”

Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, “I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr. Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor’s car and, sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor’s house, large as life and twice as natural.”

“Where is he now?”

“In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.”

“Is he alive?”

“So far,” Jacob Duncan said. “But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.”

The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.

Jacob said, “Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I’m tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn’t necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr. Rossi, our good friend to the south.”

Jasper asked, “What does Seth want to do?”

“He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr. Rossi’s boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we’ve been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.”

“Too risky,” Jonas said. “Reacher is a dangerous man. We shouldn’t keep him around a minute longer than we have to. That’s just asking for trouble.”

“As I said, Reacher’s in a safe place. Plus, in the end, if we do it Seth’s way, we’ll have been seen to have solved our own problems with our own hands, without any outside assistance at all, and therefore whatever small shred of vulnerability we displayed will evaporate completely.”

“Even so. It’s still risky.”

“There are other factors,” Jacob said.

The room went quiet again.

Jacob said, “We’ve never really known or cared what happens to our shipments once they’re in Mr. Rossi’s hands, except that I imagine we always vaguely supposed they pass down a lengthy chain of commerce, sale and resale, to an ultimate destination. And now that chain, or at least a large part of it, has become visible. As of tonight, it seems that three separate participants have representation here. Probably they’re all desperate. It’s clear to me they have agreed to work together to break up the logjam. And once that is done, it’s equally clear to me they will be under instructions to eliminate one another, so that the last man standing triples his profit.”

Jonas said, “That’s not relevant to us.”

“Except that Mr. Rossi’s boys seem to be jumping the gun. It was inevitable that one of them would seize the initiative. Our stooges on the phone tree tell me that two men are already dead. Mr. Rossi’s boys killed them outside Mr. Vincent’s motel. So my idea is to give Mr. Rossi’s boys enough time to shorten the chain a little more, so that by the end of tomorrow Mr. Rossi himself will be the last man standing, whereupon he and we can have a little talk about splitting the extra profit equally. The way it works mathematically is that we’ll all double our shares. Mr. Rossi will be happy to live with that, I imagine, and so will we, I’m sure.”

“Still risky.”

“You don’t like money, brother?”

“I don’t like risk.”

“Everything’s a risk. We know that, don’t we? We’ve lived with risk for a long time. It’s part of the thrill.”

A long silence.

Jonas said, “The doctor lied to us. He told us Reacher hitched a ride in a white sedan.”

Jacob nodded. “The doctor has apologized for that, most sincerely. I’m told he’s being a model of cooperation now. His wife is with him, of course. I’m sure that’s a factor. He also claims Reacher left Seth’s Cadillac sixty miles south of here, and that it was restolen quite independently by an operative from further up the chain. A small Middle Eastern person, according to reports on the phone tree. It appears he was the one who nearly ran Seth over.”

“Anything else?”

“The doctor says Reacher saw the police files.”

Silence in the room.

Then Jonas said, “And?”

“Inconclusive, the doctor says.”

“Conclusive enough to come back.”

“The doctor says he came back because of the men in the cars.”

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, “But in the interests of full disclosure, the doctor also claims Reacher asked Mrs. Coe if she really wants to be told what happened to her daughter.”

“Reacher can’t possibly know. Not yet.”

“I agree. But he might be beginning to pull on threads.”

“Then we have to kill him now. We have to.”

“It’s just one more day. He’s locked up. Escape is impossible.”

More silence.

Nobody spoke.

Then Jonas asked, “Anything else?”

“Eleanor helped Reacher get past the sentry,” Jacob said. “She defied her husband and left his house, quite brazenly. She and Reacher conspired together to decoy the boy away from his post. He didn’t perform well. We’ll have to fire him, of course. We’ll leave Seth to decide what happens to his wife. And it seems that Seth has broken his hand. He’ll need some attention. It appears Reacher has a very hard head. And that’s all the news I have.”

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, “We need to make a decision about the immediate matter at hand. Life and death. Always the ultimate choice.”

No reply.

Jacob asked, “Who wants to go first?”

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, “Then I’ll go first. I vote to let my boy do it his way. I vote to keep Reacher concealed until our truck is close by. It’s a minor increase in risk. One more day, that’s all. Overall, it’s insignificant. And I like finesse. I like a measure of elegance in a solution.”

A long pause.

Then Jasper said, “I’m in.”

And Jonas said, “OK,” a little reluctantly.

Reacher woke up in a concrete room full of bright light. He was on his back on the floor, at the foot of a flight of steep stairs. He had been carried down, he figured, not thrown or fallen. Because the back of his skull was OK. He had no sprains or bruises. His limbs were intact, all four of them. He could see and hear and move. His face hurt like hell, but that was to be expected.

The lights were regular incandescent household bulbs, six or eight of them, randomly placed, maybe a hundred watts each. No shades. The concrete was smooth and pale gray. Very fine. Not dusty. It was like an engineering product. High-strength. It had been poured with great precision. There were no seams. The angles where the walls met each other and the floor were chamfered and radiused, just slightly. Like a swimming pool, ready for tiling. Reacher had dug swimming pools once. Temporary employment, many years ago. He had seen them in all their different stages of completion.

His face hurt like hell.

Was he in a half-finished swimming pool? Unlikely. Unless it had a temporary roof. The roof was boards laid over heavy joists. The joists were made of multi-ply wood. Manufactured articles. Very strong. Layers of exotic hardwoods, probably glued together with resins, under enormous pressure, in a giant press in a factory. Probably cut with computer-controlled saws. Delivered on a flat-bed truck. Craned into place. Each one probably weighed a lot.

His face hurt.

He felt confused. He had no idea what time it was. The clock in his head had stopped. He was breathing through his mouth. His nose was jammed solid with blood and swellings. He could feel blood on his lips and his chin. It was thick and almost dry. A nosebleed. Not surprising. Maybe thirty minutes old. Not like Eleanor Duncan’s. His own blood clotted fast. It always had. He was the exact opposite of a hemophiliac. A good thing, from time to time. An evolutionary trait, no doubt bred into him through many generations of natural-born survivors.

His face hurt.

There were other things in the concrete room. There were pipes of all different diameters. There were green metal boxes a little crusted with mineral stains. Some wires, some in steel conduit, some loose. There were no windows. Just the walls. And the stairs, with a closed door at the top.

He was underground.

Was he in a bunker of some sort?

He didn’t know. He hoped not. His recent experience with underground bunkers was not good.

His face hurt like hell. And it was getting worse. Much, much worse. Huge waves of pain were pulsing out between his eyes, behind his nose, boring straight back into his head, one with every heartbeat, bumping and grinding, lapping out into his skull and bouncing around and then fading and receding just in time to be replaced by the next. Bad pain. But he could fight it. He could fight anything. He had been fighting since he was five years old. If there was nothing to fight, he would fight himself. Not that there had ever been a shortage of targets. He had fought his own battles, and his brother’s. A family responsibility. Not that his brother had been a coward. Far from it. Nor weak. His brother had been big too. But he had been a rational boy. Gentle, even. Always a disadvantage. Someone would start something, and Joe would waste the first precious second thinking Why? Reacher never did that. Never. He used the first precious second landing the first precious blow. Fight, and win. Fight, and win.

His face hurt like hell. He looked at the pain, and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

Not beating it.

It was beating him.

It was exploding, like bombs on timers, one, two, three. Relentlessly. Everlastingly, with every beat of his heart. It was never going to stop, until his heart stopped. It was insane. In the past he had been wounded with shrapnel and shot in the chest and cut with knives. This was worse. Much worse. This was worse than all of his previous sufferings put together.

Which made no sense. No sense at all. Something was wrong. He had seen busted noses before. Many times. No fun, but nobody made a gigantic fuss about them. Nobody looked like grenades were going off in his head. Not even Seth Duncan. People got up, maybe spat a little, winced, walked it off.

He raised his hand to his face. Slowly. He knew it would be like shooting himself in the head. But he had to know. Because something was wrong. He touched his nose. He gasped, loud and sudden, like an explosive curse, pain and fury and disgust.

The ridge of bone on the front of his nose was broken clean off. It had been driven around under the tight web of skin and cartilage to the side. It was pinned there, like a mountaintop sliced off and reattached to a lower slope.

It hurt like hell.

Maybe the Remington’s butt had a metal binding. Brass, or steel. Reinforcement against wear and tear. He hadn’t noticed. He knew he had turned his head at the last split second, as much as he could against the resistance of the sweaty palm clamped on his forehead. He had wanted as much of a side-on impact as he could get. Better than head-on. A head-on impact could drive shards of loose bone into the brain.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them again.

He knew what he had to do.

He had to reset the break. He knew that. He knew the costs and the benefits. The pain would lessen, and he would end up with a normal-looking nose. Almost. But he would pass out again. No question about that. Touching the injury with a gentle fingertip had nearly taken his head off at the neck. Like shooting himself. Fixing it would be like machine-gunning himself.

He closed his eyes. The pain battered at him. He laid his head gently on the concrete. No point in falling back and cracking his skull as well. He raised his hand. He grasped the knob of bone, finger and thumb. Atom bombs went off in his head. He pushed and pulled.

No result. The cartilage was clamping too hard. Like a web of miniature elastic straps, holding the damn thing in place. In completely the wrong place. He blinked water out of his eyes and tried again. He pushed and pulled. Thermonuclear devices exploded.

No result.

He knew what he had to do. Steady pressure was not working. He had to smack the knob of bone back into place with the heel of his hand. He had to think hard and set it up and be decisive. Like a chiropractor wrestling a spine, jerking suddenly, listening for the sudden click.

He rehearsed the move. He needed to hit low down on the angle of cheek and nose, with side of his hand, the lower part, opposite the ball of his thumb, like a karate chop, a semi-glancing blow, upward and sideways and outward. He needed to drive the peak back up the mountainside. It would settle OK. Once it arrived, the skin and the cartilage would keep it in place.

He opened his eyes. He couldn’t get an angle. Not down there on the floor. His elbow got in the way. He dragged himself across the smooth concrete, palms and heels pushing, five feet, ten, and he sat up against a wall, half-reclining, his neck bent, space for his elbows in the void under his angled back. He squared his shoulders and his hips and he got as settled and as stable as he could, so that he wouldn’t fall far, or even at all.

Showtime.

He touched the heel of his hand to where it had to go. He let it feel what it had to do. He practiced the move. The top of his palm would skim his eyebrow. Like a guide.

On three, he thought.

One.

Two.

CRACK

BLACK

Chapter 43

Mahmeini’s man was afraid. He had driven around for twenty minutes and he had seen nothing at all, and then he had come to a house with a white mailbox with Duncan written on it, all proud and spotlit. The house was a decent place, expensively restored. Their HQ, he had assumed. But no. All it contained was a woman who claimed she knew nothing. She was relatively young. She had been beaten recently. She said there were four Duncans, a father and a son and two uncles. She was married to the son. They were all currently elsewhere. She gave directions to a cluster of three houses that Mahmeini’s man had already seen and dismissed from his mind. They were unimpressive places, all meanly hemmed in by an old post-and-rail fence, unlikely homes for men of significance.

But he had set off back in that direction anyway, driving fast, almost running down some idiot pedestrian who loomed up at him out of the dark, and then from the two-lane he had seen a gasoline fire blazing to the north. He had ignored the three houses and hustled onward toward the fire and found it was in the motel lot. It was a car. Or, it had been a car. Now it was just a superheated cherry-red shell inside an inferno. Judging by the shape it had been the Ford that Safir’s boys had been driving. They were still inside it. Or, what was left of them was still inside it. They were now just shrunken and hideous shapes, still burning and melting and peeling, their ligaments shriveled, their hands forced up by the heat like ghastly claws, the furious roiling air in which they were sitting making it look like they were dancing and waving in their seats.

Rossi’s boys had killed them, obviously. Which meant they had killed Asghar too, almost certainly, hours ago. Rossi’s plan was clear. He already had a firm connection with the Duncans, at the bottom end of the chain. Now he intended to leapfrog both Safir and Mahmeini and sell to the Saudis direct, at the top end of the chain. An obvious move, displaying sound business sense, but Rossi had had his boys start early. They had seized the initiative. A real coup. Their timing was impressive. As were their skills. They had lain in wait for Asghar and taken him down and disposed of his car, all within thirty short minutes. Which was an excellent performance. Asghar was tough and wary, always thinking, not easy to beat. A good wingman. A good friend, too, now crying out for vengeance. Mahmeini’s man could sense his presence, very strongly, like he was still close by. All of which made him feel alone and adrift in hostile territory, and very much on the defensive. All of which were unusual feelings for him, and all of which therefore made him a little afraid. And all of which made him change his plan. He had sudden new priorities. The giant stranger could wait. His primary targets were now Rossi’s boys.

Mahmeini’s man started right there at the motel. He had seen someone earlier, lurking behind a window, watching. A man with strange hair. A local. Possibly the motel owner. At least he would know which way Rossi’s boys had gone.

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were parked four miles north, with their lights off and their engine running. Cassano was on the phone with Rossi. Nearly two o’clock in the morning, but there were important matters to discuss.

Cassano asked, “You and Seth Duncan made this deal, right?”

Rossi said, “He was my initial contact, back in the day. It turned into a family affair pretty soon after that. It seems like nothing much happens up there without unanimous consent.”

“But as far as you know it’s still your deal?”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to someone else’s deal.”

“Of course it’s still my deal,” Rossi said. “No question about that. It always was my deal, and it always will be my deal. Why are you even asking? What the hell is going on?”

“Seth Duncan lent his car to Mahmeini’s guy, that’s what.”

Silence on the line.

Cassano said, “There was a Cadillac at the Marriott when we got down there this afternoon. Too old for a rental. Later we saw Mahmeini’s guy using it. At first we thought he stole it, but no. The locals up here say it’s Seth Duncan’s personal ride. Therefore Seth Duncan must have provided him with it. He must have driven it down there and left it ready for him. And then after the initial contact we made, Mahmeini’s guy seemed to start operating solo. At first we thought Safir’s boys had taken out his partner, or maybe the guy just ran out, but now we think he must have come straight up here in their rental. He’s probably hanging out with the Duncans right now. Maybe they both are, like best friends forever. We’re getting royally screwed here, boss. We’re getting squeezed out.”

“Can’t be happening.”

“Boss, your contact lent his car to your rival. They’re in bed together. How else do you want to interpret it?”

“I can’t get close to the ultimate buyer.”

“You’re going to have to try.”

More silence on the line. Then Rossi said, “OK, I guess nothing is impossible. So go ahead and deal with Mahmeini’s boys. Do that first. Make it like they were never born. Then show Seth Duncan the error of his ways. Find some way to get his attention. Through his wife, maybe. And then move in on the three old guys. Tell them if they step out of line again we’ll take over the whole thing, all the way up to Vancouver. An hour from now I want them pissing in their pants.”

“What about Reacher?”

“Find him and cut his head off and put it in a box. Show the Duncans we can do anything we want. Show them we can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime. Make sure they understand they could be next.”

Reacher woke up for the second time and knew instantly it was two in the morning. The clock in his head had started up again. And he knew instantly he was in the basement of a house. Not an unfinished swimming pool, not an underground bunker. The concrete was smooth and strong because Nebraska was tornado country, and either zoning laws or construction standards or insurance requirements or just a conscientious architect had demanded an adequate shelter. Which made it the basement of the doctor’s house, almost certainly, partly because not enough time had elapsed for a move to another location, and partly because the doctor’s house was the only house Reacher had seen that was new enough to be both designed by an architect and be subject to laws and standards and requirements. In the old days people just built things themselves and crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.

Therefore the pipes of various diameters were for water and the sewer and heating. The green metal boxes with the mineral stains were the furnace and the water heater. There was an electrical panel, presumably full of circuit breakers. The stairs came down and the door at the top would open outward into the hallway. Not inward. No one let doors open inward at the top of a staircase. Careless residents would go tumbling down like a slapstick movie. And tornadoes could blow at three hundred miles an hour. Better that a shelter door be pressed more firmly shut, not blown wide open.

Reacher sat up. Evidently he had come to rest in the angle of wall and floor, with his head bent. His neck was a little sore, which he took to be a very good sign. It meant the pain from his nose was relegated to background noise. He raised his hand and checked. His nose was still very tender, and there were open cuts on it, and big pillowy swellings, but the chip of bone was back in the right place. Basically. Almost. More or less. Not pretty, presumably, but then, he hadn’t been pretty to start with. He spat in his palm and tried to wipe dried blood off his mouth and his chin.

Then he got to his feet. There was nothing stored in the basement. No crowded shelves, no piles of dusty boxes, no workbench, no pegboards full of tools. Reacher figured all that stuff was in the garage. It had to be somewhere. Every household had stuff like that. But the basement was a tornado shelter, pure and simple. Nothing else. Not even a rec room. There was no battered sofa, no last-generation TV, no old refrigerator, no pool table, no hidden bottles of bourbon. There was nothing down there at all, except the house’s essential mechanical systems. The furnace was running hard, and it was making noise. It was a little too loud to hear anything else over. So Reacher crept up the stairs and put his ear to the door. He heard voices, low and indistinct, first one and then another, in a fixed and regular rhythm. Call and response. A man and a woman. Seth Duncan, he thought, asking questions, and either Dorothy Coe or the doctor’s wife answering them, with short syllables and no sibilants. Negative answers. No real stress. No pain or panic. Just resignation. Either Dorothy Coe or the doctor’s wife was saying No, quite calmly and patiently and resolutely, over and over again, to each new question. And whichever one of them it was, she had an audience. Reacher could sense the low physical vibe of other people in the house, breathing, stirring, moving their feet. The doctor himself, he thought, and two of the football players.

Reacher tried the door handle, slowly and carefully. It turned, but the door didn’t open. It was locked, as expected. The door was a stout item, set tight and square in a wall that felt very firm and solid. Because of tornadoes, and laws and standards and requirements, and conscientious architects. He let go of the handle and crept back downstairs. For a moment he wondered if the laws and the standards and the requirements and the conscientious architects had mandated a second way in. Maybe a trapdoor, from the master bedroom. He figured such a thing would make a lot of sense. Storms moved fast, and a sleeping couple might not have time to get along the hallway to the stairs. So he walked the whole floor, looking up, his sore neck protesting, but he saw no trapdoors. No second way in, and therefore no second way out. Just solid unbroken floorboards, laid neatly over the strong multi-ply joists.

He came to rest in the middle of the space. He had a number of options, none of them guaranteed to succeed, some of them complete nonstarters. He could turn off the hot water, but that would be a slow-motion provocation. Presumably no one was intending to take a shower in the next few hours. Equally he could turn off the heat, which would be more serious, given the season, but response time would still be slow, and he would be victimizing the innocent as well as the guilty. He could kill all the lights, at the electrical panel, one click of a circuit breaker, but there was at least one shotgun upstairs, and maybe flashlights too. He was on the wrong side of a locked door, unarmed, attacking from the low ground.

Not good.

Not good at all.

Chapter 44

Seth Duncan had his right hand flat on the doctor’s dining table, with a bag of peas from the freezer laid over it. The icy cold was numbing the pain, but not very effectively. He needed another shot of his uncle Jasper’s pig anesthetic, and he was about to go get one, but before he attended to himself he was determined to attend to his plan, which was working pretty well at that point. So well, in fact, that he had permitted himself to think ahead to the endgame. His long experience in the county had taught him that reality was whatever people said it was. If no one ever mentioned an event, then it had never happened. If no one ever mentioned a person, then that person had never existed.

Duncan was alone on one side of the table, with the dark window behind him and the doctor and his wife and Dorothy Coe opposite him, lined up on three hard chairs, upright and attentive. He was leading them one by one through a series of questions, listening to their answers, judging their sincerity, establishing the foundations of the story as it would be told in the future. He had finished with the doctor, and he had finished with the doctor’s wife, and he was about to start in on Dorothy Coe. He had a Cornhusker standing mute and menacing in the doorway, holding the old Remington pump, and he had another out in the hallway, leaning on the basement door. The other three were out somewhere in their cars, driving around in the dark, pretending to hunt for Reacher. The illusion had to be maintained, for the sake of Rossi’s boys. Reacher’s capture was scheduled for much later in the day. Reality was what people said it was.

Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”

Dorothy Coe didn’t answer. She just glanced to her left, out to the hallway. A stubborn woman, hung up on quaint old notions of objectivity.

Duncan said, “That’s a very strong basement door. I know, because I installed the same one myself, when we remodeled. It has a steel core, and it fits into a steel frame, and it has oversized hinges and a burst-proof lock. It’s rated for a category five storm. It can withstand a three-hundred-mile-an-hour gust. It carries a FEMA seal of approval. So if, just hypothetically, there was a person in the basement right now, you may rest assured that he’s staying there. Such a person could not possibly escape. Such a person might as well not exist at all.”

Dorothy Coe asked, “If the door is so good, why do you have a football player leaning on it?”

“He has to be somewhere,” Duncan said. Then he smiled. “Would you prefer it if he was in the bedroom? Maybe he could kill some time in there, with your little friend, while you answer my questions.”

Dorothy Coe glanced the other way, at the doctor’s wife.

Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”

Dorothy Coe didn’t answer.

Duncan said, “The calendar rolls on. It will be spring before you know it. You’ll be plowing and planting. With a bit of luck the rains will be right and you’ll have a good harvest. But then what? Do you want it hauled? Or do you want to stick a gun in your mouth, like your worthless husband?”

Dorothy Coe said nothing.

Duncan asked, “Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?”

Dorothy Coe said, “No.”

“Did you ever hear of a man named Reacher?”

“No.”

“Was he ever at your house?”

“No.”

“Did you ever give him breakfast?”

“No.”

“Was he here when you arrived tonight?”

“No.”

Out in the hallway, three inches from the second Cornhusker’s hip, the handle on the basement door turned, a quarter circle, and paused a beat, and turned back.

No one noticed.

In the dining room, Duncan asked, “Did any kind of stranger come here this winter?”

Dorothy Coe said, “No.”

“Anyone at all?”

“No.”

“Any local troubles here?”

“No.”

“Did anything change?”

“No.”

“Do you want anything to change?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” Duncan said. “I like the status quo, very much, and I’m glad you do too. It benefits all of us. No reason why we can’t all get along.” He got up, leaving the bag of peas on the table, a little melt water beading on the wax. He said, “You three stay here. My boys will look after you. Don’t attempt to leave the house, and don’t attempt to use the phone. Don’t even answer it. The phone tree is off-limits tonight. You’re out of the loop. Punishments for noncompliance will be swift and severe.”

Then Duncan put his parka on, awkwardly, leading with his left hand, and he stepped past the guy with the Remington and headed for the front door. The others heard it open and close and a minute later they heard the Mazda drive away, the sound of its exhaust ripping the night air behind it.

Mahmeini’s man drove the Cadillac south on the two-lane, five gentle miles, and then he turned the lights off and slowed to a walk. The big engine whispered and the soft tires rustled over the pavement. He saw the three old houses on his right. There was a light burning in one of the downstairs windows. Beyond that, there were no signs of life. There were three vehicles parked out front, vague moonlit shapes, all of them old, all of them rustic and utilitarian pick-up trucks, none of them a new blue Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet would come. Mahmeini’s man was absolutely sure of that. Half of Rossi’s attention was fixed on leapfrogging Safir and Mahmeini himself, which meant the other half was fixed on securing his rear. His relationship with the Duncans had to be protected. Which meant his boys would be checking in with them often, calming them, stroking them, reassuring them, and above all making sure no one else was getting close to them. Standard commonsense precautions, straight out of the textbook.

Mahmeini’s man rolled past the end of the Duncans’ driveway and U-turned and parked a hundred yards south on the opposite shoulder, half on the blacktop, half on the dirt, his lights off, the big black car nestled in a slight natural dip, about as invisible as it was possible to get without a camouflage net. There would be a dull moonlit glow from some of the chrome, he figured, but there was mist in the air, and anyway Rossi’s boys would be looking at the mouth of the driveway ahead of their turn, not at anything else. Drivers always did that. Human nature. Steering a car was as much a mental as a physical process. Heads turned, eyes sought their target, and the hands followed automatically.

Mahmeini’s man waited. He was facing north, because on balance he expected Rossi’s boys to come from the north, but it was always possible they would come from the south, so he adjusted his mirror to get a view in that direction. The mist that was helping to hide him was fogging his rear window a little. Nothing serious, but an approaching car with its lights off might be difficult to see. But then, why would Rossi’s boys be driving with their lights off? They were three-for-three on the night, and therefore probably very confident.

Five miles north the orange glow of the gasoline fire was still visible, but it was dying down a little. Nothing burns forever. Above the glow the moon was smudged with smoke. Apart from that the nighttime landscape lay dark and quiet and still and uneventful, like it must have done for a century or more. Mahmeini’s man stared at the road ahead, and saw nothing.

He waited.

Then he saw something.

Way ahead and off to his left he saw a blue glow in the mist, a high round bubble of light, moving fast from west to east. A car, coming in at him at a right angle, aiming to hit the two-lane a mile or two north of him, aiming to turn either left and away from him, or right and toward him. He took his gun from his pocket and laid it on the passenger seat next to him. The moving bubble of light slowed, and stopped, and started again, and flared bright. The car had turned right, toward him. Immediately he knew it was not the Chevrolet. The way the light moved told him it was too small, too low, too nimble. Porsches and Ferraris in Vegas moved the same way at night, their front ends rigidly connected to the pavement, their headlights jittering and hopping. Big dumb domestic sedans looked anesthetized in comparison. They moved like lumps, swaying, dull and damped and padded and disconnected.

He watched and waited, and he saw the bubble of light resolve itself into twin nervous beams and then twin oval shapes close together and low to the ground. He saw the car slow two hundred yards away and then he saw it turn one hundred yards away, straight into the mouth of the driveway. It was the tiny red Mazda Miata he had seen parked at the restored Duncan farmhouse. The daughter-in-law’s car. She was visiting. Not a social occasion, presumably. Not so late at night. She had called ahead on the phone, probably. She had reported the encounter with the strange Iranian man, and she had been told to come on in, for safety’s sake. Probably the Duncans knew certain things were due to be settled before dawn, and they didn’t want one of their own caught in the crossfire.

Mahmeini’s man watched the Mazda bump and bounce down the driveway. He watched it park alongside the old pick-up trucks. He saw its lights go off. Ten seconds later he saw a doorway flare bright in the distance as a figure went inside, and then the scene went dark again.

Mahmeini’s man watched the road, and waited. The night mist was getting worse. It was becoming a problem. The Cadillac’s windshield was going opaque. He fumbled around and found the wiper stalk and flicked the blades right, left, right, left, and cleared it. Which made the rear screen all the worse in comparison. It was completely dewed over. Even a car with its headlights on would be hard to recognize. Its lights would be atomized into a million separate shards, into a single blinding mess. Worse than useless.

Mahmeini’s man kept one eye on the road ahead and groped around for the rear defogger button. It was hard to find. With the lights off outside, the dash and all the consoles were unlit inside. And there were a lot of buttons. It was a luxury car, fully equipped. He ducked his head and found a button with zigzag symbols on it. It looked like something to do with heating. And it had a red warning lens laid into it. He pressed it, and waited. Nothing happened to the rear window, but his ass got hot. It was the seat warmer, not the defogger. He turned it off and found another button, one eye on the console, one eye on the road ahead. He pressed the button. The radio came on, very loud. He shut it down in a hurry and tried again, another button close by, a satisfying tactile click under his fingertip.

The trunk lid clunked and popped and raised itself up, slowly and smoothly, damped and hydraulic, all the way open, completely vertical.

Now he had no view at all out the back.

Not good.

And presumably there was a courtesy light in the trunk, in reality quite weak and yellow, but no doubt looking like a million-watt searchlight in the dark of the night.

Not good at all.

He pressed the button again, not really thinking. Afterward he realized he had half-expected the trunk lid to close again, slowly and obediently, like the seat warmer and the radio had gone off again. But of course the trunk lid didn’t close again. The release mechanism merely clicked and whirred one more time, and the trunk lid stayed exactly where it was.

Wide open.

Blocking his view.

He was going to have to get out and close it by hand.

Chapter 45

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini had been in the area three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini’s crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lay of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency’s sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini’s guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.

Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.

Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tires were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir’s boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.

Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano’s hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen gray. Reacher’s work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan’s place. The big cheese.

Mahmeini’s man climbed out of the Cadillac and stood for a second in the nighttime cold. He looked all around, east, west, north, south, and he saw nothing stirring. He closed his door, to kill the interior light. He took a step, toward the trunk. He had been right. There was a light in the trunk. It was throwing a pale sphere of yellow glow into the mist. Not serious from the front, but a problem from behind. The human eye was very sensitive.

He took another step, past the rear passenger door, and he raised his left hand, palm flat, somehow already feeling the familiar sensations associated with an action he had performed a thousand times before, his palm on the metal maybe a foot from the edge of the lid, so that the force of his push would act on both hinges equally, so that the panel would not buckle, so that both calibrated springs would stretch together with soft creaks, whereupon the lid would go down smooth and easy until the upmarket mechanism grabbed at it and sucked it all the way shut.

He got as far as putting his palm on the panel.

Subconsciously he leaned into the motion, not really intending to slam the lid, not at all bad-tempered, just seeking a little physical leverage, and his change of position hunched his shoulders a little, which brought his head forward a little, which changed his eye line a little, which meant he had to look somewhere, and given the choice of the lit interior of a previously closed space or a featureless length of dark blacktop, well, any human eye would opt for the former over the latter.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared back at him.

His sightless eyes were wide open. His olive skin was pale with death and yellow in the light. Forces from braking and accelerating and turning had jammed him awkwardly into the far rear corner of the trunk. His limbs were in disarray. His neck was bent. His look was quizzical.

Mahmeini’s man stood absolutely still, his hand on the cold metal, his mouth open, not really breathing, his heart hardly beating. He forced himself to look away. Then he looked back. He wasn’t hallucinating. Nothing had changed. He started breathing again. Then he started panting. His heart started thumping. He started to shake and shiver.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared up at him.

Mahmeini’s man took his hand off the trunk lid and shuffled all the way around to the rear of the car. He stood there with the idling exhaust pooling around his knees and with his fingers steepled against his forehead, looking down, not understanding. Asghar was stone dead, but there was no blood. No gunshot wound between the eyes. No blunt-force trauma, no caved-in skull, no signs of strangulation or suffocation, no knife wounds, no defensive injuries. Nothing at all, except his friend, dead in the trunk, all slack and undignified, all thrown about and jumbled up.

Mahmeini’s man walked away, ten feet, then twenty, and then he turned back and raised his head and raised his arms and howled silently at the moon, his eyes screwed tight shut, his mouth wide open in a desperate snarl, his feet stamping alternately like he was running in place, all alone in the vast empty darkness.

Then he stopped and swiped his hands over his face, one after the other, and he started thinking. But the subtleties were almost completely beyond him. His friend had been killed sixty miles away, by an unknown person and an unknown method with no visible signs, and then locked in the trunk of a car that could have absolutely nothing at all to do with either Rossi’s boys, or Safir’s. Then his own rental had been taken away, so that he had been forced to steal the very same car, the only possible choice in an entire town, inevitably and inexorably, like a puppet being manipulated from afar by a grinning intelligence much greater than his own.

It was incomprehensible.

But facts were facts. He walked back to the trunk and steeled himself to investigate further. He pushed and pulled and hauled Asghar into the center of the space and began a detailed examination, like a pathologist leaning over a mortuary table. The trunk light burned bright and hot, but it revealed nothing. Asghar had no broken bones, and no bruises. His neck was intact. He had no wounds, no cuts, no scrapes, no scratches, and there was nothing under his fingernails. His gun and his knife and his money were missing, which was interesting. And all around him in the trunk were the usual kinds of things a person might expect to find in a trunk, which was odd. No attempt had been made to clean it up. No incriminating evidence had been removed. There was an empty grocery bag with a week-old register receipt inside, and a month-old local newspaper never read and still neatly folded, and some browned and curled leaves and some crumbs of dirt as if items had been hauled home from a plant nursery. Clearly the car belonged to someone who used it in a fairly normal manner, and who had not prepared it in any special way for its current gruesome task.

So, whose car was it? That was the first question. The license plates would reveal the answer, of course, assuming they were genuine. But there might be a faster way to find out, given the fact that nothing seemed to have been sanitized. Mahmeini’s man stepped away to the front passenger door, and opened it, and leaned in, and opened the glove box. He found a black leather wallet the size of a hardcover book, stamped on the front with the Cadillac shield in gold. Inside it he found two instruction books, one thick, one thin, one for the car and one for the radio, and a salesman’s business card clipped into four angled slots, and a registration document, and an insurance document. He pulled out both documents and dropped the wallet in the footwell and held the documents close to the light inside the glove box.

The car was Seth Duncan’s.

Which was logical, in a sudden, awful, spectacular way. Because everything had been utterly, utterly miscalculated, right from the start. There was no other possible explanation. There was no giant stranger on the rampage. No one had seen him and no one could describe him, because he didn’t exist. He was an invention. He was imaginary. He was bait. He was a ruse. The whole delivery delay was bullshit. It had been staged, from beginning to end. The purpose had been to lure everyone to Nebraska, to be cut out, to be eliminated, to be killed. The Duncans were removing links, severing the chain, intending to remake it with nobody between themselves at the bottom and the Saudis at the top, with a truly massive increase in profit as their prize. Audacious, but obvious, and clearly feasible, clearly within their grasp, because clearly their abilities had been grotesquely underestimated by everyone. They were not the clueless rural hicks everyone thought they were. They were ruthless strategists of stunning and genuine quality, subtle, sophisticated, capable of great insight and penetrating analysis. They had foreseen Mahmeini as their strongest opponent, quite correctly and accurately and realistically, and they had absolutely crippled his response from the get-go by taking Asghar down, somehow, mysteriously, before the bell had even sounded, and then by leaving his untouched body in a car they knew for sure would be found and identified as one of their own.

So, not just a coup, but a message too, brazenly and artfully and subtly delivered. A message that said: We can do anything we want. We can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, anytime, and you won’t even begin to understand how we did it. And in case subtlety didn’t impress, they had reached out and burned Safir’s guys to death in the motel lot, in a brutal demonstration of range and power. Rossi’s boys hadn’t done that. Rossi’s boys were probably already dead themselves, somewhere else, somehow else, maybe dismembered or bled out or even crucified. Or buried alive. Rossi’s spokesman had used those very words, on the subject of the Duncans’ tastes.

Mahmeini’s man felt completely alone. He was completely alone. He was the last survivor. He had no friends, no allies, no familiarity with the terrain. And no idea what to do next, except to lash out, to fight back, to seek revenge.

No desire to do anything else, either.

He stared through the darkness at the three Duncan houses. He closed the trunk lid on Asghar, reverently, with soft pressure from eight gentle fingertips, like a sad chord on a church organ. Then he walked along the dirt on the shoulder, back to the passenger door, and he leaned in and picked up his Glock from where it lay on the seat. He closed the door, and skirted the hood, and crossed the road, and stepped onto the dirt of someone’s fallow field, and walked a straight line, parallel with the Duncans’ fenced driveway, their three houses a hundred yards ahead of him, his gun in his right hand, his knife in his left.

Half a mile behind the Duncan houses, Roberto Cassano slowed and hauled the Chevrolet through a tight turn and let it coast onward toward the compound. A hundred yards out he brought it to a stop with the parking brake. He reached up and switched the dome light so it would stay off when the doors opened. He looked at Angelo Mancini next to him, and they both paused and then nodded and climbed out into the night. They drew their Colts and held them behind their backs, so that the moon glinting off the shiny steel would not be visible from the front. They walked forward together, shoulder to shoulder, a hundred yards to go.

Chapter 46

The doctor and his wife and Dorothy Coe were sitting quiet in the dining room, but the football player with the shotgun had moved out of the doorway and gone into the living room, where he was sprawled out full-length on the sofa, watching recorded NFL highlights in high definition on the doctor’s big new television set. His partner had moved off the basement door and was leaning comfortably on the hallway wall, watching the screen at an angle, from a distance. They were both absorbed in the program. The sound was low but distinct, grumbling richly and urgently through the big loudspeakers. The room lights were off, and bright colors from the screen were dancing and bouncing off the walls. Outside the window, the night was dark and still. The phone had rung three times, but no one had answered. Apart from that, all was peaceful. It could have been the day after Christmas, or late on a Thanksgiving afternoon.

Then all the power in the house went out.

The TV picture died abruptly and the sound faded away and the subliminal hum of the heating system disappeared. Silence clamped down, elemental and absolute, and the temperature seemed to drop, and the walls seemed to dissolve, as if there was no longer a difference between inside and out, as if the house’s tiny footprint had suddenly blended with the vast emptiness on which it stood.

The football player in the hallway pushed off the wall and stood still in the center of the space. His partner in the living room swiveled his feet to the floor and sat up straight. He said, “What happened?”

The other guy said, “I don’t know.”

“Doctor?”

The doctor got up from behind the dining table and fumbled his way to the door. He said, “The power went out.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Did you pay your bill?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“Could be the whole area.”

The guy in the living room found his way to the window and peered into the blackness outside. He said, “How the hell would anyone know?”

The guy in the hallway asked, “Where are the circuit breakers?”

The doctor said, “In the basement.”

“Terrific. Reacher’s awake. And he’s playing games.” The guy crept through the dark to the basement door, feeling his way with his fingertips on the hallway wall. He identified the door by touch and pounded on it. He called, “Turn it back on, asshole.”

No response.

Pitch-black throughout the house. Not even a glimmer, anywhere.

“Turn the power back on, Reacher.”

No response.

Cold, and silence.

The guy from the living room found his way out to the hallway. “Maybe he isn’t awake. Maybe it’s a real outage.”

His partner asked, “Got a flashlight, doctor?”

The doctor said, “In the garage.”

“Go get it.”

“I can’t see.”

“Do your best, OK?”

The doctor shuffled down the hallway, hesitantly, fingers brushing the wall, colliding with the first guy, sensing the second guy’s hulking presence and avoiding it, making it to the kitchen, stumbling against a chair with a hollow rattle of wood, hitting the edge of the table with his thighs. The world of the blind. Not easy. He trailed his fingers along the countertops, passing the sink, passing the stove, making it to the mud room lobby in back. He turned ninety degrees with his hands out in front of him and found the door to the garage. He groped for the knob and opened the door and stepped down into the chill space beyond. He found the workbench and reached up and traced his fingers over the items clipped neatly above it. A hammer, good for hitting. Screwdrivers, good for stabbing. Wrenches, stone cold to the touch. He found the flashlight’s plastic barrel and pulled it out from its clip. He thumbed the switch and a weak yellow beam jumped out. He rapped the head against his palm and the beam sparked a little brighter. He turned and found a football player standing right next to him. The one from the living room.

The football player smiled and took the flashlight out of his hand and held it under his chin and made a face, like a Halloween lantern. He said, “Good work, doc,” and turned away and used the beam up and down and side to side to paint his way back into the house. The doctor followed, using the same lit memories a second later. The football player said, “Go back in the dining room now,” and shone the beam ahead, showing the doctor the way. The doctor went back to the table and the football player said, “All of you stay right where you are, and don’t move a muscle,” and then he closed the door on them.

His partner said, “So what now?”

The guy with the flashlight said, “We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.”

“We hit him pretty hard.”

“Best guess?”

“What’s yours?”

The guy with the flashlight didn’t answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, “Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.”

No response.

Silence.

The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, “I’m not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.”

No response.

Silence.

The other guy asked again, “So what now?”

The guy with the flashlight said, “Go get the doctor’s wife.” He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor’s wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, “Scream.”

She said, “What?”

“Scream, or I’ll make you.”

She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, “You hear that, asshole?”

No response.

Silence.

The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back toward the dining room and his partner led the doctor’s wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, “So?”

The guy with the flashlight said, “We wait for daylight.”

“That’s four hours away.”

“You got a better idea?”

“We could call the mothership.”

“They’ll just tell us to handle it.”

“I’m not going down there. Not with him.”

“Me either.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait him out. He thinks he’s smart, but he isn’t. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain’t exactly rocket science.”

They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked off the flashlight, to save the battery, and the room went pitch-dark again, and cold, and silent.

Mahmeini’s man walked parallel with the driveway for a hundred yards and then came up against a length of fence that ran south directly across his path. It defined the lower left-hand part of the cross-bar of the hollow T that was the Duncans’ compound. It was made of five-inch rails, all of them a little gnarled and warped, but easy enough to climb. He got over it without any difficulty and paused for a second with the three pick-up trucks and the Mazda parked to his left, and the southernmost house straight in front of him. The center house was the only one that was dark. The southernmost and the northernmost houses both had light in them, faint and a little secondhand, as if only back rooms were in use and stray illumination was finding its way out to the front windows through internal passageways and open doors. There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air. But no sound, not even talking. Mahmeini’s man hesitated, choosing, deciding, making up his mind. Left or right?

Cassano and Mancini came on the compound from the rear, out of the dark and dormant field, and they stopped on the far side of the fence opposite the center house, which was Jonas’s, as far as they knew. It was closed up and dark, but both its neighbors had light in their kitchen windows, spilling out in bright bars across the weedy backyard gravel. The gravel was matted down into the dirt, but it was still marginally noisy, Cassano knew. He had walked across it earlier in the day, to find undisturbed locations for his phone calls to Rossi. Their best play would be to stay on the wrong side of the fence, in the last of the field, and then head directly for their chosen point of entry. That would reduce the sound of their approach to a minimum. But which would be their chosen point of entry? Left or right? Jasper’s place, or Jacob’s?

All four Duncans were in Jasper’s basement, hunting through old cartons for more veterinary anesthetic. The last of the hog dope had been used on Seth’s nose, and his busted hand was going to need something stronger anyway. Two fingers were already swollen so hard the skin was fit to burst. Jasper figured he had something designed for horses, and he planned to find it and flood Seth’s wrist joint with it. He was no anatomist, but he figured the affected nerves had to pass through there somewhere. Where else could they go?

Seth was not complaining at the delay. Jasper figured he was taking it very well. He was growing up. He had been petulant after the broken nose, but now he was standing tall. Because he had captured his assailant all by himself, obviously. And because he was planning what to do with the guy next. The glow of achievement and the prospect of revenge were anesthetics all by themselves.

Jonas asked, “Is this it?” He was holding up a round pint bottle made of brown glass. Its label was stained and covered in long technical words, some of them Latin. Jasper squinted across the dim space and said, “Good man. You found it.”

Then they heard footsteps on the floor above their heads.

Chapter 47

Jacob was first up the cellar stairs. His initial thought was that a football player was checking in, but the floors in their houses were typical of old-style construction in rural America, built of boards cut from the hearts of old pines, thick and dense and heavy, capable of transmitting noise but not detail. So it was not possible to say who was in the house by sound alone. He saw no one in the hallway, but when he got to the kitchen he found a man in there, standing still, small and wiry, dark and dead-eyed, rumpled, not very clean, wearing a buttoned shirt without a tie, holding a knife in his left hand and a gun in his right. The knife was held low, but the gun was pointing straight at the center of Jacob’s chest.

Jacob stood still.

The man put his knife on the kitchen table and raised his forefinger to his lips.

Jacob made no sound.

Behind him his son and his brothers crowded into the kitchen, too soon to be stopped. The man moved the muzzle of his gun, left and right, back and forth. The four Duncans lined up, shoulder to shoulder. The man turned his wrist and moved the muzzle down and up, down and up, patting the air with it. No one moved.

The man said, “Get on your knees.”

Jacob asked, “Who are you?”

The man said, “You killed my friend.”

“I didn’t.”

“One of you Duncans did.”

“We didn’t. We don’t even know who you are.”

“Get on your knees.”

“Who are you?”

The little man picked up his knife again and asked, “Which one of you is Seth?”

Seth Duncan paused a beat and then raised his good hand, like a kid in class.

The little man said, “You killed my friend and you put his body in the trunk of your Cadillac.”

Jacob said, “No, Reacher stole that car this afternoon. It was him.”

“Reacher doesn’t exist.”

“He does. He broke my son’s nose. And his hand.”

The gun didn’t move, but the little man turned his head and looked at Seth. The aluminum splint, the swollen fingers. Jacob said, “We haven’t left here all day. But Reacher was at the Marriott. This afternoon and this evening. We know that. He left the Cadillac there.”

“Where is he now?”

“We’re not sure. Close by, we think.”

“How did he get back?”

“Perhaps he took your rental car. Did your friend have the key?”

The little man didn’t answer.

Jacob asked, “Who are you?”

“I represent Mahmeini.”

“We don’t know who that is.”

“He buys your merchandise from Safir.”

“We don’t know anyone of that name either. We sell to an Italian gentleman in Las Vegas, name of Mr. Rossi, and after that we have no further interest.”

“You’re trying to cut everyone out.”

“We’re not. We’re trying to get our shipment home, that’s all.”

“Where is it?”

“On its way. But we can’t bring it in until Reacher is down.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. This kind of business can’t be done in public. You should be helping us, not pointing guns at us.”

The little man didn’t answer.

Jacob said, “Put the gun away, and let’s all sit down and talk. We’re all on the same side here.”

The little man kept the gun straight and level and said, “Safir’s men are dead too.”

“Reacher,” Jacob said. “He’s on the loose.”

“What about Rossi’s boys?”

“We haven’t seen them recently.”

“Really?”

“I swear.”

The little man was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “OK. Things change. Life moves on, for all of us. From now on you will sell direct to Mahmeini.”

Jacob Duncan said, “Our arrangement is with Mr. Rossi.”

The little man said, “Not anymore.”

Jacob Duncan didn’t answer.

Cassano and Mancini opted to try Jacob Duncan’s place first. A logical choice, given that Jacob was clearly the head of the family. They backed off the fence a couple of paces and walked parallel with it to a spot opposite Jacob’s kitchen window. The bar of yellow light coming out of it laid a bright rectangle on the gravel, but it fell six feet short of the base of the fence. They climbed the fence and skirted the rectangle, moving quietly across the gravel, Cassano to the right, Mancini to the left, and then they flattened themselves against the back wall of the house and peered in.

No one there.

Mancini eased open the door and Cassano went in ahead of him. The house was silent. No sound at all. No one awake, no one asleep. Cassano and Mancini had searched plenty of places, plenty of times, and they knew what to listen for.

They slipped back out to the yard and retraced their steps. They climbed back into the field and walked north in the dark and lined up again opposite Jasper’s window. They climbed the fence, staying out of the light. They flattened themselves against the wall and peered inside.

Not what they expected.

Not even close.

There was only one Iranian, not two. There was no happy conversation. No smiles. No bourbon toasts. Instead, Mahmeini’s man was standing there with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, and all four Duncans were cowering away from him. The glass in the window was wavy and thin in places, and Jacob Duncan’s urgent voice was faintly audible.

Jacob Duncan was saying, “We have been in business a long time, sir, based on trust and loyalty, and we can’t change things now. Our arrangement is with Mr. Rossi, and Mr. Rossi alone. Perhaps he can sell direct to you, in the future, now that Mr. Safir seems to be out of the picture. Perhaps that might be of advantage. But that’s all we can offer, not that such a thing is even ours to offer.”

The little man said, “Mahmeini won’t take half a pie when the whole thing is on the table.”

“But it isn’t on the table. I repeat, we deal with Mr. Rossi only.”

“Do you really?” the little man asked. He changed his position and stood sideways, and raised his arm level with his shoulder, and closed one eye, and tracked the gun slowly and mechanically back and forth, left and right along the line of men, like a great battleship turret traversing, pausing first on Seth, then on Jasper, then on Jonas, then on Jacob, and then back again, to Jonas, to Jasper, to Seth, and then back again once more. Finally the gun came to rest aimed square at Jonas. Right between his eyes. The little man’s finger whitened on the trigger.

Then simultaneously the window and the little man’s head exploded, and the crowded room filled with powdered glass and smoke and the massive barking roar of a .45 gunshot, and blood and bone and brain slapped and spattered against the far wall, and the little man fell to the floor, and first Mancini and then Cassano stepped in from the yard.

After less than an hour the two football players were thoroughly bored with sitting in the dark. And not just bored, either, but unsettled and a little anxious, too, and irritated, and exasperated, and humiliated, because they were very aware that they were being beaten on a minute-to-minute basis, and being beaten on any basis did not come easy to them. They were not submissive people. They never came second. They were the big dogs, and being denied heat and light and NFL highlights was both insulting and totally inappropriate.

One said, “We have a shotgun, damn it.”

The other said, “It’s a big basement. He could be anywhere.”

“We have a flashlight.”

“Pretty weak.”

“Maybe he’s still unconscious. It could be an actual fault, and we’re sitting here like idiots.”

“He has to be awake by now.”

“So what if he is? He’s one guy, and we have a shotgun and a flashlight.”

“He was a soldier.”

“That doesn’t give him magic powers.”

“How would we do it?”

“We could tape the flashlight to the shotgun barrel. Go down, single file, like they do in the movies. We’d see him before he sees us.”

“We’re not supposed to kill him. Seth wants to do that himself, later.”

“We could aim low. Wound him in the legs.”

“Or make him surrender. That would be better. And he’d have to, wouldn’t he? With the shotgun and all? We could tape him up, with the tape we use for the flashlight. Then he couldn’t mess with the power again. We should have done that in the first place.”

“We don’t have any tape, for either thing.”

“Let’s look in the garage. If we find some tape, we’ll think about doing it.”

They found some tape. They followed the flashlight beam through the hallway, through the kitchen, through the mud room, all the way to the garage, and right there on the workbench was a fat new roll of silver duct tape, still wrapped up, fresh from the store. They carried it back with them, not really sure if they were pleased or not. But they had promised themselves in a way, so they pulled off the plastic wrap and picked at the end of the tape and unwound a short length. They tried the flashlight against the shotgun barrel, working in the dim light of reflections off the walls. The flashlight fit pretty well, ahead of the forestock, and underslung because of the front sight above the muzzle, and jutting out a little because of its length. The plastic lens was about an inch in front of the gun. Satisfactory. But to get it secure they were going to have to wrap tape right over the thumb switch, which was a point of no return, of sorts. If they were going to do that, then they were going to have to act. No point in leaving the light burning and running the battery down all for nothing.

One asked, “Well?”

Three hours before daylight. Boredom, irritation, exasperation, humiliation.

The other said, “Let’s do it.”

He propped the gun across his knees and held the flashlight in place. The other guy juggled the roll of tape, making sticky tearing noises, winding it around and around, like he was binding broken ribs with a bandage, until the whole assembly was fat and mummified. He ducked his head and bit off a nine-inch tail and pressed it down securely, and then he squeezed everything hard between his palms, and smoothed the edges of the tape with his fingers. The first guy lifted the gun off his knees and swung it left and right and up and down. The flashlight stayed solidly in place, its beam moving faithfully with the muzzle.

“OK,” he said. “Cool. We’re good to go. The light is like a laser sight. Can’t miss.”

The other guy said, “Remember, aim low. If you see him, jerk the barrel down and fire at his feet.”

“If he doesn’t surrender first.”

“Exactly. First choice is to immobilize him. But if he moves, shoot him.”

“Where will he be?”

“Could be anywhere. Probably out of sight at the bottom of the stairs. Or hiding behind the water heater. It’s big enough.”

They followed the light out to the hallway and stopped near the basement door. The guy with the gun said, “You open it and step back and then get behind me. I’ll go down slowly and I’ll move the light around as much as I can. Tell me if you see him. We need to talk each other through this.”

“OK,” the other guy said. He put his hand on the knob. “We sure about this?”

“I’m ready.”

“OK, on three. Your count.”

The guy with the gun said, “One.”

Then “Two.”

The other guy said, “Wait. He could be right behind the door.”

“At the top of the stairs?”

“Just waiting to jump out at us before we’re ready.”

“You think? That would mean he’s been waiting there a whole hour.”

“Sometimes they wait all day.”

“Snipers do. This guy wasn’t a sniper.”

“But it’s possible.”

“He’s probably behind the water heater.”

“But he might not be.”

“I could fire through the door.”

“If he isn’t there, that would alert him.”

“He’ll be alerted anyway, as soon as he sees the flashlight beam coming down.”

“The door has a steel core. You heard what Seth said.”

The guy with the gun asked, “So what do we do?”

The other guy said, “We could wait for daylight.”

Boredom, irritation, exasperation, humiliation.

The guy with the gun said, “No.”

“OK, so I’ll open up real fast, and you fire one round immediately, right where his feet are. Or where they would be. Just in case. Don’t wait and see. Just pull the trigger, whatever, right away.”

“OK. But then we’ll have to go down real fast.”

“We will. He’ll be in shock. I bet that gun is pretty loud. Ready?”

“I’m ready.” The guy with the gun estimated the arc of the swinging door and shuffled a foot closer and braced himself, the stock to his shoulder, one eye closed, his finger tight on the trigger.

The other guy said, “Aim low.”

The oval of light settled on the bottom quarter of the door.

“On three. Your count.”

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

The first guy turned the knob and flung the door wide open and the second guy fired instantly, with a long tongue of flame and a huge roaring 12-gauge boom.

Chapter 48

Reacher had studied the electrical panel and had decided to cut all the circuits at once, because of human nature. He was pretty sure that the football players would turn out to be less-than-perfect sentries. Practically all sentries were less than perfect. It was any army’s most persistent problem. Boredom set in, and attention wandered, and discipline eroded. Military history was littered with catastrophes caused by poor sentry performance. And football players weren’t even military. Reacher figured the two in the house above him would stay on the ball for about ten or fifteen minutes, and then they would get lazy. Maybe they would make coffee or turn on the television, and relax, and get comfortable. So he gave them half an hour to settle in, and then he cut all the power at once, to be sure of killing whatever form of entertainment they had chosen.

Whereupon human nature would take over once again. The two in the house above him were used to dominance, used to getting their own way, used to having what they wanted, and accustomed to winning. Being denied television or warmth or coffee wasn’t a major defeat or the end of the world, but for guys like that it was a proxy version of a poke in the chest on a sidewalk outside a bar. It was a provocation. It would eat away at them, and it would not be ignored forever. Ultimately they would respond, because of ego. The response would start with anger, and then threats, and then intervention, which would be inexpert and badly thought-out.

Human nature.

Reacher hit the circuit breakers and found the stairs in the dark and crept up to the top step and listened. The door was thick and tight in its frame, so he didn’t hear much, except the bouts of hammering an inch from his ear, and then the scream from the doctor’s wife, which he discounted immediately, because it was clearly staged. He had heard people scream before, and he knew the difference between real and fake.

Then he waited in the dark. All went quiet for the best part of an hour, which was longer than he expected. All bullies are cowards, but these two had a little more pussy in them than he had guessed. They had a shotgun, for God’s sake, and he assumed they had found a flashlight. What the hell were they waiting for? Permission? Their mommies?

He waited.

Then eventually he sensed movement and deliberation on the other side of the door. He imagined that one guy would be holding the shotgun, and the other would be holding the flashlight. He guessed they would plan to shuffle down slowly behind the gun, like they had seen in the movies. He figured their primary intention would be to capture him and restrain him, not to kill him, partly because there was a large conceptual gap between sacking a quarterback and murdering a fellow human being, and partly because Seth Duncan would want him alive for later entertainment. So if they were going to shoot, they were going to aim low. And if they were smart, they were going to shoot immediately, because sooner or later they would have to realize that his own best move would be to be waiting right there at the top of the stairs, for the sake of surprise.

He felt the doorknob move, and then there was a pause. He put his back flat on the wall, on the hinge side of the door, and he put one foot on the opposite wall, at waist height, and he straightened his leg a little, and he clamped himself tight, and then he lifted his other foot into place, and he walked himself upward, palms and soles, until his head was bent against the stairwell ceiling and his ass was jammed four feet off the ground.

He waited.

Then the door flew open away from him and he got a split-second glimpse of a flashlight taped to a shotgun barrel, and then the shotgun fired instantly, at point-blank range and a downward angle, right under his bent knees, and the stairwell was instantly full of deafening noise and flame and smoke and dust and wood splinters from the stairs and shards of plastic from where the muzzle blast blew the protruding flashlight apart. Then the muzzle flash died and the house went pitch-dark again and Reacher vaulted out of his clamped position, his right foot landing on the top stair, his left foot on the second, balanced, ready, using the bright fragment of visual memory his eyes had retained, leaning down to where he knew the shotgun must be, grabbing it two-handed, tearing it away from the guy holding it, backhanding it hard into where he knew the guy’s face must be, achieving two results in one, making the guy disappear backward and recycling the shotgun’s pump action both at once, loudly, CRUNCH crunch, and then shouldering the swinging door away and feeling it crash against the second guy, and bursting out of the stairwell and firing into the floor, not really seeking to hit anyone but needing the brief light from the muzzle flash, seeing one guy down on his left and the other still up on his right, launching himself at that new target, clubbing the gun at the guy, cycling the action again against his face, CRUNCH crunch, bringing him down, kicking hard against his fallen form, head, ribs, arms, legs, whatever he could find, then dancing back and kicking and stamping on the first guy in the dark, head, stomach, hands, then back to the second guy, then the first again, all unaimed and wild, overwhelming force indiscriminately applied, not giving up on it until well after he was sure no more was required.

Then he finally stopped and stepped back and stood still and listened. Most of what he heard was panicked breathing from the room on his left. The dining room. He called, “Doctor? This is Reacher. I’m OK. No one got shot. Everything is under control now. But I need the power back on.”

No response.

Pitch-dark.

“Doctor? The sooner the better, OK?”

He heard movement in the dining room. A chair scraping back, a hand touching a wall, a stray foot kicking a table leg. Then the door opened and the doctor came out, more sensed than seen, a presence in the dark. Reacher asked him, “Do you have another flashlight?”

The doctor said, “No.”

“OK, go switch on the circuit breakers for me. Take care on the stairs. They might be a little busted up.”

The doctor said, “Now?”

“In a minute,” Reacher said. Then he called out, “You two on the floor? Can you hear me? You listening?”

No response. Pitch-dark. Reacher moved forward, carefully, sliding his feet flat on the floor, feeling his way with the toes of his boots. He came up against the first guy’s head, and worked out where his gut must be, and jammed the shotgun muzzle down into it, hard. Then he pivoted onward, as if pole-vaulting, and found the second guy a yard away. They were on their backs, roughly in a straight line, lying symmetrically, feet to feet. Reacher stood between them and kicked the side of his left boot against one guy’s sole and his right boot against the other’s. He got set and aimed the shotgun at the floor in front of him and rehearsed a short arc, left and then right and back again, like a batter in the box loosening up his swing ahead of a pitch. He said, “If you guys move at all, I’m going to shoot you both in the nuts, one after the other.”

No response.

Nothing at all.

Reacher said, “OK, doctor, go ahead. Take care now.” He heard the doctor feel his way along the wall, heard his feet on the stairs, slow cautious steps, fingertips trailing, the creak and crack of splintered boards underfoot, and then the confident click of a heel on the solid concrete below.

Ten seconds later the lights came back on, and the television picture jumped back to life, and the excited announcers started up again, and the heating system clicked and caught and hummed and whirred. Reacher screwed his eyes shut against the sudden dazzle and then forced them open to narrow slits and looked down. The two guys on the floor were battered and bleeding. One was out cold, and the other was dazed. Reacher fixed that with another kick to the head, and then he looked around and saw the roll of duct tape on the sofa. Five minutes later both guys were trussed up like chickens and bound together back-to-back by their necks and their waists and their ankles. Together they were far too heavy to move, so Reacher left them right where they were, on the hallway floor, hiding the ruined patch of parquet where he had fired into the ground.

Job done, he thought.

Job done, Jacob Duncan thought. Seth’s Cadillac had been retrieved from the road, and both dead Iranians had been stripped to the skin and their clothes had been dumped in the kitchen woodstove. Their bodies had been hauled to the door and left in the yard for later disposal. Then the kitchen wall and the floor had been wiped clean, and the broken glass had been swept up, and the busted window had been patched with tape and wax paper, and Seth’s hand had been taken care of, and then Jasper had dragged extra chairs in from another room, and now all six men were sitting close together around the table, the four Duncans plus Cassano and Mancini, all of them tight and collegial and elbow to elbow. The Knob Creek had been brought out, and toasts had been drunk, to each other, and to success, and to future partnership.

Jacob Duncan had leaned back and drunk with considerable private satisfaction and personal triumph, because he felt fully vindicated. He had glimpsed Cassano at the window, had seen the aimed .45, and had talked a little longer and louder than was strictly necessary, proclaiming his undying loyalty to Rossi, cementing the relationship beyond a reasonable doubt, all the while keeping his nerve and waiting for Cassano to shoot, which he had eventually. Quick thinking, courage under pressure, and a perfect result. Doubled profits stretched ahead in perpetuity. Reacher was locked safely underground, with two good men on guard. And the shipment was on its way, which was the most wonderful thing of all, because as always a small portion of it would be retained for the family’s personal use. A kind of benign shrinkage. It made the whole crazy operation worthwhile.

Jacob raised his glass and said, “Here’s to us,” because life was good.

Reacher found a paring knife in a kitchen drawer and cut the decapitated remains of the flashlight off the shotgun barrel. Laymen misunderstood gunpowder. A charge powerful enough to propel a heavy projectile through the air at hundreds of miles an hour did so by creating a shaped bubble of exploding gas energetic enough to destroy anything it met on its way out of the barrel. Which was why military flashlights were made of metal and mounted with the lens behind the muzzle, not in front of it. He tossed the shattered plastic in the trash, and then he looked around the kitchen and asked, “Where’s my coat?”

The doctor’s wife said, “In the closet. When we came back in I took all the coats and hung them up. I kind of scooped yours up along the way. I thought I should hide it. I thought you might have useful stuff in it.”

Reacher glanced into the hallway. “Those guys didn’t search my pockets?”

“No.”

“I should kick them in the head again. It might raise their IQ.”

The doctor’s wife told him to sit down in a chair. He did, and she examined him carefully, and said, “Your nose looks really terrible.”

“I know,” Reacher said. He could see it between his eyes, purple and swollen, out of focus, an unexpected presence. He had never seen his own nose before, except in a mirror.

“My husband should take a look at it.”

“Nothing he can do.”

“It needs to be set.”

“I already did that.”

“No, seriously.”

“Believe me, it’s as set as it’s ever going to get. But you could clean the cuts, if you like. With that stuff you used before.”

Dorothy Coe helped her. They started with warm water, to sponge the crusted blood off his face. Then they got to work with the cotton balls and the thin astringent liquid. The skin had split in big U-shaped gashes. The open edges stung like crazy. The doctor’s wife was thorough. It was not a fun five minutes. But finally the job was done, and Dorothy Coe rinsed his face with more water, and then patted it dry with a paper towel.

The doctor’s wife asked, “Do you have a headache?”

“A little bit,” Reacher said.

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the President?”

“Of what?”

“The Nebraska Corn Growers.”

“I have no idea.”

“I should bandage your face.”

“No need,” Reacher said. “Just lend me a pair of scissors.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

She found scissors and he found the roll of duct tape. He cut a neat eight-inch length and laid it glue-side-up on the table. Then he cut a two-inch length and trimmed it to the shape of a triangle. He stuck the triangle glue-side to glue-side in the center of the eight-inch length, and then he picked the whole thing up and smoothed it into place across his face, hard and tight, a broad silver slash that ran from one cheekbone to the other, right under his eyes. He said, “This is the finest field dressing in the world. The Marines once flew me from Lebanon to Germany with nothing but duct tape keeping my lower intestine in.”

“It’s not sterile.”

“It’s close enough.”

“It can’t be very comfortable.”

“But I can see past it. That’s the main thing.”

Dorothy Coe said, “It looks like war paint.”

“That’s another point in its favor.”

The doctor came in and stared for a second. But he didn’t comment. Instead he asked, “What happens next?”

Chapter 49

They went back to the dining room and sat in the dark, so they could watch the road. There were three more Cornhuskers out there somewhere, and it was possible they would come in and out on rotation, swapping duties, spelling each other. Like shift work. Reacher hoped they all showed up sooner or later. He kept the duct tape and the Remington close by.

The doctor said, “We haven’t heard any news.”

Reacher nodded. “Because you weren’t allowed to use the phone. But it rang, and so you think something new has happened.”

“We think three new things have happened. Because it rang three times.”

“Best guess?”

“The gang war. Three men left, three phone calls. Maybe they’re all dead now.”

“They can’t all be dead. The winner must still be alive, at least. Murder-suicide isn’t normally a feature of gang fights.”

“OK, then maybe it’s two dead. Maybe the man in the Cadillac got the Italians.”

Reacher shook his head. “More likely the other way around. The man in the Cadillac will get picked off very easily. Because he’s alone, and because he’s new up here. This terrain is very weird. It takes some getting used to. The Italians have been here longer than him. In fact, they’ve been here longer than me, and I feel like I’ve been here forever.”

The doctor’s wife said, “I don’t see how this is a gang war at all. Why would a criminal in Las Vegas or wherever just step aside because two of his men got hurt in Nebraska?”

Reacher said, “The two at the motel got more than hurt.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Think about it,” Reacher said. “Suppose the big guy is at home in Vegas, taking it easy by the pool, smoking a cigar, and his supplier calls him up and says he’s cutting him out of the chain. What does the big guy do? He sends his boys over, that’s what. But his boys just got beat. So he’s bankrupt now. He’s fresh out of threats. He’s powerless. It’s over for him.”

“He must have more boys.”

“They all have more boys. They can choose to fight two on two, or ten on ten, or twenty on twenty, and there’s always a winner and there’s always a loser. They accept the referee’s decision and they move on. They’re like rutting stags. It’s in their DNA.”

“So what kind of gangs are they?”

“The usual kind. The kind that makes big money out of something illegal.”

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not gambling debts. It’s not something theoretical on paper. It’s something real. Something physical. With weight, and dimensions. It has to be. That’s what the Duncans do. They run a transportation company. So they’re trucking something in, and it’s getting passed along from A to B to C to D.”

“Drugs?”

“I don’t think so. You don’t need to truck drugs south to Vegas. You can get them direct from Mexico or South America. Or California.”

“Drug money, then. To be laundered in the casinos. From the big cities in the East, maybe coming through Chicago.”

“Possible,” Reacher said. “Certainly it’s something very valuable, which is why they’re all in such an uproar. It has to be the kind of thing where you smile and rub your hands when you see it rolling in through the gate. And it’s late now, possibly, which is why there are so many boots on the ground up here. They’re all anxious. They all want to see it arrive, because it’s physical, and valuable. They all want to put their hands on it and babysit their share. But first of all, they want to help bust up the logjam.”

“Which is what?”

“Me, I think. Either the Duncans are late for some other reason and they’re using me as an excuse, or this is something a stranger absolutely can’t be allowed to see. Maybe the area has to be sanitized before it can come in. Have you ever been told to stay away from anywhere for periods of time?”

“Not really.”

“Have you ever seen any weird stuff arrive? Any big unexplained vehicles?”

“We see Duncan trucks all the time. Not so much in the winter.”

“I heard the harvest trucks are all in Ohio.”

“They are. Nothing more than vans here now.”

Reacher nodded. “One of which was missing from the depot. Three spaces, two vans. So what kind of a thing is valuable and fits in a van?”

Jacob Duncan saw that Roberto Cassano’s mind had been changed once and for all by the dead man in the Cadillac’s trunk. Mancini’s, too. Now they both accepted that Reacher was a genuine threat. How else could they react? The dead man had no marks on him. None at all. So what had Reacher done to him? Frightened him to death? Jacob could see both Cassano and Mancini thinking about it. So he waited patiently and eventually Cassano looked across the table at him and said, “I apologize, most sincerely.”

Jacob looked back and said, “For what, sir?”

“For before. For not taking you seriously about Reacher.”

“Your apology is accepted.”

“Thank you.”

“But the situation remains the same,” Jacob said. “Reacher is still a problem. He’s still on the loose. And nothing can happen until he’s accounted for. We have three men looking for him. They’ll work all night and all day if necessary. Just as long as it takes. Because we don’t want Mr. Rossi to feel we’re in any way the junior partner in this new relationship. That’s very important to us.”

Cassano said, “We should go out too.”

“All of us?”

“I meant me and Mancini.”

“Indeed,” Jacob Duncan said. “Perhaps you should. Perhaps we should turn the whole thing into a competition. Perhaps the prize should be to speak first when we sit down to renegotiate the profit share.”

“There are more of you than us.”

“But you are professionals.”

“You know the neighborhood.”

“You want a fairer fight? Very well. We’ll send our three boys home to bed, and I’ll send my son out in their place. Alone. That’s one against two. As long as it takes. May the best man win. To the victor, the spoils, and so on, and so forth. Shall I do that?”

“I don’t care,” Cassano said. “Do whatever you want. We’ll beat all of you, however many you put out there.” He drained his glass and set it back on the table and stood up with Mancini. They walked out together, through the back door, to their car, which was still parked in the field, on the other side of the fence. Jacob Duncan watched them go, and then he sat back in his chair and relaxed. They would waste some long and fruitless hours, and then all in good time Reacher would be revealed, and Rossi would take the small subliminal hit, and the playing field would tilt, just a little, but enough. Jacob smiled. Success, triumph, and vindication. Subtlety, and finesse.

The road outside the dining room window stayed dark. Nothing moved on it. The two Cornhusker vehicles were still parked on the shoulder beyond the fence. One was an SUV and one was a pick-up truck. Both looked cold and inert. Overhead the moon came and went, first shining faintly through thin clouds, and then disappearing completely behind thicker layers.

The doctor said, “I don’t like just sitting here.”

“So don’t,” Reacher said. “Go to bed. Take a nap.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. I’m waiting for daylight.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t have streetlights here.”

“You’re going out?”

“Eventually.”

“Why?”

“Places to go, things to see.”

“One of us should stay awake. To keep an eye on things.”

“I’ll do that,” Reacher said.

“You must be tired.”

“I’ll be OK. You guys go get some rest.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

They didn’t need much more persuading. The doctor looked at his wife and they headed off together, and then Dorothy Coe followed them, presumably to a spare room somewhere. Doors opened and closed and water ran and toilets flushed, and then the house went quiet. The heating system whirred and the taped-up football players muttered and grunted and snored on the hallway floor, but apart from that Reacher heard nothing at all. He sat upright on the hard chair and kept his eyes open and stared out into the dark. The duct tape bandage itched his face. He did OK for ten or twenty minutes, and then he slipped a little, like he knew he would, like he often had before, into a kind of trance, like suspended animation, half-awake and half-asleep, half-effective and half-useless. He was a less-than-perfect sentry, and he knew it. But then, practically all sentries were less than perfect. It was any army’s most persistent problem.

Half-awake and half-asleep. Half-effective and half-useless. He heard the car and he saw its lights, but it was a whole stubborn second before he understood he wasn’t dreaming.

Chapter 50

The car came in from the right, from the east, preceded by headlight beams and road noise. It slowed to a walk and passed behind the parked Cornhusker pick-up, and then it rolled on and passed behind the parked SUV. Then it turned and nosed into the driveway, with a crunch and a squelch from its wheels on the gravel, and then it stopped.

And then Reacher saw it.

There was enough light scatter and enough reflection to identify it. It was the dark blue Chevrolet. The Italians. Reacher picked up the Remington. The car stayed where it was. No one got out. It was sixty yards away, half in and half out of the driveway mouth. Just sitting there, lights on, idling. A tactical problem. Reacher had three innocent noncombatants in a wood-frame house. There were two parked cars in the driveway and two on the road, for cover. There were two opponents and the house had windows and a door both front and back.

Not ideal conditions for a gun battle.

Best hope would be for the Italians to approach the front door on foot. Game over, right there. Reacher could swing the door open and fire point-blank. But the Italians weren’t approaching on foot. They were just sitting in the car. Doing nothing. Talking, maybe. And scouting around. Reacher could see dim flashes of white as necks craned and heads turned. They were discussing something.

Angelo Mancini was saying, “This is a waste of time. He ain’t in there. He can’t be. Not unless he’s hanging out with three of their football players.”

Roberto Cassano nodded. He glanced over his shoulder at the pickup truck and the SUV on the shoulder, and then he glanced ahead at the gold GMC Yukon on the driveway. It was parked in front of an older truck. He said, “That’s the old woman’s ride, from the farm.”

Mancini said, “Sleepover time.”

“I guess Mahmeini’s boy was right about something. They know the doctor is the weak link. They’ve got him staked out.”

“Not much of a trap, all things considered. Not with their cars parked out front. No one is going to walk into that.”

“Which is good for us, in a way. They’re wasting their resources. Which gives us a better chance somewhere else.”

“Do you want to check here? Just in case?”

“What’s the point? If he’s in there, he’s already their prisoner.”

“That’s what I was thinking. But then I thought, not necessarily. They could be his prisoner.”

“One against three?”

“You saw what he did to the guy in the Cadillac’s trunk.”

“I don’t know. I kind of want to check, I guess. And maybe we should. But you heard the man. This is a competition now. We can’t waste time.”

“Wouldn’t take much time.”

“I know. But we’ll look like idiots if he’s not in there. The football players will be straight on the phone to the Duncans, all yukking it up about how we came looking in a place he couldn’t possibly be.”

“No one said there are style points involved.”

“But there are. There are always style points involved. This is a long game. There’s a lot of money involved. If we lose face, we’ll never get it back.”

“So where?”

Cassano looked again at the old woman’s truck. “If she’s here, then her house is empty tonight. And people looking for places to hide love empty houses.”

Reacher saw them back out and drive away again. At first he didn’t understand why. Then he concluded they were looking for Seth Duncan. They had pulled up, they had eyeballed the parked cars, they had seen that the Mazda wasn’t among them, and they had gone away again. Logical. He put the Remington back on the floor, and planted his feet, and straightened his back, and stared out into the darkness.

Nothing else happened for ninety long minutes. No one came, no one stirred. Then pale streaks of dawn started showing in the sky to Reacher’s right. They came in low and silver and purple, and the land slowly lightened from black to gray, and the world once again took solid shape, all the way to the far horizon. Rags of tattered cloud lit up bright overhead, and a knee-high mist rose up off the dirt. A new day. But not a good one, Reacher thought. It was going to be a day full of pain, both for those who deserved it, and for those who didn’t.

He waited.

He couldn’t get his Yukon out, because he had no key for Dorothy Coe’s pick-up truck. It was possibly in her coat, but he wasn’t inclined to go look for it. He was in no hurry. It was wintertime. Full daylight was still an hour away.

Five hundred miles due north, up in Canada, just above the 49th Parallel, because of the latitude, dawn came a little later. The first of the morning light filtered down through the needles of the towering pine and touched the white van in its summer picnic spot at the end of the rough grassy track. The driver woke in his seat, and blinked, and stretched. He had heard nothing all night long. He had seen nothing. No bears, no coyotes, no red foxes, no moose, no elk, no wolves. No people. He had been warm, because he had a sleeping bag filled with down, but he had been very uncomfortable, because panel vans had small cabs, and he had spent the night folded into a seat that didn’t recline very far. It was always on his mind that the cargo in the back was treated better than he was. It rode more comfortably. But then, it was expensive and hard to get, and he wasn’t. He was a realistic man. He knew how things worked.

He climbed out and took a leak against the pine’s ancient trunk. Then he ate and drank from his meager supplies, and he pushed his palms against his aching back, and he stretched again to work out the kinks. The sky was brightening. It was his favorite time for a run to the border. Light enough to see, too early for company. Ideal. He had just twenty miles to go, most of them on an unmapped forest track, to a point a little less than four thousand yards north of the line. The transfer zone, he called it. The end of the road for him, but not for his cargo.

He climbed back in the cab and started the engine. He let it warm and settle for a minute while he checked the dials and the gauges. Then he selected first gear, and released the parking brake, and turned the wheel, and moved away slowly, at walking speed, lurching and bouncing down the rough grassy track.

Reacher heard sounds at the end of the hallway. A toilet flushing, a faucet running, a door opening, a door closing. Then the doctor came limping past the dining room, stiff with sleep, mute with morning. He nodded as he passed, and he skirted the football players, and he headed for the kitchen. A minute later Reacher heard the gulp and hiss of the coffee machine. The sun was up enough to show a reflection in the window of the SUV parked beyond the fence. Webs of frost were glinting and glittering in the fields.

The doctor came in with two mugs of coffee. He was dressed in a sweater over pajamas. His hair was uncombed. The damage on his face was lost in general redness. He put one mug in front of Reacher and threaded his way around and sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table.

He said, “Good morning.”

Reacher said nothing.

The doctor asked, “How’s your nose?”

Reacher said, “Terrific.”

The doctor said, “There’s something you never told me.”

Reacher said, “There are many things I never told you.”

“You said twenty-five years ago the detective neglected to search somewhere. You said because of ignorance or confusion.”

Reacher nodded, and took a sip of his coffee.

The doctor asked, “Is that where you’re going this morning?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Will you find anything there after twenty-five years?”

“Probably not.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Because I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I hope you never have to. I hope I’m wrong.”

“Where is this place we’re talking about?”

“Mrs. Coe told me that fifty years ago two farms were sold for a development that never happened. The outbuildings from one of them are still there. Way out in a field. A barn, and a smaller shed.”

The doctor nodded. “I know where they are.”

“People plow right up to them.”

“I know,” the doctor said. “I guess they shouldn’t, but why let good land go to waste? The subdivisions were never built, and they’re never going to be. So it’s something for nothing, and God knows these people need it. It’s yield that doesn’t show up on their mortgages.”

“So when Detective Carson came up here twenty-five years ago, what did he see? In the early summer? He saw about a million acres of waist-high corn, and he saw some houses dotted around here and there, and he saw some outbuildings dotted around here and there. He stopped in at every house, and every occupant said they’d searched their outbuildings. So Carson went away again, and that old barn and that old shed fell right between the cracks. Because Carson’s question was, did you search your outbuildings? Everyone said yes, probably quite truthfully. And Carson saw the old barn and the old shed and quite naturally assumed they must belong to someone, and that therefore they had indeed been looked at, as promised. But they didn’t belong to anyone, and they hadn’t been looked at.”

“You think that was the scene of the crime?”

“I think Carson should have asked that question twenty-five years ago.”

“There won’t be anything there. There can’t be. Those buildings are ruins now, and they must have been ruins then. They’ve been sitting there empty for fifty years, in the middle of nowhere, just moldering away.”

“Have they?”

“Of course. You said it yourself, they don’t belong to anyone.”

“Then why have they got wheel ruts all the way to the door?”

“Have they?”

Reacher nodded. “I hid a truck in the smaller shed my first night. No problem getting there. I’ve seen worse roads in New York City.”

“Old ruts? Or new ruts?”

“Hard to tell. Both, probably. Many years’ worth, I would say. Quite deep, quite well established. No weeds. Not much traffic, probably, but some. Some kind of regularity. Enough to keep the ruts in shape, anyway.”

“I don’t understand. Who would use those places now? And for what?”

Reacher said nothing. He was looking out the window. The light was getting stronger. The fields were turning from gray to brown. The parked pick-up beyond the fence was all lit up by low rays.

The doctor asked, “So you think someone scooped the kid up and drove her to that barn?”

“I’m not sure anymore,” Reacher said. “They were harvesting alfalfa at the time, and there will have been plenty of trucks on the road. And I’m guessing this whole place felt a bit happier back then. More energetic. People doing this and that, going here and there. The roads were probably a little busier than they are now. Probably a lot busier. Maybe even too busy to risk scooping a kid up against her will in broad daylight.”

“So what do you think happened to her?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was still looking out the window. He could see the knots in the fence timbers. He could see clumps of frozen weeds at the base of the posts. The front lawn was dry and brittle with cold.

Reacher said, “You’re not much of a gardener.”

“No talent,” the doctor said. “No time.”

“Does anyone garden?”

“Not really. People are too tired. And working farmers hardly ever garden. They grow stuff to sell, not to look at.”

“OK.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m asking myself, if I was a little girl with a bicycle, and I loved flowers, where would I go to see some? No point coming to a house like this, for instance. Or any house, probably. Or anywhere at all, really, because every last inch of ground is plowed for cash crops. I can think of just three possibilities. I saw two big rocks in the fields, with brambles around them. Nice wildflowers in the early summer, probably. There may be more just like them, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because in the early summer they would be completely inaccessible, because you’d have to wade a mile through growing corn just to get to them. But there was one other place I saw the same kind of brambles.”

“Where was that?”

“Around the base of that old barn. Windblown seeds, I guess. People plow close, but they leave some space.”

“You think she rode there on her own?”

“I think it’s possible. Maybe she knew the one place she was sure to see flowers. And maybe someone knew she knew.”

Chapter 51

The Duncans had moved on to Jonas’s kitchen, because the taped window in Jasper’s was leaking cold air, and the burning fabric in the stove was making smoke and smells. They had stopped drinking bourbon and had started drinking coffee. The sun was up and the day was already forty minutes old. Jacob Duncan checked the clock on the wall and said, “The sun is up in Canada too. Dawn was about ten minutes ago. I bet the shipment is already rolling. I know that boy. He likes an early start. He’s a good man. He doesn’t waste time. The transfer will be happening soon.”

The road that led south from Medicine Hat petered out after Pakowki Lake. The blacktop surface finished with a ragged edge, and then there was a quarter-mile of exposed roadbed, just crushed stone bound with tar, and then that finished too, in a forest clearing with no apparent exit. But the white van lined up between two pines and drove over stunted underbrush and found itself on a rutted track, once wide, now neglected, a firebreak running due south, designed with flames and westerly winds in mind. The van rolled slowly, tipping left and right, its wheels moving up and down independently, like walking. Ahead of it was nothing but trees, and then the Montana town of Hogg Parish. But the van would stop halfway there, a little more than two miles short of the border, at the northern limit of the safe zone, exactly symmetrical with its opposite number in America, which was no doubt already in place and waiting, all fresh and energetic and ready for the last leg of the journey.

The doctor went back to the kitchen and returned with more coffee. He said, “It could have been an accident. Maybe she went inside the barn.”

Reacher said, “With her bicycle?”

“It’s possible. We don’t know enough about her. Some kids would dump a bike on the track, and others would wheel it inside. It’s a matter of personality. Then she might have injured herself on something in there. Or gotten stuck. The door is jammed now. Maybe it was balky then. She could have gotten trapped. No one would have heard her shouting.”

“And then what?”

“An eight-year-old without food or water, she wouldn’t have lasted long.”

“Not a pleasant thought,” Reacher said.

“But preferable to some of the alternatives.”

“Maybe.”

“Or she might have gotten hit by a truck. Or a car. On the way over there. You said it yourself, the roads could have been busy. Maybe the driver panicked and hid the body. And the bike with it.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. In that barn, or miles away. In another county. Another state, even. Maybe that’s why nothing was ever found.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said again.

The doctor went quiet.

Reacher said, “Now there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There’s time.”

“How much?”

“Probably half an hour.”

“Before what?”

“The other three Cornhuskers will come here for breakfast. Their buddies are here, so this is their temporary base. They’ll make my wife cook for them. They enjoy feudal stuff like that.”

“I figured,” Reacher said. “I’ll be ready.”

“One of them is the guy who broke your nose.”

“I know.”

The doctor said nothing.

Reacher said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Is your garage like your garden or like your television set?”

“More like my television set.”

“That’s good. So turn around and watch the road. I’ll be back in ten.” Reacher picked up the Remington and found his way through the kitchen to the mud room lobby. He found the door that led to the garage. It was a big space, empty because the Subaru was still at the motel, and neat and clean, with a swept floor and no visible chaos. There were shelving racks all along one wall, loaded with the stuff that hadn’t been in the basement. There was a workbench along a second wall, well organized, again neat and clean, with a vise, and a full-width peg-board above, loaded with tools logically arrayed.

Reacher unloaded the Remington, five remaining shells from the magazine and one from the breech. He turned the gun upside down and clamped it in the vise. He found an electric jigsaw and fitted a woodcutting blade. He plugged it in and fired it up and put the dancing blade on the walnut and sawed off the shoulder stock, first with a straight cut across the narrowest point, and then again along a curving line that mirrored the front contour of the pistol grip. Two more passes put a rough chamfer on each raw edge, and then he found a rasp and cleaned the whole thing up, with twists of walnut falling away like grated chocolate, and then he finished the job with a foam pad covered with coarse abrasive. He blew off the dust and rubbed his palm along the result, and he figured it was satisfactory.

He swapped the jigsaw blade for a metal cutter, a fine blued thing with tiny teeth, and he laid it against the barrel an inch in front of the forestock. The saw screeched and screamed and howled and the last foot of the barrel fell off and rang like a bell against the floor. He found a metal file and cleaned the burrs of steel off the new muzzle, inside and out. He released the vise and lifted the gun out and pumped it twice, crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch, and then he reloaded it, five in the magazine and one in the breech. A sawn-off with a pistol grip, not much longer than his forearm.

He found the coat closet on his way back through the house and retrieved his winter parka. The Glock and the switchblade were still in the pockets, along with the two screwdrivers and the wrench. He used the switchblade to slit the lining inside the left-hand pocket, so the sawn-off would go all the way in. He put the coat on. Then he unlocked the front door, and went back to the dining room to wait.

The Cornhuskers came in separately, one by one, the first of them right on time, exactly thirty minutes after the doctor had spoken, in a black pick-up truck he left on the road. He jogged up the driveway and pushed in through the door like he owned the place, and Reacher laid him out with a vicious blow to the back of the head, from behind, with the wrench. The guy dropped to his knees and toppled forward on his face. Reacher invested a little time and effort in dragging him onward across the shiny wood, and then he taped him up, quick and dirty, not a permanent job, but enough for the moment. The crunch of the wrench and the thump of the guy falling and Reacher’s grunting and groaning woke the doctor’s wife and Dorothy Coe. They came out of their rooms wearing bathrobes. The doctor’s wife looked at the new guy on the floor and said, “I guess they’re coming in for breakfast.”

Reacher said, “But today they’re not getting any.”

Dorothy Coe asked, “What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is a new day. How well do you know Eleanor Duncan?”

“She’s not to blame for anything.”

“She’ll be hauling your harvest this year. She’s going to be in charge.”

Dorothy Coe said nothing.

The doctor’s wife said, “You want us to stay out of the way?”

“Might be safer,” Reacher said. “You don’t want one of these guys falling on you.”

“Another one coming,” the doctor called from the dining room, soft and urgent.

The second guy went down exactly the same as the first, and in the same place. There was no room left to drag him forward. Reacher folded his legs at the knees so the door would close, and then he taped him up right there.

The last to arrive was the guy who had broken Reacher’s nose.

And he didn’t come alone.

Chapter 52

A white SUV parked on the road beyond the fence, and the guy who had broken Reacher’s nose climbed out of the driver’s seat. Then the passenger door opened and the kid called John got out. The kid Reacher had left at the depot. Go to bed, Reacher had said. But the kid hadn’t gone to bed. He had hung out until he heard that things were safe, and then he had come out to claim his share of the fun.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The hallway was almost too crowded to move. It was full of football players, four of them lying around like carcasses, like beached whales, limbs taped, heads flopping. Reacher picked his way around them and watched out a window. The two late arrivals were making their way past Dorothy Coe’s pick-up, past John’s own Yukon, hustling through the damp and the cold, heading for the door, full of high spirits.

Reacher opened the door and stepped out to meet them head-on. He drew his sawn-off across his body, a long high exaggerated movement like a pirate drawing an ancient flintlock pistol, and he held it right-handed, elbow bent and comfortable, and he aimed it at the guy who had hit him. But he looked at John.

“You let me down,” he said.

Both guys came to a dead stop and stared at him a little more urgently than he thought was warranted, until he remembered the duct tape on his face. Like war paint. He smiled and felt it pucker. He looked back at the guy who had hit him and said, “It was nothing that couldn’t be fixed. But I’m not certain you’ll be able to say the same.”

Neither guy spoke. Reacher kept his eyes on the guy who had hit him and said, “Take out your car keys and toss them to me.”

The guy said, “What?”

“I’m bored with John’s Yukon. I’m going to use your truck the rest of the day.”

“You think?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

No response.

Reacher said, “It’s make-your-mind-up-time, boys. Either do what I tell you, or get shot.”

The guy dipped into his pocket and came out with a bunch of keys. He held them up briefly, to prove what they were, and then he tossed them underhand to Reacher, who made no attempt to catch them. They bounced off his coat and landed on the gravel. Reacher wanted his left hand free and his attention all in one place. He looked at the guy again and asked, “So how does your nose feel right now?”

The guy said, “It feels OK.”

“It looks like it has been busted before.”

The guy said, “Two times.”

Reacher said, “Well, they say three is a lucky number. They say the third time’s the charm.”

Nobody spoke.

Reacher said, “John, lie facedown on the ground.”

John didn’t move.

Reacher fired into the ground at John’s feet. The gun boomed and kicked and the sound rolled away across the land, loud and dull, like a quarry explosion. John howled and danced. Not hit, but stung in the shins by fragments of gravel kicked up by the blast. Reacher waited for quiet and pumped the gun, a solid crunch-crunch, probably the most intimidating sound in the world. The husk of the spent cartridge ejected and flew through the air and landed near the car keys and skittered away.

John got down on the ground. First he got on his knees, awkwardly, like he was in church, and then he spread his hands and lowered himself facedown, reluctantly, like a bad-tempered coach had demanded a hundred push-ups. Reacher called over his shoulder, “Doctor? Bring me the duct tape, would you?”

No response from inside the house.

Reacher called, “Don’t worry, doctor. There won’t be any comebacks. Never again. This is the last day. Tomorrow you’ll be living like normal people. These guys will be unemployed, heading back where they came from, looking for new jobs.”

There was a long, tense pause. Then a minute later the doctor came out with the tape. He didn’t look at the two guys. He kept his face averted and his eyes down. Old habits. He gave the roll to Reacher and ducked back inside. Reacher tossed the tape to the guy who had hit him and said, “Make it so your buddy can’t move his arms or legs. Or I will, by some other method, probably including spinal injury.”

The guy caught the roll of tape and got to work. He wrapped John’s wrists with a tight three-layer figure eight, and then he wrapped the waist of the eight in the other direction, around and around. Plastic handcuffs. Reacher had no idea of the tensile strength of duct tape in terms of engineering numbers, but he knew no human could pull it apart lengthways. The guy did the same to John’s ankles, and Reacher said, “Now hog-tie him. Join it all up.”

The guy folded John’s feet up toward his butt and wrapped tape between the wrist restraints and the ankle restraints, four turns, each about a foot long. He squeezed it all tight and stood back. Reacher took out his wrench and held it up. There was a little blood and hair on it, from the previous two guys. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his switchblade. He dropped it on the ground behind him. He took out his Glock pistol. He dropped it on the ground behind him. Then he turned and laid the sawn-off next to it. He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall. It covered all four weapons. He looked at the guy who had hit him and said, “Fair fight. You against me. Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army. Bare knuckles. No rules. If you can get past me, you’re welcome to use anything you can find under my coat.”

The guy looked blank for a second, and then he smiled a little, as if the sun had come out, as if an unbelievable circumstance had unveiled itself right in front of him, as if a hole had opened up in a tight defense, as if suddenly he had a straight shot to the end zone. He came up on his toes, and angled his body, and bunched his right fist up under his chin, and got ready to lead with his left.

Reacher smiled too, just a little. The guy was dancing around like the Marquess of Queensberry. He had no idea. No idea at all. Maybe the last fight he had seen was in a Rocky movie. He was six-seven and three hundred pounds, but he was nothing more than a prize ox, big and dumb and shiny, going up against a gutter rat.

A 250-pound gutter rat.

The guy stepped in and bobbed and weaved for a minute, up on his toes, jiggling around, ducking and diving, wasting time and energy. Reacher stood perfectly still and gazed at him, wide-eyed with peripheral vision, focusing nowhere and everywhere at once, hyperalert, watching the guy’s eyes and his hands and his feet. And soon enough the left jab came in. The obvious first move, for a right-handed man who thought he was in a boxing ring. Any guy’s left jab followed the same basic trajectory as his straight left, but much less forcefully, because it was powered by the arm only, snapping out from the elbow, with no real contribution from the legs or the upper body or the shoulders. No real power. Reacher watched the big pink knuckles getting closer, and then he moved his own left hand, fast, a blur, whipping it in and up and out like a man flailing backhanded at a wasp, and he slapped at the inside of the guy’s wrist, hard enough to alter the line of the incoming jab, hard enough to deflect it away from his face and send it buzzing harmlessly over his moving shoulder.

His shoulder was moving because he was already driving hard off his back foot, jerking forward, twisting at the waist, building torque, hurling his right elbow into the gap created by turning the guy counterclockwise an inch, aiming to hit him with the elbow right on the outer edge of his left eye socket, hoping to crack his skull along the line of his temple. No rules. The blow landed with all 250 pounds of moving mass behind it, a solid, jarring impact Reacher felt all the way down to his toes. The guy staggered back. He stayed on his feet. Evidently his skull hadn’t cracked, but he was feeling it. He was feeling it bad, and his mouth was opening, ready to howl, so Reacher shut it again for him with a vicious uppercut under the chin, convulsive, far from elegant, but effective. The guy’s head snapped back in a mist of blood and bounced forward again off his massive deltoids and Reacher tried for his other eye socket with his left elbow, a ferocious in-and-out snap from the waist, and then he put a forearm smash from the right into the guy’s throat, a real home run swing, and then he kneed him in the groin, and danced behind him and kicked him hard in the back of the knees, a sweeping, scything action, so that the guy’s legs folded up under him and he went down heavily on his back on the path.

Six blows, three seconds.

No rules.

Second-string Nebraska football against the U.S. Army.

But the guy was tough. Or afraid. Or both. Either way, he didn’t quit. He started scrabbling around on his back, like a turtle, trying to get up again, making botched snow angels in the gravel, his head snapping left and right. Maybe the decent thing would have been to let him take an eight count, but having your opponent on the floor is gutter rat heaven, the absolute object of the exercise, a precious gift never to be spurned, so Reacher stilled him by kicking him hard in the ear, and then he stamped down hard with his heel in the guy’s face, like an appalled homeowner stomping a cockroach, and the crunch of the guy’s shattering nose was clearly audible over all the generalized panting and grunting and groaning and moaning.

Game over. Eight blows in six seconds, which was grievously slow and laborious by Reacher’s standards, but then, the guy was huge, and he had an athlete’s tone and stamina, and he was accustomed to a certain amount of physical punishment. He had been competitive, just barely. In the ballpark, almost. Not the worst Reacher had ever seen. Four years of college ball was probably equivalent to four days of Ranger training, and plenty of people Reacher had known hadn’t even made day three.

He taped the guy up where he lay, with plastic handcuffs linked to four turns around the guy’s own neck and ankle restraints linked to four turns around John’s neck. Then he stepped back into the hallway and did a better job on the two who had come in first. He slid them around on the shiny parquet and taped them together, back-to-back, like the two from the middle of the night. He stood up and caught his breath.

Then a phone rang, muted and distant.

The phone turned out to be Dorothy Coe’s cell. Its ring was muted and distant because it was with her, behind a closed door, in her room. She came out with it in her hand, and looked between it and the four taped guys on the hallway floor, and then she smiled, as if at a hidden irony, as if normality was intruding on a thoroughly abnormal day. She said, “That was Mr. Vincent at the motel. He wants me to work this morning. He has guests.”

Reacher asked, “Who are they?”

“He didn’t say.”

Reacher thought for a moment, and said, “OK.” He told the doctor to keep a medical eye on all six of the captured football players, and then he went back out to the gravel path and put his coat back on. He reloaded the pockets with his improvised arsenal, and he found the car keys where they lay on the stones, and then he headed down the driveway to the white SUV parked beyond the fence.

Eldridge Tyler moved, just a little, but enough to keep himself comfortable. He was into his second hour of daylight. He was a patient man. His eye was still on the scope. The scope was still trained on the barn door, six inches left of the judas hole, six inches down. The rifle’s forestock was still bedded securely on the bags of rice. The air was wet and thick, but the sun was bright and the view was good.

But the big man in the brown coat hadn’t come.

Not yet.

And perhaps he never would, if the Duncans had been successful during the night. But Tyler was still fully on the ball, because he was cautious by nature, and he always took his tasks seriously, and maybe the Duncans hadn’t been successful during the night. In which case the big man would show up very soon. Why would he wait? Daylight was all he needed.

Tyler took his finger off the trigger, and he flexed his hand, once, twice, and then he put his finger back.

Chapter 53

The white SUV turned out to be a Chevy Tahoe, which seemed to Reacher’s untutored eye the exact same thing as a GMC Yukon. The cabin was the same. All the controls were the same. All the dials were the same. It drove just the same, big and sloppy and inexact, all the way back to the two-lane, where Reacher turned right and headed south. There was mist, but the sun was well up in the east. The day was close to two hours old.

He slowed and coasted and then parked on the shoulder, two hundred yards short of the motel. From the north he could see nothing of it except the rocket sign and the big round lounge. He got out of the truck and walked on the blacktop, slow and quiet. His angle changed with every step. First he saw the burned-out Ford. It was in the main lot, down on its rims, black and skeletal, with two shapes behind the glassless windows, both of them burned as smooth and small as seals. Then he saw the doctor’s Subaru, outside room six, jagged and damaged, but still a living thing in comparison to the Ford.

Then he saw the dark blue Chevrolet.

It was parked beyond the Subaru, outside room seven, or eight, or both, at a careless angle, at the end of four short gouges in the gravel. Frustrated men, tired and angry, jamming to a stop, ready for rest.

Reacher came in off the road and walked to the lounge door, as quietly as he could on the loose stones, past the Ford. It was still warm. The heat of the fire had scorched fantastic whorls into the metal. The lounge door was unlocked. Reacher stepped inside and saw Vincent behind the reception desk. He was in the act of hanging up the telephone. He stopped and stared at Reacher’s duct-tape bandage. He asked, “What the hell happened to you?”

“Just a scratch,” Reacher said. “Who was on the phone?”

“It was the morning call. The same as always. Like clockwork.”

“The phone tree?” Reacher asked.

Vincent nodded.

“And?”

“Nothing to report. Three Cornhusker vehicles were tooling around all night, kind of aimlessly. Now they’ve gone somewhere else. All four Duncans are in Jacob’s house.”

“You have guests here,” Reacher said.

“The Italians,” Vincent said. “I put them in seven and eight.”

“Did they ask about me?”

Vincent nodded. “They asked if you were here. They asked if I had seen you. They’re definitely looking for you.”

“When did they get here?”

“About five this morning.”

Reacher nodded in turn. A wild-goose chase all night long, no success, eventual fatigue, no desire to drive an hour south to the Marriott and an hour back again, hence the local option. They had probably planned to nap for a couple of hours, and then saddle up once more, but they were oversleeping. Human nature.

“They woke me up,” Vincent said. “They were very bad tempered. I don’t think I’m going to get paid.”

“Which one of them shot the guys in the Ford?”

“I can’t tell them apart. One did the shooting, and the other one set fire to the car.”

“And you saw that with your own eyes?”

“Yes.”

“Would you go to court and say so?”

“No, because the Duncans are involved.”

“Would you if the Duncans weren’t involved?”

“I don’t have that much imagination.”

“You told me.”

“Privately.”

“Tell me again.”

“One of them shot the guys and the other one burned their car.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “That’s good enough.”

“For what?”

“Call them,” Reacher said. “One minute from now. In their rooms. Talk in a whisper. Tell them I’m in your lot, right outside your window, looking at the wreck.”

“I can’t be involved in this.”

“This is the last day,” Reacher said. “Tomorrow will be different.”

“Forgive me if I prefer to wait and see.”

“Tomorrow there are going to be three kinds of people here,” Reacher said. “Some dead, some sheepish, and some with a little self-respect. You need to get yourself in that third group.”

Vincent said nothing.

“You know Eleanor Duncan?” Reacher asked.

“She’s OK,” Vincent said. “She was never part of this.”

“She’ll be taking over. She’ll be hauling your stuff tomorrow.”

Vincent said nothing.

“Call the Italians one minute from now,” Reacher said. He stepped back out to the lot and walked on the silver balks of timber, past room one, past room two, past three and four and five and six, and then he looped around behind room seven and room eight, and came out again near room nine. He stood in a narrow gap shaped like an hourglass, the circular bulk of room eight right there in front of him, close enough to touch, room seven one building along, the Chevy and the Subaru and the burned-out Ford trailing away from him, south to north, in a line. He took out the dead Iranian’s Glock and checked the chamber.

All set.

He waited.

He heard the room phones ring, first one, then the other, both of them faint behind walls and closed doors. He pictured men rolling over on beds, struggling awake, sitting up, blinking, checking the time, looking around the unfamiliar spaces, finding the phones on the nightstands, answering them, listening to Vincent’s urgent whispered messages.

He waited.

He knew what was going to happen. Whoever opened up first would wait in the doorway, half in and half out, gun drawn, leaning, craning his neck, watching for his partner to emerge. Then there would be gestures, sign language, and a cautious joint approach.

He waited.

Room eight opened up first. Reacher saw a hand on the jamb, then a pistol pointing almost vertical, then a forearm, then an elbow, then the back of a head. The pistol was a Colt Double Eagle. The forearm and the elbow were covered with a wrinkled shirtsleeve. The head was covered in uncombed black hair.

Reacher backed off a step and waited. He heard room seven’s door open. He sensed more than heard the rustle of starched cotton, the silent debate, the pointing and the tapped chests assigning roles, the raised arms indicating directions, the spread fingers indicating timings. The obvious move would be for the guy from room eight to leapfrog ahead and then duck around behind room six and circle the lounge on the blind side and hit the lot from the north, while the guy from room seven waited a beat and then crept up directly from the south. A no-brainer.

They went for it. Reacher heard the farther guy step out and wait, and the nearer guy step out and walk. Eight paces, Reacher thought, before the latter passed the former. He counted in his head, and on six he stepped out, and on seven he raised the Glock, and on eight he screamed FREEZE FREEZE FREEZE and both men froze, already surrendering, guns held low near their thighs, tired, just woken up, confused and disoriented. Reacher stayed with the full-on experience and screamed DROP YOUR WEAPONS PUT YOUR WEAPONS ON THE GROUND and both men complied instantly, the heavy stainless pieces hitting the gravel in unison. Reacher screamed STEP AWAY STEP AWAY STEP AWAY and both men stepped away, out into the lot, isolated, far from their rooms, far from their car.

Reacher breathed in and looked at them from behind. They were both in pants and shirts and shoes. No jackets, no coats. Reacher said, “Turn around.”

They turned around.

The one on the left said, “You.”

Reacher said, “Finally we meet. How’s your day going so far?”

No answer.

Reacher said, “Now turn out your pants pockets. All the way. Pull the linings right out.”

They obeyed. Quarters and dimes and bright new pennies rained down, and tissues fluttered, and cell phones hit the gravel. Plus a car key, with a bulbous black head and a plastic fob shaped liked a big number one. Reacher said, “Now back away. Keep going until I tell you to stop.”

They walked backward, and Reacher walked forward with them, keeping pace, eight steps, ten, and then Reacher arrived at where their Colts had fallen and said, “OK, stop.” He ducked down and picked up one of the guns. He ejected the magazine and it fell to the ground and he saw it was full. He picked up the other gun. Its magazine was one short.

“Who?” he asked.

The guy on the left said, “The other one.”

“The other what?”

“The Iranians. You got one, we got the other. We’re on the same side here.”

“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. He moved on toward the small pile of pocket junk and picked up the car key. He pressed the button set in the head and he heard the Chevy’s doors unlock. He said, “Get in the back seat.”

The guy on the left asked, “Do you know who we are?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “You’re two jerks who just got beat.”

“We work for a guy named Rossi, in Las Vegas. He’s connected. He’s the kind of guy you can’t mess with.”

“Forgive me if I don’t immediately faint with terror.”

“He’s got money, too. Lots of money. Maybe we could work something out.”

“Like what?”

“There’s a deal going down here. We could cut you in. Make you rich.”

“I’m already rich.”

“You don’t look it. I’m serious. Lots of money.”

“I’ve got everything I need. That’s the definition of affluence.”

The guy paused a beat, and then he started up again, like a salesman. He said, “Tell me what I can do to make this right for you.”

“You can get in the back seat of your car.”

“Why?”

“Because my arms are sore and I don’t want to drag you.”

“No, why do you want us in the car?”

“Because we’re going for a drive.”

“Where?”

“I’ll tell you after you get in.”

The two men glanced at a spot in the air halfway between them, not daring to let their eyes meet, not daring to believe their luck. An opportunity. Them in the back, a solo driver in the front. Reacher tracked them with the Glock, all the way to the car. One got in on the near side, and the other looped around the trunk. Reacher saw him glance onward, at the road, at the open fields beyond, and then Reacher saw him give up on the impulse to run. Flat land. Nowhere to hide. A modern nine-millimeter sidearm, accurate out to fifty feet or more. The guy opened his door and ducked his head and folded himself inside. The Impala was not a small car, but it was no limousine in the rear. Both guys had their feet trapped under the front seats, and even though they were neither large nor tall, they were both cramped and close together.

Reacher opened the driver’s door. He put his knee on the seat and leaned inside. The guy who had spoken before asked, “So where are we going?”

“Not far,” Reacher said.

“Can’t you tell us?”

“I’m going to park next to the Ford you burned.”

“What, just up there?”

“I said not far.”

“And then what?”

“Then I’m going to set this car on fire.”

The two men glanced at each other, not understanding. The one who had spoken before said, “You’re going to drive with us in the back? Like, loose?”

“You can put your seat belts on if you like. But it’s hardly worth it. It’s not very far. And I’m a careful driver. I won’t have an accident.”

The guy said, “But …” and then nothing more.

“I know,” Reacher said. “I’ll have my back turned. You could jump me.”

“Well, yes.”

“But you won’t.”

“Why not?”

“You just won’t. I know it.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because you’ll be dead,” Reacher said, and he shot the first guy in the forehead, and then the second, a brisk double tap, no pause, bang bang, no separation at all. The rear window shattered and blood and bone and brain hit the remains of the glass, delayed, slower than the bullets, and the two guys settled peacefully, slower still, like afterthoughts, like old people falling asleep, but with open eyes and fat beads of purple welling out of the neat holes in their brows, welling and lengthening and becoming slow lazy trickles that ran down to the bridges of their noses.

Reacher backed out of the car and straightened up and looked north. Nine-millimeter Parabellums. Fine ammunition. The two slugs were probably hitting the ground right about then, a mile farther on, burning their way into the frigid dirt.

Reacher checked room seven and found a wallet in a coat. There was a Nevada driver’s license in it, made out in the name of Roberto Cassano, at a local Las Vegas address. There were four credit cards and a little more than ninety dollars in cash. Reacher took sixty and got in the Impala and drove forty yards and parked tight up against the shell of the Ford. He gave the sixty bucks to Vincent in the lounge, two rooms, one night, and then he borrowed rags and matches, and as soon as the fuse was set in the Chevy’s filler neck he hustled back to the Tahoe he had left on the shoulder. The first major flames were showing as he drove by, and he saw the fuel tank go up in his mirror, about four hundred yards later. The angle he was at and the way the fireball rose and then smoked and died made the motel sign look real, like it was a genuine working rocket, like it was blasting off for the infinite emptiness of space.

Eldridge Tyler heard the gunshots. Two faint pops, rapid, a double tap, very distant, really nothing more than vague percussive holes in the winter air. Not a rifle. Not a shotgun. Tyler knew firearms, and he knew the way their sounds traveled across the land. A handgun, he thought, three or four miles away. Maybe the hunt was over. Maybe the big man was down. He moved again, easing one leg, easing the other, stretching one arm, stretching the other, rolling his shoulders, rotating his neck. He dug into his canvas tote bag and came out with a bottle of water and a brown-bread sandwich. He put both items within easy reach. Then he peered out through the space left by the missing louver, and he took a careful look around. Because maybe the big man wasn’t down. Tyler took nothing for granted. He was a cautious man. His job was to watch and wait, and watch and wait he would, until he was told different.

He leaned up on his hands and craned around and looked behind him. The sun had moved a little south of east and low slanting light was falling on the shelter’s entrance. The tripwire’s plastic insulation had dewed over with dawn mist and was glistening faintly. Ten minutes, Tyler thought, before it dried and went invisible again.

He turned back and lay flat and snuggled behind the scope again, and he put his finger on the trigger.

Chapter 54

Dorothy Coe used the guest bathroom and showered fast, ready for work at the motel. She stopped in the kitchen to drink coffee and eat toast with the doctor and his wife, and then she changed her mind about her destination. She asked, “Where did Reacher go?”

The doctor said, “I’m not sure.”

“He must have told you.”

“He’s working on a theory.”

“He knows something now. I can feel it.”

The doctor said nothing.

Dorothy Coe asked, “Where did he go?”

The doctor said, “The old barn.”

Dorothy Coe said, “Then that’s where I’m going too.”

The doctor said, “Don’t.”

Reacher drove south on the two-lane road and coasted to a stop a thousand yards beyond the barn. It stood on the dirt a mile away to the west, close to its smaller companion, crisp in the light, canted down at one corner like it was kneeling. Reacher got out and grasped the roof bar and stood on the seat and hauled himself up and stood straight, like he had before on the doctor’s Subaru, but higher this time, because the Tahoe was taller. He turned a slow circle, the sun in his eyes one way, his shadow immense the other. He saw the motel in the distance to the north, and the three Duncan houses in the distance to the south. Nothing else. No people, no vehicles. Nothing was stirring.

He stepped down on the hood and jumped down to the ground. He ignored the tractor ruts and walked straight across the dirt, a direct line, homing in, aiming for the gap between the barn and the smaller shelter.

Eldridge Tyler heard the truck. Just the whisper of faraway tires on coarse blacktop, the hiss of exhaust through a catalytic converter, the muted thrash of turning components, all barely audible in the absolute rural silence. He heard it stop. He heard it stay where it was. It was a mile away, he thought. It was not one of the Duncans with a message. They would come all the way, or call on the phone. It was not the shipment, either. Not yet. The shipment was still hours away.

He rolled on his side and looked back at the tripwire. He rehearsed the necessary moves in his head, should someone come: snatch back the rifle, roll on his hip, sit up, swivel around, and fire point-blank. No problem.

He faced front again and put his eye on the scope and his finger on the trigger.

Ten minutes later Reacher was halfway to the barn, assessing, evaluating, counting in his head. He was alone. He was the last man standing. All ten football players were down, the Italians were down, the Arabs in the Ford were down, the remaining Iranian was accounted for, and all four Duncans were holed up in one of their houses. Reacher felt he could trust that last piece of information. The local phone tree seemed to be an impeccable source of human intelligence. Humint, the army called it, and the army Reacher had known would have been crazy with jealousy at such vigilance.

He walked on, bending his line a little to center himself in the gap between the buildings. The barn was on his right, and the smaller shelter was on his left. The brambles at their bases looked like hasty freehand shading on a pencil drawing. Dry sticks in the winter, possibly a riot of color and petals in the summer. Possibly an attraction. Kids’ bikes could handle the tractor ruts. Balloon tires, sturdy frames.

He walked on.

Eldridge Tyler stilled his breathing and concentrated hard and strained to hear whatever sounds there were to be heard. He knew the land. The earth was always moving, heating, cooling, vibrating, suffering tiny tremors and microscopic upheavals, forcing small stones upward through its many layers to the broken surfaces above, where they lay in the ruts and the furrows, waiting to be stepped on, to be kicked, to be crunched together, to be sent clicking one against the other. It was not possible to walk silently across open land. Tyler knew that. He kept his eye to the scope, his finger on the trigger, and his ears wide open.

Reacher stopped fifty yards out and stood absolutely still, looking at the buildings in front of him and juggling circular thoughts in his head. His theory was either all the way right or all the way wrong. The eight-year-old Margaret Coe had come for the flowers, but she hadn’t gotten trapped by accident. The bike proved the proposition. A child impulsive enough to drop a bike on a path might have dashed inside a derelict structure and injured herself badly. But a child earnest and serious enough to wheel her bike in with her would have taken care and not gotten hurt at all. Human nature. Logic. If there had been an accident, the bike would have been found outside. The bike had not been found outside, therefore there had been no accident.

And: She had gone to the barn voluntarily, but she had not gone inside the barn voluntarily. Why would a child looking for flowers have gone inside a barn? Barns held no secrets for farm children. No mysteries. A kid interested in colors and nature and freshness would have felt no attraction for a dark and gloomy space full of decaying smells. Had the slider even worked twenty-five years ago? Could a kid have moved it? The building was a century old, and it had been rotting since the day it was finished. The slider was jammed now, and it might have been jammed then, and in any case it was heavy. Alternatively, could an eight-year-old kid have lifted a bike through the judas hole? A bike with big tires and a sturdy frame and awkward pedals and handlebars?

No, someone had done it for her.

A fifth man.

Because the theory didn’t work without the existence of a fifth man. The barn was irrelevant without a fifth man. The flowers were meaningless without a fifth man. The Duncans were alibied, but Margaret Coe had disappeared even so. Therefore someone else had been there, either by chance or on purpose.

Or not.

Circular logic.

All the way right, or all the way wrong.

To be all the way wrong would be frustrating, but no big deal. To be all the way right meant the fifth man existed, and had to be considered. He would be bound to the Duncans, by a common purpose, by a terrible shared secret, always and forever. His cooperation could be assumed. His loyalty and service were guaranteed, either by mutual interest or coercion. In an emergency, he would help out.

Reacher looked at the barn, and the smaller shelter.

If the theory was right, the fifth man would be there.

If the fifth man was there, the theory was right.

Circular logic.

Reacher had seen the buildings twice before, once by night and once by day. He was an observant man. He had made his living by noticing details. He was living because he noticed details. But there was nothing much to be seen from fifty yards. Just a side view of two old structures. Best move would be for the guy to be inside the barn, off center, maybe six feet from the door, sitting easy in a lawn chair with a shotgun across his knees, just waiting for his target to step through in a bar of bright light. Second-best move would put the guy in the smaller shelter a hundred and twenty yards away, prone with a rifle on the mezzanine half-loft, his eye to a scope, watching through the ventilation louvers Reacher had noticed on both his previous visits. A harder shot, but maybe the guy thought of himself more as a rifleman than a close-quarters brawler. And maybe the inside of the barn was sacrosanct, never to be seen by an outsider, even one about to die. But in either case, the smaller shelter would have to be checked first, as a matter of simple logic.

Reacher headed left, straight for the long east wall of the smaller shelter, not fast, not slow, using an easy cadence halfway between a march and a stroll, which overall was quieter than either rushing or creeping. He stopped six feet out, where the dry brambles started, and thought about percentages. Chances were good the fifth man had served, or at least had been exposed to military culture through friends and relatives. A heartland state, big families, brothers and cousins. Probably not a specialist sniper, maybe not even an infantryman, but he might know the basics, foremost among which was that when a guy lay down and aimed forward, he got increasingly paranoid about what was happening behind him. Human nature. Irresistible. Which was why snipers operated in two-man teams, with spotters. Spotters were supposed to acquire targets and calculate range and windage, but their real value was as a second pair of eyes, and as a security blanket. All things being equal, a sniper’s performance depended on his breathing and his heart rate, and anything that helped quiet either one was invaluable.

So would the fifth man have brought a spotter of his own? A sixth man? Probably not, because there was already a sixth man away driving the gray van, so a spotter would be a seventh man, and seven was a large and unwieldy number for a local conspiracy. So the fifth man was most likely on his own, and therefore at the minimum he would have set up a physical early-warning system, either fresh gravel or broken glass scattered along the approaches, or possibly a tripwire at the shelter’s entrance, something noisy, something definitive, something to help him relax.

Reacher stepped back from the brambles and walked toward the entrance. He stopped a foot short of level, and listened hard, but he heard nothing at all. He breathed the air, hoping to detect the kind of faint chemical tang that would betray the presence of a parked vehicle, benzenes and cold hydrocarbons riding the earthier organic odors of dirt and old wood, but his broken nose was blocked with clots of blood and he had no sense of smell. None at all. So he just drew the sawn-off with his right hand and the Glock with his left and inched forward and peered right.

And saw a tripwire.

It was a length of thin electrical cable, low voltage, like something a hobbyist would buy at Radio Shack, insulated with black plastic, tied tight and shin-high across the open end of the structure. It was filmy with the part-dried remains of the morning dew, which meant it had been in place for at least two hours, since before dawn, which in turn meant the fifth man was a serious, cautious person, and patient, and committed, and fully invested. And it meant he had been contacted the day before, by the Duncans, maybe in the late afternoon, as a belt-and-suspenders backup plan, which confirmed, finally, that the barn was indeed important.

Reacher smiled.

All the way right.

He stayed clear of the tangled vine and walked a silent exaggerated curve. He worked on the assumption that most people were right-handed, so he wanted to be on the guy’s left before he announced himself, because that would give the guy’s rifle a longer and more awkward traverse before it came to bear on his target. He watched the ground and saw nothing noisy there. He saw a truck deep inside the shelter, parked halfway under the mezzanine floor. Its tailgate was open, the dirty white paint on its edge pale in the gloom. He approached within six inches of the wire and stood absolutely still, letting his eyes adjust. The inside of the shelter was dark, except for thin random bars of sunlight coming through gaps between warped boards. The truck was still and inert. It was a Chevy Silverado. Above it, a long step up from its crew-cab roof, was the loft, and there was a humped shape up there, ass and legs and back and elbows, all preceded by the soles of a pair of boots, all brightly backlit by daylight coming in through the ventilation louvers. The fifth man, prone with a rifle.

Reacher stepped over the tripwire, left foot, then right, high and careful, and eased into the shadows. He inched along the left-hand tire track, where the earth was beaten smooth, like walking a tightrope, slow and cautious, holding his breath. He made it to the back of the truck. From there he could see the fifth man’s feet, but nothing more. He needed a better angle. He needed to be up in the truck’s load bed, which meant that a silent approach was no longer an option. The sheet metal would clang and the suspension would creak and from that point onward the morning would get very noisy very fast.

He took a deep breath, through his mouth, in and out.

Chapter 55

Eldridge Tyler heard nothing at all until a sudden shattering cacophony erupted ten feet behind him and eight feet below. There was some kind of heavy metal implement beating on the side of his truck and then footsteps were thumping into the load bed and a loud nasal voice was screaming STAY STILL STAY STILL and then a shotgun fired into the roof above his back with a pulverizing blast in the closed space and the voice yelled STAY STILL STAY STILL again and the shotgun crunch-crunched ready for the next round and hot spent buckshot pattered down on him and wormy sawdust drifted off the damaged boards above him and settled all around him like fine khaki snow.

Then the shelter went quiet again.

The voice said, “Take your hands off your gun, or I’ll shoot you in the ass.”

Tyler took his right forefinger off the trigger and eased his left hand out from under the barrel. The voice was behind him, to the left. He jacked up on his palms and turned a little, arching his back, craning his neck. He saw a big guy, six-five at least, probably two-fifty, wearing a big brown parka and a wool cap. He was holding himself awkwardly, like he was stiff. Like he was hurting bad, exactly as advertised, except for a length of duct tape stuck to his face. Nobody had mentioned that. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun and a big metal wrench. He was right-handed. His shoulders were broad. The center of his skull was about seventy-three inches off the floor of the Silverado’s load bed. Exactly as calculated.

Tyler closed his eyes.

Reacher saw a man somewhere between sixty and seventy years old, broad and not tall, with thin gray hair and a seamed, weather-beaten face. He was dressed in multiple layers topped by an old flannel shirt and wool pants. Beyond him and beneath him was the gleam of fine walnut and smooth gunmetal. An expensive hunting rifle, resting on what looked like stacked bags of rice. There was a bottle of water next to the rice, and what looked like a sandwich.

Reacher said, “Your tripwire worked real well, didn’t it?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Come down from there. Leave your rifle where it is.”

The guy didn’t move. His eyes were closed. He was thinking. Reacher saw him running through the same basic calculation any busted man makes: How much do they know?

Reacher told him, “I know most of it. I just need the last few details.”

The guy said nothing.

Reacher said, “Twenty-five years ago a little girl came here to see flowers. Probably she came every Sunday. One particular Sunday you were here too. I want to know if you were here by chance or on purpose.”

The guy opened his eyes. Said nothing.

Reacher said, “I’m going to assume you were here on purpose.”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “It was early summer. I don’t know much about flowers. Maybe they hadn’t been open long. I want to know how fast the Duncans picked up on the pattern. Three weeks? Two?”

The guy moved a little. His head stayed where it was, but his hands crept back toward the gun. Reacher said, “Fair warning. I’ll shoot you if that muzzle starts turning toward me.”

The guy stopped moving, but he didn’t bring his hands back.

Reacher said, “I’m going to assume two weeks. They noticed her the first Sunday, they watched for her the second Sunday, they had you in place for the third go-round.”

No response.

Reacher said, “I want you to confirm it for me. I want to know when the Duncans called you. I want to know when they called those boys to build the fence. I want to hear about the plan.”

No response.

Reacher said, “You want to tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

No reply.

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’m going to assume you do know what I’m talking about.”

No comment.

Reacher said, “I want to know how you knew the Duncans in the first place. Was it a matter of shared enthusiasms? Were you all members of the same disgusting little club?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “Had you done it before somewhere?”

No reply.

Reacher asked, “Or was it your first time?”

No reply.

Reacher said, “You need to talk to me. It’s your only way of staying alive.”

The guy said nothing. He closed his eyes again, and his hands started creeping back under his body again, blindly, all twisted and awkward. He was up on one hip and one elbow, curled around, the bottom of his ribcage facing Reacher like the open mouth of a bucket. The muzzle of the rifle jerked left a little. The guy had his hand on the forestock. He didn’t want to stay alive. He was going to commit suicide. Not with the rifle, but by moving the rifle. Reacher knew the signs. Suicide by cop, it was called. Not uncommon, after arrests for certain kinds of crimes.

Reacher said, “It had to come to an end sometime, right?”

The guy nodded. Just a tiny movement of his head, almost not there at all. The rifle kept on moving, sudden inch after sudden inch, pulling and snagging, trapped between the wooden boards and the guy’s awkward clothing.

Reacher said, “Open your eyes. I want you to see it coming.”

The guy opened his eyes. Reacher let him fumble the rifle through ninety degrees, and then he shot him with the sawed-off, in the gut, another tremendous 12-gauge blast in the stillness, at an angle that drove the small steel buckshot balls upward through the guy’s stomach and deep into his chest cavity. He died more or less instantly, which was a privilege Reacher figured had not been offered to young Margaret Coe.

Reacher waited a long moment and then he stepped up on the roof of the Silverado’s cab and climbed onto the half-loft shelf and squatted next to the dead man. He rolled him off the rifle and climbed down with it. It was a fancy toy, custom built around a standard Winchester bolt action. Very expensive, probably, but as good a way of wasting money as any other. There was a .338 Magnum in the breech and five more in the magazine. Reacher thought the .338 was overkill at a hundred and twenty yards against a human target, but he figured the firepower was about to be useful.

He carried the rifle to the mouth of the shelter and stepped over the tripwire again and stood with the cold sun on his face. Then he looped around and headed for the barn.

The judas hole was hinged to open outward and was secured with the kind of lock normally seen on a suburban front door. There was a corroded brass keyhole plate the diameter of an espresso cup, and there would be a steel tongue behind it, which would be snicked into a pressed steel receptacle, which would be rabbeted into the jamb and held by two screws. The jamb was the main slider itself, which was a sturdy item. Reacher aimed the fancy rifle from a foot away and fired twice, at where he thought the screws might be, and then twice more, at a different angle. The Magnums did a pretty good job. The door sagged open half an inch before catching on splinters. Reacher jammed his fingertips in the crack and pulled hard. A jagged piece of wood the length of his arm split off and fell to the floor and the door came free. Reacher folded the door all the way back, and then he stood in the sun for a second, and then he stepped inside the barn.

Chapter 56

Reacher stepped out of the barn again eleven minutes later, and saw Dorothy Coe’s truck driving up the track toward him. There were three people in the cab. Dorothy herself was at the wheel, and the doctor was in the passenger seat, and the doctor’s wife was jammed in the space between them. Reacher stood absolutely still, completely numb, blinking in the sun, the captured rifle in one hand, the other hand hanging free. Dorothy Coe slowed and stopped and waited thirty feet away, a cautious distance, as if she already knew.

A long minute later the truck doors opened and the doctor climbed out. His wife slid across the vinyl and joined him. Then Dorothy Coe got out on her side. She stood still, shielded by the open door, one hand on its frame. Reacher blinked one last time and ran his free hand over his taped face and walked down to meet her. She was quiet for a moment, and then she started the same question twice, and stopped twice, before getting it all the way out on the third attempt.

She asked, “Is she in there?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Her bike is in there.”

“Still? After all these years? Are you sure it’s hers?”

“It’s as described in the police report.”

“It must be all rusted.”

“A little. It’s dry in there.”

Dorothy Coe went quiet. She was staring at the western horizon, a degree or two south of the barn, as if she couldn’t look directly at it. She was completely still, but her hand was clenched hard on the truck’s door frame. Her knuckles were white.

She asked, “Can you tell what happened to her?”

Reacher said, “No,” which was technically true. He was no pathologist. But he had been a cop for a long time, and he knew a thing or two, and he could guess.

She said, “I should go look.”

He said, “Don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Not really.”

“I want to.”

“Better if you don’t.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“I know.”

“You have no right to stop me.”

“I’m asking you, that’s all. Please don’t look.”

“I have to.”

“Better not.”

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Then listen to her instead. Listen to Margaret. Pretend she grew up. Imagine what she would have become. She wouldn’t have been a lawyer or a scientist. She loved flowers. She loved colors and forms. She would have been a painter or a poet. An artist. A smart, creative person. In love with life, and full of common sense, and full of concern for you, and full of wisdom. She’d look at you and she’d shake her head and smile and she’d say, come on, Mom, do what the man says.”

“You think?”

“She’d say, Mom, trust me on this.”

“But I have to see. After all these years of not knowing.”

“Better if you don’t.”

“It’s just her bones.”

“It’s not just her bones.”

“What else can be left?”

“No,” Reacher said. “I mean, it’s not just her bones.”

Up on the 49th Parallel, the transfer was going exactly to plan. The white van had driven slowly south, through the last of Canada, and it had parked for the final time in a rough forest clearing a little more than two miles north of the border. The driver had gotten out and stretched and then taken a long coil of rope from the passenger footwell and walked around to the rear doors. He had opened them up and gestured urgently and the women and the girls had come on out immediately, with no reluctance, with no hesitation at all, because passage to America was what they wanted, what they had dreamed about, and what they had paid for.

There were sixteen of them, all from rural Thailand, six women and ten female children, average weight close to eighty pounds each, for a total payload of 1,260 pounds. The women were slim and attractive, and the girls were all eight years old or younger. They all stood and blinked in the morning light and looked up and around at the tall trees, and shuffled their feet a little, stiff and weary but excited and full of wonderment.

The driver herded them into a rough semicircle. He couldn’t speak Thai and they couldn’t understand English, so he started the same dumb show he had performed many times before. It was probably faster than talking anyway. First he patted the air to calm them down and get their attention. Then he raised a finger to his lips and twisted left, twisted right, tracking the whole length of the semicircle, a big exaggerated pantomime, so that they all saw, so that they all understood they had to be silent. He pointed at a spot on the ground and then cupped a hand behind his ear. There are sensors. The earth listens. The women nodded, deferential, keen to let him know they understood. He pointed to himself, and then to all of them, and then pointed south and wiggled his fingers. Now we all have to walk. The women nodded again. They knew. They had been told at the outset. He used both hands, one and then the other, palms down, stepping on the air gently and delicately. He kept the gesture going and looked along the semicircle, making eye contact with each of his charges. We have to walk softly and keep very quiet. The women nodded eagerly, and the girls looked back at him shyly from behind their hair.

The driver uncoiled his rope and measured off six feet from the end and wrapped that point around the first woman’s hand. He measured another six feet and wrapped the rope around the first girl’s hand, and then the next, and then the second woman, and so on, until he had all sixteen joined together safely. The rope was a guide, that was all, not a restraint. Like a mobile handrail. It kept them all moving at the same pace in the same direction and it prevented any of them from wandering off and getting lost. The forest transfer was dangerous enough without having to double back and crash around, hunting for stragglers.

The driver picked up the free end of the rope and wrapped it around his own hand. Then he led them off, like a train, snaking south between bushes and trees. He walked slowly and softly and listened out for commotion behind him. There was none, as usual. Asian people knew how to keep quiet, especially illegals, especially women and girls.

But as quiet as they were, twenty minutes later they were clearly heard, in two separate locations, both more than six hundred miles away, first in Fargo, North Dakota, and then in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or more accurately they were seen in both places, in that remote seismograph needles flickered a little as they passed over a buried sensor. But the deflection was minor, barely above the level of background noise. In Fargo, an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security checked back on his graph and thought: Deer. Maybe whitetails. Maybe a whole family. His counterpart in Canada checked his own graph and thought: A breeze, bringing clumps of snow down off the trees.

They walked on, slowly and carefully, treading lightly, patiently enduring the third of the four parts of their adventure. First had come the shipping container, and then had come the white van. Now came the hike, and then there would be another van. Everything had been explained beforehand, in great detail, in a small shipping office above a store in a town near their home. There were many such offices, and many such operations, but the one they had used was widely considered the best. The price was high, but the facilities were excellent. Their contact had assured them his only concern was that they arrive in America in the best of condition, as fresh as daisies. To that end, the shipping container, which would be their home for the longest of the four phases, was equipped with everything necessary. There were lamps inside with bulbs that simulated daylight, wired to automobile batteries. There were mattresses and blankets. There was plenty of food and water and there were chemical toilets. There was medicine. There were ventilation slots disguised as rust holes, and in case they weren’t enough there was a fan that ran off the same batteries as the lights, and there were oxygen cylinders that could be bled slowly if the air got stuffy. There was an exercise machine, so they could keep in shape for the four-mile hike across the border itself. There were washing facilities, and lotions and moisturizers for their skin. They were told that the vans were equipped with the same kind of stuff, but less of it, because the road trips would be shorter than the sea voyage.

An excellent organization, that thought of everything.

And the best thing was that there was no bias shown against families with girl children. Some organizations would smuggle adults only, because adults could work immediately, and some allowed children, but older boys only, because they could work too, but this organization welcomed girls, and wasn’t even upset if they were young, which was considered a very humane attitude. The only downside was that the sexes always had to travel separately, for the sake of decorum, so fathers were separated from mothers, and brothers from sisters, and then on this particular occasion they were told at the very last minute that the ship the men and the boys were due to sail on was delayed for some reason, so the women and the girls had been obliged to go on ahead. Which would be OK, they were told, because they would be well looked after at their destination, for as long as it took for the second ship to arrive.

They had been warned that the four-mile hike would be the hardest part of the whole trip, but it wasn’t, really. It felt good to be out in the air, moving around. It was cold, but they were used to cold, because winter in Thailand was cold, and they had warm clothes to wear. The best part was when their guide stopped and raised his finger to his lips again and then traced an imaginary sideways line on the ground. He pointed beyond it and mouthed, America. They walked on and passed the line one after the other and smiled happily and picked their way onward, across American soil at last, slowly and delicately, like ballet dancers.

The Duncan driver in the gray van on the Montana side of the border saw them coming about a hundred yards away. As always his Canadian counterpart was leading the procession, setting the pace, holding the rope. Behind him the shipment floated along, seemingly weightless, curving and snaking through the gaps between the trees. The Duncan driver opened his rear doors and stood ready to receive them. The Canadian handed over the free end of the rope, like he always did, like the baton in a relay race, and then he turned about and walked back into the forest and was lost to sight. The Duncan driver gestured into the truck, but before each of his passengers climbed aboard he looked at their faces and smiled and shook their hands, in a way his passengers took to be a formal welcome to their new country. In fact the Duncan driver was a gambling man, and he was trying to guess ahead of time which kid the Duncans would choose to keep. The women would go straight to the Vegas escort agencies, and nine of the girls would end up somewhere farther on down the line, but one of them would stay in the county, at least for a spell, or actually forever, technically. Buy ten and sell nine was the Duncan way, and the driver liked to look over the candidates and make a guess about which one was the lucky one. He saw four real possibilities, and then felt a little jolt of excitement about a fifth, not that she would be remotely recognizable by the time she was passed on to him.

Dorothy Coe stood behind her truck’s open door for ten whole minutes. Reacher stood in front of her, watching her, hoping he was blocking her view of the barn, happy to keep on standing there as long as it took, ten hours or ten days or ten years, or forever, anything to stop her going inside. Her gaze was a thousand miles away, and her lips were moving a little, as if she was rehearsing arguments with someone, look or don’t look, know or don’t know.

Eventually she asked, “How many are in there?”

Reacher said, “About sixty.”

“Oh my God.”

“Two or three a year, probably,” Reacher said. “They got a taste for it. An addiction. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. What the stoner kid heard from time to time was real.”

“Who were they all?”

“Asian girls, I think.”

“You can tell that from their bones?”

“The last one isn’t bones yet.”

“Where were they all from?”

“From immigrant families, probably. Illegals, almost certainly, smuggled in for the sex trade. That’s what the Duncans were doing. That’s how they were making their money.”

“Were they all young?”

“About eight years old.”

“Are they buried?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“They’re just dumped in there?”

“Not dumped,” Reacher said. “They’re displayed. It’s like a shrine.”

There was a long, long pause.

Dorothy Coe said, “I should look.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“There are photographs. Like a record. Like mementos. In silver frames.”

“I should look.”

“You’ll regret it. All your life. You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“You looked.”

“And I regret it. I wish I hadn’t.”

Dorothy Coe went quiet again. She breathed in, and breathed out, and watched the horizon. Then she asked, “What should we do now?”

Reacher said, “I’m going to head over to the Duncan houses. They’re all in there, sitting around, thinking everything is going just fine. It’s time they found out it isn’t.”

Dorothy Coe said, “I want to come with you.”

Reacher said, “Not a good idea.”

“I need to.”

“Could be dangerous.”

“I hope it is. Some things are worth dying for.”

The doctor’s wife said, “We’re coming too. Both of us. Let’s go, right now.”

Chapter 57

Dorothy Coe got behind the wheel of her truck again and the doctor and his wife slid in beside her. Reacher rode in the load bed with the captured rifle, holding tight over the tractor ruts, a long slow mile, back to where he had left the white Tahoe he had taken from the football player who had broken his nose. It was still there, parked and untouched. Reacher got in and drove it and the other three followed behind. They went south on the two-lane and then coasted and stopped half a mile shy of the Duncan compound. The view from there was good. Reacher unscrewed the Leica scope from the rifle and used it like a miniature telescope. All three houses were clearly visible. There were five parked vehicles. Three old pick-up trucks, plus Seth Duncan’s black Cadillac, and Eleanor Duncan’s red Mazda. All of them were standing in a neat line on the dirt to the left of the southernmost house, which was Jacob’s. All of them were cold and inert and dewed over, like they had been parked for a long time, which meant the Duncans were holed up and isolated, which was pretty much the way Reacher wanted it.

He climbed out of the Tahoe and walked back to meet the others. He took the sawed-off from his pocket and handed it to Dorothy Coe. He said, “You all head back and get car keys from the football players. Then bring me two more vehicles. Choose the ones with the most gas in the tank. Get back here as fast as you can.”

Dorothy Coe backed up a yard and turned across the width of the road and took off north. Reacher got back in the Tahoe and waited.

Three isolated houses. Wintertime. Flat land all around. Nowhere to hide. A classic tactical problem. Standard infantry doctrine would be to sit back and call in an artillery strike, or a bombing run. The guerrilla approach would be to split up and attack with rocket-propelled grenades from four sides simultaneously, with the main assault from the north, where there were fewest facing windows. But Reacher had no forces to divide, and no grenades or artillery or air support. He was on his own, with a middle-aged alcoholic man and two middle-aged women, one of whom was in shock. Together they were equipped with a bolt-action rifle with two rounds in it, and a Glock nine-millimeter pistol with sixteen rounds, and a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun with three rounds, and a switchblade, and an adjustable wrench, and two screwdrivers, and a book of matches. Not exactly overwhelming force.

But time was on their side. They had all day. And the terrain was on their side. They had forty thousand unobstructed acres. And the Duncans’ fence was on their side. The fence, built a quarter of a century before, as an alibi, still strong and sturdy. The law of unintended consequences. The fence was about to come right back and bite the Duncans in the ass.

Reacher put the Leica to his eye again. Nothing was happening in the compound. It was still and quiet. Nothing was moving, except smoke coming from the chimneys on the first house and the last. The smoke was curling south. A breeze, not a wind, but the air was definitely in motion.

Reacher waited.

Fifteen minutes later Reacher checked the Tahoe’s mirror and saw a little convoy heading straight for him. First in line was Dorothy Coe’s truck, and then came the gold Yukon Reacher had taken from the kid called John. It had the doctor at the wheel. Last in line was the doctor’s wife, driving the black pick-up the first Cornhusker of the morning had arrived in. They all slowed and parked nose to tail behind the Tahoe. They all looked left, away from the Duncan compound, studiously averting their eyes. Old habits.

Reacher climbed out of the Tahoe and the other three gathered around and he told them what they had to do. He told Dorothy Coe to keep the sawed-off, and he gave the Leica scope to the doctor’s wife, and he took her scarf and her cell phone in exchange. As soon as they understood their roles, he waved them away. They climbed into Dorothy Coe’s truck and headed south. Reacher was left alone on the shoulder of the two-lane, with the white Tahoe, and the gold Yukon, and the black pick-up, with the keys for all of them in his pocket. He counted to ten, and then he got to work.

The black pick-up truck was the longest of the three vehicles, by about a foot, so Reacher decided to use it second. The white Tahoe had the most gas in it, so Reacher decided to use it first. Which left John’s gold Yukon to use third, which Reacher was happy about, because he knew it drove OK.

He walked back and forth along the line and started all three vehicles and left them running. Then he started leapfrogging them forward, moving them closer to the mouth of the Duncan driveway, a hundred yards at a time, getting them in the right order, hoping to delay detection for as long as possible. Without the scope, his view of the compound was much less detailed, but it still looked quiet. He got the black pick-up within fifty yards, and he left the gold Yukon waiting right behind it, and then he jogged back and got in the white Tahoe and drove it all the way forward. He turned it into the mouth of the driveway and lined it up straight and eased it to a stop.

He slid out of the seat and crouched down and clamped the jaws of his adjustable wrench across the width of the gas pedal. He corrected the angle so that the stem of the wrench stuck up above the horizontal, and then he turned the knurled knob tight. He ducked back and hustled around the tailgate and opened the fuel filler door and took off the gas cap. He poked the end of the borrowed scarf down the filler neck with the longer screwdriver, and then he lit the free end of the scarf with his matches. Then he hustled back to the driver’s door and leaned in and put the truck in gear. The engine’s idle speed rolled it forward. He kept pace and put his finger on the button and powered the driver’s seat forward. The cushion moved, slowly, an inch at a time, through its whole range, past the point where a person of average height would want it, on toward where a short person would want it, and then the front of the cushion touched the end of the wrench, and the engine note changed and the truck sped up a little. Reacher kept pace and kept his finger where it was and the seat kept on moving, and the truck kept on accelerating, and Reacher started running alongside, and then the seat arrived at the limit of its travel and Reacher stepped away and let the truck go on without him. It was rolling at maybe ten miles an hour, maybe less, not very fast at all, but enough to overcome the wash of gravel under its tires. The ruts in the driveway were holding it reasonably straight. The scarf in the filler neck was burning pretty well.

Reacher turned and jogged back to the road, to the black pick-up, and he got in and drove it forward beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he backed it up and in and parallel parked it across the width of the space, between the fences, sawing it back and forth until he had it at a perfect ninety degrees, with just a couple of feet of open space at either end. The white Tahoe was rolling steadily, already halfway to its target, jerking left and right in the ruts, trailing a bright plume of flame. Reacher pulled the black pick-up’s keys and jogged back to the road. He leaned on the blind side of the gold Yukon’s hood and watched.

The white Tahoe was well ablaze. It rolled on through its final twenty yards, dumbly, unflinchingly, and it hit the front of the center house and stopped dead. Two tons, some momentum, but no kind of a major crash. The wood on the house split and splintered, and the front wall bowed inward a little, and glass fell out of a ground floor window, and that was all.

But that was enough.

The flames at the rear of the truck swayed forward and came back and settled in to burn. They roiled the air around them and licked out horizontally under the sills and climbed up the doors. They spilled out of the rear wheel wells and fat coils of black smoke came off the tires. The smoke boiled upward and caught the breeze and drifted away south and west.

Reacher leaned into the Yukon and took the rifle off the seat.

The flames crept onward toward the front of the Tahoe, slow but urgent, busy, seeking release, curling out and up. The rear tires started to burn and the front tires started to smoke. Then the fuel line must have ruptured because suddenly there was a wide fan of flame, a new color, a fierce lateral spray that beat against the front of the house and rose up all around the Tahoe’s hood, surging left and right, licking the house, lighting it, bubbling the paint in a fast black semicircle. Then finally flames started chasing the bubbling paint, small at first, then larger, like a map of an army swarming through broken defenses, fanning out, seeking new ground. Air sucked in and out of the broken window and the flames started licking at its frame.

Reacher dialed his borrowed cell.

He said, “The center house is alight.”

Dorothy Coe answered, from her position half a mile west, out in the fields.

She said, “That’s Jonas’s house. We can see the smoke.”

“Anyone moving?”

“Not yet.” Then she said, “Wait. Jonas is coming out his back door. Turning left. He’s going to head around to the front.”

“Positive ID?”

“A hundred percent. We’re using the telescope.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Stay on the line.”

He laid the open cell phone on the Yukon’s hood and picked up the rifle. It had a rear iron sight just ahead of the scope mount, and a front iron sight at the muzzle. Reacher raised it to his eye and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the sheet metal and aimed at the gap between the center house and the southernmost house. Distance, maybe a hundred and forty yards.

He waited.

He saw a stocky figure enter the gap from the rear. A man, short and wide, maybe sixty years old or more. Round red face, thinning gray hair. Reacher’s first live sighting of a Duncan elder. The guy hustled stiffly between the blank ends of the two homes and came out in the light and stopped dead. He stared at the burning Tahoe and started toward it and stopped again and then turned and faced front and stared at the pick-up truck parked across the far end of the driveway.

Reacher laid the front sight on the guy’s center mass and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 58

The .338 hit high, a foot above Jonas Duncan’s center mass, halfway between his lower lip and the point of his chin. The bullet drove through the roots of his front incisors, through the soft tissue of his mouth and his throat, through his third vertebra, through his spinal cord, through the fat on the back of his neck, and onward into the corner of Jacob Duncan’s house. Jonas went down vertically, claimed by gravity, his stiff fireplug body suddenly loose and malleable, and he ended up sprawled in a grotesque tangle of limbs, face-up, eyes open, the last of his brain’s oxygenated blood leaking from his wound, and then he died.

Reacher shot the rifle’s bolt and the spent shell case clanged against the Yukon’s hood and rolled down its contour and fell to the ground. Reacher picked up the cell phone and said, “Jonas is down.”

Dorothy Coe said, “We heard the shot.”

“Any activity?”

“Not yet.”

Reacher kept the phone against his ear. Jonas’s house was burning nicely. The whole front wall was on fire, and there were flames inside, throwing orange light and shadows all around, curling flat and angry against the ceilings, gleaming wetly behind intact panes of glass, spilling out through the broken windows and leaping up and merging into the general conflagration. Smoke was still blowing south, and heat too, toward the southernmost building.

Dorothy Coe’s voice came back: “Jasper is out. He has a weapon. A long gun. He sees us. He’s looking right at us.”

Reacher asked, “How far back are you?”

“About six hundred yards.”

“Stand your ground. If he fires, he’ll miss.”

“We think it’s a shotgun.”

“Even better. The round won’t even reach you.”

“He’s running. He’s past Jonas’s house. He’s heading for Jacob’s.”

Reacher saw him, flitting right to left across the narrow gap between Jonas’s house and Jacob’s, a short wide man very similar to his brother. On the phone Dorothy Coe said, “He’s gone inside. We see him in Jacob’s kitchen. Through the window. Jacob and Seth are in there too.”

Reacher waited. The fire in Jonas’s house was burning out of control. In front of it the white Tahoe was a blackened wreck inside a ball of flame. Glass was punching out of the house’s windows ahead of flames that followed horizontally like arms and fists before boiling upward. The roof was alight. Then there was a loud sound and the air inside the house seemed to shudder and cough and a hot blue shimmer gasped out through the ground floor, like an expelled breath, clearly visible, like a force, and it rose slowly upward, one second, two, three, and then the flames came back even stronger behind it.

Dorothy Coe said, “Something just blew up in Jonas’s kitchen. The propane tank, maybe. The back wall is burning hard.”

Reacher waited.

Then the ground floor itself burned through and there was another cough and shudder as the flaming timbers tumbled through to the basement. The left-hand gable tilted inward and the right-hand gable fell outward, across the gap to Jasper’s house. Sparks showered all around and thermals caught them and sent them shooting a hundred feet in the air. Jonas’s right-hand wall collapsed into the gap and piled high against Jasper’s left-hand wall, and gales of new air hit fresh unburned surfaces and vivid new flames leapt up.

Reacher said, “This is going very well.”

Then Jonas’s second floor fell in with an explosion of sparks and his left-hand wall came unmoored and folded slowly and neatly in half, the top part falling inward into the fire and the bottom part angling outward and propping itself against Jacob’s house. Burning timbers and bright red embers spilled and settled and sucked oxygen toward them and huge new flames started licking upward and outward and sideways. Even the weeds in the gravel were on fire.

Reacher said, “I think we’re three for three. I think we got them all.”

Dorothy Coe said, “Jasper is out again. He’s heading for his truck.”

Reacher watched over the front sight of his rifle. He saw Jasper run for the line of cars. Saw him slide into a white pick-up. Saw him start it up and back it out. It stopped and turned and aimed straight for the driveway. It blew through a shower of sparks, right past Jonas’s body, and it headed straight toward the two-lane. Straight toward Reacher. Straight toward the parked black truck. It braked hard and stopped short just behind it, and Jasper scrambled out. He opened the black truck’s passenger door and ducked inside.

Then a second later he ducked out again.

No key.

The key was in Reacher’s pocket.

Reacher put the phone on the Yukon’s hood.

Jasper Duncan stood still, momentarily unsure. Distance, maybe forty yards. Which was really no distance at all.

Reacher shot him through the head and he went straight down the same way his brother had before him, leaving a small pink cloud in the air above him, made of pulverized blood and bone, which drifted an inch and then disappeared in the breeze.

Reacher picked up the phone and said, “Jasper is down.”

Then he dropped the empty gun on the road behind him and climbed inside the Yukon. Lack of replacement ammunition meant that phase one was over, and that phase two was about to begin.

Chapter 59

Reacher drove the Yukon a hundred yards beyond the mouth of the driveway, and then he turned right, onto the open dirt. Lumps and stones squirmed and pattered under his tires. He drove a wide circle until he was level with the compound itself and then he stopped, facing the houses, the engine idling, his foot on the brake. From his new angle he saw that Jacob’s south wall was so far untouched by the fire, but judging by the backdrop of smoke and flame the north end of the house was burning. Ahead and far to the left he could see Dorothy Coe’s truck, waiting six hundred yards west in the fields, similarly nose-in and pent-up and expectant, like a gundog panting and crouching.

He raised the phone to his ear and said, “I’m end-on now. What do you see?”

Dorothy Coe said, “Jonas’s house is about gone. All that’s left is the chimney, really. The bricks are glowing red. And Jasper’s house is on its way. His propane just blew up.”

“How about Jacob’s?”

“It’s burning north to south. Pretty fierce. Has to be getting hot in there.”

“Stand by, then. It won’t be long now.”

It was less than a minute. Dorothy Coe said, “They’re out,” and a second later Reacher saw Jacob and Seth Duncan spill around the back corner of the house. They ran ducked down and bent over, zigzagging, afraid of the rifle they thought was still out there. They made it to one of the remaining pick-up trucks and Reacher saw them open the doors from a crouch and then climb in and hunker down low. Behind them the north end of Jacob’s house swelled and bellied and came down, quite slowly and gracefully, with sparks shooting up and out like fireworks, with burning timbers tumbling and spreading like lava from a volcano, reaching almost to the boundary fence, a vertical mass made horizontal, and then the south end of the house fell slowly backward and collapsed into the fire, leaving only the chimney upright.

Reacher asked, “How does it look?”

Dorothy Coe answered, “Just like you said it would.”

Reacher saw Jacob Duncan at the wheel of the pick-up, shorter and broader than Seth in the passenger seat. Seth still had his splint taped to his face. The truck backed up ten yards, almost into the fire behind it, and then it drove forward and hit the fence, butting against it, trying to break through. The pick-up’s front bumper bent out of shape and the hood crumpled a little, and the fence shuddered and rattled, but it held. Deep holes for the posts, sturdy timbers, strong rails. A big production. The law of unintended consequences.

Jacob Duncan tried again. He backed up, much less than ten yards this time because the fire was spreading behind him, and then he shot forward once more. The truck hit the fence and he and Seth bounced around in the cab like rag dolls, but the fence held. Reacher saw Jacob glance backward again. There was no space for a longer run-up. The fire and the mean allocation of land did not permit it.

Jacob changed his tactics. He maneuvered until the nose of the truck was exactly halfway between two posts, and then he came in slow, in a low gear, pushing the grille into the rails, firming up the contact, then easing down on the gas, pushing harder and harder, hoping that sustained pressure would achieve what a sharp blow had not.

It didn’t. The rails bent, and they bowed, and they trembled, but they held. Then the pick-up’s rear tires lost traction and spun and howled in the dirt and the fence pushed back and the truck eased off six inches.

The doors opened up again and Jacob and Seth spilled out and hustled over and tried the Cadillac instead. A heavier car, better torque, better power. But worse tires, built for quiet and comfort out on the open road, not for traction over loose surfaces. Seth drove, hardly backing up at all for fear of putting his gas tank right in the flames behind him. Then he rolled four feet forward and the chrome grille hit the rails and the tires spun almost immediately.

Game over.

“Here they come,” Reacher said.

Behind them the last vestigial support under the blazing structure gave way and the burning pile settled slowly and gently into a lower and wider shape, blowing gales of sparks and gases outward. Big curled flames danced free, burning the air itself, twisting and splitting and then vanishing. Heat distorted the air and gouts of fire hurled themselves a hundred feet up. Jacob and Seth shrank back and shielded their faces with their arms and ducked away.

They climbed the fence.

They dropped into the field.

They ran.

Chapter 60

Jacob and Seth Duncan ran thirty yards, a straight line away from the fire, pure animal instinct, and then they stopped and glanced back and spun in place, alone and insignificant in the empty acres. They saw the parked Yukon as if for the first time, and they stared at it in confusion, because it was one of theirs, driven by one of their own damn boys, and the guy wasn’t coming to help them. Then they saw Dorothy Coe’s truck far off in another direction and they glanced back at the Yukon and they understood. They looked at each other one last time, and they ran again, in different directions, Jacob one way, and Seth another.

Reacher raised his phone.

He said, “If I’m nine o’clock on a dial and you’re twelve, then Jacob is heading for ten and Seth is heading for seven. Seth is mine. Jacob is yours.”

Dorothy Coe said, “Understood.”

Reacher took his foot off the brake and steered one-handed, following a lazy clockwise curve, heading first north and then east, bumping across the washboard surface, feeling the heat of the fires on the glass next to his face. Ahead of him Seth was stumbling through the dirt, heading for the road, still seventy yards short of getting there. Reacher saw something in his right hand, and then he heard Dorothy Coe’s voice on the phone: “Jacob has a gun.”

Reacher asked, “What kind?”

“A handgun. A revolver, I think. We can’t see. We’re bouncing around too much.”

“Slow down and take a good look.”

Ten long seconds later: “We think it’s a regular six-shooter.”

“Has he fired it yet?”

“No.”

“OK, back off, but keep him in sight. He’s got nowhere to go. Let him get tired.”

“Understood.”

Reacher laid the phone on the seat next to him and followed Seth south, staying thirty yards back. The guy was really hustling. His arms were pumping. Reacher had no scope, but he was prepared to bet the thing in Seth’s right hand was a revolver too, probably half of a matched pair his father had shared.

Reacher steered and accelerated and pushed on to within twenty yards. Seth was racing hard, knees pumping, arms pumping, his head thrown back. The thing in his hand was definitely a gun. The barrel was short, no longer than a finger. The two-lane road was forty yards away. Reacher had no idea why Seth wanted to get there. No point in it. The road was just a blacktop ribbon with no traffic on it and nothing but more dirt beyond. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe the youngest Duncan thought municipal infrastructure was going to save him. Or maybe he was heading home. Maybe he had more weapons in the house. He was going in roughly the right direction. In which case he was either terminally desperate or the world’s biggest optimist. He had more than two miles to go, and he was being chased by a motor vehicle.

Reacher stayed twenty yards back and watched. Way behind his left shoulder a last propane tank cooked off with a dull thump. The Yukon’s mirror filled with sparks. Up ahead, Seth kept on running.

Then he stopped running and whirled around and planted his feet and aimed his revolver two-handed, eye-high, with his aluminum mask right behind it. His chest was heaving and all four of his limbs were trembling and despite the two-handed grip the muzzle was jerking through a circle roughly the size of a basketball. Reacher slowed and changed gear and backed up and stood thirty yards off. He felt safe enough. He had a big V-8 engine block between himself and the gun, and anyway the chances of a panting untrained man even hitting the truck itself with a short-barreled handgun at ninety feet were slight. The chances of a successful head shot through a windshield were less than zero. The chances of putting the round in the right zip code were debatable.

Seth fired, three times, well spaced, with a jerky trigger action and plenty of muzzle climb and no lateral control at all. Reacher didn’t even blink. He just watched the three muzzle flashes with professional interest and tried to identify the gun, but he couldn’t at thirty yards. Too far away. He knew there were seven- and eight-shot revolvers in the world, but they weren’t common, so he assumed it was a six-shooter and that therefore there were now three rounds left in it. Beside him the phone squawked with concern and he picked it up and Dorothy Coe asked, “Are you OK? We heard shots fired.”

“I’m good,” Reacher said. “Are you OK? He’s as likely to hit you as me. Wherever you are.”

“We’re good.”

“Where’s Jacob?”

“Still heading south and west. He’s slowing down.”

“Stay on him,” Reacher said. He put the phone back on the seat. He kept his Glock in his pocket. The problem with being a right-handed man in a left-hand-drive truck was that he would have to bust out the windshield to fire, which used to be easy enough back in the days of pebbly safety glass, but modern automotive windshields were tough, because they were laminated with strong plastic layers, and anyway his heavy wrench was in the burned-out Tahoe, probably all melted back to ore.

Seth rested, bending forward from the waist, his head coming down almost to his shins, and he forced air into his lungs, and he panted once, then twice, and he straightened up and held his breath and aimed the gun again, this time with much more concentration and much better control. Now the muzzle was moving through a circle the size of a baseball. Reacher turned the wheel and stamped on the gas and took off to his right, in a fast tight circle, and then he feinted to come back on his original line but wrenched the wheel the other way and rocked the truck through a figure eight. Seth fired once into empty space and then aimed again and fired again. A round smacked into the top of the Yukon’s windshield surround, on the passenger side, six feet from Reacher’s head.

One round left, Reacher thought.

But there were no rounds left. Reacher saw Seth thrashing at the trigger and he saw the gun’s wheel turning and turning to no effect at all. Either the gun was a six-shooter that hadn’t been fully loaded, or it was a five-shooter. Maybe a Smith 60, Reacher thought. Eventually Seth gave up on it and looked around desperately and then just hurled the empty gun at the Yukon. Finally, a decent aim. The guy would have been better off throwing rocks. The gun hit the windshield dead in front of Reacher’s face. Reacher flinched and ducked involuntarily. The gun bounced off the glass and fell away. Then Seth turned and ran again, and the rest of it was easy.

Reacher stamped on the gas and accelerated and lined up carefully and hit Seth from behind doing close to forty miles an hour. A car might have scooped him up and tossed him in the air and sent him cartwheeling backward over the hood and the roof, but the Yukon wasn’t a car. It was a big truck with a high blunt nose. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. It caught Seth flat on his back, everywhere from his knees to his shoulders, like a two-ton bludgeon, and Reacher felt the impact and Seth’s head whipped away out of view, instantaneously, like it had been sucked down by amazing gravity, and the truck bucked once, like there was something passing under the rear left wheel, and then the going got as smooth as the dirt would let it.

Reacher slowed and steered a wide circle and came back to check if any further attention was required. But it wasn’t. No question about it. Reacher had seen plenty of dead people, and Seth Duncan was more dead than most of them.

Reacher took the phone off the passenger seat and said, “Seth is down,” and then he lined up again and drove away fast, south and west across the field.

Chapter 61

Jacob Duncan had gotten about two hundred yards from his house. That was all. Reacher saw him up ahead, all alone in the vastness, with nothing but open space all around. He saw Dorothy Coe’s truck a hundred yards farther on, well beyond the running man to the north and the west. It was holding a wide slow curve, like a vigilant sheepdog, like a destroyer guaranteeing a shipping lane.

On the phone Dorothy said, “I’m worried about the gun.”

Reacher said, “Seth was a lousy shot.”

“Doesn’t mean Jacob is.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Pull over and wait for me. We’ll do this together.”

He clicked off the call and changed course and crossed Jacob’s path a hundred yards back and headed straight for Dorothy Coe. When he arrived she got out of her truck and headed for his passenger door. He dropped the window with the switch on his side and said, “No, you drive. I’ll ride shotgun.”

He got out and stepped around and they met where the front of the Yukon’s hood was dented. No words were exchanged. Dorothy’s face was set with determination. She was halfway between calm and nervous. She got in the driver’s seat and motored it forward and checked the mirror, like it was a normal morning and she was heading out to the store for milk. Reacher climbed in beside her and freed the Glock from his pocket.

She said, “Tell me about the photographs. In their silver frames.”

“I don’t want to,” Reacher said.

“No, I mean, I need to know there’s no doubt they implicate the Duncans. Jacob in particular. Like evidence. I need you to tell me. Before we do this.”

“There’s no doubt,” Reacher said. “No doubt at all.”

Dorothy Coe nodded and said nothing. She fiddled the selector into gear and the truck took off, rolling slow, jiggling and pattering across the ground. She said, “We were talking about what comes next.”

Reacher said, “Call a trucker from the next county. Or do business with Eleanor.”

“No, about the barn. The doctor thinks we should burn it down. But I’m not sure I want to do that.”

“Your call, I think.”

“What would you do?”

“Not my decision.”

“Tell me.”

Reacher said, “I would nail the judas hole shut, and I would leave it alone and never go there again. I would let the flowers grow right over it.”

There was no more conversation. They got within fifty yards of Jacob Duncan and switched to operational shorthand. Jacob was still running, but not fast. He was just about spent. He was stumbling and staggering, a short wide man limited by bad lungs and stiff legs and the aches and pains that come with age. He had a revolver in his hand, the same dull stainless and the same stubby barrel as Seth’s. Probably another Smith 60, and likely to be just as ineffective if used by a weak man all wheezing and gasping and trembling from exertion.

Dorothy Coe asked, “How do I do this?”

Reacher said, “Pass him on the left. Let’s see if he stands and fights.”

He didn’t. Reacher buzzed his window down and hung the Glock out in the breeze and Dorothy swooped fast and close to Jacob’s left and he didn’t turn and fire. He just flinched away and stumbled onward, a degree or two right of where he had been heading before.

Reacher said, “Now come around in a big wide circle and aim right for him from behind.”

“OK,” Dorothy said. “For Margaret.”

She continued the long leftward curve, winding it tighter and tighter until she came back to her original line. She coasted for a second and straightened up and then she hit the gas and the truck leapt forward, ten yards, twenty, thirty, and Jacob Duncan glanced back in horror and darted left, and Dorothy Coe flinched right, involuntarily, a civilian with forty years of safe driving behind her, and she hit Jacob a heavy glancing blow with the left headlight, hard in his back and his right shoulder, sending the gun flying, sending him tumbling, spinning him around, hurling him to the ground.

“Get back quick,” Reacher said.

But Jacob Duncan wasn’t getting up. He was on his back, one leg pounding away like a dog dreaming, one arm scrabbling uselessly in the dirt, his head jerking, his eyes open and staring, up and down, left and right. His gun was ten feet away.

Dorothy Coe drove back and stopped and stood off ten yards away. She asked, “What now?”

Reacher said, “I would leave him there. I think you broke his back. He’ll die slowly.”

“How long?”

“An hour, maybe two.”

“I don’t know.”

Reacher gave her the Glock. “Or go shoot him in the head. It would be a mercy, not that he deserves it.”

“Will you do it?”

“Gladly. But you should. You’ve wanted to for twenty-five years.”

She nodded slowly. She stared down at the Glock, laid flat like an open book on both her hands, like she had never seen such a thing before. She asked, “Is there a safety catch?”

Reacher shook his head.

“No safety on a Glock,” he said.

She opened the door. She climbed down, to the sill step, to the ground. She looked back at Reacher.

“For Margaret,” she said again.

“And the others,” Reacher said.

“And for Artie,” she said. “My husband.”

She stepped sideways around her open door, touching it with one hand as she went, slowly, with reluctance, and then she crossed the open ground, small neat strides on the dirt, ten of them, twelve, turning a short distance into a long journey. Jacob Duncan went still and watched her approach. She stepped up close and pointed the gun straight down and to one side, holding it a little away from herself, making it not part of herself, separating herself from it, and then she said some words Reacher didn’t hear, and then she pulled the trigger, once, twice, three four five six times, and then she stepped away.

Chapter 62

The doctor and his wife were waiting in Dorothy Coe’s truck, back on the two-lane road. Reacher and Dorothy parked ahead of them and they all got out and stood together. The Duncan compound was reduced to three vertical chimneys and a wide horizontal spread of ashy gray timbers that were still burning steadily, but no longer fiercely. Smoke was coming up and gathering into a wide column that seemed to rise forever. It was the only thing moving. The sun was as high as it was going to get, and the rest of the sky was blue.

Reacher said, “You’ve got a lot of work to do. Get everyone on it. Get backhoes and bucket loaders and dig some big holes. Really big holes. Then gather the trash and bury it deep. But save some space for later. Their van will arrive at some point, and the driver is just as guilty as the rest of them.”

The doctor said, “We have to kill him?”

“You can bury him alive, for all I care.”

“You’re leaving now?”

Reacher nodded.

“I’m going to Virginia,” he said.

“Can’t you stay a day or two?”

“You all are in charge now, not me.”

“What about the football players at my house?”

“Turn them loose and tell them to get out of town. They’ll be happy to. There’s nothing left for them here.”

The doctor said, “But they might tell someone. Or someone might have seen the smoke. From far away. The cops might come.”

Reacher said, “If they do, blame everything on me. Give them my name. By the time they figure out where I am, I’ll be somewhere else.”

Dorothy Coe drove Reacher the first part of the way. They climbed back in the Yukon together and checked the gas gauge. There was enough for maybe sixty miles. They agreed she would take him thirty miles south, and then she would drive the same thirty miles back, and then after that filling the tank would be John’s own problem.

They drove the first ten miles in silence. Then they passed the abandoned roadhouse and the two-lane speared onward and empty ahead of them and Dorothy asked, “What’s in Virginia?”

“A woman,” Reacher said.

“Your girlfriend?”

“Someone I talked to on the phone, that’s all. I wanted to meet her in person. Although now I’m not so sure. Not yet, anyway. Not looking like this.”

“What’s the matter with the way you look?”

“My nose,” Reacher said. He touched the tape, and smoothed it down, two-handed. He said, “It’s going to be a couple of weeks before it’s presentable.”

“What’s her name, this woman in Virginia?”

“Susan.”

“Well, I think you should go. I think if Susan objects to the way you look, then she isn’t worth meeting.”

They stopped at a featureless point on the road that had to be almost exactly halfway between the Apollo Inn and the Cell Block bar. Reacher opened his door and Dorothy Coe asked him, “Will you be OK here?”

He nodded.

He said, “I’ll be OK wherever I am. Will you be OK back there?”

“No,” she said. “But I’ll be better than I was.”

She sat there behind the wheel, a solid, capable woman, about sixty years old, blunt and square, worn down by work, worn down by hardship, fading slowly to gray, but better than she had been before. Reacher said nothing, and climbed out to the shoulder, and closed his door. She looked at him once, through the window, and then she looked away and turned across the width of the road and drove back north. Reacher pulled his hat down over his ears and jammed his hands in his pockets against the cold, and got set to wait for a ride.

He waited a long, long time. For the first hour nothing came by at all. Then a vehicle appeared on the horizon, and a whole minute later it was close enough to make out some detail. It was a small import, probably Japanese, a Honda or a Toyota, old, with blue paint faded by the weather. A sixth-hand purchase. Reacher stood up and stuck out his thumb. The car slowed, which didn’t necessarily mean much. Pure reflex. A driver’s eyes swivel right, and his foot lifts off the gas, automatically. In this case the driver was a woman, young, probably a college student. She had long fair hair. Her car was piled high inside with all kinds of stuff.

She looked for less than a second and then accelerated and drove by at sixty, trailing cold air and whirling grit and tire whine. Reacher watched her go. A good decision, probably. Lone women shouldn’t stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

He sat down again on the shoulder. He was tired. He had woken up in Vincent’s motel room early the previous morning, when Dorothy Coe came in to service it, and he hadn’t slept since. He pulled his hood up over his hat and lay down on the dirt. He crossed his ankles and crossed his arms over his chest and went to sleep.

It was going dark when he woke. The sun was gone in the west and the pale remains of a winter sunset were all that was lighting the sky. He sat up, and then he stood. No traffic. But he was a patient man. He was good at waiting.

He waited ten more minutes, and saw another vehicle on the horizon. It had its lights on against the gloaming. He flipped his hood down to reduce his apparent bulk and stood easy, one foot on the dirt, one on the blacktop, and he stuck his thumb out. The approaching vehicle was bigger than a car. He could tell by the way the headlights were spaced. It was tall and relatively narrow. It had a big windshield. It was a panel van.

It was a gray panel van.

It was the same kind of gray panel van as the two gray panel vans he had seen at the Duncan depot.

It slowed a hundred yards away, the automatic reflex, but then it kept on slowing, and it came to a stop right next to him. The driver leaned way over and opened the passenger door and a light came on inside.

The driver was Eleanor Duncan.

She was wearing black jeans and an insulated parka. The parka was covered in zips and pockets and it gleamed and glittered in the light. Its threads had been nowhere near any living thing, either plant or animal.

She said, “Hello.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was looking at the truck, inside and out. It was travel stained. It had salt and dirt on it, all streaked and dried and dusty. It had been on a long journey.

He said, “This was the shipment, right? This is the truck they used.”

Eleanor Duncan nodded.

He asked, “Who was in it?”

Eleanor Duncan said, “Six young women and ten young girls. From Thailand.”

“Were they OK?”

“They were fine. Not surprisingly. It seems that a lot of trouble had been taken to make sure they arrived in marketable condition.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Nothing.”

“Then where are they?”

“They’re still in the back of this truck.”

“What?”

“We didn’t know what to do. They were lured here under false pretences, obviously. They were separated from their families. We decided we have to get them home again.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’m driving them to Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“There are Thai restaurants.”

“That’s your solution? Thai restaurants?”

“It isn’t nearly as dumb as it sounds. Think about it, Reacher. We can’t go to the police. These women are illegal. They’ll be detained for months, in a government jail. That would be awful for them. We thought at least they should be with people who speak their own language. Like a supportive community. And restaurant workers are connected, aren’t they? Some of them were smuggled in themselves. We thought perhaps they could use the same organizations, but in reverse, to get out again.”

“Whose idea was this?”

“Everybody’s. We discussed it all day, and then we voted.”

“Terrific.”

“You got a better idea?”

Reacher said nothing. He just looked at the blank gray side of the van, and its salt stains, all dried in long feathered aerodynamic patterns. He put his palm on the cold metal.

Eleanor Duncan asked, “You want to meet them?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“You saved them.”

Reacher said, “Luck and happenstance saved them. Therefore I don’t want to meet them. I don’t want to see their faces, because then I’ll get to thinking about what would have happened to them if luck and happenstance hadn’t come along.”

There was a long pause. The van idled, the breeze blew, the sky darkened, the air grew colder.

Then Eleanor Duncan said, “You want a ride to the highway at least?”

Reacher nodded and climbed in.

They didn’t talk for twenty miles. Then they rumbled past the Cell Block bar and Reacher said, “You knew, didn’t you?”

Eleanor Duncan said, “No.” Then she said, “Yes.” Then she said, “I thought I knew the exact opposite. I really did. I thought I knew it for absolute sure. I knew it so intensely that eventually I realized I was just trying to convince myself.”

“You knew where Seth came from.”

“I told you I didn’t. Just before you stole his car.”

“And I didn’t believe you. Up to that point you had answered fourteen consecutive questions with no hesitation at all. Then I asked you about Seth, and you stalled. You offered us a drink. You were evasive. You were buying time to think.”

“Do you know where Seth came from?”

“I figured it out eventually.”

She said, “So tell me your version.”

Reacher said, “The Duncans liked little girls. They always had. It was their lifelong hobby. People like that form communities. Back in the days before the Internet they did it by mail and clandestine face-to-face meetings. Photo swaps and things like that. Maybe conventions. Maybe guest participation. There were alliances between interest groups. My guess is a group that liked little boys was feeling some heat. They went to ground. They fostered the evidence with their pals. It was supposed to be temporary, until the heat went away, but no one came back for Seth. The guy was probably beaten to death in jail. Or by the cops, in a back room. So the Duncans were stuck. But they were OK with it. Maybe they thought it was kind of cute, to get a son without the involvement of a real grown woman. So they kept him. Jacob adopted him.”

Eleanor Duncan nodded. “Seth told me he had been rescued. Back when we still talked. He said Jacob had rescued him out of an abusive situation. Like an act of altruism and charity. And principle. I believed him. Then over the years I sensed the Duncans were doing something bad, but what turned out to be the truth was always the last thing on my mental list. Always, I promise you. Because I felt they were so opposed to that kind of thing. I felt that rescuing Seth had proved it. I was blind for a long time. I thought they were shipping something else, like drugs or guns, or bombs, even.”

“What changed?”

“Things I heard. Just snippets. It became clear to me they were shipping people. Even then I thought it was just regular illegals. Like restaurant workers and so on.”

“Until?”

“Until nothing. I never knew for sure, until today. I promise you that. But I was getting more and more suspicious. There was too much money. And too much excitement. They were practically drooling. Even then I didn’t believe it. Especially with Seth. I thought he would find that kind of thing totally repulsive, because he had suffered it himself. I didn’t want to think it could cut the other way. But I guess it did. I suppose ultimately it was all he knew. And all he ever enjoyed.”

Reacher said, “I’m no psychologist either.”

“I’m so ashamed,” Eleanor said. “I’m not going back. They think I am, but I’m not. I can’t face them. I can’t be there ever again.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to give this truck to whoever helps the people in it. Like a donation. Like a bribe. Then I’m going somewhere else. California, maybe.”

“How?”

“I’m going to hitchhike, like you. Then I’m going to start over.”

“Take care on the road. It can be dangerous.”

“I know. But I don’t care. I feel like I deserve whatever I get.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. At least you called the cops.”

She said, “But they never came.”

Reacher didn’t answer.

She said, “How do you know I called the cops?”

“Because they came,” Reacher said. “In a manner of speaking. That’s the one thing no one ever asked me. No one put two and two together. Everyone knew I was hitchhiking, but no one ever wondered why I had been let out at a crossroads that didn’t lead anywhere. Why would a driver stop there? Either he wouldn’t have gotten there at all, or he would have carried on south for another sixty miles at least.”

“So who was he?”

“He was a cop,” Reacher said. “State Police, in an unmarked car. He didn’t say so, but it was pretty obvious. Nice enough guy. He picked me up way to the north. Almost in South Dakota. He told me he would have to drop me off in the middle of nowhere, because all he was doing was heading down and back. We didn’t talk about reasons, and I didn’t know he meant he was going back immediately. But that’s what he did. He pulled over, he let me out, and then two seconds later he turned around and took off again, right back the way we had come.”

“Why would he?”

“GPS and politics,” Reacher said. “That was my first guess. A big state like Nebraska, I figured there could be bitching and moaning about which parts get attention, and which don’t. So I thought maybe they were defending themselves in advance. They could come out with still frames from their GPS systems to show they’ve been everywhere in the state at one time or another. Cop cars all have trackers now, and all that kind of stuff can be subpoenaed if they get called in front of a committee. Then a little later on I changed my mind. I wondered if they’d had a bullshit call from someone, and they knew they weren’t going to do anything about it, but they still needed to cover their asses by being able to prove they had showed up, at least. Then later still I wondered if it hadn’t been such a bullshit call after all, and whether it was you who had made it.”

“It was me. Four days ago. And it wasn’t a bullshit call. I told them everything I was thinking. Why didn’t the guy even get out of his car?”

“Prejudice and local knowledge,” Reacher said. “I bet you mentioned Seth beat you.”

“Well, yes, I did. Because he did.”

“Therefore they ignored everything else you said. They put it down to a wronged wife making stuff up to get her husband in trouble. Cops can be like that sometimes. It ain’t right, but that’s how it is. And they certainly weren’t going to tackle the domestic issue itself. Not against the Duncans. Because of local knowledge. Dorothy Coe told me some neighborhood kids join the State Police. So either they were asked, or else the story had already gotten around some other way, but in either case the message was the same, which was, in that corner of that county, you can’t mess with the Duncans.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You tried,” Reacher said. “Along with everything else, you have to remember that. You tried to do the right thing.”

They drove on and blew through what counted as the downtown area, past the Chamber of Commerce billboard, past the aluminum coach diner, past the gas station with its Texaco sign and its three service bays, past the hardware store, and the liquor store, and the bank, and the tire shop and the John Deere dealership and the grocery and the pharmacy, past the water tower, past McNally Street, past the signpost to the hospital, and onward into territory Reacher hadn’t seen before. The van’s engine muttered low, and the tires hummed, and from time to time Reacher thought he heard sounds from the load space behind him, people moving around, talking occasionally, even laughing. Beside him Eleanor Duncan concentrated on the dark road ahead, and he watched her from the corner of his eye.

Then an hour and sixty miles later they saw bright vapor lights at the highway cloverleaf, and big green signs pointing west and east. Eleanor slowed and stopped and Reacher got out and waved her away. She used the first ramp, west toward Denver and Salt Lake City, and he walked under the bridge and set up on the eastbound ramp, one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb and smiled and tried to look friendly.

For Ruth,

my daughter

The Affair is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

Second Son copyright © 2011 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Title page art from an original photograph by Reese Wilson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Child, Lee.

The affair: a Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33935-9

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

2. Military police—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—

Fiction. 4. Military bases—Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838A63 2011

813′.54—dc22

2011017151

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Carlos Beltran

Cover art: based on a photograph by Teijo Kurkinen/

Plainpicture/Pictorium

v3.1_r1

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

The Affair

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Dedication

Second Son: A Reacher Short Story

Chapter

1

The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it was built with just three street doors, each one of them opening into a guarded pedestrian lobby. I chose the southeast option, the main concourse entrance, the one nearest the Metro and the bus station, because it was the busiest and the most popular with civilian workers, and I wanted plenty of civilian workers around, preferably a whole long unending stream of them, for insurance purposes, mostly against getting shot on sight. Arrests go bad all the time, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, so I wanted witnesses. I wanted independent eyeballs on me, at least at the beginning. I remember the date, of course. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of March, 1997, and it was the last day I walked into that place as a legal employee of the people who built it.

A long time ago.

The eleventh of March 1997 was also by chance exactly four and a half years before the world changed, on that other future Tuesday, and so like a lot of things in the old days the security at the main concourse entrance was serious without being hysterical. Not that I invited hysteria. Not from a distance. I was wearing my Class A uniform, all of it clean, pressed, polished, and spit-shined, all of it covered with thirteen years’ worth of medal ribbons, badges, insignia, and citations. I was thirty-six years old, standing tall and walking ramrod straight, a totally squared away U.S. Army Military Police major in every respect, except that my hair was too long and I hadn’t shaved for five days.

Back then Pentagon security was run by the Defense Protective Service, and from forty yards I saw ten of their guys in the lobby, which I thought was far too many, which made me wonder whether they were all theirs or whether some of them were actually ours, working undercover, waiting for me. Most of our skilled work is done by Warrant Officers, and they do a lot of it by pretending to be someone else. They impersonate colonels and generals and enlisted men, and anyone else they need to, and they’re good at it. All in a day’s work for them to throw on DPS uniforms and wait for their target. From thirty yards I didn’t recognize any of them, but then, the army is a very big institution, and they would have chosen men I had never met before.

I walked on, part of a broad wash of people heading across the concourse to the doors, some men and women in uniform, either Class As like my own or the old woodland-pattern BDUs we had back then, and some men and women obviously military but out of uniform, in suits or work clothes, and some obvious civilians, some of each category carrying bags or briefcases or packages, all of each category slowing and sidestepping and shuffling as the broad wash of people narrowed to a tight arrowhead and then narrowed further still to lonely single file or collegial two-by-two, as folks got ready to stream inside. I lined up with them, on my own, single file, behind a woman with pale unworn hands and ahead of a guy in a suit that had gone shiny at the elbows. Civilians, both of them, desk workers, probably analysts of some kind, which was exactly what I wanted. Independent eyeballs. It was close to noon. There was sun in the sky and the March air had a little warmth in it. Spring, in Virginia. Across the river the cherry trees were about to wake up. The famous blossom was about to break out. All over the innocent nation airline tickets and SLR cameras lay on hall tables, ready for sightseeing trips to the capital.

I waited in line. Way ahead of me the DPS guys were doing what security guys do. Four of them were occupied with specific tasks, two manning an inquiry counter and two checking official badge holders and then waving them through an open turnstile. Two were standing directly behind the glass inside the doors, looking out, heads high, eyes front, scanning the approaching crowd. Four were hanging back in the shadows behind the turnstiles, just clumped together, shooting the shit. All ten were armed.

It was the four behind the turnstiles that worried me. No question that back in 1997 the Department of Defense was seriously puffed up and overmanned in relation to the threats we faced then, but even so it was unusual to see four on-duty guys with absolutely nothing to do. Most commands at least made their surplus personnel look busy. But these four had no obvious role. I stretched up tall and peered ahead and tried to get a look at their shoes. You can learn a lot from shoes. Undercover disguises often don’t get that far, especially in a uniformed environment. The DPS was basically a beat cop role, so to the extent that a choice was available, DPS guys would go for cop shoes, big comfortable things appropriate for walking and standing all day. Undercover MP Warrant Officers might use their own shoes, which would be subtly different.

But I couldn’t see their shoes. It was too dark inside, and too far away.

The line shuffled along, at a decent pre-9/11 clip. No sullen impatience, no frustration, no fear. Just old-style routine. The woman in front of me was wearing perfume. I could smell it coming off the nape of her neck. I liked it. The two guys behind the glass noticed me about ten yards out. Their gaze moved off the woman and onto me. It rested on me a beat longer than it needed to, and then it moved on to the guy behind.

Then it came back. Both men looked me over quite openly, up and down, side to side, four or five seconds, and then I shuffled forward and their attention moved behind me again. They didn’t say anything to each other. Didn’t say anything to anyone else, either. No warnings, no alerts. Two possible interpretations. One, best case, I was just a guy they hadn’t seen before. Or maybe I stood out because I was bigger and taller than anyone within a hundred yards. Or because I was wearing a major’s gold oak leaves and ribbons for some heavy-duty medals, including a Silver Star, like a real poster boy, but because of the hair and the beard I also looked like a real caveman, which visual dissonance might have been enough reason for the long second glance, just purely out of interest. Sentry duty can be boring, and unusual sights are always welcome.

Or two, worst case, they were merely confirming to themselves that some expected event had indeed happened, and that all was going according to plan. Like they had prepared and studied photographs and were saying to themselves: OK, he’s here, right on time, so now we just wait two more minutes until he steps inside, and then we take him down.

Because I was expected, and I was right on time. I had a twelve o’clock appointment and matters to discuss with a particular colonel in a third-floor office in the C ring, and I was certain I would never get there. To walk head-on into a hard arrest was a pretty blunt tactic, but sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it.

The guy ahead of the woman ahead of me stepped inside the doors and held up a badge that was attached to his neck by a lanyard. He was waved onward. The woman in front of me moved and then stopped short, because right at that moment the two DPS watchers chose to come out from behind the glass. The woman paused in place and let them squeeze out in front of her, against the pressing flow. Then she resumed her progress and stepped inside, and the two guys stopped and stood exactly where she had been, three feet in front of me, but facing in the opposite direction, toward me, not away from me.

They were blocking the door. They were looking right at me. I was pretty sure they were genuine DPS personnel. They were wearing cop shoes, and their uniforms had eased and stretched and molded themselves to their individual physiques over a long period of time. These were not disguises, snatched from a locker and put on for the first time that morning. I looked beyond the two guys, inside, at their four partners who were doing nothing, and I tried to judge the fit of their clothes, by way of comparison. It was hard to tell.

In front of me the guy on my right said, “Sir, may we help you?”

I asked, “With what?”

“Where are you headed today?”

“Do I need to tell you that?”

“No sir, absolutely not,” the guy said. “But we could speed you along a little, if you like.”

Probably via an inconspicuous door into a small locked room, I thought. I figured they had civilian witnesses on their mind too, the same way I did. I said, “I’m happy to wait my turn. I’m almost there, anyway.”

The two guys said nothing in reply to that. Stalemate. Amateur hour. To try to start the arrest outside was dumb. I could push and shove and turn and run and be lost in the crowd in the blink of an eye. And they wouldn’t shoot. Not outside. There were too many people on the concourse. Too much collateral damage. This was 1997, remember. March eleventh. Four and a half years before the new rules. Much better to wait until I was inside the lobby. The two stooges could close the doors behind me and form up shoulder to shoulder in front of them while I was getting the bad news at the desk. At that point theoretically I could turn back and fight my way past them again, but it would take me a second or two, and in that second or two the four guys with nothing to do could shoot me in the back about a thousand times.

And if I charged forward they could shoot me in the front. And where would I go anyway? To escape into the Pentagon was no kind of a good idea. The world’s largest office building. Thirty thousand people. Five floors. Two basements. Seventeen miles of corridors. There are ten radial hallways between the rings, and they say a person can make it between any two random points inside a maximum seven minutes, which was presumably calculated with reference to the army’s official quick-march pace of four miles an hour, which meant if I was running hard I could be anywhere within about three minutes. But where? I could find a broom closet and steal bag lunches and hold out a day or two, but that would be all. Or I could take hostages and try to argue my case, but I had never seen that kind of thing succeed.

So I waited.

The DPS guy in front of me on my right said, “Sir, you be sure and have a nice day now,” and then he moved past me, and his partner moved past me on my other side, both of them just strolling slow, two guys happy to be out in the air, patrolling, varying their viewpoint. Maybe not so dumb after all. They were doing their jobs and following their plan. They had tried to decoy me into a small locked room, but they had failed, no harm, no foul, so now they were turning the page straight to plan B. They would wait until I was inside and the doors were closed, and then they would jump into crowd control mode, dispersing the incoming people, keeping them safe in case shots had to be fired inside. I assumed the lobby glass was supposed to be bulletproof, but the smart money never bets on the DoD having gotten exactly what it paid for.

The door was right in front of me. It was open. I took a breath and stepped into the lobby. Sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it.

Chapter

2

The woman with the perfume and the pale hands was already deep into the corridor beyond the open turnstile. She had been waved through. Straight ahead of me was the two-man inquiry desk. To my left were the two guys checking badges. The open turnstile was between their hips. The four spare guys were still doing nothing beyond it. They were still clustered together, quiet and watchful, like an independent team. I still couldn’t see their shoes.

I took another breath and stepped up to the counter.

Like a lamb to the slaughter.

The desk guy on the left looked at me and said, “Yes, sir.” Fatigue and resignation in his voice. A response, not a question, as if I had already spoken. He looked young and reasonably smart. Genuine DPS, presumably. MP Warrant Officers are quick studies, but they wouldn’t be running a Pentagon inquiry desk, however deeply under they were supposed to be.

The desk guy looked at me again, expectantly, and I said, “I have a twelve o’clock appointment.”

“Who with?”

“Colonel Frazer,” I said.

The guy made out like he didn’t recognize the name. The world’s largest office building. Thirty thousand people. He leafed through a book the size of a telephone directory and asked, “Would that be Colonel John James Frazer? Senate Liaison?”

I said, “Yes.”

Or: Guilty as charged.

Way to my left the four spare guys were watching me. But not moving. Yet.

The guy at the desk didn’t ask my name. Partly because he had been briefed, presumably, and shown photographs, and partly because my Class A uniform included my name on a nameplate, worn as per regulations on my right breast pocket flap, exactly centered, its upper edge exactly a quarter of an inch below the top seam.

Seven letters: REACHER.

Or, eleven letters: Arrest me now.

The guy at the inquiry desk said, “Colonel John James Frazer is in 3C315. You know how to get there?”

I said, “Yes.” Third floor, C ring, nearest to radial corridor number three, bay number fifteen. The Pentagon’s version of map coordinates, which it needed, given that it covered twenty-nine whole acres of floor space.

The guy said, “Sir, you have a great day,” and his guileless gaze moved past my shoulder to the next in line. I stood still for a moment. They were tying it up with a bow. They were making it perfect. The general common law test for criminal culpability is expressed by the Latin actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, which means, roughly, doing things won’t necessarily get you in trouble unless you actually mean to do them. Action plus intention is the standard. They were waiting for me to prove my intention. They were waiting for me to step through the turnstile and into the labyrinth. Which explained why the four spare guys were on their side of the gate, not mine. Crossing the line would make it real. Maybe there were jurisdiction issues. Maybe lawyers had been consulted. Frazer wanted my ass gone for sure, but he wanted his own ass covered just as much.

I took another breath and crossed the line and made it real. I walked between the two badge checkers and squeezed between the cold alloy flanks of the turnstile. The bar was retracted. There was nothing to hit with my thighs. I stepped out on the far side and paused. The four spare guys were on my right. I looked at their shoes. Army regulations are surprisingly vague about shoes. Plain black lace-up oxfords or close equivalents, conservative, no designs on them, minimum of three pairs of eyelets, closed toe, maximum two-inch heel. That’s all the fine print says. The four guys on my right were all in compliance, but they weren’t wearing cop shoes. Not like the two guys outside. They were sporting four variations on the same classic theme. High shines, tight laces, a little creasing and wear here and there. Maybe they were genuine DPS. Maybe they weren’t. No way of telling. Not right then.

I was looking at them, and they were looking at me, but no one spoke. I looped around them and headed deeper into the building. I used the E ring counterclockwise and turned left at the first radial hallway.

The four guys followed.

They stayed about sixty feet behind me, close enough to keep me in sight, far enough back not to crowd me. A maximum seven minutes between any two points. I was the meat in a sandwich. I figured there would be another crew waiting outside 3C315, or as close to it as they decided to let me get. I was heading straight for them. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

I used some stairs on the D ring and went up two flights to the third floor. I changed to a clockwise direction, just for the fun of it, and passed radial corridor number five, and then four. The D ring was busy. People were bustling from place to place with armfuls of khaki files. Blank-eyed men and women in uniform were stepping smartly. The place was congested. I dodged and sidestepped and kept on going. People looked at me every step of the way. The hair, and the beard. I stopped at a water fountain and bent down and took a drink. People passed me by. Sixty feet behind me the four spare DPS guys were nowhere to be seen. But then, they didn’t really need to tail me. They knew where I was going, and they knew what time I was supposed to get there.

I straightened up and got going again and turned right into radial number three. I made it to the C ring. The air smelled of uniform wool and linoleum polish and very faintly of cigars. The paint on the walls was thick and institutional. I looked left and right. There were people in the corridor, but no big cluster outside bay fifteen. Maybe they were waiting for me inside. I was already five minutes late.

I didn’t turn. I stuck with radial three and walked all the way across the B ring to the A ring. The heart of the building, where the radial corridors finish. Or start, depending on your rank and perspective. Beyond the A ring is nothing but a five-acre pentagonal open courtyard, like the hole in an angular doughnut. Back in the day people called it Ground Zero, because they figured the Soviets had their biggest and best missile permanently targeted on it, like a big fat bull’s-eye. I think they were wrong. I think the Soviets had their five biggest and best missiles targeted on it, just in case strikes one through four didn’t work. The smart money says the Soviets didn’t always get what they paid for, either.

I waited in the A ring until I was ten minutes late. Better to keep them guessing. Maybe they were already searching. Maybe the four spare guys were already getting their butts kicked for losing me. I took another big breath and pushed off a wall and tracked back along radial three, across the B ring, to the C. I turned without breaking stride and headed for bay fifteen.

Chapter

3

There was no one waiting outside bay fifteen. No special crew. No one at all. The corridor was entirely empty, too, both ways, as far as the eye could see. And quiet. I guessed everyone else was already where they wanted to be. Twelve o’clock meetings were in full swing.

Bay fifteen’s door was open. I knocked on it once, as a courtesy, as an announcement, as a warning, and then I stepped inside. Originally most of the Pentagon’s office space was open plan, boxed off by file cabinets and furniture into bays, hence the name, but over the years walls had gone up and private spaces had been created. Frazer’s billet in 3C315 was pretty typical. It was a small square space with a window without a view, and a rug on the floor, and photographs on the walls, and a metal DoD desk, and a chair with arms and two without, and a credenza and a double-wide storage unit.

And it was a small square space entirely empty of people, apart from Frazer himself in the chair behind the desk. He looked up at me and smiled.

He said, “Hello, Reacher.”

I looked left and right. No one there. No one at all. There was no private bathroom. No large closet. No other door of any kind. The corridor behind me was empty. The giant building was quiet.

Frazer said, “Close the door.”

I closed the door.

Frazer said, “Sit down, if you like.”

I sat down.

Frazer said, “You’re late.”

“I apologize,” I said. “I got hung up.”

Frazer nodded. “This place is a nightmare at twelve o’clock. Lunch breaks, shift changes, you name it. It’s a zoo. I never plan to go anywhere at twelve o’clock. I just hunker down in here.” He was about five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds, wide in the shoulders, solid through the chest, red-faced, black-haired, in his middle forties. Plenty of old Scottish blood in his veins, filtered through the rich earth of Tennessee, which was where he was from. He had been in Vietnam as a teenager and the Gulf as an older man. He had combat pips all over him like a rash. He was an old-fashioned warrior, but unfortunately for him he could talk and smile as well as he could fight, so he had been posted to Senate Liaison, because the guys with the purse strings were now the real enemy.

He said, “So what have you got for me?”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.

He said, “Good news, I hope.”

“No news,” I said.

“Nothing?”

I nodded. “Nothing.”

“You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”

“I don’t have the name.”

“Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”

I paused a beat.

“It was a shortcut,” I said.

“In what way?”

“I put it around that I had the name. I wondered who might crawl out from under a rock, to shut me up.”

“And no one has?”

“Not so far. But ten minutes ago I thought it was a different story. There were four spare men in the lobby. In DPS uniforms. They followed me. I thought they were an arrest team.”

“Followed you where?”

“Around the E ring to the D. Then I lost them on the stairs.”

Frazer smiled again.

“You’re paranoid,” he said. “You didn’t lose them. I told you, there are shift changes at twelve o’clock. They come in on the Metro like everyone else, they shoot the shit for a minute or two, and then they head for their squad room. It’s on the B ring. They weren’t following you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “There are always groups of them hanging around. There are always groups of everyone hanging around. We’re seriously overmanned. Something is going to have to be done. It’s inevitable. That’s all I hear about on the Hill, all day, every day. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We should all bear that in mind. People like you, especially.”

“Like me?” I said.

“There are lots of majors in this man’s army. Too many, probably.”

“Lots of colonels too,” I said.

“Fewer colonels than majors.”

I said nothing.

He asked, “Was I on your list of things that might crawl out from under a rock?”

You were the list, I thought.

He said, “Was I?”

“No,” I lied.

He smiled again. “Good answer. If I had a beef with you, I’d have you killed down there in Mississippi. Maybe I’d come on down and take care of it myself.”

I said nothing. He looked at me for a moment, and then a smile started on his face, and the smile turned into a laugh, which he tried very hard to suppress, but he couldn’t. It came out like a bark, like a sneeze, and he had to lean back and look up at the ceiling.

I said, “What?”

His gaze came back level. He was still smiling. He said, “I’m sorry. I was thinking about that phrase people use. You know, they say, that guy? He couldn’t even get arrested.”

I said nothing.

He said, “You look terrible. There are barbershops here, you know. You should go use one.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to look like this.”

Five days earlier my hair had been five days shorter, but apparently still long enough to attract attention. Leon Garber, who at that point was once again my commanding officer, summoned me to his office, and because his message read in part without, repeat, without attending to any matters of personal grooming I figured he wanted to strike while the iron was hot and dress me down right then, while the evidence was still in existence, right there on my head. And that was exactly how the meeting started out. He asked me, “Which army regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance?”

Which I thought was a pretty rich question, coming from him. Garber was without a doubt the scruffiest officer I had ever seen. He could take a brand new Class A coat from the quartermaster’s stores and an hour later it would look like he had fought two wars in it, then slept in it, then survived three bar fights in it.

I said, “I can’t remember which regulation covers a soldier’s personal appearance.”

He said, “Neither can I. But I seem to recall that whichever, the hair and the fingernail standards and the grooming policies are in chapter one, section eight. I can picture it all quite clearly, right there on the page. Can you remember what it says?”

I said, “No.”

“It tells us that hair grooming standards are necessary to maintain uniformity within a military population.”

“Understood.”

“It mandates those standards. Do you know what they are?”

“I’ve been very busy,” I said. “I just got back from Korea.”

“I heard Japan.”

“That was a stopover on the way.”

“How long?”

“Twelve hours.”

“Do they have barbers in Japan?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Do Japanese barbers take more than twelve hours to cut a man’s hair?”

“I’m sure they don’t.”

“Chapter one, section eight, paragraph two, says the hair on the top of the head must be neatly groomed, and that the length and the bulk of the hair may not be excessive or present a ragged, unkempt, or extreme appearance. It says that instead, the hair must present a tapered appearance.”

I said, “I’m not sure what that means.”

“It says a tapered appearance is one where the outline of the soldier’s hair conforms to the shape of his head, curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of his neck.”

I said, “I’ll get it taken care of.”

“These are mandates, you understand. Not suggestions.”

“OK,” I said.

“Section two says that when the hair is combed, it will not fall over the ears or the eyebrows, and it will not touch the collar.”

“OK,” I said again.

“Would you not describe your current hairstyle as ragged, unkempt, or extreme?”

“Compared to what?”

“And how are you doing in relation to the thing with the comb and the ears and the eyebrows and the collar?”

“I’ll get it taken care of,” I said again.

Then Garber smiled, and the tone of the meeting changed completely.

He asked, “How fast does your hair grow, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A normal kind of speed, I suppose. Same as anyone else, probably. Why?”

“We have a problem,” he said. “Down in Mississippi.”

Chapter

4

Garber said the problem down in Mississippi concerned a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Janice May Chapman. She was a problem because she was dead. She had been unlawfully killed a block behind the main street of a town called Carter Crossing.

“Was she one of ours?” I asked.

“No,” Garber said. “She was a civilian.”

“So how is she a problem?”

“I’ll get to that,” Garber said. “But first you need the story. It’s the back of beyond down there. Northeastern corner of the state, over near the Alabama line, and Tennessee. There’s a north–south railroad track, and a little backwoods dirt road that crosses it east–west near a place that has a spring. The locomotives would stop there to take on water, and the passengers would get out to eat, so the town grew up. But since the end of World War Two there’s only been about two trains a day, both freight, no passengers, so the town was on its way back down again.”

“Until?”

“Federal spending. You know how it was. Washington couldn’t let large parts of the South turn into the Third World, so we threw some money down there. A lot of money, actually. You ever notice how the folks who talk loudest about small government always seem to live in the states with the biggest subsidies? Small government would kill them dead.”

I asked, “What did Carter Crossing get?”

Garber said, “Carter Crossing got an army base called Fort Kelham.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ve heard of Kelham. Never knew where it was, exactly.”

“It used to be huge,” Garber said. “Ground was broken in about 1950, I think. It could have ended up as big as Fort Hood, but ultimately it was too far east of I-55 and too far west of I-65 to be useful. You have to drive a long way on small roads just to get there. Or maybe Texas politicians have louder voices than Mississippi politicians. Either way, Hood got the attention and Kelham withered on the vine. It struggled on until the end of Vietnam, and then they turned it into a Ranger school. Which it still is.”

“I thought Ranger training was at Benning.”

“The 75th sends their best guys to Kelham for a time. It’s not far. Something to do with the terrain.”

“The 75th is a special ops regiment.”

“So they tell me.”

“Are there enough special ops Rangers in training to keep a whole town going?”

“Almost,” Garber said. “It’s not a very big town.”

“So what are we saying? An Army Ranger killed Janice May Chapman?”

“I doubt it,” Garber said. “It was probably some local hillbilly thing.”

“Do they have hillbillies in Mississippi? Do they even have hills?”

“Backwoodsmen, then. They have a lot of trees.”

“Whichever, why are we even talking about it?”

At that point Garber got up and came out from behind his desk and crossed the room and closed the door. He was older than me, naturally, and much shorter, but about as wide. And he was worried. It was rare for him to close his door, and rarer still for him to go more than five minutes without a tortured little homily or aphorism or slogan, designed to sum up a point he was trying to make in an easily remembered form. He stepped back and sat down again with a hiss of air from his cushion, and he asked, “Have you ever heard of a place called Kosovo?”

“Balkans,” I said. “Like Serbia and Croatia.”

“There’s going to be a war there. Apparently we’re going to try to stop it. Apparently we’ll probably fail, and we’ll end up just bombing the shit out of one side or the other instead.”

“OK,” I said. “Always good to have a plan B.”

“The Serbo-Croat thing was a disaster. Like Rwanda. A total embarrassment. This is the twentieth century, for God’s sake.”

“Seemed to me to fit right in with the twentieth century.”

“It’s supposed to be different now.”

“Wait for the twenty-first. That’s my advice.”

“We’re not going to wait for anything. We’re going to try to do Kosovo right.”

“Well, good luck with that. Don’t come to me for help. I’m just a policeman.”

“We’ve already got people over there. You know, intermittently, in and out.”

I asked, “Who?”

Garber said, “Peacekeepers.”

“What, the United Nations?”

“Not exactly. Our guys only.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t know because nobody is supposed to know.”

“How long has this been happening?”

“Twelve months.”

I said, “We’ve been deploying ground troops to the Balkans in secret for a whole year?”

“It’s not such a big deal,” Garber said. “It’s about reconnaissance, partly. In case something has to happen later. But mostly it’s about calming things down. There are a lot of factions over there. If anyone asks, we always say it was the other guy who invited us. That way everyone thinks everyone else has got our backing. It’s a deterrent.”

I asked, “Who did we send?”

Garber said, “Army Rangers.”

Garber told me that Fort Kelham was still operating as a legitimate Ranger training school, but in addition was being used to house two full companies of grown-up Rangers, both hand picked from the 75th Ranger Regiment, designated Alpha Company and Bravo Company, who deployed covertly to Kosovo on a rotating basis, a month at a time. Kelham’s relative isolation made it a perfect clandestine location. Not, Garber said, that we should really feel the need to hide anything. Very few personnel were involved, and it was a humanitarian mission driven by the purest of motives. But Washington was Washington, and some things were better left unsaid.

I asked, “Does Carter Crossing have a police department?”

Garber said, “Yes, it does.”

“So let me guess. They’re getting nowhere with their homicide investigation, so they want to go fishing. They want to list some Kelham personnel in their suspect pool.”

Garber said, “Yes, they do.”

“Including members of Alpha Company and Bravo Company.”

Garber said, “Yes.”

“They want to ask them all kinds of questions.”

“Yes.”

“But we can’t afford to let them ask anyone any questions, because we have to hide all the covert comings and goings.”

“Correct.”

“Do they have probable cause?”

I hoped Garber was going to say no, but instead he said, “Slightly circumstantial.”

I said, “Slightly?”

He said, “The timing is unfortunate. Janice May Chapman was killed three days after Bravo Company got back from Kosovo, after their latest trip. They fly in direct from overseas. Kelham has an airstrip. I told you, it’s a big place. They land under cover of darkness, for secrecy’s sake. Then a returning company spends the first two days locked down and debriefing.”

“And then?”

“And then on the third day a returning company gets a week’s leave.”

“And they all go out on the town.”

“Generally.”

“Including Main Street and the blocks behind.”

“That’s where the bars are.”

“And the bars are where they meet the local women.”

“As always.”

“And Janice May Chapman was a local woman.”

“And known to be friendly.”

I said, “Terrific.”

Garber said, “She was raped and mutilated.”

“Mutilated how?”

“I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. She was twenty-seven years old. Jodie is twenty-seven years old, too.”

His only daughter. His only child. Much loved.

I asked, “How is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s a lawyer,” he said, like it was a location, not an occupation. Then in turn he asked, “How’s your brother?”

I said, “He’s OK, as far as I know.”

“Still at Treasury?”

“As far as I know.”

“He was a good man,” Garber said, like leaving the army was the same thing as dying.

I said nothing.

Garber asked, “So what would you do, down there in Mississippi?”

This was 1997, remember. I said, “We can’t shut out the local PD. Not under those circumstances. But we can’t assume any level of expertise or resources on their part, either. So we should offer some help. We should send someone down there. We can do all the work on the base. If some Kelham guy did it, we’ll serve him up on a platter. That way justice is done, but we can hide what we need to hide.”

“Not that simple,” Garber said. “It gets worse.”

“How?”

“Bravo Company’s commander is a guy called Reed Riley. You know him?”

“The name rings a bell.”

“And so it should. His father is Carlton Riley.”

I said, “Shit.”

Garber nodded. “The senator. The chairman of the Armed Services Committee. About to be either our best friend or our worst enemy, depending on which way the wind is going to blow. And you know how it is with guys like that. Having an infantry captain for a son is worth a million votes to him. Having a hero for a son is worth twice that. I don’t want to think about what happens if one of young Reed’s guys turns out to be a killer.”

I said, “We need someone at Kelham right now.”

Garber said, “That’s why you and I are having this meeting.”

“When do you want me there?”

“I don’t want you there,” Garber said.

Chapter

5

Garber told me his top pick for the Kelham job wasn’t me. It was a newly minted MP major named Duncan Munro. Military family, Silver Star, Purple Heart, and so on and so forth. He had recently completed some good work in Korea, and was currently doing some great work in Germany. He was five years younger than me, and from what I was hearing he was exactly what I had been five years in the past. I had never met him.

Garber said, “He’s in the air right now. Heading straight down there. ETA late morning tomorrow.”

“Your call,” I said. “I guess.”

“It’s a delicate situation,” he said.

“Evidently,” I said. “Too delicate for me, anyway.”

“Don’t get your panties in a wad. I need you for something else. Something I hope you’ll see as just as important.”

“Like what?”

“Undercover work,” he said. “That’s why I’m happy about your hair. Ragged and unkempt. There are two things we do very badly when we’re undercover. Hair, and shoes. Shoes, you can buy at Goodwill. You can’t buy messy hair at a moment’s notice.”

“Undercover where?”

“Carter Crossing, of course. Down in Mississippi. Off post. You’re going to blow into town like some kind of aimless ex-military bum. You know the type. You’re going to be the kind of guy who feels right at home there, because it’s the kind of environment he’s familiar with. So you’re going to stay put a spell. You’re going to develop a relationship with local law enforcement, and you’re going to use that relationship in a clandestine fashion to make sure that both they and Munro are doing this thing absolutely right.”

“You want me to impersonate a civilian?”

“It’s not that hard. We’re all members of the same species, more or less. You’ll figure it out.”

“Will I be actively investigating?”

“No. You’ll be there to observe and report only. Like a training assessment. You’ve done it before. My eyes and ears. This thing has got to be done absolutely right.”

“OK,” I said.

“Any other questions?”

“When do I leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, first light.”

“And what’s your definition of doing this thing absolutely right?”

Garber paused and shuffled in his chair and didn’t answer that question.

I went back to my quarters and took a shower, but I didn’t shave. Going undercover is like method acting, and Garber was right. I knew the type. Any soldier does. Towns near bases are full of guys who washed out for some reason or other and never got further than a mile. Some stay, and some are forced to move on, and the ones who move on end up in some other town near some other base. The same, but different. It’s what they know. It’s what they’re comfortable with. They retain some kind of ingrained, deep-down military discipline, like old habits, like stray strands of DNA, but they abandon regular grooming. Chapter one, section eight, paragraph two no longer rules their lives. So I didn’t shave, and I didn’t comb my hair either. I just let it dry.

Then I laid stuff out on my bed. I didn’t need to go to the Goodwill for shoes. I had a pair that would do. About twelve years previously I had been in the U.K. and I had bought a pair of brown brogues at an old-fashioned gentleman’s store in a village miles from anywhere. They were big, heavy, substantial things. They were well cared for, but a little worn and creased. Down at heel, literally.

I put them on my bed, and they sat there alone. I had no other personal clothing. None at all. Not even socks. I found an old army T-shirt in a drawer, olive drab, cotton, originally of a hefty grade, now washed pale and as thin as silk. I figured it was the kind of thing a guy might keep around. I put it next to the shoes. Then I hiked over to the PX and poked around the aisles I usually don’t frequent. I found a pair of mud-colored canvas pants and a long-sleeved shirt that was basically maroon, but it had been prewashed so that the seams had faded to a kind of pink. I wasn’t thrilled with it, but it was the only choice in my size. It was reduced in price, which made sense to me, and it looked basically civilian. I had seen people wearing worse things. And it was versatile. I wasn’t sure what the temperatures were going to be, in March in the northeastern corner of Mississippi. If it was warm, I could roll the sleeves up. If it was cold, I could roll them down.

I chose white underwear and khaki socks and then stopped in the toiletries section and found a kind of half-sized travel toothbrush. I liked it. The business end was nested in a clear plastic case, and it pulled out and reversed and clipped back in, to make it full-length and ready to use. It was obviously designed for a pocket. It would be easy to carry and the bristle part would stay clean. A very neat idea.

I sent the clothing straight to the laundry, to age it a little. Nothing ages stuff like on-base laundries. Then I walked off post to a hamburger place for a late lunch. I found an old friend in there, an MP colleague, a guy called Stan Lowrey. We had worked together many times. He was sitting at a table in front of a tray holding the wreckage of a half-pounder and fries. I got my meal and slid in opposite him. He said, “I hear you’re on your way to Mississippi.”

I asked, “Where did you hear that?”

“My sergeant got it from a sergeant in Garber’s office.”

“When?”

“About two hours ago.”

“Terrific,” I said. “I didn’t even know two hours ago. So much for secrecy.”

“My sergeant says you’re going as second fiddle.”

“Your sergeant is right.”

“My sergeant says the lead investigator is some kid.” I nodded. “I’m babysitting.”

“That sucks, Reacher. That blows big time.”

“Only if the kid does it right.”

“Which he might.”

I took a bite of my burger, and a sip of my coffee. I said, “Actually I don’t know if anyone could do it right. There are sensitivities involved. There may be no right way of doing it at all. It could be that Garber is protecting me and sacrificing the kid.”

Lowrey said, “Dream on, my friend. You’re an old horse and Garber is pinch hitting for you in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded. A new star is about to be born. You’re history.”

“You too, then,” I said. “If I’m an old horse, you’re already waiting at the glue factory gate.”

“Exactly,” Lowrey said. “That’s what I’m worried about. I’m going to start looking at the want ads tonight.”

Nothing much happened during the rest of the afternoon. My laundry came back, a little bleached and battered by the giant machines. It was steam-pressed, but a day’s traveling would correct that. I left it on the floor, piled neatly on my shoes. Then my phone rang, and a switchboard operator patched me in to a call from the Pentagon, and I found myself talking to a colonel named John James Frazer. He said he was currently with Senate Liaison, but he preceded that embarrassing announcement with his whole prior combat bio, so I wouldn’t write him off as a jerk. Then he said, “I need to know immediately if there’s the slightest shred or scintilla of a hint or a rumor about anyone in Bravo Company. Immediately, OK? Night or day.”

I said, “And I need to know how the local PD even knows Bravo Company is based at Kelham. I thought it’s supposed to be a secret.”

“They fly in and out on C-5 transports. Noisy airplanes.”

“In the dead of night. So they could be supply runs, for all anyone knows. Beans and bullets.”

“There was a weather problem a month ago. Storms over the Atlantic. They were late. They landed after dawn. They were observed. And it’s a base town anyway. You know how it is. The locals pick up on the patterns. Faces they know, there one month, gone the next. People aren’t dumb.”

“There already are hints and rumors,” I said. “The timing is suggestive. Like you said, people aren’t dumb.”

“The timing could be entirely coincidental.”

“Could be,” I said. “Let’s hope it is.”

Frazer said, “I need to know immediately if there’s anything Captain Riley could have, or should have, or might have, or ought to have known. Anything at all, OK? No delay.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a request from a senior officer. Is there a difference?”

“Are you in my chain of command?”

“Consider that I am.”

“OK,” I said.

“Anything at all,” he said again. “To me, immediately and personally. My ears only. Night or day.”

“OK,” I said again.

“There’s a lot riding on this. Do you understand? The stakes are very high.”

“OK,” I said, for the third time.

Then Frazer said, “But I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

I went to bed early, my hair matted, my unshaven face scratchy on the pillow, and the clock in my head woke me at five, two hours before dawn, on Friday, March 7th, 1997. The first day of the rest of my life.

Chapter

6

I showered and dressed in the dark, socks, boxers, pants, my old T, my new shirt. I laced my shoes and put my toothbrush in my pocket with a pack of gum and a roll of bills. I left everything else behind. No ID, no wallet, no watch, no nothing. Method acting. I figured that was how I would do it, if I was doing it for real.

Then I headed out. I walked up the post’s main drag and got to the guardhouse and Garber came out to meet me in the open. He had been waiting for me. Six o’clock in the morning. Not yet light. Garber was in BDUs, presumably fresh on less than an hour ago, but he looked like he had spent that hour rolling around in the dirt on a farm. We stood under the glow of a yellow vapor light. The air was very cold.

Garber said, “You don’t have a bag?”

I said, “Why would I have a bag?”

“People carry bags.”

“What for?”

“For their spare clothing.”

“I don’t own spare clothing. I had to buy these things especially.”

“You chose that shirt?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s pink.”

“Only in places.”

“You’re going to Mississippi. They’ll think you’re queer. They’ll beat you to death.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“What are you going to do when those clothes get dirty?”

“I don’t know. Buy some more, I suppose.”

“How are you planning to get to Kelham?”

“I figured I’d walk into town and get a Greyhound bus to Memphis. Then hitchhike the rest of the way. I imagine that’s how people do these things.”

“Have you eaten breakfast?”

“I’m sure I’ll find a diner.”

Garber paused a beat and asked, “Did John James Frazer get you on the phone yesterday? From Senate Liaison?”

I said, “Yes, he did.”

“How did he sound?”

“Like we’re in big trouble unless Janice May Chapman was killed by another civilian.”

“Then let’s hope she was.”

“Is Frazer in my chain of command?”

“Probably safest to assume he is.”

“What kind of a guy is he?”

“He’s a guy under a whole lot of stress right now. Five years’ work could go down the pan, just when it gets important.”

“He told me not to do anything that makes me feel uncomfortable.”

“Bullshit,” Garber said. “You’re not in the army to feel comfortable.”

I said, “What some guy on leave does after he gets drunk in a bar is not a company commander’s fault.”

“Only in the real world,” Garber said. “But this is politics we’re talking about.” Then he went quiet again, just for a moment, as if he had many more points to make and was trying to decide which one of them to start with. But in the end all he said was, “Well, have a safe trip, Reacher. Stay in touch, OK?”

The walk to the Greyhound depot was long but not difficult. Just a case of putting one foot in front of the other. I was passed by a few vehicles. None of them stopped to offer me a ride. They might have if I had been in uniform. Off-post citizens are usually well disposed toward their military neighbors, in the heartland of America. I took their neglect as proof that my civilian disguise was convincing. I was glad to pass the test. I had never posed as a civilian before. It was unknown territory. Something new for me. I had never even been a civilian. I suppose technically I was, for eighteen years between birth and West Point, but those years had been spent inside a blur of Marine Corps bases, one after another, because of my father’s career, and living on post as part of a military family had nothing to do with civilian life. Absolutely nothing at all. So that morning’s walk felt fresh and experimental to me. The sun came up behind me and the air went warm and dewy and a ground mist rose off the road to my knees. I walked on through it and thought of my old pal Stan Lowrey, back on the base. I wondered if he had looked at the want ads. I wondered if he needed to. I wondered if I needed to.

There was a coach diner a half-mile short of downtown and I stopped there for breakfast. I had coffee, of course, and scrambled eggs. I felt I integrated pretty well, visually and behaviorally. There were six other customers in there. All of them were civilians, all of them were men, and all of them were ragged and unkempt by the standards required to maintain uniformity within a military population. All six of them were wearing hats on their heads. Six mesh caps, printed with the names of what I took to be agricultural equipment manufacturers, or seed merchants. I wondered if I should have gotten such a hat. I hadn’t thought about it, and I hadn’t seen any in the PX.

I finished my meal and paid the waitress and walked on bareheaded to where the Greyhounds came and went. I bought a ticket and sat on a bench and thirty minutes later I was in the back of a bus, heading south and west.

Chapter

7

The bus ride was magnificent, in its way. Not a radical distance, no more than a small portion of the giant continent, no more than an inch on a one-page map, but it took six hours. The view out the window changed so slowly it seemed never to change at all, but even so the landscape at the end of the journey was very different than at the beginning. Memphis was a slick city, laced with wet streets, boxed in by low buildings painted muted pastel colors, heaving and bustling with furtive unexplained activity. I got out at the depot and stood a moment in the bright afternoon and listened to the hum and throb of people at work and at play. Then I kept the sun on my right shoulder and walked south and east. First priority was the mouth of a wide road leading out of town, and second priority was something to eat.

I found myself in a built-up and insalubrious quarter full of pawn shops and porn shops and bail bond offices, and I figured getting a ride there would be next to impossible. The same driver that might stop on the open road would never stop in that part of town. So I put my second priority first and fueled up at a greasy spoon café, and resigned myself to a lengthy hike thereafter. I wanted a corner with a road sign, a big green rectangle marked with an arrow and Oxford or Tupelo or Columbus. In my experience a guy standing under such a sign with his thumb out left no doubt about what he wanted and where he was going. No explanation was required. No need for a driver to stop and ask, which helped a lot. People are bad at saying no face to face. Often they just drive on by, purely to avoid the possibility. Always better to reduce confusion.

I found such a corner and such a sign at the end of a thirty-minute walk, on the front edge of what I took to be a leafy suburb, which would mean ninety percent of passing drivers would be respectable matrons returning home, which would mean they would ignore me completely. No suburban matron would stop for a stranger, and no driver with just a mile more to go would offer a ride. But to walk on would have been illusory progress. A false economy. Better to waste time standing still than to waste it walking and burning energy. Even with nine cars out of ten wafting on by, I figured I would be mobile within an hour.

And I was. Less than twenty minutes later an old pick-up truck eased to a stop next to me and the driver told me he was heading for a lumberyard out past Germantown. It must have been clear that I didn’t grasp the local geography, so the guy told me if I rode with him I would end up outside of the urban tangle with nothing but a straight shot into northeastern Mississippi ahead of me. So I climbed aboard and another twenty minutes later I was alone again, on the shoulder of a dusty two-lane that headed unambiguously in the direction I wanted to go. A guy in a sagging Buick sedan picked me up and we crossed the state line together and drove forty miles east. Then a guy in a stately old Chevy truck took me twenty miles south on a minor road and let me out at what he said was the turn I wanted. By that point it was late in the afternoon and the sun was heading for the far horizon, pretty fast. The road ahead was die-straight with low forest on both sides and nothing but darkness in the distance. I figured Carter Crossing straddled that road, perhaps thirty or forty miles away to the east, which put me close to completing the first part of my mission, which was simply to get there. The second part was to make contact with the local cops, which might be harder. There was no cogent reason for a transient bum to pal up with people in police uniforms. No obvious mechanism either, short of getting arrested, which would start the whole relationship on the wrong foot.

But in the event both objectives were achieved in one fell swoop, because the first eastbound car I saw was a police cruiser heading home. I had my thumb out, and the guy stopped for me. He was a talker and I was a listener, and within minutes I found out that some of what Garber had told me was wrong.

Chapter

8

The cop’s name was Pellegrino, like the sparkling water, although he didn’t say that. I got the impression that people drank from the tap in that part of Mississippi. On reflection it was no surprise he stopped for me. Small-town cops are always interested in unexplained strangers heading into their territory. The easiest way to find out who they are is simply to ask, which he did, immediately. I told him my name and spent a minute on my cover story. I said I was recent ex-military, heading to Carter Crossing to look for a friend who might be living there. I said the friend had last served at Kelham and might have stuck around. Pellegrino had nothing to say in response to that. He just took his eyes off the empty road for a second and looked me up and down, calibrating, and then he nodded and faced front again. He was moderately short and very overweight, maybe French or Italian way back, with black hair buzzed short and olive skin and broken veins on both sides of his nose. He was somewhere between thirty and forty, and I guessed if he didn’t stop eating and drinking he wasn’t going to make it much beyond fifty or sixty.

I finished saying my piece and he started talking, and the first thing I found out was that he wasn’t a small-town cop. Garber had been wrong, technically. Carter Crossing had no police department. Carter Crossing was in Carter County, and Carter County had a County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction over everything inside an area close to five hundred square miles. But there wasn’t much inside those five hundred square miles except Fort Kelham and the town, which was where the Sheriff’s Department was based, which made Garber right again, in a sense. But Pellegrino was indisputably a deputy sheriff, not a police officer, and he seemed very proud of the distinction.

I asked him, “How big is your department?”

Pellegrino said, “Not very. We got the sheriff, who we call the chief, we got a sheriff’s detective, we got me and another deputy in uniform, we got a civilian on the desk, we got a woman on the phones, but the detective is out sick long term with his kidneys, so it’s just the three of us, really.”

I asked him, “How many people live in Carter County?”

“About twelve hundred,” he said. Which I thought was a lot, for three functioning cops. Apples to apples, it would be like policing New York City with a half-sized NYPD. I asked, “Does that include Fort Kelham?”

“No, they’re separate,” he said. “And they have their own cops.”

I said, “But still, you guys must be busy. I mean, twelve hundred citizens, five hundred square miles.”

“Right now we’re real busy,” he said, but he didn’t mention anything about Janice May Chapman. Instead he talked about a more recent event. Late in the evening the day before, under cover of darkness, someone had parked a car on the train track. Garber was wrong again. He had said there were two trains a day, but Pellegrino told me in reality there was only one. It rumbled through at midnight exactly, a mile-long giant hauling freight north from Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. That midnight train had smashed into the parked vehicle, wrecking it completely, hurling it way far up the line, bouncing it into the woods. The train had not stopped. As far as anyone could tell it hadn’t even slowed down. Which meant the engineer had not even noticed. He was obliged to stop if he struck something on the line. Railroad policy. Pellegrino thought it was certainly possible the guy hadn’t noticed. So did I. Thousands of tons against one, moving fast, no contest. Pellegrino seemed captivated by the senselessness of it all. He said, “I mean, who would do that? Who would park an automobile on the train track? And why?”

“Kids?” I said. “For fun?”

“Never happened before. And we’ve always had kids.”

“No one in the car?”

“No, thank God. Like I said, as far as we know it was just parked there.”

“Stolen?”

“Don’t know yet. There’s not much of it left. We think it might have been blue. It set on fire. Burned some trees with it.”

“No one called in a missing car?”

“Not yet.”

I asked, “What else are you busy with?”

And at that point Pellegrino went quiet and didn’t answer, and I wondered if I had pushed it too far. But I reviewed the back-and-forth in my head and figured it was a reasonable question. Just making conversation. A guy says he’s real busy but mentions only a wrecked car, another guy is entitled to ask for more, right? Especially while riding through the dusk in a companionable fashion.

But it turned out Pellegrino’s hesitation was based purely on courtesy and old-fashioned Southern hospitality. That was all. He said, “Well, I don’t want to give you a bad impression, seeing as you’re here for the first time. But we had a woman murdered.”

“Really?” I said.

“Two days ago,” he said.

“Murdered how?”

And it turned out that Garber’s information was inaccurate again. Janice May Chapman had not been mutilated. Her throat had been cut, that was all. And delivery of a fatal wound was not the same thing as mutilation. Not the same thing at all. Not even close.

Pellegrino said, “Ear to ear. Real deep. One big slice. Not pretty.”

I said, “You saw it, I guess.”

“Up close and personal. I could see the bones inside her neck. She was all bled out. Like a lake. It was real bad. A good looking woman, real pretty, all dressed up for a night out, neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Not right at all.”

I said nothing, out of respect for something Pellegrino’s tone seemed to demand.

He said, “She was raped, too. The doctor found that out when he got her clothes off and got her on the slab. Unless you could say she’d been into it enough at some point to throw herself down and scratch up her ass on the gravel. Which I don’t think she would be.”

“You knew her?”

“We saw her around.”

I asked, “Who did it?”

He said, “We don’t know. A guy off the base, probably. That’s what we think.”

“Why?”

“Because those are who she spent her time with.”

I asked, “If your detective is out sick, who is working the case?”

Pellegrino said, “The chief.”

“Does he have much experience with homicides?”

“She,” Pellegrino said. “The chief is a woman.”

“Really?”

“It’s an elected position. She got the votes.” There was a little resignation in his voice. The kind of tone a guy uses when his team loses a big game. It is what it is.

“Did you run for the job?” I asked.

“We all did,” he said. “Except the detective. He was already bad with his kidneys.”

I said nothing. The car rocked and swayed. Pellegrino’s tires sounded worn and soft. They set up a dull baritone roar on the blacktop. Up ahead the evening gloom had gone completely. Pellegrino’s headlights lit the way fifty yards in front. Beyond that was nothing but darkness. The road was straight, like a tunnel through the trees. The trees were twisted and opportunistic, like weeds competing for light and air and minerals, like they had seeded themselves a hundred years ago on abandoned arable land. They flashed past in the light spill, like they were frozen in motion. I saw a tin sign on the shoulder, lopsided and faded and pocked with rusty coin-sized spots where the enamel had flaked loose. It advertised a hotel called Toussaint’s. It promised the convenience of a Main Street location, and rooms of the highest quality.

Pellegrino said, “She got elected because of her name.”

“The sheriff?”

“That’s who we were talking about.”

“Why? What’s her name?”

“Elizabeth Deveraux,” he said.

“Nice name,” I said. “But no better than Pellegrino, for instance.”

“Her daddy was sheriff before her. He was a well-liked man, in certain quarters. We think some folks voted out of loyalty. Or maybe they thought they were voting for the old guy himself. Maybe they didn’t know he was dead. Things take time to catch on, in certain quarters.”

I asked, “Is Carter Crossing big enough to have quarters?”

Pellegrino said, “Halves, I guess. Two of them. West of the railroad track, or east.”

“Right side, wrong side?”

“Like everywhere.”

“Which side is Kelham?”

“East. You have to drive three miles. Through the wrong side.”

“Which side is the Toussaint’s hotel?”

“Won’t you be staying with your friend?”

“When I find him. If I find him. Until then I need a place.”

“Toussaint’s is OK,” Pellegrino said. “I’ll let you out there.”

And he did. We drove out of the tunnel through the trees and the road broadened and the forest itself died back to stunted saplings left and right, all choked with weeds and trash. The road became an asphalt ribbon laid through a wide flat area of earth the size of a football field. It led through a right turn to a straight street between low buildings. Main Street, presumably. There was no architecture. Just construction, a lot of it old, most of it wood, with some stone at the foundation level. We passed a building marked Carter County Sheriff’s Department, and then a vacant lot, and then a diner, and then we arrived at the Toussaint’s hotel. It had been a fancy place once. It had green paint and trim and moldings and iron railings on the second-floor balconies. It looked like it had been copied from a New Orleans design. It had a faded signboard with its name on it, and a row of dim lights washing the exterior facade, three of which were out.

Pellegrino eased the cruiser to a stop and I thanked him for the ride and got out. He pulled a wide U-turn behind me and headed back the way we had come, presumably to park in the Sheriff’s Department lot. I used a set of wormy wooden steps and crossed a bouncy wooden veranda and pushed in through the hotel door.

Chapter

9

Inside the hotel I found a small square lobby and an unattended reception desk. The floor was worn boards partially covered by a threadbare rug of Middle Eastern design. The desk was a counter made of hardwood polished to a high shine by years of wear and labor. There was a matrix of pigeonholes on the wall behind it. Four high, seven wide. Twenty-eight rooms. Twenty-seven of them had their keys hanging in place. None of the pigeonholes contained letters or notes or any other kind of communication.

There was a bell on the desk, a small brass thing going green around the edges. I hit it twice, and a polite ding ding echoed around for a spell, but it produced no results. None at all. No one came. There was a closed door next to the pigeonholes, and it stayed closed. A back office, I guessed. Empty, presumably. I saw no reason why a hotel owner would deliberately avoid doubling his occupancy rate.

I stood still for a moment and then checked a door on the left of the lobby. It opened to an unlit lounge that smelled of damp and dust and mildew. There were humped shapes in the dark that I took to be armchairs. No activity. No people. I stepped back to the desk and hit the bell again.

No response.

I called out, “Hello?”

No response.

So I gave up for the time being and went back out, across the shaky veranda, down the worn steps, and I stood in a shadow on the sidewalk under one of the busted lamps. There was nothing much to see. Across Main Street was a long row of low buildings. Stores, presumably. All of them were dark. Beyond them was blackness. The night air was clear and dry and faintly warm. March, in Mississippi. Meteorologically I could have been anywhere. I could hear the thrill of breeze in distant leaves, and tiny granular sounds, like moving dust, or like termites eating wood. I could hear an extractor fan in the wall of the diner next door. Beyond that, nothing. No human sounds. No voices. No revelry, no traffic, no music.

Tuesday night, near an army base.

Not typical.

I had eaten nothing since lunch in Memphis, so I headed for the diner. It was a narrow building, but deep, set end-on to Main Street. The kitchen entrance was probably on the block behind. Inside the front door was a pay phone on the wall and a register and a hostess station. Beyond that was a long straight aisle with tables for four on the left and tables for two on the right. Tables, not booths, with freestanding chairs. Like a café. The only customers in the place were a couple about twice my age. They were face to face at a table for four. The guy had a newspaper and the woman had a book. They were settled in, like they were happy to linger over their meal. The only staff on view was a waitress. She was close to the swing door in back that led to the kitchen. She saw me step in and she hustled the whole length of the aisle to greet me. She put me at a table for two, about halfway into the room. I sat facing the front, with my back to the kitchen. Not possible to watch both entrances at once, which would have been my preference.

“Something to drink?” the waitress asked me.

“Black coffee,” I said. “Please.”

She went away and came back again, with coffee in a mug, and a menu.

I said, “Quiet night.”

She nodded, unhappy, probably worried about her tips.

She said, “They closed the base.”

“Kelham?” I said. “They closed it?”

She nodded again. “They locked it down this afternoon. They’re all in there, eating army chow tonight.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“Never happened before.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

“For what?”

“To eat.”

“Here? It’s all good.”

“Cheeseburger,” I said.

“Five minutes,” she said. She went away and I took my coffee with me and headed back past the hostess station to the pay phone. I dug in my pocket and found three quarters from my lunch-time change, which were enough for a short conversation, which was the kind I liked. I dialed Garber’s office and a duty lieutenant put him on the line and he asked, “Are you there yet?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Trip OK?”

“It was fine.”

“Got a place to stay?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got seventy-five cents and four minutes before I eat. I need to ask you something.”

“Fire away.”

“Who briefed you on this?”

Garber paused.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

“Well, whoever it was, he’s kind of hazy about the details.”

“That can happen.”

“And Kelham is locked down.”

“Munro did that, as soon as he got there.”

“Why?”

“You know how it is. There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base. It was a common-sense move.”

“It was an admission of guilt.”

“Well, maybe Munro knows something you don’t. Don’t worry about him. Your only job is to eavesdrop on the local cops.”

“I’m on it. I rode in with one.”

“Did he buy the civilian act?”

“He seemed to.”

“Good. They’ll clam up if they know you’re connected.”

“I need you to find out if anyone from Bravo Company owns a blue car.”

“Why?”

“The cop said someone parked a blue car on the railroad track. The midnight train wrecked it. Could have been an attempt to hide evidence.”

“He’d have burned it out, surely.”

“Maybe it was the kind of evidence that burning wouldn’t conceal. Maybe a big dent in the fender or something.”

“How would that relate to a woman getting carved up in an alley?”

“She wasn’t carved up. Her throat was cut. That was all. Deep and wide. One pass, probably. The cop I talked to said he saw bone.”

Garber paused a beat.

He said, “That’s how Rangers are taught to do it.”

I said nothing.

He asked, “But how would that relate to a car?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t relate. But let’s find out, OK?”

“There are two hundred guys in Bravo Company. Law of averages says there’s going to be about fifty blue cars.”

“And all fifty of them should be parked on the base. Let’s find out if one isn’t.”

“It was probably a civilian vehicle.”

“Let’s hope it was. I’ll work that end. But either way, I need to know.”

“This is Munro’s investigation,” Garber said. “Not yours.”

I said, “And we need to know if someone got a gravel rash. Hands, knees, and elbows, maybe. From the rape. The cop said Chapman had matching injuries.”

“This is Munro’s investigation,” Garber said again.

I didn’t answer that. I saw the waitress push in through the kitchen door. She was carrying a plate piled high with an enormous burger in a bun and a tangle of shoelace fries as big and untidy as a squirrel’s nest. I said, “I have to go, boss. I’ll call you tomorrow,” and I hung up and carried my coffee back to my table. The waitress put my plate down with a degree of ceremony. The meal looked good and smelled good.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“You can tell me about the hotel,” I said. “I need a room, but there was nobody home.”

The waitress half-turned and I followed her gaze to the old couple settled in at their table for four. They were still reading. The waitress said, “They usually sit a spell in here, and then they go back. That would be the best time to catch them.”

Then she went away and left me to it. I ate slowly and enjoyed every bite. The old couple sat still and read. The woman turned a page every couple of minutes. Much less often the guy made a big loud production out of snapping the spine of his paper and refolding it ready for the next section. He was studying it intently. He was practically reading the print off it.

Later the waitress came back and picked up my plate and offered me dessert. She said she had great pies. I said, “I’m going to take a walk. I’ll look in again on my way back and if those two are still here, then I’ll stop in for pie. I guess there’s no hurrying them.”

“Not usually,” the waitress said.

I paid for the burger and the coffee and added a tip that didn’t compare to a roomful of hungry Rangers, but it was enough to make her smile a little. Then I headed back to the street. The night was turning cold and there was a little mist in the air. I turned right and strolled past the vacant lot and the Sheriff’s Department building. Pellegrino’s car was parked outside and there was a glow in one window suggesting an interior room was occupied. I kept on going and came to the T where we had turned. To the left was the way Pellegrino had brought me in, through the forest. To the right that road continued east into the darkness. Presumably it crossed the railroad line and then led onward through the wrong side of town to Kelham. Garber had described it as a dirt track, which it might have been once. Now it was a standard rural road, with a stony surface bound with tar. It was dead straight and unlit. There were deep ditches either side of it. There was a thin moon in the sky, and a little light to see by. I turned right and walked on into the gloom.

Chapter

10

Two minutes and two hundred yards later I found the railroad track. First came the warning sign on the shoulder of the road, two diagonal arms bolted together at ninety degrees, one marked RAILROAD and the other marked CROSSING. There were red lights attached to the pole and somewhere beyond it there would be an electric bell in a box. Twenty yards farther on the ditches either side of the road ended abruptly, and the track itself was up on a hump, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, two parallel rails running not very level and not completely straight north and south, looking old and worn and short on maintenance. The gravel bed was lumpy and compacted and matted with weeds. I stood on a tie between the rails and looked first one way and then the other. Twenty yards to the north, on the left, was the shadowy bulk of an old ruined water tower, still with a wide soft hose like an elephant’s trunk, which once must have been connected to Carter Crossing’s freshwater spring, and which once must have stood ready to replenish the greedy steam locomotives that halted there.

I turned a full 360 in the dark. There was absolute stillness and silence everywhere. I could smell charcoal on the night air, maybe from where the blue car had burned the trees to the north. I could smell barbecue faintly in the east, where I guessed the rest of the township was, on the wrong side of the tracks. But I could see only darkness in that direction. Just the suggestion of a hole through the woods, where the road ran, and then nothing more.

I turned back the way I had come, the hard road under my feet, thinking about pie, and I saw headlights in the distance. A large car or a small truck, coming straight at me, moving slow. At one point it looked ready to make the turn into Main Street, and then it seemed to change its mind. Maybe it had picked me up in its beams. It straightened again and kept on coming. I kept on walking. It was a blunt-nosed pick-up truck. It dipped and wallowed over the humps in the road. Its lights rose and fell in the mist. I could hear a low wet burble from a worn V-8 motor.

It came over into the wrong lane and stopped twenty feet from me and idled. I couldn’t see who was in it. Too much glare. I walked on. I wasn’t about to step into the weeds, and the shoulder was narrow anyway, because of the ditch on my right, so I held my course, which was going to take me close to the driver’s door. The driver saw me coming, and when I was ten feet out he dropped his window and put his left wrist on the door and his left elbow in my path. By that point there was enough light spill to make him out. He was a civilian, white, heavy, wearing a T-shirt with the sleeve rolled above a thick arm covered in fur and ink. He had long hair that hadn’t been washed for a week or more.

Three choices.

First, stop and chat.

Second, step into the weeds between the pavement and the ditch, and pass him by.

Third, break his arm.

I chose the first option. I stopped. But I didn’t chat. Not immediately. I just stood there.

There was a second man in the passenger seat. Same type of a guy. Fur, ink, hair, dirt, grease. But not identical. A cousin, maybe, not a brother. Both men looked right at me, with the kind of smug, low-wattage insolence some kinds of strangers get in some kinds of bars. I looked right back at them. I’m not that kind of stranger.

The driver said, “Who are you and where are you going?”

I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.

The driver said, “I asked you a question.”

I thought: two questions, actually. But I said nothing. I didn’t want to have to hit the guy. Not with my hands. I’m no hygiene freak, but even so, with a guy like that, I would feel the need to wash up afterward, extensively, with good soap, especially if there was pie in my future. So I planned on kicking him instead. I saw the moves in my head: he opens his door, he steps out, he comes around the door toward me, and then he goes down, puking and retching and clutching his groin.

No major difficulty.

He said, “Do you speak English?”

I said nothing.

The guy in the passenger seat said, “Maybe he’s a Mexican.”

The driver asked me, “Are you a Mexican?”

I didn’t answer.

The driver said, “He doesn’t look like a Mexican. He’s too big.”

Which was true in a general sense, although I had heard of a guy from Mexico called José Calderón Torres, who had stood seven feet six and a quarter inches, which was more than a foot taller than me. And I remembered a Mexican guy called José Garces from the LA Olympics, who had cleaned-and-jerked more than four hundred and twenty pounds, which was probably what the two guys in the truck weighed both together.

The driver asked, “Are you coming in from Kelham?”

There’s a risk of bad feeling between the town and the base, Garber had said. People are always tribal, when it comes right down to it. Maybe these guys had known Janice May Chapman. Maybe they couldn’t understand why she had dated soldiers, and not them. Maybe they had never looked in a mirror.

I said nothing. But I didn’t walk on. I didn’t want the truck loose behind me. Not in a lonely spot, not on a dark country road. I just stood there, looking directly at the two guys, at their faces, first one, then the other, with nothing much in my own face except frankness and skepticism and a little amusement. It’s a look that usually works. It usually provokes something, out of a certain type of person.

It provoked the passenger first.

He wound his window down and reared up through it, almost all the way out to his waist, twisting and leaning so he could face me directly across the hood of the truck. He held on to the pillar with one hand and moved the other through a fast violent arc, like he was cracking a whip or throwing something at me. He said, “We’re talking to you, asshole.”

I said nothing.

He said, “Is there a reason I don’t get out of this truck and kick your butt?”

I said, “Two hundred and six reasons.”

He said, “What?”

“That’s how many bones you got in your body. I could break them all before you put a glove on me.”

Which got his buddy going. His instinct was to stick up for his friend and face down a challenge. He leaned further out his own window and said, “You think?”

I said, “Often all day long. It’s a good habit to have.” Which shut the guy up, while he tried to piece together what I meant. He went back over our conversation in his head. His lips were moving.

I said, “Let’s all go about our legitimate business and leave each other alone. Where are you guys staying?”

Now I was asking the questions, and they weren’t answering.

I said, “It looked to me like you were about to turn into Main Street. Is that your way home?”

No answer.

I said, “What, you’re homeless?”

The driver said, “We got a place.”

“Where?”

“A mile past Main Street.”

“So go there. Watch TV, drink beer. Don’t worry about me.”

“Are you from Kelham?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not from Kelham.”

The two guys went quiet and kind of deflated themselves, like parade balloons, back through their windows, back into the cab, back into their seats. I heard the truck’s transmission engage, and then it took off backward, fast, and then it slewed and lurched through a 180 turn, with dust coming up and tire squeal, and then it drove away and braked hard and turned into Main Street. Then it was lost to sight behind the dark bulk of the Sheriff’s Department. I breathed out and started walking again. No damage done. The best fights are the ones you don’t have, a wise man once said to me. It was not advice I always followed, but on that occasion I was pleased to walk away with clean hands, both literally and figuratively.

Then I saw another car coming toward me. It did the same thing the truck had done. It went to turn, and then it paused and straightened and headed in my direction. It was a cop car. I could tell by the shape and the size, and I could make out the silhouette of a light bar on the roof. At first I thought it was Pellegrino out on patrol, but when the car got closer it killed its lights and I saw a woman behind the wheel, and Mississippi suddenly got a lot more interesting.

Chapter

11

The car came over into the wrong lane and stopped alongside me. It was an old Chevy Caprice police cruiser painted up in the Carter County Sheriff’s Department colors. The woman behind the wheel had an unruly mass of dark hair, somewhere between wavy and curly, tied back in an approximate ponytail. Her face was pale and flawless. She was low in the seat, which meant either she was short or the seat was caved in by long years of use. I decided the seat must be caved in, because her arms looked long and the set of her shoulders didn’t suggest a short person. I pegged her at somewhere in her middle thirties, old enough to show some mileage, young enough to still find some amusement in the world. She was smiling slightly, and the smile was reaching her eyes, which were big and dark and liquid and seemed to have some kind of a glow in them. Although that might have been a reflection from the Chevy’s instrument panel.

She wound down her window and looked straight at me, first my face, then a careful up-and-down, side-to-side appraisal all the way from my shoes to my hair, with nothing but frankness in her gaze. I stepped in closer to give her a better look, and to take a better look. She was more than flawless. She was spectacular. She had a revolver in a holster on her right hip, and next to it was a shotgun stuffed muzzle-down in a scabbard mounted between the seats. There was a big radio slung under the dash on the passenger side, and a microphone on a curly wire in a clip near the steering wheel. The car was old and worn, almost certainly bought secondhand from a richer municipality.

She said, “You’re the guy Pellegrino brought in.”

Her voice was quiet but clear, warm but not soft, and her accent sounded local.

I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

She said, “You’re Reacher, right?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

She said, “I’m Elizabeth Deveraux. I’m the sheriff here.”

I said, “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

She paused a beat and said, “Did you eat dinner yet?”

I nodded.

“But not dessert,” I said. “As a matter of fact I’m heading back to the diner for pie right now.”

“Do you usually take a walk between courses?”

“I was waiting out the hotel people. They didn’t seem in much of a hurry.”

“Is that where you’re staying tonight? The hotel?”

“I’m hoping to.”

“You’re not staying with the friend you came to find?”

“I haven’t found him yet.” She nodded in turn.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Find me in the diner. Five minutes, OK?”

There was authority but no menace in her voice. No agenda. Just the kind of easy command I guessed came from being first a sheriff’s daughter and then a sheriff herself.

“OK,” I said. “Five minutes.”

She wound up her window again and reversed away and turned around, in a slower version of the same maneuver the two guys in the truck had used. She switched her headlights back on and drove away. I saw her brake lights flare red and she turned into Main Street. I followed on foot, in the weeds, between the pavement and the ditch.

I got to the diner well inside the five minutes I had been given and found Elizabeth Deveraux’s cruiser parked at the curb outside. She herself was at the same table I had used. The old couple from the hotel had finally decamped. The place was empty apart from Deveraux and the waitress.

I went in and Deveraux said nothing specific but used one foot under the table to shove the facing chair out a little. An invitation. Almost a command. The waitress got the message. She didn’t try to seat me elsewhere. Clearly Deveraux had already ordered. I asked the waitress for a slice of her best pie and another cup of coffee. She went through to the kitchen and silence claimed the room.

Up close and personal I was prepared to concede that Elizabeth Deveraux was a seriously good looking woman. Truly beautiful. Out of the car she was relatively tall, and her hair was amazing. There must have been five pounds of it in her ponytail alone. She had all the right parts in all the right proportions. She looked great in her uniform. But then, I liked women in uniform, possibly because I had known very few of the other kind. But best of all was her mouth. And her eyes. Together they put a kind of wry, amused animation into her face, as if whatever happened to her she would stay cool and calm and collected through it all, and then she would find some quality in it to make her smile. There was still light in her eyes. Not just a reflection from the Caprice’s speedometer.

She said, “Pellegrino told me you’ve been in the army.”

I paused a beat. Undercover work is all about lying, and I hadn’t minded lying to Pellegrino. But for some unknown reason I found myself not wanting to lie to Deveraux. So I said, “Six weeks ago I was in the army,” which was technically true.

“What branch?”

“I was with an outfit called the 110th, mostly,” I said. Also true.

“Infantry?”

“It was a special unit. Combined operations, basically.” Which was true, technically.

“Who’s your local friend?”

“A guy called Hayder,” I said. An outright invention.

Deveraux said, “He must have been infantry. Kelham is all infantry.”

I nodded.

“The 75th Ranger Regiment,” I said.

“Was he an instructor?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. “They’re the only ones who are here long enough to want to stick around afterward.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Then maybe he moved on again.”

“When might he have done that?”

“I’m not sure. How long have you been sheriff?”

“Two years,” she said. “Long enough to get to know the locals, anyway.”

“Pellegrino said you’d been here all your life. I mean, as far as getting to know the locals is concerned.”

“Not true,” she said. “I haven’t been here all my life. I was here as a kid, and I’m here now. But there were years in between.”

There was something wistful about her tone. There were years in between. I asked her, “How did you spend those years?”

“I had a rich uncle,” she said. “I toured the world at his expense.”

And at that point I suspected I was in trouble. At that point I suspected my mission was about to fail. Because I had heard that answer before.

Chapter

12

The waitress brought out Elizabeth Deveraux’s main course and my dessert both together. Deveraux had ordered the same thing I had eaten, the fat cheeseburger and the squirrel’s nest of fries. My pie was peach and the slice I got was about half the size of a Major League home plate. It was bigger than the dish it was in. My coffee was in a tall stoneware mug. Deveraux had plain water in a chipped glass.

It’s easier to let a pie go cold than a cheeseburger, so I figured I had a chance to talk while Deveraux had no choice but to eat and listen and comment briefly. So I said, “Pellegrino told me you guys are real busy.”

Deveraux chewed and nodded.

I said, “A wrecked car and a dead woman.”

She nodded again and chased an errant pearl of mayonnaise back into her mouth with the tip of her little finger. An elegant gesture, for an inelegant act. She had short nails, nicely trimmed and polished. She had slender hands, a little tanned and sinewy. Good skin. No rings. None at all. Especially not on her left ring finger.

I asked, “Any progress on any of that?”

She swallowed and smiled and held her hand up like a traffic cop. Stop. Wait. She said, “Give me a minute, OK? No more talking.”

So I ate my pie, which was good. The crust was sweet and the peaches were soft. Probably local. Or maybe from Georgia. I didn’t know much about the cultivation of fruit. She ate, with the burger in her right hand, her left taking fries one by one from her plate, her eyes on mine most of the time. The grease from the meat made her lips glisten. She was a slim woman. She must have had a metabolism like a nuclear reactor. She took occasional long sips of water. I drained my mug. The coffee was OK, but not as good as the pie.

She asked, “Doesn’t coffee keep you awake?”

I nodded. “Until I want to go to sleep. That’s what it’s for.”

She took a last sip of water and left a rind of bun and six or seven fries on her plate. She wiped her mouth and then her hands on her napkin. She folded her napkin and laid it down next to her plate. Dinner was over.

I asked, “So are you making progress?”

She smiled at some inner amusement and then leaned sideways away from the table, hands braced to increase her angle, and she looked me over again, slowly, a crooked path, all the way from my feet in the shadows to my head. She said, “You’re pretty good. Nothing to be ashamed about, really. It’s not your fault.”

I asked, “What isn’t?”

She leaned back in her chair. She kept her eyes on mine. She said, “My daddy was sheriff here before me. Since before I was born, actually. He won about twenty consecutive elections. He was firm, but fair. And honest. No fear or favor. He was a good public servant.”

I said, “I’m sure he was.”

“But I didn’t like it here very much. Not as a kid. I mean, can you imagine? It’s the back of beyond. We got books in the mail. I knew there was a big wide world out there. So I had to get away.”

I said, “I don’t blame you.”

She said, “But some ideas get ingrained. Like public service. Like law enforcement. It starts to feel like a family business, the same as any other.”

I nodded. She was right. Kids follow their parents into law enforcement far more than most other professions. Except baseball. The son of a pro ballplayer is eight hundred times more likely to make the Majors than some other random kid.

She said, “So look at it from my point of view. What do you think I did when I turned eighteen?”

I said, “I don’t know,” although by that point I was pretty sure I did know, more or less, and I wasn’t happy about it.

She said, “I went to South Carolina and joined the Marine Corps.”

I nodded. Worse than I had expected. For some reason I had been betting on the Air Force.

I asked her, “How long were you in?”

“Sixteen years.”

Which made her thirty-six years old. Eighteen years at home, plus sixteen as a jarhead, plus two as Carter County Sheriff. Same age as me.

I asked her, “What branch of the Corps?”

“Provost Marshal’s office.” I looked away.

I said, “You were a military cop.”

She said, “Public service and law enforcement. I killed two birds with one stone.”

I looked back, beaten.

I asked her, “Terminal rank?”

“CWO5,” she said.

Chief Warrant Officer 5. An expert in a specific specialized field. The sweet spot, where the real work was done.

I asked her, “Why did you leave?”

“Rumblings,” she said. “The Soviets are gone, reductions in force are coming. I figured it would feel better to step up than be thrown out. Plus my daddy died, and I couldn’t let some idiot like Pellegrino take over.”

I asked her, “Where did you serve?”

“All over,” she said. “Uncle Sam was my rich uncle. He showed me the world. Some parts of it were worth seeing, and some parts of it weren’t.”

I said nothing. The waitress came back and took away our empty plates.

“Anyway,” Deveraux said. “I was expecting you. It’s exactly what we would have done, frankly, under the same circumstances. A homicide behind a bar near a base? Some kind of big secrecy or sensitivity on the base? We would have put an investigator on the post, and we would have sent another into town, undercover.”

I said nothing.

She said, “The idea being, of course, that the undercover guy in town would keep his ear to the ground and then step in and stop the locals embarrassing the Corps. If strictly necessary, that is. It was a policy I supported back then, naturally. But now I am the locals, so I can’t really support it anymore.”

I said nothing.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “You were doing it better than some of our guys did. I love the shoes, for instance. And the hair. You’re fairly convincing. You ran into a bit of bad luck, that’s all, with me being who I am. Although the timing wasn’t subtle, was it? But then, it never is. I don’t see how it ever could be. And to be honest, you’re not a very fluent liar. You shouldn’t have said the 110th. I know about the 110th, of course. You were nearly as good as we were. But really, Hayder? Far too uncommon a name. And the khaki socks were a mistake. Obvious PX. You probably bought them yesterday. I wore socks just like them.”

“I didn’t want to lie,” I said. “Didn’t seem right. My father was a Marine. Maybe I sensed it in you.”

“He was a Marine but you joined the army? What was that, mutiny?”

“I don’t know what it was,” I said. “But it felt right at the time.”

“How does it feel now?”

“Right this minute? Not so great.”

“Don’t feel bad,” she said again. “You gave it a good try.”

I said nothing.

She asked, “What rank are you?”

I said, “Major.”

“Should I salute?”

“Only if you want to.”

“Still with the 110th?”

“Temporarily. Home base right now is the 396th MP. The Criminal Investigation Division.”

“How many years in?”

“Thirteen. Plus West Point.”

“I’m honored. Maybe I should salute. Who did they send to Kelham?”

“A guy called Munro. Same rank as me.”

“That’s confusing,” she said.

I said, “Are you making progress?”

She said, “You don’t give up, do you?”

“Giving up was not in the mission statement. You know how it is.”

“OK, I’ll trade,” she said. “One answer for one answer. And then you ship back out. You hit the road at first light. In fact I’ll get Pellegrino to drive you back to where he picked you up. Do we have a deal?”

What choice did I have? I said, “We have a deal.”

“No,” she said. “We’re not making progress. Absolutely none at all.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks. Your turn.”

“Obviously it would give me an insight to know if you’re the ace, or if the guy they sent to Kelham is the ace. I mean, in terms of the army’s current thinking. About the balance of probabilities here. As in, do they think the problem is inside the gates or outside? So, are you the big dog? Or is the other guy?”

“Honest answer?”

“That’s what I would expect from the son of a fellow Marine.”

“The honest answer is I don’t know,” I said.

Chapter

13

Elizabeth Deveraux paid for her burger and my pie and coffee, which I thought was generous, so I left the tip, which made the waitress smile again. We stepped out to the sidewalk together and stood for a moment next to the old Caprice. The moon had gotten brighter. A thin layer of high cloud had moved away. There were stars out.

I said, “Can I ask you another question?”

Deveraux was immediately guarded. She said, “About what?”

“Hair,” I said. “Ours is supposed to conform to the shape of our heads. Tapered, they call it. Curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of the neck. What about yours?”

“I wore a buzz cut for fifteen years,” she said. “I started growing it out when I knew I was going to quit.”

I looked at her in the moonlight and the spill from the diner window. I pictured her with a buzz cut. She must have looked sensational. I said, “Good to know. Thanks.”

She said, “I had no chance, right from the beginning. The regulation for women in the Corps required what they called a non-eccentric style. Your hair could touch your collar, but it couldn’t fall below the bottom edge. You were allowed to pin it up, but then I couldn’t get my hat on.”

“Sacrifices,” I said.

“It was worth it,” she said. “I loved being a Marine.”

“You still are,” I said. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

“Is that what your daddy said?”

“He never got the chance. He died in harness.”

She asked, “Is your mom still alive?”

“She died a few years later.”

“Mine died when I was in boot camp. Cancer.”

“Really? Mine too. Cancer, I mean. Not boot camp.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I said, automatically. “She was in Paris.”

“So was I. Parris Island, anyway. Did she emigrate?”

“She was French.”

“Do you speak French?”

I said, “Un peu, mais doucement.”

“What does that mean?”

“A little, and slowly.”

She nodded and put her hand on the Caprice’s door. I took the hint and said, “OK, goodnight, Chief Deveraux. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

She just smiled.

I turned left and walked down toward the hotel. I heard the big Chevy motor start up, and I heard the tires start to roll, and then the car passed me, going slow, and then it pulled a wide U-turn across the width of the street and stopped again, just ahead of me, facing me, at the curb right next to the Toussaint’s hotel. I walked on and got there just as Deveraux opened her door and got out again. Naturally I assumed she had something more to say to me, so I stopped walking and waited politely.

“I live here,” she said. “Goodnight.”

She had already gone upstairs before I got into the lobby. The old guy I had seen in the diner was behind the reception counter. He was open for business. I could tell he was disconcerted by my lack of luggage, but cash money is cash money, and he took eighteen dollars of mine and in return he gave me the key to room twenty-one. He told me it was on the second floor, at the front of the building, overlooking the street, which he said was quieter than the back, which made no sense at all until I remembered the railroad track.

On the second floor the staircase came up in the center of a long north–south corridor, which was uncarpeted and dimly lit by four mean and ungenerous bulbs. It had eight doors off the back side and nine off the street side. There was a slim bar of brighter yellow light showing through the crack under room seventeen’s door, which was on the street side. Deveraux, presumably, getting ready for bed. My room was four doors further north. I unlocked it and went in and turned on the light and found the kind of still air and dusty chill that indicates long disuse. It was a rectangular space with a high ceiling and what would have been pleasant proportions, except that at some point in the last decade an attached bathroom had been shoehorned into one corner. The window was a pair of glazed doors that gave out on the iron balcony I had seen from the street. There was a bed and a chair and a dressing table, and on the floor there was a threadbare Persian rug worn thin by use and beating.

I pulled the drapes closed and unpacked, which consisted solely of assembling my new toothbrush and propping it upright in a milky glass on the bathroom shelf. I had no toothpaste, but then, I had never been convinced toothpaste was anything more than a pleasant-tasting lubricant. An army dentist I had known swore that the mechanical action of the brush’s bristles was all that was needed for perfect oral health. And I had chewing gum for freshness. And I still had all my teeth, apart from a top-row molar knocked out many years before by a lucky knuckle in a street fight in Cleveland, Ohio.

The clock in my head said it was about twenty after eleven. I sat on the bed for a spell. I had been up early and was moderately tired, but not exhausted. And I had things to do, and limited time to do them in, so I waited long enough to let an average person get off to sleep, and then I went out to the corridor again. Deveraux’s light was off. There was nothing showing under her door. I crept down the stairs to the lobby. The reception desk was once again unattended. I went out to the street and turned left, toward territory as yet unexplored.

Chapter

14

I looked at the whole length of Main Street as carefully as was possible in the gray moonlight. It ran on south for about two hundred yards, as straight as a die, and then it narrowed a little and started to meander and became residential, with modest homes randomly spaced in yards of varying sizes. The west side of the straight downtown stretch had stores and commercial operations of various kinds, punctuated with narrow alleys, some of which led onward into the scrub and had more small houses on the left and the right. Those stores and commercial operations were matched by similar establishments on the east side of Main Street, neatly in line with the diner and the hotel, and the alleys to the west were matched by broader paved passageways opposite, which linked all the way through to a one-sided street built parallel to and behind Main Street. I guessed that one-sided street had been the whole point of the town in the early days, and was certainly the point in my being there that night.

It ran north and south and had a long line of establishments that faced the railroad track across nothing but a blank width of beaten earth. I imagined old passenger trains wheezing to a stop, with their panting locomotives next to the water tower a little ways up the line, the trains’ long windowed sides stretching south. I imagined restaurant staff and café owners running across the beaten earth and placing wooden steps below the train doors. I imagined passengers stepping down, spilling out, dry and hungry from their long haul, hundreds of them eagerly crossing the width of earth, and then eating and drinking their fill. I imagined coins clattering, cash registers ringing, the train whistles blowing, the passengers returning, the trains moving onward, the wooden steps being retrieved, then stillness returning for an hour, then the next train easing in, and the whole process repeating itself endlessly.

That single-sided street had powered the local economy, and it still did.

The passenger trains were long gone, of course, and so were the cafés and the restaurants. But the cafés and the restaurants had been replaced by bars, and auto parts stores, and bars, and loan offices, and bars, and gun shops, and bars, and secondhand stereo stores, and bars, and the trains had been replaced by streams of cars coming in from Kelham. I imagined the cars parking on the beaten earth, and small groups of Rangers-in-training spilling out and spending Uncle Sam’s money up and down the row. A captive market, miles from anywhere, like Garber had said, just like the railroad passengers back in the day. I had seen the proposition repeated at a hundred bases all around the world. The cars would be old Mustangs or Gran Torinos or GTOs, or secondhand BMWs or Mercedes in Germany, or strange Toyota Crowns or Datsuns in the Far East, and the beer would be different brands and different strengths, and the loans would be in different currencies, and the guns would be chambered for different loads in different calibers, and the used stereo equipment would operate on different voltages, but other than that the give and take was exactly the same everywhere.

I found the spot where Janice May Chapman had been killed easily enough. Pellegrino had said she had bled out like a lake, which meant sand would have been used to soak up the spill, and I found a fresh spreading pile of it in a paved alley near the rear left-hand corner of a bar called Brannan’s. Brannan’s was about in the center of the one-sided street, and the alley in question ran along its left flank before dog-legging twice and exiting on Main Street between an old-style pharmacy and a hardware store. Maybe the hardware store was where the sand had come from. Three or four sixty-pound bags would have done the job. It was spread in a neat teardrop shape over the smooth flagstones, about three or four inches deep.

The spot was not directly overlooked. Brannan’s rear door was about fifteen feet away, and the bar had no side windows. The back of the pharmacy was a blank wall. Brannan’s neighbor was a loan office with a Western Union franchise, and its right flank had a window toward the rear, but the place would have been closed at night. No witnesses. Not that there would have been much to witness. Cutting a throat doesn’t take much time. Given a decent blade and enough weight and force, it takes as long as it takes to move your hand eight inches. That’s all.

I stepped out of the alley and walked halfway to the railroad track and stood on the beaten earth and judged the light. No point in looking for things I wouldn’t be able to see. But the moon was still high and the sky was still clear, so I kept on going and stepped over the first rail and turned left and hiked north, walking on the ties like guys used to way back, when they were leaving the land and heading to Chicago or New York. I passed over the road crossing, and I passed the old water tower.

Then the ground began to shake.

Just faintly at first, a mild constant tremor, like the edge of a distant earthquake. I stopped walking. The tie under my feet trembled. The rails either side of me started to sing. I turned around and saw a tiny pinpoint of light far in the distance. A single headlight. The midnight train, a couple of miles south of me, coming on fast.

I stood there. The rails hummed and keened. The ties hammered up and down through tiny microscopic distances. The gravel under them clicked and hopped. The ground tremors deepened to big bass shudders. The distant headlight twinkled like a star, jumping minutely left and right through hard constrained limits.

I stepped off the track and looped back to the old water tower and leaned against a tarred wooden upright. It shook against my shoulder. The ground shook under my feet. The rails howled. The train whistle blew, long and loud and forlorn in the distance. The warning bells at the roadside twenty yards away started ringing. The red lights started flashing.

The train kept on coming toward me, for a long time resolutely distant, then all of a sudden right next to me, right on top of me, huge, just insanely massive, and impossibly loud. The ground shook so hard that the old water tower next to me danced mutely in place and I was bounced up and down whole inches. Moving air whipped and battered at me. The locomotive flashed past, and then began an endless sequence of cars, hammering, juddering, strobing in the moonlight, hurtling north without pause, ten of them, twenty, fifty, a hundred. I clung to the tarred pole for a whole long minute, sixty long seconds, deafened by squealing metal, beaten numb by the throbbing ground, scoured by the slipstream.

Then the train was gone.

The butt end of a bulk silo car rolled away from me at sixty miles an hour, and the howl of the wind dropped a half tone, and the earthquake subsided to mild tremors again, and then to nothing, and the screaming rails quieted to a low hiss. The manic bells stopped dead.

Silence came back.

The first thing I did was change my mind about how far I was going to have to walk to find the wreckage of the blue car. I had assumed it would be close by. But after that awesome display of power I figured it might be somewhere in New Jersey. Or Canada.

Chapter

15

In the end I found most of the car about two hundred yards north. It was preceded by a debris field that stretched most of the intervening distance. There were pebbles of broken windshield glass, glistening and glinting in the dew and the moonlight. The glass had been flung along random curved trajectories, as if by a giant hand. There was a chrome bumper, torn off and folded capriciously in half, a tight V, like a drinking straw. It had embedded itself in the ground, like a lawn dart. There was a wheel with no hub cap. The impact had been colossal. The car had been smashed forward like a baseball off a tee. Zero to sixty, instantaneously.

I guessed it had been parked on the track about twenty yards north of the water tower. That was where the first of the glass was located. The locomotive had hit the car, and it had flown fifty or more yards through the air, and then it had landed and cartwheeled. Maybe wheels to roof to wheels to roof, or end over end. I guessed the initial impact had more or less disassembled it. Like an explosion. Then the rolling action had flung its constituent parts all over the place. Including its fuel, which had ignited. There were narrow black tongues of burned scrub all over the last fifty yards, and what was left of the vehicle itself was nested against the trees in the epicenter of a starburst of blackened trunks and branches. Arson investigators I had met could have worked out its rate of rotation from the fuel splatter alone.

Pellegrino had seen the car in daylight and called it blue. In the moonlight it looked ash gray to me. I couldn’t find an intact painted surface. I couldn’t find an intact anything larger than a square inch. It was a burned-out mess, crushed and crumpled to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. I was prepared to accept it was a car, but only because I couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

If someone’s intention had been to conceal evidence, then that someone had succeeded, big time, and comprehensively.

I got back to the hotel at one o’clock exactly, and went straight to bed. I set the alarm in my head for seven in the morning, which was when I figured Deveraux would be getting up for work. I figured her day would start at eight. Clearly she was not neglectful of her appearance, but she was a Marine and a pragmatic person, so she wouldn’t budget more than an hour to get ready. I figured I could match her shower time with my own, and then I could find her in the diner for breakfast. Which was as far ahead as my planning extended. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to her.

But I didn’t sleep until seven in the morning. I was woken up at six. By someone knocking loudly on my door. I wasn’t thrilled. I rolled out of bed and pulled on my pants and opened up. It was the old guy. The hotel keeper.

He said, “Mr. Reacher?”

I said, “Yes?”

He said, “Good. I’m glad I got the right person. At this hour, I mean. It’s always better to be sure.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, initially, as I said, I’m confirming who you are.”

“I sincerely hope there’s more to it than that. At this hour. You only have two guests. And the other one isn’t mister anything.”

“You have a phone call.”

“Who from?”

“Your uncle.”

“My uncle?”

“Your uncle Leon Garber. He said it was urgent. And judging by his tone, it’s important, too.”

I put my T-shirt on and followed the guy downstairs, barefoot. He led me through a side door into the office behind the counter. There was a worn mahogany desk with a phone on it. The handset was off the hook, resting on the desk top.

The old guy said, “Please make yourself at home,” and left, and closed the door on me. I sat down in his chair and picked up the phone.

I said, “What?”

Garber said, “You OK?”

“I’m fine. How did you find me?”

“Phone book. There’s only one hotel in Carter Crossing. Everything going well?”

“Terrific.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Because you’re supposed to check in every morning at six.”

“Am I?”

“That’s what we agreed.”

“When?”

“We spoke yesterday at six. As you were leaving.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember. But we didn’t agree we’d talk at six every day.”

“You called me yesterday. At dinner time. You said you would call again today.”

“I didn’t specify the time.”

“I think you did.”

“Well, you’re wrong, you old coot. What do you want?”

“You’re cranky this morning.”

“I was up late last night.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking around.”

“And?”

“There are a couple of things,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Just two specific items. Matters of interest.”

“Do they represent progress?”

“At this point they’re just questions. The answers might represent progress, eventually. If I ever get them.”

Garber said, “Munro is getting nowhere at Kelham. Not so far. This whole thing might be more complicated than we thought.”

I didn’t answer that. Garber was quiet for a beat.

“Wait,” he said. “What do you mean, if you ever get the answers?”

I didn’t answer.

Garber said, “And why were you looking around in the dark? Wouldn’t it have been better to wait for first light?”

I said, “I met the chief here.”

“And?”

“Different from what you might expect.”

“How?” Garber asked. “Is he honest?”

“He’s a she,” I said. “Her father was sheriff before her.”

Garber paused again.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “She figured you out.”

I didn’t answer.

“Christ on a bike,” he said. “This has got to be a new world record. How long did it take her? Ten minutes? Five?”

“She was a Marine MP,” I said. “One of us, practically. She knew all along. She was expecting me. To her it was a predictable move.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she going to shut you out?”

“Worse. She wants to throw me out.”

“Well, you can’t let her do that. No way. You have to stay there. That’s for damn sure. In fact, I’m ordering you not to come back. You hear me? Your orders are to stay. She can’t throw you out anyway. It’s a question of civil rights. The First Amendment, or something. Free association. Mississippi is part of the Union, same as anywhere else. It’s a free country. So stay there, OK?”

I hung up with Garber and sat in the little office for a moment. I found a dollar bill in my pocket and left it on the desk, to cover the cost of an outgoing call, and I dialed the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a lot of numbers and a lot of operators, and I chose one that always answered. I asked the guy to try John James Frazer’s billet, just on the off chance. The Senate Liaison guy. I wasn’t expecting him to be there not long after six in the morning, but he was. Which told me something. I introduced myself and told him I had no news.

“You must have something,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t have called.”

“I have a warning,” I said.

“What kind?”

“I’ve seen a couple of things, and they’re enough to tell me this situation is going to turn out bad. It’s going to turn out sick and weird and it’s going to be all over every newspaper for a month. Even if it’s nothing to do with Kelham, we could end up tainted. Just because of the proximity.”

Frazer paused. “How sick?”

“Potentially very sick.”

“Gut feeling? Is it anything to do with Kelham?”

“Too early to say.”

“Help me out here, Reacher. Best guess?”

“At this stage, I’d say no. No military involvement.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“It’s only a guess,” I said. “Don’t break out the cigars just yet.”

I didn’t go back to bed. No point. Too late. I just brushed my teeth and showered and chewed some gum and got fully dressed. Then I stood by my window and watched the dawn. The creeping daylight enlarged the world. I saw Main Street in all its detailed glory. I saw scrub and fields and forest extending in every direction.

Then I sat in my chair to wait. I figured I would hear Deveraux go out to her car. I was more or less right above where it was parked at the curb.

Chapter

16

I heard Deveraux leave the hotel at twenty past seven exactly. First the street door creaked open and slammed shut, and then her car door creaked open and slammed shut. I got up and looked out the window. She was behind the wheel, low in the seat, in what looked like a clean version of the same uniform she had worn the day before. Her riot of hair was still wet from the shower. She was talking on the radio. Probably telling Pellegrino that job one for the day was to haul my ass halfway back to Memphis.

I went down the stairs and stepped out to the sidewalk. The morning air was fresh and cold. I looked up the street and saw that Deveraux’s car was parked again, right outside the diner. So far, so good. I walked in that direction and pushed in through the door, past the pay phone, past the hostess station. There were six customers inside, including Deveraux. The other five were men, four of them in work clothes and the fifth in a pale-colored suit. A professional gentleman. Maybe a country lawyer or a country doctor, or the guy that ran the loan office next to Brannan’s bar. The waitress was the same woman as the night before. She was busy toting plates of food, so I didn’t wait for her. I just walked up to Deveraux’s table and said, “Would you mind if I joined you?”

She was sipping coffee. She didn’t have her food yet. She smiled and said, “Good morning.”

Her tone was warm. She seemed happy to see me.

I said, “Yes, good morning.”

She said, “Have you come to say goodbye? That’s very polite and very formal.”

I said nothing in reply to that. She did her thing with her foot again, under the table, and kicked the facing chair out. I sat down. She asked, “Did you sleep well?”

I said, “Fine.”

“The train didn’t wake you at midnight? It takes some getting used to.”

“I was still up,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“This and that,” I said.

“Inside or out?”

“Out,” I said.

“You found the crime scene?”

I nodded.

She nodded in turn.

“And you found two things of note,” she said. “So you thought you’d stop by and make sure I appreciated their significance before you got on your way. That’s very public-spirited of you.”

The waitress came by and put a heaping plate of French toast on the table. Then she turned to me and I ordered the same thing, with coffee. Deveraux waited until she was gone, and asked, “Or was it entirely private-spirited? Is this your one last attempt to protect the army before you go?”

“I’m not going,” I said.

She smiled again. “Are you going to give me your civil rights speech now? Free country, and all that bullshit?”

“Something like that.”

She paused a beat.

“I’m all for civil rights,” she said. “And certainly there’s room at the inn, as they say. So sure, by all means, please stay. Enjoy yourself. There are trails to hike, and there are things to hunt, and there are sights to see. Knock yourself out. Do whatever you want to. Just don’t get between me and my investigation.”

I asked her, “How do you explain the two things?”

“Do I need to? To you?”

“Two heads are better than one.”

“I can’t trust you,” she said. “You’re here to steer me wrong, if you have to.”

“No, I’m here to warn the army if things start to look bad. Which I will, if I have to. But we’re a long way from any kind of a conclusion here. We’ve barely even started. It’s too early to steer anybody anywhere, even if I was going to. Which I’m not.”

“We?” she said. “We’re a long way from a conclusion? What is this, a democracy?”

“OK, you,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Me.”

At that point the waitress came back with my meal. And my coffee. I sniffed the steam and took a long first sip. A little ritual. Nothing better than just-made coffee, early in the morning. Across the table from me Deveraux continued eating. She was cleaning her plate. A metabolism like a nuclear plant.

She said, “OK, time out. Convince me. Put your cards on the table. Tell me about the first thing, and spin it so it looks bad for the army. Which it does, by the way, spin or no spin.”

I looked straight at her. “Have you been on the base?”

“All over it.”

“I haven’t. Therefore apparently you know what I’m only guessing.”

She nodded. “So bear that in mind. Tread carefully. Don’t blow smoke.”

I said, “Janice May Chapman was not raped in that alley.”

“Because?”

“Because Pellegrino reported gravel abrasions on the corpse. And there’s no gravel in that alley. Nor anywhere else that I could see. It’s all dirt or blacktop or smooth paving stones for miles around.”

“The railroad track has gravel,” she said.

A test. She wanted me to jump all over it.

“Not really gravel,” I said. “The railroad track has larger stones. Ballast, they call it, in a rail bed. Pieces of granite, bigger than a pebble, smaller than a fist. The injuries would look completely different. They wouldn’t look like gravel rash.”

“The roads are gravel.”

Another test.

“Bound with tar and rolled,” I said. “Not the same at all.”

“So?”

The final test.

Spin it so it looks bad for the army.

“Kelham is for the elite,” I said. “It’s a finishing school for the 75th, which is special ops support. It’s a big place. They must have all kinds of simulated terrain. Sand, to simulate the desert. Concrete, like the frozen steppes. Fake villages, all that kind of shit. I’m sure they have plenty of gravel there, for one reason or another.”

Deveraux nodded again. “They have a running track made of gravel. For endurance training. Ten laps is like ten hours on a road surface. Plus low-scoring individuals get to rake it smooth every morning. As a punishment. Two birds with one stone.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux said, “She was raped on the base.”

I said, “Not impossible.”

Deveraux said, “You’re an honest man, Reacher. The son of a Marine.”

“Marines have got nothing to do with it. I’m a commissioned officer in the United States Army. We have standards too.”

I started to eat my breakfast just as she finished hers. She said, “The second thing is more problematical, though. I can’t make it fit.”

“Really?” I said. “Isn’t it basically the same as the first thing?”

She looked at me, blankly.

She said, “I don’t see how.”

I stopped eating and looked back at her.

I said, “Talk me through it.”

“It’s a simple question,” she said. “How did she get there? She left her car at home, and she didn’t walk. For one thing, she was wearing four-inch heels, and for another thing, no one walks anywhere anymore. But she wasn’t picked up from home either. Her neighbors are the worst busybodies in the world, and both of them swear no one came calling on her. And I believe them. And no one saw her arrive in town with a soldier. Or with a civilian, for that matter. Or even on her own. And trust me, those barkeeps watch the traffic. All of them. It’s a habit. They want to know if they can afford to eat tomorrow. So she just materialized in that alley, unexplained.”

I was quiet for a second.

Then I said, “That wasn’t my second thing.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Your two things and my two things are not the same two things. Which means there are three things in total.”

“So what’s your second thing?”

I said, “She wasn’t killed in that alley, either.”

Chapter

17

I finished my breakfast before I spoke again. French toast, maple syrup, coffee. Protein, fiber, carbohydrates. And caffeine. All the essential food groups, except nicotine, but I had already quit by then. I put my silverware down and said, “There’s really only one obvious way to cut a woman’s throat. You stand behind her and use one hand in her hair to pull her head back. Or you hook your fingers in her eye sockets, or if you’re sure your hands are steady you could use your palm under her chin. But whichever, you expose her throat and you put some tension in the ligaments and the blood vessels. Then you get busy with the blade. You’re taught to expect major resistance to the cut, because there’s some pretty tough stuff in there. And you’re taught to start an inch earlier and finish an inch later than you think is really necessary. Just to be absolutely sure.”

Deveraux said, “I’m assuming that’s exactly what happened in the alley. But suddenly, I hope. So it was over before she realized it was happening at all.”

I said, “It didn’t happen in the alley. It can’t have.”

“Why not?”

“One of the side benefits of doing it from behind is you don’t get covered in blood. And there’s a lot of blood. You’re talking about carotids and jugulars, and a young healthy person suddenly agitated and struggling, maybe even fighting. Her blood pressure must have been spiking sky high.”

“I know there’s a lot of blood. I saw it. There was a huge pool of it. She was all bled out. As white as a sheet. I assume you saw the sand. That’s how big the pool was. It looked like a gallon or more.”

“You ever cut a throat?”

“No.”

“You ever seen it done?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“The blood doesn’t just seep out like you slit your wrists in the bathtub. It comes out like a fire hose. It sprays everywhere, ten feet or more, great gouts of it, splattering all over the place. I’ve seen it on ceilings, even. Crazy patterns, like someone took a paint can and threw it around. Like that guy, Jackson Pollock. The painter.”

Deveraux said nothing.

I said, “There would have been blood all over the alley. On the loan office’s wall, for sure. And on the bar’s wall, and maybe on the pharmacy’s wall. On the floor, too, yards away. Crazy thin patterns. Not a neat pool right underneath her. That’s just not possible. She wasn’t killed there.”

Deveraux linked her hands on the table and bowed her head over them. She was doing something I had never seen a person do before. Not literally. She was hanging her head. She breathed in, breathed out, and five seconds later she looked up again and said, “I’m an idiot. I suppose I must have known all that, but I didn’t remember it. I just didn’t see it.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “You never saw it happen, so you don’t have anything to remember.”

“No, it’s basic,” she said. “I’m an idiot. I’ve wasted days.”

“It gets worse,” I said. “There’s more.”

She didn’t want to hear about how it got worse. She didn’t want more. Not immediately. Not right then. She was still beating herself up for missing the thing with the blood. I had seen that kind of reaction many times. I had had that kind of reaction many times. Smart, conscientious people hate making mistakes. Not just because of ego. Because mistakes of a certain type have the kind of consequences that people with consciences don’t like to live with.

She frowned and ground her teeth and growled at herself for a minute, and then she shook her head and stopped and came up with a brave smile, tighter and grimmer than her normal sunny radiance. She said, “OK, tell me more. Tell me how it gets worse. But not in here. I have to eat here three times a day. I don’t want the associations.”

So we paid for our breakfasts and stepped out to the sidewalk. We stood there for a long moment, near her car, saying nothing. I could tell by her body language she wasn’t going to invite me to her office. She didn’t want me near the Sheriff’s Department. This wasn’t a democracy. In the end she said, “Let’s go back to the hotel. We can use the lounge. We’re guaranteed privacy there, after all. Since we’re the only two guests.”

We walked back down the street, and up the shaky steps, and across the old veranda. We went in and used the door on the left of the lobby. I smelled the same damp and dust and mildew as the night before. In the daylight the humped shapes I had seen in the dark turned out to be armchairs, as I had thought. There were twelve of them, grouped in various combinations, twos and fours. We took a matched pair, either side of a cold fireplace.

I asked her, “Why do you live here?”

“Good question,” she said. “I thought it would be a month or two. But it extended.”

“What about your old man’s house?”

“Rented,” she said. “The lease died with him.”

“You could rent another one. Or buy one. Isn’t that what people do?”

She nodded. “I looked at some. Couldn’t pull the trigger. Have you seen the houses around here?”

I said, “Some of them look OK.”

“Not to me,” she said. “I wasn’t ready, anyway. I hadn’t decided how long I was going to stay. Still haven’t, really. No doubt it will turn out to be the rest of my life, but I guess I don’t want to admit that to myself. I’d rather let it creep up on me day by day, I suppose.”

I thought about my pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. There was a lot more to leaving the service than getting a job. There were houses, and cars, and clothes. There were a hundred strange, unknown details, like the customs of a remote foreign tribe, glimpsed only in passing, and never fully understood.

Deveraux said, “So let’s hear it.”

I said, “Her throat was cut, right? We’re clear on that?”

“Definitely. Unmistakably.”

“And that was the only wound?”

“The doctor says so.”

“So somewhere there’s blood all over the place. Wherever it was actually done. In a room, maybe, or out in the woods. It’s impossible to clean up properly. Literally impossible. So there’s evidence out there, just waiting for you.”

“I can’t search the base. They won’t let me. It’s a jurisdiction thing.”

“You don’t know for sure it happened on the base.”

“She was raped on the base.”

“It’s not impossible she was raped on the base. That’s not quite the same thing.”

“I can’t search five hundred square miles of Mississippi, either.”

“So zoom in on the perpetrator. Narrow it down.”

“How?”

“No woman can bleed out twice,” I said. “Her throat was cut in some unknown location, blood sprayed everywhere, she died, and that’s all she wrote. Then she was dumped in the alley. But whose blood was she lying in? Not her own, because she’d left it all back in the unknown location.”

“Oh, God,” Deveraux said. “Don’t tell me the guy collected it and brought it with him.”

“Possible,” I said. “But a little unlikely. It would be tricky to cut someone’s throat while simultaneously dancing around with a bucket, trying to catch the spray.”

“There could have been two guys.”

“Possible,” I said again. “But still unlikely. It’s like a fire hose, flipping all around. Here, there, and everywhere. The second guy would be lucky to gather a pint.”

“So what are you saying? Whose blood was it?”

“An animal’s, possibly. Maybe a deer. Freshly slaughtered, but not quite fresh enough. There was some time lag. That blood was already congealing. A gallon of liquid blood would have spread much farther than that pile of sand. A little goes a long way, where blood is concerned.”

“A hunter?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Based on not very much. You didn’t see the blood. You didn’t test it. It could have been fake blood from a joke store. Or it could have been hers. Someone might have figured out a way to collect it. Just because you can’t see a way doesn’t mean a way doesn’t exist. Or they could have bled her out first and then cut her throat afterward.”

“Still a hunter,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s more,” I said. “It continues to get worse.”

Chapter

18

At that point the old lady I had seen in the diner stuck her head in the door. The hotel’s co-owner. She asked if she could bring us anything. Elizabeth Deveraux shook her head. I asked for coffee. The old lady said sorry, she didn’t have any. She said I could get it to go from the diner, if I really needed it. I wondered what exactly she was offering, therefore, if anything. But I didn’t ask. The old lady left again, and Deveraux said, “Why are you fixated on hunters?”

“Pellegrino told me she was all dressed up for a night out, as neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Those were his words. Is that a fair summary?”

Deveraux nodded. “That’s exactly what I saw. Pellegrino is an idiot, but a reliable one.”

“That’s more proof she wasn’t killed there. She would have fallen forward on her face, not on her back.”

“Yes, I missed that too. Don’t rub it in.”

“What was she wearing?”

“A dark blue sheath dress with a low white collar. Underwear and pantyhose. Dark blue shoes with spike heels.”

“Clothes in disarray?”

“No. They looked neat as a pin. Like Pellegrino told you.”

“So she wasn’t put into those clothes postmortem. You can always tell. Clothes never go on a corpse just right. Especially not pantyhose. So she was still dressed when she was killed.”

“I accept that.”

“Was there blood on the white collar? At the front?”

Deveraux closed her eyes, presumably to recall the scene. She said, “No, it was immaculate.”

“Was there blood anywhere on her front?”

“No.”

“OK,” I said. “So her throat was cut in an unknown location, while she was dressed in those clothes. But she had gotten no blood on her, until she was dumped on her back in a pool that was separately transported. Tell me how that isn’t a hunter.”

“Tell me how it is. If you can. You can help the army all you want, but you don’t have to believe your own bullshit.”

“I’m not helping the army. Soldiers can be hunters too. Many of them are.”

“Why is it a hunter at all?”

“Tell me how you cut a woman’s throat without getting a drop of blood on her front.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You string her up on a deer trestle. That’s how. By her ankles. Upside down. You tie her hands behind her. You haul her arms up until her back is arched and her throat is presented as the lowest point.”

We sat in the shadowed silence for a minute, not saying a word. I guessed Deveraux was picturing the scene. I sure was. A clearing in the woods somewhere, remote and lonely, or a room far from anywhere, with improvised equipment, or a hut or a shack with roof beams, Janice May Chapman hanging upside down, her hands hauled up behind her back, toward her feet, her shoulders straining, her back curving painfully. She was probably gagged, too, the gag tied to a third rope looped over the trestle’s top rail. That third rope must have been pulled tight, arching her head up and back, keeping it well out of the way, leaving her throat completely accessible.

I asked, “How did she wear her hair?”

“Short,” Deveraux said. “It wouldn’t have gotten in the way.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux asked, “Do you really think that’s how it was done?”

I nodded. “Any other method, she wouldn’t have bled out all the way. Not white as a sheet. She would have died, and her heart would have stopped pumping, and there would have been something left inside her. Two, three pints, maybe. It was being upside down that finished the job. Gravity, plain and simple.”

“The ropes would have left marks, wouldn’t they?”

“What did the medical examiner say? Have you had his report?”

“We don’t have a medical examiner. Just the local doctor. One step up from when all we had was the local undertaker, but not a very big step.”

Not a democracy. I said, “You should go take a look for yourself.”

She said, “Will you come with me?”

We walked back to the diner and took Deveraux’s car from the curb and U-turned and headed back down Main Street, past the hotel again, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, and onward to where Main Street turned into a wandering rural route. The doctor’s place was half a mile south of the town. It was a regular clapboard house, painted white, set in a large untidy yard, with a shingle next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The name on the shingle was Merriam, and it was lettered crisply in black over a rectangle of white paint that was brighter and newer than the surrounding surface. A new arrival, not long in town, new to the community.

The house had its ground floor given over to the medical practice. The front parlor was a waiting room, and the back room was where patients were examined and treated. We found Merriam in there, at a desk, doing paperwork. He was a florid man close to sixty. New in town, perhaps, but not new to doctoring. His greeting was languid and his pace was slow. I got the impression he regarded the Carter Crossing position as semi-retirement, maybe after a pressurized career in a big-city practice. I didn’t like him much. A snap judgment, maybe, but generally those are as good as any other kind.

Deveraux told the guy what we wanted to see and he got up slowly and led us through the house to what might once have been a kitchen. It was now tiled in cold white, and it had no-nonsense medical-style sinks and cupboards all over it. In the center of the floor it had a stainless steel mortuary table, and on the table was a corpse. The light over it was bright.

The corpse was Janice May Chapman. She had a tag on her toe with her name written on it in a spidery hand. She was naked. Pellegrino had called her as white as a sheet, but by that point she was pale blue and light purple, blotched and mottled with the characteristic marbling of the truly bloodless. She had been perhaps five feet seven inches tall, and she might once have weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds, neither fat nor excessively thin. She had dark hair bobbed short. It was thick and heavy, well cut, and still in good condition. Pellegrino had called her pretty, and it didn’t require much imagination to agree. The flesh on her face was collapsed and empty, but her bone structure was good. Her teeth were white and even.

Her throat was a mess. It was laid open from side to side and the wound had dried to a rubbery gape. Flesh and muscle had shrunk back, and tendons and ligaments had curled, and empty veins and arteries had retracted. White bone was visible, and I could see a single horizontal score mark on it.

The knife had been substantial, the blade had been sharp, and the killing stroke had been forceful, confident, and fast.

Deveraux said, “We need to examine her wrists and ankles.”

The doctor made a have at it gesture.

Deveraux took Chapman’s left arm and I took her right. Her wrist bones were light and delicate. The skin lying over them had no abrasions. No rope burns. But there was faint residual marking. There was a two-inch-wide band that was slightly bluer than the rest. Very slightly bluer. Almost not there at all. But perceptible. And very slightly swollen, compared to the rest of her forearm. Definitely raised. The exact opposite of a compression.

I looked at Merriam and asked, “What do you make of this?”

“The cause of death was exsanguination through severed carotid arteries,” he said. “That was what I was paid to determine.”

“How much were you paid?”

“The fee structure was agreed between my predecessor and the county.”

“Was it more than fifty cents?”

“Why?”

“Because fifty cents is all that conclusion is worth. Cause of death is totally obvious. So now you can earn your corn by helping us out a little.”

Deveraux looked at me and I shrugged. Better that I had said it than her. She had to live with the guy afterward. I didn’t.

Merriam said, “I don’t like your attitude.”

I said, “And I don’t like twenty-seven-year-old women lying dead on a slab. You want to help or not?”

He said, “I’m not a pathologist.”

I said, “Neither am I.”

The guy stood still for a moment, and then he sighed and stepped forward. He took Janice May Chapman’s limp and lifeless arm from me. He looked at the wrist very closely, and then ran his fingers up and down, gently, from the back of her hand to the middle of her forearm, feeling the swelling. He asked, “Do you have a hypothesis?”

I said, “I think she was tied up tight. Wrists and ankles. The bindings started to bruise her, but she didn’t live long enough for the bruises to develop very much. But they definitely started. A little blood leaked into her tissues, and it stayed there when the rest of it drained out. Which is why we’re seeing compression injuries as raised welts.”

“Tied up with what?”

“Not ropes,” I said. “Maybe belts or straps. Something wide and flat. Maybe silk scarves. Something padded, perhaps. To disguise what had been done.”

Merriam said nothing. He moved past me to the end of the table and looked at Chapman’s ankles. He said, “She was wearing pantyhose when she was brought in. The nylon was undamaged. Not torn or laddered at all.”

“Because of the padding. Maybe it was foam rubber. Something like that. But she was tied up.”

Merriam was quiet for another moment.

Then he said, “Not impossible.”

I asked, “How plausible?”

“Postmortem examination has its limits, you know. You’d need an eyewitness to be certain.”

“How do you explain the complete exsanguination?”

“She could have been a hemophiliac.”

“Suppose she wasn’t?”

“Then gravity would be the only explanation. She was hung upside down.”

“By belts or straps, or ropes over some kind of padding?”

“Not impossible,” Merriam said again. “Turn her over,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to see the gravel rash.”

“You’ll have to help me,” he said, so I did.

Chapter

19

The human body is a self-healing machine, and it doesn’t waste time. Skin is crushed or split or cut, and blood immediately rushes to the site, the red cells scabbing and knitting a fibrous matrix to bind the parted edges together, the white cells seeking out and destroying germs and pathogens below. The process is underway within minutes, and it lasts as many hours or days as are necessary to return the skin to its previous unbroken integrity. The process causes a bell curve of inflammation, peaking as the suffusion of blood peaks, and as the scab grows thickest, and as the fight against infection reaches its most intense state.

The small of Janice May Chapman’s back was peppered with tiny cuts, as was the whole of her butt, and as were her upper arms just above her elbows. The cuts were small, thinly scabbed incisions, all surrounded by small areas of crushing, which were colorless due to her bloodlessness. The cuts were all inflicted in random directions, as if by loose and rolling items of similar size and nature, small and hard and neither razor-sharp nor completely blunt.

Classic gravel rash.

I looked at Merriam and asked, “How old do you think these injuries are?”

He said, “I have no idea.”

“Come on, doctor,” I said. “You’ve treated cuts and grazes before. Or have you? What were you before? A psychiatrist?”

“I was a pediatrician,” he said. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. None at all. Not in this area of medicine.”

“Kids get cuts and grazes all the time. You must have seen hundreds.”

“This is a serious business. I can’t risk unsupported guesses.”

“Try educated guesses.”

“Four hours,” he said.

I nodded. I figured four hours was about right, judging by the scabs, which were more than nascent, but not yet fully mature. They had been developing steadily, and then their development had stopped abruptly when the throat was cut and the heart had stopped and the brain had died and all metabolism had ceased.

I asked, “Did you determine the time of death?”

Merriam said, “That’s very hard to know. Impossible, really. The exsanguination interferes with normal biological processes.”

“Best guess?”

“Some hours before she was brought to me.”

“How many hours?”

“More than four.”

“That’s obvious from the gravel rash. How many more than four?”

“I don’t know. Fewer than twenty-four. That’s the best I can do.”

I said, “No other injuries. No bruising. No sign of a defensive struggle.”

Merriam said, “I agree.”

Deveraux said, “Maybe she didn’t fight. Maybe she had a gun to her head. Or a knife to her throat.”

“Maybe,” I said. I looked at Merriam again and asked, “Did you do a vaginal examination?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“I judged she had had recent sexual intercourse.”

“Any bruising or tearing in that area?”

“None visible.”

“Then why did you conclude she was raped?”

“You think it was consensual? Would you lie down on gravel to make love?”

“I might,” I said. “Depending on who I was with.”

“She had a home,” Merriam said. “With a bed in it. And a car, with a back seat. Any putative boyfriend would have a home and a car, too. And there’s a hotel here in town. And there are other towns, with other hotels. No one needs to conduct a tryst outdoors.”

“Especially not in March,” Deveraux said.

The small room went quiet, and it stayed quiet until Merriam asked, “Are we done here?”

“We’re done,” Deveraux said.

“Well, good luck, chief,” Merriam said. “I hope this one turns out better than the last two.”

Deveraux and I walked down the doctor’s driveway, past the mailbox, past the shingle, to the sidewalk, where we stood next to Deveraux’s car. I knew she was not going to give me a ride. This was not a democracy. Not yet. I said, “Did you ever see a rape victim with intact pantyhose?”

“You think that’s significant?”

“Of course it is. She was attacked on gravel. Her pantyhose should have been shredded.”

“Maybe she was forced to undress first. Slowly and carefully.”

“The gravel rash had edges. She was wearing something. Pulled up, pulled down, whatever, but she was partially clothed. And then she changed afterward. Which is possible. She had four hours.”

“Don’t go there,” Deveraux said.

“Go where?”

“You’re trying to plead the army down to rape only. You’re going to say she was killed by someone else, separately, later.”

I said nothing.

“And that dog won’t hunt,” Deveraux said. “You stumble into someone and get raped, and then within the next four hours you stumble into someone else completely different and get your throat cut? That’s a really bad day, isn’t it? That’s the worst day ever. It’s too coincidental. No, it was the same guy. But he had himself an all-day session. He took hours. He had plans and equipment. He had access to her clothes. He made her change. This was all highly premeditated.”

“Possible,” I said.

“They teach effective tactical planning in the army. So they claim, anyway.”

“True,” I said. “But they don’t give you all day off very often. Not in a training environment. Not usually.”

Deveraux said, “But Kelham is not just about training, is it? Not from what I’ve been able to piece together. There are a couple of rifle companies there. In and out on rotation. And they get leave when they come back. Days off. Plenty of them. All in a row. One after the other.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux said, “You should call your CO. Tell him it’s looking bad.”

I said, “He already knows. That’s why I’m here.”

She paused a long moment and said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

“Like what?”

“Go look at the car wreck again. See if you can find a license plate or identify the vehicle. Pellegrino got nowhere with it.”

“Why would you trust me?”

“Because you’re the son of a Marine. And because you know if you conceal or destroy evidence I’ll put you in jail.”

I asked, “What did Merriam mean, when he wished you better luck with this one than the other two?”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “The other two what?”

She paused a beat and her beautiful face fell a little and she said, “Two girls were killed last year. Same MO. Throats cut. I got nowhere with them. They’re cold cases now. Janice May Chapman is the third in nine months.”

Chapter

20

Elizabeth Deveraux said nothing more. She just climbed into her Caprice and drove away. She pulled a wide U-turn in front of me and headed north, back to town. I lost sight of her after the first curve. I stood still for a long moment and then set off walking. Ten minutes later I was through the last of the rural meanders and the road widened and straightened in front of me. Main Street, in fact as well as name. Some daytime activity was starting up. The stores were opening. I saw two cars and two pedestrians. But that was all. Carter Crossing was no kind of a bustling metropolis. That was for damn sure.

I walked on the right-hand sidewalk and passed the hardware store, and the pharmacy, and the hotel, and the diner, and the empty space next to it. Deveraux’s car was not parked in the Sheriff’s Department lot. No police vehicles were. There were two civilian pick-up trucks there, both of them old and battered and modest. The desk clerk and the dispatcher, presumably. Locally recruited, no union, no benefits. I thought again about my friend Stan Lowrey and his want ads. He would aim higher, I guessed. He would have to. He had girlfriends. Plural. He had mouths to feed.

I made it to the T-junction and turned right. In the daylight the road speared dead straight ahead of me. Narrow shoulders, deep ditches. The traffic lanes banked up and over the rail crossing and then the shoulders and the ditches resumed and the road ran onward through the trees.

There was a truck parked my side of the crossing. Facing me. A big, blunt-nosed thing. Brush-painted in a dark color. Two guys in it. Staring at me. Fur, ink, hair, dirt, grease.

My two pals, from the night before.

I walked on, not fast, not slow, just strolling. I got within about twenty yards. Close enough for me to see detail in their faces. Close enough for them to see detail in mine.

This time they got out of their truck. The doors opened as one and they climbed out and down. They skirted the hood and stood together in front of the grille. Same height, same build. Like cousins. They were each about six-two and around two hundred or two hundred and ten pounds. They had long knotted arms and big hands. Work boots on their feet.

I walked on. I stopped ten feet away. I could smell them from there. Beer, cigarettes, rancid sweat, dirty clothes.

The guy on my right said, “Hello again, soldier boy.”

He was the alpha dog. Both times he had been driving, and both times he was the first to speak. Unless the other guy was some kind of a silent mastermind, which seemed unlikely.

I said nothing, of course.

The guy asked, “Where are you going?”

I didn’t answer.

The guy said, “You’re going to Kelham. I mean, where the hell else does this road go?”

He turned and swept his arm through an extravagant gesture, indicating the road, and its relentless straightness, and its lack of alternative destinations. He turned back and said, “Last night you told us you weren’t from Kelham. You lied to us.”

I said, “Maybe I live on that side of town.”

“No,” the guy said. “If you’d tried living on that side of town, we’d have visited you before.”

“For what purpose?”

“To explain the facts of life. Different places are for different folks.” He came a little closer. His buddy came with him. The smell grew stronger.

I said, “You guys need to take a bath. Not necessarily together.”

The guy on my right asked, “What have you been doing this morning?”

I said, “You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, we do.”

“No, you really don’t.”

“You’re not welcome here. Not anymore. None of you.”

“It’s a free country,” I said.

“Not for people like you.” Then he paused, and his gaze suddenly shifted and focused into the far distance over my shoulder. The oldest trick in the book. Except this time he wasn’t faking. I didn’t turn, but I heard a car on the road behind me. Far away. A big car, quiet, with wide highway tires. Not a cop car, because no recognition dawned in the guy’s eyes. No familiarity. It was a car he hadn’t seen before. A car he couldn’t explain.

I waited and it swept past us. It was going fast. It was a black town car. Urban. Dark windows. It thumped up the rise, pattered across the tracks, and thumped back down again. Then it kept on going straight. A minute later it was tiny in the haze. Effectively lost to sight.

An official visitor, heading to Kelham. Rank and prestige.

Or panic.

The guy on my right said, “You need to get back on the base. And then stay there.”

I said nothing.

“But first you need to tell us what you’ve been doing. And who you’ve been seeing. Maybe we should go check she’s still alive.”

I said, “I’m not from Kelham.”

The guy took a step forward.

He said, “Liar.”

I took a breath and made like I was going to speak. Then I head-butted the guy full in the face. No warning. I just braced my feet and snapped forward from the waist and crashed my forehead into his nose. Bang. It was perfectly done. Timing, force, impact. It was all there in full measure. Plus surprise. No one expects a head butt. Humans don’t hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.

The guy went down like an empty suit. His brain told his knees it was out of business and he folded up and fell over backward. He was unconscious before he hit the floor. I could tell by the way the back of his head hit the road. No attempt to soften the blow. It just smacked down with a thud. Maybe he added some fractures in back, to match the ones I had given him in front. His nose was bleeding badly. It was already starting to swell. The human body is a self-healing machine, and it doesn’t waste time.

The other guy just stood there. The silent mastermind. Or the beta dog. He was staring at me. I took a long step to my left and head-butted him too. Bang. Like a double bluff. He was completely unprepared. He was expecting a fist. He went down in the same kind of heap. I left him there, on his back, six feet from his buddy. I would have taken their truck, to save myself some time and effort, but I couldn’t stand the stink in the cab. So I walked on, to the railroad track, where I turned left on the ties and headed north.

I came off the track a little earlier than I had the night before and traced the wreck’s debris field from its very beginning. The smaller and lighter pieces had traveled shorter distances. Less momentum, I supposed. Less kinetic energy. Or more air resistance. Or something. But the smaller beads of glass and the smaller flakes of metal were the first to be found. They had stalled and fluttered and fallen to earth and come to rest well before the heavier items, which had barreled onward.

It had been a fairly old car. The collision had exploded it, like a diagram, but some parts hadn’t put up much of a fight. There were squares and flakes of rust, from the underbody. They were layered and scaly and caked with dirt.

An old car, with significant time spent in cold climates where they salt the roads in winter. Not a Mississippi native. A car that had been hauled from pillar to post, six months here, six months there, regularly, unpredictably.

A soldier’s car, probably.

I walked on and turned and tried to gauge the general vector. Debris had sprayed through a fan shape, narrow at first, widening later. I pictured a license plate, a small rectangle of thin featherweight alloy, bursting free of its bolts, sailing through the nighttime air, stalling, falling, maybe end over end. I tried to figure out where it might have landed. I couldn’t see it anywhere, not inside the fan shape, not on its edges, not beyond its edges. Then I remembered the howling gale that had accompanied the train, and I widened my area of search. I pictured the plate caught in a miniature tornado, whipping and spiraling through the roiled air, going high, maybe even going backward.

In the end I found it still attached to the chrome bumper I had seen the night before. The bumper had folded up just left of the plate, and made a point, which had half buried itself in the scrub. Like a spear. I rocked it loose and pulled it out and turned it over and saw the plate hanging from a single black bolt.

It was an Oregon plate. It featured a drawing of a salmon behind the number. Some kind of a wildlife initiative. Protect the natural environment. The tags were current and up to date. I memorized the number and reburied the bent bumper in its hole. Then I walked on, to where the bulk of the wreck had burned against the trees.

By bright daylight I agreed with Pellegrino. The car had been blue, a light powdery shade like a winter sky. Maybe it had started life that way, or maybe it had faded a little with age. But either way I found enough unblemished paint to be sure. There was an intact patch inside what had been the glove box. There was an overspray stripe under melted plastic trim inside one of the doors. Not much else had survived. No personal items. No paperwork of any kind. No discarded material. No hairs, no fibers. No ropes, no belts, no straps, no knives.

I wiped my hands on my pants and walked back the way I had come. The two guys and their truck had gone. I guessed the silent mastermind had woken up first. The beta dog. I had hit him less hard. I guessed he had hauled his buddy into the truck and taken off, slow and shaky. No harm done. No major harm, anyway. Nothing permanent. For him, at least. The other one would have a headache, for six months or so.

I stood on the spot where they had gone down and saw another black car coming toward me from the west. Another town car, fast and purposeful, wallowing and wandering a little on the uneven road. It had a good wax shine and black window glass. It blew past me at speed, thumped up, pattered over the rail line, thumped down again, and rushed onward toward Kelham. I turned and watched it, and then I turned back and started walking again. No particular place to go, except I was hungry by that point, so I headed for Main Street and the diner. The place was empty. I was the only customer. The same waitress was on duty. She met me at the hostess station and asked, “Is your name Jack Reacher?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am, it is.”

She said, “There was a woman in here an hour ago, looking for you.”

Chapter

21

The waitress was a typical eyewitness. She was completely unable to describe the woman who had been looking for me. Tall, short, heavy, slender, old, young, she had no reliable recollection. She hadn’t gotten a name. She had formed no impression of the woman’s status or profession or her relationship to me. She hadn’t seen a car or any other mode of transportation. All she could remember was a smile and the question. Was there a new guy in town, very big, very tall, answering to the name Jack Reacher?

I thanked her for the information and she sat me at my usual table. I ordered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and I asked her for coins for the phone. She opened the register and gave me a wrapped roll of quarters in exchange for a ten dollar bill. She brought my coffee and told me my pie would be right along in a moment. I walked across the silent room to the phone by the door and split the roll with my thumbnail and dialed Garber’s office. He answered the phone himself, instantly.

I asked, “Have you sent another agent down here?”

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“There’s a woman asking for me by name.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who. She hasn’t found me yet.”

“Not one of mine,” Garber said.

“And I saw two cars heading for Kelham. Limousines. DoD or politicians, probably.”

“Is there a difference?”

I asked, “Have you heard anything from Kelham?”

“Nothing about the Department of Defense or politicians,” he said. “I heard that Munro is pursuing something medical.”

“Medical? Like what?”

“I don’t know. Is there a medical dimension here?”

“With a potential perpetrator? Not that I’ve seen. Apart from the gravel rash question I asked before. The victim is covered in it. The perp should have some too.”

“They’ve all got gravel rash. Apparently there’s some crazy running track there. They run till they drop.”

“Even Bravo Company right after they get back?”

“Especially Bravo Company right after they get back. There’s some serious self-image at work there. These are seriously hard men. Or so they like to think.”

“I got the license plate off the wreck. Light blue car, from Oregon.” I recited the number from memory, and I heard him write it down.

He said, “Call me back in ten minutes. Don’t speak to a soul before that. No one, OK? Not a word.”

I ignored the letter of the law by speaking to the waitress. I thanked her for my pie and coffee. She hung around a beat longer than she needed to. She had something on her mind. Turned out she was worried she might have gotten me in trouble by telling a stranger she had seen me. She was prepared to feel guilty about it. I got the impression Carter Crossing was the kind of place where private business stayed private. Where a small slice of the population didn’t want to be found.

I told her not to worry. By that point I was pretty sure who the mystery woman was. A process of elimination. Who else had the information and the imagination to find me?

The pie was good. Blueberries, pastry, sugar, and cream. Nothing healthy. No vegetable matter. It hit the spot. I took the full ten minutes to eat it, a little at a time. I finished my coffee. Then I walked over to the phone again and called Garber back.

He said, “We traced the car.”

I said, “And?”

“And what?”

“Whose is it?”

He said, “I can’t tell you that.”

“Really?”

“Classified information, as of five minutes ago.”

“Bravo Company, right?”

“I can’t tell you that. I can’t confirm or deny. Did you write the number down?”

“No.”

“Where’s the plate?”

“Where I found it.”

“Who have you told?”

“Nobody.”

“You sure?”

“Completely.”

“OK,” Garber said. “Here are your orders. Firstly, do not, repeat, do not give that number to local law enforcement. Not under any circumstances. Secondly, return to the wreck and destroy that plate immediately.”

Chapter

22

I obeyed the first part of Garber’s order, by not immediately rushing around to the Sheriff’s Department and passing on the news. I disobeyed the second part, by not immediately rushing back to the debris field. I just sat in the diner and drank coffee and thought. I wasn’t even sure how to destroy a license plate. Burning it would conceal the state of origin, but not the number itself, which was embossed. In the end I figured I could fold it twice and stamp it flat and bury it.

But I didn’t go do that. I just sat there. I figured if I sat in a diner long enough, drinking coffee, my mystery woman would surely find me.

Which she did, five minutes later.

I saw her before she saw me. I was looking out at a bright street, and she was looking in at a dim room. She was on foot. She was wearing black pants and black leather shoes, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket the color and texture of an old baseball glove. She was carrying a briefcase made of the same kind of material. She was lean and lithe and limber, and she seemed to be moving slower than the rest of the world, like fit strong people always do. Her hair was still dark, still cut short, and her face was still full of fast intelligence and rapid glances. Frances Neagley, First Sergeant, United States Army. We had worked together many times, tough cases and easy, long hauls and short. She was as close to a friend as I had, back in 1997, and I hadn’t seen her in more than a year.

She came in scanning for the waitress, ready to ask for an update. She saw me at my table and changed course immediately. No surprise in her face. Just fast assimilation of new information, and satisfaction that her method had worked. She knew the state and she knew the town, and she knew I drank a lot of coffee, and therefore a diner was where she would find me.

I used my toe and poked the facing chair out, like Deveraux had twice done for me. Neagley sat down, smooth and easy. She put her briefcase on the floor by her feet. No greeting, no salute, no handshake, no peck on the cheek. There were two things people needed to understand about Neagley. Despite her personal warmth she couldn’t bear to be physically touched, and despite her considerable talents she refused to become an officer. She had never given reasons for either thing. Some folks thought she was smart, and some folks thought she was crazy, but all agreed that with Neagley, no one would ever know for sure.

“Ghost town,” she said.

“The base is closed,” I said.

“I know. I’m up to speed. Closing the base was their first mistake. It’s as good as a confession.”

“Story is, they were worried about tension with the town.”

Neagley nodded. “Wouldn’t take much to start some, either way around. I saw the street behind this one. All those stores, lined up like a row of teeth, facing the base? Very predatory. Our people must be sick of getting laughed at and ripped off.”

“Seen anything else?”

“Everything. I’ve been here two hours.”

“How are you, anyway?”

“We have no time for social chit-chat.”

“What do you need?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s you that needs.”

“What do I need?”

“You need to get a damn clue,” she said. “This is a suicide mission, Reacher. Stan Lowrey called me. He’s worried. So I asked around. And Lowrey was right. You should have turned this whole thing down.”

“I’m in the army,” I said. “I go where I’m told.”

“I’m in the army too. But I avoid sticking my head in a noose.”

“Kelham is the noose. Munro is the one risking his neck. I’m on the sidelines here.”

“I don’t know Munro,” she said. “Never met him. Never even heard of him before. But dollars to doughnuts he’ll do what he’s told. He’ll cover it up and swear black is white. But you won’t.”

“A woman was killed. We can’t ignore that.”

“Three women were killed.”

“You know about that already?”

“I told you, I’ve been here two hours. I’m up to speed.”

“How did you find out?”

“I met the sheriff. Chief Deveraux herself.”

“When?”

“She dropped by her office. I happened to be there. I was asking for you.”

“And she told you stuff?”

“I gave her the look.”

“What look?”

Neagley blinked and composed herself and then tilted her face down a little and looked up at me, her eyes on mine, her eyes open wide and serious and frank and sympathetic and understanding and encouraging, her lips parted a fraction as if imminently ready to exhale a murmur of absolute empathy, her whole demeanor astonished and marveling at how bravely I was bearing the many heavy burdens my lot in life had brought me. She said, “This is the look. Works great with women. Kind of conspiratorial, right? Like we’re in the same boat?”

I nodded. It was a hell of a look. But I found myself disappointed that Deveraux had fallen for it. Some damn jarhead she was. I asked, “What else did she tell you?”

“Something about a car. She’s assuming it’s critical to the case and that it belonged to a Kelham guy.”

“She’s right. I just found the plate. Garber ran it and told me to sit on it.”

“And are you going to?”

“I don’t know. Might not be a lawful order.”

“See what I mean? You’re going to commit suicide. I knew it. I’m going to stick around and keep you out of trouble. That’s why I came.”

“Aren’t you deployed?”

“I’m in D.C. At a desk. They won’t miss me for a day or two.”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I don’t need help. I know what I’m doing. I know how the game is played. I won’t sell myself cheap. But I don’t want to bring you down with me. If that’s the way it has to turn out.”

“Nothing has to turn out any which way, Reacher. It’s a choice.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

She made a face. “At least pick your battles.”

“I always do. And this one is as good as any.”

At that point the waitress came out of the kitchen. She saw me, saw Neagley, recognized her from before, saw that we weren’t rolling around on the floor tearing each other’s eyes out, and her earlier guilt evaporated. She refilled my coffee mug. Neagley ordered tea, Lipton’s breakfast blend, water properly boiling. We sat in silence until the order was filled. Then the waitress went away again and Neagley said, “Chief Deveraux is a very beautiful woman.”

I said, “I agree.”

“Have you slept with her yet?”

“Certainly not.”

“Are you going to?”

“I guess I can dream. Hope dies last, right?”

“Don’t. There’s something wrong with her.”

“Like what?”

“She doesn’t care. She’s got three unsolved homicides and her pulse is as slow as a bear in winter.”

“She was a Marine MP. She’s been digging the same ditch we have, all her life. How excited do you get about three dead people?”

“I get professionally excited.”

“She thinks a Kelham guy did it. Therefore she has no jurisdiction. Therefore she has no role. Therefore she can’t get professionally excited.”

“Whatever, there’s a bad vibe there. That’s all I’m saying. Trust me.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I mentioned your name and she looked at me like you owe her money.”

“I don’t.”

“Then she’s crazy about you. I could tell.”

“You say that about every woman I meet.”

“But this time it’s true. I mean it. Her cold little heart was going pitter patter. Be warned, OK?”

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “But I don’t need a big sister on this occasion.”

“Which reminds me,” she said. “Garber is asking about your brother.”

“My brother?”

“Scuttlebutt on the sergeants’ network. Garber has put a watch on your office, for notes or calls from your brother. He wants to know if you’re in regular contact.”

“Why would he?”

“Money,” Neagley said. “That’s all I can think of. Your brother is still at Treasury, right? Maybe there’s a financial issue with Kosovo. Got to be warlords and gangsters over there. Maybe Bravo Company is bringing money home for them. You know, laundering it. Or stealing it.”

“How would that tie in with a woman named Janice May Chapman, from the armpit of Mississippi?”

“Maybe she found out. Maybe she wanted some for herself. Maybe she was a Bravo Company girlfriend.”

I didn’t reply.

“Last chance,” Neagley said. “Do I stay or do I go?”

“Go,” I said. “This is my problem, not yours. Live long and prosper.”

“Parting gift,” she said. She leaned down and opened her briefcase and came out with a slim green file folder. It was printed on the outside with the words Carter County Sheriff’s Department. She laid it on the table and put her hand flat on it, ready to slide it across. She said, “You’ll find this interesting.”

I asked, “What is it?”

“Photographs of the three dead women. They’ve all got something in common.”

“Deveraux gave this to you?”

“Not exactly. She left it unattended.”

“You stole it?”

“Borrowed it. You can return it when you’re done. I’m sure you’ll find a way.” She slid the file across to me, she stood up, and she walked away. No handshake, no kiss, no touch. I watched her push out through the door, watched her turn right on Main Street, and watched her disappear.

The waitress heard the door as Neagley left. Maybe there was a repeater bell in the kitchen. She came out to check if there was a new arrival and saw that there wasn’t. She contented herself with refilling my mug for the second time, and then she went back to the kitchen. I squared the green file in front of me and opened it up.

Three women. Three victims. Three photographs, all taken in the last weeks or months of their lives. Nothing sadder. Cops ask for a recent likeness, and distraught relatives scurry to choose from what they have. Usually they come up with joy and smiles, prom pictures or studio portraits or vacation snapshots, because joy and smiles are what they want to remember. They want the long grim record to start with life and energy.

Janice May Chapman had showed plenty of both. Her photograph was a waist-up color shot taken at what looked like a party. She was half-turned toward the camera, looking directly into the lens, smiling in the first seconds of spontaneity. A well-timed click. The photographer had not caught her unawares, but neither had he made her pose too long.

Pellegrino had been wrong. He had called her real pretty, but that was like calling America fairly big. Real pretty was a serious underestimate. In life Chapman had been absolutely spectacular. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful woman. Hair, eyes, face, smile, shoulders, figure, everything. Janice May Chapman had had it all going on, that was for sure.

I shuffled her to the bottom of the pack and looked at the second woman. She had died in November 1996. Four months ago. A note pasted to the bottom corner of the photograph told me so. The photograph was one of those rushed, semi-formal color portraits like you see from a college service at the start of the academic year, or from a hard-worked hack on a cruise ship. A murky canvas background, a stool, a couple of umbrella flashes, three, two, one, pop, thank you. The woman in the picture was black, probably in her middle twenties, and was every bit as spectacular as Janice May Chapman. Maybe even more so. She had flawless skin and the kind of smile that starts the AC running. She had the kind of eyes that start wars. Dark, liquid, radiant. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking right through it. Right at me. Like she was sitting across the table.

The third woman had died in June 1996. Nine months ago. She was also black. Also young. Also spectacular. Truly spectacular. She had been photographed outside, in a yard, in the shade, with late-afternoon light coming off a white clapboard wall and bathing her in its glow. She had a short natural hairstyle and a white blouse with three buttons undone. She had liquid eyes and a shy smile. She had magnificent cheekbones. I just stared. If some white-coated lab guy had fed an IBM supercomputer with all we had ever known about beauty, from Cleopatra to the present day, the circuits would have hummed for an hour and then printed this exact image.

I moved my mug and laid all three pictures side by side on the table. They’ve all got something in common, Neagley had said. They were all roughly the same age. Two or three years might have covered them all. But Chapman was white, and the other two were black. Chapman was at least economically comfortable, judging by her dress and her jewelry, and the first black woman looked less so, and the second looked close to marginal, in a rural way, judging by her clothes and her unadorned neck and ears, and by the yard she was sitting in.

Three lives, lived in close geographic proximity, but separated by vast gulfs. They may never have met or spoken. They may never have even laid eyes on each other. They had absolutely nothing in common.

Except that all three were amazingly beautiful.

Chapter

23

I repacked the file and tucked it in the back of my pants under my shirt. I paid my bill and left a tip and walked out to the street. I figured I would walk up to the Sheriff’s Department. I figured it was time for some reconnaissance. Time for an initial foray. Time for an exploratory penetration. A toe in the water. Not a democracy, but it was a public building. And I had a legitimate reason to be there. I had lost property to return. I figured if Deveraux was out, I could leave the file with the desk clerk. And if Deveraux was in, I could play it by ear.

She was in.

Her old Caprice was in the lot, slotted neatly in the parking bay closest to the door. A privilege of rank, presumably. Office cultures all work the same way. I walked past it and hauled open a heavy glass door and found myself in a dowdy, beat-up lobby. Plastic tile on the floor, scarred paint on the walls, and an inquiry desk facing me, with an old guy behind it. He had no hair and a toothless, caved-in face, and he was wearing a suit vest with no coat, like an old-time newspaperman. As soon as he saw me he picked up a phone and hit a button and said, “He’s here.” He listened to a reply and then he pointed with the phone, using it like a baton, stretching its cord, and he said, “End of the corridor on the right. She’s expecting you.”

I walked the corridor and got a glimpse through a half-closed door of a stout woman at a telephone switchboard, and then I arrived at Deveraux’s billet. Her door was open. I knocked on it once as a courtesy and went in.

It was a plain square space in no better condition than the lobby. Same tile, same battered paint, same grime. It was full of stuff bought cheap at the end of the last geological era. Desk, chairs, file cabinets, all plain and municipal and well out of date. There were grip-and-grin pictures on the wall, of an old guy in uniform that I took to be Deveraux’s father, the previous incumbent. There was a stand-up hat rack with an old cardigan sweater on one of the pegs. It had hung there so long it looked crusted and rigid with age.

At first glance, not a wonderful room.

But it had Deveraux in it. I had pictures of three stunning women digging into my back, but she held her own with any of them. She was right up there. Maybe she even beat them all. A very beautiful woman, Neagley had said, and I was glad my subjectivity had been confirmed by someone else’s objectivity. She looked small in the desk chair, slender in the shoulders, lithe and relaxed. As usual, she was smiling.

She asked, “Did you ID the car for me?”

I didn’t answer that question, and her phone rang. She picked it up and listened for a moment, and then she said, “OK, but it’s still a felony assault. Keep it on the front burner, OK?” Then she put the phone down and said, “Pellegrino,” by way of explanation.

I said, “Busy day?”

“Two guys were beaten up this morning by someone they swear was a soldier from Kelham. But the army says the base is still closed. I don’t know what’s going on. The doctor is working overtime. Concussions, he says. But it’s my budget that’s going to be concussed.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux smiled again and said, “Anyway, first of all, tell me about your friend.”

“My friend?”

“I met her. Frances Neagley. I’m guessing she’s your sergeant. She was very army.”

“She was my sergeant once. Many years, on and off.”

“I’m wondering why she came.”

“Maybe I asked her to come.”

“No, in that case she’d have known where and when to meet you. It would have been prearranged. She wouldn’t have had to ask all over town.”

I nodded. “She came to warn me. Apparently I’m in a lose-lose situation. She called it a suicide mission.”

“She’s right,” Deveraux said. “She’s a smart woman. I liked her. She was good. She does this thing with her face. Like a special look, all collegial and confiding. I bet she’s a great interrogator. Did she give you the photographs?”

“You meant her to take them?”

“I hoped she would. I left them accessible, and ducked out for a minute.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated,” Deveraux said. “I wanted you to see them, alone and on your own time. Like a controlled experiment. No pressure from me, and especially no influence from me. No context. I wanted a completely unguarded first impression.”

“From me?”

“Yes.”

“Is this a democracy now?”

“Not yet. But any port in a storm, as they say.”

“OK,” I said.

“So what was it? Your first impression?”

“All three of them were amazingly beautiful.”

“Is that all they had in common?”

“I imagine so. Apart from all being women.”

Deveraux nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I agree. They were all amazingly beautiful. I’m very glad to have confirmation from an independent point of view. It was a hard thing for me to articulate, even to myself. And I’d certainly avoid saying it out loud. It would sound very weird, like some gay thing.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“I live in Mississippi,” she said. “I was in the Marine Corps and I’m not married.”

“OK,” I said.

“And I’m not currently dating.”

“OK,” I said.

“I’m not gay,” she said.

“Understood.”

“But even so, for a woman cop to be seen obsessing over a female victim’s looks never goes down well.”

“Understood,” I said again. I leaned forward to let my back clear the chair, and I pulled the file out of my waistband. I laid it on the desk.

“Mission accomplished,” I said. “Nice moves, by the way. Not many people beat Neagley in a mind game.”

“Takes one to know one,” she said. She slid the file closer and ran her palm over it, left and right, and her hand came to rest at one end, and she kept it there. Maybe where it was warm from the small of my back.

She asked, “Did you ID the car?”

Chapter

24

She kept her palm pressed on the file folder, and looked straight at me. Her question hung in the air between us. Did you ID the car? In my head I heard Garber’s emphatic squawk in my ear, on the phone in the diner: Do not, repeat, do not give that number to local law enforcement.

My commanding officer.

Orders are orders.

Deveraux said, “Did you?”

I said, “Yes.”

“And?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both. Classified information, as of five minutes after I called it in.”

She didn’t respond.

I said, “Well, what would you do in this situation?”

“Now?”

“Not now. Then. When you were in the Corps.”

“As a Marine I would have done exactly what you’re doing.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

She nodded. She kept her hand on the file. She said, “I didn’t tell you the truth before. Not the whole truth, anyway. About my father’s house. It wasn’t always rented. He owned it, from when he was married. But when my mother got sick, they found out they didn’t have insurance. They were supposed to. It was supposed to come with the job. But the county guy who was responsible had run into trouble and had been stealing the premiums. Just a two-year hiatus, but that happened to be when my mother got sick. After that, it was a pre-existing condition. My father refinanced, things got worse, and he defaulted. The bank took the title, but they let him live there as a renter. I admired both parties. The bank did the right thing, as far as it could, and my daddy kept on serving his community, even though it had kicked him in the teeth. Honor and obligation are things I appreciate.”

“Semper Fi,” I said.

“You bet your ass. And you answered my question anyway, as I’m sure you intended. If the ID is classified, then it’s a Kelham car. That’s all I really need to know.”

“Only if there’s a connection,” I said. “Between the car and the homicide.”

“Unlikely to be a coincidence.”

I said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“Me too. He was a nice man, and he deserved better.”

I said, “It was me who beat on those civilians.”

Deveraux said, “Really? How on earth did you get there?”

“I walked.”

“You can’t have. You didn’t have time, surely. It’s more than twelve miles. Almost past Kelham’s northern limit. Practically in Tennessee.”

“What happened there?”

“Two guys were out doing something. Maybe just taking a walk. They could see the woods around Kelham’s fence, but they weren’t particularly close to it. A guy came out of the woods, the two hikers got rousted, it turned bad, they got hit. They claim the guy that hit them was a soldier.”

“Was he in uniform?”

“No. But he had the look, and he had an M16 rifle.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“I know. It’s like they’re establishing a quarantine zone.”

“Why would they? They’ve already got about a million acres all to themselves.”

“I don’t know why. But what else are they doing? They’re chasing anyone that gets anywhere near the fence.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux said, “Wait. Who did you beat on?”

“Two guys in a pick-up truck. They harassed me last night, they harassed me again this morning. Once too often.”

“Description?”

“Dirt, grease, hair, and tattoos.”

“In an old black truck painted with a housepainter’s brush?”

“Yes.”

“Those are the McKinney cousins. In an ideal world they should be beat on at least once a week, regular as clockwork. So I thank you for your full and frank confession, but I propose to take no action at this time.”

“But?”

“Don’t do it again. And watch your back. I’m sure that right now they’re planning to get the whole family together and come looking for you.”

“There are more of them?”

“There are dozens of McKinneys. But don’t worry. Not yet, at least. It will take time for them to assemble. None of them has a phone. None of them knows how to use a phone.”

And at that point phones started ringing all throughout the building. And I heard urgent radio chatter from the dispatcher’s hutch, where the stout woman sat. Ten seconds later she appeared in the doorway, out of breath, holding both jambs to steady herself, and she said, “Pellegrino is calling in from near the Clancy place. Near the split oak. He says we got ourselves another homicide.”

Chapter

25

Both Deveraux and I glanced instinctively at the file folder on her desk. Three photographs. Soon to be four. Another sad visit to grieving relatives. Another request for a good recent likeness. The worst part of the job.

Then Deveraux glanced at me, and hesitated. Not a democracy. I said, “You owe it to me. I need to see this. I need to know what I’m committing suicide over.”

She hesitated another second, and then she said, “OK,” and we ran for her car.

The Clancy place turned out to be more than ten miles north and east of the town. We crossed the silent railroad and headed toward Kelham for a mile, deep into the hidden half of Carter Crossing. The wrong side of the tracks. Over there the road had no shoulders and no ditches. I guessed the ditches had silted up and the shoulders had been plowed. Flat fields full of dirt came right up to the edge of the blacktop. I saw old frame houses standing in yards, and low barns, and swaybacked sheds, and tumbledown shacks. I saw old women on porches and raggedy kids on bikes. I saw old trucks moving slow and a solitary shopper with a straw hat and a straw basket. Every face I saw was black. Different places are for different folks, the McKinney cousins had told me. Rural Mississippi, in 1997.

Then Deveraux turned due north on a washboard two-lane and left the dwellings behind us. She hit the gas. The car responded. The Chevy Caprice was every working cop’s favorite car for a reason. It was a perfect what if proposition. What if we took a roomy sedan and put a Corvette motor in it? What if we beefed up the suspension a little? What if we used four disc brakes? What if we gave it a top speed of 130 miles an hour? Deveraux’s example was well used and worn, but it still motored along. The rough surface pattered under the tires, and the body wallowed and shuddered, but we got where we were going pretty fast.

Where we were going turned out to be a large hardscrabble acreage with a battered house in its center. We turned in and used a two-rut driveway that became a plain farm track as it passed the house. Deveraux blipped her siren once as a courtesy. I saw an answering wave from a window. An old man. A black face. We headed onward across flat barren land. Way far in the distance I could see a lone tree, chopped vertically by lightning down two-thirds of its height. Each half was leaning away from the other in a dramatic Y shape. Both halves were dusted with pale green springtime leaves. The split oak, I assumed. Still alive and in business. Still enduring. Near it was parked a police cruiser, right out on the dirt. Pellegrino’s, I assumed.

Deveraux put her car next to his and we got out. Pellegrino himself was fifty yards away, just standing there, at ease, facing us, with his hands clasped behind his back.

Like a sentry.

Ten yards farther on was a shape on the ground.

We hiked across the fifty yards of dirt. There were turkey vultures in the air, three of them, looping lazily high above us, just waiting for us to be gone. Far to my right I could see a line of trees, thick in parts, and thin in others. Through the thin parts I could see a wire fence. Kelham’s northwestern boundary, I guessed. The left shoulder of whatever vast acreage the DoD had requisitioned fifty years before. And a small portion of what some well-connected fencing contractor had been overpaid to install.

Halfway to Pellegrino I could see some details in the shape behind him. A back, facing toward me. A short brown jacket. A suggestion of dark hair and white skin. The empty slump of a corpse. The absolute stillness of the recently dead. The impossible relaxation. Unmistakable.

Deveraux did not pause for a verbal report. She walked straight past Pellegrino and kept on going. She looped around wide and approached the collapsed shape from the far side. I stopped five yards short and hung back. Her case. Not a democracy.

She shuffled closer to the shape, slowly and carefully, watching where she was putting her feet. She got close enough to touch and squatted down with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped together. She looked right to left, at the head, the torso, the arms, the legs. Then she looked left to right, the same sequence all over again, but in reverse.

Then she looked up and said, “What the hell is this?”

Chapter

26

I followed the same long loop Deveraux had used and tiptoed in from the north side. I squatted down next to her. I put my elbows on my knees. I clasped my hands together.

I looked, right to left, and then left to right.

The corpse was male.

And white.

Forty-five years old, maybe a little less, maybe a little more.

Maybe five-ten, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair, going mousy. Two or three days’ stubble, going white. A green work shirt, a brown canvas windbreaker jacket. Blue jeans. Brown engineer boots, creased and cracked and starved of polish and caked with dirt.

I asked Deveraux, “Do you know him?”

She said, “I never saw him before.”

He had bled to death. He had taken what I guessed was a high-velocity rifle round through the meat of his right thigh. His pants were soaked with blood. Almost certainly the round had torn his femoral artery. The femoral artery is a high-capacity vessel. Absolutely crucial. Any significant breach will be fatal within minutes, absent prompt and effective emergency treatment.

But what was extraordinary about the scene in front of us was that prompt and effective emergency treatment had been attempted. The guy’s pants leg had been slit with a knife. The wound was partially covered with an absorbent bandage pad.

The absorbent bandage pad was a general-issue military field dressing.

Deveraux stood up and backed away, short mincing tiptoe steps, her eyes on the corpse, until she got ten or twelve feet away. I did the same thing and joined her. She talked low, as if noise was disrespectful. As if the corpse could hear us. She asked, “What do you make of that?”

“There was a dispute,” I said. “A shot was fired. Probably a warning shot that went astray. Or a giddy-up shot that came too close.”

“Why not a killing shot that missed?”

“Because the shooter would have tried again right away. He would have stepped in closer and put one through the guy’s head. But he didn’t do that. He tried to help the guy instead.”

“And?”

“And he saw that he was failing in his attempt. So he panicked and ran away. He left the guy to die. Won’t have taken long.”

“The shooter was a soldier.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Who else carries GI field dressings?”

“Anyone who shops at surplus stores.”

Deveraux turned around. Turned her back on the corpse. She raised her arm and pointed at the horizon on our right. A short sweep of her arm.

She asked, “What do you see?”

I said, “Kelham’s perimeter.”

“I told you,” she said. “They’re enforcing a quarantine zone.”

Deveraux headed back to her car for something and I stood still and looked at the ground around my feet. The earth was soft and there were plenty of footprints. The dead guy’s looped and staggered, some of them backward like an old-fashioned dance chart. Their curving sequence ended where he lay. All around the lower half of his body were toe marks and round depressions from knees, where his assailant had first squatted and then knelt to work on him. Those marks were at the head of a long straight line of partial prints, mostly toe, not much heel, all widely spaced. The shooter had run in fast. A reasonably tall person. Not a giant. Not especially heavy. There were identical prints facing the other way, where the shooter had run away again. I didn’t recognize the tread patterns. They were unlike any army boot I had ever seen.

Deveraux came back from her car with a camera. It was a silver SLR. She got ready to take her crime-scene pictures and I followed the line of panicked running prints away from the area. I kept them three feet to my right and tracked them a hundred yards, and then they petered out on a broad vein of bone-hard dirt. Some kind of a geological issue, or an irrigation thing, or I had reached the limit of what old man Clancy liked to plow. I saw no reason why a fleeing man would change direction at that point, so I kept on going straight, hoping to pick up the prints again, but I didn’t. Within fifty yards the ground became matted with low wiry weeds of some description. Ahead of me they grew a little taller, and then they shaded into the brush that had grown up at the base of Kelham’s fence. I saw no bruised stalks, but it was tough vegetation and I wouldn’t have expected it to show much damage.

I turned back and took a step and saw a glint of light twelve feet to my right. Metallic. Brassy. I detoured and bent down and saw a cartridge case lying on the dirt. Bright and fresh. New. Long, from a rifle. Best case, it was a .223 Remington, made for a sporting gun. Worst case, it was a 5.56 millimeter NATO round, made for the military. Hard to tell the difference, with the naked eye. The Remington case has thinner brass. The NATO case is heavier.

I picked it up and weighed it in my palm.

Dollars to doughnuts, it was a military round.

I looked ahead at Deveraux and Pellegrino and the dead guy in the distance. They were about a hundred and forty yards away. Practically touching distance, for a rifleman. The 5.56 NATO round was designed to penetrate one side of a steel helmet at six hundred meters, which works out to about six hundred and fifty yards. The dead guy was more than four times closer than that. An easy shot. Hard to miss, which was my only real consolation. The kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham for finishing school isn’t the kind of guy that misplaces a round at point-blank range. Yet this was clearly an unintentional hit. The bandage proved it. It was a warning shot gone wrong. Or a giddy-up shot. But the kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham has worked out his testosterone issues long ago. He puts his warning shots high and wide. And his giddy-up shots. All the subject needs is to see the muzzle flash and hear the noise of the gun. That’s all the situation requires. And no soldier does more than he has to. No soldier ever has, since Alexander the Great first put his army together. Initiative in the ranks usually ends in tears. Especially where live ammunition is involved. And civilians.

I put the brass in my pocket and hiked back. I saw nothing else of significance. Deveraux had snapped a whole roll of film, and she rewound it and took it out of her camera and sent Pellegrino back to the pharmacy to get it printed. She told him to ask for rush service, and then she told him to bring the doctor back with him, with the mortuary wagon. He departed on cue and Deveraux and I were left standing together in a thousand acres of emptiness, with nothing for company except a corpse and a blasted tree.

I asked, “Did anyone hear a shot?”

She said, “Mr. Clancy is the only one who could. Pellegrino talked to him already. He claims not to have heard anything.”

“Any yelling? A warning shot presupposes some yelling first.”

“If he didn’t hear a shot, he wouldn’t have heard yelling.”

“A single NATO round far away and outdoors isn’t necessarily loud. The yelling could have been louder. Especially if it was two-way yelling, which it might have been, back and forth. You know, if there was a dispute or an argument.”

“You accept it was a NATO round now?”

I put my hand in my pocket and came out with the shell case. I held it in my open palm. I said, “I found it a hundred and forty yards out, twelve feet off the straight vector. Exactly where an M16 ejection port would have put it.”

Deveraux said, “It could be a Remington .223,” which was kind of her. Then she took it from me. Her nails felt sharp on the skin of my palm. It was the first time we had touched. The first physical contact. We hadn’t shaken hands when we met.

She did what I had done. She weighed the brass in her palm. Unscientific, but long familiarity can be as accurate as a laboratory instrument. She said, “NATO for sure. I’ve fired a lot of these, and picked them up afterward.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I’m going to raise hell,” she said. “Soldiers against civilians, on American soil? I’ll go all the way to the Pentagon. The White House, if I have to.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why the hell not?”

“You’re a country sheriff. They’ll crush you like a bug.”

She said nothing.

“Believe me,” I said. “If they’ve gotten as far as deploying soldiers against civilians, they’ve gotten as far as working out ways to beat local law enforcement.”

Chapter

27

The guy was finally pronounced dead thirty minutes later, at one o’clock in the afternoon, when the doctor showed up with Pellegrino. Pellegrino was in his cruiser and the doctor was in a fifth-hand meat wagon that looked like something out of a history book. I guessed it was a riff on a 1960s hearse, but built on a Chevrolet platform, not Cadillac, and devoid of viewing windows or other funereal hoo-hah of any kind. It was like a half-height panel van, painted dirty white.

Merriam checked pulse and heartbeat and poked around the wound for a minute. He said, “This man bled out through his femoral artery. Death by gunshot.” Which was obvious, but then he added something interesting. He teased up the slit edge of the guy’s pants leg and said, “Wet denim is not easy to cut. Someone used a very sharp knife.”

I helped Merriam put the guy on a canvas gurney, and then we loaded him in the back of the truck. Merriam drove him away, and Deveraux spent five minutes on the radio in her car. I stood around with Pellegrino. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Then Deveraux got out of her car again and sent him about his business. He drove away, and Deveraux and I were alone once more, except for the blasted tree and a patch of dark tone on the ground, where the dead guy’s blood had soaked into the soil.

Deveraux said, “Butler claims no one came out of Kelham’s main gate at any time this morning.”

I said, “Who’s Butler?”

“My other deputy. Pellegrino’s opposite number. I’ve had him stationed outside the base. I wanted a quick warning, in case they cancel the lockdown. There’s going to be all kinds of tension. People are very upset about Chapman.”

“But not about the first two?”

“Depends who you ask, and where. But the soldiers never stop short of the tracks. The bars are all on the other side.”

I said nothing.

She said, “There must be more gates. Or holes in the fence. It’s got to be, what? Thirty miles long? And it’s fifty years old. Got to be weak spots. Someone came out somewhere, that’s for sure.”

“And went back in again,” I said. “If you’re right, that is. Someone went back in bloody to the elbows, with a dirty knife, and at least one round short in his magazine.”

“I am right,” she said.

“I never heard of a quarantine zone before,” I said. “Not inside the United States, anyway. I just don’t buy it.”

“I buy it,” she said.

Something in her tone. Something in her face.

I said, “What? Did the Marines do this once?”

“It was no big thing.”

“Tell me all about it.”

“Classified information,” she said.

“Where was it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“When was it?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

I paused a beat and asked, “Have you spoken to Munro yet? The guy they sent to the base?”

She nodded. “He called and left a message when he arrived. First thing. As a courtesy. He gave me a number to reach him.”

“Good,” I said. “Because now I need to speak to him.”

We drove back together, across Clancy’s land, out his gate, south on the washboard two-lane, then west through the black half of town, away from Kelham, toward the railroad. I saw the same old women on the same front porches, and the same kids on the same bikes, and men of various ages moving slow between unknown starting points and unknown destinations. The houses leaned and sagged. There were abandoned work sites. Slabs laid, with no structures built on them. Tangles of rusted rebar. Weedy piles of bricks and sand. All around was flat tilled dirt and trees. There was a kind of hopeless crushed torpor in the air, like there probably had been every day for the last hundred years.

“My people,” Deveraux said. “My base. They all voted for me. I mean it, practically a hundred percent. Because of my father. He was fair to them. They were voting for him, really.”

I asked, “How did you do with the white folks?”

“Close to a hundred percent with them too. But that’s all going to change, on both ends of the deal. Unless I get some answers for all concerned.”

“Tell me about the first two women.”

Her response to that was to brake sharply and twist in her seat and back up twenty yards. Then she nosed into the turning she had just passed. It was a dirt track, well smoothed and well scoured. It had a humped camber and shallow bar ditches left and right. It ran straight north, and was lined on both sides with what might once have been slave shacks. Deveraux passed by the first ten or so, passed by a gap where one had burned out, and then she turned into a yard I recognized from the third photograph I had seen. The poor girl’s house. The unadorned neck and ears. The amazing beauty. I recognized the shade tree she had been sitting under, and the white wall that had reflected the setting sun softly and obliquely into her face.

We parked on a patch of grass and got out. A dog barked somewhere, and its chain rattled. We walked under the limbs of the shade tree and knocked on the back door. The house was small, not much bigger than a cabin, but it was well tended. The white siding was not new, but it had been frequently painted. It was stained auburn at the bottom, the color of hair, where heavy rains had bounced up out of the mud.

The back door was opened by a woman not much older than either Deveraux or me. She was tall and thin and she moved slow, with a kind of sun-beat languor, and with the kind of iron stoicism I imagined all her neighbors shared. She smiled a resigned smile at Deveraux, and shook her hand, and asked her, “Any news about my baby?”

Deveraux said, “We’re still working on it. We’ll get there in the end.”

The bereaved mother was too polite to respond to that. She just smiled her wan smile again and turned to me. She said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

I said, “Jack Reacher, ma’am,” and shook her hand. She said, “I’m Emmeline McClatchy. I’m delighted to meet you, sir. Are you working with the Sheriff’s Department?”

“The army sent me to help.”

“Now they did,” she said. “Not nine months ago.”

I didn’t answer that.

The woman said, “I have some deer meat in the pot. And some tea in the pitcher. Would you two care to join me for lunch?”

Deveraux said, “Emmeline, I’m sure that’s your dinner, not your lunch. We’ll be OK. We’ll eat in town. But thanks anyway.”

It was the answer the woman seemed to have been expecting. She smiled again and backed away into the gloom behind her. We walked back to the car. Deveraux backed out to the street, and we drove away. Further down the row was a shack much like the others, but it had electric beer signs in the windows. A bar of some kind. Maybe music. We threaded through a matrix of dirt streets. I saw another abandoned construction project. Knee-high foundation walls had been built out of cinder blocks, and four vertical wooden posts had been raised at the corners. But that was all. Building materials were scattered around the rest of the lot in untidy piles. There were surplus cinder blocks, there were bricks, there was a pile of sand, there was a stack of bagged cement, gone all smooth and rigid with dew and rain.

There was also a pile of gravel.

I turned and looked at it as we drove past. Maybe two yards of it, the small sharp gray kind they mix with sand and cement to make into concrete. The pile had spread and wandered into a low hump about the size of a double bed, all weedy at the edges. It had pockmarks and divots in its top surface, as if kids had walked on it.

I didn’t say anything. Deveraux’s mind was already made up. She drove on and turned left into a broader street. Bigger houses, bigger yards. Picket fences, not hurricane wire. Cement paths to the doors, not beaten earth. She slowed and then eased to a stop outside a place twice the size of the shack we had just left. A decent one-story house. Expensive, if it had been in California. But shabby. The paint was peeling and the gutters were broken-backed. The roof was asphalt and some of the tiles had slipped. There was a boy in the yard, maybe sixteen years old. He was standing still and doing nothing. Just watching us.

Deveraux said, “This is the other one. Shawna Lindsay was her name. That’s her baby brother right there, staring at us.”

The baby brother was no oil painting. He had lucked out with the genetic lottery. That was for damn sure. He was nothing like his sister. Nothing at all. He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch. He had a head like a bowling ball, and eyes like the finger holes, and about as close together.

I asked, “Are we going in?”

Deveraux shook her head. “Shawna’s mom told me not to come back until I could tell her who slit her first-born’s throat. Those were her words. And I can’t blame her for them. Losing a child is a terrible thing. Especially for people like this. Not that they thought their girls would grow up to be models and buy them a house in Beverly Hills. But to have something truly special meant a lot to them. You know, after having nothing else, ever.”

The boy was still staring. Quiet, baleful, and patient.

“So let’s go,” I said. “I need to use the phone.”

Chapter

28

Deveraux let me use the phone in her office. Not a democracy, not yet, but we were getting there. She found the number Munro had left for her, and she dialed it for me, and she told whoever answered that Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux was on the line for Major Duncan Munro. Then she handed the receiver to me and vacated her chair and the room.

I sat down behind her desk with nothing but dead air in my ear and the remnant of her body heat on my back. I waited. The silence hissed at me. The army did not play hold music. Not back in 1997. Then a minute later there was a plastic click and clatter as a handset was scooped up off a desk, and a voice said, “Sheriff Deveraux? This is Major Munro. How are you?”

The voice was hard, and brisk, and hyper-competent, but it had an undertone of good cheer in it. But then, I figured anyone would be happy to get a call from Elizabeth Deveraux.

I said, “Munro?”

He said, “I’m sorry, I was expecting Elizabeth Deveraux.”

“Well, sadly you didn’t get her,” I said. “My name is Reacher. I’m using the sheriff’s phone right now. I’m with the 396th, currently TDY with the 110th. We’re of equal rank.”

Munro said, “Jack Reacher? I’ve heard of you, of course. How can I help you?”

“Did Garber tell you he was sending an undercover guy to town?”

“No, but I guessed he would. That would be you, right? Tasked to snoop on the locals? Which must be going pretty well, seeing as you’re calling from the sheriff’s phone. Which must be fun, in a way. People here say she’s a real looker. Although they also say she’s a lesbian. You got an opinion on any of that?”

“That stuff is none of your business, Munro.”

“Call me Duncan, OK?”

“No, thanks. I’ll call you Munro.”

“Sure. How can I help you?”

“We’ve got shit happening out here. There was a guy shot to death this morning, close to your fence, northwestern quadrant. Unknown assailant, but probably a military round, and definitely a half-assed attempt to patch the fatal wound with a GI field dressing.”

“What, someone shot a guy and then gave him first aid? Sounds like a civilian accident to me.”

“I hoped you weren’t going to be that predictable. How do you explain the round and the dressing?”

“Remington .223 and a surplus store.”

“And two guys were beat up before that, by someone they swear was a soldier.”

“Not a soldier based at Kelham.”

“Really? How many Kelham personnel can you vouch for? In terms of their exact whereabouts this morning?”

“All of them,” Munro said.

“Literally?”

“Yes, literally,” he said. “We’ve got Alpha Company overseas as of five days ago, and I’ve got everyone else confined to quarters, or else sitting in the mess hall or the officers’ club. There’s a good MP staff here, and they’re watching everyone, while also watching each other. I can guarantee no one left the base this morning. Or since I got here, for that matter.”

“Is that your standard operating procedure?”

“It’s my secret weapon. Sitting down all day, no reading, no television, no nothing. Sooner or later someone talks, out of sheer boredom. Never fails. My arm-breaking days are over. I learned that time is my friend.”

“Tell me again,” I said. “This is very important. You’re absolutely sure no one left the base this morning? Or last night? Not even under secret orders, maybe local, or from Benning, or maybe even from the Pentagon? I’m serious here. And don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

“I’m sure,” Munro said. “I guarantee it. On my mother’s grave. I know how to do this stuff, you know. Give me that, at least.”

“OK,” I said.

Munro asked, “Who was the dead guy?”

“No ID at this time. Civilian, almost certainly.”

“Near the fence?”

“Same as the guys that got beat up. Like a quarantine zone.”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s not happening. I know that for sure.”

We both went quiet for a second, and then I asked, “What else do you know for sure?”

“I can’t tell you. Orders are to keep this thing tighter than a fish’s butt.”

“Let’s play Twenty Questions.”

“Let’s not.”

“The short version. Three questions. Yes or no answers.”

“Don’t put me on the spot, OK?”

“We’re both on the spot already. Don’t you see that? We’ve got a real mess here. And either it’s in there with you or it’s out here with me. So sooner or later one of us is going to have to help the other. We might as well start now.”

Silence. Then: “OK, Jesus, three questions.”

“Did they tell you about the car?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone mention money from Kosovo as a possible motive?”

“Yes.”

“Did they tell you about two other dead women?”

“No. What other dead women?”

“Last year. Local. Same MO. Cut throats.”

“Connected?”

“Probably.”

“Jesus. No, nobody said a word.”

“Do you have written records of Bravo Company’s movements? June and November last year?”

“That’s your fourth question.”

“We’re just chatting now. Two officers, equal rank, just shooting the shit. The game is over.”

“There are no records of Bravo Company’s movements here. They’re operating under special ops protocols. Therefore everything is filed at Fort Bragg. It would take the biggest subpoena you ever saw just to get a look at the outside of the file cabinet.”

I asked, “You making any general progress there?”

No answer.

I asked, “How long does it normally take for your secret weapon to work?”

He said, “It’s usually much faster than this.”

I didn’t answer, and there was more dead air, and some quiet breathing, and then Munro said, “Listen, Reacher, I guess this is hardly worth talking about, because you’re just going to think, well, what else would I say, because we both know I was sent here to cover someone’s ass. But I’m not like that. Never have been.”

“And?”

“From what I know so far, none of our guys killed any women. Not this month, or November, or June. That’s how it looks right now.”

Chapter

29

I put the phone down on Munro, and Deveraux came back into the office immediately. Maybe she had been watching a light on the switchboard. She said, “Well?”

“No quarantine patrols. No one has left Kelham since Munro arrived.”

“He would say that, though, wouldn’t he?”

“And he’s not smelling anything. He thinks the perp is not on the base.”

“Ditto.”

I nodded. Smoke and mirrors. Politics and the real world. Utter confusion. I said, “You want to get lunch?”

She said, “After.”

“After what?”

“You have a problem to deal with. The McKinney cousins are out on the street. They’re waiting for you. And they’ve brought reinforcements.”

Deveraux led me across the corridor to a dim corner room with windows in two walls. The view across Main Street was empty. Nothing happening. But the view north toward the T-junction showed four figures. My two old friends, plus two more similar guys. Dirt, hair, fur, and ink. They were standing around in the wide area where the two roads met, hands in pockets, kicking the dirt, doing nothing at all.

My first reaction was a kind of dumbfounded admiration. A head butt is a serious blow, especially one of mine. To be walking and talking just a few hours later was impressive. My second reaction was annoyance. With myself. I had been too gentle. Too new in town, too reluctant, too proper, too ready to see mitigating circumstances in sheer animal stupidity. I looked at Deveraux and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

She said, “You could apologize and make them go away.”

“What’s my second choice?”

“You could let them hit you first. Then I could arrest them for unprovoked assault. I’d love to get the chance to do that.”

“They won’t hit me at all if you’re there.”

“I’ll stay out of sight.”

“I’m not sure I want to do either thing.”

“One or the other, Reacher. Your choice.”

I stepped out to Main Street like some guy in an old movie. There should have been music playing. I turned right and faced north. I stood still. The four guys saw me. They showed a moment of surprise, and then a moment of warm anticipation. They formed up in a side-to-side line, all four of them strung out west to east, about four feet apart. They all took a step toward me, and then they all stopped and waited. There were two trucks parked on the Kelham road, behind them and to the right. There was the brush-painted pick-up I had seen before, and in front of it was another one just as bad.

I walked on, like a fish toward a net. The sun was about as high as it was going to get in March. The air was warm. I could feel heat on my skin. I could feel the road surface under the soles of my shoes. I put my hands in my pockets. Nothing in there, except most of the roll of quarters I had gotten in the diner. I closed my fist around the paper tube. A ten dollar punch, less what I had spent on the phone.

I walked on and stopped ten feet from the skirmish line. The two guys I had met before were on the left. The silent mastermind was on the outside, and the alpha dog was in second position. Both of them had noses like spoiled eggplants. Both of them had two black eyes. Both of them had crusted blood on their lips. Neither one of them exhibited much in the way of balance or focus. Right of the alpha dog was a guy slightly smaller than the others, and next to him was a big guy in a biker vest.

I looked at the alpha dog and said, “This is your plan?”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “Four guys? Is that all?”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “I was told there were dozens of you.”

No answer.

“But I guess logistics and communications were difficult. So you settled on a lighter force, quickly assembled and rapidly deployed. Which is very up to date, actually. You should go to the Pentagon and sit in on some seminars. You’d feel right at home with their thinking.”

The new guy second from the right was drunk. He had a low level buzz going on. It was oozing from his pores. I could practically smell it. Beer for breakfast. Maybe with chasers. A decade-long diet, judging by the look of him. So he would be slow to react, and then wild and unaimed afterward. No big problem. The new guy with the biker vest was carrying some kind of back pain. Low down, base of his spine. I could tell because he was standing with his pelvis rolled forward, taking the pressure off. Some kind of rupture or strain. A dozen possible causes. He was a country boy. He could have lifted a bale, or fallen off a horse. No major threat. He would defeat himself. One enthusiastic swing, and all kinds of things would tear loose inside. He would hobble away like a cripple. By which time his drunken friend would already be down. And the other two were already in no kind of good shape. The two I knew. The two that knew me. The alpha dog was slightly on my left, and I’m a right-handed fighter. He was practically volunteering.

Overall, an encouraging situation.

I said, “It’s a shame one of you isn’t bigger. Or two or three of you. Or all of you, actually.”

No answer.

I said, “But hey, a plan’s a plan. Did it take long to work out?”

No answer.

I said, “You know what we used to say about plans, up at West Point?”

“What?”

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

No answer. No movement. I unwrapped my hand from around the roll of quarters. I wasn’t going to need them. I took my hands out of my pockets. I said, “The problem with light forces is if things go bad, they go real bad real quick. Look at what happened in Somalia. So you should think very carefully about this choice. You’re at a fork in the road here. You have to decide which way to go. You could wade in, just the four of you, right now. But the next stop after that will be the hospital. That’s a promise. That’s a cast iron guarantee. You’ll get hit harder than you’ve ever been hit before. I’m talking broken bones. I can’t promise brain damage. Looks like someone already beat me to that.”

No response.

I said, “Or you could attempt a tactical withdrawal now, and then you could take your time putting that big force together. You could come back in a couple of days. Dozens of you. You could find your granddaddy’s varmint gun. You could start the painkillers early.”

No response. Nothing verbal, anyway. But shoulders slumped a fraction, and feet started shuffling.

“Good decision,” I said. “Overwhelming force is always better. You really should go to the Pentagon. You could walk them through your reasoning. They’d listen to you. They’re listening to everyone except us.”

The alpha dog said, “We’ll be back.”

“I’ll be here,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

They walked away, trying to be casual about it, trying to salvage some dignity. They climbed into their trucks and made a big show of revving their engines and squealing their tires through tight 180 turns. They drove off west into the forest, toward Memphis, toward the rest of the world. I watched them go, and then I walked back to the Sheriff’s Department.

Deveraux had seen the whole thing from the window in the dim corner room. Like a silent movie. No dialogue. She said, “You made them go away. You apologized. I can’t believe it.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I took a rain check. They’re coming back later, dozens of them.”

“Why did you do that?”

“More arrests for you. They’ll look good for your reelection campaign.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You want to get lunch now?”

“I already have a lunch date,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Five minutes ago. Major Duncan Munro called back and asked me to dine with him in the Kelham Officers’ Club.”

Chapter

30

Deveraux left for Kelham in her car and I was left alone on the sidewalk. I walked past the vacant lot to the diner. Lunch, for one. I ordered the cheeseburger again, and then stepped over to the phone by the door and called the Pentagon. Colonel John James Frazer. Senate Liaison. He answered on the first ring. I asked him, “What genius decided to classify that plate number?”

He said, “I can’t tell you that.”

“Whoever, it was a bad mistake. All it did was confirm the car belongs to a Kelham guy. It was practically a public announcement.”

“We had no alternative. We couldn’t put it in the public domain. Journalists would have gotten it five minutes after local law enforcement. We couldn’t allow that.”

“Now it sounds like you’re telling me it belonged to a Bravo Company guy.”

“I’m not telling you anything. But believe me, we had no choice. The consequences would have been catastrophic.”

Something in his voice.

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Because right now you’re making it sound like it was Reed Riley’s own personal vehicle.”

No response.

I asked, “Was it?”

No answer.

“Was it?”

“I can’t confirm or deny,” Frazer said. “And don’t ask again. And don’t use that name again, either. Not on an unsecured line.”

“Does the officer in question have an explanation?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

I said, “This is getting out of control, Frazer. You need to rethink. The cover up is always worse than the crime. You need to stop it now.”

“Negative on that, Reacher. There’s a plan in place, and it will stay in place.”

“Does the plan include an exclusion zone around Kelham? Maybe for journalists especially?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ve got circumstantial evidence here of boots on the ground outside of Kelham’s fence. Part of the circumstantial evidence is a corpse. I’m telling you, this thing is out of control now.”

“Who’s the corpse?”

“A scrappy middle-aged guy.”

“A journalist?”

“I don’t know how to recognize a journalist by sight alone. Maybe that’s a skill they teach to the infantry, but they don’t teach it to MPs.”

“No ID on him?”

“We haven’t looked yet. The doctor hasn’t finished with him.”

Frazer said, “There is no exclusion zone around Fort Kelham. That would be a major policy shift.”

“And illegal.”

“Agreed. And stupid. And counterproductive. It isn’t happening. It never has.”

“I think the Marine Corps did it once.”

“When?”

“Within the last twenty years.”

“Well, Marines. They do all kinds of things.”

“You should check it out.”

“How? You think they put it in their official history?”

“Do it obliquely. Look for an officer who got canned overnight with no other explanation. Maybe a colonel.”

I hung up with Frazer and ate my burger and drank some coffee and then I set out to do what Garber had ordered me to do mid-morning, which was to return to the wreck and destroy the offending license plate. I turned east on the Kelham road and then north on the railroad ties. I passed by the old water tower. Its elephant’s trunk was made from some kind of black rubberized canvas, gone all perished and patchy with age. The whole thing was swaying a little in a soft southerly breeze. I walked on fifty yards and then stepped off the line and headed for where I had seen the half-buried bumper.

The half-buried bumper was gone.

It was nowhere to be seen. It had been dug up and taken away. The hole its lance-like point had made had been filled with earth, which had been stamped down by boot soles and then tamped flat by the backs of shovels.

The boot prints were like nothing I had ever seen in the military. But the shovel marks could have been made by GI entrenching tools. It was difficult to be sure. Couldn’t rule it out, couldn’t rule it in.

I walked on, deeper into the debris field. It had all been tampered with. It had been sifted, and examined, and turned over, and checked, and evaluated. Almost two hundred linear yards. Maybe a thousand individual fragments had been displaced. No doubt ten times as many smaller items had been eyeballed. A wide area. A big task. A lot of work. Slow and painstaking. Six men, I figured. Maybe eight. I pictured them advancing in a line, under effective command, working with great precision.

With military precision.

I walked back the way I had come. I got to the middle of the railroad crossing and saw a car in the east, coming from the direction of Kelham. It was still far away on the straight road. Small to the eye, but not a small car. At first I thought it might be Deveraux coming back after lunch, but it wasn’t. It was a black car, and big, and fast, and smooth. A town car. A limousine. It was right out on the crown of the road, straddling the line, staying well away from the ragged shoulders. It was swaying and wafting and wandering.

I came off the track on the Kelham side and stood in the middle of the road, feet apart, arms out, big and obvious. I let the car get within a hundred yards and then I crossed my arms above my head and waved the universal distress semaphore. I knew the driver would stop. This was 1997, remember. Four and a half years before the new rules. A long time ago. A much less suspicious world.

The car slowed and stopped in front of me. I went to my right, around the hood, down the flank, toward the driver’s window, holding back a little, trying to perfect my angle. I wanted to get a look at the passenger. I figured he would be in the back, on the far side, with the front passenger seat scooted forward for leg room. I knew how these things were done. I had been in town cars before. Once or twice.

The driver’s window came down. I bent forward from the waist. Took a look. The driver was a big fat guy with the kind of belly that forced his knees wide apart. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s cap and a black jacket and a black tie. He had watery eyes. He said, “Can we help you?”

I said, “I’m sorry. My mistake. I thought you were someone else. But thanks anyway for stopping.”

“Sure,” the guy said. “No problem.” His window went back up and I stepped aside and the car drove on.

The passenger had been male, older than me, gray haired, prosperous, in a fine suit made of wool. There had been a leather briefcase on the seat beside him.

He was a lawyer, I thought.

Chapter

31

I was facing east, toward the black part of town, and there were things over there that I wanted to see again, so I set off walking in that direction. The road felt good under my feet. I guessed once upon a time during the glory days of the railroad it had been a simple dirt track, but it had been updated since then, almost certainly in the 1950s, almost certainly on the DoD’s dime. The foundation had been dug down, for armor on flat-bed transporters, and the line had been straightened, because if an army engineer sees a ruled line on a map, then a straight road is what appears on the ground. I had walked on many DoD roads. There are a lot of them, all around the world, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self confidence, when there was nothing we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.

Then I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, talking about want ads in the hamburger place near where we were based. Changes were coming, for sure, but I wasn’t unhappy. That straight road through the low Mississippi forest was helping me. The sun was out, and the air was warm. There were miles behind me, and miles ahead, and plenty of time on the clock. I had no ambitions and very few needs. I would be OK, whatever came next. No choice. I would have to be.

I made the same turn Deveraux had made in her car, south on the dirt road between the bar ditches and the slave shacks. Toward Emmeline McClatchy’s place. At walking speed I was seeing different things than from the car. Poverty, mostly, and up close. There were patched clothes on lines, washed so thin they were almost transparent. There were no new cars. There were chickens in some of the yards, and goats, and the occasional pig. There were mangy dogs on chains. There were duct tape and baling wire fixes everywhere, to electric lines, to rain gutters, to plumbing outlets. And I was seeing suspicion too, to a degree. There were barefoot children briefly visible, staring at me, their fingers in their mouths, until they were snatched back out of sight by anxious mothers who wouldn’t meet my eye.

I kept on going and passed by Emmeline McClatchy’s place. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see anybody on that stretch of the road. No kids, no adults. Nobody. I passed by the house with the beer signs in the window. I followed the same turns Deveraux had steered me through before, left and right and left, until I found the abandoned work site and its pile of gravel.

The house planned for the lot was small, and its foundation was set at an angle according to ancient practice and wisdom, to take advantage of prevailing breezes and to avoid the full impact of the southwestern sun in the summer. The foundation itself was built of recycled blocks and sand-heavy cement. A sewer pipe and a water line had been roughed in. The corner posts were already weathering. Nothing else had been completed. Money had run out, I supposed.

The gravel in the pile was waiting to be made into concrete, I assumed. Maybe the ground floor of the new place was supposed to be a solid slab, not boards. Maybe there were advantages to doing it that way, perhaps related to termites. I had no idea. I had never built a house. I had never had to consider housing-related issues.

The gravel pile itself had spread and settled during the idle months. Weeds were showing through the edges where it was thin. It was knee-high over most of its area, and up close it was about the size of a queen bed. The divots and the pockmarks in its top surface were like a Rorschach test. It was entirely possible to see them as the result of innocent children running and jumping and stomping. It was equally possible to see them as the result of a grown woman being thrown down and raped, in a violent flurry of knees and elbows and backs.

I squatted down and ran a fingertip through the tiny stones. They were surprisingly hard to move. They were packed down tight, and some kind of a dusty residue on them seemed to have mixed with rain or dew to form a weak adhesive. I made a furrow about an inch wide and an inch deep, and then I turned my hand over.

I pressed the back of my hand into the pile and held it there for a minute. Then I looked at the result. Small white marks, but no indentations, because there was no real flesh on the back of my hand. So I pulled up my sleeve and pressed the inside of my forearm against the pile. I put the flat of my other hand on it and leaned on it hard. I bounced it up and down a couple of times, and scrabbled it around. Then I looked at it.

The result was some small red marks, some small white marks, and a whole lot of dust, dirt, and mud. I spat on my arm and wiped it on my pants and the resulting clean stripe looked both very like and very unlike the small of Janice May Chapman’s back. Another Rorschach test. Inconclusive.

But I did come to one minor conclusion. I cleaned up my arm as well as I could, which was not perfectly, and I decided that whatever gravel patch Chapman had been raped on, she had not only dressed afterward, but showered too.

I walked on and found the wider street where Shawna Lindsay had lived. The second victim. The middle class girl, comparatively. Her baby brother was still in his yard. Sixteen years old. The ugly boy. He was just standing there. Doing nothing. Watching the street. Watching me approach. His eyes tracked me all the way. I stepped up on the shoulder and came to a stop face to face with him, with only his low picket fence between us.

I said, “How’s life, kid?”

He said, “My mom’s out.”

“Good to know,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I asked.”

“Life’s a bitch,” he said.

“And then you die,” I said. Which I regretted, instantly. Insensitive, given his family’s recent history. But he took no notice. Which I was glad about. I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Why? You earning a whitey merit badge? You need to find a black person to talk with today?”

“I’m in the army,” I said. “Which means half my friends are black, and more importantly it means half my bosses are black. I talk to black people all the time, and they talk to me. So don’t give me that ghetto shit.”

The boy was quiet for a second. Then he asked, “What part of the army are you in?”

“Military Police.”

“Is that a tough job?”

“Tougher than tough,” I said. “Think about it logically. Any soldier could kick your ass, and I could kick any soldier’s ass.”

“For real?”

“More than real,” I said. “Real is for other people. Not for us.”

He asked, “What do you want to talk about?”

“A hunch.”

“What kind?”

I said, “My guess is no one ever talked to you about your sister’s death.”

He looked down.

I said, “Normally with a homicide victim, they talk to everyone who knew her. They ask for insights and opinions. They want to know what kinds of things she did, where she went, who she hung with. Did they ever talk to you about that kind of stuff?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody ever talked to me.”

“They should have,” I said. “I would have. Because brothers know things about sisters. Especially at the ages you two were. I bet you knew things about Shawna that no one else did. I bet she told you things she couldn’t tell your mom. And I bet you figured out some stuff on your own.”

The kid shuffled in place a little. Bashful, and a little proud. Like saying: Yeah, maybe I did figure some things out. Out loud he said, “No one ever talks to me about anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m deformed. They think I’m slow, too.”

“Who says you’re deformed?”

“Everybody.”

“Even your mom?”

“She doesn’t say it, but she thinks it.”

“Even your friends?”

“I don’t have any friends. Who would want to be friends with me?”

“They’re all wrong,” I said. “You’re not deformed. You’re ugly, but you’re not deformed. There’s a difference.”

He smiled. “That’s what Shawna used to tell me.”

I pictured the two of them together. Beauty and the beast. A tough life, for both of them. Tough for him, with the endless implied comparisons. Tough for her, with the endless need for tact and patience. I said, “You should join the army. You’d look like a movie star compared to half the people I know. You should see the guy that sent me here.”

“I’m going to join the army,” he said. “I talked to someone about it.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“Shawna’s last boyfriend,” he said. “He was a soldier.”

Chapter

32

The kid invited me inside. His mom was out, and there was a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator. The house was dim and shuttered. It smelled stale. It was mean and narrow inside, but it had plenty of rooms. An eat-in kitchen, a living room, and what I guessed were three bedrooms in back. Space for two parents and two kids, except I saw no sign of a father, and Shawna was never coming home again.

The kid told me his name was Bruce. We took glasses of tea and sat at the kitchen table. There was an old wall phone next to the refrigerator. Pale yellow plastic. Its cord had been stretched about twelve feet long. There was an old television set on the countertop. Small, but color, with chrome accents on the cabinet. Practically an antique, probably rescued from a trash pile somewhere and polished up like an old Cadillac.

Up close and personal the kid was no better looking than he had been outside. But if you ignored his head, then the rest of him was in pretty good shape. He was all bone and muscle, broad through the chest and the shoulders, thick in the arms. Deep down he seemed patient and cheerful. I liked him, basically.

He asked me, “Would they really let me join the army?”

“Who is they?”

“The army, I mean. The army itself. Would they let me in?”

“Do you have felony convictions?”

“No, sir.”

“An arrest record of any kind?”

“No, sir.”

“Then of course they’ll let you in. They’d take you today if you were old enough.”

“The others would laugh at me.”

“Probably,” I said. “But not for the reason you think. Soldiers aren’t like that. They’d find something else. Something you never even thought of yet.”

“I could wear my helmet all the time.”

“Only if they find one big enough.”

“And night vision goggles.”

“Maybe a bomb disposal hood,” I said. I figured bomb disposal was the coming thing. Small wars and booby traps. But I didn’t say so. Not the kind of message a potential recruit wants to hear.

I sipped my tea.

The boy asked me, “Do you watch television?”

“Not much,” I said. “Why?”

“They have commercials,” he said. “Which means they have to fit an hour’s story into forty-some minutes. So they get right to it.”

“You think that’s what I should do now?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So who do you think killed your sister?”

The boy took a sip of tea and a serious breath and then he started in on everything he had been thinking about, and everything he had never been asked about. It all came tumbling out, fast, coherent, responsive, and thoughtful. He said, “Well, her throat was cut, so we need to think about who is trained to do that kind of thing, or experienced with that kind of thing, or both.”

That kind of thing. His sister’s throat.

I asked, “So who fits the bill?”

“Soldiers,” he said. “Especially here. And ex-soldiers, especially here. Fort Kelham is field training for special ops guys. They know those skills. And hunters. And most people in town, to be honest. Including me.”

“You? Are you a hunter?”

“No, but I have to eat. People keep pigs.”

“And?”

“You think pigs commit suicide? We cut their throats.”

“You’ve done that?”

“Dozens of times. Sometimes I get a dollar.”

I asked, “When and where did you last see Shawna alive?”

“It was the day she was killed. It was a Friday in November. She left here about seven o’clock. After dark, anyway. She was all dressed up.”

“Where was she going?”

“Across the tracks. To Brannan’s bar, probably. That’s where she usually went.”

“Is Brannan’s the most popular bar?”

“They’re all popular. But Brannan’s is where most folk start out and finish up.”

“Who did Shawna go with that night?”

“She left on her own. Probably she was going to meet her boyfriend at the bar.”

“Did she ever get there?”

“No. She was found two streets from here. Where someone started to build a house.”

“The place with the gravel pile?”

The boy nodded. “She was dumped right on it. Like a human sacrifice in a history book.”

We got up from the table and poked around the kitchen for a minute. Then we took more tea and sat down again. I said, “Tell me about Shawna’s last boyfriend.”

“First white boyfriend she ever had.”

“Did she like him?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did they get along?”

“Pretty good.”

“No problems?”

“Didn’t see any.”

“Did he kill her?”

“He might have.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Can’t rule him out.”

“Gut feeling?”

“I want to say no, but someone killed her. It could have been him.”

“What was his name?”

“Reed. That was all Shawna ever said. Reed this, Reed that. Reed, Reed, Reed.”

“Last name?”

“I don’t know.”

“We wear name tapes,” I said. “Battledress uniform, above the right breast pocket.”

“I never saw him in uniform. They all wear jeans and T-shirts to town. Jackets, sometimes.”

“Officer or enlisted man?”

“I don’t know.”

“You talked to him. Didn’t he say?”

The kid shook his head. “He said his name was Reed. That’s all.”

“Was he an asshole?”

“A bit.”

“Did he look like he worked hard for a living?”

“Not really. He didn’t take things very seriously.”

“Probably an officer, then,” I said. “What did he tell you about joining the army?”

“He said serving your country was a noble thing to do.”

“Definitely an officer.”

“He said I could learn a skill. He said I might make specialist.”

“You could do better than that.”

“He said they would explain it all at the recruiting office. He said there’s a good one in Memphis.”

“Don’t go there,” I said. “Way too dangerous. Recruiting offices are shared between all four branches of the service. The Marines might grab you first. Fate worse than death.”

“So where should I go?”

“Go straight to Kelham. There are recruiters on every post.”

“Will that work?”

“Sure it will. As soon as you’ve got something in your hand that proves you’re eighteen years old, they’ll let you in and never let you out again.”

“But they say the army is getting smaller.”

“Thanks for pointing that out, kid.”

“So why would they want me?”

“They’re still going to have hundreds of thousands of people. Tens of thousands will still leave every year. They’ll always need to be replaced.”

“What’s wrong with the Marines?”

“Nothing really. It’s a traditional rivalry. They say stuff, we say stuff.”

“They do amphibious landings.”

“History shows the army has done many more all on its own.”

“Sheriff Deveraux was a Marine.”

“Is a Marine,” I said. “They never stop being Marines, even after they leave. It’s one of their things.”

“You like her,” the kid said. “I could tell. I saw you riding in her car.”

“She’s OK,” I said. “Did Reed have a car? Shawna’s boyfriend?”

The kid nodded. “They all have cars. I’m going to have a car too, after I join.”

“What kind of car did Reed have?”

“He had a 1957 Chevy Bel Air two-door hardtop. Not really a classic. It was kind of beat up.”

“What color was it?”

The kid said, “It was blue.”

Chapter

33

The kid showed me his sister’s room. It was clean and tidy. Not preserved as a shrine, but not yet cleared out, either. It spoke of loss, and bewilderment, and lack of energy. The bed was made and small piles of clothes were neatly folded. No decision had been taken about its future fate.

There was none of Shawna Lindsay’s personality on display. She had been a grown woman, not a teenager. There were no posters on the walls, no souvenirs of anything, no breathless diary. No keepsakes. She had owned some clothes, some shoes, and two books. That was all. One book was a thin thing explaining how to become a notary public. The other was an out-of-date tourist guide to Los Angeles.

“Did she want to be in the movies?” I asked.

“No,” the kid said. “She wanted to travel, that’s all.”

“To LA specifically?”

“Anywhere.”

“Did she have a job?”

“She worked part time at the loan office. Next to Brannan’s bar. She could do her numbers pretty good.”

“What did she tell you that she couldn’t tell your mom?”

“That she hated it here. That she wanted to get out.”

“Your mom didn’t want to hear that stuff?”

“She wanted to keep Shawna safe. My mom is afraid of the world.”

“Where does your mom work?”

“She’s a cleaner. At the bars in town. She gets them ready for happy hour.”

“What else do you know about Shawna?”

The kid started to say something, and then he stopped. In the end he just shrugged and said nothing. He moved toward the center of the plain square space and stood there, as if he was soaking something up. Something in the still air. I got the feeling he had rarely been in that room. Not often before Shawna’s death, and not often since.

He said, “I know I really miss her.”

We went back to the kitchen and I asked, “If I left money, do you think your mom would mind if I used her phone?”

“You need to make a call?” the kid asked back, as if that was an extraordinary thing.

“Two calls,” I said. “One I need to make, and one I want to make.”

“I don’t know how much it costs.”

“Pay phones cost a quarter,” I said. “Suppose I left a dollar a call?”

“That would be too much.”

“Long distance,” I said.

“Whatever you think is right. I’m going outside again.”

I waited until I saw him emerge in the front yard. He took up a position near the fence, just standing there, watching the street, infinitely patient. Some kind of a perpetual vigil. I tucked a dollar bill between the phone’s plastic casing and the wall and took the receiver off the hook. I dialed the call I needed to make. Stan Lowrey, back on our shared home base. I went through his sergeant and a minute later he came on the line.

I said, “Well, there’s a surprise. You’re still there. You’ve still got a job.”

He said, “I think I’m safer than you are right now. Frances Neagley just reported back.”

“She worries too much.”

“You don’t worry enough.”

“Is Karla Dixon still working financial stuff?”

“I could find out.”

“Ask her a question for me. I want to know if I should be concerned about money coming in from a place called Kosovo. Like gangsters laundering bales of cash. That kind of a thing.”

“Doesn’t sound very likely. That’s the Balkans, right? They’re middle class if they own a goat. Rich, if they own two. Not like America.”

I looked out the window and said, “Not so very different from parts of it.”

Lowrey said, “I wish I was working financial stuff. I might have picked up some necessary skills. Like how to have savings.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get unemployment. For a spell, at least.”

“You sound cheerful.”

“I’ve got a lot to be cheerful about.”

“Why? What’s going on down there?”

“All kinds of wonderful things,” I said, and hung up. Then I trapped a second dollar bill between the phone and the wall and dialed the call I wanted to make. I used the Treasury Department’s main switchboard and got a woman who sounded middle-aged and elegant. She asked, “How may I direct your inquiry?”

I said, “Joe Reacher, please.”

There was some scratching and clicking and a minute of dead air. No hold music at Treasury, either, back in 1997. Then a woman picked up and said, “Mr. Reacher’s office.” She sounded young and bright. Probably a magna cum laude graduate from a prestigious college, full of shining eyes and idealism. Probably good looking, too. Probably wearing a short plaid skirt and a white turtleneck sweater. My brother knew how to pick them.

I asked, “Is Mr. Reacher there?”

“I’m afraid he’s out of the office for a few days. He had to go to Georgia.” She said it like she would have said Saturn or Neptune. An incomprehensible distance, and barren when you got there. She asked, “May I take a message?”

“Tell him his brother called.”

“How exciting. He never mentioned he had brothers. But actually, you sound just like him, did you know that?”

“So people say. There’s no message. Tell him I just wanted to say hello. To touch base, you know. To see how he is.”

“Will he know which brother?”

“I hope so,” I said. “He’s only got one.”

I left immediately after that. Shawna’s brother did not break his lonely vigil. I waved and he waved back, but he didn’t move. He just kept on watching the far horizon. I hiked back to the Kelham road and turned left for town. I got some of the way toward the railroad and heard a car behind me, and a blip of a siren, like a courtesy. I turned and Deveraux pulled up right alongside me, neat and smooth. A short moment later I was in her front passenger seat, with nothing between us except her holstered shotgun.

Chapter

34

The first thing I said was, “Long lunch.” Which was supposed to be just a descriptive comment, but she took it as more. She said, “Jealous?”

“Depends what you ate. I had a cheeseburger.”

“We had rare roast beef and horseradish sauce. With roast potatoes. It was very good. But you must know that. You must eat in the OC all the time.”

“How was the conversation?”

“Challenging.”

“In what way?”

“First tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“Me? I’ve been eating humble pie. Metaphorically, at least.”

“How so?”

“I went back to the wrecked car. I was under orders to destroy the license plate. But it was already gone. The debris field had been picked clean, very methodically. There was a big force out there at some point this morning. So I think you’re right. There are boots on the ground outside Kelham’s fence. They’re operating an exclusion zone. They were diverted to the clean up because someone at the Pentagon didn’t trust me to do it.”

Deveraux didn’t answer.

“Then I took a long walk,” I said.

Deveraux asked, “Did you see the gravel pile?”

“I saw it this morning,” I said. “I went back for a closer look.”

“Thinking about Janice May Chapman?”

“Obviously.”

“It’s a coincidence,” she said. “Black-on-white rapes are incredibly rare in Mississippi. No matter what folks want to believe.”

“A white guy could have taken her there.”

“Unlikely. He’d have stuck out like a sore thumb. He’d have been risking a hundred witnesses.”

“Shawna Lindsay’s body was found there. I talked to her kid brother.”

“Where else would it be found? It’s a vacant lot. That’s where bodies get dumped.”

“Was she killed there?”

“I don’t think so. There was no blood.”

“At the scene or inside her?”

“Neither one.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Same guy.”

“And?”

“Addiction to risk,” she said. “June, November, March, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, then the middle, then the top. By Carter County standards, that is. He started safe and got progressively riskier. No one cares about poor black girls. Chapman was the first really visible victim.”

“You care about poor black girls.”

“But you know how it is. An investigation can’t sustain itself all on its own. It needs an external source of energy. It needs outrage.”

“And there wasn’t any?”

“There was pain, obviously. And sorrow, and suffering. But mostly there was resignation. And familiarity. Business as usual. If all the murdered women of Mississippi rose up tonight and marched through town, you’d notice two things. It would be a very long parade, and most of the marchers would be black. Poor black girls have been getting killed here forever. White women with money, not so often.”

“What was the McClatchy girl’s name?”

“Rosemary.”

“Where was her body found?”

“In the ditch near the crossing. The other side of the tracks.”

“Any blood?”

“None at all.”

“Was she raped?”

“No.”

“Was Shawna Lindsay?”

“No.”

“So Janice May Chapman was another kind of escalation.”

“Apparently.”

“Did Rosemary McClatchy have a connection with Kelham?”

“Of course she did. You saw her photograph. Kelham guys were lining up at her door with their tongues hanging out. She stepped out with a string of them.”

“Black guys or white guys?”

“Both.”

“Officers or enlisted men?”

“Both.”

“Any suspects?”

“I had no probable cause even to ask questions. She wasn’t seen with anyone from Kelham for at least two weeks before she was killed. My jurisdiction ends at Kelham’s fence. They wouldn’t have let me through the gate.”

“They let you through the gate today.”

“Yes,” she said. “They did.”

“What is Munro like?” I asked.

“Challenging,” she said again.

We thumped up over the tracks and parked just beyond them, with the straight road west in front of us, and the ditch where Rosemary McClatchy had been found on our right, and the turn into Main Street ahead and on our left. A standard cop instinct. If in doubt, pull over and park where people can see you. It feels like doing something, even when it isn’t.

Deveraux said, “Obviously I started out with the baseline assumption that Munro would be lying through his teeth. Job one for him is to cover the army’s ass. I understand that, and I don’t blame him for it. He’s under orders, the same way you are.”

“And?”

“I asked him about the exclusion zone. He denied it, of course.”

“He would have to,” I said.

She nodded. “But then he went ahead and tried to prove it to me. He toured me all over. That’s why I was gone so long. He’s running a very tight ship. Every last man is confined to quarters. There are MPs everywhere. The MPs are watching each other, as well as everyone else. The armory is under guard. The logs show no weapons in or out for two solid days.”

“And?”

“Well, naturally I assumed I was getting conned big time. And sure enough, there were two hundred empty beds. So naturally I assumed they’ve got a shadow force bivouacked in the woods somewhere. But Munro said no, that’s a full company currently deployed elsewhere for a month. He swore blind. And I believed him, ultimately, because like everyone else I’ve heard the planes come in and out, and I’ve seen the faces come and go.”

I nodded. Alpha Company, I thought. Kosovo.

She said, “So in the end it all added up. Munro showed me a lot of evidence and it was all very consistent. And no one can run a con that perfect. So there is no exclusion zone. I was wrong. And you must be wrong about the debris field. It must have been local kids, scavenging.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It looked like a very organized search.”

She paused a beat. “Then maybe the 75th is sending people directly from Benning. Which is entirely possible. Maybe they’re living in the woods around the fence. All Munro proved is that no one is leaving Kelham. He could be one of those guys who tells you a small truth in order to hide a bigger lie.”

“Sounds like you didn’t like him much.”

“I liked him well enough. He’s smart and he’s loyal to the army. But if we’d both been Marine MPs at the same time I’d have been worried. I’d have seen him as a serious rival. There’s something about him. He’s the type of guy you don’t want to see moving into your office. He’s too ambitious. And too good.”

“What did he say about Janice May Chapman?”

“He gave me what appeared to be a very expert summary of what appeared to be a very expert investigation which appeared to prove no one from Kelham was ever involved with anything.”

“But you didn’t believe it?”

“I almost did,” she said.

“But?”

“He couldn’t hide the rivalry. He made it clear. It’s him against me. It’s the army against the local sheriff. That’s the challenge. He wants the world to think the bad guy is on my side of the fence. But I wasn’t born yesterday. What the hell else would he want the world to think?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“What do you want to do?”

“He doesn’t respect the Marines, either. Him against me means the army against the Corps. Which is a bad fight to pick. So if he wants rivalry, I want to give it right back. I want to take him on. I want to beat him like a rented mule. I want to find the truth somehow and stick it up his ass.”

“Do you think you can do that?”

She said, “I can if you help me.”

Chapter

35

We sat in the idling Caprice for a long minute, saying nothing. The car must have had ten thousand hours of stake-out duty on it. From its previous life, in Chicago or New Orleans or wherever. Every pore of every interior surface was thick with sweat and odor and exhaustion. Grime was crusted everywhere. The floor mats had separated into hard tufts of fiber, each one like a flattened pearl.

Deveraux said, “I apologize.”

I said, “For what?”

“For asking you to help me. It wasn’t fair. Forget I said anything.”

“OK.”

“Can I let you out somewhere?”

I said, “Let’s go talk to Janice May Chapman’s nosy neighbors.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t let you do that. I can’t let you turn against your own people.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t be turning against my own people,” I said. “Maybe I would be doing exactly what my own people wanted me to do all along. Because maybe I would be helping Munro, not you. Because he might be right, you know. We still have no idea who did what here.”

We. She didn’t correct me. Instead she said, “But what’s your best guess?”

I thought about the limousines scurrying in and out of Fort Kelham, carrying expensive lawyers. I thought about the exclusion zone, and the panic in John James Frazer’s voice, on the phone from the Pentagon. Senate Liaison. I said, “My best guess is it was a Kelham guy.”

“You sure you want to take the risk of finding out for sure?”

“Talking to a man with a gun is a risk. Asking questions isn’t.”

I believed that then, back in 1997.

Janice May Chapman’s house was a hundred yards from the railroad track, one of the last three dwellings on a dead-end lane a mile south and east of Main Street. It was a small place, set back in a wedge-shaped yard off of a circular bulge where traffic could turn around at the end of the street. It was facing two other houses, as if it was nine o’clock on a dial and they were two and four. It was maybe fifty years old, but it had been updated with new siding and a new roof and some diligent landscaping. Both of its neighbors were in a similar state of good repair, as had been all the previous houses on the street. Clearly this was Carter Crossing’s middle class enclave. Lawns were green and weed free. Driveways were paved and uncracked. Mailbox posts were exactly vertical. The only real-estate negative was the train, but there was only one of those a day. One minute out of fourteen hundred and forty. Not a bad deal.

Chapman’s house had a full-width front porch, roofed over for shade, railed in with fancy millwork spindles, and equipped with a matched pair of white rocking chairs and a rag mat in various muted colors. Both her neighbors had the exact same thing going on, the only difference being that both their porches were occupied, each by a white-haired old lady wearing a floral-print housedress and sitting bolt upright in a rocker and staring at us.

We sat in the car for a minute and then Deveraux rolled forward and parked right in the middle of the turnaround. We got out and stood for a second in the afternoon light.

“Which one first?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Deveraux said. “Whichever, the other one will be right over within about thirty seconds.”

Which is exactly what happened. We chose the right-hand house, the one at four o’clock on the dial, and before we were three steps onto its porch the neighbor from the two o’clock house was right behind us. Deveraux made the introductions. She gave the ladies my name and said I was an investigator from the army. Up close the ladies were slightly different from one another. One was older, the other was thinner. But they were broadly similar. Thin necks, pursed lips, haloes of white hair. They welcomed me respectfully. They were from a generation that liked the army, and knew something about it. No question they had had husbands or brothers or sons in uniform, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam.

I turned and checked the view from the porch. Chapman’s house was neatly triangulated by her two neighbors. Like a focal point. Like a target. The two neighbors’ porches were exactly where the infantry would set up machine gun nests for effective enfilade fire.

I turned back and Deveraux ran through what she had already discussed. She asked for confirmation of every point and got it. All negative. No, neither of the two ladies had seen Chapman leave her house on the day she had died. Not in the morning, not in the afternoon, not in the evening. Not on foot, not in her car, not in anybody else’s car. No, nothing new had come to either one of them. They had nothing to add.

The next question was tactically difficult, so Deveraux left it to me. I asked, “Were there intervals when something could have happened that you didn’t see?” In other words: Just exactly how nosy are you? Were there moments when you weren’t staring at your neighbor?

Both ladies saw the implication, of course, and they clucked and pursed and fussed for a minute, but the gravity of the situation meant more to them than their wounded feelings, and they came out and admitted that no, they had the situation pretty much sewn up around the clock. Both liked to sit on their porches when they weren’t otherwise occupied, and they tended to be otherwise occupied at different times. Both had bedrooms at the front of their houses, and neither tried to sleep until the midnight train had passed, and then afterward both were light sleepers anyway, so not much escaped them at night, either.

I asked, “Was there usually much coming and going over there?”

The ladies conferred and launched a long, complicated narrative that threatened to go all the way back to the American Revolution. I started to tune it out until I realized they were describing a fairly active social calendar that about half a year ago had settled into a month-on, month-off pattern, first of social frenzy, and then of complete inactivity. Feast or famine. Chapman was either never out, or always out, first four or five weeks in one condition, and then four or five weeks in the other.

Bravo Company, in Kosovo.

Bravo Company, at home.

Not good.

I asked, “Did she have a boyfriend?”

She had several, they said, with prim delight. Sometimes all at once. Practically a parade. They listed sequential glimpsed sightings, all of polite young men with short hair, all in what they called dungaree pants, all in what they called undershirts, some in what they called motorcycle coats.

Jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets.

Soldiers, obviously, off duty.

Not good.

I asked, “Was there anyone in particular? Anyone special?”

They conferred again and agreed a period of relative stability had commenced three or perhaps four months earlier. The parade of suitors had slowed, first to a trickle, and then it had stopped altogether and been replaced by the attentions of a lone man, once again described as polite, young, short-haired, but always inappropriately dressed on the many occasions they had seen him. Jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets. In their day, a gentleman called on his belle in a suit and a tie.

I asked, “What did they do together?”

They went out, the ladies said. Sometimes in the afternoons, but most often in the evenings. Probably to bars. There was very little in the way of alternative entertainment in that corner of the state. The nearest picture house was in a town called Corinth. There had been a vaudeville theater in Tupelo, but it had closed many years ago. The couple tended to come back late, sometimes after midnight, after the train had passed. Sometimes the suitor would stay an hour or two, but to their certain knowledge he had never spent the night.

I asked, “When was the last time you saw her?”

The day before she died, they said. She had left her house at seven o’clock in the evening. The same suitor had come calling for her, right at the top of the hour, quite formally.

“What was Janice wearing that night?” I asked.

A yellow dress, they said, knee length but low cut.

“Did her friend show up in his own car?” I asked.

Yes, they said, he did.

“What kind of a car was it?”

It was a blue car, they said.

Chapter

36

We left both ladies on one porch and crossed the street to take a closer look at Chapman’s house. It was very much the same as the neighbors’ places. It was classic tract housing, built fast in uniform batches for returning military and their new baby boom families right after the end of World War Two. Then each individual example had grown slightly different from all the others over the passing years, the same way identical triplets might evolve differently with age. Chapman’s choice had ended up modest and unassuming, but pleasant. Someone had put neat gingerbread trim all over it, and the front door had been replaced.

We stood on the porch and I looked in a window and saw a small square living room, full of furniture that looked pretty new. There was a loveseat and an armchair and a small television set on a low chest of drawers. There was a VHS player and some tapes next to it. The living room door was open and I could see part of a narrow hallway beyond. I shifted position and craned my neck for a better look.

“Go inside if you want,” Deveraux said, behind me.

“Really?”

“The door is unlocked. It was unlocked when we got here.”

“Is that usual?”

“Not unusual. We never found her key.”

“Not in her pocketbook?”

“She didn’t have a pocketbook with her. She seems to have left it in the kitchen.”

“Is that usual?”

“She didn’t smoke,” Deveraux said. “She certainly didn’t pay for drinks. Why would she need a pocketbook?”

“Makeup?” I said.

“Twenty-seven-year-olds don’t powder their noses halfway through the evening. Not like they used to. Not anymore.”

I opened the front door and stepped inside the house. It was neat and clean, but the air was still and heavy. The floors and the rugs and the paint and the furniture was all fresh, but not brand new. There was an eat-in kitchen across the hall from the living room, with two bedrooms behind, and presumably a bathroom.

“Nice place,” I said. “You could buy it. It would be better than the Toussaint’s hotel.”

Deveraux said, “With those old biddies across the street, watching me all the time? I’d go crazy inside a week.”

I smiled. She had a point.

She said, “I wouldn’t buy it even without the biddies. I wouldn’t want to live like this. Not at all what I’m used to.”

I nodded. Said nothing.

Then she said, “Actually I couldn’t buy it even if I wanted to. We don’t know who the next of kin is. I wouldn’t know who to talk to.”

“No will?”

“She was twenty-seven years old.”

“No paperwork anywhere?”

“We haven’t found any so far.”

“No mortgage?”

“Nothing on record with the county.”

“No family?”

“No one recalls her mentioning any.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I moved on down the hallway.

“Look around,” Deveraux called after me. “Feel free. Make yourself at home. But tell me if you find something I should see.”

I walked from room to room, feeling the kind of trespass feelings I get every time I walk through a dead person’s house. There were minor examples of disarray here and there, the kind of things that would have been cleaned up and tidied away before an expected guest’s arrival. They humanized the place a little, but on the whole it was a bland and soulless home. There was too much uniformity. All the furniture matched. It looked like it had been selected from the same range from the same manufacturer, all at the same time. All the rugs went well together. All the paint was the same color. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs on the shelves. No books. No souvenirs, no prized possessions.

The bathroom was clean. The tub and the towels were dry. The medicine cabinet above the sink had a mirrored door, and behind it were over-the-counter analgesics, and toothpaste, and tampons, and dental floss, and spare soap and shampoo. The main bedroom had nothing of interest in it except a bed, which was made, but not well. The second bedroom had a narrower bed that looked like it had never been used.

The kitchen was fitted out with a range of useful stuff, but on balance I doubted that Chapman had been a gourmet cook. Her pocketbook was stowed neatly on the counter, resting upright against the side of the refrigerator. It was basically a small leather pouch, with a flap lid designed to close magnetically. It was navy blue in color, which might or might not have been the reason it had been left behind. I wasn’t sure of the current protocol involved in matching a blue bag with a yellow dress. Maybe not permitted. Although plenty of medals had blue and yellow in their ribbons, and the women soldiers I knew would have killed to get one, literally.

I opened the flap and looked in the bag. There was a slim leather wallet, dark red, and a convenience pack of tissues, unopened, and a pen, and some coins, and some crumbs, and a car key. The car key had a long serrated shaft, and a black plastic head molded to feel good to the thumbs, and embossed with a large letter H.

“Honda,” Deveraux said, beside me. “A Honda Civic. Bought new three years ago from a dealer in Tupelo. All up to date in terms of maintenance.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

Deveraux pointed to a door. “In her garage.”

I took the wallet out of the bag. It had nothing in it except cash money and a Mississippi driver’s license, issued three years before. The picture on it dimmed about half of Chapman’s allure, but it was still well worth looking at. The money added up to less than thirty dollars.

I put the wallet back and restacked the bag where it had been, next to the refrigerator. I opened the door Deveraux had pointed out, and behind it I found a tiny mud room that had two more doors in it, one letting out to the back yard on my left, and another to the garage straight ahead. The garage was completely empty apart from the car. The Honda. A small import, silver in color, clean and undamaged, sitting there cold and patient and smelling faintly of oil and unburned hydrocarbons. All around it was nothing but empty swept concrete. No unopened moving boxes, no chairs with the stuffing coming out, no abandoned projects, no junk, no clutter.

Nothing at all.

Unusual.

I opened the door to the back yard and stepped out. Deveraux came out with me and asked, “So, was there anything in there I should have seen?”

“Yes,” I said. “There were things in there anyone should have seen.”

“So what did I miss?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They weren’t there to be seen. That’s my point. We should have seen certain things, but we didn’t. Because certain things were missing.”

“What things?” she asked.

“Later,” I said, because by that point I had seen something else.

Chapter

37

Janice May Chapman’s back yard was not maintained to the same standard as her front yard. In fact it was barely maintained at all. It was almost completely neglected. It was mostly lawn, and it looked a little sad and sunken. It was mowed, but what had been mowed was basically weed, not grass. At the far end was a low panel fence, made of wood, starved of stain or protection, with the center panel fallen out and laid aside.

What I had seen from the door was a faint narrow path through the mowed weeds. It was almost imperceptible. Almost not there at all. Only the late-afternoon sun made it visible. The light came in low from one side and showed a ghostly trail, where the weeds were a little brushed and crushed and bruised. A little darker than the rest of the lawn. The path led through a curved trajectory straight to the hole in the fence. It had been made by feet, going back and forth.

I got two steps along it and stopped again. The ground was crunching under my soles. I looked down. Deveraux bumped into my back.

The second time we had ever touched.

“What?” she said.

I looked up again.

“One thing at a time,” I said, and started walking again.

The path led off the weeds, through the gap in the fence, and out into a barren abandoned field about a hundred yards in width. At the far edge of the field was the railroad track. Halfway along the right-hand edge of the field were two tumbled gateposts, and beyond them was a dirt road that ran east and west. West, I guessed, toward more old field entrances and a link to the winding continuation of Main Street, and east toward the railroad track, where it dead-ended.

The old field had tire tracks all the way across it. They came in between the ruined gateposts and ran through a wide right-angle turn straight toward the gap in Chapman’s fence. They ended close to where I was standing, in a wide looping triangle, where cars had backed up and turned, ready for the return trip.

“She got sick of the old biddies,” I said. “She was playing games with them. Sometimes she came out the front, and sometimes she came out the back. And I bet sometimes the boyfriends said goodnight and drove right around the block for more.”

Deveraux said, “Shit.”

“Can’t blame her. Or the boyfriends. Or the biddies, really. People do what they do.”

“But it makes their evidence meaningless.”

“That’s what she wanted. She didn’t know it was ever going to be important.”

“Now we don’t know when she came and went on that last day.”

I stood in the silence and looked all around. Nothing to see. No other houses, no other people. An empty landscape. Total privacy.

Then I turned and looked back at the weed patch that passed for a lawn.

“What?” Deveraux said again.

“She bought this place three years ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“She was twenty-four at the time.”

“Yes.”

“Is that usual? Twenty-four-year-olds owning real estate?”

“Maybe not very usual.”

“With no mortgage?”

“Definitely not very usual. But what has that got to do with her yard?”

“She wasn’t much of a gardener.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“The previous owner wasn’t much of a gardener either. Did you know him? Or her?”

“I was still in the Corps three years ago.”

“Not a long-time resident, that you remember from being a kid? Maybe a third old biddy, like a matched set?”

“Why?”

“No reason. Not important. But whoever, they didn’t like mowing their lawn. So they dug it up and replaced it with something else.”

“With what?”

“Go take a look.”

She backtracked through the gap in the fence and walked halfway along the path and squatted down. She parted the weedy stalks and dug her fingertips into the surface underneath. She raked them back and forth and then she looked up at me and said, “Gravel.”

The previous owner had tired of lawn care and opted for raked stones. Like a Japanese garden, maybe, or like the low-water-use yards conscientious Californians were starting to put in. Maybe there had been earthenware tubs here and there, full of cheerful flowers. Or maybe not. It was impossible to tell. But it was clear the gravel had not been a total success. Not a labor-saving cure-all. It had been laid thin. The subsoil had been full of weed roots. Regular applications of herbicide had been called for.

Janice May Chapman had not continued the herbicide applications. That was clear. No hosepipe in her garage. No watering can. Rural Mississippi. Agricultural land. Rain and sun. Those weeds had come boiling up like madmen. Some boyfriend had brought over a gasoline mower and hacked them back. Some nice guy with plenty of energy. The kind of guy who doesn’t like mess and disarray. A soldier, almost certainly. The kind of guy who does things for people, gets things neat, and then keeps them neat.

Deveraux asked, “So what are you saying? She was raped here?”

“Maybe she wasn’t raped at all.”

Deveraux said nothing.

“It’s possible she wasn’t,” I said. “Think about it. A sunny afternoon, total privacy. They’re sitting out back because they don’t want to sit on the front porch with the old biddies watching every move. They’re on the stoop, they’re feeling good, they get right to it.”

“On the lawn?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

She looked right at me and said, “Like you told the doctor, it would depend on who I was with.”

We spent the next few minutes talking about injuries. I did the thing with my forearm again. I pressed it down and mashed it around. I simulated the throes of passion. I came up with plenty of green chlorophyll stains and a smear of dry stony mud. When I wiped off the dirt we both saw the same kind of small red marks we had seen on Janice May Chapman’s corpse. They were superficial and there was no broken skin, but we both agreed Chapman might have been at it longer, and harder, with more weight and force. “We need to go inside again,” I said.

We found Chapman’s laundry basket in the bathroom. It was a rectangular wicker thing, with a lid. Painted white. On top of the pile inside was a short sundress. It had cap sleeves and was printed with red and white pinstripes. It was rucked and creased at the waist. It had grass stains on the upper back. Next item down in the laundry pile was a hand towel. Then a white blouse.

“No underwear,” Deveraux said.

“Evidently,” I said.

“The rapist kept a souvenir.”

“She wasn’t wearing any. Her boyfriend was coming over.”

“It’s March.”

“What was the weather like that day?”

“It was warm,” Deveraux said. “And sunny. It was a nice day.”

“Rosemary McClatchy wasn’t raped,” I said. “Nor was Shawna Lindsay. Escalation is one thing. A complete change in MO is another.”

Deveraux didn’t answer that. She stepped out of the bathroom into the hallway. The center point of the little house. She looked all around. She asked, “What did I miss here? What should be here that isn’t?”

“Something more than three years old,” I said. “She moved here from somewhere else, and she should have brought things with her. At least a few things. Books, maybe. Or photographs. Maybe a favorite chair or something.”

“Twenty-four-year-olds aren’t very sentimental.”

“They keep some little thing.”

“What did you keep when you were twenty-four?”

“I’m different. You’re different.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying she showed up here three years ago out of the blue and brought nothing with her. She bought a house and a car and got a local driver’s license. She bought a houseful of new furniture. All for cash. She doesn’t have a rich daddy or his picture would be next to the TV in a silver frame. I want to know who she was.”

Chapter

38

I followed Deveraux from room to room while she checked for herself. Paint on the walls, still fresh. Loveseat and armchair in the living room, still new. A recent television set. A fancy VHS player. Even the pots and pans and knives and forks in the kitchen showed no nicks or scratches from long-term use.

There were no clothes in the closet older than a couple of seasons. No old prom dress wrapped in plastic. No old cheerleader outfit. No photographs of family. No keepsakes. No old letters. No softball trophies, no jewelry box with a busted ballerina. No battered stuffed animals preserved from childhood years.

“Does it matter?” Deveraux said. “She was just a random victim, after all.”

“She’s a loose end,” I said. “I don’t like loose ends.”

“She was already here when I got back to town. I never thought about it. I mean, people come and go all the time. This is America.”

“Did you ever hear anything about her background?”

“Nothing.”

“No rumors or assumptions?”

“None at all.”

“Did she have a job?”

“No.”

“Accent?”

“The Midwest, maybe. Or just south of it. The heartland, anyway. I only spoke to her once.”

“Did you fingerprint the corpse?”

“No. Why would we? We knew who she was.”

“Did you know?”

“Too late now.”

I nodded. By now Chapman’s skin would be sloughing off her fingers like a soft old glove. It would be wrinkling and tearing like a wet paper bag. I asked, “Do you have a fingerprint kit in the car?”

She shook her head. “Butler does the fingerprinting here. The other deputy. He took a course with the Jackson PD.”

“You should get him here. He can take prints from the house.”

“They won’t all be hers.”

“Nine out of ten will be. He should start with the tampon box.”

“She won’t be on file anywhere. Why would she be? She was a kid. She didn’t serve and she wasn’t a cop.”

I said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Deveraux used the radio in her car out in the middle of the turnaround. She had chess pieces to move. Pellegrino had to replace Butler at Kelham’s gate. She came back in and said, “Twenty minutes. I have to get back. I have work to do. You wait here. But don’t worry. Butler should do it right. He’s a reasonably smart guy.”

“Smarter than Pellegrino?”

“Everyone is smarter than Pellegrino. My car is smarter than Pellegrino.”

I asked, “Will you have dinner with me?”

She said, “I have to work pretty late.”

“How late?”

“Nine o’clock, maybe.”

“Nine would be fine.”

“Are you paying?”

“Absolutely.”

She paused a beat.

“Like a date?” she asked.

“We might as well,” I said. “There’s only one restaurant in town. We’d probably end up eating together anyway.”

“OK,” she said. “Dinner. Nine o’clock. Thank you.”

Then she said, “Don’t shave, OK?”

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “You look good like that.”

And then she left.

I waited on Janice May Chapman’s front porch, in one of her rocking chairs. Both old ladies watched me from across the street. Deputy Butler showed up just inside his allotted twenty minutes. He was in a car like Pellegrino’s. He left it where Deveraux had left hers, and unfolded himself from the seat, and stepped around to the trunk. He was a tall guy, and well put together, somewhere in his middle thirties. He had long hair for a cop, and a square, solid face. First glance, he wouldn’t be the easiest guy in the world to manage. But maybe not impossible.

He took a black plastic box out of his trunk and walked up Chapman’s driveway toward me. I got out of my chair and held out my hand. Always better to be polite. I said, “Jack Reacher. I’m pleased to meet you.”

He said, “Geezer Butler.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“You play bass guitar?”

“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

“Was your dad a Black Sabbath fan?”

“My mom too.”

“Are you?”

He nodded. “I’ve got all their records.”

I led him inside. He stood in the hallway, looking around. I said, “The challenge here is to get her prints and no one else’s.”

“To avoid confusion?” he said.

No, I thought. To avoid a Bravo Company guy lighting up the system. Better safe than sorry.

I said, “Yes, to avoid confusion.”

“The chief said I should start in the bathroom.”

“Good plan,” I said. “Toothbrush, toothpaste, tampon box, personal things like that. Things that were boxed up or wrapped in cellophane in the store. No one else will have touched them.”

I hung back so as not to crowd him, but I watched him pretty carefully. He was extremely competent. He took twenty minutes and got twenty good prints, all small neat ovals, all obviously a woman’s. We agreed that was an adequate sample, and he packed up his gear and gave me a ride back to town.

I got out of Butler’s car outside the Sheriff’s Department and walked south to the hotel, where I stood on the sidewalk and wrestled with a dilemma. I felt I should go buy a new shirt, but I didn’t want Deveraux to feel that dinner was supposed to be more than just dinner. Or in reality I did want her to feel dinner could be more than just dinner, but I didn’t want her to see me wanting it. I didn’t want her to feel pushed into anything, and I didn’t want to appear overeager.

But in the end I decided a shirt was just a shirt, so I hiked across to the other side of Main Street and looked at the stores. Most of them were about to close. It was after five o’clock. I found a men’s outfitters three enterprises south of where I started. It didn’t look promising. In the window was a jacket made from some kind of synthetic denim. It glittered and shone in the lights. It looked like it had been knitted out of atomic waste. But the only other shopping choice was the pharmacy, and I didn’t want to show up at dinner wearing a dollar T. So I went in and looked around.

There was plenty more stuff pieced together from dubious fabrics, but there was plenty of plainer stuff too. There was an old guy behind the counter who seemed happy to let me poke around. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. Like a badge of office. Like a doctor wears a stethoscope. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to understand I was looking for shirts and he either frowned and tutted or beamed and nodded as I moved around from pile to pile, as if I was playing a parlor game, getting warmer and colder in my search.

Eventually I found a white button-down made of heavy cotton. The collar was an eighteen and the sleeves were thirty-seven inches long, which was about my size. I hauled my choice to the counter and asked, “Would this be OK for a job in an office?”

The old guy said, “Yes, sir, it would.”

“Would it impress a person at dinner?”

“I think you’d want something finer, sir. Maybe a pinpoint.”

“So it’s not what you’d call formal?”

“No, sir. Not by a long chalk.”

“OK, I’ll take it.”

It cost me less than the pink shirt from the PX. The old guy wrapped it in brown paper and taped it up into a little parcel. I carried it back across the street. I planned to dump it in my room. I made it into the hotel lobby just in time to see the owner setting off up the stairs in a big hurry. He turned when he heard the door, and he saw it was me and he stopped. He was out of breath. He said, “Your uncle is on the phone again.”

Chapter

39

I took the call alone in the back office, as before. Garber was tentative from the get-go, which made me uneasy. His first question was, “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “You?”

“How’s it going down there?”

“Bad,” I said.

“With the sheriff?”

“No, she’s OK.”

“Elizabeth Deveraux, right? We’re having her checked out.”

“How?”

“We’re having a quiet word with the Marine Corps.”

“Why?”

“Maybe we can get you something you can use against her. You might need leverage at some point.”

“Save your effort. She’s not the problem.”

“So what is?”

“We are,” I said. “Or you are. Or whoever. The army, I mean. They’re patrolling outside of Kelham’s fence and shooting people.”

“That’s categorically impossible.”

“I’ve seen the blood. And the car wreck has been sanitized.”

“That can’t be happening.”

“It is happening. And you need to stop it happening. Because right now you’ve got a big problem, but you’re going to turn it into World War Three.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“There are two guys beat up and one guy dead down here. I’m not mistaken.”

“Dead?”

“As in no longer alive.”

“How?”

“He bled out through a gunshot wound to the thigh. There was a half-assed attempt to patch it up with a GI field dressing. And I found a NATO shell case at the scene.”

“That’s not us. I would know.”

“Would you?” I said. “Or would I? You’re up there guessing and I’m down here looking.”

“It’s not legal.”

“Tell me about it. Worst case, it’s a policy decision. Best case, someone’s gone rogue. You need to find out which and get it stopped.”

“How?” Garber said. “You want me to walk up to a random selection of senior officers and accuse them of an egregious breach of the law? Maybe the worst ever in American military history? I’d be locked up before lunch and court-martialed the next morning.”

I paused. Breathed. Asked, “Are there names I shouldn’t say on an open line?”

Garber said, “There are names you shouldn’t even know.”

“This whole thing is drifting out of control. It’s going from bad to worse. I’ve seen three lawyers heading in and out of Kelham. Someone needs to make a decision. The officer in question needs to be pulled out and redeployed. Right now.”

“That’s not going to happen. Not as long as Kosovo is important. This guy could stop a war singlehanded and all by himself.”

“He’s one of four hundred men, for Christ’s sake.”

“Not according to the political ad campaigns two years from now. Think about it. He’s going to be the Lone Ranger.”

“He’s going to be locked up in Leavenworth.”

“Munro doesn’t think so. He says the officer in question is likely innocent.”

“Then we should act like it. We should stop with the lawyers and we should stop patrolling outside the fence.”

“We’re not patrolling outside the fence.”

I gave up. “Anything else?”

“One thing,” Garber said. “I have to do this. I hope you understand.”

“Try me.”

“You got a postcard from your brother.”

“Where?”

“At your office.”

“And you read it?”

“An army officer has no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

“Is that in the regulations too? Along with the hairstyles?”

“You need to explain the message to me.”

“Why? What does it say?”

“The picture on the front is downtown Atlanta. The card was mailed from the Atlanta airport eleven days ago. The text reads: Heading to a town called Margrave, south of here, business, but heard a story Blind Blake died there, will let you know. Then it’s signed Joe, his name.”

“I know my brother’s name.”

“What does the message mean?”

“It’s a personal note.”

“I’m ordering you to explain it to me. I apologize, but I have to do this.”

“You went to elementary school. You can read.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means what it says. He’s heading south of Atlanta to a town called Margrave.”

“Who was Blind Blake?”

“A guitar player, from way back. Blues music. One of the first legends.”

“Why would Joe make a point of informing you about that?”

“Shared interest.”

“What does Joe mean when he says he will let you know?”

“He means what he says.”

“Let you know about what?”

“About the Blind Blake legend, of course. About whether he died there.”

“Why does it matter where this man died?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a thing. Like collecting baseball cards.”

“So this is really about baseball cards?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Is this a code for something else?”

“A code? Why the hell would it be a code?”

Garber said, “You called his office today.”

“You know about that?”

“There’s a reporting mechanism in place.”

“That kid? The girl in his office?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details. But I need to know why you called him.”

“He’s my brother.”

“But why now? Were you going to ask him something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask him how he’s doing. Purely social.”

“Why now? Did something at Kelham provoke the inquiry?”

“This is none of your business.”

“Everything is my business. Help me out here, Reacher.”

I said, “Two black women were killed here before Janice May Chapman. Did you even know that? Because that’s something you should be bearing in mind, if you’re thinking about political campaigns. We ignored them and then our heads exploded when a white woman got killed.”

“How does this relate to Joe?”

“I met the second victim’s brother. Made me think about family. That’s all it was.”

“Did Joe tell you anything about money from Kosovo?”

“I didn’t get him. He was out of the office. He was in Georgia.”

“Atlanta again? Or Margrave?”

“I have no idea. Georgia is a big state.”

“OK,” Garber said. “I apologize for the intrusion.”

I asked, “Who exactly is worried about money from Kosovo?”

He said, “I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

I hung up with Garber and breathed in and out for a spell, and then I carried my new shirt upstairs and left it on my bed. I started to think about dinner with Elizabeth Deveraux. Three hours to go, and only one more thing to do beforehand.

Chapter

40

I came out of the front of the hotel and looped back through the dog-leg alley between the pharmacy and the hardware store and came out the other end between the loan office and Brannan’s bar. Where Janice May Chapman’s body had been found. The sand pile was still there, dry and crusted and powdery and a little redistributed by the breeze. I stepped around it and checked activity on the one-sided street. Not much was going on. Some of the bars were closed, because the base was closed. No point in opening without customers. A simple economic calculation.

But Brannan’s bar was open. Defiantly optimistic, or maybe just maintaining some longstanding tradition. I went in and found nobody there except two similar guys fussing with stuff in the drinks well. They looked like brothers. Middle thirties, maybe two years apart, like Joe and me. Wise to the ways of the world, which was going to give me the advantage. Their place was like a thousand base-town bars I had seen before, a complex boxed-in machine designed to turn boredom into cash. It was a decent size. I guessed it had been a small restaurant in the past, but small restaurants make big bars. The decor was maybe a little better than most. There were travel posters on the walls, of the world’s great cities photographed at night. No local stuff, which was smart. If you’re stuck for six months in the back of beyond, you don’t want to be reminded of it at every turn.

“Got coffee?” I asked.

They said no, which didn’t surprise me very much.

I said, “My name is Jack Reacher and I’m an MP with a dinner date coming up.”

They didn’t follow.

I said, “Which means that usually I’d have time to hang around all night and weasel stuff out of you in the normal course of conversation, but I don’t have time for that on this occasion, so we’ll have to rely on a straightforward question-and-answer session, OK?”

They got the message. Base-town bar owners worry about MPs. Easiest thing in the world to put a particular establishment on a local no-go list, for a week, or a month. Or forever. They introduced themselves as Jonathan and Hunter Brannan, brothers, inheritors of a business started by their grandmother back in the railroad days. She had sold tea and fancy cakes, and she had made a nice living. Their father had switched to alcohol when the trains stopped and the army arrived. They were a nice enough pair of guys. And realistic. They ran the best bar in town, so they couldn’t deny they saw everybody from time to time.

“Janice Chapman came here,” I said. “The woman who got killed.”

They agreed that yes, she did. No evasion. Everyone comes to Brannan’s.

I asked, “With the same guy every recent time?”

They agreed that yes, that was the case.

I asked, “Who was he?”

Hunter Brannan said, “His name was Reed. Don’t know much about him apart from that. But he was a big dog. You can always tell, by the way the others react.”

“Was he a regular customer?”

“They all are.”

“Was he in here that night?”

“That’s a tough question. This place is usually packed.”

“Try to remember.”

“I would say he was. For the early part of the evening, at least. I don’t recall seeing him later.”

“What car does he drive?”

“Some old thing. Blue, I think.”

I asked, “How long has he been coming here?”

“A year or so, I guess. But he’s one of the in-and-out guys.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’ve got a couple of squads over there. They go somewhere, and then they come back. A month on, a month off.”

“Did you see him with previous girlfriends?”

Jonathan Brannan said, “A guy like that, he always has arm candy.”

“Who in particular?”

“Whoever was the prettiest. Whoever was willing to put out, I guess.”

“Black or white?”

“Both. He’s pretty much an equal opportunities type of guy.”

“Remember any names?”

“No,” Hunter Brannan said. “But I remember feeling pretty jealous a couple of times.”

I went back to the hotel. Two hours until dinner. I spent the first hour taking a nap, because I was tired, and because I was figuring I wouldn’t be sleeping again too soon. Hoping I wouldn’t be, anyway. Hope springs eternal. I woke myself up at eight o’clock and unpacked my new shirt. I brushed my teeth with water and chewed some gum. Then I took a long hot shower, plenty of soap, plenty of shampoo.

I put on my new shirt and rolled the sleeves level with my elbows. The shirt was tight across the shoulders, so I left the top two buttons undone. I tucked the tails into my pants and put my shoes on and shined them one at a time against the backs of my calves.

I checked the mirror.

I looked exactly like a guy who wants to get laid. Which I was. There was nothing to be done about it.

I dumped my old shirts in the trash can and left my room and went down the stairs and stepped out to the darkness of the street. A voice from the shadows behind me said, “Hello again, soldier boy.”

Chapter

41

Ahead of me across the street were three pick-up trucks parked at the curb. Two that I recognized, and one that I didn’t. All the doors were open. Legs were dangling. Cigarettes were glowing. Smoke was drifting. I stepped left and half-turned and saw the alpha dog. The McKinney cousin. His face was still a mess. He was standing under one of the hotel’s busted lamps. His arms were down by his sides, and his hands were away from his hips, and his thumbs were away from his fingers. He was all fired up and ready.

Across the street five guys slipped out of the pick-up trucks. They started toward me. I saw the beta dog, and the beer-for-breakfast guy, and the biker with the bad back, and two guys I hadn’t seen before, each of them looking like the other four. Same region, same family, or both.

I stayed on the sidewalk. With six guys, I didn’t want any of them behind me. I wanted a wall at my back. The alpha dog stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and met the others as the right-hand item in a neat six-man arc. They all stayed in the street, eight or ten feet from me. Out of reach, but I could smell them. They were all doing the ape thing with their arms and hands and thumbs. Like gunfighters with no guns.

“Six of you?” I said. “Is that it?”

No answer.

“That’s kind of incremental, isn’t it?” I said. “I was hoping for something a little more radical. Like the difference between an airborne company and an armored division. I guess we were thinking along different lines. I have to say, I’m kind of disappointed.”

No answer.

I said, “Anyway, guys, I’m sorry, but I have a dinner date.”

They all took a step forward, bringing them closer to each other and closer to me. Six pale faces, sallow in what little light there was.

I said, “I’m wearing a brand new shirt.”

No answer.

Basic rule of thumb with six guys: you have to be quick. You can’t spend more than the bare minimum of time on any one individual. Which means you have to hit each of them one time only. Because that’s the minimum. You can’t hit a guy less than once.

I rehearsed my moves. I figured I would start in the middle. One two three, bang bang bang. The third hit would be the hardest. The third guy would be moving. The first two wouldn’t. They would be rooted to the spot. Shock and surprise. They would go down easy. But the third guy would be reacting by the time I got to him. And unpredictably. He might have a coherent plan in mind, but it wouldn’t be in motion yet. He would still be jerking around with uncontrolled reflex panic.

So I was prepared to miss out on the third guy. Maybe jump straight to the fourth. The third guy might run. Certainly at least one of them would. I have never seen a pack that stayed together after the first few heads hit the pavement.

I said, “Guys, please, I just took a shower.”

There was no answer, which was what I had privately predicted. They all stepped forward again, which is what I expected them to do. So I met them halfway, which seemed polite. I took two long strides, the second of them powering off the edge of the curbstone, two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, and I hit the third guy from the left with a straight right that would have taken his teeth out if he’d had any to start with. As it was it snapped his head back and turned his spine and shoulders to jelly and he was gone, from the fight and from my vision, because by then I was already jerking left and scything my right elbow into the second guy, horizontal across the bridge of his nose, a colossal blow full of torque from my waist and full of force from the fact that I was basically falling into him. I saw blood in the air and stamped down hard and reversed my momentum and used the same elbow backward on a guy I sensed behind me. I could tell by the impact he was flinching away and I had caught him on the ear, so I made an instantaneous mental note he might need more attention later, and then I jerked forward again and changed the angle of attack by kicking the fourth guy full-on in the groin, a satisfying bone-and-flesh crunch that simultaneously folded him in half and lifted him off his feet.

Three seconds, three down, one taking an eight count.

Nobody ran.

Another mental note: Mississippi hooligans are made of sterner stuff than most. Or else they’re just plain dumber.

The fifth guy got as far as scrabbling at my shoulder. Some kind of an attempt at a punch, or maybe he was going for a choke hold. Maybe he planned to keep me still while the sixth guy landed some blows. I couldn’t tell. But whatever, he was sorely disappointed in his ambitions. I exploded backward at him, my whole body moving, my torso twisting, my elbow whipping back, and I caught him in the cheek, and then I used the bounce to jam forward once more, in search of the lone survivor. The sixth guy. He caught his heel on the curb and his arms came up like a scarecrow, which I took as an invitation to pop him in the chest, right in the solar plexus, which was like plugging him into an electrical outlet. He hopped and danced and went down in a heap.

The guy I had hit on the ear was pawing at it like it was coming off. His eyes were closed, which made it not much of a fair fight, but those are always my favorite kind. I lined up and smacked a left hook into his chin.

He went down like a dropped marionette.

I breathed out.

Six for six.

End of story.

I coughed twice and spat on the ground. Then I hustled north. I had a block to go and the clock in my head said it was already one minute past nine.

Chapter

42

I pushed in through the diner door and found the place empty apart from the waitress and the old couple from Toussaint’s. They looked to be about halfway through their nightly marathon. The woman had a book, the man had a paper. Deveraux wasn’t there yet.

I told the waitress I was expecting company. I asked her for a table for four. I figured the tables for two would be cramped for a long social engagement. She set me up in a spot near the front and I headed for the bathroom.

I rinsed my face and washed my hands and forearms and elbows with hot water and soap. I ran wet fingers through my hair. I breathed in and breathed out. Adrenaline is a bitch. It doesn’t know when to quit. I flapped my hands and rolled my shoulders. I took a look in the mirror. My hair was OK. My face was clean.

There was blood on my shirt.

On the pocket. And above. And below. Not much, but some. A definite comma-shaped curl of droplets. Like it had been flung at me. Or like I had walked into a mist. Which I had. The second guy. I had hit him on the bridge of his nose. His nose had bled like a flushing toilet.

I said, “Shit,” quietly, to myself.

My old shirts were in the trash in my room.

The stores were all closed.

I edged closer to the sink and took another look in the mirror. The droplets were already drying. Turning brown. Maybe they would end up looking deliberate. Like a logo. Or a pattern. Like a single element taken from a swirling fabric. I had seen similar things. I wasn’t sure what they were called. Paisley?

I breathed in, breathed out.

Nothing to be done.

I headed back to the dining room and got there just as Deveraux stepped in through the door.

She wasn’t in uniform. She had changed her clothes. She was wearing a silver silk shirt and a black knee-length skirt. High heeled shoes. A silver necklace. The shirt was thin and tight and tiny. It was open at the top. The skirt sat at her waist. I could have spanned her waist with my hands. Her legs were bare. And slim. And long. Her hair was wet from the shower. It was loose on her shoulders. It was spilling down her back. No ponytail. No elastic band. She was smiling, all the way up to her amazing eyes.

I showed her to our table and we sat down facing each other. She was small and neat, centered on her bench. She was wearing perfume. Something faint and subtle. I liked it.

She said, “I’m sorry I’m late.”

I said, “No problem.”

She said, “You have blood on your shirt.”

I said, “Is that what it is?”

“Where did you get it?”

“Across the street from the hotel. There’s a store.”

“Not the shirt,” she said. “The blood. You didn’t cut yourself shaving.”

“You told me not to.”

“I know,” she said. “I like you like that.”

“You look great too.”

“Thank you. I decided to quit early. I went home to change.”

“I see that.”

“I live in the hotel.”

“I know.”

“Room seventeen.”

“I know.”

“Which has a balcony overlooking the street.”

“You saw?”

“Everything,” she said.

“Then I’m surprised you didn’t break the date.”

“Is it a date?”

“It’s a dinner date.”

She said, “You didn’t let them hit you first.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I had.”

“True,” she said, and smiled. “You were pretty good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“But you’re killing my budget. Pellegrino and Butler are getting overtime to haul them away. I wanted them gone before the hotel folks finish their dinner. Voters don’t like mayhem in the streets.”

The waitress came by. She brought no menus. Deveraux had been eating there three times a day for two years. She knew the menu. She asked for the cheeseburger. So did I, with coffee to drink. The waitress made a note and went away.

I said, “You had the cheeseburger yesterday.”

Deveraux said, “I have it every day.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Every day I do the same things and eat the same things.”

“How do you stay thin?”

“Mental energy,” she said. “I worry a lot.”

“About what?”

“Right now about a guy from Oxford, Mississippi. That’s the guy who got shot in the thigh. The doctor brought his personal effects to my office. There was a wallet and a notebook. The guy was a journalist.”

“Big paper?”

“No, freelance. Struggling, probably. His last press pass was two years old. But Oxford has a couple of alternative papers. He was probably trying to sell something to one of them.”

“There’s a school in Oxford, right?”

Deveraux nodded again.

“Ole Miss,” she said. “About as radical as this state gets.”

“Why did the guy come here?”

“I would have loved the chance to ask him. He might have had something I could use.”

The waitress came back with my coffee and a glass of water for Deveraux. Behind my back I heard the old guy from the hotel grunt and turn a page in his paper.

I said, “My CO still denies there are boots on the ground outside the fence.”

Deveraux asked, “How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know. If he’s lying to me, it will be the first time ever.”

“Maybe someone’s lying to him.”

“Such cynicism in one so young.”

“But don’t you think?”

“More than likely.”

“So how does that make you feel?”

“What are you, a psychiatrist now?”

She smiled. “Just interested. Because I’ve been there. Does it make you angry?”

“I never get angry. I’m a very placid type of a guy.”

“You looked angry twenty minutes ago. With the McKinney family.”

“That was just a technical problem. Space and time. I didn’t want to be late for dinner. I wasn’t angry, really. Well, not at first. I got a bit frustrated later. You know, mentally. I mean, when there were four of them, I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That’s all. They showed up with a total of six. What is that about? It’s deliberate disrespect.”

Deveraux said, “I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.”

“But I warned them. I told them they’d need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn’t listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.”

“How’s that going, by the way?”

“Not good. They’re as bad as the McKinney family.”

“Are you worried?”

“Some people are.”

“They should be. The army is going to change.”

“The Marines too, then.”

She smiled. “A little, maybe. But not much. The army is the big target. And the easy target. Because the army is boring. The Marines aren’t.”

“You think?”

“Come on,” she said. “We’re glamorous. We have a great dress uniform. We do great close-order drill. We do great funerals. You know why we do all that? Because Marines are very good at PR. And we get good advice. Our consultants are better than yours, basically. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what it comes down to. So you’ll lose a lot, and we’ll lose a little.”

“You have consultants?” I said.

“And lobbyists,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. The waitress brought our meals. Just like the night before. Two big cheeseburgers, two big tangles of fries. I had had the same thing for lunch. I hadn’t remembered that. But I was hungry. So I ate. And I watched Deveraux eat. Which was some kind of a threshold. It has to mean something, if you can stand to watch another person eat.

She chewed and swallowed and said, “Anyway, what else did your CO tell you?”

“That he’s having you checked out.”

She stopped eating. “Why would he?”

“To give me something to use against you.”

She smiled. “There’s not much there, I’m afraid. I was a good little jarhead. But don’t you see? They’re proving my case for me. The more desperate they get, the more I know for sure it’s some Kelham guy’s ass on the line.”

She started eating again.

I said, “My CO was also quizzing me on my mail.”

“They’re reading your letters?”

“A postcard from my brother.”

“Why?”

“They must think it might help.”

“Did it?”

“Not in the least. It was nothing.”

“They are desperate, aren’t they?”

“My CO kept apologizing about it.”

“So he should.”

“He asked if there was a code in the postcard. But really I think he was talking in code. I think he has been all along. Right back at the beginning he wasted ten minutes giving me a hard time about my hair. That’s not like him, which I think was the point. He’s telling me this isn’t him. He’s telling me he’s in the dark, under orders, doing something he doesn’t want to do.”

“Nice of him to dump his problems on you. He could have sent someone else.”

“Could he, though? Maybe this whole thing was a package deal, soup to nuts, planned up above. Like when the owner picks the team. Me and Munro. Maybe they’re getting ready to thin the herd, and we’re being given a loyalty test.”

“Munro told me he knows you by reputation.”

I nodded. “We’ve never met.”

“Reputations are dangerous things to have, in times like these.”

I said nothing.

She said, “If I asked my old buddies to check you out, what would they find?”

“Parts of it aren’t pretty,” I said.

“So this is payback time,” she said. “It’s a win-win for somebody. Either they break you or they get rid of you. You’ve got an enemy somewhere. Any idea who?”

“No,” I said.

We ate in silence for a moment, and finished up. Clean plates. Meat, bread, cheese, potatoes, all gone. I felt full. Deveraux was half my size. Or less. I didn’t know how she did it. She said, “Anyway, tell me about your brother.”

“I’d rather talk about you.”

“Me? There’s nothing to say. Carter Crossing, the Marine Corps, Carter Crossing again. That’s the story of my life. No sisters, no brothers. How many do you have?”

“Just the one.”

“Older or younger?”

“Two years older. Born way far away in the Pacific. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“Is he like you?”

“We’re like two alternative versions of the same person. We look alike. He’s smarter than me. I get things done better. He’s more cerebral, I’m more physical. He was good and I was bad, according to our parents. Like that.”

“What does he do for a living?”

I paused.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

“His job is classified?”

“Not really,” I said. “But it might give you a clue about one of the things the army is worried about here.”

She smiled. She was a very tolerant woman. She said, “Should we get pie?”

We ordered two peach pies, the same as I had eaten the night before. And coffee, for both of us, which I took to be a good sign. She wasn’t worried about being kept awake. Maybe she was planning on it. The old couple from the hotel got up and left while the waitress was still in the kitchen. They stopped by our table. No real conversation. Just a lot of nodding and smiling. They were determined to be polite. Simple economics. Deveraux was their meal ticket, and I was temporarily the icing on their cake.

The clock in my head hit ten in the evening. The pies arrived, and so did the coffee. I didn’t pay much attention to either. I spent most of my time looking at the third button on Deveraux’s shirt. I had noticed it before. It was the first one that was done up. Therefore it was the first one that would need to be undone. It was a tiny mother-of-pearl thing, silvery gray. Behind it was skin, neither pale nor dark, and very three dimensional. Left to right it curved toward me, then away from me, then toward me again. It was rising and falling as she breathed.

The waitress came by and offered more coffee. For possibly the first time in my life I turned it down. Deveraux said no, too. The waitress put the check on the table, face down, next to me. I flipped it over. Not bad. You could still eat well on a soldier’s pay, back in 1997. I dropped some bills on it and looked across at Deveraux and said, “Can I walk you home?”

She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

Chapter

43

Pellegrino and Butler had done their work. They had earned their overtime payments. The McKinney boys were gone. Main Street was silent and completely deserted. The moon was out and the air was soft. Deveraux was taller in her heels. We walked side by side, close enough for me to hear the whisper of silk on skin, and to catch the scent of her perfume.

We got to the hotel and went up the worn steps and crossed the porch. I held the door for her. The old guy was working behind the counter. We nodded goodnight to him and headed for the stairs. At the top Deveraux paused and said, “Well, goodnight, Mr. Reacher, and thanks again for your company at dinner.”

Loud and clear.

I just stood there.

She crossed the corridor.

She took out her key.

She put it in room seventeen’s lock.

She opened the door.

Then she closed it again loudly and tiptoed back to me and stretched up and put her hand on my shoulder. She put her lips close to my ear and whispered, “That was for the old man downstairs. I have to think about my reputation. Mustn’t shock the voters.”

I breathed out.

I took her hand and we headed for my room.

We were both thirty-six years old. All grown up. Not teenagers. We didn’t rush. We didn’t fumble. We took our time, and what a time it was. Maybe the best ever.

We kissed as soon as my door was closed. Her lips were cool and wet. Her teeth were small. Her tongue was agile. It was a great kiss. I had one hand in her hair, and one on the small of her back. She was jammed hard against me, and moving. Her eyes were open. So were mine. We kept that first kiss going for whole minutes. Five of them, or maybe ten. We were patient. We took it slow. We were very good at it. I think we both understood that the first time happens only once. We both wanted to savor it.

Eventually we came up for air. I took my shirt off. I didn’t want McKinney blood between us. I have a big shrapnel scar low down on my front. It looks like a pale octopus crawling up out of my waistband. Ugly white stitches. Usually a conversation starter. Deveraux saw it and ignored it. She moved right along. She was a Marine. She had seen worse. Her hand went to her top button.

I said, “No, let me.”

She smiled and said, “That’s your thing? You like undressing women?”

“More than anything in the world,” I said. “And I’ve been staring at that particular button since a quarter past nine.”

“Since ten past nine,” she said. “I paid attention to the time line. I’m a cop.”

I took her left hand and got her to hold it out, palm up. She kept it there, patiently. I undid her cuff button. I did the same with her right hand. The silk fell back over slim wrists. She put her hands on my chest. She slid them up behind my head. We kissed again, five whole minutes. Another great kiss. Better than the first.

We came up for air again and I moved on to the button on the front of her shirt. Like all the others it was small. And slippery. My fingers are big. But I got the job done. The button popped open, helped on its way by the swell of her breasts. I moved down to the fourth button. Then the fifth. I eased the silk out of the waistband of her skirt, all the way around, little by little, slowly and carefully. She was looking at me and smiling the whole time. Her shirt fell open. She was wearing a bra. A tiny black thing, with lace, and delicate straps. It barely covered her nipples. Her breasts were fantastic.

I eased the shirt back off her shoulders and it sighed and parachuted to the floor behind her. Her scent came up at me. We kissed again, long and hard. I kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder. She had a cleft down her back. Her bra strap spanned it like a little bridge. She put her head back and her hair spilled everywhere. I kissed her throat.

“Now your shoes,” she said, and her throat buzzed against my lips.

She turned me around and pushed me backward and sat me down on the edge of the bed. She knelt in front of me. She untied my right shoe, and then my left. She eased them off. She hooked her thumbs in my socks and peeled them down.

“PX for sure,” she said.

“Less than a dollar,” I said. “Couldn’t resist.”

We stood up again and kissed again. By that point in my life I had kissed hundreds of girls, but I was ready to admit Deveraux was the finest of them all. She was spectacular. She moved and quivered and trembled. She was strong, but gentle. Passionate, but not aggressive. Hungry, but not demanding. The clock in my head took a break. We had all the time in the world, and we were going to use every last minute of it.

She hooked her fingers behind the front of my waistband. She tugged on it. She undid the button, one finger, one thumb. We kept on kissing. She found my zipper tab and eased it down, slowly, slowly, small hand, neat thumb, precise finger. She put her hands flat on my shoulder blades and slid them side to side, warm, dry, soft, and then she moved them down, slowly, to my waist, and then down again. She slid the tips of her fingers under my loosened waistband and tented the fabric. She went deeper. She pushed back and down and my pants slid over my hips. We were still kissing.

We came up for air and she turned me around and sat me down again. She pulled my pants off and dumped them on top of her shirt. She left me on the bed and stepped back a pace and held her arms out wide and said, “Tell me what to take off next.”

“I get to pick?”

She nodded. “Your choice.”

I smiled. A hell of a choice. Bra, skirt, shoes. I figured she could keep her shoes on. For a spell, anyway. Maybe all night long.

I said, “Skirt.”

She obliged. There was a button and a zipper at the side. She popped the button and slid the zipper down, slowly, an inch, two inches, three, four. I heard its sound quite clearly in the silence. The skirt fell to the ground. She stepped out of it, one foot, then the other. Her legs were long and smooth and toned. She was wearing tiny black panties. Not much to them. Just a wisp of dark fabric.

Bra, panties, shoes. I was still sitting on the bed. She climbed into my lap. I lifted her hair away and kissed her ear. I traced its shape with my tongue. I could feel her cheek against mine. I could feel the smile. I kissed her mouth, she kissed my ear. We spent twenty minutes learning every contour above our necks.

Then we moved lower.

I unsnapped her bra. It fell away, insubstantial. I ducked my head. Her head went back, arching her breasts toward me. They were firm and round and smooth. Her nipples were sensitive. She moaned a little. So did I. She moved and kissed my chest. I lifted her off my lap and rolled her on her back on the bed. Then she rolled me. Twenty fabulous minutes, spent getting to know each other above the waist.

Then we moved lower.

I was on my back. She knelt over me and slid my boxers down. She smiled. So did I. Ten amazing minutes later we changed places. Her panties came down over her hips, and then she lifted her knees to let me finish the job. I buried my face between her thighs. She was wet and sweet. She moved, uninhibited. She rolled her head from side to side and squirmed her shoulders and pressed herself down on the mattress. She ran her fingers through my hair.

Then it was time. We started tenderly. Long and slow, long and slow. Deep and easy. She flushed and gasped. So did I. Long and slow, long and slow.

Then faster and harder.

Then we were panting.

Faster, harder, faster, harder.

Panting.

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“Wait, wait,” she said. “Not now. Not yet. Slow down.”

Long and slow, long and slow.

Breathing hard.

Panting.

Long and slow.

“OK,” she said. “OK. Now. Now. Now!”

Faster and harder.

Faster, harder, faster, harder.

The room began to shake.

Just very faintly at first, like a mild constant tremor, like the edge of a far distant earthquake. The French door ticked in its frame. A glass rattled on the bathroom shelf. The floor quivered. The hall door creaked and stuttered. My shoes hopped and moved. The bed head hammered against the wall. The floor shook hard. The walls boomed. Coins in my abandoned pocket tinkled. The bed shook and bounced and walked tiny fractions across the moving floor.

Then the midnight train was gone, and so were we.

Chapter

44

Afterward we lay side by side, naked, breathing hard, sweat pooling, holding hands. I stared up at the ceiling. Deveraux said, “I’ve wanted to do that for two whole years. That damn train. Might as well make use of it.”

I said, “If I ever buy a house it’s going to be next to a railroad track. That’s for damn sure.”

She moved her position and snuggled next to me. I put my arm around her. We lay quiet, and spent, and satisfied. I heard Blind Blake in my head. I had once listened to a cassette tape of all his songs, transferred from beat-up old 78s, the absurd roar and scratch of ancient shellac surface noise almost drowning out the quiet, wistful voice and the agile guitar, as it picked out the rhythms of the railroad. A blind man. Blind from birth. He had never seen a train. But he had heard plenty. That was clear.

Deveraux asked me what I was thinking about, and I told her. I said, “That’s the guy my brother’s note was about.”

“Are you still mad about it?”

“I’m sad about it,” I said.

“Why?”

“This mission was a mistake,” I said. “They shouldn’t have put me on the outside. Not for this kind of thing. It’s making me think of them as … them. Not us anymore.”

Later we had a languid conversation about whether she should go back to her own room. Reputations. Voters. I said the old guy had come upstairs for me when Garber had called. He had gotten a good look inside the room. She said if that happened again I could delay a second and she could hide in the bathroom. She said they rarely knocked on her door. And if by some chance they did the next morning and there was no reply, they would assume she was out on a case. Which would be entirely plausible. She wasn’t short of work to do, after all.

Then she said, “Maybe Janice Chapman was doing what we just did. With the gravel scratches, I mean. With her boyfriend, whoever he was. Out in her back yard, at midnight. Under the stars. The railroad track is pretty close by. Must be amazing out of doors.”

“It must be,” I said. “I was right next to the track at midnight last night. It’s like the end of the world.”

“Would the timing work? With the scabs?”

“If she had sex at midnight she was killed about four in the morning. What time was she found?”

“Ten the next evening. That’s eighteen hours. I guess there would have been some decomposition by then.”

“Probably. But bled-out bodies can look pretty weird. It would have been fairly hard to tell. And your department doctor isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes.”

“So it’s possible?”

“We’d have to explain why she put on a nice dress and pantyhose sometime between midnight and four in the morning.”

We pondered that for a moment. Then we surrendered to inertia. We said nothing more, about dresses or pantyhose, or voters or rooms or reputations, and then we fell asleep, in each other’s arms, outside the covers, naked, in the still silence of the Mississippi night.

Four hours later I was awake again and confirming my longest-held belief: there is no better time than the second time. All the first time’s semi-formal niceties can be forgotten. All the first time tricks we use to impress each other can be abandoned. There’s new familiarity, and no loss of excitement. There’s a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. Second time around, you’re ready to rock and roll.

And we did.

Afterward Deveraux yawned and stretched and said, “You’re not bad for a soldier boy.”

I said, “You’re excellent for a Marine.”

“We better be careful. We might develop feelings for each other.”

“What are those?”

“What are what?”

“Feelings.”

She paused a beat.

She said, “Men should be more in touch with their feelings.”

I said, “If I ever have one, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.”

She paused again. Then she laughed. Which was good. This was already 1997, remember. It was touch and go in those days.

I woke up for the second time at seven o’clock in the morning, thinking about pregnancy.

Chapter

45

Elizabeth Deveraux was sitting upright in the bed when I woke. She was on my left, in the center of her space, facing me, back straight, legs crossed, like yoga. She was naked and unselfconscious. She was very beautiful. Just spectacularly good looking. One of the best looking women I had ever seen, and certainly the best looking I had ever seen naked, and definitely the best looking I had ever slept with.

But by that point she was mentally preoccupied. Seven o’clock in the morning. The start of the work day. No third time lucky for me. Not right then. She said, “They must have had something else in common. Those three women, I mean.”

I said nothing.

“Beauty is too nebulous,” she said. “It’s too subjective. It’s just an opinion.”

I said nothing.

She said, “What?”

“It’s not just an opinion,” I said. “Not with those three.”

“Then we’re looking for two factors. Two things that interacted. They were beautiful and they were also something else.”

“Maybe they were pregnant,” I said.

We examined the proposition. They were girlfriend material. It was a base town. These things happen. Mostly by accident, but sometimes on purpose. Sometimes women think that moving from one base town to another with a baby is better than living alone in the base town where they were born. A mistake, probably, but not for all of them. My own mother had been OK with it, for instance.

I said, “Shawna Lindsay was desperate to get out, according to her kid brother.”

Deveraux said, “But I can’t see why Janice May Chapman would have been. She wasn’t born here. She chose this place. And she wouldn’t have needed a guy to get her out anyway. She could have just sold up and driven away in her Honda.”

“Accident, then,” I said. “With her, anyway. One other thing we didn’t see in her house was birth control. Nothing in the medicine cabinet.”

No response.

I asked, “Where do you keep yours?”

“Bathroom shelf,” she said. “There are no medicine cabinets here.”

“Did Rosemary McClatchy want to get out of town?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Why wouldn’t she?”

“Did the doctor test for pregnancy?”

“No,” Deveraux said. “I’m sure they would have in a big city. But not here. Merriam signed the certificate and gave us the cause of death, that’s all. The fifty-cent opinion.”

I said, “Chapman didn’t look pregnant.”

“Some women don’t, for months.”

“Would Rosemary McClatchy have told her mother?”

“I can’t ask her,” Deveraux said. “Absolutely not. No way. I can’t put that possibility into Emmeline’s mind. Because suppose Rosemary wasn’t pregnant? It would taint her memory.”

“There was something Shawna Lindsay’s brother wasn’t telling me. I’m sure of it. Maybe something big. You should talk to him. His name is Bruce. He wants to join the army, by the way.”

“Not the Marines?”

“Apparently not.”

“Why? Did you trash the Marines to him?”

“I was very fair.”

“Would he talk to me? He seems very hostile.”

“He’s OK,” I said. “Ugly, but OK. He seems drawn toward the military. He seems to understand command structure. You’re a Marine and a sheriff. Approach it right and he might stand up and salute.”

“OK,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try it. Maybe I’ll go see him today.”

“All three of them could have been accidental,” I said. “The big decisions might have come afterward. About what to do, I mean. If they all three liked the status quo they might have chosen a different route. Or they might have been persuaded.”

“Abortion?”

“Why not?”

“Where would they get an abortion in Mississippi? You’d have to drive north for hours.”

“Which is maybe why Janice Chapman got dressed before four in the morning. An early start. Maybe she had a long trip ahead of her. Maybe her boyfriend was driving her somewhere. For an afternoon appointment, perhaps. Then an overnight stay. Maybe she was thinking ahead, to the reception counter. The waiting room. So she put on something appropriate. Stylish, but reasonably demure. And maybe she packed a bag. That’s something else we didn’t see in her house. Suitcases.”

“We’ll never know for sure,” Deveraux said. “Unless we find the boyfriends.”

“Or the boyfriend, singular,” I said. “It might have been the same guy.”

“With all three of them?”

“It’s possible.”

“But it makes no sense. Why would he set up an appointment at an abortion clinic for them and then murder them before they got a mile down the road? Why not just go through with the appointment?”

“Maybe he’s the kind of guy who can’t afford either a pregnant girlfriend or an association with an abortion clinic.”

“He’s a soldier. Not a preacher. Or a politician.”

I said nothing.

Deveraux said, “Maybe he wants to be a preacher or a politician later.”

I said nothing.

“Or maybe he’s got preachers or politicians in the family. Maybe he has to avoid embarrassing them.”

There was a creak from a floorboard outside in the hall, and then a soft knock on my door. I recognized the sound immediately. The same as the morning before. The old guy. I pictured his slow shuffling tread, the slow tentative movement of his arm, the muted low-energy impact of his papery knuckles on the wood.

Deveraux whispered, “Oh, shit.”

Now we were like teenagers. Now we were rushing and fumbling. Deveraux rolled off the bed and grabbed an armful of clothing, which happened to include my pants, so I had to wrestle them back from her, which spilled the other garments all over the place. She tried to collect them and I tried to get my pants on. I got tangled up and fell back on the bed and she made it to the bathroom but left a breadcrumb trail of socks and underwear behind her. I got my pants more or less straight and the old guy knocked again. I limped across the floor and kicked clothes toward the bathroom as I went. Deveraux darted out and collected them up. Then she ducked back in again and I opened the door.

The old guy said, “Your fiancée is on the phone for you.”

Loud and clear.

Chapter

46

I padded downstairs barefoot, wearing only my pants. I took the call alone in the back office behind the reception counter, as before. It was Karla Dixon on the line. My old colleague. The financial wizard. She had been a founding member of the original 110th Special Unit. My second pick, after Frances Neagley. I guessed Stan Lowrey had passed on my question about money from Kosovo, and Dixon was calling back direct, to save time.

I asked, “Why did you have to say you were my fiancée?”

She asked back, “Why, did I interrupt something?”

“Not exactly. But she heard.”

“Elizabeth Deveraux? Neagley told us about her. You two are getting it on already?”

“And now I’ve got some explaining to do.”

“You need to take care there, Reacher.”

“Neagley always thinks that.”

“This time she’s right. The sergeants’ network is all lit up. Red hot. Deveraux is being checked out, big time.”

“I know that,” I said. “Garber already told me. Waste of time.”

“I don’t think so. It all suddenly went quiet.”

“Because there’s nothing there.”

“No, because there is. You know how bureaucracy works. It’s easy to say no. Silence means yes.”

“What would they find if they checked you out?”

“Plenty.”

“Or me?”

“I hate to think.”

“So there you go,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Believe me, there’s something wrong there, Reacher. I mean it. Maybe something real big. My advice would be to stay away from her.”

“Too late for that. I don’t buy it, anyway. She was a good little jarhead.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.”

Silence on the line.

I said, “What else?”

Dixon said, “There’s no money coming out of Kosovo. None at all. Whoever’s worrying about that is on a wild goose chase. It’s not a factor.”

“You sure?”

“Completely.”

“They’re wondering if Joe is telling me anything.”

“Wild goose chase,” she said again. “Treasury wouldn’t know, anyway. Unless it was billions and billions. Which it isn’t. It isn’t even dollars and cents. It’s nothing. Someone’s panicking, that’s all. They’re thrashing around. They’re looking for something that isn’t there.”

“OK, good to know,” I said. “Thanks.”

“That was the good news,” she said.

“What’s the bad news?”

“Related information,” she said. “A friend of a friend got into the Kosovo files, and they’re plenty thick right now.”

“With what?”

“Among other things, two local women disappeared without a trace.”

Dixon told me that over the last year two Kosovan women had simply vanished. There was no local explanation. No family troubles. Both were unmarried. Both had been within range of the U.S. Army’s local footprint. Both had fraternized.

“Girlfriend material,” Dixon said.

“Good looking?” I asked.

“I didn’t see photographs.”

I asked, “Was there an investigation?”

“Under the radar,” Dixon said. “We’re not there at all, remember, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. So they flew a guy in from Germany. Supposedly on his way to Italy for some NATO crap, but Kosovo was the real destination. The travel arrangements are still on file.”

“And?”

“As a patriotic American you’ll be glad to hear that every last member of the U.S. armed forces was as innocent as a newborn baby. No crimes were committed by anyone in uniform.”

“So the case was closed?”

“Tighter than a trout’s asshole.”

“Who was the investigator?”

“Major Duncan Munro.”

I finished the call with Dixon and went back upstairs. Deveraux wasn’t in my room. I padded back to hers and found the door locked. I heard the shower running. I knocked but got no response. So I showered and dressed and went back fifteen minutes later and found nothing but silence. I walked up to the diner, but she wasn’t there either. Her car was not in the department lot. So I just stood there on the sidewalk, with nowhere to go, and no one to talk to, and nothing to do, completely unaware that the hour that would change everything had just ticked down from sixty minutes to fifty-nine.

Chapter

47

I loitered on the sidewalk for half of that hour. Mostly I leaned on a wall and didn’t move. A professional skill. Necessary in my line of work. I’m good at it. But I know people who are better. I know people who have waited hours or days or weeks for something to happen.

I was waiting for the old guy with the tape measure to show up and open the shirt shop. Which he did, eventually. I pushed off my wall and crossed the street and followed him inside. He fussed with locks and lights and I made straight for his pile of button-downs. I found the same thing I was wearing and took it to the counter.

The old guy said, “Stocking up?”

I said, “No, the first one got dirty.”

He leaned in and peered at my pocket. I saw his eyes trace the curl of blood. Down and up. He said, “I’m sure that would wash out. Cold water, maybe a little salt.”

“Salt?”

“Salt helps with bloodstains. With cold water. Hot water sets them.”

“I don’t think the Toussaint’s hotel offers a very sophisticated laundry service,” I said. “Actually I don’t think they offer any kind of laundry service at all. They don’t even offer coffee in the lounge.”

“You could take the shirt home with you, sir.”

“How?”

“Well, in your suitcase.”

“Easier just to replace it.”

“But that would be very expensive.”

“Compared to what? How much do suitcases cost?”

“But you would keep a suitcase forever. You would use it over and over again for many years.”

I said, “I think I’ll just take the new shirt. No need to wrap it.”

I paid the guy and then ducked into his changing cubicle and pulled the curtain. I took off the old shirt, put on the new, and came back out.

“Got a trash can?” I asked.

The guy paused a beat in surprise and then ducked down and came back up with a knee-high metal canister. He held it out uncertainly. I balled up the dirty shirt and hit a three-pointer from about ten feet. The guy looked horrified. Then I headed back across the street to the diner for breakfast. And for a little more purposeful loitering. I knew my best chance of running into Deveraux would be right there. A woman who ate like she did couldn’t stay away for long. It was just a matter of time.

In the end it was a matter of less than twenty minutes. I ate eggs and was halfway through my third cup of coffee when she came in. She saw me from the doorway and paused. The whole world paused. The atmosphere went solid. She was in uniform again, and her hair was tied back. Her face was a little set in place. A little immobile. She looked wonderful.

I took a breath and kicked the facing chair out. She didn’t react. I saw her eyes move as she considered her options. She looked at all the tables. Most of them were unoccupied. But evidently she decided that to sit on her own might cause a scene. She was worried about voters. Worried about her reputation. So she came over to me. She pulled the chair out another foot and sat down, quiet and reserved, knees tight together, hands in her lap.

I said, “I don’t have a fiancée. I don’t have any kind of other girlfriend.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “It was just an MP colleague on the phone. They’re all playing a game with the undercover thing. Apparently it amuses them. My CO calls himself my uncle.”

No answer.

“I can’t prove a negative,” I said.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “This is the first time in two years I’ve missed breakfast.”

“I apologize for that,” I said.

“Why? There’s no need, if what you’re saying is true.”

“It is true. I’m apologizing on behalf of my colleague.”

“Was it your sergeant? Neagley?”

“No, it was a woman called Karla Dixon.”

“What did she want?”

“To tell me that no one is running a financial scam out of Fort Kelham.”

“How would she know?”

“She knows everything about anything with a dollar sign in front of it.”

“Who thought there was a financial scam out of Kelham?”

“The brass. I suppose it was a theoretical possibility. Like you said, they’re desperate.”

“If you had a fiancée, would you cheat on her?”

“Probably not,” I said. “But I’d want to, with you.”

“I’ve been burned before.”

“Hard to believe.”

“Yet true. Not a good feeling.”

“I understand,” I said. “But you weren’t being burned last night.”

She went quiet. I saw her thinking. Last night. She waved to the waitress and ordered French toast. The same as the day before.

“I called Bruce Lindsay,” she said. “Shawna Lindsay’s little brother. Did you know they have a phone?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve used it. Karla Dixon was returning a call I made from it.”

“I’m heading over there this afternoon. I think you’re right. He has something to tell me.”

Me. Not us.

I said, “It was a fellow officer’s lame joke. That’s all.”

She said, “I’m afraid there’s a problem with the fingerprints. From Janice Chapman’s house, I mean. My own fault, as a matter of fact.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Deputy Butler has a friend over there at the Jackson PD. From back when he took the course. I encourage him to get her to do our processing for us, on the quiet, to save ourselves the money. We don’t have the budget here. But Butler’s friend screwed up this time, and I can’t ask him to ask her to do it over. That would be a step too far.”

“Screwed up how?”

“She got her file numbers mixed. Chapman’s data went to a case about a woman called Audrey Shaw, and we got Audrey Shaw’s data. The wrong person entirely. Some kind of federal government worker. Which Chapman definitely wasn’t, because there’s no federal government work here, and Chapman didn’t work anyway. Unless Audrey Shaw was the previous owner of Chapman’s house, in which case it was Butler’s own screw-up, looking for prints in the wrong places, or yours, for letting him.”

“No, Butler did a good job,” I said. “He looked in all the right places. Those prints weren’t from a previous owner, not unless she sneaked back in and used Chapman’s toothbrush in the middle of the night. So it’s just one of those things, I guess. Shit happens.”

“Tell me again,” she said. “About that phone call.”

“It was Major Karla Dixon of the 329th,” I said. “With information for me. That’s all.”

“And the fiancée thing was a joke?”

“Don’t tell me the Marines are better comedians, too.”

“Is she good looking?”

“Pretty nice.”

“Was she ever your girlfriend?”

“No.”

Deveraux went quiet again. I could see a decision coming. It was almost there. And I was pretty sure it was going to turn out OK. But I didn’t find out. Not right then. Because before she could speak again the stout woman from the department’s switchboard room crashed in through the diner door and stopped dead with one hand on the knob and one on the jamb. She was out of breath. She was panting. Her chest was heaving. She had run all the way. She called out, “There’s another one.”

Chapter

48

Deputy Butler had been on his way to relieve Pellegrino for the middle watch at Fort Kelham’s gate, and a mile out he had happened to glance to his left, and he had seen a forlorn shape low down in the scrub perhaps a hundred yards north of the road. Five minutes after that he had been on the horn to HQ with the bad news, and ninety seconds after taking the message the dispatcher had made it to the diner. Deveraux and I were in her car twenty seconds after that, and she put her foot down hard and drove fast all the way, so we were on the scene less than ten minutes after Butler had first chanced to turn his head.

Not that speed made any difference.

We parked nose to tail behind Butler’s car and got out. We were on the main east–west road, two miles beyond the last of Carter Crossing itself, one mile short of Kelham, out in an open belt of scrubland, with the forest that bordered Kelham’s fence well ahead of us and the forest that flanked the railroad track well behind us. It was the middle of the day and the sky was clear and blue. The air was warm and the breeze was still.

I could see what Butler had seen. It could have been a rock, or it could have been trash, but it wasn’t. It was small in the distance, dark, slightly humped, slightly elongated, pressed down, deflated. It was unmistakable. Judging its size was difficult, because judging the exact distance was difficult. If it was eighty yards away, it was a small woman. If it was a hundred and twenty yards away, it was a large man.

Deveraux said, “I hate this job.”

Butler was standing out in the scrub, halfway between the dark shape and us. We set out walking toward him, and then we passed him without a word. I figured the overall distance was going to be close to dead-on a hundred yards, which made the shape neither a small woman nor a large man. It was going to be something in between. A tall woman, or a short man.

Or a teenager, maybe.

Then I recognized the distorted proportions.

And I started to run.

At twenty yards out I was sure. At ten yards out I was certain. At ten feet out I had absolute visual confirmation. No possible doubt. It was Bruce Lindsay. The ugly boy. Sixteen years old. Shawna Lindsay’s little brother. He was on his front. His feet were apart. His hands were down by his sides. His giant head was turned toward me. His mouth was open. His deep-set eyes were dark and dead.

We followed no kind of crime-scene protocol. Deveraux and I trampled the area and touched the corpse. We rolled it over and found an entry wound on the left side of the rib cage, up high, close to the armpit. No exit wound. The bullet had come in, shattered the heart, shattered the spine, and had deflected and tumbled and was still in there somewhere.

I knelt up and scanned the horizon. If the kid had been walking east, he had been shot from the north, almost certainly by a rifleman who had exited Kelham’s fence line woods and had been patrolling the open belt of scrub. The quarantine zone.

Deveraux said, “I talked to him this morning. Just a few hours ago. We had an appointment at his house. So why was he here?”

Which was a question I didn’t want to answer. Not even to myself. I said, “He had a secret to keep, I guess. About Shawna. He knew you’d get it out of him. So he decided to be somewhere else this afternoon.”

“Where? Where was he going?”

“Kelham,” I said.

“This is open country. If he was heading for Kelham he would have been on the road.”

“He was shy about strangers seeing him. Because of the way he looked. I bet he never walked on the roads.”

“If he was shy with strangers, why would he risk going to Kelham? There must be a dozen strangers in the guardhouse alone.”

I said, “He went because I told him it would be OK. I told him soldiers would be different. I told him he’d be welcome there.”

“Welcome there for what? They don’t offer guided tours.”

The kid was wearing canvas pants, a little like mine, and a plain sweatshirt in navy blue, with a dark warm-up jacket over it. The jacket had fallen open when we rolled him. I saw folded paper in the inside pocket.

I said, “Take a look at that.”

Deveraux slid the paper out of the pocket. It looked like an official document, heavy stock, folded three times. It looked old, and I was sure it was. About sixteen years old, almost certainly. Deveraux unfolded it and scanned it and said, “It’s his birth certificate.”

I nodded and took it from her. The State of Mississippi, a male child, family name Lindsay, given name Bruce, born in Carter Crossing. Born eighteen years ago, apparently. It might have withstood a hasty glance, but not further scrutiny. The alteration was not skillful, but it had been patient. Two digits had been carefully rubbed away, and then two others had been drawn in to replace them. The ink matched well, and the style matched well. Only the breached surface of the paper gave it away, but that was enough. It stood out. It drew the eye.

“My fault,” I said. “My fault entirely.”

“How?”

Go straight to Kelham, I had said. There are recruiters on every post. As soon as you’ve got something in your hand that proves you’re eighteen years old, they’ll let you in and never let you out again.

The kid had taken it literally. I had meant he would have to wait. But he had gone ahead and made himself eighteen years old, right there and then. He had manufactured something to have in his hand. Probably at the same kitchen table where I had sat and talked and drank iced tea. I pictured him, head down, concentrating, tongue between his teeth, maybe wetting the paper with a drop of water, scraping the old numbers off with the tip of a dinner knife, blotting the damp patch, waiting for it to dry, finding the right pen, calculating, practicing, and then drawing in the new numbers. The numbers that would get him through Kelham’s gate. The numbers that would get him accepted.

All on my dime.

I started walking back toward the road.

Deveraux came after me. I told her,

“I need a gun.”

She said, “Why?”

I stopped again and turned and looked east and scoped it out. Fort Kelham was a giant rectangle north of the road and its fence ran through a broad belt of trees that extended a couple hundred yards each side of the wire. It looked like the whole place had been hacked out of the same kind of old forest that lay south of the road, but I guessed the opposite was true. I guessed Kelham had been laid out on open ground fifty years before, and then farmers had stopped plowing short of the fence, so the trees had come afterward. Like new weeds. Not like the old woods to the south. The new trees thinned here and there, but mostly they provided deep cover wherever it was needed. Easy enough for a small force to stay concealed among them, slipping outward into the open belt of scrub when necessary, then slipping back inward and on through the fence for rest or resupply.

I started walking again. I said, “I’m going to find this quarantine squad that everyone claims doesn’t exist.”

“Suppose you do?” Deveraux said. “It will be your word against theirs. Your word against the Pentagon’s, basically. You’ll say the squad existed, they’ll say it didn’t. And the Pentagon has the bigger microphone.”

“They can’t argue with physical evidence. I’ll bring back enough body parts to convince anyone.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“They shouldn’t have shot the kid, Elizabeth. That was way out of line, whoever they are. They opened the wrong door there. That’s for damn sure. What lies on the other side is their problem, not ours.”

“You don’t even know where they are.”

“They’re in the woods.”

“In camouflage with binoculars. How would you even get near them?”

“They have a blind spot.”

“Where?”

“Close to Kelham’s gate. They’re looking for the kind of intruder who already knows he can’t get through the gate. So they’re not looking there. They’re looking farther afield.”

“The guardhouse watches the gate.”

“No, the guardhouse watches what approaches the gate. I’m not going to approach the gate. I’m going to find the gap. Too far in the rear of the mobile force, too far in advance of the guardhouse.”

“They’re shooting people, Reacher.”

“They’re shooting the people they see. They won’t see me.”

“I’ll give you a ride back to town.”

“I’m not going back to town. I want a ride in the other direction. And a firearm.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “I’m prepared to do it without either thing if necessary. Slower and harder, but I’ll get it done.”

She said, “Get in the car, Reacher.”

No indication where she planned to take me.

We got in the car and Deveraux backed it away from Butler’s cruiser and then she took off forward, east, toward Kelham. The right direction, as far as I was concerned. We covered most of the last mile and I said, “Now head off across the grass. To the edge of the woods. Like you just saw something.”

She said, “Straight at them?”

“They’re not here. They’re north and west of here. And they wouldn’t shoot at a police vehicle anyway.”

“You sure about that?”

“Only one way to find out.”

She slowed and turned the wheel and thumped down off the road onto hard-packed dirt. The road was in a gap shaped like an hourglass. Two hundred yards north of it Kelham’s new trees ran away from us in a gentle curve, and two hundred yards south of it the old woods ran away from us in a symmetrical pattern. Deveraux headed north and east, at an angle of forty-five degrees relative to the pavement, bucking and bouncing, and then she steered through a wide turn across the dirt and came to a stop with the flank of the car right next to the woods. My door was six feet from the nearest tree.

I said, “Gun?”

“Jesus,” she said. “This whole thing is illegal on so many different levels.”

“But like you told me, it’s their word against mine. If there’s anyone to shoot, they’ll say there wasn’t. The more shooting, the more denying.”

She took a breath and let it out and pulled the shotgun from its scabbard between our seats. It was an old Winchester Model 12, forty inches long, seven pounds in weight. It was nicked and worn but dewy with oil and polish. It could have been fifty years old, but it seemed well looked after. Even so, I worry about guns I have never fired. Nothing worse than pulling a trigger and having nothing happen. Or missing.

I asked her, “Does it work?”

She said, “It works perfectly.”

“When did you last fire it?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“At what?”

“At a target. I make the whole department requalify every year. And I need to be able to kick their butts, so I practice.”

“Did you hit the target?”

“I destroyed the target.”

I asked, “Did you reload?”

She smiled and said, “There are six in the magazine and one in the breech. I have spares in the trunk. I’ll give you as many as you can carry.”

“Thank you.”

“It was my father’s gun. Take care of it.”

“I will.”

“Take care of yourself, too.”

“Always.”

We got out of the car and she stepped around to the trunk and opened the lid. It was a messy trunk. There was dirt in it. Some kind of earth. But I spent no time worrying about tidiness, because there was a metal box bolted to the floor behind the seat-back bulkhead. For a woman built like Deveraux, it was a long way forward. She went up on tiptoes and bent at the waist and leaned in. Which maneuver looked fabulous from behind. Absolutely, truly spectacular. She flipped up the lid of the box and scrabbled with her fingernails and came back out with a carton of twelve-gauge shells. She straightened up and handed it to me. Fifteen rounds remaining. I put five in each pants pocket and five in my shirt pocket. She watched me do it. Then her eyes went wide and she said, “You washed your shirt.”

I said, “No, I bought a new one.”

“Why?”

“It seemed polite.”

“No, why did you buy a new one instead of washing the old one?”

“I went through this already. With the guy in the store. It seemed logical to me.”

“OK,” she said.

“You have a great ass, by the way.”

“OK,” she said again.

“I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Thank you.”

“We good now? You and me?”

She smiled.

“We always were,” she said. “I was just yanking your chain, that’s all. If she’d said she was your girlfriend I might have taken it seriously. But fiancée? That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?”

“No woman would agree to marry you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not marriage material.”

“Why not?”

“How long have you got? The laundry issue alone could take an hour.”

“How do you do yours?”

“There’s a pay launderette in the next alley past the hardware store.”

“With detergent and stuff?”

“It’s not rocket science.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

“Make sure you do, OK? We have a train to catch tonight.”

I smiled and nodded once and took a last look around, and then I stepped into the trees.

Chapter

49

At forty inches the Winchester was too long for easy transport through a forest. I had to carry it two-handed, upright in front of me. But I was glad to have it. It was a fine old piece. And fairly definitive. Twelve-gauge lead shot settles most disputes at the first time of asking.

It was March in Mississippi and there were enough new leaves on the trees to deny me a clear view of the sky. So I navigated by guesswork. Or dead reckoning, as some people prefer to call it. Which is hard to do, in a forest. Most right-handed people end up walking wide counterclockwise circles, because most right-handed people have left legs fractionally shorter than their right legs. Basic biology and geometry. I avoided that particular peril by stepping to the right of every tenth tree I came to, whether I thought I needed to or not.

The vegetation was dense, but not impossible. There was some underbrush and a lot of leaf litter. The trees were deciduous. I have no idea what kind they were. I don’t know much about trees. The trunks were of various thicknesses and mostly three or four feet apart. Most of their lower limbs had died back in the gloom. There wasn’t much light down there. There were no paths. No sign of recent disturbance.

I had one circumstance working in my favor and two against. The negatives were that I was making a lot of noise, and I was wearing a bright white shirt. I was far from inconspicuous. No camouflage. No silent approach. The positive was that I had to be approaching them from their rear. They had to be hunkered down just inside the edge of the woods. They had to be looking outward. They were looking for journalists and busybodies and other unexplained strangers. Anyone walking purposefully toward them was fair game. But I would be coming up on them from behind.

And I figured I wouldn’t be dealing with too many guys all at once. They would be split into small units. Minimum of two, maximum of four men in each. They would be mobile. No hides or bivouacs. They would be sitting on fallen logs or leaning on trees or squatting on the floor, looking out past the last of the growth into the bright daylight, always ready to move left or right to change their angle, always ready to range outward to meet a threat.

And I figured the small mobile units would be widely scattered. Thirty miles of fence is a lot of ground to defend. You could put a full-strength company in those woods, and one four-man unit would end up a thousand yards from its nearest neighbor. And a thousand yards in a wood is the same thing as a thousand miles. No possibility of immediate support or reinforcement. No covering fire. Basic rule of thumb: rifles and artillery are useless in a wood. Too many trees in the way.

I slowed down after advancing two hundred paces roughly north and west. I figured I must be approaching the first obvious viewpoint, at about nine o’clock on a notional dial, well above the road funnel, just inside a bulge that commanded a sweeping view west and south. Almost certainly it was the viewpoint that Bruce Lindsay had been seen from. He would have been on their left, easily visible from more than a mile away. They had stepped out, and advanced, and stood off maybe a couple of hundred yards from him. Maybe they had shouted a warning or an instruction. Maybe his response had been slow or confused or contradictory. So they had shot him.

I looped away wide to my right and then crept in on what I hoped was a straight line behind where I thought the first viewpoint would be. I moved through the trees like I was slipping through a crowd, easing left, easing right, leading with one shoulder, and then the other. I kept my eyes moving, side to side, and up and down. I watched the floor pretty carefully. Nothing I could do to avoid most of the stuff down there, but I didn’t want to trip, and I didn’t want to step on anything thicker than a broom handle. Dry wood can crack very loud when it breaks.

I kept on going until I sensed daylight ahead. Almost the edge of the wood. I looked left, looked right, and moved a cautious pace onward and found myself to be partly right and partly wrong. Right, because where I was standing was indeed an excellent viewpoint, and wrong, because it was unoccupied.

I stood a yard back from the last of the trees and found myself looking southwest. The field of view was wide and wedge-shaped. The road to Carter Crossing ran diagonally across it at a distance. Nothing was moving on it, but if something had been I would have seen it very clearly. Likewise I would have seen anything in the fields up to a quarter-mile either side of the road. It was a great viewpoint. No question about that. I couldn’t understand why it was abandoned. It made no tactical sense. There were many hours of daylight left. And as far as I knew nothing had changed at Kelham. No new strategic imperative had presented itself. If anything the situation was worse than ever for Bravo Company.

The state of the ground betrayed deep unseriousness too. There were cigarette butts stamped into the earth. There was a candy bar wrapper, balled up and tossed. There were clear footprints, similar to the ones I had seen alongside the bled-out journalist on old man Clancy’s land. I wasn’t impressed. Army Rangers are trained to leave no sign behind. They’re supposed to move through landscapes like ghosts. Especially when tasked to a sensitive mission of dubious legality.

I backed away, deep into the trees again, and I got myself all lined up and moved on north. I stuck to a route maybe fifty yards inside the edge of the wood. I watched for lateral paths leading back in toward Kelham’s fence. I didn’t see any. No real surprise. Covert entry and exit was probably arranged way to the north, at a remote spot at the tip of the reservation, far from any location in regular use.

I detoured again two hundred yards later, back to where the trees thinned, to a spot with a worse view of the road but a better view of the fields. Again, an excellent vantage point. Again, unoccupied. And never occupied, as far as I could tell. No cigarette butts. No candy wrappers. No footprints.

I backed away once more, to my original line, and tried again two hundred yards later. Still nothing. I began to wonder if I was dealing with less than a full company. But to put fewer men on a thirty-mile perimeter made no sense to me. I would want more. Two full companies. Or three. And I’m a cheapskate, compared to the Pentagon. If I wanted five hundred men, the brass would want five thousand. Any kind of normal planning, that wood should have been crowded. Like Times Square. I should have been shot in the back long ago.

Then I began to wonder about watch changes and meal times. Possibly the apparent undermanning left certain spots unoccupied at certain times. But I was sure those spots would be occupied most of the time. They were too good to waste. If the mission was to detect potential hostiles approaching Kelham’s perimeter, then the full 360 would have to be broken down into useful vantage points, and any of the three I had seen would qualify. So I guessed sooner or later I would find someone coming or going.

I turned around and moved deeper into the woods again. I got halfway back to my original line, and stopped walking. I just stood still and waited. For ten whole minutes I heard nothing at all. Then twenty. Then thirty. The breeze rattled leaves, and tree trunks moved and groaned, and tiny animals scuttled. Nothing else.

Then I heard footsteps and voices, far ahead and on my left.

Chapter

50

I moved west and got behind an inadequate tree about as wide as my leg. I leaned my left shoulder on it. I leveled the shotgun. I aimed down the barrel at the approaching sounds. I kept both eyes open. I went completely quiet and still.

There were three men coming, I thought. Slow, relaxed, undisciplined. They were strolling. They were shooting the shit. I heard ragged scuffling from their feet in the leaves. I heard their voices, low and conversational and bored. I couldn’t make out their words, but their tone betrayed no stress and no caution. I heard brambles wrenching and tearing, and twigs crunching and snapping, and I heard hollow clonks that I took to be plastic M16 stocks hitting trunks as the guys squeezed themselves through narrow gaps between trees. This was no kind of an orderly advance. These were not first-rate infantry soldiers. My mind ran on, like it does at times, and I saw myself writing an after-action memo criticizing their demeanor. I saw myself in a meeting at Benning, enumerating their deficiencies to a panel of senior officers.

The three men seemed to be tracking south, staying parallel to the edge of the wood, maybe twenty yards from it. No question that they were heading back to one of the viewpoints I had already scoped out. I couldn’t see the men. Too many trees. But I could hear them pretty well. They were reasonably close. They were coming level with me, about thirty yards away, to my left.

I rolled around the skinny tree I was leaning on and kept myself behind them. I didn’t follow them. Not immediately. I wanted to be sure there were no more of them coming. I didn’t want to insert myself into a moving column. I didn’t want to be the fourth guy in a big procession, with three guys ahead of me and an unknown number behind. So I stayed where I was, standing still and listening hard. But I was hearing nothing except the three guys wandering south. Nothing in the north. Nothing at all. Just natural sounds. Wind, leaves, insects.

The three guys were on their own.

I let their sound get about thirty yards down the track and then I moved after them. I picked up their physical trail easily enough. They were on an informal route that had been beaten through the underbrush by the passage of feet, back and forth, over a couple of days. There were damp turned-over leaves, and broken twigs. There was a general wash of organic matter to the margins of a meandering path about twelve inches wide. Faint, but noticeable. Very noticeable, in fact, compared to the rest of the forest floor. Compared to what I had seen elsewhere, that path looked like I-95.

I followed them all the way. I matched their pace easily enough. I didn’t worry about making noise, as a matter of logic. As long as I was quieter than any two of them, then none of the three would hear me. And it was easy to be quieter than any two of them. It would have been hard to be noisier, in fact, short of firing the Winchester a couple of times and singing the National Anthem.

I let myself get a little closer. I put a spurt on and got within twenty yards of them. Still no visual contact, except for one fleeting glimpse of a narrow back in camouflage BDUs, and a black glint of what I took to be an M16 barrel. But I could hear them clearly. There were definitely three of them. One was older than the others, by the sound of it, and possibly in command. One wasn’t saying much, and the third was nasal and hyped up. I still couldn’t make out words, but I knew they weren’t saying anything worth listening to. The tenor and rhythm of their conversation told me so. There were low sarcastic murmurs, and rejoinders, and occasional barks of cheap laughter. Just three guys, passing the time.

They did not detour over to the third of the three viewpoints I had seen. They kept on going right past it, ambling, almost certainly in single file. I heard the first guy’s voice louder, as he tossed comments back over his shoulder to the next two in line behind him, whose replies I could hardly hear at all, as they were projected forward and away from me. But I still sensed that nothing of importance was being said. They were bored, possibly tired, and mired in a routine task they were already familiar with. They anticipated no danger and no hazard.

They passed the second viewpoint, too. They strolled on south, and I followed them, two hundred yards along the trail, and then I heard them turn right and crash onward toward the first viewpoint. Nine o’clock on the notional dial. The place where Bruce Lindsay’s killers had been hiding out, almost certainly.

I made it to the turn they had taken, and I waited there, on the main track. I heard them stop twenty yards west of me, which was exactly where I had been before, just inside the edge of the wood, where the candy wrapper and the footprints and the cigarette butts were. I moved toward them, five yards, ten, and then I stopped again. I heard one of them belch, which produced laughter and general hilarity, and I guessed they had indeed moved north for their scheduled meal, and were now back on station again. I heard one of them take a leak behind a tree. I heard splashing against the kind of leathery, hairy leaves that grew down on the forest floor. I heard rifle barrels parting thin eye-level branches, as they peered out west at the open land ahead of them. I heard the scratch and clunk of a Zippo lighter, and a moment later I smelled tobacco smoke.

I took a breath and moved on, closer and closer, left and right through the trees, five more yards, then six, then seven, leading with my left elbow, then my right, swimming through the crowded space, the Winchester shotgun held upright in front of me. The three guys had no idea I was there. I could sense them ahead of me, unaware, standing still, looking outward, going quiet, settling in, their lunch hour excitement over. I held my breath and moved up one tree closer to them, silently, then another tree, then another, and then finally I got my first clear sight of them.

And I had no clue what I was looking at.

Chapter

51

There were three men, as I had thought. They were fifteen feet from me. The width of a room. They all had their backs to me. One was gray-haired and heavy. He was wearing Vietnam-era olive drab fatigues. They were too tight on him. He was carrying an M16 rifle and I could see the butt of a Beretta M9 semi-automatic pistol in a webbing holster on his belt. A nine-millimeter handgun. Standard U.S. Army issue, as was the M16. The guy had old paratrooper boots on his feet, and no hat on his head.

The second guy was younger and a little taller but not much thinner. He was sandy haired, and he was wearing what I was sure were Italian army combat fatigues. Similar to ours, but different. Better cut. He was carrying an M16 by its top handle. Right-handed. No sidearm. He was wearing black athletic sneakers. No hat. He had a small backpack in non-matching camouflage.

The third guy was wearing 1980s-issue U.S. Army woodland pattern camouflage BDUs. He wasn’t fat. Far from it. He was a runt. Maybe five feet six, maybe a hundred and forty pounds. Lean and wiry and hardscrabble and nervous. He was carrying an M16 too. Civilian shoes on his feet, no hat, no sidearm. He was the smoker. There was a lit cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand.

At first the Italian battledress made me wonder if they were some kind of a weird NATO force. But the first guy’s Vietnam fatigues didn’t fit with any current 1997 scenario, however screwed up international politics might have been by then, and neither did the third guy’s street shoes, nor did their collective lack of combat headgear, or their lack of portable lunch rations, or their completely unprofessional behavior. I didn’t know what they were. My mind ran through random possibilities, like a departures board runs through flights at an airport. I was surprised they didn’t hear the clacking and ticking from inside my head.

I looked at them again, left to right, and then right to left.

I couldn’t figure it out.

Then finally I understood: they were amateurs.

The Mississippi backwoods, next to Tennessee and Alabama. Civilian militias. Pretend soldiers. Men who like to run around in the woods with guns, but who like to say they’re defending some vital thing or other. Men who like to shoot the shit in the surplus store, right after their bulk purchase of old fatigues and Italian battledress.

And men who like to buy their guns at country gun stores. At certain country gun stores in particular. Because certain country gun stores are near military bases, and therefore some of them have something special for sale under the counter. All it takes is someone on the inside, and believe me, there is always someone on the inside. A steady stream of M16s and Berettas and worse is written off every year as lost or damaged or otherwise unusable, whereupon it is destroyed, except it isn’t. It’s hustled out the back door in the dead of night and an hour later it’s under the counter at the gun shop.

I have arrested many people, often in groups larger than the one in front of me, but I have never been very good at it. The best arrests run on pure bluster, and I get self-conscious if I have to rant and rave. Better for me to land an early sucker punch, to shut them down right at the very beginning. Except that shouting freeze freeze freeze makes me a little self-conscious too. The words come out a little tentative. Almost like a request.

But I had with me the greatest conversation-stopper ever made: a pump-action shotgun. At the cost of one unfired shell, I could make the kind of sound that would freeze any three men to any three spots in the world.

The most intimidating noise ever heard.

Crunch crunch.

My ejected shell hit the leaves at my feet and the three guys froze solid.

I said, “Now the rifles hit the deck.”

Normal voice, normal pitch, normal tone.

The sandy-haired guy dropped his rifle first. He was pretty damn quick about it. Then went the older guy, and last of the three came the wiry one.

“Stand still now,” I said. “Don’t give me a reason.”

Normal voice, normal pitch, normal tone.

They stood reasonably still. Their arms came up a little, out from their sides, slowly, and they ended up a small distance from their bodies, where they held them. They spread their fingers. No doubt they spread their toes inside their boots and sneakers and shoes. Anything to appear unarmed and undangerous.

I said, “And now you take three big paces backward.”

They complied, all three guys, all three taking exaggerated stumbling steps, and all three ending up more than a body’s length from their rifles.

I said, “And now you turn around.”

Chapter

52

I had never seen any of them before. After the slow spin the older guy had ended up facing me on my left. He was completely unknown to me. He was just a guy, not very significant, a little pouchy and worn. The guy in the middle was the sandy-haired one. He was like the older man would have been, had he grown up twenty years later and in better circumstances. Just a guy, a little soft and civilized. The third guy was different. He was what you get when you eat squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.

I tucked the Winchester’s stock up in my right armpit and pulled my elbow back and held the gun one-handed. I aimed it less than perfectly at the guys on the right. But then, it was a twelve-gauge shotgun. My aim didn’t need to be perfect.

I used my left arm as a communications aid and looked at the older guy and said, “Now comes the part where you take out your sidearm and hand it to me.”

He didn’t respond.

I said, “And here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to pull it out of the holster with one finger and one thumb, and then you’re going to juggle it around and reverse it in your hand, and you’re going to point it at yourself, OK?”

No response.

I said, “Second prize is I shoot you in the legs.”

Normal voice, normal pitch, normal tone.

No response. Not at first. I thought about wasting another shell and pumping the gun again, but in the end I didn’t need to. The old guy wasn’t a hero. He hopped right to it after a second’s thought. He did the finger and thumb thing, and he got the gun reversed in his hand, and he pressed its muzzle to his belly.

I said, “Now find the safety and set it to fire.”

It was hard to do backward, but the guy succeeded.

I said, “Hold the barrel with your thumb and first two fingers. Get your ring finger loose. Now get it back there in the trigger guard. Right back there. Pressing backward on the trigger.”

The guy did it.

I asked, “Now what do you know?”

He didn’t answer.

I said, “Any kind of struggle, you get a bullet in the gut. That’s what you know. Any kind of struggle at all. We clear on that? You understand?”

The guy nodded.

I said, “Now move your arm and bring the gun out toward me. Slowly and carefully. Keep it on the same line all the way. Keep it pointing right at yourself. Keep your ring finger hard on the trigger.”

The guy did it. He got the gun a couple of feet out from his center mass, and I stepped in and took it from him. Just pulled it right out of his hand, as smooth as you like. I stepped back and he dropped his arm and I swapped hands. The Winchester went to my left, and I held the Beretta in my right.

And breathed out.

And smiled.

Three prisoners taken and disarmed, all without a shot being fired.

I looked at the old guy and asked, “Who are you people?”

He swallowed twice and then he got some kind of backbone back, and he said, “We’re on a mission, and it’s the kind of mission civilians should stay away from, if they know what’s good for them.”

“Civilians as opposed to what?”

“As opposed to military personnel.”

“Are you military personnel?”

The old guy said, “Yes, we are.”

I said, “No, you’re not. You’re a shower of make-believe shit.”

He said, “It’s an authorized mission.”

“Authorized by who?”

“By our commander.”

“Who authorized him?”

The guy started to hem and haw and bluster. He started talking and stopped again a couple of times. I crossed the Winchester’s barrel with the Beretta and pointed the handgun straight at the guy. I wasn’t sure it worked. I never trust a gun I haven’t fired myself. But it felt right and it weighed right. The safety catch was off. I knew that for sure. And the guy was flinching pretty good. And he should know better than anyone whether the piece worked. Because it was his. I laid my finger hard on the trigger. The guy saw me do it. But still he didn’t say anything.

Then the sandy-haired guy spoke up. The soft one. He said, “He doesn’t know who authorized the mission, and he’s too embarrassed to admit it. That’s why he isn’t saying anything. Can’t you see that?”

“He’d rather get shot than be embarrassed?”

“None of us knows who authorized anything. Why would we?”

I asked, “Where are you from?”

“First tell me who you are.”

“I’m a commissioned officer in the United States Army,” I said. “Which means that if your so-called mission was authorized by the military, then you must currently be under my command, as the senior officer present. Right? That would be logical, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tennessee,” the guy said. “We’re the Tennessee Free Citizens.”

“You don’t look very free to me,” I said. “Right now you look kind of detained.”

No answer.

I asked, “Why did you come down here?”

“We got word.”

“What word?”

“That we were needed here.”

“How many of you came?”

“There are sixty of us.”

“Twenty teams for thirty miles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I asked, “What instructions did you get when you got here?”

“We were told to keep people away.”

“Why?”

“Because it was time to step up and help the nation’s military. Which is every patriot’s duty.”

“Why did the nation’s military need your help?”

“We weren’t told why.”

“Rules of engagement?”

“We were supposed to keep people away, however we had to do it.”

“Did you kill that kid this morning?”

Silence for a long, long moment.

Then the runt on my right spoke up.

He said, “You mean the black boy?”

The old guy said, “This mission is fully authorized.”

I said, “I mean the African-American teenage male, yes.”

The guy with the sandy hair glanced urgently at his buddies. First one, then the other. Rapid movements of his head. He said, “None of us should answer questions about that.”

I said, “At least one of you should.”

The old guy said, “This mission is fully authorized at the very highest level possible. There is no higher level than the level that authorized this mission. Whoever you are, mister, you are making a very big mistake.”

I said, “Shut up.”

The guy with the sandy hair looked straight at the runt and said, “Don’t say anything.”

I looked at the runt and said, “Say what you like. No one will believe you anyway. Everyone knows a pussy like you is just there for the ride.”

I turned away. Back to the old guy.

The runt said, “I shot the black boy.”

I turned back.

I asked him, “Why?”

“He was acting aggressive.”

I shook my head.

“I saw the corpse,” I said. “The bullet hit high under his arm. No damage to the arm itself. I think he had his hands up. I think he was surrendering.”

The runt sniffed and said, “I suppose it could have looked that way.”

I uncrossed the Winchester and the Beretta. I raised the handgun. I pointed it at the little guy’s face.

I said, “Tell me about yesterday.”

He looked straight at me.

Calculation in his little rat eyes.

He decided I wasn’t going to shoot.

He said, “We were north of here yesterday.”

“And?”

“I guess you could say I’m two for two this season.”

“Who applied the field dressing?”

The sandy-haired guy said, “I did. It was an accident. We were just following orders.”

I turned back to the runt and said, “Tell me again. About sighting in on a sixteen-year-old boy with his hands up.”

I moved my aim half an inch upward. The exact center of his forehead.

The guy grinned and said, “I suppose he might have been waving.”

I pulled the trigger.

The gun worked fine. Just fine. Exactly as it should. The sound of the shot cracked and hissed and rolled. Birds flew up in the sky. The spent case ejected and bounced off a tree and hit me hard in the thigh. The runt’s head blew apart and wet-slapped the leaves behind him, and he went down vertically, his skinny butt to his heels, and then he bounced slackly and spilled over in the kind of boneless tangle only the recently and violently dead can achieve.

I waited for the sound to die away and for my hearing to come back and I looked at the two survivors and I said, “Your alleged mission has just been terminated. As of right now. And the Tennessee Free Citizens has just been disbanded. As of this moment. They’re totally out of business now. You two run along and spread that news. You’ve got thirty minutes to haul your sorry asses out of my woods. You’ve got an hour to get out of this state altogether. All of you. Any slower than that, I’ll send a Ranger company after you. Now beat it.”

The two survivors just stood there for a second, completely still, pale and shocked and afraid. Then they came to. And they ran. They really hustled. I listened to them go until their noise faded away to nothing. It took a long time, but then they were gone and I knew they wouldn’t be back. They had taken a casualty, and they had no appetite for that kind of thing. I was sure they would make a martyr of the guy, but I was equally sure they would take great pains to avoid sharing his glorious fate. Blood and brains are realities, and realities are unwelcome visitors in the world of make-believe.

I clicked the safety on the Beretta and put it in my pants pocket. I untucked my shirt and let the tails hide it. Then I headed back the way I had come, leading with one shoulder and then the other, as I slipped between the trees with the Winchester upright in front of me.

Chapter

53

Elizabeth Deveraux was waiting exactly where she had left me, right next to her car, six feet from the tree line. I stepped out of the woods right in front of her and she jumped a little, but then she gathered herself pretty quickly. I guessed she didn’t want to insult me by being surprised I had made it. Or she didn’t want to show she had been anxious. Or both. I kissed her on the lips and handed back the Winchester and she asked, “What happened?”

I said, “They’re some kind of a citizens’ council from Tennessee. Some kind of a half-assed amateur backwoods militia. They’re leaving now.”

“I heard a handgun.”

“One of them was so overcome with regret he committed suicide.”

“Did he have things to regret?”

“More than most.”

“Who brought them here?”

I said, “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

I returned her spare shotgun ammunition from my pockets. She made me put it in the trunk myself. Then we drove back to town. My new Beretta dug into my thigh and my stomach all the way. We passed through the black half of Carter Crossing, and then we thumped over the railroad track, and then we pulled into the Sheriff’s Department’s lot. Home base for Deveraux. Safety. She said, “Go get a cup of coffee. I’ll be back soon.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to give Mrs. Lindsay the news about her son.”

“That won’t be easy.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Want me to come with you?”

“No,” she said. “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

I watched her drive away, and then I headed to the diner for coffee. And for the phone. I kept my mug close at hand on the hostess station and dialed Stan Lowrey’s office. He picked up himself. I said, “You’re still there. You’ve still got a job. I don’t believe it.”

He said, “That stuff is getting old, Reacher.”

“You’ll look back on it like the dying embers of a happy time.”

“What do you want?”

“From life in general? That’s a big question.”

“From me.”

“I want many things from you,” I said. “Specifically I want you to check some names for me. In every database you can find. Mostly civilian, if you can, including government stuff. Call the D.C. police and try to get them to help. The FBI too, if there’s anyone over there still speaking to you.”

“On the up and up or on the quiet?”

“On the very quiet.”

“What names?”

“Janice May Chapman,” I said.

“That’s the dead woman, right?”

“One of several.”

“And?”

“Audrey Shaw,” I said.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want you to check her out.”

“In connection with what?”

“She’s a loose end connected to another loose end.”

“Audrey Shaw,” he said, slowly, as if he was writing it down.

Then he said, “What else?”

I asked, “How far away is Garber’s office from yours?”

“It’s on the other side of the stairwell.”

“I need him on the line. So go get him and drag him over by the scruff of his raggedy old neck.”

“Why not just call him direct?”

“Because I want him on your line, not his.”

No answer, except a plastic thump as he laid down the phone on his desk, and a grunt as he stood up, and a hiss as his chair cushion recovered its shape. Then silence, which was expensive, because I was on a pay phone. I fed it another quarter and waited. Whole minutes passed. I started to think Garber was sitting tight. Refusing to come. But then I heard the phone lift up off the desk and the familiar voice asked, “What the hell do you want now?”

“I want to talk to you,” I said.

“So call me. We have switchboards now. And extensions.”

“They’re listening to your line. I think that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You’re a pawn here, the same as me. Therefore someone else’s line is safer.”

Garber was quiet for a beat.

“Possible,” he said. “What have you got for me?”

“The boots on the ground outside of Kelham were an unofficial force. A local citizens’ militia. Evidently part of some weirdo network of true patriots. Apparently they were here to defend the army from unjustified harassment.”

“Well, Mississippi,” he said. “What do you expect?”

“They were from Tennessee, actually,” I said. “And you’re missing the point. They didn’t just happen to be here. They weren’t just passing by on a whim. They weren’t here for a vacation. They were deployed here. They have a contact somewhere, who knew exactly when, and exactly where, and exactly how, and exactly why they would be needed. Who would have that kind of information?”

“Someone who had all the facts from the get-go.”

“And where would we find such a person?”

“Somewhere high up.”

“I agree,” I said. “Any idea who?”

“None at all.”

“You sure? You need to put me in the loop here if you can.”

“I’m sure. You’re already in the loop as much as I am.”

“OK, go back to your office. Five minutes from now I’m going to call you. You can ignore what I say, because it won’t mean much. But stay on the line long enough to let the tape recorders roll.”

“Wait,” Garber said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Like what?”

“News from the Marine Corps.”

“What kind of news?”

“There’s some kind of issue with Elizabeth Deveraux.”

“What kind of issue?”

“I don’t know yet. They’re playing hard to get. They’re making a real big deal about access. The file she’s in is apparently some super-toxic thing. Highest category, biggest deal in the world, and similar bullshit. But word is there was some big scandal about five years ago. The story is Deveraux got some other Marine MP fired for no good reason. Rumors say it was personal jealousy.”

“Five years ago is three years before she quit. Was she honorably discharged?”

“Yes, she was.”

“Voluntary separation or involuntary?”

“Voluntary.”

“Then there’s nothing there,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re thinking with the wrong part of your body, Reacher.”

“Five minutes,” I said. “Be back at your desk.”

The waitress freshened my cup and I drank most of the new brew while I counted three hundred seconds in my head. Then I stepped back to the phone and dialed Garber direct. He answered and I said, “Sir, this is Major Reacher reporting from Mississippi. Can you hear me?”

Garber said, “Loud and clear.”

I said, “I have the name of the individual who ordered the Tennessee Free Citizens to Kelham. That order became part of a criminal conspiracy in that it resulted in two homicides and two felony assaults. I have an appointment I need to keep at the Pentagon the day after tomorrow, and then I’ll return to base immediately afterward and I’ll get JAG Corps involved at that point in time.”

Garber was on the ball. He caught on fast and played his part well. He asked, “Who was the individual?”

I said, “I’ll keep that strictly to myself for the next forty-eight hours, if you don’t mind.”

Garber said, “Understood.”

I dabbed the cradle to end the call, and then I dialed a new number. Colonel John James Frazer’s billet, deep inside the Pentagon. The Senate Liaison guy. I got his scheduler and made a twelve o’clock appointment with him, in his office, for the day after next. I didn’t say why, because I couldn’t. I didn’t have a real reason. I just needed to be somewhere in the giant building. As bait in a trap.

Then I sat at a table and waited for Deveraux. I knew a woman who ate like she did wouldn’t be long.

Chapter

54

Deveraux came in thirty minutes later, looking pale and drawn. Death messages are never pleasant. Especially when lightning strikes twice, against a mother who is already angry. But it’s all part of the job. Bereaved relatives are always angry. Why wouldn’t they be?

Deveraux sat down and blew a long sad breath at me.

“Bad?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Terrible,” she said. “She’s not going to vote for me ever again, that’s for sure. I think if I had a house, she’d burn it down. If I had a dog, she’d poison it.”

“Can’t blame her,” I said. “Two for two.”

“It will be three for three soon. That woman is going to take a midnight stroll on the railroad tracks. I guarantee it. Within a week, probably.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Not often. But the train is always there, once a night. Like a reminder that there’s a way out if you need one.”

I said nothing. I wanted to remember the midnight train in a happier context.

She said, “I want to ask you a question, but I’m not going to.”

“What question?”

“Who put those idiots in the woods?”

“Why aren’t you going to ask it?”

“Because I’m assuming there’s a whole bunch of things here, all interconnected. Some big crisis on the base. A part answer wouldn’t make sense. You’d have to tell me everything. And I don’t want to ask you to do that.”

“I couldn’t tell you everything even if I wanted to. I don’t know everything. If I knew everything I wouldn’t be here anymore. The job would be done. I’d be back on post doing the next thing.”

“Are you looking forward to that?”

“Are you fishing?”

“No, I’m just asking. I’ve been there myself, don’t forget. Sooner or later we all hit the moment when the light goes out. I’m wondering if it’s happened to you yet. Or if it’s still to come.”

I said, “No, I don’t really want to get back on post. But that’s mostly because of the sex, not the work.”

She smiled. “So who put those idiots in the woods?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could have been a number of people. Kelham is a pie the same as any other pie, and there are lots of folks with their fingers in it. Lots of interests, lots of angles. Some of them are professional, and some of them are personal. Maybe five or six of them pass the crazy test. Which means there are five or six different chains of command terminating in five or six very senior officers somewhere. Any one of them could feel threatened in some way bad enough to pull a stunt like this. And any one of them would be quite capable of doing it. You don’t get to be a very senior officer in this man’s army by being a sweet guy.”

“Who are the five or six?”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea. That’s not my world. From where they are, I’m just a grunt. I’m indistinguishable from a private first class.”

“But you’re going to nail him.”

“Of course I’m going to nail him.”

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow, I hope. I have to go to D.C. Just for a night, maybe.”

“Why?”

“I got on a line I knew to be tapped and said I knew a name. So now I have to go hang out up there and walk the walk and see what comes out of the woodwork.”

“You made yourself the bait in a trap?”

“It’s like a theory of relativity. Same difference if I go to them or they come to me.”

“Especially when you don’t even know who they are, let alone which one of them is guilty.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I agree. It’s time to shake something loose. If you want to know if the stove is hot, sometimes the only way to find out is to touch it.”

“You must have been a pretty good cop.”

“I still am a pretty good cop.”

“So when did your light go out? With the Marines, I mean. When did you stop enjoying it?”

“About where you are now,” she said. “For years you’ve laughed off the small things, but they come so thick and fast that eventually you realize an avalanche is made up of small things. Snowflakes, right? Things don’t get much smaller than that. Suddenly you realize that small things are big things.”

“No single specific thing?”

“No, I got through fine. I never had any trouble.”

“What, all sixteen years?”

“I had some minor speed bumps here and there. I dated the wrong guy once or twice. But nothing worth talking about. I made it to CWO5, after all, which is as high as it goes for some of us.”

“You did well.”

“Not bad for a country girl from Carter Crossing.”

“Not bad at all.”

She asked, “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning, I guess. It will take me all day to get there.”

“I’ll have Pellegrino drive you to Memphis.”

“No need,” I said.

“Agree for my sake,” she said. “I like to get Pellegrino out of the county as often as possible. Let him wreck his car and kill a pedestrian in some other jurisdiction.”

“Has he done that here?”

“We don’t have pedestrians here. This is a very quiet town. Quieter than ever right now.”

“Because of Kelham?”

“This place is dying, Reacher. We need that base open, and fast.”

“Maybe I’ll make some headway in D.C.”

“I hope you do,” she said. “We should have lunch now.”

“That’s why I came in.”

Deveraux’s lunch staple was chicken pie. We ordered a matched pair and were halfway through eating them when the old couple from the hotel came in. The woman had a book, and the man had a newspaper. A routine pit stop, like dinner. Then the old guy saw me and detoured to our table. He told me my wife’s brother had just called. Something very urgent. I looked blank for a second. The old guy must have thought my wife came from a very large family. “Your brother-in-law Stanley,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

The old guy shuffled off and I said, “Major Stan Lowrey. A friend of mine. He and I have been TDY at the same place for a couple of weeks.”

Deveraux smiled. “I think the verdict is in. Marines were better comedians.”

I started eating again, but she said, “You should call him back if it’s very urgent, don’t you think?”

I put my fork down.

“Probably,” I said. “But don’t eat my pie.”

I went back to the phone for the third time and dialed. Lowrey answered on the first ring and asked, “Are you sitting down?”

I said, “No, I’m standing up. I’m on a pay phone in a diner.”

“Well, hold on tight. I have a story for you. About a girl called Audrey.”

Chapter

55

I leaned on the wall next to the phone. Not because I was necessarily worried about falling down with shock or surprise. But because Lowrey’s stories were usually very long. He fancied himself a raconteur. And he liked background. And context. Deep background, and deep context. Normally he liked to trace everything back to a seminal point just before random swirls of gas from the chartless wastes of the universe happened to get together and form the earth itself.

He said, “Audrey is a very ancient name, apparently.”

The only way to knock Lowrey off his discursive stride was to get your retaliation in first. I said, “Audrey was an Anglo-Saxon name. It’s a diminutive of Aethelthryt or Etheldreda. It means noble strength. There was a Saint Audrey in the seventh century. She’s the patron saint of throat complaints.”

“How do you know shit like this? I had to look it up.”

“I know a guy whose mother is called Audrey. He told me.”

“My point is, it’s no longer a very common name.”

“It was number 173 on the hit parade at the last census. It’s slightly more popular in France, Belgium, and Canada. Mostly because of Audrey Hepburn.”

“You know this because of a guy’s mother?”

“His grandmother too, actually. They were both called Audrey.”

“So you got a double ration of knowledge?”

“It felt like a double ration of something.”

“Audrey Hepburn wasn’t from Europe.”

“Canada isn’t in Europe.”

“They speak French there. I’ve heard them.”

“Of course Audrey Hepburn was from Europe. English father, Dutch mother, born in Belgium. She had a U.K. passport.”

“Whatever, what I’m saying is, if you would ever let a guy get a word in edgewise, if you search for Audreys you don’t get too many hits.”

“So you found Audrey Shaw for me?”

“I think so.”

“That was fast.”

“I know a guy who works at a bank. Corporations have the best information.”

“Still fast.”

“Thank you. I’m a diligent worker. I’m going to be the most diligent unemployed guy in history.”

“So what do we know about Audrey Shaw?”

“She’s an American citizen,” Lowrey said.

“Is that all we know?”

“Caucasian female, born in Kansas City, Missouri, educated locally, went to college at Tulane in Louisiana. The Southern Ivy League. She was a liberal arts student and a party girl. Middling GPA. No health problems, which I imagine means slightly more than it says, for a party girl from Tulane. She graduated on schedule.”

“And?”

“After graduation she used family connections to get an intern’s job in D.C.”

“What kind of intern’s job?”

“Political. In a Senate office. Working for one of her home-state Missouri guys. Probably just carrying coffee, but she was called an assistant to an assistant executive director of something or other.”

“And?”

“She was beautiful, apparently. She made strong men weak at the knees. So guess what happened?”

“She got laid,” I said.

“She had an affair,” Lowrey said. “With a married man. All those late nights, all that glamour. The thrill of working out the fine print in trade deals with Bolivia. You know how it is. I don’t know how those people stand the excitement.”

“Who was the guy?”

“The senator himself,” Lowrey said. “The big dog. The record gets a little hazy from that point onward, because obviously the whole thing was covered up like crazy. But between the lines it was a torrid business. Between the sheets too, probably. A real big thing. People say she was in love.”

“Where are you getting this from, if the record is hazy?”

“The FBI,” Lowrey said. “Plenty of them still talk to me. And you better believe they keep track of things like this. For leverage. You notice how the FBI budget never goes down? They know too many things about too many politicians for that to ever happen.”

“How long did the affair last?”

“Senators have to run for reelection every six years, so generally they spend the first four rolling around on the couch and the last two cleaning up their act. Young Ms. Shaw got the last two of the good years and then she was patted on the butt and sent on her way.”

“And where is she now?”

“This is where it gets interesting,” Lowrey said.

I pushed off the wall and looked over at Deveraux. She seemed OK. She was eating what was left of my pie. She was craning across the table and picking at it. Demolishing it, actually. In my ear Lowrey said, “I’ve got rumors and hard facts. The rumors come from the FBI and the hard facts come from the databases. Which do you want first?”

I settled back against the wall again.

“The rumors,” I said. “Always much more interesting.”

“OK, the rumors say young Ms. Shaw felt very unhappy about being discarded in the way she was. She felt used and cheap. Like a Kleenex. She felt like a hooker leaving a hotel suite. She began to look like the kind of intern that could cause serious trouble. That was the FBI’s opinion, anyway. They keep track of that stuff too, for different reasons.”

“So what happened?”

“In the end nothing happened. The parties must have reached some kind of mutual accommodation. Everything went quiet. The senator was duly reelected and Audrey Shaw was never heard from again.”

“Where is she now?”

“This is where you ask me what the hard facts say.”

“What do the hard facts say?”

“The hard facts say Audrey Shaw isn’t anywhere anymore. The databases are completely blank. No records of anything. No transactions, no taxes, no purchases, no cars or houses or boats or trailers, no snowmobiles, no loans or liens or warrants or judgments or arrests or convictions. It’s like she ceased to exist three years ago.”

“Three years ago?”

“Even the bank agrees.”

“How old was she then?”

“She was twenty-four then. She’d be twenty-seven now.”

“Did you check the other name for me? Janice May Chapman?”

“You just spoiled my surprise. You just ruined my story.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Chapman is the exact reverse. There’s nothing there more than three years old.”

“Correct.”

“They were the same person,” I said. “Shaw changed her identity. Part of the deal, presumably. A big bag of cash and a stack of new paperwork. Like a witness protection program. Maybe the real witness protection program. Those guys would help a senator out. It would give them an IOU to put in their back pocket.”

“And now she’s dead. End of story. Anything else?”

“Of course there’s something else,” I said. There was one last question. Big and obvious. But I hardly needed to ask it. I was sure I knew the answer. I felt it coming right at me, hissing through the air like an incoming mortar round. Like an artillery shell, aimed and ranged and fused for an air burst right next to my head.

I asked, “Who was the senator?”

“Carlton Riley,” Lowrey said. “Mr. Riley of Missouri. The man himself. The chairman of the Armed Services Committee.”

Chapter

56

I got back to the table just as the waitress was putting down two slices of peach pie and two cups of coffee. Deveraux started eating immediately. She was a whole chicken pie ahead of me, and she was still hungry. I gave her a lightly edited recap of Lowrey’s information. Everything, really, except for the words Missouri, Carlton, and Riley.

She asked, “What made you give him Audrey Shaw’s name in the first place?”

“Flip of a coin,” I said. “A fifty-fifty chance. Either Butler’s buddy screwed up her case numbers or she didn’t. I didn’t want to assume one way or the other.”

“Does this stuff help us?”

Small words, but big concepts. Help, and us. It didn’t help me. Not with Janice May Chapman, anyway. With Rosemary McClatchy and Shawna Lindsay, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Lowrey’s news cast a strange new light on them. But Lowrey’s news helped Deveraux, that was for damn sure. With Chapman, at least. It decreased the chances about a billionfold that her local population was involved with her in any way at all. Because it increased the chances about a billionfold that mine was.

I said, “It might help us. It might narrow things down a little. I mean, if a senator has a problem, which of the five or six chains of command is going to react?”

“Senate Liaison,” she said.

“That’s where I’m going. The day after tomorrow.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“You must have.”

“It was just a random choice. I needed a reason to be there, that’s all.”

“Wait,” she said. “This makes no sense. Why would the army get involved if a senator had a problem with a girl? That’s a civilian matter. I mean, Senate Liaison doesn’t get involved every time a politician loses his car keys. There would have to be a military connection. And there’s no military connection between a civilian senator and his civilian ex-girlfriend, no matter where she lives.”

I didn’t answer.

She looked at me. “Are you saying there is a connection?”

I said, “I’m not saying anything. Literally. Watch my lips. They aren’t moving.”

“There can’t be a connection. Chapman wasn’t in the army, and there certainly aren’t any senators in the army.”

I said nothing.

“Did Chapman have a brother in the army? Is that it? A cousin? A relative of some kind? Jesus, is her father in the army? What would he be now, mid-fifties? The only reason to stay in at that age is if you’re having fun, and the only way to have fun at that age is to be a very senior officer. Is that what we’re saying here? Chapman was a general’s daughter? Or Shaw, or whatever her real name was?”

I said nothing.

She said, “Lowrey told you she got the intern job because of family connections, right? So what else can that mean? We’re talking about having an actual senator who owes you favors here. That’s a big deal. Her father must be a two-star at least.”

I said nothing.

She looked straight at me.

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” she said.

I said nothing.

“I didn’t get it right,” she said. “That’s what you’re thinking. I’m on the wrong track. Chapman had no relatives in uniform. It’s something else.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the senator is the one with a relative in uniform.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “If Janice May Chapman was a sudden short-term problem who required a sudden short-term solution, why was she killed in exactly the same way as two other unconnected women four and nine months previously?”

“Are you saying it’s a coincidence? Nothing to do with the senator connection?”

“It could be that way,” I said.

“Then why the big panic?”

“Because they’re worried about blowback. In general. They don’t want any kind of taint coming near a particular unit.”

“The one with the senator’s relative in it?”

“Let’s not go there.”

“But they weren’t worried about blowback before? Four and nine months ago?”

“They didn’t know about four and nine months ago. Why would they? But Chapman jumped out at them. She had two kinds of extra visibility. Her name was in the files, and she was white.”

“Suppose it wasn’t a coincidence?”

“Then someone was very smart,” I said. “They took care of a sudden short-term problem by copycatting an MO that had been used before in two unconnected cases. Excellent camouflage.”

“So you’re saying there could be two killers here?”

“Possible,” I said. “Maybe McClatchy and Lindsay were regular everyday homicides, and Chapman was made to look like them. By someone else.”

We finished our desserts and drank our cups of coffee. Deveraux told me she had work to do. I asked her if she would mind if I went to see Emmeline McClatchy one more time.

“Why?” she asked.

“Boyfriends,” I said. “Apparently both Lindsay and Chapman were stepping out with a soldier who owned a blue car. I’m wondering if McClatchy is going to make it a trifecta.”

“That’s a long walk.”

“I’ll find a shortcut,” I said. I was beginning to piece together the local geography in my head. No need to walk three sides of a square, first north to the Kelham road, then east, then south again to the McClatchy shack. I was already roughly on the same latitude. I figured I could find a way across the railroad track well short of the official crossing. A straight shot east. One side of the square.

Deveraux said, “Be gentle with her. She’s still very upset.”

“I’m sure she always will be,” I said. “I imagine these things don’t fade too fast.”

“And don’t say anything about pregnancy.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I headed south on Main Street, in the general direction of Dr. Merriam’s office, but I planned to turn east well before I got there. And I found a place to do just that within about three hundred yards. I saw the mouth of a dirt road nested in the trees. It had a rusted fire hydrant ten yards in, which meant there had to be houses somewhere farther on. I found the first one a hundred feet later. It was a tumbledown, swaybacked affair, but it had people living in it. At first I thought they were the McKinney cousins, because it was that kind of a place, and because it had a black brush-painted pick-up truck standing on a patch of dirt that might once have been a lawn. But it was a different make of truck. Different age, different size, but the same approach to maintenance. Clearly northeastern Mississippi was not fertile ground for spray-painting franchises.

I passed two more places that were similar in every way. The fourth house I came to was worse. It was abandoned. It had a mailbox entirely hidden by tall grass. Its driveway was overgrown. It had bushes and brambles up against the door and the windows. It had weeds in the gutters, and green slime on the walls, and a cracked foundation pierced by creeper tendrils thicker than my wrists. It was standing alone in a couple of acres of what once might have been meadow or pasture, but which was now nothing more than a briar patch crowded with sapling trees about six feet tall. The place must have been empty for a long time. More than months. A couple of years, maybe.

But it had fresh tire tracks across its turn-in.

Seasonal rains had washed dirt down various small slopes and left a mirror-smooth puddle of mud in the dip between the road and the driveway. Seasonal heat had baked the mud to powder, like cement straight from the bag. A four-wheeled vehicle had crossed it twice, in and out. Broad tires, with treads designed for use on regular pavement. Not new, but well inflated. The tread pattern was exactly captured. The marks were recent. Certainly put there after the last time it had rained.

I detoured a couple of steps to avoid leaving footprints next to the tire marks. I jumped over the dip and fought through a tangle of waist-high crap until I got next to the driveway. I could see where the tires had crushed the weeds. There were broken stalks. They had bled dark green juice. Some of the stronger plants had not broken. They had whipped back upright, and some of them were smeared with oil from the underside of an engine.

Whoever had rolled down the driveway had not entered the house. That was clear. None of the rampant growth around the doors or the windows had been disturbed. So I walked on, past the house, past a small tractor barn, out to the space behind. There was a belt of trees ahead of me, and another to my left, and another to my right. It was a lonely spot. Not directly overlooked, except by birds, of which there were two in the air above me. They were turkey vultures. They were floating and looping endlessly.

I moved on. There was a long-abandoned vegetable garden, ringed by a rusted rabbit fence. An archaeologist might have been able to tell what had been grown there. I couldn’t. Further on was a long high mound of something green and vigorous. An old hedge, maybe, untrimmed for a decade and run to seed. Behind it were two utilitarian structures, placed there so as not to be visible from the house, presumably. The first structure was an old wooden shed, rotting and listing and down at one corner.

The other structure was a deer trestle.

Chapter

57

The deer trestle was a big thing, built in an old-fashioned A-frame style from solid timbers. It was at least seven feet tall. I could have walked under the top rail with no trouble at all. I guessed the idea was to back up a pick-up truck and dump a dead animal out of the bed onto the dirt between the A-frames, and then to tie ropes to the animal’s hind legs, and then to flip the ropes up over the top rail, and then to use muscle power or the pick-up itself to haul the animal up in the air so that it hung vertically and upside down, ready for the butcher’s knife. Age-old technology, but not one I had ever used. If I wanted a steak, I went to the Officers’ Club. Much less work.

The trestle could have been fifty years old or more. Its timbers were mature, seasoned, and solid. Some kind of native hardwood. There was a little green moss growing on its northern exposures, which faced me. Its top rail had been worn to a smooth polish over the years by the ropes that had run over it. There was no way of knowing how long ago it had last been used. Or how recently.

But the dirt between its spread legs had been disturbed, and recently. That was clear. The top two or three inches had been dug up and removed. What should have been beaten and blackened earth as old as the frame itself was now a shallow pit about three feet square.

There was no other useful evidence in the yard. None at all, except for the missing dirt, and the tire marks that had not come from a pick-up truck or any other kind of utilitarian vehicle. The shed next to the trestle was empty. And I checked the house again as I passed by on the trip back to the road, just to be sure, but it had not been entered. The windows were filmed with gray organic scum, which also lay less visibly on the siding and the doors and the door handles. Nothing had been touched. No marks, no smears. There were misty spider webs everywhere, unbroken. There was vegetation of every kind, some of it thorned and brawny, some of it limp and delicate, all of it growing exactly where it wanted to, up stoops, across doorways, none of it pushed aside or cut back or otherwise disturbed.

I stopped at the mouth of the driveway and parted the long grass around the mailbox with my hands. The mailbox was a standard Postal Service item, standard size, once painted gray, now no color at all, flecked with rust in fine lines where the curve of the sheet metal had stressed the enamel finish. It was set on a post that had started its service as a six-by-six, but was now wizened away to a twisted balk that retained only its core. There had been a name on the box, spelled out in stick-on letters printed on forward-leaning rectangles, in a style popular long ago. They had been peeled off, possibly as a last gesture when the home was abandoned, but they had left dry webs of adhesive residue behind, like fingerprints.

There had been eight letters on the box.

I jumped the ditch again and continued east. I passed two more houses, widely spaced, occupied, but in no kind of good condition. After the last one the road narrowed and its surface went pitted and lumpy. It burrowed into a wall of trees and ran on straight. The trees crowded in from the sides and left a thoroughfare barely a yard wide. I pressed on regardless, whipped and clawed by branches. Fifty paces later I came out the other side and found the railroad track right there in front of me, running left to right, blocking my path. At that location it was up on a raised earth berm about a yard high. The terrain in that part of Mississippi looked pretty flat to the human eye, but straining locomotives see things differently. They want every dip filled in, and every peak shaved level.

I scrambled up the yard of earth and crunched over the ballast stones and stood on a tie. To my right the track ran straight all the way south to the Gulf. To my left it ran straight north, all the way to wherever it went. I could see the road crossing far in the distance, and the old water tower. The rails either side of me were burnished bright by the passage of iron wheels. Ahead of me were more low trees and bushes, and beyond them was a field, and beyond the field were houses.

I heard a helicopter, somewhere east and a little north. I scanned the horizon and saw a Blackhawk in the air, about three miles away. Heading for Kelham, I assumed. I listened to the whap-whap-whap of its rotor and the whine of its turbine, and I watched it maintain direction but lose height as it came in to land. Then I scrambled down the far side of the earth berm and headed onward through the next belt of trees.

I hiked across the field that came next and stepped over a wire and found myself on a street I figured was parallel with Emmeline McClatchy’s. In fact I could see the back of the house with the beer signs in the windows. The ad-hoc bar. But between it and me were other houses, all surrounded by yards. Private property. In the yard dead ahead of me two guys were sitting in white plastic chairs. Old men. They were watching me. By the look of them they were taking a break from some kind of hard physical labor. I stopped at their fence line and asked, “Would you do me a favor?”

They didn’t answer in words, but they cocked their chins up like they were listening. I said, “Would you let me walk through your yard? I need to get to the next street.”

The guy on the left asked, “Why?” He had a fringe of white beard, but no mustache.

I said, “I’m visiting with a person who lives there.”

“Who?”

“Emmeline McClatchy.”

“You with the army?”

I said, “Yes, I am.”

“Then Emmeline doesn’t want a visit from you. Nor does anyone else around here.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Bruce Lindsay, most recently.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“He surely was.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “He told me he had no friends. You all called him deformed and shunned him and made his life a misery. So don’t get up on your high horse now.”

“You got some mouth on you, son.”

“More than just a mouth.”

“You going to shoot us too?”

“I’m sorely tempted.”

The old guy cracked a grin. “Come on through. But be nice to Emmeline. This thing with Bruce Lindsay shook her up all over again.”

I walked the depth of their yard and heard the Blackhawk again, taking off from Kelham, far in the distance. A short visit for somebody, or a delivery, or a pickup. I saw it rise above the treetops, a distant speck, nose down, accelerating north.

I stepped over a wire fence at the end of the yard. Now I was in the bar’s lot. Still private, technically, but in principle bars welcome passersby rather than run them off. And the place was deserted, anyway. I looped past the building and made it out to the street unmolested.

And saw an army Humvee easing to a stop outside the McClatchy house.

Chapter

58

A Humvee is a very wide vehicle, and it was on a very narrow dirt road. It almost filled it, ditch to ditch. It was painted in standard green and black camouflage colors, and it was very clean. Maybe brand new.

I walked toward it and it came to a stop and the motor shut off. The driver’s door opened and a guy climbed down. He was in woodland-pattern BDUs and clean boots. Since before the start of my career, battledress uniform had been worn with subdued name tapes and badges of rank, and like everything else in the army the definition of subdued had been specified within an inch of its life, to the point where names and ranks were unreadable from more than three or four feet away. An officer-led initiative, for sure. Officers worried about snipers picking them off first. The result was I had no idea who had just gotten out of the Humvee. Could have been a private first class, could have been a two-star general. Three-stars and above don’t drive themselves. Not usually. Not on business. Not off duty either. They don’t do much of anything themselves.

But I had a clear premonition about who the guy was. An easy conclusion, actually. Who else was authorized to be out and about? He even looked like me. Same kind of height, same kind of build, similar coloring. It was like looking in a mirror, except he was five years my junior, and it showed in the way he moved. He was bouncing around with plenty of energy. An impartial judge would have said he looked young and overexuberant. The same judge would have said I looked old and overtired. Such was the contrast between us.

He watched me approach, curious about who I was, curious about a white man in a black neighborhood. I let him gawp until I was six feet away. My eyesight is as good as it ever was, and I can read subdued tapes from further than I should, especially on bright sunlit Mississippi afternoons.

His tapes said: Munro. U.S. Army.

He had little tan oak leaves on his collar, to show he was a major. He had a field cap on his head, the same camouflage pattern as his blouse and his pants. He had fine lines around his eyes, which were about the only evidence he wasn’t born yesterday.

I had the advantage, because my shirt was plain. Civilian issue. No name tape. So I stood there for a moment in silence. I could smell diesel from his ride, and rubber from its tires. I could hear its engine tick as it cooled. I could hear the breeze in Emmeline McClatchy’s shade tree.

Then I stuck out my hand and said, “Jack Reacher.”

He took it and said, “Duncan Munro.”

I asked, “What brings you here?”

He said, “Let’s sit in the truck a spell.”

A Humvee is equally wide inside, but most of the space is taken up by a gigantic transmission tunnel. The front seats are small and far apart. It was like sitting in adjacent traffic lanes. I think the separation suited both our moods.

Munro said, “The situation is changing.”

I said, “The situation is always changing. Get used to it.”

“The officer in question has been relieved of his command.”

“Reed Riley?”

“We’re not supposed to use that name.”

“Who’s going to know? You think this truck is wired for sound?”

“I’m just trying to maintain protocol.”

“Was that him in the Blackhawk?”

Munro nodded. “He’s on his way back to Benning. Then they’re going to move him on and hide him away somewhere.”

“Why?”

“There was some big panic two hours ago. The phone lines were burning up. I don’t know why.”

“Kelham just lost its quarantine force, that’s why.”

“That again? There never was a quarantine force. I told you that.”

“I just met them. Bunch of civilian yahoos.”

“Like Ruby Ridge?”

“But less professional.”

“Why do people do stupid shit like that?”

“They envy our glamorous lives.”

“What happened to them?”

“I chased them away.”

“So then someone felt he had to withdraw Riley. You’re not going to be popular.”

“I don’t want to be popular. I want to get the job done. This is the army, not high school.”

“He’s a senator’s son. He’s making his name. Did you know the Marine Corps employs lobbyists?”

I said, “I heard that.”

“This was our version.”

I looked out my window at the McClatchy place, at its low roof, its mud-stained siding, its mean windows, its spreading tree. I asked, “Why did you come here?”

“Same reason you chased the yahoos away,” Munro said. “I’m trying to get the job done.”

“In what way?”

“I checked out the other two women you mentioned. There were FYI memos in the XO’s files. Then I cross-referenced bits and pieces of information I picked up along the way. It seems like Captain Riley is something of a ladies’ man. Since he got here he’s had a string of girlfriends longer than my dick. It’s likely both Janice Chapman and Shawna Lindsay were on the list. I want to see if Rosemary McClatchy will make it three for three.”

“That’s why I’m here, too.”

“Great minds think alike,” Munro said. “Or fools never differ.”

“Did you bring his picture?”

He unbuttoned his right breast pocket, just below his name. He pulled out a slim black notebook and opened it and slid a photograph from between its pages. He handed it to me, arm’s length across the transmission tunnel.

Captain Reed Riley. The first time I had seen his face. The photograph was in color, possibly taken for a passport or some other civilian document that prohibited headgear or other visual obstructions. He looked to be in his late twenties. He was broad but chiseled, somewhere halfway between bulky and slender. He was tan and had very white teeth, some of which were on display behind an easy grin. He had brown hair buzzed short, and wise empty eyes creased at the corners with webs of fine lines. He looked steady, competent, hard, and full of shit. He looked exactly like every infantry captain I had ever seen.

I handed the picture back, arm’s length across the transmission tunnel.

I said, “We’ll be lucky to get a definitive ID. I bet all Rangers look the same to old Mrs. McClatchy.”

“Only one way to find out,” Munro said, and opened his door. I got out on my side and waited while he looped around the stubby hood. He said, “I’ll tell you something else that came up with the cross-referencing. Something you might like to know. Sheriff Deveraux is not a lesbian. She’s a notch on Riley’s bedpost too. Apparently they were dating less than a year ago.”

And then he walked on ahead of me, to Emmeline McClatchy’s door.

Emmeline McClatchy opened up after Munro’s second knock. She greeted us with polite reserve. She remembered me from before. She paid close attention as Munro introduced himself, and then she invited us inside, to a small room that had two wooden wheelback chairs either side of a fireplace, and a rag rug on the floor. The ceiling was low and the dimensions were cramped and the air smelled of cooked food. There were three framed photographs on the wall. One was Martin Luther King, and one was President Clinton, and the third was Rosemary McClatchy, from the same series as the picture I had seen in the Sheriff’s Department’s file, but possibly even more spectacular. A friend with a camera, one roll of film, a sunny afternoon, a frame, a hammer, and a nail, and that was all that was left of a life.

Emmeline and I took the chairs by the fireplace and left Munro standing on the rug. In the tiny room he looked as big as I felt, and just as awkward, and just as clumsy, and just as alien. He took the photograph from his pocket again and held it face down against his chest. He said, “Mrs. McClatchy, we need to ask you about your daughter Rosemary’s friends.”

Emmeline McClatchy said, “My daughter Rosemary had lots of friends.”

Munro said, “In particular one young man from the base she might have been seeing.”

“Seeing?”

“Stepping out with. Dating, in other words.”

“Let me see the picture.”

Munro bent down and handed it over. She held it this way and that in the light from the window. She studied it. She asked, “Is this man suspected of killing the white girl?”

Munro said, “We’re not sure. We can’t rule him out.”

“Nobody brought pictures to me when Rosemary was killed. Nobody brought pictures to Mrs. Lindsay when Shawna was killed. Why is that?”

Munro said, “Because the army made a bad mistake. There’s no excuse for it. All I can say is it would have been different if I had been involved back then. Or Major Reacher here. Beyond that, all I can do is apologize.”

She looked at him, and so did I. Then she looked at the picture again and said, “This man’s name is Reed Riley. He’s a captain in the 75th Ranger Regiment. Rosemary said he commanded Bravo Company, whatever that is.”

“So they were dating?”

“Almost four months. She was talking about a life together.”

“Was he?”

“Men will say anything to get what they want.”

“When did it end?”

“Two weeks before she was killed.”

“Why did it end?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“Did you have an opinion?”

Emmeline McClatchy said, “I think she got pregnant.”

Chapter

59

There was silence in the small room for a moment, and then Emmeline McClatchy said, “A mother can always tell. She looked different. She acted different. She even smelled different. At first she was happy, and then later she was miserable. I didn’t ask her anything. I thought she would come to me on her own. You know, in her own good time. But she didn’t get the chance.”

Munro was quiet for a beat, like a mark of respect, and then he asked, “Did you ever see Captain Riley again after that?”

Emmeline McClatchy nodded. “He came by to offer his condolences, a week after her body was found.”

“Do you think he killed her?”

“You’re the policeman, young man, not me.”

“I think a mother can always tell.”

“Rosemary said his father was an important man. She wasn’t sure where or how. Politics, perhaps. Something where image matters. I think a black girlfriend was a good thing for Captain Riley, but a pregnant girlfriend wasn’t.”

Emmeline McClatchy wouldn’t be pushed any further. We said our goodbyes and walked back to the Humvee. Munro said, “This is looking real bad.”

I asked him, “Did you speak to Shawna Lindsay’s mother too?”

“She wouldn’t say a word to me. She chased me away with a stick.”

“How solid is the information about Sheriff Deveraux?”

“Rock solid. They dated, he ended it, she wasn’t happy. Then Rosemary McClatchy was next up, as far as I can piece it together.”

“Was it his car that got wrecked on the track?”

“According to the Oregon DMV it was. Via the plate you found. A blue ’57 Chevy. A piece of shit, not a show car.”

“Did he have an explanation?”

“No, he had a lawyer.”

“Can you prove he was Janice Chapman’s boyfriend too?”

“Not beyond a reasonable doubt. She was a party girl. She was seen with a lot of guys. She can’t have been dating all of them.”

“She was known as a party girl at Tulane, too.”

“Is that where she went?”

“Apparently.”

He smiled. “If all the Tulane coeds were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.”

“Did you know she wasn’t really Janice Chapman?”

“What do you mean?”

“She was born Audrey Shaw. She changed her name three years ago.”

“Why?”

“Politics,” I said. “She was coming off a two-year affair with Carlton Riley.”

I left him with that piece of information, and walked away south. He drove away north. This time I didn’t cut through anyone’s yard. I walked around the block, like a responsible citizen, and stepped over the wire and hiked across the field and found the dirt track through the trees. I was back on Main Street less than twenty minutes later. Five minutes after that I was inside the Sheriff’s Department. One minute after that I was in Deveraux’s office. She was behind her desk. The desk was covered in a sea of paper.

I said, “We need to talk.”

Chapter

60

Deveraux looked up at me, a little alarmed. Something in my voice, maybe. She said, “Talk about what?”

I asked her, “Did you ever date a guy from the base?”

“What base? You mean Kelham?”

“Yes, Kelham.”

“That’s kind of personal, isn’t it?”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. Are you crazy? Those guys are my biggest problem. You know how it is between a military population and local law enforcement. It would have been the worst kind of conflict of interest.”

“Do you socialize with any of them?”

“No, for the same reason.”

“Do you know any of them?”

“Barely,” she said. “I’ve toured the base and met some of the senior officers, in a formal way. Which is to be expected. They’re trying to deal with the same kind of problems I am.”

“OK,” I said.

“Why are you asking?”

“Munro was at the McClatchy place. Rosemary McClatchy and Shawna Lindsay seem to have dated the same guy. Janice Chapman also, probably. Munro heard you had dated the guy too.”

“That’s bullshit. I haven’t dated a guy in two years. Couldn’t you tell?”

I sat down.

“I had to ask,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Who was the guy?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You have to tell me. Don’t you think? McClatchy and Lindsay are my cases. Therefore it’s relevant information. And I have a right to know if some guy is taking my name in vain.”

“Reed Riley,” I said.

“Never heard of him,” she said.

Then she said, “Wait a minute. Did you say Riley?”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “Oh my God. Carlton Riley’s son? He’s at Kelham? I had no idea.”

I said nothing.

“Oh my God,” she said again. “That explains a whole lot.”

I said, “It was his car on the railroad track. And Emmeline McClatchy thinks he got Rosemary pregnant. I didn’t ask her. She came right out with it.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“You can’t. They just choppered him out of there.”

“To where?”

“What’s the most remote army post in the world?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. But a buck gets ten that’s where he’ll be tonight.”

“Why would he say he dated me?”

“Ego,” I said. “Maybe he wanted his pals to believe he had collected the whole set. The four most beautiful women in Carter Crossing. The Brannan brothers at the bar told me he was a big dog and always had arm candy.”

“I’m not arm candy.”

“Maybe not on the inside.”

“His father probably knows the guy Janice Chapman had the affair with. They’re right there in the Senate together.”

I said nothing.

She looked right at me.

She said, “Oh, no.”

I said, “Oh, yes.”

“The same woman? Father and son? That’s seriously messed up.”

“Munro can’t prove it. Neither can we.”

“We can infer it. This all is way too much hoopla for a theoretical worry about blowback in general.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Who knows how these people think?”

“Whatever, you can’t go to D.C. Not now. It’s far too dangerous. You’ll be walking around with the world’s biggest target on your back. Senate Liaison has got a lot invested in Carlton Riley. They won’t let you screw things up. Believe me, you’re nothing to them compared to a good relationship with the Armed Services Committee.”

She said all that and then her phone rang and she picked up and listened for a minute. She covered the mouthpiece with her palm and said, “This is the Oxford PD asking about the dead journalist. I want to tell them the proven perpetrator was shot to death by police after resisting arrest, case closed.”

I said, “Fine with me.”

So she told them that, and then she had to call a whole long list of state departments and county authorities, so I wandered out of her office and she got so busy I didn’t talk to her again until dinner at nine o’clock.

At dinner we talked about her father’s house. She ordered her cheeseburger and I got a roast beef sandwich and I asked her, “What was it like growing up here?”

“It was weird,” she said. “Obviously I didn’t have anything to compare it to, and we didn’t get television until I was ten, and we never went to the movies, but even so I sensed there had to be more out there. We all did. We all had island fever.”

Then she asked where I grew up, so I went through as much of the long list as I could remember. Conceived in the Pacific, born in West Berlin when my father was assigned to the embassy there, a dozen different bases before elementary school, education all over the world, cuts and bruises picked up fighting in hot wet alleys in Manila healing days later in cold wet quarters in Belgium, near NATO headquarters, then running across the original assailants a month later in San Diego and resuming the conflict. Then eventually West Point, and a restless, always-moving career of my own, in some of the same places but in many new and different places too, in that the army’s global footprint was not identical to the Marine Corps’.

She asked, “What’s the longest you were ever in one spot?”

I said, “Less than six months, probably.”

“What was your dad like?”

“He was quiet,” I said. “He was a birdwatcher. But his job was to kill people as fast and efficiently as possible, and he was always aware of it.”

“Was he good to you?”

“Yes, in an old-fashioned way. Was yours?”

She nodded. “Old-fashioned would be a good way to describe it. He thought I’d get married and he’d have to come all the way to Tupelo or Oxford to visit me.”

“Where was your house?”

“South on Main Street until it curves, and then first on the left. A little dirt road. Fourth house on the right.”

“Is it still there?”

“Just about.”

“Didn’t it rent again?”

“No, my dad was sick for a spell before he died, and he let the place go. The bank that owned it wasn’t paying attention. It’s more or less a ruin now.”

“All overgrown, with slime on the walls and a cracked foundation? A big old hedge in back? Eight letters on the mailbox?”

“How do you know all that?”

“I was there,” I said. “I passed by on my way to the McClatchy place.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “I saw the deer trestle.”

She didn’t answer.

I said, “And I saw the dirt in the trunk of your car. When you gave me the shotgun shells.”

Chapter

61

The waitress came by and picked up our empty plates and took our orders for pie. Then she went away again and Deveraux was left looking at me, a little crestfallen. A little embarrassed, I thought. She said, “I did a stupid thing.”

I said, “What kind of stupid thing?”

“I hunt,” she said. “Now and then. Just for fun. Deer, mostly. Just for something to do. I give the meat to the old folks, like Emmeline McClatchy. They don’t eat well otherwise. Pork, sometimes, if a neighbor is butchering a pig. If the neighbor thinks to share. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the neighbors can’t afford to share.”

“I remember,” I said. “Emmeline had deer meat in the pot when we were there the first time. She offered us lunch. You declined.”

She nodded. “No point in giving and then taking away. I got that deer a week ago. I couldn’t take it back to the hotel, obviously. So I used my dad’s place. I always have, since I came back here. That’s a good trestle. But then you came up with your theory about Janice Chapman. I didn’t know you very well at that point. I thought you might get on the phone to HQ. I had visions of Blackhawks in the air, finding every trestle in the county. So I sent you off to ID the wrecked car so you would be out of the way for an hour, and I went over and dug up the blood.”

“Tests would have proved it came from an animal.”

“I know,” she said. “But how long would that have taken? I don’t even know where the nearest lab is. Atlanta, maybe. It could have taken two weeks or more. And I can’t afford to be under a cloud for two weeks or more. I literally can’t afford it. This is the only job I have. I don’t know where I’d get another one. And voters are weird. They always remember the suspicion, and they never remember the outcome.”

I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, back on post, with his want ads. A brave new world, for all of us.

“OK,” I said. “But it was a fairly dumb thing to do.”

“I know it was. I panicked a little bit.”

“Do you know other hunters? And other trestles?”

“Some.”

“Because I still think that’s how those women were killed. I don’t see how it could be done any other way.”

“I agree. Which is why I panicked.”

“So sooner or later we might need to get those Blackhawks in the air.”

“Unless we find Reed Riley first and ask him some questions.”

“Reed Riley is gone,” I said. “He’s probably army liaison at Thule Air Force Base by now.”

“Which is where?”

“Northern Greenland,” I said. “The top of the world. It’s certainly the Air Force’s most remote place. I was there once. I was on a C-5 that had a problem. We had to land there. It’s part of the distant early-warning system. No sunlight for four months of the year. They’ve got radar that can see a tennis serve three thousand miles away.”

“Did you get their phone number?”

I smiled. “We’re going to have to do it another way. I’ll see what comes out of the woodwork the day after tomorrow.”

She said nothing in reply to that. We ate our pie slowly. We had time to kill. At that point the midnight train was probably just easing its way out of the yards in Biloxi.

Deveraux was still worried about the old man in the hotel, and she didn’t want to repeat her charade at the top of the stairs, so I gave her my key and we left the diner separately, ten minutes apart, which left me with the check and time for a third cup of coffee. Then I strolled down the street and nodded to the guy behind the desk and headed up the stairs and tapped on my own door. Deveraux opened up instantly and I stepped inside. She had taken her shoes and her gun belt off, but everything else was still in place. Uniform shirt, uniform pants, ponytail. All good.

We went at it like a junkie heats a spoon, half-fast, half-slow, full of intense anticipation, willing to make the investment, barely able to wait for the payoff. She started by taking the elastic out of her hair, shaking it loose, smiling at me from behind its thick dark curtain. She undid the first three buttons on her shirt, and the weight of her name plate and badges and stars dragged the loose material askew and showed me a deep triangle of bare skin. I took off my shoes and my socks and pulled my shirt tails out of my pants. She put one hand on the fourth button on her shirt, and the other on the button on the waistband of her pants, and she said, “Your choice.”

Which was a tough choice to make, but I thought long and hard about it and came to a firm conclusion. I said, “Pants,” and she popped the button and a long minute later she was barefoot and bare-legged in just her tan uniform shirt. I said, “Now you get the same choice,” and she went the other way and I took off my shirt. This time she asked about my shrapnel scar, and I gave her the short version, which was all about unfortunate timing at the start of my career, and a routine liaison visit to a Marine encampment in Beirut, Lebanon, and being passed by a truck which then blew itself up near the barracks entrance, a hundred yards from where I was standing.

She said, “I heard about an army MP there. That was you?”

I said, “I’m not sure who else was there.”

“You went into the ruin and helped people.”

“Only by accident,” I said. “I was looking for a medic. For myself. I could see what I had eaten for dinner the night before.”

“You got the Silver Star.”

“And blood poisoning,” I said. “I could have done without either thing.”

I undid my waistband button and she undid the last of her shirt buttons and then we were in nothing but our underwear. That state of affairs did not endure long. We set my shower running and climbed into the tub together and pulled the curtain. We grabbed soap and shampoo and lathered up and washed each other up and down, side to side, inside and out. No one on earth could have faulted our standards of hygiene, or our approach to insuring them. We stayed in the shower until Toussaint’s tank ran cool, and then we grabbed enough towels to make sure we wouldn’t put puddles in my bed, and then the serious business began. She tasted warm and slick and soapy, and I’m sure I did too. She was lithe and strong and full of energy. We were very patient. I figured the midnight train was by then north of Columbus, south of Aberdeen, maybe forty miles and forty minutes away.

And forty minutes is a good long time. Halfway through it there was precious little we didn’t know about each other. I knew the way she moved, and what she liked, and what she loved. She knew the same about me. I got to know the way her heart hammered against her ribs, and the way her ribs moved as she panted, and the difference between one kind of panting and another. She got to know equivalent facts about me, the early-warning catch in my throat, the things to do to make my skin flush red, where I liked to be touched, and what drove me absolutely crazy.

Then we began, a long slow build-up, with a time certain in mind, like an invading army approaching a D-Day H-Hour, like infantrymen watching the beach come closer, like pilots seeing the target grow large in the bomb sights. Long and slow, closer and closer, long and slow, for five whole minutes. Then eventually faster and harder, faster and harder, faster and harder. The glass on my bathroom shelf began to tinkle right on cue. It shook and rattled. The pipes in the walls made muffled metallic sounds. The French doors shook, one sound from the wood, another from the glass, a third from the latch. The floorboards vibrated like drum skins, a discarded shoe rolled right side up, her sheriff’s star beat a tiny tattoo against the wood, the Beretta in my pocket thumped and bounced, the bed head beat on the wall in a rhythm not our own.

The midnight train.

Right on time.

All aboard.

But this time it was different.

And wrong.

Not us, but the train. Its sound was not the same. Its pitch was low. It was suddenly slowing hard. Its distant rumble was overlaid with the binding, grinding, screeching howl of brakes. I saw in my mind iron blocks jammed against the rims, locked wheels, long showers of superheated sparks in the nighttime air, one car after the other slamming and buffeting the next in front, as the mile-long length telescoped together behind the slowing locomotive. Deveraux slipped out from under me and sat up straight, her eyes nowhere, listening hard. The grinding howl kept on going, loud, mournful, primitive, impossibly long, and then eventually it started to fade, partly because the train’s momentum had carried it far beyond the crossing, and partly because it was finally almost at a stop.

By my side Deveraux whispered, “Oh, no.”

Chapter

62

We dressed fast and were out on the street two minutes later. Deveraux stopped and took two flashlights from her trunk. She lit one up and gave one to me. We used the alley between the hardware store and the pharmacy, past Janice Chapman’s sad pile of sand, between the loan office and Brannan’s bar, and out to the beaten earth beyond. She walked on ahead of me. Almost limping. Which didn’t surprise me. I was on my knees. But she kept on going, dogged, committed, reluctant but determined to serve.

She was going to the railroad track, of course. She scrambled up the packed stones and stepped over the bright steel onto the ties. She turned south. I followed her. I figured the engineer would be about twenty minutes behind us. I figured his train would weigh about eight thousand tons. And I knew a little about trains that weigh eight thousand tons. Sometimes MPs are traffic cops like any other cops, but our traffic is specialized, in that it includes tank trains, which usually weigh about eight thousand tons, and part of directing traffic at that level is understanding it takes a tank train about a mile to stop even in a panic. And it takes an average man twenty minutes to walk a mile, so we would get there twenty minutes before the engineer did.

Which was not a privilege.

Although I doubted there would be much left to find.

We pressed on, almost jogging, trying to match awkward strides to the intervals between the ties. Our flashlight beams bounced and swung, through a fading cloud of smoke left behind by the train’s tortured brakes. I figured we were headed right where I had already walked twice that day, where the path through the field to the east crossed the track before heading into the woods to the west. Deveraux’s own childhood street, in effect, more or less. She must have been thinking about the same place, because as we approached the spot she slowed right down and started playing her flashlight beam carefully left and right.

I did the same thing, and it fell to me to find it. All that was left. Except, I supposed, a red pulverized mist that must have filled the air and touched everything within a hundred yards, a molecule here, a molecule there.

It was a human foot, amputated just above the ankle. The cut was clean and straight. Not ripped or torn or ragged. It was a neat straight line. That line had been hit by some unbelievable instantaneous shockwave, some kind of savage subsonic pulse, like an acoustic weapon. I had seen such a thing before. And so had Deveraux. Most traffic cops have.

The shoe was still in place. A polished black item, plain and modest, with a low heel and a strap and a button. The stocking was still in place under it. Its top edge looked like it had been trimmed with scissors. Under its beige opacity was dark ebony skin, ending neatly in what looked like a plaster-cast cross-section displayed in a medical school lecture hall. Bone, veins, flesh.

“Those were her church shoes,” Deveraux said. “She was a nice woman at heart. I am so, so sorry this happened.”

“I never met her,” I said. “She was out. That was the first thing the kid ever said to me. My mom’s out, he said.”

We sat on a tie about five yards north of the foot and waited for the engineer. He joined us fifteen minutes later. There wasn’t much he could tell us. Just the lonely glare of the headlight, and the briefest subliminal flash of a white lining inside a black coat falling open, and then it was all over long ago.

“Her church suit,” Deveraux said. “Black gabardine, white lining.”

Then the engineer had slammed on the brakes, as he was required to by railroad policy and federal regulations and state laws, all of which were a totally pointless waste of time, in his opinion. Stress on the train, stress on the track, and for what? A mile’s walk, and nothing when he got there. It had happened to him before.

He and Deveraux exchanged various reference numbers and names and addresses, again as per regulations, and Deveraux asked him if he was OK or wanted help in any way, but he brushed the concerns aside and set off walking north again, a mile back to his cab, not at all shaken up, just weary with routine.

We walked back to Main Street, past the hotel, to the Sheriff’s Department. No one was on duty at night, so Deveraux let us in with a key and turned on the lights. She called Pellegrino and told him to come back in on overtime, and she called the doctor and told him he had more duties to perform. Neither one was happy, but both were quick. They arrived almost together within a matter of minutes. Maybe they had heard the train too.

Deveraux sent them off together to collect the remains. We waited, not saying much, and they were back within half an hour. The doctor left again for his office, and Deveraux told Pellegrino to drive me to Memphis. Much earlier than I had planned, but I would have wanted it no other way.

Chapter

63

I didn’t go back to the hotel. I left directly from the Sheriff’s Department, with nothing except cash in one pocket and the Beretta in the other. We saw no passing traffic. No big surprise. It was the dead of night, and we were far from anywhere. Pellegrino didn’t talk. He was mute with fatigue, or resentment, or something. He just drove. He used the same route I had come in on, first the straight-shot east–west road through the forest, and then the minor road I had ridden in the old Chevy truck, and then the dusty two-lane I had ridden in the sagging Buick sedan. We crossed the state line into Tennessee, and passed by Germantown, where I had gotten out of the lumber guy’s pick-up, and then we headed through the sleeping southeast suburb and arrived in downtown Memphis, still well before dawn. I got out at the bus depot and Pellegrino drove away without a word. He went around a block and I heard his motor beating between buildings, and then it faded to nothing and he was gone.

The early start gave me a big choice of buses, but the first of them didn’t leave for an hour. So I quartered the surrounding low-rent blocks, looking for an all-night diner, and I found a choice of two. I picked the same place I had used for lunch three days previously. It was cheap, and it hadn’t killed me. I got coffee from a crusted pot, and bacon and eggs from pans that had been hot since the Nixon administration. Fifty minutes later I was in the back of a bus, heading north and east.

I watched the sun come up through the window on my right, and then I slept for the rest of the six-hour ride. I got out at the same place I had gotten in three days before, at the depot on the edge of the town close to the post where I was based. The town bore no obvious similarity to Carter Crossing, but all the same elements were there. Bars, loan offices, auto parts, gun shops, used stereo stores, each one of them thriving on the supportive stream of Uncle Sam’s military dollars. I walked past them all and headed into open country, stopping at the diner half a mile out for lunch, then continuing onward. I was back on post and in my quarters before two o’clock in the afternoon, which was much earlier than I had expected, and which gave me the chance to improve my plan a little.

The first thing I did was take a long hot shower. Deveraux’s scent came up at me in the steam. I dried off and dressed in full-on Class A uniform, soup to nuts. Then I called Stan Lowrey and asked him for a ride back to the bus depot. I figured if I hurried I could get to D.C. by dinner time, which was about twelve hours ahead of schedule. And I told Lowrey to make no secret of where I was going. I figured the more people who knew, and the longer I was there, the better chance things would have to come crawling out of the woodwork.

Washington D.C. at seven o’clock on a Monday evening was going quiet. A company town, where the company was America, and where work never really stopped, but where it moved into quiet confidential locations after five in the afternoon. Salons, bars, fancy restaurants, townhouse parlors, those locations were unknown to me, but I knew the neighborhoods most likely to contain them. So I skipped the kind of distant chain hotels a lowly O-4 like me would normally use, and I headed for the brighter lights and the cleaner streets and the higher prices south of Dupont Circle. Not that I was intending to pay for anything. Legend had it there was a fancy place on Connecticut Avenue with a glitch in its back office, whereby uniformed guests were automatically billed to the Department of the Army. Some one-time conference arrangement that had never been canceled, or some embittered veteran in charge of the ledgers, no one knew. But the legend said you could be in Arlington Cemetery before the charges caught up with you.

I walked there slowly, in the center of every sidewalk I used. I was vigilant without appearing to be so. I used store windows as mirrors and gazed around innocently at every crosswalk light. No one was paying me any attention. I was crowded and jostled at times, but only by normal busy people rushing ahead to the next thing on their long agendas. I got to the hotel without any trouble and checked in under my real name and rank, and the legend held up, in that I was asked for no charge card or deposit. All I had to do was sign a piece of paper, which I did, as clearly and legibly as possible. No point in being the bait in a trap, and then hiding your light under a bushel. Not that I had ever been sure what a bushel was. Some kind of a small barrel, I assumed. In which case the light would go out anyway, for want of oxygen.

I rode the elevator to my room and hung my Class A coat on a hanger and called down and asked for dinner to be delivered. Thirty minutes later I was eating a sirloin steak, which would also be billed to the Pentagon. Thirty minutes after that I left the tray in the corridor and went out for a walk, just trawling, just seeing if my passage would pull anyone out of the shadows behind me. But no one reacted, and no one followed. I walked around the Circle and then quartered the blocks beyond it, passing the Iraqi Embassy at one extreme and the Colombian at the other. I saw men and women I took to be federal agents of various kinds, and men and women out of uniform but clearly military, and men and women in uniform, from all four branches of the service, and numerous private citizens in serious suits, but none of them made a move against me. None of them was even slightly interested. I was part of the furniture.

So I went back to the hotel, and I went to bed in my luxurious room, and I waited to see what would happen the next day, which would be Tuesday, the eleventh of March, 1997.

Chapter

64

I woke up at seven and let the Department of the Army buy me a room service breakfast. By eight I was showered and dressed and out on the street. I figured this was when the serious business would begin. A noon appointment at the Pentagon for a guy based as far away as I was made it likely I would have stayed in town the night before, and Washington hotels were easily monitored. It was that kind of a city. And I wasn’t hiding my light under any kind of small barrels. So I half-expected opposition in the lobby, or right outside the street door. I found it in neither place. It was a fresh spring morning, the sun was out, the air was warm, and everything I saw was benign and innocent.

I made a show of strolling out to a newspaper kiosk, even though the hotel supplied publications of every type. I bought a Post, and a Times, and I lingered and loitered over making change, all slow and unconcerned, but there was no approach and no attack. I carried the papers to a coffee shop and sat at an outside table, in full view of the whole world.

No one looked at me.

By ten o’clock I was full of coffee and had read the ink off both broadsheets and no passerby had shown any interest in me. I began to think I had outsmarted myself with my choice of hotel. A transient O-4 would normally stay in a different kind of place, of which there were simply too many to call. So I began to think it likely the opposition would be focusing on the end of my journey, not a stop along the way. Which would be more efficient for them, anyway. They knew exactly where I was going, and exactly when.

Which meant they would be waiting for me in or around the Pentagon, at or before twelve o’clock. The belly of the beast. Much more dangerous. Less than three miles away, but a different planet in terms of how they would do things.

It was still a beautiful morning, so I walked. Any day could be the last of life or liberty, so small pleasures were always worth pursuing. I went south on 17th Street, past the Executive Office Building next to the White House, down the side of the Ellipse, and onto the Mall. I turned away from George Washington’s monument and headed for Abraham Lincoln’s. I looped left of the old guy and found my way onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge and stepped out over the broad waters of the Potomac. Plenty of people were making the same trip by car. No one else was doing it on foot. The morning joggers were long gone, and the afternoon joggers were still at work.

I stopped halfway across and leaned on the rail. Always a wise precaution on a bridge. Nowhere for a follower to hide. They had to keep on coming. But there was no one behind me. No one ahead of me, either. I gave it five minutes, resting on my elbows like a contemplative soul, but no one came. So I moved on again, another three hundred yards, and I arrived in Virginia. Straight ahead of me in the distance was Arlington National Cemetery. The main gate. I was there five minutes later. I walked into the sea of white stones. Immediately there were graves all around me. Always the best way to approach the Department of Defense. Through the graveyard. For purposes of perspective.

I detoured once to pay my respects to JFK, and again to pay my respects to the Unknown Soldier. I walked behind Henderson Hall, which was a high-level Marine place, and I came out the cemetery’s south gate, and there it was: the Pentagon. The world’s largest office building. Six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but just three street doors. Naturally I wanted the southeast entrance. For obvious reasons. So I looped around, staying alert, keeping my distance, until I was able to join the thin stream of people coming in from the Metro station. The stream got thicker as it funneled toward the doors. It turned out to be a decent crowd. The right kind of people, for my particular purposes. I wanted witnesses. Arrests go bad all the time, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose.

But I got in OK, despite a little uncertainty in the lobby. What I thought was an arrest team turned out to be a new watch coming on duty. A temporary manpower surplus. That was all. So I made it to 3C315 unmolested. Third floor, C ring, nearest to radial corridor number three, bay number fifteen. John James Frazer’s office. Senate Liaison. There was no one in there with him. He was all alone. He told me to close the door. I did. He told me to sit down. I did.

He said, “So what have you got for me?”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say. I hadn’t expected to get that far.

He said, “Good news, I hope.”

“No news,” I said.

“You told me you had the name. That’s what your message said.”

“I don’t have the name.”

“Then why say so? Why ask to see me?”

I paused a beat.

“It was a shortcut,” I said.

And right there the meeting died on its feet. There was really nothing more to say. Frazer put on a big show of being tolerant. And patient. He called me paranoid. Then he laughed a little. About how I couldn’t even get arrested. Then he tried to look concerned. About my state of health, maybe. And certainly about my appearance. The hair and the stubble. He put on the kind of brusque and manly voice an uncle uses with a favorite nephew.

He said, “You look terrible. There are barbershops here, you know. You should go use one.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m supposed to look like this.”

“Because of the undercover role?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not really undercover, are you? I heard the local sheriff rumbled you immediately.”

“I think it’s worth continuing for the general population. The army is not real popular with them at the moment.”

“Anyway, I expect you’ll be withdrawn now. In fact I’m surprised you haven’t been withdrawn already. When did you last get orders?”

“Why would I be withdrawn?”

“Because matters appear to be resolved in Mississippi.”

“Do they?”

“I think so. The shootings outside of Kelham were clearly a case of an excess of zeal from an unofficial and unauthorized paramilitary force from another state. The authorities in Tennessee will take care of all that. We can’t really stand in their way. Our powers are limited.”

“They were ordered there.”

“No, I don’t really think so. Those groups have extensive underground communications. We think it will prove to be a civilian initiative.”

“I don’t agree.”

“This is not debate class. Facts are facts. This country is overrun with groups like that. Their agendas are decided internally. There’s really no doubt about that.”

“What about the three dead women?”

“The perpetrator has been identified, I believe.”

“When?”

“The news became public three hours ago, I think.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t have all the details.”

“One of ours?”

“No, I believe it was a local person. Down there in Mississippi.” I said nothing.

Frazer said, “Anyway, thank you for coming in.”

I said nothing.

Frazer said, “This meeting is over, major.”

I said, “No, colonel, it isn’t.”

Chapter

65

The Pentagon was built because World War Two was coming, and because World War Two was coming it was built without much steel. Steel was needed elsewhere, as always in wartime. Thus the giant building was a monument to the strength and mass of concrete. So much sand was needed for the mix it was dredged right out of the Potomac River, not far from the rising walls themselves. Nearly a million tons of it. The result was extreme solidity. And silence.

There were thirty thousand people the other side of Frazer’s closed door, but I couldn’t hear any of them. I couldn’t hear anything at all. Just the kind of hissing quiet typical of a C ring office.

Frazer said, “Don’t forget you’re talking to an officer senior to you in rank.”

I said, “Don’t forget you’re talking to an MP authorized to arrest anyone from a newborn private to a five-star general.”

“What’s your point?”

“The Tennessee Free Citizens were ordered to Kelham. That’s clear, I think. And I agree, they acted with an excess of zeal when they got there. But that’s on the guy who gave the order, as much as it’s on them. More so, in fact. Responsibility starts at the top.”

“No one gave any orders.”

“They were dispatched at the same moment I was. And Munro. We all converged. It was one single integrated decision. Because Reed Riley was there. Who knew that?”

“Perhaps it was a local decision.”

“What was your personal position?”

“Purely passive. And reactive. I was ready to handle the fallout, if any. Nothing more.”

“You sure?”

“Senate Liaison is always passive. It’s about putting out fires.”

“Is it never proactive? Never about cutting firebreaks ahead of time?”

“How could I have done that?”

“You could have seen the danger coming. You could have made a plan. You could have decided to defend Kelham’s fence from pesky civilians asking awkward questions. But you couldn’t ask the Rangers to do that themselves. No commander on earth would recognize that as a legal order. So you could have called some unofficial buddies. From Tennessee, say, which is your home state. Where you know people. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“No, that’s ridiculous.”

“And then to integrate your whole approach you could have decided to tap MP phones, to monitor things, and to give yourself an early warning in case anything seemed to be heading in the wrong direction.”

“That’s ridiculous too.”

“Do you deny it?”

“Of course I deny it.”

“So humor me,” I said. “Let’s talk theoretically. If a person did those two things, what would you think?”

“What two things?”

“Called Tennessee, and tapped phones. What would you think?”

“That laws were broken.”

“Would a person do one thing and not the other? Speaking as a professional soldier?”

“He couldn’t afford to. He couldn’t afford to have an unauthorized force in the field without a way of knowing if it was close to being discovered.”

“I agree,” I said. “So whoever deployed the yahoos also tapped the phones, and whoever tapped the phones also deployed the yahoos. Am I making sense? Theoretically?”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes or no, colonel?”

“Yes.”

I asked, “How good is your short-term memory?”

“Good enough.”

“What was the first thing you said to me when I came in here today?”

“I told you to close the door.”

“No, you said hello. Then you told me to close the door.”

“And then I told you to sit down.”

“And then?”

He said, “I don’t recall.”

“We had a minor discussion about how busy this place is at noon.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And then you asked me what news I had.”

“And you didn’t have any.”

“Which surprised you. Because I had left a message in which I told you I had the name.”

“I was surprised, yes.”

“What name?”

“I wasn’t sure. It might have concerned anything.”

“In which case you would have said a name. Not the name.”

“Perhaps I was humoring your delusion that someone did in fact send those amateurs to Mississippi. Because it seemed important to you.”

“It was important to me. Because it was true.”

“OK, I respect your convictions. I suggest you find out who.”

“I have found out who.”

He didn’t reply.

“You slipped up,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“I didn’t leave you a message,” I said. “I made an appointment. With your scheduler. That was all. I didn’t give a reason for it. I just said I needed to see you at noon today. The only time I mentioned anything about names and the Tennessee Free Citizens was on a completely separate call with General Garber. Which evidently you were listening to.”

The hissing quiet in the little office seemed to change in pitch. It went low and ominous, like a real thrumming silence.

Frazer said, “Some things are too big for you to understand, son.”

“Probably,” I said. “I’m not too clear about what happened in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. I can’t make the quantum physics work. But I can get by with a lot of other things. For instance, I understand the Constitution of the United States pretty well. You ever heard of the First Amendment? It guarantees the freedom of the press. Which means any old journalist is entitled to approach any old fence he likes.”

“That guy was from some radical pinko rag in a college town.”

“And I understand you’re lazy. You’ve spent years kissing Carlton Riley’s ass, and you don’t want to start over with a new guy. Not now. Because that would involve actually doing your damn job.”

No reply.

I said, “The second human being your boys killed was an underage recruit. He was on his way to try to join the army. His mother killed herself the same night. I understand both of those things. Because I saw what was left. First one, and then the other.”

No reply.

I said, “And I understand you’re doubly arrogant. First you thought I wouldn’t figure out your genius scheme, and then when I did, you thought you could deal with me all by yourself. No help, no backup, no arrest teams. Just you and me, here and now. I have to ask, how dumb are you?”

“And I have to ask, are you armed?”

“I’m in Class A uniform,” I said. “No sidearm is carried with Class A uniform. You’ll find that in the regulations.”

“So how dumb are you?”

“I didn’t expect to be in this situation. I didn’t expect to get this far.”

“Take my advice, son. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“You got a gun in your desk?”

“I have two guns in my desk.”

“You going to shoot me?”

“If I have to.”

“This is the Pentagon. There are thirty thousand military personnel outside your door. They’re all trained to run toward the sound of gunfire. You better have a story ready.”

“You attacked me.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’re obsessed about who shot some ugly black kid in the back of beyond.”

“I never told anyone he was ugly. Or black. Not on the phone. You must have gotten that from your Tennessee buddies.”

“Whatever, you’re obsessed. I ordered you to leave but you attacked me.”

I leaned back in his visitor chair. I stretched my legs out in front of me. I let my arms hang down. I got good and relaxed. I could have fallen asleep. I said, “This doesn’t look like a very threatening posture, does it? And I weigh about 250. You’ll have a problem moving me before 3C314 and 3C316 get in here. Which will take them about a second and a half. And then you’ll have to deal with the MPs. You kill one of their own in dubious circumstances, they’ll tear you apart.”

“My neighbors won’t hear. No one will hear a thing.”

“Why? You got suppressors on those guns?”

“I don’t need suppressors. Or guns.”

Then he did a very strange thing. He stepped over and took a picture off his wall. A black and white photograph. Himself and Senator Carlton Riley. It was signed. By the senator, I assumed. Not by him. He stepped away from the wall and laid the picture on his desk. Then he stepped back again and pincered his fingertips and worried the nail out of the plaster.

“Is that it?” I said. “You’re going to prick me to death with a pin?”

He put the nail next to the photograph.

He opened a drawer and took out a hammer.

He said, “I was in the middle of rehanging the picture when you attacked me. Fortunately I was able to grab the hammer, which was still close at hand.”

I said nothing.

“It will be very quiet,” he said. “One solid blow should do it. I’ll have plenty of time to arrange your body whatever way I need to.”

“You’re insane,” I said.

“No, I’m committed,” he said. “To the future of the army.”

Chapter

66

Hammers are very evolved items. They haven’t changed for years. Why would they change? Nails haven’t changed. Nails have been the same forever. Therefore a hammer’s necessary features were worked out long ago. A heavy metal head, and a handle. All you need, and nothing you don’t. Frazer’s was a claw design, a framing hammer, maybe twenty-eight ounces. A big ugly thing. Total overkill for picture hanging, but such mismatches of tool and purpose are common in the real world.

It made for a decent weapon, though.

He came at me with it cocked in his right hand like a nightstick. I scrambled up out of my chair pretty fast, any idea of embarrassing him with an inappropriate postmortem position abandoned long ago. Sheer instinct. I don’t scare easy, but humans are very evolved too. A lot of what we do is hard-wired right back to the mists of time. Right back to where my pal Stan Lowrey liked to start a story.

Frazer’s office was small. Its free floor space was smaller still. Like fighting in a phone booth. How it was going to go would depend on how smart Frazer was. And I figured he was plenty smart. He had survived Vietnam, and the Gulf, and years of Pentagon bullshit. You don’t do any of that without brains. I figured he was an easy seven out of ten. Maybe an eight. In no imminent danger of winning the Nobel Prize, but definitely smarter than the average bear.

Which helped me. Fighting morons is harder. You can’t guess what they’re going to do. But smart people are predictable.

He swung the hammer right to left, waist height, a standard opening gambit. I arched back and it missed me. I figured next he would slash back the other way, left to right, same height, and he did, and I arched back again, and he missed again. An exploratory exchange. Like moving pawns on a chess board. He was breathing strangely. Ferocity, not a throat problem. Nothing for Saint Audrey to worry about. It was ferocity, and excitement. He was a warrior at heart, and warriors love nothing more than the fight itself. It consumes them. They live for it. He was smiling, too, in a feral way, and his eyes were seeing nothing except the hammer head and my midsection beyond it. There was a sharp tang of sweat in the air, something primitive, like a nighttime rodent’s lair.

I dodged forward half a step, and he matched it with a backward move of his own that left us in the middle of the floor, which was important. To me. He wanted me back against the wall, and I didn’t want to be there.

Not yet, anyway.

He swung the hammer a third time, scything it hard, making it look like he meant it, which he didn’t. Not yet. I could read the pattern. It was in his eyes. I arched back and the hammer head buzzed by an inch from my coat. Twenty-eight ounces, on a long handle. The momentum of the miss carried it way around. His shoulders turned ninety degrees and he twisted at the waist. He used the torque to come right back at me. With some arm extension this time. He forced me back. I ended up close to the wall.

I watched his eyes.

Not yet.

He was a warrior. I wasn’t. I was a brawler. He lived for the tactical victory. I lived to piss on the other guy’s grave. Not the same thing. Not the same thing at all. A different focus. He swung for the fourth time, same angle, same height. He was like a fastball pitcher, getting me used to one thing before unleashing another thing entirely. Inside, inside, inside, and then the splitter away. But Frazer wouldn’t go low. He would go high. Low would be better, but he was only a seven out of ten. Maybe an eight. But not a nine.

He swung a fifth time, same height, same angle, so hard that the tines of the claw made a raw thrumming sound as they moved through the air, stopping dead as the hammer stopped dead. He swung a sixth time, same height, same sound, more extension. I was very close to the wall. No real place to go. Then came the seventh swing, same height, same angle, same sound.

Then came his eyes.

They flicked upward, and the eighth swing aimed high, right at the side of my head. Right at my temple. I saw a glint off the hammer’s inch-wide striking face. Twenty-eight ounces. Nearly two pounds in weight. It would have punched a very neat hole through the bone.

But it didn’t, because my head wasn’t there when it arrived.

I dropped vertically, eight inches onto bent and pre-set knees, four inches so the swing would miss me, and another four as a margin of safety, and I heard the rush of air above me, and I felt the miss drag him around in a wild part-circle, and I started back up, and then we were into a whole new set of calculations. We had done the three dimensions. We had done in and out, back and forth, and up and down. Now we were ready for the fourth dimension. Time. The only remaining questions were how fast could I hit him, and how fast was he spinning?

And they were crucial questions. For him especially. I was twisting as I rose and my elbow was already moving fast and it was a certainty I was going to hit him with it in the neck. A mathematical certainty. But which part of the neck? The answer was, whichever part was there when the blow landed. Front, side, back, it was all the same to me. But not to him. For him, some parts would be worse than others.

The twenty-eight ounces had first pulled his arms away from his shoulders, in a kind of Olympic hammer-throwing way, and then they had pulled his trailing shoulder hard, in a kind of whip-cracking way, so he was well into a serious but uncontrolled spin by then. And my elbow was doing pretty well by that point. A muscle memory thing. It happens automatically. If in doubt, throw the elbow. Maybe a childhood thing. My weight was behind it, my foot was braced, and it was going to land, and it was going to land hard. In fact it was going to land very hard. It was already scything and clubbing downward. And it was accelerating. It was going to be a vicious blow. It was going to be the kind of vicious blow he might survive if he took it on the side of the neck, but not on the back. A blow like that on the back of the neck would be fatal. No question. Something to do with how the skull joins the vertebrae.

So it was all about time, and speed, and rotation, and eccentric orbits. It was impossible to predict. Too many moving parts. At first I thought he was going to take it mostly on the side. On the angle, really, but with the ratio tilted toward maybe surviving it. Then I saw it was going to be closer to fifty-fifty, but the twenty-eight ounces suddenly pulled him off in some new direction, and from that point onward there was no doubt he was going to take it on the back of the neck and nowhere else. No doubt at all. The guy was going to die.

Which I didn’t regret.

Except in a practical sense.

Chapter

67

Frazer went down by his desk, not hitting it, making a sound no louder than a fat guy sitting down on a sofa. Which was safe enough. No one calls the cops when a fat guy sits down on a sofa. There was carpet on the floor, some kind of a Persian thing most likely left behind by a previous occupant long dead of a heart attack. Under the carpet would be pad, and under that was solid Pentagon concrete. So sound transmission was strictly contained. No one will hear a thing, Frazer had said. You got that right, I thought. Asshole.

I pulled the illicit Beretta from my Class A coat pocket and held it on him for a long moment. Just in case. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. But he didn’t move. No way could he. Maybe his eyelids. His neck was loose right at the top. He had taken no vertebrae with him. His skull was attached to the rest of him by nothing but skin.

I left him where he was for the time being and was about to step into the center of the room to start scoping things out when the door opened.

And in walked Frances Neagley.

She was in woodland-pattern BDUs and she was wearing latex gloves. She glanced around the room once, twice, and she said, “We need to move him near where the picture was.”

I just stood there.

“Quickly,” she said.

So I got myself going and I hauled him over to where he might plausibly have fallen while he was hanging the picture. He could have gone over backward and hit his head on the edge of the desk. The distances were about right.

“But why would he?” I said.

“He was banging in the nail,” Neagley said. “He flinched when he saw the claw coming at him on the backswing. Some knee-jerk reaction. A reflex. He couldn’t help it. He got his feet tangled up in the rug and over he went.”

“So where’s the nail now?”

She took it off the desk and dropped it at the base of the wall. It tinkled faintly against the gutter of tile beyond the edge of the rug.

“And where’s the hammer?”

“It’s near enough,” she said. “Time to go.”

“I have to erase my appointment.”

She showed me diary pages from her pocket.

“Already in the bag,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Neagley led me down two flights of stairs and through the corridors at a pace somewhere between moderate and brisk. We used the southeast entrance to get outside and then we headed straight for the parking lot, where we stopped among the reserved spaces, and where Neagley unlocked a large Buick sedan. It was a Park Avenue. Dark blue. Very clean. Maybe new.

Neagley said, “Get in.”

So I got in, onto soft beige leather. Neagley backed up and swung the wheel and headed for the exit, and then we were through the barrier, and pretty soon after that we were on a bunch of highway ramps, and then we were through the last of them and on a six-lane road heading south, just one car among a rolling thousand.

I said, “The inquiry desk has a record of me coming in.”

“Wrong tense,” Neagley said. “It had a record. It doesn’t anymore.”

“When did you do all that?”

“I figured you were OK as soon as you were one-on-one with the guy. Although I wish you hadn’t talked so much. You should have moved to the physical much sooner. You have talents, honey, but talking ain’t top of the list.”

“Why are you even here?”

“I got word.”

“What word?”

“The story of this crazy trap. Walking into the Pentagon like that.”

“Word from where?”

“From way down in Mississippi. From Sheriff Deveraux herself. She asked for my help.”

“She called you?”

“No, we had a séance.”

“Why would she call you?”

“Because she was worried, you idiot. As was I, as soon as I heard.”

“There was nothing to worry about.”

“There could have been.”

I asked, “What did she want you to do?”

“She wanted me to watch your back. To make sure you were OK.”

“I don’t think I told her what time the appointment was.”

“She knew what bus you were on. Her deputy told her what time he’d gotten you to Memphis, and so it was easy enough to figure out what line you would take.”

“How did that help you this morning?”

“It didn’t help me this morning. It helped me yesterday evening. I’ve been on you since you left the bus depot. Every minute. Nice hotel, by the way. If they ever catch up with me for the room service, you owe me big money.”

I said, “Whose car is this?”

“It belongs to the motor pool. As per procedure.”

“What procedure?”

“When a senior staff officer passes away, his Department-owned car is returned to the motor pool. Where it is immediately road tested to determine what remedial work needs to be done before it can be reissued. This is the road test.”

“How long will it last?”

“About two years, probably.”

“Who was the officer?”

“It’s a fairly new car, isn’t it? Must have been a fairly recent death.”

“Frazer?”

“It’s easier for the motor pool to do the paperwork first thing in the morning. We were all counting on you. If anything had gone wrong we’d all have had red faces.”

“I might have arrested him instead.”

“Same thing. Dead or busted, it makes no difference to the motor pool.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’re due on post. Garber wants to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s three hours away.”

“So sit back and relax. This might be the last rest you get for a spell.”

“I thought you didn’t like Deveraux.”

“Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t help her if she was worried. I think there’s something wrong with her, that’s all. How long have you known her?”

“Four days,” I said.

“And I bet you could already tell me four weird things about her.”

I said, “I should try to call her, if she’s worried.”

“I already tried,” Neagley said. “From the scheduler’s phone. While you were giving Frazer all that theoretical shit. I was going to tell her you were nearly home and dry. But she didn’t answer. A whole Sheriff’s Department, and no one picked up.”

“Perhaps they’re busy.”

“Perhaps they are. Because there’s something else you need to know. I checked a rumor from the sergeants’ network. The ground crew at Benning says the Blackhawk that came in from Kelham on Sunday was empty. Apart from the pilots, of course. No passenger, is what they meant. Reed Riley didn’t go anywhere. He’s still on the post.”

Chapter

68

I took Neagley’s advice and relaxed through the rest of the ride. It took a lot less than three hours. The Buick was much faster than a bus. And Neagley pushed it much harder than a bus driver would. I was back on post by three-thirty. I had been gone exactly twenty-four hours.

I went straight to my quarters and took off the fancy Class As and cleaned my teeth and took a shower. Then I put on BDUs with a T-shirt and went to see what Garber wanted.

Garber wanted to show me a confidential file from the Marine Corps. That was the purpose of his summons. But first came a short question-and-answer session. It didn’t go well. It was very unsatisfactory. I asked the questions, and he refused to answer them.

And he refused to make eye contact.

I asked, “Who did they arrest in Mississippi?”

He said, “Read the file.”

“I would like to know.”

“Read the file first.”

“Do they have a good case or is it bullshit?”

“Read the file.”

“Was it the same guy for all three women?”

“Read the file first.”

“Civilian, right?”

“Read the damn file, Reacher.”

He wouldn’t let me take the file away. It had to remain under his personal control at all times. Under his eye throughout, technically, but he didn’t follow the letter of the law on that point. He stepped out of his office and closed the door quietly and left me alone with it.

It was about a quarter of an inch thick, cased in a jacket that was a different shade of khaki than the army uses. Better quality, too. It was smooth and crisp, only a little scraped and scuffed by the passage of time. It had red chevrons on all four edges, presumably denoting some elevated level of secrecy. It had a white stick-on label with a USMC file number printed on it, and a date five years in the past.

It had a second label with a name printed on it.

DEVERAUX, E.

Her name was followed by her rank, which was CWO5, and her service number, and her date of birth, which was fairly close to mine. Near the bottom edge of the jacket was a third stick-on, slightly misaligned, taken from a long roll of preprinted tape. I guessed it was supposed to say Do Not Open Unless Authorized but it had been cut at the wrong interval so that in reality it said Open Unless Authorized Do Not. Bureaucracy can be full of accidental humor.

But the contents of the file were not funny.

The contents started with her photograph. It was in color, and maybe a little more than five years old. Her hair was buzzed very short, like she had told me. Probably a number two clipper, grown out a week or so, like a soft dark halo. Like moss. She looked very beautiful. Very small and delicate. The short hair made her eyes enormous. She looked full of life, full of vigor, in control, in command. Some kind of a mental and physical plateau. Late twenties, early thirties. I remembered them well.

I laid the photograph face down on my left and looked at the first sheet of printed words. They were typewritten. An IBM machine, I guessed, with the golf ball. Common in 1992. And there were still plenty around in 1997. Computer word processing was happening, but like everything else in the military it was happening slowly and cautiously, with a great deal of doubt and suspicion.

I started reading. Immediately it was clear that the file was a summary of an investigation conducted by a USMC Brigadier General from their Provost Marshal’s office, which oversaw their MP business. The one-star’s name was James Dyer. A very senior man, for what appeared to be nothing more than a personnel issue. A personal dispute, in fact, between two Marine MPs of equal rank. Or, technically, a dispute between one Marine MP and two others, for a total of three. On one side of the issue were a woman named Alice Bouton and a man named Paul Evers, and on the other side of the issue was Elizabeth Deveraux.

Like every summary I had ever read this one began with a bald narrative of events, written neutrally and patiently, without implication or interpretation, in language anxious to be clear. The story was fairly simple. Like a subplot from daytime TV. Elizabeth Deveraux and Paul Evers were dating, and then they weren’t, and then Paul Evers and Alice Bouton were dating, and then Paul’s car got trashed, and then Alice got dishonorably discharged after a financial irregularity came to light.

That was the narrative of events.

Next came a digression into Alice Bouton’s situation. Like a sidebar. Alice was indisputably guilty, in General Dyer’s opinion. The facts were clear. The evidence was there. The case was solid. The prosecution had been fair. The defense had been conscientious. The verdict had been unanimous. The amount in question had been less than four hundred dollars. In cash, taken from an evidence locker. Proceeds from an illegal weapons sale, confiscated, bagged up, logged in, and awaiting exhibition in an upcoming court martial. Alice Bouton had taken it and spent it on a dress, a purse, and a pair of shoes, in a store close to where she was based. The store remembered her. Four hundred bucks was a lot of money for a jarhead to spend on an outfit, back in 1992. Some of the larger denomination bills were still in the store’s register when the MPs came calling, and the serial numbers matched the evidence log.

Case closed.

Sidebar over.

Next up was General Dyer’s interpretation of the three-way turmoil. It was painstaking. It was prefaced with a cast-iron guarantee that all conclusions were amply supported by data. Conversations had been had, interviews had been conducted, information had been gathered, witnesses had been consulted, and then everything had been cross-referenced and cross-checked, and anything supported by fewer than two independent sources had been omitted. A full court press, in other words. You could take it to the bank. The guarantee ended with a long emphasized paragraph. I could picture the IBM machine bucking and rocking on the desk as the golf ball slammed back and forth, supplying the furious underline. The paragraph confirmed Dyer’s belief that everything about to be described was courtroom-ready, should further action be deemed necessary or desirable.

I turned the page and started in on the analysis. Dyer wrote in a plain style, and did not inject himself into the narrative. Given the preceding page, any reader would understand that the content might not be one-hundred-percent forensically proven fact, but that equally it was very far from scuttlebutt or rumor. It was solid information. It was known as much as anything was knowable. Hence Dyer never wrote I believe or I think or It seems likely. He just told the story.

Which went like this: Elizabeth Deveraux had been seriously pissed when Paul Evers dumped her for Alice Bouton. She had felt slighted, disregarded, disrespected, and insulted. She was a woman scorned, and her subsequent behavior seemed determined to prove the cliché true in every respect. She victimized the new couple by bad-mouthing them everywhere she could, and by manipulating workloads whenever she could, to stop them getting down time together.

Then she drove Paul Evers’s car off a bridge.

Evers’s car was nothing special, but it represented a significant investment on his part, and it was essential to his social life, given that no one wants to stay on post all the time. Deveraux had retained a key for it, and late one night had driven it away and steered it carefully beyond a bridge abutment and let it roll over a thirty-foot drop into a concrete flood sluice. The impact had almost totaled the car, and heavy rain later that night had finished the job.

Then Deveraux had turned her attention to Alice Bouton.

She had started by breaking her arm.

General Dyer’s two-independent-sources rule meant that the circumstances were not precisely described, because the attack had not been witnessed, but Bouton claimed Deveraux had been the assailant, and Deveraux had never denied it. The medical facts were beyond dispute. Bouton’s left elbow had been dislocated and both bones in her left forearm had been snapped. She had been in a hard cast for six long weeks.

And Deveraux had spent those six long weeks pursuing the theft allegation with demonic intensity. Except that pursuing was the wrong word, initially, because at the outset there was nothing to pursue. No one knew anything had been stolen. Deveraux had first inventoried the evidence lockers and audited the paperwork. Only then had she discovered the discrepancy. And then she had made the allegation. And then she had pursued it, like an obsession, with the ultimate result being as described in General Dyer’s sidebar. The court martial, and the guilty verdict.

There was a huge uproar in the Marine MP community, of course, but Bouton’s guilty verdict had insulated Deveraux from any kind of formal criticism. What would have looked like a vendetta had the verdict been different was left looking like a good piece of police work entirely in keeping with the Marine Corps’ sense of ethics and honor. But it was a fine line. General Dyer had been in no doubt that the case involved major elements of personal retribution.

And, unusually for such reports, he had attempted to explain why.

Again, he confirmed that conversations had been had, and interviews had been conducted, and information had been gathered, and witnesses had been consulted. The participants in these new discussions had included friends and enemies, acquaintances and associates, and doctors and psychiatrists.

The salient factor was held by all to be Alice Bouton’s unusual physical beauty.

All were agreed that Bouton had been an exceptionally good looking woman. Words quoted included gorgeous, stunning, spectacular, heart-breaking, knockout, and incredible.

All the same words applied equally to Deveraux too, of course. All were agreed on that point also. No question. The psychiatrists had concluded that therein lay the explanation. General Dyer had translated their clinical language for the casual reader. He said Deveraux couldn’t take the competition. She couldn’t stand not to be clearly and definitively the most beautiful woman on the post. So she had taken steps to make sure she was.

I read the whole thing one more time, front to back, and then I butted all the pages neatly together and closed the jacket on them, and Garber came back into the room.

Chapter

69

The first thing Garber said was, “We just heard from the Pentagon. John James Frazer was found dead in his office.”

I said, “Dead how?”

“Looks like a freak accident. Apparently he fell and hit his head on the desk. His staff got back from lunch and found him on the floor. He was doing something with a picture of Carlton Riley.”

“That’s bad.”

“Why?”

“This is not a great time to lose our Senate Liaison.”

“Did you read the file?”

I said, “Yes, I did.”

“Then you know we don’t need to worry about the Senate anymore. Whoever replaces Frazer will have plenty of time to learn the job before the next thing comes along.”

“Is that going to be the official line?”

“It’s the truth. She was a Marine, Reacher. Sixteen years in. She knew all about cutting throats. She knew how to do it, and she knew how to pretend she didn’t. And the car alone proves it. Right there, what more is there to say? She wrecks Paul Evers’s car, and she wrecks Reed Riley’s. Same MO. Same exact reason. Except this time she’s only one of four beautiful women. And Munro says Riley dates her and then dumps her for the other three in succession. So this time she’s three times as mad. This time she goes beyond breaking arms. This time she has her own private deer trestle behind an empty house.”

“Is that going to be the official line?”

“It’s what happened.”

“So what next?”

“It’s purely a Mississippi matter now. We have no dog in the fight, and we have no way of knowing what will happen. Most likely nothing will happen. My guess is she won’t arrest herself, and she won’t give the State Police any reason to either.”

“So we’re going to walk away?”

“All three of them were civilians. They’re nothing to do with us.”

“So the mission is terminated?”

“As of this morning.”

“Is Kelham open again?”

“As of this morning.”

“She denies dating Riley, you know.”

“She would, wouldn’t she?”

“Do we know anything about General Dyer?”

“He died two years ago after a long and exemplary career. He never put a foot wrong. The man was stainless.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll take steps.”

“Toward what?”

“Toward wrapping up my involvement.”

“Your involvement is already wrapped up. As of this morning.”

“I have private property to recover.”

“You left something there?”

“I thought I was heading right back.”

“What did you leave?”

“My toothbrush.”

“That’s not important.”

“Will the DoD reimburse me?”

“For a toothbrush? Of course not.”

“Then I have a right to recover it. They can’t have it both ways.”

He said, “Reacher, if you draw one iota more attention to this thing there won’t be anything I can do to help you. Right now some very senior people are holding their breath. We’re one inch away from news stories about a senator’s son dating a three-time killer. Except neither one of them can afford to say anything about it. Not him, for one reason, and not her, for another. So we’ll probably get away with it. But we don’t know yet. Not for sure. Right now it’s still in the balance.”

I said nothing.

He said, “You know she’s good for it, Reacher. A man with your instincts? She was only pretending to investigate. I mean, did she get anywhere with it? And she was playing you like a violin. First she was trying to get rid of you, and when you wouldn’t go, she switched to keeping you close. So she could monitor your progress. Or the lack of it. Why else would she even talk to you?”

I said nothing.

He said, “The bus is long gone, anyway. To Memphis. You’d have to wait until tomorrow now. And you’ll see things differently tomorrow.”

I asked, “Is Neagley still on the post?”

He said, “Yes, she is. I just made a date to have a drink with her.”

“Tell her she’s taking the bus home. Tell her I’m taking the company car.”

He asked, “Do you have a bank account?”

I said, “How else would I get paid?”

“Where is it?”

“New York. From when I was at West Point.”

“Move it to somewhere nearer the Pentagon.”

“Why?”

“Involuntary separation money comes through quicker if you bank in Virginia.”

“You think it will come to that?”

“The Joint Chiefs think war is over. They’re singing along with Yoko Ono. There are big cuts coming. Most of them will fall on the army. Because the Marines have better PR, and because the Navy and the Air Force are a whole different thing altogether. So the people right above us are making lists, and they’re making them right now.”

“Am I on those lists?”

“You will be. And there will be nothing I can do to stop it.”

“You could order me not to go back to Mississippi.”

“I could, but I won’t. Not you. I trust you to do the right thing.”

Chapter

70

I met Stan Lowrey on my way off the post. My old friend. He was locking his car just as I was unlocking the Buick.

I said, “Goodbye, old pal.”

He said, “That sounds final.”

“You may never see me again.”

“Why? Are you in trouble?”

“Me?” I said. “No, I’m fine. But I heard your job is vulnerable. You might be gone when I get back.”

He just shook his head and smiled and walked on.

The Buick was an old lady’s car. If my grandfather had had a sister, she would have been my great aunt, and she would have driven a Buick Park Avenue. But she would have driven it slower than me. The thing was as soft as a marshmallow and twice as buttery inside, but it had a big motor. And government plates. So it was useful on the highway. And I got on the highway as soon as I could. On I-65, to be precise. Heading south, down the eastern edge of a notional corridor, not down the western edge through Memphis. I would be approaching from a side I had never seen before, but it was a straighter shot. And therefore faster. Five hours, I figured. Maybe five and a half. I would be in Carter Crossing by ten-thirty at the latest.

I went south all the way through Kentucky in the last of the daylight, and then it got dark pretty quickly as I drove through Tennessee. I hunted around for a mile and found the switch and turned on my headlights. The broad road took me through the bright neon of Nashville, fast and above the fray, and then it took me onward through open country, where it was dark and lonely again. I drove like I was hypnotized, automatically, not thinking anything, not noticing anything, surprised every time I came to by the hundred-mile bites I had been taking out of the journey.

I crossed the line into Alabama and stopped at the second place I saw, for gas and a map. I knew I would need to head west off an early Alabama exit and I needed a map with local details to show me where. Not the kind of large-scale plan you can buy ahead of time. The sheet I bought unfolded neatly and showed me every farm track in the state. But it showed me nothing more than that. Mississippi was just a blank white space on the edge of the paper. I narrowed down my target area and found a choice of four east–west routes. Any one of them might have been the road that led onward past Kelham’s gate to Carter Crossing. Or none of them might. There could have been all kinds of dog-leg turns waiting for me on the other side of the line. A regular maze. No way of knowing.

Except that Kelham had been built in the 1950s, which was still a time of big wars and mass mobilizations. And DoD planners have always been a cautious bunch. They didn’t want some reservist convoy from New Jersey or Nebraska getting lost in unfamiliar parts. So they put discreet and coded signs here and there, marking the way to and from every major installation in the nation. Their efforts intensified after the Interstate system was begun. The Interstate system was formally named for President Eisenhower, for a very good reason. Eisenhower had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War Two, and his biggest problem had not been Germans. It had been getting men and matériel from point A to point B across lousy and unmarked roads. He was determined his successors should not face similar problems should land war ever come to America. Hence the Interstate system. Not for vacations. Not for commerce. For war. And hence the signs. And if those signs had not been shot up or trashed or stolen by the locals, I could use them like homing beacons.

I found the first of the signs at the next exit I came to. I came off the ramp and struck out west on a concrete ribbon lined here and there with low-rent malls and auto dealers. After a time the commercial enterprises died back and the road reverted to what I guessed it had been before, which was a meandering rural route through what looked like pretty country. There were trees and fields and the occasional lake. There were summer camps and vacation villages and the occasional inn. There was a bright moon high in the sky, and it was all very picturesque.

I drove on but saw no more DoD signs until I was in Mississippi, and only one more after that. But it was a bold and confident arrow pointing straight ahead, with the number 17 embedded in the code below it, indicating just seventeen more miles to go. The clock in my head said five past ten. If I hustled, I would arrive ahead of schedule.

Chapter

71

Evidently the DoD engineers had been just as concerned about the westward approach to Kelham as the eastward. The road was the same in both directions. Same width, same material, same camber, same construction. I recognized it ten miles out. Then I sensed the trees and the fence in the darkness to my right. Kelham’s southeastern corner. Bottom right on a map.

The southern perimeter slid by my window, and I waited for the gate to arrive. I saw no reason why it wouldn’t be at the exact mid-point of the fence. The DoD liked neatness. If there had been a hill in the way, army engineers would have removed it. If there had been a swamp in the way, army engineers would have drained it.

In the end I guessed that actually there had been a small valley in the way, because after a couple of miles the road stayed level only by mounting a causeway about six feet high. The land all around was lower. Then the causeway widened dramatically on my right and became a huge fan-shaped concrete elevation floating above the grade. Like a gigantic turn-in, like the mouth of a wide new road. It started out about the size of an end-on football field. Maybe more, but then it got a little narrower. It met the old road at a right angle, but there were no sharp edges. No sharp turns. The turns were shallow, easing gently through graceful, generous curves. To accommodate tracked vehicles, not Buicks, however lumbering.

But if the fan shape was the mouth of a new road, then that new road dead-ended fifty yards later, at Fort Kelham’s gate. And Fort Kelham’s gate was a heavy-duty affair. That was for damn sure. Physically it was stronger than anything I had seen outside a combat zone. It was flanked by fortifications and the guardhouse, which was also a serious affair. It had nine personnel in it. The county’s interests were represented by the lone figure of Deputy Geezer Butler. He was sitting in his car, which was parked at an angle on the cusp of the farther curve, in a kind of no-man’s-land, where the county’s road became the army’s.

But the army’s heavy steel barriers were wide open, and the army’s road was in use. The base was all lit up and alive, and the whole scene looked exactly like business as usual. People were coming and going, not a big crowd, but no one was lonely. Most were driving, but some were on motorbikes. More were coming than going, because it was close to ten-thirty, and there were early starts tomorrow. But some hardy souls were still venturing out. Instructors, probably. And officers. Those who had it easy. I braked behind two slower cars and someone came out the gate and pulled in behind me and I found myself stuck in a little four-car convoy. We were swimming against the tide, going west, heading for the other side of the tracks. Possibly the last of many such convoys that evening.

I sensed the bottom-left corner coming up, Kelham’s southwestern limit, and I tried to identify the blind spot I had used two days before, but it was too dark to see. Then we were out in the open scrub. I saw Pellegrino in his cruiser, coming the other way, driving slow, trying to calm the returning traffic with his presence alone. Then we were rolling through the black half of town, and then we were bouncing over the railroad track, and then we were pulling a tight left in behind Main Street, and then we were parking on the beaten earth in front of the bars, and the auto parts places, and the loan offices, and the gun shops, and the secondhand stereo stores.

I got out of the Buick and stood on the open ground halfway between Brannan’s bar and the lines of parked cars. The open ground was being used as a kind of common thoroughfare. There were guys in transit from one bar to another, and there were guys standing around talking and laughing, and both groups were merging and separating according to some complex dynamic. No one was walking directly from place to place. Everyone was looping back toward the cars, pausing, shooting the shit, slapping backs, comparing notes, shedding one buddy and picking up another.

And there were plenty of women, too. More than I would have believed possible. I had no idea where they had all come from. Miles around, probably. Some were paired off with soldiers, others were in larger mixed groups, and some were in groups of their own. I could see about a hundred guys in total, and maybe eighty women, and I guessed there might be similar numbers inside. The men were from Bravo Company, I assumed, still on leave and anxious to make up for lost time. They were exactly what I would have expected to see. Good guys, well trained, by day performing at a hundred percent of their considerable capacities, by night full of energy, full of goodwill, and full of high spirits. They were all in their unofficial off-duty uniform of jeans, jackets, and T-shirts. Here or there a guy would look a little pinched and wary compared to the others, which most likely meant he was on the promotion track, and clearly some guys needed the spotlight more than others, but overall they were precisely what a good infantry unit looks like when it comes out to play. There was plenty of buzz going on, and plenty of noise, but I sensed no frustration or hostility. There was nothing negative in the air. They didn’t blame the town for their recent incarceration. They were just glad to get back to it.

But even so I was sure local law enforcement would be holding its breath. In particular I was sure Elizabeth Deveraux would still be on duty. And I was definitely sure where I would find her. She needed a central location, and a chair and a table and a window, and something to do as time ticked away. Where else would she be?

I eased my way through the thin crowd and stepped left of Brannan’s bar and into the alley. I skirted Janice Chapman’s pile of sand and followed the dog-leg and came out onto Main Street between the hardware store and the pharmacy. Then I turned right and walked up to the diner.

The diner was almost completely full that night. It was practically heaving, compared to how I had seen it before. Like Times Square. There were twenty-six customers. Nineteen of them were Rangers, sixteen of them in four groups of four at four separate tables, big guys sitting tight together, shoulder to shoulder. They were talking loud, and calling back and forth to each other. They were keeping the waitress busy. She was running in and out of the kitchen, and she probably had been all day long, dealing with the pent-up demand for something other than army chow. But she looked happy. The gates were finally open. The river of dollars was flowing again. She was getting her tips.

The other three Rangers were dining with their girlfriends, face to face at tables for two, leaning in, heads together. All three men looked happy, and so did all three women. And why not? What could be finer than a romantic dinner at the best restaurant in town?

The old couple from the hotel were in there too, at their usual table for four, almost hidden by the groups of Rangers all around them. The old lady had her book, and the old guy had his paper. They were staying later than normal, and I guessed they were the only service workers in town not at that very moment camped out behind their cash registers. But none of the guys from Kelham needed a bed for the night, and Toussaint’s offered no other facilities. Not even coffee. So it made sense for the owners to wait out the noise and the disruption somewhere safe and familiar, rather than listen to it all out their back windows.

Then deeper into the room and right of the aisle and alone at the rearmost table for two was Major Duncan Munro. He was in BDUs and his head was bent over a meal. On the spot, just in case, even though his involvement in Kelham’s affairs had been terminated hours before, presumably. He was a good MP. Professional to the end. I guessed he was on his way back to Germany, and was waiting for transport.

And Elizabeth Deveraux was there, of course. She was on her own at a table closer to the window than I had seen her choose before. On the spot, vigilant, just in case, paying attention, not willing to let the mayhem filter out from behind Main Street onto Main Street itself. Because of the voters. She was in uniform, and her hair was up in its ponytail. She looked tired, but still spectacular. I watched her for a beat, and then she looked up and saw me and smiled happily and kicked a chair out for me.

I paused another beat, thinking hard, and then I stepped over and sat down opposite her.

Chapter

72

Deveraux didn’t speak at first. She just looked me over, top to bottom, head to toe, maybe checking me for damage, maybe adjusting to the sight of me in uniform. I was still in the BDUs I had put on that afternoon, after getting back from D.C. A whole new look.

I said, “Busy day?”

She said, “Real busy since ten o’clock this morning. They opened the gates and out they came. Like a flood.”

“Any trouble?”

“None of them would pass a field sobriety test on their way home, but apart from that everything’s cool. I’ve got Butler and Pellegrino out and about, just to show the flag. Just in case.”

“I saw them,” I said.

“So how did it go up there?”

“Inconclusive,” I said. “Very bad timing on my part, I’m afraid. Just one of those freak things. The guy I went to see died in an accident. So I got nothing done.”

“I figured,” she said. “I was getting regular updates from Frances Neagley, until things got busy here. From eight until ten this morning you were drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. But something must have happened during those hours. My guess would be around nine o’clock. Mail call, maybe. But whatever, somebody must have reached a conclusion about something, because an hour later it all let loose. It was back to business as usual here.”

I nodded.

“I agree,” I said. “I think new information was released this morning. Something definitive, I guess.”

“Do you know what it was?”

I said, “By the way, thank you for worrying. I was very touched.”

“Neagley was just as worried as I was,” she said. “Once I told her what you were doing, that is. She didn’t need much persuading.”

“In the end it was safe enough,” I said. “It got a little tense around the Pentagon. That was the worst of it. I hung around there for quite a time. I came in through the cemetery. Behind Henderson Hall. You know that place?”

“Of course I do. I was there a hundred times. They have a great PX. It feels like Saks Fifth Avenue.”

“I got talking with a guy there. About you and a one-star called James Dyer. This guy said Dyer knew you.”

“Dyer?” she said. “Really? I knew him, but I doubt if he knew me. If he did, then I’m flattered. He was a real big deal. Who was the guy you were talking to?”

“His name was Paul Evers.”

“Paul?” she said. “You’re kidding. We worked together for years. In fact we even dated once. One of my mistakes, I’m afraid. But how amazing that you bumped into him. It’s a small world, right?”

“Why was he a mistake? He seemed OK to me.”

“He was fine. He was a really nice guy. But we didn’t really click.”

“So you dumped him?”

“More or less. But it felt close to mutual. We both knew it wasn’t going to work. It was just a question of who was going to speak first. He wasn’t upset, anyway.”

“When was this?”

She paused to calculate.

“Five years ago,” she said. “Feels like yesterday. Doesn’t time fly?”

“Then he said something about a woman called Alice Bouton. His next girlfriend after you, apparently.”

“I don’t think I knew her. I don’t recall the name. Did Paul seem happy?”

“He mentioned something about car trouble.”

Deveraux smiled.

“Girls and cars,” she said. “Is that all guys ever talk about?”

I said, “Reopening Kelham means they’re sure the problem is on your side of the fence, you know. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise. It’s a Mississippi matter now. That will be the official line, from this point forward. It’s not one of us. It’s one of you. You got any thoughts on that?”

“I think the army should share its information,” she said. “If it’s good enough for them, it would be good enough for me too.”

“The army is moving on,” I said. “The army won’t be sharing anything.”

She paused a beat.

“Munro told me he got new orders,” she said. “I suppose you have, too.”

I nodded. “I came back to tie up a loose end. That’s all, really.”

“And then you’ll be moving on. To the next thing. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. I’ll think about Janice Chapman tomorrow.”

“And Rosemary McClatchy, and Shawna Lindsay.”

“And Bruce Lindsay, and his mother. I’ll do my best for all of them.”

I said nothing.

She asked, “Are you tired?”

I said, “Not very.”

“I have to go help Butler and Pellegrino. They’ve been working since dawn. And anyway, I want to be on the road when the last of the stragglers start to head home. They’re always the toughest guys, and the drunkest.”

“Will you be back by midnight?”

She shook her head.

“Probably not,” she said. “We’ll have to manage without the train tonight.”

I said nothing in reply to that, and she smiled once more, a little sadly, and then she got up and left.

The waitress finally got to me five minutes later and I ordered coffee. And pie, as an afterthought. She treated me a little differently than before. A little more formally. She worked near a base, and she knew what the black oak leaves on my collar meant. I asked her how her day had gone. She said it had gone very well, thank you.

“No trouble at all?” I asked.

“None,” she said.

“Even from that guy in back? The other major? I heard he could be a handful.”

She turned and looked at Munro. She said, “I’m sure he’s a perfect gentleman.”

“Would you ask him to join me? Get him some pie, too.”

She detoured via his table, and she delivered my invitation, which involved a lot of elaborate pointing, as if I was inconspicuous and hard to find in the crowd. Munro looked over quizzically, and then he shrugged and got up. Each of the four Ranger tables fell silent as he passed, one after the other. Munro was not popular with those guys. He had had them sitting on their thumbs for four solid days.

He sat down in Deveraux’s chair and I asked him, “How much have they told you?”

“Bare minimum,” he said. “Classified, need to know, eyes only, the whole nine yards.”

“No names?”

“No,” he said. “But I’m assuming that Sheriff Deveraux must have given them solid information that clears our guys. I mean, what else could have happened? But she hasn’t arrested anybody. I’ve been watching her all day.”

“What has she been doing?”

“Crowd control,” he said. “Watching for signs of friction. But it’s all good. No one is mad at her or the town. It’s me they’re gunning for.”

“When are you leaving?”

“First light,” he said. “I get a ride to Birmingham, Alabama, and then a bus to Atlanta, Georgia, and then I fly Delta back to Germany.”

“Did you know Reed Riley never left the base?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What do you make of that?”

“It puzzles me a little.”

“In what way?”

“Timing,” he said. “At first I thought it was a decoy move, like politics as usual, but then I got real. They wouldn’t burn a hundred gallons of Jet A on a decoy move, senator’s son or not. So he was still scheduled to leave when the Blackhawk departed Benning, but by the time it arrived at Kelham, the orders had changed. Which means some big piece of decisive information came in literally while the chopper was in the air. Which was two days ago, on Sunday, right after lunch. But they didn’t act on it in any other way until this morning, which is Tuesday.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I see no reason for a delay. It feels to me like they were evaluating the new data for a couple of days. Which is usually wise. Except in this instance it makes no sense at all. If the new data was strong enough to make a snap decision to keep Riley on the post Sunday afternoon, why wasn’t it strong enough to open the gates Sunday afternoon? It doesn’t add up. It’s as if they were ready to act privately on Sunday, but they weren’t ready to act publicly until this morning. In which case, what changed? What was the difference between Sunday and today?”

“Beats me,” I said. Which was disingenuous. Because there was really only one answer to that question. The only material difference between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning was that I had been in Carter Crossing on Sunday afternoon, and I had been eight hundred miles away on Tuesday morning.

And no one had expected me to come back again.

What that meant, I had no idea.

Chapter

73

The waitress was overworked and slow, so I left Munro to receive the pies alone and I headed back to the dog-leg alley. I came out between Brannan’s bar and the loan office and saw that a few cars had left and the crowd on the open ground had thinned considerably, much more so than the few absent cars could explain, so I figured people were inside at that point, drinking away their last precious minutes of freedom before heading home for the night.

I found most of them inside Brannan’s bar itself. The place was packed. It was seriously overcrowded. I wasn’t sure if Carter County had a fire marshal, but if it did, the guy would have been having a panic attack. There must have been a hundred Rangers and fifty women in there, back to back, chest to chest, holding their drinks up neck-high to avoid the crush. There was a roar of sound, a loud generalized amalgam of talk and laughter, and behind it all I could hear the cash drawer slamming in and out of the register. The river of dollars was back in full flow.

I spent five minutes fighting my way to the bar, on a random route left and right through the crowd, checking faces as I went, some up close, some from afar, but I didn’t see Reed Riley. The Brannan brothers were hard at work, dealing beer in bottles, taking money, making change, dumping wet dollar bills into their tip jar, passing and repassing each other in their cramped space with moves like dancers. One of them saw me and did the busy-barman thing with his chin and his eyes and the angle of his head, and then he recognized me from our earlier conversation, and then he remembered I was an MP, and then he leaned in fast like he was prepared to give me a couple of seconds. I couldn’t remember if he was Jonathan or Hunter.

I asked him, “Have you seen that guy Reed? The guy we were talking about before?”

He said, “He was in here two hours ago. By now he’ll be wherever the shots are cheapest.”

“Which is where?”

“Can’t say for sure. Not here, anyway.”

Then he ducked away to continue his marathon and I fought my way back to the door.

I got back to the diner sixteen minutes after I left it and found that the pies had been delivered in my absence and that Munro was halfway through eating his. I picked up my fork and he apologized for not waiting. He said, “I thought you were gone.”

I said, “I often take a walk between courses. It’s a Mississippi thing, apparently. Always good to blend in with the local population.”

He said nothing in reply to that. He just looked a little bemused.

I asked, “What are you doing in Germany?”

“Generally?”

“No, specifically. As in, when you get there first thing in the morning the day after tomorrow, what’s on your desk?”

“Not very much.”

“Nothing urgent?”

“Why?”

“Three women were killed here,” I said. “And the perp is running around free as a bird.”

“We have no jurisdiction.”

“Remember that picture in Emmeline McClatchy’s parlor? Martin Luther King? He said all that needs to happen for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”

“I’m a military cop, not a good man.”

“He also said the day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”

“That stuff is way above my pay grade.”

“He also said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to stay here,” I said. “One more day.”

Then I finished my pie and went looking for Elizabeth Deveraux again.

It was eleven thirty-one when I left the diner for the second time. I turned right and walked up to the Sheriff’s Department. It was locked up and dark. No vehicles in the lot. I kept on going and turned the corner onto the Kelham road. There was a stream of traffic coming out from behind Main Street. One car after another. Some were full of women and turning left. Most were full of Rangers and turning right, at least three and sometimes four guys in each car. Bravo Company, going home. Maybe they had a midnight curfew. I glanced down to the acre of beaten dirt and saw every single car except my Buick in motion. Some were just starting up and backing out. Others were maneuvering for position, getting in line, getting ready to join the convoy.

I kept on walking, on the left-hand shoulder, keeping my distance from the traffic heading for Kelham. A lot of beer had been consumed, and the designated driver concept was not big in 1997. Not in the army, anyway. Dust was coming up off the road, and bright headlight beams were cutting through it, and motors were roaring. Two hundred yards ahead of me cars were thumping over the railroad track and then accelerating away into the darkness.

Deveraux was right there, sitting in her car on the far side of the crossing. She was facing me. She was parked with her wheels on the shoulder of the road. I walked toward her, with Bravo Company overtaking me all the way, maybe ninety of them in thirty cars in the minute it took me to reach the railroad. By the time I got there the stream was already thinning behind me. The last of the stragglers were passing me by, five and ten and twenty seconds between each one. They were driving fast, chasing after their more punctual friends.

I waited for a break in the traffic long enough to get me safely over the track, and Deveraux opened her door and got out to meet me. We stood there together, lit up bright by the oncoming headlights. She said, “Five more minutes and they’ll all be gone. But I have to wait until Butler and Pellegrino get back. I can’t go off duty before they do. That wouldn’t be fair.”

I asked, “When will they get back?”

“The train takes a whole minute to pass a given point. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it feels like an hour when you’ve been working all evening. So they’ll try to make it before midnight.”

“How long before midnight?”

She smiled. “Not long enough, I’m afraid. Five to, maybe. We wouldn’t get home in time.”

I said, “Pity.”

She smiled wider.

She said, “Get in the car, Reacher.”

She started the motor and waited a moment as the last of the Bravo Company stragglers sped by. Then she eased off the shoulder, and maneuvered out to the humped crown of the pavement, and then she turned a tight right that put us up on the crossing, sideways to the road, facing north up the railroad track, directly in line with it. She put a light foot on the gas and steered carefully and got her right-hand wheels up on the right-hand rail. Her left-hand wheels were down on the ties. The whole car was tilted at a decent angle. She drove on, not fast, not slow, but decisive and confident. She went straight, one hand on the wheel, one hand in her lap, past the water tower, then onward. Her left-hand wheels pattered over the ties. Her right-hand wheels ran smooth. A fine piece of car control. Then she braked gently, one side up, one side down, and she came to a neat stop.

On the track.

Twenty yards north of the water tower.

Right where Reed Riley’s car had waited for the train.

Where the broken glass began.

I said, “You’ve done this before.”

She said, “Yes, I have.”

Chapter

74

She said, “This is the tricky part. It’s all about momentum now.” She turned the wheel hard to the left and just as the front right-hand tire came down off the right-hand rail she hit the gas and the pulse of acceleration popped the front left-hand tire up over the left-hand rail. The whole car squirmed for a second, and she kept her foot light on the pedal, and the other wheels followed suit, two, three, four, with separate squelching sounds, sidewall rubber against steel, and then she stopped again and parked in the dirt very close to and exactly parallel with the track. The first of the ballast stones were about five feet from my window.

She said, “I love this spot. No other way to get to it, because of the ditch. But it’s worth the trouble. I come here quite often.”

“At midnight?” I asked.

“Always,” she said.

I turned and looked out the back window. I could see the road. More than forty yards away, less than fifty. At first there was nothing happening. No traffic. Then a car flashed past east to west, left to right, away from Kelham, toward town, moving fast. A big car, with lights on its roof and a shield on its door.

“Pellegrino,” she said. She was watching too now. Right at my side. She said, “He was probably holed up a hundred yards away, and as soon as that last straggler passed him he counted to ten and hightailed it for home.”

I said, “Butler was parked right at Kelham’s gate.”

“Yes, Butler is the one with a race on his hands. And our fate in his hands. As soon as he passes us, I guarantee we’re alone in the world. This is a small town, Reacher, and I know where everyone is.”

The clock in my head said eleven forty-nine. Butler’s plight involved a complex calculation. He was three miles away and wouldn’t hesitate to drive at sixty, which meant he could be home in three minutes. But he couldn’t start that three-minute dash until the last straggler got at least within headlight range of Kelham. And that last straggler might be driving pretty slow at that point, having had a skinful of beer and having seen Pellegrino parked menacingly on the side of the road. My guess was Butler would be through in eleven minutes, which would be midnight exactly, and I said so.

“No, he’ll have jumped the gun,” Deveraux said. “The last ten minutes have been fairly quiet. He’ll have moved off the gate five minutes ago. That’s my guess. He might not be far behind Pellegrino.”

We watched the road.

All quiet.

I opened my door and got out of the car. I stepped right on the edge of the rail bed. The left-hand rail was no more than a yard away. It was gleaming in the moonlight. I figured the train was ten miles south of us. Passing through Marietta, maybe, right at that moment.

Deveraux got out on her side and we met behind the Caprice’s trunk. Eleven fifty-one. Nine minutes to go. We watched the road.

All quiet.

Deveraux stepped back around and opened a rear door. She checked the back seat. She said, “Just in case. We might as well be ready.”

“Too cramped,” I said.

“You don’t like doing it in cars?”

“They don’t make them wide enough.”

She checked her watch.

She said, “We won’t make it back to Toussaint’s in time.”

I said, “Let’s do it right here. On the ground.”

She smiled.

Then wider.

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Like Janice Chapman.”

“If she did,” I said. I took off my BDU jacket and spread it out on the weeds, as long and wide as it would go.

We watched the road.

All quiet.

She took off her gun belt and stowed it on the rear seat of the car. Eleven fifty-four. Six minutes. I knelt down and put my ear on the rail. I heard a faint metallic whisper. Almost not there at all. The train, six miles south.

We watched the road.

We saw a hint of a glow in the east.

Headlights.

Deveraux said, “Good old Butler.”

The glow grew brighter, and we heard rushing tires and a straining engine in the silence of the night. Then the glow changed to delineated beams and the noise grew louder and a second later Butler’s car flashed left-to-right in front of us and thwacked over the crossing without slowing down at all. He went airborne on the lee side and crashed back to earth with a yelp of rubber and a cloud of dust. Then he was gone.

Four minutes to go.

We were neither refined nor elegant. We wrenched our shoes off and pulled our pants down and abandoned all adult sophistication in favor of pure animal instinct. Deveraux hit the deck and got comfortable on my jacket and I went down right on top of her and propped myself up on my palms and watched for the glimmer of the train’s headlight in the distance. Not there yet. Three minutes to go.

She wrapped her legs around my hips and we got going, fast and hard from the first moment, anxious, desperate, insanely energetic. She was gasping and panting and rolling her head from side to side and grabbing fistfuls of my T-shirt and hauling on it. Then we were kissing and breathing both at the same time, and then she was arching her back and grinding her head on the ground, straining her neck, opening her eyes, looking at the world behind her upside down.

Then the ground began to shake.

As before, just faintly at first, the same mild constant tremor, like the beginning of a distant earthquake. The stones in the rail bed next to us started to scratch and click. The rails themselves started to sing, humming and keening and whispering. The ties jumped and shuddered. The ballast stones crunched and hopped. The ground under my hands and knees danced with big bass shudders. I looked up and gasped and blinked and squinted and saw the distant headlight. Twenty yards south of us the old water tower started to shake and its elephant’s trunk started to sway. The ground beat on us from below. The rails screamed and howled. The train whistle blew, long and loud and forlorn. The warning bells at the crossing forty yards away started to ring. The train kept on coming, unstoppable, still distant, still distant, then right next to us, then right on top of us, just as insanely massive as before, and just as impossibly loud.

Like the end of the world.

The ground shook hard under us and we bounced and bucketed whole inches in the air. A bow wave of air battered us. Then the locomotive flashed past, its giant wheels five feet from our faces, followed by the endless sequence of cars, all of them hammering, juddering, strobing in the moonlight. We clung together, the whole long minute, sixty long seconds, deafened by the squealing metal, beaten numb by the throbbing ground, scoured by dust from the slipstream. Deveraux threw her head back under me and screamed soundlessly and jammed her head from side to side and beat on my back with her fists.

Then the train was gone.

I turned my head and saw the cars rolling away from me into the distance at a steady sixty miles an hour. The wind dropped, and the earthquake quieted down, first to gentle tremors again, and then to nothing at all, and the bells stopped dead, and the rails stopped hissing, and the nighttime silence came back. We rolled apart and lay on our backs in the weeds, panting, sweating, spent, deaf, completely overwhelmed by sensations internal and external. My jacket had gotten balled up and crumpled under us. My knees and hands were torn and scraped. I imagined Deveraux was in an even worse state. I turned my head to check and saw she had my Beretta in her hand.

Chapter

75

The Marine Corps never liked the Beretta as much as the army did, so Deveraux was handling mine with proficiency but less than total enthusiasm. She dumped the magazine, ejected an unfired round, checked the chamber, racked the slide, and then put the whole thing back together again. She said, “I’m sorry. It was in your jacket pocket. I wondered what it was. It was digging into my ass. I’m going to have a bruise.”

“In which case it’s me that’s sorry,” I said. “Your ass deserves nothing but the best. It’s a national treasure. Or a regional attraction, at the very least.”

She smiled at me and stood up, unsteady, and went in search of her pants. Her shirt tail hung down, but not far enough. No bruise yet. She asked, “Why did you bring a gun?”

“Habit,” I said.

“Were you expecting trouble?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“I left mine in the car.”

“So did lots of dead people.”

“It’s just the two of us here.”

“As far as we know.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“But alive,” I said. “And you haven’t arrested anyone yet.”

“The army can’t prove a negative,” she said. “Therefore they must know who it was. They should tell me.”

I said nothing in reply to that. I followed her lead and staggered to my feet and picked up my pants. We got dressed, hopping from foot to foot together, and then we perched side by side on the Caprice’s rear bumper and laced our shoes. Getting back to the road was no real problem. Deveraux did it in reverse, backing up onto the track like parallel parking, then backing all the way to the crossing, and then turning the wheel and taking off forward. We were in my hotel room five minutes later. In bed. She went straight to sleep. I didn’t. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought.

Mostly I thought about my last conversation with Leon Garber. My commanding officer. An honest man, and my friend, as far as I knew. But cryptic. It’s the truth, he had said. She was a Marine, Reacher. Sixteen years in. She knew all about cutting throats. She knew how to do it, and she knew how to pretend she didn’t. Then he had gotten a little impatient. A man with your instincts, he had said, about me. Later I had pushed the issue. You could order me not to go back to Mississippi, I had said. I could, he had said. But I won’t. Not you. I trust you to do the right thing.

The conversation replayed endlessly in my head.

The truth.

Instincts.

The right thing.

In the end I fell asleep very late and completely unsure whether Garber had been telling me something, or asking me something.

My long-held belief that there is no better time than the second time was put to a severe test when we woke up, because the fifth time was also pretty terrific. We were both a little stiff and sore after our outdoor extravaganza, so we took it gently, long and slow, and the warmth and the comfort of the bed helped a lot. Plus neither one of us knew whether there would ever be a sixth time, which added a little poignancy to the occasion. Afterward we lay quiet for a while, and then she asked me when I was leaving, and I said I didn’t know.

We ate breakfast together in the diner, and then she went to work, and I went to use the phone. I tried to call Frances Neagley at her desk in D.C., but she wasn’t back yet. Probably still on an all-night bus somewhere. So I dialed Stan Lowrey instead, and got him right away. I said, “I need you to do something else for me.”

He said, “No jokes this morning? About how you’re surprised I’m still here?”

“I didn’t have time to think of any. I wanted Neagley, not you. You should try to get hold of her as soon as you can. She’s better than you at this kind of stuff.”

“Better than you, too. What do you need?”

“Fast answers,” I said.

“To what questions?”

“Statistically speaking, where would we be most likely to find U.S. Marines and concrete flood sluices in close proximity?”

“Southern California,” Lowrey said. “Statistically speaking, almost certainly Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego.”

“Correct,” I said. “I need to trace a jarhead MP who was there five years ago. His name is Paul Evers.”

“Why?”

“Because his parents were Mr. and Mrs. Evers and they liked the name Paul, I guess.”

“No, why do you want to trace him?”

“I want to ask him a question.”

Lowrey said, “You’re forgetting something.”

“Like what?”

“I’m in the army, not the Marine Corps. I can’t get into their files.”

“That’s why you need to call Neagley. She’ll know how to do it.”

“Paul Evers,” he said, slowly, like he was writing it down.

“Call Neagley,” I said again. “This is urgent. I’ll get back to you.”

I hung up with Lowrey and shoveled more coins into the slot and called the Kelham number Munro had given Deveraux, right back at the beginning. The call went through to some guy who wasn’t Munro. He told me Munro had left at first light, in a car to Birmingham, Alabama. I said I knew that had been the plan. I asked the guy to check if it had actually happened. So the guy called the visiting officers’ quarters and came back to me and said no, it hadn’t actually happened. Munro was still on the post. The guy gave me a number for his room and I hung up and redialed.

Munro answered and I said, “Thank you for sticking around.”

He said, “But what am I sticking around for? Right now I’m just hiding out in my room. I’m not very popular here, you know.”

“You didn’t join the army to be popular.”

“What do you need?”

“I need to know Reed Riley’s movements today.”

“Why?”

“I want to ask him a question.”

“That could be difficult. As far as I know he’s going to be pretty much tied up all day. You might be able to grab him over lunch. If he gets time for lunch, that is. And if he does, it will be very early.”

“No, I need him to come to me. In town.”

“You don’t understand. The mood has changed here. Bravo Company is out from under the cloud. Riley’s father is flying in for a visit.”

“The senator? Today?”

“ETA close to one o’clock this afternoon. Billed as an off-the-record celebration of what the guys are doing in Kosovo.”

“How long will it last?”

“You know what politicians are like. The old guy is supposed to watch some training crap in the afternoon, but dollars to doughnuts he’ll get a real hard-on and want to hang around all night drinking with the boys.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, since you’ve got nothing to do except sit around all day, you could tell me a couple of things.”

“What things?”

The phone started beeping at me and I said, “Why don’t you call me back on the government’s dime?” I read out the number from the dial and hung up. I walked to my table to pay the breakfast check and by the time I got back to the phone it was ringing.

“What things?” Munro said again.

“Impressions, mainly. About Kelham. As in, is there a good reason for Alpha Company and Bravo Company to be based there?”

“As opposed to where else?”

“Anywhere else east of the Mississippi River.”

“Kelham is pretty isolated,” Munro said. “Helps with the secrecy thing.”

“That’s what they told me, too. But I don’t buy it. There are secrets on every base. They could keep the lid on this thing anywhere. Kosovo is not even interesting. Who would even listen? But they chose Kelham a year ago. Why did they do that? Have you seen anything about Kelham that would make it the only choice?”

“No,” Munro said. “Not really. It’s adequate, no question. But not essential. I assume it was about sending four hundred extra wallets to a dying town.”

“Exactly,” I said. “It was political.”

“What isn’t?”

“One more thing,” I said. “You’re clear about how Janice Chapman ended up in that alley, right?”

“I hope so,” he said. “Based on what I saw last night, Chief Deveraux operates an exclusion zone in terms of Main Street itself. She makes sure all the action happens between the bars and the railroad track. Therefore both Main Street and the alley would have been deserted. Therefore the perp must have stopped on Main Street and carried the corpse in from that direction.”

“How long would it have taken?”

“Doesn’t matter. No one was there to see. Could have been a minute, could have been twenty.”

“But why there? Why not somewhere else, ten miles away?”

“The body was supposed to be found, I guess.”

“Plenty of lonelier places it would still have been found. So why there?”

“I don’t know,” Munro said. “Maybe the perp was constrained in some way. Maybe he had company, somewhere close by. Like the diner, or one of the bars. Maybe he had to duck out and take care of it real fast. Maybe he couldn’t be gone for long without somebody noticing. So maybe he had to trade safety for speed. Which would dictate a nearby location.”

“Can you give me another day?” I said. “Can you be here tomorrow?”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to get my butt kicked bad for being one day late. I can’t risk two.”

“Pussy,” I said.

He laughed. “Sorry, man, but if you don’t get it done today you’re on your own.”

Chapter

76

Senator Carlton Riley’s impending visit kept the town very quiet. It was as if Kelham’s gates were locked again. I doubted that the leave order had been formally rescinded, but Rangers are good soldiers, and I was sure the base commander had dropped heavy hints about hundred-percent participation in the hoopla. I left the diner and found Main Street back to its previous torpor. My borrowed Buick was the only car parked on the block behind. It looked lonely and abandoned. I unlocked it and drove it around to the hotel and retrieved my toothbrush and settled my account at the desk. Then I got back behind the wheel and went exploring.

I started opposite the vacant lot between the diner and the Sheriff’s Department. I headed south from there for two hundred yards, to where Main Street started to bend, driving fast but not stupid fast. I made the left into Deveraux’s childhood street, and hustled along to her old house, fourth on the right. Total elapsed time, forty-five seconds.

I turned in over the dried mud puddle and drove down the overgrown driveway, past the tumbledown house, through the back yard, past the wild hedge, to the deer trestle. I swung left and backed up and popped the trunk and got out.

Total elapsed time, a minute and fifteen seconds.

There were trees to my left and trees to my right and trees ahead of me. A lonely spot, even in the bright daylight. I mimed supporting a body’s weight, cutting the wrist straps, cutting the ankle ties, carrying the body to the car, lowering it into the trunk. I fiddled around four more times, taking off imaginary pads and straps and belts and scarves from two wrists and two ankles. I stepped back to the trestle and picked up an imaginary bucket of blood and heaved it over to the car and wedged it in the trunk alongside the body.

I closed the trunk lid and got back in the driver’s seat.

Total elapsed time, three minutes and ten seconds.

I backed up and turned and drove the length of the driveway again and headed back to Main Street. I drove the same two hundred yards I had driven before and stopped on the curb between the hardware store and the pharmacy. Right at the mouth of the alley.

Total elapsed time, four minutes and twenty-five seconds.

Plus one minute to put the blood in the alley.

Plus another minute to put Janice May Chapman in the alley.

Plus fifteen seconds to get back where I started.

Total elapsed time, six minutes and forty seconds.

Touch and go.

Maybe long enough to stick in someone’s mind, in a social situation, or maybe not.

I rewound the clock in my head to four minutes and twenty-five seconds and drove on north and then east, to the railroad crossing. I came to a stop right on top of it. New total, four minutes and fifty-five seconds. Plus a minute to carry Rosemary McClatchy to the ditch, and thirty seconds to get back to the car, and twenty seconds to get back where I started.

Total elapsed time, six minutes and forty-five seconds.

Fractionally longer, but in the same ballpark.

I didn’t drive up to where Shawna Lindsay had been dumped, on the pile of gravel. No point. That destination was in a whole different category. That was a twenty-minute excursion, right there. It was the sole exception to the hurry-up rule. Therefore it had been undertaken under different circumstances. No company. No social situation. Plenty of time to thread cautiously along dark dirt roads between ditches, turning right, turning left, doing the deed, and then coming back again, just as slow, just as cautious.

But what was interesting about Shawna Lindsay’s resting place was the car that carried her there. What kind of car could get through that neighborhood twice, without attracting notice or comment? What kind of car was entitled to be there at that time of night?

I sat in the Buick for a spell and then I parked it outside the diner and went in and bought a new roll of quarters for the phone. I tried Neagley first and found her at her desk.

I said, “You’re late to work today.”

She said, “But not by much. I’ve been here half an hour.”

“I’m sorry about the bus.”

“It was OK,” she said. Public transportation was tough for Neagley. Too much chance of inadvertent human contact.

I asked, “Did you get a message from Stan Lowrey?”

“Yes, and I already traced the name for you.”

“In half an hour?”

“It was easy, I’m afraid. Paul Evers died a year ago.”

“How?”

“Nothing dramatic. It was an accident. A helicopter crashed at Lejeune. It was in the newspaper, actually. A Sea Hawk lost a rotor blade. Two pilots and three passengers died, one of which was Evers.”

I said, “OK, plan B. The other name I want is Alice Bouton.” I spelled it out. I said, “She’s been a civilian for the last five years. She was discharged from the Corps without honor. So you better call Stan back. He’s better than you at this kind of stuff.”

“The only thing Lowrey has that I don’t is a friend at a bank.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why you need to call him. Corporations know about civilians better than we do.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“I’m checking a story.”

“No, you’re clutching at straws. That’s what you’re doing.”

“You think?”

“Elizabeth Deveraux is as guilty as sin, Reacher.”

“You’ve seen the file?”

“Only the carbons.”

I said, “But with a thing like this, you have to flip a coin.”

“As in?”

“As in, maybe she did it, maybe she didn’t. We don’t know yet.”

“We know, Reacher.”

“Not for sure.”

Neagley said, “It’s a good thing you don’t own a car.”

I hung up with her and before I was a step away the phone rang on the wall, with the first good news of the day.

Chapter

77

It was Munro on the phone, and he wanted to tell me he had had a cup of coffee. Or more specifically he wanted to tell me he had talked to the steward who had brought him the cup of coffee. The conversation had been on the subject of the day’s upcoming festivities, and Munro said the stewards expected to be very busy until after dinner, but no later than that, because the mess bar would be deserted all evening, because the last time the senator visited he had hosted everybody in town, at Brannan’s bar, because politically it seemed more authentic, and no doubt the old guy would do the same thing again.

“OK,” I said. “That’s good. Riley will come to me after all. And his father. What time will dinner finish?”

“Scheduled to be over by eight o’clock, according to the steward.”

“OK,” I said again. “I’m sure father and son will leave the base together. I want you on them from the moment they drive through the gate. But unobtrusively. Can you do that?”

“Could you?”

“Probably.”

“Then what makes you doubt I could?”

“Innate skepticism, I suppose,” I said. “But whatever, keep your ear to the ground until eight tonight, and use this phone number as a contact if you need me. I’ll be in and out of this diner all day long.”

“OK,” Munro said. “I’ll see you later. But whether or not you’ll see me is a different question altogether.”

I hung up with Munro, and I asked the waitress to answer the phone for me if it rang again. I asked her to write down the callers’ names on her order pad. Then it was all about waiting. For information, and for face to face encounters, and for decisive conclusions. I stepped out to the Main Street sidewalk and stood in the sun. Across the street the guy from the shirt store was doing the same thing. Taking a break, and tasting the air. On my left two old guys were on a bench outside the pharmacy, four hands piled on two canes between two sets of knees. Apart from the four of us the town was deserted. No hustle, no bustle, no traffic.

All quiet.

Until the goon squad from Kelham showed up.

There were four of them in total. They were Kelham’s own local version of Senate Liaison, I guessed, preparing the ground the same way a Secret Service advance team prepares the ground ahead of a presidential visit. They came out of the mouth of the alley beyond the two old guys on the bench. I guessed they had just called on the Brannan brothers and alerted them to what was going to happen that night. Maybe they had made invoicing arrangements. In which case I wished the Brannan brothers the very best of luck. I imagined billing a Senate office was a long and frustrating experience.

The four guys were all officers. Two lieutenants, a captain, and a light colonel in the lead. He was fiftyish and fat. He was the kind of soft staff officer who looks ludicrous in battledress uniform. Like a civilian at a fancy dress party. He stopped on the sidewalk and put his knuckles on his hips. He looked all around. He saw me. I was in battledress uniform too. On the face of it, I was one of his. He spoke over his shoulder to a lieutenant behind him. Too far to hear his voice, but I could read his lips. He said, Tell that man to get his ass over here double-quick. I guessed he would want to know why I wasn’t back on the base, getting myself ready for hundred-percent participation in the hoopla.

The lieutenant’s eyesight was not as good as mine. He approached most of the way full of one kind of body language, which changed fast when he got close enough to read my rank insignia. He stopped a respectful four feet away and saluted and said, “Sir, the colonel would like a word with you.”

Normally I treat lieutenants well. I was one myself, not so very long ago. But right then I wasn’t in the mood for nonsense. So I just nodded and said, “OK, kid, tell him to step right up.”

The kid said, “Sir, I think he would prefer it if you went to him.”

“You must be confusing me with someone who gives a shit what he prefers.”

The kid went a little pale and blinked twice and about-turned and headed back. He must have spent the walk time translating my response into acceptable terms, because there was no instant explosion. Instead the colonel paused a beat and then set off waddling in my direction. He stopped three feet away, and I saluted him very smartly, just to keep him confused.

He returned the salute and asked, “Do I know you, major?”

I said, “That depends on how much trouble you’ve been in, colonel. Have you ever been arrested?”

He said, “You’re the other MP. You’re Major Munro’s opposite number.”

“Or he’s mine,” I said. “Either way, I’m sure we both hope you have a great day.”

“Why are you still here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I was told all issues had been resolved.”

“The issues will be resolved when I say they are. That’s the nature of police work.”

“When did you last get orders?”

“Some days ago,” I said. “They came from Colonel John James Frazer at the Pentagon, I believe.”

“He died.”

“I’m sure his successor will have new orders for me in due course.”

“It could take weeks to install a successor.”

“Then I guess I’m stuck here.”

Silence.

Then the fat guy said, “Well, stay out of sight tonight. Understand? The senator must not see a CID presence here. There are to be no reminders of recent suspicions. None at all. Is that clear?”

I said, “Request noted.”

“It’s more than a request.”

“Next up from a request is an order. But you’re not in my chain of command.”

The guy rehearsed a reply, but in the end he didn’t come out with anything. He just turned on his heel and waddled back to his pals. And at that point I heard the phone ring inside the diner, very faintly through the door, and I beat the waitress to it by a step.

Chapter

78

It was Frances Neagley on the line, from her desk in D.C. She said, “Bouton is a very uncommon name, apparently.”

I said, “Did Stan Lowrey tell you to say that?”

“No, Stan wants to know if she’s related to Jim Bouton, the baseball pitcher. Which she probably is, at least distantly, given how rare the name is. I, however, am basing my conclusion on an hour’s solid work, which turned up no Boutons at all, much less any Alice Boutons. Having said that, right now I can’t get any further than three years back with the Marines, which would miss her anyway, and if she was dishonorably discharged she probably didn’t get the kind of job or income that would show up in too many other places.”

“She probably lives in a trailer park,” I said. “Nowhere near Pendleton, either. Southern California is too expensive. She must have moved.”

“I have a call in to the FBI. And to a pal in USMC personnel command, for the ancient history. And Stan is hassling his banker friend, for the civilian stuff. Although she might not have had a bank account. Not if she lived in a trailer park. But whatever, I just wanted to let you know we’re on it, that’s all. We’ll have more later.”

“How much later?”

“Tonight, I hope.”

“Before eight o’clock would be good.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I hung up the phone and decided to stay in the diner, for lunch.

And inevitably Deveraux came in less than ten minutes later, in search of her own lunch, and, possibly, in search of me. She stepped inside and paused in front of the window, with the light behind her. Her hair lit up like a halo. Her shirt was very slightly translucent. I could see the curve of her waist. Or sense it, at least. Because I was familiar with it. I could see the swell of her breast.

She saw me staring, and she started toward me, and I kicked the opposite chair out an inch. She sat down and brought the backlight with her. She smiled and said, “How was your morning?”

I said, “No, how was yours?”

“Busy,” she said.

“Making any progress?”

“With what?”

“Your three unsolved homicides.”

“Apparently the army solved those homicides,” she said. “And I’ll be happy to do something about them as soon as the army shares its information.”

I said nothing.

She said, “What?”

“You don’t seem very interested in finding out who did it, that’s all.”

“How can I be interested?”

“The army says it was a civilian.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“What?”

“Do you know who it was?”

“Are you saying I do?”

I said, “I’m saying I know how these things work. There are some people you just can’t arrest. Mrs. Lindsay would have been one of them, for instance. Suppose she’d gone the other way and gotten tooled up and gone and shot somebody. You wouldn’t have arrested her for it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying in any town there are people the sheriff won’t arrest.”

She was quiet a long moment.

“Maybe,” she said. “Old man Clancy might be one of them. But he didn’t cut any throats. And I’d arrest anyone else, whoever they were.”

“OK,” I said.

“Maybe you think I’m bad at my job.”

I said nothing.

“Or maybe you think I’ve lost my edge because we have no crime here.”

“I know you have crime here,” I said. “I know you always did. I’m sure your father saw crimes I can’t even imagine.”

“But?”

“You don’t have investigation here. And you never did. I bet ninety-nine times out of a hundred your father knew exactly who did what, right down to the details. Whether he could do anything about it was a different issue. And I bet the one case in a hundred where he didn’t know who did it went unsolved.”

“You’re saying I’m a bad investigator.”

“I’m saying County Sheriff is not an investigator’s job. It needs other skills. All kinds of community stuff. And you’re good at it. You have a detective for the other things. Except right now you don’t.”

“Any other issues, before we order?”

“Just one,” I said.

“Which is?”

“Tell me again. You never dated Reed Riley, right?”

“Reacher, what is this?”

“It’s a question.”

“No, I never dated Reed Riley.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reacher, please.”

“Are you?”

“I didn’t even know he was here. I told you that.”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s order.”

She was mad at me, obviously, but she was hungry, too. More hungry than mad, clearly, because she stayed at the table. Changing tables wouldn’t have been enough. She would have had to storm out emphatically, and she wasn’t prepared to do that on an empty stomach.

She ordered the chicken pie, of course.

I ordered grilled cheese.

She said, “There are things you aren’t telling me.”

I said, “You think?”

“You know who it is.”

I said nothing.

“You do, don’t you? You know who it is. So this whole thing wasn’t about me knowing who it is. It was about you knowing who it is.”

I said nothing.

“Who is it?”

I didn’t answer.

“Are you saying it’s someone I won’t arrest? Who won’t I arrest? It makes no sense. I mean, obviously it’s a great idea for the army to dump the blame on someone they know will never be arrested. I get that. Because if there’s no arrest, there can be no charge, no interview, no trial, and no verdict. Hence no facts. So everyone can just walk away and live happily ever after. But how could the army know who I wouldn’t arrest? Which is nobody, by the way. So this whole thing is crazy.”

“I don’t know who it is,” I said. “Not for sure. Not yet.”

Chapter

79

We finished our lunch without saying much more. Then we had pie. Peach, naturally. And coffee. I asked her, “Did the Kelham PR squad come see you?”

She nodded. “Just before I came out for lunch.”

“So you know what’s happening tonight.”

“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Everyone on best behavior.”

“You OK with that?”

“They know the rules. If they stick to them, I won’t give them any trouble.”

Then the phone rang. Deveraux whipped around and stared at it, as if she had never heard it ring before. Which was possible. I said, “It’s for me.”

I walked over and picked up. It was Munro. He said, “I have the transportation details, if you’re interested. Reed Riley doesn’t own a car anymore, as you know, so he’s borrowing a plain olive drab staff car. He’ll be driving with his father as his only passenger. The motor pool has been told to have the car ready at eight o’clock exactly.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Good to know. Is there a return ETA?”

“There’s an eleven o’clock curfew tonight. Unofficial, all done in whispers, but it’ll happen. A few beers is authentic. Too many is embarrassing. That’s the thinking. So people will be leaving town from ten-thirty onwards. The senator’s plane is scheduled to be wheels-up at midnight.”

“Good to know,” I said again. “Thanks. Has he arrived yet?”

“Twenty minutes ago, in an army Lear.”

“Has the hoopla started yet?”

“First pitch in about an hour.”

“Will you bring me your interview notes?”

“Why?”

“There are a couple of things I want to check. As soon as the senator looks like he’s going to stay put for ten minutes, would you bring them down to me in the diner?”

Munro agreed to do that, so I hung up the phone and walked back to the table, but by then Deveraux was already getting up to leave. She said, “I’m sorry, I have to get back to work. I’ve got a lot to do. I have three homicides to solve.”

Then she pushed past me and walked out the door.

Waiting. I passed some of the time by taking a walk. I looped around the Sheriff’s Department building and entered the acre of beaten earth behind Main Street from the top. The railroad track on my left was silent. The stores and bars on my right were all open, but they had no customers. The bars all had cleaners working in them, all of them black women over forty, all of them bent low over mops and pails, all of them supervised by anxious owners well aware that a U.S. senator would be passing by, and maybe even dropping in. Brannan’s was getting more attention than most. Furniture was being moved, refrigerators were being topped off, trash was being hauled out. Even the windows were being wiped.

Across the alley from Brannan’s the loan office was doing no business at all. Shawna Lindsay had worked there before she died, and evidently she had been replaced by another young woman, less beautiful, but possibly just as good with her numbers. She was sitting on a high stool behind a counter, with a lit-up Western Union sign behind her head. I had time to kill, so on a whim I went inside. The woman looked up as the door opened, and she smiled like she was happy to see me. Maybe I was the only customer of the day so far.

I asked her how the system worked, and after a little back and forth I understood I could call my bank on the phone and order money to be sent to any such office in America. I would need a password for the bank, and either ID or the same password for the office. This was 1997, remember. Things were still pretty casual back then. I knew there were all kinds of banks close to the Pentagon, because thirty thousand people all in one place was a big market to exploit. I decided next time I was in D.C. I would move my account to one of them, and find out its phone number, and register a password. Just in case.

I thanked the young woman and moved on, to the next place in line, which was a gun shop. I bought spare ammunition for the Beretta, nine-millimeter Parabellums in a box of twenty, and a spare magazine to put fifteen of them in. I checked that it fit and worked, which it did. Most guys who don’t check new equipment are still alive, but by no means all of them. I replaced the round I had put through the skinny runt’s head, and then I put the gun back in one pocket and the new magazine and the four loose rounds in the other.

And that was it for shopping. I didn’t need a used stereo, and I didn’t need auto parts. So I dog-legged through Janice Chapman’s alley and walked back to the diner. The waitress met me at the door and told me she had taken no calls for me. I stood there for a second, unsure, and then I picked up the phone, fed it a quarter, and dialed the Treasury Department switchboard. The same number I had called from the old yellow phone in the Lindsay kitchen. The same woman answered. Middle-aged, and elegant.

She asked, “How may I direct your inquiry?”

I said, “Joe Reacher’s office, please.”

I heard the same scratching and clicking, and the same minute of dead air. Then the young woman I was sure wore a plaid skirt and a white sweater picked up and said, “Mr. Reacher’s office.”

I asked, “Is Mr. Reacher there?”

She recognized my voice immediately, probably because it was just like Joe’s. She said, “No, I’m sorry, he’s not back yet. He’s still in Georgia. I think. At least, I hope.”

“You sound worried,” I said.

“I am, a little.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “Joe’s a big boy. He can handle whatever Georgia throws at him. I don’t even think he’s allergic to peanuts.”

Then I hung up and walked deep into the room and holed up at the rearmost table for two. I just sat there, waiting for Munro, counting off the time in my head.

Munro showed up more or less exactly as promised, an hour after our earlier phone call, plus five minutes for the drive. He parked a plain car on the curb and came in and found me in the gloom at the back of the room. He unbuttoned his top pocket and slid out the slim black notebook I had seen before. He put it on the table and said, “Keep it. No one else is going to want it. No one is saving a permanent place for it in the National Archives.”

I nodded. “Some colonel just told me there are to be no reminders of recent suspicions.”

Munro nodded in turn. “I just got the same speech. And that guy is real mad at you, by the way. Did you offend him somehow?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“He’s writing a report for Garber.”

“We always need toilet paper.”

“Plus copies all over. You’re going to be famous.” He looked straight at me for a second, perhaps regretfully, and then he headed back to his car. I opened the little black book and started to read.

Chapter

80

Munro’s handwriting was cramped and neat and meticulous. It filled about fifty of the small pages. His method was to record two or three conversations at a time, and then to summarize them before moving on to the next two or three. That way both his raw materials and his conclusions were preserved side by side, the latter for ease of reference, the former for reconfirming the latter. A circular system, safe, diligent, and conscientious. He was a good cop. Reed Riley’s photograph was still in the book, wedged tight into the spine after the last note and before the first blank page. I realized he had been using it as a bookmark.

The focus of all fifty pages was Janice May Chapman. It had emerged early on that she and Riley had been dating. Not that Riley had said anything about her. Or about anything else, either. He had lawyered up at the start and confined his answers to name, rank, and number. No big deal for an investigator of Munro’s quality. He had spoken to every man in Bravo Company and teased out the facts from the blind sides and the unguarded rear. He had taken fragments of passing mentions and put them all together and woven them into a solid and reliable narrative.

Riley’s men had talked about him in a way I had heard many times before. He was too young to be a legend, too unproven to be a star, but he had some kind of celebrity charisma, partly because of who his father was, and partly because of his own personality. But he wasn’t liked. The conversations as recorded were loyal to a fault, but it was institutional loyalty, not personal loyalty, all of it filtered through any soldier’s traditional hatred for the military police. No one had a bad thing to say about the guy, but no one had a good thing to say either. By reading between the lines of what was and wasn’t said I saw that Riley was a grandstander and a show pony, and that he was impatient, reckless, careless, and full of entitlement. No big deal in a low-temperature environment like Kosovo, but he would have been accidentally shot in the back or blown up with a faulty grenade on his first day if he had been a generation older in Vietnam. That was for damn sure. Better men than Riley had suffered that fate.

Before Chapman it was clear he had dated Shawna Lindsay. They had been seen together many times. And before Lindsay he had dated Rosemary McClatchy. They too had been seen together many times, in the bars, in the diner, riding around in the blue ’57 Chevy. There was a faint twice-removed reek of testosterone in Munro’s notes, as one young man after another had chortled about the big dog mowing them down in sequence, all the best looking women in town, just like that, wham bam, thank you ma’am.

And according to Bravo Company, that prestigious sequence had begun with Elizabeth Deveraux. She was well known at Kelham, because of an early courtesy visit at the start of the mission. Back then training had been intense, and there had been no leave or down time, but the big dog had snuck out at night and nailed the prize. That triumph had been revealed one evening during Bravo Company’s first tour to Kosovo, over drinks around a fire. Again, I could almost hear the voices first-hand, full of chuckling delight at the way the rest of the regular 75th training grunts thought Deveraux was a lesbian, and at the way the boys of Bravo Company secretly knew better, because of their big dog, their alpha male, and his irresistible ways. They didn’t like the guy, but they admired him. Personality, and charisma. And hormones too, I guessed.

There was nothing else of interest in the notebook. I spent some time looking at Riley’s picture again, and then I squared the whole thing away in my own top pocket, and I went back to waiting.

The rest of the afternoon was long and fruitless. The hours passed, and no one called, and no one came, and the town stayed quiet. At one point I heard some faint live-firing noise from the east, and I guessed the hoopla at Kelham was going swimmingly. From time to time I drank a cup of coffee and ate a slice of pie, but mostly I just rested in a semi-vegetative state, eyes open but half-asleep, breathing low, saving energy, like hibernation. Local people came and went in ones and twos, and at six o’clock Jonathan and Hunter Brannan came in for an early dinner, to fuel up ahead of their busy evening, which I thought was wise, and two or three others I took to be bar owners did the same thing, and some of what I took to be their cleaners stopped by before heading home, and at seven o’clock Main Street went dark outside the window, and at seven-thirty the old couple from the hotel came in for their meal, she with her book, he with his paper.

Then a minute later Stan Lowrey called on the phone, and the evening began to unravel.

Chapter

81

Lowrey started out by apologizing for the extreme lateness of his warning, and then he said he had just heard from an MP friend at Fort Benning in Georgia, where the 75th Ranger Regiment was based. Apparently a lieutenant colonel from their remote detachment at Kelham had phoned home and told his bosses there were still two CID majors on the scene locally, one on the post itself and one in town, the latter a prize pain in the ass, and because his bosses were determined that Senator Riley be shown nothing but a good time, they had dispatched a babysitting squad to muzzle the said CID majors for the remaining duration of the senator’s visit. Just in case. Lowrey said the squad had left Benning in a Blackhawk helicopter some time ago, and therefore might well have already arrived at Kelham.

“MPs?” I said. “They won’t mess with me.”

“Not MPs,” Lowrey said. “Regular Rangers. Real tough guys.”

“How many?”

“Six,” Lowrey said. “Three for you and three for Munro, I guess.”

“Rules of engagement?”

“I don’t know. What does it take to muzzle you?”

“More than three Rangers,” I said. I scanned the street out the window and saw nothing moving. No vehicles, no pedestrians. I said, “Don’t worry about me, Stan. It’s Munro I’m concerned about. I need two pairs of hands tonight. It’s going to make it harder if he gets hung up.”

“Which he will,” Lowrey said. “You will too, probably. Word is these guys aren’t kidding around.”

“Would you call him for me and give him the same warning?” I asked. “If they haven’t already gotten to him, that is.” I recited Munro’s VOQ number, and I heard the scratch of a pencil as Lowrey wrote it down. Then I asked, “Has your pet banker come through on Alice Bouton yet?”

“Negative,” Lowrey said. “He’s been busy all day. But Neagley is still on it.”

“Call her and tell her to take her thumb out of her ass and get me some results. Tell her if I’m busy with the GI Joes when she calls she’s authorized to leave a message with the waitress.”

“OK, and good luck,” Lowrey said, and hung up. I stepped out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. Nothing doing. I guessed the Rangers would look for me first in one of the bars. Probably Brannan’s. If I was planning to make trouble, that was where I would be. So I looped around through the dog-leg alley and scanned the acre of ground from deep in the shadows.

And sure enough, there was a Humvee parked right there, big and green and obvious. I guessed the plan was to frog march me over to it and throw me in the back and drive me out to Kelham, and then to stash me in whatever room Munro was already locked up in. Then the plan would be to wait until the senator’s Lear left at midnight, and let us out again, and apologize most sincerely for the misunderstanding.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

I eased out around the corner of Brannan’s bar and looked in through the window. The place was sparkling clean. Tables and chairs were neatly arrayed, all around a focal point I assumed would be occupied by the senator and his son. Acolytes would sit close by, and there was plenty of open space where the less well connected could stand. Jonathan and Hunter Brannan were behind the bar, looking well rested and well nourished after their early dinner.

Three guys in BDUs were talking to them.

They were Rangers, each one of them a decent size, and none of them a rookie. One of them was a sergeant, and two of them were specialists. Their uniforms had seen plenty of wear, and their boots were clean but creased. Their faces were tanned and lined and blank. They were professional soldiers, pure and simple. Which was a dumb expression, because professional soldiers were all kinds of things, none of which was pure, and none of which was simple. But ultimately it didn’t matter exactly what two of them were, because the sergeant was in charge. And I had never met a sergeant who was less than well aware that there were eighteen ranks above him in the hierarchy, all the way up to the commander-in-chief, and that they all made more money than he did, in exchange for making policy decisions.

In other words, whatever a sergeant did, there were eighteen groups of people ready, willing, and waiting to criticize him.

I eased back into the shadows and headed back to the diner.

There were three customers still in the place, including the old couple from Toussaint’s and the guy in the pale suit I had seen once before. Three was a good number, but not a great number. On the other hand the demographics were close to perfect. Local business people, solid citizens, mature, easily outraged. And the old couple at least were guaranteed to stay for hours, which was good, because I might need hours, depending on Neagley’s progress, or the lack of it.

I came in the door and stopped by the phone and the waitress shook her head at me, to tell me there had been no incoming calls. I used the phone book and found the number for Brannan’s bar, and then I put a quarter in the slot and dialed. One of the Brannan brothers answered and I said, “Let me speak to the sergeant.”

I heard a second of surprise and uncertainty, and then I heard the phone being reversed on the bar, and I heard the click of nails and the thump of palms as the receiver was passed from hand to hand, and then a voice said, “Who is this?”

I said, “This is the guy you’re looking for. I’m in the diner.”

No answer.

I said, “This is the part where you want to put your hand over the mouthpiece long enough to ask the barmen where the diner is, so you can send your guys to check while you keep me talking on the phone. But I’ll save you the trouble. The diner is about twenty yards west of you and about fifty yards north. Send one guy through the alley on your left and the other counterclockwise out of the lot and around the Sheriff’s Department building. You personally can come in through the kitchen door, which should be pretty close to where you parked your truck. That way you’ve got me covered in every direction. But don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll wait for you right here. You’ll find me at a table in back.”

Then I hung up and walked to the rearmost table for four.

Chapter

82

The sergeant was the first in. Shortest distance, biggest investment. He came through the kitchen door slowly and cautiously and let it swing shut behind him. I raised my hand in greeting. I was about seven feet away from him. Then one of the specialists came in the front. From the alley, I assumed. Second shortest distance. A minute later the third guy was there, a little out of breath. Longest distance, biggest hurry.

They stood there, filling the aisle, two to my right and one to my left.

“Sit down,” I said. “Please.”

The sergeant said, “Our orders are to take you to Kelham.”

I said, “That isn’t going to happen, sergeant.”

No answer.

The clock in my head showed a quarter to eight.

I said, “Here’s the thing, guys. To take me out of here against my will would involve a considerable amount of physical commotion. At a rough guess we would bust up at least three or four tables and chairs. There might be personal injuries too. And the waitress will assume we’re Bravo Company personnel. Because no one else from Kelham has leave right now. Believe me, she keeps track of stuff like that, because her income depends on it. And she knows Bravo’s company commander is expected right there in Brannan’s bar at any minute. So it would be entirely natural for her to head around there to complain. And to get that done she’d almost certainly have to interrupt a moment of intimacy between father and son. Which would be a big embarrassment for all concerned, especially you.”

No answer.

“Sit down, guys,” I said.

They sat down. But not where I wanted them to. They weren’t dumb. That was the problem with a volunteer army. There were selection criteria. I was in an aisle seat at my table for four, facing forward. If they had all joined me at the same table, I would have had freedom of movement. But they didn’t all join me at the same table. The sergeant sat down face to face with me, but the specialists sat across the aisle, one each side of a table for two. They pulled their chairs out at an angle, one of them ready to intervene if I made a break one way, and the other ready if I broke the other way.

“You should try the pie,” I said. “It’s really good.”

“No pie,” the sergeant said.

“You better order something. Or the waitress might throw you out for loitering. And if you refuse to go, she knows who to call.”

No answer.

I said, “There are members of the public here, too. You really can’t afford to attract attention.”

Stalemate.

Ten minutes to eight.

The phone by the door stayed silent.

The waitress came by and the sergeant shrugged and ordered three pies and three cups of coffee. Two more people came in the door, both of them civilians, one of them a young woman in a nice dress, the other a young man in jeans and a sport coat. They took a table for two, three along from the specialists and directly opposite the old couple from the hotel. They didn’t look much like the kind of folks who would get straight on the phone with their congressman because of a little public mayhem, but the more warm bodies in the room the better.

The sergeant said, “We’re happy to sit here all night, if that’s what it takes.”

“Good to know,” I said. “I’m going to sit here until the phone rings, and then I’m going to leave.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you communicate with anyone. Those are my orders.”

I said nothing.

“And I can’t let you leave. Unless you agree to go to Kelham.”

I said, “Didn’t we just have this discussion?”

No response.

The phone didn’t ring.

Five minutes to eight.

At eight o’clock the guy in the pale suit paid his check and left, and the old lady from the hotel turned a page in her book. Nothing else happened. The phone stayed quiet. At five past eight I began to hear noise outside, behind us, the sound of cars and crunching tires, and I sensed a change in the nighttime air, like pressure building, as Bravo Company started to arrive in town, first in ones and twos, then by the dozens. I assumed Reed Riley had led the parade in his borrowed staff car, with his father in the seat beside him. I assumed the old guy was at that moment stationed at Brannan’s door, greeting his son’s men, ushering them in, grinning like an idiot.

The three Rangers boxing me in had eaten their pies one at a time, with the other two always alert and watchful. They were pretty good. By no means the worst I had ever seen. The waitress collected their plates. She seemed to sense what was going on. Every time she passed by she gave me a concerned look. There was no doubt whose side she was on. She knew me, and she didn’t know them. I had tipped her many times, and they hadn’t, not even once.

The noise from outside continued to build.

The phone didn’t ring.

I spent the next few minutes thinking about their Humvee. I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would have a big General Motors diesel in it, and I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would have a three-speed automatic transmission in it, and I knew that like every other Humvee in the world it would weigh north of four tons, all of which I knew would make it good for about sixty miles an hour, tops. Which I knew wasn’t race-car fast, but which I knew was fifteen times faster than walking, which I knew was a good thing.

I waited.

Then, just after eight-thirty, three things happened. The first was unfortunate, and the second was unprecedented, and the third was therefore awkward.

First, the young couple left. The girl in the nice dress, and the boy in the sport coat. He laid money on the table, and they got up together and walked out holding hands, fast enough to suggest that an evening prayer meeting was not the next item on their agenda.

And second, the old couple left. She closed her book, he folded his paper, and they got up and shuffled out the door. Back to the hotel, presumably. Far earlier than ever before. No obvious reason, except possibly a sudden hopeless intuition that old man Riley would cancel the Lear and decide on an early night in town.

At that point the waitress was in the kitchen, which left just four people in the room, one of which was me, and three of which were my babysitters.

The sergeant smiled and said, “Just us now.”

I didn’t answer.

He said, “No members of the public.”

I didn’t answer.

He said, “And I don’t think the waitress is the complaining type. Not really. She knows this place could end up on the shit list easy as anything. For a month. Or two. Or for however long it takes to put her on welfare.”

He was leaning forward across the table. Closer to me than before. Looking straight at me. His two men were leaning forward across the aisle, elbows on knees, hands loose, feet planted, watching me.

Then the third thing happened.

The phone rang.

Chapter

83

The three Rangers were good. Very good. The phone was a traditional old item with a big metal bell inside, which rang for a whole lazy second before adding a reverberation tail that took another whole lazy second to die away, whereupon the sequence would repeat itself endlessly until either the call was answered or the caller gave up. An old-fashioned, comforting sound, familiar for a hundred years. But on this occasion before the first ring was halfway over all three Rangers were in motion. The guy directly to my left was instantly on his feet, lunging behind me, putting big hands on my shoulders, pressing me down into my seat, hauling me back past the vertical, keeping me in a weak and inefficient position. The sergeant opposite me was instantly leaning forward, grabbing my wrists, pressing them into the tabletop with the flat of his hands. The third guy came up out of his chair and balled his fists and blocked the aisle, ready to hit me anywhere he could if I moved.

A fine performance.

I offered no resistance.

I just sat there.

Everyone has a plan, me included.

The phone rang on.

Three rings later the waitress came out of the kitchen. She paused a beat and took one look and then pushed past the Ranger in the aisle and headed for the phone. She picked up and listened and glanced my way and started talking, looking at me the whole time, as if she was describing my current predicament to someone.

To Frances Neagley, I assumed.

Or I hoped.

The waitress listened again for a moment and then trapped the phone between her ear and her shoulder and took out her order pad and her pen. She started writing. And kept on writing. Practically an essay. She started a second page. The guy behind me kept the pressure on. The sergeant kept hold of my wrists. The third guy moved closer. The waitress made shapes with her mouth as she concentrated on spelling unfamiliar words. Then she stopped writing and checked back through what she had, and she swallowed once and blinked twice as if the next part of her task was going to be difficult.

She hung up the phone. She tore out her two written pages and held them as if they were hot. She took a step toward us. The guy behind me took his weight off my shoulders. The sergeant let go of my wrists. The third guy sat down again.

The waitress walked the length of the aisle, right into our little group, a fifth member, and she shuffled one written page on top of the other, and she checked the three guys’ collars, and she focused on the sergeant. The man in charge.

She said, “I have a two-part message for you, sir.”

The guy nodded at her and she started reading.

She said, “First, whoever you are, you should let this man go immediately, for both your own sake and the army’s, because second, whoever you are and whatever your orders and whatever you think on this occasion, he’s likely to be right and you’re likely to be wrong. This message comes from an NCO of equal rank, with nothing but the army’s and your best interests at heart.”

Silence.

The sergeant said, “Noted.”

Nothing more.

Neagley, I thought. Good try.

Then the waitress leaned forward and put her second handwritten page face down on the table and slid it toward me, fast and easy, the same way she had slid a million diner checks before. I trapped it under my left palm and kept my right hand ready.

No one moved.

The waitress stood still for a second, and then she walked back to the kitchen.

I used the ball of my left thumb and curled the top of the paper upward, like a guy playing poker, and I read the first two lines of my message. Seven words. The first of them was a Latin preposition. Typical Neagley. Per. Meaning in this context According to. The next six words were United States Marine Corps Personnel Command. Which meant that whatever information was contained in the rest of the note had come straight from the horse’s mouth. It would be reliable. It would be definitive. It would be solid gold.

It would be good enough for me.

I let the top of the paper slap back down against the tabletop. I spread my thumb and my first two fingers and pincered them together and folded the note one-handed, blank side out, message side in. I crisped the fold with my right thumbnail and jammed the note in my right top pocket, behind Munro’s little black book, below my name tape.

Ten minutes to nine in the evening.

I looked at the Ranger sergeant and said, “OK, you win. Let’s go to Kelham.”

Chapter

84

We went out through the kitchen, single file, and we used the diner’s rear door, because that was the fastest route back to their Humvee. The sergeant led the way. I was sandwiched between the two specialists. One of them kept his hand flat on my back, pushing, and the other had hold of the front of my jacket, pulling. The night air felt sharp, neither warm nor cold. The acre of bare ground was jammed with parked cars. There were people fifty yards to my right, all of them men, all of them in uniform, all of them quiet and on best behavior, all of them clustered in a rough semicircle around the front of Brannan’s bar, like a living halo behind the head of a saint, or an overspill crowd watching a prize fight. Most had bottles of beer in their hands, probably purchased elsewhere and carried back within sight of the main attraction. I guessed the senator was loving the attention, and I guessed his son was pretending not to.

The Humvee looked wide and massive in among the regular rides. Which it was. Parked next to it at a respectful interval was a plain sedan painted flat green. Reed Riley’s borrowed staff car, I assumed, second into the lot and put next to the truck for the sake of the tough-guy image. Instinctive, for a politician.

The sergeant slowed a step and the rest of us bunched up behind him, and then we struck off again on a new vector, straight toward the truck, not fast, not slow. No one paid us any attention. We were just four dark figures, and everyone else was facing in the other direction.

The Humvee was not locked. The sergeant opened the left rear door and the specialists crowded behind me and left me no option but to get in. The interior smelled of canvas and sweat. The sergeant waited until the specialists were on board, one of them in the front passenger seat, the other across the wide transmission tunnel next to me in the back, both of them turned watchfully toward me, and then he climbed into the driver’s seat and hit the button and started the engine. It idled for a second with a hammer-heavy diesel rattle, and he squirmed in his seat, and he got ready to move off. He turned the headlights on. He put the transmission in gear. He rolled forward, the ride lumpy, the steering vague, the speed low. He headed north across the rough ground, toward the Kelham road, past the ranks of parked cars, past the back of the Sheriff’s Department building. He checked his mirror out of sheer habit, and he glanced left, and he prepared to turn right thirty yards ahead.

I asked, “What are you guys trained for?”

He said, “Man-portable shoulder-launch surface-to-air defense.”

“Not police work?”

“No.”

“I could tell,” I said. “You didn’t search me. You should have.”

I came out with my Beretta in my right hand. I reached forward and bunched his collar in my left hand tight enough to choke him. I hauled him back hard against his seat. I jammed the muzzle of the gun hard into the back of his right shoulder, directly above his armpit. Humvees are built pretty solid, including the seat frames. I had the guy pulled and pushed rigid against an immovable object. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t even going to breathe, unless I let him.

I said, “Let’s all sit still and stay calm.”

They all did both things, because of where I had the gun. His ear or his neck would not have worked. They would not have believed I was prepared to shoot the guy dead. Not one soldier against another, however desperate I was supposed to be. But a non-fatal wound through the soft flesh just to the right of his shoulder blade was plausible. And terrible. It would have ended his career. It would have ended his life as he knew it, with nothing ahead of him but crippling pain and disability checks and left-handed household utensils.

I let out half an inch of his collar but kept him tight against the seat back.

I said, “Turn left.”

He turned left, onto the east–west road.

I said, “Drive on.”

He drove on, into the die-straight tunnel through the trees, away from Kelham, toward Memphis.

I said, “Faster.”

He sped up, and pretty soon the big truck was rattling and straining close to sixty miles an hour. And at that point we entered the realm of simple arithmetic. It was nine o’clock in the evening, and that road was about forty miles long, and the chances of meeting traffic on it were low. I figured a thirty-minute, thirty-mile drive would meet all our needs.

“Keep on going,” I said.

The guy kept on going.

Thirty minutes later we were at some featureless point thirty miles west of Carter Crossing and maybe ten miles short of the minor road that led up toward Memphis. I said, “OK, this is far enough. Let’s stop here.”

I kept on hauling his collar one way and I kept on pushing the other way with the gun and the guy stepped off the gas and coasted and braked to a stop. He put the transmission in Park and took his hands off the wheel and sat there like he knew what was coming next, which maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. I turned my head and looked at the guy next to me and said, “Take your boots off.”

And at that point they all knew what was coming next, and there was a pause, like a mutiny brewing, but I waited it out until the guy next to me shrugged and bent to his task.

I said, “Now your socks.”

The guy peeled them off and balled them up and stowed them in his boots, like a good soldier should.

I said, “Now your jacket.”

He took his jacket off.

I said, “Now your pants.”

There was another long, long pause, but then the guy hitched his butt up off the seat and slid his pants down over his hips. I looked at the guy in the front passenger seat and said, “Same four things for you.”

He got right to it, and then I made him help his sergeant out. I wasn’t about to let the guy fold forward and away from me. Not at that point. When they were done I turned back to the guy next to me and I said, “Now get out of the truck and walk forward twenty paces.”

His sergeant said, “You better hope we never meet again, Reacher.”

“No, I hope we do,” I said. “Because after suitable reflection I’m sure you’ll want to thank me for not hurting you in any way at all. Which I could have, you hopeless amateur.”

No reply.

“Get out of the truck,” I said again.

And a minute later all three of them were standing on the road in my headlight beams, barefoot, pantless, in nothing but T-shirts and boxers. They were thirty miles from where they wanted to be, which under the best of conditions was a seven- or eight-hour walk, and going barefoot on a rural road was no one’s definition of the best of conditions. And even if by some miracle there was passing traffic, they stood no chance of hitching a ride. No chance at all. No one in his right mind would stop in the dark for three wildly gesticulating bare-legged men.

I climbed through to the driver’s seat and reversed a hundred yards and then turned around and headed back the way we had come, with nothing but engine noise and the sour smell of boots and socks for company. The clock in my head showed nine thirty-five, and I figured if the reduced payload let the Humvee hit sixty-five miles an hour I would be in Carter Crossing again at three minutes past ten.

Chapter

85

In the event the big GM diesel gave me a little better than sixty-five miles an hour, and two minutes short of ten o’clock I pulled up and hid the truck in the last of the trees and walked the rest of the way. A man on foot can be a lot stealthier than a four-ton military vehicle, and safety is always the best policy.

But there was nothing to hide from. Main Street was quiet. There was nothing to see except light in the diner’s window and my borrowed Buick and Deveraux’s Caprice parked nose to tail in front of it. I guessed Deveraux was keeping half an eye on the situation but not worrying too much about it. The senator’s presence all but guaranteed a quiet and untypical night.

I stayed on the Kelham road and skipped Main Street itself and looped around behind it on a wide and cautious radius. I kept myself concealed behind the last row of parked cars and walked down level with Brannan’s bar. The crowd at the door was still there. I could see maybe fifty guys clustered in the same semicircle I had seen before. Past them I could see a big crowd inside the bar itself, some guys standing and some, I assumed, sitting at the tables further into the room, although I had no direct view of the latter group. I moved closer, squeezing between parked cars and pick-up trucks, with the hubbub ahead of me getting a little louder with each step. But not much louder. The noise was a lot lower in level and a lot more polite and restrained than it would have been on any other night. Best behavior.

I crossed an open lane between the first row of cars and the second and eased onward between a twenty-year-old Cadillac and a beat-up GMC Jimmy and a soft voice right next to me said, “Hello, Reacher.”

I turned and saw Munro leaning against the far side of the Jimmy, neatly in the shadow, nearly invisible, relaxed and patient and vigilant.

“Hello, Munro,” I said. “It’s good to see you. Although I have to say I didn’t expect to.”

He said, “Likewise.”

“Did Stan Lowrey call you?”

He nodded. “But a little too late.”

“Three guys?”

He nodded again. “Mortarmen from the 75th.”

“Where are they now?”

“Tied up with telephone wire, gagged with their own T-shirts, locked in my room.”

“Good work,” I said. Which it was. One against three, no warning, taken by surprise, but a satisfactory result nonetheless. I was impressed. Munro was nobody’s fool. That was clear.

He asked, “Who did you get?”

“An anti-aircraft crew.”

“Where are they?”

“Walking back from halfway to Memphis with no shoes and no pants.”

He smiled, white teeth in the dark.

He said, “I hope I never get posted to Benning.”

I asked, “Is Riley in the bar?”

“First to arrive, with his dad. They’re holding court big time. Tab must be three hundred bucks by now.”

“Curfew still in place?”

He nodded. “But it’s going to be a last-minute rush. You know how it is. The mood turned out to be pretty good, and no one will want to be the first to leave.”

“OK,” I said. “Your job is to make sure Riley is the last to leave. I need him to be the very last car out of here. And not by a second or two, either. By a minute at least. Do whatever it takes to make that happen, will you? I’m depending on it.”

With anyone else I might then have gone ahead and sketched out a few alternative ways to accomplish that goal, like suggestions, anything from puncturing a tire to asking for the old guy’s autograph, but by then I was beginning to realize Munro didn’t need help. He would think of all the same things I could, and maybe a few more besides.

He said, “Understood.”

“And then your job is to go sit on Elizabeth Deveraux. I need her to be under your eye throughout. In the diner, or wherever. Again, whatever it takes.”

“Understood,” he said again. “She’s in the diner right now, as it happens.”

“Keep her there,” I said. “Don’t let her go out on traffic patrol tonight. Tell her with the senator behind them the guys will behave.”

“She knows that. She gave her deputies the night off.”

“Good to know,” I said. “And good luck. And thanks.”

I squeezed back between the Cadillac and the Jimmy and crossed the open lane and threaded through the rearmost rank of cars and walked out of the lot the same way I had come in. Five minutes later I was just past the railroad crossing, hidden in the trees on the side of the road that led to Kelham, waiting again.

Munro’s assessment of the collective mood turned out to be correct. No one left as early as ten-thirty, because of the weird dynamic surrounding the senator. I had seen similar things before. I was pretty sure no one from Bravo Company would have pissed on the guy if he was on fire, but everyone seemed fascinated by his alien presence, and no doubt everyone still had the base commander’s instructions ringing in his ears. Be nice to the VIP. Show him some respect. So no one peeled away early. No one wanted to go first. No one wanted to stand out. So ten-thirty came and went with no movement on the road. None at all.

As did ten thirty-five.

Ten-forty, likewise.

Then at ten forty-five the dam broke and they came in droves.

I heard noise like a muted version of an armored division firing up and I saw exhaust smoke and crisscross headlight beams far in the distance as they all started jockeying for position and funneling out of the lot. Lights swung toward me in an endless chain and thirty seconds later the lead car thumped over the crossing and sped on by. It was followed by all the others in sequence, too many to count, each just yards from the one in front, like stock cars on a racetrack straightaway. Engines roared and wheezed and worn tires pattered over the rails and I smelled the sweet sharp tang of unleaded gasoline. I saw the old Cadillac and the GMC sport utility I had squeezed between, and I saw Chevys and Dodges and Fords and Plymouths and Jeeps and Chryslers, sedans and pick-up trucks and four-wheel-drives and coupes and two-seaters. They kept on coming, an unbroken stream, heading home, relieved, exuberant, their duty done.

Ten minutes later the stream was thinning and the gaps between cars were lengthening and in the distance I could see late stragglers moving out. The last dozen vehicles took a whole minute to pass me by. None of them was a flat green staff car. The final tail-end charlie was an old Pontiac sedan, scarred and sagging. I watched it approach. As soon as he passes us, I guarantee we’re alone in the world, Deveraux had said. Then the old Pontiac thumped quietly over the track on soft tires, and then it was gone.

I stepped out of the trees and faced east and saw tiny red tail lights disappearing into the darkness. The noise faded behind them and the exhaust smoke drifted and cleared. I turned the other way and far in the distance and right on cue I saw a lone pair of headlights click on. I saw their beams bounce and swing, side to side, up and down, and I saw them lead the way north, out through the lot, and then I saw them swing toward me and bounce twice more as the wheels behind them climbed up off the dirt and onto the blacktop.

The clock in my head showed one minute to eleven.

I walked west, back over the railroad crossing, ten yards toward the town, and then I stopped and stepped out to the crown of the road and raised my hand high, palm out, like a traffic cop.

Chapter

86

The headlight beams picked me up maybe a hundred yards out. I felt the hot light on my face and on my palm and I knew Reed Riley could see me. I heard him lift off the gas and slow down. Pure habit. Infantrymen spend a lot of time riding in vehicles, and many of their journeys are enabled or directed or otherwise interrupted by guys in BDUs waving them through or pointing them left or pointing them right or bringing them to a temporary standstill.

I stayed right where I was, my hand still raised, and the flat green staff car came to a stop with its front bumper a yard from my knees. By then my eye line was high above the headlights, and I could see Riley and his father side by side behind the windshield glass. Neither one looked surprised or impatient. Both looked prepared to waste a minute on a matter of routine. Riley looked exactly like his photograph, and his father was an older version, a little thinner, a little larger in the ears and the nose, a little more powdered and presentable. He was dressed like a jerk, like every other visiting politician I had ever seen. He was wearing a khaki canvas Ike jacket over a formal shirt with no tie. The jacket had a United States Senate roundel on it, as if that safe and insulated branch of the legislature was a combat unit.

I stepped around to Reed Riley’s door, and he wound his window down. His face started out one way, and then it changed when he saw the oak leaves on my collar. He said, “Sir?”

I didn’t answer. I took one more step and opened the rear door and got in the back seat behind him. I closed the door after me and shuffled over to the center of the bench and both men craned around to look at me.

“Sir?” Riley said again.

“What’s going on here?” his father asked.

“Change of plan,” I said.

I could smell beer on their breath and smoke and sweat in their clothing.

“I have a plane to catch,” the senator said.

“At midnight,” I said. “No one will look for you before then.”

“What the hell does that mean? Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“What do you want?”

“Instant obedience,” I said. I took out the Beretta for the second time that evening, fast, swift, like a magician. One minute my hand was empty, and the next it was full of dull steel. I clicked the safety to fire, a small sound, but ominous in the silence.

The senator said, “You’re making a very serious mistake, young man. As of right now your military career is over. Whether it gets any worse than that is entirely up to you.”

“Be quiet,” I said. I leaned forward and bunched Reed Riley’s collar in my hand, the same way I had with the sergeant from Benning. But this time I put the muzzle of the gun in the hollow behind his right ear. Soft flesh, no bone. Just the right size.

“Drive on,” I said. “Very slowly. Turn left on the crossing. Head up the railroad line.”

Riley said, “What?”

“You heard me.”

“But the train is coming.”

“At midnight,” I said. “Now hop to it, soldier.”

It was a difficult task. Instinctively he wanted to lean forward over the wheel for a better view out the front. But I wouldn’t let him. I had him hauled back hard against the seat, pulled and pushed. But even so, he did OK. He rolled forward and spun the wheel hard and crabbed diagonally up onto the rise. He lined it up and felt his right front tire hit the groove in the pavement. He eased forward, dead straight, and the edge of the blacktop fell away under us. His right-hand tires stayed up on the rail. His left-hand wheels were down on the ties. A fine job. As good as Deveraux.

“You’ve done this before,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

We rolled on, less than walking pace, radically tilted, the right side of the car up and running smooth, the left side down and rising and falling over the ties like a boat on a swell. We rolled past the old water tower, then ten more yards, and then I said, “Stop.”

“Here?”

“It’s a good spot,” I said.

He braked gently and the car stopped, right on the line, still tilted over. I kept hold of his collar and kept the gun in place. Ahead of me through the windshield the rails ran straight north to a vanishing point far in the distance, like slim silver streaks in the moonlight.

I said, “Captain, use your left hand and open all the windows.”

“Why?”

“Because you guys already stink. And it’s only going to get worse, believe me.”

Riley scrabbled blindly with his fingers and first his father’s window came down, then mine, then the one opposite me.

Fresh night air came in on the breeze.

I said, “Senator, lean over and turn the lights off.”

It took him a second to find the switch, but he did it.

I said, “Now turn the engine off and give me the key.”

He said, “But we’re parked on the railroad track.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“You asked me that before. And I answered. Now do what you’re told. Or do I have to make a campaign contribution first? In which case please consider my contribution to be not shooting your son through the knee.”

The old guy made a small sound in his throat, the kind of thing I had heard once or twice before, when jokes turned out not to be jokes, when dire situations turned from bad to worse, when nightmares were revealed to be waking realities. He leaned sideways and twisted the key and pulled it and held it out to me.

“Toss it on the back seat,” I said.

He did so, and it landed next to me and skittered down the slope in the cushion made by the tilt of the car.

I said, “Now both of you put your hands on your head.”

The senator went first, and I pulled the Beretta back to let his son follow suit. I let go of his collar and sat back in my seat and said, “What’s the muzzle velocity on a Beretta M9?”

The senator said, “I have no idea.”

“But your boy should. We spent a lot of time and money training him.”

“I don’t remember,” Riley said.

“Close to thirteen hundred feet per second,” I said. “And your spinal cords are about three feet from me. Therefore about two-thousandths of a second after either one of you moves a single muscle, you’re either dead or crippled. Get it?”

No response.

I said, “I need an answer.”

“We get it,” Riley said.

His father said, “What do you want?”

“Confirmation,” I said. “I want to be sure I have this thing straight.”

Chapter

87

I picked up the car key and put it in my pocket. I spread my left leg wide and braced my foot and got comfortable on the tilted bench. I said, “Captain, you lied to your men about dating Sheriff Deveraux, am I right?”

Riley’s father said, “What possible basis do you have for interrogating us?”

“Forty-nine minutes,” I said. “Then the train gets here.”

“Are you mad?”

“A little grumpy, that’s all.”

He said, “Son, don’t say a word to this man.”

I said, “Captain, answer my question.”

Riley said, “Yes, I lied about Deveraux.”

“Why?”

“Command strategy,” he said. “My men like to look up to me.”

I said, “Senator, why were Alpha Company and Bravo Company moved from Benning to Kelham?”

The old guy huffed and puffed for a minute, trying to convince himself to hold fast, but in the end he said, “It was politically convenient. Mississippi always has its hand out. Or in someone else’s pocket.”

“Not because of Audrey Shaw? Not because you thought your boy deserved a little gift to celebrate his new command?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“But it happened.”

“Purely a coincidence.”

“Bullshit.”

“OK, it was a side benefit. I thought it might be fun. But nothing more. Decisions of that magnitude are not based on trivialities.”

I said, “Captain, tell me about Rosemary McClatchy.”

Riley said, “We dated, we broke up.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“If she was, she never said anything to me about it.”

“Did she want to get married?”

“Come on, major, you know any one of them would marry any one of us.”

“What was she like?”

“Insecure,” he said. “She drove me nuts.”

“How did you feel when she was killed?”

“Bad,” he said. “It was a bad thing to happen.”

“Now tell me about Shawna Lindsay.”

But at that point the senator decided they had taken all the shit they were going to take from me. He twisted around to dress me down, and then he remembered he was not supposed to move, and so he bounced back again like a stupid old mare against a new electric fence. He stared forward and breathed hard. His son didn’t move. So they were taking a little shit from me, at least. Mainly the part nine millimeters wide. Thirty-five hundredths of an inch, in real money. A little smaller than a .38, a lot bigger than a .25. That’s how much shit they were taking.

The old man took another breath.

He said, “That matter has been resolved, I believe. The Lindsay girl. And the other one.”

I said, “Captain, tell me about the dead women in Kosovo.”

His father said, “There are no dead women in Kosovo.”

I said, “Seriously? What, they live forever?”

“Obviously they don’t live forever.”

“Do they all die in their sleep?”

“They were Kosovan women and it happened in Kosovo. It’s a local matter. Just like this is a local matter, right here, right now. A local person has been identified. The army is not under a cloud. That’s what we were celebrating tonight. You should have been there. Success is something to be happy about. I wish more people understood that.”

I said, “Captain, how old are you?”

Riley said, “I’m twenty-eight.”

I said, “Senator, how would you feel if your son was still a captain at thirty-three?”

The old guy said, “I would be very unhappy.”

“Why?”

“It would represent failure. No one stays five years at the same rank. You’d have to be an idiot.”

I said, “That was their first mistake.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What do you mean, their? Who are they?”

“Do you have a grandfather?”

“Way back.”

“So did I. He was my granddad. But of course he was also lots of other kids’ granddad too. There were about ten of us, I think. Four separate families. It always came as a surprise to me, even though I knew.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s the same thing with Senate Liaison. There’s us, and there’s the brass in Washington, and there’s you. Like a grandfather. Except you’re the Marine Corps’ grandfather too. And they have their own Senate Liaison. They’re probably a lot better than ours. They’re probably willing to do whatever it takes. So you turned to them for help. But they made a number of mistakes.”

“I read the report. There were no mistakes.”

“Five years in the same rank? Deveraux is not the kind of person who spends five years in the same rank. Like you said, you’d have to be an idiot. And Deveraux is not an idiot. My guess is she was a CWO3 five years ago. My guess is she got two promotions since then. But your Marine Corps boys went ahead and wrote CWO5 on a file that was supposed to be five years old. They used an old picture but they didn’t back off her terminal rank. Which was a mistake. They were in too much of a rush.”

“What rush?”

“Janice Chapman was white. Finally you had one people were going to take seriously. And she was linked to you. There was no time to waste.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This whole thing was about too much rush. You worked like crazy, and teased us about access to give yourself more time. But finally you got it done just after lunch on Sunday. The file was complete. The word came through while the chopper was in the air. So it went back empty. But then you waited until Tuesday before you released it for public scrutiny. I had a rather egotistical explanation for that. I thought it was because I was here on Sunday but not on Tuesday. But that wasn’t the reason. You needed two days to make it look old. That was the reason. You had to scrape it up and scuff it around.”

“Are you saying that file was a forgery?”

“I know, you’re shocked. Maybe you’ve known for nine months, or six, or maybe just a week or so, but we all know now.”

“Know what?” Reed Riley said.

I turned toward him. He was staring forward too, but he knew I was talking to him. I said, “Maybe Rosemary McClatchy was insecure because her beauty was all she had, so maybe she got jealous, and maybe that’s where you got the idea for the vengeful woman. And she was pregnant anyway, and you’d already checked out the local sheriff, because that’s what an ambitious company commander does, and it was easier for you than most, because of your connections, so you knew about her father and the empty house, and you’re a sick bastard, so you took poor pregnant Rosemary McClatchy there and you butchered her.”

No response.

“And you liked it,” I said.

No response.

“So you did it again. And you got better at it. No more dumping them in the ditch by the railroad track. You were ready for something more adventurous. Maybe something more appropriate. Maybe Shawna Lindsay also had delusions of marriage, and maybe she was talking about living in a little house together, so you dumped her on a construction site. You could drive through that neighborhood anytime you liked. You always had. The big dog, out on the prowl, in his old blue car. Part of the scenery.”

He said, “I broke up with Shawna weeks before she died. How do you explain that?”

“You ask them back, they come running, right?”

No answer.

I said, “And you put Janice Chapman behind a bar for the same reason. She was a party girl. And maybe you set yourself a little extra challenge that night. Third time lucky. Variety is the spice of life. Maybe you told the guys you were hitting the head, and you snuck out and did it in the same time you need to take a leak. Six minutes and forty seconds would be my guess. Which is not plausible. Not for Deveraux. That’s where the alternative theory starts to falter. Did nobody think about how she’s built? She couldn’t lift a full-grown woman off a deer trestle. She couldn’t carry a corpse to a car.”

Senator Riley said, “The file is genuine.”

I said, “It started out with its feet on the ground. Someone thought up a neat little story. The jealous woman, the broken arm. The missing four hundred dollars. It was quite subtle. Conclusions would be drawn by the reader. But then someone chickened out. They didn’t want subtle anymore. They wanted a flashing red light. So you retyped the whole thing to include a car. Then you got on the phone and told your son to go put his own car on the train track.”

“That’s crazy.”

“There was no other reason behind the stuff with the car. The car was senseless. It served no other purpose. Other than to nail the lid shut on Deveraux as soon as anyone opened that file.”

“That file is genuine.”

“They went too far with the dead people. James Dyer, maybe. We could buy that. He was a senior officer. Health maybe not the best. But Paul Evers? Too convenient. As if you were scared of people asking questions. Dead people can’t answer. Which brings us to Alice Bouton. Is she going to be dead too? Or is she going to be still alive? In which case, what would she tell us if we asked her about her broken arm?”

“The file is completely genuine, Reacher.”

“Can you read, senator? If so, read this for me.” I slid the folded diner check from my pocket and tossed it in his lap.

He said, “I’m not allowed to move.”

I said, “You can pick it up.”

He picked it up. It shook in his hand. He looked at the back. He looked at the front. He turned it right way up. He took a breath. He asked, “Have you read it? Do you know what it says?”

I said, “No, I haven’t looked at it. I don’t need to know. Either way I’ve got enough to nail you.”

He hesitated.

I said, “But don’t fake anything. I’ll read it right after you, just to check.”

He took a breath.

He read out, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command.”

He stopped.

He said, “I need to know this is not classified material.”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re not cleared for classified material. Neither is my son.”

“It’s not classified material,” I said. “Keep reading.”

He said, “Per United States Marine Corps Personnel Command there was no Marine named Alice Bouton.”

I smiled.

“They invented her,” I said. “She didn’t exist. Very sloppy work. It makes me wonder if I was wrong. Maybe you watered down the subtlety in two separate stages. And maybe the car came first. Maybe it was Alice Bouton you wrote in at the last minute. Without enough time to steal a real identity.”

The old guy said, “The army had to be protected. You must understand that.”

“The army’s loss is the Marine Corps’ gain. And you’re their granddaddy too. So professionally you didn’t give a damn. It was your son you were protecting.”

“It could have been anyone in his unit. We’d do this for anyone at all.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “This was a fantastic amount of corruption. This was exceptional. This was unprecedented. This was about the two of you, and no one else.”

No answer.

I said, “By the way, it’s me who’s protecting the army.”

I didn’t want to shoot them, obviously. Not that there would be much left for the pathologist to examine, but a cautious man takes no unnecessary risks. So I dropped the gun on the seat beside me and came forward with my right hand open, and I got it flat on the back of the senator’s head, and I heaved it forward and bounced it off the dashboard rail. Pretty hard. The human arm can pitch a baseball at a hundred miles an hour, so it might get close to thirty with a human head. And the seat belt people tell us that an untethered impact at thirty miles an hour can kill you. Not that I needed the senator dead. I just needed him out of action for a minute and a half.

I moved my right hand over and got it under Reed Riley’s chin. His hands came down off his head to tear at my wrist and I replaced them with my own left hand, open, jamming down hard on the top of his head. Push and pull, up and down, left hand and right hand, like a vise. I was crushing his head. Then I slid my right hand up over his chiseled chin until the heel of my hand lodged there and I clamped my palm over his mouth. His skin was like fine sandpaper. He had shaved early that morning, and now it was close to midnight. I slid my left hand over his brow until its heel caught on the ridge below his hairline. I stretched down and clamped his nose between my finger and thumb.

And then it was all about human nature.

He thought he was suffocating. First he tried to bite my palm, but he couldn’t get his mouth open. I was clamping too hard. Jaw muscles are strong, but only when they’re closing. Opening was never an evolutionary priority. I waited him out. He clawed at my hands. I waited him out. He scrabbled in his seat and drummed his heels. I waited him out. He arched his back. I waited him out. He stretched his head up toward me.

I changed my grip and twisted hard and broke his neck.

It was a move I had learned from Leon Garber. Maybe he had seen it somewhere. Maybe he had done it somewhere. He was capable of it. The suffocation part makes it easy. They always stretch their heads up. Some kind of a bad instinct. They put their necks on the line all by themselves. Garber said it never fails, and it never has for me.

And it succeeded again a minute later, with the senator. He was weaker, but his face was slick with blood from where I had broken his nose on the dashboard rail, so the effort expended was very much the same.

Chapter

88

I got out of the car at eleven twenty-eight exactly. The train was thirty-two miles south of us. Maybe just crossing under Route 78 east of Tupelo. I closed my door but left all the windows open. I tossed the key into Reed Riley’s lap. I turned away.

And sensed a figure wide on my left.

And another, wide on my right.

Good moves by someone. I had the Beretta, and I could hit one or the other of them, but not both of them. Too much lateral travel between rounds.

I waited.

Then the figure on my right spoke.

She said, “Reacher?”

I said, “Deveraux?”

The figure on my left said, “And Munro.”

I said, “What the hell are you two doing here?”

They converged on me, and I tried to push them away from the car. I said, “Why are you here?”

Deveraux said, “Did you really think I was going to let him keep me in the diner?”

“I wish he had,” I said. “I didn’t want either of you to hear anything about this.”

“You made Riley open the windows. You wanted us to hear.”

“No, I wanted fresh air. I didn’t know you were there.”

“Why shouldn’t we hear?”

“I didn’t want you to know what they were saying about you. And I wanted Munro to go back to Germany with a clear conscience.”

Munro said, “My conscience is always clear.”

“But it’s easier to play dumb if you really don’t know the answer.”

“I never had a problem playing dumb. Some folks think I am.”

Deveraux said, “I’m glad I heard what they were saying about me.”

Eleven thirty-one. The train was twenty-nine miles south of us. We walked away, on the ties, between the rails, leaving the flat green staff car and its passengers behind us. We walked past the old water tower and made it to the crossing. We turned west. Forty yards away Deveraux’s cruiser was parked on the shoulder. Munro wouldn’t get in. He said he would walk on down to Brannan’s bar, where he had left a car he had borrowed. He said he needed to get back to Kelham as soon as possible, to square things away with the captured mortarmen, and then to hit the sack ahead of his early start the next morning. We shook hands quite formally, and I thanked him most sincerely for his help, and then he moved away and within ten paces he was lost to sight in the dark.

Deveraux drove me back to Main Street and parked outside the hotel. Eleven thirty-six in the evening. The train was twenty-four miles away.

I said, “I checked out of my room.”

She said, “I still have mine.”

“I need to make a phone call first.”

We used the office behind the reception counter. I put a dollar bill on the desk and dialed Garber’s office. Maybe the tap was still in place, and maybe it wasn’t. It made no difference to me. I got a lieutenant on the line. He said he was the senior person on duty. He said in fact he was the only person on duty. Night crew. I asked him if he had paper and pencil handy. He said yes to both. I told him to stand by to take dictation. I told him to mark the finished product urgent and to leave it front and center on Garber’s desk, for immediate attention first thing in the morning.

“Ready?” I asked him.

He said he was.

I said, “A tragedy occurred late last night in sleepy Carter Crossing, Mississippi, when a car carrying United States Senator Carlton Riley was struck by a passing train. The car was being driven by the senator’s son, U.S. Army Captain Reed Riley, who was based at nearby Fort Kelham, Mississippi. Senator Riley, of Missouri, was chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, and Captain Riley, described by the army as a rising star, was in command of an infantry unit regularly deployed on missions of great sensitivity. Both men died instantly in the accident. Carter County Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux confirmed that local drivers regularly attempt to beat the train across the road junction, in order to avoid a long and inconvenient delay, and it is believed that Captain Riley, recently posted to the area and adventurous in spirit, simply mistimed his approach to the crossing.”

I paused.

“Got that,” the lieutenant said, in my ear.

“Second paragraph,” I said. “The senator and his son were returning to Fort Kelham after helping the nearby town celebrate Sheriff Deveraux’s successful resolution of a local homicide investigation. The killing spree had lasted nine months and the five victims included three local women in their twenties, a local teenage boy, and a journalist from nearby Oxford, Mississippi. The male perpetrator, responsible for all five deaths, is described as a militia member and a white supremacist from neighboring Tennessee, and was shot to death earlier in the week, in a wooded area close to Fort Kelham, by local police, while resisting arrest.”

“Got that,” the lieutenant said again.

“Start typing,” I said, and hung up.

Eleven forty-two in the evening. The train was eighteen miles away.

Room seventeen was as plain as room twenty-one had been. Deveraux had made no attempt to personalize it. She had two battered suitcases propped open for clothes storage, and a spare uniform was hanging off the curtain rail, and there was a book on the night table. And that was it.

We sat side by side on her bed, a little shell shocked, and she said, “You did everything you could. Justice is done all around, and the army doesn’t suffer. You’re a good soldier.”

I said, “I’m sure they’ll find something to complain about.”

“But I’m disappointed with the Marine Corps. They shouldn’t have cooperated. They stabbed me in the back.”

“Not really,” I said. “They tried their best. They were under tremendous pressure. They pretended to play ball, but they put in a bunch of coded messages. Two dead people and an invented one? That thing with your rank? Those mistakes had to be deliberate. They made it so the file wouldn’t stand up. Not for long. Same with Garber. He was ranting and raving about you, but really he was acting a part. He was acting out what the reaction was supposed to be. He was challenging me to think.”

“Did you believe the file, when you first saw it?”

“Honest answer?”

“That’s what I expect from you.”

“I didn’t instantly reject it. It took me a few hours.”

“That’s slow for you.”

“Very,” I said.

“You asked me all kinds of weird questions.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Silence.

The train was fifteen miles away.

She said, “Don’t be sorry. I might have believed it myself.”

Which was kind of her. She leaned over and kissed me. I went and washed the last dry traces of Carlton Riley’s blood off my hands, and then we made love for the sixth time, and it worked out perfectly. The room began to shake right on cue, and the glass on her bathroom shelf began to tinkle, and her floor quivered, and her room door creaked, and our abandoned shoes hopped and moved, and her bed shook and bounced and walked tiny fractions. And at the very end of it I was sure I heard a sound like a cymbal crash, vanishingly brief and faint and distant, like an instant metallic explosion, like molecules reduced to atoms, and then the midnight train was gone.

Afterward we showered together, and then I dressed and got ready to head home, to face the music. Deveraux smiled bravely and asked me to drop by anytime I was in the area, and I smiled bravely and said I would. I left the hotel and walked up to the silent diner and climbed into the borrowed Buick and drove east, past Fort Kelham’s impressive gate, and then onward into Alabama, and then north, no traffic, nighttime hours all the way, and I was back on post before dawn.

I hid out and slept four hours and emerged to find that my hasty dictation to Garber’s night crew had been adopted by the army more or less word for word as the official version of events. Tones everywhere were hushed and reverent. There was talk of a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal for Reed Riley, to recognize his time in an unspecified foreign country, and his father was to have a memorial service in a grand D.C. church the following week, to recognize who knew what.

I got neither medal nor memorial. I got thirty minutes with Leon Garber. He told me right away the news was not good. The fat staff officer from Kelham’s PR squad had done the damage. His call to Benning had bounced around, mostly upward, at a very bad time, and it had been followed by a written report, and as a result of both I was on the involuntary separation list. Garber said under the circumstances it would be the work of a moment to get me taken off again. No doubt about that. I could extract a price for my silence. He would broker the deal, gladly.

Then he went quiet.

I said, “What?”

He said, “But your life wouldn’t be worth living. You’d never get promoted again. You’d be terminal at major if you lived to be a hundred. You’d be deployed to a storage depot in New Jersey. You can get off the separation list, but you’ll never get off the shit list. That’s how the army works. You know that.”

“I covered the army’s ass.”

“And the army will be reminded of that every time it sees you.”

“I have a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.”

“But what have you done for me lately?”

Garber’s clerk gave me a sheet of paper explaining the procedure. I could do it in person at the Pentagon, or I could do it by mail. So I got back in the Buick and headed for D.C. I had to return the car to Neagley anyway. I got there a half hour before the banks closed, and I picked one at random and moved my account. They offered me my choice of a toaster oven or a CD player. I took neither one, but I asked for their phone number and I registered a password.

Then I headed over to the Pentagon. I chose the main concourse entrance, and I got halfway to the door, and then I stopped. The crowd carried on around me, oblivious. I didn’t want to go in. I borrowed a pen from an impatient passerby and I signed my form and I dropped it in a mailbox. Then I walked through the graveyard and out the main gate to the tangle of roads between it and the river.

I was thirty-six years old, a citizen of a country I had barely seen, and there were places to go, and there were things to do. There were cities, and there was countryside. There were mountains, and there were valleys. There were rivers. There were museums, and music, and motels, and clubs, and diners, and bars, and buses. There were battlefields and birthplaces, and legends, and roads. There was company if I wanted it, and there was solitude if I didn’t.

I picked a road at random, and I put one foot on the curb and one in the traffic lane, and I stuck out my thumb.

Dedicated to the memory of

David Thompson

1971–2010

A fine bookseller and a good friend

The Affair took you back to the beginning,

when Jack Reacher left the army.

Now go back even further.

Please read on for

SECOND SON

a Reacher short story

by #1 New York Times bestselling author

Lee Child

1

On a hot August Thursday in 1974, an old man in Paris did something he had never done before: he woke up in the morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t. His name was Laurent Moutier, and he had felt pretty bad for ten days and really lousy for seven. His arms and legs felt thin and weak and his chest felt like it was full of setting concrete. He knew what was happening. He had been a furniture repairman by trade, and he had become what customers sometimes brought him: a wormy old heirloom weakened and rotted beyond hope. There was no single thing wrong with him. Everything was failing all at once. Nothing to be done. Inevitable. So he lay patient and wheezing and waited for his housekeeper.

She came in at ten o’clock and showed no great shock or surprise. Most of her clients were old, and they came and went with regularity. She called the doctor, and at one point, clearly in answer to a question about his age, Moutier heard her say “Ninety,” in a resigned yet satisfied way, a way that spoke volumes, as if it was a whole paragraph in one word. It reminded him of standing in his workshop, breathing dust and glue and varnish, looking at some abject crumbly cabinet and saying, “Well now, let’s see,” when really his mind had already moved on to getting rid of it.

A house call was arranged for later in the day, but then as if to confirm the unspoken diagnosis the housekeeper asked Moutier for his address book, so she could call his immediate family. Moutier had an address book but no immediate family beyond his only daughter Josephine, but even so she filled most of the book by herself, because she moved a lot. Page after page was full of crossed-out box numbers and long strange foreign phone numbers. The housekeeper dialed the last of them and heard the whine and echo of great distances, and then she heard a voice speaking English, a language she couldn’t understand, so she hung up again. Moutier saw her dither for a moment, but then as if to confirm the diagnosis once again, she left in search of the retired schoolteacher two floors below, a soft old man who Moutier usually dismissed as practically a cretin, but then, how good did a linguist need to be to translate ton père va mourir into your dad is going to die?

The housekeeper came back with the schoolteacher, both of them pink and flushed from the stairs, and the guy dialed the same long number over again, and asked to speak to Josephine Moutier.

“No, Reacher, you idiot,” Moutier said, in a voice that should have been a roar, but in fact came out as a breathy tubercular plea. “Her married name is Reacher. They won’t know who Josephine Moutier is.”

The schoolteacher apologized and corrected himself and asked for Josephine Reacher. He listened for a moment and covered the receiver with his palm and looked at Moutier and asked, “What’s her husband’s name? Your son-in-law?”

“Stan,” Moutier said, “Not Stanley, either. Just Stan. Stan is on his birth certificate. I saw it. He’s Captain Stan Reacher, of the United States Marine Corps.”

The schoolteacher relayed that information and listened again. Then he hung up. He turned and said, “They just left. Really just days ago, apparently. The whole family. Captain Reacher has been posted elsewhere.”

2

The retired schoolteacher in Paris had been talking to a duty lieutenant at the Navy base on Guam in the Pacific, where Stan Reacher had been deployed for three months as Marine Corps liaison. That pleasant posting had come to an end and he had been sent to Okinawa. His family had followed three days later, on a passenger plane via Manila, his wife Josephine and his two sons, fifteen-year-old Joe and thirteen-year-old Jack. Josephine Reacher was a bright, spirited, energetic woman, at forty-four still curious about the world and happy to be seeing so much of it, still tolerant of the ceaseless moves and the poor accommodations. Joe Reacher at fifteen was already almost full grown, already well over six feet and well over two hundred pounds, a giant next to his mother, but still quiet and studious, still very much Clark Kent, not Superman. Jack Reacher at thirteen looked like an engineer’s napkin sketch for something even bigger and even more ambitious, his huge bony frame like the scaffolding around a major construction project. Six more inches and a final eighty pounds of beef would finish the job, and they were all on their way. He had big hands and watchful eyes. He was quiet like his brother, but not studious. Unlike his brother he was always called by his last name only. No one knew why, but the family was Stan and Josie, Joe and Reacher, and it always had been.

Stan met his family off the plane at the Futenma air station and they took a taxi to a bungalow he had found half a mile from the beach. It was hot and still inside and it fronted on a narrow concrete street with ditches either side. The street was dead straight and lined with small houses set close together, and at the end of it was a blue patch of ocean. By that point the family had lived in maybe forty different places, and the move-in routine was second nature. The boys found the second bedroom and it was up to them to decide whether it needed cleaning. If so, they cleaned it themselves, and if not, they didn’t. In this case, as usual, Joe found something to worry about, and Reacher found nothing. So he left Joe to it, and he headed for the kitchen, where first he got a drink of water, and then he got the bad news.

3

Reacher’s parents were side by side at the kitchen counter, studying a letter his mother had carried all the way from Guam. Reacher had seen the envelope. It was something to do with the education system. His mother said, “You and Joe have to take a test before you start school here.”

Reacher said, “Why?”

“Placement,” his father said. “They need to know how well you’re doing.”

“Tell them we’re doing fine. Tell them thanks, but no thanks.”

“For what?”

“I’m happy where I am. I don’t need to skip a grade. I’m sure Joe feels the same.”

“You think this is about skipping a grade?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” his father said. “It’s about holding you back a grade.”

“Why would they do that?”

“New policy,” his mother said. “You’ve had very fragmented schooling. They need to check you’re ready to advance.”

“They never did that before.”

“That’s why it’s called a new policy. As opposed to an old policy.”

“They want Joe to take a test? To prove he’s ready for the next grade? He’ll freak out.”

“He’ll do OK. He’s good with tests.”

“That’s not the point, Mom. You know what he’s like. He’ll be insulted. So he’ll make himself score a hundred percent. Or a hundred and ten. He’ll drive himself nuts.”

“Nobody can score a hundred and ten percent. It’s not possible.”

“Exactly. His head will explode.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’ll be OK.”

“Will you try hard?”

“What’s the pass mark?”

“Fifty percent, probably.”

“Then I’ll aim for fifty-one. No point wasting effort. When is it?”

“Three days from now. Before the semester starts.”

“Terrific,” Reacher said. “What kind of an education system doesn’t know the meaning of a simple word like vacation?”

4

Reacher went out to the concrete street and looked at the patch of ocean in the distance up ahead. The East China Sea, not the Pacific. The Pacific lay in the other direction. Okinawa was one of the Ryuku Islands, and the Ryuku Islands separated the two bodies of water.

There were maybe forty homes between Reacher and the water on the left hand side of the street, and another forty on the right. He figured the homes closer to him and further from the sea would be off-post housing for Marine families, and the homes further from him and nearer the water would be locally owned, by Japanese families who lived there full-time. He knew how real estate worked. Just steps to the beach. People competed for places like that, and generally the military let the locals have the best stuff. The DoD always worried about friction. Especially on Okinawa. The air station was right in the center of Genowan, which was a fair-sized city. Every time a transport plane took off, the schools had to stop teaching for a minute or two, because of the noise.

He turned his back on the East China Sea and walked inland, past identical little houses, across a four-way junction, into a perfect rectilinear matrix of yet more identical houses. They had been built quick and cheap, but they were in good order. They were meticulously maintained. He saw small doll-like local ladies on some of the porches. He nodded to them politely, but they all looked away. He saw no local Japanese kids. Maybe they were in school already. Maybe their semester had already started. He turned back and a hundred yards later found Joe out on the streets, looking for him.

Joe said, “Did they tell you about the test?”

Reacher nodded. “No big deal.”

“We have to pass.”

“Obviously we’ll pass.”

“No, I mean we have to really pass this thing. We have to crush it. We have to knock it out of the park.”

“Why?”

“They’re trying to humiliate us, Reacher.”

“Us? They don’t even know us.”

“People like us. Thousands of us. We have to humiliate them back. We have to make them embarrassed they even thought of this idea. We have to piss all over their stupid test.”

“I’m sure we will. How hard can it be?”

Joe said, “It’s a new policy, so it might be a new kind of test. There might be all kinds of new things in it.”

“Like what?”

“I have no idea. There could be anything.”

“Well, I’ll do my best with it.”

“How’s your general knowledge?”

“I know that Mickey Mantle hit .303 ten years ago. And .285 fifteen years ago. And .300 twenty years ago. Which averages out to .296, which is remarkably close to his overall career average of .298, which has to mean something.”

“They’re not going to ask about Mickey Mantle.”

“Who, then?”

Joe said, “We need to know. And we have a right to know. We need to go up to that school and ask what’s in this thing.”

Reacher said, “You can’t do that with tests. That’s kind of opposite to the point of tests, don’t you think?”

“We’re at least entitled to know what part or parts of which curriculum is being tested here.”

“It’ll be reading and writing, adding and subtracting. Maybe some dividing if we’re lucky. You know the drill. Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s an insult.”

Reacher said nothing.

5

The Reacher brothers walked back together, across the four-way junction, and into the long concrete street. Their new place was ahead and on the left. In the distance the sliver of sea glowed pale blue in the sun. There was a hint of white sand. Maybe palm trees. Between their place and the sea there were kids out on the street. All boys. Americans, black and white, maybe two dozen of them. Marine families. Neighbors. They were clustered outside their own places, at the cheap end of the street, a thousand steps from the beach.

Reacher said, “Let’s go take a look at the East China Sea.”

Joe said, “I’ve seen it before. So have you.”

“We could be freezing our butts off in Korea all winter.”

“We were just on Guam. How much beach does a person need?”

“As much as a person can get.”

“We have a test in three days.”

“Exactly. So we don’t have to worry about it today.”

Joe sighed and they walked on, past their own place, toward the sliver of blue. Ahead of them the other kids saw them coming. They got up off curbstones and stepped over ditches and kicked and scuffed their way to the middle of the road. They formed up in a loose arrowhead, facing front, arms folded, chests out, more than twenty guys, some of them as young as ten, some of them a year or two older than Joe.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

The point man was a thick-necked bruiser of about sixteen. He was smaller than Joe, but bigger than Reacher. He was wearing a Corps T-shirt and a ragged pair of khaki pants. He had fat hands, with knuckles that dipped in, not stuck out. He was fifteen feet away, just waiting.

Joe said quietly, “There are too many of them.”

Reacher said nothing.

Joe said, “Don’t start anything. I mean it. We’ll deal with this later, if we have to.”

Reacher smiled. “You mean after the test?”

“You need to get serious about that test.”

They walked on. Forty different places. Forty different welcomes to forty different neighborhoods. Except that the welcomes had not been different. They had all been the same. Tribalism, testosterone, hierarchies, all kinds of crazy instincts. Tests of a different kind.

Joe and Reacher stopped six feet from the bruiser and waited. The guy had a boil on his neck. And he smelled pretty bad. He said, “You’re the new kids.”

Joe said, “How did you figure that out?”

“You weren’t here yesterday.”

“Outstanding deduction. You ever thought of a career with the FBI?”

The bruiser didn’t answer that. Reacher smiled. He figured he could land a left hook right on the boil. Which would hurt like hell, probably.

The bruiser said, “You going to the beach?”

Joe said, “Is there a beach?”

“You know there’s a beach.”

“And you know where we’re going.”

“This is a toll road.”

Joe said, “What?”

“You heard. You have to pay the toll.”

“What’s the toll?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” the bruiser said. “When I see what you’ve got, I’ll know what to take.”

Joe didn’t answer.

The guy said, “Understand?”

Joe said, “Not even a little bit.”

“That’s because you’re a retard. You two are the retard kids. We heard all about you. They’re making you take the retard test, because you’re retards.”

Reacher said, “Joe, now that’s an insult.”

The big guy said, “So the little retard talks, does he?”

Joe said, “You seen that new statue in the square in Luzon?”

“What about it?”

“The last kid who picked a fight with my brother is buried in the pedestal.”

The guy looked at Reacher and said, “That doesn’t sound very nice. Are you a psycho retard?”

Reacher said, “What’s that?”

“Like a psychopath.”

“You mean do I think I’m right to do what I do and feel no remorse afterward?”

“I guess.”

Reacher said, “Then yes, I’m pretty much a psychopath.”

Silence, except for a distant motorbike. Then two motorbikes. Then three. Distant, but approaching. The big kid’s gaze jumped to the four-way junction at the top of the street. Behind him the arrowhead formation broke up. Kids wandered back to the curbs and their front yards. A bike slowed and turned into the street and puttered slowly along. On it was a Marine in BDUs. No helmet. An NCO, back from the base, his watch finished. He was followed by two more, one of them on a big Harley. Disciplinarian dads, coming home.

The big kid with the boil said, “We’ll finish this another time.”

Joe said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Reacher said nothing.

6

Stan Reacher was a quiet man by nature, and he was quieter than ever at breakfast on the fourth morning of his new command, which was turning out to be a tough gig. Back in the States the presidency had changed hands a little prematurely, and the Joint Chiefs had scrambled to present the new guy with a full range of options for his review. Standard practice. The start of every new administration was the same. There were plans for every imaginable theoretical contingency, and they had all been dusted off. Vietnam was effectively over, Korea was a stalemate, Japan was an ally, the Soviet Union was the same as ever, so China was the new focus. There had been a lot of public hoo-hah about detente, but equally there had been a lot of private planning for war. The Chinese were going to have to be beaten sooner or later, and Stan Reacher was going to have to play his part. He had been told so on his second morning.

He had been given command of four rifle companies and he had been handed a top-secret file defining their mission, which was to act as the tip of an immense spear that would land just north of Hangzhou and then punch through clockwise to isolate Shanghai. Tough duty. Casualty estimates were frightening. But ultimately a little pessimistic, in Stan’s opinion. He had met his men and he had been impressed. On Okinawa it was always hard to avoid mental comparisons with the ghosts of the freak Marine generation that had been there thirty years before, but the current crop was good. Real good. They all shared Stan’s personal allegiance to the famous old saying: War is not about dying for your country. It’s about making the other guy die for his. For the infantry it all came down to simple arithmetic. If you could inflict two casualties for every one you took, you were ahead. If you could inflict five, you were winning. Eight or ten, the prize was in the bag. And Stan felt his guys could do eight or ten, easy.

But China’s population was immense. And fanatical. They would keep on coming. Men, and then boys. Women, too, probably. Boys no older than his own sons. Women like his wife. He watched them eat, and imagined husbands and fathers a thousand miles away doing the same thing. A Communist army would draft a kid Joe’s age without a second thought. Reacher’s age, even, especially a big kid like that. And then the women. And then the girls. Not that Stan was either sentimental or conflicted. He would put a round through anyone’s head and sleep like a baby. But these were strange times. That was for damn sure. Having kids made you think about the future, but being a combat Marine made the future a theory, not a fact.

He had no real plans for his sons. He wasn’t that kind of a father. But he assumed they would stay military. What else did they know? In which case Joe’s brains would keep him safe. Not that there weren’t plenty of smart guys on the front lines. But Joe wasn’t a fighter. He was like a rifle built without a firing pin. He was all there physically, but there was no trigger in his head. He was like a nuclear launch console instead, full of are-you-really-sure failsafes and interlocks and sequenced buttons. He thought too much. He did it quickly, for sure, but any kind of delay or hesitation was fatal at the start of a fight. Even a split second. So privately Stan figured Joe would end up in Intelligence, and he figured he would do a pretty good job there.

His second son was a whole different can of worms. The kid was going to be huge. He was going to be an eighth of a ton of muscle. Which was a frightening prospect. The kid had come home bruised and bloodied plenty of times, but as far as Stan knew he hadn’t actually lost a fight since he was about five years old. Maybe he had never lost a fight. He had no trigger either, but not in the same way as his big brother. Joe was permanently set to safe, and Reacher was permanently jammed wide open on full auto. When he was grown, he was going to be unstoppable. A force of nature. A nightmare for somebody. Not that he ever started anything. His mother had trained him early and well. Josie was smart about things like that. She had seen the danger coming. So she had taught him never, ever, ever to start trouble, but that it was perfectly OK to react if someone else started it first. Which was a sight to see. The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.

But the kid could think, too. He wasn’t academic like Joe, but he was practical. His IQ was probably about the same, but it was a get-the-job-done type of street smart IQ, not any kind of for-the-sake-of-it cerebral indulgence. Reacher liked facts, for sure, and information, too, but not theory. He was a real-world character. Stan had no idea what the future held for the guy. No idea at all, except he was going to be too big to fit inside a tank or an airplane cockpit. So it was going to have to be something else.

But anyway, the future was still far off, for both of them. They were still kids. They were still just his fair-haired boys. Stan knew that right then Joe’s horizons stretched no further than the start of the new semester, and Reacher’s stretched no further than a fourth cup of coffee for breakfast. Which the kid got up and poured, right on cue. And also right on cue Joe said, “I’m going to walk up to the school today and ask them about this test.”

“Negative on that,” Stan said.

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. First, never let them see you sweat. Second, I put in a requisition form yesterday and I’m expecting a delivery today.”

“Of what?”

“A telephone.”

“Mom will be here.”

“I won’t,” Josie said. “I have errands to run.”

“All day?”

“Probably. I have to find a store cheap enough to feed you the eight pounds of protein you seem to need at every meal. Then I have to go have lunch with the other mothers at the Officers’ Club, which will probably tie me up all afternoon, if Okinawa is still the same as it was last time we were here, which it probably is.”

“Reacher can wait home for the telephone,” Joe said. “He doesn’t need a babysitter.”

“That’s beside the point,” Stan said. “Go swimming, go play ball, go chase girls, but don’t go ask about the test. Just do your best when it rolls around.”

7

At that moment it was very late in the previous evening in Paris, and the retired schoolteacher was back on the phone with the Navy station on Guam. Laurent Moutier’s housekeeper had whispered to him that they really ought to try to get hold of the old man’s daughter. But the schoolteacher was getting nowhere. The duty lieutenant on Guam had no personal insight into the Pentagon’s plans for China, but Stan Reacher’s new posting was classified as secret, so no foreign citizen was going to hear a thing about it. Not from the Navy. No sir. No way, no how.

Moutier heard the audible half of the back-and-forth from his bed. He could understand English a little. Enough to get by, and just enough to hear things between the lines. He knew exactly how the military worked. Like practically every other twentieth-century male human in Europe he had been in the service. He was already thirty years old when World War One broke out, but he volunteered immediately and survived all four years, Verdun and the Somme included, and he came out the other end with a chestful of medals and no scars longer than his middle finger, which was statistically the same thing as completely unscathed. On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, “Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”

And Moutier found all three immediately, on his return to Paris. There were mourners everywhere. Mothers, wives, fiancées, sisters, old men. Someone said that if you gave every dead soldier a one-page obituary, just one lousy page to list all his hopes and dreams, then the resulting pile of paper would still stand taller than the Eiffel Tower itself.

Thieves were everywhere, some solo, some in mobs or gangs, some with a political tint. And Moutier saw cripples all day long, some in the natural course of events, but many more at work, because his furniture repair operation had been commandeered by the government and told to make wooden legs for the next ten years. Which Moutier did, out of parts of tables bought up cheap from bankrupt restaurants. It was entirely possible there were veterans in Paris stumping around on the same furniture they had once dined off.

The ten-year government contract expired a week before the Wall Street Crash, and the next ten years were hard, except that he met the woman who quickly became his wife, a beauty foolish enough to take on a battered forty-five-year-old wreck like him. And a year later they had their only child, a mop-haired girl they called Josephine, who had grown up and married a Marine from New Hampshire in America, and who was currently completely uncontactable, despite the vast array of technological innovations Moutier had witnessed in his lifetime, many of them invented by the Americans themselves.

8

Stan Reacher pulled his field cap low and walked away to work. A minute later Josie headed out shopping, with a big bag and a thin purse. Reacher sat on the curb, waiting for the kid with the boil to come out to play. Joe stayed inside. But not for long. Thirty minutes later he came out with combed hair and a jacket. He said, “I’m going to take a walk.”

“To the school?” Reacher asked.

“Least said, soonest mended.”

“They’re not humiliating you. You’re humiliating yourself. How does scoring a hundred percent make you feel good when you already asked what the questions were?”

“It’s a matter of principle.”

“Not my principle,” Reacher said. “My principle is they set these things so average people can pass them, which gives me enough of a chance that I don’t feel I have to get my panties in a wad beforehand.”

“You want people to think you’re average?”

“I don’t care what people think.”

“You know you have to wait here for the delivery, right?”

“I’ll be here,” Reacher said. “Unless the fat smelly kid comes out with so many friends I end up in the hospital.”

“Nobody’s coming out with anybody. They all went to a ballgame. This morning, in a bus. I saw them. They’ll be gone all day.”

9

The telephone delivery arrived while Reacher was eating lunch. He had made himself a cheese sandwich and a pot of coffee and was halfway through both when the delivery guy knocked on the door. The guy unpacked the box himself and handed Reacher the phone. He said he had to keep the box. Apparently there was a shortage of boxes on the island.

The phone was a weird instrument. It was like no phone Reacher had seen before. He put it on the countertop next to the remains of his sandwich and looked at it from all angles. It was definitely foreign, and probably about thirty years old. From some beaten nation’s wartime warehouses, then. Mountains of stuff had been inherited. A hundred thousand typewriters here, a hundred thousand binoculars there. A hundred thousand telephones, rewired and reissued. At the right time, too. Turning tents and Quonset huts all over the world into permanent brick and stone buildings must have put a lot of pressure on a lot of people. Why wait for Bell Labs or GE when you can just back up a truck to a warehouse in Frankfurt?

Reacher found the jack on the kitchen wall and plugged in the phone and checked for dial tone. It was there. So he left the phone on the countertop and headed out to the beach.

10

It was a great beach. Better than most Reacher had seen. He took off his shirt and his shoes and took a long swim in warm blue water, and then he closed his eyes and lay in the sun until he was dry again. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but white-out and glare from the sky. Then he blinked and turned his head and saw he was not alone. Fifteen feet away a girl was lying on a towel. She was in a one-piece bathing suit. She was maybe thirteen or fourteen. Not all grown up, but not a kid either. She had beads of water on her skin and her hair was slick and heavy.

Reacher stood up, all crusted with sand. He had no towel. He used his shirt to brush himself off, and then he shook it out and put it on. The girl turned her head and asked, “Where do you live?”

Reacher pointed.

“Up the street,” he said.

“Would you let me walk back with you?”

“Sure. Why?”

“In case those boys are there.”

“They’re not. They’re gone all day.”

“They might come back early.”

“Did they give you that toll road crap?”

She nodded. “I wouldn’t pay.”

“What did they want?”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

Reacher said nothing.

The girl asked, “What’s your name?”

Reacher said, “Reacher.”

“Mine’s Helen.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Helen.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since yesterday,” Reacher said. “You?”

“A week or so.”

“Are you staying long?”

“Looks like it. You?”

“I’m not sure,” Reacher said.

The girl stood up and shook out her towel. She was a slender thing, small but long-legged. She had nail polish on her toes. They walked off the sand together and into the long concrete street. It was deserted up ahead. Reacher asked, “Where’s your house?”

Helen said, “On the left, near the top.”

“Mine’s on the right. We’re practically neighbors.” Reacher walked her all the way, but her mom was home by then, so he wasn’t asked in. Helen smiled sweetly and said thanks and Reacher crossed the street to his own place, where he found hot still air and nobody home. So he just sat on the stoop and whiled away the time. Two hours later the three Marine NCOs came home on their motorbikes, followed by two more, then two more in cars. Thirty minutes after that a regular American school bus rolled in from the ballgame, and a crowd of neighborhood kids spilled out and went inside their homes with nothing more than hard stares in Reacher’s direction. Reacher stared back just as hard, but he didn’t move. Partly because he hadn’t seen his target. Which was strange. He looked all around, once, twice, and by the time the diesel smoke cleared he was certain: the fat smelly kid with the boil had not been on the bus.

11

Eventually Joe came home, silent and preoccupied and uncommunicative. He didn’t say where he had been. He didn’t say anything. He just headed for the kitchen, washed his hands, checked the new phone for dial tone, and then went to take a shower, which was unusual for Joe at that time of day. Next in, surprisingly, was their father, also silent and preoccupied and uncommunicative. He got a glass of water, checked the phone for dial tone, and holed up in the living room. Last in was their mother, struggling under the weight of packages and a bouquet of flowers the women’s welcoming committee had produced at lunch. Reacher took the packages from her and carried them to the kitchen. She saw the new phone on the countertop and brightened a little. She never felt good until she had checked in with her dad and made sure he had her latest contact information. France was seven hours behind Japan, which made it mid-morning there, which was a good time for a chat, so she dialed the long number and listened to it ring.

She got the housekeeper, of course, and a minute later the hot little house on Okinawa was in an uproar.

12

Stan Reacher got straight on the new phone to his company clerk, who leaned on a guy, who leaned on another guy, like dominoes, and within thirty minutes Josie had a seat on the last civilian flight of the evening to Tokyo, and within forty she had an onward connection to Paris.

Reacher asked, “Do you want company?”

His mother said, “Of course I would like it. And I know your grandpa Moutier would love to see you again. But I could be there a couple of weeks. More, perhaps. And you have a test to take, and then school to start.”

“They’ll understand. I don’t mind missing a couple of weeks. And I could take the test when I get back. Or maybe they’ll forget all about it.”

His father said, “Your mother means we can’t afford it, son. Plane tickets are expensive.”

And so were taxicabs, but two hours later they took one to the airport. An old Japanese guy showed up in a big boxy Datsun, and Stan got in the front, and Josie and the boys crowded together in the back. Josie had a small bag. Joe was clean from the shower, but his hair was no longer combed. It was back to its usual tousled mess. Reacher was still salty and sandy from the beach. No one said much of anything. Reacher remembered his grandfather pretty well. He had met him three times. He had a closet full of artificial limbs. Apparently the heirs of deceased veterans were still officially obliged to return the prostheses to the manufacturer, for adjustment and eventual reissue. Part of the deal, from back in the day. Grandpa Moutier said every year or so another one would show up at his door. Sometimes two or three a year. Some of them were made from table legs.

They got out at the airport. It was dark and the air was going cold. Josie hugged Stan, and kissed him, and she hugged Joe, and kissed him, and she hugged Reacher, and kissed him, and then she pulled him aside and whispered a long urgent sentence in his ear. Then she went on alone to the check-in line.

Stan and the boys went up a long outside staircase to the observation deck. There was a JAL 707 waiting on the tarmac, spotlit and whining and ringed with attendant vehicles. It had stairs rolled up to its forward door, and its engines were turning slowly. Beyond the runway was a nighttime view of the whole southern half of the island. Their long concrete street lay indistinguishable in the distance, miles away to the south and the west. There were ten thousand small fires burning in the neighborhood. Backyard bonfires, each one flickering bright at its base and sending thin plumes of smoke high in the air.

“Trash night,” Stan said. Reacher nodded. Every island he had ever been on had a garbage problem. Regulated once-a-week burning was the usual solution, for everything, including leftover food. Traditional, in every culture. The word bonfire came from bone fire. General knowledge. He had seen a small wire incinerator behind the hot little house.

“We missed it for this week,” Stan said. “I wish we’d known.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “We don’t really have any trash yet.”

They waited, all three of them, leaning forward, elbows on a rail, and then Josie came out below them, one of about thirty passengers. She walked across the tarmac and turned at the bottom of the stairs and waved. Then she climbed up and into the plane, and she was lost to sight.

13

Stan and the boys watched the takeoff, watched the jet bank and climb, watched its tiny lights disappear, waited until its shattering noise was gone, and then they clattered down the long staircase three abreast. They walked home, which was Stan’s usual habit when Josie wasn’t involved and the distance was less than eight miles. Two hours’ quick march. Nothing at all, to a Marine, and cheaper than the bus. He was a child of the Depression, not that his family’s flinty New England parsimony would have been markedly different even in a time of plenty. Waste not, want not, make do and mend, don’t make an exhibition of yourself. His own father had stopped buying new clothes at the age of forty, feeling that what he owned by that point would outlast him, and to gamble otherwise would be reckless extravagance.

The bonfires were almost out when they arrived at their street. Layers of smoke hung in the air, and there was the smell of ash and scorched meat, even inside the hot little house. They went straight to bed under thin sheets, and ten minutes later all was silent.

14

Reacher slept badly, first dreaming about his grandfather, the ferocious old Frenchman somehow limbless and equipped with four table legs, moving and rearing like a piece of mobile furniture. Then he was woken in the early hours by something stealthy in the backyard, a cat or a rodent or some other kind of scavenger, and then again much later when the new phone rang twice. Too soon for his mother to have arrived in Paris, too late for a report of a fatal accident en route to Tokyo. Something else, obviously, so he ignored it both times. Joe got up at that point, so Reacher took advantage of the solitude and rolled over and slept on, until after nine o’clock, which was late for him.

He found his father and his brother in the kitchen, both of them silent and strained to a degree he found excessive. No question that grandpa Moutier was a nice old guy, but any ninety-year-old was by definition limited in the life expectancy department. No big surprise. The guy had to croak sometime. No one lives forever. And he had already beaten the odds. The guy was already about twenty years old when the Wright brothers flew, for God’s sake.

Reacher made his own coffee, because he liked it stronger than the rest of his family. He made toast, poured cereal, ate and drank, and still no one had spoken to him. Eventually he asked, “What’s up?”

His father’s gaze dipped and swiveled and traversed like an artillery piece, and came to rest on a point on the tabletop, about a foot in front of Reacher’s plate. He said, “The phone this morning.”

“Not Mom, right?”

“No, not that.”

“Then what?”

“We’re in trouble.”

“What, all of us?”

“Me and Joe.”

Reacher asked, “Why? What happened?” But at that point the doorbell rang, so there was no answer. Neither Joe or his father looked like moving, so Reacher got up and headed for the hallway. It was the same delivery guy as the day before. He went through the same ritual. He unpacked a box and retained it and handed Reacher a heavy spool of electric cable. There must have been a hundred yards of it. The spool was the size of a car tire. The cable was for domestic wiring, like Romex, heavy and stiff, sheathed in gray plastic. The spool had a wire cutter attached to it by a short chain.

Reacher left it on the hallway floor and headed back to the kitchen. He asked, “Why do we need electric cable?”

“We don’t,” his father said. “I ordered boots.”

“Well, you didn’t get them. You got a spool of wire.”

His father blew a sigh of frustration. “Then someone made a mistake, didn’t they?”

Joe said nothing, which was very unusual. Normally in that kind of a situation he would immediately launch a series of speculative analyses, asking about the nature and format of the order codes, pointing out that numbers can be easily transposed, thinking out loud about how QWERTY keyboards put alphabetically remote letters side by side, and therefore how clumsy typists are always a quarter-inch away from an inadvertent jump from, say, footwear to hardware. He had that kind of a brain. Everything needed an explanation. But he said nothing. He just sat there, completely mute.

“What’s up?” Reacher asked again, in the silence.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” his father said.

“It will be unless you two lighten up. Which I guess you’re not going to anytime soon, judging by the look of you.”

“I lost a code book,” his father said.

“A code book for what?”

“For an operation I might have to lead.”

“China?”

“How did you know that?”

“Where else is left?”

“It’s theoretical right now,” his father said. “Just an option. But there are plans, of course. And it will be very embarrassing if they leak. We’re supposed to be getting along with China now.”

“Is there enough in the code book to make sense to anyone?”

“Easily. Real names plus code equivalents for two separate cities, plus squads and divisions. A smart analyst could piece together where we’re going, what we’re going to do, and how many of us are coming.”

“How big of a book is it?”

“It’s a regular three-ring binder.”

“Who had it last?” Reacher asked.

“Some planner,” his father said. “But it’s my responsibility.”

“When did you know it was lost?”

“Last night. The call this morning was a negative result for the search I ordered.”

“Not good,” Reacher said. “But why is Joe involved?”

“He isn’t. That’s a separate issue. That was the other call this morning. Another three-ring binder, unbelievably. The test answers are missing. Up at the school. And Joe went there yesterday.”

“I didn’t even see the answer book,” Joe said. “I certainly didn’t take it away with me.”

Reacher asked, “So what exactly did you do up there?”

“Nothing, in the end. I got as far as the principal’s office and I told the secretary I wanted to talk to the guy about the test. Then I thought better of it and left.”

“Where was the answer book?”

“On the principal’s desk, apparently. But I never got that far.”

“You were gone a long time.”

“I took a walk.”

“Around the school?”

“Partly. And other places.”

“Were you in the building across the lunch hour?” Joe nodded.

“And that’s the problem,” he said. “That’s when they think I took it.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“It’s an honor violation, obviously. I could be excluded for a semester. Maybe the whole year. And then they’ll hold me back a grade, which will be two grades by then. You and I could end up in the same class.”

“You could do my homework,” Reacher said.

“This is not funny.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll have moved on by the end of the semester anyway.”

“Maybe not,” their father said. “Not if I’m in the brig or busted back to private and painting curbstones for the rest of my career. We all could be stuck on Okinawa forever.”

And at that point the phone rang again. Their father answered. It was their mother on the line, from Paris, France. Their father forced a bright tone into his voice, and he talked and listened, and then he hung up and relayed the news that their mother had arrived safely, and that old man Moutier wasn’t expected to live more than a couple of days, and that their mother was sad about it.

Reacher said, “I’m going to the beach.”

15

Reacher stepped out through the door and glanced toward the sea. The street was empty. No kids. He made a snap decision and detoured to the other side and knocked on Helen’s door. The girl he had met the day before. She opened up and saw who it was and crowded out next to him on the stoop and pulled the door all the way closed behind her. Like she was keeping him secret. Like she was embarrassed by him. She picked up on his feeling and shook her head.

“My dad is sleeping,” she said. “That’s all. He sat up and worked all night. And now he’s not feeling so hot. He just flaked, an hour ago.”

Reacher said, “You want to go swimming?”

She glanced down the street, saw no one was there, and said, “Sure. Give me five minutes, OK?” She crept back inside and Reacher turned and watched the street, half hoping that the kid with the boil would come out, and half hoping he wouldn’t. He didn’t. Then Helen came out again, in a bathing suit under a sundress. She had a towel. They walked down the street together, keeping pace, a foot apart, talking about where they’d lived and the places they’d seen. Helen had moved a lot, but not as much as Reacher. Her dad was a rear echelon guy, not a combat Marine, and his postings tended to be longer and more stable.

The morning water was colder than it had been the afternoon before, so they got out after ten minutes or so. Helen let Reacher use her towel, and then they lay on it together in the sun, now just inches apart. She asked him, “Have you ever kissed a girl?”

“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”

“The same girl two times or two girls once each?”

“Two girls more than once each.”

“A lot?”

“Maybe four times each.”

“Where?”

“On the mouth.”

“No, where? In the movies, or what?”

“One in the movies, one in a park.”

“With tongues?”

“Yes.”

She asked, “Are you good at it?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

“Will you show me how? I’ve never done it.”

So he leaned up on an elbow and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were small and mobile, and her tongue was cool and wet. They kept it going for fifteen or twenty seconds, and then they broke apart.

He asked, “Did you like it?”

She said, “Kind of.”

“Was I good at it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it with.”

“Well, you were better than the other two I kissed,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, but he didn’t know what she was thanking him for. The compliment or the trial run, he wasn’t sure.

16

Reacher and Helen walked back together, and they almost made it home. They got within twenty yards of their destination, and then the kid with the boil stepped out of his yard and took up a position in the middle of the road. He was wearing the same Corps T-shirt and the same pair of ragged pants. And he was alone, for the time being.

Reacher felt Helen go quiet beside him. She stopped walking and Reacher stopped a pace ahead of her. The big kid was six feet away. The three of them were like the corners of a thin sloping triangle. Reacher said, “Stay there, Helen. I know you could kick this guy’s ass all by yourself, but there’s no reason why both of us should be exposed to the smell.”

The big kid just smiled.

He said, “You’ve been to the beach.”

Reacher said, “And we thought Einstein was smart.”

“How many times have you been?”

“You can’t count that high.”

“Are you trying to make me mad?”

Reacher was, of course. For his age he had always been a freakishly big kid, right from birth. His mother claimed he had been the biggest baby anyone had ever seen, although she had a well-known taste for the dramatic, so Reacher tended to discount that information. But even so, big or not, he had always fought two or three classes up. Sometimes more. With the result that one on one, ninety-nine percent of the time, he had been the small kid. So he had learned to fight like a small kid. All things being equal, size usually wins. But not always, otherwise the heavyweight championship of the world would be decided on the scale, not in the ring. Sometimes, if the small guy is faster and smarter, he can get a result. And one way of being smarter is to make the other guy dumber, which you can do by inducing a rage. An opponent’s red mist is the smaller guy’s best friend. So yes, Reacher was trying to make the smelly kid mad.

But the smelly kid wasn’t falling for it. He was just standing there, taking it, tense but controlled. His feet were well placed, and his shoulders were bunched. His fists were ready to come up. Reacher took one pace forward, into the miasma of halitosis and body odor. Rule one with a guy like that: don’t let him bite you. You could get an infection. Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.

The guy’s eyes stayed up. He said, “There’s a girl here. You’re going to get your butt kicked in front of a girl. You won’t be able to show your face. You’ll be the neighborhood retard pussy. Maybe I’ll charge the toll every time you come out of your house. Maybe I’ll expand the zone all over the island. Maybe I’ll charge a double toll. From you and your retard brother.”

Rule three with a guy like that: upset the choreography. Don’t wait, don’t back off, don’t be the challenger, don’t be the underdog, don’t think defensively.

In other words, rule four: hit him first.

And not with a predictable little left jab, either.

Because rule five: there are no rules on the back streets of Okinawa.

Reacher snapped a vicious straight right into the guy’s face and caught him square on the cheek.

That got his attention.

The guy rocked back and shook his head and popped a straight right of his own, which Reacher had expected and was ready for. He leaned left and let the fat fist buzz past his ear. Smarter and faster. Then the guy was all tangled up in the follow-through and could do nothing but step back and crouch and start over. Which he got well into doing.

Until he heard the sound of a motorbike. Which was like the bell at the end of a round to him. Like Pavlov’s dog. He hesitated for a fatal split second.

Reacher hesitated, too. But for a shorter time. Purely because of geometry. He was facing up the street, toward the four-way junction. His eyes flicked up and he saw a bike heading north to south, keeping straight on the main road, passing by, not turning in. He processed that information and deleted it even before the bike was gone, just as soon as its speed and position had made a turn impossible. Whereupon his gaze came straight back to his opponent.

Who was at a geometric disadvantage. He was facing down the street, toward the sea. He had nothing to go on but sound. And the sound was loud and diffuse. Not specific. No spatial cues. Just an echoing roar. So like every other animal on earth with better sight than hearing, the guy yielded to a basic instinct. He started to turn his head to look behind him. Irresistible. Then a split second later the auditory input went unambiguous when the roar got trapped behind buildings, and the guy came to his conclusion and stopped his move and started to turn his head back again.

But by then it was far too late. By then Reacher’s left hook was halfway through its travel. It was scything in, hard and fast, every sinew and ropy muscle in his greyhound’s frame unspooling in perfect coordination, with just one aim in sight: to land that big left fist on the guy’s neck.

Total success. The blow landed right on the boil, crushing it, crushing flesh, compressing bone, and the guy went down like he had run full speed into a clothesline. His legs came out from under him and he thumped more or less horizontally on the concrete, just sprawling, tangled and stunned like a pratfall stunt in a silent movie.

Next obvious move was for Reacher to start kicking him in the head, but he had an audience with feminine sensibilities, so he resisted the temptation. The big guy got his face off the floor and he looked nowhere in particular and said, “That was a sucker punch.”

Reacher nodded. “But you know what they say. Only suckers get sucker punched.”

“We’re going to finish this.”

Reacher looked down. “Looks kind of finished already.”

“Dream on, you little punk.”

“Take an eight count,” Reacher said. “I’ll be back.”

17

Reacher hustled Helen up to her house and then he jogged across the street to his own. He went in the door and ran through to the kitchen and found his father in there, alone.

“Where’s Joe?” Reacher asked.

“Taking a long walk,” his father said.

Reacher stepped out to the backyard. It was a square concrete space, empty except for an old patio table and four chairs, and the empty incinerator. The incinerator was about the size of a big round garbage can. It was made of diagonal steel mesh. It was up on little legs. It was faintly gray with old ash, but it had been emptied and cleaned after its last use. In fact the whole yard had been swept. Marine families. Always meticulous.

Reacher headed back to the hallway. He crouched over the spool of electric cable and unwound six feet of wire and snipped it off with the cutters.

His father asked, “What are you doing?”

“You know what I’m doing, Dad,” Reacher said. “I’m doing what you intended me to do. You didn’t order boots. You ordered exactly what arrived. Last night, after the code book went missing. You thought the news would leak and Joe and I would get picked on as a result. You couldn’t bring us Ka-Bar knives or knuckledusters, so you thought of the next best thing.”

He started to wind the heavy wire around his fist, wrapping one turn after another, the way a boxer binds his hands. He pressed the malleable metal and plastic flat and snug.

His father asked, “So has the news leaked?”

“No,” Reacher said. “This is a previous engagement.”

His father ducked his head out the door and looked down the street. He said, “Can you take that guy?”

“Does the Pope sleep in the woods?”

“He has a friend with him.”

“The more the merrier.”

“There are other kids watching.”

“There always are.”

Reacher started wrapping his other hand.

His father said, “Stay calm, son. Don’t do too much damage. I don’t want this family to go three for three this week, as far as getting in trouble is concerned.”

“He won’t rat me out.”

“I know that. I’m talking about a manslaughter charge.”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Reacher said. “It won’t go that far.”

“Make sure it doesn’t.”

“But I’m afraid it will have to go a certain distance. A little farther than normal.”

“What are you talking about, son?”

“I’m afraid this time I’m going to have to break some bones.”

“Why?”

“Mom told me to. In a way.”

“What?”

“At the airport,” Reacher said. “She took me aside, remember? She told me she figures this place is driving you and Joe crazy. She told me I had to keep an eye on you and him both. She said it’s up to me.”

“Your mother said that? We can look after ourselves.”

“Yeah? How’s that working out so far?”

“But this kid has nothing to do with anything.”

“I think he does,” Reacher said.

“Since when? Did he say something?”

“No,” Reacher said. “But there are other senses apart from hearing. There’s smell, for instance.”

And then he jammed his bulbous gray fists in his pockets and stepped out to the street again.

18

Thirty yards away there was a horseshoe gaggle of maybe ten kids. The audience. They were shifting from foot to foot and vibrating with anticipation. About ten yards closer than that the smelly kid was waiting, with a sidekick in attendance. The smelly kid was on the right, and the sidekick was on the left. The sidekick was about Reacher’s own height, but thick in the shoulders and chest, like a wrestler, and he had a face like a wanted poster, flat and hard and mean. Those shoulders and that face were about ninety percent of the guy’s armory, Reacher figured. The guy was the type that got left alone solely because of his appearance. So probably he didn’t get much practice, and maybe he even believed his own bullshit. So maybe he wasn’t really much of a brawler.

Only one way to find out.

Reacher came in at a fast walk, his hands still in his pockets, on a wide curving trajectory, heading for the sidekick, not slowing at all, not even in the last few strides, the way a glad-handing politician approaches, the way a manic church minister walks up to a person, as if delivering an eager and effusive welcome was his only aim in life. The sidekick got caught up in the body language. He got confused by long social training. His hand even came halfway up, ready to shake.

Without breaking stride Reacher head-butted him full in the face. Left, right, bang. A perfect ten, for style and content, and power and precision. The guy went over backward and before he was a quarter of the way to the floor Reacher was turning toward the smelly kid and his wrapped hands were coming up out of his pockets.

In the movies they would have faced off, long and tense and static, like the O.K. Corral, with taunts and muttered threats, hands away from their sides, up on their toes, maybe circling, narrowed eyes on narrowed eyes, building the suspense. But Reacher didn’t live in the movies. He lived in the real world. Without even a split second’s pause he crashed his left fist into the smelly guy’s side, a vicious low blow, the second beat in a fast rhythmic one-two shuffle, where the one had been the head butt. His fist must have weighed north of six pounds at that point, and he put everything he had into it, and the result was that whatever the smelly kid was going to do next, he was going to do it with three busted ribs, which put him at an instant disadvantage, because busted ribs hurt like hell, and any kind of violent physical activity makes them hurt worse. Some folks with busted ribs can’t even bear to sneeze.

In any event the smelly kid didn’t do much of anything with his busted ribs. He just doubled over like a wounded buffalo. So Reacher crowded in and launched a low clubbing right and bust some more ribs on the other side. Easy enough. The heavy cable wrap made his hands like wrecking balls. The only problem was that people don’t always go to the hospital for busted ribs. Especially not Marine families. They just tape them up and gut it out. And Reacher needed the guy in a hospital cot, with his whole concerned family all around him. At least for one evening. So he dragged the guy’s left arm out from its midsection clutch, clamping the guy’s wrist in his own left hand, clumsy because of the wire, and he twisted it through a 180 turn, so the palm was up and the soft side of the elbow was down, and then he smashed his own right fist clean through the joint and the guy howled and screamed and fell to his knees and Reacher put him out of his misery with an uppercut under the jaw.

Game over.

Reacher looked left to right around the silent semicircle of spectators and said, “Next?”

No one moved.

Reacher said, “Anyone?”

No one moved.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s all get it straight. From now on, it is what it is.”

And then he turned and walked back to his house.

19

Reacher’s father was waiting in the hallway, a little pale around the eyes. Reacher started unwrapping his hands, and he asked, “Who are you working with on this code book thing?”

His father said, “An Intelligence guy and two MPs.”

“Would you call them and ask them to come over?”

“Why?”

“All part of the plan. Like Mom told me.”

“They should come here?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Right now would be good.” Reacher saw he had the word Georgia stamped backward across one of his knuckles. Must have been where the wire was manufactured. Raised lettering on the insulation. A place he had never been.

His father made the call to the base and Reacher watched the street from a window. He figured with a bit of luck the timing would be perfect. And it was, more or less. Twenty minutes later a staff car pulled up and three men in uniform got out. And immediately an ambulance turned into the street behind them and maneuvered around their parked vehicle and headed on down to the smelly kid’s house. The medics loaded the kid on board, and his mother and what looked like a younger brother rode along as passengers. Reacher figured the kid’s father would head straight for the hospital, on his motorbike, at the end of his watch. Or earlier, depending on what the doctors said.

The Intelligence guy was a major, and the MPs were Warrant Officers. All three of them were in BDUs. All three of them were still standing in the hallway. All three of them had the same expression on their faces: why are we here?

Reacher said, “That kid they just took away? You need to go search his house. Which is now empty, by the way. It’s ready and waiting for you.”

The three guys looked at each other. Reacher watched their faces. Clearly none of them had any real desire to nail a good Marine like Stan Reacher. Clearly all of them wanted a happy ending. They were prepared to clutch at straws. They were prepared to go the extra mile, even if that involved taking their cues from some weird thirteen-year-old kid.

One of the MPs asked, “What are we looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Reacher said. “Eleven inches long, one inch wide, gray in color.”

The three guys stepped out to the street, and Reacher and his father sat down to wait.

20

It was a reasonably short wait, as Reacher had privately predicted. The smelly kid had demonstrated a degree of animal cunning, but he was no kind of a criminal mastermind. That was for damn sure. The three men came back less than ten minutes later with a metal object that had been burned in a fire. It was ashy gray as a result. It was a once-bright alloy fillet eleven inches long and one inch wide, slightly curved across its shorter dimension, with three round appendages spaced along its length.

It was what is left when you burn a regular three-ring binder.

No stiff covers, no pages, no contents, just scorched metal.

Reacher asked, “Where did you find it?”

One of the MPs said, “Under a bed in the second bedroom. The boys’ room.”

No kind of a criminal mastermind.

The major from Intelligence asked, “Is it the code book?”

Reacher shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It’s the test answers from the school.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“So why call us?”

“This has to be handled by the Corps. Not by the school. You need to go up to the hospital and talk to the kid and his father together. You need to get a confession. Then you need to tell the school. What you do to the kid after that is your business. A warning will do it, probably. He won’t trouble us again anyway.”

“What exactly happened here?”

“It was my brother’s fault,” Reacher said. “In a way, anyway. The kid from down the street started hazing us, and Joe stepped up and did really well. Smart mouth, fast answers, the whole nine yards. It was a great performance. Plus, Joe is huge. Gentle as a lamb, but the kid didn’t know that, obviously. So he decided to duck the physical route, in terms of revenge. He decided to go another way. He figured out that Joe was uptight about the test. Maybe he had heard us talking. But anyway, he followed Joe up to the school yesterday and stole the answers. To discredit him.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Circumstantially,” Reacher said. “The kid didn’t go to the ballgame. He wasn’t on the bus. So he was in town all day. And Joe washed his hands and took a shower when he got back. Which is unusual for Joe, in the afternoon. He must have felt dirty. And my guess is he felt dirty because he had been smelling that kid’s stink all day, from behind him and around corners.”

“Very circumstantial,” the major said.

“Ask the kid,” Reacher said. “Lean on him, in front of his dad.”

“Then what happened?”

“The kid made up a scenario where Joe memorized the answers and then burned the book. Which would be plausible, for a guy who wanted to cheat on a test. And it was trash night, which was convenient. The plan was the kid would burn the book in his own backyard, and then sneak into ours during the night and dump the metal part in our incinerator, among our ashes, so the evidence would be right there. But we had no ashes. We missed trash night. We had to be up at the airport instead. So the kid had to abort the plan. He just snuck away again. And I heard him. Early hours of the morning. I thought it was a cat or a rat.”

“Any trace evidence?”

“You might find footprints out there,” Reacher said. “The yard was swept at some point, but there’s always dust. Especially after trash night.”

The MPs went away and took a look at the yard, and then they came back with quizzical expressions on their faces, as if to say, the kid could be right.

The Intelligence major got a look on his own face, like I can’t believe I’m about to say this to a thirteen-year-old, and then he asked, “Do you know where the code book is, too?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not for sure. But I could make a pretty good guess.”

“Where?”

“Help my brother out with the school, and then we’ll talk.”

21

The three Marines came back ninety minutes later. One of the MPs said, “You bust that kid up pretty good, didn’t you?”

“He’ll live,” Reacher said.

The other MP said, “He confessed. It went down like you figured. How did you know?”

“Logic,” Reacher said. “I knew Joe wouldn’t have done it, so clearly someone else did. It was just a question of who. And how, and why.”

The Intelligence major said, “We squared things away with the school. Your brother is in the clear.” Then the guy smiled. He said, “But there’s one unfortunate consequence.”

“Which is what?”

“They don’t have the answers anymore, so the test has been canceled.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Every silver lining has a cloud.”

“Did you see the questions?”

The major nodded. “Reading, writing, adding, subtracting. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“No general knowledge?”

“No.”

“No baseball?”

“Not even a hint.”

“No statistics?”

“Percentages, maybe, in the math section. Odds and probabilities, that sort of thing.”

“Which are important,” Reacher said. “As in, what are the odds of a Marine officer losing a code book?”

“Low.”

“What are the odds of a good Marine officer like my dad losing a code book?”

“Lower still.”

“So the probability is the book isn’t lost at all. The probability is there’s another explanation. Therefore time spent chasing the notion it’s lost is time wasted. Time spent on other avenues would be more fruitful.”

“What other avenues?”

“When did President Ford take over from President Nixon?”

“Ten days ago.”

“Which must have been when the Joint Chiefs started dusting off all the options. And I’m guessing the only real live one is China. Which is why we got the transfer here. But we’re the combat phase. So a little earlier than us the planners must have been brought in. A week or so ago, maybe. They must have been told to nail everything down double quick. Which is a lot of work, right?”

“Always.”

“And what’s the last phase of that work?”

“Revising the code books to match the updated plans.”

“What’s the deadline?”

“Theoretically we have to be ready to go at midnight tonight, should the president order it.”

“So maybe somewhere there’s a guy who worked on the codes all through the night. A rear echelon guy who got here about a week ago.”

“I’m sure there is. But we already checked all over the base. That’s the first thing we did.”

“Maybe he worked off post.”

“That would be unauthorized.”

“But it happens.”

“I know. But even if it did in this case, he would have been back on the base hours ago, and the book would have been back in the safe hours ago.”

“Suppose he wore himself out and fell asleep? Suppose he hasn’t gotten up yet? Suppose the code book is still on his kitchen table?”

“Where?”

“Across the street,” Reacher said. “Knock on the door and ask for Helen.”

22

Joe got back from his long walk an hour later and he and his brother and his father headed for the beach and took a swim. The water was warm, the sand was white, and the palms were swaying. They loitered and strolled until the sun dipped low, and then they headed home to the hot little house at the top of the concrete street, where an hour later the new phone rang again and Josie told them that her father had died. Old Laurent Moutier was gone, at the age of ninety, taking with him, like everyone does, a lifetime of unknown private hopes and dreams and fears and experiences, and leaving behind him, like most people do, a thin trace of himself in his living descendants. He had never had a clear idea of what would become of his beautiful mophaired daughter and his two handsome grandsons, nor did he really want one, but like every other twentieth-century male human in Europe he hoped they would live lives of peace, prosperity, and plenty, while simultaneously knowing they almost certainly wouldn’t. So he hoped they would bear their burdens with grace and good humor, and he was comforted in his final moments by the knowledge that so far they always had, and probably always would.

A Wanted Man is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Lee Child

Deep Down copyright © 2012 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Title page art from an original photograph by Benjamin Earwicker

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Child, Lee.

A wanted man : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33936-6

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex–police officers—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. Conspiracies—

Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838W36 2012

813′.54—dc23 2012018420

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

Cover photograph: Ryan McGinnis/ Flickr/ Getty Images

v3.1_r5

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

A Wanted Man

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Dedication

Deep Down: A Reacher Short Story

Chapter 1

The eyewitness said he didn’t actually see it happen. But how else could it have gone down? Not long after midnight a man in a green winter coat had gone into a small concrete bunker through its only door. Two men in black suits had followed him in. There had been a short pause. The two men in the black suits had come out again.

The man in the green winter coat had not come out again.

The two men in the black suits had walked thirty brisk feet and climbed into a bright red car. Fire-engine red, the eyewitness called it. Vivid red. Fairly new. A regular four-door sedan, the eyewitness thought. Or maybe a five-door. Or a three-door. But definitely not a two-door coupe. A Toyota, the eyewitness thought. Or maybe a Honda. Or a Hyundai. Maybe a Kia.

But whichever, the two men in the black suits had driven away in it.

There was still no sign of the man in the green winter coat.

Then blood had pooled out from under the concrete bunker’s door.

The eyewitness had called 911.

The county sheriff had shown up and gotten the story. He was good at hustling folk along while looking patient. It was one of his many talents. Eventually the eyewitness had finished up. Then the county sheriff had thought for a long moment. He was in a part of the nation where in every direction there were hundreds of square miles of emptiness just over the dark horizon. Where roads were long lonely ribbons.

He was in roadblock country.

So he had called the highway patrol, and then he had ordered up the helicopter from the state capital. He had put out an urgent APB on a bright red import carrying two men in black suits.

Jack Reacher rode for ninety miles and ninety minutes with a woman in a dirty gray van, and then he saw bright vapor lights up ahead at the highway cloverleaf, with big green signs pointing west and east. The woman slowed the van, and stopped, and Reacher got out and thanked her and waved her away. She used the first ramp, west toward Denver and Salt Lake City, and he walked under the bridge and set up on the eastbound ramp, one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb and smiled and tried to look friendly.

Which was not easy. Reacher was a big man, six feet five inches tall, heavily built, and that night as always he looked a little ragged and unkempt. Lonely drivers wanted pleasant and unthreatening company, and Reacher knew from long experience that visually he was no one’s first choice of companion. Too intimidating. And right then he was further handicapped by a freshly broken nose. He had patched the injury with a length of silver duct tape, which he knew must make him look even more grotesque. He knew the tape must be shining and glittering in the yellow light. But he felt the tape was helping him medically, so he decided to keep it in place for the first hour. If he didn’t get a ride inside sixty minutes, he would consider peeling it off.

He didn’t get a ride inside sixty minutes. Traffic was light. Nebraska, at night, in the wintertime. The cloverleaf he was at was the only significant interchange for miles around, but even so whole minutes passed with no action at all. Up on the bridge the through traffic was fairly steady, but few people seemed keen to join it. In the first hour only forty vehicles showed up to turn east. Cars, trucks, SUVs, different makes, different models, different colors. Thirty of them blew past without even slowing. Ten drivers checked him out and then looked away and accelerated onward.

Not unusual. Hitchhiking had been getting harder for years.

Time to shorten the odds.

He turned away and used a splintered thumbnail to pick at the edge of the duct tape on his face. He got half an inch of it loose and gripped that makeshift tab between the pad of his thumb and his forefinger. Two schools of thought. One went for the fast rip. The other advocated a slow peel. An illusory choice, Reacher thought. The pain was the same either way. So he split the difference and opted for a fast peel. No big deal on his cheek. A different story across his nose. Cuts reopened, the swelling lifted and moved, the fracture itself clicked and ground.

No big deal on the other cheek.

He rolled the bloodied tape into a cylinder and stuck it in his pocket. He spat on his fingers and wiped his face. He heard a helicopter a thousand feet overhead and saw a high-power searchlight beam stabbing down through the darkness, resting here, resting there, moving on. He turned back and put one foot in the traffic lane again and stuck out his thumb. The helicopter hung around for a spell and then lost interest and hammered away west until its noise died back to nothing. Traffic heading cross-country on the bridge stayed sparse but steady. Feeder traffic heading north and south on the county road got thinner. But almost all of it turned one way or the other on the highway. Almost none of it continued straight. Reacher remained optimistic.

The night was cold, which helped his face. Numbness dulled the ache. A pick-up truck with Kansas plates came out of the south and turned east and slowed to a roll. The driver was a rangy black guy bundled into a thick coat. Maybe his heater wasn’t working. He eyeballed Reacher long and hard. He almost stopped. But he didn’t. He looked away and drove on by.

Reacher had money in his pocket. If he could get to Lincoln or Omaha he could get a bus. But he couldn’t get to Lincoln or Omaha. Not without a ride. He took to tucking his right hand under his left arm between cars, to stop it from freezing. He stamped his feet. His breath pooled around his head like a cloud. A highway patrol cruiser blew by with lights but no siren. Two cops inside. They didn’t even glance Reacher’s way. Their focus was up ahead. Some kind of an incident, maybe.

Two more cars almost stopped. One out of the south, and one out of the north, minutes apart. They both slowed, stumbled, stuttered, eyeballed, and then picked up speed and drove on by. Getting closer, Reacher thought. It’s coming. Maybe the late hour was helping. People were more compassionate at midnight than midday. And night driving already felt a little out of the ordinary. Picking up a random stranger wasn’t such a big leap.

He hoped.

Another driver took a good long look, but kept on going.

And another.

Reacher spat on his palms and slicked his hair into place.

He kept the smile on his face.

He remained optimistic.

And then finally, after a total of ninety-three minutes on the ramp, a car stopped for him.

Chapter 2

The car stopped thirty feet upstream of him. It had a local plate, and was a reasonable size, and American, and dark in color. A Chevrolet, Reacher thought, probably dark blue, or gray, or black. It was hard to tell, in the vapor light. Dark metallics were always anonymous at night.

There were three people in the car. Two men in the front, and a woman in the back. The two men were twisted around in their seats, like there was a big three-way discussion going on. Like a democracy. Should we pick this guy up or not? Which suggested to Reacher that the three people didn’t know each other very well. Such decisions among good friends were usually instinctive. These three were business colleagues, maybe, a team of equals, thrown together for the duration, exaggeratedly respectful of each other’s positions, especially the outnumbered woman’s.

Reacher saw the woman nod, and he lip-read her yes, and the men turned back and faced front again, and the car rolled forward. It stopped again with the front passenger’s window alongside Reacher’s hip. The glass came down. Reacher bent at the waist and felt warmth on his face. This car’s heater was working just fine. That was for damn sure.

The guy in the front passenger seat asked, “Where are you headed tonight, sir?”

Reacher had been a cop in the army for thirteen years, and then for almost as long had lived on his wits, and he had survived both phases of his life by being appropriately cautious and by staying alert. All five senses, all the time. Deciding whether or not to take an offered ride depended mostly on smell. Could he smell beer? Weed? Bourbon? But right then he could smell nothing at all. His nose had just been broken. His nasal passages were clogged with blood and swellings. Maybe his septum was permanently deviated. It felt entirely possible he would never smell anything ever again.

Touch was not an option in that situation, either. Nor was taste. He would learn nothing by groping around like a blind man, or by licking things. Which left sight and sound. He heard neutral tones from the front passenger, no marked regional accent, an educated cadence, an air of authority and executive experience. On all three of them he saw soft uncalloused hands, unmuscled frames, neat hair, no tans. Indoor people. Office folk. Not at the top of the tree, but a long way from the bottom. They each looked somewhere in their middle forties, perhaps halfway through their lives, but more than halfway through their careers. Like lieutenant colonels, maybe, in army terms. Solid achievers, but not superstars.

Each of them had on black pants and a blue denim shirt. Like uniforms. The shirts looked cheap and new, still creased from the wrapper. A team-building exercise, Reacher figured. Some kind of corporate bullshit. Fly a bunch of middle-ranking executives out from their regional offices, get them together in the wilderness, give them shirts, set them tasks. Maybe all the hoo-hah was making them feel a little bit adventurous, which was why they were picking him up. And maybe there would be candid mutual critiquing afterward, which was why they had labored through the big three-way democratic discussion. Teams needed teamwork, and teamwork needed consensus, and consensus needed to be unforced, and gender issues were always sensitive. In fact Reacher was a little surprised the woman wasn’t riding in front, or driving. Although driving might have been seen as a subservient role, for the only woman in a trio. Like fetching coffee.

A minefield.

“I’m heading east,” Reacher said.

“Into Iowa?” the front passenger asked.

“Through Iowa,” Reacher said. “All the way to Virginia.”

“Hop in,” the guy said. “We’ll get you some of the way there.”

The woman was sitting behind the front passenger, so Reacher tracked around the trunk and got in on the driver’s side. He settled on the rear bench and closed the door. The woman nodded to him a little shyly. A little cautiously, maybe. Perhaps because of his busted nose. Maybe the sight upset her.

The guy at the wheel checked his mirror and took off up the ramp.

Chapter 3

The county sheriff’s name was Victor Goodman, which most folks thought was entirely appropriate. He was a good man, and he was usually victorious in whatever he set his mind to. Not that there was a necessary connection between the two halves of his name. He won not because he was good, but because he was smart. Smart enough, certainly, to check and re-check his prior decisions before moving on. Two steps forward, one step back. That was his system. It served him well. It always had. And right then it was leading him to believe he had been hasty with his APB.

Because the crime scene in the concrete bunker was serious shit. The man in the green winter coat had been executed, basically. Assassinated, even. There had been some direct and to-the-point knife work going on. This was not a dispute or a scuffle that had gotten out of hand. This was professional stuff, straight from the major leagues. Which was rare in rural Nebraska. Practically unknown, more accurately.

So first Goodman had called the FBI in Omaha, to give them a heads-up. He was far too smart to worry about turf wars. And second he had reconsidered the two men in the red car. Fire-engine red, the eyewitness had called it. Vivid red. Which made no sense. It was way too bright for professionals to use as a getaway vehicle. Too obvious. Too memorable. So it was likely the two guys had stashed an alternative vehicle nearby, in a convenient spot. It was likely they had driven over there and switched.

And it was the work of a second to take off two suit coats. The eyewitness was unclear about their shirts. White, he thought. Basically. Or cream. Maybe striped. Or checked. Or something. No ties. Or maybe one of them was wearing a tie.

So Goodman got back on the line to the highway patrol and the airborne unit and dumbed down his APB: now he wanted any two men in any kind of vehicle.

The guy in the front passenger seat turned around in a fairly friendly fashion and said, “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your face?”

Reacher said, “I walked into a door.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. I tripped and fell over. Not very exciting. Just one of those things.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Nothing an aspirin wouldn’t put right.”

The guy twisted farther around and looked at the woman. Then at the driver. “Do we have an aspirin available? To help this man out?”

Reacher smiled. A team, standing ready to solve problems big or small. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”

The woman said, “I’ve got one.” She ducked down and picked up her bag from the floor. She rooted around in it. The guy in the front passenger seat watched her do it, full of eager attention. He seemed excited. A goal had been set, and was about to be met. The woman came out with a packet of Bayer. She shook one pill loose.

“Give him two,” the guy in the front said. “He looks like he could use them. Hell, give him three.”

Which Reacher thought was a little too commanding. Might not play well in the postgame analysis. It placed the woman in a difficult situation. Maybe she needed her aspirins for herself. Maybe she had an internal condition. Maybe she would find it embarrassing to say so. Or perhaps the guy up front was into some kind of a double bluff. Maybe he was so stainless in every other way he could get away with making control look like innocent exuberance.

Reacher said, “One will do the trick, thanks.”

The woman tipped the small white pill from her palm to his. The guy up front passed back a bottle of water. Unopened, and still cold from a refrigerator. Reacher swallowed the pill and split the seal on the bottle and took a good long drink.

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

He passed the bottle back. The guy in front took it and offered it to the driver. The driver shook his head, mute. He was focused on the road ahead, holding the car between seventy and eighty, just bowling along. He was close to six feet tall, Reacher figured, but narrow in the shoulders, and a little stooped. He had a thin neck, with no fuzz on it. A recent haircut, in a conservative style. No rings on his fingers. The cheap blue shirt had arms too short for him. He was wearing a watch full of small complicated dials.

The guy in the front passenger seat was shorter but wider. Not exactly fat, but hamburgers more than once a week might push him over the edge. His face was tight and pink. His hair was fairer than the driver’s, cut equally recently and equally short and brushed to the side like a schoolboy’s. His shirt was long in the arms, small in the waist, and loose in the shoulders. Its collar was still triangular from the packet, and the wings were resting tight against the flesh of his neck.

Up close the woman looked maybe a year or two younger than the men. Early forties, possibly, rather than mid. She had jet black hair piled up high on her head and tied in a bun. Or a chignon. Or something. Reacher didn’t know the correct hairdressing term. She looked to be medium height and lean. Her shirt was clearly a smaller size than the men’s, but it was still loose on her. She was pretty, in a rather severe and no-nonsense kind of a way. Pale face, large eyes, plenty of makeup. She looked tired and a little ill at ease. Possibly not entirely enchanted with the corporate bullshit. Which made her the best of the three, in Reacher’s opinion.

The guy in the front passenger seat twisted around again and offered his smooth round hand. He said, “I’m Alan King, by the way.”

Reacher shook his hand and said, “Jack Reacher.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Reacher.”

“Likewise, Mr. King.”

The driver said, “Don McQueen,” but he didn’t try to shake hands.

“What were the odds?” Reacher said. “King and McQueen.”

King said, “I know, right?”

The woman offered her hand, smaller and paler and bonier than King’s.

She said, “I’m Karen Delfuenso.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Karen,” Reacher said, and shook. She held on a split second longer than he had expected. Then McQueen got off the gas in a hurry and they all pitched forward a little. Up ahead brake lights were flaring red. Like a solid wall.

And way far in the distance there was rapid blue and red strobing from a gaggle of cop cars.

Chapter 4

Two steps forward, one step back. Check and re-check. Sheriff Victor Goodman was revisiting the issue of the alternate car he figured the two men had switched to. He tried to stay as current as a guy in his position could, way out there in the sticks, which wasn’t easy, but a year or so before he had read a sidebar in a Homeland Security bulletin, which said that at night a dark blue color was the hardest to pick out with surveillance cameras. Coats, hats, cars, whatever, dark blue showed up as little more than a hole in the nighttime air. Hard to see, hard to define. Not that Goodman’s county had any surveillance cameras. But he figured what was true for an electronic lens would be true for the human eye, too. And he figured the two men might be clued in about such stuff. They were professionals, apparently. Therefore the car they had stashed might be dark blue.

Or it might not.

So what should he do?

In the end, he did nothing. Which he figured was the wisest choice. If he was guessing wrong, then to ask the roadblocks to pay special attention to dark blue cars would be self defeating. So he let his revised APB stand as it was: he wanted any two men in any kind of vehicle.

*  *  *

At that point the Interstate was a six-lane road, and the three eastbound lanes were jammed solid with inching vehicles. Cars, trucks, SUVs, they were all creeping forward, braking, stopping, waiting, creeping forward again. McQueen was drumming his fingers on the wheel, frustrated. King was staring ahead through the windshield, patient and resigned. Delfuenso was staring ahead too, anxious, like she was late for something.

Reacher asked in the silence, “Where are you guys headed tonight?”

“Chicago,” King said.

Which Reacher was privately very pleased about. There were plenty of buses in Chicago. Plenty of morning departures. South through Illinois, east through Kentucky, and then Virginia was right there. Good news. But he didn’t say so out loud. It was late at night, and he felt a sympathetic tone was called for.

He said, “That’s a long way.”

“Six hundred miles,” King said.

“Where are you coming from?”

The car stopped, rolled forward, and stopped again.

“We were in Kansas,” King said. “We were doing real well, too. No traffic. No delays. Up till now. This thing here is the first time we’ve stopped in more than three hours.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“I know, right? Minimum of sixty all the way. I think this is literally the first time Don has touched the brake. Am I right, Don?”

McQueen said, “Apart from when we picked Mr. Reacher up.”

“Sure,” King said. “Maybe that broke the spell.”

Reacher asked, “Are you on business?”

“Always.”

“What kind of business?”

“We’re in software.”

“Really?” Reacher said, trying to be polite.

“We’re not programmers,” King said. “That’s all pizza and skateboards. We’re in corporate sales.”

“You guys work hard.”

“Always,” King said again.

“Successful trip so far?”

“Not so bad.”

“I thought you might be on some kind of a team-building thing. Like an exercise. Or a retreat.”

“No, just business as usual.”

“So what’s with the shirts?”

King smiled.

“I know, right?” he said. “New corporate style. Casual Fridays all week long. But clearly branded. Like a sports uniform. Because that’s how software is these days. Very competitive.”

“Do you live here in Nebraska?”

King nodded. “Not so very far from right here, actually. There are plenty of tech firms in Omaha now. Way more than you would think. It’s a good business environment.”

The car rolled forward, braked, stopped, moved on again. It was McQueen’s own vehicle, Reacher guessed. Not a rental. Not a pool car. Too worn, too messy. The guy must have drawn the short straw. Designated driver for this particular trip. Or maybe he was the designated driver for every trip. Maybe he was low man on the totem pole. Or maybe he just liked driving. A road warrior. A road warrior who was taking time away from his family. Because he was a family man, clearly. Because it was a family car. But only just. There was kid stuff in it, but not a lot. There was a sparkly pink hair band on the floor. Not the kind of thing an adult woman would wear, in Reacher’s opinion. There was a small fur animal in a tray on the console. Most of its stuffing was compressed to flatness, and its fur was matted, as if it was regularly chewed. One daughter, Reacher figured. Somewhere between eight and twelve years old. He couldn’t be more precise than that. He knew very little about children.

But the kid had a mother or a stepmother. McQueen had a wife or a girlfriend. That was clear. There was feminine stuff everywhere in the car. There was a box of tissues with flowers all over it, and a dead lipstick in the recess in the console, right next to the fur animal. There was even a crystal pendant on the key. Reacher was pretty sure he would be smelling perfume on the upholstery, if he had been able to smell anything at all.

Reacher wondered if McQueen was missing his family. Or maybe the guy was perfectly happy. Maybe he didn’t like his family. Then from behind the wheel McQueen asked, “What about you, Mr. Reacher? What line of work are you in?”

“No line at all,” Reacher said.

“You mean casual labor? Whatever comes your way?”

“Not even that.”

“You mean you’re unemployed?”

“But purely by choice.”

“Since when?”

“Since I left the army.”

McQueen didn’t reply to that, because he got preoccupied. Up ahead traffic was all jockeying and squeezing into the right-hand lane. Those slow-motion maneuvers were what was causing most of the delay. A wreck, Reacher figured. Maybe someone had spun out and hit the barrier and clipped a couple of other cars on the rebound. Although there were no fire trucks present. No ambulances. No tow trucks. All the flashing lights were at the same height, on car roofs. There were so many of them and they were blinking so fast that they looked continuous, like a permanent wash of red-blue glare.

The car inched onward. Start, stop, start, stop. Fifty yards ahead of the lights McQueen put his turn signal on and bullied his way into the right-hand lane. Which gave Reacher a straight line of sight to the obstruction.

It wasn’t a wreck.

It was a roadblock.

The nearest cop car was parked at an angle across the left-hand lane, and the second was parked a little farther on, at the same angle, across the middle lane. Together they sat there like arrows, one, two, both pointing toward the right-hand lane, giving drivers no choice at all but to move over. Then there were two cars parked in the middle lane, in line with the traffic flow, opposite two parked in line on the shoulder, and then came two more, angled again, positioned in such a way as to force people through a tight and awkward turn, all the way across the width of the road, all the way into the left-hand lane, after which they could fan out and accelerate away and go about their business.

A well organized operation, Reacher thought. A slow approach was guaranteed by the congestion, and slow progress through the obstruction was guaranteed by the sharp left turn at the end of it. Careful and extended scrutiny was guaranteed by the long narrow gantlet between the two in-line cars in the middle lane and the parallel in-line pair on the shoulder. This was no one’s first rodeo.

But what was it for? Eight cars was a big deal. And Reacher could see shotguns out. This was no kind of a routine check. This was not about seat belts or license tags. He asked, “Have you had the radio on? Has something bad happened?”

“Relax,” King said. “We get this from time to time. Escaped prisoner, most likely. There are a couple of big facilities west of here. They’re always losing people. Which is crazy, right? I mean, it ain’t brain surgery. It’s not like their doors don’t have locks.”

McQueen made eye contact in the mirror and said, “It’s not you, I hope.”

“Not me what?” Reacher asked.

“Who just escaped from jail.”

A smile in his voice.

“No,” Reacher said. “It’s definitely not me.”

“That’s good,” McQueen said. “Because that would get us all in trouble.”

They inched onward, in the impatient queue. Through a long glassy tunnel of windshields and rear windows Reacher could see the troopers at work. They were wearing their hats. They had shotguns held low and big Maglites held overhand. They were shining their flashlight beams into one car after another, front, back, up, down, counting heads, checking floors, sometimes checking trunks. Then, satisfied, they were waving cars away and turning to the next in line.

“Don’t worry, Karen,” King said, without turning his head. “You’ll be home again soon.”

Delfuenso didn’t reply.

King glanced back at Reacher and said, “She hates being on the road,” by way of explanation.

Reacher said nothing.

They crept forward. Up ahead the routine never changed. Eventually Reacher sensed a pattern. The only circumstance under which the troopers were checking trunks was when there was a male driver alone in a car. Which ruled out King’s escaped prisoner theory. No reason why an escaped prisoner couldn’t hide in the trunk of a car occupied by two people, or three, or four. Or five, or six, or a whole busload. Much more likely the troopers had gotten a specific tip about a lone guy hauling something large and something bad. Drugs, guns, bombs, stolen goods, whatever.

They crept forward. Now they were third in line. Both cars ahead had lone men at the wheel. Both got their trunks checked. Both got waved onward. McQueen rolled forward and stopped where a trooper told him to. One guy stepped in front of the hood and flicked his flashlight beam across the license plate. Four more stepped up, two on each side, and shone their lights in through the windows, front, back, counting. Then the guy in front stepped aside and the guy nearest McQueen waved him onward, his hand gesturing low and urgent, right in McQueen’s line of vision.

McQueen eased forward and hauled on the wheel and made the tight left turn, and then the tight right turn, and then he was facing a thousand miles of free-flowing emptiness ahead of him. He breathed out and settled in his seat, and beside him King breathed out and settled in his seat, and McQueen hit the gas and the car accelerated hard and drove on east, fast, like there was no more time to waste.

A minute later and across the barrier Reacher saw a car coming on equally fast in the opposite direction. A dark Ford Crown Victoria, with flashing blue lights behind the grille. A government vehicle, clearly, rushing toward some kind of a big emergency.

Chapter 5

The dark Crown Victoria was an FBI squad car out of the Omaha field office. The duty agent there had taken Sheriff Goodman’s call and had reacted instantly. Goodman had said professionals, which in FBI terms meant organized crime, and organized crime was the FBI’s preferred diet, because reputations were made there, and glory and promotions were earned there. So an on-call Special Agent had been dispatched immediately, a decorated twenty-year Bureau veteran, highly qualified, highly experienced, and highly regarded.

Her name was Julia Sorenson, and she was just shy of forty-seven years old, and she had been in Omaha just shy of forty-seven very happy months. Omaha was not New York or D.C., but it was not a Bureau backwater, either. It was not Siberia. Not even close. For some unknown historical reason crime followed the railroad tracks, and Nebraska had some of the planet’s biggest rail yards within its state lines. So Sorenson’s talents were not being wasted. She was not frustrated and she was not unfulfilled.

She dialed as she drove and called Sheriff Goodman’s cell and told him she was on her way. She arranged to meet him at the crime scene, in one hour’s time.

*  *  *

Goodman was in his car when he took that call. He had one deputy securing the crime scene and babysitting the eyewitness, and all the others were blocking the local roads out of the county. Which left himself as the only available mobile unit. He was out and about, looking for the bright red car.

His county was large but not geographically complicated. A century earlier someone had drawn a square on a map, and the shape had stuck. The square was transected twice, first by a two-lane road running all the way across it left to right, west to east, and again by a two-lane road running bottom to top, south to north. Those two roads met near the middle of the square and made a crossroads, around which a town of eight thousand people had grown up. Cross-county traffic east to west and west to east was light, because the Interstate fifty miles north ran parallel and took most of the load. But traffic north to south and south to north was markedly heavier, because in one direction the Interstate attracted traffic, and in the other direction it dumped it out. It had taken local businesspeople about five minutes to notice that pattern, and three miles out of town to the north they had developed a long ragged strip with gas and diesel and diners and motels and bars and convenience stores and cocktail lounges. Relaxed citizens thought of the place as merely another business district, and uptight citizens called it Sin City. It was subject to exactly the same laws, rules, and regulations as the rest of the county, but for fifty years in an unspoken way those laws and rules and regulations had been enforced with a very light touch. The result was keno and poker machines in the bars, and strippers in the cocktail lounges, and rumors of prostitution in the motels, and a river of tax revenue into the county’s coffers.

Two-way traffic, just like the two-lane road.

Goodman was headed to Sin City. For no moral reason, but simply because the place was the last stop before the distant highway, and it was pocked with abandoned lots and long-dead enterprises and windowless cinder block walls. If you wanted to stash a getaway car and transfer to it unmolested, it was about the only game in town.

He cleared the crossroads and left the respectable neighborhoods behind. Next came a soybean field, and then came a quarter-mile stretch of shoulder with old fourth-hand farm machinery parked on it. All of it was for sale, but most of it had waited so long for a buyer it had rusted solid. Then came more beans, and then came Sin City’s glow in the distance. There were gas stations at each end of the strip, one on the west side of the road and one on the east, both of them as big as stadium parking lots, for the eighteen-wheelers, both of them lit up bright by lights on tall poles, both of them with oil company signs hoisted high enough to see for miles. In between were the diners and the motels and the bars and the convenience stores and the cocktail lounges, all of them variously scattered on both sides of the road at random angles, some of them lit, some of them not, all of them standing alone in parking lots made of crushed stone. Some had survived fifty years, and some had been abandoned to weedy decay long ago.

Goodman started on the east side of the two-lane. He looped past a diner he patronized from time to time, driving slow and one-handed, using the other on the interior handle for the spotlight mounted on his windshield pillar, checking the parked vehicles. He drove around the back of the diner, past the trash bins, and then onward, circling a cocktail lounge, checking a motel, finding nothing. The gas station at the end of the strip had a couple of fender-bent sedans parked near its lube bays, but neither was bright red, and judging by the grime on their windshields both had been there for a good long spell.

Goodman waited for passing traffic and then nosed across the road and started again on the west side, at the north end, where the first establishment was a bar made of cinder blocks painted cream about twenty years before. No windows. Just ventilators on the roof, like mushrooms. No red cars anywhere near it. Next place in line was a cocktail lounge, fairly clean, said to be Sin City’s most salubrious. Goodman turned to figure-eight around the front of it, and his pillar spotlight lagged a little, and there it was.

A bright red import, parked neatly behind the lounge.

Chapter 6

Reacher leaned to his right a little, to see past Don McQueen’s head and through the windshield to the road in front, which put his shoulder nominally in Karen Delfuenso’s space. She leaned a corresponding amount to her own right, hard against her door, to preserve her distance. Reacher saw the flat spread of headlight beams, and beyond them nothing but darkness rushing at him, with a lonely pair of red tail lights far away in the distance. The speedometer was showing eighty miles an hour. Fuel was showing three-quarters full. Engine temperature was showing dead-on normal. There was a Stovebolt logo on the airbag cover, which meant the car was a Chevrolet. Total recorded miles were just over forty thousand. Not a new car, but not an old one, either. It was humming along quite happily.

Reacher settled back in his seat, and Delfuenso tracked his movement. Alan King half turned in the front and said, “My brother was in the army. Peter King. Maybe you knew him.”

“It’s a very big institution,” Reacher said.

King smiled, a little sheepish.

“Sure,” he said. “Dumb comment, I guess.”

“But a common one. Everyone assumes we all knew each other. I don’t know why. I mean, how many people live where you live?”

“A million and a half, maybe.”

“Do you know them all?”

“I don’t even know my neighbors.”

“There you go. What branch was your brother in?”

“He was an artilleryman. He went to the Gulf the first time around.”

“So did I.”

“Then maybe you did know him.”

“We were half a million strong. Everyone went.”

“What was it like?”

“Didn’t your brother tell you?”

“We don’t talk.”

“It was hot,” Reacher said. “That’s most of what I remember.”

“What branch were you in?”

“I was a cop,” Reacher said. “Military Police. Criminal Investigation Division, man and boy.”

King half shrugged, half nodded, and said nothing more. He faced front again and stared out into the darkness.

On the shoulder a sign flashed by: Welcome to Iowa.

Sheriff Goodman aimed his car into the lounge’s rear lot and put his headlights on bright. The parked import was not a Toyota, or a Honda, or a Hyundai, or a Kia. It was a Mazda. A Mazda 6, to be precise. A five-door hatch, but the rear profile was sleek, so it looked pretty much like a regular four-door sedan. It was a late model. It was fire-engine red. It was empty, but not yet dewed over. It hadn’t been parked for long.

Next to it on both sides were plenty of empty spaces. Behind it was fifty yards of weedy gravel, and then basically nothing all the way to the Denver suburbs seven hundred miles to the west. In front of it was the lounge’s rear door, which was a plain steel rectangle set in a mud-colored stucco wall.

A good spot. Not overlooked. No witnesses. Goodman pictured the two guys climbing out of the Mazda, shucking their suit coats, stepping across to their new ride, getting in, taking off.

What new ride?

No idea.

Taking off to where?

Not east or west, because they couldn’t get out of the county east or west without first driving south, back to the crossroads, and no one drives a getaway vehicle back toward the scene of the crime. So they had carried on north, obviously. Because the Interstate was up in that direction, just waiting there for them beyond the dark horizon, like a big anonymous magnet.

Therefore they were long gone. Either they had gotten out of the county minutes before the local northern roadblock had been set up, or they had gotten through it undetected minutes afterward because at that point the deputies were still looking for a bright red car.

Goodman’s own fault, and he knew it.

He got on his radio and told his guys to close down their local roadblocks. He told them exactly why. He told two of them to secure the area behind the cocktail lounge, and he told the rest of them to resume their general duties. He called the highway patrol’s dispatcher, and got no good news. He checked his watch and calculated time and speed and distance, and he breathed in and breathed out, and he put his car in gear, and he set off back to the crime scene again, ready for his appointment with Special Agent Julia Sorenson.

His fault.

The two men were out of the state already.

It was the FBI’s problem now.

Chapter 7

Julia Sorenson found the crossroads easily enough, which was not surprising, because her GPS showed it to be the only cartographical singularity for miles around. She made the right turn, as instructed, and she drove west a hundred yards toward a pool of light, and she saw a concrete bunker with a sheriff’s car and a deputy’s cruiser parked right next to it.

The crime scene, exactly as described.

She understood the cars better than the bunker. The cars were Crown Vics like her own, but painted up in county colors and fitted with push bars front and rear and light bars on their roofs. The bunker was harder to explain. It was rectangular, maybe twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep and ten feet tall. It had a flat concrete roof and no windows. Its door was metal, bowed and scuffed and dented. The whole structure looked old and tired and settled. The concrete itself was worn by wind and weather, spalled and pitted, hollowed out here and there into fist-sized holes. Brown flinty stones had been exposed, some of them smooth, some of them split and shattered.

She parked behind the deputy’s car and climbed out. She was a tall woman, clearly Scandinavian, handsome rather than pretty, with long ash blonde hair, most of which color was natural. She was wearing black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She had solid black shoes on her feet, and she had a black pear-shaped shoulder bag which carried all her stuff except her gun, which was in a holster on her left hip, and her ID wallet, which was in her pocket.

She took out the wallet and flipped it open and walked toward the sheriff. She judged him to be about twenty years older than she was. He was very solid but not tall, like three-quarters of a football player. Not bad for an old guy. He was wearing a winter jacket over his uniform shirt. No gloves, even though the night was cold. They shook hands and stood quiet for a second, facing the concrete bunker, as if wondering where to start.

“First question,” Sorenson said. “What is this place?”

Goodman said, “It’s an old pumping station. It brought water up from the aquifer.”

“Abandoned now?”

Goodman nodded. “The water table fell. We had to dig a deeper hole. The new pump is about a mile from here.”

“Is the dead guy still in there?”

Goodman nodded again. “We waited for you.”

“Who has been in there so far?”

“Just me and the doctor.”

“There’s a lot of blood.”

“Yes,” Goodman said. “There is.”

“Did you step in it?”

“We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.”

“What did you touch?”

“Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.”

Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.

“There’s a light inside,” Goodman said.

She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years groundwater had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of groundwater a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.

She moved on.

Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.

The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a gray sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his rib cage.

He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.

Sorenson said, “How do you see it, Sheriff?”

From outside the door Goodman said, “They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.”

Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.

She asked, “Do you know who he is?”

“Never saw him before.”

“Why did they pull up his shirt?”

“Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.”

“I agree,” Sorenson said. “It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?”

“Eight or nine inches, maybe.”

“Did the eyewitness see a knife?”

“He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.”

Sorenson asked, “Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced .22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.”

“Still loud, in an enclosed space.”

“Pretty far from anywhere.”

“Then I don’t know why they didn’t,” Goodman said.

Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked, “Do you mind if I disturb the body? I want to check for ID.”

Goodman said, “It’s your case.”

“Is it?”

“The perps are out of the state by now.”

“They are if they went east.”

“And if they went west, it’s only a matter of time. They got through the roadblocks, apparently.”

Sorenson said nothing.

“They switched to another car,” Goodman said.

“Or cars,” Sorenson said. “They might have split up and traveled separately.”

Goodman thought about the empty spaces either side of the parked Mazda. Thought about his final APB: Any two men in any kind of vehicle. He said, “I didn’t consider that possibility. I guess I screwed up.”

Sorenson didn’t reassure him. She just picked her way around the blood and squatted down in the driest patch she could find. She put her left hand out behind her for balance and used her right hand on the corpse. She pressed and patted and searched. There was nothing in the shirt pocket. Nothing in the coat, inside or out. Her gloved fingers turned red with rubbery smears. She tried the pants pockets. Nothing there.

She called, “Sheriff? You’re going to have to help me here.”

Goodman picked his way inside, on tiptoe, using long sideways steps, like he was on a ledge a thousand feet up. Sorenson said, “Put your finger in his belt loop. Roll him over. I need to check his back pockets.”

Goodman squatted opposite her, arm’s length from the body, and hooked a finger in a belt loop. He turned his face away and hauled. The dead guy came up on his hip. Blood squelched and dripped, but slowly, because it was drying and mixing with the grit on the floor to make a paste. Sorenson’s gloved hand darted in like a pickpocket, and she poked and prodded and patted.

Nothing there.

“No ID,” she said. “So as of right now, we have ourselves an unidentified victim. Ain’t life grand?”

Goodman let the guy roll back, flat on the floor.

Chapter 8

Jack Reacher was no kind of a legal scholar, but like all working cops he had learned something about the law, mostly its practical, real-world applications, and its tricks and its dodges.

And he had learned the areas where the law was silent.

As in: there was no law that said people who pick up hitchhikers have to tell the truth.

In fact Reacher had learned that harmless fantasy seemed to be irresistible. He figured it was a large part of the reason why drivers stopped at all. He had ridden with obvious cubicle drones who claimed to be managers, and managers who claimed to be entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who claimed to be successful, and employees who said they owned the company, and nurses who said they were doctors, and doctors who said they were surgeons. People liked to spread their wings a little. They liked to inhabit a different life for an hour or two, testing it, tasting it, trying out their lines, basking in the glow.

No harm, no foul.

All part of the fun.

But Alan King’s lies were different.

There was no element of self-aggrandizement in what he was saying. The guy wasn’t making himself bigger or better or smarter or sexier. He was telling stupid, trivial, technical lies for no clear reason at all.

As in: the blue denim shirts. They were not a corporate brand. They were not crisp attractive items with embroidered logos above the pockets. They had never been worn before, or laundered. They were cheap junk from a dollar store, straight from the shelf, straight from the plastic packet. Reacher knew, because they were the kind of shirts he wore himself.

As in: King claimed they hadn’t stopped in three hours, but the gas gauge was showing three-quarters full. Which implied the Chevy could run twelve hours on a single tank. Which was close to a thousand miles, at highway speeds. Which was impossible.

And: the water King had given him with Karen Delfuenso’s aspirin was still cold from a refrigerator. Which would be impossible, after three hours in a car with the heater blasting.

Lies.

As in: King claimed somewhere in Nebraska as his residence, but then said there were a million and a half people living where he lived. Which was impossible. A million and a half was close to Nebraska’s entire population. Omaha had about four hundred thousand people, and Lincoln had two-fifty. There were only nine U.S. cities with populations of more than a million, and eight of them were either emphatically bigger or smaller than a million and a half. Only Philadelphia was close to that number.

So were these guys really from Philly? Or did King mean a metro area? In which case Philadelphia was too big, but all kinds of other places would slide up the scale and become possibilities. Columbus would fit the bill, maybe, or Las Vegas, or Milwaukee, or San Antonio, or the Norfolk–Virginia Beach–Newport News sprawl.

But not anyplace in Nebraska.

Not even close.

And why wasn’t Karen Delfuenso talking? She had said I’ve got one, about the aspirin, and she had said her name during the mutual introductions, and then she had said nothing more. Reacher himself was quite capable of silence for hours at a time, but even he had been making an effort in terms of polite conversation. Delfuenso looked like the kind of woman who would join in with such social proprieties. But she hadn’t.

Why not?

Not my problem, Reacher thought. His problem was to get himself on a bus to Virginia, and he was closing in on that target at close to eighty miles an hour, more than a hundred feet a second. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Julia Sorenson hopped around outside the bunker and peeled her plastic booties off, and then she sealed them in a bag with her gloves. Evidence, possibly, and certainly a biohazard. Then she found her phone and called out full-boat teams of FBI medical examiners and crime scene investigators.

Her case.

She got in the back of the deputy’s car with the eyewitness. No reason to haul the poor guy out into the cold. Goodman got in the front and the deputy twisted around behind the wheel. It was a regular little conference, two and two, separated by the bulletproof shield.

The eyewitness was a man of about fifty, whiskery, not well groomed, dressed in winter farm clothes. He ran through his story with the kind of imprecision Sorenson expected. She was well aware of the limitations of eyewitness testimony. As a Quantico trainee she had been sent to interview a doctor suspected of Medicare fraud. She had waited for her appointment in his crowded waiting room. A guy had burst in to rob the place for drugs, firing a handgun, rushing here, rushing there, rushing out. Afterward, of course, she found out the whole thing was staged. The doctor was an actor, the robber was an actor, the handgun rounds were blanks, and everyone in the waiting room was a law enforcement trainee. There was no consensus on what the robber looked like. Absolutely none at all. Short, tall, fat, thin, black, white, no one really remembered. Since that morning Sorenson had taken eyewitness testimony with a pinch of salt.

She asked, “Did you see the man in the green coat arrive?”

The guy said, “No. I saw him on the sidewalk, that’s all, heading for the old pumping station, right there.”

“Did you see the red car arrive?”

“No. It was already there when I looked.”

“Were the two men in the black suits in it?”

“No, they were on the sidewalk too.”

“Following the other man?”

The guy nodded. “About ten feet back. Maybe twenty.”

“Can you describe them?”

“They were just two guys. In suits.”

“Old? Young?”

“Neither. They were just guys.”

“Short? Tall?”

“Average.”

“Black or white?”

“White.”

“Fat or thin?”

“Average.”

Sorenson asked, “Any distinguishing marks?”

The guy said, “I don’t know what that is.”

“Anything special about their faces? Beards, scars, piercings? Tattoos? Like that.”

“They were just guys.”

“What about the color of their hair? Was it light or dark?”

“Their hair?” the guy said. “I don’t know. It was hair-colored, I guess.”

Sorenson asked, “Did you see a knife when they went in?”

“No,” the guy said.

“Did you see a knife when they came out?”

“No.”

“Did they have blood on them?”

“I guess one of their suit jackets looked wet in a couple of spots. But it was black, not red. Like it could have been water. On a black suit, I mean.”

Sorenson said, “The street lights are yellow.”

The guy glanced out his window, as if to confirm it, and said, “Yes.”

“So blood might have looked black, in the yellow light.”

“I guess.”

Sorenson asked, “Did the red car belong to the two men?”

The guy said, “They got in it, lady.”

“But how did they look when they got in it? Like they were totally familiar with it? Or did they fumble around?”

Goodman looked a question from the front seat. Sorenson said, “The dead guy had nothing in his pockets. Including no car keys. So how did he get there? Maybe the red car was his.”

Goodman said, “Then how did the two men get there? They didn’t walk. It’s cold, and they weren’t wearing coats.”

“Maybe they all came together.”

The eyewitness said, “I don’t know, lady. They got in the car and drove away. That’s all I saw.”

So Goodman let the eyewitness make his way home to bed, and then he drove Sorenson north, to let her take a look at the abandoned red car.

Chapter 9

Reacher’s eyes were closed and his nose wasn’t working, so taste and touch and hearing were taking up the sensory slack. He could taste copper and iron in his mouth, where blood was leaking down the back of his throat. He could feel the rear bench’s mouse-fur upholstery under his right hand fingertips, synthetic and dense and microscopically harsh. His left hand was in his lap, and he could feel the rough cotton of his pants, thick and fibrous and still slick with the manufacturer’s pre-wash treatments. He could hear the loud zing of concrete sections under the tires, and the hum of the motor, and the whine of its drive belts, and the rush of air against the windshield pillars and the door mirrors. He could hear the give and take of seat springs as he and the others floated small quarter-inches with the ride. He could hear Don McQueen breathing slow and controlled as he concentrated, and Karen Delfuenso a little anxious, and Alan King changing to a shorter, sharper rhythm. The guy was thinking about something. He was coming up to a decision. Reacher heard the scrape of cloth against a wrist. The guy was checking his watch.

Then King turned around, and Reacher opened his eyes.

King said, “I really want to get to Chicago before dawn.”

Suits me, Reacher thought. Plenty of morning departures from Chicago. South through Illinois, east through Kentucky, and then Virginia is right there. He said, “That should be possible. We’re going fast. It’s wintertime. Dawn will be late.”

King said, “Plan was Don drives the first half, and I drive the second half. Now I’m thinking we should split it into thirds. You could drive the middle third.”

“Not Karen?” Reacher said.

No response from Delfuenso.

“Karen doesn’t drive,” King said.

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’m always happy to help.”

“Safer that way.”

“You haven’t seen my driving yet.”

“It’s an empty road, straight and wide.”

“OK,” Reacher said again.

“We’ll switch next time we stop for gas.”

“Which will be when?”

“Soon.”

“Why?” Reacher asked. “You’ve been driving for three hours but the tank is still three-quarters full. At that rate we could get halfway to New York before we need gas. Maybe more.”

King paused a beat. Blinked. Said, “You’re an observant man, Mr. Reacher.”

Reacher said, “I try to be.”

“This is my car,” King said. “I think you can trust me to know its quirks and its foibles. The gas gauge is faulty. There’s a malfunction. All the action is in the first little bit. Then it falls off a cliff.”

Reacher said nothing.

King said, “Believe me, we’ll have to stop soon.”

The two deputies securing the area behind the cocktail lounge had parked their cruisers at matching angles, pretty far from the red Mazda, as if the car was dangerous in itself. As if it was radioactive, or liable to explode. Goodman nosed his Crown Vic into the implied no-go triangle and stopped twenty feet from the target. Sorenson said, “No witnesses came forward here, I assume?”

“Today isn’t my birthday,” Goodman said. “It’s not all my Christmases rolled into one, either.”

“Is this lounge abandoned too?”

“No, but it closes at midnight. It’s a respectable place.”

“Compared to what?”

“The other lounges up here.”

“What time would the red car have gotten here?”

“Earliest? Not before twenty past midnight. Too late for witnesses.”

“I’m guessing you never worked in a bar, did you?” Sorenson asked.

“No,” Goodman said. “I never did. Why?”

“Just because the customers go home at midnight, it doesn’t mean the staff does too. You can be sure some poor dumb waitress will have been here for a little while afterward. Do you know the owner?”

“Sure.”

“So call him.”

“Her,” Goodman said. “Missy Smith. She’s been here forever. She’s a well-known character. She won’t be pleased if I wake her up.”

Sorenson said, “I won’t be pleased if you don’t.”

So Goodman dialed his cell and stumped around near his own car while Sorenson went to take a look at the Mazda. It had North Carolina plates, and a little barcode strip on the rear window, and it looked neat and clean and fresh inside. She called in the plates and the VIN to her Omaha office, and she saw Sheriff Goodman writing on his palm with a ballpoint pen, with his phone trapped up between his ear and his shoulder. She saw him put his pen away and click off his call, and then he said to her, “Missy Smith left here at midnight exactly, with the last of the customers.”

But there was no triumph in his voice. No told-you-so tone.

“And?” Sorenson asked.

“One of the waitresses stayed behind to clean up. Apparently there’s a rotational system. Every night one of them gets paid until half past midnight.”

“And that’s her number you got on your hand?”

“Yes, it is. Her cell phone.”

“This Mazda is a rental car,” Sorenson said. “Out of state plates, barcode for the return reader, valeted twice a week.”

“Nearest car rental depot would be the Omaha airport. I could call it in.”

“I already did. You should call the waitress.”

So Goodman put his left palm in his headlight beam and dialed his cell with his right-hand thumb.

Chapter 10

Not far into Iowa the Interstate went down to two lanes and got long and lonely. Exits were many miles from each other. Each one was an event in its own right. Each one was preceded by three blue boards, spaced out in sequence hundreds of feet apart, detailing first gas, and then food, and then accommodations, in a style that was half information and half advertisement. Some boards were blank. Some places had food but no gas, or gas but no motel, or an inn but no diner. Reacher knew the grammar. He had traveled most of the Interstate system. Some boards would be deceptive, leading drivers fifteen or twenty miles down dark rural roads to places that would be shut when they got there. Others would be ahead of tight knots of establishments where a driver would be spoiled for choice, Exxon or Texaco or Sunoco, Subway or McDonald’s or Cracker Barrel, Marriott or Red Roof or the Comfort Inn. It was all about lights in the distance. The deceptive exits would be dark, and the promising ones would have a red and yellow glow on the horizon.

They drove on, numb and silent and patient, and eventually Alan King chose a no-name turn not long after Des Moines.

He said, “This one will be fine, Don.”

There was a single brand on each of the blue boards ahead of the exit, all different. Reacher recognized none of them specifically, but all of them generically. He knew the grammar. There would be a no-name gas station, and a microwave oven and an urn of stewed coffee in a dismal hut across the street, and a faded mom-and-pop motel a mile down the road. He could see the gas station lights a mile away, blue and white in the nighttime mist. A big place, probably, set up for trucks as well as cars.

Don McQueen slowed well ahead of the turn, like a jumbo jet on approach. He checked his mirror and used his signal, even though he must have known there was no one closer than a mile behind him. The asphalt on the ramp was coarse and loud. The ramp led to a two-lane county road, and then the gas station was a hundred feet away to the right, to the south, on the far shoulder, to the east. It was a big place in terms of area, but sketchy in terms of facilities. Six pumps and an air hose and an interior vacuum for regular-sized vehicles, and a separate area with truck pumps and puddles of spilled diesel. No canopy. A small pay hut, and a bathroom block standing alone and distant on the edge of the lot. No food.

But sure enough, directly across the street from the gas station was a long low ramshackle barn-shaped building, with Food And Drink All Day All Night hand-painted in white on the slope of its roof, in shaky letters close to six feet high. Beyond the barn was a smaller version of the blue accommodation sign, with a discreet arrow pointing onward into the darkness toward the motel. There was knee-high night mist above the roadway, with the glitter of ice crystals in it.

McQueen drove the hundred feet on the two-lane and turned in at the gas station and eased to a stop, facing the way he had come, with the flank of the car next to a pump. He shut the motor down and dropped his hands off the wheel and sat still in the sudden silence.

Alan King said, “Mr. Reacher, you go get us all coffee, and we’ll fill the car.”

Reacher said, “No, I’ll get the gas. Seems only fair.”

King smiled. “Gas, ass, or grass, right? The price of hitchhiking?”

“I’m willing to pay my way.”

“And I’d let you,” King said. “But I don’t buy the gas. Not for a trip like this. This is company business, so we spend company money. I couldn’t let you subsidize the corporation I work for.”

“Then at least let me pump it. You shouldn’t have to do all the work.”

“You’re about to drive three hundred miles. That’s work enough.”

“It’s cold out there.”

King said, “I think you want to see how much gas goes in the car. Am I right? You don’t believe my gauge is busted?”

Reacher said nothing.

King said, “I believe it would be minimally courteous to trust a simple factual statement made by the guy who has offered to get you a considerable part of the way to your destination.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Coffee,” King said. “Two with cream and one spoonful of sugar, plus whatever Karen wants.”

Delfuenso didn’t speak. There was a beat of silence, and King said, “Nothing for Karen, then.”

Reacher climbed out of the car and headed across the two-lane.

Sheriff Goodman’s call went straight to voice mail. He said, “The waitress’s phone is switched off.”

“Of course it is,” Sorenson said. “She’s fast asleep. She’s tired after a long evening’s work. Does she have a landline?”

“The cell was the only number Missy Smith gave me.”

“So call the Smith woman back and get an address. We’ll have to go bang on her door.”

“I can’t call Missy Smith again.”

“I think you can.” But right then Sorenson’s own cell started ringing. A plain electronic sound. No tune. No download. She answered, and listened, and said, “OK,” and clicked off again.

“The Mazda was rented at the Denver airport,” she said. “By a lone individual. My people say his DL and his credit card were phony.”

“Why Denver?” Goodman asked. “If you wanted to come here, wouldn’t you fly into Omaha and rent a car there?”

“Denver is much bigger and much more anonymous. Their rental traffic must be twenty times Omaha’s.”

Her phone rang again. The same plain electronic sound. She answered and this time Goodman saw her back go straight. She was talking to a superior. Universal body language. She said, “Say that again, please?” Then she listened a little, and then she said, “Yes, sir.”

And then she clicked off the call.

She said, “Now this thing just got weird.”

Goodman asked, “How?”

“My guys over at your pumping station already transmitted the dead guy’s fingerprints. And they already came back. And along the way they lit up some computer at the State Department.”

“The State Department? They aren’t your people. That’s foreign affairs. You belong to the Justice Department.”

“I don’t belong to anyone.”

“But why the State Department?”

“We don’t know yet. The dead guy could be one of theirs. Or known to them.”

“Like a diplomat?”

“Or someone else’s diplomat.”

“In Nebraska?”

“They’re not chained to their desks.”

“He didn’t look foreign.”

“He didn’t look like anything. He was covered in blood.”

“So what do we do?”

“Maximum effort,” Sorenson said. “That’s what they’re asking for. Where are the two guys now?”

“Now? They could be in a million different places.”

“So it’s time to gamble. Before I get taken off this thing. Or supervised. One or the other is sure to happen first thing in the morning. That’s what maximum effort means. So suppose the two guys are still on the road?”

“But which road? There are a million roads.”

“Suppose they stayed on the Interstate?”

“Would they?”

“They’re probably not local. They’re probably running home right now, which could be a big distance.”

“In which direction?”

“Either one.”

“You said they might be traveling separately.”

“It’s a possibility, but a small one. Statistics show most paired perpetrators stick together after the commission of a serious crime. Human nature. They don’t necessarily trust each other to deal with the aftermath.”

“Statistics?”

“We find them to be a useful guide.”

“OK, if they’re still together, and if they’re still on the Interstate, and if they went west, they must be about a quarter of the way back to Denver by now. And if they went east, they must be well into Iowa.”

“Speed?”

“Close to eighty, probably. Most Highway Patrols don’t get very excited by anything less than that. Not around here. Unless there’s weather. But it’s pretty clear tonight.”

Maximum effort. Gamble. Sorenson thought hard for thirty seconds and then got back on her phone and called up two final Hail Mary roadblocks on the Interstate, both to be in place in less than one hour’s time, the first in the west, a quarter of the way back to Denver plus eighty miles, and the second in the east, well into Iowa plus eighty miles. Both were to be on the lookout for two men, unspecified age, average appearance, no distinguishing marks, possible bloodstained clothing, possible possession of a bladed weapon showing signs of recent use.

Chapter 11

Reacher came out of the food shack carrying four cups of coffee in a pressed cardboard tray. He fully expected three of them to be wasted. He fully expected the car to be gone. But it wasn’t. It had moved off the pump, but it was waiting for him near the air hose and the interior vacuum, with its lights on and its engine running. Alan King was in the front passenger seat and Karen Delfuenso was behind him. Don McQueen was out of the car, standing near the driver’s door, looking cold and tired. Reacher had been right about his height and build. The guy was about six feet and slender, all arms and legs.

Reacher carried the coffee across the two-lane and gave one of the cream-and-sugars to McQueen. Then he tracked around the hood and gave the other to Alan King. Then he opened Delfuenso’s door and held out the third cup. He said, “Black, no sugar.”

Delfuenso hesitated a second, and then she took the cup. She said, “Thank you. That’s how I like it. How on earth did you know?”

Thirteen words. Which was eight more than he had heard from her so far, ever since they had met. He thought: Everyone knows thin women in their early forties don’t use cream or sugar. He said, “It was just a lucky guess.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

He stepped over to the trash barrel next to the vacuum and dumped the cardboard tray. Don McQueen opened the driver’s door for him, like a little ceremony. He slid into the seat and put his coffee in the cup holder. McQueen got in behind him.

Reacher found the lever and racked the seat back for legroom. It hit McQueen in the knees. Reacher looked at Alan King and said, “Why don’t you trade places with Mr. McQueen? We’ve got the two tallest people one behind the other here.”

King said, “I always ride in front.”

“Always?”

“Without exception.”

So Reacher shrugged and adjusted the mirror and fastened his seat belt and got himself comfortable. Then he nudged the lever into Drive, and touched the gas, and eased out onto the two-lane, and drove the hundred feet, and took the ramp, and got back on the highway.

More proof they hadn’t been driving three hours.

No one had used the restroom.

Sheriff Goodman clicked off his cell and said, “Now Missy Smith has got her phone shut down.”

Sorenson nodded. “It’s late. The civilians are asleep. Do you know where she lives?”

No answer from Goodman. Wariness in his silence.

“Obviously you know where she lives,” Sorenson said. “She’s been here forever. She’s a well known character. We’ll have to go bang on her door, before we go bang on the waitress’s door.”

Goodman said, “We can’t go bang on Missy Smith’s door. Not in the middle of the night.”

Sorenson didn’t answer that. She had taken a small sideways step, leftward from the red Mazda’s driver’s-side flank, and she was looking at an angle through the gap between the cocktail lounge and the cinder block bar. She said, “I can see the gas station from here. Across the street.”

Goodman said, “So?”

“Anyone over there could see me.”

“You thinking about witnesses? We’d be pretty lucky if some long-haul trucker was pumping his gas at the exact minute our guys arrived here and took off again. And was gazing in the right direction, and was paying close attention instead of scratching his butt. And anyway, how would we find him?”

“No, I’m thinking the gas station might have cameras. Maybe wide-angle. Like fisheyes. They might see over here.”

Goodman said nothing.

“Does the gas station have cameras?”

“I don’t know,” Goodman said.

“It might,” Sorenson said. “Some of those big trucks take a hundred gallons. And times are hard right now. Drivers might be tempted to take off before paying. Oil companies wouldn’t like that. They might take defensive measures.”

“We should go find out.”

“We will,” Sorenson said. “And then we’ll go bang on Missy Smith’s door. Don’t think we won’t. The old gal can sleep a little more, but not forever.”

Reacher was an adequate driver, but nothing more than that. Physically his body worked only two ways: either extremely slow or extremely fast. Most of the time he rumbled along with typical big-man languor, often appearing quiet and lazy, sometimes appearing positively comatose. Then if necessary he could explode into furious action, for as long as it took, a blur of hands and feet, and then he would lapse back into torpor. He had no middle setting, and a middle setting was what good driving needed. Action and reaction had to be prompt but controlled, alert but measured, rapid but considered, and it was hard for Reacher to identify that kind of middle ground. Typically he found himself either twitching at a danger two hundred yards ahead, or ignoring it completely, on the grounds that it might go away by itself. He had never killed or injured anyone with a car, except deliberately, but he was a realistic man and didn’t kid himself: his driving was much worse than average.

But as promised the Interstate was straight and wide, back up to three lanes again by that point, and the big soft Chevrolet held its line very well. Nighttime traffic was very light and neither action or reaction was much called for. In fact the biggest challenge was to stay awake, but Reacher was good at that. He could grind along at some basic level of consciousness more or less forever. He kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and he checked his mirrors regularly every twenty or so seconds, first the passenger door, then the windshield mirror, then the driver’s door, then the windshield again. Behind his right shoulder Karen Delfuenso sat awake but silent, tense and anxious, and next to her Reacher could hear Don McQueen breathing slow, not quite asleep but not quite awake either. Alan King was awake in the passenger seat, looking mute and morose and a little preoccupied. His head was half turned, so he could see the road ahead and Reacher together, and the speedometer too, Reacher thought.

So Reacher drove on, at an approximately legal speed, with the crystal pendant on the key tapping him on the knee from time to time, as the car rocked and swayed.

It turned out that the gas station had four cameras, all of them monochrome, none of them color. They fed a hard disk recorder located on a shelf in the booth behind the register, right next to the cigarettes. The four separate feeds were displayed in real time on a quad-split LCD screen to the left of the cash drawer.

Three of the cameras were of no interest to Sorenson. The first and the second were mounted low down at the vehicle entrance and exit, to capture plate numbers. They were zoomed in too tight to show any background. The third camera was mounted in the ceiling of the cashier’s booth itself, high up behind the guy’s right shoulder, to make sure he wasn’t ripping the place off. Standard practice, in a cash business. Trust but verify.

But the fourth camera was better. Marginally. It was a black glass hemisphere mounted high on a bracket halfway up the sign pole. It was dialed back to a wide angle view of the whole property. For insurance purposes, the cashier said. If two semi trucks backed up and got their trailers tangled, it was useful to know which one had moved first. If someone stole gas or diesel, it was useful to show the court a composite narrative, the plate number entering, the guy pumping, the guy driving away, the plate number leaving.

The field of view from the fourth camera was wide enough to show the county two-lane heading north and south, and the gravel patch beyond its far shoulder, in front of the cinder block bar, and the cinder block bar itself, and part of Missy Smith’s cocktail lounge, and the gap between those two buildings. The way the fishbowl distortion tilted the picture made it look like the camera was peering more or less horizontally into the gap. Bright pools of light were visible on the live feed, right at the edge of the shot, from the deputies’ parked vehicles.

Picture quality was not great. The nighttime world was shown in shades of gray. Lights from passing cars bled and smeared and fluoresced and lagged their sources’ lateral movement.

But it was better than nothing.

Maximum effort. Gamble.

“OK,” Sorenson said. “Show me how to rewind this thing.”

Chapter 12

The gas station night cashier was a willing kid, pretty smart, and certainly young enough to be right at home with technology. He hit a button and made the fourth camera’s feed go full screen on the LCD monitor. He hit another button and brought up plus and minus signs next to the time code. He showed Sorenson which arrow on the keyboard matched which sign. He told her to hold the arrows down to make the recording jump backward or forward in fifteen-minute segments, or to tap them once to make it run backward or forward at normal speed.

Sorenson started by jumping the recording all the way back to just before midnight. Then she let it run. She and Goodman crowded shoulder to shoulder in front of the screen, and tried to make sense of what they were seeing at the edge of the shot. The picture was vague and soupy, like cheap night vision, but gray, not green. Headlights flared and burned. The cinder block bar had no cars parked outside, but Missy Smith’s lounge had at least three.

There was nothing visible through the gap between the buildings.

“Does this thing have fast forward?” Sorenson asked.

“Hold down the shift key,” the kid said.

Sorenson sped through the next five minutes. The time code hit thirty seconds before midnight. She tapped the arrow for normal speed and watched. Nothing happened at the cinder block bar. But customers started coming out of the cocktail lounge, vague human shapes, grays on gray, smeared by the oily motion of the digital video. They climbed into cars, lights blazed, cars reversed, cars swooped forward. Most of them went south. Last thing out through the lounge’s front door was a stout shape that looked female. It climbed into what Sorenson took to be a Cadillac, and disappeared.

Two minutes past midnight.

“That was Missy Smith,” Goodman said.

The neon in the windows clicked off behind her.

The edge of the screen stayed quiet for sixteen more minutes.

Then at eighteen minutes past midnight there was a moving flare of light in the gap between the lounge and the bar. Headlight beams on bright, almost certainly, projecting forward from a car approaching over rough ground, from the left of the screen, from the south, over the crushed stone behind the buildings. The beams slowed, and then paused, and then turned tight through ninety degrees, toward the patient camera, whiting out briefly as they hit the lens head-on, and then they continued their lateral sweep and came to rest out of sight behind the lounge.

“That’s them,” Goodman said. “Has to be.”

Sorenson used two fingers and toggled between the forward and backward buttons and isolated the brief sequence where part of the car was visible in the gap. There wasn’t much to see. Just the bright lights, and a blur of a three-quarter view of what must have been the car’s hood behind them, and then the flash as the lights hit the camera directly, and then a blur of what must have been the car’s driver’s-side flank, and then nothing, as the car parked out of sight and killed its headlights.

The car had looked a light, luminous gray, which could have been red in real life.

“OK,” Sorenson said. “They drove north from the crime scene, and they pulled into the back lots at the south end of the strip, and they drove all the way up behind the buildings, and they parked at the lounge’s back door, and they switched vehicles. We need to know what kind of car was waiting there. So we really need to talk to that waitress.”

“Too early,” Goodman said. “The waitress didn’t get off for another twelve minutes. They must have been long gone by then.”

“You never worked in a bar, did you? We established that, right? The owner had already gone home. The cat was away, so the mice could play. The staff is paid for thirty extra minutes, but they don’t necessarily work for thirty extra minutes. They get through as fast as they can and then they get the hell out of there. She could have been leaving right at that moment. And even if she wasn’t, she could have been in and out the back with trash or empty bottles.”

“OK,” Goodman said.

Sorenson said, “Let’s see how long our window is, before they leave again.”

She tapped the forward arrow and the time code started spooling onward again. She counted in her head, five seconds for them to get out of the Mazda, five seconds to unlock the new vehicle, five seconds to get in, five seconds to get settled, five seconds to start it up.

She leaned closer to the screen and studied the angled view into the gap, ready to see the new vehicle crawl left-to-right across the empty space as it prepared to loop north behind the cinder block bar on its way back to the road. Its lights would be tangential to the camera’s fishbowl field of view. There would be no flare. No whiteout. There would be at least one frame where most of the vehicle’s front-to-back length would be clearly captured. It might be possible to determine make and model. It might even be possible to guess at color.

Sorenson watched.

And saw nothing.

No vehicle slid north through the gap. Not in the first minute, or the second, or the third, or the fourth or the fifth. She hit fast forward and raced onward. Nothing happened. The picture stayed immobile, a tableau, a still life, absolutely no activity at all, uninterrupted for almost fifteen whole minutes, until a random pick-up truck drove by on the two-lane, heading south, and crossed with a random sedan driving north. After that brief blur of excitement the screen lapsed back to stillness.

Sorenson said, “So where the hell did they go? South? Behind the buildings, all the way back to the other end of the strip?”

Goodman said, “South makes no sense at all.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right,” Sorenson said. She pictured in her mind her Hail Mary roadblocks on the Interstate, hundreds of miles apart, each one of them complicated and expensive and disruptive, each one of them a potential case-breaker or career-breaker, depending on results, or lack of them.

Gamble.

Chapter 13

The Interstate through Iowa stayed flat and ruler straight for mile after mile. Traffic was light but consistent. Allegedly a million Americans were on the move at any one time, night and day, and clearly Iowa was getting its share of that million, but a minority share, probably proportional to its population. Reacher held the Chevy a little under eighty, just rolling along through the empty vastness, relaxed, at ease, surfing on the subdued growl of the motor and the rush of the air and the whine of the tires, sometimes overtaking, sometimes being overtaken, always counting off each mile and each minute in his head, always picturing the Greyhound depot in Chicago in his mind. He had been there before, many times, on West Harrison on the near South Side, a decent place full of heavy diesel clatter and constant departures. Or maybe he could try a train from Union Station. He had once ridden the train eighteen hours from Chicago to New York. It had been a pleasant trip. And there were bound to be routes that continued onward to D.C., which was pretty close to where he ultimately wanted to be.

He drove on, fingers and toes.

Then all over again brake lights flared red up ahead, like a solid wall, and in the distance beyond them there were flashing blue and red lights from a big bunch of cop cars. Beside him Alan King groaned in disgust and closed his eyes. Karen Delfuenso had no audible reaction. Don McQueen slumbered on. Reacher lifted off the gas and the car slowed. He got over into the right-hand lane well ahead of the jockeying. He braked hard and came to a stop behind a white Dodge pick-up truck. Its big blank tailgate loomed up like a cliff. It had a bumper sticker that read: Don’t Like My Driving? Call 1-800-BITE-ME. Reacher looked in the mirror and saw a semi ease to a stop behind him. He could feel the beat of its idling engine. Alongside him the middle lane slowed and then jammed solid. Beyond it and a second later the left-hand lane jammed up in turn.

The Chevy’s lights against the Dodge’s white tailgate threw brightness backward into the car. Alan King turned his face away from it, toward his window, and tucked his chin down into his shoulder. Reacher heard Don McQueen cough and snore and move. He looked in the mirror again and saw the guy had thrown his forearm up over his eyes.

Karen Delfuenso was still wide awake and upright. Her face was drawn and pale. Her eyes were on his, in the mirror.

And she was blinking.

She was blinking rapidly, and deliberately, over and over again, and then she was jerking her head sideways, sometimes left, sometimes right, and then she was starting up with the blinking again, sometimes once, or twice, or three times, or more, once as many as nine times, and once as many as thirteen straight flutters of her eyelids.

Reacher stared in surprise.

Then the semi sounded its horn long and loud and Reacher glanced forward again to find the Dodge had moved on. He touched the gas and crept after it. Evidently the Iowa cops had arranged the obstacle the same way the Nebraska cops had. Everyone was cramming over into the right-hand lane. A mess, potentially, except that the cops had two officers out and about on foot, with red-shrouded flashlights. They were regulating the maneuvers. And some kind of Midwestern goodwill or common sense was in play. There was plenty of after you, neighbor stuff going on. Reacher figured the delay might amount to ten minutes. That was all. No big deal.

He glanced in the mirror.

Karen Delfuenso started blinking again.

* * *

Sorenson replayed the critical quarter-hour window two more times, once backward and once forward, both at high speed. As before she saw the Mazda arrive, and as before she then saw nothing at all until the random traffic blew by on the two-lane fifteen minutes later, the pick-up truck heading south and the sedan heading north.

Gamble.

“South still makes no sense?” she asked.

“No sense at all,” Goodman said.

“Are you sure?”

“There’s nothing there.”

“Bet your pension?”

“And my house.”

“Shirt off your back?”

“My firstborn grandchild, if you like.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “They went north. And you know what? We saw them do it.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” Sorenson said, and she froze the picture on the random traffic, as the northbound sedan passed in front of the southbound pick-up truck. She said, “That’s them, in the sedan. Has to be. It’s the only vehicle going north. They spent fifteen minutes doing something else, and then they got back on the road by looping around south of the lounge, not north of it. It’s the only logical explanation.”

“Fifteen minutes doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fifteen minutes is a long time to delay a getaway for no reason.”

“Then obviously there was a reason.”

The kid behind the register said, “I heard a car alarm at about twenty past midnight.”

Sorenson stared at him.

She said, “And you didn’t think to mention that before?”

“Why would I? You didn’t ask me. You didn’t explain yourselves. You still haven’t. And I only just remembered anyway.”

“Twenty past midnight?”

“About.”

“Definitely a car alarm?”

“No question. Pretty loud, too. The highlight of my night so far. Until you guys showed up.”

“Where was it?”

The kid waved his hand.

“Over there,” he said. “Could have been behind Missy Smith’s lounge, for sure.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “Thank you.”

Goodman asked her, “So what are we saying? They spent fifteen minutes stealing a getaway car?”

“Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But whatever, a car alarm going off is another good reason why the waitress might have stuck her head out the back. She would have been worried about her own car, if nothing else. We have to find her, right now. It’s time to go bang on some doors.”

Goodman checked his watch.

“We better hurry,” he said. “Those guys will be hitting the roadblocks about now. You should have put them a hundred miles out, not eighty.”

Sorenson didn’t reply.

Chapter 14

Nine minutes, Reacher thought. Not ten. He had overestimated the likely delay, but only slightly. The cops on foot had done a fine job of corralling the approaching flow, and the cops at the roadblock itself were evidently fast and efficient. Traffic was moving through at a reasonable clip. Reacher couldn’t see the search procedure in detail, because of the Dodge pick-up’s bulk right in front of him, but clearly the protocol was nothing more than quick and dirty. He rolled on, and paused, and rolled on, and paused, with the red-blue glare ahead of him getting brighter and fiercer with every car length he traveled. Next to him Alan King seemed to have gone to sleep, still with his face turned away and his chin ducked down. Don McQueen still had his arm over his eyes. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, but she had stopped blinking.

A hundred yards to go, Reacher thought. Three hundred feet. Maybe fifteen vehicles in the queue ahead. Eight minutes. Maybe seven.

Missy Smith lived in what is left when a family farm gets sold to an agricultural corporation. A driveway, a house, a car barn, a small square yard in front and a small square yard in back, all enclosed by a new rail fence, with ten thousand flat acres of someone else’s soybeans beyond. Sheriff Goodman drove up the driveway and parked twenty feet from the house. He lit up his roof lights. The first thing people did after a nighttime knock on the door was to look out their bedroom window. Quicker to let the lights make the explanations, rather than get all tangled up in a whole lot of yelling and hollering.

Sorenson stayed in the car and let Goodman go make the inquiry. His county, his population, his job. She saw him knock, and she saw some upstairs curtains twitch, and she saw the front door open four minutes later, and she saw the old gal standing in the hallway, in a robe. Her hair was neatly brushed. Hence the four minutes.

Sorenson saw Goodman bow and scrape, and she saw him ask the question, and she saw Missy Smith answer it. She saw Goodman write something down, and she saw him read it back for confirmation, and she saw the old gal nod. She saw the front door close, and she saw the hallway light go off, and she saw Goodman trot back to the car.

“Miles from here,” he said. “As luck would have it.”

He turned the car around and headed back to the road.

The white Dodge pick-up truck got through the roadblock with no trouble at all. Cops peered into it from every angle and checked the load bed and then waved it onward. Reacher buzzed his window down and put his elbow on the door and squinted against the bright red-blue strobes and rolled the Chevy forward. A grizzled old trooper with stripes on his arm stepped up. He bent at the waist and scanned the car’s interior.

Looking for something.

But not finding it.

So the guy started to straighten up again, already dismissing the Chevy, already thinking about the next car in line, but his eyes came to rest on Reacher’s face, and they widened a little, as if in sympathy or wonder or appreciation, and he said, “Ouch.”

“My nose?” Reacher said.

“That must have stung.”

“You should see the other guy.”

“Where is he now?”

“Not in your state.”

“That’s good to know,” the trooper said. “You drive safe tonight, sir.”

Reacher asked, “Who are you looking for, captain?”

“That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m only a sergeant.”

“OK, who are you looking for, sergeant?”

The guy paused.

Then he smiled.

“Not you,” he said. “That’s for sure. Not you.”

And then he moved a foot toward the rear of the car, ready to greet the next in line, and Reacher buzzed his window up and threaded through the improvised chicane, and then he got settled in his seat and took off again, accelerating through forty, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, with nothing at all in front of him except darkness and the white Dodge’s tail lights already half a mile ahead.

Chapter 15

The address Missy Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman turned out to be what is left when a family farm gets sold to a home-building corporation. The farmland itself had been added to some giant remote holding, but a shallow acre had been retained alongside the road and a row of four small ranch houses had been built on it. They were maybe twenty years old. In the moonlight they all looked bravely maintained and in reasonable shape. They were all identical. They all had white siding, gray roofs, front lawns, short straight driveways, and mailboxes at the curb, on stout wooden posts.

But there was one clear difference between them.

Three of the houses had cars on their driveways.

The fourth didn’t.

And the fourth was the address Missy Smith had given to Sheriff Goodman.

“Not good,” Sorenson said.

“No,” Goodman said.

All four houses were dark, as was to be expected in the middle of the night. But somehow the house with no car looked darker than the other three. It looked quiet, and undisturbed, and empty.

Sorenson climbed out of the car. The road was nothing more than an old farm track, blacktopped over. It was badly drained. Rain and run-off from the fields had left mud in the gutters. Sorenson stepped over it and waited at the mouth of the empty driveway. Goodman stepped over the mud and joined her there. Sorenson checked the mailbox. Reflex habit. It was empty, as was to be expected for an evening worker. An evening worker picks up her mail before going to work, not after.

The mailbox was white, like all the others. It had a name on it, spelled out in small stick-on letters. The name was Delfuenso.

“What’s her first name?” Sorenson asked.

Goodman said, “Karen.”

Sorenson said, “Go knock on the door, just to be sure.” Goodman went. He knocked.

No response.

He knocked again, long and loud.

No response.

Sorenson cut across the lawn to the neighbor’s door. She rang the bell, once, twice, three times. She took out her ID, and held it ready. She waited. Two minutes later the door opened and she saw a guy in pajamas. He was middle-aged and gray. She asked him if he had seen his neighbor come home that night.

The guy in pajamas said no, he hadn’t.

She asked him if his neighbor lived alone.

The guy said yes, she did. She was divorced.

She asked him if his neighbor owned a car.

The guy said yes, she did. A pretty decent one, too. Not more than a few years old. Bought with money from the divorce. Just saying.

She asked him if his neighbor always drove to work.

The guy said yes, she did. It was that or walk.

She asked him if his neighbor’s car was usually parked on the driveway.

The guy said yes it was, all day long before work, and all night long after work. It was parked right there on top of the oily patch they could see if they stepped over and looked real close, because of how a leaky transmission was the car’s only fault. The neighbor should have had it seen to long ago, on account of it being liable to seize up otherwise, but some folks plain ignore stuff like that. Just saying.

Sorenson asked him if his neighbor ever spent the night away from home.

The guy said no, she didn’t. She worked at the lounge and came home every night at ten past midnight, regular as clockwork, except for when she had the clean-up overtime, when it was maybe twelve thirty-five or so. Mrs. Delfuenso was a nice woman and a good neighbor and the guy hoped nothing bad had happened to her.

Sorenson thanked him and told him he was free to go back to bed. The guy said he hoped he had been helpful. Sorenson said he had been. The guy said if she wanted to know more, she should go talk to the other neighbor. They were closer. Friends, really. They did things for each other. For instance, Mrs. Delfuenso’s kid slept over there, while Mrs. Delfuenso was working.

Sorenson said, “Karen has a child?”

“A daughter,” the guy said. “Ten years old. Same as the neighbor’s girl. The kids sleep over there and then Mrs. Delfuenso takes over and gives them breakfast and drives them to the school bus in the morning.”

Chapter 16

Reacher had never been hypnotized, but in his opinion driving empty highways at night came close. Basal and cognitive demands were so low they could be met by the smallest sliver of the brain. The rest coasted. The front half had nothing to do, and the back half had nothing to fight. The very definition of relaxation. Time and distance seemed suspended. The Dodge’s tail lights would be forever distant. Reacher felt he could drive a thousand hours and never catch them.

Normally numbers would fill the void in his head. Not that he was a particularly competent mathematician. But numbers called to him, twisting and turning and revealing their hidden facets. Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which was interesting.

Or perhaps he would take advantage of the fact that all the cops for miles around were on roadblock duty behind him, and let his speed creep up to 81, and muse about how one divided by 81 expressed as a decimal came out as .0123456789, which then recurred literally forever, 0123456789 over and over and over again, until the end of time, longer even than it would take to catch up to the Dodge.

But that night words came to him first.

Specifically four words, spoken by Alan King: Plus whatever Karen wants. The coffee order. Two with cream and sugar, Plus whatever Karen wants. Which attacked Reacher’s impression of them as a team. Team members knew each other’s coffee orders by heart. They had stood on line together a hundred times, in rest areas, in airports, at Starbucks, at shabby no-name shacks. They had ordered together in diners and in restaurants. They had fetched and carried for each other.

But King had not known how Karen liked her coffee.

Therefore Karen was not a team member, or not a regular team member, or perhaps she was a new team member. A recent addition to the roster. Which might explain why she wasn’t talking. Perhaps she felt unsure of her place. Perhaps she simply didn’t like her new associates. Perhaps they didn’t like her. Certainly Alan King had spoken impatiently and even contemptuously about her, right in her presence. Like she wasn’t there. He had said, Karen doesn’t drive. After she hadn’t ordered coffee, he had said, Nothing for Karen, then.

They were not a trio. King and McQueen were a duo, barely tolerating an interloper.

Sorenson met Goodman back on Karen Delfuenso’s empty oil-stained driveway, and she told him about Delfuenso’s kid.

“Jesus,” Goodman said. He glanced at the other neighbor’s house. “And the kid is in there now?”

“Unless she sleepwalks. And she’s expecting to see her mommy in the morning.”

“We shouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until we’re sure.”

“We’re not going to tell her. Not now. But we have to talk to the neighbor. It’s still possible this whole thing is nothing. Something innocent might have come up, and Karen might have left a message.”

“You think?”

“No, not really. But we have to check.”

So they cut across the other lawn together and Sorenson tried to weight her knock so that a sleeping adult might hear it, but sleeping children wouldn’t. Hard to do. Her first attempt woke nobody. Her second might have woken everybody. Certainly it brought a tired woman of about thirty to the door.

There had been no message from Karen Delfuenso.

Chapter 17

The next words into Reacher’s empty mind had been spoken by the grizzled old State Police sergeant: Not you. Eventually they led to numbers, first six, then three, then one. Six because they contained six letters, and three because each word had three letters, and taken together they had three vowels and three consonants. Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.

Three, and six.

Good numbers.

A circle could be drawn through any three points not on a straight line.

Take any three consecutive numbers, the largest divisible by three, and add them up, and then add the digits of the result, again and again if necessary, until just a single number is left.

That number will be six.

But eventually the words Not you led past the number six, and then past the number three, and then all the way down to the number one, simply because of their content. Reacher had asked: Who are you looking for, sergeant? The sergeant had answered: Not you. Not: Not you guys or not you people.

Not you.

They were looking for a lone individual.

Which was consistent with what had happened at the earlier roadblock. Reacher had gotten a better view back there, and he had seen men driving alone getting extra scrutiny.

But: Not you.

Which meant that the cops had at least a rough description of the guy they were looking for, and that Reacher categorically wasn’t that guy. Why not? There could be a million reasons. Right off the bat Reacher was tall, white, old, and heavy. And so on, and so forth. Therefore the target might be short, black, young, and skinny. And so on, and so forth.

But the sergeant had paused first, and thought, and smiled. The Not you had been emphatic, and a little wry. Maybe even a little rueful. As if the difference between Reacher and the description had been a total contrast. Or completely drastic. But it wasn’t possible to be drastically tall, unless they were looking for a dwarf or a midget, in which case the merest glance into the car would have sufficed. It wasn’t possible to be drastically white. White or black was an everyday difference. No one thought of degrees of blackness or whiteness. Not anymore. Reacher wasn’t drastically old either, unless their target was a fetus. And Reacher wasn’t outstandingly heavy, unless their target was practically skeletal.

Not you. Said right after Reacher’s deliberate mistake about the guy’s rank, which would have been understood as a pro-forma compliment, just one regular guy to another, probably one veteran to another. Common ground.

Not you. Emphatic, wry, rueful, and good natured. Just one regular guy to another, one vet to another, right back, equally. Still surfing on the earlier stuff about the busted nose. Referring back to it, in a way. A continuation of the banter. Common ground, established and repeated.

Therefore the guy they were looking for didn’t have a busted nose.

But then, most people didn’t have a busted nose.

Which meant the sergeant had been generalizing. As if to say: I’m pretty sure our description would have included that nose of yours, for instance.

Which meant they had been told their target didn’t have anything especially noticeable about him. No first-glance singularities. Nothing obvious. No scars, no tattoos, no missing ears, no glass eyes, no yard-long beard, no weird haircut.

Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and he remembered the rote expression very well: No distinguishing marks.

Sorenson and Goodman stepped over the muddy gutter again and climbed back into Goodman’s car and Sorenson said, “You should check in with your dispatcher. You should see if anyone reported a lone woman wandering about, maybe confused or disoriented. From now on our working hypothesis is that the two guys stole Delfuenso’s car. And they might have hit her over the head to get it.”

“They might have killed her.”

“We have to hope for the best. So you should get your deputies to check the area behind the lounge, too. Very carefully. She could be unconscious in the shadows somewhere.”

“By now she’d be halfway frozen to death.”

“So you should do it quickly.”

So Goodman got on the radio, and Sorenson got on her cell, to check in with the distant troopers in two separate states. They were both negative on a pair of men traveling together, with average appearance and no distinguishing marks, and they were negative on bloodstained clothing, and they were negative on bladed weapons. Sorenson did the math in her head. The two guys were almost certainly already through. Time and space said so. But she asked the troopers to stay in place for another hour. The two guys could have had a flat tire. Or some other kind of unexpected delay. She didn’t want to have the roadblocks dismantled only for the guys to roll through the vacated space five minutes later.

Then she clicked off her call and Goodman told her his dispatcher hadn’t heard a thing, and that all his deputies were searching hard, behind the Sin City lounge and all over town.

Chapter 18

Reacher drove on, with Alan King fast asleep next to him and Don McQueen fast asleep behind him. Karen Delfuenso was still awake, still upright and tense. Reacher could feel her gaze on his face in the mirror. He glanced up and made eye contact. She was staring at him. Staring hard, as if mutely willing him to understand something.

Understand what? Then numbers came back to him, this time specifically thirteen, and two, and three, and one, and nine. Delfuenso had blinked out those numbers, in five separate sequences, between emphatic shakes of her head.

Why?

Communication of some kind?

A simple alphabetical code? The thirteenth letter of the alphabet was M. The second was B. The third was C. The first was A. The ninth was I.

MBCAI.

Not a word. Not a Roman numeral. A corporation? An organization? An acronym, like SNAFU or FUBAR?

Reacher looked way ahead into the darkness and fixed the upcoming mile in his mind, all four dimensions, and then he met Delfuenso’s eyes in the mirror again and silently mouthed the letters, all lips and teeth and tongue and exaggerated enunciation: M, B, C, A, I?

Delfuenso glared back at him, eyes bright, half ecstatic that he was trying, half furious that he wasn’t getting it, like a thirsty woman who sees an offered drink snatched away.

She shook her head. No. She jerked her chin once to the left, and then once to the right. She stared hard at him, eyes wide, as if to say, See?

Reacher didn’t see. Not immediately. Except to grasp that maybe the jerk to the left signified one thing, and the jerk to the right signified another thing. Two different categories. Perhaps the blinks preceded by the jerks to the left were letters, and the blinks preceded by the jerks to the right were numbers. Or vice-versa.

M-2-C-A-1?

13-B-3-1-I?

Then Alan King stirred and woke up and moved in his seat, and Reacher saw Delfuenso turn her face away and stare out her window.

King looked at Reacher and asked, “You OK?”

Reacher nodded but said nothing.

King said, “You need another aspirin?”

Reacher shook his head, no.

King said, “Karen, give this guy another aspirin.”

No answer from Delfuenso.

King said, “Karen?”

Reacher said, “I don’t need another aspirin.”

“You look like you do. Karen, give him a couple.”

“Maybe Karen needs her aspirins for herself.”

“She can share.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But you look zoned out.”

“I’m just concentrating on the road ahead.”

“No, you look like you’re thinking about something.”

“I’m always thinking about something.”

“Like what?”

“Right now, a challenge,” Reacher said.

“What kind?”

“Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute?”

“What?”

“You heard.”

King paused.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course I can.”

“Can you talk coherently and at normal speed for a whole minute without using a word that contains the letter A?”

“That would be tougher,” King said. “Impossible, probably. Lots of words contain the letter A.”

Reacher nodded. “You just used three of them. Total of eighteen since you woke up ten seconds ago.”

“So it’s a stupid challenge.”

“No, it’s an easy challenge,” Reacher said.

“How?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, tell me now.”

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said again. “Think of it as something to look forward to.”

So King shrugged and then stared into space for a minute, distracted, maybe a little disgruntled, maybe even a little angry, but then he turned away and closed his eyes again.

Reacher drove on, and started thinking about the twin roadblocks they had passed through. Eight cars and eight officers in each location, with flashlights and plenty of time for close scrutiny. He imagined himself a wanted man of average appearance, traveling alone, suddenly at risk and vulnerable, perhaps anticipating those roadblocks up ahead. What could such a man do to prepare?

He could disguise one or other of those fatal tells, that’s what he could do.

He could alter his average appearance, with makeup or putty or wigs or fake piercings or fake tattoos or fake scars.

But that would not be easy, without skills and practice. And that would not be easy at short notice, either.

So he would have to address the other tell.

He would have to make himself no longer alone.

Which would be easy to do, even without skills or practice. Which would be easy to do even at short notice.

He could pick up a hitchhiker.

Chapter 19

Sorenson called in Delfuenso’s name and address, and less than a minute later she knew that Delfuenso’s car was a four-year-old Chevrolet Impala, dark blue in color, and she knew its plate number. She passed on that information to the roadblock crews. Both said the plate number was not on their scribbled lists of cars carrying two men. Both said they would check their dashboard video to confirm. Both said that process could take some time.

So Sheriff Goodman drove Sorenson back to the cocktail lounge, where the search for a dead or unconscious woman had turned up negative results. The deputies had traced ever-widening circles from the lounge’s back door and had found nothing of interest. They had checked the shadows, the abandoned doorways, the weedy fence lines, the trash bins, and all the puddles and all the potholes.

Goodman said, “She could be further afield. She could have gotten up, and wandered off, and collapsed again. That kind of thing can happen, with bangs on the head.”

One of the deputies said, “Or they could have bundled her into the car and then rolled her out later. In the middle of nowhere. Safer for them that way. So she could be anywhere. She could be fifty miles away.”

Sorenson said, “Say that again.”

“She could be fifty miles away.”

“No, the first part.”

“They could have bundled her into the car.”

Her plate number was not on their scribbled lists of cars carrying two men.

Sorenson said, “You know what? I think they did. And I think she’s still in the car. I think she’s a hostage. And a smokescreen. Three people. Not two. They’ve been getting a free pass all the way.”

No one spoke.

“What was she wearing?”

No reply.

“Come on, one of you has been in this lounge on your night off. Don’t pretend you haven’t.”

“Black pants,” Goodman said.

“And?”

“A black and silver top,” Goodman said. “Kind of sparkly. Not much to it. Very low cut.”

“Distinctive?”

“Unless you’re legally blind. We’re talking about a major display here.”

“Of what?”

“Well, you know.”

“I don’t.”

“I mean, she would be practically falling out of it.”

“And this is the respectable lounge? What do they wear in the others?”

“Thong underwear.”

“Is that all?”

“And high heeled shoes.”

Sorenson got back on her cell. Long-distance traffic, through Nebraska and Iowa, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. Truckers, farmers, solid bible-believing Midwestern citizens. A low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit would have stood out like a beacon. Bored troopers would have spent extra time on that car, for sure.

But no Nebraska trooper had seen a low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit.

And no Iowa trooper had seen a low cut sparkly cocktail-waitress outfit either.

Reacher drove on, his left hand resting on the bottom curve of the wheel, his right hand resting on the shifter, for variety, to stop his shoulders locking up and getting sore. He could feel a little vibration in the shifter. His right palm was registering a faint buzz. The linkage was transmitting some kind of internal commotion. He nudged the lever one way and the other, just fractionally, to make sure it was seated properly. He glanced down. It was squarely lined up on the D. The tiny vibration was still there. No big deal, probably. He hoped. He knew very little about cars. But army vehicles vibrated like crazy, and no one worried about it.

Next to the shifter the sequence P-R-N-D-L was lit up with a soft glow. Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and Low. Alphabetically the sixteenth letter, then the eighteenth, then the fourteenth, then the fourth, and finally the twelfth. An unlucky and cumbersome sequence, if you had to blink it out, for instance. Three of the five letters were beyond the halfway point. Better than WOOZY or ROOST or RUSTY or TRUST, but still. Blinking or tapping or flashing a light in a linear fashion was not an efficient transmission method for a twenty-six-letter alphabet. Too time consuming, and too easy for either the transmitter or the receiver to lose count. Or both of them together. Old Sam Morse had figured all that out a long time ago.

Reacher glanced down again.

Reverse.

Karen Delfuenso had not blinked more than thirteen times. Which meant that all her letters were in the first half of the alphabet. Which was possible, but not statistically likely.

And an amateur who didn’t know Morse Code might still understand the same basic drawbacks Samuel Morse had foreseen. Especially an amateur who was for some reason tense and anxious and who had limited time for communication. Such an amateur might have improvised, and come up with a shortcut system.

Drive, and reverse.

Forward, and backward.

Maybe the jerk of the head to the left meant count forward from A, because in the Western nations people read from left to right, and therefore the jerk of the head to the right would mean count backward from Z.

Maybe.

Possibly.

Right thirteen, left two, right three, right one, left nine. N, B, X, Z, I.

Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. NB could be the standard Latin abbreviation for nota bene, which meant note well, or in other words pay attention, but what was XZI?

Gibberish, that’s what.

Reacher glanced in the mirror.

Delfuenso was staring at him again, willing him to understand.

In the mirror.

Her image was reversed.

Maybe she had anticipated that. Maybe left was right, and right was left.

Forward thirteen, back two, forward three, forward one, back nine.

M, Y, C, A, R.

My car.

Reacher looked in the mirror again and mouthed, This is your car?

Delfuenso nodded, urgently and eagerly and desperately and happily.

Chapter 20

Sorenson stepped back and turned and looked and said, “They went south first, and then they got back on the road and went north. Why?”

Goodman said, “That was the way they came. Maybe they didn’t know they could get back on the road any other way.”

“Bullshit. They glance north, they see the old bar and an acre of gravel, and they know they can get out that way.”

“So maybe they went for gas at the other station.”

“Why would they? There’s a gas station right here, at this end of the strip, staring them right in the face. Or do you think they were worried about price comparisons?”

“Maybe they saw the cameras.”

“If one has cameras, the other has cameras too. You can bet on that.”

“The price is the same anyway, both ends. It always is.”

“So why did they loop back south?”

Goodman said, “For some other reason, I guess.”

Sorenson set off walking south, fast over the frozen gravel, past the back of a closed-up diner, past the back of a no-name bar, past the back of a broken-down motel, past the back of a lit-up and open convenience store.

She stopped.

Ahead of her was a wide gap, and then another bar, and then another cocktail lounge, and then nothing at all until the other gas station.

She said, “Let’s assume they didn’t want a drink or a meal. Let’s assume they weren’t interested in a room for the night. And if they wanted gas, they’d have used the nearer station. So why did they come back this way?”

“The convenience store,” Goodman said. “They needed something.”

They hustled around to its front door and went inside to bright cold fluorescent glare and the smell of old coffee and microwaved food and antiseptic floor cleaner. A bored clerk behind the register didn’t even raise his head. Sorenson scanned the ceiling. There were no cameras.

The aisles were close-packed with junk food and canned food and bread and cookies and basic toiletries, and automotive requirements like quarts of oil and gallons of antifreeze and screen wash and clip-on cup holders and patent self-extinguishing ashtrays and collapsible snow shovels. There were rubber overshoes for wet conditions, and tube socks, and white underwear for a dollar an item, and cheap T-shirts, and cheap denim shirts, and canvas work shirts, and canvas work pants.

Sorenson took a close look at the clothing aisle, and then she headed straight for the register, her ID at the ready. The clerk looked up.

“Help you?” he said.

“Between about twenty past and half past midnight, who was in here?”

“Me,” the guy said.

“No customers?”

“Maybe one.”

“Who?”

“A tall skinny guy in a shirt and tie.”

“No coat?”

“It was like he ran in from a car. No time to get cold. No one walks here. This is the middle of nowhere.”

“Did you see the car?”

The clerk shook his head. “I think the guy parked around the back. He sort of came around the corner. I guess that was my impression, anyway.”

Sorenson asked, “What did he buy?”

The guy straightened out a curling helix of register tape spilling out of a slot. He traced his thumbnail over pale blue ink, in an irregular pattern, stop and go, leaping backward from one time stamp to another, then pausing at an eleven-line entry.

“Six items,” he said. “Plus subtotal, tax, total, tender, and change.”

“He paid cash?”

“He must have, if I made change.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t pay much attention. This is not a dream job, lady.”

“What did he buy?”

The guy examined the tape. “Three of something, and three of something else.”

“Three of what, and three of what else? This was tonight. This is not ancient history we’re talking about here. We’re not asking for a prodigious feat of memory.”

“Water,” the guy said. “I remember that. Three bottles, from the refrigerator cabinet.”

“And?”

The guy looked at the tape again.

He said, “Three other things, all the same price.”

“What three other things?”

“I don’t remember.”

Sorenson said, “Have you been smoking tonight?”

The guy went wary.

He said, “Smoking what?”

“Maybe that’s a question for Sheriff Goodman. You in shape for a search tonight?”

The guy didn’t answer that. He just bounced his hand up and down, rehearsing a triumphant finger snap, waiting to remember. Trying to remember. Then finally he smiled.

“Shirts,” he said. “Three denim shirts, on special. Blue. Small, medium, and large. One of each.”

* * *

Sorenson and Goodman walked out of the store and looped around to the back lot again. Sorenson said, “Karen Delfuenso was their hostage and they planned to use her as their smokescreen, so they couldn’t let her stay in the skimpy top. Too memorable. They knew there could be roadblocks. So they made her change.”

“They all changed,” Goodman said. “Three people, three shirts.”

Sorenson nodded.

“Bloodstains,” she said. “Like the eyewitness told us. At least one of their suit coats was wet.”

“We screwed up,” Goodman said. “Both of us. I told the roadblocks two men in black suits. Then any two men. You told them any two men. But it wasn’t any two men. It was any three people, two men and a woman, all in blue denim shirts.”

Sorenson said nothing. Then her phone rang, and the Iowa State Police told her they had rewound their dashboard video and located Karen Delfuenso’s car. It had passed through their roadblock more than an hour ago. It had not attracted their attention because it had four people in it.

Chapter 21

Sorenson hunched away from Goodman and switched her phone to her other hand and said, “Four people?”

The State Police captain in Iowa said, “It’s a kind of shadowy picture, but we can see them fairly clearly. Two in the front, and two in the back. And my sergeant remembers the driver.”

“Can I talk to your sergeant?”

“Can I shut down this roadblock?”

“After I talk to your sergeant.”

“OK, wait one.”

Sorenson heard scratchy sounds in her ear, and the filtered rattle of an idling truck engine. She turned back to Goodman and said, “We were even more wrong than we knew. There are four of them in the car.” Then she heard a cell phone change hands and a rusty voice said, “Ma’am?”

She asked, “Who was in the car?”

The sergeant said, “Mostly I remember the driver.”

“Male or female?”

“Male. A big guy, with a busted nose. Badly busted. I mean raw, like a very recent injury. He looked like a gorilla with its face smashed in.”

“Like the result of a fight?”

“He more or less admitted it. But he said it didn’t happen in Iowa.”

“You talked to him?”

“Briefly. He was polite enough to me. Nothing to report, apart from the nose.”

“Was he acting nervous?”

“Not really. He was quiet. And stoic. He had to be, with a nose like that. He should have been in the hospital.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A winter coat.”

“What about the passengers?”

“I don’t really recall them very well.”

“You’re not on the witness stand here, sergeant. You’re not under oath. Anything you can remember might help me.”

“All I have is impressions. I don’t want to mislead you.”

“Anything at all might help.”

“Well, I thought they were like Peter, Paul and Mary.”

“Who?”

“Folk singers. From back in the day. Before your time, maybe. They were all dressed the same. Like a singing group. Two men and a woman.”

“Blue denim shirts?”

“Exactly. Like a country music trio. I figured their trunk would be full of steel-strung guitars. I thought maybe they were heading from last night’s show to tonight’s. We see that sometimes. And the woman was all made up, like she had just come off stage.”

“But the driver was different?”

“I thought he was maybe a manager. Or a roadie. You know, big and rough. Just an impression, like I said.”

“Anything else?”

“Don’t quote me, OK?”

“I won’t.”

“There was an atmosphere. The woman looked mad. Or resentful, somehow. I thought maybe the shows weren’t going so well, and she wanted to quit the tour, but it was two against one. Or three, if the manager guy had a stake. It was late, but she was wide awake, like she had something on her mind. That was my impression, anyway.”

Sorenson said nothing.

The sergeant said, “They were the targets, right?”

Sorenson said, “The two men in the shirts, yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

Then the captain came back on. He said, “Ma’am, you told us to look for two fugitives, not some family psychodrama involving a car full of vaudeville players.”

“Not your fault,” Sorenson said again.

“Can I break down this roadblock now?”

“Yes,” Sorenson said. “And I need an APB on that plate number, all points east of you.”

“I have no units on the road east of me, lady. I had to bring them all here. Face it, ma’am, whoever those guys are, they’re long gone now.”

Reacher could wink, but only with his left eye. A childhood inheritance. As a kid he had slept mostly on his left side, and on waking would keep his left eye closed against the pillow and open only his right, to peer around whatever darkened bedroom he happened to be in. And he wasn’t sure Delfuenso could see his left eye. Not from the back seat, with the mirror set the way it was. And to mess with his vision was not a good idea at eighty miles an hour, anyway. So he raised his right hand off the shifter, so she could see it, and then he dropped it back.

He jabbed his thumb to the left. No mirror involved. They were both facing the same way. Left was left. He tapped his index finger three times. Then left again, one tap. Then right, nine, his pale finger fast but clear in the low light, and then left, ten, and left, one, and left, three, and finally left, eleven.

He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows, to supply the question mark.

Carjack?

Delfuenso nodded back at him, eagerly.

A definite yes.

Which explained a lot of things.

But not the matching outfits.

Reacher took his hand off the shifter and plucked at the shoulder of his coat, finger and thumb, and he looked quizzically in the mirror and mouthed, Shirts?

Delfuenso glanced left, glanced right, frustrated, as if unable to find a quick way to explain. Then she looked hard to her left, as if checking on McQueen, and she started to unbutton her shirt. Reacher watched the road with one eye and the mirror with the other. Three buttons, four, five. Then Delfuenso pulled her shirt wide open and Reacher saw a tiny black and silver garment under it, like fancy underwear, like a bodice, laced tight against her stomach, her breasts resting high and proud on a fabric shelf made from two vestigial cups.

Reacher nodded in the mirror. He had seen similar outfits. Most men had. Every soldier had. She was a cocktail waitress, maybe a bartender. She had been coming off her shift, maybe getting into her car, maybe waiting at a light, and the two guys had pounced. They had stopped somewhere and bought her a shirt, to eliminate an APB’s inevitable headline description: a dark-haired woman wearing practically nothing.

Delfuenso started buttoning up again. Reacher jabbed his finger in Alan King’s direction and his thumb in Don McQueen’s, and then he opened his hand and raised it uncertainly, questioningly, like a universal semaphore: Why them too?

Delfuenso opened her mouth and closed it, and then she started blinking again, a long and laborious sequence.

Forward two, forward twelve, backward twelve, backward twelve, forward four.

B, L, O, O, D, blood.

Backward twelve, backward thirteen.

O, N, on.

Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, forward nine, backward nine.

T, H, E, I, R, their.

Blood on their clothes? Reacher mouthed.

Delfuenso nodded.

Reacher drove on through the darkness, with the white Dodge’s tail lights still a mile ahead, past quiet lonely exits spaced miles apart, with questions in his head spinning like plates on sticks.

Chapter 22

Sheriff Goodman hunched deeper into his coat against the cold and turned a full circle in the convenience store’s back lot. He said, “I assume they parked here. Therefore they probably changed here too. Maybe they trashed their old jackets. The knife too, possibly. We should check the trash cans.”

Sorenson said, “You volunteering?”

“I have deputies with nothing better to do.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “But it’s probably a waste of time. A buck gets ten they pitched the jackets in Delfuenso’s trunk. And they probably dropped the knife down one of the water pipes in the bunker.”

“Are you going to try a third roadblock?”

“Iowa doesn’t have the manpower.”

“Illinois, then. If they’re staying on the Interstate, they’re most likely going all the way to Chicago. You could have the Illinois cops waiting for them, right on the state line.”

“They have to know they’re pushing their luck. They’ve survived twice. They won’t risk a third time. They’re going to take back roads now. Or go to ground somewhere.”

“So we’re done with roadblocks?”

“I think there’s nothing more to be gained.”

“Will their thinking match yours?”

“I’m trying to make mine match theirs.”

“Then that’s bad news for Karen Delfuenso,” Goodman said. “They don’t need the smokescreen anymore. They’ll dump her out in the middle of nowhere.”

“They won’t,” Sorenson said. “She’s seen their faces. They’ll kill her.”

The first question in Reacher’s mind was: would they call out roadblocks in two separate states for a carjacking? And the answer was: yes, probably. Almost certainly, in fact. Because carjacking where the owner was forced to stay on board was kidnapping, and kidnapping was a big, big deal. A federal case, literally, handled by the FBI, which was the only agency capable of coordinating a multi-state response.

And the local terrain was huge and empty. Blocking the roads was about the only option for any kind of law enforcement in that part of the country.

That, and helicopters.

And Reacher had seen a helicopter, a thousand feet up, with a searchlight.

Second question: what were the odds against two sets of roadblock-worthy and helicopter-worthy and FBI-worthy fugitives being on the loose on the same winter night in the same lonely place? Answer: very long odds indeed. Very unlikely. Coincidences happened, but to be there to witness one was a coincidence in itself, and two simultaneous coincidences was one too many.

Therefore: the roadblocks had been for King and McQueen.

Two guys, not one.

Almost certainly.

Which made no sense, initially.

Because: the first roadblock in Nebraska had been looking hard at lone drivers. Which was explicable, in a way. Obviously a lone guy could disguise himself by picking up a second guy, and two guys could disguise themselves by picking up a third guy, and so on, and so on, forever. An addition method. But subtraction could work too. As in: two guys could disguise themselves by one of them hiding out of sight. And the Nebraska cops had been smart enough to anticipate that maneuver. Lone drivers had had their trunks searched, not for drugs or guns or bombs or stolen goods, but for a second guy curled up and hiding.

But: the Nebraska cops shouldn’t have been looking for two people. They should have been looking for three people. The two perpetrators, plus the carjack victim, a more-or-less topless cocktail waitress.

Which introduced an incongruity.

As in: King and McQueen clearly believed the APB would be for those three people. Themselves, and Delfuenso. Because they had given Delfuenso a shirt. To alter her appearance. The disguise method. And then they had gone the extra mile. They had given a hitchhiker a ride. Reacher himself, a fourth person. The addition method.

Four people, not three. A smokescreen. A deception, starting with the bland shirts, and continuing even to the extent of getting Reacher himself into the driver’s seat for the second roadblock. A smokescreen, a deception, and more than anything else a diversion. The busted nose. Any cop would have been distracted by it.

And there had been no democratic discussion at the cloverleaf, right back at the beginning. That particular conversation had been of a different kind entirely. King and McQueen had twisted around in their seats and told Delfuenso they would hurt her bad if she betrayed them. They had spelled it out: Keep your mouth shut. Then they had pressed her: Are we clear on that? Do you understand? Reacher had seen her nod, yes, quiet and scared and timid, just before he got in the car.

And the aspirin episode had not been about concern for a stranger’s health. By that point Alan King had already decided he wanted Reacher driving later. And he had not monitored Delfuenso’s search through her bag out of innocent eagerness or excitement. He had been making sure she didn’t find some way of signaling for help.

Reality.

Reacher was no one’s first choice of nighttime companion.

King and McQueen had offered the ride for one reason only.

They were defending themselves against a three-person APB.

But the actual APB had been for two people.

Why?

Only one possible answer: the FBI had known there were two guys on the run, but they hadn’t known the two guys had jacked a car and taken a hostage.

In which case: did the FBI know now?

And therefore: the roadblocks had not been for the carjacking. Not in and of itself. Not if the FBI didn’t even know about the carjacking.

The roadblocks had been for the primary crime.

Which must therefore have been pretty bad.

Blood on their clothes.

Reacher drove on, eighty miles an hour through the Iowa darkness, breathing slow and steady.

Goodman and Sorenson walked back to the red Mazda. Sorenson’s FBI crime scene team had moved up from the pumping station and were all over it. They had already found blood and fingerprints, and hairs and fibers. The two men had taken no forensic precautions. That was clear.

Sorenson said, “They were very disorganized.”

Goodman said, “Most criminals are.”

“But these guys are not like most criminals in any other way. This was not a mugging or a robbery gone wrong. They wore suits. The State Department is involved. But they were completely unprepared. They didn’t plan. They’re improvising all the way. They even had to hijack their getaway vehicle, for God’s sake. Why?”

“Maybe they didn’t plan because they didn’t know they needed to plan.”

“You come all the way to Nebraska to kill a guy, you know you need to plan.”

“Maybe they didn’t come to kill the guy. Or not yet, anyway. Maybe something got out of hand all of a sudden. Most homicides are spontaneous.”

“I agree,” Sorenson said. “But nothing else about this case feels spontaneous.”

Goodman sent a deputy to check the dumpsters behind the convenience store. Then the head crime scene technician backed butt-first out of the Mazda and walked over to Sorenson with two photographs in his hand. The first was a color Polaroid of the dead guy’s face, cleaned up, eyes opened, blood wiped away, arranged to look as close to a live guy as a dead guy can get. He had dark eyes, shaped like almonds, tipped up a little at the outside corners. He had a small circular mole low down on his right cheek, south and west of his mouth. On a woman it would have been called a beauty spot. On a man it just looked like a mole.

The second photograph was a monochrome blow-up of the same face. From a video still. From a surveillance camera, almost certainly. It was of poor quality, very grainy, smeared a little by movement and a cheap CCD camera and fluorescent light and a low-bit digital recording. But the eyes were clearly recognizable. And the mole was there, in the same place, perfectly positioned, as unique as a barcode or a fingerprint, and as definitive as a DNA sample.

“From where?” Sorenson asked.

“The rental counter at the Denver airport,” the technician said. “The victim rented the Mazda himself, just after nine o’clock this morning. Now yesterday morning, technically. The mileage on the car indicates he drove straight here with no significant detours.”

“That’s a long way.”

“A little over seven hundred miles. Ten or eleven hours, probably. One stop for gas. The tank is low now.”

“Did he drive all that way alone?”

“I don’t know,” the technician said. “I wasn’t there.”

A cautious guy, old school, data driven, and possibly a little bad tempered. Night duty, in the winter, in the middle of nowhere.

Sorenson asked, “What’s your best guess?”

“I’m a scientist,” the guy said. “I don’t guess.”

“Then speculate.”

The guy made a face.

“There’s no trace evidence in the back of the car,” he said. “But both front seats show signs of occupation. So he might have had a single passenger from Denver. Or he might have driven in alone, in which case the passenger seat trace would come from the two perpetrators using the car to get from the crime scene to this location.”

“Yes or no?”

“I would say he probably drove in alone. There’s more trace on the driver’s seat than the passenger’s seat.”

“Like the difference between a seven-hundred-mile drive and a three-mile drive?”

“I can’t specify a ratio. It doesn’t happen that way. Most trace gets rubbed in over the first minute or two.”

“Yes or no? Real world?”

“Probably yes. The driver’s seat shows heavy use, the passenger’s seat doesn’t.”

“So how did the two guys get here? Wearing suits and no winter coats?”

“Ma’am, I have no idea,” the technician said, and walked back to the car.

“I have no idea either,” Goodman said. “My guys have seen no abandoned cars. That was one of the things I told them to look for.”

Sorenson said, “Obviously they didn’t abandon a car. If they had their own car, they wouldn’t have had to hijack a cocktail waitress. And we need to know where the fourth guy came from, too. And we need to figure out where he was while his pals were busy in the bunker.”

“He sounds distinctive.”

Sorenson nodded. “A gorilla with its face smashed in. Anyone should remember a guy like that.”

Then her phone rang, and she answered it, and Goodman saw her back go straight and her face change. She listened for thirty seconds, and she said, “OK,” and then she said it again, and then she said, “No, I’ll make sure it happens,” and then she clicked off.

A straight back, but she had said OK, not Yes, sir.

Not a superior from her FBI field office, therefore, or from D.C.

Goodman asked, “Who was that?”

Sorenson said, “That was a duty officer in a room in Langley, Virginia.”

“Langley?”

Sorenson nodded.

She said, “Now the CIA has got its nose in this thing too. I’m supposed to provide progress reports all through the night.”

Chapter 23

It was technically challenging to take out a guy in the front passenger seat while driving at eighty miles an hour. It required simultaneous movement and stillness. The driver’s foot had to stay steady on the pedal, which meant his legs had to stay still. His torso had to stay still. Above all, his left shoulder had to stay still. Only his right arm could move, which would dictate a backhand scythe to the passenger’s head.

But it would be a relatively weak blow. It would be easy enough to fake a lazy cross-body scratch of the left shoulder, and then launch the right fist through a long half circle, like a backward right hook, but the top edge of the Chevy’s dash roll was fairly high, and the bottom edge of its mirror was fairly low, so the swing would have to be carefully aimed through the available gap, and then it would have to be kicked upward for the last part of its travel.

And Reacher’s arms were long, which meant he would have to keep his elbow tucked in to stop his knuckles fouling against the windshield glass. Which would dictate an upward kick and a snap of the elbow in the final inches, which together would be very hard to calibrate in order to avoid an action-and-reaction jerk to the left shoulder. And any movement of the left shoulder would be a very bad idea at that point. A minor slalom at eighty miles an hour on a straight wide road would be easily recoverable in theory, but there was no point in announcing hostile intent and then spending the next five seconds with both hands on the wheel fighting a skid. That would give the initiative straight back to the passenger, no question about it.

So all in all it would be better to settle for a light tap, not a heavy blow, which meant the exact choice of target would be important, which meant the larynx would come top of the list. An open hand held horizontally, like a karate chop, and a light smack in the throat. That would get the job done. Disabling, but not fatal. Except that Alan King was asleep, with his face turned away and his chin tucked down to his chest. His throat was concealed. He would have to be woken up first. Maybe a poke in the shoulder. He would straighten up, he would face forward, he would blink and yawn and stare.

Easy enough. Poke, scratch, swing, pop. Technically challenging, but entirely possible. Alan King could be handled.

But Don McQueen couldn’t. Science had never found a way to take out a guy sitting directly behind a driver. Not while that driver was doing eighty miles an hour. No way. Just not feasible. No kind of four-dimensional planning could achieve it.

Reacher drove on, at eighty miles an hour. He checked the mirror. No traffic behind him. McQueen was asleep. He checked again a minute later. Delfuenso was staring at him. He learned the road a mile ahead and looked back in the mirror. He nodded, as if to say: Go ahead. Begin transmission.

She began.

Forward nine.

I.

Forward eight, forward one, back five, forward five.

H, A, V, E, have.

Forward one. A.

Forward three, forward eight, forward nine, forward twelve, forward four.

C, H, I, L, D, child.

I have a child.

Reacher nodded, and lifted the small stuffed animal out of the center console, as if to say: I understand. The toy’s fur was stiff with dried saliva. Its shape was distorted by the clamp of a tiny jaw. He put it back. Delfuenso’s eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away.

Reacher leaned over and poked Alan King in the shoulder.

King stirred, and woke up, and straightened, and faced forward, and blinked and yawned and stared.

He said, “What?”

Reacher said, “The gas gauge is through the first little bit. I need you to tell me when to stop.”

The deputy came back from the convenience store and told Goodman there were no bloody coats or knives in the trash cans. Sorenson called the head technician back from the Mazda again and said, “I need to know about the victim.”

“Can’t help you there,” the guy said. “There was no ID and the autopsy won’t be until tomorrow.”

“I need your impressions.”

“I’m a scientist. I was out sick the day they taught Clairvoyance 101.”

“You could make some educated guesses.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I’m getting hassle through two separate back channels.”

“Who?”

“First the State Department, and now the CIA.”

“They’re not separate. The State Department is the political wing of the CIA.”

“And we’re the FBI, and we’re the good guys here, and we can’t afford to look slow or incompetent. Or unimaginative. So I’d like some impressions from you. Or informed opinion, or whatever else they taught you to call it in Cover Your Ass 101.”

“What kind of informed opinion?”

“Age?”

“Forty-something, possibly,” the guy said.

“Nationality?”

“He was American, probably,” the guy said.

“Because?”

“His dental work looks American. His clothing is mostly American.”

“Mostly?”

“I think his shirt is foreign. But his underwear is American. And most people stick to underwear from their country of origin.”

“Do they?”

“As a general rule. It’s a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And an intimacy issue. It’s a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.”

“That’s science?”

“Psychology is a science.”

“Where is the shirt from?”

“Hard to say. There’s no label in it.”

“But it looks foreign?”

“Well, basically all cotton clothing is foreign now. Almost all of it comes from somewhere in Asia. But quality and cut and color and pattern all tend to be market-specific.”

“Which market?”

“The fabric is thin, the color is cream rather than white, the collar points are long and narrow, the design of the checks is purely graphic rather than imitative of a traditional weave. I would say the shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.”

Chapter 24

Alan King jacked himself upright and craned to his left. He took a good long look at the fuel gauge. He said, “I think we’ll be OK for a spell more. Let me know when it hits the three-quarter mark.”

“Won’t be long,” Reacher said. “It seems to be going down awful fast.”

“That’s because you’re driving awful fast.”

“No faster than Mr. McQueen was.”

“Then maybe the fault has corrected itself. Maybe it was only intermittent.”

“We don’t want to run out of gas. Not out here. It’s pretty lonely. Can’t count on getting help. The cops are all back at that roadblock.”

“Give it another thirty minutes,” King said. “Then perhaps we’ll start to think about it.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“Tell me about that thing with the letter A.”

“Later.”

“No, now.”

“I said later. What part of that is hard to understand?”

“You don’t like to be pushed around, do you, Mr. Reacher?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been pushed around. If it ever happens, you’ll be the first to find out whether I like it or not.”

King turned his head away and gazed forward into the darkness for a full minute more, completely silent, and then he slid down in his seat and tucked his chin back down and closed his eyes again. Reacher checked the mirror. McQueen was still out cold. Delfuenso was still awake.

And she was blinking again.

Backward seven, forward eight, forward five, backward two. T-H-E-Y, they.

Forward eight, forward one, backward five, forward five.

H-A-V-E, have.

Forward seven, backward six, backward thirteen, backward eight.

G-U-N-S, guns.

They have guns.

Reacher nodded in the mirror, and drove on.

The scene behind the cocktail lounge stayed quiet for five more minutes. The lab guys took a long sequence of close-up photographs inside the Mazda, using strobes. The car’s misty glass lit up from within with irregular flashes, like a thunderstorm viewed from a great distance, or a battle on the other side of a hill. Goodman’s deputies searched the ground and found nothing of significance. Sorenson interrogated federal and state databases by phone, looking for large men with recent facial injuries. She came up empty.

Then came the sounds of a whispering V-8 engine and tires on crushed stone, and the dip and bounce of headlight beams in the mist, and a dark sedan nosed its way north toward them. It was a navy blue Crown Vic, identical to Sorenson’s own, same specification, same needle antennas on the back deck, but with Missouri plates. It came to a stop at a respectful distance and two men got out. They were wearing dark suits. They stood in the lee of their open doors and struggled into heavy down parkas. Then they closed their doors and moved closer, scanning the scene as they walked, noticing and dismissing the county deputies, noticing and dismissing Sheriff Goodman, noticing and dismissing the crime scene technicians, before settling their attention on Sorenson. They stopped six feet from her and pulled IDs from their pockets.

The same IDs as hers.

FBI.

The agent on the right said, “We’re from Counterterrorism, central region, out of Kansas City.”

Sorenson said, “I didn’t call you.”

“Your field office’s duty log triggered an automatic alert.”

“Why?”

“Because the crime scene location is sensitive.”

“Is it? It’s an abandoned pumping station.”

“No, it’s an open and uncapped well head with direct vertical access to the largest groundwater reserves in the United States.”

“It’s a dry hole.”

The agent nodded. “But only because the water table fell below the bottom of the bore. Dry or not, if you poured something down that pipe, it would find its way into the aquifer. That’s inevitable. Gravity alone would make sure of it. Like dripping ink on a sponge.”

“Poured what?”

“There’s a number of things we wouldn’t want to go down there.”

“But it would be a drop in a bucket. Literally. A very tiny drop and a very big bucket. I mean, there’s a lot down there. They use two and a half trillion gallons every year. And even one of those big road tankers is, what, five thousand gallons? That’s nothing in comparison.”

The guy nodded again. “But terrorism is an asymmetrical business. As a matter of fact, you’re right. Five thousand gallons of poisonous chemicals or viruses or germs or whatever wouldn’t do much harm. Not scientifically. But can you see a way of convincing people of that? There’d be mass panic. There’d be a mass stampede out of here. Total chaos throughout a large part of the nation. And that’s exactly what terrorists like. Plus we’d have severe disruption to agriculture, for years. And there are military installations here.”

“Are you serious? That’s chemical and biological warfare.”

“We’re completely serious.”

“So why hasn’t that pipe been capped?”

“There are ten thousand holes like that one. We’re working as fast as we can.”

Sorenson said, “This is a homicide. I don’t see a terrorist angle.”

“Really? Did you get a call from State? About the victim?”

“Yes.”

“And CIA?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s some kind of overseas issue here. Don’t you think?”

Sorenson heard her technician’s voice in her head: I would say the shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.

She said, “So are you taking over from me?”

The agent on the right shook his head and said, “No, it’s still your case. But we’re going to be looking over your shoulder. Night and day. Just until we’re sure. Nothing personal. We hope you don’t mind.”

Reacher heard McQueen wake up behind him. He looked in the mirror and saw the guy staring out his window, at the empty traffic lanes alongside him. Then he saw him look the other way, beyond Delfuenso, at the shoulder of the road.

They passed an exit sign. They passed three blue boards, one of them blank. Gas and accommodations, but no food. There were no lights on the horizon. No welcoming glow. A deceptive exit, in Reacher’s opinion. Fifteen or twenty miles of dark rural roads, and then places that would be shut when they finally got there.

“Take this one,” McQueen said.

“What?” Reacher said.

“Exit here.”

“You sure? Looks pretty dead.”

“Just do it.”

Reacher glanced sideways at Alan King. McQueen saw him do it. McQueen said, “Don’t look at him. He’s not in charge here. I am. And I’m telling you to take this exit.”

Chapter 25

The two counterterrorism agents from Kansas City did not look over Sorenson’s shoulder. Not literally. They just stood with her, sometimes one on either side, sometimes in a tight collegial triangle. They introduced themselves as Robert Dawson and Andrew Mitchell, equal rank, both of them with more than fifteen years in. Dawson was a little taller than Mitchell, and Mitchell was a little heavier than Dawson, but otherwise they were very similar. Fair-haired, pink-faced, early forties, dressed in navy blue suits under their parkas, with white shirts and blue ties. Neither one of them seemed particularly tired or stressed, which Sorenson found impressive, given the nighttime hour and the pressures of their assignment.

But equally neither one of them had much to offer in terms of procedural suggestions. By that point the investigation was essentially stalled, and Sorenson was well aware of it. The perpetrators were somewhere east of Des Moines, and the hostage was already dead or close to it, and therefore a little ten-year-old girl was already a motherless child, or close to it.

Further progress would depend on luck and forensics, and resolution would be painstakingly slow and uncertain.

Not one for the show reel.

Front and center on no one’s résumé.

Sorenson said, “We should alert Chicago, I guess.”

Dawson said, “Or Milwaukee, or Madison, or Indianapolis, or Cincinnati, or Louisville.”

Mitchell said, “Or Interpol. Or NASA, maybe. By now they could be anywhere in the known universe.”

“I’m wide open to ideas, Agent Mitchell.”

“Nothing personal,” Dawson said.

Then the same sights and sounds happened all over again: the whisper of a V-8 engine, and the crunch of tires over crushed stone, and the flicker of headlight beams in the mist, and another plain sedan nosed its way north toward them. It was another Ford Crown Victoria, another government car, but not quite identical to Sorenson’s own, or Dawson and Mitchell’s own. It was built to the same specification, but it had different needle antennas on the trunk lid, and it was light in color, not dark, and it had official U.S. plates.

It came to a stop thirty feet away and the driver got out. He was wearing chino pants and a sweater and a coat. He moved closer, scanning the scene as he walked, ignoring the deputies, ignoring Goodman, ignoring the crime scene technicians, aiming straight for Sorenson and Dawson and Mitchell. Up close he looked like the kind of guy who would be more comfortable in a gray three-piece suit, but who had gotten a panic call in the middle of the night and grabbed the nearest things to hand, like a banker woken by his elderly dog whining at the bedroom door.

He stopped six feet away and pulled ID from his pocket.

Different ID.

The State Department.

The name on the ID was Lester L. Lester, Jr. The photograph showed the guy’s face below neatly combed hair and above a neatly rolled button-down collar Sorenson would have bet good money came from Brooks Brothers.

She asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Lester?”

Mitchell asked, “Is your middle name Lester too?”

The man called Lester looked at him.

He said, “As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Outstanding,” Mitchell said.

“What can I do for you?” Sorenson asked again.

“I’m here to observe,” Lester said.

“Because the victim was known to you?”

“Not to me personally.”

“But known to the Department of State?”

“That’s the gist of it.”

“Who was he?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Then turn yourself around and go back wherever the hell you came from. Because you’re not helping here.”

Lester said, “I have to stay.”

Sorenson asked, “Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then take it out and call home and get clearance to tell me what I need to know.”

Lester showed no signs of doing that.

Mitchell asked, “Are your CIA pals here too?”

Lester made a big show of looking all around, very carefully.

“I don’t see anyone else,” he said. “Do you?”

Mitchell said, “Maybe they’re hanging back in the shadows. That’s what they’re good at, right?”

Lester didn’t reply. Then Sorenson’s phone started ringing. The plain electronic sound. She answered and listened. She said, “OK, got that, thank you, sir.” She clicked off the call. She looked straight at Lester and smiled. She said, “You must have driven out here pretty fast.”

Lester said, “Must I have?”

Sorenson nodded. “That was my SAC on the phone. He told me you were on your way. The grapevine is still working, apparently. He told me to expect you within the next ten or so minutes.”

Lester said, “There wasn’t much traffic on the roads.”

“And my SAC told me who the dead guy was.”

Lester didn’t reply.

Dawson asked Sorenson, “So who was the dead guy?”

“An embassy worker, apparently.”

“One of ours?”

“Yes.”

“Like a diplomat?”

“An attaché of some kind.”

“Senior?”

“I didn’t get that impression. But probably not junior, either. Judging by the tone of voice.”

“Age?”

“Forty-two.”

“Important?”

“My SAC didn’t specify.”

Mitchell said, “If a Special Agent-in-Charge is wide awake and on the telephone in the middle of the night, then the guy was important. Wouldn’t you say?”

Dawson asked, “Where did he serve? What region? What responsibilities?”

“My SAC didn’t specify. I don’t think he’s been told. Which might mean somewhere and something sensitive.”

The shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East.

Dawson asked, “Why was he here?”

“I don’t know.”

Dawson looked at Lester, and asked the same question.

Lester said, “I don’t know why he was here.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. That’s why I’m here. Because we don’t know.”

Then twenty feet away Sheriff Goodman’s phone started ringing, muffled in his pocket but still loud in the silent night. All four people in the impromptu cluster turned toward the sound. Goodman answered and listened and his eyes sought Sorenson’s and he started walking toward her, as if instinctively, as if compelled, finishing his call and folding his phone when he was ten feet away, and not speaking until he was another five feet closer.

“That was my dispatcher,” he said. “The eyewitness is missing. The guy you talked to tonight. He never made it home.”

The short discussion with McQueen had eaten up some time and distance, so Reacher had to take the ramp pretty fast. Then he had to brake pretty hard ahead of a tight curve. For a split second he considered hitting Alan King in the throat. He was fairly well braced in his seat, with his right foot hard on the pedal and his left hand tight on the wheel. King was waking up because of the abrupt turn and the sudden deceleration. Chances were good his neck would be in the right place at the right time.

But McQueen was still a problem, even at twenty miles an hour. Theoretically Reacher could find the lever and jam the seat back into him, and maybe swing an elbow, but the headrest was in the way, and there was collateral damage just waiting to happen, right there next to the guy on the rear bench.

A mother, separated from her child.

Two feet from McQueen, on his right. And the guy was probably right-handed. Most people were.

They have guns.

So Reacher just coasted onward, through the curve, to the turn at the end of the ramp. Repeats of the gas board and the motel board faced him on the far shoulder of a narrow two-lane road. Both had arrows pointing right.

Alan King yawned and said, “We’re getting off here?”

Don McQueen said, “This is as good a place as any.”

“For what?” Reacher said.

“For gas,” McQueen said. “What else? Turn right. Follow the sign.”

Chapter 26

Reacher turned right and followed the sign. The road was narrow and dark. And dead straight, like a lot of roads in Iowa. The surrounding landscape was invisible, but it felt flat. Dormant winter fields, left and right, as far as the mind could sense. There was nothing up ahead. Just darkness. And then Missouri, presumably, a hundred miles away. Maybe a river first. The Des Moines, Reacher thought. He had studied geography in school. The river called the Des Moines met the mighty Mississippi a couple hundred miles southeast of the city called Des Moines.

He said, “This is a complete waste of time, guys. We’re going to drive twenty miles and find a gas station that went out of business before they invented unleaded.”

McQueen said, “There was a sign. Has to mean something.”

“It means there was gas here back when you were in grade school. Thirty cents a gallon. And Luckies at thirty cents a pack.”

“I’m sure they keep those signs updated.”

“You’re a very trusting person.”

“Not really,” McQueen said.

Reacher drove on. The road surface was pitted and pot-holed and the car bounced and swayed. Not its natural element, as a vehicle. Or Reacher’s, as a driver. Both had been better on the highway.

McQueen asked, “How’s your head?”

Reacher said, “My head is fine. It’s my nose that’s busted, not my skull.”

“You need another aspirin?”

“I already had that discussion with Mr. King. While you were asleep.”

King said, “He elected to soldier on without. He seems very protective of Karen’s personal supply.”

“Aspirin is not a prescription drug,” McQueen said. “She could get more at the gas station. Or Tylenol, or Advil.”

“Or leeches,” Reacher said. “We might find some under a dusty old pile of inner tubes and buggy whips. After we bust the padlock the bank put on thirty years ago.”

“Just keep going,” McQueen said. “Be patient.”

So Reacher drove on, slowly south on the lumpy road, and two miles later he was proved wrong, and McQueen was proved right. They all saw a faint yellow glow in the nighttime mist, way far ahead in the distance, on the horizon, like a beacon, which grew stronger as they approached it, and which finally resolved itself into the fierce neon glare of a brand new Shell station, all crisp white and yellow and orange, sitting like a mirage or a landed UFO on a quarter-acre bite out of a fallow cornfield. It had hi-tech pumps on two gondola islands, and lube bays, and a glassed-in store lit up so bright it must have been visible from outer space.

And it was open for business.

“You should have trusted me,” McQueen said.

Reacher slowed the car to a walk and turned in. He chose the pumps farther from the store and nearer the road and eased to a stop. He put the transmission in Park and shut down the motor. He pulled the key, casually, like a reflex, like a rote habit, and dropped it in his pocket.

Alan King saw him do it, but said nothing.

Reacher said, “Same system? I get the coffee, you get the gas?”

“Works for me,” McQueen said.

So Reacher opened his door and got out. He stood and stretched and arched his back and then looped around the pump islands and headed for the bright lights. He could see a kid on a stool behind the register, watching him, staring at his face. The busted nose. A universal attraction, apparently. The guy wasn’t much more than twenty years old, and he looked sleepy and slow.

Reacher paused before going in, and checked back. Alan King had dipped a credit card and was getting ready to pump the gas. McQueen was still in the rear seat. Delfuenso was still next to him.

Reacher went inside. The kid behind the register looked up and nodded a cautious greeting. Reacher waited until the door sucked shut and said, “Got a pay phone?”

The kid blinked and opened his mouth and closed it again, like a goldfish.

“Not a difficult question,” Reacher said. “A simple yes or no answer will suffice.”

“Yes,” the kid said. “We have a pay phone.”

“Where is it?”

“By the restrooms,” the kid said.

“Which are where?”

The kid pointed.

“In back,” he said.

Reacher looked the other way, out the window.

Don McQueen’s door was open.

But he was still in the car. Just sitting there, facing forward.

Reacher turned back and saw a door in the rear wall of the store. It had two stick figures on it, one in a skirt and one in pants. He stepped over to it and pulled it open. Behind it was a small lobby, with two more doors, one with the pants figure on it, and the other with the skirt. On the wall between the two was a pay phone, shiny and new, with an acoustic hood over it.

Reacher checked back. King was pumping the gas. McQueen was twisted sideways in his seat. He had both feet out of the car. They were planted on the ground. But that was all. He was stretching his legs. For comfort. He wasn’t moving.

Not yet, anyway.

Reacher checked the ladies’ room. No windows. No alternate exit.

He checked the men’s room. No windows. No alternate exit. He pulled a wad of towels from the dispenser and came back out to the lobby and folded the towels twice and jammed them between the lobby door and its frame, on the hinge side, so that the door held itself open a few inches. A little less than four inches, to be exact. Reacher ducked back and checked the view from the phone. He could see a small sliver of the store. He could see a tiny slice of the main door. Not much, but he would know if it opened.

He hoped.

He lifted the receiver and dialed 911.

More or less instantly a dispatcher asked, “What is your current location?”

Reacher said, “Give me the FBI.”

“Sir, what is your current location?”

“Don’t waste time.”

“Do you need fire, police, or ambulance?”

“I need the FBI.”

“Sir, this is the 911 emergency service.”

“And since about September the twelfth 2001 you’ve had a direct button for the FBI.”

“How did you know that?”

“Just a lucky guess. Hit the button, and hit it now.”

Reacher stared through the gap at the tiny slice of the main door. Nothing happening. Not yet. The sound in his ear changed. Dead air, then a new dial tone.

Then a new voice.

It said, “This is the FBI. What is the nature of your emergency?”

Reacher said, “I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska.”

“What is the nature of your information?”

“Just connect me, now.”

“Sir, what is your name?”

Reacher knew all about nighttime duty officers. He had talked to thousands during his years in the service. They were always either on the way down, and therefore insecure, or on the way up, and therefore ambitious. He knew what worked with them, and he knew what didn’t. He had learned the right psychological approach.

He said, “Connect me now or you’ll lose your job.”

A pause.

Then dead air.

Then a new dial tone.

Then the outer door swept open. Reacher heard the loud swish of its rubber seal and saw part of its bright white frame flash through the limits of the narrow gap. He got a glimpse of a blue shoulder. He heard the fast click of heels on tile.

He hung up the phone.

He stepped forward and grabbed the folded towels with one hand and pushed the lobby door with the other and tossed the towels behind him and came face to face with Don McQueen.

Chapter 27

Reacher and McQueen stepped mutely around each other, chest to chest, like guys do at restroom doors. McQueen went in and Reacher headed through the store to the coffee station, which was a complex push-button one-cup-at-a-time machine, a yard wide, all chrome and aluminum, brand new, probably Italian. Or French. European, certainly. It seemed to grind a separate batch of beans after each push of the button, and it was so slow that McQueen was out of the men’s room before Reacher was through with the last cup. Which was a good thing, in that McQueen was then more or less obligated to carry two cups back to the car, which meant his hands were full, and armed men with full hands were better than armed men with empty hands, in Reacher’s considered opinion.

Reacher carried the other two cups, black no sugar, one for himself and one for Karen Delfuenso. Alan King was still out of the car. The car was still next to the pump. The readout showed that less than four gallons had gone in the tank.

King said, “I’ll drive from here, Mr. Reacher.”

Reacher said, “Really? I haven’t done my three hundred miles yet.”

“Change of plan. We’re going to head for the motel and hole up for the night.”

“I thought you wanted to get to Chicago.”

“I said our plans have changed. What part of that don’t you understand?”

“Your call,” Reacher said.

“Indeed,” King said. “So I’ll need the car key.”

Four-dimensional planning. Reacher was on the near side of the car, and King and McQueen were on the far side. Delfuenso was still in her seat. Her door was wide open. Her head was inches away from King’s right hand. It would take part of a second for King and McQueen to drop their cups of coffee. Part of another second for them to get to their guns. Reacher could throw his own cup like a scalding grenade at one head or the other, but not both. He could scramble around the trunk, or over it, but not fast enough.

No chance.

Geometry, and time.

He rested his cup on the Chevy’s roof and fished in his pocket for the key.

He held it out.

Come and get it.

But King wasn’t the dumbest guy in the world. He said, “Just drop it on the seat. I’ll be right there.”

Don McQueen got in the front. He twisted counterclockwise, like a friendly guy just checking all his pals were going to get properly settled and comfortable. But the position kept his right hand free and clear, close to his right pants pocket, close to the right side of his pants waistband.

King was still near the gas cap, with his own right hand free and clear, still inches from Karen Delfuenso’s head.

Geometry, and time.

Reacher climbed in behind the driver’s seat, and leaned over and dropped the key.

McQueen smiled at him.

King closed Delfuenso’s door for her from the outside, and then he tracked around the trunk and closed Reacher’s door for him. He picked up the key and climbed in and scooted his seat six inches forward. He started the engine and eased back to the road and drove onward into the darkness, south, away from the Interstate, toward the promised motel.

The FBI emergency response operator had stayed on the line and listened in to the aborted call to Omaha. He had heard the ring tone. He had heard the receiver go down. He was a rookie, hence the routine night duty. But he was a fast-tracked rookie, hence the D.C. assignment and the important post. He was fast-tracked because he was smart.

He was smart enough to follow up.

He called the Omaha field office and spoke to the duty agent. He asked, “Have you guys got something going on there tonight?”

The agent in Nebraska yawned and said, “Kind of. There’s a single-victim knife-crime homicide in the back of beyond miles from anywhere, which doesn’t sound like a very big deal, but for some reason the SAC is on it, and the CIA and the State Department are sniffing around, and we’ve had a bunch of roadblocks on the Interstate.”

“Then you should know I put a call through to you, but the caller hung up before you answered.”

“Location?”

“Caller ID and the phone company indicate a gas station in the middle of nowhere, south and east of Des Moines, Iowa.”

“Did you get a name?”

“No name, but the caller was male, and in a hurry. He sounded like he was sick with a head cold. Very nasal.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Not specifically. He said he had information, probably for Omaha, Nebraska.”

“Probably?”

“That was the word he used.”

The guy in Nebraska said, “OK, thanks,” and hung up.

The dark Iowa road ran dead straight for another eight miles to a featureless T junction. There was an immense field on the left, and another on the right, and a double-wide field ahead. Hence the mandatory turn. A repeat accommodations sign had an arrow pointing left to the motel. Another eight miles later there was a featureless crossroads with an arrow pointing right. Alan King drove on, threading through the giant checkerboard matrix of Iowa agriculture. Alongside him Don McQueen sat half turned, slumped against his window, awake and watchful. Behind McQueen Karen Delfuenso stared rigidly ahead. She wouldn’t look at Reacher. She seemed disappointed in him.

Reacher himself sat still and breathed slow, in and out, just waiting.

The night duty agent in Nebraska wrote the words male caller, in a hurry, head cold, nasal voice, gas station, S&E of Des Moines, Iowa on a pad of paper, and then he scrolled through the speed dial list on his telephone console. He stopped on Sorenson, J, cellular.

He thought for a second.

Then he hit Dial.

Just in case it was important.

At that moment Julia Sorenson was talking to Sheriff Goodman about the missing eyewitness. The guy lived with a woman he wasn’t married to, in a rented farm property eleven miles north and west of the crime scene, and there was only one practical route for him to take, and he hadn’t arrived, and neither he nor his truck had been found along the way. He was not in any of Sin City’s bars or lounges, and Goodman’s deputies hadn’t found him in town.

Then Sorenson’s phone rang, and she excused herself and turned away and took the call. It was the night duty agent back at the field office. She only half listened to his preamble. Law enforcement got lots of aborted calls. Kids, pranksters, drunks, misdials, all part of the territory. But she started to pay serious attention when the guy got to the apparent source of the call. Because of her earlier gloomy and defeated conclusion: The perpetrators were somewhere east of Des Moines.

“Say that again?” she asked.

The guy said, “A pay phone in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, south and east of Des Moines, Iowa.”

“Are we sure of that?”

“Caller ID and the phone company confirmed it.”

“Who made the call?”

“No name, but the emergency operator said the voice was male.”

“Anything else?”

“He was in a hurry and he sounded nasal.”

“Nasal?”

“Like he had a head cold.”

“Is there a recording?”

“Of the original call? I’m sure there is.”

“Have it e-mailed to me. And call that gas station. Check if they have video, and if not, get a narrative and descriptions of everybody and everything.”

The duty agent said, “You need to call the CIA.”

Sorenson said, “Don’t tell me what I need to do.”

“It’s just that they’re calling me all the time. They want updates.”

“Tell them nothing,” Sorenson said. “Not yet.”

Then she clicked off the call and turned back and looked Goodman in the eye and said, “Sorry, chief, but I have to go to Iowa.”

Chapter 28

Goodman got the bare bones of the story from Sorenson and said, “What about my missing eyewitness?”

Sorenson said, “You can handle that yourself for the rest of the night. But don’t worry. You’re about to get plenty of help. As soon as the office workers get in tomorrow I’ll be replaced and you’ll be knee-deep in agents. You’ll have so many here you can put a couple on traffic duty. You can find out who drops gum on the sidewalk.”

“Your SAC is already involved. And you haven’t been replaced yet.”

“He hasn’t kicked it upstairs yet. Can’t do that, in the middle of the night. But he will. And he’ll cover his ass. Right now I bet he’s writing a report, which will be in every e-mail in-box everywhere by the time the sun comes up, and the last paragraph will be a recommendation to pull me out and bring in the heavy hitters from D.C. You can take that to the bank.”

“Doesn’t he trust you?”

“He trusts me just fine. But this thing looks toxic. He won’t want it anywhere near his own office. He prefers to look good.”

“So why are you going to Iowa?”

“Because right now it’s still my case.”

“You really think it’s them?”

“The location is right. It’s about where they’d be by now.”

“That’s just a wild-ass guess.”

“Who else would call Omaha from east of Des Moines?”

“Why would they call at all? And from a traceable pay phone?”

“A secret conscience attack, maybe. By the driver, possibly. They tell me the voice was nasal. Which could be a busted nose, not the flu. And maybe a pay phone was all he could find.”

“But he hung up.”

Sorenson nodded. “He changed his mind. That can happen.”

Goodman said, “What about Karen Delfuenso’s daughter?”

“You’ll have to tell her. You’d have to anyway. This is your county, and she’s your people.”

“When should I tell her?”

“When she wakes up.”

“That’s going to be tough.”

“It always is.”

“Those guys will be long gone by the time you get to southeastern Iowa. It’s a long way away.”

“I can drive faster than they did. No more roadblocks, and I don’t have to worry about tickets.”

“Even so.”

“Whatever, it’s better than staying here, doing nothing,” Sorenson said.

Sorenson checked in with Dawson and Mitchell and told them what she was going to do. She didn’t offer them a ride. She expected them to follow in their own car. She thought big-deal counterterrorism agents would relish the chase. But they said they were going to stay put, right there in the wilds of Nebraska. Near the point of vulnerability. They said there was nothing to worry about in Iowa. No disrespect to that fine state, they said. But it wasn’t a prime terrorist target.

Sorenson said, “They could have a base camp there. Like a hideout.”

Mitchell said, “Are you serious?”

“Not really.”

Dawson nodded. “We’ll call St. Louis. Technically southeastern Iowa is their responsibility. They’ll get involved if they need to.”

Sorenson didn’t speak to Lester L. Lester, Jr., of the State Department. She just ignored him completely. She got a ride with Goodman back to the old pumping station, and she got back in her car, and she followed her GPS back to the Interstate, seventy miles an hour all the way, with her lights flashing and her cell phone charging.

A deceptive exit, Reacher thought again. Dark rural roads, and places that were shut when you got there. He had been wrong about the gas station, but in and of itself that didn’t make the motel any more likely to exist. Fifty-fifty was a reasonable outcome, where truth in advertising was concerned. He had seen plenty of abandoned motels on his travels. America was full of them. They were like little time capsules, forever frozen in an earlier era, sometimes plain, sometimes adventurous in their design, always testament to the long sad decline in their owners’ energies and ambitions, always evidence of the way public taste had moved on. A week in a cabin near a buggy lake was no longer enough. Now it was cruises and Vegas and the Virgin Islands. Reacher had seen travel agents’ windows. He knew where vacationers went. He knew where they didn’t go. He saw no reason why a motel in the wilds of Iowa would have done any business in the last thirty years.

Which was a pity, because a stop for the night would have opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

King had turned left and right, left and right, endlessly south and east through the checkerboard darkness, a total of more than thirty miles since leaving the Shell station. At each turn a copy of the accommodations board had tempted them onward, the bland little arrows looking both firm and tentative, both promising and hopeless. McQueen didn’t look worried. He was awake and vigilant, and he seemed confident. He trusted the signs.

And it turned out he was right to. A mile later, for the second time that night, Reacher was proved wrong. He saw a dull glow in the mist, far ahead on the left, and he watched as it resolved itself into separate beige pearls of light, which turned out to be dim electric bulbs in bulkhead fixtures set knee-high on the walls of a long low motel building. The design of the place was standard. There was dark brown siding, and a lobby and an office at the north end, with a Coke machine and a porte cochere, and then the building continued south in a regular rhythm, window, door, window, door, for a total of twelve rooms. Each door had two white plastic lawn chairs next to it. The low-set bulkhead fixtures were to light a sidewalk that ran the length of the building. Two rooms had cars parked outside, one an old sedan, lacy with rust, and the other an immense pick-up truck painted in a motorcycle manufacturer’s colors. There was a third car parked tight against the office wall, a three-door import not much bigger than a golf cart. The night clerk’s ride, presumably.

Alan King slowed the Chevy and stopped and idled on the road twenty feet from the motel’s entrance. He surveyed the place, carefully, end to end, and he said, “Good enough?”

Don McQueen said, “Works for me.”

King didn’t seek Karen Delfuenso’s opinion. There was no big three-way democratic discussion. He just rolled onward and turned in on the far side of the porte cochere and came to a stop under it, facing north, with the rooms behind him. Inconvenient, in that he would have to back up or turn around after checking in, but inevitable, in that America drives on the right and takes circles counterclockwise.

There was a night light burning in the lobby. Reacher could see a reception counter, and a closed door behind it that no doubt led to an office. Probably the night guy was in there, asleep in a chair. There was a vase of flowers on the counter, probably fake.

Alan King said, “Mr. Reacher, would you go make the inquiry about rooms?”

Reacher said, “Obviously there are rooms. There are twelve doors and two cars.”

“Then would you kindly check us in?”

Reacher said, “I’m not the best guy to do that.”

“Why not?”

Reacher thought: Because I don’t want to get out of the car. Not now. Because I no longer control the car key.

He said, “Because I don’t have a credit card.”

“Really?”

“Or ID. Apart from an old passport, that is. But it’s been expired for years, and some people don’t like that.”

“You must have a driver’s license, surely.”

“I don’t.”

“But you were just driving.”

“Don’t tell the cops.”

“Unlicensed driving is a felony.”

“Probably just a misdemeanor.”

“Have you ever had a license?”

“Not a civilian license, no.”

“Have you ever even passed a test?”

“I guess so. Probably. In the army, possibly.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember learning. I don’t remember a test, as such.”

McQueen said, “I’ll come with you. I have a credit card.”

Which worked for Reacher. He didn’t want to be out of the car alone, but equally he didn’t want either King or McQueen to select the rooms alone. He wanted some influence over who went where. He opened his door. McQueen opened his door. They got out together, McQueen ten feet from the lobby, Reacher on the far side of the car. McQueen waited. Reacher looped around the trunk. Reacher paused, gestured, right-handed, open palm: Go ahead. After you. A precaution, not politeness. He didn’t want to walk in front of a man with a gun. Not that he thought there was a serious danger of getting shot. Not then and there. Not with a night clerk and at least two motel guests within earshot.

McQueen went ahead down a decorative path made of broken paving stones jigsawed together. Reacher followed. McQueen pulled the lobby door. Reacher stepped up and held it and gestured again: After you.

McQueen went in. Reacher followed. The lobby had a vinyl floor and four gaudy wicker armchairs grouped around a low table. There was a higher table with push-top coffee flasks and stacks of paper cups. There was a rack on the wall with compartments for small folded brochures describing local tourist attractions. It was mostly empty.

The reception counter butted up against the side wall on the right. It ended six feet short of the wall on the left, near the table with the coffee. There was low TV sound behind the office door, and a rim of soft light all around it. McQueen bellied up to the counter on the right, and Reacher came to a stop alongside him, on the left.

“Hello?” McQueen called.

No response.

McQueen tapped his knuckles on the counter.

“Hello?” he called again.

No response.

“Service industries,” McQueen said, quietly. “Can’t beat them.”

He knocked on the counter again, a little louder.

“Hello?” he said, also a little louder. No response.

He glanced left at Reacher and said, “You better go knock on his door.”

Which would put Reacher in front of the gun for the first time, but there was no natural way to refuse. The route around to the door was to the left, and Reacher was on the left. Simple as that. Choreography. Geometry. Inevitable.

So Reacher looped around, between the end of the counter and the table with the coffee, and he stepped into the narrow well behind the counter. He glanced back out through the lobby window. The Chevy was still there, under the porte cochere. It hadn’t moved. It was idling patiently, just waiting, with white exhaust pooling at the rear.

But McQueen had left his car door open.

Which was the first warning bell.

The second was the sound of feet on vinyl.

A fast one-two shuffle.

Exactly like the sound of a man stepping back and turning sideways.

The third warning bell was a fast composite rustle of skin and cotton and wool and metal.

Exactly like the sound of something heavy coming out of a pocket.

Reacher turned back and faced McQueen and saw nothing beyond the muzzle of a small stainless steel handgun pointing at the center of his face.

Chapter 29

The gun was a Smith & Wesson 2213. The smallest automatic in Smith & Wesson’s extensive range. Three-inch barrel, .22 Long Rifle rimfires, eight in the magazine. Dainty, but a serious weapon. McQueen had been very fast with it. Phenomenally fast. Like a magician. Like a conjuror. First it wasn’t there, and then it was.

Just like that.

Reacher stood very still.

The gun was maybe eight feet away. Behind it McQueen’s long right arm was locked straight and raised slightly above the horizontal. He was standing sideways on. His head was turned. One eye was closed.

His finger was white on the trigger.

Not good.

The .22 Long Rifle was one of the world’s oldest rounds, and by far the most common. Annual production every year since 1887 had exceeded two billion units. For a reason. It was cheap, it was quiet, and its recoil was gentle. And it was effective. Out of a rifle it was good against rats and squirrels at four hundred and fifty feet, and against dogs and foxes at two-fifty, and against full-grown coyotes at one-fifty.

Against a human head at eight feet it would be devastating.

Even out of a short-barreled handgun.

Not good.

Not good at all.

Reacher couldn’t see the Chevy anymore. McQueen was in the way. Which was not such a bad thing. At least Delfuenso would not have to watch it happen.

Which was a mercy.

But then: look on the bright side of life.

That was Reacher’s innate credo.

As in: there were four basic ways of missing with a short-barreled handgun. Even at eight feet, even against a head-sized target. They were: missing high, missing low, missing left, and missing right.

Missing high was always the most likely.

All guns kick upward as they fire. Action, reaction, a basic law of physics. Inevitably new shooters with machine guns stitched a vertical line that rose forever. A classic fault. Ninety percent of training was about holding the muzzle down. Suppressors helped, because of the extra weight.

There was no reason to believe McQueen was a new shooter.

But if he was going to miss, he was going to miss high.

Laws of physics.

Four things happened at once: Reacher let out a sudden loud inarticulate bellow, and McQueen startled and rocked back a step, and Reacher dropped vertically toward the floor, and McQueen pulled the trigger.

And missed.

Missed high, partly because Reacher’s head was no longer where it had been before. Gravity had done its work. Reacher heard the roar of the shot, quieter than some, but still deafening in a closed room, and simultaneously he heard the wallboard explode above and behind his head, and then he hit the floor, knees first, then his hip, then his side, sprawling, down low behind the counter, out of sight. He had no plan. At that point he was in a strict one-step-at-a-time mode. Stay alive, and see what the next split second brings. As he fell he was aware of a vague intention to hurl the whole counter up and out, straight at McQueen, if it wasn’t bolted to the floor, or else roll backward through the door into the inner office, where there had to be a window, which would be closed against the weather, but he could plunge through it elbows first, because cuts and bruises were better than a bullet in the head.

Fight or flight.

But neither thing was necessary.

The blast of the shot peaked and started to die and Reacher heard the scrape and scrabble of feet on vinyl and he grabbed the end of the counter low down near the floor and jerked himself overhand to his right, one powerful instantaneous stroke, and he got his head out in the gap, and he saw McQueen more or less falling out through the lobby door, and then sprinting back along the neat little path, and hurling himself back into the car, and the car howling away with spinning wheels and blue tire smoke. Reacher scrambled up to his knees and got there in time to see McQueen slam his door and the car rock through a wild 180 turn, back onto the road, facing south again, and then it accelerated away, hard, nose high, tail low, wheels spinning and scrabbling for grip and pouring smoke. The last thing Reacher saw through the haze was a brief flash of white in the Chevy’s rear window, which was Karen Delfuenso’s pale face, turning back in horror, her mouth wide open.

Reacher stayed on his knees. Silence came back. White gypsum powder drifted down on him, slowly, weightless, like talc, on his shoulders, in his hair. Tire smoke hung in the night air under the porte cochere, and it rolled slowly forward in a ghostly dissipating cloud, which followed the trajectory of the 180 turn, like a description, like an explanation, like proof, and then it disappeared completely, like it had never been there at all.

Then the office door opened a crack and a short fat man stuck his head out and looked around and said, “Just so you know, I already called the cops on you.”

Julia Sorenson heard her phone ping over the noise of her speeding car and she opened her e-mail and found an audio attachment from the emergency operator in D.C. Her phone cradle was hooked up to her car’s stereo system, which was the base Ford option and therefore nothing fancy, but it was plenty loud and clear. She turned the volume up and hit Play and heard a short fifteen-second recording, of two voices on the telephone, one in the Hoover Building and the other allegedly in Iowa.

This is the FBI. What is the nature of your emergency?

I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska.

What is the nature of your information?

Just connect me, now. Sir, what is your name?

Then there was a short pause, just a beat really, and then: Connect me now or you’ll lose your job.

Then there was another short pause, then dead air, then a new dial tone.

Then nothing.

She played it again, and listened exclusively to the caller, not the operator.

I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska.

Just connect me, now.

Connect me now or you’ll lose your job.

Six seconds. Twenty-three words, spoken with urgency but also with a certain weird patience. A very nasal intonation, full of breath sounds, entirely consistent with a badly broken nose, the M sounds shading toward B sounds, information more like inforbation, and Omaha more like Obaha.

She played it again, zeroing in.

Probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska.

Or you’ll lose your job.

Clearly the strange urgent-but-patient blend meant the guy was accustomed to making important operational calls, or issuing instructions of some kind, and that he knew even alert and intelligent listeners needed a chance to get from zero to sixty. But he wasn’t just a businessman. Even a high-level guy used to trading millions on the phone would get a little more freaked about calling an FBI emergency line in the middle of the night. This guy sounded like it was routine to him. The your in your field office meant he wasn’t actually FBI himself, at least not currently, but he seemed to know how things worked, and in a sense the your sounded like he considered himself a peer, or a part of the same world. Your field office, my field office.

The probably was intriguing. It was measured, and considered, and intelligent. As if the guy was in reality almost a hundred percent certain he wanted Omaha, but didn’t want to derail the process with an initial assumption that could conceivably prove faulty later on. Or as if he wanted to recruit the emergency operator as a kind of partner, to let the operator own some component of the ultimate decision, to oil the wheels, to speed things along.

Her gut feeling told her again: this was a guy accustomed to making important operational calls. He had very sound bureaucratic instincts.

As in: Or you’ll lose your job. Preceded by the very short pause for thought. This was a guy who knew exactly what to say. Who had gone through duty officers before. Who had maybe even been a duty officer once upon a time.

So what was he doing driving a car full of two murderers and a hostage?

And why did he make the call and then hang up prematurely?

She got no further with those questions, because right then her phone rang with a live call, the plain electronic tone blasting loud and deep and sonorous through dashboard speakers and door speakers and a subwoofer under the rear parcel shelf. She dropped the volume a notch and touched Accept. It was her duty officer on the line, at her field office in Omaha. The guy who hadn’t picked up in time.

He said, “I have the SAC holding for you.”

Sorenson slowed down to eighty. She checked the road ahead and checked her mirrors. She said, “Put him on.”

There was a static click, loud and emphatic through the sound system. Then a voice said, “Sorenson?”

Sorenson said, “Yes, sir.”

Her Special Agent-in-Charge. Her supervisor. Her boss. A man called Perry, fifty-four years old, a Bureau lifer, ambitious, first name Anthony, called Tony to his face, called Stony behind his back, because of the mineral lump where his heart should have been.

He said, “I called the gas station in Iowa.”

“You did, sir?”

“I’m awake. I might as well do something useful.”

“And?”

“They don’t have video.”

“But?”

“The night clerk seems like a smart enough kid. He came through with a pretty coherent story.”

“Which was?”

“The car was a dark blue Chevy Impala. He didn’t get the plate. Four people in it, three men and a woman. Initially one man and the woman stayed in the car. A second man pumped the gas. First point of interest, he used a credit card we just found out is phony.”

“Was it related to the card used at the Denver airport?”

“We don’t think so. Different source, almost certainly. The second point of interest is the car took only three-point-something gallons, which the kid behind the register thought was strange. The average sale at that location is closer to eleven gallons, unless someone’s filling a can for a lawnmower.”

“So they either part-filled the car, which might mean they’re close to home, or they topped it off, which means they’d stopped before.”

“We’re checking if the same card has been used anywhere else tonight. No results yet. But anyway, while the gas business was happening the third man entered the store alone and waited until the door closed and then asked for the pay phone.”

“This was the driver, sir?”

“Yes. The kid described him as gigantic, with a busted nose, all raw and crusted with blood. The kid admits at first he was a little scared. The guy looked like something out of a slasher movie. Like a wild man. His clothes were dirty and his hair was a mess. But he spoke normally and ultimately he seemed pleasant enough. So the kid pointed him to the phone, which is out of sight near the restrooms. So the kid has no direct knowledge of whether the guy actually used the phone or not. Then the guy who had stayed in the car came in to use the toilet. The slasher movie guy came out and got coffee all around and then the other guy came out and they left together. The car drove away in an orderly fashion and headed south.”

“Atmosphere? Anything squirrelly?”

“Nothing to report. It was the middle of the night, so they all looked a little tired and vague, but there were no bad words, no apparent tension, and no real hurry either, as far as I understand it.”

“Did you listen to the emergency line recording, sir?”

“Yes, I was copied on it, obviously.”

“Did anything stand out for you?”

“The word probably. It makes no sense. If he’s one of them he knows where the crime was committed. In which case he would have said he had information for Omaha, Nebraska, period.”

“You think he’s not one of them?”

“I think he’s low-level muscle. He drives, and he fetches coffee. He doesn’t know the details.”

Bullshit, Stony, Sorenson thought. He doesn’t sound low-level to me. He sounds smarter than you, for instance.

She said, “Thank you, sir. That’s very useful.”

“Keep in touch,” the SAC said, and clicked off.

Sorenson drove on for a mile, thinking, and then she eased back up to ninety miles an hour and went back to e-mail. She turned the sound system’s volume up high and played the recording one more time.

Just connect me, now.

The big guy’s first sentence had been reasonable, patient, and explanatory. I have information, probably for your field office in Omaha, Nebraska. A scene-setter. A preamble. But it hadn’t gotten the desired results. The emergency operator hadn’t jumped right to it. So the big guy had gotten impatient. Just connect me, now. Urgent, breathy, frustrated. Some slight wonder and incomprehension in his voice. Some slight emphasis on the last word. Now. A little desperate. As if to say: I have completed the first step of the ritual dance, and I really, really don’t have time for the second, and I really, really can’t understand why you don’t understand that.

Not a change of heart. The big guy had hung up because he was out of time. Because the other guy had come in to use the bathroom.

The big guy was one of them. But he was a traitor.

Chapter 30

Reacher put his hands flat on the floor and pushed himself up off his knees. He turned and looked at the fat man in the office doorway and said, “I need to borrow your car.”

The fat man stared at Reacher’s face.

He said, “What?”

“Your car. Right now.”

“No way.” The guy was about thirty, prematurely losing his hair, about five feet four high, and about five feet three wide. He was wearing a white shirt and a red sleeveless V-necked sweater. He said, “I told you, I already called the cops. They’re on their way. So don’t try anything stupid.”

Reacher said, “How long will it take for the cops to arrive?”

“Two minutes, max. They’re already rolling.”

“From where?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “County?”

The guy said, “At night we rely on the State Police.”

“They were all on roadblock duty. On the Interstate. A long way west of here. Short notice. No time to organize replacements. I’d say they’re two hours away, minimum. Not two minutes, maximum. If they come at all, that is. No one died here.”

“A shot was fired.”

“And that’s a bad thing, right?”

“Of course it is.”

“So they’re the bad guys. Because they fired the shot. And they fired it at me. Which makes me the good guy.”

“Or the even worse guy.”

“Whichever,” Reacher said. “If I’m the good guy you’ll help me because you’re on my side. If I’m the even worse guy you’ll help me because you’re scared of me. But either way you’ll help me. So you might as well just cut to the chase and give me your keys.”

“Won’t do you any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because I protect myself.”

“Against what?”

“Against people like you.”

“How?”

“No gas in my car.”

“There has to be gas in your car. You’re thirty miles from the gas station.”

“There’s a gallon or so. Good for about forty miles. And forty miles is nothing out here.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s the best anti-theft protection there is. Better than an alarm, better than a tracker, better than a fancy lock.”

“You’re pretty smart,” Reacher said. “Or completely nuts. One or the other. What about your guests tonight? Who are they? Maybe I could borrow that pick-up truck.”

The fat man just said, “Oh, man, please.”

But Reacher didn’t push it. He just stood there, defeated. Because of numbers. Specifically four, and three, and two. Almost four minutes had passed. King and McQueen were about to hit the next road junction. It would be a T junction, offering two choices, or a crossroads, offering three. Iowa. The checkerboard. The agricultural matrix. To be more than a field’s-length behind a fleeing fugitive meant facing endlessly escalating odds of taking the wrong turn. So far Reacher had seen T junctions and crossroads in about a two-to-three ratio, spaced an average of about eight miles apart. The fat man’s gallon of gas might last about sixty minutes. And at the end of that hour the odds of being on the right track would have stacked up to around six-fifty to one against. Hopeless.

Time, and geometry.

Sorenson’s e-mail pinged again and she found an audio file from the Iowa 911 service. It was the call that had been patched through to the FBI emergency operator.

What is your current location?

Give me the FBI.

Sir, what is your current location?

Don’t waste time.

Do you need fire, police, or ambulance?

I need the FBI.

Sir, this is the 911 emergency service.

And since about September the twelfth 2001 you’ve had a direct button for the FBI.

How did you know that?

Just a lucky guess. Hit the button, and hit it now.

The same nasal voice. The same measured urgency. No panic, but not much patience, either. The same insight. As a matter of fact 911 dispatchers had not gotten an FBI button on September twelfth 2001. The installations had started a week or so later. But in principle the guy was right. He was clued in.

But how?

She played the file again, and got as far as I need the FBI when her ring tone cut in over it. Another live call. The plain electronic tone, loud and thrilling through the speakers. It was her duty officer again, at his desk in Omaha. He said, “I don’t know if it means anything, but the Iowa State Police are saying they just got a 911 call about a gunshot fired in a motel lobby, about thirty-some miles south and east of that gas station.”

* * *

The fat man hovered nervously behind the reception counter and Reacher took a look at the bullet hole in his wall. It was directly above the office door, maybe nine inches left of center, close to the ceiling, maybe an inch and a half below the crown molding. It looked like the round had hit near a stud or a screw. The impact had blasted off a large shallow flake of plaster, about the size of a teacup saucer, and the flake had left a corresponding crater. The center of the crater was drilled with the .22 hole, neat and precise, a little smaller than a pencil.

Reacher backed off and stood where McQueen had stood. He turned sideways. He bent his knees and lowered himself five inches, to make himself McQueen’s height. He raised his arm and straightened it and pointed his index finger at the hole.

He closed one eye.

He shook his head.

It had been a bad miss, in his opinion. Because it would have missed even if he hadn’t fallen down on the floor. It would have missed even if he had stretched up high on tiptoes. It would have missed even if he had jumped up in the air. It might have grazed a seven-five NBA star, but at six-five Reacher would have been OK under any circumstances.

If he was going to miss, he was going to miss high.

Civilian marksmanship was appalling, for a population obsessed with guns.

Reacher straightened up again and turned back to the fat man and said, “I need to use your phone.”

Chapter 31

Julia Sorenson drove some fast minutes uninterrupted, and then her phone rang again, loud over the speakers. Her duty officer, in Omaha. He said, “It’s your lucky night. I think.”

“How so?”

“The same guy is on the line again.”

“The nasal guy?”

“Right now, live and in person.”

“Where is he?”

“On the same phone that just called in the 911 in Iowa.”

“The motel lobby thing?”

“You got it.”

“How far out are the Iowa cops?”

“A long way. The roadblocks screwed them up.”

“OK, put the guy on.”

“You sure? Stony will want this one.”

“My case,” Sorenson said. “Put the guy on. I’ll deal with Stony later.”

She heard clicks and hiss and then a new acoustic. A room, not large. Hard surfaces. Probably an office. Laminate desks, metal cabinets. She heard the nasal voice. It said, “Hello?”

She said, “This is FBI Special Agent Julia Sorenson. What is your name, sir?”

* * *

Reacher put an elbow on the fat man’s laminate desk and trapped the receiver against his shoulder. He said, “I’m not going to tell you my name. Not yet, anyway. We need to talk first.”

The woman named Sorenson said, “About what?”

She was from Minnesota, Reacher thought. Originally. She sounded a little Scandinavian, like her name. And she seemed businesslike. She didn’t waste words. She was direct and to the point. He said, “I need to understand my personal situation.”

“Is Karen Delfuenso still alive?”

“As far as I know.”

“Then it’s her personal situation we should be considering.”

“I am considering it,” Reacher said. “That’s my point. Are you going to slow me down or help me out?”

“With what?”

“Finding her.”

“You’re no longer with her?”

“No. They shot at me and drove off. Delfuenso is still in the car.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m not going to tell you my name.”

“No, I mean I need to understand your involvement.”

“I have no involvement.”

“You were seen driving the car.”

“They asked me to.”

“So you’re their driver?”

“I never saw them before.”

“What does that mean? You were what, a random stranger? A passerby? And they just stopped and asked you to drive their car?”

“I was hitching rides. They picked me up.”

“Where?”

“In Nebraska.”

“And they asked you to drive the car? Is that normal?”

“Not in my experience.” No response from Sorenson.

Reacher said, “I think they were expecting roadblocks and they wanted cover. I think they were anticipating a three-person APB, so they wanted four people in the car. I think they wanted someone else at the wheel, not one of them. Someone the cops would see first. My busted nose was a bonus. I bet that was ninety percent of the description you got. A guy with his face smashed in.”

“A gorilla.”

“What?”

“A gorilla with its face smashed in. Not very nice, I know.”

“Not very nice to the gorilla,” Reacher said. “But whatever, I was useful to them. But then they came off the Interstate. So they didn’t need me anymore.”

“So they shot you? Are you hurt?”

“I said they shot at me. They missed.”

“Do you know where they’re going?”

“No idea.”

“Then how can you find Delfuenso?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“If they don’t need you anymore, they don’t need her anymore, either. Just her car.”

“So we better be quick.”

“I’m still an hour away.”

“Are the troopers coming?”

“They’re all behind me.”

Reacher said, “I’ve lost them anyway. The roads out here are impossible. I’m going to have to come at this from a different direction.”

“What were you doing in Nebraska?”

“None of your business.”

“Is that where you broke your nose?”

“I don’t remember.”

“The sergeant at the roadblock said you admitted you’d been fighting.”

“Not really. I said he should see the other guy. That was all. It was a conventional pleasantry.”

“He told us you said the other guy was in a state other than Iowa.”

“I can’t comment on what he told you. I wasn’t there for that conversation.”

“Was the other guy in Nebraska?”

“You’re wasting time.”

“I’m not. I’m driving as fast as I can. What else can I do at the moment?”

“Drive faster still.”

Sorenson asked, “Where were you going?” Reacher said, “When?”

“When they picked you up.”

“Virginia.”

“Why?”

“None of your business.”

“What’s in Virginia?”

“Many things. It’s an important state. Twelfth largest in the Union in terms of population. Thirteenth, in terms of GDP. You could look it up.”

“You’re not convincing me. You’re not helping your personal situation.”

“Why am I calling you?”

“Maybe you want a deal.”

“I don’t. I don’t need a deal. I need to help Delfuenso if I can, and then I need to go to Virginia.”

“Why would you need to help Delfuenso?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I’m a human being.”

No answer from Sorenson.

Reacher asked, “What did those guys do, anyway?”

“I think I won’t discuss that with you. Not yet.”

“I know they jacked Delfuenso’s car. I know they had blood on their clothes.”

“How do you know that? They bought shirts and changed.”

“Delfuenso told me.”

“You talked?”

“She blinked it out. In secret. A simple letter code.”

“Smart woman. Brave woman, too.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “She warned me about the guns. I let her down.”

“Evidently.”

“You didn’t do so great either, with the two-man APB.”

“One would think a BOLO for two men would logically include more than two. By a simple inference.”

“Troopers don’t infer things. They don’t take the initiative. Nine times out of ten it gets them in trouble.”

Sorenson asked, “How is Delfuenso doing?”

Reacher said, “She’s not exactly having the time of her life.”

“She has a kid back home.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “She told me.”

Sorenson asked, “Do you have access to a vehicle?”

Reacher said, “Not really. There are a couple here I might be able to borrow, but it’s pointless anyway. Those guys could be anywhere by now.”

“What’s your name?”

“Not yet.”

“OK, stay right where you are. I’ll see you when I get there.”

“You might,” Reacher said. “Or you might not.”

Drive faster still, the nasal guy had said, and Sorenson tried very hard to. She eased up to nearly a hundred miles an hour, which was outside her personal comfort zone. But the road was straight and wide and empty. I never saw them before, he had said. I was hitching rides. Did she believe him? Maybe. Or maybe not. It was a very neat and comprehensive explanation of the facts. Therefore perhaps suspicious in itself. Because real life was neither neat nor comprehensive. Not usually. And who hitchhiked anymore? Especially in the wintertime? The guy sounded educated. And not noticeably young. Not a normal hitchhiking demographic. Statistics. The Bureau found them to be a useful guide.

And: They shot at me. But: They missed. Either extreme good fortune, or extremely good playacting. Getting shot at by the indisputably guilty helped build credibility. Perhaps all concerned had figured that out well ahead of time.

Then her low-fuel warning pinged at her and a little lamp lit up yellow. Dumb. Not a great time to run out of gas. Not a great place, either. Iowa was a lonely state. Exits were many miles apart. Each one was an event in its own right. She took the next she saw, a no-name turn a little east of Des Moines. She could see gas station lights ahead, blue and white in the mist. The ramp led to a two-lane county road, and she saw the gas station itself a hundred feet away to the south. It was a big place, set up for trucks as well as cars. The car part had six pumps. There was a small pay hut, and a bathroom block standing alone on the edge of the lot. Across the street was a long barn-shaped building with Food And Drink All Day All Night painted in white on the slope of its roof.

She pumped the gas and heard the nasal voice in her head again: I’ve lost them anyway. The roads out here are impossible. I’m going to have to come at this from a different direction. Twenty-two words. Resignation, frustration, and then a new resolution. The first-person singular, used twice. The instinctive assumption of individual personal responsibility for the fate of another. And determination. And knowledge, too. She had said One would think a BOLO for two men would logically include more than two. A BOLO. A be-on-the-lookout. He hadn’t needed to ask what it meant. He already knew. Then he had said: Troopers don’t infer things. They don’t take the initiative. Nine times out of ten it gets them in trouble. Which was a perceptive comment. As was: I think they were expecting roadblocks and they wanted cover. Which matched her own thinking exactly.

Resolute, responsible, determined, knowledgeable, and perceptive.

Driving two murderers in a stolen car.

With a hostage.

Why am I calling you?

Who the hell was this guy?

Chapter 32

Reacher spilled brochures out of the tourist-attraction rack in the lobby until he found one with something approximating a map. It was not an outstanding example of the cartographer’s art. But it was the best the place had to offer. It was basically a hand-drawn rectangle with Kansas City at the bottom left, and St. Louis at the bottom right, and Des Moines at the top left, and Cedar Rapids at the top right. In between those four anchoring cities was a lot of white space, with a bunch of little icons describing things Reacher wasn’t interested in.

He was interested in the white space itself, particularly the upper half of it. The Iowa half. Thirtieth out of fifty in population, twenty-sixth out of fifty in land area, but Iowa had a quarter of America’s best-grade topsoil all to itself, and therefore it was at the head of the list when it came to corn and soybeans and hogs and cattle. Which meant spare, sparse habitation, and miles between neighbors, and lonely isolated buildings of uncertain purpose, and a kind of live-and-let-live lack of curiosity about who was doing what, and where and when and how and why they were doing it at all.

The two worst places to search were densely populated cities, and wide open countryside. Reacher had succeeded in those environments many times, but he had failed there too. Also many times.

Behind him the fat man said, “Who’s going to pay for the hole in my wall?”

Reacher said, “Not me.”

“Well, someone will have to.”

“What are you, a socialist? Pay for it yourself. Or fix it yourself. It isn’t brain surgery. Two minutes and a tub of spackle will take care of it.”

“It’s not right that a person should just burst in here and do a thing like that.”

Reacher said, “I’m busy.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re looking at a blank sheet of paper.”

“You got a better map?”

“It wasn’t right.”

“Shit happens. Get over it.”

“That bullet could have come through the wall and hit me.”

“Are you kidding? Look where it is.”

“But whoever fired it didn’t know I was short. Not in advance. How could they? It was completely reckless. It was totally irresponsible.”

“You think?”

“I could have been hurt.”

“But you weren’t. So don’t worry about it.”

“I could have been killed.”

“Look where it is,” Reacher said again. “It would have missed if you were standing on your own shoulders.”

Then the phone rang in the office and the guy ducked back in to answer it. He came straight back out and said, “It’s the FBI, for the man with the broken nose. That would be you, I suppose.”

Reacher said, “Pretty soon it could be either one of us, if you don’t stop yapping at me.”

He took the map with him to the desk and picked up the receiver. It was the Scandinavian woman again. Originally from Minnesota. Julia Sorenson. She said, “You’re still there.”

“Evidently,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“I told you why. The roads here are like graph paper. Pointless trying to follow anyone more than two minutes ahead.”

“Does it matter exactly which route they take? They’re heading basically south. We should assume they have a destination in mind. They’re not going to stay in Iowa.”

Reacher said, “I don’t agree.”

“Why not?”

“Daylight is coming. Town and county cops will be back on duty by seven or eight in the morning. And those guys must be assuming their plate number is everywhere by now. Plus descriptions, of them and the car. They won’t risk much more. They can’t. So they’ll hole up before dawn. Somewhere right here in Iowa.”

“They could get into Missouri before the break of day.”

“But they won’t. They’ll assume the Missouri troopers will be waiting right on the line. Troopers like to do that. Like a welcome and a warning. With the new day’s BOLOs taped right on their dashboards.”

“They can’t stay in Iowa either,” Sorenson said. “They can’t really stay anywhere. If they assume their plate number is everywhere, they’ll assume we’re calling motel keepers too.”

“They won’t be using a motel. I think they have a specific place to go. A place of their own. Because their choice of exit off the Interstate was not random. I wouldn’t have taken it. No sane person would have taken it. It was just a no-name back road. But they knew it well. They knew where they were going. They knew the gas station was there, and they knew this motel was here, too. No way of knowing either thing unless they’ve been here before.”

“You could be right.”

“Equally I could be wrong.”

“Which is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will they hole up all day?”

“I would.”

“That’s risky. They’d be sitting ducks.”

“Sitting ducks, yes. But not really risky. Ninety minutes after peeling out of here they’ll be somewhere inside an empty five-thousand-square-mile box. You planning to go door-to-door, hoping for the best?”

“How would you do it?”

“Have you made a decision about my personal situation?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you may never know how I would do it.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy,” Reacher said.

“What kind of guy?”

“Why did you call me back?”

“To try and find out what kind of guy you are.”

“And what’s your conclusion so far?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m an innocent passerby. That’s all. That’s the kind of guy I am.”

“Everyone always says they’re innocent.”

“And sometimes they’re telling the truth.”

“Stay right there,” Sorenson said. “I’ll be with you in less than an hour.”

Sorenson drove on, somewhere between ninety and a hundred, one eye on the road ahead, the other on her GPS map. She was getting close to the no-name turn. And she could see the nasal guy’s point. No sane person would have taken it. The landscape ahead looked infinitely dark and infinitely empty. No lights of any kind, no features, no items of interest.

They knew where they were going.

Then her phone rang yet again. It was Perry, her SAC. Stony, her boss. He said, “I found out a little more about the victim.”

“That’s good,” Sorenson said. “The guy the State Department sent out wouldn’t say a word.”

“Mr. Lester? I went over his head. Not that State had much to conceal. Turns out the victim was a trade attaché. A salesman, basically. A dealmaker. That’s all, really. His job was to oil the wheels for American exporters.”

“Where did he serve?”

“I wasn’t told. But they let slip he was an Arabic speaker. Draw your own conclusions.”

“Why was he in Nebraska?”

“No one knows.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Not business, as far as I can tell. He was on leave between postings.”

“You know that two counterterrorism guys came up from Kansas City?”

“Yes, I heard that. Might mean something. Might not. Those guys are always looking for reasons to freak out. They have a big budget to justify.”

Sorenson said nothing.

Perry said, “We have a budget to justify too. I hear you made contact with the driver.”

Sorenson said, “He claims he was a hitchhiker. He claims they dumped him at gunpoint. I’ll be meeting with him inside an hour.”

“Good. Arrest him on sight. Homicide, kidnapping, grand theft auto, breaking the speed limit, anything else you can think of. Bring him back here immediately, in handcuffs.”

Chapter 33

Sheriff Victor Goodman did the obvious, cautious thing, which was to drive the route between the old pumping station and the farm where the eyewitness lived, which was eleven miles to the north and west of town. On the way out there he drove slowly and paid careful attention to the right-hand shoulder of the road. There was ice here and there. Overall the land was pretty flat, but at a detailed level there were humps and bumps and bad cambers and ragged edges. According to a deputy who knew the guy, the eyewitness drove a well-used Ford Ranger pick-up truck. It was too old for ABS, and assuming it was unloaded it would be light and skittery at the back end. Skids and slides were possible, even likely, because it was late and the guy was probably hurrying. And a skid or a slide at speed could put the guy fifty feet into a field, easily, and maybe even tip him over, if the tires caught a rut or a furrow. So Goodman used the beam on his windshield pillar, near and far, back and forth, slowing to a walk on the curves, making sure.

He found nothing.

The house the guy lived in was a modest affair. Eighty years previously it might have anchored an independent one-man fifty-acre spread. Now it was a leftover, after two or three rounds of farm consolidations, these days either rented to or provided for a laborer. It had a sagging ridgeline and milky glass in the windows. It was dark and still. Goodman got out of his cruiser and pounded on the door and yelled and hollered.

Then he waited, and three minutes later a disheveled woman came to the door, in night clothes. The common-law wife. No, the guy was not home yet. No, he didn’t make a habit of staying out all night. Yes, he always called if he was going to be late. No, she had no idea where he was.

So Goodman got back in his car and drove the same road back to the pumping station, slowly and carefully, using his pillar spot all the way, this time paying close attention to the other shoulder, and watching the first fifty feet of brittle stubble beyond it.

He saw nothing.

So then he drove other routes, in descending order of likelihood. His county was not geographically complicated. The central crossroads created four quadrants, northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest, each one of them to some varying extent filled in with random ribbons of development. It was conceivable the guy had chosen to thread his way home through an arbitrary and indirect route. Conceivable, but unlikely. Gas was expensive and there was no reason to add unnecessary miles. There was no reason to think the guy had a second lady friend willing to receive a late-night visit. But Goodman was a thorough man, so he checked.

But he found no old Ford Ranger pick-up trucks parked anywhere in the northwestern quadrant. Or in the northeastern quadrant. Or in the southwestern.

The southeastern quadrant was the least likely of all. To get there the guy would have had to turn his back on home, and why would he do that well after midnight? And the southeastern quadrant was mostly commercial, anyway. The two-lane county road leading south was lined on both sides by small strip malls. The road leading east was the same. There were seed merchants and dry goods stores and groceries and gun shops and pawn shops. There was a bank. There was a pharmacy, and a John Deere dealership. All of those establishments closed at five o’clock each afternoon. There was angled street parking in front of the stores, uniformly unoccupied at night, and larger lots behind, mostly empty, and old barns used for storage, all locked up tight.

Sheriff Goodman checked them all anyway. He was a thorough man. He drove slowly south, looking down the alleys between the buildings, then looping back north through the back lots on the right, then going south again and paying attention to the other side of the road, before coming north again through the back lots on the left.

He found nothing. He repeated the same procedure on the road leading east, all the way out into open country and then back again, checking both sides, checking the alleys, checking the storefronts, checking the rear lots.

And there it was.

An old Ford Ranger pick-up truck, parked neatly behind Gus Bantry’s hardware store.

Reacher folded the inadequate map and put it in his back pocket. He checked the view out the office window. Still dark. But dawn was coming. He looked at the fat man and said, “You want to rent me a room?”

The fat man didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “I could give you money and you could give me a key. You could call it running a business.”

The guy responded by stepping out to the well behind the counter and unpinning a notice from the wall. It was a sheet of paper laminated in plastic, with a cursive script and pale inkjet printing spelling out a simple sentence: Management reserves the right to refuse service. The plastic was lightly dusted with gypsum powder, from the bullet hole.

Reacher said, “I’m the good guy here. You heard me on the phone with the federal authorities. It was an amicable conversation.”

The guy said, “I can’t afford any more trouble.”

“You’ve had all the trouble you’re likely to get tonight. From here on in it’s going to be all about an investigation. You could have ten agents here for a week. Or more than ten, or more than a week. How does that compare to your usual winter occupancy?”

The guy paused.

Reacher said, “OK, we’ll all go somewhere else.”

The guy said, “Forty dollars.”

“Twenty.”

“Thirty.”

“Don’t push it. These guys have an office of budgetary responsibility. They see something they don’t like, they’ll call the IRS, just for fun.”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

“Deal,” Reacher said. He dug in his other back pocket and came out with a wad of crumpled bills. He counted out twenty-five bucks, a ten and two fives and five singles.

The fat man said, “A week in advance.”

“Don’t push it,” Reacher said again.

“OK, two nights.”

Reacher added a twenty and another five. He said, “I’ll take a room in the middle of the row. No neighbors either side.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a solitary soul.”

The fat man trawled through a drawer and came out with a brass key on a leather fob, which had the number 5 printed in faded gilt on one side, and some mailing instructions on the other. He said, “You have to sign the register.”

“Why?”

“Iowa law.”

Reacher put himself down as Bill Skowron, who had hit .375 for the Yankees in the World Series just weeks before Reacher was born. The fat man handed over the key and Reacher headed for his room.

Sheriff Goodman called Julia Sorenson on her cell. He told her he had found the eyewitness’s truck.

Sorenson asked, “Any signs of a disturbance?”

Goodman said, “No, it was just parked, like normal. Behind a hardware store, real neat and tidy, just like the Mazda behind the cocktail lounge.”

“Locked?”

“Yes, which is a little unusual here, to be honest. People don’t normally lock their cars. Especially not twenty-year-old beaters.”

“No sign of the guy himself?”

“Nothing. Like he just vanished.”

“Is there a bar nearby, or a rooming house?”

“Nothing. It’s a strip mall.”

“I’ll get some lab people to go take a look.”

“It’s nearly dawn.”

“All the better,” Sorenson said. “Daylight always helps.”

“No, I mean Karen Delfuenso’s kid will be waking up soon. Any news?”

“The driver called me again. They dumped him. Delfuenso was still alive, the last he saw of her.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Long enough for the situation to have changed, I’m afraid.”

“So I’m going to have to tell the kid.”

“Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure. And call her school principal. The kid won’t be fit to go today. And maybe you should keep the neighbor’s kid home too, for company. Does the neighbor work days?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Try to keep her home. Delfuenso’s kid is going to need a familiar face.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m getting close. The driver is meeting me at a motel.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He says he’s an innocent passerby.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure.”

By that point Sorenson had just passed the Shell station. She was turning right and left, right and left, endlessly south and east through the empty darkness, following the little blue accommodation boards. Her GPS showed the motel location about thirty miles ahead. She was about thirty minutes away, she thought. Her Crown Vic was doing OK across country. She was gunning it hard on the straightaways and then braking hard and hauling it like a land yacht through the turns. Like all Bureau cars it had the Police Interceptor suspension, which was better than stock. Not exactly a NASCAR prospect, but it was doing the job. Apart from the tires, that was. They were shrieking and howling and complaining loudly. She was going to need a new set. Stony was going to be thrilled.

Reacher unlocked room five’s door and went inside and saw a standard motel arrangement. A queen bed on the left, a credenza opposite its foot, a closet in back in line with the credenza, and a bathroom in back in line with the bed. The walls were wood grain laminate a lot more orange than any natural tree, and the floor was brown carpet, and the bedspread was a color halfway between the two. The room was no kind of an aesthetic triumph. That was for damn sure. But he didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on using it.

He switched on the bathroom light and left the bathroom door half open. He switched on the lamp on the far-side night table. He pulled the curtains shut, all but an inch-wide crack. Then he stepped out to the cold again and locked up behind him.

He crossed the front lot and crossed the road and walked west into a frozen field, fifty yards, a hundred. He hunched down in his coat and turned around and squatted down and looked back. Room five looked exactly like it had a guy in it, just sitting there, just hanging out. Reacher had survived a long and difficult life by staying alert and being appropriately cautious. He wasn’t about to let the Scandinavian woman catch him unawares. He was going to hang back and stay out of sight until he was sure who she was, and who she had brought with her. Any kind of back-up or SWAT team, and he was out of there, never to return. If she was on her own, then maybe he would stroll over and introduce himself.

Or maybe he wouldn’t.

He watched the road, and waited.

Chapter 34

After a little less than thirty minutes crouching in the cold Reacher saw headlights and blue and red strobes faraway to his left, like an alien bubble rolling fast through the peaceful pre-dawn mist. About two miles away, he thought. Two minutes, at the speed it was doing. The headlights probed ahead and flicked up and down, and the strobes followed close behind. A single car, low and wide, all urgent and lonely. No back-up. No SWAT team.

So far so good.

The lights got brighter as the car got closer. Half a mile out he figured it was a Crown Victoria. A government car. A quarter of a mile out he figured it was dark blue. Two hundred yards out he figured it was the same car he had seen hours before, blasting west on the Interstate from Omaha. He fancied he could tell an individual car by its stance and its ride, like a fingerprint.

He watched as it braked hard and turned in under the porte cochere, counterclockwise, with the string of rooms behind it, like Alan King had done. He saw the reversing lights flash white as the transmission jammed into Park. He saw a woman get out.

FBI Special Agent Julia Sorenson, presumably. The Scandinavian. She looked the part. That was for sure. She was tall, with long blonde hair. She was wearing black shoes and black pants and a black jacket with a blue shirt under it. She stood for a second and eased her back. Then she leaned into the car and slung a black pear-shaped bag over her shoulder. She took a small wallet from her pocket. ID, presumably. She looped around the hood and headed for the office door.

She took a gun off her hip.

Reacher stared left into the darkness. He saw no following vehicles. A one-two punch would have been reasonable tactics. Obvious, even. Bait, and then back-up. But it wasn’t happening.

Yet.

The woman walked up the flagstone path. Fast, but not running. She pulled the lobby door. She went inside.

Sorenson saw a standard-issue rural motel lobby, with sheet vinyl on the floor and four awful wicker armchairs, and a breakfast buffet table with coffee flasks and paper cups. There was a waist-high reception counter with walk-around space on the left and none on the right. There was an office door behind the counter, with a fresh bullet hole in the wall high above it.

There was TV sound behind the office door, and a rim of light all around it. Sorenson stood in the middle of the floor and called, “Hello?”

Loud and clear and confident.

The office door opened and a short fat man came out. He had strands of thin hair plastered to his skull with product. He was wearing a red sweater vest. His eyes bounced between Sorenson’s ID and her gun, back and forth, back and forth.

She said, “Where’s the man with the broken nose?”

He said, “I need to know who’s going to pay for the damage to my wall.”

She said, “I don’t know who. Not me, anyway.”

“Isn’t there a federal scheme? Like victim compensation or something?”

“We’ll discuss that later,” she said. “Where’s the man with the broken nose?”

“Mr. Skowron? He’s in room five. He’s very rude. He called me a socialist.”

“I need to borrow your master key.”

“I could have been killed.”

“Did you see what happened?”

The guy shook his head. “I was in the back room, resting. I heard a gunshot and I called it in. It was all over by the time I opened the door.”

“I need to borrow your master key,” Sorenson said again.

The guy dug in a bulging pocket and came out with a brass item on an unmarked ring. Sorenson put her ID away and took it from him. She asked, “Who are your other guests?”

“They’re here to fish. There are lakes nearby. But mostly they drink. They didn’t even wake up when the gun was fired.”

“Go back in the office,” Sorenson said. “I’ll tell you when it’s safe to come out.”

Still no activity to the left. No lights, no cars. No back-up. Reacher watched carefully, the lobby, then the road, the lobby, then the road, like a tennis umpire. He saw the woman come back out, through the door, onto the flagstone path. She still had her gun in her hand. She hadn’t shot the fat man. She was clearly a person of considerable patience. She walked between the lobby and her car, past the Coke machine, and she headed down the row of rooms, on the sidewalk lit up by the bulkhead lights. She glanced at the doors as she walked. One, two, three, four.

She stopped just before room five.

She looked in through the crack between the curtains, just briefly, a duck of her head out and back. Then again, much longer, a careful survey of the sliver of the room she could see. No feet on the end of the bed. He’s in the bathroom, she was thinking. Reacher checked left again. No lights in the north. No noise, no movement. He checked to his right too, just to be sure. The back-up could have looped around a square on the checkerboard. Which would have been smart tactics. But there were no lights in the south, either. No noise, no movement. The woman wasn’t using her phone. No communication. No coordination. They wouldn’t have left her exposed for so long.

She was alone.

No back-up, no SWAT team.

Reacher saw her knock on room five’s door. He saw her wait, and knock again, harder. He saw her put her ear against the crack.

He stood up and started walking toward her, across the frozen dirt. He saw her put a key in the lock and turn it. He saw her enter the room, her gun up and ready. Twenty seconds later she came back out again.

She stood on the sidewalk next to the lawn chairs, glancing left, glancing right, staring straight ahead. Her gun was still in her hand, but down by her side. Reacher crunched onward over the frozen stubble. He stepped out of the field and onto the road.

She heard him. Her face turned toward him, blindly locating the sound.

“Hello,” he said.

Her gun came up. A two-handed stance, feet braced. He saw her eyes lock on. He was looming up at her out of the dark. He said, “We spoke on the phone. I’m unarmed.”

The gun stayed where it was.

He crossed the road. He stepped into the motel’s front lot. The light from the dim bulkhead fixtures reached him. The woman said, “Stop right there.” He stopped right there.

The gun was a Glock 17. Black, boxy, with a dull polycarbonate sheen. Behind it her head was turned slightly to the side, as if quizzically. A strand of hair was across one eye. She was a lot better-looking than Don McQueen. That was for damn sure.

She said, “Get down on the ground.”

He spread his fingers and held his hands out from his sides, his palms toward her. He said, “No need to get all excited. We’re on the same side here.”

“I’ll shoot.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Reacher looked to his left. Her car was still all lit up under the porte cochere. She hadn’t killed the strobes. They were flashing red and blue from secret little mouse-fur moldings on the rear parcel shelf. Further down the road there was nothing but darkness. In the other direction there was a new light on the horizon. Very far away. Not moving. Not a vehicle. Just a very faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.

He said, “You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork.”

She said nothing.

“And it wouldn’t be righteous. I’m unarmed and I’m not offering an imminent threat. You’d lose your job. You’d go to jail.”

No response.

“And you want to find Karen Delfuenso. You don’t have descriptions of the two guys. You don’t have the names they’re using. You don’t know the things they let slip. But I do. You need to keep me alive long enough to ask me questions, at least.”

The gun stayed where it was. But she stepped and shuffled to her left, turning all the way, keeping the front sight hard on him. She backed off twenty feet, until his path to room five’s door was covered but unobstructed. At first he thought she wanted him to go inside, but she said, “Sit down, in the lawn chair.”

He walked forward. The Glock’s muzzle tracked him all the way, from twenty feet. A confident markswoman. McQueen had missed from eight. He stopped next to the left-hand lawn chair. He turned around. He backed up, butt-first. He sat down.

She said, “Lean back. Stick your legs out straight. Hang your arms over the sides.”

He complied, and ended up about as ready for instant action as his granddad’s granddad waking up from an afternoon nap. She was evidently a smart woman. A good improviser. The chair was cold against the backs of his thighs. White plastic, thoroughly chilled.

She stayed where she was, but she lowered the gun.

He was not what Sorenson had been expecting. Not exactly. He wasn’t a gorilla and he wasn’t like something out of a slasher movie. But she could see why he had been described that way. He was huge, for a start. He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside of the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed, and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates. His clothes were creased and dirty. His hair was matted. His facial injury was awful. His nose was split and swollen and bruising had spread under his eyes.

A wild man. But not really. Underneath everything else he seemed strangely civilized. He had moved with a kind of considered grace, calm and contained. He had spoken the same way, thinking ahead whole paragraphs and essays in the split-second pauses between sentences. You won’t shoot because you don’t want to do the paperwork. Straight to the heart of the matter. Knowledgeable, and confident. His gaze was both wise and appealing, both friendly and bleak, both frank and utterly cynical. His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. As if there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.

She raised her gun again.

She said, “I’m sorry, but I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska.”

Chapter 35

Sorenson’s words just hung there in the cold night air. I’m under orders to arrest you on sight and take you back to Nebraska. The big guy paused a beat, and then he smiled, politely, generously, as if pretending to be amused by a joke he had in fact heard many times before, and he said, “Well, best of luck with that.”

He didn’t move. He just stayed there in the shaky chair, leaning back, legs straight out, arms dangling.

Sorenson said, “I’m serious.”

He said, “They were very disorganized, weren’t they?”

She said, “Who were?”

“The two guys. I expect you’ve got a fairly substantial forensic trail.”

“Who are you?”

“I mean, jacking a car is always a sign of desperation, isn’t it? You can’t rely on it. There might be no traffic. You might pick the wrong victim and get shot in the face.”

“What’s your point?”

“They told me their names. And I think they were their real names. They didn’t sound like prepared aliases. And I don’t think they were. Because nothing else about those guys seemed very prepared.”

“What names did they give you?”

“Alan King and Don McQueen.”

“King and McQueen? Those sound totally made up.”

“Exactly. If they really were made up, they’d have chosen better. And it was OK if I knew. I wasn’t supposed to survive.”

“What’s your point?” Sorenson asked again.

“The one calling himself Alan King said he had a brother who had been in the army, name of Peter King. That might be a good place to start.”

“With what?”

“Tracing them.”

“Who are you?” Sorenson asked again.

“Tell me about your boss.”

“Why would I?”

“He’s ambitious, right? He wants a pat on the head. He thinks an arrest before the sun comes up is going to look good. And he might be right. It might look good. But flexibility would be a much better tactic here.”

“Are you negotiating with me?”

“I’m just saying there’s very little point in rushing back to Nebraska when Karen Delfuenso was last seen heading in the opposite direction. Your boss will understand that eventually. Delayed gratification is a good thing. It’s what built the middle class.”

“You’re resisting arrest, technically. If I shot you now, it would be righteous.”

“So go ahead. What do you think I want, to live forever?”

She didn’t reply.

He said, “I’ll tell you my name.”

She said, “I already know your name. You signed the motel register. Your name is Skowron.”

He said, “You see, that’s a convincing alias. You bought right into it. Moose Skowron, hit .309 for the Yankees in 1960, and .375 in the postseason.”

“Your name is not Skowron?”

“Hardly. I couldn’t hit Major League pitching. But you should pay attention to 1960. The World Series in particular. The Yankees were coming off their tenth pennant in twelve years, they outscored the Pirates 55 to 27, they outhit them .338 to .256, they hit ten home runs against four, they got two complete-game shutouts from Whitey Ford, and still they lost.”

“What has baseball to do with anything?”

“It’s an illustration. It’s a metaphor. It always is. I’m saying it’s always possible to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That’s what you would be doing if you took me back to Nebraska.”

Sorenson was quiet for a second, and then she lowered her gun.

Reacher saw the gun go down, slowly but surely, and he thought: It’s in the bag. Nearly. Two minutes and twenty seconds of talking. A delay and a frustration for sure, but a lot faster than shouting or yelling or fighting. A lot faster, and also a lot safer. As bad as McQueen’s .22 Long Rifles would have been, Sorenson’s nine-millimeter Parabellums would be worse. Much worse. He said, “My name is Reacher. First name Jack. No middle name. I used to be a cop in the army.”

Sorenson asked, “And what are you now?”

“Unemployed.”

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it says. I move from place to place.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“And you really were hitching rides?”

“I really was.”

“Why are you going to Virginia?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Not a good enough answer.”

“It’s all I can give you.”

“I need more. I’m way out on a limb here.”

“I’m going to Virginia to find a woman.”

“Any woman?”

“One in particular.”

“Who?”

“I talked to her on the phone. She sounded nice. I thought I should go check her out.”

“You talked to her on the phone? You haven’t actually met her?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re traveling halfway across the country to spend time with a woman you never met?”

“Why not? I have to be somewhere. And I don’t have anywhere else I need to be. So Virginia will be as good as anyplace else.”

“Do you think this woman will want to spend time with you?”

“Probably not. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“She must be a hell of a woman.”

“She has a nice voice. That’s all I know so far.”

Another thirty-five seconds. Total elapsed time, two minutes fifty-five. Getting there. Faster than fighting. And safer. He said, “Anything else you need to know?”

“How did you break your nose?”

“Someone hit me with the blunt end of a shotgun.”

“In Nebraska?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Who can say? Some folks are just naturally aggressive.”

“If you’re not who you say you are, I could lose my job. I could go to jail.”

“I know that. But I am who I say I am. And you are who you are. You think Karen Delfuenso is the most important thing here. Not like your boss.”

Sorenson paused.

She nodded.

She said, “So where do we start?”

Bingo. Three minutes and twenty-one seconds. But then Sorenson’s cell phone rang, and it was all over before it had even begun.

Chapter 36

Initially from Sorenson’s point of view the ring tone was a nuisance and an interruption. It broke a spell. The big guy was well on the way to giving it all up. Who he was, what he was doing, why he was there. Every interrogation was different. Sometimes it paid to play along. Pretend to believe, pretend to cooperate, pretend to be convinced. Then his guard would drop and the truth would come. Another few minutes might have done it.

She took out her phone. It buzzed warmly against her palm. She knew it wouldn’t be Stony. Stony was typing and revising and spell-checking. It would be the night duty agent, in Omaha. With high-priority information. Maybe there was something back from her facial-injury inquiries. Maybe the big guy was wanted in a dozen states. Skowron, or Reacher, or whatever the hell his name really was. In which case the call wouldn’t be a nuisance or an interruption at all. It would be a shortcut instead.

She answered.

It was the night duty agent. He said, “The Iowa troopers are reporting another 911. Some farmer called in a vehicle fire on the edge of his land.”

“Where?”

“About five miles south of you.”

“What vehicle?”

“He can’t tell. It’s some distance away. He’s got a big farm. A regular car, he thinks.”

“Who is responding?”

“Nobody. The nearest fire department is fifty miles away. They’ll let it burn out. I mean, it’s wintertime in Iowa. What could it set fire to?”

She clicked off. She looked at the big guy and said, “Vehicle fire, five miles south of here.”

The big guy stood up, one fast fluid movement. He crossed the motel’s lot and stepped out to the middle of the road. He said, “I can see it. I saw it before.”

She kept her gun in her hand. She joined him on the blacktop. She saw a light on the horizon. Miles away. A faint orange glow, like a distant bonfire.

He said, “Not good.”

She said, “You think it’s the Impala?”

“It would be a coincidence if it wasn’t.”

“We’re screwed if they switched vehicles again.”

He nodded.

“It would be a setback,” he said.

She said, “Are you telling me the truth?”

“About what?”

“Your name, for instance.”

“Jack-none-Reacher,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

“You got ID?”

“I have an old passport.”

“Under what name?”

“Jack-none-Reacher.”

“Does the photograph look like you?”

“Younger and dumber.”

“Get in the car.”

“Front or back?”

“Front,” she said. “For now.”

The Crown Vic was transportation, nothing more. Not a mobile office, not a command center. Reacher got in the front seat and saw no laptop computers, no powerful radios, no array of holstered weapons. Just a phone cradle bolted to the dash, and a single extra mismatched switch. For the strobes, presumably.

Sorenson slid in alongside him and rattled the selector into gear and took off, out from under the porte cochere, counterclockwise back to the road, the same way Alan King had driven, but slower. The car bounced and yawed and settled, and then Sorenson accelerated hard. The road was dead straight. The fire was dead ahead. They were heading straight for it. It looked bright and hot. Reacher remembered a line from an old song: Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Halfway there it was obvious that gasoline was involved. There was blue in the orange, and a kind of raging fierceness at the center of the fire. There would be black smoke above it, but the sky was still black in the south, so it didn’t show up. In the east there were the first faint streaks of dawn, low down on the horizon. Reacher thought briefly about Chicago, and the Greyhound depot on West Harrison, and the early buses, and then he dismissed them from his mind. Another time, another place. He watched Sorenson drive. She had her foot hard on the gas. Slim muscles in her right thigh were standing out.

She asked, “How long were you in the army?”

He said, “Thirteen years.”

“Rank?”

“I was terminal at major.”

“Does your nose hurt?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should see the other guy.”

“Were you a good cop in the army?”

“I was good enough.”

“How good was that?”

“I was like old Moose Skowron, I guess. Most years I hit over .300. When it mattered I could step it up to .375.”

“Did you get medals?”

“We all got medals.”

“Why don’t you live anywhere?”

“Do you have a house?”

“Of course.”

“Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?”

“Not entirely.”

“So there’s your answer.”

“How do we find these guys if they switched cars again?”

“Lots of ways,” Reacher said.

A mile out the fire took on a shape, wide at the base, narrow above. Half a mile out Reacher saw strange jets and fans and lobes of flame, pale blue and roaring and almost invisible. He figured the fuel line was failing, maybe at the seams or where the metal was stressed by folds and turns. He figured the tank itself was holding, but vapor was cooking off and boiling out through tiny cracks and fissures, sideways, upward, downward, like random and violent blowtorches, the tongues of flame as strong and straight as metal bars, some of them twenty or thirty feet long. Inside the fireball the car itself was a vague cherry red shape, jerking and wriggling and dancing in the boiling air. Reacher buzzed his window down and heard the distant noise. He put his hand in the freezing slipstream and felt faint warmth on his palm.

“Don’t get too close,” he said.

Sorenson eased up and slowed down. She said, “Do you think the tank will blow?”

“Probably not. The gas is boiling and bleeding off. There’s no big pressure buildup. Combustion is too vigorous to let any kind of blow-back happen. So far, anyway.”

“How much gas do you think is left?”

“Now? I’m not sure. The tank was full less than forty miles ago.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait. Until it either blows up or calms down enough for us to recognize what kind of car it was.”

Sorenson stopped three hundred yards from the fire, and like good cops everywhere she pulled off the road and onto the shoulder, at least a yard, and then she backed up and parallel-parked herself another whole foot into the weeds. A cautious woman. There was no chance of getting rear-ended, because there was no traffic. Reacher faced front and watched and waited. He expected a fast decision. The gas couldn’t last long. On the road the car had used plenty. And that was to produce just a few puny horsepower. A hundred at most, to haul a mid-size sedan down a completely flat highway. Now the same tank was feeding a fire as intense as a phosphorous bomb. A thousand times more powerful. Like a jet engine, literally.

He asked, “Where did they jack the car, right back at the beginning? At a light?”

Beside him Sorenson shook her head. “Behind the cocktail lounge where Delfuenso works. I think they tried to steal the car first. She came out, either because of the alarm, or she was leaving anyway.”

“She had her bag,” Reacher said.

“Then she was leaving anyway. They stopped and bought shirts, and then they hit the road.”

“And water.”

“How did you know that?”

“I drank some of it. It was still cold. What were they running from?”

“They stabbed a guy to death.”

“In the cocktail lounge?”

“No, in an abandoned pumping station three miles away. Some kind of strange rendezvous.”

“So how did they get three miles to the cocktail lounge? Did they walk?”

“They used the victim’s car.”

“Why didn’t they keep it?”

“It was bright red and foreign. There was an eyewitness.”

“To the stabbing itself?”

“More or less. To the getaway, certainly.”

“Who was the eyewitness?”

“A farm worker, about fifty.”

“Was he any good to you?”

“No worse than usual. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Excuse the pun. He saw the dead guy go in, followed by the two perps. He saw the perps come out and drive away.”

“Where was their own car? Didn’t they have one?”

“No one knows.”

“If they had their own car, they’d have used it, surely. They must have driven in with the guy they stabbed.”

“My tech person thinks they didn’t.”

“Who was the guy they stabbed?”

“A trade attaché. Like a foreign service guy. He worked in our embassies overseas. He was an Arabic speaker, apparently.”

“What did they stab him with?”

“Not sure. Something big. An eight- or nine-inch blade. A hunting knife, probably.”

“What was the foreign service guy doing in Nebraska?”

“No one knows. They say he was between postings. The red car was rented in Denver. At the airport. So presumably the guy flew in from somewhere and drove the rest of the way. No one has mentioned a reason why he would do that. Or from where. But the State Department is worried about it. They sent a guy.”

“Already?”

“My tech team fingerprinted the dead guy, and it’s been fun and games ever since. Bureau counterterrorism showed up unannounced, and the State Department guy came, and my SAC has been up all night, and the eyewitness disappeared.”

“Weird,” Reacher said.

In the end the fire died just as fast as the sun came up. On the left the eastern skies cracked purple and pink and gold, and dead ahead the unspent gas ran out, and the smaller blaze ebbed, and the bigger blaze came over the horizon. Cold daylight lit the scene and gave heft and form to the blackened shell. The car was parked on the shoulder, facing south, as far off the road as Sorenson was. The tires were burned away. All the glass was gone. The paint had vaporized. The sheet metal was scorched gray and purple in fantastic whorls. For twenty yards all around, the winter stubble had burned and blackened. An arc of blacktop was bubbling and smoking. There were last licks of flame here and there, low and timid and hesitant compared to what had come before.

Sorenson bumped back onto the road and drove closer. Reacher looked at the shell. Ashes to ashes. It had started out that way, all bare and shiny in the factory, and it was ending up the same way, all gutted and empty.

It was an Impala. No question about it. Reacher knew the shape of its trunk, the flat of its flanks, the hump of its roof, the pitch of its hood. He was getting a three-quarters rear view, but he was totally sure. It was Delfuenso’s Chevy.

All gutted and empty.

My car.

Reacher stared.

It wasn’t empty.

Chapter 37

Reacher was the first to get out. He closed his door and stood next to the Crown Vic’s hood, with cold on his back and heat on his face. He was five feet closer than he had been before, and therefore his angle was five feet better.

All the glass was gone. All the rubber was gone, all the plastics, all the vinyl, all the high-tech space age materials. All that was left was metal, the parts designed to be visible still curved and molded, the parts designed to be hidden all sharp and knifelike and exposed. In particular the rear parcel shelf had lost its padding and its loudspeakers and its soundproof mat and its mouse-fur covering. What was left was a stamped steel cross-member, corrugated here and there for strength, drilled here and there with holes, but otherwise as plain and brutal as a blade. Its front edge was perfectly straight.

Except it wasn’t.

Reacher took three more steps. The heat was astonishing. The front of the parcel shelf looked different on the right than the left. On the right its straight edge was compromised by a humped shape completely unrelated to engineering necessity. It was an organic shape, odd and random, in no way similar to the stamped angularity all around it.

It was a human head, burned smooth and tiny by the fire.

Sorenson got out of her car.

Reacher said, “Stay there, OK?”

He turned away and took a breath from the cold side, and another, until his lungs were full. He turned back and started walking. He kept his distance, looping wide, until he was level with the side of the shell. Then he darted in, until he felt the blacktop hot and sticky under the soles of his boots.

The Chevy’s rear seat was burned away completely. But the person on it wasn’t. Not completely. On the right, directly behind the blackened frame of the front passenger seat, fallen down through the missing cushions to the zigzag springs below, was a shape, like a sea creature, like a seal or a porpoise or a dolphin, black in color, oozing and smooth and smoking, cooked down to half its original size. It had tiny vestigial arms, clawed up like twigs. It had no expression, because it had no face.

But it had died screaming.

That was for damn sure.

They retreated fifty yards north and stood silently, breathing hard, staring blankly at a spot a thousand miles beyond the far horizon. They stood like that for a whole minute, and then another, as still as statues.

Then Sorenson said, “Where are they now?”

Reacher said, “I don’t know.”

“And what are they driving?”

“They’re not driving anything. They’re being driven. They were picked up.”

“By who?”

Reacher didn’t answer. But he moved, finally. He glanced up at the sky and looked at the light. It was still very early. But it would do. He found the Chevy’s tire tracks easily enough. They bumped down onto the shoulder through a thin skim of mud on the edge of the road about a yard wide. The mud was neither wet nor dry, and it had captured the tread prints perfectly. Like the finest plaster. The drift off the road onto the shoulder had been long and cautious. The Chevy had come in like a jumbo jet on approach. More like McQueen’s driving than King’s.

Reacher walked out into the dormant field. Sorenson followed him. They looped around the wreck together, as close as the heat would let them get. Once beyond it they looped back to the road, and they found more tire tracks.

A second car had driven onto the shoulder. This one at a much tighter angle. Its tread prints were captured in the skim of mud. Road tires, solid, reliable, nothing radical, nothing fancy, probably on a big sedan. But they had come steering in pretty hard. That was clear. And some little time later they had steered out again just as hard, and bumped their way south. Taken together the tracks looked like the same bite out of a big circle.

Sorenson said, “Nothing came through between you and me, right? So this guy must have gotten here hours ago.”

“No, he came north,” Reacher said. “Not south. He didn’t come past the motel. He U-turned right here, he picked them up, and he headed back where he came from. You can see all that from the tracks.”

“Are you certain?”

“What else can have happened? They didn’t jack another car. That’s for sure. There’s no traffic out here. You could wait forever. And I doubt if they’re walking. So they were picked up. This was a rendezvous. They got here first. They were waiting. They know this place. Which is how they know that back road off the Interstate.”

“Who picked them up?”

“I don’t know,” Reacher said again. “But this thing is starting to look like a big operation. Three coordinated crews, at least.”

“Why three? There were only two here. King and McQueen, plus whoever picked them up.”

“Plus whoever was simultaneously disappearing your eyewitness, all the way back in Nebraska. That’s what I mean by coordination. They’re cleaning house. They’re taking care of everyone who ever laid eyes on King and McQueen.”

The break of day brought with it a cold breeze out of the north. There was rain coming. And soon. Reacher hunched down in his coat. Sorenson’s pants legs flapped like sails. She walked twenty yards into a field. To get away from the smell on the wind, Reacher figured. He followed her, with stiff stalks crunching under his feet. Just to keep her company. He didn’t need to move. Right then he couldn’t smell anything at all. But he had smelled similar things before, from time to time in the past, back when his nose still worked. Oil, gas, plastic, charred meat. A chemical stink, plus rotting forgotten barbecue. Worse. Any sane person would want to get out of the way.

Sorenson called the Iowa troopers and claimed the scene for the FBI. She said it was not to be approached, and nothing was to be touched, and nothing was to be moved. Then she called her own tech team and told them to make the long trip over. She told them she wanted the best crime scene analysis ever attempted, and the best autopsy ever performed.

“Waste of time,” Reacher said, when she clicked off. “There’s virtually nothing to be found after a fire like that.”

“I just need to know,” she said.

“Know what?”

“That she was dead before the fire started. If I could know that, I might be able to carry on.”

They walked back to Sorenson’s car, a long curving route around the wreck, away from the heat and the smell, and when they got twenty feet from it she did what she had to do: she cleared her throat and took a breath and pulled her gun and arrested Jack-none-Reacher, on suspicion of conspiracy, and homicide in the first degree, and kidnapping.

Chapter 38

Sorenson was holding her Glock two-handed again, steady and straight and level, feet properly planted, weight properly braced. She was less than four yards from Reacher. Her head was turned again, to the side, just a little, the same way as it had been before, as if quizzically. The same strand of hair was over the same eye.

She said, “Look at it from my point of view. What’s my alternative? What else am I supposed to do? We lost the hostage, so the game has changed. Now it moves up a level. And we need to start with an arrest, or we’ll be crucified. You understand that, right?”

Reacher said, “Are you apologizing to me?”

“Yes. I suppose I am. I’m very sorry. But you know how these things work. If you are who you say you are, that is.”

“I am who I say I am. You’re a very suspicious woman. A person’s feelings could get hurt.”

“I have to be suspicious. But I’m sorry about that too.”

Reacher smiled, just briefly. “I must say this is a very civilized arrest. Could be the politest ever. Apart from the gun, that is. You don’t need it. Where am I going to escape to?”

“Forgive me. But I need the gun. You’re a legitimate suspect. And you have valuable information. I’m sure my SAC would prefer to airbrush the Omaha field office right out of this whole thing altogether, but it’s far too late for that now. So he’s got to be able to show something for a night’s work. Either a suspect, or a material witness. And you’re one or the other. Maybe you’re both.”

“Suppose I don’t want to go to Omaha?”

“She’ll wait.”

“Who will?”

“The woman in Virginia. Or maybe she won’t. Or maybe she’s already forgotten all about you. But whatever, that’s all on hold now.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Virginia. I agree, that’s on hold now. I was thinking about Iowa. Right here, right now. This is where the trail starts. With those tire tracks.”

Tire tracks.

Reacher glanced behind him, at the yard-wide skim of mud on the edge of the road, but he couldn’t see what he needed to see.

Sorenson said, “Where the hell do you think you are, in the movies? You’re a civilian. This isn’t your trail. This isn’t my trail anymore, either. We lost the hostage. Remember? An innocent woman. An innocent member of the public. A carjacking victim. A mother, for God’s sake. You get that? There’s going to be a big task force now. Dozens of people. Maybe even hundreds. An Assistant SAC leading it at the very least. There’s going to be media. Cable news. It’s all going to be way above my pay grade. They’re going to hide me away like an idiot child. So there’s nothing for either one of us here in Iowa. Not now. Get used to it.”

Reacher said, “The trail will go cold before the task force even gets here.”

“There’s nothing we can do about that.”

“There is. We can stop wasting time. We can make a start.”

“Have you got unemployment insurance?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. So don’t include me in your harebrained schemes.”

“OK, I could make a start.”

“How? You’re a civilian. You’re one man. You have no resources. What could you possibly do?”

“I could find them.”

“Because?”

“I’ve found people before.”

“And then what?”

“I could impress upon them the error of their ways.”

“An eye for an eye?”

“I’m not interested in their eyes.”

“I can’t let that happen. It would be a crime in itself. There has to be due process. Let the law take care of it. That’s the price of civilization.”

“Civilization can go sit on its thumb. I liked Delfuenso. She was a nice woman. Brave too. And smart. And tough. She worked all evening at a shitty job, and still she was thinking right to the end.”

“I don’t dispute any of that.”

“They opened the wrong door, Julia. They get what they get.”

“From you? How so? Who died and made you king of the world?”

“Someone has to do it. Are you guys going to?”

Sorenson didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “I’ll take that as a no, shall I?”

Sorenson shrugged, and then she nodded, reluctantly, as if despite herself. She said, “There’s another call I have to make.”

“To who?”

“A county sheriff back in Nebraska. Delfuenso’s daughter is about to wake up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So I need to put the cuffs on you. I need to put you in the back of the car.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“This is not a game.”

“It’s going to rain,” Reacher said. “We’re going to lose the tire marks.”

“Turn around,” Sorenson said. “Hold your hands out behind you.”

“Have you got a camera?”

“What?”

“A camera,” Reacher said. “Have you got one?”

“Why?”

“We need pictures of the tire marks. Before it rains.”

“Turn around,” Sorenson said again.

“Let’s make a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“You lend me your camera, and I’ll take pictures of the tire marks, while you make your call to the county sheriff.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll talk some more.”

“About what?”

“About my personal situation.”

“What’s my other option?”

“You don’t have another option.”

“I’m the one with the gun here.”

“Except you’re not going to use it. We both know that. And you have my word. I won’t run. You can trust me. I swore an oath too. In the army. A bigger oath than yours.”

“I have to take you back with me. You understand that, right? Omaha has to do something right tonight.”

“You could say you never found me.”

“The motel keeper knows I did.”

“You could shoot him in the head.”

“I was tempted.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“You have to come back with me afterward.”

“That wasn’t in the deal. Not yet. Not technically. That was to be decided later. I said, and then we’ll talk some more.”

“If you’re telling the truth, you have nothing to worry about.”

“You still believe stuff like that?”

Sorenson said, “Yes, I do.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Weigh it up,” Sorenson said. “Think about it. Make a choice. You have no car, no phone, no contacts, no support, no help, no back-up, no budget, no facilities, no lab, no computers, and you have absolutely no idea where those guys have gone. You need food and rest. You need medical attention for your face. But I could leave you here like that. Right here, right now, alone, in the middle of nowhere, with the rain coming. Then I’d be fired, and guess what? You’d be hunted down like a dog anyway.”

Reacher said, “What’s my other option?”

“Come back with me to Omaha, help us out, and maybe even pick up some information as you go along. To do with as you wish.”

“Information from where?”

“From who, not from where.”

“OK, from who?”

“From me.”

“Why would you?”

“Because I’m improvising here. I’m trying to find a way to get you in the car.”

“So now you’re the one offering a deal.”

“And it’s a good deal. You should take it.”

Reacher took his photographs while Sorenson called the county sheriff back in Nebraska. It was a digital camera. He half-remembered maybe once taking a picture with a cellular telephone, but apart from that vague possibility the last time he had handled a camera had been back in the age of film. Not that it made much difference, he assumed. In both cases there was a lens, and a little button to press, and a little thing to look through. Except there wasn’t. There was no viewfinder hole. Instead the operator had to do the whole thing on a tiny television screen. Which meant working with the camera held out at arm’s length, and walking backward and forward. Like a man in a hazard suit with a Geiger counter.

But he got the two shots he wanted, and he headed back to the car. Sorenson was through with her call by then. It hadn’t been fun, by the look of it. Not a barrel of laughs. She said, “OK, let’s go. You can ride in the front.”

He said, “Look at the pictures first.”

The rain started to fall. Big heavy drops, some of them vertical, some of them sideways on the gusting wind. They got in the car, and he passed her the camera. She knew how to use it. She toggled forward, and then back again.

“You only took two pictures?” she said.

“Two was all I needed.”

“Two of the same thing?”

“They’re not of the same thing.”

The rain hammered on the Crown Vic’s roof. Sorenson looked at the first photograph, very carefully, and then the second, just as carefully. They were both close-ups of tire marks in the mud. Apparently the same tire, and the same mud. She went back and forth between them, once, twice, three times. She said, “OK, they’re identical. And they’re from the car that U-turned, correct? So what are they, left and right? Or front and rear?”

“Neither,” Reacher said.

“So what are they?”

“Only one is from the car that U-turned.”

“What about the other one?”

“That’s from your car.”

Chapter 39

Sorenson looked at the pictures again, first one, and then the other, back and forth, over and over. The same tire, and the same mud. She said, “This doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“I agree,” Reacher said. “Not necessarily.”

“I was never here before.”

“I believe you.”

“And the Bureau doesn’t have its own make of tires. I’m sure we just buy them, like anyone else. Probably from Sears. I’m sure we look for something cheap and reliable. Something generic. Whatever’s on sale. Like everyone does. So these go on all the big sedans. There must be half a dozen different makes and models. Fleet vehicles, rentals, the big things old people drive. I bet there are a million tires like this in the world.”

“Probably more,” Reacher said.

“So what are we saying?”

“We’re saying we know for sure what kind of tires the bad guys have on their car. The same kind as yours. Which means their car is probably a big domestic sedan. It’s a start.”

“That’s all?”

“Anything else would be speculation.”

“We’re allowed to speculate.”

“Then I would say they are urban. Or at least suburban. Big sedans are rare in farm country. It’s all pick-up trucks and four-wheel-drives out here.”

“How urban?”

“From the kind of place that has taxi companies and car services. And offices and maybe an airport. The local market has to be right. I’m sure you couldn’t buy tires like these out here, for instance. Why would anyone keep them in stock?”

“So you’re not saying there’s Bureau involvement here?”

“I’m sure there isn’t.”

“But?”

“Nothing.”

“But?”

“But I’m pretty much a black and white kind of a person, and I like things confirmed yes or no, beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Then no. It’s confirmed. Right now. Straight from the horse’s mouth. For absolute sure. Beyond any kind of doubt. It is completely inconceivable the Bureau was involved with this. That’s the worst kind of crazy thinking.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s go. Tell me if you want me to drive for a bit. I know the way.”

Sorenson pulled a big wide U-turn of her own, and then she hit it hard and hurried north through the rain. They passed the motel doing about sixty. It looked different by day. The low bulkhead lights were off, and the siding looked paler.

Reacher said, “I paid for two nights in there. And I spent about thirty seconds in the room.”

Sorenson said, “Why did you pay?”

“I was feeling guilty about the guy’s wall.”

“Not your fault.”

“That was my impression at the time.”

“So you shouldn’t feel guilty. Not about him, anyway. I didn’t like him.”

“Well, I’ve still got his key. It’s in my pocket. Maybe I’ll mail it back, and maybe I won’t.”

Then they came to the first junction, and Sorenson braked late and made the left with all kinds of squealing and sliding on the slick surface. She came off the gas and got straightened out and hit it again.

“Sorry,” she said.

Reacher said nothing. He was in no position to complain. They were still on the road. He would have been in a field.

“The tires are worn,” she said. “I noticed on the way out here.”

Reacher said nothing.

She said, “Which means the bad guys’ tires are worn too. If the pictures are identical, that is. Which is step two. We know what kind of tires they have, and we know approximately how old they are. Maybe an older car. Maybe an older driver. Could be some old person around here, with one of those big old cars.”

“I doubt it,” Reacher said. “I don’t think old people really love to come out in the middle of the night to watch women burn to death. Because you realize that fire was started when they were all still there? They didn’t set a fuse. It wasn’t spontaneous combustion. They lit it and they all stood around and watched and waited until they were sure it was going well.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “It wasn’t a local senior. It was someone from somewhere urban.”

“With taxi companies and car services and offices and an airport,” Reacher said. “And maybe with a metro-area population around a million and a half. That’s something Alan King let slip. He said a million and a half people live where he lives.”

“That’s potentially interesting. Unless it was misdirection.”

“I don’t think it was. I don’t think they had a script. They were generally fast and smart, but it was a random question and an instant answer. No thinking time. Too fluid for a lie. Their other lies were slower and more clumsy.”

“Anything else?”

“At one point McQueen used what I felt was an odd word choice. I was skeptical about the gas station being where the highway sign said it was, and when we got there McQueen said You should have trusted me. I think most people would have said believed instead. Don’t you think? You should have believed me?”

“What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure. In the service we were taught to listen for odd words. The Russians had language schools, with perfect accents, and slang and so on and so forth, and sometimes the only tells were odd words. So for a minute I wondered if McQueen was foreign.”

Sorenson drove on and said nothing.

She was thinking: The shirt was bought in Pakistan, or possibly the Middle East. She asked, “Did McQueen have an accent?”

Reacher answered, “None at all. Very generic American.”

“Did he look foreign?”

“Not really. Caucasian, six feet, maybe one-sixty, fair hair, pale blue eyes, slender, long arms and legs, kind of gangly, but when it came to pulling the gun out of his pocket and running up the path and jumping in the car he turned out to be plenty athletic. Gymnastic, even.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “So the word choice was probably innocent.”

“Except you have to look at the victim. He will have had dealings with foreigners.”

“As a trade attaché? I suppose that’s the point.”

“Have you ever met a trade attaché?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” Reacher said. “But I met a few folks who claimed they were trade attachés.”

“What does that mean?”

“How much help does Coca-Cola really need to sell its stuff around the world? Not very much, right? Generally speaking American products speak for themselves. Yet every embassy has a trade attaché.”

“What are you saying?”

“Have you ever seen a trade attaché’s office? I’ve been in two. Both had courtyard windows, not street windows, both were lined with lead and Faraday cages, and both were swept for bugs four times a day. I know the Coke formula is a secret, but that’s ridiculous.”

“Cover for something?”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Every CIA head of station on the planet calls himself a trade attaché.”

* * *

Sheriff Goodman was dog tired. And he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to take Delfuenso’s daughter out of school for the day. Or for a couple of days, or a week, or a month, or whatever Special Agent Sorenson might have in mind. His attitude was the opposite. He felt work and structure and familiarity were useful crutches in stressful times. He encouraged his own people to come in as normal no matter what had happened. Bereavement, divorce, illness in the family, whatever. In his experience routine helped people cope. Obviously he had to go through the compassionate motions, telling people to take all the time they needed, stuff like that, but he always added that no one would think less of them if they stuck to their tasks. And most of them seemed grateful for it. Most of them worked on as usual, and they seemed to benefit in the long term.

But those were grown-ups, and Delfuenso’s kid was a kid.

He drove out to the short row of ranch houses slowly and reluctantly. Four times in his career he had been required to tell a parent a child had died. He had never had to tell a child its parent had died. Not a ten-year-old, anyway. He didn’t really know how. Just the facts, Sorenson had said, in an earlier conversation. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure. Not very helpful. The facts were tough. Hey kid, guess what? Your mom burned to death in a car. There was no easy way to say it. Because there was no easy way for the kid to face it. She goes to bed one night all hunky-dory, and she wakes up the next morning with a different life.

Although: Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure.

What were the facts? What did they actually know for sure? He had seen burned bodies. House fires, barn fires. You had to get dental records. Or DNA. For the death certificate, and the insurance. A couple of days, at least. Medical opinions, that had to be signed off on and notarized. So as far as Delfuenso was concerned, nobody really knew anything for sure. Not yet. Except that she was missing, apparently carjacked.

And maybe a two-stage process would be better, with a ten-year-old. First, I’m sorry, but your mom is missing. Then, a couple of days later, when they were really sure, I’m sorry, but your mom died. Drip, drip. Maybe better than one massive blow. Or was that just cowardice on his own part?

He parked in front of the neighbor’s house and concluded, yes, it was cowardice on his own part, no question, but it was also the best approach, probably, with a ten-year-old kid. Kids were different.

Just the facts. Don’t say anything more until we know for sure.

He got out of his car, slow and reluctant. He closed the door and stood for a second, and then he tracked around the hood and stepped over the muddy gutter and walked up the neighbor’s short driveway.

Chapter 40

Sorenson got through the checkerboard and back to the Interstate without further incident. The car stayed on the road. The rain kept on falling. It was a gloomy day. The sky was low and the color of iron. Traffic was heavier than Reacher had seen it the night before. Each vehicle was trailing a long gray zeppelin of spray. Sorenson had her wipers on fast. She was sticking to seventy miles an hour. She asked, “What’s the fastest way of finding Alan King’s brother from the army?”

“King claimed he was a red leg,” Reacher said. “Probably just a dagby. The Gulf, the first time around. Mother Sill will know.”

“I didn’t understand a word of that.”

“A red leg is an artilleryman. Because way back they had red stripes on their dress pants. And their branch color is still red. A dagby is a 13B MOS. Which is a cannon crewmember’s military occupational specialty. In other words, a dagby. A dumb-ass gun bunny. Mother Sill is Fort Sill, which is artillery HQ. Someone there will have a record. The Gulf the first time around was the thing with Saddam Hussein, back in 1991.”

“I knew that part.”

“Good.”

“The brother’s first name was Peter, right?”

“Correct.”

“And you still think King was his real last name?”

“More likely than not. Worth a try, anyway.”

“Dumb-ass gun bunny isn’t very polite.”

“But very necessary,” Reacher said. “Unfortunately Frederick the Great once said that field artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. It went to their heads. They started calling themselves the kings of battle. They started to think they’re the most important part of the army. Which obviously isn’t true.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Military Police is the most important part of the army.”

“What did they call you?”

“Sir, usually.”

“And?”

“Meatheads. Monkey patrol. And chimps, but that was an acronym.”

“For what?”

“Completely hopeless in most policing situations.”

“Where is Fort Sill?”

“Lawton, Oklahoma.”

She speed-dialed her phone in its cradle. Reacher heard the ring tone loud and clear through the stereo. A voice answered, male, low and fast and without preamble. A duty officer, probably, with Sorenson’s number front and center on his caller ID, and therefore instantly on the ball and ready for business. The night guy, most likely, still there at the end of his watch. He didn’t sound like a guy who had just gotten out of bed. Sorenson said to him, “I need you to call the army at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, and get what they have on an artilleryman named Peter King, who was on active service in 1991. Present whereabouts and details of family would be especially appreciated. Give them my cell number and ask them to call me back direct, OK?”

“Understood,” the guy said.

“Is Stony in his office yet?”

“Just arrived.”

“What’s the word?”

“Nothing is happening yet. It’s weird.”

“No three-ring circus?”

“Phones are quiet. No one has even asked for the night log yet.”

“Weird.”

“Like I said.”

The eyewitness was not kept waiting at the reception desk. There was no line. He had been given a cup of coffee and he had eaten a breakfast muffin. The woman at the desk took his name and asked what kind of bed he preferred. She was a plump, motherly type, seemingly very patient and capable. The eyewitness didn’t really understand her question.

He said, “Bed?”

The woman said, “We have rooms with kings, queens, and twins.”

“I guess anything will do.”

“Don’t you have a preference?”

“What would you suggest?”

“Honestly, I think the rooms with the queens are ideal. Overall they feel a little more spacious. With the armchairs and all? Most people like those rooms the best.”

“OK, I’ll take one of those.”

“Good,” the woman said brightly. She marked it up in a book and took a key off a hook. She said, “Room fourteen. It’s easy to find.”

The eyewitness carried the key in his hand and left the lobby. He stood for a moment in the chill air and looked up at the sky. It was going to rain. It was probably already raining in the north. He set off down the path and saw a knee-high fingerpost for rooms eleven through fifteen. He followed the sign. The path wound its way through sad winter flowerbeds and came out at a long low block of five rooms together. Room fourteen was the last but one. There was an empty leaf-strewn swimming pool not far from it. The eyewitness thought it would make a nice facility in the summer, with blue water in it, and the flowers all around it in bloom. He had never been in a swimming pool. Lakes and rivers, yes, but never a pool.

Beyond the pool was the perimeter wall, a waist-high decorative feature made of stucco over concrete blocks. Ten feet beyond that was the security fence, all tall and black and angular and topped with canted-in rolls of razor wire. The eyewitness figured it must have been very expensive. He knew all about the price of fencing, being a farmer. Labor and materials could kill you.

He unlocked room fourteen. He stepped inside. The bed was a little wider than the one he shared at home. There were clothes on it, in neat piles. Two outfits, both the same. Blue jeans, blue shirts, blue sweaters, white undershirts, white underwear, blue socks. There were pajamas on the pillow. There were toiletries in the bathroom. Soap, shampoo, shaving cream. Some kind of lotion. Deodorant. There were razors. There was toothpaste, and a toothbrush sealed in cellophane. There was a comb. There was a bathrobe. There were lots of towels.

He looked at the bed but sat down in an armchair. He had been told lunch was available from twelve o’clock onward. Nothing to do until then. So he figured he might start his day with a nap. Just a short doze. It had been a long night.

Reacher waited until Sorenson was safely past a howling semi truck, and then he said, “Tell me about how the fingerprint thing worked with the dead guy.”

“Standard procedure,” Sorenson said. “It’s the first thing they do, before decomposition starts to make it difficult. They take the prints and upload them to the database.”

“By satellite?”

“No, over the regular cell phone networks.”

“That’s convenient.”

“You bet it is. We love cell phones. We love them to death. For all kinds of reasons. I mean, can you imagine? Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same.”

“Were there prints in the bright red car?”

“Plenty. Those guys took no care at all.”

“Did you upload them?”

“Of course.”

“Any results?”

“Not yet,” Sorenson said. “Which almost certainly means those guys aren’t in the database. The software will hunt for hours, until it’s sure, but it never takes this long. They must be virgins.”

“Therefore not foreign,” Reacher said. “There are no foreign fingerprint virgins, right? Everyone gets fingerprinted at the port of entry. Or for their visas. Unless they’re illegals. They could have come over the Canadian border, I guess. People say it’s full of holes.”

“Except how did they get into Canada? We have access to their databases too. And Canada has no other borders. Unless they hiked across the North Pole or swam the Bering Strait.”

“There’s Alaska.”

“But to get into Alaska from overseas you have to be fingerprinted.”

“No chance of errors or glitches?”

“Not for the last ten years.”

“OK, they’re not foreign.”

Sorenson drove on. She had driven the opposite way just hours before, but she didn’t really recognize the terrain. The highway looked different. It was lit up a dull gray and there was no view to the sides and no horizon ahead or behind. It was like passing through an endless cloud. The rain was easing but the road was still streaming. There was spray everywhere.

By her side Reacher said, “Where did the State Department guy come from?”

She said, “I don’t know. He just showed up in a car. But he was for real. I saw his ID.”

“Does the State Department have field offices, like you guys?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“So where did he come from? Obviously not D.C., because he got there too quick.”

“Good question. I’ll ask my SAC. He got a message that the guy was coming. And I know he spoke to State during the night. That’s how we found out the dead guy was a trade attaché.”

“Or not. It feels to me like State was keeping its eye on something. Like standing by, in the vicinity. If the guy really was from State, that is. He could have been CIA too.”

Sorenson said nothing. Nothing about the checked shirt from Pakistan or the Middle East, nothing about the nighttime calls from the CIA, nothing about their insistent requests for constant updates. She didn’t know why, beyond a kind of basic superstition. Some things just shouldn’t be mentioned out loud, and in her opinion the idea of the CIA roaming America’s heartland by night was one of them.

Chapter 41

Delfuenso’s daughter was called Lucy. Sheriff Goodman met her on the neighbor’s stoop. She was a thin child, dark haired and sallow, still in pajamas. She smelled faintly of sleep and a busy household. Goodman sat her down on the concrete step and sat next to her with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging loose in front of him. Just two regular folks, chatting. Except they weren’t. He started out by asking how she was, and he didn’t get much of an answer. The kid was mute with incomprehension. But she was listening. He said her mom hadn’t come home from work. He said no one knew where she was. He said lots of people were out looking for her.

The kid didn’t really react. It was as if he had given her a piece of arcane and useless information from another world entirely, like the surface temperature of the planet Jupiter, or how AM was different from FM on the radio dial. She just nodded politely and fidgeted and shivered in the cold and wanted to go back inside.

Next Goodman spoke with the neighbor herself. He gave her the same incomplete information: Delfuenso was missing, her whereabouts were unknown, a search was continuing. He told the woman he had been advised that Lucy should stay home from school. He said maybe it would be a good idea if her own kid stayed home too. Then he asked the woman if she could stay home from work as well, to keep an eye on them both. He said familiar faces would probably be a good thing for Lucy, under the circumstances.

The neighbor hemmed and hawed and fussed a little, but in the end she said she would try to make it all work. She would do her best. She would make some calls. Goodman left her there at the door, the two kids energetic in the gloom behind her, the woman herself inert and distracted and looking worried about a dozen different things all at once.

The rain stopped and the clouds thinned and the Interstate went from streaming to damp to dry, all within a ten-mile stretch. Reacher started to recognize some of the road. It looked different by day. No longer a tunnel through the dark. Now it felt like an endless causeway, raised a little above the infinite flatness all around. He sat still and patient and watched the exits, most of them deceptive, some of them promising. Then he saw a really good one three or four miles ahead, vague in the distance, shapeless in the gray light, a cluster of buildings and a forest of bright signs, Exxon and Texaco and Sunoco, Subway and McDonald’s and Cracker Barrel, Marriott and Red Roof and the Comfort Inn. Plus a huge billboard for an outlet mall he hadn’t seen by night, because the sign was made of unlit paper, not neon.

He said, “Let’s get breakfast.”

Sorenson didn’t answer. He felt her stiffen in her seat. He felt her get a little wary. He said, “I’m hungry. You must be, too. And I’m sure we need gas, anyway.”

No response.

He said, “I’m not going to give you the slip. I wouldn’t be in this car in the first place unless I wanted to be. We have a deal. You remember that, right?”

She said, “The Omaha field office has to show something for a night’s work.”

“I understand that. I’m coming with you, all the way.”

“I have to be sure of that. So we’ll eat if there’s a drive-through.”

“No,” he said. “We’ll go inside and sit at a table, like civilized people who trust each other. And I need to take a shower. And I need to buy some clothes.”

“Where?”

“At the outlet mall.”

“Why?”

“So I can change.”

“Why do you need to change?”

“So I make a good impression.”

“Were your bags still in the Impala?”

“I don’t have bags.”

“Why not?”

“What would I put in them?”

“Clean clothes, for instance.”

“And then what, three days later?”

Sorenson nodded. “You make a good point.” She was quiet for half a mile and then she slowed the car and put on her turn signal for the exit. She said, “OK, I’m trusting you, Reacher. Don’t embarrass me. I’m way out on a limb here.”

Reacher said nothing. They turned left off the end of the ramp and nosed into a Texaco station. Sorenson got out of the car. Reacher got out too. She didn’t like that much. He shrugged. He figured if she was going to trust him at all, she might as well trust him from the very beginning. She dipped a plain Amex and started pumping. He said, “I’m going in the store. You need anything?”

She shook her head. She was worried. With good reason. A live gas hose was like a ball and chain. He was free, and she was anchored.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and walked away. The store was like a shabby version of the Shell station’s, south and east of Des Moines. Same kind of aisles, same kind of stuff, but run-down and dirty. Same kind of clerk at the register. The guy was staring at Reacher’s nose. Reacher prowled the aisles until he found the section with travel necessities. He took a tube of antiseptic cream and a small box of Band-Aids. And a small tube of toothpaste. And a bottle of aspirin. He paid in cash at the register. The clerk was still staring at his nose. Reacher said, “Mosquito bite. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

He found Sorenson waiting for him halfway between the store and the pump. Still worried. He said, “Where do you want to get breakfast?”

She said, “Is McDonald’s OK with you?”

He nodded. He needed protein and fats and sugars, and he didn’t really care where they came from. He had no prejudice against fast food. Better than slow food, for a traveling man. They got back in the car and drove a hundred yards and pulled off again and parked. They went inside to fluorescent light and cold air and hard plastic seats. He ordered two cheeseburgers and two apple pies and a twenty-ounce cup of coffee. Sorenson said, “That’s lunch, not breakfast.”

Reacher said, “I’m not sure what it is. Last time I woke up was yesterday morning.”

“Me too,” Sorenson said, but she ordered regular breakfast items. Some kind of a sausage patty, with egg, in a bun, also with a cup of coffee. They ate together across a wet laminate table. Sorenson asked, “Where are you going to get a shower?”

“Motel,” Reacher said.

“You’re going to pay for a night’s stay just to take a shower?”

“No, I’m going to pay for an hour.”

“They’re all chains here. They’re not hot-sheet places that rent by the hour.”

“But they’re all run by human beings. And it’s still morning. So the maids are still around. The clerk will take twenty bucks. He’ll give a maid ten to do a room over again, and he’ll put ten in his own pocket. That’s how it usually works.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“I’d be pretty far gone if I hadn’t.”

“Expensive, though. With the clothes and all.”

“How much do you pay for your mortgage every month? And the insurance and the oil and the maintenance and the repairs and the yard work and the taxes?”

Sorenson smiled.

“You make a good point,” she said again.

Reacher finished first and headed for the men’s room. There was a pay phone on the wall outside. He ignored it. There was no window. No fire exit. He used the john and washed his hands and when he got back he found two men crowding Sorenson from behind. She was still in her chair and they were one each side of her, meaty thighs close to her shoulders but not quite touching them, giving her no room at all to swivel and get out. They were talking about her to each other, over her head, coarse and boorish, wondering out loud why the pretty little lady wasn’t inviting them to sit down with her. They were truckers, probably. Possibly they mistook her for a business traveler far from home. A woman executive. The black pantsuit, the blue shirt. A fish out of water. They seemed to like her hair.

Reacher stopped ten feet away and watched. He wondered which she would pull first, her ID or her Glock. He guessed ID, but would have preferred the Glock. But she pulled neither. She just sat there, taking it. She was a very patient person. Or perhaps there would be paperwork involved. Reacher didn’t know the ins and outs of Bureau protocol.

Then one of the guys seemed to sense Reacher’s presence and he went quiet and his head turned and his eyes locked on. His pal followed suit. They were large men, both of them bulky with the kind of flesh that wasn’t quite muscle and wasn’t quite flab. They had small dull eyes and unshaven faces, and bad teeth and stringy hair. They were what a doctor friend of Reacher’s used to write up as PPP. A diagnosis, a message, a secret insider medical code, one professional to another, for ease of reference.

It meant Piss-Poor Protoplasm.

Decision time, boys, Reacher thought. Either break eye contact and walk away, or don’t.

They didn’t. They kept on staring. Not just fascination with the nose. A challenge. Some kind of a brainless hormonal imperative. Reacher felt his own kick in. Involuntary, but inevitable. Adrenaline, seasoned with an extra component, something dark and warm and primitive, something ancient and prehistoric and predatory, something that took out all the jitters and left all the power and all the calm confidence and all the absolute certainty of victory. Not like bringing a gun to a knife fight. Like bringing a plutonium bomb.

The two guys stared. Reacher stared back. Then the guy on the left said, “What are you looking at?”

Which was a challenge all by itself, with a predictable dynamic. For some unknown reason most people backed down at that point. Most people squirmed, and got defensive, and got apologetic. Not Reacher. His instinct was to double down, not back down.

He said, “I’m looking at a piece of shit.”

No response.

Reacher said, “But a piece of shit with a choice. Option one, get back in your truck and get breakfast fifty miles down the road. Option two, get in an ambulance and get breakfast through a plastic tube.”

No response.

“It’s a limited time offer,” Reacher said. “So be quick, or I’ll choose for you. And to be absolutely honest, right now I’m leaning toward the ambulance and the feeding tube.”

Their mouths moved and their eyes flicked from side to side. They stayed where they were. Just for a couple of seconds, just enough to save face. Then they picked option one, like Reacher knew they would. They turned and shuffled away, slowly enough to look unconcerned and a little defiant, but they kept on going. They made steady progress. They pushed out the door and disappeared into the lot. They didn’t look back. Reacher breathed out and sat down again.

Sorenson said, “I don’t need you to look after me.”

Reacher said, “I know. And I wasn’t. They were talking to me by that point. I was looking after myself.”

“What would you have done if they hadn’t left?”

“Moot point. Guys like that always leave.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I’m perpetually disappointed. It’s a disappointing world. As in, why were you just sitting there and taking it?”

“Paperwork,” she said. “Arresting people is such a pain in the ass.”

She took out her phone and lit it up. She checked it for bars and battery. She shut it down again.

“Expecting a call?” Reacher asked.

“You know I am,” she said. “I’m waiting to be taken off this case.”

“Maybe that isn’t going to happen.”

“It should have happened two hours ago.”

“So what’s your best guess?”

But she didn’t get a chance to answer that question, because right then, right on cue, her phone started ringing.

Chapter 42

The phone hopped and buzzed. The ring tone was thin and reedy. A plain electronic sound. Sorenson answered the call and listened. Reacher could see in her face it was not the call she was expecting. She wasn’t being taken off the board. Not yet. She was being given information about the case instead. Not bad news, necessarily, judging by her expression, but not good news either. Interesting news, probably. Perplexing news, possibly.

She clicked off and looked across the wet laminate table and said, “Our medical examiners finally got around to moving the dead guy out of the old pumping station.”

Reacher said, “And?”

“A hitherto unnoticed condition became readily apparent.”

“Which is?”

“Just before they stabbed him to death, they broke his arm.”

Sorenson told Reacher her Bureau MEs had hoisted the dead guy onto a wheeled gurney for the short trip out to the meat wagon. No body bag, which was normal for that kind of situation, where a corpse was lying in a lake of drying blood. No point getting the bag sticky both inside and out. They had planned to zip the guy up in the truck.

But on the way to the truck the gurney had hit a bump and the dead guy’s right arm had flopped off the side, with the elbow turned the wrong way out. They had used a portable X-ray machine right there on the sidewalk, and determined that the joint was shattered. It was inconceivable the injury could have happened at any prior time, because the pain would have been unbearable. No one could walk around with a shattered elbow. Not even for a minute. Certainly no one could drive all the way from Denver. And the injury wasn’t postmortem either. There was a little bleeding visible through the skin. And some very slight swelling. But not much. Blood pressure had continued after the break, but not for long.

“Defensive injury,” Reacher said. “In a way. At one remove, as it were. He pulled a weapon. A gun, or possibly a knife of his own. In self-defense. They disarmed him with a degree of violence. I assume he was right-handed.”

“Most people are,” Sorenson said. “And then they cut him, and stabbed him, and then he bled out moments later.”

“Did the eyewitness hear a scream?”

“He didn’t say so.”

“Busted elbows hurt bad. He must have heard something. A yelp, at least. Pretty loud, probably.”

“Well, we can’t ask him now.”

“No weapons found at the scene? His or theirs?”

Sorenson shook her head. “They probably tossed them all down the open pipe.”

“You still think he was just a trade attaché? Far from home with a knife or a gun in his pocket?”

Sorenson shook her head again.

“Something I haven’t told you,” she said. “The CIA has been sniffing around all night long. They called within minutes. Even before Bureau counterterrorism got there. Well before the State Department guy got there.”

“What did they want?”

“Updates and information.”

“There you go,” Reacher said. “The dead guy was one of their own.”

“So why am I still on the case? This thing should have gone nuclear by now.” She checked her phone again. It had bars and battery, but it was stubbornly silent.

They hit the outlet mall next. Cheap stuff, in a cheap and dismal building. About a third of the units sold men’s clothing. Reacher recognized some of the brands. He wasn’t impressed by the discount pricing. In his opinion the steep reductions merely brought the values close to where they should have been all along.

As always his choices were limited by the availability or otherwise of the right big-and-tall sizes. But he managed to find generic blue jeans at one store, and a three-layer upper body ensemble at another: T-shirt, dress shirt, and cotton sweater, all shades of blue. Plus blue socks and white underwear at a third store, and a short blue warm-up jacket at a fourth. He figured he would keep the boots he already had. Just a few days more. They were OK.

“You like blue?” Sorenson asked him.

“I like everything to match,” he said.

“Why?”

“Someone told me I should.”

Total damage was seventy-seven dollars in cash, which was well within target. Three days’ wear, minimum, maybe four maximum, somewhere between about twenty and twenty-five bucks a day. Cheaper than living somewhere, and easier than washing and ironing and folding and packing. That was for damn sure.

Sorenson asked, “Where do you get your money?”

Reacher said, “Here and there.”

“Where and where?”

“Savings, some of it.”

“And the rest?”

“I work sometimes.”

“Doing what?”

“Casual labor. Whatever needs doing.”

“How often?”

“Now and then.”

“Which can’t pay much.”

“I get the rest from alternative sources.”

“What does that mean?”

“Spoils of war, usually.”

“What war?”

Reacher said, “I steal from bad guys.”

“And you’re admitting this to me?”

“I’m following your example. Federal agencies seize property all the time, right? You find coke in some guy’s glove box, it’s goodbye BMW. Same with houses and boats.”

“That’s different. That stuff reduces our expenditures. It spares the taxpayer.”

“Likewise,” Reacher said. “I’d be on food stamps otherwise.”

He chose the Red Roof Inn for his shower. A franchise operation, with the owner on duty at the desk, and like all such guys, happy to put a little extracurricular cash in his back pocket. As expected he settled for a pair of tens, one for him and one for whichever maid was first up for favors. Reacher carried his gas station purchases into the room in one bag, and his new outfit in four others. Sorenson came in with him and checked around. She didn’t say anything, but he saw she wasn’t happy with the bathroom window. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. It was a ground floor room, with a paved alley out back.

“Stay here, if you want,” Reacher said. “I’ll leave the shower curtain open. To keep your mind at rest.”

She smiled, but she didn’t reply. Not directly. Instead she said, “How long will this take?”

“Twenty-two minutes for the shower,” he said. “Then three to get dry, and three to get dressed. Plus five for unforeseen eventualities. Call it thirty-three minutes total.”

“That’s very exact.”

“Precision is a virtue.”

She left and he started peeling off his old clothes. They were in pretty bad shape. He had been wearing them for days, since Bolton, South Dakota. In places they were crusted with mud, and in other places they were spotted with blood, some of it his own, and some of it not. He balled the wrecked garments up tight and stuffed them all in the bathroom trash. Then he cleaned his teeth very thoroughly and set the shower running.

He washed his hair and soaped himself up from head to foot and scrubbed and rinsed. Eight minutes. Then he got out of the shower and used a washcloth and a sink of hot water and the mirror above it to attend to his face. He soaked off the hardened smears of blood and sponged the open lacerations carefully. He rubbed a slick of soap on his upper lip and sniffed as hard as he could until he started sneezing uncontrollably. Clots of blood came out, as big as garden peas.

Then he got back in the shower and washed himself from head to foot all over again. He toweled off and dressed, and combed his hair with his fingers. He put his old passport and his ATM card in one pocket and his toothbrush in another. He put the short fat guy’s motel key in his jacket. He ate aspirins and drank water from the tap. Then he found his antiseptic cream and his Band-Aids and he opened the window to let the steam out and clear the mirror.

Julia Sorenson was in the back alley, watching the window.

She was on the phone. She wasn’t enjoying the call. She was arguing, but politely. With her boss, Reacher guessed. Hence the restraint. He couldn’t hear what was being said on either end of the conversation, but he figured the guy was finally taking her off the board, and she was pitching to stay on. She seemed to be making all kinds of good points. Her free hand was chopping the air, pushing objections aside, moving persuasive reasons front and center. She was using the physical gestures to put animation in her voice. The telephone was a poor means of communication, in Reacher’s opinion. It had no room for body language and nuance.

He looked back in the mirror and used toilet paper to dry his cuts. Then he squeezed thin worms of cream into them from the tube of antiseptic. He wiped the excess and dried the intact areas of skin. He put a Band-Aid over the biggest cut. Another over the second biggest. He dumped the trash on top of his old clothes and closed the bathroom window and headed for the bedroom. He took a look in the mirror next to the closet. The new clothes were pretty good. His hair looked OK. His face was a mess. No oil painting, that was for sure. But then, it never had been, and it was certainly a lot better than an hour ago. A whole lot better. Almost halfway human.

He stepped out to the lot. Sorenson’s cruiser was right outside the door. She was leaning on the front fender. Reacher guessed she had left the alley when he closed the bathroom window. At that point she had hustled around to the front, double quick. Not to greet him. To make sure he didn’t run.

She said, “You clean up pretty well.”

Something in her face. Something in her voice. Not hurt. Not anger. Not necessarily even disappointment. More like confusion.

Reacher said, “What?”

“I got a call.”

“I saw.”

“My SAC.”

“I guessed. Did he take you off the case?”

She shook her head no, then changed it to a yes. She said, “I mean, I’m off the case, yes. But not because he took me off, no.”

“Then why?”

“Because there is no case. Not anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that as of twenty minutes ago there is no active investigation. Which is logical, really, because as far as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned nothing happened in Nebraska last night. Absolutely nothing at all.”

Chapter 43

Sorenson said, “They took it the other way. They didn’t take it nuclear. They made it a black hole instead. They’re erasing it from history. A CIA demand, presumably. Or State. Something squirrelly. Some kind of national security bullshit.” Then her phone rang again before Reacher could reply. She checked the incoming number and asked, “Where is the 405 area code?”

“Southwestern Oklahoma,” Reacher said. “Lawton, probably. It’s the army.”

She answered and listened for a spell and thanked whoever she was talking to. She clicked off and said, “Mother Sill confirms she had a Peter James King on active duty in 1991. He was a fister. Which I’m sure isn’t what I think it is.”

“Fire support team,” Reacher said. “Not just a dagby after all. I sold him short. Probably a forward observer. Smart guys, most of them. The 13F MOS. Which meant he maneuvered with the lowly infantry or the humble armored divisions, rather than the kings of battle themselves. Did they confirm a brother named Alan?”

“No. Didn’t deny one, either. But they’ll need paperwork.”

“What happened to Peter?”

“He quit as a sergeant first class in 1997.”

“Same year as me. Where is he now?”

“Mother Sill doesn’t know for sure. Last she heard he was working with a security company in Denver, Colorado. Which happens to be exactly where the dead guy flew into.”

“Coincidence,” Reacher said. “Alan King said they don’t talk.”

“Did you believe him?”

“He told the truth about Peter’s name and service, apparently. Why wouldn’t he be telling the truth about not talking to him too?”

“How many people live in Denver?”

“About six hundred thousand,” Reacher said. “Between two and a half and three million in the metro area, depending on how you measure it. Too small and too big to match King’s million and a half.”

“How do you know stuff like that? Area codes and populations?”

“I like information. I like facts. Denver was named after James W. Denver, who was governor of the Kansas Territory at the time. It was a kiss-ass move by a land speculator called Larimer. He hoped the governor would move a county seat there and make him rich. What he didn’t know was that the governor had already resigned. Mails were slow in those days. And then the new place became part of Colorado anyway, not Kansas. Area code is 303.”

“Get in the car,” Sorenson said.

“Want me to drive the rest of the way?”

“No, I don’t. I can’t arrive with you at the wheel. It’s bad enough having you in the front.”

“I’m not going to ride in the back.”

Sorenson didn’t reply to that. They climbed aboard, into their accustomed positions. Sorenson backed out of the motel lot and threaded her way back to the highway. She took the ramp and accelerated. There were rain clouds in the east. The weather was chasing them all the way. Sorenson fumbled her phone up into its cradle, where it beeped once to acknowledge it was charging, and then immediately it started to ring again, no longer thin and reedy, but loud and powerful through the sound system. Sorenson accepted the call and Reacher heard a man’s voice say he was en route for the location south and east of Des Moines, Iowa, as instructed.

Sorenson clicked off and said, “My forensics team, heading for Delfuenso.”

Reacher said, “Who is what we should be talking about here. How can the Bureau shut down a case where an innocent bystander died?”

“Such a thing has happened before.”

“But facts don’t just go away.”

“We don’t dispute Delfuenso died. Lots of people die every day.”

“How did she die?”

“No one knows. She drove her own car to a neighboring state. It set on fire. Suicide, maybe. Maybe she took some pills and smoked a last cigarette. And dropped the cigarette. We’ll never know for sure, because the evidence was lost in the fire. The pill bottle, and so on.”

“That’s your boss’s script?”

“It’s a local matter now. Sheriff Goodman will deal with it. Except he won’t, because someone will sit on him too, for sure.”

“What about the missing eyewitness? Is he erased too?”

Sorenson shrugged at the wheel. “A no-account local farm worker, with a history of drinking and a rented house and no stable relationships? People like that wander off all the time. Some of them come back, and some of them don’t.”

“That’s all in the script too?”

“Everything will have a plausible explanation. Not too precise, not too vague.”

Reacher said, “If the case was closed twenty minutes ago, why are you still getting calls? Like just now, from Mother Sill, and your forensics guy?”

Sorenson paused a beat. She said, “Because they both had my cell number. They called me direct. They didn’t go through the field office. They haven’t gotten the memo yet.”

“When will they?”

“Not soon, I hope. Especially my forensics guys. I need to know how King and McQueen kept Delfuenso in the back seat. I mean, would you just sit still for that? They set the car on fire, and you just sit there and take it? Why would you? Why wouldn’t you fight?”

“They shot her first. It’s obvious. She was already dead.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“They may never be able to prove it.”

“All I need is an indication. A balance of probabilities. Which I might get. My people are pretty good.”

“Your boss will recall them, surely.”

“He doesn’t know they’re out and about. And I’m not going to make it a point to tell him.”

“Won’t they check in?”

“Only with me,” Sorenson said. “I’m their primary point of contact.”

She drove on, another fast mile, with Reacher quiet beside her. The sun was still out behind them. It was casting shadows. The rain clouds were still low in the sky. But they were coming. The far horizon was bright. Reacher said, “If there’s no case anymore, then the Omaha field office doesn’t need to show anything for its night’s work. Because there was no night’s work. Because nothing happened in Nebraska.”

Sorenson didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “And if there’s no case anymore, who needs a suspect or a material witness? No one did anything and no one saw anything. I mean, how could anyone, if nothing even happened?”

No response.

Reacher said, “And if there’s no active investigation anymore, then there won’t be any new information for you to pass on to me.”

Sorenson said nothing.

Reacher asked, “So why am I still in this car?”

No answer.

Reacher asked, “Am I in the script too? A no-account unemployed and homeless veteran? With no stable relationships? Not even a rented house? People like me wander off all the time, right? Which would be very convenient for all concerned. Because I’m the last man alive who can call bullshit on this whole thing. I know what happened. I saw King and McQueen. I saw Delfuenso with them. I know she didn’t drive her own car to a neighboring state. I know she didn’t take any pills. So are they going to erase me too?”

Sorenson said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Julia, did you discuss me with your boss while I was in the shower?”

Sorenson said, “Yes, I did.”

“And what are your orders?”

“I still have to bring you in.”

“Why? What’s the plan?”

“I don’t know,” Sorenson said. “I have to bring you to the parking lot. That’s all I was told.”

Chapter 44

Reacher spent a long minute revisiting a variation on an earlier problem: It was technically challenging to take out a driver from the front passenger seat, while that driver was busy doing eighty miles an hour on a public highway. More than challenging. Impossible, almost certainly, even with seat belts and airbags. Too much risk. Too many innocent parties around. People driving to work, old folks dropping in on family.

Sorenson said, “I’m sorry.”

Reacher said, “My mom always told me I shouldn’t put myself first. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to this time. How much trouble will you be in if you don’t deliver me?”

“A lot,” she said.

Which was not the answer he wanted to hear. He said, “Then I need you to swear something for me. Raise your right hand.”

She did. She took it off the wheel and brought it up near her shoulder, palm out, halfway between slow and snappy, a familiar move for a public official. Reacher swiveled in his seat and caught her wrist with his left hand, one, and then he leaned over and snaked his right hand under her jacket and took her Glock out of the holster on her hip, two. Then he sat back in his seat with the gun in the gap between his leg and the door.

Three.

Sorenson said, “That was sneaky.”

“I apologize,” Reacher said. “To you and my mom.”

“It was also a crime.”

“Probably.”

“Are you going to shoot me?”

“Probably not.”

“So how are we going to play this out?”

“You’re going to let me out a block from your building. But you’re going to tell them you lost me twenty miles back. So they start looking in the wrong place. Maybe we stopped at a gas station. Maybe I went to use the bathroom, and ran.”

“Do I get my gun back?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. “A block from your building.”

Sorenson drove on and said nothing. Reacher sat quiet beside her, thinking about the feel of the skin on her wrist, and the warmth of her stomach and hip. He had brushed them with the heel of his hand, on his way to her holster. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft.

They stayed on the Interstate through the southern part of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and they crossed the Missouri River on a bridge, and then they were back in the state of Nebraska, right in the city of Omaha itself. The highway speared through its heart, past a sign for a zoo, past a sign for a park, with residential quarters to the north and a ragged tightly-packed strip of industrial enterprises to the south. Then eventually the highway curved away to the left and Sorenson came off on a street that continued straight onward east to west through the center of the commercial zone. But by that point the zone had changed. It had become more like a retail park. Or an office park. There were broad lawns and trees and landscaping. Buildings were low and white, hundreds of yards apart. There were huge flat parking lots in between. Reacher had been expecting something more central and more urban. He had pictured narrow streets and brick walls and corners and alleys and doorways. He had been anticipating a regular downtown maze.

He asked, “Where exactly is your place?”

Sorenson pointed beyond the next light, diagonally, west and a little north.

“Right there,” she said. “That’s it.”

Two hundred yards away Reacher saw the back of a sprawling white building, pretty new, four or five stories high. Behind it and to the right and left of it were wide grassy areas. Beyond it was a gigantic parking lot for the next enterprise in line. Everything was flat and empty. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.

“Keep going,” he said. “This is no good.”

Sorenson had already slowed the car. She said, “You told me a block away.”

“These aren’t blocks. These are football fields.”

She rolled through the light. Directly behind the white building Reacher saw a small parking lot with staff vehicles and unmarked cars in neat lines. But there was a navy blue Crown Vic all alone some yards from them, waiting at an angle, and a black panel van next to it. There were four men stumping around in the space between the two, hunched in coats, sipping coffee, shooting the shit, just waiting.

For him, presumably.

He asked, “Do you know them?”

“Two of them,” Sorenson said. “They’re the counterterrorism guys that came up from Kansas City last night. Their names are Dawson and Mitchell.”

“And the other two?”

“Never saw them before.”

“Keep going.”

“Couldn’t you at least talk to them?”

“Not a good idea.”

“They can’t really do anything to you.”

“Have you read the Patriot Act?”

“No,” Sorenson said.

“Has your boss?”

“I doubt it.”

“Therefore they can do whatever the hell they want to me. Because who’s going to tell them otherwise?”

Sorenson slowed some more.

Reacher said, “Don’t turn in, Julia. Keep on going.”

“I gave them an ETA. Pretty soon they’re going to come out and start looking for me.”

“Call them and tell them you’re broken down on the shoulder somewhere. Tell them you got a flat tire. Tell them we’re still in Iowa. Or tell them we took a wrong turn and went to Wisconsin by mistake.”

“They’ll track my cell. Maybe they already are.”

“Keep on going,” Reacher said.

Sorenson accelerated gently. They passed the side of the white building. It was about a hundred yards away. It had a wide looping driveway in front of it. Its facade was modern and impressive. There was a lot of plate glass. There was no obvious activity going on. All was quiet. Reacher turned his head and watched as the building fell away behind them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Where do you want to go now?” Sorenson asked.

“A mile away will do it.”

“And then what?”

“Then we say goodbye.”

But they didn’t get a mile away, and they didn’t say goodbye. Because Sorenson’s phone rang in its cradle and she answered and Reacher heard a man’s voice, urgent and loud and panicked. It said, “Ms. Sorenson? This is Sheriff Victor Goodman. Karen Delfuenso’s daughter is gone. She was taken away by some men.”

Chapter 45

Sorenson hit the brakes and hauled on the wheel and U-turned immediately and headed back toward the highway, fast, past the FBI building again, past its front, past its side, past its rear lot, and onward, the same way they had come minutes before. The voice on the phone told the whole long story. County Sheriff Victor Goodman, Reacher gathered, about eighty miles away. The local guy. The first responder, the night before. He sounded like a competent man, but tired and stressed and way out of his depth. He said, “I told the kid her mom was missing first thing this morning. I figured it was best to break it gently. You know, the first step, and then the second step. I told the neighbor she should keep both kids home from school today. I asked her to stay home with them. But she didn’t. She was worried about her job. She left them there alone. Which she thought would be OK. But it wasn’t OK. I dropped by again to touch base and only the neighbor’s kid was there. All by herself. She said some men came and took Delfuenso’s kid away.”

Sorenson asked, “When?”

Goodman said, “This is a ten-year-old girl we’re talking about here. She’s pretty vague. Best guess is about an hour ago.”

“How many men?”

“She doesn’t really know.”

“One? Two? A dozen?”

“More than one. She said men, not a man.”

“Descriptions?”

“Just men.”

“Black? White? Young? Old?”

“White, I’m sure, or she’d have said. This is Nebraska, after all. No idea about age. All adults look old to a ten-year-old.”

“Clothing?”

“She doesn’t remember.”

“Vehicle?”

“She can’t describe it. I’m not certain she even saw a vehicle. She claims she did, and she’s calling it a car, but it could have been anything. A pick-up, or an SUV.”

“Color?”

“She can’t recall. If she saw it at all, that is. She might have just assumed it. She’s probably never seen a pedestrian in her life. Not out there.”

“Does she remember what was said?”

“She wasn’t really paying attention. The doorbell rang, and Lucy Delfuenso went to answer it. The neighbor’s kid says she saw men at the door, and she heard some talking, but basically she stayed in the back room. She was busy playing with something. She was really into it. About five minutes later she realized Lucy hadn’t come back from the door.”

“Why would Delfuenso’s kid answer the door in someone else’s house?”

“It doesn’t feel like that to them. It’s like both of them treat both places like home. They’re in and out all the time.”

“Have you searched the area? Including Delfuenso’s own house?”

“I’ve got everyone on it. No sign of Lucy anywhere.”

“Did you canvass the other neighbor? That gray-haired guy?”

“He wasn’t there. He leaves for work at six in the morning. The fourth house didn’t see anything either.”

“Did you call the state troopers?”

“Sure, but I have nothing to give them.”

“Missing kids get an instant response, right?”

“But what can they do? It’s a small department. And it’s a big state. They can’t stop everyone everywhere.”

“OK, we’ll figure it out,” Sorenson said. “I’m on my way. But in the meantime you should keep on looking.”

“Of course I will. But they could be sixty miles away by now.”

Sorenson didn’t answer that. She just clicked off the call and howled around the on-ramp and headed west close to a hundred miles an hour.

Ten high-speed minutes later Reacher gave Sorenson her Glock back and asked, “Is your boss going to ignore a missing kid too?”

Sorenson put the gun back on her hip and said, “My boss is an ambitious guy. He dreams of bigger things. He wants to be an Assistant Director one day. Therefore he’ll do whatever the Hoover Building tells him to do, right or wrong. Some SACs are like that. And the Hoover Building will do whatever the CIA tells it to do. Or the State Department, or Homeland Security, or the West Wing, or whoever the hell is calling the shots here.”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s modern law enforcement. Get used to it.”

“How much freedom of action are you going to get?”

“None at all, as soon as they figure out where I am.”

“So don’t answer your phone.”

“I’m not going to. Not the first couple of times, anyway.”

“And after that?”

“They’ll leave voice messages. They’ll send texts and e-mails. I can’t go rogue. I can’t disobey direct orders.”

Reacher said nothing.

Sorenson said, “Well, would you? Did you?”

“Sometimes,” Reacher said.

“And now you’re a homeless unemployed veteran with no stable relationships.”

“Exactly. These things are never easy. But you can make a start. You can get something done before they shut you down.”

“How?”

“Motive,” Reacher said. “That’s what you need to think about. Who the hell snatches a dead woman’s kid? And why? Especially a kid who knows nothing at all about what happened to her mom?”

“But this can’t be unrelated, surely. This can’t be a coincidence. This is not the father showing up after some custody battle. This is not some random pedophile on the prowl.”

“Maybe it was the neighbor’s kid they were looking for. Maybe they got them confused. It was the neighbor’s house, after all. Is the neighbor divorced too?”

“This is not a coincidence, Reacher.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” Reacher said. “It makes no sense at all.”

Sheriff Goodman was into his thirtieth hour without sleep. He was dazed and groggy and barely upright. But he kept on going. No reason to believe the abductors had stayed in the vicinity, but he had his guys out checking any and all vacant buildings, barns, huts, shelters, and empty houses. He himself was supplementing their efforts by covering the places they weren’t getting to. He had found nothing. They had found nothing. Radio traffic was full of tired and resigned negativity.

He ended up back in front of Delfuenso’s neighbor’s house. He parked and sat there and fought to stay awake. Fought to make himself think. He recalled how the kid had acted on the stoop, first thing that morning. Mute with incomprehension, nodding politely, fidgeting. She was a country girl. Ten years old. Not a prodigy. She would have believed any kind of halfway-legitimate adult. She would have been convinced by any kind of show of knowledge or authority. She would have bought into any kind of promise. Come with us, little girl. We found your mommy. We’ll take you to her.

But who?

Who even knew Delfuenso was missing in the first place? His whole department, obviously, plus the neighbors and presumably some of the other locals. And the bad guys. But why would they kill the mother and then come back for the child?

Why?

He got out of his car to clear his head in the cold air. He stumped around for a minute, and then he rested on the passenger-side front fender. The heat from the engine bay kept him warm. There was rain in the east. He could see the clouds. They were scooting toward him. Then he stared straight ahead at the two houses in front of him, Delfuenso’s and her neighbor’s, looking for inspiration. He found none at all. He looked down at the muddy gutter. The mud was crisscrossed with his tire tracks. Like a record of futility, written there in rubber and dirt and water. He had parked on that street four separate times in the space of a few hours. First, after the sprint over from Missy Smith’s place in the middle of the night. With Sorenson. Then again early in the morning, on his own, to break some of the news. Then again later, to touch base, like a good chief should, which was when he had found Lucy missing. And finally now, after the failed and fruitless local search. There were a lot of tracks. More than he would have thought, for four visits. In and out, back and forth, some straight, some curved. In a couple of places the road surface was bad enough that the mud bulged out into puddles six feet wide. Like tar pits. Apparently he had driven through both of them.

But no one else had.

He checked again, just to be sure, this time on the move, walking up and down with delicate mincing steps, staying clear of the evidence. Or the lack of it. As far as he could tell there were no tracks other than his own. There were no different marks in front of Delfuenso’s house. Or in front of the neighbor’s. Just his Crown Vic’s familiar and undramatic Michelins. The automotive equivalent of generic aspirin. He knew them well. He was responsible for the department’s budget. He ordered the tires on-line from a police supply warehouse in Michigan. Low price, no tax, full warranty. They came in on the mail truck and he had them fitted at Phil Abelson’s tire shop in the next county. Phil had done a deal, a low charge in exchange for a long-term commitment. Phil was a smart guy.

Goodman got back in his car and moved it off the curb and parked it again on the hump in the middle of the road, where the blacktop was dry and pristine. He got back out and checked again, unobstructed.

He was sure.

No tracks other than his own trusty low-rent Michelins, P225/60R16s, ninety-nine bucks per, plus five for fitting and balancing.

The neighbor’s kid hadn’t really seen a car because there had been no car.

Lucy Delfuenso had been abducted on foot.

But what kind of sense did that make, in the wilds of Nebraska?

Chapter 46

Sorenson came off the Interstate exactly where Reacher had gotten on about twelve hours previously. He saw the ramp he had used in the dark and the cold. He remembered the helicopter in the air, and the Impala stopping thirty feet from him, and Alan King and Don McQueen twisting in their seats to warn Karen Delfuenso. He remembered Alan King asking where he was headed. I’m heading east, he had said. All the way to Virginia.

Not exactly.

Mission not accomplished.

Sorenson continued south, into territory Reacher hadn’t seen before, on a county road just as straight as anything in Iowa. But the landscape left and right was subtly different. A little rougher, a little harder. Not as picture-perfect. Twenty miles to the left clouds were rolling in from the east. There was rain in the air below them, gusting and misty and diffuse. The same rain that had fallen in Iowa, on the burned-out Impala, and the fat guy’s motel. It was coming after them slowly but doggedly, like a message, like bad news that couldn’t be ignored.

Evidently Sorenson had seen the eastbound on-ramp too, and she had drawn the obvious conclusion. She said, “That was where they picked you up, right?”

Reacher nodded. “I was there a fraction over an hour and a half. Fifty-six vehicles passed me by. They were the fifty-seventh.”

“Suppose you hadn’t been there? Suppose nobody had? They wouldn’t have gotten a smokescreen.”

“Delfuenso was a smokescreen all by herself.”

“But suppose I had been quicker with that? Suppose it had been a three-person APB all along? Maybe with the plate number as the cherry on top.”

“They had guns,” Reacher said. “They could have fought their way through the roadblocks. Or they could have held a gun to Delfuenso’s head. That might have worked. I don’t suppose either Nebraska or Iowa gives their troopers that kind of training.”

“Big risk.”

“What’s your point?”

“They started out south of the Interstate and they finished up south of the Interstate. They couldn’t guarantee finding a hitchhiker. Not in the middle of winter. And they knew where the roadblocks were going to be, if there were going to be any at all. So why didn’t they go east on country roads, directly? Why choose to risk the highway in the first place?”

“At one point they said they were heading to Chicago.”

“How many people in Chicago?”

“About three million in the city, and about eight in the metro area. Area codes are 312 and 773.”

“Did you believe they were heading for Chicago?”

“Not really. Not on reflection. Too far. Too ambitious for one night’s drive.”

“So why did they take the Interstate?”

Now the rain clouds were closer. They were moving in like a black wall. The sun had gone. Reacher felt an angry wind rocking the car. The road ahead was straight and level, well constructed, two lanes but not narrow. Turns to the left and right were infrequent, and the east-west roads were little more than paved tracks between fields. They looked desolate, like they didn’t really lead anywhere.

He asked, “Have you got a map?”

Sorenson said, “Only electronic.”

She fired up her GPS, and Reacher saw it find a satellite. The small screen redrew and the car became a pulsing arrow moving down a thick gray line. The small roads left and right were represented as faint gray lines.

Sorenson said, “You can zoom in and out, if you want.”

Reacher found the right buttons and zoomed out. The arrow stayed the same size, but the gray lines got smaller. The north-south road they were on was a principal thoroughfare, but there was nothing equivalent running east and west until a crossroads thirty miles south of their current position.

“That’s where we’re going,” Sorenson said. “The old pumping station is right there.”

In the other direction there was no major east-west road until some distance north of the highway. Reacher said, “I guess speed might have been an issue. If they needed to get where they were going before dawn, then the Interstate might have been the only option. But I agree about the risk of exposure. And I’m not sure how speed was an issue, exactly. They were picked up, after all. They could have arranged the rendezvous for somewhere much closer. So altogether it would have been more logical to take off directly east from the crossroads, not north. That road looks as good as this one. I’m sure it runs all the way to Iowa.”

The first fat raindrops hit the windshield. Sorenson turned her lights and wipers on. A mile to the east the rain was heavy.

Sheriff Goodman saw the clouds. His car was still parked in the middle of the road. He was leaning on the fender again. He had decided that snatching a kid on foot was ridiculous. A whole day’s walk would get you precisely nowhere in Nebraska. So now he was wondering if the abductors had parked where he was parked, out of the mud. Maybe they were fastidious. Or maybe they had seen the mud and anticipated the danger and decided to avoid leaving tracks in the first place. Or maybe they were worried about witnesses, in which case maybe they had parked out of sight, a couple of hundred yards away. Which would still leave them exposed for a good few minutes. They would have to walk in, two or more unexplained pedestrians, and then they would have to walk out again, two or more men with a child in tow, possibly reluctant.

Then the first fat raindrops fell. Goodman watched them spatter on the mud. He checked the sky. He figured they were in for a short sharp downpour. Not uncommon. The state’s immense groundwater reserves had to come from somewhere. He took a last look at the muddy gutter. Pretty soon it would be liquid, and pretty soon after that it would be skimmed over with fresh run-off from the fields, like silt, as flat and as fine as talcum powder. He wasn’t concerned. The investigation would not be set back. He wasn’t losing evidence, because there was no evidence to lose.

Then the rain got a little harder and he pushed off the fender. Or tried to. He got a sudden sharp pain in his shoulders. And his arms. And a savage dull pain in the center of his chest. Like heartburn. But not heartburn. He hadn’t eaten anything.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. His chest locked up solid. His knees gave way. He slid down the slick paint of the fender. He rested for a moment on his heels. He could feel the lip of the wheel arch digging into his back. He could smell the tire. He could smell the rain. His arms wouldn’t move.

He pitched sideways and sprawled on his back. He saw black clouds above him. He felt rain on his face. His chest was being crushed. Like it had a heavy weight on it. Like one time long ago in the gym when his spotter had stepped away and he had ended up with a two-hundred-pound barbell resting below his neck. He hadn’t even been able to call out. He couldn’t call out now. He had no air in his lungs. He couldn’t move. He fought for a minute, and then he gave it up, because he knew with sudden strange certainty he would never move again.

He relaxed.

He lost all the feeling in his legs and his arms. Like they weren’t even there. He was interested. He was dying from the extremities inward. His body was racing down a list, shedding one non-essential item after another. The animal organism, immensely evolved, programmed to maintain its core function just as long as it could. Programmed to redefine that core function ruthlessly and second by second. Legs? Who needs them? Arms? What for? It was the brain that counted. The brain would be the last thing to die.

Four minutes, he thought. That was the figure that came to him. He remembered his training. People drowning in ponds, kids choking on things, you get four minutes after the heart stops. He felt his life shrinking upward and inward, into his head. That’s all he was now. A head. A brain. Nothing else. That was all he ever had been. That was all any human ever was. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. There was no pain. Not anymore. He was a brain, unsupported. He had no body. Like science fiction. Like a man from Mars. A space alien. He could still see. But his vision was dimming at the edges. Like an old TV. That’s how it was going to happen. He understood. Finally. A question, answered. A mystery, solved. He was going to switch off like an old black-and-white TV, collapsing to a tiny spot of light that burned bright in the center of the screen, before dimming and then disappearing forever.

Chapter 47

The wipers thrashed back and forth and the rain hammered on the roof of the car and bounced a foot off the road. Through the murk Reacher saw an oil company sign high above the plain, lit up bright. Less than half a mile away, he thought. Sorenson glanced at him and said, “OK, pay attention. This is what the locals call Sin City. This is where it starts.”

She slowed the car. The gas station was on the left. But she turned right, into a lumpy gravel lot behind a no-name cinder block bar. She crunched on south and stopped behind a low beige building. There was a red Mazda parked at the back door. She said, “This is where Delfuenso worked. It’s a cocktail lounge. King and McQueen drove up from the crossroads in the red car.”

She rolled onward through the rain, bouncing and splashing through puddles, and she stopped again behind another low building. She said, “This is a convenience store. This is where they bought the shirts and the water.” Then she bumped her way back to the road, and paused before turning. She said, “They went north from here, and you know what happened after that.” But she went the other way and drove on south. Reacher saw dormant bean fields, with standing water in the plow ruts, and a sad wet quarter-mile of old farm machinery for sale, and then more bean fields. Then came low buildings with spilling rain gutters, and small forlorn strip malls. The town itself, such as it was. The GPS arrow was coming up to the crossroads. The north-south spine was about to meet the east-west spine. The map was fairly definitive. In terms of getting anywhere other than the local corner store, those two roads were the only long-distance options.

Sorenson turned west at the crossroads and a hundred yards later she stopped outside a low concrete bunker. It was maybe twenty feet long by fifteen deep and ten tall. It had a flat roof and no windows and an old metal door. It was soaked with rain, suddenly clean and tan. Reacher said, “This is the old pumping station?”

Sorenson nodded. “The dead guy was on the floor inside. King and McQueen were seen leaving in the red Mazda.”

Reacher looked ahead, and behind, and left, and right. He fiddled with the GPS until he had it zoomed out to a twenty-mile radius. At that scale there was nothing on the screen except the north-south road and the east-west road. Everything else had faded away to insignificance. He said, “I think King and McQueen weren’t local. It’s likely they had never been here before. They probably came in off the Interstate, the same way we did. They saw the bars and the lounges. They didn’t want to keep the red car, so they headed back there, which was the only kind of place they’d seen where it was likely they could find a replacement.”

“OK, but why didn’t they come back to the crossroads and turn east from there?”

“Two reasons,” Reacher said. “They’re not local, so they didn’t know for sure where that road goes. I assume Delfuenso didn’t have GPS or maps in her glove box. But more importantly they’ll have assumed the crossroads would be roadblocked from the start. Four birds with one stone, right there. North, south, east, west, no one can go anywhere except through that crossroads. Didn’t the sheriff block it?”

“No,” Sorenson said. “I don’t think he did.”

“He should have. That was a mistake. But no big deal, because they ran away from it anyway. They went north, and they saw no obvious way east until they hit the highway. At night, in the dark, those side roads must have looked hopeless. So that’s why they took the Interstate. No choice.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “I’ll buy that.”

“The bigger question is how they got here in the first place. If they didn’t drive in from Denver with the dead guy, and if they didn’t have a car of their own, then they must have gotten a ride in with someone else. In other words they were dropped off here. Just like they were picked up again later. Possibly by the same people. In which case, why didn’t whoever it was just wait around for them? Why abandon them to a long and dangerous interlude? The only answer is, whatever happened in the pumping station wasn’t supposed to happen. Maybe King and McQueen were supposed to get a ride with the dead guy. But they killed him instead. For some unexplained reason. Which left them improvising like crazy.”

Sorenson’s phone rang. Loud and dramatic through the speakers. She checked the caller ID. “Omaha,” she said. “The field office.”

“Don’t answer it,” Reacher said.

She didn’t. She let it go. It rang for a long time, and then it cut off. Reacher said, “We should go see Delfuenso’s house. Or her neighbor’s, anyway. We should check it out. And we should talk to the neighbor’s kid. Maybe she remembered something about the men. They’re likely the same crew who vanished the eyewitness. Maybe the same crew who dropped King and McQueen here in the first place.”

Sorenson said, “I can’t remember where Delfuenso’s house is. It was the middle of the night.”

Her phone trilled once. A voice mail message.

“Don’t listen to it,” Reacher said.

She didn’t. Instead she scrolled through her list of contacts until she found Sheriff Goodman’s cell number. She hit Call and the phone dialed. Reacher heard the purr of the ring tone through the speakers, slow and sonorous, patient, no kind of urgency.

It rang for a long time, on and on.

There was no answer.

“Weird,” Sorenson said.

*  *  *

She backed away from the old pumping station and turned around and headed back toward the crossroads. Before she got there she turned off into a side street. Reacher knew what she was doing. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t be on a main drag. It would be in back somewhere, where land was cheaper, where a big lot wouldn’t be a drain on the public purse. She nosed around corners and passed all kinds of places, but none of them was a police station. She came out again south of the crossroads and tried again in another quadrant.

“There,” Reacher said. He had seen a shortwave antenna on the roof of a low tan building. The building had a fenced lot big enough for a small handful of cruisers. The lot was empty, except for puddles, where the blacktop was holed by age. The whole place was old and worn, but it looked like it was maintained to a reasonable paramilitary standard. Nothing like the army, but nothing like a regular civilian establishment either.

Sorenson parked in the lot and they hustled through the downpour and found a woman behind a counter in the lobby doing double duty as receptionist and dispatcher. Sorenson showed her ID and asked where Sheriff Goodman was. The woman tried his car on the radio and got no result. She tried his cell from her landline console and got no result on that, either. She said, “Maybe he went home to take a nap. He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time.”

“We need Karen Delfuenso’s address,” Sorenson said. “And directions.”

The woman behind the counter provided both. North and east of the crossroads, out in the empty farmland, maybe eight miles distant. Basically left and right and left and right at every opportunity. Another checkerboard. They drove out there slowly. The eastern horizon was bright. The rain was rolling out, but slower than it had rolled in. Reacher was tired. He felt hollowed out. Every cell in his body was thrilling and buzzing with exhaustion. He had been awake most of two days. Not the longest he had ever endured, but up there. He guessed Sorenson was feeling just as bad. She was pale to begin with, and she was going blue around the eyes.

Then after the final right-hand turn Reacher saw a row of four small ranch houses all alone in the emptiness. There was a cop car parked in the middle of the road. Sorenson said, “He’s here after all. That’s Sheriff Goodman’s car. And that’s Karen Delfuenso’s house, second from the right.”

She parked on the curb twenty feet back, and they got out.

Chapter 48

They found Goodman where he had fallen, on his back, hard up against the front wheel of his car. His eyes were full of rainwater. New drops splashed into the tiny pools and overflowed down his cheeks like tears. His mouth was open and water was pooling in his throat. His clothes were soaked. He looked like a drowned man. His skin was already ice cold. He had no pulse. He looked slack and collapsed and empty, like only dead people can. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone.

He’s an old man and he’s been awake for a long time.

Not anymore, Reacher thought.

“How old was he?” he asked.

“Late sixties,” Sorenson said. “Maybe early seventies. Too young to die, anyway. He was a nice man. A good man, like his name. Was it a heart attack?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “Stress, exhaustion, and worry. That kind of thing. Not good for a person. Cops should get paid more.”

“No argument from me on that point.”

“Did he tell us what we need to know?”

“I don’t think he knew what we need to know.”

“I guess we should call it in.”

So they got back in Sorenson’s car, and she dialed the department’s switchboard number on her cell. The woman behind the counter answered, and Sorenson broke the news. The woman cried. Sorenson clicked off and they waited, wet, cold, and tired, staring ahead through the windshield, not seeing much, and not saying anything.

Next on scene was a very large thirty-five-year-old man in a deputy’s car. He was fair-haired and bulky and red-faced, and he was wearing a padded nylon jacket open over a uniform. The jacket had a sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves. The guy came to Sorenson’s window and bent down. The jacket fell open and Reacher saw a black plate with the name Puller over one shirt pocket and a sheriff’s department star over the other. The star had the words Chief Deputy on it. The guy knocked on the window with fat red knuckles. Sorenson didn’t lower her glass. She just pointed. The guy walked toward his chief’s car with short nervous steps, like he was approaching a fortified position. Like he was expecting an armed enemy to open fire. He made it around to the passenger side and stopped. He looked down. Then he staggered away to the shoulder and bent double and threw up in the mud.

Reacher noticed the rain had stopped.

A long moment later the guy named Puller straightened up a little and stared out over the open land. He was green in the face. Not sentimental about the old man, but upset by the sight of a corpse. Reacher got out of the car. The road was still streaming, but the air felt suddenly fresh and dry. Sorenson got out on her side. The guy named Puller started back toward them and they all met as a threesome in the space between the cars.

Sorenson asked, “Are you the department’s second in command?”

Puller said, “I guess so.”

“Then you guess wrong. As of now you’re the chief. Acting chief, anyway. And you’ve got things to do. You need to bring us up to speed, for instance.”

“With what?”

“There’s a missing kid here.”

“I didn’t really keep up with that.”

“Why not?”

“I do traffic mostly. To and from the Interstate. Up beyond Sin City. You know, with the radar gun.”

“Were you briefed on what happened here last night?”

“We all were.”

“But you didn’t keep up with it?”

“I do traffic mostly.”

“Didn’t Sheriff Goodman take you off your normal duties?”

“He took us all off.”

“So why didn’t you pay attention?”

“He didn’t really tell me what to do.”

Reacher asked, “Were you dropped on your head as a baby?”

The guy named Puller didn’t answer.

Sorenson said, “Call your dispatcher and arrange for an ambulance to take the body away.”

“OK.”

“Then call Sheriff Goodman’s family.”

“OK.”

“Then call the funeral home.”

“From where?”

“From a telephone. Any telephone. Just make sure it’s nowhere near me.”

The guy named Puller walked back to his cruiser and Reacher and Sorenson walked up Delfuenso’s neighbor’s driveway.

Delfuenso’s neighbor was a woman not much more than thirty. Her daughter was a ten-year-old version of the same person, still straight and slender and unlined. The kid’s name was Paula. She was camped out in the back room. No view of the road. No view of anything, except mud. She had an electronic box hooked up to the TV. All kinds of things were happening on the screen. Explosions, mostly. Tiny cartoon figures were getting vaporized in sudden puffs of smoke smaller than golf balls.

The neighbor said, “I had to go to work. I’m sorry.”

Sorenson said, “I understand,” like she meant it. Reacher understood too. He read the papers. He heard people talking. He knew jobs were easy to lose, and hard to get back.

The neighbor said, “I told them not to answer the door.”

Sorenson looked at the kid and asked, “Paula, why did you?”

The kid said, “I didn’t.”

“Why did Lucy?”

“Because the man called her name.”

“He called Lucy’s name?”

“Yes. He said, Lucy, Lucy.”

“What else did he say?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Are you sure? You must have heard something.”

The kid didn’t answer.

Sorenson waited.

The kid asked, “Am I in trouble?”

Sorenson hesitated.

Reacher said, “Yes, kid, you are. Quite a lot of trouble, to be honest. But you can get out of all of it if you tell us everything you heard and everything you saw this morning. You do that, and you’ll be completely free and clear.”

A plea bargain. An incentive. A stick and a carrot. A time-honored system. Reacher had gone that route many times, back in the day. A ten-year stretch reduced to a three-to-five, probation instead of jail time, charges dropped in exchange for information. The system worked with twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds. It worked just fine. Reacher saw no reason why it wouldn’t work just as well with a ten-year-old.

The kid said nothing.

Reacher said, “And I’ll give you a dollar for candy, and my friend will give you a kiss on the head.”

Bribery worked, too.

The kid said, “The man said he knew where Lucy’s mom was.”

“Did he?”

The kid nodded, earnestly. “He said he would take Lucy to her mom.”

“What did the man look like?”

The kid was squeezing her fingers, like she could wring the answer out of her hands.

She said, “I don’t know.”

“But you peeked a little bit, right?”

The kid nodded again.

Reacher asked, “How many men did you see at the door?”

“Two.”

“What did they look like?”

“Like you see on the TV.”

“Did you see their car?”

“It was big and low.”

“A regular car? Not a pick-up truck or a four-wheel-drive?”

“Regular.”

“Was it muddy?”

“No, it was shiny.”

“What color was it?”

The kid was wringing her hands again.

She said, “I don’t know.”

Sorenson’s phone rang. She checked the window and mouthed, Omaha.

Reacher shook his head. Sorenson nodded, but she didn’t look happy. She let it ring. Eventually it stopped and Reacher looked back at the kid and said, “Thanks, Paula. You did great. You’re not in trouble anymore. You’re totally free and clear.” He dug in his pocket and peeled a buck off his roll of bills. He handed it over. Sorenson’s phone trilled once. Voice mail. Reacher said, “Now the pretty lady will give you a kiss on the forehead.”

The kid giggled. Sorenson looked a little shy about it, but she went ahead and bent down and did the deed. The kid went back to her onscreen explosions. Reacher looked at her mom and said, “We need to borrow the key to Karen’s house.”

The woman got it from a drawer in the hallway. It was a regular house key, on a fob with a crystal pendant. Just like the car key. Reacher wondered what kind of temperature would melt crystal glass. A lower temperature than regular glass, probably. Because of whatever they put in it to make it sparkle. So the car key fob was gone forever. It was a smear of trace elements on the Impala’s burned-out floor, or a tiny cloud of vapor already halfway to Oregon on the wind.

He took the key and said, “Thanks,” and then he and Sorenson stepped out the door. Goodman’s car was still there, but the ambulance had been and gone with the body. Puller’s car was gone. And the clouds had gone too. The sky had brightened up. A watery winter sun was visible, high overhead.

Sorenson paused on the driveway and checked her voice mail list. Reacher said, “No need to listen to it. You already know what it says.”

“I’m going to have to call in,” she said. “The situation has changed. There’s still a missing kid here and now there’s no local law enforcement. Nothing competent, anyway. Not anymore.”

“Call later,” Reacher said. “Not yet.” He looped around the wet grass and started up Delfuenso’s driveway, with the door key in his hand.

Sorenson asked, “What do you expect to find in there?”

“Beds,” Reacher said. “Or sofas, at least. We need to take naps. Right now we’re no good to anyone. And we don’t want to end up like Goodman.”

Chapter 49

Delfuenso’s house was identical to her neighbor’s in practically every respect. Same exact layout, same kitchen, same windows and floors and doors. Same handles, same knobs, same bathrooms. A cookie-cutter development. There were three small bedrooms. One was clearly Delfuenso’s, and one was clearly her daughter’s, and one was clearly a guest room.

“Your pick,” Reacher said. “The guest bed, or the living room sofa.”

“This is crazy,” Sorenson said. “I just ignored two calls from my field office. Probably from my boss personally. So I’m effectively a fugitive now. And you think I should sleep?”

“It’s an efficiency issue. Like you said, there’s a missing kid. Your people aren’t going to do anything about her. The locals are useless now. Therefore we’ll have to deal with it. Which we can’t do if we’re dead on our feet from fatigue.”

“They’ll come after me. I’ll be a sitting duck, asleep in bed.”

“They’re two hours away. A two-hour nap is better than nothing.”

“We can’t deal with it anyway. We have no idea what’s going on. We have no resources.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “I heard you the first time. No contacts, no support, no help, no back-up, no budget, no facilities, no lab, no computers. No nothing. But what else do you want to do? The guys who have all that stuff are ignoring this whole thing. So we’ll have to manage without.”

“How? Where do we start?”

“With Karen Delfuenso’s autopsy. The initial results. We’ll know more when we get those.”

“How will those help?”

“Wait and see. You could hustle them along, if you like.”

“I don’t need to. I know those guys. They’ll be working as fast as they can.”

“Where?”

“Des Moines, probably. The nearest decent morgue. They’ll have walked in and commandeered it. That’s how we work.”

“When will we hear from them?”

“You know something, don’t you?”

“Get some sleep,” Reacher said. “Answer your phone if it’s your tech guys, and don’t if it isn’t.”

Reacher used the living room sofa. It was a compact three-seater with low arms, and it was upholstered in flowery yellow fabric. It was worse than a bed and better than the floor. He stretched out on his back and got his head comfortable and pulled his knees up to fit. He set the clock in his head for two hours, and he breathed in once, and he breathed out once, and then he fell asleep, almost instantly.

And then he was woken again almost instantly, by the phone. Not Sorenson’s phone, but the house phone in the kitchen. Delfuenso’s landline. It had a traditional metal bell, and it pealed slow and relaxed, six times, patient and unknowing, and then it went to the answering machine. Reacher heard Delfuenso’s voice on the greeting, bright and alive, happy and energetic: “Hi, this is Karen and Lucy. We can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave us a message after the tone.”

Then came the tone, and then came another woman’s voice. She said something about making a play date with Lucy, and then the call ended, and Reacher went back to sleep.

*  *  *

He woke up for the second time right on his two-hour deadline. His knees were numb and his back felt like it had been hit with hammers. He sat up and swiveled and put his feet on the floor. There was no sound in the house. Just still air. Far from anywhere, in the middle of winter.

He stood up and stretched and put his palms flat on the ceiling. Then he found the bathroom and rinsed his face and brushed his teeth with dinosaur toothpaste he guessed was Lucy’s. Then he checked the guest room.

Sorenson was fast asleep on the bed. Her face was turned toward him and a lock of hair was across one eye, just like it had been behind her gun. One arm was up above her head and the other was folded defensively across her body. Half secure, and half insecure. An active subconscious. A conflicted state of mind. He was wondering how best to wake her when her phone rang and did it for him. The plain electronic sound, thin and accusing. One ring. Two. She stirred and her eyes opened wide and she sat bolt upright. She fumbled for the phone with sleep-numbed hands and checked the window.

“Omaha,” she said.

Three rings.

She said, “I can’t ignore it anymore.”

Four rings.

She said, “I’m kissing my career goodbye.”

Five rings.

Reacher stepped over to the bed and took the phone from her. He pressed the green button. He raised the phone to his ear. He said,

“Who is this?”

A man’s voice in his ear said, “Who are you?”

“I asked first.”

“Where did you get this phone?”

“Take a wild-ass guess.”

“Where is Special Agent Sorenson?”

“Who’s asking?”

There was a long pause. Maybe the guy was hooking up a recording device or setting up some kind of a GPS locator. Or maybe he was just thinking. He said, “My name is Perry. I’m the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Special Agent-in-Charge at the field office in Omaha, Nebraska. In other words I’m a very senior federal law enforcement officer and I’m also Agent Sorenson’s boss. Who are you?”

Reacher said, “I’m the guy who was driving the car in Iowa. And right now Agent Sorenson is my prisoner. She’s a hostage, Mr. Perry.”

Chapter 50

Sorenson was going a mute kind of crazy on the bed. The guy in Reacher’s ear was breathing hard. Reacher said, “I have very modest demands, Mr. Perry. If you want to get Agent Sorenson back safe and sound, all you have to do is precisely nothing. Don’t call me, don’t try to track me, don’t try to find me, don’t hassle me, don’t interfere with me in any way at all.”

The guy said, “Tell me what you want.”

“I just did.”

“I can help you. We can work together on this.”

Reacher asked, “Did you take the hostage negotiator’s course?”

“Yes, I did.”

“It shows. You’re not listening. Just stay away from me.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“I’m planning to do your job.”

“My job?”

Reacher said, “You’ve got dead people here, and a missing kid. You should have told the CIA and the State Department to sit down and shut up, but you didn’t. You caved instead. So stay out of my way while I fix things for you.”

“Who the hell are you?”

Reacher didn’t answer that. He just clicked off the call and tossed the phone on the bed.

“You’re crazy,” Sorenson said.

“Not really,” Reacher said. “This way he’s blameless and you’re blameless but the job still gets done. Everyone wins.”

“But he’s not going to do what you told him. I know this guy, Reacher. He’s not going to just sit there and take it. He’s not going to let you embarrass him in front of the CIA. He’s going to come after you. He’s going to start a full-on manhunt.”

“Let the best man win,” Reacher said. “I’ve been hunted before. Many times. And no one ever found me.”

“You don’t get it. It’ll be easy. He can track my phone.”

“We’ll leave it right there on the bed. We’ll buy another one.”

“He can track my car, for God’s sake.”

“We’re not going to use your car.”

“What, we’re going to walk?”

“No, we’re going to use Sheriff Goodman’s car. It’s right here. And he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”

Goodman’s car was still there on the crown of the road. The keys were still in it, which was what Reacher had expected. City cops usually took their keys with them. Country cops, not so much. There was nothing more embarrassing than having some street kid steal a patrol car during an urban melee, but that kind of danger was rare in the boonies, so habits were different.

And there was an added bonus, too. They didn’t need to buy a new phone. Goodman’s cell was right there, charging away in a dashboard cradle identical to Sorenson’s own Bureau issue. The screen was showing two missed calls. One from Sorenson’s cell, and the other from the department’s dispatcher.

Postmortem calls.

Reacher racked the driver’s seat back and fired up the engine. The car was a police-spec Crown Vic, under the skin exactly the same as Sorenson’s more discreet version. But it was older and grimier inside. The seat had been crushed into Goodman’s unique shape by many hours of use. Reacher felt like he was putting on a dead man’s clothes.

Sorenson asked, “Where are we going?”

Reacher said, “Anywhere with cell reception. We need to wait until we hear from your tech guys. About the autopsy. You need to call them and give them the new number.”

“We’re basically stealing this car, you know.”

“But who’s going to do anything about it? That idiot Puller?”

Reacher turned around in Delfuenso’s empty driveway and headed back south and west toward the crossroads. He got less than half a mile before Goodman’s phone rang in its cradle. A loud electronic squawk. Urgent, and nothing fancy.

The readout window showed a 402 area code.

“Omaha,” Reacher said.

Sorenson craned over to read the rest of the number. “Shit,” she said. “That’s my SAC’s private line.”

“He’s calling Goodman? Why?”

“You kidnapped me. He’s alerting local law enforcement all over eastern Nebraska. Iowa too, probably.”

“Doesn’t he know Goodman is dead?”

“I doubt it. I don’t see how he could. Not yet.”

“How did he get this number?”

“Database. We have lots of numbers.”

“Has he spoken to Goodman before?”

“No. I don’t think so. The night duty agent took a call from him. That’s all. That’s how this whole thing started.”

“How do I work this phone?”

“You’re not going to talk to him, are you?”

“We can’t let everyone ignore him. He’ll start to feel bad.”

“But he knows your voice. You two just spoke.”

“What did Goodman sound like?”

“Like a seventy-year-old guy from Nebraska.”

“How do I work the phone?”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Quick, before it goes to voice mail.”

“There’s a microphone in the windshield pillar. Just hit the green button.”

Reacher hit the green button. He heard telephone sounds over the car speakers, unnaturally loud and clear and detailed. Every hiss and every crackle was faithfully rendered. He heard Special Agent-in-Charge Perry’s voice. It sounded brisk and a little tense. It said, “Is this Sheriff Goodman?”

Reacher took his right hand off the wheel and put his little finger in the corner of his mouth. Like an intrusive implement during a dental procedure. He said, “Yes, it is.”

The voice filling the car said, “Sheriff, I’m Anthony Perry, the SAC at the Omaha FBI. The Bureau has an interest in a situation that may be developing in your neck of the woods.”

“And what situation would that be, sir?”

“I believe you may have met Agent Sorenson from my office.”

“I had that pleasure last night. A mighty fine young woman. You must be proud to have her working for you, sir.”

Sorenson laid her head back and closed her eyes.

Perry said, “Well, yes, but that’s beside the point right now. We picked up a report from the Nebraska State Police that a child went missing this morning.”

“Sad but true, sir.”

“I believe Agent Sorenson may have headed directly to you as a result.”

“That’s good,” Reacher said. “I’ll be glad of all the help I can get.”

He gulped saliva past his finger.

Perry said, “Are you OK, Sheriff?”

“I’m tired,” Reacher said. “I’m an old man and I’ve been awake for a long time.”

“You haven’t seen Agent Sorenson today?”

“No, not yet, but I’ll be sure to watch out for her.”

“It’s not that simple, Sheriff. I believe she may have detoured on her way here with a male suspect. I believe that male suspect may have somehow overpowered her and may be currently holding her hostage.”

“Well, sir, I can certainly see how you might describe that as a situation. Yes, indeed. But you don’t need my permission to come look for her. I think you’re entitled to take care of your own people. And you’re always welcome here.”

“No, I can’t spare the manpower,” Perry said. “We can’t be everywhere at once. I’m asking you and your boys to be my eyes and ears down there. Can you do that for me?”

“Do what exactly?”

“Let me know immediately if you see Agent Sorenson, or her car. And if possible take her companion into custody.”

“Do you have a description?”

“He’s a big guy with a broken nose.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“You should treat him as extremely dangerous. Don’t take unnecessary risks.”

“You mean shoot first and ask questions later?”

“I think that would be a very sound operating principle, under the circumstances.”

“OK, you got it, Mr. Perry. You can cross my county off your list of concerns, as of right now. If he comes here, we’ll deal with him.”

“Thank you, Sheriff. I very much appreciate your cooperation.”

“We’re here to serve, sir,” Reacher said. He took his finger out of his mouth and pressed the red button on the phone.

Sorenson didn’t speak.

Reacher said, “What? That’s a good result. This whole county is ours now. We can come and go as we please.”

“But suppose we have to stray out of this county? Don’t you get it? You’re a wanted man. He’s putting a hit on you.”

“People have tried that too,” Reacher said. “And I’m still here, and they’re not.”

A mile later Sorenson called her tech team to let them know she had a new cell number. Her guys didn’t answer, so she had to leave a voice mail, which Reacher took to be a good sign, because it likely meant that right then they were hard at work, bent over a stainless steel mortuary table somewhere. He didn’t envy them their task. Like all cops he had attended autopsies. A rite of passage, and a character thing, and sometimes important to the chain of evidence. Decomposed floaters were the worst, but badly burned people were a close second. Like carving a London broil, but not exactly.

He stopped a couple of miles short of the crossroads. He didn’t want to be seen driving the dead sheriff’s car. Not by local people and especially not by Puller or any of the other deputies. He didn’t want controversy or radio chatter. Not at that point. At that point anonymity was his friend. He found a field entrance and backed up into the tractor ruts and left the motor running for the heat. He had about half a tank of gas. He stared straight ahead out the windshield at flat brown dirt that ran all the way to the horizon. Six months from then the car would have been hidden by green leaves, in the middle of thousands or tens of thousands of tons of produce, all made by plant DNA and rain and minerals from the earth.

Sorenson asked, “What are you thinking?”

“Right now?”

“No, about Delfuenso’s autopsy.”

“It’ll be a yes or no answer,” he said. “Either one thing or the other.”

“Care to expand on that?”

“No,” he said. “I might embarrass myself.”

“Are you easily embarrassed?”

“I can feel a little foolish if I make grand pronouncements that turn out wrong.”

“Does that happen often?”

“More often than I would like. Do you have kids?”

Sorenson shook her head. “Never happened for me.”

“Did you want it to?”

“I’m not sure. You?”

“No and no. Are you easily embarrassed?”

“Not easily,” Sorenson said. “Not professionally, anyway. Sometimes personally, I suppose. Like right now I wish I could shower and change. I’ve been wearing this shirt since I got up yesterday.”

Reacher said, “I wear mine three days minimum. And right now my nose is busted. So I can’t smell anything anyway.”

She smiled.

He said, “You could go shopping. You could shower at Delfuenso’s house. This county is ours.”

“Showering at Delfuenso’s house would be creepy. A dead woman’s bathroom?”

“We’re driving a dead man’s car.”

“Where could I go shopping, anyway?”

“There must be a store in town. You could get bib overalls.”

“You don’t want to go to town. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped here.”

“We could go to Sin City. We know they have shirts there, at least. In the convenience store.”

“Not very nice shirts.”

“You’d look good in anything.”

“I’ll choose to ignore that,” she said. Then she said, “OK, let’s go to Sin City. I’ll do what you did. I’ll buy a shirt and you can get me an hour in a motel.”

“Doesn’t work that way in the afternoon. The maids will have gone home. You’d have to pay for a whole night.”

“No problem. It’s worth it to me.”

“You’re very fastidious.”

“Most people are.”

“We could get lunch, too.”

But then Goodman’s phone rang again. The same urgent electronic squawk, loud and resonant through the speakers.

The area code was 816.

“Kansas City,” Reacher said.

“Don’t answer it,” Sorenson said.

The phone squawked on, six, seven, eight times, and then it stopped. The car went quiet again. Just the purr of the motor, and the whir of the heater.

Reacher said, “Your counterterrorism guys are from Kansas City, right?”

“They’re not mine,” Sorenson said.

“Dawson and Mitchell, right?”

“Yes.”

“Who else would call Goodman from a Kansas City number?”

“Could be anyone. Brother, sister, daughter, son. Old college roommate. Fishing buddy.”

“During work hours?”

“Why not?”

“Did Goodman even go to college?”

“I have no idea.”

“I don’t think his chief deputy did.”

The phone trilled once. Voice mail. Sorenson leaned over and fiddled with the phone. Her hair touched Reacher’s arm. The car filled with a watery, distorted sound.

“Cell phone,” Sorenson said. “Weak signal. Probably indoors. Or in a moving vehicle.”

Then a voice broke through and said, “Sheriff Goodman, this is Agent Dawson with FBI counterterrorism out of Kansas City. We met last night. I need you to call me back as soon as possible. And until then I need to warn you about a man traveling with Agent Sorenson out of our Omaha office. He’s a dangerous fugitive and should be apprehended on sight. My partner and I are on our way to you. We’ll deal with the situation after we get there, but please take care until we do. We’ll be with you in about thirty minutes or less. We’ll check in at the department and hope to see you there.”

Then there was more watery distortion, and then there was silence.

Just the purr of the motor, and the whir of the heater.

Sorenson said, “Not our county after all.”

Chapter 51

Reacher didn’t move the car. It was in as good a place as any. He said, “Clearly Omaha isn’t talking to Kansas City. If your guy had known Dawson and Mitchell were on the way here he wouldn’t have asked Goodman to be his eyes and ears.”

“More likely the other way around,” Sorenson said. “Kansas City isn’t talking to Omaha. They’re operating independently. Which is typical, for a bunch of counterterrorism hotshots.”

“Do they think I’m a terrorist?”

“They know you were driving the car for King and McQueen. Who killed a guy you’re pretty sure was CIA. Which puts you all in the relevant category, wouldn’t you say?”

“There was a black guy in a pick-up truck who almost stopped for me. Not long before King and McQueen showed up. I was kind of glad at the time. I was cold and it looked like his heater was busted. Now I wish he had stopped. I’d be in Virginia by now.”

“With pneumonia, maybe.”

“Let’s go get you a shirt and a shower.”

“But we only have half an hour. Or less.”

“Until what? No one’s got a beef with you. And no one will even see me.”

“They think I’ve been kidnapped. They’ll rescue me. Same thing as taking me prisoner.”

“Your boss hasn’t talked to them. They know nothing about the alleged kidnap. They said I was traveling with you, not holding you hostage. They’ll say hi, you’ll say hi, they’ll ask you about the guy with the nose, you’ll say you have no idea where he is. That’s if they find you at all. Which they won’t. They won’t want a room at the motel, and even if they do, the clerk won’t put them in the same room as you. That’s not how motels work, generally.”

“OK,” Sorenson said. “Let’s go.”

Goodman’s car had no GPS on the dash and no map in the glove box. No obvious need for either thing. Presumably Goodman had known his county like the back of his hand. Probably he had grown up there and lived there all his life. So Reacher navigated by memory and common sense and guesswork. He was about two miles north and east of the crossroads and he needed to get three miles due north of the crossroads. So he threaded basically west through the checkerboard and came out on the main drag opposite the sad line of for-sale farm junk. He paused there and checked both ways and saw nothing to worry about. No Bureau sedans, no SWAT teams, no armored trucks. No local deputies, no roadblocks, no choppers in the air. So he turned north and cruised the last mile and looped in behind the convenience store.

Sorenson detached Goodman’s phone from its cradle and put it in her bag. She went in the store and five minutes later she came out again with the same kind and the same size of shirt that Delfuenso had been given, and a smaller softer packet Reacher guessed was dollar underwear and socks. The best-looking motel was on the other side of the road, so Reacher drove over there but parked some distance away. He figured it was better if Sorenson approached the place on foot. In his experience hotel keepers were habitual gossips, and he didn’t want a county-wide bulletin about a stranger driving the sheriff’s car. He watched Sorenson go into the office, and he saw her come out again five minutes later with a key. He watched her walk down the row of rooms, and he saw her go into one.

Thirty minutes, he figured, for a fastidious woman whose last shower had been more than thirty hours ago. Or forty minutes, possibly, if she was the kind of person who dried her hair with electricity.

He moved the car and parked it behind a bar that was closed in the daytime. Sin City as a whole was pretty quiet. The diners all had signs reading Last Food Before the Interstate and the gas stations had signs reading Last Gas Before the Interstate. He figured the Chamber of Commerce could have put up a sign saying Last Everything Before the Interstate without a word of a lie. But not many drivers were availing themselves of their final opportunities.

He got out of the car and locked it and walked away. He crossed the road and looped around behind Delfuenso’s cocktail lounge. The red Mazda was still there. Five doors, four seats. The locks had been jimmied, presumably by Sorenson’s tech team. The interior was bland and clean. The driver’s seat was set for a person of average height. A rental car, typical in every respect.

If in doubt drink coffee was Reacher’s operating principle, so he headed back across the road to the diner nearest Sorenson’s motel. He got a high-backed corner booth with a blank wall behind him, and a heavy pottery mug full to the brim with a strong brew. A bad receptacle, but decent coffee. And a good tactical position. He could see the room and he could see the street. The restroom corridor was three feet from his left shoulder and there was a fire exit at the end of it. He watched out the window and saw traffic on the road. An eighteen-wheeler heading north, and a similar thing heading south. A battered pick-up truck, a boxy four-wheel-drive covered in mud, and a delivery van lacy with rust.

And then a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria, coming north.

Same make and model and color as Sorenson’s car.

Needle antennas on the trunk lid, just like Sorenson’s antennas.

FBI.

Two men in it.

It was going slow. Too slow. A telling percentage slower than normal caution. It was going at search speed. The driver was scanning left, and the passenger was scanning right. Reacher watched it crawl past. He thought the guys in it were two of the four he had seen in the lot behind the FBI building in Omaha. Maybe. Dawson and Mitchell. Possibly.

He sipped his coffee and measured time and speed and distance in his head. And right on cue the blue Crown Vic came back, now heading south, still going slow, the two heads in it turning as the two pairs of eyes scanned the shoulders, the buildings, the people, the cars, pausing here and there and hanging up and then jumping ahead again.

Then the car slowed some more.

And turned in.

It bumped over a broken curb and crunched over the gravel into the diner’s front lot and came closer and parked with its nose a yard from Reacher’s window. The two guys in it sat still. No urgency. No purpose. A coffee break, after a long and fruitless search. That was all. Reacher was pretty sure he recognized them. He was pretty sure they were Dawson and Mitchell. They were blinking and yawning and wagging their necks to ease out the kinks. They were dressed in dark blue suits and white shirts and blue ties. They looked a little ragged. A little tired. One looked a little taller and a little thinner than the other, but otherwise they were a matching pair. Both had fair hair and red faces. Both were somewhere in their early forties.

Do they think I’m a terrorist?

They know you were driving the car for King and McQueen.

They got out of the car together and stood for a moment in the cold. The driver stretched with his arms straight and his hands held low and the passenger stretched with his elbows bent high and his fists near his ears. Reacher figured they would have Glocks in shoulder holsters and cuffs on their belts. And the Patriot Act and unlimited authority and all kinds of national security bullshit to back them up.

They glanced left, glanced right, and located the diner door.

Reacher took a last sip of his coffee and trapped two dollar bills under his mug. Then he slid out of his booth and stepped into the restroom corridor. He heard the front door open and he heard two pairs of shoes on the tile. He heard the hostess take two menus out of a slot. He walked down the corridor and pushed through the door and stepped out to the back lot.

He crossed the gap between buildings and tucked in behind the motel and tracked along its rear wall. He stopped at the only bathroom window with steam on it. He tapped on the glass and waited. The window opened a crack and he heard a hairdryer shut off. Sorenson’s voice said, “Reacher?”

He asked, “Are you decent?”

She said, “Relatively.”

He stepped up and looked in through the crack. She had a towel tucked tight around her. The top edge was up under her arms. The bottom edge was considerably north of her knees. Her hair was wet on one side of her part, and dry on the other. Her skin was pale pink from the steam.

She looked pretty good.

He said, “Your Kansas City pals are in the diner.”

She said, “They’re not my pals.”

“Did your tech people call yet?”

“No.”

“What’s keeping them?”

“It’s probably a complicated procedure.”

“I hope they’re good enough.”

“Good enough for what?”

“To tell me what I want to know.”

“That will depend on what you want to know, won’t it?”

“I’ll wait in the car,” he said. “It’s behind a bar, two buildings along.”

She said, “OK.”

The window closed and he heard the click of the latch, and the roar of the hairdryer starting up again. He walked on north, through the back lot, past trash bins, past a pile of discarded mattresses, past an empty rotting carton that according to the printing on the outside had once held two thousand foam cups. He crossed the open no-man’s-land and slipped behind the next building, which seemed to be another cocktail lounge. He stepped over an empty bottle of no-name champagne.

And stopped.

Dead ahead of him and thirty yards away was Goodman’s car, behind the bar, exactly where he had left it. But stopped tight behind it in a perfect T was another car. Facing away. A sand-colored Ford Crown Victoria. A government car for sure, but not FBI. Not the same as Sorenson’s car, or Dawson and Mitchell’s. It had different antennas on the trunk lid, and official U.S. license plates. Its motor was running. White exhaust was pooling around its pipes.

It was blocking Goodman’s car.

Deliberately or inadvertently, Reacher wasn’t sure.

There was one man in it, behind the wheel. Reacher could see the back of the guy’s head. He had sandy hair, the exact same color as his car. He was wearing a sweater. He was on the phone.

A sweater meant no shoulder holster. No shoulder holster meant no gun. No gun meant the guy wasn’t a plain clothes marshal or any other kind of an operational agent. Not the Justice Department, or the DEA or the ATF or the DIA or any of the many other three-letter agencies.

Ultimately the sweater meant the guy was no threat at all.

A bureaucrat, probably.

Clothes maketh the man.

Reacher walked on and stopped right next to the guy’s window and knocked on the glass. The guy startled and peered up and out with watery blue eyes. He fumbled for his button. The window came down.

Reacher said, “Move your car, pal. You’re blocking me in.”

The guy took his phone away from his ear and said, “Who are you?”

Reacher said, “I’m the sheriff.”

“No you’re not. I met the sheriff last night. And he’s dead, anyway. He died this morning. So they say.”

“I’m the new sheriff. I got promoted.”

“What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?”

The guy looked momentarily taken aback, as if suddenly conscious of a grievous etiquette offense. He said, “I’m Lester Lester, with the State Department.”

Reacher said, “Your parents were very economical people, weren’t they?”

“Family tradition.”

“Anyway, Lester, I need to get going now.”

The guy made no move.

Reacher said, “Two choices, Lester. Roll forward or backward.”

The guy did neither thing. Reacher saw the wheels turning in his head. A slow process. But the guy got there in the end. He stared. A big man. A broken nose. He said very loudly, “You’re the person we’re looking for. Aren’t you?”

“No point asking me. I have no idea who you’re looking for.”

“Get in the car.”

“Why?”

“I need to take you into custody.”

“Are you kidding?”

“You think the security of our nation is a joke?”

“I think involving people like you in it is.”

Very loudly.

Reacher was suddenly aware of the phone, still in the guy’s hand.

Who was he on the phone to?

The diner?

Maybe the guy wasn’t so dumb after all.

Chapter 52

Reacher wrenched the car door open and tore the phone out of the guy’s hand and hurled it high in the air, right over the roof of the bar. Then he grabbed the guy by the scruff of his sweater and hauled him out of his seat and half dragged and half ran him back the way he had come, ten feet, twenty, and then he spun him around like a discus thrower and launched him toward the back wall of the cocktail lounge. Then he sprinted back and jammed himself into the guy’s seat and slammed the lever into gear and stamped on the gas. Gravel sprayed all over the place and the car shot forward and he stamped on the brake and more or less fell out the door and danced around the trunk of Goodman’s car to the driver’s door. He blipped the fob and tore the door open and started up and backed away from the back wall of the bar and swung the wheel hard.

The sand-colored Crown Vic was still moving. He had left it in gear. He overtook it and turned tight around its hood and its slow roll caught him with a soft low-speed impact, its front end against his rear quarter. He fishtailed free and drove on through the gap between the bar and the next establishment in line. He glanced left and saw the sandy-haired guy limping as fast as he could after something, either Goodman’s car or his own, he wasn’t sure. After that last glimpse he looked away from the guy and focused forward and drove through the front lot and bounced over the camber of the main drag and squeezed through a gap into the back lots on the other side of the road.

Then he slowed down and took a breath and got straightened up and edged forward until he was lined up with the next gap south and had a distant view of the motel and the diner together.

No sign of Sorenson.

No action at the diner.

The blue Crown Vic was still parked. Still quiet. No one was rushing toward it. The diner door stayed resolutely closed. There was no commotion visible through the windows.

Reacher watched for a whole minute, until he was convinced.

The State Department guy had not been on the phone to the diner.

So then he watched the motel, and three minutes later Sorenson’s room door opened and she stepped out. She was in the same pant suit with the new shirt under it. She had her old shirt balled up in the new shirt’s wrapper. She was taking her laundry home. A different approach. Because she had a home.

She stood for a second on the walkway outside her room, glancing left and right, head high, like a woman looking for a taxicab from a city sidewalk. Then she set off north toward the bar where he had said the car was parked. He turned the wheel and eased out through the gap and crunched through the front lot and bumped over the road again and swooped around and braked to a stop right next to her. He leaned over and opened her door and she slid into her seat like it was a maneuver they had rehearsed every day of their lives.

He said, “I had to move. I had a little trouble with your Mr. Lester from the State Department.”

She said, “Mr. Lester isn’t mine.”

Then he realized he had more trouble than he had thought. Far back in the mirror he saw Dawson and Mitchell burst out the diner door and run out into the parking lot. Both had phones to their ears. Their free hands were pumping and their jackets were flapping open. So Lester had in fact called the diner. But not deliberately. Not directly. In a very circuitous way instead. Probably he had been on the line with his people in Foggy Bottom, and his shouted You’re the person we’re looking for and the abrupt termination of the call had gotten some bright guy thinking, and that bright guy had immediately called the Hoover Building, and the Hoover Building had called Kansas City, and Kansas City had called Dawson and Mitchell on their cells, and were in fact probably still in the process of telling them The guy you’re looking for is currently kicking Lester Lester’s ass about twenty yards from you.

They saw him. Or they saw Sorenson. They froze in place and pointed and then ran for their car.

Reacher hit the gas and the sudden acceleration dumped Sorenson back in the passenger seat and the car slewed and fishtailed over the gravel. Reacher fought the wheel and bumped down over the curb at an angle and took off north up the road. He craned his neck and watched in the mirror and saw the blue Bureau car jam backward and turn and come after him.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’m a lousy driver.”

“Now you tell me,” Sorenson said. She scrabbled around and clipped her seat belt and pulled it tight around her. Reacher kept his foot down hard. A big V-8, police spec, plenty of power and torque. Not bad at all. Except that Dawson and Mitchell had the exact same car. Same V-8, same spec, same power and torque. And maybe less weight, without the light bar on the roof and the push bars front and rear. Better aerodynamics, certainly.

Reacher knew the Interstate was fifty miles ahead, and he knew there wasn’t much of anything else before that. There were some turns left and right, and there were some small stands of trees here and there, and there were occasional old wooden farm buildings standing all rotted and abandoned and unexplained in the fields. Apart from that there was just winter dirt, and it was all very flat. No dips, no valleys. No hills, no ridges.

Places to run.

No place to hide.

The road surface was bad, and the road bed had been heaved up and down by years of winter frosts and summer droughts. Acceptable at normal speeds, but dangerous going fast. Goodman’s cruiser was riding like a yacht on an ocean swell. The engine was howling and the wheel was writhing in Reacher’s hands. Dawson and Mitchell were maybe four hundred yards back, but they were gaining. Reacher jammed his foot down harder. Pedal to the metal. A hundred miles an hour.

Places to run.

No place to hide.

Puller, he thought.

He said, “Do you know how to work the radio?”

Sorenson said, “I could try.”

“Find out where Puller is with his radar gun. Tell him he’s got a speeder heading north. A dark blue sedan.”

Reacher drove on. No steering involved. The road was dead straight. The car went weightless over dips and hollows. Never airborne, but not far from it. Sorenson took the microphone out of its clip and fiddled with switches. She cleared her throat and said, “Deputy Puller, what is your location?”

Puller’s voice came back over static: “Who is that?”

“This is Agent Sorenson with the FBI. Where are you now?”

“A mile shy of the county line, ma’am.”

“North, south, east or west?”

“North.”

“OK, good. You have a speeder coming north toward you. A dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. Please stop the driver and caution him against his reckless and unsafe behavior.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

“Out,” Sorenson said. She hung up the microphone. She said, “How do you stop a car doing a hundred miles an hour? We’ll probably get Puller killed.”

“In which case we’ll be helping the gene pool.” Reacher hurtled onward. Dawson and Mitchell were now three hundred yards back. About six seconds, at a hundred miles an hour. But they were still gaining. Reacher scanned far ahead. Straight road, flat dirt, low horizon. No sign of Puller.

He asked, “Did your tech team call?”

Sorenson said, “Not yet. What’s on your mind?”

“Motive,” Reacher said. “Who snatches a dead woman’s kid? Especially a kid who saw nothing and knows nothing?”

“How can the autopsy answer that question?”

“It might not,” Reacher said. “That’s what’s on my mind.” His foot was hard on the boards. It was crushing the pedal. But the car was tapped out. It wouldn’t go any faster. A hundred was as good as it got. They passed a turn to the left. Another, on the right. Paved, but not much more than tracks between fields.

“There,” Sorenson said.

Reacher saw a dot on the horizon. A tiny smudge, vaguely black and white and gold against the brown. Puller’s cruiser, waiting on the shoulder. Maybe a mile away. Thirty-six seconds. No more turns before it. Faraway to the right was a copse of trees. Faraway to the left was an old barn, swaybacked and gray with age.

Thirty seconds.

Twenty seconds.

“Hold tight,” Reacher said.

Fifteen seconds.

He clamped the wheel tight in his hands and came off the gas and stamped on the brakes. The front end dipped radically and he and Sorenson were thrown forward and he fought to keep the car straight. Dawson and Mitchell didn’t slow down. They kept on coming. Puller’s car was a hundred yards ahead. Then fifty. Then thirty. Then Reacher swung the wheel hard and drove off the road into the dirt on the right and Dawson and Mitchell were launched ahead of him like a slingshot. Reacher hugged a tight bouncing circle in the dirt and saw Dawson and Mitchell passing Puller at about seventy and Puller lighting up his strobes and his siren and pulling out behind them. Reacher continued the circular turn and thumped back up on the road and headed south, fast, back the way he had come, all the way to the turn he had seen on the left, which was now on the right. He braked hard and took it and pattered over the lumpy surface and turned in on a rutted track and came to a dead stop out of sight behind the old swaybacked barn. He got out and ran to the far corner of the ramshackle structure and peered out north.

Nothing in the distance. No sign of Dawson and Mitchell. Not yet. They were still out of sight, more than a mile to the north. He counted out time and space in his head. Right then they would be slowing, stopping, turning around, hassling with Puller, showing ID, arguing, yelling, getting frustrated.

Getting delayed.

Then they would be coming back south, as fast as they could. They would have seen his tight turn on the dirt, and they would be planning on chasing him all the way back to town.

Three minutes, he figured.

Maybe three minutes and ten seconds.

He waited.

And then he saw them, right on time, faraway on the main drag, hustling left to right, north to south, doing about a hundred again. An impressive sight. The big stately sedan was really picking up its skirts. Its paint was winking in the watery sun. It was planted firmly on the blacktop, squatting at the rear, straddling the center line. Reacher ran back past Goodman’s car and peered out from the barn’s other corner. He got a rear view of the blue Crown Vic blasting south. After ten seconds it was a tiny dot. After twenty seconds it was gone altogether.

He breathed out and walked back to the car. He got back in and closed the door. He sat slumped in the seat with his hands on his knees.

Silence. Nothing but the faithful idle of the engine, and clicks and ticks as stressed components cooled back down.

Sorenson said, “You’re not such a terrible driver.”

He said, “Thank you.”

“What now?”

“We wait.”

“Where?”

“I guess this place is as good as any.”

She unzipped her black leather bag and took out Goodman’s phone. She clipped it in its dashboard cradle. It chimed once to tell them it was charging.

Then it started to ring.

She leaned over and checked the window.

“My tech team,” she said.

Chapter 53

Sorenson touched the green button and Reacher heard telephone sounds over the speakers again, weirdly clear and detailed, like before. Sorenson said, “You have something for me?”

A man’s voice said, “Yeah, we have some preliminary results.”

The voice was tired, and a little breathless. Reacher thought the guy was walking and talking at the same time. Probably stumbling out to the fresh air and the bright sunlight, after long and unpleasant hours in a white-tiled basement room. Breathing deep, blinking, yawning and stretching. Reacher could picture the scene. A pair of institutional doors, a short flight of concrete steps, a parking lot. Maybe planters and benches. Back in the day the guy would have been pausing at that point, to light a welcome cigarette.

Sorenson said, “Go ahead.”

The guy said, “You want me to be honest?”

“You usually are.”

“Then I can’t promise you the incineration was postmortem. It might have been. Or it might not have been. There’s something that might have been damage to what might have been a rib. If I squint a bit I could see it as a gunshot wound to the chest. Which might have been enough. It’s in what would have been the general area of the heart. But I wouldn’t say so in court. The other side would laugh me out of the room. There’s far too much heat damage for conclusions about external injuries.”

“Gut feeling?”

“Right now my gut feeling is I want to retrain as a hairdresser. This thing was about the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Sorenson was quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, “Anything else?”

“I started from the beginning, with the pelvic girdle. That’s the only way to confirm gender with a case like this. And it was totally clear. The pelvic bones had been reasonably well protected by a thick layer of fat.”

Reacher looked up. Delfuenso wasn’t fat. She was thin. Sorenson said, “And?”

“It’s beyond a reasonable doubt the corpse was male.”

Sorenson ran through the details with her guy. Like a crash course in forensic anthropology. Reacher remembered some of the words and some of the principles from the classroom. He had studied such things once, partly as a professional requirement, and partly out of interest. There were four things to look for with pelvises. First was the iliac spread. The ilia were the big bones shaped like butterfly wings, and female ilia were flared wider, and shaped more like a cradle, like cupped hands, with the anterior spines farther apart, whereas male ilia were narrower and tighter and much more straight up and down, more like a guy on a riverbank describing a foot-long trout.

Then second, the hole in the ischium was small and triangular in females, and large and round in males. And third, the angle across the pubic arch was always greater than ninety degrees in females, and rounded, and always less than ninety degrees in males, and sharp.

And the fourth was the clincher, of course: the space between the ischia was big enough in females for a baby’s head to fit through. Not so with males. Not even close.

Pelvises didn’t lie. They couldn’t be confused one for the other. Even a million-year-old pelvis dug out of the ground in pieces was quite clearly either male or female. Short of being ground to powder, a pelvis determined gender, no question, no doubt at all, end of story, thank you and goodnight. That was what Reacher had learned in the classroom, and that was what the voice on the phone confirmed.

Sorenson said, “So it wasn’t Delfuenso.”

The voice on the phone said, “Correct. And I’m happy for you. But that’s all I can reliably tell you. It was a male human being. Anything more than that would be pure guesswork.”

Sorenson clicked off the call and turned to Reacher and said, “You knew, didn’t you?”

Reacher said, “I suspected.”

“Why?”

“Nothing else made sense after Lucy was taken. I figured Delfuenso might still be a captive somewhere, maybe freaking out, maybe refusing to cooperate, and the only way to shut her up was to go get her kid.”

“To calm her down?”

“Or to threaten her with.”

“So now we have two of them in danger.”

“Or maybe we don’t,” Reacher said. “Maybe we have two of them as safe as houses. Because there are other potential conclusions, too. But they could be wrong conclusions. They could be embarrassingly grand pronouncements.”

“Which one died? King or McQueen? Or was it someone we never heard of yet?”

“It was King, I think. He was a little fat, especially around the middle. And he would fit the theory.”

“Which is what?”

“Something McQueen said when we pulled off the Interstate for gas.”

“You told me this already. He said you should have trusted him.”

“Before that. I was dubious about coming off there and he got a little impatient and said he was in charge.”

“Maybe he was. One or the other had to be. I doubt it was a democracy.”

“But there’s a sound in those specific words, don’t you think? In charge? You have Special Agents-in-Charge. We had officers in charge of this and that. A charge is something you’re given. You’re entrusted with it. It’s authority that devolves down an official hierarchy.”

“That’s very subjective.”

“I think a regular bad guy would have said I’m the boss here. Something like that.”

“So what are you saying? You think McQueen is ex-military? Or ex–law enforcement?”

Reacher didn’t answer that. He said, “And then he said the thing about trusting him. As if he was worthy of trust, somehow as of right. And then he shot at me and missed.”

“Probably not either military or law enforcement, then. Lousy marksman.”

“Maybe he was a great marksman.”

“But he was in the room with you. It was what, about eight feet? How can he be a great marksman and miss from eight feet?”

“Maybe he missed on purpose.”

Sorenson said nothing.

Reacher said, “I didn’t really think much of it at the time. I was just happy to be alive. But it was a hell of a high shot. It was a foot over my head. Maybe more. I remember saying it would have missed the motel keeper if he’d been standing on his own shoulders. It was exaggerated. It must have been about ten degrees above the horizontal. More than eleven-point-something, to be precise.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“I’m serious. There’s more. He moved his position so he was blocking my view of the car.”

“So?”

“So he was blocking their view of me. As if he needed them to think he was doing one thing, when really he was doing another thing.”

“He missed. That’s all. People do, sometimes.”

“I think it was deliberate.”

“He killed the guy in the pumping station, Reacher. He killed his own partner, apparently. He burned him to death. Why would he miss you deliberately? What makes you special?”

“Only one way to find out,” Reacher said.

“Which is what?”

“Tell me your phone number.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to need it.”

“I left my phone in Delfuenso’s house, remember?”

“You’re about to go get it back. And your car. And your reputation. You’re about to be a hero.”

Chapter 54

Reacher and Sorenson swapped places in Goodman’s car and Sorenson drove back to town, sedately, never more than fifty miles an hour. They passed Sin City, and they passed the empty bean fields, and they passed the quarter-mile of old machinery, and more bean fields, and they turned right at the crossroads and drove a hundred yards and parked next to the old pumping station. Sorenson fiddled with Goodman’s phone and brought up the list of recent calls and voice mails. She found Dawson’s cell number. She dialed it and the guy answered almost instantly.

He said, “Sheriff Goodman?”

Sorenson said, “No, this is Sorenson out of Omaha. Long story with the sheriff’s phone. But I have the man you’re looking for. He’s in my custody. You can come pick him up anytime you like.”

“Where are you?”

“At the old pumping station.”

“We’ll be there in two minutes.”

Ninety seconds later Reacher opened his door and said, “OK, I’m ready for my close-up.” He got out into the cold and crossed the sidewalk and faced the old pumping station’s concrete wall and put his fingertips on the rough surface. He shuffled his feet a yard apart and leaned forward and took his weight on his hands. Assume the position. Sorenson stood six feet behind him and pulled her gun and held it two-handed, trained on the center of his back.

“Looking good,” she said.

“Not feeling good,” he said.

“Best of luck,” she said. “It’s been fun hanging out with you.”

“We’re not done yet. I hope to see you again.”

They held their poses. The concrete was cold. Then Reacher heard tires on the pavement. He heard a car come to a stop, and he heard doors open. He turned his head. The blue Crown Vic. Dawson and Mitchell. They came out fast, coats billowing, guns drawn, triumph on their faces. They talked with Sorenson briefly. Congratulations, appreciation, thanks. They said they would take over from there. Reacher turned his face back to the wall. He heard Sorenson walk away. He heard Goodman’s car start up. He heard it drive off down the street.

Then there was silence. Just breathing from behind him, and the sound of cold air moving across the land.

Then either Dawson or Mitchell said, “Turn around.”

Which Reacher was glad to do. His fingertips were numb and his shoulders were starting to hurt. He pushed off the wall and rocked upright and turned around. Both guys had their guns on him. They looked the same as they had through the diner window. Early forties, blue suits, white shirts, blue ties, still ragged, still tired, still flushed. Maybe a little more tired and a little more flushed than before, due to their recent exertions. Of which the worst part had probably been dealing with Puller. Fast driving was no big deal. Dealing with morons was. What was the phrase? Like teaching Hindu to a beagle.

The one who was a little taller and a little thinner than the other said, “My name is Dawson. My partner’s name is Mitchell. We’d like you to get in the car.”

Reacher said, “You understand I never met King or McQueen before last night?”

“Yes, sir. You were hitching rides. We accept that completely. No hard feelings about the evasive maneuvers in the stolen cop car just now, either. And Mr. Lester is prepared to overlook his injuries.”

“What injuries?”

Mitchell said, “You hurt his leg. His feelings too, probably.”

“So we’re all good?”

“Peachy.”

“Then why are you arresting me?”

Dawson said, “We’re not arresting you. Not technically.”

“You’re arresting me untechnically, then?”

“Recent legislation gives us various powers. We’re authorized to use all of them.”

“Without telling me what they are?”

“You’re required to cooperate with us in matters of national security. And we’re required to think primarily of your own personal safety.”

“Safety from what?”

“You’re tangled up with things you don’t understand.”

“So really you’re doing me a favor?”

Dawson said, “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Reacher got in their car. In the back. Loose, not handcuffed, not restrained in any way except for the seat belt they made him wear. They said it was Bureau policy to follow best practices for driver and passenger safety. He was pretty sure the rear doors wouldn’t open from the inside, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t planning on jumping out.

Mitchell drove, east to the crossroads and then south into the hinterland. Dawson sat quiet alongside him. Reacher watched out the window. He wanted to study the route they were taking. The county two-lane heading south was pretty much the same as it was heading north. There was no direct equivalent of Sin City, but otherwise the terrain was familiar. Fallow winter fields, some trees, a few old barns, an occasional grocery store, an untidy yard with used tractor tires for sale. There was even a repeat of the sad quarter-mile of third-hand farm machinery, equally lame, equally rusted. There was clearly a glut on the pre-owned market.

“Where are we going?” Reacher asked, because he thought he should, sooner or later, strictly for the sake of appearances.

Dawson roused himself from a stupor and said, “You’ll see.”

What Reacher saw was the rest of Nebraska and a good part of Kansas. Almost three hundred miles in total, the first half of that distance due south from where they had started, just shy of Nebraska’s east-west Interstate, all the way down to Kansas’s own east-west Interstate. They stopped and got very late lunches at a McDonald’s just over the state line. Dawson insisted on drive-through. The same way Sorenson had wanted to eat in Iowa. Reacher figured the FBI had an official policy. Probably a recommendation from a committee. Don’t let your prisoner starve, but don’t let him get out of the car, either. He ordered the same meal as the last time, twin cheeseburgers and apple pies and a twenty-ounce cup of coffee. He was a creature of habit where McDonald’s was concerned. The meal was passed in through Mitchell’s window and then passed over Mitchell’s shoulder to him and he ate it quite comfortably on the back seat. There was even a cup holder there. Cop cars had gotten a lot more civilized since his day. That was for sure.

He slumbered through the rest of the two-lane mileage. Slumber was his word for a not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake state of semi-consciousness he liked a lot. Even if he hadn’t, it would have been hard to resist. He was tired, the car was warm, the seat was comfortable, the ride was soft. And neither Dawson nor Mitchell was talking. Neither one said a single word. There was no big three-way conversation. Not that Reacher wanted one. Silence was golden, in his opinion.

Then they turned east on the Interstate, toward Kansas City, Missouri. Reacher knew his American history. Kansas City was first settled by Americans in 1831. It was first incorporated in 1853. It was called the City of Fountains, or the Paris of the Plains. It had a decent baseball team. World Champions in 1985. George Brett, Frank White, Bret Saberhagen.

Its area code was 816.

Its population was counted several different ways. Local boosters liked to bump it up by ranging far and wide.

But most agreed its metro area was home to about a million and a half people.

Chapter 55

The Interstate’s architecture and its appearance and its grammar were the same as its parallel twin a hundred and fifty miles to the north. It was equally straight and wide and level. Its exits were equally infrequent. They were preceded by the same blue boards, part information, part temptation. Some exits were for real, and some were deceptive. The blue Crown Vic hummed along. Dawson and Mitchell stayed resolutely silent. Reacher sat straight and comfortable, held in place by his belt. He watched the shoulder, and he watched the road ahead. It was getting dark in the east. The day was nearly over. The sun had come up over the burned-out Impala, and now it was disappearing somewhere far behind him.

Then he felt the car slow fractionally ahead of an exit sign to a place with a name he didn’t recognize. The blue boards showed gas and food but no accommodation. But that deficiency was recent. The accommodations board was blank, but newly blank. There was a neat rectangle of new blue paint on it, not quite the same shade as the old blue paint. A bankruptcy, possibly, or a corporate realignment, or the death of a mom or a pop or of both.

Or something more complicated, maybe.

Up ahead the exit itself looked somewhere halfway between for real and deceptive. Plausible, but not wildly attractive. There was no gas station sign immediately visible. No lurid colors announcing fast food. But the way the land lay in the gathering gloom suggested there might be something worthwhile over the next ridge or around the next bend.

Mitchell checked his mirror and put on his turn signal and slowed some more. Best practices for driver and passenger safety. He eased off the gas and hugged the white line and took the exit gently and smoothly. He kept his turn signal going and paused and yielded at the end of the ramp and turned right on a two-lane local road. South again, maybe a hundred miles short of the Paris of the Plains, out into open country.

They passed a gas station a mile later, and a no-name diner a mile after that. Then a last blue board stood all alone on the shoulder, completely blank except for one horizontal patch of new blue paint and one vertical patch of new blue paint. A short motel name and an arrow pointing straight ahead, both of them recently concealed.

Left and right of the road was nothing but dormant agriculture. Just like Iowa. Wheat, sorghum, and sunflowers. Nothing doing right then, but in six months it would all be as high as an elephant’s eye, on some of the best prairie topsoil in the world. For long miles there was no habitation to be seen. Whatever farm buildings were left were all more distant than the darkening horizons.

Mitchell drove more than twenty miles through the lonely country, and then he slowed again. Reacher peered ahead into the gloom, looking for lights. He saw none at all. Then the road jinked right and left around a stand of bare trees and fell away into a broad shallow valley and the last gloomy glow from the west showed a motel about a mile away, laid out like a model on a table.

It was a fair-sized place. It had a central block, maybe for the office and the dining room, and a bunch of satellite blocks, with maybe five or six rooms in each. The blocks were all low-built but long, and they were all roofed with what looked like Spanish tiles, and they were all faced with what looked like pale stucco. There was an empty swimming pool, and there were cement paths, and parking areas, and bare flowerbeds. The whole compound was ringed by a low decorative wall done up in the same pale stucco as the buildings. From a distance the overall effect was like a seaside place. Not exactly Miami, not exactly California, not exactly Long Island, but a kind of landlocked fever-dream interpretation of all three mixed together.

And despite the blanked-out signs, the place looked open for business.

There were lights on in the main office block, and four of the windows in the satellite blocks were lit up too. There was steam drifting from what might have been a kitchen vent. There were two cars parked far apart in two different lots. Both were sedans, both were long and low, both were dark in color. Fords, Reacher thought. Crown Victorias, probably.

Exactly like the car he was riding in.

He said, “Is that place where we’re going?”

Mitchell drove on in silence, and Dawson didn’t answer either.

As they got closer Reacher expected to see more of the place. More details. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. The details never resolved. Something was obscuring his view. Not just the evening gloom. From half a mile out there seemed to be some kind of a low haze all around the edges of the compound. Like a force field, walling it in.

From a quarter-mile out, he saw what it was.

It was a security fence, maybe eight or ten feet high, made of dense metal mesh painted flat black, with rolls of razor wire canted inward at the top at an angle of forty-five degrees. It followed every twist and turn of the low stucco wall, all the way around the compound, but set ten feet farther out, like that innocent architectural frivolity’s sinister cousin.

Canted inward at the top.

It was for keeping people in, not keeping them out.

Dawson made a call on his cell and by the time Mitchell got close to the fence a motorized gate was already opening. He drove on through and Reacher turned in his seat and saw the gate closing again behind them. Mitchell kept on going, along a worn concrete roadway, tight around a circle, and he stopped next to the office. He didn’t sit back and sigh and stretch like his journey was over. He didn’t switch off the motor. He kept the car in gear and his foot on the brake. Reacher unclipped his belt and tried his door. He had been right. It wouldn’t open from the inside.

Dawson got out and opened it for him from the outside. He didn’t say anything. He just pointed with his chin, toward the office door. Reacher slid out and stood up straight in the evening chill. Dawson got back in and closed his door and the car drove off. It moved quietly away from next to Reacher’s hip and completed its trip around the circle and headed back along the worn concrete roadway to the gate. The gate was already opening before the car got there and it drove on through without stopping. It paused for a second and then turned right on the two-lane and headed back north, the way it had come.

The gate closed behind it, not fast, not slow, but silent.

Reacher stepped into the motel office. It looked like a hundred others he had seen. It was very similar to the fat man’s place from early that morning. There was a reception counter, and lobby furniture, and a table with space for coffee and breakfast muffins. There was vinyl on the floor, and pictures on the walls, and lighting chosen more for a small electric bill than adequate illumination.

There was a plump, motherly woman behind the counter. She was smiling, in a kind, welcoming fashion.

She said, “Mr. Reacher?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“We’ve been expecting you.”

“Have you?”

She nodded. She said, “We have rooms with kings, queens, and twins, but I’ve gone right ahead and put you in a room with a queen.”

“Have you?” Reacher said again.

The woman nodded again. She said, “I think the rooms with the queens are the nicest. They feel more spacious, with the armchairs and all. Most people like those rooms the best.”

“Most people? How many guests do you get?”

“Oh, we have quite the procession.”

He said, “I guess I’m happy with a queen. I’m on my own.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

She wrote in a book and took a key off a hook. She said, “Room twenty. It’s easy to find. Just follow the signs. They’re all lit up at night. Dinner starts in an hour.”

Reacher put the key in his pocket and went back outside. It was nearly full dark. As promised he saw knee-high fingerposts lit up by nearby spotlights set on spikes in the ground. He followed the sign for rooms sixteen through twenty. The path was brushed concrete and it wound its curving way around empty flowerbeds and it came out at a long low block of five rooms together. Room twenty was the last room in line. The empty swimming pool was not far from it, and beyond the pool was the decorative wall faced with stucco, and beyond that was the security fence. Up close it looked tall and black and angular. The mesh was a matrix of flat steel blades welded into rectangles smaller than postage stamps. Too small to put a finger in. Way too small for a foothold. Plus loops of razor wire overhanging the whole thing. It was a very efficient fence.

Reacher unlocked his door and let himself in. As promised he saw a queen bed, and armchairs. There were clothes on the bed, in two neat piles. Two outfits, both the same. Blue jeans, blue button-down shirts, blue cotton sweaters, white undershirts, white underwear, blue socks. Every garment looked to be exactly the right size. Not easy to find, at short notice.

We’ve been expecting you.

There were pajamas on the pillow. There were toiletries in the bathroom. Soap, shampoo, conditioner, shaving cream. Some kind of skin lotion. Deodorant. There were disposable razors. There was toothpaste, and a new full-size toothbrush sealed in cellophane. There was a hairbrush and a comb, like the toothbrush brand new and still sealed. There was a bathrobe on a hook. There were little hotel slippers in a packet. There were all kinds of towels on the rails, and a bath mat.

Just like the Four Seasons.

But there was no television in the room, and no telephone.

He locked up again, and went out exploring.

*  *  *

Overall the whole compound was roughly rectangular, indented here and there for the sake of interest and variety. A complicated network of brushed concrete paths wound in and out and visited everywhere of significance, including five separate accommodation blocks, and the main building, and the pool, and a mini golf installation way in one far corner. There were raised flowerbeds everywhere, edged with lower versions of the low stucco wall. In the gaps and the angles between the buildings and the walls and the flowerbeds there was crushed stone. A simpler network of concrete roadways connected the gate to the turning circle near the office, and then onward to five separate five-space parking lots near each of the accommodation blocks, and to a delivery bay behind the main building.

Four rooms were lit up inside. Two of them were near the two parked cars, and two of them weren’t. The parked cars were Ford Crown Victorias, police spec, with needle antennas on their trunk lids. Reacher checked their dark interiors through their windows, and saw empty cell phone cradles on their dashboards, just like Sorenson’s.

He stood for a minute in the dark and listened hard. He heard nothing. Total silence. No traffic. No airplanes. Just vast nighttime emptiness all around. Common sense and dead reckoning told him he was in Kansas, somewhere on the axis between Topeka and Wichita, probably halfway between the two, or maybe slightly nearer Topeka, possibly someplace near the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. But as far as physical evidence was concerned he could have been on the dark side of the moon. The sky felt heavy and cloud-covered and there was no world beyond the dense mesh fence.

He turned and strolled back the way he had come, past one of the lit-up windows, and then he more or less bumped into a guy coming out of a room marked 14. The guy was a lean, hardscrabble type, of medium height, not young but not yet ancient, with a lined and seamed face like he spent all his time outside in the weather.

A farm worker, about fifty.

The guy smiled like he had a shared secret and said, “Hi.”

Reacher said, “You’re the eyewitness.”

The guy said, “The what?”

Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Reacher said, “You saw the red car.”

“Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. But we’re not allowed to talk about any of that. Not even to each other. Didn’t they tell you?”

The guy was wearing new blue jeans, and a new blue button-down shirt under a new blue cotton sweater. Exactly like the clothes on Reacher’s bed, but smaller. His hair was clean and brushed. He had a fresh shave. He looked like a guy on vacation.

Reacher asked him, “When did you get here?”

The guy said, “Early this morning.”

“With Dawson and Mitchell, or with someone else?”

“I didn’t get their names. And we’re not allowed to talk about it, anyway. Didn’t they tell you?”

“Who’s supposed to tell me?”

“Didn’t you get a visit?”

“Not yet.”

“When did you get here?”

“Just now. A few minutes ago.”

“They’ll come pretty soon, then. They’ll come to your room and they’ll tell you the rules.” The guy shuffled in place on the path. Like he was impatient about something. Like he had somewhere else to be.

Reacher asked him, “Where are you going now?”

The guy said, “To the dining room, man. Where else? They got beer there. A whole bunch of different brands. Long neck bottles, good and cold. I mean, no work all day and free food and free beer? Does it get any better than that?”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “You coming?”

“Later, maybe.”

“No rush,” the guy said. “I’m planning to snag a few, but they got plenty. They ain’t going to run out anytime soon. You can trust me on that.” And then he hustled onward along the winding path, at first all lit up from the waist down by the fingerpost spotlights, and then eventually out of sight.

Reacher stayed where he was. Room fourteen. One of the two lit-up rooms without a Bureau car parked nearby. The other was room five. He turned around and backtracked, all the way past the six-through-ten block, around a flowerbed, across the gap to the next block, to the first door in line. Room five. He was planning to knock, but he didn’t need to. When he was still six feet away the door burst open and a girl ran out, all arms and legs and energy. A thin kid, dark haired and pale, maybe ten years old, all jacked up on excitement, and smiling wide. Then she saw Reacher’s giant bulk in the gloom on the walkway and she froze in place and her smile changed to puzzlement and her hands came up over her mouth, so that Reacher could see nothing of her face except two huge eyes.

He said, “Hello, Lucy.”

Chapter 56

Delfuenso herself came out straight after that. She must have heard his voice. She stopped on the walkway all backlit by warm light from the room behind her. She looked in great shape. She looked rested, and happy, and relieved, and relaxed. She was wearing a woman’s version of the place’s standard-issue clothing. New blue jeans, and a new blue blouse under a new blue sweater of a different style, lighter and tighter and shorter than the men’s. Her hair was clean and styled, and her face was bright and fresh. Clearly she had found piles of clothes on her bed, and toiletries in her bathroom.

We’ve been expecting you.

She said, “Lucy, this is Mr. Reacher. He was with me part of the time.”

The kid said, “Hello, Mr. Reacher.”

“Hello, Lucy,” Reacher said again.

The kid said, “You broke your nose.”

“Technically someone broke it for me.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not much anymore.”

Delfuenso said, “Lucy was on her way to try the mini golf.”

“It’s too dark,” Reacher said. “I was just there.”

The kid pondered that new information. Her face went serious and contemplative. She said, “Then can I go look for something else? I don’t think I’ve seen everything yet.”

“Sure,” her mother said. “Go see what you can find.” So the kid scuttled away along the path and Delfuenso looked at Reacher and said, “I guess the fence makes it safe for her to run around on her own. And there’s no water in the pool.”

Reacher said, “Can we talk?”

“About what?”

“Last night. And today.”

“We’re not allowed to talk about that.”

“Do you always do what you’re told?”

“No, not always. But I think I will about this kind of stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“National security. We can’t tell anyone about anything.”

“I was there with you.”

“For some of it. Not for all of it.”

“Will you answer questions for me? That’s not the same as telling me things.”

“They brought you here. They’ll tell you what’s happening.”

Reacher said, “I don’t think they know what’s happening.”

They had just thirty minutes before dinner and Delfuenso was nervous about talking, so they used the closest clandestine location they could find, which was Delfuenso’s room itself. It was identical to Reacher’s, except for two twin beds instead of a single queen, which made it cramped, because of two large armchairs. Reacher sat down in one, and Delfuenso lifted her bag off the other. The bag with the aspirins. It looked heavy. Maybe she still had her bottle of water in it.

He said, “What did you think had happened, back at that motel?”

She dumped her bag on the bed. It bounced once, and settled. She sat down in her chair.

“We’re not allowed to talk about that,” she said again.

“Says who?”

“They made it clear. We’re here for our own protection. Talking could put us at risk.”

“How could it?”

“They didn’t say exactly. They just said we’re tangled up in things we don’t understand, and we’re here because they want to keep us safe. We’re sequestered, like a jury. Something to do with the Patriot Act.”

“Sequestered? That’s bullshit. You’re locked up. You can’t leave.”

“I don’t want to leave. It’s kind of fun here. I haven’t had a vacation in years.”

“What about your job?”

“They said they’ll square that away with my boss. School too, for Lucy. They said they can make it OK. A thing like this, everyone has to pull together.”

“Did they say how long you have to stay here?”

“Until it’s over. Not too long, probably. But I hope it’s at least a week.”

Reacher said nothing.

Delfuenso said, “Your nose looks a little better.”

“Does it?” Reacher said, although he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to talk about his nose. But he figured a little conversation might not hurt. A delay and a frustration, but faster than shouting or yelling or fighting.

Delfuenso said, “It looked really awful before. I was staring at it in the car for hours. You cleaned it up.”

He nodded.

She said, “In fact you cleaned your whole self up. You took a shower, didn’t you?”

“It’s not that rare of an occurrence.”

“Well, I wondered.”

“I bought new clothes too.”

“You needn’t have. They give you clothes here. They said we’re allowed to keep them. Both sets, if we want. And the toiletries.”

He asked, “What happened after you left that motel in Iowa?”

She didn’t answer.

He said, “You know what happened. They know what happened. How can it hurt if I know what happened too? I’m in here with you. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t talk to anyone else.”

Delfuenso thought for a long moment. Her face went exactly like her daughter’s, serious and contemplative. Then she shrugged and said, “That part was pretty awful. After you went inside with McQueen, I mean. I couldn’t see much. He was in the way. But I saw the flash and heard the shot. He came running out and I couldn’t see you anymore. I assumed you were dead. And then McQueen told us you were.”

“Did he?”

Delfuenso nodded. “King asked if he got you, and McQueen said yes, right between the eyes. They kind of laughed about it. I was terrified. I assumed they would do the same to me. I mean, why wouldn’t they? We were no use to them anymore. I started screaming. King told me to shut up. So I did. It was pathetic. I thought if I did what he told me, he wouldn’t shoot me. I really learned something in that minute. People will do anything to stay alive, even if it’s just ten more seconds.”

“Then what happened?”

“We drove around some. Like figures of eight, around the fields. They were staying close for some reason. King was driving. He stopped about ten miles west. I assumed this was it. I assumed my time had come. But he said he wanted to have some fun first. He told me to take my shirt off. The blue one they bought for me. And I was going to. Like I said, people will do anything to stay alive. King got out of the car. He got in next to me in the back. He kind of chased me across the seat. Then McQueen got out and opened my door and pulled me out and King kind of started to follow after me and McQueen shot him. Just like that. Just pulled his gun and shot him.”

“In the chest?”

Delfuenso nodded. “Right in the heart.”

“And then?”

“McQueen calmed me down and told me he was an FBI agent working undercover with the bad guys. Pretending to be one of them.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Rather him than me. That’s a tough job.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I mean, I’ve seen it in the movies.”

“Then what?”

“McQueen told me he had fired over your head and you were still alive and perfectly OK. He said he was sorry I had to see what happened to King but he couldn’t figure out any other way to save me. Not right then. He said he had to act a part to a certain extent but couldn’t let things go too far.”

“And then?”

“He made some calls on his cell and he belted King in where he was, which was where I had been sitting, and then we drove off. I was in the front. We parked again about five miles east and two new guys came and picked us up in their own car. They set fire to mine. They said they had to do that, because the bad guys would expect McQueen to obscure the evidence, and they might check to make sure he had. They said they would get me a new car. Which is great, because that old one had a bad transmission.”

“These new guys were FBI too?”

“Yes. From Kansas City. They showed me ID. McQueen didn’t have ID, because he was undercover.”

“And they brought you straight here?”

She nodded again. “I said I wouldn’t stay without Lucy, so they went to get her too.”

“Where did McQueen go?”

“He came here with me and left again immediately. He said he had to get back in position. He said he had some explaining to do. I think he’s going to tell them you killed King.”

“Me?”

“That’s what they were discussing. Like they picked up a stranger to change the numbers but the stranger tried to rob them. I think he’s going to say you killed King and escaped.”

“Did they say what kind of bad guys these are?”

Delfuenso shook her head.

“No,” she said. “But they seem very worried about them.”

Dinner came next, and it was a very strange meal. They walked over to the main building together like a little family, Reacher and Delfuenso side by side with Lucy skipping and tripping between them. The dining room was a large square space with twenty tables and eighty chairs, all of them serviceable pine items thickly varnished to a high syrup shine. The room was like many other rooms Reacher had seen, but it was completely empty apart from the eyewitness, who was sitting alone at a corner table behind a miniature thicket of three empty beer bottles, all different. He was working on a fourth, and he jabbed its neck in the air in an enthusiastic greeting. A happy man. Maybe he hadn’t had a vacation in years either. Or ever.

The motherly woman from the reception desk brought menus. Reacher wondered if she was FBI too, and concluded she probably was. As it happened the three guests she had right then were contented enough, at least for the moment, but he imagined others might find the situation stressful or annoying, in which case he figured she would need some kind of official weight to back up her naturally patient manner.

The menu offered just two choices, cheeseburger or chicken, presumably both microwaved straight out of a freezer. FBI agents tended to come out of law school or law enforcement, not out of restaurant kitchens. Reacher chose the cheeseburger, his fifth of the day, and Delfuenso and her daughter followed suit.

Then before the meals arrived two more people came in. Both men, both in blue suits and white shirts and blue ties. The owners of the parked Crown Vics, obviously. The resident agents. The babysitters. They looked alert and alive and solidly competent.

Delfuenso said, “They’re the two who brought me here.”

Lucy said, “They’re the two who brought me here. From Paula’s house.”

The two men scanned the room and headed straight for Reacher. The one on the right said, “Sir, we’d appreciate it if you’d eat your dinner at our table tonight.”

Reacher said, “Why?”

“We need to introduce ourselves.”

“And?”

“We need to tell you the rules.”

Chapter 57

The two Bureau suits led Reacher to a four-place table in the opposite corner of the room to where the eyewitness had stationed himself. Reacher took the corner chair, his back to the wall, the whole room in view. Pure habit. No real reason. No danger of any kind. That dining room was probably the safest place in Kansas.

The two agents sat down, one on his left and one on his right. They leaned in, intently, elbows on the table. They were maybe a little younger than McQueen or Sorenson. Late thirties, or dead-on forty. Not rookies, but not old-timers, either. Both were dark and wiry. One was going bald faster than the other. They said their names were Bale and Trapattoni. They said they were close colleagues of Dawson and Mitchell. Same field office, same job. They said they had read Reacher’s record from the military. They said they knew all about him.

Reacher said nothing about that.

Bale was the guy losing his hair. He asked, “You happy here?”

Reacher said, “Why would I be?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“I took an oath to protect the Constitution. So did you, I guess.”

“And?”

“I’m being deprived of my liberty without due process of law. That’s a Fifth Amendment offense, right there. And you’re a party to it.”

“This isn’t a prison.”

“I guess the fence maker didn’t get that memo.”

“So you’re not happy?”

Reacher said, “Actually I’m fine. I like you guys. I like the FBI. I like the way you think. I can’t help it. You’re doing wrong, but you’re doing wrong right. You put everyone together, so there are mutual witnesses to everything that goes on here. You could have thrown us in solitary somewhere and done whatever the hell you liked to us. But you couldn’t do that. Because deep down you’re on the side of the angels. I can’t take that away from you. You even left the mini golf here. When did you buy this place?”

Trapattoni said, “Three years ago.”

“Was it a Kansas City initiative?”

“Yes, it was. Counterterrorism, central region.”

“Why did you need it?”

“There was an emerging requirement.”

“For what?”

“For a place to keep people safe.”

“I think it’s a place for keeping yourselves safe.”

“How so?”

“I think you take witnesses away from local law enforcement whenever your undercover operations get messy. So that no questions are ever answered.”

“You don’t think undercover agents deserve to be kept safe?”

“I think they deserve all the help they can get.”

“So?”

“I’m wondering how many undercover operations you run. This place could take fifty people at a time. That’s a lot of witnesses.”

“I can’t comment on how many operations we run.”

“Has this place ever been full?”

“No.”

“Has it ever been empty?”

“No.”

“In three years? That’s quite a few operations.”

“It’s a big job.”

Reacher said, “So tell me the rules.”

Bale said, “There are two of them.”

“Try me. I can count that high.”

“You’ll be our guest here until the operation is concluded. That’s non-negotiable. And you won’t discuss what you’ve seen of the operation so far with the other guests. Or with anyone else. Not even any tiny little part of it. Not now and not ever. That’s non-negotiable too.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s for your own good. They saw you too. Only one of those guys in the Impala was on the side of the angels.”

“King died.”

“But not before he used his phone a couple of times. From the gas stations, we think. The times of the calls coincide with the use of the credit card.”

“You were tapping his phone?”

“Having an undercover man brings many advantages.”

“What did he say about me?”

“They have your name and your description. Bear that in mind when you think bad thoughts about the fence maker.”

“Who are these guys?”

No answer.

“Is McQueen going to be OK?”

“Don’t worry about him.”

“I can’t help it.”

“We put seven months into this. He’s not going to quit now.”

“I’m not worried about him quitting. I’m worried about someone else making that decision for him. He’s got some explaining to do tonight.”

“We can’t discuss it,” Bale said. “Just remember the rules.”

And that was it. Bale sat back. Trapattoni sat back. The conversation was over. And right on cue the food came. Reacher figured the motherly type had been watching through a spy hole. Or listening on a headset.

*  *  *

Delfuenso and her daughter were long gone and the eyewitness was finishing up his seventh bottle of beer by the time Reacher left the dining room. He walked along the lit-up path toward his temporary quarters and he stopped in the chill air and looked up at the sky. There were no stars. No moon. Ideal conditions for a little clandestine activity, except there was no way out but the gate, and there was no way of opening it, and there were no telephones.

Then the eyewitness came stumbling out of the dining room and up the path. The knee-high fingerpost lights gave Reacher a pretty good view of the guy’s legs working not quite right. He was more than buzzed, but not yet falling down. He was taking slow and elaborately precise steps, left, right, putting his feet down flat, striding shorter than normal, looking down and concentrating hard. Reacher backtracked until his shins were in a pool of light. Full disclosure. He didn’t want to give the guy a heart attack.

The guy came on slowly, left foot, right foot, and then he saw Reacher’s legs and stopped. No big shock. No great surprise.

The guy gave an amiable grin.

Reacher said, “Were you this drunk when you saw the red car?”

The guy thought about it and said, “Approximately.”

“Who talked to you about it?”

“Sheriff Goodman and the blonde lady from the FBI.”

“What didn’t you tell them?”

“I told them everything.”

“No, you didn’t,” Reacher said. “No eyewitness ever does. You left things out. Things you weren’t sure about, things that might have sounded stupid, things you were doing that you shouldn’t have been doing.”

“I was looking for my truck.”

“Where was it?”

“I couldn’t remember. That’s why I was looking for it.”

“Did you tell them that part?”

“They didn’t ask.”

“And you were going to drive home like that?”

“It’s not far. I know the turns.”

“And?”

“I got caught short. I stopped to take a leak.”

“Where?”

“In back of the old pumping station. I didn’t tell them that part, either.”

Reacher nodded. Things you were doing that you shouldn’t have been doing. Public urination, and drunk driving. Illegal in every town in America. He said, “So you didn’t really see them. Not if you were behind the building.”

The guy said, “No, I saw them real close. I was all done by then. I was all zipped up and coming out.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so. It was pretty dark. There was a shadow.”

“How far away were you?”

“Ten feet, maybe.”

Reacher asked, “What did you notice?”

“I told the sheriff,” the guy said. “And the blonde lady.”

“You answered their questions. That’s not the same thing.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Concentrate.”

The guy closed his eyes. He swayed back and forth on his heels. He raised his hand and held it palm-out, as if he was steadying himself against the old concrete building. He was using physical cues. He was thinking himself back into the moment.

He said, “The first guy was hurrying. He wanted to get in there first. He was unzipping his coat.”

“Had they been in a group of three before that? Walking together?”

“I can’t be sure. But I think so. It felt like that. Like suddenly the first guy had bolted ahead, and the other two guys were hustling to keep up.”

“Suits, right?”

“No coats at all.”

“Anything in their hands?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you do when all three of them were inside?”

“I headed back across the road.”

“Why?”

“I needed to find my truck. And I didn’t want to stick around.”

“Why not?”

“Bad feeling.”

“From the guys in the suits?”

“More from the first guy. In the green coat. I didn’t like him.”

Reacher asked, “Did you hear anything?”

The guy said, “A little shouting and yelling. Like they were fighting.”

“Where were you when the guys in the suits came out again?”

“On the other sidewalk.”

“Anything else?”

The guy said, “I shouldn’t be talking about this. They told me not to.” And then he stepped around Reacher, carefully and elaborately and precisely, and he carried on along the path. Reacher started after him, and then he stopped. Because he heard the soft whisper of a car on the road. A quarter-mile away, maybe. He turned and saw lights in the distance, vague diffuse beams bouncing and stabbing through the mist.

Then the gate began to open, not fast, not slow, and silent.

Chapter 58

Evidently Julia Sorenson had not gotten her phone back. Or her car. Or her reputation. She had not become a hero. Reacher saw a shiny black Crown Vic pull in off the two-lane and drive through the still-moving gate. Its headlight beams turned in a wide arc and it hissed over the concrete roadway and came to a stop on the circle near the main office door. A guy Reacher hadn’t seen before got out of the front passenger seat and opened the rear passenger door. He didn’t seem to say anything. He just pointed with his chin. Like Dawson had.

Julia Sorenson slid out of the back and stood up and stood still. She looked tired in the low light, and a little defeated. A little round-shouldered. The night breeze caught her coat and flapped it open. She was still wearing the new shirt. But her holster was empty. She had surrendered her weapon.

The guy from the front closed her door behind her and slid back in his seat. The car drove off and left her standing there alone. The gate started to open again. The car drove through it, and paused a beat, and turned right, and drove back the way it had come.

The gate closed again behind it. Reacher watched the car until its lights were gone and its whisper had died away to silence. Then he turned around and watched Sorenson.

She stood still for a moment more, and then she went inside. Reacher counted out time in his head, for the greeting from the motherly type at the reception desk, and the smile and the welcome, and the kings and the queens and the twins, and the armchairs, and the floor space, and the majority preferences. All that kind of stuff. We’ve been expecting you. Four minutes, he figured. Maybe less, if the conversation went faster, which he figured it might, because it would be one agent to another. Or maybe more than four minutes, if Sorenson was up on her high horse and asking all kinds of outraged and resentful questions.

It took four minutes exactly. Sorenson came out with a key in her hand. She looked resigned. She checked the numbers on the low fingerposts and set off in Reacher’s direction. Then she checked again at the next fork and headed off at a shallow angle down a different path.

“Julia,” Reacher called, softly.

She stopped walking.

She called, “Reacher?”

“Over here.”

She stepped off the path and walked over the crushed stone to him. He asked, “What happened with you?”

She said, “We’re not supposed to communicate.”

“Or what? They’re going to lock us up?”

“Well, we can’t talk out here. Where can we go?”

They went to Reacher’s room. Sorenson took a good look around it and said, “This is completely bizarre. It’s just like a regular motel.”

Reacher said, “It is a regular motel. Or it was. The Kansas City field office bought it three years ago. They told me. You never heard about it?”

“Not a word. Are the others here too?”

Reacher nodded. “Delfuenso and her kid, and the eyewitness. Safe and sound. They’re all having a good time, actually.”

“Even though they’re locked up?”

“They’ve been told they’re sequestered. Like a jury. For their own good. Not the same thing as being locked up. They’re all treating it like a vacation. Mini golf and free beer.”

“Is it legal?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. But it probably is. Except that it probably shouldn’t be. You know how these things are.”

“Who brought them here?” she said. “Who burned in the car?”

“Alan King burned in the car,” Reacher said. “But he was shot in the heart first. By McQueen. McQueen is one of you, undercover. Out of Kansas City. Which is why Dawson and Mitchell came straight up to babysit you at the pumping station. They were doing damage control. McQueen burned the car and he and Delfuenso were picked up by part of his Bureau support team. In a Bureau sedan, like the tire marks showed, again out of Kansas City. McQueen came here with them but left again immediately. Apparently he said he had to get back in position.”

“Poor guy. He’s going to be under a hell of a lot of pressure. With King dead? How is he going to explain that?”

“With great difficulty, I would think.”

“But you were right. He missed you deliberately. He fired over your head.”

“But there was nothing he could fake when it came time to punch Delfuenso’s ticket. So he offed King instead.”

“Good man. I hope he’s OK.”

“What happened with you?” Reacher asked again.

Sorenson sat down on the bed. She said, “Me? It started out OK. In fact it started out just fine. I drove back to Delfuenso’s place and got my phone and got back in my own car and called my SAC. I told him I had managed to overpower you and hand you over to the Kansas City boys. My SAC was very impressed. And he was very pleased. But I couldn’t quite let it go. I asked a few too many questions. He didn’t like that so much. I could tell. Then at one point he changed completely. He wasn’t pleased anymore. Not pleased at all. I could hear it in his voice.”

“At what point?”

“I checked the glove box when I locked up Goodman’s car. Purely out of habit. I didn’t want any unsecured weapons left in it, and who knows what a country sheriff keeps in his glove box? But as it happened there was nothing in there except a notebook and a pen. So I looked through the notebook, naturally. Turns out Sheriff Goodman was a very thorough guy. He’d been doing his research overnight, and he’d been making notes about Karen Delfuenso. I guess he figured the more the merrier, when it came to information. I guess he thought it would help, if we didn’t get her back fast, although I can’t see how it would.”

“And?”

“There was something in there that struck me as odd, so I asked my SAC about it. Except I didn’t actually ask about it. I just mentioned it, really. But whichever, that was when he went all weird on me.”

“What something was odd?”

“I took Delfuenso to be a long-term resident. Maybe not necessarily a fourth generation farm girl or anything, but I got the impression she’d been there a good long time. Certainly I figured Lucy would have been born and raised there.”

“But she wasn’t?”

“They’ve only been there seven months. The neighbor on the other side said they moved there after a divorce. So it seems to have been a much more recent divorce than I thought.”

“Are we even sure she was married in the first place?” Reacher said.

“There’s a kid.”

“That doesn’t imply marriage.”

“Why wouldn’t she have been married?”

“She copes on her own,” Reacher said. “She copes really well. Like she’s always been obliged to. And she’s smart. Looking after some guy would drive her crazy.”

“Smart women shouldn’t get married?”

“Are you married?”

She didn’t answer that. She said, “I don’t care if it was a wedding with a thousand guests on a beach in Hawaii or a one-night stand in a motel in New Jersey. The point isn’t that she was a single mom. The point is she’s a single mom who moved to town just seven months ago.”

Reacher said, “The Kansas City boys told me this operation is seven months old.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why would they lie?”

“No, I mean Delfuenso can’t be connected. How could she be? It has to be a coincidence. It has to be. Because we’ve already got one coincidence.”

Reacher said, “So now we have two coincidences?”

“Which is one too many.”

“What’s the first coincidence?”

Sorenson said, “You remember Alan King’s brother?”

“Peter King? The fister?”

“Apparently my night guy put a search on him. Just to be helpful. Right after he got off the phone with Mother Sill, the first time. DMVs, the postal service, the banks, the credit card companies. The cell phone companies, if we can get away with it, which is usually always. And the results came back this evening.”

“And what were they?”

“It looks like Peter King left Denver and moved to Kansas City.”

“When?”

“Seven months ago.”

Chapter 59

Reacher moved in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Alan King told me his brother wasn’t speaking to him.”

Sorenson said, “Did Alan King live in Kansas City?”

“I think so.”

“Maybe he didn’t. And even if he did, maybe they never met. Kansas City is a big enough place.”

“I know,” Reacher said. “Metro area population is a million and a half.”

“Is it?”

“Area code is 816.”

“OK.”

Reacher said, “So now we have three coincidences. Seven months ago Delfuenso moved to the back of beyond in Nebraska, and simultaneously Peter King moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where his brother might or might not have been living, and where his brother might or might not have been even speaking to him, and simultaneously your central region counterterrorism people, who are based in Kansas City, Missouri, decided to start up a complex undercover operation that seems to be centered on a spot very close to Delfuenso’s new quarters in the back of beyond in Nebraska.”

“We can’t have three coincidences. That’s too many.”

“I would agree,” Reacher said. “Theoretically. But we don’t have three coincidences. We have two proven links.”

“Proven how?”

Reacher leaned forward in his chair and put his palm on the bed. He pressed down and tested the mattress for softness and yield.

He said, “First, Peter King was definitely Alan King’s brother. And Alan King was definitely a bad guy. Because an undercover FBI agent found it necessary to shoot him in the heart and burn him up in a fire. Which is a pretty basic definition for being a bad guy, wouldn’t you say?”

“And second?”

Reacher said, “Your SAC had you brought here because you found out about Delfuenso’s move seven months ago. And this place is for people who stumble on evidence of undercover operations. Therefore Delfuenso’s move was part of an undercover operation.”

“What part?”

Reacher said, “Let’s go ask her.”

Reacher stopped short of Delfuenso’s door, and Sorenson stepped up and knocked softly. There was a long minute’s delay, and then there was the rattle of a chain. The door opened a crack on dim light inside and Delfuenso’s voice whispered, “Who is it?”

Reacher figured she was whispering because her kid had just gone to sleep.

Sorenson said, “Karen Delfuenso?”

Delfuenso whispered, “Yes?”

Sorenson said, “I’m Julia Sorenson from the FBI field office in Omaha. I was working on getting you back last night.”

And then Delfuenso shushed her, quite impatiently, like Reacher knew she would. Because her ten-year-old had just gotten to sleep. Delfuenso came out and bustled Sorenson away from the door, like Reacher knew she would, over to a place more than ten feet away, where it was safe to make a noise.

“I’m sorry,” Sorenson said. “I didn’t mean to be a nuisance. I just wanted to introduce myself. I just wanted to see you were OK.”

“I’m fine,” Delfuenso said, and more than ten feet behind her Reacher slipped into the room.

He had been in the room once before, so he was safely familiar with its layout, even in the dark, and it was dark. There was no light anywhere except an orange neon bulb inside a light switch in the bathroom. Its faint glow showed Lucy asleep in the bed farther from the door. She was on her side, fetal, rolled into the blankets. The sheet was up to her chin. Her hair was spilled on the pillow, black on white. Reacher found Delfuenso’s bag on the other bed. Nearer the door, nearer the armchairs. He had seen her lift it off the chair and dump it on the bed. It had looked heavy. And the mattresses were soft and yielding. Not like trampolines. Not like drum skins. But even so the bag had bounced. Like she still had her bottle of water in it.

He stepped slow and quiet on the carpet and carried the bag to the bathroom. He spread a folded bath towel on the vanity counter, one-handed, patting it into place directly under the dim glow from the light switch. He emptied the bag on the towel. A precaution against noise, which worked to some extent, but not completely. There was no loud clattering, but there were plenty of sharp thumps.

He waited. And listened. Lucy slept on, breathing low and quiet.

He raked through the things on the towel. There was all kinds of stuff. Makeup, a hairbrush, two plastic combs. A slim glass bottle of scent. Two packs of gum, both half gone. A wallet, containing three dollars and no credit cards and a seven-month-old Nebraska driver’s license. It was made out to Delfuenso at the address Reacher had visited. She was forty-one years old. There was an emery board for her fingernails, and a steakhouse toothpick still in its paper wrapper, and seventy-one cents in loose coins, and a ballpoint pen, and a house key on a chain with a crystal pendant.

He saw the pack of aspirins. There was no bottle of water. There was nothing large and heavy except a bible. A hardcover King James version, smaller than an encyclopedia, bigger than a novel. Fairly thick. Dark red cardboard on the front, dark red cardboard on the back. Gold printing on the spine, gold printing on the front. Holy Bible. It looked like it didn’t get much use. It looked like it hadn’t been opened very often.

In fact it was impossible to open. The pages were all crinkled and gummed together, by some kind of yellowish fluid, dried long ago. A spillage, possibly. Inside the bag. Pineapple juice, maybe, or orange. Or grapefruit. Something like that. Something sugary. A small carton with a straw, or a drinking cup for the kid, dumped in there and overturned.

So why keep the bible? Was there a taboo against trashing damaged bibles and replacing them? Reacher didn’t know. He was no kind of a theologian.

It was very heavy, for a book.

He used his nails and tried to separate the front cover from the first endpaper page. Not possible. It was gummed solid. Evenly, and uniformly. Reacher pictured the spilled juice, pulsing out around the hole for the straw or through the spout of the cup, flooding the bag, soaking the good book evenly and uniformly.

Not possible.

Spilled juice would leave a random stain, probably large, but it wouldn’t cover the whole book equally. Some part of it would be untouched. What got wet would swell, and the rest would stay the same. Reacher had seen books in that condition. Frozen pipes, bloodstains. Damage was never uniform.

He used one of Delfuenso’s combs and forced it end-on between the pages. He slid it up and down and levered it back and forth until he had made two fingertip-sized recesses in the pulp. Then he put the book spine-down on the vanity counter and bent over and hooked his nails in the recesses and jerked left and right.

Paper tore and the book fell open.

Everything from Exodus to Jude had been hollowed out with a razor. A custom-shaped cavity had been created. Very neat work. The cavity was roughly rectangular, maybe seven inches by six, maybe two inches deep. Not much of the paper had been left at the top and the bottom and the sides of the book. Hence the glue. Walls had been built, thin but solid. The whole thing was like a jewelry box with its lid stuck shut.

But it contained no jewelry.

The cavity was shaped and sized and contoured specifically for its current contents, which were a Glock 19 automatic pistol, and an Apple cellular telephone with matching charger, and a slim ID wallet.

The Glock 19 was a compact version of the familiar Glock 17. Four-inch barrel, smaller and lighter all around. Often considered a better fit for a woman’s hand.

Always considered easier to conceal.

It was loaded with eighteen nine-millimeter Parabellums, seventeen in the magazine and one in the chamber, ready to go. No manual safety on a Glock. Point and shoot.

The phone was switched off. Just a blank screen on the front, and a shiny black casing on the back, with a silver apple, partly bitten. Reacher had no idea how to turn the phone on. There would be a button somewhere, or a combination of buttons, to be pressed in sequence or held down for a certain small number of seconds. The charger was a neat white cube, very small, with blades for an outlet, and a long white wire tipped with a complex rectangular plug.

The ID wallet was made of fine black leather. Reacher flipped it open. It was like a tiny book in itself. The left-hand page was a colored engraving of a shield. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The right-hand page was a photo ID. Delfuenso’s face was on it. A little pale from the flash, a little green from fluorescent tubes overhead. But it was her. The picture was overlapped with an official seal. Department of Justice again. Holographic. The words Federal Bureau of Investigation ran side to side across the whole width of the card.

Special Agent Karen Delfuenso.

Reacher repacked the cavity and squeezed the covers down over the damage he had caused. He carried the book in his hand, slow and quiet past the sleeping girl, out through the door, toward the two women still huddled ten feet away. Sorenson was talking inanely, just burning time, and Delfuenso was looking a little exasperated and impatient with her. They both heard the scuff of Reacher’s boots on the concrete. They both turned toward him.

Reacher raised the bible and said, “Let us pray.”

Chapter 60

They left Lucy sleeping alone. Delfuenso thought it was safe enough. The whole place was secure, and she said the kid wasn’t the type who woke up in the night scared or disoriented. They went to Sorenson’s room, which was number nine. Closer than Reacher’s. Sorenson hadn’t been in it yet. She hadn’t gotten that far. She had been on her way to open it up when Reacher had called out to her in the dark.

She unlocked her door with her key and all three of them stepped inside. Reacher saw an identical version of his own billet. Two armchairs, a queen bed, two neat piles of clothing, but the feminine selection, the same as Delfuenso was wearing. No doubt the bathroom was equally provisioned with lotions and potions and towels.

Delfuenso sat down in an armchair and Reacher handed her the bible. She cradled it in her lap, with both hands on it, like it was a purse and she was afraid of bag snatchers. Sorenson sat on the bed. Her room, her entitlement. Reacher took the second armchair.

He said, “Obviously I have a million questions.”

Delfuenso said, “You’ve put us all in a very difficult situation. You should have left my bag alone. What you did was almost certainly illegal.”

Reacher said, “Grow up.”

Sorenson looked at Delfuenso and asked, “Didn’t they search you here? Or on the way here?”

Delfuenso said, “No, they didn’t.”

“Me neither,” Reacher said. “Not even a little bit.”

“Then that’s a serious deficiency,” Sorenson said. “Wouldn’t you agree? I thought Kansas City was supposed to be good at this stuff.”

Delfuenso shrugged. “I was playing the part of the random helpless victim, so I’m not surprised they gave me a pass. They should have searched Reacher, though. His position was never very clear.”

“Kansas City doesn’t know who you are?” Reacher asked.

“Of course they don’t,” Delfuenso said. “Or I wouldn’t be here in their damn prison camp, would I?”

“So who are you?”

“That’s not something I’m willing to discuss.”

“Did King and McQueen come in south from the Interstate? To the old pumping station?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because it’s the key fact here.”

“No, they came north out of Kansas.”

“How?”

“They were driven. By an accomplice.”

“Had they been there before? To that crossroads?”

“Has anyone?”

“So they never saw Sin City. They didn’t know anything about it. They didn’t know they could jack a car there. But still, that’s where they went. Why?”

Delfuenso didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Because you were McQueen’s emergency contact. That’s why. In case things went wrong. But you weren’t put there by Kansas City. Because Kansas City doesn’t know who you are. So who put you there?”

Delfuenso didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Someone else put you there, obviously. Someone higher up the food chain, clearly, to be going over Kansas City’s head in secret. I’m guessing the Hoover Building. Some big cheese in a suit, all burdened down with worries.”

Delfuenso said nothing.

Reacher said, “Which begs the question, what exactly was the nature of those worries?”

Delfuenso said, “Were you really a military cop?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

Sorenson said, “Yes, he was. I’ve seen his file. He was decorated six times. Silver Star, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Soldier’s Medal, Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.”

“We all got medals,” Reacher said. “Don’t read too much into it.”

Delfuenso said, “There’s a problem with Kansas City.”

Reacher said, “What kind of a problem?”

“Poor performance.”

“How poor?”

“They’re getting people killed.”

Delfuenso ran it down for them. She spoke for ten minutes straight. The central region was always busy. There were valuable targets within its jurisdiction. Important civilian infrastructure, and military establishments, including factory sites. There was always terrorist chatter, too, both domestic and foreign, on the internet, some of which was aimed at that infrastructure and those establishments and factories. Most of which was fantasy dreaming or empty boasts or idle wouldn’t-that-be-cool speculation. But some of it was real. Enough of it to worry about, anyway.

So the Kansas City boys went proactive, and got into a sequence of four undercover penetrations. They got agents inside four separate targets. The operations were textbook smooth at the beginning. Then they fell apart. None of them produced intelligence. Two of them produced dead undercover agents.

But still. Notwithstanding. The central region was always busy. The internet chatter never let up. Then one day there was a new voice. It talked about liquid measure of some kind. Gallons, hundreds of gallons, thousands of gallons. With a regular emphasis on Nebraska’s water table. No one knew what any of it meant. No one could decipher any specific intent. But the chatter intensified daily. Thousands of gallons, hundreds of thousands, millions of gallons, and eventually tens of millions.

So a fifth undercover operation was planned. The new voice was contacted by a lone federal dissident entirely invented by Kansas City. The federal dissident offered to join forces with the new voice and help. Background questions were asked, and answers were invented. Bona fides were established. After a long and cautious delay the new voice agreed to meet with the federal dissident. And so the operation came slowly to life.

But at the same time an operation-within-an-operation had been planned by the Hoover Building. Like spying on the spies. Under the guise of a routine higher-level review it had been suggested that Kansas City bring in an agent entirely unknown in the Midwest. For the undercover position. In theory, for extra safety and security. In reality, the Hoover Building wanted a guaranteed reliable man at the heart of the operation. The name they put forward was Special Agent Donald McQueen, most recently of the San Diego field office.

And as a backstop and as an on-the-ground observer they moved Karen Delfuenso from the main counterterrorism unit in D.C. They moved her in secret. The whole nine yards, like witness protection. She rented a house. She got a job. Her kid came with her and enrolled in school.

“That’s a big deal,” Sorenson said. “Were you happy with that?”

“Happy enough,” Delfuenso said. “You know how it is. We go where we’re told. And I like moving around. I want Lucy to see something of the world.”

“Did she know why you were moving?”

“Not specifically. Only generically. She knows I have a gun and a badge. But she doesn’t ask questions. She’s used to it.”

“But she could have blown your cover. She could have talked in school.”

“And said what? Mommy’s got a gun? Every mommy in Nebraska has a gun. Or Mommy’s a secret agent? All kids make up stories like that. It’s expected. Especially when their mommy is really a cocktail waitress, half naked from the waist up all night long.”

Then Delfuenso went on with the story. McQueen made contact early on. He played it slow and careful and built up trust and credibility. The new voice turned out to be a medium-sized group of white Americans in an uneasy alliance with a medium-sized group of foreigners from the Middle East. The group called itself Wadiah. Its leader was a man with a code name of his own, and so far McQueen had been denied access to him. The foreigners from the Middle East were thought to be Syrians.

“What’s their aim?” Reacher asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Delfuenso said.

“That’s a weird ethnic mixture.”

“I agree.”

“Is McQueen going to be OK?”

“That depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full type of guy, or a glass-half-empty. They lost two out of four so far. So on the face of it his odds are about fifty-fifty.”

“Not good.”

“Which is why some big cheese in a suit was all burdened down with worries.”

“And that’s without him having to explain what happened to King.”

“Tell me about it,” Delfuenso said.

Sorenson made hot tea with a plug-in kettle from a cupboard and water from the bathroom. She brought it over on a tray. Reacher thanked her but looked at Delfuenso and asked, “Why did you do all that blinking in the car?”

Delfuenso took her tea and asked back, “Did I have you fooled?”

“Totally. I thought you were a random victim. Brave and smart, for sure, but regular-person brave and smart, not law enforcement.”

“And that’s exactly what I needed you to think. McQueen knew who I was, obviously, but King didn’t. So I had to play a part for him. I had to play a part all night, in fact, because it was pretty obvious I was going to end up face to face with either Wadiah or the Kansas City FBI. And neither one of them could be allowed to know who I was.”

“I get that. I know you had to act a part. But you didn’t have to blink.”

“My aim was to get out of there as fast as I could. The sooner the better. By any means available. So I thought if I enlisted you I might get out quicker. You looked like a capable guy. I thought you might get the chance to stage something along the way. But you didn’t. So sure enough I ended up face to face with the Kansas City boys, who put me in here, because I played my part so well they think I’m nobody.”

“So what really happened last night?”

“You saw most of it.”

“But not all of it. And I didn’t understand any of it. And I’m interested in the conversation you had with McQueen after he shot King in the heart. You must have had at least half an hour alone with him, before you were picked up.”

“Closer to forty minutes. And it wasn’t McQueen who shot King in the heart. He passed me his gun around the seat. I told you different because I was still playing the part back then. Also I made up all that stuff about screaming and wailing.”

“So what really happened tonight?”

“You tell me.”

Reacher shrugged.

“I have no idea,” he said. “But I don’t think either King or McQueen was carrying the knife. Too big for a suit pocket. There was nothing in their hands. I suppose one of them could have had it strapped to his forearm, but that seems unlikely. I think the other guy had it. And I think he was always planning to use it. He was unzipping his coat as he walked into the bunker.”

“You spoke to the eyewitness.”

“I’m sure he’ll deny it. He’s following the rules. For the free beer.”

Delfuenso said, “These things are always co-productions. King and McQueen went on behalf of Wadiah to meet with some other guy appearing on behalf of some other group. Funding, probably, or some other kind of cooperation. Or logistics. Or supply. It was supposed to be a love-in. The plan was King and McQueen should get a ride there, and then the new guy would take them onward to his HQ. Like a ritual dance. But it went to rat shit immediately. The new guy started shouting something at them and then he pulled out a knife and tried to kill them. McQueen disarmed him.”

“And broke his arm in the process.”

“Did he?”

Sorenson said, “The medical examiner told us. At lunchtime today.”

Reacher said, “And then what?”

Delfuenso said, “And then McQueen killed the guy. In self defense. Almost a reflex.”

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. “He killed him to shut him up. The guy was shouting. Who knew what he was going to say next? Too big a risk to take. Could be the guy is based in San Diego and he’s seen McQueen going in and out of the FBI building there. And McQueen wouldn’t want King to hear that.”

“It was a justifiable homicide.”

“Did he do it well?”

“Is that your benchmark for justifiable?”

“Style points can help. If the decision is close.”

“I don’t know how well he did it.”

“I do,” Sorenson said. “I saw the body. And he did it pretty well. Lateral slash on the forehead to blind the guy, and the knife up under the ribs, like one, two.”

“Happy now?” Delfuenso asked.

“That’s a little old-school,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? The forehead thing used to be considered cool. Flamboyant, even. But it was always completely unnecessary. Might as well make the second move first. If you’ve got a nine-inch blade up to the hilt in someone’s gut, does it really bother you that he’s still got twenty-twenty vision?”

“Whatever, it was justifiable.”

“I agree. No argument from me. Either way. What happened next?”

“They ran for it. They didn’t like the red car. They figured either the local cops or the other group of bad guys would come looking for it. Or both. McQueen knew where I was. He always knew my whereabouts. So he drove up to Sin City, but like he didn’t really know where he was going, and he kind of pretended to spot my Chevy, and right away King agreed it would be a good car to steal.”

“But they didn’t just steal it.”

“They couldn’t get it open. It’s a late model. All kinds of security. They set the alarm off. I looked out the window in the ladies’ room. They were just standing there. So I figured if I went out back like I had just finished work they could rob me at gunpoint and take the key. That was what I was expecting. McQueen too, he said. Maybe a tap on the head, at worst. But King had other ideas. He didn’t want to leave a witness. So he went for the whole hijack thing. He took the cocktail waitress along for the ride. And so the act began.”

“Did McQueen know the guy in the bunker?”

“No. He told me he’d never seen him before.”

“So you don’t know who he was either. And you weren’t getting a real-time news feed all night and all day. Not like we were. And Kansas City won’t have told you, because you’re nobody.”

“Told me what?”

Sorenson said, “As far as we know the dead guy was a CIA head of station.”

Delfuenso was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I need guidance on this.” She opened her bible and took out the cell phone and the charger. She got everything plugged in. She held a button down for two long seconds. The screen lit up. With a text message already on it. All in capital letters.

“Emergency,” she said. “McQueen just dropped off the radar.”

Chapter 61

Delfuenso called whatever secret number was stored in her phone, and she got the latest update. To say McQueen had dropped off the radar was just a figure of speech. In reality his GPS signals had disappeared off a computer screen. He was carrying two chips, one in his phone, and one sewn in the back of his belt. For seven months they had recorded his every move. Now an hour ago they had blinked off and disappeared, never to return. Both of them. Seconds apart. The likelihood of two near-simultaneous failures was so remote it wasn’t even worth considering. McQueen was in trouble.

Reacher asked, “Where was he last recorded?” Delfuenso said, “At his normal location.”

“Which is where?”

“A Wadiah hideout.”

“Which is where?”

“Near Kansas City.”

Reacher asked, “Do your people have a plan?”

Delfuenso said, “We’re not going to involve the Kansas City boys. That was decided a long time ago. They’re walled off, as of this minute. Because they can’t help us with a problem like this. Their track record tells us they probably caused it.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“A SWAT team direct from Quantico.”

“When?”

“Rapid deployment.”

“How rapid?”

“They’ll be in Kansas City in eight hours.”

“That’s rapid?”

“It’s a big country. There’s a lot to organize.”

“Eight hours is way too long.”

“I know it is.”

“But we’re right here. The three of us. We’re a hundred miles from Kansas City. Which is two hours. Not eight.”

There was no discussion. Not that Reacher expected there to be. An undercover agent was down, and he figured the FBI’s unwritten codes would be at least half as strong as the army’s. Undercover was the toughest job in the world, and the only way to make it bearable was to make it so the guy in the field knew he was watched over by people who would react instantly if he ran into trouble.

They gave themselves three minutes to prepare. Reacher didn’t need them. He hadn’t unpacked. His toothbrush was still in his pocket. He was good to go. Delfuenso spent her time writing a note for Lucy. Sorenson spent her time getting out of her pant suit and into the free stuff from the piles on her bed. She said she felt it was going to be a denim kind of night.

Then in a brief before-the-storm pause Delfuenso looked straight at Reacher and said, “Remember, Wadiah has your name and your description.”

Reacher said, “I know.”

“And McQueen has almost certainly told them it was you who killed King. Remember that too.”

“What are you, my mother? Don’t worry about me.”

At that point they had just one weapon between them, which was the Glock 19 from Delfuenso’s bible. She carried it in her right hand, with her ID wallet open and ready in her left. Her phone was in her pants pocket. First port of call was Trapattoni’s room. His light was still on. He answered Delfuenso’s knock within seconds. He was confused by her ID. Like the ground had suddenly shifted under his feet. Not a cocktail waitress. Not an innocent victim. Not anymore. And apparently her ID was better than his. Higher up the food chain. Like an ace of trumps. Maybe because it had been issued by the Hoover Building, not by a regional field office. Reacher didn’t really understand the nuances. But the guy fell in line immediately. He grabbed his suit coat, no questions asked, and he hustled with them all the way over to Bale’s quarters.

Bale put up more of a fight. Apparently he had a bigger ego. The visit started out the same way. Light still on, a fast answer to the knock, genuine surprise at the ID thrust under his nose. Then the guy started to argue. He said he knew nothing about any of this. He hadn’t been informed. He hadn’t been briefed. Delfuenso wasn’t in his chain of command. She was an agent of equal rank, that’s all, Hoover Building or no Hoover Building. She couldn’t tell him what to do.

The guy was immovable. He was all the way up on his high horse.

Which put Delfuenso on the spot. She couldn’t put the guy on the line with the mothership. The Hoover Building was not going to back her up. Not then. Too cautious. The suits were not going to approve a half-assed nighttime guerilla excursion by two women agents and a civilian. Too much risk, too much liability. Way outside the box. All that was left was the power of personal persuasion. Agent to agent. Face to face. And it wasn’t working.

So Reacher hit the guy. Not hard. Just a pop to the solar plexus, left-handed. No big deal. Just enough to fold him up a little. Then it was easy to pin his arms behind his back while Sorenson took his gun out of his shoulder holster, and his spare magazine off his belt, and his cell phone out of one pocket, and his car key out of another. Trapattoni gave up the same four items voluntarily. And with a degree of haste and alacrity.

Reacher put Bale in one armchair, and Trapattoni joined him in the other.

Delfuenso said, “Your job is to stay here and attend to your duties. You still have two guests, one of which is my daughter. I expect her to be kept safe and treated well.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “You gave up your service weapons. Where I come from, that’s a real big no-no. I’m sure it’s the same with you. Do what you’re told, and no one will ever know about it. Step out of line, and I’ll make sure everyone knows about it. You’ll be a laughing stock. Robbed by two women? You’ll be a punchline. You won’t get a job as a dog catcher.”

There was no answer, but Reacher sensed surrender.

They checked both cars and chose the one with more gas, which was Bale’s. Delfuenso drove. Sorenson sat next to her in the front. Reacher sprawled in the back. A hundred yards later the motherly type in the office played it Trapattoni’s way, not Bale’s. She volunteered to look after Lucy, and she hit the button for the gate at the first time of asking. Delfuenso and Sorenson and Reacher got back in Bale’s car and drove away. Around the traffic circle, along the concrete roadway, and out through the gate.

They turned right, north toward the Interstate.

The gate closed again behind them.

A car, three phones, a Glock 19, two Glock 17s, and eighty-eight rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition.

Good to go.

Chapter 62

The twenty-plus miles of dark rural two-lane was hard going at speed, so there was no meaningful conversation until they were through the cloverleaf and heading east on the highway. Bale’s car drove straight and steady, just like Sorenson’s, just like the Impala. Quiet and smooth and unburstable, even at close to a hundred miles an hour. Impressive, Reacher thought.

Delfuenso asked, “What exactly does a CIA head of station do for a living?”

Reacher said, “He’s responsible for a chunk of foreign territory. He lives near and works out of its biggest embassy. He deals with defectors and runs the local agents who work for us.”

Then he said, “Or she.”

Delfuenso asked, “Are there any women CIA heads of station?”

“I have no idea. I was in the army.”

“Did you have female superiors?”

“Whenever fortune felt like smiling on me.”

“Local agents who work for us? What kind?”

“The usual kind. Foreign nationals who because of blackmail, bribes, or ideology betray their countries to us. Now and then the head of station meets with the most important of them.”

“How?”

“Just like in the movies. A lonely café, a back street, a city park, packages on the shelf in a phone booth.”

“Why do they meet?”

“The blackmailed need to hear the threats over again, and the bribed need their bags of money, and the ideologues need to be stroked. And the heads of station need to collect their information.”

“How often do they meet?”

“Could be once a week, could be once a month, whatever the individual agent needs.”

“And the rest of the time this guy is posing as a trade attaché?”

“Or a cultural attaché. Or anything else that doesn’t sound like very much work.”

“And this is Russia and the Middle East and Pakistan and places like that, right?”

“I sincerely hope so,” Reacher said.

“So why would a guy like that try to kill an FBI agent in Nebraska?”

Sorenson said, “He was an Arabic speaker. So maybe one of the Syrians from Wadiah had been one of his agents, back in Syria. Or maybe he still was. Maybe it was all to do with something they started overseas. But no Syrian came to that meet in the bunker, so maybe the CIA guy got suspicious. I mean, from his point of view everyone except his own guy is a bad guy, right?”

“Except that the CIA isn’t allowed to operate inside America.”

“Well, maybe it’s super-covert. Maybe they were going to terminate the guy. Because of unfinished business or something. They’re not going to share that with us.”

Delfuenso said, “But the guy could tell the difference between McQueen and his best Syrian buddy, right? Or what? If he couldn’t terminate the right guy, he might as well just go right ahead and terminate the wrong guy instead? Did I miss that on the CIA web site?”

Reacher said, “They weren’t going to terminate anyone. They wouldn’t send a head of station to do that. They have specialists. They call them wet boys. That’s who they would have sent. And a wet boy wouldn’t have brought his Boy Scout knife. He’d have brought an altogether different kind of knife. And taken an altogether different kind of approach. We wouldn’t even have identified the dead guy yet. Not by fingerprints or face or dental work, anyway.”

Sorenson said, “OK, so it was just a regular meet. No drama. The CIA head of station was running his agent.”

“But his agent didn’t show. So why didn’t he just bullshit his way out of there? Why pull the knife?”

“Maybe he’s not a good bullshitter.”

“He’s a CIA head of station. There are no better bullshitters.”

“Maybe he knew McQueen from somewhere.”

“McQueen didn’t know him.”

“It doesn’t have to be a two-way street. So maybe the guy knew McQueen was FBI, and then he sees him inside a terrorist organization, in which case I guess most people are going to think traitor well before they think undercover.”

“So it was all an innocent accident? Mistaken identity?”

“Some things are simpler than they appear.”

Reacher nodded.

“I know,” he said.

Delfuenso said, “But none of this explains why a CIA head of station showed up posing as a member of a terrorist group. That’s who King and McQueen were sent to meet, don’t forget.”

“Maybe he was undercover too,” Sorenson said.

“The CIA isn’t allowed to operate inside America.”

“This is the modern world, Karen.”

“Two simultaneous undercover operations in the same place at the same time? What would be the odds?”

“Not too long,” Reacher said. “Not necessarily. All it takes is two people to get interested in the same interesting thing.”

“Would they use a head of station for that kind of work?”

“They might. He would be unknown back here. He’d have the skills. He’d be used to the life. He’d speak the language. As far as the paperwork goes, they might say he’s between postings.”

Delfuenso said, “If they killed my guy, I’d burn their house down. So why haven’t we heard from them?”

“You probably have,” Reacher said. “But not personally. Right now it’s probably still one-on-one, in some back room in Washington. Two old white guys in suits. With cigars.”

The clock in Reacher’s head and the mileage boards counting down toward Kansas City showed they were going to beat their two-hour deadline by a decent margin. The trip was going to take an hour forty, or an hour forty-five, max. Not that there wouldn’t be a few extra miles at the end. The bad guys were unlikely to be hiding out in whatever the highway people took to be the exact center of the city. Reacher didn’t expect them to be holding their meetings in the lobby of a downtown hotel.

“It’s a suburban house,” Delfuenso said, like she could hear him thinking. “South of the city, and a little east.”

“How far out of town?”

“Maybe twelve miles.”

An hour fifty-three, he thought, door to door.

He said, “What kind of neighborhood?”

“Decent. And crowded.”

“That’s awkward.”

“Potentially.”

“But well chosen, I suppose.”

Delfuenso nodded at the wheel. “Wadiah is smarter than most of what we see.”

The Paris of the Plains got a mile closer every forty seconds, and Sorenson asked, “What do you know about Peter King?”

Delfuenso said, “Where did you hear that name?”

“Reacher heard Alan King say it.”

Delfuenso glanced at Reacher in the mirror and nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember that. And then he made the slip about a million and a half people living where he lived. Right after claiming he was based in Nebraska. Right after claiming he’d been driving three hours despite a full tank and bottles of cold water.”

Sorenson said, “We know Peter King moved from Denver to Kansas City, seven months ago.”

“You know more than you should.”

“Was his move a coincidence?”

“There are no coincidences. Not in law enforcement. You know that.”

“Is he a cop or an agent?”

“Why would he be?”

“I’m just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s all. He served his country.”

“Then sadly no, Peter King is not a cop or an agent.”

“Is he connected to Wadiah?”

“We think so.”

“How closely connected?”

“We think he might be their leader.”

“I see.”

“Because in terms of their organizational chart there’s only a couple of roles we can’t put a name to, and there’s only a couple of names we can’t assign a role to. One of those roles is leader, and one of those names is Peter King. So to connect the two seems like a fairly logical assumption.”

“With a brother he doesn’t talk to in the ranks?”

“He doesn’t talk to anyone in the ranks. Not if he’s the leader. That’s not how these cells operate. The leader talks to his trusted lieutenants only, two or three of them at the most. Then there’s a chain of command, rigorously compartmentalized, for security.”

“Even so, it’s still weird.”

Delfuenso nodded. “McQueen got to know Alan King pretty well. There’s some kind of strange sibling dynamic going on there. Alan is the kid brother. Or was, I should say now. Very needy guy. Always craving his big brother’s approval. Obsessed by the guy. Which is why he mentioned him last night, I guess. There was no other reason to. Apparently there was some unspoken issue, stretching back more than twenty years. Peter was holding Alan accountable for something. Some kind of lapse or betrayal or disgrace. In return Alan was always trying to prove himself. And McQueen got the impression Peter wanted Alan to prove himself. Like a redemption thing. Tough love, but love nonetheless. You know how it is with family. Blood is thicker than water, and all that kind of shit. From what we know about him, Peter is going to be mighty pissed that Alan is dead.”

“Which must be why McQueen is in trouble. Tonight of all nights.”

Delfuenso nodded again.

“Exactly,” she said. “Let’s hope he’s managing to convince him it was Reacher who did it, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.”

The plain west-east Interstate that had run so serenely all the way through the state of Kansas splintered into a whole mess of beltways and thruways about ten miles short of the line. Delfuenso turned south, still on the Kansas side, and then she headed east again on a federal road with a new number, and they entered Missouri in the overtaking lane at ninety miles an hour, following a sign to a place called Lee’s Summit. But they turned north well before they got there, toward a new place called Raytown, but they never got there, either. They turned off before it slid into view, heading now north and west, into multiple acres of suburban sprawl backed by what Reacher took to be a large park. By day it might have been pretty. By night it was just a big black hole. By that point Delfuenso was driving slow and cautious, nosing the silent car through uncertain turns, pausing hesitantly, moving briskly through patches of light, slowing again in patches of darkness, as if unsure of her destination, or scared of it.

Reacher asked her, “Have you been here before?”

She said, “None of us has, except McQueen. Too soon for that. This phase of an operation is all about standing back and seeing what develops. But I’m copied on the file. I know the address. I’ve seen the house on Google Maps. So I know the general situation.”

The general situation was going to be American suburbia, plain and simple. That was clear. There were municipal sidewalks left and right, mossy concrete, heaved up here and there by tree roots, studded less often by city fireplugs. And Reacher could see houses, regularly spaced in lots, most of them modest, some of them small, a few of them large, all of them dark and fast asleep. Most of them had white siding. Some were painted a color. Most of them were one-story, much wider than they were high. Some had eyebrow windows at the eaves, for upstairs bonus rooms. All had mailboxes and foundation plantings, and lawns, and driveways. Most had cars parked, at least one or two, or sometimes three. Some had children’s bikes outside, dumped and dewy, and soccer goals, or hockey goals, or basketball hoops. Some had flagpoles, with Old Glories hanging limp and gray in the still night air.

“Not what I expected,” Reacher said.

“I told you,” Delfuenso said. “A decent, crowded neighborhood.”

“Syrians don’t stand out here?”

“The pale ones say they’re Italians. The dark ones have been telling people they’re Indians. From the subcontinent. You know, Delhi and Mumbai and places like that. Most people can’t tell the difference. They say they work tech jobs in the city.” Then she slowed, and came to a stop on the curb. She said, “OK, I think we’re about two blocks away. How do you want to do this?”

Reacher had stormed houses before. More than once, less than twenty times, probably. But usually with a full company of MPs, divided into squads, some of them in back, some of them out front, some of them held in reserve in armored trucks with heavy firepower, all of them equipped with working radios. And all of them usually in places cordoned off and cleared of noncombatants. And usually with a bunch of medics standing by. He felt underequipped, and vulnerable.

He said, “We could set fire to the place. That usually works pretty good. They all come running out sooner or later. Except that McQueen could be tied up or locked in or otherwise incapacitated. So we better put one of us in the cellar door, if there is one, and one of us through the front, and one of us through the back. How are your marksmanship skills?”

“Pretty good,” Delfuenso said.

“Not bad,” Sorenson said.

“OK, you’ll have your guns up and out in front of you. Shoot anything that moves. Except if it’s me or McQueen. Use head shots for certainty. Aim at the center of the face. Save rounds. No double taps. We’ll have the advantage for about four seconds. We can’t let it turn into a siege.”

Delfuenso said, “You don’t want to try a decoy approach? I could go to the door and pretend to be lost or something.”

“No,” Reacher said. “Because then after they shoot you in the head Sorenson and I will have to do all the work on our own.”

“Have you done this kind of thing before?”

“Haven’t you?”

“No, this is strictly a SWAT function.”

“It’s usually about fifty-fifty,” Reacher said. “In terms of a happy ending, I mean. That’s been my experience.”

“Maybe we should wait for Quantico.”

“Let’s at least go take a look.”

They slid out of Bale’s car, stealthy and quiet, guns in their hands. They were the only things moving. Dark blue clothing, nearly invisible in the moonlight. They went single file on the sidewalk, instinctively six or eight feet from each other, the whole length of the first block, and across the street without pausing, at that kind of time in that kind of place more likely to come down with a rare disease than get run over by moving traffic. They walked the length of the second block, but slowed toward its end, and bunched up a little, as if discussion might be necessary. Delfuenso had said she knew the house from above, in two dimensions on the computer screen, and she had said she hoped she would know it in three dimensions on the ground. It was all going to depend on what the block looked like from the side. From a human’s point of view, not a satellite camera’s.

They stopped on the corner and Delfuenso peered up the street to their right. It rose on a slight slope, and then it dropped away again. The first few houses were visible. The rest weren’t.

“This is it,” Delfuenso said.

“Which house?”

“The second house over the hill on the left.”

“You sure? We can’t see it yet.”

“The satellite pictures,” she said. “I looked at the neighbors. Up and down the street. And the corners. I know this is the right street. No fire hydrant. Every other corner has had one. This one doesn’t. W for without a fire hydrant, W for Wadiah. That’s how I planned to remember it.”

Reacher glanced around. No fire hydrant.

“Good work,” he said.

Sorenson volunteered to go in through the cellar door. If there was one. If not, she would find a side window and break in from there. Reacher was OK with that. The third angle would help, but it wouldn’t be decisive. Clearly the most dangerous spot would be the front, and clearly the most effective spot would be the back. Only two real choices. Risk and reward.

He said, “I’ll be the back door man.”

Delfuenso said, “Then I’ll take the front.”

“But don’t tell them you’re lost. Shoot them in the face instead. Before they even say hello.”

“We should give Sorenson a head start. If there is a cellar door, I mean. That’s a slower way in.”

“We will,” Reacher said. “When we get there.”

And then they moved off together, walking fast, up the street to their right.

Chapter 63

They stayed off the sidewalk and walked in the road. No point in wasting what little tree cover there was. Reacher stopped them when he figured they were about seven feet below the crest of the rise. From there he and Sorenson would go yard to yard behind the houses, and Delfuenso would pause a long moment and then walk on alone. She would give them that head start because of their sideways detour and their tougher going. Fences, hedges, dogs. Maybe even barbed wire. This was Missouri, after all. The Southern Wire Company of St. Louis had once been the world’s biggest manufacturer of bootleg cattle wire. Three cents a pound. Enough to go round.

But Delfuenso’s approach was always going to be the most dangerous. Lookouts were always posted out front. Not always posted out back. If any approach was going to be spotted, it was going to be hers. Then it would depend on their paranoia level. Which might be high, by that point. Was she just an innocent pedestrian, or was everything a threat now?

There was no barbed wire. No dogs. Suburban pets were too pampered to spend the night outside. Suburban yards were too fancy for wire. But there were hedges and fences. Some of the fences were high and some of the hedges had thorns. But they got through OK. Sorenson was very agile over the fences. Better than Reacher. And thorny hedges could be backed through. Cheap denim was a tough material.

It was going to be hard to tell exactly when they would hit the top of the hill, because they were on flat rolled lawns in yards built up with all kinds of terraced landscaping. But there was a weak moon in the sky and Reacher could see the power lines through the gaps between houses, and he saw them peak on one particular pole, in a very shallow inverted V, and he took that to mean they were at the crest of the rise.

The second house over the hill on the left.

Sorenson got it. She used her hands and mimed it out, one, two, and then she pointed at the two as if to say That’s the target. Reacher nodded and they moved on, through the yard they were in, over a picket fence with rabbit wire stapled to it, into the next yard, which belonged to the target’s next-door neighbor. It was crowded with stuff. There was a gas grill, and lawn chairs, and many and various wheeled vehicles. They were the kind small children sit astride and either pedal or scoot. One was in the shape of a tennis shoe. Reacher stopped and looked at the house. Three bedrooms, probably. Two of them full of kids. Thin walls. Nothing but siding and sheetrock. Better to shoot in the other direction. Unless the other neighbor was an orphanage.

They moved on, to the last fence. They looked over at their target.

Their target was a two-story house.

It was about half as wide and twice as high as any of its neighbors. It had dark red siding. It had what looked like a full-width kitchen across the back. Then would come a front central hallway, probably, with rooms either side. And a staircase. Probably four rooms on the second floor. About the size of any other house, really, but split in half and stacked.

Not good. Not good at all. Two-story houses were about eight times as difficult as one-story houses. That had been Reacher’s experience.

Sorenson looked a question at him.

He winked. Left eye.

They climbed the fence. Into the target’s yard. It was minimally maintained. Rough grass, no flowerbeds. No trees. No ornamental plantings. No grills, no chairs, no toys.

But there was a cellar door.

And it was wide open.

It was the traditional kind of cellar door. Made of pressed metal, maybe five feet long by four feet wide, split down the middle into two halves, built at a very shallow angle into the ground, the top end hard up against the foundation of the house and about a foot and a half higher than the bottom end. It gave onto a short flight of rough wooden steps.

There was no light in the basement. Reacher walked left and right and saw no light anywhere in the house, except behind a small pebble-glass window on the ground floor, on the left-hand side of the building. A powder room, presumably. Occupied, possibly. Worst case, all kinds of fanatics sleeping four to every room, with one of them awake and in the toilet.

Dining room, living room, maybe four rooms upstairs.

Worst case, maybe twenty-four people.

He walked back to Sorenson and she held forked fingers under her eyes and then put them together and pointed them down through the cellar door: I’m going to take a look down there. He nodded. She took the wooden steps slowly and carefully, putting her weight near the outer ends, where creaks were less likely. She reached the concrete floor and ducked her head and disappeared under the house.

Reacher waited. Forty seconds. A whole minute.

Sorenson came back. The duck of the head, the reappearance in the well at the foot of the steps. In the moonlight she looked a little out of breath. But she nodded. OK. It’s clear. Reacher pointed at her, and tapped his left wrist, and then touched his ear. Wait until you hear us at the doors.

Sorenson disappeared again.

Reacher backed away until he could see down the side of the house to the street. Delfuenso was waiting there. In the shadows. She was leaning on a sidewalk tree. She was practically merged with it. He waved. She pushed off the tree. She mimed: What’s happening? A cupped hand, brought up to her shoulder, her elbow tucked in. He shrugged. A big exaggerated gesture: I’m not sure. She held her thumb sideways: Yes or no?

He held his thumb up.

Yes.

She nodded. She took a breath. She held her palms out to him, both hands, including the gun, and she spread all her fingers: In ten.

She curled a finger down: In nine.

Another finger: In eight.

Then she scooted sideways out of the picture, toward the front door, and Reacher did the same thing, toward the back.

Seven. Six. Five. Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Delfuenso had been counting faster than Reacher. He heard a hammering on the front door while his foot was still in the air. The hammering sounded like the butt of a Glock on a steel plate. A steel front door. Reinforced. A security measure. He wondered what kind of resistance the back door was about to offer him.

Not much, as it turned out.

He smashed his boot heel an inch above the knob, accelerating all the way, punching hard through the last final fraction, and the door burst inward and then Reacher was right there in the kitchen, a little fast, but otherwise with no more trouble than stepping over some kind of small hurdle in his way. The hammering continued at the front. The kitchen was cold and empty. Recently used, but currently deserted. Reacher stepped into the hallway, ready to find someone on the way to answer the door, ready to shoot that someone in the back.

The hallway was deserted.

The hammering continued. Loud enough to wake the dead. Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle. There was a dining room on the left. It was full of stuff and full of furniture. But it was empty of people.

There was a parlor on the right.

Full of stuff. Full of furniture.

Empty of people.

There were two more doors off the hallway. One had a bar of light under it. The pebble-glass window. The powder room. Occupied, possibly. Reacher took a long step and raised his boot and smashed it through the lock. The lock proved no stronger than the kitchen’s. The door crashed open and Reacher stepped back with his finger tight on the trigger.

The powder room was empty.

The light was on, but there was no one home.

Then Sorenson stepped in through the final door, leading with her Glock.

“Don’t shoot,” Reacher said. “It’s me.”

He saw the cellar stairs behind her. Empty. No one there.

Ground floor all clear.

He said, “Let Delfuenso in. I’m going to check upstairs.”

He went up. His least favorite situation. He hated the stairs. Everyone did. Everything was against you, including gravity. Your enemy had the high ground and the better angle. And the limitless possibilities of concealment. And the immense satisfaction of seeing you lead with your head.

Not good, but Reacher went up those particular stairs happily enough, because by that point he was certain the house was empty. He had busted into houses before. The vibe was wrong. There was no heartbeat. It felt still and quiet. It felt abandoned.

And it was.

There were four bedrooms with four walk-in closets and two bathrooms, and Reacher checked them all, jerking left and right again, pirouetting like a damn paramilitary ballerina. There should have been music playing, with sudden orchestral climaxes.

All the bedrooms and closets and bathrooms were empty.

There was junk, there were beds, there were clothes, there was furniture.

But there were no people.

Ground floor all clear.

Second floor all clear.

Nobody home.

Which in some small portion of everyone’s mind is a very welcome result. Human nature. Relief. Anticlimax. Peace with honor. But Reacher and Sorenson and Delfuenso met in the central hallway and admitted to nothing but frustration. If McQueen wasn’t there, he had to be somewhere else just as bad, if not worse. He had been evacuated in a hurry.

“They must have a bigger place somewhere,” Reacher said. “Surely. They’re supposed to be two medium-sized groups working together. This place is too small for them, apart from anything else. This place is just a pied-à-terre, or officers’ quarters, or guest quarters. Something like that. Some kind of extra facility.”

“Could be a mail drop,” Sorenson said.

“McQueen lived here,” Delfuenso said. “We know that for sure. He told us so, and we have seven months of GPS to prove it.”

Reacher walked up and down the hallway, turning lights on as he went. He lit up the dining room and he lit up the parlor. He lit up the kitchen. He said, “Start looking. If they’re back and forth between two places regularly, they’ll have left some kind of a trace. However well they cleaned up.”

And they had cleaned up pretty well. That was clear. They had done a decent job. But not in any conventional sense. There was considerable disarray. There were used dishes in the sink. The beds were unmade. Sofa cushions had not been plumped, old newspapers had not been removed, the trash had not been taken out. Mugs had not been washed, ashtrays had not been emptied, clothes had not been folded and put away. The occupants had gotten out fast.

But they had prioritized. They had taken a lot of stuff with them. That was where their clean-up effort had been spent. Mail, paperwork, bills, bureaucracy, officialdom. No trace of any such items had been left behind. No names. No papers large or small. No scraps. No notes, no doodles, no messages. Not that Reacher was expecting to find a treasure map with OUR HQ and an arrow on it, in bright red ink. But most people leave something behind. Some small unconsidered item. A toll receipt, a matchbook, a cinema ticket. In the trash, dropped in a corner, under a sofa cushion. These guys hadn’t. They were pretty good. Careful, meticulous, alert and aware. Very disciplined. That was clear. Disciplined on an ongoing day-to-day basis, too. Not just high days and holidays. Good security. Further progress was going to depend on a random mistake.

Then Sorenson called from the kitchen.

With the random mistake.

Chapter 64

Sorenson had seven big-size McDonald’s paper sacks lined up on the kitchen counter. Take-out food. The bags were used and stained and crumpled. Sorenson had emptied them all. There were soda cups and milk shake cups and burger clamshells and apple pie wrappers. There were cheeseburger papers and register receipts. There was old lettuce going brown, and chopped onion going slimy, and ketchup packets going crusted.

Sorenson said, “They like McDonald’s.”

“Not a crime in itself,” Reacher said. “I like McDonald’s.”

“But it’s a good plan B,” Delfuenso said. “We could leave them alone and they’ll die anyway in five years from heart attacks.”

“They like McDonald’s,” Sorenson said again. “My guess is pretty much every day they sent a gofer to the nearest drive-through for a couple of sacks. I bet there’s a drive-through not more than five minutes from here.”

“This is America, after all,” Delfuenso said.

“And maybe you get the taste for it. So when you’re stationed at your other camp, maybe you look for a drive-through near there, too. And maybe once in a while if you have to make the trip all the way from A to B, you stop at the drive-through near A and you load up with a little something for the ride. And then if you have to make the trip all the way back again from B to A, maybe you stop at the drive-through near B and you do the same thing.”

“And you cross-pollute your garbage,” Reacher said.

Sorenson nodded.

“Exactly,” she said. “You buy a burger and fries and a soda, and you eat it in the car along the way, except maybe you don’t finish the soda, so you carry the sack into the house at the end of the trip and you finish it right here. In this kitchen. And then you dump the sack in the trash. Which is hygienic, but the bad news is you just linked two geographic areas that should have stayed separate.”

Reacher asked, “What do the register receipts tell us?”

“Six of them are from one place and the seventh is different.”

“Where is the seventh from?”

“I don’t know. It’s not an address. It’s a code number.”

Sorenson couldn’t go through her field office. As far as her field office was concerned she was quarantined in the motel in Kansas, at the central region’s express request. So she got on-line on Trapattoni’s phone and found a PR number for McDonald’s. She wasn’t optimistic. Any jerk could call from a cell phone and say she was with the FBI. She was expecting a long and tedious runaround.

So Reacher asked Delfuenso, “How is McQueen’s GPS data recorded?”

“Screen shots,” she said. “Lines and points of light on a map. You can choose the interval. A week, a day, an hour, whatever you want.”

“Can they do seven months?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“How would you get it if you needed to see it?”

“By e-mail. To my phone, if necessary.”

“We need to see it.”

“They think I’m holed up in that motel.”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to tell them you aren’t. Just tell them you’re going crazy doing nothing and you want to help out. Tell them you have a theory and you want to work on it. Tell them you might as well do something while you’re sitting there. Tell them you’ll get right back to them if it pans out.”

“What theory?”

“Doesn’t matter. Be shy about it. Just tell them you need the data.”

Delfuenso dialed her phone, and Sorenson got put on hold for the second time.

By that point they were two hours and nearly thirty minutes into it. Reacher figured Quantico would be well into the process of gearing up. He wasn’t exactly sure how FBI SWAT teams worked. Maybe they had pre-packed trucks ready for the drive out to Andrews Air Force Base. Or maybe they used helicopters. Or maybe they stored their stuff at Andrews permanently, all ready to go. Then would come the long flight west. Well over a thousand miles. In an Air Force C-17, he figured. He doubted that the FBI had heavy jets of its own. Then the landing, at Kansas City’s own municipal airport, way to the northwest, or at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, about twenty miles south. If Richards-Gebaur was still in business. He wasn’t sure. Plenty of places had been abandoned, right at the time his own career was coming to an end. A systemic problem. In which case Whiteman Air Force Base would be the only alternative, sixty miles to the east. Then would come more trucks or helicopters, and then painstaking tactical preparations, and then finally action.

Eight hours. It’s a big country. There’s a lot to organize.

The choice of airport would depend on where McQueen was. Sorenson was still talking her way through a corporate maze. Delfuenso was staring at her phone, willing an e-mail to arrive. Time was ticking away. Reacher figured they might end up doing nothing more than guiding the Quantico team in on target. Like forward observers. Like Peter King.

Better than nothing.

*  *  *

Sorenson got her information first. Such as it was. There had been no real opposition from the McDonald’s main office. No real secrecy or obfuscation. Just confusion, and a certain amount of incompetence, and a lot of hold music and phone tag. Eventually she had ended up talking to a minimum-wage server at the franchise in question. A burger flipper. On a wall phone, probably. She could hear tile echo and raw fries being plunged into hot oil. She asked the server for his location.

“I’m in the kitchen,” the boy said.

“No, I mean, where is your restaurant?”

The boy didn’t answer. Like he didn’t know how. Sorenson thought she could hear him chewing his lip. She thought he wanted to say, Well, the restaurant is on the other side of the counter. You know, like, from the kitchen.

She asked him, “What is your mailing address?”

He said, “Mine?”

“No, the restaurant’s.”

“I don’t know. I never mailed anything to the restaurant.”

“Where is it located?”

“The restaurant?”

“Yes, the restaurant.”

“Just past Lacey’s. You can’t miss it.”

“Where is Lacey’s?”

“Just past the Texaco.”

“On what road?”

“Right here on Route 65.”

“What’s the name of the town you’re in?”

“I don’t think it has a name.”

“Unincorporated land?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“OK, what’s the nearest town with a name?”

“Big town?”

“We could start with that.”

“That would be Kansas City, I guess.”

Then there was some yelling. A manager, Sorenson thought. Something about clean-up time.

The kid said, “Ma’am, I got to go,” and hung up the phone.

* * *

Sorenson put her phone on the kitchen counter and Reacher looked a question at her and she said, “Route 65, near something called Lacey’s, just past a Texaco station.”

Reacher said nothing.

Sorenson got back on-line on her phone and called up a map. She made all kinds of pinching and spreading and wiping motions with her fingertips. On and on. Her face was falling all the time. She said, “Terrific. Route 65 runs all the way through the state, north to south, from Iowa to Arkansas. It’s nearly three hundred miles long.”

“Any sign of Lacey’s?”

“This is a map. Not the business pages. Lacey’s is probably a store of some kind. Or a bait shop. Or a bar.” But she stayed with it. She went ahead and searched on-line. She typed Lacey’s + Kansas City. Nothing. Then Lacey’s + Missouri.

She said, “It’s a small grocery chain.”

She dabbed her finger against the glass to follow a link. The phone was slow. Then the site came up and she started with the wiping and the pinching and the spreading again. She said, “They have three locations on Route 65. Each one about twenty miles apart. Like an arc. They’re all about sixty miles from the city.”

Two hours and forty minutes into it.

“Making progress,” Reacher said.

Then Delfuenso’s phone pinged, for an incoming e-mail.

Chapter 65

The seven-month screen shot was laid over a grayed-out satellite image of five contiguous central states. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. More than three hundred and forty thousand square miles. More than twenty-six million people.

McQueen’s movements among those miles and those people were recorded as thin amber lines. His recent jaunt up from Kansas to Nebraska to Iowa and back again to Kansas showed up as a faint jagged rectangle. There were some other long spidery lines. But not many. He had made very few other long-haul trips. Most of his movements had been concentrated close to Kansas City itself. At that position on the map the amber lines overlaid one another like a manic scribble. Almost a solid mass. The lines were bright where they repeated one over the other. Some spots looked like holes burned in the screen.

Reacher asked, “Can you zoom in?”

Delfuenso did the spreading thing with her fingers, like Sorenson had. She expanded the manic scribble. She centered it on the screen. She zoomed it some more. She centered it again. The solid mass became a knotted tangle of movements. The bright lines dimmed as they separated.

But two spots still burned stubbornly hot. Two locations, each one visited maybe hundreds of times. The inch of space between them was a river of light. A journey back and forth, made maybe hundreds of times. One spot was southwest of the other. Like a seven on a clock face, and a two.

“Point A and point B,” Reacher said. “Can’t be anything else.”

Sorenson got the map back on her screen. She put her phone next to Delfuenso’s. She zoomed and wiped until she matched the state line, where the die-straight border between Kansas and Missouri suddenly looped off course, to follow the banks of the Missouri River. She said, “OK, point A is right here, on this street, basically. In this house, obviously.” Then she scrolled north and east, both phones at once, both index fingers moving in lockstep, precise and delicate. She said, “And point B is very close to the northernmost Lacey’s store.”

Sixty miles. Through mazy suburbs, and along dark country roads.

Two hours and fifty minutes into it.

Plus another hour, now.

Maybe more.

“Let’s go,” Reacher said.

Bale’s car had GPS, which helped. Sorenson read the address for the northernmost Lacey’s off her phone, and Delfuenso entered it in the machine. Then she lit up the strobes and took off, loud and fast. No more need for stealth. Not around point A, anyway. Point B would be a different matter. She said she would deal with that when they got there.

The same satellites that had tracked McQueen got the car out of town after almost no time at all in the mazy suburbs. Score one for technology, Reacher thought. The cold hard logic in the circuits sent them what he was sure was the wrong way, down a bland street he was certain was a dead end. But then a concealed right and a shallow left brought them to one of the beltway on-ramps, and six fast miles after that they turned east on I-70, along the southern edge of Independence, Missouri. President Harry S Truman’s hometown. Reacher’s favorite president. The highway was straight and empty, and a hundred miles an hour was easy. Reacher began to feel a little more optimistic. They were going to make it to point B within about fifty minutes, total. Which was good. Because even if the Quantico guys were already in the air by then, which they had to be, they still had a long way to come.

They left the highway at a small road in the middle of nowhere, but by that point Reacher was trusting the system. He was watching the arrow, and the gray lines. He saw how Route 65 dog-legged north of where they were. It jogged east toward a town called Marshall. Some historical reason, presumably. The GPS was cutting the corner. It was going to join Route 65 right after a famous Civil War battlefield site. Reacher knew his American history. That particular field had seen a nine-hour artillery duel. The Kings of Battle. With observers. And crude incendiary rounds. The Confederate gunners had heated their cannonballs in fires, hoping to set things ablaze. The Union gunners had worn red stripes on their pants.

Out his window the moonlight showed fields on both sides of the road, all churned up by animals, all fenced in with wire. There were gates and water troughs and giant piles of feed covered over with tarpaulins, and weighted down with old car tires.

“Farm country again,” Sorenson said. “Is that what it’s going to be? A farm?”

“A farm would make sense,” Reacher said. “Somewhere isolated. With barns, and so on. For vehicles. And for storage. And for dormitories, maybe. For many dormitories, possibly. I don’t know how many people there are in two medium-sized groups.”

“Not too many,” Delfuenso said. “Not necessarily. Half a dozen is called medium. Up to maybe fifteen or twenty. So it’ll be somewhere between twelve and forty.”

“That’s enough,” Sorenson said. “Don’t you think?”

Reacher said nothing. They had eighty-eight rounds of ammunition. The last figures he had seen in the army showed that an average infantryman records one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended. In which case, for forty opponents, they would need six hundred thousand rounds. Not eighty-eight. Alternatively they would need to be a lot smarter than an average infantryman.

*  *  *

Route 65 wore its status lightly. It was three hundred miles long and it split the state, but in person it looked like any other country road. Maybe a little wider, maybe a little better surfaced, but otherwise it had nothing to recommend it. Almost immediately it crossed the mighty Missouri on an iron trestle. But that was its only point of interest. After the bridge it ran north through the darkness, anonymously, never really deviating, never really staying straight. Then Sorenson said, “OK, we’re about ten miles south. I don’t know which way the kid at the McDonald’s was orienting himself. I don’t know if we’re going to see the Texaco station and the Lacey’s store first, or whether we’re going to hit the McDonald’s first.”

Delfuenso killed the strobes. Five miles after that, she started to slow. Two miles later, she killed the rest of her lights. The world shrank around them, instantly dark blue and misty. There was no Texaco sign ahead. No blaze of light from a supermarket window. No red neon, no golden arches.

“Keep going,” Sorenson said.

Delfuenso crept onward, at maybe twenty miles an hour. Not as hard as it looked. The yellow line in the center of the road showed up gray and kept them on course. There was some forward visibility. Not much, but enough for twenty miles an hour. People could run faster.

Still no Texaco, no Lacey’s, no McDonald’s. Or no McDonald’s, no Lacey’s, no Texaco, depending on what the order was going to be. Reacher looked left and right, as far as he could into the fields. They were dark and flat and empty. Nothing to see. Not that he expected a neon sign saying Last Terrorist Hideout Before the Interstate. But twelve or forty people usually put on some kind of a show. Maybe the glow of an outhouse lamp around a warped door, or a lookout’s cigarette, or a locked car’s alarm flashing gently on the dash, or the blue haze of an insomniac’s television behind a badly drawn drape.

But there was nothing.

Delfuenso said, “We must have gone wrong somewhere.”

Sorenson said, “No, this is the right road. The Lacey’s should be dead ahead.”

“Are those web site maps always accurate?”

“Government GPS is always accurate. Point B is dead ahead, too.”

Reacher said, “So make a note, in case you have to talk to Quantico. Tell them Whiteman Air Force Base would be the best place to land.”

“Talk to Quantico? You mean, if we fail to get the job done and I’m the only survivor?”

“Obviously there’s a number of possible outcomes.”

“And that’s one of them?”

“That’s two of them. We might fail to get the job done with no survivors.”

Chapter 66

A fast food restaurant and a grocery store and a gas station put out a lot of electric light, so they had been expecting to see a glow a mile or so before they got there. But as it turned out they were already halfway past the McDonald’s before they even noticed it. It was closed for the night. As was Lacey’s, the grocery store. As was the Texaco station.

Reacher hoped they weren’t on the blue boards on the highway. Or it would be a classic deceptive exit. The gas station looked like a ghost ship. No lights anywhere. Just a tangle of strange dark shapes rising up out of the ground. The grocery store was a sullen gray mass, as big as a hill, but angular. And without the red and yellow neon and the fluorescent tubes inside, the McDonald’s was just another small A-frame silhouette against the sky. It could have been any kind of a low-rent operation, all closed up and done for the day.

“I heard the manager shouting in the background,” Sorenson said. “Something about clean-up time. I guess that’s what they do when they’re about to close.”

Reacher said, “So where’s point B?”

Sorenson did her twin-phone thing again. She calibrated them against the Interstate. She got them both lined up. She scaled them the same. She took a breath and said, “If the grocery store web site is accurate, then point B is about a mile northwest of our current position.”

“That’s out in the fields,” Reacher said.

“It’s a farm,” Delfuenso said. “I knew it would be.”

They left the car parked sideways across three spaces in Lacey’s front lot. They tracked around the dark bulk of the building and came out at the back. Just reconnaissance at that point. Just purely. Strictly a preliminary survey. An immediate attack would have been pinning a lot of hopes on a grocery store’s web site. For one thing, the symbol the web site had used to mark the spot would scale up to about a mile wide.

Reacher had seen from Bale’s GPS that Route 65 was strictly a north-south deal. So he lined himself up with it and faced the way they had been driving. Then he made a forty-five degree turn to his left and pointed. He said, “That’s northwest. What do you see?”

Not much, was the consensus. And it was true. But it was equally true there was even less to see in any other direction. Somehow the dark was darker due west and due north. As if there really was something there in the northwest quarter. Invisible, but there. They strained their eyes, they relaxed, they defocused, they looked away, they tried peripheral vision. They saw nothing. But it felt like a substantial kind of nothing.

Reacher said, “Can you do Google Maps?”

Sorenson said, “Cell service is not good enough out here.”

So they went back to the car and Reacher fiddled with Bale’s GPS. He zoomed it in, and in, until he was sure all the little roads were there. Then he moved their current position to the right of the screen.

The space behind Lacey’s was bounded on the right by Route 65, and on the left by a small road running parallel, and at the top by one east-west two-lane, and at the bottom by another. An empty box, more or less square, but not quite. Technically it was a parallelogram, because the roads at the top and the bottom sloped down a little from right to left. It wasn’t a particularly big empty box. But it wasn’t small either. Exact scale was hard to determine on the GPS screen, but worst case, the box was a mile on a side. Best case, it might have been two miles by two. Reacher said, “That’s somewhere between six hundred and forty and two thousand five hundred and sixty acres. Is that too big for a single farm?”

Sorenson said, “There are just over two million individual farms in the United States, working almost a billion acres, for an average farm size of close to five hundred acres. Statistics. We find them useful.”

“But an average is just an average, right? If there’s a bunch of moms and pops working five or ten acres, then someone is working twenty-five hundred.”

“Livestock, maybe. Or industrial corn.”

“There’s livestock here. I saw the hoof marks.”

“You think it’s all one farm?”

“Maximum of five,” Reacher said. “Shouldn’t take too long to check them all.”

Delfuenso’s phone buzzed. The secret phone. From her bible. It was set on silent, but it didn’t sound very silent to Reacher. Whatever little motor produced the vibration was whining away like a dentist’s drill. Delfuenso answered and listened for a long minute. Then she acknowledged and hung up.

“My boss,” she said. “With a new factor for my theory. He wondered if it might be pertinent.”

“What theory?” Reacher said.

“The thing I claimed to be working on to get the GPS data. The thing I had to be shy about.”

“What new factor?”

“Now the State Department spokespeople are denying the dead guy in the pumping station was anything to do with them. They’re saying he was just a guy. Definitely not a consular official, or any other kind of employee. Double definitely not, fingers in their ears, la, la, la.”

“But he was fingerprinted. He’s in the system now.”

“An understandable error. Forensics is always quick and dirty in the field.”

“Bullshit,” Sorenson said. “My people are good.”

“I know they are.”

“So?”

“So maybe it’s State’s spin control that’s quick and dirty.”

Reacher nodded. “Why don’t they just take out an ad in the paper? This way they’re practically proving the guy was CIA.”

“To us, maybe. But we knew already. This way the rest of the world can sleep easy at night.”

“Or is it a legal thing? This way they can deny they were operating inside America.”

“Everyone knows they operate inside America. They gave up hiding that a long time ago.”

“Then they’re proving something else, too. This guy wasn’t just CIA. He was bent CIA. He wasn’t undercover. He was guest starring. Why else deny him?”

“You think a CIA head of station was a double agent?”

“They can count that high over there. Being a triple agent might pose a challenge.”

“I don’t like the idea of a CIA insider talking to Wadiah.”

“Didn’t happen,” Reacher said. “Your guy knifed him too soon for talking.”

“They’d been together before. They must have been. At least for a few minutes. I think they walked to that bunker as a threesome.”

Like suddenly the first guy had bolted ahead, and the other two guys were hustling to keep up.

“Probably,” Reacher said.

“So they must have talked.”

“Probably.”

“I want to know what they said.”

“We’ll ask McQueen. When we find him.”

“Tell me the answer to that word game. Where you have to speak for a minute without using the letter A.”

“Is that how you want to remember me?”

“I could win a couple of bar bets.”

“That was a game with Alan King.”

“I overheard.”

“Later,” Reacher said. “When we’ve found McQueen. He’ll want to hear it too.”

“He was asleep.”

“I doubt he ever sleeps.”

“How many acres was it?”

“Doesn’t matter about acres. This is about buildings. We’ll know it when we see it.”

And they saw it and knew it exactly ten minutes later, after six hundred yards on foot.

Chapter 67

They formed up in back of the grocery store, where they had stood before. They aligned themselves with the road, for reference, and they turned forty-five degrees left, as before. Northwest. Reacher took a last look at McQueen’s GPS tracks. At maximum magnification they hooked around an angle, like an upside-down letter J. Clearly there was a vehicle entrance off the top east-west two-lane. McQueen had driven north on Route 65, past the McDonald’s, past the Lacey’s store, past the Texaco station, and then he had turned left, and left again, into a driveway. He had done all that enough times to burn the evidence into a photograph. And its bright end point was just about right on the diagonal across the parallelogram. About halfway along its length. Which in terms of miles would be half of the square root of two, at the pessimistic end of the scale, or half of the square root of eight, at the optimistic end. Close to thirteen hundred yards, or close to twenty-five hundred. Either twenty minutes’ walk, or forty. Or somewhere in between. They would be coming up on whatever it was from the rear three-quarter direction. Not bad. Better than the front, certainly, and better than head-on toward the back. Not as good as sideways-on. If any house had a blank wall, it would be on the side. Or a wall with token windows, maybe with pebble glass, powder rooms or bathrooms. Like the place in the suburbs, sixty miles away.

They separated laterally as much as they dared. Delfuenso started out way to the left, and Sorenson started out way to the right. Reacher was in the middle, and he could see both of them, but only just. They couldn’t see each other. Delfuenso set out first. Then minutes later Sorenson walked out into the dirt. Reacher came last. Three targets, widely separated side to side, widely separated front to back. Dark clothes, dark night. Maybe not yet smarter than the average infantryman, but not any dumber, either.

There was heavy mud underfoot, all churned up and lumpy and unreliable. Some of it felt slick and slippery. Animal dung, Reacher assumed, although he still couldn’t smell anything. He kept his eyes fixed on an imaginary spot on the horizon, to keep his progress straight. He had Bale’s Glock in his right hand, down by his side. Ahead of him and far to his left he could just about see Delfuenso. A shadowy figure, barely there at all. But she was making decent progress. Short steps, energetic, really working it. He could see Sorenson a little better. She wasn’t so far ahead. And she was marginally paler than Delfuenso. Blonde, not dark. The moon was still out in places, but it was low in the sky and not bright.

Safe enough.

So far.

The mud kept their speed low. Reacher revised his estimates. Not twenty minutes or forty. It would take closer to thirty minutes or sixty. Frustrating, but not a disaster. The Quantico guys were still at thirty-five thousand feet. Probably somewhere over West Virginia. Still hours away. He trudged onward, slipping and sliding.

Then he began to slow. Because the blank view ahead of him seemed to be solidifying. Just a sense. There was some kind of substance there. Still invisible. Not a small distant farmhouse, presumably. Something bulkier. Maybe a giant barn. Sheet metal, or corrugated tin. Painted black. Blacker than the night itself.

On his left Delfuenso was slowing too. She was sensing the same thing. And on his right Sorenson was altering course a little. Her line was drifting closer to his. Delfuenso was edging in, too. There was something ahead of them, and instinct was telling them not to face it alone.

Reacher walked on, staring ahead. Seeing nothing. His vision was as good as anyone else’s. He had never worn eyeglasses. He could read in dim light. And in the black of night the human eye was supposed to be able to see a candle flame a mile away. Maybe more. And initial adaptation to the dark was supposed to happen within four seconds. The iris was supposed to open wide. To the max. And then retinal chemistry was supposed to kick in over the next few minutes. Like turning up a volume knob. But Reacher could see nothing ahead. It was like he was blind. Except that in this case seeing nothing felt like a version of seeing something. There was something there.

A breeze came up and flapped his pants. The air felt suddenly cold. Ahead on his right Sorenson was waiting for him. And Delfuenso was cutting in toward him. They were abandoning their separation. They were making one big target. Bad tactics. They met up a minute later. They regrouped. All three of them together, way out in the field, like they had been at the beginning, behind Lacey’s loading dock.

“This is weird,” Sorenson whispered. “There’s a big shape out there.”

“What shape?” Reacher asked. Maybe her eyes were better than his.

“Like a big patch of nothing. Like a hole in the air.”

“That’s what I’m seeing,” Reacher said. “A big patch of nothing.”

“But a low patch of nothing,” Delfuenso said. The breeze blew again and she shivered. She said, “Start high. Look at the sky. Then move down. You can see an edge. Where one kind of nothing changes to another kind of nothing.”

Reacher looked at the sky. Ahead of them in the north and the west it was padded with thick black cloud. No light at all. Way behind them in the southeast was a patch of thinner gray. Sullen moonlight, through a fissure. Not much. But there was wind up there. The thinner clouds were moving. Maybe the fissure would open wider. Or maybe it would close up altogether.

He faced front again and started high and moved his gaze down. Looking for Delfuenso’s edge. Looking hard. But not seeing it. There was no other kind of nothing. It was all the same kind of nothing to him.

He asked, “How low?”

“Above the horizon, but not by much.”

“I can’t even see the horizon.”

“I’m not imagining it.”

“I’m sure you’re not. We’ll have to get closer. You up for that?”

“Yes,” Delfuenso said.

Sorenson nodded, blonde hair moving in the dark.

They walked on, staying close. Ten yards. Twenty yards.

Staring ahead.

Seeing nothing.

Thirty yards.

And then they saw it. Maybe the greater proximity did the trick, or maybe the wind moved the cloud and threw a couple of extra moonbeams down to earth. Or maybe both.

It wasn’t a farm.

Chapter 68

It looked like a capsized battleship. Like a hull, upside down and beached. It was black, and hard, and strangely rounded in places. It was long and low. It was deep. It was maybe hundreds of feet from side to side, and hundreds of feet from front to back. It was maybe forty feet tall. It was about the size of the Lacey’s supermarket. But far more substantial. Lacey’s was a cheap and cynical commercial structure. Lacey’s looked like it would blow away in a storm. And plenty of similar establishments had.

But this thing out in the field looked bombproof. Something about the way it was hunched down in the earth suggested concrete many feet thick. The radiused haunches where walls met roofs suggested immense strength. Its corners were rounded. There were no doors or windows. There seemed to be a waist-high railing all around the edge of the roof. Tubular steel.

They walked closer. Forty yards later they had a better view. Reacher glanced back. Behind them the wind was nibbling at the fissure in the clouds. The moon was coming out. Which was both good and bad. He wanted a little more light, but not too much more. Too much more could be a problem.

He faced front again and started to see detail up ahead. The building wasn’t black. Not exclusively. It was also dark brown and dark green. Dull flat nonreflective paint, thickly applied in giant random slashes and spikes and daggers.

Camouflage.

A U.S. Army pattern, dating back to the 1960s, to the best of Reacher’s recollection.

Delfuenso whispered, “What is it?”

“Not sure,” Reacher said. “An abandoned military installation, obviously. The fence is gone. Some farmer got a hundred extra acres. I don’t know what it was originally. It’s blastproof, clearly. Could have been for storage of air-defense missiles, possibly. Or it could have been an ammunition factory. In which case the concrete is protecting the outside from the inside, not the other way around. I would have to see the main doors to know more. Missile storage needs big doors, for the transporters. An ammunition factory would have smaller doors.”

“Abandoned when?”

“That’s a very old camouflage pattern. So the place hasn’t been painted in fifty years. It was abandoned after Vietnam, maybe. Which might make it more likely it was an ammunition factory. We didn’t need so many bullets or shells after that. But we cut back a little on missiles too. So it could be either.”

“Why is it still here?”

“These places can’t be demolished. How would you do it? They were built to take on a lot more than a wrecking ball.”

“How do people get a place like this?”

“Maybe they bought it. The DoD is happy to take what it can get. Or maybe they’re squatting. No one checks on places like this. Not anymore. No manpower. There are too many of them. Your granddad’s tax dollars at work.”

“It’s huge.”

“I know it is. You want to revise your personnel estimate? You could get more than forty people in there. You could get four hundred.”

“You could get four thousand in there.”

“Didn’t McQueen give you a figure?”

“A terrorist headcount is a moving target. He never saw everyone at once. I’m still betting on a couple of dozen, tops.”

“They must be rattling around in there.”

“How do we do this?”

“Very carefully.”

“Where do we start?”

Reacher glanced at her. And then at Sorenson. The guy in the field knew he was watched over by people who would react instantly if he ran into trouble. But instantly was a big word. They were very close to four hours into a mission launched because eight hours had seemed ludicrously long. Was four hours an instant? Not even close.

So was eight hours so much worse?

He said, “The smart money is on very careful surveillance. We need to study that place from all four sides.”

Delfuenso said, “That would take hours.”

“So be it.”

“You mean we should wait for Quantico.”

“It’s an option.”

“But not a good one,” Delfuenso said. “Especially not for Don McQueen.”

“I agree.”

“So the dumb money is on attacking without adequate preparation. Is that our choice?”

“Call it half-assed preparation.”

“To be honest, in what way are we even minimally prepared?”

“We’re tooled up,” Reacher said. “We’re awake, and they might not be.”

Sorenson said, “If we don’t do something now, there’s no point doing anything at all. That’s our situation, right? And that’s a military kind of problem, isn’t it? Did you train for this stuff?”

“I trained for all kinds of things. Usually by starting with a little history. Back in the day the Soviets had some pretty big missiles. That thing in front of us was built to stand up to one. We have three handguns.”

“But suppose you were the inside man?”

“I’m all in favor of helping McQueen.”

Delfuenso said, “Just not with us?”

“There were certain things I never had to say to my own people. Because it was right there in the job description.”

“What certain things?”

“You could get killed or maimed, doing this.”

“Is there a way we can reduce that risk? Without taking hours?”

“Yes, there is,” Reacher said.

They invested seven minutes in talking through the contingencies. There was no point in making a plan. No plan could survive the first exchange of fire. No plan ever did. Except in this case it was impossible to make a plan, anyway. Because there was no information.

They turned away from the building and sat down in a line in the dirt and talked. This might happen, that might happen. They agreed on some rules of thumb. They nailed down some basic procedures. Reacher was reasonably optimistic about getting close to the concrete. Neither a missile hangar nor an ammunition factory needed gun ports. And there was no way to drill your own. Even with a missile. So the place was not bristling with guns. Therefore the approach from distance would be safe enough. After that, there would be plenty of things to worry about. There would be sentries on the roof, presumably. Behind the tubular steel railing. On a walkway. Or maybe a running track. But not many sentries. And all of them so far untested. Reacher knew his history. Sentries were sometimes more trouble than they were worth.

They ran out of things to say. There was an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private jokes. They don’t translate between cultures. So none were made. All three of them just stood up mute and turned around and paced off distances and got into their starting positions. They looked ahead through the dark and identified their personal targets.

“Ready?” Reacher said.

Sorenson said, “Good to go.”

Delfuenso said, “Yes.”

“Remember, speed and direction. No deviation from either. Now go.”

They stood up.

They started walking.

All went well, until Sorenson was shot in the head.

Chapter 69

Reacher heard it all in reverse order. Because of the speed of sound, and because of how close he was to Sorenson, and because of how far he was from the building. He heard the wet punch of the bullet finding its target, and a split second later he heard the supersonic crack of the bullet’s flight through the air, and a split second after that he heard the boom of the rifle that fired it from four hundred yards away. By which time he was already on the ground. He moved on the first sound, throwing himself down, and before he even hit the dirt he had some early conclusions, thoughts not so much developing as flashing fully formed in his mind: He knew it was a sniper rifle, probably an M14 or equivalent, probably a .308, and he knew it had no night scope, or he himself would have been the first target, given human nature, and therefore he knew Sorenson had been spotted simply because she was pale in the moonlight, her skin and her hair just marginally more visible than his or Delfuenso’s.

He knew all of that, instantly and instinctively. And he knew Sorenson was dead. He knew it for sure. There was no mistaking the sound. He had heard such sounds before. It had been a head shot, through and through, in and out, 168 grains at more than twenty-six hundred feet per second, hitting with more than twenty-six hundred foot-pounds of energy, dropping more than twenty-six inches from four hundred yards, like a curveball finding the strike zone.

Not survivable.

Not even remotely.

He waited.

There was no second shot.

He moved his hands. He rubbed dirt on them, front and back. He dragged dirt up to his face and smeared it on.

He moved his head.

He couldn’t see Delfuenso.

Which was good. She was on the ground somewhere, head down and invisible. He looked the other way. He saw a faint gleam in the dirt. Small and pale. Sorenson’s hand. Either her right or her left, depending on how she had fallen.

He knew there would be no answer, but even so, he whispered, “Julia?”

There was no answer.

So he whispered, “Delfuenso?”

No answer.

“Delfuenso? Karen? Are you there?”

A breathy voice came back in the dark: “Reacher? Are you hit?”

He said, “Sorenson was.”

“Bad?”

“Worse than bad.” He started crawling, elbows and knees, head down. The back part of his brain told him he must look like a bug on a bed sheet. The front part told him no, if he was visible he would be dead already. He risked a glance ahead, one eye, and adjusted course a fraction. He stopped an arm’s length from the pale gleam in the dirt. He reached out and found Sorenson’s hand. It was still warm. He found her wrist. He laid two fingers on it.

You could get killed or maimed, doing this.

I don’t need you to look after me.

There was no pulse. Just limp, clammy skin. All the invisible thousand muscular tensions of the living were gone. He crawled half a yard closer. He followed her arm, to her shoulder, to her neck.

No pulse.

Her neck was slick with slippery blood and gelatinous brain tissue and gritty with bone fragments. Her jaw was still there. And her nose. And her eyes, once blue and amused and quizzical. There was nothing left above her eyes. She had been hit in the center of the forehead. The top of her head had come off. Hair and all. Her scalp would be hanging down somewhere, attached by a thread of skin. He had seen such things before.

He checked her neck one more time.

No pulse.

He wiped his hand in the dirt and patted around for her pistol. He couldn’t find it. It could have been anywhere. Black polycarbonate, in the dead of night. He gave up on it. He found her shoulder again, and the small of her back, and he slipped his hand under her sweater and moved it around and took the spare magazine off her belt. Her hip was still warm. A cotton shirt, and her body under it, somewhere between hard and soft. He lay on his belly and stuffed the magazine in his pocket. Then he backed away, elbows and knees, and he turned like a crab and crawled over to Delfuenso’s position. A long way. Thirty or forty yards.

Delfuenso whispered, “Is she dead?”

He said, “Instantaneous.”

There was a long, long pause.

Then Delfuenso said, “Shit, I really liked her.”

“Me too,” Reacher said.

“A person like that is the best of the Bureau.”

Something wild in her voice.

“Shit happens,” Reacher said. “Get over it.”

“Is that how you army people react to things?”

“How do you FBI people react to things?”

She didn’t answer.

She said, “So what now?”

“You should go back to the car,” Reacher said. “Keep low all the way. Call Quantico and update them. Remember, tell them Whiteman Air Force Base is their best shot. Maybe you should call Omaha, too. Her SAC is a guy called Tony Perry. I talked to him once. And I think the night duty agent was a friend of hers. So break it gently. Also her tech guy. He should hear it personally.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“No,” Reacher said. “I’m going to find that sniper.”

“You can’t do that alone.”

“You can’t come with me. You have a kid.”

“I can’t let you. I’m ordering you to withdraw.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Let Quantico take care of it.”

“McQueen can’t wait that long.”

“You’ll be killed. There could be hundreds of them in there.”

“You said two dozen.”

“Even so. Two dozen men. They’re trained for this kind of thing.”

“And now we’re about to find out how well they’re trained. Maybe they were great in high school, but let’s see if they can hit a Major League fastball.”

“They could be vicious.”

“They don’t know the meaning of the word. Not yet.”

“I can’t let you do it. You won’t survive. I might as well shoot you now.”

“You can’t stop me. I’m a civilian.”

“Therefore McQueen and Sorenson are nothing to you. Let us look after our own.”

“I would,” Reacher said. “But I don’t hear any SWAT planes in the air.”

“They’re close.”

“They’re over Ohio. Maybe Indiana. That’s not close.”

“How does it help if you get shot too?”

“It doesn’t. But I might not.”

“There’s a number of possible outcomes, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “There are.”

“And that’s definitely one of them.”

“Yes,” he said again. “It is.”

“So why?”

“Because I liked Sorenson. I liked her a lot. She was fair and decent to me.”

“So come to her memorial service. Write to the newspaper. Start a fund for a statue. You don’t have to go into battle for her.”

“Battle offers me better odds.”

“In what way?”

“It gives me some kind of a chance to survive the night.”

“How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you’re guaranteed to survive the night.”

“No,” Reacher said. “If I come back with you, I’m guaranteed to die of shame.”

There was no more conversation. No more argument. No more back and forth. Just an awkward silence. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private. So neither Reacher nor Delfuenso said anything. She just looked at his face. He wasn’t sure why. It was all smeared with dirt. With cowshit, probably. Maybe it was just as well his nose wasn’t working.

Delfuenso said, “Good luck.”

Then she backed away, elbows and knees, and she crabbed through a turn and set off back the way they had come, toward Lacey’s store. Reacher watched her until she was lost to sight. He waited a minute more, to be sure she wasn’t going to break her word and double back. He knew she wanted to. But she didn’t. Because of Lucy, presumably. You have a kid. It was about the only line she hadn’t argued with, in all of their long conversation.

He waited a minute more, to be doubly sure, and then he turned around the other way and crawled forward into the darkness.

Chapter 70

West Point had talked for hundreds of hours about tactics and strategy, and Reacher had paid attention, in a theoretical way. But in a practical way he preferred his own methods. Which were based entirely on the other guys. No point in thinking about himself all the time. He knew his own strengths, which were few, and his own weaknesses, which were many. It was the other guys that mattered. What were their strengths?

Well, they were good shooters. Or at least one of them was. That was clear. A head shot at four hundred yards in the dark of night was by no means extraordinary, but it was thoroughly competent.

But apart from that, they wouldn’t have much. And their weaknesses would be significant. Mostly caused by fear. They would be so accustomed to secrecy and paranoia their perceptions would be permanently altered. As in: Reacher was betting that right then they were making two very bad decisions. First, they were overthinking his approach. They were assuming anyone originally with Sorenson would now either quit or track around ninety or more degrees and come at them from a different direction. They were briefly considering a double bluff from such a person, but paranoia prefers triple bluffs to doubles, so they were focusing their main attentions on the three new angles, not the one old angle. The southeast approach was now considered sterile, as far as they were concerned. No doubt they would post a guy or two anyway, but they wouldn’t be their best guys, and they would be spending most of their time craning over their shoulders toward where they thought the real action was.

And therefore second, they were about to send out a party into that safe and sterile corridor, to haul away Sorenson’s body. Because they were worried about who she was. And because they couldn’t leave her lying out there. It wasn’t their land. Some farmer’s granddaddy had given it up to the DoD, way back in the day, and then these many years later the granddaddy’s grandson had gotten it back again, and he was working it, starting early every morning, like farmers do. So for secrecy’s sake the body had to go. And real soon. Paranoia waits for no man. Five or ten minutes, Reacher thought. They would come out one of the larger doors on the north side. Two of them, probably. In a vehicle. They would drive straight over.

They would stop ten feet from where Reacher had dug himself into the dirt.

It was eight minutes, and they did exactly what Reacher was expecting. A pick-up truck came looping around out of the north, on the same trajectory but at a tighter angle than McQueen’s upside-down-J-shape GPS tracks. It was a gray truck. Primer, maybe. Hard to see in the moonlight. But there. Not a crew cab. Just a regular pick-up. It headed straight over, bouncing on the dirt. It was showing no lights. Secrecy, and paranoia. The cab was dark and shadowed. No detail to be seen inside. But there would be two guys minimum. Maximum of three. More likely two.

The truck slowed and two guys hung their heads out the windows, looking for what they had come for. Sorenson’s hair was clotting black by then, but there was still enough white skin to guide them in. Still enough of a gleam in the pale moonlight. They acquired their target and rolled through the last twenty yards and backed up with their tailgate near where she lay. They got out together and stood still for a moment.

Two of them. Not three. The dome light in the cab proved it. Unarmed. Nothing held in their hands, nothing slung on their backs.

They walked toward her.

Reacher was not a superstitious man, nor was he spiritual in any way, nor did he care for ancient taboos. But it was important to him they didn’t touch her.

They shuffled around and looked down, in a headscratching kind of a way. Like any two grunts anywhere, handed a task. They were Syrians, Reacher figured. But pale. The alleged Italians. They looked stunted. Small, wiry frames. Thin necks.

They got themselves set. They planted their feet. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their job was pretty obvious. The mechanics were self-evident. The geometry was what it was. The one on the left would do half the work, and the one on the right would do the other half. They would pick up what they could, and the dawn birds would take care of the rest.

They bent their knees.

And the ground behind them opened like a folk tale and a giant nightmare figure rose up out of it, shedding dirt and slime like a waterfall, and it took one long step and smashed its right fist into the back of the left-hand guy’s neck, a huge, vicious, downward-clubbing blow, like the apparition was driving a railroad spike with its knuckles, and then after the impact there was a long, elegant follow-through, the huge fist sweeping way down past the knee, then immediately whipping back up, the same route, like a convulsion, the giant figure jerking at the waist, its elbow smashing the right-hand guy square in the throat.

Then Reacher knelt on the first guy’s chest, and pinched the guy’s nose shut with the fingers of one hand, and jammed the other hand palm-down over the guy’s mouth.

No struggle. Already dead.

The second guy struggled. But not for long.

Reacher wiped his hands in the dirt and headed for the pick-up truck.

Chapter 71

Their guns were in the truck, dumped on the seats. Two Colt submachine guns, with canvas slings. Like M16 rifles, basically, but shorter and chambered for the nine-millimeter Parabellum. American made, nine hundred rounds a minute, twenty-round magazines, your choice of full auto or three-round bursts or single shots. Reacher didn’t like them much. America had never really gotten into the submachine gun business. Not in a convincing way. There were many better choices to be had from Europe. Steyr, or Heckler and Koch. Just ask Delta Force. Or Quantico, for that matter. The guys on the plane wouldn’t be armed with Colts. That was for damn sure.

But still. Something was better than nothing. Reacher checked them over. They were loaded and they seemed to work. He closed the passenger door and tracked around to the driver’s side. He pushed the seat back and got in. The engine was still running. The truck was a Ford. Nothing fancy. He wound both windows down and tucked his Glock under his right thigh and piled both Colts on the passenger seat.

Good to go.

He counted to three and put the truck in gear and moved off slowly. The ground that had felt churned up and lumpy and unreliable underfoot felt just as bad under the wheels. The truck shuddered and slipped and bounced on stiff, load-ready springs. He followed the same course the two guys had used on the way out. A straight line, basically, to the top corner of the building. Its huge bulk stayed shadowy and indistinct most of the way. But as he got closer he saw more of it. Then suddenly it was right there, out his open window. Like driving past a docked ocean liner. Poured concrete, no doubt reinforced inside by thick steel bars, and shaped by temporary wooden formwork. He could see the wood grain here and there, preserved forever. The curves had been made by stepping flat planks around a radius. What looked smooth from a distance looked brutal and discontinuous up close. In places wet concrete had been forced out through gaps between boards. The building looked like it was lined with unfinished seams. The camouflage paint was thick and cross-hatched with brush strokes. Not a tidy job. But then, camouflage talent was all about pattern, viewed from afar. Not application, viewed from up close.

He slowed and took a breath and hauled on the wheel and made the turn around the top corner and saw the north face of the building for the first time. It was a blank concrete wall with three giant protuberances coming out of it. Like squat semicircular concrete tunnels, parallel, each one straight and maybe a hundred feet long. Like elongated igloo entrances. For air raid protection. There would be blast doors at both ends of the tunnels, never to be open at the same time. Trucks would drive in through the first door, and then pause in a kind of quarantine. The first door would close behind them, and the second door would open in front of them. Then the trucks would drive on. Getting out would be the same procedure in reverse. The interior of the structure would never be exposed to external pressure waves.

Missile storage, Reacher thought. The Cold War. Anything, anywhere, anytime. If the military wanted it, the military got it. In fact the military got it whether it wanted it or not.

First question: which of the three entrance tunnels was currently in use?

Which was an easy question to answer. The moonlight showed tire tracks quite clearly. The soft earth was beaten down into two ruts, in and out of the center tunnel. Practically a highway.

Reacher held his curve, wide and easy, and then he bumped down into an established track that would bring him head-on to the center door. Which was closed. It had a frame wider than the mouth of the tunnel. Like an airplane hangar. The door would open in two halves, like a theater curtain, rolling on big iron wheels and rails.

Open how? There was no radio in the car. No surveillance camera near the door. No light beam to be tripped, no call button, no intercom. Reacher drove slowly forward, unsure, with the door ahead of him like a high steel wall. Behind the railing on the roof he could see sentries. Five of them, long guns over their shoulders on slings, peering out into the middle distance in what looked like a fairly desultory fashion. Sentry duty was arduous and boring. Not what the average adventurer signs up for. No excitement. No glamour.

Reacher came to a stop with the pick-up’s grill a yard from the door.

The door started to open.

The two halves broke some kind of a seal between them and set off grinding back along their tracks, driven by what sounded like truck engines straining under the load. The whole assembly must have weighed hundreds of tons. Blastproof. Whatever the military wanted. The gap widened. Two feet. Three. There was dim light in the tunnel. Weak bulbs, in wire cages, strung out along the ceiling. Reacher tugged the Glock out from under his leg. He held it, low down and out of sight.

The doors stopped when the gap got to be about seven feet wide. Enough for a passenger vehicle. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and put his left hand on the wheel and touched the gas and rolled inside.

And saw four things: a guy right next to him, right next to a big red button near the first door, and a guy a hundred feet away, right next to a big red button near the second door.

His earlier advice to Delfuenso: Shoot them in the face, before they even say hello.

Which he did, with the first guy. Although not technically in the face. He raised the Glock a little higher and drilled the guy through the center of the forehead, about where Sorenson had gotten hers.

Save rounds. No double taps. Which was OK. The first one had worked just fine. The guy was in some kind of a baggy green uniform. He had a handgun on his belt, in a big flapped holster. Not like any military thing Reacher had ever seen. More like folk art.

Reacher looked up again. The second guy was too far away. A hundred feet was too long for a handgun. So he stepped out of the truck and hit the big red button. The giant door started to close again behind him. He waited. The second guy waited. Still a hundred feet away. Still too far for a handgun. So Reacher got back in the truck and put his seat belt on. Then he stamped on the gas and accelerated. Straight at the second guy. Who froze for a fatal second. Who fumbled with his big flapped holster. Who gave up on it and ran. Away from his door. No way to open it in a hurry. Not an escape hatch. The mechanism was too slow. The guy was going to take his chances loose inside the tunnel. Which was dumb. The guy wasn’t thinking strategically. He wasn’t thinking himself into his opponent’s frame of mind. He was going to duck and dive and dodge, and then dart away and hug the side wall. He was going to assume no driver would risk wrecking his vehicle against the concrete.

Reacher drove on, left-handed.

And sure enough, the guy feinted one way, and feinted the other, and then slammed himself flat against the wall, like a bullfighter, assuming Reacher would swing close but swerve away before contact.

Mistake.

Reacher ran straight into him at about thirty miles an hour, smashing the front of the truck mercilessly into the concrete, taking the guy between the knees and the waist, crushing him, seeing the shock on his face, and then the hood panel folded up from the crash like a concertina and he didn’t see him anymore. Reacher was slammed against his seat belt and the windshield shattered and the truck came up on its front wheels and then crashed back down and Reacher was thrown back hard against the cushion. All kinds of smoke and steam rose up. The noise had been short but loud and it had brought ferocious echoes off the concrete, tearing, crushing metal, breaking glass, harsh clangs from separating components. Bumpers, Reacher thought, and headlight bezels and hub caps. Things like that.

The tunnel went quiet. Reacher sat still for a second. He figured very little would have been heard beyond the second door. If anything at all. The door was designed to be effective against a hundred-megaton atom bomb. The pop of a single nine-millimeter round and the sound of a car crash would be nothing to it.

He forced open his distorted door and climbed out of the wreckage. He stepped around to what was left of the hood. The second guy was about cut in half. Bleeding badly from every hole he had. He was dark haired and dark skinned. Foreign, for sure. But we all bleed the same color red. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of his misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price.

The Colt submachine guns were all tangled in the passenger foot well, thrown there by the crash. Reacher lined them up straight and hung one on his left shoulder, and one on his right. He swapped out the Glock’s two-gone magazine for the fresh one he had taken from Sorenson’s belt. Two rounds can make a difference.

Then he walked the rest of the tunnel and pushed the big red button.

Chapter 72

Reacher heard a whine like a starter motor, and a cough, and then two huge truck engines burst into life and the second door started to open. Up close and on foot it was a different experience. The truck engines were as big and as loud as anything they put on a Mack or a Peterbilt. The doors were huge and thick, like buildings all their own.

And up close and on foot they seemed to move faster. Or maybe that was an illusion. Which would be understandable. Because the gap was going to be man-sized a long time before it was vehicle-sized. Everything was relative. Ten more seconds and the gap would be big enough to step out on stage.

The big diesels dug in, and the gap grew two feet wide.

Then two and a half.

Reacher raised the Glock.

He stepped through the gap.

No one there.

Reacher was in an empty garage. The space was maybe forty feet by forty. It had a sad old pick-up truck in one corner, gray primer, down at the front on a flat tire, but that was it in terms of vehicle content. The rest was all empty space and oil stains. All the way to the back wall, which was a recent installation in plywood. The side walls and the ceiling were the original concrete. And in fact the side walls and the ceiling were all more or less the same thing. Like a tunnel, continuing on from the entrance tunnel, forty feet wide and probably four hundred feet long, but now interrupted by the new partition.

There were three ways out of the garage, not counting the door Reacher had just come in through, which would be a fourth. There was a new door dead ahead in the plywood partition, and there was an original door in each of the side walls. In those two original spots the tunnel’s vaulted curve was straightened out by a door frame cast so thick and so deep it was almost a tunnel in itself. Reacher pictured the complexity of the lumber formwork, and the anxious DoD engineers inspecting it, and the immense stress it was under until the mass of concrete had set.

The original door on the right was taped over.

It had a sheet of heavy see-through plastic laid over it, fixed at the edges with what looked like a whole roll of duct tape.

Purpose unknown.

But Reacher’s motto was If in doubt, turn left, so he went the other way. Through the other original door, in the left-hand side wall. The door itself was a stout old item faced in some kind of faded laminate. Probably a real big deal fifty years ago. Some kind of a new wonder material. The handle was a plain steel affair, but thick and solid. Probably cost a thousand dollars all on its own.

Reacher turned the thick steel handle and pushed the door and stepped into a square room made from two old walls and two new. Some kind of a crew room. Comfortable chairs, low to the ground. A man in one of the chairs. Not McQueen. He started to get up. He went back down easily enough. Center mass, not a head shot. Safer. More to aim at. Instantaneous brain death not required. Not in that situation. The guy’s finger was not on a launch button.

The crew room had a second door, and Reacher kept the Glock hard on it until he was sure no one was coming to the rescue. Then he moved on, through that second door, into a long narrow internal hallway that ran away from him to the right, four hundred feet or more. He was beginning to see the layout. The building inside was three parallel chambers, long and thin, like three cigars laid side by side. Corresponding with the three entrances. All full of missiles, way back when. Then empty, just three long echoing vaults. Now colonized and boxed off with plywood. Long central hallways, rooms to the left, rooms to the right, repeated three times over. Which was ironic. What goes around comes around. The modern DoD had started out exactly the same way. Massive expansion at the start of World War Two had left it scrambling. It burrowed into whatever unsuitable old building it could find.

The bad news was, there were a lot of new rooms. Possibly forty per chamber. A total of a hundred and twenty. Plus or minus. Quantico would arrive before he was halfway through the search. Which would be a problem. They would have gotten Delfuenso’s call well before then. She would have told them to land at Whiteman and head north locked and loaded and ready to rock and roll. The crossfire was not going to be pretty.

And the even worse news was plywood was not a good insulator of sound. Which meant the last gunshot had been clearly audible throughout fully one-third of the facility. So Reacher ducked back the way he had come, through the crew room, past the dead guy in the low-slung chair, and into the garage again. The big mechanized doors were still standing open. Like pulled drapes. Beyond them was the hundred-foot entrance tunnel, still with the two dead guys and the wrecked pick-up in it. Reacher found the inside button and hit it. The starter whined and the big diesels caught and the doors began to close. The noise was deafening. Which was exactly what Reacher wanted. Given a choice he liked his rear flank protected, and he wanted plenty of audible warning if someone tried to come in after him.

Then he walked the depth of the garage space and tried the new door in the plywood end partition. It opened into the same kind of long, narrow central corridor. Rooms to the left, rooms to the right. The center vault, colonized just like the first vault. Some of the doors had blue spots on them. Plastic circles, cut out and glued on. The second room on the left and the second room on the right both had one. That pattern repeated every three rooms as far as the eye could see.

Reacher checked behind him. The door he had come through had two blue spots.

He listened hard and heard nothing. He took a breath and counted to three and set off walking. To the second door on the right. A cheap store-bought item. With a thin chrome handle. And a blue spot, at eye level.

He turned the thin chrome handle. He pushed open the door. A room, of decent size. Empty. No people. No furniture. No nothing, except what had been there all along, which was another original door through the side wall. It was identical to the first two he had seen, with the complex cast frame like a tunnel all its own, and the pale old laminate facing, and the heavy steel handle. Clearly the blue spot meant a way through, side to side. A shortcut, from chamber to chamber. For busy people. The garage door got two blue spots because it had ways through both left and right. The lateral access was an efficiency measure. Both now, apparently, and certainly back when missiles roamed the earth. It would have been time-consuming for a technician to walk the whole length of the building and go outside and then come back in down a different tunnel. Far better to facilitate a little cross-town traffic. Maybe every sixty feet or so. Some guy with a clipboard would have figured that out, long ago. The architects would have gotten to work, with drafting tables and sharpened pencils, and load factors calculated with slide rules and guesswork.

Reacher was in a room on the right-hand side of the row. And just like the door he had seen on the right in the garage, this door on the right was also covered over with thick see-through plastic, which was also stuck down very carefully at the edges with duct tape. Lots of it.

Purpose unknown.

He had two motel keys in his pocket. One from the fat man’s place in Iowa, and one from the FBI’s quarantine spot in Kansas. The fat man’s key was sharper. The tang at the end had been left pretty rough by the key-cutting process. Maybe the key was a replacement. Maybe some guest had headed home with the original still in his pocket, and maybe the fat man’s policy was to use the cheapest services he could find.

Reacher pressed the see-through plastic against the faded old laminate behind it, and he scratched at it with the tip of the key. The key snagged and jumped and made pulls and blisters. The blisters went thin and puffy and the second go-round with the key started a hole in one of them. Reacher got the tip of the key in the hole and sawed away at it, cutting where he could, stretching and tearing where he couldn’t. When the slit reached three inches long he put the key back in his pocket and hooked his fingers in the slit, palms out, and he forced his hands apart.

The plastic was tough. Some kind of heavy grade. Not like the tissue-thin stuff he had seen painters use as drop cloths. More like shrink-wrap. He had seen people struggling with it. Supermarkets should sell switchblades, right next to the salami. He got the slit about twelve inches long and the tension went out of it. He had to start a new cut with the key. He learned from that experience. He changed his technique, to a rhythmic cut-yank-cut-yank sequence, with the key in his mouth between cuts. Eventually he got it done, more or less all the way from top to bottom, very stretched and ragged, but big enough to force himself through.

He put his arm through the hole and turned the heavy steel handle and pushed the door with his fingertips. Nothing but darkness beyond. And cold air. And a silent acoustic suggestive of vast space and hard walls.

He turned sideways and forced himself through the slit in the plastic, leading with the Glock, then his right foot, then his right shoulder, ducking his head, pulling his left arm and his left foot after him. He used touch and feel, tracing the shape of the cast frame around the door, closing the door behind him, searching for a light switch. He knew there would be one. Those old-time architects with their drafting tables and their sharpened pencils would have been plenty thorough. The electrical plans would have been a whole separate sheaf of blueprints.

He found an electric conduit on the wall. Steel pipe, thickly painted, cold to the touch, covered in dust. He traced it back to a square metal box, maybe four inches by four, with a dimple on its front face, and a cold brass toggle in the dimple.

He turned the lights on.

Chapter 73

The third chamber was not subdivided. It was in its original state. It was a tunnel, roughly semicircular in section, forty feet wide, maybe four hundred feet long, just over head high at the side walls, perhaps thirty feet tall at the peak of the vaulted ceiling. It was formed from concrete, poured and cast like the outside, with wood grain showing here and there, with stepped curves, with thin ragged ribs and seams where the formwork had leaked. It was unpainted, but no longer raw. It was mellow and faded and dusty, after many patient decades. It had a blank wall at the far end, and it had blastproof doors at the near end, with a mechanism exactly like the one Reacher had used in the center chamber.

It was not empty.

All along the center of the space was a nose-to-tail line of enormous flatbed semi trailers. No tractor units. Just the trailers, one after the other, like a traffic jam on the highway. Each trailer was close to fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. There were eight of them. Each of them had four load-bearing axles at the rear, and two huge cantilevered arms at the front, first rearing up at a steep angle, and then reaching forward at a shallower angle, ready to latch into the tractor unit, like gigantic insect antennas.

They were all painted the color of sand. Desert camouflage base coat. Reacher knew exactly what they were. They were components from the army’s HET system. Heavy Equipment Transporter. This particular type of trailer was called the M747. Its matching tractor unit was called the M746. Both had been built by the Oshkosh Corporation in Wisconsin. Both had been taken out of front-line service after the Gulf War in 1991. Neither had proved sufficiently durable. Their task had been to haul Abrams battle tanks around. Battle tanks were built for tank battles, not for driving from A to B on public roads. Roads got ruined, tracks wore out, between-maintenance hours were wasted unproductively. Hence tank transporters. But Abrams tanks weighed more than sixty tons, and wear and tear on the HETs was prodigious. Back to the drawing board. The old-generation hardware was relegated to lighter duties.

But in this case, not much lighter.

Each of the eight trailers was loaded with a nose-to-tail pair of flasks or vats or containers. For some kind of liquid, clearly. But really big. Tens of thousands of gallons. Each unit was the size of four Volkswagens stacked two on two, like bricks. The size of a small room. They were made of steel, rolled and folded and hydroformed, and welded, like squat fat bottles, with a protective frame all around, the function of the bottle and the function of the frame so well integrated it was hard to see where one finished and the other began. Overall they were like rounded-off cubes, about twelve feet long, by twelve feet wide, by twelve feet high, reinforced in places for strength and durability. The steel looked thick and solid. Maybe it was backed with an extra mineral layer. An innovation.

But not a recent invention. Because nothing in the chamber was recent. There was a thick layer of dust over everything. Over the massive containers, over the flatbed trailers, over the concrete floor. Gray, and spectral, and undisturbed. Under the trailers most of the tires looked soft. Some of them were flat completely. There were cobwebs. The scene was archaeological. Like breaking through into a Pharaoh’s tomb. The first to lay eyes on it for five thousand years.

Or twenty years, maybe. The physical evidence was there. The age of the equipment. The dust. The perished rubber. The still air. The chill. It was perfectly possible to believe those trailers had been backed in two decades ago, and detached from their tractor units, never to move again, and then walled off, and left behind, and forgotten.

Eight trailers. Sixteen containers. Sixty-four Volkswagens. The steel was painted bright yellow, now faded a little by dust and time. On the side of each one, at a modest size, no bigger than a basketball, was stenciled a design first sketched in 1946, by a bunch of smart guys at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Smart guys with time on their hands, designing a symbol, coming up with what they thought was stuff coming out of an atom. Most people thought it was three fat propeller blades, black on yellow.

Nuclear waste.

Chapter 74

Reacher killed the lights and squeezed back through the slit in the plastic. He crossed the empty room and stepped out to the corridor. And saw three people. All men. They were walking away from him, talking as they went, piles of three-ring binders in their arms. Shirtsleeves. Dark pants. Unarmed. None of them was McQueen.

Reacher let them go. The cost outweighed the gain. Too noisy, for no real reason. They opened a blue-spot door on the left, way far up the corridor. Clearly heading sideways into the first chamber. Four spots down, one room over, one room back. Or whatever. Like map coordinates. Not unlike getting around the Pentagon.

They had come out of a room ahead and on the left of where Reacher was standing. Its door was open, and it hadn’t been before. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and walked the thirty feet. The room was an office, maybe twenty feet by seventeen, with one concrete wall and three plywood walls. All four walls were full of shelves. The floor was full of desks. Both desks and shelves were full of paper. Loose, in stacks, clipped together, in rubber bands, in binders. The paper was full of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figure numbers, of no great interest or appeal, just raw material to be added and subtracted and multiplied. Which they had been. Most of the papers were like ledger pages.

No computers.

All paper.

More footsteps in the corridor.

Reacher listened hard. He heard a door open. He heard it close. He heard nothing else. He stepped back out to the hallway. He figured if McQueen was being held prisoner somewhere, it would be deep in the bowels. Four hundred feet away, potentially. Way in the back, far from the outside world. In one of two chambers. A complex search pattern. And the long central hallways were deathtraps. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Apart from the rooms with blue spots. But there weren’t many of them. And worrying about sideways escape routes didn’t do much for sustained forward motion.

That’s a military kind of problem, isn’t it? Did you train for this stuff?

Not exactly. Not without people and ordnance and helicopters and radios and fire support. Which he didn’t have.

He checked the room opposite. Another office, twenty feet by seventeen, shelves, desks, papers, numbers. Lots of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figures, all of them added and subtracted. All of them carefully recorded and accounted for. He checked the room next door. Same exact thing. Desks, shelves, papers, and numbers. He retraced his steps and headed back to the first room he had come from. The room with the lateral door.

He heard more footsteps in the hallway.

He stepped inside the room and closed the door.

Now he heard lots of footsteps in the hallway.

People, running.

People, shouting.

He went Glock-first through the slit in the plastic and closed the door behind him.

The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. Reacher hustled the length of the third chamber, four hundred feet, past all the abandoned trailers, past all the huge sinister bottles. Dust came up from under his feet. It was like walking in thin snow. For the first time he was glad about his busted nose. His nasal passages were lined with scab tissue. Without it he would be sneezing like crazy.

The last original door was ten feet from the end of the tunnel. Exactly in line with the last yellow bottle. Exactly in line with its radiation symbol. Reacher pulled it open and took out the fat man’s motel key and fought his way through the plastic skin. Cut, rip, cut, rip. Easier in that direction. The plastic bellied out into the room and he could keep plenty of tension on it. The space beyond was empty. It had been built like a room, but it was being used like a lobby.

He listened at the door to the corridor. He heard sounds, but they were distant. They were the sounds of chaos and confusion. A hurried search, combing the length of the building, moving away from him. He was behind the front lines. Way in the back, far from the outside world.

He opened the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet to his left men were going room to room. Five of them, maybe, searching, in and out, in and out. Moving away from him.

The door opposite had a blue spot. It would be empty. Built like a room, used like a lobby. So Reacher started one room down, across the corridor. No blue spot. He crept over to it, slow and silent. He opened the door. An office. Shelves, desks, paper. A man behind one of the desks. Reacher shot him in the head. The blast of the gunshot ripped through the chamber, barely muffled at all by the plywood partitions. Reacher stepped back to the door. He peered out. Hundreds of feet away the five searchers were frozen in place, bodies moving one way, eyes the other. Reacher put the Glock in his pocket and took the Colt off his shoulder. The submachine gun. He clicked it to full auto and held it high and sighted down the barrel. He pulled the trigger and fought the muzzle climb. Twenty rounds at the rate of nine hundred a minute. Less than a second and a half. Smooth as a sewing machine. All five men went down. Probably three dead, one wounded, one panicking. Not that Reacher was keeping score. He already knew the score. He was winning. So far.

He dropped the empty gun and slipped the other Colt off his other shoulder. He thought: Time to visit the first chamber. Time to keep them guessing. He ducked back to the door with the blue spot. He opened it. He went in. Built like a room, used like a lobby.

But not empty.

There was a staircase in it.

It was a metal thing, like a ladder, steep, like something from a warship. It led into a vertical tunnel through the roof concrete. At the top of the vertical tunnel was a square steel hatch, massive, with cantilevered arms and springs and a rotary locking wheel, like in a submarine. It was closed. Reacher figured it would be domed on the outside, designed to seat itself tighter under the pulsing pressure of a blast wave.

The locking wheel drove pegs through a complicated sequence of gears, into clips all around the rim. The wheel was in the unlocked position. That was obvious. None of the pegs was engaged. Clearly the guys on the roof had closed the hatch behind them, to hide the light from below. To preserve their night vision, and for secrecy. But they had left it unlocked, so they could get back in. Common sense.

The smart move would have been to shin up the ladder and spin the locking wheel so that whoever was out there stayed out there. That way Reacher could have continued his inside activities undisturbed.

But the sniper was out there. With his M14, and his one-gone magazine, and probably a big smug smile on his face.

Reacher turned out the lobby light. He waited four seconds in the dark, for his irises to open wide. Then another minute, for his retinal chemistry to kick in. Then he found the handrail by feel and started climbing.

Chapter 75

Reacher got to the top of the ladder and felt around in the dark and used an after-image of what he had seen. He figured the hatch might weigh a few tons. Maybe more, if it was some kind of a sophisticated steel-and-concrete sandwich construction. Which it might be, because of radiation concerns. Those old-time architects would have been well schooled in such things. Possibly by the pointy-heads at the University of California. No point in designing a hatch to survive a blast if it was going to leak gamma rays afterward. But no human could lift several tons while standing on a ladder. Which meant the bulk of the weight would be counterbalanced by the springs. Which meant the hatch should open with a decent push.

He pushed.

The hatch rose two inches. Accompanied by deep twanging and grinding from the springs.

Loud.

He waited.

A band of not-quite-black showed around three sides of the rim. He figured the sentries would be standing at the edge railing. Which would put three-quarters of them some distance away. The roof was the size of Yankee Stadium. Only those on the south side were close.

He pushed again, harder.

The hatch rose another foot.

More twanging and grinding.

No reaction.

He pushed again. The hatch opened all the way. Ninety degrees, like a door. He looked up and saw a square of dark Missouri sky. The hatch was hinged on the north side of the square. The ladder was bolted to the east side. Which meant he would come out with his front and his back and his right-hand side all vulnerable.

Which meant he should come out fast. Which was not easy to do. No way of keeping his finger on the trigger. The moment of maximum danger. Every mission had one. He hated stairs. He hated leading with his head.

He clamped the Colt in his right hand, between the flat of his thumb and his palm. He jumped his left hand up, rung by rung. He got the Colt out and put his knuckles on the roof, like an ape. He twisted at the waist and got his left hand flat on the concrete.

He took a breath and counted to three and vaulted out.

He got up in a crouch and held the Colt high, jerking it side to side as he scanned around. The house-storming shuffle, all over again.

He was close to the edge of the roof, on the south side. To his half left was the sterile southeastern corridor. No one there. To his right was the west, with a lone shadowy figure faraway at the rail, looking away from him. He turned north and saw five figures staring out where Bale’s GPS had shown the two-lane. They thought Sorenson’s approach had been a cross-country diversion. They thought the main attack was coming from the road.

Overthinking, and paranoia.

He clicked the second Colt to single shots and moved behind the upright hatch. It would give him partial three-quarters cover from the west and the north. He rested his left elbow on it. He sighted in on the guy in the west. Two hundred feet, maybe. An easy shot with any kind of a rifle. An easy shot with any kind of an H&K sub, which were generally as good as rifles, at short-to-medium distances. Unknown, with the Colt. But better than the Glock. A handgun at two hundred feet was the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.

Reacher was a good long-distance marksman. He had won competitions. But not under conditions like he faced at that moment. He needed to see two things at once. His current target, and the reaction from the other five guys three hundred feet and seventy degrees farther on, when they heard the shot. He needed to see their vague silhouettes turn toward the sound. He needed to identify the shape of the M14. He needed to know which one of them was the sniper.

Because the sniper was next.

He rested the front sight on the guy in the west. He breathed out and kept his lungs empty. Calm and quiet. Calm and quiet. He could feel his heart, but the front sight wasn’t moving. He was good to go.

He eased his trigger finger tighter. And tighter. Smooth, microscopic, relentless. Flesh on metal on metal. He felt the break coming.

The gun fired.

Bright flash, loud sound.

Bull’s eye.

The guy in the west jerked slightly and fell down vertically.

The five guys in the north spun around.

The sniper was the middle guy. Third from the left, third from the right. Reacher saw the M14 in his hands. Slope arms, out in front of him, turning with him. A familiar shape. Forty-seven inches long, the dull gleam of walnut in the moonlight. Almost four hundred feet away. Reacher moved around the raised hatch lid, slow and easy, no rush at all, and he sighted in, and he breathed in and breathed out, and out, and out, and he fired again.

A miss.

But not a disaster. The round drifted a little left and down and caught the next guy low in the throat.

Reacher leaned a fraction clockwise to compensate and fired again. But by that point the four survivors were all moving. A nine-millimeter Parabellum takes a third of a second to travel four hundred feet, and a third of a second is long enough for a guy to move enough.

A miss.

No one went down.

One in the chamber, seventeen in the box. Reacher moved his thumb and switched to triples. His preferred option, with a B-grade weapon. Quantity, not quality. A random little triangle, like jabbing with a three-legged stool. He aimed generally right and fired.

The right-hand guy went down.

Three survivors. From left to right, numbers one, three, and four. They all knelt and fired back. Wild misses, except for the M14. The .308 came close. But not very. Which was telling. The guy was OK with no pressure at all. But in the heat of the moment he wasn’t the best in the world. Reacher figured they could put that on the guy’s tombstone: Great against unsuspecting women in the dark. Otherwise, not so much.

Reacher fired again, at numbers three and four, the sniper and his immediate neighbor, like a composite target. A triple.

Number four went down.

Not the sniper.

Two survivors.

Reacher had one in the chamber, and eleven in the box. Plus the Glock and two spare magazines, one of them full and one of them two short. He could use the Glock’s rounds in the Colt, if he had to. Same nine-millimeter Parabellums. The magic of standardization. He had no idea what the two survivors had left. The M14 was most likely using a twenty-round magazine. The other guy’s gun might have been anything. A long duel was a possibility. Up close and personal. Within sight. An infantry slugfest. The real kings of battle. A vulgar brawl, which was the kind of fight Reacher liked best.

Numbers one and three were still kneeling. Not close together. Reacher heaved the hatch lid closed and lay down behind it. He clicked back to singles. He wrapped himself around the dome of the hatch and got himself comfortable. The sniper fired at him. Better this time. The round hit the hatch and clanged away, a giant ricochet that might have made it all the way to Lacey’s store.

Reacher lay still, calm and quiet, and comfortable.

He fired back.

And hit the sniper.

Very low on the left side, he thought. Maybe in the hip. Nothing but a flesh wound. Not fatal, but certainly a distraction. The guy spun away and went down prone. Smaller target. The other guy followed suit. He went down flat and started blazing away. Some kind of an attempt at covering fire. Dangerous only to people in the next county, but at least the guy was showing some kind of solidarity. Reacher sighted in on the muzzle flash, and took his time. He aimed a little high and a little right, to allow for what seemed like persistent drift, and he tried to skip one off the concrete and up into the guy’s face. Too dark to see if it worked, but certainly the guy stopped firing. Maybe he was only reloading. Or taking a nap. But he looked very still. Then a distant car drove left to right on the two-lane, maybe six hundred yards away, with its lights on bright, and the moving bubble in the mist backlit the situation for a second, and Reacher came to the conclusion the guy was permanently out of action. He was sprawled in an odd position.

Reacher moved his aim a fraction, back to the wounded sniper. One in the chamber, nine in the box. Ten chances, a static target, four hundred feet. He used the same high-and-right compensation and fired again. And again. And again. He felt he was hitting. But he couldn’t see for sure. There was no answering fire. Then the same car came back the other way on the two-lane. Lost, maybe. Or worried about the gunshots. Not a cop, probably. No blue lights, no red lights, and no sane cop would parade back and forth in the line of fire. The moving bubble of light framed the view for a second. Soft, and vague. The sniper wasn’t moving. He looked hunched, head down, and inert.

Reacher fired again. And again.

One in the chamber, four in the box. He had all the visual information he was going to get. He could fire a thousand times and be no surer than he already was. He came out from behind the dome and started a low crawl north. Elbows and toes. Slow, and painful on the concrete. No reaction from up ahead. No incoming rounds. Reacher held his fire. No point in identifying his position with the muzzle flash.

He stopped a hundred and fifty feet away. Just for a moment. To assess and evaluate. Still no movement. Just vague shapes, humped and low. Then the same car drove by on the two-lane. For a third time. Same bright lights. Same moving bubble. Reacher started to worry a little about who it was. Nosy neighbors could be a problem. Nine-millimeter rounds fired in the open were not loud, but they would be audible at a reasonable distance. The car’s lights showed an unchanged situation. No movement. No sign of life. Possibly a trap.

Reacher crawled onward. Slow and easy. He would hear the hatch behind him if a new player wanted to join in the fun. The springs were loud. The sentries must have heard them too, when he had come up the ladder, but at that point the sentries hadn’t known there were hostiles already inside the building. Maybe they thought they were getting reinforcements. Or a cup of coffee and a sandwich. In that respect they hadn’t been paranoid enough.

Reacher stopped again fifty feet out. There was no movement ahead. Nothing at all. He stood up and walked the rest of the way. And found the five humped shapes, more or less all in a line in the dark. Five men. Four dead. The sniper was still breathing. He must have been hit three or four times. Still alive. Lucky.

But not very.

Reacher kicked the M14 away and slung the Colt back on his shoulder. He grabbed the guy by the belt and dragged him to the rail. He lifted him over, by his belt and the collar of his coat. Then he dropped him. The guy bounced once on the stepped concrete radius and fell forty feet to the ground.

Let’s see if they can hit a Major League fastball.

Strike three, pal.

Reacher turned and jogged the four hundred feet back to the domed hatch. He heaved the lid open and felt with his feet for the ladder.

Chapter 76

If Delfuenso had been correct about no more than two dozen opponents, then there were nine of them left, with maybe one of those nine wounded. The guy in the corridor, one of the five searchers. He had gone down pretty heavily. More than just gravity. Out of the fight, almost certainly. Which left eight still vertical. Better than a poke in the eye. A decent rate of attrition. So far. Reacher opened the blue-spot door and peered out into the corridor.

No one there.

He went room to room, one at a time, from the back of the building to the front, and he saw the same things everywhere: desks and shelves and paper. No people. It took him the best part of ten minutes to clear the second chamber. He entered the first through the garage. He started again, room to room, moving in the opposite direction, front to back.

Desks, shelves, paper.

No people.

Not in the first room, not in the second, not in the third or the fourth or the fifth. He guessed they must all be clustered in the far back corner. Safety in numbers. A defensible position. Unless they were all playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse, moving from chamber to chamber around him. Which was unlikely. But possible.

The third room on the left had been done up like a kitchen. A stove, a refrigerator, a sink. Drawers full of knives and forks and spoons. Food storage. The room opposite was a dining hall. Trestle tables and benches. Beyond that were bedrooms. Like dormitories. Bunk beds, eight to a room. Three rooms in total. Plus two more, each with just one bed. Privacy, but no luxury. The beds were plain iron cots. Rough sheets, coarse blankets. After that came washrooms and toilets. After that came yet more offices. Desks and shelves and paper.

So Delfuenso had been more or less exactly right. There were accommodations for a total of twenty-six people, max. The wrong side of two dozen, but not by much. One of them would be McQueen, presumably.

Therefore there were nine hostiles still vertical, somewhere.

Then it was eight, because the next room had a guy working feverishly at a desk. Reacher shot him point blank and instantly in the chest, with the Glock, and then it was seven, because the sound of the gunshot stirred things up and he caught another guy running for safety in the corridor, and shot him in the back.

Then everything went quiet again. No sound anywhere, even accounting for the fact Reacher was a little deaf after firing so often in an enclosed space. The next room was empty. As was the next. Which was the halfway point in the chamber. Twenty more rooms to go. Ten on each side. Three more blue spots, all on the right. All leading through to the middle chamber. Built like rooms, used like lobbies. Therefore there were still seventeen viable targets ahead. Slow progress. The Quantico team was probably in Illinois airspace by then. Maybe talking to St. Louis air traffic control, getting permission to proceed, setting a course for the approach to Whiteman.

The next room on the left was empty.

Desks, shelves, paper.

No people.

The next room on the right had Don McQueen in it.

McQueen was tied to a chair. He had a black eye and was bleeding from a cut on the cheek. He was dressed in coarse black denim. Like prison garb. No belt. No GPS chip.

There was a man behind the chair.

The man behind the chair had a gun to McQueen’s head.

The man behind the chair was Alan King.

Living and breathing.

Alive again.

Chapter 77

Except the man behind the chair was not Alan King. He was a slightly different version of the exact same guy. Marginally older, a little harder, maybe half an inch taller, maybe a pound or two lighter. But otherwise identical.

“Peter King,” Reacher said.

“Stay where you are,” King said. “Or I’ll shoot your man.”

Reacher said, “He’s not mine.”

Peter King’s gun was a Beretta M9. Army issue. Better than the Glock, in Reacher’s private opinion. Its muzzle was tight in the hollow behind McQueen’s right ear. A dangerous place for it to be. Therefore, job one: make the Beretta move.

Peter King said, “I need you to place your weapons on the floor.”

“I guess you do,” Reacher said. “But I’m not going to.”

“I’ll shoot your man.”

“He’s not mine. I already told you that.”

“Makes no difference to me. I’ll shoot him anyway.”

Reacher raised the Glock.

“Go right ahead,” he said. “Then I’ll shoot you. You pull your trigger, I’ll pull mine. There’s only one definite here. Which is that I’m going to walk out of this room, and you’re not. The only question is whether McQueen is going to come out with me, or stay in with you. You understand that, right? What were you, a forward observer?”

King nodded.

Reacher said, “Then you’ve hung out with real soldiers long enough to have some basic grasp of short-term tactics.”

“You’re not going to give this guy up. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find him.”

“I’d prefer to take him with me, sure. But it’s not a dealbreaker.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy, hitching rides.”

“McQueen claims you killed my brother.”

Job one: make the Beretta move.

“The woman killed your brother,” Reacher said. “The cocktail waitress. Even then it wasn’t a fair fight. Your brother was a useless tub of lard.”

King said nothing.

Reacher said, “I bet he burned real well. All that fat? I bet he went up like a lamb chop on a barbecue.”

King said nothing.

Reacher said, “You would too, probably. You’re not much thinner. Is it a genetic thing? Was your momma fat as well as ugly?”

No reaction.

None at all.

“What do you care about your brother anyway?” Reacher asked. “Story is you weren’t even talking to him. Which I guess I can understand. He must have been a real disappointment. What did he do? Wet the bed all the time? Or did he interfere with the family dog?”

King didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “What kind of a dog was it? Did it yelp?”

The Beretta didn’t move.

Stalemate.

“Tell me,” Reacher said. “I’d like to understand. I’d like to know what came between you. I’d like to know what made you cut him off for twenty long years. Because I had a brother once. He’s dead now, unfortunately. We were both busy all the time. But we talked when we could. We got along pretty well. We had fun. We were there for each other, when we needed to be. I never made him ashamed, and he never made me ashamed.”

Silence in the room. One concrete wall, three plywood walls, a weird, dull acoustic.

Then King said, “It was more than twenty years.”

“What was?”

“Alan was a coward.”

“How so?”

“He ratted someone out.”

“You?”

“His best friend.”

“Doing what? Knocking over a package store?”

“Doesn’t matter what they were doing,” King said. “Alan walked, and his best friend didn’t.”

“And you would never do that, right?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Because you’re a man.”

“You got that right,” King said.

“So face me like a man,” Reacher said. “Take your gun out of McQueen’s ear and count to three and go for it.”

“What, like a duel?”

“Call it whatever you want. But stop using an innocent man for a shield. That’s a pussy’s trick.”

“He’s not an innocent man. He’s a federal agent.”

“He’s tied to a chair. You can get back to him afterward.”

“You think you’re going to lose?”

“There are two possible outcomes here. Both should be considered.”

No answer.

“Pussy,” Reacher said.

“We count to three, right?”

“If you can.”

“Then we fire?”

“One of us does.”

“Start with your gun down by your side.”

“You first.”

“On three,” King said. “Guns down. You and me both. Then we count to three again. Then we fire.”

Reacher watched the guy’s eyes. They were OK.

“Works for me,” he said.

King said, “One.”

Reacher waited.

King said, “Two.”

Reacher waited.

King said, “Three.”

Reacher lowered his gun, loose and easy against his thigh.

King did the same thing.

McQueen breathed out and leaned away.

Reacher watched King’s eyes.

King took a breath and said, “OK.”

Reacher said, “Ready when you are.”

“On three, right?”

“Go for it.”

King said, “One.”

Strategy. It was the other guy that mattered. Reacher knew as sure as he knew anything that King was going to fire on two. It was a cast-iron certainty. The first count had been a decoy and a reassurance. One, two, three, guns down. It had set a rhythm and a precedent. An expectation. It had established trust. For a reason. King had it all figured out. He was a man with a plan. It was right there in his eyes. He was a smart guy.

But not smart enough.

He wasn’t thinking strategically. He wasn’t thinking himself into his opponent’s frame of mind.

Reacher raised the Glock and shot him in the face, right after the one.

Chapter 78

After that it got harder, not easier. First Reacher couldn’t get McQueen out of the chair. He was tied to it with thin cord pulled very tight and the knots were hard as stones. And second, the survivors somewhere in the rooms beyond had finally gotten the message. They must have heard the shot close by and as soon as King didn’t come out all triumphant they started up with a half-assed version of Custer’s last stand. Either that or they were all planning to run for it. And either thing would put live bodies in the way. Reacher heard them all crowding together in the corridor. He heard the snick of slides being pulled. Automatic weapons, being checked and readied. He heard an urgent muffled conference, not far from the door, half in English and half in Arabic.

He asked, “What does Wadiah mean, anyway?”

McQueen said, “Safekeeping.”

“I thought so.”

“You speak Arabic?”

“The odd word.”

“Don’t you have a knife?”

“I have a toothbrush.”

“That won’t help.”

“It’s good against plaque.”

“Just get me out of this damn chair.”

“I’m trying.”

The cord was too tough to break. It was some kind of a blend, maybe cotton and nylon, woven tight, about a quarter of an inch across. Probably tested against all kinds of strains and weights.

Reacher said, “I have a key.”

McQueen said, “I’m not in handcuffs, for God’s sake.”

Reacher pulled out the fat man’s key. He nicked at the rope with the rough-edged tang, down by McQueen’s right hand. The tang cut some fibers. Maybe two or three. Out of maybe ten thousand. Reacher said, “Put some tension on it. As much as you can. You’re FBI, right? Make like you’re trying to lift your pension.”

McQueen’s shoulder and biceps bunched and the cord went hard as iron. Reacher sawed at it. Not back and forth. He had to pluck at it. The key worked only one way. But it made progress. Outside the door the voices were loud. Two factions. Doubt and questions, resolve and encouragement. Reacher was rooting for the doubt. Just for a little while longer. McQueen kept the pressure on. Fibers snapped and severed, first a few, then several, then many, then an eighth of an inch, then most of them, then only a few remained, and finally McQueen tore his right hand loose.

Reacher picked up Peter King’s Beretta from the floor. He put it in McQueen’s right hand. McQueen said, “That Colt on your shoulder would be better. These corridors are pretty long.”

Reacher said, “It only has five rounds left in it. I’m planning to use it as a club.” He started on McQueen’s left wrist, plucking, cutting, fibers popping under the strain. McQueen said, “You could reload it.”

Reacher said, “No time. We don’t want to be caught with our pants down.”

“How many in your Glock?”

“Thirteen.”

“Unlucky.”

“True.” Reacher stopped sawing and swapped out the magazine for the full one he had taken from Bale, in the motel room in Kansas, about a million years ago. Click, click, hand to hand, not a blur like the showboats could do it, but no more than a second and a half. He started sawing again. The voices were still loud in the corridor.

Reacher said, “Do you have an accurate headcount?”

McQueen said, “Twenty-four tonight, not including me.”

“Six left, then.”

“Is that all? Jesus.”

“I’ve been here at least twenty minutes.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Just a guy, hitching rides.”

“Well, good work, whoever you are.”

“Did you have a private room, when you were here?”

“No, those were for Peter King and the big boss.”

“I thought Peter King was the big boss.”

“No, King was number two.”

“So who’s the big boss?”

“I don’t know. I never met him.”

“Where is he now?”

“I have no idea.”

The door opened. McQueen fired from his chair. A dark shape fell backward. Reacher stepped across and kicked the door shut again. He said, “Five left.”

McQueen said, “How would you do it?”

“If I was them? I’d open every door in the corridor and put a guy in the first five rooms with blue spots. They’d see us before we saw them. We couldn’t go anywhere at all.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“Are they smart enough?”

“I don’t know,” McQueen said. “They’re plenty smart in some ways.”

“I’m certainly getting that feeling.”

“How? You know what this is all about?”

Reacher said, “I think I’ve figured most of it out.”

“So you understand we absolutely need to capture this building intact, right?”

“Speak for yourself. All I absolutely need to do is get to Virginia.”

“What’s in Virginia?”

“Many things. It’s an important state. Twelfth largest in terms of population, and thirteenth in terms of GDP.”

McQueen’s left hand came free. Reacher gave him the Colt and crouched down and started work on his ankles, from behind.

The ankle ropes went slower. The tough fibers were doing the work the hardware store guy should have done with his buffing wheel. The key was getting smooth. Not good. So Reacher adapted his technique. He used the last of the burr on the tang to tug up part of the knot, and he used the key from the FBI’s motel in Kansas as a spike to force the knot apart. A different approach, and slower, but it got the job done a small fraction at a time. Five minutes later McQueen was three-quarters free, and five minutes after that he was out of the chair completely. He was trailing bracelets of severed rope from his wrists. He had the Colt submachine gun in his left hand and Peter King’s Beretta in his right. Good to go. They were about two hundred feet from the first mechanized door, and three hundred feet from the second. Three hundred feet from the sweet night air. Three hundred feet from safety.

“Ready?” Reacher said.

McQueen nodded.

Reacher opened the door to the corridor.

Chapter 79

The escape went bad immediately. The three hundred feet might as well have been three thousand miles. The five survivors had done the smart thing. All the room doors were standing open, along the whole length of the corridor, to the left and the right. Whichever way Reacher and McQueen went they risked getting fired on from inside as they passed. Or not. It was unpredictable. It was a lottery. Five hostiles, thirty-nine doors, not counting the one they were coming out of. Standard infantry tactics would have been to roll grenades into every room, at an angle, as they approached, or to blast through one plywood wall after another with anti-tank weapons. But they had no grenades, and no anti-tank weapons. They had two handguns and an almost-empty submachine gun. Problem.

Reacher said, “We need a diversion.”

McQueen said, “What kind?”

“We could set the place on fire.”

“We absolutely cannot do that. We need to preserve the paperwork.”

“I don’t have any matches, anyway. We’d have to try to get to the kitchen and use the stove. In which case we might as well try to get all the way out.”

“We should go sideways. There’s a clear run through the third chamber.”

“Pick a door,” Reacher said. He couldn’t see the blue spots. All the doors were folded back into the rooms. He knew there were six doors with blue spots. Built like rooms, used like lobbies. There were five bad guys. Therefore one way through was clear. A sixteen percent chance. Sixteen point six, recurring forever, to be totally accurate.

“Back to back?” McQueen asked.

“Who leads?” Reacher said.

“Doesn’t really matter.”

“It might,” Reacher said. He wasn’t pinning much hope on a sixteen percent chance. They were likely to run into someone in whichever lateral lobby they chose. One of the five. The resulting gunfire would alert the other four. If they gave chase, then the backward-facing guy would have to do most of the hard work. But if the four survivors did the smart thing and made lateral loops of their own, one by one, like outflanking maneuvers, then the forward-facing guy would take most of the load.

“You lead,” Reacher said.

McQueen stepped out into the corridor. Reacher stepped out behind him, walking backward, and they moved together, slow and quiet and cautious, back to back, almost touching, but not quite. From that point on it was all about trust. Reacher desperately wanted to glance back over his shoulder, and he knew McQueen felt the same, but neither man did. Each was responsible for a hundred and eighty degrees, no more, no less. They made it twenty feet, to the next pair of doors, one on the left and one on the right, and McQueen slowed and took a breath. Both doors were open.

No blue spots.

Nobody in the rooms.

Onward.

Another twenty feet. Another pair of doors. One on the left, one on the right.

Smarter than smart.

The bad guys had people in both rooms.

Reacher and McQueen pivoted ninety degrees, instantly, Reacher firing right, McQueen firing left, and way up at the far end of the corridor a third guy stepped out and way down at the bottom end a fourth guy stepped out and Reacher and McQueen were caught in a literal crossfire, with incoming rounds from all four points of the compass. Reacher hit the guy in the room ahead of him and the guy went down and McQueen bundled in after Reacher and slammed the door. They stood there together, stooped and panting, with the dead guy on the floor between them.

“You hit?” Reacher asked.

“No,” McQueen said.

That was the good news. The rest of the news was all bad. Ahead of them was a blastproof concrete wall probably ten feet thick. To their left and their right and behind them were plywood partitions just half an inch thick. And outside of a thin cheap door with no lock were four hostiles who knew exactly where they were.

Reacher said, “They don’t even need to come in. They can fire through the walls. Or the door.”

“I know,” McQueen said.

And they did. Immediately. The first round came through the door. It punched out an ugly scab of wood that spun sideways and missed McQueen by an inch. The second round came through the wall. The plywood was tougher. But not much. The bullet came right through, but it had shattered into fragments. One of them nicked Reacher on the back of his hand. No big deal, in the grand scheme of things, but the cut started a fat trickle of blood. He stepped close to the splintered hole and put the Glock’s muzzle hard on it and fired back, twice, at different angles. McQueen did the same thing at the door. Reacher heard feet wheeling away.

Temporary relief, but ultimately only a stalemate.

Reacher stepped to the side wall and raised his boot high and kicked it, the same way a firefighter kicks down a door. The wall cracked and gave a little. He figured they could kick their way through eventually. But there was no point. They were on the wrong side of the corridor for the old lateral doors. All the blue spots were on the opposite side. And slow and noisy progress from one rat trap to another would gain them absolutely nothing.

Not good.

And then it got worse.

The building filled with a faint diesel roar. The outer door, opening, at the far end of the hundred-foot entrance tunnel. Reacher pictured the seal breaking, the big diesels rumbling, the two halves of the door grinding back along their tracks, the gap between them widening slowly and unstoppably. Far too soon for Quantico. They were still in the air, surely. Over Missouri by that point, hopefully, maybe even on approach to Whiteman, maybe even right then lowering the landing gear, but Whiteman was all of sixty miles away, and they still had complex preparations and transfers to make.

So, not the cavalry.

More bad guys.

He said, “They’re bringing in reinforcements.”

McQueen nodded, and said nothing.

Reacher said, “How many, do you think?”

“Could be dozens. Hundreds, even. There’s a network. Everything’s a co-production now.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“I’m very sorry,” McQueen said. “Thank you for everything you tried to do.”

They shook hands, mute and awkward in the miserable plywood room, McQueen still trailing frayed cords from his wrists, Reacher’s hand bloody from his cut.

The diesel noise started up again. The outer door closing, to allow the inner door to open, the ancient fail-safe circuits still obedient.

McQueen said, “I assume they’ll lead them straight here.”

Reacher nodded. “So at least let’s not wait for them. Let’s make them work for it.”

“The third chamber is the place to be. They’ll be a little less willing to shoot in there.”

Reacher nodded again. The flatbed trailers, the giant yellow flasks. The radiation symbols. He said, “Don’t stop for me. No matter what. Better that one of us gets out than neither.”

McQueen said, “Likewise.”

“I’ll go first. I’ll go left and through. You go right.”

“You want the Colt back?”

“You keep it. It drifts left and down. Remember that.” Reacher cannibalized his part-gone magazines and put a full load in his Glock. One in the chamber, seventeen in the box. Some of the brass ended up smeared with his blood. Which seemed appropriate. Some old guy once said the meaning of life is that it ends. Which was inescapably true. No one lives forever. In his head Reacher had always known he would die. Every human does. But in his heart he had never really imagined it. Never imagined the time and the place and the details and the particulars.

He smiled.

He said, “On three?”

McQueen nodded.

He said, “One.”

The diesels sounded louder. The inner door, opening.

McQueen said, “Two.”

Reacher stepped over to the splintered threshold.

McQueen said, “Three.”

Reacher burst out at full speed, through the door, through some kind of final mental barrier, into the corridor, ice cold and careless, in his mind already dead like his father and his mother and his brother, bargaining for nothing more at all except the chance to take someone with him, or two of them, or three, and a guy to his left heard the noise and stepped out of a room and Reacher shot him, a triple tap, chest, chest, head, and then he plunged onward, across the narrow space, into a blue-spot room, a guy right in front of him going down the same way, chest, chest, head, and then Reacher was through the ancient door, into another plywood room, which was empty, with gunfire behind him, and out into the center chamber’s corridor, a shape running toward him from the right, firing, and into the next blue-spot room, with footsteps behind him, and then it was all over, finally and utterly and completely and definitively, because of the taped plastic sheet over the old door ahead of him, and because the Glock jammed and wouldn’t fire anymore.

A tired spring in the magazine, maybe, or his blood on the shell casings, already sticky and all fouled up.

The world went very quiet.

He turned around, slowly, and he put his back on the plastic sheet. Two men had guns on him. One pale face, one dark. The odd ethnic mixture. They were shoulder to shoulder in the doorway. The last two survivors from the original headcount. Both for him. Which was OK. It meant McQueen was getting a clear run, at least for the moment.

Their guns were Smith & Wesson 2213s, stainless steel, the exact same thing as McQueen had used in the fat man’s motel lobby. Wadiah’s standard issue, apparently. Maybe a bulk purchase, at a discount price. Three-inch barrels, eight .22 Long Rifle rimfires in the magazines. But not aimed high this time. Not high at all. Aimed right at the center of his chest.

The white guy smiled.

The Arab smiled.

The white guy closed one eye and sighted down the three-inch barrel.

The Arab closed one eye.

Reacher kept both eyes open.

Their trigger fingers tightened.

No sound anywhere. Reacher willed McQueen to make it. Get to the garage. Hide in the sad old truck. Let the reinforcements move past you. Hit the button and close the door. Then run like hell.

Their trigger fingers tightened some more.

They tightened all the way.

Then: two shots. Very close and very loud. A ragged little volley. Like a loose double tap. The white guy fell to his knees. Then he pitched forward on his face. The Arab sprawled sideways. His face was all gone, replaced by a gaping exit wound. Shot in the back of the head.

And behind them both, suddenly revealed, still on her feet, a Glock 19 in her hand, was a small slender figure.

Karen Delfuenso.

Chapter 80

Delfuenso had driven Bale’s Crown Vic all the way inside and parked it in the garage. McQueen was already in the front passenger seat. Delfuenso said it was her that Reacher had seen on the two-lane, driving back and forth, with her bright lights on. At first she had meant it just as moral support, but later she had realized the backlight might be useful. Hence the triple trip. She had seen Reacher’s muzzle flash on the roof. She had buzzed her windows down and heard the shots. When the subsequent long delay became unbearable she had found her way inside.

Reacher said, “Thank you.”

She said, “You’re welcome.”

She got a first-aid kit out of the trunk. Bureau issue. She said every unmarked car had one. Standard practice. A matter of policy. She cleaned the cut on his hand and bound it up. Then they got in the car. She backed up and turned around and rolled through into the entrance tunnel. Reacher got out again and hit the red button. The inner door started to close, to allow the outer door to open. The ancient fail-safe circuits, still obedient. Then they came out of the tunnel into the sweet night air, and they bumped across the dirt, where the farmer’s grandson had torn out the DoD’s old approach road. They made it back to the two-lane, and turned right, and right again, and they parked sideways across three bays in Lacey’s front lot, exactly where they had started.

Reacher asked her, “Do you have an ETA for Quantico?”

She said, “There was a delay. They’re still about three hours out.”

“Would you drive me back to the cloverleaf?”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Why?”

“I want to get to Virginia.”

“Quantico will want to talk to you.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

“They’ll need to know what you know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Is that going to be your official position?”

“It always is.”

“And what’s your unofficial position?”

“Same thing. I don’t know anything.”

“Bullshit,” McQueen said to her. “He told me he had it all worked out.”

“I don’t believe him,” Delfuenso said. “I don’t have it all worked out. Not yet. Not all of it, anyway. Obviously I saw the nuclear waste. So I assume they were planning a strike somewhere. Maybe soon. Maybe into Nebraska’s aquifers.”

“Not possible,” Reacher said. “Those trailers aren’t going anywhere. Not now, not soon, not ever. They haven’t moved for twenty years. Their tires are rotted and I bet their axles are rusted solid. It would take the Corps of Engineers a year just to get them out of the tunnel.”

“Why are they in there at all? That place wasn’t built to house that kind of stuff.”

“They had to put it somewhere. No one wants it in their own back yard. It was probably just temporary. But they never figured out a permanent solution. So I guess they just forgot about it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“But why would Wadiah want it, if it can’t be moved? If it can’t be moved, it can’t be used.”

“They were never going to use it. It’s strictly window dressing. It’s purely for show.”

“What show?”

“I’m not saying another word,” Reacher said. “Quantico will say I’m not allowed to know. They’ll call me a security risk. They’ll try to keep me in that motel in Kansas for the rest of my life. Which would drive me crazy. Which would give everyone a problem.”

“Privately, then,” Delfuenso said. “Strictly between us.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You owe me,” Delfuenso said.

“Then I get a ride to the cloverleaf?”

“Deal.”

“It’s the law of unintended consequences,” Reacher said.

“In what way?”

“It’s a bank,” Reacher said.

“Wadiah is a banking organization,” Reacher said. “The United States has done a pretty good job of shutting down terrorist banking, all over the world. The bad guys can’t move money anywhere, and they can’t keep money anywhere. So they had to invent an alternative. A parallel system. I guess a bunch of entrepreneurs spotted an opening. Some Americans, some Syrians. Wadiah is the Arabic word for safekeeping. It also means a type of Islamic bank account. As in, you put money in it, and they keep that money safe for you.”

“There’s money in that building?” Delfuenso said. “Where?”

“There’s no money in any bank. Not in yours, not in mine. Not really, apart from a few bucks in a drawer. Most money is purely theoretical. It’s all in computers, backed by trust and confidence. Sometimes they have gold in a vault downstairs, to make themselves look serious. You know, to suggest capital reserves, like in the Fed in New York, or Fort Knox.”

“The nuclear waste?” Delfuenso said. “It’s a capital reserve? Their version of the gold in Fort Knox? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “It sits there and backs their currency. Which they invented. They don’t deal in dollars or pounds or euros or yen. Remember the on-line chatter? They were talking about gallons. That’s what they call their currency unit. They buy and sell in gallons. This bomb costs a hundred gallons, that bomb costs five hundred gallons. Wadiah keeps track of the deals. They take deposits, they process payments, they shuffle balances from one account to another, they make a profit from their fees. Like any bank. Except they don’t use computers, because we can hack computers. It’s all on paper. Which is why McQueen wouldn’t let me burn the place down. Because you guys need names and addresses. It’s like a regular terrorist encyclopedia in there.”

Delfuenso looked at McQueen. She said, “Is he right?”

McQueen said, “Apart from one minor point.”

“Which is?”

“Those tanks are empty. They’re completely harmless. They were built but never used. They’re surplus. That’s why they’re in there. Surplus equipment in a surplus building.”

“Did Wadiah know they were empty?”

“Sure,” McQueen said. “Not that they ever admitted it to their clients.”

Delfuenso smiled, just briefly.

“I’m living the dream,” she said. “I just shot a couple of crooked bankers.”

Delfuenso started the car again and rolled slowly south. Reacher sprawled in the back. Delfuenso and McQueen talked in the front, professionally, one agent to another, assessing the operation, evaluating the result. They ran through all the details, from the inside perspective, and from the outside. She told him about Sorenson. They agreed her fate was the only item in the debit column. Other than that they agreed the outcome was more than satisfactory. Spectacular, even. A major score. A treasure trove of information, and a complex system dismantled. Then McQueen told her the only remaining loose end was the identity of the big boss. Not Peter King, as previously thought. Delfuenso blinked and stopped the car on a lonely curb in the middle of nowhere.

She said, “I got some news from Quantico. When I called them about Whiteman. We heard from the State Department again. But not from their PR people this time. I think this one is genuine.”

“What did they say?”

“They have no staffer named Lester L. Lester, Jr. Never did. They never heard of him.”

“CIA?”

“Likewise. Never heard of him. And we can believe them. Because right now all their cards are on the table. They’re depending on us to keep quiet about the guy in the old pumping station.”

“Who was he?”

“He had worked in Pakistan and all over the Middle East. Except he wasn’t running agents. They were running him. He had gone native. He was Wadiah’s mole inside Langley.”

Delfuenso moved off the curb and started south again.

McQueen said, “Why did he attack us?”

“He attacked you personally. He had your name. Kansas City’s security is poor, and the CIA watches what we do. They knew we had a mole inside Wadiah. Their mole reported back. The big boss told him to deal with you. So he lured you to a remote location for a meaningless meeting. Simple as that.”

“You did well,” Reacher said, from the back seat. “Fast reactions. The smart money would have been on the other guy.”

McQueen said, “Thank you.”

“The forehead thing was a bit retro, though.”

“It was the way it came out. That’s all. I bent his arm and grabbed the knife, and the blade ended up pretty high, so I thought, why the hell not? Just for old times’ sake.”

They came off Route 65 where it turned east, onto the small rural road, ready to cut the corner back to the Interstate exit. They passed the Civil War battlefield site, where Americans had fired cannons at Americans for nine long hours. McQueen turned in his seat and looked at Reacher and said, “One last thing.”

Reacher said, “What?”

“Tell me how you talk for a minute without using the letter A.”

Delfuenso said, “You were asleep.”

McQueen said, “I haven’t slept for seven months.”

Reacher said, “Easy. Just start counting. One, two, three, four, five, six. And so on. You don’t hit a letter A until you get to a hundred and one. You can even do it real fast and still get nowhere near ninety-nine inside a minute.”

Delfuenso eased to a stop next to a ragged grassy shoulder. No one spoke. No doubt the FBI had appropriate banter for the occasion. The army sure did. But private jokes are private. So they all sat quiet for a minute. Then Reacher got out and walked away, without looking back, past the first ramp west toward Independence and Kansas City, and onward over the bridge to the eastbound ramp. He put one foot on the shoulder and one in the traffic lane, and he stuck out his thumb, and he smiled and tried to look friendly.

For Jane,

standing by the major oak

No one knows suspense like

#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child.

And there’s no bigger name in suspense

than Jack Reacher.

If you enjoyed A Wanted Man,

please keep reading for the

Jack Reacher short story

“Deep Down”

Deep Down

Reacher’s designated handler told him it wasn’t going to be easy. There were going to be difficulties. Numerous and various. A real challenge. The guy had no kind of a bedside manner. Normally handlers started with the good news.

Maybe there isn’t any, Reacher thought.

The handler was an Intelligence colonel named Cornelius Christopher, but that was the only thing wrong with him. He looked like a decent guy. Despite the fancy name he seemed to have turned out fairly plain and pragmatic. Reacher would have liked him, except he had never met him before. Going undercover with a handler you never met before led to inefficiency. Or worse.

Christopher asked, “How much did they tell you yesterday?”

Reacher said, “I was in Frankfurt yesterday. Which is in Germany. No one told me anything. Except to get on a plane to Dulles, and then report to this office.”

“I see,” Christopher said.

“What should they have told me?”

“You really know nothing about this?”

“Some local trouble with staff officers.”

“So they did tell you something.”

“No one told me anything. But I’m an investigator. I do this stuff for a living. And some things are fairly obvious. I’m a relatively new guy who has so far been posted almost exclusively overseas. Therefore I’m almost certainly unknown to the kind of staff officer who doesn’t get out much.”

“Out of where?”

“The Beltway, for instance. Call it a two-mile radius from this very office. Maybe they also have a fishing cottage on a lake somewhere. But that’s not the kind of place I’m likely to have been.”

“You’re not very happy, are you?”

“I’ve had more promising days.”

“What’s your problem?”

“When does this thing start?”

“This afternoon.”

“Well, that’s my problem, right there. I’ve got a handler I never met before and a situation I know nothing about.”

“Scared?”

“It’s bad workmanship. It’s shoddy and confused. It shows no pride. Because you guys are always the same. There’s a clue in the title, remember?”

“What title?”

“Your title. Military Intelligence. Ideally both of those words should mean something to you. But surely at least one of them does. One at a time, if you wish. On alternate days, if you want.”

“Feel free to give me your honest opinion.”

Reacher said, “So what do I need to know?”

And at that same minute a car backed out of a driveway, in a distant location, slowly, a front-wheel-drive car, with a yelp as the tires turned. Not the shriek of speed. The opposite. A suburban sound, rubber on a tended blacktop driveway, like the smell of the sprinkler on the summer air.

Then the car paused and the driver selected a forward gear and the car rolled south, gently over the speed bumps that the driver himself had argued should be put in, for the safety of the children.

Then the car turned a little west, toward the highway, ready to join the mighty flow toward the capital.

Colonel Cornelius Christopher sat forward and made a space on his desk, paired hands coming together back to back, and then sweeping apart, pushing clutter aside. The move was emphatic. But purely metaphorical. There was nothing on the desk. No clutter. A good man-manager, Reacher thought. He let me have my say, and now we’re moving right along.

Christopher said, “There’s no danger. It’s going to be all talking.”

Reacher said, “Talking about what?”

“You were right, it’s about staff officers. There are four of them. One of them is bad. They’re all political liaison people. To the House and the Senate. They practically live there. You know the type. Going places, fast track, better not to get in their way.”

“Specifically?”

“The army is asking for a new sniper rifle. We’re giving evidence to some new pre-committee. Begging, basically. Our legislative overseers. In fact, not even really. They sent senior staffers instead. We’re not even talking to elected officials.”

“Now you don’t sound very happy.”

“I’m not here to be happy. The liaison officers are sitting in on these hearings, obviously. And one of them is leaking. Design criteria, load, range, size, shape, weight, and budget.”

“Leaking to who?”

“A likely bidder located overseas, we assume. A foreign manufacturer, in other words. Someone that wants the business. Someone that likes a rigged game.”

“Is the business worth it? How many sniper rifles do we buy? And how much do we pay for them?”

“It’s the implied endorsement. They can sell copies for five grand each to the freak market. The price of a decent used car. As many as they want. Like selling crack.”

“Who else is at these hearings?”

“There’s our four liaison and the four staffers we’re pitching to, plus our procurement guy and the Marine procurement guy, plus a Ranger sniper and a Marine sniper for color commentary.”

“The Marines are involved?”

“In a minority way. They didn’t bring their own liaison, for instance. But it’s definitely a joint project. No other way of doing a thing like this.”

“So why wouldn’t it be the Marines leaking? Their procurement guy or their sniper? Why assume it’s our guys?”

“The leaks are via a fax machine inside the Capitol Building. Which is where our liaison guys have their offices.”

“How certain are you of that?”

“Completely.”

“Could be the staffers. They’re in the Capitol Building, presumably.”

“Different phone network. Our legislative overseers are on some new super-duper thing. Our offices are still steam-powered.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “So it’s one of our guys.”

“I’m afraid so,” Christopher said.

“Motive?”

“Money,” Christopher said. “Got to be. I can’t see anyone forming a deep ideological attachment to a European firearms manufacturer. Can you? And money is always a factor for officers like these. They’re mixing with corporate lawyers and lobbyists all the time. Easy to feel like the poor relation.”

“Can’t we just watch their fax machine?”

“Not inside the Capitol Building. Our legislative overseers don’t like surveillance. Too many unintended consequences.”

“Are they sending to an overseas fax number?”

“No, it’s a local number. But these guys hire local people. As agents and lobbyists.”

“So my job is what?”

“To find out which one of our guys is the bad apple. By talking to them.”

“Where?”

“In the committee, at first. The Ranger sniper has been recalled. Personal reasons. You’re going to take his place.”

“As what?”

“Another Ranger sniper.”

“With a real Marine sniper in the room? I’ll be asked for opinions. He’ll nail me in a second.”

“So be Delta Force, not Rangers. Be mysterious. Don’t say anything. Be all weird and silent. Grow a beard.”

“Before this afternoon?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve seen your file. You know which end of a rifle is which. We have confidence in you.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“Which is?”

“Our liaison guys are not guys. They’re women.”

“All of them?”

“All four.”

“Does that make a difference?”

“I sincerely hope so. Some of the talking is going to have to be social. That’s easier with women. You can do it one on one. Men always want to drink in groups.”

“So I’m here to take women to bars, and ask them what they want to drink, and by the way are they leaking military secrets overseas? Is that the idea?”

“You’ll have to be more subtle than that. But yes, it’s a kind of interrogation. That’s all. Which you’re supposed to be good at. You’re supposed to do this stuff for a living.”

“In which case why not arrest them all and interrogate them properly?”

“Because three of the four are innocent. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and so on. Their careers would be hurt.”

“That never stopped you before.”

“We never had fast track people before. Not like this. Going places. We wouldn’t cripple them all. One of them would survive, and she’d get her revenge.”

Reacher said, “I’m just trying to establish the rules of engagement.”

“Anything that wouldn’t get thrown out of court for blatant illegality.”

“Blatant?”

“Flashing red with a siren. That kind of blatant.”

“That bad?”

“We can’t tolerate this kind of thing. Not with a foreign manufacturer. We have politicians to please, and they have donors to protect. American donors.”

“Who like a rigged game.”

“There’s two different kinds of rigged. Our kind, and their kind.”

“Understood,” Reacher said.

“There’s no danger,” Christopher said again. “It’s all just talking.”

“So what are the difficulties? What’s not going to be easy?”

“That’s complicated,” Christopher said.

The front-wheel-drive car joined the traffic stream on the highway. It became just one of thousands, all heading the same way, all fast and focused and linear and metallic, like giant rounds fired from giant chain gun barrels somewhere far behind them. Which was a mental image the driver liked very much. He was a bullet, implacable and relentless, singular in his purpose. He was heading for his target. His aim was true.

Across the barrier no one was heading in the other direction. The morning flow was all one way, high speed and crowded, toward the distant city.

Christopher did the thing with his hands again, clearing metaphorical clutter off his desk, and out of the conversation. Ready for a new topic. The difficulties. He said, “It’s a speed issue. We have to be quick. And at the same time we have to keep things normal for the Marine Corps. We can’t let them suspect we have a leak. So we can’t stop talking, or they’ll guess. But we can’t let much more stuff go overseas. So you can’t waste time.”

Reacher said, “What, this is going to be like speed dating?”

“You’re new in town, so why wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” Reacher said. “Believe me. It would be like a dream come true. But it takes two to tango. And I’m a realistic guy. On a good day I could get a woman to look at me. Maybe. But four women all at once is not very likely.”

Christopher nodded.

“That’s the complication,” he said. “That’s the difficulty we were worrying about. Plus, these women are scary. West Pointers, off-the-charts IQs. Fast track. Going places. You can imagine.”

“I don’t have to imagine. I was at West Point.”

“We know. We checked. You didn’t overlap with any of them.”

“Are any of them married?”

“No, fortunately. Fast track women don’t get married. Not until the time is right.”

“Any serious relationships?”

“Same answer.”

“Are they older or younger than me?”

“Older. Twenty-nine and thirty.”

“Then that’s another negative. Most women date older men. And what rank am I going to be?”

“You’re going in as a sergeant. Most snipers are.”

“Women like that don’t want enlisted men.”

Christopher nodded again. “I said at the beginning this wasn’t going to be easy. But think logically. You might not need to go through all four. You might hit lucky the very first time. Or the second. And you might just know anyway. We have to assume the guilty one will resist any kind of contact. It could be that three say yes and one says no. In which case she’s the one.”

“They’ll all resist contact. They’ll all say no.”

“Maybe one slightly more emphatically than the others.”

“I’m not sure I could tell the difference. It always feels about the same to me. My social antenna must not be very well developed.”

“We don’t see another way of doing this.”

Reacher nodded.

He asked, “Did you get me a uniform?”

“We got you a suit.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to be a Ranger. Or Delta. And they like to show up in civvies. It makes them feel like secret agents.”

“It won’t fit.”

“The suit? It’ll fit. Your height and weight are in your file. It was easy. It was like ordering anything. Except bigger.”

“Have you got bios on these women?”

“Detailed,” Christopher said. “Plus transcripts of everything said at the hearings so far. You should probably read those first. The way they talk will tell you more than the bios.”

Five miles west, across the Potomac River, a thirty-year-old woman belted a fanny pack low on her hips and moved it around until it was comfortable, in its accustomed position. Then she bent forward and flipped her hair back and slid a toweling band in place, easing it back, and back, until it was seated just right. Then she kicked the hallway baseboard for luck, left toes, right toes, and then she opened her door and stepped out and ran in place for a moment, just gently, warming up, loosening, getting ready, facing it down.

Five miles.

Thirty minutes.

Possible.

It would depend on the lights, fundamentally. If more than half of the crosswalks were green, she would make it. Fifty-one percent. That was all she needed. Less than that, she wouldn’t. Simple arithmetic. A fact of life. No disgrace.

Except it was. Failure was always a disgrace.

She took a breath, and another, and she hit her watch, and she ran down her path, and left onto the sidewalk, and she settled in for the first unbroken stretch. Long, easy strides, relaxed but pushing just a little, breathing well, moving well, her hair swinging behind her in a perfect circular rhythmic pattern, symmetrical, like a metronome.

The first crosswalk was green.

Reacher started with the transcripts. The pre-committee hearings. There were records of two separate sessions, the first two weeks ago, and the second one week ago. Hence the rush. The third session was due.

The transcripts were exactly what transcripts should be. Every vocal sound uttered in the room had been transcribed onto paper. Every um and er and you know, every false start, every repetition, every unfinished sentence, every stutter and stammer, every hopeless tangle and broken train of thought. Reading the pages was almost like hearing the voices. But not quite. There was a semi-real quality. Speech never hit paper just right, however good the transcriber.

The first to speak was one of the Senate staffers. Reacher could picture the guy. Not young. Disrespectful to send a kid, unless the kid was a hotshot, and hotshots didn’t get sent to waste time listening for sixteen hours before saying no to the army. So it would be an older guy, solid and substantial and been-there-forever, but a clear B-lister all the same, because A-listers didn’t get sent to waste time listening for sixteen hours before saying no to the army, either.

This particular example of a senior B-lister sounded puffed-up and bossy. He started out by making himself chairman of the board. He just announced it. No one objected. Not that Reacher expected anyone to. Presumably the guy had a dynamic of his own going on with the other staffers, and why would the army or the jarheads care which one of the assholes did what? So the guy went ahead and formally recited the purpose of the meeting, which he said was to examine available courses of action in the light of the perceived requirement for a new infantry weapon, namely a sniper rifle.

Reacher didn’t like that sentence at all. Because of the word perceived. Clearly that was how the argument was going to go. You don’t really need this. Yes, we do. Why? Which was the big bureaucratic elephant trap, right there. The on-the-ground snipers would drift the wrong way. Had they ever missed a shot because of inferior equipment? Hell no, sir, we never miss our shots. Hell, we can use anything. Hell, we could make our own damn sniper rifles out of your granddaddy’s old varmint gun and a length of rainwater gutter and a roll of goddamned duct tape.

Sir.

And the procurement officers would drift too far the other way, until they started sounding like gun nuts or NRA members writing a letter to Santa Claus. So it was a ritual dance. There was no way of winning. It was 1986 and it was all about planes and missiles and computers and laser-guided integrated systems. Firearms were boring. They were going to lose. But not after their wet-dream sniper rifle specification leaked overseas. The foreign manufacturer could gear up ahead of the next attempt. Or go right ahead and build the thing and sell it to the Soviets.

Reacher turned the pages, and it went pretty much as he had guessed it would. The puffed-up bossy guy asked why they needed the new rifle, and no one answered. The bossy guy asked them to pretend he was an idiot and knew nothing about the subject. Not a big ask, Reacher thought. Then the army procurement guy spoke up and the typist must have nearly worn out his m key: Um. Erm. Umm. (Pause) I’m … I’m … I’m …

The bossy guy said they could come back to that. Then he asked what exactly they were looking for, and things got back on solid ground with long back-and-forths about what qualities a sniper rifle needed. Cold shot accuracy was head of the list, of course. Often a sniper gets just one chance, which by definition will be out of a cold barrel. It has to hit. So the barrel is all about perfectly uniform internal dimensions, and heavy match-grade steel, with the right twist, and maybe some fluting for stiffness and reduced weight, the whole thing properly bedded into the stock, which shouldn’t swell or shrink depending on the weather, or be too heavy to carry twenty miles. And so on.

The liaison women spoke often and at length. The first up was identified by the initials C.R. She said, “This is extremely high-tech metalwork we’re talking about here. And we’ll need groundbreaking optics. Maybe we could incorporate laser range finding. This could be very exciting. It could be a great research opportunity for somebody.”

A smart woman. Whole sentences. And good sentences. She was trying to make it radical, not boring, and she was hinting at big dollars getting spent in someone’s district, which would be an IOU any senator would be happy to tuck away in his vest pocket. A good tactical approach.

But it didn’t work. The chairman of the board asked, “Who’s going to pay for all that?”

At which point the transcriber had written: Pause.

Reacher switched to the bio stack and found that C.R. was Christine Richardson. From Orange County, California. Private prep school, private high school, West Point. She was thirty years old and already a lieutenant colonel. Fast track, and the political shop was a greased rail anyway. Nice work, if you could get it.

The thirty-year-old woman with the fanny pack and the headband made it through three crosswalks on green and got held up at the next three on red. The seventh turned green before she got there, but it was choked with walkers, and they were slow to get going, so she got hung up behind them, running in place for two whole seconds, then pushing through, dodging left, dodging right, refusing to cut away diagonally, because then the distance would be less than the full five miles, which would be cheating, and she never cheated. At least not with running. She made it through the crowd to the opposite corner, and she turned right, and she logged the junction in her mind as half-red and half-green, which seemed fair to her, and which meant so far she was running exactly fifty-fifty, three and a half green, three and a half red, which was not a catastrophe, but which was not great either, because she liked to bank plenty of greens well before she got closer to the center, where things were always stickier.

She ran on, another unbroken stretch, her strides still long and easy, still relaxed, but pushing now just a little more, picking up the pace, still breathing well, still moving well, her hair still swinging behind her in its perfect pattern, still symmetrical, still like a metronome.

The next crosswalk was red.

The man in the car got snarled up in traffic where 270 approached the Beltway. Inevitable, and expected. Orderly deceleration by all concerned, the flow hanging together, still like the thousand-round burst from the distant chain gun, but fully subsonic now, slow and fat and stealthy in the air. 355 to Wisconsin Avenue would be jammed, so he decided to stay on until 16th Street, east of Rock Creek Park. It wouldn’t be a racetrack, but it would be better. And it would drop him down all the way to Scott Circle, and then Mass Ave ran all the way to the Capitol.

He was a bullet, and he was still on target.

From the other side of the office Cornelius Christopher said, “OK, library hour is over. Go get your suit now. You can take the documents with you, but not out of the building.”

The supply office was two floors down, not exactly full of exploding fountain pens or cameras concealed in buttonhole flowers, but full of distantly related stuff, and certainly full of all the items needed to turn an honest man into a fake. The suit was well chosen. Not remotely expensive or up to date, but not tacky, either. Some kind of gray sharkskin weave, probably some man-made fiber in there, or a lot, wide lapels like five years ago. Exactly what an enlisted man would wear to a bank interview or a bail hearing. It was artfully creased here and there, from years in an imaginary closet, and there was even room dust on the collar. It looked like it was going to fit, except the arms and the shoulders. Reacher’s file figures showed six-five and two-fifty, and he was reasonably in proportion, like a regular guy enlarged, except for arms as long as a gorilla’s, and shoulders like basketballs stuffed in a sack.

There was a button-down shirt that was going to be way too small in the neck, but that was OK, because soldiers in suits were supposed to look awkward and uncomfortable. The shirt was blue and there was a red tie with it, with small blue crests on it. It could have come from a rifle club somewhere. It was a good choice. The undershirt and the boxers were standard white PX items, which was fine, because Reacher had never heard of anyone buying that kind of stuff anywhere else. There was a pair of black PX socks, and a pair of black dress-uniform shoes. They looked to be the right size.

The supply guy said, “Try it all on. If there’s a problem, we can do some alterations. If not, you should keep it on. Get used to it, and wear it in some. You’d already be on a bus or a plane by now, if you were really coming in from somewhere.”

The shirtsleeves ended up half-staff, and the neck couldn’t get close to buttoning, but the effect was OK. Every sergeant in civvies Reacher had ever seen wrenched his tie loose after about ten minutes. The suit coat was tight across the shoulders, and the sleeves stopped short of the knobs on the side of his wrists. He stood back and checked a mirror.

Perfect. A sergeant’s salary was embarrassingly close to the poverty line. And sergeants didn’t read GQ. Not usually. The whole ensemble looked exactly like a hundred dollars grudgingly spent at the outlet mall ahead of a sister-in-law’s second wedding.

The supply guy said, “Keep it on. It’ll do.”

Reacher was supposed to supply his own pocket junk, so next up was ID. It had his real name and his photograph on it, but a master sergeant’s rank, and an infantry unit sufficiently generic to be plausible for a guy deployed with Special Forces, shooting individuals one at a time from a mile away.

“How do I communicate with the colonel?” Reacher asked.

“Try the telephone,” the supply guy said.

“Sometimes hard to find a phone in a hurry.”

“There’s no danger,” the supply guy said. “It’s all just talking.”

The woman with the fanny pack and the headband crossed the Potomac on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, high above the water, running hard, die straight, through the hot swampy air, a glorious unbroken sprint, heading for Georgetown but not planning to get there. She was going to turn right on M Street, which became Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way to Washington Circle, and then New Hampshire Avenue to Dupont Circle, and then Mass Ave the rest of the way to the Capitol itself.

A crazy route, geographically, but any other option was either less or more than five miles, and five miles was what she ran. To the inch. Anyone else would have used her car’s odometer, on a quiet Sunday morning, but she had bought a surveyor’s wheel, a big yellow thing on a stick, and she had walked with it four separate times before she came up with eight thousand eight hundred yards exactly, and not a single step less or more. Precision was important.

She ran on. By that point she could feel a wide sweat stripe all the way down her back, and her throat was starting to burn. Pollution, hanging over the sluggish river, a visible cloud. But she dug in and pushed on, long, long strides, fast cadence, arms pumping. Her headband was soaked. But she was ahead of schedule. Just. Many variables to come, but she had a chance of making it. Five miles in thirty minutes. Eight thousand eight hundred yards in one thousand eight hundred seconds. Fourteen and two-thirds feet a second. Not an international distance, so there was no world record. No national record, no Olympic record. But the greats might have done it in twenty-four minutes. So thirty was acceptable. For her, with traffic, and lights, and office workers in the way.

She pushed on, breathing hard, still moving well, right up there in the zone.

The traffic on 16th Street was stop-start heavy, frustration on every block, past Juniper Street, and Iris, and Hemlock, and Holly, and Geranium, and Floral. Then past Walter Reed, with the park green and serene on the right. The driver was no longer a bullet. He was shrapnel at best, subject to aerodynamic forces, jinking right and left between the lanes to win some fractional advantage on the dead-straight road. A Southern town, built for horses and buggies, perspiring gentlemen in hats and vests flicking mosquitoes away, now sclerotic with jammed vehicles, superheated air shimmering above their hoods, expensive paint winking in the sun.

He still had a long way to go. He was going to be late.

Reacher walked the corridors until he smelled an office with a coffee machine going. He ducked in and helped himself to a cup, practicing a sergeant’s manner, on the surface quiet and deferential, with ramrod competence showing underneath. But the office was empty, so his acting was wasted, and the coffee was burnt and stewed. But he took it with him anyway, in one hand, the sheaf of documents in the other, all the way back to Cornelius Christopher’s office.

Christopher said, “You look the part.”

Reacher said, “Do I?”

“Your file says you’re pretty good with a long gun.”

“I do my best.”

“You could have been a real sniper.”

“Too much waiting around. Too much mud. The best snipers are always country boys.”

“And you’re a city boy?”

“I’m a nowhere boy. I grew up on Marine bases.”

“Yet you joined the army?”

“I’m naturally contrary.”

“Did you finish your reading?”

“Not yet.”

“We checked for financial irregularities,” Christopher said. “Or financial excesses, I suppose. But they’re all living within their means. Appropriate accommodations, four-cylinder cars, good clothes but small wardrobes, modest jewelry, no vacations, not that they’d take a vacation anyway. Not fast track people. Not if they want to be Chief of Staff one day. Or a defense industry lobbyist.”

Reacher put the thirty-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Christine Richardson to the bottom of the pile, and started in on the second of the women, twenty-nine years old and a mere major, name of Briony Walker, the daughter of a retired naval officer, brought up mostly in Seattle and San Diego, public elementary school, public high school, valedictorian, West Point.

Christopher said, “I hope it’s not her.”

Reacher said, “Why?”

“The naval connection.”

“You like the navy?”

“Not much, but it’s still a military family.”

The third candidate was another thirty-year-old light colonel, this one called Darwen DeWitt, and right there Reacher knew she wasn’t the product of a military family. Not with a name like that. In fact she was the daughter of a Houston businessman who owned about a hundred dent-repair franchises. Private education all the way, softball star, West Point.

The fourth was Alice Vaz, age thirty, lieutenant colonel, granddaughter of another lieutenant colonel, except this one had been called Mikhail Vasilyevich and he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Red Army. A Soviet. His son, Alice’s father, had gotten out of Hungary just in time, with a pregnant wife, and Alice had been born in the United States. A citizen. California, public elementary, public high, West Point.

“Notice anything definitive?” Christopher asked.

Reacher said, “Their names are perfectly alphabetical. Alice, Briony, Christine, and Darwen.”

“OK, apart from that.”

“Two of them are rich girls. What does that do to your money motive?”

“Maybe taking money is a habit with rich people. Maybe that’s how they get rich in the first place. Did you notice anything else?”

“No.”

“Neither did we.”

The woman with the fanny pack and the headband was on New Hampshire Avenue, gunning hard up the rise, the hubbub of Dupont Circle already visible in the haze ahead. She was up two greens on the crosswalks and she could see it already, reaching the Capitol steps, slamming her hand on her wrist to stop the watch, gasping for air, once, twice, bent over, hands on knees, then raising her head, then bringing her arm up slowly, and blinking the sweat from her eyes and focusing on the pale LCD readout and seeing the magic numbers: twenty-nine something.

She could do it.

She hammered on, striding short because of the gradient, really breathing, really hurting, but still moving well.

The man in the car was still on 16th Street. He had the air on high, but even so he could feel sweat on his back. Vinyl upholstery, and a four-cylinder motor with no power to spare for a big compressor. He was just past Harvard Street, getting to where young and rent-strapped aides were forced to live. No cars for them. They were walking to work, right alongside him, about the same speed.

He watched one, a girl, in pantyhose despite the heat, the nylon scissoring fast, ugly white athletic sneakers on her feet, with tube socks, her dress shoes no doubt in the big bag she was carrying, along with briefing papers and position papers and talking points, maybe with a makeup kit, hoping against hope everyone else would be busy and she would get to go on the television news for a comment.

There were male versions too, dressed out of a Brooks Brothers sale, heads high, striding out. Every block brought more of them, twos and threes, until both sidewalks were full of them, all heading the same way, power walking, almost an army, an unstoppable force, clean-living and idealistic young people setting out to do good for their country.

They were going to get to work before him. The traffic was awful.

The transcript showed that the second pre-committee hearing had picked up more or less exactly where the first had left off, solidly on the safe grounds of technical discussions, about minutiae like actions and stocks and bedding and triggers and scopes. It was as if a collective but unspoken agreement had been reached, to avoid unpleasant issues, and to run out the clock with the kind of things shooters liked to talk about.

The four liaison women poked and prodded and drew the men out endlessly, going over things again and again, refining details until Reacher could practically see the new weapon in his mind’s eye. Three of them were doing it just to keep the ball rolling, and the fourth was lapping it all up, no doubt picturing her contact in a foreign boardroom reading her fax, unable to believe the precision of the specification he was being handed.

Who was the fourth?

Christine Richardson and Darwen DeWitt did most of the talking. The transcript looked like a movie screenplay where C.R. and D.D. were the big stars. They each got plenty of ink. But their approaches were different. Richardson was rah-rah for the army, every question and every point laying a kind of guilt trip on the politicians for not rushing to make the world a safer place. DeWitt showed more concern for the Congressional point of view. She was almost a fifth skeptic. Devil’s advocate, maybe, or perhaps her sympathies genuinely lay elsewhere. Perhaps her Houston dent-repair upbringing had made her a fiscal conservative. But wherever she was coming from, she laid bare the details of the secret spec as much as anyone.

Briony Walker and Alice Vaz said less. Walker was all about accuracy. The naval family. She wanted the rifle to be like the guns on her daddy’s ships, artillery instruments, infallible when properly aimed. And she was weirdly interested in the end results. She asked about head shots and chest shots, about how it felt to wait while the bullet flew, about what they saw through the scope afterward. The effect was almost pornographic.

Alice Vaz asked mostly wider questions. The others debated rifle stocks made of composite materials, which wouldn’t shrink or swell no matter the conditions, and she asked about the conditions. Where in the world was this rifle likely to go? How hot? How cold? How high? How wet? She didn’t get clear answers, and after a spell she gave up. There were no A.V. attributions in the last twenty pages of the transcript.

Christopher asked, “Gut feeling?”

Reacher said, “Just from this?”

“Why not?”

“Then I would say it’s Christine Richardson. She sounds like the prime mover. She wants everything spelled out every which way. No secrets with that woman.”

“I could say she’s trying to sell it. I could say she thinks the political guys will find that stuff interesting.”

“No, she knows they don’t. But she keeps on talking anyway. She won’t let them leave anything vague or unspecified. Why is that?”

“Maybe she has OCD.”

“What’s that?”

“Obsessive compulsive disorder. Like alphabetizing your underwear.”

“How do you alphabetize underwear?”

“Figure of speech.”

“So you’re happy with Richardson?”

“No,” Christopher said. “We think it’s her too. From the externalities in the transcripts, at least. The issue is going to be proving it.”

The woman with the fanny pack and the headband was on Mass Ave, approaching Scott Circle, and the man in the car was on 16th Street, approaching Scott Circle. Their average speeds for the last many minutes had been more or less identical, at ten miles an hour, her progress steady and resolute and relentless, his frustratingly stop-start-fast-fast-slow. She was pushing hard, ready for an iconic athletic breakthrough, desperate for it, and he was agitated about the time, anxious about being late, wishing he could have parked and taken the Metro without getting back at the end of the day to find all his wheels had been stolen.

It happened like this: she was on the left-hand sidewalk, on Mass Ave, and he was at right angles to her, in 16th Street’s extreme right lane, wanting to come off into the circle. She was looking straight ahead, watching the traffic, watching the upcoming crosswalk lights, trying to time it, suddenly convinced that if she got held up there her bid was over. He was looking beyond the three cars ahead, to the far left, diametrically away from her, watching the traffic coming into the circle, which would have prior right of way. He was looking for an upcoming gap, trying to time it, hoping to roll up to the line and squirt on through, one unbroken move.

She sprinted, hard, hard, hard, and he moved up, craning left, looking for the gap that would be his, seeing half a gap, rolling, rolling, the cars ahead of him clearing, the gap tightening, not really a gap at all, but his last chance, so he went for it, hitting the gas, wrenching the wheel, smashing into her as she sprinted into the space she had been sure would remain, because surely no driver would try to use it.

She went up in the air and down on his windshield rail, impossibly loud metallic thumps and crashes, and he braked hard and she spun on the shiny roof and clattered over the inclined tailgate and landed head first on the blacktop.

Reacher butted all the paperwork into a neat stack and put it back on Christopher’s desk. Christopher said, “Almost time to get down to business. Do you know the committee room number?”

Reacher said, “Yes.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No.”

“Good. I’m not going to tell you. I want you wandering around like a little lost country boy. I want everything about this thing to be realistic from the get-go.”

“Nothing about this thing is realistic. And nothing about this thing is going to work.”

“Look on the bright side. You might get lucky. One of them might be into rough trade. All on the army’s dime, too.”

Reacher said nothing. He used the door on F Street and turned right and left onto New Jersey Avenue, and then the Capitol Building was right there in front of him, half a mile ahead, big and white and shining in the sun. He looped around into the plaza and went up the steps. A Capitol cop looked at his ID and gave him a barrage of directions so confusing that Reacher knew he would need a couple of refreshers along the way. Which he got, first from another guard, and then from a page.

The designated committee room had an impressive door made from polished mahogany; and inside, it had an impressive table made from the same wood. Around the table were seated four people. One was the transcriber. He was in shirtsleeves and had a court-reporter machine in front of him. The other three were clearly the army procurement officer, and the Marine Corps procurement officer, and the Marine sniper. The two officers were in uniform, and the sniper was in a cheap suit. Probably a Recon Marine. A Delta wannabe. The officers shook hands, and the sniper gave a millimetric nod, which Reacher returned, equally briefly, which for two alleged snipers was effusive, and for a dogface and a jarhead meeting for the first time was practically like rolling around on the floor in an ecstatic bear hug.

There was no one else in the room. No political staffers, none of the liaison women. The clock in Reacher’s head said the meeting was due to start inside a minute. The clock on the wall was a minute fast, so the meeting was already underway, according to Capitol time. But nothing was happening. No one seemed to care. The Marine sniper was mute, and the procurement guys were clearly as happy to waste time sitting quiet as to waste it talking up a storm about a lost cause.

The clock ticked. No one spoke. The jarhead stared into space, infinitely still. The officers moved in their chairs and got comfortable. Reacher copied the jarhead.

Then eventually the staffers came in, followed by three women in army Class A uniform. Three women, not four. Class A uniform, female officer, the nameplate is adjusted to individual figure differences and centered horizontally on the right side between one and two inches above the top button of the coat. Reacher scanned the black plastic rectangles. DeWitt, Vaz, and Walker were there. Richardson was not. A and B and D were present, but C was missing. No Christine.

The four staffers looked a little upset, and the three women looked very unhappy. They all sat down, in what were clearly their accustomed places, leaving one chair empty, and the guy at the head of the table said, “Gentlemen, I’m afraid we have some very upsetting news. Earlier today Colonel Richardson was struck by a car as she was running to work. At Scott Circle.”

Reacher’s first thought was: Running? Why? Was she late? But then he understood. Jogging, fitness, shower and dress at the office. He had seen people do that.

The guy at the head of the table said, “The driver of the car is a postal worker from the Capitol mail room. Eyewitness accounts suggest risks were taken by both parties.”

The army procurement officer asked, “But how is she? How’s Christine?”

The guy at the head of the table said, “She died at the scene.”

Silence in the room.

The guy said, “Head trauma. From when she hit the windshield rail, or from when she finally fell to the ground.”

Silence. No sound in the room, except the patter of the transcriber’s machine, as he caught up with what had been said. Then even he went quiet.

The guy at the head of the table said, “Accordingly, I suggest we close down this process and resume it at a more suitable time.”

The army procurement officer asked, “When?”

“Let’s schedule it for the next round of budget discussions.”

“When are those?”

“A year or so.”

Silence.

Then Briony Walker said, “No, sir. We have a duty to fulfill. The process must be completed. Colonel Richardson would have wanted it no other way.”

No answer.

Walker said, “The army deserves to have its case made properly and its needs and requirements placed in the record. People would quickly forget our reason for abandoning this process. They would assume we had not been truly interested. So I propose we complete our mission by making certain every detail and every parameter have been adequately clarified and accurately recorded. Then at least our legislators will know exactly what they are approving. Or rejecting, as the case may be.”

The guy at the head of the table said, “Does anyone wish to speak against the proposal?”

No answer.

“Very well,” the guy said. “We will do as Major Walker suggests, and spend the rest of the day going over everything one more time. Just in case there’s something we missed.”

And go over it they did. Reacher recognized the sequence of individual discussions from the transcripts. They started at the beginning and worked their way through. Most items were simply reiterated and reconfirmed, but there were some lingering live debates. Briony Walker was all out for bolt action. The naval family. The accuracy issue. A bolt action was operated manually, as gently as you liked, so the gun stayed still afterward, with no microscopic tremors running through it. On the other hand a semi-automatic action was operated by gunpowder explosions, and was absolutely guaranteed to put tremors into the gun afterward. Perhaps for a critical length of time.

“How long?” one of the staffers asked.

“Would be critical?” Walker asked back.

“No, how long do these tremors last?”

“Some fractions of a second, possibly.”

“How big are they?”

“Certainly big enough to hurt accuracy at a thousand yards or more.”

The staffer looked across the table and said, “Gentlemen?”

The army procurement guy looked at his Marine counterpart, who looked at his sniper, who stared into space. Then everyone looked at Reacher.

Reacher said, “What was the first item you discussed?”

The staffer said, “Cold shot accuracy.”

“Which is important why?”

“Because a sniper will often get just one opportunity.”

“With a bullet that was chambered when?”

“I think we heard testimony that it can have been several hours previously. Long waits seem to be part of the job.”

“Which means any tremors will have disappeared long ago. You could chamber the round with a hammer. If you assume the money shots are always going to be singles, and widely spaced, possibly by hours or even days, then the action doesn’t matter.”

“So you’d accept a semi-automatic sniper rifle?”

“No, sir,” Reacher said. “Major Walker is correct. Possibly the money shots won’t always be the first shots. And accuracy is always worth pursuing wherever possible. And bolt actions are rugged, reliable, simple, and easy to maintain. They’re also cheap.”

So then came a debate about which bolt action was best. The classic Remington had fans in the room, but so did Winchester and Sako and Ruger. And at that point Alice Vaz started up with more of her big-picture questions. She said, “The way to understand our requirements, for not only actions but also stocks and bedding, it seems to me, is to understand where and how this rifle will actually be used. At what altitude? At what barometric pressures? In what extremes of temperature and humidity? What new environments might it face?”

So to shut her up the army procurement guy ran through just about everything in the War Plans locker. No names and no specific details, of course, but all the meteorological implications. High altitude plus freezing mist, extreme dry heat with sand infiltration, rain forest humidity and high ambient temperature, in snow many degrees below zero, in downpours, and so on.

Then one of the staffers insisted that the steel for the barrel had to be domestic. Which was not a huge problem. Then another insisted that the optics had to be domestic too. Which was a bigger problem. Reacher watched the women seated opposite. Darwen DeWitt wasn’t saying much. Which was a surprise after her star turns the first two times out. She was a little more than medium height, and still lithe, like the teenage softball star she had been. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned, with features more likely to be called strong than pretty, but she was spared from being plain by mobile and expressive eyes. They were dark, and they moved constantly but slowly, and they blazed with intelligence and some kind of inner fire. Maybe she was burning off surplus IQ, to stop her head from exploding.

Briony Walker was the navy daughter, and she looked it, neat and controlled and severe, except for an unruly head of hair, untamed even by what looked like a recent and enthusiastic haircut. She too had an animated face, and she too had a lot going on behind her eyes.

Alice Vaz was the best looking. Reacher didn’t know the word. Elfin, maybe? Gamine? Probably somewhere in between. She had darker skin than the other two, and a cap of short dark hair, and the kind of eyes that switch between a twinkle and a death ray in, well, the blink of an eye. She was smaller than the other two, and slight, in a European kind of way, and maybe smarter, too. Ultimately she was controlling the conversation, by hemming it in with questions too boring to answer. She was making the others focus.

The meeting dragged on. Reacher made no further contributions beyond an occasional grunt of assent. Eventually conversation dried up and the guy at the head of the table asked if everyone agreed the army’s needs and requirements were now properly in the record. All hands went up. The guy repeated the question, this time personally to and directly at Briony Walker, possibly a courtesy, possibly out of spite, her own words fed back to her. But Walker took no offense. She just agreed, yes, she was completely satisfied.

Whereupon the four staffers stood up and left the room, hustling and bustling and without a word, as if to take time out to say goodbye would hopelessly overburden their busy schedules. The women stood up, but the next out of the room was the army procurement guy, who just clapped his Marine buddy on the shoulder and disappeared. Whereupon the Marine clapped his NCO on the shoulder and they walked out together, leaving just Reacher and the women in the room.

But it didn’t stay that way for long. The women were already in a huddle. Not exactly leaning in, face to face, a tight little triangle, shoulder to shoulder, touching each other, like regular women. But maybe the West Point version. They drifted in lockstep to the door, there was a polite glance from Alice Vaz, and then they were gone.

Reacher stayed where he was. No big rush. Nothing he could have done about it. Maybe there were guys who could have pulled it off. Hey, I’m sorry about your dead buddy that I never met, but can I separate you from your grieving pals and take you out and buy you a drink? Reacher was not one of those guys.

But the women weren’t going anywhere. He was sure of that.

He got up and stepped out and saw them where the corridor widened into a lobby. They were still together in their tight huddle. Not going anywhere. Just talking. Lots of social rules. They would end up in a bar, for sure, but not yet.

Reacher drifted back to a bank of pay phones and dialed. He leaned on the wall. He saw Briony Walker glance at him, then glance away. Just the out-of-towner making a call. Maybe to his local buddies, telling them he’s done for the day, asking them where the action is at night.

Christopher said, “Yes?”

Reacher said, “Did you hear about Christine Richardson?”

“Yes, we did.”

“So it’s going to be a little harder now.”

“It might be over now. If Richardson was the leak all along.”

“Suppose she wasn’t?”

“Then it might be easier, not harder. With the other three. Emotion helps. Loose lips sink ships.”

“It wasn’t a fun afternoon. Romance is on no one’s mind. They’re talking to each other. There’s no way into a conversation like that.”

“Exploit any opportunity you can.”

“You’re not in the Capitol, but you’re monitoring their fax line, right?”

“Correct.”

“Including tonight?”

“Of course. What do you know?”

“It’s not DeWitt.”

“How do you know?”

“She was upset. She’s thirty years old and she never had anyone die before.”

“It’s natural to be upset.”

“But if she had a secret agenda she’d have gotten over it. To do her work. But she didn’t. She hardly said a word. She sat there like the whole thing had no purpose. Which was absolutely the appropriate reaction for anyone without an agenda of her own.”

“Had either of the other two gotten over it?”

“Alice Vaz was all over it. Briony Walker likewise. And Walker made a real big fuss about going through it all one more time. With every detail stated for the record.”

“So she could check if she missed anything in her last two faxes?”

“That’s a possible interpretation.”

“What did Vaz do?”

“Same thing she did in the transcripts. Big geography. She should quit and run a travel agency.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. Just monitor that fax line for me.”

Reacher hung up the phone. The women were still in the lobby, still talking, still not going anywhere. He set off toward them, just strolling, like a man with an hour to kill, like a stranger in town drawn toward the only faces he knew. Plan A was to keep the pretense going, maybe getting into the group via Briony Walker’s interest in gunshot wounds. Maybe she was a sniper groupie. He could offer some opinions. Head shot or chest shot? Well, ma’am, I favor the throat shot. If you hit it just right you can make their heads come off.

Plan B was to abandon the pretense and come clean as an MP captain undercover for MI, and see where that road led. Which might be all the way home. If he made out Richardson had been the prime suspect, then whoever worked hardest to reinforce that conclusion would be the guilty one. If no one worked hard, then Richardson had been the guilty one all along.

He strolled on.

Plan A or Plan B?

They made the decision for him.

They handed it to him on a plate.

They were civilized women, and reflexively polite in the way that military people always are. He was heading close to them. He wasn’t going to pass by on the other side. So he had to be acknowledged. Briony Walker looked straight at him, but Darwen DeWitt was the first to speak. She said, “We weren’t introduced. I guess it wasn’t that kind of an afternoon.”

“No, ma’am,” Reacher said. “I guess it wasn’t.” He said his name. He saw each of the three file it away in her memory.

He said, “I was sorry to hear about Colonel Richardson.”

DeWitt nodded. “It was a shock.”

“Did you know her well?”

“We all came up together. We expected to carry on together.”

“Brother officers,” Reacher said. “Or sisters, I guess.”

“We all felt that way.”

Reacher nodded. They could all afford to feel that way. No rivalry. Not yet. They faced no significant bottleneck until the leap from Brigadier General to Major General. From one star to two. Then a little rivalry might bite.

Briony Walker said, “It must have happened to you, sergeant. You must have lost people.”

“Ma’am, one or two.”

“And what do you do on days like that?”

“Well, ma’am, typically we would go to a bar and toast their journey. Usually starts out quiet, and ends up happy. Which is important. For the good of the unit.”

Alice Vaz said, “What unit?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”

“What bar?”

“Whatever is close at hand.”

DeWitt said, “The Hyatt is a block away.”

They walked over to the Hyatt. But not exactly together. Not a foursome. More accurately a threesome and a singleton in a loose association, held together only by Reacher playing dumb enough to miss the hints he should get lost. The women were too polite to make it more explicit. But even so the walk was excruciatingly embarrassing. Out of the grounds, across Constitution, onto New Jersey Avenue, across Louisiana and D Street, and then they were there, at the Hyatt’s door. Reacher stepped up promptly and held it open. Because immediate action was required, right there, right then. Indecisive loitering on the sidewalk would have led to heavier hints.

They shuffled past him, first Vaz, then DeWitt, and finally Walker. Reacher fell in behind them. They found the bar. Not the kind of place Reacher was used to. For one thing, there was no bar. Not as such. Just low tables, low chairs, and waiter service. It was a lounge.

Walker looked at Reacher and asked, “What should we drink?”

Reacher said, “Pitchers of beer, but I doubt if they have those here.”

A waiter came and the women ordered white wine spritzers. It was summer. Reacher ordered hot coffee, black, no sweeteners required. He preferred not to clutter a table with jugs and bowls and spoons. The women murmured among themselves, a trio, with occasional guilty glances at him, unable to get rid of him, unable to be rude to him.

He asked, “Do those meetings usually go like that? Apart from the thing with Colonel Richardson, I mean.”

Vaz said, “Your first?”

Reacher said, “And hopefully my last, ma’am.”

Walker said, “No, it was worth it. It was a good at-bat. They can’t say no to everything. So we just made it fractionally more likely they’ll say yes to something else, sometime soon.”

“You like your job?”

“Do you like yours, sergeant?”

“Yes, ma’am, most of the time.”

“I could give the same answer.”

The waiter brought the drinks, and the women returned to their three-way private conversation. Reacher’s coffee was in a wide, shallow cup, and there wasn’t much of it. He was a couple of mouthfuls away from the next awkward moment. They hadn’t gotten rid of him leaving the Capitol, and they hadn’t gotten rid of him entering the hotel. The end of the first round of drinks was their next obvious opportunity. All it would take was an order: Sergeant, you’re dismissed. No way of fighting that, not even under Plan B. Captain, you’re dismissed worked just as well, when said by majors and lieutenant colonels.

But it was Darwen DeWitt who left after the first round of drinks. She was still not talking much, and she clearly wasn’t enjoying herself. She was finding no catharsis. She said she had work to do, and she got up. There were no hugs. Just tight nods and brave smiles and meaningful glances, and then she was gone. Vaz and Walker looked at Reacher, and Reacher looked right back at Walker and Vaz. No one spoke. Then the waiter came back right on cue, and Vaz and Walker ordered more spritzers, and Reacher ordered more coffee.

The second spritzer loosened Walker up a little. She asked Reacher what he felt when he pulled the trigger on a live human being. Reacher quoted a guy he knew. He said recoil against his shoulder. Walker asked what was the longest kill he had ever made. Truth was about eleven feet, at that stage, because he was a cop, but he said six hundred yards, because he was supposed to be a sniper. She asked with what. Truth was a Beretta M9, but he said an M21, an ART II scope, and a 7.62 NATO round.

Alice Vaz asked, “Where was this?”

Reacher said, “Ma’am, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Which sounds like a Special Forces scenario.”

“I guess it does.”

“Six hundred yards is fairly close range for you guys.”

“Practically point blank, ma’am.”

“Black bag for CIA, or legitimate, for us?”

“Ma’am, I’m not at liberty to say.”

And those twin denials seemed to create some credibility. Both women gradually abandoned their defensive body language. Not that it was replaced by personal interest. It was replaced by professional interest, which came across in a poignant way. Neither woman had a realistic hope in her lifetime of becoming a battlefield commander. Both were forced to take a different route. But both seemed to look across the divide with concern. In an ideal world they would be fighting. In which case they would want the best available weapons. No question about that. In which case simple ethics demanded the best available weapons for those currently doing the fighting in the less than perfect world. Simple justice. And simple preparedness, too. Their sisters might never get there, but their daughters would one day.

Walker asked Reacher his private opinion about the rifle design. Were there things that should be added? Taken away? Reacher said, “Ma’am, I think they got it about right,” partly because that was the kind of thing a sergeant would say to an officer, and partly because it was true. Walker seemed happy with the answer.

Then both Walker and Vaz got up to use the restroom. Reacher could have used a pit stop too, but he didn’t want to follow directly behind them. That would have been too weird, right after the walk from the Capitol. So he waited. He saw Vaz use a pay phone on her way. There was a line of them in wooden hutches on the lounge’s back wall. Vaz used the center phone. Walker didn’t wait for her. She went on ahead. Vaz spoke for less than ten seconds and then hung up and continued on her way to the restroom.

Walker never came back from the restroom. Vaz sat down alone and unconcerned and said Walker had gone back to the office. She had used the D Street door. She had a lot to do. And did Reacher want another drink?

Reacher and Vaz, alone together. Walker, on her own, on the loose.

Reacher said, “You buying?”

Vaz said, “Sure.”

Reacher said, “Then yes.”

“Then follow me,” Vaz said. “I know a better place than this.”

The better place was tucked in close to the tracks out the back of Union Station. It was better in the sense it had an actual bar. It was worse in every other way. In particular it was in a lousy neighborhood, full of ugly brick and ramshackle buildings, with dark streets and all kinds of alleyways and yards all over the place, with more wires overhead than trees. The bar itself felt like a waterfront establishment, mysteriously landlocked, low and wide and made a warren by subdivision into many different room-sized areas. Reacher sat with his back to a corner, where he could see both front and rear doors at once. Vaz sat next to him, not close, but not far away, either. She looked good. Better than she had a right to. Class A uniform, female officer, was generally no kind of a flattering outfit. It was essentially tubular. Maybe Vaz’s was tailored. It had to be. The jacket was waisted. It went in and out properly. The skirt was tight. And a little short. Just a fraction, but detectable by the human eye unaided.

Vaz said, “I hope not to be in this shop much longer.”

“Where next?”

“War Plans, I hope.”

“Do they cash this shop’s checks?”

“You mean, can I take my credits with me? Absolutely. Politics and War Plans? They’re practically the same thing.”

“So when?”

“As soon as possible.”

“But you’re worried this business with Colonel Richardson will slow things down. No one likes a fuss, right? And the shop is understaffed now. Maybe they can’t let you go.”

“You’re pretty smart, for a sergeant.”

“Rank has nothing to do with being smart, ma’am.”

“Tell me about yourself.”

“You first.”

“Nothing to tell,” Vaz said. “California girl, West Point cadet, first I wanted to see the world, and then I wanted to control it. You?”

“Marine Corps boy, West Point cadet, first I wanted to see the world, and then I wanted to survive it.”

“I don’t remember many West Point cadets who became sergeants afterward.”

“Some did. From time to time. In a way.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“You’re an undercover operator,” Vaz said. “I always knew the day would come.”

“When what?”

“When you finally figured it out. As in, your procurement office is riddled with corruption, and has been for years. As in, you don’t need a new sniper rifle. You know that. But those guys have already sold stock in the new model. Maybe the money is already spent. So they have to make it happen. Any way they can. I mean, did you hear some of the arguments they were making?”

“Where is their office?”

“Who? Procurement is a big department.”

“The guy I saw today, for instance.”

“His office is in the Capitol Building.”

“With a fax machine?”

“Of course.”

“Did any of the others know this?”

“In the political shop? We all did. Why do you think Walker made them go through the whole thing again today? Because she wanted to generate a third fax.”

“Why?”

“An extra piece of evidence for you. We knew you’d catch up with it eventually.”

“Why didn’t one of you drop a dime before?”

“Not our place.”

“You mean the cost-benefit ratio wasn’t right. One of you would have to step up, and it’s conceivable she could lose. Because anything can happen in a military court. In which case she’s out of the running right from that moment. Because she was once on the losing side. You couldn’t risk that kind of mistake. Not having come so far.”

“The running for what?”

“For whatever it is you all plan to be.”

“For a spell we thought the previous sniper could be the undercover guy. The one you replaced. Like entrapment. He was letting the officer push him to want more and more. But in the end we thought he was just a sniper. So we’d have nailed you for the real undercover guy in about a minute, except no one was really paying attention this afternoon.”

“Because of Richardson? What did she think was happening?”

“The same as we all did. Procurement is a swamp and you’d notice sooner or later.”

“What is it you plan to be?”

“Respected. Perhaps within a closed community, but by someone.”

“Has your life lacked respect so far?”

“You have no idea,” Vaz said. She turned toward him, moving on the bench, her knees coming close to his, dark nylon over dark skin. She said, “I’m proceeding on the assumption that I can trust my impression that you’re younger than me. And in a branch with much less generous and accelerated promotion. And that therefore I outrank you.”

“I’m a captain,” Reacher said. “Ma’am.”

“Therefore if our chains of command were in any way related, it would be inappropriate for us to have a close relationship. Therefore the question is, are our chains of command in any way related?”

“I think they’re about as far apart as chains of command can be.”

“Wait there,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

And she got up and threaded her way through the cluttered space, heading for the restroom corridor in back. Five minutes, minimum, Reacher thought. He followed her as far as a pay phone on the wall. The phone was a scratched old item and the wall behind it was dark with smoke and grime.

He dialed, and said his name.

Cornelius Christopher said, “Yes?”

Reacher said, “I’m done.”

“What does that mean? You’re quitting?”

“No, it means the job is done.”

“What do you know?”

“Walker must be back at the Capitol by now. Any faxes yet?”

“No.”

“You were wrong. No one is leaking to a foreign firearms manufacturer. No one ever was. Why would anyone need to? Everyone knows what a good sniper rifle should be. It’s self-explanatory. It’s obvious. The basic principles have been understood for a century. No one needs to gather secret intelligence. Because they already know.”

“So what’s the story?”

“I’m waiting for the final proof. I should have it in five minutes or less.”

“Proof of what?”

“It’s Alice Vaz,” Reacher said. “Think about the transcripts. Her big-picture questions. She asked a couple more this afternoon. She wanted it spelled out exactly where this new rifle will be used. She asked what new environments it might face.”

“So?”

“She was trying to get into War Plans through the back door. And the procurement guy fell for it. No details, but he gave plenty of weather clues. Anyone could reverse-engineer our entire slate of global intentions from what he said.”

“Like what?”

“He said high altitude plus freezing mist.”

“Afghanistan,” Christopher said. “We’re going to have to go there sooner or later.”

“And extreme dry heat with sand infiltration.”

“The Middle East. Iraq, most likely.”

“And rain forest humidity and high ambient temperature.”

“South America. Colombia, and so on. The drug wars.”

“And in snow many degrees below zero.”

“If we have to go to the Soviet Union.”

“You see? She got a summary of all our future plans from the guy. Exactly the kind of oblique data that enemy intelligence analysts love.”

“Are you sure?”

“I gave her two seconds to react and she came up with blaming procurement for being corrupt. It was almost plausible. She’s very smart.”

“Which enemy? Which foreign intelligence?”

“The Soviets, of course. A local fax number, probably in their embassy.”

“She’s their asset?”

“In a big, big way. Think about it. She’s on the fast track. She’s going right to the top. Which is what? The Joint Chiefs, at least. But maybe more. A woman like this could be President of the United States.”

“But how did they recruit her? And when?”

“Probably before she was born. Her granddaddy was some big Red Army hero. So maybe her daddy wasn’t a real refugee. Maybe the KGB shuffled him to Hungary so he could get out and look like a dissident. Whereupon his daughter could be born an American and become a real deep down sleeper. She was probably groomed for the fast track from birth. These people play a long game.”

“That’s a lot of assumptions.”

“The proof will be here in about three minutes. Or not.”

“But why risk wasting a super-high-value asset on this? Because if you’re right, then this is useful, but it’s not life-changing. This is not the hydrogen bomb.”

“I think this was kind of accidental. I think it came up in the normal course of her duties. But she couldn’t resist phoning it in. Habit, or a sense of obligation. If she’s a true believer.”

“What’s the proof you’re getting in five minutes? Or is it three?”

“It’s two minutes now, probably,” Reacher said. “She made a brief call from the Hyatt hotel. Think about it. She’s a huge asset. Maybe their biggest ever. She’s headed all the way to the top. Which could be anywhere. And right now she’s stopping in War Plans next, which is a real big prize in itself. So she has to be protected. Like no one has ever been protected before. And she was suspicious of me somehow. Maybe routine paranoia. I was new. I was hanging around. So she called for help. She told the embassy’s wet boys where I’d be, and when. And then she lured me into the trap. Right now I’m supposed to believe I’m about to get in her pants.”

“Soviet wet boys are coming for you?”

“One minute now, probably. I’m about to be a mugging gone wrong. I’m going to be found dead on a street corner.”

“Where are you?”

“In the badlands behind Union Station.”

“I can’t get anyone there in less than a minute.”

“I didn’t expect you would.”

“Are you going to be OK?”

“That depends on how many they send.”

“Can you arrest Vaz before they get there?”

“She’s long gone. I’m sure she went straight out the bathroom window. You’ll have to pick her up. She’ll be heading for her office.”

Then a man stepped in through the bar’s rear door.

“Got to go,” Reacher said. “It’s starting.”

Reacher hung up the phone. The guy at the rear door was compact and hard-edged, dressed in black, moving easily. He looked vaguely similar to Vaz in terms of ethnic background. But he was a decade older. Nothing in his hands. Not yet. Not inside a public bar. Reacher guessed the point of the guy coming in the back was to chase him out the front, where the main force would be gathered. Easier to set up a mugging gone wrong on a public street, rather than in a private yard in back of a bar. Because it wasn’t a great street. Not a great neighborhood. Broken lighting, plenty of shadows, plenty of doorways, passersby habituated by instinct and long experience to look away and say nothing.

The guy was scanning the room. Vaz had spent very little time on the phone. Very few words. Probably not more than big guy, very tall, gray suit. Reacher felt the guy’s eyes on him. He practically heard the check marks. Big guy, right there. Very tall, no question. Gray suit, here’s our boy. The guy started away from the door.

Reacher started toward it.

A wise man asked, what’s the best time to plant a tree? A wise man answered, fifty years ago. As in, what’s the best time to make a decision? A wise man answers, five seconds before the first punch is thrown.

The guy in black weighed maybe one-ninety, and he was doing about two miles an hour. Reacher weighed two-fifty, and he was doing about three miles an hour. Therefore closing speed was five miles an hour, and impact, should it happen, would involve some multiple of four hundred forty pounds a square inch.

Impact did happen.

But not at five miles an hour. Closing speed was dramatically increased by a sudden drive off Reacher’s back foot and the vicious clubbing swing of his elbow. Which therefore connected with a real big multiple of their combined bodyweights. Reacher caught the guy on the perfect cheekbone-nose-cheekbone line and the cracking and splintering was clearly audible over the wooden thud of feet on the floor. The guy went down like a motorcycle rider hitting a clothesline. Reacher walked on by and stepped out the back door.

Nobody or somebody?

That was the only question. And there is no bigger difference than nothing or something. Had they posted all of the main force at the front? Or had they left a lone guy as back-up?

They had left a guy. Dark hair, dark eyes, thicker coat than his pal. Smart as a whip, probably, but any human given instructions is at a disadvantage. Your target is a big guy, very tall, gray suit. And however smart you are, however quick, that lethal one, two, three question-and-answer drumbeat occupies precious mental milliseconds, at least big guy check, very tall check, gray suit check, like that, and the problem comes when the big guy in the gray suit occupies those same precious milliseconds by walking straight toward you and breaking your skull with his elbow.

Reacher walked on, to where an arch led from the yard to the alley.

The alley was wide enough for two horses and a beer cart axle. At the right-hand end was an arch to another private yard. At the left-hand end was the street. Reacher’s shoes were quiet. Class A uniform shoes. Therefore man-made soles. No one wanted leather welts. More to polish. Reacher stopped short of the street and put his back against the left-hand wall. In a movie there would be a busted shard of mirror at his feet. He could edge it out and check the view. But he wasn’t in a movie. So he inched around, and peered out, one eye.

Thirty feet away. Four guys. Therefore a total of six dispatched. Six wet boys in a foreign embassy. Permanently. For her. Like no one has ever been protected before. A woman like this could be President of the United States. They had two cars parked on the far side of the street. Diplomatic plates. Probably never paid their parking fines. The guys were in a rough arc near the bar’s door, their backs to Reacher, just standing there semi-animated, like guys sometimes do for a spell, outside a bar.

There was no busted shard of mirror, but there was a broken quarter brick, about the size of a baseball. In no way reflective, but the need for a mirror was past. Reacher picked it up, and stepped out to the street, and turned left.

Thirty feet was ten paces, and Reacher kept a steady speed through the first five of them, and then he wound up and threw the brick fragment at the nearer car and accelerated hard so that the brick shattered the rear windshield and the four heads snapped toward the sound and Reacher’s elbow hit the first of those heads all in a tight little one-two-three sequence, less than a second beginning to end.

The first guy went down, obviously, vertically beneath Reacher’s scything follow-through, and then Reacher spun back off the bounce and drove the same elbow backward into the next guy’s head. Which left two guys still on their feet, one close, one inconveniently distant, so Reacher feinted toward the farther one and then pivoted back and head-butted the nearer one, like he was trying to drive a fencepost into dry baked earth with his head. Which left one still on his feet, which the guy put to good use by running for it.

Reacher let him go. There were things Reacher didn’t like to do. Running was one of them.

Twenty-four hours later Reacher was back in Frankfurt, where he stayed for a week, before moving on to Korea for a regular tour. Neither he nor anyone in the world heard anything more about Alice Vaz. He had no idea whether his analysis had been right or wrong, close or wildly inaccurate. But a month after his arrival in Seoul he heard he was being considered for a medal. The Legion of Merit, to be specific, and for no discernible reason, other than what might be gleaned from the notes in the manual: Awarded for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services to the United States.

Never Go Back is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

High Heat copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Title page art from an original photograph by Andre Laksmana

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Child, Lee.

Never go back : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.

pages cm.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33937-3

1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Military police—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H4838N48 2013

813′.54—dc23 2013019278

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Carlos Beltran

Cover art: Tom Hallman

v3.1_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Never Go Back

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Dedication

High Heat: A Jack Reacher Novella

Books by Lee Child

About the Author

Chapter 1

Eventually they put Reacher in a car and drove him to a motel a mile away, where the night clerk gave him a room, which had all the features Reacher expected, because he had seen such rooms a thousand times before. There was a raucous through-the-wall heater, which would be too noisy to sleep with, which would save the owner money on electricity. There were low-watt bulbs in all the fixtures, likewise. There was a low-pile carpet that after cleaning would dry in hours, so the room could rent again the same day. Not that the carpet would be cleaned often. It was dark and patterned and ideal for concealing stains. As was the bedspread. No doubt the shower would be weak and strangled, and the towels thin, and the soap small, and the shampoo cheap. The furniture was made of wood, all dark and bruised, and the television set was small and old, and the curtains were gray with grime.

All as expected. Nothing he hadn’t seen a thousand times before.

But still dismal.

So before even putting the key in his pocket he turned around and went back out to the lot. The air was cold, and a little damp. The middle of the evening, in the middle of winter, in the northeastern corner of Virginia. The lazy Potomac was not far away. Beyond it in the east, D.C.’s glow lit up the clouds. The nation’s capital, where all kinds of things were going on.

The car that had let him out was already driving away. Reacher watched its tail lights grow faint in the mist. After a moment they disappeared completely, and the world went quiet and still. Just for a minute. Then another car showed up, brisk and confident, like it knew where it was going. It turned into the lot. It was a plain sedan, dark in color. Almost certainly a government vehicle. It aimed for the motel office, but its headlight beams swung across Reacher’s immobile form, and it changed direction, and came straight at him.

Visitors. Purpose unknown, but the news would be either good or bad.

The car stopped parallel with the building, as far in front of Reacher as his room was behind him, leaving him alone in the center of a space the size of a boxing ring. Two men got out of the car. Despite the chill they were dressed in T-shirts, tight and white, above the kind of athletic pants sprinters peel off seconds before a race. Both men looked more than six feet and two hundred pounds. Smaller than Reacher, but not by much. Both were military. That was clear. Reacher could tell by their haircuts. No civilian barber would be as pragmatic or brutal. The market wouldn’t allow it.

The guy from the passenger side tracked around the hood and formed up with the driver. The two of them stood there, side by side. Both wore sneakers on their feet, big and white and shapeless. Neither had been in the Middle East recently. No sunburn, no squint lines, no stress and strain in their eyes. Both were young, somewhere south of thirty. Technically Reacher was old enough to be their father. They were NCOs, he thought. Specialists, probably, not sergeants. They didn’t look like sergeants. Not wise enough. The opposite, in fact. They had dull, blank faces.

The guy from the passenger side said, “Are you Jack Reacher?”

Reacher said, “Who’s asking?”

“We are.”

“And who are you?”

“We’re your legal advisors.”

Which they weren’t, obviously. Reacher knew that. Army lawyers don’t travel in pairs and breathe through their mouths. They were something else. Bad news, not good. In which case immediate action was always the best bet. Easy enough to mime sudden comprehension and an eager approach and a hand raised in welcome, and easy enough to let the eager approach become unstoppable momentum, and to turn the raised hand into a scything blow, elbow into the left-hand guy’s face, hard and downward, followed by a stamp of the right foot, as if killing an imaginary cockroach had been the whole point of the manic exercise, whereupon the bounce off the stamp would set up the same elbow backhand into the right-hand guy’s throat, one, two, three, smack, stamp, smack, game over.

Easy enough. And always the safest approach. Reacher’s mantra was: Get your retaliation in first. Especially when outnumbered two-to-one against guys with youth and energy on their side.

But. He wasn’t sure. Not completely. Not yet. And he couldn’t afford a mistake of that nature. Not then. Not under the circumstances. He was inhibited. He let the moment pass.

He said, “So what’s your legal advice?”

“Conduct unbecoming,” the guy said. “You brought the unit into disrepute. A court martial would hurt us all. So you should get the hell out of town, right now. And you should never come back again.”

“No one mentioned a court martial.”

“Not yet. But they will. So don’t stick around for it.”

“I’m under orders.”

“They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now. The army doesn’t use skip tracers. And no skip tracer could find you anyway. Not the way you seem to live.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “So that’s our legal advice.”

Reacher said, “Noted.”

“You need to do more than note it.”

“Do I?”

“Because we’re offering an incentive.”

“What kind?”

“Every night we find you still here, we’re going to kick your ass.”

“Are you?”

“Starting tonight. So you’ll get the right general idea about what to do.”

Reacher said, “You ever bought an electrical appliance?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I saw one once, in a store. It had a yellow label on the back. It said if you messed with it you ran the risk of death or serious injury.”

“So?”

“Pretend I’ve got the same kind of label.”

“We’re not worried about you, old man.”

Old man. For no good reason Reacher saw an image of his father in his mind. Somewhere sunny. Okinawa, possibly. Stan Reacher, born in Laconia, New Hampshire, a Marine captain serving in Japan, with a wife and two teenage sons. Reacher and his brother had called him the old man, and he had seemed old, even though at that point he must have been ten years younger than Reacher was that night.

“Turn around,” Reacher said. “Go back wherever you came from. You’re in over your heads.”

“Not how we see it.”

“I used to do this for a living,” Reacher said. “But you know that, right?”

No response.

“I know all the moves,” Reacher said. “I invented some of them.” No reply.

Reacher still had his key in his hand. Rule of thumb: don’t attack a guy who just came through a door that locks. A bunch is better, but even a single key makes a pretty good weapon. Socket the head against the palm, poke the shaft out between the index and middle fingers, and you’ve got a fairly decent knuckleduster.

But. They were just dumb kids. No need to get all bent out of shape. No need for torn flesh and broken bones.

Reacher put his key in his pocket.

Their sneakers meant they had no plans to kick him. No one kicks things with soft white athletic shoes. No point. Unless they were aiming to deliver blows with their feet merely for the points value alone. Like one of those martial arts fetishes with a name like something off a Chinese food menu. Tae Kwon Do, and so on. All very well at the Olympic Games, but hopeless on the street. Lifting your leg like a dog at a hydrant was just begging to get beat. Begging to get tipped over and kicked into unconsciousness.

Did these guys even know that? Were they looking at his own feet? Reacher was wearing a pair of heavy boots. Comfortable, and durable. He had bought them in South Dakota. He planned to keep on wearing them all winter long.

He said, “I’m going inside now.”

No response.

He said, “Goodnight.”

No response.

Reacher half turned and half stepped back, toward his door, a fluid quarter circle, shoulders and all, and like he knew they would the two guys moved toward him, faster than he was moving, off-script and involuntary, ready to grab him.

Reacher kept it going long enough to let their momentum establish, and then he whipped back through the reverse quarter circle toward them, by which time he was moving just as fast as they were, two hundred and fifty pounds about to collide head-on with four hundred, and he kept on twisting and threw a long left hook at the left-hand guy. It caught him as designed, hard on the ear, and the guy’s head snapped sideways and bounced off his partner’s shoulder, by which time Reacher was already throwing a right-hand uppercut under the partner’s chin. It hit like a how-to diagram and the guy’s head went up and back the same way his buddy’s had bounced around, and almost in the same second. Like they were puppets, and the puppeteer had sneezed.

Both of them stayed on their feet. The left-hand guy was wobbling around like a man on a ship, and the right-hand guy was stumbling backward. The left-hand guy was all unstable and up on his heels and his center mass was open and unprotected. Reacher popped a clubbing right into his solar plexus, hard enough to drive the breath out of him, soft enough not to cause lasting neurological damage. The guy folded up and crouched and hugged his knees. Reacher stepped past him and went after the right-hand guy, who saw him coming and swung a feeble right of his own. Reacher clouted it aside with his left forearm and repeated the clubbing right to the solar plexus.

The guy folded in half, just the same.

After that it was easy enough to nudge them around until they were facing in the right direction, and then to use the flat of his boot sole to shove them toward their car, first one, and then the other. They hit head-on, pretty hard, and they went down flat. They left shallow dents in the door panels. They lay there, gasping, still conscious.

A dented car to explain, and headaches in the morning. That was all. Merciful, under the circumstances. Benevolent. Considerate. Soft, even.

Old man.

Old enough to be their father.

By that point Reacher had been in Virginia less than three hours.

Chapter 2

Reacher had finally made it, all the way from the snows of South Dakota. But not quickly. He had gotten hung up in Nebraska, twice, and then onward progress had been just as slow. Missouri had been a long wait and then a silver Ford, driven east by a bony man who talked all the way from Kansas City to Columbia, and who then fell silent. Illinois was a fast black Porsche, which Reacher guessed was stolen, and then it was two men with knives at a rest stop. They had wanted money, and Reacher guessed they were still in the hospital. Indiana was two days going nowhere, and then a dented blue Cadillac, driven slowly by a dignified old gentleman in a bow tie the same blue as his car. Ohio was four days in a small town, and then a red crew-cab Silverado, with a young married couple and their dog, driving all day in search of work. Which in Reacher’s opinion was a possibility for two of them. The dog would not find easy employment. It was likely to remain forever on the debit side of the ledger. It was a big useless mutt, pale in color, about four years old, trusting and friendly. And it had hair to spare, even though it was the middle of winter. Reacher ended up covered in a fine golden down.

Then came an illogical loop north and east into Pennsylvania, but it was the only ride Reacher could get. He spent a day near Pittsburgh, and another near York, and then a black guy about twenty years old drove him to Baltimore, Maryland, in a white Buick about thirty years old. Slow progress, overall.

But from Baltimore it was easy. Baltimore sat astride I-95, and D.C. was the next stop south, and the part of Virginia Reacher was aiming for was more or less inside the D.C. bubble, not much farther west of Arlington Cemetery than the White House was east. Reacher made the trip from Baltimore on a bus, and got out in D.C. at the depot behind Union Station, and walked through the city, on K Street to Washington Circle, and then 23rd Street to the Lincoln Memorial, and then over the bridge to the cemetery. There was a bus stop outside the gates. A local service, mostly for the gardeners. Reacher’s general destination was a place called Rock Creek, one of many spots in the region with the same name, because there were rocks and creeks everywhere, and settlers had been both isolated from one another and equally descriptive in their naming habits. No doubt back in the days of mud and knee britches and wigs it had been a pretty little colonial village, but later it had become just another crossroads in a hundred square miles of expensive houses and cheap office parks. Reacher watched out the bus window, and noted the familiar sights, and catalogued the new additions, and waited.

His specific destination was a sturdy building put up about sixty years before by the nearby Department of Defense, for some long-forgotten original purpose. About forty years after that the military police had bid on it, in error, as it turned out. Some officer was thinking of a different Rock Creek. But he got the building anyway. It sat empty for a spell, and then it was given to the newly-formed 110th MP Special Unit as its HQ.

It was the closest thing to a home base Reacher had ever had.

The bus let him out two blocks away, on a corner, at the bottom of a long hill he had walked many times. The road coming down toward him was a three-lane, with cracked concrete sidewalks and mature trees in pits. The HQ building was ahead on the left, in a broad lot behind a high stone wall. Only its roof was visible, made of gray slate, with moss growing on its northern hip.

There was a driveway entrance off the three-lane, which came through the high stone wall between two brick pillars, which in Reacher’s time had been purely decorative, with no gates hung off them. But gates had been installed since then. They were heavy steel items with steel wheels which ran in radiused tracks butchered into the old blacktop. Security, in theory, but not in practice, because the gates were standing open. Inside them, just beyond the end of their swing, was a sentry hutch, which was also new. It was occupied by a private first class wearing the new Army Combat Uniform, which Reacher thought looked like pajamas, all patterned and baggy. Late afternoon was turning into early evening, and the light was fading.

Reacher stopped at the sentry hutch and the private gave him an inquiring look and Reacher said, “I’m here to visit with your CO.”

The guy said, “You mean Major Turner?”

Reacher said, “How many COs do you have?”

“Just one, sir.”

“First name Susan?”

“Yes, sir. That’s correct. Major Susan Turner, sir.”

“That’s the one I want.”

“What name shall I give?”

“Reacher.”

“What’s the nature of your business?”

“Personal.”

“Wait one, sir.” The guy picked up a phone and called ahead. A Mr. Reacher to see Major Turner. The call went on much longer than Reacher expected. At one point the guy covered the mouthpiece with his palm and asked, “Are you the same Reacher that was CO here once? Major Jack Reacher?”

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“And you spoke to Major Turner from somewhere in South Dakota?”

“Yes,” Reacher said.

The guy repeated the two affirmative answers into the phone, and listened some more. Then he hung up and said, “Sir, please go ahead.” He started to give directions, and then he stopped, and said, “I guess you know the way.”

“I guess I do,” Reacher said. He walked on, and ten paces later he heard a grinding noise, and he stopped and glanced back.

The gates were closing behind him.

The building ahead of him was classic 1950s DoD architecture. Long and low, two stories, brick, stone, slate, green metal window frames, green tubular handrails at the steps up to the doors. The 1950s had been a golden age for the DoD. Budgets had been immense. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the military had gotten whatever it wanted. And more. There were cars parked in the lot. Some were army sedans, plain and dark and well-used. Some were POVs, personally-owned vehicles, brighter in color but generally older. There was a lone Humvee, dark green and black, huge and menacing next to a small red two-seater. Reacher wondered if the two-seater was Susan Turner’s. He figured it could be. On the phone she had sounded like a woman who might drive such a thing.

He went up the short flight of stone steps to the door. Same steps, same door, but repainted since his time. More than once, probably. The army had a lot of paint, and was always happy to use it. Inside the door the place looked more or less the same as it always had. There was a lobby, with a stone staircase to the second floor on the right, and a reception desk on the left. Then the lobby narrowed to a corridor that ran the length of the building, with offices left and right. The office doors were half glazed with reeded glass. The lights were on in the corridor. It was winter, and the building had always been dark.

There was a woman at the reception desk, in the same ACU pajamas as the guy at the gate, but with a sergeant’s stripes on the tab in the center of her chest. Like an aiming point, Reacher thought. Up, up, up, fire. He much preferred the old woodland-pattern battledress uniform. The woman was black, and didn’t look happy to see him. She was agitated about something.

He said, “Jack Reacher for Major Turner.”

The woman stopped and started a couple of times, as if she had plenty she wanted to say, but in the end all she managed was, “You better head on up to her office. You know where it is?”

Reacher nodded. He knew where it was. It had been his office once. He said, “Thank you, sergeant.”

He went up the stairs. Same worn stone, same metal handrail. He had been up those stairs a thousand times. They folded around once and came out directly above the center of the lobby at the end of the long second-floor corridor. The lights were on in the corridor. The same linoleum was on the floor. The office doors to the left and right had the same reeded glass as the first-floor doors.

His office was third on the left.

No, Susan Turner’s was.

He made sure his shirt was tucked and he brushed his hair with his fingers. He had no idea what he was going to say. He had liked her voice on the phone. That was all. He had sensed an interesting person behind it. He wanted to meet that person. Simple as that. He took two steps and stopped. She was going to think he was crazy.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He shrugged to himself and moved on again. Third on the left. The door was the same as it always had been, but painted. Solid below, glass above, the reeded pattern splitting the dull view through into distorted vertical slices. There was a corporate-style nameplate on the wall near the handle: Maj. S. R. Turner, Commanding Officer. That was new. In Reacher’s day his name had been stenciled on the wood, below the glass, with even more economy: Maj. Reacher, CO.

He knocked.

He heard a vague vocal sound inside. It might have been Enter. So he took a breath and opened the door and stepped inside.

He had been expecting changes. But there weren’t many. The linoleum on the floor was the same, polished to a subtle sheen and a murky color. The desk was the same, steel like a battleship, painted but worn back to shiny metal here and there, still dented where he had slammed some guy’s head into it, back at the end of his command. The chairs were the same, both behind the desk and in front of it, utilitarian mid-century items that might have sold for a lot of money in some hipster store in New York or San Francisco. The file cabinets were the same. The light fixture was the same, a contoured white glass bowl hung off three little chains.

The differences were mostly predictable and driven by the march of time. There were three console telephones on the desk, where before there had been one old rotary-dial item, heavy and black. There were two computers, one a desktop and one a laptop, where before there had been an in-tray and an out-tray and a lot of paper. The map on the wall was new and up to date, and the light fixture was burning green and sickly, with a modern bulb, all fluorescent and energy saving. Progress, even at the Department of the Army.

Only two things in the office were unexpected and unpredictable.

First, the person behind the desk was not a major, but a lieutenant colonel.

And second, he wasn’t a woman, but a man.

Chapter 3

The man behind the desk was wearing the same ACU pajamas as everyone else, but they looked worse on him than most. Like fancy dress. Like a Halloween party. Not because he was particularly out of shape, but because he looked serious and managerial and deskbound. As if his weapon of choice would be a propelling pencil, not an M16. He was wearing steel eyeglasses and had steel-gray hair cut and combed like a schoolboy’s. His tapes and his tags confirmed he was indeed a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, and that his name was Morgan.

Reacher said, “I’m sorry, colonel. I was looking for Major Turner.”

The guy named Morgan said, “Sit down, Mr. Reacher.”

Command presence was a rare and valuable thing, much prized by the military. And the guy named Morgan had plenty of it. Like his hair and his glasses, his voice was steel. No bullshit, no bluster, no bullying. Just a brisk assumption that all reasonable men would do exactly what he told them, because there would be no real practical alternative.

Reacher sat down in the visitor chair nearer the window. It had springy bent-tube legs, and it gave and bounced a little under his weight. He remembered the feeling. He had sat in it before, for one reason or another.

Morgan said, “Please tell me exactly why you’re here.”

And at that point Reacher thought he was about to get a death message. Susan Turner was dead. Afghanistan, possibly. Or a car wreck.

He said, “Where is Major Turner?”

Morgan said, “Not here.”

“Where, then?”

“We might get to that. But first I need to understand your interest.”

“In what?”

“In Major Turner.”

“I have no interest in Major Turner.”

“Yet you asked for her by name at the gate.”

“It’s a personal matter.”

“As in?”

Reacher said, “I talked to her on the phone. She sounded interesting. I thought I might drop by and ask her out to dinner. The field manual doesn’t prohibit her from saying yes.”

“Or no, as the case may be.”

“Indeed.”

Morgan asked, “What did you talk about on the phone?”

“This and that.”

“What exactly?”

“It was a private conversation, colonel. And I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m commander of the 110th Special Unit.”

“Not Major Turner?”

“Not anymore.”

“I thought this was a major’s job. Not a light colonel’s.”

“This is a temporary command. I’m a troubleshooter. I get sent in to clean up the mess.”

“And there’s a mess here? Is that what you’re saying?”

Morgan ignored the question. He asked, “Did you specifically arrange to meet with Major Turner?”

“Not specifically,” Reacher said.

“Did she request your presence here?”

“Not specifically,” Reacher said again.

“Yes or no?”

“Neither. I think it was just a vague intention on both our parts. If I happened to be in the area. That kind of a thing.”

“And yet here you are, in the area. Why?”

“Why not? I have to be somewhere.”

“Are you saying you came all the way from South Dakota on the basis of a vague intention?”

Reacher said, “I liked her voice. You got a problem with that?”

“You’re unemployed, is that correct?”

“Currently.”

“Since when?”

“Since I left the army.”

“That’s disgraceful.”

Reacher asked, “Where is Major Turner?”

Morgan said, “This interview is not about Major Turner.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“This interview is about you.”

“Me?”

“Completely unrelated to Major Turner. But she pulled your file. Perhaps she was curious about you. There was a flag on your file. It should have triggered when she pulled it. Which would have saved us some time. Unfortunately the flag malfunctioned and didn’t trigger until she returned it. But better late than never. Because here you are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know a man named Juan Rodriguez?”

“No. Who is he?”

“At one time he was of interest to the 110th. Now he’s dead. Do you know a woman named Candice Dayton?”

“No. Is she dead too?”

“Ms. Dayton is still alive, happily. Or not happily, as it turns out. You sure you don’t remember her?”

“What’s this all about?”

“You’re in trouble, Reacher.”

“For what?”

“The Secretary of the Army has been given medical evidence showing Mr. Rodriguez died as a direct result of a beating he suffered sixteen years ago. Given there’s no statute of limitations in such cases, he was technically a homicide victim.”

“You saying one of my people did that? Sixteen years ago?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“That’s good. So what’s making Ms. Dayton unhappy?”

“That’s not my topic. Someone else will talk to you about that.”

“They’ll have to be quick. I won’t be sticking around for long. Not if Major Turner isn’t here. I don’t remember any other real attractions in the neighborhood.”

“You will be sticking around,” Morgan said. “You and I are due a long and interesting conversation.”

“About what?”

“The evidence shows it was you who beat on Mr. Rodriguez sixteen years ago.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’ll be provided with a lawyer. If it’s bullshit, I’m sure he’ll say so.”

“I mean, bullshit, you and I are not going to have any kind of a long conversation. Or a lawyer. I’m a civilian, and you’re an asshole wearing pajamas.”

“So you’re not offering voluntary cooperation?”

“You got that right.”

“In which case, are you familiar with Title 10 of the United States Code?”

Reacher said, “Parts of it, obviously.”

“Then you may know that one particular part of it tells us when a man of your rank leaves the army, he doesn’t become a civilian. Not immediately, and not entirely. He becomes a reservist. He has no duties, but he remains subject to recall.”

“But for how many years?” Reacher said.

“You had a security clearance.”

“I remember it well.”

“Do you remember the papers you had to sign to get it?”

“Vaguely,” Reacher said. He remembered a bunch of guys in a room, all grown up and serious. Lawyers, and notaries, and seals and stamps and pens.

Morgan said, “There was a lot of fine print. Naturally. If you’re going to know the government’s secrets, the government is going to want some control over you. Before, during, and after.”

“How long after?”

“Most of that stuff stays secret for sixty years.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Don’t worry,” Morgan said. “The fine print didn’t say you stay a reservist for sixty years.”

“That’s good.”

“It said worse than that. It said indefinitely. But as it happens the Supreme Court already screwed us on that. It mandated we respect the standard three bottom-line restrictions common to all cases in Title 10.”

“Which are?”

“To be successfully recalled, you have to be in good health, under the age of fifty-five years, and trainable.”

Reacher said nothing.

Morgan asked, “How’s your health?”

“Pretty good.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m a long way from fifty-five.”

“Are you trainable?”

“I doubt it.”

“Me too. But that’s an empirical determination we make on the job.”

“Are you serious?”

“Completely,” Morgan said. “Jack Reacher, as of this moment on this day, you are formally recalled to military service.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You’re back in the army, major,” Morgan said. “And your ass is mine.”

Chapter 4

There was no big ceremony. No processing-in, or reprocessing. Just Morgan’s words, and then the room darkened a little as a guy in the corridor took up station in front of the door and blocked the light coming through the reeded glass panel. Reacher saw him, all sliced up vertically, a tall, broad-shouldered sentry, standing easy, facing away.

Morgan said, “I’m required to tell you there’s an appeals procedure. You’ll be given full access to it. You’ll be given a lawyer.”

Reacher said, “I’ll be given?”

“It’s a matter of simple logic. You’ll be trying to appeal your way out. Which implies you’re starting out in. Which means you’ll get what the army chooses to give you. But I imagine we’ll be reasonable.”

“I don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.”

“You’ll be given a lawyer for that, too.”

“What’s supposed to have happened to the guy?”

“You tell me,” Morgan said.

“I can’t. I don’t remember him.”

“You left him with a brain injury. It caught up with him eventually.”

“Who was he?”

“Denial won’t work forever.”

“I’m not denying anything. I’m telling you I don’t remember the guy.”

“That’s a discussion you can have with your lawyer.”

“And who is Candice Dayton?”

“Likewise. But a different lawyer.”

“Why different?”

“Different type of case.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No,” Morgan said. “Not yet. The prosecutors will make that decision in their own good time. But until then you’re under orders, as of two minutes ago. You’ll retain your former rank, for the time being. Administratively you’re assigned to this unit, and your orders are to treat this building as your duty station and appear here every morning before 08:00 hours. You are not to leave the area. The area is defined as a five-mile radius of this desk. You’ll be quartered in a place of the army’s choosing.”

Reacher said nothing.

Morgan said, “Are there any questions, major?”

“Will I be required to wear a uniform?”

“Not at this stage.”

“That’s a relief.”

“This is not a joke, Reacher. The potential downside here is considerable. For you personally, I mean. The worst case would be life in Leavenworth, for a homicide conviction. But more likely ten years for manslaughter, given the sixteen year gap. And the best case is not very attractive either, given that we would have to look at the original crime. I would plan on conduct unbecoming, at the minimum, with a new discharge, this time without honor. But your lawyer will run it down for you.”

“When?”

“The relevant department has already been notified.”

There were no cells in the old building. No secure facilities. There never had been. Just offices. Reacher was left where he was, in the visitor chair, not looked at, not spoken to, completely ignored. The sentry stood easy on the other side of the door. Morgan started tapping and typing and scrolling on the laptop computer. Reacher searched his memory for Juan Rodriguez. Sixteen years ago he had been twelve months into his command of the 110th. Early days. The name Rodriguez sounded Hispanic. Reacher had known many Hispanic people, both inside the service and out. He remembered hitting people on occasion, inside the service and out, some of them Hispanic, but none of them named Rodriguez. And if Rodriguez had been of interest to the 110th, Reacher would have remembered the name, surely. Especially from so early, when every case was significant. The 110th had been an experimental venture. Every move was watched. Every result was evaluated. Every misstep had an autopsy.

He asked, “What was the alleged context?”

No answer from Morgan. The guy just kept on tapping and typing and scrolling. So Reacher searched his memory for a woman named Candice Dayton. Again, he had known many women, both inside the service and out. Candice was a fairly common name. As was Dayton, comparatively. But the two names together meant nothing special to him. Neither did the diminutive, Candy. Candy Dayton? Candice Dayton? Nothing. Not that he remembered everything. No one remembered everything.

He asked, “Was Candice Dayton connected to Juan Rodriguez in some way?”

Morgan looked up, as if surprised to see he had a visitor sitting in his office. As if he had forgotten. He didn’t answer the question. He just picked up one of his complicated telephones and ordered a car. He told Reacher to go wait with the sergeant downstairs.

Two miles away, the man who only three people in the world knew as Romeo took out his cell, and dialed the man only two people in the world knew as Juliet, and said, “He’s been recalled to service. Colonel Morgan just put it in the computer.”

Juliet said, “So what happens next?”

“Too early to tell.”

“Will he run?”

“A sane man would.”

“Where are they putting him?”

“Their usual motel, I expect.”

The sergeant at the desk downstairs didn’t say anything. She was as tongue-tied as before. Reacher leaned on the wall and passed the time in silence. Ten minutes later a private first class came in from the cold and saluted and asked Reacher to follow him. Formal, and polite. Innocent until proven guilty, Reacher guessed, at least in some people’s eyes. Out in the lot there was a worn army sedan with its motor running. A young lieutenant was stumping around next to it, awkward and embarrassed. He held open the rear door and Reacher got in the back. The lieutenant took the front passenger seat and the private drove. A mile later they arrived at a motel, a run-down sway-backed old heap in a dark lot on a suburban evening–quiet three-lane road. The lieutenant signed a paper, and the night clerk gave Reacher a key, and the private drove the lieutenant away.

And then the second car arrived, with the guys in the T-shirts and the athletic pants.

Chapter 5

There were no pockets in the athletic pants, and none in the T-shirts, either. And neither man was wearing dog tags. No ID at all. Their car was clean, too. Nothing in it, except the usual army document package stowed neatly in the glove compartment. No weapons, no personal property, no hidden wallets, no scraps of paper, no gas receipts. The license plate was a standard government registration. Nothing abnormal about the car at all, except the two new dents in the doors.

The left-hand guy was blocking the driver’s door. Reacher dragged him six feet along the blacktop. He offered no resistance. Life was not a television show. Hit a guy hard enough in the side of the head, and he didn’t spring back up ready to carry on the fight. He stayed down for an hour or more, all sick and dizzy and disoriented. A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.

Reacher opened the driver’s door and climbed inside the car. The motor was stopped, but the key was still in. Reacher racked the seat back and started the engine. He sat still for a long spell and stared ahead through the windshield. They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now. The army doesn’t use skip tracers. And no skip tracer could find you anyway. Not the way you seem to live.

He adjusted the mirror. He put his foot on the brake and fumbled the lever into gear. Conduct unbecoming, at the minimum, with a new discharge, this time without honor.

He took his foot off the brake and drove away.

He drove straight back to the old HQ building, and parked fifty yards from it on the three-lane road. The car was warm, and he kept the motor running to keep it warm. He watched through the windshield and saw no activity ahead. No coming or going. In his day the 110th had worked around the clock, seven days a week, and he saw no reason why anything would have changed. The enlisted night watch would be in for the duration, and a night duty officer would be in place, and the other officers would go off duty as soon as their work was done, whenever that might be. Normally. But not on that particular night. Not during a mess or a crisis, and definitely not with a troubleshooter in the house. No one would leave before Morgan. Basic army politics.

Morgan left an hour later. Reacher saw him quite clearly. A plain sedan came out through the gate and turned onto the three-lane and drove straight past where Reacher was parked. In the darkness Reacher saw a flash of Morgan at the wheel, in his ACU pajamas and his eyeglasses, his hair still neatly combed, looking straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, like someone’s great aunt on the way to the store. Reacher watched in the mirror and saw his tail lights disappear over the hill.

He waited.

And sure enough, within the next quarter hour there was a regular exodus. Five more cars came out, two of them turning left, three of them turning right, four of them driven solo, one of them with three people aboard. All the cars were dewed over with night mist, and all of them were trailing cold white exhaust. They disappeared into the distance, left and right, and their exhaust drifted away, and the world went quiet again.

Reacher waited ten more minutes, just in case. But nothing more happened. Fifty yards away the old building looked settled and silent. The night watch, in a world of its own. Reacher put his car in gear and rolled slowly down the hill and turned in at the gate. A new sentry was on duty in the hutch. A young guy, blank and stoic. Reacher stopped and buzzed his window down and the kid said, “Sir?”

Reacher gave his name and said, “I’m reporting to my duty station as ordered.”

“Sir?” the guy said again.

“Am I on your list?”

The guy checked.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Major Reacher. But for tomorrow morning.”

“I was ordered to report before 08:00 hours.”

“Yes, sir. I see that. But it’s 23:00 hours now, sir. In the evening.”

“Which is before 08:00 in the morning. As ordered.”

The guy didn’t speak.

Reacher said, “It’s a simple matter of chronology. I’m keen to get to work, therefore a little early.”

No answer.

“You could check with Colonel Morgan, if you like. I’m sure he’s back at his billet by now.”

No answer.

“Or you could check with your duty sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” the kid said. “I’ll do that instead.”

He made the call, and listened for a second, and put the phone down and said, “Sir, the sergeant requests that you stop by the desk.”

“I’ll be sure to do that, soldier,” Reacher said. He drove on, and parked next to the little red two-seater, which was still there, exactly where it had been before. He got out and locked up and walked through the cold to the door. The lobby felt quiet and still. A night and day difference, literally. But the same sergeant was at the reception desk. Finishing her work, before going off duty. She was on a high stool, typing on a keyboard. Updating the day’s log, presumably. Record keeping was a big deal, all over the military. She stopped and looked up.

Reacher asked her, “Are you putting this visit in the official record?”

She said, “What visit? And I told the private at the gate not to, either.”

Not tongue tied anymore. Not with the interloper Morgan out of the house. She looked young, but infinitely capable, like sergeants the world over. The tape over her right breast said her name was Leach.

She said, “I know who you are.”

Reacher said, “Have we met?”

“No, sir, but you’re a famous name here. You were this unit’s first commander.”

“Do you know why I’m back?”

“Yes, sir. We were told.”

“What was the general reaction?”

“Mixed.”

“What’s your personal reaction?”

“I’m sure there’s a good explanation. And sixteen years is a long time. Which makes it political, probably. Which is usually bullshit. And even if it isn’t, I’m sure the guy deserved it. Or worse.”

Reacher said nothing.

Leach said, “I thought about warning you, when you first came in. Best thing for you would have been just to run for it. So I really wanted to turn you around and get you out of here. But I was under orders not to. I’m sorry.”

Reacher asked her, “Where is Major Turner?”

Leach said, “Long story.”

“How does it go?”

“She deployed to Afghanistan.”

“When?”

“The middle of the day, yesterday.”

“Why?”

“We have people there. There was an issue.”

“What kind of an issue?”

“I don’t know.”

“And?”

“She never arrived.”

“You know that for sure?”

“No question.”

“So where is she instead?”

“No one knows.”

“When did Colonel Morgan get here?”

“Within hours of Major Turner leaving.”

“How many hours?”

“About two.”

“Did he give a reason for being here?”

“The implication was Major Turner had been relieved of her command.”

“Nothing specific?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Was she screwing up?”

Leach didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “You may speak freely, sergeant.”

“No, sir, she wasn’t screwing up. She was doing a really good job.”

“So that’s all you’ve got? Implications and disappearances?”

“So far.”

“No gossip?” Reacher asked. Sergeants were always part of a network. Always had been, always would be. Like rumor mills. Like uniformed versions of tabloid newspapers.

Leach said, “I heard one little thing.”

“Which was?”

“It might be nothing.”

“But?”

“And it might not be connected.”

“But?”

“Someone told me the guardhouse at Fort Dyer has a new prisoner.”

Chapter 6

Fort Dyer was an army base very close to the Pentagon. But Leach told Reacher that eight years after he mustered out a cost cutting exercise had merged it with the Marine Corps’ nearby Helsington House. The newly enlarged establishment had been given the logical if clumsy name of Joint Base Dyer-Helsington House. In Reacher’s day both Dyer and Helsington House had been very high-status places in their own right, staffed mostly by senior and very important people. With the result that the Dyer PX had looked more like Saks Fifth Avenue than a Wal-Mart. And he had heard the Marines’ store was even better. Therefore the new blended version was likely to be no lower on the social totem pole. Therefore its cells were likely to house only high-status prisoners. No drunken brawlers or petty thieves there. An MP major with a problem would be a typical tenant. Therefore Leach’s rumor might be right. The Dyer guardhouse was located north and west of the Pentagon. Diagonally across the cemetery. Less than five miles from the 110th’s HQ. Much less.

“The army and the jarheads in the same place?” Reacher said. “How’s that working out for them?”

“Politicians will do anything to save a buck,” Leach said.

“Can you call ahead for me?”

“You going there? Now?”

“I have nothing better to do at the moment.”

“Do you have a vehicle?”

“Temporarily,” Reacher said.

The night was quiet and dark and suburban, and the drive to Dyer took less than ten minutes. Getting into the Joint Base itself took much longer. The merger had happened less than four years after 9/11, and whatever cost cutting money had been saved hadn’t been saved on security. The main gate was on the south side of the complex, and it was impressive. There were concrete dragons’ teeth everywhere, funneling traffic through a narrowing lane blocked by three consecutive guard shacks. Reacher was in battered civilian clothes and had no military ID. No ID at all, in fact, except a worn and creased U.S. passport that was already long expired. But he was in a government car, which created a good first impression. And the military had computers, and he showed up as on active service as of the middle of that evening. And the army had sergeants, and Leach had lit up the favor network with a blizzard of calls. And Dyer had a Criminal Investigation office, and to Reacher’s mild surprise there were still guys around who knew guys who knew guys who remembered his name. The upshot was that just forty-five minutes after stopping at the first barrier he was face to face with an MP captain in the guardhouse front office.

The captain was a serious dark guy of about thirty, and his ACU nametape said his name was Weiss. He looked honest and decent and reasonably friendly, so Reacher said, “This is just a personal matter, captain. Not even remotely official. And I’m probably a little toxic right now, so you should proceed with extreme caution. You should keep this visit off the record. Or refuse to talk to me altogether.”

Weiss said, “Toxic how?”

“Looks like something I did sixteen years ago has come back to bite me in the ass.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t remember. No doubt someone will remind me soon enough.”

“The computer says you were just recalled.”

“Correct.”

“I never heard of that before.”

“Me neither.”

“Doesn’t sound good. Like someone really wanted you back in the jurisdiction.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s how I took it. Like I was being extradited out of civilian life. To face the music. But it was a much simpler procedure. There was no kind of a hearing.”

“You think they’re serious?”

“Feels that way at the moment.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I’m looking for Major Susan Turner of the 110th MP.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, it’s personal.”

“Connected with your problem?”

“No. Not in any way.”

“But you were with the 110th, right?”

“A long time before Major Turner got anywhere near it.”

“So you’re not subverting testimony or coaching a witness?”

“Absolutely not. This is a different matter entirely.”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“I was hoping that might be a future development. Or not, depending on what I think of her when I meet her.”

“You haven’t met her yet?”

“Is she here?”

Weiss said, “In a cell. Since yesterday afternoon.”

“What’s the charge?”

“She took a bribe.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

“How much of a bribe?”

“I’m just a jailer,” Weiss said. “You know how it is. They don’t give me chapter and verse.”

“Can I see her?”

“Visiting hours are over.”

“How many guests have you got tonight?”

“Just her.”

“So you’re not busy. And we’re off the record, right? So no one will know.”

Weiss opened up a green three-ring binder. Notes, procedures, standing orders, some of them printed, some of them handwritten. He said, “She seems to have been expecting you. She passed on a request through her lawyer. She mentioned you by name.”

“What’s the request?”

“It’s more of an instruction, really.”

“Saying what?”

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

Reacher said nothing.

Weiss looked down at the three-ring binder and said, “Quote, per the accused’s explicit request, under no circumstances is Major Jack Reacher, U.S. Army, Retired, former commander of the 110th MP, to be granted visitation privileges.”

Chapter 7

Getting out of the Joint Base was only marginally quicker than getting in. Each of the three guard shacks checked ID and conducted a trunk search, to make sure Reacher was who he said he was, and hadn’t stolen anything. Then after clearing the last of the barriers he threaded his way along the same route the local bus had taken. But he stopped early, and pulled in at the curb. There were plenty of highway ramps all around. There was I-395, spearing south and west. There was the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading north and west. There was I-66, heading due west. There was I-395 going east, if he wanted it. All of them quiet and flowing fast. There was a big country out there. There was I-95, all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, and the West Coast, five days away, and the vast interior, empty and lonely.

They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now.

A new discharge, this time without honor.

She doesn’t want to see you.

Reacher moved off the curb and drove back to the motel.

The two guys with the T-shirts were gone. Evidently they had gotten up and staggered off somewhere. Reacher left their car on the curb two hundred yards away. He left the key in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Either it would be stolen by a couple of punks, or the two guys would come back to get it. He really didn’t care which.

He walked the last of the distance and let himself into his dismal room. He had been right. The shower was weak and strangled, and the towels were thin, and the soap was small, and the shampoo was cheap. But he cleaned up as well as he could, and then he went to bed. The mattress felt like a sack stuffed with balled-up plastic, and the sheets felt damp with disuse. But he fell asleep just fine. He set the alarm in his head for seven, and he breathed in, and he breathed out, and that was it.

Romeo dialed Juliet again and said, “He just tried to make contact with Turner over at Dyer. And failed, of course.”

Juliet said, “Our boys must have missed him at the motel.”

“Nothing to worry about.”

“I hope not.”

“Goodnight.”

“Yes, you, too.”

Reacher didn’t make it to seven o’clock. He was woken at six, by a brisk tap at the door. It sounded businesslike. Not threatening. Tap, tap, tappity tap. Six o’clock in the morning, and someone was already cheerful. He slid out of bed and hauled his pants out from under the mattress and put them on. The air in the room was sharp with cold. He could see his breath. The heater had been off all night.

He padded barefoot across the sticky carpet and opened the door. A gloved hand that had been ready to tap again was pulled back quickly. The hand was attached to an arm, which was attached to a body, which was in a Class A army uniform, with JAG Corps insignia all over it. A lawyer.

A woman lawyer.

According to the plate on the right side of her tunic her name was Sullivan. She was wearing the uniform like a business suit. She had a briefcase in her non-tapping hand. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t particularly short, but her eye line was level with Reacher’s shirtless chest, where there was an old .38 bullet wound, which seemed to preoccupy her.

Reacher said, “Yes?”

Her car was behind her, a dark green domestic sedan. The sky was still black.

She said, “Major Reacher?”

She was in her mid-thirties, Reacher guessed, a major herself, with short dark hair and eyes that were neither warm nor cold. He said, “How can I help you?”

“It’s supposed to be the other way around.”

“You’ve been assigned to represent me?”

“For my sins.”

“For the recall appeal or the Juan Rodriguez thing or the Candice Dayton thing?”

“Forget the recall appeal. You’ll get five minutes in front of a panel about a month from now, but you won’t win. That never happens.”

“So Rodriguez or Dayton?”

“Rodriguez,” Sullivan said. “We need to get right to it.” But she didn’t move. Her gaze traced its way downward, to his waist, where there was another scar, by that point more than a quarter century old, a big ugly white starfish overlaid by crude stitches, cut through by a knife wound, which was much more recent, but still old.

“I know,” he said. “Aesthetically I’m a mess. But come in anyway.”

She said, “No, I think I’ll wait in the car. We’ll talk over breakfast.”

“Where?”

“There’s a diner two blocks away.”

“You paying?”

“For myself. Not for you.”

“Two blocks away? You could have brought coffee.”

“Could have, but didn’t.”

“Some big help you’re going to be. Give me eleven minutes.”

“Eleven?”

“That’s how long it takes me to get ready in the morning.”

“Most people would say ten.”

“Then either they’re faster than me or imprecise.” He closed the door on her and padded back to the bed and took his pants off again. They looked OK. Laying them out under the mattress was as close as he ever got to ironing. He walked on to the bathroom and set the shower running. He cleaned his teeth and climbed under the weak lukewarm stream and used what was left of the soap and shampoo. He dried himself with damp towels and dressed and stepped out to the lot. Eleven minutes, dead on. He was a creature of habit.

Major Sullivan had turned her car around. It was a Ford, the same model as the silver item that had driven him across Missouri many days before. He opened the passenger door and climbed in. Sullivan sat up straight and put the car in gear and eased out of the lot, slow and cautious. Her uniform skirt was at her knees. She was wearing dark nylons and plain black lace-up shoes.

Reacher asked, “What’s your name?”

Sullivan said, “You can read, I presume.”

“First name, I mean.”

“Does it matter? You’re going to call me Major Sullivan.” She said it in a way that was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Nor unexpected. A personal relationship was not on the agenda. Army defense lawyers were diligent, intelligent, and professional, but they were on nobody’s side but the army’s.

The diner was indeed two blocks away, but the blocks were long. A left, and then a right, and then a ragged strip mall, on the shoulder of another three-lane road. The mall featured a hardware store, and a no-name pharmacy, and a picture framing shop, and a gun store, and a walk-in dentist. The diner stood alone at the end of the strip, in its own lot. It was a white stucco affair with the kind of inside decor that made Reacher bet the owner was Greek and there would be a million items on the menu. Which made it a restaurant, in his opinion, not a diner. Diners were lean, mean, stripped-down places, as ruthless as combat rifles.

They took a booth in a side wing, and a waitress brought coffee before being asked, which raised Reacher’s opinion of the place a little. The menu was a multi-page laminated thing almost as big as the tabletop. Reacher saw pancakes and eggs on page two, and he investigated no further.

Sullivan said, “I’m recommending a plea bargain. They’ll ask for five years and we’ll offer one and settle on two. You can do that. Two years won’t kill you.”

Reacher said, “Who was Candice Dayton?”

“Not my case. Someone else will talk to you about that.”

“And who was Juan Rodriguez exactly?”

“Someone you hit in the head who died from his injuries.”

“I don’t remember him.”

“That’s not the best thing to say in a case like this. It makes it sound like you hit so many people in the head that you can’t distinguish one from the other. It might prompt further inquiries. Someone might be tempted to draw up a list. And from what I hear it might be a very long list. The 110th was pretty much a rogue operation back then.”

“And what is it now?”

“A little better, perhaps. But far from outstanding.”

“That’s your opinion?”

“That’s my experience.”

“Do you know anything about Susan Turner’s situation?”

“I know her lawyer.”

“And?”

“She took a bribe.”

“Do we know that for sure?”

“There’s enough electronic data to float a battleship. She opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday, and at eleven o’clock a hundred thousand dollars showed up in it, and then she was arrested at twelve o’clock, more or less red-handed. Seems fairly open and shut to me. And fairly typical of the 110th.”

“Sounds like you don’t love my old unit, overall. Which might be a problem. Because I’m entitled to a competent defense. Sixth Amendment, and so on. Do you think you’re the right person for the job?”

“I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.”

“I should see the evidence against me, at least. Don’t you think? Isn’t there something in the Sixth Amendment about that, too?”

“You didn’t do much paperwork sixteen years ago.”

“We did some.”

“I know,” Sullivan said. “I’ve seen what there is of it. Among other things you did daily summaries. I have one that shows you heading out for an interview with Mr. Rodriguez. Then I have a document from a county hospital ER showing his admission later the same day, for a head injury, among other things.”

“And that’s it? Where’s the connection? He could have fallen down the stairs after I left. He could have been hit by a truck.”

“The ER doctors thought he had been.”

“That’s a weak case,” Reacher said. “In fact it’s not really a case at all. I don’t remember anything about it.”

“Yet you remember some stairs that Mr. Rodriguez might have fallen down, after your interview.”

“Speculation,” Reacher said. “Hypothesis. Figure of speech. Same as the truck. They’ve got nothing.”

“They have an affidavit,” Sullivan said. “Sworn out by Mr. Rodriguez himself, some time later. He names you as his attacker.”

Chapter 8

Sullivan hauled her briefcase up on the booth’s vinyl bench. She took out a thick file and she laid it on the table. She said, “Happy reading.”

Which it wasn’t, of course. It was a long and sordid record of a long and sordid investigation into a long and sordid crime. The root cause was Operation Desert Shield, all the way back in late 1990, which was the build-up phase before Operation Desert Storm, which was the Gulf War the first time around, after Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded his neighbor, the independent state of Kuwait. Half a million men and women from the free world had gathered over six long months, getting ready to kick Saddam’s ass, which in the end had taken all of one hundred hours. Then the half-million men and women had gone home again.

The materiel wind-down had been the problem. Armies need a lot of stuff. Six months to build it up, six months to break it down. And the build-up had received a lot more in the way of care and attention than the wind-down. The wind-down had been piecemeal and messy. Dozens of nationalities had been involved. Long story short, lots of stuff had gone missing. Which was embarrassing. But the books had to be balanced. So some of the missing stuff was written off as destroyed, and some as damaged, and some as merely lost, and the books were closed.

Until certain items started showing up on the streets of America’s cities.

Sullivan asked, “You remember it yet?”

“Yes,” Reacher said. He remembered it very well. It was the kind of crime the 110th had been created to fight. Man-portable military weapons don’t end up on the streets by accident. They’re filched and diverted and stolen and sold. By persons unknown, but by persons in certain distinct categories. In logistics companies, mostly. Guys who have to move tens of thousands of tons a week with hazy bills of lading can always find ways of making a ton or two disappear, here and there, for fun and profit. Or a hundred tons. The 110th had been tasked to find out who and how and where and when. The unit was new, with its name to make, and it had gone at it hard. Reacher had spent hundreds of hours on it, and his team had spent many times more.

He said, “But I still don’t remember any Juan Rodriguez.”

Sullivan said, “Flip to the end of the file.”

Which Reacher did, where he found he remembered Juan Rodriguez pretty well.

Just not as Juan Rodriguez.

The 110th had gotten a solid tip about a gangbanger in South Central LA, who went by the street name of Dog, which was alleged to be a contraction of Big Dog, because the guy was supposedly sizeable both in terms of status and physique. The DEA wasn’t interested in him, because he wasn’t part of the drug wars. But the tip said like neutrals everywhere he was making a fortune selling black market weapons to both sides at once. The tip said he was the go-to guy. The tip said he was angling to unload eleven crates of army SAWs. SAWs were not metal things with little teeth, good for cutting wood. SAWs were Squad Automatic Weapons, which were fearsome fully-automatic machine guns, with fearsome capacities and fearsome capabilities.

Reacher had gone to South Central LA and walked the hot dusty streets and asked the right kind of questions in the right kind of places. In that environment he was unmistakably army, so he had posed as a disaffected grunt with interesting stuff for sale. Grenades, launchers, armor-piercing ammunition in vast quantities, Beretta handguns. People were naturally cautious, but ultimately the pose worked. Two days later he was face to face with the Dog, who turned out to be big indeed, mostly side to side. The guy could have weighed four hundred pounds.

The last sheet in the file was the affidavit, which was headed Evidentiary Statement of Juan Rodriguez, a.k.a. Big Dog, a.k.a. Dog. Reacher’s name was all over it, as well as a long list of injuries, including a broken skull and broken ribs and tissue damage and contusions. It was signed at the bottom, by Rodriguez himself, and witnessed, by a lawyer on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Los Angeles, and notarized, by someone else entirely.

Sullivan said, “Remember him now?”

“He was lying in this affidavit,” Reacher said. “I never laid a finger on him.”

“Really?”

“Why would I? I wasn’t interested in him. I wanted his source, that’s all. I wanted the guy he was buying from. I wanted a name.”

“You weren’t worried about SAWs on the streets of LA?”

“That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine.”

“Did you get the name?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I asked, he answered.”

“Just like that?”

“More or less.”

“What does that mean?”

“I was a good interrogator. I made him think I knew more than I did. He wasn’t very smart. I’m surprised he even had a brain to injure.”

“So how do you explain the hospital report?”

“Do I have to? A guy like that, he knows all kinds of unsavory characters. Maybe he ripped someone off the day before. He wasn’t operating in a very civilized environment.”

“So that’s your defense? Some other dude did it?”

“If I’d done it he wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. He was a useless tub of lard.”

“I can’t go to the prosecutor with some other dude did it. I can’t say the proof is you would have actually killed him, rather than merely mortally injuring him.”

“You’ll have to.”

“No, I won’t have to. You need to listen up, Reacher. You need to take this seriously. I can get you a deal, but you have to get out in front of it. You have to own it and show some contrition.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I’m giving you my best advice.”

“Can I get a new lawyer?”

“No,” Sullivan said. “You can’t.”

They ate the rest of their breakfasts in silence. Reacher wanted to move to another table, but he didn’t, because he thought it would look petty. They split the check and paid and went out to the car, where Sullivan said, “I have somewhere else to go. You can walk from here. Or take the bus.”

She got in her car and drove away. Reacher was left on his own, in the restaurant lot. The three-lane in front of him was part of the local bus route. There was a bench stop thirty yards to his left. There were two people waiting. Two men. Mexicans, both of them much thinner than the Big Dog. Honest civilians, probably, heading for yard work in the cemetery, or janitor jobs in Alexandria, or in D.C. itself.

There was another bus stop fifty yards to his right. Another bench. On the near side of the street, not the far. Heading north, not south. Heading out, not in. To McLean, and then Reston, maybe. And then to Leesburg, probably, and possibly all the way to Winchester. Where there would be more buses waiting, bigger buses, which would labor through the Appalachians, into West Virginia, and Ohio, and Indiana. And onward. And away.

They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now.

A new discharge, this time without honor.

She doesn’t want to see you.

Reacher waited. The air was cold. The traffic was steady. Cars and trucks. All makes, all models, all colors. Then far to his left he saw a bus. Heading north, not south. Heading out, not in. The bench was fifty yards to his right. He waited. The bus was a big van, really, converted. Local, not long distance. A municipal service, with a subsidized fare. It was snorting and snuffling its way toward him, slowly.

He let it go. It passed him by and continued on its way, oblivious.

He walked back to the 110th HQ. Two miles in total, thirty minutes exactly. He passed his motel. The car with the dents in the doors was gone from the curb. Reclaimed, or stolen.

He got to the old stone building at five minutes to eight in the morning, and he met another lawyer, who told him who Candice Dayton was, and why she was unhappy.

Chapter 9

The sentry Reacher had met the afternoon before was back in his hutch. The day watch. He nodded Reacher through the gate, and Reacher walked onward to the short flight of steps and the freshly painted door. The Humvee was still in the lot. As was the small red two-seater. The car with the dents in the doors was not.

There was a new sergeant at the desk in the lobby. The night watch, presumably, finishing up. This one was male, white, and a little more reserved than Leach had been in the end. Not explicitly hostile, but quiet and slightly censorious, like a milder version of the guys in the T-shirts from the night before: You brought the unit into disrepute. He said, “Colonel Morgan requires you to report to 207 immediately.”

Reacher said, “Immediately what?”

The guy said, “Immediately, sir.”

“Thank you, sergeant,” Reacher said. Room 207 was upstairs, fourth on the left, next to his own room. Or next to Susan Turner’s, or Morgan’s, now. Back in the day 207 had been Karla Dixon’s office, his number cruncher. His financial specialist. She had busted open plenty of tough things. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, crimes come down to love, hate, or money, and unlike what it says in the bible, the greatest of these is money. Dixon had been worth her modest weight in gold, and Reacher had fond memories of room 207.

He used the stairs and walked the corridor and passed his old office. The nameplate was still on the wall: Maj. S. R. Turner, Commanding Officer. He heard Captain Weiss’ voice in his head, and Major Sullivan’s: She took a bribe. Maybe there was an innocent explanation. Maybe a distant uncle had died and left stock in a uranium mine. Maybe it was a foreign mine, hence the offshore status. Australian, perhaps. There was uranium in Australia. And gold, and coal, and iron ore. Or somewhere in Africa. He wished Karla Dixon was there. She could have taken one look at the paperwork, and seen the truth in an instant.

He didn’t knock at 207’s door. No reason to. Apart from Morgan he was likely to be the highest rank in the building. And rank was rank, even in his peculiar circumstances. So he went straight in.

The room was empty. And it was no longer an office. It had been converted to a conference room of some kind. There was no desk, but there was a big round table and six chairs. There was a black spider-shaped thing in the center of the table, presumably a speakerphone for group discussions with remote parties. There was a credenza against one wall, presumably for in-meeting coffee and sandwiches. The lightshade was the same glass bowl. There was an economy bulb in it, turned on already, glowing weak and sickly.

Reacher stepped over to the window and looked out. Not much to see. The lot was narrower on that side of the building. No parking. Just a big trash container, and a random pile of obsolete furniture, desk chairs and file cabinets. The chair upholstery looked swollen with damp, and the file cabinets were rusty. Then came the stone wall, and over it was a decent view east, all the way to the cemetery and the river. The Washington Monument was visible in the far distance, the same color as the mist. A watery sun was behind it, low in the sky.

The door opened behind him and Reacher turned around, expecting Morgan. But it wasn’t Morgan. It was déjà vu all over again. A neat Class A uniform, with JAG Corps insignia on it. A woman lawyer. Her nameplate said Edmonds. She looked a little like Sullivan. Dark, trim, very professional, wearing a skirt and nylons and plain black shoes. But she was younger than Sullivan. And junior in rank. She was only a captain. She had a cheaper briefcase.

She said, “Major Reacher?”

He said, “Good morning, captain.”

She said, “I’m Tracy Edmonds. I’m working with HRC.”

Which was the Human Resources Command, which back in the days of plain English had been the Personnel Command. Which at first made Reacher think she was there to take him through the paperwork. Pay, bank details, the whole nine yards. But then he realized they wouldn’t have sent a lawyer for that kind of thing. A company clerk could do that stuff perfectly well. So she was there about the Candice Dayton thing, probably. But she was junior, and she had given up her first name unasked, and she had an open look on her face, all friendly and concerned, which might mean the Candice Dayton thing wasn’t as serious as the Big Dog problem.

He asked, “Do you know anything about Susan Turner’s situation?”

She said, “Who?”

“You just walked past her office.”

She said, “Only what I’ve heard.”

“Which is what?”

“She took a bribe.”

“For what?”

“I think that’s confidential.”

“It can’t be. She’s confined prior to trial. Therefore there must be probable cause in the record. Or have we abandoned civilized jurisprudence while I’ve been away?”

“They say she took a day to pass on crucial information. No one understood why. Now they do.”

“What information?”

“She arrested an infantry captain from Fort Hood. An espionage case, allegedly. The captain gave up the name of his foreign civilian contact. Major Turner sat on it for twenty-four hours, and the contact used the time to get away.”

“When was this exactly?”

“About four weeks ago.”

“But she wasn’t arrested until the day before yesterday.”

“That’s when the foreign contact paid her. Which was evidence they had to wait for. Without it the delay could have been explained as incompetence, not criminality.”

“Has the pre-trial confinement been appealed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who’s her lawyer?”

“Colonel Moorcroft. Out of Charlottesville.”

“You mean the JAG school?”

Edmonds nodded. “He teaches criminal defense.”

“Is he commuting from there to here?”

“No, I believe he’s in the Dyer VOQ.”

Which were the Visiting Officers’ Quarters, at Fort Dyer. Or, now, Joint Base Dyer-Helsington House. Not the Ritz exactly, but not too far from it, and no doubt a whole lot better than a crappy motel on a three-lane a mile from Rock Creek.

Edmonds pulled out a chair for him, and then one for herself, and she sat down at the conference table. She said, “Candice Dayton.”

Reacher sat down, and said, “I don’t know who Candice Dayton is. Or was.”

“Denial is not a smart way to go, I’m afraid, major. It never works.”

“I can’t pretend to remember someone if I don’t.”

“It creates a bad impression. It reinforces a negative stereotype. Both things will go against you in the end.”

“Who was she?”

Edmonds lifted her briefcase onto the table and opened it up. She took out a file. She said, “You were posted to Korea several times, is that correct?”

“Many times.”

“Including at one time a short spell working with the 55th MP.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. It’s all here in black and white. It was very late in your career. Almost the last thing you did. You were at Camp Red Cloud. Which is between Seoul and the demilitarized zone.”

“I know where it is.”

“Candice Dayton was an American citizen, and at that time she was temporarily a resident in Seoul.”

“A civilian?”

“Yes. You remember her now?”

“No.”

“You had a brief affair.”

“Who did?”

“You and Ms. Dayton, of course.”

“I don’t remember her.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

“No.”

“Have you had many sexual liaisons in your life?”

“That’s a very personal question.”

“I’m your lawyer. Have you?”

“As many as possible, generally. I like women. I guess it’s a biological thing.”

“So many there may be some you don’t remember?”

“There were some I try to forget.”

“Does that category include Ms. Dayton?”

“No. If I was trying to forget her, that would mean I remember her. Right? And I don’t.”

“Are there others you don’t remember?”

“How would I tell?”

“You see, this is what I meant about reinforcing a stereotype. It won’t help you in court.”

“What court?”

“Candice Dayton left Seoul pretty soon after you did, and she went home to Los Angeles, which is where she was from. She was happy to be back. She got a job, and she did quite well for a number of years. She had a daughter early on, who thrived and then did well in school. She got promoted at work, and she bought a bigger house. All the good stuff. But then the economy went bad, and she lost her job, and then she lost her house. As of right now, she and her daughter are living in her car, and she’s looking for financial assistance, from anywhere she’s entitled to get it.”

“And?”

“She got pregnant in Korea, major. Her daughter is yours.”

Chapter 10

Edmonds paged through the file, walking delicate fingers from sheet to sheet. She said, “Army policy is to take no proactive steps. We don’t send out search parties. We merely make a note against the father’s name. Usually nothing happens. But if the father comes to us, as you did, then we’re obliged to act. So we’re going to have to give your current status and location to the court in Los Angeles.”

She found the page she was looking for. She pulled it out from among all the others. She slid it across the conference table. She said, “Obviously, as your lawyer, I would strongly recommend a paternity test. You’ll have to pay for it, but it would be most unwise to proceed to a final settlement without one.”

Reacher picked up the sheet of paper. It was a crisp new photocopy of an affidavit. Just like the Big Dog’s. Signatures, and lawyers, and seals, and stamps, all done in a law office in North Hollywood, apparently. His name was all over it. Dates were given for his deployment with the 55th. Dates and times and social activities were recorded. Candice Dayton must have kept a comprehensive diary. The baby’s date of birth was noted. It was exactly nine months after the midpoint of his time at Red Cloud. The baby’s name was Samantha. Sam for short, presumably. She was now fourteen years old. Nearly fifteen.

Edmonds slid a second sheet across. It was a crisp new photocopy of a birth certificate. She said, “She didn’t put your name on it. I think originally she was happy to go it alone. But now she’s fallen on hard times.”

Reacher said nothing.

Edmonds said, “I don’t know your current financial situation, obviously. But you’re looking at a little more than three years of child support. Plus college, possibly. I imagine the court will contact you in about a month, and you can work it out with them.”

Reacher said, “I don’t remember her.”

“Probably best not to say that too often. These things are fundamentally adversarial in nature, and you should avoid extra resentment on Ms. Dayton’s part, if you can. In fact it might be a smart move to contact her proactively. As soon as possible. To show willingness, I mean.”

Edmonds took back the affidavit, and she took back the birth certificate. She slotted them back into the file, each in its allotted place. She put the file back in her briefcase and closed it. She said, “As you know, major, the Uniform Code of Military Justice still lists adultery as a criminal offense. Especially for those with security clearances. Because the risk of compromise is generally seen as significant. Especially where a civilian is involved. But I think if you’re seen to be acting reasonably with Ms. Dayton, then I can get the prosecutor to let that aspect slide. Especially if you were to approach Ms. Dayton proactively, with an offer. As I said. Right away, perhaps. I think that would be well received. By the prosecutor, I mean.”

Reacher said nothing.

Edmonds said, “It was a long time ago, after all. And no harm to national security has been apparent. Unless your other issue interferes. The thing with Mr. Rodriguez, I mean. They might want to hit you with everything they can find, in which case I really won’t be able to help you.”

Reacher said nothing.

Edmonds stood up from the table and said, “I’ll keep in touch, major. Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

She left the room and closed the door behind her. Reacher heard her heels on the linoleum in the corridor, and then he heard nothing at all.

Fatherhood was up there as one of the most commonplace male experiences in all of human history. But to Reacher it had always seemed unlikely. Just purely theoretical. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series, or being able to sing. Possible in principle, but always likely to pass him by. A destination for other people, but not for him. He had known fathers, starting with his own, and his grandfathers, and his childhood friends’ fathers, and then some of his own friends, as they got married and started to raise families. Being a father seemed both straightforward and infinitely complex. Easy enough on the surface. Underneath, simply too immense to worry about. So generally it seemed to come out as a day-to-day thing. Hope for the best, one foot in front of the other. His own father had always seemed in charge. But looking back, it was clear he was just making it up as he went along.

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

Reacher got no more time to think about her. Not right then. Because the door opened and Morgan walked in, still in his ACU fatigues, still wearing his spectacles, still all groomed and fussy and squared away. He said, “You’re dismissed for the day, major. Be back here before 0800 tomorrow.”

Punishment by boredom. Nothing to do all day. Not an unusual tactic. Reacher didn’t respond. He just sat and stared into the distance. Bad manners or minor insubordination couldn’t make his situation any worse. Not at that point. But in turn Morgan just stood there too, dumb as a rock, holding the door, so eventually Reacher had to get up from the table and file out of the room. He took it slow in the corridor until he heard Morgan shut himself back in his own office.

Then he stopped and turned around.

He walked back to the far end of the corridor and checked the office on the left. Room 209. Calvin Franz’s office, back at the beginning. A good friend, now dead. Reacher opened the door and stuck his head in and saw two men he didn’t recognize. NCOs, but not the two from the motel the night before. Not the two in the T-shirts. They were at back-to-back desks, working hard on computers. They looked up at him.

“Carry on,” he said.

He stepped back out and tried the opposite door. Room 210, once David O’Donnell’s billet. O’Donnell was still alive, as far as Reacher knew. A private detective, in D.C., he had heard. Not far away. He stuck his head in the room and saw a woman at a desk. She was in ACU fatigues. A lieutenant. She looked up.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Room 208 had been Tony Swan’s office. Another good friend, also now dead. Reacher opened the door and checked. No one there, but it was a one-person billet, and that one person was a woman. There was a female officer’s hat on the window sill, and a tiny wristwatch unlatched and upside down on the desk.

He had seen 207. Once Karla Dixon’s domain, now no one’s. The conference room. Dixon was still alive, as far as he knew. In New York, the last time he had heard. She was a forensic accountant, which meant she was very busy.

Room 206 had been Frances Neagley’s office. Directly opposite his own, because she had done most of his work for him. The best sergeant he ever had. Still alive and prospering, he thought, in Chicago. He stuck his head in and saw the lieutenant who had dumped him at the motel the night before. In the first car, driven by the private first class. The guy was at the desk, on the phone. He looked up. Reacher shook his head and backed out of the room.

Room 204 had been Stan Lowrey’s office. A hard man, and a good investigator. He had gone early, the only one of the original unit smart enough to get out unscathed. He had moved to Montana, to raise sheep and churn butter. No one knew why. He had been the only black man in a thousand square miles, and he had no farming experience. But people said he had been happy. Then he had been hit by a truck. His office was occupied by a captain in Class A uniform. A short guy, on his way to testify. No other reason for the fancy duds. Reacher said, “Excuse me,” and headed out again.

Room 203 had been an evidence locker, and still was, and 201 had been a file room, and still was, and 202 had been the company clerk’s quarters, and still was. The guy was in there, a sergeant, relatively old and gray, probably fighting involuntary separation on an annual basis. Reacher nodded a greeting to him and backed out and went downstairs.

The sour-faced night guy had gone and Leach had taken his place at the reception desk. Behind her the corridor led back to the first-floor offices, 101 through 110. Reacher checked them all. Rooms 109 and 110 had been Jorge Sanchez’s and Manuel Orozco’s offices, and were now occupied by similar guys from a newer generation. Rooms 101 through 108 held people of no particular interest, except for 103, which was the duty officer’s station. There was a captain in there. He was a good looking guy in his late twenties. His desk was twice the normal size, all covered over with telephones and scratch pads and message forms and an untidy legal pad, with its many used pages folded loosely back like an immense bouffant hairdo from the 1950s. The face-up page was covered with angry black doodles. There were shaded boxes and machines and escape-proof spiral mazes. Clearly the guy spent a lot of time on the phone, some of it on hold, some of it waiting, most of it bored. When he spoke it was with a Southern accent that Reacher recognized immediately. He had talked to the guy from South Dakota, more than once. The guy had routed his calls to Susan Turner.

Reacher asked him, “Do you have other personnel deployed around here?”

The guy shook his head. “This is it. What you see is what you get. We have people elsewhere in the States and overseas, but no one else in this military district.”

“How many in Afghanistan?”

“Two.”

“Doing what?”

“I can’t give you the details.”

“Hazardous duty?”

“Is there another kind? In Afghanistan?”

Something in his voice.

Reacher asked, “Are they OK?”

“They missed their scheduled radio check yesterday.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Never happened before.”

“Do you know what their mission is?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“I’m not asking you to tell me. I’m asking whether you know. In other words, how secret is it?”

The guy paused a beat and said, “No, I don’t know what their mission is. All I know is they’re out there in the back of beyond, and all we’re getting is silence.”

Reacher said, “Thank you, captain.” He headed back to the reception desk, where he asked Leach for a pool car. She hesitated, and he said, “I’m dismissed for the day. Colonel Morgan didn’t say I had to sit in the corner. An omission, possibly, but I’m entitled to interpret my orders in the best possible light.”

Leach asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“Fort Dyer,” Reacher said. “I want to talk to Colonel Moorcroft.”

“Major Turner’s lawyer?”

Reacher nodded. “And Dyer is definitely less than five miles away. You won’t be aiding or abetting a serious crime.”

Leach paused a beat and then opened a drawer and took out a grubby key. She said, “It’s an old blue Chevy sedan. I need it back here before the end of the day. I can’t let you have it overnight.”

“Whose is the red sports car outside?”

Leach said, “That’s Major Turner’s ride.”

“Do you know the guys in Afghanistan?”

Leach nodded. “They’re friends of mine.”

“Are they good?”

“They’re the best.”

Chapter 11

There were three Chevrolet sedans in the HQ lot, and two were old, but only one was old and blue. It was dirty and all beat up and saggy, and it had about a million city miles on the clock. But it started up fine, and it idled OK. Which it needed to, because the daytime traffic was slow. Lots of lights, lots of queues, lots of jammed lanes. But getting into Dyer itself was quicker than the first time. The main gate guards were relatively welcoming. Reacher figured Leach must have called ahead again. Which meant she was turning into a minor ally. Which Reacher was happy about. A sergeant on your side made the world go round, smooth and easy. Whereas a sergeant who took against you could kill you dead.

He parked the car and went inside, where it got slower again. A woman at a desk called around and was unable to locate Moorcroft anywhere. Not in the VOQ, not in the legal offices, not in the guardhouse, and not in the cells. Which left only one place to look. Reacher moved on, deeper into the complex, until he saw a sign with an arrow: Officers Club. It was late for breakfast, but late breakfasts were a natural habitat for senior rear-echelon staffers. Especially senior rear-echelon staffers who were also academic pointy-heads on short-term visits.

The OC dining room turned out to be a pleasant, bland space, low, wide, and long, recently refurbished, probably by the same guy who did the dining rooms in mid-price chain hotels. There was plenty of blond wood and mid-green fabric. Plenty of angled dividers, and therefore plenty of separate little seating areas. There was carpet on the floor. There were venetian blinds on the windows, cracked open about halfway. For no good reason Reacher remembered a joke his old colleague Manuel Orozco liked to tell: How do you make a Venetian blind? You poke his eyes out. And then: How do you make a Swiss roll? You push him down an Alp. Whereupon David O’Donnell would start pointing out that Swiss rolls weren’t really Swiss. More likely British. Nineteenth century. Like a Victoria sponge, but assembled differently. O’Donnell was the kind of pedant that made Reacher look normal.

Reacher moved on. Most of the little seating areas were empty, but Moorcroft was in one of them. He was a short, rotund, middle-aged man with an amiable expression, in a Class A uniform, with his name big and obvious on the flap of his right breast pocket. He was eating toast, at a big isolated table for four.

And face to face at the table with him was Major Sullivan, Reacher’s lawyer for the Big Dog. Sullivan wasn’t eating. She had already had breakfast, with Reacher, in the Greek establishment. She was cradling a cup of coffee, nothing more, and talking, and listening, in what looked like a very deferential manner, like majors often converse with colonels, or students with teachers.

Reacher stepped into the intimate little area and pulled out a chair and sat down at the table between them. He said, “Do you mind if I join you?”

Moorcroft asked, “Who are you?”

Sullivan said, “This is Major Reacher. My client. The one I was telling you about.”

Nothing in her voice.

Moorcroft looked at Reacher and said, “If you have things to discuss, I’m sure Major Sullivan would be happy to schedule an appointment at a more appropriate time.”

“It’s you I want to talk to,” Reacher said.

“Me? About what?”

“Susan Turner.”

“Do you have an interest?”

“Why has her pre-trial confinement not been appealed?”

“You must state a legitimate interest before we can consider specifics.”

“Any citizen has a legitimate interest in the correct application of due process against any other citizen.”

“You think my approach has so far been incorrect?”

“I’ll be better able to make that determination after you answer my question.”

“Major Turner is facing a serious charge.”

“But pre-trial confinement is not supposed to be punitive. It’s supposed to be no more rigorous than is required to ensure the accused’s presence at trial. That’s what the regulation says.”

“Are you a lawyer? Your name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I was an MP. Actually, I am an MP, I suppose. All over again. Therefore I know plenty about the law.”

“Really? In the same way a plumber understands the science behind fluid mechanics and thermodynamics?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, colonel. It’s not brain surgery.”

“So enlighten me, by all means.”

“Major Turner’s situation doesn’t require confinement. She’s a commissioned officer in the United States Army. She’s not going to run.”

“Is that a personal guarantee?”

“Almost. She’s the commander of the 110th MP. As was I. I wouldn’t have run. She won’t, either.”

“There are elements of treason here.”

“Here, maybe, but not in the real world. No one is thinking treason. Or they wouldn’t have brought her here to Dyer. She’d be in the Caribbean by now.”

“Nevertheless, it’s not a speeding ticket.”

“She won’t run.”

“Again, is that a personal guarantee?”

“It’s a considered assessment.”

“Do you even know her?”

“Not really.”

“So butt out, major.”

“Why did she instruct you to prevent me from visiting?”

“She didn’t, technically. That instruction was passed on by the duty lawyer. At some unspecified time in the late afternoon. Therefore the restriction was already in place before I took over her case, which was the next morning. Which was yesterday.”

“I want you to ask her to reconsider.”

Moorcroft didn’t answer. Sullivan leaned into the conversation and looked at Reacher and said, “Captain Edmonds told me she’d met with you. About the Candice Dayton matter. She said she advised you to take proactive steps. Have you yet?”

Reacher said, “I’ll get to it.”

“It should be your first priority. Nuances count, in a thing like this.”

“I’ll get to it,” Reacher said again.

“This is your daughter we’re talking about here. She’s living in a car. That’s more important than a theoretical worry about Major Turner’s human rights.”

“The kid is nearly fifteen years old in Los Angeles. No doubt she’s slept in cars before. And if she’s my kid she can take a day or two more of it.”

Moorcroft said, “I think Major Sullivan and Captain Edmonds are trying to make the point you might not have a day or two more. Depending on what the prosecutors decide to do about the Rodriguez issue, I mean. I imagine they’re rubbing their hands with glee. Because it’s a perfect storm. Clear evidence, plus a disastrous PR angle.”

“The clear evidence is clear bullshit.”

Moorcroft smiled, practiced and indulgent. “You’re not the first defendant ever to say that, you know.”

“The guy is dead. But I’m supposed to be able to confront the witnesses against me. So how is this even legal?”

“It’s an unfortunate anomaly. The affidavit speaks from beyond the grave. It is what it is. It can’t be cross-examined.”

Reacher looked at Sullivan. She was his lawyer, after all. She said, “The colonel is right. I told you, I can get you a deal. You should take it.”

And then she left. She drained her cup, and stood up, and said goodbye, and walked away. Reacher watched her go, and then he turned back to Moorcroft.

He asked, “Are you going to appeal Major Turner’s confinement?”

“Yes,” Moorcroft said. “As a matter of fact I am. I’m going to ask for confinement to the D.C. military district, and I expect to be successful. She’ll be out and about before long.”

“When will you start the process?”

“I’ll put in the paperwork as soon as you let me finish my breakfast.”

“When will you get a decision?”

“By the middle of the day, I should think.”

“That’s good.”

“Good or bad, it’s really none of your business, major.”

Moorcroft chased toast crumbs around his plate for a minute more. Then he stood up in turn and said, “Good day, major,” and strolled out of the room. He waddled a little as he walked. Much more academic than military. But not a bad guy. Reacher felt his heart was in the right place.

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

I’ll get to it.

Reacher walked all the way north through the complex and stopped in at the guardhouse, where a different captain was in charge. Not Weiss, from the night before. The day guy was an aquiline black man about seven feet tall, but slender as a pencil, folded into a desk chair that was far too small for him. Reacher asked to visit with Susan Turner, and the guy consulted the green three-ring binder, and he refused the request.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So Reacher walked back to where the old blue Chevy was parked, and he drove it back to the 110th HQ, and he left it where he had found it. He went inside and gave the key to Leach. She was agitated again. Nervous, stressed, and uptight. Not terrible, but visible. Reacher said, “What?”

Leach said, “Colonel Morgan’s not here.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“We need him.”

“I can’t imagine what for.”

“He’s the CO.”

“No, Major Turner is your CO.”

“And she’s not here either.”

“What happened?”

“Our guys in Afghanistan missed their second radio check. It’s forty-eight hours since we heard from them. And therefore we need to do something. But Morgan’s not here.”

Reacher nodded. “He’s probably having a new poker fitted. Up his ass. It’s probably a lengthy procedure.”

He moved on, into the ground-floor corridor, to the second office on the left. Room 103. The duty officer’s station. The guy was in there, behind his huge desk, handsome, Southern, and worried. His doodles were bleaker than ever. Reacher asked him, “Didn’t Morgan tell you where he was going?”

“Pentagon,” the guy said. “For a meeting.”

“Is that all he said?”

“No details.”

“Have you called?”

“Of course I have. But it’s a big place. They can’t find him anywhere.”

“Does he have a cell phone?”

“Switched off.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Nearly an hour.”

“What would you want him to do?”

“Authorize a request for a search party, of course. Every minute counts now. And we have lots of people over there. The 1st Infantry Division. And Special Forces. And helicopters, and drones, and satellites, and all kinds of aerial surveillance.”

“But you don’t even know where your guys are supposed to be, or what they’re supposed to be doing.”

The duty officer nodded and jabbed his thumb at the ceiling. At the upstairs offices. He said, “The mission is in Major Turner’s computer. Which is now Colonel Morgan’s computer. Which is password-protected.”

“Do the radio checks go into Bagram?”

The guy nodded again. “Most of them are routine data. Bagram sends us the transcript. But if there’s anything urgent, then they’re patched through to us, right here in this office. On a secure phone line.”

“What was it the last time they transmitted? Routine, or urgent?”

“Routine.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Call Bagram and get an estimate of their range, from that last time.”

“Will Bagram even know their range?”

“Those radio guys can usually tell. By the sound, and the signal strength. By a gut feeling, sometimes. It’s their job. Ask for their best guess, to the nearest five miles.”

The guy picked up a phone, and Reacher walked back to Leach at the reception desk in the lobby. He said, “Get on the line for the next ten minutes and hit up everyone you know at the Pentagon. Full court press, to locate Morgan.”

Leach picked up her phone.

Reacher waited.

Ten minutes later Leach had nothing. Not altogether surprising. The Pentagon had more than seventeen miles of corridors and nearly four million square feet of office space, all occupied by more than thirty thousand people on any given workday. Trying to find a random individual was like trying to find a needle in the world’s most secretive haystack. Reacher walked back to 103 and the duty officer said, “The Bagram radio room figures our guys were about two hundred and twenty miles out. Maybe two hundred and thirty.”

“That’s a start,” Reacher said.

“Not really. We don’t know what direction.”

“If in doubt, take a wild-ass guess. That was always my operating principle.”

“Afghanistan is a big country.”

“I know it is,” Reacher said. “And it’s unpleasant all over, from what I hear. But where is it worst?”

“The mountains. The border with Pakistan. Pashtun tribal areas. The northeast, basically. No one’s idea of fun.”

Reacher nodded. “Which is the kind of place the 110th gets sent. So get on the horn to the base commander and ask him to order up an air search, starting two hundred and twenty-five miles northeast of Bagram.”

“That could be completely the wrong direction.”

“Like I said, it’s a wild-ass guess. You got something better?”

“They won’t do it anyway. Not on my say-so. A thing like this would need a major or better.”

“So take Morgan’s name in vain.”

“Can’t do it.”

Reacher listened. All quiet. No one coming. The duty officer waited, his hand curled into a fist, halfway between his lap and his phone.

You’re back in the army, major.

You’ll retain your former rank.

You’re assigned to this unit.

“Use my name,” Reacher said.

Chapter 12

The duty officer made the call, and then the military machine took over, distant and invisible and industrious, on the other side of the world, nine time zones and nearly eight thousand miles away, planning, briefing, readying, arming, and fueling. The old stone building in Rock Creek went quiet.

Reacher asked, “How many other people do you have in the field?”

The duty officer said, “Globally? Fourteen.”

“Nearest?”

“Right now, Fort Hood in Texas. Cleaning up after Major Turner’s thing down there.”

“How many in hazardous situations?”

“That’s a moving target, isn’t it? Eight or ten, maybe.”

“Has Morgan gone AWOL before?”

“This is only his third day.”

“What was Major Turner like as a commander?”

“She was fairly new. She only had a few weeks.”

“First impression?”

“Excellent.”

“Is this Afghanistan thing hers, or did she inherit it?”

“It’s hers,” the duty officer said. “It’s the second thing she did when she got here, after Fort Hood.”

*  *  *

Reacher had never been to Bagram, or anywhere else in Afghanistan, but he knew how it would work. Some things never change. No one liked sitting around doing nothing, and no one liked their own people in trouble. Especially not in the tribal areas, which were brutal and primitive in ways too drastic to contemplate. So the search mission would be undertaken very willingly. But it would carry significant danger. Combat air support would be needed, and overwhelming air-to-ground firepower would be required. Lots of moving parts. Therefore mission planning would take some time. Two hours minimum, Reacher figured, to get all the ducks in a row. Then two hours of flight time. There would be no early resolution.

Reacher spent some of the wait time walking. Back to his motel, and past it, and then left and right on the long blocks to the ragged strip mall ahead of the Greek restaurant, which he ignored, because he wasn’t hungry. He ignored the picture framing shop, because he had no pictures in need of framing, and he ignored the gun shop, because he didn’t want to buy a gun, and he ignored the walk-in dentist, because his teeth felt fine. He stopped in at the hardware store, and bought a pair of dark khaki canvas work pants, and a blue canvas work shirt, and a brown field coat padded with some kind of trade-marked miracle insulation layer. Then he stopped in at the no-name pharmacy and bought dollar socks and boxers and two white T-shirts, which he figured he would wear one on top of the other, under the work shirt, because the T-shirt fabric looked thin, and the weather showed no signs of warming up. He added a three-pack of disposable razors, the smallest available, and an aerosol can of shaving foam, the smallest available, and two packs of gum, and a plastic comb.

He carried his purchases back to the motel, two long blocks, and he let himself into his room. It had been serviced in his absence. The bed had been made and the meager bathroom supplies had been replaced. Fresh towels, dry but still thin, and new wrapped soap, still small, and a new tiny bottle of shampoo, still chemically identical to dishwashing liquid. He stripped in the chill and crammed his old clothes in the trash buckets, half in the bathroom and half in the bedroom, because the buckets were small, and then he shaved very carefully, and then he took his second shower of the day.

He started the heater under the window in the bedroom and dried himself with a hand towel in its hot raucous blast, to save the larger towel for a future occasion. He dressed in his new clothes and put his old boots back on and combed his hair. He checked the result in the bathroom mirror and was satisfied with what he saw. He was at least clean and tidy, which was about as good as it ever got.

She’ll be out and about before long.

Reacher walked back to the 110th HQ. His four upper-body layers plus the miracle insulation did their job. He stayed warm enough. The HQ gates were open. The day guy was in the sentry hutch. Morgan’s car was back in the lot. The plain sedan. Reacher had seen it the night before, with Morgan himself at the wheel, all prim and upright. Reacher detoured across toward it and laid his palm on the hood. Which was warm. Almost hot. Morgan had just gotten back.

Which explained Leach’s state of mind. She was silent and uptight at the reception desk in the lobby. Behind her the duty officer was inert in the ground-floor corridor, all pale in the face, just standing there. Reacher didn’t wait to be told. He turned and headed up the old stone stairs. Third office on the left. He knocked and entered. Morgan was at the desk, thin lipped and furious, practically quivering with rage.

Reacher said, “Good of you to drop by, colonel.”

Morgan said, “What you just did will cost the Pentagon more than thirty million dollars.”

“Money well spent.”

“It will be a court martial all its own.”

“Possibly,” Reacher said. “But yours, not mine. I don’t know where you’ve served before, colonel, but this isn’t amateur hour anymore. Not here. Not with this unit. You had two men you knew to be in danger, and you absented yourself for two whole hours. You left no word about where you were going, and your phone was switched off. That’s completely unacceptable.”

“Those men are in no danger. They’re poking around with some trivial inquiry.”

“They missed two consecutive radio checks.”

“Probably goofing off, like the rest of this damn unit.”

“In Afghanistan? Doing what? Hitting the bars and the clubs? Checking out the whorehouses? Spending the day at the beach? Get real, you idiot. Radio silence out of Afghanistan is automatically bad news.”

“It was my decision.”

“You wouldn’t recognize a decision if it ran up and bit you in the ass.”

“Don’t speak to me like that.”

“Or what?”

Morgan said nothing.

Reacher asked, “Did you cancel the search?”

Morgan didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “And you haven’t told me we’re looking in the wrong place, either. Therefore I was right. Those guys are lost on the border in the tribal areas. You should have done this twenty-four hours ago. They’re in real trouble.”

“You had no right to interfere.”

“I’m back in the army, I’m assigned to this unit, and I hold the rank of major. Therefore I wasn’t interfering. I was doing my job, and I was doing it properly. Like I always used to. You should pay some attention and pick up some pointers, colonel. You’ve got maybe a dozen people in the field, exposed and vulnerable, and you should be thinking about nothing else, all day and all night. You should leave a precise contact number at all times, and you should have your cell switched on, and you should be prepared to answer it, no matter what else you’re doing.”

Morgan said, “Have you finished?”

“I’ve barely even started.”

“You understand you’re under my command?”

Reacher nodded. “Life is full of anomalies.”

“Then listen up, major. Your orders have changed. From now on you are confined to your quarters. Go straight back to your motel and stay there until you hear from me again. Do not leave your room at any time for any reason. Do not attempt to communicate with anyone from this unit.”

Reacher said nothing.

Morgan said, “You are dismissed, major.”

The duty officer was still in the ground-floor corridor. Leach was still behind the reception desk. Reacher came down the stairs and shrugged at them both. Part apologetic, part rueful, partly the universal military gesture: same old shit. Then he headed out the door and down the stone steps to the cold midday air. The sky was clearing. There was some bright blue up there.

Reacher walked the rest of the hill and turned on the three-lane. A bus passed him by. Heading out, not in. Onward, and away. He walked on, down a slight dip, up a slight rise. He saw the motel ahead of him, on the right, maybe a hundred yards distant.

He stopped.

The car with the dented doors was in the motel lot.

Chapter 13

The car was easily recognizable, even at a distance. Make, model, shape, color, the slight deformation in the driver’s side sheet metal. It was alone in the lot, level with where Reacher guessed his room must be. He moved three paces forward, on a diagonal to the edge of the sidewalk, to improve his angle, and he saw four men coming out his door.

Two of them were as easily identifiable as the car. They were the guys from the night before. One hundred percent certain. Shape, size, coloring. The other two men were new. Nothing special about the first of them. Tall, young, dumb. As bad as his two pals.

The fourth man was different.

He looked a little older than the others, and he was a little bigger than the others, which made him close to Reacher’s own size. Six-four, maybe, and two-forty. But all muscle. Huge thighs, small waist, huge chest, like an hourglass, like a cartoon drawing. Plus big knotted shoulders, and arms propped away from his sides by the sheer bulk of his pectorals and his triceps. Like a world champion male gymnast, except more than twice the size.

But it was his head that was truly extraordinary. It was shaved, and it looked like it had been welded together from flat steel plates. Small eyes, and heavy brows, and sharp cheekbones, and tiny, gristly ears, like pasta shapes. He was straight-backed and powerful. Slavic, somehow. Like a poster boy out of an old Red Army recruiting advertisement. Like the ideal of Soviet manhood. He should have been holding a banner, one-handed, high and proud, his eyes fixed mistily on a golden future.

The four men shuffled out and closed the door behind them. Reacher walked on, ninety yards away, then eighty. An Olympic sprinter could have closed the gap in about eight seconds, but Reacher was no kind of a sprinter, Olympic or otherwise. The four men stepped over to their car. Reacher walked on. The four men opened their doors and folded themselves inside, two in the back, two in the front. Reacher walked on. Seventy yards. Sixty. The car moved through the lot, and stopped nose-on to the three-lane, waiting for a gap in the traffic, waiting to turn. Reacher wanted it to turn toward him. Turn left, he thought. Please.

But the car turned right, and joined the traffic stream, and drove away into the distance, and was lost to sight.

A minute later Reacher was at his door, unlocking it again, opening it up, and stepping inside. Nothing was disturbed. Nothing was torn up or tipped over or trashed. Therefore there had been no detailed search. Just a cursory poke around, looking for a first impression.

Which was what?

There was a wet tub, and a wet towel, and some old clothes stuffed in the trash cans, and some abandoned toiletries near the sink. Like he had just upped and quit. Which they had told him to, after all. You should get the hell out of town, right now. Every night we find you still here, we’re going to kick your ass.

Maybe they thought he had heeded their warnings.

Or maybe not.

He left the room again and walked up to the motel office. The clerk was a squirrelly guy about forty, all bad skin and jutting bone, perched up on a high stool behind the counter. Reacher said, “You let four guys into my room.”

The clerk sucked his teeth and nodded.

Reacher said, “Army?”

The guy nodded again.

“Did you see ID?”

“Didn’t need to. They had the look.”

“You do a lot of business with the army?”

“Enough.”

“To never ask questions?”

“You got it, chief. I’m sweetness and light all the way, with the army. Because a man’s got to eat. They do anything wrong?”

“Not a thing,” Reacher said. “Did you hear any names?”

“Only yours.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Anything else I can do for you?” the guy asked.

“I could use a fresh towel,” Reacher said. “And more soap, I guess. And more shampoo. And you could empty my trash.”

“Whatever you want,” the guy said. “I’m sweetness and light all the way, with the army.”

Reacher walked back to his room. There was no chair. Which was not a breach of the Geneva Conventions, but confinement to quarters was going to be irksome for a large and restless man. Plus it was only a motel, with no room service. And no dining room, and no greasy spoon cafe across the street, either. And no telephone, and therefore no delivery. So Reacher locked up again and walked away, to the Greek place two blocks distant. Technically a grievous breach of his orders, but win or lose, trivialities weren’t going to count for much, either one way or the other.

He saw nothing on the walk, except another municipal bus, heading out, and a garbage truck, on its rounds. At the restaurant the hostess gave him a table on the other side of the room from his breakfast billet, and he got a different waitress. He ordered coffee, and a cheeseburger, and a slice of pie, and he enjoyed it all. He saw nothing on the walk back except another bus heading out, and another garbage truck on its rounds. He was back in his room less than an hour after leaving it. The squirrelly guy had been in with a new towel, and new soap, and new shampoo. The trash cans were empty. The room was as good as it was going to get. He lay down on the bed and crossed his ankles and put his hands behind his head and thought about taking a nap.

But he didn’t get one. Within about a minute of his head hitting the pillow, three warrant officers from the 75th MP showed up to arrest him.

Chapter 14

They came in a car, and they were driving it fast. Reacher heard it on the road, and he heard it thump up into the lot, and he heard it slew around and jam to a stop outside. He heard three doors open, a ragged sequence of three separate sounds, all contained in the same second, and he heard three pairs of boots hit the ground, which meant three guys, not four, which meant they were not the guys from the car with the dented doors. There was a pause, with one set of footsteps receding fast, which he guessed was someone running around to cover the rear, which was a waste of time, because there was no bathroom window, but they didn’t know that, and better safe than sorry. Which told him he was dealing with a competent crew.

He uncrossed his ankles and unlaced his hands from behind his head and sat up on the bed. He swiveled around and put his feet on the floor. Right on cue the hammering started on the door. Nothing like Major Sullivan’s polite little tap, tap, tappity tap from six o’clock in the morning. This was a full-on furious boom, boom, boom, by big strong guys trained to make a paralyzing first impression. Not his own favorite method. He had always felt self-conscious, making a lot of noise.

The guys outside stopped banging long enough to shout something a couple of times. Open up, open up, Reacher guessed. Then they started banging again. Reacher stood up and walked to the door. He thumped on it from the inside, just as hard and just as loud. The commotion stopped on the outside. Reacher smiled. No one expects a door to talk back.

He opened up and saw two guys in army combat uniform. One had a sidearm drawn, and the other had a shotgun. Which was pretty damn serious, for a suburban Virginia afternoon. Behind them their car had three doors hanging open. Its motor was running.

Reacher said, “What?”

The guy on the hinge side of the door was in charge. Safest spot, for the senior guy. He said, “Sir, you’re to come with us.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“Unit?”

“75th MP.”

“Acting for who?”

“You’ll find out.”

The name on the guy’s uniform tape was Espin. He was about the size of a flyweight boxer, dark haired, hard and muscled, with a flattened nose. He looked like an OK type of guy. In general Reacher liked warrant officers. Not as much as sergeants, but more than most commissioned officers.

He asked, “Is this an arrest?”

“Do you want it to be?” Espin said. “If so, keep talking.”

“Make your mind up, soldier. It’s one thing or the other.”

“I prefer voluntary cooperation.”

“Dream on.”

“Then yes, you’re under arrest.”

“What’s your name?”

“Espin.”

“First name?”

“Why?”

“I want to remember it as long as I live.”

“Is that a threat?”

“What’s your name?”

“Pete,” the guy said.

“Got it,” Reacher said. “Pete Espin. Where are we going?”

“Fort Dyer,” Pete Espin said.

“Why?”

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

The third guy came back from behind the building. Junior to Espin, but only technically. All three of them looked like veterans. Seen it all, done it all. Espin said, “We’re going to search you first.”

“Be my guest,” Reacher said. He held his arms out wide. He had nothing to hide. He had nothing in his pockets except his passport, his ATM card, his toothbrush, some cash money, some gum, and his motel key. Which was all quickly confirmed. Whereupon the guy with the shotgun motioned him over to the car. To the back seat on the passenger side. Which was the safest spot to carry a bad guy in a four-place vehicle without a security screen. Smallest chance of him interfering with the driver. The guy who had checked for a bathroom window got in the driver’s seat. Espin got in next to Reacher. The guy with the shotgun closed Reacher’s door on him and then climbed in the front passenger seat. All set, nice and easy and professional. A good crew.

It was too late for lunch and too early for rush hour, so the roads were clear and the drive was quick, on a different route than the one Reacher had used before, through a tangle of streets to Dyer’s northern entrance, which seemed much less used than the main gate to the south. But it was no less secure. Getting in took the same amount of time. Dragons’ teeth, barriers, and check, check, check, three separate times. Then they drove a looping back way around and fetched up at the rear door of the guardhouse. Reacher was ushered out of the car, and in through the door, to a guy behind it. Not exactly a prison guard. More like a clerk or an administrator. He was unarmed, like most prison staff, and he had keys on his belt. He was in a small square lobby, with locked quarantine doors to the left and the right.

Reacher was led through the door on the left and onward to an interview room. Which had no windows. Just four blank walls, and a table bolted to the floor, with two chairs on one side and one on the other. The room had not been designed by the dining room guy. That was clear. There was no blond wood or carpet. Just scuffed white paint on cinder block, and a cracked concrete floor, and a fluorescent bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling.

A Dyer guy Reacher hadn’t seen before came in with a clear plastic zip bag and took away all the stuff from his pockets. Reacher sat down on the solo side of the table. He figured that was his designated position. Espin sat down opposite him. Everyone else left. Espin said nothing. No questions, no pleasantries, no bullshit to pass the time.

Reacher said, “Who wants to talk to me?”

Espin said, “He’s on his way.”

“He?”

“Some Polish name.”

“Who is he?”

“You’ll see.”

Which Reacher did, about twenty minutes later. The door opened, and a man in a suit came in. The man was on the early side of middle age, with short dark hair showing some gray, and a pale, pouchy face showing some fatigue, and a hard compact body showing some time in the gym. The suit was black, not cheap, but worn and shiny in places, and it had a badge holder flipped open and hooked in the top breast pocket. The badge was Metro PD. Which was D.C.’s local police department.

A civilian.

The guy sat down next to Espin and said, “I’m Detective Podolski.”

“Good to know,” Reacher said.

“I need some answers.”

“To what kind of questions?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t.”

“Questions about a felony assault.”

“How old this time? Twenty years? A hundred? Something that happened during the Civil War?”

“Tell me about your morning.”

“What morning?”

“This morning. Today.”

“I got up, and then I spoke to a lawyer, and then I spoke to another lawyer, and then I spoke to another lawyer. This morning was wall to wall lawyers, basically.”

“Their names?”

“Sullivan, Edmonds, and Moorcroft.”

“And Moorcroft would be Colonel Moorcroft, of your JAG school in Charlottesville, but temporarily working out of this base?”

“Not my JAG school,” Reacher said. “But yes, that’s the guy.”

“And where did you speak with him?”

“Right here, on this base. In the OC dining room.”

“And when did you speak with him?”

“This morning. Like I said.”

“What time specifically?”

“Does a private conversation between two army officers on an army base fall into your jurisdiction, detective?”

“This one does,” Podolski said. “Believe me. When did you speak with him?”

“His breakfast time,” Reacher said. “Which was later than mine. I would say the conversation began at twenty-three minutes past nine.”

“That’s certainly specific.”

“You asked me to be specific.”

Podolski said, “What was the conversation with Colonel Moorcroft about?”

“A legal matter,” Reacher said.

“Privileged?”

“No, it was about a third party.”

“And the third party would be Major Susan Turner, of the 110th MP, currently under investigation by the army on corruption charges?”

“Correct.”

“And Major Sullivan witnessed this conversation, is that right?”

“Yes, she was there.”

“She says you wanted Colonel Moorcroft to do something, is that correct?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You wanted him to appeal Major Turner’s pre-trial confinement?”

“Yes, I did.”

“But he wouldn’t? Is that correct? And in fact he told you to butt out?”

“At one point, yes.”

“You argued, in fact. In a heated manner.”

“We didn’t argue. We discussed a technical matter. It wasn’t heated.”

“But the bottom line is you wanted Colonel Moorcroft to do something for you, and he refused to do it. Is that a fair summary?”

Reacher said, “What exactly is this about?”

Podolski said, “It’s about Colonel Moorcroft getting beaten half to death, late this morning, in southeast D.C. On my streets.”

Chapter 15

Podolski took out a notebook and a pen, and he laid them neatly on the table, and he said, “You should have a lawyer here.”

Reacher said, “I wasn’t in southeast D.C. today. Or any other part. I didn’t even cross the river.”

“Do you want a lawyer?”

“I already have a lawyer. Two of them, actually. They’re not much use to me. In fact one of them in particular seems to be doing me no good at all.”

“Major Sullivan, you mean?”

“She left before the conversation was over. Moorcroft was going to file the paperwork. He agreed just after Sullivan was gone.”

“That’s convenient.”

“It’s also true. Is Moorcroft saying different?”

“Moorcroft isn’t saying anything. He’s in a coma.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You had a car, didn’t you?” Podolski asked. “A blue Chevrolet sedan, borrowed from the 110th HQ.”

“So what?”

“You could have grabbed Moorcroft up and driven him across the river.”

“Could have, I suppose, but didn’t.”

“It was a brutal attack.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. There must have been blood everywhere.”

Reacher nodded. “Brutal attacks and blood everywhere tend to go hand in hand.”

“Tell me about your clothes.”

“What clothes?”

“The clothes you’re wearing.”

Reacher looked down. “They’re new. I just bought them.”

“Where?”

“At a strip mall two blocks from my motel.”

“Why did you buy them?”

She’ll be out and about before long.

“It was time,” Reacher said.

“Were your old clothes dirty?”

“I suppose.”

“Did you get something on them?”

“Like what?”

“Blood, for instance.”

“No, there was no blood on them.”

“Where are they now?”

Reacher said nothing.

Podolski said, “We talked to the clerk at your motel. He said you made a point of asking for your trash to be emptied.”

“I didn’t really make a point.”

“But still, he emptied your trash. Like you asked him to. Just before the garbage truck came. So now, your old clothes are gone.”

“Coincidence.”

“That’s convenient,” Podolski said again. “Isn’t it?”

Reacher didn’t reply.

Podolski said, “The clerk checked the clothes. He’s that kind of guy. They were too big for him, of course, but they might have had some value. But they didn’t. Too dirty, he said. And too stained. Including with what looked like blood to him.”

“Not Moorcroft’s,” Reacher said.

“Whose, then?”

“I’d been wearing them a long time. I have a hard life.”

“You fight a lot?”

“As little as possible. But sometimes I cut myself shaving.”

“You showered, too, didn’t you?”

“When?”

“When you trashed the clothes. The motel clerk said you asked him for new towels.”

“Yes, I showered.”

“Do you normally shower twice a day?”

“Sometimes.”

“Was there a particular reason, today?”

She’ll be out and about before long.

Reacher said, “No particular reason.”

“To rinse the blood, maybe?”

“I wasn’t bleeding.”

“If we checked the drain, what would we find?”

“Dirty water,” Reacher said.

“You sure about that?”

“The whole room is dirty.”

“You’re facing a homicide charge right now, is that correct? From sixteen years ago? Juan Rodriguez? Some guy you beat up?”

“False accusation.”

“I’ve heard that before. Which is what Colonel Moorcroft said too, isn’t it? Major Sullivan told me you mentioned the matter to him. But he wasn’t sympathetic. Did that make you angry?”

“It made me a little frustrated.”

“Yes, it must get tiring, being so widely misunderstood.”

Reacher said, “How bad is Moorcroft?”

“Feeling guilty now?”

“I’m feeling concerned, about him and his client.”

“I heard you never even met the woman.”

“Should that make a difference?”

“The doctors say Moorcroft might wake up at some point. No one can say when, or what state he’ll be in when he does. If he does.”

Reacher said, “I was at the 110th HQ part of the morning.”

Podolski nodded. “For about twenty minutes total. We checked. What were you doing the rest of the morning?”

“Walking.”

“Where?”

“Here and there.”

“Anyone see you walking?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s convenient,” Podolski said, for the third time.

“You’re talking to the wrong guy, detective. Last I saw of Moorcroft, he was making his way out of the OC dining room right here, happy as a clam. Whoever attacked him is running around out there, laughing at you, while you’re wasting your time with me.”

“In other words, some other dude did it?”

“Obviously.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Podolski said again.

“You ever been wrong?”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is, am I wrong now? And I don’t think I am. I’ve got a guy with a history of violence, who was seen arguing with the victim right before the time of the crime, and who dumped a full set of clothes right after the time of the crime, and took his second shower of the day, and who had access to a vehicle, and whose movements aren’t entirely accounted for. You were a cop, correct? What would you do?”

“I would find the right guy. I’m sure I saw that written down somewhere.”

“Suppose the right guy says he’s the wrong guy?”

“Happened all the time. You have to use your judgment.”

“I am.”

“Pity,” Reacher said.

“Show me your hands.”

Reacher put his hands on the table, flat, palms down. They looked big and tan, and worn and rough. Both sets of knuckles were very slightly pink, and very slightly swollen. From the night before. The two guys, in the T-shirts. The left hook, and the right uppercut. Big impacts. Not the biggest ever, but solid. Podolski stared for a long time.

“Inconclusive,” he said. “Maybe you used a weapon. A blunt instrument of some kind. The doctors will tell me.”

Reacher said, “So what next?”

“That’s the DA’s decision. In the meantime you’ll come with me. I want you locked up downtown.”

The room went quiet, and then Espin spoke for the first time.

“No,” he said. “Unacceptable. He stays here. Our homicide beats your felony assault.”

Podolski said, “This morning beats sixteen years ago.”

Espin said, “Possession is nine points of the law. We’ve got him. You don’t. Imagine the paperwork.”

Podolski didn’t answer.

Espin said, “But you can come over and talk to him anytime you want.”

“Will he be locked up?” Podolski asked.

“Tighter than a fish’s butt.”

“Deal,” Podolski said. He stood up, and gathered his pen and his notebook, and walked out of the room.

After that it was straight into routine pre-trial confinement. Reacher was searched again, and his boot laces were taken away, and he was half-pushed and half-led along a narrow blank corridor, past two grander interview rooms opposite, and around two corners, all the way to the cell block. Which was a lot more civilized than some Reacher had seen. It was more like the far corner of a chain hotel than a prison. It was a warren of subcorridors and small lobbies, and the cell itself was like a motel room. Hardened, for sure, with bolts and locks, and a steel door that opened outward, and concrete walls, and a barred foot-high slit window near the ceiling, and metal fittings in the bathroom, and a narrow barracks-style cot for a bed, but it was spacious and reasonably comfortable all the same. Better than the place on the three-lane, overall. That was for damn sure. There was even a chair next to the bed. Joint Base Dyer-Helsington House, in all its opulent glory. High status prisoners on the inside got it better than low status officers on the outside.

Reacher sat down in the chair.

Espin waited in the doorway.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Reacher said, “I need to see the duty captain, as soon as possible.”

Espin said, “He’ll stop by anyway. He’ll need to tell you the rules.”

“I know the rules. I was a duty captain myself, once upon a time. But I still need to see him as soon as possible.”

“I’ll pass on the message.”

And then Espin left.

The door slammed, and the lock turned, and the bolts shot home.

Twenty minutes later the same sounds happened in reverse. The bolts slammed back, and the lock turned the other way, and the door opened. The beanpole captain ducked his head under the lintel and walked in. He said, “Are we going to have trouble with you?”

Reacher said, “I don’t see why you should, as long as you all behave yourselves properly.”

The tall guy smiled. “What can I do for you?”

“You can call someone for me. Sergeant Leach at the 110th. Tell her where I am. She might have a message for me. If she does, you can come and tell me what it is.”

“You want me to feed your dog and pick up your dry cleaning, too?”

“I don’t have dry cleaning. Or a dog. But you can call Major Sullivan, at JAG, if you like. She’s my lawyer. Tell her I want to see her, here, by the close of business today. Tell her I need a client conference. Tell her it’s extremely important.”

“That it?”

“No. Next you can call Captain Edmonds, at HRC. She’s my other lawyer. Tell her I want to see her right after Major Sullivan. Tell her I have urgent things to discuss.”

“Anything else?”

“How many customers do you have today?”

“Just you and one other.”

“Which would be Major Turner, right?”

“Correct.”

“Is she nearby?”

“This is the only cell block we got.”

“She needs to know her lawyer is out of action. She needs to get another one. You need to go see her and make sure she does.”

“That’s a weird thing for you to say.”

“What happened to Moorcroft was nothing to do with me. You’ll know that soon enough. And the best way of getting the egg off your face is not to get it on in the first place.”

“Still a weird thing for you to say. Who died and made you president of the ACLU?”

“I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. So did you. Major Turner is entitled to competent representation at all times. That’s the theory. And a gap will look bad, when the appeals kick in. So tell her she needs to meet with someone new. As soon as possible. This afternoon would be good. Make sure she grasps that.”

“Anything else?”

“We’re all good now,” Reacher said. “Thank you, captain.”

“You’re welcome,” the tall guy said. He turned around and folded himself under the lintel again and stepped out to the corridor. The door slammed, and the lock turned, and the bolts shot home.

Reacher stayed where he was, in the chair.

Fifteen minutes later the door sounds came again. The bolts, the lock, the hinges. This time the duty captain stayed out in the corridor. Less strain on his neck. He said, “Message from Sergeant Leach, over at your HQ. The two guys in Afghanistan were found dead. On a goat trail in the Hindu Kush. Shot in the head. Nine millimeter, probably. Three days ago, possibly, by the looks of it.”

Reacher paused a beat, and then he said, “Thank you, captain.”

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

And the worst had happened.

Chapter 16

Reacher stayed in his chair, thinking hard, flipping an imaginary coin in his head. First time: heads or tails? Fifty-fifty, obviously. Because the coin was imaginary. A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset. No one could explain exactly why, but the phenomenon was easily observed in experiments. Something to do with multiple axes of spin, and wobble, and aerodynamics, and the general difference between theory and practice.

But Reacher’s coin was imaginary. So, second time: heads or tails? Exactly fifty-fifty again. And the third time, and the fourth time. Each flip was a separate event all its own, with identical odds, statistically independent of anything that came before. Always fifty-fifty, every single time. But that didn’t mean the chances of flipping four heads in a row were fifty-fifty. Far from it. The chances of flipping four heads in a row were about ninety-four to six against. Much worse than fifty-fifty. Simple math.

And Reacher needed four heads in a row. As in: Would Susan Turner get a new lawyer that afternoon? Answer: either yes or no. Fifty-fifty. Like heads or tails, like flipping a coin. Then: Would that new lawyer be a white male? Answer: either yes or no. Fifty-fifty. And then: Would first Major Sullivan or subsequently Captain Edmonds be in the building at the same time as Susan Turner’s new lawyer? Assuming she got one? Answer: either yes or no. Fifty-fifty. And finally: Would all three lawyers have come in through the same gate as each other? Answer: either yes or no. Fifty-fifty.

Four yes-or-no answers, each one of them a separate event all its own. Each one of them a perfect fifty-fifty chance in its own right. But four correct answers in a row were a six-in-a-hundred improbability.

Hope for the best. Which Reacher did. To some extent justifiably, he felt. Statistics were cold and indifferent. Which the real world wasn’t, necessarily. The army was an imperfect institution. Even in noncombatant roles like the JAG Corps, it wasn’t perfectly gender-neutral, for instance. Senior ranks favored men. And a senior rank would be seen as necessary for the defense of an MP major on a corruption charge. Therefore the gender of Susan Turner’s new lawyer wasn’t exactly a fifty-fifty proposition. Probably closer to seventy-thirty, in the desired direction. Moorcroft had been male, after all. And white. Black people were well represented in the military, but in no greater proportion than the population as a whole, which was about one in eight. About eighty-seven to thirteen, right there.

And Reacher could keep at least one of his own lawyers in the building practically indefinitely. All he had to do was keep them talking. One spurious point after another. Some big show of anxiety. He could keep them there forever, until they grew bored or impatient enough to abandon legal propriety and good manners. Therefore the chances of his lawyer and Turner’s being present in the building together were better than fifty-fifty, too. Seventy-thirty again, possibly. Maybe even better.

And regular visitors to Dyer might know the north gate was closer to the guardhouse, and therefore they could be relied upon to use it. Maybe. Which put the gate question better than fifty-fifty, too. If Turner’s new lawyer was a regular visitor. Which he might not be. Pointy-headed classroom stars didn’t necessarily get around much. Call it fifty-five to forty-five. A marginal advantage. Not overwhelming.

Nevertheless, overall, the plan’s chances were a little better than six in a hundred.

But not a whole lot better.

If Turner got a new lawyer in the first place, that was.

Hope for the best.

Reacher waited. Relaxed, patient, inert. He counted off the time in his head. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Three-thirty. Four o’clock. The chair was comfortable. The room was warm. And fairly soundproof. Very little noise was audible from the outside. Just a dull acoustic. Not that the place was remotely like a regular prison. It was a civilized place, for civilized people.

All of which, Reacher hoped, was going to help.

Finally at four-thirty in the afternoon the bolts slammed back, and the lock turned, and the door opened. The beanpole captain said, “Major Sullivan is here to see you.”

Showtime.

Chapter 17

The tall guy stood back and let Reacher walk in front of him. The corridor dog-legged left, and then right. Reacher pieced together the geography from what little he had seen. He figured the main office was around three more corners. Still some distance away. Before that would come the small square lobby, with the locked quarantine doors, and the clerk, and the rear door to the outside. Before that would come the interview rooms, on both sides of a short stretch of corridor all its own. The scuffed spaces for cops and suspects would be on the right, and on the left would be the slightly grander spaces he had seen on his way to the cells. There were two of them. His destination, he assumed. Higher quality, for conferences between lawyers and clients. They had windows in their doors, narrow vertical rectangles of wired glass, set off-center above the handles.

He walked straight past the first door, glancing in the window but pretending not to, seeing Sullivan in there, seated on the left side of a table, in her neat Class A uniform, hands folded on top of her closed briefcase, and he kept on walking, to the second door, where he stopped and glanced in the window quite openly.

The second room was empty.

No client, and no lawyer, male or otherwise.

Neither heads nor tails.

Not yet.

Behind him the tall guy said, “Hold up, major. You’re in this one back here.”

Reacher turned around and tracked back. The door wasn’t locked. The tall guy just turned the handle and opened it up. Reacher listened to the sounds it made. A solid metallic click from the handle, a cursive precision grind from the hinges, an air-locked swish from the silicone seals. Not loud, but distinctive. Reacher stepped inside. Sullivan looked up. The tall guy said, “Buzz when you’re done, counselor.”

Reacher sat down opposite Sullivan, and the tall guy closed the door and walked away. The door was not locked because there was no handle on the inside. Just a flat expanse, with something missing, unexpected, like a face without a nose. There was a doorbell button next to the jamb. Buzz when you’re done. The room itself was plain and pleasant. No windows, but it was cleaner and crisper than the cop room. The light bulb was brighter.

Sullivan kept her briefcase closed, and her hands clasped on top of it. She said, “I won’t represent you in the Moorcroft assault. In fact I really don’t want you as a client at all.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was checking what he could hear from the corridor. Which wasn’t much, but which was maybe enough.

Sullivan said, “Major?”

Reacher said, “I’m what they’re giving you, so get used to it.”

“Colonel Moorcroft is a friend of mine.”

“Your old teacher?”

“One of them.”

“Then you know what those guys are like. In their heads they’re never out of the classroom. Socratic, or whatever they call it. He was yanking my chain, for the sake of it. He was arguing, for the fun of it, because that’s what they do. You left, and then as soon as he finished his toast he said he was going to file the paperwork. He intended to all along. But straight answers aren’t his style.”

“I don’t believe you. No paperwork was filed this morning.”

“The last I saw of him he was walking out of the dining room. About two minutes after you.”

“So you’re denying this one, too?”

“Think about it, counselor. My aim was to get Major Turner out of her cell. How would attacking Moorcroft help me? It would set me back, at least a day, if not two or three.”

“Why do you care so much about Major Turner?”

“I liked her voice on the phone.”

“Maybe you were angry with Moorcroft.”

“Did I look angry?”

“A little.”

“You’re wrong, major. I didn’t look angry at all. Because I wasn’t angry. I was sitting there quite patiently. He wasn’t the first classroom guy I ever met. I went to school, after all.”

“I felt uncomfortable.”

“What did you tell Podolski?”

“Just that. There was a dispute, and I felt uncomfortable.”

“Did you tell him it was heated?”

“You confronted him. You argued.”

“What was I supposed to do? Stand up and salute? He’s not exactly the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”

“The evidence against you appears to be considerable. The clothes, in particular. That’s classic.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was listening again. He heard footsteps in the corridor. Two people. Both men. Low voices. Short, uncontroversial sentences. A succinct and everyday exchange of information. The footsteps moved on. There were no door sounds. No click, no grind, no swish.

Sullivan said, “Major?”

Reacher said, “Do you have a wallet in your briefcase?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’re not carrying a purse, and if you don’t mind me saying so, your uniform is tailored very close to your figure, and there are absolutely no bulges in your pockets.”

Sullivan kept her hands on her briefcase and said, “Yes, I have a wallet in here.”

“How much money is in it?”

“I don’t know. Thirty dollars, maybe.”

“How much was your last ATM withdrawal?”

“Two hundred.”

“Got a cell phone in there, too?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s as much evidence against you as me. Clearly you called an accomplice and offered him a hundred and seventy bucks to kick your old teacher’s ass. Maybe because your grades weren’t perfect, all those years ago. Maybe you were still angry about it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Sullivan didn’t answer.

Reacher asked, “How were your grades?”

Sullivan said, “Not perfect.”

Reacher listened again. Silence in the corridor.

Sullivan said, “Detective Podolski will order a landfill search. He’ll find your clothes. It won’t be difficult. Last in, first out. Will they stand up to DNA analysis?”

“Easily,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t me.”

Then: more footsteps in the corridor. Soft, quiet, two people. A procession, maybe. One person leading another. A halt, an explanation, a casual, low-toned, ten-beat sentence. Maybe: This one, colonel. The other one’s in use. And: door sounds. The crisp metallic click of the handle, the slick grind of the hinges, and the suck of the silicone seal.

The arrival of a lawyer. Turner’s, for sure. Because she was the only other customer in the place. While Reacher’s lawyer was still in the building. His first lawyer, yet. So far, so good.

Heads and heads.

Score two.

Reacher said, “Tell me about the Rodriguez affidavit.”

Sullivan said, “An affidavit is a sworn statement of fact.”

“I know that,” Reacher said. “Like I told your old pal Moorcroft, this stuff isn’t brain surgery. Affidavit is Latin for he has declared upon oath. But does it really speak from beyond the grave? In a practical sense? Real world?”

For the first time Sullivan took her hands off her briefcase. She rocked them from side to side. Equivocal. All kinds of academic gestures. Maybe, maybe not. She said, “In American jurisprudence it’s fairly unusual to rely on an unsupported affidavit, especially if the person who swore it out is unavailable for cross examination. But it can be allowed, if the interests of justice demand it. Or the interests of public relations, if you want to be cynical. And the prosecution will argue that Rodriguez’s affidavit is not exactly unsupported, anyhow. They have the daily summary from the 110th’s files, showing your visit with him, and they have the ER report from immediately afterward, showing the results of it. They’ll claim the three things together present a seamless and coherent narrative.”

“Can you argue against that?”

“Of course,” Sullivan said. “But our argument looks suddenly very weak, dynamically. What they’re going to say makes perfect sense, in an everyday way. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. We’ll need to take out the middle this and replace it with something that sounds very unlikely on its face. As in, you left, and someone else just happened to show up in the same place at the same time and beat the guy to a pulp.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was listening again.

Sullivan said, “Our problem is whether an attempted defense that fails will annoy the court to the point where you get a worse sentence than you would have gotten with the plea bargain. Which is a serious risk. My advice is to play safe and take the deal. Two years is better than five or ten.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He was still listening. At first, to nothing. Just silence. Then: more footsteps in the corridor. Two people. One following the other.

Sullivan said, “Major?”

Then: door sounds. The same door. The same crisp metallic click of the handle, the same slick grind of the hinges, the same suck of the silicone seal. Then a pause, and the same sounds all over again, in the reverse sequence, as the door closed. And then: one set of footsteps, walking away.

So now Turner was in the next-door room with her lawyer, and the corridor was empty.

Showtime.

Reacher said, “I have a serious problem with my cell, counselor. You really need to come see it.”

Chapter 18

Sullivan asked, “What kind of a problem do you have with your cell?” She said it a little wearily, but not impatiently. She wasn’t dismissing the matter out of hand. Defense lawyers dealt with all kinds of bullshit. Suspects were always looking for an edge or an angle. For the inevitable appeal. Any imagined slight or unfairness had to be investigated and evaluated. Reacher knew that. He knew how the game was played.

He said, “I don’t want to put something in your mind. I don’t want to preempt your honest opinion. I need you to see this for yourself.”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“OK,” she said, a little wearily.

She stood up. She stepped over to the door. She pressed the buzzer.

She left her briefcase on the table.

Reacher stood up and waited behind her.

One minute.

Two.

Then the narrow glass window in the door darkened, and the door opened up, and the duty captain said, “All done, counselor?”

Sullivan said, “No, he has a problem with his cell.”

The tall guy looked at Reacher, with a quizzical expression on his face, part resigned, part surprised, as if to say, Really? You? This old shit?

But he said, “OK, whatever. Let’s go take a look.”

Like he had to. He knew how the game was played.

Reacher led the way. Sullivan went next. The tall guy brought up the rear. They walked in single file, through the dog-legs, left and then right, to the cell door, which was unlocked and unbolted, because Reacher wasn’t in it. Reacher pulled it open and held it for the others. The tall guy smiled and took the door from him and gestured: after you. He was dumb, but not brain damaged.

Reacher went in first. Then came Sullivan. Then the tall guy. Reacher stopped and pointed.

“Over there,” he said. “In the crack.”

Sullivan said, “What crack?”

“In the floor, near the wall. Under the window.”

Sullivan stepped forward. The tall guy stopped short of the bed. Sullivan said, “I don’t see a crack.”

Reacher said, “There’s something in it. It’s wriggling.”

Sullivan froze. The tall guy leaned in. Human nature. Reacher leaned the other way, just a subtle drift, but the tall guy’s mass was moving one way, and Reacher’s the other. Reacher shoved the guy, below his shoulder, on his upper arm, hard, like a swimmer pushes off the end of the pool, and the guy went down over the bed like he was falling off a pair of stilts. Sullivan spun around and Reacher stepped to the door, and out to the corridor, and he closed the door and bolted it.

Then he ran back, awkward in his laceless boots, past the room with Sullivan’s briefcase in it, to the next room. He stood well back and looked in through the narrow rectangular window.

And saw Susan Turner for the very first time.

She was worth the wait, he thought.

Totally worth it.

She was sitting on the right-hand side of the table. She was wearing army combat uniform, with all the hook-and-loop tapes and tags pulled off, and tan combat boots, with no laces. She was an inch or two above average height. She was small-boned and slender, with dark hair pulled back, and tanned skin, and deep brown eyes. Her face was showing mostly fatigue, but there was spirit in it too, and intelligence, and a kind of detached, ironic mischief.

Spectacular, in Reacher’s considered opinion.

Totally worth the wait, he thought again.

Her lawyer was on the left side of the table, a full bird colonel in Class A uniform. Gray hair and a lined face. Middle-aged and medium-sized.

A man.

A white man.

Heads.

Score three.

Reacher moved on, all the way to the quarantine door between himself and the rear lobby. There was no inside handle. Just a buzzer button, like the conference rooms. He kicked off his boots, and then he hit the button, urgently, over and over again. Less than five seconds later the door opened. The lobby clerk stood there, the handle in his hand. His keys were on a squared-off metal screw ring, like a small piece of mountaineering equipment, secured in a belt loop.

Reacher said, breathless, “Your captain is having some kind of a seizure. Or a heart attack. He’s thrashing around. You need to check him out. Right now, soldier.”

Command presence. Much prized by the military. The guy hesitated less than a second and then stepped into the inner corridor. The door started to swing shut behind him. Reacher nudged his left boot into the gap, and then turned to follow. He ran bootless and quiet behind the guy and then overtook him and wrenched open the first cell door he came to. Unlocked and unbolted, because it was empty.

But not for long.

“In here,” he said.

The lobby guy shouldered in, fast and urgent, and Reacher grabbed his keys and tore them right off his pants, belt loop and all, and then he shoved him hard and sent him sprawling, and he closed the door and shot the bolts.

He breathed in, and he breathed out.

Now came the hard part.

Chapter 19

Reacher padded bootless back to the room where Sullivan’s briefcase still rested on the table. He pushed the door all the way open and darted in and grabbed the case and then he turned back fast and caught the door again before it slammed shut behind him. He knelt on the floor in the corridor and opened the case. He ignored all the files and all the legal paperwork and rooted around until he found a car key, which he put in his pants pocket. Then he found the wallet. He took out the army ID. Sullivan’s first name was Helen. He put the ID in his shirt pocket. He took out her money and put it in his other pants pocket. He found a pen and tore off a small triangle of paper from a Xeroxed form and he wrote Dear Helen, IOU $30, and he signed it Jack Reacher. He put the slip of paper in the money slot, and he closed the wallet, and he closed the briefcase.

Then he stood up, with the briefcase in his hand.

He breathed in, and breathed out.

Showtime.

He moved on, twelve feet, to the next room, and he glanced in through the narrow window. Susan Turner was talking, patiently, marshaling arguments, using her hands, separating one point from another. Her lawyer was listening, head cocked, writing notes on a yellow legal pad. His briefcase was open on the table, pushed to the side. It was emptier than Sullivan’s, but the guy’s pockets were fuller. His uniform was not well tailored. It was baggy and generous. The nameplate on the pocket flap said Temple.

Reacher moved on again, all the way to the quarantine door between him and the lobby. He replaced his left boot with Sullivan’s car key, so the door stayed unlatched, and he put his boots back on, slack and laceless. Then he headed back to Turner’s interview room, and he stopped outside the door.

He breathed in, and he breathed out.

Then he opened the door, fast and easy, and he stepped inside the room. He turned and bent and placed Sullivan’s briefcase against the jamb, to stop the door from closing again. He turned back, and saw both Turner and her lawyer looking up at him, nothing much in the lawyer’s face, but what looked like dawning recognition in Turner’s.

He said, “Colonel, I need to see your ID.”

The guy said, “Who are you?”

“Defense Intelligence Agency. Purely routine, sir.”

Command presence. Much prized by the military. The guy stalled a second, and then he fished in an inside pocket and came out with his ID. Reacher stepped over and took it from him and looked hard at it. John James Temple. He raised his eyebrows, as if surprised, and he looked again, and then he slipped the ID into his shirt pocket, right next to Sullivan’s.

He said, “I’m sorry, colonel, but I need a minute of your time.”

He stepped back to the door and held it open. After you. The guy looked uncertain for a moment, and then he got up from the table, slowly. Reacher glanced over his shoulder at Turner and said, “You wait here, miss. We’ll be right back.”

The lawyer paused a beat and then shuffled out ahead of him. Reacher said, “Sir, to your right, please,” and followed after him, also shuffling, literally, because of the loose boots. Which were the weak points. Lawyers weren’t necessarily the most physically observant of people, but they had brains and they were generally logical. And this phase of the plan was a low-speed proposition. No urgency. No rush, no panic. Practically slow-motion. This guy had time to think.

Which, evidently, he used.

About twenty feet short of the first vacant cell the guy stopped suddenly and turned around and looked down. Straight at Reacher’s boots. Instantly Reacher spun him face-front again and put him in the kind of arresting-a-senior-officer grip that any MP learns early in his career, about which there was nothing in the field manual, and which was not taught in any way except by hints and example. Reacher grabbed the guy’s right elbow from behind, in his left hand, and simultaneously squeezed it hard and pulled it downward and propelled it forward. As always the guy was left fighting the downward force so hard he forgot all about resisting the forward motion. He just stumbled onward, crabwise, twisted and bent, gasping a little, not really from pain, but from outraged dignity. Which Reacher was happy about. He didn’t want to hurt the guy. This was not his fault.

Reacher maneuvered the guy to an open and empty cell, which he guessed might have been Turner’s, from the look of it, and he pushed him inside, and he closed the door on him, and he bolted it.

Then he stood in the corridor, just a beat, and he breathed in, and he breathed out.

Good to go.

He shuffled back to the second conference room and stepped inside. Susan Turner was on her feet, between the table and the door. He held out his hand. He said, “I’m Jack Reacher.”

“I know you are,” she said. “I saw your photo. From your file. And I recognized your voice. From the phone.”

And he recognized hers. From the phone. Warm, slightly husky, a little breathy, a little intimate. Just as good as he remembered. Maybe even better, live and in person.

He said, “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

She shook his hand. Her touch was warm, not hard, not soft. She said, “I’m very pleased to meet you too. But what exactly are you doing?”

He said, “You know what I’m doing. And why. At least, I hope you do. Because if you don’t, you’re not worth doing it for.”

“I didn’t want you to get involved.”

“Hence the thing about not visiting?”

“I thought you might show up. Just possibly. If you did, I wanted you to turn tail and get the hell out, immediately. For your own sake.”

“Didn’t work.”

“What are our chances of getting out of here?”

“We’ve been lucky so far.” He fished in his shirt pocket and took out Sullivan’s ID. He checked the picture against Turner’s face. Same gender. Roughly the same hair color. But that was about all. He gave her the ID. She said, “Who is she?”

“My lawyer. One of my lawyers. I met her this morning.”

“Where is she now?”

“In a cell. Probably hammering on the door. We need to get going.”

“And you’re taking my lawyer’s ID?”

Reacher patted his pocket. “I’ve got it right here.”

“But you don’t look anything like him.”

“That’s why you’re going to drive.”

“Is it dark yet?”

“Heading that way.”

“So let’s go,” she said.

They stepped out to the corridor and walked to the quarantine door. It was still held open an inch by Sullivan’s car key. Reacher pulled the door, and Turner scooped up the key, and they stepped into the small square lobby, and the door sucked shut behind them. The exit door was locked, with a small neat mechanism, no doubt expensive and highly secure. Reacher took out the clerk’s keys, and started trying them, one after the other. There were eight in total. The first was no good. Neither was the second. Nor the third. Nor the fourth.

But the fifth key did the trick. The lock snicked open. Reacher turned the handle and pulled the door. Cold air came in, from the outside. The afternoon light was fading.

Turner said, “What car are we looking for?”

“Dark green sedan.”

“That helps,” she said. “On a military base.”

Warm, husky, breathy, intimate.

They stepped out together. Reacher closed the door behind them, and locked it. He figured that might buy an extra minute. Ahead of them to the left was a small parking lot, about thirty yards away, across an expanse of blank blacktop. Seventeen cars in it. Mostly POVs. Only two plain sedans, neither one of them green. Beyond the lot a road curved away west. On the right the same road turned a corner and ran out of sight.

“Best guess?” Turner said.

“If in doubt, turn left,” Reacher said. “That was always my operating principle.”

They turned left, and found another lot hidden beyond the corner of the building. It was small, nothing more than a bumped-out strip with diagonal bays. Six cars in it, all of them nose in. All of them identical dark green sedans.

Turner said, “That’s better.”

She lined herself up equidistant from the six rear bumpers and pressed the button on the key fob.

Nothing happened.

She tried again. Nothing. She said, “Maybe the battery is out.”

“In the car?” Reacher said.

“In the key,” she said.

“Then how did Sullivan get here?”

“She stuck the key in the door. Like we used to, back in the day. We’ll have to try them one by one.”

“We can’t do that. We’ll look like car thieves.”

“We are car thieves.”

“Maybe none of these is the right car,” Reacher said. “I didn’t see the plate. It was dark this morning.”

“We can’t wander about this base much longer.”

“Maybe we should have turned right.”

They tracked back, as brisk and unobtrusive as they could be in boots without laces, past the rear door to the guardhouse again, and onward around the corner. It felt good to walk. Freedom, and fresh air. Reacher had always figured the best part of getting out of jail was the first thirty yards. And he liked having Turner next to him. She was nervous as a cat, but she was holding it together. She looked confident. They were just two people walking, like con artists everywhere: act like you’re supposed to be there.

There was another bumped-out bay around the east corner, six diagonal slots, symmetrical with the one they had already seen to the west. There were three cars in it. Only one of them was a sedan. And it was dark green. Turner hit the key fob button.

Nothing happened.

She stepped up close and tried the key in the door.

It didn’t fit.

She said, “Where does a lawyer who’s visiting the guardhouse come in? The front entrance, right? Is there a parking lot out front?”

“Bound to be,” Reacher said. “But I wish there wasn’t. We’ll be very exposed out front.”

“We can’t just hang around here. We’re sitting ducks.”

They walked on, to the front corner of the building, and stopped short, in the shadows. Reacher sensed open space ahead, and maybe lights, and maybe traffic.

“On three,” Turner said. “One, two, three.”

They turned the corner. Act like you’re supposed to be there. They walked fast, like busy people going somewhere. There was a fire lane along the front face of the building, and then a curbed divider, with a long one-row lot beyond it, full of parked cars except for one empty slot. And to the left of the empty slot was a dark green sedan.

“That’s it,” Reacher said. “I kind of recognize it.”

Turner headed straight for it and hit the key fob button, and the car lit up inside and its turn signals flashed once, and its door locks clunked open. Ahead on the left, about a hundred yards away, a car was crawling toward them, at a cautious on-post kind of speed, with its headlights on against the gloom. Reacher and Turner split up, Reacher going right, Turner going left, down the flanks of the green car, Reacher to the passenger’s door, Turner to the driver’s door. They opened up and climbed in together, no fumbling, no hesitation. The approaching car was getting nearer. They closed their doors, slam, slam, like overworked staffers with minutes between vital appointments, and Turner put the key in the slot and started the engine.

The oncoming car turned in to the lot, and rolled toward them, from the left, its headlight beams lighting them up.

“Go,” Reacher said, “Go now.”

Turner didn’t. She got it in reverse gear and touched the gas, but the car went nowhere. It just reared up against the parking brake. Turner said, “Shit,” and fumbled the lever down, but by then it was too late. The oncoming car was right behind them. It stopped there, blocking them in, and then its driver turned the wheel hard and crawled forward again, aiming to park in the empty slot right next to them.

Its driver was Captain Tracy Edmonds. Reacher’s lawyer. Working with HRC. Candice Dayton. His second appointment of the afternoon.

Reacher slumped right down in his seat, and cradled his face in his hand, like a man with a headache.

Turner said, “What?”

“That’s my other lawyer. Captain Edmonds. I scheduled back to back meetings.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to be certain I was out of my cell when your lawyer showed up.”

“Don’t let her see you.”

“That’s the least of our problems. The shit will hit the fan about a minute after she goes inside, don’t you think?”

“You should have figured one lawyer would be enough.”

“Would you have?”

“Probably not.”

Alongside them Edmonds jacked back and forth a couple of times until she was all neat and straight in her allotted space. She flicked her lights off and Turner flicked hers on and backed straight out and cut the wheel hard. Edmonds opened her door and climbed out of her car. Reacher swapped hands on his face. Turner rattled the lever into a forward gear and straightened up and took off, slowly. Edmonds waited patiently for her to complete the maneuver. Turner waved a thank-you gesture and hit the gas.

“South gate,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? I figure all these guys will have come in from the north.”

“Agreed,” Turner said. She rolled on south, brisk but not suicidal, all the way through the complex, past buildings large and small, turning here and there, slowing here and there, waiting at stop signs, peering left and right, moving on again, until finally the last of the base fell away behind them, and then they were into the exit road, heading for the first guard shack barrier.

The first of three.

Chapter 20

The first barrier was easy. Act like you’re supposed to be there. Turner collected Reacher’s borrowed ID from him, and held it with hers, fanned in her hand like a pair of threes, and she slowed to a walk, and buzzed her window down, and popped the trunk as she eased to a stop, the whole performance a natural, flowing sequence, as if she did it every single day of her life.

And the sentry in the shack responded to the performance perfectly, like Reacher guessed she hoped he would. He spent less than a second glancing at the fanned IDs, and less than a second glancing into the open trunk, and less than a second slamming it shut for them.

Turner nudged the gas, and rolled forward.

And breathed out.

Reacher said, “Edmonds has to be inside by now.”

“Got any bright ideas?”

“Any sign of a problem, just hit the gas. Straight through the barrier. Busting up a piece of metal with stripes on it can’t get us in much more trouble.”

“We might run over a sentry.”

“He’ll jump out the way. Sentries are human, like anyone else.”

“We’ll dent an army car.”

“I already dented an army car. Last night. With two guys’ heads.”

“You seem to have a thing about denting army property with heads,” she said. Warm, husky, breathy, intimate. “Like the desk in my office.”

He nodded. He had told her the story on the phone. From South Dakota. An old investigation, and a little resulting frustration. A short story, made long. Just purely to keep her talking. Just to hear more of her voice.

She asked, “Who were the two guys from last night?”

“Complicated,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“I hope you’ll be able to,” she said.

They rolled toward the second checkpoint. Where blasting through turned out not to be an available option. It was just after five in the afternoon. Rush hour, military style. There was a modest queue of vehicles waiting to get out, and a modest queue waiting to get in. Already two cars were in line in the exit lane, and three in the entrance lane. There were two guys on duty in the shack. One was darting left and right, letting one vehicle in, then letting one vehicle out, back and forth in strict rotation.

The other guy was inside the shack.

On the phone. Listening intently.

Turner eased to a stop, third car in line, in a narrowing lane, with the guard shack ahead on her left, and an unbroken row of concrete dragons’ teeth on her right, each one of them a squat, truncated pyramid about three feet tall, each one of them no doubt built on a rebar armature and socketed deep below grade.

The second guy was still on the phone.

In the other lane the barrier went up and a car drove in. The first guy ducked across and checked ID, and checked a trunk, and hit a button, and the exit barrier went up, and a car drove out. Reacher said, “Maybe rush hour is our friend. It’s all kind of cursory.”

Turner said, “Depends what that phone call is.”

Reacher pictured Tracy Edmonds in his mind, walking in the main door of the guardhouse, and stepping into the front office, and finding the duty captain absent. Some clerk would nod and shuffle. How patient would Edmonds be? How patient would the clerk be? Rank would play its part. Edmonds was a captain, too. Same as the duty guy. An officer of equal rank. She would cut the guy some slack. She wouldn’t get instantly all up on her high horse, like a major or a colonel would. And certainly the clerk would be slow to intervene.

Inside the guard shack the second guy was still on the phone. Outside the guard shack the first guy was still darting side to side. A second car drove in, and a second car drove out. Turner rolled forward and stopped, now first in line to leave, but also completely boxed in, on the left and the right, with two cars behind her, and the striped metal barrier in front of her. She took a breath, and popped the trunk, and fanned the IDs, and buzzed her window down.

The second guy got off the phone. He put the instrument down and looked straight at the exit lane. He scanned it, front to back, and back to front, starting with Turner and finishing with Turner. He came out of the shack and stepped to her window.

He said, “Sorry for the delay.”

He glanced at the fanned IDs, and stepped back and glanced at the trunk, and closed it for them, and hit the button on the side of the shack, and the barrier went up, and Turner rolled forward.

And breathed out.

Reacher said, “One more. And good things come in threes.”

“You really believe that?”

“No, not really. The chances of three yes-or-no propositions working out right are about twelve in a hundred.”

Up ahead the third guard shack looked to be an exact repeat of the second. The same queue of the same three cars, a matching queue on the entrance side, two guys on duty, one of them outside ducking back and forth, and one of them inside on the phone.

Listening intently.

Turner said, “These phone calls have to be important, right? I mean, these guys have got better things to do right now. There’s a whole bunch of senior officers getting delayed here. And some of them must be Marines. They don’t like that kind of stuff.”

“And we do?”

“Not like the Marines don’t. We’re not always on standby to save the world.”

“My dad was a Marine.”

“Did he save the world?”

“He wasn’t a very senior officer.”

“I wish I knew who was on the phone.”

Reacher thought back to when he had been a captain. How long would he have waited for another captain to finish up his business? Not too long, probably. But maybe Edmonds was a nicer person. More patient. Or maybe she felt out of her depth, in a guardhouse environment. Although she was a lawyer. She must have seen plenty of guardhouses. Unless she was mostly a desk person. A paperwork lawyer. Which she might have been. She was assigned to HRC, after all. That had to mean something. How much of HRC’s work was done in the cells?

He said, “This is a big base. Those calls aren’t necessarily coming from the guardhouse.”

“What else would be so important?”

“Maybe they have to clear the way for a general. Or maybe they’re ordering pizza delivery. Or telling their girlfriends they’ll be home soon.”

“Let’s hope so,” Turner said. “One of the above. Or all of them.”

In the opposite lane the barrier went up and a car drove in. The guy on the outside ducked across to the exit lane and checked ID, and checked a trunk, and raised the barrier, and a car drove out. Turner rolled forward one place. The inside guy was still on the phone.

Still listening hard.

Turner said, “They don’t even need a phone call. I’m not wearing my tapes or my tags. They were taken away from me. I look exactly like an escaping prisoner.”

“Or a Special Forces hardass. Undercover and anonymous. Look on the bright side. Just don’t let them see your boots.”

Another car drove in, and another car drove out. Turner rolled forward to the head of the line. She popped the trunk, and fanned the IDs, and buzzed her window down. The inside guy was still on the phone. The outside guy was occupied in the other lane. Up ahead beyond the last barrier the dragons’ teeth stopped and the exit road widened out and became just a regular Virginia street.

There was an Arlington County police cruiser parked on it.

Turner said, “Still want me to bust out?”

“Only if we have to,” Reacher said.

The outside guy finished up checking and raised the entrance barrier. The inside guy finished up listening and put the phone down. He came out and bent down and looked at the IDs in Turner’s hand. Not just a glance. His eyes flicked from the photos to the faces. Reacher looked away and stared ahead through the windshield. He stayed low in his seat and tried to look middle-aged and medium-sized. The guy at the window stepped back to the trunk. More than a glance. And then he put his palm on the lid and eased it back down and gently latched it shut.

Then he stepped away to the side of the shack.

And hit the exit button.

The barrier raised up high, and Turner nudged the gas, and the car rolled forward, under the barrier, and past the last of the dragons’ teeth, and out into the neat suburban street, all wide and prosperous and tree-lined, and then onward, past the parked Arlington cruiser, and away.

Reacher thought: Captain Tracy Edmonds must be one hell of a patient woman.

Chapter 21

Susan Turner seemed to know the local roads. She made a left and a right and skirted the northern edge of the cemetery, and then she turned again and drove partway down its eastern flank. She said, “I assume we’re heading for Union Station. To dump the car and make them think we took a train.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said.

“How do you want to get there?”

“What’s the dumbest route?”

“At this time of day?” she said. “Surface streets, I guess. Constitution Avenue, for sure. We’d be slow and visible, all the way.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. They’ll expect something different.”

So Turner got in position and lined up to cross the river. Traffic was bad. It was rush hour in the civilian world, too. Nose to tail, like a moving parking lot. She drummed her fingers on the wheel, and watched her mirror, looking to jink from lane to lane, trying to find a tiny advantage.

“Relax,” Reacher said. “Rush hour is definitely our friend now. There’s no chance of pursuit.”

“Unless they use a helicopter.”

“Which they won’t. Not here. They’d be too worried about crashing and killing a congressman. Which would do their budget no good at all.”

They crept onto the bridge, slowly, and they moved out over the water, and they left Arlington County behind. Turner said, “Talking of budgets, I have no money. They took all my stuff and put it in a plastic bag.”

“Me too. But I borrowed thirty bucks from my lawyer.”

“Why would she lend you money?”

“She doesn’t know she did. Not yet. But she’ll find out soon enough. I left her an IOU.”

“We’re going to need more than thirty bucks. I need street clothes, for a start.”

“And I need boot laces,” Reacher said. “We’ll have to find an ATM.”

“We don’t have cards.”

“There’s more than one kind of ATM.”

They came off the bridge, slowly, stopping and starting, into the District of Columbia itself. Metro PD territory. And immediately Reacher saw two Metro cruisers up ahead. They were parked nose to nose on the curb behind the Lincoln Memorial. Their motors were running, and they had about a dozen radio antennas between them. Each car held one cop, all warm and comfortable. A standard security measure, Reacher hoped. Turner changed lanes and rolled past them on the blind side of a stalled line of nose-to-tail traffic. They didn’t react at all.

They drove onward, through the gathering dark, slow and halting, anonymous among a glacial pack of fifty thousand vehicles crowding the same few miles of streets. They went north on 23rd, the same block Reacher had walked the day before, and then they made the right onto Constitution Avenue, which ran on ahead of them, seemingly forever, straight and long, an unending river of red tail lights.

Turner said, “Tell me about the two guys from last night.”

Reacher said, “I came in on the bus and went straight to Rock Creek. I was going to ask you out to dinner. But you weren’t there, obviously. And the guy who was sitting in for you told me about some bullshit assault charge lodged against my file. Some gangbanger we had looked at all of sixteen years ago. I wasn’t impressed, so he pulled some Title 10 thing and recalled me to service.”

“What, you’re back in the army?”

“As of yesterday evening.”

“Outstanding.”

“Doesn’t feel that way. Not so far.”

“Who is sitting in for me?”

“A light colonel named Morgan. A management guy, by the look of him. He quartered me in a motel north and west of the building, and about five minutes after I checked in, two guys showed up in a car. NCOs for sure, late twenties, full of piss and wind about how I had brought the unit into disrepute, and how I should get out of town, to spare them the embarrassment of a court martial, and how they were going to kick my ass if I didn’t. So I banged their heads against the side of their car.”

“Who the hell were they? Did you get names? I don’t want people like that in my unit.”

“They weren’t from the 110th. That was totally clear. Their car was warm inside. It had been driven a lot farther than a mile from Rock Creek. Plus their combat skills were severely substandard. They weren’t your people. I know that for sure, because I did a kind of unofficial headcount back at the building. I wandered all over, and checked all the rooms. Those guys weren’t there.”

“So who were they?”

“They were two small parts of a big jigsaw puzzle.”

“What’s the picture on the box?”

“I don’t know, but I saw them again today. Only from a distance. They were at the motel, with reinforcements. Two other guys, for a total of four. I guess they were checking if I was gone yet, or else aiming to speed up my decision.”

“If they weren’t from the 110th, why would they want you gone?”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “They didn’t even know me yet. Usually people don’t want me gone until later.”

They crept onward, past the Vietnam Wall. There was another Metro car there. Engine running, bristling with antennas. Reacher said, “We should assume the shit has hit the fan by now, right?”

“Unless your Captain Edmonds fell asleep waiting,” Turner said.

They crawled past the parked cruiser, close enough for Reacher to see the cop inside. He was a tall black man, thin, like a blade. He could have been the duty captain’s brother, from Dyer. Which would have been unfortunate.

Turner asked, “What was the assault charge from sixteen years ago?”

Reacher said, “Some LA gangbanger selling black market ordnance, from the Desert Storm drawdown. A big fat idiot who called himself Dog. I remember talking to him. Hard to forget, actually. He was about the size of a house. He just died, apparently. Leaving behind an affidavit with my name all over it. But I didn’t hit him. Not a glove. Hard to see how I could, really. I would have been elbow-deep in lard before I connected with anything solid.”

“So what’s the story?”

“My guess is some disgruntled customer showed up with a bunch of pals and a rack of baseball bats. And some time later the fat guy started to think about how he could get compensated. You know, something for nothing, in our litigious society. So he went to some ambulance chaser, who saw no point in going after the guys with the bats. But maybe the fat guy mentioned the visit from the army, and the lawyer figured Uncle Sam had plenty of money, so they cooked up a bullshit claim. Of which there must be hundreds of thousands, over the years. Our files must be stiff with them. And quite rightly they’re all looked at and laughed at and put away in a drawer and ignored forever. Except this one was hauled out again into the light of day.”

“Because?”

“It’s another piece of the jigsaw. Morgan told me my file had a flag on it. He said it malfunctioned when you pulled it, but triggered when you sent it back. I don’t believe that. Our bureaucrats are better than that. I don’t think there was a flag at all. I think there was a whole lot of last-minute scrambling going on. Someone got in a big panic.”

“About you?”

Reacher shook his head. “No, about you, initially. You and Afghanistan.”

Then he stopped talking, because the car filled with blue and red light. Through the mirrors. A cop car, behind them, forcing its way through. Its siren was going, cycling through all the digital variants it had, fast and urgent. The whooping, the manic cackling, the plaintive two-tone horn. Reacher turned in his seat. The cruiser was about twenty cars back. Ahead of it traffic was diving for the curb, scattering, trying to squeeze an extra lane out of the jammed roadway.

Turner glanced back, too. She said, “Relax. That’s a Metro car. The army will hunt us itself. We don’t use Metro for anything. The FBI, maybe, but not those clowns.”

“Metro wants me for Moorcroft,” Reacher said. “Your lawyer. A detective called Podolski thinks I did it.”

“Why would he?”

“I was the last guy who talked to him, and I trashed my old clothes afterward, and I was alone and unaccounted for at the relevant time.”

“Why did you trash your clothes?”

“Cheaper than laundry, overall.”

“What did you talk to Moorcroft about?”

“I wanted him to get you out of jail.”

Now the cop was about ten cars back, shouldering through the jam, pretty fast.

Reacher said, “Take your jacket off.”

Turner said, “Normally I want a cocktail and a movie before I remove my clothing.”

“I don’t want him to see your uniform. If he’s looking for me, he’s looking for you, too.”

“He’s got our plate number, surely.”

“He might not see the plate. We’re nose to tail here.”

The cars in front were heading for the gutter. Turner followed after them, steering left-handed, using her right hand on her jacket, tearing open the placket, hauling down the zipper. She leaned forward and shrugged out of the left shoulder, and then the right. She got her left arm out, and she got her right arm out. Reacher hauled the jacket from behind her and tossed it in the rear foot well. She had been wearing a T-shirt under the jacket, olive green, short sleeved. Probably an extra small, Reacher thought, which fit her very well, except it was a little short. It barely met the waistband of her pants. Reacher saw an inch of skin, smooth and firm and tan.

He looked back again. Now the cop was two places behind, still coming, still flashing red and blue, still whooping and cackling and whining.

He said, “Would you have come out to dinner with me, if you’d been in the office yesterday? Or tonight, if Moorcroft had gotten you out?”

She said, with her eyes on the mirror, “You need to know that now?”

They were yards short of 17th Street. Up ahead on the right the Washington Monument was lit up in the gloom.

The cop car came right alongside.

And stayed there.

Chapter 22

It stayed there because the car one place ahead hadn’t moved all the way over, and because in the next lane there was a wide pick-up truck with exaggerated bulges over twin rear wheels. The cop had no room to get through. He was a white man with a fat neck. Reacher saw him glance across at Turner, fleeting and completely incurious, and then away again, and then down at his dashboard controls, where evidently his siren switches were located, because right then the note changed to a continuous cackling blast, manic and never ending, and unbelievably loud.

But evidently there was something else down between the seats, and evidently it was a lot more interesting than siren switches. Because the guy’s head stayed down. He was staring at something, hard. A laptop screen, Reacher thought. Or some other kind of a modern communications device. He had seen such things before. He had been in civilian cop cars, from time to time. Some of them had slim gray panels, on swan-neck stems, full of instant real-time notes and bulletins and warnings.

He said, “We got trouble.”

Turner said, “What kind?”

“I think this guy is on his way to Union Station, too. Or the bus depot. To look for us. I think he’s got notes and pictures. Pictures would be easy to get, right? From the army? I think he’s got them right in front of him, right now. See how he’s making a big point of not looking at us?”

Turner glanced to her left. The cop was still staring down. His right arm was moving. Maybe he was fumbling for his microphone. Up ahead the traffic moved a little. The car in front got out of the way. The pick-up with the wide arches slid over six inches. The cop had room to get through.

But he didn’t look up. And his car didn’t move.

The siren blasted on. The guy started talking. No way to make out what he was saying. Then he shut up and listened. He was being asked a question. Possibly some stilted radio protocol that meant: Are you sure? Because right then the guy turned face-on and ducked his head a little for a good view out his passenger window. He stared at Turner for a second, and then he flicked onward to Reacher.

His lips moved.

A single syllable, brief, inaudible, but definitely a voiced palatal glide morphing into a voiceless alveolar fricative. Therefore almost certainly: Yes.

Then he unclipped his seat belt and his right hand moved toward his hip.

Reacher said, “Abandon ship.”

He opened his door hard and part rolled and part fell out to the curb. Turner scrambled after him, away from the cop, over the console, over his seat. The car rolled forward and nestled gently against the car in front, like a kiss. Turner came out, all arms and legs, awkward in her loose boots. Reacher hauled her upright by the hand and they hustled together across the width of the sidewalk and onto the Mall. Bare trees and evening gloom closed around them. Behind them there was nothing to hear except the cackling blast of the siren. They looped around toward the near end of the Reflecting Pool. Turner was in her T-shirt, nothing more, and the air was cold. Reacher took off his jacket and handed it to her.

He said, “Put this on. Then we’ll split up. Safer that way. Meet me in fifteen minutes at the Vietnam Wall. If I don’t arrive, keep on running.”

She said, “Likewise if I don’t,” and then she went one way and he went the other.

Reacher was distinctive in any context, because of his height, so the first thing he looked for was a bench. He forced himself to walk slow and easy, with his hands in his pockets, without a care in the world, because a running man attracted the eye a hundred times faster than a walking man. Another old evolutionary legacy. Predator and prey, motion and stillness. And he didn’t look back, either. He made no furtive glances. He kept his gaze straight and level, and he walked toward what he saw. Full dark was coming down fast, but the Mall was still busy. Not like summertime, but there were plenty of winter tourists finishing up their days, and up ahead the Wall had its usual crowd of people, some of them there to mourn, some of them to pay more general respects, and some of them the gaggle of weird folks the place always seemed to attract. He couldn’t see Turner anywhere. The siren had stopped, replaced by honking horns. Presumably the cop was out of his car by that point, and presumably his and Sullivan’s stationary vehicles were jamming up the traffic flow.

Reacher saw a bench in the gloom twenty yards away, unoccupied, positioned parallel with the still waters of the Pool, and he strolled on toward it, slow and relaxed, and then he paused as if deciding, and he sat down, and leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees. He looked down, like a contemplative man with things on his mind. A long and careful stare would betray him, but at first glance nothing about his pose would say tall man, and nothing would say fugitive, either. The only notable tell was his lack of a jacket. It wasn’t exactly shirtsleeve weather.

Thirty yards behind him the horns were still sounding.

He waited, head down, still and quiet.

And then forty yards away in the corner of his eye he saw the cop with the fat neck, hustling along on foot, with a flashlight in his hand, but no gun. The guy was twitching left and right, nervous and searching hard, presumably in his boss’ bad books for getting close and getting beat. Reacher heard two new sirens, both of them far away in the distance, one in the south, maybe all the way down on C Street, and one in the north, on 15th possibly, or 14th, maybe level with the White House or the Aquarium.

Reacher waited.

The cop with the fat neck was heading for the Wall, halfway there, but then he stopped and turned a full circle. Reacher felt his gaze pass right over him. A guy sitting still and staring at the water was of no interest at all, when there were plenty of better prospects all around, like a crowd of thirty or forty heading for the base of the Monument, either a tour group or a crowd of strangers all coincidentally drifting in the same direction at the same time, or a mixture of the two. Moving targets. Evolution. The cop set off after them. Not a bad percentage play, Reacher thought. Anyone would expect motion. Sitting still was tough.

The distant sirens came closer, but not very close. Some kind of a center of gravity seemed to pull them east. Which again was a decent percentage play. The Metro PD knew its own turf, presumably. To the east were the museums and the galleries, and therefore the crowds, and then came the Capitol, and beyond that came the best getaways north and south, by road and rail.

Reacher waited, not moving at all, not looking around, just staring ahead at the water. Then when the stopwatch in his head hit ten minutes exactly, he eased himself to his feet and ran through as many un-fugitive-like motions as he could think of. He yawned, and he put his palms hard on the small of his back, and he stretched, and he yawned again. Then he set off west, just strolling, like he had all the time in the world, with the Pool on his left, in a long leisurely curve through the bare trees that brought him to the Wall four minutes later. He stood on the edge of the crowd, just one pilgrim among many, and he looked for Susan Turner.

He couldn’t see her anywhere.

Chapter 23

Reacher walked above the Wall, following the rise and the fall and the shallow angle, from 1959 to 1975, and then back again at the lower level, from 1975 to 1959, past more than fifty-eight thousand names twice over, without once seeing Susan Turner anywhere. If I don’t arrive, keep on running, he had said, and she had replied, Likewise if I don’t. And they were well past their agreed fifteen minutes. But Reacher stayed. He made one more pass, from the lonely early deaths on their low eight-inch panels, past the peak casualties more than ten feet high in 1968 and 1969, and onward to the lonely late deaths, on low eight-inch panels again, looking at every person he saw either straight on or reflected in the black stone, but none of them was Turner. He came out at the end of the war and ahead of him on the sidewalk was the usual huddle of souvenir sellers and memorabilia merchants, some of them veterans and some of them pretending to be, all of them hawking old unit patches and branch insignia and engraved Zippo lighters, and a thousand other things of no value at all, except in the sentimental sense. As always tourists came and chose and paid and went, and as always a static cadre of picturesque and disaffected types hung around, more or less permanently.

Reacher smiled.

Because one of the disaffected types was a thin girl with a curtain of dark hair hanging loose, wearing an oversized coat wrapped twice around her, knee length, with camo pants below, and the tongues hanging out of her boots. Her coat sleeves were rolled to her wrists, and her hands were in her pockets. She was standing huddled, head down, in a daze, rocking just perceptibly from foot to foot, out of it, like a stoner.

Susan Turner, acting the part, fitting in, hiding in plain sight.

Reacher walked up to her and said, “You’re really good.”

“I needed to be,” she said. “A cop walked right by. As close as you are. It was the guy we saw before, in the cruiser that was parked back there.”

“Where is he now?”

“He went east. Like a rolling cordon. It passed me by. You, too, I guess.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“He went down the other side of the Pool. You never raised your head.”

“You were watching me?”

“I was. And you’re pretty good, too.”

“Why were you watching me?”

“In case you needed help.”

Reacher said, “If they’re combing east, we better go west.”

“Walking?”

“No, by taxi,” Reacher said. “Taxis in this town are as invisible as it gets.”

Every significant tourist site along the Mall had a rank of two or three cabs waiting. The Wall was no exception. Behind the last souvenir booth were battered cars with dirty paint and taxi lights on their roofs. Reacher and Turner got in the first in line.

“Arlington Cemetery,” Reacher said. “Main gate.”

He read the printed notice on the door. The fare was going to be three bucks for the flag drop, plus two dollars and sixteen cents per mile thereafter. Plus tip. They were going to be down about seven bucks, total. Which was going to leave them about twenty-three. Which was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but which was a long way short of what they were going to need.

They sat low in sagging seats and the cab crashed and bounced like its wheels were square. But it made the trip OK. Around the back of the Lincoln Memorial, and out over the water on the Memorial Bridge, and back into Arlington County. To the bus stop at the cemetery gate. Right where Reacher had started out, almost exactly twenty-four hours previously.

Which was a weird kind of progress.

The bus stop at the cemetery gate had a small crowd waiting, all small dark Hispanic men, all laborers, all tired, and patient, and resigned. Reacher and Turner took their places among them. Turner blended in fairly well. Reacher didn’t. He was more than a head taller and twice as wide as anyone else. And much paler. He looked like a lighthouse on a dark rocky shore. Therefore the wait was tense. And long. But no cop cars rolled past, and eventually the bus came. Reacher paid the fares, and Turner sat at a window, and Reacher sat next to her on the aisle and hunched down as low as he could go. The bus moved off, slow and ponderous, on the same route Reacher had taken the day before, past the stop where he had gotten off at the bottom of the three-lane hill, and onward up the steep incline toward the 110th HQ.

Turner said, “They’ll call the FBI, because they’ll assume we’re going interstate. The only question is who calls first. My money is on the Metro PD. The army will wait until morning, most likely.”

“We’ll be OK,” Reacher said. “The FBI won’t use roadblocks. Not here on the East Coast. In fact they probably won’t get off their asses at all. They’ll just put our IDs and our bank cards on their watch lists, which doesn’t matter anyway, because we don’t have IDs or bank cards.”

“They might tell local PDs to watch their bus depots.”

“We’ll keep an eye out.”

“I still need clothes,” Turner said. “Pants and a jacket at least.”

“We’ve got nineteen dollars. You can have one or the other.”

“Pants, then. And I’ll trade you your jacket back for your shirt.”

“My shirt will look like a circus tent on you.”

“I’ve seen women wear men’s shirts. Like wraps, all chic and baggy.”

“You’ll be cold.”

“I was born in Montana. I’m never cold.”

The bus labored up the hill past the 110th HQ. The old stone building. The gates were open. The sentry was in his hutch. The day guy. Morgan’s car was still in the lot. The painted door was closed. Lights were on in all the windows. Turner swiveled all the way around in her seat, to keep the place in sight as long as she could. Until the last possible moment. Then she let it go and faced front again and said, “I hope I get back there.”

Reacher said, “You will.”

“I worked so hard to get there in the first place. It’s a great command. But you know that already.”

“Everyone else hates us.”

“Only if we do our job properly.”

The bus made the turn at the top of the hill, onto the next three-lane, that led to Reacher’s motel. There was rain in the air. Just a little, but enough that the bus driver had his wipers going.

Turner said, “Tell me again how this is all my fault. Me and Afghanistan.”

The road leveled out and the bus picked up speed. It rattled straight past Reacher’s motel. The lot was empty. No car with dented doors.

He said, “It’s the only logical explanation. You put a fox in someone’s henhouse, and that someone wanted to shut you down. Which was easy enough to do. Because as it happened no one else in the unit knew what it was about. Your duty captain didn’t. Neither did Sergeant Leach. Or anyone else. So you were the only one. They set you up with the Cayman Islands bank account scam, and they busted you, which cut your lines of communication. Which stayed cut, when they beat on your lawyer Moorcroft, as soon as he showed the first sign of trying to get you out of jail. Problem solved, right there. You were isolated. You couldn’t talk to anyone. So everything was hunky dory. Except the records showed you had spent hours on the phone to South Dakota with some guy. And scuttlebutt around the building said the guy had been a previous 110th CO. Your duty captain knew that for sure, because I told him, first time I called. Maybe lots of people knew. Certainly I got a lot of name recognition when I showed up yesterday. And you and I could be assumed to share some common interests. We might have talked about the front burner. Either just shooting the shit, or maybe you were even asking me for a perspective.”

“But I didn’t mention Afghanistan to you at all.”

“But they didn’t know that. The phone log shows duration, not content. They didn’t have a recording. So I was a theoretical loose end. Maybe I knew what you knew. Not much of a problem, because I wasn’t likely to show up. They seem to have checked me out. They claim to know how I live. But just in case, they made some plans. They had the Big Dog thing standing by, for instance.”

“I don’t see how that would help them any. You’d have been in the system, with plenty of time to talk.”

“I was supposed to run,” Reacher said. “I was supposed to disappear and never come near the army again, the whole rest of my life. That was the plan. That was the whole point. They even showed up at the motel to make sure I understood. And the Big Dog thing was a great choice for that. The guy is dead, and there’s an affidavit. There’s no real way to fight it. Running would have been entirely rational. Sergeant Leach thought if she could find a way of warning me, I’d head for the hills.”

“Why didn’t you run?”

“I wanted to ask you out to dinner.”

“No, really?”

“Not my style. I figured it out when I was about five years old. A person either runs or he fights. It’s a binary choice, and I’m a fighter. Plus, they had something else in their back pocket.”

“Which was?”

“Something else designed to make me run, which didn’t, either.”

“Which was?”

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

I’ll get to it.

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said. “It’s a complicated story.”

The bus ground onward, all low gears and loud diesel, past the strip mall Reacher knew, with the hardware store, and the pharmacy, and the picture framing shop, and the gun store, and the dentist, and the Greek restaurant. Then it moved out into territory he hadn’t seen before. Onward, and away.

He said, “Look on the bright side. Your problem ain’t exactly brain surgery. Whatever rabbit you were chasing in Afghanistan is behind all this shit. So we need to work backward from him. We need to find out who his friends are, and we need to find out who did what, and when, and how, and why, and then we need to bring the hammer down.”

Turner said, “There’s a problem with that.”

Reacher nodded.

“I know,” he said. “It won’t be easy. Not from the outside. It’s like we’ve got one hand tied behind our back. But we’ll give it our best shot.”

“Unfortunately that’s not the problem I’m talking about.”

“So what is?”

“Someone thinks I know something I don’t. That’s the problem.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know who the rabbit is,” Turner said. “Or what the hell he’s doing, or where, or why. Or how. In fact I don’t know what’s happening in Afghanistan at all.”

“But you sent two guys there.”

“Much earlier. For a completely different reason. In Kandahar. Pure routine. Entirely unconnected. But along the way they picked up on a whisper from a Pashtun informer, that an American officer had been seen heading north to meet with a tribal leader. The identity of the American was not known, and his purpose was not known, but the feeling was it can’t have been anything good. We’re drawing down. We’re supposed to be heading south, not north, toward Bagram and Kabul, prior to getting the hell out. We’re not supposed to be way up in-country, having secret meetings with towelheads. So I sent my guys to chase the rumor. That was all.”

“When?”

“The day before I was busted. So I won’t even have a name until they report back to me. Which they won’t be able to, not until I’m back on the inside.”

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, “What?”

“It’s worse than that.”

“How can it be?”

“They won’t be able to report back ever,” Reacher said. “Because they’re dead.”

Chapter 24

Reacher told Turner about the missed radio checks, and the agitation in the old stone building, and the semi-authorized air search out of Bagram, and the two dead bodies on the goat trail. Turner went still and quiet. She said, “They were good men. Natty Weeks and Duncan Edwards. Weeks was an old hand and Edwards was a good prospect. I shouldn’t have let them go. The Hindu Kush is too dangerous for two men on their own.”

“It wasn’t tribesmen who got them,” Reacher said. “They were shot in the head with nine-millimeter rounds. U.S. Army sidearms, most likely. Beretta M9s, almost certainly. The tribesmen would have cut their heads off. Or used AK47s. Different kind of hole altogether.”

“So they must have gotten close to the wrong American.”

“Without even knowing it,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? A handgun to the head is an up-close-and-personal kind of a thing. Which they wouldn’t have allowed, surely, if they had the slightest suspicion.”

“Very neat,” Turner said. “They shut me down, at both ends. Here, and there. Before I got anything at all. As in, right now I have nothing. Not a thing. So I’m totally screwed. I’m going down, Reacher. I don’t see a way out of this now.”

Reacher said nothing.

*  *  *

They got off the bus in Berryville, Virginia, which was one town short of its ultimate destination. Better that way, they thought. A driver might remember a pair of atypical passengers who stayed on board until the very end of the line. Especially if it came to radio or TV appeals, or routine police interviews, or public enemy photographs in the post office.

The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and cold. Berryville’s downtown area was pleasant enough, but they backtracked on foot, back the way the bus had come, across a railroad track, past a pizza restaurant, to a hardware store they had seen from the window. The store was about to close, which was not ideal, because clerks tend to remember the first and last customers of the day. But they judged yet more time in ACU pants was worse. So they went in and Turner found a pair of canvas work pants similar to Reacher’s. The smallest size the store carried was going to be loose in the waist and long in the leg. Not perfect. But Turner figured the discrepancy was going to be a good thing. A feature, not a bug, was how she put it. Because the pant legs would pool down over her army boots, thereby hiding them to some extent, and making them less obvious.

They bought the pants and three pairs of boot laces, one for Reacher’s boots, and one for Turner’s, and one for her to double up and use as a belt. They conducted their business in as unmemorable a manner as they could. Neither polite nor impolite, neither rushing nor stalling, not really saying much of anything. Turner didn’t use the rest-room. She wanted to change, but they figured for the last customer of the day to go in wearing ACU pants and come out in a new purchase would likely stick in the clerk’s memory.

But the store had a big parking lot on one side, and it was empty and dark, so Turner changed her pants in the shadows and dumped her army issue in a trash container at the rear of the building. Then she came out, and they traded jacket for shirt, and they sat down on a curb together and tied their boots.

Good to go, with four dollars left in Reacher’s pocket.

*  *  *

Four bucks was a week’s wage in some countries of the world, but it wasn’t worth much of a damn in Berryville, Virginia. It wouldn’t buy transportation out of the state, and it wouldn’t buy a night in a motel, and it wouldn’t buy a proper sit-down meal for two, not in any kind of restaurant or diner known to man.

Turner said, “You told me there’s more than one kind of ATM.”

“There is,” Reacher said. “Fifty miles ahead, or fifty miles back. But not here.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me, too.”

“There’s no point in holding on to four dollars.”

“I agree,” Reacher said. “Let’s go crazy.”

They walked back toward the railroad track, fast and newly confident in their newly laced boots, to the pizza restaurant they had seen. Not a gourmet place, which was just as well. They bought a single slice each, to go, pepperoni for Reacher, plain cheese for Turner, and a can of soda to share between them. Which left them eighty cents in change. They ate and drank sitting side by side on a rail at the train crossing.

Turner asked, “Did you lose guys when you were CO?”

“Four,” Reacher said. “One of them was a woman.”

“Did you feel bad?”

“I wasn’t turning cartwheels. But it’s all part of the game. We all know what we’re signing up for.”

“I wish I’d gone myself.”

Reacher asked, “Have you ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

“No.”

“Ever had a foreign bank account?”

“Are you kidding? Why would I? I’m an O4. I make less than some high school teachers.”

“Why did you take a day to pass on the name of the Hood guy’s contact?”

“What is this, the third degree?”

“I’m thinking,” Reacher said. “That’s all.”

“You know why. I wanted to bust him myself. To make sure it was done properly. I gave myself twenty-four hours. But I couldn’t find him. So I told the FBI. They should think themselves lucky. I could have given myself a week.”

“I might have,” Reacher said. “Or a month.”

They finished their pizza slices, and drained the shared can of soda. Reacher wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then wiped the back of his hand on his pants. Turner said, “What are we going to do now?”

“We’re going to walk through town and hitch a ride west.”

“Tonight?”

“Better than sleeping under a bush.”

“How far west?”

“All the way west,” Reacher said. “We’re going to Los Angeles.”

“Why?”

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

“I’ll tell you later,” Reacher said. “It’s complicated.”

They walked through the downtown area, on a street called East Main, which became a street called West Main after a central crossroads. All the store windows were dark. All the doors were shuttered. Berryville was no doubt a fine American town, matter-of-fact and unpretentious, but it was no kind of hub. That was for damn sure. It was all closed up and slumbering, even though it was only the middle of the evening.

They walked on. Turner looked good in the shirt, even though she could have gotten herself and her sister in it together. But she had rolled the sleeves, and she had shrugged and wriggled like women do, and it had draped and fallen into some kind of a coherent shape. Somehow its hugeness emphasized how slender she was. Her hair was still down. She moved with lithe, elastic energy, a wary, quizzical look never leaving her eyes, but there was no fear there. No tension. Just some kind of an appetite. For what, Reacher wasn’t entirely sure.

Totally worth the wait, he thought.

They walked on.

And then on the west edge of town they came to a motel.

And in its lot was the car with the dented doors.

Chapter 25

The motel was a neat and tidy place, entirely in keeping with what they had seen in the rest of the town. It had some red brick, and some white paint, and a flag, and an eagle above the office door. There was a Coke machine, and an ice machine, and probably twenty rooms in two lines, both of them running back from the road and facing each other across a broad courtyard.

The car with the dented doors was parked at an angle in front of the office, carelessly and temporarily, as if someone had ducked inside with a brief inquiry.

“Are you sure?” Turner asked, quietly.

“No question,” Reacher said. “That’s their car.”

“How is that even possible?”

“Whoever is running these guys is deep in the loop, and he’s pretty smart. That’s how it’s possible. There’s no other explanation. He heard we broke out, and he heard we took thirty bucks with us, and he heard about that Metro cop finding us on Constitution Avenue. And then he sat down to think. Where can you go with thirty bucks? There are only four possibilities. Either you hole up in town and sleep in a park, or you head for Union Station, or the big bus depot right behind it, and you go to Baltimore or Philly or Richmond, or else you head the other way, west, on the little municipal bus. And whoever is doing the thinking here figured the little municipal bus was the favorite. Because the fare is cheaper, and because Union Station and the big bus depot are far too easy for the cops to watch, as are the stations and the depots at the other end, in Baltimore and Philly and Richmond, and because sleeping in the park really only gets you busted tomorrow instead of today. And on top of all that they claim to know how I live, and I don’t spend much time on the East Coast. I was always more likely to head west.”

“But you agreed to head for Union Station.”

“I was trying to be democratic. Trying not to be set in my ways.”

“But how did they know we’d get out of the bus in Berryville?”

“They didn’t. I bet they’ve already checked everywhere from about Leesburg onward. Every visible motel. Hamilton, Purcellville, Berryville, Winchester. If they don’t find us here, that’s where they’re heading next.”

“Are they going to find us here?”

“I sincerely hope so,” Reacher said.

The motel office had small windows, for a decorative effect, like an old colonial house, and on the inside they were fitted with sheer drapes of some kind. No way of telling who was in the room. Turner walked to a window, and put her face close to the glass, and looked ahead, and left, and right, and up, and down. She whispered, “No one there. Just the clerk, I think. Or maybe he’s the owner. Sitting down, in back.”

Reacher checked the car doors. They were locked. As was the trunk. He put his hand on the hood, above the radiator chrome. The metal was hot. The car hadn’t been parked there long. He moved left, into the mouth of the courtyard. No one there. No one going from room to room, no one checking doors or looking in windows.

He stepped back and said, “So let’s talk to the guy.”

Turner pulled the office door, and Reacher went in ahead of her. The room was a lot nicer than the kind of place Reacher was used to. A lot nicer than the place a mile from Rock Creek, for instance. There was quality vinyl on the floor, and wallpaper, and all kinds of framed commendations from tourist authorities. The reception desk was an actual desk, like something Thomas Jefferson might have used to write a letter. Behind it was a red leather chair with a guy in it. The guy was about sixty, tall and gray and impressive. He looked like he should have been running a big corporation, not a small motel.

Turner said, “We’re looking for our friends. That’s their car outside.”

“The four gentlemen?” the guy said, with a tiny and skeptical hesitation before the word gentlemen.

“Yes,” Turner said.

“I’m afraid you just missed them. They were looking for you about ten minutes ago. At least, I assume it was you they were looking for. A man and a woman, they said. They wondered if you’d checked in already.”

“And what did you tell them?” Reacher asked.

“Well, naturally, I told them you hadn’t arrived yet.”

“OK.”

“Are you ready to check in now?” the guy asked, in a tone that suggested it wouldn’t break his heart if they didn’t.

“We need to find our friends first,” Reacher said. “We need to have a discussion. Where did they go?”

“They wondered if perhaps you’d gone to get a bite to eat. I directed them to the Berryville Grill. It’s the only restaurant open at this time of the evening.”

“The pizza place doesn’t count?”

“It’s not exactly a restaurant, is it?”

“So where’s the Berryville Grill?”

“Two blocks behind us. An easy walk.”

“Thank you,” Turner said.

There were two ways to walk two blocks behind the motel. On the left-hand cross street, or the right-hand cross street. Covering both at once would involve splitting up, which would risk a potential one-on-four confrontation for one of them. Reacher was happy with those odds, but he wasn’t sure about Turner. She was half his size, literally, and she was unarmed. No gun, no knife.

He said, “We should wait here. We should let them come to us.”

But they didn’t come. Reacher and Turner stood in the shadows, for five long minutes, and nothing happened. Turner moved a little, to let the light play along the flank of the car. She whispered, “Those are pretty good dents.”

Reacher said back, “How long does it take to check out a damn restaurant?”

“Maybe they got sent on somewhere else. Maybe there’s a bar with hamburgers. Or a couple of them. Which don’t count as restaurants, with the motel guy.”

“I don’t hear any bars.”

“How do you hear a bar?”

“Hubbub, glasses, bottles, extractor fans. It’s a distinctive sound.”

“Could be too far away to hear.”

“In which case they’d have come back for their car.”

“They have to be somewhere.”

“Maybe they’re eating at the grill,” Reacher said. “Maybe they got a table. A last-minute decision. We were hungry, they could be hungry too.”

“I’m still hungry.”

“It might be easier to take them inside a restaurant. Crowded quarters, a little inhibition on their part. Plus knives on the tables. Then we could eat their dinners. They must have ordered by now. Steak, ideally.”

“The waiter would call the cops.”

Reacher checked the cross street on the right. Nothing doing. He checked the cross street on the left. Empty. He walked back to where Turner was waiting. She said, “They’re eating. They have to be. What else could they be doing? They could have searched the whole of Berryville by now. Twice over. So they’re in the restaurant. They could be another hour. And we can’t stay here much longer. We’re loitering on private property. And I’m sure Berryville has laws. And a police department. The motel guy could be on the phone two minutes from now.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s go check it out.”

“Left or right?”

“Left,” Reacher said.

They were cautious at the corner. But the left-hand cross street was still empty. It was more of an alley than a street. It had the motel’s wooden fence on one side, and the blank flank of a brick-built general store on the other. A hundred yards later it was crossed by a wider street that ran parallel with West Main. The second block was shorter and more varied, with some standalone buildings, and some narrow vacant lots, and then up ahead were the rear elevations of the buildings that stood on the next parallel street, including one on the right, which had a tall metal kitchen chimney, which was blowing steam, pretty hard. The Berryville Grill, for sure, doing some serious mid-evening business.

Turner said, “Back door or front door?”

“Front window,” Reacher said. “Reconnaissance is everything.”

They turned right out of the cross street and got cautious again. First came a dark storefront that could have been a flower shop. Then came the restaurant, second in line. It was a big place, but deeper than it was wide. It had four front windows, separated into two pairs by a central door. The windows came all the way down to the floor. Maybe they opened up, for the summer. Maybe they put tables on the sidewalk.

Reacher kept close to the wall and moved toward the near edge of the first window. From that angle he could see about a third of the interior space. Which was considerable. And well filled. The tables were small and close together. It was a family-style restaurant. Nothing fancy. The wait staff looked to be all girls, about high school age. The tables were plain wood. About half of them were occupied. By couples, and threesomes, and by family groups. Old people and their adult children, some of them having fun, some of them a little strained and quiet.

But none of the tables was occupied by four men. Not in the part of the restaurant Reacher could see. He backed off. She leapfrogged past him and walked briskly along the restaurant frontage, looking away, and she stopped beyond the last window. He watched the door. No reaction. No one came out. She hugged the wall and crept back and looked inside from the far edge of the last window. Reacher figured from there she could see a symmetrical one-third, the same as he had, but on the other side of the room. Which would leave a central wedge unexamined.

She shook her head. He set off, and she set off, and they met at the door. He pulled it, and she went in first. The central wedge had plenty of tables. But none of them was occupied by four men. There was no maitre d’ lectern. No hostess station, either. Just empty floor inside the door. A young woman bustled over. A girl, really. Seventeen, maybe. The designated greeter. She was wearing black pants, and a black polo shirt with short sleeves and an embroidered Berryville Grill logo on the front. She had a livid red birthmark on her forearm. She said, “Two for dinner?”

Turner said, “We’re looking for some people. They might have been asking for us.”

The girl went quiet. She looked from Turner to Reacher, suddenly understanding: a man and a woman.

“Were they here?” Reacher asked. “Four men, three of them big, and one of them bigger?”

The girl nodded, and rubbed her forearm, subconsciously. Or nervously. Reacher glanced down.

It wasn’t a birthmark.

It was changing shape. And changing color.

It was a bruise.

He said, “Did they do that?”

The girl nodded.

“The big one,” she said.

“With the shaved head and the small ears?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “He squeezed my arm.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to know where else you could be. And I couldn’t tell him.”

It was a big mark. From a big hand. More than six inches across.

The girl said, “He really scared me. He has cruel eyes.”

Reacher asked, “When were they here?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell them where to look.”

“No bars, no hamburger joints?”

“That’s exactly what he asked. But there’s nothing like that here.”

The girl was close to tears.

Reacher said, “They won’t be coming back.”

It was all he could think of to say.

They left the girl standing there, rubbing her arm, and they used the cross street they hadn’t used before. It was a similar thoroughfare, narrow, unlit, raggedy at first, and then firming up on the second block, with the motel’s fence on the right. They took the corner cautiously, and scanned ahead before moving out.

The motel lot was empty.

The car with the dented doors was gone.

Chapter 26

Three hundred yards later Reacher and Turner hit Berryville’s city limit, and West Main became plain old State Route 7. Turner said, “If those guys could figure out where we went, we have to assume the army could too. The FBI as well, even.”

Which made hitchhiking a nightmare. It was pitch dark. A winter night, in the middle of nowhere. A long straight road. Oncoming headlights would be visible a mile away, but there would be no way of knowing what lay behind those headlights. Who was at the wheel? Civilian or not? Friend or foe?

Too big of a risk to take a gamble.

So they compromised, in a win-some, lose-some kind of way that Reacher felt came out about equal in terms of drawbacks and benefits. They retraced their steps, and Turner waited on the shoulder about fifty yards ahead of the last lit-up town block, and Reacher kept on going, to where he could lean on the corner of a building, half in and half out of a cross street alley, where there was some light spill on the blacktop. A bad idea, in the sense that any car turning west beyond them was a lost opportunity in terms of a potential ride, but a good idea in the sense that Reacher could make a quick and dirty evaluation of the through-town drivers, as and when they appeared. They agreed he should err on the side of caution, but if he felt it was OK, he would step out and signal to Turner, who would then step up to the curb and jam her thumb out.

Which overall, he thought at the beginning, was maybe more win-some than lose-some. Because by accident their improvised system would imitate a very old hitchhiking trick. A pretty girl sticks out her thumb, a driver stops, full of enthusiasm, and then the big ugly boyfriend jogs up and gets in, too.

But thirty minutes later Reacher was seeing it as more lose-some than win-some. Traffic was light, and he was getting no time at all to make a judgment. He would see headlights coming, he would wait, then the car would flash past in a split second, and his brain would process, sedan, domestic, model year, specification, and long before he got to a conclusion the car was already well past Turner and speeding onward.

So he switched to a pre-screening approach. He decided to reject all sedans, and all SUVs younger than five years, and to approve all pick-up trucks, and all older SUVs. He had never known the army to hunt in pick-up trucks, and he guessed all army road vehicles would be swapped out before they got to be five years old. Same for the FBI, surely. The remaining risk was off-duty local deputies, joining in the fun in their POVs. But some risk had to be taken, otherwise they would be there all night long, which would end up the same as sleeping in a D.C. park. They would get busted at first light tomorrow, instead of last light today.

He waited. For a minute he saw nothing, and then he saw headlights, coming in from the east, not real fast, just a good, safe city speed. He leaned out from his corner. He waited. He saw a shape flash past.

A sedan.

Reject.

He settled back against the building.

He waited again. Five minutes. Then seven. Then eight. Then: more headlights. He leaned out. He saw a pick-up truck.

He stepped out to the sidewalk in its wake and jammed his left fist high in the air and fifty yards away Turner jumped to the curb and stuck out her thumb. Total precision. Like a perfect postseason bang-bang double play, fast and crisp and decisive in the cold night air. The pick-up’s headlight beams washed over Turner’s immobile form like she’d been there all along.

The pick-up didn’t stop.

Shit, Reacher thought.

The next viable candidate was an elderly Ford Bronco, and it didn’t stop, either. Neither did a middle-aged F150, or a new Dodge Ram. Then the road went quiet again. The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around to ten-thirty in the evening. The air grew colder. He had on two T-shirts and his jacket, with its miracle layer. He started to worry about Turner. She had one T-shirt and one regular shirt. And her T-shirt had looked thin from laundering. I was born in Montana, she had said. I’m never cold. He hoped she was telling the truth.

For five more minutes nothing came in from the east. Then, more headlights, wide-spaced and low, tracking the road’s rise and fall with a rubbery, well-damped motion. A sedan, probably. He leaned out just a fraction, already pessimistic.

Then he ducked back in, fast. It was a sedan, swift and sleek, a Ford Crown Victoria, shiny and dark in color, with black windows and antennas on the trunk lid. MPs, possibly, or the FBI, or Federal Marshals, or the Virginia state cops. Or not. Maybe another agency altogether, on an unconnected mission. He leaned out again and watched it go. It missed Turner in the shadows and blasted onward into the distance.

He waited. One more minute. Then two. Nothing but darkness.

Then more headlights, way back, maybe still on East Main, before the downtown crossroads, coming on steadily, now on West Main for sure, getting closer. They were yellow and weak. Old fashioned and faint. Nothing modern. Not halogen. Reacher leaned out from his corner. The headlights kept on coming, slow and steady. They flashed past.

A pick-up truck.

The same double play. His left fist, her thumb.

The pick-up slowed right down.

It stopped.

Turner stepped off the curb and leaned in at its passenger window and started talking, and Reacher started jogging the fifty yards toward her.

This time Juliet called Romeo, which was unusual. Mostly Romeo had the breaking news. But their labors were divided, and so sometimes Juliet had the new information.

He said, “No sign of them, all the way to Winchester.”

Romeo said, “Are they sure?”

“They checked very carefully.”

“OK, but keep them in the area. That bus line is our best option.”

“Will do.”

Reacher arrived a little out of breath, and saw the pick-up was an old Chevrolet, plain and basic, built and bought for utility, not show, and the driver looked to be a wily old boy of about seventy, all skin and bone and sparse white hair. Turner introduced him by saying, “This gentleman is heading for Mineral County in West Virginia. Near a place called Keyser, not too far from the Maryland line.”

Which all meant nothing to Reacher, except that West Virginia sounded one step better than regular Virginia. He leaned in at the window next to Turner and said, “Sir, we’d really appreciate the ride.”

The old guy said, “Then hop right in and let’s go.”

There was a bench seat, but the cab was narrow. Turner got in first, and if Reacher pressed hard against the door there was just about room for her between him and the old guy. But the seat was soft and the cab was warm. And the truck motored along OK. It was happy to do sixty. It felt like it could roll down the road forever.

The old guy asked, “So where are you folks headed ultimately?”

“We’re looking for work,” Reacher said, thinking of the young couple in Ohio, in the red crew-cab Silverado, with the shedding dog. “So pretty much any place will do.”

“And what kind of work are you looking for?”

And so began a completely typical hitchhiking conversation, with every party spinning yarns based on half truths and inflated experiences. Reacher had been out of the service for a long time, and when he had to he worked whatever job he could get. He had worked the doors in night clubs, and he had dug swimming pools, and stacked lumber, and demolished buildings, and picked apples, and loaded boxes into trucks, and he made it sound like those kinds of things had been his lifelong occupations. Turner talked about waiting tables, and working in offices, and selling kitchenwares door to door, all of which Reacher guessed was based on her evening and weekend experiences through high school and college. The old guy talked about tobacco farming in the Carolinas, and horses in Kentucky, and hauling coal in West Virginia, in eighteen-wheel trucks.

They drove through Winchester, crossing I-81 twice, and then onward toward the state line, into Appalachian country, on the last northern foothills of Shenandoah Mountain, the road rising and twisting toward Georges Peak, the motor straining, the weak yellow headlights jerking from side to side on the sharp turns. Then at midnight they were in West Virginia, still elevated in wild country, rolling through wooded passes toward the Alleghenies in the far distance.

Then Reacher saw a fire, far ahead in the west, on a wooded hillside a little south of the road. A yellow and orange glow, against the black sky, like a bonfire or a warning beacon. They rolled through a sleeping town called Capon Bridge, and the fire got closer. A mile or more away, but then suddenly less, because the road turned toward it.

Reacher said, “Sir, you could let us out here, if you wouldn’t mind.”

The old guy said, “Here?”

“It’s a good spot.”

“For what?”

“I think it will meet our needs.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’d appreciate it very much.”

The old guy grumbled something, dubious, not understanding at all, but he took his foot off the gas and the truck slowed down. Turner wasn’t understanding, either. She was looking at Reacher like he was crazy. The truck came to a halt, on a random stretch of mountain blacktop, woods to the left, woods to the right, nothing ahead, and nothing behind. Reacher opened his door, and unfolded himself out, and Turner slid out beside him, and they thanked the old man very much and waved him away. Then they stood together in the pitch dark and the dead quiet and the cold night air, and Turner said, “You want to tell me exactly why we just got out of a warm truck in the middle of nowhere?”

Reacher pointed, ahead and to the left, at the fire.

“See that?” he said. “That’s an ATM.”

Chapter 27

They walked on, following the curve of the road, west and a little south, getting closer to the fire all the time, until it was level with them, about two hundred yards into the hilly woods. Ten yards later, on the left shoulder, there was the mouth of a stony track. A driveway, of sorts. It ran uphill, between the trees. Turner wrapped Reacher’s shirt tight around her and said, “That’s just some kind of random brush fire.”

“Wrong season,” Reacher said. “Wrong place. They don’t get brush fires here.”

“So what is it?”

“Where are we?”

“West Virginia.”

“Correct. Miles from anywhere, in backwoods country. That fire is what we’ve been waiting for. But be quiet as you can. There could be someone up there.”

“Firefighters, probably.”

“That’s one thing there won’t be,” Reacher said. “I can guarantee that.”

They started up the stony path. It was loose and noisy underfoot. Hard going. Better driven than walked. On both sides the trees crowded in, some of them pines, some of them deciduous and bare. The track snaked right, and then left again, rising all the way, with a final wide curve up ahead, with the fire waiting for them beyond it. They could already feel heat in the air, and they could hear a vague roar, with loud cracks and bangs mixed in.

“Real quiet now,” Reacher said.

They rounded the final curve, and found a clearing hacked out of the woods. Dead ahead was a tumbledown old barn-like structure, and to their left was a tumbledown old cabin, both buildings made of wooden boards alternately baked and rotted by a century of weather. To their far right was the fire, raging in and around and above a wide, low rectangular structure with wheels. Yellow and blue and orange flames blazed up and out, and the trees burned and smoldered near them. Thick gray smoke boiled and swirled and eddied, and then caught the updraft and whipped away into the darkness above.

“What is it?” Turner asked again, in a whisper.

“Like that old joke,” Reacher whispered back. “How is a fire in a meth lab the same as a redneck divorce?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone’s gonna lose a trailer.”

“This is a meth lab?”

“Was,” Reacher said.

“Hence no firefighters,” Turner said. “Illegal operation. They couldn’t call it in.”

“Firefighters wouldn’t come anyway,” Reacher said. “If they came to every meth lab that caught on fire, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Meth labs are accidents waiting to happen.”

“Where are the people?”

“Probably just one person. Somewhere around.”

They moved into the clearing, toward the cabin, away from the fire, staying close to the trees. Smoke drifted and light and shadow danced all around them, pagan and elemental. The fire roared on, fifty yards away, undisturbed. The cabin was a simple one-story affair, with an outhouse in back. Both unoccupied. No one there. The barn was wide enough for two vehicles, and it had two vehicles in it, a big red Dodge pick-up truck with huge tires and acres of bulging chrome, brand-new, and a red convertible sports car, a Chevrolet Corvette, waxed and gleaming, with tail pipes as big as Reacher’s fists. Also brand-new, or close to it.

Reacher said, “This country boy is doing well.”

“No,” Turner said. “Not so well.”

She pointed toward the fire.

The skeleton of the trailer was still visible, twisting and dancing in the flames, and there was burning debris all around it, spilled and fallen, but changing the basic rectangular shape was a flat protrusion on the ground in front of it, like a tongue hanging out of a mouth, something low and rounded and very much on fire, with flames of a different color and a different intensity. The kind of flames you see if you leave a lamb chop on the grill too long, but a hundred times bigger.

“I guess he tried to save it,” Reacher said. “Which was dumb. Always better to let it burn.”

“What are we going to do?” Turner said.

“We’re going to make a withdrawal,” Reacher said. “From the ATM. It was a decent-sized lab, and he had a couple of nice cars, so my guess is our credit limit is going to be pretty handsome.”

“We’re going to take a dead man’s money?”

“He doesn’t need it anymore. And we have eighty cents.”

“It’s a crime.”

“It was already a crime. The guy was a dope dealer. And if we don’t take it, the cops will. When they get here tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“Where is it?”

“That’s the fun part,” Reacher said. “Finding it.”

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

“Usually while they’re still alive. I was planning to take a walk behind Union Station. Think of it like the IRS. We’re government employees, after all.”

“That’s terrible.”

“You want to sleep in a bed tonight? You want to eat tomorrow?”

“Jesus,” Turner said.

*  *  *

But she searched just as hard as Reacher did. They started in the cabin. The air was stale. There was nothing hidden in the kitchen. No false backs in the cupboards, no fake tins of beans, nothing buried in flour canisters, no voids behind the wall boards. There was nothing in the living room. No trapdoors in the floor, no hollowed out books, nothing in the sofa cushions, nothing up the chimney. There was nothing in the bedroom, either. No slits in the mattress, no locked drawers in the night table, nothing on top of the wardrobe, and no boxes under the bed.

Turner said, “Where next?”

Reacher said, “I should have thought of it before.”

“Where?”

“Where did this guy feel real private?”

“This whole place feels real private. It’s a million miles from anywhere.”

“But where most of all?”

She got it. She nodded. She said, “The outhouse.”

It was in the outhouse ceiling. There was a false panel right above the toilet, which Reacher unlatched and handed to Turner. Then he put his arm in the void and felt around and found a plastic tub. He hauled it out. It was the kind of thing he had seen in houseware stores. In it was about four thousand dollars in bricked twenties, and spare keys for the Dodge and the Corvette, and a deed for the property, and a birth certificate for a male child named William Robert Claughton, born in the state of West Virginia forty-seven years previously.

“Billy Bob,” Turner said. “Rest in peace.”

Reacher bounced the keys in his hand and said, “The truck or the sports car?”

“We’re going to steal his car as well?”

“They’re already stolen,” Reacher said. “No titles in the box. Probably some tweaker, boosting cars, paying off a debt. And the alternative is walking.”

Turner was quiet a second more, like it was going to be a bridge too far, but then she shook her head and shrugged and said, “The sports car, of course.”

So they kept the money and the Corvette key and put the rest of the stuff back in the outhouse ceiling. They hiked over to the barn, and dumped the money in the Corvette’s load space. On the edge of the clearing the fire was still going strong. Reacher tossed the car key to Turner and climbed in the passenger seat. Turner started the engine, and found the headlight switch, and clipped her belt low and tight.

And a minute later they were back on the road, heading west in the dead of night, fast, warm, comfortable, and rich.

Chapter 28

Turner took a mile to get settled in and then she upped her speed and found a perfect rhythm through the curves. The car felt big and low and hard and brutal. It threw long super-white headlight beams far ahead, and trailed loud V8 burble far behind. She said, “We should turn off soon. We can’t stay on this road much longer. One of those cars that came through Berryville was FBI, I think. Did you see it?”

“The Crown Vic?” Reacher said.

“Yes,” she said. “So we need to get away from any logical extension of that bus route. Especially because that old guy in the truck could tell them exactly where he let us out. He won’t forget that stop in a hurry.”

“He won’t talk to the cops. He hauled coal in West Virginia.”

“He might talk to the guys in the dented car. They might scare him. Or they might give him money.”

“OK, go south,” Reacher said. “South is always good in the wintertime.”

She upped the speed a little more, and the tail pipes got louder. It was a fine car, Reacher thought. Maybe the best in the world for American roads. Which was logical, because it was an American car. He smiled suddenly and said, “Let’s turn the heater way up and put the top down.”

Turner said, “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t I? It’s like a rock and roll song on the radio. A fast car, some money in my pocket, and a little company for once.”

So Turner put the heater dial all the way in the red, and she slowed to a stop at the side of the road, and they figured out the latches and the switches, and the top folded itself down into a well behind them. The night air flooded in, cold and fresh. They wriggled lower in their seats, and took off again. All the driving sensations were doubled. The speed, the lights, the noise. Reacher smiled and said, “This is the life.”

Turner said, “I might get used to it. But I would like a choice.”

“You might get one.”

“How? There’s nothing to work with.”

“Not exactly nothing,” Reacher said. “We have an apparent anomaly, and we have a definite piece of procedural information. Which together might suggest a preliminary conclusion.”

“Like what?”

“Weeks and Edwards were murdered in Afghanistan, but you weren’t murdered here, and I wasn’t, and Moorcroft wasn’t. And he could have been. A drive-by shooting in southeast D.C. would have been just as plausible as a beating. And I could have been, because who was ever going to notice? And you could have been. A training accident, or carelessness handling your weapon. But they chose not to go down that road. Therefore there’s a kind of timidity on the D.C. end. Which is suggestive, when you combine it with the other thing.”

“Which is what?”

“Would you know how to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands?”

“I could find out.”

“Exactly. You’d search on the computer, and you’d make some calls, and you’d get whatever it was you needed, and you’d get it done. But how long would it take?”

“Maybe a week.”

“But these guys did it in less than a day. In an hour, probably. Your account was open by ten in the morning. Which has to imply an existing relationship. They told the bank what they wanted, and it was done right away, immediately, with no questions asked. Which makes them premium clients, with a lot of money. But we know that anyway, because they were prepared to burn a hundred grand, just to nail you. Which is a big sum of money, but they didn’t care. They went right ahead and dumped it in your account, and there’s no guarantee they’ll ever get it back. It might be impounded as evidence. And even if it isn’t, I don’t see how they can turn around afterward and say, oh by the way, that hundred grand was ours all along and we want it returned to us.”

“So who are they?” Turner asked.

“They’re very correct people, running a scam that generates a lot of money, prepared to order all kinds of mayhem eight thousand miles away in Afghanistan, but wanting things clean and tidy on their own doorstep. On first-name terms with offshore bankers, able to get financial things done in an hour, not a week, able to search and manipulate ancient files in any branch of the service they want, with fairly efficient muscle watching their backs. They’re senior staff officers in D.C., almost certainly.”

Turner hung a left just after a town called Romney, on a small road that took them south but kept them in the hills. Safer that way, they thought. They didn’t want to get close to the I-79 corridor. Too heavily patrolled, even at night. Too many local PDs looking to boost their municipal revenues with speed traps. The only small-road negative was the complete lack of civilized infrastructure. No gas, no coffee. No diners. No motels. And they were hungry and thirsty and tired. And the car had a giant motor, with no kind of good miles-per-gallon figures. A lone road sign at the turn had promised some kind of a town, twenty miles ahead. About half an hour, at small-road speeds.

Turner said, “I’d kill for a shower and a meal.”

“You’ll probably have to,” Reacher said. “It won’t be the city that doesn’t sleep. More likely the one-horse crossroads that never wakes up.”

They never found out. They didn’t get there. Because a minute later they ran into another kind of small-road problem.

Chapter 29

Turner took a curve and then had to brake hard, because there was a red road flare spiked in the blacktop directly ahead. Beyond it in the distance was another, and beyond that were headlight beams pointing in odd directions, one pair straight up vertically into the nighttime sky, and another horizontal but at right angles to the traffic flow.

Turner threaded left and right between the two spiked flares, and then she coasted to a stop, with the tail pipes popping and burbling behind them. The vertical headlights were from a pick-up truck that had gone off the road ass-first into a ditch. It was standing more or less upright on its tailgate. Its whole underside was visible, all complicated and dirty.

The horizontal headlights were from another pick-up truck, a sturdy half-ton crew-cab, which had turned and backed up until it was parked across the road at a right angle. It had a short and heavy chain hooked up to its tow hitch. The chain was stretched tight at a steep upward angle, and its other end was wrapped around a front suspension member on the vertical truck. Reacher guessed the idea was to pull the vertical truck over, back onto its wheels, like a falling tree, and then to drag it out of the ditch. But the geometry was going to be difficult. The chain had to be short, because the road was narrow. But the shortness of the chain meant that the front of the falling truck would hit the back of the half-ton, unless the half-ton kept on moving just right and inched out of the way. All without driving itself into the opposite ditch. It was going to be an intricate automotive ballet.

There were three men on the scene. One was sitting dazed on the shoulder, with his elbows on his knees, and his head down. He was the driver of the vertical truck, Reacher guessed, stunned by the accident, and maybe still drunk or high, or both. The other two men were his rescuers. One was in the half-ton’s cab, looking back, elbow on the door, and the other was walking side to side, getting ready to direct operations.

An everyday story, Reacher figured. Or an every-night story. Too many beers, or too many pipes, or too many of both, and then a dark winding road, and a corner taken too fast, and panicked braking, and locked rear wheels under an empty load bed, maybe some wintertime ice, and a spin, and the ditch. And then the weird climb out of the tipped-up seat, and the long slide down the vertical flank, and the cell phone call, and the wait for the willing friends with the big truck.

No big deal, from anyone’s point of view. Practically routine. The locals looked like they knew what they were doing, despite the geometric difficulties. Maybe they had done it before, possibly many times. Reacher and Turner were going to be delayed five minutes. Maybe ten. That was all.

And then that wasn’t all.

The dazed guy on the shoulder became slowly aware of the bright new lights, and he raised his head, and he squinted down the road, and he looked away again.

Then he looked back.

He struggled up and got to his feet, and he took a step.

He said, “That’s Billy Bob’s car.”

He took another step, and another, and he glared ahead, at Turner first, then at Reacher, and he stamped his foot and swung his right arm as if batting away immense clouds of flying insects, and he roared, “What are you doing in it?”

Which sounded like Whut Chew Doon An At, maybe due to bad teeth, or booze, or befuddlement, or all of the above. Reacher wasn’t sure. Then the guy who was ready to direct operations got interested too, and the guy at the wheel of the half-ton crew-cab got out, and all three guys formed up in a raggedy little semicircle about ten feet ahead of the Corvette’s front fender. They were all wiry and worn down. They were all in sleeveless plaid work shirts over no-color sweatshirts, and blue jeans, and boots. They all had woolen watch caps on their heads. The dazed guy was maybe five-eight, and the director of operations was maybe five-ten, and the half-ton driver was about six feet. Like small, medium, and large, in a country clothing catalog. From the low end of the market.

“Run them over,” Reacher said.

Turner didn’t.

The guy from the crew-cab said, “That’s Billy Bob’s car.”

The dazed guy roared, “I already said that.”

Are Ready Sud At.

Real loud.

Maybe his hearing had been damaged by the wreck.

The guy from the crew cab said, “Why are you folks driving Billy Bob’s car?”

Reacher said, “This is my car.”

“No it ain’t. I recognize the plate.”

Reacher unclipped his seat belt.

Turner unclipped hers.

Reacher said, “Why do you care who’s driving Billy Bob’s car?”

“Because Billy Bob is our cousin,” the guy said.

“Really?”

“You bet,” the guy said. “There have been Claughtons in Hampshire County for three hundred years.”

“Got a dark suit?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to a funeral. Billy Bob doesn’t need a car anymore. His lab burned up tonight. He didn’t get out in time. We were passing by. Nothing we could do for him.”

All three guys went quiet for a moment. They shuffled and flinched, and then shuffled some more and spat on the road. The guy from the half-ton said, “Nothing you could do for him but steal his car?”

“Think of it as repurposing.”

“Before he was even cold?”

“Couldn’t wait that long. It was a hell of a fire. It’ll be a day or two before he’s cold.”

“What’s your name, asshole?”

“Reacher,” Reacher said. “There have been Reachers in Hampshire County for about five minutes.”

“You taking the mickey?”

“Not really taking it. You seem to be giving it up voluntarily.”

“Maybe you started the fire.”

“We didn’t. Old Billy Bob was in a dangerous business. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Same with the car. Ill-gotten gains, ill gotten all over again.”

“You can’t have it. We should have it.”

Reacher opened his door. He jack-knifed his feet to the ground and stood up fast, in a second, all the way from having his butt four inches off the blacktop to his full six feet five. He stepped around the open door and walked forward and stopped, right on the spot where the ragged little semicircle was centered.

He said, “Let’s not have a big discussion about inheritance rights.”

The guy from the half-ton said, “What about his money?”

“Possession is nine points of the law,” Reacher said, like Espin, in the Dyer interview room.

“You took his money, too?”

“As much as we could find.”

Whereupon the dazed guy launched forward and swung his right fist in a violent arc. Reacher swayed backward and let the fist fizz past in front of him, harmlessly, and then he flapped his own right arm, back and forth, as if he was batting away more of the invisible insects, and the dazed guy stared at the pantomime, and Reacher cuffed him on the side of the head with his open left palm, just under the rim of his hat, like an old-time cop with a rude boy from the neighborhood, just a tap, nothing more, but still the guy went down like his head had been blown apart by a round from a high-powered rifle. He lay still on the road, not moving at all.

The guy from the half-ton said, “Is that what you do? Pick on the smallest first?”

“I wasn’t picking on him,” Reacher said. “He was picking on me. Are you going to make the same mistake?”

“Might not be a mistake.”

“It would be,” Reacher said. Then he glanced beyond the guy, at the vertical pick-up truck. He said, “Shit, that thing’s going to fall over.”

The guy didn’t turn around. Didn’t look. His eyes stayed fixed on Reacher’s.

He said, “Good try. But I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Reacher said, “I’m not kidding, you moron.” And he wasn’t. Maybe the half-ton had a loose transmission. Maybe it had sagged forward six inches when the guy shut it down before he got out. But whatever, there was new tension in the chain. It was rigid. It was practically humming. And the vertical truck was teetering right on the point of balance, an inch away from falling forward like a tree. A breath of wind would have done it.

And then a breath of wind went right ahead and did it.

The branches all around sighed and moved gently, just once, and the vertical truck’s tailgate scraped over small stones trapped beneath it, and the chain went slack, and the truck started to topple forward, almost imperceptibly, one degree at a time, and then it hit the point of no return, and then it was falling faster, and faster, and then it was a giant sledgehammer smashing down into the half-ton’s load bed, the weight of its iron engine block striking a mighty blow on the corrugated floor, breaking the axle below it, the half-ton’s wheels suddenly canting out at the bottom and in at the top, like knock knees, or puppy feet, the smaller truck’s wheels folding the other way, on broken steering rods. The chain rattled to the ground, and competing suspensions settled, and the smaller truck came to rest, up at an angle, partly on top of the larger truck, both of them spent and inert and still.

“Looks like they were having sex,” Reacher said. “Doesn’t it?”

No one answered. The small guy was still on the floor, and the other two were staring at a whole new problem. Neither vehicle was going anywhere soon, not without a big crane and a flatbed truck. Reacher climbed down into the Corvette. The wreckage was blocking the road, from ditch to ditch, so Turner had no choice. She backed up and threaded between the two burning flares, and she headed back the way they had come.

Chapter 30

Turner said, “Those guys will drop a dime, as soon as they hear about us. They’ll be on the phone immediately. To their probation officers. They’ll be cutting all kinds of deals. They’ll use us as a get-out-of-jail card, for their next ten misdemeanors.”

Reacher nodded. The road couldn’t stay blocked forever. Sooner or later some other passerby would call it in. Or the Claughton cousins would call it in themselves, having exhausted all other alternatives. And then the cops would show up, and their inevitable questions would lead to exculpatory answers, and deals, and trades, and promises, and exchanges.

“Try the next road south,” Reacher said. “There’s nothing else we can do.”

“Still enjoying yourself?”

“Never better.”

They made the turn, on the quiet two-lane road they had quit twenty minutes earlier. It was deserted. Trees to the left, trees to the right, nothing ahead, nothing behind. They crossed a river on a bridge. The river was the Potomac, at that location narrow and unremarkable, flowing north, downhill from its distant source, before hooking east and then broadening into the lazy current it was known as at its mouth. There was no traffic on the road. Nothing going their way, nothing going the other way. No lights and no sounds, except their own.

Reacher said, “If this was a movie, right about now the cowboy would scratch his cheek and say it’s too quiet.”

“Not funny,” Turner said. “They could have sealed this road. There could be state police around the next bend.”

But there weren’t. Not around the next bend, or the next. But the bends kept on coming. One after the other, like separate tense questions.

Turner said, “How do they know how you live?”

“Who?”

“The senior staff officers.”

“That’s a very good question.”

“Do they know how you live?”

They couldn’t find you before. They won’t find you now. The army doesn’t use skip tracers. And no skip tracer could find you anyway.

“They seem to know I didn’t buy a split level ranch somewhere in the suburbs. They seem to know I don’t coach Little League and grow my own vegetables. They seem to know I didn’t develop a second career.”

“But how do they know?”

“No idea.”

“I read your file. There was a lot of good stuff in it.”

“A lot of bad stuff, too.”

“But maybe bad is good. In the sense of being interesting to someone. In terms of personality. They were tracking you since you were six years old. You exhibited unique characteristics.”

“Not unique.”

“Rare, then. In terms of an aggressive response to danger.”

Reacher nodded. At the age of six he had gone to a movie, on a Marine base somewhere in the Pacific. A kids’ matinee. A cheap sci-fi potboiler. All of a sudden a monster had popped up out of a slimy lagoon. The youthful audience was being filmed in secret, with a low-light camera. A psy-ops experiment. Most kids had recoiled in terror when the monster appeared. But Reacher hadn’t. He had leapt at the screen instead, ready to fight, with his switchblade already open. They said his response time had been three-quarters of a second.

Six years old.

They had taken his switchblade away.

They had made him feel like a psychopath.

Turner said, “And you did well at West Point. And your service years were impressive.”

“If you close your eyes and squint. Personally I remember a lot of friction and shouting. I was on the carpet a lot of the time.”

“But maybe bad is good. From some particular perspective. Suppose there’s a desk somewhere, in the Pentagon, maybe. Suppose someone’s sole job is to track a certain type of person, who might be useful in the future, under a certain type of circumstance. Like long-range contingency planning, for a new super-secret unit. Deniable, too. Like a list of suitable personnel. As in, when the shit hits the fan, who are you gonna call?”

“Now it sounds like you who’s been watching movies.”

“Nothing happens in the movies that doesn’t happen in real life. That’s one thing I’ve learned. You can’t make this stuff up.”

“Speculation,” Reacher said.

“Is it impossible there’s a database somewhere, with a hundred or two hundred or a thousand names in it, of people the military wants to keep track of, just in case?”

“I guess that’s not impossible.”

“It would be a very secret database. For a number of obvious reasons. Which means that if these guys have seen it, thereby knowing how you live, they’re not just senior staff officers. They’re very senior staff officers. You said so yourself. They have access to files in any branch of the service they want.”

“Speculation,” Reacher said again.

“But logical.”

“Maybe.”

“Very senior staff officers,” Turner said again.

Reacher nodded. Like flipping a coin. Fifty-fifty. Either true, or not true.

*  *  *

The first turn they came to was Route 220, which was subtly wider than the road they were on, and flatter, and better surfaced, and straighter, and altogether more important in every way. In comparison it felt like a major artery. Not exactly a highway, but because of their heightened sensitivities it looked like a whole different proposition.

“No,” Turner said.

“Agreed,” Reacher said. There would be gas and coffee, probably, and diners and motels, but there could be police, too, either state or local. Or federal. Because it was the kind of road that showed up well on a map. Reacher pictured a hasty conference somewhere, with impatient fingers jabbing paper, with urgent voices saying roadblocks here, and here, and here.

“We’ll take the next one,” he said.

Which gave them seven more tense minutes. The road stayed empty. Trees to the left, trees to the right, nothing ahead, nothing behind. No lights, no sound. But nothing happened. And the next turn was better. On a map it would be just an insignificant gray trace, or more likely not there at all. It was a high hill road, very like the one they had already tried, narrow, lumpy, twisting and turning, with ragged shoulders and shallow rainwater ditches on both sides. They took it gratefully, and its darkness swallowed them up. Turner got her small-road rhythm going, keeping her speed appropriate, keeping her movements efficient. Reacher relaxed and watched her. She was leaning back in her seat, her arms straight out, her fingers on the wheel, sensitive to the tiny quivering messages coming up from the road. Her hair was hooked behind her ears, and he could see slim muscles in her thigh, as she worked first one pedal and then the other.

She asked, “How much money did the Big Dog make?”

“Plenty,” Reacher said. “But not enough to drop a hundred grand on a defensive scam, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“But he was right at the end of the chain. He wasn’t the top boy. He wasn’t a mass wholesaler. He would be seeing only a small part of the profit. And it was sixteen years ago. Things have changed.”

“You think this is about stolen ordnance?”

“It could be. The Desert Storm drawdown then, the Afghanistan drawdown now. Similar circumstances. Similar opportunities. But different stuff. What was the Big Dog selling?”

“Eleven crates of SAWs, when we heard about him.”

“On the streets of LA? That’s bad.”

“That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine. All I wanted was a name.”

“You could sell SAWs to the Taliban.”

“But for how much?”

“Drones, then. Or surface-to-air missiles. Extremely high-value items. Or MOABs. Did you have them in your day?”

“You make it sound like we had bows and arrows.”

“So you didn’t.”

“No, but I know what they are. Massive ordnance air burst. The mother of all bombs.”

“Thermobaric devices more powerful than anything except nuclear weapons. Plenty of buyers in the Middle East for things like those. No doubt about that. And those buyers have plenty of money. No doubt about that, either.”

“They’re thirty feet long. Kind of hard to slip in your coat pocket.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Then she went quiet, for a whole mile.

Reacher said, “What?”

“Suppose this is government policy. We might be arming one faction against another. We do that all the time.”

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, “You don’t see it that way?”

“I can’t make it work deep down. The government can do whatever it wants. So why scam you with a hundred grand? Why didn’t you just disappear? And me? And Moorcroft? Why aren’t we in Guantanamo right now? Or dead? And why were the guys who came to the motel the first night so crap? That was no kind of government wet team. I barely had to break a sweat. And why would it get to that point in the first place? They could have backed you down some other way. They could have ordered you to pull Weeks and Edwards out of there. They could have ordered you to cease and desist.”

“Not without automatically raising my suspicions. It would have put a big spotlight on the whole thing. That’s a risk they wouldn’t want to take.”

“Then they’d have found a better way. They would have ordered a whole countrywide strategic pull-back, all the way to the Green Zone. For some made-up political reason. To respect the Afghans’ sovereignty, or some such thing. It would have been a tsunami of bullshit. Your guys would have been caught up in it along with everyone else, and you wouldn’t have thought twice about it. It would have been just one of those things. Same old shit.”

“So you’re not convinced.”

“This all feels amateur to me,” Reacher said. “Correct, uptight, slightly timid people, somewhat out of their depth now, and therefore relying on somewhat undistinguished muscle to cover their collective asses. Which gives us one small problem and one big opportunity. The small problem being, those four guys know they have to get to us first, before the MPs or the FBI, because we’re in deep shit now, technically, with the escape and all, so the assumption is we’ll say anything to help with our situations. And even if no one believes us, it would all be out there as a possibility or a rumor, and these guys can’t afford any kind of extra scrutiny, even if it was half-assed and by the book. So that’s the small problem. Those four guys are going to stay hard on our tails. That’s for damn sure.”

“And what’s the big opportunity?”

“Those same four guys,” Reacher said. “Their bosses will be lost without them. They’ll be cut off at the knees. They’ll be helpless and isolated. They’ll be ours for the taking.”

“So that’s the plan?” Turner said. “We’re going to let the four guys find us, and we’re going to bust them, and then we’re going to move on up from there?”

“Except we’re not going to bust them,” Reacher said. “We’re going to do to them what they were going to do to us.”

“Which is what?”

“We’re going to put them in the ground. And then we’re going to listen out for their bosses howling in the void. And then we’re going to explain to them carefully why it’s a very bad idea to mess with the 110th.”

Chapter 31

They crossed the line into Grant County, and the lonely hill road ran on unchanging, mile after mile. The speedometer was drifting between fifty and sixty, up and down, but the gas gauge was moving one way only, and fast. Then a sign on the shoulder announced the Grant County Airport twenty miles ahead, and a town named Petersburg.

Turner said, “A place with an airport has to have a gas station, right? And a motel. And a place with an airport and a gas station and a motel has to have a diner.”

Reacher said, “And a police department.”

“Hope for the best.”

“I always do,” Reacher said.

They hit the town before the airport. It was mostly asleep. But not completely. They came out of the hills and merged left onto a state road that became North Main Street a hundred yards later, with built-up blocks on the left and the right. In the center of town there was a crossroads with Route 220, which was the road they had avoided earlier. After the crossroads North Main Street became South Main Street. The airport lay to the west, not far away. There was no traffic, but some windows had lights behind them.

Turner went south, across the narrow Potomac again, and she took a right, toward the airport, which was a small place for light planes only, and which was all closed up and dark. So she U-turned, curb to curb, and she headed back, across the river again, toward the downtown crossroads.

Reacher said, “Go right on 220. I bet that’s where the good stuff is.”

East of the crossroads 220 was called Virginia Avenue, and for the first two hundred yards it was close-but-no-cigar. There was a sandwich shop, closed, and a pizza place, also closed. There was an out-of-business Chevron station, and two fast food franchises, both closed for the night. There was an ancient motor court inn, boarded up, falling down, its lot choked with weeds.

“No good stuff yet,” Turner said.

“Free market,” Reacher said. “Someone put that Chevron out of business. And that motel. All we have to do is find out who.”

They drove on, another block, and another, past the city limit, and then they scored a perfect trifecta on the cheaper land beyond. First came a country cafe, open all night, on the left side of the road, behind a wide gravel lot with three trucks in it. Then there was a motel, a hundred yards later, on the right side of the road, a modern two-story place on the edge of a field. And beyond the motel in the far distance was the red glow of an Exxon station.

All good. Except that halfway between the cafe and the motel was a state police barracks.

It was a pale building, long and low, made from glazed tan brick, with dishes and whip antennas on its roof. It had two cruisers parked out front, and lights behind two of its windows. A dispatcher and a desk sergeant, Reacher figured, doing their night duty in warmth and comfort.

Turner said, “Do they know about this car yet?”

Reacher looked at the motel. “Or will they before we wake up in the morning?”

“We have to get gas, at least.”

“OK, let’s go do that. We’ll try to get a feel for the place.”

So Turner eased on down the road, as discreet as she could be in a bright red convertible with six hundred brake horsepower, and she pulled in at the Exxon, which was a two-island, four-pump affair, with a pay hut made of crisp, white boards. It looked like a tiny house. Except that it had antennas on its roof, too.

Turner parked near a pump, and Reacher studied the instructions, which said that without a credit card to dip, he was going to have to pre-pay in cash. He asked, “How many gallons?”

Turner said, “I don’t know how big the tank is.”

“Pretty big, probably.”

“Let’s say fifteen, then.”

Which was going to cost fifty-nine dollars and eighty-five cents, at the posted rate. Reacher peeled three twenties out of one of Billy Bob’s bricks and headed for the hut. Inside was a woman of about forty behind a bulletproof screen. There was a half moon shape at counter height, for passing money through. Coming out of it were the sweet nasal melodies of an AM radio tuned to a country station, and the chatter and noise of a police scanner tuned to the emergency band.

Reacher slid his money through and the woman did something he guessed permitted the pump to serve up sixty bucks of gas, and not a drop more. One country song ended, and another started, separated only by a muted blast of static from the scanner. Reacher glanced at it and tried a weary-traveler expression and asked, “Anything happening tonight?”

“All quiet so far,” the woman said.

Reacher glanced the other way, at the AM radio. “Country music not enough for you?”

“My brother owns a tow truck. And that business is all about being first on the scene. He gives me ten dollars for every wreck I get him to.”

“So no wrecks tonight?”

“Not a one.”

“No excitement at all?”

The woman said, “That’s a nice car you’re riding in.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I always wanted a Corvette.”

“Did you hear about us on the scanner?”

“Been speeding?”

“Hard not to.”

“Then you’ve been lucky. You got away with it.”

Reacher said, “Long may it continue,” and he smiled what he hoped was a conspiratorial little smile, and he headed back to the car. Turner was already pumping the gas. She had the nozzle hooked into the filler neck, and she was turned three-quarters away from him, with the back of one thigh against the flank of the car, and the other foot up on the curb of the island. She had her hands behind her, and her back was arched, as if she was easing an ache. Her face was turned up to the night sky. Reacher imagined her shape, like a slender S under the big shirt.

Totally worth it.

He said, “The clerk is listening in on a scanner. We’re clean so far.”

“You asked her? She’ll remember us now.”

“She will anyway. She always wanted a Corvette.”

“We should trade with her. We should take whatever she’s got.”

“Then she’d remember us forever.”

“Maybe those hillbillies won’t call it in. Maybe their trucks were stolen, too. Maybe they just vanished into the woods.”

“Possible,” Reacher said. “I don’t see why they would wait so long.”

“We could park way in the back of the motel. Right out of sight. I think we should risk it. We really need to eat and sleep.”

The pump clicked off, just short of twelve gallons. Either the tank was smaller than they had guessed, or the gauge was pessimistic.

Turner said, “Now she knows it’s not our car. We’re not familiar with how much gas it takes.”

“Will she give us the change?”

“Maybe we should leave it.”

“It’s twelve bucks. This is West Virginia. We’d stick out like sore thumbs.”

“Tell her we’re heading south on 220. Tell her we’ve got a long way to go before daybreak. Then when she hears about us on the scanner she’ll call it in wrong.”

Reacher collected twelve dollars and fifty-two cents in change, and said something about trying to make it to I-64 before dawn. The AM radio murmured its tunes, and the police scanner stayed quiet. The woman looked out the window and smiled a little sadly, as if it was going to be a long time before she saw a Corvette again.

Turner picked Reacher up at the pay hut door, and they drove back toward town, and pulled in again three hundred yards later, at the motel.

She said, “Check in first, and then hit the cafe?”

Reacher said, “Sure.”

She paused a long beat, and looked straight at him.

She said, “How many rooms are we going to get?”

He paused a long beat in turn, and said, “Let’s eat first. Then check in.”

“Why?”

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

Samantha Dayton.

Sam.

Fourteen years old.

“After we order,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

Chapter 32

The cafe was a rural greasy spoon as perfect as anything Reacher had ever seen. It had a black guy in a white undershirt next to a lard-slick griddle three feet deep and six feet wide. It had battered pine tables and mismatched chairs. It smelled of old grease and fresh coffee. It had two ancient white men in seed caps, one of them sitting way to the left of the door, the other way to the right. Maybe they didn’t get along. Maybe they were victims of a feud three hundred years old.

Turner chose a table in the middle of the room, and they rattled the chairs out over the board floor, and they sat down. There were no menus. No chalkboards with handwritten lists of daily specials. It wasn’t that kind of a place. Ordering was clearly telepathic between the cook and his regular customers. For new customers, it was going to be a matter of asking out loud, plain and simple. Which the cook confirmed, by raising his chin and rotating his head a little, so that his right ear was presented to the room.

“Omelet,” Turner said. “Mushrooms, spring onions, and cheddar cheese.”

No reaction from the cook.

None at all.

Turner said it again, a little louder.

Still no reaction. No movement. Just total stillness, and a raised chin, and an averted gaze, and a dignified and implacable silence, like a veteran salesman insulted by a counteroffer. Turner looked at Reacher and whispered, “What’s with this place?”

“You’re a detective,” Reacher said. “You see any sign of an omelet pan up there?”

“No, I guess not. All I see is a griddle.”

“So probably the best way to get some enthusiasm out of this guy would be to order something griddle-related.”

Turner paused a beat.

Then she said, “Two eggs over easy on a fried biscuit with bacon on the side.”

The cook said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Same for me,” Reacher said. “And coffee.”

“Yes, sir.” And immediately the guy turned away and got to work with a wedge of new lard and a blade, planing the metal surface, smoothing it, three feet out and three feet back, and six feet side to side. Which made him a griddle man at heart. In Reacher’s experience such guys were either griddle men or owners, but never really both. A griddle man’s first instinct was to tend the metal, working it until it was glassy down at a molecular level, so slick it would make Teflon feel like sandpaper. Whereas an owner’s first instinct would have been to bring the coffee. Because the first cup of coffee seals the deal. A customer isn’t committed until he has consumed something. He can still get up and walk away, if he’s dissatisfied with the wait, or if he remembers an urgent appointment. But not if he’s already started in on his first cup of coffee. Because then he would have to throw some money down, and who really knows what a cup of diner coffee costs? Fifty cents? A dollar? Two dollars?

“OK, we’ve ordered,” Turner said. “So what do you have to tell me?”

“Let’s wait for the coffee,” Reacher said. “I don’t want to be interrupted.”

“Then I have a couple of things,” she said. “I want to know more about this guy Morgan, for instance. I want to know who’s got his hands on my unit.”

“My unit, too,” Reacher said. “I always assumed I’d be its worst-ever commander, but I guess I’m not. Your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it.”

“Do we know where he’s from?”

“No idea.”

“Is he one of them?”

“Hard to say. Obviously the unit needed a temporary commander. That’s not proof of guilt in itself.”

“And how would recalling you to service fit their game plan? Surely they would want to get rid of you, not keep you close at hand.”

“I think it was all supposed to make me run. Which I could have. I could have gone permanently AWOL. They made a big point of saying no one would come after me. No skip tracers. Like a one-two punch, with the Big Dog affidavit. A charge I can’t beat, and a mandate to stick around to face it. I think most guys in my situation would have headed for the hills at that point. I think that was their expectation, strategically. But it didn’t work.”

“Because when a monster comes up out of the slime, you have to fight it.”

“Or it could have been a JAG order, simple as that. There might have been a sidebar on the file, saying that if I didn’t cooperate, then I had to be nailed down. Because of some kind of political sensitivity, in the Secretary’s office. Certainly it wasn’t Morgan’s own decision. A light colonel doesn’t decide shit like that. It had to come from a higher level.”

“From very senior staff officers.”

“Agreed, but which ones, exactly?”

Turner didn’t answer that. The griddle man brought the coffee, finally. Two large pottery mugs, and a little pink plastic basket full of creamer pots and sugar packets, and two spoons pressed out of metal so thin they felt weightless. Reacher took a mug and sniffed the steam and tried a sip. The mug’s rim was cold and thick, but the coffee was adequate. Hot, and not too weak.

He put the mug back down on the table and linked his hands around it, as if he was protecting it, and he looked at Turner, right in the eye, and he said, “So.”

She said, “One more thing. And it’s going to be tough to say. So I’m sorry.”

“What is it?”

“I shouldn’t have asked about one room or two.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“But I did. I’m not sure I’m ready for one room yet. I feel like I owe you. For what you’ve done for me today. I don’t think that’s a good state of mind to be in, under those circumstances. The one-room type of circumstances, I mean.”

“You don’t owe me anything. I had purely selfish motivations. I wanted to take you out to dinner. Which I’m right now in the middle of doing, I guess. In a way. Perhaps not as planned. But whatever, I got what I wanted. Anything else is collateral damage. So you don’t owe me shit.”

Turner said, “I feel unsettled.”

“You just got arrested and broke out of jail. And now you’re running for your life and stealing cars and money.”

“No, it’s because of you.”

“Why?”

“You make me feel uncomfortable.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she said. “It’s just the way you are.”

“And what way is that?”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“You can’t,” Reacher said. “I’m a military cop. And a man. I have no feelings.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I was kidding.”

“No, you weren’t. Not entirely.”

She paused a long moment.

Then she said, “You’re like something feral.”

Reacher said nothing in reply to that. Feral, from the Latin adjective ferus, wild, via bestia fera, wild animal. Generally held to mean having escaped from domestication, and having devolved back to a natural state.

Turner said, “It’s like you’ve been sanded down to nothing but yes and no, and you and them, and black and white, and live or die. It makes me wonder, what does that to a person?”

“Life,” Reacher said. “Mine, anyway.”

“You’re like a predator. Cold, and hard. Like this whole thing. You have it all mapped out. The four guys in the car, and their bosses. You’re swimming toward them, right now, and there’s going to be blood in the water. Yours or theirs, but there’s going to be blood.”

“Right now I hope I’m swimming away from them. And I don’t even know who they are or where they are.”

“But you will. You’re thinking about it all the time. I can see you doing it. You’re worrying away at it, trying to catch the scent.”

“What else should I do? Buy us bus tickets straight to Leavenworth?”

“Is that the only alternative?”

“What do you think?”

She took her first sip of coffee, slow and contemplative. She said, “I agree with you. And that’s the problem, right there. That’s what’s making me uncomfortable. I’m just like you. Except not yet. And that’s the point. Looking at you is like looking into the future. You’re what I’m going to be one day. When I’m all sanded down, too.”

“So I’m too similar? Most women say no because I’m too different.”

“You scare me. Or the prospect of becoming you scares me. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I’m not sure I ever will be.”

“Doesn’t have to happen. This is a bump in the road. You’ll still have a career.”

“If we win.”

“We will.”

“So best case, I step off the path to stay on it. Worst case, I’m off it forever.”

“No, worst case is you’re dead or locked up. Worst case is the wrong guys win.”

“It’s always win or lose with you, isn’t it?”

“Is there a third option?”

“Does it burn you up to lose?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a kind of paralyzing arrogance. Normal people don’t get all burned up if they lose.”

“Maybe they should,” Reacher said. “But you’re not really like me. You’re not looking at yourself when you look at me. That’s why I came all this way. You’re a better version. That’s what I sensed on the phone. You’re doing it the way it should be done.”

“Doing what?”

“Everything. Your job. Your life. Being a person.”

“Doesn’t feel that way. Not right now. And don’t think of me like a better version. If I can’t look at you and see what’s going to be, you can’t look at me and see what should have been.”

Then the griddle man came back, this time with plates full of eggs and bacon and fried biscuits, all of which looked good, and all of which looked perfectly cooked. The eggs had clean, crisp edges. Clearly the guy cared for his metal well. After he was gone again Turner said, “This is all assuming you have a definite preference, that is, one way or the other, about the number of rooms.”

Reacher said, “Honest answer?”

“Of course.”

“I do have a definite preference.”

“For?”

“I have to tell you my thing first.”

“Which is?”

“The other item designed to make me run.”

“Which was?”

“A paternity suit,” Reacher said. “Apparently I have a daughter in Los Angeles. By a woman I can’t remember.”

Chapter 33

Reacher talked, and Turner ate. He told her the things he had been told. Red Cloud, between Seoul and the DMZ, and Candice Dayton, and her diary, and her home in LA, and her homelessness in LA, and her daughter, and her car, and her visit with a lawyer.

Turner asked, “What’s the kid’s name?”

“Samantha,” Reacher said. “Sam for short, presumably.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen. Nearly fifteen.”

“How do you feel?”

“Bad. If she’s mine, I should have been there for her.”

“You really don’t remember her mother?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Is that normal for you?”

“You mean, exactly how feral am I?”

“I suppose.”

“I don’t think I forget people. I hope I don’t. Especially women I sleep with. But if I did, I would be unaware of it, by definition. You can’t be aware of forgetting.”

“Is this why we’re going to Los Angeles?”

“I have to know,” Reacher said.

“But it’s suicide. They’ll all be waiting for you there. It’s the one place they can be sure you’ll go.”

“I have to know,” Reacher said again.

Turner said nothing.

Reacher said, “Anyway, that’s the story. That’s what I had to tell you. In the interests of full disclosure. In case it had a bearing. On the rooms issue, for instance.”

Turner didn’t answer.

They finished up, and they got their check, which was for a total represented by a scrawled figure circled beneath three scribbled lines. How much was a cup of diner coffee? No one knew, because no one ever found out. Maybe it was free. Maybe it had to be, because the composite total was modest. Reacher had thirteen dollars and thirty-two cents in his pocket, which was Sullivan’s surviving eighty cents plus the change he had gotten in the gas station hut, and he left all of it on the table, thereby including a handsome tip. A guy who worked a hot griddle all night deserved no less.

The car was where they had left it, unmolested, not surrounded by searchlights and SWAT teams. Far to their left the state police barracks looked quiet. The cruisers out front had not moved. The warm lights were still showing in the windows.

“Stay or go?” Turner asked.

“Stay,” Reacher said. “This place is as good as any. As weird as that sounds, with the troopers right here. It’s not going to get better than this. Not until it’s over.”

“Not until we win, you mean.”

“Same thing.”

They eased themselves into the Corvette’s low seats, and Turner fired it up and drove back to the motel. She stopped outside the office.

“I’ll wait here,” she said. “You go do it.”

“OK,” he said.

He took a fistful of twenties from one of Billy Bob’s bricks.

“Two rooms,” she said.

*  *  *

The night clerk was asleep in his chair, but it didn’t take much to wake him up. The sound of the door did half the job, and a polite tap from Reacher’s knuckles on the counter did the rest. The guy was young. Maybe it was a family business. Maybe this was a son or a nephew.

“Got two rooms?” Reacher asked him.

The guy made a big show of checking on a computer screen, like many such guys do, which Reacher thought was dumb. They weren’t the worldwide heads of global operations for giant hotel corporations. They were in motels with rooms they could count on their fingers and toes. If they lost track, then surely all they had to do was turn around and check the keys hanging on the hooks behind them.

The guy looked up from the screen and said, “Yes, sir, I can do that.”

“How much?”

“Thirty dollars per room per night. With a voucher included, for breakfast at the cafe across the street.”

“Deal,” Reacher said, and he swapped three of Billy Bob’s twenties for two of the young guy’s keys. Rooms eleven and twelve. Adjacent. A kindness, on the young guy’s part. Easier for the maid in the morning. Less distance to push her heavy cart.

“Thank you,” Reacher said.

He went out to the car, and Turner drove around to the rear of the compound, where she found a patch of lumpy winter grass behind the last of the buildings. She eased the car up onto it, and they raised the top, and they locked it up for the night, and they left it there, not visible from the street.

They walked back together and found their rooms, which were on the second floor, up an exterior flight of concrete stairs. Reacher gave Turner the key to eleven, and kept twelve for himself. She said, “What time tomorrow?”

“Noon,” he said. “And I’ll drive some, if you like.”

“We’ll see. Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

He waited until she was safely inside before he opened his door. The room behind it was a concrete box with a popcorn ceiling and vinyl wallpaper. Better than the place a mile from Rock Creek, but only by degrees. The heater was quieter, but far from silent. The carpet was cleaner, but not by much. As was the bedspread. The shower looked reasonable, and the towels were thin but not transparent. The soap and the shampoo were dressed up with a brand name that sounded like a firm of old Boston lawyers. The furniture was made of pale wood, and the television set was a small off-brand flat screen, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There was no telephone. No minibar refrigerator, no free bottle of water, no chocolate on the pillow.

He turned on the television and found CNN and watched the ticker at the bottom of the screen, all the way through a full cycle. There was no mention of two fugitives fleeing an army facility in Virginia. So he headed for the bathroom and started the shower and stood under it, aimlessly, long after the soap he had used was rinsed away. Fragments of the conversation over the scarred cafe table came back to him, unstoppably. You’re like something feral, she had said. You’re like a predator. Cold, and hard.

But in the end the line that stuck was from earlier in the exchange. Turner had asked about Morgan, and he had told her, Your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it. He went over and over it, sounding the words in his head, moving his lips, saying it out loud, breaking it down, sputtering each phrase into the beating water, examining each separate clause in detail.

Your guys in Afghanistan.

Missed two consecutive radio checks.

And he did nothing about it.

He shut off the water and got out of the tub and grabbed a towel. Then, still damp, he put his pants back on, and one of his T-shirts, and he stepped out to the upstairs walkway. He padded barefoot through the cold night air, to room eleven’s door.

He knocked.

Chapter 34

Reacher waited in the cold, because Turner didn’t open up right away. But he knew she was awake. He could see electric light through the spy hole in her door. Then it darkened briefly, as she put her eye to it, to check who was there. Then he was left to wait some more. She was hauling some clothes on, he guessed. She had showered, too, almost certainly.

Then the door opened, and she stood there, with one hand on the handle and the other on the jamb, blocking his way, either consciously or subconsciously. Her hair was slick with water and finger-combed out of her eyes. She was wearing her army T-shirt and her new work pants. Her feet were bare.

Reacher said, “I would have called, but there’s no telephone in my room.”

“Mine either,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Something I told you about Morgan. I just realized what it means.”

“What did you tell me?”

“I said your guys in Afghanistan missed two consecutive radio checks, and he did nothing about it.”

“I was thinking about that, too. I think it’s proof he’s one of them. He did nothing because he knew there was nothing to do. He knew they were dead. No point in organizing a search.”

“Can I come in?” Reacher asked. “It’s cold out here.”

No answer.

“Or we could use my room,” he said. “If you prefer.”

“No, come in,” she said. She took her hand off the jamb and moved aside. He stepped in, and she closed the door behind him. Her room was the same as his. His shirt was on the back of a chair. Her boots were under the chair, stowed neatly, side by side.

She said, “I guess I could afford some new shoes now.”

“New everything, if you want,” he said.

“Do you agree?” she said. “It’s proof he’s one of them?”

“It could be proof he’s lazy and incompetent.”

“No commander could be that dumb.”

“How long have you been in the army?”

She smiled, briefly. “OK, plenty of commanders could be that dumb.” He said, “I don’t think the important part is him doing nothing about it.”

She sat down on the bed. Left him standing near the window. Her pants were loose, and her shirt was tight. She was wearing nothing underneath it. That was clear. He could see ribs, and slender curves. On the phone from South Dakota he had pictured her as a blonde, with blue eyes, maybe from northern California, all of which had turned out to be completely wrong. She was dark haired and dark eyed, and from Montana. But he had been right about other things. Five-six or five-seven, he had guessed out loud, but thin. Your voice is all in your throat. She had laughed out loud and asked: You saying I’m flat-chested? He had laughed back and said, 34A at best. She had said, Damn.

But the reality was better than the telephone guesses. Live and in person she was something else entirely.

Totally worth it.

She said, “What was the important part of what Morgan said?”

“The two missed radio checks.”

“Because?”

“Your guys checked in on the day you were arrested, but then they missed the next day, and the next.”

“As did I, because I was in jail. You know that. It was a concerted plan. They shut us down, both ends, over there and over here, simultaneously.”

“But it wasn’t simultaneous,” Reacher said. “That’s my point. Afghanistan is nine hours ahead of Rock Creek. That’s practically a whole day’s worth of daylight in the winter. And no one walks on a goat trail in the Hindu Kush after dark. That would be a bad idea for a huge number of reasons, including falling down and accidentally breaking your leg. So your guys were out there getting shot in the head during daylight hours. That’s for damn sure. No question about it. And daylight hours end by about six o’clock local.”

“OK.”

“Six o’clock in the evening in Afghanistan is nine o’clock in the morning here.”

“OK.”

“But my lawyer said you opened your bank account in the Cayman Islands at ten o’clock in the morning, and the hundred grand arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, and you were arrested at noon.”

“I remember that last part.”

“Which means your guys were dead at least an hour before they started messing with you. Many hours, most likely. Minimum of one, maximum of eight or nine.”

“OK, so not exactly simultaneous. Not two things at once, but one thing after the other. Does that make a difference?”

“I think it does,” Reacher said. “But first we have to step back a day. You sent Weeks and Edwards into the hills, and the reaction was instantaneous. The whole thing was over by noon the next day. How did they react so fast?”

“Luck?”

“Suppose it was something else.”

“You think they have a mole in the 110th?”

“I doubt it. Not with our kind of people. It would have been impossible in my day, and I can only imagine things have gotten better.”

“Then how?”

“I think your comms were penetrated.”

“A tap on the Rock Creek phones? I don’t think that’s possible. We have systems in place.”

“Not Rock Creek,” Reacher said. “It makes no sense to tap the local ends of the network. There are too many of them. Better to concentrate on the center of the web. Where the spider lives. I think they’re reading everything that goes in and out of Bagram. Very senior staff officers, with access to anything they want. Which back at that point was everything. Which was exactly what they got. They sifted through all the chatter, and they got the original rumor, and your orders, and your guys’ reactions, and the whole back and forth.”

“Possible,” Turner said.

“Which makes a difference.”

“But only as a background detail.”

“No, more than that,” Reacher said. “They had already stopped Weeks and Edwards, between one and nine hours previously, so why did they still go ahead and come after you?”

“You know why. They thought I knew something I actually didn’t.”

“But they didn’t need to think anything. Or guess, or plan for the worst. Not if they were reading stuff in and out of Bagram. No speculation was required. They knew what Weeks and Edwards told you. They knew for sure. They had it in black and white. They knew what you knew, Susan.”

“But I knew nothing. Because Weeks and Edwards told me nothing.”

“If that’s true, then why did they go ahead and come after you? Why would they do that? Why would they go ahead with a very complex and very expensive scam for no reason at all? Why would they risk that hundred grand?”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying Weeks and Edwards did tell you something. I’m saying you do know something. Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, and maybe you don’t remember it now, but Weeks and Edwards gave you some little nugget, and as a result someone got his panties in a real big wad.”

Chapter 35

Turner put her bare feet up on the bed and leaned back on the pillow. She said, “I’m not senile, Reacher. I remember what they told me. We’re paying a Pashtun insider, and they met with the guy, and he told them an American officer had been seen heading north to meet with a tribal elder. But at that point the identity of the American officer was definitely not known, and the purpose of the meeting was definitely not known.”

Reacher asked, “Was there a description?”

“No, other than American.”

“Man or woman?”

“Has to be a man. Pashtun elders don’t meet with women.”

“Black or white?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Army? Marines? Air Force?”

“We all look the same to them.”

“Rank? Age?”

“No details at all. An American officer. That’s all we knew.”

“There has to be something else.”

“I know what I know, Reacher. And I know what I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“What does that even mean? This is like you and that woman in Korea. No one is aware of forgetting. Except I’m not forgetting. I remember what they said.”

“How much back and forth was there?”

“There was what I just told you, about the rumor, and then there were my orders, which were to go chase it. And that was all. One signal out, and one signal back.”

“What about their last radio check? Did you see it?”

“It was the last thing I saw, before they came for me. It was pure routine. No progress. Nothing to see here, folks, so move right along. That kind of thing.”

“So it was in the original message. About the rumor. You’re going to have to try to remember it, word for word.”

“An unknown American officer was seen heading north to meet with a tribal elder. For an unspecified reason. That’s it, word for word. I already remember it.”

“What part of that is worth a hundred thousand dollars? And your future, and mine, and Moorcroft’s? And a bruise on a schoolgirl’s arm, in Berryville, Virginia?”

“I don’t know,” Turner said.

They went quiet after that. No more talking. No more discussion. Turner lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Reacher leaned on the window sill, running her summary through his head, fourteen words, a perfect sentence, with a subject and an object and a verb, and a satisfying rhythm, and a pleasing cadence: An unknown American officer was seen heading north to meet with a tribal elder. He went over and over it, and then he broke it into thirds, and stared it down, clause by clause.

An unknown American officer.

Was seen heading north.

To meet with a tribal elder.

Twenty-three syllables. Not a haiku. Or, a little less than a haiku-and-a-half.

Meaning?

Uncertain, but he sensed a tiny inconsistency between the start of the sentence and its finish, like a grain of sand in an otherwise perfect mechanism.

An unknown American.

A tribal elder.

Meaning?

He didn’t know.

He said, “I’ll get going now. We’ll come back to it tomorrow. It might creep up on you in the night. That can happen. Something to do with the way the brain reacts to sleep. Memory processing, or a portal to the subconscious, or something like that. I read an article about it once, in a magazine I found on a bus.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get going,” she said. “Stay here.”

Reacher paused a beat.

He said, “Really?”

“Do you want to?”

“Does the Pope sleep in the woods?”

“Then take your shirt off.”

“Really?”

“Take it off, Reacher.”

So he did. He hauled the thin stretchy cotton up over his shoulders, and then up over his head, and then he dropped it on the floor.

“Thank you,” she said.

And then he waited, like he always did, for her to count his scars.

“I was wrong,” she said. “You’re not just feral. You’re an actual animal.”

“We’re all animals,” he said. “That’s what makes things interesting.”

“How much do you work out?”

“I don’t,” he said. “It’s genetic.” Which it was. Puberty had brought him many things unbidden, including height and weight and an extreme mesomorph physique, with a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of NFL armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue. He had never messed with any of it. No diets. No weights. No gym time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, was his attitude.

“Pants now,” she said.

“I’m not wearing anything underneath.”

She smiled.

“Me either,” she said.

He undid his button. He dropped his zip. He pushed the canvas over his hips. He stepped out. One step closer to the bed.

He said, “Your turn now.”

She sat up.

She smiled.

She took her shirt off.

She was everything he thought she would be, and she was everything he had ever wanted.

They woke very late the next morning, warm, drowsy, deeply satiated, roused from sleep only by the sound of automobile engines in the lot below their window. They yawned, and stretched, and kissed, long and slow and gentle.

Turner said, “We wasted Billy Bob’s money. With the two-room thing. My fault entirely. I’m sorry.”

Reacher asked, “What changed your mind?”

“Lust, I suppose. Prison makes you think.”

“Seriously.”

“It was your T-shirt. I’ve never seen anything so thin. It was either very expensive or very cheap.”

“Seriously.”

“It was on my bucket list since we talked on the phone. I liked your voice. And I saw your photograph.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You mentioned the girl in Berryville. That’s what changed my mind. With the arm. That offended you. And you’ve done nothing but chip away at my problem. You’re ignoring your own, with the Big Dog. Which is just as serious. Therefore you still care for others. Which means you can’t really be feral. I imagine caring for others is the first thing to go. And you still know right from wrong. Which all means you’re OK. Which all means my future self is OK, too. It’s not going to be so bad.”

“You’re going to be a two-star general, if you want to be.”

“Only two stars?”

“More than that is like running for office. No fun at all.”

She didn’t answer. There was still motor noise in the lot. It sounded like multiple vehicles were driving around and around, in a big circle. Maybe three or four of them, one after the other. Up one side of the building, and down the other. An endless loop.

Turner asked, “What time is it?”

“Nine minutes before noon.”

“How do you know?”

“I always know what time it is.”

“What time is check out?”

Then they heard footsteps on the walkway outside, and an envelope slid under the door, and the footsteps reversed direction, and faded away.

“Check out time is noon, I guess,” Reacher said. “Because I assume that envelope is our copy of the invoice, paid in full.”

“That’s very formal.”

“They have a computer.”

The motor noise was still there. Reacher assumed the lizard part of his brain had already screened it for danger. Were they army vehicles? Cop cars? FBI? And apparently the lizard brain had made no comment. Correctly, in this case, because they were clearly civilian vehicles outside. All gasoline engines, including an out-of-tune V8 with a holed muffler, and at least one weak four-cylinder cheap-finance-special-offer kind of a thing, plus crashing suspensions and rattling panels. Not military or paramilitary sounds at all.

They got louder and faster.

“What is that?” Turner said.

“Take a look,” Reacher said.

She padded slender and naked to the window. She made a peephole in the drapes. She looked out, and waited, to catch the whole show.

“Four pick-up trucks,” she said. “Various ages, sizes, and states of repair, all of them with two people aboard. They’re circling the building, over and over again.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“What town are we in?”

“Petersburg, West Virginia.”

“Then maybe it’s an old West Virginia folk tradition. The rites of spring, or something. Like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Except they do it in pick-up trucks, in Petersburg.”

“But it looks kind of hostile. Like those movies you mentioned, where they say it’s too quiet. The parts where the Indians ride in a circle around the wagon with the busted wheel. Faster and faster.”

Reacher looked from her to the door.

“Wait,” he said.

He slid out of bed and picked up the envelope. The flap was not gummed down. Inside was a piece of paper. Nothing sinister. As expected. It was a tri-folded invoice showing a zero balance. Which was correct. Room eleven, thirty bucks, less thirty bucks cash upfront.

But.

At the bottom of the invoice was a cheery printed thank-you-for-staying-with-us line, and below that the motel owner’s name was printed like a signature, and below that there was a piece of completely gratuitous information.

“Shit,” Reacher said.

“What?”

He met her by the bed and showed her.

We surely appreciated you staying with us!

John Claughton, Owner.

There have been Claughtons in Grant County for three hundred years!

Chapter 36

Reacher said, “I guess they’re really serious about that Corvette. They must have gotten on some kind of a phone tree last night. A council of war. A call to action. Hampshire County Claughtons, and Grant County Claughtons, and Claughtons from other counties, too, I’m sure. Probably dozens of counties. Probably vast swathes of the entire Mountain State. And if Sleeping Beauty in the office last night was a son or a nephew, then he’s also a cousin. And now he’s a made man. Because he dimed us out.”

“That Corvette is more trouble than it’s worth. It was a bad choice.”

“But it was fun while it lasted.”

“Got any bright ideas?”

“We’ll have to reason with them.”

“Are you serious?”

“Spread love and understanding,” Reacher said. “Use force if necessary.”

“Who said that?”

“Leon Trotsky, I think.”

“He was stabbed to death with an ice pick. In Mexico.”

“That doesn’t invalidate his overall position. Not in and of itself.”

“What was his overall position?”

“Solid. He also said, if you can’t acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk. He was a man of sound instincts. In his private life, I mean. Apart from getting stabbed to death with an ice pick in Mexico, that is.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We should start by getting dressed, probably. Except that most of my clothes are in the other room.”

“My fault,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t make a whole big thing out of it. We’ll survive. You get dressed, and we’ll both go next door, and I’ll get dressed. Safe enough. We’ll only be out there a couple of seconds. But take a shower first. There’s no rush. They’ll wait. They won’t come in here. They won’t break down Cousin Asshole’s door. I’m sure that’s part of the Claughton family code.”

Turner matched Reacher’s habitual shower time exactly, dead on eleven minutes, from the first hand on the faucet to stepping out the door. Which in this instance involved a long pause, spent trying to time it right, to get to the next room unseen by a circling pick-up truck, and then deciding that with four of them each moving at close to thirty miles an hour, remaining unseen was not an available option. So they went for it, and for ten of the twenty feet they were ahead of the game, until a truck came around and Reacher heard a rush under its hood, as the driver reacted instinctively to the sudden appearance of his quarry, by stamping on the gas. Chasing it, Reacher supposed. Running it down. An evolutionary mechanism, like so many things. He unlocked his door and they spilled inside. He said, “Now they know for sure we’re here. Not that they didn’t know already. I’m sure Cyber Boy has been giving them chapter and verse.”

His room was undisturbed. His boots were under the window, with his socks nearby, and his underwear, and his second T-shirt on a chair, and his jacket on a hook. He said, “I should take a shower, too. If they keep on driving circles like that, they’ll be dizzy before we come out.”

*  *  *

Reacher was ready in eleven minutes. He sat on the bed and laced his boots, and he put his coat on and zipped it up. He said, “I’m happy to do this by myself, if you like.”

Turner said, “What about the troopers across the street? We can’t afford for them to come over.”

“I bet the troopers let the Claughtons do whatever they want. Because I bet the troopers are mostly Claughtons, too. But I’m sure we’ll do it all out of sight, anyway. That’s what usually happens.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Yes,” she said. “Not too many times.”

“They won’t all fight. There’ll be a congestion problem, apart from anything else. And we can curb their enthusiasm by putting the first few down hard. The key is not to spend too much time on any one individual. The minimum, ideally. Which would be one blow, and then move on to the next. Elbows are better than hands, and kicking is better than both.”

“OK.”

“But I’ll talk to them first. It’s not like they don’t have a slight point.”

They opened the door and stepped out to the walkway and the bright noon light, and as Reacher expected they saw the four trucks drawn up tight, nose-in at the bottom of the concrete staircase, like suckerfish. Eight guys were leaning against their doors and their fenders and their load beds, patiently, like they had all the time in the world, which they did, because there was no way down from the second-floor walkway other than the concrete staircase. Reacher recognized the three guys from the night before, on the hill road, small, medium, and large, the latter two looking more or less the same as they had before, and the small guy looking much better, like he was most of the way recovered from whatever binge had led to his accident. The other five were similar fellows, all hardscrabble types, the smallest of them a wiry guy all sinew and leathery skin, the largest somewhat bloated, by beer and fast food, probably. None of them was armed in any way. Reacher could see all sixteen hands, and all sixteen were empty. No guns, no knives, no wrenches, no chains.

Amateurs.

Reacher put his hands on the walkway’s rail, and he gazed out over the scene below, serenely, like a dictator in an old movie, ready to address a crowd.

He said, “We need to find a way of getting you guys home before you get hurt. You want to work with me on that?”

He had overheard a guy in a suit on a cell phone one time, who kept on asking You want to work with me on that? He guessed it was a technique taught at expensive seminars in dowdy hotel ballrooms. Presumably because it mandated a positive response. Because civilized people felt an obligation to work with one another, if that option was offered. No one ever said, No, I don’t.

But the guy from the half-ton did.

He said, “No one is here to work with you, boy. We’re here to kick your butt and take our car and our money back.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We can go down that road, if you like. But there’s no reason why all of you should go to the hospital. You ever heard of Gallup?”

“Who?”

“It’s a polling organization. Like at election time. They tell you this guy is going to get fifty-one percent of the vote, and this other guy is going to get forty-nine.”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“You know how they do that? They don’t call everyone in America. That would take too long. So they sample. They call a handful of people and scale up the scores.”

“So?”

“That’s what we should do. We should sample. One of us against one of you. We should let the result stand in for what would have happened if we’d all gone at it together. Like the Gallup organization does.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “If your guy wins, you get to trade your worst truck for the Corvette. And you get half of Billy Bob’s money.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “But if my side wins, we’ll trade the Corvette for your best truck. And we’ll keep all of Billy Bob’s money.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “That’s the best I can do, guys. This is America. We need wheels and money. I’m sure you understand that.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “My friend here is ready and willing. You got a preference? Would you prefer to fight a woman?”

The guy from the half-ton said, “No, that ain’t right.”

“Then you’re stuck with me. But I’ll sweeten the deal. You can increase the size of your sample. Me against two of you. Want to work with me on that?”

No answer.

“And I’ll fight with both hands behind my back.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Both hands behind your back?”

“For the terms we just agreed. And they’re great terms, guys. I mean, either way you get to keep the Corvette. I’m being reasonable here.”

“Two of us, and your hands behind your back?”

“I’d put a bag on my head if I had one.”

“OK, we’ll take a piece of that.”

“Terrific,” Reacher said. “Any of you got health insurance? Because that would be a good way to choose up sides.”

Then suddenly next to him Turner whispered, “I just remembered what I forgot. From last night. The thing in the original report.”

“Was it the tribal guy?” Reacher whispered back. An unknown American. A tribal elder. The grain of sand. The American was defined as unknown, but the tribal elder was not. “They told you his name?”

“Not his name, exactly. Their names are all too complicated to remember. We use reference numbers instead. Assigned as and when they first become known to U.S. authorities. And the guy’s number was in the report. Which means he’s already in the system. He’s known to somebody.”

“What was the number?”

“I don’t remember. A.M. something.”

“What does A.M. mean?”

“Afghan male.”

“That’s a start, I guess.”

Then from below the guy from the half-ton called up, “OK, we’re all set down here.”

Reacher glanced down. The small crowd had separated out, six and two. The two were the guy from the half-ton himself, and the bloated guy, full of McDonald’s and Miller High Life.

Turner said, “Can you really do this?”

Reacher said, “Only one way to find out,” and he started down the stairs.

Chapter 37

The six spectators hung back, and Reacher and the chosen two moved together, into clear space, a tight little triangle of three men in lock step, two walking backward and one forward, all of them watchful, vigilant, and suspicious. Beyond the parked trucks was an expanse of beaten dirt, about as wide as a city street. To the right was the back of the compound, where the Corvette was, behind the last building, and to the left the lot was open to Route 220, but the entrance was narrow, and there was nothing to see but the blacktop itself and a small stand of trees beyond it. The state police barracks was way to the west. No one on the beaten dirt could see it, and therefore the troopers could see no one on the beaten dirt.

Safe enough.

Good to go.

Normally against two dumb opponents Reacher would have cheated from the get-go. Hands behind his back? He would have planted two elbows into two jaws right after stepping off the last stair. But not with six replacements standing by. That would be inefficient. They would all pile in, outraged, up on some peculiar equivalent of a moral high horse, and thereby buzzed beyond their native capabilities. So Reacher let the triangle adjust and rotate and kick the ground until everyone was ready, and then he jammed his hands in his back pockets, with his palms against his ass.

“Play ball,” he said.

Whereupon he saw the two guys take up what he assumed were their combat stances, and then he saw them change radically. Tell a guy you’re going to fight with your hands behind your back, and he hears just that, and only that. He thinks, This guy is going to fight with his hands behind his back! And then he pictures the first few seconds in his mind, and the image is so weird it takes over his attention completely. No hands! An unprotected torso! Just like the heavy bag at the gym!

So guys in that situation see nothing but the upper body, the upper body, the upper body, and the head, and the face, like irresistible targets of opportunity, damage just waiting to be done, unanswerable shots just begging to be made, and their stances open wide, and their fists come up high, and their chins jut forward, and their eyes go narrow and wild with glee as they squint in at the gut or the ribs or the nose or wherever it is they plan to land their first joyous blow. They see nothing else at all.

Like the feet.

Reacher stepped forward and kicked the fat guy in the nuts, solid, right foot, as serious as punting a ball the length of the field, and the guy went down so fast and so hard it was like someone had bet him a million bucks he couldn’t make a hole in the dirt with his face. There was a noise like a bag hitting a floor, and the guy curled up tight and his blubber settled and went perfectly still.

Reacher stepped back.

“Poor choice,” he said. “Clearly that guy would have been better left on the bench. Now it’s just you and me.”

The guy from the half-ton had stepped back, too. Reacher watched his face. And saw all the guy’s previous assumptions being hastily revised. Inevitably. Yeah, feet, he was thinking. I forgot about that. Which pulled his center of gravity too low. Now it was all feet, feet, feet. Nothing but feet. The guy’s hands came down, almost to his pelvis, and he put one thigh in front of the other, and he hunched his shoulders so tight that overall he looked like a little kid with a stomach cramp.

Reacher said, “You can walk away now and we’ll call it done. Give us a truck, take the Corvette, and you’re out of here.”

The guy from the half-ton said, “No.”

“I’ll ask again,” Reacher said. “But I won’t ask three times.”

The guy said, “No.”

“Then bring it, my friend. Show me the good stuff. You got good stuff, right? Or is driving around in circles all you can do?”

Reacher knew what was coming. The guy was obviously right-handed. So it would be an inswinging right, starting low and never really getting high enough, like a sidearm pitcher, like a boxing glove fixed to a door, and the door slamming, with you in the doorway. That’s what it was going to be like. When it came. The guy was still shuffling around, still trying to find a launch pad.

And then he found one, and then it came. Like a glove on a door. What are you going to do? Most people are going to duck out of the way. But one six-year-old at the sci-fi movie isn’t. He’s going to turn sideways, and push forward hard, off bent knees, and he’s going to meet the door with his shoulder, nearer the hinge, about halfway across its width, maybe a little more, a solid aggressive shove where the momentum is lower, well inside the arc of the glove.

Which is what Reacher did with the guy from the half-ton. He twisted, and pushed off, and slammed the guy with his shoulder, right in the center of his chest, and the guy’s fist flailed all the way around Reacher’s back and came at him from the far side, limp, like the guy was trying to cop a feel in the picture house. After which the guy wobbled backward a long pace and got his balance by jabbing his hands out from his body, which left him stock still and wide open, like a starfish, which he seemed to realize immediately, because he glanced down in horror at Reacher’s moving feet.

Newsflash, my friend.

It’s not the feet.

It’s the head.

The feet were moving in a boxer’s shuffle, creating aim and momentum, and then the upper body was whipping forward, and the neck was snapping down, and the forehead was crunching into the bridge of the guy’s nose, and then snapping back up, job done, Reacher jerking upright, the guy from the half-ton staggering on rubber knees, half a step, and then the other half, and then a vertical collapse, weak and helpless, like a Victorian lady fainting into a crinoline.

Reacher looked up at Turner on the walkway.

He said, “Which truck do you think is the best?”

Chapter 38

The Claughton code of honor was a wonderful thing. That was clear. None of the six spectators interfered or intervened in any way. Either that, or they were worried about what Reacher might do to them, now that his hands were out of his pockets.

In the end Turner liked the fat guy’s truck the best. It was a V8, but not the one with the leaky muffler. It had the second-fullest tank of gas. It had good tires. It looked comfortable. She drove it up next to the hidden Corvette, and they transferred Billy Bob’s money from the Corvette’s load space to the truck’s glove compartment, which two receptacles were about the same size, and then they rumbled back past the sullen crowd, and Reacher tossed the Corvette key out his window. Then Turner hit the gas and made the left on 220, past the state troopers, past the cafe with the griddle, and onward to the crossroads in the center of town.

Thirty minutes later Petersburg was twenty miles behind them. They were heading west, on a small road on the edge of a national forest. The truck had turned out to be a Toyota, not new, but it ran well. It was as quiet as a library, and it had satellite navigation. It was so heavy it smoothed out the bumps in the road. It had pillowy leather seats and plenty of space inside. Turner looked tiny in it. But happy. She had something to work with. She had a whole scenario laid out.

She said, “I can see why these guys are worried. An A.M. number changes everything. The guy is known to us for a reason. Either his activities, or his opinions. And either thing is going to lead us somewhere.”

Reacher asked, “How do we access the database?”

“Change of plan. We’re going to Pittsburgh.”

“Is the database in Pittsburgh?”

“No, but there’s a big airport in Pittsburgh.”

“I was just in Pittsburgh.”

“At the airport?”

“On the road.”

“Variety is the spice of life,” she said.

Getting to Pittsburgh meant cutting northwest across the state, and hitting I-79 somewhere between Clarksburg and Morgantown. Then it was a straight shot, basically north. Safe enough, Reacher thought. The Toyota was as big as a house and weighed three tons, but it was effectively camouflaged. What’s the best place to hide a grain of sand? On a beach. And if the Toyota was a grain of sand, then West Virginia’s roads were a beach. Practically every vehicle in sight was a full-size pick-up truck. And Western Pennsylvania would be no different. A visitor from outer space would assume the viability of the United States depended entirely on the ability of the citizenry to carry eight-by-four sheets of board, safely and in vast quantities.

The late start to the day turned out to be a good thing. Or a feature, not a bug, as Turner might have put it. It meant they would be driving the highway in the dark. Better than driving it in the light. On the one hand highways got the heaviest policing, but on the other hand cops can’t see what they can’t see, and there was nothing less visible than a pair of headlights doing the legal limit on an Interstate highway at night.

Reacher said, “How are we going to get the exact A.M. number?”

Turner said, “We’re going to take a deep breath and go way out on a limb. We’re going to ask someone to get all snarled up in a criminal conspiracy, aiding and abetting.”

“Who?”

“Sergeant Leach, I hope. She’s pretty solid, and her heart is in the right place.”

“I agree,” Reacher said. “I liked her.”

“We have records and transcripts in the file room. All she has to do is go take a look at them.”

“And then what?”

“Then it gets harder. We’ll have a reference number, but not a name or a biography. And a sergeant can’t access that database. I’m the only one at Rock Creek who can. Morgan now, I suppose, but we can hardly ask him.”

Reacher said, “Leave that part to me.”

“You don’t have access.”

“But I know someone who does.”

“Who?”

“The Judge Advocate General.”

“You know him?”

“Not personally. But I know his place in the process. He’s forcing me to defend a bullshit charge. I’m entitled to cast the net wide in my own defense. I can ask for pretty much anything I want. Major Sullivan can handle it for me.”

“No, in that case my lawyer should. It’s much more relevant to my bullshit charge than yours.”

“Too dangerous for the guy. Moorcroft got beaten half to death for trying to get you out of jail. They’re never going to let your counsel get near that information.”

“Then it’s dangerous for Sullivan, too.”

“I don’t think they’ll be watching her yet. They’ll find out afterward for sure, but by then it’s too late. There’s no point closing the barn door after the horse is out.”

“Will she do it for you?”

“She’ll have to. She has a legal obligation.”

They drove on, quiet and comfortable, staying in West Virginia, tracking around the jagged dip where the end of Maryland’s panhandle juts south, then setting course for a town called Grafton. From there the Toyota’s electronics showed a road running northwest, which joined I-79 just south of Fairmont.

Turner said, “Were you worried?”

Reacher said, “About what?”

“Those eight guys.”

“Not very.”

“Then I guess that study from when you were six was right on the money.”

“Correct conclusion,” Reacher said. “Wrong reasoning.”

“How so?”

“They thought my brain was wired backward. They got all excited about my DNA. Maybe they were planning to breed a new race of warriors. You know what the Pentagon was like back then. But I was too young to take much of an interest. And they were wrong, anyway. When it comes to fear, my DNA is the same as anyone else’s. I trained myself, that’s all. To turn fear into aggression, automatically.”

“At the age of six?”

“No, at four and five. I told you on the phone. I figured it was a choice. Either I cower back, or I get in their faces.”

“I’ve never seen anyone fight with no hands.”

“Neither had they. And that was the point.”

They stopped for gas and a meal in a place called Macomber, and then they rolled on, ever westward, through Grafton, and then they took the right fork, through a village called McGee, and eventually they came to the I-79 entrance ramp, which the Toyota told them was about an hour south of the Pittsburgh International Airport, which meant they would arrive there at about eight in the evening. The sky was already dark. Night had already closed in, secure, and enveloping, and concealing.

Turner said, “Why do you like to live like this?”

Reacher said, “Because my brain is wired backward. That’s what they missed, all those years ago. They looked at the wrong part of me. I don’t like what normal people like. A little house with a chimney and a lawn and a picket fence? People love that stuff. They work all their lives, just to pay for it. They take thirty-year mortgages. And good for them. If they’re happy, I’m happy. But I’d rather hang myself.”

“Why?”

“I have a private theory. Involving DNA. Far too boring to talk about.”

“No, tell me.”

“Some other time.”

“Reacher, we slept together. I didn’t even get a cocktail or a movie. The least you can do is tell me your private theories.”

“Are you going to tell me one of yours?”

“I might. But you go first.”

“OK, think about America, a long time ago. The nineteenth century, really, beginning to end. The westward migration. The risks those people took. As if they were compelled.”

“They were,” Turner said. “By economics. They needed land and farms and jobs.”

“But it was more than that,” Reacher said. “For some of them, at least. Some of them never stopped. And a hundred years before that, think about the British. They went all over the world. They went on sea voyages that lasted five years.”

“Economics again. They wanted markets and raw materials.”

“But some of them couldn’t stop. And way back there were the Vikings. And the Polynesians, just the same. I think it’s in the DNA, literally. I think millions of years ago we were all living in small bands. Small groups of people. So there was a danger of inbreeding. So a gene evolved where every generation and every small band had at least one person who had to wander. That way the gene pools would get mixed up a little. Healthier all around.”

“And you’re that person?”

“I think ninety-nine of us grow up to love the campfire, and one grows up to hate it. Ninety-nine of us grow up to fear the howling wolf, and one grows up to envy it. And I’m that guy.”

“Compelled to spread his DNA worldwide. Purely for the good of the species.”

“That’s the fun part.”

“That’s probably not an argument to make at your paternity hearing.”

They left West Virginia and entered Pennsylvania, and five miles after the line they saw a billboard for a shopping mall. The billboard was lit up bright, so they figured the mall was still open. They pulled off and found a faded place anchored by a local department store. Turner headed to the women’s section with a wad of cash. Reacher followed after her, but she told him to go check the men’s section instead.

He said, “I don’t need anything.”

She said, “I think you do.”

“Like what?”

“A shirt,” she said. “And a V-neck sweater, maybe. At least.”

“If you get something you can give me my old shirt back.”

“I’m going to junk it. You need something better.”

“Why?”

“I want you to look nice.”

So he browsed on his own, and he found a shirt. Blue flannel, with white buttons. Fifteen dollars. And a V-neck sweater, cotton, a darker blue. Also fifteen dollars. He changed in the cubicle and trashed his twin T-shirts and checked the mirror. His pants looked OK. As did his coat. The new shirt and sweater looked neat under it. Nice? He wasn’t sure. Nicer than before, maybe, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.

Then twenty minutes later Turner came back, head-to-toe different. New black zip boots, new blue jeans, a tight crew-neck sweater, and a cotton warm-up jacket. Nothing in her hands. No shopping bags. She had trashed the old stuff, and she had bought no spares. She saw him noticing, and said, “Surprised?”

“A little,” he said.

“I figured we should stay nimble right now.”

“And always.”

They moved on to the smaller stores in the mall’s outlying regions and found an off-brand pharmacy. They bought folding toothbrushes and a small tube of toothpaste. Then they headed back to the truck.

The Pittsburgh International Airport was way far out from the city, and the Interstate led them straight to it. It was a big, spacious place, with a choice of hotels. Turner picked one and parked in its lot. They split Billy Bob’s remaining money nine different ways, and filled every pocket they had. Then they locked up and headed for the lobby. No luggage was no problem. Not at an airport hotel. Airport hotels were full of people with no luggage. Part of the joy of modern-day travel. Breakfast in New York, dinner in Paris, luggage in Istanbul. And so on.

“Your name, ma’am?” the clerk asked.

Turner said, “Helen Sullivan.”

“And sir?”

Reacher said, “John Temple.”

“May I see photo ID?”

Turner slid the two borrowed army IDs across the desk. The clerk glanced at them long enough to establish that, yes, they were photo IDs, and yes, they had the names Sullivan and Temple on them. He made no attempt to match the photographs with the customers. In Reacher’s experience few such people did. Possibly outside their responsibilities, or talents.

The guy said, “May I swipe a credit card?”

Reacher said, “We’re paying cash.”

Which again was no problem at an airport hotel. Credit cards and travelers’ checks go missing, too, because as bad as the baggage handling is, the pickpocketing is good. Reacher peeled off the room rate plus a hundred extra for incidentals, as requested, and the guy was happy to take it. In exchange he gave up two key cards and directions to the elevators.

The room was fine, if not radically different in principle than the cell in the Dyer guardhouse. But in addition to the basics it had a minibar refrigerator, and free bottles of water, and robes, and slippers, and chocolates on the pillows.

And a telephone, which Turner picked up and dialed.

Chapter 39

Reacher heard the purr of a ring tone. Turner had the handset trapped between her shoulder and her neck, and she mouthed, “Leach’s cell number.” Then her eyes changed focus as the call was answered. She said, “Sergeant, this is Susan Turner. My official advice to you as your commanding officer is to hang up immediately and report this call to Colonel Morgan. Are you going to do that?”

Reacher didn’t hear Leach’s answer, but it was obviously no, because the conversation continued. Turner said, “Thank you, sergeant. I need you to do two things for me. First, I need the A.M. number in the original signal from Weeks and Edwards. The transcript should be in the file room. Is Colonel Morgan still in the house?”

Reacher didn’t hear the answer, but it was obviously yes, because Turner said, “OK, don’t risk it now. I’ll call back every hour.” Then she stayed on the line, ready to ask about the second thing she wanted Leach to do for her, but Reacher didn’t hear what it was, because right then there was a knock at the door. He crossed the room and opened up, and standing there was a guy in a suit. He had a walkie-talkie in his hand, and a corporate button in his lapel. A hotel manager of some kind, Reacher thought.

The guy said, “I apologize, sir, but there’s been a mistake.”

Reacher said, “What kind of a mistake?”

“The incidentals deposit should have been fifty dollars, not a hundred. When paying in cash, I mean. For the phone and the minibar. If you order room service, we ask you to pay the wait staff direct.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

So the guy dipped in his pocket and came out with fifty dollars, two twenties and a ten, all fanned out, like Reacher had won a prize on a television show, and he said, “Again, I apologize for the overcharge.”

Reacher took the money and checked it. U.S. currency. Fifty bucks. He said, “No problem,” and the guy walked away. Reacher closed the door. Turner put the phone down and said, “What was that?”

“I guess the clerk at the desk hadn’t gotten a memo. We’re supposed to lodge fifty with them, not a hundred, because room service is all cash.”

“Whatever.”

“How was Sergeant Leach?”

“She’s a brave woman.”

“You know her number by heart? A sergeant you just met in a new command?”

“I know all their numbers by heart.”

“You’re a good commander.”

“Thank you.”

“What was the second thing you asked her for?”

“You’ll see,” Turner said. “I hope.”

Romeo dialed, but Juliet was slow to answer. Romeo rubbed his palm on the leather arm of the chair he was sitting in. His palm was dry, and the leather was smooth and lustrous, made that way by fifty years of suited elbows.

Then in his ear Juliet said, “Yes?”

Romeo said, “The names Sullivan and Temple just came up in an airport hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Fortunately for us its register is linked to Homeland Security. Being at an airport.”

“Is it them, do you think?”

“We’ll have descriptions soon. The hotel is sending a man up to take a look. But I think it has to be them. Because what are the odds? Those two names in combination? As far as we know, those are the only IDs they have.”

“But why the airport in Pittsburgh?”

“Doesn’t matter why. Where are our boys?”

“On their way to Los Angeles.”

“See how fast you can turn them around.”

The room was warm, so Reacher took off his miracle coat, and Turner took off her new jacket. She said, “You want to get room service?”

“Sure.”

“Before or after?”

“Before or after what?”

“Before or after we have sex again.”

Reacher smiled. In his experience the second time was always better. Still new, but a little less so. Still unfamiliar, but a little less so. Always better than the first time, and in Turner’s case the first time had been spectacular.

“After,” he said.

“Then take your clothes off,” she said.

“No, you first this time.”

“Why?”

“Because variety is the spice of life.”

She smiled. She took her new sweater off. She was wearing nothing under it. No bra. She didn’t really need one, and she wasn’t about to pretend. He liked her for that. He liked her for everything, basically. Not that he had a big problem with any kind of a topless woman in his room. But she was special. Mentally, and physically. Physically she was flawless. She was lean and strong, but she looked soft and tiny. One curve flowed into another, endlessly, seamlessly, like a single contour, like a Mobius strip, from the cleft of her back, to her shoulder, to her waist, to her hips, to her back, where it started all over again. Her skin was the color of honey. Her smile was wicked, and her laugh was infectious.

*  *  *

Romeo dialed, and this time Juliet picked up immediately. Romeo said, “It’s them. A tall, heavy, fair-haired man, and a younger dark-haired woman, much smaller. That’s what the hotel manager saw.”

“Any indication how long they intend to stay?”

“They paid cash for one night.”

“Did they book a wakeup call?”

“No. They can’t fly. Not with cash, and not with those IDs. Reacher looks nothing like Temple. Even the TSA would notice. I think they’re just holed up. Not a bad choice. Airport hotels are always anonymous, and Pittsburgh isn’t the center of the known universe. I’d like to know how they got so much money, though.”

“Our boys will get there as soon as they can.”

“The hotel manager said Turner was on the phone.”

“Who to?”

“I’m having it traced now.”

Afterward they lay spent and sweaty in tangled sheets, breathing hard, then breathing low. Turner got up on an elbow and stared at Reacher’s face, and ran her fingertips over his brow, slow and searching. She said, “It’s not even bruised.”

“All bone,” he said. “All the way through.”

Her touch moved down to his nose.

“This wasn’t, though,” she said. “Not all the way through. And recent, right?”

“Nebraska,” Reacher said. “Some guy, all worked up about something.”

Her fingertip traced the cuts, all healed up but not long ago, and the thickened bumps of bone, which now gave his nose a slight right turn. Still a surprise to him, but automatically normal to her. She traced around his ear, and his neck, and his chest. She put the tip of her pinkie in his bullet hole. It fit just right.

“A .38,” he said. “A weak load.”

“Lucky,” she said.

“I’m always lucky. Look at me now.”

Her touch moved on, to his waist. To the old shrapnel scar.

“Beirut,” she said. “I read your file. A Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Not bad, but still, I bet overall you got more metal in your gut than on your chest.”

“It was bone,” Reacher said. “Fragments of somebody’s head, who was standing nearer.”

“It said shrapnel in the file.”

“How many times did you read that file?”

“Over and over again.”

“You know where the word shrapnel comes from?”

“Where?”

“An eighteenth-century British guy named Henry Shrapnel.”

“Really?”

“He was a captain in their artillery for eight years. Then he invented an exploding shell, and they promoted him to major. The Duke of Wellington used the shell in the Peninsular Wars, and at the Battle of Waterloo.”

“Terrific.”

“But thanks for reading that file. It means a lot to me.”

“Why?”

“Because now I don’t have to spend a lot of time telling you a bunch of old stories. You know them already.”

“Telling each other old stories has a nice ring to it.”

“You haven’t told me any.”

“But I will,” she said. “I’ll tell you as many as you want to hear.”

Romeo dialed Juliet and said, “She was calling a pre-paid cell phone almost certainly purchased at a Wal-Mart. If it was paid for in cash, it’s untraceable. And I bet it was.”

Juliet said, “It was worth a try.”

“But you know, one big market for pre-paid cell phones is the military. Because some of them don’t make enough for a regular monthly contract. Which is shameful, frankly. And because some of them lead necessarily disorganized lives, and pre-paid suits them better.”

“That’s a leap.”

“The phone is showing up on three cell towers north and west of the Pentagon.”

“I see.”

“Rock Creek is north and west of the Pentagon.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I think she was calling the mothership. And someone aboard the mothership took her call.”

“Our boys are on their way to Pittsburgh.”

“Doesn’t matter. No one at Rock Creek can help her now.”

Chapter 40

Turner took a shower, but Reacher didn’t bother. He wrapped up in a robe and lounged in a chair, warm, deeply satisfied, as relaxed as he could ever remember being. Then Turner came out in the other robe and asked, “What time is it?”

“Four minutes,” Reacher said. “Until you’re due to call Leach again. Does she know I’m with you?”

Turner nodded. “I’m sure the whole world knows by now. And I told her, anyway.”

“Was she OK with that?”

“She’s a sergeant in the U.S. Army. I don’t think she’s a prude.”

“That’s not the point. If you beat your thing, then no one can touch her for helping you. She’ll come out smelling of roses. But if I don’t beat my thing, then she’s still in trouble for helping me. Or vice versa. And so on and so forth. She’s doubling her risk and halving her chances.”

“She didn’t object.”

“You should hang on to her.”

“I will,” Turner said. “If I ever get back.”

And then she picked up the phone and dialed.

*  *  *

A little more than fourteen miles away, a phone rang inside the FBI Field Office on East Carson Street, Pittsburgh, which was a little south and east of the downtown area. A duty agent answered, and found himself talking to the Hoover Building in D.C. He was told that the Homeland Security computers were showing the names Sullivan and Temple as guests in an airport hotel nearby. The duty agent spooled back through his bulletins and his BOLOs, and saw that the D.C. Metro cops and the army MPs were looking for two fugitives presumed to be traveling under those names.

The duty agent called his Special Agent in Charge, and asked, “Do you want me to spread the word to D.C. and the army?”

His SAC was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “No need to complicate things.”

No need to share the credit, the duty agent thought.

His SAC said, “Send one of our own to check it out.”

“Now?”

“Whenever you can. No big rush. We’ve got until the morning. I’m sure they aren’t going anywhere.”

Turner had the room phone trapped between her shoulder and her neck again, as before, and Reacher could hear the ring tone. Then he heard Leach answer. He couldn’t make out her words, but he could make out her mood. Which was not good. She launched into a long fast monologue, all of it reduced to a rapid plastic quack by the earpiece, but all of it frustrated and angry. Turner said, “Thanks anyway,” and hung up, looking very tired, and bitterly disappointed.

Reacher said, “What?”

“Take a guess.”

“There was no number after all.”

“The transcript is missing. Someone took it out of the file room.”

“Morgan?”

“Has to be. No one else would or could.”

“So either he’s one of them or he’s following orders blindly.”

Turner nodded. “They’re cleaning house. And they’re covering all the bases. Because they’re better than I thought they were. And therefore I’m screwed. There’s no way out for me now. Not without that A.M. number.”

“Isn’t it still in a computer somewhere?”

“We don’t really trust computers. The feeling is we might as well send stuff straight to The New York Times. Or China.”

“So your physical transcript is your only record?”

She nodded again. “It’s the only one I’m aware of. Maybe Bagram keeps a copy. Why? You thinking of asking JAG to issue a subpoena? Good luck with that.”

“Could it be misfiled?”

“No, and Leach checked everywhere anyway. She’s not dumb.”

“There has to be another way around this.”

“Wake me up if you think of it,” she said. “Because right now I’m all done thinking. I have to get some sleep.”

She dropped her robe to the floor and padded naked around the room, straightening the drapes, turning out the lights, and then she climbed under the covers, and rolled over, and sighed a long, sad, exhausted sigh, and then she lay still. Reacher watched her for a moment, and then he went back to his chair, and sat a spell in the dark. He pictured the Rock Creek file room in his mind, upstairs, first on the left, room 201. He pictured the duty captain downstairs in 103, taking the long-distance call from Weeks and Edwards, writing it up, hand-carrying the sheet of precious paper up the old stone stairs, showing it to Turner, getting her reply, transmitting it, copying it out, and heading upstairs again to file both the call and the response in the right drawer, correctly, sequentially, back to back.

And then he pictured Morgan coming out of his office, just two rooms away, and glancing up and down the corridor. The work of a moment. Two pages, burned or torn up or shredded. Or folded into a pocket, and handed over at a later time, to persons unknown, in exchange for tight nods of appreciation, and implied promises of future consideration.

There has to be another way around this. Reacher might have remembered the number. He liked numbers. This one might have had some intrinsic appeal. Prime, or nearly, or with interesting factors. But he hadn’t seen the number. But nothing was impossible. No system was ever perfect, no security was ever a hundred percent foolproof, and there were always unforeseen wrinkles.

There has to be another way around this.

But Reacher couldn’t think of one. Not right then. He stood up, and yawned, and stretched, and then he dropped his robe on top of Turner’s, and he slid into bed next to her. She was already deeply asleep. Breathing slow. Warm, and soft. Her circuit breakers had tripped. She had shut down, overwhelmed. Like that old movie: I’ll think about that tomorrow. He stared up at the ceiling, dim and gray above him. Then he closed his eyes, and breathed in, and breathed out, and he fell asleep.

He slept well, for five solid hours.

And then he woke up, at four o’clock in the morning.

Because someone was hammering on the door.

Chapter 41

Turner woke up, too, immediately, but Reacher put his hand on her shoulder. He whispered, “I’ll go.” He blinked once and slid out of bed and found his robe on the floor. He put it on as he walked. The hammering didn’t quit. It was not a polite or an apologetic sound. Not a hotel-in-the-dead-of-night sound. It was full-on urgent and demanding. Boom, boom. Arrogant, and intrusive. It was a no-argument sound. It was the sound of law enforcement. Or the sound of someone pretending to be law enforcement.

Reacher didn’t use the spy hole. He didn’t like spy holes. He never had. Too easy for an assailant to wait until the lens darkened, and then to fire a handgun through the pre-drilled hole. No aim required. Better to ignore the spy hole altogether, and fling the door open real quick and punch them in the throat. Or not. Depending on who they were, and how many they were.

Behind him Turner was out of bed and in her robe, too. He pointed her toward the bathroom. Nothing to gain by presenting a single unified target. And she had nowhere else to go. There was only one way out of the room, which was the door. They were on a high floor, and the windows didn’t open anyway. Legal issues, presumably, because of inquisitive children, and because it was an airport hotel, with noise and jet fumes from early in the morning until late at night.

Turner stepped into the bathroom, and Reacher put his hand on the handle. He took a breath. MPs or federal agents would have weapons drawn. That was for sure. But they wouldn’t shoot. Not right away. They had too much training. And too many protocols. And too much potential paperwork. But the four guys from the dented car might shoot right away. They had training, but no protocols and no paperwork.

So, best bet, open the door but stay behind it. Irresistible. A door that sags open seemingly all by itself just begs for a craned neck and a quick glance inside. And in turn a craned neck and a quick glance inside just begs for a straight right to the temple. Then you kick the door shut again instantly, and you’ve got a hostage on the floor on one side of the threshold, with his pals left outside on the other. You’ve got the basis for a negotiation.

Reacher turned the handle. Downward, ten degrees. Twenty. Thirty. No reaction. Forty, fifty, sixty. No reaction. So he continued all the way to ninety, fast, and he gave the handle a sharp tug, to pull the door through maybe two-thirds of its travel, and then he made a fist and cocked his arm and waited.

For a long time.

Clearly the door had been trapped open by a boot applied from the other side, while decisions were being considered. Which process was taking considerable time.

Close to a whole minute passed.

Then an object came sailing in.

Reacher didn’t look at it. Didn’t follow it with his conscious vision. He wasn’t born yesterday. But the brief flash he caught in the corner of his eye said envelope. A brown letter-size envelope, sealed with a metal closure, he thought, like something out of an office. Lightly loaded, with no thickness to it. And the sound it made when it fluttered to the carpet backed up the first impressions. Papery but stiff, with a faint resonant crackle, where it hit edge-on, and tiny sliding sounds, as if it carried a small number of separate items inside, each one of them thin and light.

Reacher waited.

Then a head came around the door.

With a face.

Sergeant Leach’s face.

Leach was in her ACUs. She looked very tired. She stepped into the room, and Turner stepped out of the bathroom, and Reacher closed the door. Turner saw the envelope on the carpet and said, “Is it all there?”

Leach said, “Yes.”

“I thought you were going to overnight it.”

“I think you’re going to need it sooner than FedEx can get it to you.”

“So you drove out all this way?”

“Well, I didn’t walk or fly.”

“How long did it take?”

“About four hours.”

“Thank you, sergeant.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What time are you due on post in the morning?”

“Soon enough that I really should leave right about now.”

“But?”

“I’m in a position I don’t want to be in.”

“What position?”

“I’m going to have to criticize a fellow team member, and a senior officer.”

“Is that one person or two?”

“One person, ma’am.”

“Me?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Morgan?”

“No, ma’am. Someone else. But you’re the CO and I’m not a snitch.”

“Then tell Reacher. He’s no one’s CO.”

Leach paused a beat, and weighed up the artifice. And came out in favor, apparently, because she turned to Reacher and said, “Sir, I have a longstanding concern about the duty captain.”

Reacher said, “How longstanding?”

“Permanent.”

“Why haven’t you done anything about it?”

“I don’t know how. He’s a captain and I’m a sergeant.”

“What’s the issue?”

“He’s a doodler. He draws and scribbles all the time he’s on the phone.”

Reacher nodded.

“I’ve seen the results,” he said. “On his desk. An old legal pad.”

“Do you know why he does it?”

“Because he’s bored.”

“But sometimes he’s not bored. When big news comes through. He changes. Suddenly he’s happy.”

“No law against that.”

“But the pen is still in his hand. He changes, and the drawings change, too. Sometimes they’re not even drawings. Sometimes he jots things down. Key words.”

Reacher said nothing.

Leach said, “Don’t you see? He deals with classified information, which is supposed to exist in physical form in one place only, which is the Rock Creek file room. For the information or parts of the information to exist in physical form elsewhere is dead against regulations.”

Turner said, “Oh please, tell me.”

Reacher said, “He wrote the number down?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leach said. “Yes, sir. He wrote the number down.”

Leach pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. It was a page from the yellow legal pad Reacher had seen. It was curled at the top, wide and generous, from several days of being rolled over. It was practically covered in black ink, from a ballpoint pen. There were shapes and whorls and boxes and machines and spirals, with occasional plaintext times and names and words, some of them heavily underlined, some of them boxed in and shaded over almost to the point of illegibility.

Leach put her fingertip on the first legible word, which was a little less than a third of the way down the page. The word was Kandahar. A proper noun. The name of a place. It had a vivid arrow sketched next to it. The arrow was pointing away from the word, emphatically. Leach said, “This is the last signal before the one that’s missing. This is Weeks and Edwards moving out of Kandahar, going back to Bagram on standby, as ordered. That all is still in the file room, exactly where it should be.”

Then she jumped her fingertip to the bottom third of the page, where two words stood out, separated by a hyphen: Hood - Days. The H of Hood was enhanced after the fact, with baroque curlicues. A man on the phone, bored. Leach said, “This is the next signal after the one that’s missing. It’s still in the file room, too, immediately after the Kandahar thing. This is our guys checking in from Fort Hood in Texas, reporting that they expect to be all wrapped up in a matter of days.”

Then she moved her hand upward again and bracketed her fingers over the middle third of the page. She said, “So this part here is what corresponds to the gap in the record.”

The middle third of the page was a mass of bleak doodles, with shapes and whorls repeated endlessly, and boxes and mazes and spirals. But buried right in the center of it all were the letters A and M, followed by a four-digit number. The whole thing had been first scrawled, and then gone over carefully, with more precise lines, squared up, and sharpened, and underlined, and then abandoned.

A.M. 3435.

Turner smiled and said, “He’s technically in the wrong, sergeant, but we’re going to overlook it this one time.”

A.M. 3435.

Which was a number that Reacher might have remembered pretty well, because it was mildly engaging, in the sense that 3 and 4 and 3 and 5, if raised to the powers of 3 and 4 and 3 and 5 respectively, would collectively add up to exactly 3435. Which was slightly interesting. Such numbers had been much discussed by a guy called Joseph Madachy, who once upon a time had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a magazine called Journal of Recreational Mathematics. Reacher had read a stack of back issues, as a kid, in the library on a Marine base in the Pacific. He said, “Sergeant, what’s my best way of contacting Major Sullivan at JAG?”

“Directly, sir?”

“Person to person.”

“When, sir?”

“Right now.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Right this minute.”

Leach pulled another piece of paper from her pocket. Smaller. A sheet from a scratch pad, torn in half. She said, “This is Major Sullivan’s personal cell. I’m sure right now it’s on her night table.”

“How did you know I would need it?”

“I figured that was how you were going to have to do it. Defense motions get pretty wide latitude. But permission to speak freely?”

“Of course.”

Leach took a second slip of paper from her pocket. Another sheet from a scratch pad, torn in half, just the same. She said, “This is Captain Edmonds’ personal cell. Your other lawyer. I think she’s a better prospect. She’s more likely to pursue it with vigor. She likes to see the right thing done.”

“Even after I busted myself out of jail?”

“I think so.”

“So she’s an idealist?”

“Get it while you can. It won’t last. It didn’t with Major Sullivan.”

Reacher asked, “Is the FBI involved yet?”

Leach said, “They’ve been notified.”

“Who is organizing the army’s efforts?”

“The 75th MP. A team led by Warrant Officer Espin. Who you met. He was the one who brought you to Dyer. People say he’s taking it personally. He claims you abused his good nature. He claims he did you a favor, and thereby inadvertently set the whole thing in motion.”

“What did he do for me?”

“He kept you at Dyer. Detective Podolski wanted to take you downtown. Espin said no. And then on top of that, you asked him to go get the MP duty captain right away, which he did, which he’s counting as an another favor exploited.”

“The duty captain would have come anyway.”

“But not so quickly. And your whole plan depended on getting everything done before late afternoon. So you had to start early. Which Espin feels he accidentally facilitated.”

“Is he getting anywhere?”

“Not so far. But not through lack of trying.”

“Can you get a message to him?”

“Probably.”

“Tell him to get over himself. Ask him what he would have done, in our situation.”

“I will, sir. If I can.”

“What’s your name, sergeant?”

“Sir, it’s Leach.”

“No, your first name.”

“Sir, it’s Chris.”

“As in Christine or Christina or something?”

“Just Chris, sir. That’s what’s on my birth certificate.”

“Well, Chris, if I was still CO of the 110th, I’d move heaven and earth to keep you there. That unit has had its share of great NCOs, and you’re right up there with the best of them.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No, thank you, sergeant.”

Leach left after that, in a hurry, facing a four-hour drive back, followed by a full day at the office. Reacher looked at Turner and said, “You must be a hell of a good commander, to inspire loyalty like that.”

“No more than you were,” she said. “You had Frances Neagley.”

“You been reading her file, too?”

“I’ve been reading all the files. All the operational histories, too. I wanted to know the 110th inside out.”

“Like I said, you’re a great commander.” Reacher flattened the page from the legal pad against the top of the hotel desk, and he smoothed the torn half of the scratch pad paper next to it. Then he picked up the phone and dialed Captain Tracy Edmonds’ private cell number.

Chapter 42

There was a lot of ring tone, but Reacher expected that.

Cell networks can take eight seconds to route a call. And very few sleepers jump up like the movies. Most people wake up slow, and then blink and fumble.

But Edmonds answered eventually. She said, “Hello?” Her tone was a little anxious, and the sound of her voice was a little plummy, as if her tongue was thick, or her mouth was full.

Reacher said, “Captain Edmonds?”

“Who is this?”

“Your client, Jack Reacher. Major, United States Army. Recently recommissioned. Currently maneuvering with the 110th MP. Are you alone?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“We’re about to have a privileged conversation, counselor. We have legal matters to discuss.”

“You’re damn right we do.”

“Calm down, captain.”

“You broke out of jail.”

“That’s not allowed anymore?”

“We have to talk.”

“We are talking.”

“Really talk, I mean.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone. So what?”

“Got a pen?”

She paused a beat. “Now I have.”

“Paper?”

“Got it.”

“OK, pay attention. To better mount an adequate defense, I need hard copies of everything anyone has on a citizen of Afghanistan known to us only as A.M. 3435.”

“That’s probably secret.”

“I’m entitled to due process. Courts take that shit very seriously.”

“Whatever, it’s a big ask.”

“Fair’s fair. They have their bullshit with the affidavit.”

“Reacher, I’m representing you in a paternity suit. Not the Juan Rodriguez thing. That’s Major Sullivan. And to get hard copies of military intelligence out of Afghanistan would be huge even in a criminal case. You won’t get it in a paternity suit. I mean, why would you?”

Reacher said, “You told me the Uniform Code of Military Justice still lists adultery as a crime. What’s the penalty?”

“Potentially substantial.”

“So it’s not just a paternity suit. It’s a criminal case, too.”

“That’s tenuous.”

“They can’t have it both ways, counselor. They mentioned adultery as a crime. Either that means something or it doesn’t.”

“Reacher, we have to talk.”

“Is this where you tell me coming in from the cold would be the best thing to do?”

“It would be.”

“Perhaps. But I’ve chosen Plan B anyway. So I need that information.”

“But how does it relate? Afghanistan hadn’t even started when you were in Korea. Or when you saw the Big Dog.”

Reacher said nothing.

Edmonds said, “Oh.”

“Correct,” Reacher said. “You’re pretty quick, for a lawyer. This is about Major Turner, not me. Or maybe it’s about Major Turner and me, because what we’ve got here is someone laying down a challenge to two COs of the 110th Special Unit. Which means there are going to be winners and losers, and the smart money says you need to be with the winners, because being on the right side of history brings bounty beyond imagining, in this man’s army.”

“Are you going to be the winners?”

“Count on it. We’re going to beat them like rented mules. And we need to, captain. They killed two of our own in Afghanistan. And beat one of your colleagues half to death.”

Edmonds said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Turner was still in her robe, and she was showing no signs of going back to bed. Reacher asked her, “What was in the envelope?”

“The other thing I asked Sergeant Leach for.”

“Evidently. But what was it?”

“We’re going to Los Angeles next.”

“Are we?”

She nodded. “You need to take care of the Samantha situation.”

“I’ll get to it.”

“Worst case, we’re going to fail here, and they’re going to lock us up and throw away the key. I can’t let that happen to you. Not before you’ve met your daughter. You’d think about nothing else, for the rest of your life. So you can put my problem on the back burner for a spell, and you can move yours to the front.”

“When did you make this plan?”

“Some time ago. As I was entitled to. You’re in my unit, apparently. Therefore I’m your CO. We’re going to Los Angeles next.”

“What was in the envelope?”

She answered by spilling the contents on the bed.

Two credit cards.

And two driver’s licenses.

She paired them up and kept one of each for herself, and she passed the others to Reacher. A New York State driver’s license, and a Visa credit card. The license was made out to a guy named Michael Dennis Kehoe, forty-five years old, at a Queens address. Male, blue eyes, height six-six. He was an organ donor. The picture showed a square face and a wide neck. The Visa card was in the same name, Michael D. Kehoe.

Reacher said, “Are they real?”

“Mine are.”

“And mine aren’t?”

“They’re kind of real. They’re from the undercover locker.”

Reacher nodded. The 110th sent people undercover all the time. They needed documents. The government supplied them, authentic in every way, except for never having been issued to an actual person.

He asked, “Where are yours from?”

“A friend of Leach’s. She said she knew someone who looked like me.”

“So what’s your name now?”

Turner answered by flipping the license into his lap, like a card trick. Illinois, Margaret Vega, five-seven, brown eyes, thirty-one years old. Not an organ donor. The photograph showed a light-skinned Hispanic woman. At first glance a little like Turner, but not a whole lot.

Reacher flipped the license back.

“And Ms. Vega was happy to give up her DL?” he said. “Just like that? And her credit card, too?”

“We have to return them. And we have to pay back any charges we make. Obviously I had to promise. But Billy Bob’s money can take care of that.”

“That’s not the point. Ms. Vega is way out on a limb now.”

“I guess Leach can be persuasive.”

“Only because she thinks you’re worth it.”

“She had no friends who looked like you. Not even close. Which is why we had to use the locker. Probably Mr. Kehoe was the target in a training scenario. He looks like the guy with the chainsaw in a slasher movie.”

“Should work fine, then. When are we leaving?”

“As soon as possible,” Turner said. “We’ll catch an early flight.”

*  *  *

They showered and dressed, and then packing was nothing more than jamming their new toothbrushes in their pockets, and putting on their coats. They left the drapes closed and the lights off, and Reacher hung the Do Not Disturb card on the outside handle, and then they hustled down the corridor to the elevator. It was just after five in the morning, and Turner figured the long-hauls to the West Coast would start around six. Not an infinite choice of carriers out of Pittsburgh International, but there would be at least several. Worst case, they could connect through San Francisco, or Phoenix, or Las Vegas.

The elevator reached the lobby and they stepped out to a deserted scene. There was no one at the desk. No one anywhere. So Reacher dropped their key cards in the trash, and they headed for the door, where they got straight into a hesitant after-you-no-after-you thing with a lone guy who had chosen that exact moment to come in from the dark sidewalk outside. He was a compact man in a navy suit and a white shirt and a navy tie. He had a fresh haircut, short and conservative, and a pink face, recently shaved. Eventually they worked out a three-way pecking order. The guy held the door for Turner, who stepped out, and then Reacher hung back, and the guy stepped in, and finally Reacher stepped out.

There were no taxis at the curb. But there was a hotel shuttle bus, with its engine running and its door open. No driver at the wheel. Inside, maybe, taking a leak.

Ten yards farther on a Crown Vic was parked in the fire lane. Dark blue, clean and shiny, with antennas on the trunk lid. Reacher turned and looked back at the hotel door. Deep in the lobby the guy who had come in was waiting for service at the desk. Navy suit. White shirt. Navy tie. Short hair, pink face, clean shave.

Reacher said, “FBI.”

Turner said, “They were tracking those names. Sullivan and Temple.”

“He walked right past us. How long till his brain kicks in?”

“He’s FBI, so it won’t be instantaneous.”

“We could head back to the truck and drive ourselves.”

“No, the truck should stay here. We need to keep breaking the chain. Get on the bus. The driver will be back in a minute. Got to be. He left it running.”

Reacher said, “We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“We’ll be invisible,” Turner said. “Just folks on a bus.”

Reacher glanced around. The guy was still at the counter. No one behind it. The shuttle bus was all done up in chrome and a corporate style. It had black windows. Like a movie star’s limousine. A touch of glamour, for the everyday traveler.

Black windows. Just folks on a bus. Predator and prey, motion and stillness. An old evolutionary legacy. Reacher said, “OK, we’ll get on the bus.”

They climbed aboard, and the suspension dipped under their weight, and they shuffled along a low narrow aisle and took seats on the far side, halfway to the back.

And then they sat still and waited.

Not a great feeling.

The view out was not great either, because of the distance and the window tint and the multiple layers of glass, but Reacher could still see the guy. He was getting impatient. He had turned around to face the empty lobby, and he had stepped a yard away from the desk. Claiming the wider space, expressing his resentment, but staying close enough to the help to remain definitively first in line. Not that he had any competition. Nor would he for an hour or so. Red-eye arrivals would start about six, too.

Then the guy suddenly moved forward, a long pace, eager, as if he was about to greet someone. Or accost someone. On the right of the frame a second figure stepped into view. A man, in a black uniform with a short jacket. A bellboy, maybe. The FBI guy asked a question, accompanied by a sweeping gesture with his arm, like where the hell is everybody, and the guy in the short jacket paused, uncomfortable, as if obliged to venture outside his accustomed territory, and then he squeezed behind the counter and rapped on a door, with no result, so he opened the door a crack and called through, inquiringly, and fifteen seconds later a young woman came out, running her fingers through her hair. The FBI guy turned back to the desk, and the young woman moved up face to face with him, and the guy in the short black jacket walked out of the lobby.

Not a bellboy.

The bus driver.

He climbed aboard, and saw that he had customers, and he glanced back at the lobby, to see if he was about to get more, and he must have concluded not, because he asked, “Domestic or international?”

Turner said, “Domestic.”

So the guy dumped himself down in his seat, and unspooled a long seat belt, and clipped it tight, and the door closed with a wheezing sigh, and the guy put the bus in gear.

And then he waited, because he had to, because an arriving car was maneuvering around the parked Crown Vic, and thereby blocking his exit.

It was the car with the dented doors.

Chapter 43

The car with the dented doors squeezed around the parked Crown Vic, and then it slowed to a walk and prepared to pull up just short of the hotel entrance. The bus moved off into the vacated space, grinding slow and heavy, and it passed the car close by, flank to flank. Reacher got up off his seat and stared out the window. All four guys were in the car. The two he had met on the first night, and the third guy, and the big guy with the tiny ears. The whole crew was there.

“Leave it,” Turner said.

“We need to take them off the table.”

“But not here, and not now. Later. They’re on the back burner, remember?”

“No time like the present.”

“In a hotel lobby? In front of an FBI agent?”

Reacher craned around and saw the four guys climb out of the car. They glanced left and right, fast and fluid, and then they headed straight inside, single file, a crisp linear stream, one, two, three, four, like men with an urgent purpose. Turner said, “Stand easy, major. Another time, another place. We’re going to LA.”

The bus picked up speed and left the hotel behind. Reacher watched for as long as there was something to see, and then he turned back. He said, “Tell me what you know about how the FBI tracked our names.”

“The modern world,” Turner said. “Homeland Security. It’s an information-dependent operation. All kinds of things are linked together. Airlines for sure, and no doubt airport hotels, too. In which case it would be easy enough to set up an alert in case two specific names appeared in the same place at the same time.”

“Would the Bureau share that information?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Then we need to revisit what we said about the top boys here. They’re not very senior staff officers. They’re very, very senior staff officers. Don’t you think? To be inside Homeland Security’s databases, independently, in real time?”

“Maybe not-so-real time. The FBI beat them here, after all.”

“From their Pittsburgh field office. Our guys had further to come. They must have set out much earlier. They must have known before the FBI did. They had an alert of their own.”

The hotel bus let them out at the terminal, and they ducked inside to check the departure boards. Next out were two flights within a minute of each other, U.S. Airways to Long Beach, and American Airlines to Orange County.

“Got a preference?” Turner asked.

“Long Beach,” Reacher said. “We can rent a car. Straight shot up the 710. Then the 101. The mother’s affidavit was out of a law office in North Hollywood. I’m guessing that’s where she is.”

“How are you going to find her?”

“I’ll start in her lawyer’s parking lot. That’s one place she won’t get moved on.”

“Her lawyer’s office will be staked out, surely. By elements of the 75th and the FBI for sure. And our four unofficial friends will be there about six hours after they realize we’re not in the hotel.”

“So we’ll have to be very careful.”

The U.S. Airways ticket counter was opening up. A cheerful woman of about fifty spent a minute booting computers and sorting labels and papers and pens, and then she turned toward them with a smile. Turner asked about seats to Long Beach, on the morning flight. The woman clicked away on her keyboard, flat-fingered because of her nails, and said she didn’t have many. But two was no problem. So first Turner and then Reacher handed over driver’s licenses and credit cards, absently and casually, as if they had just pulled them at random from a full deck of documentation. The woman lined them up in front of her, in a neat physical analogue of a window seat and an aisle, and she typed the names, moving her head back and forth as she glanced between the licenses and the screen, and then she swiped the cards, and she hunted and pecked and clicked some more, and then a machine kicked in and printed boarding cards. The woman swept them up, and collated them with the right licenses and the right credit cards, and she said, “Ms. Vega, Mr. Kehoe, here you go,” and she handed them over, like a little ceremony.

They thanked her and walked away, and Reacher said, “This is why you made me buy a sweater, right?”

“You’re going to meet your daughter,” Turner said. “And first impressions count.”

Juliet called Romeo, because there was a division of labor, and some of the responsibilities were his, and he said, all excited, “Our boys are in the corridor, right now, directly outside their room.”

Romeo said, “Corridor?”

“Hotel corridor. Hotel room. Our guys say the room is dark, it is quiet, there is a Do Not Disturb notice on the door, and they have not yet checked out.”

“So they’re in the room?”

“They have to be.”

“Then why are our boys in the corridor?”

“There’s a problem.”

Romeo said, “What kind of a problem?”

“The FBI is there.”

“Where?”

“With our boys. Literally. In the corridor. Just kind of standing around. One guy. He can’t do anything because he thinks he has four civilian witnesses. We can’t do anything because we know we have one FBI witness. We’re all just standing around.”

“In the corridor?”

“Right outside their room.”

“Do we know they’re in there? For certain?”

“Where else would they be?”

“Are they both in there?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I did some cutting and pasting.”

“Of what?”

“Data. After that call to the mothership. It threw me a little. I thought some precautions might be appropriate. Among the things I put on the alert list was the 110th’s undercover locker. For no good reason. Just for the sake of being able to feel I was doing everything I could. But I just got something back. One of the identities just bought a ticket on U.S. Airways, from Pittsburgh to Long Beach, in California.”

“For when?”

“First flight this morning. About half an hour from now.”

“Only one of them?”

“None of the other identities is showing up as active.”

“And which one is?”

“Michael Dennis Kehoe. The man, in other words. They’ve split up. I guess they had to. All the woman has is the Helen Sullivan ID, and by now they must realize no one named Helen Sullivan is getting on an airplane anytime soon. Not without extensive trials and tribulations beforehand. Which Turner can’t afford. Therefore Reacher is heading to California alone. Which makes sense. He needs to be there. She doesn’t.”

Juliet said, “Maybe Turner is in the room on her own.”

“Logical. If Reacher is on his way to California.”

“Perfectly logical. If he is.”

“But not if he isn’t. We need to find out, right now. We need to cut a deal with the FBI. We won’t rat them out, and they won’t rat us out. Or whatever. But we need to get our boys through that door, right now. Even if the FBI gets in as well.”

Turner was the CO, and she wanted to get airside as soon as possible. She thought airport security would be some kind of a barrier. Against the four guys, at least. If they got as far as the airport, that was. Which they might, if they talked to the bus driver. Two passengers? Yes, sir, domestic. But airport security was useless against the FBI or the army. Those guys went to the head of the line, and then in through the side door.

So, not really a barrier. More of a filter.

They had nothing made of metal in their pockets, except small change, which they pooled in a scuffed black bowl. They stepped through the hoop one after the other, just two coatless, shoeless figures among a building crowd. They put their coats back on and laced up their boots and split the change and moved off in search of coffee.

Juliet called Romeo and said, “Our boys got a look inside the hotel room. They claimed they were worried about their friend, and the FBI guy was all over that immediately. It made opening the door look like a public service.”

Romeo said, “And?”

“There was no one in the room.”

“They’re in the airport terminal.”

“Both of them?”

“One of the women passengers on the same U.S. Airways flight used a credit card that comes back to a bank in Arlington County. A woman named Margaret Vega.”

Juliet said, “And?”

“She was a very late booking. Within the last hour.”

“And?”

“She was one of only two passengers who booked at that time. The other being Michael Dennis Kehoe. Their cards were charged within the same minute.”

“Where did Turner get a credit card in the name of Margaret Vega?”

“I don’t know. Yet.”

“Not the undercover locker?”

“No. A real person, possibly. From the mothership, perhaps. I’ll check.”

“When does the flight leave?”

“They’ll start boarding in about fifteen minutes.”

“OK, I’m sending our boys straight to the terminal. They can check landside, at least.”

“I’m ahead of you,” Romeo said. “They can go airside. They can even get on the plane, if they need to. I got them two seats and two standby seats. Which was difficult, by the way. It’s shaping up to be a full flight. Tell them the boarding cards will be at the ticket counter.”

The gate area was a wide, spacious lounge, carpeted, painted in soothing pastel colors, but it was far from restful, because it was packed with more than a hundred people. Clearly Pittsburgh to Long Beach was a popular route. Reacher wasn’t sure why. Although he had read that Pittsburgh was becoming an in-demand moviemaking town. Because of money. Financial incentives were being offered, and production companies were responding. All kinds of movies had already been shot there, and more were planned. So maybe these were show folk, heading home. The Long Beach airport was no less convenient for Hollywood and Beverly Hills than LAX. Both were the same freeway slog. But whatever, the crowd was large and unruly. And as always Reacher tried to hang back beyond its edge, but Turner was the CO, and she wanted to get on the plane as early as possible. As if the narrow fuselage was sovereign territory, like an embassy on foreign soil, not the same as the city that surrounded it. They had a high row number, which meant their seats would be toward the back, which meant they would board before most of the rest, directly after the halt and the lame, and the families with small children, and the first class cabin, and the frequent fliers. So Turner was all in favor of pushing up close to the desk. She had a small person’s deftness. She slid through gaps denied to Reacher’s clumsier frame. But he followed her doggedly, and he got to the spot she had staked out about a minute after her.

And then more or less immediately the boarding process began. A woman opened the official door and used a microphone on a curly cord, and the crowd surged, and wheelchairs pushed through, and old guys with walking canes limped after them, and then couples carrying children and fantastically complicated seating equipment went next, and then sleek men and women in suits rushed on, and then Reacher was carried along in the flow, down the jet way, through cold air and kerosene stink, and finally into the cabin. He hunched and ducked and made his way down the aisle to his seat, which was a narrow thing with adequate legroom only if he folded himself into it bolt upright. Next to him Turner looked happier. Hers was the body type the seats had been designed for.

They clipped their belts and waited.

Romeo called Juliet and said, “I’m watching the U.S. Airways system right now.”

Juliet said, “And?”

“Bad news, I’m afraid. Kehoe and Vega have already boarded. And we just lost both our standby seats. Two of their frequent fliers showed up and preempted them. They get priority.”

“Can’t you call U.S. Airways and tell them they don’t?”

“I could, but I don’t think I will. The airline would make a charge. That’s how it works now. Apparently goodwill has monetary value, at least when Uncle Sam is paying the bill. And a charge would generate paperwork, which we can’t afford. So we’ll have to live with it. We’ll get two of them on, at least.”

“Which two?”

“It seems to have been done alphabetically.”

“Not ideal,” Juliet said.

“Eyes and ears are all we need at this point. A holding operation. I got the other two on American to Orange County. They’ll arrive around the same time. They can link up in California.”

*  *  *

Reacher stared ahead, down the long aluminum tube, and watched people as they shuffled in, and turned right, and shuffled some more, and peered at their seat numbers, and jammed large suitcases and bulky coats into the overhead lockers. Luggage, baggage, burdens. Not his thing. Some of the approaching faces were happy, but most were glum. He remembered taking flights as a kid, long ago, at the military’s expense, on long-forgotten carriers like Braniff and Eastern and Pan American, when jet travel was rare and exotic and people dressed up for it and glowed with excitement and novelty. Suits and ties, and summer dresses, and sometimes even gloves. China plates, and milk jugs, and silver silverware.

Then he saw the guy he had punched in the side of the head.

Chapter 44

There was no mistaking the guy. Reacher remembered him well. At the motel, on the first night, the car showing up, not yet dented, the guy climbing out of the passenger seat and tracking around the hood and starting in with all the verbal chit-chat.

We’re not worried about you, old man.

Reacher remembered the long left hook, and the feel of bone, and the sideways snap of the guy’s head. And then he had seen him again, from a distance in the motel lot the next day, and for a third time just minutes ago, getting out of the car at the hotel.

It was the guy, no question.

And right behind him was the guy Reacher thought of as the third man. Not the driver from the first night, and not the big guy with the small ears, but the makeweight from the second day. Both guys peered ahead, left and right, close and far, until they located their quarry, and then they looked away fast and acted innocent. Reacher watched the space behind them, but the next passenger was a woman, as was the next after that, who was also the last. The steward came on the PA and said he was about to close the cabin door and everyone should turn off their portable electronic equipment. The two guys kept on shuffling up the aisle, and then they dumped themselves down, in separate lone seats, one on the left and one on the right, three rows and four rows ahead, respectively.

Turner said, “This is crazy.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Reacher said. “How long is this flight?”

Which question was answered immediately, not by Turner, but by the steward on the PA again, with another of his standard announcements. He said the computer was showing a flight time of five hours and forty minutes, because of a headwind.

Reacher said, “This back burner thing isn’t working. It isn’t working at all. Because they’re not letting it work. I mean, what exactly is this? Now they’re coming on the plane with us? Why? What are they going to do? In front of a hundred other people in a small metal tube?”

“Could just be close-order surveillance.”

“Do they have eyes in the back of their heads?”

“Then it’s a warning shot of some kind. We’re supposed to feel intimidated.”

“Yeah, now I’m really scared. They sent Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.”

“And where are the other two?”

“Full flight,” Reacher said. “Maybe two seats was all they could get.”

“In which case why not send the big guy?”

“The question is not why or why not. It’s how. How are they doing this? They started from stone cold and now they’re five minutes behind us. And as far as they know we have no ID. Except Sullivan and Temple, and they have to figure we know no one named Sullivan or Temple is getting on a plane today, not without some serious scrutiny. So how did they know we were heading for departures? Why would we, without ID? It was much more likely we’d head for the parking lot and get back on the road.”

“The bus driver told them.”

“Too quick. He’s not even back yet. It’s them. There’s no information they can’t get. They’re in this airline’s operating system, right now. They saw us buy the tickets, and they watched us board. Which means they’re in the 110th’s undercover locker, too. Because how else would the name Kehoe mean anything to them? They’re watching everything we do. Every move we make. We’re in a goldfish bowl.”

“In which case they must have matched Vega to Kehoe by now. Because we booked at the same time, and we’re sitting together. So they know I’m Vega. Which means the real Vega is in bad trouble. As is Leach, too, for brokering the loan. And for delivering the stuff. We really need to warn them both.”

“We can’t warn either one of them. We can’t do anything. Not for the next five hours and forty minutes.”

The plane taxied, earthbound and clumsy, ahead of an American Airlines departure, which Reacher figured was the Orange County flight, due to leave a minute later. The sky was still dark. There was no sign of the morning sun.

Then came the runway, and the plane turned and paused, as if to compose itself, and then its engines roared and it accelerated on its way, rumbling over the concrete sections, relentlessly, and Reacher watched out the window and saw the ground fall away below and the broad aluminum wing dip and flex as it took the weight. The lights of Pittsburgh twinkled in the distance, carved into curves and headlands by broad black rivers.

Three and four rows in front the two guys were staring studiously ahead. Both had middle seats. The least desirable, and therefore the last to sell. On the left of the cabin was the guy from the first night. He had a younger woman next to him at the window, and an older woman next to him on the aisle. On the right of the cabin was the makeweight from the second day. He had an old white-haired guy next to him at the window, one of the early boarders, Reacher thought, with a walking stick. On the aisle was a woman in a suit, who would have looked more at home in first class. Maybe she was on a business trip. Maybe her employer had cut back on benefits.

Turner said, “I wish we knew who they were.”

“They’re on a plane this time,” Reacher said. “Not in a car. Which implies two major certainties. This time they have IDs in their pockets. And no weapons.”

“How far up the chain of command would you have to go before you found someone with unfettered twenty-four-seven access to every national security system this country has?”

“I assume everything changed after 9/11. I was gone four years before that. But I would guess an O8 in Intelligence might have that capability. Although not unfettered. They’re a paranoid bunch. They have all kinds of checks and balances. To do a little private snooping on an airline’s passenger manifest at five o’clock in the morning would be something else entirely.”

“So who?”

“Think about it the other way around. How far down the chain of command would you have to go? The president could do it. Or the National Security Advisor. Or anyone who gets in the Situation Room on a regular basis. The Chiefs of Staff, in other words. Except this is a round-the-clock responsibility, and it’s been running for more than a dozen years now. So there must be a separate desk. A Deputy Chief of Staff. Some kind of a go-to guy, tasked to be on top of everything, all the time. He could dip in and out any old time he wanted to. No checks and balances for him, because he’s the guy the checks and balances get reported to.”

“So we’re dealing with a Deputy Chief of Staff?”

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“Conspiring with someone in Afghanistan?”

“Those guys all know each other. They’re very social. Probably classmates.”

“So who are these guys on the plane? They don’t look like Pentagon staffers.”

Reacher didn’t answer. He just watched and waited.

And then ten minutes later his patience was rewarded.

The woman in the fancy business suit got up and headed for the bathroom.

Chapter 45

Reacher waited for the woman in the suit to pass by, and then he unclipped his belt and got up and headed forward, one row, two, three, four. He dropped into the woman’s vacated seat, and the makeweight from the second day reared back against the white-haired old guy with the cane, who was fast asleep with his head against the window.

Reacher said, “Let me see your ID.”

Which the guy didn’t. He just sat there, completely disconcerted, pressed up against his quarry like a sardine in a can. He was wearing some kind of nylon cargo pants, and a black sweatshirt under a black pea coat. He had a Hamilton watch on his left wrist, which meant he was probably right-handed. How long do women take in the bathroom? In Reacher’s experience they were not lightning fast. Four minutes, possibly.

Which was about three more than he needed.

He leaned forward, like he was going to head-butt the seat in front of him, and he rocked to his right, and he leaned back again, all one continuous fluid motion, so the guy ended up half trapped behind his right shoulder and his upper arm, and he reached over with his right hand and grabbed the guy’s right wrist, and he dragged the guy’s hand over toward him, twisting the wrist so the knuckles came first, with the palm facing away, and with his left hand he grabbed the guy’s right index finger, and he said, “Now you’ve got a choice. You can take it like a man, or you can scream like a little girl.”

And he broke the guy’s finger, by wrenching it down ninety degrees and snapping the first knuckle, and then he popped the second knuckle with the ball of his thumb. The guy jumped and squirmed and gasped in shock and pain, but he didn’t scream. Not like a little girl. Not with a hundred other people there.

Next Reacher broke his middle finger, in the same way, in the same two places, and then the guy started trying to get his trapped left arm free, which Reacher allowed, but only so he could swap hands and attend to the same two fingers on the other side.

Then he said, “ID?”

The guy didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was too busy whimpering and grimacing and staring down at his ruined hands. His fingers were all over the place, sticking out at odd angles, bent into L shapes. Reacher patted him down, at close quarters, pushing him and pulling him to get at all his pockets. Nothing exciting in most of them, but he felt a characteristic lump in the right hip pocket. A tri-fold wallet, for sure. He pulled it out and stood up. Across the aisle and one row back the other guy was half on his feet. The woman in the suit was out of the bathroom and coming toward him. She hung back to let him sit, and then she continued on her way.

Reacher dumped the wallet in Turner’s lap and re-clipped his belt. She said, “What did you do to him?”

“He won’t be pulling any triggers for a week or two. Or hitting anything. Or driving. Or buttoning his pants. He’s off the table. Prevention is better than cure. Get your retaliation in first.”

Turner didn’t answer.

“I know,” Reacher said. “Feral. What you see is what you get.”

“No, it was good work.”

“How did it look?”

“He was hopping around a bit. I knew something was happening.”

“What’s in the wallet?”

Turner opened it up. It was a fat old item, made of decent leather that had molded itself around its contents. Which were numerous. The back part had cash in two sections, a healthy quarter-inch wad of twenties, but nothing larger, and then a thinner selection of ones and tens and fives. The front part had three pockets sized to carry credit cards. On the top of the deck in the center was a North Carolina driver’s license, with the guy’s face in the picture, and the name Peter Paul Lozano. Behind the DL was a stack of credit cards, Visa and MasterCard and Discover and American Express, with more in the slots on the left and the right, all of them current, in-date and unexpired, all of them in the name of Peter P. Lozano.

There was no military ID.

“Is he a civilian?” Turner said. “Or sanitized?”

“I’m guessing sanitized,” Reacher said. “But Captain Edmonds can tell us. I’ll give her the name. She’s working with HRC.”

“Are you going to get the other guy’s name?”

“Two would triangulate better than one.”

“How are you going to do it?”

“I’ll think of something.”

Four rows ahead the guy named Lozano was hunched over and rocking back and forth in his seat, as if he had his hands clamped up under his arms to manage the pain. A stewardess came by, and he glanced at her, as if he wanted to speak, but then he looked away again. Because what was he going to say? A bad man came by and hurt me? Like a little girl? Like a snitch in the principal’s office? Clearly not his style. Not in front of a hundred other people.

“Military,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think? Boot camp taught him to keep his mouth shut.”

Then the other guy squeezed out past the old lady next to him. The guy from the first night, with all the verbal chit-chat. He stepped forward a row and bent down to talk to his buddy. It turned into a regular little conference. There was discussion, there was exhibition of injuries, there were hostile glances over the shoulder. The woman in the business suit looked away, her face blank and frozen.

Turner said, “It won’t work twice. Forewarned is forearmed. The guy is getting a damn play by play.”

“And hoping his seatmate has a strong bladder.”

“Do you really think Edmonds will get us the file on 3435?”

“She either will or she won’t. It’s about fifty-fifty. Like the toss of a coin.”

“And either way is OK with you, right?”

“I’d prefer to have the file.”

“But you’re not going to be heartbroken if you don’t get it. Because just asking for it was enough. Asking for it was like telling them we’re one step away. Like our breath on their necks.”

“I’d prefer to have the file,” Reacher said again.

“Like these guys on the plane. You’re sending them back walking wounded. You’re sending a message, aren’t you?”

Reacher said nothing.

Reacher kept one eye on the guy from the first night, three rows ahead on the left. The woman next to him at the window seemed to be asleep. From behind she looked young, and she was dressed like a homeless person. Definitely no summer frock, and no gloves. But she was clean. A movie person, probably. Junior, to be flying coach. Not an A-lister. Maybe an intern, or an assistant to an assistant. Perhaps she had been scouting locations, or organizing office space. The older woman on the aisle looked like a grandma. Maybe she was heading out to visit her grandkids. Maybe her ancestors had worked for Carnegie and Frick, in their brutal mills, and then when the city hit hard times maybe her children had joined the rustbelt diaspora and headed for sunnier climes. Maybe they were living the dream, in the warmth of southern California.

Reacher waited.

And in the end it was the guy himself who proved to have a bladder issue. Too much morning coffee, perhaps. Or orange juice. Or water. But whichever, the guy stood up and squeezed out past grandma, and oriented himself in the aisle, and locked eyes with Reacher, and took hesitant steps toward the back of the plane, watching Reacher all the way, one row, two, three, and then as he came alongside he turned and walked backward the rest of the way, his eyes still on Reacher’s, exaggerated, as if to say no way you’re getting a jump on me, and he fumbled behind himself for the door, and he backed ass-first into the bathroom, his eyes still locked on Reacher’s until the last possible second, and then the door closed and the bolt shot home.

How long do men take in the bathroom?

Not as long as women, generally.

Reacher unclipped his belt and stood up.

Chapter 46

Reacher waited outside the bathroom, patiently, like a regular passenger, like the next man in line. The door was a standard bi-fold contraption, hinged on the right, cream in color, and a little grimy. No surprises. Then he heard the sudden muted suck of the flush, and then there was a pause, for hand washing, he hoped, and then the red Occupied changed to a green Vacant, and the center of the door pulled back, and its left-hand edge slid along its track, and as soon as it was three-quarters of the way home Reacher wheeled around and slammed the heel of his left hand through the widening gap and caught the guy in the chest and smashed him back into the bulkhead behind the toilet.

Reacher crammed in after him and closed the door again with a jerk of his hips. The space was tiny. Barely big enough for Reacher on his own. He was jammed hard up against the guy, chest to chest, face to face. He turned half left, so he was hip to hip, so he wouldn’t get kneed in the balls, and he jammed his right forearm horizontally into the guy’s throat, to pin him against the back wall, and the guy started wriggling and struggling, but uselessly, because he couldn’t move more than an inch or two. No swing, no momentum. Reacher leaned in hard and turned his own left hand backward and caught the guy’s right wrist, and rotated it like a doorknob, which meant that as the twist in Reacher’s arm unwound the exact same twist went into the other guy’s arm, more and more, harder and harder, relentlessly, until the guy really needed to do a pirouette or a cartwheel to relieve the agonizing pressure, which obviously he couldn’t, due to the complete lack of space. Reacher kept it going until the point of the guy’s elbow was facing directly toward him, and then he raised the guy’s arm, up and up, still twisting, until it was horizontal, an inch from the side wall, and then he took his forearm out of the guy’s throat and smashed his own elbow down through the guy’s elbow, shattering it, the guy’s arm suddenly folding the way no arm is designed to fold.

The guy screamed, which Reacher hoped would be muffled by the door, or lost in the sound of rushing air, and then the guy collapsed into a sitting position on the commode, and then Reacher broke his other arm, the same way, twist, twist, smash, and then he hauled him upright again by the collar and checked his pockets, an inch away, up close and personal, the guy still struggling, his thighs going like he was riding an imaginary bicycle, but generating no force at all because of the extreme proximity, Reacher feeling nothing more than a ripple.

The guy’s wallet was in his right hip pocket, the same as the previous guy. Reacher took it and turned to his left and jabbed the guy with his elbow, hard, in the center of his chest, and the guy went back down on the toilet, and Reacher extricated himself from the tangle of flopping limbs, and he shouldered out the door. He closed it behind him as much as he could, and then he walked the short distance back to his seat.

The second wallet was loaded more or less the same as the first. A healthy wad of twenties, and some leathery small bills the guy had gotten in change, and a deck of credit cards, and a North Carolina driver’s license with the guy’s picture and the name Ronald David Baldacci.

There was no military ID.

Reacher said, “If one is sanitized, they all are.”

“Or they’re all civilians.”

“Suppose they aren’t.”

“Then they’re lifers at Fort Bragg. To have North Carolina DLs.”

“Who’s at Fort Bragg these days?”

“Nearly forty thousand people. More than two hundred and fifty square miles. It was a city all its own at the last census. There’s a lot of airborne, including the 82nd. And Special Forces, and psy-ops, and the Kennedy Special Warfare Center, and the 16th MP, and a lot of sustainment and logistics.”

“A lot of people in and out of Afghanistan, in other words.”

“Including the logistics people. They brought stuff in, and now they’re taking it out again. Or not.”

“You still think this is a repeat of the Big Dog scam?”

“Except bigger and better. And I don’t think they’re selling it here at home. I think they’re selling it to the native population.”

“We’ll find out,” Reacher said. “We’re one step away, after all.”

“Back burner again,” Turner said. “You took care of what you had to. Now you’re going to meet your daughter.”

About five minutes after that the guy came out of the bathroom, pale, sweating, seemingly smaller, much diminished, only his lower body moving, his upper body held rigid, like a robot only half working. He stumbled down the aisle and squeezed past the grandma and dumped himself back in his seat.

Reacher said, “He should ask the stewardess for an aspirin.”

Then the flight reverted to normal, and became like most flights Reacher had taken. No food was served. Not in coach. There was stuff to buy, mostly small chemical pellets artfully disguised as various natural products, but neither Reacher nor Turner bought any. They figured they would eat in California. Which would make them hungry, but Reacher didn’t mind being hungry. He believed hunger kept him sharp. He believed it stimulated creativity in the brain. Another old evolutionary legacy. If you’re hungry, you work out a smarter way to get the next woolly mammoth, today, not tomorrow.

He figured he was owed about three hours’ sleep, after being woken by Leach at four in the morning, so he closed his eyes. He wasn’t worried about the two guys. What were they going to do? They could spit peanuts at him, he guessed, but that was about all. Beside him he felt Turner arrive at the same conclusion. She rested her head on his shoulder. He slept bolt upright, waking with a start every time his head tipped forward.

Romeo called Juliet and said, “We have a serious problem.”

Juliet said, “In what way?”

“Turner must have remembered the number after all. Reacher’s lawyer just made an application to see the full bio on A.M. 3435.”

“Why Reacher’s lawyer?”

“They’re trying to slip it by. They assume we’re watching her lawyer, but maybe not his. It’s not even his main lawyer. It’s the newbie doing his paternity case.”

“Then we can get it thrown out, surely. It’s got nothing to do with his paternity case.”

“It’s an application, like any other. The process is what it is. We’d have to show good reason. And we can’t, because there’s nothing demonstrably special about the guy. Except to us. We can’t afford that kind of attention. Everyone would think we’d lost our minds. They’d say, who the hell is redacting that guy? He’s just a run-of-the-mill peasant.”

“So how long have we got?”

“A day, perhaps.”

“Did you cancel their credit cards?”

“I canceled his. Easy enough, because it was the army’s to start with. But I can’t touch hers without a paper trail. Margaret Vega is a real person.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to finish it in California. They’ll be on the ground soon, four against two.”

Reacher and Turner slept most of three hours, and woke up with the plane on approach into Long Beach, and with the steward on the PA again, talking about seat backs and tray tables and upright positions and portable electronic equipment. None of which interested Reacher, because he hadn’t moved his seat back, hadn’t used his tray table, and he had no electronic equipment, portable or otherwise. Out the window he could see the brown desert hills. He liked California. He figured he could live there, if he lived anywhere. It was warm, and no one knew him. He could have a dog. They could have a dog. He pictured Turner, maybe in a back yard somewhere, pruning a rose or planting a tree.

She said, “We shouldn’t use Hertz or Avis. To rent the car, I mean. Or any of the big franchises. Just in case their computers are hooked up with the government.”

He said, “You’re getting paranoid in your old age.”

“Doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.”

He smiled.

She said, “What would that leave us with?”

“Local guys. Rent-a-Wrecks, or four-year-old Lamborghinis.”

“Will they take cash?”

“We have credit cards.”

“They might have canceled them. They seem able to do that kind of thing.”

“They can’t have. Not yet. They don’t even know we’ve got them.”

“They saw us buy these flights.”

“They saw Vega and Kehoe buy these flights. But we’re not Vega and Kehoe anymore. From now on we’re Lozano and Baldacci, at least when it comes to credit cards. We’ll use theirs. How’s that for a message?”

“They can track credit cards.”

“I know.”

“You want them to find us, don’t you?”

“Easier than us finding them. But I agree with you about Hertz and Avis. We don’t want to make it too easy. We need to give them a sense of achievement.”

“First we have to make it through the airport. Which could be full of MPs. Because Warrant Officer Espin isn’t the dumbest bunny ever born. He must know where you’re going. And he’s got the personnel. He could have a guy in every airport within a hundred miles of LA. All day and all night. And the FBI could be there, too. Their Pittsburgh people don’t need to be geniuses to figure out where we were going.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open.”

The glide path was long and gentle, and the landing was smooth, and the inward taxi felt fast and nimble. Then a tiny bell sounded and a light went out and about ninety-seven people leapt to their feet. Reacher stayed in his seat, because it was no less comfortable than standing under a six-foot ceiling. And the guys three and four rows ahead stayed sitting, too, because there was no way known to science for an adult male human to get out of an airline seat in coach without using leverage from his hands and his arms.

The plane emptied from the front, with people flowing out in layers, like sand in an hourglass. They grabbed their suitcases and their coats from where they had stowed them, and they funneled away, and the next row slid out to replace them, and the next. The old white-haired guy with the cane and the young movie intern had to struggle out past their immobile center-seat neighbors. Then the next rows cleared, and the two guys were left sitting all alone in a sea of emptied space. Reacher took his turn down the aisle, head bent and hunched, and he paused three rows ahead and hauled the left-hand guy to his feet by the front of his shirt. It seemed the least he could do. He paused again a row later and did the same with the right-hand guy. Then he moved on, down the aisle, through the galley, out the door, through warm air and kerosene stink, and into the Long Beach airport.

Chapter 47

Airports are full of solo loiterers, which makes spotting surveillance almost impossible. Because everyone is a suspect. A guy sitting around doing nothing behind a rumpled newspaper? Rare on the street, but pretty much compulsory in the airport. There could have been fifty undercover MPs and fifty FBI agents inside the first thirty feet alone.

But no one showed any interest in them. No one looked at them, no one approached them, and no one followed them. So they walked away fast, straight to the taxi line, and they got in the back of a beat-up sedan, and they asked the driver for off-airport car rental, but not Hertz, Avis, Enterprise, or anyone else with an illuminated sign. The driver didn’t ask supplementary questions. Didn’t seek detailed specifications. He just took off, like he knew where he was going. His brother-in-law’s, probably, or whichever guy gave him the best finder’s fee.

In which case the brother-in-law or the top-dollar hustler must have been named Al, and he must have been a cool guy, because the cab pulled up in front of a vacant lot filled with about twenty parked cars and backed by a wooden shed, which had Cool Al’s Auto Rental painted on its roof, inexpertly, by hand, in thin paint, with a wide brush.

“Perfect,” Reacher said.

Peter Paul Lozano took care of the cab fare, via a bill peeled off his quarter-inch stack of twenties, and then Reacher and Turner wandered through the lot. Clearly Cool Al had positioned his business in what he must have figured was a sweet spot halfway between the Rent-a-Wreck idea and the four-year-old Lamborghini approach. The lot was filled with vehicles that had started out prestigious, and had probably stayed prestigious for a good long time, but which were now well into a long and sad decline. There were Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers and BMWs and Jaguars, all of them last-but-three body styles, all of them scuffed and dented and a little dull.

“Will they work?” Turner asked.

“Don’t know,” Reacher said. “I’m the last guy to ask about cars. Let’s see what Cool Al has to say on the subject.”

Which was, translated and paraphrased, “They’ve lasted this long, so why should they stop now?” Which struck Reacher as both logical and optimistic. Cool Al himself was a guy of about sixty or sixty-five, with a full head of gray hair, and a big belly, and a yellow shirt. He was at a desk that took up half the space in his shed, which was hot, and which smelled of dusty wood and creosote.

He said, “Go on, pick a car, any car.”

“A Range Rover,” Turner said. “I’ve never been in one before.”

“You’ll love it.”

“I hope so.”

Reacher did the deal, at the giant desk, with licenses from Vega and Baldacci, and a made-up cell number, and one of Baldacci’s credit cards, and a scrawled signature that could have been pretty much anything. In return Cool Al handed over a key and waved a wide arm toward the right side of the lot and said, “The black one.”

The black one turned out to be sun-hazed down to a steely dark purple, and its window tints were lifting and bubbling, and its seats were cracked and sagging. It was from the 1990s, Turner thought. No longer a premium vehicle. But it started, and it turned right, and it rolled down the road. Turner said, “It’s lasted this long. Why should it stop now?”

*  *  *

It stopped a mile later, but on command, for breakfast at the first diner they saw, which was a family-run place on Long Beach Boulevard. It had all the good stuff, including a long-delayed omelet for Turner. She called Sergeant Leach from the payphone and told her to take care. Reacher watched the parking lot, and saw no one. No pursuit, no surveillance, no interest at all. So they got back on the road and headed north and west, looking for a 710 on-ramp, Reacher driving for the first time. The stately old boat suited him well. Its window tints were reassuring. They were nearly opaque. And the mechanical parts seemed up to their task. The car floated along, as if the road surface was just a vague rumor, somewhere far, far away.

Turner said, “What are you going to do if you see them?”

Reacher said, “Who?”

“Your daughter and her mother.”

“You mean what am I going to say?”

“No, I mean from a distance, the very first time you lay eyes on them.”

“I don’t see how I would recognize them.”

“Suppose you did.”

“Then I’m going to look for the trap.”

“Correct,” Turner said. “They’re bait, until proven otherwise. The MPs and the FBI will be there for sure. It’s a known destination. Every single person you see could be undercover. So proceed accordingly.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Between here and North Hollywood the danger doubles with every mile. We’re heading straight for the center of the inferno.”

“Is this a pre-action briefing?”

“I’m your CO. I’m obliged to give one.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“You might recognize them, you know.”

“Daughters don’t necessarily resemble their fathers.”

“I meant you might remember the mother.”

*  *  *

Juliet called Romeo, because some responsibilities were his, and he said, “I have some very bad news.”

Romeo said, “Does it relate in any way to Baldacci using his credit card at a car rental called Cool Al’s?”

“What kind of Al’s?”

“It’s a West Coast thing. What happened?”

“Reacher got to them on the plane. He put them out of action and stole their wallets.”

“On the plane?”

“He broke Lozano’s fingers and Baldacci’s arms and no one noticed.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Apparently it is. One against two, on an airplane, with a hundred witnesses. It’s a blatant humiliation. And now he’s renting cars on our dime? Who does this guy think he is?”

Reacher thought he was a bad driver. At first he had meant it as a safety-first subterfuge, rightly assuming it would remind him to concentrate, but then he had learned it was true. His spatial awareness and his reaction times were all based on a human scale, not a highway scale. They were up close and personal. Animal, not machine. Maybe Turner was right. Maybe he was feral. Not that he was a terrible driver. Just worse than the average driver. But not worse than the average I-710 driver, on that particular morning, on the section known as the Long Beach Freeway. People were eating, and drinking, and shaving, and brushing their hair, and applying makeup, and filing nails, and filing papers, and reading, and texting, and surfing, and holding long conversations on cell phones, some of which were ending in screams, and some of which were ending in tears. In the midst of it all Reacher tried to hold his speed and his line, while watching the drift and the wobble up ahead, and calculating which way he should swerve if he had to.

He said, “We should stop and call Captain Edmonds. I want to know if she can get what we need.”

“Keep it on the back burner,” Turner said.

“I would if I could. But they won’t let us. Their other two guys might have been on that flight to Orange County. Or else on the next Long Beach departure. Either way they’re only an hour or two behind us.”

“Knowing what Edmonds can or can’t get won’t help us with them.”

“It’s tactically crucial,” Reacher said. “Like in the field manual. We have to assess whether they need to retain unimpaired cognitive function for future interrogation.”

“That’s not in the field manual.”

“Maybe they cleaned it up.”

“You mean if Edmonds has failed, you’ll keep the two guys alive so you can beat it out of them?”

“I wouldn’t beat it out of them. I would ask them nicely, like I did with the Big Dog. But if I know I don’t need to ask them anything, then I can let nature take its course beforehand.”

“What course will that be?”

“The future’s not ours to see. But something uncomplicated, probably.”

“Reacher, you’re on the way to see your daughter.”

“And I’d like to live long enough to get there. We can’t do a front burner and a back burner thing. Not on this. We have to do two front burners. Ma’am. Respectfully submitted.”

Turner said, “OK. But we’ll buy a phone, so we don’t have to keep on stopping. In fact we’ll buy two phones. One each. Pre-paid, for cash. And a street map.”

Which they did about a mile later, by coming off the freeway into a dense retail strip anchored by a chain pharmacy, which carried pre-paid cell phones, and maps, and whose registers accepted cash along with every other form of payment known to man. They put the map in the car, and stored each other’s numbers in their phones, and then Reacher leaned on the Range Rover’s warm flank and dialed Edmonds’ cell.

She said, “I made the application at start of business today.”

“And?”

“So far there have been no motions to deny.”

“How soon would you expect them?”

“Instantly. Or sooner.”

“So that’s good.”

“Yes, it is.”

“So how long?”

“Later today, or early tomorrow.”

“Got a pen?”

“And paper.”

“I want you to check Peter Paul Lozano and Ronald David Baldacci with HRC.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want you to check.”

“Relevant to anything in particular?”

“To being on the right side of history.”

“I heard something you should know.”

“As in?”

“Detective Podolski found your clothes in the landfill. They’ve been tested.”

“And?”

“The blood didn’t match.”

“Should I hold my breath waiting for an apology from Major Sullivan?”

“She’s coming around. She was very touched you left her an IOU.”

“Is the Metro PD dropping out now?”

“No. You fled after a lawful police challenge.”

“That’s not allowed anymore?”

“I’ll do my best with Lozano and Baldacci.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said.

And then they got back on the freeway and headed north, just one of ten thousand moving vehicles winking in the sun.

Romeo called Juliet and said, “I spoke to the gentleman known as Cool Al directly, on a pretext, and he tells us they’re in a twenty-year-old black Range Rover.”

Juliet said, “That’s good to know.”

“Not the fastest car on the planet. Not that any would be fast enough. I put our boys on a helicopter. Orange County to Burbank. They’ll be in position at least an hour ahead of time.”

“Who paid for it?”

“Not the army,” Romeo said. “Don’t worry.”

“Did you cancel Baldacci’s credit card? Lozano’s, too, I suppose.”

“I can’t. Those are personal cards. They have to do it themselves, as soon as they get out of the hospital. Until then we’ll have to reimburse them, as always.”

“This thing is costing us a fortune.”

“Little acorns, my friend.”

“Not so little.”

“Nearly over. Then it’s back to business as usual.”

Reacher kept on dodging the eaters, and the drinkers, and the shavers, and the hair stylists, and the makeup artists, and the nail filers, and the file filers, and the readers, and the texters, and the surfers, and the screamers, and the criers, and he made it as far as East Los Angeles, where he took the Santa Ana Freeway, up to the 101 in Echo Park. Then it was a long slow grind, northwest through the hills, past names he still found glamorous, like Santa Monica Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard, and the Hollywood Bowl. And then his telephone rang. He answered it and said, “I’m driving one-handed on the 101 with the Hollywood sign on my right, and I’m talking on my phone. Finally I feel like I belong.”

Edmonds said, “Got a pen and paper?”

“No.”

“Then listen carefully. Peter Paul Lozano and Ronald David Baldacci are active duty soldiers currently long-term deployed with a logistics battalion out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They’re assigned to a company trained for the infiltration and exfiltration of sensitive items into and out of Afghanistan, which at the moment, of course, is all exfiltration, because of the drawdown, which is also keeping them very busy. Their fitness reports are currently above average. That’s all I know.”

Which information Reacher relayed to Turner, after hanging up, and Turner said, “There you go. Stuff that should be making it home isn’t.”

Reacher said nothing.

“You don’t agree?”

He said, “I’m just trying to picture it. All these sensitive items, coming out of caves or wherever, and most of them getting loaded up for Fayetteville, but some of them getting dumped in the back of ratty old pick-up trucks with weird license plates, which then immediately drive off into the mountains. Maybe the trucks were full of cash on the inward journey. Maybe it’s a cash-on-delivery business. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“More or less.”

“Me too. A fishbowl. A lot of stress and uncertainty. And visibility. And risk of betrayal. That’s where they learn who to count on. Because everything is against them, even the roads. How sensitive are these things? Are they OK in the back of a ratty old pick-up truck with a weird license plate?”

“What’s your point?”

“All the action is in Afghanistan. But our guys are at Fort Bragg.”

“Maybe they’re just back from Afghanistan.”

“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I noticed the first minute I saw the first two. I figured neither one of them had been in the Middle East recently. They had no sunburn, no squint lines, and no stress and strain in their eyes. They’re homebodies. But they’re also the A team. So why keep your A team in North Carolina when all your action is in Afghanistan?”

“Typically these people have an A team on each end.”

“But there is only one end. Stuff comes out of the caves and goes straight into the ratty old pick-up trucks with the weird license plates. It never gets anywhere near Fort Bragg or North Carolina.”

“Then maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re selling it in America, not Afghanistan. That would need an A team at Bragg, to siphon it off.”

“But I don’t think that’s happening either,” Reacher said. “Because small arms is all they could sell, realistically. We’d notice anything heavier. And to sell enough small arms to make the money they seem to be making would flood the market. And the market isn’t flooded. Or you would have heard about it. Someone would have dropped a dime if there was a torrent of military stuff for sale. Domestic manufacturers, probably, getting squeezed out. The message would have gotten to your desk eventually. That’s what the 110th is for.”

“So what are they doing?”

“I have no idea.”

Reacher remembered all the pertinent data from Candice Dayton’s affidavit, including her lawyer’s name, and his office address. Turner had found the right block on the street map, and her left thumbnail was resting on it, and her right index finger was tracing their progress, and her two hands were getting very close together. They crossed the Ventura Freeway, and she said, “Keep on going until Victory Boulevard. It should be signposted for the Burbank airport. Then we’ll drop down from the north. I imagine most of their focus will be to the south. We’ll be on their blind side.”

Victory Boulevard turned out to be the next exit. Then they made a right on Lankershim, and tracked back south and east, exactly parallel with the freeway they had left minutes before.

“Now pull over,” Turner said. “From here on in we go super-cautious.”

Chapter 48

Reacher parked in the mouth of a cross street, and they gazed south together, at the blocks north of the Ventura Freeway, which were a bustling A–Z catalog of American commercial activity, from medium size on down through small and all the way to super-tiny, with retail enterprises, and wholesale enterprises, and service enterprises, some of them durable, some of them wildly optimistic, some of them up-and-coming, some of them fading fast, some of them familiar and ubiquitous. A visitor from outer space would conclude that acrylic nails were just as important as eight-by-four boards.

Turner still had the map open, and she said, “He’s on Vineland Avenue, two blocks north of the freeway. So make a left on Burbank Boulevard, and then Vineland is a right, and then it’s a straight shot. No one knows this car, but we can’t afford to drive by more than two times.”

So Reacher set off again, and made the turns, and drove Vineland like anyone else, not slow and peering, not fast and aggressive, just another anonymous vehicle rolling through the sunny morning. Turner said, “He’s coming up, on the right side, next block. I see a parking lot out front.”

Which Reacher saw, too. But it was a shared lot, not the lawyer’s own. Because the right side of the block was all one long low building, with a shake roof and a covered walkway in front, with the exterior walls painted what Reacher thought of as a unique Valley shade of beige, like flesh-colored makeup from the movies. The building was divided along its length, into six separate enterprises, including a wig shop, and a crystal shop, and a geriatric supplier, and a coffee shop, and a Se Habla Espanol tax preparer, with Candice Dayton’s lawyer more or less right in the center of the row, between the magic crystals and the electric wheelchairs. The parking lot was about eight slots deep, and it ran the whole width of the building’s facade, serving all the stores together. Reacher guessed any customer was entitled to park in any spot.

The lot was about half full, with most of the cars at first glance entirely legitimate, most of them clean and bright under the relentless sun, some of them parked at bad angles, as if their drivers had ducked inside just long enough for a simple errand. Reacher had given much thought to what kind of a car two people could live in, and he had concluded that an old-fashioned wagon or a modern SUV would be the minimum requirement, with a fold-flat rear bench and enough unimpeded length between the front seats and the tailgate to fit a mattress. Black glass to the sides and the rear would be an advantage. An old Buick Roadmaster or a new Chevy Suburban would fit the bill, except that anyone planning to live in a new Chevy Suburban would surely see an advantage in selling it and buying an old Buick Roadmaster, and keeping the change. So mostly he scanned for old wagons, maybe dusty, maybe on soft tires, settled somehow, as if parked for a long time.

But he saw no such vehicles. Most were entirely normal, and three or four of them were new enough and bland enough to be airport rentals, which is what Espin and the 75th MP would be using, and two or three of them were weird enough to be FBI seizures, reissued for use as unmarked stake-out cars. Shadows and the glare of the sun and window tints made it hard to be sure whether any were occupied, or not.

They drove on, same speed, same trajectory, and they got on the freeway again, because Reacher felt a sudden U-turn or other atypical choice of direction would stand out, and they drove around the same long slow rectangle, and they came down Lankershim for the second time, and they parked in the mouth of the same cross street again, feeling comfortably remote and invisible from the south.

“Want to see it again?” Turner asked.

“Don’t need to,” Reacher said.

“So what next?”

“They could be anywhere. We don’t know what they look like, or what car they’ve got. So there’s no point driving around. We need to get a precise location from the lawyer. If the lawyer even knows, day to day.”

“Sure, but how?”

“I could call, or I could get Edmonds to call for me, but the lawyer is going to say all correspondence should come to the office, and all meetings should be held at the office. He can’t afford to give her location to a party as involved as I’m supposed to be. He would have to assume any contact I had would end up either creepy or violent. Basic professional responsibility. He could get sued for millions of dollars.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what guys do, when they have nothing better going on.”

“Which is what?”

“I’m going to call a hooker.”

They backed up and headed north again, and they found a hamburger restaurant, where they drank coffee and where Reacher studied certain entries in a Yellow Pages borrowed from the owner, and then they got back on the road again, as far as a motel they saw next to one of the Burbank airport’s long-term parking lots. They didn’t check in. They stayed in the car, and Reacher dialed a number he had memorized. The call was answered by a woman with a foreign accent. She sounded middle-aged, and sleepy.

Reacher asked her, “Who’s your top-rated American girl?”

The foreign woman said, “Emily.”

“How much?”

“A thousand an hour.”

“Is she available now?”

“Of course.”

“Does she take credit cards?”

“Yes, but then she’s twelve hundred an hour.”

Reacher said nothing.

The foreign woman said, “She can be with you in less than thirty minutes, and she’s worth every penny. How would you like her to dress?”

“Like a grade school teacher,” Reacher said. “About a year out of college.”

“Girl next door? That’s always a popular look.”

Reacher gave his name as Pete Lozano, and he gave the name and the address of the motel behind him.

“Is that next to the airport parking lot?” the foreign woman asked.

“Yes,” Reacher said.

“We use it a lot. Emily will have no trouble finding it.”

Reacher clicked off the call, and they got comfortable, and they waited, not talking, doing nothing at all but looking ahead through the windshield.

After ten minutes Turner said, “You OK?”

Reacher said, “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I’m sitting here staring at fourteen-year-old girls. I feel like a pervert.”

“Recognize any?”

“Not yet.”

Altogether they waited more than thirty-five minutes, and then Reacher’s phone rang. Not the foreign woman calling back with an excuse for Emily’s lateness, but Captain Edmonds calling back with what she announced as front-page news. Reacher tilted the phone and Turner put her head close to listen. Edmonds said, “I got the full jacket on A.M. 3435. It came through five minutes ago. Not without a little hustle on my part, I might add.”

Reacher said, “And?”

“No, really, you’re most welcome, major. Absolutely my pleasure. I don’t mind risking my entire career by entering in where JAG captains should fear to tread.”

“OK, thank you. I should have said that first. I’m sorry.”

“Some things you need to understand. We’ve been in Afghanistan more than ten years now, and in that context 3435 is a relatively low number. Currently we’re well over a hundred thousand. Which means the data on this man were created some time ago. About seven years ago, I think, as far as I can tell. And there have been no significant updates. Nothing beyond the routine minimum. Because this is a fairly ordinary guy. Boring, even. At first glance he’s a meaningless peasant.”

“What’s his name?”

“Emal Gholam Zadran. He’s now forty-two years old, and he’s the youngest of five Zadran brothers, all of them still alive. He seems to be the black sheep of the family, widely regarded as disreputable. The elder brothers are all fine upstanding poppy growers, working the family farm, like their ancestors did for a thousand years before them, very traditional, small time and modest. But young Emal didn’t want to settle for that. He tried his hand at a number of things, and failed at them all. His brothers forgave him, and took him back, and as far as anyone knows he lives near them in the hills, does absolutely nothing productive, and keeps himself to himself.”

“What was he written up for seven years ago?”

“One of the things he tried out, and failed at.”

“Which was?”

“Nothing was proven, or we’d have shot him.”

“What wasn’t proven?”

“The story is he set up as an entrepreneur. He was buying hand grenades from the 10th Mountain Division and selling them to the Taliban.”

“How much did he get for them?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“Not proven?”

“They tried their best.”

“Why didn’t they shoot him anyway?”

“Reacher, you’re talking to an army lawyer here. Nothing was proven, and we’re the United States of America.”

“Suppose I wasn’t talking to an army lawyer.”

“Then I would say nothing was proven, and right then we were probably kissing Afghan butt and hoping they would set up a civilian government of their own at some point in the not-too-distant future, so we could get the hell out of there, and in that atmosphere shooting indigenous individuals against which nothing had been proven, even by our own hair-trigger military justice system, would have been regarded as severely counterproductive. Otherwise I’m sure they would have shot him anyway.”

“You’re pretty smart,” Reacher said. “For an army lawyer.”

And then he clicked off, because he was watching a kid who had gotten out of a cab and was walking into the motel driveway. She was luminous. She was young and blonde, and fresh and energetic, and somehow earnest, as if she was determined to use all the many years ahead doing nothing but good in the world. She looked like a grade school teacher, about a year out of college.

Chapter 49

The kid walked past the motel office, and then she stopped, as if she didn’t know where to go. She had a name but no room number. Turner buzzed her window down and called out, “Are you Emily?”

Which was something she and Reacher had rehearsed. No question it was weird to be approached in a motel parking lot by a woman in a car, ahead of what was clearly going to be a bizarre threesome. But a similar approach by a man would have been weirder still. So Turner got to ask the question, which the kid answered by saying, “Yes, I’m Emily.”

Turner said, “We’re your clients.”

“I’m sorry. They didn’t tell me. It’s more money for couples.”

“You’ve probably heard this before, or not, possibly, but all we want to do is talk. We’ll give you two thousand dollars for an hour of your time. Clothes on throughout, all three of us.”

The kid came nearer, but not too close, and she lined herself up with the open window, and she stooped an inch, and she looked in and said, “What exactly is this about?”

Reacher said, “An acting job.”

*  *  *

They talked out in the open, to keep it unthreatening, Reacher and Turner leaning on the side of the car, with Emily completing the triangle four feet away, where she was free to turn and run. But she didn’t. She ran Lozano’s Amex through a slot in her iPhone, and as soon as she saw an authorization number she said, “I don’t do porn.”

Reacher said, “No porn.”

“Then what kind of acting job?”

“Are you an actor?”

“I’m a call girl.”

“Were you an actor first?”

“I was an intending actor.”

“Do you do role-play?”

“I thought that’s what I was doing today. The naive young idealist, prepared very reluctantly to do whatever it takes to get extra funding for her school. Or possibly I want to borrow a lawnmower from one of the PTA dads. But normally it’s about interviewing for a job. How can I show I’m really committed to the company?”

“In other words, you’re acting.”

“All the time. Including now.”

“I need you to go see a law firm receptionist and act your way into her good books.” Reacher told her what he wanted. She showed no curiosity as to why. He said, “If there’s a choice, pick a motherly type. She’ll be sympathetic. This is about a struggling mother getting some help. Tell her Ms. Dayton is a friend of your aunt, and she loaned you some money when you were in college, and it got you out of a hole, and now you can repay the favor. And you want to see her again anyway. Something like that. You can write your own script. But the receptionist is not supposed to give up the location. In fact she’s prohibited from doing so. So this is your Oscar moment.”

“Who gets hurt here?”

“No one gets hurt. The opposite.”

“For two thousand dollars? I never heard of that before.”

“If she’s for real, she gets helped. If she’s not for real, I don’t get hurt. It’s all good.”

Emily said, “I don’t know if I want to do it.”

“You took our money.”

“For an hour of my time. I’m happy to stand here and talk. Or we could get in the car. I’ll get naked if you like. That’s what usually happens.”

“How about an extra five hundred in cash? As a tip. When you get back.”

“How about seven hundred?”

“Six.”

Emily said, “And the Oscar goes to, Emily.”

She wouldn’t let them drive her. Smart girl. Words were cheap. The long preamble could have been nothing but a hot air fantasy, ahead of her unclothed body being found dead in a ditch three days later. So they gave her the address and twenty bucks and she caught a cab instead. They watched it out of sight, and then they turned back and got in the Range Rover and waited.

Turner said, “Man up, Reacher. A.M. 3435 is Emal Zadran, who has a documented history of buying and selling United States ordnance in the hills of the tribal areas. Whereas Peter Lozano and Ronald Baldacci have a documented history of being part of a company tasked to get that very same United States ordnance in and out of those very same hills. Is that deafening noise I hear the sound of the pieces falling into place?”

“He was buying and selling U.S. ordnance in the hills seven years ago.”

“After which he fell off the radar. By getting better at it. He moved right up to the top of the tree. Now he’s the top boy and the go-to guy. He’s making a fortune for somebody. He has to be. Why else would they go to such lengths to hide him?”

“You’re probably right.”

“I need your serious input here. Not mindless agreement. You’re my executive officer.”

“Is that a promotion?”

“Just new orders.”

“I mean it, you could be right. The informer called him a tribal elder. Which strikes me as a status-based label. Like an honorific. And a black sheep who sits around all day doing nothing productive wouldn’t be thought of as a person of status. More likely the village idiot. Certainly he wouldn’t be honored. So old Emal is doing something for somebody. And my only objection was having a team on standby in North Carolina, when all the action is in Afghanistan. But maybe there’s a legitimate role for them. Because if what you think is true, then there’s a lot of money coming home. Wagonloads, probably. A big, physical quantity. So yes, they need a team in North Carolina. Just not to handle weapons. To handle the money.”

Romeo called Juliet and said, “It’s getting worse.”

Juliet said, “How could it?”

“They just used Lozano’s Amex. Two thousand dollars on an entertainer. Do you know what that means?”

“They’re bored?”

“There’s only one kind of entertainer who carries her own card reader, and that’s a prostitute. They’re taunting us. They’d be giving it to homeless people, if homeless people had card readers on their phones. Or phones at all, I suppose.”

“Which they don’t.”

“And Reacher’s lawyer got Zadran’s full jacket, about an hour ago. So it’s out there now.”

“You worry too much.”

“It’s an obvious connection. It won’t take a genius to work it out.”

“Or maybe you worry too soon,” Juliet said. “You haven’t heard the good news yet.”

“Is there any?”

“Our boys just saw them drive past the lawyer’s office. In a twenty-year-old Range Rover, black. Hard to be sure, because it had dark windows, but the strong impression was there were two people inside, one large and one small.”

“When was this?”

“Less than an hour ago.”

“Just once?”

“So far. Reconnaissance, obviously.”

“Is there much activity there?”

“It’s a strip mall. It’s like a Fourth of July parade.”

“Where did they go after they cruised by?”

“They took the freeway. Probably looped around. They’re probably holed up a few blocks to the north.”

“Anything we can do?”

“Yes, I think there is. They were super-cautious around that office. They must know the MPs and the FBI are all over it. And there’s nothing to be learned there. Not for them. It would be the worst kind of malpractice. So I don’t think they’ll go near that office again. In which case guarding it is a waste of personnel. We can’t miss them there, because they won’t go there. Simple as that. Therefore our boys would be better used elsewhere. Possibly in a more proactive role. Just a suggestion.”

“I agree,” Romeo said. “Turn them loose.”

Reacher and Turner passed the time by trying to figure what kind of ordnance would sell for a lot of money and fit in the back of a pick-up truck. Which was frustrating, because the two categories tended to be mutually exclusive. MOABs were sinister finned pear-shaped cylinders thirty feet long and four feet wide. Drones were worth thirty-seven million dollars a pop, but had a wingspan greater than sixty feet. And without the joystick controls they were just lumps of dumb metal. And the joystick controls were all in Texas or Florida. Conversely rifles and handguns and hand grenades weren’t worth much. A Beretta M9 was about six hundred bucks in a store. Maybe four hundred used, on the street, or in the hills, less overhead and expenses, which meant it would take three or four hundred sales just to cover the hundred grand risked in the Cayman Islands. And even the army would notice if it was losing handguns by the thousand.

They got nowhere.

And then Emily came back.

Chapter 50

Emily got out of a cab, just like the first time, still in character, all radiant and naive, and she hustled over and stood where she had before, about five feet from Turner’s window. Turner buzzed the glass down, and Emily said, “I felt bad doing that.”

“Why?” Reacher said.

“She was a nice woman. I manipulated her.”

“Successfully?”

“I got the location.”

“Where is it?”

“You owe me six hundred bucks.”

“Not technically. It’s a tip, which means it’s a gift outside of the main contract. There’s no element of owing.”

“Are you trying to get out of it now?”

“No, I’m just naturally pedantic.”

“Whichever, I still need six hundred bucks.”

Which Ronald Baldacci paid, from the plank of twenties in his wallet. Reacher passed it to Turner, who passed it out the window to Emily, who glanced around and said, “This looks like a drug deal.”

“What’s the location?” Reacher asked.

She gave a street address, complete with a house number.

Reacher said, “What is that? A vacant lot? A business with its own parking?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was the mood in the office?”

“Very busy. I don’t think Ms. Dayton is high on their list of priorities.”

“OK, thank you, Emily,” Reacher said. “It was nice to meet you. Have a great day.”

“That’s it?”

“What else is there?”

“Aren’t you going to ask what a nice girl like me is doing in a job like this? Aren’t you going to give me advice for the future?”

“No,” Reacher said. “No one should listen to my advice. And you seem to be doing fine anyway. A thousand bucks an hour ain’t bad. I know people who get screwed for twenty.”

“Who?”

“People who wear uniforms, mostly.”

Turner’s map showed the new location to be south of the Ventura Freeway, in a neighborhood without a name. Not really Universal City, not really West Toluca Lake, definitely not Griffith Park, and too far south to be North Hollywood. But Reacher figured it was the right kind of place. It would have a high turnover of people, all coming and going and incurious, and it would have ventures and operations starting up and shutting down. Therefore it would have empty buildings, and it would have staff-only lots in front of failed businesses. Best way to get there was south on Vineland again, past the law office, across the Ventura Freeway, and then the neighborhood lay waiting on the right.

Turner said, “We have to assume the MPs and the FBI have this same information.”

“I’m sure they do,” Reacher said. “So we’ll do it the same way we did the law office.”

“One pass.”

“Which might be the second pass for some of them, because I’m sure they’re rotating back and forth. Between there and the law office, I mean. They can’t let either scene get too static.”

“What if it’s a little alley, or a one-way street?”

“Then we’ll abort. We’ll find some other way.”

“And best case, all we do is eyeball it. No meet and greet. We need a whole lot of long-range surveillance before we even think about that.”

“Understood.”

“Even if the cutest fourteen-year-old in the world runs out waving a home-made banner that says Welcome Home Daddy. Because it might be the wrong fourteen-year-old, with a different daddy.”

“Understood,” Reacher said again.

“Say it.”

“No meet and greet,” Reacher said.

“So let’s go.”

They didn’t use Vineland Avenue. They figured rolling past the law office again would turn one pass into two, for some of the watchers, for no productive reason at all, and then the two could become three, if the rotation was timed just wrong. And three times was not a charm. Most people picked up on things the third time around. That was Reacher’s experience. Even if they didn’t know they were noticing. A stumble on a word while talking to a friend? You just saw the same guy for the third time, in the corner of your eye. Or the same car, or the same flower truck, or the same coat or dog or shoes or walk.

So they looped clockwise, east first, and then south, and they crossed the freeway a little to the right of a straight line. Then they pulled over. The target neighborhood was ahead on the right. It was a low-rise warren with concrete curbs and dry grass shoulders, with tarred poles carrying dozens of wires, some of them as thick as Reacher’s wrist, and behind them were small buildings, some of them bungalows, some of them garden apartments, some of them stores or bodegas. There was one nail salon and one pick-up truck clearly visible. There were basketball hoops and ice hockey goals and satellite dishes as big as hot tubs, and parked cars everywhere.

“Not good,” Turner said.

Reacher nodded, because it wasn’t. It was tight-packed and close-quarters, and rolling through would mean stopping and starting and maneuvering around one obstacle after another. Walking speed would be a luxury.

He said, “You’re the CO.”

She said, “You’re the XO.”

“I say go for it. But it’s your decision.”

“Why do you say go for it?”

“The negatives look bad, but they’re actually positives. Things could work out in our favor. The MPs and the FBI don’t know what we’re driving. As far as they’re concerned, this is just an old truck with dark windows. They’re not looking for it.”

“But the two guys from the dented car might be. They’re getting good intelligence. Worst case, someone saw the credit card and knows what we’re driving.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Reacher said. “They can’t do anything to us. Not here. Not in front of government witnesses. They must know the MPs and the FBI are right there with them. It’s a perfect Catch-22. They’ll just have to sit there and take it.”

“They might follow us. The MPs and the FBI wouldn’t see anything wrong with that. Just another car leaving the neighborhood.”

“I agree. But like I said. That would be things working out in our favor. That would be two birds with one stone. We eyeball the location, and we lure the guys out to a place of our choosing. All in all, I would call that a good day’s work. Speaking as an XO, that is. But it’s your decision. That’s why you get the big bucks. Almost as many as some high school teachers.”

Turner said nothing.

Reacher said, “Two front burners, remember.”

Turner said, “OK, go for it.”

They checked the map and Reacher rehearsed the turns. A right, a left, a right, and that was her street, apparently. Her lot number looked to be about halfway between one end and the other. Turner said, “Remember, eyeballs only. No meet and greet.”

“Got it,” Reacher said.

“No exceptions.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He eased off the curb and rolled down to the first turn and swung the wheel, and then he was in the neighborhood. The first street was a mess. Mixed-use zoning, with a bakery truck stopped outside a grocery, and a kid’s bike dumped in the gutter, and a car with no wheels up on blocks. The second street was better. It was no wider, but it was straight and less cluttered. The tone of the neighborhood rose through its first fifty yards. There were little houses on the left and the right. Not prosperous, but solid. Some had new roofs, and some had painted stucco, and some had parched plants in concrete tubs. Regular people, doing their best, making ends meet.

Then came the final right turn, and the tone rose some more. But not to dizzying heights. Reacher saw a long straight street, with the 101 plainly visible at the far end, behind hurricane fencing. The street had tract housing on both sides, built for GIs in the late 1940s, and still there more than sixty years later. The houses were all cared for, but to varying degrees, some of them well maintained, some of them refurbished, and some of them extended, but others more marginal. Most had cars on their driveways, and most had extra cars on the curb. Overall so many it was effectively a one-lane road.

Slow, and awkward.

Turner said, “FBI ahead on the right, for sure.”

Reacher nodded and said nothing. One of the cars on the curb was a Chevy Malibu, about sixty feet away, plain silver, base specification, with plastic where there should have been chrome, with two stubby antennas glued to the back glass, with a guy behind the wheel wearing a white collared shirt. An unmarked car, but no real attempt at deception. Therefore possibly a supervisor, just stopping by for a moment, to check on morale and spread good cheer. To the guy he was parked right behind, maybe.

Reacher said, “Check out the thing in front of him.”

It was a civilian Hummer H2, wide, tall, gigantic, all waxed black paint and chrome accents, with huge wheels and thin tires, like black rubber bands.

“So eight years ago,” Turner said. A legal seizure, possibly, because of coke in the door pocket, or because it was charged to a scam business, or it had carried stolen goods in the back, first confiscated and then reissued as an undercover surveillance vehicle, slightly tone-deaf in terms of credibility, like the government usually was.

And sixty feet in front of the Hummer was a small white compact, parked on the other curb, facing toward them, clean and bland, barely used, not personalized in any way. An airport rental, almost certainly. The 75th MP. Some unfortunate guy, coach class to LAX, and then a bare-bones government account with Hertz or Avis. The worst car on the lot, and no upgrade.

“See it?” Reacher asked.

Turner nodded beside him. “And now we know where the address is. Exactly halfway between the Hummer’s front bumper and that thing’s, I would say. Subtle, aren’t they?”

“As always.” Reacher had been checking house numbers, and the lot they were looking for was going to be on the left, about ninety feet ahead, if the government’s triangulation was dead-on accurate. He said, “Do you see anyone else?”

“Hard to tell,” Turner said. “Any one of these cars could have people in it.”

“Let’s hope so,” Reacher said. “Two people in particular.”

He rolled on, slow and careful, giving himself a margin of error. The old truck’s steering was a little vague and sloppy. Plus or minus six inches was all it was good for. He passed the silver Malibu, and glanced down to his right. The white collared shirt had a necktie down the front. FBI for sure. Probably the only necktie inside a square mile. Then next up was the Hummer. It had a fair-haired white guy behind the wheel. With a whitewall crew cut, high and tight. Probably the first whitewall crew cut ever seen inside a pimped-out H2. Government. Tone deaf.

Then Reacher glanced to his left, and started tracking the numbers. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. A gap of some kind, basically. Something different from the places before and after. Something boarded up and foreclosed, or burned down and bulldozed, or never built in the first place. With a big old car parked back in the shadow of its neighbors. Maybe a Buick Roadmaster.

But the address Emily had gotten was a house like all the others. Not different from the places before or after, not boarded up by the bank, and not burned and leveled. Just a regular house, on a regular lot. It had a car in its driveway, but it wasn’t a Buick Roadmaster. It was a two-door coupe, imported, sun-faded red, fairly old, and even smaller than the MP’s white compact. Therefore not big enough for two people to sleep in. Not even close. The house itself was an old one-story, extended upward, with a ground-floor window on the left, and a ground-floor window on the right, and a new attic window punched out directly above a blue front door.

And coming out the blue front door was a girl.

She could have been fourteen years old. Or fifteen.

She was blonde.

And she was tall.

Chapter 51

Turner said, “Don’t stop,” but Reacher braked anyway. He couldn’t help it. The girl looped around the parked coupe and stepped out to the sidewalk. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a blue denim jean jacket, and big black baggy pants, and yellow tennis shoes on her feet, with no socks, and no laces. She was slender and long-limbed, all knees and elbows, and her hair was the color of summer straw. It was parted in the center, and wavy, and it came halfway down her back. Her face was unformed, like teenagers’ faces are, but she had blue eyes, and cheekbones, and her mouth was set in a quizzical half-smile, as if her life was full of petty annoyances best tolerated with patience and goodwill.

She set off walking, west, away from them.

Turner said, “Eyes front, Reacher. Hit the gas and pass her and do not stop. Drive to the end of the road, right now. That’s an order. If it’s her, we’ll confirm later, and we’ll deal with it.”

So Reacher sped up again, from walking pace to jogging, and they passed the girl just as she was passing the MP’s white compact. She didn’t seem to react to it in any way. Didn’t seem to know it was there for her. She hadn’t been told, presumably. Because what could they say? Hi there, miss, we’re here to arrest your father. Who you’ve never met. If he shows up, that is. Having just been told all about you.

Reacher kept one eye on the mirror and watched her grow smaller. Then he paused at the T, and turned left, and looked at her one more time, and then he drove away, and she was lost to sight.

No one came after them. They pulled over a hundred yards later, but the street behind them stayed empty. Which theoretically was a minor disappointment. Not that Reacher really registered it as such. In his mind right then the two surviving guys from the dented car were on the backest of all back burners, on a stovetop about ten miles deep.

He said, “They told me she was living in a car.”

“Maybe her mom got a new job. Or a new boyfriend.”

“Did you see any surveillance opportunities?”

“Nothing obvious.”

“Maybe we should join the crowd and park on the street. We’d be OK as long as we never got out of the car.”

“We can do better than that,” Turner said. She checked her map, and looked out through the Range Rover’s windows, all around, craning her neck, searching for high ground or elevated vantage points. Of which there were plenty to the south, where the Hollywood Hills rose up in the smog, but they were too distant, and in any case the front of the house would be invisible from the south. In the end she pointed a little north of west, at an off-ramp in the tangle where the 134 met the 101. It was raised up high, and its curve seemed to cradle the whole neighborhood, as it swooped around from one freeway to the next. She said, “We could fake a breakdown, if that ramp has a shoulder. Overheating, or something. This car certainly looks the part. We could stay there for hours. The FBI doesn’t do roadside assistance. If the LAPD stops for us, we’ll say sure, we’re about cooled down now, and we’ll get on our way.”

“Warrant Officer Espin will have seen it,” Reacher said. “He’ll have scoped out the terrain, surely. If he sees any kind of a parked vehicle up there, he’ll investigate.”

“OK, if anything other than a marked LAPD cruiser stops for us, we’ll take off immediately, and if it’s Espin we’ll duke it out in the wilds of Burbank.”

“We’ll lose him well before Burbank. I bet they gave him a four-cylinder rental.”

They wanted a pawn shop next, because they needed a quality item for a short spell of time, and fast, and unmemorably, and they were going to pay for it with a stolen credit card, so overall second hand was the better market. They used surface streets to West Hollywood, and picked one of many establishments, and Reacher said to the guy, “Let me see your best binoculars.”

Of which there were many, mostly old. Which made sense. Reacher figured that back in his father’s day binoculars were bought simply because binoculars were bought. Every family had a pair. And an encyclopedia. No one used either. Or the clockwork eight-millimeter camera, if the family was a colonel’s or better. But they had to be provided. Part of a family man’s sacred duty. But now all those family men were dead, and their adult children’s houses were of finite capacity. So their stuff found itself stacked between the acoustic guitars and the college rings, still in the velvet-lined leather buckets it came in, and tagged with prices halfway between low and very.

They found a pair they liked, powerful but not too heavy, and adjustable enough to fit both their faces, and Baldacci paid, and they walked back to the car.

Turner said, “I think we should wait for dusk. Nothing will happen before then, anyway. Not if her mom has a new job. And we have a black car. Espin won’t even see it in the dark. But the street itself should be lit up enough for binoculars.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “We should eat first, I guess. This could take hours. How long are you prepared to stay up there?”

“As long as it takes. As many times as it takes.”

“Thank you.”

“In all of my dating history, I don’t know if this is the smartest thing I’ve ever done, or the dumbest.”

*  *  *

They ate in West Hollywood, well and slowly and expensively, on Peter Paul Lozano’s dime, and they let late afternoon turn into early evening, and as soon as the street lights were brighter than the sky they got back in the car and took Sunset Boulevard to the 101. Traffic was bad, as always, but the sky used the wasted minutes to get darker and darker, so that by the time they took the curving off-ramp the day had gone completely.

There was no official shoulder on the ramp, but there was more than a shoulder’s width of painted chevrons on the right side, to define the traffic lane through the curve, so they pulled over as if their dashboard was lit up like a Christmas tree. Turner had the new old binoculars out and ready, and they rolled forward until she figured they had as good a view as they were going to get. Reacher shut the motor down. They were about three hundred yards from the blue front door, and about forty feet above it. Just like the field manual. A straight line, with elevation. More than satisfactory. Not bad at all. The house was quiet. The blue door was closed. The old red coupe was still on the driveway. The FBI Malibu had gone from the street, but the Hummer was still there, as was the small white compact sixty feet from it. The rest of the automotive roster had changed a little. Day shift workers were heading home, and night shift workers were heading out.

They took turns with the binoculars. Reacher twisted around in the driver’s seat and rested his back on the door, and looked out beyond Turner next to him, through her open window. The optical image was dark and indistinct. No night-vision enhancement. But it was adequate. Behind him cars sped past, just feet away, a steady procession, all of them leaving the 101 and joining the 134. None of them stopped to help. They just rocked the old truck with their slipstreams, and sped onward, oblivious.

Romeo called Juliet and said, “They were just in West Hollywood. They bought something in a pawn shop, on Baldacci’s card, and then they ate at a very expensive restaurant, on Lozano’s.”

Juliet said, “What would they want from a pawn shop?”

“Doesn’t matter. The point is they were in West Hollywood, whiling away the hours, apparently aimlessly, which one assumes they wouldn’t do if there were things still on their agenda, like determining Ms. Dayton’s current location, for instance. So I think we should assume they have it now.”

“How did they get it?”

“Doesn’t matter how. What matters is what they’re going to do next. Possibly they were in West Hollywood just hiding out until dark. In which case they’re probably back at the house by now, about to begin a lengthy period of surveillance.”

“Our boys aren’t there anymore.”

“Then get them back. Tell them to look at the neighborhood with a military eye and work out where a skilled team would be watching from. There can’t be more than a handful of suitable vantage points. They won’t be hunkered down in a neighbor’s back yard, for instance. They’re probably fairly distant. The field manual calls for a line of sight plus elevation. Upstairs in an empty building, perhaps, or a water tower, or a parking garage. Tell our boys to compile a list of possibilities, and then tell them to split up and investigate. More efficient that way. We need this done tonight.”

“You can buy guns in a pawn shop.”

“But they didn’t. There’s a waiting period. California has laws. And they only spent thirty dollars.”

“On the credit card. There could have been a side deal in cash. Lozano and Baldacci had plenty with them on the plane.”

“An illegal purchase? Then they wouldn’t have stuck around to eat. Not in the same neighborhood. They’d have been too nervous. They’d have gone somewhere else. That’s my sense. So assume they’re still unarmed.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Juliet said. “It would make things easier.”

Turner spent thirty minutes with the binoculars, and then she passed them back to Reacher, blinking and rubbing her eyes. He widened them out to fit, and adjusted the focus, which took a big turn of the wheel. Either he was half blind, or she was.

She said, “I want to call Sergeant Leach again. I want to know she’s OK.”

He said, “Give her my best.” He half listened to Turner’s end of the conversation while he watched what was happening three hundred yards away. Which was nothing much. The Hummer stayed where it was, and the small white compact stayed where it was. No one went in or out through the blue front door. Sergeant Leach was apparently OK. As was her cooperative friend Margaret Vega. At that point, at least. So far. The conversation was short. Turner said nothing explicit, but between the lines Leach seemed to be agreeing with her that the die was cast, and the only available options were win big or go home.

The blue door stayed closed. Most of the time Reacher kept the binoculars trained hard on it, but then for maybe four seconds out of every twenty he started a fragmented exploration of the neighborhood. He traced his way back down the street, and out through the elbow where they had come in, with the bakery truck outside the grocery, and the dumped bike, and the car with no wheels. Then came the main drag, which was Vineland Avenue, about as far south of the freeway as the law office was north.

He went back to the blue door, which stayed closed.

And then he traced his way down the street again, but went the other way at the far end, right instead of left, and he found an identical elbow, like a mirror image. The same kind of zoning, and the same kind of issues. And then the main drag again, still Vineland, but a further quarter mile south. Which made the neighborhood not quite a rectangle. It was taller on the right than the left. Like a pennant. Some ways above its top right corner was the freeway, and then the law office, and some ways below its bottom right corner was an old coach diner, all lit up and shiny.

Reacher knew which way he would walk.

He went back to the blue door, which stayed closed.

*  *  *

It stayed closed until a minute before eight o’clock. And then it opened, and she came out again, just the same as before. Same long-limbed stride, almost graceful, same hair, same shirt, same jacket, same shoes. Presumably no socks or laces, and possibly the same wry expression, but it was dark, and the optics had limits.

Just the same as before.

But she turned the other way.

She went east, not west. Away from the freeway interchange. Toward the main drag. No one went with her. No shadow, and no protection. Reacher pointed, and Turner nodded.

He said, “Do you think it’s possible they didn’t tell either one of them?”

She said, “Obviously they didn’t tell the kid. They can’t say, we found your daddy but decided to arrest him instead.”

“Can they say that to the mother? She’s not going to get much child support if they throw away the key.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“They didn’t send anyone with her. Which they should have. If I can’t get to her in the house, then I’ll try to get to her when she leaves. That’s obvious, surely. But no one is with her. The only logical reason is that they haven’t told them, and they can’t explain away four guys following them everywhere, so they don’t follow them everywhere.”

“Plus they’re cheapskates. If they told them, they’d have to put a woman support officer in the house. Which would cost money.”

“OK, so if mother and child are bait but don’t know it, and they leave the house, then all Espin or anyone else can do is a long-distance tail, and an occasional pass in a vehicle.”

“Agreed.”

“But no one is moving and neither vehicle has started its engine.”

“Maybe they wait until she’s out of sight.”

“Let’s see if they do.”

They didn’t. The girl turned right at the far end of the street, and disappeared, but back at her house no one moved, and neither car started.

Turner said, “Maybe there’s another team.”

“Would you approve that budget?”

“Of course I would.”

“Would they? If they won’t even put a woman officer in the house?”

“OK, there’s only one team and it’s not moving. Laziness and complacency. Plus it must be hard to get a parking spot.”

“They’re not moving because they think I’m dumb enough to walk up the driveway and knock on the door.”

Then a car drove in, all the way from the far end of the neighborhood, coming off Vineland, and coming through the elbow they had used before. Its lights swung right and left, and then it came down the street, head-on and blinding, past the Hummer, past the blue door, almost level with the small white compact, and then it stopped, and backed up fast, past the house again, past the Hummer, and all the way back to the last parking spot on the street, which was evidently much farther away than its driver desired. The car parallel-parked neatly and its headlights shut off, and two guys got out, far-off and indistinct, just moving shadows really, one maybe larger than the other.

The lizard brain stirred, and a billion years later Reacher leaned forward an inch.

Chapter 52

The binoculars were marginal at the distance, and the light was very low, so Reacher kept an open mind. On any given day there were nearly forty million people in California, and for two specific individuals to show up while observed by a third was an unlikely event.

But unlikely events happened from time to time, so Reacher kept his field of view tight on the two figures, and he goosed the focus as they walked, for the sharpest image. They walked in the street, not on the sidewalk, straight down the traffic lane, fast, side by side, getting closer all the time, Reacher getting surer all the time. They passed the Hummer again, and they stepped into a pool of light, and then Reacher was certain.

He was looking at the driver from the first night, and next to him was the big guy with the shaved head and the small ears.

They stopped right in front of the house, and they stood still, and then they turned back to face the way they had come, as if they were studying the far horizon, and then they began to rotate in place, slowly, counterclockwise, using small shuffling steps, occasionally pointing, always away from the house and upward.

Reacher said, “They’re looking for us.”

They continued to rotate, past the midpoint, and then they saw the right-hand end of the off-ramp for the first time. The guy with the ears seemed to understand immediately. His arm came up and he sketched the curve right to left, and then back again left to right, tracking the wide circumference, showing how it cradled the whole neighborhood, and then he pulled his palm back toward his chest, as if to say it’s like the front row of the dress circle up there, and this is the stage, right here, and then he used the same palm to shade his eyes, and he stared at the ramp in detail, section by section, yard by yard, looking for the best angle, until finally he came to rest, as if staring straight into the binoculars from the wrong end.

Reacher said, “They’ve found us.”

Turner checked the map and said, “They can’t get here very quickly. Not with the way the roads go. They’d have to drop down to the Hollywood Bowl, on surface streets, and then come back up again, behind us on the 101. That’s a very big square.”

“The kid is out on her own.”

“It’s us they want.”

“And it’s her we want. They should stick with her. I would.”

“They don’t know where she went.”

“It’s not rocket science. Her mom’s not home, and she watched TV shows until the eight o’clock hour, and then she went out to get something to eat.”

“They’re not going to take her hostage.”

“They beat Moorcroft half to death. And they’re running out of time.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Reacher didn’t answer. He just dropped the binoculars in Turner’s lap and started the car and jammed it in gear and glanced back over his shoulder. He gunned it off the chevrons and into the traffic lane, and he swooped around the curve, leaving the 101, joining the 134, merging with slow traffic, looking ahead for the first exit, which he figured would be very soon, and which he figured would be Vineland Avenue. And it was, with a choice of north or south. Reacher inched through the congestion, frustrated, and went south, along the taller edge of the neighborhood, past the first mixed-use elbow, past the second, and onward, a hundred yards, until he saw the coach diner ahead, all lit up and shiny.

And crossing Vineland toward it was the girl.

He slowed and let her pass fifty yards in front of him, and then he watched her as she stepped into the diner’s lot. There was a gaggle of kids in one corner, maybe eight of them in total, boys and girls, just hanging out in the shadows and the night air, aimlessly, joking around, posturing and preening, the way kids do. The girl headed over toward them. Maybe she wasn’t going to eat after all. Maybe she had eaten at home. Something from the freezer, perhaps, microwaved. And maybe this was her after-dinner social life. Maybe she had come out to a regular rendezvous, to join the crowd at their chosen spot, to hang out and have fun, all night long.

Which would be OK. There was safety in numbers.

She stepped up close to the other kids, and there were some deadpan comments, and some high fives, and some laughter, and a little horsing around. Reacher was running out of road, so he took a snap decision and pulled into the lot, and parked in the opposite corner. The girl was still talking. Her body language was relaxed. These were her friends. They liked her. That was clear. There was no awkwardness.

But then minutes later she inched away, her body language saying I’m going inside now, and no one moved to follow her, and she didn’t look disappointed. Almost the opposite. She looked like she had enjoyed their company for sure, but now she was ready to enjoy her own. Equally for sure. As if it was all the same to her.

Turner said, “She’s a loner.”

Reacher said, “And tall.”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“I know.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“I want to go inside.”

“No meet and greet. Not yet.”

“I won’t talk to her.”

“You’ll draw attention to her.”

“Only if those guys see this car out front.”

Turner said nothing. Reacher watched the girl pull the door and step inside. The diner was built in the traditional style, out of stainless steel, with folds and creases and triple accent lines like an old automobile, and small framed windows like an old railroad car, and neon letters configured in an Art Deco manner. It looked busy inside. The peak period, between the blue plate specials and the late-night coffee drinkers. Reacher knew all about diners. He knew their rhythms. He had spent hundreds of hours in them.

Turner said, “Observation only.”

Reacher said, “Agreed.”

“No contact.”

“Agreed.”

“OK, go. I’ll hide the car somewhere and wait. Don’t get in trouble.”

“You either.”

“Call me when you’re done.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said. He climbed out and crossed the lot. He heard cars on Vineland, and a plane in the sky. He heard the group of kids, scuffling and talking and laughing. He heard the Range Rover drive away behind him. He paused a beat and took a breath.

Then he pulled the diner door, and he stepped inside.

The interior was built in the traditional style, too, just as much as the outside, with booths to the left and the right, and a full-width counter dead ahead, about six feet from the back wall, which had a pass-through slot to the kitchen, but was otherwise all made of mirror glass. The booths had vinyl benches and the counter had a long line of stools, all chrome and pastel colors, like 1950s convertibles, and the floor was covered with linoleum, and every other horizontal surface was covered with laminate, in pink or blue or pale yellow, with a pattern, like small pencil notations, that given the dated context made Reacher think of endless arcane equations involving the sound barrier, or the hydrogen bomb.

There was a stooped and gray-haired counter man behind the counter, and a blonde waitress about forty years old working the left side of the coach, and a brunette waitress about fifty years old working the right side, and they were all busy, because the place was more than three-quarters full. All the booths on the left were taken, some by people eating at the end of the work day, some by people eating ahead of a night out, one by a quartet of hipsters apparently intent on period authenticity. The right side of the coach had two booths free, and the counter showed nineteen backs and five gaps.

The girl was all the way over on the right, at the counter, on the last stool, owning it, like the place was a bar and she had been a regular patron for the last fifty years. She had silverware and a napkin in front of her, and a glass of water, but no food yet. Next to her was an empty space, and then came a guy hunched over a plate, and another, and another, with the next empty stool nine spots away. Reacher figured he would get a better look at her from one of the empty booths, but diners had an etiquette all their own, and lone customers taking up four-place booths at rush hour was frowned upon.

So Reacher stood in the doorway, unsure, and the blonde waitress from the left side of the coach took pity on him and detoured over, and she tried a welcoming smile, but she was tired and it didn’t really work. It came out as a dull and uninterested gaze, nothing there at all, and she said, “Sit anywhere you like, and someone will be right with you.” Then she bustled away again, and Reacher figured anywhere you like included four-person booths, so he turned to his right and took a step.

The girl was watching him in the mirror.

And she was watching him quite openly. Her eyes were locked on his, in the mirrored wall, via reflections and refractions and angles of incidence and all the other stuff taught in high school physics class. She didn’t look away, even when he looked right back at her.

No contact, he had promised.

He moved on into the right side of the coach, and he took an empty booth one away from directly behind her. To see her best put his shoulder against the window and his back to the rest of the room, which he didn’t like, but he had no option. The brunette waitress showed up with a menu and a smile as wan as the blonde’s, and she said, “Water?”

He said, “Coffee.”

The girl was still looking at him in the mirror.

He wasn’t hungry, because the meal Lozano had bought in West Hollywood had been a feast fit for a king. So he slid the menu aside. The brunette was not thrilled with his lack of an order. He got the feeling he wouldn’t see her again anytime soon. No free refills for him.

The girl was still watching.

He tried the coffee. It was OK. The counter man brought the girl a plate, and she broke eye contact long enough to say something to him that made him smile. He had an embroidered patch on his uniform, with his name, which was Arthur. He said something back, and the girl smiled, and he moved away again.

Then the girl picked up her silverware and her napkin in one hand, and her plate in the other, and she slid off her stool, and she stepped over to Reacher’s booth, and she said, “Why don’t I join you?”

Chapter 53

The girl put her silverware down, and her napkin, and her plate, and then she ducked back to the counter to retrieve her glass of water. She waved to the guy called Arthur and pointed at the booth, as if to say I’m moving, and then she came back with her water and put it next to her plate, and she slid along the vinyl bench, and she ended up directly opposite Reacher. Up close she looked the same as she did from a distance, but all the details were clearer. In particular her eyes, which seemed to work well with her mouth, in terms of getting all quizzical.

He said, “Why would you want to join me?”

She said, “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t know me.”

“Are you dangerous?”

“I could be.”

“Arthur keeps a Colt Python under the counter, about opposite where you’re sitting. And another one at the other end. They’re both loaded. With .357 Magnums. Out of eight-inch barrels.”

“You eat here a lot?”

“Practically every meal, but the word would be often. Not a lot. Lot refers to quantity, and I prefer small portions.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it. I’m naturally pedantic.”

He said, “Why did you want to join me?”

“Why did I see your car three times today?”

“When was the third time?”

“Technically it was the first time. I was at the lawyer’s office.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

“About what?”

“About why we see the same cars three times a day.”

“We?”

“Those of us paying attention,” she said. “Don’t play dumb, mister. There’s something going on in the neighborhood, and we would love to know what it is. And you look like you might tell us. If I asked you nicely.”

“Why do you think I could tell you?”

“Because you’re one of them, cruising around all day, snooping.”

Reacher said, “What do you think is happening?”

“We know you’re all over the lawyer’s office. And we know you’re all over my street. So we’re guessing someone on my street is the lawyer’s client, and they’re in some shady business together.”

“Who on your street?”

“That’s the big question, isn’t it? It depends on how much of a head fake you use with your parking places. We think you would want to be close to your target, but not right in front of it, because that would be too obvious. But how close? That’s what we don’t know. You could be watching a lot of different houses, if you go left and right a little ways, up and down the street.”

Reacher said, “What’s your name?”

“Remember that Colt Python?”

“Loaded.”

“My name is Sam.”

“Sam what?”

“Sam Dayton. What’s your name?”

“Is that really all you know about the operation on your street?”

“Don’t damn us with faint praise. I think we did very well to piece that much together. You’re all very tight-lipped about it. Which is a great expression, isn’t it? Tight-lipped? But the tell is the way you move your cars between the law office and where I live. I understand why you do it, but it gives away the connection.”

“No one has talked to you about it?”

“Why would they?”

“Has your mom said anything?”

“She doesn’t pay attention. She’s very stressed.”

“What about?”

“Everything.”

“What about your dad?”

“I don’t have one. I mean, obviously I must, biologically, but I’ve never met him.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“I don’t have any.”

Reacher said, “Who do you think we are?”

“Federal agents, obviously. Either DEA, ATF, or FBI. This is Los Angeles. It’s always drugs or guns or money.”

“How old are you?”

“Almost fifteen. You didn’t tell me your name yet.”

Reacher said, “Reacher,” and watched her very carefully. But there was no reaction. No spark. No aha! moment. Or no OMG!! moment, which Reacher understood to be more likely with kids. His name meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. It hadn’t been mentioned in her presence.

She said, “So will you tell me what’s going on?”

Reacher said, “Your dinner is getting cold. That’s what’s going on. You should eat.”

“Are you eating?”

“I already ate.”

“So why come in?”

“For the decor.”

“Arthur is very proud of it. Where are you from?”

“I move around.”

“So you are a federal agent.” And then she started eating some of her food, which Reacher bet himself was billed on the menu as Mom’s Amazing Meatloaf. The smell of ground beef and ketchup was unmistakable. He knew all about diners. He had spent hundreds of hours in them, and he had eaten most of what they had to offer.

She said, “So am I right? Is it the lawyer and a client?”

“Partly,” Reacher said. “But there’s no shady business between them. It’s more about a guy who might visit with one of them. Or both of them.”

“A third party? With a beef?”

“Kind of.”

“So it’s going to be an ambush? You’re waiting for the guy to show? You’re going to bust him on my street? That would be very cool. Unless it happens at the law office. Can you choose? If you can, will you do it on my street? You should think about it anyway. The street would be safer. That little mall is busy. Is the guy dangerous?”

“Have you seen anyone around?”

“Only your own people. They sit in their cars and watch all day. Plus your mobile crews. The guy in the silver Malibu comes by a lot.”

“A lot?”

“Frequently, I should say. Or often. And the two guys in the rental. And you two in the Range Rover. But I haven’t seen a man on his own, looking dangerous.”

“What two guys in a rental?”

“One of them has a funny-shaped head. And cropped ears.”

“Cropped?”

“At first from a distance I thought they were just small. But up close you can see they’ve been cut. Like into tiny hexagons.”

“When did you get up close with that guy?”

“This afternoon. He was on the sidewalk outside my house.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not a thing. But why would he? I’m not a lawyer or a client and I don’t have a beef with anyone.”

Reacher said, “I’m not authorized to tell you much, but those two guys are not with us. They’re not ours, OK? In fact they might be a part of the problem. So stay away from them. And tell your friends.”

The girl said, “Not so cool.”

Then Reacher’s phone rang. He was unaccustomed to carrying a phone, and at first he assumed it was someone else’s. So he ignored it. But the girl stared at his pocket, until he pulled it out. Turner’s stored number was on the screen.

He excused himself, and answered.

Turner was breathing hard.

She said, “I’m heading back, and I need you out front of the diner, right now.”

Some kind of tight emotion in her voice.

So Reacher clicked off the call, and left Sam Dayton alone in the booth, and went outside, and hustled through the lot to the street. A minute later he saw headlights way to his left, spaced high and wide, coming toward him fast. The old Range Rover, out of the south, in a big hurry. Then its lights lit him up and it jammed to a hard stop right next to him and he yanked the door and slid inside.

He said, “What’s up?”

Turner said, “A situation got a little out of hand.”

“How bad?”

“I just shot a guy.”

Chapter 54

Turner took the Ventura Freeway going west, and she said, “I figured the law office would be closed for the night by now, and probably the whole strip with it, and therefore I figured the watchers would be gone by now, too, so I went up to take a look around, because there are things we may need to know in the future, including what kind of locks the law office has, and what kind of alarm. Which, by the way, are both fairly basic. You could buy five minutes in there, if you had to. And then I looked at my map and saw how I could get to Mulholland Drive pretty easily, because I’ve always wanted to drive a car on Mulholland Drive, like a G-man in a movie, and I figured if the kid is in there with you for her dinner, then she’s in there for at least thirty minutes more, which gives me time for a personal excursion, so off I went.”

“And?” Reacher said, simply to keep her going. Shooting people was stressful, and stress was a complex thing. People reacted to it in all kinds of different ways. Some people bottled it up, and some talked it out. She was a talker, he figured.

She said, “I was followed.”

“That was dumb,” he said, because she didn’t like mindless agreement.

“I spotted him early. There were lights behind him and I could see it was only one guy. A solo driver, and that was all. So I didn’t think much of it. And lots of people like Mulholland Drive, so it didn’t bother me he was going the same direction.”

“So what did?”

“He was also going the same speed. Which is unnatural. Speed is a personal thing. And I’m pretty slow, most of the time. Usually people are bunching up behind me, or I’m getting passed by altogether. But this guy was just there, always. Like I was towing him on a rope. And I knew it wasn’t the 75th MP or the FBI, because neither one knows what we’re driving, so it had to be our other friends, except there was only one guy in the car, not two, which meant either it was neither one of them, or they’ve split up now and they’re hunting solo, but whatever, it got old real quick, and the movies say Mulholland gets wild real quick, so I figured I better stop at the very first turn-out I saw, like a message, to tell him I had made him, which would then give him a choice, either accept defeat gracefully and keep on rolling down the road, or be a sore loser and stop and harass me in person.”

“And he stopped?”

“He sure did. He was the third of the four in the dented car this morning. What you call the driver from the first night. They’ve split up and they’re hunting solo.”

“I’m glad it was him, and not the other one.”

“He was bad enough.”

“How bad?”

“Real bad.”

“Bullshit,” Reacher said. “He was a waste of food. He was the one I hit second. Which makes him worse than the one who just bought us dinner.”

“Busted,” Turner said. “It was like taking candy from a baby.”

“What kind of taking?”

“He had a gun.”

“That would level the playing field a little.”

“It did, for about three-quarters of a second, and then he didn’t have a gun anymore, which meant I did, and some voice in my head was screaming threat threat threat center mass bang and I blinked and found out I had gone and done it, right through the heart. The guy was dead before he hit the ground.”

“And you need me right now for what?”

“Are you telling me you don’t offer counseling?”

“Not a core strength.”

“Fortunately I’m a professional soldier, and won’t need counseling.”

“Then how may I help you?”

“I need you to move the body. I can’t lift it.”

Mulholland looked exactly like the movies, but smaller. They drove in as cautious as G-men, prepared to stop if the coast was clear, prepared to keep on going if there were flashing lights and crackling radios already on the scene. But there weren’t. So they stopped. Traffic on the road was light. Picturesque, but not practical.

But the nighttime view from the turn-out was spectacular.

Turner said, “Not the point, Reacher.”

The dead guy was on the ground near his car’s front corner. His knees were folded sideways, but other than that he was flat on his back. There was no doubt about it. It was the driver from the first night. With a hole in his chest.

Reacher said, “What gun was it?”

“Glock 17.”

“Which is where right now?”

“Wiped and back in his pocket. For the time being. We have to work out how to play it.”

“Only two possible ways,” Reacher said. “Either the LAPD finds him sooner, or later. Best bet would be to throw him in the ravine. He could be there a week. He could get eaten up. Or at least chewed, especially the fingers. Putting him in the car is much worse. Doesn’t matter if we make it suicide or homicide, because the first thing they’ll do is run the fingerprints, and from that moment onward Fort Bragg will go crazy, and this whole thing will unravel from the far end.”

“As in, not our end. And you don’t want that.”

“Do you?”

“I just want it unraveled. I don’t care who does it.”

“Then you’re the least feral person I ever met. They slandered you in the worst possible way. You should cut their heads off with a butter knife.”

“No worse than they said about you, with the Big Dog.”

“Exactly. I’m about to stop and buy a butter knife. So give me a sporting chance. A few days in the ravine won’t hurt anyone. Because even if we don’t wrap it up personally, then the LAPD and Fort Bragg will, maybe next week, when they eventually find this guy. Either way it’s going to unravel.”

“OK.”

“And we’re keeping the Glock.”

Which they did, along with a wallet and a cell phone. Then Reacher bunched the front of the guy’s coat in his hands and heaved him off the ground, and staggered with him as close to the edge of the drop as he dared. Most ravine disposals failed. The bodies hung up, six or seven feet down, right there on the slope. Due to a lack of height and distance. So Reacher spun the guy around, like a hammer thrower at the Olympics, two full circles, low on the ground side, high on the air side, and then he let go and hurled him out into the darkness, and he heard the crashing of disturbed trees, and the rattle of stones, and then not much else, apart from the hum of the plain below.

They U-turned off the turn-out and headed back, through Laurel Canyon to the freeway. Reacher drove. Turner stripped the Glock and checked it, and then put it back together and put it in her pocket, with one nine-millimeter in the chamber and fifteen more in the magazine. Then she opened the wallet. It was loaded just like the others. A thick raft of twenties, a handful of smaller bills, a full deck of unexpired and legitimate credit cards, and a North Carolina driver’s license with the guy’s picture on it. His name had been Jason Kenneth Rickard, and he had finished his earthly sojourn a month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday. He was not an organ donor.

His phone was a cheap item similar to the pair Reacher and Turner had bought at the chain pharmacy. An untraceable mission-specific pre-paid, no doubt. Its directory showed just three numbers, the first two labeled Pete L and Ronnie B, which were obviously Lozano and Baldacci, and the third was just Shrago. The call register showed very little activity. Nothing outgoing, and just three incoming, all from Shrago.

Turner said, “Shrago must be the big guy with the small ears. He seems to have the squad leader’s role.”

“They’re not small,” Reacher said. “They’re cropped.”

“What are?”

“His ears.”

“How do you know?”

“The girl told me. She’s seen them up close.”

“You talked to her?”

“She initiated contact, in the diner.”

“Why would she?”

“She thinks we’re feds. She’s curious about what’s happening on her street. She thought we might give her the details.”

“Where did she see the guy with the ears?”

“At the end of her driveway.”

“She really doesn’t know what’s happening?”

“Not even about the paternity suit. My name meant nothing to her. Clearly her mother hasn’t told her about the affidavit. She doesn’t even know her mother is the lawyer’s client. She thinks it’s one of her neighbors.”

“You shouldn’t have talked to her.”

“I had no choice. She sat herself at my table.”

“With a complete stranger?”

“She feels safe in the diner. The counter man seems to look after her.”

“What was she like?”

“She’s a nice kid.”

“Yours?”

“She’s the best candidate yet. She’s about as weird as me. But I still don’t recall a woman in Korea. Not that last time.”

Turner said, “Cropped ears?”

“Like little hexagons,” Reacher said.

“I never heard of that.”

“Me either.” Reacher took out his phone and dialed Edmonds. It was nine o’clock on the West Coast, which made it midnight on the East Coast, but he was sure she would answer. She was an idealist. Dial tone sounded seven times, and then she picked up, thick-tongued like before, and Reacher said, “Got a pen?”

Edmonds said, “And paper.”

“I need you to check two more names with HRC. Almost certainly from the same logistics company at Fort Bragg, but I need confirmation. The first is Jason Kenneth Rickard, and the second is a guy called Shrago. I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. Try to get some background on him. Apparently he has mutilated ears.”

“Ears?”

“The things on the side of his head.”

“I spoke with Major Sullivan earlier this evening. The office of the Secretary of the Army is pushing for a fast resolution of the Rodriguez issue.”

“Dropping the charges would be pretty fast.”

“It’s not going to happen that way.”

“OK, leave it with me,” Reacher said. He clicked off the call, and put his phone in his pocket, and went back to driving two-handed. Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a dumb name for the road they were on. It was in Laurel Canyon, for sure, winding its narrow, hilly way through a very desirable and picturesque neighborhood, but it wasn’t a boulevard. A boulevard was a wide, straight, ceremonial thoroughfare, often planted with rows of specimen trees or other formal landscaping features. From the old French boullewerc, meaning bulwark, because that was where the idea came from. A boulevard was the landscaped top of a rampart, long, wide, and flat, ideal for strolling.

Then they came out on Ventura Boulevard, which was not the same thing as the Ventura Freeway, but which was at least wide and straight. The Ventura Freeway lay ahead, and Universal City was to the right, and Studio City was to the left.

Reacher said, “Wait.”

Turner said, “For what?”

“The Big Dog’s lawyer was in Studio City. Right on Ventura Boulevard. I remember from the affidavit.”

“And?”

“Maybe his locks and his alarm aren’t so great either.”

“That’s a big step, Reacher. That’s a whole bunch of extra crimes right there.”

“Let’s at least go take a look.”

“I’ll be an accessory.”

“You can have a veto,” Reacher said. “Two thumbs on the button, like a nuclear launch.”

He turned left, and rolled down the road. Then a phone rang. A loud, electronic trill, like a demented songbird. Not his phone, and not Turner’s, but Rickard’s, from the back seat, next to his empty wallet.

Chapter 55

Reacher pulled over and squirmed around and picked up the phone. It was trilling loud, and vibrating in his hand. The screen said Incoming Call, which was superfluous information, given all the trilling and vibrating, but it also said Shrago, which was useful. Reacher opened the phone and held it to his ear and said, “Hello?”

A voice said, “Rickard?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Not Rickard.”

Silence.

Reacher said, “What were you thinking? A bunch of warehousemen against the 110th MP? We’re three for three. It’s like batting practice. And you’re all that’s left. And you’re all alone now. And you’re next. How does that even feel?”

Silence.

Reacher said, “But they shouldn’t have put you in this position. It was unfair. I know that. I know what Pentagon people are like. I’m not unsympathetic. I can help you out.”

Silence.

Reacher said, “Tell me their names, go straight back to Bragg, and I’ll leave you alone.”

Silence. Then a fast beep-beep-beep in the earpiece, and Call Ended on the screen. Reacher tossed the phone back on the rear seat and said, “I’ll ask twice, but I won’t ask three times.”

They drove on, and then Studio City came at them, thick and fast. The boulevard was lined with enterprises, some of them in buildings all their own, some of them huddled together in strip malls, like the place in North Hollywood, with some of the buildings and some of the malls approached by shared service roads, and others standing behind parking lots all their own. Numbers were hard to see, because plenty of storefronts were dark. They made two premature turns, in and out of the wrong parking lots. But they found the right place soon enough. It was a lime green mall, five units long. The Big Dog’s lawyer was in the center unit.

Except he wasn’t.

The center unit was occupied by a tax preparer. Se Habla Espanol, plus about a hundred other languages.

Turner said, “Things change in sixteen years. People retire.”

Reacher said nothing.

She said, “Are you sure this is the right address?”

“You think I’m mistaken?”

“You could be forgiven.”

“Thank you, but I’m sure.” Reacher moved closer, for a better look. The style of the place was not cutting edge. The signage and the messages and the boasts and the promises were all a little dated. The lawyer had not retired recently.

There was a light on in back.

“On a timer,” Turner said. “For security. No one is in there.”

“It’s winter,” Reacher said. “Tax time is starting. The guy is in there.”

“And?”

“We could talk to him.”

“What about? Are you due a refund?”

“He forwards the old guy’s mail, at least. Maybe he even knows him. Maybe the old guy is still the landlord.”

“Maybe the old guy died ten years ago. Or moved to Wyoming.”

“Only one way to find out,” Reacher said. He stepped up and rapped hard on the glass. He said, “At this time of night it will work better if you do the talking.”

Juliet called Romeo, because some responsibilities were his, and he said, “Shrago tells me Reacher has Rickard’s phone. And therefore also his gun, I assume. And he knows they’re warehousemen from Fort Bragg.”

Romeo said, “Because of Zadran’s bio. It was an easy connection to make.”

“We’re down to the last man. We’re nearly defenseless.”

“Shrago is worth something.”

“Against them? We’ve lost three men.”

“Are you worried?”

“Of course I am. We’re losing.”

“Do you have a suggestion?”

“It’s time,” Juliet said. “We know Reacher’s target. We should give Shrago permission.”

For a spell it looked like Turner was right, and there was no one there, just a light on a security timer, but Reacher kept on knocking, and eventually a guy stepped into view making shooing motions with his arms. To which Reacher replied with beckoning motions of his own, which produced a standoff, the guy miming I don’t do nighttime walk-ins, and Reacher feeling like the kid in the movie that gets sent to the doctor’s house in the middle of the night, all Come quickly, old Jeb got buried alive in a pile of W9s. And the guy cracked first. He snorted in exasperation and set off stomping up his store’s center aisle. He undid the lock and opened the door. He was a young Asian man. Early thirties, maybe. He was wearing gray pants and a red sweater vest.

He said, “What do you want?”

Turner said, “To apologize.”

“For what?”

“Interrupting you. We know your time is valuable. But we need five minutes of it. For which we’d be happy to pay you a hundred dollars.”

“Who are you?”

“Technically at the moment we work for the government.”

“May I see ID?”

“No.”

“But you want to pay me a hundred dollars?”

“Only if you have material information.”

“On what subject?”

“The lawyer that had this place before you.”

“What about him?”

“Congress requires us to verify certain types of information a minimum of five separate ways, and we’ve done four of them, so we’re hoping you can be number five tonight, so we can all go home.”

“What type of information?”

“First of all, we’re required to ask, purely as a formality, do you have personal knowledge whether the subject of our inquiry is alive or dead?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And which is it?”

“Alive.”

“Good,” Turner said. “That’s just a baseline thing. And all we need now is his full legal name and his current address.”

“You should have come to me first, not fifth. I forward his mail.”

“No, we tackle the hard ones early. Makes the day go better. Downhill, not up.”

“I’ll write it down.”

“Thank you,” Turner said.

“It has to be exact,” Reacher said. “You know what Congress is like. If one guy puts Avenue and another guy puts A-v-e, it’s liable to get thrown out.”

“Don’t worry,” the guy said.

*  *  *

The lawyer’s full legal name was Martin Mitchell Ballantyne, and he hadn’t moved to Wyoming. His address was still Studio City, Los Angeles, California. Almost walking distance. Turner’s map showed it to be close to the Ventura end of Coldwater Canyon Drive. Maybe where the guy had lived all along.

In which case he had been a lousy lawyer. The address was a garden apartment, probably from the 1930s, which was eight decades of decay. It had been dowdy long ago. Now it was desperate. Dark green walls, like slime, and yellow light in the windows.

Turner said, “Don’t get your hopes up. He might refuse to see us. It’s kind of late to come calling.”

Reacher said, “His light is still on.”

“And he might not remember a thing about it. It was sixteen years ago.”

“Then we’re no worse off.”

“Unless he calls it tampering with a prosecution witness.”

“He should think of it as a deposition.”

“Just don’t be surprised if he throws us out.”

“He’s a lonely old guy. Nothing he wants more than a couple of visitors.”

Ballantyne neither threw them out nor looked happy to see them. He just stood at his door, rather passively, as if a lot of his life had been spent opening his door late in the LA evening, in response to urgent demands. He looked medium sized and reasonably healthy, and not much over sixty. But he looked tired. And he had a very lugubrious manner. He had the look of a man who had taken on the world, and lost. He had a scar on his lip, which Reacher guessed was not the result of a surgical procedure. And behind him he had what Reacher took to be a wife. She looked just as glum, but less passive and more overtly hostile.

Reacher said, “We’d like to buy fifteen minutes of your time, Mr. Ballantyne. How would a hundred bucks work for you?”

The guy said, “I no longer practice law. I no longer have a license.”

“Retired?”

“Disbarred.”

“When?”

“Four years ago.”

“It’s an old case we want to talk about.”

“What’s your interest in it?”

“We’re making a movie.”

“How old is the case?”

“Sixteen years.”

“For a hundred bucks?”

“It’s yours if you want it.”

“Come in,” the guy said. “We’ll see if I want it.”

They all four crabbed down a narrow hallway, and into a narrow living room, which had better furniture than Reacher expected, as if the Ballantynes had downsized from a better place. Four years ago, perhaps. Disbarred, maybe fined, maybe sued, maybe bankrupted.

Ballantyne said, “What if I can’t remember?”

“You still get the money,” Reacher said. “As long as you make an honest effort.”

“What was the case?”

“Sixteen years ago you wrote an affidavit for a client named Juan Rodriguez, also known as the Big Dog.”

Ballantyne leaned forward, all set to give it a hundred dollars’ worth of honest effort, but he got there within about a buck and a quarter.

He sat back again.

He said, “The thing with the army?”

Recognition in his voice. And some kind of misery. As if some bad thing had stirred, and come back from the dead. As if the thing with the army had brought him nothing but trouble.

“Yes,” Reacher said. “The thing with the army.”

“And your interest in it is what exactly?”

“You used my name, where you had to fill in the blanks.”

“You’re the guy?” Ballantyne said. “In my house? Haven’t I suffered enough?”

And his wife said, “Get the hell out, right now.” Which apparently she meant, because she kept on saying it, loud and clear and venomous, over and over again, with heavy emphasis on the right now. Which in terms of tone and content Reacher took as clear evidence that consent had been withdrawn, and that trespass had begun, and he had promised Turner two thumbs on the nuclear button, and he was a little mindful of the prosecution witness issue, so he got the hell out, right then, with Turner about a foot behind him. They walked back to the car and leaned on it and Turner said, “So it’s all about the filing system.”

Reacher nodded.

“Fingers crossed,” he said.

“Are you going to use Sullivan?”

“Would you?”

“Definitely. She’s senior, and she’s right there at JAG, not stuck in HRC.”

“Agreed,” Reacher said.

He took out his phone and called Edmonds.

Chapter 56

Edmonds picked up, sleepy and a little impatient, and Reacher said, “Earlier tonight you told me Major Sullivan told you the office of the Secretary of the Army is pushing for a fast resolution of the Rodriguez issue.”

“And you’ve woken me up in the middle of the night to give me another witty response?”

“No, I need you to find out exactly who delivered that message to Major Sullivan, or at least which channel it came through.”

“Thank you for thinking of me, but shouldn’t Major Sullivan handle this direct?”

“She’s going to be very busy doing something else. This is very important, captain. And very urgent. I need it done early. So hit up everyone you know, everywhere. As early as you can. While they’re still on the treadmill, or whatever it is people do in the morning.”

Reacher patted his pockets and found Sullivan’s personal cell number, on the torn-in-half scratch pad page that Leach had given him. He dialed, and counted the ring tones. She picked up after six, which he thought was pretty good. A light sleeper, apparently.

She said, “Hello?”

“This is Jack Reacher,” he said. “Remember me?”

“How could I forget? We need to talk.”

“We are talking.”

“About your situation.”

“Later, OK? Right now we have stuff to do.”

“Right now? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Either right now or as soon as possible. Depending on your level of access.”

“To what?”

“I just spoke with the lawyer who did the Big Dog’s affidavit.”

“On the phone?”

“Face to face.”

“That was completely inappropriate.”

“It was a very short conversation. We left when requested.”

“We?”

“Major Turner is with me. An officer of equal rank and equal ability. An independent witness. She heard it, too. Like a second opinion.”

“Heard what?”

“Does your legal archive have a computer search function?”

“Of course it does.”

“So if I typed Reacher, complaint against, what would I get?”

“Exactly what you got, basically. The Big Dog’s affidavit, or similar.”

“Is the search fast and reliable?”

“Did you really wake me up in the middle of the night to talk about computers?”

“I need information.”

“The system is pretty fast. Not a very intuitive search protocol, but it’s capable of taking you straight to an individual document.”

“I mentioned the case to the lawyer and he remembered it immediately. He called it the thing with the army. Then he asked me what my interest was, and I told him, and he said, haven’t I suffered enough?”

“What did he mean by that?”

“You had to be there to hear it. It was all in his tone of voice. The Big Dog affidavit was not just a complaint he mailed in and forgot about. It was not routine. It was a thing. It was a whole story, with a beginning, and a middle, and an end. And I’m guessing it was a bad end. That’s what we heard. He made it sound like a negative episode in his life. He was looking back on it, with regret.”

“Reacher, I’m a lawyer, not a dialog coach. I need facts, not the way people make things sound.”

“And I’m an interrogator, and an interrogator learns plenty by listening. He asked me what my interest was, as if he was wondering what possible interest was there left to have? Hadn’t all possible interests been exhausted years ago?”

“Reacher, it’s the middle of the night. Do you have a point?”

“Hang in there. It’s not like you have anything else to do. You won’t get back to sleep now. The point is, then he said, haven’t I suffered enough? And simultaneously his wife started yelling and screaming and throwing us out the door. They’re living in reduced circumstances, and they’re very unhappy about it. And the Big Dog was a hot button. Like a defining event, years ago, with ongoing negative consequences. That’s the only way to make sense of the language. So now I’m wondering whether this whole thing was actually litigated at the time, all those years ago. And maybe the lawyer got his butt kicked. And maybe he got his first ethics violation. Which might have been the first step on a rocky road that terminated four years ago, when he got disbarred. Such that neither he nor his wife can bear to hear about that case ever again, because it was the start of all their troubles. Haven’t I suffered enough? As in, I’ve had sixteen years of hell because of that case, and now you want to put me through it all again?”

“Reacher, what are you smoking? You didn’t remember the case. Therefore you didn’t litigate it. Or you’d remember it. And if it was litigated sixteen years ago, to the point where the lawyer got his butt kicked, why are they relitigating it now?”

“Are they relitigating it now?”

“I’m about to hang up.”

“What would happen if someone searched Reacher, complaint against, and ordered up the Big Dog affidavit, and fed it into the system at unit level? With a bit of smoke and mirrors about how serious it was?”

No answer.

Reacher said, “It would feel exactly like a legal case, wouldn’t it? We’d assemble a file, and we’d all start preparing and strategizing, and we’d wait for a conference with the prosecutor, and we’d hope our strategy survived it.”

No answer.

Reacher said, “Have you had a conference with the prosecutor?”

Sullivan said, “No.”

“Maybe there is no prosecutor. Maybe this is a one-sided illusion. Designed to work for one minute only. As in, I was supposed to see your file and run like hell.”

“It can’t be an illusion. I’m getting pressure from the Secretary’s office.”

“Says who? Maybe you’re getting messages, but you don’t really know where they’re coming from. Do you even know the Big Dog is dead? Have you seen a death certificate?”

“This is crazy talk.”

“Maybe. But humor me. Suppose it really was litigated sixteen years ago. Without my knowledge. Perhaps one of hundreds, with a specimen case involving some other guy, but I was in the supporting cast. Like class action. Maybe they started some aggressive new policy against ambulance chasers. Which might account for the guy getting his butt kicked so bad. What kind of paperwork would we have seen?”

“If it really was litigated? A lot of paperwork. You don’t want to know.”

“So if I searched Reacher, defense against complaint, what would I find?”

“Eventually you’d find everything they tagged as defense material, I suppose. Hundreds of pages, probably, in a big case.”

“Is it like shopping on a web site? Does it link from one thing to another?”

“No, I told you. It’s a clunky old thing. It was designed by people over thirty. This is the army, don’t forget.”

“OK, so if I was worried about a guy called Reacher, and I wanted to scare him away, and I was in a big hurry, I could search the archive for Reacher, complaint against, and I could find the Big Dog’s affidavit, and I could put it back in circulation, while being completely unaware it was only a small part of a much bigger file. Because of the way the search function works. Is that correct?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Which is your job, starting right now. You have to test that hypothesis. See if you can find any trace of a bigger file. Search under all the tags you can think of.”

They got in the car and drove east on the freeway, back to Vineland Avenue, and then south, past the girl’s neighborhood, to the coach diner. She was gone, inevitably, and so was the blonde waitress, and so were all the other dinnertime customers. Rush hour was definitely over. Late evening had started. There were three men in separate booths, drinking coffee, and there was a woman eating pie. The brunette waitress was talking to the counter man. Reacher and Turner stood at the door, and the waitress broke away and greeted them, and Reacher said, “I’m sorry, but I had to run before. There was an emergency. I didn’t pay for my cup of coffee.”

The waitress said, “It was taken care of.”

“Who by? Not the kid, I hope. That wouldn’t be right.”

“It was taken care of,” the woman said again.

“It’s all good,” the counter man said. Arthur. He was wiping his counter.

“How much is a cup of coffee?” Reacher asked him.

“Two bucks and a penny,” the guy said. “With tax.”

“Good to know,” Reacher said. He dug out two bills and a lone cent, and he put them on the counter, and he said, “To return the favor, to whoever it was. Very much appreciated. What goes around comes around.”

“OK,” the guy said. He left the money where it was.

“She told me she came in often.”

“Who did?”

“Samantha. The kid.”

The guy nodded. “She’s pretty much a regular.”

“Tell her I was sorry I had to run. I don’t want her to think I was rude.”

“She’s a kid. What do you care?”

“She thinks I work for the government. I don’t want to give her a negative impression. She’s a bright girl. Public service is something she could think about.”

“Who do you work for really?”

“The government,” Reacher said. “But not the part she guessed.”

“I’ll pass on the message.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Longer than I’ve known you. So if there’s a choice between her privacy and your questions, I guess I’m going to go with her privacy.”

“I understand,” Reacher said. “I would expect nothing less. But would you tell her one more thing for me?”

“Which would be what?”

“Tell her to remember what I said about the hexagons.”

“The hexagons?”

“The little hexagons,” Reacher said. “Tell her it’s important.”

They got back in the car and they started it up, but they didn’t go anywhere. They sat in the diner’s lot, their faces lit up pink and blue by the Art Deco neon, and Turner said, “Do you think she’s safe?”

Reacher said, “She’s got the 75th MP and the FBI staring at her bedroom window all night long, both of them specifically on the alert for an intruder, which they expect to be me, except it won’t be, because I’m not going there, and neither is Shrago, in my opinion, because he knows what I know. Neither one of us could get in that house tonight. So yes, I think she’s safe. Almost by accident.”

“Then we should go find ourselves a place to stay. Got a preference?”

“You’re the CO.”

“I’d like to go to the Four Seasons. But we should keep radio silence on the credit cards, as far as our overnight location is concerned. So it’s cash only, which means motels only, which means we should go back to that hot-sheets place in Burbank, where we met Emily the hooker. All part of the authentic experience.”

“Like driving a car on Mulholland Drive.”

“Or shooting a man on Mulholland Drive. That’s in the movies, too.”

“You OK?”

She said, “If I have a problem, you’ll be the first to know.”

The motel was certainly authentic. It had a wire grill over the reception window, and cash was all it took. The room looked like it should feel cold and damp, but it was in Los Angeles, where nothing was cold and damp. Instead it felt brittle and papery, as if it had been baked too long. But it was functional, and not far from comfortable.

The car was parked five rooms away. No place else to hide it. But safe enough, even if Shrago saw it. He would watch the room in front of it, and then he would break in, and find the wrong people, and assume the car was one step to the side of where it should have been, but left or right was a fifty-fifty chance, which meant if he called it wrong he would have committed three separate burglaries before he even laid eyes on the target, and suppose the car was two steps from where it should have been? How many rooms was that? His head would explode long before he got to five steps. His tiny ears would ping off into the far distance, like shrapnel.

Reacher figured he had about four hours to sleep. He was sure Edmonds was busting a gut in Virginia, on East Coast time, gathering information, so she could call early and wake him up.

Chapter 57

Edmonds’ first call came in at two in the morning local time, which was five o’clock Eastern. Reacher and Turner both woke up. Reacher put the open phone between their pillows, and they rolled over forehead to forehead, so they could both hear. Edmonds said, “You asked me earlier, about Jason Kenneth Rickard, and a guy called Shrago. Got a pen?”

Reacher said, “No.”

“Then listen carefully. They’re the same as the first two. They’re all deployed with the same company at Fort Bragg. Three teams to a squad, and they’re a team. What that means exactly, I don’t know. Possibly this is skilled work, and they learn to rely on each other.”

“And to keep their mutual secrets,” Reacher said. “Tell me about Shrago.”

“Ezra-none-Shrago, staff sergeant and team leader. Thirty-six years old. Hungarian grandparents. He’s been in the unit since the start of the war. He was in and out of Afghanistan for five years, and since then he’s been based at home, exclusively.”

“What’s up with his ears?”

“He was captured.”

“In North Carolina or Afghanistan?”

“By the Taliban. He was gone three days.”

“Why didn’t they cut his head off?”

“Probably for the same reason we didn’t shoot Emal Zadran. They have politicians, too.”

“When was this?”

“Five years ago. They gave him a permanent billet at home after that. And he hasn’t been back to Afghanistan since.”

Reacher closed the phone, and Turner said, “I don’t like that at all. Why would he sell arms to the people who cut his ears off?”

“He doesn’t make the deals. He’s just a cog in a machine. They don’t care what he thinks. They want his muscle, not his opinions.”

“We should offer him immunity. We could turn him on a dime.”

“He beat Moorcroft half to death.”

“I said offer, not give. We could stab him in the back afterward.”

“So call him, and make the pitch. He’s still on speed dial, in Rickard’s phone.”

Turner got up and found the right cell, and got back in bed and dialed, but the phone company told her the number she wanted was blocking her calls.

“Efficient,” she said. “They’re cleaning house as they go, minute by minute. No more Mr. Rickard. Or Baldacci, or Lozano. All consigned to history.”

“We’ll manage without Shrago’s input,” Reacher said. “We’ll figure it out. Maybe in a dream, about five minutes from now.” She smiled, and said, “OK, goodnight again.”

Juliet called Romeo, because some responsibilities were his, and he said, “Shrago has located their car. It’s at a motel south of the Burbank airport.”

Romeo said, “But?”

“Shrago feels it’s likely not in front of the right room, as a basic security measure. He’d have to check ten or a dozen, and he feels he won’t get away with that. One or two, maybe, but no more. And there’s no point in disabling the car, because they’d only rent another, on one of our own credit cards.”

“Can’t he get to the girl?”

“Not before she leaves the house again. It’s buttoned up tight.”

Romeo said, “There’s activity in the legal archive. A lone user, with JAG access, searching for something. Which is unusual, at this time of night.”

“Captain Edmonds?”

“No, she’s in the HRC system. She just took a good look at Rickard and Shrago, about an hour ago. They’re closing in.”

“On Shrago, perhaps. But not on us. There’s no direct link.”

“The link is through Zadran. It’s like a neon sign. So tell Shrago to get out of Burbank. Tell him to wait on the girl. Tell him we’re counting on him, and tell him this mess has to be cleaned up first thing in the morning, whatever it takes.”

Edmonds’ second call came at five in the morning local time, which was eight in the East. Reacher and Turner did the forehead-to-forehead thing again, and Edmonds said, “OK, here’s an update. Treadmill time is over, and office hours are yet to begin, so all I have is rumor and gossip, but in D.C. that’s usually more accurate than anything else.”

Reacher said, “And?”

“I spoke to eight people either in or associated with the office of the Secretary.”

“And?”

“Rodriguez or Juan Rodriguez or Dog or Big Dog is ringing no bells. No one recognizes the name, no one is aware of an active case, no one has passed a message to Major Sullivan, and no one is aware of a senior officer doing so either.”

“Interesting.”

“But not definitive. Eight people is a small sample, and the feeling is a sixteen-year-old embarrassment wouldn’t be given much bandwidth. We’ll know more in an hour, when everyone is back in the office.”

“Thank you, captain.”

“Sleeping well?”

“We’re in a motel that rents by the hour. We’re getting our money’s worth. Was Ezra Shrago offered counseling after the thing with his ears in Afghanistan?”

“Psychiatric notes are eyes-only.”

“But I’m sure you read them anyway.”

“He was offered counseling, and he accepted, which was considered unusual. Most people seem to do it the army way, which is to bottle it up until they collapse with a nervous breakdown. But Shrago was a willing patient.”

“And?”

“As of three years after the incident he still retained strong feelings of anger, resentment, humiliation and hatred. The home deployment was preemptive, just as much as therapeutic. The feeling was he couldn’t be trusted among the native population. He was an atrocity waiting to happen. The notes say he hates the Taliban with a passion.”

Afterward Turner said, “Now I really don’t like it. Why would he sell weapons to people he hates?”

“He’s a cog,” Reacher said again. “He lives in North Carolina. He hasn’t seen a raghead in five years. He gets paid a lot of money.”

“But he’s participating.”

“He’s disassociating. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Reacher left the phone where it was, between their pillows, and they went back to sleep.

But not for long. Edmonds called for a third time forty minutes later, at a quarter to six in the morning, local time. She said, “Just for fun I went back through the Fort Bragg deployments, because I wanted to see how long they had all served together as a quartet. Shrago was in at the beginning, as I said, and then came Rickard, and then Lozano, and then Baldacci was the last in, which was four years ago, and they’ve been together ever since. Which makes them the oldest team in the unit, by a big margin. They’ve had plenty of time to get to know each other.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“But that’s not the real point. The real point is, four years ago that unit had a temporary commander. The previous guy fell down dead with a heart attack. It was the temporary commander who put Shrago’s team together. And guess who he was?”

“Morgan,” Reacher said.

“You got it in one. He was a major then. He got his promotion soon after that, for no very obvious reason. His file is pretty thin. You could read it as a cure for insomnia.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. But right now I sleep fine, apart from getting woken up by the phone.”

“Likewise,” Edmonds said.

Reacher asked, “Who sent Morgan to Bragg four years ago? Who tells a guy like that where to go?”

“I’m working on that now.”

Reacher left the phone where it was, and they went back to sleep.

They got a final half hour, and then the fourth call of the morning came in, at a quarter after six local time, and it came direct from Major Sullivan at JAG. She said, “I just spent three hours in the archive, and I’m afraid your theory is a little off the mark. The Big Dog’s claim was not litigated sixteen years ago, nor has it been at any time since.”

Reacher paused a beat.

“OK,” he said. “Understood. Thanks for trying.”

“Now do you want the good news?”

“Is there any?”

“It wasn’t litigated, but it was investigated very thoroughly.”

“And?”

“It was a fraud, from beginning to end.”

Chapter 58

Sullivan said, “Someone really went to bat for you. You must have been very well respected, major. It wasn’t a class action thing. There was no new policy regarding ambulance chasers. This was all about you. Someone wanted to clear your name.”

“Who?”

“The hard work was done by a captain from the 135th MP, name of Granger.”

“Man or woman?”

“A man, based on the West Coast. Don Granger.”

“Never heard of him.”

“All his notes were copied to an MP two-star, name of Garber.”

“Leon Garber,” Reacher said. “He was my rabbi, more or less. I owe him a lot. Even more than I thought, clearly.”

“I guess so. He must have driven the whole thing. And you must have been his blue-eyed boy, because this was one hell of a full court press. But you owe Granger, too. He worked his butt off for you, and he saw something everyone else missed.”

“What was the story?”

“You guys generate a lot of complaints. Your branch’s standard operating procedure is play dumb and hope they go away, which they often do, but if they don’t, then they’re defended, with historically mixed results. That’s how it went for many years. Then the ones that went away started to cause a problem, ironically. You all had old un-proven allegations on file. Most of them were obvious bullshit, quite rightly ignored, but some were marginal. And promotions boards saw them. And they started wondering about smoke without fire, and people weren’t getting ahead, and it became an issue. And the Big Dog’s complaint was worse than most. I guess General Garber felt it was too toxic to ignore, even if it might have gone away by itself. He didn’t want to leave it sitting there on the record. It was way too smoky.”

“He could have asked me about it direct.”

“Granger asked him why he didn’t.”

“And what was the answer?”

“Garber thought you might have done it. But he didn’t want to hear it direct.”

“Really?”

“He thought you might have gotten upset at the thought of SAWs on the streets of Los Angeles.”

“That was the LAPD’s problem, not mine. All I wanted was a name.”

“Which you got, and he didn’t really see how else you could have gotten it.”

“He didn’t talk to me afterward, either.”

“He was afraid you’d stop by and put a bullet in the lawyer’s head.”

“I might have.”

“Then Garber was a wise man. His strategy was immaculate. He put Granger on it, and the first thing Granger didn’t like was the Big Dog, and the second thing he didn’t like was the lawyer. But there were no cracks anywhere, and he knew you had been with the guy moments before he was beaten, and the affidavit was what it was, so he was stuck. He came up with the same thing you did, which was some other dude did it, or dudes, maybe a delegation sent over by a disgruntled customer, which in that context meant a gang, either Latino like Rodriguez or black, but he didn’t make any progress on his own. So next he went to the LAPD, but the cops had nothing to offer, either. Which Granger didn’t necessarily regard as definitive, because at the relevant time the cops had been up to their eyes in racial sensitivity issues, like the LAPD often was back then, and they were nervous about discussing gangs with a stranger, in case the stranger was really a journalist who believed gang issues were code words for racial insensitivity. So Granger went back to the gang idea on his own, and he checked the record for who had been armed and dangerous at the time, as a kind of starting point, and he found no one had been armed and dangerous at the time. There was a seventy-two hour period without a single gang crime reported anywhere. So initially Granger concluded gangs were on the wane in LA, and he better look elsewhere, but he had no luck, and Garber was ready to pull him out. Then Granger saw what he was missing.”

From her pillow Turner said, “The seventy-two hour hiatus was because the LAPD trashed all the gang crime reports. Probably on the advice of their PR people. Not because nothing was happening.”

“Correct, major,” Sullivan said. “But the patrolmen’s notebooks still had all the details. Granger got some lieutenant backed up in a corner, and the true story came out, which was bizarre. About twenty minutes after Reacher left, five black guys from El Segundo showed up and started beating the Big Dog in his own front yard. A neighbor called it in, and the LAPD showed up, and they witnessed about a minute of the beating, and then they got themselves in gear and arrested the guys from El Segundo, and it was the patrolmen themselves who took the Big Dog to the hospital. But there had been a degree of excessive force in the arrests, and a number of serious injuries, so the report was reviewed, and then word came down to bury anything that wasn’t totally kosher, and the precinct captains erred on the side of caution, and they buried everything. Or maybe it wasn’t caution. Maybe there was nothing kosher.”

Reacher said, “So I’m in an affidavit for a beating, but the LAPD actually saw someone else doing it?”

“Granger got photocopies of their notebooks. They’re all in our archives.”

“That’s some ballsy lawyer the Big Dog found.”

“Worse than you think. Plan A was jump on the bandwagon and sue the LAPD itself. Why not? Everyone else was. Granger was snooping the lawyer’s office one night, on Ventura Boulevard, and he found a draft affidavit identical to yours, except it had the LAPD all over it, instead of you. But ironically that couldn’t fly, because the LAPD could prove for a fact it hadn’t been in the neighborhood that day, because all its records were doctored, so as soon as that little wrinkle sunk in, the lawyer switched to Plan B, which was the army. Which is of course fraudulent and criminal, but the reasoning was very solid. Ever afterward the LAPD could never admit they trashed crime reports for political convenience, so the lawyer was guaranteed absolute silence from that direction. And the Big Dog wanted a big payday, and the guys from El Segundo had no traceable assets, so Uncle Sam was the next best thing.”

“How did Granger wrap it up?”

“He had to thread the needle, because he didn’t want to embarrass the LAPD in public. But he knew a JAG guy who knew a guy in the Bar Association, and between them they put some professional hurt on the lawyer. Granger made him write out another affidavit, swearing the first one was fraudulent, which he personally witnessed, and which, by the way, is still in the archive one slot away from where the phony one was. And then Granger split the lawyer’s lip.”

“He put that in the archive, too?”

“Apparently he was defending himself against an unprovoked attack.”

“That can happen. How is Colonel Moorcroft doing?”

“He’s out of danger, but not good.”

“Give him my best, if you get the chance. And thanks for your efforts tonight.”

Sullivan said, “I owe you an apology, major.”

Reacher said, “No, you don’t.”

“Thank you. But you still owe me thirty dollars.”

Reacher pictured Turner in his mind, in Berryville, Virginia, after the hardware store, in her new pants, with his shirt ballooning around her, its tail touching the backs of her knees. He said, “They were the best thirty dollars I ever had.”

They celebrated the best way they knew how, and then it was too late to go back to sleep, so they got up and showered, and Turner said, “How does it feel?”

“No different,” Reacher said.

“Why not?”

“I knew I didn’t do it, so it contributed no new information, and it brought no relief, because I wasn’t upset to begin with, because I don’t care what people think.”

“Even me?”

“You knew I didn’t do it. Like I knew you didn’t take a hundred grand.”

“I’m glad she apologized. It was very courteous of you to say she didn’t need to.”

“It wasn’t courtesy,” Reacher said. “It was a statement of fact. She really didn’t need to apologize. Because her initial prejudice was correct. And I shouldn’t have said I didn’t do it, because I almost did. I was a minute away from making every word of that affidavit true. Not because of SAWs on the streets of Los Angeles. I wasn’t worried about them. It takes a lot of strength and training to use one right. And maintenance. The squad machine gun goes to your best guy, not your worst, and are there guys like that on the streets of Los Angeles? I didn’t think so. I figured the SAWs would fire once and end up as boat anchors. Nothing to get upset about there. It was the other stuff that upset me. Claymore mines, and hand grenades. No expertise required. But lots of collateral damage, in an urban situation. Innocent passersby, and children. And that sneering tub of lard was making a fortune, and spending it all on dope and hookers and twenty Big Macs a day.”

Turner said, “Let’s go get breakfast. And let’s not come back here. Authenticity is losing its charm.”

They put their toothbrushes in their pockets, and they put on their coats, and they headed out to the lot. The street lights were still brighter than the sky. The car was where they had left it, five rooms away.

There was something written on it.

It was written in the grime on the front passenger’s window. Someone had used a broad fingertip and traced three words, a total of thirteen letters, all of them block capitals, neatly, with the punctuation all present and correct: WHERE’S THE GIRL?

Chapter 59

Samantha Dayton woke early, like she often did, and she came down the narrow attic stair and checked the view from the living room window. The Hummer was gone. In the middle of the night, probably, due on station at the law office. In its place was the purple Dodge Charger, looking way too cool for a cop car. But a cop car it was, nevertheless. Generically speaking, at least. Technically it was a federal agent’s car, she supposed. DEA, or ATF, or FBI. She recognized the driver. She was getting a handle on the rotation. Further on down the street the small white compact was where it always was. And it was the real mystery. Because it was not a cop car. It was a rental, most likely. Hertz or Avis, from LAX, she thought. But the DEA and the ATF and the FBI all had field offices in Los Angeles, with big staffs and cars of their own. Therefore the guy in the small white compact was from an organization important enough to participate, but too small and too specialized to have its own local office. Therefore the guy had flown in, from somewhere else. From D.C., probably, where all the secrets were.

She took her shower, and dressed, in her favorite black pants and her favorite jean jacket, but with a fresh blue T-shirt, and therefore blue shoes. She combed her hair out, and checked the view again. It was coming up to what she called zero hour. Twice a day the small white compact moved, for meals, she guessed, or bathroom breaks, and about four times a day the Hummer and the Charger swapped positions, but there was apparently no coordination between the agencies, because once a day in the early morning everyone was missing at the same time, for about twenty minutes. Zero agents, zero hour. The street went back to its normal self. Some kind of logic issue, she supposed, or simple math, like in class, with x number of cars, and y number of locations, and z number of hours to cover. Something had to give.

She looked out and saw that the small white compact was already gone, and then the Charger moved out as she watched. It started up, and eased away from the curb, and drove away. The street went quiet. Back to its normal self. Zero hour.

Reacher ran through his earlier reasoning one more time: the 75th MP and the FBI were watching her house, and they were specifically on the alert for an intruder. I’m not going there, and neither is Shrago, because neither one of us could get in.

He said, “It’s a bluff. He’s trying to get in our heads. He’s trying to draw us out. That’s all. He can’t get anywhere near the girl.”

Turner said, “Are you absolutely sure about that?”

“No.”

“We can’t go there. You’re still on the shit list, until Sullivan makes it official. And I’m still on the shit list, probably forever.”

“We can go there once.”

“We can’t. They already saw the car once yesterday. Maybe twice. And getting arrested won’t help her or us.”

“We can get another car. At the Burbank airport. Shrago will know about it inside an hour, but we can use that hour.”

Breakfast was always a problem. There was never anything in the house, and anyway her mother slept late in the morning, all tired and stressed, and she wouldn’t appreciate a lot of crashing and banging in the kitchen. So breakfast was an expedition, which was a word she really liked, in her opinion based on old Latin, ex for out, and ped for foot, like pedal or pedicure or pedestrian, so all put together it meant going out on foot, which is exactly what she usually did, because obviously she couldn’t drive yet, being only fourteen years old, albeit nearly fifteen.

She was looking forward to driving. Driving would be a big advantage, because it would widen her scope. In a car she could go to Burbank or Glendale or Pasadena for breakfast, or even Beverly Hills. Whereas out on foot her choice was limited to the coach diner, south on Vineland, or alternatively the coffee shop near the law office, north on Vineland, and that was about it, because everything else was tacos or quesadillas or Vietnamese, and none of those places was open for breakfast. Which was frustrating.

Normally.

But not such a big deal on that particular morning, because the federal agents would face the same limited choice, which would make them easier to find. Fifty-fifty, basically, like tossing a coin, and she hoped she tossed it right, because the big one named Reacher seemed willing to talk, about stuff worth listening to, because he was obviously right in the middle of it all, some kind of a senior guy, rushing off after urgent phone calls, and spilling the beans on the man with the ears.

So, heads or tails?

She pulled the blue door shut behind her, and she started walking.

They put the old Range Rover on a curb in a tow zone outside the rental lot, and they lined up at the desk behind a white-haired couple just in from Phoenix. When their turn came they used Baldacci’s license and credit card and picked out a mid-size sedan, and after a whole lot of signing and initialing they were given a key. The car in question was a white Ford, dripping wet from washing, parked under a roof, and it was bland and anonymous and therefore adequate in every way, except that its window tints were green and subtle and modern, nothing like the opaque plastic sheets that had been stuck to the Range Rover’s glass. Driving the Ford was going to feel very different. Inward visibility was going to be restricted only by sunshine and reflections. Or not.

Turner had brought her book of maps, and she plotted a route that stayed away from Vineland Avenue until the last possible block. The day dawned bright and fresh in front of them, and traffic stayed quiet. It was still very early. They came out of Burbank on small streets, mostly through office parks, and they rolled through North Hollywood, and they crossed the freeway east of Vineland, and they headed for the neighborhood at an angle, feeling exposed and naked behind the thin green glass.

“One pass,” Turner said. “Slow constant speed to the end of the street, no stopping under any circumstances, all the time anticipating normality and the presence of law enforcement vehicles, and if it turns out any different we’ll continue to the end of the street anyway, and we’ll work it out from there. We must not get trapped in front of the house. OK?”

“Agreed,” Reacher said.

They turned into the first elbow, and they drove past the grocery, and past the car with no wheels, and they turned left, and then right, and then they were in her street, which stretched ahead long and straight and normal, a narrow metallic lane through nose-to-tail cars, both sides, all parked, all winking in the morning sun.

Turner said, “FBI ahead on the right. Purple Dodge Charger.”

“Got it,” Reacher said.

“Plus the last car on the lot ahead on the left. The MP special.”

“Got it,” Reacher said again.

“The house looks normal.”

Which it did. It looked solid and settled, and still, as if there were sleeping people inside. The front door was closed, and all the windows were closed. The old red coupe had not moved.

They rolled on.

Turner said, “So far every other vehicle is empty. No sign of Shrago. It was a head fake.”

They kept on going, at a slow and constant speed, all the way to the end of the street, and they saw nothing at all to worry about.

“Let’s go get breakfast,” Reacher said.

*  *  *

Romeo called Juliet and said, “They rented another car. A white Ford, at the Burbank airport.”

Juliet said, “Why? Surely they know they can’t hide from us.”

“They’re hiding from the FBI and the MPs. Changing cars is a sound tactic.”

“A white Ford? I’ll tell Shrago immediately.”

“Is he making progress?”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

Romeo said, “Hold on a minute.”

“What’s up?”

“More activity on Baldacci’s card. The gentleman in Long Beach just took a second day’s rental on the Range Rover. Which means they haven’t changed cars. What they’ve done is added a car. Which means they’ve split up, and they’re moving separately. Which is smart. They’re two against one. They’re pressing their advantage. Make sure Shrago knows.”

They looped south of the neighborhood and came back north on Vineland as far as the coach diner. The white Ford was doing its job. It was turning no heads. It was unremarkable and anonymous and invisible, like a hole in the air. Ideal, except for its transparent windows.

The diner was doing good business, at that time of the morning all of it serious and no-nonsense, with early workers fueling up ahead of long days of labor. There were no ironic hipsters present. The girl wasn’t there, either. Which wasn’t a surprise, because even though she was pretty much a regular, who ate practically every meal there, it was still very early. Reacher knew almost nothing about fourteen-year-old girls, but he imagined early rising was not among their top ten lifestyle preferences. The guy named Arthur was behind his counter, and the brunette waitress was rushing around. A swing shift, maybe, late night and early morning. The blonde wasn’t there. Maybe she worked peak hours only, starting just before lunch, and finishing just after dinner.

They took the last booth on the right, directly behind the girl’s empty stool. A busboy gave them water, and the brunette gave them coffee. Turner ordered an omelet, and Reacher ordered pancakes. They ate, and enjoyed it, and lingered, and waited. The girl didn’t show. The rest of the clientele changed with the passage of time, office workers and retail workers replacing the laborers, their orders a little more delicate and a little less calorific, their table manners a little less like throwing coal in a furnace. Reacher got four refills of coffee. Turner got toast. The girl didn’t show.

Reacher got up and stepped over and sat down again on the girl’s empty stool. The guy named Arthur tracked the move, like a good counter man should, and he nodded, as if to say I’ll be right with you. Reacher waited, and Arthur served coffee, and orange juice, and he bussed a plate, and he took an order, and then he came over. Reacher asked him, “Does Samantha get breakfast here?”

The guy said, “Most days.”

“What time does she come in?”

The guy asked, “Would I be wrong if I said you’ll never see forty again?”

“Generous, not wrong.”

“Some people say it’s the times we live in, but I think it’s never been any different, which is that when a man in his forties starts asking an unhealthy amount of questions about a girl of fourteen, then most people are going to notice, and some of them might even do something, such as ask questions back.”

“As they should,” Reacher said. “But who died and made you chairman of the board?”

“It was me you asked.”

“I enjoyed talking to her, and I’d like to talk to her again.”

“Not reassuring.”

“She’s curious about a law enforcement situation, which is not a good combination.”

“The thing on her street?”

“I thought I might trade her some facts for a promise to stay out of the way.”

“Are you law enforcement?”

“No, I’m here on vacation. It was this or Tahiti.”

“She’s not old enough for facts.”

“I think she is.”

“Are you authorized?”

“Am I breathing?”

“She’s an early riser. She would have been in and out by now. Long ago. I guess she’s not coming today.”

Chapter 60

Reacher paid the check with Baldacci’s cash, and they got back in the Ford, and Turner said, “Either she ate at home today, or she skipped breakfast altogether. She’s a teenage girl. Don’t expect consistency.”

“She said she ate practically every meal here.”

“Which is not the same as every meal, period.”

“The guy said most days.”

“Which is not the same as every day.”

“But why would she skip today? She’s curious, and she thinks I’m a source.”

“Why would she expect you to be here?”

“Law enforcement has to eat, too.”

“Then the coffee shop would be just as logical, near the lawyer’s office. She knows there are two locations.”

“We should go take a look.”

“Too difficult. We wouldn’t see anything from the street, and we can’t go in on foot. Plus she’s an early riser. She’ll have been and gone.”

“We should cruise her house again.”

“That wouldn’t tell us anything. The door is shut. We don’t have X-ray vision.”

“Shrago is out there somewhere.”

Turner said, “Let’s go back to the off-ramp.”

Reacher said, “In a white car in daylight?”

“Just for ten minutes. To put our minds at rest.”

In bright daylight the old binoculars were superb. The magnified image was crisp and hyper-vivid. Reacher could see every detail, of the street, of the white compact, of the purple Dodge, of the blue front door. But nothing was happening. Everything looked quiet. Just another sunny day, and just another endless stake-out, boring and uneventful, like most stake-outs are. There was no sign of Shrago. Some of the parked cars had heavy tints or blinding reflections, but they weren’t plain enough to be rentals. And those plain enough to be rentals were empty.

“He’s not there,” Turner said.

“I wish we knew for sure she was,” Reacher said back.

Then his phone rang. Captain Edmonds, in Virginia. She said, “I found another file on Shrago, from five years ago. The decision to keep him out of the Middle East was controversial. We were fighting two wars, we were hurting for numbers, hundreds of people were getting re-upped involuntarily, the National Guard was gone for years at a time, and the idea of paying a loose cannon who couldn’t go to Iraq or Afghanistan was seen as absurd. First choice was involuntary separation, but he was making his case on compassionate grounds, so he had to be heard, and eventually the argument went all the way up the HRC chain of command, to an Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for personnel, who ruled in Shrago’s favor.”

“And?” Reacher said.

“That same Assistant Deputy was also in charge of temporary commands. He was the guy who moved Morgan to Fort Bragg a year later.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought so. Which is why I called. Shrago owed him, and Morgan was his chess piece.”

“What was his name?”

“Crew Scully.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“New England blue blood.”

“Where is he now?”

“He got promoted. Now he’s a Deputy Chief of Staff in his own right.”

“Responsible for what?”

“Personnel,” Edmonds said. “HRC oversight. Technically he’s my boss.”

“Who moved Morgan to the 110th, this week?”

“Scully’s second-in-command, I assume. Unless things have changed.”

“Will you check that for me? And will you check whether Scully has access to Homeland Security intelligence systems?”

“I don’t think he would have.”

“I don’t think so either,” Reacher said. He clicked off the call, and went back to staring at the street.

Juliet called Romeo, because some responsibilities were his, and he said, “Shrago tells me they’re not traveling separately. He decided to check the rental depot, and he got there just in time to see the Range Rover getting towed.”

“More fool them. Using one car limits them. Which is to our advantage.”

“That’s not the point. The Range Rover is on Baldacci’s credit card. We’ll have to pay the tow fee and the daily rental. It’s another slap in the face.”

“What else did Shrago see?”

“He’s close. She’s out of the house. Just walking around. There’s no one within a mile of her. He’s going to pick his spot.”

“And get the message to them how?”

“At the diner. They’ve been there twice. There’s a gentleman named Arthur who seems willing to pass the word.”

*  *  *

Turner’s ten minutes had turned into almost forty, but nothing had happened, either on the off-ramp behind them, or on the street in front of them. She said, “We have to go.”

Reacher said, “Where?”

“Just drive. Randomly. Within a mile of her door, because if she’s out, she’s walking. Surface streets only, also because she’s walking. Shrago will be thinking the same.”

So they fired up the Ford and merged onto the 134, and got off again immediately, and started the search on Vineland, block by block, randomly, except for her own street, which they decided not to risk. Most blocks were about a thousand feet long and two hundred feet deep, which meant there were about a hundred and twenty in a square mile, which meant there were nearly four hundred inside a circle with a two-mile diameter, which meant there were close to ninety miles of road to cover. But not quite, because some blocks were double-wide, and the highway shoulders and the ramps ate up space, and some tracts had never been built. About sixty miles, probably. Three hours’ worth, at a safe speed of twenty. Not that moving around increased the chances of a random encounter. Space and time didn’t work that way. But moving around felt better.

They saw nothing in the first hour, except the background blur of sidewalks and poles and trees and houses and stores, and parked cars in their hundreds. They saw not more than a handful of people, and they paid close attention to all of them, but none of them was the girl, and none of them was Shrago. They saw no cars crawling slow like their own. Most were heading from here to there innocently and normally, at a normal speed, and sometimes more. Which caused the only excitement in the whole of the second hour, when a dull black BMW ran a light about a hundred yards ahead, and was T-boned by an old Porsche on the cross street. Steam came up and a small crowd gathered, and then Reacher turned left and saw no more, until another random turn brought him back in line, by which time a cop car was there, with its light bar flashing, and after three more turns there was a second cop car, and an ambulance.

But apart from that, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Thirty minutes later Turner said, “Let’s take an early lunch. Because she might, if she had an early breakfast. Or no breakfast at all.”

“The diner?” Reacher said.

“I think so. Practically every meal means she might skip one, but not two.”

So they worked their way back through the maze, and they joined Vineland just north of the neighborhood, and they rolled south until they saw the old coach diner dead ahead on the left, all gleaming and shining in the sun.

And crossing Vineland toward it was the girl.

Chapter 61

Juliet called Romeo, and he said, “I’m afraid it fell apart. We had a piece of bad luck. He needed to grab her near his car, obviously. Right next to it, ideally. He couldn’t drag her down the street screaming, not for any appreciable distance. So he leapfrogged ahead and parked the car, and then he looped around on foot and came out again behind her, and it was all going fine, and he was all set to pass her right alongside the car, and they had about twenty yards left to go, and then some idiot ran a light and got into a fender bender, and suddenly there was a crowd of people, and a cop car, and then another cop car, and obviously Shrago couldn’t do anything in front of a crowd of people or the LAPD, so the girl watched the fun for a minute and then walked on, and Shrago had to let her go, because at first he couldn’t get his car out from the middle of all the mess, and then when he finally got going, he’d lost her and he couldn’t find her again.”

Romeo said, “So what next?”

“He’s starting over. All her known haunts. Her house, the law office, the diner. He’ll pick her up again somewhere.”

“This has to be finished in California. We can’t afford for them to come home.”

*  *  *

Reacher slowed, and let the girl cross fifty yards ahead of him, and then he swung the wheel and followed her into the diner’s lot. She went straight in through the door, and he parked the car, and Turner said, “Should I come in with you?”

Reacher said, “Yes, I want you to.”

So they went in, and they waited just inside the door, where they had waited before. The diner looked exactly the same as the previous evening, with the blonde waitress back on duty in the left side of the coach, and the long-suffering brunette working the right side, and Arthur behind his counter, and the girl on her stool, way at the end. The blonde waitress came by, like before, with the same blank smile, and Reacher pointed to a booth on the right, one away from directly behind the girl, and the blonde gave them up to the brunette with no marked reluctance at all. They walked in and sat down, Reacher with his back to the room again, Turner facing him across the atomic laminate, the girl with her back to them both, about six feet away.

But she was watching them in the mirror.

Reacher waved at her reflection, partly as a greeting, partly as a join us gesture, and the kid lit up like Christmas was coming and slid off her stool, and caught Arthur’s eye and jerked her thumb at the booth behind her, as if to say I’m moving again, and then she stepped across, and Turner scooted over and the kid sat down next to her on the bench, the three of them all together in a tight little triangle.

Reacher said, “Samantha Dayton, Susan Turner, Susan Turner, Samantha Dayton.”

The kid twisted around on the vinyl and shook hands with Turner and said, “Are you his assistant?”

Turner said, “No, I’m his commanding officer.”

“Way cool. What agency?”

“Military police.”

“Awesome. Who are all the others?”

“There’s only us and the FBI.”

“Are you leading or are they leading?”

“We are, of course.”

“So it’s your guy in the white car?”

“Yes, he’s ours.”

“Parachuted in from where?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

The kid laughed, and looked happy as a clam. The inside scoop, and a woman CO, and jokes. She said, “So the guy due to show up is a military guy? Like an AWOL soldier saying goodbye to his family before disappearing forever? But why would his family have a lawyer? Or is it his lawyer? Is he a spy, or something? Like a very senior officer, all old and distinguished, but tragically disillusioned? Is he selling secrets?”

Reacher said, “Have you seen anyone today?”

“The same people as yesterday.”

“No men on their own?”

“The man with the cropped ears is on his own today. In the rental. Maybe his partner is out sick.”

“Where did you see him?”

“He came down Vineland in his car. I was in the coffee shop for breakfast. Near the lawyer’s office. Although we’ll need to rethink that involvement. This thing is a triangle, isn’t it? And we don’t know which one the lawyer is working for. Could be the neighbor, could be the soldier. Could be both of them, I suppose, although I don’t see how. Or why, actually.”

Reacher asked, “What time did you eat breakfast?”

“It was early. Just after the agents left.”

“They left?”

“Just for twenty minutes. That seems to be the pattern. You should coordinate better. Everyone moves at the same time, which leaves a gap.”

“That’s bad.”

“It’s OK with me. It means I can get out without them knowing. Then when I come back they’re all surprised, because they thought I was still in there.”

“Is that what you did this morning?”

“It’s what I’m going to do every morning.”

“Did the man with the ears see you leave?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did he see you anyplace else?”

“I don’t think so. I was trying to blend in. Because of your people, not him. I didn’t see him. But I saw his car again later. It was parked where there was a fender bender.”

Reacher said, “You need to stay away from that guy.”

“I know. You told me that yesterday. But I can’t stay in the house all day.”

Turner paused a beat, and asked, “How long have you lived in that house?”

“Always, I think. I don’t remember any other houses. I’m pretty sure I was born in that house. That’s what people say, isn’t it? Even when they weren’t, exactly. Which I wasn’t, either. I was born in the hospital. But I went home to that house. Which is what the phrase means these days, I suppose, now that the whole parturition business has been institutionalized.”

Turner said, “Have you ever lived in a car?”

“That’s a weird question.”

“You can tell us. We know people who would love to get that high on the food chain.”

“Who?”

“Lots of people. What I mean is, we don’t judge.”

“Am I in trouble?”

Reacher said, “No, you’re not in trouble. We’re just checking a couple of things. What’s your mom’s name?”

“Is she in trouble?”

“No one’s in trouble. Not on your street, anyway. This is about the other guy.”

“Does he know my mom? Oh my God, is it us you’re watching? You’re waiting for him to come see my mom?”

“One step at a time,” Reacher said. “What’s your mom’s name? And yes, I know about the Colt Python.”

“My mom’s name is Candice Dayton.”

“In that case I would like to meet her.”

“Why? Is she a suspect?”

“No, this would be personal.”

“How could it be?”

“I’m the guy they’re looking for. They think I know your mother.”

“You?”

“Yes, me.”

“You don’t know my mother.”

“They think face to face I might recognize her, or she might recognize me.”

“She wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t.”

“It’s hard to say for sure, without actually trying it.”

“Trust me.”

“I would like to.”

“Mister, I can tell you quite categorically you don’t know my mom and she doesn’t know you.”

“Because you never saw me before? We’re talking a number of years here, maybe back before you were born.”

“How well are you supposed to have known her?”

“Well enough that we might recognize each other.”

“Then you didn’t know her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think I always eat in here?”

“Because you like it?”

“Because I get it for free. Because my mom works here. She’s right over there. She’s the blonde. You walked past her two times already and you didn’t bat an eye. And neither did she. You two never knew each other.”

Chapter 62

Reacher slid along the bench and craned around and took a look. The blonde waitress was busy, moving left, moving right, blowing an errant strand of hair out of an eye, wiping a palm on a hip, smiling, taking an order.

He didn’t know her.

He said, “Has she ever been to Korea?”

The kid said, “That’s another weird question.”

“How is it weird?”

“It is if you know her.”

“How so?”

“Her whole stressed-out martyr shtick is based around how she’s never been out of Los Angeles County but one time in her life, when a boyfriend took her to Vegas but couldn’t pay for the hotel. She doesn’t even have a passport.”

“Are you certain about that?”

“That’s why she dyes her hair. This is southern California. She has no papers.”

“She doesn’t need papers.”

“She’s an undocumented citizen. It takes a long time to explain.”

“Is she doing OK?”

“This isn’t the life she planned.”

“Are you doing OK?”

“I’m fine,” the kid said. “Don’t worry about me.”

Reacher said nothing, and Arthur came out of the blind spot behind his shoulder, and bent down and whispered in the kid’s ear, quietly, but his hard consonants made it clear what he was saying, which was: This lady and gentleman need to have a conference with another gentleman. Whereupon the kid jumped up, all aglow, perfectly happy to be displaced by a yet-more-senior agent even closer to the heart of the drama. Arthur moved back out of sight, and the kid hustled after him, and smooth as silk her vacated spot on the bench was immediately filled by a small solid figure sliding into place, neatly, elbows already on the table, and triumph in his face.

Warrant Officer Pete Espin.

Reacher looked at Turner, and Turner shook her head, which meant Espin had men in the coach, at least two, probably armed, and probably close by. Espin got comfortable on the bench, and then he cupped his hands, like he was reassembling a shuffled deck, and he said, “You’re not her daddy.”

Reacher said, “Apparently.”

“I checked, just for the fun of it. The State Department said Ms. Dayton never had a passport. The DoD said she never entered Korea on any other kind of document. So I checked some more, and it turns out the lawyer is selling stuff on the internet. Any kind of document, saying anything you want it to say. At one of two price levels, either paper only, or plausible. In this type of case plausible means real women, real children, and a real Xerox of a real birth certificate. And this guy is not the only one. This is a thriving business. There’s a lot of inventory. You want a kid born on a certain date, you can take your pick.”

“Who bought the affidavit?”

“He gave his name as Romeo, but his money was good. Out of the Cayman Islands.”

“When did Romeo buy it?”

“The same morning Major Turner was arrested. It’s an instant service. You tell them the names and the places and the dates and they doctor the boilerplate. You can even upload text, if you want. The documents are done in a computer and they come by e-mail, and they look like photocopies. Candice Dayton was chosen because of her kid’s birthdate. The lawyer knew her as a waitress, from eating in here. She got a hundred bucks for signing her name. But the birthdate was dumb. Did you notice that? It was exactly halfway through your time at Red Cloud. As in, exactly. Which sounds like a guy looking at a calendar, not natural biology.”

“Good point,” Reacher said.

“So you’re off the hook.”

“But why was I ever on the hook? That’s the big question. You got an answer for me? Why did Romeo buy that affidavit?”

Espin said nothing.

“And who is Romeo really?” Reacher asked.

No answer.

Turner said, “What happens next?”

Espin said, “You’re under arrest.”

“Is Reacher, too?”

“Affirmative.”

“You need to call Major Sullivan at JAG.”

“She called me first. The Big Dog thing is dead in the water, but between stepping into that cell at Dyer and this moment now, Reacher has committed about a hundred crimes we know about, and maybe more beyond that, from unlawful incarceration of a person in furtherance of a separate felony, to credit card fraud.”

Reacher said, “Did you get a message from us through Sergeant Leach?”

“Apparently you want me to get over myself.”

“I asked what you would have done differently.”

“I would have placed my trust in the system.”

“Bullshit.”

“Especially if I was innocent.”

“Was I innocent?”

Espin said, “Initially.”

Reacher said, “You didn’t answer my question. Why did Romeo buy that affidavit?”

“I don’t know.”

“And could it have been Romeo who let the Dog out again?”

“Possibly.”

“Why would he do that? And the other thing? The two phony affidavits. What was their purpose? What was their only possible purpose?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You’re a smart guy.”

“Romeo wanted you to run.”

“Why did Romeo want me to run?”

“Because you were in Major Turner’s business.”

“And what does that say about Major Turner’s business? If she’s guilty, Romeo should want me as a witness. He should want me on the stand, confirming all the grisly details for the jury.”

Espin paused a beat. Then he said, “I have orders to bring you back, majors. Both of you. The rest of it is above my pay grade.”

“You know it’s a frame,” Reacher said. “You just told me Romeo has money in the Cayman Islands. He created Major Turner’s account himself. This is not brain surgery. You’ve seen better scams than this. This is the idiots’ guide. Therefore it’s certain to fall apart. Most likely real soon. Because Turner and I are not morons. We’re going to burn their house down. Which gives you a choice. Either you’re the drone who brings us home in handcuffs mere days before our greatest triumph, or you engage your brain and you start figuring out where you want to be when the dust settles.”

“Which would be where?”

“Not here.”

Espin shook his head. “You know how it is. I have to come home with something.”

“We can give you something.”

“What kind of something?”

“An arrest of your own, a medalworthy determination to leave no stone unturned, and the icing on a very large cake. And the icing is always the sweetest and most visible part of a very large cake.”

“I’m going to need more than the sales brochure.”

“Someone beat Colonel Moorcroft half to death, and I think you’ve all concluded it wasn’t me. So who was it? You’ll be bringing in a long-time member of a very big deal, and you’ll be tying a bow on it for the political class, by tilting the spotlight.”

“Where would I find this long-time member?”

“You would look for someone who was off-post for an unexplained period of time.”

“And?”

“You would figure someone tailed Moorcroft out of the breakfast room and either forced him or enticed him into a car. You would figure there was no other way to work it. And you would figure it wasn’t an NCO. Because the breakfast room was in the Officers’ Club. So you would go looking for an officer.”

“Got a name?”

“Morgan. He set Moorcroft up for the beating. He delivered him. Check his laundry basket. I doubt he participated, but I bet he stood close enough to get a real good look.”

“Was he off-post at the time?”

“He claims to have been in the Pentagon. His absence was well documented. It was a source of great concern. And the Pentagon keeps records. A lot of work, but a buck gets ten you’ll prove he wasn’t there.”

“Is this solid?”

“Morgan is a part of a small and diverse group, containing as far as we know at one end four NCOs from a logistics company at Fort Bragg, and at the other end two Deputy Chiefs of Staff.”

“That’s hard time if you’re wrong.”

“I know it.”

“Two of them?”

“One of them is in Homeland Security, and one of them isn’t.”

“That’s very hard time if you’re wrong.”

“But am I?”

Espin didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “It’s always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I’m wrong, or I’m right, either you bring us back, or you don’t, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they’re not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.”

“And you’re an unbiased judge?”

“No, I’m not unbiased. I’m going to rip their faces off while they sleep. But just because I’m mad about it doesn’t mean they didn’t do it.”

“Got names?”

“One so far. Crew Scully.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“New England blue blood, apparently.”

“I bet he’s a West Pointer.”

“I’m a West Pointer, and I don’t have a stupid name.”

“I bet he’s rich.”

“Plenty of rich people in prison.”

“Who’s the other one?”

“We don’t know.”

“Crew Scully’s best bud from prep school, probably. Those guys stick together.”

Reacher said, “Maybe.”

Espin said, “I get Morgan, and Major Turner gets those guys?”

“You’ll be the human interest story.”

“What is it they’re supposed to be doing?”

So Turner ran through it all, starting with cash money obtained on the secondary markets, and ratty old pick-up trucks with weird license plates, with the cash in the trucks, and then the cash in army containers, and the contents of the army containers in the trucks, which then drive off into the mountains, while the cash is secretly loaded, ready to be secretly unloaded again by the four guys in North Carolina. All enabled by an Afghan native with a documented history of arms sales, and all coordinated by, and presumably enriching, the two Deputy Chiefs, who may or may not also be operating a rogue strategic initiative.

Espin said, “I thought you were being serious.”

Chapter 63

Espin said, “What you describe just ain’t happening. The United States military learned its lessons, major. Long ago. We count the paperclips now. Everything has a barcode. Everything is in a bombproof computer. We have companies of MPs at every significant site. We have more checks than a dog has fleas. We’re not losing stuff anymore. Believe me. That old-style chaos is way out of date now. If there’s a sock with a hole in it, that sucker comes home. If a single bullet got lost, there would be a shitstorm so bad we’d see the sky turn brown from here. It just ain’t happening, ma’am.”

Turner said nothing.

Reacher said, “But something is happening. You know that.”

“I’m listening. Tell me what’s happening.”

“Talk to Detective Podolski at Metro. Morgan was off-post at the critical time.”

“Morgan is still what you’re giving me?”

“He’s worth having. All I got was two fake lawsuits.”

“Seems like Morgan’s value just went down, as part of a credible conspiracy.”

“Something is happening,” Reacher said again. “Fake bank accounts, fake legal documents, beatings, four guys chasing us all over. It’s all going to look plenty credible when it’s done. It always does. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And the smart guys get their hindsight in first.”

“Hell of a gamble,” Espin said.

“It’s always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either Morgan is high value or he’s low, and either something is happening or it isn’t, and either you’re a boring drone or you’re the guy who was way ahead of the curve, getting ready to put another ribbon on his chest.”

Espin said nothing.

Reacher said, “It’s time to flip that coin, Pete. Heads or tails.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“We’re going back to D.C. You don’t need to bring us home. We’re going anyway.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“That’s where Morgan is.”

“That’s where they all are.”

Espin said, “Suppose you agree we fly together?”

Reacher said, “Works for us. But only you. No one else.”

“Why?”

“I want you to leave your guys here another day. The last of the four from Fort Bragg is hanging around. He thinks the girl still works as bait. So I want her protected. She might not be mine, but she’s a sweet kid. Maybe because she’s not mine.”

“I guess my guys could spare a day.”

“I want close personal protection, but unobtrusive. Don’t scare her. Treat it like an exercise. Because it’s likely nothing more than theoretical, anyway. It’s us he wants. And he’ll know what plane we’re on, because Romeo will tell him. So he’ll be right behind us. He might even be on the same flight.”

Espin said nothing.

Reacher said, “Make your mind up, soldier.”

Espin said, “I don’t need to make my mind up. What you’re proposing gives me six hours to make my mind up.”

“But you need to make a decision.”

“Delta at LAX ninety minutes from now,” Espin said. He backed down the guys Reacher couldn’t see, with standard infantry hand signals, and then he slid out to the aisle, and he stood up, and he walked away.

Reacher and Turner followed him out a minute later. The girl was in her mother’s half of the coach, sitting on a stool, saying something to Arthur that was making him smile. Reacher watched her as he walked. All legs and arms, all knees and elbows, the jean jacket, the pants, the new blue T-shirt, the matching shoes, no socks, no laces, the hair like summer straw, halfway down her back, the eyes, and the smile. Fatherhood. Always unlikely. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series. Not for him.

In the car Turner said, “How do you feel?”

“No different,” he said. “I didn’t have a kid before, and I don’t have one now.”

“What would you have done?”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

“You OK?”

“I guess I was getting used to the idea. And I liked her. We might have had things in common. Which is weird. I guess people can be the same, the world over. Even if they’re not related.”

“Do you think she’s going to fear the howling wolf?”

“I think she envies it already.”

“Then maybe you are related. From way back in time.”

Reacher took one last look at her, through the diner’s small framed window, and then Turner drove away, south on Vineland, and she was lost to sight.

LAX was going to be the 101 to the 110, with a final sideways hop on El Segundo Boulevard, and it was going to take most of the ninety minutes Espin had given them, because the freeways were rolling slow. Edmonds called again from Virginia while they were still north of the Hollywood Bowl, and she said, “Crew Scully moved Morgan to the 110th personally. He didn’t delegate on that occasion. And he normally does, with temporary commands. And he has no access to Homeland Security intelligence systems.”

Reacher said, “Check if he has a friend who does.”

“I’m already on it.”

“Let me know.”

“Are we still on the right side of history?”

“Count on it,” Reacher said, and hung up.

The traffic rolled on, but strangely, always moving but very slowly, as if every driver was a movie guy shooting a scene in slow motion. Turner said, “This could be like we arrested ourselves, you know. We could walk off that plane, and Espin could cuff us right there in the D.C. terminal.”

“We’ll think of something,” Reacher said. “Six hours is a long time.”

“Got any ideas?”

“Not yet.”

“These are professional weapons handlers. That’s all they do.”

“Fifty-fifty, Susan. Either it’s all they do or it isn’t.”

“What else could they do?”

“We have six hours to figure that out.”

“Suppose we don’t figure it out?”

Reacher said, “Espin heard the name Crew Scully and figured the guy was rich. Suppose he is? Suppose they both are?”

“We know they’re rich.”

“But we’re making an assumption about how they got rich. Suppose they were rich before. Suppose they were always rich. Suppose they’re old-money East Coast aristocrats.”

“OK, I’ll watch out for old men in faded pink pants.”

“It might alter the equation. We’re assuming a powerful profit motive here. We might need to downgrade that. They could smooth out their own bumps. That hundred grand might have been their own money.”

“This is not a hobby, Reacher. Not with fake bank accounts, and fake legal papers, and old men getting beat up, and four guys coming after us.”

“I agree, this is way more than a hobby.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. I’m trying to get a jump on the six hours.”

They left the white Ford in a covered lot at the Delta terminal, and they dropped the key in a trash can, which they figured would cost Romeo plenty in rental and recovery fees. Turner stripped Rickard’s Glock and put the separated parts in four more trash cans. Then they walked inside through the wrong door and took the long way around. They came up on the ticket counters from behind. Espin was already there. He must have taken the 405. And he must have taken it alone. There was no one with him. No one next to him, and no one in the shadows. He was standing still, facing the main terminal doors. They walked up behind him, and he spun around, and Reacher bought three first class seats with Baldacci’s credit card.

Chapter 64

They were at the gate twenty minutes before boarding started, in seats with a wide field of view, and they didn’t see Shrago. Not that Reacher expected to. LA was a big place, hard to get around, and first the bank charge would have to be spotted, and then Shrago would have to get himself to the airport, and there simply wasn’t enough time. So Reacher drank coffee and relaxed, and then boarding started, and then his phone rang, so he took his seat while talking, which was what pretty much everyone else was doing.

It was Edmonds on the phone, from Virginia. She said, “The 75th MP just informed me about the Candice Dayton situation.”

“I told you I didn’t remember her.”

“I apologize. I should have been less skeptical.”

“Don’t worry about it. I almost believed it myself.”

“I asked around about Crew Scully’s friends.”

“And?”

“He had a West Point classmate he stayed close to. They came up together like bottle rockets. I asked five separate people, and this is the guy I got from all of them.”

“What is he?”

“Currently the army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence.”

“That would do it.”

“They share similar backgrounds, they live near each other in Georgetown, and they’re members of all the same clubs, including some very exclusive ones.”

“Are they rich?”

“Not like some people are rich. But they’re comfortable, in an old-fashioned way. You know how it is with those people. Comfortable takes a few million.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Gabriel Montague.”

“You were right about the similar backgrounds. Gabe and Crew. Sounds like a bar near Harvard. Or a store where you buy torn jeans for three hundred dollars.”

“These are huge targets, Reacher. These are giants walking the earth. And you have precisely zero evidence of anything.”

“You think like a lawyer. One of which I need right now, by the way. I’m an innocent man. I don’t want any smoke and mirrors about what happened after they locked me up for two things I didn’t do. If I broke out, it was because I was entitled to.”

“Major Sullivan is working on that. She wants everything dismissed. The fruits of a poisoned tree.”

“Tell her to be quick. We’re heading back right now, with a semiofficial escort. I don’t want any fun and games at Reagan National. She’s got about six hours.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Then the steward came on the PA and said the cabin door was closing, and all devices should be in the off position. So for the first time in his life Reacher complied with the crew member’s instruction, and he dropped the phone in his pocket, and the plane pushed back and started to taxi. It took off over the ocean, and then it pulled a wide right-hand 180, so it was facing east again, and it recrossed the coast above Santa Monica, and it climbed as it flew inland, so that North Hollywood and the Ventura Freeway and Vineland Avenue and the coach diner and the little house with the blue door were all off the port side, far away and far below, barely visible at all.

*  *  *

A three-way conversation in first class was not easy. The chairs were wide, which put the window seat on one side pretty far from the aisle seat on the other. And the crew members were always back and forth from the galley, with endless free food and drink. Which all helped Reacher see why being rich was called being comfortable, but which made talking difficult. In the end Espin got up and perched on the arm of Turner’s chair, and Turner leaned over nearer Reacher in the window, and they got it to where everyone could see and hear everyone else, and Espin said, “If I need any kind of warrant for Morgan, obviously they’re going to ask me about the nature of this alleged conspiracy. So you better have a story for me by the time we get off this plane. Or you’re giving me nothing. In which case we’d need to rethink your special status.”

Reacher said, “It’s not going to work that way, Pete. This is not an audition. We’re not trying to break into the movies. And you have no vote here. We’re going our separate ways at Reagan National, whether or not we have a story, and whether or not you like it, and you’re going to wave us goodbye with a cheery smile on your face, either standing up by the door or sitting down in a wheelchair with a broken leg. Those are the ground rules. Are we clear?”

Espin said, “But we share what information we have?”

“Absolutely. As in, Captain Edmonds just told me Crew Scully has a close personal friend named Gabriel Montague.”

“He would. Did they go to prep school together?”

“More or less. West Point, anyway.”

“Who is he?”

“The army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence.”

“That’s about as high as it gets.”

“Almost.”

“Do you have evidence?”

“My lawyer assessed it as precisely zero. In the interests of full disclosure.”

“But you think those are the two?”

“I do now.”

“Why now?”

“William Shakespeare. He wrote a play called Romeo and Juliet. Two households, both alike in dignity. A pair of star-crossed lovers, because Juliet was a Capulet and Romeo was a Montague. Like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. You could rent the movie.”

“You think Montague goes by Romeo? Would he be that dumb?”

“He probably thinks it’s cute. Like faded pink pants. He probably thinks people like us never heard of William Shakespeare.”

“Your lawyer was right. Precisely zero.”

“She’s a lawyer. You’re not. You’re the guy with the coin. Either Montague is Romeo or he’s not. It’s exactly fifty-fifty.”

“That’s like going to Vegas and betting the mortgage on red.”

“An even chance is a wonderful thing.”

“These are Deputy Chiefs of Staff, Reacher. You’d want to be very sure. You’d have to shoot to kill.”

Romeo called Juliet and said, “They’re on the way home. Three tickets in first class. Which is another slap in the face. The third ticket is Espin, from the 75th MP. At first I thought he had made the arrest, but then why would Reacher buy the tickets? They’ve turned our flank. That’s what they’ve done. Espin has gone native.”

Juliet said, “Shrago is at least an hour from the airport.”

“Tell him to hustle. He’s on American, the next flight out.”

“How far behind Reacher will he be?”

“Two hours.”

“That’s a long time. We have one man left, and he isn’t even here. I think we’re beaten.”

“It was always a possible outcome. We knew what kind of business we were getting into. We knew what we might have to do.”

“We survived a good long time.”

“And we’ll survive a two-hour gap. Nothing will happen. Major Turner will need to shower. Traveling with women is inefficient. And after that it will get easier for Shrago. They’ll have to come looking for us. We won’t have to look for them.”

*  *  *

Espin came and went, back and forth across the aisle, based on the forensic value of the conversation, and his comfort level. Perching on an arm was not the kind of ride Baldacci had paid for. Most of the time he sat and pondered on his own. As did Turner, and as did Reacher. Without notable success. Then Turner called Espin back, and when he was settled she said, “We have one fixed point, which is the logistics chain. It’s a two-way conveyor belt, and it never stops. Right now it’s sending empty boxes in and bringing full boxes out. And those full boxes are full of all the right stuff. Barcoded socks with holes in them. I accept that. So nothing’s happening. Except we know something’s happening. So what if those empty boxes aren’t empty? We know the tribesmen aren’t buying the stuff with the barcodes, but what if they’re buying stuff sent over exclusively for them? Almost like mail order. Which is why the four guys at Fort Bragg were important. They packed the crates that should have been empty.”

Espin said, “There are systems in place at both ends.”

“Equally paranoid?”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“So it could be happening?”

“It could be.”

“But Reacher thinks the profit motive might not be front and center. Which might make this a personal project. Maybe they’re playing favorites. Maybe they’re arming one faction over another. Maybe they think they’re big experts on Afghanistan. Those old New England guys always think they’re half British. Maybe they remember the old days on the Northwest Frontier. Maybe they think they have unique expertise.”

“Possible.”

“But the conveyor belt is two way. We must never forget that. They might be bringing stuff out, not in, concealed among the returning ordnance. Which also makes the guys at Bragg important. They’d have to unpack it in secret, and move it along.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“If profit isn’t front and center, then it could be some kind of personal enthusiasm. Art, maybe, like statues or sculptures. The stuff the Taliban trashes. If you’re a refined gentleman, that kind of thing might appeal to you. Except their reaction has been way over the top for art. No one gets beat up over an old statue.”

“So what kind of stuff?”

“We’ve got two old gentlemen with personal enthusiasms that have to be kept very secret. Because the enthusiasms are criminal, and also shameful somehow. But also lucrative, in a gentlemanly way. That’s the feeling I’m getting.”

“Young girls? Young boys? Orphans?”

“Look at it from Emal Zadran’s point of view. He was a screw-up and a failure, but he rehabilitated himself. He earned some respect in his community. How? Someone gave him a role, that’s how. As an entrepreneur again, most likely. Someone wanted to buy or sell, and Zadran became the go-to guy. Because he knew the right people. He had connections already in place. Maybe crucial relationships, maybe just by chance.”

Espin said, “Buy or sell what?”

Reacher said, “We’ll figure that out in D.C. Right after you wave us goodbye, either standing up or sitting down.”

They slept the rest of the way. The cabin was warm, and the chairs were comfortable, and the motion was soothing. Reacher dreamed about the girl, at a much younger age, maybe three, chubby not bony, dressed in the same outfit but miniaturized, with tiny laceless tennis shoes. They were walking on a street somewhere, her small hand soft and warm in his giant paw, her little legs going like crazy, trying to keep up, and he was glancing over his shoulder all the time, anxious about something, worried about how she was going to run if she had to, in her laceless shoes, and then realizing he could just scoop her up in his arms, and run for her, maybe forever, her fragrant weightless body no burden at all, and relief flooded through him, and the dream faded away, as if its job was done.

Then the air pressure changed and the steward started up with the stuff about seat backs and tray tables and upright positions. Espin glanced across the aisle, and Reacher and Turner glanced back at him. The coin was in the air, right then. The guy was deciding. Was he a drone, or was he ahead of the curve? Fifty-fifty, Reacher thought, like everything else in the world.

Then they were on approach, the big plane suddenly heavy and ponderous again, and as soon as the crew members had taken their seats everyone turned on their phones, and Reacher saw he had a voice mail message from Major Sullivan, an hour old. He called it up and heard some static, and then, “Confirming no action will be taken against you for any matters arising out of either of the phony affidavits. So you’re in the clear, as of now. But Major Turner is still considered a legitimate fugitive. Her situation is the same as it always was. So the clock will start ticking all over again, the moment you touch down. You’ll be seen as aiding and abetting. You’ll be an accessory to a very serious felony. Unless you walk away from her in the airport. Which I strongly suggest you do, speaking as your lawyer.”

He deleted the message, and dialed Edmonds. She answered, and he asked, “Where were Scully and Montague seven years ago?”

She said, “I’ll try to find out.”

And then the plane touched down, and the clock started ticking.

Chapter 65

First on meant first off, too, and the official door at the end of the jet bridge was still closed when they got there. Time zones meant it was very late on the East Coast. Reacher pushed the door and scanned ahead. There was a thin crowd at the gate. Not as bad as Long Beach. Maybe only ten undercover MPs and ten FBI agents inside the first thirty feet alone. Reacher held the door and let Espin go first, and he watched him very carefully. But Espin looked for no one in particular, and he made no eye contact with anyone, and he made no furtive signs or gestures. He just moved through the crowd like a regular person. Reacher and Turner followed after him, and a minute later they all regrouped in a yard of clear space, in the corridor under the baggage claim sign, and Reacher said, “You go on ahead. We’re going to stay here.”

Espin said, “Why?”

“In case you put your guys the other side of security.”

“There are no guys.”

“We’ll stay here anyway.”

“Why?”

“Tactical considerations.”

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”

“You’ll never find us.”

“I found you in LA. And there’s bait here, too. I’ll know where to look.”

“You should concentrate on Morgan.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Espin said, and then he walked away. Reacher and Turner watched him go, and Reacher said, “Let’s get coffee.”

Turner said, “Are we staying here?”

Reacher looked at the arrivals board, and said, “It would make some kind of sense. Next in is American, in about two hours. Shrago’s bound to be on it. And from the airplane door to the other side of security, he’s bound to be unarmed. So this would be the place to hit him.”

“Are we going to?”

“No, but I wanted to put the idea in Espin’s head. In case he gets cold feet an hour from now. He’ll assume we’re still here. But we won’t be. We’ll get the coffee to go. We’ll be right behind him.”

In Reacher’s experience every successful venture in Washington, D.C., had one indispensible thing in common, which was a sound base of operations. But such a place could not be bought with cash. Any kind of a decent hotel was going to need a credit card. Which meant either Margaret Vega was going to pay, or they were going to tell Gabriel Montague where they were staying. Turner was in favor of telling him, so Shrago would show up, so they could deal with him. Reacher disagreed.

She said, “Why?”

“If they send Shrago to our location, and he disappears, they’re going to know what happened to him.”

“Obviously.”

“I don’t want them to know what happened to him. I want them uncertain. For as long as humanly possible. I want them not knowing. I want them staring into the void, hoping for a sign.”

“This is why we need more women officers. For us it’s enough to win. For you, the other guy has to know he lost.”

“I want them to keep their cell phones switched on. That’s all. It might be the only way we prove this for sure. It might be the only way we find them in the first place. Shrago needs to disappear somewhere unknown, and we have to get the numbers out of his phone, and then Sergeant Leach needs to hit up a whole different bunch of friends, and we need to find those phones before they finally give up on Shrago and switch them off.”

So Margaret Vega paid for a night on the twelfth floor of a very nice hotel with a view of the White House, in a room that had everything they needed, and plenty they didn’t. Turner wanted to get clothes, but it was midnight and nothing was open. So they showered long and slow and wrapped up in robes about two inches thick, and then they sat and ticked away the time until they figured it was twenty minutes before Shrago’s plane would go wheels-down across the river. At which point they got dressed again, and went out.

Romeo called Juliet and said, “I kept a flag on the Margaret Vega card, just in case Turner went shopping on her own, and it just bought a night in a hotel here in town.”

Juliet said, “Shrago’s phone will be on again about two minutes from now.”

“Tell him not to take a cab straight there.”

They saw Shrago come out of the terminal. They were in a cab, twenty yards away. The cab was sixteen feet long and six feet wide, but it was invisible. It was a cab at an airport. Shrago didn’t see it. He just waited in line behind one other person, and got in a cab of his own.

“That’s the guy,” Reacher said.

“I see him,” the driver said. The meter was still running from the ride from the hotel. Plus a hundred dollar tip. Plus another hundred for the fun of it. That was the deal. It wasn’t their money.

The driver eased off the curb and stayed about fifty yards behind Shrago’s cab. Which headed for the heart of town, over the bridge and straight onto 14th Street, and across the Mall and through the Federal Triangle. Then it crossed New York Avenue and stopped.

Shrago got out.

The cab drove away.

They were about level with Lafayette Square, which was right in front of the White House, but they were two blocks east, still on 14th Street. Turner said, “What’s here?”

“Nothing, apparently,” Reacher said, because Shrago had started walking, north on 14th, to the corner with H Street.

He turned left.

Reacher paid the driver with Billy Bob’s money, three hundred keep-the-change dollars, and they got out and hustled up to the same corner. Shrago was already into his second block. He was moving fast. He was about to pass the corner of Lafayette Square, which would give him nothing to look at on his left. Not in the dark. And only one thing to look at on his right, basically.

“He’s going to our hotel,” Turner said. “An approach on foot, so the cab driver doesn’t remember. Montague has the Vega card, too.”

“From the first flight. Smart guy. He kept on tracking it.”

“This derails your strategy a little.”

“No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.”

They hung back, but Shrago didn’t. He went straight in the hotel door, full speed. Like a busy man with important issues to resolve. Getting himself into the role.

Turner said, “Got a new plan?”

Reacher said, “We’re not in there. He’ll figure that out eventually. Then he’ll come out again.”

“And?”

“Did you like the first plan, with the cell phones?”

“It was pretty good.”

“Shrago might rescue it for us. Soon as he figures out we’re not in there, he might call his boss immediately. Like a real time update. Maybe his boss demands it. In which case what happens after that is nothing to do with you and me. We weren’t there. He just told them that. They’re back in the unknown.”

“If he calls.”

“Fifty-fifty. Either he does, or he doesn’t.”

“If we know that he’s called.”

“He might be on the phone as he walks out.”

“He might have called from our empty room.”

“Fifty-fifty. Either we see it, or we don’t. Either we know, or we guess.”

They hung back in the park’s outer shadows, and waited. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The weather had not changed. It was cold and damp. Reacher thought about the girl’s laceless sneakers. Not fifty-state shoes. Then he thought about hotel security, the night watch, checking a bogus ID, opening the register, placing a call to the room, heading upstairs with a pass key. Ten minutes, maybe. It was nine minutes.

Shrago came back out through the door.

There was no phone in his hand.

Turner said, “Heads or tails, Reacher.”

Reacher stepped out of the shadows and said, “Sergeant Shrago, I need you over here. I have some urgent news.”

Chapter 66

Shrago didn’t move. He stood still, right there on the H Street sidewalk. Reacher was directly opposite, on the other sidewalk. It was quiet. Two o’clock in the morning. A company town. Reacher said, “Sergeant Shrago, the news is that as of this very moment you fit a demographic otherwise known as shit out of luck. Because now you can’t win. We’re too close. Unless you take us both out, right here and right now. On this street. Which you won’t. Because you can’t. Because you’re not good enough. So you’re not going home with a prize tonight. What you need is damage control. Which you can get. All you need to do is write everything down.”

Shrago didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Or you could speak it out loud into a tape recorder, if writing isn’t your thing. But one way or the other they’ll make you tell the story. This is going to be a big scandal. Not just the army asking questions. We’ll have Senate committees. You need to be the first one in. They always let the first one go. Like you’re a hero. You need to be that guy, Shrago.”

Shrago said nothing.

“You can say you don’t know the top boys. Less stress that way. They’ll believe you. Concentrate on Morgan instead. About how he delivered Moorcroft for the beating. They’ll eat that up with a spoon.”

No response.

“There are only two choices, sergeant. You can run away, or you can cross the street. And running away buys you nothing. If we don’t get you tonight, we’ll get you tomorrow. So crossing the street is the better option. Which you have to do anyway, whether you want to shake our hands, or take us out.”

Shrago crossed the street. He stepped off his curb, and walked, across lanes that could feel small in a car, but which looked pretty wide on foot. Reacher watched him all the way, his eyes and his shoulders and his hands, and he saw a kind of off-Broadway performance, a man seeing the light, a man finally understanding where his duty lay, and it was a pretty good act, but showing through all the time was a plan to get past Reacher long enough to put Turner out of action, which would level the contest at one on one. Reacher could see it in his eyes, which were manic, and in his shoulders, which were tensed and driven forward by adrenaline, and in his hands, which were open but which were clenching and unclenching, just a quarter inch either way, like the guy couldn’t wait to set things in motion.

He stepped up on Reacher’s curb.

Reacher said nothing. He didn’t push it. He didn’t need to. Either way Shrago was going to talk to Espin. After getting out of a car, or after getting out of a coma. The choice was his. He had been born free.

But not smart. He passed on the car, and opted for the coma. Which Reacher understood. Immediate action was always the best bet. Shrago lined himself up, with Reacher to his right, and Turner beyond Reacher’s far shoulder. Reacher figured the guy was planning a left elbow backhand to his throat, which he would use to claw his way onward, as if propelled by an oar, so he could get to Turner instantly, with a free right hand and time for a single decisive blow, which would have to be hard, and which would have to be to the center of her face. Busted nose, maybe cheekbones, maybe orbital sockets, unconsciousness, concussion. Maybe even a cracked skull, or a broken neck.

Which wasn’t going to happen.

“Ground rules,” Reacher said. “No ear biting.”

Up close the guy looked extraordinary. His head was gleaming in the street lights, and his eyes were socketed way back, and the bones in his face looked hard and sharp, like a person could break his hand just by hitting them. The waistband of his pants was cinched in tight with a belt, and below it his thighs ballooned outward, and above it his chest swelled wide. He was maybe fifteen years younger than Reacher, a young bull, hard as a rock, with aggression coming off him like a smell. His ears had the center whorls intact like any other guy, but the flatter parts around them had been cut away, probably with scissors, very tight in, so that what was left looked like pasta, like uncooked tortellini florets, shiny, the color of a white man’s flesh. Not exactly hexagons. A hexagon was a regular shape, with six equal sides, and Shrago’s stubs had been trimmed for extreme closeness, not geometric regularity. They were irregular polygons, more accurately. Reacher figured if the kid had been his, he would have had a discussion. No point in being a pedant, unless you got it exactly right.

He said, “Last chance, sergeant. Time to make the big decision. We know all about Scully, and Montague, and Morgan. The only way to save yourself is to start talking. A soldier’s best weapon is his brain. Time to start using yours. But either way I’m going to break your arm. Full disclosure. Because you hurt the girl in the Berryville Grill. Which was uncalled for. Do you have a problem with women? Was it women who cut your ears off?”

Shrago planted his feet and twisted from the waist, violently, to his right, and downward a little, so fast that his left arm was flung way beyond him, so far that his bent back showed in the light. Next up would have been the same twist back again, even faster, even more violent, with the left arm carefully marshaled this time, with the elbow aiming for the far side of Reacher’s throat, with extension, so the blow would both do its job and serve as a kind of foothold, to lever himself onward to Turner.

Would have been.

Reacher knew it was coming, so he was moving a hair-trigger split second after Shrago was, matching Shrago’s twist with a twist of his own, like two dancers almost coordinated, with Reacher’s giant right fist hooking low to exactly where Shrago’s exposed kidney was about to arrive, because of his big turn, with Reacher all the time trying to parse the emotion, trying to judge how much of it was about the ears, and how much of it was about Scully and Montague, because the degree of passion in a cause’s defense was an indicator of its depth, and in the end he figured a lot of it was the ears, but some of it was defense, of something sweet and cozy and lucrative.

Then Shrago reached his point of equilibrium, all wound up like a spring, and he started to unwind the violent twist in the opposite direction, with his elbow coming up on target, but before he got even an inch into it Reacher’s right fist landed, a perfect hit, a paralyzing blow to the kidney, a sick, stunning, spreading pain, and Shrago staggered, his coordination lost, his stance opening wide, and Reacher was left to unwind his own twist, all by himself in his own good time, which he did, with his left fist coming up low to high and finding the side of Shrago’s neck, below the corner of his jaw, a fast and heavy double tap, one, two, right, left, the kidney, the neck, which rocked Shrago the other way, leaving him upright but good for an eight count, which he didn’t get, because fighting in the dark on the edge of Lafayette Square was not a civilized sport with rules. Instead Reacher looked him over in the dim light and figured only one part of his body was harder than the bones of Shrago’s face, so he skipped in and head butted him, right on the bridge of his nose, like a bowling ball swung fast, like there was a head on the floor at the end of the maple lane, right there at the point of release. Reacher danced back and Shrago stayed on his feet for a long second, and then his knees got the message that the lights were out upstairs, and he went down in a vertical heap, like he had jumped off a wall. Reacher rolled him on his front, with the sole of his boot, and then he bent down and got hold of a wrist, and twisted it until the arm was rigid and backward, and then he broke the elbow with the same boot sole. He went through the pockets, and found a wallet and a phone, but no gun, because the guy had come straight from the airport.

Then he stood up and breathed out and looked at Turner and said, “Call Espin and tell him to come pick this guy up. Tell him he’ll get what he needs for his warrant.”

*  *  *

They waited in the shadows at the far corner of the park. Shrago’s phone was the same cheap instrument as Rickard’s, a mission-specific pre-paid throwaway, and it was set up the same way, but with four numbers in the contacts list, not three, the first being Lozano, Baldacci, and Rickard, and the fourth entered simply as Home.

And the call register showed Shrago had phoned home two minutes before stepping out of the hotel.

“From our empty room,” Turner said. “You guessed right. Your plan survived contact with the enemy.”

Reacher nodded. He said, “They probably sent him searching elsewhere. In which case they won’t expect a call from him, not until he has news. And they won’t call him before morning, probably. Which we won’t answer anyway. Which will leave them a little confused and anxious. We might get twelve hours, before they quit on him.”

“We better tell Espin to keep it under the radar. Or Montague will see the arrest. He’s certain to be monitoring the 75th.” So Turner did that, with a second call to Espin, and then she dialed Sergeant Leach’s cell. She started out with the same good-conscience preamble she had used the first time, advising Leach to hang up and report the call to Morgan, but for the second time Leach didn’t, so Turner gave her the number Shrago had been calling, and she asked her to hit up anyone she knew who was capable of a little freelance signals intelligence. From Turner’s tone it was clear Leach was offering a cautiously optimistic outlook. Reacher smiled in the dark. U.S. Army sergeants. There was nothing they couldn’t do.

Then a car stopped at the other end of the park, a battered sedan like the thing that had dumped Reacher at the motel on the first night, and two big guys got out, in boots and ACUs, and they hauled Shrago out of the bushes and laid him on the rear seat. Not without a little difficulty. Shrago was no lightweight.

Then the guys got back in their car and drove away. Reacher and Turner paused a decent interval, like a funeral, and then they crossed the street again, and stepped in through the hotel door, and rode up to their room in the elevator.

Chapter 67

They showered again, purely as a piece of cleansing symbolism, and to use some more towels, of which there were about forty in the bathroom, most of them big enough and thick enough to sleep under. Then they waited for Leach to call back, which they figured would happen either soon or never, because either her network had the right kind of people in it, or it didn’t. But the first phone to ring was Reacher’s, with information from Edmonds. She said, “Seven years ago Crew Scully had just made Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, for personnel. He hasn’t changed his billet since. Back then he was based in Alexandria. Now all of HRC is at Fort Knox, in Kentucky. Except for the Deputy Chief’s office, which stayed in the Pentagon. Which is why Scully is still able to live in Georgetown.”

Reacher said, “He sounds like a very boring guy.”

“But Montague doesn’t. Seven years ago Montague was in Afghanistan. He commanded our in-country intelligence effort. All of it. Not just the army’s.”

“Big job.”

“You bet.”

“And?”

“I can’t prove anything. There’s no surviving paperwork.”

“But?”

“He must have signed off on Zadran. That’s the way the protocol works. No way did a suspected grenade smuggler go home to the mountains without a say-so from Intelligence. So that question you asked before, about why didn’t they just shoot him anyway? Basically because Montague told them not to, that’s why. So Zadran owed Montague, big time.”

“Or Zadran had something on Montague, big time.”

“Whichever, we can trace the relationship back at least seven years.”

Reacher said, “I should have asked you to look at Morgan seven years ago.”

Edmonds said, “I was surprised you didn’t. So I used my own initiative. Morgan has been in and out of everywhere, basically. He’s the go-to guy for filling a gap. But we live in a random universe, and he’s been in more logistics battalions than randomness alone would predict. None of them supplying Iraq, and all of them supplying Afghanistan. Which is not entirely random either.”

“Was it always Scully who moved him?”

“Every single time.”

“Thank you, captain.”

“What side of history are we on right now?”

But Reacher hung up without answering, because another phone was ringing. Not Turner’s, but Shrago’s. Like Rickard’s had, with the crazy birdsong. The same kind of phone. Shrago’s was on the hotel dresser, loud and piercing, grinding away like a mechanical toy. The window on the front said: Incoming Call. Which was superfluous information. But then directly below it said: Home.

The phone rang eight times, and then it stopped.

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, “That was anxiety. Simple as that. We haven’t spent any more money, so we haven’t generated any new leads. So they’ve got nothing to tell him.”

“I wonder how long they’ll stay anxious. Before they get real.”

“Denial is a wonderful thing.” Turner walked over to the window, and peered out between the drapes. She said, “When I get back I’m going to have my office steam cleaned. I don’t want any trace of Morgan left behind.”

“Why did Montague let Zadran go home to the mountains?”

“You would want to say either political reasons or legal reasons.”

“Both of which are possible. But what if it was something else?”

“I can’t see what else. The guy was in his middle thirties at the time, and the youngest of five, which was two strikes against in a very hierarchical culture, and he was a screw-up and a failure, which was strike three, so the guy had no status and no value, and clearly no real talent either. So he was nobody’s number-one draft pick. This was not about recruiting an asset, either for the day job or the personal enthusiasm.”

Then Shrago’s phone rang again. Same birdsong, same grinding, same words on the screen. It rang eight times, and then it stopped.

Juliet came back into the room, and sat down on a daybed. From a second daybed six feet away Romeo said, “Well?”

Juliet said, “I tried twice.”

“Gut feeling?”

“He might have been busy. If he gets within a hundred feet of them he’s going to turn his phone off. I think that’s pretty obvious.”

“How long would he remain in close proximity to them?”

“Could be hours, theoretically.”

“So we just wait for his call?”

“I think we have to.”

“Suppose it doesn’t come?”

“Then we’re finished.”

Romeo breathed out, long and slow. He said, “Win or lose, it’s been a good ride.”

Turner’s phone rang a minute after Shrago’s stopped for the second time. She put it on speaker and Leach said, “It’s a pre-paid burner probably bought at a Wal-Mart. If it was bought for cash it’s about as traceable as my sister’s ex-husband.”

Turner said, “Any details at all?”

“Plenty. The only thing we don’t know is who owns it. We can see everything else. That phone has called only two numbers in its life, and it’s been called by only two numbers in its life, both of which are the same two numbers.”

“Equally divided?”

“Very lopsided.”

“In favor of?”

Leach read out a number, and it wasn’t Shrago’s.

“That’s got to be Romeo,” Reacher said. “Sergeant, we need you to check that number next.”

“I already took that liberty, major. It’s the same deal. A pre-paid burner from Wal-Mart, but this one is even more lonely. The only number it ever called, and the only number that ever called it, is its mate. This is a very compartmentalized communications network. Their tradecraft and their discipline look exemplary to me. You’re dealing with very smart people. Permission to speak freely?”

Turner said, “Of course.”

“You should proceed with extreme caution, majors. And you could start by tightening up a little.”

“In what way?”

“The other number the first guy called belongs to a phone currently immobile two blocks north of the White House. My guess is you’re in that fancy hotel, and either a bad guy is watching the building, or you already took the phone away from him, and it’s in your room. In which case you need to bear in mind, if I can see it, they can see it, too. Until you switch it off, that is. Which you should think about doing.”

“You can see it?”

“Technology is a wonderful thing.”

“Can you see the other two phones?”

“Absolutely. I’m looking at them right now.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re together at an address in Georgetown.”

“Now? Is this real time?”

“As it’s happening. Refreshed every fifteen seconds.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Most folks are fast asleep.”

“Indeed.”

“Scully’s place, or Montague’s?”

“Neither one. I don’t know what the building is.”

Chapter 68

Leach said there was a lot of argument about triangulation and wifi and GPS and margins of error, and no one was talking left coat pocket or right pants pocket, but most would agree you could say with reasonable certainty which individual building a cell phone was in. And the bigger the building, the greater the certainty became, and Leach was fixed on a fairly large building. She had been able to isolate the address, and she had found it on the computer, and she said the street view showed it to be a fairly grand townhouse. She relayed the visuals, which included an antique brick facing, and four stories, and twin sash windows either side of a fancy front door, which was painted shiny black and had a brass lantern above it. There was a letter slot and a street number on the door, and a small brass plaque that seemed to say Dove Cottage.

Turner stayed on the line with Leach, and Reacher called Edmonds from his own phone. He gave her the address in question, and he asked her to search wherever she could, like tax records or title data or zoning applications. She said she would, and they hung up, and Turner hung up with Leach, and Turner said, “We don’t have a car.”

Reacher said, “We don’t need one. We’ll do what Shrago did. We’ll take a cab, and we’ll approach on foot.”

“Didn’t work out so well for Shrago.”

“We’re not Shrago. And they’re defenseless now. Deputy Chiefs live in a bubble. It’s a very long time since they did anything for themselves.”

“Are you going to cut their heads off with a butter knife?”

“I didn’t get one yet. Maybe I could ask room service.”

“Am I still CO?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I want a clean arrest. I want them in the cells at Dyer, and I want a full-dress court martial. I want it textbook, Reacher. I want to be exonerated in public. I want the jury to hear every word, and I want a ruling from the bench.”

Reacher said, “A clean arrest needs probable cause.”

“So should cutting their heads off with a butter knife.”

“Why did Montague let Zadran go home to the mountains?”

“Because of his history.”

“I wish we knew more about him.”

“We know all we’re going to know.”

Reacher nodded. A meaningless peasant, forty-two years old, the youngest of five, the black sheep of the family, disreputable, tried his hand at a number of things, and failed at them all. He said, “The butter knife would be easier.”

Then his phone rang. It was Edmonds. He said, “That was quick.”

She said, “I figured I might get an hour’s sleep tonight if I was quick.”

“Don’t count on it. What have you got?”

“Dove Cottage is a private members’ club. It opened four years ago. Membership roll is confidential.”

“Four years ago?”

“We have no evidence.”

“Four years ago we have Morgan at Bragg, building a team around Shrago.”

“We can’t prove a connection.”

“Are Scully and Montague members?”

“Which part of confidential didn’t you get?”

“Any rumors?”

“The membership is said to be all male. Including politicians, but it’s not a political salon, and military, and media, and business, but no deals seem to get done. Guys go there to enjoy themselves, that’s all. Sometimes they stay all night.”

“Doing what?”

“No one knows.”

“How do you get to be a member?”

“I don’t, if it’s all male.”

“How would I?”

“Invitation only, I guess. You’d have to know a guy who knows a guy.”

“And no one knows what they do in there?”

“There are hundreds of private clubs in D.C. There’s no way of keeping track.”

Reacher said, “Thank you, counselor. For everything. You’ve done a fine job.”

“That sounds like goodbye.”

“It might be. Or not. Like flipping a coin.”

The latitude and the season meant they had about ninety minutes before the sun came up. So they took what they needed and rode down to the street, where a man in a hat got them a cab. The cab went way north on 16th, to Scott Circle, where it took Mass Ave to Dupont, where it took P Street across the park and into Georgetown. They went as far as the corner with Wisconsin Avenue, where they got out. The cab drove away, and they walked two blocks, back the way they had come, and they made a left, and they headed for their target, which was another two blocks north, on the right, in what looked like the most expensive neighborhood since money was invented. To the left were the landscaped grounds of some immense mansion. On the right were townhouses, gleaming in the dark, lustrous, burnished, each one substantial in its own right, each one proudly taking its place in line.

Their target fit right in.

“Some cottage,” Turner said.

It was a tall, handsome house, strictly symmetrical, restrained and discreet and unshowy in every way, but still gleaming with burnished luster nonetheless. The brass plaque was small. There were lights on in some of the windows, most of which still had old wavy glass, which made the light look soft, like a candle. The door had been repainted about every election year, starting with James Madison. It was a big door, solidly made, and properly fitted. It was the kind of door that didn’t open, except voluntarily.

No obvious way in.

But they hadn’t been expecting miracles, and they had been expecting to watch and wait. Which was helped a little by the landscaped grounds of the immense mansion. The grounds had an iron fence set in a stone knee-wall, which was just wide enough for a small person to sit on, and Turner was a small person, and Reacher was used to being uncomfortable. Overhead was a tight lattice of bare branches. No leaves, and therefore no kind of total concealment, but maybe some kind of camouflage. The branches were tight enough to break up the street light. Like the new digital patterns, on the pajamas.

They waited, half hidden, and Turner said, “We don’t even know what they look like. They could come out and walk right past us.” So she called Leach again, and asked for an alert if the phones moved. Which they hadn’t yet. They were still showing up on a bunch of towers, triangulated ruler-straight on the house in front of them. Reacher watched the windows, and the door. Guys go there to enjoy themselves. Sometimes they stay all night. In which case they would start leaving soon. Politicians and military and media and businessmen all had jobs to do. They would come staggering out, ready to head home and clean up ahead of their day.

But the first guy out didn’t stagger. The door opened about an hour before dawn, and a man in a suit stepped out, sleek, showered, hair brushed, shoes gleaming as deep as the door, and he turned left and set off down the sidewalk, not fast, not slow, relaxed, seemingly very serene and very satisfied and very content with his life. He was older than middle age. He headed for P Street, and after fifty yards he was lost in the dark.

Reacher guessed subconsciously he had been expecting debauchery and disarray, with mussed hair and red eyes and undone ties, and lipstick on collars, and maybe bottles clutched by the neck below open shirt cuffs. But the guy had looked the exact opposite. Maybe the place was a spa. Maybe the guy had gotten an all-night hot stone massage, or some other kind of deep-tissue physical therapy. In which case it had worked very well. The guy had looked rubbery with well-being and satisfaction.

“Weird,” Turner said. “Not what I was expecting.”

“Maybe it’s a literary society,” Reacher said. “Maybe it’s a poetry club. The original Dove Cottage was where William Wordsworth lived. The English poet. I wandered lonely as a cloud, and a host of golden daffodils, and all that shit. A little lime-washed house, in England. In the English Lake District, which is a beautiful spot.”

Turner said, “Who stays up all night reading poetry?”

“Lots of people. Usually younger than that guy, I admit.”

“To enjoy themselves?”

“Poetry can be deeply satisfying. It was for the daffodil guy, anyway. He was talking about laying back and spacing out and remembering something good you saw.”

Turner said nothing.

“Better than Tennyson,” Reacher said. “You have to give me that.”

They watched and waited, another twenty minutes. The sky behind the house was lightening. Just a little. Another dawn, another day. Then a second guy came out. Similar to the first. Old, sleek, pink, be-suited, serene, deeply satisfied. No sign of stress, no sign of rush. No angst, no embarrassment. He turned the same way as the first guy, toward P Street, and he walked with easy, relaxed strides, head up, half smiling, deep inside a bubble of contentment, like the master of a universe in which all was well.

Reacher said, “Wait.”

Turner said, “What?”

Reacher said, “Montague.”

“That was him? Leach didn’t call.”

“No, this is Montague’s club. He owns it. Or he and Scully own it together.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the name. Dove Cottage is like Romeo. Deep down this guy is a poor intelligence officer. He’s way too clever by half. He just can’t resist.”

“Resist what?”

“Why did he let Zadran go home to the mountains?”

“Because of his history.”

“No, despite his history. Because of who he was. Because of who his brothers were. His brothers forgave him and took him back. Zadran didn’t rehabilitate himself and find a role. His brothers rehabilitated him and gave him a role. Part of their deal with Montague. It was a two-way street.”

“What deal?”

“People remember that William Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy, but they forget that both of them lived with his wife and his sister-in-law and a passel of kids. Three in four years, I think.”

“When was this?”

“More than two hundred years ago.”

“So why are we even talking about it?”

“The original Dove Cottage was a little lime-washed house. Too small, for seven people. They moved out. It got a new tenant.”

“Who?”

“A guy named Thomas De Quincey. Another writer. It was wall to wall writers up there, at the time. They were all friends. But Wordsworth had stayed only eight years. De Quincey stayed for eleven. Which makes Dove Cottage his, more than Wordsworth’s, in terms of how much time they spent there. Even though Wordsworth is the one people remember. Probably because he was the better poet.”

“And?”

“Wait,” Reacher said. “Watch this.”

The door was opening again, and a third guy was coming out. Gray hair, but thick and beautifully styled. A pink face, washed and shaved. A three-thousand-dollar suit, and a shirt as fresh as new snow. A silk tie, beautifully knotted. A politician, probably. The guy stood for a second and took a deep breath of the morning air, and then he started walking, just like the first two, relaxed, unconcerned, serenity coming off him in waves. He headed the same way, toward P Street, and eventually he was lost to sight.

Reacher said, “Conclusions?”

Turner said, “Like we already figured before. It’s a sanctuary for refined older gentlemen with personal enthusiasms.”

“What’s coming home in the ordnance shipments?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did Zadran’s brothers do for a living?”

“They worked the family farm.”

“Growing what?”

Turner said, “Poppies.”

“Exactly. And they gave Zadran a role. As their salesman. Because he had connections already in place. Like you said. What did Thomas De Quincey write?”

“Poetry?”

“His most famous work was an autobiographical book called Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. That’s what he did in Dove Cottage, for eleven straight years. He eased away the tensions of the day. Then he wrote a memoir about it.”

Turner said, “I wish we could get in there.”

Reacher had been in the original Dove Cottage, in England. On a visit. He had paid his entrance money at the door, and he had ducked under the low lintel. Easy as that. Getting into the new Dove Cottage was going to be much harder. Penetrating a house was something Delta Force and Navy SEALs trained for all their careers. It was not a simple task.

Reacher said, “Do you see cameras?”

Turner said, “I don’t, but there have to be some, surely.”

“Is there a doorbell?”

“There’s no button. Just a knocker. Which is more authentic, of course. Maybe there are zoning laws.”

“Then there must be cameras. A place like this can’t fling its door open every time there’s a knock. Not without knowing who it is.”

“Which implies an operations room, with screens, and some kind of remote unlock function. One guy could run it. Will there be security?”

“There have to be servants. Discreet little guys in dark suits. Like butlers or stewards. Who are also security. I guess the cameras are small. Maybe just fiber-optic lenses, poking out through the wall. There could be dozens of them. Which would make sense. Someone has to keep an eye open for what could go on, in a place like this.”

“We need to see someone go in, not out. We need to see how the system works.”

But they didn’t. No one went in. No one came out. The house just sat there, looking smug. The same lights stayed on. The first smears of morning came up over the roof.

Turner said, “We’ve never met them.”

Reacher said, “They’ve seen our photographs.”

“Have they shown our photographs to their operations guy?”

“I sincerely hope so. Because we’re talking about the top boy in charge of intelligence for the United States Army.”

“Then the door will stay locked,” Turner said. “That’s all. Costs us nothing.”

“Does it alert them? Or are they alert already?”

“You know they’re alert. They’re staring into the void.”

“Maybe they don’t let women in.”

“They would have to send someone down to explain that. If they don’t recognize us, then we could be anybody. City officials, or whatever. They’d have to talk to us.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Knocking on the door is an option. How far up the list do you want to put it?”

“In the middle,” Turner said.

Five minutes later Reacher asked, “Below what?”

“I think we should call the DEA. Or Espin, at the 75th. Or the Metro PD. Or all of the above. The FBI, too, probably. They can start work on the financial stuff.”

“You’re the CO.”

“I want a legal arrest.”

“So do I.”

“Really?”

“Because you do.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“I like a legal arrest wherever possible. Every time. I’m not a barbarian.”

“We can’t stay here anyway. It’s getting light.”

And it was. The sun was on the far horizon, shooting level rays, backlighting the house, casting impossibly long shadows. A cone of sky was already blue. It was going to be a fine day.

“Make the call,” Reacher said.

“Who first?”

“Leach,” Reacher said. “Better if she coordinates. Otherwise it will be like the Keystone Cops.”

Turner emptied her pockets of phones, of which there were two, hers and Shrago’s. She checked she had the right one, and she opened it, and she turned away from the street, ready to dial. She was lit up from the back, warm and gold in the new dawn sun.

And then Shrago’s phone rang. On the stone knee-wall, on the ledge below the fence. The crazy birdsong was switched off, but the grinding wasn’t. It was happening big time. The phone was squirming around, like it was trying to choose a direction. The screen was lit up as before, with Incoming Call, and Home.

The phone buzzed eight times, and then it stopped.

“Dawn,” Turner said. “Some kind of deadline. Either prearranged, or in their own minds. They must be getting plenty anxious by now. They’re going to give up on him soon.”

They watched the house a minute more, and as they turned away an upstairs window lit up bright, just a brief yellow flash, like an old-fashioned camera, and they heard two muffled gunshots, almost simultaneous but not quite, a little ragged, too quick for a double tap from a single weapon, but just right for two old guys counting to three and pulling their triggers.

Chapter 69

Nothing happened for a long, eerie minute. Then the black door was hauled open fast and a whole stream of guys started pouring out, in various states of readiness, some clean and dressed and ready to go, some almost, some still rumpled and creased, all of them white and old, maybe eight or nine of them in total, and mixed in with them were half a dozen younger men in uniform, like hotel pages, and a younger man in a black turtleneck sweater, who Turner thought could be the operations guy. They all slowed down on the sidewalk, and they composed themselves, and then they sauntered away, like nothing was anything to do with them. One guy in a suit walked right past Reacher, with a look on his face that said, Who, me?

Then Reacher and Turner started moving against the fleeing tide, toward the house, toward the black door, and they were buffeted by a couple of late stragglers, and then they were inside, in a wide, cool hallway, done in a Colonial style, all pale yellow, and brass candlesticks, and clocks, and dark mahogany wood, and an oil portrait of George Washington.

They went up the stairs, which were wide and thickly carpeted, and they checked an empty room, which had two elegant daybeds in it, next to two elegant coffee tables. The coffee tables held fine examples of the opium smoker’s needs. Lamps and bowls and long, long pipes, the heights all arranged so that a man lying relaxed on his side would find the pipe exactly where he wanted it. There were pillows here and there, and a warm, dull weight in the air.

They found Scully and Montague in the next room along. They were both around sixty years old, both gray, both trim, but not iron-hard like the kind of general who wants people to know he came from the infantry. These two were happy for folk to know they came from the back rooms. They were wearing dark pants and satin smoking jackets. Their pipes were made of silver and bone. They both had holes in both temples, through and through with jacketed bullets. Nine-millimeters, from the service Berettas that had fallen to the floor. The entry wounds were on the right. Reacher pictured them, the dawn call, as agreed, but no answer, so maybe a handshake, and then muzzles against skin, and elbows out, and one, two, three.

And then the street was suddenly howling with sirens, and about a hundred people jumped out of cars.

A guy from the DEA told them the story, in a front room off the wide, cool hallway. It turned out Shrago had spilled to Espin inside about a second and a half, which meant Morgan was in custody thirty minutes later, and Morgan had spilled inside a second and a half, too, whereupon Espin had called three different agencies, and a raid had been planned. And executed. But five minutes late.

“You weren’t late,” Reacher said. “You could have come yesterday, and they would have done the same thing. It didn’t matter who was coming up the stairs. You or us or anybody, they were going down like gentlemen.”

The guy said there were opium dens like Dove Cottage everywhere, all over the world, for the kind of civilized man who prefers fine wine over beer. Opium was the authentic product, heated to a vapor, the vapor inhaled, a gentleman’s relish, as sweet as organic honey. The real thing. The source. Not cut or altered or extracted or converted. Not in any way. Not sordid, not street, and unchanged for thousands of years. Archeologists would tell you Stone Age had a double meaning.

And like fine wine, all kinds of bullshit crept in. Terrain was held to be important. The best was held to be Afghan. Individual hillsides were examined. Like vineyards. Montague did a deal with the Zadran brothers. Their stuff was high grade. They branded it Z and talked it up, and pretty soon Dove Cottage was getting enormous membership fees. It all worked fine for four years. Then their in-country guy was seen heading north for the ritual pow-wow, and the whole thing unraveled, despite their best efforts. Espin came by and said their best efforts had been considerable. He said he was halfway through the financial stuff, and already he could see the hundred grand had come straight out of Montague’s own account.

Then eventually the crowd in the house included Colonel John James Temple, who was still Turner’s attorney of record, and both Major Helen Sullivan and Captain Tracy Edmonds, who were still Reacher’s. Temple had gotten a permanent stay on Turner’s confinement order. She was basically free to go, pending formal dismissal of charges. Sullivan and Edmonds had bigger problems. Given Morgan’s current status, it was impossible to say whether Reacher was or was not still in the army. It was likely a question that would run all the way to the Deputy Chief for personnel, who was dead upstairs.

Turner begged a ride for them both, with Colonel Temple, who had been little placated when Reacher returned his ID. The atmosphere was tense. But Reacher was keen to get Turner back to the hotel, and Colonel Temple’s sedan was better than walking. Except they didn’t go back to the hotel. Evidently Turner had given Rock Creek as their destination, because Temple drove over the water into Virginia. The old stone building. Her command. Her base. Her home base. Her home. When I get back I’m going to have my office steam cleaned. I don’t want any trace of Morgan left behind.

Which was when he had known for sure. She loved the campfire. As had he, once upon a time, but only briefly, and only that special fire inside the 110th Special Unit. Which was now hers.

It was well into the morning when they arrived, and everyone was there. The night watch had stayed. Espin had kept them in the loop, and they had followed the play by play. The day watch had gotten in to find it a done deal, all bar the shouting. Sergeant Leach was there, and the duty captain. Reacher wondered if Turner would ever mention the doodling. Probably not. More likely promote him sideways.

Her first hour was largely ceremonial, with a lot of fist bumps, and shooting the shit, and slaps on the back, and then somehow she ended the tour in her office, and she stayed there, starting where she had left off, reviewing every piece of information, and checking every disposition. Reacher hung out with Leach for a spell, and then he went down the old stone steps and took a long walk, a random figure-eight around bland three-lane blocks. He got back and found her still occupied, so he hung out with Leach some more, and then it went dark, and then she came down the stairs, with a car key in her hand.

She said, “Ride with me.”

The little red sports car had been down a few days, but it started fine, and it ran steady, if a little loud and throaty, but Reacher figured that might have been dialed in on purpose by the guy who designed the muffler. Turner put the heater dials in the red and unlatched the top, and dropped it down behind the seats.

“Like a rock and roll song on the radio,” she said.

She backed out of her slot, and she drove out through the gate, and she turned left, and she followed the bus route, past the motel and onward to the mall, where she pulled up in front of the big stucco place with the Greek style of menu.

“Buy you dinner?” she said.

There were all kinds of people in the restaurant. Couples, and families, and children. Some of the children were girls, and some of them might have been fourteen. Turner chose a booth at the front window, and they watched a bus go by, and Reacher said, “I’m a detective, and I know what you’re going to say.”

She said, “Do you?”

“It was always fifty-fifty. Like flipping a coin.”

“That easy?”

“You have no obligation even to think about it. This was my thing, not yours. I came here. You didn’t come to South Dakota.”

“That’s true. That’s how it started. I wasn’t sure. But it changed. For a time. Starting in that cell, in the Dyer guardhouse. You were taking Temple away, and you looked over your shoulder at me and told me to wait there. And I did.”

“You had no choice. You were in the guardhouse.”

“And now I’m not.”

“I understand,” Reacher said. “The 110th is better.”

“And I got it back. I can’t just walk away.”

“I understand,” Reacher said again. “And I can’t stay. Not here. Not anywhere. So it’s not just you. We’re both saying no.”

“The 110th was your creation. If that makes you feel better.”

“I wanted to meet you,” Reacher said. “That was all. And I did. Mission accomplished.”

They ate, and paid, and they emptied their pockets on the table. Turner took the wallets, and the credit cards, and Shrago’s phone, for processing, and Reacher took the cash money, for the upcoming weeks, less thirty dollars, which Turner promised to return to Sullivan. Then they walked out to the lot. The air was cold, and a little damp. The middle of the evening, in the middle of winter, in the northeastern corner of Virginia. The lazy Potomac was not far away. Beyond it in the east D.C.’s glow lit up the clouds. The nation’s capital, where all kinds of things were going on. They kissed for the last time, and hugged, and wished each other luck, and then Turner got in her little red car and drove away. Reacher watched her until she was lost to sight. Then he dropped his cell phone in the trash, and he crossed the street, and he walked until he found a bus bench. North, not south. Out, not in. Onward, and away. He sat down, alone.

For my readers,

with my grateful thanks.

High Heat

The man was over thirty, Reacher thought, and solid, and hot, obviously. He had sweated through his suit. The woman face to face with him could have been younger, but not by much. She was hot too, and scared. Or tense, at least. That was clear. The man was too close to her. She didn’t like that. It was nearly half past eight in the evening, and going dark. But not cooling off. A hundred degrees, someone had said. A real heat wave. Wednesday, July 13th, 1977, New York City. Reacher would always remember the date. It was his second solo visit.

The man put the palm of his hand flat on the woman’s chest, pressing damp cotton against her skin, the ball of his thumb down in her cleavage. Not a tender gesture. But not an aggressive gesture, either. Neutral, like a doctor. The woman didn’t back off. She just froze in place and glanced around. Without seeing much. New York City, half past eight in the evening, but the street was deserted. It was too hot. Waverly Place, between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square. People would come out later, if at all.

Then the man took his hand off the woman’s chest, and he flicked it downward like he wanted to knock a bee off her hip, and then he whipped it back up in a big roundhouse swing and slapped her full in the face, hard, with enough power for a real crack, but his hand and her face were too damp for pistol-shot acoustics, so the sound came out exactly like the word: slap. The woman’s head was knocked sideways. The sound echoed off the scalding brick.

Reacher said, “Hey.”

The man turned around. He was dark haired, dark eyed, maybe five-ten, maybe two hundred pounds. His shirt was transparent with sweat.

He said, “Get lost, kid.”

On that night Reacher was three months and sixteen days shy of his seventeenth birthday, but physically he was pretty much all grown up. He was as tall as he was ever going to get, and no sane person would have called him skinny. He was six-five, two-twenty, all muscle. The finished article, more or less. But finished very recently. Brand-new. His teeth were white and even, his eyes were a shade close to navy, his hair had wave and body, his skin was smooth and clear. The scars and the lines and the calluses were yet to come.

The man said, “Right now, kid.”

Reacher said, “Ma’am, you should step away from this guy.”

Which the woman did, backward, one step, two, out of range. The man said, “Do you know who I am?”

Reacher said, “What difference would it make?”

“You’re pissing off the wrong people.”

“People?” Reacher said. “That’s a plural word. Are there more than one of you?”

“You’ll find out.”

Reacher looked around. The street was still deserted.

“When will I find out?” he said. “Not right away, apparently.”

“What kind of smart guy do you think you are?”

Reacher said, “Ma’am, I’m happy to be here alone, if you want to take off running.”

The woman didn’t move. Reacher looked at her.

He said, “Am I misunderstanding something?”

The man said, “Get lost, kid.”

The woman said, “You shouldn’t get involved.”

“I’m not getting involved,” Reacher said. “I’m just standing here in the street.”

The man said, “Go stand in some other street.”

Reacher turned back and looked at him and said, “Who died and made you mayor?”

“That’s some mouth, kid. You don’t know who you’re talking to. You’re going to regret that.”

“When the other people get here? Is that what you mean? Because right now it’s just you and me. And I don’t foresee a whole lot of regret in that, not for me, anyway, not unless you’ve got no money.”

“Money?”

“For me to take.”

“What, now you think you’re going to mug me?”

“Not mug you,” Reacher said. “More of a historical thing. An old principle. Like a tradition. You lose a war, you give up your treasure.”

“Are we at war, you and me? Because if we are, you’re going to lose, kid. I don’t care how big of a corn-fed country boy you are. I’m going to kick your ass. I’m going to kick it bad.”

The woman was still six feet away. Still not moving. Reacher looked at her again and said, “Ma’am, is this gentleman married to you, or related to you in some other way, or known to you either socially or professionally?”

She said, “I don’t want you to get involved.” She was younger than the guy, for sure. But not by much. Still way up there. Twenty-nine, maybe. A pale-colored blonde. Apart from the vivid red print from the slap she was plenty good looking, in an older-woman kind of a way. But she was thin and nervous. Maybe she had a lot of stress in her life. She was wearing a loose summer dress that ended above her knee. She had a purse hooked over her shoulder.

Reacher said, “At least tell me what it is you don’t want me to get involved in. Is this some random guy hassling you on the street? Or not?”

“What else would it be?”

“Domestic quarrel, maybe. I heard of a guy who busted one up, and then the wife got real mad with him afterward, for hurting her husband.”

“I’m not married to this man.”

“Do you have any interest in him at all?”

“In his welfare?”

“I suppose that’s what we’re talking about.”

“None at all. But you can’t get involved. So walk away. I’ll deal with it.”

“Suppose we walk away together?”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Old enough,” Reacher said. “For walking, at least.”

“I don’t want the responsibility. You’re just a kid. You’re an innocent bystander.”

“Is this guy dangerous?”

“Very.”

“He doesn’t look it.”

“Looks can be deceptive.”

“Is he armed?”

“Not in the city. He can’t afford to be.”

“So what’s he going to do? Sweat on me?”

Which did the trick. The guy hit boiling point, aggrieved at being talked about like he wasn’t there, aggrieved at being called sweaty, even though he manifestly was, and he came in at a charge, his jacket flapping, his tie flailing, his shirt sticking to his skin. Reacher feinted one way and moved another, and the guy stumbled past, and Reacher tapped his ankles, and the guy tripped and fell. He got up again fast enough, but by then Reacher had backed off and turned around and was ready for the second maneuver. Which looked like it was going to be an exact repeat of the first, except Reacher helped it along a little by replacing the ankle tap with an elbow to the side of the head. Which was very well delivered. At nearly seventeen Reacher was like a brand-new machine, still gleaming and dewy with oil, flexible, supple, perfectly coordinated, like something developed by NASA and IBM on behalf of the Pentagon.

The guy stayed down on his knees a little longer than the first time. The heat kept him there. Reacher figured the hundred degrees he had heard about must have been somewhere open. Central Park, maybe. Some little weather station. In the narrow brick canyons of the West Village, close to the huge stone sidewalk slabs, it must have been more like a hundred and twenty. And humid. Reacher was wearing old khakis and a blue T-shirt, and both items looked like he had fallen in a river.

The guy stood up, panting and unsteady. He put his hands on his knees.

Reacher said, “Let it go, old man. Find someone else to hit.”

No answer. The guy looked like he was conducting an internal debate. It was a long one. Clearly there were points to consider on both sides of the argument. Pros, and cons, and plusses, and minuses, and costs and benefits. Finally the guy said, “Can you count to three and a half?”

Reacher said, “I suppose.”

“That’s how many hours you got to get out of town. After midnight you’re a dead man. And before that too, if I see you again.” And then the guy straightened up and walked away, back toward Sixth Avenue, fast, like his mind was made up, his heels ringing on the hot stone, like a brisk, purposeful person on a just-remembered errand. Reacher watched until he was lost to sight, and then he turned back to the woman and said, “Which way are you headed?”

She pointed in the opposite direction, toward Washington Square, and Reacher said, “Then you should be OK.”

“You have three and a half hours to get out of town.”

“I don’t think he was serious. He was hauling ass, trying to save face.”

“He was serious, believe me. You hit him in the head. I mean, Jesus.”

“Who is he?”

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy passing through.”

“From where?”

“Pohang, at the moment.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“South Korea. Camp Mujuk. The Marine Corps.”

“You’re a Marine?”

“Son of a Marine. We go where we’re posted. But school’s out, so I’m traveling.”

“On your own? How old are you?”

“Seventeen in the fall. Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one getting slapped in the street.”

The woman said nothing.

Reacher said, “Who was that guy?”

“How did you get here?”

“Bus to Seoul, plane to Tokyo, plane to Hawaii, plane to LA, plane to JFK, bus to the Port Authority. Then I walked.” The Yankees were out of town, in Boston, which had been a major disappointment. Reacher had a feeling it was going to be a special year. Reggie Jackson was making a difference. The long drought might be nearly over. But no luck. The Stadium was dark. The alternative was Shea, the Cubs at the Mets. In principle Reacher had no objection to Mets baseball, such as it was, but in the end the pull of downtown music had proven stronger. He had figured he would swing through Washington Square and check out the girls from NYU’s summer school. One of them might be willing to go with him. Or not. It was worth the detour. He was an optimist, and his plans were flexible.

The woman said, “How long are you traveling?”

“In theory I’m free until September.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I just got here. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“Your parents are OK with this?”

“My mother is worried. She read about the Son of Sam in the newspaper.”

“She should be worried. He’s killing people.”

“Couples sitting in cars, mostly. That’s what the papers say. Statistically unlikely to be me. I don’t have a car, and so far I’m on my own.”

“This city has other problems too.”

“I know. I’m supposed to visit with my brother.”

“Here in the city?”

“Couple hours out.”

“You should go there right now.”

Reacher nodded. “I’m supposed to take the late bus.”

“Before midnight?”

“Who was that guy?”

The woman didn’t answer. The heat wasn’t letting up. The air was thick and heavy. There was thunder coming. Reacher could feel it, in the north and the west. Maybe they were going to get a real Hudson Valley thunderstorm, rolling and clattering over the slow water, between the high cliffs, like he had read about in books. The light was fading all the way to purple, as if the weather was getting ready for something big.

The woman said, “Go see your brother. Thanks for helping out.”

The red handprint on her face was fading.

Reacher said, “Are you going to be OK?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jill.”

“Jill what?”

“Hemingway.”

“Any relation?”

“To who?”

“Ernest Hemingway. The writer.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You free tonight?”

“No.”

“My name is Reacher. I’m pleased to meet you.” He stuck out his hand, and they shook. Her hand felt hot and slick, like she had a fever. Not that his didn’t. A hundred degrees, maybe more, no breeze, no evaporation. Summer in the city. Far away to the north the sky flickered. Heat lightning. No rain.

He said, “How long have you been with the FBI?”

“Who says I am?”

“That guy was a mobster, right? Organized crime? All that shit about his people, and getting out of town or else. All those threats. And you were meeting with him. He was checking for a wire, when he put his hand on you. And I guess he found one.”

“You’re a smart kid.”

“Where’s your backup? There should be a van, with people listening in.”

“It’s a budget thing.”

“I don’t believe you. The city, maybe, but the feds are never broke.”

“Go see your brother. This isn’t your business.”

“Why wear a wire with no one listening?”

The woman put her hands behind her back, low down, and she fiddled and jiggled, as if she was working something loose from the waistband of her underwear. A black plastic box fell out below the hem of her dress. A small cassette recorder, swinging knee-high, suspended on a wire. She put one hand down the front of her dress, and she pulled on the wire behind her knees with her other hand, and she squirmed and she wriggled, and the recorder lowered itself to the sidewalk, followed by a thin black cable with a little bud microphone on the end.

She said, “The tape was listening.”

The little black box was dewed with perspiration, from the small of her back.

Reacher said, “Did I screw it up?”

“I don’t know how it would have gone.”

“He assaulted a federal agent. That’s a crime right there. I’m a witness.”

The woman said nothing. She picked up the cassette recorder and wound the cord around it. She slid her purse off her shoulder and put the recorder in it. The temperature felt hotter than ever, and steamy, like a hot wet towel over Reacher’s mouth and nose. There was more lightning in the north, winking slow, dulled by the thick air. No rain. No break.

Reacher said, “Are you going to let him get away with that?”

The woman said, “This really isn’t your business.”

“I’m happy to say what I saw.”

“It wouldn’t come to trial for a year. You’d have to come all the way back. You want to take four planes and two buses for a slap?”

“A year from now I’ll be somewhere else. Maybe nearer.”

“Or further away.”

“The sound might be on the tape.”

“I need more than a slap. Defense lawyers would laugh at me.”

Reacher shrugged. Too hot to argue. He said, “OK, have a pleasant evening, ma’am.”

She said, “Where are you going now?”

“Bleecker Street, I think.”

“You can’t. That’s in his territory.”

“Or nearby. Or the Bowery. There’s music all over, right?”

“Same thing. All his territory.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Croselli. Everything north of Houston and south of 14th is his. And you hit him in the head.”

“He’s one guy. He won’t find me.”

“He’s a made man. He has soldiers.”

“How many?”

“A dozen, maybe.”

“Not enough. Too big of an area.”

“He’ll put the word out. All the clubs and all the bars.”

“Really? He’ll tell people he’s frightened of a sixteen-year-old? I don’t think so.”

“He doesn’t need to give a reason. And people will bust a gut to help. They all want brownie points in the bank. You wouldn’t last five minutes. Go see your brother. I’m serious.”

“Free country,” Reacher said. “That’s what you’re working for, right? I’ll go where I want. I came a long way.”

The woman stayed quiet for a long moment.

“Well, I warned you,” she said. “I can’t do more than that.”

And she walked away, toward Washington Square. Reacher waited where he was, all alone on Waverly, head up, head down, searching for a breath of air, and then he followed after her, about two minutes behind, and he saw her drive away in a car that had been parked in a tow zone. A 1975 Ford Granada, he thought, mid-blue, vinyl roof, a big toothy grille. It took a corner like a land yacht and drove out of sight.

Washington Square was much emptier than Reacher had expected. Because of the heat. There were a couple of unexplained black guys hanging around, probably dealers, and not much else. No chess players, no dog walkers. But way over on the eastern edge of the square he saw three girls go into a coffee shop. Coeds for sure, long hair, tan, lithe, maybe two or three years older than him. He headed in their direction, and looked for a payphone on the way. He found a working instrument on his fourth try. He used a hot damp coin from his pocket and dialed the number he had memorized for West Point’s main switchboard.

A sing-song male voice said, “United States Military Academy, how may I direct your call?”

“Cadet Joe Reacher, please.”

“Hold the line,” the voice said, which Reacher thought was appropriate. West Point was in the business of holding the line, against all kinds of things, including enemies foreign and domestic, and progress, sometimes. West Point was Army, which was an unusual choice for the elder son of a Marine, but Joe’s heart had been set on it. And he claimed to be enjoying it so far. Reacher himself had no idea where he would go. NYU, possibly, with women. The three in the coffee shop had looked pretty good. But he didn’t make plans. Sixteen years in the Corps had cured him of that.

The phone clicked and buzzed as the call was transferred from station to station. Reacher took another hot wet coin from his pocket and held it ready. It was a quarter to nine, and dark, and getting hotter, if such a thing was possible. Fifth Avenue was a long narrow canyon running north ahead of him. There were flashes of light in the sky, low down on the horizon, way far in the distance.

A different voice said, “Cadet Reacher is currently unavailable. Do you have a message?”

Reacher said, “Please tell him his brother is delayed twenty-four hours. I’m spending the night in the city. I’ll see him tomorrow evening.”

“Roger that,” the new voice said, with no interest at all, and the line went dead. Reacher put the second coin back in his pocket, and he hung up the phone, and he headed for the coffee shop on the eastern edge of the square.

An air conditioner over the coffee shop’s door was running so hard it was trembling and rattling, but it wasn’t making much difference to the temperature of the air. The girls were together in a booth for four, with tall soda glasses full of Coke and melting ice. Two of them were blondes and one was a brunette. All of them had long smooth limbs and perfect white teeth. The brunette was in short shorts and a sleeveless button-front shirt, and the blondes were in short summer dresses. They all looked quick and intelligent and full of energy. Storybook Americans, literally. Reacher had seen girls just like them in greasy old out-of-date copies of Time and Life and Newsweek, at Mujuk and every other base he had lived on. They were the future, the stories had said. He had admired them from afar.

Now he stood at the door under the roaring air conditioner and admired them from a whole lot closer. But he had no idea what to do next. Life as a Corps kid taught a guy plenty, but absolutely nothing about bridging a fifteen-foot door-to-table distance in a New York City coffee shop. Up to that point his few conquests had not really been conquests at all, but mutual experiments with Corps girls just as isolated as himself, and just as willing and enthusiastic and desperate. Their only negatives had been their fathers, who were all trained killers with fairly traditional views. The three students in front of him were a whole different can of worms. Much easier from the parental point of view, presumably, but much harder in every other way.

He paused.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He moved on, fifteen feet, and he approached their table, and he said, “Do you mind if I join you?”

They all looked up. They all looked surprised. They were all too polite to tell him to get lost. They were all too smart to tell him to sit down. New York City, in the summer of 1977. The Bronx, burning. Hundreds of homicides. The Son of Sam. Irrational panic everywhere.

He said, “I’m new here. I was wondering if you could tell me where to go, to hear some good music.”

No answer. Two pairs of blue eyes, one pair of brown, looking up at him.

He said, “Are you headed somewhere this evening?”

The brunette was the first to speak.

She said, “Maybe.”

“Where to?”

“Don’t know yet.”

A waitress came by, barely older than the coeds themselves, and Reacher maneuvered himself into a spot where her approach gave him no choice but to sit down. As if he had been swept along. The brunette scooted over and left an inch between her thigh and his. The vinyl bench was sticky with heat. He ordered a Coke. It was way too hot for coffee.

There was an awkward silence. The waitress brought Reacher’s Coke. He took a sip. The blonde directly opposite asked him, “Are you at NYU?”

“I’m still in high school,” he said.

She softened a little, as if he was a rare curiosity.

“Where?” she asked.

“South Korea,” he said. “Military family.”

“Fascist,” she said. “Get lost.”

“What does your dad do for a living?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“Get lost yourself.”

The brunette laughed. She was an inch shorter than the others, and her skin was a shade darker. She was slender. Elfin, almost. Reacher had heard the word. Not that it meant much to him. He had never seen an elf.

The brunette said, “The Ramones might be at CBGB. Or Blondie.”

Reacher said, “I’ll go if you go.”

“It’s a rough area.”

“Compared to what? Iwo Jima?”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s an island in the Pacific.”

“Sounds nice. Does it have beaches?”

“Lots of them. What’s your name?”

“Chrissie.”

“Pleased to meet you, Chrissie. My name is Reacher.”

“First or last?”

“Only.”

“You have only one name?”

“That anyone uses.”

“So if I go to CBGB with you, do you promise to stick close by?”

Which was pretty much a do-bears-sleep-in-the-woods type of a question, in Reacher’s opinion. Is the Pope a Catholic? He said, “Sure, count on it.”

The blondes on the opposite side of the table started fidgeting with dubious body language, and immediately Reacher knew they wouldn’t come too. Which was dead-on A-OK with him. Like a big green light. A one-on-one excursion. Like a real date. Nine o’clock in the evening, Wednesday, July 13th, New York City, and his first civilian conquest was almost upon him, like a runaway train. He could feel it coming, like an earthquake. He wondered where Chrissie’s dorm was. Close by, he guessed.

He sipped his Coke.

Chrissie said, “So let’s go, Reacher.”

Reacher left money on the table for four Cokes, which he guessed was the gentlemanly thing to do. He followed Chrissie out through the door, and the night heat hit him like a hammer. Chrissie, too. She held her hair away from her shoulders with the backs of her hands and he saw a damp sheen on her neck. She said, “How far is it?”

He said, “You’ve never been?”

“It’s a bad area.”

“I think we have to go east about five blocks. Past Broadway and Lafayette to the Bowery. Then about three blocks south to the corner with Bleecker.”

“It’s so hot.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Maybe we should take my car. For the AC.”

“You have a car?”

“Sure.”

“Here in the city?”

“Right there.” And she pointed, to a small hatchback car on the curb about fifty feet away. A Chevrolet Chevette, Reacher thought, maybe a year old, maybe baby blue, although it was hard to tell under the yellow street lights.

He said, “Doesn’t it cost a lot to keep a car in the city?”

She said, “Parking is free after six o’clock.”

“But what do you do with it in the daytime?”

She paused a beat, as if unraveling the layers of his question, and she said, “No, I don’t live here.”

“I thought you did. Sorry. My mistake. I figured you were at NYU.”

She shook her head and said, “Sarah Lawrence.”

“Who’s she?”

“It’s a college. Where we go. In Yonkers. North of here. Sometimes we drive down and see what’s going on. Sometimes there are NYU boys in that coffee shop.”

“So we’re both out-of-towners.”

“Not tonight,” Chrissie said.

“What are your friends going to do?”

“About what?”

“About getting home tonight.”

“I’m going to drive them,” Chrissie said. “Like always.”

Reacher said nothing.

“But they’ll wait,” Chrissie said. “That’s part of the deal.”

The Chevette’s air conditioner was about as lousy as the coffee shop’s, but something was better than nothing. There were a few people on Broadway, like ghosts in a ghost town, moving slow, and a few on Lafayette, slower still, and homeless people on the Bowery, waiting for the shelters to open. Chrissie parked two blocks north of the venue, on Great Jones Street, between a car with its front window broken and a car with its back window broken. But it was under a working street light, which looked to be about as good as it got, short of employing a team of armed guards, or a pack of vicious dogs, or both. And the car would have been no safer left on Washington Square, anyway. So they got out into the heat and walked to the corner through air thick enough to eat. The sky was as hot and hard as an iron roof at noontime, and it was still flickering in the north, with the kind of restless energy that promised plenty and delivered nothing.

There was no line at the door of the club, which Chrissie felt was a good thing, because it meant there would be spots to be had at the front near the stage, just in case it really was the Ramones or Blondie that night. A guy inside took their money, and they moved past him into the heat and the noise and the dark, toward the bar, which was a long low space with dim light and sweating walls and red diner stools. There were about thirty people in there, twenty-eight of them kids no older than Chrissie, plus one person Reacher already knew, and another person he was pretty sure he was going to get to know, pretty well and pretty soon. The one he knew was Jill Hemingway, still thin and blonde and nervous, still in her short summer dress. The one he felt he would get to know looked a lot like Croselli. A cousin, maybe. He was the same kind of size and shape and age, and he was wearing the same kind of clothes, which were a sweated-through suit and a shirt plastered tight against a wet and hairy belly.

Jill Hemingway saw Reacher first. But only by a second. She moved off her stool and took a step and immediately the guy in the suit started snapping his fingers and gesturing for the phone. The barkeep dumped the instrument in front of him and the guy started dialing. Hemingway pushed her way through the thin crowd and came up to Reacher face to face and said, “You idiot.”

Reacher said, “Jill, this is my friend Chrissie. Chrissie, this is Jill, who I met earlier this evening. She’s an FBI agent.”

Beside him Chrissie said, “Hi, Jill.”

Hemingway looked temporarily nonplussed and said, “Hi, Chrissie.”

Reacher said, “Are you here for the music?”

Hemingway said, “I’m here because this is one of the few places Croselli doesn’t get total cooperation. Therefore this is one of the few places I knew he would have to put a guy. So I’m here to make sure nothing happens to you.”

“How did you know I would come here?”

“You live in South Korea. What else have you heard of?”

Chrissie said, “What exactly are we talking about?”

Croselli’s guy was still on the phone.

Reacher said, “Let’s sit down.”

Hemingway said, “Let’s not. Let’s get you the hell out of here.”

Chrissie said, “What the hell is going on?”

There were tiny cafe tables near the deserted stage. Reacher pushed through the crowd, left shoulder, right shoulder, and sat down, his back to a corner, most of the room in front of him. Chrissie sat down next to him, hesitant, and Hemingway paced for a second, and then she gave it up and joined them. Chrissie said, “This is really freaking me out, guys. Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

Reacher said, “I was walking down the street and I saw a guy slap Agent Hemingway in the face.”

“And?”

“I hoped my presence would discourage him from doing it again. He took offense. Turns out he’s a mobster. Jill thinks they’re measuring me for concrete shoes.”

“And you don’t?”

“Seems oversensitive to me.”

Chrissie said, “Reacher, there are whole movies about this stuff.”

Hemingway said, “She’s right. You should listen to her. You don’t know these people. You don’t understand their culture. They won’t let an outsider disrespect them. It’s a matter of pride. It’s how they do business. They won’t rest until they fix it.”

Reacher said, “In other words they’re exactly the same as the Marine Corps. I know how to deal with people like that. I’ve been doing it all my life.”

“How do you plan to deal with them?”

“By making the likely cost too high. Which it already is, frankly. They can’t do anything in here, because they’d be arrested, either by you or the NYPD. Which is too high of a cost. It would mean lawyers and bribes and favors, which they won’t spend on me. I’m not worth it. I’m nobody. Croselli will get over it.”

“You can’t stay in here all night.”

“He already tried it on the street, and he didn’t get very far.”

“Ten minutes from now he’ll have six guys out front.”

“Then I’ll go out the back.”

“He’ll have six guys there too.”

Chrissie said, “You know when I asked you to stick close by me?”

Reacher said, “Sure.”

“You can forget that part now, OK?”

Reacher said, “This is nuts.”

Hemingway said, “You hit a made man in the head. What part of that don’t you understand? That just doesn’t happen. Get used to it, kid. And right now you’re in the same room as one of his goons. Who just got off the phone.”

“I’m sitting next to an FBI agent.”

Hemingway said nothing in reply to that. Reacher thought: NYU. Sarah Lawrence. Hemingway had never confirmed it either way. He had asked her: How long have you been with the FBI? She had answered: Who says I am?

He said, “Are you or are you not?”

She said nothing.

“It’s not real hard. It’s a yes or no answer.”

“No,” she said. “It really isn’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s yes and no. Not yes or no.”

Reacher paused a beat.

“What, you’re freelancing here?” he said. “Is that it? This isn’t really your case? Which is why there was no back-up van? Which is why you were using your little sister’s tape player?”

“It was my tape player. I’m suspended.”

“You’re what?”

“Medical grounds. But that’s what they always say. What it means is they took my badge, pending review.”

“Of what?”

“Like you said. The lawyers and the bribes and the favors. They’re weighing me in the balance. Me against all the good stuff.”

“This was Croselli?”

Hemingway nodded. “Right now he’s fireproof. He had the investigation shut down. I figured I might get him to boast about it, on the tape. I might have gotten something I could use. To make them take me back.”

“Why wasn’t Croselli armed in the city?”

“Part of the deal. They all can do what they want in every other way, but the homicide figure has to come down. Give and take. Everyone’s a winner.”

“Does Croselli know you’re suspended?”

“Of course he does. He made them do it.”

“So in fact the goon in the same room as me knows it too, right? Is that what we’re saying here? He knows you’re not about to pull a badge. Or a gun. He knows you’re just a member of the public. Legally, I mean. In terms of your powers of arrest, and so on. And less than that, in terms of your credibility. As a witness against Croselli’s people, I mean.”

“I told you to go see your brother.”

“Don’t get all defensive. I’m not blaming you. I need to make a new plan, that’s all. I need to understand the parameters.”

Chrissie said, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.”

“Why not?”

“At Sarah Lawrence we would say it was uncomfortably gender normative behavior. It was patriarchal. It spoke to the paternalistic shape of our society.”

“You know what they would say in the Marine Corps?”

“What?”

“They would point out you asked me to stick close by, because you think the Bowery is dangerous.”

“It is dangerous. Twelve guys are about to show up and kick your butt.”

Reacher nodded. “We should go, probably.”

“You can’t,” Hemingway said. “The goon won’t let you. Not until the others get here.”

“Is he armed?”

“No. Like I said.”

“You sure?”

“Hundred percent.”

“Do we agree one opponent is better than twelve?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wait here,” Reacher said.

Reacher walked across the dim room, as graceful as a bulked-up greyhound, with all the dumb confidence a guy gets from being six-five and two-twenty and sixteen years old. He moved on through the bar, toward the restroom corridor. He had been in relatively few bars in his life, but enough to know they were superbly weapons-rich environments. Some had pool cues, all neatly lined up in racks, and some had martini glasses, all delicate and breakable, with stems like stilettos, and some had champagne bottles, as heavy as clubs. But the CBGB bar had no pool table, and its customers were apparently indifferent to martinis and champagne. The most numerous local resource was long-neck beer bottles, of which there were plenty. Reacher collected one as he walked, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Croselli’s guy get up and follow him, no doubt worried about rear exits or bathroom windows. There was in fact a rear exit, at the end of the restroom corridor, but Reacher ignored it. Instead he stepped into the men’s room.

Which was perhaps the single most bizarre place he had ever seen, outside of a military installation. The walls were bare brick covered in dense graffiti, and there were three wall-hung urinals and a lone sit-down toilet all exposed up on a step like a throne. There was a two-hole metal sink, and unspooled toilet rolls everywhere. No windows.

Reacher filled his empty beer bottle with water from the faucet, for extra weight, and he wiped his palm on his T-shirt, which neither dried his hand nor made his shirt appreciably wetter. But he got a decent grip on the long glass neck, and he held the bottle low down by his leg and he waited. Croselli’s guy came in seconds later. He glanced around, first amazed by the decor, then reassured by the lack of windows, which told Reacher all he really needed to know, but at sixteen he still played it by the book, so he asked anyway. He said, “Do we have a problem, you and me?”

The guy said, “We’re waiting for Mr. Croselli. He’ll be here in a minute. Which won’t be a problem for me. But it will be for you.”

So Reacher swung the bottle, the water kept in by centrifugal force, and it caught the guy high on the cheekbone and rocked him back, whereupon Reacher whipped the bottle down again and smashed it on the lip of a urinal, glass and water flying everywhere, and he jabbed the jagged broken circle into the guy’s thigh, to bring his hands down, and then again into his face, with a twist, flesh tearing and blood flowing, and then he dropped the bottle and shoved the guy in the chest, to bounce him off the wall, and as he came back toward him he dropped a solid head butt straight to the guy’s nose. Which was game over, right there, helped a little by the way the guy’s head bounced off the urinal on his way to the floor, which all made a conclusive little head-injury trifecta, bone, porcelain, tile, good night and good luck.

Reacher breathed in, and breathed out, and then he checked the view in the busted mirror above the sink. He had diluted smears of the guy’s blood on his forehead. He rinsed them off with lukewarm water and shook like a dog and headed back through the bar into the main room. Jill Hemingway and Chrissie were on their feet in the middle of the dance floor. He nodded them toward the exit. They set off toward him and he waited to fall into step. Hemingway said, “Where’s the goon?”

Reacher said, “He had an accident.”

“Jesus.”

They hustled on, through the bar one more time, into the lobby corridor, fast and hot.

Too late.

They got within ten feet of the street door, and then it opened wide and four big guys in sweated-through suits stepped in, followed by Croselli himself. All five of them stopped, and Reacher stopped, and behind him Chrissie and Jill Hemingway stopped, eight people all in a strung-out, single-file standoff, in a hot narrow corridor with perspiration running down the bare brick walls.

From the far end of the line Croselli said, “We meet again, kid.”

Then the lights went out.

Reacher couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. The darkness was total and profound, like the next stop after nothing. And the darkness was completely silent, way down at some deep primeval level, all the low subliminal hum of modern life suddenly gone, leaving nothing in its place except blind human shufflings and a kind of whispered eerie keening that seemed to come up from ageless rocks below. From the twentieth century to the Stone Age, at the flick of a switch.

From behind him Reacher heard Chrissie’s voice say, “Reacher?”

“Stand still,” he said.

“OK.”

“Now turn around.”

“OK.”

He heard her feet on the floor, shuffling. He searched his last retained visual memory for where the first of Croselli’s guys had stopped. The middle of the corridor, facing dead ahead, maybe five feet away. He planted his left foot and kicked out with his right, hard, blindly, aiming groin-high into the pitch-black emptiness ahead. But he hit something lower, making contact a jarring split second before he expected. A kneecap, maybe. Which was fine. Either way the first of Croselli’s guys was about to fall down, and the other three were about to trip over him.

Reacher spun around and felt for Chrissie’s back, and he put his right arm around her shoulders, and with his left hand he found Hemingway, and he half pulled and half pushed them back the way they had come, to the bar, where a feeble battery-powered safety light had clicked on. Which meant it hadn’t been the flick of a switch. The whole building had lost power.

He found the restroom corridor and pushed Chrissie ahead of him and pulled Hemingway behind him, to the rear door, and they barged through it, out to the street.

Which was way too dark.

They hustled onward anyway, fast, out in the heat again, muscle memory and instinct compelling them to put some distance between the door and themselves, compelling them to seek the shadows, but it was all shadows. The Bowery was a pitch-dark and sullen ditch, long and straight both ways, bordered by pitch-dark and sullen buildings, uniformly massive and gloomy, their unlit bulk for once darker than the night sky. The skyline sentinels forty blocks north and south weren’t there at all, except in a negative sense, because at the bottom of the sky there were dead fingers where inert buildings were blocking the glow of starlight behind thin cloud.

“The whole city is out,” Hemingway said.

“Listen,” Reacher said.

“To what?”

“Exactly. The sound of a billion electric motors not running. And a billion electric circuits switched off.”

Chrissie said, “This is unbelievable.”

Hemingway said, “There’s going to be trouble. Give it an hour or so, and there’s going to be rioting, and arson, and a whole lot of looting. So you two, right now, head north as far and as fast as you can. Do not go east or west. Do not use the tunnels. Do not stop until you’re north of 14th Street.”

Reacher said, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to work.”

“You’re suspended.”

“I can’t stand by and do nothing. And you have to get your friend back where you found her. I think those are our basic obligations.” And then she ran, south toward Houston Street, and was lost in the dark within seconds.

The street light on Great Jones was no longer working, but the blue Chevette was still under it, gray and formless in the dark, as yet unmolested. Chrissie opened it up, and they got in, and she started the motor and put it in gear. She didn’t turn on the lights, which Reacher understood. Disturbing the massive darkness didn’t seem right. Or possible, even. The great city felt stunned and passive, an immense organism laid low, implacable and indifferent to tiny scurrying humans. Of which there was a growing number within view. Windows were opening, and folks on lower floors were walking downstairs and coming out, standing near their doors and peering about, full of wonder and apprehension. The heat was still way up there. It wasn’t cooling down at all. A hundred degrees, maybe more, clamping down and now smug and settled and supreme, unchallenged by fans or air conditioning or any other kind of manmade mediation.

Great Jones Street was one-way west, and they crossed Lafayette and Broadway, and continued on West Third, Chrissie driving slow and tentative, not much faster than walking pace, a dark car in the dark, one of very few about. Maybe drivers had felt compelled to pull over, as part of the general paralysis. The traffic lights were all out. Each new block was newly weird, still and silent, blank and gray, absolutely unlit. They turned north on LaGuardia Place, and went counterclockwise around the bottom right-hand corner of Washington Square, back to the coffee shop. Chrissie parked where she had before, and they got out into the soupy air and the silence.

The coffee shop was dark, obviously, with nothing to see behind its dusty glass window. The air conditioner above the door was silent. And the door was locked. Reacher and Chrissie cupped their hands and pressed them to the glass and peered through, and saw nothing except vague black shapes in the dark. No staff. No customers. Maybe a health board thing. If the refrigerators went out, maybe they had to abandon ship.

Reacher said, “Where will your friends have gone?”

Chrissie said, “No idea.”

“You said there was a plan.”

“If one of us gets lucky, we meet back here at midnight.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get luckier.”

“I feel OK now.”

“We’re still south of 14th Street.”

“They won’t find you in the dark, surely.”

“Will we find your friends in the dark?”

“Why would we want to? They’ll get back by midnight. Until then we should hang out and experience this. Don’t you think? This is pretty amazing.”

And it was. There was a hugeness to it. Not just a room or a building or a block, but the entire city, slumped inert and defeated all around them, as if it was ruined, as if it was dead, like a relic from the past. And maybe it was more than just the city. There was no glow on any horizon. Nothing from across either river, nothing from the south, nothing from the north. Maybe the whole Northeast was out. Maybe all of America. Or the whole world. People were always talking about secret weapons. Maybe someone had pulled a trigger.

Chrissie said, “Let’s go look at the Empire State Building. We may never see it like this again.”

Reacher said, “OK.”

“In the car.”

“OK.”

They went up University, and used Ninth Street across to Sixth Avenue, where they turned north. Sixth Avenue was nothing at all. Just a long black hole, and then a small rectangle of night sky where it ended at Central Park. There were a few cars on it. All were moving slow. Most had their lights off. Like the Chevette. Instinctive, somehow. A shared assumption. Crowd behavior. Reacher caught a sudden whiff of fear. Hide in the dark. Don’t stand out. Don’t be seen.

Herald Square had people in it. Where Broadway cut across, at 34th Street. Most of them were out in the middle of the triangle, away from the buildings, trying to see the sky. Some of them were formed up in moving bunches, like sports fans leaving the stadium after a win, with the same kind of boisterous energy. But Macy’s windows were all intact. So far.

They kept going all the way to West 38th, crawling past the dead traffic lights and the cross streets, unsure every time whether they should yield or keep on going, but it turned out there was no real danger of either fender benders or confrontation, because everyone was moving slow and acting deferential, all after you, no, after you. Clearly the spirit so far was cooperation. On the roads, at least. Reacher wondered how long it would last.

They went east on 38th and turned on Fifth four blocks north of the Empire State. Nothing to see. Just a broad dark base, like both sides of every other block, and then nothing above. Just spectral darkness. They parked on the Fifth Avenue curb, on the block north of 34th Street, and got out for a closer look. Thirty-fourth was a double-wide street, with a clear view east and west, dark all the way, except for an orange glow in the far distance above what must have been Brooklyn. Fires were burning there.

“It’s starting,” Reacher said.

They heard a cop car coming north on Madison, and they saw it cross the six-lane width of 34th Street one block over. Its lights looked amazingly bright. It drove on out of sight, and the night went quiet again. Chrissie said, “Why did the power go out?”

“Don’t know,” Reacher said. “Overload from all the AC, or a lightning strike somewhere. Or the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion. Or maybe someone didn’t pay the bill.”

“Nuclear explosion?”

“It’s a known side effect. But I don’t think it happened. We’d have seen the flash. And depending where it was, we’d have been burned to a crisp.”

“What kind of military are you?”

“No kind at all. My dad’s a Marine, and my brother is going to be an army officer, but that’s them, not me.”

“What are you going to be?”

“I have no idea. Probably not a lawyer.”

“Do you think your FBI friend was right about riots and looting?”

“Maybe not so much in Manhattan.”

“Are we going to be OK?”

Reacher said, “We’re going to be fine. If all else fails, we’ll do what they did in the olden days. We’ll wait for morning.”

They turned onto 34th Street and drove over as close as they could get to the East River. They stopped on a trash-strewn triangle half under the FDR Drive, and they stared through the windshield over the water to the dark lands beyond. Queens dead ahead, Brooklyn to the right, the Bronx way far to the left. The fires in Brooklyn looked pretty big already. There were fires in Queens, too. And the Bronx, but Reacher had been told there were always fires in the Bronx. Nothing behind them, in Manhattan. Not yet. But there were plenty of sirens. The darkness was getting angry. Maybe because of the heat. Reacher wondered how Macy’s windows were doing.

Chrissie kept the engine running, for the AC. The gas was about half full. The tails of her shirt hid her shorts completely. She looked like she was wearing nothing else. Just the shirt. Which looked great. She was very pretty. He asked, “How old are you?”

She said, “Nineteen.”

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“You like it here?”

“So far. We get seasons. Heat and cold.”

“Especially heat.”

She asked, “How old are you?”

“I’m legal,” he said. “That’s really all you need to know.”

“Is it?”

“I hope so.”

She smiled, and turned off the engine. She locked her door, and leaned over to lock his. She smelled of hot clean girl. She said, “It’s going to get warm in here.”

“I hope so,” he said again. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close and kissed her. He knew how to do it. He had more than three years of practice. He put his free hand on the curve of her hip. She was a great kisser. Warm, wet, plenty of tongue. Closed eyes. He pushed her shirt up a little and ducked his hand under it. She was lean and firm. Hot, and a little damp. She brought her spare hand over and put it under his shirt. She smoothed it up over his side, over his chest, and down to his waist. She put the tips of her fingers under his waistband, which he took to be an encouraging sign.

They came up for air, and then they started again. He moved his free hand to her knee, and slid it up the wondrous smooth skin of her thigh, on the outside, with his thumb on the inside, to the hem of her shorts, and back again, to the other knee, and up her other leg, just as smooth and luscious, his fingers on the inside this time, his thumb on the outside, all the time trying to imagine anything more splendid than the feel of a warm girl’s skin, and failing. And this time he went a little further, until his leading finger was jammed against the hard seam between her legs, at the bottom of her zip. She clamped hard on his hand, which at first he took as an admonition, but then he realized she had another purpose in mind, so he kept his hand there, pushing hard as she ground away, almost lifting her off the seat. Then she sighed and gasped and went all rubbery, and they came up for air again, and he moved his crushed hand to the buttons on her shirt, and he tried to make his fingers work. Which they did, reasonably well, one button, two, three, all the way down until her shirt fell open.

They kissed again, the third marathon, and his free hand went to work in a different area, first outside a silky bra, and then inside, from below, until it was all pushed up and her small damp breasts were his. He moved his mouth to her neck, and then to her nipples, and he put his hand back where it had been before, and she started grinding again, long and slow, long and slow, breathing hard, until for a second time she sighed and gasped and fell against him, as if she had no bones in her body.

Then she put a hand on his chest and pushed him away, back toward his window, which again he took as a reproach, until she smiled like she knew something he didn’t, and unbuttoned his pants. Slim brown fingers took care of his zip, at which exact point for the first time in his life he truly understood the phrase died and gone to heaven. Her head went down into his lap, and he felt cool lips and a tongue, and he closed his eyes, and then he opened them again and stared about, determined to remember every last detail of his situation, the where and the when, and the how, and the who and the why, especially the why, because his conscious mind could find no logical path between the Port Authority bus terminal and what had to be some kind of enchanted kingdom. New York, New York. It’s a wonderful town. That was for damn sure. So he stared around, locking it all in, the river, the formless boroughs beyond, the distant fires, the wire fences, the bleak concrete pillars holding up the road above.

He saw a man standing thirty yards away in the dark, silhouetted against the glow coming off the water. Mid-twenties, maybe, judging by his posture, medium height, thick in the upper body, a geeky shape to his head, because of uncooperative hair. He had the kind of hair that should have been cut much shorter, but it was 1977. He was holding something in his right hand.

Chrissie was still busy. She was unquestionably the best ever. No comparison. None at all. He wondered if Sarah Lawrence was coed. He could go there. Just as good as NYU. Not that they were likely to get married or anything. But maybe she had friends. Or a sister. In fact he knew she had friends. The two blondes. They’ll wait. That’s part of the deal. They had two hours until midnight, which suddenly seemed like nothing at all.

The guy moved in the dark. He rolled around a pillar, light on his feet, staying covered, checking the blind spot at ninety degrees, checking the other direction, and then moving forward, fast and straight to the next pillar.

Toward the Chevette.

The guy eased around the new pillar, just to check his new blind spot, and then he pulled back and merged with the concrete, barely visible again, all the time being very careful with the thing in his hand, as if it was valuable or especially fragile.

Chrissie was still busy. And she was doing a fine, fine job. Died and gone to heaven wasn’t even close. It was an underestimate of the most serious kind. Egregious, even. It was the kind of faint praise that could cause a diplomatic incident.

The guy moved again. He went through the same routine, reflexively, glance, glance, move, to the next pillar, closer still to the Chevette, and he blended in, bringing his right arm to rest last, solicitous of the thing he was holding, taking care not to bring it into contact with the concrete.

Thereby bringing it separately through the river’s glow, all by itself.

Reacher knew what it was.

It was an upside down revolver, swinging by the trigger guard on the guy’s right-hand index finger. A squat shape, thick in the upper body like the guy himself, rounded in the grips, a two-and-a-half-inch barrel, smooth, with few projections. Could have been a Charter Arms Bulldog, a five-shooter, sturdy, most often chambered for the .44 Special. Double action. Easy to service. Not a target shooter’s gun. But good close up.

Chrissie was still busy. The guy moved again. Closer still to the Chevette. He stared right at it. Before he had gotten on the bus in Pohang Reacher’s mother had made him read her newspapers. New York City. A killing spree. The Son of Sam. Named from his crazy letters. But before the letters came he had been called something else. He had been called the .44 Caliber Killer. Because he used .44 caliber bullets. From a revolver.

Specifically, the NYPD said, from a Charter Arms Bulldog.

Chrissie was still busy. And this was no kind of a time to stop. No kind of a time at all. In fact stopping was not a possibility. Physically, mentally, every other way. It was absolutely not on the agenda. It was in a whole different hemisphere than the agenda. Maybe a whole different universe. It was a biological fact. It was not going to happen. The guy stared. Reacher stared back. He’s killing people. Couples sitting in cars. Way to go, Reacher thought. Do it now. I’ll go out on a high note. The highest possible note in the whole history of high notes. Jack Reacher, RIP. He died young, but he had a smile on his face.

The guy made no move. He just stared.

Reacher stared back.

The guy made no move.

Couples sitting in cars.

But they weren’t. Not from an exterior perspective. Chrissie’s head was in his lap. Reacher was alone in the car. Just a driver, off the road in the emergency, waiting in the passenger seat, for the extra legroom. The guy stared. Reacher stared back. Chrissie was still busy. The guy moved on. To the next pillar, and the next, and then he was lost to sight.

And then Chrissie’s work was done.

Afterward they repaired the damage as well as they could, straightening and zipping and buttoning and combing. Chrissie said, “Better than Blondie?”

Reacher said, “How could I tell?”

“Better than Blondie live on stage at CBGB, I mean.”

“A lot better. No real comparison.”

“You like Blondie, right?”

“Best ever. Well, top five. Or ten.”

“Shut up.” She started the engine again and put the air on max. She slid down in her seat and lifted her shirt tails so the vents blew straight up against her skin.

Reacher said, “I saw someone.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Doing what?”

“Peering into this car.”

“Who?”

“Some guy.”

“For real? That’s kind of creepy.”

Reacher said, “I know. And I’m real sorry, but I have to go find Jill Hemingway. I should tell her first. She needs some favors.”

“Tell her what?”

“What I saw.”

“What did you see?”

“Something she should know about.”

“Was it one of Croselli’s guys?”

“No.”

“So how is it important?”

“She might be able to use it.”

“Where is she?”

“I have no idea. Let me out in Washington Square and I’ll walk. I bet she’s north of Houston.”

“You would be going right back in there, where we got chased out before.”

“Let’s call that phase our reconnaissance.”

“What would you do this time?”

“Fastest way to find Hemingway is to look for Croselli.”

“I’m not going to let you.”

“How could you stop me?”

“I would tell you not to. I’m your girlfriend. At least until midnight.”

“Is this what they teach you at Sarah Lawrence?”

“Pretty much.”

“Works for me,” Reacher said. “We’ll just hang out, see if she comes by.”

“Really?”

“I mean it.”

“Why?”

“Laws of physics. A random encounter doesn’t get more likely just because both parties are moving.”

“OK, where?”

“Let’s say the corner of Bleecker and Broadway. That might make the encounter less random.”

“That’s way down there.”

“It’s a block from Houston. We can break out south if we need to.”

“We?”

“Was it you who wanted me to stick close by?”

“This is a whole different type of crazy.”

Reacher nodded.

“I understand,” he said. “I really do. It’s your choice. You can let me out in Washington Square. That would be fine. Don’t think I’ll ever forget you.”

“Really?”

“If I’m done before midnight, I’ll come say good-bye.”

“I mean, really, you won’t forget me? That’s very sweet.”

“Also very true. As long as I live.”

Chrissie said, “Tell me more about the guy you saw.”

Reacher said, “I think it was the Son of Sam.”

“You are crazy.”

“I’m serious.”

“And you just sat there?”

“Seemed like the best thing to do.”

“How close did he get?”

“About twenty feet. He had a good look, and he walked away.”

“The Son of Sam was twenty feet from me?”

“He didn’t see you. I think that’s why he walked away.”

She glanced all around in the dark and put the car in gear. She said, “The Son of Sam is an NYPD case, not the FBI.”

Reacher said, “Whoever passes on a tip gets a brownie point. I imagine that’s how it works.”

“What’s the tip?”

“The way he moved.”

There were more sirens behind them. First Avenue, Second Avenue, uptown, downtown, crosstown, there were plenty of cops on the streets. The mood was changing. Reacher could taste it on the air.

“I’ll come with you,” Chrissie said. “For the experience. These are the big things we’ll always remember.”

They used 34th Street again, back toward the center of the island, back toward the heart of darkness. The city was still pitch black, still dead, like a giant creature fallen on its back. There were broken windows. There were people roaming in groups, carrying stuff. There were police cars and fire trucks speeding through the streets, all lit up and whooping and barking, but their lights didn’t make much impression on the blackness, and their sirens didn’t seem to worry the roaming people. They merely scuttled into doorways as the cars and trucks passed. The people reminded Reacher of tiny nighttime organisms working on a corpse, penetrating its skin, exploring it, disassembling it, feeding off it, recovering its nutrients, recycling its components, like a dead whale feeds a million sea creatures on the ocean bed.

They turned south on Fifth Avenue at the Empire State Building and drove slowly in the middle lane, passing knots of people in the roadway, two of whom were carrying a rolled-up carpet, three of whom were loading the trunk of a big battered car with something in boxes. They veered left onto Broadway at 23rd Street, past the ghostly Flatiron Building, and they continued south, around Union Square, across 14th Street, into enemy territory, and onward. The mayhem got a little worse the further south they went. Broadway looked narrow, like a dark trench through a dark landscape, and there were busted windows, and people everywhere, moving in groups, fast and furtive and silent, barely visible at all, except for the glow of cigarettes. They passed 4th Street, and 3rd, where they had been before, and Chrissie started to slow the car, and Reacher said, “Change of plan. I think Sixth Avenue and Bleecker might be better.”

Chrissie said, “Why?”

“What is Croselli worried about right now?”

“Getting his stuff ripped off. Like anyone. If he has stuff.”

“I think he does. I mean, how does he earn money between Houston and 14th? Maybe protection rackets and hookers and so on, but dope for sure. He must have a stash somewhere. But where? Not in an ancestral home in Little Italy, because that’s way south of Houston.”

“You know the geography pretty well.”

“I’ve studied it from afar. And he walked west from Waverly. After the slapping incident. Toward Sixth Avenue. Obviously he was heading back to make his phone calls. About me. So his HQ must be west of Waverly.”

“You think Hemingway knows where it is?”

“I’m sure she does. And I’m sure she’s watching it, right now. I’m assuming no one gave her an actual role tonight, because she’s suspended. So she’s still freelancing. I bet she’s hoping some bunch of guys busts down Croselli’s door, so she can get a record of what’s inside. Maybe she’ll even get Croselli defending it, which would be pretty much a slam dunk, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t matter what kind of deal he made. Some things can’t be ignored.”

“It will be more than just Croselli defending it. He’s got twelve guys.”

“Ten now,” Reacher said. “Two of them are in the hospital. Or trying to get there. But we’ll keep out of their way. It’s Hemingway we want.”

“Hard to find one woman in the dark.”

“All we can do is try.”

So they rolled onward, toward Houston Street, past a big stereo store with two busted windows and not much left inside, and they made the right and crept west, past the dark wasteland streets of Soho coming in from the left, Mercer, and Greene, and Wooster, and West Broadway, and Thompson, and Sullivan, and MacDougal. Then they turned right on Sixth, and headed north a block to where Bleecker and Downing and Minetta all met in an untidy little six-way split. Retail was down-market and scruffy in that location, some of it too scruffy even for looters, some of it already busted wide open and stripped. Looking north, Sixth was the same long black hole it had been before, with the same slim upright rectangle of night sky at the end of it.

Chrissie said, “Should I park here?”

Reacher said, “Let’s cruise a few blocks.”

“You said we would hang out and let her come to us.”

“Mission creep. Occupational hazard. Like the Navy transporting the Marines.”

“I’m an English major.”

“Just five minutes, OK?”

“OK,” she said.

But they didn’t need five minutes. They were done in barely sixty seconds. They made the tight left onto Downing, and a right on Bedford, and a right on Carmine, back toward Bleecker again, and in a doorway on the right side of the street Reacher caught a flash of pale skin and blonde hair, and he pointed, and Chrissie jammed to a stop, and Jill Hemingway stepped out of the dark and bent down to Reacher’s window, like a Seoul streetwalker talking to an enlisted man.

Reacher expected Hemingway to be mad at his reappearance, but she wasn’t. He figured she felt exposed. Or caught out in her own obsession. Which she was, basically. And she looked a little sheepish about it.

He asked, “Is his place near here?”

She pointed through the car at a pair of large blank doors across the street. They were tall and wide. Like a wagon entrance, from long ago, big enough for a cart and a team of horses. In the daylight the paint might have looked dark green. Set into the right-hand door was a judas gate, big enough for a person. Presumably the doors would lead to an interior ground-floor yard. It was a two-story building. Offices above, possibly. Or storerooms. Behind the building was a bigger building, blank and dark and massive. A brick church of some kind, maybe.

Reacher asked, “Is he in there?”

Hemingway nodded.

Reacher asked, “With how many others?”

“He’s alone.”

“Really?”

“He runs protection rackets. Among other things. So now he has to deliver. His guys are all out, watching over his clients.”

“I didn’t know protection rackets worked that way. I thought they were just extortion, plain and simple.”

“They are, basically. But he needs to maintain some kind of credibility. And he needs to keep his best cash cows in business. There’s a lot of damage being done tonight. Plenty of places are going to go under. No more payoffs from them. And a wise man keeps an eye on his cash flow.”

Reacher turned and looked at the doors. “You hoping someone will break in?”

“I don’t know what’s taking them so long. That’s the problem with junkies. No get-up-and-go.”

“What has he got in there?”

“A little of everything. He keeps his inventory low because he’s got the New Jersey Turnpike and the Holland Tunnel for rapid resupply, which is apparently what they teach you in business school now, but still, I bet there’s a week’s worth in there.”

“Are we in the way? Should we go park somewhere else?”

“You should go home. This isn’t your business.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“The Son of Sam.”

“Croselli isn’t enough for you?”

“I saw him.”

“Who?”

“I saw a man carrying a Charter Arms Bulldog and peering into cars.”

“Are you serious?”

“It was our car he peered into.”

“Where?”

“The East River, at 34th Street.”

Hemingway said, “You know guns, right? Being a Marine and all?”

“Son of a Marine,” Reacher said. “It was the right gun.”

“It’s pitch dark.”

“The moon and the stars and the water.”

Hemingway ducked down another inch and looked across Reacher at Chrissie. “Did you see it too?”

Chrissie said, “No.”

“How come?”

“I wasn’t looking.”

Hemingway said, “I don’t know what to do. OK, let’s say we have a confirmed sighting, but so what? We already know the Son of Sam is in New York. That’s the point of the guy. It adds no new information. You’d need something more. You’d need to know who he is. Do you?”

“No,” Reacher said. “But I know what he used to be.”

They parked on Bleecker, intending to walk back and join Hemingway in her doorway hideout, but suddenly Bleecker had people on it, some of them in groups, some of them in pairs, some of those groups and pairs carrying stuff too heavy for comfort, and therefore consequently looking for alternative modes of transportation, such as small hatchback cars, each one apparently ideal for hauling a large television. Reacher and Chrissie were a yard out of the Chevette, with the doors closed but not locked, when the staring match started. Two guys, staggering under an enormous box, with Sony written on it upside down. They came in a straight line, eyeballing the Chevette all the way, and Reacher said, “Keep walking, guys.”

The guy on the left was a shadowy grunting figure, and he said, “Suppose we don’t?”

“Then I’ll kick your butt and steal your television.”

“Suppose you drive us?”

“Just keep walking,” Reacher said.

They didn’t. They eased the box carefully to the ground and stood up again, breathing deep, two dark figures in the dark. Even from six feet away it was hard to make out detail, but their hands hadn’t gone to their pockets yet, which was a good sign. It meant any upcoming combat was likely to be unarmed, which was reassuring. Reacher had grown up in a culture of extreme violence, it being hard to describe the U.S. Marine Corps any other way, and he had taken its lessons on board, with the result that he hadn’t lost a fight in more than ten years, against Corps kids from the same culture, and against rivalrous local youth all around the world, who liked to think the U.S. military was nothing special, and who liked to try to prove it by proxy, usually unsuccessfully. Two punks on a blacked-out New York City street were unlikely to prove an unprecedented problem, unless they had knives or guns, which was unknowable at that point.

The guy on the right said, “Maybe we’ll take the girl with us. Maybe we’ll have ourselves some fun.”

The guy on the left said, “Just give us the keys and no one gets hurt.”

Which was the moment of decision. Surprise was always good. Delay was always fatal. Guys who let a situation unfold in its own good time were just stockpiling problems for themselves. Reacher ran at the left-hand guy, two choppy steps, like an infielder charging a grounder, and he didn’t slow down. He ran right through the guy, leading with his forearm held horizontal, jerking his elbow into the guy’s face, and as soon as he felt the guy’s nose burst open he stamped down and reversed direction around the box and went after the second guy, who flinched away and took Reacher’s charging weight flat in the back. The guy pitched forward like he had been hit by a truck, and Reacher kicked him in the head, and the guy lay still.

Reacher checked their pockets. No knives, no guns, which was usually the case. But it had been their choice. They could have kept on walking. He hauled the right-hand guy next to the left-hand guy, close together, shoulder to shoulder, and he picked up the heavy box like a strongman in the circus, struggling and tottering, and he took two short steps and dropped it on their heads from waist height.

Chrissie said, “Why did you do that?”

“Rules,” Reacher said. “Winning ain’t enough. The other guy has to know he lost.”

“Is that what they teach you in the Marine Corps?”

“More or less.”

“They’ll wreck the car when they wake up.”

“They won’t. They’ll throw up and crawl home. By which time you’ll be long gone anyway.”

So Chrissie locked up, and they walked back through the heat to where Hemingway was waiting on Carmine. Reacher said, “No progress?”

Hemingway said, “Not yet.”

“Maybe we should go recruit someone. There are plenty of people on Bleecker.”

“That would be suborning a felony.”

“Means to an end.”

“Tell me what you meant about the guy with the Bulldog.”

“Can you use it?”

“Depends what it is.”

“It was dark,” Reacher said. “Obviously.”

“But?”

“He was in his mid-twenties, I would say, medium height, heavy in the chest and shoulders, quite pale, with wavy hair that wouldn’t lie down.”

“Carrying a .44 Bulldog?”

“Most Bulldogs are .44s. But I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“How far away was he?”

“Twenty feet, at one point.”

“How long were you eyeballing him?”

“Twenty seconds, maybe.”

“Twenty seconds at twenty feet,” Hemingway said. “In a blackout? That’s a tough sell. I bet there have been a thousand reports tonight. People freak out in the dark.”

“He was a trained man,” Reacher said.

“Trained how?”

“The way he moved through the available cover. He’s ex-military. He’s had infantry training.”

“So have lots of guys. You ever heard of Vietnam?”

“He’s too young. This guy was of age six or seven years ago. The draft was winding down. You had to be pretty unlucky. And I don’t think he was ever in combat. I’ve seen lots of people back from Vietnam. They’re different. This guy was all theory and training. Second nature, for sure, pretty slick, but he had never lived or died by it. I can guarantee that. And I don’t think he was a Marine. They’re different too. I think he was army. And I think he’s been in Korea. It was like a fingerprint. I think he did basic, and infantry, with the urban specialization, and I think he served in Seoul. Like a particular combination. That’s how he looked. I see it all the time. You ever been there? Seoul teaches you to move a certain way. But he’s been out at least two years, because of the hair, and he’s had time to get a bit heavy. I think he volunteered at eighteen or nineteen, and I think he served a three-year hitch. That was my impression, anyway.”

“That’s one hell of a detailed impression.”

“You could offer it as a filter. They could see if any persons of interest match up.”

“It was twenty seconds in the pitch dark.”

“What else have they got?”

“Maybe I could.”

“Suppose it worked? Suppose they get the guy? Would that be good for you?”

“Of course it would.”

“So what’s the downside?”

“Sounding desperate and pathetic.”

“Your call.”

“You should try it,” Chrissie said. “Someone needs to catch the guy.”

Hemingway said nothing.

They waited, all crammed together in the doorway opposite Croselli’s place, with absolutely nothing happening. They heard sirens, and snatches of conversation from people passing by on Bleecker. Like headline news. It was now only ninety degrees. The lights had gone out at Shea in the bottom of the sixth, with the Mets trailing the Cubs by two to one. Subway riders had spent scary hours trapped underground, but were slowly making their way back to the surface. Cars were using chains and ropes to tear the shutters off stores. Even Brooks Brothers on Madison had been looted. Crown Heights and Bushwick were on fire. Cops had been hurt and arrests had been made.

Then the last of the passersby moved on and Carmine went quiet again and the clock in Reacher’s head ticked around toward midnight. He said to Chrissie, “I’ll walk you back to your car. Your friends will be waiting.”

She said, “Are you staying here?”

“Might as well. I already missed my bus.”

“Do you think the roads are open?”

“Wide open. They want people to leave.”

“Why?”

“Fewer mouths to feed here.”

“Makes sense,” Chrissie said. They walked together to the corner, and around it, where the Chevette waited undisturbed. The two guys were still laid out in the roadway, under the box. Like a cartoon accident. They were still breathing.

Reacher said, “Want me to ride with you?”

“No,” Chrissie said. “We go back alone. That’s part of the deal.”

“You know how to go?”

“Up on Sixth and across on 4th. And then it’s right there.”

“Roger that.”

“Take care, OK?”

“I will,” Reacher said. “You too. I’ll never forget you.”

“You will.”

“Check back next year, see if I have.”

“OK. Let’s see who remembers. Same night, same place. Deal?”

“I’ll be there,” Reacher said.

She got into the car, and she eased away from the tangle of limbs behind her, and she made the left on Sixth, and she waved through her open window. And then she was gone.

Hemingway said, “I’m going to put it in the system. Your impression, I mean. That’s the smart play here. They’ll ignore it, of course, but it will be in the record. I can say told you so, afterward. If you’re right. That’s always worth a point or two. Sometimes more. Being right afterward can be a wonderful thing.”

“It’s a filter,” Reacher said. “That’s all. It’s about efficiency.”

“But I still need Croselli.”

“The Son of Sam wouldn’t get you out of jail?”

“I need Croselli.”

“Why?”

“Because he burns me up.”

“You ever read a book called Moby-Dick?”

“OK, I get it. And I admit it. Croselli is my great white whale. I’m obsessed. But what can I do about it? What could anyone, with a whale pressing on her head?”

“Is that how you feel? Like you have a whale pressing on your head?”

“That’s exactly how I feel.”

“Then let’s trade,” Reacher said.

“What for what?”

“I need a ride out of town.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible. I’m sure my brother is worrying about me. Which I’m sure is hard on the old guy. I need to put him out of his misery.”

“I’m not a taxi dispatcher.”

“You have a car.”

“I’m not a chauffeur, either.”

“You could lend it to me.”

“How would I get it back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you even have a license?”

“Not exactly.”

“No deal,” she said.

“OK,” Reacher said.

“What were you going to do for me?”

“Suppose an unknown suspect broke into Croselli’s place, and you got a look inside. Then the unknown suspect fled, but you were too busy securing the scene to chase him.”

“I’ve been waiting two hours for that to happen. But it hasn’t.”

“I could do it.”

“You’re sixteen years old.”

“How is that relevant?”

“Entrapment is bad enough. Entrapment with minors is probably worse.”

“Who would ever know, apart from you and me?”

“I have no way of getting you a ride out of town.”

Reacher paused a beat, and said, “Maybe we should refine the plan.”

“What plan?” Hemingway said. “We don’t have a plan.”

“Probably better if it’s not you who makes the discovery. It could look like a personal vendetta. It could give Croselli’s lawyers something to work with. Probably better if it’s not even the FBI at all. Better if it’s the NYPD. Don’t you think? An independent agency, with no ax to grind. If they discover a dope dealer and his stash in their city, then it’s out there. It can’t be denied. It is what it is. Your people will have to hush up their deal, and they’ll have to admit you were right all along, and you can turn your review procedure into a medal ceremony.”

“The NYPD is busy tonight.”

“They have a narcotics division, surely. Make the call ahead of time. Get a sense of how long they’re going to be, and we’ll try to time it exactly right. I’ll bust in, you hang back and keep an eye on things for a minute until the cops show up, and then we’ll both slip away, and you can drive me north. Meanwhile the NYPD will be building your case for you, and by the time you’re back in town your bosses will be rolling out the red carpet.”

“How far north do you want to go?”

“West Point. It’s up the river a ways.”

“I know where it is.”

“So do we have a deal?”

Hemingway didn’t answer.

Hemingway finally agreed about thirty minutes later, close to one o’clock in the morning. But the plan went wrong immediately. First they couldn’t find a working phone. They searched up and down Carmine, and they tried the corner of Seventh Avenue, and the corner of Bleecker, and Sixth Avenue, and every payphone they found was silent. They didn’t know if it was the result of the blackout, or just the general abject state of the city. Reacher figured the phone company had its own electricity, in its own wires, so he was all in favor of carrying on the search, but Hemingway was reluctant to foray further, in case she missed something over at Croselli’s place. So she walked back to the doorway on Carmine and Reacher went on alone, across Sixth, and on the corner between Minetta Street and Minetta Lane he found a phone with a dial tone.

It was too dark to see the numbers, so he dialed by feel, zero for the operator, and he waited a long time before she answered. He asked for the NYPD’s Sixth Precinct, and waited again, even longer, before the call was picked up and a voice barked, “Yes?”

Reacher said, “I want to report illegal narcotics in the West Village.”

The voice said, “What?”

“There’s a storeroom full of drugs on Carmine just been bust open.”

“Any dead bodies?”

“No.”

“Anyone currently in the act of getting killed?”

“No.”

“Fire?”

“No.”

The voice said, “Then stop wasting my time,” and the phone went dead. Reacher hung up and hustled back, sweating, ninety degrees at one in the morning, and he relayed the news to Hemingway, who nodded in the dark and said, “We should have seen that coming. I guess they’re all hands on deck right now.”

“We might have to use your own people.”

“Forget it. They wouldn’t take my call.”

Reacher said, “Still got your little sister’s cassette recorder?”

“It’s my cassette recorder.”

“Still got it?”

“Why?”

“Maybe I can get him to boast on the tape.”

“You?”

“Same principle. You can’t let this look like a vendetta.”

“I can’t let you. You and him, face to face? I have a conscience.”

“What’s he going to do to me?”

“Beat you to death.”

“He’s a made man,” Reacher said. “He has soldiers. Which means he tells other people to do the heavy lifting. Which means he’s out of practice. He’s all hat and no cattle. He’s got nothing. We already saw that on Waverly. Any twelve-year-old in the Philippines could eat his lunch.”

“Is this a Marine Corps thing?”

“I’m not a Marine.”

“How would you get in?”

“I assume the church behind him is locked.”

“Tonight for sure. If not every night.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“How would the military do it?”

“Marines or army?”

“Army.”

“They’d call in artillery support. Or air-to-ground.”

“Marines?”

“They’d start a fire, probably. That usually brings them out real fast.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m not a Marine,” Reacher said again. He looked across the street. The second-story windows were dark, obviously. Which meant Croselli could be right there, watching. But without seeing much. A man in a dark room watching a lit street had an advantage. A man in a dark room watching a dark street might as well have saved himself the eyestrain.

Reacher crossed the dark street, to the double doors. He put his fingertips on them. They felt like sandpaper. Fifty-year-old paint, plus fifty years of smoke and grime and dust. He tapped, first with his fingernails, then gently with his knuckles. The wood felt old and thick and solid, like it had been shipped a hundred years before, from some ancient forest out west. He slid his palms across the surface, until he found the judas gate. Same paint, same grime, same wood. He felt for the hinges, and didn’t find any. He felt for the lock, and rubbed it with his thumb. It seemed to be a small round Yale, worn brass, probably as old as the paint.

He headed back to Hemingway. He said, “The doors are probably two or three inches thick, and the judas gate is all of a piece. All quality lumber, probably hard as a rock by now.”

“Then maybe the army way is the only way.”

“Maybe not. The judas gate opens inward. The lock is an old Yale, put in maybe fifty years ago. I’m guessing they didn’t chase out a void in the door. Not in wood that hard. Not back then. People weren’t so uptight about security. I bet the lock is surface-mounted on the back. Like an old house. The tongue is in a little surface-mounted box. Two screws, is all.”

“There will be another door. Out of the yard, into the building. Might have a newer lock.”

“Then I’ll knock and rely on charm.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“It’s the least I can do. I screwed you up before. You might have gotten something. You were going to take that slap and keep him talking.”

“He had already found the wire.”

“But he’s arrogant. He’s got an ego. He might have carried on regardless, just to taunt you.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

“Then let me put it right.”

Reacher turned around and lifted his shirt and bared his back to Hemingway. He felt hot fingers scrabbling at his waistband, gapping it out, fitting the plastic box behind the elastic on his shorts. Then he felt the scrape of a wire, and her hand burrowed up his back, under his shirt, to his shoulder blade, and then on over the top, a curious vertical embrace, her breath on his neck, and then she turned him around again to face her, and her other hand went up the front of his shirt, to find the microphone, to pass it from hand to hand, and to pull it down into place. She stopped with it trapped against his chest, and she kept her hand there, flat, nothing between her palm and his skin except the small pebble of technology.

She said, “I put it in my bra. But you don’t have one.”

“Imagine that,” Reacher said.

“There’s nothing to keep it in place.”

Reacher felt an immediate film of sweat between his chest and her hand. He said, “Got a Band-Aid in your purse?”

“You’re a smart kid,” she said, and she went into a one-hand-two-elbows contortion to root through her bag, and as she craned her neck to look downward into it her forehead touched his lips, just briefly, like a kiss. Her hair was limp, but it smelled like strawberries.

She jerked her bag back up on her shoulder and held up something that crackled slightly. A Band-Aid, he assumed, still in its hygienic wrapper. He took it from her and peeled it open in the space between their faces. Then in turn she took it back from him one-handed and used it to tape the microphone in the trench between his chest muscles. She smoothed the adhesive, once, twice, and then she took her hands out from under his shirt and pulled it down into place.

She put her palm on his chest, like Croselli had put his on hers, pressing hard on the damp cotton, and she said, “He’ll find it.”

“Don’t worry,” Reacher said. “If he puts his hands on me, I’ll beat him to death.”

Hemingway said nothing.

Reacher said, “That’s a Marine Corps thing.”

The darkness didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. Reacher lined up on the opposite curb, like a sprinter at the start of a race, but he couldn’t exactly see where he was heading. Adjustments were going to be necessary as he ran. He took off, slow and clumsy, partly because of the dark, partly because he was a terrible runner, with long lumbering strides, and three paces out he saw the doors, and two paces out he saw the judas gate, and with one pace to go he saw its lock, and he launched his leading foot in a scything kick, slightly across his body, and he smashed his heel as close to the small Yale circle as he could get, with all his two hundred and twenty pounds behind it, multiplied significantly by the final acceleration of his foot, and by the fact that his whole bulk was moving briskly, if not exactly fast.

But it was enough. The judas gate exploded inward, with what felt like no resistance at all, and Reacher hurtled through the resulting blank rectangle into a space so dark he could make out nothing at all. There was the feel of cobblestones under his feet, and the sour smell of garbage, and sheer dark walls rising on his left and his right and ahead.

He felt his way along the right-hand wall to the back corner of the yard, where he found a door. Ridged glass above, a panel below, a smooth steel handle, and a lock that felt newer. The glass was probably tempered and reinforced with wire. The lock was probably chased into the door and the jamb. A whole different proposition.

He waited, to see if Croselli would come down and open it himself. Which he might. He must have heard the crash of the judas gate. But he didn’t come down. Reacher waited three minutes, breathing hard, stretching his eyes wide open, willing them to see something. But they didn’t. He stepped up to the door again and traced its shape with his hands. The panel below the glass would be the weak spot. Plywood, probably, maybe three-eighths thick, painted, retained in the frame by quarter-round moldings. Reacher was wearing shoes he had bought in the London airport two deployments ago, stout British things with welts and toecaps as hard as steel. They had busted heads and kneecaps already that night. Plywood wasn’t going to be a major problem.

He stepped back and poked forward with his toe to fix his target in his mind. Then he kicked out, bang, bang, concentrating on the corners of the panel, viciously and noisily, until the wood splintered and the moldings came loose.

Then he stopped and listened.

No sound from inside the building.

Which was a bitch. Reacher would have preferred to meet Croselli face to face on the ground floor. He didn’t relish heading up a flight of stairs toward an alert opponent at the top.

He waited some more.

No sound.

He squatted down with his back against the doorframe and punched out the panel with his elbow, until it folded inward, like a miniature door itself, hinged on a few surviving nails. Then he twisted around and put his arm and his shoulder through the hole and reached up and scrabbled for the knob. Which he found easily enough. He had arms like a gorilla. Every childhood photograph of him featured six inches of bare wrist, at the end of every sleeve.

The door opened and he struggled upright and backed off a yard, just in case. But there was no sound inside. Croselli didn’t come out. There was nothing to see. Just darkness. The inside air smelled hot and stale.

Reacher stepped in, to what felt like a narrow lobby with a tiled floor. He slid his feet ahead, one after the other, and he felt a bottom stair. There was a handrail on the left. The opposite wall was less than three feet away. It was painted, and it was damp with condensation.

Reacher went up the stairs, his right hand out in front of him, his left holding the handrail. There was a yard-wide half landing, and then the stairs doglegged and continued upward. At the top was dusty superheated air and a six-by-three upstairs lobby with a sticky carpet and a door at each end. A front room, and a back room.

Under the back room door was a bar of faint warm light.

Reacher stared at it, like a thirsty man in the desert might stare at a cold drink. It was a candle, probably. It was the first manmade light he had seen in more than three hours.

He put his hand under his shirt at the back and pushed the button Hemingway had shown him. It’s red, she had said, which hadn’t helped, because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and it was pitch dark anyway. So he had learned it by feel. He tapped his chest, so that a thump could mark the start of the recording. Then he put his hand on the doorknob.

Reacher twisted the knob and pushed the door, one, two, fast and hard, and he stepped into a room lit by a guttering candle. The flame danced in the rush of air. The room was a twenty-by-twenty space with a dark window in the back wall, and a row of old-fashioned safes on the left, like something out of a black-and-white Western movie about bank robbers, and on the right there was a row of file cabinets and a desk, and sitting at the desk in a leather reclining chair was Croselli. The chair was pushed out and turned sideways, so that he was sitting face-on to the door.

He had a gun in his hand.

It was a Colt M1911, a .45 automatic, standard military issue for sixty-six years, hence the model number. It looked a little scratched and battered. It was all lit up by the candle, which was on the desk, welded to a china plate by a pool of its own wax. A standard household item, a few cents at the hardware store, but it felt as bright as the sun.

Croselli said, “You.”

Reacher said nothing.

Croselli had shed his jacket and pulled down his tie, but his shirt was still wet. He said, “I was expecting Hemingway. What are you tonight, her knight in shining armor? Is she sending a boy to do a man’s job?”

Is he armed? Reacher had asked. Not in the city, Hemingway had said. He can’t afford to be. Not applicable inside his own premises, apparently. Which was a bitch. Reacher looked at the row of safes. There were six of them, shoulder to shoulder, each one about a yard wide and six feet tall. They had keyholes, not combination locks. The door on the far end was wide open, and the void behind it was empty. Their armory, Reacher guessed. For dire emergencies. Like that very night. Clearly Croselli’s soldiers were all armed, all out on the street, all ensuring protection.

“You have a gun,” Reacher said, for the tape.

“I’m defending my property,” Croselli said.

“This is your place?”

“I’m not a common burglar.”

Reacher took a step. The Colt’s muzzle rose a degree, to track him. Reacher asked, “Is your name on the title?”

“I’m not that stupid.”

“Then this isn’t your place.”

“Only technically. Believe me, kid, everything you see here is mine.”

“What’s in the safes?”

“Inventory.”

“Yours?”

“I already told you.”

“I need to hear it in short simple words.”

“Why?”

“We could do business.”

“Business?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You and me?”

“If you’re smart,” Reacher said.

“You broke down my door.”

“Would you have let me in, if I had knocked?”

“What kind of business could we do, you and I?”

“You’re using the New Jersey Turnpike and the Holland Tunnel. Which means you’re getting supplied out of Miami, all the way up I-95. Which means you’re paying over the odds, and you’re losing some to unreliable mules, and you’re losing some to routine New Jersey State Police patrols. I could help you with all of that.”

“How?”

“I bring stuff in direct from the Far East. On military planes. No scrutiny. My dad’s a Marine officer.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Anything you want.”

“What kind of price, kid?”

“Show me what you’ve got and tell me what you paid. Then I’ll break your heart.”

“You hurt two of my men.”

Reacher said, “I hope so. I need you to understand. You do not mess with me.” He took another step. The Colt’s muzzle rose another degree. Reacher said, “Are you buying from Martinez?”

“I never heard of Martinez.”

“Then you’re way over the odds already. Who are you buying from?”

“The Medellin boys.”

“I could save you forty percent.”

Croselli said, “I think you’re full of shit. I think this is a Hemingway stunt.”

“You shut her down.”

“For which I paid good money. For which I expected a durable result. Anything else is liable to make me angry.”

“This has nothing to do with Hemingway.”

“Pull up your shirt.”

“Why?”

“I want to see the wire. Before I shoot you.”

Reacher thought: unregistered guns, a deceptive real estate title, a straight-up reference to the Medellin cartel out of Colombia, and a straight-up reference to bribery. The tape had enough. He took a deep, deep breath and put his hands on the hem of his T-shirt. Then he jerked forward from the waist and blew out the candle.

The room went from softly glowing to blacker than the Earl of Hell’s winter coat all in a split second, and Reacher blundered straight ahead, forcing passage between Croselli’s chair and the desk, and Croselli whipped the Colt around in the same general direction and fired. But he missed by a mile, and the muzzle flash backlit him perfectly, like a photographer’s strobe, so Reacher picked his spot and slammed a straight right into the back of his neck, right where soft turns to hard, and Croselli pitched head first out of the chair and landed on his knees. Reacher groped for the chair and lifted it high by the armrests and slammed it down on Croselli’s back. He heard the sound of steel on linoleum as the Colt skittered away, and he brushed the chair aside and groped and patted blindly until he found the collar of Croselli’s shirt, which he bunched in his left hand while he pounded away with his right, short roundhouse punches to the side of Croselli’s head, his ear, his jaw, one, two, three, four, vicious clubbing blows, until he felt the steam go out of the guy, whereupon he reached forward and grabbed the guy’s wrists and yanked them up behind his back, high and painful, and he clamped them together in his left hand, human handcuffs, a party trick perfected years before, enabled by the freakish strength in his fingers, from which no one had ever escaped, not even his brother, who was of equal size, or his father, who was smaller but stronger. He hauled Croselli to his feet and slapped at his pants pockets until he heard the jingle of keys. Croselli got his second wind and started struggling hard, so Reacher turned him a little sideways and quieted him down again with a pile-driver jab to the kidney.

Then he fished out the keys and held them in his right hand, and he asked, “Where’s your book of matches?”

Croselli said, “You’re going to die, kid.”

“Obviously,” Reacher said. “No one lives forever.”

“I mean tonight, kid.”

Reacher separated a key by feel and pressed the point high on Croselli’s cheek. He said, “If so, you won’t see it happen. I’ll take your eyes out first.”

“Matches in the desk drawer,” Croselli said.

Reacher turned him again and slammed a short right to his stomach, to fold him over and keep him preoccupied, and he walked him bent over and puking to the desk, and he used his free hand to rattle open the drawers, and to root around, all by feel. There was all kinds of stuff in the drawers. Staplers, pens, rolls of Scotch tape, some in dispensers, pencils, paper clips. And a book of matches, a little limp and damp.

Using a matchbook one-handed was practically impossible, so Reacher turned Croselli toward the window wall, let go of his wrists, and shoved him hard, and used the resulting few undisturbed seconds to detach a match and strike it, all fizzing and flaring in the dark, and to light the candle with it once again, by which time Croselli was shaping up for a charge, so Reacher stepped toward him and dropped him with a right to the solar plexus, just as the room bloomed back to its former cozy glow.

A solar plexus was worth at least a minute, Reacher thought, and he used that minute to cross the room and pick up the Colt, and to dump its magazine, and to eject the shell from its chamber, and to pick up the chair, and to set it back on its casters, and to turn it just so, and to find the Scotch tape, and to pick the guy up, and to dump him in the chair, and to start taping his wrists to the frame.

Scotch tape was weaker than duct tape, but Reacher made up for it with length, around and around, right hand, left hand, until the guy looked like he had two broken wrists, in casts made of some kind of new see-through yellowish plaster. Then came his ankles. In all Reacher used six whole rolls of tape, and after that there was no way the guy was moving.

Then Hemingway came in the door.

She looked at the candle first, and then at Croselli.

Reacher said, “He admits on tape everything here is his.”

She said, “I heard a gunshot.”

“He missed. It was about twenty degrees off on the port side.”

“I was worried.”

“It’s the godfather who should worry. This is a made man.”

“What did he say on the tape?”

“Take it out of my pants and listen for yourself.”

Which she did. Reacher felt the hot quick fingers again, and the weird embrace, under his shirt, as the microphone was passed from hand to hand. Then she clicked and waited and clicked again, and a thin tinny version of Croselli’s voice filled the room, taking responsibility for everything in it, admitting to the Medellin connection, admitting to the bribe, and hinting at the size of it.

She said, “You have his keys?”

Reacher said, “Right here in my hand.”

“Open the safe doors.”

Which he did, starting next to the empty armory, working away from the window, until all of the safes stood open. All of them were full of smooth-packed plastic-wrapped bricks, some brown or green in color, most white or yellow.

She said, “Can you get his keys back in his pocket?”

He did, and said, “What next?”

“Does his phone work?”

He tried it, and said, “Yes.”

She gave him a number and said, “It’s our internal credible threat hotline.”

He called it in, the exact address, without giving his name, and then the call ended, and she said, “Their response time will be more than five minutes but less than ten.”

She put her plastic cassette recorder on the floor near Croselli’s feet. She said, “We should go. My car is not close.”

Reacher said, “Is this enough?”

She said, “More than enough. Medellin is toxic. And the evidence is right here. It’s a photograph, Reacher. This is a photogenic prosecution. It doesn’t matter who he bribed. No one is ever going to say a word against this one. It’s a tidal wave.”

“One last thing,” Reacher said, and he turned back to Croselli, and he said, “Slapping women is not permitted. You’re supposed to be a man, not a pussy.”

Croselli said nothing.

Reacher raised his hand. “How would you like it?”

Croselli said, “You wouldn’t hit a guy tied to a chair.”

Reacher said, “Watch me,” and slapped the guy in the face, hard, a real crack, wet or not, and the chair went up on its side legs, and balanced, and balanced, and tottered, and then thumped down on its side, with its casters spinning and Croselli’s head bouncing around like a pinball.

Then they hit the bricks, and Hemingway’s prediction of five-to-ten came true, in that they saw hurrying cars about six minutes out, and then a pair of heavy trucks. A lot of firepower. And why not, for a credible threat?

Hemingway’s car was four blocks away, on Sullivan. It was the mid-blue Granada Reacher had seen before, with the vinyl roof and the toothy grille. He said, “You sure this gets you off the hook?”

She said, “Count on it, kid. Being right afterward is a wonderful thing.”

“Then give me a ride out of town.”

“I should stay.”

“Give them time to grieve. Give them time to figure out how it’s really their own idea. I’ve seen this shit before. All organizations are the same. You need to lay low for a day. You need to be out of the spotlight.”

“West Point?”

“Take the Thruway and the Tappan Zee.”

“How long will I be gone?”

“They’re going to roll out the red carpet, Jill. Just give them time to find it first.”

They drove a long, long time in the dark, and then they hit neighborhoods with power, with traffic lights and street lights and the occasional lit room. Billboards were bright, and the familiar nighttime background of orange diamonds on black velvet lay all around.

Hemingway said, “I have to stop and call.”

Reacher said, “Call who?”

“The office.”

“Why?”

“I have to know whether it worked.”

“I’m sure it did.”

“I have to know.”

“So stop. We could get a cup of coffee.”

“It’s a hundred degrees.”

“Got to be less than ninety now.”

“Still too hot for coffee.” She pulled over to the right-hand lane, and then she took an exit road to what Reacher imagined was a superpower version of the standard type of highway facility, with multiple restrooms, and gas big enough for trucks, and motel rooms for weary drivers, and not just something to eat, but a restaurant big enough to feed Syracuse. And payphones. There was a long line, right outside the restaurant’s extensive and brightly-lit windows. Hemingway used one, and hung up smiling, and said, “It’s working. Croselli has been arrested.”

He asked, “How’s the whale?”

She said, “The whale is gone.”

She looked dazed for a second, and then she got a big smile on her face, and they hugged, with some kind of relief and ecstasy in her tight embrace. Reacher felt bony ribs, and the flutter of her heart. It was beating fast.

Then she moved to another phone and dialed another number, and she gave her name, and she dictated a long report about a confirmed sighting of the Son of Sam, made by what she called a confidential informant, who had what she called extensive military experience.

Then she hung up again and said, “This will sound crazy, but I really want to rent a room just to take a shower.”

Reacher said, “Doesn’t sound crazy to me.”

“Does it matter what time you get there?”

“Not within a shower or two.”

“So let’s do it.”

“Both of us?”

“It’s a mutual benefit.”

“Who goes first?”

“I go first.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

She paid at the motel office, a visible wad of bills, what Reacher figured must be the whole-night rate, and she came back with a key, to room 15, which was located way in back, the last cabin before the woods. Reacher said, “Do you want me to wait in the car?”

Hemingway said, “You can wait in the room.”

So they went in together, and found a hot stale space, with the usual features. Hemingway checked the bathroom, and came out with a bunch of towels, and said, “These are yours,” and then she went back in and closed the door.

Reacher waited on the bed until she came out again much later, all hot and pink and wrapped in towels. She said, “Your turn,” and she crossed the room, a little unsteady on her feet, as if overcome by steam, or exhaustion.

He said, “You OK?”

She said, “I’m fine.”

He paused a beat, and then he went in the bathroom, which was as steamy as a sauna, with the mirror all fogged up, showing the swipes and arcs where the maid had cleaned it. He stripped and hung his limp clothes on a hook, and he started the shower and set it warm, and he stepped into the tub and pulled the curtain. He soaped up and used the shampoo, and he scrubbed and rinsed, and he stood under the warm stream for an extra minute, and then he got out.

Getting dry was not really an option, given the temperature and the humidity. He moved the moisture around his skin with a towel, and he put his old clothes back on, damp and snagging, and he combed his hair with his fingers. Then he stepped out in a billow of moisture.

Jill Hemingway was flat on her back on the bed. At first he thought she was sleeping. Then he saw her eyes were open. He took her wrist and felt her pulse.

Nothing there.

He tried her neck.

Nothing there.

Her eyes stared up at him, blank and sightless.

Medical reasons. Her heart, he thought. No doubt a cause of concern. He had felt it racing and fluttering. He had seen her stagger. He crossed the room and stared out the window. Still the dead of night. Through the trees he could see lights from cars on the highway. He could hear their sound, faint and constant. He crossed back to the bed and checked again, wrist, neck, nothing.

He stepped out to the lot and closed the door behind him, and hiked over to the line of payphones outside the restaurant. He chose one at random and dialed the number she had given him, for the internal hotline. He reported her death, said it looked natural, and gave the location.

He didn’t give his name.

Jill Hemingway, RIP. She died young, but she had a smile on her face.

He walked on, to the gas plaza, past the car pumps, past the truck pumps, to the exit road. He kept one foot in the traffic lane, and rested the other on the curb, and he stuck out his thumb. The second car to pass by picked him up. It was a Chevrolet Chevette, baby blue, but it wasn’t Chrissie’s. It was a whole different car altogether, driven by a guy in his twenties who was heading for Albany. He let Reacher out at an early exit, and a dairyman in a pick-up truck took him onward, and then he walked a mile to the turn that led up to the Academy. He ate in a roadhouse, and he walked another mile, and he saw West Point’s lights up ahead, far in the distance. He figured no one would reveille before 0600, which was still two hours away, so he found a bus bench and lay down to sleep.

The day after the blackout power was restored in part of Queens at seven in the morning, followed by part of Manhattan shortly afterward. By lunchtime half the city was back. By eleven in the evening the whole city was back. The outage had been caused by a maintenance error. A lightning strike in Buchanan, New York—part of the long summer storm Reacher had seen in the distance—had tripped a circuit breaker, but a loose locking nut had prevented the breaker from closing again immediately, as it was designed to do. As a consequence, a cascade of trips and overloads had rolled south over the next hour, until the whole city was out. By morning, more than sixteen hundred stores had been looted, more than a thousand fires had been set, more than five hundred cops had been injured, and more than four thousand people had been arrested. All because of a loose nut.

Twenty-eight days after the blackout the Son of Sam was captured outside his home on Pine Street, Yonkers, New York, less than four miles from Sarah Lawrence College. His year-long killing spree was over. His name was David Berkowitz, and he was twenty-four years old. He was carrying his Charter Arms Bulldog in a paper sack. He confessed to his crimes immediately. And he confirmed he had volunteered for the U.S. Army at age eighteen, and had served three years, partly inside the continental U.S., but mostly in South Korea.

BY LEE CHILD

Killing Floor

Die Trying

Tripwire

Running Blind

Echo Burning

Without Fail

Persuader

The Enemy

One Shot

The Hard Way

Bad Luck and Trouble

Nothing to Lose

Gone Tomorrow

61 Hours

Worth Dying For

The Affair

A Wanted Man

Never Go Back

eBooks

Second Son

Deep Down

High Heat

About the Author

LEE CHILD is the author of eighteen New York Times best-selling Jack Reacher thrillers, with eight having reached the #1 position. All have been optioned for major motion pictures; the first of which, Jack Reacher, was based on One Shot. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in almost a hundred territories. A native of England and a former television director, Child lives in New York City.

www.leechild.com

Lee Child is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please visit www.rhspeakers.com or call 212-572-2013.

Personal

Chapter 1

Eight days ago my life was an up-and-down affair. Some of it good. Some of it not so good. Most of it uneventful. Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something. Like the army itself. Which is how they found me. You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you. Not always. Not completely.

They started looking two days after some guy took a shot at the president of France. I saw it in the paper. A long-range attempt with a rifle. In Paris. Nothing to do with me. I was six thousand miles away, in California, with a girl I met on a bus. She wanted to be an actor. I didn’t. So after forty-eight hours in LA she went one way and I went the other. Back on the bus, first to San Francisco for a couple of days, and then to Portland, Oregon, for three more, and then onward to Seattle. Which took me close to Fort Lewis, where two women in uniform got out of the bus. They left an Army Times behind, one day old, right there on the seat across the aisle.

The Army Times is a strange old paper. It started up before World War II and is still going strong, every week, full of yesterday’s news and sundry how-to articles, like the headline staring up at me right then: New Rules! Changes for Badges and Insignia! Plus Four More Uniform Changes On The Way! Legend has it the news is yesterday’s because it’s copied secondhand from old AP summaries, but if you read the words sideways you sometimes hear a real sardonic tone between the lines. The editorials are occasionally brave. The obituaries are occasionally interesting.

Which was my sole reason for picking up the paper. Sometimes people die and you’re happy about it. Or not. Either way you need to know. But I never found out. Because right next to the obituaries are the personal ads. Which as always were mostly veterans looking for other veterans. Dozens of ads, all the same.

Including one with my name in it.

Right there, center of the page, a boxed column inch, five words printed bold: Jack Reacher call Rick Shoemaker.

Which had to be Tom O’Day’s work. Which later on made me feel a little lame. Not that O’Day wasn’t a smart guy. He had to be. He had survived a long time. A very long time. He had been around forever. Twenty years ago he already looked a hundred. A tall, thin, gaunt, cadaverous man, who moved like he might collapse at any moment, like a broken stepladder. He was no one’s idea of an army general. More like a professor. Or an anthropologist. Certainly his thinking had been sound. Reacher stays under the radar, which means buses and trains and waiting rooms and diners, which, coincidentally or not, is the natural economic habitat for enlisted men and women, who buy the Army Times ahead of any other publication in the PX, and who can be relied upon to spread the paper around, like birds spread seeds from berries.

And he could rely on me to pick up the paper. Somewhere. Sooner or later. Eventually. Because I needed to know. You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you. Not completely. As a means of communication, as a way of making contact, from what he knew, and from what he could guess, then maybe he would think ten or twelve consecutive weeks of personal ads might generate a small but realistic chance of success.

But it worked the first time out. One day after the paper was printed. Which is why I felt lame later on.

I was predictable.

Rick Shoemaker was Tom O’Day’s boy. Probably his second in command by now. Easy enough to ignore. But I owed Shoemaker a favor. Which O’Day knew about, obviously. Which was why he put Shoemaker’s name in his ad.

And which was why I would have to answer it.

Predictable.

Seattle was dry when I got out of the bus. And warm. And wired, in the sense that coffee was being consumed in prodigious quantities, which made it my kind of town, and in the sense that wifi hotspots and handheld devices were everywhere, which didn’t, and which made old-fashioned street-corner payphones hard to find. But there was one down by the fish market, so I stood in the salty breeze and the smell of the sea, and I dialed a toll-free number at the Pentagon. Not a number you’ll find in the phone book. A number learned by heart long ago. A special line, for emergencies only. You don’t always have a quarter in your pocket.

The operator answered and I asked for Shoemaker and I got transferred, maybe elsewhere in the building, or the country, or the world, and after a bunch of clicks and hisses and some long minutes of dead air Shoemaker came on the line and said, “Yes?”

“This is Jack Reacher,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Don’t you have all kinds of automatic machines to tell you that?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re in Seattle, on a payphone down by the fish market. But we prefer it when people volunteer the information themselves. We find that makes the subsequent conversation go better. Because they’re already cooperating. They’re invested.”

“In what?”

“In the conversation.”

“Are we having a conversation?”

“Not really. What do you see directly ahead?”

I looked.

“A street,” I said.

“Left?”

“Places to buy fish.”

“Right?”

“A coffee shop across the light.”

“Name?”

I told him.

He said, “Go in there and wait.”

“For what?”

“For about thirty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

No one really knows why coffee is such a big deal in Seattle. It’s a port, so maybe it made sense to roast it close to where it was landed, and then to sell it close to where it was roasted, which created a market, which brought other operators in, the same way the automakers all ended up in Detroit. Or maybe the water is right. Or the elevation, or the temperature, or the humidity. But whatever, the result is a coffee shop on every block, and a four-figure annual tab for a serious enthusiast. The shop across the light from the payphone was representative. It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don’t really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants. I got a plain house blend, black, no sugar, in the middle-sized go-cup, not the enormous grande bucket some folks like, and a slab of lemon pound cake to go with it, and I sat alone on a hard wooden chair at a table for two.

The cake lasted five minutes and the coffee another five, and eighteen minutes after that Shoemaker’s guy showed up. Which made him Navy, because twenty-eight minutes was pretty fast, and the Navy is right there in Seattle. And his car was dark blue. It was a low-spec domestic sedan, not very desirable, but polished to a high shine. The guy himself was nearer forty than twenty, and hard as a nail. He was in civilian clothes. A blue blazer over a blue polo shirt, and khaki chino pants. The blazer was worn thin and the shirt and the pants had been washed a thousand times. A Senior Chief Petty Officer, probably. Special Forces, almost certainly, a SEAL, no doubt part of some shadowy joint operation watched over by Tom O’Day.

He stepped into the coffee shop with a blank-eyed all-in-one scan of the room, like he had a fifth of a second to identify friend or foe before he started shooting. Obviously his briefing must have been basic and verbal, straight out of some old personnel file, but he had me at six-five two-fifty. Everyone else in the shop was Asian, mostly women and very petite. The guy walked straight toward me and said, “Major Reacher?”

I said, “Not anymore.”

He said, “Mr. Reacher, then?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Sir, General Shoemaker requests that you come with me.”

I said, “Where to?”

“Not far.”

“How many stars?”

“Sir, I don’t follow.”

“Does General Shoemaker have?”

“One, sir. Brigadier General Richard Shoemaker, sir.”

“When?”

“When what, sir?”

“Did he get his promotion?”

“Two years ago.”

“Do you find that as extraordinary as I do?”

The guy paused a beat and said, “Sir, I have no opinion.”

“And how is General O’Day?”

The guy paused another beat and said, “Sir, I know of no one named O’Day.”

The blue car was a Chevrolet Impala with police hubs and cloth seats. The polish was the freshest thing on it. The guy in the blazer drove me through the downtown streets and got on I-5 heading south. The same way the bus had come in. We drove back past Boeing Field once again, and past the Sea-Tac airport once again, and onward toward Tacoma. The guy in the blazer didn’t talk. Neither did I. We both sat there mute, like we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning. I watched out the window. All green, hills and sea and trees alike.

We passed Tacoma, and slowed ahead of where the women in uniform had gotten out of the bus, leaving their Army Times behind. We took the same exit. The signs showed nothing ahead except three very small towns and one very large military base. Chances were therefore good we were heading for Fort Lewis. But it turned out we weren’t. Or we were, technically, but we wouldn’t have been back in the day. We were heading for what used to be McChord Air Force Base, and was now the aluminum half of Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Reforms. Politicians will do anything to save a buck.

I was expecting a little back-and-forth at the gate, because the gate belonged jointly to the army and the Air Force, and the car and the driver were both Navy, and I was absolutely nobody. Only the Marine Corps and the United Nations were missing. But such was the power of O’Day we barely had to slow the car. We swept in, and hooked a left, and hooked a right, and were waved through a second gate, and then the car was right out there on the tarmac, dwarfed by huge C-17 transport planes, like a mouse in a forest. We drove under a giant gray wing and headed out over open blacktop straight for a small white airplane standing alone. A corporate thing. A business jet. A Lear, or a Gulfstream, or whatever rich people buy these days. The paint winked in the sun. There was no writing on it, apart from a tail number. No name, no logo. Just white paint. Its engines were turning slowly, and its stairs were down.

The guy in the blazer drove a well-judged part-circle and came to a stop with my door about a yard from the bottom of the airplane steps. Which I took as a hint. I climbed out and stood a moment in the sun. Spring had sprung and the weather was pleasant. Beside me the car drove away. A steward appeared above me, in the little oval mouth of the cabin. He was wearing a uniform. He said, “Sir, please step up.”

The stairs dipped a little under my weight. I ducked into the cabin. The steward backed off to my right, and on my left another guy in uniform squeezed out of the cockpit and said, “Welcome aboard, sir. You have an all–Air Force crew today, and we’ll get you there in no time at all.”

I said, “Get me where?”

“To your destination.” The guy crammed himself back in his seat next to his co-pilot and they both got busy checking dials. I followed the steward and found a cabin full of butterscotch leather and walnut veneer. I was the only passenger. I picked an armchair at random. The steward hauled the steps up and sealed the door and sat down on a jump seat behind the pilots’ shoulders. Thirty seconds later we were in the air, climbing hard.

Chapter 2

I figured we turned east out of McChord. Not that there was much choice. West was Russia and Japan and China, and I doubted such a small plane had that kind of range. I asked the steward where we were going, and he said he hadn’t seen the flight plan. Which was obvious bullshit. But I didn’t push it. He turned out to be a chatty guy on every other subject. He told me the plane was a Gulfstream IV, confiscated from a bent hedge fund during a federal proceeding, and reissued to the Air Force for VIP transportation. In which case Air Force VIPs were lucky. The plane was terrific. It was quiet and solid, and the armchairs were sensational. They adjusted every which way. And there was coffee in the galley. A proper drip machine. I told the guy to keep it going, but that I would go back and forth myself, for refills. He appreciated that. I think he took it as a mark of respect. He wasn’t really a steward, obviously. He was some kind of a security escort, tough enough to get the job, and proud I knew it.

I watched out the window, first at the Rockies, which had dark green trees low down and blinding white snow high up. Then came the tawny agricultural plains, in tiny mosaic fragments, plowed and sowed and harvested, over and over again, and not rained on much. By the look of the land I figured we clipped the corner of South Dakota and saw a bit of Nebraska before setting out over Iowa. Which because of the geometric complexities of high altitude flight meant we were likely aiming some ways south. A Great Circle route. Weird on a flat paper map, but just right for a spherical planet. We were going to Kentucky, or Tennessee, or the Carolinas. Georgia, even.

We droned on, hour after hour, two full pots of coffee, and then the ground got a little closer. At first I thought it was Virginia, but then I figured it was North Carolina. I saw two towns that could only be Winston-Salem and Greensboro. They were on the left, and receding a little. Which meant we were heading southeast. No towns until Fayetteville. But just before that came Fort Bragg. Which was where Special Forces HQ was located. Which was Tom O’Day’s natural economic habitat.

Wrong again. Or right, technically, but in name only. We landed in the evening dark at what used to be Pope Air Force Base, which had since been given away to the army. Now it was just Pope Field, just a small corner of an ever-bigger Fort Bragg. Reforms. Politicians will do anything to save a buck.

We taxied a long time, tiny on tarmac big enough for airlift squadrons. Eventually we stopped near a small administrative building. I saw a sign that said 47TH LOGISTICS, TACTICAL SUPPORT COMMAND. The engines shut down and the steward opened the hatch and lowered the steps.

“Which door?” I said.

“The red one,” he said.

I went down the steps and walked ahead through the dark. There was only one red door. Not old and dusty, but freshly painted. Still shiny. It opened when I was six feet from it. A young woman in a black skirt suit came out. Dark nylons. Good shoes. A very young woman. She had to be still in her twenties. She had blonde hair and green eyes and a heart-shaped face. Which had a big warm welcoming smile on it.

She said, “I’m Casey Nice.”

I said, “Casey what?”

“Nice.”

“I’m Jack Reacher.”

“I know. I work for the State Department.”

“In D.C.?”

“No, here,” she said.

Which made some kind of sense. Special Forces were the armed wing of the CIA, which was the hands-on wing of the State Department, and some decisions would require all three fingers in the same pie all at once. Hence her presence on the base, young as she was. Maybe she was a policy genius. Some kind of a prodigy. I said, “Is Shoemaker here?”

She said, “Let’s go inside.”

She led me to a small room with a wired-glass window. It had three armchairs in it, none of them matching, all of them a little sad and abandoned. She said, “Let’s sit down.”

I said, “Why am I here?”

She said, “First you must understand everything you hear from this point onward is a classified secret. There will be a severe penalty for a breach of security.”

“Why would you trust me with secrets? You never met me before. You know nothing about me.”

“Your file has been circulated. You had a security clearance. It was never revoked. You’re still bound by it.”

“Am I free to leave?”

“We’d prefer you to stay.”

“Why?”

“We want to talk to you.”

“The State Department?”

“Did you agree to the part about classified secrets?”

I nodded. “What does the State Department want with me?”

“We have certain obligations.”

“In what respect?”

“Someone took a shot at the president of France.”

“In Paris.”

“The French have appealed for international cooperation. To find the perpetrator.”

“It wasn’t me. I was in LA.”

“We know it wasn’t you. You’re not on the list.”

“There’s a list?”

She didn’t answer that, except to reach high up between her jacket and her blouse and pull out a folded sheet of paper, which she handed to me. It was warm from her body, and slightly curved. But it wasn’t a list. It was a summary report from our embassy in Paris. From the CIA Head of Station, presumably. The nuts and bolts of the thing.

The range had been exceptional. An apartment balcony fourteen hundred yards away had been identified as the rifleman’s hide. Fourteen hundred yards is more than three-quarters of a mile. The French president had been at an open-air podium behind wings of thick bulletproof glass. Some kind of improved material. No one had seen the shot except the president himself. He had seen an impossibly distant muzzle flash, small and high and far to his left, and then more than three whole perceptible seconds later a tiny white star had appeared on the glass, like a pale insect alighting. A long, long shot. But the glass had held, and the sound of the bullet’s impact against it had triggered an instant reaction, and the president had been buried under a scrum of security people. Later enough bullet fragments had been found to guess at a .50 caliber armor-piercing round.

I said, “I’m not on the list because I’m not good enough. Fourteen hundred yards is a very long way, against a head-sized target. Three whole seconds. Like dropping a stone down a well.”

Casey Nice nodded and said, “The list is very short. Which is why the French are worried.”

They hadn’t been worried immediately. That was clear. According to the summary report they had spent the first twenty-four hours congratulating themselves on having enforced such a distant perimeter, and on the quality of their bulletproof glass. Then reality had set in, and they had lit up the long-distance phones. Who knew a sniper that good?

“Bullshit,” I said.

Casey Nice said, “What part?”

“You don’t care about the French. Not this much. Maybe you would make some appropriate noises and get a couple of interns to write a term paper. But this thing crossed Tom O’Day’s desk. For five seconds, at least. Which makes it important. And then you had a SEAL on my ass inside twenty-eight minutes, and then you flew me across the continent in a private jet. Obviously both the SEAL and the jet were standing by, and obviously you had no idea where I was or when I would call, so you must have had a whole bunch of SEALs and a whole bunch of jets standing by, here, there and everywhere, all over the country, day and night. Just in case. And if it’s me, it’s others too. This is a full-court press.”

“It would complicate things if it was an American shooter.”

“Why would it be?”

“We hope it isn’t.”

“What can I do for you that’s worth a private jet?”

Her phone rang in her pocket. She answered and listened and put it back. She said, “General O’Day will explain. He’s ready to see you now.”